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Ten years ago, Kazakhstan’s western region of Mangystau was swept by a series of oil workers’ strikes. The mobilisation lasted for more than six months and, at its peak in summer 2011, several thousand workers were involved. The epicentre was Zhanaozen, a city of 150,000 built in the 1960s next to Uzen’, a now-ageing oilfield that was once the country’s largest.
Throughout 2011, labour relations worsened to the extent that the resulting slump in production started to show on company balance sheets. On 16 December, the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence, clashes erupted between the authorities and striking workers. At least 16 civilians died and hundreds were wounded by police fire. Three dozen workers, union leaders and protesters were sentenced for the violence, while the authorities barred any independent investigation of the events, which the former UK prime minister Tony Blair later helped spin internationally.
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Two months ago, with the war in Yemen entering its seventh year, the UN secretary general, in his appeal to funders at the annual pledging conference, reminded everyone that “More than 16 million people [in the country] are expected to go hungry this year. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions. The worst hunger is in areas affected by the conflict.”
Yemen today has a population of 30 million people, with three million currently displaced. They are either hosted by relatives or in camps and informal settlements where they are dependent on humanitarian supplies since there is no employment and they are far from their lands. Another million have returned home after various periods of displacement.
It was mostly dreich in Scotland yesterday, and everything felt familiar.
We ve had 13 elections and referendums in the past decade, and the results have become as routine as the short walk to the polling station. There will be another SNP victory. Support for independence continues to rise. The Union is still in crisis.
Mid-afternoon, as polling stations got busier, the drizzle became hail and rattled roofs across Edinburgh. This wasn’t just another day in May. This time was different.
Yesterday saw the most boring election in the history of the Scottish parliament, and yet, at the same time, the most important.
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If you’re used to Westminster’s bipolar politics, Scotland’s multi-party system can seem baffling. And so it’s easier for the London media to focus on the rotting corpses of the dying regime – older men raging against their own irrelevance – than follow the forces reshaping Scotland.
The path through the five Holyrood elections to date has been cut by a group we could call ‘the radicals’. These are the people who, as bombs blew Baghdad to bits in 2003, abandoned uninspiring Labour and Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigns, and elected the ‘rainbow parliament’ that included six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs and seven Greens.
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Commodity trading firms are among the most important corporations in global capitalism, yet most people have never heard of them.
As intermediaries between suppliers and buyers of primary and secondary commodities, these shadowy entities are key players in vital international markets, from aluminium and crude oil to soybean meal and zinc. They use their transportation, processing and storage capabilities to capitalise on disruptions in global supply chains, and they trade on derivatives markets to both hedge against, and speculate on, price fluctuations.
For commodity traders, instability is good for business. When a global pandemic leads to the shuttering of factories and massive shifts in consumer demand, the traders can profit from the resulting volatility. When drought in the American Midwest leads to a reduction in the domestic supply of livestock feed in the US, they can use their transportation capabilities to ship more soybeans from Brazil. And