Monthly Archives: December 2006
THE News Line editorial board sends its revolutionary greetings for the New Year of 2007 to the working class and youth of the world, particularly to the embattled masses of Iraq, Palestine and the Lebanon. The Middle East with its major and strategic oil resources was the central battle ground...
‘Last night’s event appears to suggest that something sudden and catastrophic happened,’ offshore workers’ union, OILC leader Jake Malloy told News Line yesterday. Six bodies were recovered from the sea on Wednesday evening after a helicopter carrying offshore gas rig workers crashed off Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. One man was still...
As President George Bush prepared to discuss his next move in Iraq yesterday, he was delivered a posthumous blow from former President Gerald Ford, who died on Tuesday. In an interview with the Washington Post’s Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, embargoed until after his death, Ford said: ‘I just don’t think we should...
In his New Year message released on Thursday, 28 December, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber calls for a national debate about top pay. This is after revealing that for every £100 earned by a top company director in 2000 they now earn £205, while ordinary employees have only seen a...
THE Labour government’s policy to cut, close, reconfigure, and privatise the NHS has caught up with a number of senior government ministers, including leading Blairite cabinet minister, and Labour party chairman, Hazel Blears. Blears supports Labour’s NHS policy, but out of consideration for preserving her living as an MP,...
THE decision to hang the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, and also the Iraqi Vice-President, Taha Yasin Ramadan – whose sentence was increased from life imprisonment on appeal – was made in Washington and London, and not by the US-UK run puppets in Baghdad. The State Department has welcomed Saddam’s...
PROPOSED rules by the Bush regime’s Transportation Security Administration for the US railway system ignore necessary employee training and protections against employer retaliation. The Teamsters Union is still reviewing the rules, issued last week, but so far has determined that the proposals are inadequate. ‘The White House has failed again...
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ordered a resumption of military strikes against Palestinian militants, and was accused of breaking the truce that has lasted since November 26. The Hamas government spokesman Ghazi Hamad denounced the decision as ‘Zionism continuing their aggression against our people’. However, he...
KHALID MISHAAL, head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, has called for an all-inclusive dialogue among all political Palestinian forces, particularly Fatah and Hamas, which would end up with the formation of a national unity government. Speaking to Al-Jazeera in an exclusive interview, Mishaal said that Hamas was willing to take...
THE Putin regime has infuriated the British bourgeoisie by its strengthening of the state owned gas and oil sectors of the Russian economy, at the expense of Shell, BP and other western capitalist groups. The ‘Telegraph’ newspaper is the representative of the most alarmed sections of the British bourgeoisie, with...
TENS of thousands of students have been participating in a series of rallies and demonstrations all last week throughout Greece, protesting against the right-wing government’s intention to revise next month’s article 16 of the Greek Constitution. This would allow the establishment of private universities and colleges, opening the door for...
‘The way things are going they are going to wrap everything up – they are covering up everything,’ the cousin of murdered Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes told News Line yesterday. Alex Pereira was responding to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair’s ‘confident’ prediction that the police chief will be cleared...
PRESIDENT Bush, on Wednesday, called for a major expansion of the US army, and yesterday, the British Defence Minister, Browne, slavishly echoed his master’s call, by saying that Britain would have to have a bigger army. Mind you, his boss Blair had got in first, by declaring that he was...
THE International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) posted a statement on its website following the December 10 death of former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Tens of thousands of workers were murdered under Pinochet’s 18-year, blood-soaked dictatorship that came to power in...
All five thousand Devon Primary Care Trust (PCT) employees across the county have been sent a letter offering voluntary redundancy as a cost-cutting measure. Health workers have been told they have nine days to decide whether they wish to leave the NHS. Workers have been offered six weeks pay if...
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, on Tuesday, called on Palestinians to ‘remain united’ in a common cause after days of clashes between Haniya’s Hamas and Fatah factions. Haniya moved to ease tensions whipped up by the US President Bush, UK Prime Minister Blair and Israeli Premier Olmert after the...
PRIME Minister Tony Blair told businessmen from Britain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Dubai yesterday: ‘We must mobilise our alliance of moderation in this region and outside it to defeat the extremists.’ The leader of British imperialism, who was speaking at the end of a six-day, six-nation diplomatic...
THE leaders of the Palestine National Authority (PNA) government yesterday rejected the interference of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Palestinian internal affairs. Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, the deputy chairman of the political bureau of Hamas, which leads the Palestinian government, called on all Arab, Islamic and friendly countries to...
‘Rushed through reforms’ to doctors’ training will see ‘risks to patient care’, warns the British Medical Association. The BMA said that under the government’s ‘Modernising Medical Careers’ reforms, around 20,000 new specialist training posts are to be created across the UK next summer. The process of selecting junior doctors to the...
Amnesty International has condemned last Thursday’s High Court ruling to dismiss the legal challenge brought by the family of Jean Charles de Menezes against the prosecuting authorities’ decision not to bring criminal charges against any individuals in connection with his killing in London in July 2005. De Menezes family lawyers...
WORK and Pensions Secretary Hutton asked a question at the start of his verbal onslaught on the unemployed yesterday morning. It was: ‘People want to know how we are going to cope with the big economic and social changes that are heading our way.’ His answer was – after a...
ISLAMIC Jihad official Da’ud Shihab in a press conference in Gaza on Sunday, held by the Higher Follow-Up Committee of the National and Islamic Forces, announced ‘an immediate ceasefire’ between Fatah and Hamas. He read out the following statement: ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. ‘And hold fast,...
‘As fire crews and support staff were being honoured at a Buncefield award ceremony, fire authority bosses were busily cutting the pay of the crews they were praising,’ said a furious Hertfordshire Fire Brigades Union yesterday. The award ceremony on Monday 11 December, the first anniversary of the Buncefield fire...
Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton yesterday declared war on the unemployed, saying Labour will cut off benefits from those who reject the slave wage jobs which he claimed migrant workers are happy to take. Introducing his plans for a review of Welfare Reform, Hutton warned that British...
Last Saturday, 16 December, 2006 marked the start of a series of protests across the world with renewed calls on the US government to close the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp. Amnesty International said in a statement on Saturday: ‘In January 2002, the US authorities transferred the first “war on terror”...
THE crisis of the Blair government has intensified to the point where the government is now more deeply split and divided than ever, while it continues to reveal its contempt for even bourgeois law, and its poisonous hostility to the working class. Last week the Attorney General, under direct...
Palestinian resistance movement Hamas yesterday accused Palestinian National Authority President Mahmud Abbas of attempting a military coup after Fatah forces sealed off two Hamas-led government ministries. Two Palestine Legislative Council ministers have also been shot at in the past few days. Tensions continued to erupt into violence after Abbas announced he...
The Blair government has intervened in a European Court of Justice (EJC) test case to insist that the right to strike is not a fundamental right. The intervention comes weeks before the EJC hearing of an appeal against a British Appeal Court ruling revoking a strike ban granted to Finland’s...
‘Our members are solid’, Iceland distribution depot, Enfield, TGWU convenor Dave Brace told News Line on the morning picket line yesterday. The strikers are fighting a miserly 2.4 per cent pay rise imposed by Iceland contractor DHL Exel and the failure of the contractor to pass on any of the...
THE Attorney General – the same official who ruled after much equivocation that the war with Iraq was legal – on Thursday told the House of Commons that ‘it has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.’ He was referring...
OVER 70 hospital staff, patients, supporters and trade unionists held a rally outside the threatened Whipps Cross District General Hospital in Walthamstow, north London yesterday. Workers were eager to sign up at the launch of a campaign to form a Council of Action to occupy Whipps Cross Hospital to prevent...
‘THIS is a disgraceful decision,’ the family of murdered Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes said yesterday, after the High Court rejected their appeal against the decision not to prosecute the police who shot him last year. A statement was read out by Patricia da Silva Armani, the cousin of...
HERTFORDSHIRE fire crews are appalled at the way two community action groups in Bovingdon and Radlett are being treated by local politicians over the closure of their local fire stations. The Fire Brigades Union says it has seen the work of these two groups of local taxpayers and has...
2,500 POST OFFICES are to be closed by 2009 and all that the CWU post office workers union is doing about this massacre is pleading with the government not to do it. The attitude of the CWU leaders is the exact opposite to that of the working class. There...
Over three hundred angry Camden trade unionists and residents lobbied the Town Hall last Wednesday night over suddenly announced plans to cut services. The Tory-Liberal Democrats led council executive was meeting to decide on cuts, including a 42 per cent cut in funding for Camden Law Centre. Messages of support were...
A PAKISTANI judge yesterday ruled that there was no evidence to try Rashid Rauf on terrorist charges, or that he was a member of a terrorist organisation. Rauf had been termed a ‘key suspect’ and the ‘ring leader’ of a plot to explode a number of British airliners...
Iran’s oil minister has called for today’s meeting of the OPEC oil cartel to cut production in order to raise prices above 60 dollars a barrel. Speaking on Tuesday, Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said that at their meeting in Nigeria today OPEC members should decide to cut production and bolster...
Civil rights organisation Liberty welcomed yesterday’s Law Lords ruling in favour of anti-war protesters who police stopped from travelling to a protest at RAF Fairford. A Liberty statement said: ‘In a landmark decision the Law Lords have determined that police may not prevent peaceful demonstrations unless a breach of the...
The British Medical Association (BMA) Central Consultants and Specialists Committee (CCSC) is meeting today at BMA House, Tavistock Place, London. One of the resolutions before the committee calls for a plan of action to keep district general hospitals (DGHs) open and defend jobs. The resolution from North East London RCSC states:...
HAMAS leader Khaled Mishaal has reiterated that all Palestinian factions agree on a state ‘within the 1967 borders’ and that Hamas agrees to the ‘de facto coexistence of two free independent states’. He told the media that he accepted that Israel ‘is a reality’, but said Hamas would not...
THE massive Royal Shell energy giant, which purchased the Sakhalin-2 concession for a song from Boris Yeltsin, was yesterday brought down to earth with a huge thud. The oil giant was forced by the Russian state to sell 30 per cent of its 55 per cent shareholding to the state-owned...
The Labour government has decided to put on hold a decision to scrap the ‘double whammy’ NHS accounting rules that are forcing hospital trusts into a cycle of spiralling deficits. This is despite warnings and appeals from the trade unions and trust chiefs that the system is promoting painful cuts. Under...