Late February three wealthy business leaders with close Liberal Party connections Robert de Crespigny, Ron Walker and Hugh Morgan announced the formation of Australian Nuclear Energy to develop nuclear power generation. Prime Minister John Howard praised the initiative as a great idea.
Renfrey Clarke
The federal governments Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review, released on November 21, had only one real purpose to provide John Howard with evidence for championing the nuclear power cycle.
What other conclusion can we come to, when the review made its assessments while ignoring Australias most spectacular renewable energy resource the hot dry rock geothermal energy of the Cooper Basin and other regions.
Since supporters of President Boris Yeltsin were routed in parliamentary elections in December, Russians have been faced with the prospect that their next president may be Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
In the final years of perestroika, when there was little in Soviet shops except bare shelves and bored salespeople, Russians could still comfort themselves: at least you could always get bread. In four or five varieties, at prices so low they are almost painful to remember: about 25 kopecks (at the time, a few US cents) for a half-kilo loaf.
If a presidential election were held in Russia in the near future, the winner would very likely be a populist candidate pledging strong action against corruption and crime; opposing privatisation and promising a
Roy Medvedev was the leading dissident Soviet historian during the Brezhnev years. He was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1969. In 1971, following the publication in the West of his monumental study on Stalin, Left History Judge,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin appears to have blocked local authority elections called by the Russian parliament for December 8.
ALEXANDER BUZGALIN is a lecturer in economics at Moscow State University and a central figure in the Marxist Platform tendency of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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