Australia’s former military chief has characterized recent attacks on Indian students as racially motivated, rejecting Canberra’s official line that the violence has been purely criminal rather than racist.
The attacks over the past 18 months, including a fatal stabbing of a 21-year-old Indian graduate this month, have strained ties with India and hurt Australia’s lucrative foreign student market, its third-largest export earner.
“If you didn’t suspect a racial strand you’d be mad,” former general Peter Cosgrove told the Age newspaper on Tuesday night after delivering a speech on race relations.
“Attacks recently by groups of people on individuals looks like a profiling approach to people from the sub-continent. Rather than say ‘nothing to worry about,’ I’d rather look more closely,” he said.
Meanwhile, a senior official said police noticed a high crime rate against Indians in Melbourne even before a public furor erupted over the issue.
Chief Commissioner Simon Overland, chief of the Victoria state police, said criminals had been targeting victims with Indian backgrounds for robberies.
But he said that although Indians were overrepresented among robbery victims, they were no more likely than others in Victoria to be assaulted.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
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