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Leftnews.org is a collection of daily news and views from the political left-wing found around the web.
Leftnews is a project of the Citizens' Press.
The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.
FAIR | With the encouragement of the state, universities are taking draconian steps to silence debate about US-backed violence in the Middle East.
Russian political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky writes in Jacobin from his jail cell at Zelenograd SIZO-12. He discusses the need for an alternative to the “individualist logic of modern liberalism and the totalitarian aggressiveness of the new conservatism.”
The Breach | Riding by riding, a cross-country network of Palestinian solidarity organizing pushed Liberal MPs to respond to their constituents
More and more ECEs and care givers are leaving the sector in search of better paid work. Current early childhood education students are uncertain about their futures. Many are opting out of pursuing a career in this field altogether. Indeed, the province could be short 8,500 ECEs by 2026. Ontario needs to do better and pay its ECEs and child care workers a decent wage.
The Maple | HonestReporting Canada’s campus media fellowship offers $1,000 to students, including journalists, to advocate for Israel.
Tricontinental | Amid the intensifying water crisis that plagues billions of people across the world, Israel is using water as a weapon in its war against Palestinians by denying access and destroying infrastructure.
This lyrical vignette from the recently departed Paul Burkett is the author’s final, posthumously published piece for Monthly Review. In it, the eminent ecological economist and jazz musician muses on the nature of creativity, technology, and the corporatization of music—and the struggle to decommodify it, freeing musicians and their craft from the confines of capitalism.
Jacobin | In granting Julian Assange only the most limited appeal rights, the UK High Court has deliberately closed its eyes to the press freedom issues at stake and shown a grotesque indifference to Assange’s basic human rights.
The answer is not regulation (before or after the event), but the banning of fictitious capital investment. Close down hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and exchange trade funding. Instead, banking should be a public service for households and small companies in order to take deposits and make loans – not funding for a massive financial casino where criminals and swindlers gamble away our livelihoods.
Part One: The Question of Being. By Colin Bodayle - MIDWESTERN MARX INSTITUTE
Prabhat Patnaik | There is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium.
Democrats are losing working-class votes. A new study from Jacobin, ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy, and the Center for Working-Class Politics shows how few Democratic Party candidates use populist rhetoric, propose progressive economic policies, or come from working-class backgrounds.
Canada’s former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney reshaped the country with a mix of free trade enthusiasm and privatization. Lionized in his passing by Canada’s press, his legacy of undermining the country’s working classes shouldn’t be whitewashed.
There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times: The Tenth Newsletter (2024)
Amidst the genocide against Palestinians and the war in Congo, human beings cling to hope. Saleem, in Rafah, dreams beyond the present, of Red Books Day and a brighter future.
Canadian Dimension | Aaron Bushnell’s supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is “self-defense,” the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.
Jacobin | Since Labor PM Paul Keating’s early ’90s privatization spree, Australian governments have been obsessed with public-private partnerships. It’s a model that spends public money to subsidize private profits — often with disastrous outcomes.
Morning Star | The two-day hearing in London’s Royal Courts of Justice is considering Mr Assange’s application to appeal against the dismissal of most of his case that he should not be extradited, which was heard in 2020. Should this application fail, Mr Assange will face 17 charges in the US under the Espionage Act and one for computer hacking. If convicted, he could be jailed for up to 175 years.
People's World | Former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump not only committed massive financial frauds to build his real estate empire, but his “complete lack of contrition and remorse” about them—when New York state caught him—“borders on the pathological,” the state judge who decided the case declared.