President Lula da Silva has promised billions of dollars to improve housing problems in Brazil’s cities. Conditions for the poor are so grim that the Homeless Workers’ Movement has mobilised thousands of families to occupy and improvise housing on waste sites, particularly those that are empty because of land (...)

Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, was assassinated 20 years ago. His original ideas for his country prefigured the alternative world movement and current approaches to change in Africa and South America

One hundred years on, at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre, two writers have found a new way to tell an old joke. The old joke is ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, a comedy in three acts by John Millington Synge, first staged in 1907. A man walks into a bar (a village shebeen), confesses to having killed his father, and is acclaimed a hero – until his father catches up with (...)