News stories by Stephen de Tarczynski, page 3

Sara Aboueid, 15, and Jamillah Noordin, 16, wear uniforms similar to countless numbers of footballers around the world. Every week during Australia’s football season, the young women don shirts and shorts in their club’s colours. Like several of their teammates, both also wear a hijab.

Aboriginal landowners in Australia’s far north are battling government plans to construct this country’s long-term nuclear waste storage facility on their land.

The police 'picked me up, they put me in the back of the car. Then they took me to (locality withheld) and beat (expletive) me, and they left me there,' a young person of African background said in a new study into the treatment of youths of African background by Australian police in Melbourne.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) may have reduced its numbers in East Timor as that country’s stability improves, but the controversy created by its troops’ behaviour continues to raise questions about their sensitivity to the political situation there.

'We don’t want to have any part of this. We want to move out of it so we have a bit of freedom and be able to determine our own future,' says Richard Downs, an elder of the Alyawarra people of central Australia.

While pessimism continues to dog the lead-up to next month’s climate change talks in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, a new Philippine law aimed at streamlining the country’s efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of global warming has received a guarded welcome by environmental groups here.

Although the enacting in August of the Magna Carta of Women (MCW) - a major law aiming to end discrimination against women across the archipelago - was well-received here, there remain concerns about whether the legislation will be fully implemented.

Activists here are stepping up their campaign to urge Australia's parliament to pressure the Japanese government to formally apologise to, and compensate, so-called 'comfort women', a euphemism for women across the Asia Pacific region who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan's military during the Second World War.

While Australia remains committed to playing an ongoing role in assisting the six nations of the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) to protect their marine environments, a leading scientist here says that an Australian-style of management in the triangle will not work.

The Rudd government’s recently-released defence white paper outlines a substantial boost to the nation’s military capabilities and places a high priority on stability in neighbouring countries, including Indonesia and South Pacific states.