FOR THE forward-looking gang at internet-based gadget emporium Firebox.com, 2004 was a great year. The small, private business saw another gargantuan leap in profits. In December the company was named Britain’s 13th fastest growing private company in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100.
QUESTIONS ABOUT China’s future have begun to multiply after a long period when—bizarrely for a country of such size and importance—it had drifted off the map of global concern. On the one hand China’s role in the dominant international economic structures has become more visible especially following its entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
China’s economic growth has been uneven—leading to a widening gulf between rich and poor, and seeing labour shortages in some areas, unemployment in others. There are signs of growing unrest around the country as a result. Below are press extracts that give a glimpse of the discontent.
THE TSUNAMI tragedy has shown the consequences of capitalist globalisation. It has transformed the impact of natural and environmental hazards into terrible human disaster.
Trafalgar Square, London, has been the site of demonstrations, and of attempts by the authorities to ban them, since it was constructed in 1842-3.
‘How can they talk about elections?’Christmas eve, there is a cold wind, the temperatures in the desert dip below freezing. A group of us, all doctors, decide to try and reach Fallujah. There are stories of disease and hunger.
On 9 January 1905 peace-ful demonstrators were massacred by troops in St Petersburg, the capital of imperial Russia. This event, known as Bloody Sunday, ignited a revolutionary movement which paralysed the Russian state for a year, sparked protest in town and countryside, and gave birth to genuine workers’ democracy in the process.
What can we learn from a revolution in Russia a century ago? It seems a world removed from our lives in 2005. But 1905 was about a new working class coming of age.
MIKE LEIGH’S film, out this week, takes us back in time to London in the 1950s. As in many large cities in Europe at that time, you find working people living in the wake of the Second World War and facing hardship, shortages and poverty.
In Britain from 1955 to 1957, 141 women died due to backstreet abortions. Prior to 1967 around 100,000 illegal abortions were carried out each year in Britain. Prior to 1967 it is estimated that 35,000 women were hospitalised each year due to botched backstreet abortions in Britain. Every day 55,000 unsafe abortions take place around...
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‘Lots more pensioners mean we have to work for longer to pay for pensions.’
