Dear IRR News subscriber,

This week the late Manning Marable (who was on the Editorial Committee of the IRR’s journal Race & Class) won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography, Malcolm X – a life of reinvention. In his honour we have freed up a number of his articles on the politics of the black working class in the US.

Aisha Maniar reports on the impact of contracting out interpreting services in courts, prisons and police stations across the UK. We also review a report by Migreurop on the outsourcing of border controls in Europe and the treatment of stowaways.

In other news from across the UK two women have been charged in connection with the racially motivated murder of Simon Tang in Northern Ireland in 1996 and there have been other racially motivated attacks this week on families in Northern Ireland. In Portadown three families were targeted and in Ballymena an arson attack was reported. The CPS reversed its decision not to prosecute a police officer involved in the alleged abuse of a young black man in Newham and figures released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that 293 police officers from across the UK were disciplined for racist behaviour, but only five were actually dismissed.

Harmit Athwal

Editor, IRR News