Le Monde Diplomatique

Speculating on hunger
by Jean Ziegler
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Financial speculators invested in food futures even before the great crash of 2008, driving up food prices to dangerous levels. This can and must be stoppedThe asphalt road was straight and monotonous. Baobab trees passed one after the other, and the earth was yellow and dusty, despite the early hour. The air in the old black Peugeot was stifling. I was travelling north, towards Senegal's big plantations, with Adama Faye, an agronomist and overseas development adviser to the Swiss embassy, (...) - 2012/02 / Password

France: is the future still nuclear?
by Tristan Coloma
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Nuclear power will be a key issue in France's presidential election, following last year's explosion at Marcoule and the Fukushima disaster in Japan. But in the world's most nuclear-reliant country, not just safety is at stake“Nuclear Power? No Thanks!” Public reactions to the Fukushima disaster could change the global energy landscape. In India and China there have been violent demonstrations against the building of new nuclear power stations. Germany plans to phase out nuclear power by 2022, (...) - 2012/02 / Password

Online disappointment
by Smain Laacher and Cédric Terzi
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Young Tunisian bloggers who promoted and recorded the events of the Arab Spring now find that, without a common enemy, the social media are just a cacophony of divided and conflicting views
Internet activists, documenting living conditions and expressing their sense of injustice were important to the Arab Spring. Most were 20-30 year olds from the urban middle class with little experience of activism, who insisted that what they did was apolitical. Repression united them: “When Ben Ali was (...) - 2012/02 / Open access

Live, on the Egyptian street
by Navid Hassanpour
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
It's already the conventional view that new social media inspired and aided the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptian revolution. The reality was a little different
The world saw the Egyptian revolution happen onscreen. It was broadcast live, in real time, through Twitter and Facebook status updates, a political thriller with millions of actors. The protest banners and placards were addressed to the lenses of the media and through them to the world. Satellite television channels became part (...) - 2012/02 / Open access

Anonymous power
by Felix Stalder
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Wikipedia last month joined blackout protests against US anti-piracy moves. Now cyber protestors, safe in their anonymity, are able to gang together briefly in support of specific causes Recent targets of the highly effective “Anonymous” cyberattacks, made in the name of freedom of speech and social justice, include the Belgian website of steel giant ArcelorMittal, hacked in January in protest against the closure of two blast furnaces; the website of the US private intelligence firm Stratfor, (...) - 2012/02 / Password

Senegal falls behind the rest of Africa
by Sanou Mbaye
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Senegal's constitutional court in late January cleared President Wade to stand for a third term in the coming elections. Protests swept the country at this news for, under Wade, a once prosperous economy has dropped behind that of its neighboursAt independence in 1960, Senegal was the richest country in West Africa, in infrastructure and human resources. Over the years, these advantages have dwindled away. Senegal is unable to keep pace with the economic growth the rest of Africa is (...) - 2012/02 / Password

Israel: a mission to disrupt
by Meron Rapoport
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
In testimonies collected and published by the NGO Breaking the Silence, we learn what Israeli soldiers did, and were expected to do, in the West Bank and Gaza in the past decade, to impose the occupation “I'll tell you when I flipped. We were in action in Gaza… We were in a trench and children got closer and threw stones. The orders were that the moment [a Palestinian] can hit you with a stone, he can hit you with a grenade... so I shot him. He was 12, or 15, something like that. I don't think (...) - 2012/02 / Password

The pirate nobody wants
by Rémi Carayol
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
The idea seems good: try pirates where they've been taken after capture. But the trial of a group of Somalis brought in at the conclusion of an army raid was a political showAbdulahi Ahmed Guelleh, 36, was freed on 30 November 2011. Just before midnight the warders at La Santé prison in Paris, where he had been locked up for several months, threw him out. He was frightened, and did not want to leave. He knows very little about France, even though he has spent more than three years there, (...) - 2012/02 / Open access

The competence of tyrants
by Joseph Sassoon
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
The Ba'ath Party under Assad runs Syria as it ran Iraq under Saddam. An external invasion was needed to topple Saddam — will Assad fall of his own accord? Syria and Iraq were both controlled by the Ba'ath Party (in Iraq 1968-2003; in Syria under the Assad dynasty from 1970 to the present), and many of their decision-making mechanisms were similar. Both regimes created a centralised bureaucracy with the president at its apex and security services integral to the system. In both countries, (...) - 2012/02 / Password

Hungary without safety nets
by G M Tamás
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Viktor Orbán and his rightwing government are interested only in a young and entrepreneurial middle class, conservative and nationalist. For everybody else, there is no encouragement or financial supportThe mood of fear in Hungary is not just the result of the economic crisis and policies of Viktor Orbán's government; it is a failure of the democratic republic, and the neoliberal regime behind it, to create a fairer social order. If people had felt a little freer and more secure, or that they (...) - 2012/02 / Password

North Korea's dynastic succession
by Bruce Cumings
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
When North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, died, there was widespread concern about the consequences, especially in the West. But his son seems to have succeeded smoothly: the country will not collapse, implode or explode. The succession appears to be safe, and may last a long timeI was in Singapore when Kim Jong-il died on 17 December, so I was reading from a salutary distance what passed for expert American commentary. “North Korea as we know it is over,” according to a piece in The New York (...) - 2012/02 / Open access

In search of a national identity
by Martine Bulard
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
“I used to describe myself as Chinese, because that's what I'd learnt in my history books. It was only when I went to study in Belgium that I discovered I was actually Taiwanese.” Iris, who is finishing a Masters on puppet theatre, got quite emotional. She learned there was a difference when she first met students from the People's Republic of China, also studying in Europe. Years later, she still gets angry about her Taiwanese education when she thinks about that moment of revelation.
Until (...) - 2012/02 / Password, 2012/02 - Taiwan

Taiwan is open for business
by Martine Bulard
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
There was relief in China, Taiwan and Washington in January when Taiwan's outgoing president Ma Ying-jeou, who supports closer ties with mainland China, was re-elected with a comfortable majority. His opponent, Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party, who seemed likely to topple him, favours formal independence for Taiwan Sociologist Hsiao Hsin-huang Michael is a man in a hurry. Although close to the separatist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) he is not engrossed in the election (...) - 2012/02 / Password, 2012/02 - Taiwan

Jobs and wages
by Anne Dufresne
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
“We have built one of the best low-wage sectors in Europe,” boasted Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2005. Since 2003 policies designed to increase labour market flexibility (known as the Hartz reforms) have made German workers considerably poorer. Temporary work has become a sector in its own right, unemployment benefit payments linked to previous income have been abolished and “mini-jobs” (flexible jobs paying ? 400 a month) have appeared. Around (...) - 2012/02 / Password, 2012/02 - Salaries

Less pay for the workers
by Anne Dufresne
3 Feb 2012 at 5:41pm
Wages used to be none of the EU's business. But following the German example, lower pay (or more hours for the same money) has become normalised, and is now requiredIn April 2010 the “troika” of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund intervened in Greece's collective bargaining process. The Greek government agreed to cut public sector salaries (by around 25%). In June 2010 the troika urged the Romanian government to adopt “a revised labour code (...) - 2012/02 / Password, 2012/02 - Salaries