Monthly Archives: October 2016
EX-LABOUR Premier Blair has summoned the anti-Brexit camp, that is the bosses, the bankers, the majority of Tory and Labour MPs and the majority of the TUC General Council, all fanatical supporters of the EU to arms. ‘We are the insurgents now,’ he has declared. Earlier this month, Blair told...
WORK and Pensions Secretary Damian Green is today set to announce a consultation on reforming the hated Work Capability Assessment Tests of claimants of disability benefits, while Labour called on them to be scrapped. Claimants are to be assessed in a more ‘targeted and personalised’ way to ‘help’ more people...
AN Israeli court dropped charges on Wednesday against two Israeli security guards who shot and killed two Palestinian siblings at a checkpoint in April, ruling that there was not sufficient evidence that they had acted improperly. A private security contractor shot and killed Maram Salih Hassan Abu Ismail, 23, and...
‘A MONUMENTAL victory!’ the GMB union declared yesterday as the London employment tribunal ruled against Uber and in favour of the workforce who are now entitled to holiday pay, sick pay and the National Minimum Wage. The London Employment Tribunal ruled that Uber acted unlawfully by not providing drivers...
EIGHT hundred British troops, with tanks, armoured vehicles and drones are to be sent to Estonia in the Spring, on the border with Russia. The boosted mission, up from 500 announced earlier this year, is part of a planned deployment of 4,000 extra NATO troops to eastern Europe by the...
US-led Coalition forces carrying out air strikes in Syria must conduct thorough investigations into reports of civilian casualties from its operations and disclose their findings, said Amnesty International. Eleven Coalition attacks examined by the organisation appear to have killed some 300 civilians during two years of strikes targeting the armed...
A FEW short weeks ago at the Labour Party conference, the ‘left’ shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, proudly announced that the party would no longer have to whisper the word ‘socialism’ in private, the implication being that it would be proclaimed proudly from the rooftops under his and Corbyn’s leadership. In...
NEW University of Oxford research confirms there is a strong link between increased benefit sanctions and higher foodbank use. The University of Oxford researchers analysed four years of Trussell Trust foodbank data and found an increase in ten Jobseeker’s Allowance sanctions per 100,000 adults was associated with five more adults...
‘THE Ministry of Justice is presiding over a bloodbath of assaults, suicides and self-injury in prisons,’ Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, warned yesterday. The number of people dying in prison has risen by 21 per cent in a year as safety in jails deteriorates...
AS IS well known, the Clinton-led Democratic Party has pledged that if and when she is elected as President of the USA, she will take action to impose a no-fly zone on Syria. This will lead to thousands of Syrian people losing their lives, and could well lead to...
THE Resolution Foundation economic think tank is warning in a report, Pressing the Reset Button, published yesterday that the Chancellor faces an £84bn borrowing black hole in his Autumn Statement in some four weeks. Calculating from the average change in forecasts, after the Brexit referendum to the latest OBR projection...
‘HAVE a heart London,’ chanted a whole crowd of Refugees Welcome demonstrators waving red hearts on the Millennium Bridge over the River Thames yesterday. One of the protesters, schoolteacher and NUT member Natalie Zdrojewski, told News Line: ‘I’m here because what is happening to a lot of children is disgusting....
ONGOING protests in the occupied Palestinian territory and around the world are demanding the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Lebanese militant for Palestinian resistance who has been imprisoned by France for more than 32 years. A rally was held on Monday in front of the headquarters of the International...
THE NORTH Central London Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) has been unveiled, only the second in the country to do so, and it has sent alarm bells ringing throughout the NHS. Yesterday morning Birmingham City Council became the first to publish the Birmingham and Solihull’s STP. Camden and Birmingham councillors...
A LEAKED document obtained by the Labour Party has revealed that the Treasury faces a black hole of up to £16bn in its finances this year, as well as an additional £700m bill arising from a 25.9 per cent hike to Britain’s contribution to the EU!!! In George Osborne’s March...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah affirmed on Sunday that the battle against terrorist organisations in Aleppo is decisive for the entire region just as the battle of Mosul in Iraq. In a speech during an eulogy ceremony, Nasrallah pointed out that the terrorist crowds which were brought to Aleppo...
LAST Friday the much delayed CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) between the EU and Canada hit a brick wall when the Belgium region of Wallonia voted to reject its ratification – under the Belgium constitution all five of its regions had to give agreement. CETA is a ‘free trade’...
THE HOME Office announced yesterday that the transfer of refugee children from Calais to Britain has been halted while the destruction of the camp is underway, at the request of the French government. Baroness Sheenan, speaking from the camp, said yesterday: ‘The agreement that has been made concerning the refugees...
SOUTH Africa’s ruling ANC has dismissed a call by its chief whip, Jackson Mthembu, for the party’s NEC to resign in the wake of various controversies. ‘The NEC cannot resign because it was elected by the branches of the ANC. It is accountable to the branches,’ party spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa,...
BEFORE the Brexit referendum on June 23rd the masses of British workers refused to capitulate to the vast barrage of propaganda from Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’. Driven by the big wage cuts that have taken place since the 2008 banking collapse, and the huge sacrifices that the...
FIVE years after Libya’s long time leader Muammar Gadaffi was cold-bloodedly murdered right in front of mobile phone cameras and with the full backing of the Western nations participating in the 2011 military campaign against Libya, Russia’s Sputnik International has talked to Abdel Baset bin Hamel, a journalist who...
TENSIONS were high in the ‘Jungle’ Calais refugee camp yesterday as defiant occupants braced themselves for today’s scheduled closure. There were clashes with French police on Saturday night with many defiant refugees saying ‘we’re not moving’. Riot police fired teargas at refugees and asylum seekers after they started pelting...
CLASS struggle has erupted on the campus of one of the top universities in the United States of America, Harvard. Four hundred US students gathered in the main square last Friday October 14, cheering in support of the university’s catering staff who have been on indefinite strike for the last...
THE FRENCH government is to raze the Calais refugee camp to the ground ‘within days’, forcibly removing every man, woman and child. After six months of doing absolutely nothing about the 1,000 unaccompanied children languishing in the camp, the Tory government finally brought the first handful of 14 refugee children...
TORY health secretary Jeremy Hunt, after attempting to impose an unsafe and unfair contract on junior doctors, now wants new contracts for one million health workers across the NHS, including consultants. Hunt says he is in ‘constructive’ negotiations with NHS unions on ‘further contract reform.’ He said the government is...
UNISON is accusing Derby City Council of inflaming tensions and escalating a dispute with school support staff who have seen their pay slashed by up to 25%. The staff – who began their latest two-day strike yesterday (Thursday) – plan to distribute balloons and stickers to parents and children as...
THE war between the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and Tory prime minister Theresa May was stepped up on Wednesday when Carney issued a paper rubbishing May for her speech at the Tory party conference where she talked of the bad ‘side effects’ of the policy...
LEADER of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has called on Iranian authorities not to back down in the face of the United States’ ever-increasing demands. Ayatollah Khamenei made the remarks on Wednesday in a meeting with a group of top university students and members of Iran’s National Elites...
ECUADOR has admitted that it ‘partly restricted’ the internet access for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is taking refuge at its London embassy from the various imperialist powers that are keen to get at him after the revelations that WikiLeaks has made about imperialism’s crimes all over the...
AT a rally organised in Gaza City on Monday commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, a number of activists and former prisoners vowed that Palestinian resistance movements would kidnap more Israeli soldiers until all Palestinian political prisoners were freed from Israeli custody. In 2006, Gaza...
HOMELESSNESS charity St Mungo’s revealed yesterday that 129 rough sleepers died in London since 2010 – an average of one a fortnight – while some people, shockingly, were told by councils to sleep rough to access support. The charity’s report, Nowhere safe to stay: the dangers of sleeping rough, sheds...
TUC deputy general secretary Paul Novak joined RMT striking Southern rail guards on their morning picket line at London’s Victoria station yesterday. Novak told News Line: ‘I’m here to show solidarity and support to RMT members on Southern trains. It’s a travesty that neither the employer nor the government will...
JUST over 3,200 of New Zealand’s 3,500 junior doctors began 48-hour strike action at 7.00am yesterday morning. The New Zealand Resident Doctors Association (NZRDA) members are fighting to restrict the number of consecutive days they are obliged to work. Their union wants the maximum number of days junior doctors have...
HEAD teachers from all 250 primary schools in West Sussex have written to Theresa May to demand an extra £20 million as they face such an acute funding crisis that some schools are considering cutting the school week to a four-day-week! Without £20m emergency transitional funding they say that...
THE decision by the UK state-owned NatWest Bank to cancel RT’s (Russia Today) UK bank accounts is a crude attempt by the May government to drive it off the air, and to censor the news so that an attempt can be made to brainwash British workers...
AN Israeli court in Jerusalem made a decision on Sunday to release the teenage daughter of Misbah Abu Sbeih, who was killed by Israeli forces after he shot and killed two Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem last week. Lawyer Muhammad Mahmoud of prisoners’ rights group Addameer said that 17-year-old Eiman...
THE ASSAULT on the Iraqi city of Mosul has begun, with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announcing in a televised address in the early hours of Monday: ‘The hour of victory has come. Today I declare the start of the heroic operations to liberate you from Daesh.’ Artillery began firing...
THE man who is credited as the principle architect of the single European currency 14 years ago has just warned that his ‘project’ is unworkable and on the verge of ‘collapse’. Professor Otmar Issing, the European Central Bank’s first chief economist, expressed his fears that the euro and with it...
CHIEF Inspector of Schools Sir Michael Wilshaw has criticised Tory PM Theresa May’s ‘obsessive’ plan to approve a new wave of selective grammar schools calling it ‘socially divisive’. Wilshaw says the move will lower standards for the majority of pupils and would only work ‘for the few’. May has repeatedly...
BANK of England Governor Carney has fallen out with PM May telling her that he will not take orders from politicians on what the Bank of England’s policies should be. He spoke up just days after the Tory Party conference, where May criticised the Bank’s policies of low or no...
THE leader of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement has warned that the US military is preparing the ground for an act of aggression against the war-torn Arab country. In a televised speech on Thursday, Abdul Malik Badreddin al-Houthi slammed Washington’s recent missile attacks against three mobile radar sites on Yemen’s Red...
THE SPECTRE of health insurance to ‘top-up’ the NHS has raised its ugly head. It is part of the arsenal of weapons turned on the NHS in all-out war launched by this Tory government. War on the junior doctors, war on student nurses and war on A&Es, maternity and...
BRITAIN’S secretive work at a death-row jail in Bahrain is being challenged by international human rights group Reprieve. The UK Foreign Office paid almost a million pounds last year to NI-CO Ltd, a company owned by the Northern Irish government, for projects with Bahrain which included training hundreds of prison...