| SOUTH AFRICA
 The labour movement has been unable to de-link itself from its archenemy: capital. As its structures bureaucratise, as its leaders become career unionists, as it opens investment companies and pays staff increasingly inequitable salaries, it increasingly mirrors the very thing it is fighting. If the South African Federation of Trade Unions is to meet its promise, it must be fundamentally different from the organisation it was born out of. pambazuka.org/
OVER the past 20 years and more, thousands of working people, across the social spectrum, have been made homeless and effectively robbed of billions of rands. These are men and women who, through being retrenched, having become ill or been injured, have fallen into arrears with their bond payments, sometimes for as little as three or four months. www.fin24.com/
 There are many distortions in the dominant narratives around the 1976 students’ uprising. One of the most critical of these is the persistent, subtle projection of that uprising as the exclusive initiative of young men, to the complete exclusion and erasure of the invaluable contributions and sacrifices of young women. This constitutes epistemic violence against Black women. pambazuka.org/
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AMERICA’s current level of inequality is unusual. Compared with other countries and compared with what it was in the past even in the United States, it’s unusually large, and it has been increasing unusually fast. It used to be said that watching for changes in inequality was like watching grass grow: it’s hard to see the changes in any short span of time. But that’s not true now. 
MEXICO’s most prominent human rights lawyers, journalists and anti-corruption activists have been targeted by advanced spyware sold to the Mexican government on the condition that it be used only to investigate criminals and terrorists. 
Why blaming only socialism for Venezuela’s political and economic crisis doesn’t make sense.
In an extract from his new book, Brian Merchant reveals how he gained access to Longhua, the vast complex where iPhones are made and where, in 2010, unhappy workers started killing themselves. 
It’s ten years since the publication of Toxic Childhood, which warned of the dangers of too much screen-time on young people’s physical and mental health. Its fears of how technology is affecting youngsters’ lives have been realised with children made slaves to screens. 
The freedom of the press — or whatever is left of it, anyway — is crumbling beneath a ruthless & sustained assault by powerful interests, spearheaded by the major media corporations. Censorship practices have gained more traction as news networks continue to blame the unpopular election results on so-called “fake news,” an idea reinforced by intelligence agencies’ claim that Russia influenced the public by promoting reporting that is critical of US policy (a practice also known as journalism). 
The National Education Association, the largest labor union in the U.S., published a shortsighted puff piece on its Website that seemingly applauds doing away with human beings working as teachers. In their place would be computers, iPads, Web applications and a host of “devices” that at best would need human beings to serve as merely lightly trained facilitators while children are placed in front of endless screens. 
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton barrels toward one chilling conclusion: beginning as early as the Johnson administration, federal authorities systematically constructed a criminal justice regime that targets, criminalizes, polices, and imprisons staggering numbers of young black men. 