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Smart bombs. Guided missiles. Minimal collateral damage. Attacks on high-value targets. All phrases designed to give the impression that modern warfare, although just as deadly as any time throughout history, is now shorter, sharper, cleaner and more precise than ever before.

Duncan Meerding Workers want higher wages and better conditions, while employers want to keep down labour costs. This is one of the major contradictions in the capitalist world today. The labour costs that employers come across include not only
The August 27 Court of Appeal decision to jail militant unionist Craig Johnston is a sharp illustration of the class prejudices of Australia's legal system. While Johnston is locked up because of property damage sustained during an industrial
Leslie Cannold Recently, ABC TV's Compass program screened a documentary about abortion. The British filmmaker Julia Black is the daughter of the founder of Marie Stopes International. Heavily pregnant during the filming, Black sets out to revisit
Rohan Pearce It was the biggest-ever protest against a political convention in the United States. The August 29 demonstration against the Republican National Convention was a resounding rejection of the White House and its "war on terror". The
2 'Make refugee rights a political issue' BRISBANE — "The best thing we can do to help the refugees is to make refugee rights a key political issue", Aladdin Sisalem, the last asylum seeker to be held on Manus Island, told a public meeting of
Simon Butler, Newcastle The mining division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) has welcomed the August 9 conviction of the companies and individuals responsible for events that led to the tragic deaths of four coal
Jenny Long, Sydney As part of its campaign against new job-threatening multi-year contracts to clean schools and other public buildings announced in June by the NSW Labor government, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) announced
Norman Brewer, Berlin On August 30, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Germany's cities for the fourth Monday in a row to protest the plans of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic-Greens coalition government
Eva Cheng Just after midnight on August 18, five grassroots organisers of the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (Liberation), retired after yet another busy day in the party's Paliganj local office, near Patna, the capital city of the
US Greens In response to Tennessee reader Howard Switzer's complaints (Write On, GLW #596) about my comments on the US Greens in my article in "Democrats sabotage Nader-Camejo campaign" (GLW #595), the main point of my article was the fact that the
David Zirin The modern Olympic games began in 1898 as a place for imperial rivals, in the process of carving up the world from Cuba to the Congo to the Philippines, to wave flags and use sports to whip up a nationalist frenzy. Since those times,