Elections

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein shakes hands with Hillary Clinton

US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's full remarks to several Wall Street audiences became public on October 15 when the transparency group WikiLeaks dumped its latest batch of emails obtained from the account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman. WikiLeaks called the latest release a “holy grail” for journalism.

Stephen Jolly has been a socialist councillor on Yarra City Council since 2004. In the October 22 election he is standing as part of a team of seven socialist activists across all three wards in Yarra.

It is now less than one week until the Moreland City Council election.

Campaigning for Sue Bolton at the early polling centre in the suburb of Fawkner, you can sense the level of community recognition for the socialist councillor. When a group of school kids and their teacher were looking for a public toilet at the playground adjacent to the polling centre, one of them suggested I “get Sue Bolton onto it”.

“Don’t go around acting holier-than-thou about this like you’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before,” said Tomi Lahren, 24-year-old Trump-supporting commentator for right-wing US media network The Blaze, over Donald Trump’s leaked comments boasting about sexual assault. “Give me a break.”

Apparently, the universe does have a sense of humour.

After blaming his poor showing in the first presidential debate on problems with his microphone, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s candidacy is swirling around the toilet bowl due to comments that a different microphone did pick up.

Trump went into the second debate on October 9 with Hillary Clinton needing the impossible — for millions of people to forget the revulsion they felt when they learned about his casual misogyny unearthed in a 2005 recording.

In late September and early October, two big political explosions shook the already unstable foundations of the Spanish state. On September 25, Carles Puigdemont, premier of Catalonia and head of the pro-independence Together For The Yes (JPS) regional government, told the Catalan parliament that the country would decide its political status by September next year through “a referendum or a referendum”.

Socialist Alliance member, Sue Bolton, is standing for re-election as a councillor in the City of Moreland. Polling day is October 22.

Regional elections took place in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country on September 25, registering an overall rise in support of parties that favour Basque self-determination at the expense of Spanish centralists. At the same time, the combined vote of broad left forces rose.

The elections were meant to decide whether the incumbent centre-right Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) would continue to govern in the Basque Country, an autonomous region in the Spanish state where a long campaign for self-determination has been waged.


Peace supporters react to the plebiscite result.

The "No" vote was won by a half of a percentage point in a Colombian plebiscite on October 2 on a peace deal between the government and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which aims to end more than five decades of civil war.

Rafael Correa, Lenin Moreno and Jorge Glas

Ecuador’s ruling party, the leftist Pais Alliance of President Rafael Correa, has elected disability rights activist Lenin Moreno to be its next candidate for president during its October 1 congress, TeleSUR English said. Presidential elections are scheduled for February 19 next year.

Attendees at a conference of Momentum, a group of grassroots supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, in Liverpool to coincide with Labours' national conference.

It wasn’t a surprise, but that didn’t make it any less historic.

WELL, THAT was pretty much what we all thought having to spend 90 minutes with Donald Trump would be like.

After 18 months of hype and anticipation, an expected record number of viewers watched the first presidential debate to find out what most of them already knew: Donald Trump is an egomaniac who expresses his love for the American people by how many buildings he owns in their cities.