Press Release, IceNews. After a parliamentary resolution that passed unopposed, the Government of Iceland, on 15 December 2011, recognised Palestine as an independent and sovereign state within the pre-1967 Six Day War borders. This is the first recognition of Palestine by a Western European or Northern European country.
Continue reading →By Deena Stryker, Daily Kos. In Iceland the financial crisis resulted in people recovering their sovereign rights through a new approach to direct participatory democracy that led to a new Constitution. (English | French | Portuguese | Spanish)
Continue reading →By Staff, BBC | WSWS. Last month, cash-strapped Portugal, which had been ordered by the IMF to privatize, went to sell shares in its state-owned companies to Angola, a former colony that became independent in 1975. To put this story in perspective: 50 years ago, to conclude 450 years of Portuguese control of the trading cities on the Arabian Sea, India had to expel Portugal forcibly from Goa. Western progressives and conservatives alike find these role reversals hard to swallow.
Continue reading →By Staff, AHP | Translated by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. Thousands of Fanmi Lavalas supporters rallied on Friday December 16th to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the elections that brought Father Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency of Haiti with more votes in 1990 than both presidential candidates combined received in the 2011 2nd-round elections. (English | French)
Continue reading →By Patrick Glennon, In these Times | Balázs Nagy-Navarro, You Tube. Four journalists and members of Hungary’s Television and Filmmakers Independent Trade Union are in the seventh day of a hunger strike to protest their government’s infringements on free speech.
Continue reading →By Julio Godoy, IPS | Tierramérica. Common cranes normally migrated in September from their spring and summer habitat in Europe to spend the autumn and winter in northern Africa. But climate change is altering their natural migratory patterns, sparking conflicts between farmers and environmentalists. (English | Spanish)
Continue reading →By Tamino, Open Mind. With the bulk of the fluctuations due to natural factors removed, the continued course of global warming since 1979 is undeniable. Five different measures of the eath surface and lower-atmosphere temperatures agree on this, and the last two years (2009 and 2010) were the two hottest.
Continue reading →By Mark Doyle and Piers Scholfield, BBC Documentary. During a visit to Haiti, Doyle and Scholfield follow the course of Haiti’s cholera epidemic and examine the controversy around it.
Continue reading →By Angelo Van Schaik, Radio Netherlands via All Africa. Senegalese immigrants expressed their outrage on the streets of Florence, Italy, after the news on Tuesday December 13 that an Italian man linked to extreme right-wing circles killed two Senegalese street venders and critically injured three others before shooting himself.
Continue reading →By Nnimmo Bassey and staff, Friends of the Earth International via Common Dreams. The UN climate talks in Durban take the world a step back by undermining an already inadequate system. The developing countries’ promised reductions are greater than those of the industrialized world, which is responsible for 75 percent of the total human emissions in the atmosphere. (English | French)
Continue reading →By Joshua S. Hill, Planet Save. The year 2010 saw an unusually high melting season in Greenland which subsequently caused the bedrock of the island to lose 100 billion tonnes of ice and uplift by as much as 20 millimetres.
Continue reading →By Oscar Arias Sanchez, Acento | Translated by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. In this open letter from December 9, 2011, Oscar Arias Sanchez, the Nobel laureate and former President of Costa Rica (1986-1990, 2006-2010), urges Martelly to focus on social programs rather than reestablish the armed forces that were disbanded on January 6, 1995 by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (English | Spanish)
Continue reading →By Staff (gp), AlterPresse | Commentary and translation by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. Director General of Haitian police, Mario Andresol, says the drug traffic in Haiti has intensified, but Assistant Secretary of State for the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, William Brownfield, says the drug traffic has slowed. Nevertheless they agree that Haiti needs more weapons and militarized police. (English | French)
Continue reading →By Staff, Haiti Grassroots Watch. Part 4 of 7. ”You get some factories and some salaries, and everything else is imported…. People need to know what FTZs are, what has happened in Mexico, or Honduras, so they don’t think these things will ‘save’ us.” – Camille Chalmers, Economist. (English | French)
