BY SHANE BENTLEY
A five-day dispute between Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) maintenance staff employed by Patrick Stevedores at Port Botany in Sydney and Fisherman's Island in Brisbane ended on the afternoon of November 21 after union members
Issue 564
News
BY PAUL OBOOHOV
CANBERRA — The Save The Ridge campaign group is intensifying its campaign to defend the area of bushland threatened by the Gungahlin Drive road extension.
Save the Ridge activists have begun marking endangered trees throughout
BY JIM MCILROY
BRISBANE — On November 27, 200 people marched through city streets demanding an end to uncontrolled land clearing in Queensland. The marchers rallied outside the state parliament on the last day of sitting for the year.
At the
BY CHRIS LATHAM
PERTH — On November 27, public servants escalated their campaign for a new certified agreement (CA) with a 24-hour stoppage.
The government attempted to put off the strike by making a late offer on November 25. Community and
BY HEATHER MARR& MARIANNE JAMIESON
ALBANY, Western Australia — On December 14, towns across Australia will celebrate their communities' support for refugees on temporary protection visas, who are threatened with deportation.
The Albany City
BY PAUL OBOOHOV
Opposition candidate Andrew Hall has won 45.1% in the ballot for the position of national president of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). Hall is a member of the militant Members First group within the union.
"This
BY PAUL OBOOHOV
CANBERRA — The ACT Legislative Assembly passed the first industrial manslaughter laws in Australia on November 27. The legislation, introduced by the ACT Labor government, was supported by two independent MLAs and Greens MLA
BY BILL MASON
BRISBANE — The current US occupation of Iraq has "great parallels with the US war on Vietnam" in the 1960s and 1970s, Gary MacLennan, Queensland University of Technology lecturer and radical scholar, told a forum held at the
BY DUROYAN FERTL
SYDNEY — In response to continuous media and government vilification of Muslims in south-west Sydney, 50 people attended a meeting in Bankstown on November 26 organised by the Canterbury-Bankstown Peace Group entitled "Don't
World
BY EVA CHENG
The United States' "free trade" push suffered another setback at the November 17-21 fourth ministerial summit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), held in Miami. Due to opposition, led by Brazil, to aspects of the pact, the
BY EVA CHENG
The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) had only 62 of its 206 candidates elected in Hong Kong's District Council elections on November 23. In the last DC elections in 1999, 83 DAB candidates were
BY LEE YU KYUNG
On November 17, following a meeting with US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, South Korea's defence minister Jo Young Gil announced that Seoul had agreed to send 3000 additional troops to Iraq, including combat troops. They will
BY AHMAD NIMER
TORONTO — In a significant victory for the right to organise on Canadian campuses, protests by Palestinian solidarity activists forced the University of Toronto (UT) administration to allow a planned conference to go ahead. The
BY BENJAMIN DANGL
COCHABAMBA — This interview with socialist leader Evo Morales took place a month after the massive popular uprising against the Bolivian government's proposal to export the country's natural gas to the US for a meagre sum. Huge
BY LESLIE FEINBERG
General John Abizaid, top gun in charge of Pentagon forces in the Middle East, summoned his senior commanders to a meeting the week of November 18 at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to discuss strategy for
BY MICHAEL KARADJIS
The recent horrific bombings of two historic Turkish synagogues and two British targets in Istanbul, which left 52 people dead and some 70 injured, raise the question of why al Qaeda would target Turkey and massacre large
BY BERNIE WUNSCH
MIAMI — The protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) ministerial meeting climaxed on November 20 with a large and peaceful march by more than 30,000 people opposed to corporate globalisation. However, the riot
SAN FRANCISCO — Voters shocked the Democratic Party establishment in the November 4 mayoral election by giving Green Party candidate and city councillor Matt Gonzalez more than 20% of the vote.
He came in second to moderate Democrat Gavin Newsom,
BY ROHAN PEARCE
On November 23, US soldiers in Baghdad arrested Kasim Hadi and Adil Salih. Hadi and Salih are activists with the Union of the Unemployed in Iraq (UUI).
It was not the first time that UUI members have been arrested by US forces. In
BY DALE MILLS
US civil liberties groups have reacted with alarm to a leaked FBI memo which equates demonstrations in the USA with terrorist activity. The memo, released by the New York Times on November 23, was dated October 15. Its purpose is to
BY DICK NICHOLS
The biggest loser in the November 13 Catalan regional election was the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC), the Catalan sister organisation of the social-democratic Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE).
For two decades, the PSC
BY DALE McKINLEY
JOHANNESBURG — If the public analyses of the African National Congress (ANC) government's November 13 "medium-term budget policy statement" are anything to go by, economic debate in South Africa is in a sad state. There has been
BY NORM DIXON
Thousands of workers across Zimbabwe joined anti-government protests on November 18, despite threats of police repression prior to the marches and the arrest of scores of trade unionists on the day. Police brutally beat hundreds of
BY EVA CHENG
An international campaign was launched on November 20 to stop the contamination of Mexican corn (maize) with the DNA from genetically modified (GM) corn produced by multinational food corporations. Corn is the Mexican population's
Culture
Fat Cats and Running Dogs: the Enron Stage of CapitalismBy Vijay PrashadZed Books, 2002, 246 pp, $28.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Enron, the giant US-based energy corporation, may have died from "creative accounting" and speculative
Matrix RevolutionsWritten and directed by Andy and Larry WachowskiWith Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Keanu Reeves, Mary Alice and Laurence FishburneAt major cinemas
REVIEW BY NICK FREDMAN
In an epic blaze of hyper-marketing, the Matrix series
To the land of libertyThey came in freedom's nameThey came out openlyTo expose the villain's game
From Miami's emigres"The Brothers" came in '96Their goals your power playTo injure and impoverish
Free the Five, free the Five
So five infiltrated
Editorial
Ian Macfarlane, the head of the Reserve Bank, must be really pleased with the work of his Australian Council of Trade Unions office. With unemployment falling to 5.6% and construction booming, the ACTU has submitted to the Australian Industrial