Two more urban guerrilla attacks occurred in Athens and Salonica respectively within 24 hours of the armed attack against a police station in Athens [see : Police station attack tests Greek government, John Hadoulis/AFP, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 28, 2009]. A time-bomb hit the house of a leading conservative politician in Athens and another explosive mechanism hit the Spanish consulate in Salonica. At the same time confusion reigns over the communique with which a new armed group appears to be claiming responsibility for Tuesday’s attack.
Within only 24 hours of the Tuesday armed attack against the police station of Agia Paraskevi in Athens which has left 6 police officers seriously wounded (two remain in intensive care), two more attacks, with explosives this time, have come to add up tension to the already heated social and political climate in greece.
On the early hours of Friday 30 of October, a time-bomb hit the entrance of the house of a leading conservative politician, Ms Marietta Giannakou, causing material damage but no human injuries, as a phone-call by the urban guerrillas to the press had warned of the explosion. Ms Giannakou is the leading MEP of the now in opposition New Democracy right-wing party, and was the Minister of Education during the massive movement against educational reforms in 2006-2007. The attack against Ms Giannakou’s house has been claimed through a long communique by the Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy who amongst other things used the opportunity to communicate their views against anarchist participation in educational protest marches, professing once again their self-proclaimed nihilist platform.
Earlier this week the Minister of Public Order, Mr Chrisochoidis, has gone public urging the 6 persons wanted in relation to the Nuclei of Fire bomb campaign to surrender, arguing that the State will show leniency due to [their yoof].
The same night in Salonica, the Spanish Consulate was hit by an explosive mechanism. A communique by a first appearing group has claimed the attack was in solidarity to Amadeu Casellas, a long-term anarchist prisoner in Spain. [According to one source, “the attack in Thessaloniki has been claimed by the “international chamber for the diffusion of revolutionary violence”…”.] Last week more explosive mechanisms in Salonica had hit several MP offices, including the office of the Deputy Minister of Public Order, Mr Vougias, as well as the house of the extreme-right minded Archbishop of Salonica.
The new attacks come to add to the climate of escalating tension in the country, to which considerable confusion was added by a communique published on Friday in the daily press, claiming responsibility for the Tuesday attack against the police station of Agia Paraskevi. The communique which employs long quotes from the Communist Party leader during the Civil War, Nikos Zachariadis, as well as from the Communist International, is signed by the acronyms OPLA, the name of the Communist Party “Groups for the Protection of People’s Struggle’, [Organization for the Protection of the People’s Struggle (Greek: Οργάνωση Προστασίας Λαϊκού Αγώνα, abbreviated ΟΠΛΑ – OPLA)] an elite corps of combat units and intelligence teams during the Civil War, notorious for assassinations of both monarchofascists and political opponents within the communist movement. Besides changing the acronym to now mean “Groups of Popular Proletarian Self-Defense”, the communique consists largely of paraphrases of the original text announcing the forming of OPLA in the 1940s, urging “the organisation of structures of mass popular self-defense” against state and parastate repression. The Communist Party of Greece has responded angrily, denouncing the communique as a provocation and a mockery of history and the armed struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE). The authenticity of the communique remains highly disputed and controversial.
I was stopped by a soldier, said he, “You are a swine”
He beat me with his baton and he kicked me in the groin
I bowed and I scraped, sure me manners were polite
But all the time I’m thinking of me little Armalite…
Sure a brave RUC man came up into our street
Six hundred British soldiers were gathered round his feet
“Come out, ye cowardly Fenians”, said he, “Come out and fight”
But he cried, “I’m only joking”, when he heard the Armalite
One of the men involved in a knife fight at David Irving’s recent lecture at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Florida is apparently a member of or associated with ‘Crew 38’, the subsidiary mob for prospective members of the neo-Nazi skinhead organisation the (Confederate) Hammerskins.
In Australia, the (Southern Cross) Hammerskins have recently launched their own, local version of ‘Crew 38’ — http://www.myspace.com/crew38australia // http://schammerskins.org/crw_38.html — and last month one of its supporters — along with three other men — paid an unscheduled visit to the Melbourne Anarchist Resource Centre. The group’s leader, Justin O’Brien of ‘Hold Fast Body Art’ (aka the Blood & Honour state representative for Victoria), allegedly stated, inter alia, that if there were any future ‘anti-fascist’ activity in Melbourne, he and his kameraden would be back to kick the heads in of whomever they happened to find in the space at the time. (At the time these gentlemen came calling, a group campaigning against sexual violence was holding a meeting.)
I’m not entirely sure why a small businessman like Justin would want to declare war on a group of strangers / Melbourne’s anarchist community in this fashion, but then again, I think you probably need to be a little bit unconventional in your thinking to want to be a neo-Nazi activist in the first place amirite?
According to Hatewatch, in the US, trouble is brewing between rival neo-Nazis belonging to the Hammerskins and Volksfront. In Australia, however, it’s one big happy family, with members of both groups — as well as members of the ‘Australia First Party’, ‘Blood & Honour’, ‘One Nation Party’, ‘New Right’, “national anarchists”, and assorted other fascists — sitting down in peace and harmony last month at the Petersham RSL — extremely proud hosts of the ‘2009 Sydney Forum’. There, they presumably paid tribute to Australia’s returned servicemen and women — and, coincidentally, further plotted how to rid the country of Asians, blacks, homosexuals, Jews, leftists and other Untermenschen.
In what may be the latest sign of simmering tensions in Florida between two prominent racist skinhead groups, two men suffered knife wounds this week during a speech by Holocaust denying historian David Irving at a luxury Palm Beach County hotel.
Irving spoke to about three dozen invited guests in a conference room he booked at the Ritz-Carlton hotel south of Palm Beach. During his talk on “decoding the Nazi message,” two men, Christopher Nachtman and John Kopko, stepped outside to argue and one of them pulled a knife, police say. A fight ensued. Furniture was broken and a carpet was bloodied. Both men were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment of knife wounds. No charges have been filed yet.
Irving is a longtime Holocaust revisionist. In 2000, he sued Emory University professor and Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt for libel in his homeland of Britain, after she accused of him of deliberate falsification. A London court declared Irving a pro-Nazi anti-Semite and “active Holocaust denier” and ordered him to pay all court costs. In 2006, he was imprisoned in Austria after pleading guilty to telling audiences that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Irving subsequently backed off those claims. Earlier this year, he set up a website selling Nazi memorabilia. His visit to South Florida was the latest on a surreptitious speaking tour in the United States, in which Irving informs attendees of his venue at the last minute so as to thwart protestors.
Irving told Florida television station WPBF that Kopko initiated the attack, and that the fight had nothing to do with his lecture. He said his assistant witnessed the incident. “She said that she saw four people chasing one member of the audience out and beating him to the floor, and she said she thought they were going to kill him, but he pulled a knife from nowhere and stabbed one of these men repeatedly,” he told the TV station. “It was a personal feud, apparently, which goes back over the years, and I gained the impression, or so I was told, that three or four of these people had come in there with the intention of roughing him up,” he said. He doesn’t know Kopko personally, Irving added.
Postings on Stormfront, the leading white supremacist website, imply that Kopko, 43, is associated with Crew 38, the support group for the Confederate Hammerskins. A Stormfront poster using the screen name of “White Racialist” wrote after the incident, “John is a good man and a true soldier for the Cause, and has been for 20+ years … As for the lowly coward that pushed a knife into John’s BACK, no fate is too awful for you. You have to try a lot harder than that to kill Crew 38!”
Kopko was an official of the National Socialist White Workers Party in 1992 when he led a protest outside a West Palm Beach bookstore on the premise that the business sold pornographic material that promoted race mixing and homosexuality. That same year, he tried to get neo-Nazi publications placed in Palm Beach County libraries. A newspaper reported that he showed up at a meeting dressed like a Nazi storm trooper.
Nachtman, 31, is a former member of the once-prominent neo-Nazi group, National Alliance. He has used the screen name “Blutfahne” – German for “blood flag” – on Stormfront and VNN Forum. The latter is an online forum of Vanguard News Network, whose motto is, “No Jews. Just right.” He also posts under the screen name “Teutonic Legion” on Stormfront, and his avatar is the Volksfront logo. He has promoted Volksfront and Confederate Hammerskins events, and helped organize the February 2007 Volksfront Victory Achievement Conference in Missouri, where he spoke.
There have been numerous recent confrontations in central Florida that suggest a war is brewing between former longtime allies Volksfront and the Confederate Hammerskins. Michael Lawrence, one of the original founders of the Confederate Hammerskins in 1987, switched his allegiance to Volksfront in 2007, and became the group’s unofficial leader in Florida. Randal Krager, who co-founded Volksfront in 1994 while serving a prison sentence, moved from Portland, Oregon, to Florida with his wife and son to live next door to Lawrence.
Since Lawrence’s defection, his longtime friend and Confederate Hammerskins member, Richie Myers, has steadily gained power throughout the state as the group’s Orlando leader. Myers and his second-in-command, Coby Stonecypher, regularly associate with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club gang. Lawrence and Krager do not. A public indication of trouble brewing between Confederate Hammerskins and Volksfront appeared in a Stormfront posting advertising Volksfront’s annual Martyr’s Day event, to be held this year in Pensacola. The announcement said the gathering was “family friendly [by that we mean no drunks, no non-racial ‘clubs’, no deviate or degrading behavior].” Many readers took that as disapproval of outlaw motorcycle clubs attending recent white supremacist gatherings, which has happened at Confederate Hammerskins events.
A woman using the screen name of “Vidgis” hinted on Stormfront this week that the stabbing at Irving’s lecture reflected an escalation in tensions between the two skinhead groups. She wrote, “…the saddest part is how the various White Pride organizations are at war with one another. If we would turn that rage towards the real enemies, we’d be making real progress.”
Knifings and neo-Nazis aren’t the sorts of events or people that show up often in Manalapan, the affluent little coastal town where Irving spoke at the Ritz-Carlton. It has been home to the likes of famed criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, New Age musician Yanni and boxing promoter Don King. The 52-room oceanfront mansion of the widow of publishing heir Randolph Hearst fetched $22 million at a foreclosure auction last year. Monday’s fracas presumably was an atypical event at the Ritz-Carlton, whose website says it “has catered to the world’s most discerning guests,” and describes it as having “refined beauty” and a “graceful atmosphere.” The presidential suite runs a cool $3,000 per night. Hotel officials say the conference room where Irving spoke was reserved under the name of his book publisher in Great Britain, and they knew nothing about Irving.
Irving told local media that he was “deeply ashamed that this happened.”
NB. Irving was obviously not referring to the Holocaust.
From the Departments of While You’re Reading This Children Are Starving & Sh*t Just Got Real comes:
Good Game presenter claims ABC gender bias after axing
Asher Moses
[Fairfax]
October 30, 2009
An evil pixie at the ABC has decided to sabotage the ratings success of Good Game by ordering management to sack, without warning or explanation, one of its presenters — ‘Junglist’ (Jeremy Ray) — and to replace him with a virtual unknown: the poisoned chalice in this instance going to someone called ‘Hex’ (Stephanie Bendixsen).
Personally, I’d like to see both presenters (including ‘Bajo’ / Steven O’Donnell) axed and replaced with B-grade TV celebrities ABC management’s children inform them are like, totally hot right now. But like, only after a private consultancy firm has been hired to do some hideously-overpriced market research on what the yoof are like, really watching on TV.
And stuff.
One extremely-talented performer that immediately springs to mind — to be precise: cartwheels, fire-breathes and juggles his way into my consciousness — is Dylan Lewis. He’s crazy, funny, wacky and zany — and The Kids love him!
Mad skillz!
Anyway, there’s been plenty of online back-and-forth in the meantime, both about the decision to sack Junglist, and the future of the show. The actual decision to sack Junglist appears to have taken place on or about October 23 (according to David Wildgoose @ Kotaku), but the shit has really only hit the fans this week, after the first episode featuring Bajo and Hex went to air (October 26).
Here’s what ‘Bajo’ had to say after having completed his first show with ‘Hex’ (Stephanie Bendixsen):
Author Bajo (Presenter)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 8:10:07pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
I would very much like to do that again, one of the best days I’ve ever had on this show!
If you’ve ever worked in any sort of organization you’ll know that as much as it sucks, work related issues cannot be discussed outside the work place, it’s just as simple as that, and I wish we could tell you more – but we can’t and that can’t change and it’s not going to. It feels unfair to us that we can’t say our side of the story, but that’s the position we’re in and we understand and respect why these rules are in place in our workplace, or any.
[NB. When Bajo writes “I would very much like to do that again, one of the best days I’ve ever had on this show!”, he is not referring to shooting the show with Hex, but to an ‘Open Day’ GG had previously arranged. Seethis comment for further clarification.]
Well actually, exactly who is responsible for ‘Junglist’ being removed from the show is slightly unclear. ABC management reckons they took the decision and it was because Junglist was a slack bastard behind the scenes — an under-performer. But the remaining cast and crew — possibly as a result of the laws which govern how the script unfolds on that long-running soap opera Workplace Relations — also appear to be completely supportive of Junglist’s sacking. Here’s the Good Game statement:
Dear GG’ers
You can’t help but have noticed we’ve been quiet regarding Junglist’s departure from the show which has really sucked because we’re used to having such an honest and open relationship with you.
For all sorts of reasons we are unable to tell you things that have happened over many months inside Team Good Game which have impacted on the production. That’s just real life folks. We know it leaves many questions unanswered but we have reached that point where we really can’t say any more than that.
But we can tell you this much…
The decision to take Junglist off air was not forced upon us by ABC Management and it’s one that is fully supported by all the GG team. We are gutted that it has come to this but in our opinion it absolutely had to happen.
It’s strange for us to read that so many of you think this is because we have suffered a raging case of political correctness gone mad or a wish to dumb the show down. That’s absolutely not right. We, as ever, will continue our quest to bring you the show for gamers by gamers but this has to be our last word on this – we have shows to make!
Finally, we genuinely wish Junglist all the best, and we hope he finds a medium for his awesome analysis and presenting skills that works for him.
Team Good Game Out
(Syd, Bajo, Moe, Tuk, Gog, Mafia, Jeremy Pencil, Palindrome)
And here’s how Junglist responded:
Author Junglist (Reviewer)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 4:48:18pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
I can tell you that this is a lie. There was no vote taken, no consensus reached. In fact, the GG team was completely unaware of the change until the same day I found out. The same confidentiality clause that prevented me from saying anything publicly, prevented management from telling them anything.
I have spoken to members of the GG team who clearly DON’T support this, but can’t say anything publicly. Of course they’ll tow the party line. They have to.
Up until now the situation has just been poorly handled. But to now LIE to your own audience, in an effort to save face for replacing an experienced reviewer/presenter with an inexperienced one, is quite simply the lowest thing I’ve ever seen ABC management do.
I feel now as if I’m being professionally attacked, so here’s a truth bomb. In the meeting where I was told I would be replaced, the reason given was they wanted a girl on the show. “Mass appeal” was a direct quote from that meeting. After a half-hour of explaining how they’ll lose their hardcore following, they responded that yes, they knew this, but expected to make up the numbers with a new following. “A show can grow beyond its hardcore base”, is another direct quote.
The decision was forced by ABC management, for a mass appeal direction, and will naturally be dumbed down for the loss of experience. Case in point: Monday night’s show. Both Forza 3 and Kingdom Hearts clearly written by people with no idea about those franchises. Hell, no one on the team even thought to correct the presenters on how to pronounce “Forza” correctly? Expect a lot more of that…
And so on…
one
Author Junglist (Reviewer)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 5:16:31pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
“We have felt personally attacked by some of the posts by Jung, and others, with the inability to reply due to confidentiality.”
Actually, I’ve been very supportive of Hex, and pointed out that all she ever did was accept a cool job. What possible truth bomb could YOU drop? I’m not trying to be a White Knight, I’ve made mistakes too. I’ve disagreed with the ABC on reviewing policies, which sometimes resulted in footage being handed in late. And it’s a shame that the Christmas special was decided on around the same time I booked an overseas trip, and neither party were flexible enough to change plans.
But at the very, very least, I want to be honest with the community. Realise it or not, Good Game has a responsibility to show younger Australian viewers what the ABC is about. I think the appropriate term here is, “epic fail”.
two
Author Syd (Series Producer)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 5:35:21pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
This could easily degenerate into a he said she said we said… none of us were in that meeting after all… BUT the GG team is here with me in the office right now…
Jung mate, I’m sorry to say it but you are wrong… no one on the team feels we have to tow the party line here – no one has been coerced into doing or saying anything they don’t want to. Sure we didn’t all find out till you did – but that does not mean we don’t feel it’s the right thing to do for the show. That’s the truth we need to swallow here… as bitter a taste as it might leave in our mouths.
Regardless of what Jung might say GG will NOT be dumbed down and I state again, the decision was nothing to do with bringing in a girl… FFS – I’m a girl and I started this show – I don’t care about the gender of the presenters – I just care about having the best ppl working on it.
Guys… I totally acknowledge Jung[‘]s contribution to GG – and yeah I can see how it feels like we’ve stabbed a mate – and what’s the Aussie thing to do? Stand up for a mate in a fight right? But this show is more than just one person – is and always has been.
GG has been my life for the last nearly four years… why on earth would I want anything to hurt it?
Syd
three
Author Junglist (Reviewer)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 5:43:42pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
“GG has been my life for the last nearly four years… why on earth would I want anything to hurt it?”
I completely believe that you have the best of intentions, Syd. It’s you that holds this show together. And I likewise believe you when you say it has nothing to do with bringing in a girl.
But it’s not up to you, is it? This change comes from higher up.
As I said, I’ve spoken to team members who contradict what you say about “supporting the ABC’s decision”, so this is damage control, pure & simple.
four
Author Bajo (Presenter)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 7:42:17pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
Hi guys,
I can’t stress enough to scrub ‘mass appeal’ from your minds. The words are ridiculous to me, and the team and no one has ever felt that it’s even remotely where we are heading. If you find you can’t scrub it than at least take a look at the show over the next few weeks and you’ll see that we’re not changing focus/direction at all. Yes there is some change obviously, but not to the content and definitely not to our attitude to how we present gaming information. No one is understating the loss we’ll feel without Junglist[‘]s excellent reviews and input to the show, but we will find our groove again, with your help and the help of our very hardworking team who have come from so many different places from magazines to other shows to freelance game journos to just plain gamers that we thought were awesome and needed to work on the show. No one has any interest in dumbing anything down, the thought of it makes me vomit on Gog’s keyboard. Amongst other people keyboards and chairs.
From outside looking in it’s easy to jump to conclusions and assume lots of things, so try to trust that we really do care about you, we troll every day, and we feel your words. We are going to deal with this change in the best possible way we can with the tools we have, with the best possible team we can find. We are still filling our team up behind and in front of the scenes, and it’s only growing as the year turns into the next. Like Syd said, we have two shows next year, and GGSP is focused on tween, which allows us to put MORE adult content in the regular GG, something we have always wanted to do and have always fought to do.
Despite all this hate and flame, just take a deep breath. Now, exhale, and think about games for a moment, which is why we are all here. I’m not trying to make light of an obviously hard and awful conversation we’re having, but games are awesome.
Their awesome juice will seep into our souls, and we’ll be awesome again, and show you this juice as it transforms into words. The juice will then flow out of our pores, into our actual drink of juice (possibly pineapple) and then that juice will be drunk again, only doubling the effect of awesome juice which is all from games in the first place.
I very much wish I could be next to you all to talk about this in person. It’s hard to express my frustration about the misconceptions I keep seeing here. I would like to give you all a real hug… please accept this internet hug ‘O’ for now.
Those of you whom are doubtful, I do hope you choose to stay, and at least give us a chance. The show is really important to me, and us, and we just want it to be epic as it once was, with all the tools we have.
five
Author Junglist (Reviewer)
Date/Time 29 Oct 2009 8:43:18pm
Subject Re: Statement from the team…
“I can’t stress enough to scrub ‘mass appeal’ from your minds.”
That’s because “mass appeal” is the truth. You’re asking for a lot of trust in that statement when trust is clearly an issue right now. I actually believe that you believe what you’re saying, but you weren’t the one who talked to upper management for 30 minutes about their new mass appeal plan.
“Yes there is some change obviously, but not to the content.”
Explain then why I’m only contributing 1 token review a week? And quite possibly those reviews won’t even make it into the show? A proven reviewer over 3 years has been replaced with a less experienced one. The content HAS changed, already.
As ever Baj it seems like you couldn’t wait to just get on with things… fair enough if you don’t care about this whole thing, but asking everyone to just forget about it by promising fruit hats and horse heads is insulting peoples’ intelligence.
For my part, I’ve been honest about my own weaknesses in my role. There is no more “we can’t say anything”. I’ve said it. So have at me bro, if that’s what you feel like.
From the Department of “Hips Don’t Lie… But Can They Win Votes?”:
Zahra Stardust eyes up Brendan Nelson’s seat of Bradfield
Tony Wright The Age
October 29, 2009
Politics requires an ability for contortion, but one of the new candidates for Brendan Nelson’s seat of Bradfield takes acrobatics to a new level.
A young woman named Zahra Stardust is the latest to add her name to the huge field jostling for the seat, which goes to the polls on December 5.
And her pre-politics job? She’s a pole dancer.
Ms Stardust is backed by the Australian Sex Party. She also has her own website, though we should perhaps offer the warning that those with dicky hearts ought to think twice before checking it out.
Nominations close at midday on Thursday, November 12, 2009.
I should note that my heart was broken when Warwick Capper promised and then failed to nominate for the seat of Beaudesert in the Queensland state election in March, 2009.
PS. Did you know that Brendan Nelson is a medical doctor? Certificate and everything.
Following the police shooting on October 24 of a kind and caring neo-Nazi named Jeff Hughes in Nanaimo in Canada, John Kopko and Christopher Nachtman, two angry Aryans in attendance at one of nutzi historian David Irving’s speeches — delivered on October 26 at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan, Florida — decided to clarify their political differences by stabbing one another.
This is not an uncommon practice among members of the far right.
Irving is currently on tour in the US, and his speaking engagements are apparently being booked by his publisher, ‘Focal Point Publications’ (or as ‘Focal Point Productions’). His current tour, taking him from Florida to South Carolina to North Carolina, then to Richmond, Virginia, Washington (DC), Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York, New Haven (CT), Manchester (NH), Niagara Falls (NY) and Indianapolis is scheduled to end in Chicago on November 23.
Whether there will be any more stabbings remains to be seen.
In Germany: “An 88-year-old former Waffen SS fanatic went has gone on trial accused of the wartime execution of three civilians in the Netherlands during the Second World War”, while elsewhere a German woman is keeping Berlin clean of neo-Nazi propaganda, a mission inspired by her encountering a sticker 20 years ago: ‘”I was angry that I hadn’t scratched the sticker off,” she recalls. She returned that evening and it was still hanging there. She couldn’t understand why the many people who had waited at the bus stop that day hadn’t bothered to remove it. “So I decided to stop looking the other way,” she says.’
Which was, of course, her first mistake.
There’s a moral to this story, what it is I cannot say
Oh maybe it’s the ancient curse, crime it will not pay
If you ask Wee Willie McFadden, he’ll say “You’re kind, you know”
If you want to pinch a record player, do it up the Shankill Road
If you want to pinch a record player, do it up the Shankill Road
‘Bakers Delight’ is the name given to a chain of bakeries around Australia, mostly franchises. The company was established in 1980, and its co-founders, Roger and Lesley Gillespie, are now sometimes to be found on Australia’s Rich List. In September, Roger Gillespie (who last made the Rich 200 in 2004 with a fortune of $100 million) bought the Victorian discount grocery chain, NQR.
Their own corporate profile reads:
Bakers Delight is Australia’s most successful bakery franchise.
Over the past 29 years this Australian owned company, has grown to over 700 bakeries across three countries, serving 2.5 million customers each week.
Every day, in every bakery, Bakers Delight bakers create a range of traditional and gourmet breads. All products are baked from scratch, fresh daily on the premises.
Bakers Delight bakeries are distinctive in appearance, branding, product quality and customer experience.
The company’s philosophy underpins every action: Delightful Environment, Delightful Service, Delightful Product.
Also, in the case of Bakers Delight stores in St. Helena, Diamond Creek and Laurimar: No Penalty Rates, No Guaranteed Hours, No Sick Pay and No Holiday Pay.
The friendly sales assistants at Bakers Delight stores in St. Helena, Diamond Creek and Laurimar (Victoria, Australia) are currently negotiating a new workplace agreement. So far their employer, Wayne Price, has offered them an agreement that does away with penalty rates, guaranteed hours, sick pay and holiday pay in exchange for a tiny bit extra in the base rate. Mr. Price has also refused to include yearly pay increases to cover the cost of living. On top of this the workers are being bullied and told they are not allowed to discuss the agreement or talk to the union. They are under constant video surveillance and feel intimidated by Mr Price. They would really appreciate your support! All the workers are asking for is to receive Award entitlements like penalty rates for working nights and weekends, security of hours and sick pay and holiday pay. Currently they don’t receive these entitlements, with some workers receiving as little as $9.29 an hour! While you pay top prices for your bread, the employees are working under conditions that undermine industry standards.
Let Bakers Delight know that you will not tolerate the exploitation of young workers. The workers are fighting for:
Penalty rates on evenings, weekends and public holidays;
Guaranteed shifts and security of hours;
Sick pay and holiday pay;
Guaranteed pay rises every year to cover the cost of living;
An end to workplace bullying and over-supervision.
These are the conditions other workers in the retail industry enjoy.
Bakers Delight’ workers deserve them too!
For more infos on this and other industrial campaigns in the retail and services sector, please see the UNITE website.
Everyone is welcome to come to the Calendar Launch on Friday, November 13 at Readings Bookshop in Carlton at 6pm for free wine and talk! [Readings is located at 309 Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria: Phone (03) 9347 6633.]
Face Up To The Future! with 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar. 3CR asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future.
In 2006, 3CR created a Seeds of Dissent! Calendar to celebrate 3CR’s 30th birthday. The full colour, nationally distributed calendar teemed with radical dates, ideas and inspiration for social change. The calendar sold out of its 2000 copies. Since then 3CR’s Promotions Sub Committee’s Calendar Team has produced a yearly calendar, each with a fresh theme.
Face Up ToThe Future! — 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar — looks ahead to imagine a future we want to live in, while also celebrating Australia’s radical history. We asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future. Some artists have created images that imagine the ideal future and some have chosen to depict issues we need to address today in order to achieve it.
Australian history re-envisioned with a cheeky female bushranger, uranium mining and the need to recognise the interdependence of ecology, the tyrannical expectations of female beauty, the return of tumbling as a form of transportation (!), Indigenous people at the heart of popular culture… these are the some of the issues explored by artists such as Arlene Texta Queen, Deborah Kelly, Bindi Cole, Adam Hill, Tom O’Hern, Mitch [? sorry Mitch], Jo Waite, Rayna Fahey, Tom Civil, Mickie Quick, Lachlan Conn and Paul J Kalemba.
Cross-stitched samplers, stencils, felt pen drawings, collages, cartoons, illustration, computer art… these are the media the artists use to take us into the future of the 2010 Seeds of Dissent Calendar.
is a wonderful new book by some trouble-making bloke called Iain McIntyre, and is published by the redoubtable and not-at-all nervous Breakdown Press.
Launched in Newcastle at TINA — where L kindly grabbed me a copy — it will be launched again, kicking and screaming, in Melbourne on THURSDAY the 5th NOVEMBER at the BELLA UNION BAR (Victorian Trades Hall, cnr Victoria and Lygon Streets) between the hours of 6 and 8pm.
The book compiles tales of unconventional political dissent included in three previously-published pamphlets — How To Make Trouble And Influence People (1996), How to Stop Whining and Start Living (1998) and Revenge Of The Troublemaker (2003) — and, as an EXTRA! ADDED! BONUS!, interviews with a number of pranksters, photos galore, and er, other stuff.
Media Watch exposes the racist shit-stirring engaged in by the infotainment program ‘Nine News’ last week in ‘Welfare and Refugees’.
NOFX once asked ‘How can they sleep at night?’, to which the answer is ‘In luxury, on fluffy white pillows’.
Peter Overton is a Walkley Award winning investigative journalist yuppie hack from Sydney’s North Shore (and an ‘Old Falconian’). Thus, he is no stranger to hardship. So too, multi-millionaire Alan Jones, the squawking talk-back hack who once boasted that he “led the charge” at Cronulla in December 2005. (On Howard Sattler, see : Demons At Drivetime.)
On continuing popular resistance and (para-)state repression in Greece — in English — see (the invaluable) ‘After the Greek Riots’ blog: “What is going on? The newly-installed government seems to have realised that its “iron fist” show of the first few days in power was not sustainable. Even more importantly, December is now clearly visible in the horizon: “citizens will be allowed to demonstrate on the day”, declared the minister of so-called citizen protection. “No more vandalisms and destruction, however”. Thank you so kindly for allowing us the right to demonstrate, your Highness. December is coming quick and your citizen-subjects are eager to salute you!” Fnarr fnarr.
Added Bonus!
Serbian comrades Sanja Dojkić, Tadej Kurepa, Nikola Mitrovic, Ivan Savic, Ratibor Trivunac and Ivan Vulović — aka‘The Belgrade Six’ — remain in police custody after having been arrested in early September, 2009. The six are accused of ‘international terrorism’: the arrests are allegedly related to a ‘direct action’ which took place at the Greek Embassy in Belgrade on August 25, 2009. Damage to the Embassy was negligible: a window was cracked, a tiny scorch mark was left on the facade of the building, and a circle ‘A’ painted on one of its walls. If convicted of the crime, the six could be facing a term of anywhere from 3–15 years imprisonment. (They deny all charges.)
In Paris, on October 17, a dozen comrades of the CNT-AIT occupied the Serbian Cultural Center (situated in front of the Beaubourg / Paris Museum of Contemporary Art). Other solidarity actions are ongoing.
A former National Front member’s fairytale marriage to a Waikato woman is over as he ramps up his involvement in the white supremacy movement again.
Kyle Chapman, who vowed to give up his far-right activities when he married devout Mormon Claire Clifford in May, has been linked to [that is, in reality, is a key organiser with] the white pride [that is, in reality, the neo-Nazi vigilante] group Right Wing Resistance, which has been patrolling the streets of New Brighton in Christchurch.
Mr Chapman, once convicted of fire-bombing a marae, co-ordinated a gathering at the Wellington Cenotaph this weekend for the far-right’s annual Flag Day observance.
He was among about 30 members of the National Front and Right Wing Resistance who converged on central Wellington. Left-wing counter-demonstrators stayed away this year to avoid giving the marchers a bigger profile.
Mrs Chapman told the Waikato Times today she and Kyle Chapman separated last night because he had refused to maintain his wedding day promises.
“Kyle hasn’t given up things that he said he was going to but that was probably always on the cards because he is so in love with it,” she said.
“Last night I asked him to leave and basically I just said to him ‘if you get involved in that stuff then don’t bother coming back’.”
When contacted by the Waikato Times, Mr Chapman said he no longer spoke to the media.
The Right Wing Resistance, which Mr Chapman has described as the “street arm” of his Nationalist Alliance, says Christchurch is the centre of a “white pride” revival. It now claims to have members in five cities.
Mr Chapman has also been continuing his attempts, announced in January, to found a “European Nationalist land base” in Canterbury and has been appealing for donations.
Paul Innes, the plasterer from Perth who (as ‘Steelcap Boot’) moderates ‘Stormfront Downunder’, spearheads similar efforts in Western Australia; the effort is part of a shambolic attempt by white separatists to establish ‘Pioneer Little Europes’ across the world. Sadly, Jeff Hughes, the leader of one such effort in Nanaimo, Canada, was shot to death by police several days ago (October 23), in circumstances which at this stage are unclear. Hughes apparently posted as “nish in exile” on Stormfront, and was a member of ‘Northwest Front Canada’. ‘Northwest Front Canada’ is a project of veteran US neo-Nazi Harold Covington.
“We will win the hearts of the people living there bit by bit,” he wrote on a white pride website. “To avoid it becoming [sic] a [sausage] fest we will look at supporting some Eastern Euro like-minded women for the many single men we have.”
In May, the Waikato Times reported how the 38-year-old former leader of the National Front married the former Miss Clifford and moved from Christchurch to live with her on her lifestyle block on the outskirts of Hamilton.
In an exclusive interview on the day of his wedding, Mr Chapman pleaded with people to give him a chance to turn his life around after quitting his roles with the Nationalist Alliance and The Survive Club. He said at the time he “wanted to have a nice peaceful life with Claire”.
Mrs Chapman is pregnant with Mr Chapman’s child but she said she intended to divorce him. The baby is due in February.
“I don’t know about anything he is involved with. I don’t go to the websites or anything. I am not really that way inclined. He just doesn’t get it because he is just so ingrained in his way of thinking.”
“He mis-represented himself to me but in some ways I have learned such a lot and I guess I was naive but I have woken up a lot more through this.”
Mrs Chapman said Mr Chapman no longer lived with her and she understood he was living in Paeroa with a group of followers.
Kyle posts on the white supremacist ‘Stormfront’ using the handle ‘NZTrooper’, a handle he’s been using since 2003. See also : OMGWTF Kyle Chapman is back! (Again.) (October 25, 2009).
Fence tagging sparks call to ban [F]ront
Stacey Wood The Dominion Post
October 26, 2009
Eastbourne couple Geoff and Gwyn Morphew don’t care if the Right-wing [sic] National Front and their mates are good, paying customers – they want them out of the Hutt Park Top 10 Holiday Park permanently.
The Morphews woke up yesterday to find their freshly painted front fence covered in swastikas and swear words, a rare sight in their quiet Lowry Bay neighbourhood.
The black scrawls were a shock, and the couple want to send photographs of them to the nearby Seaview holiday park, which has been the venue for the national “Flag Day” conference of Right-wing groups for the past four years.
“I’m going to send them some photographs of this and say ‘don’t let them stay there again’,” Mr Morphew said. The couple said they had spoken to neighbours about the vandalism and none of them had heard of such a thing happening in their street before.
They had painted their fence just two months ago but now faced the task of removing black swastikas and obscene words from in front of their house.
On Saturday, about 30 National Front members and associates marched on Wellington to celebrate Flag Day.
Anti-fascist groups who had clashed with the Right-wingers [sic] in past years stayed away to avoid giving them more attention.
A spokesman from the Nationalist Alliance denied any involvement with the vandalism.
Holiday park staff would not comment on whether the Right-wingers [sic] would be welcome in the future.
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
