Kavita Krishnan is the national secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association and a former president of the All India Students' Association. She is also a central committee member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) and editor of Liberation magazine. Krishnan will be an international guest at the World at a Crossroads conference in Sydney, April 10-12. For more information, or to register, visit .
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International human rights group Amnesty International issued a report on March 30 accusing the Greek police of widespread abuses during the wave of street protests that shook the country late last year. The report claimed police conducted arbitrary arrests, physically abused detainees, and disproportionately targeted immigrants.
Israel鈥檚 High Court ruled to allow leaders of the extreme right to march bearing Israeli flags through the Palestinian majority town of Umm al-Fahm, near Haifa, on March 24.
A group of community activists marked Earth Hour with an occupation of the Hazelwood Power station in Victoria聮s Latrobe Valley on March 28.
The combination of a ten-year long 鈥減eople鈥檚 war鈥 waged by the People鈥檚 Liberation Army (PLA), and a pro-democracy uprising in 2006 overthrew the centuries-old Nepalese monarchy and paved the way for elections to a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. Elected last year, the largest number of seats are held by the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, which is aligned with the PLA and currently heads a coalition government.
Some 200 workers occupied the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast in Ireland's north in response job cuts on March 31. The workers acted after the bosses summarily announced the closure of the plant with the loss of all jobs. Visteon took over the plant from Ford in 2000. All plant makes parts for Ford.
Nearly 700 people marched on March 29 from a Baptist church to the courthouse of rural Powhatan County, Virginia.
The Iraqi Teachers' Union is under attack from the Iraqi government. The government has authorised an official body to take over the union with the pretext of forcing the union to hold elections. It is worth noting that the ITU has already held several national conferences since 2003 and had elected an ITU leadership openly and democratically.
In the biggest shake-up of job centres since the Howard government聮s replacement of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) with the privatised Job Network in 1998, the federal Labor government has created a new Job Services Australia (JSA) network. It halves the number of not-for-profit agencies involved and cuts thousands of jobs.
The Victorian ALP state government has cynically tried to dress up its attack on public sector workers as an attempt to save jobs. Public sector workers will have their wage rises slashed from 3.25% to 2.5% annually.
The unemployment rate jumped to 8.5% in March as the economy shed another 663,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the job loss reported for March, and upward revisions of 84,000 for the prior two months, the economy has lost an average of 684,000 jobs per month since November 2008.
The Socialist Alliance has announced Sam Wainwright as its candidate for the May 16 Fremantle by-election. Wainwright, aged 38, is a wharfie, member of the Maritime Union of Australia and activist in the Fremantle Community Solidarity group.
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