If greenhouse gas emissions continue to spiral, scientists predict ecological disaster: melting ice sheets, erratic and destructive weather patterns and increasing desertification. All this will turn hundreds of millions of people into refugees.
693
UNSW redundancies I
Your article "Student organisation imposes AWAs" (GLW #691) contained a glaring inaccuracy. The UNSW Student Guild did not give staff 24 hours notice of their redundancies as reported. If you had checked the enterprise
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Friends,
Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.
Despite generally being smaller in number compared to last year’s November anti-Work Choices protests, many of the November 30 city-wide rallies were as lively.
Almost a year ago, in the same week the Howard government’s industrial relations “reforms” were passed by the Senate, most of the media’s attention was focused a series of “anti-terror” raids that targeted a group Muslim men in Melbourne. Despite all the media surrounding the arrests, the men were not charged with conspiring to commit any specific terrorist act. The media hysteria helped fuel the racist Cronulla lynch mob attacks in December 2005.
The return of ALP leader Steve Bracks for a third term at the November 25 Victorian election was less a vote for the state ALP government than a vote against the federal Coalition government.
It was also a rejection of the legacy of former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, whose 1992-1999 government was responsible for wholesale privatisation and the slashing of public services. While Labor campaign ads reminded Victorians of the Kennett legacy, Bracks has not bought back into public ownership any of the privatised assets, including public transport. Labor won 55 of the 88 lower house seats.
On December 1, up to 2 million people attended a rally in Beirut called by Hezbollah and its allies to demand the resignation of US-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad SinioraÂ’s government.
As was widely expected, the year-long Cole inquiry, while finding that Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd deliberately concealed from the UN $290 million in bribes it paid to Iraq in 2000-03 to secure wheat contracts, cleared PM John Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing.
Early morning on September 5 security guards burst into the sleeping quarters of Colnbrook immigration detention centre in west London. The guards had come to take 32 Iraqi Kurdish men away. Barefoot, handcuffed, with the guards swearing at them, the 32 were taken to RAF Brize Norton airforce base. Their threatened forced deportation to Arbil in northern Iraq was imminent.
The Stern report makes recommendations that will allow for a temperature rise of around 3°C, but this is likely to be devastating for the planet. George Monbiot says that, “Two degrees is the point at which some of the most dangerous processes catalysed by climate change could become irreversible”.
Final approval at the UN General Assembly of the declaration on indigenous peoplesÂ’ rights was blocked on November 28 by a group of African countries led by Namibia, and supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Russia.
Last Friday, as I sat down to write this, a progress report on the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly fighting fund was emailed in from Will who heads our small but serious finance team. More than $16,000 came in from our supporters the previous week (donations and fund raising events), taking the total raised this year to $203,815.
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