Beginning in December of 2010, massive protests against hunger and joblessness manifested all over the country of Tunisia. Similar violent protests erupted in Algeria over food costs. Consequently, on January 12, 2011, the Jordanian government made attempts to prevent similar events from happening; the government announced a plan worth $169 million dollars to control the price of essential resources and to spur job creation.
East Timor, a portion of the Indonesian archipelago, was colonized by Portugal in the 16th century. It was not until 1975 that Portugal decolonized the area, at which point East Timor declared independence. Shortly after this, however, the Indonesian army, under the orders of Indonesian President Suharto, invaded and annexed East Timor. 60,000 East Timorese were killed or died of starvation during the invasion.
University of North Carolina (UNC) Sierra Student Coalition members and students created the Coal-Free UNC movement in an effort to end the University’s use of coal and close the on-campus coal plant. Its goal is to eliminate coal on campus by 2015. Coal-Free UNC also wanted the University to adhere to its green initiative EXPLAIN. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal national campaign to end dependence on coal and its use on campus, while encouraging the use of renewable sources of energy inspired UNC’s campaign.
Beginning in 1999 the Austrian government has made several large changes to the traditional higher education process, which had existed for hundreds of years prior. In 1999 Austria signed off on the Bologna Process, a European Union-wide initiative to standardize education throughout Europe. This meant that universities required students to complete degrees in between three and four years, when Austrians had traditionally had five or six. Despite a decrease in the time period for degree completion, syllabuses were barely touched, and so students were overwhelmed by work.&n
In December of 2006, Eon, an energy company, submitted an application to the Medway council in Kent, England to build coal-fired generating units, the first to be built in England since 1974. The plant would emit more carbon dioxide than the world’s thirty lowest emitting countries combined. Within a few months, two other companies were proposing similar projects, with even more to follow. Eon planned to implement Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), as per the government’s request.
In June of 2004, police arrested twenty-three businessmen in the Uzbek city of Andijan for their supposed connection to Akramia, an Islamic extremist group. These businessmen enjoyed considerable support among the Andijan population, because they employed many locals at higher wages than other companies did. The national government, however, saw these businessmen as a nuisance. After the 1999 Tashkent bombings, the Uzbek government cracked down on Muslims, and made it much harder for Muslims to have their own businesses. The twenty-three Muslim businessmen in Andijan
Yemen is a country of over 20 million people located in West Asia, at the intersection of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. After a history of being one country it experienced three centuries of separation into North and South, most recently divided between the Ottoman and British empires early in the 20th century.
The country finally united again in 1990, when the north and south merged and became the Republic of Yemen. The parliament of each former nation elected the new president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, as it formed the new government.
In 2002, El Salvador was under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to privatize its healthcare system, which had up until that point been controlled by the government and available to all legally employed Salvadorans. The system, while admittedly seriously lacking in the services that it provided to the typical Salvadoran, had shown marked improvements over the past few years. A widely popular 1999 strike by the ISSS, the healthcare workers union, had prevented the country from privatizing healthcare and since that point services had graduall
After the United States dropped the first atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the initial shock of the weapons’ destructive power wore off, many countries became interested in developing electricity based off of the nuclear technology. Along with the exciting new possibilities that always accompany new technology, nuclear fission carried with it a whole host of dangerous challenges as well.
Beginning in early 2007, foreign workers in the Northern Mariana Islands (mainly Saipan, the most populated of the islands) campaigned for the United States government to take control of the Islands' immigration policy. The Northern Mariana Islands are located in the Western Pacific, in the region of Japan and the Philippines.
The Pakistan that gained independence from the British Empire in 1947 was a strange and ultimately ill-fated state. The country included two geographically disparate regions, West and East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh), separated by nearly one thousand miles of Indian territory. Throughout the military regimes of the 1950s and 60s, Bengali needs were neglected to benefit the “22 families,” all West Pakistani, who controlled the country’s economy. A movement for East Pakistani autonomy emerged from this climate, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (known popularly as Mujib).&nb
Ever since gaining its independence from Spain in 1956, Morocco firmly held that the Spanish Sahara (now known as the Western Sahara) should be included within its borders. Morocco based this assertion on the fact that some of the nomadic populations in the region had apparently once owed allegiance to the Moroccan sultan, yet the strength of its commitment to securing control over Spanish Sahara may have increased after it became known in the early 1970s that the region contained substantial phosphate mines.
Today Villa El Salvador is a squatting community on the Southern outskirts of Lima, Peru, and is home to about 400,000 people. The shantytown, which was born of a small land invasion in 1971, has been recognized internationally as the largest continuously squatted area in the world.
In the early 1990s the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was a confederation made up of six constituent republics: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. However, the ethnic groups from each of these regions were spread throughout the SFRY, which blurred the borders between the constituent republics and made politics in each region much more complicated. For instance, Bosnia-Herzegovina was 44% Bosnian Muslims, 31% Serbs, and 17% Croats. In order to provide federal representation to each constituent republic, the leadership
The strikes and demonstrations that deposed President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Colombia were planned somewhat day to day and began as reactionary actions in response to Rojas’s attempts to hold power indefinitely. The opposition to Rojas had a wide base, across social classes and political party lines, and varied spokesmen, from students to political leaders to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This was a result of the growing discontentment with the direction of the Rojas regime.
Bolivia contains significant natural resources, but also has a long history of exploitation by foreign powers. One of these resources is natural gas. Just like the precious metals from Potosí, however, the gas was mostly exported (partially due to low demand within Bolivia) as a raw material, meaning very little wealth stayed in Bolivia, and the wealth that did remain was concentrated in a few, mostly white, hands. In protest of this policy tens of thousands of Bolivian activists, who mostly came from indigenous backgrounds, worked toward the nationalization of the nation’
France has conducted nuclear tests in its colonies since before the Cold War began. It conducted atmospheric nuclear tests in Algeria up until 1962 when they won their independence. Consequently, France began testing in French Polynesia in 1966 instead, and by 1974, had moved to underground tests. From 1966 to 1992, France conducted 41 atmospheric tests and 138 underground nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
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Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines in 1965. Marcos was reelected in 1969 and when barred to run for a third term, he declared martial law and gave himself near absolute power. Marcos assumed full control of the military, dissolved congress, and had many of his political opponents and critics arrested. One of his more prominent critics had been Senator Benigno Aquino who was prepared to challenge Marcos in the 1973 election, had it occurred.
For a half-century prior to the Acehnese campaign, the Indonesian government had ruled Aceh, located at the northwestern end of the island of Sumatra. The Acehnese suffered a high level of human rights abuses at the hands of the Indonesian government. From the 1950s until 1998, an Acehnese group resisted using violence. But in the late 1990’s, their resistance, led by student activists, took the form of nonviolence in a series of rallies, boycotts and strikes.
Beginning in 1981, Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for over twenty-nine years. Though he ran for
presidential reelection several times, elections were marked by widespread
fraud, and opposing politicians were legally prohibited from running against
Mubarak until 2005. Virtually all key officials in government were from
Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP). Mubarak constructed a vast security
apparatus to control public dissent; in the 1990s, citizens would only whisper
his name for fear of reprisal. For his entire tenure as president, Egypt was in
Grenada under the dictatorship of Eric Gairy suffered from economic deterioration and widespread corruption. In the face of domestic repression, support for the Left built strength during events leading up to the creation of the New Jewel Movement (NJM). In November 1970, 30 nurses staged a non-violent protest demonstration against poor working conditions at St. George’s General Hospital, their place of work. They were joined by youth groups, trade unions, and school children. Police responded by teargasing demonstrators and arresting 22 nurses.
Ghana was the first African country south of the Sahara to gain its independence. The process aimed at African representation had begun as early as the 1920s and under the post-World War II Constitution African parties were allowed to contest elections. But the British tended to favor cooperation with conservative African chiefs and a small intellectual elite, who no longer represented the people as a whole.
Beginning on August 29, 1949, Soviet officials conducted aboveground nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk facility in Kazakhstan. More than one million people resided in villages in the Semipalatinsk oblast. In the next oblast, Karaganda, there were two million residents. Until 1963, all tests were above ground and created large, radioactive clouds that engulfed villages in the area, resulting in skyrocketing rates of cancer and other diseases. After 1963, the tests were conducted below ground.
In January 2010, it became clear that the Jamaican government sought to sell Air Jamaica to a foreign company. The government and the owners of Air Jamaica saw the company as losing a lot of money and, due to heavy subsidizing, the government had a great deal of power over the future of the airline. Some reports suggest that Air Jamaica was losing more than USD $90 million per year and was already USD $900 million in debt. However, Air Jamaica employed over 1,600 Jamaicans. Fearing for the loss of their jobs and the potential damage that could be done to the country
