News from around the world

On a cool, damp Saturday afternoon, on the front steps of Toronto’s Old
City Hall, nearly one hundred people gathered to demand "Reproductive
Justice: Equal Access Now!"

Japanese civic movements held a press conference and released a statement on territorial conflicts between Japan, China, and Korea on Friday, September 28. The statement was initiated by a small number of activists of peace movement, intellgentsia, media people, and lawyers.

Good news from Gilgit. We just got the confirmed reports that Baba Jan, federal youth secretary Labour Party Pakistan and chief organiser Progressive Youth Front Gilgit, has been released after nearly a year in jail. His bail was accepted on Saturday in the last of the cases registered against him.

The Revolutionary Socialists Movement affirms its complete rejection of all attacks on religious sites and symbols, whether Muslim or Christian. They strengthen sectarian tendencies and polarisation; breaking the ranks of the majority of the masses of workersand peasants, the poor and the oppressed. Such attacks weaken the masses’ struggles, their unity and the development of their consciousness and self-organisation in the battle against the gang of exploiters and investors which govern and control the livelihoods and fates of millions.

Labour Party Pakistan is calling a nationwide strike on Saturday 15 September in all factories and institutions against the killings of 289 in Karachi textile factory and 25 in Lahore shoe factory during the last 24 hours. Labour Qaumi Movement and National Trade Union Federation have announced full support for the call.

Last year, human rights activist Baba Jan Hunzai spoke out as an advocate for the former residents of Hunza Valley, whose homes were swept away by the lake formed after a 2010 land slide blocked the flow of the Hunza River.

Socialist Resistance leader Dave Packer died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage at the age of sixty five. His funeral took place on Friday 20 July, attended by 100 people and opened by his partner of almost 30 years Jane Kelly.

The anti-nuclear movement has been going from strength to strength in Japan with 170,000 demonstrating in Tokyo on July 16 in response to a call from Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe and other celebrities in the largest response so far to the government’s decision to restart reactors closed after the Fukushima disaster.

We thought important to publish without waiting for a longer article the news that Baba Jan and Iftikhar Hussain are now safely back in Jutial Jail.

We just received the news that Baba Jan got abducted from his prison cell by state agents of the Join Investigation Committee. No one knows where he has been shifted and his family and friends are extremely worried for his life.