China and India are backing a 21 country $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to challenge to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
Memorandum of understanding were signed with 21 Asian countries in Beijing Friday. Australia, Indonesia and South Korea were absent following hidden pressure from Washington.
The development bank was proposed a year ago by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and is to offer financing for infrastructure projects in underdeveloped Asian countries.
Headquartered in Beijing, former chairman of the China International Capital Corp investment bank Jim Liqun, is expected to take a leading role.
The bank will initially be capitalized with $50 billion, most of it contributed by China. The country is planning to increase authorized capital to $100 billion. With that amount the AIIB would be two-thirds the size of the $175 billion Asian Development Bank.
India will be the second largest bank shareholder though Kuwait, Qatar, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nepal, Oman, and all the countries of the Association of Southeast Asia, except Indonesia are involved.
Australia, Indonesia and South Korea did not participate following US claims of ‘concerns’ about a rival to Western-dominated multilateral lenders.
Japan, China’s main rival in Asia, which dominates the Asian Development Bank along with the United States, did not attend but had not been expected to do so.
Indonesia refused to participate claiming it needs time to discuss China’s proposal.
The Australian Financial Review said US Secretary of State John Kerry had personally asked Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to “steer clear” from joining AIIB.
“Australia has been under pressure from the US for some time to not become a founding member of the bank and it is understood Mr. Kerry put the case directly to the prime minister when the pair met in Jakarta on Monday following the inauguration of Indonesian President Joko Widodo,” the paper said.
South Korea, one of America’s closest allies in Asia, is also prevaricating. Its finance ministry said it spoke with China to request more time to consider details such as the AIIB’s governance and operational principles.
US officials have said they do not want to support an initiative Washington thinks is unlikely to promote good environmental, procurement and human rights standards in the way the World Bank and ADB are required to do.
But Chinese officials are convinced the American opposition is an attempt to contain the global rise of China and its ambition to remain the dominant power in Asia.
“You could think of this as a basketball game in which the US wants to set the duration of the game, the size of the court, the height of the basket and everything else to suit itself,” Wei Jianguo, a former Chinese commerce minister, told the Financial Times.
Matthew Goodman, scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC believes the initiatives of a BRICS Bank and AIIB “represent the first serious institutional challenge to the global economic order.”
Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said the AIIB will set high standards, safeguard policies and improve on bureaucratic, unrealistic and irrelevant policies, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Australia has issued a blanket ban on visas from West African nations affected by the Ebola outbreak to prevent the disease reaching the country, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said, becoming the first rich nation to shut its doors to the region.
Australia has not recorded a case of Ebola despite a number of scares, and conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott has so far resisted repeated requests to send medical personnel to help battle the outbreak on the ground.
The decision to refuse entry for anyone from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, while touted by the government as a necessary safety precaution, was criticised by experts and advocates as politically motivated and short sighted.
“The government has strong controls for the entry of persons to Australia under our immigration programme from West Africa,” Morrison told parliament on Monday.
“These measures include temporarily suspending our immigration programme, including our humanitarian programme from Ebola-affected countries, and this means we are not processing any application from these affected countries.”
All non-permanent or temporary visas were being cancelled and permanent visa holders who had not yet arrived in Australia will be required to submit to a 21-day quarantine period, he added.
A number of US states, including New York and New Jersey, have also imposed mandatory quarantines on returning doctors and nurses amid fears of the virus spreading outside of West Africa. Federal health officials say their approach is extreme.
The Ebola outbreak that began in March has killed nearly 5 000 people, the vast majority in West Africa. The disease has an incubation period of about three weeks, and becomes contagious when a victim shows symptoms.
Ebola, which can cause fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood or saliva.
Australia has contributed A$18 million to help fight the disease but has been criticised by medical groups, opposition lawmakers and rights groups for not sending teams to affected regions.
The risks to Australia were already small due to its geographical isolation, said Dr Adam Kamradt-Scott, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity.
The visa ban, he said, would do nothing to protect the country from Ebola while potentially having a negative public health impact by unduly raising fears about the disease and creating a general climate of panic.
“This blanket ban actually does very little to reduce the risk of Ebola arriving in Australia. It also sends a very bad message both in terms of our humanitarian assistance programme as well as Australia’s attitude towards West Africa at the moment,” he told Reuters.
“This is purely just a political decision. There is very little scientific evidence or medical rationale why you would choose to do this, and this is the type of politics we find starts to interfere with effective public health measures.”
Earlier in October, it was revealed that Australia had turned down requests from Britain and the United States to send personnel to Sierra Leone to assist in combating the outbreak there, as well as additional funding.
Australia’s “narrow approach” to Ebola makes no sense from a health perspective, given that applicants for humanitarian visas are already screened and monitored for illnesses, said Graham Thom, a spokesperson for Amnesty International Australia.
Refusing to send healthcare workers while at the same time refusing entry to those most in need will further damage Australia’s reputation, already under fire over its tough asylum seeker policies, he said.
“There are ways and means in which people can be monitored, quarantined to insure that those who come are free from the disease,” he told Reuters.
“All it does is insure that already exceedingly vulnerable people are trapped in a crisis area and sends a signal about Australia’s commitment to actually dealing with this crisis in a responsible way as a member of the international community.”
China, the world’s top coal importer, will levy import tariffs on the commodity after nearly a decade, in its latest bid to prop up ailing domestic miners who have been buffeted by rising costs and tumbling prices.
The sudden move by China to levy import tariffs of between 3 percent and 6 percent from October 15 is set to hit miners in Australia and Russia – among the top coal exporters into the country.
Traders said Indonesia, the second-biggest shipper of the fuel to China, will be exempt from the tariffs since a free trade agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) means Beijing has promised the signatory nations zero import tariffs for some resources.
A 3 percent import tariff imposed on lignite last year did not include Indonesia.
“China is clearly moving to protect its local miners. Given that the tariff also covers coking coal, Australia, being the top supplier to China, is likely going to be the most affected,” said Serene Lim, an analyst at Standard Chartered.
The Ministry of Finance said in a statement on Thursday that import tariffs for anthracite coal and coking coal will return to 3 percent, while non-coking coal will have an import tax of 6 percent. Briquettes, a fuel manufactured from coal, and other coal-based fuels will see their import tariffs return to 5 percent.
Import taxes for all coals, with the exception of coking coal, was at 6 percent prior to 2005 before they were scrapped in 2007. Coking coal import taxes were set at 3 percent before being abolished in 2005.
News of the tariff lifted China’s thermal coal futures by 1.9 percent to 529.2 yuan ($86.33) a tonne, while China-listed shares in top miners such as Shenhua Energy and China Coal Energy also rose.
Chinese traders were only willing to pay about $65 a tonne for coal with heating value of 5,500 kcal/kg (NAR) on a landed basis before the tariff was announced, against offers of about $66 a tonne by Australians, traders said.
“With the latest tax, Chinese can only offer around $62, which means Australian sellers will need to cut prices by about $3.50-$4 a tonne,” said a senior trader at major international trading house.
“It is game over for Australian coal.”
INTENSE LOBBYING
The latest effort to limit imports comes after nearly a year of intense lobbying by China’s top miners for Beijing to stem the flood of cheap supplies that have inundated the domestic market and dragged local prices to a six-year low.
The China National Coal Association, which had submitted proposals to reduce domestic output, reduce the tax burden and regulate imports, had urged Beijing to act swiftly to support the besieged sector, where 70 percent of the miners were making losses and more than half were owing wages.
On a broader level, the persistent slump in coal prices has put a severe financial strain on coal-dependent provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Shaanxi, which are already struggling with high debts and a weakening property market.
China said last month it will ban the import and local sale of coal with high ash and sulphur content starting from 2015 in a bid to tackle air pollution. But Australian miners were left unscathed by that regulation as the most stringent standards did not apply to power plants.
Separately, trade sources said Beijing has also asked its state-owned power utilities to cut coal imports by as much as 40 million tonnes from September to December, a move that is set to hit imports in the fourth quarter.
China, also the world’s top coal producer and consumer, saw imports rise 13 percent from a year ago to 327.1 million tonnes in 2013, accounting for about 10 percent of the country’s total consumption. (1 US dollar = 6.1299 Chinese yuan)
Australia’s agreement to provide India with uranium could leave Canberra with no say on the use of nuclear material shipped to India, the former head of Australia’s nuclear watchdog said Friday.
“[Australian authorities] clearly left out a number of things that the Indians don’t like . . . Where Australia has given reprocessing consent in the past, it’s on the basis that we approve downstream facilities where the plutonium will be used. But under the India agreement, we’re just not doing that,” John Carlson, the former head of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, was cited as saying by The Guardian.
Plutonium is created from uranium in nuclear reactors and may potentially be used in the creation of nuclear weapons.
According to Carlson, the “reprocessing consent” outlined in the sixth article of the bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement means Australia has no say in how India may choose to use byproducts from energy production.
The deal appeared to waive “standard provisions” relating to nuclear safeguards, Carlson told the newspaper, noting that Australia has been allowed to track the uranium it supplies, and well as its byproducts, under every similar agreement thus far.
An agreement on nuclear cooperation between India and Australia was signed on September 5 during Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s trip to New Delhi. Australia, which holds the largest uranium deposits in the world, has previously refused to sign such an agreement because India is not party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The US is keeping quiet about which countries are taking part in the fight against ISIS.
Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS that nearly 40 nations have agreed to contribute to the fight, but “it’s not appropriate to start announcing” what roles each will play.
However, an international conference on the ISIS situation took place in Paris on Monday, with world leaders set to debate the anti-ISIS coalition. The meeting includes representatives of some 30 countries, but excludes Iraq’s neighbors Syria and Iran.
Turkey and Jordan, key US allies in the region, are thought to be reluctant to intervene directly.
Turkey is a NATO member, and borders both Syria and Iraq from the north. Despite this, it won’t let the US use its facilities in the mission against the IS, a government official in Ankara told AFP.
Turkey was also absent during the signing of a joint communiqué on the situation in Iraq on Thursday.
The US State Department meanwhile praised The Netherlands for “leading an effort” to stop the foreign fighters supporting terrorism from arriving in the country.
Britain became the first country to officially join the military operation. UK Prime Minister David Cameron called IS “the embodiment of evil” on Sunday, following the group’s beheading of its third Western hostage, this time British citizen David Haines. Earlier, IS killed two US journalists in the same manner.
Germany, Australia, France and Canada are also part of the campaign.
Alex Salmond, the First Minister for Scotland, has said that comments by Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minster, that the world would not “be helped by an independent Scotland” are “foolish, hypocritical and offensive”.
Mr Abbott who is on a visit to London told the Times newspaper that it was “hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland.”
“I think the people who would like to see the break-up of the United Kingdom are not the friends of justice, the friends of freedom, and the countries that cheer at the prospect are not the countries whose company one would like to keep,” he said.
Scottish voters will go to the polls on 18 September and will be asked the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”
Alex Salmond jumped on Mr. Abbotts’ comments and told BBC Scotland they were hypocritical and “offensive to the Scottish people” considering the benefits Australia has got since becoming independent from Britain after the Second World War.
“They are foolish, actually, because of the way he said it. To say the people of Scotland who supported independence weren’t friends of freedom or justice, I mean, the independence process is about freedom and justice,” he said.
He added that even the British government could recognize the need for a democratic vote on the issue and that the referendum was a “model of democratic conduct”.
The Scottish premiere also said that Abbott was gaffe prone and had put his foot in it, with his comments.
One of his previous gaffes involved referring to Canada as Canadia during a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa in June.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, has warned that Scottish independence would be “cheered” by the enemies of the West in the most outspoken foreign attack in the campaign so far.
“As a friend of Britain, as an observer from afar, it’s hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland,” Abbott said in an exclusive interview for The Times, London.
“I think that the people who would like to see the break-up of the United Kingdom are not the friends of justice, not the friends of freedom, and that the countries that would cheer at the prospect of the break-up with the United
Kingdom are not the countries whose company one would like to keep,” Abbott added.
“Independence seems to be working well for Australia,” responded Gail Lythgoe, a spokeswoman for the official pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland. “The decision about Scotland’s future is one for the people of Scotland to make – a point that even UK Prime Minister David Cameron asserts,” Lythgoe said.
“After a Yes vote, Scotland will take her place as a normal and valued member of the international community – just as Australia did when she gained independence at the turn of the century.”
Abbott, who spent two years at Oxford University, is no stranger to controversy and has previously insulted native Australian aborigines, housewives and immigrants despite the fact he moved to the country himself as a child.
Abbott’s comments on Scottish independence follow those by US President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who both gave veiled support for the continuation of the United Kingdom as a whole following approaches from Downing Street. But the Australian Prime Minister’s comments represent the most explicit rejection of Scottish independence yet made by an international leader.
Scots will go to the polls on September 18, and will be asked one question, “Should Scotland become an independent country?”
Police say a woman’s apology for a tirade of racist abuse towards Sydney train passengers is not enough, and she may face prosecution.
The woman was arrested on Thursday night and was being questioned at a central coast police station.
A video posted on YouTube emerged on Thursday morning showing a middle-aged woman abusing a man and a woman whom she calls “Asian” on a train heading north on the Newcastle and Central Coast line.
In the video she identifies herself as Sue Wilkins.
“He can’t even get a regular girlfriend, he’s got to get a gook,” Wilkins says to the man.
When the woman tries to defend herself, Wilkins makes fun of her accent before saying: “What’s wrong with Hong Kong? Why did you come to Australia?”
Wilkins told Ninemsn that she regretted the verbal attack and she was embarrassed by her behaviour.
“It’s not nice what I did to that lady,” Wilkins told Ninemsn.
“It wasn’t nice to say that to her because it’s not nice when people say that to me … call me white trash and fatso. I know how it hurts and I shouldn’t be saying it to other people.”
But NSW police assistant commissioner Max Mitchell told reporters on Thursday afternoon that police still wanted to speak with Wilkins and she should come forward.
“From a policing perspective we will thoroughly investigate this matter and the person responsible will be prosecuted,” he said.
Police had spoken to Wilkins when she got off the train at Strathfield after the incident at about 4pm on Wednesday afternoon, but at the time were not aware of the full details.
He said he did not know why police had spoken to her, but they ultimately let her continue her journey.
“Police patrolling from the local area command said they were there for another matter and were unaware of the full circumstances of this matter,” he said.
He said police had not spoken to Wilkins since.
In the video, Wilkins appears to be on the phone to police when she gives her name, apparently reporting the children who refused to give up their seat for her.
Mitchell said she could be charged with offensive behaviour, which carries a $500 fine.
“But also magistrates have the opportunity of taking into consideration the racially motivated context of this matter,” he said, which means the offence could carry a harsher penalty.
He urged witnesses to the incident to come forward.
The chief executive of Sydney Trains, Howard Collins, said after 36 years of running London’s train system, he had never seen “such [racist] behaviour like I’ve seen here”. – The Guardian (extract)
In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror’s editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and “discover what lies behind the sunny face”. The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the “sunny face”. As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. “We admire you Aussies,” people would say. “You know how to deal with your blacks.”
I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: “We are civilised, and they are not”. I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.
In 1969, I flew to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia and met Charlie Perkins. At a time when Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census — unlike the sheep — Charlie was only the second Aborigine to get a university degree. He had made good use of this distinction by leading “freedom rides” into racially segregated towns in the outback of New South Wales. He got the idea from the freedom riders who went into the Deep South of the United States.
We hired an old Ford, picked up Charlie’s mother Hetti, an elder of the Aranda people, and headed for what Charlie described as ”hell”. This was Jay Creek, a “native reserve”, where hundreds of Aboriginal people were corralled in conditions I had seen in Africa and India. One outside tap trickled brown; there was no sanitation; the food, or “rations”, was starch and sugar. The children had stick-thin legs and the distended bellies of malnutrition.
What struck me was the number of grieving mothers and grandmothers – bereft at the theft of children by the police and “welfare” authorities who, for years, had taken away those infants with lighter skin. The policy was “assimilation”. Today, this has changed only in name and rationale.
The boys would end up working on white-run farms, the girls as servants in middle-class homes. This was undeclared slave labour. They were known as the Stolen Generation. Hetti Perkins told me that when Charlie was an infant she had kept him tied to her back, and would hide whenever she heard the hoofs of the police horses. “They didn’t get him,” she said, with pride.
In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for this crime against humanity. Older Aboriginal people were grateful; they believed that Australia’s first people — the most enduring human presence on earth — might finally receive the justice and recognition they had been denied for 220 years.
What few of them heard was the postscript to Rudd’s apology. “I want to be blunt about this,” he said. “There will be no compensation.” That 100,000 people deeply wronged and scarred by vicious racism – the product of a form of the eugenics movement with its links to fascism — would be given no opportunity to materially restore their lives was shocking, though not surprising. Most governments in Canberra, conservative or Labor, have insinuated that the First Australians are to blame for their suffering and poverty.
When the Labor government in the 1980s promised “full restitution” and land rights, the powerful mining lobby went on the attack, spending millions campaigning on the theme that “the blacks” would “take over your beaches and barbies”. The government capitulated, even though the lie was farcical; Aboriginal people comprise barely three per cent of the Australian population.
Today, Aboriginal children are again being stolen from their families. The bureaucratic words are “removed” for “child protection”. By July 2012, there were 13,299 Aboriginal children in institutions or handed over to white families. Today, the theft of these children is now higher than at any time during the last century. I have interviewed numerous specialists in child care who regard this as a second stolen generation. “Many of the kids never see their mothers and communities again,” Olga Havnen, the author of a report for the Northern Territory government, told me. “In the Northern Territory, $80 million was spent on surveillance and removing kids, and less than $500,000 on supporting these impoverished families. Families are often given no warning and have no idea where their children are being taken. The reason given is neglect — which means poverty. This is destroying Aboriginal culture and is racist. If apartheid South Africa had done this, there would have been an uproar.”
In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aborigines is 37 – lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on earth, currently racked by civil war. Wilcannia’s other distinction is that the Cuban government runs a literacy programme there, teaching young Aboriginal children to read and write. This is what the Cubans are famous for – in the world’s poorest countries. Australia is one of the world’s richest countries.
I filmed similar conditions 28 years ago when I made my first film about indigenous Australia, The Secret Country. Vince Forrester, an Aboriginal elder I interviewed then, appears in my new film, Utopia. He guided me through a house in Mutitjulu where 32 people lived, mostly children, many of them suffering from otitis media, an infectious, entirely preventable disease that impairs hearing and speech. “Seventy per cent of the children in this house are partially deaf,” he said. Turning straight to my camera, he said, “Australians, this is what we call an abuse of human rights.”
The majority of Australians are rarely confronted with their nation’s dirtiest secret. In 2009, the respected United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, witnessed similar conditions and described government “intervention” policies as racist. The then Minister for Indigenous Health, Tony Abbott, told him to “get a life” and stop listening to “the victim brigade”. Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, “booming” state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing. Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises. That may well be changing. A resistance is growing, yet again, in the Aboriginal heartland, especially among the young. Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law. However, in the 21st century the outside world is starting to pay attention. The specter of Mandela’s South Africa is a warning.
This article first appeared in the London Daily Mirror.
The Australian military has sacked six male officers over their role in the so-called “Jedi Council”, a group which allegedly produced and shared videos of themselves having sex with women.
The Australian Defence Force said six officers and non-commissioned officers had been fired over the production or distribution of “highly inappropriate material demeaning women” on defence computers and the Internet.
“The standard of behaviour we expect of our serving members is clear,” chief of army Lieutenant-General David Morrison said in a statement received Friday.
“It is also clear that if you engage in misconduct, or you fail to uphold the army’s standards, then you will be held to account.”
Reports in June said the officers had allegedly filmed themselves having sex with women, including colleagues and civilians, and distributed the images to military personnel around the country without the women’s knowledge.
The revelations, which followed a government report detailing more than 1,000 claims of sexual or other abuse in the forces from the 1950s to the present day, prompted Morrison to tell troops to respect women or quit the military.
“I will be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values,” he said at the time.
The six men sacked ranged in rank from sergeant to major and three of them have been investigated by New South Wales police. A further seven also face termination while four are subject to administrative sanctions.
Disciplinary and/or administrative action was also being considered against a further 172 people, predominately army personnel, who were identified as peripheral to the group’s email exchanges, defence said.
Morrison said a total of 122 regular army and reservists had had their service terminated so far this year due to serious misconduct or unacceptable behaviour, taking drugs and civilian offences.
The Australian Defence Force has been hit by a series of sex scandals, including the 2011 Skype incident in which a young male recruit had sex with a female classmate and streamed the encounter online to cadets in another room without her knowledge.
Last week the male cadet officer at the centre of that incident was kicked out of the army following his conviction in court. – AFP
A third man has died from injuries suffered during a bloody ambush on foreign trekkers in Papua New Guinea which has rocked the tourism industry, police said Monday.
The man, a porter for the group of Australian and New Zealand hikers on the remote Black Cat track, sustained machete wounds in last week’s violent assault and died in hospital in Lae, police spokesman Superintendent Dominic Kakas said.
Two other local guides were hacked to death with machetes in the harrowing attack in Morobe province on September 10, and several others were taken to hospital with serious wounds.
Four of the eight tourists were also hurt, including one who was speared in the leg.
PNG police arrested four men on Sunday — three in the town of Wau and a fourth in nearby Salamauan — in connection with the attack but two other suspects are still on the run.
“They are being interviewed now,” Kakas told AFP of the four, adding that no further arrests had yet been made.
PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has warned that the crimes will attract the death penalty, and the family of one of the slain porters, Kerry Rarovu, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation they felt “the criminals must die the same as Kerry died”.
Christie King, the Australian leader of the hiking group, has described the attack as a “frenzied bloody massacre which made no sense”.
“I am so sorry for these men to have received such terrible injuries,” she told the ABC, which reported that it was doubtful any of the injured porters would walk again.
“I’m worried about my future. I’m going to be paralysed maybe, I don’t know,” one of the wounded men told the broadcaster.
Crime in Papua New Guinea is rampant, including in the capital Port Moresby where in June four Chinese nationals were hacked to death, with one reportedly beheaded and the others dismembered.
Peter Vincent, chief of PNG’s Tourism Promotion Authority, has condemned the attack and told The Post Courier that the Black Cat trail was closed “until further notice”. – Sapa/AFP
In a testament to the depravity of black thug culture, an Australian collegiate baseball player attending school in America was killed by three teenagers looking for fun, police reported. Christopher Lane, who was out for a jog in the town of Duncan, Oklahoma where his girlfriend and her family live, was targeted at random after he passed a home where the boys were staying. ”They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,’” said Police Chief Danny Ford. ”The boy who has talked to us said, ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.’”
James Edwards, 15, Chancey Luna, 16, and Michael Jones, 17, have all been charged as adults in Lane’s death. Edwards and Luna, both black Americans, have been charged with first degree murder, and will be tried as adults per Oklahoma law. Jones, who is white, was charged with using a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon and with accessory to first-degree murder after the fact. He will also be tried in adult court, but is still considered a youthful offender. If convicted, Edwards and Luna face life in prison without parole. Jones, who wept in court as he tried to talk about the crime before being cut off by the judge, faces anywhere from two years to life in prison. Edwards and Luna are being held without bond. Jones’s bond is set at $1 million.
Police noted that Lane was jogging through an affluent section of Duncan around 3 p.m. local time when a car carrying the three teenagers pulled up behind him. In court, prosecutor Jason Hicks alleged that Luna was in the back seat, Edwards was in the passenger seat and Jones was driving the vehicle. Luna allegedly shot Lane in the back with a .22 caliber revolver that has yet to be recovered. ”We were bored,” Luna reportedly admitted to authorities.
Hicks, who called the boys “thugs,” noted that Edwards found the slaying amusing. “I believe this man is a threat to the community and should not be let out,” Hicks said during the bail hearing. “He thinks it’s all a joke.” Edwards, who has had earlier run-ins with the law, had also been in court on Friday, apparently after the crime had been committed, to sign papers related to his juvenile probation.
James Johnson, who called police to tell them the trio was hiding in the carpark of the Immanuel Baptist Church about 5pm on Friday, described them in all-too-familiar terms. He called them “troublemakers” and “bullies” with no parental supervision, and said that Edwards had threatened to kill his own son using Facebook. ”They threatened to kill my son because they are in a gang, the Crips, and were trying to get my son in it and I wouldn’t let him do it.,” Johnson explained. “I told him he couldn’t run with those boys. He’s a little terrified.” Police Chief Ford believes that the teens’ wanted “to make a name for themselves” on the streets.
Indeed, a dark picture emerges as one peruses the social media sites teens like these invariably use to brag about themselves and their exploits. Before it was removed, Chauncy Luna’s Facebook page revealed he goes by the alias Baby Drake. It showed photos of him posing with friends, including Edwards, and flashing gang signs. Two pictures on James “Lilbuggy” Edwards’ Facebook page are also quite revealing. One shows a handgun, and several others show staggeringly large sums of cash. Both may be explained by another photo containing hashtags suggesting he was a member of the Crips. There is also a photo of him posing with a shotgun. ”Bitch we up them poles,” Edwards says in the clip, “F— ‘em.” (A dismantled shotgun with the serial numbers ground off was found in the car, but it is not currently known if it is the same weapon).
Tweets on Edwards’ Twitter account suggest he is racist. On April 29, he tweeted “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM.” On July 15, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted, Edwards tweeted “Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!:) lol shit ima keep sleepin shit! #ayeeee.” “Woods” is a term used to denigrate white people. Yet Chief Ford, who has yet to see Edwards’ social media, told the Daily Caller a hate crime charge is not likely. “I’m not discounting the stuff that’s on there, but they do that for shock and effect,” he contended.
The real shock and effect evidenced by this case so far is the deafening silence of the racial grievance industry along with their media and celebrity enablers who apparently see no way to exploit this tragedy. Jesse Jackson is the lone exception, if one considers a single tweet much of an effort. “Praying for the family of Chris Lane,” Jackson said Wednesday on Twitter. “This senseless violence is frowned upon and the justice system must prevail.” Not a word, however from people like Al Sharpton, Attorney General Eric Holder, or President Obama, all of whom were willing to weigh in on the Trayvon Martin case on numerous occasions.
Former Congressman Allen West directly addressed the reticence of what he characterized as the “race industry crew.” On Twitter, he castigated Obama. “‘We were bored & decided to kill somebody.’ 3 black teens shoot white jogger.Who will POTUS identify w/this time?” West tweeted Tuesday afternoon. West’s Facebook posting was equally caustic. “[S]hall we hear anything from the race industry crew, Hollywood elites, or maybe Oprah Winfrey? The issue is not about proliferation of guns in America. This is about a failing black community and the fact that its young men are desensitized to violence because a gangsta culture promotes it,” West wrote.
The apologists for the status quo invariably point to America’s long and tattered track record of racism, going all the way back to the days of slavery, to explain the cultural dysfunction behind such heinous crimes. Yet as black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have pointed out on numerous occasions, black Americans were making steady progress in times that were far more racist (and poorer) than today. Yet today, in a time of vastly more racial equality and wealth redistribution, black men between the ages of 14 and 24 commit homicides at a rate 10 times that of young white and Hispanic males combined, according to a study by Northeastern University.
The key factors observers like Sowell and Williams frequently point to are the destruction of the nuclear family and the widespread glorification of social dysfunction. Though they affect all racial groups to varying degrees (after all, one conspirator in the Lane killing was white) no one can dispute their devastating effects on the black community. Rather than address this, many politicians, businessmen and entertainers hypocritically glamorize, enrich themselves and further their careers by promoting this culture of destruction. Thus, as Barack Obama wonders aloud how America “can bolster and reinforce our African-American boys,” he pals around with rapper Jay-Z, who has become a multi-millionaire rapping about guns, dope, misogyny and gratuitous violence. Amazon.com is selling a line of Trayvon Martin hoodies, while Ebony magazine has published several covers with celebrities dressed in the same thug-symbolizing attire. A director at the Smithsonian Institute expressed an interest in displaying Martin’s hoodie there, before the idea was ultimately rejected.
Yet when violence occurs, “civil rights” leaders like Jesse Jackson call it “senseless” and carefully avoid drawing attention to the real problem. The same goes for all the celebrities who have lined up to turn Trayvon Martin into a cause célèbre, but are currently nowhere to be found or heard on the Lane case. And despite wall-to-wall media coverage of this atrocity, principal deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest professed ignorance about the case, before claiming he “wouldn’t want to get ahead of the legal process here.” When Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry noted President Obama was more than willing to get ahead of the legal process with regard to Trayvon Martin, Earnest offered up a generic response about the president’s “concerns” regarding the “impact of violence and whether there is more we can do to try to protect our children.”
We can’t protect our children from a thug culture when those who know better can’t be bothered to acknowledge its existence because it doesn’t accrue to their political advantage. And while the social dysfunction proliferates, blessed by the liberal and cultural elite, the racial divide widens. That is the real reason why the usual suspects have nothing to say about the killing of Christopher Lane. They know they, too, are part of the problem. – frontpagemag.com
Australia’s new race discrimination commissioner starts in the job today and he’s got his sights firmly set on tackling the modern face of racial prejudice.
Dr Tim Soutphommasane is a 30-year-old first generation Australian, whose parents fled Laos in the mid-1970s, he grew up in south west Sydney.
He’ll now spearhead the nation’s response to racism and discrimination and he’s keen to craft strategies to help eliminate casual bigotry and cyber racism.
Presenter:Emily Bourke
Speaker:Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Australia’s new Race Discrimination Commissioner
EMILY BOURKE: Australia’s new race discrimination chief says racism is still far too common.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: About 20 per cent of Australians report that they have experienced race hate talk, so racial slurs or verbal abuse. Eleven per cent report that they have been excluded from the workplace or social activities on the basis of their skin colour or ethnicity.
EMILY BOURKE: As a migrant himself, Tim Soutphommasane, has experienced racism in Australia first-hand.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I’m a first generation Australian of Chinese and Lao heritage. It’s a mouthful when I say that to people. But I think it sums up my cultural identity. I have experienced racial slurs. It can be very confronting. It’s very unpleasant, but most of all it’s about a denial of respect and equality.
EMILY BOURKE: Dr Soutphommasane says the modern face of racism is increasingly casual.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: For instance, you might have someone making light of an issue or cracking a joke and when someone complains there, the response is perhaps along the lines of well, come on, just have a bit of a laugh, don’t take yourself too seriously. And I think that attitude belittles the experience of racial prejudice and discrimination.
It’s not just about hurt feelings, or about mere offence. Part of the cultural shift that needs to take place on casual racism is to recognise that racism is as much about impact as it is about intention.
EMILY BOURKE: But he adds racism among young Australians has followed the same trend as schoolyard bullying – it’s moved online.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Cyber racism among younger Australians is a serious emerging problem. There’s no question that if we do not tackle this issue, we may be creating further challenges of social cohesion and we may be cultivating a sense of indifference to racial abuse when it happens online.
EMILY BOURKE: In his new role, Dr Soutphommasane says he wants to start a new conversation about racism and how to stop it.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: What it’s going to require is change at the everyday level in civil society, in your workplaces, in your schools and indeed in your backyards, at those barbecues, when someone says something that’s off-colour.
Perhaps in the past we’ve been happy to let that slide and not create a bit of a fuss. But if we’re prepared to take a stand and prepared to persuade someone to see racism from the perspective of another person, then perhaps we have an opportunity here to achieve a generational shift in our thinking. – ABC
An Australian mining firm was convicted on Friday in Darwin of desecrating a sacred outback Aboriginal site in a landmark ruling protecting the beliefs of the beleaguered minority in the country.
OM (Manganese) Limited, an Australian subsidiary of Singapore-based OM Holdings Limited, was fined $133 600 for damaging the spiritual significance of an Aboriginal rock site at Bootu Creek, north of remote Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.
OM Manganese had previously been convicted of physically damaging the site when an overhanging rock feature known as the Horse’s Head collapsed due to nearby blasting activities in 2011, destroying the area known in English as “Two Women Sitting Down”.
But Darwin magistrate Sue Oliver on Friday ruled it had also amounted to desecration.
“The defendant did not consider damage to the site as a vague and remote possibility,” Oliver said, describing the company’s failure to do so as “wilful blindness”.
“The defendant company made decisions that involved the sacred site that favoured business and profit over the [cultural protection] obligations they had.”
Oliver imposed the fine for what the local Kunapa people said amounted to destruction of the site, forever disrupting their relationship with the land and its mythology or “dreaming”.
“It will always remain a sacred site to us, but it has been ruined and we don’t know what to do,” said Kunapa representative Gina Smith of the site which had been “there for thousands of years as part of our culture and our story”.
“It’s been significantly changed, which makes it much harder for Aboriginal people to recognise the dreaming,” she added.
“We’re not likely to use it any more.”
According to the Kunapa dreaming, a marsupial rat and a bandicoot fought over bush tucker, or native food, at the Bootu Creek site and their blood spilled over the rocks, turning them the rich red of manganese ore.
The Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, the statutory body responsible for overseeing sacred sites in the Northern Territory which brought the case against OM Manganese, welcomed the “historic” ruling.
“When a sacred site is desecrated or damaged it tears the social fabric of the affected community, as the harmony of those people is inherently linked to that sacred site,” said AAPA chief Ben Scambary.
OM Holdings said it had contested the desecration charge on the basis that the damage was unintentional, but it accepted Oliver’s ruling.
“The company never intended to harm, damage or disrespect the sacred site. We sincerely regret the damage and the hurt caused and I unreservedly apologise to the site’s custodians and traditional owners,” OM CEO Peter Toth said in a statement to the Australian stock exchange.
Aborigines, the most disadvantaged Australians, are believed to have numbered around one million at the time of British settlement in 1788. There are now just 470 000 out of a total population of 23 million. – AFP
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