“For France”, occupied Western Sahara’s “present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty”, declared French President Emmanuel Macron, drawing a standing ovation from the lawmakers he was addressing in the parliament of its former colony Morocco earlier on October 29.

“The sole and exclusive sovereign over Western Sahara is the Sahrawi people. [Neither] Macron, nor anyone else, has the right to decide on their behalf,” retorted the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), as Western Sahara is officially known.

This government, led by the Polisario Front (PF) which is recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Sahrawi people, is in control of the Free Zone – or the Liberated Territory – amounting to a fifth of Western Sahara. With the military and financial support of the US and France and the complicity of Western Sahara’s former colonizer France, the Moroccan army annexed the remaining 80%, including the whole of its coastline, in 1975 and continues occupation to date.

Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara is not recognized by the African Union (AU), of which the SADR is a member-state. The UN includes it in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories where decolonization is yet to be completed. Its General Assembly regards Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an illegal occupation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) maintains there is no “tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco.”

Macron’s decision to grant French recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara also contravenes the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In a ruling earlier that month on October 4, CJEU reiterated that the fisheries and trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and Morocco involving natural resources extracted from Western Sahara were illegal because Morocco has no sovereignty over this territory.

The judgment requires these illegal agreements to cease within a year. In less than a month, Macron entered France into fresh deals worth USD 10.8 billion, pledging “investments” he claimed would “benefit local populations” in Western Sahara.

“Past international investments in Western Sahara’s resources, such as in the [extraction of] phosphates and fisheries,” have yielded little benefit to the Sahrawi people, Kamal Fadel, Western Sahara’s Representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The influx of foreign capital only tends to further entrench the occupation by supporting Morocco’s infrastructure and military presence in the region.”

Most of the jobs created in the process are handed to Moroccan settlers to incentivize them to stay put in the occupied territory. The remaining jobs are doled out to a few in exchange for their “loyalty and obedience”, while the Sahrawi masses are condemned to live under “poverty, oppression and abuse”, added Babouzeid Lebbihi, President of Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA).

Leaders of this organization, along with other Sahrawi activists, suffer constant harassment at the hands of the occupation authorities, whose security forces regularly besiege homes, confiscate properties, and take political prisoners, several of whom have been subjected to torture and rape.

In December 2020, Trump announced the US recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory,” in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel, legitimizing the apartheid settler colonial state’s occupation of Palestine.

Taking office a month later in January 2021, the current US President Joe Biden reiterated the endorsement of Moroccan occupation. A year later, in March 2022, Western Sahara’s former colonizer Spain followed suit, before France crossed that bridge earlier this week. Earlier this year, the AU also decided to suspend the members of representatives of SADR from meetings with international partners.

These developments undermining the prospects of a sovereign SADR “fuel discontent among Sahrawis and escalate regional unrest,” warned Fadel.

“Gaza has changed the whole equation,” said Babouzeid. “For more than three decades, the Sahrawi people under occupation have bet on political action and peace in order to avoid bloodshed, and today our land is being sold to the occupation by imperialist powers.” With major powers like France “adding fuel to the fire… I believe that the situation will explode in the region,” he added.

“Under the legitimate leadership of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi people remain resolute in resisting Moroccan occupation, with all legitimate means, including armed struggle,” warns the Sahrawi government.

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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned Israel and the United States of “a crushing response” for actions against Iran and its allies, according to state media.

Khamenei, 85, made the remarks on Saturday while addressing students ahead of the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by hardline students – which cemented the decades-long enmity between Tehran and Washington that persists today.

“The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” Khamenei said in the capital, Tehran, also referring to Iran-aligned armed groups that include Yemen’s Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.

The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of any attack, or the scope.

He had previously struck a more cautious approach, saying officials would weigh Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed”, after the Israeli military launched strikes last week on military bases in Iran, hitting about 20 sites over several hours in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran.

Khamenei on Saturday met with university students to mark Students’ Day, which commemorates a November 4, 1978, incident in which Iranian soldiers opened fire on students protesting the rule of the shah at Tehran University.

The US military operates throughout the Middle East, with some troops now manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.

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For decades, the Latin American nation has been a leading assembler of motorized vehicles. Mexico is now led by a president with a PhD in sustainable energy engineering.

Claudia Sheinbaum supports Mexican companies that aim to design and build their own brand of EVs.

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Beijing’s push for renewable energy projects across Africa has been highlighted at a groundbreaking ceremony at the site of a new Chinese-led geothermal power plant project to be built in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.

State-owned energy and construction company PowerChina will build the 35-megawatt Orpower 22 geothermal plant at the Menengai Crater, with the facility owned by Chinese firm Kaishan Group, which is spending US$93 million on the construction.

During the ceremony, President William Ruto said the plant will raise the country’s global ranking in geothermal production to fifth overall, and “highlights our commitment to unlock Kenya’s vast geothermal potential to drive economic growth”.

Kenya was the first African nation to harness geothermal power, which uses heat from the Earth to generate electricity, but Ruto said just 10 per cent of the country’s geothermal energy has been explored.

Last year, PowerChina commissioned another 35MW geothermal power plant in Kenya, owned by Sosian Geothermal Power Station. It followed a 14-year contract between China’s Kaishan Group and Kenya’s Sosian Energy to run the geothermal plant before handing it back to Sosian after its investment has been recouped.

The Kenyan power plants represent a growing footprint of Chinese-built or funded renewable energy projects in Africa – from solar and wind to hydropower projects. It follows Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2021 pledge to stop financing new overseas coal-fired power plants and increase funding for renewable projects instead.

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At its meeting this week, the Western Sydney University (WSU) Rank-and-File Committee voted to send a message of support and solidarity to the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee. As the message explains, university workers and students in Australia, like the Boeing workers, face the need to organise independent rank-and-file committees to fight the trade union apparatuses’ enforcement of corporate-government job destruction and the underlying agenda of war and austerity.

To join the WSU Rank-and-File Committee or discuss establishing rank-and-file committees at other universities, contact the committee at: rfc.wsu@gmail.com.

We are workers and students at Western Sydney University (WSU) who formed a rank-and-file committee earlier this year, initially to fight the pro-business restructuring and destruction of jobs and conditions at our university’s preparatory college.

As we have warned, the purge of staff at the WSU College has now become a template for the restructuring and elimination of thousands of jobs at universities across Australia as a direct result of funding cuts by the Labor government.

Having read about your struggle on the World Socialist Web Site, we decided to send a message of solidarity with the determined stand you and the 33,000 Boeing machinists are taking against the years of attacks on wages and working conditions.

Like you, we have formed a rank-and-file committee, totally independent of the trade unions, which are complicit in the corporate-government agenda.

We support your powerful seven-week strike and your 64 percent rejection last week of the second sellout contract proposed by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) leadership.

As the WSWS reported, the IAM’s latest contract proposal amounted to “an endorsement of a corporate dictatorship.” It not only did not make up for a decade of wage freezes, it failed to restore pensions stolen from you in 2014, and would have given the company the go-ahead for 17,000 announced layoffs.

Your vote is a real blow to the IAM and the Biden administration, which is relying upon the union officials to end the strike because it cuts across its support for, and arming of, the war against Russia, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its plans for wider wars against Iran and China.

The IAM leadership never wanted your strike to go ahead and refuses to use the union’s $300 million assets to aid you. The miserable $250 weekly strike pay is intended to starve you back to work.

Boeing management, which has jettisoned basic safety standards in passenger airplane manufacturing, wants you to pay for its crimes and profits.

Your stand demonstrates the potential strength of the global working class and is a real blow against this giant corporation’s war profits and the US war machine. The shut-down of a major military contractor shows how the working class can halt the plunge into war.

Your October 3 statement—“Boeing machinists must unite with East Coast dockworkers to defend jobs and stop world war!”— points the way forward for class-conscious workers everywhere.

Our struggles can only succeed if workers organise independently of the union bureaucracies and fight for a world where human need, not profit, is the priority.

While you face ruthless enemies in management, the IAM machine and the Biden administration, you have even more powerful friends—the American and international working class.

Like Boeing workers, we confront unions that are responsible for imposing previous government cuts and that are implementing the agenda of war and austerity, including by restructuring universities to serve the needs of war economies.

We endorse the call made by the World Socialist Web Site in its October 24 Perspective: “After rejection of sellout deal, working class must mobilize behind the Boeing strike.” The tremendous social power of the working class must be organised through building the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) as a global rebellion of the rank-and-file.

As that Perspective states: “Workers can only fulfill their aspirations if they take political power in their own hands and marshal society’s resources to greatly improve the living standards of the world’s population and end social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.”

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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted a "crucial" test of its latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Hwasongpho-19 on Thursday, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Friday.

The missile flew a distance of 1,001.2 kilometers for 5,156 seconds before landing on a preset area in open waters off the country's east coast, and the test-fire had no negative effect on the security of neighboring countries, the KCNA report said.

The test updated the recent record of the strategic missile capability of the DPRK and demonstrated the modernity and credibility of the country's powerful strategic deterrent, and the latest strategic weapon system will function as "the primary core means" in defending the country, the KCNA said.

Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the DPRK, guided the event, calling the test-fire "an appropriate military action" to show the country's counteraction in response to the escalating security situation on the Korean Peninsula and part of "an indispensable process" in the course of constantly developing the DPRK's strategic attack capabilities, the report said.

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Lebanon’s prime minister accused Israel of rejecting a ceasefire after the Israeli military bombed the Hezbollah stronghold of south Beirut for the first time this week on Friday.

At least 10 strikes hit the southern suburbs before dawn after the Israeli military issued evacuation warnings, with TV footage showing explosions and clouds of smoke.

“The raids left massive destruction in the targeted areas, as dozens of buildings were levelled to the ground, in addition to the outbreak of fires,” Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported, adding that strikes also targeted Aley, southeast of the capital, and Bint Jbeil in the country’s south.

The Israeli military said it continued operations against the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and its Palestinian ally Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The strikes came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met US officials to discuss a possible deal to end the war in Lebanon, ahead of Tuesday’s US presidential election.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the “expansion” of Israel’s attacks, saying they signalled a refusal to engage in truce efforts.

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Workers Party of Bangladesh (WPB) has called for national elections to be held immediately in the country and for the unconditional release of its president Rashed Khan Menon who has been arrested on “false charges” of murder.

In a statement released following its Polit Bureau meeting last week, the WPB claimed that failing to call for elections now would create a fresh constitutional crisis in the country. It also demanded that all political parties, including the Awami League, must be allowed to participate in the elections to put “the country back to constitutional order as soon as possible.”

As per Bangladesh’s constitution, an election must be held within three months after the dissolution of the parliament. The last parliament in the country was dissolved in early August following the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

However, the interim government has expressed its inability to hold the election within the stipulated time period and claimed that it would be “wrong” to hold elections before political reforms are carried out in the country. Mohammad Yunus, the chief advisor to the interim government has, however, failed to specify the reforms needed and give a timeline for the next elections.

Meanwhile, the administration under the interim government has claimed even if the process to hold a new election starts today, it may take another year to complete it.

The WPB and other major political formations in the country have warned that a significant delay in holding elections may lead to popular anger which will not be not be good for the country.

Meanwhile, the interim government has also expressed its intentions to ban the country’s major political party the Awami League and all other “like minded” parties for the next parliamentary elections.

The interim government has accused that the victory of Awami League in the last four elections was a result of fraud. It has termed all the elections since 2008 as “illegal.” The reason cited for the intention to ban Awami League’s former allies is their alleged “silent support” to its manipulation in those elections, Daily Star reported.

Both Menon and Haq have been in jail for months now. They have been charged for murder of protesters during the quota reform agitation despite neither of them being part of the Hasina government at the time.

Left parties have denied the interim government’s allegations. Instead the left argues that the cases against their leaders are politically motivated. They have alleged that the religious right in the country has used the quota agitation to marginalize all progressive forces by filing false cases against their leaders and staging assaults on their workers and offices and demanded the end of their political persecution.

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African Union health watchdog’s chief has said mpox outbreak is ‘still on the upward trend generally’ as cases spread.

More than 1,100 people have died of mpox in Africa, where some 48,000 cases have been recorded since January, according to the CDC.

Cases were still increasing in several countries as the continent struggled to contain another major outbreak coming on the heels of COVID-19 that exposed weaknesses in Africa’s health system.

So far, 19 countries in Africa have reported cases of mpox after an infection was detected in Mauritius, popular with tourists attracted to its stunning white beaches and crystal-clear waters.

Yet the funds to contain the outbreak were in short supply, Africa CDC warned.

“What we need is the continuous political and financial mobilisation,” Ngongo said, adding that this was a necessary measure to stop mpox from being another pandemic “which would be much more severe than COVID-19”.

Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals but can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.

The United Kingdom announced on Wednesday that it had detected the country’s first case with the latest mpox variant, clade 1b. It has also been detected in Sweden and Germany.

Central Africa, which has been hardest hit by the outbreak, accounts for 85.7 percent of cases and 99.5 percent of deaths on the continent.

The majority of deaths have been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the epicentre of the outbreak, which launched a vaccination drive earlier this month.

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The US has been in the lead with higher tariff barriers and controls on high-tech exports, initiated under the Trump presidency and markedly intensified by Biden.

It is now being joined by the European Union, which this week imposed an additional tariff of 35 percent on Chinese electric vehicles on top of a 10 percent tariff already in force.

The new measures, which will come into force next week, are to last five years. They were introduced on the basis that Chinese EV makers were benefiting unfairly from state subsidies.

The Chinese government rejected the claim of undue state support, saying it would “continue to take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all Chinese companies.”

The decision to impose the tariffs came after eight rounds of talks aimed at trying to devise a mechanism through which a minimum price could be set along with the volume of Chinese exports. But the talks broke down with both sides saying the differences remained significant.

Further talks are to be held, with the EU accepting an invitation by China to send envoys to Beijing to see if some agreement can be reached on these mechanisms.

The divisions within the EU, which must rank as some of the most significant on trade issues in the history of the Union, were underscored by comments from Germany. Hildegarde Müller, the head of the German auto industry association, VDA, said the decision was “a setback for free global trade and so for prosperity and Europe’s growth.”

The chief executive of BMW Oliver Zipse said protectionism would only make cars more expensive for consumers and accelerate plant closures in Europe.

The interconnectedness of the global car industry was indicated by Roberto Vavassori, who told the Financial Times (FT) that “for many suppliers in the automotive industry, [the Chinese] are both the biggest threat and the biggest customer.”

He asked: “What did the Chinese do, what did the Japanese do and what did the Koreans do when they were behind on technology? They collaborated. The European industry needs to get the Chinese to localise in Europe and it needs to collaborate with them, particularly around battery technology in order to catch up.”

For workers in the auto industry, in Europe and internationally, neither path is the way forward in a situation where they face a wave of job destruction and wage cutting.

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Indian and Chinese troops exchanged sweets at several border points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on Diwali, marking a significant thaw in Sino-Indian ties. This traditional practice comes on the heels of a major breakthrough - the completion of disengagement at two friction points in eastern Ladakh's Demchok and Depsang Plains.

The move marks a collaborative spirit following the recent disengagement at two friction points in eastern Ladakh—Demchok and Depsang Plains. This disengagement, completed just a day prior, represents a hopeful step towards stabilizing Sino-Indian ties that have been strained since 2020.

This development follows weeks of negotiations, culminating in an agreement finalised on October 21, as announced by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Delhi. The pact aims to resolve issues stemming from the 2020 standoff, focusing on patrolling and troop disengagement along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

On Wednesday, an Army source said that troops of both sides had completed the disengagement at the two friction points and patrolling would commence soon at these points.

The verification process after the disengagement was in progress and patrolling modalities were to be decided between ground commanders, the source said then.

As talks continue at the local commander level, the exchange of sweets on Diwali may serve as a beacon of hope for more collaborative and peaceful interactions in the future. The gesture, steeped in tradition, highlights the potential for reconciliation and dialogue between the two nations.

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Algeria is on track to triple its rail network by 2030 to boost national economic growth and regional connectivity.

With more than 5,000 kilometres of rail already in service, new lines such as the Kenchela-Constantine line are providing faster travel, connecting communities and creating economic opportunities.

This expansion integrates strategic freight and passenger lines, reducing road congestion and improving access to remote areas.

Algeria's investments are paving the way for a more connected future, where rail is a driver of both sustainable transport and economic development.

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