World

EAST TIMOR: Transition still painful August 30 is the first anniversary of East Timor's courageous act of self-determination, when, after 24 years of occupation, 78.9% of voters defied concerted Indonesian military and militia attempts to crush

THAILAND: Villagers seize dam, demand justice VILLAGE OF THE POOR, northern Thailand — It's early morning in the Kaeng Tana National Park and I'm on the verandah of a guesthouse overlooking the wide brown Moon River, just above its confluence

Debt relief leaves countries worse off An International Monetary Fund-administered initiative to relieve the debt burden on the world's poorest countries is a "fraud" which is leaving countries like Zambia worse off than before, the British aid

CUBA: Money has 'tainted' Olympics The head of Cuba's Olympics committee, Jose Ramon Fernandez, has accused Western commercial influences of corrupting sport. Fernandez, who is also one of the country's vice-presidents, charges that rich countries

A report into the daily operations of Papua New Guinea's Tolukuma goldmine claims that the mine's Australian operators expect to wipe out all fish life and food resources along a 30-kilometre stretch of a nearby river. This is a direct consequence of

PAKISTAN: Sugar mill workers fight for jobs LAHORE - More than 700 workers in sugar mills in Sind province were made redundant during July and August. At the Alnoor Sugar Mills and Shah Murad Sugar Mill, both owned by the same person, 240 workers

World Bank admits failure The World Bank has admitted that a sector adjustment loan for the restructuring of India's coal industry “has exacted a severe toll on citizens whose lives ultimately were supposed to have been made better by

Around 20,000 people from around the state of Bihar braved torrential rains to march to Parliament Street in Delhi on August 23. The march and rally were organised by the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) to support demands for an economic

RIO BRAVO, TAMAULIPAS — Mexico's new national government of Vicente Fox hasn't taken office yet, but already it confronts its thorniest political problem. This challenge comes not from the country's former governing party, the Institutional

CUBA: Another shady and sinister story The case of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez, plucked from the Florida straits in November and held against his family's will for eight months until his July return, forced world attention onto US policy towards

Death of Indian Marxist Arvind N. Das Distinguished Indian Marxist intellectual Arvind N. Das died on August 7, just a month before he would have turned 52, in Amsterdam's Free University Hospital. A fortnight earlier, he had suffered a cardiac

OXFORD, England — Over the past year, European activists have watched large political mobilisations unfold in the United States with keen interest. Although Europe has not recently witnessed a demonstration on the scale of the Seattle anti-World