ON June 6, results began to come in from the second round of Peru’s presidential election. It appeared early on that the race was tight. Peru Libre’s Pedro Castillo held a slim lead over Fuerza Popular’s Keiko Fujimori. Castillo, a school teacher from a rural district of northern Peru, ran a door-to-door campaign amongst impoverished Peruvians, while Fujimori, the daughter of a former president who is now in prison, ran a television campaign that was lubricated with large amounts of money. This was a two-way fight between the Left (Castillo) and the Right (Fujimori).

IN a tightly fought run-off election to elect the president of Peru, a school teacher and progressive activist, Pedro Castillo won by securing 50.2 per cent (8,791,778) of the total votes polled. He narrowly defeated Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing neoliberal, who secured 49.7 per cent (8,720,337) votes. In a country of 32 million people, where 17 million of the eligible 24 million had voted, the victory margin is a small 71,443 votes.

THE All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO) organised a webinar on May 14, 2021 in solidarity with Palestine, condemning Israeli attacks. Iraklis Tsavdaridis, executive secretary of the World Peace Council (WPC) and Dr Aqel of the Palestinian Peace Committee spoke in the webinar, apart from the leadership of the AIPSO.Pallab Sengupta, general secretary of the AIPSO presiding over the webinar, briefly reported about the background of the present Israeli attacks on Palestine.

ON May 6, 2021, Israeli officials arrived at Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to support the Zionist settlers who were in the midst of a campaign to evict Palestinian families from their homes. East Jerusalem, where Sheikh Jarrah is located, has been under Israeli occupation since 1967; ‘occupation’ is a technical term, since the United Nations Security Council resolution 242 (1967) protected the seized areas of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank as areas to be treated by Israel as the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).

THE Communist and Workers Parties through a joint statement have strongly and unequivocally condemned the Israeli aggression meted out against Palestinians in Jerusalem as well as the continued military bombardment upon Gaza which has resulted in the killing of scores of Palestinian civilians and the maiming of hundreds more, among them children.Israel’s brazen violation of international humanitarian law and international law has continued for decades now, aided and abetted with the full support of imperialist forces, and without any meaningful intervention from international institutions t