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28JUN17.- The U.S. Conference of Mayors on Monday unanimously passed three resolutions opposing the military-heavy Trump budget proposal, urging Congress to move funding out of the military and into human and environmental needs rather than the reverse.

25JUN17.- It was curious to observe how much of Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign to rebuild the Labour Party was about foreign policy. Wars, he said, make us less safe, not more. Agreeing with him were: the obvious facts of the matter, voters in opinion polls, and apparently voters in their votes.

20JUN17.- “It started raining as soon as people gathered, poured during the Women’s March to Ban the Bomb and the program outside the UN, then stopped raining, but only after it was all over! A good turnout for a rainy day, estimated about 1.000, including 50 Japanese” activist Ellen Thomas explains.

16JUN17 – HAVANA.-- Any strategy aimed at changing the political, economic and social system in Cuba, whether it seeks to achieve it through pressures and impositions, or by using more subtle methods, will be doomed to failure

18JUN17.- US President Donald Trump announced his unsurprising decision to remove the US from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Most of the media ascribed the decision to Trump’s misunderstanding of the issue. Very few members of the press were ready to engage in a real discussion on future strategies regarding the environment and climate change. Trump promised to quit the Paris Agreement while campaigning and millions of people voted for him. This what democracy looks like.

25MAY17.- The anti-Trump resistance movement has been effective in its nascent stage, utilizing public protests to signal opposition to the president’s plans. In taking to the streets, airports and congressional town hall meetings, the resistance has had a decisive impact on blocking the discriminatory travel ban on individuals from Muslim-majority countries, and on rendering the first iteration of the Republican health care replacement plan dead in the water.

22MAY17.- It could have been me facing a deportation proceeding. During the time I applied for asylum, I had frequent nightmares where I heard my name ‘Jhon Sanchez,’ announced in a court; my wrists were shackled and I was brought to my country where soldiers tossed me in a hole. I woke up while I using my bare hands to dig myself out of the hole. Now I can barely imagine what my fellow friends are thinking when they go to school, when they travel abroad, when they’re being approached by a police officer.

26JUN17.- If anybody had any doubts about the need to refund, reinstate, protect and develop the UK Health Service the process taking place across the Atlantic is providing us with all the reasons.

25JUN17.- Obsession with privatisation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society have been the neoliberal agenda pervading the world economic system since the 70s’ after Friedrich Hayek was given the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. Other main ideologists were Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan and the disturbing promoter of selfishness Ayn Rand, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Jacques Chirac, Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys” and Alan Greenspan.

19JUN17.- On the occasion of the European Tour of the Standing Rock Water Protectors we had the opportunity to meet the young rapper and activist Rafael Gonzalez alias Tufawon.

18JUN17.- Republicans–and quite a few Democrats–are trying to exploit the mass shooting in Alexandria to demonize left-wing expressions of discontent toward the system.

18JUN17.- The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a significant victory in its fight to protect the Tribe’s drinking water and ancestral lands from the Dakota Access pipeline.

22MAY17.- In Moscow earlier this week I mentioned to a Russian friend that racists in my town in Virginia were chanting fascist and confederate slogans plus “Russia is our friend!” He replied: “But we never had slavery; we had serfdom.” He didn’t grasp why Russia was being grouped together with slavery.

18MAY17.- The president of Microsoft slammed the National Security Agency (NSA) for its role in the ongoing global malware attack, saying it was “yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem.”