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NSW school cleaners to strike for four days

Jenny Long, Sydney As part of its campaign against new job-threatening multi-year contracts to clean schools and other public buildings announced in June by the NSW Labor government, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) announced

UNITED STATES: Massive protests reject warmongers' agenda

Rohan Pearce It was the biggest-ever protest against a political convention in the United States. The August 29 demonstration against the Republican National Convention was a resounding rejection of the White House and its "war on terror". The

Most Iraqis support resistance says aid worker

Chris Slee, Melbourne Donna Mulhearn, an Australian volunteer aid worker who has lived and worked in Baghdad for six months, and who visited Fallujah while the city was under attack by US forces, spoke to 50 people at a public meeting organised by

Workplace deaths need to stop

Duncan Meerding Workers want higher wages and better conditions, while employers want to keep down labour costs. This is one of the major contradictions in the capitalist world today. The labour costs that employers come across include not only

WORLD SPORT: Staring down the Olympic monster

David Zirin The modern Olympic games began in 1898 as a place for imperial rivals, in the process of carving up the world from Cuba to the Congo to the Philippines, to wave flags and use sports to whip up a nationalist frenzy. Since those times,

GERMANY: Monday demonstrations continue to grow

Norman Brewer, Berlin On August 30, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Germany's cities for the fourth Monday in a row to protest the plans of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic-Greens coalition government

'Trust the Howard government to lie!'

Paul Benedek "'Trust' is indeed a key issue in the coming election. The Australian people can have absolute trust that the Howard government will lie about its record and its real intentions", Coral Wynter, the Socialist Alliance candidate for the

News briefs 2

2 'Make refugee rights a political issue' BRISBANE — "The best thing we can do to help the refugees is to make refugee rights a key political issue", Aladdin Sisalem, the last asylum seeker to be held on Manus Island, told a public meeting of

BOLIVIA: Thousands protest for nationalisation

Fred Fuentes Mass protests are shaking Bolivia, forcing interim President Carlos Mesa to back down from his threat not to authorise any new bills until his hydrocarbon law was passed, unamended and without discussion. Mesa had claimed that the

On the box

Message Stick: Ankula Watjarira — Follows the Ernabella Choir — established in the Ernabella Mission in remote South Australia in the '50s — as it travels to the Adelaide Festival, blending Western hymns into Pitjantjatjara language. ABC,

Jack McPhillips, communist and trade unionist

Jim McIlroy Leslie John (Jack) McPhillips, a long-time leader of the Communist Party of Australia and trade union official, died last month, aged 94. Jack was one of the early generation of CPA union officials, who were prominent in the union

INDIA: Grassroots organisers shot dead

Eva Cheng Just after midnight on August 18, five grassroots organisers of the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (Liberation), retired after yet another busy day in the party's Paliganj local office, near Patna, the capital city of the