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Hundreds of thousands of workers and small farmers marched across Mexico, on January 30 in a huge mobilisation for economic and human rights.
“The choice facing Israel in eight days time concerns peace, and the country can say yes to peace or no to peace … A dove of peace is sitting on the window ledge, and we can decide to open the window and let it in, with all the apprehension, or slam the window shut”, Kadima party electoral candidate and current Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told an international media conference on February 2.
The following article is by Kavita Krishnan and is reprinted from the January issue of Liberation, which is produced by the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist. Krishnan is the editor of Liberation and is the national secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association. She is a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference in Sydney, for more information or to register, visit http://www.worldatacrossroads.org.
A boat of Burmese refugees found off Indonesia claimed on February 3 that they had been towed out to sea and set adrift by Thai authorities.
The abridged interview below with Walden Bello, from Focus on the Global South, was carried out and published by Alejandro Kirk for the Inter-Press Service about the tasks facing the World Social Forum (WSF), which met between January 27 and February 1 in the Brazilian city of Belem. The full interview can be read at http://www.ipsnews.net.
The ninth World Social Forum ended on February 1 in Belem with its “Assembly of assemblies” adopting “dozens of resolutions and proposals to be the subjects of a programme of mobilisations around the world in 2009”, according to a February 2 Inter-Press Service report.
The following press release was issued on February 3 by the secretariat of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee. For more information on the global BDS campaign, visit http://www.bdsmovement.net. On February 6, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) announced that members of the affiliated South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) "achieved a great victory" when a ship carrying Israeli goods to South Africa was unable to offload due to a SATAWU-imposed boycott.
Somalia is often cited by Western politicians and journalists as the archetypical “failed state”, with no functioning state since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, and with power contested by warlords, Islamists, clan militias, armed criminal gangs and even pirates.Somalia is often cited by Western politicians and journalists as the archetypical "failed state", with no functioning state since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, and with power contested by warlords, Islamists, clan militias, armed criminal gangs and even pirates.