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Created: Friday, 26 July 2019 10:15

Written by Trevor Rayne and Suzi Rose

Two days before the Transitional Military Council signed the first part of a power-sharing deal with the Forces of Declaration of Freedom and Change in Sudan (FFC) on 17 July, FRFI interviewed Rashid El Sheikh, Sudanese Communist UK and Ireland. Rashid explained the context and significance of the mass mobilisation in Sudan and described the new forces involved.

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Created: Thursday, 15 August 2019 11:23

Written by Ria Aibhilín

Since April protests have taken place across Honduras, first against privatisation reforms and now more widely against the neoliberal government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH). A fresh wave of protests in June was met with brutal repression by the government. Ria Aibhilín reports.

JOH was elected for an unprecedented second term in the November 2017 elections, which were widely reported to have been accompanied by fraud, manipulation, vote-buying and intimidation. The backlash to his election win was so great that the government imposed a ten-day 6pm-6am curfew and by January 2018 at least 33 people had been killed by the police and army during protests, actions branded by the Honduran National Roundtable for Human Rights as state terrorism. In April 2019 students, teachers, nurses and doctors took to the streets in response to legislative decrees which would allow ministers to impose privatisation reforms on public healthcare and education services.

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Created: Thursday, 15 August 2019 11:25

Written by Cassandra Howarth

While a wave of imperialist-backed reaction has swept across Latin America in the last decade, encompassing Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador to name just a few, Bolivia remains a beacon of hope for progress in Latin America, a staunch ally of those the United States attacks as a ‘Troika of Tyranny’ – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. President Evo Morales, leader of Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) will be seeking a fourth term in office in October’s presidential election. Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, is currently leading in opinion polls and is expected to win with a comfortable majority. MAS has won every election since 2005, and in the primary election in January Morales received 36.54% of the votes, compared to 7.10% for his closest rival. However, the United States – which since 2002 has spent $97m funding opposition groups – is increasing efforts to undermine him in favour of the right-wing candidate, former president Carlos Mesa, who cosied up to the US during his presidency and was vice president when the state killed 60 people during the gas war of 2003.

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Created: Thursday, 15 August 2019 11:52

Written by Ruby Most

In June the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission published a report on ‘social mobility’, ‘Elitist Britain 2019’, which found that high-powered jobs in the media, politics, law and public sector ‘remain dominated by a narrow section of the population: the 7% who attend independent [private] schools and the roughly 1% who graduated from just two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.’ The study comes as Boris Johnson has just become the 20th Eton-educated British Prime Minister, and no one better epitomises this privileged ruling class minority than this chauvinistic self-serving career politician.

The commission found that those in ‘elite’ jobs were more than five times as likely to have been privately educated than the rest of the population. The privately educated accounted for 65% of senior judges, 57% of the House of Lords, and 44% of newspaper columnists; and the 1 % of the population with an Oxbridge education for 71% of senior judges, 57% of cabinet ministers and 56% of permanent secretaries. This tiny minority of extremely powerful and privileged people are educated to rule over the working class.

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