Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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Namibia: a massacre the world forgot
After Germany lost WWI and with it Namibia, its colonial crimes there were almost buried — until the efforts of the socialist GDR, who in 1974 sent JOHN GREEN undercover to document the nation's past and present struggles
Captured Herero and Nama prisoners circa 1904. The Germans massacred large numbers of the indigenous population: between 24,000-100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama were killed in the 20th century’s first genocide.
From 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre war games to HMS Spey provocations in the Taiwan Strait, Labour continues Tory militarisation — all while claiming to uphold ‘one China’ diplomatic agreements from 1972, reports KENNY COYLE
White racist rioting has many an infamous precedent in Britain, writes DAVID HORSLEY
The SNP might dissemble over the meaning of ‘nationalism,’ but it can’t disguise the fact that it is no left-wing party, says ELAINE SMITH
Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
IF WE think about the toxic colonial legacy of European countries, we invariably think of Britain, Spain, France or Belgium — but who knows anything about German colonialism? That will certainly be true for many, at least before they read the recent novel, After Lives by last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who highlights the brutality of German colonialism in Tanganyika.
Germany, just like other colonising nations, has scrupulously evaded examining its colonial past or attempting to come to terms with it.
Before its defeat in World War I, Germany held colonies in what today are 14 separate countries in Africa and among them was South-West Africa (present day Namibia). German South-West Africa had been a colony of the German empire from 1884 until 1915.
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