Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian activist, academic and spoken word artist. She is currently a Phd. candidate in Political Science at York University in Toronto. She released her spoken word CD Hadeel in Novermber 2009. Here she performs 'Shades of Anger'.

This is a recording of a speech made by Arundhati Roy as a part of the Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Trust Lecture that was delivered on the 20th of January, 2012 at Xaviers college, Mumbai, India.

Nicolas Sarkozy has declared there are too many foreigners in France, deliberately using extreme-right rhetoric to regain ground in his difficult re-election battle. The French president is already under attack by religious leaders and from within his own party for veering to the right and stoking anti-Muslim sentiment by forcing the marginal topic of halal meat into the centre of his campaign. He has now vowed to cut immigration by half and limit state benefits for legal migrants.

The Brazilian government is stepping up South-South aid, to strengthen the South American giant’s status as a donor country and its international clout. It now provides assistance to 65 countries, and its financial aid has grown threefold in the last seven years. A project to extend financing for food purchases to five countries in Africa has helped confirm that Brazil, traditionally a recipient of aid, has taken its place among the group of foreign donor countries.

The third Global Health Watch report shows that health financing, including dwindling support for AIDS, is one of the challenges facing global health. The third edition of the Global Health Watch report provides an analysis of health challenges facing the world today. It also seeks solutions to these challenges. The new edition identifies three main issues that affect people around the world. 'We talk about the three acts – the three main crises that face poor people every day...the crises of finance, of food and fuel, which are life crises squeezing people’s lives throughout the world,' said Peter Benjamin of the People’s Health Movement, during the launch of the report in Johannesburg.

At the battered terminal of Tripoli’s tiny Mitiga airport, over 150 young men and women jostle to be repatriated home to Nigeria on Libya’s Buraq airlines. This journey to Lagos is one of hundreds the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has facilitated since the start of the uprising against Gaddafi’s regime over a year ago. IOM estimates that one million migrant workers were in Libya sending remittances home before the crisis, a heavy footprint for a Libyan population of under seven million.

The Municipal Services Project, which explores alternatives to privatisation, has a new website which is well worth a visit. It has links to publications, blog posts and a twitter feed.

Kenyan fighter jets have stricken several targets in the southern Somali town of Diff, raising fears of potential casualties, Press TV reports. A Diff resident told Press TV that four warplanes launched raids on Monday 5 March and bombarded training camps of Somali militant group, Al-Shabab in Diff, about 20 km from the border.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

In the context of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, stepping down, Yemeni blogger Noon Arabia writes that many analysts agree that the US policy in Yemen has predominantly been viewed from the terrorism prism, but one doesn't need to be an expert to notice that it has not been successful so far and has in fact backfired on the US. The use of drones on Yemeni soil to kill 'suspected' al Qaeda leaders, the unjustified killing of a teenager and many other innocent civilians commonly referred to as 'collateral damage' and the illegal detention of a journalist, has fostered more animosity towards the US.

Can institutional philanthropy - foundations established by the very wealthy and capitalized by investments in the stock market, hedge funds, and offshore investments - support a movement that challenges the very capitalist economic system that sustains it?

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Human life cannot co-exist with nuclear power. The best way to prevent more nuclear disasters is to finally put an end to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Visit this page to find out more.

The Africa Today broadcast for 27 February has interviews with Dr. Nia Imara and Pierre Labossiere of Haiti Action Committee for an update on Haiti eight years after the coup and talks with Nehanda Imara of Communities for a Better Environment on a series of community classes on urban agriculture, the environment, and health.

Amidst all the wars, violence, natural catastrophes and personal tragedies that we are surrounded with, pluralistic notions of identity founded on a harmonious blend of universal values with local diversity hold out hopes of a better world.

The Radical History Review seeks submissions for an issue on the global politics of the anti-apartheid movement, 1946-1994. The time frame underlines our sense of the global significance of what we call the Anti-apartheid Era, inaugurated by the postwar United Nations Debates on discrimination suffered by Indians in South Africa and culminating in the post-Cold War transition to democracy in South Africa during the 1990s. As we see it, this anti-apartheid era encompasses the evolution of the United Nations, decolonization, the Cold War, the founding of the non-aligned movement at Bandung, the rise [and fall] of Third World solidarity structures, the US Civil Rights Movements, Left-Leaning Revolutions, human rights politics, upheavals of the global Sixties, and the onset of neoliberal globalization and offers new ways of connecting and contextualizing these various developments.

For the first time and more than twenty years after the official recognition of their rights, children are provided with the possibility to access justice at the international level through a newly adopted complaints procedure. For this procedure to become a tangible reality for child victims, States need to sign and ratify the new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child before it can enter into force and display its effects. The official UN signing ceremony opening the Protocol for signature and ratification took place 28 February 2012, during the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

In keeping with Western medicine’s approach to illness, the international community’s anti-corruption strategies treat the symptom of corruption rather than the cause; seeking to stifle the outcomes of a flawed system rather than rightfully treating it as the disease itself, concludes this article from the Peace and Conflict Monitor. 'The most significant conclusions relate to a re-conceptualization of our understanding of the corruption-causes-poverty narrative by calling for a re-moralization of the corruption debate within the larger systemic context of the neoliberal world order. '

The world’s rapid urbanisation means hundreds of millions of children are not getting even their most basic needs met, the United Nations children agency (UNICEF) warns in a report. Children in slums and poor urban communities lack access to clean water, sanitation and education, as services struggle to keep up with fast urban growth, says the aid agency’s flagship State of the World’s Children report which this year focuses on urban poverty.

Mari Monique was pregnant when they pooled all of their savings to join one of the first emigrant groups that opened a gruelling route in search of Brazil’s economic growth promise. The same path has now been trodden by more than 4,000 fellow Haitians. The route begins in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, where emigrants embark on a plane that takes them to Panama. Continuing by bus and on foot, the groups make their way through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and sometimes Bolivia before finally reaching the Amazon border – still a week by boat from the nearest big city. The entire journey can take up to two months, depending on the traveller’s ability to find their way through Spanish-speaking countries, and can cost as much as $3,000.

More than seven months overdue, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria grant will finally be released to key South African AIDS organizations that have been struggling to survive. Some were on the verge of shutting down. The Global Fund released US$7,106,426.91 to the South African National Treasury on 6 February, the same day seven of the grant's sub-recipients delivered an open letter to Minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, pleading for intervention to bring the Fund's 'life-threatening delays' to an end.