"BINGE DRINKING" has become an issue in the last 20 years. There has been an explosion in the availability of alcohol. Previously, a lot of women wouldn’t have gone to pubs. Now drink is readily available at the local supermarket, massively promoted and cheaply priced.
After more than seven decades in the Egyptian Communist movement, Youssef Darwish’s hopes for socialism are as strong as ever. As a lawyer he represented trade unions during the great workers’ struggles of the 1940s. As a political organiser he worked tirelessly to maintain the communist movement’s independence during the 1950s and 1960s.
BETWEEN 24 and 27 March this year Cairo will host a meeting of activists from the Arab world and the international movements against war and globalisation.
THE CURRENT regime has been in power for 23 years and continues to rule through the emergency laws.
Necessity is the mother of invention, goes the cliche. Necessity drove Esfir Shub to become a brilliant film editor in the years immediately after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the early 1920s filmmaking resources were scarce, but film was a key modern art form and a crucial means of conveying information to people across the newly formed Soviet Republic.
Saturday 12 FebruaryStop the War Coalition national conference, London. Go to www.stopwar.org.ukKyoto climate march, 11.30am, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, near Holborn tube, central London. For details go to www.campaignagainstclimatechange.net House of Commons Council Housing group of MPs session to collect evidence to back the demand for direct investment in council housing, 2-4pm, Swallow Hotel, High Street West, Gateshead.
THE LAST century was the bloodiest in history. The Holocaust, the Nazis’ attempted annihilation of Jews and other "sub-humans", claimed 12 million victims and was its most brutal act. It was not the only genocide. There was the attempt by the fledgling Turkish state to wipe out the Armenians from within its borders in the second decade of the 20th century. In the last decade there was the slaughter in Rwanda.
WESTERN governments today often try to justify tightening controls on immigrants and refugees by claiming that their acceptance of escaping Jews in the 1930s shows they have no problem with those "genuinely" seeking asylum.
"NOT ESPECIALLY inhumane." This was French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s recent verdict on the wartime occupation of France. During the Second World War over 60,000 resisters and 75,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from France. Fewer than 3,000 Jews returned. These deportations were made easier by the willing participation of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime, which governed the part of France not immediately occupied by the Germans following France’s defeat in 1940. Vichy drew up lists of Jews resident in France and then played a full role in their persecution.
ON 3 March 1959, 85 internees at the Hola Detention Camp in Kenya refused to take part in forced labour and sat down in protest. Internees in the camp had been refusing to work for nine days and now these men were to be made an example. When the camp commander, G M Sullivan, blew his whistle over 100 guards attacked the prisoners with clubs and rifle butts, killing one of them.
A NEW book by Caroline Elkins underlines just how vicious British rule in Kenya was.
Wednesday 26-31 JanuaryWorld Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil. For details go to www.forumsocialmundial.org.br
