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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

North Korea vowed Wednesday to bolster its nuclear deterrent, describing an exercise by United States and South Korean troops as preparation for a “war of aggression” against the communist state.

“A new Chile is born,” said President Sebastián Piñera as he personally welcomed 33 miners at the surface after their spectacular rescue from a collapsed mine in the Atacama desert 10 months ago. The country has indeed changed since then but not as La Moneda palace’s current occupant expected.