SOME 1.4 million children as young as seven sat down this week to five days of what one headteachers' conference has condemned as "annual torture".
"I BELIEVE the documents are a forgery by someone who had no familiarity with the inner workings of the Iraqi intelligence service." With those words a "highly regarded expert" blew a gaping hole in the smear campaign against anti-war MP George Galloway on Sunday. The expert had examined thousands of official papers captured from the Iraqi regime by Western intelligence agencies in the 1991 Gulf War.
'TOM'S shooting wasn't an accident," Michelle De Mello, a close friend of Tom Hurndall, told Socialist Worker.
NEW LABOUR laid into George Galloway last week, suspending him from the party for daring to speak out against the war on Iraq. The leadership want to shut him up. They know one effect of suspension is to rule him out of being nominated for a safe Labour seat in Glasgow. Their treatment of Galloway is in stark contrast to those who have certainly "brought the party into disrepute".
SOME 3,000 people took to the streets of the Afghan capital, Kabul, last week in the first demonstration against the US military occupation of their country. The protest took place just weeks after the world's media began broadcasting scenes of similar protests in Iraq. US forces have remained in Afghanistan since the end of the one-sided war there 18 months ago.
DR GHAYASUDDIN Siddiqui is leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain and a prominent member of the Stop the War Coalition. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the impact of the anti-war movement on the Muslim community in Britain. Dr Siddiqui uses the term Islamist to refer to groups the mainstream press would usually call Islamic fundamentalists.
THE GOVERNMENT says foundation hospitals will mean modernising the NHS and more choice for patients. In truth they are a dagger at the heart of the NHS. In every locality they will mean an elite of hospitals which will prosper by poaching staff from others and by borrowing from the private sector.
THERE WAS no comfort for New Labour from last Thursday's elections, and little for any of the other mainstream parties either. There were, however, dramatic breakthroughs for the left. The Scottish Socialist Party won six seats in the proportional voting element of the Scottish Parliament elections.
ALVARO URIBE Velez is a good friend of George Bush and Tony Blair. The right wing president of Colombia was the only South American ruler to back war on Iraq. Uribe now sounds like he wants his powerful backers to send their forces to Colombia.
ALAN MILLER, a steelworker at the Stocksbridge plant in South Yorkshire, was sickened by the news last week of massive job cuts at the plant. Bosses of the Corus steel firm decreed that 1,150 jobs are to go across Britain - including hundreds at Stocksbridge. This was part of their "restructuring" plan to boost profits.
I SUPPOSE I must be an educational failure. I sat the English test. I failed to get full marks - and I had written the story on which the test was based. Presumably I had failed to fully understand the intentions of the author. The story was from my book A Chest of Stories for Nine Year Olds, but being in the folk tale style it was indeed suitable for the 11 year olds taking the test.
GEORGE BUSH is coming to Europe on Sunday 1 June. Thousands of anti-war and anti-capitalist protesters plan to give him the welcome he deserves. Bush will be at a meeting of the G8 grouping of world leaders in Evian near the French-Swiss border. The G8 meeting is a major opportunity to protest against the chief warmongers - Bush and Blair - and their occupation of Iraq.
