In-depth to say the least (it's 55 pages if you print it out) interview with marxist writer/activist and recent Mute collabor Loren Goldner by the South Korean SaNoShin group, covering the 20th century history of class struggle and present developments/future prospects.
From Goldner's Break Their Haughty Power website (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/)

Overview of the maoist victory in the Nepalese Constitutent Assembly election by long-term observer and sympathiser Gary Leupp, a US academic and regular Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) contributor.  It's not necessary to agree with Leupp that the maoists stand for 'communism' to recognize that the election result represents a major strategic success for the provisionally demilitarized 'people's war' and a geopolitical upheaval at the borders of India (where the Naxalite maoists continue to wage war) and China.  More open to question, perhaps, is Leupp's claim that the event is overlooked or unreportable in Western media.  The FT ran a remarkably positive full-page feature the day before yesterday, followed up yesterday with renewed emphasis on Party assurances the immediate agenda is not 'socialism' but the replacement of 'feudalism' with 'capitalist development'.  (This is what Leupp says too, and it's the only part of his article to be criticised on the Kasama maoist website, where the article is reproduced (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/).)  Incidentally, the article is tagged 'site-specific' (as in 'art') here because the maoists say they want to put a red flag on Mt. Everest that's big enough to see from the moon.  

Back in Beijing, after a tense couple of days in Chengdu. The city is the Eastern gateway to Tibet, located at the foot of the mountains. It has a huge PLA base, and was the jumping off point for the troops which are now saturating Tibet. The serious action is now apparently in the villages. There are reports of serious clashes in several rural districts, though Lhasa is now locked down. Police have been killed, and in the Aba area, the ratio of Tibetans to army is now 1:1 according to someone I talked to. I met a couple of journos who'd tried to get into Tibet hiding under blankets in a car. They'd been picked up  - everyone seems to have failed to get into the areas of Tibet and Sichuan where the ongoing violence is concentrated.

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Loren Goldner will be giving a talk on the subject of the Korean working class at Housmans bookstore in Kings Cross, London at 6pm on Saturday 19th of January.

More details: http://www.metamute.org/en/Three-Talks-by-Loren-Goldner

ABSTRACT

Originally in Report on Positivity: A budding India-U.S. strategic partnership takes shape as India expands its military capacity. The Bay of Bengal will soon be witness to the largest joint naval exercises between India and the U.S. Three aircraft carriers will participate in the war games, two from the U.S., and one from India. A total of 17 warships, 13 of them from the U.S., will join India’s in an annual exercise taking place from 4-9 September. Two will come from Japan, one from Australia, and one from Singapore. They will be accompanied by submarines and dozens of naval warplanes. (1)

(2)

From New Left Review (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2678) some solid statistical evidence -- particularly strong on intersections of national, municipal, private and foreign capital -- for a point that might have seemed to border on truism but apparently is not gasped in mainstream 'China studies: the expansion of Chinese industrial capitalism in the last 20 years can is broadly comparable to the same process in Europe and America in the 19th century, and speculation over notions like 'the paradoxes of market socialism' is useless.  (Anyone who doubted this should read Zola's Germinal  next to any journalistic account of migrant labour in Chinese coal mines.)  An earlier but more analytically developed account of some of the same phenomena, by Aufheben, can be found at: http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-14-2006/welcome-to-the-chinese-century
The notion that 'state capitalism' is something specific to countries outside the 'Western' bloc is also usefully debunked by the excellent histories of Japanese and South Korean working class formation on the Echanges et Mouvement site: http://www.mondialisme.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=3