World

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has offered asylum to Edward Snowden, the courageous whistle-blower who has exposed the vast NSA spying on every US citizen who uses a phone or the Internet, as well as people throughout the world. Bolivian president Evo Morales and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega followed suit. These three countries broke the diplomatic iron ring Washington sought to place around Snowden, who has been protected but in a sort of limbo in the transit area of Moscow’s international airport. Attack on Morales

The statement below was released by the Socialist Party of Malayaia (PSM) on July 10. * * * The PSM is deeply concerned about the ongoing Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) free trade agreement. The 18th round is to commence in Kota Kinabalu in east Malaysia from July 15 until July 25.

A man is sitting in a cell of the Soto del Real prison on the outskirts of Madrid, plotting the downfall of the People’s Party (PP) government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. He is blind with rage and determined to use everything he knows to annihilate Rajoy and his cabinet. The man is not a left-wing activist. He is a former senator and national treasurer of the party whose leaders he now loathes. His name is Luis Barcenas, known in PP inner circles as “Luis the Arsehole”. He has accumulated up to €48 million in Swiss, Uruguayan and other bank accounts.

George Zimmerman, the self-declared head of a neighbourhood watch in a gated Florida community who stalked, confronted and then killed African American teenager Trayvon Martin, walked out of a Sanford, Florida, courtroom on July 13 a free man.

The Egyptian army massacred 53 protesters who were calling for the release from detention and reinstatement of overthrown president Mohamed Morsi on July 8.

A new poll released on July 10 showed that US people hold a positive view of the actions of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, despite government and media demonisation, Glenn Greenwald said in The Guardian that day. A Quinnipiac poll found: “Fifty-five percent (55%) said Snowden was a whistle-blower in leaking details about top-secret US programs that collect telephone and Internet data ... thirty-four percent said he's a traitor.”

In a speech to the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art held in Sydney in June, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange discussed the impact of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations, the meaning of the wholesale US spying program Snowden revealed, and the policies of the WikiLeaks party. Below is an extract of the talk, a video and full transcript of Assange's speech can be found at Thing2Thing.com. * * *

Let it be noted that on this day, Saturday 13 July 2013, it was still deemed legal in the US to chase and then shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home from the store because you didn't like the look of him.

In Green Left Weekly #972, Tony Iltis wrote on the huge protests against the Morsi government, the military intervention that removed it and the immediate aftermath. These events, hailed by many on the Egyptian left as a “second revolution”, have sparked widespread debate around the world. Below, Tim Dobson, presents a different view of the events ― one that argues it was an outright reactionary coup. You can also read Iltis's most recent piece.

A recent ruling by the United States Supreme Court represents a big step forward, while another represents a leap backward. Both passed by a five-to-four vote. First the good news. The Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defined marriage as a right of only heterosexual couples. DOMA was passed by Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996.

More than two years ago, the Syrian people, inspired by the Arab Spring, began a democratic revolution against the viciously authoritarian Bashir al-Assad regime, a revolution that we enthusiastically supported from its beginning and continue to support. For two long years now, we, like the rest of the world, have watched in horror as the Syrian government waged merciless war on its own people. Some of the revolutionaries argued that for strategic if not for pacifist reasons, the movement should have remained non-violent despite the mounting repression it faced.

Yet again, there are floods devastating the Himalayan region; yet again the same criminal negligence and apathy of the administrative machinery exacerbating the tragedy. The lack of proper disaster management infrastructure in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, the delayed warnings, and the government’s refusal to act on the warnings from the Meteorological department in Delhi ― unfortunately, all of this is painfully familiar.