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At least six people died after Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki in eastern Indonesia erupted late on Sunday, spewing explosive plumes of lava and forcing authorities to evacuate several nearby villages, officials said on Monday.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, located on Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province, erupted on Sunday at 11.57pm local time, belching a fiery-red column of lava, volcanic ash and incandescent rocks, Hadi Wijaya, a spokesman for The Centre of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, said on Monday.

“After the eruption, there was power outage and then it was raining and big lightning which caused panic among residents,” he said, adding that the authority had raised the status of the volcano to level IV or the highest.

The agency has recommended a 7km (4.35 miles) radius must be cleared.

The Disaster Management Agency lowered the known death toll from an earlier report of nine, saying it had received updated information from local authorities. Heronimus Lamawuran, a local official at East Flores area, said the eruption had affected seven villages.

The authorities are still gathering data on the number of evacuees and damaged buildings.

Indonesia sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity atop multiple tectonic plates.

This eruption follows a series of eruptions of different volcanoes in Indonesia. In May, a volcano on the remote island of Halmahera, Mount Ibu, caused the evacuation of people from seven villages.

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The air quality index exceeded 1,000 on Saturday, above the 300 considered ‘dangerous’, according to data from IQAir.

Pakistan’s second city of Lahore will close primary schools for a week over record pollution, government authorities said on Sunday, to avoid exposing millions of children to smog several times above levels deemed dangerous.

For days, the city of 14 million people has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.

“Weather forecast for the next six days shows that wind patterns will remain the same. Therefore we are closing all government and private primary schools in Lahore for a week,” said Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore.

“This smog is very harmful for children. Masks should be mandatory in schools. We are keeping an eye on the health of children in senior classes,” Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb told a news conference on Sunday.

Smog counters have been established in hospitals, she added.

Breathing the toxic air has catastrophic health consequences, with the WHO saying strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be triggered by prolonged exposure.

On Saturday, the concentration of deadly PM2.5 pollutants – fine particulate matter in the air that causes most damage to health – was more than 40 times the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization. PM2.5 levels on Sunday morning exceeded that before decreasing slightly.

Last week, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hotspots” in the city.

Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.

Children are particularly vulnerable because they have less developed lungs and breathe more rapidly, taking in more air relative to their size than adults.

Pollution in excess of levels deemed safe by the WHO shortens the life expectancy of Lahore residents by an average of 7.5 years, according to the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.

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“For France”, occupied Western Sahara’s “present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty”, declared French President Emmanuel Macron, drawing a standing ovation from the lawmakers he was addressing in the parliament of its former colony Morocco earlier on October 29.

“The sole and exclusive sovereign over Western Sahara is the Sahrawi people. [Neither] Macron, nor anyone else, has the right to decide on their behalf,” retorted the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), as Western Sahara is officially known.

This government, led by the Polisario Front (PF) which is recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Sahrawi people, is in control of the Free Zone – or the Liberated Territory – amounting to a fifth of Western Sahara. With the military and financial support of the US and France and the complicity of Western Sahara’s former colonizer France, the Moroccan army annexed the remaining 80%, including the whole of its coastline, in 1975 and continues occupation to date.

Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara is not recognized by the African Union (AU), of which the SADR is a member-state. The UN includes it in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories where decolonization is yet to be completed. Its General Assembly regards Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an illegal occupation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) maintains there is no “tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco.”

Macron’s decision to grant French recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara also contravenes the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In a ruling earlier that month on October 4, CJEU reiterated that the fisheries and trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and Morocco involving natural resources extracted from Western Sahara were illegal because Morocco has no sovereignty over this territory.

The judgment requires these illegal agreements to cease within a year. In less than a month, Macron entered France into fresh deals worth USD 10.8 billion, pledging “investments” he claimed would “benefit local populations” in Western Sahara.

“Past international investments in Western Sahara’s resources, such as in the [extraction of] phosphates and fisheries,” have yielded little benefit to the Sahrawi people, Kamal Fadel, Western Sahara’s Representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The influx of foreign capital only tends to further entrench the occupation by supporting Morocco’s infrastructure and military presence in the region.”

Most of the jobs created in the process are handed to Moroccan settlers to incentivize them to stay put in the occupied territory. The remaining jobs are doled out to a few in exchange for their “loyalty and obedience”, while the Sahrawi masses are condemned to live under “poverty, oppression and abuse”, added Babouzeid Lebbihi, President of Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA).

Leaders of this organization, along with other Sahrawi activists, suffer constant harassment at the hands of the occupation authorities, whose security forces regularly besiege homes, confiscate properties, and take political prisoners, several of whom have been subjected to torture and rape.

In December 2020, Trump announced the US recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory,” in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel, legitimizing the apartheid settler colonial state’s occupation of Palestine.

Taking office a month later in January 2021, the current US President Joe Biden reiterated the endorsement of Moroccan occupation. A year later, in March 2022, Western Sahara’s former colonizer Spain followed suit, before France crossed that bridge earlier this week. Earlier this year, the AU also decided to suspend the members of representatives of SADR from meetings with international partners.

These developments undermining the prospects of a sovereign SADR “fuel discontent among Sahrawis and escalate regional unrest,” warned Fadel.

“Gaza has changed the whole equation,” said Babouzeid. “For more than three decades, the Sahrawi people under occupation have bet on political action and peace in order to avoid bloodshed, and today our land is being sold to the occupation by imperialist powers.” With major powers like France “adding fuel to the fire… I believe that the situation will explode in the region,” he added.

“Under the legitimate leadership of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi people remain resolute in resisting Moroccan occupation, with all legitimate means, including armed struggle,” warns the Sahrawi government.

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Alibaba Group Holding is scaling down its metaverse operations, according to a source familiar with the matter, making it the latest Big Tech company to pull back resources from the once-popular sector.

Dozens of employees at Yuanjing, the metaverse unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, have been laid off, as part of a restructuring that aims to optimise and improve efficiency in the organisation, the source said.

The lay-offs, which were first reported by Chinese media on Friday, affected Yuanjing’s operations in both Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. Yuanjing, which had received “billions of yuan” in investment, previously employed a few hundred workers, according to a report by online news outlet AI Jingxuanshe.

The source, however, said the Alibaba unit will continue to exist, with a focus on metaverse applications and tools, as well as providing metaverse-based services to customers.

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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned Israel and the United States of “a crushing response” for actions against Iran and its allies, according to state media.

Khamenei, 85, made the remarks on Saturday while addressing students ahead of the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by hardline students – which cemented the decades-long enmity between Tehran and Washington that persists today.

“The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” Khamenei said in the capital, Tehran, also referring to Iran-aligned armed groups that include Yemen’s Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.

The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of any attack, or the scope.

He had previously struck a more cautious approach, saying officials would weigh Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed”, after the Israeli military launched strikes last week on military bases in Iran, hitting about 20 sites over several hours in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran.

Khamenei on Saturday met with university students to mark Students’ Day, which commemorates a November 4, 1978, incident in which Iranian soldiers opened fire on students protesting the rule of the shah at Tehran University.

The US military operates throughout the Middle East, with some troops now manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.

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For decades, the Latin American nation has been a leading assembler of motorized vehicles. Mexico is now led by a president with a PhD in sustainable energy engineering.

Claudia Sheinbaum supports Mexican companies that aim to design and build their own brand of EVs.

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Beijing’s push for renewable energy projects across Africa has been highlighted at a groundbreaking ceremony at the site of a new Chinese-led geothermal power plant project to be built in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.

State-owned energy and construction company PowerChina will build the 35-megawatt Orpower 22 geothermal plant at the Menengai Crater, with the facility owned by Chinese firm Kaishan Group, which is spending US$93 million on the construction.

During the ceremony, President William Ruto said the plant will raise the country’s global ranking in geothermal production to fifth overall, and “highlights our commitment to unlock Kenya’s vast geothermal potential to drive economic growth”.

Kenya was the first African nation to harness geothermal power, which uses heat from the Earth to generate electricity, but Ruto said just 10 per cent of the country’s geothermal energy has been explored.

Last year, PowerChina commissioned another 35MW geothermal power plant in Kenya, owned by Sosian Geothermal Power Station. It followed a 14-year contract between China’s Kaishan Group and Kenya’s Sosian Energy to run the geothermal plant before handing it back to Sosian after its investment has been recouped.

The Kenyan power plants represent a growing footprint of Chinese-built or funded renewable energy projects in Africa – from solar and wind to hydropower projects. It follows Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2021 pledge to stop financing new overseas coal-fired power plants and increase funding for renewable projects instead.

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At its meeting this week, the Western Sydney University (WSU) Rank-and-File Committee voted to send a message of support and solidarity to the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee. As the message explains, university workers and students in Australia, like the Boeing workers, face the need to organise independent rank-and-file committees to fight the trade union apparatuses’ enforcement of corporate-government job destruction and the underlying agenda of war and austerity.

To join the WSU Rank-and-File Committee or discuss establishing rank-and-file committees at other universities, contact the committee at: [email protected].

We are workers and students at Western Sydney University (WSU) who formed a rank-and-file committee earlier this year, initially to fight the pro-business restructuring and destruction of jobs and conditions at our university’s preparatory college.

As we have warned, the purge of staff at the WSU College has now become a template for the restructuring and elimination of thousands of jobs at universities across Australia as a direct result of funding cuts by the Labor government.

Having read about your struggle on the World Socialist Web Site, we decided to send a message of solidarity with the determined stand you and the 33,000 Boeing machinists are taking against the years of attacks on wages and working conditions.

Like you, we have formed a rank-and-file committee, totally independent of the trade unions, which are complicit in the corporate-government agenda.

We support your powerful seven-week strike and your 64 percent rejection last week of the second sellout contract proposed by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) leadership.

As the WSWS reported, the IAM’s latest contract proposal amounted to “an endorsement of a corporate dictatorship.” It not only did not make up for a decade of wage freezes, it failed to restore pensions stolen from you in 2014, and would have given the company the go-ahead for 17,000 announced layoffs.

Your vote is a real blow to the IAM and the Biden administration, which is relying upon the union officials to end the strike because it cuts across its support for, and arming of, the war against Russia, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its plans for wider wars against Iran and China.

The IAM leadership never wanted your strike to go ahead and refuses to use the union’s $300 million assets to aid you. The miserable $250 weekly strike pay is intended to starve you back to work.

Boeing management, which has jettisoned basic safety standards in passenger airplane manufacturing, wants you to pay for its crimes and profits.

Your stand demonstrates the potential strength of the global working class and is a real blow against this giant corporation’s war profits and the US war machine. The shut-down of a major military contractor shows how the working class can halt the plunge into war.

Your October 3 statement—“Boeing machinists must unite with East Coast dockworkers to defend jobs and stop world war!”— points the way forward for class-conscious workers everywhere.

Our struggles can only succeed if workers organise independently of the union bureaucracies and fight for a world where human need, not profit, is the priority.

While you face ruthless enemies in management, the IAM machine and the Biden administration, you have even more powerful friends—the American and international working class.

Like Boeing workers, we confront unions that are responsible for imposing previous government cuts and that are implementing the agenda of war and austerity, including by restructuring universities to serve the needs of war economies.

We endorse the call made by the World Socialist Web Site in its October 24 Perspective: “After rejection of sellout deal, working class must mobilize behind the Boeing strike.” The tremendous social power of the working class must be organised through building the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) as a global rebellion of the rank-and-file.

As that Perspective states: “Workers can only fulfill their aspirations if they take political power in their own hands and marshal society’s resources to greatly improve the living standards of the world’s population and end social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.”

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