World in View: Blood on Saudi Arabia’s hands

September 13, 2023

There is an “Eastern route” for migrants from Africa that crosses Yemen and lands in Saudi Arabia. A new report from Human Rights Watch documents the violence of Saudi border guards against Ethiopian migrants. The U.S. has chosen not to raise the issue publicly.

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Women Worldwide: November-December 2022

November 11, 2022

Women students protest rape culture at Stanford; feminists in Gaza face backlash for campaigning against family violence against young women; Tunisian feminists protest male-dominated election structure; first woman appointed to Yemen’s Supreme Judicial Council, and women activists there win passport rights.

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Youth in Action: May-June 2022

May 19, 2022

Takes up: student workers at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, who struck on March 3 to protest the elimination of a farm residency program; graduate students at Indiana University went on strike April 13 for better wages, benefits, and to stop fee hikes, and for recognition of their union; and on April 25, about 20 students at Tufts U. held a protest against General Dynamics recruiting on campus.

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Pompeo worsens war on Yemen’s masses

January 31, 2021

In huge swaths of Yemen—particularly in areas controlled by Houthi rebels—famine and mass starvation are rampant. To add to this tragedy, U.S. President Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s parting shot before leaving office was to declare the Houthis a terrorist organization, thus creating draconian difficulties for food aid to reach famine-suffering masses.

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Capitalism is the real pandemic

April 6, 2020

Neither the coronavirus nor the ongoing climate changes are merely “acts of nature.” Rather both have emerged at this moment because humanity is grounded—entrapped—in the economic-social-political system(s) of capital/capitalism. It is the behemoth that we must examine: the monster we must free ourselves from.

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Editorial: Trump after impeachment

March 8, 2020

In the aftermath of Trump’s impeachment trial, impunity and purges rage while checks and balances failed. Armed with a philosophy of freedom, the opposition to Trump and to the capitalist system that spawned him would give Trump the challenge that fellow politicians could not.

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Art out of genocide

January 21, 2020

Review of the multimedia exhibit: “Stories Never Told: Yemen’s Crises and Renaissance,” in which Yemeni artists and hundreds of others spoke truth to power through their art.

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Rally to end war in Yemen

December 16, 2018

Rally in Chicago calling for end to war in Yemen, including U.S.-supported Saudi military campaign. 44 blue backpacks represent children killed when the Saudi coalition dropped a U.S.-supplied bomb on a school bus packed with children.

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Yemen peace talks

December 14, 2018

Yemeni civil society organizations have released a statement that should become the basis for peace negotiations.

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In Syria only solution: ‘revolution, revolution’

March 12, 2018

As Assad regime and Russian forces continue slaughter in Ghouta with bombs and chemical weapons while world powers refuse to interfere, supporters of Free Syria staged emergency vigils in Chicago on Feb. 18 and 25 demanding the bombing of Ghouta end and the blockade be lifted.

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IV. International crises

May 17, 2017

The people’s revolutionary struggles form the ground for approaching developments including Trump’s attack on a Syrian military base. The human-to-human communication found in places like Kafranbel has been a form of theory in itself. The deadliest weapon of mass destruction in the Syrian conflict has been the lie that there is “no good alternative” to Assad, echoing the bourgeoisie’s “no alternative” to capitalism. The state of Europe today illustrates the central importance of revolutionary solidarity.

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Immigrants and allies challenge Trump’s inhumanity

April 22, 2017

As the Trump administration ramps up deportations and related abuses, strikes, protests, and sanctuary cities are proliferating. The oppression of a lower caste of workers and the discrimination and violence faced by immigrants present a challenge to the Left, labor and the rest of humanity.

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Trump won’t smash Assad’s genocidal regime—support the Syrian Revolution!

April 9, 2017

Assad’s chemical attack on civilians reveals the lie the world has been living. Trump’s limited counterstrike was a response to the unprecedented mass opposition to him, not an abandonment of his counter-revolutionary agenda. It is crucial to take the living freedom struggles in Syria and globally as our basis, to oppose the lie that “there is no alternative,” and to clarify what we are for, not just against.

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Editorial: Yemen as world’s future?

March 13, 2017

The U.S. raid that destroyed Yakla in Yemen, killing 25 civilians, drew world focus on slaughter of Yemenis since the 2011 uprising in Change Square in Sana’a toppled the Saleh dictatorship.

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Where to now for the Middle East?

November 30, 2016

A look at the situation in the Middle East in light of Donald Trump’s election that takes up Syria, Yemen and the arming by the U.S. of varying forces–some of whom are fighting each other.

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Chicago air show opposed

Chicago anti-war activists protest the annual Air and Water Show’s message that war planes and war are cool, simultaneously educating the public on the wars the U.S. is involved in.

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Workshop Talks: Bleak future if no labor solidarity

July 3, 2016

Workshop Talks columnist Htun Lin looks at the world situation from the massacre of LGBTQ people in Orlando to the murder of Jo Cox in Britain to Brexit and to how workers are reacting, suggesting that there is no exit from global capitalism without international labor solidarity.

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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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The need for new beginnings in thought and in action

April 25, 2016

Contents: Introduction; I. Discontent, revolt and reaction in the U.S.; II. The worldwide war against women; III. Chinese labor in revolt; IV. Counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa; V. Toward organizational new beginnings. The fact that the old, crumbling order will not go away quietly explains why we print the Marxist-Humanist Draft Perspectives in the pages of the paper of News and Letters Committees. It is an open window onto the needed philosophy of revolution, without which all revolutions and freedom movements remain incomplete.

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Hospitals, children bombed: war zone care a nightmare

March 18, 2016

A Yemeni doctor pleads for help for the tragic and hopeless circumstances of many wounded from the Yemeni Civil War in a Taiz hospital, and the U.S. is called upon to have a grassroots movement to support military pilots who would resist what are clearly illegal bombings of foreign hospitals and healthcare and rescue workers.

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