Monthly Archives: July 2005
‘Labour history was made in Chicago last July with a merger that has paid real dividends for American workers’, says the UNITE HERE trade union in a statement to mark the first anniversary of the merger. ‘On July 8, 2004, the garment, textile and laundry workers union UNITE merged with...
Media unions BECTU and the NUJ yesterday condemned ‘BBC fat-cat bonuses’ and called on BBC bosses to hand them back. They were responding to the total of over £866,000 in executive bonuses revealed in the BBC annual report yesterday, while the corporation is pressing ahead with its planned 4,000 job...
Prime Minister Blair made it clear yesterday he will use last Thursday’s bomb attacks in London to give the police and intelligence services sweeping new powers. During questions after his statement to MPs in the House of Commons he also refused to assure Holborn and St Pancras Labour MP Frank...
THE Israeli Cabinet decided last Sunday to extend the route of the Zionists’ illegal ‘Security Wall’ to grab a large chunk of Palestinian East Jerusalem. About 230,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem where major roads lead to the Palestinian occupied territories on the West Bank. Both East Jerusalem and the West...
The puppet Iraqi Oil Ministry announced Saturday that fire had erupted in the oil tanks of Al-Dawrah Refinery, southern Baghdad, last night. A ministry spokesman said that mortar shells were fired at the refinery, causing fire to erupt in a gasoline tank. The teams of firefighters were able to extinguish the...
ON SATURDAY night, the city centre of Birmingham, the second largest city in the country, was emptied of more than 20,000 people by the police, who said that there was a serious terrorist threat against the city and that Birmingham was in danger. This proved to be wrong. There was...
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, last Thursday condemned the London blasts, urging an end to the ‘injustice and bias against the Arab nation’. Commenting on the series of bombings that took place in various parts of the British capital, killing or wounding hundreds of people, a responsible source at...
‘Blair is no saviour for the African people,’ G8 Alternatives movement spokesman Mike Arnott told News Line yesterday. He was responding to Blair’s statement on behalf of the G8 leaders, that: ‘It isn’t the end of poverty in Africa but it is the hope that it can be ended.’ Blair’s pledge...
NEWS LINE sends its condolences to the families of those who were killed in Thursday’s terrorist attacks on London, and its best wishes for a speedy recovery to those who were injured. The Marxist movement has always opposed terrorism as playing into the hands of the class enemy, giving it...
ISRAELI occupation forces demolished four houses, razed land and arrested Palestinians in the West Bank last Wednesday. They demolished one house that was still under construction, in the village of Lubban in the southeast of Nablus Governorate. The homes were destroyed under the pretext that they were constructed without permits and...
At least thirty-three people were killed and hundreds more injured after a series of explosions hit the London Underground network and a double-decker bus yesterday morning. British Transport Police initially blamed the blasts on power surges, but after an explosion on a bus in Tavistock Square near Euston, it was...
YESTERDAY’S tube and bus disaster in London, with 33 dead and hundreds injured, has already been claimed as a terrorist attack, despite the fact that traces of explosives have been allegedly found in only one of the places where an explosion took place. Initially, the cause of the halting of...
ANGRY protesters have condemned police tactics at the G8 Alternatives demonstration in Auchterarder, outside Gleneagles on Wednesday, when riot police, mounted police and police with dogs were used to disperse demonstrators after hundreds had marched peacefully into a field. James Shade and Jackie Wilson, from Govanhill, Glasgow, spoke to News...
THE Afghan ‘government’ has called for a rethink of the US-led fight against the Taleban, after heavy casualties to civilians caused by US air attacks has resulted in a rising popularity for the Taleban movement. Seventeen people, including women and children were killed in a US bombing raid in the...
Over 15,000 people took part in the G8 Alternatives demonstration at Gleneagles yesterday afternoon. Welcoming the marchers to Auchterarder at a rally in the local park, anti-war MP George Galloway said: ‘The most violent criminals on the earth today are in the Gleneagles Hotel at the G8 summit.’ Demonstrators on the...
Members of the 53-nation African Union held a summit meeting in the Libyan coastal town of Sirte last Monday and Tuesday, on the eve of the G-8 summit. The AU meeting was hosted by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. In his opening speech Gadaffi warned Africans against begging to the G8...
THE scale of the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan has got the Pentagon rattled. It fears that the US strategic requirement, to be able to fight two major wars at the same time, is being exposed as a pipedream. Its forces are already being stretched to breaking point, and...
Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers’ ‘Report on an unannounced inspection of Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre’ is another damning indictment of the brutal system of detention centres for refugees. Owers last inspected Harmondsworth in September 2000, though there have been some improvements, 44 of the recommendations she made in that...
‘We are calling on thousands to pile on buses and trains and join us at Gleneagles today,’ G8 Alternatives movement spokesman Mike Arnott told News Line. This was despite the police announcing yesterday that the march on Gleneagles Hotel would be limited to 5,000. Arnott said: ‘The police have arbitrarily changed...
Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will hold a summit meeting in Damascus on Thursday, 7th July, adviser to the Palestinian President for national security affairs, Brigadier-General Jibril al-Rujub, announced last Saturday. Al-Rujub said that the summit comes within the framework of consultations and coordination between the...
IT has long been Prime Minister Blair’s contention that the strategic interests of the British ruling class demand 100 per cent support for the US ruling class, specifically its foreign policy. At one stage, he referred to British military support for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as the...
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi yesterday urged African nations to stop ‘begging’. In a half-hour speech as host of the 53-nation African Union two-day summit in Sirte, Gadaffi said: ‘Pleading to the G8 to lift debts won’t make a future for Africa. ‘We need cooperation between the big and the small...
The British Foreign Office said yesterday it was ‘aware of and deeply concerned’ by reports that Iraqi police commandos, the allies of British forces in Iraq, are regularly torturing prisoners. Reports in the British press alleged abuses such as strangulation, hanging by the arms, burning, sexual abuse, the breaking of...
ON Saturday, leaders of the capitalist world, from the Pope and his Cardinals to various Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and not a few Chancellors – along with their courts of aging pop stars, called for an end to poverty in Africa. It was a plea led by the great and...
Charities Oxfam, Action Aid and Christian Aid said yesterday that Bush’s pledge to double US aid to Africa was too little, too late. Action Aid senior policy officer Patrick Watt said Bush’s increase from $4billion to $8billion over five years was the equivalent to two days of US spending on...
TODAY’S Edinburgh march to ‘Make Poverty History’ will be led by Bishops, Cardinals and boss class politicians, in other words, by the religious and political frontmen for the very capitalists that are looting Africa, Latin America and Asia, and burning Iraq! It is being said that Chancellor Gordon Brown is...
The Iraqi resistance is dealing daily blows against the US-UK led occupiers as it steps up its attacks. Last Tuesday fighters attacked with three mortars a US military headquarters in Al-Ramadi city in western Iraq. The mortars landed on the headquarters, which the US troops set up two days before in the...
UNISON Head of Health, Karen Jennings, has condemned Labour government plans to allow private treatment centres to poach NHS staff, breaking a Labour government pledge to UNISON and the other NHS trade unions. She said: ‘The government guaranteed us that private sector treatment centres would have to sign up to...
‘Sending lay first aiders could be dangerous and in some cases risk lives,’ Michael Summers, chairman of the Patients Association told News Line yesterday. He was expressing concern over government plans to keep a million people out of Accident and Emergency departments by only sending ambulances to what an operator...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei said Tuesday that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has ‘no objection to the creation of a temporary government of national unity for overseeing’ the planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. This offer was greeted by the Hamas movement as ‘not serious’. Commenting on a question...