International

Over 200 people, Africans fleeing Libya by boat, drowned on Wednesday before reaching safety in Italy. It is just one of many tragedies resulting from North Africa’s refugee crisis, one of the world’s worst, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres. Many of the refugees who were fleeing Libya in fact came from Somalia, Eritrea and Ivory Coast.

Ai Weiwei was being monitored around the clock by the secret police when **Time Out Hong Kong** gained access to his Beijing studio to discuss the ‘Jasmine Revolution’. This must be the last interview before his disappearance. Although Mr Ai has had numerous run-ins with China’s state security apparatus he has never been formally detained or disappeared in this way before.

Intentional or not, as there are no documents to support this hypothesis, the attack on Libya has served as a diversion to hamper a possible “second wave” of popular revolts in the Arab world. These are the thoughts of the political analyst Immanuel Wallerstein in Znet, published on 2 April by Rebelión and we circulate it because it is a different – and possible – view.

The former Landsbankinn in Iceland that went bankrupt in the big financial crash in Iceland in October 2008 offered its British customers sky high interests, way above any that of any other bank. The question at stake in the referendum is whether or not Icelandic taxpayers should compensate those who put their money in the Icesave account now that Landsbankinn is bankrupt.

The White House-massaged media spin portrays President Barack Obama’s decision to go to war in Libya as a triumph for a triumvirate of liberals — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and Obama adviser Samantha Power — who have well-established records of advocating the use of U.S. military force for “humanitarian” purposes.

The likelihood of DU use in Libya has now increased following the deployment and use of A-10 and Harrier AV-8B aircraft. ICBUW calls for pressure to be brought on the US to clarify the situation, and to put DU ammunition beyond use.

Below is a letter from Anne, an English teacher living in Japan for the last 10 years. Having survived the Earthquake she writes about the very human response to the tragedy that is afflicting the people in this part of Japan in stark contrast to the scenes of looting and violence that seem to accompany other natural disasters around the world.

Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award and members of the World Future Council have called for a global phase-out of atomic power reactors as well as the abolition of nuclear weapons. In a joint statement, fifty laureates said the Japanese nuclear disaster had raised global awareness of the extreme dangers that can result from nuclear power generation.

Responding to the comment by Japanese nuclear safety agency spokesman Mr. Nishiyama that Greenpeace’s radiation data from Iidate village, 40km from the crisis-ridden Fukushima nuclear plant “could not be considered reliable” (1), and that most people have already voluntarily left the town of Iitate, Greenpeace radiation expert Jan van der Putte said:

In his early thirties, Kamakura-born Koichi Nakatani will never forget the day he stepped outside his isolated Hokkaido home and began as usual to breathe in the beautiful day when the thought struck him…. ‘oh, radiation is in the air, I shouldn’t really breathe deeply; oh my open sea and sky, will I ever be able to breathe deeply here again?’