Today is my second day in underground life. On November 3, when General Musharaf declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution, I was in Toba Tek Singh, a city around four hours from Lahore. This was to attend a meeting to prepare for the Labour Party Pakistan’s fourth national conference. The conference is scheduled to be held on November 9-11 in the city. Posters welcoming the delegates were printed and an invitation card to supporters for the open session of the conference was ready as well.
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November 7, 2007 -- On the third day of my underground period, I escaped arrest by seconds. It was because of inexperience. We live in a society full of high-tech methods to find a person.
The Victorian Socialist Alliances lead candidate for the Senate, Margarita Windisch, gave this speech to the monthly meeting of the Melbourne branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).
In the lead up to the federal election, your guide to whats really happening behind the spin of the official campaign.
On October 31, residents of Wonthaggi the South Gippsland town that is near the proposed site of the Victorian Labor governments proposed $3 billion desalination plant joined environmentalists from Melbourne in a 100-strong protest on the steps of state parliament.
Six hundred students from more than a dozen high schools and colleges walked out of school and gathered at Parliament House lawns in Hobart on November 1 to protest against Gunns pulp mill. The mill, planned for the Tamar Valley near Launceston, would be the biggest of its kind in the world and has been approved by both state and federal governments.
Woodchipping giant Gunns Ltds $1.4 billion pulp mill in northern Tasmania is just one example of how a corporation has sought to subvert and corrupt the legal and political process, all in the name of profits. Gunns has shown a reckless disregard for both the ecological and human health implications of the pulp mill.
The US launched its first assault in the war on terror in Afghanistan six years ago. Today, the country remains one of the poorest places on Earth, ruled by a corrupt warlord elite. Tariq Ali, a veteran of the anti-war struggle for four decades, spoke to Sherry Wolf about the disastrous consequences of the US-led war and what the future holds.
There is an idea promoted by the ALP, aimed at obfuscating the partys true nature, which is often used by ALP left-wingers to justify their continued allegiance. Its what may be called the generational myth, and it goes like this: previous generations of ALP leaders and membership have always been more progressive, have more clearly seen the light on the hill, and its only the partys current leadership that has sold out.
Almost 90 Western Australian construction workers are due to suffer fines of up to $22,000 each on November 5, after admitting at an October 24 court hearing to taking unlawful industrial action in February last year. The workers crime was to take part in a 400-person strong strike in February 2006 on the city tunnel section of the Perth-Mandurah rail line to demand the reinstatement of their elected health and safety union representative Peter Ballard, who had been sacked by building company Leighton-Kumagai for insisting on maintaining safe working conditions.
Twenty-four aircraft of the Sri Lankan air force were damaged or destroyed during an attack on the Anuradhapura air base, in Sri Lankas North Central Province, carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on October 22. The LTTE has for several decades been fighting for self-determination for Sri Lankas Tamil minority, in response to the discrimination and violent repression carried out against the Tamil people by a series of racist Sri Lankan governments that have drawn their support from the islands Sinhalese majority.
PM John Howard is running low on stocks for a fear campaign to propel him back into office for a fifth time. In 1998, Howard gave just enough support to Pauline Hanson’s racist fear campaign against Asian migrants and Aboriginal people to to get him over the line in spite of promising to bring in the unpopular GST. In 2001, the fear campaign was generated by the Tampa refugees, with Howard defiantly claiming, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. In 2004, it was the threat of rising interest rates under Labor — oops, can’t use that one again Johnnie!
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