By Marcus Pabian

Arriving in Havana on June 16 for a meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro and his brother, retired Cuban president Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that Cuba and Venezuela were undergoing “one and the same revolution”. The revolutionary socialist governments of Venezuela and Cuba are organising the working people of their two countries to reduce material and cultural poverty and increase genuine democracy. They are showing poor people across the world an inspiring alternative to capitalism.

By Shua Garfield

“We cannot continue to pour carbon pollution into the atmosphere as if there is no cost … Climate change threatens our food production, agriculture, and water supplies.” With this dire warning, the minister for climate change and water, Senator Penny Wong, released the federal government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme green paper on July 16. However, the proposals outlined in the paper are not a recipe for serious action to avoid the climate change disasters that Wong warns of. Instead, the paper is largely a plan to hand out money to the worst polluters.

By Kerry Vernon

An estimated 80,000 were killed in a few seconds on August 6, 1945, when the first atom bomb, “Little Boy”, was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima from a US Army Air Force B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay. About 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. Two days later, the second nuclear bomb, “Fat Man”, was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.