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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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| Thursday, July 28 | | · | Where Have All the Good Men Gone? |
| Monday, May 09 | | · | Another Look at Daneil Ortega and the Sandinista Struggle |
| Monday, May 02 | | · | Never-Ending Double Standards |
| Friday, April 15 | | · | One Zimbabwe or Another |
| Tuesday, April 12 | | · | The Origin of AIDS: an Ethical Inquiry |
| Thursday, March 17 | | · | Bush/Kerry, Republican/Democrat: same Imperialist |
| Wednesday, March 09 | | · | Blaming Gays, Blacks, and Chimps for AIDS |
| Thursday, March 03 | | · | This is Madness |
| Sunday, January 16 | | · | God the father, God the son, God the holy bigot |
| Thursday, January 13 | | · | Horrified By Destructive Forces? |
Older Articles
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World Focus: When electoral fraud is met by congratulations
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By Stephen Gowans
November 19, 2009 - gowans.wordpress.com
It has become standard practice in many parts of the world for opposition candidates to decry as fraudulent election results that favor the incumbent. Charges of vote fraud are routinely levelled against governing parties that win elections contested by opposition parties backed by Western governments.
For example, after (and even before) Zimbabwe's last set of elections, the governing Zanu-PF party was accused of vote fraud, but the evidence for the opposition's claim was gathered by organizations funded by the United States, a major backer of the opposition movement. Washington makes no secret of its desire to drive the incumbent president, Robert Mugabe, from power, by hook or crook, not because he's corrupt, despotic or a human rights abuser, as Washington alleges, but because he has done what all foreign leaders back to Lenin have done who have fallen astray of Washington – failed to honor contracts and safeguard private property. (That's not to say Mugabe and Lenin are alike in any way other than having committed what in Washington's view is the supreme crime.) A cooked exit poll is not beyond the motivations and capabilities of US and British-backed anti-Mugabe forces, but that's largely beside the point. Mugabe's Zanu-PF did poorly in the election, and Mugabe, himself, failed to win a first round victory in the presidential election. If Zanu-PF rigged the vote, it blundered badly.
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World Focus: Simon Mann’s coup plot: nasty, brutal and posh
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By Simon Basketter
November 10, 2009 - socialistworker.co.uk
There is a tendency to portray the British ruling class as a somewhat buffoonish collection of toffs, removed from the realities of life.
And there is some truth in it. The establishment in Britain is indeed an inbred collection of incompetents. But they are also an incredibly nasty and dangerous bunch of people.
Last week we got an insight into their world.
British former special forces officer Simon Mann was released from Equatorial Guinea, in central Africa, where he had been sentenced in July 2008 to just over 34 years in jail.
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World Focus: Barack Obama, The Nobel Peace Prize and the Wrong discussion
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By Iniko Ujaama
October 10, 2009
I realise the discussion is out of focus and they have us debating about the wrong things. Perhaps the more peripheral issue is whether Obama deserves their prize (assuming it is worth anything). Had we not had so much respect and admiration for such awards we would not be having the same discussion.
Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I think many factors would influence our response to this occurrence. Many people are debating whether he 'deserves' the award and I for some time today engaged in this debate also. But upon reflection, much is overlooked which forms the bases for even having such a discussion. First, I think this discussion presumes a certain meaning and significance to the award which must be clarified (or at least a common ground established) before the discussion could be engaged productively.
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World Focus: A Wrecking Ball of Imperialism
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By Stephen Gowans
September 07, 2009
gowans.wordpress.com
Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at Australia's University of Wollongong, has written a reply to my article Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman's quest to do what the CIA used to do and make it seem progressive, and then a reply to my reply. Martin is the author of a number of books and articles on nonviolence, including Nonviolence against Capitalism, Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, and "Nonviolent strategy against capitalism" (in Social Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008, pp. 42-46.)
In the latest exchange, I try to show that the disagreement between Martin and me is rooted, I believe, in a conflict between Marxist and anarchist perspectives on the state, and the question of whether the state is inherently good or bad.
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World Focus: Racism, Obama and the Fall of the American Economy
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By Fidel Castro
October 14, 2008
Trade, within a society and between countries, is the exchange of goods and services produced by human beings. The owners of the means of production appropriate the profits. As a class, they are the leaders of the capitalist state and they boast of fostering development and social wellbeing through market. This they worship as an infallible God.
In every country there is competition between the strongest and the weakest; the ones with more physical energy and better fed, those who learned how to read and write, who attended school and have more experience accumulated; the ones with more extensive social relations and more resources, and those within society who fail to have these advantages.
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World Focus: Global Food Crisis: Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World
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by Stephen Lendman
April 21, 2008
Consumers in rich countries feel it in supermarkets but in the world's poorest ones people are starving. The reason - soaring food prices, and it's triggered riots around the world in places like Mexico, Indonesia, Yemen, the Philippines, Cambodia, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Egypt, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Peru, Bolivia and Haiti that was once nearly food self-sufficient but now relies on imports for most of its supply and (like other food-importing countries) is at the mercy of agribusiness.
Wheat shortages in Peru are acute enough to have the military make bread with potato flour (a native crop). In Pakistan, thousands of troops guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. In Thailand, rice farmers take shifts staying awake nights guarding their fields from thieves. The crop's price has about doubled in recent months, it's the staple for half or more of the world's population, but rising prices and fearing scarcity have prompted some of the world's largest producers to export less - Thailand (the world's largest exporter), Vietnam, India, Egypt, Cambodia with others likely to follow as world output lags demand. Producers of other grains are doing the same like Argentina, Kazakhstan and China. The less they export, the higher prices go.
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World Focus: Chávez Emphasizes Global Context of Venezuelan Food Shortages
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by James Suggett
March 27th 2008
Venezuelanalysis.com
In an international press conference Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez expressed concern for a potential world food crisis and criticized the diversion of food supplies for biofuel, while Venezuela and other Global South countries struggle with food shortages.
“The important thing is that this theme be explained to the people, that governments be alerted; many might not realize it with the sea of things that occur daily,” Chávez advised.
Since 2004, global cereal production has remained constant at around 1.6 billion tons, while the demand for cereals has escalated to almost 1.7 billion tons, according to research by a group of Spanish agricultural companies published at agroinformacion.com.
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World Focus: Food price rises will kill millions
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socialistworker.co.uk
February 26, 2008
Esme Choonara looks at protests and riots as market madness threatens world’s poor
Millions around the world are facing a future of insecurity, starvation and malnutrition as the price of basic food soars. The price of maize, wheat, soya beans and rice – staples for the majority of the world’s population – have more than doubled in the last few years.
Around 25,000 people currently die every day from hunger and poverty-related causes. This figure is set to rise as food prices drive more into food insecurity.
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World Focus: Holiday Season Hypocrisy
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by Stephen Lendman
December 20, 2007
sjlendman.blogspot.com
Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It's to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's widely acknowledged not to be his birthday. Along with its religious significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26 - January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and historical heritage. Jews as well celebrate the season with the Hanukkah Festival of Lights. It's to commemorate their struggle for survival, but for Jewish children it's their Christmas with gifts from parents like their Christian friends get.
Christmas is also the time when the national obsession to shop and consume reaches its zenith. It traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve, and after the holiday continues into January with plenty of extra buying power from holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other resources gotten or borrowed. It's for everything people never knew they wanted until creative advertising wizardry made their lives incomplete without them.
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World Focus: What Happy Thanksgiving
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By Netfa Freeman
November 23rd, 2007
blackstarnews.com
There's nothing like one-o-them home cooked meals by Momma.
Just the thought of extended family getting together and partaking in the bonding ritual of a feast, is enough to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye.
And when something becomes a tradition it can be hard to break from, even if its roots prove to be decadent and warped.
Even though many African people in the United States know not to recognize Columbus Day we have yet to renounce Thanksgiving and we neglect its true historical significance. Who can deny that Columbus was nothing more than a colonial pirate who stumbled, lost and starving, onto the shores of this continent? He would have certainly perished if it weren't for his indigenous rescuers, whom he repaid with plunder, pillage and enslavement.
We take comfort in knowing that he wasn't from Africa, and that the likes of him committed in essence the same assault on Africa. But doesn't Thanksgiving have the same decadent origins? How absurd is it for Black people/Africans to recognize Thanksgiving as anything other than a "celebration in the taking."
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World Focus: World Social Forum: a rolling carnival of resistance in Kenya
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by Charlie Kimber in Nairobi, Kenya
January 23, 2007 - socialistworker.co.uk
The World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi, Kenya, began with a march from the slum of Kibera.
Kibera (which was featured in the film The Constant Gardener) sums up everything the WSF is about. Its 800,000 inhabitants are squatters, living in shacks with hardly any facilities.
There are grossly inadequate sanitation and water services, and just four publicly funded schools for the half a million people of school age.
Thousands of Kibera's people joined the march, which grew to around 50,000.
Many on the march from outside Kibera were forum delegates. They came with a range of immediate concerns – land rights, HIV/Aids, the liberation of Palestine and Western Sahara, trade, women's rights and many more.
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World Focus: Male Arrogance, Abuse and Intimate Relationships
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by Ras Tyehimba
October 17, 2006
Recently, I read in the media of the incident involving Anita Lutchmepersad, who was forced to leave her home because of the threatening abuses of a 'close male relative'. After she left, he burnt down the house and drank detergent in an apparent suicide bid. According to one newspaper report, the male relative had seen a text message from one of Anita's co-workers and misinterpreted it, getting in to a fit of rage. Another newspaper report told of Devica Mahabir who survived being poisoned, beaten and burned but was left horribly disfigured by her husband who killed himself after murdering her lover. What are the factors at play in such scenarios? How do so many relationships which SEEM to start off so good and which are supposedly based on 'love' be filled with so much mistrust, pain and abuse?
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World Focus: Who feels the Earthquake?
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by Joey Clarke
So there was an earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005. TIME Magazine just reminded me. They also told me some numbers: 80,000 people died. Hard to imagine for someone who has spent his life in small islands. Unless I think in terms of all the people in my part of Kingston: all of Liguanea, Upper Mountainview, New Kingston and Beverly Hills, plus Gordon Town to boot. All dead within minutes. Or, from the Port-of-Spain years: Belmont/St Ann's, and most of the East-West Corridor - wiped out. Or, say, all of Bridgetown, Barbados... or, everybody in St Lucia, plus ten or so thousand from Martinique or St Vincent.
Strange how I can consider all those dead so coldly when I think in terms of number... maybe I should think in terms of one person: my friend, my relative, my colleague... the person I see every day. Plus the person I don't see so often, the person I run in to now and then, and the person I sometimes notice on my way from A to B. All such persons (plus 79,000 or so more who are part of the lives of others) suddenly killed en masse... it's too much. I don't know if I can ever grasp the scale of a tragedy like that; and I don't even know if it would be any clearer if I had happened to be tooling around Kashmir last October. I suspect that - like the people I saw in the photos - I would be too desperate about my own wellbeing to count beyond myself, and my immediate circle. The TIME article prompted me to start writing, but it wasn't because of the dead, nor even of the 3 million homeless (consider all Jamaica and all Trinidad, but only the lucky ones sleeping in camps), nor - though it impressed me - the 30,000 tons of food (more than I'm likely to eat in the next 20 years) that has been parachuted into the area.
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World Focus: Why the US REALLY Exports its Ideals
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By A Corey Gilkes
Will Hutton of the British Guardian wrote on Jan 22nd an article entitled Why the US exports its ideals of "freedom and democracy" – the new mantra. He implored readers that in spite of the cynicism and the blustering arrogance of the Bush administration, to have faith in the sincerity of the increasing call for democracy coming from the US on both sides of the political fence.
There is, of course, the possibility that the US is indeed sincere about its desire to spread the ideal of democracy across the globe. In fact, many US politicians and humanitarian groups truly believe in what they say. Some others honestly believe that the world is separated into one group of fluid, liberal democracies the pinnacle of which is the US and the rest of the world gripped by rigid, totalitarian regimes. This is why I am so wary of these liberal types of North America and Europe. Many – like their conservative counterparts – are so blinded by their own hubris and belief of being the crusading country that they fail to see that that outlook, no matter how well-intentioned it may be, when detached from certain historical and contemporary contexts, only brings more suffering, displacement and hardship for developing countries. Even with the best of intentions many of them just don't get it; they don't understand that their own views of the rest of the world are often shaped by reasoning and ideologies that were racist and paternalistic in their origin.
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World Focus: The Council on Foreign Relations Does AIDS
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by Ed Krales
In July, 2005, on the fifth anniversary of the U.N. Security Council resolution addressing the threat HIV/AIDS poses to the security of nations, the Council on Foreign Relations published Laurie Garrett's study entitled "HIV and National Security: Where Are the Links?"
Garrett, "Senior Fellow for Global Health" at the CFR, addresses problems not usually considered by HIV/AIDS workers and policy makers. Some of the topics she deals with are how the Black Death changed the political and social structure of Europe; the role of armed forces and UN peacekeepers in spreading HIV; how states are destabilized and the effect their instability has on the rest of the world; and Bush's "President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief". There is much technical information in the report but also many omissions and inaccurate assumptions.
Garrett outlines ideas on how to fight AIDS, minimizing the security threat faced by affected nations. Her prime concern is protecting police and the military from drug-resistant forms of the virus. Her secondary concern is tracking those people she considers responsible for spreading it.
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