National News
Hospitals report dramatic rise in starvation cases
FORTY-THREE hospital trusts report that last year they admitted more than 2,000 patients because they were suffering from malnutrition. That represents a quadrupling of the number of cases of malnutrition over the last 10 years. More than 900 of these cases were classed as severe — meaning patients were in danger of starving to death.
But these alarming figures are just the extreme tip of an iceberg of misery and deprivation as GPs treat thousands more poverty-stricken patients for malnutrition.
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Evicting Peter to house Paul
A COMMUNITY of 72 households in St Michael’s Gate, Peterborough, is facing eviction to make way for housing homeless people in a deal between a London-based estate agent described as a “social landlord” and the Peterborough City Council. And even the councillors who voted to accept the deal said it “stunk of fish”.
But the council will save a lot of money on the deal by housing some of its own homeless families who are currently being accommodated at great cost in hotels like Travelodge and this is costing the council around £1 million per year.
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Stop Moorside nuclear madness
ENVIRONMENTAL campaigners are raising funds in order to commission an independent report into the potential hazards surrounding plans for a gigantic new type of nuclear plant (AP1000) at Moorside in Cumbria, near the Lake District.
The industry has asked people to comment on their reactor design so the campaigners, organising through the 38degrees campaign website as Radiation Free Lakeland, want to commission this independent report. They know that former US nuclear regulator Arnie has described the AP1000 as “Chernobyl on steroids”, now they need the evidence putting into a report to expose the plan.
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‘White lives matter’ flops
THE FIRST public action by a tiny group of white racists, calling themselves “White Lives Matter” (WLM) in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, attracted only a handful of activists to their protest event in Margate, Kent, last Saturday.
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Post Office managers to strike
POST OFFICE managers are to strike next Monday (31st October) after the failure of Post Office bosses to hold constructive talks over the closure of the defined salary pension scheme.
This has prompted 736 managers, who are members of the giant union Unite, to stage this second 24-hour strike next Monday in conjunction with members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU).
The dispute embraces pensions, job losses and the franchising of Crown post offices. Unite warned that more strikes could be on the cards in the run-up to Christmas, causing severe disruption at this peak time of the year.
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Whisky Galore
by our Scottish political correspondent
Four years on from being passed into law one of the Scottish government’s heath measures has still not come into force. This is the minimum unit price for alcohol, which is designed to increase sharply the price of super-strength lagers, cheap and apple-free ciders in the touching hope that consumers of large quantities of such beverages will respond to market mechanisms and simply reduce their consumption. Scots buy about 20 per cent more alcohol than citizens of England and Wales.
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Culture News
by our Scottish political correspondent
Scottish arty types have caused raised eyebrows over the funding of their self-indulgent projects.
One lucky beneficiary of government handouts is Ellie Harrison, a lecturer at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Creative Scotland gave her £15,000 for a year-long “durational performance” called The Glasgow Effect, which means she will stay in the City of Glasgow for a whole year without venturing beyond its boundaries.
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Tibetan cultural delegation wraps up
A CHINESE delegation from China’s Tibet Autonomous Region on Saturday wrapped up a three-day trip to Britain last weekend. The delegation, headed by Zhang Yun, visited universities and a media house to boost exchanges on Tibetan culture.
The delegation visited the universities of Oxford, Westminster and Cambridge, where they talked with researchers and students on issues ranging from Tibet’s opening up and religious freedom, to the ancient culture in the area and the translation of the Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
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US out of Korea!
by New Worker correspondent
KOREAN solidarity activists were out on the streets of London last week demonstrating outside the US and the south Korean embassies to protest at the latest war moves of US imperialism and their south Korean puppets. NCP leader Andy Brooks and other comrades joined the pickets called by the Korean Friendship Association (KFA) on 20th October at a time of increasing tension on the Korean peninsula. The protest started at 15:00 outside the south Korean embassy in Westminster and then moved on to the hub of US imperialism in Grosvenor Square to continue the action until 18:20.
Book review: The Displaced
reviewed by Daphne Liddle
The Displaced
£10
Published by Guy Smallman, 2016 (guysmallman.com)
GUY SMALLMAN is a rare kind of photojournalist; he is a freelance who is not sponsored by any of the big media corporations or press barons, but he gets to places in the world where there are important stories to be told about the impact of war and conflict on local people’s lives that western governments would prefer were not reported.
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International News
Stop war threats: peace treaty with Korea now!
by Deirdre Griswold
“NO first use” of nuclear weapons. It is a pledge never to attack another country with nuclear bombs or missiles, unless that country has attacked you first with such weapons.
The world would be a much safer place if the US and the other countries in NATO that possess nuclear weapons were to make such a pledge. But these imperialist states refuse to do so.In fact, only three of the world’s nuclear powers have pledged “no first use”. They are China, India and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
But you wouldn’t know it if all you read and heard came from the politicians and major media in America. They are drumming it into the heads of the people here that north Korea — the DPRK — is a major threat to the world because it has now built half-a-dozen nuclear warheads.
The US has almost 7,000 such doomsday weapons. It has many military bases in south Korea. Several times a year it conducts huge war exercises directed against the DPRK. The last was held in August and involved 80,000 troops from the US and south Korea.
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Hackers hit anti-Syrian sites
Telesur
“WE attacked the Belgian media that hide the work of its air force in Syria,” the Syrian Cyber Army said in a statement on their website Monday.
A Syrian hacker group said that it had attacked the websites of several Belgian media outlets as a retaliation over their under-reporting of Belgium’s role in the US-led coalition in Syria that, according to the group, was responsible for killing several civilians in the city of Aleppo.
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China’s image soars amongst Africans
Xinhua
The image of China as a development model has soared amongst Africans, said a report issued here based on the latest survey findings of Afrobarometer, a pan-African, non-partisan research network.
In the eyes of Africans, China rivals the United States in influence and popularity as a development model, according to the new report released Monday that covered 36 African countries and involved 54,000 respondents on China’s growing presence in Africa.
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Returning to a Vietnam ten times more beautiful
by Ronald Suárez Rivas
VIETNAM appears below the airplane window just as I remembered it, with its endless rice fields that extend to the edge of its cities and its industrious people continuously travelling back and forth.
But this is not the country that I knew as a child, accompanied by my parents, 31 years ago.
Friends who have visited more recently had warned me of this, and it became evident as soon as we had landed and were heading to Hanoi, the capital, as part of the exchange that takes place every year between the newspapers Granma and Nhan Dan.
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‘We are Syria’ campaign launched
by Basma Qaddour
UNDER the slogan “We are Syria”, a campaign was launched on Saturday 15th October at the Damascus Opera House to call for lifting the unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe on Syria.
The sanctions prevent the Syrian people from getting humanitarian needs, especially medicines for children’s cancer and medical equipment, as well as requirements for treating Persons with Special needs, the members of the ‘Sabaya al-Ata’a’ Association, which launched the campaign, said.
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Features
Ireland: British secret police spy on Shell to Sea
by John Hedges
GARDA CHIEFS and Scotland Yard commanders allowed British undercover policeman Mark Kennedy to spy on environmental groups in Ireland, including the Shell to Sea campaign in Mayo. Dublin Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan wants Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald to get some long-overdue and straight answers from her British counterpart when she meets Home Secretary Amber Rudd this month.
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Gaddafi’s murder unleashed terror
Sputnik
Five years after Libya’s long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi was cold-bloodedly murdered right in front of mobile phone cameras and with the full backing of the Western nations participating in the 2011 military campaign against Libya, Sputnik talked to Abdel Baset bin Hamel, a journalist who was close to the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was killed on 20th October 2011.
“The reforms in education, health care and infrastructure that Muammar Gaddafi carried out in Libya for 43 years will forever remain part of this country’s history. The current crisis results from the fact that the changes, which have been taking place here [since 2011], are implemented by foreigners and with international support. All this has been the work of the great powers pursuing their own goals,” Abdel Baset bin Hamel said.
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Karl Marx: the most worldly philosopher
by Zoltan Zigedy
KARL MARX turns up in the most unlikely places. Two and a half decades after most US and European public intellectuals gleefully announced Marx’s ideas henceforth irrelevant, The Wall Street Journal offers a surprisingly measured discussion of his thought under the title The Most Worldly Philosopher (10-1&2-2016).
The author, Jonathan Steinberg, an emeritus fellow of Cambridge and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, closes with: “Marx left a legacy of powerful ideas that cannot be dismissed as an obsolete creation of a vanished intellectual climate...” and that stimulated “...the growth of Marxist parties and the millions who accepted that ideology over the course of the 20th century. That was worldly philosophy indeed.”
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