Guy Standing, professor Economic Security at the university of Bath, UK, and founding member of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) published the bestselling book The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. His criticism of the way European governements are responding to the financial crisis is scathing.

Serious global discussions have begun in the lead-up to the Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) deadline of 2015. Governments and international agencies are asking what has been achieved, what still needs to be done and how best to proceed after the deadline. Fabienne Richard, researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp thinks t ...

Three years after the debts volcano on Wall Street erupted, we can see more clearly what happened: a crisis of neoliberal globalization.

Exactly one year ago, anger drove the young Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself alight. The flames engulfed many Arab countries. Bouazizi died, but the Arab Spring was born. One year on, is there something to celebrate? MO* put the question to Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswani, Syrian human rights activist Haytham Manaa, and Algerian top dipl ...

We stumble from one crisis to the next and politicians fail to deliver thorough answers. The impasse frustrates the basis, although it contains a treasure of positive energy as well. Rob Hopkins, founder of the transition movement, has succeeded in mobilising this hidden energy. Recently Hopkins was in Brussels for a meeting with the Belgian t ...

In July the new social liberal president of Peru, Ollanta Humala appointed Susana Baca as culture minister. A surprise, as the singer, who with the help of David Byrne built an international career and won a Grammy award in 2002, belongs to the Afro-Peruvian minority and has no political experience whatsoever. But she does have a clear opinion: ...

Forested developing countries can collect big money from climate funds by preserving their forests or recovering neglected forests. In UN jargon this is called REDD + : Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Sounds good at the negotiating table, but deep in those very forests, things are going on that should not happen, let alon ...

The 2008 financial crisis and the lingering economic crisis are increasingly putting the economic globalization under pressure. Pankaj Ghemawat, an internationally renowned economist of Indian origin, thinks that there is plenty of space for more international integration. On the condition that efforts are being made to urgently increase emplo ...

Monday 7 November at 7 pm in the Kaaitheater in Brussels, two internationally recognized experts will debate about population, climate, migration and development.

Every day the world adds 209.000 inhabitants and the UN expects the 7 billionth living human to be born on October 31th. Will we welcome him or her chanting peace on earth for everone? Or will the reality be gloomier, and will the explosive population growth erase all the positive effects of our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint?

Worldwide tens of thousands of people marched protesting governments’ austerity measures, unemployment, financial institutions run like casinos, public bailouts of those same financial institutions, ecological decay, war, and a host of other things no longer shrugged off cynically.