The strike of post-secondary students in Quebec has taken a dramatic turn with the May 18 approval by the provincial government of a special law to cancel the school year at strike-bound institutions and outlaw protest activity deemed disruptive of institutions not participating in the strike.
Details of Bill 78 were unveiled the day before and debated in a special, overnight session of Quebec鈥檚 National Assembly.
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Thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons have called off a hunger strike after winning several key concessions from Israel.
Solidarity protests have been staged in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied Jerusalem, and Israel, and tens of thousands joined a rally in the town of Kafr Kana in the Galilee. Actions in solidarity with the hunger strikers have been organised around the world.
The rulers of the world are panicking over the results of Greek democracy.
The announcement by giant US bank JPMorgan Chase that it had lost US$2 billion in a shady deal shows the kinds of financial speculation that led to the 2007-2009 financial collapse continue to steam ahead.
It also underscores that both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Democrat president Barack Obama are in Wall Street鈥檚 pocket.
As the financial system was collapsing in the waning months of the George W Bush administration, it responded with huge bailouts of banks and other financial institutions.
In the week before the first anniversary of the indignado (鈥渢he outraged鈥) protests and camps that broke out across Spain on May 15 last year, the Spanish media was full of opinionated wishful thinking about the state of what became known as the 15-M movement.
This wasn鈥檛 just the usual malice of the right-wing media, which can always be relied upon to play up the inevitable roughness of some indignado actions 鈥 like call-outs where only a handful respond and end up outnumbered by police and TV crews.
Up until now the argument has been that there's no alternative. We have to slash public spending and wages because there's so much debt that otherwise there'll be chaos, absolute chaos.
The joy of this method is it saves having to make a case for your actions, so it ought to be used more often. Journalists accused of phone hacking could say, "I had no choice but to listen to a dead soldier's voicemail because otherwise there'd be chaos, absolute chaos. Just look at Greece, they didn't hack any phones and look at the mess they're in, there was no alternative."
The rhetoric from Tunisia's interim government, led by the Islamist party Ennahda (the Renaissance), as well as the financial establishment, is that the old regime is gone.
What is needed now, they say, is stability and the restoration of economic growth to complete the transition to democracy.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on April 2: "Investors and the population at large need to regain confidence in the future of the economy, to look beyond the short-term difficulties and provide the foundations for a rebound of the Tunisian economy."
The findings of the Climate Commission report The Critical Decade will be a focus of discussion at the upcoming Climate Change Social Change conference.
The report has generated much heated debate by suggesting that rising temperatures in western Sydney will affect everything from our water supply to mental health and crime levels.
The impact of the carbon price on the environment and working families in western Sydney will also feature at the conference. It will be held at the Parramatta Town Hall and will take place on June 30, the day before the tax officially takes effect.
Exploration licences for coal seam gas mining (CSG) cover 75% of the land in New South Wales where people live. Residents are worried about the effect CSG mining could have on their land and water, and angry about the lack of consultation by the gas companies.
Attorney-general Nicola Roxon is planning a raft of new powers for ASIO to intercept and store any individual鈥檚 information. The move follows the adoption of new laws that allow Australia鈥檚 spy agencies to target individuals and organisations that oppose the government's interests 鈥 nicknamed the 鈥淲ikiLeaks amendment鈥.
Several proposed changes to telecommunications interception and access laws, as well as the Intelligence Services Act 2001, would expand ASIO鈥檚 powers of surveillance and reduce government oversight of ASIO activities.
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