Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
Liberals and leftists must do better on Venezuela
Isn’t it odd that all the liberals who vigorously ‘call out’ juvenile bullying cannot denounce the most powerful country in the world bullying the small, impoverished nation of Venezuela, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
A supporter of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution holds a portrait of Nicolas Maduro at a rally in Urena on Monday
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
The long-term effects of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange mean that the impact of war lasts well beyond a ceasefire
THIS coming September will mark 46 years since the US helped engineer a bloody coup against the Chilean government, a government seeking to break the chains of imperial dominance and capitalist enslavement.
Today the US government is at it again, engaging its enormous power to destroy a liberating project of the Venezuelan people. In the interim, US dirty hands have been present in thwarting the self-determination of peoples throughout the world, in some cases multiple times. Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, tiny Grenada, Panama – the list of the violated goes on and on – extending more recently to Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Honduras and, at the moment, Venezuela.
It doesn’t matter whether the US is ruled by Republicans or Democrats. When the first whiff of national independence is detected by the global watch dogs, the alarm sounds and the political “leaders” fall in line.
Surely only the wilfully blind fail to see a pattern. You don’t have to be a Marxist to grasp that the US is systematically and unilaterally reining in countries deemed by its corporate interests to be renegades. Nor do you have to study Lenin to see that this is the behaviour that history associates with empires. Thus, the word “imperialism” should come easily to even those who have little or no knowledge of the scientific precision of the term.
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FIONA SIM sees the Venezuelan anti-fascist and anti-imperialist initiatives as offering hope to the rest of the world
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