"I HAVE to sign at my local dole office once a month.Having lost my job at the start of September, I eventually got to sign on in November. 

The nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank is an indication of the abject failure of the Fianna Fail and Green government to deal with the banking crisis, but also that the crisis has reached a new and dangerous level. In the wake of the nationalisation, the shares of the two main banks, Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and Bank of Ireland (B of I), plummeted.

DURING HIS end of year address Pope Benedict spoke of the destruction of the rainforest and an apparently equally sinister threat. Pope Benedict said that saving humanity from homosexual or transexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction!

BUSH, OLMERT, CIA, how many kids did you kill today? was one of the chants heard outside Belfast City Hall as over 150 people protested their opposition to Israel’s merciless slaughter of Gaza’s civilians. Many of the protestors came from local schools and colleges

The first volume of a film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Torro is in the cinemas that depicts the life of Che Guevara, legendary leader of the Cuban Revolution is in the cinema. Viewers of the first film, despite some moments of insight, may well be left underwhelmed by a film that deals predominantly with the period in time in which Che is engaging in guerrilla action in the harsh Sierra Maestra hills of Cuba in the period up to the January 1959 victory of the revolution.

By Stephen Boyd, Editor, the Socialist

2008 will be remembered for the credit crunch and world financial crisis. But as 2009 begins we can safely predict this year will be remembered as the year when the "real economy" of countries all around the globe went into meltdown.