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No Gas protest held at the front of santcuary resort where woodside were holding their impact forum meeting. Disgruntled community members showed their dire conscern and rightly so over dangerous emissions that will be a direct result of the proposed gas precint if the compulsary acquisition of James prices Point goes through.

Egyptians celebrating

Two articles are posted below on the historic toppling of United States-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt 鈥 and on the continuing struggle of the Egyptian people for economic, social and political change.

According to multiple reports tens of thousands of workers across Egypt have gone on strike and joined the anti-Mubarak protests.

The deepest cuts to Britain鈥檚 public spending since World War II were announced in October. At the same time, it was revealed that some of the nation鈥檚 biggest corporations and richest people were using legal loopholes to avoid paying tax. The treasurer in the Conservative Party-Liberal Democrat coalition government, Conservative MP George Osborne, announced that 拢81 billion would be slashed from public spending including 拢7 billion in welfare cuts.

This went up on IS singer Macy Gray's on January 17: "I'm booked for 2 shows in Tel Aviv. I'm getting a lot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians. What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is disgusting, but I wanna go. I gotta lotta fans there I don't want to cancel on and I don't know how my NOT going changes anything. What do you think? Stay or go?"

Several hundred people from the Egyptian community in Sydney and supporters staged a protest against the Mubarak dictatorship and in support of the people power revolution in Egypt.

Wunmi

鈥淧eople say to me, 鈥榊ou鈥檙e still talking about politics?鈥 and I say, 鈥楥鈥檓on, life is politics鈥欌, Afro-fusion singer-songwriter Wunmi told 麻豆传媒 Weekly while she was in Sydney as part of the Big Day Out (BDO) music festival.

Protesters.

鈥淲e will not be silenced,鈥 shouts an Egyptian protester in one of the many videos posted on YouTube of the uprising against the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship that began on January 25.

Ongoing democracy protests in Tunisia, which continued beyond the January 14 overthrow of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to demand a government free from the former ruling party, were hit by a wave of vicious repression in late January. The protesters from the 鈥渃aravan of liberation鈥, which had camped for five days outside Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi鈥檚 offices in Tunis, were driven off the streets on January 29.
The persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is unfortunately nothing new in the history of Australia or other Western nations. The outward appearance of democratic government often masks a darker, anti-democratic reality. Dissenters and truth-tellers such as Assange, who dare to challenge the official version of events, have been subjected to acts of bastardry in the past. The Australian government鈥檚 treatment of Assange today invites comparison with the earlier case of the Australian socialist journalist Wilfred Burchett, who died in 1983.
The popular uprising which has swept Egypt over the past two weeks, inspired by the revolt which drove the Tunisian dictator from power in mid-January, is the expression of a people鈥檚 power movement in the Arab world which has been 40 years in the making. I have been waiting for this for a long time. I lived in Cairo for six months in the first half of 1967, until the so-called Six Day War forced my family to leave Egypt for Britain. My father was a meteorological scientist working through the United Nations with the Eqyptian agriculture department for a time.

As momentous events in Egypt demonstrate, much of the world is calling to account an 鈥渙ld order鈥. These are exciting times for the possibilities of real change in the way our societies are run. One of the catalysts of the 鈥減eople power鈥 we see on our TV screens is the extraordinary disclosure of secret information that tells us how wars begin and governments manipulate and deceive in our name.