US auto workers union reaches preliminary deal with Ford


AFP
October 25, 2023

UAW President Shawn Fain, shown at a Chicago rally earlier this month, hailed a tentative agreement with Ford as an historic win - 

Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Jim Vondruska

John BIERS

The US auto workers union reached a tentative agreement with Ford late Wednesday, a breakthrough in a 41-day stoppage on Detroit’s “Big Three” car manufacturers.

The deal, which rank-and-file workers must still approve in a vote, includes a 25 percent wage increase for hourly employees, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union said.

Other key elements include guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments; an elimination of different pay levels or “tiers” that disadvantage junior employees; and a right to strike over plant closures.

“For months we’ve said that record profits mean record contracts,” said UAW President Shawn Fain in a statement. “And UAW family, our Stand Up Strike has delivered.”

Ford confirmed the agreement, saying “we are pleased to have reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract with the UAW covering our US operations.”

Also cheering was US President Joe Biden, who hailed an “historic accord,” saying “I applaud the UAW and Ford for coming together after a hard fought, good faith negotiation and reaching a historic tentative agreement tonight.”

Biden made history in September as the first US president to stand on a picket line as he endorsed the UAW’s call for “record” contracts in light of record auto industry profits.

The wage increase in the tentative agreement is somewhat lower than the 40 percent sought by Fain when the UAW launched the strike on September 15 in the first ever simultaneous stoppage of Detroit’s Big Three (Ford, General Motors and Stellantis).

However, it is much above the nine percent increase Ford initially proposed in August.

“This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford, at the Big Three, and across the auto industry,” Fain said, while stressing that the final decision rests with members.

“We’re going to let that democratic process take its course,” said Fain, calling the rank-and-file “the highest authority.”

Fain said the ratification process will include detailed online presentations and regional meetings.

After rejecting a tentative agreement struck by UAW negotiators, workers at Mack Trucks voted to go on strike earlier this month.

– Expanding strike –

While the initial UAW strike targeted three plants with just 12,700 workers walking out, the union has gradually expanded the action in the ensuing weeks as it has sought a better deal.

More than 45,000 workers were on strike prior to the Ford deal. The UAW has about 146,000 auto workers in the United States.

In just the last two days, the UAW escalated the strike at both Stellantis and GM, taking down key factories in Michigan and Texas that make some of the companies’ most profitable vehicles.

Both GM and Stellantis are currently offering 23 percent wage hikes. Fain has argued the companies need to sweeten the deal further in light of union concessions after bankruptcy reorganizations more than a decade ago.

Following a tentative agreement, labor unions sometimes do not end a strike until the accord is ratified by members.

But in a twist, the UAW said Ford workers would return to their shifts to apply pressure to GM and Stellantis.

“This is a strategic move to get the best deal possible,” said UAW Vice President Chuck Browning, adding that “the last thing” GM and Stellantis want is for Ford to get back to full capacity while they mess around and lag behind.”

Stellantis to buy stake in Chinese EV start-up Leapmotor

AFP
October 25, 2023

Stellantis will pay China's Leapmotor $1.6 billion for a 20 percent stake

 - Copyright AFP Tobias SCHWARZ

Global carmaker Stellantis said Thursday it will buy a 20 percent stake in Chinese electric car maker Leapmotor, making it the latest European brand seeking a foothold in the country’s highly competitive market via partnerships with local manufacturers.

Hangzhou-based Leapmotor only produces electric vehicles and is relatively unknown in Europe, despite selling 10,000 cars a month in China, while Stellantis is one of the world’s largest carmakers, owning popular brands including Alfa Romeo and Jeep.

Under the deal, the Netherlands-based firm will spend 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) on the stake in Leapmotor.

The two firms will also establish a Stellantis-led joint venture, Leapmotor International, which will hold “exclusive rights for the export and sale, as well as manufacturing, of Leapmotor products outside Greater China”, Stellantis said.

“As consolidation unfolds among the capable electric vehicles start-ups in China, it becomes increasingly apparent that a handful of efficient and agile new generation EV players, like Leapmotor, will come to dominate the mainstream segments in China,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in a statement.

“It’s the perfect time to take a leading role in supporting the global expansion plans of Leapmotor, one of the most impressive new EV players who has a similar tech-first, entrepreneurial mindset to ours,” he said.

With 200 vehicles on French roads since last spring, Leapmotor is seeking to clear regulatory hurdles from the European Union in order to deploy more widely in France — its first target market in Europe.

The start-up offers a compact model, the T03, priced at 26,000 euros — aimed at meeting market demand for entry-level electric cars.

Leapmotor told AFP in September that it was ready to ally with a European group, though it did not confirm rumours about a potential alliance with Stellantis.

The company’s CEO, Zhu Jiangming, hailed the partnership with Stellantis as a “great milestone” in the firm’s history.

Stellantis already has a presence in China, via a tie-up with the Chinese group Dongfeng Motor to sell its Peugeot and Citroen cars in the world’s second-largest economy.

But it has struggled to gain a foothold, announcing last week that it would sell the three factories owned by that joint venture to Dongfeng Motor in line with a “strategy of reducing our assets in China”.

And a joint venture with Guangzhou Automobile Group filed for bankruptcy last year.

Other European manufacturers have also stepped up partnerships with Chinese companies to win over local customers.

In July, German car giant Volkswagen announced it would invest more than 600 million euros in Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng.

Erdogan challenges Ataturk’s legacy on Turkey’s centenary

AFP
October 26, 2023

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk are the two seminal figures of post-Ottoman Turkey - 

Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File KEVIN WINTER

Fulya OZERKAN and Burcin GERCEK in Ankara

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will mark Turkey’s centenary Sunday by honouring the post-Ottoman republic’s revered founder, while chipping away at the foundation of his secular state.

Erdogan and World War I-era military commander Mustafa Kemal Ataturk have become the seminal figures of modern Turkey, their contrasting styles and visions defining the shape of society and the country’s place in the world.

Dubbed “reis” (“chief”) by supporters, Erdogan is now Turkey’s longest-serving leader, overseeing a massive modernisation drive that has sustained his popularity in poorer and more religiously conservative provinces since 2003.

Meaning the “father of all Turks”, the surname Ataturk was bestowed on Mustafa Kemal by Turkey’s parliament after the field marshal drove out foreign armies and built a new, staunchly secular republic from the Ottoman Empire’s ruins.

Now, Erdogan is walking a fine line between paying respects to the man who created the country, and building his own legacy — one that critics fear is pulling Turkey back into its Ottoman past.

He peppers his speeches with proclamations about a new “Century of Turkey”, which could include a revised constitution that protects women’s right to stay veiled in public and defines marriage as a union between a man and woman.

State television is also rolling back coverage of the celebrations, citing Israel’s war with Gaza militants.

A lack of foreign guests at Turkey’s big birthday bash is adding to a sense of this being one party that Erdogan would prefer to skip.

Erdogan “didn’t really want to celebrate the republic,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University.

“People are unhappy. Nothing has been done to create a festive atmosphere.”

– ‘Climate of fear’ –

Ataturk’s lasting importance in Turkey is difficult to overstate, making any attempts by Erdogan to eclipse him particularly sensitive.

Historian, researcher and writer Ekrem Isin said Ataturk is still viewed by vast strata of society as a liberator who both defended Turks from World War I invaders and ended the religious conservatism of sultans’ rule.

“Think of a people who had spent 600 years under dynastic rule,” Isin said.

“Anyone who raised his head a little was hit with a stick. There was a climate of fear.”

The new, secular and Europe-oriented republic formed by Ataturk allowed people “to stand on their own feet, granting them rights that they did not even ask for”.

Some of the most sensitive reforms involved the stripping of religion from most facets of public life in the overwhelming Muslim state.

This may be exemplified best by the fate of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, an ancient cathedral that the Ottomans converted into a mosque.

– Political Islam –

Ataturk turned the UNESCO-protected building — once the seat of Eastern Christianity — into a museum, bestowing it a religious neutrality that underscored his vision of modern “Turkishness”.

Erdogan converted the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque in 2020, drawing international indignation and criticism from his secular rivals.

“Erdogan is very much interested in putting his mark in every important policy matter,” said Berk Esen, an associate professor at Istanbul’s Sabanci University.

“I think Erdogan has anti-secularism in his veins,” added political analyst and columnist Barcin Yinanc.

“Political Islam has a problem with secularism and the republic,” she said.

“We are entering the second century of the republic with a government that is not at peace with the republic. Perhaps it does this consciously, because it feeds on polarisation.”

Erdogan’s underlying message Sunday, when he is due to deliver prepared remarks, will be that “he has done more in 20 years than was done in 100 years,” Yinanc said.

– ‘No excitement’ –

Sunday’s celebration will still include a drone show over the Bosphorus and fireworks in Turkey’s main cities.

The drones’ inclusion is a tacit nod to the technological innovations being spearheaded by the Baykar company, founded by the president’s popular son-in-law Selcuk Bayraktar.

The festivities could also be partially overshadowed by a million-strong rally in defence of Palestinian rights that Erdogan’s AKP party has scheduled for Saturday in Istanbul.

“He could have organised this meeting for next week. This anniversary only comes once in a century,” Kadir Has University’s Ozel said.

“Our government is an (AKP) party government that has always opposed the republican project.”

Turkey’s TRT state broadcaster is also cancelling concerts and other entertainment broadcasts for the event, citing “the alarming human tragedy in Gaza”.

The historian Isin said festive marching band parades would always commemorate October 29 in his youth.

This time, it will be “an unpleasant celebration with no atmosphere of excitement,” Isin said

Vlad the Impaler steps out of Dracula’s shadow


AFP
October 26, 2023

Fangs for coming: visitors admire one of the few portraits of Vlad III, aka Dracula, in Austria's Forchtenstein Castle 

- Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File KEVIN WINTER

Blaise GAUQUELIN with Ionut IORDACHESCU in Romania

Cloaked in a black cape like the infamous count himself, 10-year-old Niklas Schuetz runs through the dark corridors of a hill-top castle in search of the truth about Dracula.

“He was a Romanian prince, not a vampire,” said the schoolboy, as he tripped by torchlight through the nocturnal gloom of Forchtenstein Castle.

The group being guided through the Austrian fortress are eager to sink their teeth into the gripping life of Vlad Tepes, the notorious “Vlad the Impaler”, whose descendants once held the schloss.

The castle is home to one of the few paintings of the cruel 15th-century prince, and this Halloween its curators are trying to bring the real historical figure out from the chilling shadow of the monster invented by the Irish writer Bram Stoker.

Rather than being a ghoulish fiend, the real Vlad Tepes had for a “long time gone down in history as a positive figure” who courageously fought the Ottoman Turks, said the director of its collections, Florian Bayer.

“More and more people are able to distinguish between the bloodsucking vampire and the historical figure,” he said.

Voivode Vlad III — also known by his patronymic name Dracula derived from the Slavonic word for dragon — once ruled over Wallachia, a Romanian-speaking vassal state of the Kingdom of Hungary.

– ‘Forest’ of the impaled –

Held as a child hostage of the sultan at the Ottoman court, he later turned against his former captors.

In several hard-fought campaigns against the Turks, he struck fear into his enemies by impaling thousands of Turkish prisoners.

This gruesomely slow death was also used against his internal rivals, like “the German merchants from neighbouring Transylvanian towns,” historian Dan Ioan Muresan told AFP.

Tepes was often depicted amidst a “forest” of impaled bodies.

Yet despite his gory reputation, Vlad was a handsome devil and something of a ladykiller, according to Muresan.

He was a “very handsome man with an imposing build”, with long hair flowing over his Turkish-style kaftans adorned with diamonds.

By marrying a cousin of the Hungarian king, he “gave rise to a branch from which the British royal family descends,” the historian added.

Indeed Britain’s King Charles III has repeatedly boasted of their shared blood ties, saying that Transylvania runs through his veins.

– Communist marketing –

The gothic novel by Stoker published in 1897 helped kickstart the modern vampire genre.

Dozens of films later, the fictional Dracula had transformed into a pop culture icon.

“Until the 1960s, Romanians didn’t associate the character imagined by Stoker with Vlad Tepes,” said Bogdan Popovici, head of the national archives in the Transylvanian city of Brasov, home to some of the prince’s manuscripts.

“It was the Communists who started to commercialise it for the Western market to attract tourists,” he said.

While cashing in on selling the vampire myth to visitors, the regime of Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu sought to resurrect Vlad as a national hero.

Paradoxically, the Communist regime was careful in differentiating the real Dracula from its fictitious counterpart as it pursued its mission to wipe out pagan traditions.

– Tears of blood –

“Romanians have never recognised themselves in the character, which was born out of a foreign imagination and planted into an exotic reality,” said Muresan.

“It is being exploited as a kind of tourist trap,” he said.

The real Vlad never set foot in Romania’s Bran Castle — widely taken as the inspiration for the lair of Dracula — but it hasn’t stopped it drawing visitors in their droves.

Murdered by his own people in 1476 in the wake of a conspiracy, experts dispute the whereabouts of his remains to this day, with some claiming that his head was sent to the sultan in Constantinople to confirm his death.

A recent Italian scientific study based on the analysis of the prince’s handwritten letters found that Vlad probably suffered from haemolacria, indicating that he could shed tears of blood.

The creepy detail is undoubtedly enough to keep the Dracula myth alive for some time yet.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for VLAD THE IMPALER 

Arctic archipelago turns the page on its mining past


AFP
October 26, 2023

Rusty bits of rail track and other rubble are virtually all that remain on the site of the former Svea coal mine which operated from 1917 until 2020

 - Copyright AFP JUNG YEON-JE

Viken KANTARCI with Pierre-Henry Deshayes in Oslo

At the old Svea mine in the Arctic, broken railway tracks overgrown with weeds lead nowhere. Of the hundred buildings that once made up the town, there’s almost nothing left.

Coal brought fortune to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, but that bonanza became a curse for the remote group of islands, now the most harmful fossil energy for the climate.

Svalbard, today home to 3,000 people and located in the fastest-warming region on the planet, is bit by bit erasing all traces of its mining past.

A 40-minute helicopter flight from the main town of Longyearbyen, the Svea mine and its surrounding settlement have been returned to Mother Nature after a massive, recently-completed restoration project.

“At its peak there were barracks for 300 people, with a canteen, an airfield with 35,000 passengers yearly, a power plant, a workshop, and storage,” said Morten Hagen Johansen, in charge of the project at the mine where he was once employed.

The Svea site is the biggest natural restoration ever undertaken in Norway.

Only a handful of man-made objects remain, preserved because they are considered historic.

They include a few dilapidated brick buildings, a rusted track vehicle, and railway tracks that once transported wagons loaded with coal.

The area “was home to many miners who were working here for decades,” Hanna Geiran, head of the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage, told AFP.

“Preserving these artefacts helps to better understand what this place was,” she added.

– Avalanches –

The mine was opened by a Swedish company in 1917 and officially closed 100 years later after producing 34 million tonnes of coal.

The site has since been returned to its natural state at a cost of around 1.6 billion kroner (about $140 million) to the Norwegian state.

“The concept is to try to let nature take it back,” said Hagen Johansen.

“That means to let creeks run freely. To make sure that avalanches do happen, because that will transport more sediment down and it will make new creeks.”

The part of the Barents Sea where the Svalbard archipelago is located is warming up to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, according to a study published in last year.

At Svea, a spectacular landslide recently created a deep crevasse down a hilly slope.

“It is the result of a very heavy rainfall last summer where they got maybe 50-60 millimetres (2-2.3 inches) of rain in just 24 hours,” geologist Fredrik Juell Theisen said.

“That was very unusual before climate change started changing the climate up here,” he added.

– Russian presence –

The climate backlash is for the archipelago now trying to rid itself of fossil fuels.

Seven other mines located in the hills of Longyearbyen have almost all been closed, with the last one due to shut in 2025.

The town also disconnected its coal plant for good this month in exchange for a less-polluting diesel plant, ahead of a transition to renewable energies at a later stage.

Going forward, Svalbard’s economy will rely on tourism and scientific research.

The only coal still being mined on the archipelago will be a vein in Barentsburg, a Russian mining community with just under 500 Russians and Ukrainians, most of them from the Donbas region.

Under the 1920 international treaty that recognises Norway’s sovereignty over Svalbard, all signatories are entitled to exploit the region’s natural resources equally.

As a result, Russia has for decades maintained a mining community om Svalbard, via the state-run company Trust Arktikugol, in a strategic region belonging to a NATO member.

According to some observers and Russia itself, strict environmental regulations that Norway has introduced in the region — about two-thirds of Svalbard land is protected in one way or another — are at least partly aimed at limiting .

It’s impossible to know whether such considerations played into Oslo’s decision to restore the Svea mine at great cost, said Mats Kirkebirkeland of Norwegian think tank Civita.

“But there’s no denying that some of the Norwegian environmental policies and the geostrategic policies on Svalbard are aligned.”

Iraq dig unearths 2,700-year-old winged sculpture largely intact

AFP
October 25, 2023

This 2,700 year old relief uncovered by archaeologists in northern Iraq depicts a lamassu, an Assyrian deity portrayed with a human head, the body of a bull and the wings of a bird - Copyright AFP WANG Zhao

A dig in northern Iraq has unearthed a 2,700-year-old alabaster sculpture of the winged Assyrian deity Lamassu, which was found largely intact despite its large dimensions.

Only the head was missing and that was already in the collection of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad after being confiscated by customs officers from smugglers in the 1990s, the dig’s French leader Pascal Butterlin said.

“I never unearthed anything this big in my life before,” Butterlin said of the 18-tonne sculpture measuring 3.8 by 3.9 metres (about 12.5 by 12.8 feet). “Normally, it’s only in Egypt or Cambodia that you find pieces this big.

“The attention to detail is unbelievable,” said the professor of Middle East archaeology at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Erected at the entrance to the ancient city of Khorsabad, some 15 kilometres (10 miles) north of the modern city of Mosul, the sculpture shows the Lamassu, an Assyrian deity with a human head, the body of a bull and the wings of a bird.

It was commissioned during the reign of King Sargon II who ruled from 722 to 705 BC and erected at the city’s gates to provide protection, Butterlin said.

First mentioned in the 19th century by French archaeologist Victor Place, the relief dropped from public records until the 1990s when Iraqi authorities earmarked it for “urgent intervention”.

It was during this period that looters pillaged the head and chopped it into pieces to smuggle abroad.

The rest of the relief was spared the destruction wreaked by the Islamic State jihadist group, which overran the area in 2014, because residents of the modern village of Khorsabad hid it before fleeing to government-held territory, Butterlin said.

Canadian scientists find a way to make batteries charge faster

By Dr. Tim Sandle
October 25, 2023

Teslas are a common sight on roads around Los Angeles and San Francisco, and data shows electric vehicle sales in the state are rising - 

Copyright AFP Sajjad HUSSAIN

Researchers from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montreal (UQAM) have found a new approach to making inexpensive batteries that can not only hold large amounts of charge but also recharge quickly.

The research focuses on improving lithium ion batteries, rechargeable cells that are used in electric vehicles, power tools, smartphones and other devices. These types of batteries are used extensively in the electrification of transport (such as electric cars) sector due to their high energy density, low self-discharge and long cycle life.

Conventional lithium-ion batteries consist of single or multiple lithium-ion cells, along with a protective circuit board. Yet despite the commonality of these batteries, progress with technology is partly hampered by a relatively slow charging time. New research has signalled a new way forward.

It is hoped from the research that energy sector manufacturers will be able to make batteries that can be charged faster. This is not only with vehicles for lithium-ion batteries have come to dominate more than 90 per cent of the global solar grid market.

To understand how a battery performs, researchers needed to see what was going on inside different batteries while they were being used. The was achieved through the use of the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron at the University of Saskatchewan (USask).

CLS is a national research facility of the University of Saskatchewan and one of the largest science projects in Canada’s history. This technology offers the bright, intense x-ray light required to peer into a working battery.

Lithium ion batteries can be made of a combination of different materials, which researchers tweak to get the performance they want.

This allowed the researchers to combine two materials and use the benefits of both of them. This was part of the hunt for one material that is capable of fast charging and another one that is capable of having a huge capacity.

The outcome was that the researchers produced a battery by mixing a known fast-charging material with a high-capacity one and experimented with different ways to combine them. This was made possible through the CLS, with the technology enabling the scientists to image the lithium ions–so that they could monitor the battery chemistry while it was being charged.

This demonstrated that a found that a layered, sandwich-like approach worked best since the lithium ion is able to move more efficiently through the cell. The findings appear in the journal ChemElectroChem. The paper is titled “Exploring the Synergistic Effects of Dual-Layer Electrodes for High Power Li-Ion Batteries.”

Japan show provides glimpse of robots as future of rescue efforts

By AFP
October 26, 2023

Visitors to the Japan Mobility Show will get a vision of the future of rescue in the disaster-prone country, including exoskeletons

 - Copyright AFP Kazuhiro NOGI

Etienne BALMER

With a drone camera, a survivor is spotted in the rubble. A robot on tracks brings him water while rescuers in exoskeletons clear an escape route for an autonomous stretcher to take her to safety.

This is the futuristic vision on display at the Japan Mobility Show, aiming to exhibit how technology can help and sometimes replace humans in a country short of workers and no stranger to disasters.

But so as not to alarm people, the imaginary tragedy is unleashed by Godzilla, who has unleashed catastrophe in Japanese disaster films since the 1950s.

In Japan nearly 30 percent of the country’s population is aged 65 and over.

“Because of the decline of the population there are fewer and fewer people available for dangerous tasks,” said Tomoyuki Izu, founder of Attraclab, a local start-up specialising in autonomous mobility.

“My idea is to help people such as firefighters with my machines,” Izu, 61, told AFP.

It was Attraclab that co-developed the small delivery robot squeezing through the cardboard rubble at the Japan Mobility Show and designed the remote-control stretcher on wheels or tracks.

For now the Japanese government favours “traditional equipment” for relief efforts, he said at the event, which opens to the public this weekend.

But Izu believes there will be a market for more advanced technology in the future.

“There’s a lots of anime with humanoid robots in Japan, and therefore people love them. But these kinds of autonomous vehicles are still very strange for them,” he said.

Since 2016, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) has been developing Kaleido, a robust humanoid robot capable of delicately lifting and moving injured people.

– ‘Shortage of labour’ –

“In the future this robot will be able to save people, or go to dangerous zones, like fires,” said Itsuki Goda from the robotics division of KHI.

He conceded, though, that the machine needs more development on its scanning capabilities to get through difficult terrain.

“We need more years of development if we want to use it in real situations, where conditions are always different,” he told AFP.

Kaleido’s current load capacity of 60 kilograms (132 pounds) will be increased very soon with a new prototype, promised Goda.

Price is also an issue.

Right now this robot is “maybe 10 times more expensive than a human, but if we produce 10,000 of them per year, the price will go down rapidly”, Goda added.

Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, another niche segment has exploded: robots to clear up disaster areas that are difficult or dangerous to access.

Engineering firm Sugino Machine presented a powerful but small robotic arm rigged on crawlers that can work in areas that emergency workers cannot go.

The machine was built in 2018 for a nationally run atomic research agency, as Japan continues the work to decommission the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

“This can be used for initial damage assessment or to remove debris or to remove heavy items that people cannot lift,” Akira Inujima from Sugino Machine told AFP.

Various tools can be attached to its arm, such as image, temperature or radioactivity sensors, or a high-pressure water lance.

“We have a shortage of labour. It is difficult to go all robot. But we can offer solutions to help people’s work,” he said.

“After Fukushima, we have been able to continue technological development because there has been project after project (heavily supported by the government), like removing debris, that needs our work,” Inujima said.

“It’s important to continue this work and not make this fade away.”

Argentina’s Milei repels women voters, fires up disgruntled men

By AFP
October 24, 2023

In September, with Milei on the up and up in opinion polls, thousands of Argentine women marched in defense of abortion, a right they feared he would take away

 - Copyright AFP/File Emiliano Lasalvia

Leila MACOR

In Argentina, where women have made some recent gains but are still fighting for full equal rights, anti-establishment presidential candidate Javier Milei has divided the electorate with an unashamedly machismo stance.

Some love him for it. Others are appalled.

The libertarian outsider who unexpectedly surged to the front of the presidential race in an August primary, had a poorer-than-expected showing in Sunday’s first election round, coming second behind center-left candidate Sergio Massa.

“There was a very strong mobilization of women against Milei,” whose rhetoric “was not only anti-feminist but also anti-woman,” political scientist Ivan Schuliaquer of the San Martin University in Buenos Aires told AFP.

Milei does not hold back when it comes to chauvinistic tropes.

“I’m not going to be apologizing for having a penis!” he said in an interview last year.

Milei is antiabortion — a right granted to Argentine women only in 2021 — does not support equal pay and has suggested scrapping the women’s ministry if he becomes president.

On the question of femicide, he has demanded “equality before the law” — meaning that targeting a victim for their gender should stop being considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing.

Over 250 women fell victim to femicide in Argentina in 2022.

While many women are alarmed, Milei’s utterances have found resonance with some men, and polls show his voters were mainly male.

“There has been a lot of patriarchal reaction to Milei’s ideas,” leftist presidential candidate Myriam Bregman said on national radio after garnering less than three percent of the vote Sunday.

“They (Milei’s male supporters) feel their privileges are being brought into question.”

– ‘Green tide’ –

At Milei’s final campaign rally, a supporter told AFP that feminists in Argentina “sound like a broken record.”

The supporter, 57-year-old manual laborer Moises Achee, said he was also “against them changing the Spanish language” to make provision for gender inclusive pronouns.

“I don’t want them to impose things on me that I don’t accept… So we go with Javier Milei!”.

Argentina has been a Latin American leader in gay marriage and identity legislation, with a 2021 law allowing non-binary people to mark their gender with an “X.”

Abortion, too, has been legal in the country since 2021 until the 14th week of pregnancy.

In September this year, with Milei on the up and up in opinion polls, thousands of Argentine women marched in defense of abortion, a right they feared he would take away.

The feminist movement gained prominence in Argentina in 2015 with massive countrywide protests against femicide.

The push for abortion came later, and the so-called “green tide” named after the green bandannas donned by demonstrators, subsequently spread across Latin America and beyond.

“Argentina is the door to the fight for human rights in the region,” said Soledad Vallejos, a journalist specializing in gender issues who helped found the anti-femicide movement “Ni Una Menos.”

As such, if conservatives “can change the minds of Argentines, (this too) will spread across the region,” she told AFP.

– ‘Deeply reactionary’ –

The emergence of the “green tide” had a strong counter-reaction in Argentina, igniting an angry clapback in conservative, and male, sectors that took to WhatsApp groups and social media in anger.

“There was an overreach of feminism in whose eyes you were guilty just for being a man,” Milei’s director of digital communication, Agustin Romo, told elDiarioAR, an online newspaper, in August.

This, in turn, elicited a reaction “even in nonideological men and women. Or in women who realized they had gone overboard,” ventured Romo, a former online influencer.

As voices became more and more divided in the period from 2017 to 2019, a libertarian economist became a popular guest on Argentine TV, generating good ratings with his sometimes radical rants. It was Milei.

Then came the Coronavirus pandemic and the fight over vaccine and mask mandates — further uniting the anti-establishment crowd.

According to philosopher Ricardo Forster, Milei’s “seemingly rebellious” discourse, so attractive to people who feel marginalized in an increasingly polarized world, was in fact a “deeply reactionary” harkening for old-fashioned, conservative values.

“Something about masculinity is at stake… that is expressed in the growth of the extreme right in many parts of the world,” Forster told the Perfil newspaper, comparing the Milei phenomenon with Donald Trump in the United States and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

For Schuliaquer, while the divide between Argentina’s traditional rival parties used to be one of class, the pending political contest between Milei and the incumbent Peronist movement will be one of “gender and generation.”

Some S.African miners return to surface after underground dispute

By AFP
October 25, 2023

Police and security forces patrolled the area Tuesday evening as about 100 miners sang protest songs outside the mine

 - Copyright AFP/File Yuichi YAMAZAKI

Some of the miners who stayed underground for more than two days in a standoff between rival South African labour unions began returning to the surface Wednesday, their representatives said.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), one of the two unions involved, said 107 of the more than 500 workers who had failed to emerge from the Gold One mine in Springs, east of Johannesburg, after a night shift on Monday morning “have come back to the surface”.

“They are currently at the medical station for further check-ups,” NUM spokesman Livhuwani Mammburu told AFP.

NUM and management at the mine had alleged the workers were being “held hostage” by members of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), a rival union.

AMCU denied the allegations saying the miners were staging a “sit-in” protest.

“I am told that they overpowered those that were holding them hostage and ran away,” the NUM’s Mammburu said of the 107 who made it out Wednesday.

Rescue and security teams were working to get the remaining miners out, he said.

The AMCU’s regional secretary Tladi Mokwena disputed this account, saying all the miners were coming out “willingly” having run out of food.

“Management has closed all the routes for them to receive food. So, we couldn’t allow workers to stay underground without food,” he said.

Police did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

On Tuesday, police spokeswoman Dimakatso Nevhuhulwi said officers were “on standby” and monitoring the situation while talks between the mine and the unions were ongoing.

An AFP reporter at the scene on Tuesday evening said police and security forces patrolled the area as about 100 miners, mostly from the AMCU, sang protests songs as they waited for the outcome of the meeting between the mine management and unions.

The dispute revolves around union representation at the mine, where the NUM is currently the only group officially registered.

The AMCU says an overwhelming majority of miners have signed up to join it. But it is yet to be given official representation, which it says is the reason for the protest.

The NUM was founded in 1982 by the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former labour unionist. It remains the nation’s biggest mineworker union.