Alendra ‘Len’ Harris says she feels validated by the judge’s ruling, which she says also backs up the hundreds of similar allegations from other Starbucks workers around the country who have unionized in an effort to get better pay and working conditions.
Love to see it. May 2024 be year of the active union.
“At present, no country, no destination, and no sub-sector have achieved meaningful reductions in tourism greenhouse gas emissions,” the report says.
“In 2023, the world witnessed an extraordinary succession of broken climate records, causing widespread and profound impacts on ecosystems and society. This moment compels a proportionate response from the tourism community.”
Bourgeois travellers creating emissions? A surprise to who? I wonder if 9% of this is the oligarchs who private-jet everywhere?
About 740,000 Rohingya were resettled in Bangladesh after fleeing their homes in Myanmar to escape a brutal counterinsurgency campaign by security forces. But the camps in Bangladesh are squalid, with surging gang violence and rampant hunger, leading many to flee again.
A mob of Indonesian students on Wednesday attacked the basement of a local community hall in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, where 137 Rohingya were taking shelter. The incident drew an outcry from human rights group and the U.N. refugee agency, which said the attack left the refugees shocked and traumatized.
Indonesia’s navy said Thursday that it forcibly pushed a boat packed with refugees back to international waters after it approached the shores of Aceh province.
One of the single most successful right-wing propaganda pieces over decades has been the vilification of those who are fleeing for their lives. “Of course, people who are being forcibly displaced need to be locked up” – ultimately, to me, the fact that the production of anger and malcontent amongst comfortable middle-class people is so easy is what signals deep structural cracks in social fabric in the west.
It’s almost like we lack empathy – something about led paint and big amygdalas doesn’t cut it for me. People have just succumbed to the rampant right-wing individualist narratives and deeply internalised xenophobia and racism because apparently, that’s easier than dismantling the ever inequitable and inhumane capitalism.
These “refugee crises” are so deeply ignored by mainstream apologist media at this point. It’s no wonder given the top headline in the Murdoch rag today is about how CEOs deserve to be able to micromanage employees “in the office”, rather than enabling the empowering work-from-home model. Sick joke that Australia’s majority outlets are radical right.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said on December 31 that the country’s economy had grown “more resilient and dynamic than before” as he addressed the nation in a speech marking the New Year.
…
China’s “reunification” with Taiwan is inevitable, Mr. Xi said, striking a stronger tone than he did last year with less than two weeks to go before the Chinese-claimed island elects a new leader.
The January 13 presidential and parliamentary elections are happening at a time of fraught relations between Beijing and Taipei. China has been ramping up military pressure to assert its sovereignty claims over democratically governed Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan to be its “sacred territory” and has never renounced the use of force to bring it under Chinese control, though Xi made no mention of military threats in his speech carried on state television.
The way Chinese imperialism is folded back into “economic success” with such ease, even by leftist media, is so disillusioning. It seems growingly likely that Taiwan will be on its own much like Hong Kong and Macau in all this.
The most concerning here, to me, is not the reduction in “democracy” – particularly given the thin democracy we do have is just a wrapper over oligarchical capitalism – but that the ongoing erosion of “freedoms” and amplified imperialist colonial tendencies is largely sweeping the world unchecked.
Or worse, backed by neo-colonial powers in ever-increasing genocide to address manufactured resource scarcity and racial division.
He won that vote but was forced to resign amid deadly protests over alleged election fraud, and fled the country. He returned after his then ally Luis Arce won the presidency in October 2020.
Morales has since fallen out with Arce.
Saturday’s announcement from the court reversed a ruling it had made in 2017 which effectively found that being able to run for re-election is a “human right.”
The new ruling cannot be appealed.
Morales denounced the new ruling as evidence of what he called complicity against him among judges, the government and the right wing in Bolivia.
The court’s decision means that people in Bolivia can serve no more than two terms as president — either consecutively or not.
It’s interesting how populist leaders tend to fall into this bucket of succumbing to right-wing, even fascist, tendencies once they achieve power. One could almost read politics, globally, as a theatrical farce that serves as a pretence for capitalist control – except that globally politicians are responsible for a great deal of harm against citizens.
The cold reading of these kinds of power-grabbing leaders is often “they’re harmful, but that’s why more people should vote” from the exhaustingly right-wing US populace, without any acknowledgement of the deeper power that (structurally) conditions human agency.
But that’s a story for another day.
Security forces in Afghanistan killed a number of Tajik and Pakistani nationals and arrested scores others involved in attacks against religious clerics, the public, and mosques, a senior Taliban official said Sunday.
Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, Taliban’s appointed defense minister, during a press conference in the capital, Kabul, said dozens of Tajiks and more than 20 Pakistanis were killed in the past 12 months “in operations by security forces.”
He said scores of Tajiks and hundreds of Pakistanis involved in various incidents were also arrested during that period.
Interestingly Afghan authorities seem to be pursuing immigrants. There could almost be a sense of populist governance at play here commensurate with the right on a broader scale – if it weren’t for the “complexity” of politics.
More than 4,360 people, including combatants and civilians, were killed in Syria’s civil war in 2023, in the thirteenth year since fighting began, a war monitor said on Sunday.
The figure was an increase on 2022, when 3,825 people were killed.
That was the lowest annual death toll since the conflict began in 2011 with the government’s brutal crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protests, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
This year’s count included 1,889 civilians, 241 of them women and 307 children, according to the United Kingdom-based Observatory, which has a network of sources inside Syria.
Syrian government forces accounted for almost 900 of the dead this year, with other fighters including from the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, pro-Iran groups, Islamist factions, Islamic State group jihadists and foreign combatants accounting for the rest.
Let’s hope that 2024 brings a decrease in the total global conflict and death. War only serves capitalism.
The Houthis have targeted vessels in the vital Red Sea shipping lane with strikes they say are in support of Palestinians in Gaza, where Israel is waging war to root out the militant group Hamas.
Several shipping lines have suspended operations through the Red Sea in response to the attacks, instead taking the longer journey around Africa.
The Yemeni rebels have said they are targeting Israel and Israeli-linked vessels. The US set up a multinational naval taskforce to protect the Red Sea transit route, which carries up to 12% of global trade.
At least someone is working to counteract US munitions supplies to a genocidal regime. Even if it’s sadly ineffectual.