Tony Dewberry
After years of struggle by asylum seekers and campaigning by the refugee-rights movement, the racist system of mandatory detention seems to be facing a crisis. Last week the federal government ordered the release from detention
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Sue Bolton Quite a few places in the meat industry have AWAs. Some are in the retail services. Not a single AWA in the industry includes a rostered day off and the AWAs often allow the line to operate at a faster speed without increasing the amount
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Kathy Newnam, Darwin Coalition Senator Nigel Scullion was given a cool reception at an "information session" he held in Alice Springs on July 26 in an attempt to sell the Coalition government's proposal to build a nuclear-waste dump near the town.
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Sue Bolton Kevin Quill, a member of the Electrical Trades Union and a Pilbara Mineworkers Union activist at Hamersley Iron, described what happened when individual contracts were introduced in the Pilbara in the early 1990s. "Individual contracts
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Marlene Obeid A number of Afghan prisoners have begun a hunger strike, which they say they will pursue until death if their demands are not met, in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to reports from the US Department of
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91̳ Weekly's Bronwyn Jennings spoke to Geelong Trades Hall secretary Tim Gooden about the campaign to defeat the federal Coalition government's proposed changes to industrial relations laws. Can the new IR laws be defeated? Yes. They may
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Liam Mitchell A central thrust of Prime Minister John Howard's planned new workplace laws will be to ensure employers can more easily lower their labour costs by forcing workers onto individual contracts, or Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs)
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Sarah Stephen If it's true that terrorists are driven by a hatred of Western "democracies" and liberal ideas, it's more than ironic that, in the wake of the London bombings, there is bipartisan agreement in Australia to step up security
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Paul Oboohov, Canberra The Unions ACT rally against PM John Howard's new industrial laws, set for August 9, the first sitting day of the new Senate, will no longer be held in front of Parliament House as planned, but several kilometres away in
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Message Stick: 4-Wheel Dreaming — Documents a journey into the very heart of Australian Aboriginal culture. ABC, Friday, August 5, 6pm. Hiroshima's Atom Bomb Dome — To coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, this program
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Sarah Stephen Sam Watson, an Indigenous leader and spokesperson for Socialist Alliance, believes that the level of racist paranoia has increased following the London bombings, and he says the federal government is trying to drag us back to a past
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Move over Pauline Hanson, you've been replaced by an aggressive army of professional word-spinners who easily out-offend, out-vilify and out-incite you. They'll do fine service selling the Howard government's next war moves and
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Peter Boyle "Without 91̳ Weekly, freedom of the press and public truth-telling in Australia would be gravely ill. This one newspaper is a beacon; in the least diverse, most restricted newspaper climate in the Western world, 91̳
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The following open letter from the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta — the Senior Aboriginal Women's Council of Coober Pedy — was issued on July 19. It was signed by Eileen Kampakuta Brown, Emily Munyungka Austin, Ivy Makinti Stewart and Tjunmutja Myra
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Jim Green Federal science minister Brendan Nelson announced on July 15 that the Coalition government intends to dump its nuclear waste in the Northern Territory, thus breaching assurances given prior to the 2004 federal election that the
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Jon Lamb On July 25, Lieutenant Colonel Lance Collins, a leading intelligence expert on East Timor and Indonesia, blew the whistle on the Australian Defence Force's intelligence manipulation and cover-ups in East Timor in 1999. Collins has also
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August 6 and August 9 will mark the 60th anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city was
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Maureen Francis The NSW Labor government's planned $2 billion water desalination plant in Sydney's eastern suburbs has produced an interesting group of opponents. The state Liberal opposition may perhaps be discounted: they see it as their duty
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Since the moment that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement on July 1, pro-choice activists, feminists and Democratic Party officials have sounded the alarm. Their concern is understandable. Long considered the
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NSW CFMEU strategy I attended the June 22 "Stand Up and Speak Out" meeting at Parramatta Town Hall. Contrary to what your article [in GLW #631] reported, CFMEU NSW secretary Andrew Ferguson did not "urge caution, lest the right of entry of union
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In the wake of the July 7 bombings in London, people in Britain and around the world are asking: why did this happen, and what can we do to stop it from happening again? Perfectly reasonable questions to which there are a variety of possible answers,
News
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DARWIN — A 20-year-old Aboriginal man was confined to a wheelchair on July 16 after being dragged behind a police wagon until the toenails and skin were torn off his feet. Police spokespeople told the July 24 Sunday Territorian that the incident
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BRISBANE — The US government faces "deficits" on a number of fronts in its occupation of Iraq, leading US peace activist Phyllis Bennis told a public forum at the Avid Reader Bookshop on July 27. The forum was sponsored by the Brisbane Social Forum
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ARMIDALE — Since the July 1 Sky Channel meeting and rally to defend workers' rights, attended by 500-600 workers, unionists have been meeting weekly to organise a family picnic and rally on August 7, and to inform the community about the effects
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HOBART — Twenty people held banners and placards and chanted "Medicare, not warfare!" and "Bring the troops home now!" alongside a major road on July 26. The protesters, organised by the socialist youth organisation Resistance, were expressing
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NEWCASTLE — On the morning of July 29, 200 workers rallied outside the office of federal Coalition MP Bob Baldwin in the town of Raymond in a display of solidarity with the nine-week-long strike by maintenance workers employed by Boeing at the
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Chris Johnson, Queenscliffe They came in red coats, scarves and hats, wrapped in red blankets and waving red flags. One-hundred-and-fifty residents of the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria called on the state Labor government to reverse its decision
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HOBART — The Hobart Organic Food Co-operative distributed free food to 60 people in a Food not Bombs activity on Parliament House Lawns on July 22. Food not Bombs is a volunteer organisation dedicated to creating a world free from coercion and
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ADELAIDE — Local bands Traveling Sacks, Mandala Project, Candle Wax and Ezulai, and musicians from Spacial Monkey donated their time and music to help raise more than $500 for 91̳ Weekly and the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network on
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BRISBANE — "The trade union movement is facing the biggest challenge in its history" from the Coalition government's planned anti-union laws, environmentalist and former NSW Builders Labourers Federation secretary Jack Mundey said at the July 24
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John Percy
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Sue Bolton Victoria's South West Trades and Labour Council is organising a community rally in Warrnambool on August 6 against PM John Howard's plans to take the axe to workers' rights. SWTLC assistant secretary Margaret Brabender told 91̳
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Kerry Smith A peaceful walk into Wandella State Forest, near the town of Cobargo in south-eastern NSW, turned into a terrifying experience for about 25 people on July 23. The adults and children were trapped in the forest for more than three hours
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NEWCASTLE — John Pilger's latest film Stealing a Nation was screened on July 23, and given media coverage by several local papers. The film tells the story of Diego Garcia, an island territory of Britain whose population was forced off their land
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BRISBANE — Thirty opponents of the controversial Woolworths construction site at Maleny, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, picketed the offices of the Queensland environment and planning minister Desley Boyle and Premier Peter Beattie on July 29.
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MELBOURNE — A fundraising event for a Victorian speaking tour by Letty Scott in November was held on July 21. Letty is campaigning for justice for her husband, Douglas Scott, who died in Darwin's Berrima prison 20 years ago. She believes that he
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MELBOURNE — Rob Stary, the lawyer defending Jack Thomas against terrorism related charges, told a July 27 public forum on the "war on terror" that the government prosecutor had applied for Thomas' trial to be held in camera. "We think there
Analysis
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John Martinkus HT Lee died on July 26. I only knew HT for the last six years of his life, but the circumstances of our meeting in the final days before the 1999 independence ballot in East Timor meant that we formed a strong friendship. HT
World
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Vikki John I am deeply saddened and in shock to find out that Francis Ona passed away suddenly on July 24 at his village in Guava, Bougainville, at the age of 52. Although I had not met Mr. Ona in person, I was privileged from 1993-95, with other
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Alex Bainbridge, Toronto Two-hundred people, mainly academics and graduate students, participated in the first international anniversary conference of the California-based red-green journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism over the July 22-24
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At a joint press conference with visiting US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld on July 26, Kyrgystan's defence minister announced that his government would continue to allow Washington to station around 1000 US military personnel at an airport near
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On July 27, the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) launched 'Project Escalate', a campaign for a living wage for its members. The strike, marches and pickets were well-supported in the main cities, with more than 4000 marching in Cape
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On July 28, the Islamic Human Rights Commission reported that attacks on Asian-Britons reported to it, and not to the police, had increased 13-fold since July 7 - from an average of 6-7 a week, to 170 in two weeks. The Muslim Safety Forum, which
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Max Lane East Timor's local elections are now in their eighth month. In Aileu, close to Dili, the Socialist Party of Timor (PST) achieved second place after Fretilin, pushing the Democrat Party into third place. Overall, in the districts contested
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Political science professor Kenneth Good, who has taught at the University of Botswana for 15 years, lost an appeal in the Botswana courts on July 27 over his deportation from the country. Good was deported on May 31 as a "threat to national
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On July 25, public servants rejected the acting prime minister's call to return to work, as the fourth day of their strike brought many government agencies to a standstill. Two-thousand workers marched to parliament in Nukualofa to present a letter
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To the chagrin of right-wing media pundits in Britain, Karl Marx has been voted "greatest ever philosopher" by listeners in a five-week online poll run by the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time. The July 21 Weekly Worker reported that the In Our Time
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On July 29, hundreds of people marched to the US embassy to protest the neoliberal policies of President Oscar Berger and the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was passed by US Congress in June. Protesters called for higher wages,
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On July 27, the first ever solidarity brigade to Venezuela began, organised by the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network. The brigade aims to give Australians a taste of the unfolding Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, a process led by President
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Max Lane "The mobilisations on July 23 when Arroyo gave her state of the nation address to Congress were the biggest since the anti-Arroyo actions began", Sonny Melencio told 91̳ Weekly by phone on July 27. Melencio is vice-chair of Bukluran
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Eva Cheng Chevron Corp, the second biggest US oil company, which is competing fiercely with China National Offshore Oil Corp to take over a smaller US oil concern, UNOCAL, has been found to have made big donations to vocal CNOOC critics, some of
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On July 26, more than 1000 Afghans protested at the US military base in Bagram, chanting "Die America!" and throwing stones. The protesters attempted to break down an outer gate, demanding that eight detainees who were arrested without consultation
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Alex Miller On July 22, a 27-year-old Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot eight times by armed police in London — seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. The police later admitted that de Menezes had been unarmed and had no
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Students were brutally attacked and tear-gassed by police at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby on July 27, following a series of clashes over a new grading system at the university. A number of students sustained serious injuries
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Duroyan Fertl, Havana On July 26, the Cuban people celebrated the 52nd anniversary of the failed attack on Moncada Barracks, an attack led by a 26-year-old lawyer named Fidel Castro. The 1953 attack was designed to inspire Cubans to rise up
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James Balowski, Jakarta Despite earlier opposition, leaders of Indonesia's parliament now appear to be willing to allow provincial-based political parties to be established in Aceh. This was a major sticking point in finalising the peace agreement
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Kim Bullimore Once hailed as the father of the Israeli settler movement in occupied Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now regarded by the settlers as their enemy. With August 15 expected to be the date on which Israel begins to
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Raul Bassi "The end of the last hope", was the way that a worker from Rio de Janeiro expressed her disillusionment with the Workers Party (PT) government of President Lucio Inacio "Lula" da Silva. "There is corruption, and the president is
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Doug Lorimer "They just keep getting stronger. Despite months of assurances that their forces were on the wane, the guerrillas and terrorists battling the American-backed enterprise here appear to be growing more violent, more resilient and more
Culture
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Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold WarBy Penny M. Von EschenHarvard University Press, 2004329 pages, $60 (hb) REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON Louis Armstrong was one of dozens of US jazz musicians sponsored by the US State
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Turkeysthanksgivingandthose yankee doodleswiththeir big toysboomand gloomthe new centurionscast asliberatorswithno-man's landgrowing larger every daywhilecorpses pile upmulti-culturallyallreeking of democracy's deceptionandonly the desertkeeping it
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REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN Code 46Directed by Michael WinterbottomStarring Samantha Morton and Tim RobbinsOpens nationally August 4 Code 46 is a love story, but it's not your usual love story. It has as a backdrop some fascinating and very
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War of the WorldsDirected by Steven SpielbergStarring Tom Cruise REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY I think Steven Spielberg's movie Empire of the Sun is one of the great films of the 1980s. So when it comes to expecting something special from Spielberg, I