SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
“Fake news” may have shot to prominence in 2017, courtesy of Donald Trump, but the power of the corporate media to mislead, misinform and under-inform for political purposes — usually to protects the interests of those who control the media and their powerful allies — has deeper roots.
And when deployed in Latin America, it has had serious consequences for ordinary citizens, as a look at three countries reveals.
In Brazil, privately owned news media, including O Globo, the second-largest commercial TV network in the world, supplied wall-to-wall coverage of the anti-government rallies in 2016 against President Dilma Rousseff.
International solidarity can ensure that Trump and his machine cannot prevail without a level of political and economic cost that he will not want to pay, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD
The global left must be unwavering in it is support for Venezuela as Washington increases its aggression, and clear-eyed about the West’s cynical motives for targeting it, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
The US is desperate to stop Honduras’s process of social and democratic change, writes TIM YOUNG



