PM John Howards new intervention policy in the Northern Territory has begun with federal and state police storming into Indigenous communities.
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My university, the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), has given 22 student and staff records to the Australian Federal Police, the NSW police and the Australian Taxation Office.
On July 5, anti-war activist Peter McGregor confronted Attorney-General Philip Ruddock at a University of NSW symposium and served him with a warrant for war crimes. Police arrested McGregor, a retired academic from Newcastle, and charged him with unlawful entry on inclosed lands. The warrant charged Ruddock, along with PM John Howard, foreign minister Alexander Downer and defence minister Brendan Nelson with crimes including Planning, preparing, initiation or waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.
Ali Humayun, the queer Pakistani locked up in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, is suing VIDC management and the federal government for negligence of care.
Indonesian police routinely torture, rape and kill with impunity in West Papua and risk fanning separatism there, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on July 5.
On July 14, Gold Coast doctor Mohamed Haneef was charged with providing support to a terrorist organisation after 12 days in detention without any charge. His detention without charges or a trial shows the danger to civil liberties posed by federal and state anti-terror laws.
Pressure from unions over the exploitation of foreign workers employed under the 457 visa scheme for temporary workers has forced the Howard government to tighten some of the regulations.
A bill recently pushed through federal parliament has the potential to threaten state moratoriums on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by granting new powers to the federal agriculture minister, a WA anti-GMO activist told Green Left Weekly.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruled on June 28 that the 2001 conviction of Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi — sentenced to 27 years’ jail for allegedly bombing Pan Am flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people — “may have suffered a miscarriage of justice”. The SCCRC referred al Megrahi’s case to Scotland’s appeal court.
Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has admitted that securing oil supplies is a key factor behind the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. This was how the BBC reported Nelsons July 5 comments to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on the release of a review of Australias defence strategy.
Fifty delegates from the Queer Collaborations student conference, held in Hobart from July 9 to 13, rallied on July 12 in solidarity with Northern Territory Indigenous communities that are being invaded by federal police. The conference voted to support the Indigenous community in the NT against the Howard governments interference. The rally then marched to Liberal Senator Eric Abetzs office to hand him the statement written by the elders of the Mutitjulu people, which asked for community assistance but not police intervention.
Recent attacks on the organic food industry are about discrediting it to soften up the public to accept genetically modified (GM) crops, Dr Maggie Lilith of the Conservation Council of WA and the Say No to GMO campaign told Green Left Weekly.
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