Monthly Archives: May 2007
FIVE more American troops were killed and three were captured near Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, in a pre-dawn attack on Saturday. The blast that destroyed two Humvees was heard for miles and a drone filmed the burning wrecks. The fatalities on Saturday take the total number of US...
Thirty drivers at airline caterers Gate Gourmet are furious after receiving letters from the company telling them to accept pay cuts. The Transport and General Workers Union members are among 230 workers who were moved to Gate Gourmet’s Heathrow West site from Hatton Cross in 2005, keeping their Hatton Cross...
GORDON Brown yesterday launched his campaign to take over the job of Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister. He spoke about his ‘new ideas and vision’ and said ‘I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place. . .’ From the experience of the three Blair governments, Blair-Brown...
Blair stood down yesterday, driven out of power by the Iraqi insurgency and the British workers’ determination to defend their welfare state. The disorientated Blair went out to the cheers of his constituency faithful, after revealing despite all of his internationalist pretensions that he is just another scurvy little...
More than 50 nurses from several AFL-CIO unions packed a House of Representatives hearing room on Tuesday to demand their rights be protected. They were there to hear witnesses, including one of their colleagues, set a congressional panel straight about a series of decisions last year by the Republican-controlled National...
Chase Farm Hospital Accident & Emergency and Maternity departments must close, the government’s emergency services tsar Professor George Alberti has said. Save Chase Farm campaigners in Enfield, north London, have been shocked by Alberti’s report which claims the closures are clinically justified. An angry Save Chase Farm Councillor Kate Wilkinson said...
ON THE eve of the fifth anniversary of the Potters Bar rail crash which killed seven people and injured 70, Britain’s biggest rail union has renewed its call for a joint public inquiry into Potters Bar and February’s Grayrigg derailment in Cumbria, which killed one passenger. RMT general secretary...
SIX Iraqi primary schoolchildren have been slaughtered by a US helicopter spraying al-Nedawat village with machine gun fire and hitting a primary school, in Diyala province. Other children were wounded in the attack. It is just the latest incident in Iraq where the occupation forces have been massacring civilians...
THE AFL-CIO American trade union confederation has congratulated Human Rights Watch for its May Day report exposing the ‘vicious anti-union’ activities of retailing giant Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, owns Azda supermarkets in Britain. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney stated: ‘The Human Rights Watch Report released today exposes in horrific detail...
THE BMA leadership yesterday came out in favour of NHS rationing. It also supported the NHS having a written constitution, and being run by an Independent Board, appointed by the government, which would be broad enough to allow a ‘Venture capitalist from Texas’ to sit on it, said...
Migrant workers and refugees were joined by trade unionists, community groups and others fighting exploitation and deportations, in a demonstration of more than 25,000 people through central London on Monday. Despite the rain, they kept up chants and singing all along the route of the march, which stretched right along...
British Medical Association (BMA) leaders yesterday launched what they described as their ‘Green Paper’ for an NHS of ‘core services’ run by an independent board of governors selected and appointed by parliament. The 80-page document A rational way forward for the NHS in England was introduced by Chair of...
THERE was a great turnout of over 300 trade unionists, local residents and youth at the Wembley Park anti-academy occupation Jamboree in north-west London on Saturday. NUT members and other people are occupying the proposed site for a new academy next to the new Wembley Stadium. The occupation is growing in...
IT MUST be a grave crisis indeed when Reid the Home Secretary – who only a week ago was posing as carrying the entire burden of the world’s security on his shoulders, and was intent in seeing this job through to victory – announces that he will be...
OVER 25,000 people took to the streets to demand citizenship for migrant workers and refugees fleeing persecution to seek asylum in Britain, in a march through central London yesterday. The rain did not dampen their spirits, as they waved placards, sang songs and shouted out ‘We are not criminals!’ along...
LABOUR was routed in Thursday’s regional and council elections losing by late yesterday afternoon 454 councillors and eight councils in England, while it lost its overall majority in the Welsh Assembly elections, and was running neck and neck with the Scottish nationalists for which is to be the biggest...
GENERAL Rose, who was the commander of the UN forces in Bosnia, has just publicly supported the right of the Iraqi insurgents to fight their war of independence while speaking to the Newsnight programme. He added that the US and UK governments ‘must admit that they have been defeated and...
‘Academies are about Blair’s obsession with privatisation’, said NUT president Baljeet Ghale yesterday during a visit to the anti-academy occupation at the sports ground site for a planned academy in Wembley, north west London. Ghale told campaigners at the site: ‘They are nothing to do with raising standards. ‘If these private...
The National Union of Journalists in Ireland and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission on Thursday joined together to condemn new powers which threaten press freedom and the confidentiality of journalists’ sources. Under Article 13 of the Policing (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 2007, police officers now have extended powers...
The family of James Miller, the Devon film-maker killed in Gaza, yesterday urged Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to take a decision on his case and prosecute those responsible. Miller was shot dead by a soldier from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) four years ago, May 2,2003, while filming a...
TRUE to form, the voice of the trade union bureaucracy, the Stalinist Morning Star counted tens of thousands of marchers on the TUC’s May Day march from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square. It was obvious to the rest of us who were very generous with our counting, that up to...
UP to 5,000 people marched through central London yesterday on the TUC May Day demonstration. The PCS trade union was on 24-hour strike against mass sackings in the civil service, while the NHS trade unions organised lunchtime industrial action around the country. On the London march, the 200 strong WRP...
CORPORAL Donald Payne has just got a minor one year sentence for a war crime after pleading guilty to inhumane treatment of civilian detainees in Basra. You can’t get lighter treatment than that. In the course of the brutalising of a group of Iraqi civilians over 36 hours, one...
On the 7th of October 2006 a coalition of migrant groups, trade unions and social justice activists marched in London demanding equal rights for all’, says the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC). ‘We were joining many others across Europe and Africa in an international effort to co-ordinate struggles and...
UP to 5,000 people marched through central London yesterday on the TUC May Day demonstration. The PCS trade union was on 24-hour strike against mass sackings in the civil service, while the NHS trade unions organised lunchtime industrial action around the country. On the London march, the 200 strong WRP...
THE News Line editorial board sends its revolutionary greetings on this May Day to the insurgent workers of Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. The Iraqi insurgency has defeated US and UK imperialism. The development of this struggle inspired the masses of the Lebanon to chase the Israeli military out of their...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) Junior Doctors Conference in London on Saturday called for the immediate resignation of health secretary Patricia Hewitt and health minister Lord Hunt, over the government’s post-graduate medical training ‘reforms’ fiasco. Doctors are angry that 18,000 junior doctors face being without a training place or job...