[Abridged from a presentation by Raul Bassi, on behalf of the Socialist Alliance, to a conference hosted by the Venezuelan embassy in Sydney on July 7.]
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On July 17 the British House of Commons standards and privileges committee recommended the suspension of George Galloway, the former Labour MP who is now an MP for the left-wing Respect coalition, for 18 days. Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq war.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) academic Dr Gary MacLennan told a public meeting on July 18 that ordinary people think laughing at the disabled is wrong
only in a university is it seen as otherwise.
The head of Britains Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has called for police to be given the power to imprison terror suspects indefinitely without charge.
The corporate media has heaped praise on Al Gore following the international rock gig Live Earth. But to ask the Uwa people, from the tropical cloud forests of north-eastern Colombia, what they thought about Gore and Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), the oil company from which his personal fortune is derived, would be to receive a very different opinion.
This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of Frances Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”
The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as Frances president in April and the landslide to the conservatives in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 10, described in France as the blue wave, were widely presented in the Australian capitalist media as a dramatic shift to the right in French political life. They are all too keen to wipe out last years images of French workers and students successfully resisting anti-worker laws, something they only grudgingly reported on in the first place.
The Socialist Alliance is aiming for a 60% overall emissions reduction, including 95% power station emissions reduction, by 2020 and a 90% overall emissions reduction by 2030. Immediate comprehensive planning is required, including the setting of annual targets, to meet these overall targets on time or sooner.
The French presidential and parliamentary elections produced very contradictory results for the broadly defined radical left. Its collective vote of a little less than 9% in the presidential poll, while large compared to other industrialised countries, was down from 15% in 2002. However the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) bucked the trend and cemented its position as the most credible voice of the anti-capitalist left.
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