A company making wooden wind turbine blades has successfully tested a 50-meter-long prototype that’s set to debut soon in the Indian and European markets.

Last year, the German firm Voodin successfully demonstrated that their laminated-veneer timber blades could be fabricated, adapted, and installed at a lower cost than existing blades, while maintaining performance.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/worlds-first-all-timber-wind-turbine-blades-are-cheaper-recyclable-fire-resistant-and-stronger-than-carbon-fiber/

In Italia l’evasione complessiva si riduce. Aumenta però quella dell’Irpef di lavoratori autonomi e imprenditori individuali. Tra i motivi, la scarsa efficacia della fatturazione elettronica in questo settore e la flat tax. I dati della Relazione 2023.

https://lavoce.info/archives/102490/a-che-punto-e-levasione/

For instance, an economy that uses mostly public transit, renewable energy, multi-unit housing and plant-based protein can meet human needs with a fraction of the impact of an economy that produces a lot of SUVs, fossil fuels, mansions and industrial beef, and which allocates a bunch of totally unnecessary production to service the fantasies of overconsuming elites.

Remember, we know it is possible to provide decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people with 30% of current global energy and material use, by ensuring efficient technologies and focusing production on socially necessary goods and services.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

Come mostrato da un report del 2018 di Unodc, l’agenzia Onu con competenza sul crimine transnazionale, l’organizzazione e la dimensione delle attività inerenti il traffico di migranti variano ampiamente, coinvolgendo di frequente strutture ben diverse dalle reti del traffico così tanto spesso evocate. I dati che emergono da studi e ricerche suggeriscono che coloro che a essere colpiti dalle politiche repressive degli stati del nord globale sono nella maggior parte dei casi individui (e non gruppi organizzati) e, nel contesto europeo in particolare, persone migranti che cercano di limitare il costo da corrispondere ai facilitatori o che si ritrovano a vario titolo coinvolte in maniera del tutto occasionale in processi di aiuto alla migrazione irregolare.

Ricerche condotte in Italia e in Grecia hanno sistematicamente dimostrato, ad esempio, che nella migrazione via mare le persone migranti spesso prendono il controllo delle imbarcazioni su cui viaggiano o svolgono altri compiti di navigazione al solo scopo di salvare la propria vita e quella di coloro che viaggiano insieme a loro. Eppure, nel corso delle indagini queste persone vengono sovente identificate o etichettate come membri di reti criminali

La proposta di direttiva anti-traffico recentemente presentata dalla Commissione continua a riprodurre una concezione pericolosamente monolitica e riduttiva del favoreggiamento dell’immigrazione irregolare come dominio esclusivo di reti transnazionali del crimine organizzato, ignorando deliberatamente l’enorme quantità di dati empirici che indicano invece la netta prevalenza di fenomeni di favoreggiamento dell’immigrazione su piccola scala e senza il coinvolgimento di organizzazioni criminali, nei quali appare difficilmente riscontrabile alcun intento criminale o profitto

https://jacobinitalia.it/sui-migranti-lue-persevera-negli-errori/

"Far from being peculiar to this or that crisis, workers' control initiatives have arisen along with every revolutionary crisis that has yet occurred in industrialized or even partly industrialized countries.

Lenin never spelled out what aspects of the production process the workers would be empowered to judge. What this meant in practice, however, is clearly suggested in his remarks about Taylorism, namely, that if a given method can quadruple productivity for the benefit of the capitalists, it can just as well do so for the benefit of the working class. In line with this approach, the Soviet government reacted with consistent disfavor to workers' managerial initiatives, even where the alternative was a factory-shutdown. [...] The acceptance of Taylorist methods was just one component--albeit a central one--of Lenin's larger view of the Russian economy as still requiring full development of the capitalist production process even if under (presumed) working class leadership. [...] Lenin treats workers' self-management as being not only premature but even counterproductive to his overall strategy for reaching socialism by way of state capitalism.

In the Italian factories, by contrast, "absenteeism among workers was negligible, discipline effective, combativity widely diffused. Antonio Gramsci gave a clear example of such a link when he wrote: "The proletarian dictatorship can only be embodied in a type of organization that is specific to the activity
of producers, not wage-earners, the slaves of capital. The factory council is the nucleus of this organization.... The factory council is the model of the proletarian State."

The Spanish Civil War provided the occasion, in certain regions of the country, for the closest approach yet made to a society fully based on workers' control. The most notable aspects of the Spanish experience may be summarized as follows. First, workers' control was practiced in every sector of the economy. While it went furthest in agriculture, in at least one city (Barcelona) it was also introduced in all industries and services. Second, the structural changes were very radical, often entailing the elimination of certain managerial positions, the equalization of wages, and, in some peasant collectives, the abolition of money. Particularly impressive is the fact that, where land-expropriations took place, the peasants almost invariably preferred communal ownership to parcellization. Third, even the most radical of the changes were introduced directly and immediately, placing maximum reliance on the participation of the masses to the highest level of their abilities. Fourth, contrary to many stereotypes, the changes in question were not necessarily made at the expense of efficiency, but instead often involved advances in technology or coordination, as in the consolidation of the Barcelona bakeries and the vertical integration of the Catalan lumber industry. And finally, it was in some places close to three years before the self-managed operations were suppressed by force of arms. There was thus ample time for them to prove themselves as practical arrangements.

Allende's Chile was a direct successor to revolutionary Spain in more ways than one: electoral stimulus, workers' initiatives, conflicts within the left, decisive foreign support to the right, and crushing defeat. In some ways, of course, Chile never reached the levels attained in Spain. Thus, the
Chilean workers and peasants remained for the most part unarmed, and there were no whole regions of the country that they controlled. Nevertheless, there is one important sense in which the Chilean case carries the accumulated experience of workers' control another step forward: namely, that the
interaction between class-conscious workers and the elected government was a great deal more fluid. In effect, the autonomous workers' initiatives were, to a greater extent than in either Italy or Spain, an offshoot of the struggle that was being conducted at state level.

It should hardly be necessary to say that the struggles for workers' control and for socialism are inseparable. And yet the problem that has arisen again and again in practice is that they have found themselves organizationally in conflict. "Socialism" has been the formal monopoly of a political party (or parties), while self- management has been the direct expression of the workers and peasants themselves. Whichever one has prevailed, the result has been a setback in the movement toward a classless society. "Socialism" without self- management has revived or perpetuated rigid social strata,
while self- management without a strong political direction has simply been suppressed"

http://www.net4dem.org/cyrev/archive/Misc.%20Articles/WorkersControl/WorkersControl.pdf

Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

[...]

For “voluntary departure” to be sufficiently successful to enable annexation and re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Strip, one would think that at least 70 percent of Gaza’s residents would have to be removed — meaning more than 1.5 million people. This goal is utterly unrealistic given the current political circumstances, both within Gaza and across the Arab world.

https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-concentration-camp-expulsion/