Monthly Archives: January 2009
DIVISIONS among the Israeli political leaders have emerged over the way to handle the offensive on Gaza. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak is promoting a week-long ‘humanitarian cease-fire’ in the Gaza Strip. In contrast, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who lost the Second Lebanon war and has nothing more to...
Postal workers yesterday expressed their anger at the government’s determination to part-privatise Royal Mail. ‘If Mandelson is determined to push this through, our only option may well be a national strike,’ warned Communication Workers Union (CWU) Eastern Region Secretary Paul Moffat yesterday. He was responding to Business Secretary Mandelson’s reaction to...
BUSINESS Secretary Lord Mandelson launched a £20bn loan guarantee scheme for medium and small businesses yesterday, aimed at getting banks to lend to companies once again. There will be £10bn for the Working Capital Scheme for banks to lend £20bn of capital to businesses with a turnover of up to...
THE fact that Acting Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has not filed any lawsuits charging Israel with war crimes is a condemnable act, said a Hamas official on Tuesday. Hamas, in a statement said the actions raised questions about the true nature of the perspective of the Palestinian Authority...
THE British Chambers of Commerce yesterday published its Fourth Quarter Economic Survey of nearly 6,000 businesses. It highlights what it called ‘a frightening deterioration’ in the UK economic situation. It had to conclude that there were ‘no positive features in the Q4 results. Domestic demand is plunging, exports...
The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip vowed on Monday that the Palestinian resistance, backed by the population, would emerge victorious over Israel’s offensive. ‘We are approaching victory,’ Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, said in his broadcast from an undisclosed location. ‘I tell you...
‘It was a night of terror, we were terrified, we thought we were going to burn to death,’ said 27-year-old Fadia Al-Najjar from Khaza’a yesterday morning, reporting the horrific night she and her family had just gone through. ‘Bombs were everywhere, and with them came the white clouds. White...
The Israeli military yesterday bombed one of its own troops who Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, had kidnapped and taken to a safe location. The Hamas fighters took the kidnapped soldier to a home in Gaza, which was tracked by the Israeli army and targeted by Israeli warplanes only...
WITH capitalism in its greatest crisis, and with tens of millions of jobs and tens of millions of people’s lives being destroyed after the collapse of the banking system, there is an enormous revolutionary anger and hatred building up in the working class of the world against capitalism, capitalists...
more than 3,300 jobs were axed or came under threat yesterday as prime minister Brown held his much-heralded ‘jobs summit’ with bosses and union leaders to promote Labour’s workfare plans. As Brown said he would take measures to fill an alleged 500,000 vacancies, logistics giant Wincanton announced the...
With Israel’s two-week military offensive in Gaza showing no signs of abating, patience is running thin among those waiting to get into the Strip from the Egyptian border town of Rafah, the Palestinians’ only access to the outside world that is not controlled by Israel, UN agency IRIN reported...
OVER 200,000 people joined the largest-ever demonstration in Britain in support of the Palestinian people, when they marched in London on Saturday. About 10,000 people also marched in Edinburgh and there were demonstrations in towns and cities throughout the country. At a rally in Hyde Park, at the start of the...
WITH unemployment set to go up by at least one million this year, to three million, the government is in a panic. Its panic is not about what to do to prevent the mass sackings that are already taking place, since that would mean carrying out socialist policies. It is concerned...
TWENTY-THREE Gazans were killed on Sunday morning and dozens injured by illegal weapons that ensure the incineration of buildings and people hit by the explosives. Israel is using phosphorus bombs and shells. Dr Yusef Abu Rish at Gaza City’s Nasser hospital said that at least 55 people were injured...
The GMB trade union yesterday called for tougher enforcement of the National Minimum Wage in the wake of allegations that a Primark supplier in Manchester has been exploiting immigrant labour. It has been alleged that TNS Knitwear, which supplies 20,000 garments to fashion chain Primark each week, paid illegal immigrants...
ISRAEL has rejected the UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire and a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and is determined to carry on with its murderous terrorist campaign and kill as many Gazans as it can. The crude theory behind this practice is that the more Palestinians...
Israel early yesterday ignored a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for an ‘immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza’. Israeli forces killed at least 30 Palestinians in the hours after the resolution was passed early yesterday morning, as they intensified...
UNITE union officers met with General Motors bosses on Thursday, to discuss the future of the company’s Luton plant. The 1,400 workers at the Kimpton Road van manufacturing factory returned to work on Monday after three weeks, to hear that GM Europe is looking for $750 million cuts, and immediately...
ISRAELI forces killed 21 Palestinians in the early hours after midnight Thursday ignoring the UN Security Council agreement on a draft ceasefire resolution. These included six members of the same family, and dozens more injured since midnight in the Gaza Strip. Later in the morning, two sisters were killed by another...
THE Bank of England yesterday cut interest rates to 1.5 per cent, the lowest level in its 315-year history, since the start of the bourgeois era. The disaster-struck Engineering Employers Federation, whose members are seeing their factories sinking fast, reacted by saying that the move was ‘too timid’,...
AFTER taking part in the Ashura procession in Beirut’s southern suburb to mark the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, hundreds of thousands gathered to listen to Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah’s speech, broadcast on a large screen. Nasrallah lashed out at those Arab leaders who still have normal ties...
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) yesterday accused Israel of failing to assist wounded Palestinians after finding four small children next to their dead mothers in one house. In a statement demanding urgent access, the ICRC said: ‘On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society...
THE international banking system has collapsed, the steel industries of the planet are in slump, and the US and Japanese motor car giants are in desperate straits, on the brink of bankruptcy, with huge debts instead if profits, amidst rapidly collapsing order books. Capitalism is in crisis and...
Tens of thousands of Palestinians yesterday attended a funeral procession for 47 defenceless civilians who were killed on Tuesday when Israeli artillery shelled a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabaliya. The bodies of children, women, and elderly people were among the dead. The mourners walked from Kamal...
TAMILNET reports that the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) have stated that, with the people’s support, they will surmount all difficulties. In an interview with Tamilnet, the LTTE Political Head, B. Nadesan, pointed out that Ki’linochchi was where Sri Lanka military has suffered previous historic debacles. He dismissed the occupation of the town...
THE two-million-strong Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will today launch an ‘intensive’ campaign for healthcare and trade union rights for all workers in the United States, but is still insisting that this can be delivered by incoming President Barack Obama. Trade union recognition and a National Health Service were two...
THREE Palestinians were killed near midnight on Monday in an Israeli attack on a United Nations school that was housing people displaced by the violence in Gaza, the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees said yesterday. UNRWA said that Israeli forces attacked the Asma Elementary School in Gaza City, which...
FORTY-THREE Palestinians were killed by Israeli tanks and rocket fire on UN-run schools late on Monday night and during Tuesday. The schools were well lit and flagged and highly visible when the attacks took place. The fact that the Israeli army has been provided with the coordinates for all UN-run...
Nine more Israeli soldiers were injured in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, two of them seriously, as fierce fighting continued on the tenth day of the Israeli assault on the impoverished Strip. Palestinian fighters continue to exchange fire with Israeli troops, primarily in northern towns and the outskirts of densely-populated...
YESTERDAY Adams Childrenswear announced that it had closed down 111 of its stores throughout the UK, and that its remaining 160 shops would stay open as the administrators try to sell the company. Adams employs 3,200 people. On the same day Waterford Wedgwood, made up of companies that have...
AS it has vowed, the Palestinian resistance was waiting for the Israeli occupation soldiers to foil their aggression, killing nine of them and wounding dozens others, according to Ezz-eddine Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. Hamas resistance fighters also said they have destroyed an Israeli Merkava with a B-29bomb. Hamas announced...
OVER 100,000 people took part in the largest-ever demonstration Britain has seen in support of the Palestinian people on Saturday, as Israel invaded the impoverished Gaza Strip. Over 450 Palestinians have already been massacred by missile strikes from the air, sea and land since last week. A march of an estimated...
ISRAEL, on Saturday evening, committed over 200 tanks and 20,000 troops to an invasion of Gaza, covered by artillery fire and fire from warships off the Gaza coast, in a desperate effort to destroy the Hamas movement. The Israeli government sees Hamas in the same way that it saw Yasser...
Fifteen Palestinian civilians were killed yesterday and at least 40 others were wounded when Israeli shells hit Gaza City shopping centre. Among those killed by the Israeli air strike were a mother and her four children in Wadi At-Tuffah in Gaza City. Gaza City has been surrounded after a column of...
THERE was no lull in the Israeli air strikes on Gaza yesterday. Three young brothers – Iyad, Mohammed and Abdelsattar al-Astal died in a raid that targeted their house near the city of Khan Younis. At the same time, 450 foreign passport holders left the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing...
YESTERDAY morning Israel allowed about 450 foreign passport holders to leave the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing near Beit Hanoun, after refusing to let anyone leave the Gaza Strip for months. A military decision was taken by the Israeli command to let the 450 go on Thursday night. Palestinians were...
Israeli warplanes continued to pound targets including a mosque in Gaza yesterday as Hamas ordered a ‘day of wrath’ against Israel over the killing of a senior commander, Dr Nizar al-Rayyan and his family. Thousands of Israeli security personnel were on alert after Hamas called for ‘massive marches’ following Friday...
The US and UK has blocked an emergency UN resolution condemning Israel and demanding it end its savage bombardment of Gaza. The UN Security Council ended its emergency meeting on Gaza without issuing any resolution as the Israeli onslaught continued with the death toll reaching over 400. The Libyan representative read...
YESTERDAY’S UN Security Council emergency meeting on Gaza ended without the issuing of a resolution after the US and the UK refused to vote for a Libyan sponsored Arab League motion which called for an immediate halt to Israeli attacks on Gaza and for the ending of the Israeli...
