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The first of February this year was a historic day in the Chinese village of Wukan. Several thousand villagers, who had chased out their corrupt old leaders, went to the polls to democratically elect new representatives. A few months later, on 27 May, there was another equally historic democratic election in a factory in nearby Shenzhen…

This is what the scientists say and it is CERN that announced the finding of the most sought-after elementary particle of recent decades, the Higgs boson, opening the doors to the subatomic world. Although other experts are more cautious: what has been registered indicates what could be the signature of the Higgs particle, such is science, very careful.

We are seeing increasing social protests all over the world, with hundreds of thousands on the streets from Santiago to Montreal, from Moscow to Tokyo and everywhere in between. Sudan, after having recently divorced its southern neighbour is a country not know for its human rights and police leniency, so it is encouraging that even here things are moving, even if carefully.

Three weeks of UN talks aimed at hammering out a draft treaty to regulate the $70 billion a year global arms trade finally got under way on Tuesday, a day late because of a diplomatic tussle over Palestinian representation.

Friends of the Humanist Movement and Silo’s message took a bus from Argentina’s Buenos Aires to Jujuy to accompany the Tupac Amaru in their celebrations of Inti Raymi. They joined together to absorb the force and energy of the winter solstice solar rays, of Tata Inti – Father Sun, while giving thanks for all the good that had happened while discarding all the bad.

During the handover of the first identity cards under the provisions of the new Gender Identity Law, President Cristina Kirchner said that, “although we still lack a lot of social equality, today is a day of immense reparation for those who, like some of you here today, have waited for your rights to feel like free men or women to be recognised for 42 years.”

I met Lucy at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum that took place in Bonn from 25 to 27/6/12. She was introducing some of her nonviolence work in Palestine and I was struck by the similarities of concepts and language with my own humanist take and work on active nonviolence, which is exactly how she put it. I wanted to know more about her work.

Read the report
Reporters Without Borders is today releasing a report on the crisis in the western state of Arakan, a copy of which it gave yesterday to National League for Democracy parliamentary representative Aung San Suu Kyi, who is currently on a four-day visit to Paris, the last leg of a European tour that ends tomorrow.

Almost half a million people were on the streets in protest July 1, 2012, marking the day this territory was handed back to Chinese sovereignly by the British 15 years ago. It’s not that people are displeased at that changeover, it’s what ‘one does’ these days to show the power-holders that everything is not quite in order, with the insistent demand, let’s get it right!

Revolution, Uprising, Protest Movement, Crisis, Armed Insurgency, Civil War, and many other variations of titles have been used over the past 15 months to describe events in Syria. There have been many disagreements on Syria over this span of time, but there is no disagreement over the fact that Syria has been the central event on the global political scene.