Finn Brennan, ASLEF organiser on the Underground, said: ‘Despite our objections, London Underground has insisted that train drivers revert to working as they did before the Covid-19 crisis. They are being told that they can no longer continue to work in the safer way that they have been working over the last six weeks.
‘This is because the government is insisting that Transport for London (TfL) maximises the service it operates, regardless of the implications for driver safety. 42 TfL workers have already lost their lives to this dreadful disease. The government appears to regard them as…
Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly.
Having ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest cities, the coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the megacities of developing countries.
— County Sustainability Group A market area in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, crowded with people despite the coronavirus pandemic, May 12, 2020. [Photo: Ahmed Salahuddin/NurPhoto] \ Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria, and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly. We study the fragility and resilience of such cities and their urban peripheries, with the aim of encouraging data-driven policy decisions. Given its deadly trajectory in marginalized communities of hard-hit New York and London, coronavirus may well devastate much poorer cities.
Particularly concerning are the slum areas that are home to roughly a billion people— one in seven people on Earth. Characterized by insecure property rights, low-quality housing, limited basic services, and poor sanitation, these informal settlements aggregate risk factors that accelerate the spread of infection.
Yet, our research finds, many residents of slums and squatter settlements are not getting the help they need to survive the coronavirus pandemic.
DENSITY AND POVERTY Overcrowding is one reason slums are known incubators of disease. Informal settlements are typically 10 times denser than neighboring areas of the same city. The Dharavi slum in central Mumbai, for example, has some 97,000 residents per square mile, compared to 11,500 people per square mile elsewhere in the city. It is far harder to practice physical distancing, at home or on the street, in such close quarters.
shared with thanks.. English translation thefreeonline. pics added.. note> the term ‘libertaria’ translated from Spanish is a synonym for ‘anarchist’ and doesn’t imply US right wingers!
ORIGINAL EN CASTELLANO ABAJO
We rescue a brief text that lists both reforms as well as transformations that our society must undertake in pursuit of a libertarian economy, respectful of people, other societies and the environment. It leaves us a question in the air. Can anarchism be globalized, or will we be chained forever to the designs of armies and hierarchs? Will this be our crossroads?
Your Health! _ Source – The transition to an anarchist economy 09/30/2015 by Jose Luis Carretero
A very respectable comrade asked me a while ago for contribution to a possible “economic program” for the libertarian movement. I had little time to write it, but what was basically sought was to open the debate for the writing of a book. This is, basically, what I sent, I think that, now, it can also serve, more than as a closed guide or dogmatic apparatus of things that I am not entirely clear about, as a text that drives an increasingly urgent debate on post-capitalism .
The social transformation necessary to start an economy entirely focused on an anarchist socialist paradigm requires a process of consolidation and development that involves several, temporarily delimited, stages. The construction of a new society and a new economy needs a gradual development, and at the same time entrenched in moments of revolutionary rupture of the preceding order.
It is a transition process that begins with social advances that empower the forces that obtain them, and the classes involved in the fight for their achievement. These advances are unfolding their effects, varying the previous status quo, reinforcing anarchist positions, and accumulating the necessary forces that must be fully expressed in moments of open revolutionary bankruptcy, in which the advancement processes will accelerate.
This dynamic vision of the process of building a transformed society, compared to the purely static conceptualizations that draw the desired scenario, but refuse to imagine and unravel how to achieve it from the current situation, begins with the delimitation of a minimum program to pose at the current moment.
Good Saturday morning and welcome to the Weekend! Yeah, yeah … I know … weekends aren’t a whole lot different than weekdays lately, but still … we can find some fun things to do! For me, it’ll be laundry!!! WHOO HOO!!! Damn, it just doesn’t get much more exciting, does it? I feel my heart […]
Meet the Secretary Bird …Just look at those lashes!!! This beauty is actually a bird of prey usually found in the open grasslands and savanna of the sub-Saharan region of Africa. Watch her strut her stuff
There is a necessity for a liberatory politics in the Archipelago known as the Philippines and as anarchists we think Anarchism has the framework to fill this need. The dominant forms of politics we have now are insufficient for developing a liberatory politics in the archipelago. This liberatory politics becomes a necessity because politics in…
Bank of England secret bail out of big business – over £100bn committed in 3 weeks As part of their activities to combat the economic fallout of Covid-19, the Bank of England has created a new scheme called the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF), to specifically support the UK’s biggest companies impacted by the crisis. The […]
Our comrade Gabriel has been handed over to the Spanish State this morning (May 13) and is currently in the Badajoz prison (Extremadura). He is well and strong as always. He will certainly have to stay 14 days in a mandatory quarantine and then, supposedly, be transferred to another prison. In that sense, more information will follow.
Spain asks 16 yrs more .. he already did 30 yrs!
After about a year and a half in hiding, on January 25, 2020, Gabriel Pombo Da Silva was arrested in Portuguese territory. Gabriel previously spent more than 30 years in prison
With an international arrest warrant for a residual theoretical sentence of over ten years (a personal vendetta converted into a “legal detail”), Gabriel continued to contribute to the anarchist struggle with his writings.
This 28 page collection of writings by Gabriel Pombo da Silva is available here to download..
The zine is written in Gabriel’s amazingly raw, imaginative style and shows why the German and Spanish authorities tried to suppress him forever – Read his words, be inspired and take action!!
Although we do not have guarantees that the mail will work regularly, it is obvious that it will not be a virus that is responsible for the letters from your loved ones and solidarity individuals not being able to arrive!
From daily News Line in Britain, 18 May 2020:
The Free 
