OVER 400 people packed into an organising meeting in central London on Tuesday of last week to launch the Stop the War Coalition. The meeting followed the 2,000-strong rally in central London the week before.
AROUND 200 helicopter pilots working in the North Sea oil and gas industry were due to start a ballot on industrial action over pay this week. The pilots, members of the BALPA union, work for CHC Scotia and fly to North Sea oil and gas platforms from Aberdeen, Norwich, Humberside and Blackpool.
ANTI-NAZI activists are stepping up their campaign against the Nazi BNP and National Front (NF) in Oldham in the run-up to the 20 October Respect anti-racist festival in the town. Campaigners prevented the NF from holding a demonstration in the town centre last Saturday.
OVER 200 lecturers and students from Langside College in Scotland demonstrated last week against redundancies. They joined a rally in Clydebank town hall with Scottish Socialist Party MSP Tommy Sheridan.
ADVERTISING cutbacks are producing an enormous crisis in the media, which depends on advertising. Before 11 September ITV advertising "showed its worst downturn for half a century", reports the Financial Times. "The outlook now looks much worse, with some television executives expecting a 30 percent fall in revenues."
GEORGE W Bush has gathered together all the weapons of modern war to attack one of the poorest nations on earth. We say stop the war now because:
MILLIONS OF people in Afghanistan were suffering from George Bush's war drive at the start of this week, before he had unleashed a single bomb. Threats of a ferocious US-led assault on Afghanistan forced relief agencies to pull out.
GEORGE W Bush's speech to the US Congress last week was a chilling combination of threats, arrogance and hypocrisy. "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," he warned. If Bush had thought about it, that was a declaration of war on more than half the world. Billions of people across the globe hate what the US government stands for. They hate what the US does through its domination of the IMF, World Trade Organisation and World Bank.
Crime of war "BUSH AND Blair say they are fighting a war for civilisation. Yet they have forgotten what civilisation means. What happened in America was a crime against humanity. The perpetrators should be brought to justice.
UNITED STATES: On just one day last week there were anti-war protests on 146 campuses. Two days earlier 2,600 people had protested in Portland. The University of California in Berkley was at the forefront of the protests. Over 3,000 people attended the demonstration there. A national demonstration in Washington was planned for Saturday of this week.
THE LANGUAGE used by Bush and Blair to justify their war drive is giving encouragement to racists and Nazis. In the US racist attacks took place within days of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
SOCIALIST Worker supporters report a big increase in sales as large numbers of people look for arguments against Bush's war drive. Last Saturday saw large street sales-85 in Brixton in south London, 232 in Birmingham, 307 in Manchester, 28 in Guildford, 50 in Hove, and many others. They helped to create a visible opposition to the war as local anti-war coalitions started to take shape.
