Monthly Archives: April 2008
THERE is not the slightest doubt that capitalism worldwide is in its greatest crisis ever. The US-UK failed attempt to occupy Iraq and steal its oil and gas resources has led to a gigantic inflation in the price of oil, gas and other basic raw materials, driving down...
Last Wednesday marked sixty years since the Deir Yassin massacre. On April 9, 1948 the Zionist paramilitary troops and terrorist gangs committed a massacre at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in one of some two dozen documented massacres of Palestinian civilians by Zionist forces seeking to transform Palestine into...
Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith yesterday called on the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) not to re-open its corruption probe into the 1986 so-called ‘Al-Yamamah’ arms deal. This is in spite of last Thursday’s High Court ruling that the SFO acted unlawfully in 2006 by dropping its probe into allegations of...
Over 100,000 Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), working across 10 government departments and agencies will be on strike at the same time as other public sector workers, including teachers and lecturers in a one day strike on 24 April. The strike is in protest at the...
OVER 100,000 Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), will be on strike at the same time as the NUT teachers and the UCU lecturers on Thursday April 24th. All of the three major trade unions are fighting the Labour government’s wage-cutting, below-inflation rate ‘wage rises’ policy and...
‘We believe that no-one should be above the law, not arms dealers, not Saudi princes, not government ministers’, said Symon Hill of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) yesterday. He was speaking at a press conference in the wake of a High Court ruling that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted...
Iraq on Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to the US-led occupation forces. Iraqi officials said three mortar rounds slammed into Sadr City, the east Baghdad stronghold of anti-US Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, killing at least seven people and wounding 24. One of the three rounds struck...
THE High Court yesterday ruled that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted unlawfully by dropping a corruption inquiry into a £43bn Saudi arms deal. Since the Office had been directed by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, and his Attorney General Lord Goldsmith in this matter, the implication of...
DOCTOR Saeb Erekat, head of the PLO Negotiations’ Affairs Department, has said that differences over many issues remain pending between the Palestinian and Israeli sides. In a news conference he held at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah, Erekat added that the issues relating to settlement dominated the biggest part...
FOOD riots and major strike actions are erupting all over the capitalist world, driven forward by a doubling of food prices in many countries, as part of the growing worldwide inflation. This situation has emerged out of the failure of the US-UK attack on Iraq, and the massive increases in...
GPs yesterday opposed plans by Virgin Healthcare to offer GPs 10% of the profits it plans to make from private services including dentistry, therapies and laser surgery on offer in its planned network of polyclinics. Virgin plans to open health centres known as ‘polyclinics’ with GPs employed by the NHS...
ON THE eve of today’s expected one million strong march in Baghdad, called by Moqtada al-Sadr, against the US-UK occupation of Iraq, US tanks and troops leading Iraqi puppet soldiers have been fighting to enter the al Sadr Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City, where up to two million Shi’ites...
A delegation from the Chagos Islands Community Association (CICA) travelled from Crawley yesterday to attend a ‘Let Them Return’ meeting in the House of Lords. The meeting chaired by Lord Avebury was to launch the resettlement proposal from the Chagos Refugees Group and the UK Chagos Support Association (UKCSO) called...
A strike by 4,000 Registered Nurses (RNs) at ten San Francisco Bay Area, California, Sutter facilities has concluded with nurses walking together back into work, resolved to force Sutter to deal with the very serious patient care problems endemic to the chain. The strike was marked by an average...
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) yesterday rejected an 8% over three years pay-cutting NHS Pay Review Body offer, which is backed by the Brown government. Commenting on the long-term pay deal for midwives and 1.2 million NHS workers, RCM general secretary, Dame Karlene Davis, said that that RCM would...
NURSES and other NHS workers have been offered a three-year pay deal worth 8% by the government. NHS trade union leaders who are prepared to recommend three-year pay deals that amount to eight per cent, when even the current RPI inflation rate is 4.1 per cent, are doing their...
Fierce clashes between Mahdi Army fighters and US forces in the Iraqi capital’s Sadr City district killed at least 20 people on Sunday, amid calls from Iraqi puppet leaders for all militias to be disbanded. Officials from Iraq’s puppet security and defence ministries said women and children were among...
THE Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who once boasted that he had resolved the crisis of capitalism and its tendency to go from boom to bust, has now admitted that capitalism is in its greatest ever financial crisis. He has also admitted belatedly, that all of the instruments established at...
THE UP-to 2,000 Chagossians who live in Crawley have been shocked to hear that their representatives have been barred from attending the launch of ‘Let Them Return’ and the presentation of the report ‘Returning Home’ at the House of Lords on Tuesday April 8, at 11.00am. The secretary of the...
Business Secretary John Hutton yesterday ruled out a rethink on the decision to scrap the lowest tax band, amid claims that the Brown government has abandoned low-paid workers. Many of the changes announced by prime minister Brown while he was still chancellor of the exchequer came into force yesterday...
THE MUGABE regime has been beaten in the polls by the trade union backed Movement for Democratic Change and is now considering its options to try and cling onto power. Zanu-PF represents a corrupt and venal Zimbabwean ruling class which has robbed the working class and the rural poor of...
BY JOHN COULTER Irish political journalist The battle of the sexes will engulf the republican movement as women will seek to break male-run Sinn Fein in the forthcoming fight to replace party president and West Belfast MP Gerry Adams, as well as Deputy First Minister and Mid Ulster MP Martin...
THE outgoing US president, George W Bush, has spent the entire week pledging a Nato expansion eastwards, and that states such as Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Georgia and the Ukraine would be joining this allegedly defensive alliance that is shortly to have missile radars in Poland and the Czech republic....
Camouflaged with the provincial elections in Sri Lanka’s East, under military and paramilitary terror, is the Sri Lanka (SL) government’s agenda to dismember the homeland of Tamil speakers that include Tamils and Tamil Muslims, says TamilNet. The elections with a possible boycott of TNA, as a result of the intimidation...
The squeeze on the availability of mortgages is expected to continue and get worse in the next three months, the Bank of England has warned. It also predicted in its quarterly Credit Conditions Survey that demand for home loans was likely to fall slightly during the same period. The Bank said...
MEMBERS of the 270,000-strong National Union of Teachers (NUT), Britain’s largest teaching union are to take strike action on April 24 over pay. They voted 48,217 (75 per cent) to 15,884 (25 per cent) for strike action. After announcing the ballot result on Tuesday, NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott said:...
UNISON yesterday called on the government to build more council houses as First Direct became the first major bank to stop lending to house buyers. A UNISON spokeswoman told News Line: ‘Owning their own home is beyond the reach of most public sector workers. ‘The government needs to urgently address the...
Hamas has said it considers the invitation extended to Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Mahmud Abbas to visit Washington as ‘political bribery in return for political and security concessions at the expense of Palestinian interests’. Hamas stressed on Tuesday that ‘what our people need is freedom and a state.’ The movement...
AHEAD of MPs considering the Second Reading of the new Counter-Terrorism Bill in Parliament yesterday afternoon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for extension of pre-charge detention from 28 days to 42, at his monthly press conference. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was telling the media she was determined to push through...
RADICAL cleric Moqtada al-Sadr gave a lengthy interview to Al-Jazeera Satellite Television last Saturday about the US occupation of Iraq. He was first asked to shed light on his absence over the past year. Al-Sadr said he was following the situation in Iraq closely, despite his disappearance from the public...
Doctors’ leaders yesterday warned that the government’s proposed screening programme for all those over 40 years of age lacked scientific evidence and could lead to the healthy being seen at the expense of the sick. Concerns that screening well people could make it more difficult for sick patients to get...
Palestinians took to the streets across the West Bank and Israel to commemorate Land Day at the weekend, in protest against ongoing Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land through settlement expansion and the construction of the separation wall. Land Day marks the anniversary of the killing of six demonstrators by...
MPs were urged yesterday to vote against government proposals for ‘secret inquests’, and to reject plans for 42-day detention without charge by both human rights group Amnesty and INQUEST, the legal charity. A parliamentary briefing paper warned against the government’s proposals for secret death in custody inquests. The proposals are contained...
A JOINT report from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC) yesterday revealed the fears in business circles that the ‘credit crunch’ and financial crisis is about to get much worse. The CBI represents industrial capitalists and PWC is a worldwide management consultancy specialising in mergers...