Climate change: Rupert Murdoch’s 'Australian' peddles damaging bad science
By Renfrey Clarke
March 6, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – Readers of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship, the Australian, will have noticed a flurry of self-justifying articles and editorials in recent months, as the editors try to deflect criticism of the newspaper’s global warming coverage. What has the Australian been saying on the topic, and does this measure up to the responsibilities of a major news outlet?In Britain in 1998, the medical science journal The Lancet published a study that claimed to identify a link between the mental disorder autism and the administering to children of the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Libya: Gaddafi kills his own people, but Western military intervention is no solution
[See also "Libya: How Gaddafi became a Western-backed dictator". For more coverage of Libya, click HERE.]
By Peter Boyle
March 7, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly -- The dictatorial regime of Muammar Gaddafi has escalated its violence against rebel forces seeking to bring it down. On March 6, opponents of the regime were reported to be in control of a number of cities, especially in Libya’s east. Al Jazeera said on March 4 that anti-government protests in the capital Tripoli had been met with tear gas by security forces. Opponents said Az Zawiyah, a town just 40 kilometres from Tripoli that is home to an oil refinery, was mostly under rebel control.
Thailand: Why the lese majeste law is an abomination
By Giles Ji Ungpakorn
South Africa: The history and character of `black economic empowerment'
Sudan: Urgent call for action on behalf of detained and tortured protesters
The following is a letter template that human rights and democracy activists in Sudan are asking people around the world to use as a basis of a protest letter to be send
United States: New workers' movement at the crossroads
By Dan La Botz
Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams: 'We can bring about a democratic revolution'
Follow Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams TD as he casts his vote for the first time in an Irish Dail election to topping the poll with 15,072 first preference votes and becoming a Sinn Fein TD for Louth/East Meath.
By Gerry Adams
March 1, 2011 -- The [Irish] election is now finally and positively and definitively over! The last counts in Wicklow and Laois Offaly and Galway West have been completed and the shape of the next Dáil is now known.
Acres of newsprint have been used to analyse the results and hours of television and radio, of tweets and blogs have reported on every twist and turn of what was a hugely important election.
Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have been punished for the bad decisions they took in government. Fine Gael and Labour benefited from the public anger. They did so despite having said they will implement Fianna Fail’s policy of adding private banking debt to the sovereign debt, and of implementing a succession of punitive austerity budgets over the next three years at least.
There are a plethora of independents from the left to the right and many in between.
Philippines: Veteran revolutionary reflects on stormy times and prospects for the left
Full Quarter Storms
By Sonny Melencio
2010, Transform Asia Inc.
Ireland: Electoral revolt against austerity, left makes big gains
Election night report of the count in Dun Laoghaire.
Canada: How can we aid Libya’s freedom movement?
Libyan Canadian shouts down with Gaddafi slogans outside Calgary City Hall, February 22, 2011. Photo by Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald.
By John Riddell
February 28, 2011 -- Socialist Voice -- The brutal massacres of civilians in Libya at the order of the country’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, have shocked the world. His air force has carried out air strikes against unarmed civilians. On February 25, Qaddafi followers aimed murderous fire on anti-government protests in his last stronghold, Tripoli. The government declares its intention of reconquering the country in civil war.
What can those in Canada do to end the killings?
On February 26, the United Nations Security Council voted for sanctions against the Libyan regime, including an arms embargo and the freezing of assets of Qaddafi and his family. These measures are hardly more than cosmetic, serving to polish up great-power credentials.
United States: The new American workers' movement and the confrontation to come
Protesters fill the Rotunda at the state capitol building on February 16, 2010, in Madison, Wisconsin.
By Dan La Botz
February 28, 2011 -- Solidarity Webzine -- The new US workers' movement—born in the last few weeks in the giant protests in Wisconsin and Ohio—faces a fateful confrontation. In Madison and Columbus, Republican legislators are pushing to abolish public employee labour unions and tens of thousands of workers are protesting and resisting. We have seen nothing like this face-off between workers and bosses in the United States since the labour upheaval of the early 1970s, though the issues in the balance are more like those of the 1930s. The very existence of the US labour movement is at stake. The question is: What will it take to win?
The ‘mubaraking’ of Gaddafi, Maliki, Mugabe and others
By Patrick Bond
February 27, 2011 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The late South African anti-apartheid poet-activist Dennis Brutus occasionally used “Seattle”, the name of a city in the northwestern United States, as a verb. We should “seattle Copenhagen”, he said in late 2009, to prevent the global North from doing a climate deal in their interests, against Africa’s.