November 2005 Archive 

Revving up the China Threat Michael Klare looks at how the Bush Administration’s stance on China has gone from worry about its economic strength to full-on preparation for a new cold war

The future is geek Why pay out good money to Microsoft and the big corporations when you can get the computer software you need for free? Derek Wall hails the open source revolutionaries

Open source and free software top 10

Paris is burning In 1991, after violent riots between youths and police scarred the suburbs of Lyon, French sociologist Alain Tourraine predicted that ‘it will only be a few years before we face the kind of massive urban explosion of the American experience’. The 12 nights of consecutive violence following the deaths of two young Muslim men of African descent in a Paris suburb indicate that Tourraine’s dark vision of a ghettoised, post-colonial France is now upon us.

Ceuta and Melilla: Europe’s wall of shame In the last week of September 2005, the true image of Fortress Europe entered our living rooms: black people hanging from barbed wire, laying down with broken arms an legs, bleeding and desperately asking for help. Since 27 September, when it is said that al least 1,000 tried to cross the 3 to 6-meter fence that separates Morocco from Melilla – a Spanish territory in the North African coast - similar images, if not worse, have been exposing the consequences of EU immigration policies.

Go home, George! Go home! US politics is edging closer to the point at which politicians will have no choice but to pack up and get out of Iraq, writes Robert Dreyfuss

Europe: bridging the emotional gap In search of a fresh argument for the left in Britain to become more European in its thinking and organising, I picked an extraordinary book off my bookshelf: `Europe in Love; Love in Europe’ by Louisa Passerini from the European University Institute in Florence.

Give me the music to free my soul The record companies are up in arms about music sharing over the internet. Susan D Seeking offers a guide to free, almost-free and paid-for sources

G8 – Africa nil Four months on and with the ‘historic G8 deal for Africa’ already in tatters, the Make Poverty History coalition is as silent as it was once ubiquitous. Ahead of December’s World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong, Stuart Hodkinson investigates

Pinter takes the prize Harold Pinter has been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, the most prestigious literary award in the world. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist ‘who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms’. David Edgar celebrates Pinter’s achievement

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