Read all posts from ‘Global Issues’

Roughly six weeks after 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa, the strikes are over and the miners have all gone back to work, having finally agreed to terms on a pay increase slightly lower than their original demands.  The dust […]

I can well imagine the slack jawed  expressions on some our front benchers’ beatific faces on seeing political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi’s cartoons on the net. Personnally I didn’t think they were extraordinarily funny  and were more the work of an amateur artist. Yet the portrayal of the three lions in […]

It’s been almost fifteen years since the end of the civil war and the landowners on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are discussing the return of the mining giant Rio Tinto. Rio’s infamous Panguna mine, owned by its subsidiary Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) was at the […]

Germany has an official agenda of supporting democracy and peace. However, the German arms industry sells weapons to dictators or conflict-suffering regions, sometimes to the detriment of even the country’s own interests. Compared to other NATO-states, Germany is generally reluctant to engage in wars. The most recent example is last […]

“An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.” Voltaire suggested more than two centuries ago. Scan the headlines of any major broadsheet today and you can see that many countries (Nepal included)  have taken the assassination bit more seriously than the democracy part. Nepal has been flirting with […]