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At midnight on June 4, around 2800 kitchen staff, orderlies and hospital cleaners were set to be locked out of their workplaces by four contracting companies — Spotless, OCS, ISS and Compass — in hospitals across New Zealand. However, last-minute negotiations between the Service and Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota (SFWU) and the District Health Board averted the lockout.

Global warming, workers’ rights and opposition to the Iraq war are key campaigns this year, a Socialist Alliance state conference on May 19 decided.

The corporate owned- and controlled-media’s accounts of recent events in Venezuela give the impression that a new student movement is fighting for their democratic rights against an increasingly autocratic government. This is testimony to the way the corporate media turns reality on its head — making the victim look like the aggressor and vice versa.

As several hundred people gathered in front of the Australian embassy in Jakarta on May 30 screaming “Fuck you Australia” and the mainstream media denounced Australia as “arrogant”, after Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso was asked to testify at the NSW coronial inquiry into the 1975 Balibo killings in East Timor, rights groups expressed a somewhat different view. At a joint press conference in Jakarta on May 31, Indonesia’s NGO Coalition for International Human Rights Advocacy (Koalisi LSM) said that Sutiyoso should have been arrested for refusing the summons. According to deputy NSW state coroner Dorelle Pinch, Sutiyoso was allegedly part of Team Susi, one of the Indonesian military units in Balibo when the five Australian-based journalists were murdered. United Nations police, who in 2000 began a formal investigation into the killings, believe that Sutiyoso was one of several officers involved in the attack and other clandestine operations against Portuguese East Timor in 1975. In October of that year, Sutiyoso led an assault on the sleepy coastal town of Batugade in Timor, the first time that Jakarta had occupied and held a foreign town and the precursor to the full-scale invasion two months later.

Green Left Weekly is committed to social justice and environmental sustainability, speaks out against capitalism, and sides with the marginalised and oppressed. But it is silent on the plight of the most oppressed group of all — non-human animals, notably those exploited by the animal agriculture industry.