A 50,000 strong demonstration took place in Rome on Sunday of last week to protest against the Bolkestein directive, a proposal by the European Commission to privatise public services and attack workers’ rights.
Amid the suffering in southern Africa, one event last week was a powerful sign of resistance and hope.
One of the best aspects of the Southern Africa Social Forum was the way it attracted groups like market traders and cross-border traders — very significant groups in southern Africa — and welded them into unity with workers.
Zimbabwe is in crisis. Rampant inflation, soon to hit 400 percent a year, has debased the currency, wiped out the livelihoods of people on fixed pensions and cut almost everyone’s living standards.
One million French workers struck and protested on Tuesday of last week. The popular strikes were called in opposition to attacks by the right wing government on the social security system and laws protecting workers.
Colombia’s unions and social movements were set to hold a national strike on Wednesday of this week.
I come from Bamoko in Mali, about 2,000 miles from the Nador in Morocco where I am now. It was the death of my child which made me leave my wife behind, along with my two other children and my father and mother.
Before the recent famine in Niger there was a long period when there were increasingly strong appeals for aid, but nothing happened. We have now reached that time in Malawi — and people have already begun to die.
The first time I heard the name of Musab al-Zarqawi was on 5 February 2003 when the then US secretary of state Colin Powell singled him out as the link between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
Over 2,000 people took to the streets of the Irish capital, Dublin, last Saturday to celebrate the release of five Rossport men who had been jailed for 94 days because their government has become a mouthpiece for the oil and gas companies.
French special forces stormed a Corsican ferry last week. Corsican trade unionists had seized control of the ship in protest at the privatisation of the SNCM ferry company.
Almost four years after the "liberation" of Afghanistan, the country’s interior minister has resigned. The reason he cited was the continued control exercised by "local leaders" — warlords who fought in Afghanistan’s long civil war — across much of the country.
