At Christmas time, 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony in Berlin in which he changed one word in the well-known Ode to Joy in the fourth movement. "Freiheit" ("Freedom") replaced "Freude" ("Joy"), to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall that had occurred weeks previously
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The shooting of two Aboriginal boys in Townsville on November 25 shows that racism isn’t going away in the North Queensland town. The two boys, aged just 8 and 10, were playing in a park in Wulguru when they were fired upon by a drunken Townsville soldier wielding an air rifle.
December’s United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen were a key topic of discussion at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), held in Trinidad and Tobago in late November.
On November 23, 57 people were massacred in the Filipino Magnindanao province by the ruling Ampatuan clan that governs it. Many of those killed were journalists. On November 27, the primary suspect in the massacre, Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr, was arrested.
Unchecked urban expansion has chewed up large areas of Adelaide’s productive agricultural land for poorly planned and poorly designed housing developments, with no amenities and little or no access to public transport.
In September, the Victorian district committee of the mining and energy section of the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) adopted the recommendations of the Crisis in Power report written by Dave Kerin.
When Labor came to power in November 2007, new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said: "Today, the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward, to plan for the future, to embrace the future and, together as Australians, to unite and write a new page in our nation's history."
Australian governments, both Liberal and Labor, have had a policy of treating refugees as enemies for at least 20 years. Probably the most infamous occasion was the Coalition’s November 2001 federal election victory, where the major parties adopted a joint policy of turning back 438 refugees who had been saved from drowning by the Norwegian freighter the MV Tampa.
US officials in Afghanistan have unveiled a “new” detention facility within the US military-run Bagram Airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan (DFP).
Socialist Alliance member and author Terry Townsend launched his new book The Aboriginal Struggle & the Left on December 2 at the Brisbane Activist Centre.
In February 2008 — at the first session of parliament after he won government — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a moving apology to the Stolen Generations, the Aboriginal children abducted from their families last century as part of a policy of social engineering to extinguish the Aboriginal identity.
The call by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the International Encounter of Left Parties in Caracas last month to begin to launch a ``Fifth Socialist International’’ could not have been better timed.
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