World

The following is abridged from a January 18 article by Richard Samuelson, the co-director of Britain’s Free West Papua Campaign ().

Politics, culture and sports take center stage in Cuba this February, beginning with a Chinese New Year celebration, a coast-to-coast cycling competition, international jazz festival, mammoth book fair and, yes, the election of the next Cuban president.

It was a victory long overdue. The corporate giant — plantation company Lion Group — could have resolved the issue a decade ago, but it chose the path of arrogance and sheer disregard for its toiling workers.

In what country does protesting against water privatisation — or better put, protesting against the removal of your only source of water — lead to the police killings of a protesting child, arrests and bashings of protesters and a threatened 60 year jail sentence under the “anti-terrorism” legislation?

In a world where the mainstream media riddles dumbed-down news reportage with inane sports metaphors, sometimes it takes sports to remind us of the gravity of the actual news.

The president of the Venezuela’s National Assembly’s Energy and Mines Committee, Angel Rodriguez, rejected the illegal judicial decision on behalf of British, US and Dutch courts, of freezing the Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) assets in their countries, as part of a lawsuit brought by the US Exxon Mobil, due to the nationalisation of the Orinoco Belt, which took place last May.

Venezuela’s Energy Minister, Rafael Ramirez, characterised a series of court orders obtained by Exxon Mobil Corp. in Britain, the Netherlands, and the Dutch Antilles, freezing up to US$12 billion in assets of Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA, as "judicial terrorism" in a statement today.

Leaders of the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) have vowed to defy court rulings banning them from participating in public assemblies. The court orders were placed on 35 opposition party and grassroots activists who were charged with illegal assembly following a January 26 protest against price hikes imposed by the government-owned oil corporation, Petronas.

The war for Chad is not over. It is likely to become more bloody and involve a wider humanitarian disaster before any solutions can be grasped. The next week will be critical for the future of the country — and for the wider region, including Sudanese-controlled Darfur.

The US Department of Energy announced January 30 that it is pulling out of the Futuregen Project in Mattoon, Illinois — the United States’ US$1.8 billion “clean coal” demonstration plant, scheduled to start construction next year. The DoE had committed to paying 74% ($1.3 billion) of Futuregen’s costs.

During the war against Vietnam, it was not until 1970 that the US union movement took protest action in an organised manner. And even then, it was a pro-war demonstration called by New York’s Building Trades Council in support of President Richard Nixon. However anti-war unions responded to that demonstration — held on May 20 and drawing 50,000 workers (many of them paid to attend) — with a protest of their own. While it only drew half as many people, it was a significant milestone — it was the first time that US unions formally organised an anti-war demonstration.

This is an abridged report issued on January 28 by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing 168 million workers in 155 countries. For more information, please visit .