Sean Healy

  • Feast inside, soup kitchen outside

    SYDNEY — The contrast was obvious and deliberate. Inside, in the warmth of the luxury ANA Hotel, was World Bank president James Wolfensohn lecturing a $150-a-plate dinner on the joys of "globalisation"; outside, in the cold and

  • PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Students launch hunger strike

    At least a dozen students at the University of Papua New Guinea in the capital, Port Moresby, have launched a hunger strike to demand the removal from the country of representatives of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

  • UNITED STATES: The world's number one rogue nation

    BY JIM GREEN & SEAN HEALY In just six months as "globocop", United States President George W. Bush has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, sabotaged the Biological Weapons Convention, sped ahead missile "defence" plans

  • ITALY: Heat rises on Berlusconi, police

    An Italian police officer has confirmed eyewitness reports that the brutal July 21 raid on the headquarters of groups protesting the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa was an act of vengeance ordered by higher authorities. Speaking

  • UN finds little progress on poverty

    Many of the world's poorest countries are struggling to make even modest progress on reducing poverty, and there is now little chance that they will meet the United Nations Millennium Summit targets for poverty eradication and

  • ITALY: G8 rulers turn to violent repression

    What is clear after the Genoa G8 summit is that the world's rulers have made a conscious policy decision: it is time to violently repress the anti-globalisation movement. Many of the individual elements of the state terror employed

  • QATAR: WTO trade talks in doubt

    Fearful that their hopes for a new round of global "free trade" talks will turn to dust, rich country governments have scheduled an emergency summit for the end of August to discuss the future of the World Trade Organisation. The

  • ARGENTINA: Wall Street demands, and gets, austerity

    Fearful of the country's deepening economic crisis, Wall Street bond traders have demanded, and received, dire austerity measures from Argentinian President Fernando de la Rua in a bid to ensure that the debts owed them will be paid

  • BURMA: Interim government soon?

    The military regime which has ruled Burma for nearly 40 years may be about to not only release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest but form a power-sharing government with her party, the National League for

  • ITALY: Rich countries stonewall on debt cancellation

    While their press secretaries will no doubt come up with a headline-grabbing figure to spin it otherwise, the leaders of the world's eight largest industrialised economies are preparing to ignore worldwide calls to "drop the debt" at

  • The hoops of debt relief

    @box text intr = In order to qualify for what debt relief is on offer, poor countries must jump through many hoops. Qualify as "IDA": In order to qualify for debt relief, a Third World country must first be deemed eligible for

  • A bitter bean to swallow

    Drinking it in a wannabe-hip caf‚ in Newtown or Fitzroy, it smells of modern sophistication; hauling great bags of it down a steep hillside in East Timor or Colombia, it smells of age-old slavery. It's just a little bean, but coffee