 Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the major news developments from around the world. Our headlines? In Bolivia, the movement towards socialism or the MAS party raises concerns over changes to electoral process and the results. Workers of rail operations company in South Africa return to work after winning concessions from the management, international organizations condemn Israel's settlement plan, and just in the audience, Labour Party makes history with the first majority in New Zealand since 1996. In our first story on Sunday, October 18, Bolivia will mark the first election since the coup d'etat, which took Evo Morales out of office in November 2019. Many are hopeful that the elections will bring to an end a period marked by the absence of democracy, denigration of rights, political persecution, constitutional violations and more. However, the comments and actions of the de facto regime regarding the electoral process have alarmed many, both within and outside Bolivia. The movement towards socialism or the MAS party of Morales has raised an alarm that the new preliminary results transmission mechanism poses a serious threat to the transparency and clarity of the electoral process. The objective of the new mechanism is to transmit the preliminary results in a faster manner and to show early trends in voting patterns. The results shown by the system, however, are not binding and final as there is a final tally that is released. The earlier mechanism called TREP or the Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results played a central role in the creation of the argument that electoral fraud was committed in the elections of October 2019. In the elections in October 2019, a shift in trends shown by TREP was the sole argument with which the Organization of American States alleged that fraud had been committed. Multiple reports done by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT and others since have shown that not only was a shift in TREP results not drastic and hard to explain as the OAS alleged, but also that it matched results of the final tally. Other concerns have emerged due to the fact that trial runs on the new mechanism only began a couple of weeks back. In our next story on Thursday, October 15th, the workers of the Bambela Operating Company, BOC, returned to work after the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, that's NUMSA, reached an agreement on a wage hike. This ended the 10-day long strike on Wednesday. The agreement provides a hike ranging from 10% for the lowest earners to 4.1% for the highest. 258 of the 320 workers of BOC, which manages and operates the goutrain commuter rail system linking Johannesburg, Pretoria, Erkulakheni and Oliver Tambo International Airport, had downed tolls since October 5th, demanding a wage hike of 8%. Representing these workers, NUMSA had been negotiating with the company since March. Negotiations which had to be temporarily suspended due to the lockdown resumed in June, but reached deadlock after the company refused to give more than 4%. As per the software, the lowest earner will receive a 10% hike, which amounts to an increase of RAN 900. Those earning over 8,500 and upper credit RAN 20,000 will receive an increase of RAN 850, and the wages of those earning about RAN 20,000 will be hiked by 4.1%. All these hikes will be back later in July. In our next story, the recent Israeli announcement has significantly expanded its illegal settlement construction at the occupied West Bank, by approving in total more than 4,900 new settler homes, has been strongly condemned by the international community. The European Union, the United Nations and the Arab League have come out with statements expressing deep concern towards the Israeli decision which they say will undermine and completely destroy the two-state solution for eventual peace in West Asia. The EU in a joint statement dated Friday, October 16, 2020, when the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain said that the Israeli decision to expand its illegal settlements to court violates international law and further impedils the viability of the two-state solution to bring about a just and lasting peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel had announced its plans to proceed with its earlier massive West Bank annexation plans of constructing almost 5,000 brand new illegal settler homes, which it had halted some months ago at the insistence of US President Donald Trump. This was part of the Arab-Israeli normalization deal. Peace Now the Israeli settlement watchdog said that the latest additions now take the total number of new settler homes in occupied Palestine this year to more than 12,150. And finally, in New Zealand, the Labour government led by Prime Minister Jacinda Arden is said to come back to power with a landslide majority. As 95% of the results were out on Saturday, the Labour Party was set to form a government on its own with nearly half of the votes polled and lead in 64 out of the 120 seats. The centre-right national party led by Judith Collins, Collin won more than a third of the seats and nearly two-fifths of its votes. The election results will have the first Labour majority government after over 33 years and the first to win a majority on its own since the first election with a proportional voting system in 1996. The Labour Party has led a minority government in coalition with a populist New Zealand first party and with outside support of the Green Party after the 2017 election. Labour's representation of the House of Representatives has increased from 46 in the outgoing House to approximately 64 and the vote share jumped from around 37% to 49%. The national party is said to come second coming down from 56 seats to 35. Labour's coalition partner in the outgoing government New Zealand first led by Peter Winston failed to win a single seat and is lost in all of its nine seats. The left-leaning Green Party which supported Arden's government managed to come back to a double-digit seat share with 10 seats and a vote share of 7.8%. The Maori party which had lost all its representation in the 2017 election managed to win a single seat from a Maori electorate constituency. The Labour victory is mostly seen as a result of the Arden government's performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. New Zealand was able to limit the spread of the disease and also its economic fallout. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back on Monday with more news from around the world. Until then, keep watching People's Dispatch.