National News
The 10 areas worst hit by youth housing benefit cuts
STATISTICS published by the House of Commons Library last week reveal the 10 areas in Britain where young people have been hit hardest by the stopping of housing benefit to young people between the ages of 18 and 21.
The study suggests 18,000 people are potentially hit by the Government’s decision to strip jobseekers and those on low wages under the age of 21 of housing benefit.
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Employers can force women workers to wear high heels
CAMPAIGNERS for the rights of working women were dismayed last week when the Government rejected calls for a ban on employers’ rights to force women to wear high heels to work.
The demand for the ban is based on the damage that spending long hours standing in high heels on a regular basis can do to women’s feet, causing varicose veins and serious painful foot deformities in later life, reducing the mobility and independence of these women when they are older.
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McCluskey wins again
THE GIANT union Unite last Friday announced the result of the general secretary election — Len McCluskey has been re-elected to the post.
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Seafarers protest in Aberdeen
THE TRANSPORT union RMT last week held a protest demonstration in Aberdeen against poverty pay on Streamline Shipping’s ship MV Daroja. Workers are paid as little as £2.56 per hour on freight routes between Aberdeen and Orkney and Shetland on the Cyprus-flagged ship.
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Shock cut in safety inspectors as unions prepare for Workers’ Memorial Day
THE GIANT union Unite last Wednesday revealed a shock 25 per cent cut in health and safety inspectors just as unions throughout Britain and the world are gearing up to mark Workers’ Memorial Day on Friday 28th April.
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Hospital staff face exorbitant parking fees
HOSPITAL staff are paying “extortionate” charges of nearly £100 a month to park at work, according to the public sector union UNISON.
The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust is one of the top chargers, with full-time staff paying £85.38 per month to park at the Royal Free Hospital site.
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No to new Korean war!
by New Worker correspondent
LONDONERS picketed the American embassy in Grosvenor square last week to demonstrate against a new Korean war brought nearer by the provocations of US war-lord Donald Trump in recent days.
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History — it’s how you look at it
Reviewed by Ray Jones
Sweet William or the Butcher?: The Duke of Cumberland and the ‘45
Author: Jonathan Oates (2008), 224pp. Publisher: Pen Sword & Military. ISBN: 9781844157549
AS KARL MARX said, it’s the material world that forms consciousness not the other way around. Ideas and concepts arise from our interaction with the world and most fundamentally from how humans make their living — how they survive.
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International News
Centre and far right to face off in French elections
Workers World (US)
THE 23RD APRIL first round of the French presidential election ended with the top four candidates each getting between 20 and 24 per cent of the vote. The run-off of the top two finishers on 7th May is between centre-right politician Emmanuel Macron and ultra-rightist Marine Le Pen.
Neither of the two parties that have run the French government for the past 50 years — the so-called Socialist Party (PS) and the Republicans — will have a candidate in the second round.
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New effort to clear name of ‘Lockerbie bomber’
Sputnik
THE FAMILY of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, who was convicted of sabotaging Pan Am Flight 103 in the 1980s, is launching a fresh effort to posthumously clear his name.
Family lawyer Aamer Anwar said that a dossier of evidence will be delivered to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which will review it and decide whether to hand the case on to an appeals court.
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Israeli warplanes attack Syrian positions in Golan Heights
by Pavel Jacomino
ISRAELI warplanes have again rocketed Syrian positions in the Golan Heights. Israeli jets fired two missiles at a military position in the vicinity of Khan Arnabah in the Quneitra countryside last Friday, causing material damage.
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The British Library in Bejing
by Huang Tingting
WANT to see for yourself how British classics Jane Eyre and Romeo and Juliet came into being?
If you are in Beijing this April, you will have the chance. The National Library of China (NLC) has opened a new exhibition containing original manuscripts of iconic works of literature from the collections of the British Library and the NLC displayed side-by-side in China’s capital for the first time.
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Music mission to Beijing hopes to hit right note
Xinhua
THE BRITISH government is sending a music mission to China to tap into the lucrative Chinese music market. The government also announced financial grants as part of a music exports growth scheme to help promote the rising music stars of the future.
A spokesperson for the Department for International Trade said: “British artists currently make up around 5 per cent of the top 100 chart entries in China and we want to help British talent access this growing market with a week-long mission in Beijing from 24th April to 1st May.”
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Features
General Election: desperate attempt to derail Scottish independence
by John Wight
BRITISH Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to call a snap general election bears all the hallmarks of a government in the throes of a continuing political crisis in the wake of last year’s referendum result to rip the UK out of the European Union (EU), commonly referred to as Brexit.
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Tutoring Trump
by Zoltan Zigedy
AFTER AGREEING that the United States (US) attack upon a Syrian airforce base constituted a violation of international law, a violation of Syrian sovereignty, an Ivy League law professor told NPR (National Public Radio) that he believes that the premeditated strike was justified nonetheless. The professor likened it to running a stop sign or a stop light in an emergency.
This is the level of tortured hypocrisy to which US intellectual elites have sunk.
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