Just as the world's attention was focussed on China's Beijing Olympics, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, on 7 August, invaded the tiny breakaway province of South Ossetia. The initial attack on the South Ossetian capital, Tskninvali, soon extended to an all out war.

In 1962, Stalinism was given a name: Ivan Denisovich. Six years earlier, Nikita Khrushchev, behind closed doors and at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, revealed the magnitude of Stalinist repression and crimes.

The Republican Right and their many friends and allies in the media are attacking Barack Obama for saying little about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Obama made an initial statement, which was strongly critical of Russia, but called for a United Nations role and made no direct threats.

For those in the war torn Caucasus this has been a week of unfathomable turmoil. It has been a week filled with images of displaced peoples, and the instruments of modern warfare doing what they do best, dispensing death.

U.S. corporate media frequently evoked the Cold War as a key to understanding the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. This was certainly true of the media themselves, which generally placed black hats or white hats on the actors involved.

President Dmitri Medvedev said Russia will respect whatever status the autonomous South Ossetia and Abkhazia Republics may choose and guarantee its global acceptance.

The Georgian military invasion of South Ossetia, a de facto autonomous region with its own government since the early 1990s, followed by the swift Russian counter-attack which drove out the Georgian forces, has provoked a lot of talk in the media but little clarity.

A former top leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been saved from expulsion and possible disgrace and Germany’s oldest party, founded in 1863, has huffed and puffed its way out of one more pothole.

On July the 14th, Luis Moreno Ocampo, serving as international war-crimes prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) formally indicted Sudanese President Omar Bashir for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity against several Sudanese tribes.

Practically the whole left has come through Chianciano Terme over the past month. This little Tuscan town, which historically has been run by the Italian Communist Party (PCI), will be home at the end of this week to the Seventh Congress of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC).

Everyone is now accustomed to hearing that the financial crisis in the United States and in Britain was caused by American financial institutions lending money to unsafe borrowers for buying houses.

BERLIN – I attended the big rally with Obama in Berlin Thursday evening, not as a press representative but as one of the crowd. And what a giant crowd it was! The news reports counted “over 200,000” but to someone sandwiched in so tight I could hardly lift my hand to scratch my itching nose.

Ned Ludd. You've heard the name, read the book, very probably got the T-shirt as well. Now you can hear the music – courtesy of the Italian folk-roots band of the same name.

Describing the economic interests of workers in the industrialized countries and those of workers in developing countries as "inextricably tied," United Auto Workers (UAW President Ron Gettelfinger presented a keynote address to the International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF) in Sao Paulo, Brazil last month.

The hardening of French immigration policy, following Nicolas Sarkozy's appointment as Interior Minister in 2002 and his subsequent election as President in 2007, is not the exception in the European Union but the rule.

European Union member states are now able to detain undocumented people for periods up to 18 months without any form of due process. Before, this was only possible for a maximum period of 6 months.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to revoke its sanctions against Cuba, reported the bloc’s foreign relations commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, quoted by Reuters.

Vietnam and the UK have discussed ways to promote bilateral cooperation in coping with climate change and controlling environmental pollution during a week-long visit by Minister of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) Pham Khoi Nguyen.

The six-month summit of heads of state and governments of the European Union (EU) ends Friday with no accord on a foreseeable date to approve the Lisbon Treaty, rejected in a referendum by Ireland.

The NO vote of the Irish people proves that the arguments about the so-called "Irish model" and "the most favored country" concerned the interests of the bourgeois and not the people.