Information and Analysis: Towards a world for people not profit
21st Century Socialism
Monday, 22nd March 2010
In Depth
In Highgate Cemetery, three miles from where I write, Karl Marx's body lies a-mouldering in his grave; and, for so many years, it seemed that his critique of the capitalist system was also safely buried. More ...
What lessons can be drawn from China's spectacular and sustained economic growth? More ...
The way that Russia marked the 15th Anniversary of the end of the USSR, the final events of which took place between the 8th and 31st of December 1991, has caused consternation in the Western media. More ...
The Ma’an News service is a valuable resource. While its TV stations inform and entertain the locals, its news agency (MNA) sends the world 24-hour news from beleaguered Palestine. Viewers of its well-designed website receive minute-by-minute information in Arabic, Hebrew and English, with local news from ten districts in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, accompanied by high quality, and often shocking, photographs. More ...
The greatest successes in industrial development and prosperity of the last fifty years have been produced by state ownership and investment, central planning and regulated monopoly rather than by the 'free market'. More ...
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Current Affairs
by Noah Tucker
In the morning of 2nd April 1982, people in Britain listened to the news with bewilderment. UK territory was being invaded by a foreign power- and, even more astonishing, the invading country was Argentina. How on earth had a third class military power, in the southern hemisphere and on the other side of the Atlantic, managed to land its troops on a part of the British Isles? More ...
by Simon Korner
The catalyst for the recent intervention by the US in Yemen was the attempted blowing up of a US airliner on Christmas Day. Obama accused an Al Qaeda group based in Yemen of directing the operation. The Nigerian suspect is almost certain to face execution in the US. More ...
Headlines
Hassan al-Err, aged 67, and his seven-member family are moving into a mud house built by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, because other building materials are not available. More ...
People & Culture
"How does it feel to betray your own race?" These are the infamous last words of the mercenary colonel Miles Quartrich, snarled at the hero Jake Sully in the final minutes of James Cameron's Avatar; set a century and a half into the future and 25 trillion miles from our planet. But Sully and the tiny minority of humans who change sides to fight alongside the Na'vi people in the 3D sci-fi epic were far from being the only ones who became traitors. More ...
History
T.E. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom is on the syllabus at the elite US army training college at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Seen as the man who “cracked fighting in the Middle East”, Lawrence is a “kind of poster boy” of how to do colonial rule, according to writer-presenter Rory Stewart, in The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia (BBC2, Jan 16 and 23 2010). More ...
Headlines
With all their energy focused on healing, Cuba's medical teams will stay in Haiti for as long as the people need them. More ...
Headlines
On January 27th, Evo Morales began his second term as president of Bolivia by swearing in a cabinet made up of an equal number of women and men - unprecedented in this South American nation with a strong patriarchal tradition. More ...
International
In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled 'New Castro Same Cuba'. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an “abusive” regime that uses its “repressive machinery … draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms”. More ...
Headlines
President Hugo Chavez on Monday January 26th said that Petrocaribe, Venezuela's cut-rate regional energy alliance, will forgive quake-stricken Haiti's debt, AFP reported. More ...
International
This message was broadcast in Honduras on 10th January by Radio Globo, the radio station which expresses the views of the majority of Hondurans who oppose the coup regime. More ...
Opinions
The half-page, feature length article by Peter Sherwell about the situation in Venezuela that appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on 29th November follows an established pattern of unsympathetic and negative reporting in European and North American media, some of it touched on in my book 'Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', published earlier this year. More ...
Opinions
Thanks to television, on Tuesday, January 19, I heard a member of the U.S. military say to a group of Haitians, “If you don’t stand in line, we’re not going to help you.” I hope the Haitians didn’t understand him. More ...