Rachel Shabi and John Hooper write:

"Genoa: Now, The Reckoning"
Rachel Shabi and John Hooper, The Guardian

[In the summer of 2001, Italian police launched a brutal raid on protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa after they had returned to their sleeping quarters. Among 62 injured were various Britons, some of whom have still not recovered. Finally, more than 60 officers are being called to account in court. Rachel Shabi and John Hooper report.]

On Saturday night, July 21 2001, Richard Moth and his girlfriend Nicola Doherty left their friends in a Genoa bar because she was feeling tired and wanted an early night. The two London care workers were among vast numbers of people demonstrating at that year's G8 summit. Protesters against corporate globalisation had been following the leaders of the world's major industrial nations to their annual meetings in different parts of the globe since 1998. But this was a gathering on a scale unlike anything that had preceded it. The organisers put the numbers at 200,000; the police said there were 100,000. And it had turned ugly. Even though — or perhaps because — there were 20,000 police in Genoa, including reinforcements drawn from all over Italy, the summit protests became a bloody battleground.

Four More Years of Bush Makes the World Anxious

Timothy Heritage, Reuters

PARIS — The rest of the world will be watching with anxiety when President Bush is inaugurated Thursday for a second time, fearing the most powerful man on the planet may do more harm than good.

Many world leaders, alienated by Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy and the U.S.-led war in Iraq, would have preferred him to lose the U.S. election last November. Since his victory, they have been urging him to listen and consult more.

kernow writes:

"The Challenge of the New Right"

David Garcia, Precarity Forum Provocation #2

This began off list when I engaged Patrice Riemens in discussion. As this meeting is taking place in the Netherlands I think that it is important to learn the lessons of the rise of the new european right. Unlike the mainstream centrist parties the new european right has made significant political capital out of the fact that the globalised free market has losers as well as winners even in the rich countries. In doing so they have outflanked the old political parties, moving with great effectiveness to exploit the dislocations and insecurities created by the global free market to re-ignite the old mix of racism and xenophobia.

"Thatcher Must Stay Away from Africa"

Zimbabwe Herald

The ordinary British, French, German, Belgian,
Portuguese and Spanish man or woman did not benefit
from the colonies.

In fact, they were expected to die for them when
troops were sent out to crush resistance from
"natives" who felt semi-slavery was not that wonderful
an option.

The people who benefited, Cecil John Rhodes and his
ilk, were those who guided the process and made sure
they won the commercial rewards, looting Africa and
the pockets of their metropolitan taxpayers.