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A two-week strike ended late on January 27 after an agreement was reached with President Lansana Conte to delegate some of his powers to a new prime minister. More than 90 people were killed and hundreds injured during police crackdowns on the strike. Hospitals ran out of blood supplies on January 22, when attacks by soldiers and police left dozens dead. Unions called the strike to demand that the president step down and to voice anger at the appalling living conditions in the extremely impoverished west African nation. Guinea, ruled by Conte ever since he took power in a military coup more than 22 years ago, was ranked the most corrupt African country in Transparency International’s 2006 survey. While Guinea is rich in natural resources, some neighbourhoods in the capital, Conakry, do not even have running water or electricity, and low wages and massive inflation mean many cannot afford to buy food. Last May, police killed 20 people when mostly youth protesters in Conakry took to the streets to protest rice and fuel price rises.

Five footballers at North Carolina’s Guilford College were charged with “ethnic intimidation” and the assault of three Palestinian students on January 21. The FBI will also investigate whether the footballers should be charged with “hate crimes”. The three Palestinian students were brutally attacked by up to 15 members of the college football team, who used “brass knuckles” and called them “terrorists”, “sand niggers” and “fucking Palestinians”. Students at the college have condemned the attacks as racist and have begun to organise in support of the Palestinian students. On January 24, Yes! Weekly online magazine reported that students have also threatened to walk out of school if the attackers were not suspended.

Petrodollar Warfare
By William Clark
New Society Publishers, 2005
$29.95 267pages

In her 2001 book, Blue Army: Paramilitary Policing in Victoria, senior lecturer in criminology at Monash University Associate Professor Jude McCulloch reports 44 victims of police shootings in Victoria since the 1980s, mostly poor people from non-Anglo backgrounds, but also police themselves. That number is now more than 50.

Walter Chavez, an adviser to Bolivian president Evo Morales, has found himself in the centre of a well-orchestrated corporate media campaign aimed at delegitimising the Morales government internationally by linking it to “terrorist” groups. This accusation comes only a week after attempts by the Spanish media to link Morales’s party — the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) — with the Basque separatist group ETA.