World

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

Lara Pullin Since last year, Nicaraguan parliamentary politics has been dominated by threats of a constitutional crisis. While the National Assembly debates corruption, and US-defined "good governance", however, outside parliament people are more

Matt Preston & Sarah Peart, Glasgow More than 400 delegates braved the Scottish winter to attend the annual conference of the Scottish Socialist Party, taking place in Perth on February 12-13. The conference was marked by diverse and wide-ranging

Naomi Klein "The Iraqi people gave America the biggest 'thank you' in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a trial involving US soldiers who have served in Iraq, to test if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can relieve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the US centre for

Rohan Pearce On February 10, municipal elections were held in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh and its surrounds. The vote, the first since limited municipal elections in 1964, is to be followed by similar ballots in the south-western and eastern

On February 16, up to 200,000 people took to the streets of Ecuador's capital Quito, in the country's second major demonstration in three weeks. The march, organised by the Social Christian Party and Quito Mayor Paco Moncayo, who is the leader of the

Matthew Davies Publicity about the tsunami relief effort in Indonesia's Aceh province has mostly depicted Indonesia's military (TNI) in an unprecedented favourable light. But the TNI's own official record has painted a very different picture than

Dr Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah in January. This account of his experiences is reprinted from British Socialist Worker, available at <http://www.socialistworker.co.uk&#062;. It was the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to

On February 15, the European Court of Human Rights said the lack of legal aid available to Helen Steel and David Morris when they were prosecuted for libel by McDonald's meant that they had been denied a fair trial. They were awarded £24,000 in