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NSW Labor’s proposal to build a dam in the Tillegra Valley will be a waste of $300 million, according to local residents who picketed the offices of Hunter Water in Newcastle on May 16.
“Here is a government that has given us a guarantee that working Australians all get a look in, not just the big end of town”, said Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow of federal Treasurer Wayne Swan’s first budget.
The federal Labor government says it is not homophobic. Yet it agrees with its Coalition predecessor that marriage is a “union between a man and woman”. Regardless of opinion on marriage, the legal rights afforded this institution should be available to all couples regardless of gender.
I’m writing on May 13 at 5:19am from the city of Wanzhou, Chongqing Municipality, China. I’ve just re-entered my apartment after the latest aftershock sent everyone onto the streets once more. It’s been a long 15 hours since the initial earthquake yesterday afternoon that so devastated Wenchuan and surrounds, such as the beautiful city of Chengdu. At this moment, my understanding of the scope of this disaster is only what I have been able to garner from international news websites and secondhand reports from my Chinese friends.
Prensa Latina reported on May 12 that the US government closed several websites by Steve Marshall, a British resident in Spain, owner of a travel agency, for their trade links with Cuba. In October Washington ordered the US Web hosting company eNom

The Rudd government’s first budget, touted as a “Robin Hood” budget, takes very little from the “rich” and gives practically nothing to the poor and disadvantaged. In its fundamentals, it continues on from where the former Howard Coalition government left off.

An expanded form of this article first appeared in Revista Corriente Alterna. The translation of this extract is by British group, Socialist Resistance.
East Timor's foreign minister Zacarias Albano da Costa met with his Cuban counterpart Felipe Perez Roque in Havana where he thanked the country for its continuous support of East Timor, "even under the most difficult circumstances", according to a
The coal industry is planning to replace oil by turning coal into liquid fuels and into feedstocks for the chemical industry. Of course they are also planning to burn ever-more coal to produce electricity. If these plans materialise, green chemistry and renewable solar energy will both be sidelined for the rest of this century.
In May and June of 1968, a movement erupted in France that threatened not just the survival of the government of President Charles De Gaulle but the system that it represented — capitalism.
Reuters reported on May 16 that Venezuela had "shut the door to new gold projects and threatened other mining and logging concessions". Environment minister Yuviri Ortega said Venezuela will "deny environmental permits" for any open-pit mines and