Monthly Archives: August 2005

A lawsuit filed last Tuesday against US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld reveals the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on a foreign student held without charges for more than two years as an ‘enemy combatant’ in a South Carolina naval brig, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says. Although three men have...

BRITAIN and the United States had the gall to officially protest, last Wednesday, to the Iranian government about Iranian interference into the internal affairs of Iraq. Britain and the US are the two states who in March 2003 began an illegal war and occupation of Iraq, starting with a shock...

‘Eight hundred workers at the gate gourmet airline catering company have been sacked,’ Tony Woodley told a press conference at the TGWU offices in Hillingdon, west London, yesterday. Five hundred workers were sacked on Wednesday and the remaining three hundred, including those on holiday and sick leave, were ...

London UNISON health convenor Geoff Martin yesterday slammed plans by the Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust to slash up to 100 beds and close wards in a bid to ‘save approximately £15 million’, with further ‘savings’ to come. Martin said: ‘We are moving into the busy winter period and with...

Tory leader Michael Howard was yesterday bending over backwards to give every support to the Labour Prime Minister Blair and his war against democratic rights in Britain. He was telling judges that if they did not accept Blair’s proposals for fighting terrorism, and moved to hold them up, they were...

Vindicating Palestinian fears of transforming the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest prison, Israel on Monday ruled out giving the Palestinians their own gate to the world. The Israelis insisted at the last minute on Monday it will control traffic in and out of Gaza after Israeli settlers and soldiers...

DRACONIAN repressive measures are now being proposed, off the cuff, thick and fast, as the Blair government races to put an end to the British axiom of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ to adopt the maxim of the continental police state, ‘guilty until proven innocent’. Stung by French government accusations...

Eight UN experts on Monday called for the Israeli separation Wall being constructed on Palestinian land to be dismantled. The UN experts were marking the Anniversary of a call by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, for Israel to halt construction of the separation Wall. In a...

Government plans for secret no-jury ‘pre-trial’ trials before ‘security cleared’ judges are ‘totally unacceptable’ Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn told News Line yesterday. He added: ‘All courts ought to be independent and in public.’ The plans announced by the Home Office are part of the government’s ‘anti-terror’ measures. Included in these planned measures...

Four men were yesterday remanded in custody to appear on criminal charges at the Old Bailey on November 14th, in connection with the July 21st bomb scares in London. They were whisked into the Belmarsh Magistrates Court, south London, in a fleet of armoured vehicles bringing them from Paddington...

Three days before Colombian President Uribe was scheduled to meet with President Bush on August 4th at his Crawford, Texas ranch, the State Department certified that Colombia met the human rights conditions in US law, the Latin American Working Group (LAWG) says. ‘This blatantly political decision was intended to clear...

SCOTLAND YARD and the Crown Prosecution Service are meeting to discuss bringing charges against three men under the Treason Act, for which the death penalty was only abolished in 1998. The three men were named by the capitalist press yesterday as ‘Islamic radicals’ Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Izzadeen and...

At least one person was killed and sixty others were wounded yesterday when over 1,000 angry Iraqis clashed with police in Samawa, south of Baghdad, during a protest over lack of water and electricity. Witnesses said police opened fire on the crowd after angry protesters had thrown rocks and attacked...

IRAQ’S puppet leaders are unable to agree on a constitution for the country despite all of the urgings from the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to ‘get on with it’. The very fact that Rumsfeld can address Iraqi ‘leaders’ in this way proves the master-servant relationship that exists between...

RESPONDING immediately to Tory pressure, Prime Minister Blair yesterday launched his programme of draconian attacks on basic rights and liberties, for a reign of terror against Muslims and socialists who oppose imperialism. He said that the ‘Home Secretary today publishes new grounds for deportation and exclusion. These will include fostering...

America is ‘complicit in torture’ carried out in secret detention centres around the world, accuses Amnesty International in its latest report. Torture and secret detention: Testimony of the ‘disappeared’ in the ‘war on terror’ features the experience of two Yemeni men. The report states: ‘On 20 June 2005, Amnesty International delegates...

Prime Minister Blair yesterday outlined new draconian measures to deport or jail people judged to be ‘glorifying terrorism’. He said ‘intensive meetings across government’ had taken place over the past fortnight ‘to set a comprehensive framework for action’ in dealing with the UK terrorist threat. He added ‘administrative measures, not requiring...

Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Minister of Civil Affairs, Mohammad Dahlan has revealed a plan regarding the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Dahlan, who also heads the committee in charge of disengagement cooperation, also outlined post withdrawal arrangements, and the closures which will be imposed during pullout which will start on August,...

Yesterday’s Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decision to cut interest rates from 4.75 per cent to 4.5 per cent, provoked worried reactions. The Transport and General Workers’ Union said the quarter per cent cut was ‘a belated gesture which is too little too late for the tens of...

IT was Prime Minister Blair who insisted that the 7th July bombings and the July 21 attempted bombings were nothing to do with the war in Iraq, and the killing of up to 100,000 Iraqis. He said that the source of the bombings was Islamic, and was, what he...

HOME Office minister Blears has had a strenuous week. On the one hand she has been working to support British Transport Police Chief Johnston. He said that his officers would not be stopping and searching ‘white grandmothers’, revealing the racist nature of police policy. On the other...

Fourteen US Marines and their civilian translator were killed by a roadside bomb blast in north-western Iraq early yesterday. The Marines were killed in action when their armoured vehicle was hit by an ‘improvised explosive device’, the US military said. The US military statement added that one other Marine...

Seven US marines have been killed in western Iraq, the US military said yesterday. The soldiers were killed on Monday near Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river 200km (120 miles) northwest of Baghdad, US military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Boylan said. It was not immediately clear if they were killed...

THE French government is threatening Iran with retribution if it does not give up its nuclear energy programme. The French Prime Minister, De Villepin, one of the main opponents of the US-UK war with Iraq, addressing the Iranian government, said that this time the retribution would be backed by...

The TUC has published the Preliminary Agenda for the 137th annual Trades Union Congress, taking place from 12-15 September in Brighton. Very little action is proposed, certainly no strike action, though it is evident from the motions that trade union members have very serious concerns and are looking for action. First...

Firefighters in Suffolk were angry yesterday as the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces set out to break their strike actions against plans to axe twelve frontline firefighters and a turntable ladder appliance. The Ministry of Defence is now being paid £50,000 a day by Suffolk County Council for...

ABD-AL HAQ-AL ANI, counsellor for the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s defence panel, has revealed that an assault took place on the Iraqi leader at a recent hearing by three judges into the charges that are being prepared against him by the Iraqi puppet government. Al Ani told the...

The Metropolitan Police confirmed yesterday that Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates arrived in Brazil on Sunday for talks with the family of young electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police last month. Yates and the British ambassador to Brazil, Peter Collecott were yesterday due to begin...

HOME Secretary Clarke is currently on holiday, after the Prime Minister insisted that he should not bow to public pressure and cancel it, as the Home Secretary had done, because of the crisis caused by the July 7th and 21st bombings and attempted bombings, and the police warning...

‘Please help us in our quest for justice,’ Allessandro Pereira, cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes told a vigil in Parliament Square last Friday night. Pereira told a 500-strong crowd: ‘Jean Charles de Menezes, was aged 27, he was a young Brazilian man who came to London full of...

HEALTH Secretary Hewitt warned over a month ago that if NHS trusts failed to resolve their growing debt crisis, hospital departments would be closed and that – dispensing with half measures – whole hospitals would be closed. Under Labour the survival of the fittest, the law of...

Suffolk Fire Brigades Union Brigade Committee yesterday called for a national demonstration next Thursday, 11 August, in support of tomorrow and this Friday’s strike action. Thursday week’s demonstration is planned to take place at 2pm-4pm in Ipswich. The demonstration has been called to coincide with a planned fire Joint Consultative Committee...