National News
Labour vows to freeze household energy bills
by Svetlana Ekimenko
LABOUR LEADER Sir Keir Starmer has unveiled the key points of his party’s “emergency” plan, to be later released in full, to tackle the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.
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Workers’ Notes
by New Worker correspondent
TUESDAY saw official confirmation of what 99 per cent of the population already knew. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) announced that despite average wages rising 4.7 per cent between April and June, inflation is rising resulting in real-term wages declining by three per cent.
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Over the Shop Counter
WE START at the top with Harrods, the posh people’s store in London, whose Qatari owners have the dubious distinction of being the first employer to threaten its staff with the new Tory laws that permit bosses to hire agency workers as strike breakers.
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On the Waterfront(s)
Workers involved in getting goods into the shops are also flexing their muscles. At Felixstowe in Suffolk, Britain’s largest container port (ironically established to get away from the bolshie London dockers), an eight-day strike is on the cards, which will greatly disrupt the activities of the retail trade particularly with regard to perishable foodstuffs
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Bourgeois Press
Two major newspaper companies are facing industrial action from disgruntled journalists
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Cost of Dying Strike
As an appropriate ending it is worth reporting that workers at the Co-operative Funeralcare’s only British factory, which makes coffins for their late customers, are on strike for a week from next Monday.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
NICOLA STURGEON as First Minister has put a great deal of energy into demanding a second independence referendum. To this end a case has been taken to the UK Supreme Court to obtain a ruling as to whether or not Holyrood has a right to organise one. This case will be heard in October, but it might be easier and cheaper for someone to read her the 1999 Scotland Act which clearly sets that Holyrood does not.
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Chinese Opera at the Edinburgh Fringe
Global Times
KUNQU OPERA, China’s 600-year-old cultural heritage, is set to appear at one of the world’s most celebrated art festivals – the Edinburgh Fringe, following the signing on Monday of a China–UK strategic cultural promotion agreement between the Asian Art Fund of Scotland and the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre based in Beijing.
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International News
USA: Starbucks recruits CIA goon for union busting
by Arjae Red
A 2ND AUGUST post on Twitter from @UnionBustingBot, revealing Starbucks had recently hired former Pinkertons employee and CIA agent Amanda Stanfill as the Manager for Global Intelligence for Retail Operations, went viral. Stanfill has quite an impressive resume as an agent of the imperialist US security state and a union-buster
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Michigan primary – Tlaib wins, Zionists lose
by Martha Grevatt
RASHIDA TLAIB of Detroit made history on 3rd January 2019, when she became the first Palestinian-American Representative in the US Congress. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were also the first two Muslim women elected to the House.
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Fidel: A man who transcended borders
by María Josefina Arce
MEN SUCH AS Fidel Castro transcend their era and the borders of the country where they are born. Never better expressed than in the words of the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, when he affirmed that: “Fidel does not belong only to Cuba, he belongs to this world of ours, to this America of ours…”
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US pandemic fight a complete failure
Xinhua
THE USA’s dealing with the COVID19 pandemic is a total failure as it disregards the lives of its citizens in order to pursue its capitalist interests, a leading Turkish medical specialist has said.
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Features
‘I was never afraid of the big shots’
by Frank Schumann
Workers World has provided excerpts from this interview, first published by the Marxist German daily Junge Welt, in English because it gives an historical view from Friedrich Wolff, who was a senior lawyer in the old German Democratic Republic (GDR).
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There is only one China
by New Worker correspondent
NCP LEADER Andy Brooks took part in a seminar on the Taiwan issue at the Chinese embassy on 12th August together with members of Friends of Socialist China, the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding and the Chinese community in London.
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Murder before Evensong
Book review by Ben Soton
Murder Before Evensong by the Reverend Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London 2022. Hardback: 368pp; rrp £16.99.
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