Monthly Archives: October 2005
MORE than 15 Israeli air strikes on Thursday, Friday and early Saturday destroyed Gaza Strip water, power and roads and killed seven Palestinians. Yesterday, Israeli air attacks were continuing and Israel had sealed off the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Accompanying the Israel assaults was a clear message from...
‘Stop killing our children!’ demanded over 400 families and friends and supporters of mainly young men and women who have died in custody or directly at the hands of the state, last Saturday. They were taking part in the seventh annual remembrance procession from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street organised...
ISRAEL has ruled out peace and even an interim accord with the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people, kicking the ‘peace process’ into the gutter. More than 15 Israeli air strikes on Thursday, Friday and early Saturday destroyed Gaza Strip water, power and roads infrastructure and killed seven...
GATE Gourmet workers who have been selected for compulsory redundancy angrily spoke to News Line over the weekend about letters they had received explaining their selection. Devinder said: ‘In July, I received a certificate of commendation for being a good hard worker who had completed five years service. ‘In August,...
‘WHEN we went to the TUC in Brighton last month, they voted unanimously to support our struggle now we need that support to be turned into action,’ said Gate Gourmet picket Amarwant at Heathrow Airport yesterday. She continued: ‘The leaders of our union have negotiated a terrible deal with the...
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have reacted with horror at Met chief Sir Ian Blair’s attempted justification of his ‘Shoot-to-Kill’ policy. The 27 year old Brazilian electrician was shot seven times to the head whilst being restrained by officers as he sat in a tube carriage at Stockwell...
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has voiced his ‘dismay’ over remarks by Iran’s president calling for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’. Annan reminded Iran that, as a UN signatory, it had undertaken not to threaten the use of force against another state. Annan’s remarks reek of cynical...
THE Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’. He also said that ‘a world without the US and Israel is possible’, and added: ‘Anyone who signs a treaty which recognises the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of...
US Operatives killed detainees during interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq, says the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU has just published an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in US facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. ACLU...
HUNDREDS of locked out Gate Gourmet workers went to the TGWU regional office in Hillingdon yesterday to receive their ‘hardship’ payments and to question the union officers about getting their jobs back. Locked out worker, Majo told News Line: ‘The compromise agreement is collapsing because no one is signing...
THE bosses organisation, the CBI, yesterday warned that thousands of manufacturing jobs are about to be slashed by employers seeking to reduce their costs, after the recent major rises in the price of oil and other basic commodities. The CBI’s latest survey found that in the manufacturing sector orders and...
‘WE are not signing the Compromise Agreement. It’s one big con. It’s daylight robbery. There’s no other word for it.’ ‘I sent in my application for an employment tribunal. It’s gone,’ locked-out Gate Gourmet worker Harmohinder told News Line on the picket line at Heathrow airport yesterday. ‘There’s no point in...
‘Is it our intention to do the dirty work for dictatorships all over the world?’ Labour MP John Denham challenged Home Secretary Clarke yesterday. Denham spoke up during Clarke’s moving of the second reading in the House of Commons of the Terrorism Bill. A flustered Clarke denied the charge but spent...
BBC unions on Tuesday expressed shock and anger over planned cuts at BBC World Service. ‘BBC bosses have announced that they plan to cut £2.3 million from the World Service News and Current Affairs department with the loss of 45 to 50 jobs’, said the National Union of Journalists. The NUJ...
An undercover unit of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) backed by 15 military vehicles stormed into and imposed curfew on the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem and two adjacent refugee camps on Sunday and extra-judicially executed two Palestinians, identified as Loai Assadi and Majed Samir al-Ashqar. Palestinian military liaison...
IT IS remarkable that in a ‘constitutional referendum’ organised by a puppet government, in a country under occupation by the US and the UK, in the middle of a series of savage US offensives where the counting and recounting of votes has taken nine days accompanied...
ON the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday Gate Gourmet workers told News Line that they were not going to accept compulsory redundancy. Mr Gurbaksish said: ‘The union has sold us cheap. The company will take no-one back the way things are going. ‘If Gate Gourmet wanted to re-employ us they...
Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway has thrown down a challenge to the US Senate homeland security committee to charge him with perjury, saying ‘I’ll see you in court’. Galloway said yesterday that he was prepared to fly out immediately to the United States if Senator Coleman,...
MOST of the locked out Gate Gourmet workers who have received compulsory redundancy letters by special delivery during the past few days went to the TGWU regional office in Hillingdon yesterday. Meanwhile, the daily mass picket at Heathrow airport continued, with scores attending. Angry TGWU members spoke to News Line. Mr...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday said that he was poised to make irreversible changes to primary and secondary education by bringing in an education market directly linked to the changes that he is making in the NHS. In his speech Blair linked his decision to hand a major portion of the...
Prime Minister Blair yesterday announced plans for a ‘system of independent, self-governing state schools’, and an education ‘market based on choice’, with changes being ‘irreversible’. In a speech given to a selected audience at Downing Street, Blair said today’s White Paper on education ‘marks a pivotal moment in the...
LOCKED-out Gate Gourmet workers were very angry on the picket line at the weekend after many of them had received special delivery letters informing them that they are facing compulsory redundancy. Mrs A Gill told News Line yesterday: ‘They posted the letter through my door at 9.15 on Thursday night. ‘There’s...
The leading orthopaedic surgeon at Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield has handed in his notice after 30 years in the NHS, because ‘all managers care about is not breaching targets’. Consultant surgeon Mr David Grace said he was told to treat routine bunion operations ahead of elderly emergency patients with...
ON August 10 2005 Gate Gourmet locked out and dismissed over 700 workers in a pre-planned operation designed to secure the introduction of their company ‘Survival Plan’. The operation immediately ran into huge resistance, when thousands of BA staff walked out in sympathy with the locked-out workers causing...
THE leaking of a Ministry of Defence poll commissioned by senior British army officers has acted as an antidote to the fatuous pro-war propaganda of the Blair government – that the vast majority of the Iraqi people are in favour of the occupation and view the occupiers as liberators....
TGWU members on the picket line yesterday condemned the ‘Compromise Agreement, reached between Gate Gourmet and the TGWU leaders. Mr Sangha said: ‘The company and the union leaders are really playing with us now. This compromise agreement is rotten, it takes away all our rights.’ He added: ‘We have no...
Heather Wakefield, UNISON National Secretary, Local Government Service Group, last Wednesday rushed a circular out to branches. This contained campaign materials to demand the same opportunist and divisive pensions deal for local government workers that the union leaders had just agreed for health, education and civil service workers. This deal accepts...
SYRIA yesterday condemned the UN report into the assassination of the former Lebanese Premier, Hariri – a report which pointed the finger of blame at Syria, without any proof – as a ‘political statement against Syria based on allegations by witnesses known for their hostility to Syria.’ Mehdi Dakhlallah, Syria’s...
Al-Jazeera satellite TV carried live on 15 October a 50-minute episode of its weekly programme ‘Open Dialogue,’ hosted by Ghassan Bin-Jiddu. He interviewed Khalid Mish’al, head of the Hamas Political Bureau, and an audience of about 20 participants, some of whom asked questions later in the programme. ‘When we...
YESTERDAY the capitalist state looked after its own, and decided that the two armed police officers who shot dead an unarmed man, Harry Stanley, in September 1999, not only were beyond the reach of the law but had in fact ‘acted reasonably’. This coup de grace for all ideas that...
‘I feel a terrible injustice has been done to me and my family’, Irene Stanley, the widow of Harry Stanley told News Line yesterday. She was responding to the statement by the Crown Prosecution Service that no charges will be brought against the two police officers who shot her unarmed...
GATE Gourmet workers were very angry yesterday when they heard that BA has decided that three BA shop stewards are to face disciplinary hearings after the company decided that they ‘have a case to answer’. The three shop stewards, who represent baggage handlers, could be sacked if found guilty...
Being a trade unionist is becoming more dangerous with a total of 145 people worldwide killed due to their trade union activities in 2004, 16 more than the previous year, according to the ICFTU Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights Violations. The report published on Monday, which covers 136 countries...
Saddam Hussein yesterday insisted he was the president of Iraq, and refused to recognise the US appointed court, declining to give his name or confirm his identity. He remained completely defiant of the US appointed Star Chamber, ‘trying’ him in the US fortress Green Zone. Saddam questioned whether the individuals trying...
OPPORTUNIST trade union leaders in the health, education and civil service sectors yesterday sold out the future of public sector workers by agreeing that all new starters will work till they are 65, while current staff will be able to retire at 60. They agreed to add five years to...
Rose Gentle, Susan Smith, Peter Brierley and Karla Hewett, whose sons and brother died in the Iraq war, set up a 24-hour Peace Camp opposite Downing Street yesterday afternoon. Furious that the government has turned them down, they are appealing to the public for donations to fund their legal challenge...
AMERICA’S largest manufacturing company, General Motors (GM), announced on Monday that its losses were $1.6bn in the three months to the end of September, bringing the total for this year to $4bn. Chief Executive Rick Wagoner revealed that the corporation has a survival plan in which it will sell off...
The Palestinian leadership on Sunday condemned the ‘unjustified’ extra-judicial execution of a Palestinian activist and slammed Israel’s tightening of the closure it imposed on the occupied territories as ‘collective punishment’. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) extra-judicially executed Palestinian anti-occupation activist Nihad Abu Ghanem, 27, near the northern West Bank town of...
Locked out Gate Gourmet workers insisted to News Line yesterday they want their jobs back. On the picket line at Heathrow Airport Jarnail, said: ‘I want my job back on the old terms and conditions. I don’t want compensation or redundancy. ‘The union leaders should have fought for every job from...
WHILE US President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair and their quislings in Baghdad were pumping out propaganda about ‘freedom and democracy’, to get Iraqis out to vote in the referendum on a constitution, the US military engaged in its usual blood-letting in occupied Iraq on Sunday. After...
Striking United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members at a Brooks, Alberta, slaughterhouse, last Saturday called for attempted murder charges after a car crash that injured their union leader. The mainly Sudanese workers at Lakeside Packers, owned by Arkansas-based, Tyson Foods, began a bitter strike for union recognition...
US warplanes and helicopter gunships have carried out punishment raids on two villages near Ramadi, killing at least 40 Iraqi civilians. In a statement yesterday, the US military claimed it had killed 70 insurgents on Sunday. This followed the deaths of six US Marines, five near Ramadi, on Saturday. The statement...