In recent years “making poverty history” has become the fashionable cause for ageing rock stars such as Bono and Sir Bob Geldof. As global poverty means that each year 9 million children die of preventable diseases, the need to achieve this goal is undeniable.
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A flotilla of waterborne vessels kayaks, rafts, canoes and even a yellow rubber duckie joined in the Peoples occupation of the worlds biggest coal port in Newcastle Harbour on February 10. The protest demanded No new coal mines, No new coal-fired power stations and No new coal loader.
Green Left Weekly has received a desperate appeal from Papernas (the National Liberation Party of Unity) in Indonesia for emergency solidarity in the wake of severe floods in Jakarta and surrounding heavily populated areas.
“We have just spent the most exciting year of our lives residing in Venezuela. It’s the heartland of the most important radical political upheaval of our time, and centre of the project for socialism in the 21st century”, enthused Jim McIlroy who, along with Coral Wynter, spent 2006 in Caracas reporting on the Bolivarian revolution for Green Left Weekly.
The Kosova peoples eight-year wait for the same right to independence allowed to other peoples of the former Yugoslavia some 15 years ago has finally reached
anti-climax.
The February 6 Sydney Daily Telegraph reported that Australians yet to establish a view on the Venezuelan president will have the opportunity to do so in person if the organisers of an online petition inviting him to visit get their way.
For more than six months, the people of Oaxaca in southern Mexico have been mobilising to oust the hated state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The repression of the uprising has been severe, with ongoing savage attacks including killings on movement activists by the military-style Federal Preventative Police.
Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Greg Combet expressed great pride in the role played by trade unions and union members in achieving justice for the victims of James Hardies asbestos products.
The action was in response to threats by federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock to have the governor-general disallow proposed ACT legislation on same-sex civil unions. In June 2006, the federal government disallowed an ACT bill on civil unions because it could have undermined the institution of marriage.
In his first two months since being elected federal ALP leader on December 4, Kevin Rudd has made subtle, but significant changes to federal Labor policy in its battle of ideas for Australias future. As if following a dictum not to be wedged politically outflanked from the right by PM John Howards Coalition government Rudd is moving significant sections of Labor policy in a more rightward direction and attempting to position Labor as the defender of the fabric of Australian family life.
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