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Libya is being torn apart by outsiders
Ghassan Salamé is the head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. He took over this job in 2017, six years after the catastrophic NATO war on Libya. What Salamé inherited was a country torn into shreds, two governments in place—one in Tripoli and one in Tobruk—and one civil war that had too many factions to name.
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I will hold you in my arms a day after the war
On Monday, 27 January, the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng slipped away. His camera had been a familiar presence in the anti-apartheid struggle; after years of photographing police violence and popular resistance, he tired of making ‘images bespeaking gloom, monotony, anguish, struggle, [and] oppression’, he wrote in 1993.
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The war in Libya will never end
General Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA) continue to partly encircle Libya’s capital, Tripoli. Not only does the LNA threaten Tripoli, but it is within striking distance of Libya’s third-largest city, Misrata.
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Notes on a novel coronavirus
The virus’s final penetrance worldwide will depend on the difference between the rate of infection and the rate of removing infections—by recovery or death. If the infection rate far exceeds removal, then the penetrance may approach the whole of humanity, although there will likely accrue large geographic differences.
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Where is the rift? Marx, Lacan, capitalism, and ecology
When, decades ago, ecology emerged as a crucial theoretical and practical issue, many Marxists (as well as critics of Marxism) noted that nature–more precisely, the exact ontological status of nature–is the one topic where even the crudest dialectical materialism has an advantage over Western Marxism.
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Disabled people under attack
In December, Ontario’s Auditor-General, Bonnie Lysyk, issued a report that offers the province’s right wing Tory government an opportunity to attack disabled people living in poverty.
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World’s super rich meet in Davos to discuss the climate change problem they created
Research has shown that the people most responsible for a warming planet were disproportionately the same people attending the summit and an increasing number of observers see climate change, inequality and capitalism as bound together.
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A Stock Market boom is not the basis of shared prosperity
The U.S. is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm.
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The Lebanese Intifada, or the growth of an anti-capitalist mass movement
Today the cow is dry. Businessmen stepped on her neck for years, extracting the last drop of milk. There is nothing left for them to fight for, except for the hopes of using us to beg either from the U.S., the E.U. or the Gulf States.
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In France’s longest protests since 1968, striking workers continue the fight against neoliberalism
From bus drivers to ballet dancers, workers from across France have taken to the streets in opposition to President Emmanual Macron’s attempts to reshape the country into a U.S.-style neoliberal state.
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When it comes to pay, U.S. business leaders are world champs
U.S. CEOs not only draw the highest salaries (including bonuses and equity awards, etc.), but they are king of the hill when it comes to lording it over their employees, as illustrated by the high ratio of CEO to worker earnings.
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The people of Colombia are cracking up the walls of war and authoritarianism
The protests that started with the national strike called by Colombia’s central union on November 21 to protest pension reforms and the broken promises of the peace accords have persisted for two months and grown into a protest against the whole establishment. And the protests have continued into the new year and show no signs of stopping.
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World First: Bank of England unveils climate stress test to banks and insurance companies
Tackling climate change isn’t just about replacing fossil fuels with renewables, or planting more trees. It’s about confronting climate stress across society.
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What inequality?
Economic inequality in the United States and around the world is now so obscene, and has convinced more and more people to do something about it, that the business press has initiated a campaign to deny its very existence.
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The climate-migration-industrial complex
Thirty years ago there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming.
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Your arrow can pierce the sky, but ours has gone into orbit
On Wednesday, 15 January, China and the United States agreed to suspend their full-scale trade war. From February 2018, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods that entered the US market, and then China retaliated. This tit-for-tat game continued for almost two years, causing massive disruption in the global value chain.
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Britain exits the European Union and takes a sharp right turn
This article assesses the two recent historic events in Britain: the exit of Britain from the imperialist bloc known as the European Union (EU); and the crushing electoral defeat of the Labour Party. Neither Brexit, nor Labour’s defeat, can be understood in isolation from the other.
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Jeff Bezos donates three minutes’ income to help Australia fight wildfires
The donation would be equivalent to someone who earned $500 per week announcing on social media that they had just donated five cents to help tackle the blazes.
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Fossil fuel political giving outdistances renewables 13 to one
During the latest midterm election cycle, the fossil fuel industry paid at least $359 million for federal campaign donations and lobbying.
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‘Grévolution’: first round of a general strike
Since the middle of December, France has been gripped by a wave of large scale strikes. In this article the French collective Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes analyses the composition of the strikes, and the potential for its continued escalation.