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.
896
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”.
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.
“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.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AWMU) has launched action in the Federal Court to protect a member who is facing disciplinary action from his employer after he took action to address a serious health and safety issue.
In early August, Jon Zwart, an AMWU delegate and health and safety representative at Visy Coburg, tagged (took out of service) a forklift whose reverse beeper was not audible.
Activists rallied in Melbourne to call for greater rights for people with mental illness on September 16.
The rally was called by the Australian Mental Health Human Rights and Law Reform Coalition to condemn abuses in the Victorian mental health system.
Students from the University of Wollongong have campaigned over the past three years for the university to switch to 100% renewable energy by 2015.
They have collected more than 3000 signatures from students in support of the plan.
The university administration has instead begun plans to build a trigeneration plant on the campus, which would generate electricity through burning natural gas.
The Barry O’Farrell Coalition government has promised it will make “New South Wales number one” again. We are assured this will mean improving transport, health and education infrastructure and strengthening the public sector that delivers these services to the people of NSW.
The “horror budget” some media promised was delivered on September 6. This budget does little to improve public services. Instead, the state’s fiscal output rests on strengthening private sector spending.
A decade ago most experts would have thought it impossible. But several teams of scientists say the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to its smallest recorded extent, volume and area.
Environmental physicists from the University of Bremen said on September 9 the Arctic ice cap extent was “small as never before”.
About 50 people attended a vigil on the parliament lawns in Hobart on September 16 in support of Ali Alishah, a jailed anti-pulp mill protester.
Alishah was arrested on September 5 at Gunns' proposed pulp mill site in the Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania after locking on to a truck that was entering the site. He has already spent almost two weeks in jail and will likely stay in custody until September 26.
A long-term forest campaigner, Alishah was taking action with the group Code Green, which has been conducting civil disobedience actions at the pulp mill site.
As time passes, the reasons the public might have for trusting chemical company Orica and the NSW environment minister Robyn Parker are evaporating.
On the night of August 8, highly toxic hexavalent chromium leaked from Orica’s Kooragang Island plant and blew over the Newcastle suburb of Stockton.
Orica notified the NSW environment department at 10.45am the next morning. Orica representatives began doorknocking residents in Stockton on August 10. Parker says she was not told of the accident until that night.
These days, there aren’t many victories against attacks on working-class people by neoliberal governments and greedy, ruthless corporations.
This makes the victory in the campaign to save Melbourne’s only Aboriginal school, the Ballerrt Mooroop College in Melbourne’s northern suburb of Glenroy, especially important.
Late on September 12, the state education minister Martin Dixon sent an email to campaigners saying that he had agreed to the compromise plan that had been negotiated between the Ballerrt Mooroop College and the Glenroy Specialist School for disabled children (GSS).
- Previous page
- Page 2
- Next page