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US District Judge Margaret Garnett dismissed a federal murder charge against the 27 year old.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23916

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) expressed its firm rejection of the country’s free trade agreement with the European Union (EU). The party called the deal a “wholesale surrender of India’s economic interest to the EU.”

The India-EU FTA was signed in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during an India-EU business forum meeting in New Delhi on Tuesday, January 27.

European Council president Antonio Costa was also present during the signing ceremony.

The FTA, once implemented, will lead to massive reduction in tariffs on goods traded between both the economies. The EU hopes the deal will help it double its exports to India by 2032.

“We have created the mother of all deals. We have created a free trade zone of two billion people, with both sides set to benefit,” said Ursual von der Leyen in a post on X.

According to Modi, the FTA with the EU is the largest FTA in India’s history and it “will bring substantial benefits for the 1.4 billion people of India, make access to European markets easier for our farmers and small industries, create new opportunities in manufacturing.”

The EU is India’s largest trading partner as a group. Their bilateral trade in goods and services reached 208 billion USD in 2024.

The deal took almost two decades to reach the signing stage as both the economies were discussing it since 2007.

The deal comes at a time when both the economies are impacted by global trade disruptions caused by the Donald Trump administration in the US through arbitrary use of tariffs.

India is already facing a 50% tariff on most of its exports to the US. The EU too faces threats of similar tariffs.

The EU recently signed a similar trade deal with South American economic bloc Mercosur which was blocked by the European parliament. Last year it signed similar deals with Indonesia and Mexico as well.

India has also recently signed FTAs with countries like the UK, New Zealand, and Oman.

The India-EU FTA would take another six months to take its final shape. Both the countries hope to implement it within a year.

Complete surrender of India’s economic interests

As per the agreement, India will remove or reduce tariffs on over 96% of goods imported from the EU countries which includes machinery, alcohol, and processed food.

In return, the EU will reduce tariffs on almost all imports (99.5%) from India, including footwear, clothing, gems and jewelry, and seafood.

India will also gradually reduce the tariffs on European cars from its current 110% to 10% with an annual cap of 250,000, while tariffs on EU-made aircrafts and spacecrafts would be eliminated.

The India-EU free trade deal also talks about strengthening the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) which was announced in September 2023 as a trade route between Asia and Europe.

While claiming lack of transparency from the government over the details of the deal, CPI (M) expressed apprehensions that the FTA with the EU will cause the massive destruction of livelihoods in the country.

It claimed the reduction in tariffs in mostly labor-intensive sectors in India would lead to the closure of Indian production, which will benefit the rich while wrecking “the livelihoods of workers, farmers, and common people.”

The long-standing pressure created by the farmers unions in India, though the FTA has kept out the dairy and some crucial agricultural products from its purview, still opens crucial sectors directly linked with agriculture.

Under the FTA, India has agreed to gradually eliminate all tariffs on several agricultural products imported from the EU, such as olive and vegetable oils, fruit juices, sheep meat, and processed food products.

CPI (M) also opposed the deal over India agreeing on Haifa in Israel as a key IMEC transit point under the deal.

CPI (M) claims that “at a time when the world is demanding Israel be declared an apartheid state and face sanctions for its genocidal aggression in Gaza, the Indian government is choosing to deepen ties with Israel through this FTA.”

This move by the government of India is “deplorable and should not be allowed,” CPI (M) asserted.

The post Indian left opposes free trade agreement with EU, calls it “wholesale surrender” of country’s economic interests appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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Budapest Pride

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Mayor Gergely Karácsony of Budapest did not ask for permission. He led by example, standing alongside hundreds of thousands of Hungarians pouring into the streets of his city for the 30th annual Pride Month celebration last year.

Meanwhile, the country’s authoritarian right-wing government made public displays of queerness illegal.

Now, Mayor Karácsony is being charged for organizing an unlawful assembly despite a prohibition order, PBS reports. The Budapest Chief Prosecutor’s Office said it will seek to impose fines without a trial.

“I refuse to be intimidated or silenced,” Karácsony wrote in a Jan. 28 post on X. “I will never accept that standing up for freedom, free speech, or love can be treated as a crime. Despite threats or punishment, I will continue to fight. Freedom and love cannot be banned!”

Ahead of the March 2025 Pride event, Hungarian authorities threatened organizers with years of imprisonment. They also said they would deploy facial recognition software against attendees to track them and impose fines, but after 350,000 people marched on Budapest (as per organizers, although crowd estimates vary), police backtracked.

Earlier that month, the country’s authoritarian right-wing party, shepherded by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, passed a law barring any public assembly that “promotes and displays deviations from the gender identity corresponding to the sex at birth, gender change, and homosexuality.”

In April, a constitutional amendment was added in a similar vein, enshrining the right of children’s “moral development” as the foremost law of the land, superseding nearly every other right.

In reality, this rhetorical cudgel wherein extremists pearl-clutch about “the children” is, as it is in many authoritarian regimes, a convenient scapegoat. The real goal is to attack the LGBTQ community, and to repress free speech more broadly.

“The spurious justification for the passing of this law—that events and assemblies would be ‘harmful to children’—is based on harmful stereotypes and deeply entrenched discrimination, homophobia and transphobia,” said Dávid Vig, Director of Amnesty International Hungary at the time.

But organizers are maintaining a defiant tone. In emails with Erin in the Morning, they said they’ll be coming back this year for Pride 2026, this time in June.

“At Budapest Pride, we will continue to stand firm in our support of the fundamental freedoms that everyone is entitled to,” a spokesperson said. “We stand up for ourselves, we stand up for each other, because we want to live in a free, peaceful and equal country.”

Hungary has been in the news a great deal recently due to its anti-LGBTQ policies, as it was the first contemporary EU country to enact a Pride ban. Romania soon followed.

“For the first time in its 13-year history, setbacks in human rights of trans people across Europe and Central Asia now clearly outweigh progress,” a TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) report found in May. “This regression signals more than just a crisis for trans communities—it is a broader crisis of democracy and fundamental rights across the region.”

Furthermore, Orbán has become a disturbing fixture in American politics, helping lawmakers here in the States pioneer new and creative ways to antagonize LGBTQ people.

“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did,” Rod Dreher, an editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. Vox first reported this story.

“I was told this by a conservative reporter who […] said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

Meanwhile, CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference, a highly influential yearly gathering of (largely American) conservatives—was co-hosted last year by Hungary and Poland. The headlining keynote speaker was Prime Minister Orbán.

“The Trump tsunami swept through the entire world,” Orbán said. “We are no longer suffocating in the woke sea.”

The risks facing LGBTQ people across the world in this political moment are dire. At the same time, the fact remains that authoritarians—no matter the continent—rule by fear.

As seen at Budapest Pride, many of their threats cannot be carried out to scale. There’s more of us than there are of them.

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A new report has found that UK universities still aren’t doing enough to support disabled students. The 2025 Access Insights report from Disabled Students UK found that 63% of disabled students have gone without adjustments.

Disabled students

Disabled Students UK surveyed over 1,000 students from over 100 universities about their experiences. This is the third year the study has run and the largest into Higher Education accessibility in the UK. It’s particularly relevant now with the government focusing on getting young disabled people into education.

So you’d think with the push to get disabled people into education that it would at least be accessible, right? Wrong.

As the report says

Disabled students are not new in Higher Education. What is new is the growing body of evidence that shows, year after year, where and how our systems continue to fail them.

Attitudes improving, but access worsening

One good thing discovered in the survey is that attitudes from staff are better than in previous years. There’s also seemingly a greater understanding of disability now. However, 20% have been made to feel unwelcome by staff. As the report notes, this goes alongside structural barriers that stop disabled people from progressing and doing as well as their nondisabled peers.

The report found that although support can be agreed by staff, it isn’t necessarily delivered. Less than half of those surveyed said their approved adjustments were consistently implemented. 63% of disabled students ended up studying without their adjustments. A big reason for this is that chasing them up repeatedly takes too much time and energy. Just 44% said that all their agreed adjustments had been followed through with.

The amount of disabled students being able to get official personalised support from Disability Services fell last year. 66% of disabled students had a support plan, down from 77% in 2024. The proportion of declared students with a support plan fell from 77% in 2024 to 66% in 2025 and fewer students met with a Disability Advisor, suggesting a shift towards more informal or automated models of support under growing capacity pressure.

Disabled students can’t physically get to class

Many students were concerned that measures which came into place at the start of the COVID pandemic are now being rolled back. These of course made studying more accessible for disabled students. The survey found that remote or hybrid lectures are being stopped. Even measures such as lecture recording don’t happen as much.

As the report says:

These decisions are frequently justified as restoring educational quality or campus experience, yet they disproportionately exclude already marginalised students.

This represents a failure to learn from evidence. Universities have seen that these measures work. Choosing not to retain them is a choice that prioritises convenience or tradition over accessibility.

On top of this, students are still struggling to physically access lectures. Disabled students are still struggling against inaccessible buildings, unsuitable teaching spaces and inflexible timetabling.

Accessible uni accommodation also a problem. Students report that this is limited and often more expensive than other accommodation options. 47% of disabled students said they had to pay extra for accessible student housing.

Access fails make disabled students feel unsafe

Scarily, the report found a “significant proportion” are not confident that they would be able to safely evacuate their university buildings in a fire.

The report also found that despite all the access failures, many students did not feel safe or confident enough to challenge decisions or chase up support. Awareness of the complaints support is also low, so many do not report issues. Some who did complain said that their treatment had worsened afterwards.

Students also reported that complex systems were hard to navigate. This means those with less capacity for these tasks are less likely to seek help for access failures.

As a result, failures are not formally recorded, so universities are unaware of them. And the only people who face consequences are the disabled people whose lives are made worse by access failures.

Despite this, students said that staff are more supportive and understanding. However lack of training and being unclear about their responsibilities towards disabled students undermined this.

What needs to happen

Disabled Students UK have some recommendations for UK universities to make studying easier for disabled students

They say that agreed support must be met, and this should be monitored across the students’ time at uni. There should also be consequences when needs are not met. DSUK also says the administrative burden on students must be reduced. Disability Services should also work alongside other parts of the university, as opposed to being there to compensate for inaccessibility. It must also be easier and safer for disabled students to raise issues, without fear of mistreatment.

The organisation wants universities to take clear ownership of accessibility. It also expresses how important it is that any cost-cutting exercises are assessed on how they would impact disabled students. They also want universities to avoid rolling back measures that clearly help disabled students.

Labour once again proves they don’t care about disabled people.

Let’s not forget that this is all happening while the government is obsessed with young disabled people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET). You’d think then that they’d be investing more to ensure that disabled people can actually get into education. But that would assume that they actually want to help disabled people into education, instead of just demonising us.

Because it’s far easier to call disabled young people lazy, than it is to actually support them to thrive.

Featured image via Studying in the UK

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

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This is completely idiotic and could easily backfire on Washington. Canada could hold its own meetings with California, Texas, and Alaska independence movements...

Snip:

US government officials held a meeting with Canadian separatists pushing for the secession of the country’s western, oil-rich Alberta province, sources told the Financial Times (FT) in a new report.

“Officials in the [US President] Donald Trump administration discussed loaning Alberta $500 million to break up Canada and make it the 51st state,” one of the sources said.

Jeff Rath, legal advisor to the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), told the outlet that Washington is pushing for an “independent” Alberta.

The report adds that leaders of the APP are seeking another meeting next month with officials from the US State and Treasury Departments in order to request a $500-million credit facility to fund the secession.

Snip:

The Iraqi Nujaba Movement and Kata’ib Hezbollah have announced the launch of nationwide campaigns to register volunteers to support the Islamic Republic of Iran, amid heightened regional tensions and warnings of potential military escalation involving the United States.

Nazem al-Saidi, head of the Executive Council of Iraq’s Nujaba Movement, said volunteer registration centers would be opened across all Iraqi provinces.

[...]

The Nujaba Movement warned that any attack against Iran, or against Shiite religious authorities and Iran’s leadership, would be met with an unexpected response that would significantly alter the regional balance and affect US presence and interests.

Separately, Akram al-Kaabi, leader of the Nujaba Movement, said that any US or Israeli strike on Iran would lead to a broader regional confrontation involving US forces, bases, and interests across West Asia.

Guardian source

I like Sheinbaum, too! What is it Stalin said about social democracy...?

I've been looking at lots of "travel to Cuba" posts on rednote. It's incredibly sad. The Cuban economy is desperate for tourist dollars but has almost nothing to offer tourists except as a living museum on the effects of austerity. The netizens go there to see what China was like 30+ years ago to reflect on their own fortunate circumstances.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23768

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi fired back at Trump’s new threats and said Iran’s forces have their 'fingers on the trigger'

Footage aired on Iranian state television showed Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy commander Alireza Tangsiri inside the submarine missile facilities, displaying rows of cruise missiles reportedly capable of striking targets over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away with smart guidance systems.

“Our capabilities are constantly developing,” Tangsiri said, adding that Iranian forces were ready to deal with any threat “at any level and in any geography.”

Earlier this week, the political deputy of the IRGC Navy, Mohammed Akbarzadeh, warned that Tehran could disrupt international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran refrained from imposing a blockade on the strait during the 12-day US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic in June, but has repeatedly warned it could be an option in any upcoming attack on the country.

Akbarzadeh said Iran receives real-time intelligence “from the sky, the surface and under the water of the Strait.”

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