Singapore's general election on September 11 returned the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), led by Lee Hsien Loong, to office with 69.9% of the vote and 83 out of 89 elected seats. This is an increase of almost 10% on their vote in 2011.
This result, which went against the predictions, was a huge setback to the opposition parties. Only the Worker’s Party (WP) was able to hold onto one Single Member Constituency (SMC) seat, Hougang, and one five-seat General Representative Constituency (GRC), Aljnunied. Even in Aljunied the WP only just held on with 50.1% of the vote.
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Demonstration in solidarity with West Papua. Honiara, Solomon Islands.
Indonesian police beat two West Papuan students in Yahukimo, Papua Province, on September 16 for handing out leaflets about the Pacific Islands Forum.
The Australian Tamil Congress (ATC) has welcomed a September 16 report released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which "identified patterns of grave violations in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2011, strongly indicating that war crimes and crimes against humanity were most likely committed by both sides to the conflict".
Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Mustafa Ouda
By Ahmed Masoud
Rimal Press, 2015
US$20, 205 pages, pb
There is an act of violence in Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Mustafa Ouda that reverberates throughout the novel. An act done in a perfunctory way, described in a short sentence that compels the reader to sit up, if not choke.
Campaigning kicked off on September 8 for the first competitive elections in Myanmar (Burma) since the 1950s. The November 8 poll will pit the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) against more than 100 opposition parties, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).
Myanmar’s military ceded power to a quasi-civilian government through 2010 elections that were boycotted by the NLD, ending a military dictatorship that spanned from 1962.
Day care centre for Colombian refugees in Ecuador.
Governments across the world are erecting walls and tightening laws to keep refugees out, but one country is taking a radically different approach based on the simple premise that “no one is illegal”.
The Andean nation of Ecuador, with a population of 15.7 million people, is no stranger to the challenges of dealing with refugee crises.
Nicolas Del Cano.
Initiated just over four years ago, the Left and Workers Front (FIT) in Argentina has scored some breakthroughs, quickly earning its place on the national political scene.
The Intervention: An Anthology
Edited By Rosie Scott & Anita Heiss
Concerned Australians, 2015
$25
“The Intervention to us was like Australia declaring war on us and in the process they demonised and dehumanised Aboriginal men, women and children,” says Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Aboriginal elder and 2015 Northern Territory Australian of the Year.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said on September 17 that international media were looking to “scam” the world over what is happening on the border between Venezuela and Colombia.
Hungarian riot police used tear gas and water cannons against crowds of refugees and migrants on September 17. Clashes at the Horgos-Roszke border crossing with Serbia lasted for hours, after hundreds of refugees and migrants protested to demand entry to Hungary.
The historian Geoffrey Blainey recently addressed staff at BHP headquarters in Melbourne on the 130th anniversary of the forming of Broken Hill Propriety Company Limited in 1885.
Blainey told the assembled audience “there is no commercial institution in Australia that has contributed so much to the nation’s history”.
To set the historical record straight, he should have added that there is no commercial institution that has fought so hard against the workers whose surplus value it expropriated than BHP.
I come from the same generation as Jeremy Corbyn. We were all born into families who had lived through the war.
My dad joined up as soon as he could and was in the navy for five years. My mum was in a reserved occupation. Her first boyfriend was a rear gunner who was shot down over Berlin in 1943, aged 19.
One of my uncles lost his leg at Niemagen. My primary school had air raid shelters. Most of the dads of my friends had been in the services.
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