The Victorian Government鈥檚 announcement on October 18 that it will ban single-use plastic shopping bags is a welcome step towards reducing plastic pollution.
Victoria will join South Australia, ACT, Northern Territory and Tasmania, which already have similar bans in place.聽Queensland and WA will follow in 2018, leaving NSW as the only state to allow the bags.
A single-use plastic bag is used for just 12 minutes on average, but can take up to 1000 years to break down.
Palestinians and media groups have condemned Israel鈥檚 raid on of 11 Palestinian telecom and production companies in the occupied West Bank on October 18, which have since been shut down.
called on authorities to stop their harassment of Palestinian media, as well as for Israeli forces to release the two journalists arrested in the raids in the West Bank.
It is approaching crunch time for the Adani mega-coalmine in Queensland鈥檚 Galilee Basin, with the movement against it growing by the day, including in areas that traditionally support mining.
Finally, the federal government has a policy for the electricity sector: the National Energy Guarantee. (NEG. Did it think this one through?)
It is, effectively, an emissions trading scheme applied to electricity. It is similar to other schemes 鈥 the Clean Energy Target (CET) and the Emissions Intensity Scheme (EIS) 鈥 supported by Labor.
The Austrian legislative elections, held on October 15, finished with one clear winner: 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, who leads the conservative Austrian People鈥檚 Party (OVP). His party emerged as the biggest political force in the country, winning 31.7% of the votes and 61 of the 183 seats in Austrian parliament鈥檚 lower house, the National Council.
Kurz is now set to become Austria鈥檚 new chancellor 鈥 the youngest in the country鈥檚 history 鈥 and thereby completing his meteoric rise to the top.
Chevron has become the second big oil company to abandon plans to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight off the South Australian coast, a year after BP cancelled its plans to drill.
Oil companies say the Bight has similar potential to the Gulf of Mexico, site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, which was the largest marine oil spill in history and killed 11 people.
Veronica Heredia, the lawyer representing missing activist Santiago Maldonado's聽family, has said they will wait for the autopsy results of the body found on October 17 in the Chubut River, in Argentina.
Sergio Maldonado, the brother of the missing activist, also questioned how the body was found upstream, in a previously checked area, where a corpse could easily have been previously found.
The walls of the National Gallery of Victoria ran red on October 14 as activist group the Artists鈥 Committee, an informal association of artists and arts workers opposed to the detention of asylum seekers, continued its project to pressure the National Gallery of Victoria to immediately end its contract with Wilson Security.
Wilson Security provides security services to both the gallery and Australia鈥檚 offshore detention facilities on Manus Island and Nauru and is known to have committed human rights abuses against asylum seekers and refugees.
Every year, the Sydney Peace Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation partnered with the University of Sydney, presents the Sydney Peace Prize to activists fighting for positive social or environmental change.
The prize, which includes a $500,000 award, provides a platform for the activists to increase their reach and spread awareness for their causes. It has been presented annually since 1998 and is a valuable form of recognition of non-violent, influential activism. Last year鈥檚 award recipient was author and environmental activist, Naomi Klein.聽
Advocates of LGBT rights and religious freedom denounced President Donald Trump as he became the first sitting president to address the Values Voter Summit on October 13.
In his speech, Trump assured his supporters that 鈥淛udeo-Christian religious values鈥 would be protected by his administration.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the Family Research Council (FRC), one of the groups behind the summit, as a hate group, tweeted that 鈥渟peaking to anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT groups, Pres. Trump says he is proud to be among so many friends鈥.
A leader of the community that lost seven members in an alleged police massacre has been assassinated in southwest Colombia, the regional government said on October 17.
Jose Jair Cortes was the spokesperson of the Alta Mira y Frontera community in Tumaco, Narino state, where anti-narcotics officials allegedly murdered seven people on October 5.
The Coalition Against WestConnex (CAW) hand-delivered more than 10,000 written submissions and community objections to the WestConnex M4-M5 Link Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to the Planning Department鈥檚 head office on October 16.
Spokesperson for WestConnex Action Group and No WestConnex: Public Transport Anne Picot said: 鈥淭his unprecedented number of objections to the Stage 3 EIS represents the strength of opposition to WestConnex, and the traffic inducing M4-M5 Link. We are confident that thousands more objections have been lodged on-line.