National News
No aid to Ukrainian Nazis!
by New Worker correspondent
THE CALL for solidarity with the anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine once again echoed across Whitehall at a protest picket last weekend. NCP leader Andy Brooks and other London comrades joined the picket opposite Downing Street on Saturday to denounce British support for the puppet regime in Kiev and to stand by the Ukrainian anti-fascists and the Novorossiyans who took up the gun to drive the Nazi gangs out of eastern Ukraine.
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Sanctioned claimants lose housing benefit
THE PARLIAMENTARY Public Accounts Committee last week condemned the practice of cutting off housing benefit (HB) from unemployed and disabled people who have had their benefits withdrawn as a punishment for failing to comply with Job Centre demands to look for work or attend interviews.
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41,000 disabled had benefits cut since 2012
GOVERNMENT figures released last week by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) showed that between December 2012 and September 2016, 85,112 punitive sanctions were used to cut benefits and 71,366 of them were issued to disabled people receiving Employment Support Allowance (ESA). A total of 41,000 disabled claimants were affected and some had their allowance cut more than once.
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Welsh Muslim teacher on trip barred entry to US
JUHEL MIAH, a young Muslim teacher from South Wales travelling with schoolchildren on a trip to New York and barred entry to the United States simply because he was a Muslim.
Miah and a group of children and other teachers were about to take off from Iceland on 16th February on their way to the US when he was removed from the plane at Reykjavik.
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Facing sack for self defence
THE RMT rail union is fighting the case of Lee Cornell, who was sacked by London Underground (LU) for defending himself from an abusive and aggressive fare-dodger at London Bridge Underground station. Two of his colleagues who came to his aid have also been disciplined.
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Pollution charge on London vehicles
LONDON Mayor Sadiq Khan plans to introduce a £10 charge on the owners of more polluting cars that enter the congestion charge zone from next October.
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Sturgeon’s Poll Tax?
by our Scottish Political correspondent
THE SCOTTISH petty bourgeois are revolting. That is the normal state of affairs but at the moment they are revolting over the matter of business rates.
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International News
Ukraine: High tension & low temperatures
by Elson Concepción Pérez
IT’S FEBRUARY and, exactly as was the case three years ago, events in Ukraine are making headlines. Guns are again being fired; deaths and injuries are being reported. Low temperatures of below 20°C are affecting the region these days but they have not lowered tensions in a conflict, which far from nearing a resolution, is worsening
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Japanese ultra-right denounced
by Liang Junqian
JAPAN’S APA Group CEO Toshio Motoya, an extreme right-winger, has recently come under international criticism again, and this time it was for his anti-Semitic comments.
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Breaking the chain of colour revolutions
Sputnik
RUSSIA’S year-and-a-half counter-terrorist campaign in Syria helped solve the geopolitical task of disrupting the chain of revolutions in the region, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said last Tuesday.
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Black Reconstruction and the Paris Commune: Two Momentous Revolutions
by Jeff Sorel
BLACK history brings back to life long-buried struggles of African-American people for liberation and justice. One of the most stirring such struggles took place a century-and-a-half ago during Reconstruction, when a revolutionary upsurge in the 1870s led to formerly enslaved people winning political power throughout the US South.
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Monster Film or Monstrous Film?
by Li Fangfang
WHEN acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose films have won international awards and whose directing of the spectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics fetched him a Peabody Award, released his latest venture on 6th December 2016, it was bound to create buzz.
The Great Wall, a Chinese—US venture starring Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Jing Tian and Andy Lau, is the most expensive film production in Chinese history, with an estimated budget of around $135 million. Billed as an “epic historical fiction action-adventure monster film,” it grossed 1 billion yuan ($144.24 million) in two weeks. There were also good reports from South-east Asia, Turkey and Iceland, where Zhang’s first fully English-language film was released on 29th December 2016. It will début in North American cinemas on 17th February 2017.
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Features
Amnesty’s report cannot be taken at face value
by John Wight
AMNESTY International’s report on the mass torture and execution of prisoners by Syrian security forces at Saydnaya Prison just outside Damascus is notable for the lack of concrete evidence it provides in support of what are serious allegations of war crimes.
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How the CIA tricked the world’s best writers
by Branko Marcetic
A new book reminds us that the CIA is one of history’s great purveyors of fake news
THROUGH covert funding and well-placed assets, the CIA helped create, keep alive and exert editorial control over a range of seemingly independent entities. Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, a history of the CIA’s decades-spanning attempts to co-opt and outright recruit writers and intellectuals for its own ends, is the fruit of at least 15 years of research. Yet by some cosmic happen-stance, it’s only now being released, when it’s more relevant than ever.
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