Recent polls in Australia now show that Kevin Rudd is the preferred prime minister of 44% of those surveyed, but the guy is just another right-wing creep swanning around the world, giving the world unsolicited advice in Ruddese while living it up in presidential hotel suites costing up to $2700 a night.
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Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia on September 21.. Journalist Jon Lewis was present at the execution and told media waiting outside the prison that Davis was “defiant until the very end, defending his innocence until the end”.
Davis was convicted of killing off duty Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. He was sentenced to death.
At this year’s Deadly Awards, an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture being held on September 27, all eyes will be on one of the fastest rising stars in Aboriginal music.
“Bloody Greeks — corrupt and lazy, born cheaters who think the world owes them a living. Why should the hard-working taxpayers of the euro zone core economies like Germany have to fund billion-euro rescue packages for those scoundrels?”
That’s the vicious tone of Germany’s tabloids and conservative politicians towards Greece’s galloping public debt crisis and the Greek people’s protests against the austerity programs.
The austerity has been imposed on them by the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (the “troika”) as the price of bail-out funding.
Yirrkala, in north-east Arnhem land, is home to the famous 1963 “Bark Petition”. This was a protest action by the Yolngu people that led to the first native title litigation in Australia’s history.
I was there last month for the anniversary of that stage of their landmark struggle.
The petition was an attempt by the Yolngu people to force legal recognition of their land ownership rights.
A 20-hour assault on the US embassy in Kabul by Taliban fighters on September 14 has exposed further weaknesses in the already-crumbling facade of the United States-led occupation of Afghanistan.
The Taliban launched a sustained rocket attack on what is supposedly the most secure area in the country, seriously embarrassing Western officials who continue to insist “progress” is being made.
How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the British music magazine NME in the week that London was burning, that their faces should be staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in Britain.
The wave of riots in numerous English cities this August did not lead to widespread disruption anywhere in Wales.
Despite this, several people in Wales have been arrested for riot related offences, some of whom have been denied bail and handed highly disproportionate sentences.
These arrests are not a result of the limited disorder that happened in Cardiff on August 9, which briefly led the BBC to drop the term “England Riots” in favour of “UK Riots”.
“We are going to the United Nations to request our legitimate right, obtaining full membership for Palestine in this organisation,” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Ramallah-based, internationally recognised Palestinian Authority (PA), declared in a September 16 televised address.
“We are going to the Security Council.”
Abbas has acknowledged the initiative is largely symbolic and that UN recognition of Palestinian sovereignty would not translate to actual control of territory.
WikiLeaks' release of cables from the United States embassy in La Paz has shed light on its attempts to create divisions in the social and indigenous movements that make up the support base of the country’s first indigenous-led government.
The cables prove the embassy sought to use the US government aid agency, USAID, to promote US interests.
A March 6, 2006, cable titled “Dissent in Evo’s ranks” reports on a meeting only months after Morales' inauguration as president in December 2005 with “a social sectors leader” from the altiplano (highlands) region in the west.
Neoliberal policies “which have fed the growing political disaffection of Bolivia's majority poor, have helped fuel the country's rolling 'social revolution.'"
This was how a May 6, 2006, US embassy cable from La Paz recently released by WikiLeaks viewed the powerful wave of struggle that led to the election of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005.
This secret assessment came despite Washington publicly trumpeting neoliberal policies as the way to solve the problems of Latin America's poor.
Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa died after violent and cowardly abuse by British soldiers, a public inquiry in Britain has found.
Inquiry chairperson William Gage published his report on September 8. He described the treatment of Mousa and his fellow detainees in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2003 as "an appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence on civilians which resulted in the death of one man and injuries to others".
Mousa was detained along with a number of others by members of the 1st Battalion Queen's Lancashire Regiment after a raid on the Ibn al-Haitham hotel in Basra.
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