International

India’s prime minister appealed Monday for a more reasoned approach to combating corruption, as huge crowds turned out to support a hunger-striking activist on the seventh day of his anti-corruption fast.

Population growth and water stress are driving Earth to a food and environmental crunch that only better farming techniques and smarter use of the ecosystem will avert, a UN report issued on Monday said.

Indian activist Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption hunger strike drew thousands of supporters to central New Delhi on Saturday as his populist campaign sought to face down the government. The 74-year-old spoke briefly to the crowds from a high podium before he reclined on cushions to be feted with speeches, chanting and live music during the second day of his public fast.

The People’s Party of Palestine (PPP) organized a march in Nablus yesterday, calling for a boycott Israeli goods to show solidarity with the people of Gaza.

The European Revolution news portal has published a summary of what’s been taking place in Spain for the last three months where people haven’t been so mobilized for generations. “Yet what is certain is that new and powerful social movement has been born here in Spain and it will continue.”

What does the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco have to do with the Arab Spring uprisings from Tunisia to Syria? The attempt to suppress the protests that followed. In our digitally networked world, the ability to communicate is increasingly viewed as a basic right. Open communication fuels revolutions—it can take down dictators.

Australia’s top medical body has condemned the mandatory detention of boatpeople as “inherently harmful” to their physical and mental health, after documents revealed a surge in self-harm among detainees.

Despite the very low wintry temperatures and the heavy rainfall all day last Thursday in the city of Santiago, Chilean students went on with the massive social protest which has been described as the unprecedented “march of the hundred thousand umbrellas against profiteering in education”.

This was the prayer of the thousands of placards that, under continuous rain and a temperature close to freezing, were carried through the streets of Santiago today by almost 100 thousand people, obediently sticking to the new route outlined by the government in order to distance the protest and its conscience-raising role from the centre of the capital.

Protesters prepared to take to Madrid’s streets Wednesday to decry the cost of a rock festival-style, million-strong youth party for Pope Benedict XVI in the midst of an economic crisis. On the eve of the 84-year-old pontiff’s arrival in the Spanish capital to celebrate lavish World Youth Day events, more than 100 groups opposed to the visit are protesting.