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...Australia's stance on immigration has been riddled with controversy for almost a decade. After a flash flood of boat arrivals in 2001 - 43 boats full of 5,516 asylum seekers arrived that year - the conservative John Howard government established the grimly named "Pacific Solution," which diverted asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat to remote detention centers scattered around the Pacific Ocean. Holding camps were set up on the small island nation of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where would-be refugees were kept indefinitely while their applications were processed. Many were confined in the premises...
...Australia's conservative opposition, the Liberal Party of Australia, blames this year's spike of boat arrivals - almost all with the help of human smugglers from Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of Asia - on Rudd's new border policy. If nothing else, the Pacific Solution was at least an effective deterrent, they claim. In 2001, before Howard's program was implemented, there were 5,516 arrivals by boat; by 2002, there was just one. The numbers stayed below 60 until 2007, but have been increasing steadily ever since. "When you weaken laws for unauthorized arrivals, you are in fact creating...
...Still, Berlusconi's almost instant reference to a possible troop pullout was the centerpiece of a day of impassioned, often contradictory reactions from the highest levels of the Italian government. It followed the nation's worst day of military casualties since a November 2003 car-bomb attack in Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, killed 19 Italian soldiers. That death toll was cited when Italy eventually pulled out of Iraq in 2006, but at the time of the Nasiriyah attack, Berlusconi held firm to Italy's military commitment and ironclad alliance with then U.S. President George W. Bush. (See Berlusconi's worst...
...Sergio Romano, a Corriere columnist and former Italian ambassador to NATO, says Frattini's concerns echo those expressed in the halls of power across continental Europe. "He's saying what almost all European leaders are saying, either privately or publicly," Romano tells TIME. "There is a rather widespread idea that [the mission in Afghanistan] is not leading anywhere...
...Somalia earlier this week. While the Americans swoop in and carry out targeted strikes such as this, the African Union peacekeeping mission to the country (called the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM) remains stymied on the ground, undermanned and vulnerable, its troops bearing an unenviable and almost impossible task. In a country that has been in chaos for nearly 20 years, what peace can 5,000 Burundian and Ugandan soldiers possibly keep...