Officially Leonora is not a detention centre for refugees but an “alternative place of detention”. Between January 21-23, the Refugee Rights Action Network’s second “Caravan of Compassion” made the 1660km round trip from Perth to Leonora. Caravan participant and Resistance member Zebedee Parkes describes his weekend trip to the remotely located concentration camp.
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All those scenes from Cairo of mass demonstrations look like the perfect expression of the big society. So we can only assume British PM David Cameron wants us to try something similar here. It would certainly encourage more people to take an interest in politics.
List of protests in support of Egyptian democracy movement, against Western support for regime
After as many as 2 million people took over Tahrir Square and the streets of Cairo, with millions more across Egypt, on February 1 to demand on end to the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, the regime responded with a violent assault on protesters continuing to occupy the square.
International Socialist Review editor Ahmed Shawki reports from Cairo on the latest mass protests against Hosni Mubarak--and what the future holds for Egypt's uprising.
Based on Psalm 137
By the waterholes of Mother Country we slung down our yidakis, and cut our bodies and drugged our minds in grief, as we remembered the dreamtime.
And the settlers demanded from us a corroboree performance and a jail sentence, mutual obligation and a souvenir boomerang for the gift shop.
How could we dance and perform sacred traditions for their markets? We have become aliens and inmates, invisible in this eternal land.
When you fly over the earth’s oldest land mass, Australia, the view can be shocking. Scars as long as European countries are the result of erosion. Salt pans shimmer where once native vegetation grew. This is almost impossible to reverse.
Al Jazeera.net reported on January 29 that new protests had erupted in the Middle Eastern nation of Yemen, which sits at the bottom of the Arab peninnsular, demanding an end to the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The site reported on January 28 that thousands had also taken to the streets in anti-government protests in Jordan, with people angry over price rises and unemployment.
“This is a message to the people and the whole world that what you see is a revolution, not an uprising or a coup,” a woman told Al-Jazeera on January 23. She was among people from across Tunisia who descended on the capital and surrounded Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi’s residence.
Clients at the Casuarina Centrelink in Darwin were treated to a singing protest on January 27 against the Basics Card. As part of the federal government’s Northern Territory intervention, Indigenous people in the NT have half of their welfare payments restricted to a card that can be used to buy only food, clothing and medical supplies at specified stores.
Rob “Kris Pistofferson” Inder-Smith sang and played guitar, protesting against his payments recently being put on the Basics Card without an adequate explanation. The words are published below.
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Of all the commentaries and interviews coinciding with the anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake, none are likely to exceed in significance the interview granted by OAS Representative to Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, to the Swiss daily Le Temps on December 20.
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