On February 16, ABC News featured the US military prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis vilifying Adelaide father of two David Hicks as a war criminal. Davis would not specify when Hicks would be brought before a military tribunal of the type that was ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court last June but reinstituted by Congress a few months later.
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Four hundred people joined a protest rally and march at Hyde Park on February 11 to oppose Part 3a of NSWs planning laws. The laws gave NSW planning minister Frank Sartor the power to override local councils and approve contentious developments even when they breach existing legislation.
Rachel Siewert, Greens senator for Western Australia, is concerned that the federal opposition hasnt come out more strongly against the governments welfare package. We would get rid of Welfare to Work and look towards better options that support people, she told Green Left Weekly.
The Solomon Islands government wants the Pacific Islands Forum to initiate talks on an exit plan for the PIFs Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), Solomons foreign minister Patterson Oti told a PIF consultative meeting in Honiara on February 12.
HOBART On February 12, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) secured an injunction from the English High Court preventing the British Natural History Museum from conducting any further tests on the remains of 17 deceased Tasmanian Aborigines before a full hearing scheduled for February 22.
Dita Sari is arguably the most well-known progressive activist in Indonesia today. A former trade union leader and political prisoner under the Suharto regime, she is now the chairperson of the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), which is the leading force in the new, broader National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas). Sari was interviewed in Jakarta by Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle after the founding conference of Papernas in January, which selected her as its candidate for the 2009 presidential elections.
Mike Sambo, the national coordinator of Zimbabwes International Socialist Organisation, explained to Green Left Weeklys Steve Marks on February 16 what lies behind the regeneration of class struggle in the country.
BRISBANE On February 13, 600 people attended a public meeting at the Brisbane Institute to hear Canberra-based Australia Institute executive director Clive Hamilton speak on the recently published book Silencing Dissent: How the Australian government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate, which he co-edited with UNSW politics lecturer Sarah Maddison.
The call by Australian Greens’ leader Senator Bob Brown on February 9 for a long-term plan to phase out coalmining, exports and power generation has predictably stirred a barrage of outrage from the coal industry. Brown’s call also flushed out the Labor-Coalition bipartisan consensus of support for coal-company profits over the environment.
October 2007 will be the 40th anniversary of Ernesto Che Guevaras death in the mountains of Bolivia. It will also be the occasion of what will hopefully be the biggest anti-imperialist convergence Australia has seen in decades the Latin American and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum.
The Socialist Alliance is campaigning for urgent action to address the environmental catastrophe in NSW caused by drought and decades of bad management.
On February 15, PM John Howard’s government announced that it had agreed to the construction of a new US spy-satellite ground station at the Kojarena intelligence base 30 kilometres east of Geraldton. The new facility will transmit data to and from two US geostationary spy satellites focused on the Middle East and Asia.
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