Ecuadorian activist Donald Moncayo Jiménez stands next to a gas flare from a refinery in the Sucumbíos province of Ecuador, on 14 January 2023. Photograph: Pedro Pardo/AFP/Getty Images
Exclusive: ‘Deep-rooted injustices’ affect billions of people due to location of wells, pipelines and other infrastructure
A quarter of the world’s population lives within three miles (5km) of operational fossil fuel projects, potentially threatening the health of more than 2 billion people as well as critical ecosystems, according to first-of-its-kind research.
A damning new report by Amnesty International, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that more than 18,300 oil, gas and coal sites are currently distributed across 170 countries worldwide, occupying a vast area of the Earth’s surface.
Proximity to drilling wells, processing plants, pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities elevates the risk of cancer, respiratory conditions, heart disease, premature birth and death, as well as posing grave threats to water supplies and air quality, and degrades land.
Almost half a billion (463 million) people, including 124 million children, now live within 0.6 miles (1km) of fossil fuels sites, while another 3,500 or so new sites are currently proposed or under development that could force 135 million more people to endure fumes, flares and spills, according to Extraction Extinction: Why the Lifecycle of Fossil Fuels Threatens Life, Nature, and Human Rights.
Most active projects have created pollution hotspots, turning nearby communities and critical ecosystems into so-called sacrifice zones – heavily contaminated areas where low-income and marginalized groups bear the disproportionate burden of exposure to pollution and toxins.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
In an age of resurgent fascism, the left can fight back and win
Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the contest for the New York mayoralty is a historic moment. He has crushed Andrew Cuomo – but more importantly, the brand of politics that the Democratic Party establishment represents.
He now has the opportunity to ensure that it is the US left which assumes the leadership of the movement against Trumpism.
He has won over half the vote, defying the opinion polls, and he is the first mayoral candidate to win over a million votes since John Lindsay in 1969.
The socialist left – the authentic, real deal, unapologetic, loud and proud socialist left – will now take power in New York City, the biggest and important city in the United States. In age of darkness, one of the great centres of the Western world has elected a socialist who stands against capitalism, against racism, against genocide.
This is a historic moment – and the consequences will reverberate not just around the United States, but across the Western world and indeed beyond. There are so many lessons that we must now learn so that what is today triumphed in New York will tomorrow take power at national level across the West – and drive back the rising tide of fascism.
In 2002, former US President George W. Bush meets María Corina Machado, then director of Súmate, an “independent democratic civil society group” funded by the US government to “oversee the electoral process in Venezuela”. Source: White House/Eric Draper
Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but there’s nothing peaceful about her politics
When I saw the headline María Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.
If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.
Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.
This is who María Corina Machado really is:
She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
She pushed for the US sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.
Machado was also one of the political architects of “La Salida,” the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”
She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by US migration policies.
Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.
But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under US ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.
Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.
Benito Mussolini ‘Il Duce’ (The Leader) is regarded as the original Fascist. Communists, Socialists and Anarchists were the active opponents to Fascism as was seen in the Spanish Civil War which ended in 1939 at the beginning of WW2.
Victoria Bay of Los Angeles protests against fascism while attending a “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstration in front of City Hall on July 17, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said one congressman.
After US President Donald Trump absurdly announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate the amorphous “antifa” movement as a “major terrorist organization,” a Democratic congressman had one request.
“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) on CNN.
Goldman added that Trump is using the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week “as a pretext to go after people he disagrees with.”
“He on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder when the murderer had not even been caught or identified,” he said.
“Antifa” is a portmanteau meaning “anti-fascist,” and the term encompasses autonomous individuals and loosely-affiliated groups of people who say they oppose fascism—but with no organizational structure or leaders, it was not clear on Wednesday how the White House would seek to designate the idea of anti-fascist protest “a major terrorist organization.”
As The Guardiannoted, since antifa is a US-based movement, it cannot be included on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations as ISIS and al-Qaeda are, allowing the Department of Justice to prosecute those who give material support to those organizations.
“There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States,” the outlet added.
Trump’s former FBI director, Christopher Wray, also testified in 2020—during nationwide racial justice protests that Trump also linked to antifa—that there is no organization to designate as a terrorist group.
Mark Bray, a historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, suggested Trump’s threat was akin to a statement claiming that the White House could designate other social justice movements as terrorist groups.
“Antifa is a kind of politics, not a specific group,” Bray toldAl Jazeera. “In the same way that there are feminist groups but feminism is not, itself, a group. Any group that calls itself antifa and promotes the basic principles of militant anti-fascism is an antifa group. There is no general headquarters or leader to get official recognition from.”
The number of members of the anti-fascist movement and their identities are not public, and though Trump called for the “funders” of antifa to be investigated, Al Jazeera noted that there is “no way of identifying and collating a list of financiers of the movement”—which mainly raises small amounts of money “for bail,” according to Bray.
“He is trying to promote the common right-wing conspiracy theory that there are shadowy financiers like George Soros playing puppet master behind everything the left does,” Bray told Al Jazeera.
With its stated plan to designate antifa a terrorist group, said left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, “they’re openly admitting they’re fascist.”
Veteran union organizer Charles Idelson added that “surely what Trump and his puppets repeating the lie really want is to ban is anti-fascist thought and speech, and imprison individuals who express it.”
Since Kirk’s killing last week, Trump and others on the right have asserted that left-wing groups and commentators were responsible for the assassination because some had tied Kirk to fascism and racism.
Right wing all week: How dare anybody call us fascist?!
Trump today: Designates anti-fascist groups as terrorists, uses FCC to consolidate control of the media and hands TikTok to allies
Trump’s claim that he will designate antifa as a terrorist group came soon after ABC, under explicit pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, announced it was taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air indefinitely after he remarked on the far-right MAGA movement’s reaction to the killing—a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment, said rights advocates.
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, toldThe Washington Post that Trump’s plan for antifa’s designation would “raise significant First Amendment, due process, and equal protection concerns.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
