TASMANIA 鈥 The Weld Valley in southern Tasmania was the site of a convergence on January 20-21. Activists discussed strategies and planned the next actions in the campaign to save the Styx and Weld valleys from logging. Addressed by Greens Senator Christine Milne, Tasmanian Greens member Tim Morris and Adrian Whitehead from Beyond Zero Emissions, an overriding theme of the convergence was climate change. On January 25, 30 people attended a submission-writing workshop and media conference outside the Department of Primary Industries and Water in Hobart. Their aim was to force the state government to recognise the role of forest conservation in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, something the government avoided in its their draft 鈥楥limate Change Strategy鈥.
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The refusal by Tristar Steering and Suspension to pay a dying employee his work entitlements after he applied for a voluntary redundancy is just the latest in a long fight the company鈥檚 workers have waged to secure their rightful entitlements. Another 30 longstanding Tristar workers are still awaiting their own entitlements.
Despite right-wing intimidation, the founding congress of the National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) successfully concluded on January 20. A leadership was elected, which has already had its first meeting, preparing for a year of 鈥渁ll out鈥 political campaigning.
Unions are increasingly concerned over Airline Partners Australia鈥檚 (APA) proposed $11.1 billion takeover bid for Qantas. The buy-out, by the Macquarie Bank-led private equity consortium, has yet to be formally submitted, though the Qantas board of directors has unanimously agreed to the $5.60 a share bid.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Granta Books, 2005
237 pages, $24.95 (pb)
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Granta Books, 2005
237 pages, $24.95 (pb)
American Hoax: Undercover in the USA (sort of)
By Charles Firth
Pan Macmillan, 2006
272 pages
$32.95 (pb)
By Charles Firth
Pan Macmillan, 2006
272 pages
$32.95 (pb)
A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. 鈥淪ome 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide鈥, wrote senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They described people 鈥渓iving in a cage鈥, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
Fifteen-thousand people fled from the town of Vaharai in eastern Sri Lanka following heavy shelling by the Sri Lankan army on January 18. According to the Tamilnet website, the shelling was intensified in the evening despite an urgent message sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross from Vaharai hospital authorities saying that the area around the hospital, where many displaced people had sought refuge, was under attack.
Factional fighting between the armed wings of Fatah and Hamas resumed on January 25 when a vehicle carrying members of the Hamas Executive Force was bombed. Two EF fighters later died as a result of their injuries. The subsequent bloody clashes between rival militants, which took place mainly in the Gaza Strip, left 19 people dead, including a two-year-old boy and eight civilians.
On January 22, 2002, then Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) senator Evo Morales was expelled from parliament, accused of being a 鈥渘arco-terrorist鈥. Exactly five years later, as the nation鈥檚 first indigenous president, Morales gave his first annual report to parliament. This time it was not Morales who exited prematurely.
鈥淚n my country, a surgery like that costs [US]$8,000鈥, said Roberto Andrade from El Salvador about the operation he received in Cuba that removed cataracts from both his eyes, completely free of charge, according to a January 10 Miami Herald article. 鈥淚 make $12 a day. I would never, ever, be able to save that much.鈥
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