Issue 926
News
Over 2000 people marched in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra and Adelaide to protest twenty years of mandatory detention and to mark World Refugee Day on the weekend of June 16-17.
Protesters tore through a giant run-through banner that read "free the refugees" as part of World Refugee Day rally in Melbourne. Below the slogan, symbolic bars were broken representing the breaking of the fences imprisoning refugees.
About 7000 union and community activists braved heavy rain in Sydney to protest against the NSW government's plans to undermine workers' compensation and entitlements on June 13. They chanted “shame, Barry, shame” and “injured workers in his sights, taking away our compo rights”.
Thousands of workers braved torrential rain to tell Barry O'Farrell and the NSW Government exactly what they think of the proposed attacks on workers compensation.
Analysis
Once again we have seen the spectacle of the Jewish leadership banning dissenting Jews from their annual festival of ideas, Limmud Oz. Organisers of this year’s conference held last weekend in Melbourne told the co-ordinators of a workshop on a new book, Beyond Tribal Loyalties, that their session would not be included.
Carlo Sands comes out strongly in favour of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations, lauding everyone from Tom Jones to Julia Gillard, even putting up his own hand to make a similar sacrifice.
World
Austin Mackell, an Australian journalist based in Cairo who has reported on the Egyptian revolution, speaks about his arrest by the regime, and Egyptian politics around the elections.
Afrodity Giannakis, Green Left correspondent in Greece and an activist in SYRIZA, gives her first impressions of the result of the June 17 election where the conservative New Democracy beat the left coalition SYRIZA to the highers vote by just 3% of votes.
On the eve of the June 17, 2012 elections in Greece, Green Left correspondent Afrodity Giannakis reports from Thessalonika, on the hopes and fears of a people being forced to bear the burden for a global capitalist economic crisis built on the greed, speculation and corruption of the rich and powerful minority.
In the June 17 elections, anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) came a close second with 26.9% of the vote. The right-wing New Democracy came first with more than 29%, amid huge blackmail and threats from major governments and financial institutions, and will now attempt to form a coalition government.
Culture
On June 16, 2012, an all-female line-up of artists put on a Sydney gig to raise funds for women prisoners after funding for the charity Sisters Inside was cut by the Liberal state government in Queensland.
WHERE HAS YOUR SMILE GONE? Your smile a mask of despair from an ancient tragedy. Your look
News that a popular front-man is about to become a front-woman might not stir such intense buzz if we lived in a world that was truly sexually liberated. Hell, it might not even be “news,” just another instance of an individual becoming more like the person they envision themselves to be; end of story.