World

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.

March 17 and 18 were bad days for the US government and the corporate interests it represents, as it suffered two blows to its campaign to undermine the growing movement in Latin America towards regional integration to challenge US domination.

A demonstration by Buddhist monks in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on March 10 to commemorate the anniversary of China’s crushing of the Tibetan independence movement in 1959 triggered protests for self-determination that, by March 14, had escalated into anti-Chinese riots in which 19 people were killed.

Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi’s northern region. Such farms sell their produce on the country’s auction floors directly to international corporations, including Limbe Leaf Tobacco (majority-owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company), and US-based Alliance One Tobacco.

The demonstrations which began on March 10, 2008, in Tibet, and which turned into riots since March 14, are remarkable both for their breadth and their radicalism. Far from being confined to the capital, Lhasa, they have spread to the bordering provinces of China, where communities of Tibetans reside: witnesses report important mobilisations in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan.