Opinion and Analysis Archive

31.01.2006 While the many of us snap up £1.99 flights to Rome, a small but growing band of conscientious objectors are making a stand by refusing to fly. Is this the beginning of the budget travel backlash, asks Tom Robbins.

28.01.2006 After years of ignoring the social contract, the global corporate elite currently gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum may soon find there is bad news ahead and that the party is coming to an end, says Jeff Faux.

27.01.2006 Ben Terrall examines Haiti’s coup regime, human rights abuses, the sham of planned elections and the complicity of Washington on a military and diplomatic level.

26.01.2006 "I heard this evening that the UN are going to launch an emergency appeal for the area on 10 February. If donors don’t respond generously and immediately, what I’m seeing now will pale in comparison with what will come." Brendan Cox reports from Wajir, Kenya.

26.01.2006 At least $232 billion was sent home by around 200 million migrants last year, three times official development aid, says Manuel Orozco, and he asks: What impact is this having on poverty reduction?

25.01.2006 The pressures of occupation and poverty are undiminished, but the Palestine election is an opportunity for activists to promote a vision of change, finds Eóin Murray.
* Also, read OneWorld UK's Palestine Guide

24.01.2006 The Iraqi body politic is shattered, with little hope now of avoiding an all-out civil war. That, says Robert Dreyfuss, is the only conclusion that can be reached by looking at the results of the Iraq election, the official returns of which were announced on Friday.

23.01.2006 Recent racially motivated attacks in Russia are triggering debate over how to deal with rising xenophobia, reports Fred Weir.

20.01.2006 The unprecedented appointment of women to key posts in the Tanzanian cabinet is just a beginning, argues Salma Maoulidi: "We must ensure that women...make a difference once in office...lest we fall victims to the 'See, women can’t lead' rejoinder."

18.01.2006 When it comes to gay relationships, the most impoverished countries are the most prejudiced - a fact difficult for many to acknowledge, since they prefer to see poor people as victims of prejudice rather than as perpetrators of it, says Jeremy Seabrook.

17.01.2006 The Khartoum government continues to get away with murder in Darfur and people urging intervention on strictly humanitarian grounds have no influence. The result is virtually pre-ordained: the death, rape and suffering will continue, says Gerald Caplan.

16.01.2006 Many Sri Lankan journalists feel that, once again, they are under threat in a country with a history of attempts to muzzle the media, says Amantha Perera.

12.01.2006 Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has found it all too easy to regulate the media and far harder to deal fairly with an aggressively independent free press, says Ardimas Sasdi.

11.01.2006 After a year of disasters, Christian Aid’s international director, Paul Valentin, counts the cost of the world’s failure to recognise that prevention is better than cure.

10.01.2006 For four years Guantánamo’s high profile obscured a far shadier world of US-sponsored interrogation chambers around the world, writes Clive Stafford Smith. Only now is the world finally asking about the archipelago of US prisons around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying prisoners from one torture chamber to the next.

09.01.2006 After two decades of discussion a key new draft treaty is likely to be adopted by the UN General Assembly this year. At the same time, the world’s most powerful government apparently believes it is authorised to disappear people if and when it wishes. Steve Crawshaw reports.

06.01.2006 As driver churn their way through the desert dunes of Mauritania and Mali on their way to hoped-for victory in this year’s Lisbon-Dakar rally, the billowing sands keep some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations out of sight.

04.01.2006 The Russia-Ukraine crisis is a reminder that politics, not the market, is driving global energy policies, says Daniel Litvin.

04.01.2006 'Within our lifetimes, and those of our children, we will have released the sleeping giants of undersea methane, new epidemics, water wars, melted glaciers, economic chaos and famine - if we go on as we are. Irreversibility Day is set for 2030 – unless we each commit to taking serious personal action now' - a call to action by OneWorld UK Director Anuradha Vittachi, as OneWorld's new Carbon countdown megablog is launched.

03.01.2006 Leading thinkers and scholars from around the world share their fears, hopes and expectations of 2006.