One hundred and thirty people packed out a room in the Crowne Plaza hotel to hear traditional owners and nuclear experts call for the closure of the Ranger uranium mine in the world heritage-listed Kakadu national park.
Yvonne Margarula condemned the mine for its presence on land that is sacred to her people — the Mirrar people. “The promises never last,” she said. “But the problems always do.”
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Three former members of the left-wing student group Capitalism Research Society (CRC) were taken into police custody on March 21.
Among those arrested was the group’s former president Choi Ho-hyeon. They were charged under the National Security Act, a draconian anti-communist law that was enacted in 1948 during the height of bloody right-wing suppressions of popular grassroots democratic movements.
The law has been repeatedly used to crack down on political opposition and progressive movements.
Transport Workers Union national secretary, Tony Sheldon, has condemned Qantas’s training of overseas strikebreakers after the company’s chief executive, Alan Joyce, admitted to the practice.
Sheldon said on April 5: “They really need to come clean on who they are training, who is doing the training and why it has to be done in secret in another country? Why are they hiding it around the other side of the world?
“Qantas has said they forecast a 7 per cent increase in international capacity and 8 per cent in domestic – they have the capacity to pay their workforce a decent wage.
A poll by Roy Morgan Research several days into the Fukushima nuclear crisis found that 61% of Australians oppose the development of nuclear power in Australia, nearly double the 34% who support it.
The growth in support for nuclear power over the past five years has been totally erased — and then some.
There was undoubtedly growing support for nuclear power until Fukushima, but the issue had been the subject of a great deal of hype and spin.
Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) has been caught up in an increasingly violent conflict after the West African nation’s November 28 elections ended with the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and his main opponent Alassane Ouattara both claiming victory.
Ivory Coast is wracked by an armed conflict between the Ivory Coast army and rebel forces allied to Ouattara. Both sides have been accused of human rights abuses.
More than 1000 Philippine Airlines (PAL) ground staff from the Philippine Airlines Employees Association (PALEA) staged a torch-lit rally on April 1 between terminals at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The protest was supported by several big labour federations. The union representing flight attendants has also pledged solidarity with PALEA.
When police blocked the march, workers blocked a major road for several hours. This disrupted access to the airport and lead to flights being cancelled or delayed.
“There’s no reason why technologically we can’t employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way,” United States President Barack Obama told a group gathered at a town meeting in New Orleans in October 2009.
“Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way”
You might think after the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima that Obama would have a reason to back off his support of nuclear energy as a new “clean” energy alternative.
The Moro people of the Philippines’ southern Mindanao Islands have never considered themselves Filipinos.
The Spanish colonisers never succeeded in subjugating the Moro sultanates. However, when Spain ceded the Philippines to the US in 1898, the Moro homeland, Bangsamoro, was included.
In the ensuing war, which lasted until 1913, 20,000 Moros — fighters and civilians — were killed.
Locals from Lake Tyers, a small Aboriginal community in East Gippsland, set up a roadblock leading into their township on March 8.
The action was to protest against a Victorian government-imposed administrator and call for a return to democracy in their community.
The only exceptions allowed through the blockade were health service employees and school buses.
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) member of the Sri Lankan parliament M. A. Sumanthiran, addressed a meeting organised by the Australian Tamil Congress on March 26.
He said that even though Tamils in Sri Lanka are a nation with the right to self-determination, the formation of a separate state is not a realistic option because of the opposition of the “international community”.
Article 1 of the United Nations charter speaks of the right of self-determination of peoples. However, in the 1960s the UN General Assembly put some restrictions on this right.
This was inspired by the “Collateral Murder” video released in April 2010 by WikiLeaks.
* * *
1. Oh, come all you American teenagers
Put away your video games
And get some real shoot em-up-action
Wasting folks with weird-sounding names
Now how would you like to bear true faith
By joining an Apache crew
In trouble spots around the world
There’s killing work to do
Light them up
Keep shooting
Look at all
Those dead bastards
2. Well, there’s so many features to tell you about
Like the Boeing M230 chain gun
With that Arab-slaying motherfucker
Despite crisis levels of overcrowding, many urban Aboriginal communities have been denied federal funding for new housing. On March 18, ABC online said town camps around Darwin were not allocated any of the $1.5 billion in upgrades planned for Aboriginal communities.
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