βWe Tamils, inside and outside the island of Sri Lanka, still want an independent state,β Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, prime minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE), told me recently in New York.
βAnd because the war crimes and severe brutality of the Mahinda Rajapaksa government against our people have become well known, our cause is being spoken about all over the world.β
898
Crowds burned a US flag in Kabul on October 6 at a rally to mark the 10th anniversary the next day of the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
There is a sharp reality disconnect in the Black community.
On the one hand, the Black population continues to support the first African American president, Barack Obama, by more than 90%.
Yet the plight of the Black communities is at its worst condition in three decades. Official unemployment is over 16% β twice that of whites and iabout 30% for young African Americans.
Black household income is in decline and the lowest of the five major ethnic groups. Poverty is at the highest levels in 30 years.
Thereβs no doubt that the explosion of social media, mobile technology and online-organising capabilities have dramatically altered the battle terrain of class struggles today in ways good, bad and ugly.
From the Arab Spring to New Yorkβs ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests, social media and online organising are clearly transforming the way that small, isolated campaigns develop into mass movements in the streets. But how do we separate the genuinely useful aspects of social media from the βdata smogβ of media hype?
The Woman Who Shot Mussolini
By Frances Stonor Saunders
Faber and Faber, 2010
375 pages, $32.99 (pb)
The Honourable Violet Gibson was not like the other women of the Anglo-Irish elite when it came to Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy's fascists.
While Lady Asquith (wife of the former prime minister) was delighted by Mussolini, and Clementine Churchill (wife of the future prime minister) was awestruck by βone of the most wonderful men of our timesβ, Violet Gibson aimed a revolver at the fascist dictator in Italy in April 1926 and shot him in the nose.
Entering the darkened space of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation that held Vietnamese artist Dinh Q Leβs latest installation, Erasure, which finished on September 10, I imagined myself to be stepping into the psychological space of a disturbed memory.
The brooding political and cultural climate surrounding the issue of refugees in Australia has involved politicians exploiting the sensitive subject in a game of political football.
Natacha Atlas, the award-winning electronic-worldbeat artist, has her upcoming show in Israel and will be boycotting the state until the apartheid regime is dismantled.
Workers in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship have won pay rises of about 11% over three years. Management initially offered only 9%, but conceded bigger rises following a 65% βnoβ vote to the offer in a staff ballot. Members of the Community and Public Sector Union had threatened industrial action over the issue.
By contrast, Australian Taxation Office (ATO) management has so far refused to go beyond its original offer of 9% over three years.
Mining company ECI International has βsubmitted a surrender requestβ to the state government for its coal and gas exploration licence covering 500 square kilometers β including the town of Colac and a large region of the Otway Ranges β said the October 7 Colac Herald.
This is the second coal exploration venture in the area that has withdrawn after Mantle Mining pulled out of its project in the Deans Marsh area.
The withdrawal occurs less than two weeks after 100 residents packed a hall at Forrest, in the Otway Ranges, to organise opposition to the project.
NSW education minister Adrian Piccol has announced a process of βcommunity consultation on the reform of TAFE and the vocational education and training sector in NSWβ.
The NSW Liberal government plans to repeat its Victorian counterpartβs attacks on public education and further privatise vocational education. The government plans to encourage private colleges and universities to undercut TAFE providers. It will offer a publicly-funded student voucher system to achieve this.
As part of its attacks on the NSW public sector, the OβFarrell Liberal government will begin charging parents up to $40 a day for each child they send to the once-free public preschools run by the Department of Education and Community Services (DEC). The fees will be introduced next year to the 100 DEC preschools across NSW.
These preschools were established to improve the educational opportunities for students in poor socio-economic areas, including communities that may be isolated, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Just about every passerby stopped at a recent ΒιΆΉΣ³» Weekly stall in Hamilton, Newcastle, to sign a petition for a moratorium on coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
All those who stopped were concerned about plans to mine CSG at nearby Fullerton Cove.
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