In the May 1 local council elections in England and Wales, the ruling Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, suffered its worst election defeat in 40 years.
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The Whale Warriors: On Board a Pirate Ship in the Battle to Save the Worlds Largest Mammals
By Peter Heller
HarperCollins, 2007
303pages, $28 (pb)
By Peter Heller
HarperCollins, 2007
303pages, $28 (pb)
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.
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.
The battle over the privatisation of NSW electricity continues. A power industry delegates meeting on May 15 condemned the state ALP governments push to privatise the retail electricity providers and generators and reaffirmed its total rejection of the governments plans.
Since beginning its first parliamentary term with the symbolic apology to the Stolen Generations, the Rudd Labor government has promised a shift away from the hostility towards Indigenous Australians shown by the previous Howard government.
The Residents Action Movement has been growing rapidly in the last month (with around 100-300 people joining per week) as a result of the popularity of their key campaign to remove the 12.5% goods and services tax on food.
“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.
More than 1000 electricity workers, employed by Energex, Ergon Energy and Powerlink, marched through the city on May 14 in an escalation of the combined power unions campaign for improved pay and conditions from the three state government-owned corporations.
A new period of uncertainty has opened in Bolivia with the initiation of recall referendums for the president and prefects of Bolivias nine departments by the opposition-controlled Senate.
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