The Tiny Tips column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard
Mojtaba Khamenei… successor to his father Ali Khamenei, is reported to own the high-end Kensington properties through associates. The apartments, located on the sixth and seventh floors of a building close to Kensington Palace, are believed to be worth more than £50 million.
‘I can’t really afford to take full baths anymore. It’s hard work, keeping yourself clean with a bit of water and a flannel’, the 78-year-old, from London, told Big Issue.
According to UNICEF’s 2024 global estimates, more than 230 million girls and women worldwide have undergone female genital mutilation. This alarming number reflects not progress but regression. Despite decades of advocacy by the United Nations and other organizations, achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal to eliminate FGM is out of reach. These statistics boorishly underscore not only the persistence of the FGM practices but also the depth of the systemic, cultural, and political forces that continue to perpetuate FGM.
‘If the city is saying they’re building the wall to protect people of the N2, why can’t they take the people out of the area to a place where there’s no crime?’ asked Nomqondiso Ntsethe, a 65-year-old pensioner, who shares a shack in Taiwan with 13 children and grandchildren. ‘It’s a political game’, she said. ‘They’re separating the poor from the rich. It’s segregation’… Mayor Hill-Lewis, who last year put the city’s housing backlog at about 600,000, has remained defiant amid the latest criticism… ‘This barrier was built 20 years ago when the ANC was in charge of Cape Town – the same party now hysterically and hypocritically shouting about our plan to fix the security barrier to keep the people of Cape Town safer’, he said.
Atlas has averaged $2m (£1.49m) a month in bunker sales this year, but Hubbard predicts this could rise to $50m (£37m) next month. ‘Bunker building is like being a farmer. When it’s time for harvest, you have to reap all you can.’ The Texan insists he is ‘not the type who hopes for war’, but admits ‘from my point of view, I don’t have to advertise very much [at the moment]’. ‘Now that they’ve been bombed, they’re all going to want shelters. It’s just a fact of life’, he says.
The working class does not have to choose sides! The proletarians of the whole world must not succumb to the siren calls of nationalism or take sides with either camp, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. All nations, all bourgeoisies, whether democratic or authoritarian, left or right, populist or ‘progressive’, are warmongers. Despite the pompous rhetoric of hypocritical morality, pitting ‘civilisation’ against ‘barbarism’, ‘good’ against ‘evil’, ‘aggressors’ against ‘victims’, wars are nothing more than clashes between rival bourgeoisies. In these ever-increasing conflicts, it is always the exploited who are taken hostage and sacrificed for the interests of those who oppress and kill them. To end wars, capitalism must be overthrown!
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