News stories by Stephen de Tarczynski, page 5

With hundreds of Australian mining companies now involved in the extraction of natural resources in Africa, the Rudd government is also aiming to play a bigger role in the continent’s affairs.

One is cohesive, has a relatively small population and has been democratic since its foundation; the other is fragmented, is one of the world’s most-populous nations and only emerged from years of authoritarian rule a decade ago.

With new figures showing that 44 percent of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was, community organisations have welcomed a stepped-up government programme to tackle racial, cultural and religious intolerance.

One year after the historic apology made to indigenous Australians by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the nation, conjecture remains over whether enough has been done to support the acknowledgement of wrongs inflicted on the first Australians.

While the bushfires which ravaged parts of the state of Victoria earlier this month - the most devastating in the nation’s history - are not being blamed directly on the effects of climate change, it is clear that global warming was indeed a factor.

There are concerns that the behaviour of Fiji’s interim government indicates the possibility of a Burma-style dictatorship emerging in the Pacific nation.

Australia's national day is celebrated annually with much fanfare. But Jan.26, which marks the establishment of the colony of New South Wales more than 200 years ago, is viewed by many indigenous activists as the anniversary of the European invasion of their land.

Although Antarctica has hitherto been believed to be the only continent to buck the global trend of warming, new findings by United States-based scientists indicate that the coldest continent is indeed hotting up in a similar way to the rest of the world.

Recently declassified government records from 1978 are a further indictment of Australia’s complicity in Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor.

Australia's rejection of Bush administration requests to accept a number of detainees currently held at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, although supported in some quarters, is also being opposed in others.