The gold shall not be sold
For thirty pieces of silver
No to the mine that contaminates
No to the mine that kills ya!
The copper shall not be sold
For thirty pieces of silver
No to the mine that contaminates
No to the mine that kills ya!
Conga no way…
Conga’s just not happening…
That’s the verdict of the people
And there’s no reversing
The NEWMONT conquistadors
Come not with cross and sword
They come with five billion dollars
And they leave you with nothing
The NEWMONT conquistadors
Come not with bibles and diseases
They come with their heavy machinery
956
More than 10,000 Palestinians took part in a funeral procession on February 25 in the West Bank village of Saeer for 30-year-old Arafat Jaradat, who died while in Israeli detention.
Jaradat's death on February 23 in Megiddo Prison came less than a week after he was arrested for throwing stones at Israeli cars in the West Bank. Although Israeli officials say he died of cardiac arrest, an autopsy shows clear signs that his death was the result of horrific torture, according to Palestinian Authority officials.
In a five-to-four split decision, the Supreme Court ruled that, in effect, no citizen may challenge the constitutionality of any of the executive orders, or laws passed by Congress, that violate democratic rights under the pretext of the “war on terrorism.”
The decision was in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Global Rights, Global Fund for Women, Human rights Watch, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union, journalists Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges, and several defense attorneys.
About 10,000 nurses and midwives across Western Australia were threatened with disciplinary action and deregistration by the state’s director general if they went ahead with a 24-hour strike on February 25.
The evening before the planned action, WA premier Colin Barnett intervened to offer the nurses a 14% pay rise over three years.
Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) members accepted the offer after voting at a mass meeting on February 25.
In Western Australia, mental illness is the second-highest cause of disease for women and the fourth-highest cause for men.
Premier Colin Barnett has responded by publishing a green paper for public discussion for a new Mental Health Act. The proposed act contains provisions that would improve the rights of people subjected to a Compulsory Treatment Order (CTO). But it negates those same provisions by allowing the treating psychiatrist to simply ignore them.
The National Tertiary Education Union released the statement below on March 1.
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National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members at the University of Sydney will strike for 24 hours on March 7 over enterprise bargaining.
“This is the first strike in a decade and shows just how riled our members are at management's arrogance and its lack of commitment to the enterprise bargaining process,” said branch president Michael Thomson.
“We logged our enterprise bargaining claims on August 7 last year.
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr, US Ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich, and writer and activist Eva Cox took part in the ABC’s Q&A on February 25. More than 15 minutes of the program was spent discussing WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange.
“The Stain” is the name of a photo exhibition by Turkish artist A. Suderin Murat, which looks at the issue of violence against women.
Coinciding with International Women’s Day, the exhibition will be open to the public from March 4-10 at the Auburn Town Hall Exhibition Gallery.
For many years, Murat has campaigned against all kinds of discrimination. She considers art to be “the most effective and peaceful tool” for helping society.
In the week that US citizen Bradley Manning admitted in court that he leaked military secrets to reveal to the public the “the true costs of war”, I attended the first screening in Sydney of the documentary On The Bridge.
The screening was part of the inaugural Big Picture Festival, a social justice film festival.
The federal government said on February 23 it would introduce several changes to the 457 temporary visa program, to take effect from July. The proposals were applauded by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and criticised by big business. The 457 visa system is a highly exploitative, insecure and discriminatory visa system, originally introduced under the former John Howard government. Once elected, the ALP kept the visa class in place as a favour to big business, tinkering with it rather than abolishing it in favour of strengthening permanent skilled migration.
More than 200 people from Melbourne’s Hazara community held a three-hour protest in Federation Square on February 25 to draw attention to the rising violence against the Hazara community in Pakistan.
About 100 Hazara people were killed in the latest bomb massacre in the city of Quetta in Balochistan province on February 16.
The statement below was released by the Socialist Alliance on March 2.
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Legal proceedings are under way against long-term trade union and community activist Bob Carnegie. The case has serious implications for trade union rights and broader civil liberties.
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