Region

Without decent roads people cannot go about daily life with ease, children cannot get to schools easily and farmers cannot get their crops to market. Also, vehicles quickly deteriorate and break down and the cumulative effect is one of dis-communication, heavy costs for repairs on local economies already under stress and a disabling of people’s lives generally.

Confronted with widespread public discontent, Tunisian Prime Minister Beji Caid el Sebsi on Thursday defended his government’s record and said it was doing “the impossible” to bring about elections.

A young Algerian, Sid Hamed Bouzaine has been released from an immigration detention centre near Malaga. After even being made to marry his girlfriend of 2 years, Spanish Authorities have seemingly bowed to public pressure and accepted his claim to stay in the country given that reportedly three of his brothers have been killed by the state and the other one has disappeared.

This is what different French public figures and some of the organisations principally committed to defending the gypsies have announced. Since last summer, the French Government of Nicolas Sarkozy has continued to apply all kinds of pressures so that the Romanian and Bulgarian gypsies, Community citizens, leave France for good.

Thousands of students marched through the rain on Thursday demanding far-reaching education reforms and dismissing the government’s latest plan to resolve the weeks-old crisis. For three months students have been taking to the streets to demand free public education and an end to for-profit schools, which are seen as fuelling high prices and disparity between the rich and poor.

At least 50,000 Brazilian rural workers called for increased social justice, especially for women, from President Dilma Rousseff’s government as they marched through Brasilia’s streets on Wednesday. “Brazil is a very socially unequal country and when it comes to women, that inequality is even bigger,” said Carmen Foro, who coordinated this year’s annual protest march.

The Venezuelan Minister for Energy and Oil, Rafael Ramírez, said bringing home the gold is a measure that will strengthen the economy and sovereignty. He also defended the government project to nationalise gold mining in the country. The Venezuelan executive announced on Wednesday that it will recover the gold deposited in countries such as the UK, the USA and Canada.

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.

Police tightened security in main cities on Wednesday in case of anti-government protests even though organisers had a day earlier postponed the vigils after deadly riots last month. Several shops and banks did not open for business in Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu – the 3 main towns affected by last month’s security crackdown on protesters which killed 19 people, police said.