Global News and Analysis

Source: In These Times

As thousands of marchers converged on the plaza outside the national Congress building on the anniversary of the coup in Honduras June 28, a handful of famished, exhausted but determined educators looked on from tents—on the 35th day of a hunger strike.

The educators are just one of the many faces of the Honduran resistance movement that has blossomed in the past year, uniting unionists, indigenous people, feminists, LGBT activists, campesinos and other factions who previously had little contact. (Read Jeremy Kryt’s reporting from Honduras for In These Times here.) read more

Ten years later, evidence that conviction of ‘Cuban 5’ influenced by journalists on State Dept payroll

Source: IPS News

The entry of a Swedish-led oil consortium into southern Sudan in 1997 triggered civil war and crimes against humanity, claims a European coalition of aid agencies.

The European Coalition on Oil in Sudan (ECOS) has called on the Swedish, Austrian and Malaysian governments to investigate into the possible complicity of the consortium in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

When the Swedish company Lundin Oil formed a consortium with Petronas Carigali Overseas from Malaysia, OMV (Sudan) Exploration from Austria and Sudapet from Sudan in 1997, they signed a contract with Khartoum to drill for oil in Block 5A in Unity State, southern Sudan. read more

Source: Truthout

At a dinner party, an ever-so-proper aristocrat who had been at the British evacuation of Dunkirk 60 years ago, remained tightlipped despite intense questioning from the other guests about what he had seen there. Finally, he shuddered at the memory and exclaimed, “The noise, my dear, and the people!”

An apocryphal story, perhaps, but the high-falutin’ Supreme Court of the United States has the same attitude toward America – this would be such a great country if it wasn’t for all the noise and people. read more

Source: The Independent

Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses—for food, for sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through history, and it’s everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house. George Washington insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs, and hangovers. read more