About 5000 people walked across Commonwealth Bridge and rallied in front of Parliament House on June 5, calling for real action on climate change now.
Speakers included former Liberals Leader John Hewson, Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute, 2010 Greens Senate candidate Lin Hatfield Dodds and Bishop Pat Power.
Hewson said we needed to respond to climate change with a greater sense of urgency and in a way that recognised the magnitude of the problem.
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In a contribution to the magazine Viento Sur, Real Democracy Now! activist Nacho 脕lvarez looked at the challenges facing the Real Democracy Now! movement three weeks after May 15. Excerpts of the article are published below.
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Collective reflection about what to do, how to channel people鈥檚 anger and how to structure a sustained and massive protest movement now grips the streets and squares of hundreds of Spanish cities.
Global greenhouse gas emissions rose faster than ever last year and the market-based schemes set up to bring emissions down are in trouble. That鈥檚 the bad news from two recent reports by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the World Bank.
The editor-in-chief of whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, told the Belfast Telegraph that the United States was working behind the scenes to put WikiLeaks and himself out of business.
Media outlets from the Dawn Media Group, Pakistans leading media house, published the first set of WikiLeaks files relating to Pakistan on May 20.
The leaked US cables revealed that the Pakistani military is complicit in US drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas, bordering Afghanistan.
Each set of cables published by the group has had a ripple effect, with the leaked US cables widely reproduced.
At first, embarrassed military spokespeople and politicians exposed by the leaks denied the contents. Later, they tried to ignore them.
It鈥檚 been a year since the 鈥渕emorandum of understanding鈥 between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Greek government was signed. It is now clear it has failed to deliver the country鈥檚 promised economic recovery.
As confirmed by the treasury data, Greece鈥檚 debt has risen rather than fallen.
At the same time, the impact on Greek people of the austerity measures demanded by the IMF has been devastating.
Official unemployment has reached about 16% 鈥 an all-time high. There are 787,000 people unemployed 鈥 181,000 more than last year.
Since the 1980s, Friends of the Earth's (FoE) annual Radioactive Exposure Tour has exposed thousands of people first-hand to the realities of 鈥渞adioactive racism鈥 and to the environmental impacts of the nuclear industry.
The tour is a 10-day journey into the heart of the breathtaking semi-arid landscapes of South Australia and its atomic history and current uranium mining operations.
On a section of the apartheid wall in Occupied Palestine someone spray-painted a quote from Edward Said that says: "Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?"
In late April, the progressive Spanish daily Publico asked why there was so little resistance to the economic crisis, despite the country鈥檚 5 million jobless and rising misery.
鈥淚n all of the mainstream media analysis of WikiLeaks' recent release of Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from Guantanamo, relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners who have been held at the prison over the last nine years and four months,鈥 Andy Worthington wrote in a may 11 TruthOut.org article, 鈥渙ne group of prisoners has so far been overlooked: the Yemenis.鈥
Rebellion runs through pop music, but no performer has ever fused music and radical politics like Gil Scott-Heron, who died on May 27. In a series of early 1970s albums, Scott-Heron, collaborating with composer/arranger Brian Jackson, made militant funk and soul that remains unmatched. It exploded any idea that art and politics don鈥檛 mix, and has been hugely influential. Scott-Heron has become known as the godfather of rap not just because his spoken word over drumbeats prefigured the genre, but because he used the style to tell of ghetto life and urge resistance.
As many as 1 million people gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square and across Egypt on May 27 for a 鈥淔riday of Anger鈥. The huge march showed the revolution that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak in February has reached a new stage.
The demonstrations were called by left organisations in defiance of Egypt's military rulers 鈥 as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and liberal groups that were part of the mass protests against Mubarak in February.
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