Australian Federal MPs voted Wednesday in favour of a motion supporting the return of Wikileaks’ founder Jullian Assange to Australia, ahead of a US extradition hearing next week in London’s High Court of Justice. In an unprecedented show of political support for Assange, the Australian Parliament called upon the US and UK to bring the [...]

The High Court of Australia dismissed the Catholic Church’s bid to avoid paying damages to the father of a choirboy allegedly sexually abused by Cardinal Goerge Pell. The landmark decision confirms the decision of the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal that victims’ families may seek compensation as secondary victims of clergy sexual abuse. The Thursday ruling [...]

Meta’s (META.O) oversight board announced Friday it will examine two cases on how the media giant handled potentially misleading posts shared ahead of the Australian Voice referendum last year. Meta (formerly known as the Facebook company) is the social media company that owns and operates Facebook and Instagram. In October 2023, two Facebook users separately [...]

Russian law enforcement detained at least two dozen people Saturday at a protest in Moscow, as wives and relatives of Russian service members fighting in Ukraine advocated for their return. Reportedly, those arrested were primarily journalists covering the protest and human rights activists rather than participants in the protest. Relatives of the soldiers gathered to [...]

Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong announced Thursday that the government was imposing additional sanctions on five entities with direct links to the Myanmar military. Targets of the sanctions include the Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank and the Myanmar Investment and Commercial Bank, two major banks that support the regime’s activities. The sanctions “are a [...]

Protestors participated in anti-femicide demonstrations in Nairobi on Saturday in the largest event ever held in Kenya against sexual and gender-based violence. Thousands of activists marched in cities and towns across the nation, calling for the government to act following a series of murders of women in January. Thousands of women marched in cities and [...]

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned on Saturday domestic neo-Nazi activity after a group of masked men boarded a Sydney train on Australia Day. Three police operations into neo-Nazi demonstrations were conducted across Sydney over the weekend amidst a recent rise in neo-Nazi, antisemitic and extremist right-wing incidents. On Friday morning, about 61 men masked [...]

Japanese prosecutors indicted several individuals from three factions within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) amidst political a fundraising scandal on Friday, according to local media. Former accountants of the Abe and Nikai factions within the LDP were indicted without arrest. The indictments follow a decision not to indict senior executive members of the Abe, [...]

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) 2023 prison census shows near-record levels of journalist imprisonment, with Israel jumping from being tied at 24th place to ranking at sixth place amongst the world’s leading jailers of journalists. The census revealed the top five jailers of journalists as China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia and Vietnam, respectively. Israel’s journalist [...]

Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated popular fiction writer Grigori Chkhartishvili (pen name Boris Akunin) a “foreign agent” for his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The ministry said Friday that Chkhartishvili “opposed the special military operation in Ukraine.” Chkhartishvili’s cited opposition was a Facebook post written the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in [...]