Handicap This!: April 2024

April 17, 2024

Takes up: The World Health Organization (WHO) report, ‘Measuring Violence Against Women With Disability’; World Bipolar Day; the “We Are Here” rally in Missouri calling for higher pay for care assistants; and three organizations in Asia sponsoring the UN’s 2024 Project Zero Conference for inclusive education and employment for those with disabilities.

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Propping up fascists

March 17, 2023

To avoid Russia’s outright defeat in its brutal war against Ukrainians, the alliance of nations–Russia, Iran, and China, now with North Korea–that for 12 years has united to suppress the Syrian Revolution for freedom and dignity seems to be firming up again.

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Handicap This!: January-February 2023

January 24, 2023

Takes up: Vanuatu, a Pacific island country, developed a national sign language, Storian wetem han; in Minnesota personal care assistants have won a wage increase through the SEIU Healthcare Minnesota union; the UN celebrated the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on Dec. 3.

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UN documents Uyghur forced labor, torture

September 10, 2022

The pretext for China’s genocidal campaign against Uyghurs was “Countering Religious Extremism.” Under China’s “anti-terrorism law system” a new UN report states, “acts of legitimate protest, dissent and other human rights activities or of genuine religious activity fall within terrorism.”

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Women WorldWide: March-April 2022

March 15, 2022

Demonstrations in Mexico City against legislation recognizing surrogacy; decriminalization of abortion in Colombia; organizations assisting survivors of domestic violence and other traumas oppose the truck convoy in Ottawa, Canada, as re-traumatizing women; FiLiA began their “Kakuma Campaign” in Kenya on behalf of the residents of Block 13, an LGB&T+ refugee camp.

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Women WorldWide: March-April 2022

February 27, 2022

FiLiA began their “Kakuma Campaign” in Kenya on behalf of the residents of Block 13, the LGB&T+ area of the Kakuma refugee camp; demonstrations in Mexico City against legislation on surrogacy; the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia; and people in organizations assisting survivors of domestic violence, war, homelessness and other traumas came out against the truck convoy in Ottawa, Canada, as traumatizing women.

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Afghans resist Taliban and the world

November 12, 2021

After the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, there are mounting human rights violations. They are forcing women to disappear from public life and accept abuse but Afghanistan’s people, agents of history, are not known for capitulating long to injustice.

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Youth in Action: May-June 2021

May 8, 2021

Young climate activists prepare for the next UN climate change conference, COP26; the French Senate’s reactionary vote to dissolve the National Union of Students of France; youth protest a Japanese plan to dump more than 1 million tons of irradiated water from the Fukushima reactor site into the ocean; and more than 60,000 schoolchildren in Japan signed a “Stop Extreme School Rules” petition.

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Rohingya burned out

January 31, 2021

Rohingya Muslims have faced extreme hardship at the hands of Burma’s military with the cooperation of the civilian government under once opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, spurred on by Buddhist religious leaders encouraging genocide.

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Fukushima is never going away

April 30, 2017

Problems from the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima are not going away because the government is not dealing with them seriously and refuses to ask for international help.

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LALIT confronts colonization of Diego Garcia

November 26, 2016

A member of LALIT in Mauritius speaks of their Action Conference on the situation of Diego García Island, which Britain has refused to give back to the original inhabitants after more than 50 years of struggle, and which it rents to the U.S. for a military base.

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Detroiters insist: water is a human right

September 12, 2016

The book Mapping the Water Crisis: The Dismantling of Black Neighborhoods in Detroit and the film Detroit Minds Dying, expose that the preponderance of water shutoffs in Detroit occur in poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, the lies of Detroit city officials, and the difference determined activists can make.

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II. The worldwide war against women

May 7, 2016

Part II of the Draft Perspectives 2016: The worldwide war against women includes attacks on abortion rights, counter-revolution in Egypt, attacks on women by UN troops. Women celebrated International Women’s day in Turkey and other countries.

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Queer Notes: May-June 2016

Queer young women of color show that the Black Lives Matter movement is also about women of color and other marginalized people; Indonesia is becoming inhospitable for LGBTQ people; and Chicago LGBTQ people get peer support from their chapter of the national Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.

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Women WorldWide, May-June 2015

April 30, 2015

A roundup of women’s actions worldwide including: feminists jailed in China before International Women’s Day; the unfair and punitive jailing of Purvi Patel for having a miscarriage; the fightback against the increase in sexist, racist, homophobic and classist harassment in Sci-Fi fandom; and the women’s hunger and work strike against terrible conditions at the Karnes Detention Center in Texas for migrant women and children.

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Support the people of Kobane’s struggle for self-determination!

October 13, 2014

As Marxist-Humanists we call for the support of the ongoing Syrian Revolution. We call for the right of self-determination of the Kurdish people, and we call for military and political support to the heroic defenders of Kobane. This struggle isn’t just local, or sectarian, but rather it cuts deeply into the universal history of humanity’s striving for freedom.

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Queer Notes, September-October 2014

August 31, 2014

From the September-October 2014 issue of News & Letters

by Dee Perkins

With the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories, going nowhere, President Obama signed an executive order July 21 prohibiting such discrimination by federal contractors, which employ some 28 million workers, and, further, [=>]

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UK sees Marxists under every bedroom tax protest

March 18, 2014

London, England–The UN’s own rapporteur for housing, Raquel Rolnik, has denounced UK government policy as creating a housing crisis for its most vulnerable citizens. Her findings were dismissed as a “misleading Marxist diatribe” by cabinet ministers. In a report detailing her investigation into the British housing sector, Rolnik specifically targets the government’s now infamous “bedroom tax.” She described it for Al Jazeera as having “an enormous impact on [a citizen’s] right to housing and also on other human rights, like the right to food [and] the right to education.”

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Climate change and development

May 3, 2013

Another devastating sign of capitalism’s degeneracy is its failure even to slow down climate change. Youth have spearheaded a new movement to control it. It is the actual social relations, relations of production, forms of labor, relationship to the land and other means of production, by which we can judge what must be uprooted, and to what extent any society has or has not moved to a path of development that breaks from capitalism’s never-ending growth of capital, or, as Marx put it, production for production’s sake.

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Handicap This! November-December 2012

December 8, 2012

by Suzanne Rose

London, England—A disability campaigner who set up an e-petition to stop government benefit cuts has vowed to continue her fight, after gaining more than 62,000 signatures. E-petitions need 100,000 signatures for a debate in parliament. Though the petition has failed in this regard, it is not the end for the campaign. Pat [=>]

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Mali’s contradictions

August 4, 2012

The fracturing of Mali and the demand for self-determination of the Tuareg people in the north continue (see May-June N&L), but with grave contradictions. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the coalition that has fought for independence and a new country, Azawad, joined forces with Ansar Dine, a Tuareg-led militant Islamist group [=>]

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Earth Summit 20 years on

June 2, 2012

To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):

Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev

The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]

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Palestinian solidarity

February 28, 2012

In Chicago on Dec. 31, well over 100 demonstrators came to show solidarity with Palestinians by releasing 300 black balloons in downtown Grant Park—one balloon for each child killed during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip three years ago.

On the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian people, Nov. 29, we reflected on [=>]

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Palestinian women discuss statehood

November 29, 2011

Palestinian women discuss statehood

Ramallah, Palestine—The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD) organized a political discussion on the UN approach to Palestin­ian statehood. Mrs. Amal Khreishe, the general direc­tor, facilitated the meeting, which hosted Mr. Bassan Essalhi, the secretary of the Palestinian Popular Party, and Mr. Hanna Eissa, an expert in international law.

]

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Women World Wide, September-October 2011

September 28, 2011

by Artemis

Unite Here, a union for service workers, has filed charges against the management of Hyatt Hotels for turning heat lamps on hotel housekeepers picketing the Chicago Hyatt for safer jobs in July in near 100 degree temperatures. Nearly all hotel housekeepers are women and most are women of color and immigrants. After downsizing, they [=>]

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For the people of Gaza

August 19, 2011

The area of the world where the right to water is perhaps most severely abused is the Gaza Strip. Since 2003, no piped water has existed. Out of Gaza’s 145 wells, only 55 are functional. The World Health Organization reported that 80% of the “drinking” water in Gaza is unsafe for consumption. Since the closure [=>]

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Women World Wide, July-August 2011

August 6, 2011

by Artemis

The reactionary majority of the U.S. Supreme Court gutted all future class action suits by throwing out the case against Wal-Mart, which has discriminated against over 1.5 million women workers as well as implemented extreme anti-union policies. Not surprisingly, big business was delighted with the verdict.

The International Criminal Court at the Hague, Netherlands, issued [=>]

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Big nations fiddle while climate heats up, poor starve

July 26, 2011

You don’t need a weatherman to know the wind has blown in another year of disasters: record flooding of the Lower Mississippi River, a record Texas drought, a record Arizona wildfire, the worst fire season in U.S. history. This comes after 2010, the planet’s hottest year in history, which brought record flooding in Pakistan and [=>]

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World in View: Haiti one year later

March 9, 2011

Oxfam, Amnesty International, the Red Cross and the UN issued sobering reports on the first anniversary of the most devastating earthquake in modern Haitian history. Only an estimated 5% of the debris which covers much of Port-au-Prince has been removed. Beyond nearly a quarter of a million people who died, several thousand more have recently [=>]

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Gaza youth shout out

March 6, 2011

Editor’s note: This Manifesto, posted by Gaza youth on Facebook, spoke for so many that it spread all over the world and was translated into dozens of languages. For the full statement go to: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=118914244840679¬es_tab=app_2347471856.

“Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN… Fuck USA!

“We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the [=>]

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World food crisis, still

January 26, 2011

The world food crisis, which was hot in 2008 and then subsided temporarily, is getting worse again. It was one of the factors in Tunisia’s revolution, along with recent revolts in Algeria. The piece below, published in the June-July 2008 issue of News & Letters, is still quite germane.

World food crisis stirs revolt
by Franklin Dmitryev

In [=>]

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Stop the culture of torture

November 18, 2010

From the Nov.-Dec. 2010 issue of News & Letters:

Forum: Stop the culture of torture

Chicago–At the end of September the Illinois Coalition Against Torture gave venue to torture victims and their primary lawyer at “Jon Burge GUILTY–beyond the trial.” The event featured Mary L. Johnson, mother of a still-imprisoned torture victim; Flint Taylor, battling lawyer for [=>]

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