Jim Casey was elected senior vice president of the NSW Fire Brigade Employees Union (FBEU) in its May elections. Casey, a socialist, was part of a left ticket of four, running with an ALP member, a syndicalist and a rank-and-file unionist with a history in of activism in the Maritime Union of Australia. The team decided to run an executive ticket of four people, with recommendations for the other nine positions on the committee of management.
693
The West Papuan Morning Star flew over Newcastle City Hall on December 1, the anniversary of the first official raising of the flag in West Papuan in 1961. The flag raising ceremony was addressed by Greens councillor Michael Osborne and Australian West Papua Association spokesperson Michael Freund of Australian West Papua Association.
Nicaraguas Sandinistas will never forget the night of November 5 and the four days of street celebrations that followed. The first official results of the election came in around 11pm. They foretold that Daniel Ortega, presidential candidate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), would win on the first round. Partisans of the Sandinista movement, which led the popular revolution of 1979, had waited 16 long, trying years for this day, ever since the Sandinista government went down to bitter defeat in February 1990.
UNSW redundancies I
Your article "Student organisation imposes AWAs" (GLW #691) contained a glaring inaccuracy. The UNSW Student Guild did not give staff 24 hours notice of their redundancies as reported. If you had checked the enterprise
In a November 27 media release, the WA-based Project SafeCom refugee right group, renewed its call for the abolition of Australias temporary protection visa (TPV) regime following a report in the same days Australian newspaper that an Iraqi asylum-seeker sent home by Australian officials was assassinated in Baghdad after being accused of being an Australian spy.
Last Friday, as I sat down to write this, a progress report on the Green Left Weekly fighting fund was emailed in from Will who heads our small but serious finance team. More than $16,000 came in from our supporters the previous week (donations and fund raising events), taking the total raised this year to $203,815.
The return of ALP leader Steve Bracks for a third term at the November 25 Victorian election was less a vote for the state ALP government than a vote against the federal Coalition government.
It was also a rejection of the legacy of former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, whose 1992-1999 government was responsible for wholesale privatisation and the slashing of public services. While Labor campaign ads reminded Victorians of the Kennett legacy, Bracks has not bought back into public ownership any of the privatised assets, including public transport. Labor won 55 of the 88 lower house seats.
On December 1, up to 2 million people attended a rally in Beirut called by Hezbollah and its allies to demand the resignation of US-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Sinioras government.
As was widely expected, the year-long Cole inquiry, while finding that Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd deliberately concealed from the UN $290 million in bribes it paid to Iraq in 2000-03 to secure wheat contracts, cleared PM John Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing.
Early morning on September 5 security guards burst into the sleeping quarters of Colnbrook immigration detention centre in west London. The guards had come to take 32 Iraqi Kurdish men away. Barefoot, handcuffed, with the guards swearing at them, the 32 were taken to RAF Brize Norton airforce base. Their threatened forced deportation to Arbil in northern Iraq was imminent.
The Stern report makes recommendations that will allow for a temperature rise of around 3°C, but this is likely to be devastating for the planet. George Monbiot says that, Two degrees is the point at which some of the most dangerous processes catalysed by climate change could become irreversible.
Final approval at the UN General Assembly of the declaration on indigenous peoples rights was blocked on November 28 by a group of African countries led by Namibia, and supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Russia.
- Previous page
- Page 5
- Next page