Critical Times

Federal Government is under fresh attack for approving visas that leave foreign workers vulnerable to serious exploitation, with a national nursing agency under investigation for exploiting up to 30 Chinese nurses on trainee visas.

Federal Labor’s accusation that the Government is condoning exploitation to drive down wages and conditions comes after The Age found that Nurse Bank Australia is sending Chinese nurses to work up to 50 hours a week — including on Christmas — in nursing homes and hospitals, while paying them a flat weekly rate of $300.

Labor’s immigration spokesman, Tony Bourke, says the Government’s failure to police schemes for overseas workers has led to an increase in slave-like conditions in Australia.

read more »

Some Experts Blast Latest Climate Report By Seth Borenstein The Associated Press Sunday 28 January 2007 Washington – Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. read more »

US military unveils heat-ray gun
By James Westhead
BBC News, Washington

The gun uses a large dish mounted on a Humvee vehicle
The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.

The gun – called Silent Guardian – projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling, but is actually harmless.

The beam can be fired as far as 500m (550 yards), much further than existing non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets.

read more »

Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China – and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog.

The bizarre sequence of events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu in the summer with his father who was delivering bottles of gas, the Nanjing Morning Post reported on Wednesday.

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

read more »

On the third day of the AVSN brigade, and a day after the 2 million electoral campaign rally for Chavez in Caracas, members visited the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV). The UBV is located in the old PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Autonoma) building headquarters in Caracas. These buildings were once the preserve and playhouses for unproductive managers in decades gone past. read more »

« By Terry Cook
Within weeks of winning the leadership of the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP), Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard are already moving to refashion industrial relations (IR) policy in line with the demands of big business.

Powerful sections of the corporate elite were concerned at former leader Kim Beazley’s pledge that Labor would “rip up” the Howard government’s WorkChoices legislation if it won the federal election due this year. The issue was an important factor in media support for the Rudd-Gillard challenge to Beazley last December.

read more »

The transparent nature of Howard’s appeal to prejudice is shown by the limited impact it will actually haveAustralia has a history of testing would-be citizens and not stating the real reason for the tests. Just after Federation a white Australia was imposed not by openly banning Chinese and other people of colour from entering but by allowing immigration officers to exclude those who failed a fifty-word dictation test in any European language the examiner chose.

Prime Minister John Howard has announced a new test for would-be citizens but this time in English.

read more »

In the country of “the fair go” addressing the status of Indigenous health is one of the greatest challenges to this nation’s sense of decency and fairness.A group of Australia’s leading health, human rights, aid and development organisations is so concerned about the deepening health crisis in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that they took the unusual step of placing a full-page advertisement in The Australian on 11 December. Speaking for the group, Tom Calma, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Social Justice Commissioner, said: “It is a national scandal that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live 17 years less than other Australians and that their babies die at almost three times the rate of non-Indigenous children.

read more »

Climate Resets “Doomsday Clock” By Molly Bentley BBC News Wednesday 17 January 2007 Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind. As a result, the group has moved the minute hand on its famous “Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight. The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, now stands at five minutes to the hour. read more »

A Vietnamese pig farmer says he has found a novel way to boost productivity: by exposing his 3,000 hogs to the melodies of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert while they have their snouts in the trough.

Nguyen Chi Cong, 44, says he started playing recordings of classical symphonies and sonatas over loudspeakers six years ago for the benefit of his workers, only to find the music also had a soothing effect on the pigs.

“I saw that my pigs started eating more and that they were gaining weight faster than usual,” he said.

read more »

In the orientation session Gregory Wilpert, Editor of the Venezuela Analysis website, was the second speaker to address the brigade members.

He spoke around the topic, “Socialism for the 21st Century”.

Venezuela’s population doubled in the previous 40 years and oil prices slumped to $10 a barrel, causing huge economic, social and political crises in Venezuela.

read more »

The 1st January 2007 marks the 106th “Birthday” of Australian Federation 1901. In the same year, Sir Edmund Barton endorsed the commonwealth government’s participation in the legislation of an archaic, barbaric act of genocide. Derived from the Papal Bulls of 1445 and their partnership with the Crown to “…globally zone the black, red and yellow races of the world.

read more »

WASHINGTON: Within minutes of Condoleezza Rice arriving on Capitol Hill it became clear that the Administration had finally, after four divisive years, united Congress on the war in Iraq.

Unfortunately for the Secretary of State, the politicians were united in opposition to the new policy of President George Bush. “Madam Secretary,” said Senator Bill Nelson, a moderate Democrat, “I have supported you and the Administration on the war, and I cannot continue to support the Administration’s position.

read more »

Why would anyone want to go to Venezuela when it is so off the beaten track that most Australians travel? Well, Columbus did and quite a few conquistadors followed him. They were after El Dorado (Rivers of Gold) and almost 400 yrs later, rivers of liquid gold – black oil that is – were discovered. Still is this enough to visit a tourist backwater? Then there is the intriguing personality of the country’s leader, President Chavez.

read more »

by Democracy Now!

Sarah Olson and Dahr Jamail speak out against the Army’s efforts to force journalists to testify on behalf of the military.

U.S.

read more »

By Rob Taylor

AUSTRALIA appeared to be suffering an accelerated Greenhouse effect, with the pace of global warming faster across the country than in other parts of the world, climatologists said today.
The world’s driest inhabited continent, already suffering one of its worst droughts, was waging its own unique climate war, said Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology yearly climate report.

Half the country was desperate for water and the other half was awash with a year’s rainfall for the entire continent.

read more »

By Alexia Garamfalvi Legal Times Monday 25 December 2006 No one thinks that Donald Rumsfeld will end his days in a German prison. Or that there is any real chance he will have to face trial in Germany over allegations that he authorized policies leading to the torture of prisoners at U.S. read more »

The Court-Martial of Ehren Watada Begins

By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t | Report Tuesday 02 January 2006 A pre-trial hearing is scheduled to take place Thursday in Tacoma, Washington, in the court-martial of Ehren Watada, the 28-year-old Army lieutenant who is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq on the basis that the war is illegal. Watada’s court appearance comes on the same day the new Democratic-controlled Congress returns to work and begins to investigate one of the lingering questions surrounding the nearly four-year-old war. It’s the same question that Watada said led to his decision to publicly challenge the legality of the war and refuse deployment – whether the intelligence that led to the US-led invasion was cooked by Bush administration officials. read more »

By Robert Fisk, The Independent UK.

Hussein’s execution will be remembered as a case of America destroying an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington. Saddam to the gallows.

read more »

Puppet Kills Puppet

By Marc Ash t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 01 January 2007 Shortly after Saddam Hussein was hanged at a US installation in Baghdad, the New York Times called him a “Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence.” The Washington Post dubbed Hussein an “Architect of ruthless Iraqi dictatorship.” President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial. read more »