National News
Fuel poverty threatens thousands
SOARING unemployment and rising fuel costs are set to drive thousands more households into fuel poverty, according to a report published last week by the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.
The FPAG says that about four million households in England are already in fuel poverty, spending more than 10 per cent of their income on domestic fuel.
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Tube faces £6bn funding gap
TRANSPORT UNION RMT warned last week that Underground rail services in London are staring down the barrel of a £6 billion funding gap, which threatens to wreck modernisation schedules and plans for the 2012 Olympics while leaving thousands of jobs under threat.
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Stop the corporate killers
THE PRESSURE group Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK) last week demanded that the Government act quickly to implement the recommendations of an independent report into deaths on construction sites to prevent more workers being killed.
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Thousands gather at Miners’ Gala
MORE THAN 100,000 people gathered in glorious sunshine last Saturday to celebrate the 125th Durham Miners Gala – twice as many as the organisers had expected.
£20,000 tax on growing old?
THE GOVERNMENT is considering introducing a charge of up to £20,000 on everyone at retirement age as a form of insurance to fund the cost of care in extreme old age.
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Postal workers to strike this Friday
THOUSANDS of postal workers across Britain will be striking and demonstrating on Friday 17th July against continuing cuts and executive action by Royal Mail.
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Remember the brutality of fascism
by Robert Laurie
SATURDAY 4th July saw the International Brigade Memorial Trust hold their annual commemoration of the British volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.
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Voters turn against Trident
AN OPINION poll conducted last wee for the Guardian newspaper found that a majority are now in favour of scrapping nuclear weapons. In particular 54 per cent do not want to see the ageing Trident nuclear weapon system replaced.
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Public inquiry into Baha Mousa killing
THE GOVERNMENT last week announced that it is about to open the long-awaited public inquiry into the death of Iraqi hotel receptionist Baha Mousa at the hand of British troops in 2003.
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Corus workers march to save steel
WORKERS from across Teesside who are employed by the Corus Steel Company will march through Redcar with friends and supporters this Saturday, 18th July in a campaign against the threatened closure of the region’s Corus plant.
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Lemmings brought to BA protest
SCORES of GMB and Unite union representatives of workers employed by British Airways last Tuesday staged a protest outside the company’s annual general meeting in London.
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Features and International News
Iraq resistance claim victory
by our Arab Affairs correspondent
THE IRAQ resistance is claiming victory in forcing US troops to withdraw from Baghdad and all the other urban areas in occupied Iraq. Underground Baathist resistance leader Izzat Ibrahim al Duri is now calling for a final push to drive the Americans completely out of the country and the resistance has launched a new offensive against the imperialist garrisons.
Another milestone in the American occupation of Iraq was passed when American troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities and towns on 30th June.
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Protests sweep Peru
THOUSANDS of Peruvians took part in a three-day strike declared by trade unions and social movements that was called last week to protest at the economic policies of President Alan García.
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South Ossetians thank Russia
Pravda.ru
RUSSIAN President Dmitry Medvedev, who visited the republic of South Ossetia for the first time this week, shared his impressions of the country, which Russia recognised as an independent state after the armed conflict with Georgia last summer.
“It was our first visit to the new state, which appeared as an independent country nearly a year ago. It happened after an act of crude aggression on the part of the Georgian regime,” Medvedev said. “The Georgian regime is entirely responsible for what happened in August of 2008,” he added.
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Pressure against Honduran coup leaders
THE HONDURAN coup leaders have denounced the Organisation of American States’ ruling and have decided to be apart from the continental community at A time when international pressure is being exerted to restore the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, back to power.
There is no other way left open to this regional organisation than to impose sanctions against the coup supporters and to strengthen
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Top Israel politician on corruption rap
ISRAELI police investigators said on Tuesday that there is sufficient evidence to indict Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on suspicion of money laundering, breach of public trust, fraudulent receipt of goods and disrupting police investigations.
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The GDR – thinking back
by Hans Heinz Holz
WINTER 1946/47. Freezing cold. For some reason – I don’t remember which – I had to travel from Frankfurt/Main into the SBZ (Soviet Occupation Zone).
Hand in the food rationing card in Frankfurt; receive the East German one in Rostock.
It was like a Christmas present: The daily ration was 1 ½ times that of the Western one. Amidst the deepest poverty, the Soviet occupational power – near starving themselves – looked after the people. That happened over 62 years ago, I am 82 now and will never forget it. Why am I using this as an introduction?
It was this very spirit of communist solidarity
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An anniversary worth remembering!
Rob Gowland
THE BEGINNING of July is the anniversary of the greatest tank battle of the Second World War, a titanic yet short-lived affair that sealed the fate of Hitler’s Germany once and for all: the Battle of Kursk, a battle that is usually ignored or belittled by capitalism’s historians, but which was and is of decisive importance.
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Honduras: the Keystone Coup Plotters
by Dara MacNeill
HONDURAN President Manuel Zelaya made one fatal mistake: he genuinely believed the propaganda about “democracy” and the “will of the people” that is uttered most frequently by those who care least for such things.
That fundamental error was enough to merit an early morning visit from the Honduran military, before Zelaya was beaten and unceremoniously bundled onto a flight to an unknown destination. As it transpired the military “deported” Zelaya to nearby Costa Rica.
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The life and death of Michael Jackson
by Larry Hales
It happened you would even play, be merry
And dance, in sheer exuberance of spirit:
And then would all the splendour of your manhood,
The sweet desires of youth sound, wild with power,
On strings of brass, in burning tambourines.
And from that mighty music the beginning
Of jazz arose, tempestuous, capricious,
Declaring to the whites in accents loud
That not entirely was the planet theirs.
Excerpt from “May Our People Triumph,” Patrice Lumumba.
THE EXCERPT above, taken from a poem by Patrice Lumumba, depicts specifically the spirit of African people chained and enslaved. From the conditions imposed upon them came a rich musical culture.
The conditions were not of a natural kind, but came from the degenerate racist ideology that justified the primitive accumulation of capital by European nations and the US, which included genocide, rape, land theft and enslavement of the original inhabitants of the Americas, Africa and Asia.
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