“We do not want war, we hate it. But we must prepare for it”, explained Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez on August 16 in response to plans to increase numbers of US bases around his country, which has confirmed the continuation of US threats of aggression from the Bush to the Obama administrations.

[The following is the text of a July 4 address to the Socialism 2009 conference held in San Francisco. It is reprinted from johnpilger.com.]

This year’s winner of Cuba’s National Award for Journalism is veteran journalist Luis Sexto. Little known outside Cuba, Sexto is a professor of journalism at the Faculty of Social Communication at the University of Havana.

On September 15, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a report it commissioned into Israel’s war on Gaza in December-January, during which some 1400 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military. Thirteen Israelis also died, including four civilians.

The big US banks that had to be saved with government money a year ago after they gambled too freely with “mortgage-backed securities” have learned their lesson. The lesson is that they can gamble as wildly as they like, keep the profits if they win and count on government paying for them if they lose.

[The following is an abridged version of a speech given on August 1 to Cuba’s national legislature, the National Assembly of People’s Power, by Cuban President Raul Castro.]

“If we continue at this rate, we’re not going to make it.” That was the verdict of Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at the end of “informal consultations” held last month in the German city of Bonn to try to resolve issues complicating agreement on a new international treaty to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissio

San Francisco – People around the world have seen images on TV of seemingly berserk crowds shouting down Democratic Party members of Congress at “town meetings” called to supposedly discuss health-care insurance reform.

On August 26, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu offered to freeze the building of new Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank for nine months.

Jakarta – Watching Jusuf Isak’s body wrapped in white linen being passed down to his sons, standing deep in the grave dug in Java’s rich, red muddy soil, was like watching life itself being buried, for Jusuf was somebody who never stopped living life to the full, to the very last moment. He died on August 15, aged 81.

The inauguration of re-elected Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa in the nation’s capital Quito on August 10 became a focal point for a discussion about the rising tensions in South America between the growing number of elected left-wing governments on the continent and moves by Washington to increase the number of its military bases in Colombia, which is ruled by the right-wing gov

Members of the Venezuelan parliament passed the Organic Education Law on August 14.

On August 6, Wahyu Sulaiman Rendra, Indonesia’s greatest dramatist and most influential poet, died in Jakarta, aged 74. More than a thousand people, mostly villagers but also intellectuals, attended his funeral on August 7 at his home and theatre group centre, Bengkel Teater, outside Jakarta.

The National Network for Women’s Liberation (Jaringan Nasional Perempuan Mahardika – JNPM) is an Indonesian women’s liberation organisation consisting of local women’s committees, coordinating bodies and women’s sections of labour, student, peasant and urban poor organisations committed to the liberation of women.

Port Louis – Thirty years ago this Indian Ocean island nation of 1 million people experienced the most massive upsurge of working-class struggle in its history. Today Mauritius is known as a “paradise”, especially for honeymooners. There are apparently no working people here other than those serving the needs of foreign tourists.

When Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (widely known as “Prachandra”) became Nepal’s prime minister last August, his party – the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), UCPN (M) – pronounced it a “golden dawn” for Nepal after 10 years of civil war.

San Francisco – The stock market has rebounded from its March lows, back up to where it was in January. Goldman Sachs reports big profits, as do a few other big banks. “Leading indicators” are up. The danger of a financial collapse appears to be behind us. Some pundits are predicting the end of the recession in the next few months, or early next year.

In a major policy speech on June 25, Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, tried to do what may be impossible – present the Islamist Palestinian resistance organisation as a willing partner in a US-led peace process, while holding on to his movement’s political principles and base.

In the early hours of June 28, a coup d’etat was instigated against the popularly elected Honduran government of President Manuel Zelaya. The coup was organised by an alliance of congressional leaders and the military high command.

The corporate media’s recent focus on the global economic crisis has all but eclipsed a much greater crisis – global climate change and the general destruction of the world’s environment. But if the environment “goes bust”, the implications for humanity and millions of plant and animal species are well known and horrifying.

The first major political incident after the July 8 Indonesian presidential election were two co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on Jakarta’s Marriot and Ritz Carlton luxury hotels on July 17, which killed seven people, including six foreigners. These were the first suicide bomb attacks in almost five years.

There has been a renewed campaign of anti-Iran propaganda and threats of more severe economic sanctions by the US and its imperialist allies, including Australia, following the mass protests in Iran triggered by the June 12 presidential election and the charges by defeated candidates of electoral fraud.

August 30 marks 10 years since the UN-sponsored referendum on Indonesian-occupied East Timor’s political status.

A few years ago it might have appeared that the process of radical social change underway in Venezuela had little in common with the socialist revolutions of the 20th century, including that paradigm of Latin American people’s power revolutions, the Cuban Revolution.

The revolutionary socialist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on July 9 proposed a reform to democratise the media and stop the corporate media endlessly campaigning to violently overthrow the elected government.