Australia's offshore asylum policy ruled legal by High Court
Australia's High Court has ruled that the government's policy of detaining asylum seekers offshore is legal.
The court rejected a challenge brought by lawyers for one detainee who argued the policy was unconstitutional.
The ruling means more than 250 people, including 37 babies, are likely to be deported to a detention camp on the Pacific island nation of Nauru.
Anyone who tries to reach Australia by boat to claim asylum is taken to Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
The policy has been fiercely criticised by rights groups and the UN, while Australian senators have said Nauru is not safe for children.
Rights groups have reported harsh conditions, violence and abuses at the camps.
'Smugglers will not prevail'
Speaking in parliament after the ruling, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defended the controversial border security arrangements, saying they were necessary to deter and prevent people smuggling.
UN says one-third of refugees sailing to Europe are children
For the first time since the crisis began, women and children make up the majority of refugees undertaking the perilous journey to Greece
Children now make up over a third of the people making the perilous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece, the UN has said, as two more babies drowned off Europe’s shores.
For the first time since the start of the migration crisis in Europe, there are also now more women and children crossing the border from Greece to Macedonia than adult males, according to UN children’s agency Unicef.
The figures emerged as Europe struggles with its biggest movement of people crisis since the second world war, with more than a million people fleeing war, violence and poverty risking life and limb to reach its shores last year.
“Children currently account for 36% of those risking the treacherous sea crossing between Greece and Turkey,” the Unicef spokeswoman Sarah Crowe said.
TPP signed: the ‘biggest global threat to the internet’ agreed, as campaigners warn that secret pact could bring huge new restrictions to the internet
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement covers 40 per cent of the world’s economy, and sets huge new rules for online businesses as well as traditional ones
An agreement that some campaigners have called the “biggest global threat to the internet” has just been signed, potentially bringing huge new restrictions on what people can do with their computers.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the conclusion of five years of negotiations, and will cover 40 per cent of the world’s economy. Its claimed purpose is to create a unified economic bloc so that companies and businesses can trade more easily — but it also puts many of the central principle of the internet in doubt, according to campaigners.
One particularly controversial part of the provisions make it a crime to reveal corporate wrongdoing "through a computer system". Experts have pointed out that the wording is very vague, and could lead to whistleblowers being penalised for sharing important information, and lead to journalists stopping reporting on them.
America's Agitator: Donald Trump Is the World's Most Dangerous Man
By Markus Feldenkirchen, Veit Medick and Holger StarkDonald Trump is the leader of a new, hate-filled authoritarian movement. Nothing would be more harmful to the idea of the West and world peace than if he were to be elected president. George W. Bush's America would seem like a place of logic and reason in comparison.
Donald Trump recently spoke about American football. No other game more fully embodies his country's character. The sport is about capturing territory, and players need to be tough and fearless to win. A player who is afraid of being tackled by someone from the opposing team while running has already lost the game. "I don't even watch it as much anymore,"
Trump told a crowd of his supporters in Reno, Nevada. "The whole game is all screwed up."
Inside Syria: The farm airstrip that's the center of the U.S. fight against ISIS
Updated 2305
The rutted road stretches into the distance across the plains of Hasakah. Herdsmen watch over their few dozen sheep. A scattering of oil pumps nod lazily as they extract a few dollars of crude from deep below. Above, the contrails left by coalition warplanes drift across the blue sky in hazy circles.
We bump through the mud-brick villages. Wide-eyed children stop playing marbles in the dirt to gaze at us. Old men wearing keffiyehs, the traditional red and white headscarf, peer suspiciously. This corner of northern Syria -- close to the border with Iraq -- is a mix of Arab tribes and Kurds, Muslims and Christians. It has long been neglected, despite its oil and farming, by the Syrian regime hundreds of miles away in Damascus. But in the war against ISIS, Hasakah is suddenly a place of interest, and especially for the Pentagon.
A Greek grandmother, fisherman among Nobel Peace nominees
A PATH TO PROGRESS
Emilia Kamvisi and Stratis Valiamos symbolically show the best responses Greeks have made toward a huge influx of refugees.
ATHENS — "What did I do? I didn't do anything," asked Emilia Kamvisi, an 85-year-old grandmother from the Greek island of Lesbos, when she heard she'd been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms. Kamvisi's flash of fame came after she and two friends aged 89 and 85 were photographed bottle feeding a Syrian baby last autumn, as they helped refugees who had survived the treacherous boat journey from Turkey.
Four months later, she is among three people nominated for the Nobel prize to symbolically represent the "behavior and attitude of Greece, organizations, and volunteers towards the huge refugee crisis."
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