National News
Serwotka lambasts sell-out union leaders
by New Worker correspondent
MARK Serwotka, general secretary of the civil service union PCS, last Saturday made a blistering attack on right-wing unions leaders who had failed their members last December by dropping out of the concerted union fight to defend public sector pensions.
He was speaking at the annual conference of the National Shop Stewards Network, with around 500 delegates in Friends Meeting House, Euston, London.
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Carillion ‘blacklisted 224 workers’
THE GENERAL union GMB has published a report revealing that the giant construction and services company Carillion illegally blacklisted 224 workers to deny them employment.
The report, Blacklisting — illegal corporate bullying endemic, systemic and deep-rooted in Carillion and other companies, was issued at the start of GMB’s annual conference in Brighton this week, where strikers from Swindon Great Western Hospital were given a warm welcome by delegates.
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EDL threat to journalists
THE NATIONAL Union of Journalists last week issued an urgent notice to news photographers intending to take pictures of an event in Rochdale last Saturday organised by the Islamophobic English Defence League after a threat to photographers was made by a splinter group within the EDL spectrum.
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Cable announces Beecroft mark 2
BUSINESS and Industry Secretary Vince Cable last week announced plans to introduce “settlement agreements” whereby employers could sack workers they did not like without giving a reason on condition they gave them a cash settlement.
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London bus workers vote for strike
LONDON bus workers have voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a dispute over London’s bus operators’ refusal to recognise the massive increase in workload for their workers during the Olympic Games.
Members of Unite working for 21 London bus operators, including Go Ahead, Stagecoach, London United, Arriva, Metroline, First and Abelio backed strike action by an average of 94 per cent.
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We don’t want Olympic missiles!
by New Worker correspondent
AROUND 100 people from Lewisham and Greenwich marched from Oxleas Woods on Shooters’ Hill to Blackheath last Saturday, linking the two sites where the Government plans to site Rapier missiles to “defend” the coming Olympic Games in east London from any terrorist attack from the air.
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New anti-racist journal
Unity, the magazine of Unite Against Fascism
Reviewd by Caroline Colebrook
THE FIRST edition of Unity, the quarterly magazine of Unite Against Fascism has at last appeared, giving us now three major anti-fascist and anti-racist journals in this country, the other two being the monthly Searchlight and the bi-monthly Hope not Hate.
Unity is £3 for 32 pages and its first edition, Spring 2012, is focussed on the local elections that happened in May.
Unity can be obtained from the UAF national office at PO Box 36871, London WC1X 9X, phone 020 7801 2782 web: Unite Against Fascism and email: info@uaf.org.uk
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International News
Greek radical left rejects bail-out terms
Xinhua news agency
GREEK Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA) party leader Alexis Tsipras is demanding the replacement of the Greek bailout “memorandum” terms “that led the country to bankruptcy” with a new national economic reconstruction plan to tackle the country’s acute debt crisis.
“We just assume the responsibility to reconstruct the country from the ruins of the memorandum,” Tsipras said during a press briefing in Athens on Tuesday, during the final stretch to the 17th June general election.
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48 years of revolutionary struggle in Colombia
by Miguel Urbano Rodrigues
The author is Portuguese and a journalist, former editor of the weekly Avante — the newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party — a former member of the European Parliament and co-founder of the Web magazine Odiario.info.
THE REVOLUTIONARY Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) commemorated its 48th anniversary on 27th May. The event was celebrated in the jungles and mountains of the country by the thousands of members who are fighting for an independent, democratic and progressive Colombia.
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Iran welcomes new nuclear proposal
by Luis Chirino
IRAN HAS welcomed the willingness of six world powers to consider its five-point proposal at the forthcoming nuclear negotiations in Moscow. But the Iranians said that to be successful the dialogue has to count on a positive approach and cooperation by the western powers.
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Chavez kicks off re-election campaign
by Xelcis Presno
VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez has officially kicked-off his presidential campaign after registering his candidacy with the National Electoral Council for the forthcoming 7th October presidential elections.
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African immigrants attacked in Israel
by Abayomi Azikiwe Editor, Pan-African News Wire
IN LATE May, animosity toward African migrants in Israel reached a boiling point. After months of anti-African speeches in the Knesset and the cabinet, mobs of racist gangs began to attack Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans in south Tel Aviv.
People were beaten on the streets, and businesses were looted amid calls for the banning and deportation of Africans.
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Features
Greece: two tough battles
Statement from the International Relations Section of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
Part two of two
Face-lift of the bourgeois system
THE KKE has for some time warned the Greek people that the bourgeois class is preparing a face-lift of the political scene in order to preserve its power. The reason is that it cannot manage the political system on the basis of the rotation of a conservative New Democracy (ND) party and a social-democratic party (PASOK) in power as it has been doing since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974.
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