National News
New launch of campaign for hardest hit
A NEW campaign against Government cuts to services and benefits for the disabled was launched last Thursday at a public meeting in Ashington, Northumberland.
It was the first of a series of joint meetings between the Northern Public Services Alliance and The Hardest Hit Campaign in the run up to a regional rally in the autumn.
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Unite questions NHS land sell-off
THE GIANT union Unite last week expressed concern over the Government’s decision to press the NHS to sell off land for “affordable housing”.
Unite’s national officer for health, Rachael Maskell, said: “There are a number of questions that need to be clarified about this announcement which we will be seeking answers to.
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MPs slam work fitness tests
THE PRIVATE company paid £100 million a year by the Government to administer work fitness tests — and reduce the benefit costs by transferring people from sickness benefit to Jobseekers’ Allowance — has come under heavy criticism from the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee and the fitness tests have been described as “deeply flawed”.
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Lansley letter supports unions’ case
HEALTH Secretary Andrew Lansley last week surprised public sector unions when, in a letter to the Treasury, he reiterated the unions case for defending public sector pensions and warned that cutting them would throw millions of retired workers into depending on means-tested benefits to supplement their basic pensions — at great cost to the Treasury.
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GPs to sign petition calling for NHS bill to be withdrawn
THOUSANDS of England’s general practitioners are expressing their dissatisfaction at the Government’s Health and Social Care bill by signing a new petition calling for the bill’s withdrawal.
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GMB to join protest over care home cuts
THE GMB general union is to join a protest in Croydon this coming Saturday in protest at the mismanagement of Southern Cross.
This company which has run hundreds of residential care homes for the elderly but sold them off and rented them back to raise a fortune — and then found rising running costs and local authority funding cuts meant it could not pay the rent bills and now faces repossession of all its buildings.
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Spotlight on Nepal
by New Worker correspondent
COMRADES gathered in central London for a New Worker meeting last week to hear a report from writer and journalist Peter Tobin, who has recently returned after six months in Nepal.
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Party Day at the Centre
by New Worker correspondent
COMRADES and friends joined New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks and Party Chair Alex Kempshall in celebrating the NCP’s founding day reception last Saturday at the Party Centre in London.
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Marxism: the choice of the Chinese people
by New Worker correspondent
NEW COMMUNIST Party leader Andy Brooks took part in a seminar with other communists, academics and labour movement leaders at the Chinese embassy in London last week, held to mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in 1921.
Around the theme of Marxism in China, the participants discussed the historic links between the British and Chinese people and the role of the Communist Party of China in liberating the country and leading the people’s republic into the 21st century.
Ambassador Liu Xiaoming opened the seminar with a keynote speech in which he said “Marxism became the choice of the Chinese people following a painstaking journey of exploration and perseverance since the second half of the 19th century,” in an opening that swept across the struggle of the Chinese communist movement over the decades to achieve liberation and practice and develop Marxism following the establishment of the people’s government in 1949.
[ Keynote Speech by H.E. Ambassador Liu Xiaoming at the Marxism in China Seminar ]
International News
Egyptians press revolution forward
by Gene Clancy
THOUSANDS of Egyptians, intent on defending the gains of their revolution and vowing to achieve still more, rallied on 15th July in Cairo and Alexandria.
They encircled a security building, chanting: “Oh police, you are criminals”. They demanded trials for the police officers suspected of killing hundreds of activists during the winter uprising that brought down US-backed President Hosni Mubarak.
[Read the complete story in the print edition]
Iran leads the world on drugs seizures
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
THIS IS a story which is bound not to make the corporate media: The UN has praised the Islamic Republic of Iran for being the country that has taken the lead on seizing illicit drugs and hopes the rest of the world will follow suit. It seems that while Iran is seizing drugs, production soars under Nato’s nose in Afghanistan.
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Saving Greece or saving the Euro?
by Alex Silva
ALMOST without exception, the great western mass media’s headlines emphasise the approval of the second financial rescue granted to Greece, a news that actually hides behind a bitter reality: the Greek people are not the ones that are receiving this life jacket, but the Euro, and, as a final resort, it is the European Union that was on the verge of collapse.
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Features
Cuba: economic changes to raise efficiency and strengthen socialism
by Teresa Gutierrez
JULY 26th marks 58 years since the attack on the Moncada Garrison in Santiago de Cuba by heroic Cuban revolutionaries.
The 1953 military assault against the US-supported dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista failed. Many of the combatants were killed and leaders of the action, including Fidel Castro, were jailed.
[ Cuba: economic changes to raise efficiency and strengthen socialism ]
‘Welcome to the Fourth Reich’
by Rob Gowland
THE RIGHT in the US, in the form of the Republican Party, is conducting a sustained attack on the Obama administration, with their focal point being the US deficit. The Right is demanding that urgent action be taken to cut the deficit, by dropping all manner of projects that serve the public.
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