Monthly Archives: July 2005
Yesterday, police said that two more of the alleged 21 July would-be London bombers were now in custody after a series of armed raids in North Kensington, west London. One raid was carried out in Delgarno Gardens near Wormwood Scrubs, and another in Tavistock Road and Tavistock Crescent, near Westbourne...
JUST minutes after the IRA issued a statement that it was giving up its historic armed struggle, the British army began demolishing a watch tower on the border with the Irish Republic in South Armagh, emphasising how desperate the British government is to encourage the IRA to implement its...
The IRA announced the end of the armed struggle against British imperialism in a statement issued on Thursday. The statement said: ‘The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm (1600 BST) this afternoon. All IRA units have been...
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei warned Tuesday that, ‘without Jerusalem there will be no peace’ with Israel. ‘Peace starts in Jerusalem and ends there. Peace starts by recognising our right to return, to self-determination, the establishment of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital and the cessation of settlement...
‘All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. ‘All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. With these words the IRA yesterday gave up the historic revolutionary struggle to unite Ireland through expelling British imperialism, after a long...
The IRA yesterday announced the end of its armed struggle against British imperialism. The IRA statement said: ‘The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. ‘All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. ‘All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of...
THE scale of the crisis that has hit capitalist Britain is now so great that it has forced the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth, to speak out. She warned, as a lawyer, on Tuesday in Malaysia, that the abolition of many democratic rights and liberties by the Blair government,...
The GMB trade union Tuesday called upon DHL management to publicly apologise to the family of one of its employees, whom it ‘callously sacked for suspected malingering or unauthorised absence when in fact he was suffering from ill health that had given rise to confusion and in the end...
American trade unions, SEIU and the Teamsters have disaffiliated from the national AFL-CIO confederation, and four major unions – the Teamsters, Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE HERE, and SEIU – decided not to attend the federation’s national convention. The four, along with the Laborers, Carpenters and Farm Workers unions formed the 6-million strong...
PRIME Minister Tony Blair announced yesterday at his monthly press conference that he would not ‘give an inch to terrorism’, and vowed to combat it and its sources at home and abroad. He however, adjusted his previous line that the war in Iraq was nothing at all to do with...
‘The police say they have a “shoot-to-kill-to-protect policy”. Were you made aware of that policy and is it something that parliament should have been made aware of?’ This was the question from a journalist at the prime minister’s monthly press conference yesterday. Blair replied: ‘I’m not sure of the history of...
ON Sunday, Police Commissioner Blair told the world that the policy of shooting to kill ‘terrorist suspects’ was national policy, not just a Metropolitan Police policy, and that the policy had been ‘reviewed and reviewed’ and that ‘we are quite comfortable that the policy is right.’ Blair continued to admit...
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) says it got no answers about Israel’s intentions from the American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during Rice’s latest visit to the Middle East. The PNA said Rice only gave ‘verbal assurances’, while Israeli leaders were declaring that large areas of the occupied West Bank...
YESTERDAY, Lord Stevens, the ex-Metropolitan Police commissioner, urged that there should be no change in the policy of the state, after a completely innocent unarmed Brazilian, Jean Charles Menezes, was shot to death, murdered by a gang of police killers at Stockwell Tube last Friday. Lord Stevens claims to have...
THE Palestine National Authority will be the sole administrator of the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal in August, the Palestine Liberation Organisation Executive Committee has confirmed. Following its meeting in Gaza last week the PLO EC urged all factions to commit to the truce and to unify their efforts...
THURSDAY’S ‘bomb attacks’ – which did not cause a single serious injury but caused widespread alarm and panic – not least amongst the security services who were ordered to shoot to kill suspected bombers – illustrate the way that the US-UK imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have completely...
YESTERDAY plain clothes police shot dead an unarmed Asian youth with five bullets to the head at Stockwell Underground station. He was shot at close range while pinned to the floor in a Tube carriage just after 10.00am. Passenger Mark Whitby, told BBC News: ‘I was sitting on the train reading...
‘OUR battle will go on until we get justice for our people,’ said the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) General Secretary Tony Woodley on the picket line outside parliament on Wednesday. He was addressing the press as TGWU members who clean parliament staged their first ever strike against poverty...
THE US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, is currently touring Africa, putting forward the US plan to establish free trade and open markets with the states of the oil and mineral rich continent. The US plans for Africa to be its sphere of influence, handing off its imperialist rivals, France...
Yesterday, London was living off its nerves after reports of four explosions, three at underground stations and one on a bus. Police were given orders to shoot to kill to prevent terrorists carrying out explosions. Police pointed their guns at people outside Downing Street, and made one man, believed to be...
‘The Health and Safety Commission says it is seeking “the right balance of enforcement and advice”, in line with the “enforcement-lite” approach sought by the government and the Hampton report,’ says the TUC Hazards magazine. ‘Launching its latest annual report, HSC chair Bill Callaghan said: “The endorsement of the Commission’s...
CHANCELLOR Brown, in testimony to the Treasury Select Committee, has announced that he is bending his much vaunted ‘golden rule’ – that the government must balance its expenditure with its revenues over the ‘economic cycle’. Brown told a startled committee that the Treasury is planning to lengthen the economic cycle...
The family of Baha Mousa who was tortured to death and eight other torture victims yesterday welcomed the announcement that three British soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment were being charged with war crimes. Solicitor Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers acting on behalf of the Iraqi victims and their...
Houses of Parliament cleaners will be on the picket line outside the House of Commons at 10am this morning. They will be joined by Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Shahid Malik and several other MPs at St Stephen’s Entrance, as the TGWU cleaners hold their first-ever one-day strike for decent...
IN THESE days, when capitalist Britain is being rocked by the world economic crisis and the disaster of its imperialist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the death of a failure, ex-Tory leader Edward Heath, has given an opportunity for all the Tories in the House of Commons to rally...
The British government should not support Colombia’s new paramilitary demobilisation law, which Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will promote when he meets with Tony Blair at Downing Street this week, Human Rights Watch said Monday. ‘Uribe is about to sign a law that would let Colombia’s paramilitaries off the hook for...
There is ‘no doubt’ that support for the US-led war on Iraq ‘puts the UK more at risk’ of terrorist attack. This is one of the main conclusions of a report published yesterday by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Social Research Council. The report, Security, Terrorism...
IN the United States it has just been revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has been secretly collecting the internal documents of civil rights and anti-war groups. It has amassed 3,500 pages from these organisations, including 1,173 from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Alongside this, in Britain,...
The Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos) is about to start its Kliper launch vehicle project, the head of the agency told a Moscow press conference on Thursday. This is to be part of a new planned space programme. The Russian government has approved a new 10-year space programme budget that will total...
Former Labour cabinet minister Clare Short yesterday insisted she ‘had no doubt’ the July 7th London bombings were linked to Iraq and Palestine. Short was speaking in the wake of Blair’s claims on Saturday that this was not so. In an interview with GMTV, Short said: ‘We are implicit in...
BUSH and Blair say that they are ‘fighting for democracy and freedom’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the more they step up this fight, the more they attack and trample upon the basic liberties and democratic rights of the working class at home. In fact, the imperialist powers are fighting...
Israel’s military escalation is ‘an attempt by Israel to meddle in our internal Palestinian life,’ Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei warned in a press conference early on Saturday. Qurei was speaking after the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) last Friday extra-judicially shredded to pieces by air strikes six anti-occupation activists in...
THE US state is beginning to split over the war in Iraq, so severe is the pounding that US troops and the US leadership are taking from the Iraqi insurgents. Friday’s New York Times carried an article by ex-CIA chief John Deutch, who served under President Clinton in 1995-96 and...
Amid a flurry of diplomatic visits aimed at securing a smooth Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and military escalation by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that claimed a second Palestinian life in 24 hours, the Palestinian National Authority leadership Thursday pledged calm during the unilateral Israeli move. This was...
‘The Palestinian Authority should seek to protect the Palestinian people, not the Israeli settlements,’ Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said yesterday, as gunbattles continued between Hamas fighters and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) security forces in Gaza. Hospital officials said two Palestinian bystanders have been killed and more than a dozen...
Numerous high-level officials and advisors in Afghanistan’s US-backed puppet government are implicated in major war crimes and human rights abuses that took place in the early 1990s, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. ‘This report isn’t just a history lesson. These atrocities were among some of the gravest...
Two-thirds of university entrants in England and Wales who applied for maintenance grants – designed to assist poorer students – were turned down, according to figures from the Student Loans Company (SLC). Twenty-seven per cent of last year’s 273,000 applicants had received full grants of £1,000 and seven per cent...
THE generals who demanded a ruling from the Labour government’s Attorney General that war with Iraq was legal before they would send their troops in, are now demanding that British troops must have immunity from prosecution for the alleged crimes that they have committed in Iraq. In fact, they demanded...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday said that there is to be more new repressive legislation, on top of the huge powers that the government and the Home Secretary already have to tackle ‘extremism’. He also pledged to lead a worldwide drive to tackle the ‘evil’ ideology behind the London bombings. This in...
Prime Minister Blair yesterday announced the government’s intention to introduce new laws against ‘incitement and the instigation of terrorism’, for which he had the full support of the Tories and Liberal Democrats. During prime minister’s question time in the House of Commons, not one MP’s voice was raised against Blair’s...
Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Civil Affairs Minister Muhammad Dahlan met with a Hamas leadership delegation comprising Isma’il Haniyah and Sa’id Siyam, in Gaza, at dawn Monday. Dahlan briefed the delegation on the understandings reached with the Israeli side on the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Western Bank. Informed sources said that...
THE HSBC, one of the world’s major banks, has published a paper called ‘European Meltdown’ in the wake of the Dutch and French votes against the EU Constitution and the emergence of calls in Italy and Germany, in particular, for the restoration of the old currencies. The bank is now...