World

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.

Over the February 3-4 weekend, 60 people participated in a conference on European anti-capitalist left unity projects organised by left-wing Swiss party SolidariteS. Held in the border town of Le Locle in the Neuchatel canton, the conference attracted mainly SolidariteS members and supporters, but members of the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) also attended.

Faced with thousands of protesters, reflecting growing popular pressure, Ecuador’s Congress voted on February 13 to allow a motion by President Rafael Correa for a referendum on a constituent assembly.

The US troop casualty rate in Iraq surged to a post-invasion high over the four months to the end of January, according to a February 7 Associated Press. AP reported that more US troops “were killed in combat in Iraq over the past four months — at least 334 through Jan. 31 — than in any comparable stretch since the war began.”

Washington is growing increasingly frustrated that its European Union allies are refusing to toughen financial sanctions that were imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council last December to pressure Iran to abandon research into the production of enriched uranium.

After months of internecine fighting that has resulted in more than 90 Palestinian deaths, Fatah and Hamas signed a deal on February 8 to form a new unity government. The deal, brokered by Saudi Arabia, was signed after a two-day emergency meeting in Mecca.

In recent years “making poverty history” has become the fashionable cause for ageing rock stars such as Bono and Sir Bob Geldof. As global poverty means that each year 9 million children die of preventable diseases, the need to achieve this goal is undeniable.

A report from the bipartisan US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the costs of the Iraq war released on February 1 revealed that US President George Bush’s plan, announced on January 10, to deploy an additional 21,500 US troops to Iraq this year could result in up to an extra 48,000 troops being deployed.

For more than six months, the people of Oaxaca in southern Mexico have been mobilising to oust the hated state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The repression of the uprising has been severe, with ongoing savage attacks — including killings — on movement activists by the military-style Federal Preventative Police.

An emergency February 7-8 Mecca summit sponsored by Saudi Arabia that brought together the leaders of rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah resulted in a power-sharing agreement between and a plan to form a national unity government. Palestinians hope a unity government can achieve the international recognition required to lift the crippling economic embargo against the Palestinian Authority that has been imposed by the West since Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in last January’s elections.

The Kosova people’s eight-year wait for the same right to independence allowed to other peoples of the former Yugoslavia some 15 years ago has finally reached … anti-climax.

Green Left Weekly has received a desperate appeal from Papernas (the National Liberation Party of Unity) in Indonesia for emergency solidarity in the wake of severe floods in Jakarta and surrounding heavily populated areas.