Gloucestershire’s phlebotomists have brought their historic strike to a close after almost a year of action, leaving a legacy of determination – and a clear lesson about the power of solidarity in the face of anti-union laws and austerity, says FBU general secretary STEVE WRIGHT
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Holocaust – what’s in a word?
Holocaust, shoah, genocide – none of the words chosen to describe the nazis’ extermination programme are free of ideology, writes DAVID ROSENBERG
With more people dying each year and many spending their final days in institutions, researchers argue that wider access to palliative care could offer a more humane and cost-effective alternative, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
While public outrage has focused on the abuse committed within Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit, key questions remain unresolved, says JOHN GREEN
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
Tens of thousands of students left their classrooms and took to the streets against conscription and rising military spending. NICK WRIGHT reports from Berlin
A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
AS we mark Holocaust Memorial Day this weekend it is worth noting that the term “Holocaust” was not widely used by writers and scholars until the 1960s and was only one of several words that have described the extermination of an estimated six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and around one million Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) by nazi fascists between 1941-5.
One million of those Jews were slaughtered in mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen (SS and police units aided by local collaborators) who swept through areas of the USSR that the nazis invaded from June 1941.
Many others died from starvation and disease in walled ghettoes in which the nazis incarcerated them. The majority, however, were industrially murdered in a network of specially constructed death camps.
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On May 16 1944, Romani families in Auschwitz-Birkenau armed themselves with stones, tools, and sheer collective will, forcing the SS to retreat – leaving a legacy of defiance that speaks directly to the fascisms of today, says VICTORIA HOLMES
The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine, writes PAWEL WARGAN
JOHN ELLISON recalls the momentous role of the French resistance during WWII
Such betrayals to the authorities are strikingly at odds with the history of Jewish persecution, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER