Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

SCENE -- an undisclosed hall in Frankston, Victoria. A podium draped in an Australian flag stands in front of approximately 500 chairs. Seventeen of them are occupied.

Morne de Klerk via Getty Images

Who could have imagined Test cricket after dark? With a pink ball. For some it tugs at the very white fabric with persistent green-grass stains of the game they love. Yet in reality, day-night Tests will follow a great cricket tradition of breaking with cricket tradition.

For three months you live like this, trying every night. You are getting weaker, sinking deeper and deeper into a hole of depression and despair. One Sunday you spend the whole day in the makeshift Jungle church, praying something with change, that night, you make the journey with a renewed sense of hope. Suddenly you find yourself hiding under the train. You are alone, the other boys you made the journey with have been caught and sent back. Your little body just fits in the gap between the train and the track. The train starts to move, you slide inside it and hide under a lorry.

Alamy

Until we remove the stigma that comes with the biological fact that women carry the children and give birth, we aren't going to have a level playing field. Men should be encouraged to take time away from their careers to share the privilege of being with their children in those precious first few years.

Paul Kennedy via Getty Images

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Twenty years ago Kevin Spacey uttered this famous line about his alter ego, Keyser Söz, in The Usual Suspects. Keyser Söz isn't climate change, but he might as well be.

ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

MOSCOW -- An ad hoc coalition created for a special purpose to solve one specific task is a modern approach that has been gaining support since the turn of the century when it was first proposed by then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Consolidation of efforts against ISIS, proposed by Russia, France and even the United States, is an example. Such a team would need no oath of allegiance or common values, but can be quite effective over a short period of time.

Portra Images via Getty Images

Most of the problems the GLBTIQ community experiences in accessing services all return to this one issue: we are not equal. Being 'less than' in Australia leads to problems with mental health, isolation and a sense of failing to be part of a more global community.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The people who broke into my home took a framed picture of my children that had been tucked away out of view and put it face down out in the open. This incident occurred as I'm carrying out an investigative reporting project into Mexico's most high-profile human rights crime.

Cevdet Gokhan Palas via Getty Images

When I get my ego out of my art I can experience the freedom of non-attachment to outcome. When I approach the empty page as if I've never done this before, I can access the simple vastness of not-knowing. And not caring too much about it, either.

Natalie Roberts

The other day my husband coined the phase: 'You're the Yin to my Yang'. And that is certainly the case with how we both approach this new special-needs parenting gig.

DANIEL ROLAND via Getty Images

At 73, Allende still maintains the charm of a youthful Latina Sibylla, a pragmatic intellectual who can tell the future from experience and unabashedly talk about love and heartbreak, in her books or in person, the way young women do in the age of Adele. That's part of Allende's magic: in conversation or in her stories, her personal tales bestow on humanity a sense of hope that is never too far to materialize.

Raymond Kleboe via Getty Images

When women won the right to own property, it was never envisaged that this right would be conditional on safety. Today, too many women are forced to surrender their housing rights in order to be free from violence.

Angels Baseball LP via Getty Images

Proponents of 'clicktivism' believes that it's a cathartic experience for the user, which creates awareness powerful enough to enact real-world change. Opponents view it as nothing more than mindless mouse-clicking, an artificial, faddish commitment to a cause with no follow-through.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

I am convinced my son Damien could have taken the right steps to overcome his problems and achieve a productive goal in life. He and many others never got the opportunity. Harm reduction stands beside all forms of drug treatment as a legitimate and much-needed element in drug policy.

Newspix via Getty Images

Snipes at sitting Australian Prime Ministers whenever they set foot outside the country are an unfortunate hangover of a by-gone colonial era. Australia does not sit at the top seats of global fora by chance. We deserve to be there by virtue of the fact we are a Top 20 nation.

blowbackphoto via Getty Images

The idea that crisis will bring the continent together no longer rings true in Europe. The only way the EU will work is if it, like any other well-functioning federation, has a strong center. For that to happen, individual nations need to give up a measure of domestic sovereignty. Yet, each crisis seems to have had the opposite effect, pushing the union toward a breakup as member states jealously guard their sovereignty.
 

The Russians are building new nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines to replace those built in the 1980s and now reaching the end of their operational lives. Their nuclear torpedo, more of an underwater drone, deliberately seeks to turn a city into a radioactive wasteland that would last for decades. It is a throwback to the worse designs of the Cold War, long since abandoned. And the U.S. is rearming as well. The Obama administration is planning to spend over $1 trillion in the next 30 years on an entire new generation of nuclear bombs, bombers, missiles and submarines to replace those built during the Reagan years.