Strike action by workers at Scottish Power and Manweb has been postponed again after management made a new offer. This was due to be put to a meeting of stewards from the AEEU, GMB, and TGWU unions on Thursday of this week.
Jeremy Dear has been elected as the new general secretary of the NUJ journalists' union. In the final count Jeremy got 3,437 votes, a clear victory over his nearest rival Bernie Corbett, who ended with 2,159 after transfers from other eliminated candidates had been taken into account.
Council Housing campaigners are stepping up their fight against New Labour's plans to sell off council houses across Britain. This comes after New Labour minister Stephen Byers' recent announcement that councils will be able to borrow money to improve their housing stocks.
Around 100 angry social services staff in the UNISON union stormed into Brighton and Hove City Council HQ on Wednesday morning of last week, and occupied the office of the director of social care and health.
Protesters have launched a campaign against racist treatment of asylum seekers by the US multinational Wackenhut. Under new arrangements asylum seekers within a 25-mile radius of the new Salford "reception centre" must report on the hour. Activists lobbied the reception centre on Thursday of last week.MARK KRANTZ
New Labour finally caved in to pressure over one of its key policies towards asylum seekers this week. The home secretary, David Blunkett, announced the government is planning to scrap the voucher scheme that forces refugees to live off just £26.54 a week, plus £10 cash.
The Scottish legal system was slammed as incompetent and racist by two official reports last week. The reports gave damning evidence of the way the police and courts failed to bring justice to the family of a young Sikh murder victim in Lanarkshire, Surjit Singh Chhokar.
Stop this slaughter NEW LABOUR is worried by the growing resistance to the war Britain and the US are waging on the people of Afghanistan. The government was shocked by the size of the 50,000-strong demonstration in London against the war.
THE MEDIA last week relegated the impact of the bombing of Afghanistan to the third or fourth item on news bulletins, behind gung-ho tales of derring-do by "special forces".
THE MEDIA routinely report civilian casualties in Afghanistan as "Taliban claims". In a growing number of cases the media then quietly admits three or four days later that the claim was in fact true.
