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The Australian government announced this year (27.9.11) that women in the armed forces will be allowed to serve in any frontline combat roles by 2016.
While women are prominent in many roles already, as senior officers, crew members on warships, air force pilots, and soldiers in Afghanistan, the move excited debate over security and safety issues for all troops, with two sexes in the ranks. … Read More »
Another social outsider able to keep guns: the attacker who fired on shoppers in Liege on 13.12.11 took six lives with some 100 others hurt. … Read More »
In a busy week for Australian achievers, the singer, song-writer and actor Kylie Minogue received a high honour from a British university, and the ANU astrophysicist Brian Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize for Physics.
GOOD ONE KYLIE MINOGUE
Kylie Minogue, 43, received an Honorary Doctorate in Health Science from the Anglia Ruskin University at Chelmsford in England (6.10.11). … Read More »
The recent massacres in Norway have highlighted an urgent need for intelligent, well-informed international debate shared challenges of countering violent extremism.
As Shada Islam writes from Brussels, that is the theme of efforts by the ASEM process, (Asia-Europe Meeting), bringing together 48 countries of Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. … Read More »
COMMENTARY: The murder of innocents in Norway by a zealot identifying with the extreme right, called Anders Breivik, has caused some disassociation and position-taking by the so-called “new nationalist” parties in several European countries. These, like the Wilders party, PVV, in the Netherlands, or the Sweden Democrats, have made sudden electoral gains, on the back of campaigns against mass immigration, especially if Islamic. (See EUAustralia Online: “Finland vote latest in Euro-nationalist trend”, 22.4.11; “Voting: tense count in Sweden, 22.9.10; “Wilders, horse-trading …”, 5.9.10).
They have been at pains to point out that the Norwegian gunman, if singing from some pages in their songbook, was an isolate; that they concentrate on legal parliamentary politics; that they have broken their links with a fascist past, or, in cases like the Netherlands, never had such a past; and that they do not sympathise with, let alone provide any infrastructure for terrorist activities. While police in Europe have been taking a prudent look at some of the rhetoricians and associations on the radical right, few accusations have actually been made that these new parties condone egregious violent crimes. (Criticism in the liberal press is rather that extreme ideas will feed into the fantasies of weak types, and the insane).
Haydn Rippon, a doctoral researcher studying the new nationalist movement, prepared this appraisal. … Read More »
After the bomb outrage and mass shootings in Norway, a methodical response has been unfolding in the adjacent countries of Europe.
Some signal, if qualified relief was provided as initial counting of the number dead was contradicted; as many as 93 were thought killed at one time, that number now brought down to 76.
Overnight in Norway the number dead in the double outrage, inside Oslo and on Utoeya island, climbed to at least 91.
Emergency workers have counted 84 dead at the youth camp on the island outside of the capital city, where a lone gunman is understood to have roamed for as long as 40 minutes, shooting at teenage victims with an automatic weapon. … Read More »