François Bayrou's fall was celebrated last night with farewell parties organised in front of a number of town halls. Generally, it was welcomed with satisfaction by millions of young people and workers.

Angela Rayner’s rapid fall from high office must have brought to mind a parody of the pleas of Richard III during the battle of Bosworth Field: “A house, a house, my kingdom for a house”.

We republish here a translation of an article by Unité CGT – the left wing of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in France, representing a significant number of its industry federations and Departmental Unions. In it, Unité CGT calls for the workers and their trade union organisations to take up the rallying cry of Bloquons tout! and shut down France on 10 September. They call for this mobilisation to be broadened to include factory occupations and a general strike.

Without western weapons, Israel would have been unable to carry out its genocide against the Palestinians or to carry on its provocations against Iran. Foremost among those arming the Israeli state is, of course, the United States. But the second largest supplier of weapons is Germany.

On 22 July, the newly elected President of Romania, Nicușor Dan, expressed his dismay in an Instagram post at the results of a newly published national study concerning the ‘Perceptions of the population towards communism’, released by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile.

Barring any dramatic developments, the Prime Minister of France Bayrou will fall on 8 September. Only political suicide on the part of the MPs of the Socialist Party could save this deeply unpopular government. For the time being, the leader of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure and his friends are not willing to take this step.

The news from Alaska caused shockwaves in every capital city of Europe. I refer, of course, not to ordinary citizens, but to that special elite of wise men and women who like to call themselves our leaders.

Since the collapse of the canopy that killed 16 people last November, Serbia has seen massive mobilisations, including the largest in the country’s history on 15 March. They have continued down to the present yet still no justice has been had for the victims. Patience has run out.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the world and sparked a series of revolutionary events internationally. In this article, Konstantin Korn and Emanuel Tomaselli look at the way the revolutionary process unfolded in Austria towards the end of the First World War, including an overview of the general strike of January 1918, and how the Social-Democratic leaders betrayed the movement.

The announcement by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana of a new party on Thursday has provoked a strong wave of support and enthusiasm.

Today, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced the launch of a new left party, aimed at taking on the “corporations and billionaires” and their “rigged system”. The RCP is getting on board. Fight for real change! Fight for revolution!

On Tuesday night, big protests were held against Zelensky in Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, and Odessa after he forced through a law that would undermine Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies. Yesterday, these protests continued and spread to other areas including Kharkov, Chernivtsi, Vinnytsia, Nikolaev, Poltava and Chernihiv.

This July marks the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb military, police and paramilitary units killed around 8,000 Bosniak men, mostly civilians and prisoners of war. In terms of its scale and the number of victims, the Srebrenica massacre is one of the largest single crimes committed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This crime has become synonymous with the conflict itself and the series of war crimes that occurred during the civil war.

On 12-13 July, around 30 comrades gathered in Brno for the Fourth Congress of Komunistická Avantgarda, the Czech and Slovak organisation of the RCI. Delegates from across the Czech Republic and Slovakia were joined by foreign visitors from Austria, Poland and Great Britain. Literally as our meeting was taking place, the Czech Senate passed a bill with an amendment criminalising support for communism. We responded defiantly with a huge banner proclaiming: “Neither Fico nor Fiala, the party of workers to the forefront!”

The measures recently announced by François Bayrou constitute a reactionary offensive on a massive scale: the abolition of two public holidays, a ‘blank year’ (freezing pensions, social benefits, etc.), the elimination of thousands of civil service jobs, cuts to local authority funding, a €5 billion cut to public health spending – and so on, for an estimated total saving of €43.8 billion.