Leftnews.org is a collection of daily news and views from the political left-wing found around the web.

Leftnews is a project of the Citizens' Press.

Yesterday’s Italian election brought victory for Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Fratelli d’Italia — and record-low turnout. The opposition between technocrats and the far right is the symptom of a deeper decline.

Havana, Sep 26 (Prensa Latina) Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Monday that the victory of the Yes vote in the popular referendum on the Family Code was an act of justice.

This civic act was described as historic, due to its social transcendence, and because for the first time in Cuba’s constitutional development, a law was submitted to a popular referendum, which placed Cuba among the few countries that have developed such an institution of direct democracy.

Patrick Cockburn | CounterPunch | President Vladimir Putin has been trying to wage war on the cheap in Ukraine for seven months, with disastrous results for Russia. He is now ordering a partial military mobilisation that will take time to implement and may at best only create a stalemate between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

Pierre Poilievre’s ability to channel popular anger during a period of high inflation and economic instability should worry us.

Silicon valley’s lobbying and triangulation entrenched new categories that disempower gig workers, but some see an opportunity to organize

None of Italian capital’s failures will be dealt with by the new right-wing government. They will do no better than previous centre-left, centre-right or ‘technocratic’ Italian governments. Indeed, they are likely to make things even worse, alongside adopting reactionary and anti-labour policies to sustain their coalition.

In the 1930s, six right-wing oligarchs used the US’s and UK’s largest newspapers to spout sensationalist xenophobia, and at times even boost fascist propaganda. Today, Fox News and other right-wing mass media outlets are using the very same blueprint.

At his United Nations General Assembly address this week, newly elected leftist Colombian president Gustavo Petro denounced the war on drugs and destruction of the planet waged by the United States. We reprint his remarks here in full.

New polling suggests that a majority of Canadians want a vote on maintaining their country’s link to the British Crown. Imagine that: a long-overdue, democratic debate on cutting ties with a wildly undemocratic institution.

Last year, Israel designated several Palestinian humanitarian organizations as terrorist groups. In an open letter, 60 Canadian law professors urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make good on his professed commitment to human rights. He has yet to respond.

New revelations show that the CIA secretly took control of the security company hired by Ecuador’s government to guard Julian Assange during his exile in London. The agency’s spying on Assange and his visitors constitutes a major breach of civil liberties.

Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality. Since wages and natural resource prices are much lower in the global South than the North, poor countries must export many more units of embodied labour and resources than they import in order to achieve a monetary balance of trade. This creates a constant transfer of labour and ecology from the periphery to the core, developing the latter but impoverishing the former.

The Taiwan question remains unresolved, more than 70 years after the end of the Chinese civil war. The U.S. stokes the fires of this divisive issue on a regular basis, keeping the government of the People’s Republic in Beijing on the defensive.

Clashing priorities as dental care advocates, Canadian Dental Association seek to fill in program details

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has sounded the alarm about “civil unrest” this winter as prices across Europe soar, even while demanding public money be used to send yet more weapons to Ukraine. The question is whether Western publics will keep buying the narrative of an existential threat that can only be dealt with if they, rather than their leaders, dig deep into their pockets.

In Britain, people are now being arrested just for saying things like “Who elected him?” about the newly crowned King Charles. It’s a shocking authoritarian clampdown — and it’s being applauded by the supposedly “pro-free-speech” right.

In Canada, most citizens are indifferent to the British Crown — making the official Canadian spectacle of mass mourning for Queen Elizabeth II feel particularly ridiculous.

People all around the world live or die based on the whims of the commodities market. We need to discard the idea that markets are an acceptable way to distribute the world’s resources.

Royalty plays an important part in reinforcing ideas that inequality is natural and of the impossibility of fundamental change. It has no place in a democracy and is anathema to the idea of socialism and equality.