With 53% of the votes the Venezuelan opposition has managed to secure 112 seats in the National Assembly. This gives them a sweeping two third majority and wide ranging powers. Drunk with victory and seething with revenge, they have started to announce plans to reverse every single one of the gains of the Bolivarian revolution. This has provoked ferment amongst the revolutionary rank and file, which at the same time is directing part of their anger at bureaucrats and reformists within its own ranks.

As we have stated previously, the downing of a Russian jet in Syria by the Turkish military was clearly a provocation on the part of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His aim was to stop an alliance being formed between Russia and the West in Syria. He has achieved the opposite with Turkey now more isolated and the major world powers coming closer to each other while Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been elbowed to one side.

While official NATO leaders were quick to state the right of Turkey to defend its sovereign space after downing the Russian jet, they were also quick to call for restraint on the part of Russia as well as Turkey. “De-escalation” was the buzzword all major world leaders were using.

 The Turkish military have recently shot down a Russian military aircraft on the border with Syria. It is unclear so far whether it was ground fire or Turkish jets that brought down the Russian plane. But that is a mere detail. What is quite clear is that this was a blatant provocation by the Turkish ruling clique.

Turkish military officials claimed that Turkish F-16s had shot down the plane after “repeatedly warning” its pilots that they were “violating Turkish airspace”. Russia's defence ministry said an Su-24 had crashed on Syrian territory after being hit by fire from the ground, and that its pilots had managed to eject. Russia insists that its warplane did not violate Turkish airspace. The ministry stressed that "throughout its flight, the aircraft remained exclusively above Syrian territory", adding: "Objective monitoring data shows it." The fact is that video footage showed the plane crashing into mountains in Latakia province – that is, inside Syria. The pilots also landed inside Syrian territory. Even the Turkish radar imagery seems to confirm that the plane was shot down over Syrian airspace.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn provided the one thing that was lacking in Britain: a point of reference for the accumulated discontent and frustration of the masses. It is beginning to regenerate the Labour Party and push it to the left. That represents a mortal danger to the ruling class and they will stop at nothing to destroy it.

Last Friday, Paris was the scene of mass slaughter in which at least one hundred and twenty-nine people, mostly young kids enjoying themselves in cafes and a rock concert, were shot down in cold blood. The killers, shouting Allahu Akbar, discharged magazine after magazine, calmly reloading before killing more defenceless people as they lay helpless on the ground.

Last Friday, Paris was the scene of mass slaughter in which at least one hundred and twenty-nine people, mostly young kids enjoying themselves in cafes and a rock concert, were shot down in cold blood. The killers, shouting Allahu Akbar, discharged magazine after magazine, calmly reloading before killing more defenceless people as they lay helpless on the ground.

Reactionary Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has struck again last night in a co-ordinated attack on different sites in Paris leaving over 128 dead and more than 100 severely injured. This is a wholly reactionary attack against ordinary working people, many of them youth, enjoying a night out in restaurants, concert halls and a football stadium. We condemn the murderous gang which carried out these attacks and we express our solidarity with the people of Paris.

For a very long time British politics has resembled a stagnant pond. With the election of Jeremy Corbyn in a landslide victory it felt as if a huge stone had been thrown into it, making gigantic waves that have transformed the entire political landscape. But not everyone is pleased.  Even before he was elected, Jeremy Corbyn faced an orchestrated campaign of vilification that in sheer viciousness and intensity has no precedent in recent British politics. Day in, day out, the public is subjected to a deafening cacophony in which the howling of the wolves is accompanied by the snarling of the dogs and the hissing of the snakes.

The International Monetary Fund has been forced, not only to repeatedly downgrade its growth forecasts, but to now predict a fall in World GDP in dollar terms, the first since 2009. This is a reflection of the crisis-ridden world we are in.

The IMF economists have been repeatedly forced to eat their words as the world economy, supposedly in its seventh year of “recovery”, has leaned from one crisis to another. The world slump of 2008-9 was a defining moment. It ushered in a protracted crisis, described by Lawrence Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary, as “secular stagnation”.

  The current refugee crisis has brought out some of the horrors of capitalist society, as well as the contrast between the basic human solidarity of ordinary working people and the cold calculation and callousness of capitalist rulers in Europe and elsewhere.