Unsustainable agriculture and vegetarianism By Peter Johnston "Today a greater percentage of the human race is overweight than at any other time in history. Meanwhile a greater percentage of the human race suffers from malnutrition than at any other
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Help needed! Green Left Weekly has received news that Brandon Astor Jones, one of our weekly columnists, needs some help. Brandon is on death row in the United States. He is appealing against his conviction. However he has lost faith in the lawyer he
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By Sue Bolton MELBOURNE — Since 1988, Labor and Liberal Victorian governments have targeted the Latrobe Valley for hospital "rationalisation". On October 11, state health minister Marie Tehan invited the private sector to build a new hospital to
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HREOC: help or hindrance in human rights? By Angela Matheson Australia's first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, Mick Dodson is pacing about his office at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in
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Chasing the "battlers'" vote @auth = By Dave Holmes With a federal election looming, both the ALP and the Coalition are stepping up their propaganda aimed at the so-called "battlers", ie, the mass of low-paid workers hard-hit by the capitalist
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By Peter Montague The word "dioxin" stands for a group of chemicals that occurs rarely, if ever, in nature. A very large proportion of dioxin comes from human sources. Dioxin began accumulating in the environment around 1900 when the founder of Dow
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By Joan Coxsedge ASIO recently tabled its annual report — more accurately, its annual fundraiser — in the federal parliament. This yearly caper is a ploy by senior ALP figures to claim that ASIO is now "open and accountable" and thereby block
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By Kath Gelber "Women ... are losing out", according to Bettina Arndt, sex therapist and now journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. In a piece entitled, "The Sexual Illiterates", on October 28, Arndt bemoans the inadequacies of current sexual
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Well, I'm doing my latest new thing now: growing a sequoia, a redwood ... Is it possible to defy geography and grow this tree here? — Lee May. Lee May, who writes the gardening page for the Atlanta Journal, wonders whether a tree that is native to
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Hospital picket PERTH — For the last couple of weeks the miscellaneous workers union have picketed Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital to protest against ongoing privatisation. Under the new conditions the number of orderlies will be cut by 50%, and the
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The idea here is that anyone can win. The pauper can become a prince in the course of a good bet. The riches of the few are available, if only you can guess correctly. The reality is that only a very small minority of punters on the Cup will win big,
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By Denis Doherty A national peace protest and camp planned for December 1 to 3 is to be held on the lawns of Parliament House. Organisers are determined to remind the major players in the nuclear club that the majority of people want nuclear weapons
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In October we commemorated the 20th anniversary of the murder of two Australian television teams in East Timor. Senator Gareth Evans has denied that the government covered up the facts of the killings in Balibo on October 16, 1975. Like so much of what Evans says on East Timor, however, that denial is refuted by the evidence of honest people. His government's cover-up and the cover-up of preceding Australian governments is a fact.
News
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By Ben Courtice HOBART — Some members of the state Labor Opposition want to leave open the option of entering a new alliance with the Green Party after the next state election, due in February 1996. However, Opposition leader Michael Field insists
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By Karen Fletcher and Chris Spindler SYDNEY — Around 400 nurses and patients gathered outside St Vincent's public hospital in Darlinghurst on November 1 to protest against the loss of at least 70 beds and several vital services as a result of
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By Bernie Rosen The death of Charlie King, a Rationalist speaker at the Sydney Domain for nearly 34 years, leaves a gap in the intellectual life of our community that will be hard to fill. Charlie took over the platform from his illustrious
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By Ben Courtice HOBART — After three years of negotiations the Liberal state government has passed legislation to hand 12 sacred sites back to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. While both the government and Tasmanian Aboriginal Council
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By Bill Mason BRISBANE — Australian Meat Holdings and the meatworkers' union have agreed to re-open three Queensland abattoirs closed for almost a month by a dispute over enterprise bargaining. More than 1700 meatworkers returned to work under
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By Stan Thompson ADELAIDE — One thousand nurses held an angry march and rally on October 30 to protest against cuts to the health budget. In the last two years, the Liberal state government has cut $61 million dollars from the health budget which
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Tom Flanagan DARWIN — The actions of trade unions played a decisive role in the delay, and eventual success, of ERA's efforts to export a shipment of uranium from Fort Hill Wharf last week. The threat of union bans was one of the factors that led
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By Bill Mason BRISBANE The struggle between Comalco and 78 unionists on strike over wages at the bauxite mining town of Weipa is the first embryonic approach by employers to de-unionise the work force, according to ACTU (Qld) assistant secretary Tim
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By Peter Boyle If you were to judge from the front page headlines of Australia's daily newspapers, you'd believe that on October 30 — the first day of the International Court of Justice hearing in The Hague on the legality of nuclear weapons —
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By Kim Comerford BRISBANE — About 60 people attended the Women's Liberation Conference organised by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and Resistance on October 29. The conference was the first of its kind here. The conference panels focussed on
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Virtual morality "The university of Dallas, a Catholic institution, is considering a rule that would make sex in the dormitory rooms punishable by expulsion ... To avoid creating an incentive for abortion, the rule would exempt pregnant women from
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By Dan Kelly In September, Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) members responded to inadequate staffing of Student Assistance Centres (SACs) around the country with restrictions on public contact hours and bans on processing Austudy eligibility
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By Leon Harrison and Anne Pavy PERTH — For the second time in three years, the mayor of Perth, Dr Peter Nattrass, has been accused of homophobia. In 1992 Nattrass and five other Perth councillors were found by the Equal Opportunity Tribunal to have
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By Kath Gelber SYDNEY — Following the First National Conference on Violence Against Gay Men and Lesbians held here on October 28 and 29, organised by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Australian Council of Lesbian and Gay Rights (ACLGR)
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By Tom Flanagan DARWIN — After five days of sustained campaigning community activists, trade unionists and Greenpeace failed to stop 20 containers of uranium ore (yellowcake) from leaving here on November 2. However, Energy Resources Australia
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By Lisa Macdonald On April 20 the High Court rejected an application by Yaluritja (Clarrie Isaacs) to appeal against a Supreme Court of WA decision to allow the issuing of six liquor licences at the indigenous people's sacred site of "Goonininup"
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By Lisa Macdonald SYDNEY — Seventeen Christian churches and organisations in Australia last week announced their intention to provide sanctuary for East Timorese refugees under threat of deportation by the federal Labor government. The newly formed
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By Bill Mason BRISBANE — A proposed alliance between parties like the Greens, the Democrats and the Women's Party could pose a threat to the major parties, according to Queensland Greens spokesperson Drew Hutton. Hutton delivered a talk at the
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By Tom Flanagan DARWIN — Two visitors from Texas, US gave unexpected support to local protesters against the ERA uranium shipment on November 2. When George and Dora Mower, aged 68 and 71, bought two of the nine passenger tickets for a round the
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Dodie McGuinness, a national executive member of Sinn Féin and a member of the Six County executive of Sinn Féin for six years, will be touring the eastern states from November 8-23. A native of Derry, McGuinness is has been active in
Analysis
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The November 1 Federal Court ruling against a claim for native title by the Waanyi people of north-west Queensland is a victory for big mining interests. It shows the real colours of a judicial system designed to protect big business "rights" to
World
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By Norm Dixon The announcement in late October by the South African safety and security minister, Sydney Mufamadi, that former apartheid regime defence minister General Magnus Malan and ten senior defence officers are to be charged with murder in
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By Renfrey Clarke MOSCOW — Of some 200 reserve officers due to be drafted into military service after graduating this year from Moscow higher education institutions, the military authorities succeeded in enlisting only 13 between May and August. Of
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By Norm Dixon Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel prize for literature and a prominent democracy campaigner, has called on the international community to take decisive action against the military regime that rules Nigeria. Soyinka, who lives in
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By Eva Cheng Preparatory meetings in the lead-up to the Asia-Pacifc Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference scheduled for Osaka, Japan later this month, indicate that the 18 member nations will be unlikely to agree on the timing of the removal of
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Four leading members of Mexico's ruling elite have been assassinated over the past two years. Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and six other people died in a gun battle at Guadalajara's Miguel Hidalgo international airport
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By Jennifer Thompson A member of the Kurdistan organisation of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (WPCI) has been issued with a death threat by an Islamic Revolutionary Hizbollah leader. The fatwa (religious order), repartedly issued by Islamic
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By Norm Dixon Ken Saro-Wiwa, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and 14 other opponents of the brutal Nigerian regime was sentenced to death by a military tribunal on October 31. Saro-Wiwa has led the battle
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By Doug Lorimer Confronted by a massive campaign of chauvinist propaganda and economic blackmail by the Canadian ruling class and its parties, a narrow majority of Québec voters on October 30 rejected a proposal for Québec
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NGOs continue anti land mine campaign The United Nations conference to review the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons met in Vienna from September 25 to October 13. The major focus of its discussion was landmines. In a message to the conference,
Culture
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The Struggle for Australian Industrial RelationsBy Braham DabscheckOxford University Press, 1995. 194 pp., $26.95 (pb)Reviewed by Phil Shannon As Keating and Howard obscenely compete for the votes of working class "battlers", we should remind
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Based on highly reliable international contacts, leaked documents and horoscopes from several TV magazines, Nostradamus' Media Watch presents a highly accurate forecast of political events across the globe. Young Liberal's march Inspired by the
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Telling — East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992By Michele TurnerUniversity of NSW Press, 1992. 218 pp., $19.95Reviewed by Wendy Lowenstein This is a superb book; the best oral history I have read. It is moving and passionate, and above all
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Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex and HairBy Lisa JonesPenguin Books, 1994. 306 pp., $14.95 (pb)Reviewed by Carla Gorton Bulletproof Diva is a collection of street-wise, straight talking and opinionated articles by Lisa Jones. Jones is a staff
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Australian Options — Left discussions for social justice and political changeAustralian Options Publishing Inc.Reviewed by Melanie Sjoberg The second issue of a new quarterly journal, Australian Options, is now available. The journal aims to
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Reinventing Darwin — The Great Evolutionary DebateBy Niles EldredgeWeidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995 Reviewed by Adam Hanieh The writings of evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould have an enormously popular following. So it was
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Back of BeyondDirected by Michael RobertsonStarring Paul Mercurio and Colin FrielsScreening at Hoyts cinemasReviewed by Margaret Allan The promotional material for this film promises, "Back of Beyond — a journey you never imagined". Quite frankly
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The Box Seat: Seamus Heaney — Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry, in British-occupied northern Ireland. He now both a professor of rhetoric at Harvard and a professor of poetry at Oxford. His works are richly physical in their depiction of
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Programs of interest on Sydney Community TV (UHF 31) — Perleeka, indigenous Australians' program, nightly, 7pm. Art Experimenta, Mondays, 8pm and 11.30pm, and Tuesdays, 3am and 6.30am. Bent TV, Gay and lesbian program, Thursdays, 10.30pm and
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[This poem is about Harry Connell, long time activist and founder member of the Builders Labourers Rank and File Committee in the early 1950s.] Harry, they're workin' in the rain, Harry, mate, they're workin' in the rain, Down in George St., mate,
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By Nikki Ulasowski WOLLONGONG — "Cuba is facing the hardest time ever since the revolution. The government of the United States has tried to isolate Cuba. One side of the counter revolutionaries want to tighten the blockade, they want
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Wall of TestimonyWritten by Jose Casimiro and Maria Alice Casimiro BrancoPerformed by the Lafaek East Timor AssociationReviewed by Sally Mitchell and Tim E. Stewart Wall of Testimony — the latest play by the Lafaek East Timor Association — made