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Not long after the FBI raid on Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen’s office and home, journalist Adam Davidson made a bold prediction in the New Yorker: “We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.”
With overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the new 2019 budget for the military is 13% larger than in 2017. It is even bigger than what Donald Trump had proposed, writes Barry Sheppard.
The US spends more on its armed forces than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, France and Japan combined, according to the United Nations. About 17% of the nation’s entire US$4 trillion budget goes to the military.
Jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has increased his support by five percentage points and would win Brazil’s October presidential election if he was allowed to run, a poll by CNT/MDA showed on August 20.
This news came just days the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee said the Brazilian state must “take all necessary measures” to allow Lula, the candidate of the left-leaning Workers Party (PT), to exercise his full political rights as a candidate in the presidential elections.
It had been planned to be a lavish celebration on the Pnyx hill next to the Acropolis in Athens where the citizenry would hold popular assemblies in the ancient democratic period.
The angry aftermath of the forest fires last month put paid to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hosting European Union and other luminaries in such a way. The event was to mark the formal end of the country’s subordination to the austerity memorandums enforced on it by the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund.
Venezuelans braced themselves as a series of long-anticipated economic measures came into effect on August 20, including the launch of a new paper currency called the Sovereign Bolivar.
The new currency brings with it a revaluation of all prices, wages and pensions, which will be cut by five zeros. Both the old Strong Bolivar and Sovereign Bolivar will co-exist for a period of time yet to be announced by the government.
Flooding due to monsoon rains in mid-August has devastated the southern Indian state of Kerala. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands evacuated.
In the August 19 statement below the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation accuses India’s hard right BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of deliberate neglect of flood victims.
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In recent weeks, a new wave of protests and demonstrations in the streets, civil disobedience and strikes in factories has been sweeping all over the cities and towns of Iran, writes Reza Akbari.
This follows the protest wave in mid-January, when the people, infuriated by the high cost of living, corruption, nepotism, inequality and injustice flooded into the streets, crying out their discontent and anger.
Our current industrial laws are anti-worker, anti-union and unjust. A campaign to change them is a must.
More than 600 delegates in Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power, the country’s highest decision-making body, approved the draft of a new Constitution on July 22. It came after two days of debate in which more than 100 delegates participated, writes Helen Yaffe.
The federal Coalition government remains unstable even though Scott Morrison has replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister in the August 24 leadership spill.
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