ASIO will be able to copy, delete or modify data held on any computer covered by a warrant. It will be able to use innocent third-party computers to gain access to a computer that is part of a network it has a warrant to monitor. In fact, the definition of “network” is so wide open, ASIO could monitor the entire Australian network – a network of networks – with just one warrant. It also allows for ASIO to store the content of communications – going well beyond the storage of metadata by internet providers.  more ...

Listening to US President Barack Obama’s UN address to the General Assembly on September 24, it felt as though he was living in another world where the only threats to peace were Russia and Muslim terrorists. The rhetoric, hypocrisy, deception and language are a reminder of George W Bush and his war on terrorism. “The shadow of World War that existed at the founding of this institution [UN] has been lifted, and the prospect of war between major powers reduced,” said Obama.  more ...

Last week the Abbott government made a deal with the Cambodian government to resettle refugees. It also reintroduced the former Howard government’s cruel temporary protection visas, and introduced new legislation removing asylum seeker rights to protection.  more ...

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union and industry advocate for Australia’s journalists, has described the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill No 1 which has been passed by the Senate, as an outrageous attack on press freedom in Australia.  more ...

Civil society organisations (CSOs) and other stakeholders across six continents, grouped under the newly established Antibiotic Resistance Coalition, have called for international leadership and concerted global action to address the escalating crisis surrounding antimicrobial resistance.  more ...

This past summer, as Israeli weapons de-industrialised Gaza and decimated its civilians, leftist publications in Latin America began circulating a 2012 essay by the renowned Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Writing in the wake of Israel’s November 2012 onslaught in Gaza, Galeano lamented the “erasing of Palestine from the map”. Palestinians, he wrote, “cannot breathe without permission” and “when they vote for someone who they shouldn’t, they are punished.”  more ...

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the previously underground Marxist-Leninist organisation in the country, led a popular uprising against the semi-feudal monarchy and the corrupt pseudo-democratic bourgeois regime that supported it. Known as the Saur Revolution, this event saw thousands of political prisoners freed from the previous regime’s jails. Even Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, welcomed the overthrow of the Daoud Khan regime.  more ...