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Personnel in the Australian navy have broken down and cried while carrying out duties that include repelling refugees from Australian waters, according to documents released under Freedom of Information laws and reported on by the July 22 Sun-Herald.
The Venezuelan revolution, led by socialist President Hugo Chavez, has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world with its increasingly successful challenge to US imperialism and US-backed neoliberal policies that have caused widespread impoverishment across Latin America. Since Chavez’s re-election in December on an explicitly socialist platform, there has been a struggle to significantly “deepen” the revolutionary process towards creating a “socialism of the 21st century”.
Around 50 workers from the Fosters brewery at Yatala, south of Brisbane, and their supporters rallied outside the Carlton United Brewery (CUB) head office in Fortitude Valley on July 27 in support of their campaign for a union agreement. The protesters held up placards and waved to passing traffic, who honked their support.
Three-hundred people packed Griffith University’s Multi-Faith Centre on July 22 for an emergency community forum in support of Mohamed Haneef and democratic rights.
A mass anti-Howard rally is being planned for Melbourne in September. The rally will be in opposition to the Howard government’s Work Choices laws as well as other abuses carried out by the government, such as the unjust imprisonment of Dr Mohamed Haneef under “anti-terrorism” laws.
On July 21 the East/Hills branch of the Socialist Alliance pre-selected Annolies Truman to run for the seat of Pearce in the up-coming federal election.
Pharmaceutical giants have put profits before lives when it comes to Third World people’s access to HIV medications, Andrew Hewett, executive director of Oxfam Australia, said.
The July 26 premiere of Tasmania’s Clean, Green Future: Too Precious to Pulp at the State Theatre was packed out, with many would-be viewers missing out. Heidi Douglas created this short film to expose the true effect on Tasmania of the pulp mill proposed by Gunns Ltd. Douglas is one of the “Gunns 20", who have faced legal action for speaking out against the mill. Also shown was Roger Scholes’ Franklin River Blockade.
Michael Moore’s Sicko, released in the US on June 22, has already become one of the five highest grossing documentaries of all time. Predictably, the film’s withering attack on the US’s profit-driven health-care system has elicited a strong response from apologists for neoliberalism. The following article on the reaction to Moore’s film originally appeared as an editorial in the US Socialist Worker.
Federal ALP leader Kevin Rudd took a further step to the right on July 23 when he announced full support for logging old-growth forests in Tasmania. Rudd also announced his support for Gunns Ltd’s $2 billion pulp mill project proposed for the Tamar Valley, north of Launceston, in the federal electorate of Bass.
In an attempt to bolster the regime of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel and the US have proposed a plan to “kick start” the “peace” process by rehashing the Olso Accords and the “Road Map to Peace”.
A representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was welcomed by a large crowd packed into a Sydney University lecture theatre on July 26.