On February 6, 400 people converged on the lawns outside the national parliament building in Canberra to protest of the continued detention of Australian citizen David Hicks at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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The queer rights activists of Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH) believe that Peter Jensen, the Anglican archbishop of Sydney, should condemn a highly oppressive anti-gay law being introduced in Nigeria that is being backed by the Anglican Church in that country.
Fifty people heard leading Queensland Aboriginal activist Sam Watson announce at a February 7 public meeting held in the Sydney inner-west suburb of Leichhardt that Queensland Police Sergeant Chris Hurley was formally charged on February 5 with manslaughter and assault occasioning bodily harm for the 2004 death in custody of Palm Island Aborigine Mulrunji Doomadgee.
Anti-nuclear campaigners from the Medical Association for Prevention of War, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, the Australian Student Environment Network and campaign groups in all mainland states were among the 30 people who attended a national strategy meeting on February 3-4 in the Blue Mountains.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the referendum that acknowledged Aboriginal people as citizens in their own country. Forty years seems like a long time 聴 so how much has really changed?
As with other environmental issues, Australia鈥檚 water crisis has reached such an extent that mainstream media and politicians are being forced to abandon their traditional policy of denial. However, true to form, politicians are proposing solutions that are a mixture of the half-hearted, the irrelevant and the destructive. In common with the debates on global warming and Third World poverty, there is an underlying assumption that the water crisis can be overcome by the very thing that created it 鈥 the market economy.
Following years of a sustained campaign by the ruling elite to vilify Islam, the 2007 federal election is shaping up to be a 聯Muslim聰 election, with the two major parties trying to out-do each other with racist slurs against Arabs and Muslims.
Since his January 15 inauguration, President Rafael Correa has set about implementing his plan for changing Ecuadorian society, centred on a 鈥渃itizens鈥 revolution鈥 to refound the country and begin the construction of a 鈥渟ocialism of the 21st century鈥 by investing economic wealth in social spending on health, education, housing and the environment.
Hobart Resistance organiser Mel Barnes took part in the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network brigade to Venezuela in December, to see the revolutionary process for herself. The brigade was timed to coincide with the presidential election in which President Hugo Chavez won another landslide victory as people voted to deepen the Bolivarian revolution.
The January 27 demonstration in Washington DC was the largest anti-war protest in the US since September 2005.
The scale of the death, misery and horror unleashed on Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion is almost beyond comprehension. In October, British medical journal The Lancet published a study conducted by Iraqi physicians in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University that put the death toll among Iraqis as a result of the war at 655,000. Hundreds of people are being killed, wounded or abducted each day. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, with 1.6 million Iraqis internally displaced and almost 2 million refugees having fled the country altogether.
A man released without charge after a week in detention as one of the latest batch of police 鈥渢error suspects鈥 has branded Britain as 鈥渁 police state for Muslims鈥. Abu Bakr, one of nine men arrested in high-profile raids in Birmingham on January 31, made the comment on the BBC Newsnight program following his release on February 7. One other man was released along with Bakr; another seven are still being held in police custody.
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