By Peter Boyle

July 17, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly -- A week after Malaysian authorities failed to stop people taking to the streets of the capital Kuala Lumpur on July 9 to demand free and fair elections, six activists from the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) remained in detention without trial. The detainees include federal member of parliament Dr Jeyakumar Deveraj, who has been hailed by a prominent local writer as “the Malaysian saint of the poor”.

PSM secretary general S. Arutchelvan told Green Left Weekly that he agreed with the civil society organisers of the July 9 Bersih 2.0 (“bersih” means clean in Malay) that the number of people who defied incredible police repression to come out in the streets that day was about 50,000. Police reportedly detained up to 1600 people and repeatedly fired teargas into peaceful groups of people.

July 14, 2011 -- Socialist Resistance -- On Sunday, July 10, 2011, that bastion of scandal-mongering populist reaction in Britain, the News of the World (NOTW), departed this earth writes Piers Mostyn.

It was Britains’s biggest selling Sunday paper and the paper that achieved the highest ever sales in the world. Two days later, after what a Guardian columnist described as “an uprising of MPs”, the Murdoch empire dropped its bid to take over BSkyB. It was a humiliating retreat for the world’s biggest media mogul.

July 15, 2011 – Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary icon, a pathbreaking Marxist theorist and, according to the editors of

Jeyakumar Devaraj, Sungai Siput MP, is currently detained without trial under the Emergency Ordinance, together with five other Socialist Party members, o

By the National Coordinating Committee, International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe

Candlelight vigils (also see pics below) are being held outside the federal police HQ at Bukit Aman, Kuala Lumpur.

By Peter Boyle, national convenor Socialist Alliance (Australia)

By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer and John Riddell

By Sue Bradford

By Rupen Savoulian

By Martin Hart-Landsberg

July 7, 2011 -- Reports from the Economic Front, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- The charts above deserve a long careful look. According to the US National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession ended in the United States in June 2009. Not many working people are celebrating the expansion’s second anniversary.

As Paul Wiseman, an Associated Press economics writer, notes:  

[This economic] recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s. After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

By the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Germany)

July 9, 2011 -- It’s that time again! Greece needs more loans and governments in Europe are arguing about whether it’s really necessary and who should foot the bill. There is widespread opinion in Germany that Greece itself is to blame for the problems it now finds itself in. It is claimed that first of all cheated its way into the eurozone, then the government spent too much and the governed worked too little, many believe.

Latently nationalistic interpretations of this kind have been nourished by German politicians and the media, who have no end of proposals for how to "solve" the crisis. For example, the Greeks should save more, work more and sell their public property – and if all of these measures do not help, then Greece will just have to leave the eurozone or declare itself bankrupt.

The stupid thing is, neither are the causes of the crisis that have been named are correct, nor will the proposed ways out of the crisis achieve their goal.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation has produced Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks! to explain the truth about the fallacies being spread about the causes of the Greek crisis, and who is responsible.