National News
The staff of life
by New Worker correspondent
MEANWHILE the class struggle continues regardless of any distractions from elections and grand ceremonies.
Workers at the Hovis bakery in south Belfast, which supplies about 50 per cent of Northern Ireland’s bread, are taking strike action to secure a 10 per cent pay rise. The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU), along with Unite, plan to begin their strike on Friday.
BFAWU said that enough is enough after they had worked throughout a difficult year to supply the nation with food, in particular putting their own health and that of their families at risk by continuing to “work as normal” in the face of the pandemic. The response of the bosses, says BFAWU, is only “minimal percentage pay offers being tabled that felt like a slap across the face for the efforts of these workers in the past year”.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
WEDNESDAY 6th May was described in the mainstream media as “Super Thursday”, in the American fashion. For the left it was not noticeably super. Despite the different outcomes across the country, it was a great triumph for the incumbent Governments whether they be Labour in Wales, the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland or the Tories in England.
In many respects the Holyrood results were a replay of the 2016 vote. The SNP did marginally better, securing 64 of the 129 seats in the Scottish parliament, one sort of a majority and one more seat that last time. That will ensure their return to office – with the eight Green members providing reliable support in getting Bills through Parliament.
The Tories, who remain the official opposition with 31, lost two seats in the two on the regional lists. Labour lost two, leaving them with 22. The Liberal Democrats lost one, retaining four. None of the other hopefuls got any. Only three constituency seats changed hands, so arguably it was all a bit of a waste of time.
Perhaps the main difference from last time was the increase in turnout by 7.6 per cent to 63.2, which means this is the first Holyrood election that generated any real interest. At the 2019 General Election 68 per cent made it to the polls. But in many working-class areas the turnout was only just above 50 per cent.
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The Neverendum
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
As soon as the votes were counted Ms Sturgeon was quick off the mark demanding another referendum as is her custom, safe in the knowledge that one is not going to happen.
Given the delicately balanced arithmetic it is the last thing she wants. She could lose, and that would be the end of her. Even worse, she could win with a wafer-thin 50.1–49.9 victory, which would make her responsible for handling a messy divorce with issues such as a hard border and the unresolved currency question.
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Lord West slams France over Jersey row
by Svetlana Ekimenko
A RETIRED Admiral has weighed in on the row between Britain and France over fishing rights around the Channel Islands post-Brexit. In an escalating maritime row, over 60 small Normandy vessels massed off Jersey last week after French fishermen complained of difficulty in obtaining licenses to operate, required for the first time under new post-Brexit fishing agreements, prompting Britain and France to send naval patrol vessels to the area.
French threats to blockade the harbour at St Helier and even cut off the self-governing British Crown Dependency’s electricity supply were slammed by Admiral Lord West, Baron of Spithead, as “childish, irrational, petulant and dangerous”.
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Victory Day: We remember them
by New Worker correspondent
THE RUSSIAN ex-pat community has long marked Victory Day for solemn ceremonies in London and other parts of the UK. Although this year’s commemorations were sadly muted due to the ongoing coronavirus restrictions, the sacrifice of the millions who gave their lives in the struggle against the Nazis in the Second World War their memory was not forgotten at events in London and northern Scotland.
In Scotland, a ceremony was held on the site of a secret air-base where Soviet pilots and crews were trained to fly British military transports destined for the eastern front.
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International News
Leaks prove UK funded anti-Syrian groups
Radio Havana Cuba
A SENIOR AIDE to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has accused Britain of funding anti-Damascus groups to stoke further unrest in the Arab country, and said Western states were exerting pressure on Syrian officials to dissent from the government.
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The CIA hate campaigns on social media
by Raul Antonio Capote
THE US Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities division has a Political Action Group (PAG) that performs, amongst other missions, analyses based on Big Data, processing profiles of subjects of interest and elaborating action plans that are sent to the Internet Task Force in charge of conducting the work.
Information is obtained via ‘Big Data’ that can be used for subversive work, allowing the forces to be better organised and mobilised to fulfil a given objective, and especially, through the micro-segmentation of the public, the concerns of each neighbourhood, each family, each person can be exploited, in a particular, specific manner.
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Putin condemns Neo-Nazi attempts to rewrite history
Sputnik
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin said during his speech at the Victory Parade on Sunday that modern followers of Nazi death squads continue attempts to rewrite the history of the Second World War.
“Today we are witnessing the surviving members of those killing squads and their followers trying to rewrite history and justify the traitors and criminals whose hands are smeared with the blood of hundreds of thousands of civilians,” Putin said.
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Ukraine: the path of self-destruction
by David Harasym
UKRAINE’S SHIFT from Yanukovych to Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been a series of tragic and rapidly escalating mistakes. Of course, none of this can be taken out of context and must carefully be examined with Ukraine’s long, complex history in mind. Decisions of the recent past – based on historical events and simmering, decades-long animosities – are at the basis of these mistakes and arrant miscalculations.
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Guantanamo Bay: an offence to Cuba’s sovereignty
by María Josefina Arce
THE CLOSURE of the Guantanamo naval base and the return of that territory located in the eastern part of the country illegally occupied by the USA, is a long-standing demand of Cuba, supported by other peoples, political personalities and international organisations.
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Stand by the Donbas resistance!
by New Worker correspondent
ON SATURDAY 8th May, the eve of Victory over Fascism Day, 25 left-wing parties and movements from four continents joined the International Anti-Fascist Forum video conference organised by the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
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Features
I’m still here, though my country’s gone West
by Vijay Prashad
A FULL GENERATION has elapsed since the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3rd March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. “We have a strict regime on our borders” Gorbachev told Németh, “but we are also becoming more open”.
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ANZAC Day and Australia’s dark foreign policy
by Jan Dieles
SUNDAY 25th April marked 106 years since Australian and New Zealander troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula of the then-Ottoman Empire, to fight and die in their thousands under an uncaring British command in pursuit of British imperial interests.
A tragedy worth commemorating, indeed. The tragedy of the horrors that wars, especially wars conducted on behalf of the interests of a foreign power, bring.
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