Long looked to globally as a model for good government, today's Sweden has a party with widely known neo-Nazi roots in its parliament, changed societal norms seeming to have sparked incidents defying belief.

Long looked to globally as a model for good government, today's Sweden has a party with widely known neo-Nazi roots in its parliament, changed societal norms seeming to have sparked incidents defying belief.

He was an officer in the Saudi Royal Navy assigned to the strategic Saudi base of Jubail in the Persian Gulf. She was a single mom from Mindanao, in the Philippines, who saw, like so many others, employment in Saudi Arabia as a route out of poverty. When he picked her up at the Dammam International Airport in June, little did she know she was entering, not a brighter chapter of her life but a chamber of horrors from which she would be liberated only after six long months.

Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Labouring Masses) commiserates with the families of the eight Chinese nationals killed in the tour bus hijacking in Manila on Monday, August 23. The blunders of the Philippine police and officials in the hijacking crisis, which led to the deaths of the eight tourists, are indefensible from many aspects.

Today in the United States, under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, xenophobic and racist violence is escalating. The criminal agents of the Border Patrol have reached the point of killing in cold blood, before the eyes of hundreds of witnesses. On May 28, construction worker Anastasio Hernández Rojas was beaten to death by some 20 agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. Then on June 7 in Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Border Patrol agents fired into a group of youths on the Mexican side of of the border, murdering 14-year-old Adrián Hernández with a shot to the head. These crimes are part of a policy of racist repression looking for scapegoats, typified by the legalization of xeonophobia and police use of racial profiling in Arizona’s SB 1070 law. But while Obama criticize the law, “Obama, listen, we are in the struggle,” his thugs are killing on the border. It is an illusion to think that the commander in chief of U.S. imperialism, or his counterpart and semi-colonial underling, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, will defend the workers. It is necessary to mobilize the power of the working class to defend immigrants.

The January 12 earthquake in Haiti that devastated the capital city, leaving well over 100,000 dead and a million homeless, was one of the worst geological calamities of modern times. The earthquake was a natural disaster, but the horrendous death toll and monumental destruction were caused by capitalism and imperialism. Now the human suffering has been enormously compounded by to the militarization of the relief effort and reoccupation of Haiti by the United States. More than a dozen flights by aid groups, carrying rescue squads, tons of medical supplies and entire field hospitals, were refused permission to land at the Port-au-Prince airport by U.S. military air controllers who are now in charge. Food was already stocked in warehouses, but agencies refused to distribute it for fear of "riots." The media blitz is a propaganda war to embellish the image of U.S. imperialism. This phony humanitarianism are being used to disguise a new U.S. occupation of Haiti. We demand an end to the imperialist occupation, U.S./U.N. forces get out of Haiti and stop blocking entry of Haitian refugees.