World

The below article is reprinted from http://tamilnet.com.

International oil giant Chevron is lobbying the US government to cancel trade deals with Ecuador over a court case where it faces a US$16 billion fine for polluting the Amazonian rainforest.

Unionists protested on July 20 in San Francisco against the decision by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to cut the wages of more than 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of US$6.55 per hour, alleging he must do so because the state legislature has not passed a budget.

Much of the world is fascinated by the US presidential election campaign.

Democratic Socialist Perspective, http://dsp.org.au

A bombing that killed five Hamas members and a five-year-old girl on July 25 in the Gaza Strip has escalated tensions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA), based in the West Bank.

“At least 3,000 people mobilized by the Papuan Christian Communication Forum staged a rally in Jayapura” on August 4, a Jakarta Post article reported the following day.

Like the good Count of Transylvania, the so-called Doha Round of trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) collapsed twice — in Cancun in 2003 and in Potsdam in 2007 — only to come back from the dead.

Below is an open letter from Naser Fayaz, a journalist for ATN TV channel, which has been sent to human rights organisations. It is reprinted from http://asia-pacific-action.org. The Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan, http://rawa.org, “requests all its supporters and well-wishers of Afghan people to defend the brave and freedom-loving journalist Naser Fayaz and register their protest to his harassment by sending letters to the following sources”: President Hamid Karzai, [email protected]; United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, [email protected]; Supreme Court of Afghanistan [email protected].

The Beijing Olympic games, which began on August 8, are shaping up to be a perfect reflection of our times — taking place against a backdrop of human rights abuses, terrorism scares and under a blanket of chemical smog.

The defeat of the Colorado Party (PC) in the April presidential election meant much more than a change of government in Paraguay.

On July 19-20, the latest negotiations over Iran’s uranium enrichment program were held in Geneva between the five UN Security Council members (the US, Britain, France China and Russia) and Germany on one side and Iran on the other.