World

  • Profits (and poverty) rise in EU

    An official European Union report issued on February 20 revealed that one in six people in the EU live below national poverty thresholds. The February 21 British Morning Star reported that according to the European Commission’s social inclusion report 10% of people in the EU — one of the wealthiest regions in the world — live in households in which no-one has a job.

  • El Salvador's 'year of peace'?

    El Salvadoran President Antonio Saca’s right-wing government has proclaimed 2007 the “year of peace”, inaugurating this move with an attempt to nominate the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of Saca’s ARENA party, with the highest human rights award in the country.

  • Aceh: New forms of foreign domination developing

    The left-wing Acehnese Peoples Party (PRA) will be holding its founding congress in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh at the end of February. Sydney University Southeast Asian Studies lecturer Max Lane spoke to Thamrin Ananda, chairperson of the Preparatory Committee of the PRA.

  • Zimbabwe: Fighting spirit back!

    The following report is by a correspondent in Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe’s political situation has suddenly become pregnant with the possibility of uprisings, as ordinary people begin to defy police brutality. Unlike in the past when people were very scared of the police, now the situation seems to be different, with events bearing testimony to the mood of resistance. Just a drive around Highfield Township on February 18 was enough to see the return of the late ’90s fighting spirit among the poor people.

  • Philippines: Death squads escalate their dirty work

    Many Australians would assume that death squads, disappearances, harassment by the military, violent dispersal of demonstrations and political prisoners were features of the Philippines that vanished when Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.

  • ElBaradei warns against Iran enrichment 'hype'

    In an interview printed in the February 19 London Financial Times, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium to fuel-grade level on an industrial scale.

  • US Iraq commander wants thousands more troops

    On February 17 — one day after the US House of Representatives approved a non-binding, bipartisan resolution opposing President George Bush’s plan to increase the size of the US occupation force in Iraq by 21,500 combat troops — the commander of US forces in Baghdad announced he had filed a request for even more soldiers.

  • Dita Sari: 'The movements need a political breakthrough'

    Dita Sari is arguably the most well-known progressive activist in Indonesia today. A former trade union leader and political prisoner under the Suharto regime, she is now the chairperson of the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), which is the leading force in the new, broader National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas). Sari was interviewed in Jakarta by Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle after the founding conference of Papernas in January, which selected her as its candidate for the 2009 presidential elections.

  • Solomon Islands government calls for RAMSI exit plan

    The Solomon Islands government wants the Pacific Islands Forum to initiate talks on an exit plan for the PIF’s Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), Solomons foreign minister Patterson Oti told a PIF consultative meeting in Honiara on February 12.

  • Students protest tuition fees in Canada

    Protests against tuition fees brought Canada to a standstill on February 7. In Toronto, as temperatures dropped to as low as -20°C, more than 6000 students took to the streets, demanding the government increase funding to make post-secondary education accessible.

  • Venezuela's revolution - giving power to the poor

    “We, and millions of people around the world … believe another world is possible, a world free from war, poverty and hunger. Here in Venezuela the [government of socialist President Hugo Chavez] along with the majority of the people in our country are fighting hard to build this new world, despite the attempts of the old elite and the US government to prevent us from succeeding.” This is what 25-year-old university student Germania Fernandez told Pablo Navarrete, according to a December 1 article on Venezuelanalysis.com.

  • Cuba's green revolution: threat of a good example

    The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Footprint Network’s 2006 report, Living Planet, released last October, painted a grim picture of the calamitous state of the world’s environment. It warned that human activities are outstripping the natural world’s capacity to regenerate.