SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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Remember the Sharpeville Massacre by actually fighting racism
UN anti-racism day is not a date picked at random, but the anniversary of a turning point in the struggle against apartheid. Join us to discuss the national and international priorities for today’s black-led politics, writes MARC WADSWORTH
Painting of the Sharpeville massacre, which took place 21 March 1960, Sharpeville, Transvaal province, South Africa, currently located in the South African Consulate in London
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
NEW research has shown that at least 80 people — many of them youths — were murdered by South Africa’s racist apartheid police 63 years ago this month in what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. Officials at the time lied that the figure was only 69 as part of a big state cover-up.
The damning findings by US scholars say that, in addition, 297 people were seriously injured at Sharpeville when officers with submachine guns opened fire on peaceful, unarmed protesters outside a police station. It was a demonstration called by the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania against the hated “pass laws” that forced black people to either carry identity cards or be thrown in jail.
To commemorate the massacre, which shocked the world and helped to eventually crush apartheid and usher in black-majority rule, UN chiefs made March 21 its Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
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MARC WADSWORTH reports from the meeting to commemorate the Sharpeville Massacre 65 years ago
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MARC WADSWORTH salutes the remarkable talents of Labour’s first Indian MP, a communist who rocked the Commons with savage takedowns of the empire and the monarchy
