OVER 1,000 protesters converged on the Woomera detention centre for refugees in the south Australian desert last Easter. This video is an inspiring account of what happened. Woomera is one of six privately run camps used by the Australian government to detain all "illegal entrants".
AMEN, the new film from radical director Costas-Gavras, provoked a furious reaction in France even before it was screened.
ACTIVIST film-makers including Indymedia Argentina and the makers of This is What Democracy Looks Like and Genova Libera! have teamed up to make a new video, Argentina in Revolt. It uses footage of protests, and interviews of working and unemployed activists to show the turmoil that exploded in Argentina in December last year. Over a million people took to the streets when the economy collapsed under $150 billion of debt to the International Monetary Fund.
MS DYNAMITE released her debut album A Little Deeper six weeks ago. This came after the single "It Takes More", which featured some of the best lyrics I'd heard from a chart hit in a long time. The artist behind this is 20 year old Naomi Daley from north London. She recently said her music is "a way for my message to be heard for and by everybody". And what a message.
APOLOGISTS for Western capitalism have long sought to discredit the idea of socialism by pointing to the terror of Stalin's regime in Russia. It is now just over ten years since that system collapsed, but the message is the same-any attempt to build an alternative to capitalism is doomed to follow the path of the Soviet Union.
THE NEW film Minority Report is a provocative thriller about the authorities overstepping their boundaries to prosecute people simply for thinking about a crime. It is based on a short story by science fiction writer Philip K Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg.
THE POET Shelley has inspired hundreds of books throughout the 180 or so years since he died. But Paul O'Brien's new book, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland, finds a lot of new and very interesting things to say about Shelley and his fight against oppression. The book is about Shelley's two visits to Ireland in 1812.
THE HUGE protests against the G8 in Genoa last July were a major step forward for the anti-capitalist movement. Jonathan Neale's new book, You Are G8, We Are 6 Billion, captures the joy and the fear that the 300,000 people involved in the protests in Genoa felt.
THIS IS a moving photo of Carlo Giuliani, murdered by Italian police during last year's G8 Genoa protests. It was taken by socialist photographer Jess Hurd. It forms part of the new "Crisis" exhibition.
ARE YOU sick of the media and New Labour politicians poisoning the issue of race with claims of "swamping" and "isolationist" Muslims? Then read "Racism: Myths and Realities" by Hassan Mahamdallie, in the latest International Socialism. Racism is a very real problem today. The recent election successes of far right parties across Europe have worried millions of people. In Britain we have seen the election of three Nazi BNP councillors in Burnley.
SWEDISH BAND The (International) Noise Conspiracy say that "the sounds from the streets of Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Gothenburg and Genoa" are their main musical influences. In June 2001, during the recording of their new album A New Morning, Changing Weather, the band went to Gothenburg in Sweden.
HARLAN COUNTY War is a brilliant new film just out on video. It is drama based on the year-long strike of 180 miners in Kentucky in the US in 1973. The miners work long hours in dangerous conditions. The miners and their families live in small houses without running water.
