While I was in Venezuela a number of comrades asked me about some
manifesto against “Chavez’s attacks on trade union rights” and also
about the controversy over a letter Noam Chomsky had signed which the
bourgeois media had used in their campaign in defence of “human rights”
in Venezuela.

TUESDAY: Twenty four
hours ago, the streets of Tripoli were full of the sounds of rejoicing.
Now they are filled with the sounds of gunfire. The real battle for
Tripoli has commenced.

In the Horn of Africa, a famine is raging that has claimed the lives of
tens of thousands of people. For the first time in 30 years, the UN has
officially declared a famine. The drought in East Africa has resulted in
a food crisis across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya that has affected over
12 million people; hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia have
fled to neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, where unsanitary and crowded
conditions await, leading to thousands more deaths. But this seems to go
almost unreported in the media, which is dominated by stories of
rioting, phone hacking and the economic crisis.