AFTER an absence of nearly three decades, the red flags of the working-class movement returned to the stage of the Southall auditorium in London – a venue historically graced by revolutionary leaders like Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet. It was here that Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh’s comrades, Pandit Kishori Lal and Shiv Varma, once inspired audiences with tales of India’s glorious freedom struggle. It was also where the late Prime Minister VP Singh vehemently criticised the corruption of an electoral democracy subservient to capital.

ON Friday, February 28, when US President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office of the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump mused: ‘I hope I will be remembered as a peacemaker’.As Trump talked about the necessity to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine, Zelenskyy fidgeted. The two men, representing two different sets of interests, did not see eye-to-eye either on the nature of this war or on the possibility of concluding it. Zelenskyy sees Russia as the out-and-out aggressor, and he feels that Russian President Vladimir Putin will never agree to a stable peace.

IT did not take long. Within weeks, US President Donald J Trump authorised the firing of missiles at some caves in Somalia, where – he claimed – a military leader of ISIS (or the Islamic State) was hiding. No US president in the past quarter century has started his term without an attack on ‘terrorists’. Three days after he became president, on January 23, 2009, Barack Obama sent an aircraft to fire a missile at Ziraki village in North Waziristan (Pakistan).

Republican President Donald Trump’s January 20 inaugural address in the US Capitol rotunda—a sacred space his Trumpites rampaged through four years before in the failed insurrection he ordered—was shot through with racist and imperialist language, even more than his speeches on the campaign trail. Add exploiting natural resources and you have a potent brew.Needless to say, Trump often got applause, plus some standing ovations from the right-wing Republican crowd and the oligarchs lined up behind him. The few Democrats, including outgoing President Joe Biden, clapped tepidly, if at all.

ON January 14, 2025, the government of the United States announced the following decisions:1. Remove Cuba from the State Department list of countries that allegedly sponsor terrorism;2. Make use of the presidential faculty to prevent US courts from taking action with regards to lawsuits that might be filed by virtue of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act; and3. Eliminate the list of restricted Cuban entities that designates a group of institutions which US citizens and institutions are not allowed to make financial transactions with, which has had an impact on third countries.Despite its limi