Venezuelan Elections: What Lies ahead?

BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION

Zoe PC

Photo: Zoe PC

The elections to the Venezuela’s National Assembly on Sunday, December 6 were a key moment for the besieged country. After five years of the legislative wing being used as a tool in attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government, the National Assembly has been reclaimed as a space for democracy and country-building. The new National Assembly will have a number of challenges as well, as Venezuela faces a major economic crisis due to the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States.

Guaido Threatens to Use Force to Overthrow President Maduro

IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION AGAINST VENEZUELA 

teleSUR | December 08, 2020

Juan Guaido (R) and President Donald Trump (L) at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, Feb. 5, 2020. | Photo: EFE

The U.S.-backed opposition politician Juan Guaido Tuesday assured that he does not rule out violence to overthrow Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro because “we must have all possible alternatives in mind.”

Farmers Denied Rs 1,900 Crore Due to Sales Below MSP in Last Two Months

INDIAN FARMERS’ PLIGHT

Kabir Agarwal and Dheeraj Mishra

The Wire | December 08, 2020

Paddy procurement is at full swing at the new grain market in Patiala city. Photo: Vivek Gupta

New Delhi: If the government’s minium support price (MSP) programme helped in properly creating a minimum floor price, farmers across 11 major agricultural states would have, on average, earned almost Rs 1,900 crore more by selling their produce.

According to The Wire’s analysis of data from Agmarknet – the government’s price information system, which sources price and quantity arrival data from around 3,000 wholesale mandis across the country – farmers on average were denied at least Rs 1,881 crore by having to sell their produce below the MSP in October and November.

Massive All India Response To Bharat Bandh Call Of Farmers’ Organisations

INDIAN FARMERS PROTESTS

All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee

Countercurrents | December 08, 2020

~ Complete Bandh in some states, huge protests all over India

~ More than 50 Lac people participate in 20,000 places to make Bharat Bandh Successful

~ All Sections of common working class people and white-collar workers join Bandh; city streets and markets deserted

~ Organised and Unorganised Sector workers involved in supporting Bandh; Daily wagers sacrifice to make Bandh successful

COVID-19 Vaccine: Rich Countries Might Gain, Poor Ones Might Suffer

COVID-19 VACCINE

 Peoples Dispatch | December 06, 2020

Multiple vaccine candidates for COVID-19 are looking promising and performing well in trials. However, just a few rich countries have already either booked or bought most of the doses of these vaccines that will be manufactured the next year. Low and middle-income countries are at the bottom of the queue to receive vaccine doses.

Corporate Media Silence Deafening as Former Clinton Aide Confirms Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Alan Macleod

MintPress News | December 07, 2020

Atop Clinton insider has revealed that the former president visited the Caribbean home of notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. In a long interview last week with Vanity Fair, longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Doug Band, noted that, contrary to the official line, his boss did indeed spend time on Little Saint James, the private island that the billionaire pedophile used as a base to traffick and rape women and children.

Physicists in China Challenge Google’s ‘Quantum Advantage’

QUANTUM MECHANICS 

Philip Ball

Nature | December 03, 2020

This photonic computer performed in 200 seconds a calculation that on an ordinary supercomputer would take 2.5 billion years to complete.Credit: Hansen Zhong

A team in China claims to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ — exploiting the counter-intuitive workings of quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers.

The Sword and the Sickle: William Blake and Class Struggle

LITERATURE ON CLASS STRUGGLE  

David Betteridge

Culture Matters | December 04, 2020

To celebrate his 79th birthday, David Betteridge writes about swords, sickles and class struggle

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Have a slow look at the drawing shown above. Is it not an image that captures our eye, engages our intelligence, and feeds our imagination, springing as it does from the artist’s own eye and intelligence and imagination? By means of his long-practised craft, the artist transports us into a Tale of Two Fields, of Two Bladed Implements, of Two Adversaries representing Two Classes, and of Two Ways of Life and Death. We see more than an illustrative drawing. We see an emblem, transcending the historic past in which it is set, and speaking of and to all times. This emblem is, I would claim, a gift to be treasured, likely to stick in our memories. It is beautifully stark in its overall impact, and subtle in its detail. Look, for example, at which blade overlaps which; and look at the two hands holding them. One is gauntleted, implying rank. The other is bare, implying the opposite.

The artist who drew our “Sword & Sickle” emblem above is Bob Starrett, best known as a political cartoonist. He is a latter-day “Eccles” or “Gabriel” of Clydeside and beyond, as readers of his Rattling the Cage know, and readers of the Culture Matters site, as also the many activists who have gone to him asking for campaign designs for leaflets or posters, and invariably got them, sometimes within a turnaround time of a day or a night.