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“Aboriginal people across Queensland and across Australia have lost all confidence in the capacity of the criminal justice system to address our needs”, Sam Watson, the Socialist Alliance spokesperson on Indigenous issues said about the latest explosion of Aboriginal rage, at the Cape York community of Aurukun. The flare-up was caused by rumours that an Aboriginal man had been assaulted while in police custody.
In a report published on January 3, the Union of Concerned Scientists argues that ExxonMobil is employing disinformation tactics used by the tobacco industry to promote public confusion over climate change and to delay urgent action to halt global
Oliver Ressler, Austrian artist and co-director (with Dario Azzellini) of Five Factories - Worker Control in Venezuela, will be in Australia in January to host screenings of his new film, followed by discussion.
In what seems to be becoming a signature atrocity of US President George Bush’s “war on terror”, US air strikes hit a Somali wedding ceremony, according to a January 10 BBC Online report. Up to 31 people were killed. The BBC quoted the account of an elder in Banka-Jiira, a grazing area, who told the news service’s Somali branch: “There have been air strikes carried out by American planes in these areas since Sunday. Here in the Banka-Jiira area, which is the largest grazing area in the Juba Valley region, we have been hard hit. There have been several air strikes over nearby Booji grazing area too. The most unfortunate incident was an attack on a big wedding ceremony …
On January 10, US President George Bush unveiled his government’s new plan for prosecuting Washington’s almost four-year-old counterinsurgency war in Iraq, which in a December 20 interview with the Washington Post he for the first time acknowledged the US was “not winning”.
With climate change posing as one of the gravest threats to capital accumulation - not to mention humankind and our environment - in coming decades, it is little wonder that economists such as Sir Nick Stern, establishment politicians like Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and US Democrat Al Gore, and financiers at the World Bank and in the City of London have begun warning the public and, in the process, birthing a market for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
It seems like an overly cliched script with a plot so tired that even Hollywood’s dross-marketing machine might think twice about touching it: a Mid-East nation led by an aggressive regime with a record of violating human rights whenever it feels like (which turns out to be often) threatens countries in the region with its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But, in a twist unlikely to make it into the next blockbuster, according to a January 7 article in London’s Sunday Times, it’s the Israeli military that’s planning to use nuclear weapons, not the “mad Arabs” that are the more conventional WMD-toting movie villains.
The carbon offset industry was all about growth in 2006. The high-profile, Britain-based CarbonNeutral Company reported an annual turnover of £2.7 million, while the global market sold an estimated £60 million, and this figure was estimated to increase five times over in three years.
Parliamentarians from the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the Dutch Socialist Party, the Greens and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party were arrested on January 8 following a protest at the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the River Clyde. The protest was organised by Faslane 365, which is promoting a year-round blockade of the base.
Committing Poetry in Times of War
Directed by stavros
With Bill Nevins and Priscilla Baca y Candelaria
<http://committingpoetry.com>
Saddam Hussein was rushed to the gallows as 2006 ended — a former dictator put to death under instructions from his one-time supporters in the US government.
I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
Bright Eyes
Saddle Creek Records