Blood & Guts: Dispatches From The Whale Wars
Sam Vincent
Black Inc., 2014, 274 pages, $29.99 (pb)
Industrial-scale whaling, writes Sam Vincent in Blood & Guts, had picked clean the world’s oceans until only the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary remained, protected by the icy remoteness of Antarctica and a worldwide ban on commercial whaling.
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On March 9, US President Barack Obama issued an excutive order imposing more sanctions of Venezuelan officals and declaring the oil-rich nation a “national security threat”. It came after a long period of often violent right-wing protests and economic shortages facing the left-wing Chavista governmetn of President Nicolas Maduro.
"The Greek Elections: What Next? SYRIZA and the fight against austerity," was the theme of a forum, presented by the Department of Political Economy, Sydney University, and the Australia-Greece Solidarity Campaign, on March 10 at the New Law School. Up to 150 people packed into a lecture theatre to hear a panel of speakers, followed by a lively discussion period on the key issues.
Socialist Alliance has welcomed support from the NSW CFMEU Construction Division for its state election campaign. The union recently voted to donate $5000 to the campaign and profiled a Socialist Alliance Upper House candidate, CFMEU member and mobile crane operator Howard Byrnes, in its latest union journal Unity.
Let me be clear: I am not happy, as such, that Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won Israel's March 17 elections.
Netanyahu is a blood-soaked killer. He should be put on trial for his many crimes, from the relentless theft of Palestinian land to last summer’s massacre in Gaza — and I yearn to see that day.
The power to “play God” with the lives of asylum seekers was granted to Australia’s immigration minister by the passage of the most punitive refugee laws ever seen last December.
Former immigration minister Scott Morrison, who held refugee children to ransom to pressure recalcitrant senators to concede their votes, pushed through the laws.
The Senate has voted down Christopher Pyne’s Higher Education Reform Bill, which would uncap university fees. This is the second time that the legislation has been struck down. It puts Tony Abbott’s government on aan uneasy footing.
The defeat of the bill comes after Pyne spent weeks on a campaign to bully and threaten crossbenchers in parliament. This strategy included threatening to cut $150 million of research funding to the National Collaborative Research and Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) if the bill was not passed.
The silence around jobs in the NSW election is deafening.
Newcastle has been losing 200 jobs a year from the sale of state assets and the casualisation and retrenchment of state employees.
Up to 8000 workers in jobs such as fitters, boilermakers, welders, riggers and trades assistants in ship building and rail manufacture are also under threat.
Both major parties are focusing on other issues instead of the Hunter region’s jobs.
Associate Professor Jake Lynch, a member of Sydney Staff for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), was assaulted by an elderly Zionist woman during a demonstration in support of Palestine on March 11.
The assault occurred at Sydney University, during a pro-Israel talk given by Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan and supporter of Israel.
Demonstrators interrupted Kemp’s talk, targeting his support for the Israeli occupation in Palestine, chanting “Richard Kemp, you can’t hide, you support genocide.”
The Queensland Labor government has paved the way for the huge expansion of coalmines in the Galilee Basin.
New Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced on March 11 that a deal had been made with Adani and GVK-Hancock to allow the dumping of dredge spoil from the expansion of the coal port at Abbot Point in unused industrial land adjacent to the port.
Palaszczuk said the deal met her election campaign commitment to ban dumping of dredge spoil in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park or in the Caley Valley Wetlands.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent comments on the “lifestyle choice” of Aboriginal Australians living in remote areas are troubling, especially given his self-anointed role of “Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”.
I have been privileged to work in Aboriginal health, in a rural centre of South Australia, for a number of years. The simplistic notion that people live in remote regions purely due to a lifestyle choice is far from reality.
Stop CSG Illawarra released this statement on March 16.
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Today the Minister for Resources and Energy Anthony Roberts announced the buy-back of three coal seam gas (CSG) exploration licences that encroach on the Sydney Water Catchment.
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