World

"I really qualify it as militarily insignificant. They are very small, they are very random, they are very ineffective", Major General Ray Odierno, commander of the US Army's 4th Infantry Division, told a June 18 press briefing from

Within 100 days of taking office on January 1 this year, Brazilian President Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva's Workers Party (PT) government had demonstrated its commitment to neoliberal economic policies beyond anything Washington

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under increasing pressure to justify his government's support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. Having based his support on the claim that Iraq possessed a substantial arsenal of weapons of mass

At US$45.6 billion, Japan's military budget was dwarfed only by the military budget of the United States which totalled $396.1 billion for fiscal 2003. Throughout the 1990s, Japan's war budget was the second largest in the world &#151

"This building went up two years ago. It was corruption that brought it down", Algerian student Abelzak told Reuters, as he surveyed the damage of the vastly under-reported May 21 earthquake that left 2200 Algerians dead and more

On June 18, US troops shot two Iraqis dead at a demonstration outside the Coalition Provisional Authority's office in Baghdad. A military convoy entering the US compound was pelted with rocks by the protesters, and soldiers from

On June 18, the intelligence committees of the US Senate and Congress began hearings on the "intelligence" that the White House used to justify the invasion of Iraq, in particular, the claims made about Iraq's alleged biological and

JAKARTA &#151 It has now been a month since martial law was declared in Indonesia's northern-most province of Aceh. But the "integrated operation" launched by the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) to smash the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)

When Hasan de Tiro proclaimed the independent state of Aceh and launched the Aceh Sumatra National Liberation Front, also known as the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), in 1978, he attracted little support. Contrary to the myth-making of the

PARIS — France was again brought to a standstill on June 10 by the movement against the government's attacks on workers' pension rights. The demonstrations were as massive as on previous occasions: 200,000 marched in Paris,

"For us, the war is still going on", a US soldier in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad, told the London Financial Times on May 30. He showed the FT's correspondent the impact marks from mortar rounds and rocket-propelled

There have been more sensational revelations about British state-sponsored terrorism in Northern Ireland following the publication on April 17 of an official report — by Metropolitan Police chief Sir John Stevens — that found that