Taking one for the team: 6 ways our cells can die and help fight infectious disease

White blood cells dying.

Georgia Atkin-Smith, La Trobe University and Ivan Poon, La Trobe UniversityWe have all heard of COVID-19, the flu and bacterial infections. But what is actually happening to our cells when we contract these diseases? Many of our body’s cells don’t live to tell the tale. But cell death isn’t necessarily a bad thing — in fact, the death of infected cells can provide a sacrificial mechanism to stop pathogens in their tracks before they can spread through our body.

Over the years, researchers have realised there are many ways for our cells to die. Our genetics contain a comprehensive “licence to die”, with the route to cell death dictated by both the type of the cell and the pathogen. Let’s check some out:

The dancing death

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, ten million cells in your body will have died, through a type of death called apoptosis. This term, coined in 1972 by Australian pathologist John Kerr, comes from the Greek phrase for “leaves falling from a tree”.

Apoptosis is the most common form of cell death, and has also been nicknamed the “dance of death”, because of the extraordinary shape changes exhibited by the cells under a microscope as they sacrifice themselves.

For example, apoptotic cells dying from radiation or infection with influenza A virus (aka, the flu) generate large, bubble-like structures on their surface called blebs, before shooting out long beaded necklace-like protrusions and finally shattering into pieces.

The death of flu-infected cells is suggested to both aid and limit viral spread. Nevertheless, it’s a spectacular event to witness (and an excellent reminder to get your flu shot this winter).

White blood cell blebbing and dying.

Out with a bang

Vaccinia virus is used worldwide to vaccinate against smallpox. In fact, it was the very first vaccine, developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner.

We now also know that vaccinia virus can make our cells more sensitive to a particular type of cell death, caused by a molecule called TNF. This can help prevent the disease spreading by killing off infected cells before the virus has a chance to replicate.

Many of our cells have a roughly spherical or balloon-like shape, encapsulated by a protective layer called the cell membrane. Just like bursting a balloon with a pin, puncture to the cell membrane marks the point of no return.

This process occurs during necroptosis — an explosive type of cell death in which proteins inside the cell punch holes in the membrane. The cell pops and dies, shutting down the machinery needed for viral replication.

The spider web of death

When they aren’t busy haunting our nightmares, spiders can be found weaving silken masterpieces of extraordinary detail and strength. The web of a golden orb weaving spider, for example, is strong enough to entangle small birds.

On a smaller but equally impressive scale, our immune system contains specialised cells called neutrophils that can weave a deadly web of their own and entrap bacteria. Neutrophils gallantly sacrifice themselves in the process of casting their web, in a type of cell death perhaps fittingly called NETosis.

When infected with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia and meningitis, neutrophils eject a specialised web made from their own DNA. These webs can entangle nearby bacteria to prevent their escape until other immune cell reinforcements arrive to clear the infection. Sometimes, proteins found in these webs can also kill the bacteria – quite an impressive defence mechanism!

There are a surprising number of ways cells can lay down their lives for the greater good.
Author provided

The last meal

Just as our bodies are compartmentalised into organs such as the stomach, liver or heart, our individual cells also have specialised compartments. One of the cell’s “stomachs” (a structure called the “autophagosome”) engulfs and digests cellular contents such as damaged molecules through the process of autophagy.

However, in some circumstances, the machinery that drives this Pac-Man-style action can also facilitate the cell’s demise. Coincidentally, the bacteria Helicobacter pylori can infect cells of the human stomach lining, called epithelial cells, which can cause ulcers and gastritis. The cells can respond with a process called autophagic cell death, in which the induction of autophagy causes the cell to die.

A fiery death

Pyromania, derived from the Greek word pyr, meaning fire, is an obsessive desire to set things ablaze. Some of our immune cells also have the ability to self-immolate and cause inflammation as part of our response to infection.

Since its relatively recent discovery in 2001, this type of cell death, called pyroptosis, has become a hot topic (sorry) among cell biologists, and is often facilitated by a molecular complex called the inflammasome.

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In 2021, understanding pyroptosis is more important than ever, as it has been linked to infection with SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Activation of the factors that cause pyroptosis may help explain the excessive inflammation seen in patients with severe COVID-19. And this could potentially offer a new way to combat the disease.

Overdosing on iron and fat

There’s no doubt the key to a long and healthy life is a balanced diet and exercise. However, sometimes we can’t resist the urge to devour a burger and fries with ice cream for dessert. With enough hard work, we can burn it off again. But for individual cells, overindulging can be fatal.

Too much iron and/or harmful types of fat molecules can cause cells to die by ferroptosis. Cells infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB, can increase their iron content and cause ferrototic cell death! Pass the salad, thanks.

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The survival of the human body is a fine balancing act between cell growth and cell death. Understanding our cells’ complex “licence to die” could give us new ways to combat disease.

Georgia Atkin-Smith, Research scientist, La Trobe University and Ivan Poon, Associate Professor, Biochemistry, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fight for freedom: new research to map violence in the forgotten conflict in West Papua

BAGUS INDAHONO/EPA

Camellia Webb-Gannon, University of Wollongong; Jaime Swift, University of Oxford; Michael Westaway, The University of Queensland, and Nathan Wright, The University of Queensland

Indonesia has recently indicated it is considering investigating the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in the 1965 “anti-communist” purge under authoritarian leader Suharto.

If the inquiry goes ahead, it would mark a shift in the government’s long-standing failure to address past atrocities. It is unclear if they will include other acts of brutality alleged to have been committed by the Indonesian regime in the troubled region of West Papua.

According to Amnesty International, at least 100,000 West Papuans have been killed since the Indonesian takeover of West Papua in the 1960s.

While the number of killings peaked in the 1970s, they are rising again due to renewed activism for independence in the territory. In September 2019, as many as 41 people were killed in clashes with security forces and Jihadi-inspired militia.

Clashes between security forces and the West Papua National Liberation Army have escalated since January, which human rights groups say have resulted in at least five deaths. At least two other civilians were killed in another incident.

The latest violence was sparked by racial attacks on Papuan university students in Java last year, which prompted thousands of Papuans to protest against the government. The protests brought renewed media attention to human rights violations in the region and Papuans’ decades-long fight for autonomy.

However, because the international media have been prohibited from entering West Papua, the broader conflict has received relatively little attention from the outside world. (This week’s feature by ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in Australia was a rare exception.)

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Read more:
Riots in West Papua: why Indonesia needs to answer for its broken promises

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New project to map past atrocities

Late last year, we embarked on a project to map the violence that has occurred in West Papua under Indonesian occupation.

This was in part inspired by the massacre mapping project of Indigenous people in Australia by the Guardian and University of Newcastle, and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre’s mapping of violence in Sri Lanka.

Our aim was to bring renewed attention to the protracted crisis in West Papua. We hope that by showing the extent of state-sanctioned violence going back decades, we might encourage the kind of international scrutiny that eventually led to intervention in East Timor.

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The map only documents some of the massacres that have taken place in West Papua since the 1970s, as conditions in the territory make it difficult to accurately record and verify deaths. The challenges include a lack of resources for record-keeping, internal displacement and frequently destroyed properties, and a fear of reporting deaths. Others have disappeared, and their bodies have never been found.

We also encountered a relative dearth of data from the 1990s to 2010s, in part due to few journalists reporting on incidents during this period.

For the purposes of our project, we relied largely on reportage from the Asian Human Rights Commission and the International Coalition for Papua (both of which have strong connections within West Papua), as well as research by the historian Robin Osborne, Papuan rights organisation ELSHAM, Indonesian human rights watchdog TAPOL and a comprehensive report by academics at Yale Law School published in 2004.

Among the most recent attacks is the torture and murders of scores of protesters on Biak Island in 1998, according to a citizens’ tribunal held in Sydney. Some estimates say the death toll may have been as high as 200.

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Though far from complete, our mapping project reveals several broad trends.

• The majority of massacres have taken place in the West Papuan highlands, the region with the highest ratio of Indigenous to non-Indigenous West Papuans

• many killings were committed while Papuans were peacefully protesting for independence from Indonesia

• given the numbers of troops posted to West Papua and the types of weapons at their disposal, the government should have had full knowledge of the extent of devastation caused by attacks by security forces and militia groups. (Indonesian security forces are generally known for being out of the government’s control)

• in the vast majority of killings, the perpetrators have never been held to account by the government.

The government claims the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) is conducting inquiries into some of the more recent incidents, although there are concerns the body doesn’t have sufficient powers and the government has previously been reluctant to accept findings of abuses.

Why has the world stayed silent?

Both Australia and New Zealand have been hesitant about intervening in human rights crises in the region, particularly when Indonesia is involved.

In 2006, Australia signed the Lombok Treaty, which assured Jakarta it would respect the sovereignty of the Indonesian state and not support “separatist movements”.

However, Australia – and the rest of the world – did finally act when it came to the independence referendum in East Timor.

Australian troops serving on the East Timor/West Timor border with the UN peacekeeping force in 2000.
Dean Lewins/AAP

In his memoir, former Prime Minister John Howard mentioned East Timor independence as one of his key achievements. However, in office, he showed very little appetite for supporting East Timor independence and ruffling Indonesia’s feathers.

It was largely the diplomatic intervention at the international level by US President Bill Clinton, alongside the deployment of Australian Federal Police (AFP) working as unarmed civilian police for the UN mission in East Timor, that eventually secured the referendum.

Co-author Jaime Swift serving in East Timor in 2006.
Author provided

Media coverage played a critical role in persuading the world to take action. In West Papua, the media have not had the same effect.

This is in part due to what the Indonesian security forces learned from East Timor on how to control the media. The Indonesian government has frequently cut internet services in West Papua, enacted a complete ban on foreign journalists and denied requests from the UN Human Rights Commission to investigate human rights violations.

Despite this, mobile phone videos of abuse continue to leak out.

In the absence of extensive media coverage, Papuan pro-democracy advocates and their supporters have been calling for a UN-sanctioned human rights investigation. There is also significant support from human rights defenders in Indonesia for such an inquiry.

As it now has a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia should fully support such a move. However, the military retains considerable influence in the country, and holding commanders suspected of human rights abuses to account remains politically difficult.

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In fact, President Joko Widodo last year appointed as his new defence minister Prabowo Subianto, who himself has been accused of human rights abuses.

Given these challenges, what will it take for the world to show enough moral courage to force change in West Papua?

The right way forward is clear. As a member of the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia needs to put an end to the media ban in West Papuan, support an independent UN investigation and hold accountable those responsible within the government for violent acts.

If Indonesia does not take this course of action, then diplomatic pressure from the world will be required.

Camellia Webb-Gannon, Lecturer, University of Wollongong; Jaime Swift, DPhil (PhD) candidate, University of Oxford; Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, and Nathan Wright, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

High Court rules Indigenous people cannot be deported as aliens, but the fight for legal recognition remains

Mick Tsikas/AAP

Kate Galloway, Griffith University and Melissa Castan, Monash University

The High Court made an important decision today about whether it is possible for Aboriginal Australians to be deported from the country if they are not citizens.

By a majority of 4:3, the court decided that

Aboriginal Australians … are not within the reach of the ‘aliens’ power conferred by s 51(xix) of the Constitution.

The outcome of the decision is clear for one of the men, Brendan Thoms, who is a registered native title holder. As such, it is beyond the power of the Commonwealth to deport him.

However, the majority was divided on the question of whether the other plaintiff, Daniel Love, was an Aboriginal person as a question of fact, and so did not make a finding about whether or not he was an “alien”.

This case is significant. In some regards, it is about questions of deportation and immigration. But, crucially, it is a constitutional law case grappling with the deeper question of whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians can be aliens and therefore excluded from the Australian state.

Although the decision applies to only a small number of people – Indigenous Australians who are not citizens – it has a broader impact in recognising the special status of Indigenous Australians in Australia.

Background of the case

The case involved two Aboriginal men born overseas who were ordered to be deported from Australia because they each had a criminal conviction. Both men appealed to the High Court and their cases were heard together late last year.

Love, a Kamileroi man, was born in Papua New Guinea to an Aboriginal father and PNG mother. He moved to Australia in 1984 when he was five years old, but never applied for citizenship. After serving a 12-month sentence for assault occasioning bodily harm, his permanent residency visa was cancelled by the government. He was in detention but was released in 2018 pending the High Court’s decision.

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Can Indigenous Australians be deported as ‘aliens’? A High Court decision will show us the strength of modern colonial power

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Thoms, a Gunggari man and declared native title holder, was born in New Zealand to an Aboriginal mother and New Zealand father. He has lived in Australia since 1994. Like Love, his visa was cancelled after he served part of an 18-month sentence for a domestic violence assault. He has remained in immigration detention pending the court’s decision.

The Commonwealth has maintained that since the men are not citizens of Australia, the minister for Home Affairs has the power to cancel their visas and deport them. Under Section 51 (xix) of the Constitution, the Commonwealth has the power to make laws relating to “naturalisation and aliens”.

However, lawyers for the two men argued that although they are not citizens, they cannot be aliens – and therefore cannot be deported.

As a question of law, an alien is a person who owes allegiance to another country because they were born there. For people recognised as Aboriginal Australians, with longstanding connections to community, culture and traditional land, this implies they do not belong in their own country.

As Love’s lawyers argued to the court,

as a member of the Aboriginal race of Australia and the child of an Australian citizen … [he] is not an alien.

This argument suggests a new category of person described as “non-citizen non-aliens”. And under this special category, the lawyers argued, the minister would not have the constitutional right to deport them.

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The conflict in this case arises because it seems contradictory for Aboriginal people to be thought of as strangers in their own land. This is especially so for registered native title holders, such as Thoms. As a native title holder, the law recognises his connection to the land.

The basis of the men’s argument, therefore, rests on the connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to their country and the obvious implication of belonging.

Impact for Indigenous Australians

The court’s decision is good news for Indigenous Australians, as it expresses a new form of relationship between Indigenous people and the state – that of a “non-citizen, non-alien”.

The category will protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians born overseas, ensuring they will not lose their right to traditional lands because of an accident of birth. The decision upholds the law’s recognition of the importance of Indigenous Australians’ connection to, and rights over, their lands.

But it does mean that a person must be able to prove their Aboriginality before the court as a question of fact.

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Because Thoms is a native title holder, his circumstances were clear. The majority was divided, however, on Love’s status as an Aboriginal person, as he is not a native title holder. And there was ultimately no finding as to whether he qualifies as an alien under the law.

The case also highlights the ongoing challenges for Indigenous Australians in their fight for proper legal recognition in relations with the state.

The minister ignored the implications of these men’s Aboriginality in seeking to deport them. And the Commonwealth argued before the High Court that these men did not belong in Australia – that they were aliens. Further, three of the seven judges agreed with that argument and decided there was no special category for “non-citizen, non-aliens”.

The fact this case was brought at all indicates that the relationship between Indigenous Australians and the state remains unresolved.

Despite the majority decision, it seems First Nations peoples’ close connection with the land is still not enough on its own to guarantee their ongoing rights to be part of Australia, and to retain their ties to community and country.

This decision will be recognised as a milestone for Indigenous Australians. But the closeness of the decision and the qualified finding in relation to Love’s case means this question of belonging for non-citizen Indigenous people will likely be raised again.

Kate Galloway, Associate Professor of Law, Griffith University and Melissa Castan, Associate Professor, Law Faculty, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Don’t give up on politics. It’s where the fight for the fair go must be won

Governments have made a difference to inequality in the past, as Roosevelt’s New Deal did in the 1930s, and could do so again if citizens acted to ensure their voices are heard.
Wikimedia

Marc Stears, University of Sydney

This article is the third in the Reclaiming the Fair Go series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation to mark the awarding of the 2018 Sydney Peace Prize to Nobel laureate and economics professor Joseph Stiglitz. These articles reflect on the crisis caused by economic inequality and on how we can break the cycle of power and greed to enable all peoples and the planet to flourish. The Sydney Peace Prize will be presented on November 15 (tickets here).

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Deepening economic inequality is a scourge across most of the world’s democracies. For decades now, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has been widening. This has very real and very dangerous consequences for people’s mental and physical health and for the cohesion of our communities. So why isn’t anything serious being done about it?

Reversing this trend, or at least ameliorating it, would not be difficult. Economists around the world have spent the last few years laying out some fairly straightforward policy solutions. These range from reform of the rules governing how pay is set in the big corporations to sustained investment in the foundational social services that everyone but the very richest relies upon, including public education, health and housing.

Despite this clarity, very few of these initiatives are being pursued in any of the developed democracies. Instead, political action remains focused on tax cuts that favour the wealthy or big business, on immigration restrictions that can hinder economic growth, and on public subsidies for a handful of old industries, even where there are environmental reasons to be transitioning away from them.

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The fair go is a fading dream, but don’t write it off

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Why the inaction on inequality?

The question that matters more than almost any other when it comes to inequality right now, then, is not whether it is a problem or how to resolve it, but what is it that’s holding us back from doing what we need to do?

The answer to this question cannot lie in an absence of practice, knowledge or understanding. Most countries successfully initiated inequality-tackling reforms in previous generations. And they often did so in far more pressing political and economic circumstances, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s or the immediate aftermath of the second world war.

Joseph Stiglitz.
Bengt Oberger/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Even where there is not previous experience to draw upon, politicians and their advisers can draw upon a host of more recent studies of the causes, consequences and potential responses to the rise of inequality. This includes the work of this year’s Sydney Peace Prize recipient, Joseph Stiglitz. There is no shortage of expertise for a new generation of egalitarian reformers to draw upon.

Nor does the answer lie in entrenched public unwillingness to tackle the problem. It is true that in the 1980s and 1990s, electorates the world over were often skittish about interventionist economic policy proposals. They favoured tax reductions over public service investment and were anxious about government’s efforts to “pick winners” in the economy.

But such anxiety has greatly lessened right now. Indeed, polling consistently suggests that even in countries without a sustained tradition of government action against inequality, a large public appetite now exists for measures to tackle it. Such measures, stretching from sharp increases in minimum wages to the nationalisation of major public utilities, enjoy majority support in many democracies.

We have also witnessed electorates across the world take bold and risky decisions in their voting behaviour. This includes support for extremist political movements motivated partly by a desire fundamentally to shift away from the status quo.

The problem lies with our politics

If the problem does not lie in knowledge or public support, it must lie somewhere that does not currently get enough attention: in our processes of policymaking – in short, our politics.

Political life in the developed democracies has been radically transformed in the last few decades. Usually this is told in a storybook version, with an endless rise of openness and inclusivity.

In the early decades of the 20th century, this narrative goes, women and the poorest won the vote. In the middle of the century, trade unions and civil society organisations exerted increasing influence on national political decision-making. And as the century aged, other groups including LGBTQI action groups, minority and indigenous populations began to find some long-denied political influence.

But there is another, far darker story to tell. The last few decades have witnessed the rise of another way of doing politics. The anthropologist Janine Wedel brilliantly describes that way in Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security (2014).

It is the world of the professional lobbyist, of the revolving door between global corporations and the highest levels of government, of uneasy relationships between public decision-making and private profit, and of the capture of elite thinking by norms and expectations that owe too much to the practices of the financial services sector.

Meet the New Influence Elites, a 2016 IPR Public Lecture by Professor Janine Wedel.

All of this has happened at the same time, of course, as a sharp decline in the organisations that used to do much to hold these tendencies back. Union membership has fallen rapidly in the advanced democracies, for instance. And formal mechanisms that guaranteed that governments had to explain their policy decisions to multiple stakeholders have been eroded across the world.

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To tackle inequality, we must start in the labour market

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As a result, the salience of issues such as “what the public thinks” and “what the public needs” when it comes to the economy have been significantly eroded as well.

What all of this means is that economic decision-making increasingly responds to a narrower and narrower section of society. In such circumstances, it is no wonder that almost no concerted action has been taken to halt the rise of inequality.

Fight for the fair go is political first

What it also means, though, is that the action we need to restore the fair go cannot begin with the economy. It must instead begin with policymaking and politics.

We need to make sure the voices of those affected by inequality are genuinely heard and heeded. This commitment should run through everything we do: from supporting our local trade union to opening up scholarly resources to those people in need, from demanding action to rein in corporate lobbying and special access to generating exciting and innovative ideas for using new technologies to accentuate the voice of those without access to formal power.

These ideas are where our energy needs to be. If we want to see greater equality, we need to spend time working out precisely how our political life can become truly responsive. And then we must campaign to make those changes real.

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You can read other articles in the series here.

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Why are unions so unhappy? An economic explanation of the Change the Rules campaign

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Marc Stears, Professor and Director, Sydney Policy Lab, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia should steer clear of the sanction fight between the US and China

Bruce Baer Arnold, University of Canberra

Even though Australia follows the United States in much of its policy, Australian exporters and consumers will be hoping we don’t get caught in the crossfire as the US and China impose sanctions on each other.

US President Donald Trump has the power to impose trade sanctions on China for its disregard of US intellectual property (IP) rights: patents, trademarks and copyright.

These sanctions could make Chinese exports more expensive or prevent access to the US market. China has already indicated it will play tit for tat, imposing its own sanctions.

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Trade disputes are often as much about rhetoric as about reality. China will remind the world that the US began as a pirate nation, harvesting European technological innovation and cultural production (such as work by Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Trollope) on the basis that it was a developing nation and because it could.

Away from the headlines China will likely take the US to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a global mechanism for resolution of trade disputes. The US has announced it will take China to the WTO over patent violations.

The US will presumably ramp up claims with the WTO against other trading partners (such as India, Indonesia, Thailand and members of the European Union) that appear on its watch list for allegedly pirating US knowhow.

What this means for Australia

Academics such as Matthew Rimmer have astutely highlighted disadvantages for Australian consumers as citizens of an IP colony. This is where we import more than we export in content and pay a premium for work from overseas.

For example, we pay more than our US counterparts for software and hardware that most people take for granted. Our IP regime – in principle and practice – construes many violations of IP rights as piracy.

Our regime is aligned with that of the US. That reflects our traditional defence policy and the significance of US investment. What is good for US companies Microsoft, Pfizer and Disney is deemed to be good for Australia.

But joining in this cascade of retaliation will jeopardise economic growth, foster political unrest in developing economies and penalise consumers. The salient feature of economic growth over the past four decades has been globalisation – trade and investment across borders – rather that fundamental productivity gains through information technology.

Integration with the global economy (alongside the hollowing-out of local manufacturing and the TAFE system) mean that we cannot turn back the clock to the days of Alfred Deakin. Deakin’s grand compromise – the Australian Settlement – promised to protect small farmers, local manufacturers and workers behind walls that restricted migration and imports.

The headline-grabbling sanctions from Trump might also not necessarily be supported. Some business leaders recognise the importance of trade across the global economy and are perplexed by the current policy that seems to be driven by Trump’s late-night tweeting rather than anything coherent.

Where does that leave China?

China’s response has so far been cool. Moderation in the public arena highlights the idiosyncratic nature of Trump’s statements. It also reflects a deeper reality.

China wants to sell high-technology products to Australia, the US and other nations. One is example is 5G telecommunication networks from Huawei.

It wants the advantages that come from exploitation of the global IP regime, with its innovators and entrepreneurs building portfolios of patents and buying leading Western brands. It is likely to emulate what we saw with Japan: from “pirate” to IP citizen, complying with laws, within a few decades.

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Made in China: three ways Chinese business has evolved from imitation to innovation

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Beijing is slowly strengthening the enforcement of IP rules in key regions such as China’s Pearl River Delta. In part that’s an effort to reduce the backlash in its export markets and it’s also a recognition that growth may be a matter of fostering innovation rather than copying or cheap labour.

Australia sources many manufactured items from China, with that production often dependent on US, Japanese and EU IP. Our own economy depends on exports of commodities; universities are dependent on overseas (particularly Chinese) students. So we don’t want to see an increase in international tensions and don’t want a slowing of the global economy because of a cascade of tit-for-tat sanctions.

Bruce Baer Arnold, Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Fight Against Boko Haram

Australia: Rudd 2.0 Fighting the Abbottsphere

Kevin Rudd is back and ‘zipping’ about, putting the Abbott and all his men (as well as a few women) to the sword and in the eyes of the electorate (a good percentage of it anyway) there is finally some leadership and fight back in the ALP.

For more visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/kevin-rudd-coalition-greens-policy

Islamic Mob Burns Down Church in Egypt

‘Kill all the Christians,’ local imam tells villagers.

CAIRO, March 8 (CDN) — A Muslim mob in a village south of Cairo last weekend attacked a church building and burned it down, almost killing the parish priest after an imam issued a call to “Kill all the Christians,”  according to local sources.

The attack started on Friday evening (March 4) in the village of Sool, located in the city of Helwan 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Cairo, and lasted through most of Saturday. A local imam, Sheik Ahmed Abu Al-Dahab, issued the call during Friday afternoon prayers, telling area Muslims to kill the Christians because they had “no right” to live in the village. The attack started several hours later.

The Rev. Hoshea Abd Al-Missieh, a parish priest who narrowly escaped death in the fire, said the clamor of the church being torn apart sounded like “hatred.”

“I was in the attack, but I can’t describe it,” he said. “The sound of the church being destroyed that I heard – I can’t describe it, how horrible it was.”

According to villagers, the mob broke into the Church of the Two Martyrs St. George and St. Mina, and as they chanted “Allahu Akbar [God is greater],” looted it, demolished the walls with sledgehammers and set a fire that burned itself out the next morning. Looters removed anything valuable, including several containers holding the remains of venerated Copts – most of whom were killed in other waves of persecution – then stomped and kicked the containers like soccer balls, witnesses said.

After the fire went out, the mob tore down what little remained of the church structure. The group of Muslims then held prayers at the site and began collecting money to build a mosque where the church building once stood, said the assistant bishop of Giza the Rev. Balamoun Youaqeem.

“They destroyed the church completely,” he said. “All that was left is a few columns and things like that. As a building, it’s all gone.”

During the fire, Al-Missieh was trapped in a house near the church building that was filling up with smoke. He faced a difficult dilemma – choke or burn to death in the house, or face an angry mob of thousands screaming for blood.

“When the smoke was too much, I told myself, ‘I am dying anyway,’ so I decided I would go out and whatever happened, happened,” Al-Missieh said.

When he went outside, a man with a rifle told the priest to follow him. At first Al-Missieh was reluctant, he said, but the man fired off two rounds from the rifle and told the crowd to step away.

“No one will touch this man, he is with me,” the priest remembered the man yelling at the mob. Al-Missieh was taken to a house where he met three other workers who were at the church when it was attacked. The men all relayed stories similar to the priest’s.

Friday’s attack was another in a long list of disproportionate responses in Egypt to a rumor of an affair between a Muslim and a Copt. Earlier this month, Sool villagers accused a Muslim woman in her 30s and a Coptic man in his 40s, both of them married, of being involved with each other. On Wednesday (March 2) a village council of Coptic and Muslim leaders convened and agreed that the man should leave the village in order to avoid sectarian violence.

The next day, the woman’s cousin killed the woman’s father in a fight about the honor of the family. The same day, the cousin died of wounds he sustained in the fight. By Friday, Al-Dahab, the local imam, had blamed the entire incident on Christians in the village and called on all Muslims in Sool to kill them.

Because of the attack, Copts in Sool fled to adjacent villages. The women who remained in the village are now being sexually assaulted, according to Youaqeem, who added that he is receiving phone calls from women in the village begging for help. Those reports have not yet been independently confirmed.

“Everybody tried to find a way to get out,” Youaqeem said.

Groups of Muslims have set up blockades around Sool, declaring they intend to turn it into an “Islamic village,” Youaqeem said.

On Sunday (March 6), roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Radio and Television Building in Cairo to protest the attack and what Copts see as a long-standing government refusal to address or even acknowledge the persecution of Christians in Egypt. Protestors also accused the government of not sending enough troops to the village to control the situation. Holding up crosses and signs, the protestors shouted the name of Jesus and chanted, “We need our church.”

Soldiers armed with AK-47s with fixed-sheathed bayonets held the crowd back from the building as several priests took turns addressing the crowd. When the Giza parish priest, Bishop Anba Theodosius, said the army had pledged to rebuild the church but would not give a written guarantee of the promise, the crowd became enraged and pushed through the line of soldiers.

No one was injured in the push. More protests about the attack continued Tuesday in Cairo.

Youaqeem said the attack has devastated and enraged the Coptic community, but he sees hope.

“As they say – ‘All things work to the good of those who love the Lord,’” he said.

Report from Compass Direct News

Nepal Christians Fight for Burial Rights

Nearly 200 graves face demolition.

KATHMANDU, Nepal, January 25 (CDN) — Three years after the death of a Christian who was a captain in the Nepal Army, his widow, Gamala Guide, faces fresh grief.

The grave of her husband, Narayan Guide, is threatened with destruction as authorities of Nepal’s most powerful Hindu temple are reclaiming the forested land where it is located.

“What kind of strange country is this that doesn’t allow its own citizens to rest in peace?” the 55-year-old recently asked leaders of the Christian community in Kathmandu. “Please do something to stop the desecration, or my husband will die a second death.”

At least 200 graves, many of them unmarked due to Christians’ fear of discovery and destruction, could share the same fate. The Pashupatinath Area Development Trust, the organization administering the Pashupatinath temple that dates back to the fourth century AD, has begun renovating the shrine as Nepal celebrates 2011 as its “tourism year” with the goal of attracting 1 million visitors. The temple has been declared a world heritage site by UNESCO.

“In the late 1980s, the government gave us 292 hectares of land to develop the Pashupatinath temple,” said Ram Saran Chimoria, director of the trust. “We have accordingly drawn up a five-year plan that will renovate the main shrine and beautify its surroundings. The forested land adjoining the temple will be used to grow plants considered sacred by Hindus.”

Chimoria said part of the forest is also meant to be used for Hindu burials.

“A Hindu sect called the Dashnami, which has 10 sub-groups under it, buries its dead here, as Muslims and Christians do,” he said. “Since Pashupatinath is a Hindu temple, the 10 sub-groups are allowed to bury their dead here. But other communities also began burying their dead here, first pretending to be the Dashnami and then clandestinely. This is against Hindu traditions, and the temple is seeking to reclaim what belongs to it. It is the responsibility of the government to allot burial grounds to non-Hindus, not the trust’s.”

The burial ground lies opposite Arya Ghat, a cremation ground at Pashupatinath, where bodies are burned on pyres according to Hindu tradition. Known as the Sleshmantak Forest, it is a steep and nearly inaccessible wooded tract where monkeys and foxes roam. Locals advise visitors not to wander into the forest alone, even during day time, for fear of robbers.

“I attended several burial rites there,” said Chirendra Satyal, spokesman of the Catholic Assumption Church of Kathmandu Valley. “They were all low-key. Many of the graves are unmarked to avoid detection. The burial ground is used as a garbage dumping site, and at times foxes dig up the buried bodies. There are also cases of bodies being dumped on top of one another.”

An increasingly angry Christian community, tired of petitioning the government for an official burial ground, is now seeking stronger measures.

“Nepal became secular in 2006, and two years later, we petitioned the prime minister, the culture minister and the top human rights agency in Nepal, saying that in a secular democracy Christians should have the same rights as others and should be given their own burial ground,” said C.B. Gahatraj, general secretary of a Christian committee formed to provide recommendations to parliament, which is drafting a new constitution. “We understand the temple’s position. But the state should understand ours too.”

The committee had identified forested land on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley, in an area called Duwakot, and proposed that it be given to them.

“We would make it one of the most idyllic sites in Nepal,” said Gahatraj. “It would have gardens and would be an attractive destination for tourists as well. But so far, there has been no response from the state.”

Believing the time has come for stronger action, Christians plan to discuss the issue with 22 major parliamentary parties on Sunday (Jan. 30).

“At the meeting, we will present our case again,” Gahatraj said. “We also want the trust to suspend the demolition drive till we are given our own land. If there’s no result, we will internationalize our case by taking our problem to international rights organizations and the United Nations.”

As the first such public protest, on Feb. 15 at Maitighar Mandala, one of the most prominent areas of the capital, the Christian community will begin a “relay hunger strike.” Christians are also beginning the first-ever Christian census this year to ascertain their true position in society.

“We estimate there are about 2 million Christians now [out of a population of nearly 29 million],” Gahatraj said.  

Catholics, however, form a tiny fraction of the Christian community. Satyal assessed there were about 7,500 Catholics. In 2009, three women were killed at the Assumption Church when a militant underground organization planted a bomb there. All three had to be cremated.

“Land is a premium commodity in Kathmandu Valley,” said Anthony Sharma, Nepal’s first Catholic bishop. “When the living don’t have land, it is futile to seek land for the dead. We have accepted cremation for Catholics in Nepal in keeping with acceptance worldwide.”

But even the cremation is dogged by discrimination.

“The Arya Ghat cremation ground at Pashupatinath distinguishes between upper castes and lower castes,” the bishop said. “If Christians are taken there, they would be treated as lower castes. So we have organized our own cremation site in Teku [in a different part of the town].”

Madhav Kumar Nepal, who resigned as prime minister on June 30 but leads a caretaker government, was regarded as having a soft spot for Christians. After the attack on the Assumption church, he was among the first state officials to visit the injured in the hospital and kept his promise to bring the culprits to justice, with police managing to arrest the blast mastermind.

Nepal resigned last year under pressure by the largest opposition party, and since then the turbulent republic has remained under a powerless caretaker government, unable to make any major decision.

With the squabbling political parties unable to form a new government and a political deadlock spilling into its seventh month, there are now new fears about the prospective constitution, which is expected to consolidate the secular nature of the nation. The constitution was to have been completed last year, but as the bickering parties failed to accomplish the task, the deadline was extended to May 28.

The delay has enabled a spurt in activities of Hindus calling for the restoration of Hinduism as the state religion. If Nepal’s May deadline fails as well, Christians fear it could be impossible to obtain their own official burial site.

Report from Compass Direct News

Pakistani Muslims Beat Elderly Christian Couple Unconscious

80-year-old’s bones broken after he refused prostitute that four men offered.

SARGODHA, Pakistan, October 21 (CDN) — An 80-year-old Christian in southern Punjab Province said Muslims beat him and his 75-year-old wife, breaking his arms and legs and her skull, because he refused a prostitute they had offered him.

From his hospital bed in Vehari, Emmanuel Masih told Compass by telephone that two powerful Muslim land owners in the area, brothers Muhammad Malik Jutt and Muhammad Khaliq Jutt, accompanied by two other unidentified men, brought a prostitute to his house on Oct. 8. Targeting him as a Christian on the premise that he would not have the social status to fight back legally, the men ordered him to have sex with the woman at his residence in village 489-EB, he said.

“I turned down the order of the Muslim land owners, which provoked the ire of those four Muslim men,” Masih said in a frail voice. District Headquarters Hospital (DHQ) Vehari officials confirmed that he suffered broken hip, arm and leg bones in the subsequent attack.

His wife, Inayatan Bibi, said she was cleaning the courtyard of her home when she heard the four furious men brutally striking Masih in her house.

“I tried to intervene to stop them and pleaded for mercy, and they also thrashed me with clubs and small pieces of iron rods,” she said by telephone.

The couple was initially rushed to Tehsil Headquarters Hospital Burewala in critical condition, but doctors there turned them away at the behest of the Jutt brothers, according to the couple’s attorney, Rani Berkat. Burewala hospital officials confirmed the denial of medical care.

Taken to the hospital in Vehari, Inayatan Bibi was treated for a fractured skull. The beatings had left both her and her husband unconscious.

Berkat said the Muslim assailants initially intimidated Fateh Shah police into refraining from filing charges against them. After intervention by Berkat and Albert Patras, director of human rights group Social Environment Protection, police reluctantly registered a case against the Jutt brothers and two unidentified accomplices for attempted murder and “assisting to devise a crime.” The First Information Report (FIR) number is 281/10.

Station House Officer Mirza Muhammad Jamil of the Fateh Shah police station declined to speak with Compass about the case. Berkat said Jamil told her that the suspects would be apprehended and that justice would be served.

Berkat added, however, that police appeared to be taking little action on the case, and that therefore she had filed an application in the Vehari District and Sessions Court for a judge to direct Fateh Shah police to add charges of ransacking to the FIR.

Doctors at DHQ Vehari said the couple’s lives were no longer in danger, but that they would be kept under observation.

Report from Compass Direct News