The following motion was passed by Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) executive council on July 26.
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“The VTHC believes refugees should not be punished for fleeing war and persecution to seek asylum. This is a right granted to all people under Australian and international law.
“There are over 10 million refugees in the world.
“Last year, Australia granted 13,759 humanitarian visas. This is less than 0.2% of the world’s refugees. Australia ranks 12th in the world by GDP, yet we rank 71st in taking refugees by GDP. By any measure, we do not do our fair share.
975
Anyone with even superficial experience with how aged people are treated would be disgusted and outraged by the standards of most nursing homes, a result of neoliberal policies in Australia.
An investigation by ABC TV’s Lateline on July 15 found many elderly people living in aged care facilities are grossly neglected. Advocacy groups have called it “a national human rights emergency”.
The issue typically gets mentioned in the media only when a spectacle is involved, like a fire in a nursing home that costs lives.
The hunger strike by more than 1000 prisoners in California's jails entered its third week on July 23. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has refused to negotiate or address the strikers' five main demands, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity (PHSS) said on July 23.
The suffocating heat wave that struck the north-east United States in recent days brought new attention to the harsh conditions that thousands of low-wage workers endure every day of the year.
While millions of New York City residents pondered how to escape from stifling temperatures, workers at a McDonald's in Manhattan's Washington Heights were being forced to work in a real-life “Hell's Kitchen”.
Protesters were out in more than 100 US cities on July 20, venting their anger after George Zimmerman was cleared of murdering Trayvon Martin.
They demanded federal prosecutors bring civil rights charges against the former Florida neighbourhood watch leader who successfully argued he acted in self-defence after trailing the unarmed black teen, confronting him and then shooting him dead.
The Justice for Trayvon rallies were organised by civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network.
Where on my body
are your eyes zigzagging?
I die for you!!
The hungry bludger gambling
With the lice in my empty pocket
and still hung over in the Zipper’s ducts
Where have muted body parts been penetrated by the drill
With shafts as thick as Imperialism
Whose begging is never ending, as the “Taleban” that you are?
Laughter is wounded,
And Samarkand, with a skirt full of pebbles
And a hole,
the forbidden commodity
of the black market.
Hole, hole!
Oh, so ruthless
Fascism has had no mercy
To the body, to the rectum, to the shoulder blade,
Even to the damp pants
Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts
CLR James, edited by Christian Hogsbjerg
Duke University Press 2013
222 pp., $47.99
Hegel, Haiti & Universal History
Susan Buck-Moss
University of Pittsburgh Press 2009
176 pp., $89.99
“I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man,” said Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the successful Haitian slave revolt of 1791 to 1804.
This guide was created by the Refugee Action Collective Victoria.
The Regional Resettlement Arrangement
The new arrangement is called the Regional Resettlement Arrangement (RRA), and it goes further than the "Pacific Solution Mark II" introduced by former prime minister Julia Gillard last year. It allows Australia to send asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea for processing and resettlement.
In the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, the police department in Columbia, Missouri, seems intent on following in the steps of their Sanford, Florida counterparts.
At a time when many feel that an inherently racist system has declared open season on young Black men, Brandon Coleman was murdered in Columbia — and police and city leaders have offered little in the way of assistance, at the scene of the crime or in the aftermath of the killing.
When I reported from South Africa in the 1960s, the Nazi admirer Johannes Vorster occupied the prime minister's residence in Cape Town. Thirty years later, as I waited at the gates, it was as if the guards had not changed.
White Afrikaners checked my ID with the confidence of men in secure work. One carried a copy of Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's autobiography. “It's very eenspirational,” he said.
The conversations started in June between Venezuela and the United States have definitively ended, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on July 20 at an event of the Strategic Regions of Integral Defense (REDI) in Cojedes state.
“My policy is zero tolerance to gringo aggression against Venezuela,” Maduro said. “I'm not going to accept any aggression, whether it be verbal, political, or diplomatic.
“Enough is enough. Stay over there with your empire, don't involve yourselves anymore in Venezuela.”
“The Canadian government is forcing me to divorce my wife.” With these words, Salvadoran refugee and long-time Canadian resident Jose Figueroa sums up the devastatingly cruel situation he and his family find themselves in.
The human rights situation in El Salvador from the 1970s to the '90s was dire. A vicious right-wing military dictatorship, supported financially and morally by the United States government. Widespread murder and torture of innocent people, often through the use of death squads, which were trained in the US.
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