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There are still about 12.3 million people worldwide who work in some form of bonded or forced labour, according to a May 12 International Labour Organisation (ILO) report.
The world has recently lost one of the most important leaders of the indigenous movement in Latin America.

Michael Lebowitz is a Canadian Marxist economist. He is the director of the “Transformative practice and human development” program at the Caracas-based left-wing think tank, the Centro Internacional Miranda. He is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University and author of Build it Now: 21st Century Socialism and the 2004 Isaac Deutscher-prize winning Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class.

Nepal’s political stalemate of sorts continues.
Prominent journalist Jeff McMullen questioned the Northern Territory intervention at a forum organised by Reconciliation for Western Sydney on May 20 in Wentworthville.
On May 21 University of Newcastle cleaners staged a protest at the twin entrances to the campus. They demanded that big budget cuts be reversed and the prior cleaning regime and working hours be restored.
A Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) member in South Australia has become the second worker to face charges for refusing to speak to the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).
On May 18, human rights activists rallied outside Australian foreign affairs minister Stephen Smith’s office in Perth to protest against the treatment of Burma’s democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
\The article below is compiled from Prensa Latina reports on May 16 and 17.
Close to 100 people attended a May 17 Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH)-organised International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) rally in Newtown to commemorate the day the World Health Organisation took homosexuality off its list of mental disorders.
Opinion polls in both the Fairfax and Murdoch dailies on May 18-19 show voter support for PM Kevin Rudd has fallen. Rudd, who scored a 74% approval rating in the Fairfax Nielsen poll on March 30, dropped 10 points in the May 18 poll, down to 64%.
When the United Nations describes the Sinhalese army’s attacks on the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka as a “bloodbath on the beach” you know a massacre is going on.