Monthly Archives: August 2007
YESTERDAY dozens of police officers were inspecting the beginning of the Climate Change camp, in a sportsfield owned by Imperial College, less than 1,000 yards from Heathrow airport’s perimeter. A fortnight ago the police were supporting an action by the BAA calculated to ban a large number of groups from...
TEAMSTERS’ General President James P Hoffa has spoken up about the US health care crisis in the wake of the attempts of the Big Three, GM, Ford and Chrysler’s drive to ditch their health care commitments. He focuses on the issue that providing health care through union contracts is now...
Police yesterday stopped and searched youth arriving for the Camp for Climate Change a mile away from the protest camp at the northern perimeter of Heathrow airport and made them abandon any vehicles they were travelling in. A police van waved down ‘suspicious’ vehicles. People had to unload medical supplies...
TEHRAN’S Friday prayer leader, Chairman of the Expediency Council, and ex-President of Iran Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, told worshippers ‘Wherever America goes, it finally understands that it should keep Iran happy.’ He added that the US was entangled in a quagmire because it wasn’t familiar with Iraq and Afghanistan. He said...
GORDON Brown, the man who sold off a good portion of the British gold reserves for a relative pittance, and boasted that he had broken the boom to bust cycle that is part and parcel of the capitalist system, was singing an entirely different tune over the weekend. This was...
There is a real panic setting in in the capitalist world’s financial system with the main world banks beginning to act to secure themselves by bankrupting others. Stock markets see-sawed violently downwards last week: with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 382 points on Thursday night, then refusing to recover...
THE CWU postal workers top leadership, Hayes and Ward, on Thursday called off the rolling strikes and suspended all strike action, except in the Crown Post offices, so that a month of secret talks can take place with the Royal Mail and the government. The talks are to...
A MEMORANDUM of Understanding was signed by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Iraqi puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in Ankara on Wednesday. Maliki paid a one-day official visit to Turkey. As far as the Turks were concerned the visit was to sign a ‘co-operation’...
FOLLOWING a meeting held yesterday between Royal Mail and the CWU, a Joint Statement was agreed that means detailed discussions will take place on all the relevant issues between the two parties. The CWU stated: ‘As a result the next wave of postal strikes due to commence today after...
PRESIDENT George W Bush on Wednesday said China would be ‘foolhardy’ to push down the dollar in retaliation for the massive US pressure to revalue the Chinese currency upwards. He was responding to the argument being put forward by Chinese Communist party academics, that if US pressure to...
The Communica-tion Workers Union (CWU) has announ-ced a national demonstration in London in support of postal workers on Tuesday, 21 August 2007. A CWU spokeswoman told news Line yesterday: ‘The rally is for all public sector workers to come together to support the postal workers in their current dispute. ‘We...
ILWU Locals 10 and 34 are organising an International Labour Conference to Stop the War, on October 20 from 9am-5 pm in San Francisco, California. Its statement declares: ‘As the war in Iraq and Afghanistan enters its seventh year, opposition to the war among working people in the United States and the...
US Intelligence officials have told the ‘Washington Post’ that the British army has been defeated in southern Iraq, and specifically in the second city of Iraq, Basra. There, the various militias control the streets, and 500 British troops are currently under siege in Basra Palace, surrounded, as US intelligence has...
THE family of Roger Sylvester are disappointed but not surprised by the decision of the Independent Police Complaints Commission that the police officers involved in Roger’s restraint-related death should not face any disciplinary action. Having seen similar decisions from the IPCC in a series of other controversial deaths in custody...
‘I’m excited but cautious,’ Amani Deghayes, the sister of Libyan-born Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes, told News Line yesterday. She was responding to news that UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has made a written request for the release of five British residents from US custody at Guantanamo Bay, including her brother. Amani...
THE UK government has requested the release of five British residents from US custody at Guantanamo Bay, something which the Blair government, in which Gordon Brown played a central role, refused to do. The men are not British citizens but lived in the UK before they were detained by the...
Ezzet Al-Resheq, political bureau member of the Hamas Movement, on Monday castigated Palestinian National Authority (PNA) president Mahmud Abbas for insisting on meeting with Israeli premier Ehud Olmert. Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya said: ‘This meeting cannot produce any political results. ‘It is reproducing a long path that has led the...
ONCE again the spotlight has been put on the private equity locusts. This time a Financial Times investigation has shown how TPG, CVS and Merryl Lynch Private Equity put £600 million into turning Debenhams into a private company, wrote in £1.1 billion of debt onto its balance sheets, remortgaged...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) yesterday condemned moves by private schools to rescue their finances through obtaining academy status. A NUT spokeswoman told News Line: ‘We are opposed to academies in principle. ‘But the instance of failing schools that are strapped for cash trying to survive by gaining state funding...
THE ex-Iranian president and current chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, has spoken up about the crisis that the US is seeking to impose on Iran. He stated on Al Arabiya TV: ‘It has become evident today that a psychological war is being waged on Iran, and in...
The High Court yesterday refused to grant British Airports Authority (BAA) a blanket ban on protests in and around Heathrow airport that would have affected five million people. Instead, the judgement grants an injunction against the Plane Stupid group and certain members of two other groups, Hacan Clearskies and...
Palestinian Ma’an news agency’s reports on developments in the occupied territories last Friday, August 3rd, illustrate the heroic daily resistance of the Palestinian people. At 0731 gmt: ‘In the north of the West Bank, troops are launching a heavy artillery attack on the city of Nablus, during an ongoing military...
POLICE are looking for 14 asylum seekers who escaped from the Campsfield Detention Centre, run by the US Company GEO and secured by Group 4, after a fire was started there. The 14 remain free after 12 asylum seekers were recaptured. Asylum seekers imprisoned in Campsfield are not criminals,...
‘All these centres should be closed down, there should be no immigration controls,’ Teresa Hayter of the Campaign to Close Campsfield told News Line yesterday. She was commenting on the mass escape from the Campsfield House immigration detention centre near Kidlington in Oxford on Saturday night. Yesterday 14 people were still...
‘The strikes are strongly supported, our members are determined to continue the strike action until Royal Mail seriously negotiates,’ a Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) national spokeswoman told News Line yesterday. Merseyside Amalgamated CWU Branch Secretary Ray Lucas added: ‘There is a move afoot to join forces in a public sector...
‘I will be recommending members reject the new pay offer,’ UNISON Oxfordshire health branch chairman Mark Ladbrooke told News Line yesterday. He was commenting on the just-announced upcoming national ballot of UNISON’s 450,000 health worker members on a new NHS pay increase offer of 2.5 per cent, plus minor...
UNISON yesterday told its members that the barely improved health employers offer which has been approved by the Brown government is ‘the best that can be achieved’. The offer remains 2.5 per cent, in two stages for health workers in England, along with a few minor fringe benefits for...
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) Postal Executive announced yesterday afternoon it has agreed a further round of rolling strike action. A CWU statement yesterday said: ‘Exploratory talks facilitated by ACAS have taken place this week between The Communication Workers Union and Royal Mail. ‘Further talks are planned to take...
YESTERDAY’S De Menezes family press conference gave its view of the Stockwell 2 document drawn up by the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission). The family welcomed the position of the IPCC that Jean Charles de Menezes was an entirely innocent man. The IPCC document however states that Sir Ian...
The TUC preliminary agenda covers the mounting concerns of workers over jobs, wages and conditions, public services and basic rights. The agenda opens with a resolution calling on the TUC to ‘continue to campaign against the exploitation and abuse of migrant workers and to publicise examples of this...
THE postal workers dispute intensified yesterday when, with Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool already out on unofficial strike, the action was spreading all over the country, at the start of the second week of official rolling strikes. Earlier on Tuesday, Royal Mail took the gloves off and organised mainly Polish strikebreakers...
EGYPTIAN presidential spokesman Sulayman Awwad said yesterday that President Husni Mubarak’s talks last Tuesday 31 July with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Defence Secretary Robert Gates took up the condition of the region, especially conditions in Palestine, Iraq and Darfur. Awwad pointed out that Mubarak, as usual,...
Around 5,400 postal workers walked out in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool yesterday in the face of management provocations. Glasgow Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) officials yesterday said they will be holding mass meetings this morning after 4,000 postal workers walked out on unofficial strike after being taken off pay for refusing...
THE programme of rolling strike action by the Communication Workers Union – in opposition to Royal Mail’s plans to cut wages, add five years to the retirement age, tear up working conditions and sack 40,000 staff – continued yesterday. Mail Centre and cash handling workers were called out for 24...
THAT the US is preparing a new great war in the Middle East and the Gulf to destroy Iran and Syria is crystal clear from the fact that it intends to supply its strategic allies in the region, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with $63 billion of the most...
Armed violence is the greatest threat facing Iraqis, but the population is also experiencing another kind of crisis of an alarming scale and severity, says a report by Oxfam and Iraqi aid agencies. Eight million people are in urgent need of emergency aid; that figure includes over two million who...