Wed April 28th, 2010
 5pm for 5.30 Start    -    9pm Finish
Uniting Church Centre 130 Lt Collins Street Melbourne 
        Snacks, tea/ coffee & conversation                                                     5.00-5.25pm

Welcome  + Update on A2E Project                                                   5.30     

Larry Marshall/ Harry Kerr                                                              

Presentation by Professor Joseph Camilleri                                5.40       

US Empire:  Hope, Hegemony and Obama                                                        
Australia’s Role in engaging with  Empire        

 3. [...]

Christine Ahn and Gwyn Kirk, “Democracy Thwarts U.S. Base Plans” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 10, 2010)

We pay tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of 87. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. …
 http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/01/28
 To see an animation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History [...]

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where [...]

The stories we are told by our leaders and the stories we tell each other help to build our worldview. We have to take back control of these narratives to empower each other and construct a more peaceful world.

MELBOURNE, Dec 8 (IPS) – For the global religious community, the use of nuclear arms is an overwhelmingly important ethical issue for the human family. Thus, nothing less than the immediate abolition of such weapons is needed from the highest levels, said speakers at the Parliament of the World’s Religions currently underway in this Australian [...]

It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Cote d’Ivoire, after the Guardian and the BBC’s Newsnight obtained emails sent by its traders(1). They reveal that Trafigura knew that the oil slops it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste(2). But the Ivorian contractor it employed to pump out the hold of its tanker dumped them around inhabited areas in the capital city and the countryside. Tens of thousands of people fell ill and 15 died(3). It is one of the world’s worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable. It’s just another instance of the rich world’s global fly-tipping.

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power [...]

Lecture delivered by Prof Dr. Chandra Muzaffar at the Centre for the Study of World Religions(CSWR), Harvard University on 1st October 2009. The Lecture is the first in the series entitled ” Ecologies of Human Flourishing.”
Please follow think link to listen to the audio of Dr. Chandra Muzaffar’s talk delivered at harvard:
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/resources/lectures/muzaffar3.html

People world over are disenchanted with free market capitalism, says a new BBC global survey. Those surveyed in 27 countries – both developed and developing – have said that there is a need for regulating businesses and distributing wealth evenly.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread [...]