News

Indonesian and Australian activists are preparing to protest US wars in the Middle East and the stepped-up “war on terror” during US President Barack Obama’s visits.Indonesian and Australian activists are preparing to protest US wars in the Middle East and the stepped-up "war on terror" during US President Barack Obama's visits.

“We want to be one voice, we have to support all the people and back them up to come back to their own culture”, Murray George, a Pitjantjatjara elder from Fregon community in the far north of South Australia, told a March 2 meeting in the Adelaide Activist Centre.

In response to the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's call to his ambassadors to ban the screening of Insurgency of the 21st Century, Australian activist groups have started promoting the documentary.

Two hundred Aboriginal people and supporters rallied outside state parliament on March 10 to protest the death in custody of another young Aboriginal man in a Queensland prison.

On 22 February, Newcastle Greens councillor Michael Osborne received a notice of a “code of conduct” complaint, because he’d taken part in a protest.

The Socialist Alliance (SA) held its Victorian state conference on February 27, with about 80 people taking part.

For the second year in a row, flag-raising ceremonies in Victoria marked the anniversary of the Saharawi Republic, as a gesture of solidarity and friendship with the people of Western Sahara. The Saharawi Republic was declared on February 27, 1976. However, the country remains under Moroccan occupation.

Green Left Weekly reported in its last issue (#828, March 3) that the immigration ombudsman was about to visit the Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, and that coincidentally, construction of a gym in the alpha compound had commenced.

Almost everyone has seen the iconic photo of Ernesto Che Guevara taken in 1960 by photographer Alberto Korda. In the decades since it was taken, it has been reproduced countless times, including on towels, lunchboxes, cigarette packets and especially T-shirts.

A petition signed by 35 distinguished Australian Jews rejecting the automatic right of Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel is printed below. Under the racist “law of return”, Jews do not need to have any connection with Israel to obtain citizenship. Signatories include ethicist Peter Singer, feminist campaigner Eva Cox, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein and writer Sara Dowse.

“There are two messages we want to get across as part of our campaign in the federal elections”, Socialist Alliance candidate Alex Bainbridge told Green Left Weekly.

Western Australian public servants are mounting an important battle to stop the government terminating their job security as part of an overall government assault on community services. Unionists say thousands of jobs are in danger and public services are threatened.