• Normally, we would not expect Australia -- a relatively well-off and isolated country -- to have been involved in many wars. This has not been the case for Australia and, more interesting, it has persistently not been the case

  • Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that the country agreed to host a U.S. military base. Observers said the deployment of American troops to Asia-Pacific is a move to counter China's growing influence in the region

  • Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has expressed support for allowing the sale of uranium to India in the near future

  • Three men and a women from Spain were in an Australian court after they were arrested in connection with the seizure of more than 600 pounds of cocaine from a yacht in Queensland, the second significant seizure in just over a year

  • Australia's resumed push to swap asylum-seekers arriving by boat with refugees from Malaysia is the government's most recent policy response to an issue that has preoccupied officials and the public for years

  • Concerns about the changing balance of power in the Asia-Pacific are fuelling a debate in Australia about the potential acquisition of 100 F-35s. The decision is important in a country where maintaining regional air superiority remains critical to its national security thinking

  • The door for China's dramatic increase in influence in the island nations of the Pacific was opened by decades of mismanagement of Pacific affairs by western allies Australia and New Zealand. And if the US and the west want to regain ground, the two Pacific partners are going to have to rethink how they engage with the region

  • Just a week after a vessel sunk near Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, another asylum-seeker vessel with 150 people aboard sank while en route to Australia

  • Australia is keen on creating the world's largest network of marine reserves in order to protect ocean life

  • Just days after local beef was linked to an E-coli contamination scare in the U.S., Australia assured that its beef is safe for domestic as well as foreign markets

  • Rights groups have welcomed a decision by the Australian government to process all asylum-seekers in the same way, regardless of how they arrived in the country

  • As global politics and economic development pivot to Asia, Australia is itself becoming a pivotal country in regional and global affairs

  • Australia is rapidly re-posturing in the face of a militarized East Asia

  • Qantas Airways faces yet more negative publicity and possible legal action from the mother of an unaccompanied child traveller after the Australian airline confessed losing the boy at Hobart Airport last month

  • Australia's plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia got an unexpected vote of confidence from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who says the proposed plan is safer and better for asylum seekers

  • A report commissioned by the Australian government has revealed the pristine natural winter snow of the Australian Alps could disappear by 2050. The 'Caring For Our Australian Alps Catchments' report said the Alps are endangered by climate change

  • Qantas signed a contract to order from Airbus 110 new aircraft. It is the largest single commercial jet order in Australian aviation history

  • Australia had a 72 percent increase in its trade surplus in August

  • Winds carried ash clouds from a volcano in Chile thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean to affect flights in South Africa early this month, so it is possible that the spores of a variant of a deadly mutant fungus, Ug99, a wheat stem rust that surfaced in South Africa in 2009, could travel to Australia - one of the world's four main wheat exporters - in the same way