There are still about 12.3 million people worldwide who work in some form of bonded or forced labour, according to a May 12 International Labour Organisation (ILO) report.
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Plans are underway for the fifth national day of action for same-sex marriage rights. Rallies are already planned in seven cities across Australia on August 1.
Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) from five Victorian universities took strike action on May 21.
Schools and clinics in many Aboriginal homelands and outstations are likely to close under proposed changes announced by the Northern Territory government on May 20.
The world has recently lost one of the most important leaders of the indigenous movement in Latin America.
“Our motherland has been completely liberated from separatist terrorism”, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa said in a May 19 “victory speech” to parliament. He was referring to the military defeat of the pro-independence Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by the Sri Lankan Army.
On May 21 University of Newcastle cleaners staged a protest at the twin entrances to the campus. They demanded that big budget cuts be reversed and the prior cleaning regime and working hours be restored.
“The International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience sat on May 15-16 in Paris to hear testimony about the harmful effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam’s environment and population”, Thanhniemnews.com said on May 20.
Michael Lebowitz is a Canadian Marxist economist. He is the director of the “Transformative practice and human development” program at the Caracas-based left-wing think tank, the Centro Internacional Miranda. He is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University and author of Build it Now: 21st Century Socialism and the 2004 Isaac Deutscher-prize winning Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class.
Opinion polls in both the Fairfax and Murdoch dailies on May 18-19 show voter support for PM Kevin Rudd has fallen. Rudd, who scored a 74% approval rating in the Fairfax Nielsen poll on March 30, dropped 10 points in the May 18 poll, down to 64%.
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