Kolkata: Former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee today hit out at CPI-M saying the charges it levelled against him were "a character assassination" and the current political culture of the present leadership made the party and Left politics "almost irrelevant".

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The late Huw Wheldon of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London.

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he countdown to Paraguay's presidential elections in April has begun, and the candidate for the Patriotic Alliance for Change (APC), former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, looks likely to pose a serious threat to the six-decades-old Colorado Party monopoly on power.

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These days, it ain't easy being indy. The last 12 months have seen the demise of Clamor, Punk Planet, Satya and LiP.

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Most of my conflicts so far had been organisational. Although I disliked the way the SWP [a major British, socialist party, run by idiots and kitsch leftists] operated internally, I still largely agreed with the basic political perspectives — especially around the war on Iraq.

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In 1945, Theodor Adorno summarised antisemitism as 'the rumour about the Jews'. [4] The rumour predates Christianity and is dependent upon the psychological drivers of the antisemite rather than the real actions of Jews.

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Better known for his trademark anti-U.S. tirades, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez takes on a more delicate role on Friday when he tries to broker a deal to free hostages held by Colombia's Marxist guerrillas.

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The latest issue [of Jewish Socialist] includes an interview with Michael Rosen concerning the attacks on Jewish activists by Gilad Atzmon and Paul Eisen, who claim that the only way to be a Jew supporting the Palestinians is to renounce Jewish identity.

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It's centuries of institutional anti-Jewish doctrines that get catalyzed in public when the mood hits.

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That day, we left the Bastille circle with bleeding noses and bruised faces, but a new political maturity. From then on, as pro-democracy and human rights activists, we understood that we were invisible in the West.

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With Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales' respective rises to power, the question debated in so many books and at so many World Social Forums over the past decade—which is the preferred revolutionary path for Latin America, taking state power and then changi …

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The election probably turned on issues of Republican incompetence and corruption. Now that Democrats have regained a measure of power, we must look forward.

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Sean Matgamna has a long history in UK left politics. Here, he takes issue with his comrades on the Left, some of whom are getting quite scary. This is one of the best deconstructions of anti-Zionist antisemitism I've seen. This idea is of course difficult to grasp.

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Historian Anne Summers calls to our attention antisemitism during the Boer War.

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To start from basic principles. Racism is wrong and should be opposed, wherever and whenever it occurs, regardless of who is practicing it and who is the target.

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