4 December: A peaceful student occupation of Senate House, University of London's headquarters, was violently evicted by the police this evening. When hundreds of students demonstrated in protest, they were assaulted by the cops.

When Engels, revered patriarch of international social democracy passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know un-paralleled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction.

A statement from the occupiers:

An independent network of over 100 students is occupying the headquarters of the University of London at Senate House. We can be contacted at londonoccupation@gmail.com and 07754768945.

Click here to download the paper as a pdf.
Click here to read articles online.

The 4:1 nurse ratio campaign argues nurses cannot look after an unlimited number of patients without patients suffering.

To ensure there is a safe number of nurses on shift there needs to be a mandatory patient to nurse ratio (4:1). Without that bottom line, financial pressures will always lead to reductions in nurses on shift.

Energy giant Npower has said it will make 1,460 staff redundant. Their jobs will be outsourced overseas.

Offices in Stoke, Peterlee, Thornaby in Teesside, and Oldbury in the West Midlands are being shut. Other affected sites are in the north east and Leeds. 540 office workers will be transferred to Capita.

Workers being made redundant are back office workers; the workers being transferred are call centre staff. There may be more redundancies, sell offs and outsourcing, which will effect thousands more staff.

The Executive of the Unite union meets from 8 December. It will decide the union’s attitude on Ed Miliband’s drive to change union members’ Labour political-levy payments to “opt-in”.

Jim Kelly, chair of the London and eastern region of Unite, told the Guardian on 3 December: “Our executive has got to keep a collective voice, and that... has to be expressed through the block vote at a decision-making party conference where unions keep 50% of the vote....

Ongoing struggles between the Libyan government and militias may either be resolved or worsen on the 15 December. That is the date the government has set for the full incorporation of the militias — which have been at low level war with the government — into the army.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan had the militias on the pay roll; on 15 December that pay will stop. The crisis is acute; the Amazigh and Tibu tribes of the south have respectively stopped the gas and the petroleum supplies to the north.

In recent weeks more than 100,000 anti-government protesters have taken to the streets of Bangkok and closed down numerous government offices.

The “yellow shirt” protesters are responding to the Yingluck Shinawatra government’s attempt to pass an amnesty bill that could lead to the return from exile of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s brother.

London Underground union RMT has begun balloting for strikes to stop a management cuts plan that will lead to the closure of every ticket office on London Underground and the loss of nearly 1,000 jobs.