Ireland: United Left Alliance confronts big challenges

[For more coverage of the United Left Alliance and its discussions at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, click HERE.]

By Dick Nichols, Dublin

July 16, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/Green Left Weekly -- Ireland’s seven-month-old United Left Alliance is the “new kid on the block” of European anti-capitalist parties. Launched on November 27 last year, it emerged from the February Irish national elections—where its name didn’t even appear on the ballot paper—with five TDs (Teachta Dála, members of the Irish parliament, the Dail). To date the ULA has also won 20 positions in local councils and one seat in the European parliament.

Malaysia: Free the PSM 6!

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.

Murdoch's News Corporation: crime, corruption and class rule

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.

Audio: Who was Rosa Luxemburg?

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

Malaysia: Free Jeyakumar Devaraj, activist doctor

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

Zimbabwe socialists facing treason charges call for solidarity! Trial now August 22, 2011


Action in solidarity with the Zimbabwe socialists, July 18, 2011.

By the National Coordinating Committee, International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe

Urgent appeal: Free the Malaysian socialist detainees!

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)

Aotearoa/New Zealand: Greed is good, as long as it's green

Greens Party co-leader Russel Norman sees the big business Pure Advantage group as "being an important ally for the Green Party’s vision of smart green prosperity".

[Sue Bradford will be a speaker at the World at a Crossroads II: Climate change: social change conference, in Melbourne, Australia, September 30-October 3, 2011.]

By Sue Bradford