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In one hour, the national 24h general strike in Belgium will start. The port pilots of Zeebrugge, Antwerpen etc. will stop working. No ship will enter nor leave the ports of Belgium. At 10 pm the Belgian airspace will come to a halt and no civil plane will land or depart from any airport. All trains will also stop for 24 hours. It will be just the beginning of probably the biggest general strike in the history of the Belgian working class. Truckers have called to block the main roads and blockades will be set up in all industrial zone's. Tomorrow morning the rest of the country will come to a halt, busses, trams, underground, all public services and all industry and distribution. The magistrates have issued a call of solidarity and will also go on strike. Despite the mobilisation of 12.000 police officers (including 500 police students!), the totality of the available police force, the strike will be one of the most general of general strikes ever. Nothing moves without the workers, no wealth is created without the workers. Welcome to working class Belgium!

Written yesterday, December 14

A FPU conference in Kiev was violently attacked by fascist thugs on June 26.

The decision of Lawrence & Wishart to demand that the Marxist Internet Archive (marxists.org) take down the collected works of Marx and Engels from their website has sparked justified outrage across the internet.

Yesterday a 300-strong police force attacked the students of the Abd Elmalik Essadi University in Martil.

This is a video which shows the victory of anti-evictions campaign PAH in preventing the repossession of a block of flats in Girona, Salt. As we described in an earlier article, hundreds had mobilised to defend the block (known as BlocSalt) which had been occupied by campaigners and is owned by state-controlled bank SAREB. With English captions.

They surprised everyone, in particular the government that was meeting to discuss the new budget cuts. Fed up with meaningless promises and angered by the dangerously low staff levels, fire-fighters from the south of Belgium and Brussels decided to go for it. Unannounced, a few hundred fire-fighters with some 30 trucks parked themselves outside the Prime Minister’s office and the Belgian parliament... and then the fun began!

The New Scientist magazine carried an article recently, in its edition dated 13th April, with the title "Austerity’s Toxic Genetic Legacy". In the article the author explains how the high stress levels caused by high unemployment and a falling standard of living, such as the working class are experiencing now, can cause serious illness. Not only that but long-term psychological stress can cause long-lasting changes in genes that trigger chronic inflammation.

A new book details the human cost of capitalist crisis. "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills" by economists David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu uses statistical analysis to discover the human effects of the recession. In a Guardian article, Stuckler describes the book as articulating “why austerity kills”.

Sabino Cuadra (member of the Spanish parliament for Amaiur) denounces the hypocrisy of the "rule of law" and refutes accusations of violence against the anti-evictions movement.

You couldn’t have made it up. A family of Cuban “dissidents” brought to Spain by the Spanish government over two years ago found themselves evicted from their home in Alicante by the police because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent. Now they say they want to go back to Cuba!