National News
Peace activists try to disarm war-planes bound for Saudi Arabia
TWO PEACE activists were arrested last weekend on suspicion of criminal damage after they tried to damage a Eurofighter Typhoon at the BAe Systems site at Warton in Lancashire.
They were trying to disarm military aircraft leaving Britain bound for Saudi Arabia to be used in war crimes against Yemen.
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MPs denounce sexist dress rules
TWO PARLIAMENTARY committees last week called on the Government to ban sexist dress codes and to fine employers who insist on imposing them.
A report from the Petitions Committee and the Women and Equalities Committee said the Government must enforce the law properly to ban dress codes at work that discriminate against women.
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Tory council to charge disabled for their needs assessment
TORY-run Northamptonshire Council is planning to become the first in Britain to start charging the sick and disabled for their own care assessments.
Furious Labour MPs and campaign groups hit out at plans by Tory-run Northamptonshire County Council to force people need of social services to pay £50 for a needs assessment before they can access care.
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Pensioners could be forced into care homes
AROUND 13,000 pensioners could be forced into care homes against their will under secret NHS cost cutting plans and local authority cash to support care for people in their own homes being slashed, according to an investigation by the Health Service Journal and campaigners Disability United.
Charities expressed alarm, describing the new measures as “outrageous”.
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More people sleeping rough
THE NUMBER of people being forced to sleep rough in England has risen for the sixth successive year, according to the latest official statistics.
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Southern Rail strips train crew accreditation
SOUTHERN Rail, in its long dispute with transport union RMT and the train drivers’ union ASLEF, last week made a bizarre move to strip key train crew members of their safety accreditation.
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A Fine Class Traitor
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
AN OLD Etonian baronet whose ancestor smoothed the way for James VI of Scotland to succeed Elizabeth Tudor and who himself lived in a castle surrounded by peacocks would not normally be the subject of a favourable tribute in a communist newspaper. But we can make an exception for Tam Dalyell, the former Labour MP who died last week aged 84.
Tam Dalyell was born on 9th August 1932. Strictly speaking he was Sir Thomas Dalyell Tenth Baronet of The Binns, the 17th century castle overlooking the Firth of Forth that was his home.
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Local Government News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
THE SNP’s leadership has finally woken up to the fact that its North Lanarkshire council group is something of an embarrassment.
In preparation for May’s local elections, the National leadership held a grilling last weekend at a local hotel to select those deemed unsuitable to be seen in public. The results have not yet been made public.
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Patients not profits
by New Worker correspondent
SCORES of campaigners gathered in Old Palace Yard, opposite Parliament, last Saturday for a march, rally and “howl” against Government plans that are further dismantling the NHS.
The Government’s “Sustainability and Transformation Programme” (STP) that is being imposed on NHS trusts is in effect calling on all trusts to come together in their localities to produce five-year plans that are mainly about cutting costs and outsourcing services. Campaigners say the STP stands for “Slash, Trash and Plunder.”
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The lessons of history
by New Worker correspondent
NEW Communist Party (NCP) leader Andy Brooks joined comrades, war veterans, diplomats and anti-fascists at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in London last week. On 27th January 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest death camp in the Third Reich, and every year on that day the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust are remembered at the Imperial War Museum and the nearby Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park.
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Chinese New Year: a firm fixture in Britain’s cultural calendar
Xinhua
THE Chinese new year has been welcomed in Britain with its biggest ever programme of events and celebrations. From London’s Trafalgar Square to major cities across Britain, tens of thousands of British people joined Chinese communities to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Rooster last weekend.
Celebrations in Britain’s capital city have been amongst the biggest outside of Asia, with a colourful parade starting in central London’s Chinatown, ending at a main stage in Trafalgar Square for a festival of music and dance.
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International News
What is behind new escalation of the Donbas conflict?
Sputnik
UKRAINIAN President Petro Poroshenko has cut short a working visit to Germany following an unprecedented escalation of the conflict in Donbas, where Ukrainian forces have violated the fragile ceasefire almost 2,000 times over the past 24 hours alone.
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Arab League concerned At Trump travel ban
by Pavel Jacomino
THE ARAB League has expressed “deep concern” over an “unjustified” decision by US President Donald Trump to restrict entry into the United States from several Muslim-majority countries. In a statement released on Sunday, Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said new regulations “are unjustified restrictions on the entry of citizens of several Arab nations to the US, in addition to the consequences of suspending the acceptance of Syrian refugees.”
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Putin and Trump express willingness to cooperate
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump agreed to stabilise and deepen bilateral cooperation during a phone conversation last Saturday, the Kremlin said.
“The two sides expressed willingness to work actively together to stabilise and develop Russian—American cooperation on a constructive basis, as equals, and to mutual benefit,” the Kremlin said in a statement issued after their first phone conversation since Trump’s inauguration last week.
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Political turmoil deepens in south Korea
by Deirdre Griswold
THE POLITICAL crisis in south Korea just won’t go away. The people are angry and organised, determined to get rid of the corrupt dictatorship of President Park Geun Hye. After months of massive demonstrations, Parliament in December voted to impeach her but she refuses to leave office. An impeachment trial is now being conducted by the Constitutional Court.
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Trump erases Jews from Holocaust
Telesur
TRUMP’S Holocaust Memorial Day statement, released hours after signing a ban on Muslim refugees, makes no reference to Jews or anti-Semitism.
On the day the world commemorated the worst genocide of the 20th century with pledges of “never again”, President Donald Trump banned Muslim refugees from entering the US and issued a statement that notably removed any reference to the anti-Semitism which fuelled Adolf Hitler’s systematic murder of six million Jews and four million other “undesirables”.
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Features
‘Traitors’: Why Armed Opposition fails to win hearts and minds of Syrians
“by Ekaterina Blinova
CONTRARY to common belief, fuelled by the US and European Union (EU) mainstream media, the Syrian armed opposition has little support amongst ordinary Syrians who regard them as “traitors”, says Olga Naccache, a Lebanese film director of Syrian descent. Syria has long been a secular state committed to religious pluralism and must remain secular, she stressed.
Although the intra-Syrian peace talks have finished in Astana, the question on everyone’s minds is whether Syrians will be able to return to a normal life and heal the scars of war when the conflict comes to an end.
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Celebrating the Russian Revolution in Brussels
by New Worker correspondent
Communists from all over Europe gathered in Brussels last month to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great October Russian Revolution. A New Communist Party (NCP) delegation joined comrades from many other communist parties for the 10th annual European Communist Meeting on 23rd January. NCP leader Andy Brooks represented the Party at the day-long conference at the European Parliament in the Belgian capital.
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The meaning of Red October
by Andy Brooks
The New Communist Party contribution to the European communist conference in Brussels in January
THE 100TH anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution is time for reflection as well as celebration. In one form or another the 1917 Russian Revolution will be celebrated in every country of the world and it is fitting that we should be here not just to honour the generations that have gone before us, but to look to the future with confidence and determination.
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