The government is committed to preventing attacks against Indian students studying in Australia, which are harming relations with India and damaging the nation’s reputation, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday, while conceding that some assaults appeared racially motivated.
He offered his government’s condolences to the family of Indian nationals attacked in Australia, telling lawmakers that repairing the subsequent damage to the country’s image was an “essential priority.”
“Recent contemptible attacks on Indian students and others of Indian origin in Australia have cast a long shadow, not only over our education links, but across our broader relationship and bilateral agenda,” Smith said in an update to parliament on relations between the two nations.
“We also need to accept and to understand that it has considerably damaged Australia’s reputation in India and among the Indian people; indeed it has been widely noticed beyond India and south Asia,” he said.
“If any of these attacks have been racist in nature — and it seems clear some of them have — they will be punished with the full force of the law. Such attacks affront our values and are anathema to our view of modern Australia,” Smith said.
“While Australia is one of the world’s most tolerant countries and one the safest, we cannot promise to stop all urban crime. No government can credibly do that,” he said.
“What we are promising is to make a whole-of-nation and whole-of-government commitment to do our best to address this problem and minimize it,” he said.
Smith said his government would report to Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna this week on what progress police have made over the attacks in Melbourne.
Indian students staged street marches following the near-fatal stabbing of an Indian student at a party in September, and attention to the issue intensified after a 21-year-old Indian graduate was stabbed to death last month.
Smith said police in four states had recently made arrests for violent crimes against Indians, including 45 arrested in Victoria.
Australia has been criticized in the Indian media for playing down racism as a motive for the violence.
Police maintain that there is no statistical evidence that Indian students are being targeted by violent criminals.
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
Counting was under way in Nepal yesterday, after a high-stakes parliamentary election to reshape the country’s leadership following protests last year that toppled the government. Key figures vying for power include former Nepalese prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli, rapper-turned-mayor Balendra Shah, who is bidding for the youth vote, and newly elected Nepali Congress party leader Gagan Thapa. In Kathmandu’s tea shops and city squares, people were glued to their phones, checking results as early trends flashed up — suggesting Shah’s centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) was ahead. Nepalese Election Commission spokesman Prakash Nyupane said the counting was ongoing “in a peaceful manner”
RSS