National News
British Telecom or Bangalore Telecom?
by New Worker correspondent
THE Communication Workers Union (CWU) is up in arms at proposals by management to move jobs to India. At present 12 employees and a manager handle orders and manage changes to BT/EE mobile services from sites in Bristol, Wolverhampton and Nottingham, but they have been told the work will cease on New Year’s Eve.
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Retail woes
by New Worker correspondent
SHOP WORKERS union USDAW, which promoted a parliamentary bill to legislate against violence against its members, expressed disappointment that the Assaults on Retail Workers (Offences) members Bill by Nottingham North’s Labour/Co-op MP Alex Norris MP, was objected to by the Government on Friday. This means that consideration of it is delayed until the end of the month.
Paddy Lillis, USDAW’s General Secretary, said: “We were deeply disappointed by the Government’s response to our petition, offering little more than sympathy, despite the fact it was supported by 23 leading retailers. I urge the Government to listen to the voices of shop workers and retailers by legislating for stiffer penalties for those who assault workers. If they want to turn their words of sympathy into action, they should support the Bill and help it onto the statute book.”
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University job threats
by New Worker correspondent
WHILST there have been many headlines about university students grumbling about being locked in their rooms instead of being let out to drink beer, the long-term future of these institutions is very uncertain.
To give just two examples: in North Wales, Bangor University is asking its staff to consider voluntary redundancy, cuts in hours or early retirement; whilst at Edinburgh’s younger university, Heriot-Watt, a ballot is underway in opposition to redundancies.
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Assange performed enormous service to the world
Sputnik
AMERICAN linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky told the court deciding on the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States that the whistle-blower has performed an enormous service to the people by revealing information the US government wanted to keep secret.
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COVID Capers
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
THE Scottish Government recently awarded a £400,000 contract for the dismantling of the coronavirus-emergency Glasgow Louisa Jordan Hospital, established at a cost of £43 million. (It obviously couldn’t be named after Florence Nightingale like the others because she was English.) On Tuesday it was announced that 806 new cases were logged that day and 123 people were in hospital with the coronavirus. This suggests that the concept of joined-up government is an alien one to the Scottish National Party.
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A Glimpse Behind the Scenes
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
The warfare between the two main SNP camps took a turn for worse on Tuesday when the Convenor of the Holyrood inquiry into the shenanigans surrounding the trial of Alex Salmond, SNP MSP Linda Fabiani, speaking for the committee, said: “The Committee continues to be completely frustrated with the lack of evidence and, quite frankly, obstruction it is experiencing.”
This broadside was directed mainly at the present Government and the SNP’s party machinery, helpfully headed by the First Minister’s husband. The inquiry was effectively forced to suspend hearings, although another of the weekly hearings will take place next Tuesday.
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Keeping it in the Family
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
A colourful figure is battling to be nominated a north Ayrshire Holyrood seat presently held by an SNP MSP who is the husband of an MP. He hit the headlines recently by proclaiming that there will be no need for taxation in an independent Scotland: “Once we have our own currency, we will have the ability to create money and spend it on the things that are needed. The state literally creates money. It does not need our money.”
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Facing a COVID winter
Xinhua
SINCE THE outbreak of COVID-19 in Britain, experts have raised concerns over how the coronavirus will impact life for people in winter.
According to Professor Andrew Easton at the University of Warwick, it is still unknown how exactly the coronavirus will behave and what that may look like for Britain.
One thing he said is known, however, is that other common winter viruses around colds and flu will be confused with the coronavirus. “That will make assessment difficult. If somebody presents with a flu, you wouldn’t normally tell them to go and isolate for 14 days. There’s going to be an increase in a number of people with these other respiratory diseases. It will make assessing COVID-19 difficult.”
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End sanctions on Democratic Korea!
by New Worker correspondent
KOREAN solidarity activists returned to Whitehall on Saturday to demand an end to British sanctions against Democratic Korea in July and an end to all the other sanctions imposed on the DPR Korea by US imperialism, the European Union and America’s lackeys in Japan and south Korea.
NCP leader Andy Brooks and other comrades including London organiser Theo Russell, joined the picket called by the Korean Friend ship Association on 26th September by the gates of the road leading to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, just a stone’s throw from Downing Street and the heart of government.
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‘Anti-Capitalist’ material now banned in English schools
by Jason Dunn
AS PART of growing ideological polarisation in the West, some governments have begun to try to quell rising anti-capitalist feeling and consider movements who oppose the current economic orthodoxy as extremist.
Last week the Johnson government ordered schools in England not to use teaching material that includes opposition to capitalism, as the UK joins in the anti-communist trajectory sweeping Western countries.
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International News
War in the Caucasus
by Alexander Shtorm
RUSSIA does not need to get involved in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russian politicians should only safeguard Russian interests. Many believe that there is no real danger of a new Russian-Turkish war but Russia cannot just sit back and enjoy the gladiatorial conflict. What should Russia do?
Russia should maintain the status of an observer and guarantor of peace, even though it is going to be fragile peace. The conflict is already happening, and one needs to keep it local.
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Four centuries of infamy
by Pedro de la Hoz
BEFORE Europeans arrived in America, Portuguese seafarers snatched the first Africans from their homelands to be sold and exploited in the Iberian peninsula. Documentary evidence indicates a date: 1444. In 1510, 18 years after the first voyage of Columbus, the monarch Fernando de Castilla authorised the transfer of consignments of Africans to Hispaniola, in order to leave their lives in the mineral veins of the island, like the aborigines. Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888 were the last to abolish slavery in this part of the world.
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Trump threatens Iran with more sanctions
Radio Havana Cuba
THE Trump administration is preparing to introduce a new round of sanctions to prevent every last avenue of legal financial exchange with Iran.
The proposal is still under review and hasn’t been sent to Trump, but Bloomberg News disclosed that it will target more than a dozen banks and label Iran’s entire financial sector off limits.
Since almost all aspects of life are already effectively under the most aggressive US sanctions ever, the new measures are unlikely to have any meaningful bearing on Iran’s economy and seem mostly a political stunt ahead of the US election.
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Do foreigners have the right to complain about countryside karaoke?
By Joshua Zukas
IF YOU haven’t experienced it, you probably don’t get out enough. You arrive for a short break at one of Vietnam’s quintessential countryside destinations. The views from your rustic lodge are sublime. Streams meander through lofty rice terraces. Pockets of cloud cling to jungle-topped karst mountains. The rice paddies emanate a green so fanciful that it’s bordering on nuclear.
But somebody, somewhere, is howling into a microphone, plunging the celestial landscape into an aural inferno with their brazen self-confidence.
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Features
USA: Is Marxism still relevant?
by Olujimi Alade
WITH THE DIRE economic circumstances brought on by COVID-19 and the rise in police brutality provoking civil unrest unseen since the 1960s, the Millennial Generation as well as Generation Z are beginning to see the pitfalls of both neoliberalism and US conservatism.
The Republicans in office are taking notice and are peddling falsehoods in order to stymie any potential movement. They’re taking their usual criticisms of Karl Marx and moulding them in a way that would appeal to potential radicals and push them away from Marxism.
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Revealed: How SMERSH paralysed Nazi intelligence
Sputnik
NAZI INTELLIGENCE mastered the art of spreading radio disinformation amongst the Allies after the occupation of France and the campaign for the Atlantic. The Nazis started their radio disinformation operations in 1940; they called it funkspiel, which is German for ‘radio game’.
The NKVD and SMERSH (the ‘Death to Spies’ Red Army counter-intelligence unit) soon set up similar operations, disrupting Wehrmacht intelligence-gathering until the very end of the war.
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Oppression in the USA
by Ed Newman
THE LATEST events of police brutality and racist murders in several US cities are not a recent phenomenon. They are long-standing episodes, stretching since the times of slavery, and, as now, develop alongside the violence of paramilitary and white-supremacist groups.
The racial issue and discrimination against Black people have been a major aspect in shaping the American culture from colonial times until the creation of the current republic, therefore it covers much of the domestic policy. The historical and present situation of African-Americans is, in many ways, central to the country’s problems.
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