World

On February 22, an Israeli court handed down one of the most serious punishments to an Israeli soldier for illegally killing a Palestinian — four-and-a-half months in prison. On June 8, 2003, an Israeli soldier at a Jenin checkpoint spotted a

Doug Lorimer A series of bombings outside mosques in and around Baghdad during the week prior to and on the day of the festival of Ashoura, the holiest day of the Shia year, has been seized upon by the US press to promote the idea that only the

John Seed & Ruth Rosenhek, Tiruvanammalai Tiruvanammalai is a bustling city in the state of Tamil Nadu near the south-east tip of India. Dominating the landscape is the sacred mountain Arunachala, which, according to Hindu mythology, is the form

A young Mexican immigrant reported to the Department of Children's Services for not immunizing her toddler was ordered by a Tennessee judge to learn English, and to use birth control, in January. In October, the judge, Barry Tatum, told another

On February 23, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation announced that its members had voted to accept their first national industrial agreement since 1991, with 82% voting in favour. The agreement, which will cover 200,000 nurses, midwives and

Tanya Reinhart, Tel Aviv The February 8 Sharm-el-Sheikh summit of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been hailed in the Western media as the opening of a new era. This is the climax of a

Dick Nichols On February 20, voters handed a humiliating thrashing to Portugal's incumbent conservative Social-Democratic and Popular Party (SDP-PP) coalition, returning the centre-left Socialist Party to government with an outright majority. The

Another three children from the Guarani tribe starved to death in 2004, as the tribe's lack of access to farmland threatens a deep crisis. Fifteen Guarani children starved to death in 2003. In the last 70 years, the tribe has been gradually evicted

On February 18, a US senate committee demanded that the peak body representing state pollution monitoring agencies, and that that represented local pollution monitoring agencies, hand over their financial records. The two peak bodies had given a

Stuart Munckton In his weekly televised address to the nation on February 20, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused the US government of plotting to assassinate him. He said that advance warning of a potential assassination attempt had come from

James Balowski, Jakarta In the boldest statement on the subject to date, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has signalled that the US is ready to restore full military training ties with the Indonesian military (TNI). But the announcement

John Martinkus is a respected author and journalist, one of the few to raise awareness of the plights of the people of East Timor, West Papua and Aceh. More recently he has turned his attention to Iraq, where he was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in