In the months leading up to Ecuador’s October 2006 presidential election, the US Embassy in Quito claimed to be impartial.
Rather than supporting one particular candidate, then-US ambassador Linda Jewell said the embassy only wanted to help facilitate “a fair and transparent electoral process”.
World
US woman with four jobs dies while napping
“A New Jersey woman who worked four jobs, who sometimes 'wouldn’t sleep for five days' according to a co-worker, died Monday while napping between shifts in her car on the side of the road.
Maria Fernandes died in her 2001 Kia Sportage after inhaling carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gas container she kept in the car ...
Protests are continuing in the Missouri town of Ferguson and across the country for justice for the family of Michael Brown, the unarmed Black teenager shot dead by a police officer on August 9, and against police violence and racism.
Below is an abridged September 3 US Socialist Worker editorial on the struggle.
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The graffiti in Ferguson, Missouri tells a story.
Since the two-party political establishment in the Spanish state ― the People’s Party (PP) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) ― got less than 50% in the May 25 European elections, its nightmares have been getting scarier.
The spectre disturbing their sleep is Podemos, the political expression of the indignado movement that in May 2011 exploded against austerity and corruption and for “real democracy”.
There is a political movement in Scotland that is quite beyond anything containable by or even comprehensible through the terms of conventional parliamentary, tick-some-scoundrel's-name-every-four-years politics.
Many of us have had our political senses so numbed for so long by broken promises of change that it’s taken a long time for people to wake up to this fact.
For the West's masters of war, it's a good time to be in Wales. A military alliance that has struggled for years to explain why it still exists, NATO has got a packed agenda for its September 4 and 5 Newport summit.
NATO may not be at the centre of US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron's plans to ramp up intervention in the Middle East and wipe the so-called Islamic state “out of existence”. But after 13 years of bloody occupation of Afghanistan and a calamitous intervention in Libya, the Western alliance has got an enemy that at last seems to fit its bill.
On November 27, 1095, a speech by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont used allegations of the persecution of Christians in the Holy Land to launch a series of military adventures by the warrior aristocracies of feudal Christian Western Europe against the Muslim civilisations of the Middle East.
The ensuing two centuries of religious wars, or Crusades, were characterised by land-grabbing, plunder and the massacre of Muslims, Jews and non-Catholic Christians.
More than 3000 landless families occupied the Santa Monica farm in Brazil on August 31.
The farm, registered in the name of businessperson and Brazilian Democratic Movement Party Senator Eunicio Oliveira, is a complex of more than 20,000 hectares. It is self-declared as unproductive.
The occupation was organised by the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), a powerful Brazilian social movement that fights for land for the poor.
“World leaders are failing to address the worst ever Ebola epidemic, and states with biological-disaster response capacity, including civilian and military medical capability, must immediately dispatch assets and personnel to West Africa,” international health NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said in a September 2 statement.
One week after an August 26 ceasefire halting an Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of Palestinians remained displaced, sheltered in United Nations schools and other facilities.
On September 1, 58,071 people still lived in 36 UN schools across the coastal enclave, according to Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.
Israel’s 51-day onslaught damaged 15,670 houses, including 2276 completely destroyed, and up to 500,000 Palestinians were displaced.
The appointment of dictator Prayuth Chan-ocha as prime minister by his hand-picked military parliament was such an unsurprising non-event that Prayuth did not even bother to attend. The so-called “vote” was unanimous.
Prayuth has set himself up as Thailand’s “Supremo”, placing himself in charge of all important posts. This harks back to the dark old days of the military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s.
As acclaimed writer Wat Wanyangkoon said: “The junta is detritus left over from the Cold War.”
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist who chronicled the Great Crash of 1929, the Great Depression did not actually end. Rather, it was swept away by World War II.
Something eerily similar seems to be happening with the global economy since the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC) six years ago.
The vice-chairperson of the US Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer, said: “The global recovery has been disappointing … year after year we have had to explain from mid-year why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back.”
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