Australians have joined the international campaign calling on U2s Bono who has appealed to the world for peace and poverty reduction to apply those same values to block the manufacture and distribution of a video game that promotes the invasion and destruction of Venezuela.
691
Three to four thousand people joined a rally and march against the G20 meeting on November 18. The rally opposed the neoliberal and militarist agenda of the meeting, which brought together finance ministers from the G8 group of rich nations, Australia, the European Union and 10 economically significant Third World nations, as well as the heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Protest actions were held around Australia on November 17 as part of the Chavez not Bush! international week of solidarity with Venezuela. The actions called opposed US interference in Venezuelas December 3 presidential election. In Sydney (pictured), 40 people picketing the US consulate were addressed by Keysar Trad from the Islamic Friendship Association, and Kiraz Janicke and Marce Cameron from the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network. Trad spoke strongly in favour of Venezuelas right to self-determination and pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan as disastrous examples of the US governments failure to respect this principle.
At a joint November 17 press conference with his New Zealand counterpart Helen Clark, Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced that a joint Australian-New Zealand force of both military personnel and police will, in response to a request from the government of Tonga, go to Tonga tomorrow morning.
On November 16, 45 people rallied outside the Philippines consulate in the CBD to demand an end to the killings and harassment of political and trade union activists in the Philippines.
On October 31, Morocco’s allies on the United Nations Security Council — including France, the United States and Britain — blocked a motion to condemn human rights abuses against the people of occupied Western Sahara. Despite reports of Morocco’s escalating repression of the Saharawi independence movement, the resolution passed by the Security Council merely extended the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), a 15-year-old “peacekeeping” mission that has failed to facilitate a referendum on self determination.
Almost anyone else found to have been cheating, lying and secretly on the take would have been the subject of a frothing rant over the airwaves by Sydney shock jock Alan Jones, but when Jones was caught being paid millions in commercial sponsorships over the past decade to present advertising as news, there was no public self-flagellation. As Chris Masters biography of Jones argues, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) hearings showed that Jones was for sale, despite Joness proclamations that his opinions are his alone.
The US-backed government of Lebanons Sunni Muslim prime minister, Fuad Siniora, has been thrown into crisis after five Shiite cabinet ministers resigned over the November 10-11 weekend after Siniora refused to change the makeup of his government to give more cabinet posts to Hezbollah and its allies.
On November 6, quoting the Ministry of Public Security, the official Xinhua News Agency proudly announced there were only 17,900 mass incidents Beijings term for mass protests in the first nine months of 2006. Xinhua said it represented a drop of 22% from the same period last year.
For years, the role of the United States in conniving with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica has been shrouded in mystery.
The day after a US-created Iraqi tribunal sentenced former president Saddam Hussein to death, a senior Iraqi official heading a committee set up by the US authorities in 2003 to purge members of the former ruling Baath Party from public life announced that it will recommend allowing most of them to take back their government jobs or get pensions.
- Previous page
- Page 3
- Next page