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BY VIVIEN MILEY The involvement of the giant corporations in the global HIV/AIDS fund may quickly destroy what hope there is that the global fund will help stop the spread of the virus. On June 26, the day after the UN General Assembly's special
On July 5, representatives of the East Timor Transitional Cabinet, the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor and the Australian government met in Dili and signed the Timor Sea Arrangement, concluding 10 months of negotiating and
BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS& BERNIE WUNSCH CANBERRA — "No reconciliation without justice", demanded protesters at a July 1 rally and march on Parliament House organised by the Indigenous Students' Network. The protesters called on the government
HOBART — Australia's "minister for racism" Philip Ruddock received an unwelcome reception when he spoke to a Liberal party meeting in Salamanca Square on July 5. Fifteen protesters slammed the government's "shameful" policy of forcibly detaining
Socialism with capitalist characteristics "They are also working for building socialism with Chinese characteristics." — Chinese President Jiang Zemin, announcing that businesspeople can join the Communist Party. The CCP? "If we let people
BY MICHAEL ARNOLD Over recent years the "drug problem" has been regularly discussed in the corporate media. In the midst of this discussion, more than 1000 Australian heroin users have died as a result of overdoses between 1996 and 2000. While
BY NORM DIXON JOHANNESBURG — Trade union militants and grassroots activists involved in a wave of working-class community struggles against evictions and cut-offs of water and electricity gathered here for the annual Khanya College winter school
The city of Juarez, on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, provides a telling example of how "free trade" agreements affect the lives of ordinary people. Juarez is in Mexico's "free trade zone", a commercial zone along the northern border
BY EVA CHENG On the eve of the end of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's five-year-old Awami League government, a strike and protest wave is gripping Bangladesh. After thousands of garment workers rose nationally on July 1 to defend their
BY BILL MASON BRISBANE — Stoppages and pickets are breaking out in the electricity and building industries around Queensland, as unions campaign for improved enterprise bargaining agreements, focusing on key issues such as wages, job security and
BY JENNY LONG SYDNEY — Twenty activists gathered on July 5 under the banner of Trade Unionists to Defend Workers' Compensation to call on the NSW Labor Council and affiliated unions to relaunch industrial action to defeat the state government's
BY SEAN HEALY Drinking it in a wannabe-hip caf‚ in Newtown or Fitzroy, it smells of modern sophistication; hauling great bags of it down a steep hillside in East Timor or Colombia, it smells of age-old slavery. It's just a little bean, but coffee