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A quarter century ago, Victoria Sandino Palmera joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP). She had previously been a militant in the Communist Party and–when FARC-EP was above ground in the 1990s–joined the Patriotic Pole. But the repression of what she calls the ‘traditional oligarchy’ sent her back to the jungle over and over again. Victoria Sandino made it clear that she was not keen on this war. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’

On 25 November 1960, three of four of the Mirabal sisters – María Teresa, Minerva, and Patria – of the Dominican Republic were assassinated for their resistance against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The youngest of the three – María Teresa – said before her death, ‘Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me. We shall continue to fight for justice’.

On 13 November 2019, as part of its deadly attack on the people of Gaza, Israeli armed forces bombed a building in the Deir al-Balah neighbourhood of Gaza City.

On November 10, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Ayma was removed from office.

On 13 October, Moreno had to promise to withdraw Decree 833. Pressure from the streets, from the United Nations, and from the Ecuadorian Episcopal Conference forced him to the table, where a televised discussion was held. The indigenous leaders won the ‘debate’–they were much more prepared and far more humane than the president and his clumsy ministers.

Turkey has invaded Syria. In particular, Turkey has crossed the border to destroy the largely Syrian Kurdish province of Rojava, south of the Turkey-Syria border and east of the Euphrates River. The green light for this invasion came from Washington, DC, when U.S. President Donald Trump told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the U.S. would withdraw its troops from the area.

A recent report by the International Labour Organisation shows that the total global labour force is now measured at 3.5 billion workers. This is the largest size of the global labour force in recorded history. Talk of the demise of workers is utterly premature when confronted with the weight of this data.

More than seven million Kashmiris remain suffocated by the Indian government. The curfew that went into effect on 5 August is still in place. The media is not able to get into the state and offer a report of the situation. Telephone and internet services have been shut down.

Strikes have followed Sala all her life, as they followed Emma Mashinini. These are militants who understand that social divisions favour the wealthy, while social unity favours the poor. Those fires in the South African spazas mirror the attacks on the houses, schools, and health centres in Milagro Sala’s Jujuy province. Tears are not enough to put these fires out.

Last week, Agence France-Presse got its hands on a draft UN report called Special Report on the Ocean and Cyrosphere in a Changing Climate. This 900-page document is study of the oceans for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007.

Dark skies persist over coastal Brazil, where the country’s major population centres are to be found. This year, there have been 40,341 fires in the Amazon, the highest since 2010.

The main conflict here – since the 1940s – has been between India and Pakistan. Disagreements are deeply rooted in the political culture of each country. The rise of the far right in India has only inflamed the conflict further.

On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.

We live world where the aspirations of the workers and peasants are arrogantly dismissed. It is a world where the violence of a B-52 bomber is seen as reasonable, whereas the cries for an end to hunger are seen as utopian.

Trump has made nasty remarks about how Asian countries are the great polluters of the planet. Trump, in his shudderingly ignorant way, said that the United States of America would use its power to prevent Asians from destroying the planet.

Impossible to deny the reality of poverty in our world. Studies of the data on income and wealth routinely show that billions of people on the planet live with minimal access to resources. These studies demonstrate that poverty cannot be measured merely by the financial resources that are not available; they demonstrate how billions of people have no access to electricity, safe drinking water, education, or health care.

The largest delegation from outside Russia at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in early June came from China.

On the one hand, people who spend most of their time working develop an understanding of the ‘practical transformation of the world’. This framework is implicit in the workers’ activity, since the worker–given the theft of their time–is often prevented from having a ‘clear theoretical consciousness of this practical activity’.

“For humanity, comrades,” writes Frantz Fanon at the close of his monumental The Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. Terrible inequalities in our world keep humanity divided.

A war against Iran–as Hamid says–will be catastrophic, not only for Iran but for Eurasia. It would divide the world into two, vultures and hyenas feasting on both halves.