We’ve all heard about corporate losses, the plummeting stockmarket and growing bankruptcies, but of course it’s not the highly paid executives and corporate millionaires who the recession is hurting the most.  

Adam Turl examines the lives of the 10 richest people in the US - and uncovers a rogue's gallery of serial polluters, budget-slashers, CIA contractors, union-busters and right-wing nuts.

BACK IN February - when even the mainstream media was convinced the capitalist economy was in full-blown meltdown mode - Newsweek magazine ran an article titled "Why there won't be a revolution."

To understand Israel’s role in the Middle East one needs to understand its long relationship with imperialism.

On April 9th 1948, the Zionist militia’s known as the Lehi (or the Stern Gang) and the Irgun crept up on the village of Deir Yassin, a town of about 750 Palestinian Arabs 5.5km west of Jerusalem.

The rise of Hamas is due to the failure of Arab nationalist and leftist forces to push back imperialism. Throughout the post-war period in the Middle East, socialism or left-wing nationalist ideas were the most popular but they failed because they always sought to substitute a great leader or a band of heroic fighters for the revolutionary movement of the mass of people.

The recent United Nations Conference on Racism was boycotted by New Zealand United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Israel and Germany before the conference had even begun. When the conference started, many other western states also left. The reason given was fear of a “rancorous and unproductive debate”, according to our Foreign Minister Murray McCully. The topic that was debated was the racist nature of the Israeli state.

For thirteen centuries Palestine had been universally known as an Arab land. At the beginning of the twentieth century over 90 percent of the people, in what today would be Israel and the occupied territories, were Arab. For 400 years they had lived under Ottoman rule and had established a distinctive regional identity as Palestinians.

The coup in Fiji is the latest sign of serious instability in the Pacific. From Timor Leste to Tonga, poverty has gone hand in hand with mounting polilical crises. New Zealand politicians talk about development and democracy but the bottom line is economic control.

For the NZ media, Sri Lanka’s brutal 30-year conflict is often depicted as a simple contest: ‘Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus’.