Mohammed Karimi has come a long way to find himself at the gate of a cattle weighing station in Australia's outback...Karimi, along with six other refugees, are enrolled in a 12-week course at the Warwick campus of TAFE, a nation-wide tertiary educational institute. The students are the second batch to go through the new program, sponsored by Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), which trains them for work in the agricultural industry.

The joint conference of the United Nations department of public information and non-governmental organizations, which gets under way in Australia tomorrow, will this year focus on global health in relation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aiming to attract greater participation of civil society from the Asia-Pacific region.

Australia must tighten rules governing the behavior of its companies, especially mining firms, toward indigenous people at home and abroad, a United Nations human rights body said on Friday. The 18-member committee of independent experts on racism also told Australia to do more to integrate recent immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other Muslim countries and tackle racism against indigenous people in Australia.

Having never used Facebook or sent a tweet, and with no desire to do so, I am what you might call a social media sceptic...It troubles me to contemplate the effect it's having on government and public policymaking - when politicians feel the need to respond to the gossip and information generated with such rapidity by Twitter.

Eleven students and three staff members from a school in East Java, Indonesia, have visited Young [Australia] for a week. The school is one of three Indonesian sister schools to Young High School and the first to visit on cultural exchange.

The most anticipated Portland theater event of the summer is only a little more than a week away. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in a co-production by Australia’s Sydney Theatre Company and Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre

Mid-level foreign affairs officers from across the region will be participating in a training programme which seeks to increase their awareness of diplomatic issues presently facing small island Caribbean states.

Culture and creativity are central to life in the 21st century. The global stakes have never been higher; never before have we been surrounded by so much information or so much art - high and popular, visual and aural, original and reproduced, amusing and challenging, bland and exciting.