Monthly Archives: December 2012
PAKISTAN has faced a rising food crisis for the last three years, and global price hikes could worsen the situation, warns UN agency IRIN. ‘Given the predictions for lower global production of cereal crops this year, there is likely to be a global hike in prices that will affect Pakistan,’...
ONE HUNDRED ambulance workers and supporters from Manchester descended on parliament yesterday to demonstrate against the transfer of the patient transport service (PTS) from the NHS to privateer Arriva. Unison warned that the privatisation will lead to a poorer quality service for vulnerable patients and act as a blueprint for...
THE leading group representing the Egyptian bourgeoisie, around President Mursi, who is known as Mubarak with a beard, has just been massively shocked by the Egyptian working class and its struggle for basic democratic rights and socialism. The trade unions insist that they will not allow the leaders of the...
OVER 1,000 doctors involved in the care of people with lung disease have written to the new NHS Commissioning Board in England, expressing ‘grave concern’ about the future of NHS care for their patients. The letter was composed at the British Thoracic Society Winter Conference in London last Friday. It says...
BY A MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT PROPOSALS are being made by clinical leaders to bring in 7-day working for hospital consultants. These proposals are laid out in a new paper produced by a steering group of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) titled ‘Seven-Day Consultant Present Care’. The chairman of the group is...
LEWISHAM East Labour MP Heidi Alexander handed in a 22,000 signature petition to Downing Street yesterday against plans to axe Lewisham Hospital’s A&E and downgrade its maternity services. The south east London MP also handed in a letter from 200 doctors opposing South East London Healthcare Trust Special Administrator (TSA)...
THOUSANDS of school students in all Greek cities participated in militant mobilisations against the government’s austerity laws and police violence on Thursday, the fourth anniversary of the killing of 15-year-old schoolboy Alexis Grigoropoulos by a policeman in Athens that led to the December Uprising in 2008. In some Greek cities,...
UK MANUFACTURING output in October fell at its fastest rate since June, just-released official figures show. Output fell by 1.3%, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. Compared with a year earlier, output was down by 2.1%. The figure for the wider measure of industrial output, which also includes energy production...
JERUSALEM – King Abdullah II of Jordan arrived in Ramallah on Thursday, in the first visit by an Arab leader since Palestine’s admission to the United Nations as a state. President Mahmud Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, welcomed the king along with PLO and Fatah members as well...
FURTHER welfare cuts and tax rises ‘must be on the cards’ to make the government’s numbers in the Autumn Statement add up, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned yesterday. In a briefing on Wednesday’s statement, IFS director Paul Johnson began by noting ‘the economic and fiscal news was bad....
COMMENTING on the Chancellor’s autumn statement, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘When you are self-harming you should stop, not look for better sticking plasters. ‘With the economy still scraping along the bottom, unemployment set to rise and the Chancellor missing his own debt target, we need a fundamental change...
THE dust had barely settled on Tory chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement on the state of the British economy before the gaping holes in his boast that ‘the economy is healing’ became glaringly apparent. A close inspection of his figures tells a completely different story and reveals Osborne to be...
CHANCELLOR Osborne’s Autumn Statement to the House of Commons yesterday afternoon was a savage attack on the working class and the poor. Early in his hour-long speech he admitted that the Treasury’s seizure of the Royal Mail Pension Fund earlier this year has ‘had a significant one-off impact on the...
CHANCELLOR George Osborne in his Autumn statement was forced to admit failure, that his policies were not working and that he had been forced to extend austerity measures to 2018 – and that he will miss his own targets for reducing the national debt, despite his savage austerity measures. He...
WORKERS on 12 Egyptian newspapers and five TV channels have gone on strike for a day this week against the recently issued constitutional declaration and the draft constitution. The newspapers did not print on Tuesday and the TV channels went off-air on Wednesday. The draft constitution, which was passed on 30...
THE just re-elected US President, Barack Obama, yesterday warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons against the NATO-supported opposition forces, saying there would be consequences if he were to do so. The Syrian government has responded that it would never use chemical weaponry against the Syrian people. However,...
HAMAS Political Bureau Deputy Chief Musa Abu-Marzuq has said that the resistance’s victory in Gaza has brought unity and reconciliation between Palestinian factions much closer than ever before. Abu-Marzuq declared that Fatah and Hamas had stood alongside each other in this battle ‘which is a wonderful situation that brings us...
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) yesterday launched a campaign to highlight the threat to the UK’s universal postal service and jobs. Calling for the postal regulator Ofcom to ‘step in and redress the balance of unfair competition’, the CWU announced it will hold a consultative ballot of its members in...
Chancellor Osborne will step up the Coalition’s attacks on public spending in his Autumn Statement today, while handing over another huge tranche of taxpayers money to the privateers. Most government departments will be informed that they must ‘save’ an extra 1% next year and a further 2% the following year. Osborne...
THE Leveson report’s executive summary considered whether ‘the close relationship’ with politicians affected press standards. It says: ‘I can do no more here than paint the general picture and identify the recommendations that I have made. ‘Module Three was not in the main concerned with the routine interactions between politicians and...
In an interview on Sunday the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, made it absolutely clear that as far as the coalition government is concerned there will be no going back on the policy of imposing savage austerity cuts to the welfare state, wages and benefits. Osborne was speaking in advance of...
seventy fire stations in England are threatened with closure and scores more face severe downgrading when the government presses ahead with its spending cuts, the Fire Brigades Union warned yesterday. Public safety risks being compromised and a service the public relies on downgraded, the union warned after its latest analysis...
TEN million households are suffering from the financial and political crisis says Which? as it calls on the coalition government, ahead of its Autumn statement, to put consumers at the heart of measures to drive economic recovery. In fact, Chancellor Osborne is preparing to increase taxation and bring in even...
President Mahmud Abbas speech to the UN General Assembly Mr. President of the General Assembly, Your Excellency Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, PALESTINE comes today to the United Nations General Assembly at a time when it is still tending to its wounds and still burying its beloved martyrs...
THE UK’s ‘big four’ banks face a financial black hole of up to £60bn from regulatory demands, hidden losses, and potential mis-selling costs that threaten to jeopardise future growth, the Bank of England has warned. In its Financial Stability Report (FSR), the Bank revealed that RBS, Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC...
FOREIGN Office documents made public by the National Archives after more than 50 years give the fullest account yet of a massacre which took place in1958 during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. They confirm that eleven Kenyans were beaten to death by prison warders at the Hola detention camp,...
THE People’s Democratic Republic of Laos (LPD) is the most bombed country in history, with 600,000 tonnes of Un-Exploded Ordinance (UXO) – bombs which could go off at any minute – still littering its countryside today. The ‘Secret War’ on Laos was the largest operation ever conducted by the...
LABOUR has won three by-elections, holding Croydon North, Middlesbrough and Rotherham, while the coalition governing parties were wiped out. The Tories came behind UKIP, their more insular first cousin, in two of the seats, while their Liberal Democrat coalition partners lost their deposits in two out of three seats. The...