My stepmother Shanthie Naidoo and her sister Ramnie were on an overnight flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow for a speaking tour when Extinction Rebellion offshoot Heathrow Pause began wilfully endangering aircraft by flying drones over the airport this morning. Shanthie is an ANC struggle veteran who lived in exile in London from 1973 to 1993, apart from some time in the exile community in Mazimbu, Tanzania. She and all her immediate family were jailed by the Apartheid government for political reasons. Shanthie's late brother Indres did 10 years on Robben Island and later wrote the book 'Island in Chains'. Their grandfather Thembi Naidoo worked alongside Mohandas K Gandhi during the civil disobedience campaigns against the early form of Apartheid. Extinction Rebellion has chosen for its logo a variation on the 'sonnenkreuz', a symbol used by both proto-fascist neo-pagan organisations and modern neo-Nazis. Around 220,000 passengers fly in and out of Heathr

WHAT do you call an event that would see a country lose a third of its population? A catastrophe? An apocalypse? In Europe they call it “Union.” According to the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the “free movement of labour” between European Union member states will see that fraction of some countries' populations emigrate in the next 40 years. A recent IIASA study, reported on Friday by the EU Observer website, says Romania and Croatia's populations will fall by 30 percent by 2060, and Lithuania's by 38 percent. By contrast, eight years of the West's proxy war on Syria, when much of the country was overrun by terrorists who behead followers of other religious sects, has seen between 12 and 23 percent of the population flee the country. The 1983-85 Ethiopian famine killed about 1.2 million people and drove another 400,000 out of the country, about five per cent of the population at the time. Another 41 years of EU

“Jovian” French President Emmanuel Macron spelt out this week, for anyone with lingering doubts, that membership of the European Union is incompatible with national sovereignty and independence – and that the bloc should assume an imperial role. In deference to the new Sun King, newspapers in all of the 28 current member states dutifully printed his proclamation on Monday, including Britain's liberal sneer-sheet The Guardian. Macron began by repeating the common but false claim that the EU, established in 1993 as a successor to the European Economic Community (which only contained NATO members), had kept the peace in Europe since the end of WWII. Then he turned on those, like Britain, daring to reassert national self-determination. “What country can act on its own in the face of aggressive strategies by the major powers?” Macron asked, seemingly ignoring the fact that three of the great military and economic powers are currently EU members. “Who can claim to be sovereign,

Continuing a long British tradition of political protest, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was 'egged' on Sunday. A man described in news reports as a “pro-Brexit protester” caught up with 'Jezza' outside the Finsbury Park Mosque and slapped a raw egg down on his head, with the words: “When you vote, you get what you vote for.” The protester was arrested for assault. The media was quick to assure us that the Labour leader was unharmed after his ordeal. Labour shadow home secretary Diane Abbott ramped up the hyperbole when she tweeted: “He punched Jeremy very hard. He happened to have an egg in his palm. But it could have been a knife.” But the sticky situation Corbyn found himself in was no more than what he deserved after selling out his principals, his friends and his country twice last week in a vain attempt to appease factions in his party who want him out. First he declared his support for a re-run of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union,

Teachers from across Africa urged the continental bloc to halt the privatisation of national education systems today. Unions affiliated to the Education International (EI) federation pressed the African Union (AU) to stop the spread of sordid tin-shack schools funded by the world's richest man. The EI statement, issued in the Ethiopian capital and seat of the AU Addis Ababa warned: “we are witnessing a shift away from education as a public good,” with “a reduction in education budgets and increased privatisation of education.” “This is not the Africa we want,” said EI Africa Committee Chair Christian Addai-Poku, referring to the AU's 'Agenda 2063' plan. “Quality education for the public good is an indispensable condition for the development of our continent and the realisation of the full potential of all its people.” The teaching unions criticised the rapid growth across the continent of ‘low-cost’ private schools, which they said were “notorious for empl

Guest post by the Vice-Chancellor of the Johannesburg Communist University The US assault on Venezuela is part of something bigger. It is part of an attempt by the USA to restore the position it had in the 1950s (when this writer was a child). This is the full meaning of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). MAGA is not a withdrawal from the world, but it represents a US-led colonialist attempt to repossess the world. In the pursuit of its megalomaniac goals the USA is putting out mass-scale misdirection and misrepresentation, mixed with crude frankness. The USA sends mixed messages. Those of us who are to be the losers have to work hard to gain a clear picture of what is happening, and of what can proceed to happen in the near future. For Africans and for the once-called “Tricontinental” former colonial countries, the USA’s project, which is a bipartisan (Democrats as much as Republicans) project, represents an intended reversal of the “independence” movement that swept th

The Hispanosphere was interviewed by news website Sputnik International on Thursday January 31, about the latest attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela. Here is the original transcript. What do you know about the ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela? Who is Juan Guaido, and what is his relationship to US intelligence services? Who is backing the coup and what's going on there? Like a lot of wealthy Latin Americans, Juan Guaidó went to university in the US. He studied “governance”, which is about telling people how to run their country.  Guaidó appeared on the political scene in Venezuela just after that, about 2007. For years before that the opposition had been taking money from the National Endowment for Democracy, which sounds like a charity but is really part of the US State Department. If you know the history of the NED, it took over the CIA's old job of channelling money to opposition and regime-change forces in other countries. Guaidó is from the Popular Will party,

Lima Group rules out intervention Washington's Latin American allies will not back any invasion of Venezuela to overthrow its elected government.  Peruvian Foreign Minister Néstor Popolizio insisted on Tuesday that the 'Lima Group' of nations – those hostile to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government – was against “military intervention.” “As the Lima Group we have said that we do not support any military intervention in Venezuela,” Mr Popolizio said at a meeting of the group in the Canadian capital Ottawa. The prospect of a US-led invasion to back extremist Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guadió's claim to the presidency appeared more likely on Tuesday after White House National Security Advisor John Bolton appeared at a press conference holding a notepad scrawled with “5,000 troops to Colombia.” But Mr Popolizio insisted “we have no information” about a planned invasion. At Tuesday's pressconference US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin annou

Europe's corporatist empire The British people's decision to leave the European Union (EU) in the June 2016 referendum was painted by EU-rophiles as a victory for the far-right – even before the polls opened. But who are the real fascists? Coup plotters Yesterday the unelected commission that runs the EU came out in support of the latest of many violent coup attempts against the elected government of Venezuela. The latest scheme, backed by US Vice-President Mike Pence, saw the opposition-controlled National Assembly declare its speaker Juan Guaidó 'president' just days after Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for his second term. “Violence and the excessive use of force by security forces are completely unacceptable, and will for sure not resolve the crisis,” the commission's 'foreign minister' Federica Mogherini insisted, days after 27 National Guard troops kidnapped their officers, seized weapons and tried to start an armed insurrection. “The Venezuelan