Emma Clancy

Tanya Reinhart, the Israeli linguistics professor and champion of Palestinian rights, died of a stroke in her sleep on March 17 in New York at the age of 63. Palestinian organisations issued a statement from Gaza on March 19, describing Reinhart as “a great indefatigable activist against the policy of the Zionist government of apartheid Israel towards us Palestinians”.
A national survey conducted last year by the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education for the Australia Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) has revealed that most of Australia’s 700,000 university students have become financially worse off over the past five years.
Four years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is wracked by ongoing and escalating violence. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, according to a study published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet in October.
The global youth radicalisation of the 1960s illustrated the revolutionary potential of students in society. Young people and students have played a vital role in revolutionary struggles in the past and continue to do so today. In Latin America, young people are energetic leaders and participants in the social movements, and in Venezuela, young people view themselves as being the “foot soldiers” of the revolution.
At an extraordinary Ard Fheis (congress) of Sinn Fein held in Dublin on January 28, delegates voted overwhelmingly to endorse the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), long known for its discriminatory and violent practices towards the Irish republican movement and Northern Ireland Catholics. About 90% of the 982 delegates at the congress accepted the motion put forward by Sinn Fein’s Ard Chomhairle (national executive), paving the way for a devolution of power to the Northern Ireland Assembly as outlined in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
On January 21, Prime Minister John Howard condemned the organisers of the Big Day Out (BDO) music festival in Sydney for asking those planning to attend not to display Australian flags at the events as an “insult to the freedom it represents”.
More than 30 Palestinians have been killed in the past month in violence between Fatah and Hamas that flared up after Fatah-aligned President Mahmoud Abbas called on December 17 for new presidential and legislative elections. Hundreds more have been wounded in the violence, which intensified in the Gaza Strip late last year and has now spread to the West Bank.
In the lead-up to the November 7 US Congressional elections, President George Bush’s Republican Party tried to terrorise the US public into voting for the party responsible for leading the country into the disastrous Iraq war.
A Gaza ceasefire was negotiated by Israeli and Palestinian officials on November 26. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it is aimed at ending the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel by armed Palestinian resistance groups, and providing the basis for negotiations regarding the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Palestinians, for their part, hope the ceasefire will provide some relief for the people of the sealed Gaza Strip, who have faced a relentless Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign since late June.
The new student organisation at the University of New South Wales, established as a result of the Howard government’s “voluntary student unionism” (VSU) law, is forcing staff earning $40,000 or more per year onto individual contracts (AWAs — Australian Workplace Agreements).
In the deadliest single attack on Palestinians in four years, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed 19 civilians at Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip on November 8. Seven homes were bombed in the early hours of the morning as the victims slept and, according to the Gaza-based United Nations Relief and Works Agency, more than 60 civilians were injured in the attack.
The ABC announced on October 31 that it was axing the popular satirical TV panel show The Glass House — one day after NSW Liberal Senator Connie Fierrvanti-Wells attacked the show in a parliamentary estimates committee hearing examining “ABC bias”.