On January 9, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released its report into mainland immigration detention facilities, based on HREOC visits to detention centres in August and November. The report noted a number of improvements in the system of immigration detention. However, there was yet another death in detention just days after the report was released.
Analysis
During a December 21 visit to Iraq, newly elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that Australia’s “battle group” of 515 combat troops would be withdrawn from the country by June 2007.
In 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting carbon trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for Washington’s support — which never materialised.
The world is teetering on the brink of unstoppable climate change. Many now recognise the need for serious change in the way we produce and use energy, our transport systems, food production, urban design and forestry practices. Yet politicians are still mouthing platitudes while allowing corporations to continue to profit from polluting our atmosphere and destroying our ecosystem.
There are two starkly different election processes underway right now, but most readers will probably have only been reading about one of them: the US presidential elections, which Forbes magazine estimates will likely cost as much as US$3.3 billion all up! In Cuba, just 145 kilometres from the coast of Florida, a very different election process is taking place.
The unforgettable tabloid headline Greenie granny goaled accompanied a picture of a smiling, backpack-toting Betty Downie being led away by two policemen from the Franklin River blockade sums up the fighting spirit of this wonderful activist. Betty died, aged 95, in a retirement home in Launceston on December 5, 2007.
On January 7, Indigenous activist Christine King made a statement to ABC Radio on behalf of the Stolen Generations Alliance. She called on the Rudd government to put its money where its mouth is and provide a national fund of $1 billion to compensate the stolen generations.
The 23rd Congress of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance in Australia, reaffirmed its commitment to broader left regroupment.
A long standing activist of anarchist persuasion, Peter had been a lecturer in media studies at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) until his retirement in 2005.
In the last instalment of a recent exchange that was sparked by Green Left Weekly’s interview with Eva Golinger (GLW #716, June 28, 2007), Professor Steven Zunes accused me of having made a “series of false accusations and major leaps of logic” in my critical assessment of the links that the non-profit International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) maintains with the United States’ leading democracy manipulators.
The first days of the December 3-14 Bali meeting on a post-Kyoto framework for tackling climate change showed that the US-led call for a comprehensive new agreement that would require Third World countries that are big greenhouse-gas emitters to commit to emission reductions had the support of most First World government delegations. This push would reverse one of the most valuable aspects of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.
Kevin Smith, a researcher for Carbon Trade Watch, participated in the December 3-14 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali, Indonesia. Smith spoke to Green Left Weeklys Zoe Kenny about the campaign against carbon trading.
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