A Senate committee inquiry into the Community Development Programme (CDP) — supposedly covering remote employment and community development — has found it causes real harm to people and communities. It is a racist work for the dole scheme and it must be scrapped.
Australia
Climate and renewable energy activists are furious that the federal and Victorian governments are throwing $100 million into a dubious “clean energy” pilot project to produce hydrogen from brown coal in the Latrobe Valley.
The $500 million demonstration plant is at AGL’s Loy Yang power station and mine near Traralgon. It is being built to develop the technology to gassify brown coal and will produce up to three tonnes of hydrogen in its first year. It is expected to create about 400 jobs.
Greater Sunrise
A play by Zoe Hogan
Directed by Julia Patey
Belvoir Theatre, Sydney
Until April 21
"In 2004, Australia placed a bug in Timor-Leste's presidential cabinet room, in order to gain the advantage in negotiations over resources in the Timor Sea. The bug was placed under the cover of an aid program. The bug ended up costing Timor-Leste billions of dollars in lost resources," playwright Zoe Hogan notes about her new play, Greater Sunrise.
In 1513, Niccolo Machiavelli, arguably the finest political theorist of his time, used his famous work The Prince to tease out “means and ends” theory. He concluded that when it came to the exercise of power, a ruler should use any methods available to maintain stability. The means are irrelevant if the ends are positive enough to trump them.
About 100 people, including many students from the nearby Haberfield Public School, protested at the pedestrian bridge on Parramatta Road, Haberfield, on April 10, against construction plans for the controversial WestConnex tollway.
Publicity for the protest proclaimed: "Tell WestConnex and the NSW government we oppose four more years of tunnelling, construction, dust and traffic at the Muirs sites, less than 200 metres from Haberfield Public School." The Muirs sites are a large area of former commercial land, now being used by WestConnex as a construction zone.
The ubiquitous Commonwealth Games mascot Borobi the blue koala belies the fate of the “Aussie icon” it represents. It is ironic that Borobis flourish in the very region where koala numbers have declined drastically in recent years.
Koalas are an endangered species in Queensland, NSW and the ACT and land clearing has long been recognised as the culprit. As well as the animals killed during the actual process of land clearing, the destruction of habitat results in increasing population losses.
Aboriginal activists and supporters have been protesting in Bundjalung Country, also known as the Gold Coast, exposing the whitewashing Commonwealth Games.
Continuing the legacy of actions against the Commonwealth Games in 1982, the “Freedom Camp” at Doug Jennings Park has been exposing the Games’ establishment elitism with actions almost every day. Aboriginal activists from Western Australia, the Northern Territory, New South Wales and north Queensland have converged on the park.
US President Donald Trump is prepping a team of lawyers and policy experts to help right-wing Latin American governments write new laws imposing sanctions on Venezuelan officials and industries, a US source familiar with the policies told McClatchy News' Washington Bureau.
The push is part of Washington’s economic and political war against the left-wing government that aims to undermine Venezuela’s democracy and oust President Nicolas Maduro.
This is an abridged version of an interview with assistant secretary of the Victorian Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Jeff Hoy, which was broadcast on Green Left Radio on 3CR.
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The wharfies are on strike at Webb Dock once again, 20 years after the infamous Patrick dispute. Can you tell us about the current strike and the factors that led to this industrial action?
The body of Carlos Alexandre Pereira Maria was found on April 8 in a bullet-riddled car in Curumau, east of Rio de Janeiro, local media reported.
Pereira, 37, had been cited to testify in court as part of the investigation of the March 14 assassination of councilwoman and socialist activist Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes. Franco was a strong opponent of the military take-over of Mare, a poor neighbourhood in Rio home to about 140,000 people.
After the chemical attack on Douma on April 8 in which dozens of people were killed, the Stop the War Coalition in Britain released the statement below.
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A population of 800,000 makes Mansa a small town by Indian standards. The main market town of the agricultural Malwa region of Punjab, it has a long history of peasant struggle.
A stronghold of the revolutionary peasant movement since the 1920s, and the communist movement since the 1930s, within a few years of Indian independence left-wing peasants’ struggles had expropriated the region’s large feudal landowners.
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