World

An estimated 2.4 million Kenyans are facing food insecurity this year. One cause is poor rains, which have affected all of north-east Africa and are probably at least partially the result of climate change. Another is the rising cost of imported food. Rising food costs are also partly caused by climate change, but also by speculation. For the finance industry, food is just another commodity to be bought, sold or hoarded to generate the most profits.

October 15 was the first time since February 2003, with the huge demonstrations in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, that a call for an international action on a specific date has met with such a response.

Greek trade unions warned on October 21 of further strikes in the next week after parliament approved new harsh cutbacks amid mass protests that left one man dead and about 200 injured. Civil servants' union Adedy secretary-general Ilias Iliopoulos said the new law "will not be implemented" and accused the government of ignoring popular dissent. Greece's main private-sector union, GSEE, was also planning new strikes. GSEE board member Stathis Anestis said: "We plan long-running opposition to ensure that the crippling cutbacks imposed by our loan shark predators are not enforced."

Indonesian army forces brutally attacked the Papuan national conference in Abepura on October 19. The conference was attended by up to 20,000 people discussing West Papua's struggle for independence from Indonesia. WestPapuaMedia.info said on October 21 that local sources confirmed six people were killed. New Matilda.com reported on October 20 an account from a priest who saw a truck full of arrested people who were “covered with blood” and had been “beaten and shot”.

Left-wing political parties, trade unions, social activists and student groups at a press conference in the Labour Party Pakistan (LPP) office invited people to join them in an Occupy Lahore anti-capitalist camp at Nasir Bagh in the city centre. The camp will continue for at least two days. A program for the camp will be announced soon. The camp is being set up in solidarity with the worldwide Occupy movement and the growing unrest among peoples caused by the global economic recession.

In the aftermath of Ollanta Humala’s June 5 victory in the Peruvian presidential election, the “investment community” and the international business press reacted with the hysteria of thieves who think they have heard a distant siren approaching. Their first impulse was to cut and run. Peruvian stocks plunged amid fears that this “radical leftist” would put an end to the “good times”, levelling higher taxes on mining profits and perhaps nationalising key export industries.

John Bellamy Foster is renowned Marxist economist and ecologist, and an editor of Monthly Review. He was a featured guest speaker at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change-Social Change conference, which Green Left Weekly co-organised in Melbourne over September 30-October 3.

Walking around downtown Cairo on October 10, everything felt relatively normal ― if, perhaps, a little more tense than usual for post-January 25 Cairo. That is, until I came across the wrecks of burnt out cars on the Corniche el Nil in Maspero, just north of Tahrir Square, being pulled apart by enterprising young men.

On October 15, protests and occupations as part of a "United for Global Change" day of action initiated by the Spanish Indignant movement took place in more than 1000 cities in dozens of nations around the world.

Striking Greek public-sector workers paralysed transport and left rubbish piling up in Athens and Thessaloniki on October 14, the Morning Star said that day. The strike was the latest salvo against the European Union-International Monetary Fund campaign to make working people pay for the banking crisis. Rubbish collectors stayed off the job for a 10th consecutive day, the article said. Members of the All Workers Militant Front also blockaded the Acropolis for a second day.

The Venezuelan government returned more than 15,800 hectares of ancestral lands to the indigenous Yukpa people on October 12, as Venezuela celebrated “Indigenous Resistance Day” with public events and marches across the country. Originally designated by then-US president Franklin Roosevelt as “Columbus Day” in 1937, October 12 is the date that Christopher Columbus first “discovered” the Americas. The anniversary was re-named “Day of Indigenous Resistance” by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002 to commemorate indigenous struggle against European invasion and colonisation.

Mothers and wives of Palestinian prisoners quickly gathered outside the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza after a prisoner swap deal was announced on October 11 between Israel and Hamas. These women have not seen their loved ones, imprisoned by Israel, for five years. For the past five years, the families of 950 Palestinian prisoners from Gaza have been protesting weekly outside the ICRC’s headquarters, demanding their right to visit their sons, husbands and relatives inside the Israeli jails, a right denied to them by Israel.