Patrick Bond

Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, the COP17, clean up its act?

There's no way around it: to solve the worsening climate crisis requires we must accept both that the vast majority of fossil fuels must now be left underground, and that through democratic planning, we must collectively reboot our energy, transport, agricultural, production, consumption and disp

Two of South Africa’s greatest water warriors were not actually killed in conflict, though at the time of their deaths on 22 and 23 June, both were furious with their traditional political party home, the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

Judging by what transpired at last week’s global climate negotiations in the former West German capital, Bonn, it appears certain that in just over five months time, the South African port city of Durban will host a conference of procrastinators, the ‘COP 17’ (Conference of Parties), dooming the

PART 1: WASHINGTON’S SEEDING OF THE ARAB DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

Drunk on their own neoliberal rhetoric, the multilateral establishment swoons over the continent’s allegedly excellent growth and export prospects, in the process downplaying underlying structural oppressions in which they are complicit: corrupt power relations, economic vulnerability, worsening

Here in Palestine, disgust expressed by civil society reformers about Barack Obama’s 19 May policy speech on the Middle East and North Africa confirms that political reconciliation between Washington and fast-rising Arab democrats is impossible.

Apparently, ‘one in three Africans is middle class’ and as a result, Africa is ready for ‘take off’, according to African Development Bank chief economist Mthuli Ncube last week at the World Economic Forum–Africa summit in Cape Town.

South Africa’s most vocal neoliberal politician, Trevor Manuel, is apparently being seriously considered as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund.

If Muammar Gadaffi’s wicked son Saif al-Islam is to be believed, we will soon be witnessing ‘rivers of blood’ in Benghazi in Libya to shame even the Middle East’s most murderous tyrants, worse even than Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Gaza residents two years ago and its 2006 invasion of Lebanon (alth