Monthly Archives: August 2008
‘SOCIAL injustice is killing people on a grand scale.’ This is the conclusion of the World Health Organisation’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, headed by professor Sir Michael Marmot, which published its report this week. The WHO found that social factors are responsible for huge variations in ill...
‘The strike was properly solid! Only four buses went out of 142 buses,’ Unite Rep Mickey Leachman said when he spoke to News line at Lea Interchange Garage on the picket line about the strength of the bus workers’ pickets yesterday. Bus workers across north, central and west London, came...
Northern Rock bosses yesterday confirmed that the nationalised bank has sacked 1,300 workers. Eight hundred of the redundancies were compulsory, with the remaining 500 being voluntary, the bank said. The cuts are part of its effort to streamline its operations after being nationalised. The number of sackings is consistent with earlier...
After shattering the Israeli blockade of Gaza earlier this week, the SS Free Gaza and SS Liberty victoriously departed Gaza for Cyprus at 2.00pm last Thursday. The two ships, carrying 44 human rights activists, sailed to the Gaza Strip last Saturday, August 23rd, carrying a shipment of medical supplies. They have...
‘The TUC leaders must act to defend jobs or make way for those who will,’ Dave Wiltshire, national secretary of the All Trades Union Alliance, said yesterday. He was commenting on a TUC report which said: ‘More than 3.3 million workers (13 per cent of the workforce) are not confident...
AVERAGE house prices in Britain are now 10.5 per cent lower than they were a year ago, according to figures published yesterday by Nationwide, one of the country’s biggest mortgage lenders. This is the largest drop since the last collapse of the housing market in 1990. House prices have dropped...
A damning report, the second in seven days on the British government’s practice of incarcerating children in UK removal centres was published yesterday. Excerpts follow from the report on a fully announced inspection of Tinsley House Immigration Removal Centre on 10-14 March this year by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons,...
‘We must be ready to occupy Chase Farm Hospital,’ North East London Council of Action Secretary Bill Rogers told trade unionists, local residents and youth at the monthly picket of the Enfield hospital on Tuesday. Throughout the day people stopped to give their support to the monthly mass picket of...
ON THE eve of his visit to Ukraine, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband declared that the purpose of talks with ‘international partners’ was to create ‘the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia’. This fighting talk from Labour premier Gordon Brown’s Foreign Secretary was part of a chorus of...
AMERICAN occupation forces carried out a bombing raid on the village of Nawabad in the Shindand district of Herat province last Friday, killing 90 people, including 60 children, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Kai Eide, the UN’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan, said yesterday: ‘Investigations by...
‘IT’S been one of our best pickets yet, now we have to be ready to occupy,’ North East London Council of Action Secretary Bill Rogers said yesterday. Speaking at the end of the 7am-2pm monthly mass picket of Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, Rogers, Chairman of Chingford ASLEF branch, continued:...
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers in their sentry post along Jaffna lagoon found a male corpse with gun shot wounds washed ashore on Monday morning and informed Jaffna police, Tamil Net reported yesterday. Jaffna Magistrate, Vasanthasenan, visited the site, held inquiries and directed the police to hand over the...
THE new Deputy Governor of the Bank of England (BoE), Charles Bean said yesterday that when the so-called ‘credit crunch’ began last August central bankers had expected the crisis to be over by Christmas 2007. He added that, however, it had carried on for a year and every time the...
TribAL leaders in southern Iraq accused the US Administration last week of attempting to establish permanent bases in Iraq to strike against its opposing powers in the region and protect the Israeli entity. During a conference held in Basra, they demanded the expulsion of the Khalq terrorist organisation from...
The GMB trade union yesterday condemned the use of Gate Gourmet-employed catering workers as strike breakers at Stansted Airport. Security workers who scan luggage at Stansted began a 24-hour strike in a dispute over pay at 3am yesterday. The 33 GMB members are seeking a pay rise of about 5%, while...
‘All of us are shocked, numb, totally gutted,’ said an angry Samantha Rigg-David outside Brixton police station on Saturday following the death in custody of her brother, Sean Rigg. The family are demanding answers into how mentally-ill 40-year-old Rigg, from Balham, died. Rigg was held on suspicion of assaulting a police...
TWO boats carrying humanitarian aid breached the Israeli siege of the Palestinian people in Gaza when they arrived at the main port of Gaza City on Saturday. The vessels, Liberty and Free Gaza, set out from Larnaca in Cyprus on Friday and were manned by 44 volunteers from 17 countries....
Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has said he hopes a concert in Tskhinvali will help the world to see the ‘truth’ of what happened in South Ossetia. Gergiev, who is a native of the neighbouring Russian republic of North Ossetia, was shown speaking live on state-owned Russian television channel Rossiya just...
The GMB trade union yesterday accused Stansted security contractor Airfield Services of Gate Gourmet tactics. It said that Airfield Services was showing gross irresponsibility in refusing to accept an invitation to ACAS to avoid disruption to the travelling public and warned a Gate Gourmet-style lock-out situation is brewing. Airfield Services on...
UK economic growth ground to a halt between April and June, according to the latest official data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which revised an earlier estimate of 0.2% growth downwards. The ONS said that the latest zero growth figure put an end to 63 consecutive quarters...
‘Bailiffs and Bulldozers, is the only way Lewisham Council are going to remove us’, is the motto of the Worried Tenants Group who are fighting to stop Lewisham Council from demolishing the two bedroom bungalows of the Excaliber Estate. Known to locals as the Bungalow Estate, Baldwin Road in...
THE BOURGEOIS law courts damned the Brown government yesterday for its role as an accessory to the US and its torturers. The government was told that ‘the torturer has become like the pirate and the slave trader before him . . . an enemy of all mankind.’ The British government was...
Yesterday’s High Court ‘torture verdict strongly condemned the UK government for complicity in US crimes’, said legal charity Reprieve. Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones handed down their judgement yesterday morning on the case of Guantánamo Bay prisoner and British resident Binyam Mohamed. Foreign Secretary David Miliband was given...
THE Iranian daily Keyhan has been examining the Russian intervention into Georgia and seeking to draw lessons from it. It states: ‘In the early hours of last Friday, Georgian tanks, artillery and fighter planes, self-assured of American support, attacked the city of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, the majority...
THE call has gone up in the Competition Commission report that three of BAA’s seven airports – two of its three in London, out of Gatwick, Stansted or Heathrow, and one in Scotland, either Glasgow or Edinburgh – must be sold off. BAA is known as the airport...
‘If there is no movement then we will have to look to further action in the near future,’ UNISON Scottish Secretary Matt Smith told a rally of striking council workers in Glasgow’s George Square yesterday. He was speaking during the 200,000 strong local government workers’ 24 hour strike. Smith said: ‘According...
TEN French soldiers were killed in an ambush by Taleban fighters east of the Afghan capital, Kabul, and 21 were wounded yesterday. This followed Sarkozy’s opportunist decision to curry favour with the US regime by sending more French troops to Afghanistan. The French recently took over control of the Kabul...
Undeterred by sackings, harassment, violence and hardship, members of the Pearl Continental Karachi Hotel Workers Union are more determined than ever to fight until victory in what has become Pakistan’s longest-running labour dispute. Hundreds of union members and supporters rallied outside the Karachi Pearl Continental August 13 to press...
THE former military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf who came to power by a military coup in 1999, and was the main ally in the region of US imperialism, was yesterday forced to resign as president to avoid being impeached by the Pakistani parliament. His resignation was marked by tens of...
By John Coulter, Irish political journalist Religious sectarianism is alive and well and breeding viciously again in the North. As the North this month commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Omagh bomb massacre by the dissident Real IRA in west Tyrone which claimed the lives of 29 civilians plus unborn twins,...
Jubilant Pakistanis danced in the streets, waved flags and fired shots in the air, and called for President Pervez Musharraf to be put on trial, after he announced his resignation yesterday. The former army chief, who seized power in a military coup in 1999, had been under huge pressure to...
THE decision by the Ukrainian government to offer joint use of missile attack and space early warning systems to the Western powers is not just a move calculated to anger Russia, it will also split Ukraine, and bring it to the brink of civil war. The Ukrainian...
The Brown government was yesterday accused of building up a national DNA database ‘by stealth’ by retaining profiles of nearly 40,000 children never convicted of a crime. The Home Office has admitted that there are 39,095 DNA profiles of 10-18 year olds from England and Wales who were...
The Prime Minister of the Hamas-led government in Gaza, Ismail Haniya on Friday called on Egypt and Saudi Arabia to move swiftly and open the Rafah crossing that links Gaza to Egypt. The crossing must be opened, Haniya said, so the siege on Gazans can stop, and necessary supplies...
THE US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi yesterday for talks with the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Her mission was to get his signature for the six point ceasefire agreement with Russia, without which President Medvedev has made clear he would not sign. Earlier, the US had further...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has spoken on the second anniversary of the end of the war of July-August 2006, or what Hezbollah calls the ‘Divine Victory’. At the beginning of the speech, and before talking about the war anniversary, Nasrallah offered his condolences to the families of...
strike action against low pay was announced by Unite and the GMB unions at Gatwick and Stansted Airports yesterday. Unite head of Civil Aviation, Steve Turner, announced two one-day strikes at Gatwick on 25th and 29th August, declaring: ‘There is an air of growing confidence amongst aviation workers...
BANK of England governor King’s report, on the immediate prospects for British capitalism has produced a run on the pound – so precarious is the position of British capitalism. He detailed a continuing fall in production, rising unemployment and a recession, at the same time as price inflation accelerates, leading...
TAMILNET reports that a fire at Poonthoaddam Refugee Camp in Vavuniyaa town last Wednesday destroyed 80 temporary sheds of internally displaced families. No injuries were reported in the fire which broke out around 11.00am, according to the police. Last month, on the 17th, a similar fire in the same...
‘There is a feeling of economic chill in the air,’ Bank of England governor Mervyn King said yesterday. Introducing the Bank’s latest monthly inflation report, King warned workers and the middle class: ‘The adjustment of the UK economy to higher commodity prices and a more realistic pricing of credit will...
IF NICE and the ‘NHS health reformers’ have their way, free health care at the point of need is destined for the dustbin of history, in favour of medical manslaughter based on the cost of treatment. This committee that decides which drugs are too expensive for the NHS to...
RUSSIA’s victory over the US supported Georgian blitzkrieg on South Ossetia, has driven the US ruling class into a frenzy. The Georgian offensive seems to have been inspired by the US supported Operation Storm, when Croatia ‘cleansed’ the Krajina of up to 200,000 Croatian Serbs in 1995. The strategic changes brought...
THE UN Security Council held a third emergency meeting on August 10th on the situation in South Ossetia, where the conflict is expanding in intensity and geographical scope, hearing briefings by senior UN officials and the views of members in an effort to coalesce around a unified position. The representative...