National News
Keep the EDL out of Tower Hamlets
COMMUNITY groups and anti-fascists in London’s East End last week called on their local police chief to stop a planned march by the Islamophobic English Defence League through Tower Hamlets — an area with a large Muslim community.
The community leaders and local residents sent an open letter to Dave Stringer, Borough Commander, Tower Hamlets:
Keep the EDL out of Tower Hamlets
FA tackled on wage abuses
THE GIANT union Unite last in this period. week called on the Football Association (FA) and the Professional and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) to support the union’s campaign to eradicate unpaid internships and national minimum wage abuses at Britain’s top football clubs.
Unite has written to FA chairman Greg Dyke and PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor to blow the whistle on such practices.
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Post Office staff in bank holiday strikes
AROUND 4,000 workers at Britain’s 372 Crown Post Offices took strike action over the bank holiday weekend in the latest of a five-month series of strikes over closures, cuts and pay.
Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), said: “Our message can’t be much stronger to Post Office management. Crown Post Office workers do not agree with management’s slash and burn approach and are prepared to take prolonged industrial action to defend jobs and services and win a fair pay rise.
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Workers with no place to go
LOCAL authority cuts to public conveniences are adversely affecting many workers, including paramedics, transport workers, police community support officers, postal workers and bin men who spend their working day out on the road, according to a report published last week by the public sector union Unison.
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The No Food Guide
THE CHARITY Citizens Advice in Scotland has issued an emergency guide for people surviving with no food or money as multiple cuts to the welfare safety net are resulting in growing numbers of people finding themselves completely destitute.
The charity said it was forced to issue the document after being swamped by pleas for help from people left with no means of support.
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Hovis zero hours strike
MEMBERS of the bakery workers’ union BFAWU employed by Hovis in Wigan last week voted by 75 per cent in favour of strike action following weeks of abortive talks over the use of temporary staff on reduced pay.
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Stirling workers fight cuts
WORKERS employed by Stirling council took strike action last Tuesday in protest at pay cuts and an attempt to increase working hours.
The public sector union Unison says the “longer hours-less pay” proposals amount to a 13 per cent pay cut.
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International News
Bo Xilai’s trial underscores China’s resolve for rule of law
by Li Laifang and Mou Xu
THE UNPRECEDENTED openness and transparency in the trial of Bo Xilai have been hailed both at home and abroad, the case also underscores the Party’s resolve to push the rule of law in China.
Bo, a former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and former secretary of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee, stood trial from August 22nd to 26th in east China’s Shandong Province over charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.
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New wave of strikes sweep South Africa
by Gao Yuan
MORE THAN 140,000 South African workers in the construction industry on Monday downed tools to demand higher pay amid a new wave of strikes sweeping South Africa, as the country struggles to recover from last year’s labour unrest.
The workers are joining more than 30,000 auto workers who have been on a strike since last Monday.
Also on Monday hundreds of airport workers embarked on a strike, causing delays at Johannesburg’s main international airport.
Monday was also the day set by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to start nationwide strikes in the energy and mining sectors.
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Fight to free Manning
Workers World (US)
Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked secret US government documents to Wikileaks was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. He has since taken the name Chelsea and says he now wants to live as a woman.
IT WAS no surprise, but no less a crime of US military injustice, that Private Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. And there is no reason that the movement that supports this young soldier, whose actions most of the world’s people consider heroic, should slow down its actions to win Manning’s freedom.
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Following grandpa’s passion in fostering Vietnam-China ties
by Le Thi Phuong and Zhang Jianhua
HA THI Tuong Thu, a journalist from the staterun Vietnam News Agency (VNA), has vowed to emulate her late grandfather’s passion in preserving the long and enduring ties between Vietnam and China. “Vietnam and China are close neighbours and our two peoples have shared common aspirations and a long-standing friendship, especially during our long revolutionary struggle for national liberation in the past and up to now during our national development efforts,” Thu said shortly before she departed for Beijing in late August where she has been assigned as chief of the VNA’s Beijing Bureau.
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Afghanistan: graveyard of imperial ambition
by Sergei Vasilenkov ACCORDING to the statements of the United States the US military is to completely leave Afghanistan in 2014. It took Nato 13 years to realise that they were strangers in Afghanistan. It seems that this country is impossible to conquer and draw into someone’s orbit. The proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan do not want to accept foreign values. What will happen to Afghanistan after 2014?
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Features
The criminal irresponsibility of western foreign policy
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
HARDLY a day has gone by since an apparent chemical weapons attack in rural Damascus but there is the British Foreign Secretary William Hague making insinuations virtually blaming the Syrian Government, jumping the gun on another mission creep as he and his partners performed in Libya. This is what could be termed criminal irresponsibility.
A case could be, and indeed has been, made to accuse William Hague and the political leadership of Nato of war crimes in Libya and breach of international law in Syria, financing, aiding and supporting terrorist groups to destabilise the legitimate government of the country. So after the recent track record of Nato, spearheaded by the FUKUS Axis (France-UKUS), after the lies, deception, skullduggery, cajoling, arrogance, bullying, blackmail and chauvinism that are buzzwords in FUKUS foreign policy, and always have been, who can believe a word they say?
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Housing — luxurious, makeshift and haunted
Rob Gowland
WHEREVER you go in this country at present, more and more people are doing it tough. And regardless of who wins the Australian federal election, whether it’s Labour or the Liberals, the economic situation is just going to get tougher. Of course, if Abbott, the Liberal leader becomes PM, it will actually get very much tougher, although workers will be made to bear the brunt whoever wins.
Meanwhile in their usual heedless way, the moneyed classes go on their merry way as if everything was all right with the world and there were no threatening clouds on the horizon in any direction.
Climate change can be ignored, the de-industrialisation of the country can be ignored, the growing impoverishment of the people can be ignored; every negative indicator can be ignored as long as we’ve got money — that’s the way the well-off view the world.
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South Korea: A nuclear industry riddled with corruption
by Neil Harris
THE SOUTH Korean nuclear industry had been hoping to take advantage of Japan’s continuing problems following the disaster at Fukushima. It planned to win orders to build up to 80 reactors around the world in the next decade, using its experience running south Korea’s 23 nuclear plants as an advertisement for its expertise.
As part of its campaign, the state owned Korea Electric Power Corporation opened a new London office and is actively seeking contracts to build and operate the next generation of British nuclear reactors including Anglesey, Oldbury in Gloucestershire and Sellafield.
Unfortunately south Korea’s reactors may not look quite as attractive as the country had hoped after a year of scandals which have rocked its secretive nuclear industry. A number of those reactors have had to be shut down during the swelteringly hot Korean summer, causing electricity shortages, a ban on air conditioning and a series of arrests.
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