World

  • Malaysia: Fuel heats governmental crisis

    The National Front (BN) government led by PM Abdullah Badawi has been shaky since the March general election that returned a much stronger parliamentary opposition — now largely united in a new People’s Front (Pakatan Rakyat).

  • Venezuela: What a pro-worker government looks like

    This year’s May Day solidarity brigade to Venezuela, the seventh brigade from Australia to be organised by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN), had 12 participants representing various unions. One of those was Chris Spindler, an organiser for the Victorian Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU). Spindler was sent on the brigade as an official AMWU representative, to report back on how the Bolivarian revolution being led by President Hugo Chavez’s government was improving the lives of workers and the poor. On June 11, the Victorian AMWU voted to affiliate to the AVSN and to send a message of solidarity and congratulations to the workers of the giant steel plant Sidor — which was nationalised in April following a long struggle by its workforce. Green Left Weekly’s Trent Hawkins spoke to Spindler about the his impressions of the revolution.

  • Zimbabwe: Behind &#145Comrade&#146 Mugabe's regime

    The ZANU-PF government of President Robert Mugabe has its origins in the liberation struggle against the white supremacist Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. How did a government that emerged from a mass struggle for liberation degenerate into the dictatorship that exists today?

  • Chavez threatens to cut Europe's oil over racist law

    In response to the extreme, racist anti-immigrant “Return Directive” law, passed by the European parliament on June 18, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to stop oil sales to any country that applied the directive.

  • Peace requires justice — end the Gaza siege

    Despite raids by Israel that left six people dead in the Gaza Strip and numerous rockets launched by Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad the previous day, a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza took effect on June 19. At the official start of the ceasefire at 6am, both sides appeared to be holding the truce.

  • Britain: 'Humiliating victory' in war on civil liberties

    On June 11, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposals to extend the time that police are allowed to detain “terrorist suspects” without charge narrowly scraped through a vote in the House of Commons. The MP vote was 315 to 306 to back Brown’s proposal to extend the limit on detention without charge from 28 to 42 days.