By Giles Ji Ungpakorn

April 29, 2010 -- In a democratic society, when there is a deep crisis, it is customary for the government to dissolve parliament and call elections in order for the people to decide. This happened in Britain and France after mass strikes and demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s.

After mass right-wing Yellow Shirt protests against the government in Bangkok in 2006, Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai government dissolved parliament and called elections. Yet the Democrat Party and others refused to take part in these elections because they knew they would lose. This led to a military coup. The military wrote their own undemocratic constitution. Fresh elections were held under the control of the military, yet Thaksin’s party won an overall majority again. Abhisit Vejjajiva’s government is only in power by using two judiciary coups, Yellow Shirt violence at Government House and the airports, and the actions of the army. It has never been elected.

April 29, 2010 -- The Scottish Socialist Party is standing in 10 seats across Scotland in the UK general election on May 6.The video above was broadcast on BBC TV on April 23.

SSP election manifesto: `For an independent socialist Scotland'

No cuts, no wars, for an end to corruption

By Ingo Schmidt

The following documents were also adopted by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on April 22, 2010, in Bolivia.

By Evo Morales, president of the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia.

[See also ``Bolivia: Australian participants report on World People's Conference on Climate Change''. For full coverage of the Cochabamba conference, click HERE.]

By Ben Courtice, Socialist Alliance via Blind Carbon Copy

This is just a first reflection on the monumental World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which just finished in Cochabamba. I will post more on particular aspects of the summit soon.

By Jed Brandt, Kathmandu

April 21, 2010 — JedBrandt.net — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail clippers and bootleg Bollywood films from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counterparts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are normal for Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.

April 23, 2010 – Several represe