History & Anniversaries

THIRTY YEARS ago, on 1 January 1974, a power-sharing government was established in Northern Ireland. Within months it had been brought down by a Loyalist stoppage and it would be 25 years before another power […]

LC: It shows what’s possible when you have a party and a leadership which wages a real fight in defence of workers’ interests. At that time, like today, local councils were carrying out a mix […]

ON 15 June 1953, about 60 building workers on the Friedrichshaim hospital building site in East Berlin stopped work to draw up a letter protesting at a 10% increase in the work norms imposed by […]

WHEN CIA experts wrote a report in September 1978 on the political health of the pro-western monarchist regime in Iran, they concluded that despite his autocratic rule, the Shah presided over a stable dynasty that […]

WHILST THERE are quite clear differences between the situation now and the situation in Lebanon following the Israeli invasion in 1982 (not least the collapse of Stalinist USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries), it indicates […]

If a shooting war starts in the Gulf it will be the first real test of the US army rebuilt after its withdrawal from Vietnam. The US interventions during the 1980s in El Salvador, Grenada […]

ON 5 November 1956 British and French paratroops occupied Egypt’s Port Said at the entrance to the Suez Canal.

ON THE 22 October 1962 the president of the United States, John F Kennedy, made a speech to the nation. Informing everyone of the build up of offensive nuclear weapons (supplied by the Soviet Union) […]