World

Fred Fuentes Mass protests are shaking Bolivia, forcing interim President Carlos Mesa to back down from his threat not to authorise any new bills until his hydrocarbon law was passed, unamended and without discussion. Mesa had claimed that the

On June 11, Suzanne Swift was arrested at her mother's house in Eugene, Oregon. Swift, a soldier in the military police, had refused to return to Iraq. The Register-Guard reported on June 15 that Swift says she will not redeploy because "she was

Margarita Windisch & Susan Price, Caracas In January, the Sixth World Social Forum will take place on three continents: Africa (in Mali), Asia (in Pakistan) and Latin America (in Venezuela). The Caracas forum is scheduled for January 24-29 on the

Lou Plummer, Fayetteville, North Carolina On the day after his 19th birthday in 1966, my father received his commission as an officer in the same North Carolina National Guard unit that took his father to Europe in World War Two. By 1969, having

Jim McIlroy, Caracas In a series of fiery speeches on the closing day of the World Social Forum, January 29, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned the US government that a US attack on Iran would be "10 times worse than Iraq". "Enough already

Dr Ilan Pappe is one of Israel's most prominent "new historians". In May 2002, Pappe was threatened with expulsion from his university, the University of Haifa, for supporting a Jewish graduate student whose dissertation documented an massacre of

An annual survey of trade union rights violations published on June 7 by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions found that 115 trade unionists were murdered in 2005 for defending workers' rights, more than 1600 were violently assaulted,

Louay Alzaher Last month, "civilised" Britain troops revenged themselves on the police headquarters of Basra city, because the police had arrested two British commandos, disguised in traditional Iraqi dress, who had fired on Iraqi police, killing

Norm Dixon "Every civilised nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction... We're determined to confront those threats at the source", US President George Bush declared in a February 11 speech. "We will stop these

Patrick Bond, Durban The ruling African National Congress will win the vast majority of seats in the March 1 elections for South Africa's city, town and district councils, given the lack of left electoral opposition. An ANC vow that half of its new

Malik Miah, San Francisco Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the trade unions in the United States were regarded by working people as the preeminent vehicles for the defence of labour's interests because they won the best wages, health

Dipankar Bhattacharya, the general-secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), has recently been charged with attempted murder for his role in leading a 2001 march against mass killings by the BJP-led government of Jharkhand state.