International news

Bolivia has earned more than US$16 billion from the energy industry since President Evo Morales nationalised the sector in 2006, Spanish newsagency EFE reported government officials as saying.

EFE reported that hydrocarbons minister Juan Jose Sosa said: “Seven years before the nationalisation, from 1999 to 2005, the state received around $2 billion. After these seven years, the state received more than $16 billion.”

EFE said: “Morales issued an executive order on May 1, 2006, nationalising the seven oil companies, the majority of them foreign firms, operating in Bolivia.”

Venezuela's new Labour Law for Workers came into effect on May 7, guaranteeing shorter working hours, longer maternity leave and pensions for all Venezuelans.

Described by the Venezuelan government as the “most advanced labour law in the world”, the law reduces the working week from 44 hours to 40, and requires that employers provide two consecutive days a week off.

When the law came into effect, labour minister Maria Iglesias said the new working hours are part of the process towards a “just distribution of wealth”.

McDonald's workers and supporters held a picket on May 10 outside the Britomart McDonald's store in Auckland, said activist Socialist Aotearoa activist Nico on a May 12 post at Unite news.

Nico said a group of about 30 people created a physical picket line across the two entrances of the store, holding banners and placards reading “25c won't pay the rent” (in reference to the company's pay rise offer), and “McStrike”.

A new scandal has erupted involving the use of the “war on terror” to crack down on the democratic rights of US citizens.

The US justice department has acknowledged secretly seizing all the work, home and cell phone records of almost 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press (AP).

A right-wing wave swept Pakistan in the May 11 general elections. At the federal level, the conservative Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) will form the government having won 35% of the vote.

Former Pakistani cricket captain Imran Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf, came second with 19% of the vote and surprised many. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the ruling party for the past five years, came third with only 15% ― thanks to Sindh where it was able to fetch most of its votes.

France’s National Assembly and Senate have voted to extend the country’s military intervention in Mali. A resolution passed both houses of parliament on April 22 with a single vote against.

Three days later, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 2100, creating a policing mission (known as MINUSMA) starting July 1. Its projected size is 11,200 soldiers and 1440 police.

A truck delivering waste from a fracking operation in Greene County, Pennsylvania, on April 19 was quarantined after being rejected by a hazardous waste landfill as too dangerous.

The truck was carrying highly radioactive radium-226 in concentrations 86 times higher than allowed per Environmental Protection Agency limits.

After being quarantined at the landfill, the truck was sent back to the fracking site, which is operated by Rice Energy.

Radium, it should be noted, is a routine by-product of fracking — the fossil fuel extraction method behind the ongoing “natural gas boom”.

Ten years ago, then Australian Prime Minister John Howard sent 2000 Australian soldiers to join the US-led invasion of Iraq. Like US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Howard lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify an illegal war of aggression.

The Labor Party hoped to gain political advantage by opposing the unpopular war, but did so only on a technicality: the lack of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) authorisation for the invasion.

Hundreds of protesters from the indigenous advocacy NGO Survival International gathered outside Peruvian consulates and embassies in London, Paris, Madrid and San Francisco on April 23. They had gathered to urge the Peruvian government to reconsider expanding the Camisea gas mega-project.

Camisea’s Bloc 88, deep in the Amazonian jungles of south-eastern Peru, is thought to contain over 10 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The impact of austerity has thrown politics in Britain into turmoil. Both parties of the ruling coalition government — the Conservative Party (Tories) and the Liberal Democrats — lost heavily in municipal elections in England on May 2 to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

The UKIP is a right-wing, populist, anti-immigration party that is pulling all the main parties to the right. Labour’s performance was better but poor, since its answer to austerity is its own brand of austerity and it has pandered to anti-immigrant sentiment.

With photos by Lee Yu Kyung in Kuala Lumpur

Up to 120,000 people packed and overflowed a large stadium in Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur on May 8 to protest the fraudulent re-election of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) government on May 5.

The crowd defied a police threat to arrest all who attended the opposition-called rally. The police did not dare confront the huge crowd but, since the rally, the police have called in 28 rally speakers for questioning.

The Ecosocialist Conference, a broad and enthusiastic all-day meeting in New York April 20, took a big step toward creating an anti-capitalist wing of the environmental movement.

The conference was arranged in just six weeks by organizers of the Ecosocialist Contingent in the mass demonstration against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in Washington February 17. It was supported by 29 groups who subscribed to the Ecosocialist Contingent statement for “system change, not climate change.”

Jailed WikiLeaks whistleblower and US soldier, Bradley Manning, was named on April 25 as the grand marshal in this year’s LGBTI Pride Parade in San Francisco. But, amid controversy and pressure, San Francisco Pride president Lisa Williams issued a statement the next day rescinding the honour.

Manning was elected by former grand marshals, who form an electoral college to choose a grand marshal each year. Other grand marshals are appointed by the SF Pride board and by a community vote. Grand marshals are chosen for making significant contributions to the LGBTI community.

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, veteran Irish civil rights leader, said in response to the case of Irish republican Marian Price, who was returned to jail in 2011: “It is a clear signal to everyone who is not 'on board' and who is not of the same mind as the government that no dissent will be tolerated.

“No dissent will be tolerated and you challenge the status quo at your peril.”.

There’s a new president in Latin America, and his name isn’t Nicolas Maduro. The election that brought him to power was called by an illegitimate regime following a coup d’etat, and his name isn’t Porfirio Lobo.

He’s a wealthy, conservative businessman, and his name isn’t Sebastian Pinera. His party ruled for over 60 years, and his name isn’t Enrique Pena Nieto.

May Day this year in Spain was not built as a special mobilisation against austerity, poverty and unemployment, and did not coincide with a general strike. Despite that, this was not a ritualistic May Day.

Tens of thousands of workers in Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Turkey and scores of other countries across the world marched en masse for May Day.

More than 50,000 low-paid workers rallied in the streets of Jakarta today to demand better pay and improved working conditions.

Bolivian President Evo Morales told a May Day demonstration in La Paz that his government would expel the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the BBC said that day.

The US government-funded agency provides funds and training to groups around the world that support US interests. In countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela, USAID has funded groups involved in bids to bring down elected governments.

West Papua has been gaining international support recently, especially in its pursuit of inclusion in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), a regional intergovernmental organisation that has supported the independence movements of its members.

Controversially, Indonesia, which has occupied West Papua for decades, has had observer status in MSG since 2011.

A mob led by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka attacked a clothing shop owned by Muslims in March, setting fire to clothes while police looked on.

The attack on the Fashion Bug shop in Pepiliyana, a suburb of Colombo, followed the spreading of a false rumour that a Sinhala Buddhist employee had been raped by a Muslim employee on the premises.

The citizens of the Spanish state awoke on April 14 to shocking news ― acts of “pure Nazism” were spreading across the country.

Not only that, but they were being organised in concert with “elements close to ETA” (the armed Basque independence group that has declared a permanent ceasefire).

Who was responsible? A Spanish equivalent of the Greek neo-Nazi outfit Golden Dawn? Some surviving cell of the Falange (one-time shock troops of the Franco dictatorship and admirers of Hitler’s New Order in Europe)?

A 700-strong march wound its way through the medieval streets of Freiburg, in the south-west German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, on April 20 to protest against the imminent resumption of deportation flights from the state.

The theme of the protest was “Those who want to stay should stay”.

Those targeted for deportation are Roma refugees who fled Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and their German-born children.

The owner of the eight-storey Bangladesh factory complex that collapsed on April 24 killing at least 362 people has been arrested at the country's border with India. Three owners of garment factories in the collapsed building on the capital's outskirts have also been arrested. They are suspected of forcing staff to work, ignoring safety warnings.

Two government engineers involved in approving the building's design have also been detained.

On April 23, Chris Carlson wrote at Venezuela Analysis:

*** Opposition leader Henrique Capriles claimed yesterday that the presidential elections were “stolen”, and demanded further audit measures that the Venezuelan government has said are “impossible”.

Capriles made the statements during a press conference on Wednesday in which he gave the government an ultimatum regarding the audit.

Thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails marked Prisoners' Day with protests on April 17, joined by supporters outside the wire.

More than 3000 detainees refused breakfast as part of a one-day hunger strike in solidarity with Samer Essawi, whose on-off fast has lasted more than 250 days and stoked weeks of street protests.

Essawi is receiving nutrients via an intravenous drip but refusing food and his lawyer says his low heart rate means that he could die at any time.

An armed squad stormed the main office of Uthayan, a Tamil language daily newspaper published in the city of Jaffna in Sri Lanka's north, At 4.45am on April 13. The attackers set fire to the printing presses and copies of the paper that were ready for distribution.

The Tamilnet website said the squad was believed to be operated by Sri Lankan military intelligence. Jaffna, like other Tamil areas, is under military rule.

The attack is the fourth this year against Uthayan, which is owned by Tamil National Alliance (TNA) member of parliament E. Saravanapavan.

On April 2, 1911 women all over Britain were holding all-night parties, staying out at concerts and late-night restaurants, skating at ice rinks until the morning and generally having a very good time.

But this was also a huge act of civil disobedience because the April 2 was Census night and these women staying out all night were refusing to have their details recorded in protest at the government’s refusal to grant votes for women.

N THE 60 years since the end of the Korean War, U.S. policy toward North Korea has fluctuated between the options of "containment" and "rollback."

Sometimes, the policy has shifted in the course of one presidency. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both started out as advocates of rollback--regime change, either by military force or by provoking an internal collapse--but ended as caretakers of containment.

The continued rightward shift of capitalist politics in the United States was underscored with the official release of President Barack Obama’s proposed budget.

In it, Obama proposes to cut the already inadequate pension program for the elderly known as Social Security and the medical insurance program for the elderly, Medicare.

These and other programs for the elderly and poorer sections of the working class are under attack. Both major parties claim that spending on social welfare must be cut in the current economic depression.

The April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon were another gut-wrenching reminder of how precious and fragile human life can be, how suddenly and cruelly it can be taken away.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, we are offered a glimpse of some of the worst aspects of humanity — the actions of the as-yet-unknown perpetrators of the attacks, as well as the call for racist, genocidal attacks against Muslims in response.

But we also can see some of the best aspects of humanity.

A US jury ordered oil giant Exxon Mobil to pay US$236 million to the state of New Hampshire on April 9 to clean up groundwater contamination from fuel additive MTBE, the Morning Star said.

Jurors sat through nearly three months of testimony in the longest trial in New Hampshire history. They said Exxon had been negligent in adding MTBE to petrol, saying it was a defective product. They found the company liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.

The statement below was released by the Party of the Labouring Masses, a socialist party from the Philippines, on April 5.

* * *

The situation on the Korean peninsula has taken a belligerent new turn drawing the entire region into a threatening climate of war preparations.

According to the line promoted by the US government: the new young North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, is making unprovoked threats ― including a nuclear threat ― against South Korea and the US and that even China, North Korea's only close ally, supported tighter United Nations sanctions against the North.

A second storage pool was leaking highly radioactive water at the crisis-stricken Fukushima Dai-chi nuclear plant on April 7, operator Tepco said.

About 120 tonnes of radioactive water breached the inner lining of one underground storage pool on April 5, with concerns that some may have leaked into the soil.

Tepco is moving the remaining 13,000 tonnes of water in that tank to other pools, but said the April 7 leak was not large enough to warrant doing the same.

The state assembly of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu has passed a resolution calling for a United Nations-supervised referendum on independence for the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

This follows a month-long wave of mass actions throughout Tamil Nadu, initiated by students but drawing in broader sections of the population.

The Tamil Nadu protesters want the Indian government to raise a similar resolution at the United Nations. The students are planning to launch a civil disobedience campaign if the Indian government does not act on their demands.

The United Nations warned on April 10 that austerity measures in richer, developed countries were hitting children hard. Most European governments have turned to austerity measures to cover their bankers' gambling losses.

Social and economic policy research head UN children's agency Unicef Chris de Neubourg, said that they must reflect on how their cuts are affecting children. Instead of sparing today's children a future burden they are, in many cases, “presenting the bill to the children now,” risking "”letting them pay both now and in the future,” he told reporters in Geneva.

The admission on April 2 by former French Socialist Party (PS) government budget minister Jerome Cahuzac that he did have a Swiss bank account for tax evasion purposes has set off a storm of disgust and fury in France.

The already unloved government of prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has been shaken to its core. President Francois Hollande’s popularity has sunk faster and lower than that of any president in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.

It is not hard to see why. Here was the minister entrusted with the fight against tax fraud found out to be a lying tax cheat.

On the third anniversary of the release of the Collateral Murder video by WikiLeaks -- which exposed horrific war crimes by US forces in Iraq -- Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks contributor Birgitta Jonsdottir visited the US. Jonsdottir addressed a forum at Judson Memorial Church in New York City on April 5.

The room erupted into cheers when the election results were announced. For hours, the city of Merida's most ardent supporters of socialist presidential candidate Nicolas Maduro had gathered in the local offices of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). However, after a few moments, the closeness of the numbers sank in.

At the time of writing, the National Electoral Council (CNE) had announced that with 99% of votes counted, the PSUV's Maduro won with 50.6%. His closest rival, Henrique Capriles, received 49.1%; giving Maduro a slim 1.5% victory.

In the week leading up to Venezuela’s April 14 presidential elections, whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published a classified cable indicating that US-based aid organisations were working to overthrow the government and defend US corporate interests in the Andean country.

With the death of another “controversial” world leader, what the media should have done was go back to their editorials that threw around terms like “authoritarian” and “tyrant”, and were filled with tales of a legacy of economic destruction and class hatred and support for dictators, and just used a simple find/replace to remove “Hugo Chavez” and insert “Margaret Thatcher”.

Never have I witnessed a gap between the mainstream media and public opinion quite like the first 24 hours since the death of Margaret Thatcher.

While both the press and President Barack Obama were uttering tearful remembrances, thousands took to the streets of the UK and beyond to celebrate. Immediately, there were strong condemnations of what were called "death parties," described as "tasteless", "horrible," and "beneath all human decency""

SinnFein.ie reported:

Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams commenting on the death today of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said:

“Margaret Thatcher did great hurt to the Irish and British people during her time as British Prime Minister.

"Working class communities were devastated in Britain because of her policies.

Former chair of the US National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, received the 2013 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in January for his role overseeing the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

The NIE report found that all 16 US intelligence agencies judged “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”, and has since been credited with stopping a US-Israeli war against Iran.

The results of Venezuela's presidential elections in a few weeks may well predictable, with polls showing socialist candidate Nicolas Maduro well ahead of his right-wing opponent. But we are going through a fragile, vulnerable period, with a future that is less predictable.

These elections, as the start of the era of the Bolivarian revolution without its historic leader Hugo Chavez, have special characteristics and factors that go beyond the vote.

Unity and leadership

The leader of Greece's Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) Alexis Tsipras spoke in London on March 15 at a meeting organised by SYRIZA's London branch. SYRIZA came close to winning elections last year in Greece on a platform of rejecting austerity and making the rich, rather than working people, pay for capitalism's crisis. Below is abridged from the question and answer session after the meeting. The full version can be found at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, as can Tsipras's speech.