COMRADE Kodiyeri Balakrishnan is no more with us.  After a long battle with cancer, he died in a hospital in Chennai.  In the last three years since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he showed indomitable will in continuing to work while undergoing bouts of chemotherapy.

CPI(M) Tamil Nadu state committee organised a memorial meeting to pay homage to Comrade Kodiyeri Balakrishnan on October 3 at Kerala Samajam, Chennai. Senior CPI(M) leader T K Rangarajan said that the Kannur district was in the forefront of the communist movement in Kerala from where many leaders like Ananthan Nambiar, V P Chintan, Sadaiyan Govindan, E K Nayanar, Pinarayi Vijayan and Kodiyeri Balakrishnan came into the movement. He said that the district is fighting communal forces like the RSS and other Hindutva outfits for the last 40 years and sacrificed more than 300 comrades in that st

ON October 2, 2022, nearly 156 million Brazilians (out of 212 million) went to the ballot box to elect a new president, new governors, and new federal and state legislatures. Thousands of candidates went from one end of the country to the other to galvanise the population to vote for different visions of the country. The divergent possibilities of Brazil’s future were captured at the presidential level, where eleven candidates from a range of political traditions vied to lead the country.

FOR the first time ever, the annual rate of inflation in the Eurozone, measured by the Consumer Price Index, has reached double digits: it exceeded 10 per cent in September 2022, up from 9.1 per cent in August. Energy and food prices of course drove this acceleration in inflation, increasing by 41 per cent and 13 per cent respectively, but they were not the only items witnessing an increase in the inflation rate. Even if we leave out energy and food, the inflation rate in all other commodities taken together increased from 5.5 per cent in August to 6.1 per cent in September.

SWIMMING against the tide is not an easy task. The general trend in the era of neoliberal economic policies has been towards disinvestment, deregulation, dismantling of the public sector and withdrawal from social sector expenditure. Kerala under the LDF government has been swimming against the tide and with phenomenal success. At all times of crisis whether it be the floods, cyclones, Nipah or the unprecedented Covid pandemic, Kerala has steered a course that has won great acclaim worldwide.