'DISCOVER weapons of mass distraction," declares the latest Easyjet billboard ad campaign, above a photo of a woman's breasts in a bikini top. Every high street is full of such images, selling records, cars, plumbing parts and mobile phones. The models fulfil society's stereotype of the ideal female shape - they are all skinny and busty.
JOHN BOMBA, a leading Zimbabwean socialist and pro-democracy activist, should have been speaking at this year's Marxism 2003 event in London. Instead he was refused entry to Britain by the UK High Commission in Harare. Here John talks angrily about his experience.
WORK TILL you drop was the message from trade and industry secretary Patricia Hewitt last week. Under the utterly transparent cover of "tackling age discrimination" she announced the government plans to lift the retirement age to 70 or scrap it altogether.
LINDSEY GERMAN is the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and the editor of Socialist Review, the monthly magazine of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Lindsey spoke to Socialist Worker as part of our series on the future of the left.
THE STRIKES in France during May and June were amazing. Some people have compared them to the public sector workers' strikes of December 1995. In many ways they were better. On 13 May, for example, there were at least eight million on strike.
HEALTH WORKERS from the North Lincolnshire NHS Trust were coming to the end of their eight days of alternate strike days last week. They wanted to end with a bang and decided to take their fight to the multinational company that refuses to pay the £5.02 an hour they are demanding.
SOCIALIST WORKER is different from all other newspapers. It does not just report events that happen - it aims to help people fight back. The paper creates a space for activists from the movement and working class people to tell their side of the story. And it lets people know that others are fighting the same battles as they are.
A HOUSING estate in Wrexham, North Wales, hit the headlines two weeks ago when it erupted in two nights of rioting. One of the Iraqi Kurds living on Caia Park estate was in a relationship with a local woman. A dispute over this led to a gang of local white thugs attacking another Iraqi's house. They severely beat him when he stepped outside.
"THEY MAKE profits on our backs," "Private companies are only in it to make a fast buck," "The only thing they care about are the shareholders, not us or the patients." These were just some of the angry comments by low paid strikers from Scunthorpe, Grimsby and Goole hospitals as they descended on the headquarters of their bosses Carillion last week.
ONE OF the most well-known figureheads of the global movement against corporate power was thrown in jail in France last week. José Bové, leader of the radical farmers' Conféderation Paysanne, faces ten months inside.
ALL THE blustering of Alastair Campbell and his chorus of tame ministers and Labour backbenchers can't conceal the fact that the Iraq war is turning very nasty for its perpetrators. The row over the fact that George W Bush and Tony Blair lied their way to war wouldn't be half so bad if the situation on the ground in Iraq weren't becoming so serious.
MARK SERWOTKA, general secretary of the civil servants' union PCS, spoke to Socialist Worker as part of our series on the future for the left.
