Exit polls have shown the Dutch Socialist Party will get 15 seats after the September 12 elections, the same number it had before.
When two weeks ago, with polls showing the SP stood to win about 35 seats, even The Economist felt the need to raise the alarm over SP-leader Emile Roemer's 鈥渇ar-left party鈥. With this fresh in the memory, that's a deep disappointment for Dutch leftists. But it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
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Pressure is mounting for police officers involved in the Hillsborough disaster to face prosecution.
In 1989, 96 football fans were killed in a human crush in a game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield.
The calls for prosecution follow the publication of a damning report by the Hillsborough Independent Panel that exposed the extent of the cover-up by South Yorkshire Police, which attempted to shift the blame onto the 96 innocent victims.
The statement below was released by the Dutch Socialist Party on September 12.
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A combative Emile Roemer addressed hundreds of Socialist Party members in the Paard van Troje (Trojan Horse) venue in The Hague. The SP held on to its 15 seats, despite a fiercely fought two-horse race between the PvdA (Labour Party) and the VVD (centre-right liberals).
鈥淵es,鈥 said Roemer, 鈥淚 am extremely proud of this party and of the million people who voted for us.
鈥淢y plan is to demolish the ultra-right so that a true opposition arises, because I am ready to work with them,鈥 Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez told a mass rally of supporters of his re-election campaign in the Caracas neighbourhood of Charallave on September 9.
鈥淲hy do they hate us?鈥 That was the question asked by many baffled Americans after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Eleven years later, Americans are asking the question again after the US ambassador, another US diplomat, two US marines and 10 Libyan guards were killed in attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi.
The hate film, Innocence of Muslims, was virtually unheard of until its producers dubbed its most offensive scenes into Egyptian vernacular Arabic and promoted it in the Middle East on social media.
鈥淩IP to the 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and RIP to the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit. And the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who experience this everyday. Your 9/11 is their 24/7.鈥
The above quote that flashed across the social media last week captured a reflection of many people about the terrible collective punishment still inflicted on innocent people right across the Middle East and beyond for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US.
About 40 activists from the Refugee Action Collective Victoria and other refugee rights groups protested outside the Melbourne offices of Thai Airways on September 14. Thai Airways were used in the July 25 deportation of a Tamil refugee back to Sri Lanka. He underwent a 16-hour interrogation on arrival, after which he told a press conference that he withdrew his past allegations of torture at the hands of the Sri Lankan regime.
Refugee advocates rallied in Sydney and Melbourne in a snap response to the first group of 40 refugees flown to Nauru to be held indefinitely on September 14.
Protesters in Sydney rallied outside the department of immigration offices and heard Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Sydney branch secretary Paul McAleer pledge to 鈥渟tand side by side in solidarity鈥 with refugees.
The governments of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have gone to great lengths to control information about the ongoing uprisings in their countries. This is part of their efforts to crush the democracy movements that have sought to overthrow the ruling monarchies.
The protests are part of the Arab Spring uprisings that began in Tunisia in late 2010 and spread across the Middle East and north Africa.
On the Catalan National Day, September 11, Spanish politics suffered a huge shock: up to 2 million people 鈥 more than a quarter of the population of Catalonia 鈥 marched through the streets of Barcelona shouting one word, 鈥渋ndependencia鈥.
It was a moment when countless Catalans (those from the four provinces that make up Catalonia in Spain's north-east) discovered that others felt the way they did 鈥 it is time to drop Spain for a state of our own.
More than 1000 members of the United Firefighters Union (UFU), along with supporters from other unions, marched to the Victorian parliament house on September 13 to protest against funding cuts to the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Country Fire Authority.
UFU members marched in their uniforms, despite attempts by management to intimidate them not to do so.
Leaked Treasury documents obtained by the union show that the Metropolitan Fire Brigade will lose $25 million and the Country Fire Authority $41 million in the first year of the cuts.
Sinn Fein TD (member of the Irish parliament) Pearse Doherty speaking to about 100 people in Perth on September 8 about the brutal austerity, to fund huge bank bailouts, in Ireland. This is destroying the lives of working people and driving 76,000 people to emigrate every year.
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