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Join Alternatives and the millions of other organisations around the world who are mobilising during this day of action launched by the World Social Forum.

The 13th edition of Alternatives’ Days took place from the 23rd to the 26th of August at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Several hundred people participated in workshops and seminars which explored diverse themes from social ecology to water, peace, reasonable accommodation, citizenship, urban agriculture and social justice. It all took place with a helping hand from over 20 invited guests from the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia.

This year, Alternatives Days took place in the context of the first Quebec Social Forum, which closed with a rousing march in Montreal on Sunday the 26th of August.

We invite you to take a look at our workshop et Social Forum summaries, written by Alternatives’ interns.

On November 22, the US State Department decided to override restrictions on US-Indonesian military ties imposed by Congress less than two weeks earlier

Only 1022 hand-picked voters - out of 700,000 West Papuans - were allowed by Indonesia to vote in the 1969 UN-supervised ballot, and under coercion, they voted for West Papua to remain under Indonesian rule.

For over 40 years the world has looked the other way while Papua (the eastern-most province of Indonesia, formerly called Irian Jaya) has been ravaged in a program of repression by the Indonesian military. But that is starting to change.

Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to “make poverty history” in time for the G-8 summit in Scotland. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the British Chancellor is appealing to the “richer oil-producing states” of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. “Oil wealth urged to save Africa,” reads the headline in London’s Observer.

On 1 February 2005, King Gyanendra of Nepal usurped all executive powers of State through a proclamation of Emergency in the country that has been precipitously descending into bloody chaos since his anointment as the king following the inexplicable massacre of the royal clan on 1 June 2001.

Caracas: In most places, the word globalisation conjures up images of businessmen and corporate consultants on six figure salaries making offers that governments cannot refuse. But in Nuevo Horizonte, a vast barrio, or slum, strung out like dirty linen high above the Venezuelan capital, globalisation means Martha Perez Miranda, a smiling 50-something Cuban dentist, who fixes poor folks’ teeth for free.

Beginning in the 15th century silver exploitation of Potosi and continuing to today, women have been involved in intricate and often invisible ways in the Bolivian mining sector.

"The Iraqi people gave America the biggest ’thank you’ in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother.

“Two or three years after the partition of India and Pakistan, the two governments remembered that inmates of mental asylums should also be switched. Meaning, all mentally retarded Muslims languishing in Indian asylums should be sent to Pakistan and those Hindu Sikhs in the mental asylums of Pakistan should be sent to India. Several high level intellectual conferences were held and finally a date was fixed for switching the mentally disabled”. Thus begins a famous short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ written by a renowned writer of his times, Saadat Hasan Manto.

Warmest wishes for a happy Holiday Season and a prosperous New Year filled with peace, justice, solidarity and tolerance.

Please note that Alternatives office is closed from December, 24 2004 to January 10th, 2005. See you next year !

My first run-in with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army came on March 31 in Baghdad. The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, had just sent armed men to shut down the young cleric’s newspaper, Al Hawza, claiming that its articles comparing Bremer to Saddam Hussein incited violence against Americans.

Completed in 1914 by the United States, the Panama Canal has been described as “one of the supreme achievements of all time” and “the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature”.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected the first black leader of what was hailed as a new multiracial, multicultural and democratic South Africa. Now in 2003 in Soweto, one of the central battlegrounds in the antiapartheid struggle, people get their electricity cut off and no longer have ready access to water. Private security firms evict them from their inadequate housing. Through 1999 and 2000, protests grew against unemployment and privatization of basic services. Crackdowns by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) became increasingly repressive.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist, wrote about the joys of call-centre work in Bangalore on February 29. These jobs, are giving young people "self-confidence, dignity and optimism" - and that’s not just good for Indians, but for Americans as well. Why? Because happy workers paid to help U.S. tourists locate the luggage they’ve lost on Delta flights are less inclined to strap on dynamite and blow up those same planes.

On April 5, Indonesia will hold the first of three votes to elect its parliamentary representatives and president. These elections will be Indonesians’ first chance to elect their president directly. But political stability is far from being assured in this the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Despite frequent references in the western press to Indonesia’s problems with terrorism, it is the military and foreign companies that appear to play a more important role in this year’s election.