The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”
718
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.
Organising is well under way for protests during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney in September, to which PM John Howard will be welcoming his war criminal mate, US President George Bush.
On July 18, Ford Australia president Tom Gorman announced that Ford's Geelong engine plant would close in 2010, putting 600 workers out of work. Geelong Trades Hall Council's Union Air radio show interviewed Australian Manufacturing Workers Union vehicle division delegate plant Tony Anderson.
On July 17 the British House of CommonsÂ’ 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.
At least 500 Teleco workers received termination letters on July 6 as part of the governmentÂ’s announced plan to privatise the company.
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 “anti-terror” hysteria in the lead-up to the Sydney APEC summit in September has been ramped up still further — this time by Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of FranceÂ’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
An article in GLW #717 incorrectly listed Cheryl Kaulfuss as the chair of MelbourneÂ’s July 14 rally for Indigenous rights. The chair was Shiralee Hood. An article in the same edition described Wally Curran as a metalworkersÂ’ union leader. Curran was a long-time leader of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union.
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.
Australians Brendan Hurst and Justin Saint were recently killed in a roadside attack near Baghdad. They had been working for the Queensland-registered security firm BLP International as contractors training Iraqi police.
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