Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance, says she has provided information to the panel investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks which proves senior Bush administration officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened in New York City and Washington DC. Andrew Buncombe reports.

Urban involution and the informal proletariat--a future history of the Third World's post-industrial megacities. Mike Davis, author of "Late Victorian Holocausts" and "Dead Cities", examines a situation with a billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

The fourth World Social Forum was held in the neoliberal capital of the global South. Mumbai, India--soaring elite consumption, widening inequality and anti-Muslim pogroms of Shining India, with the New Hindu Right set for fresh electoral victory. Achin Vaniak reports.

The AFL-CIO is on the scene in Venezuela, just as it was in Chile in 1973. Again, its operations in that country are being funded by the US government. This time, the money is being laundered through the National Endowment for Democracy, hidden from AFL-CIO members and the American public. Kim Scipes reports.

The question facing pro-democracy forces is whether, in addition to demanding an investigation of the US role in the destabilization of President Aristide and to calling for the disarming of right-wing thugs, it is correct to call for the restoration of President Aristide to office. The demand for the restoration of Aristide is not a comment on Aristide himself. It is a demand for the restoration of constitutional democracy, argues Bill Fletcher.

Pogroms have once more rocked the Balkans--rioting Kosovar Albanians destroyed Serbian homes and burned Orthodox churches. The West looked on with bewilderment and indifference. This latest crisis in Kosovo is not unfolding in the midst of a civil war, nor as the result of the nationalist policies of Slobodan Milosevic or some other local dictator. The pogrom occurred in a province that has been run by the UN and controlled by NATO troops since 1999. Analysis by Boris Kagarlitsky.

The intervention by the US in Haiti brings to the fore an old confrontation: between the imperial savagery of the 'civilisation mongers’ and the powerlessness of the colonised. A new chapter in active US interventionism has been opened, close to American shores, in the Caribbean and Central America. Haiti has been swiftly occupied with Venezuela in the sight of the guns. Analysis by Aijaz Ahmed.

Robert Fisk discusses the chilling implications of the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin.