IV559 - August 2021

A NATIONAL STRIKE led by Indigenous Guatemalans, as well as an institutional crisis over the peremptory firing of anti-corruption prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval, are shaking that Central American country.

“Life no doubt was bad under the US occupation. Taliban suicide missions further compounded the misery bombed onto Afghan villages by the US war jets. The latter claimed more civilian lives. However, under the Taliban it will go from bad to worse. Once consolidated, Taliban will start deploying their horns more ruthlessly.”

“We have defeated a new onslaught of imperialism and the criminal right through worker, peasant, communal and popular resistance. From there we must begin to rebuild our economy. We will see if the government representatives take into account this balance sheet, considerations and proposals.”

“Small in size but Himalayan in courage, this protest began to dominate the TV screens and blogosphere. ”

In Martinique, hit by a particularly deadly fourth wave of Covid-19, the vaccination campaign is struggling to take off. 25.4% of the population has received at least one dose, of which almost 20% have received a complete vaccination regimen. Rates are still low, which place the island among the least vaccinated French territories, along with Guadeloupe and French Guiana. For care home residents, 48.6% have had a first-injection, of which 44.2% have had a complete vaccination regimen. For health professionals, the figures are 30.9% and 21.6, respectively.

A woman’s right to decide what happens to her body is at the core of her right to equality, human dignity, and choice. This right is identified as one’s bodily autonomy. By criminalising abortion, Sri Lanka’s law undermines a woman’s right to exercise her bodily autonomy. Despite this criminalisation, women who choose to exercise such rights are vulnerable to unsafe abortion procedures. In 2016, 12.5% of maternal deaths in Sri Lanka were a result of unsafe abortions.

In less than a week after United States-NATO forces left the country, the puppet regime in Afghanistan collapsed, as the militant Taliban march into city after city without resistance. The capital Kabul is now in Taliban hands. President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.

The killing on 7 July 2021 of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, highlighted the status as a land of extreme poverty attributed by the mainstream media of the “democratic countries” to the first territory to have abolished slavery on the “American” continent. It is in the perspective of this “historical revenge” that the historian Marco Morel – author of “A Revolução do Haiti e o Brasil escravista – O que não deve ser dito” (“The Haitian Revolution and Slavery-era Brazil - What not to say”) – analyses the current situation in Haiti and its relationship with Brazil, placing them in their historical contexts. The interview was conducted on 10 August by Gabriel Brito for the Brazilian website “Correio da Cidadania”

We mourn with the Afghan people their double tragedy. The first tragedy---the US’s illegal and utterly unjustified military invasion twenty years ago---helped prepare the ground for today’s tragedy, the accession to power of the Islamo-fanatical Taliban. Condemnation of the latter must not mean any softening of the criticism of US and Western imperialism or in shedding tears at its departure from the country.

Wales is the one country within the United Kingdom where there has been a Labour administration over recent years [1]. To many people’s surprise, including their own, Labour not only won the Senedd [2] election in May but gained a seat overall.