World

MELANIE BERESFORD, a senior lecturer in South-east Asian history at Wollongong University, recently spent three and a half months doing a research project on industrial development in northern Vietnam. She is also author of National Unification

The Australian government's recent decision to give Papua New Guinea another Iroquois combat helicopter, and to continue to fund the maintenance of the Australian-supplied helicopter fleet, can only further escalate the conflict

US deportations illegal A US federal appeals court has declared President George Bush's policy of repatriating Haitian refugees illegal. The appeals court in New York said on July 29 that the government cannot return the Haitians without a

Hyundai targets Siberian wilderness The Udege people of the Russian far east are preparing for battle against the Korean conglomerate, Hyundai, which is planning large-scale logging operations in the Primorsky Krai region. The company has

CRACOW — The flow of foreign public funding from the West to eastern Europe should be called strategic investment rather than aid. The small amount of funds available mainly benefit the donor country and are allocated

South Africa's fence of deathIt coils and slithers across the barren rocky soil between Mozambique and South Africa like a sinister electric eel. Someone once called it "the devil's fence". South Africa built it in 1985 to

George Novack, well known as both a scholar and a defender of civil liberties, died in New York on July 30 at the age of 86. Novack became a Marxist in the early 1930s, joining the (Trotskyist) Communist League of America

Blow against censorship in IrelandA landmark decision by the Irish High Court on July 31 ruled against some of the censorship practised by the state-owned radio and television station, Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE). RTE

Hanna Suchocka, Poland's prime minister, has been granted extraordinary powers to deal with the many problems besetting the government as it attempts to force the pace toward a market economy. Poland's experiment with

MPs' pay rise LONDON — Prime Minister John Major suffered his first defeat on the floor of parliament on July 14. Conservative MPs crossed the floor in defiance of their ministers — to vote themselves a 38% pay rise. The government has

PALLO JORDAN is a member of the African National Congress National Executive Committee. He is also an elected member of that body's executive, the National Working Committee. Born in 1942, and a graduate of the University of Sussex, he for many

The fountain in Place Saint Michel, outside the courtroom where four senior former health officials are on trial, ran blood red as a reminder by protesters of the 256 haemophiliacs who died after receiving AIDS-infected