Up to a thousand EPMU Solid Energy miners are entering their third week of industrial action as the stand-off over negotiations over multi-employer collective agreement.

The month-long lockout of workers at Talleys-owned Open Country Cheese is over after workers have secured their goal of a collective employment agreement to cover their jobs. 

Literally, Americans are searching for the meaning of socialism. In a year marked by the beginning of the economic crisis in the US, the online edition of the Merrian-Webster dictionary announced that the Word of the Year 2008 was ... bailout. Many of the other words in the list of the ten with the "the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time" were related either to the economic crisis and the uncertainty this generates (turmoil, precipice, rogue) and the US presidential election (maverick, bipartisan).

But number three in the list came the word socialism. Merrian-Webster Online claims traffic to their site "now exceeds 125 million individual page views per month", so that means many millions of US citizens are searching for the meaning of socialism. Surely a sign of the times!