Monthly Archives: July 2012
TODAY is the 40th anniversary of the release of the Pentonville 5 dockers when the TUC was forced to call a general strike and nearly brought down the Heath Tory government. The Pentonville 5 were TGWU London dockers who were arrested and jailed in July 1972 in Pentonville prison. They were...
GAZA prime minister Ismail Haniya is ‘satisfied’ with the outcome of talks with Egypt’s President Mursi, the Hamas-backed Palestinian newspaper Filastin website reported on Saturday. Haniya disclosed a host of ‘immediate decisions’ approved during his meeting with Mursi. He asserted that the meeting of the Gaza government delegation has special significance...
August is traditionally the month when politicians, bankers and bureaucrats across Europe take an extended break away from the chaos of the economic meltdown of the eurozone. This year their holidays will be ruined by the knowledge that there is no respite from the economic crisis and that their return in...
US TREASURY Secretary Timothy Geithner held emergency meetings with German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi yesterday. Markets had surged after Draghi said last Thursday that the ECB would preserve the euro ‘by all means necessary’. Over the following days, the leaders of Germany, France...
unions have angrily condemned the news that Academies can now employ unqualified ‘teachers’. The change, announced late last Friday afternoon, is immediate. Until now, state-funded schools could only employ people with ‘Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)’, meaning they have been trained and approved as meeting a range of professional standards. The change...
FOR the second day running the bourgeois media have been dominated by the Olympic opening extravaganza organised brilliantly by Danny Boyle, who used and developed the techniques of mass use of non-professional performers to express aspects of working class history, a technique pioneered by the likes of Ken...
TAMILNET reports that Tamil politicians all over the world are urging global action to gain the release of POWs, and political prisoners. Addressing a press conference in Vavuniyaa on Tuesday, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) called for the immediate release of all political prisoners who are held without...
Fierce fighting raged for a second straight day in Syria’s commercial capital Aleppo yesterday, as government troops pressed home their offensive against Western-backed armed gangs. Clashes between Syrian security forces and armed gangs intensified along the Syria-Lebanon border, while the battle raged on in Homs and Aleppo. The deadliest fighting took...
‘THIS is just the latest blow to hard-working teachers and other public sector employees already reeling from a raft of changes to their pensions,’ said NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates yesterday. She was responding to news that teachers and other public sector workers in defined benefit pension schemes could have...
GOVERNMENT education cuts are depriving many young people and adults of the chance to contribute fully to society, Unison has warned. A new freedom of information survey, sent by Unison to all of the 248 further education colleges in England, has revealed the devastating impact government funding cuts are having...
SAUDI security forces yesterday opened fire on anti-regime demonstrations in the eastern city of Qatif, injuring several protesters. The attack came after thousands of Saudi protesters took to the streets in Qatif, demanding the release of political prisoners, including a prominent Shia cleric. Chanting slogans in support of social justice in...
GREEK PM Antonis Samaras is meeting the organisation of Greece’s international creditors, the Troika (IMF, EU, ECB), to try to persuade it to give Greece more time to repay part of the gigantic loans that have been made to it, and to hand over the 31.5 bn euros that...
SAUDI officials are trying to strike a deal with Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Ashraf to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan. The recent meeting between King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Ashraf in Jeddah, discussed the nuclear situation in the Gulf area. The meeting came after Saudi Arabia began sending its special...
AT A time of a desperate economic crisis of capitalism, when millions of families fear that they will not be able to pay their rent or mortgages and feed and clothe their families, the message from the bosses and bankers is loud and clear: it is to hold down...
THERE was a very lively demonstration of blood testing workers outside Colindale tube station yesterday morning. They were handing out post cards explaining their fight to stop the closure of Colindale NHS Blood and Transplant Testing Laboratory. Unite rep Barry Tomkins told News Line: ‘What’s been going on here is an...
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urged UK Bank of England governor Mervyn King in 2008 to reform the London interbank offered rate (Libor) process to prevent ‘deliberate misreporting’. Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, sent King a private email warning him about irregularities in the...
ISRAELI Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said Israel is ready to discuss the issue of an ‘apology’ for the Mavi Marmara incident, maintaining that given the developments in the region, there are more reasons, especially today, for Turkey and Israel to return to normal diplomatic relations. Although...
THE SLUMP deepened dramatically in the UK in the year’s second quarter. Official figures showed yesterday that output fell by a startling 0.7% between April and June. ons (Office of National Statistics) figures show the UK economy has now contracted for three quarters in a row, making it the longest...
‘External intervention’ in Syria is becoming more likely, says a leading UK-based military think tank. Planning for possible intervention is already under way in Western capitals, Turkey and Jordan, the report says. The report comes from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) which has close ties to the...
THE war drums are beating with increasing intensity for armed intervention by imperialism into Syria to effect the smashing up of the Assad regime, the overthrow of the secular state and the victory of the rag-bag of imperialist stooges, mercenaries and jihadists who comprise the ‘free Syrian army.’ This has been...
THE AFL-CIO, NFL Players Association, the NOW, Netroots Nation, the LGBT organisations and many more joined Hyatt housekeepers for the launch of a worldwide boycott. DeMaurice Smith, Executive Director of the NFL Players Association, is among the many allies who stood with the Hyatt workers for the launch of the...
CREDIT ratings agency Moody’s yesterday reflected the rapidly developing EU meltdown by doing the unthinkable – warning the EU’s strongman, Germany, that it had feet of clay and faced a reduction of its Triple A credit rating. This was in the wake of Monday’s world wide share...
EGYPT’S President Mursi has intervened to settle strikes across the textile sector and at the giant Cleopatra Ceramics in Ain Sokhna, where striking workers agreed to mediation to get unpaid wages from the Mubarak-era factory owner, said the ITUC on Monday. In Mahalla, textile worker Ahmed Hosni was killed and...
REBEKAH Brooks and Andy Coulson, plus six others, face a total of 19 charges relating to phone hacking, the Crown Prosecution Service announced yesterday. The two ex-editors of the News of the World are to be charged in connection with the accessing of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone messages. Brooks, who...
The announcement by the Tory media, culture and sport secretary, Jeremy Hunt, that cabinet ministers are actively discussing the introduction of Ronald Reagan style employment laws marks a decisive point in the class war being waged by the coalition against the working class and its trade union organisations. The immediate...
SENIOR Hamas official Mahmoud Zahhar on Sunday denied media reports that the Islamist resistance group is considering declaring the Gaza Strip a separate entity from the Palestinian Authority controlled West Bank. ‘Such news is being disseminated by the enemies of Hamas seeking to maintain the siege on Gaza,’ Zahhar stressed. He...
UNIONS reacted angrily yesterday to threats by Arts, Media and Sports Secretary Hunt that public sector workers who strike during the Olympics should face the sack. An RMT spokesman told News Line: ‘It’s a nonsense – provocative nonsense from a Tory minister who has not the slightest grasp of workplace...
RUSSIA and China on Thursday vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that threatened sanctions against Syria and President Bashar al-Assad if he does not end the use of heavy weapons. The third Russia-China veto in nine months opened up an acrimonious battle at the 15-nation council with Russia...
NORWAY is commemorating one year since 77 mainly young people who were members of the Young Socialists, and engaged in a summer school, were killed and 242 hurt in gun and bomb attacks in the capital Oslo and on the island of Utoeya where the school was taking place. PM...
THE Tories are threatening emergency action to either ban the official strike action next Thursday by Home Office PCS union members, including Border Agency staff, or sack the workers involved. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the BBC on Saturday: ‘It’s an absolute disgrace. It’s totally out of sync with the...
AT 5.30AM yesterday about 50 armed riot police stormed the striking steel workers’ pickets at the Hellenic Steel plant in Aspropyrgos, about 25 km from the Athens city centre. Riot police attacked pickets with noise and smoke bombs, tear-gas and then with their truncheons. About ten workers have been taken...
TORY PM Cameron has declared, in the last few days, that he will be pushing through austerity measures until the end of the next parliamentary term in 2020 and that he cannot, in all honesty, see any end to the austerity programme of savage cuts. At the same time, the...
RUSSIA and China yesterday vetoed a UK-US UN Security Council resolution threatening the Syrian government with sanctions and regime change. The vote came a day after US and UK-organised ‘rebels’ bombed a meeting of top Syrian security officials, killing three senior military figures with close ties to President Bashar...
WORKERS at all 54 Remploy sites, members of the GMB and Unite unions, went on strike yesterday in a bid to save 2,800 disabled workers’ jobs. The decision to force the closure of Remploy factories means that thousands of disabled people and their families will be put into poverty and...
IN an interview given to the Daily Telegraph, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, declared that ‘austerity’ will be forever as far as he is concerned. When the Tories cobbled together a coalition with the LibDems in 2010, the stated aim was to enforce spending cuts for five years. This,...
THE Pentagon is building a missile defence radar station at a covert location in Qatar, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The site will be part of a system intended to defend the interests of the United States and its allies against Iranian rockets, unnamed US officials told the...
SYRIA’S deputy defence minister Assef Shawkat and security Chief General Hisham Ikhtiyar have been killed in a bomb attack on a security building in the capital by pro-Western terrorists. Syrian Defence Minister Dawoud Rajiha was also killed in the bombing at the headquarters of the National Security Bureau on Wednesday. Cabinet...
400 Houston janitors are continuing their strike against contractors for whom they clean the offices of some the wealthiest corporations in the world, but earn less than half the poverty level. They belong to the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 150,000 janitors in the United...
UNEMPLOYMENT has fallen by 65,000 in the three months to May, while the number of newly unemployed in receipt of the JobSeekers Allowance, for which an unemployed person has to qualify, rose by 6,100 in the month of June. The jobless total is now 2.58 million, while the...
On their picket line outside the British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday, GMB members demanded the doctors association show respect for their own staff and increase their derisory pay offer. The BMA has offered its staff a 1.5% basic pay rise plus a one off 0.5% Performance Related Pay that...
THE British government accepts that colonial forces in Kenya tortured and abused detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion, the High Court has heard. Three elderly Kenyans who are suing the government for damages were told it did not dispute that ‘terrible things’ had happened to them, including castration. Their lawyers say...
THE capitalist media has been forced, in recent days, to reveal some of the misdoings of the great banks that stand astride the planet, looting and plundering it by any and every means. We heard about the Libor rate fixing scandal, and then the revelations about how the big...
SYRIAN authorities on Monday clashed with an armed terrorist group in al-Zyara area in Idleb, state news agency SANA reported. A source at the Province told SANA that the authorities destroyed two of the terrorists’ cars and confiscated a third one. The source added that weapons and ammunition were seized from...
THREE victims of alleged torture at the hands of the British government during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s and 1960s give evidence in person at the High Court today. In 2011 a High Court judge ruled that claimants Paulo Muoka Nzili, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, had...