Portside

1. Unions and LGBTQ+ Rights
2. BRICS, ANC and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity
3. Thailand Voters Rebuke Military Rulers
4. UK Local Elections
5. Attack on Brazil’s Landles
6. India: Breakthrough Vote Brings Down Modi Stronghold
7. Feminists in Kazakhstan
8. Hiroshima Demands Nuke Ban
9. Putin and Victory Day

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Unions and LGBTQ+ Rights

Marina Watson Peláez / Equal Times (Brussels)

Trade unions – which generally consider solidarity and the respect of the human rights of all people as fundamental principles – have a crucial role to play in challenging discriminatory laws, supporting the LGBTQI+ community at work and ensuring that we live in a more inclusive and respectful world.

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BRICS, ANC and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

William Shoki / Alameda Institute (London)

Although BRICS still projects an image of a collective of rising superpowers, it is far from it. China is the dominant partner, with India the only other to exhibit strong economic growth. The widespread enthusiasm for the currency as a potentially game-changing move – which, to be sure, will certainly give wiggle room to the economies of the South – reflects the truncated horizon of the political moment.

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Thailand Voters Rebuke Military Rulers

Zaheena Rasheed and Sawitree Wongketjai / Al Jazeera (Doha)

Thailand’s reformist opposition has won the most seats and the largest share of the popular vote in a general election after voters roundly rejected the military-backed parties that have ruled the Southeast Asian country for nearly a decade. The progressive Move Forward Party and the populist Pheu Thai Party are projected to win about 286 seats in the 500-member House of Representatives.

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UK Local Elections

Thomas G Clark / Jewish Voice for Labour (London)

The Greens have demonstrated that it’s possible to take on the Tories in their own backyard and win, not by imitating them, but by offering a genuine alternative. Labour did appallingly against candidates it had recently purged, particularly in Liverpool and Leicester but also elsewhere – something the mainstream media conveniently fail to report.

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Attack on Brazil’s Landless

Peoples Dispatch (New Delhi)

The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Brazil’s largest social organization and a major force for land reform, is under attack from the country’s conservative forces in the parliament and the mass media. The movement has been subject to slanderous media campaigns, vitriolic diatribes by right-wing politicians, and the victim of criminalization and legal processes. 

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India: Breakthrough Vote Brings Down Modi Stronghold

Nagesh Prabhu / The Hindu (Mumbai)

In the southwestern state of Karnataka, the Congress party improved its tally from the 80 seats it won in 2018, powering to 135 seats on the back of a robust unified campaign promising free rice, power and income support, and building a case against far right President Modi’s BJP based on local issues of corruption and governance.

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Feminists in Kazakhstan

Feminist Anti-War Resistance and Zhanar Sekerbayeva / Links (Sydney)

Feminist Anti-War Resistance spoke with Zhanar Sekerbayeva, a co-founder of the “Feminita” Kazakhstan Feminist Initiative. This year, Zhanar ran for election to Maslikhat (a regional parliament in Kazakhstan) and spoke openly with a feminist agenda. Zhanar is a lesbian and has faced several waves of harassment during the campaign for defending the rights of the queer community.

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Hiroshima Demands Nuke Ban

Justin McCurry / The Guardian (London)

As the spectre of nuclear weapons returns – this time in Ukraine – survivors of the atomic bombings, known as hibakusha, are urging G7 leaders to issue a strong statement against the use of atomic weapons when they meet in Hiroshima later this week.

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Putin and Victory Day

Anna Ochkina / Russian Dissent (Chicago)

Today in Russia, the celebration of Victory Day is still accompanied by Soviet military songs and films, but what do these familiar images of the Soviet military saga symbolize now? The ideological distortion of the war is needed by today's Russian authorities, not to educate the people on humanism and pacifism, but solely to justify their own repressive domestic and aggressive foreign policy.