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Rules of racism The Australian Arabic Council (AAC) wishes to bring to your attention the film Rules of Engagement, directed by William Friedkin and produced by Paramount Pictures, which will be distributed in Australia from August 17 by Village
BY PAUL BENEDEK "Riot police and detention centre security broke down the doors, gassed the hunger strikers, put them in steel handcuffs and threw them like animals into waiting trucks to be taken away." Is this a scene from Nazi Germany in the
By Chris Slee MELBOURNE — More than 200 people attended the Global Action Conference, jointly sponsored by Friends of the Earth and Green Left Weekly, held at Melbourne University on July 29. The conference comprised three plenary sessions and 11
Indy Media Centres launched in Melbourne, Sydney BY SEAN HEALY SYDNEY — Independent Media Centres are now up and running in Melbourne and Sydney, where they'll provide a protesters' eye view of protest actions at the World Economic Forum's
Lift the sanctions on Iraq! BY LEIGH HUGHES When asked in 1996 about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from United States-enforced sanctions against the country, US secretary of state Madeleine Albright declared "the price is worth it".
BY SIMON BUTLER Perhaps most people would like to believe that state-sanctioned abuses of human rights occur only in Third World dictatorships. The reality, shamefully, is far different. The human rights of refugees in Australia are consciously and
BY JONATHAN STRAUSS The Coalition government is preparing to extend social security "mutual obligation" requirements even further, this time to disability pensioners and to those sole parents and non-working partners of the unemployed who receive
BP rogue web site contest BP, the world's third largest oil company, has adopted the sun as its new logo and redesigned its web site (<http://www.bp.com>) to make it look like a clean, green environmental organisation. Greenpeace is
President Hugo Chavez was re-elected by a comfortable margin in Venezuela's July 30 general elections. Chavez won 59% of the vote, beating his nearest rival and former ally, Francisco Arias, who gained 38%. Chavez and Arias were both leaders of the
LAHORE — The Dada Bhai Cement Factory in the Norrieabad District, in Sind province, has become the focus of attention of Pakistan's labour movement. Sixty of the factory's workers have lost their jobs for attempting to forming a union. Thirteen

Students prepare for the 'big show' BY ADAM BAKER BRISBANE — "On September 11 in Melbourne the big show is coming to town", Griffith University academic Richard Sanders told students at an August 1 forum here, which discussed the penetration of

BY EVA CHENG Prompted by the 1997-98 world economic crisis and after two years of rapid growth, the fledgling international movement for a "Tobin tax" — a tax on currency transactions to help curb financial speculation — is seeking to speed up