Lula will likely eat what he ate on his first day in prison: bread and butter with his coffee. He will know that across the planet there will be demonstrations in his name. ‘Lula Livre’ (Free Lula) the people will cry out. You’re not alone, they will say, você não está sozinho. It will give him hope.

Once more, punctually, Israel—with the vengeance of Zeus—has begun to bomb Gaza, from which the sounds and smells of war are never absent due to Israeli bombings. It helps Israel that the United States is fully behind its policy of annihilation.

Disregard by the dominant powers of human lives in places such as Iraq has a long history. It goes back a hundred years.

The fight over the Amazon is not new, but the scale of its potential destruction has considerably increased. The protagonists of the murder of the Amazon are clear: capitalist firms of different scales and the political class that enables them.

Above all, we’d like to demand the right to dream. For us, the present is unacceptable. We demand the future.

The mood in Caracas (Venezuela) is sombre. It appears that the attempted coup against the government that began on 23 January is now substantially over (as the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tells me).

Last week, the people of Haiti erupted in protests over fuel price hikes. Behind the protests lie a story of corruption by the elite, blatantly insensitive IMF policies, predatory pricing by U.S. oil firms and the fallout of the economic war on Venezuela.

Is the President of Venezuela the President of Venezuela or is the President of the United States the President of Venezuela? There is absurdity here.

This Tricontinental Newsletter on a phrasebook for imperialism is intriguing if shorter than usual.

What happened to Chile in 1973 is precisely what the United States has attempted to do in many other countries of the Global South. The most recent target for the US government—and Western big business—is Venezuela.

Inequality is sexist. It is also transphobic and racist. This is a reality demonstrated by Oxfam’s recent report on wealth and inequality, and a reality well understood by the people who live it.

It is plain as day that the United States wants to overthrow the government in Venezuela.

Late last year, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton went to Miami (USA), where he coined a new–chilling–phrase: troika of tyranny. It echoed former U.S. President George W. Bush’s phrase, axis of evil. Bush’s axis included Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

On 8 and 9 January, over 160 million workers went on strike in India from a broad range of sectors, from industrial workers to health care workers. This has been one of the largest general strikes in the world.

On January 1 in India, 5.5 million women formed a 620-kilometer wall across the length of the state of Kerala to fight for women’s rights to the Sabrimala temple. On the same day, Cuba celebrated 60 years since the 1959 revolution, which has been a persistent thorn in the side of global capital ever since.

It has been almost a year since we got off the ground. Our offices across the world humming with activity. You have received forty-four newsletters from us, eleven dossiers and one notebook and one working document. More is on the way as we enter our second calendar year.

Susan Ram, who is writing a book on the French Left for LeftWord Books (New Delhi), has a crisp assessment of the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement and of its fifth week of demonstration–Act V Macron Démission (Macron Resign). It is anger and determination that defines the yellow vest protest.

One in eight people across the world live in informal settlements. This, despite the “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family” as declared by the International Declaration of Human Rights. Reality, however, is very far from this.

As AMLO begins his presidential term in Mexico, he has been confronted by years of neoliberal policies, policies crafted by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, who praised the selling off of Mexico’s assets as a model. When protestors contest this agenda—as they recently did at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires—, the reply from leaders comes written in tear gas. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of farmers and thousands more of those who stood with them marched across Delhi to demand a parliamentary session to address the agrarian crisis.

Earlier this month, in Savar (Bangladesh), over 1400 delegates came to the fourth People’s Health Assembly–first held in 2000 by popular health organisations to drive a global dynamic to champion public health measures. At the centre of the discussions were increased health inequalities–between the rich and the poor certainly, but also sharply between affluent states and states that have found their wealth robbed by colonialism and the adverse order produced over the past fifty years.