Issues Follow Follow

Lecturers at Northumbria university are due to begin indefinite strike action from Tuesday of next week after effectively being locked out by their employers.

If you’re wiser and luckier than me, you won’t have chosen to watch a pair of programmes on BBC4 last week, The Pedants’ Revolt and Never Mind the Full Stops. The idea that lay behind the first was that we are living in a time when more and more people are trying to hold the line on correct spelling, punctuation and grammar.

University lecturers met in Scarborough last week for the last time prior to the merging of the AUT and Natfhe lecturers’ unions to form the Union of Colleges and Universities (UCU).

A single British company produced more carbon dioxide last year than all of Croatia. Eon UK, which owns Powergen, is Britain’s biggest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. Last year it produced 27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Health Service lobby Over 1,000 nurses from the Royal College of Nursing and Unison took part in a mass lobby of parliament on Thursday of last week to protest against job cuts in the NHS.

"As far as the size goes, we are committed to rebuilding Iraq and to restoring the economy and to stabilising the security. The size of the embassy is in keeping with the goals we have set ourselves for Iraq."US State Department spokesman Justin Higgins, defending spending $600 million dollars on the new US embassy in Baghdad, the largest embassy ever built in the world

Near Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in the village of Qalai Qazi, stands a new, bright yellow health clinic built by US contractor The Louis Berger Group.

The failure of employers to guarantee secure pensions for rail workers could see the biggest strike in the industry since the General Strike of 1926.

A quarter of a million workers, students and professionals marched through the streets of Beirut on Wednesday of last week in one of the biggest workers’ demonstrations in Lebanon’s history. Schools, shops and businesses closed for a day in solidarity with the demonstrators.

The proposals leaked from Labour’s pensions White Paper were denounced by pensioner activists and some union leaders.

Over 3,000 car workers and office staff walked out at the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port on Merseyside on Thursday of last week. All three shifts at the Cheshire plant downed tools in protest at the threat of losing 1,000 jobs.

Just days before the government publishes its White Paper on pension reform, Britain’s biggest pensioner organisation – the National Pensioners Convention (NPC) – opened its annual Pensioners’ Parliament.