Two Taliban Are Killed in Revenge by Afghans

Two Taliban Are Killed in Revenge by Afghans
function getSharePasskey.United States soldiers in Helmand Province near where a bomb reportedly killed two American service members on Sunday. An Afghan policeman was also killed.

The New York Times
Hundreds in Dara-e-Noor helped corner two killers.
But on Sunday, something very unusual occurred, according to witnesses and Afghan intelligence officials.
Hundreds of people from around the district of Dara-e-Noor joined with the local police to corner the Taliban assassins. A firefight broke out. Eventually the wounded Taliban were captured. But instead of turning them over to the authorities, the villagers trussed the men to a tree and punched and kicked them to death.
Revenge killings are not unusual in Afghanistan; when the Taliban executed murder suspects in Kabul before the American invasion, they would shout, “In revenge, there is life!”
But such killings against the feared Taliban are relatively rare. The episode in Dara-e-Noor represented an uncommon response from local villagers, one motivated at least in part by an angry fear that Afghanistan’s deeply corrupt judicial system would turn the killers loose.
The mob dragged the wounded assassins away from their hideout and made quick work of them, Hassan Khan, a local tribal elder, said in a telephone interview. “The people punched them with their fists and kicked them with their legs and whatever they had in their hand” until they were dead, he said.
“The people were very angry and upset because of the atrocious actions” of the killers, Mr. Khan said. “So when people get angry, no one can stop them.”
Conditions may have been ripe for such an unusual reprisal, some in the community said. The politician who was assassinated, Qazi Khan Mohammed, the secretary of the Nangarhar Provincial Council, was a highly respected local leader. And the region around Dara-e-Noor has always been home to people loyal to a powerful anti-Taliban commander named Hazrat Ali.
Moreover, it was not only villagers who appeared to rejoice in the killing of the assassins. The Afghan intelligence service issued a statement on Sunday that almost seemed to endorse the revenge killing, which, however popular in Dara-e-Noor, was contrary to the rule of Afghan law.
“Such action, and the rapid decision by people against the criminals, shows the hatred and anger against the Taliban and terrorists,” the statement said. (Its account also varied slightly from that of the villagers and the police, saying that one attacker was killed by the provincial secretary’s bodyguards on Saturday and that the other assassin was arrested but then killed on the orders of tribal elders.)
It may not have been such a surprise that the Afghan intelligence service would highlight an illegal, extrajudicial killing. Three months ago the head of the service, Amrullah Saleh, appeared on national television and criticized the judicial system as freeing kidnappers and other criminals.
While local vigilantes had the upper hand in Dara-e-Noor, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a deadly attack at the other end of Afghanistan, in restive, opium-dominated Helmand Province.
There, two American servicemen were killed Sunday by a two-stage roadside bomb, according to the provincial governor’s spokesman. He said the Taliban had structured the bomb in such a way as to make whoever defused the smaller charge on top of the device think the danger had passed.
In reality, said the governor’s spokesman, Dawood Ahmadi, a much larger explosive was hidden beneath. As the men tinkered with what they believed was an already defused bomb, the much larger bomb on the bottom exploded, killing the two Americans, both advisers to the Afghan police, Mr. Ahmadi said. An Afghan policeman was also killed, while an interpreter and two other police officers — one of them the acting district chief — were wounded, he said.
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said the Taliban were behind the blast, which he described as a trick device. “We will carry out more attacks against NATO and Afghan forces all over Afghanistan in the future,” he said.
An American military statement said only that “two coalition service members” were killed in the blast, along with an Afghan national policeman and an Afghan civilian.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures

NEW DELHI — A mob attack on women drinking in a college-town bar has set off the latest battle in the great Indian culture wars, uncorking a national debate over moral policing and its political repercussions, and laying bare the limits of freedom for young Indian women.
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Agence France-Presse
Members of the group Sri Ram Sena attacked customers at a bar in Mangalore, India, on Jan. 24.
The latest Old versus New India hubbub began one Saturday last month when an obscure Hindu organization, which calls itself Sri Ram Sena, or the Army of Ram, a Hindu god, attacked several women at a bar in the southern Indian college town of Mangalore and accused them of being un-Indian for being out drinking and dancing with men.
The Sena had television news crews in tow, so its attack on the women at the bar, called Amnesia — the Lounge, was swiftly broadcast nationwide.
The video, broadcast repeatedly since then, showed some women being pushed to the ground and others cowering and shielding their faces. It was unclear whether they were trying to protect themselves from their assailants’ fists or the television cameras or both. None of them have come out publicly since then, and it is unclear whether anyone was seriously hurt.
Eventually, more than 10 members of the Sena were arrested, only to be released on bail in a week. Since then, they have promised to campaign against Valentine’s Day, which they criticized as a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture, and they said they did not disapprove of men drinking at bars.
The conflict surrounding so-called pub culture in India set off nearly two weeks of shouting matches on television talk shows and editorial pages. Politicians have also jumped into the fray.
At first, some lawmakers with the governing Congress Party seized on the Mangalore attack to denounce their political rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., for its loose affiliations with a variety of Hindu radical groups. But the B.J.P., which governs the state of Karnataka, where Mangalore is located, instantly condemned the violence. And soon enough, others allied with the governing coalition, while condemning violence, joined the finger-wagging.
One official denounced shopping malls, too, calling them havens of hand-holding. The health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, promised a national alcohol law to curb drinking, without which, he told reporters, “India will not progress.”
B. P. Singhal, a former member of Parliament who was with the B.J.P. and who has been making the rounds of television talk shows, rued that men acted irresponsibly in the company of women at bars. A Sena leader appeared on television to say his group was stepping in to enforce morality because the government had failed.
The women and child development minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has been one of the few politicians to openly criticize the Sena, calling its methods “Talibanization.”
The debate comes as a new generation of Indian women steps out of the home for work or play in a rapidly expanding economy and finds itself having to negotiate old social boundaries, harassment and, sometimes, outright violence. New Delhi is among the most notorious for this; among big cities in India, it has logged the highest number of reported cases of rape and molestation for the last decade.
On a recent night at Cafe Morrison, a deafening rock ’n’ roll bar, the national stir over pub culture inspired irritation, dismay and soul-searching.
“It’s pathetic,” said Kirat Rawel, 23, a college student who was spending the evening at the bar here in the capital with her younger sister, Nimrit, 21. “It is basically for the vote bank. It has nothing to do with culture.”
The sisters said their parents, who live in a small town more than five hours from here by car, had no problem with their going to a bar and having a drink.
The sisters also know that even in New Delhi, one of India’s most seemingly modern cities, they are not immune to attacks like the one in Mangalore and that they are surrounded by other Indians who, in their hearts, do not approve of young women who go out at night and drink in the company of strangers. They suspected that there was quiet approval among many Indians of the Sena mob that assaulted the women in Mangalore.
“Urban India may criticize it,” Kirat Rawel said, “but there is a certain section of India that believes in it.”
By 10 p.m., most of the women, who were a minority at Cafe Morrison anyway, had begun to clear out. The Rawel sisters, like many single women in this city, said they worried most about how to get home safely.
Sanah Galgotia, 21, nursed a beer and recalled this story: She had been walking home around midafternoon recently when a car full of men slowly followed behind. Furious, she turned around, shouted and banged on the car window, only to have the driver try to run her over. She escaped and ran home. When she got there and recounted her ordeal, her mother asked why she had pursued the aggressors.
To Ms. Galgotia, the episode demonstrated the “schizophrenic” attitude of Indian women — alternating between being assertive and subservient and then judging others for tilting one way or the other. She is guilty of it, too, she said. When she sees a woman who smokes in public, she sizes her up instantly.
“In India, no matter how modern you are, you’re still in this schizophrenic nonmodern thing,” she said, straining to be heard as the D.J. blasted Pearl Jam.
She looked around and wondered aloud whether she and her friends were simply “trying to ape the West.” That set off an argument.
Her friend Murphy John, 21, shook his head. “I’m wearing a jacket, not a dhoti-kurta,” he said, referring to the traditional Indian draped pantaloon and tunic, “because I like wearing a jacket. It’s globalization.”
“We are globalized in our lifestyle,” Ms. Galgotia responded, “but very Indian at heart. I know I am.”
Another friend at the table, Sandesh Moses, 22, said he thought the Sena had probably accomplished its goal.
“They don’t want women to go out,” he said. “I can guarantee a lot of people will be supporting them.”

Iraqis Say U.S. Patrol Killed Girl, 8, in Crowd

BAGHDAD — An 8-year-old Iraqi girl was killed Saturday and several other civilians were wounded when gunfire from an American military convoy struck a crowd of Shiite pilgrims traveling to the holy city of Karbala, witnesses and Iraqi officials said.
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In a statement on Saturday, the American military said that there had been an accidental discharge of a weapon and that it had reports of two people wounded in Diwaniya, the area in central Iraq where the shooting took place. It said it was starting an investigation, but declined to give any details.
The shooting came at a delicate time for American forces in Iraq, after a security agreement between the United States and Iraq set new ground rules that greatly limit American military actions. When American forces are operating outside their bases, the agreement requires them to consult directly with their Iraqi counterparts.
Iraqi officials have said that the Americans violated the agreement twice in recent weeks by attacking Iraqi criminal suspects without consulting Iraqi forces.
The shooting on Saturday seemed to fall into another category, occurring while the Americans were on an official mission guarding a supply convoy but were not pursuing any Iraqi suspects. While condemned by local officials, it drew a surprisingly muted public response, perhaps a reflection of how rare American military actions are in that part of Iraq.
Although violence has diminished greatly across the country, there were other scattered attacks over the weekend, highlighting the fragility of the security gains.
A bomb in northern Baghdad early Sunday morning killed two people and wounded 11 others as they began their pilgrimage to Karbala, Iraqi officials said. Another explosive device placed in a vehicle in the center of Baghdad wounded two people.
It was unclear how the shooting on Saturday began. Col. Asaad Malek, the commander of a joint American and Iraqi military outpost in Diwaniya, said the Americans had been protecting a convoy of fuel trucks when they stopped to attend to a disabled vehicle.
The road was crowded with pilgrims heading to Karbala, witnesses said. Salah Mon’em, 26, who was wounded, said the patrol had sounded horns to keep the crowds at bay. Before he realized what was happening, he said, “I fell down because of a bullet that hit me.”
Jassim Hassan, a 25-year-old college student, described a scene of chaos and confusion. “I don’t know how all of this happened and I can’t remember a thing, because everything was so fast and sudden,” he said.
After the short burst of gunfire, the 8-year-old girl, Sa’adiya Saddam, collapsed on the ground by her wailing mother, witnesses said.
Her brother, Hussein, also 8, said: “We didn’t notice the Americans before the gun shooting started. My sister fell immediately, swimming in her own blood.”
Colonel Malek said the Americans had sent a representative to apologize to the victim’s family and had begun the process of compensation.
On Sunday, a trial date was set for the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during his farewell visit to Iraq in December. The journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 29, was charged with assaulting a foreign leader. His trial is set to begin on Feb. 19, a spokesman for the court said.
Lawyers for the journalist had tried to get a reduction in the charges stemming from the episode, which made him a folk hero in much of the Arab world and beyond. In setting a trial date, however, Iraq’s top court, the Higher Federal Court, let the most serious charges stand. If convicted, he could face as many as 15 years in prison.
His trial could become an important test of Iraq’s evolving judicial system. It is not clear how much of his trial, if any, will be open to the public.
A brother of Mr. Zaidi’s, Maytham al-Zaidi, said he was surprised and disappointed by the decision. “I am scared now,” he said in a telephone interview. “The Higher Federal Court was our only hope. Now it looks like the Iraqi government is insisting on sending him to jail for the longest time.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose party made significant gains in provincial elections on Jan. 31, has stepped up his outreach to a number of former members of the government of Saddam Hussein. The prime minister has promised them safe passage should they return to Iraq, and the possibility of government jobs or pensions.
The move represents a significant effort to repair the breach with former members of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party, who have been largely excluded from the Iraqi government.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Imad al-Khozay from Diwaniya.

In the Magazine - Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?

In the Magazine
Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?

“If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power,” Barack Obama mused not long ago aboard his campaign plane, “as long as we are also making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies, crises and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way. . . .” He stopped. He wanted to make sure he got this just right, and he had got a little caught up in rebutting the claim, which Hillary Clinton has artfully advanced, that he is not prepared to handle emergencies. Obama stopped picking at his grilled salmon in order to stare out at the sky for a few moments. “I think,” he said, in that deep and measured voice of his, “that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.”
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Christian Witkin for The New York Times
CANDIDATE CABINET Foreign-policy advisers of Senator Obama (at head of table) include, from left around table, Gregory Craig, Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration and Samantha Power.
Perhaps they would. Obama’s supporters believe that his life story and the angle of vision it affords him hold out the possibility of curing the harm they would say we have done to ourselves through our indifference to the views of others and through the insularity of a president who seems so incurious about the world. There is thus an emblematic force to Obama’s candidacy. A President Obama, says Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who popularized the term “soft power” to describe the capacity to gain support through attraction rather than force, “would do more for America’s soft power around the world than anything else we could do.”
But Nye wasn’t quite finished. At a meeting of national-security experts in August, he played out a harrowing crisis situation involving Iran and concluded afterward that “much though I’m attracted to the freshness of Obama’s life story, I would come out on the experience side of it” — that is, on Clinton’s side. This is Obama’s problem in a nutshell. Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world. Perhaps Obama’s inability so far to make a dent in Clinton’s 20-point (or more) lead in the polls proves that many believe he’s on the wrong side of that balance.
The United States has had only one foreign policy and one national-security strategy since the transforming events of 9/11 — and this set of doctrines has been shaped by the very distinctive worldview of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the men and women around them. The great project of the foreign-policy world in the last few years has been to think through a “post-post-9/11 strategy,” in the words of the Princeton Project on National Security, a study that brought together many of the foreign-policy thinkers of both parties. Such a strategy, the experts concluded, must, like “a Swiss Army knife,” offer different tools for different situations, rather than only the sharp edge of a blade; must pay close attention to “how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions”; must recognize that other nations may legitimately care more about their neighbors or their access to resources than about terrorism; and must be “grounded in hope, not fear.” A post-post-9/11 strategy must harness the forces of globalization while honestly addressing the growing “perception of unfairness” around the world; must actively promote, not just democracy, but “a world of liberty under law”; and must renew multilateral instruments like the United Nations.
In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. “There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living,” as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. “The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama.” Hillary Clinton’s inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband’s second term in office — the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington’s foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you’re bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” Ex-Clintonites in Obama’s inner circle also include the president’s former lawyer, Greg Craig, and Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary.
The first of the Clinton people to notice this rising political star was Anthony Lake, national-security adviser in Bill Clinton’s first term. Lake says that he was introduced to Obama in 2002 when the latter had just begun considering a run for a Senate seat. Impressed, he began contributing ideas. When Obama came to Washington as a senator and joined the Foreign Relations Committee, Lake continued to work with him on occasion. Like others, Lake was impressed not so much by Obama’s policy prescriptions as by his temperament and intellectual habits. “He has,” Lake says, “the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity.” This awareness of complexity felt like a kind of politics itself and a repudiation of the Bush administration’s categorical thinking.
Obama spoke out against the impending war in Iraq in the fall of 2002; and those members of the Democratic establishment who, like Lake, also opposed the war came to view him as a kindred spirit. Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration who, along with Lake, heads up Obama’s foreign-policy team, says, “You were considered naïve, wrong, weak, stupid to oppose that war.” Hillary Clinton (and John Edwards) voted for the war. Obama’s opposition to it showed Rice “a willingness not to be bound by conventional wisdom and the well-trod path.”
The deep sense of hopefulness that Obama inspires in his supporters has much to do with a life trajectory unique in the history of major presidential candidates. Obama has always been acutely conscious about the relationship between his personal arc and that of his country. In “Dreams From My Father,” published in 1995, before he ran for anything, Obama offered a vivid and strikingly introspective account of his knockabout childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as of a journey he made as an adult to Kenya, the homeland of his absent father. He presents himself in all his cultural hybridity — African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.
One recurrent theme of the book is how very little the world, at least the world in which most people live, responds to our wishes or our ideals. Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lolo, explains the rule of the jungle to the young boy: “Men take advantage of weakness in other men.” Obama’s mother, an innocent abroad, is shocked to learn that Lolo was conscripted into that country’s brutal repression of an insurgency and sent to the jungles of New Guinea, where he saw and did unspeakable things. In America, Obama writes, power was muted; in a place like Indonesia, it was “undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped. . . . That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them.”
In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a “new international economic order.” But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. “The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam,” he said to me on the campaign plane, “which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.”
Indeed, for all his soaring idealism, Obama seems to have absorbed Lolo’s teachings about the world’s refractoriness. The foreign-policy figures whom he finds “most compelling,” he says, are the archrealists who shaped policy during the cold war, including the secretaries of state George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson and the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan. “What impresses me is not just the specifics of what they did,” he said, “but the approach they took to solve the problem, which is, if we have assets or tools to deal with foreign policy, we know that the most costly is the military tool, particularly in a nuclear era, so we want to apply all the other tools that are less costly.” Obama said that he also admired the worldly pragmatists who served the first George Bush, including Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser: “The whole Bush team, I think, was not entirely aware of the opportunities of this new world, but they had a very clear-eyed assessment.” He has sought out the former secretary of state Colin Powell for counsel, and spoken with Scowcroft as well.

Australia's History

Aboriginal people dream on a timeless continent Australia’s Aboriginal people were thought to have arrived here by boat from South East Asia during the last Ice Age, at least 50,000 years ago. At the time of European discovery and settlement, up to one million Aboriginal people lived across the continent as hunters and gatherers. They were scattered in 300 clans and spoke 250 languages and 700 dialects. Each clan had a spiritual connection with a specific piece of land. However, they also travelled widely to trade, find water and seasonal produce and for ritual and totemic gatherings.
Despite the diversity of their homelands - from outback deserts and tropical rainforests to snow-capped mountains – all Aboriginal people share a belief in the timeless, magical realm of the Dreamtime. According to Aboriginal myth, totemic spirit ancestors forged all aspects of life during the Dreamtime of the world’s creation. These spirit ancestors continue to connect natural phenomena, as well as past, present and future through every aspect of Aboriginal culture.
Britain arrives and brings its convicts A number of European explorers sailed the coast of Australia, then known as New Holland, in the 17th century. However it wasn’t until 1770 that Captain James Cook chartered the east coast and claimed it for Britain. The new outpost was put to use as a penal colony and on 26 January 1788, the First Fleet of 11 ships carrying 1,500 people – half of them convicts – arrived in Sydney Harbour. Until penal transportation ended in 1868, 160,000 men and women came to Australia as convicts.
While free settlers began to flow in from the early 1790s, life for prisoners was harsh. Women were outnumbered five to one and lived under constant threat of sexual exploitation. Male re-offenders were brutally flogged and could be hung for crimes as petty as stealing. The Aboriginal people displaced by the new settlement suffered even more. The dispossession of land and illness and death from introduced diseases disrupted traditional lifestyles and practices.
Squatters push across the continent By the 1820s, many soldiers, officers and emancipated convicts had turned land they received from the government into flourishing farms. News of Australia’s cheap land and bountiful work was bringing more and more boatloads of adventurous migrants from Britain. Settlers or ‘squatters’ began to move deeper into Aboriginal territories – often with a gun - in search of pasture and water for their stock.
In 1825, a party of soldiers and convicts settled in the territory of the Yuggera people, close to modern-day Brisbane. Perth was settled by English gentlemen in 1829, and 1835 a squatter sailed to Port Phillip Bay and chose the location for Melbourne. At the same time a private British company, proud to have no convict links, settled Adelaide in South Australia.
Gold fever brings wealth, migrants and rebellion Gold was discovered in New South Wales and central Victoria in 1851, luring thousands of young men and some adventurous young women from the colonies. They were joined by boat loads of prospectors from China and a chaotic carnival of entertainers, publicans, illicit liquor-sellers, prostitutes and quacks from across the world. In Victoria, the British governor’s attempts to impose order - a monthly licence and heavy-handed troopers - led to the bloody anti-authoritarian struggle of the Eureka stockade in 1854. Despite the violence on the goldfields, the wealth from gold and wool brought immense investment to Melbourne and Sydney and by the 1880s they were stylish modern cities.
Australia becomes a nation Australia’s six states became a nation under a single constitution on 1 January 1901. One of the new national parliament’s first acts was to pass legislation, later known as the White Australia Policy, restricting migration to people of primarily European origin. This was dismantled progressively after the Second World War and today Australia is home to people from more than 200 countries.
Australians go to war The First World War had a devastating effect on Australia. There were less than 3 million men in 1914, yet almost 400,000 of them volunteered to fight in the war. An estimated 60,000 died and tens of thousands were wounded. In reaction to the grief, the 1920s was a whirlwind of new cars and cinemas, American jazz and movies and fervour for the British Empire. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, social and economic divisions widened and many Australian financial institutions failed. Sport was the national distraction and sporting heroes such as the racehorse Phar Lap and cricketer Donald Bradman gained near-mythical status.
During the Second World War, Australian forces made a significant contribution to the Allied victory in Europe, Asia and the Pacific. The generation that fought in the war and survived came out of it with a sense of pride in Australia’s capabilities.
New Australians arrive to a post-war boom After the war ended in 1945, hundreds of thousands of migrants from across Europe and the Middle East arrived in Australia, many finding jobs in the booming manufacturing sector. Many of the women who took factory jobs while the men were at war continued to work during peacetime.
Australia’s economy grew throughout the 1950s with major nation-building projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme in the mountains near Canberra. International demand grew for Australia’s major exports of metals, wools, meat and wheat and suburban Australia also prospered. The rate of home ownership rose dramatically from barely 40 per cent in 1947 to more than 70 per cent by the 1960s.
Australia loosens up Like many other countries, Australia was swept up in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s. Australia’s new ethnic diversity, increasing independence from Britain and popular resistance to the Vietnam War all contributed to an atmosphere of political, economic and social change. In 1967, Australians voted overwhelmingly ‘yes’ in a national referendum to let the federal government make laws on behalf of Aboriginal Australians and include them in future censuses. The result was the culmination of a strong reform campaign by both Aboriginal and white Australians.
In 1972, the Australian Labor Party under the idealistic leadership of lawyer Gough Whitlam was elected to power, ending the post-war domination of the Liberal and Country Party coalition. Over the next three years, his new government ended conscription, abolished university fees and introduced free universal health care. It abandoned the White Australia policy, embraced multiculturalism and introduced no-fault divorce and equal pay for women. However by 1975, inflation and scandal led to the Governor-General dismissing the government. In the subsequent general election, the Labor Party suffered a major defeat and the Liberal–National Coalition ruled until 1983.
Since the 1970sBetween 1983 and 1996, the Hawke–Keating Labor governments introduced a number of economic reforms, such as deregulating the banking system and floating the Australian dollar. In 1996 a Coalition Government led by John Howard won the general election and was re-elected in 1998, 2001 and 2004. The Liberal–National Coalition Government enacted several reforms, including changes in the taxation and industrial relations systems. In 2007 the Labor Party led by Kevin Rudd was elected with an agenda to reform Australia’s industrial relations system, climate change policies, and health and education sectors.

Flag raising ceremony at Tian'anmen(1)

The sacred moment-Flag raising ceremony at Tian'anmen(1)

Information & World news

International news :-
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