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Twelve workers have been sacked for refusing to sign AWAs (individual contracts) with their employer, Vopak Terminals, a Port Botany company that stores and handles bulk petroleum and chemical products.

On the afternoon of May 4, a contingent of police arrested Farooq Tariq, the general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, in his Lahore office. LPP members in Lahore and Karachi held demonstrations protesting Tariq’s arrest. The party has been targeted for its pro-democracy activities, particularly its role in the ongoing movement for the restoration of the chief justice of Pakistan’s High Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

— Australia will face a moral duty to accept thousands of “environmental refugees” when rising sea levels caused by global warming displace the peoples of small Pacific island states in future decades, Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute, told an audience of around 300 at the Irish Club on May 1.

The April 27-29 ALP national conference adopted an industrial relations policy for the forthcoming federal election. Forward with Fairness confirmed Kevin Rudd’s announcement on April 17 that a future ALP government would seek to enforce the Howard government’s ban on all strikes outside of a recognised bargaining period and insist on secret ballots before strikes could be called.

Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change?
by Rebecca Kay
Ashgate, 2006
236 pages, $121.50