National News
Transport battles North and South
NEEDLESS TO SAY the class struggle continues in the real world. One of these struggles is being waged by rail union RMT against the South Western Railway (SWR), which has unleashed “an attack on rail services, jobs and pay unseen since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s”.
Both SWR and Network Rail have started a “stakeholder consultation” on plans to reduce peak and off-peak services by 15 per cent across the network by the end of next year.
General Secretary Mick Lynch warned that: “RMT will simply not accept any cuts to services and attacks on jobs and pay on the railway,” adding: “It’s bizarre in the extreme that the company are trying to spin their savage cuts as somehow improving their services. No one will fall for this nonsense. It wasn’t long ago that the government promised they were going to ‘reverse the Beeching cuts’ but with these proposals they are trashing that promise and instead preparing to unleash Beeching two on our railways.”
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
ON THE 16th August the Edinburgh-based Daily Business website reported that Alex Salmond was to be elected leader of the Alba Party at its inaugural conference. It quoted General Secretary Chris McEleny as saying that Salmond was “the only person that’s ever been able to face down a UK Government to make them accept Scotland’s independence demands and deliver an independence referendum. Alba could not be led by someone better”.
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Biden ‘doesn’t give a damn’ about Britain
by Ilya Tsukanov
JOE BIDEN’S failure to appoint an ambassador to Britain, over seven months into his term, is a sign that the president doesn’t really care about Britain or the rest of the world, former US diplomat Brett Bruen, who served as White House director of global engagement under Barack Obama, has suggested.
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Lorry tragedy documentary for film festival
VNS
A NEW Vietnamese documentary about the people-trafficking lorry tragedy in Essex is going to be screened at an international film festival in India. The documentary, produced by Việt Nam News, will be screened at the Pune International Short Film Festival next month.
One Year On – The Essex Lorry Tragedy was a special production made to mark the anniversary of the deaths of 39 Vietnamese who perished as they tried to enter the UK illegally in October 2019.
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Roger Waters says war spending is tax on workers
Radio Havana Cuba
“THE 9/11 terrorist attacks could have been a wake-up call for the United States and the world to reassess priorities, but instead it fuelled extremism and helped funnel public resources into the coffers of war profiteers,” Waters told Russia Today presenter Afshin Rattansi.
The former Pink Floyd frontman spoke to RT’s Going Underground on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the 1973 US-backed coup in Chile, which led the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet to power.
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International News
Left victory in Norwegian polls
by Igor Kuznetsov
A CHANGE of government is looming in Norway, as the left-of-centre “red” coalition heads for a parliamentary majority in Monday’s general election.
Although Labour, the traditional heavyweights, have had their weakest showing in years, despite winning the election, the fringe left-wing parties, by contrast, have had a record success.
Combined, the Labour (26.4 per cent), Centre (13.6 percent) and the Socialist Left (7.5 per cent) have won 89 of 169 seats in the Norwegian parliament, with over 99 per cent of votes counted. This allows them to safely depose the right-of-centre “blue” bloc led by the Conservatives.
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The scourge of war
by Guillermo Alvarado
NO WAR COMES or goes by itself. Each conflict is usually accompanied by a series of plagues whose effects take time to control, as is happening in Afghanistan where poverty could reach catastrophic proportions next year.
This was the warning of the director for the Asia Pacific region of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Kanni Wignaraja, when analysing the complex situation in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign troops following two decades of military occupation.
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FBI releases declassified 9/11 records
by Ed Newman
THE FBI has released a newly declassified 16-page document related to logistical support provided to two of the Saudi hijackers in the run-up to the 11th September 2001 (9/11) attacks.
The document, released late on Saturday, describes contacts the hijackers had with Saudi associates in the USA but offers no evidence that the Saudi government was complicit in the plot. It is the first investigative record to be disclosed since US President Joe Biden ordered a declassification review of materials that for years have remained out of public view.
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The dirty work of American intelligence
Global Times
THE WORLD has once again witnessed the ineptitude of US intelligence. The sudden collapse of the Ghani government in Afghanistan and the hasty withdrawal of American troops has added to a lengthy list of “major failures” by US intelligence.
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Features
9/11 collapsed towers… and Empire
by Finian Cunningham
THE USA’s 245-year history as a political entity has been one long trail of wars and more wars. It is estimated that nearly 95 per cent of that historical span has seen the nation involved in either all-out wars, proxy conflicts or other military subterfuges.
Since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, however, the USA has gone into hyper-war mode. Twenty years ago, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan ushered in multiple other American wars and covert operations from Asia to Africa, from the Middle East to the Americas.
At one point, the former Obama administration was bombing seven countries simultaneously all in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Hundreds of US bombs rain down somewhere on the planet every day.
[Read the complete story in the print edition]
Russia–Belarus summit: Is unity back on the agenda?
by Lyuba Lulko
THE UNION of Russia and Belarus has finally emerged from oblivion, but… mirror, mirror on the wall, does it have the brightest prospects of them all? Is it going to be the beginning of the way for Russia and Belarus to rebuild the broken puzzle of post-Soviet states? Can Putin and Belarus turn back time, as Cher once sang?
The meeting between Russian and Belarusian presidents Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko on 9th September turned out to be productive.
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Ain’t no party like a Communist Party: Portugal’s Avante! Festival
by Jamal Rich
CLOSE TO 40,000 regular festival goers descended upon Amora, a small suburb outside of Portugal’s capital Lisbon, last weekend for the 45th Avante! Festival – a cultural, musical and political extravaganza that is a highlight of summer here. The event is named for and sponsored by the newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) Avante! (or Onwards! in English) – which was instrumental in overthrowing the fascist dictatorship of António Salazar in 1974.
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