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Once again, during the recent revolt against the First Employment Contract, the enthusiasm and dynamism evident on French streets were in marked contrast with the disconcerting silence of French thinkers and writers. The same was true during the November riots in the banlieues. There was a lot of chattering, but few, other than such rare figures as Jean Baudrillard and John Berger, were able to read the events, uncover their deeper significance and suggest what they might portend. With no (...)
Translated by Donald Hounam and Harry Forster
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‘Withdraw, move on and rampage’
Iraq is simultaneously descending into both a civil war and a war of resistance against foreign occupation. The United States has been hoping to exploit the divide between Iraqi patriots and global jihadists, but the Sunni opposition is growing more structured and unified as it adapts to changing conditions, and may transcend those divisions.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
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‘A demonisation process is under way’
Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria is looking weaker as it faces heavy pressure from the United States and France, plus domestic opposition. Yet the Ba’ath party has had Syria in its grip for 40 years and has little intention of losing its controlling power.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
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The slogan is ‘do business, not politics’
A bazaar economy has taken over the towns of Algeria, a country that is in the grip of an economic fever. Despite its oil revenues, it cannot pay its public servants properly, other than the police; it has a chronic youth unemployment problem and treasury corruption.
Translated by Donald Hounam
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‘There is no responsible use of torture’
Original text in English
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‘The price of oil is rising, and may never fall’
News that Russian oil production will be lower than expected in the next few years and anxieties about Iran’s nuclear ambitions have pushed oil prices well over $70 a barrel, perhaps towards the $100 mark. And the price may never fall again.
Translated by Donald Hounam
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‘Why did we let this war poison everything?’
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said last month that the UNHCR would open an office in Grozny as soon as security permits. The appearance of normalisation implied by his statement is deceptive. The Russians are counting on continued violence, and local resignation.
Translated by Krystyna Horko
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Translated by Krystyna Horko
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Lessons from a terrible global experience
It’s almost 200 years since the Anglo-American trade was banned: how do historians now view its practices and effects?
Original text in English
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Education leads to temping and unemployment
Translated by Krystyna Horko
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Translated by Krystyna Horko
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Pharmaceuticals for healthy people
US pharmaceutical companies have long known that the potential market for their products is limited by the finite number of sick people; so they have turned to the healthy for further expansion of their markets, using exploitative, fear-inducing advertising techniques.
Original text in English
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‘Western knowledge as mortal as its predecessors’
Each civilisation on earth has taken its own route in the pursuit of knowledge, and interaction between those civilisations has been less frequent than we tend to assume, suggesting that there can be no such thing as universal science on this planet, let alone beyond it.
Translated by Harry Forster
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Songs from a prison cell
Original text in English
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A new initiative at the WHO
Original text in English