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Loose cannons

Door opener "As [AWB] chairman, I was trotted out to open doors or to be a figure head to take a political beating for the sake of doing business or to perform other ceremonial roles." — Trevor Flugge testifying on February 27 to the Cole inquiry

Fight for your rights! Protest June 28!

Stuart Munckton Last year, PM John Howard's Coalition government used its Senate majority to force through the Work Choices legislation, against widespread community opposition. This nasty piece of anti-worker legislation has the aim of shifting

Cindy Sheehan: 'Stop killing innocent people for profit'

Cindy Sheehan, whose GI son was killed in Iraq in 2004, has become a leading figure in the US anti-war movement. The following is abridged from a speech she made to a public meeting at the January World Social Forum in Caracas. It's great to be

Stolenwealth Games: Indigenous rights are human rights

Indigenous people from around Australia will gather in Melbourne during the "Stolenwealth Games" on March 15-26. Organised by the Black GST, the Indigenous gathering will discuss ways to bring international media attention to the following demands

IRAQ: Majority of US troops favour rapid exit

Doug Lorimer The March 1 Middle East edition of the US military's Stars and Stripes newspaper reported that a poll of active-duty US troops in Iraq found that 51% of them believe all US military forces should be withdrawn from Iraq within at least

Write On: Letters to the Editor

Cannabis In his attack on Liberal Party anti-drugs policy, Gary Meyerhoff (Write On, GLW #656) contends that "despite claims by some mental health professionals that some pre-existing mental illnesses can be exacerbated or 'brought on' by marijuana

State-sponsored sexual assault?

Dale Mills A complaint by prisoners' pressure group Sisters Inside led to a 20-month inquiry that found that in a four-year period, 41,728 strip searches were performed on women in Queensland's prisons. Only two searches found "significant

On the box

As It Happened: Life Behind The Wall — Looks at the now extinct German Democratic Republic 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. SBS, Saturday, March 18, 7.30pm. Message Stick: Julie Dowling — With the support of her identical twin sister

Australian aid: separating the wheat from the chaff

Tim O'Connor and Kate Wheen Trevor Flugge, the wheat farmer from WA who was recently splashed across the newspapers smiling, shirtless, sweating and aiming a handgun at the camera, may not be the first person you would associate with Australian

IRAQ: Thousands killed by government death squads

Doug Lorimer Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has fled Iraq in fear of his life after reporting that more than 7000 people have been killed by Iraqi interior ministry death squads in recent months, John Pace, the outgoing head of the

Bellyful of Rice lies

Rohan Pearce It sounds like a heartwarming story: An African-American girl born in Alabama during the era of Jim Crow, growing up and getting a job that makes her almost inevitably be described as "the most powerful woman in the world", power she

Our Common Cause: Don't forget the asylum seekers

Tony Dewberry "You can judge politicians by how they treat refugees; they do to them what they would like to do to everyone else if they could get away with it." — Ken Livingstone, lord mayor of London It seems the Howard government wants to