In February this year, a boat carrying 83 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka was intercepted by the Australian Navy. After being detained on Christmas Island for a month, the Tamils were transferred to Nauru.
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Diego Montoya, who was arrested in La Paila, Valle del Cauca, on September 10, ranked second on the FBIs 10 most-wanted fugitives list. He will shortly be extradited to the US to stand trial for cocaine-related racketeering offences. Predictably, the US State Department and much of the corporate media have hailed his arrest as a victory in the so-called war on drugs. Yet, despite this official posturing, it is undeniable that Montoya, like many other significant figures associated with Colombias multibillion-dollar cocaine industry, was a product of US Colombia policy.
Eleven Palestinians were killed and 20 others were wounded on September 27 when Israel resumed bombing the Gaza Strip. The bombings are widely seen as a precursor to a wide-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip promised by Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak earlier in September and came in the wake of Israel declaring the Gaza Strip an enemy entity on September 19.
In early September, the NSW carbon trading scheme collapsed. Conspicuously absent from mainstream media coverage of this event, however, was any attempt to analyse the inherent problems of relying on market mechanisms to solve the global problem of climate change.
Climate change
You might be surprised that Clive Hamilton's book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change is actually an update of The Dirty Politics of Climate Change from 2001.
For all the revelations he gives about Australia's
Sydney University students and staff rallied outside Fisher Library on September 6 to protest against plans, announced by vice-chancellor Gavin Brown to open a new ,that will cooperate with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), in placing the university firmly at the forefront of future developments in Australias nuclear related research.
The Socialist Alliance supports the struggle for democracy in Burma, and stands in solidarity with the democracy movement activists, political prisoners and exiles bravely defying its military dictatorship.
On September 23, federal environment minister Malcolm Turnbull and industry and resources minister Ian Macfarlane announced a new national clean energy target.
Socialist Alliance members and supporters will be very busy over the next few months as the federal election draws near. We will be organising election launches, meetings, fundraisers, letterboxing and leafleting drives.
The federal government announced on September 23 that it has for the first time adopted an actual target for energy generation from clean sources. Under the plan, 15% of Australias electricity would be generated from such sources by 2020, including renewable energy like wind and solar, as well as clean, green nuclear power and clean coal. Prime Minister John Howard heralded the plan as a major cost saving and regulatory breakthrough.
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