Monthly Archives: March 2009
UK resident Binyam Mohamed, recently freed from Guantanamo Bay, has called for ex-US President Bush to be put on trial over his rendition and torture and, if there is enough evidence, the former UK Premier Blair as well. Mohamed said he would not have faced torture or extraordinary rendition but...
PETER Mandelson is one of five Labour government cabinet ministers who insists on his business interests being a secret and for that purpose has placed them in a ‘blind trust’ where his portfolio is handled for him, while he is a minister but its contents remain secret to the...
EX-PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF has not been lying in his political grave for six months and already the lawyers are marching against the new regime of the Bhutto family, headed by President Zardari. The new president is carrying on from where the old one left off and is refusing to reappoint all...
IN the last article we saw how the state had leapt into action from the outset of the strike to try and break it physically through the use of the police and the courts. Far from being cowed, the miners responded with increased determination. A 260-mile march from Kent to Nottingham...
Strike action is ‘on the cards’ to defend Liverpool University departments. The philosophy, politics and communications and statistics departments at Liverpool University are still at risk following a meeting of the university’s senate on Wednesday afternoon to the backdrop of noisy protests from staff and students, warned the University and...
TODAY marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the beginning of the year-long miners’ strike, a strike that saw the full force of the capitalist state, its police, its law courts and its secret security apparatus used in an attempt to crush the miners, their wives and families and their...
THE UNITE trade union leaders yesterday were in full flight praising Toyota workers for taking their advice and assisting the bosses by accepting a 10 per cent wage cut and a ten per cent cut in the working week. Unite, whose leaders have given the Brown bankers government £11 million...
Car manufacturer Toyota yesterday announced that production at its UK plants would be cut by ten per cent, with an associated cut in wages of ten per cent. The agreement – which affects 4,500 workers at plants in Burnaston, Derby, Deeside, and Flintshire – will come into place from April...
government proposals to cut teacher training to just six months were condemned by unions yesterday as consigning the ‘vision of a world class education system to the scrap heap’. The plans were unveiled by Prime Minister Brown in a wide-ranging public service reform paper called Working Together. The paper also announced...
THE Continuity IRA and the Real IRA have opened fire and killed and wounded soldiers and policemen in the north of Ireland, breaking open the current peace process. They believe that they are reinstating the armed struggle that Sinn Fein abandoned in its rush to take part in a...
Dear Editor, The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is working with other Trade Unions, politicians and members of the public to retain a wholly publicly owned Royal Mail. A March and Rally has been planned to take place in Corby on 20th March 09, the constituency of Phil Hope MP who is...
Public sector union Unison yesterday sounded the alarm bells over a move from NHS foundation trust bosses to lift the cap on the number of private patients they are allowed to treat. A Unison spokeswoman said: ‘Our fear is that it will allow these hospitals, with all their freedoms,...
EVERYWHERE capitalism is crashing! Yesterday the FTSE 100 index fell to 3472.68 points making a 50 per cent crash from the FTSE’s high point of two years ago. Over £700bn has been lopped off of share prices. On Friday night the Dow Jones index was at 6626 points....
TAMILNET reports that the Indian High Commissioner in Mauritius last Friday rebuffed a memorandum from thousands of Mauritian Tamil demonstrators, requesting India stop the war against the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The representatives of the demonstrators were seeking to submit the memorandum in person to the High Commissioner, who...
TOP British medical journal The Lancet has published a series of detailed research reports on the health status of 3.8 million people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In Part Three News Line is reproducing the extensive Lancet press release on the final scientific papers. 5. ‘The Best Solution...
MPs yesterday demanded a judicial inquiry into a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner’s claims that MI5 was complicit in his torture. In a ‘Mail on Sunday’ interview, UK resident Binyam Mohamed claims MI5 fed his US captors questions, at a time he said he was being tortured in Morocco. Mohamed has...
PRESIDENT Obama has shaken his supporters with his admission that the war in Afghanistan is not being won, and that he is willing to negotiate with the more moderate elements of the Taleban in a reconciliation process. A month into his presidency, Obama authorised the deployment of up to 17,000...
The labour collective occupying the Kherson engineering factory has issued a decree appealing to the ‘Workers of Ukraine’. The decree says: ‘We understand that we can achieve our demands only with the support of workers of other enterprises and institutions. ‘Working groups of enterprises throughout Ukraine should join efforts and support...
Northern Ireland Assembly Deputy First Minister and Sinn Fein MP Martin McGuinness yesterday slammed the redeployment of British Army Special Forces in the North as a ‘danger to the community’. He was responding to Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde’s request for support from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, allegedly to help...
TOP British medical journal The Lancet, the has published a series of detailed research reports on the health status of 3.8 million people living in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT). News Line is reproducing in Part II the extensive Lancet press release on scientific papers 3 and 4. 3. Chronic Diseases Are...
THEY were withdrawn from the north of Ireland because there could not be a ‘peace process’ and a power-sharing regime while they were there, performing their murderous ‘anti-insurgency’ duties. Now they are on the way back, with the power-sharing regime unable to stop them, even if it wanted to do...
TOP British medical journal The Lancet, the has published a series of detailed research reports on the health status of 3.8 million people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).| The Lancet says the OPT is ‘one of the most important flashpoints not only in Middle East politics,...
The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee yesterday cut interest rates from one per cent to a record low of 0.5 per cent. Interest rates have now been reduced six times since October. At the same time Bank governor Mervyn King revealed he had exchanged letters with Chancellor Darling on February...
MANDELSON began his speech to the City of London magnates at the Mansion House last Wednesday night by declaring his continuing support for the Thatcherite principle that the banks are the only section of the British economy that are worth maintaining and saving. He declared: ‘The entire thrust of the...
England should follow the example of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and abolish all prescription charges, the British Medical Association (BMA) said today. The Department of Health is currently reviewing the list of long-term conditions that are exempt from prescription charges. In its submission to the review, the BMA says that...
TODAY the working class is fighting against a crisis-ridden capitalist system whose banks and industries have collapsed, and whose political leaders, such as the Brown government in the UK, are determined to support the banks to any extent and at any cost, and to make the working class and...
‘THIS major change to junior doctors’ hours is probably the biggest challenge hospitals will face in 2009.’ This is the view of Dr Jonathan Fielden, Chairman of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) Central Consultants and Specialists Committee (CCSC). He was referring to the fact that a 48-hour-week will be required for...
Peace Now an Israeli left-wing Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) reported on Monday that the Israeli government is planning to build more than 73,300 new housing units in the West Bank. Peace Now estimates that if all of the units are built, it would mean a 100 per cent increase in...
THE head of General Motors Europe warned yesterday that without government finance Vauxhall Luton and Ellesmere Port face immediate closure as ‘the obvious next step’. Speaking at the Geneva Motor Show, Carl-Peter Forster said the two factories which employ 3,300 workers, will close if bail-out talks with the government do...
VAUXHALL factories at Ellesmere Port and Luton will close if GM’s talks with the Labour government for the Treasury to take over the financing of both plants fail, the head of General Motors Europe said yesterday at the Geneva Motor Show. Carl-Peter Forster, head of GM Europe, did not...
Civil servants union PCS has organised a lobby of Parliament today, 3rd March, where it will be joined by other trade unions and campaigning organisations to call on the government to drop its regressive ‘welfare reform’ plans. The PCS says: ‘We have joined forces with other unions, anti-poverty campaigners and...
Over 30,000 Belgian postal workers began a three-day strike yesterday against privatisation to defend their jobs, pay and working conditions. Postal unions held a demonstration through the capital Brussels. ‘Two thousand marched through the streets of Brussels today,’ CGT trade union secretary-general Josef de Donckel told News Line. ‘The...
THE developing world-wide economic crisis is now bringing the contradictions inside the EU together and sharpening them to the point of a massive transformation that will bring the dissolution of the EU, and a series of workers revolutions in Eastern Europe. When Yeltsin decreed the end of the USSR the...
AN OPEN letter to US President Obama reveals how one juvenile and 19 other prisoners remain dangerously brutalised in Guantánamo Bay, despite federal courts ordering their release. On 26 February lawyers acting for Guantánamo prisoners launched an urgent appeal to Obama to halt the abuse of 20 men declared...
Postal workers yesterday reacted angrily to Business Secretary Lord Mandelson’s threat to their jobs and pensions if they did not give up their opposition to Royal Mail privatisation. Commenting on Mandelson’s claims made in the Observer newspaper, Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) North Wales, Northwest Divisional Rep Ian Taylor told...
BUSINESS Secretary Peter Mandelson, in the words of the bourgeois media ‘came out fighting’ over the weekend to ‘make war’ on the CWU leaders and their ‘scare tactics’ (his term for their very limited defence of the Royal Mail) and on Labour ministers and MPs who intend to vote...