World

Within days of Washington’s war on Iraq entering its sixth year, the White House confirmed news reports that the US troop death toll had passed the 4000 mark. Associated Press reported on March 23 that “the grim milestone” came after “a roadside bomb killed four US soldiers in Baghdad”.

On March 6, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) member of parliament K. Sivanesan was killed by a claymore mine while driving through a village in northern Sri Lanka on his way home from a parliamentary sitting in Colombo. Sivanesan had voted against a further extension of the state of emergency currently in place.

It is not an overstatement that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is a shining beacon of hope for struggling masses around the world.

On March 18, Peter Boyle, the national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective — a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance — interviewed S. Arutchelvan, the secretary general of the Malaysian Socialist Party (PSM), about the PSM’s electoral successes in the March 12 general elections. This interview was originally published by socialist e-journal Links at .

Below is an abridged March 19 statement by Human Rights Watch, .

Below is an abridged statement by the International Trade Union Confederation

On March 19, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joined Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz to face a group of 400 stunned Bear executives. Five days earlier, Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s five largest investment banks, had lost $17 billion of wealth, triggering the biggest financial panic since the Great Depression.

Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, led by President Hugo Chavez, is an ongoing process aiming at the transformation of Venezuela to overcome poverty and empower the poor majority — as well as lead a process of Latin American integration to break

“Percy Schmeiser’s decade-long legal odyssey has finally come to an end — and he’s got a cheque for [C]$660 to prove it”, the March 20 Toronto Globe and Mail reported.

Kathy Black recently took part in a speaking tour of Australia at the invitation of Sydney’s Stop the War Coalition. Black is one of six national conveners of US Labor Against the War and is also the Philadelphia president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), a group affiliated to the AFL-CIO union federation. She spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Margarita Windisch about some of the gender and race issues that US unions have to tackle.

The Prague City Court rejected an appeal from the Czech Communist Youth Association (KSM) against an official banning order, the German JungeWelT reported on March 27. The interior ministry prohibition order was originally issued in October 2006.

The European Commission is increasingly annoyed by its inability to foist unwanted, unnecessary and unsafe genetically modified crops onto European consumers and some member-state governments.