This book, edited by John Feffer, tells an untold story - the life-affirming response of ordinary people around the world to the 'irreversible' juggernaut of the global economy. Many books contain cogent intellectual critiques. Here, in contrast, we see the modest attempts to create alternatives by those for whom globalization has no need. There is no single response but many different ones, all sharing important common features: meeting basic needs, making sustainable, culturally appropriate improvements to people's lives, and on the basis of active civic participation, solidarity and learning one from another.

The British Embassy has announced a further £30 million (R430m) contribution for emergency assistance in Africa. Half the contribution, R215m, will be put to humanitarian assistance and recovery programmes across Southern Africa and the other half will go to Ethiopia.

Three Million US dollars will be granted by the French government in the months of March and April, to support demining programmes and the resettlement of displaced people in Angola.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, military peacekeeping forces have increasingly intervened in countries in conflict, forcing a more direct engagement than ever before between the military, local populations and humanitarian agencies. Military movement into what has traditionally been 'humanitarian space', raises significant issues of principle, as well as policy and operational questions, for the entire international community, including governments, the military, humanitarian agencies and the UN. It is essential that these two roles - impartial humanitarian assistance as a response to an urgent and inalienable right, and peace operations with their inevitably partial and political mandates - are kept separate, argues a paper by the The Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN).

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI) are very much like identical twins in the government's economic policy. President Kufuor has made the development of ICT one of the cornerstones of his vision for Ghana's development. He has established a high-powered commission to oversee its development. The first two years of his administration have seen him also making first hand contacts around the world to interest investors in Ghana.

Aidspan is pleased to announce the launch of "GLOBAL FUND OBSERVER" (GFO), a free email-based newsletter and related discussion forum. GFO provides an independent platform for news, analysis and commentary about the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The Lesotho National Insurance Group (LNIG) is suing the weekly tabloid "Mohahlaula", for publishing a news item that the company has deemed to be damaging to its business activities. In its 15 November 2002 edition, the publication reported that the company was facing possible bankruptcy due to alleged mismanagement of funds.

Over the past 50 years, forced displacement has been a major obstacle to development and the fight against poverty. Despite the efforts of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and others to find 'durable solutions' for those who are forced to flee their homes, attitudes have, if anything, hardened towards refugees and asylum-seekers.

Three months ago the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it had adopted a new set of lending guidelines that would permit borrowing countries to take control of their economies like never before. But over the past week, the Fund flexed its muscles over two of the world's poorest countries and imposed conditions that critics predict will be disastrous for the poor in those nations -- and that signified business as usual for the Washington-based institution. The IMF told Zambia -- an African country ravaged by debt, mismanagement, and disease -- that it will delay one billion dollars in debt relief until the poor nation sells its state-owned commercial bank, the Zambia National Commercial Bank.

The United States has held out against other members of the World Trade Organisation, refusing to agree to a third draft of an agreement on how to grant developing countries wider access to low-cost drugs, including antiretroviral medications, the Associated Press reports.

"Poverty and violence" are the tragic reasons pushing thousands of people to leave their home countries in search of a better future. Economic globalisation and the development disparities it has produced in the southern hemisphere and in Eastern European transition countries are every day pushing thousands of people to leave their home countries to find a form of subsistence in wealthier lands, says the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

This book provides a powerful and probing critique of the myths, meanings, promises, and perils of globalization, postcoloniality, and other currently popular discourses by interrogating their implications for Africa and African studies. It challenges misrepresentations and misappropriations of Africa in academic texts and in the popular media and reaffirms the importance of progressive nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and internationalism for Africa’s reconstruction, a project in which universities and African intellectuals—including those in the North—have a critical role to play in promoting productive trans-national literacy and conversations across the Atlantic.

The Malawi Human Rights Commission has observed with "great concern" public utterances from some quarters - especially politicians - that carry racial discrimination overtones. "The Commission has also received complaints from indigenous and non-indigenous Malawians, as well as people of other nationalities, that they have been victims of racial abuse," said a press release.

In a bid to revive what was once a diverse and dynamic press, several journalists in Zanzibar last week launched the archipelago's first private newspaper for 40 years.

President Thabo Mbeki has said that South Africa still has a long way to go if it is to create a non-racial society. The bulk of the economy, including the land, remains predominantly white-owned, nine years after the end of apartheid, he said in an opening speech to the African National Congress convention.

The reduction in barriers to international trade can increase and create incomes for the poor and provide more resources to fight poverty, says a paper produced by the UK Department for International Development. The main findings of the paper are that trade liberalisation can have a positive impact on poverty only if developing and developed countries agree in adopting domestic and international trade policies based on best practices and tailored to individual circumstances.

A dismissed Anglo Platinum manager has claimed that his former colleagues made racist remarks and that he lost his job for raising complaints about this and for calling union members "comrades".

This book argues that HIV/AIDS is an epidemic of globalisation. Its trajectory can be directly linked to global inequality. Globalisation determines the scale and scope of HIV/AIDS, and HIV/AIDS will shape international political, economic and social relations in the first decades of this century. Above all, HIV/AIDS shows the bankruptcy of national and international public health policy.

Orthodox economists sometimes get it wrong. When a government fixes the prices of various goods below what they cost to produce, they fail to provide the necessary subsidy to fill the gap. The orthodox theory predicts that there will be empty shelves in the shops. But in Zimbabwe, this is not how things have turned out. Retailers there have indeed run out of all manner of price-controlled goods.

Scientists from seven developing countries are to take part in a new US$26-million research project to unravel the mysteries of soil biodiversity. The project, launched by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), will carry out research into tropical soil-dwelling organisms such as insects, beetles, fungi, worms and bacteria.