National News
Islamophobes go mad in Manchester
The first response of the vast majority of the people of Manchester to that outrage has been one of love and goodwill trying to build stronger ties to bring communities of all faiths together, and to reject the hatred and division that the bomber hoped to spread.
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Grenfell Tower residents raised fire safety concerns
PEOPLE living in the west London tower block Grenfell Towers that went up in flames very quickly in the early hours of Wednesday morning, leading to multiple deaths, had raised concerns about the fire safety of the building.
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FBU calls for an end to pay freeze
PRIME Minister Theresa May last week admitted that, trying to battle on with a minority government, she will have to bring an end to the Tories’ austerity policies.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) is calling for immediate action, including a specific pledge to put an end to the misery of the seven-year pay freeze that has impacted on firefighters and other public services workers.
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School strike against academy
TEACHERS at the Dormers Wells High School in Ealing this week took strike action for the second time in protest at plans to turn the school into an independent academy. They are supported by the National Union of Teachers (NUT).
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Rise in complaints against pay-day lenders
COMPLAINTS about payday loan companies have risen sharply for the second consecutive year despite strict new regulations limiting interest charges.
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Plymouth’s missing votes
LUKE POLLARD, the newly elected MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, has demanded an inquiry into votes from two wards in his constituency that were counted but missed out from the final result.
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Revolutionary Democracy
Reviewed by Robert Laurie
Revolutionary Democracy Volume XXII, No 2 April, 2017. £5.00 + £1.00 p&p from NCP Lit, PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.
THE latest issue of Revolutionary Democracy has just arrived in Britain. The latest one (the first published since April of last year) contains the usual mixture of articles on contemporary India, news and views from around the globe and important historical material from Soviet sources.
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International News
The clear winner in the General Election
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
THERE WAS one clear winner in the British 2017 general election amongst a field in which nobody else actually won. That was the opinion polls, which this time got it right. In the field, the candidate who came nearest to glowing in victory was Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, whose positive campaign and strength of character came shining through.
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Western sanctions are killing Syrian children
Sputnik
CAUSED BY the sanctions imposed by the West, Syrian hospitals are struggling with shortages of medication, especially certain specific drugs that the country had been importing. F
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Corruption: can it be defeated?
by Pavel Jacomino
THE DIRECTOR of Mexico’s Comptroller General’s Office, Eduardo Rovelo, has declared that corruption in his country is a structural disease. Impossible to eradicate, the most that authorities may do is to keep it under control, that is under ‘tolerable’ limits.
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Iran: the continuing fight against terrorism
Syria Times
THE TERROR attacks that targeted Tehran a few days ago will not be the last as long as Saudi Arabia and other Arab and regional countries offer financial and military support to terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Nusra Front with the aim of achieving political objectives that serve the Zionist project.
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Gaddafi’s son free at last!
Telesur
AFTER five years of detention in a mountain prison, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been released from detention as part of an amnesty. He is now amongst his uncles and relatives in the eastern Libyan city of al-Bayda.
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Riverdance: dance allows communication between cultures
Xinhua
DANCE is a universal language and a way of communicating between cultures says Shane McAvinchey, a former member of the Irish Riverdance company.
McAvinchey, who toured with Riverdance between 2000 and 2004 and was part of its flying squad for another five years, was in Barcelona teaching a workshop at the Nuala Irish Dancers School.
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Features
Why did workers flock to sign up for the First World War?
by New Worker correspondent
IN THE early years of the 20th century working class awareness and socialist ideas were growing. The leaders of the labour movement recognised the imperialist nature of war and opposed it.
And yet once the First World War was declared in August 1914 thousands of working class men flocked to join the army, most of them during the first three months of the war.
Professor Julian Putkowski last Monday evening delivered a very interesting account of his researches into the reason for this flood of volunteers at a well-attended meeting in Housmans Bookshop, organised by Veterans for Peace.
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Qatar: smell of war in the air
Sputnik
The major powers of the Arab world have united against Qatar, cutting off diplomatic ties with the monarchy. Political observer Gennadi Petrov says the crisis, which has roots that go back decades, has more direct origins in President Trump’s Middle East tour, where he called on US Arab allies to wage an uncompromising struggle against terrorism.
IN HIS article for Russian business publication Expert.ru, Petrov pointed out that the US’s Arab allies duly saluted to Trump’s words and quickly found the one, true ‘guilty party’, “in the face of this tiny monarchy with unbounded ambitions.”
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The silent sabotage Cuba will never forget
Granma
by Alejandra García
ON 1ST JUNE 1964, Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro denounced, for the first time, the United States’ biological war against Cuba. Granma International interviews two leading figures in the struggle against haemorrhagic dengue fever, which had been purposefully introduced.
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