The following is abridged from an address by Sydney-based Afghan refugee Riz Wakil to the November 16 convergence at federal parliament in Canberra.
Thank you for coming here on the first sitting day of parliament to say: "It doesn't matter who won
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John Pilger Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name. Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil", has never seemed more
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Jon Lamb, Darwin East Arm Wharf is a new sprawling development on the edge of Darwin that is fast becoming the hub of the town's maritime trade. Established in 1999, the site has next to no facilities for seafarers, waterside workers and others who
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We, the office bearers of the Craig Johnston Trade Union Support Committee (CJTUSC), are extremely disappointed at the November 3 correspondence currently being circulated by Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron.
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Sue Bolton In a letter to all national and state union secretaries and trades and labour council secretaries on November 3, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron stated that he "has been approached by a number of
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Former Victorian secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Craig Johnston was jailed on August 27 for 9 months for taking part in an industrial protest in defence of jobs. Former AMWU delegate Steev Mansour explains why he supports
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In response to the Coalition government's parliamentary secretary for health Christopher Pyne's call for terminations of pregnancies over 21 weeks to be banned, and severely limited for pregnancies over 12 weeks, the Socialist Alliance has repeated
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Imagine trying to convince teenagers that they shouldn't have sex. Such a ridiculous idea would be laughable, except that it is the policy of US President George Bush, and is undermining the health and wellbeing of young people in the US and around
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Ian Jamieson, Fremantle With the support of the Greens in the Western Australian Legislative Council in October, Labor Premier Geoff Gallop's government finally succeeded, after four years, in getting its much-vaunted workers' compensation
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Keep it up When I was in Australia, studying һƷ̽ Weekly saw me through the days. If you come from a Third World country where politics is still decipherable and you end up in a First World" where politics is over-choreographed and full of
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Former intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie contested PM John Howard's Sydney seat of Bennelong in the October 9 federal election and gained one of the largest swings toward the Greens in the country. Auburn Greens councillor Malikeh Michaels spoke to
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Chasing the Sleeper Cell — They were dubbed "The Lackawanna Six" and they were US citizens accused of aiding al Qaeda after having personally met with Osama bin Laden. SBS, Sunday, November 28, 11am. Living Answers — Aboriginal, Torres Strait
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Tamara Pearson, Sydney From the way the mainstream media has been quoting politicians and religious leaders, including federal health minister Tony Abbott, Governor-General Micheal Jeffery and Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart on abortion lately, you
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The following is a message from jailed unionist Craig Johnston to the November 25 Melbourne rally calling for his release and for an end to the criminalisation of unions. From my prison cell in Loddon I thank you all for attending this rally. I
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Abortion is still illegal in most Australian states except when the pregnant woman's life is in danger. The ACT is the only territory or state that has removed abortion from criminal statutes. Abortion laws were liberalised in WA after two
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The following statement issued by the Socialist Alliance argues that the Coalition government's anti-union agenda can be defeated. With control of both houses of parliament, the Coalition has made it clear that it wants to push through another
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According to retired bricklayer Albie Bambridge, "Craig was the first metalworker organiser I trusted". The following is his story. I first met Craig in about 1993 or 94 when I was working at the bottle works in Spotswood. We were doing a complete
News
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Liberated health care "Patients and hospital employees [at Fallujah General Hospital] were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." — New York Times, November
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HOBART — More than 100 Aboriginal people and their supporters gathered on the lawns of state parliament on November 17 to support the transfer of three Tasmanian islands to Aboriginal ownership. The state government announced the day before that
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Iggy Kim, Sydney On November, 150 people rallied outside the US consulate to protest the destruction of Fallujah and demand that Australian troops get out of Iraq. The rally, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, heard speeches from Greens
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John Percy, Sydney Fairfield City Council has been put on the spot by the right-wing Vietnamese Community of Australia, which is organising a flag-raising ceremony for the flag of the defunct South Vietnamese regime in Cabra-Vale Park on November
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Kerryn Williams & James Caulfield, Canberra "The refugee movement is here to stay. We are becoming stronger by the day. We will fight on to free the refugees!" This declaration from Big Brother's Merlin Luck captured the determined mood of up to
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Jenny Long, Sydney Preliminary results for the 2004 election for the seven-member executive and 45-member central council of the NSW Public Service Association (PSA) indicate that no single faction will dominate these bodies and that the left-wing
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#3 Rally for disability services HOBART — Fifty people with disabilities, their families, carers and supporters joined a rally outside parliament on November 17. The rally was organised by Tascare, a support organisation for young people with
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Alex Tighe, Adelaide Angered by federal health minister Tony Abbott's claim that there is an "abortion epidemic" in Australia and calls by Coalition backbenchers for the federal government to restrict women's access to abortion services, on
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Andrew Martin, Brisbane Jailed unionist Craig Johnston "put his own neck on the line to defend his members", former Victorian state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) Frank Fairley said on November 20. Fairley was
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#2 Education unions strike across NT DARWIN — On November 10, 80 staff covered by the Australian Education Union at the Darwin, Batchelor and Alice Springs campuses of the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education went on strike for
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һƷ̽ Weekly's James Caulfield and Kerryn Williams spoke to some of those present at the November 16 convergence on parliament about why they joined the protest. Lesley Bond was representing the Taree Residents For Refugees, established less
Analysis
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The bosses and the Reserve Bank are nervously looking over their shoulder. With relatively low levels of unemployment, a skills shortage, rocketing profits and massively increasing salaries for company executives, can the combined forces of PM John
World
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The Secret Service payed a visit to Boulder High School on November 11, after it heard that students were planning a spoken word performance of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" at the school's talent show the following night. The school's principal Ron
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Tony Iltis A mass round-up of thousands of young Eritrean men for evading military service, and reports that at least 20 of those detained were massacred after a disturbance in the Adi Abeito prison in Asmara, are the latest indication of serious
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Only a few thousand workers participated in the "indefinite" general strike called by the illegal Korean Government Employees Union that began on November 15. The union, which has 140,000 members, said that 45,000 had committed to join the strike to
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More mass actions and workers' protests have erupted in China, releasing pent-up anger over further erosion of the workers' and peasants' living conditions. And the government has responded with severe repression. Up to 100,000 peasants
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Roberto Jorquera Since the 1960s, the US government has maintained a crippling economic blockade on Cuba. The blockade has had a devastating effect on the ability of the Cuban government to trade on the international market. The resulting isolation
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A November 18 statement from the United Nations drug office confirmed that Afghanistan's economy is now dominated by opium production, which jumped 64% in the last year and now accounts for more than 60% of GDP. UN official Antonio Maria Costa
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Hundreds of people came together on November 16 to protest the installation of pre-paid water metres in Soweto and other townships. The protest was organised by a Coalition that included Anti-Privatisation Forum, Independent Baptists, Jubilee and the
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Doug Lorimer Yasser Arafat, who died in a Paris hospital on November 11, at the age of 75, was the iconic figure of his people's struggle for freedom from six decades of brutal, US-backed, Zionist ethnic cleansing and colonisation of the
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Kim Bullimore, West Bank International Solidarity Movement activist Hannah James was singled out and arrested by the Israeli secret police, the General Security Services (GSS) as she took part in a peaceful demonstration against the expansion of
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On November 16, the Philippines army and police massacred 16 people, including a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old, in Hacienda Luisita, in Tarlac, during a protest of striking workers. More than 5000 sugar-mill workers and sugar-cane farmers in the
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Gilberto Soto, a Salvadoran-born US resident and organiser for the US-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) was assassinated on November 5, outside his mother's home in Usulutan, El Salvador. After shooting him at close range, two men
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Rohan Pearce The NBC TV footage of a US marine executing a wounded and unarmed Iraqi resistance fighter in a Fallujah mosque was a rare crack in the facade that Washington, with the complicity of most of the corporate media, has tried to present to
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On November 17, the Russian government released astonishing figures revealing that less than half the 932 Russian soldiers killed last year died in the "line of duty', and 260 of them committed suicide. More than 100 deaths were classified as
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According to Weekly News Update on the Americas, Chilean police arrested 30 of the approximately 200 demonstrators at a rally on November 10. They were protesting the infringements on civil liberties in the lead up to the November 19-21 Asia-Pacific
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Rohan Pearce Anyone naive enough to think that the Iraqi elections scheduled for January will produce a genuinely, as opposed to formally, independent government is likely to have their illusions shattered by a new crackdown on political opposition
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Dale T. McKinley, Johannesburg During the last week of October, a 13-member delegation from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) arrived in Zimbabwe for a brief "fact-finding mission" that, according to COSATU, was designed to "get a
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Tim Anderson Hidden behind the rhetoric of "democracy" in the 458-page report titled "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba", and underlying US President George Bush's regime's plan for a "transition" in the island nation, are all the major
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Fred Fuentes The left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) made big gains in the Nicaraguan municipal elections held on November 7. Despite an overall increase in voter abstention from 38% to 44%, the FSLN's vote climbed from 618,821 in
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Michael Karadjis Five years after North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops entered Kosova, occupation authorities have begun a program of privatisation of state and social enterprises. The surprise is not that NATO and the United Nations
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Following a successful 24-hour general strike on November 15, El Alto's Federation of Neighbourhood Juntas (FEJUVE) declared that it would launch an indefinite strike if the Bolivian government did not agree to its demands. The entire city of El Alto
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Zimbabwe's Social Forum finally got underway on October 28. As police had refused to allow the forum to go ahead some weeks earlier, organisers had to hurriedly pull together a new venue and date. A contingent of uniformed police kept a watchful eye
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For the second time in a fortnight, the Miami Dade police have admitted that a stun-gun had been used against a child. In the first incident, on October 20, a six-year-old boy holding a shard of glass was stunned with a Taser. Then, on November 10,
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On November 15, Palestinians solidarity activists in Nablus displayed a message of solidarity with the people of Fallujah. At 5:30 PM, the word "Fallujah" was set ablaze on a mountain north of Nablus, known as Jabl-an-Naar (Mountain of Fire). Written
Culture
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Edgar Snow: A BiographyBy John Maxwell HamiltonLouisiana State University Press, 2003343 pages, $40 (pb) REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON "Revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries or their propaganda", wrote US journalist Edgar Snow. "Revolutions are
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Review by Peter Boyle The SpookWritten by Melissa ReevesDirected by Neil ArmfieldWith Eugenia Fragos, Russell Kiefel, Tom Long and Steve Le Marquand Tuesday 6.30pm, Wednesday to Friday 8pm, Saturday 2pm and 8pm Sunday 5pmBelvoir St Theatre, Sydney
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Australian IdolChannel 10Just finishedWith a net annual profit of $76.93 million to crow about, Network Ten's hold on the youth market demographic is sure to continue — at least until it's milked what it can from the recently