Monthly Archives: January 2010
RAIL union RMT yesterday slammed the government for ‘presiding over a culture of private waste’ on the railways, calling for an end to the rail privatisation ‘rip-off’. This came after new figures obtained by RMT parliamentary convenor John McDonnell revealed that the cost of designing and tendering rail franchises since...
ALASTAIR Campbell yesterday defended ‘every single word’ of the notorious ‘sexed up’ dodgy dossier of September 2002, that was used by a desperate Blair government to try and gain support for attacking Iraq. Campbell was giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, and it was put to...
BLAIR’S spin-master, Alastair Campbell, told the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry yesterday, that he ‘defends every single word’ of the 2002 dodgy dossier on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. These words included the establishment ‘beyond doubt’ that Iraq had WMDs that it could deliver on target within 45 minutes, and...
‘Tamil speaking people should vote for a person who publicly recognises their rights and aspirations,’ said Mr Manicaksothy, a prominent person in Jaffna peninsula, reports TamilNet. He added in a report to media on Monday in support of Dr Wickramabahu Karunaratne, the Common Front contestant in the forthcoming presidential candidate...
Right wing Labour MP Frank Field yesterday appeared alongside David Cameron at an election event, suggesting that he would serve in a Cameron government. The MP for Birkenhead, who backed ex-cabinet ministers Hoon and Hewitt’s attempted leadership coup against prime minister Brown, assured the audience at a presentation to...
JUST days after the failure of the Hoon-Hewitt attempt to remove Gordon Brown as premier, one of Labour’s leading right-wingers, Frank Field, yesterday joined the would-be Tory Prime Minister Cameron, at a Tory election event, to signal his support for the Tory leader, with a general election just...
THE London Guantanamo Campaign staged a protest yesterday outside the American embassy on the 8th anniversary of the establishment of the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison, demanding it be shut down. They were also calling for the immediate release of Shaker Aamer, who has family in Britain, and Ahmed Belbacha who...
A Hamas delegation headed by the Islamist movement’s senior most leader Khaled Mishaal met with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus on Saturday to discuss the status of the occupied Palestinian territories. The meeting tackled the latest developments in the Palestinian territories as reconciliation efforts between rival factions Hamas and...
Further heavy snowfalls are forecast today, piling more pressure on Britain’s already-stretched winter resources. Prime Minister Brown has convened the Cobra emergency committee as forecasters warned yesterday that up to 20cm of snow could settle as grit and gas suplies are critically short. Warnings were given yesterday that food prices are...
THOUSANDS of people, including men, women and children paid their last respects on Saturday to the remains of the late Thiruvengadam Vellupillai, father of LTTE leader V Prabhakaran, at Theeruvli in Valveddiththu’rai (VVT) near the memorial monument of Lt. Col. Kumarappa, Lt Col Pulenthiran and Col Kiddu. Mr Velupillai...
LAST Saturday, the Tory leader, Cameron, told the Daily Telegraph that if he should win the General Election he is ready to toughen the anti-union laws, to illegalise strike actions in the public sector against the government’s policy to freeze wages for a year. He added for good measure...
Testimony given to South African jurist Richard Goldstone’s UN Fact Finding Mission on the winter 2008/2009 war on Gaza, illustrates vividly one of the daily massacres of Palestinian civilians that took place. In the late morning of January 7th 2009, Israeli tanks moved onto a small piece of agricultural land...
The leader of the Viva Palestina aid convoy for Gaza, British MP George Galloway, was yesterday deported and declared persona non grata by Egypt. Officials denied that they had deported him but a foreign ministry official told Galloway he was no longer welcome before he left Cairo airport for London. The...
GAS for industry and grit for the roads were being rationed yesterday as British industry began to shut down. Vauxhall, Ellesmere Port, Jaguar Land Rover, Solihull, and British Sugar refineries at Bury St Edmunds and Newark were among over 30 factories in the UK to be told to switch from...
THE Viva Palestina convoy has found out that, when it comes to preventing aid reaching the much-battered and besieged Gaza Strip, the Mubarak regime that runs Egypt is as much an opponent as Zionist Israel. In fact, the Egyptian regime, along with the US, is currently building a steel...
‘TO THIS day, not a single police officer has been punished for the deliberate shooting of an innocent man and the cover up that followed. ‘This is a public scandal and this memorial stands testament to that,’ Vivian Figueiredo, cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes, said yesterday. She was unveiling a...
ON Wednesday mid-day, ex-ministers Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon sent a text to all Labour MPs asking them to support a call for a secret MPs ballot on whether they supported the leader, Prime Minister Brown, or not. They made the call, but the expected Labour reinforcements, from its cabinet,...
MEDICAL aid and 518 international activists finally entered Gaza on Wednesday night, following protests against the Egyptian government’s refusal to let them in led to clashes in the divided border town. An Egyptian soldier was shot dead during the clashes, Egyptian state television reported, and at least 12 Palestinians were...
HEWITT and Hoon, are two of the Labour Party’s leading Blairites. Hoon was heavily involved in Blair’s criminal Iraq war, and in the pursuit of the whistleblower Doctor Kelly, while Hewitt was booed at NHS trade union conferences because of her role in privatising the NHS, and...
AMERICAN spy agencies need to make ‘sweeping’ changes to their work in Afghanistan, a report by Major-General Michael T Flynn and two other senior US military men has warned. The publication of their report, in association with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), comes in the wake of...
The House of Commons yesterday witnessed a Blairite revolt against Prime Minister Brown. Ex-cabinet ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt bolstered the Tories by calling for a secret ballot on Brown’s leadership, only months before a general election must be called. Brown was informed just before parliamentary questions began that the...
ISRAEL cancelled the visit of a military delegation to Britain last week after British authorities could not guarantee that the Israeli occupation army’s officers would not be arrested. The delegation was made up of five officers who were invited to the UK by the British army. Israel was rebuffed...
Israel’s ultra-Zionist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday questioned on Israeli radio if President Mahmud Abbas represents all Palestinians, given his lack of authority in the Gaza Strip. He called the Palestinian Authority ‘a bunch of terrorists,’ adding that there is ‘no chance of reaching peace with the Palestinians...
IT seems that the United States is preparing the ground to make the Palestinians an offer that they will not be able to refuse – the style of negotiations associated with the Cosa Nostra. The Egyptian regime, which is almost as heavily financed by the US as is Israel, is...
Thirty per cent funding cuts will force universities to axe thousands of courses, lecturers and students, university bosses’ most senior representative has warned. In interviews on Sunday and yesterday, Universities UK (UUK) president Steve Smith, said the cuts announced by Business, Innovation and Skills Secretary Mandelson before Christmas...
RECENT attacks on Al-Qaeda positions in Yemen, including cruise missile strikes, were led by the United States according to a CBS television report Saturday. The channel quoted Sebastian Gorka, a ‘US special operations expert who trains Yemeni officers’ as saying the United States had led the recent ground and air...
THE US emphasised that it had gone to war on the territory of the Yemen yesterday, by closing its embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, hardly a sign of great strength. Britain is the US’ partner in this new expansion of the war that began in Afghanistan in...
Hundreds of Palestinians from lands occupied in 1948 and international activists demonstrated at the Beit Hanoun (Eretz) crossing linking the Gaza Strip with 1948 Palestine on New Year’s Day to mark the first anniversary of the war on Gaza and protest at the continued siege on the densely populated...
ISRAELI Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned yesterday that Israel will strike ‘aggressively’ at Gaza in reaction to any fire from the territory. He said at the opening of his weekly Cabinet meeting: ‘Our policy is clear to all and I think it also became clear over the weekend – to...
UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis has warned politicians against making ‘selfless’ public service workers pay the price for the economic slump. In his New Year message, Prentis said the recession was brought on by the greed of city bankers, who should have known better. He said: ‘I pay tribute to the...
THE CBI New Year’s message calls for ‘a new and re-energised government by the summer, with – we hope – the authority to take the decisions necessary to reshape the public finances.’ The CBI Director General Richard Lambert is keeping his options open – he does not call...
A SENIOR Egyptian engineer working on the ‘steel wall’ which the Egyptian authorities are building along the borders with the Gaza Strip, has confirmed that there is comprehensive US supervision of its construction by engineers who are said to be working in the US Army. He added that the...