Socialist Alliance member and TAFE student Sarah Hathway spoke at a rally at Geelong TAFE on April 16. Her speech is abridged below.
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I’m currently studying a Diploma of Community Services at the Gordon [TAFE]. Like many of us here, I also studied at the Gordon before these insidious TAFE cuts took effect, so I’ve seen the devastating impact the cuts have had on services that used to be provided on campus.
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As the Venezuelan opposition is emboldened by chaos on the streets, reactionary propaganda on the private airwaves that still dominate Venezuela's media landscape and firm support from Washington, now is the time for the international left to galvanise support for the Bolivarian revolution.
Under the false pretext of electoral fraud, the right-wing opposition leader Henrique Capriles tried for a power grab after losing presidential elections on April 14, threatening to destabilise the country.
A US jury ordered oil giant Exxon Mobil to pay US$236 million to the state of New Hampshire on April 9 to clean up groundwater contamination from fuel additive MTBE, the Morning Star said.
Jurors sat through nearly three months of testimony in the longest trial in New Hampshire history. They said Exxon had been negligent in adding MTBE to petrol, saying it was a defective product. They found the company liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.
“The coup has already been defeated” declared Nicolas Maduro, the winner of the April 14 presidential elections, mid-morning on April 16. By that time, seven people had been assassinated by fascist bands who were activated the night before in attacks at headquarters of the governing Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), popular health centres and houses recently turned over by the government to displaced families.
Also at that point of the day, the call for a general strike did not materialise. The call was made by the fascist high command led by the failed candidate of April 14.
The statement below was released by the Party of the Labouring Masses, a socialist party from the Philippines, on April 5.
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The situation on the Korean peninsula has taken a belligerent new turn drawing the entire region into a threatening climate of war preparations.
According to the line promoted by the US government: the new young North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, is making unprovoked threats ― including a nuclear threat ― against South Korea and the US and that even China, North Korea's only close ally, supported tighter United Nations sanctions against the North.
A protest was held outside Labor minister Tanya Plibersek's office in Sydney on April 17 to protest the Julia Gillard government's $2.3 billion cut to tertiary education over the next four years.
The government says they are cutting money from tertiary education in order to increase funding to school education, but the government plans to give a $2.4 billion increase to private schools over the same period. This will increase public funding of private schools to $85 billion over that period.
Another protest will be held at Sydney University on April 24 at 12pm.
Socialist Worker contributors Khury Petersen-Smith and Sofia Arias attended the Boston Marathon as spectators. They had left the finish line area only an hour before two explosions ripped through the crowd. So far, the death toll stands at three, with more than 100 people injured, a number of them very seriously. Khury and Sofia talk about their response to the nightmare -- and the consequences of the witch-hunt to find a culprit to blame.
The Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network released this statement on April 17.
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The Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network joins with all those voices for democracy and peace to call for an immediate end to the opposition-initiated violence now occurring in Venezuela.
On April 14, a majority of Venezuelans voted for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s (PSUV) presidential candidate, Nicolas Maduro. In doing so, they voted to continue the Bolivarian revolution previously led by Hugo Chávez.
In the aftermath of Venezuela's April 14 presidential elections that was won by the candidate of the Boliviaran revolution, Nicolas Maduro, the right-wing opposition has refused to respect the result and is carrying out a campaign of often-violent street protests.
In a quirk of history, Margaret Thatcher died a little more than one month after Hugo Chavez. Thatcher was a figurehead for the global class war in the 1980s and '90s known as “neoliberalism”. Chavez was a figurehead for the struggle against it and the alternative starting to be built in Latin America over the past decade.
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