Takes up: Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination demanding mobility rights in South Korea; Disability Inclusive Community Building helping people in Kakuma Refugee Camp, in Kenya; and Autism Awareness Month in Mississippi, Malasya and South Africa.
Takes up: a yearly 2.5% increase in self-harm cases among people aged 24 and under; proposed UK ban of pornography depicting incest where one person is pretending to be under 18; and the situation of pregnant women and girls in ICE custody.
Takes up: a legal ruling in the Philippines Supreme Court giving a measure of recognition to same-sex couples; the Dominican Republic decriminalizing same-sex relations; and students at University of California-Berkeley creating and editing Wikipedia pages to preserve LGBTQ+ history.
Before Netanyahu and Trump launched their war against Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan began their own war. To understand this latest outbreak of death and destruction, an understanding of some of the complex history of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations is required.
Takes up: Paula Doress-Worters, a founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, writing Our Bodies, Ourselves; far Right president José Antonio Kast taking office in Chile; and International Women’s Day demonstrations in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
On October 2025, the Rapid Support Forces, one of the factions waging war against the Sudanese people, took over the city El-Fasher, perpetrating genocide. This is the latest action in a three-year war which is causing the gravest humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century.
Takes up: a whitewashed required curriculum for introductory sociology in Florida’s 28 public community colleges; a loan-limit policy by the Federal Student Loan Program that could have disastrous implications for the medical field; and implications of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in Indiana colleges.
Takes up: the life of U.S. mathematician Gladys Brown West; and the insufficiency of laws punishing rape in cases in London, Germany and France.
Worldwide, over 500,000 content moderators work for global internet corporations. The work is performed by an increasingly female and young adult workforce in low-income countries. They have been organizing unions to deal with the job’s hazards.
A discussion of what femicide really is, triggered by a definition of the word in the bourgeois press.
In Oklahoma, Maine, Florida and Chicago, Van Gelder gives us a view of battles in defense of public and higher education. The rightist moves against state and local K-12 school districts and even individual teachers, staff, parents and students attempts to instill fascism and Christian Nationalism from the cradle.
Takes up: the situation of people with disabilities in Gaza; the opening of an accessible playground at Ella Baker Global Studies and Humanities Magnet School in Minneapolis; and World Disabilities Day 2025.
ICE murders in Minneapolis convinced more people to resist the war Trump is waging against the population, sparking new revolts, from student walkouts to general strike, from demands to abolish ICE to questioning of the system it came from.
Takes up: the first woman-led campaign by Workers Defense Project protesting the working conditions of housekeepers; Canada cancelling the caregiver permanent residency program; and women filing a lawsuit regarding unnecessary medical procedures by gynecologist Javaid Perwaiz.
Trump expanded both the war on Venezuela and the world’s spiral into war. Its connection to his war to subdue the people in the U.S. was brought home by an ICE agent’s murder of Renee Nicole Good.
Takes up: U.S. stopped federal protections for Trans and Intersex prisoners; International Transgender Day of Remembrance 2025; protests in Turkey against a bill criminalizing same-sex relations and gender-affirming surgery; and Russian LGBTQ+ people fleeing to Argentina.
Takes up: spread of the Nordic Model in Europe, i.e., decriminalizing victims of prostitution while criminalizing pimps and customers; and 2025 International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Takes up: UK stories of artists and activists living with disabilities; women in Moldova and Armenia helping women with disabilities be independent; and Sylvain LeMay receiving the Canadian Union of Public Employees National Disability Rights Activism Award.
Excerpts from a statement issued by Internationalist Solidarity with the Mapuche Autonomist Struggle calling to stand with the Mapuche people resisting occupation and extractivism in Chile and Argentina.
Takes up: Mary “May” McGee, who won a 1973 Irish Supreme Court case legalizing contraceptives; Despite a Nov. 6 protest of over 10,000, the Latvian parliament voted to exit the Istanbul Convention against violence against women; Women for Change in South Africa organized a protest against a femicide rate five times higher than the global average.
Indigenous peoples came en masse to this year’s climate summit, protesting, meeting, and insisting on radical participation. However, they were met with open resistance, feeble responses, and indifference from many countries, especially the rich ones.
The horrendous realities in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Rio de Janeiro and Venezuela are connected. Several of the world’s powers are implicated. The global capitalist system allows mass murder, rape and genocide to become “normalized.”
Takes up: UK Supreme Court ruling that sex assigned at birth determines legal sex; anti-gay legislation in Burkina Faso; a Takatapui exhibit in Aotearoa/New Zealand; advances for rights of Intersex people in Europe; and protection of Trans and Intersex people in Pakistan.
Takes up: the life of anti-gender violence activist Susan Xenarios; South Korean women suing the U.S. military for maintaining a network of prostitution; World Women’s March in Canada; and an anti-femicide march in Argentina.
Tracing the development of the climate movement—from its focus on environmental issues to divisions over opposing genocide in Gaza—Franklin Dmitryev argues that the climate justice movement inherently reaches for a broader understanding of the roots of the climate crisis and the need for a deep social transformation.
From food safety to public health, from immigration to Black history to Israel’s war on Palestinians, the Trump administration is stripping access to important information. But every strategy to attack information and thought has generated new resistance.
Takes up: Opening of the Disability Cultural Center in San Francisco; ‘Everyone Is Good at Something’ by Indian photographer Vicky Roy; and new steps in the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities in Ireland.
A view of the educational situation in several states of the U.S., from budget cuts and ideological repression to language discrimination and the introduction of AI in classrooms.
Takes up: proliferation of women’s “co-living spaces” in China; 51st anniversary of Studio D, the only publicly-funded feminist filmmaking studio in Canada; a march in Spain demanding worldwide abolition of reproductive surrogacy; and the Women Against the Far-Right campaign in Great Britain.
Takes up: Flame Con comics convention in NYC; the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court ruling St. Lucia’s colonial-era anti-gay-sex laws unconstitutional; resistance against Trump’s anti-Transgender policies; United in Pride, a grassroots organization in Ottawa; and Graeme Reid renewed as the UN’s LGBTQ+ expert scholar and author.
Takes up: a demonstration in Lippstadt, Germany, against Evangelical Lippstadt Hospital’s decision to stop providing abortions; a Superior Court Justice in Ontario, Canada, finding five men not guilty of sexual assault; and police removing migrants, mostly women and children, from a makeshift encampment outside the City Hall in Paris, France.
People in Sudan are experiencing the worst cholera outbreak in years, as well as destroyed villages and rape as a weapon of war. The upsurge of Sudanese masses in 2019 showed an emancipatory pathway forward when they overthrew Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s iron-fisted rule swept tens of thousands into dungeons. The National Assembly changed the Constitution to allow unlimited re-election to the presidency. Illegal mass deportations to El Salvador from the U.S. continue without any due process. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans continue to be locked up and tortured in the inhuman prison known as CECOT.
A year ago, a massive student-led movement overthrew the dictatorial rule of Sheikh Hasina. One year on, where does Bangladesh stand? Women’s experiences show that Bangladesh has a long way to go.
Takes up: an orphanage who cares for children with disabilities in Uganda; Nova Scotia’s New Student Code of Conduct; a protest against President Trump’s big bill on Capitol Hill; and Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith stealing money from the Canada Disability Benefit.
The Trump administration has doggedly tried to destroy public education by cutting its funding, barring children of undocumented parents from Head Start, sabotaging school lunch programs, as well as what is taught. His national school voucher program continues the attack.
Takes up: the life of feminist activist Susan Brownmiller; the UK government announcing a bill that would criminalize pornography depicting strangulation; and International Domestic Workers Day.
Takes up: Hungarian Supreme Court ruling that President Orban’s law banning public displays of homosexuality is illegal; Black Pride Colorado’s fund raise for “Diana,” a Trans woman attacked with acid in Philadelphia; and Kashish Pride Film Festival in Mumbai, India.
For immigrants—documented or undocumented—the U.S. is becoming a police state. Next year, it could be for the rest of us. The real opposition can only come from citizens and non-citizens protesting and organizing, putting their minds and bodies against a growing fascist state.
The genocidal undertone of anti-immigrant politics, from the U.S. to Iran and from India to Germany, reinforces the fact that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not some outlandish exception. In the aftermath of Israel’s war on Iran and Iran’s rulers crackdown on their own people, the question arises: Is Israeli’s genocide in Gaza the signal of where this stage of world capitalism is heading if it is not stopped?
On July 7, mostly young men and women marched in Kenya calling for the resignation of the autocratic corrupt government of President William Ruto. Police responded by killing 31, wounding hundreds, and arresting over 500 revealing that it’s the youths’ protests the government fears the most.
The May conflict between these two countries was only the latest of a long series of clashes, indeed wars, over the Kashmir region which both claim. However, this “incident” was particularly ominous as both nuclear-armed powers seemed close to further escalation.
Takes up: A UN Women report about women-led and women’s rights organizations in humanitarian crisis zones; an ongoing epidemic of hundreds of domestic violence cases, including eight femicides, in Nova Scotia, Canada; and UK modernizing its voyeurism laws to keep up with abuses of advances in technology.
Revoking the right to abortion relegated women as less than full human beings. All human rights are up for grabs, and women’s hard-won rights were deemed easy to destroy. Trump has acted accordingly but is running into “the resistance,” with women leading the way.
Takes up: the opening of Poland’s first abortion clinic; International Women’s Day in Argentina; and a march in South Africa demanding the government declare escalating levels of femicide and violence against women and children a national emergency.
Takes up: 2025 International Transgender Day of Visibility; the organization Free Mom Hugs; LGBTQ+ people in Germany; and the reinstatement of a colonial-era “buggery law” in Trinidad and Tobago.
From immigrants to Transgender people, from workers to students to women, no one is safe. Attacks on many fronts are part and parcel of what is widely recognized as a Trump/Musk coup, but is usually portrayed as normal politics in the media. Institutions cannot be trusted to save us and they need to feel the pressure from people fighting back.
What kind of new world order is Trump heading for? Forced annexation of territories (as in Russia’s war on Ukraine), genocide (as in Israel’s war on Gaza), and neocolonialism (as in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are crucial parts of it. The word “multipolar” cannot hide its imperialist nature.
What it is about this moment of this capitalist society that brought a creature like Trump to the top? The crumbling of society goes beyond economic measures. The symptoms are everywhere of a system that increasingly does not believe in its own future.
Why did the massive resistance eight years ago not prevent Trump’s return? And what is the “Left” today? More important than the unity of the Left is the unity of the movement from theory and the movement from practice.
