►iraq – The leader of Iraq's journalists' union, Shihab al-Tamimi, has died in hospital. He was shot in the chest on February 23rd, and as a result died of heart attack. An independent journalist working for many local newspapers, al-Tamimi was a fierce critic of Iraq's sectarian militias and called for an end to the civil war. He is the 270th Iraqi journalist to have been killed in the violence since the 2003 invasion.
►jordan – 200 Vietnamese migrant workers, mostly women, struck for more than two weeks in protest at being forced to work long hours for just £50 per month, when they had been promised a rate of £100.
The footwear machinists’ strike was repressed by the Jordanian police, who sided with the security guards and joined in beating the workers. This despite the fact that the Jordanian Labour Ministry investigators had found the workers to be starving and bruised.
The workers, who were taken to Jordan by a Vietnamese agency, are demanding that they be allowed to return home.
►lebanon – Unions seem likely to force Prime Minister Siniora to grant an increase in the minimum wage. The unions are complaining that the minimum wage (on which one-third of Lebanese subsist) has been frozen for ten years, with the result that purchasing power fell 15 per cent last year. With a mounting £22 billion public debt and chronic power shortages in working-class areas, they say that Siniora is presiding over economic disaster.
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