So, as we’ve probably all noticed, Australian news is kind of… Australia-centric? I’m wondering what news stories you’ve been encountering that really should be getting wider coverage.
Here are some of mine:
- After years of military dictatorship, Burma is on the verge of democratic reforms… or so it would seem, because the new civilian government, backed by the military, is sending some very mixed messages. I actually wrote about the situation in Burma for Global Comment, so you should check that out.
- Tuvalu ran out of water last week. Speaking of matters Aus-centric, the piece I’ve linked there is the first I’ve seen that hasn’t framed the issue in terms of What New Zealand and Australia are Doing to Help.
- And, okay, I have to include one Australian story because it’s fantastic and under-reported, too: In WA, two men who have been fighting to have their sex recognised without undergoing gender reassignment surgeries have finally won their case. Helen passes on the Australasian Legal Information Institute media release at Questioning Transphobia.
What have you to add?
Categories: environment, gender & feminism, law & order, media, Politics
Hoyden About Town 
I heard about the WA case on ABC radio the other day and felt terribly cheerful (hooray! We’re winning something!).
Parts of Thailand and Cambodia are underwater and/or threatened by flash flooding, since last month. The tourist areas apparently often have Western-style drainage facilities, which the locals don’t. So most of the dead are Thai and Cambodians (and most of the stories I could find were talking about tourists from Western countries being rescued or threatened, natch).
http://www.thaitravelnews.net/thailand-floods/thailand-floods-warnings-heavy-rain-flash-flooding-landslides/
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20111002/cambodia-flash-flooding-111002/
I was rendered buoyant and joyful by this report of schoolgirls in Chile who are occupying their own school to demand free public education, and seem to be creating a socialist utopia along the way. In fairness, this was reprinted in the SMH. I would also like to nominate them as Friday Hoydens. Can you imagine what people like that will be capable of going on to achieve?
Aphie, It always squicks me that the first response is BUT ARE THE AUSTRALIANS OKAY? I wasn’t aware that nationality made one life more valuable than another? Oh, wait.
That is so fantastic, orlando!! I will not be around for Friday Hoydening, but perhaps you yourself…?
I saw your Global Comment article, that was great to have some information on.
It’s fairly minor on a global news scale, but Diederik Stapel’s academic fraud hasn’t had huge play in the English language academic press, although there’s a bit of it about (eg Psychology Today). He produced very eye-catching and publicity friendly studies, including one cited at Hoyden (I sent Blue Milk a heads-up) and a friend at Tilburg University writes that probably most work he collaborated on in recent years will have to be withdrawn.
Some of my uni friends follow Polish politics and were thus struck by the big news there: the emergence of Janusz Palikot, who is much more aggressively secular than was thought to work in Polish politics.
I haven’t heard any updates on the Fijian labour law situation with Air Pacific implicated in drafting union-hostile laws, since the ABC Radio coverage of last month.
did my comment go through? (testing)
Mississipi Personhood Amendment
ceriwytch
Originally posted by 17catherines at Mississipi Personhood Amendment
Originally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood Amendment
Okay, so I don’t usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.
Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the “Personhood Amendment”. This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.
Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn’t just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.
What’s more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.
The reason I’m posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women’s Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later – on a Sunday – thanking me and noting that I’m one of the first “outside” people to contribute.
So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.
If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.
What to do?
– Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.
– If you can afford it, you can donate at the site’s link.
– You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren’t speaking out against this.
– Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.
Fished you out of spam, bri. Could you possibly link to where you c+p’d that from?
If anyone’s looking for a good source of international information which covers places and events which aren’t precisely News Limited territory (i.e. not Oligarchic Hegemonic Western mainstream) I strongly suggest Pressenza International Press Agency. They describe themselves as follows:
Pressenza, an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence with offices in Milan, Rome, London, Paris, New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Santiago and Hong Kong.
I have them on my RSS ticker, and it gets really interesting to see their coverage of a lot of different issues – there’s a strong slant toward the global south, for a start.
Sorry Chally I missed that bit in my cut and paste!
Originally posted by gabrielleabelle
I have to say I cringe a bit when news report concludes with a reference as to whether or not Australians are safe – but, on the other side, my daughter was in London during the 2005 terrorist attacks and I couldn’t contact her. I was desperate for information and suddenly understood that maybe this isn’t so much a nationalistic thing, but more providing information.
*trigger warning for suicide*
That guy who set loose his private zoo before shooting himself. I would like to talk to him at length about irresponsibility. Grr.
@TAK, I’m torn between fuck-yeah and wondering how fucking hurting he must have been not to realise that he could have posted a blog on his private zoo’s website or Twitter account (wev) about how his animals would need feeding. There was obviously a whole lot of pain going on in this situation.
Gaddafi has been captured or killed – reports are conflicted – TW for a gory picture.
@tigtog: It’s hard to talk further about this situation without speculating about the man’s mental state, which I don’t want to do. But I’ll say that I’m not a huge fan of private, closed zoos in the first place, and place equal blame on the system that lets people keep endangered animals without appropriate oversight. This article in The Conversation argues that the animals were probably a genetic mess anyway, so that could be a tiny bit of solace for the species, if not the individual animals involved.
I think there’s plenty being filtered out of the news here too. For instance, two hundred of us marched to a rally at the Australian College of Midwives conference on Thursday because they have, without consultation, written guidelines for their members to prevent them attending homebirths thus denying a lot of women the care they choose in pregnancy and birth. Not to mention our bodily autonomy is going down the gurgler faster than you can say RANZCOG. The only news which attended was Channel 9, whose reporter immediately went up to one of two men in attendance to ask them what it was all about. Sadly the visiting head of a foreign state, with her husband in tow, beat us off most of the news. We’re all woefully underinformed about important news of all kinds. Some of us went from our homebirth protest to see the folks at Occupy Sydney and talk to them about our human rights struggle. I was proud to have my children with me learning oh so much that day.
http://janetfraser.id.au/blog/2011/08/23/endangered-birth/
Oh I read this post last week and saw the Chasers attempt to ridicule the same problem on their show – and I know you called for stories outside our own insular view but these two just left me so gobsmacked, and horrified that it turns out the Chaser skit didn’t come close to the real deal that I hope you don’t mind me sharing apropos of venting (under the circumstance linking to them seems inappropriate).
This headline is on the ABC news online today: ‘Australian man recounts Bangkok flood’ and
While yesterday over The Age online they managed this feat of irrelevance, completely side stepping the actual real story happening in Chile: ‘Camila and the cause: can young Australians shift the political agenda?’ which managed to somehow twist the protests in Chile over education into a non-story of speculation about Australians in the Labour and Liberal parties.
Can they be serious?