World

On the evening of July 24, New Zealand hospital workers claimed a major victory against the aggressive industrial tactics of Australian company Spotless Services.

Max Lane spoke to the Socialist Party of Timor’s (PST) secretary-general, Avelino da Silva Coelho, in the wake of East Timor’s June 30 parliamentary elections, in which the PST received 0.96% of the vote.

The revolutionary student movement in Venezuela is divided into countless tiny organisations, often with bases in just one faculty or one campus. One of these organisations, the Popular Revolutionary Movement of Fire (MPR Fogata), in a statement issued in June called for “the revolutionary student movement of Venezuela to strengthen the forces in favour of unity”. The statement argued: “Now we are presented with the possibility of deepening these forces and gradually making that [unity] a reality.”

On July 17 the British House of Commons’ standards and privileges committee recommended the suspension of George Galloway, the former Labour MP who is now an MP for the left-wing Respect coalition, for 18 days. Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq war.

The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as France’s president in April and the landslide to the conservatives in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 10, described in France as the “blue wave”, were widely presented in the Australian capitalist media as a dramatic shift to the right in French political life. They are all too keen to wipe out last year’s images of French workers and students successfully resisting anti-worker laws, something they only grudgingly reported on in the first place.

According to a report issued by the Palestinian National Information Centre (PNIC), during the month of June, Israel occupation forces killed 49 Palestinians and wounded a further 147. During the same period, Israel abducted and arrested 383 Palestinians and carried out 765 invasions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and committed a total of 2380 human rights violations against the civilian Palestinian population.

This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of France’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).

At least 500 Teleco workers received termination letters on July 6 as part of the government’s announced plan to privatise the company.

Internationally known environmental activist Sajida Khan passed away on the night of July 15 in her Durban home at age 55. She was suffering her second bout of cancer, and chemotherapy had evacuated her beautiful long hair.

The head of Britain’s Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has called for police to be given the power to imprison “terror suspects” indefinitely without charge.

The French presidential and parliamentary elections produced very contradictory results for the broadly defined radical left. Its collective vote of a little less than 9% in the presidential poll, while large compared to other industrialised countries, was down from 15% in 2002. However the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) bucked the trend and cemented its position as the most credible voice of the anti-capitalist left.

A furor has erupted over the recent formation of the GAM party in Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh. Former members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) announced the formation of the party on July 7. Chaired by former GAM military commander Muzakkir Manaf, it adopted GAM’s white crescent and star symbol on a red background as its logo. Former GAM “prime minister” Malik Mahmud later said that Jakarta had agreed to the establishment of a local party in Aceh based on the former rebel group that fought for Acehnese independence from Indonesia.