18th April 08 - Robert Weissman, Dissident Voice

Have things changed at the International Monetary Fund? Or is the world just witnessing yet another in a long series of global economic double standards? IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn says that the “need for public intervention” to address the global financial crisis “is becoming more evident.” Strauss-Kahn has urged for a global fiscal stimulus, writing that, “Timely and targeted fiscal stimulus can add to aggregate demand in a way that supports private consumption during a critical phase.”

17th April 08 - Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, Counter Punch

The randomness of numbers sometimes throws up some striking coincidences. Behind the shadow plays conjured up by the zealous servants of neoliberal globalisation, the brutal backstage reality revealed itself this week, through the publication of two international statistics.

17th April 08 - Michela Wrong, New Statesman

In much of Africa today, the sad reality is that land is still the only asset guaranteed to retain its value. It is rare for African societies to show much interest in their neighbours' affairs. Language differences and cultural perspectives rooted in the colonial era usually make the citizens of one African state feel they have more in common with events in Washington, Paris or London than the country next door.

16th April 08 - George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK)

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

16th April 08 - Michael T. Klare, Tom Dispatch

Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live -- trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

14th April 08 - Vandana Shiva, Al Jazeera

Prices of basic foods have sharply increased amid a rise in costs of commodities. The crisis has led to riots in poor countries by people who have limited access to food. Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author of many books. She talks to Al Jazeera about the food crisis in India, and what can be done to overcome it.

11th April 08 - Philip Bowring, Asia Sentinel

A growing confluence of events kicked off by Tibetan riots in March could end in disaster for the forces of global trade liberalization. The Tibet-inspired flameout of the Olympic torch on the streets of Paris could well be the symbolic turning point of the era of globalization, at least for its major recent beneficiary – China. Take it to an extreme and it recalls the comment of the then-British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on the eve of World War I, the end of another era of globalization: “The lights are going out all over Europe”.

11th April 08 - Jeremy Seabrook, The Guardian (UK)

As if to demonstrate that poverty is now a residual issue in the world, the poor are being slowly eliminated from the imagery of the busy global media. "Nowhere in Bollywood films do you see a poor person," says Pandurang Hegde, activist in the forests of northern Karnataka. "There is no place in the iconography of the new India for anything that suggests impoverishment and loss."

11th April 08 - Heidi Fritschel, Open Democracy

Prices are surging for food commodities worldwide, posing a tough policy challenge for developing countries - can they protect poor consumers without crushing new opportunities for farmers? Poor consumers across the globe are protesting about their rising food bills. In December 2007, Mexicans rioted in response to an enormous jump in tortilla prices, which quadrupled in some parts of the country; in January 2008, Indonesians took to the streets to protest high soybean prices; in February, protesters in three major towns in Burkina Faso, angry about the rising cost of food and other basic goods, attacked government offices and shops; unrest linked to food markets has occurred also in Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

11th April 08 - Haider Rizvi, IPS News

A new study released by an independent policy think tank casts further doubts on the World Bank's ability to stay neutral in the global politics of climate change. "It is making money off of causing the climate crisis and then turning around and claiming to solve it," charged Janet Redman, the study's lead author and a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies.