When China — along with Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Italy — was granted permanent observer status in the Arctic Council last month, it left many experts wondering whether a paradigm shift in geopolitics is taking place in the region.

Until recently, security issues, search and rescue protocols, indigenous rights, climate change, and other environmental priorities were the main concerns of the intergovernmental forum, which includes the eight voting states bordering the Arctic and several …

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As Ivan Sen’s new feature film, Mystery Road, takes centre stage on Wednesday as the opening night film at the 60th Sydney Film Festival, it’s timely to reflect on the rise of indigenous filmmaking in this country.

When I began my career in film and television in the 1970s, a white (English) man played the central Aboriginal character in the TV series Boney. Films such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Walkabout and The Last Wave, …

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Richard Taylor, the president of the International Hydropower Association, left the air-conditioned interior of the Borneo Convention Center on Wednesday to face a crowd of more than 300 indigenous people. The protesters had traveled to Kuching, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, from villages far in the state’s interior that will soon be underwater if a series of proposed hydroelectric dams is built. They had traveled many miles by boat and by …

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The last time the housing market was this hot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the buyers pushing up prices were mostly small time. Nowadays, they are big time — Wall Street big.

Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are …

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COALCOMAN, Mexico — From a desk overlooking the shady plaza of his backwater mountain town, Mayor Rafael Garcia recounts how he and other citizens finally mustered the nerve to take on the gangsters tormenting them.

“The problem started when they began messing with the population: extortion, rapes, killings,” Garcia, 42, says of the Knights Templar, the fancifully named cartel of thugs who control many of western Michoacan state’s 113 counties. “We were terrified. We are still …

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Washington, DC – Top US companies are now in negotiations to agree on new safety standards for their clothing-producing contractors in Bangladesh, after a garment factory’s collapse in Dhaka killed more than 1,100 workers in April.

The move comes after these companies, most prominently including Walmart and Gap, refused to sign on to a fire and safety standards agreement, announced weeks ago, that has received wide backing among European companies. Yet labour advocates are disparaging the …

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Israel plans to expel thousands of African refugees to an unidentified third country, according to a court document obtained Monday, in an initiative that has provoked concerns from human rights groups.

The program is an effort to confront one of Israel’s more persistent problems: What to do with some 60,000 African migrants – the majority from Eritrea and Sudan – who have illegally crossed the border into Israel from Egypt over the past eight years.

During a …

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Turkey has bought $21 million in tear gas and pepper spray – mainly from US and Brazil – over the past 12 years, Turkish media reported. The US is known for its exports of crowd control munitions to countries rocked by widespread protest.

In total, Turkey imported 62 tons of tear gas and pepper spray between 2000 and 2012, Turkish newspaper Sozcu reported.

Turkey is currently being rocked by its biggest wave of anti-government protests in years. …

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Americans are confronted daily with the violence of inequality. The rich have longer life spans, better health care, access to better educational opportunities and an abundance of food. [1] Many live in palatial homes in gated communities and wield a disproportionate amount of control and power over the major social, cultural, and political apparatuses that shape everyday life.[2] Unlike most Americans, the extravagantly rich are protected from the massive degree of violence produced by poverty, …

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Sequestration, the automatic across-the-board spending cuts that went into effect in March, by design cuts a wide array of government-funded programs. One of the areas is domestic violence funding for programs on the state and local level. At the same time that sequestration is reducing those budgets, however, victims’ need for support has been steadily increasing.

Kim Gandy, CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, reports that nearly all state programs had already been …

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