World

Recently the International Transport Workers’ Federation general secretary David Cockroft issued a letter to the Thai government in support of three trade unionists who face charges for closing down the international airports last year.

Recalling the words of Les MiserablesVictor Hugo, United Socialist Party of Venezuela Youth (JPSUV) leader Heryck Rangel said “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and today in Venezuela, the time of socialism has arrived”.

The article below is based on a statement by Malaysian Socialist Party (PSM) general-secretary S. Arutchelvan on August 1, on the mass protests that day against the repressive Internal Security Act. The ISA allows security forces to detain people and hold them without trial.

A rash of workplace occupations is spreading across the globe as workers defy the brutal consequences of the recession.

The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule. The generals’ June 28 coup ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted, and relentless repression.

Those “free speech” crusaders at the Inter American Press Association are at it again, leading the charge in an international campaign against what IAPA president Enrique Santos Calderon decried on August 2 as “the gravest attempt to silence the press that has occurred in the last few years in the region”.

The so-called beer summit between President Barack Obama, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police officer sergeant James Crowley took place without incident on July 30 at the White House.

The following article is abridged from a July 29 statement by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall group

The head of Venezuela's telecommunications agency (CONATEL), Diosdado Cabello, announced the immediate closure of 32 privately owned radio stations and two regional television stations on August 1.

Thirty Thomas Cook workers involved in a four-day occupation of the travel companies Graffon Street premises in Dublin were forcibly evicted by police., the August 4 Irish Times said.

On August 1, United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) members across the country participated in 1556 local assemblies to discuss the reorganisation of the party’s base into local patrols.

Being Irish, one of the thousands who left the country during the 1980s economic crisis, I follow Irish politics closely.