“This political force should be liquidated,” said Pavlo Petrenko, Ukraine’s justice minister, quoted in the July 9 edition of Capital (Kiev’s equivalent of the Australian Financial Review).
Petrenko was referring to the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU). For a time in the 1990s, it was the most supported party in Ukraine and it still won 13% of the vote at the 2012 parliamentary poll.
1020
The Newcastle Resistance Centre was packed to capacity on August 3 to hear Shamikh Badra speak about what is happening in his home city of Gaza.
Badra said his grandfather was forced from his village in 1948 and ended up in Gaza.
He described the geography of the conflict, and how Israel exploits religion to cover the fact that it is occupying Palestinian land.
“In 1948,” he said, “there was no Hamas, no rockets. Yet this did not stop them from invading and committing massacres.”
Two young people who died in their car on July 25 after using a gas heater to keep warm had been homeless for some time.
Dr Bruce Redman from the Salvation Army told the Ballarat Courier after the discovery of their bodies: “The Salvos are finding more and more people who are resorting to live in their cars because of a lack of affordable accommodation options.
“When it's summer, people tend to sleep on the beach or in their cars and no one really notices. But when it's cold, most people expect to have a roof over their heads, somewhere where they can stay warm.”
Cuba calls for US to end covert operations
The Cuban government has called on Washington to halt hostile covert operations against it, the Morning Star said on August 7.
An Associated Press investigation revealed that a US government program had sent young Latin Americans to Cuba on political missions posing as AIDS-awareness workshop organisers.
Ten years ago, on August 13 2004, the John Howard government, with the support of the Labor Party, passed legislation that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
Queer people did not have the right to marry before the legislation was passed, but the new definition was brought in to close any loopholes and make it explicit that the Coalition government did not support civil rights for gay and lesbian people.
Former prime minister Bob Hawke is urging Australia to become the world's nuclear waste dump. But he has little hope of succeeding.
Students and staff at the University of Wollongong (UOW) held a forum on August 7 to discuss the impact the higher education cuts proposed by the federal government would have on the university.
The forum was organised by UOW Uncut, a new group of staff and students who are campaigning against the funding cuts.
The anger was palpable among the 60 people who attended the forum, chaired by UOW National Tertiary Education Union branch president Joanne Buckskin, and addressed by NTEU NSW secretary Genevieve Kelly, staff member Alexander Brown, and student Ben Kohler.
A dove
that flew off
just after the fall of Afghan Buddha
Didn’t have enough
Unoccupied airspace
Unoccupied skies
To flap its wings to restart the heart beats gone numb
Of zillions resting in
Graves
Segregated apart as
For the occupant and by the ccupied.
The names on the tombstones
of the graves of the occupied
Could later become undecipherable,
Though they
Far outnumber that of the occupants.
Hope the dead never wake up,
to scrutinize their underrepresented statistics,
to check the word limit of reports from Gaza,
The 157 Tamil refugees who refused “a very good” deal to be deported to India now face the orchestrated despair of detention on Nauru.
The refugees were delivered to Nauru on August 2 without the knowledge of their lawyers and reportedly showing “clear signs of manhandling and trauma”. Human rights lawyer George Newhouse said he had “not had the opportunity to inform our clients of their rights and options.
In the same week that employment minister Eric Abetz announced the government would expand Work for the Dole to all job seekers under 50 and that job seekers would have to apply for double the number of jobs than previously, billionaire miner Andrew Forrest released his own recommendations for welfare reform — some of the most punitive ever proposed.
SYRIZA member and journalist Afrodity Giannakis spoke in Melbourne on July 22 on Greek socialists' struggle to clear a new path out of the wilderness of austerity.
SYRIZA is Greece's largest left-wing party. Giannakis described Greece as "a society stripped of democratic illusions, where workers are compelled to labour for months on the promise of future wages while shipowners evade taxes through tailored loopholes.
The largest coalmine ever built in Australia, and one of the biggest in the world, received final approval from the federal environment minister Greg Hunt on July 28.
The Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland, owned by Indian company Adani, is forecast to produce 60 million tonnes of coal a year over the next 60 years. This dwarfs Australia’s current largest mine, which produces 20 million tonnes a year.
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