Alvaro Uribe is found guilty of witness tampering and procedural fraud, reports NICK MACWILLIAM

THE correspondence between Marx, Engels and others occupies several volumes of the 50-volume Collected Works. The correspondence, of course, is not a diary and much is rightly taken up with the theory and practice of politics.
Yet there are passages which reflect Marx and Engels’ life in mid-Victorian England and how they viewed affairs in what was then the predominant capitalist power. These insights often informed their political and theoretical work and they also take away from the right-wing stereotype that Marx and Engels were iconoclasts untroubled by the issues and difficulties of daily life.
While Christmas had been reinstated as a holiday period in the 1850s, partly thanks to the efforts of Charles Dickens, the marking of Easter developed more slowly. Good Friday, then as now, was an important Christian occasion but Easter Monday did not become a public holiday until after the 1871 Bank Holidays Act. Before then, cheap rail excursions for the working class had started to become a feature.

KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws

The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT

While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT

10 years ago this month, Corbyn saved Labour from its right-wing problem, and then the party machine turned on him. But all is not lost yet for the left, says KEITH FLETT