World

The announcement by giant US bank JPMorgan Chase that it had lost US$2 billion in a shady deal shows the kinds of financial speculation that led to the 2007-2009 financial collapse continue to steam ahead. It also underscores that both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Democrat president Barack Obama are in Wall Street’s pocket. As the financial system was collapsing in the waning months of the George W Bush administration, it responded with huge bailouts of banks and other financial institutions.

The rulers of the world are panicking over the results of Greek democracy.

Up until now the argument has been that there's no alternative. We have to slash public spending and wages because there's so much debt that otherwise there'll be chaos, absolute chaos. The joy of this method is it saves having to make a case for your actions, so it ought to be used more often. Journalists accused of phone hacking could say, "I had no choice but to listen to a dead soldier's voicemail because otherwise there'd be chaos, absolute chaos. Just look at Greece, they didn't hack any phones and look at the mess they're in, there was no alternative."

The rhetoric from Tunisia's interim government, led by the Islamist party Ennahda (the Renaissance), as well as the financial establishment, is that the old regime is gone. What is needed now, they say, is stability and the restoration of economic growth to complete the transition to democracy. International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on April 2: "Investors and the population at large need to regain confidence in the future of the economy, to look beyond the short-term difficulties and provide the foundations for a rebound of the Tunisian economy."

Bahraini democracy activist Zainab Abdulnabi, representing the Bahraini Australian Youth Movement, delivered an impassioned speech at the end of the Sydney May Day march on May 6, 2012

Eighty four protesters were arrested at a May Day protest in Dili. The 84 were placed in a detention centre. More than 100 protesters had marched to the Hotel Timor, a four star hotel in Dili, on May 1 to demand a pay rise and to stop sackings of local staff. Four staff of the hotel had recently been dismissed after being accused of stealing. The demonstrators chose May 1, the International Workers' Day, to express their concerns and demand their rights.

Greece will hold new elections in June if last-ditch negotiations on forming a coalition government fail once again.

The presence of police and mobile brigade soldiers at construction sites for the PNG LNG (liquefied natural gas) project in Papua New Guinea ― majority owned by Exxon Mobil ― is an indication of the community discontent surrounding the project. Fears have been raised that conflict over the project could provoke violence like that of Bougainville in the 1990s.

In what marks a significant shift in the balance of European politics, in the final round presidential election on May 6, Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande defeated right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement by almost 52% to 48%. Hollande is France's first president from the social democratic Socialist Party in France in 17 years. Sarkozy is the first president since 1981 not to win a second term.

Now that parties supporting cuts are losing elections across Europe, I wonder if the British Labour Party will consider a policy of opposing cuts. At the moment, they sort of oppose them, so if the government announces 200 libraries are closing next Wednesday morning, Labour says: "This is typical of this callous administration. They ought to wait until the afternoon."

As the world marked World Press Freedom Day on May 3, an annual day declared by the UN General Assembly, Sudanese journalists had no reason to celebrate. They spent the day just like many before it, fighting against censorship and calling for press freedom. Journalists working for Al-Jareeda, an independent daily based in Khartoum, headed to the Sudanese Journalist’s Union to stage a silent sit-in. On May 1 and 2, Al-Jareeda was taken over by the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) of Sudan.

The victory of Socialist Party (PS) candidate Francois Hollande in the French presidential election on May 6 set off a wave of hope across Europe. On May 9, the Spanish government announced that it was nationalising the country’s fourth biggest bank, Bankia, to keep it from collapsing. What do these seemingly unrelated events have to do with each other? Enormous expectations are being loaded onto the shoulders of the former French PS national secretary. In recession-stricken Spain, Portugal and Greece, people hope he will put Europe’s economies on a path to growth and job-creation.