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“It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable cliches of innocence — cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent “G’day USA” campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade people in the US that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, “sheriff of Asia”.

On March 13 the Victorian Legislative Assembly passed a bill to establish a relationships register, which will allow couples, regardless of gender, to be formally recognised under Victorian law. However, concerns have been raised that the proposals contain a number of serious shortcomings.

On February 26, Forestry Tasmania, the state-government-run corporation that manages Tasmania’s forests, revealed that it had signed a 20-year deal to supply wood to Gunns Limited’s proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill.

The March 25 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the site of a planned supermarket development in the northern NSW town of Moree is an Indigenous burial site.