National News
Assange vigil outside the High Court
by Ekaterina Blinova
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rallied outside the High Court of Justice in London this week as the court considered whether Assange will have further opportunities to fight extradition to the United States before UK courts. The demonstrators held up posters calling for Assange’s release and his non-extradition to the USA. Inside two senior judges heard evidence from his lawyers and those representing the American government, and opted against making an immediate decision on what is likely Assange’s final bid to block extradition.
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Cease-fire now!
by New Worker correspondent
Over 250,000 people marched on the Israeli embassy in London on Saturday in support of the Palestinian Arabs and to demand an immediate end to Israeli aggression in Gaza. At a rally near the Zionist embassy former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Palestinian ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot both called for justice for the Palestinian people.
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Struggles on the street
by New Worker correspondent
The legal news website RollOnFriday reports that a cleaner has been fired for eating a leftover sandwich found in Devonshires, an ambulance chasing London legal firm specialising in “no-win no-fee” medical negligence cases.
The cleaner, Gabriela Rodriguez from Ecuador, had cleaned Devonshires offices for two years before being sacked by her sub-contracting employer Total Clean after Devonshires had made a formal complaint about the £1.50 tuna sandwich from Tesco that had been left over from a meeting and was due to be discarded.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
The Scottish Labour Party’s annual conference has been and gone. The event was more eye-catching than it has been in recent years. It was notable for being held in a decent sized Glasgow venue rather than a heavily curtained hall in a county town. However the numbers protesting outside at Labour’s stand on Palestine greatly exceeded those inside.
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International News
Ukraine after the fall of Avdiivka
By Hu Xijin , Global Times
Last Saturday Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Alexander Syrskyi suddenly announced his decision to withdraw Ukrainian units from Avdiivka in the Donetsk region. This is the most significant change on the Ukrainian battlefield since May of last year and the latest trend favouring Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia will hold presidential elections next month, and Putin winning his fifth term is widely anticipated in Western public opinion.
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Solidarity with Gaza and the Donbas in Dublin
by Theo Russell
Activists gathered last Saturday in front of the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, central Dublin, to call for an end to arms supplies to Ukraine and Israel, and an end to NATO aggression in Ukraine and Yemen and Israel’s brutal military operation in the Gaza Strip. The protesters also called for ceasefires in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen.
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Can it be any clearer?
by Guillermo Alvarado, Radio Havana Cuba
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently expressed a series of blunt truths about what is really happening in the Middle East, in particular in the martyred Gaza Strip, subjected to intense Zionist bombardment and ground attacks.
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Moscow Urges USA to Show Restraint over Navalny’s Death
Sputnik
The United States needs to show restraint in connection with the death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and wait for the results of the medical examination, the Russian Foreign ministry said last week. “It is interesting why, for the White House and the State Department, the death of a Russian citizen in a Russian penal colony turned out to be much more important and seemed more terrible than the death of a US citizen, journalist Gonzalo Lira, tortured in a Ukrainian prison? Instead of indiscriminate accusations, it would be better to show restraint and wait for the official results of the medical examination,” the ministry said.
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Features
The Descent into Barbarism
by Prabhat Patnaik , People’s Democracy (India)
IN the Junius Pamphlet written from jail in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg had said that the choice before humanity was between barbarism and socialism. Liberal opinion would contest this, arguing that the barbarism that marked the two world wars and the period in between was unrelated to capitalism; indeed the liberal tendency that comes to the fore under capitalism, it would claim, fought against the barbarism of that period. Capitalism, it would assert, has been characterised by the ascendancy of humane values to an unprecedented extent, as the post-war years have shown.
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Donbas communists speak
by New Worker correspondent
Boris Litvinov, secretary of the Donetsk district of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, joined a Zoom meeting with members of International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) while on a visit to Moscow earlier in the month. This was our first contact with comrade Litvinov for some time as residents in the Donbas are still unable to access many applications including virtual meeting platforms.
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An epic tale of the West Country
Book review by Ben Soton
The Armour of Light by Ken Follett: Macmillan 2023; 752 pp; £25:00 Hbk, £6:00 Pbk
The Armour of Light is the fifth novel set in the fictional West Country city of Kingsbridge. The previous four include The Pillars of the Earth set in the 12th century; The World Without End, cov- ering the Hundred Years War and the Black Death and the Column of Fire set during the Reformation. Meanwhile in 2020 Follet wrote the prequel The Evening and the Morning set in the years before the Norman Conquest .
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China: Human rights and human dignity
by Nils Bergemann , Beijing Review
When I talk to German friends who have lived in China for a long time – one of them has been in the country for almost 50 years – they confirm what my Chinese friends also tell me: China has become safer, better educated, and more and more open and prosperous. The increase in security also indicates an improvement in legal certainty and progress in the field of human rights.
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