World

The Caracas Commitment was adopted by delegates to the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas over November 19-21. The full document can be read here. It included a plan for action that, among other things, included to:

Few know the story of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, who continues to endure humiliating and degrading treatment in US custody.

Twenty-five years after the worst industrial disaster in history, the people of Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, are still fighting for justice.

Officials from the Venezuelan National Land Institute, supported by the National Guard, took over 31 farms across the country on November 23, totalling 19,000 hectares of farmland. The government said the landowners did not have legal titles or were not putting the land to adequate use.

About 650 workers at the St. Francis Hotel, one of San Francisco’s oldest and most luxurious, walked out on strike on November 18. This was the third of what may be many strikes to hit San Francisco’s Class A hotels.

The United States government has said it will recognise the November 29 elections organised by the dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti, who came to power in a June 28 military coup, as legitimate, the Latin American Herald said on November 23.

Anti-coup resistance is continuing in Honduras, despite ongoing repression. There are strong indications the regime is preparing for greater repression in the lead-up to the November 29 elections, which it is seeking to use to legitimise its rule.

The US government is clearly seeking to foment war between its client state Colombia, the third-largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and revolutionary Venezuela.

“Hicks should be released … He will not be given recourse to a fair trial under the US military commission, however it is constituted. There will be no presumption of innocence. The evidentiary tests are poor. And therefore this is a question of basic civil rights and civil liberties for all of us." -Kevin Rudd, 2006.

Climate change deniers, conservative politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists were all but incontinent with delight. Flooding the internet in mid-November were thousands of documents and private emails that had been exchanged over more than a decade by prominent climate scientists.

Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that with the capitalist crisis and threat of war risking the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring” for greater unity of those willing to fight for socialism.

During an inaugural speech to the 772 delegates at the First Extraordinary Congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) on November 21, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez raised a series of proposals to open the debate and discussion over consolidating the struggle for socialism both internationally and in Venezuela.