Malaysia's ruling coalition are on a political offensive to win back the northern state of Kedah in the August 12th state polls.ANN^

Fiji's doing austerity.^WSWS

Africa

Putin has said ahead of the Russia-Africa Summit that Russian trade with African countries has hit $18 billion and yet could be much higher.^RT China and Kenya agree to deepen Belt and Road co-operation,^CGTN as has Ethiopia.^CGTN Algeria has applied for BRICS membership and wants a $1.5 billion stake in the New Development Bank.^TC Meanwhile, African exports to China have fallen by 12% in the first half of 2023 despite a push to buy more goods from Africa, while goods exported to Africa have risen, due to the economic slowdown in China and across the world.^SCMP

The Central African Republic is to vote in a week in a referendum on a new draft constitution, which the opposition is against due to anti-democratic measures inside it.^AN A month after the Mali constitution referendum, the council has confirmed that 97% (...hmm...) of the population voted to adopt the draft constitution, which strengthens the power of the president and gives special power to the armed forces, against the hopes of opposition groups.^AN

80,000 people have been displaced in Nigeria after violence between farmers and herdsmen, which have killed 300 people so far.^AN

Angola, one of Africa's largest oil producers, has little oil refining infrastructure and so imports fuel at high prices to power itself which cuts into the money they make from producing the oil in the first place - but they have a new oil refinery and others are planned (though there have been long delays).^DW

North America

Dwindling demand is hitting the US shale patch as companies pull back and revenues slow down, with US oil output set to level off in the second half of the year.^FT

Misdiagnoses kill nearly 400,000 people every year and disable a similar number.^STAT

The smaller unions of Louisville, the headquarters of UPS and the location of UPS Worldport, the company against which the Teamsters may strike, are in support of the Teamsters.^RNN

Latin America

Mexico has been hit with three sets of trade arbitration proceedings in the last few days from Canadian and US firms, all invoking NAFTA and USMCA.^Bilaterals

Wind power is being installed in Antigua and Barbuda, which is already completely self-sufficient in energy production (and actually exports energy).^TS

Nicaragua has proposed that Taiwan's permanent observer status be replaced with China, while a Guetamalan presidential contender is also proposing closer ties with China and away from Taiwan.^SCMP The Supreme Electoral Triual of Guatemala has condemned the raid against it in search of evidence and records of the entity's personnel.^TS

Venezuela's Maduro has celebrated the construction of the 4,600,000th house built through the Great Housing Mission, which has been promoted for the last 12 years.^TS

Argentina is set to introduce tax and currency measures that will devalue the peso as part of an IMF deal.^FT National production of lithium in Argentina will begin in September, with equipment for the factory supplied by China.^MP

Lula has signed a decree that would bring down the number of guns for personal defence purposes from 4 to 2, and require permit applicants to demonstrate the effective need to acquire guns.^MP

The War Against The West

Putin has said that Russia destroyed 15 Leopards and 20 Bradleys in a single day.^RT Demining Ukraine will take over 700 years even without including the impact of the US sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, and the country is now the most mined in the world.^RT Lukashenko has claimed that Wagner wants to invade Poland, as he showed maps about which directions Poland would attack Belarus as Polish brigades are increasingly brought to the border.^EN

More sanctions on Russia.^PD

Latin America Again Refuses to Fall In Line With the Collective West on Ukraine, This Time from Brussels^NC

Australia is hosting the Talisman Sabre war games, the largest Australian military exercises yet, with over 30,000 military personnel around the world taking part.^WSWS Chinese experts have called it a paper tiger.^GT The House and Senate are fighting over how much military aid to give Taiwan.^SP

Responsible Statecraft is on the Korea conflict lately, with headlines: Can Washington discourage South Korea from wanting its own nukes?^RS; Wake up: Pushing de-nuking on N.Korea is a dream with a nightmare ending^RS; and US-Korea policy is ‘trapped in a pattern of cyclical amnesia'^RS

Retrospectives, Analysis, History, Theory, and Technology

The Tricontinental's 29th Newsletter (by Vijay Prashad), this time on NATO.^MR

Richard Wolff's analysis on the US's deindustrialization, how China cleverly benefited, and how overall capitalism is relocating away from the US to new centers of profit.^SP

Capitalism has moved on, abandoning its old centers and thereby pushing its problems and divisions to crisis levels. Because profits still flow back to the old centers, those there gathering the profits delude their countries and themselves into thinking all is well in and for global capitalism. Because those profits sharply aggravate economic inequalities, social crises there deepen. For example, the wave of labor militancy sweeping across nearly all U.S. industries reflects anger and resentment against those inequalities. The hysterical scapegoating of various minorities by right-wing demagogues and movements is another reflection of the worsening difficulties. Yet another is the growing realization that the problem, at its root, is the capitalist system. All of these are components of today’s crisis.

Even in capitalism’s new dynamic centers, a critical socialist question returns to agitate people’s minds. Is the new centers’ organization of workplaces—retaining the old capitalist model of employers vs. employees in both private and state enterprises—desirable or sustainable? Is it acceptable for a small group, employers, exclusively and unaccountably to make most key workplace decisions (what, where, and how to produce and what to do with the profits)? That is clearly undemocratic. Employees in capitalism’s new centers already question the system; some have begun to challenge and move against it. Where those new centers celebrate some variety of socialism, employees will more likely (and sooner) resist subordination to the residues of capitalism in their workplaces.

Since the start of the pandemic, the rate of new cases of Type 1 diabetes in children has risen by 14% in the first year and 27% in the second year, compared to the pre-pandemic period (when diabetes was already rising by 3-4% per year).^WSWS

LGBTQIA+

Idaho families with transgender children are trying to stop the state's ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors.^Advocate

Grindr employees are to unionize to create Grindr United with CWA, in part due to the CEO's prior backing of anti-LGBTQ+ politicians.^Advocate

Religious chuds marched in Botswana's capital against legislation to make same-sex relations legal. ^AN

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Berlin in the 45th Berlin Pride Parade.^DW

For trans liberation and social change - Shon Faye^GL

Climate and the Environment

Thousands of Megallanic penguins have washed up on the coast of Uruguay, with most appearing to have starved to death due to human overfishing and bad weather.^RT

A comprehensive dataset of Antarctic ice sheet thickness and bed topography has been created for the first time.^MP

A new federal report on sun-dimming technologies and how they might be implemented is concerning scientists who do not want any of that to happen.^ICN

Indian climate weekly news.^Mongabay India's flooding has been exacerbated due to outdated drainage systems which need desilting, and exploited wetlands and waterbodies.[^Mongabay](https://archive.ph/bZiEy

Analysis of how the climate crisis and environmental destruction are hitting several African countries - such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and the DRC.^MR