National News
Release Shaker Aamer!
by Theo Russell
NEW WORKER supporters joined protesters marching from the site of the new US embassy in south London, last Saturday, to call for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner held in the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp, where he has languished for almost nine years without being charged.
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Miserable Monday
TRADE unions representing local authority workers dubbed it Miserable Monday when Communities Secretary Eric Pickles announced that councils in Britain are to face cuts averaging 9.9 per cent in their funding from central government next year. This is part of the Con-Dem Coalition’s plans to reduce local authority funding by a total of 28 per cent over the next four years.
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Stop the Preacher of Hate
THE ENGLISH Defence League, and extreme right-wing anti-Islamic organisation led by former hardcore neo-Nazis, last Monday dropped plans to invite the controversial American preacher Terry Jones to speak at one of its events in Luton in February.
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Ambulance targets scrapped
THE GMB union, which represents thousands of ambulance workers, last week expressed shock at government plans to scrap the 19-minute ambulance response time target.
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Billions in war chest
GEORGE Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has admitted that he could be sitting on tens of billions of pounds which was not declared in the latest spending review.
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Pupil premium a Con-Dem con
THE Con-Dem government’s promise to provide schools with £430 extra money for every pupil it accepts from a very low income family will actually backfire and result in some in the most deprived areas losing cash, according to Labour’s Andy Burnham.
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Forensic Science Service to be abolished
THE STATE-owned Forensic Science Service (FSS), which employs 1,600 people, is to be wound up — closing by 2012.
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Court closures will deny justice
THE CIVIL service union PCS last week attacked a Con-Dem government announcement that it is planning to close 93 magistrates’ courts and 49 county courts.
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Inflation robbery
THE PUBLIC sector union Unison last week commented on the latest figures on inflation from the Office for National Statistics sowing it had risen to 3.3 per cent last month and retail price inflation reached highs of 4.7 per cent.
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International News
Pastor Jones, Stockholm and the globalisation of terror
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
STOCKHOLM is now on the terror map, having experienced its first-ever suicide bombing. Once again the individual demonstrates the power to challenge the state. It is a new age of the globalisation of terror. The racist bigots among us are as responsible as the bombers and so, in a way, is the mass media.
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Cuba—India: 50 years of friendship
Radio Havana Cuba
THE INDIAN state of Kerala today presents an encouraging health status thanks to a programme inspired by the Cuban health system, a system recognised worldwide due to its success and low cost for developing countries.
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America: a Nazi safe haven
Radio Havana Cuba
THE UNITED States is in the spotlight again, but it’s not about new Wikileaks’ revelations, but regarding declassified official documents that prove that the United States was a safe haven for Nazi war criminals after the end of the Second World War.
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Features
Israel and International Law
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
THE CAPITAL city of the United States of America, is, to all intents and purposes, apparently not Washington DC, but Tel Aviv. The USA donates billions of dollars of its tax-payers’ hard-earned cash every year to Israel and what is the payback? In three words, the stiff middle finger.
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Nobel Peace Prize farce: justice will prevail
by Xia Dongmei
ON 10TH DECEMBER the Norwegian Nobel Committee held a “recipient-absent” ceremony in Oslo to award the so-called “peace prize” to Liu Xiaobo, a convicted criminal serving prison sentence for instigating subversion of state power. The whole event has become an out-and-out political farce.
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Of dynamite and royalty
by Rob Gowland
THIS IS my last column for the year, so I will catch up on a few things that I have omitted to comment on recently.
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist with an interest in explosives. He was the first to use nitro-glycerine as an explosive agent, incorporating it into his invention, dynamite, which he developed in the 1860s.
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