World

On June 24, more than 10,000 workers picketed a power loom factory in Sadhar Faisalabad for more than eight hours. They were demanding the arrest of the owner of the factory and his gangsters.

The last time I saw Aung San Suu Kyi, general secretary of Burma’s National League for Democracy (NLD), was in 1996.

The last month in Afghanistan has seen the anti-occupation Islamist Taliban forces stage a jailbreak of 1200 of prisoners in Kandahar, threats by the US’s puppet Afghan President Hamid Karzai to attack Pakistan (the major US ally in the region), the killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers in a border clash with occupation troops, pro-Taliban insurgents reach the Pakistani city of Peshawar and the highest number of casualties for both US and other occupation forces for any month since the October 2001 invasion.

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

According to a July 2 Brisbane Times article, the Iraqi government is suing the formerly Australian government-owned AWB Limited, which has a monopoly over Australian wheat exports, over its alleged rorting of the United Nations’ oil-for-food program as part of UN-enforced sanctions against Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1991.

Venezuela’s environment ministry has proclaimed sweeping restrictions on mining in the Imataca Forest, in Venezuela’s south-east, according to a June 27 Venezuelanalysis.com article. Despite this, negotiations over mining permits continue with affected companies.

As Malaysian opposition parties and social activists, emboldened by advances in the March general elections, prepared to hold a giant protest against recent oil price hike (petrol up 41%, diesel up 67%) in Kuala Lumpur on July 6, a series of disturbing events unfolded.

The following article is abridged from a June 26 post on http://peruanista.blogspot.com. The full article, along with a series of videos on the struggle, can be found at http://links.org.au.

Below was posted at http://climateandcapitalism.com.

These are some of the corporations currently doing business with the Burmese military junta. For a full list, see the Burma Campaign UK’s “Dirty List” of corporations in Burma.

There have been nationwide protests against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s decision to raise the prices of petrol, diesel and cooking gas.

On June 30, the collective agreements covering actors in the US television industry expired.