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Medical students rally for refugees in Sydney on April 7.

Attending my first commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, held at Waverley Cemetery on April 1, I was struck by the solemnity of the occasion.

The hushed tones of those in attendance denoted a reverence for the event that time and distance has not dimmed. Even the children attending on this hot and sultry autumn day in Sydney’s eastern suburbs seem to catch the sadness among those gathered to remember.

For the past 26 years, Ethiopia has been ruled by an authoritarian government. The party in government is the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) — a very criminal group.

I live next door to the world’s largest gun manufacturer. Here in Mexico, the murder rates are close to civil war levels.

Two weeks after the Australian cricket team demonstrated the true level of integrity in Australian sport, the Commonwealth Games — dubbed the Stolenwealth Games — opened on the Gold Coast on April 4.

About 100 protesters highlighted Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples as the opening ceremony got under way. The protest was organised by a national committee including Indigenous activist group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) and the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy.

Campaigning for a woman right’s to choose in Ireland has stepped up since the announcement of the date and wording of a referendum on changing the constitution to allow abortion.

The referendum, to be held on May 25, will ask voters whether to repeal the section of the Irish constitution that bans abortion. If passed, it would allow parliament to make laws to regulate the procedure.

An estimated 500,000 people, largely youth, demonstrated in Washington, DC on March 24 against the continued mass shootings at schools across the country.  Hundreds of thousands more mobilised in about 800 cities and towns.

The spark that lit the pent-up tinder of anger against school shootings — of which there have been 18 since January — was the response to the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida.

Bhaskar Sunkara is editor of the US-based socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has experienced rapid growth over the past year. Green Left Weekly’s Alex Bainbridge spoke to him about US politics under President Donald Trump and prospects for socialists.

The Coalition opposition has blocked legislation introduced by the Victorian Labor government to restructure Victoria's fire services.

The legislation aims at changing the current situation where cities such as Geelong and Ballarat, and many Melbourne suburbs are covered by the Country Fire Authority (CFA) rather than the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

The federal and Victorian governments announced on March 27 a two-year extension of the controversial Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) for East Gippsland, the North East and the Central Highlands. They will be reassessed at the end of the two-year period.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Victorian state government’s March 29 announcement to arm its police with semi-automatic, military-grade weapons was an early April Fool’s joke.

After all, the announcement came in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in the United States. It also came after the Crime Statistics Agency published data on March 15 showing that crime rates have fallen by 9.9%.

Thousands of early childhood educators around Australia walked off the job for the third time in 12 months on March 27, as part of the ongoing Big Steps campaign for equal and professional pay.

The walk-off came about because of the federal government’s failure to meet the February 1 deadline educators and their union, United Voice, had set for a response to their demand for a fair pay increase.

“What is happening in Venezuela is a revolution, not a dictatorship,” Pacha Catalina Guzman, an activist with Venezuela’s largest peasant-based organisation, the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ) and the Bolivar and Zamora Revolutionary Current (CRBZ), told a public meeting of more than 40 people on March 29.

The meeting was the last in Guzman’s Australian tour coordinated by Latin America Solidarity Network (LASNET) that took her to Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney.

The New South Wales government plans to ban people with a history of drug offences from living in social housing in parts of inner-city Sydney.

The desire to provide an environment that helps people who are trying to minimise their drug use and stay away from drug markets is understandable. The reality is there is no evidence that this is what the policy will achieve.

Mireille Knoll was brutally murdered in her Paris apartment on March 23. She was 85 years old with a disability and a Holocaust survivor. Police suspect anti-Semitism may have motivated the attack upon her; all prompting an emotional outpouring.

Turkey has condemned Israel’s slaughter of unarmed Palestinians, but the Turkish regime commits the same atrocities against Kurdish people.

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