World

On November 4, Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-US president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, accused Russia of fomenting mass protests against him. Saakashvili’s remarks were his first response to three days of protests in the capital Tbilisi in which some 100,000 people — a tenth of the city’s population — demanded his resignation.

With 44.9% of the valid votes cast, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, wife of President Nestor Kirchner, won Argentina’s October 28 presidential election. Fernandez was backed by her husband’s Front for Victory (FPV) party, still formally a faction within the Peronist (nationalist-populist) Justicialist Party (PJ).

A program for cultural transformation is being developed by ordinary Cypriots after the island’s politicians have proved unable to resolve the Cyprus problem, which has figured in international politics for over half a century.

The November 2 British Independent reported that US- NATO ally Turkey “has started to impose economic sanctions on Iraqi Kurdistan by stopping flights between Istanbul” and Irbil, capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region in northern Iraq.

November 7, 2007 -- On the third day of my underground period, I escaped arrest by seconds. It was because of inexperience. We live in a society full of high-tech methods to find a person.

Today is my second day in underground life. On November 3, when General Musharaf declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution, I was in Toba Tek Singh, a city around four hours from Lahore. This was to attend a meeting to prepare for the Labour Party Pakistan’s fourth national conference. The conference is scheduled to be held on November 9-11 in the city. Posters welcoming the delegates were printed and an invitation card to supporters for the open session of the conference was ready as well.

The US launched its first assault in the “war on terror” in Afghanistan six years ago. Today, the country remains one of the poorest places on Earth, ruled by a corrupt warlord elite. Tariq Ali, a veteran of the anti-war struggle for four decades, spoke to Sherry Wolf about the disastrous consequences of the US-led war — and what the future holds.

For the 16th consecutive year, the United Nations has overwhelmingly voted for a resolution urging the US to lift its 47-year long economic embargo against Cuba.

“America’s hostile policy to the Iranian people and the country’s legal institutions are against international law. They are worthless and ineffective, and doomed to failure”, Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a media conference in Tehran on October 25.

A new UN report that tracks the world’s progress in achieving sustainable development goals, as recommended in the UN’s historic 1987 Our Common Future report, has painted a grim picture of across-the-board environmental deterioration.

An official from ousted president Jean Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas political movement was abducted at gunpoint on October 27. Dr Maryse Narcisse acted as spokesperson for exiled president and belongs to the five-member executive committee of Fanmi Lavalas. She was taken in front of her home in the area of Petion-Ville in Haiti’s capital.

Twenty-four aircraft of the Sri Lankan air force were damaged or destroyed during an attack on the Anuradhapura air base, in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province, carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on October 22. The LTTE has for several decades been fighting for self-determination for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, in response to the discrimination and violent repression carried out against the Tamil people by a series of racist Sri Lankan governments that have drawn their support from the island’s Sinhalese majority.