Content about Labor

Andrew McEvoy makes no apologies — he is passionate about Australia. “It’s a magnificent country. A country which has been taken for granted by many Australians,” the country’s tourism chief says.

“But all that is changing now. Australians have woken up to the fact that there is a lot to see and do right here … at home.”

At 48, some would say he has one of the best jobs in Australia.

When other children of his age thought a stone was just a pebble to play with, Shmuel Schnitzer knew it was a priceless object with many facets — a diamond.

“I saw my first diamond when I was very young, maybe five or six years old,” says the 63-year-old who, besides being honorary life president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB), is co-founder of S Schnitzer Diamonds, one of Israel’s leading diamond companies.

“My father used to bring diamonds home. Already then, I adored them.”

Remember those days when you had to make your way to the nearest travel agency and buy your air ticket one month ahead? On travel day, you had to wait in line for half an hour to check in.

Today, you can buy a ticket via your mobile phone three days before traveling, charge the flight to your phone bill and reserve a seat online. With a two-dimensional bar code sent to your mobile, you scan it for a boarding pass at a do-it-yourself check-in counter. You’re good to go in less than 15 minutes.

The number of people with high blood pressure is increasing at a rapid pace, and community intervention is vital to prevent the disease from posing a heavy burden on China's public health and economy, experts said on Sunday, World Health Day.

"It's estimated based on previous surveys that 24 percent of Chinese people over age 15 have high blood pressure," said Wang Wen, vice-chairman of the Chinese Hypertension League. "This means there are about 260 million such patients in the country."

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but starting this week we can march a thousand days forward into a new future.

On April 5th, the world will reach a vital moment in history’s largest and most successful anti-poverty push — the 1,000-day mark before the target date to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

He was a young man who seemed in search of something — meaning to his life, perhaps. He traveled on his search through the Middle East and Eastern Europe into Greece, a journey he chronicled in a series of blog posts from May 7 to September 9, 2007.

Only recently, twenty-nine-year-old Danny Ho Hing-sang had decided to settle down — stop bouncing between part-time jobs and traveling with his girlfriend. He got a job as an IT technician at an international news agency in Hong Kong.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea said on Thursday it had approved plans for nuclear strikes on targets in the United States.

Washington, in response, has scrambled to reinforce its Pacific missile defenses, preparing to send ground-based interceptors to Guam.

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the DPRK's increasingly bellicose threats combined with its military capabilities represented a "real and clear danger" to the US and to its allies the Republic of Korea and Japan.

Putting your unique resume online to interact with head hunters and managers may get you closer to your goal, but it takes patience, Xu Lin finds out.

When Wang Xinming first saw people "Nordic walking" in a park - using a pair of poles while walking naturally - he thought only people with a physical disability would walk with sticks.

But after he tried it once, the 68-year-old former civil servant soon became an enthusiast of this growing sport, which was developed in Finland in 1997 and introduced into China a decade ago.

The use of poles reduces the stress on joints, especially protecting knees during a workout. The pole action also strengthens the upper body.

Independent Chinese app developers face a struggle for survival in the domestic market, despite its size and growing revenue, as Zhang Yuchen reports from Beijing.

A gleam of hope may have lit up the eyes of independent mobile application developers in response to the news that 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio has officially earned his seat at the cool kids' table by selling his news-aggregator app, called Summly, to the tech giant Yahoo! for a reported $30 million in cash and stock.

Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa discussed topics ranging from infrastructure, agriculture and healthcare to energy development and climate change at the fifth BRICS summit in Durban. But what has caught the world's attention is the proposal to establish a BRICS development bank, aimed at providing a financing channel exclusively for developing countries.

So will BRICS become a center of power that can break the existing world order, which is marked by Western dominance and US hegemony?