"We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under." (Martin Van Creveld, Professor of Military History at Israel’s Hebrew University, September 2003)

Iran: We have been here before. The year before the assault on and near destruction of unarmed neighbouring Iraq, George W. Bush, of course declared the “Axis of Evil”, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

But it was the man now hailed “peacemaker”, former President Jimmy Carter, who, in his State of the Union Address on the 23rd of January 1980, made the most chilling statement - until the current political psychopathy – regarding a possible nuclear strike on Iran.

Very simplisticly put, the then Soviet Union supported Afghanistan’s leftist government, and eventually invaded the country in their defence, against challenges by the traditionalist, conservative Muslim, majority and (US backed) Mujahideen.

Union of organizations against abductions and disappearance had organized an awareness program through the media of leaflets for 17th (today) in protest against the continuing abductions and disappearances.

They were stopped by the security forces at Puliyankulama this afternoon. The officers had told them that they could not be permitted to go to Jaffna and they could go to Mulative if necessary.

Tense situation erupted here between the organizers and the security forces officers and in the end they staged a huge protest there. Security forces continued to disrupt this protest against abductions and disappearances from this morning.

CIA infects South American leaders with cancer?

Over 18 months period four progressive leaders of Latin America and their fellow citizens were shocked by the diagnosis delivered by their physicians - cancer. Fernando Lugo, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Hugo Chavez, and recently Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner were given this diagnosis. The Presidents of Paraguay, Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina suspiciously simultaneously turned out on the verge of survival.

Chavez immediately warned that the disease may be a "new weapon of the empire to eliminate unwanted leaders." Maybe, but oddly enough, the result was the opposite. All politicians not only did not stop their political life and moved away from responsibilities, but on the contrary, dramatically increased their rating and rallied around the supporters.

First, in August of 2010 60-year-old Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was diagnosed with a tumor of lymphatic system. After six sessions of chemotherapy in Sao Paulo and Asuncion, doctors reported that the tumor was gone. He was elected in 2008 with a mandate for five years. He resigned his ecclesiastical rank and became the second leftist president in the history of the country.

By Eva Gollinger - Correo del Orinoco International, December 27th 2011

Ever since the US-supported coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela failed in April 2002, Washington has been pursuing a variety of strategies to remove the overwhelmingly popular South American head of state from power. Multimillion-dollar funding to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela through US government agencies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has increased exponentially over the past ten years, as has direct political support through advisors, strategists and consultants - all aiming to help an unpopular and outdated opposition rise to power.

Iran claimed to have taken surveillance footage of a US aircraft carrier near the Strait of Hormuz as both countries raised the stakes in their standoff over the key oil route.

By Raf Sanchez, Washington

The commander of Iran's navy said the reconnaissance mission was proof that his fleet had "control over the moves by foreign forces" but it was unclear what intelligence could be derived from the grainy video, which was played triumphantly on state television.

Admiral Habibollah Sayyari's statement came as Iranian ships, helicopters and submarines continued a 10-day war game exercise designed to give credibility to the country's threat to close the Strait and choke off the world's oil supplies if the West moves ahead with sanctions.

Venezuelan president suggests spate of cancer among leftwing South American leaders may be inflicted by US technology

Tom Phillips guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 December 2011 13.37 GMT Article history

He has called George W Bush the devil and described Barack Obama as a clown.

But Hugo Chávez's customary jabs at his neighbours to the north took an unusual turn this week, when the Venezuelan president suggested that Washington might be behind a wave of cancer among Latin American heads of state.

"Would it be so strange that they've invented the technology to spread cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" Chávez pondered, one day after Argentina's president Cristina Fernández de Kirchnerannounced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and would undergo surgery in January.

Turkey's government forced to admit victims of bombing were not Kurdish separatist fighters

Peter Beaumont guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 December 2011 18.42 GMT Article history

The donkeys had been sent across Turkey's south-eastern border withIraq to ferry vats of smuggled diesel and cigarettes. On Thursday when they came back it was with bodies wrapped in carpets lashed to their sides: the victims of a Turkish air raid that killed up to 35 villagers from this remote region.

In a major embarrassment for Turkey's government, it was forced on Thursday to admit that the dead, originally described by the Turkish army as Kurdish separatist fighters from the banned PKK, were civilians, misidentified by Turkish drones and then bombed on Wednesday evening as they travelled close to the Iraqi border.

The wife of the missing Jaffna political activist Kugan Muruganandan has sought his release in view of Christmas.

The appeal by Muruganandan Chanda came at a media briefing today (Dec. 25) convened by relatives of Kuganand Lalith Kumar Weeraraju, who disappeared several days ago.

Movement for Peoples Struggle – UK held a protest demonstration in front of Sri Lanka High Commission in London on 19 December, 2011. London demonstration joined the wave of demonstrations being held in Sri Lanka and in foreign countries to urge ruling party administration in Sri Lanka to release abducted and illegally detained two MPS activists, Lalith Kumara Veeraraj and Kugan Muruganathan, in Jaffna on 9 December while organizing a MPS media conference scheduled to be held on the following day.

Southwest China's Sichuan province will hike the minimum monthly wage by about 23.4 percent starting Jan. 1, 2012, to help attract laborers facing rapidly rising living costs, local authorities said Thursday. The minimum monthly wage will be raised to 1,050 yuan (166 U.S. dollars), 960 yuan, 880 yuan and 800 yuan in regions at different levels of development, the provincial human resources and social security office said in a statement. Sichuan, with a population of 89 million, is a major source of migrant workers for major cities around China, especially in the eastern coastal manufacturing hubs. In the southern economic powerhouse of Shenzhen, local authorities plan to raise the minimum monthly wage by 15 percent to 1,500 yuan in January to attract laborers. Severe labor shortages and rising living costs in Chinese cities prompted wage hikes both this year and last year. Twenty-one provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities had raised the minimum monthly wage by an average of 21.7 percent by October this year, according to Yin Chengji, spokesman for the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

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“The surge of mass rising can’t be stopped by killing us.”

Supreme Leading Committee, PBSP (MBRM), 1st week, December’11.

The Communists guide the oppressed class to the way of freedom, lead them in the struggle of changing their fate. Hence, for the reactionaries, the most favourite option for keeping the oppressed under control is to demolish the communists. It is their design to diminish the onward movement of revolution, which is essential for the oppressed class. In the Indian subcontinent, such a barbaric attitude was first imported by Indira Gandhi and the Congress govt. Later on, it was exported to the neighbouring countries including East Bengal. Sonia Gandhi, daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, present leader of the Indian Congress party, is still practising the same reactionary, savage, severe policy of which Comrade Kishenji has been the last victim.

On the Dark Side in Al Doura - A Soldier in the Shadows from Pulse TV & Maverick Media on Vimeo.

WARNING: Graphic and disturbing photos between 38:40 and 40:45.
U.S. Army Ranger John Needham, who was awarded two purple hearts and three medals for heroism, wrote to military authorities in 2007 reporting war crimes that he witnessed being committed by his own command and fellow soldiers in Al Doura, Iraq. His charges were supported by atrocity photos which, in the public interest, are now released in this video. John paid a terrible price for his opposition to these acts. His story is tragic.

 On the International Human Rights day, Lalithkumar and Kuhan Murugan have been abducted by Government Mercenaries and they are missing. We, the New Democratic People Front, appeal for their immediate release.

We give our strong support  to the island wide demonstration and show our solidarity with the participants of procession for the release of the abducted.

Q. Your experience with the formulation of national constitution in the last two years and the resistance by the reactionary parliamentary right wingers like Nepali congress. How do you sum it up in retrospect?

A. Our experience of Constituent Assembly for the last two years and our co-work with parliamentarian parties, including Nepali Congress, has been very complicated and bitter. In this whole process, intense ideological struggle is going on between two mutually contradictory trends: whether to build a new national army by integrating PLA in a dignified manner or make them surrender by disarming them and whether to attempt writing people's constitution with anti-feudal and anti-imperialist content or write a parliamentarian constitution based on status quo. In this struggle our party is becoming weaker day by day.

In this course, a serious two-line struggle is taking place on the evaluation of different compromises and agreements reached from the past to now.

Suvojit Bagchi spent over a month in Maoist hideouts in the forests of south Chhattisgarh.

SUVOJIT BAGCHI 27th Nov

CAMP IN THE FOREST

After walking for eight hours in a forest that possibly had more hillocks and rivulets than trees, without any long pause, by early evening we entered a narrow barren table of land bounded on either side by two separate ridges. At the far end stood a few blue and yellow tents. Somji, one of the men who had met me at the edge of the forest, picked up speed as we approached the tents. With the amber red setting sun in the backdrop, I saw some activity in the camps as Somji reached the centre of the table.

Q. You said there is class struggle in the making of the new constitution. Can you elaborate which classes are aligned in to Nepal to backwards from the marching forward and how it is reflected in the expression of the new constitution. How they are placed in different parties?  Which are the parties totally retrograde?

A. Constitution is a political document that guides the state power of the given country to drive forward. Like the state power, constitution is also relative to a certain class, oppressor or the oppressed. At one point of the people's war, the Constituent Assembly came into being as a political tactic to drive forward the unfinished task of new democratic revolution in Nepal. The classes, which were fighting militarily during people's war, are now clashing ideologically and politically in the Constituent Assembly. The front of class struggle has definitely changed but not the objective.

With the demolition of monarchy, feudalism has become weak in Nepal. The comprador bourgeois has acquired upper hand in the state power. However, the characteristic of the state power has not changed yet. The contradiction formed of the entire people of oppressed class, nation, region and sex on the one side and the comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which is leading the reactionary state power, on the other, is the principal contradiction. It is manifested now in the Constituent Assembly too. To write a constitution that paves the way forward to resolving the basic contradictions emerged out of semi-feudal and semi-colonial condition of Nepal and restructuring the state power accordingly is the task our party is trying to accomplish from the Constituent Assembly. However, two-line struggle seems to be sharp on the content of the constitution.

It is principally the class not a party, we are confronting with, in the Constituent Assembly. However, the ideological and political line of a party represents the interest of a certain class. In this sense, we have to struggle with the parties too. The Nepali Congress, a section of UML and some parties from Madhesh represent the interest of comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie and feudalism in Nepal. So we have sharp contention with them in the Constituent Assembly.

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Canada signed Kyoto in the late 1990s, but neither the current Conservative government nor their Liberal predecessors met targets. New Democrat environment critic Megan Leslie said there are no penalties under Kyoto, and pulling out saves the Tories from having to report that Canada is falling short of its Kyoto targets. “It’s like we’re the kid in school who knows they’re gonna fail the class, so we have to drop it before that actually happens,” Leslie said.

“The Harper government has imposed a death sentence on many of the world’s most vulnerable populations by pulling out of Kyoto,” Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Canada said in a statement. “The decision to leave Kyoto behind destabilizes the promise of action on the climate crisis. This is a further signal that the Harper government is more concerned about protecting polluters than people.”

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The threatened 'strike' - which would black out Wikipedia in English and possibly other languages - is in response to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is currently before the House Judiciary Committee. Opponents of the bill - designed to protect copyright online - allege that it takes a 'guilty until proven innocent approach'. Sites such as Wikipedia, where content can be published by any user, are alleged to be at risk. The activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation said, 'At a minimum, this means that any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content.'  'That’s a huge burden, and worse for services that are just getting started – the YouTubes of tomorrow that are generating jobs today.' At present, Mr Wales's proposed 'strike' has been put up for discussion on the site. There are hundreds of comments from site insiders, most of which 'Firmly Support' the action.

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Despite the US’s declared withdrawal of its military personnel and contractors out of Iraq, Washington has prepared to control the country’s rich oil reserves in any case, shared Ranjit Singh Kalha, former India’s ambassador to Iraq in the 1990s.