Monthly Archives: February 2010
One in three NHS accident and emergency departments could close across London, documents seen by the BBC have revealed. Eleven A&E units are under threat from closure, under reorganisation plans by the area NHS London. There are currently 31 A&Es in the capital. Six of these may go in the west...
The University and College Union (UCU) said yesterday (Thursday) that forcing students to pick up the bill for higher education was an astonishingly weak, but somewhat predictable conclusion from the Policy Exchange. The union said the think tank’s report, More Fees Please?, failed to consider any radical options for the...
THE Court of Appeal yesterday forced the British Labour government and its Foreign Secretary, Miliband to publish seven paragraphs concerning the torture of a British resident that the Foreign Secretary had sought to suppress for ‘national security’ reasons. The publication came after the British government was sued to force...
THE split in the Sri Lankan ruling class has deepened with the arrest of General Fonseka who led the military campaign which killed tens of thousands of Tamils and ended with the execution of the Tamil Tiger leadership who were surrendering under a white flag. Supporters of the seized Sri...
Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday lost an Appeal Court bid to stop the disclosure of secret information relating to the torture of UK resident Binyam Mohamed. The Court of Appeal ordered the publication of seven paragraphs of a High Court judgement summarising the UK authorities’ knowledge of Binyam Mohamed’s torture...
IRAN has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of its plans to enrich uranium to 20 per cent – after its offer to send uranium abroad to Russia and France for enrichment was rejected by the West. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has met US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates...
NICK REILLY, the GM executive who closed down Vauxhall Motors in 2002, unveiled, yesterday in Frankfurt, the GM plan for Opel and Vauxhall. Earlier this year GM let what was its other European arm, Saab, go for a relative handful of US dollars. Reilly unveiled GM’s ‘Plan...
TEN THOUSAND Opel and Vauxhall sackings were announced by General Motors Europe Chief Executive David N (Nick) Reilly and Executive Director Reinald Hoben, yesterday. They confirmed the closure of the Antwerp plant and warned that there is no production planned for the Vauxhall plant in Luton, Bedfordshire beyond 2012. Reilly said:...
‘YOU cannot make savage funding cuts without serious consequences, despite Lord Mandelson’s insulting efforts to sell the cuts as an opportunity,’ said UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt yesterday. She added: ‘The government is abandoning a generation who instead of benefiting from education will find themselves on the dole alongside...
THE OPPOSITION leader Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the Party of the Regions, has won the Ukrainian presidential election, and has defeated Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the leaders of the Orange counter-revolution by 2.59% of the votes. The other counter-revolutionary leader, ex-president Yushchenko, was knocked out in...
The Philippines Health Alliance for Democracy (HEAD) on Sunday called for the immediate release of two doctors, a nurse, a midwife and other health workers (CHWs) arbitrarily arrested and illegally detained by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. ‘Contrary to allegations made by Colonel Aurelio Baladbad of the 202nd Infantry...
Diane Abbott MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington has pledged her support for the British Medical Association’s campaign against privatisation, ‘Look after our NHS’. Abbott met with BMA Council Chair Dr Hamish Meldrum at Westminster last week. The pair discussed how privatisation was based on the false idea that healthy...
IN ‘going-broke Britain’ the number of people becoming insolvent in England and Wales in 2009 was 134,142, according to official data from the Insolvency Service. In the fourth quarter of last year alone, 35,574 people became insolvent, up 24.9 per cent from the last three months of 2008. At the...
Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) last Friday, 5 February, lodged papers to commence a judicial review on behalf of 66 Iraqis claiming torture and abuse at the hands of UK soldiers and interrogators during the period May 2003 – December 2007. The judicial review will argue that, given the common systemic...
ROMANIAN President Traian Basescu said on Thursday that Romania will host US interceptor missiles along its border with the Russian Federation. This latest missile plan is part of a US ruling class scheme to defend itself and Western Europe after it has launched a ballistic missile first strike against Russia. This...
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya welcomed Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Sha’ath into his home in the Ash-Shati Refugee Camp on Thursday, along with delegations of Fatah and Hamas leaders in Gaza. The visit to Haniya’s home came after Sha’ath spent the day touring Al-Azhar University and civil service institutions...
THREE Labour MPs and one Tory peer will face criminal charges over their expenses, Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keir Starmer announced yesterday. MPs Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine and Lord Hanningfield will be charged under section 17 of the Theft Act 1968. Anyone convicted faces a maximum sentence...
BRITISH imperialism, at the height of its power and even up to the 1930s, had at its heart the dictum of sea power, that its navy had to be bigger than the combined naval forces of all of its potential opponents. The navy then had an empire to protect, from...
The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday hit out at the ‘huge profits being made by private companies providing NHS services’. This followed the revelation that the government plans to axe the capital budget for hospital buildings and equipment by a huge 21.9 per cent or £1.4bn in the coming financial...
Calling for victory over ruthless employers, Construction and Engineering workers from many parts of Britain, rallied 100 strong outside the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday. The rally called by the GMB union pledged to restore the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI) conditions of employment for all workers...
THE Greek ‘socialist’ Prime Minister George Papandreou has announced austerity measures to attack the country’s working class, youth, urban middle class and small farmers, to rescue the Greek capitalists from the enormous crisis that grips them. Papandreou is to impose a public sector pay freeze, in reality a savage wage...
Angry Cadbury workers lobbied MPs on Tuesday, entering parliament at precisely 1pm, the exact time that Cadbury shareholders voted in favour of a ‘highly-leveraged’ £11.5 billion takeover bid from American food processor, Kraft. Last month, Unite warned that Kraft’s debts, estimated to be about £22 billion, meant there would be...
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) yesterday announced that it will start a strike ballot today of 270,000 PCS members working for the civil service and its related bodies over unilateral changes to the civil service compensation scheme. A PCS statement said: ‘The ballot, to run between 4th and...
MEMBERS of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) are vowing to fight as long as it takes to defeat the government’s heavy-handed, anti-union moves to break its independent union. Speaking at a brown-bag luncheon last week at the AFL-CIO in Washington DC, Humberto Montes de Oca, SME’s interior secretary, and...
CLARE SHORT, one-time International Development Minister, revealed to the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday just how Blair, with the aid of Goldsmith, deceived the Cabinet and then parliament into making war on Iraq. She told the Inquiry that she was a loyal Blairite and supported the government’s stated policy on Iraq....
NORMAL government structures were shut down as Blair and his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, lied and deceived in order to push the Cabinet into supporting the Iraq war, Clare Short said yesterday. She told the Chilcot Inquiry that she was frozen out of all decision making and, when she...
‘The announcement from Barack Obama’s administration that it is siting Patriot missiles in four Gulf states marks not a defensive but an aggressive act,’ said Stop the War Coalition yesterday. Stop the War added: ‘The “defensive shield” marks an escalation of the situation in the Middle East, and in particular...
The following is the address by COSATU President, Sidumo Dlamini, to the Gaza Report-back Rally in Lenasia last Friday. ‘Almost a year ago, Gaza was run down by the occupying forces of Israel in a barbaric show of might and in pursuit of their colonial expansionist ambitions. ‘Schools, clinics, UN buildings,...
THE US has moved to prepare the way for an Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities by deploying missile shields in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait. As well, two major warships, Aegis cruisers, equipped with all the necessary weaponry to shoot down any missiles from Iran have now been...
THE Chinese government has condemned the US and President Obama for agreeing to a $6.4bn US arms sale package to Taiwan. The island of Taiwan is the part of China where the remnants of the army and government of General Chiang Kai Shek fled, after the victory of the Chinese...
‘Blair lied, thousands died’, chanted over seven hundred, mainly young, protesters outside the Iraq Inquiry last Friday, the day that the former prime minister gave evidence. News Line spoke to some of the demonstrators: Tim McCombie from Oxford, studying at Camberwell College of Art, said: ‘I’m here because it’s very...