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INDONESIA: 'The old forces are back in power'

The ouster of President Abdurrahman Wahid and his replacement by Megawati Sukarnoputri has opened up a new, and likely volatile, era in Indonesia. Reprinted here, in abridged form, is an interview with Budiman Sudjatmiko, the prominent and

Labor backdown on closure of women's refuge

BY ANNE PITSTOCK HOBART — On July 27 Tasmanian health minister Judy Jackson announced that the state's Labor government had backed off from its May 11 decision to close the Caroline House women's refuge. Up to now, Caroline House has been

TAFE library staff protest

BY CHRISTOPHER PERKINS WOLLONGONG — Illawarra TAFE library unionists and their supporters staged two spirited demonstrations against job cuts and work casualisation on August 2. The NSW Labor minister for education, John Aquilina, was in the

Creative protesters puts Nike to shame

BY SEAN WALSH MELBOURNE — Anti-Nike protesters have held the most colourful and energetic demonstration this city has seen since the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum. Swelling to 250 people, the August 3 protest was the 19th weekly

Socialists build support in East Timor

BY JON LAND With elections to the country's first post-occupation Constituent Assembly due on August 30, East Timor's socialists are building up their support across the country and are confident of good results. The Socialist Party of Timor is

ITALY: Heat rises on Berlusconi, police

BY SEAN HEALY An Italian police officer has confirmed eyewitness reports that the brutal July 21 raid on the headquarters of groups protesting the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa was an act of vengeance ordered by higher authorities. Speaking

Detention centres the 'ugly end of economic rationalism'

BY MARINA CARMAN SYDNEY — "Australasian Correctional Management gets paid $139 a day for each refugee in the detention centres that it runs. And what do the refugees get? Appalling conditions, not enough food or toilets, sedatives, surveillance,

The Big Lie

@box text intr = Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propagandist (a job which today would be called "spin doctor"), came up with a theory in the 1930s called the Big Lie: the bigger the lie you tell people, the theory went, and the more you repeat

'Our dream is live as human beings'

BY LISA MACDONALD Osama Saddig Yousif is one of thousands of activists in the north African country of Sudan who have been arrested, jailed and tortured many times by the Islamic fundamentalist government that took power in a military coup on June

UNITED STATES: The world's number one rogue nation

BY JIM GREEN & SEAN HEALY In just six months as "globocop", United States President George W. Bush has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, sabotaged the Biological Weapons Convention, sped ahead missile "defence" plans

Much debate at Queer Collaborations conference

BY ERIN KILLION NEWCASTLE — The 150 activists who gathered for it will certainly long remember this year's annual Queer Collaborations conference, held here from July 9-13. The formal agenda prepared by the QC organising collective included

IRAQ: US, Britain to 'rescue sanctions', but not Iraqis

BY EVA CHENG Fifty-six years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people. On August 6, 1991, under the cover of the United Nations, the US did it again — it