What the Taliban failed to achieve in relation to the Afghan presidential elections held on August 20, incumbent President Hamid Karzai managed to accomplish.
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Below is an open letter initiated by the Socialist Alliance to Australia's foreign affairs minister, Stephen Smith, calling on the Australian government to act for the immediate and unconditional reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya — and to pressure the US government to finally cut all aid and ties with the dictatorship.
Please add your name, and organisation if relevant, to this statement by emailing weekly.greenleft@gmail.com. Please send this letter, a version of it or your own to Stephen.Smith.MP@aph.gov.au (fax, phone number and address below).
For a series of reports and interviews since Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s dramatic return to Honduras on September 21, visit here. To send letter to Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, and add your name to an open letter, demanding Australia join the governments all over the world in denouncing and isolating the coup regime, visit here. After this article are two eyewitness accounts from inside Honduras on the rising repression. They have been translated from Spanish by Linda Seaborn.
On June 28, elected President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup backed by the Honduran elite. Since then, a mass resistance movement of the poor majority has brought the Central American country to a standstill and the coup regime very close to defeat. Pedro Fuentes is international secretary of the Brazilian Party Socialism and Liberty (PSOL). He wrote this article from Honduras on September 29.
On September 26, a massive demonstration in solidarity with the Honduran peopleoccurred in capital, San Salvador, of Central American nation El Salvador . On Nune 28, the elected government of Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup. Three months of sustained resistance by the poor has prevented the regime from consoldating itself, and it continues to hang by a thread. The Salvadorean march was organised by the left-wing FMLN, whose presidential candidate Mauricio Funes won the March election. The right-wing coup in neighbouring Honduras is seen as a threat also to El Salvador and the Funes government — and an example for the Salvadorean oligarchy to follow.
A number of audio and video updates on the situation in Honduras from September 29 and 30 can be found at Links, international journal of socialist renewal.
Two articles below are by the Die Linke (The Left Party) in Germany on its significant gains in the elections, and from A href="http://www.internationalviewpoint.org">International Viewpoint on the Portuguese elections, which resulted in significant losses for the ruling party and big gains for the Left Bloc.
The military dictatorship in Honduras, which overthrew elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, is preparing a bloody crackdown on the mass resistance of the Honduran poor demanding Zelaya’s return. Zelaya, who secretly re-entered Honduras on September 21, is inside the Brazilian embassy. The dictatorship has suspended constitutional liberties, expelled representatives of the Organisation of American States, a key anti-coup TV and radio station have been shutdown, and given Brazil 10 days to remove Zelaya for its embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.
This appeal has been released by the Part of the Masses (PLM) in the Philippenes.
During his address to the 64th United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on the world to join Latin American countries in constructing a new type of socialism. He also said U.S. President Barack Obama has brought the "smell of hope" to the U.N., and demanded a return of the democratically elected president to Honduras, an end to the blockade of Cuba, and "decisive" action on climate change.
The three-part video below was produced by Inter-Press Service. It features interviews and footage of the protests against the Group of 20 Summit in Pittsburgh in the United States over September 24-25. The protests were organised by a coalition of union, environmentalist, Church, socialist and other organisations.
“The whole area is full of Aboriginal artefacts and the archaeologists' reports indicate that it is probably one of the most extensive, if not the most extensive find of Aboriginal heritage in the state”, Michael Mansell, legal director of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), told ABC Hobart on September 16.
Shortly after two dust storms swept the entire east coast of Australia over September 22-26, concerns were raised that radioactive materials from central Australian uranium mines could make the same journey.
More and more people accept that we need emergency action to achieve a safe climate. The Copenhagen Summit in December will be a dramatic opportunity for governments to show whether or not they are prepared to be part of the solution.
South Australia’s Climate Camp took place at Warren Gorge, near Port Augusta, over September 24-27. The camp targeted two ageing brown coal-fired power stations — which are among the most polluting in Australia — the Northern and Playford B plants.
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