WHEN news arrived on July 11, 2021 in Havana, Cuba, of protests in the Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel arrived there by the afternoon, met with the protestors and talked with them about their frustrations. Dissatisfaction is normal in any society, particularly during the uncertainty of the pandemic with the economic problems it has exacerbated.

ON June 6, results began to come in from the second round of Peru’s presidential election. It appeared early on that the race was tight. Peru Libre’s Pedro Castillo held a slim lead over Fuerza Popular’s Keiko Fujimori. Castillo, a school teacher from a rural district of northern Peru, ran a door-to-door campaign amongst impoverished Peruvians, while Fujimori, the daughter of a former president who is now in prison, ran a television campaign that was lubricated with large amounts of money.

IN a tightly fought run-off election to elect the president of Peru, a school teacher and progressive activist, Pedro Castillo won by securing 50.2 per cent (8,791,778) of the total votes polled. He narrowly defeated Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing neoliberal, who secured 49.7 per cent (8,720,337) votes. In a country of 32 million people, where 17 million of the eligible 24 million had voted, the victory margin is a small 71,443 votes. Though the margin of victory is small, its significance is enormous.

THE All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO) organised a webinar on May 14, 2021 in solidarity with Palestine, condemning Israeli attacks. Iraklis Tsavdaridis, executive secretary of the World Peace Council (WPC) and Dr Aqel of the Palestinian Peace Committee spoke in the webinar, apart from the leadership of the AIPSO.

ON May 6, 2021, Israeli officials arrived at Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to support the Zionist settlers who were in the midst of a campaign to evict Palestinian families from their homes. East Jerusalem, where Sheikh Jarrah is located, has been under Israeli occupation since 1967; ‘occupation’ is a technical term, since the United Nations Security Council resolution 242 (1967) protected the seized areas of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank as areas to be treated by Israel as the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).