Politics

Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi is on Sunday set to make her first political trip outside her home city since she was freed from house arrest, despite a government security warning. Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of detention days after a controversial election last November, will visit the Bago region, about 80 kilometres north of Yangon.

To speak of nonviolence obliges us to review what we understand by violence. The great backing received by the 15-M movement in Spain is due, apart from their demands, to the fact that their actions and protests are peaceful and non-violent. Nevertheless, we still don’t know very well what nonviolence as a methodology of social struggle is.

Since May protests have been ongoing in Chile against the profit-making Education system. Chilean students mobilized to demand a profound reform in education, rejected on Sunday the possibility of negotiating with Congress and reaffirmed they would hold further marches throughout August.

The area where the first spark of rioting started, following the fatal shooting by police of a local resident, today saw a large and peaceful demonstration calling for an end to the violence on all sides but also for changes in the recent austerity measures that most of those marching see as the root cause of the recent disturbances.

London and other UK cities are descending into an uneasy, massive police deployment induced calm. The post-mortem has began, even if the beast is not quiet dead yet. Everybody has an opinion as to who’s to blame. Nobody is asking the kids (“thugs”? or “victims of social exclusion”?), now going through the courts, some as young as 10.

If we want to understand why there have been widespread incidents of street violence across London for the past few days, we need look no further than the comments of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he announced this Wednesday, “a fight-back is under way!” As if it were another country that had invaded the city!

Disappointed and frustrated, New York advocates condemn Friday’s announcement from the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ), which brazenly announced its decision to bypass state governments and implement Secure Communities ( S-Comm ) and unilaterally terminate its Memorandum of Agreements ( MOAs ) with states.

Here we publish in full the open letter by the Chilean Community in Support of the Humanitarian Crisis taking place in Syria and which gave rise to a public demonstration at the Sirian embassy in Santiago, denouncing the extreme violation of human rights that this government has been carrying out for months.

Death of a Tottenham resident in North London by Police shooting sparks three nights of rioting, looting, firebombing and attacks on Police by members of minority communities and youth gangs. Recent cuts to services in areas already deprived and marginalised seem to have created a toxic atmosphere that only needed a trigger, and sure enough, it happened.

The Ouattara government has repeatedly promised to break with the past, when security forces were above the law. Yet rather than create an army likely to respect the rule of law, Ouattara has promoted commanders who were in command when atrocities took place and should be investigated, not rewarded.