For the first time since France鈥檚 fifth republic was established in 1958, the presidential run-off to be held on May 7 won鈥檛 involve a candidate from either the traditional centre-left or centre-right parties.
Former investment banker and ex-government minister Emmanuel Macron (24%) and far right National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen (21.3%) topped the results in the first round of France鈥檚 presidential elections on April 23.
Less than three months into President Donald Trump鈥檚 reign we can already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war.
The threat is still remote, but the pieces are in place. An aircraft carrier group is聽en route聽to the Korean peninsula and anonymous sources have threatened a pre-emptive strike against North Korea.
About 5000 people in Sydney, 2000 in Melbourne and 1000 in Brisbane gathered on April 22, heeding an international call by scientists in the US, who were protesting the massive cuts to the 2018 science budget proposed by President Donald Trump.
The cuts would apply to the US National Institute of Health, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Twenty-two Canberra school cleaners won a claim for underpayment in the Federal Court on April 21, in a case launched on their behalf by United Voice.
Nineteen of the workers are S鈥檊aw Karen refugees from Myanmar, who spent two decades in refugee camps in Thailand before being resettled in Australia.聽
The part-time school cleaners had been pressured into signing contracts they did not understand, paid by different business entities without explanation either to the workers or the ACT government and routinely exposed to unsafe working conditions.
Community campaigners rallied in Port Augusta on April 30 to make a final call for the South Australian government to build a new solar thermal power plant in the town.
BP鈥檚 recent decision to pull out of a plan to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight has been dubbed 鈥渟trategic鈥 by the company鈥檚 exploration managing director, Claire Fitzpatrick.
Burrowing under the metropolis, winding through neighbourhoods and consuming green spaces, kilometres of bleak bitumen motorways provide the superstructure for the outdated combustion engine to travel further.
According to University of Technology Sydney, vehicles are traveling 25% further, which equates to 25% more pollutants and 25% more impact on communities and the environment. 鈥淚nduced traffic鈥 is the phenomenon that when roads are built people switch from public transport to roads and, in the age of climate change, roads congest, choke and gridlock Australian cities.
Support for the more than 1500 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, which began on April 16, continues to grow across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, despite the more than 1500 prisoners on hunger strike getting almost no reaction from mainstream media.
Koalas on the NSW North Coast are threatened with extinction by proposed increases in logging intensity and imminent extensions of timber contracts, according to the North East Forest Alliance.
NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said: 鈥淚n order to meet current wood supply contracts, the NSW Government plans to zone most of the coastal state forests for intensive logging and clearfelling, and to remove the already inadequate protection for core koala habitat.
Australia is the most urbanised country on earth. Almost 90% of Australians live in urban areas, while rural Australia, as of 2010鈥11, had only 134,000 farm businesses employing 307,000 people to manage 52% of Australia 鈥 417.3 million hectares of land, including the 46.3% of Australia that is marginal land.
Two asylum seekers who had been detained in Australia's offshore detention camps spoke at a forum organised by Refugee Action Collective Victoria on April 22.
Ravi, a Tamil asylum seeker from Sri Lanka now living in Australia, told the forum how he spent two years on Nauru after surviving a 22-day boat journey. He said he had left one "hell", as a former political prisoner in Sri Lanka, only to be sent to another "hell" on Nauru.
麻豆传媒 Weekly interviewed Ted McAlear, former Secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation (Illawarra), on April 26.
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May 1 is a significant day for Ted McAlear. Ted, now 88 years of age, was a former member of the Mine Workers Union and later secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation in Port Kembla. (The WWF merged with the Seaman鈥檚 Union of Australia in 1993 to become the Maritime Union of Australia.)