Thousands of Australian schoolchildren abandoned their classrooms on November 30, in defiance of Prime Minister Morrison, to protest the federal government's lack of action on climate change. This upsurge in Australia was ignited by a young Swedish student Greta Thunberg, who vowed to protest against her nation's politicians inactivity on the Paris Climate Change Agreements.

This in turn inspired a couple of students from Castlemaine, Victoria to carry out their own protest at the office of Bridget McKenzie, a National Party senator. Which then ignited a nation wide protest by primary and high school students last Friday.

Read more: Student Strike 4 Climate Action stuns the nation

by Peter Goers

Republished with permission of the author

Remember when the most awful thing about Donald Trump was his hair? That weird blonde thing on his head which seems to defy physics, all tonsorial logic and good taste. Now that seems to be mere vanity. What's under the hair is the sick joke.

After the massacre of eleven innocents in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Trump's reaction was to continue his Nuremburgesque rallies for his demented and moronic faithful. He suggested that members of the synagogue should have been better protected - in other words being armed to shoot the shooter. More guns. That's just what America needs. Then he complained to his atrocious audience that the press conference he gave about the massacre had given him a bad hair day. This seemed to disturb him more than the slaughter.

Read more: Shootings and hate show Trump is no longer a joke

by Reyvi Mariñas

In 2008, I met Manoy Tony, an elder from the island of Rapu-Rapu in Bicol region, and Frances Quimpo, from the Centre for Environmental Concerns in the Philippines (CEC), in a public forum held in Melbourne about large-scale mining activities in the Philippines.

In the forum, they pointed out how huge mining companies like the Lafayette Philippines Inc, a subsidiary of an Australian mining company, have substantially destroyed the environment and community’s livelihood as a result of cyanide spills, pollution and depletion of water resources.

In fact, Lafayette’s two mine spills in Rapu-Rapu that happened in 2005 was amongst “the worst mining disasters in the Philippines”. Recent report shows that rehabilitation work on the mine site and surrounding coastal communities in Albay and Sorsogon has been very slow and the cost of rehabilitation has now ballooned to P310 million (‘Slow progress in Rapu-Rapu mine rehabilitation’, Rappler, 08 May 2018).

Read more: Irresponsible Australian mining in the Philippines persists

11 November: Armistice Day

Or, Making the World Safe for Big Oil

Humphrey McQueen, 4 November 2018

The guns fell silent on the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month while they continued to blaze on the Eastern Front, in the Far East and – above all – throughout the Middle East as they still do.

Revolution in Berlin, and mutinous troops everywhere, cornered the Allies into offering terms less than unconditional surrender. The German leadership played on the Allies’s fear that the Second Reich would go the way of Czarist Russia and turn Bolshevik.

Having failed in July-August 1914 to block an inter-Imperialist war with the promised general strike, Europe’s working people imposed a cease-fire.

The ‘Peace’ Treaty signed at Versailles in July 1919 did not usher in ‘peace’. The Reparations Clauses were war by other means, as von Clausewitz might have put it.

Read more: 11 November: Armistice Day or, Making the World Safe for Big Oil