Headlines

An international arbitration tribunal has ordered Venezuela to pay for expropriated mines

Vancouver, Aug.23.─ An international arbitration tribunal has ordered Venezuela to pay a Vancouver-based mining company more than US$1.2 billion for expropriating its gold mines.

Venezuela took over Rusoro Mining's investments in the country as part of a nationalization of the gold industry in 2011.

• Since the end of the cold war, multi-party democracy has flourished. In many countries it is now at risk
• Democracy advances stall in Africa just as it is happening in Latin America from the very begining of this Century  

Aug.20.─ Some call it Africa’s second liberation. After freedom from European colonisers came freedom from African despots. Since the end of the cold war multi-party democracy has spread far and wide across the continent, often with impressive and moving intensity. Remember 1994, when South Africans queued for hours to bury apartheid and elect Nelson Mandela as president in their country’s first all-race vote.

Many of Africa’s worst Big Men were swept away. Mengistu Haile Mariam fled Ethiopia in 1991; Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) decamped in 1997; a year later Sani Abacha of Nigeria died in office (or, as rumour has it, in the arms of prostitutes).

Associate Professor Farish Noor considers, however, that it will be more difficult to predict election results with so many parties in the fray 

Kuala Lumpur, Aug.16.─ The emergence of new political parties in Malaysia suggests participatory democracy is quite vibrant, academic and respected observer Dr Farish A. Noor says.

It shows Malaysians still believe in playing by the rules of constitutional democracy, says the Associate Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Melting ice caps could lead radioactive waste to the ocean
Another disturbing side effect of Global Warming

 Nuuk, Aug.15.─ A new scandal involving the US in Greenland has bubbled to the surface following the revelations that radioactive waste from a former top secret military base could find its way to the ocean due to the melting icecaps.

The base in question, Camp Century, was established under the ice east of the Thule Air Base in 1959 by the US Army. It used a mobile atomic reactor as an energy source for the around 200 soldiers and researchers who resided there.