IVP600 - January 2025

The Chinese regime has never been as opaque as it is today. We are living in a time of uncertainty, not yet knowing how Donald Trump will play his cards in relation to China. Between the climate crisis and chaotic de-globalisation, these are unprecedented times. Let’s try to decipher the situation, without trying to remove the question marks.

More than nine years after the failure of negotiations between PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and the Turkish state and the end of the ceasefire, the Erdogan regime is once again trying to force the PKK (and its forces in Syria, in Rojava) to lay down their arms. However, this new "process", initiated by the leader of the far right Devlet Bahçeli, remains unclear for the moment about what rights the Kurdish people could obtain, apart from a possible release of Öcalan, if he calls for the dismantling of the Kurdish armed forces. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has summed up his approach to the "resolution" of the conflict as follows: "Either they will bury their weapons or we will bury them with their weapons."

Within days of Donald Trump’s election win in November 2024, China’s president Xi Jinping was at a ceremony opening a deep-water port in Peru as part of a “diplomatic blitz” through Latin America.

Xi’s presence was a symbol of China’s rising influence in the region.

On 11th December 2024, while replying to a question in Pakistan’s National Assembly, the federal finance minister admitted for the first time that since 2019, and while under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme, gas prices increased by a record 840% and electricity tariffs rose over 110 %.

President Donald J. Trump, in his first week in office swung a wrecking ball smashing institutions, breaking laws, and wreaking havoc. The effect is dizzying.

Roland Rance critises the ramping up of the state’s determination to further criminalise protest and calls for action to fight back

Newly elected United States President Donald Trump has set the tone with some startling foreign policy statements: annexation of the Panama Canal, outright colonisation of Greenland and, for Canada, publication on his social network of a map of North America entirely covered in the Star-Spangled Banner. As if inspired by Netanyahu brandishing the map of a single great Israel before the UN General Assembly, here is Trump, season 2.

On 17 January 1975, the Veil law was promulgated in France: voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) could now be carried out legally and in a safe environment. The right to contraception and abortion was a victory won by the struggles of the feminist movement in the 1970s, in France as in many other countries.

There are two conspicuous myths about the Gaza ceasefire that went into effect last Sunday: that it was due to Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu and that it was a victory achieved by Hamas.

One thing is indisputable: the management of Alstom, the French global manufacturer of rail technology, is sticking to its current strategy, which has been dictated by its major shareholders, and the effects of which can be seen in Mannheim-Käfertal.