Stolen Police Helicopter Attacks Venezuela Top Court, Interior Ministry

teleSUR | June 27, 2017

Oscar Alberto Perez has been identified as the pilot who stole the helicopter. | Photo: Screenshot from Twitter video.

A helicopter from the Venezuela’s Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations agency was stolen Tuesday evening, circled around the Supreme Court building, firing shots toward the building, followed by two explosions which were said to be grenades, according to official sources.

The top court’s building in northern Caracas was sealed off after the national guard repelled the attack, which occurred around 5 p.m. local time.

A banner was unfurled from the helicopter that read, “350 Libertad,” in reference to article 350 of the Bolivarian Constitution that opposition forces are attempting to invoke to stop the National Constituent Assembly.

Venezuela’s Maduro Condemns Helicopter Attack on Supreme Court, Justice Ministry

by LUCAS KOERNER

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | June 27, 2017

Caracas, June 27, 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has denounced a “terrorist attack” on the offices of the Supreme Court and Justice Ministry in downtown Caracas late Tuesday afternoon.

According to the head of state, the attack was perpetrated by a member of the Venezuelan forensic police (CICPC) piloting a stolen police helicopter.

The assailants reportedly circled the Supreme Court, opening fire and dropping at least four hand grenades, one of which did not explode. The president indicated that the attack coincided with a “social function” in the Supreme Court, which he said could have resulted in “dozens of dead or injured”.

Down from the Mountain

by Greg Grandin – LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | June 26, 2017

President Hugo Chávez with residents of the Caracas barrio of Antímano. (Archive)

By the end of the last century, Venezuela’s old constitutional order, which for four decades had rotated power between two ideologically indistinguishable parties, was close to collapse. The crisis had started decades earlier, in 1983, when the bottom fell out of the world oil market. Then, as now, Venezuela derived most of its state revenue from the export of petroleum. By that point, the country had become heavily urban: 16 of its 19 million people lived in cities, a significant majority below the poverty line, with many in extreme poverty. Most of these urban poor resided in shanty towns sprawling up along the mountain walls that encircle Caracas, where the better-off live. In 1989, the government tried to solve the crisis of cheap oil with IMF-brokered austerity, which drove the poor down into the city, where they rioted and looted for three days. According to some observers, the military killed more than a thousand people, though the number is disputed and there has never been an official tally. The Caracazo, as the uprising became known, marked the beginning of increasingly focused opposition throughout most of Latin America to post-1970s economic orthodoxy, which held that high interest rates, balanced budgets, low tariffs, privatised industries, weakened labour laws and reduced social spending were the keys to development. Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and El Salvador would all eventually come to elect governments trying to find a way out of the neoliberal straitjacket.

Philippines: Duterte Regime Is Mixed Up and Vulnerable

by Prof. Jose Maria Sison

President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, walks with rebels from the New People’s Army, or NPA. | Photo: Reuters

As he is about to finish the first year of his six-year term of office in June, Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte is being assessed and evaluated by a broad spectrum of commentators in terms of performance and fulfillment of promises. His trust rating in poll surveys is still relatively high but this has begun to erode noticeably from the 80 percent peak of his popularity upon his election by a plurality vote of 38 per cent or 16 million of the electorate in May last year.

Those who continue to support him assert that performance in a year is not enough basis for a final judgment and that there is more than enough time ahead for him to accomplish promises that have most impressed them, such as the eradication of the drug problem, criminality, and corruption.

Pimps and procurers of Judiciary Bane of Indian democracy

by A K Biswas

Frontier | June 27, 2017

“Courts are comparable to brothels” [1]
–Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (26 June 1838–8 April 1894), a Deputy Magistrate of Government of Bengal wrote celebrated novel Anandamath. The composer of the national song, “Bande Matarm” had observed in an essay that “courts were comparable to brothels.” Anybody would expose himself to be hauled over the coals for observations as such in contempt of court. Were the British more tolerant? The novelist, decorated with coveted royal titles Rai Bahadur in 1891 and Companion of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire in 1891, retired unmolested with glory.  A recent case has obliged us to recall the inherent import of what Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had written over a century ago.

Smolny on the Night of the Storm

by Anatoly Lunacharsky

Source: Internet

Smolny was brightly lit from top to bottom. Crowds of excited people were hurrying back and forth along its many corridors. There was great animation everywhere, but the most impetuous human stream, a real flood of impassioned people, was the one that made its way towards the end of the corridor on the top floor, where, in the most remote back room of all, the Military Revolutionary Committee was in session. The girls in the outer room, worn out though they were, struggled heroically to deal with the unbelievable crush of people who came for explanations and instructions or with all sorts of requests and complaints. Once you got caught up in this human maelstrom you found yourself surrounded by faces flushed with excitement and hands outstretched to receive some order or some mandate.

FACE OF AN ECONOMY: Inequality, debt, retirees and single women in Australia

A Journal of People report

Inequality, debt, and rich getting richer are not absent in Australia, a capitalist economy. In the economy, the top 1% got richer, faster, and wage inequality and wealth inequality has increased.

“We hear a lot about inequality in Australia but the true picture is much more complicated than the headlines usually suggest” writes Roger Wilkins, Professorial Research Fellow and Deputy Director (Research), Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne.

In an article headlined “Income inequality exists in Australia, but the true picture may not be as bad as you thought” Roger Wilkins writes: