Tag: Australia

Hours after San Francisco Bay Area radio show host JR Valrey screened his documentary film, “Operation Small Axe,” about police brutality at a university in Philadelphia, daily newspapers in that city carried articles about two separate lawsuits filed against Philly police alleging brutality. “Police brutality is definitely not ‘isolated incidents,’ as officials always say after each new killing or beating by police,” said Valrey, host of the Block Report, a program aired on KPFA-FM, the Pacifica station in the Bay Area.

Coltan is a mineral necessary for making electronic things work – like cellphones, ipods, PS3s and laptops. Over 6 million Congolese have been murdered to assure that the corporations and governments involved have a corner on the market for the minerals that the Congo produces. This is "Break the Silence" Congo Week. Check out the events and get involved!

I was sitting in San Francisco, something like halfway between England and its former convict colony, Australia, when I stumbled on news that the Queen of England had placed former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of President George Bush's closest allies, very near the top of her list of 458 Australian birthday honors on June 9, just eight days after Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally pulled the last of the Australian troops that John Howard had, in 2003, committed to our Iraq War.

The current plan to launch yet another environmental assault on Bayview Hunters Point, with three natural gas turbine combustion power plants, and yet another at the San Francisco International Airport, was tabled for two weeks by the Board of Supervisors.