Australia & Pacifics

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s highest court on Wednesday rejected a challenge to foreign interference laws in a case that involved a U.S. conservative political organization and free speech arguments.

China has condemned the laws introduced in 2018 that are widely seen as a means of preventing covert Chinese interference in Australian politics, universities and other institutions.

People working on behalf of a foreign powers have to be publicly registered with the Attorney-General’s Department in the interests of transparency.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The prime ministers of Britain and Australia are expected to confirm the broad outlines of a free trade deal Tuesday following talks in London.

The trade agreement is the first Britain has negotiated from scratch since it left the European Union. Earlier deals with countries including Japan were built on existing agreements struck by the EU.

Boris Johnson and his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, reached agreement on the deal during negotiations in London, Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan said.

(Reuters) --- Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that New Zealand's Muslim community should be the focus of any film about the Christchurch mosque attacks after some people raised objections to a movie focussing on her response to the bloodshed.

A film called "They Are Us" is being planned about the attacks on two mosques by a white supremacist gunman on March 15, 2019, in which 51 people were killed, the Hollywood Reporter said last week. 

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Aupito William Sio recalled the terrifying day during his childhood when police officers holding German shepherd dogs turned up at his family home before dawn and shined flashlights into their faces while his father stood there helpless.

Now the minister for Pacific peoples, Sio and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Monday the government would formally apologize for an infamous part of the nation’s history known as the Dawn Raids.

SYDNEY, Jun 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) – The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) announced a 38-strong rowing team today, for the Tokyo Olympics.

The team, including Rio Olympic silver medallist, Alexander Hill, two-time World Cup medallist, Amanda Bateman, and Georgie Rowe, who set multiple indoor rowing world records in 2019 and 2020, is the largest so far, named to the Australian Olympic team for Tokyo, taking the number of selected athletes to 187, of an expected 450-strong team.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Tentative plans for a movie that recounts the response of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to a gunman’s slaughter of Muslim worshippers drew criticism in New Zealand on Friday for not focusing on the victims of the attacks.

Hollywood news outlet Deadline reported that Australian actor Rose Byrne was set to play Ardern in the movie “They Are Us,” which was being shopped by New York-based FilmNation Entertainment to international buyers.

SYDNEY, June 10 (Xinhua) -- A "lab-leak hypothesis" about the origin of COVID-19 is flawed, said Dominic Dwyer, a professor at the University of Sydney, in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald published Tuesday.

The key flaw, he said, is that no evidence shows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Authorities in Australia and New Zealand said Tuesday they’ve dealt a huge blow to organized crime after hundreds of criminals were tricked into using a messaging app that was being secretly run by the FBI.

Police said criminal gangs thought the encrypted app called ANOM was safe from snooping when, in fact, authorities for months had been monitoring millions of messages about drug smuggling, money laundering and even planned killings.

WELLINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- APEC trade ministers have committed to speeding up the cross-border flow of vaccines and related goods to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pledge came following the APEC Ministers Responsible for Trade Meeting chaired by New Zealand Minister for Trade and Export Growth Damien O'Connor on Saturday.

"As we face the biggest health and economic crisis of our lifetimes, I was greatly heartened to see how we united to make progress. We represent half of global GDP and wanted to use trade as a force for good," O'Connor said in a statement.

(Reuters) --- The Australian state of Victoria extended on Wednesday a snap coronavirus lockdown in its capital of Melbourne for a second week, as it scrambles to rein in a highly contagious variant first detected in India, but will ease some curbs elsewhere.

Last Thursday's lockdown in Australia's second most populous state was to have run until Thursday, following the detection of the first locally acquired cases in three months, but infections rose and the number of close contacts reached several thousand.