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PM attacks student protest
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Students protesting in anti-war rallies across Australia on Wednesday should have been in school rather than running amok on the streets, Prime Minister John Howard said. Thousands of primary and high school students ditched classes yesterday and took to the streets in sometimes wild protests against a war on Iraq.

Mr Howard said he was not ignoring the will of the public by sending troops to the Persian Gulf to prepare for war while thousands protested at home. But he said it was inappropriate for students to protest during school hours.
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"I think most Australians take the view that young people of school age, of 13 and 14, ought to be at school during school hours," Mr Howard told Hobart radio HO-FM. "And I don't think it reflects particularly well on some schools that many of them appeared to be running amok and causing a lot of inconvenience to motorists, other members of the public and of the police.
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"There is a time and a place for protests, I don't think that time or that place is by school students during school hours.
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" I think they should be in school."

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Howard rejects global protests
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The Prime Minister insists he will not be swayed by the human tide of protest against a war with Iraq - not by the more than 250,000 people who marched in Sydney yesterday, nor the 10 million who rallied worldwide.
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"This is a very difficult issue and I accept a lot of Australian people don't agree with me," John Howard said in an interview broadcast last night, after his return from overseas. "I also suspect there are a lot of Australians who do, and they are not perhaps as noisy about it. And there are a lot of people in between."
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Sydney's peace march from Hyde Park was the biggest in the country's history. In all, 500,000 Australians rallied around the nation at the weekend, while anti-war protests swept 600 towns and cities worldwide. But Mr Howard, who has remained a steadfast ally of the United States and Britain in their push against Iraq, told Channel Nine's 60 Minutes last night: "In the end, while I respect people's opinions and I listen to them ... my charge as prime minister is to make whatever decisions are in the interest of this country.
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"And I believe the way we are handling this is in the best interests of Australia." Mr Howard said he was not convinced that the mass rallies proved public opinion was against a possible war.
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In London, where at least a million people took to the streets, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, remained equally determined. He said there would be "no marches for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which, if he is left in power, will be left in being".

"The moral case against war has a moral answer," Mr Blair said. "It is the moral case for removing Saddam. It is not the reason we act. That must be according to the UN mandate on weapons on mass destruction. But it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act, we should do so with a clear conscience."
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In Brisbane, the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, told a rally of 50,000 that he was sick of Mr Howard saying he was on an overseas peace mission when he only talked about war. "Why hasn't he been listening to the people in Melbourne on Friday night, in Sydney today, in Adelaide today, in other parts of the country yesterday?" But Mr Crean was shouted down when he said Iraq must be disarmed, and that this may require a war with UN backing.
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The Defence Minister, Robert Hill, acknowledged that the protests sent a message that the Government must do all it can to deal with the crisis peacefully. Earlier, Mr Howard told Channel Seven: "I don't know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people who turn up to demonstrations. What I'm doing here is what I think is right for Australia. This is not something where you read each opinion poll or you measure the number of people at demonstrations."

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"This is a very difficult issue and I accept a lot of Australian people don't agree with me,"

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I'm surprised to hear that the demonstrations weren't only in the U.S., but Canada, Spain, England, Australia, Morocco, and probably many other places.

I'm shocked.

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