National News
Postman Pat goes to war
by New Worker correspondent
Part of last year’s strike wave was the Communication Workers Union (CWU) action against the privatised Royal Mail that saw postal deliveries disrupted in the run up to Christmas. Some 115,000 workers took strike action after Royal Mail bosses used all sorts of legalistic manœuvres to invalidate overwhelming strike mandates.
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Uncharitable Charity
by New Worker correspondent
Monday lunchtime saw a lively protest by strikers employed by St Mungo Community Housing Association outside the City Hall in London’s Royal Docks. This was just the latest stage in a bitter industrial action involving under-paid workers at the charity that is dedicated to ending homelessness.
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Non-Poverty Pay
by New Worker correspondent
Things are looking up for one group of public sector workers: Senior Civil Servants. The mandarins have used their trade union, the FDA, to threaten strike action to secure a decent pay offer that will now be put to the members.
According to the FDA, the 2023/24 Pay Remit Guidance will be amended to allow individual departments to pay an extra fixed £1,500 non-consolidated payment to help them cope with the increased cost of living.
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The ever-changing Earth
by Ben Soton
{The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story} by Peter Frankopan. London, Bloomsbury Publishing 2023, 736pp, hardback rrp £30.
{The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story} is the latest work of Peter Frankopan, professor of Byzantine History at Worcester College Oxford. His previous works include {The First Crusade: The Call from the East} (2012), {The Silk Roads: A New History of the World} (2015) and {The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World} (2018). All of Frankopan’s works are published by Bloomsbury.
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Eastbourne hosts conference on Engels
Xinhua
The seaside resort of Eastbourne in East Sussex last week hosted an international conference titled {Engels in Eastbourne}.
Nearly 100 professors, experts and scholars from more than 20 universities and research institutions in more than 10 countries, including the UK, China, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Spain, Romania, Denmark, Turkey and India, held in-depth discussions to commemorate the 175th anniversary of The {Communist Manifesto}.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf has at last one great achievement to his name – he has now lasted longer in his office longer than Liz Truss managed in hers. The bigger question, however, is what if anything he has done to refute his popular nickname of “Useless”.
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International News
A monument taken down will not erase history
by Elson Concepción Pérez , Granma
Anyone who has visited the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland could never have imagined that on 5th May 2023, in the Polish city of Glubczyce, the monument of gratitude to the Red Army, which liberated Poland from the Nazis, would be demolished.
With expressions of euphoria for some and sadness and shame for others, the world was able to see, live and direct, the images of this event, broadcast by the Polish Institute of National Memory.
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Feed the poor – not the Pentagon!
Workers World (USA)
US President Joe Biden averted a default on the federal debt on 3rd June when he signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Biden hailed the bipartisan “compromise and consensus” that resulted in the bill being approved by the House and Senate earlier in the week. He even said the Republican negotiators, who wanted cuts in spending – but of course not military spending – “acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.”
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India says signalling system error led to train crash
by New Worker correspondent
The train derailment in eastern India that killed at least 288 people and injured more than 800 last week was caused by an error in the electronic signalling system that sent the trains on the wrong tracks says Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
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Ben Wallace runs for top NATO job
by James Tweedie, Sputnik
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has thrown his hat into the ring to be the next NATO secretary general. But who is the ambitious Cabinet minister and what can we expect from him as head of the US-led military bloc?
With Norway's Jens Stoltenberg stepping down in the autumn, political figures from across Europe are jockeying to replace him.
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Features
A new airliner from People’s China: another lesson in self-reliance
by Raghu, People’s Democracy (India)
IT HAS been some time coming, but China’s first large home-made passenger jet finally entered commercial service last week, on 28th May 2023 on a China Eastern Airlines flight from Shanghai to Beijing. The C919 jetliner, with a 156-168 seat capacity and a nominal range of 4000–5500 km, is made by the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China or COMAC. It is a single-aisle narrow-body passenger aircraft positioned to compete with the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.
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Fighting fascism in Europe!
by New Worker Correspondent
We support the victory not of Russia, but of the world against resurgent fascism in Europe.
Theo Russell, representing the NCP and the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity campaign, met comrades and friends at a key-note conference in Moscow on the Ukraine crisis last month.
He joined campaigners from Holland, France, Austria, Italy, Brazil, the Basque Country and India, who overcame the difficulties in travelling to Russia imposed by the imperialist sanctions regime, to meet in the Russian capital for the 6th annual conference of the Red Square-Molotov Club.
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