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When Leon Wofsy died at age 97 on August 25 this year, progressive movements throughout the United States lost a champion. Leon accomplished many things in his long life. He was an innovative scientist, and a fine writer and teacher, but above all things, he was a patient and peerless organizer.

On September 24, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom delivered a historic verdict, a verdict which not only consolidated the core ethos and conventions of democracy, but also echoed the sentiments of Professor A.V. Dicey on Rule of Law, which still reverberates in the corridors of the Balliol College, Oxford University, situated not more than sixty miles from the place where the historic verdict was delivered.

Smoking tobacco is the single largest cause of preventable death around the world. With more than 7 million premature deaths due to smoking including second-hand smoke yearly, the menace of smoking is far away from being tamed and is estimated to reach a massive 8 million by 2030.

“Everyone thinks they’re a communist when they’re your age.”
“When you grow up, you’ll understand how the world really works.”
“It’s so funny to hear kids defending socialism.”

It is written that “Enannatum, ruler of Lagash,” slew “60 soldiers” from Umma. The battle between the two ancient city states took place 4,500 years ago near where the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together in what is today Iraq. The matter in dispute? Water.

Revolutionary activist, philosopher and professor Dr. Angela Davis is being inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame this year. The organization is the nation’s oldest membership group dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the achievements of women in the United States. Davis has a long history in the civil rights movement as an advocate for the oppressed, along with standing firm on issues such as racism, systemic oppression, and justice for Palestine.

There is an eerie similarity between President Donald Trump’s advice to the non-white women members of the US Congress to “go back to where they came from” and the occasional suggestions by the Hindutva apparatchiki in India to their opponents to “go to Pakistan”.

Beginning with the “ghetto riot” at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village in 1969, an open gay liberation movement came into existence which has been a significant force in the larger peoples’ movements for almost a half-century. While most people identify gay liberation with the “New Left” of the 1960s, it, like the civil rights, women’s rights, and anti-war movements of the time, cannot be separated from the range of broad labor-left organizations that had been forced into a political closet with the onset of the Cold War, including the Communist Party.

The rainbow-emblazoned corporate swag has been ordered, the gay and lesbian employees dispatched to New York. The floats are all designed and constructed, ready to roll down Fifth Avenue—colorful billboards advertising just how LGBT friendly T-Mobile, MasterCard, TD Bank, Delta Air Lines, and other sponsors are these days.

28th June, 2019 marked the 50 years of the infamous riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York, where on 28th June, 1969, the New York police personnel had barged into a gay bar called Stonewall, and had mercilessly beaten up lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, which then sparked off one of the first and biggest demonstrations by the queer community in the USA against police atrocity, and homophobic laws. To mark the occasion, ‘pride’ is celebrated in the month of June every year all over the world. In 1969, the world was just waking up to queer rights and activism. Britain had just decriminalised homosexuality in 1967, though the age of consent for gay men was still higher than the rest of the population, i.e., 21. Most of the European and United States had anti-sodomy laws, while the post-colonial Asian and African countries had happily retained the colonial law on sodomy. In fact, adult homosexual acts finally got decriminalised in all the States of the USA only in 2003! Just 16 years back!