Monthly Archives: November 2007
TAMILNET has reported the LTTE leader Prabakharan’s address to Tamil Tiger cadres and supporters on ‘Heroes Day’. We reproduce part of it. News Line gives its full support to the Tamil Tigers defence of the Tamil people, although we do not share Prabakharan’s view that the ‘Sinhala nation’ is...
IT has emerged that it is a question of principle for the Labour government that elderly people who are now living in nursing and other homes, and have spent a lifetime paying taxes of one kind or another, must pay for their personal care. This was the message from Health...
Trade unions yesterday reacted angrily to the announcement by work and pensions secretary Peter Hain that he will proceed with the closure of 28 Remploy factories, with the loss of 2,000 supported jobs. Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary said: ‘This announcement by Peter Hain has angered Remploy workers and their...
YESTERDAY the number two CWU leader Dave Ward was boasting that the super-flexibility deal that the leadership put to the membership and which over 29,000 workers, 34 per cent of the total voters, rejected in the just finished ballot, ‘demonstrates that the union is leading the change agenda’. This statement...
British trade unionists on Wednesday demonstrated their support for America’s striking screenwriters as part of an international day of solidarity called by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The demonstration of solidarity came as the WGA dispute with the multinational media conglomerates has started to hit the US film and...
THE United States and its puppet Iraqi government are seeking to renew the UN mandate for Iraq for just one year, meaning that the mandate will expire on December 31, 2008. The Iraqi puppet regime says that from that date and with its agreement, US bases will be permanently established...
Lebanon has entered a decisive week during which its parliament is due to elect a new president. With tanks and troops deployed on the streets, many fear a crisis could spark greater political tensions and trigger unrest in a country still suffering the consequences of its devastating 1975-1990 civil war. Many...
Yesterday morning Remploy workers, fighting for their jobs against Labour plans to close 28 factories, occupied the foyer of the Department of Work and Pensions’ head office. On the eve of a Remploy unions lobby of parliament, a group of eleven workers and shop stewards marched into Caxton House,...
THE Australian trade unions have welcomed the victory of the Labour Party in the general election, but doubts are growing over whether the new Prime Minister Rudd intends to repeal all the anti-union measures brought in by Howard, that proved to be Howard’s undoing. The 150,000 strong Australian Nursing Federation...
YESTERDAY Gordon Brown attempted to revive his political credibility, severely damaged after the Northern Rock and Child Benefit details crises by delivering a speech to the only constituency that matters to him, the CBI bosses. He began at his smarmiest: ‘It is a privilege to be here to address you...
The 80,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) working for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have voted two to one for strike action. In a dispute over the threatened imposition of a below inflation pay offer, workers at Jobcentres, the Pension service and Child Support...
UNISON, the major UK health union, yesterday blamed the government for the crisis over dirty ambulances and issued a call ‘for urgent action to get dirty ambulances off the road’. Sam Oestreicher, UNISON National Officer for Ambulance Staff said: ‘The government recently announced extra money for deep cleaning hospitals,...
JUSTICE Secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday dismissed Tory claims that Labour is facing its own Black Wednesday, over Northern Rock and the missing data discs crisis, when Brown’s centralised state apparatus lost 25 million people’s records and kept quiet about it for a month. Black Wednesday was when international speculators...
France was brought to a halt yesterday as over a million state employees went on strike, joining a week-long stoppage by transport workers. Teachers, postal staff, nurses, air-traffic controllers, tax officials and other civil servants staged a one-day protest to demand pay rises and an end to government plans...
OVER a million French civil servants went on strike yesterday, joining the hundreds of thousands of railworkers, busworkers and gas and electricity workers who began their strike last week. Postal workers, teachers, air traffic controllers and hospital staff walked out in a 24-hour strike over pay and job cuts, imposed...
‘Many thousands of low paid workers, including many UNISON members lost money and faced a bleak Christmas as a result of the despicable behaviour of the companies involved,’ said UNISON General Secretary, Dave Prentis, speaking at the launch of a new report on Monday. At the House of Commons launch...
OVER 50 people picketed a meeting of Lambeth Primary Care Trust (PCT) yesterday, in opposition to the closure of the renowned Emergency Clinic at Maudsley mental health hospital in south London. They staged an overnight vigil before the meeting and handed out leaflets, which said: ‘24hr crisis services for the...
ONE can now see why the Zionists and the US government were so keen to get rid of Yasser Arafat. He not only refused to accept the end of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return, he insisted that East Jerusalem had to be the capital of Palestine and...
FRENCH university and high school students were called on to make this Thursday, November 22, a day of strikes and demonstrations against the law for autonomy of universities. The national student coordination organisation for action against the law met on Sunday at Tours with 200 students representing 64 universities and...
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has published a ‘A Communiqué from Arab Prisoners of War In An-Naqab Desert Prison. ‘Demanding to put the prison administration on trial… ‘For the crime of bursting into their cells, abusing their rights.’ Addressed ‘to whom it may concern’, the communiqué says: ‘We the prisoners in...
THE collapse of the US sub-prime market has produced a major banking crisis in the UK, which has seen the Northern Rock bank being put on an unprecedented £25 billion life support machine by Prime Minister Brown and his Chancellor, Darling. Meanwhile, other British banks have suffered massive falls in...
UP TO 3,000 workers and youth marched behind the banner of the North East London Council of Action through Enfield on Saturday, demanding that Chase Farm Hospital remain open. The determined demonstrators assembled in Enfield, before marching through the town centre to Chase Farm, with people cheering and joining in...
ANGRY Junior Doctors and their supporters held a vigil on Thursday outside a meeting of the House of Commons health committee which is holding an inquiry into the Modernisation Medical Careers (MMC) programme. MPs on the committee were taking evidence from the government’s Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, a...
PRESIDENT Musharraf swore in a new caretaker puppet government yesterday to lead crisis-hit Pakistan towards rigged elections in January, when demonstrations and all rallies will still be banned and armed soldiers on every major street corner will control the country’s cities. At the same time, Benazir Bhutto who returned...
THE Democratic-led House of Representatives defied a White House veto threat on Wednesday and inserted timelines for an immediate troop withdrawal, in a 50 billion dollar Iraq war funding bill. The House voted 218 to 203 to pass the emergency war budget, calling for a pull-back of most combat troops...
MASS meetings of rail and transport workers were voting in France yesterday to continue their strike actions in defence of pensions. The RATP urban transport workers of Paris had earlier voted at nearly all their workplaces to stay out on strike today. SNCF railworkers at Paris Nord, Marseilles, Nantes...
Public sector union UNISON yesterday welcomed a government move to scrap six projected private treatment and diagnostic centres. As well, the Department of Health (DoH) announced that another scheme, Care UK’s mobile diagnostic service for the West Midlands, which is already in operation, will have its contract cancelled. However, the...
THE French transport workers’ strike against pension cuts yesterday caused huge stoppages on TGV fast rail routes, local train, metro and bus services. Only 90 out of 700 TGV fast trains were running and rail links to Paris’ airports were practically non-existent. With gas and electricity workers also taking part, power...
YESTERDAY, the French railworkers’ trade unions began their indefinite strike action, to defeat the attempts of the Sarkozy regime to destroy their pension agreements, by raising the retirement age, first to 60 and then to 65, adding 10 years onto the working life of French public sector workers. Sarkozy maintains...
THE United Steelworkers (USW) last Tuesday said a new report conducted by a group of independent health and safety experts should serve as a wake-up call for Grupo Mexico, the world’s third-largest copper producer with an allegedly deadly record of worker safety violations. The report released today concludes that...
GORDON Brown began his Mansion House speech to the City of London on Monday night with a ringing but empty declaration. He said: ‘I want to speak about Britain’s unique place in the new world. And where, as a result, our responsibilities lie; how our national interest can be best...
TAMIL NADU state police on the Indian mainland have swooped on Tamil nationalist leaders reports TamilNet. Tamil Nadu police arrested Pazha Nedumaaran, the leader of the Tamil Nationalist Movement (TNM), Vaiko, the leader of Marumalardchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (MDMK) and several other leaders of parties supporting...
HUGE petrol and food price increases have pushed up the UK cost of living, cutting workers’ wages and living standards. The Office of National Statistics confirmed yesterday that the costs of food factories had risen by 6 per cent in the last year. It is now estimated that this increase, the...
HEZBOLLAH leader Hassan Nasrallah addressed a mass rally in the Lebanese capital Beirut last Saturday to mark ‘Martyrs’ Day’ celebrations. He spoke about the military exercises which were recently announced by Hezbollah. He said that these exercises were a direct response to earlier Israeli army exercises carried out in ‘northern...
THE HSJ (Health Service Journal) has done a service to the NHS, and its tens of millions of users. It has revealed just how the government is consciously acting to implement the Darzi plan for NHS reconfigurations. Behind all of the misleading propaganda surrounding Darzi, is the basic plan to...
The GMB trade union yesterday slammed ‘failed Remploy management’ over plans to close 28 factories for disabled workers. Responding to proposals from Remploy management, GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny, on behalf of the Remploy Consortium of Trades Unions, said: ‘At the Labour Party Conference the government agreed a new direction...
Bromley Hospitals NHS Trust plans to close wards and sack hundreds of staff in a bid to save £23 million in a year, in the face of ‘debts’ of £99 million. The trust provides the services at the Princess Royal University Hospital, Orpington Hospital and Beckenham Hospital. The November 1 Trust Board...
BOTH the HSBC and Barclays banks along with the Royal Bank of Scotland have suffered major share losses in the past week, as investors revealed that they did not believe the protestations coming from the three major banks that they were not ensnared by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. This...
‘We will return to Diego Garcia – it’s our right!’ – Chagos Islanders shouted outside Downing Street on Saturday. They put up the banner of the Chagos Islands Community Association and their flag and also held up many placards, which said: ‘All People Chagossian lost their identity – Diego Garcia,...