Burdened by decades of neocolonialism and corruption, Senegal faces an all-too-familiar dilemma faced by countries across the Global South: how to pursue sovereign development under the weight of debt. 

Egyptian economist Samir Amin observed the dangers of our world but also its possibilities. 

In a letter to his five children written en route to Bolivia, Ernesto Che Guevara said: “Always be able to feel deep within your being all the injustices committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality a revolutionary can have.” Che’s legacy remains a doctor’s love for humanity.

Two recommendations from the report stand out. First, it asks that the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel. Second, the report urges that UN member states allow criminal prosecutions of Israeli officials connected with the practices of apartheid against the Palestinian people. Since most of the world’s states have signed the Convention Against Apartheid, they are now obliged to act.

Aylan Kurdi is dead. Many other Aylan Kurdis remain. Our outrage at this callous death should drive us deeper into a politics that calls for a drawdown of the violence in Syria and for a serious peace process in Libya, that forces us to be resolute in our fight against IMF and NATO destruction of societies and states.

Joining Kenya, Ethiopia, Paraguay and Macedonia — all lobbied by Israel over the course of the year - India abstained from a crucial vote that would have allowed the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli war crimes. The decision sends signals of India’s disturbingly different stance towards Palestine.

The workers’ tragedy in Dhaka provides a peek into the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the global garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s

Obama’s second term opens with the worst kind of display of US power – backing two clients, Rwanda and Israel, who are hell-bent on creating mayhem against their neighbours. UN will do nothing against these two.

American ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three officials were killed when a mob attacked the US consulate in Benghazi on 12 September. The protest arguably emerged out of a long-standing sense of humiliation and anger at the West.

NATO has consistently blocked any attempt to scrutinise the war crimes it committed during the ‘humanitarian intervention' in Libya.

Slowly, the South has tried to revive UNCTAD, whose policy framers have become a bit more aggressive in their defence of an alternative to neo-liberalism.

A new UN report strongly suggests that the rush to a NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ might have been made on exaggerated evidence, and that NATO’s own military intervention might have been less than ‘humanitarian’ in its effects.

With international diplomacy at the UN deadlocked on issues like climate change, new regional formations offer a way forward.

‘The slow US support for the uprising in Egypt, the cautious tone with Bahrain and Yemen, and the strident language against Libya are of a piece: The US is not driven by the popular upsurge but by its desire to control the events in north Africa and the Gulf to accord with the three pillars of its foreign policy in the Arab world, writes Vijay Prashad.

Reflecting on the background to Ethiopia's 1984 famine and the global media's portrayal of an 'icon of misery', Vijay Prashad revisits the broader geopolitical context behind the country's repeated bouts of food insecurity during the period. If Haiti, as a contemporary equivalent, is to be able to offer prosperity to its people, then the current momentum behind raising aid needs to be harnessed to cancel the country's iniquitous debt, Prashad stresses, as part of a broader global transformation of economic relations envisaged under initiatives such as the 1973 United Nations new international economic order (NIEO).

With the US intent on continuing its funding for counterterrorism efforts against 'al-Qaeda' in Mali, Vijay Prashad argues that blindly channelling funds to the Malian military might well lead to the country going 'the way of Guinea'. Washington's focus is entirely on counterterrorism efforts, Prashad stresses, with the military support on offer to Mali dwarfing that available for development while enabling former military general and current President Amadou Toumani Touré to consolidate his power.