Fighting for asylum rights

Across Europe governments are putting in place both joint and separate measures to control and prevent the entry into Europe of migrants trying to escape the political and economic consequences of neo-liberalism.

 

Home Office requests adjournment of hearing

The Ay family, Kurdish refugees from Turkey, are still battling against efforts by the Home Office to deport them from Britain.

 

Ruling-class opinions about the future of global capitalism are currently more divided than at any time for the last decade. The latest IMF ‘World Economic Outlook’ predicts US growth of 2.2 percent this year and 2.6 percent in 2003, stating that ‘the global slowdown in 2000-01 has proved to be more moderate than most previous downturns’.

 

European Social Forum - Against a Europe of capital and war

Chris Nineham’s article on the European Social Forum (ESF) in October’s Socialist Review lays down some important markers for the future of the movement. Opposition to war in Iraq is, of course, the priority.

 

Ireland

In three well-orchestrated steps the British government has switched off the Irish ‘peace process’. High profile police raids were followed by a suspension of the assembly and Tony Blair’s watershed speech on the October 17. IRA disbandment is now a precondition for any restart.

 

Environment

THE ANNOUNCEMENTS, in the academic journals Nature and Science on 3rd October, of the sequencing of the genomes of one of the 170 malaria parasites and of a malaria-carrying mosquito, was greeted with much jubilation in the media. Malaria is one of the four most devastating infectious diseases (the others being dysentery, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS), killing 1-2 million people a year, 90 percent of them in Africa. This terrible statistic is compounded by a massive infection rate of 300-500 million people a year, many of whom become chronically debilitated.