According to former French intelligence security chief Alain Chouet, the terrorism-related charges against Willie Brigitte, who is being tried in France, are “weak”. Quoted in the February 5 Australian, he said Brigitte is a “person without importance whom the Australian authorities continue to play on to create fear”.
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On February 2, ABC News Online reported the laying off of 110 workers by Melbourne carpet manufacturer Feltex. A spokesperson for Godfrey Hirst, which took over Feltex late last year, said the workers jobs would go with the closure of the Feltex factories in Tottenham and Braybrook in Melbournes west. This vindicated workers and unionists who had resisted attempts by Godfrey Hirst to take away their redundancy entitlements, Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union media officer Tommy Clarke told Green Left Weekly.
Ecosocialism blog
Readers of Green Left Weekly may be interested in Climate and Capitalism, a new blog, edited in Canada, that aims to present Marxist perspectives on climate change, and to provide socialists with the information and analysis they
The queer rights activists of Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH) believe that Peter Jensen, the Anglican archbishop of Sydney, should condemn a highly oppressive anti-gay law being introduced in Nigeria that is being backed by the Anglican Church in that country.
It was with much disgust and sadness that I watched the demolition, on February 6, of perfectly good public housing on the Macquarie Fields public housing estate.
Anti-nuclear campaigners from the Medical Association for Prevention of War, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, the Australian Student Environment Network and campaign groups in all mainland states were among the 30 people who attended a national strategy meeting on February 3-4 in the Blue Mountains.
On February 2, I had a heart attack. All of a sudden, I was spun into the emergency health system. Over the next four days I received the most amazing health care from the ambos to the nurses and doctors at the public Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. It was a powerful rebuttal of the narrow-minded idea that society has to be based on material self-interest, profit and greed.
On February 6, 400 people converged on the lawns outside the national parliament building in Canberra to protest of the continued detention of Australian citizen David Hicks at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Fifty people heard leading Queensland Aboriginal activist Sam Watson announce at a February 7 public meeting held in the Sydney inner-west suburb of Leichhardt that Queensland Police Sergeant Chris Hurley was formally charged on February 5 with manslaughter and assault occasioning bodily harm for the 2004 death in custody of Palm Island Aborigine Mulrunji Doomadgee.
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”.
GEELONG — A 40-strong community protest successfully picketed Boral's Geelong site on February 5. Boral management described the demonstration as an "unpeaceful protest". The protesters took a stand over safety conditions on the site after three
Debate about public transport and its decline is raging in NSW in the lead-up to the March 24 state election. The NSW public transport system is plagued by delays, reliance on old equipment, breakages, lack of staff and, as a consequence, inadequate services to remote and poorer areas. As yet, neither Morris Iemmas Labor government nor the Liberal opposition has proposed adequate solutions to the crisis.
Following years of a sustained campaign by the ruling elite to vilify Islam, the 2007 federal election is shaping up to be a Muslim election, with the two major parties trying to out-do each other with racist slurs against Arabs and Muslims.
The release of the fourth assessment report by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on February 2, and the dire predictions in it of the impact of global warming on Australia, was seized on by PM John Howard to push his “solutions” to global warming. These have less to do with saving the environment than protecting corporate profits, with the main prongs being defence of the coal mining companies and support for an expanded nuclear industry.
The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of buying time for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a surge of US troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria, he said. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.
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