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Claudia Sheinbaum is the next president of Mexico

Original article by Zoe Alexandra republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Claudia Sheinbaum at her campaign launch.

The progressive leader is making history as the first woman president in North America and has vowed to follow in the footsteps of her colleague President López Obrador in building an anti-neoliberal economic development model

Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential election in Mexico on June 2, making her the first female president of Mexico. The scientist, public servant, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and longtime activist ran with the “Let’s Continue Making History” Coalition composed of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), the Labor Party (PT), and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico. With 58% of the votes (according to INE quick count at 1:25 am (UTC-6)), Sheinbaum defeated Xóchitl Gálvez Ruíz who was the candidate of the right-wing Force and Heart for Mexico Coalition of PRI-PAN-PRD. Jorge Álvarez Máynez came in third with around 10% of the total vote share.

Sheinbaum addressed thousands of supporters in the Zocalo in the center of Mexico City to celebrate her victory. “I feel excited and thankful, for the recognition that you have given to the Fourth Transformation of public life of Mexico. Here as we have always done, I promise to not let you down. Today, the people of Mexico have made possible the continuity and advance of the Fourth Transformation, and also for the first time in 200 years, we women have arrived to the presidency of the Republic!”

Earlier in a press conference, Sheinbaum also announced that MORENA had achieved a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and was set to also win a majority in the Senate. Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa, won the race for head of government of Mexico City.

Sheinbaum’s party MORENA had announced her victory in a press conference about an hour and a half after polls had closed and all major exit polls projected her victory with a 2:1 margin, which they characterized as an irreversible trend. The President of MORENA, Mario Delgado, had stated: “Today sovereignty, independence, and democracy have also triumphed. The people have shown that they will not be deceived, not with hate campaigns nor with lies. The votes defeated the bots!”

The National Electoral Institute (INE) began to release results of the quick count at 8:00 pm (Mexico City time). Just before midnight on Sunday, the Council President of the National Electoral Institute (INE), Guadalupe Taddei Zavala, released a message to announce that based on the preliminary results of the rapid count, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum is set to win the presidency with a wide margin over right-wing candidate Xóchitl Gálvez. She added that between 58.9-61.7% of the electorate had participated in Sunday’s local and federal elections.

Tensions had begun to rise in the period after voting when conservative candidate Gálvez Ruiz, instead of accepting her overwhelming defeat, confirmed in the exit polls and the preliminary results of INE, called on her supporters to remain vigilant and suggested she is in fact be the winner. She then published a series of tweets, echoing the same messages of “vigilance” and wrote, “They want you to go to bed thinking that they beat you. They lie like always.” Analysts had been alerting to a situation wherein Gálvez would “cry fraud” and attempt to undermine the results of the election in light of her predictable defeat.

However, this narrative was quickly debunked after the official results confirmed the landslide victory of the MORENA candidate. When Sheinbaum announced her victory, she confirmed that Gálvez had called to congratulate her moments earlier.

Claudia Sheinbaum vows to continue making history

Sheinbaum will be the first woman president of Mexico and North America, and has vowed to continue the project of the “Fourth Transformation” inaugurated by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, led by the principle of “Mexican Humanism”. The anti-neoliberal socio economic project has had enormous success across Mexico in raising the standard of living for the majorities in the country through the increase in minimum wage, expanded social and economic programs to increase access to key rights of education, housing, healthcare, and more. AMLO will finish his term in office with a 80% approval rating, according to Gallup polls.

Sheinbaum spoke about the importance of the 4T project in an interview with Peoples Dispatch and BreakThrough News in April 2023, “states have to give the rights to the people. What do we think is a right? Education, health, a home, pension for all the elders. We also believe in strategic areas of the economy such as energy. The state has to be part of this, especially electricity, oil and mainly and now lithium…it’s important and it’s going to be very important in the future…You cannot have private investment measured only by GDP or international investment. You have to measure investment, public and private, in wealth for the people. And that’s the big difference with neoliberalism that believed that everything was going to be solved by the market.”

Mexico’s northern neighbor, the United States, is its most important trading partner. During AMLO’s six-year term, he managed to maintain a mostly amicable relationship with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but also did not shy away from holding his ground on key issues. For example, as president, AMLO was one of the strongest voices on topics which directly contradict US policy such as the US blockade of Cuba, the imprisonment and persecution of Julian Assange, and the subordination of the region to corporate and imperialist interests. AMLO was also a driving figure in reinvigorating spaces of regional integration and served as pro-tempore president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). How Sheinbaum relates to her northern neighbor and the rest of the region will be a defining feature of her presidency.

Original article by Zoe Alexandra republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

18/6/24 Apologies that I made a mistake when I first posted this article.

Continue ReadingClaudia Sheinbaum is the next president of Mexico

Swinney considers U turn on new oil and gas licences

I’ve been expecting the SNP to abandon their green commitments and here it is … SNP’s Swinney describing fossil fuels as sustainable and calling for abandoning the transition to help the transition from fossil fuels. That pretty impressive twisted thinking Swinney.

URI removed

First Minister John Swinney is considering dropping Nicola Sturgeon’s opposition to new oil and gas licences (Image: PA)

7/9/24 This content removed following DMCA takedown notices initiated from the Scotsman claiming copyright infringement. I disagree with them – i.e. I don’t accept that I’m infringing the Scotsman’s copyright – and they look to be produced by a simple automated routine without human supervision or intervention i.e. a stupid bot. I’m disappointed that my website host accepts these notices without question, has redirected some articles as a result and threatened further restrictions.

I have successfully defended one article that the Scotsman was claiming copyright to. That copyright is clearly owned by the letter’s authors. That’s the standard of competence I’m up against.

Scotsmen poncing about. Sporran, haggis, gear …


Continue ReadingSwinney considers U turn on new oil and gas licences

Israeli Minister Threatens to Turn Occupied West Bank Into Ruins ‘Like in the Gaza Strip’

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, speaks during a rally with supporters in the southern Israeli city of Sderot on October 26, 2022.
 (Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)

One advocate responded: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza.”

Israel’s forces have killed at least 36,224 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in less than eight months, and far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday threatened to similarly attack the illegally occupied West Bank.

Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, shared on social media a video he recorded in Bat Hefer, following similar posts a day earlier. The Times of Israel reported that the minister’s comments came after Palestinians’ gunfire from Tulkarem in the West Bank toward the Israeli settlement.

“Our message to the neighbors beyond the fence in Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Shuweika, and Qalqilya: We will turn you into ruined cities like in the Gaza Strip if the terror you are exerting on the settlements continues,” Smotrich said in Hebrew, according to a translation from Al Jazeera.

NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy pointed out that not only is Smotrich an advocate of illegal Israeli settlements—he has a home near Kedumim—but also “his role as finance minister means he oversees budgets, like police and army.”

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns of the U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians, said of Smotrich’s remarks: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza. Starting with the refugee camps and Area C communities (to a certain extent it has already begun).”

Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank.

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States, issued a statement about multiple recent events, including the minister’s comments.

“Every day, we see Israel’s far-right government targeting civilian infrastructure vital to the lives of ordinary Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank,” Hooper said. “This ongoing destruction has one goal—to make life unbearable for the Palestinian people and to force their removal from the land of Palestine.”

CAIR also “condemned the far-right Israeli government’s destruction of a vegetable market in the West Bank city of Ramallah,” explaining: “During a raid, Israeli stun grenades and tear gas canisters ignited the blaze that consumed a large portion of the market. Some 200 shops and stalls were impacted.”

The group further pointed out that the devastation in Ramallah followed Israeli forces bombing a pair of encampments in and near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, attacks that killed dozens of Palestinians displaced by the war—which over 30 countries have argued to the International Court of Justice amounts to genocide.

Smotrich has come under fire for other statements since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 7 attack. Just last month, in what critics called blatantly genocidal language, he advocated for “total annihilation” of Gaza.

In January, Smotrich said that the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be a “humanitarian solution” and “a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are 2 million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel.”

Smotrich made similar remarks before the current escalation, declaring in March 2023 that an entire Palestinian town should be “wiped out” by Israel and that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingIsraeli Minister Threatens to Turn Occupied West Bank Into Ruins ‘Like in the Gaza Strip’

Children die of malnutrition as Rafah operation shifts threat of famine in Gaza

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/02/children-die-malnutrition-rafah-famine-gaza-israeli-troops-aid-strip

Palestinians gather to receive the humanitarian aid supplies airdropped into Khan Younis, Gaza, on 28 May. Photograph: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

Arrival of Israeli troops in the southern border town has choked aid supplies, as hunger deepens in southern Gaza

Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones.

In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah.

At least 30 child victims of malnutrition have been recorded in Gaza, but almost all died in the north, until recently the area with the most extreme shortages of food and medical care, where a top US aid official said famine had taken hold in some areas.

The arrival of Israeli troops in Rafah in May shifted the grim calculus of threat in the strip.

“The ongoing situation in Rafah is a disaster for children,” said Jonathan Crickx, chief of communication for Unicef in Palestine. “If nutrition supplies, especially ready-to-use therapeutic food, used to address malnutrition among children, cannot be distributed, the treatment of more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition will be interrupted.”

…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/02/children-die-malnutrition-rafah-famine-gaza-israeli-troops-aid-strip

Continue ReadingChildren die of malnutrition as Rafah operation shifts threat of famine in Gaza