Monthly Archives: July 2014
WILLIAM Hague has stood down as foreign secretary, but will stay in the cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons till the next election, Downing Street has reported. In fact he has fallen on his sword, a broken man. He never recovered from the refusal of the working class...
LIBYA’S Interim Government has called on the two sides in the violent clashes between rival militias in the surrounds of Tripoli International Airport, which had been continuing since dawn that morning, to ‘stop hostile acts and terrorising peaceful people’. In a statement issued on Sunday, the government also called on...
NHS patients from outside the EU are to be charged 150% of the cost of treatment in the NHS. This is part of a ‘crackdown’ on what is being cynically called ‘health tourism’ by the UK coalition regime. It wants to make big profits out of providing NHS care...
DEPUTY Oil Minister for International and Trade Affairs Ali Majedi has voiced Iran’s readiness to speedily replace Iraq oil in the world market if Baghdad was forced to stop its exports due to its security crisis. Making this attempt to curry favour with the USA he told IRNA on Saturday...
THE government is planning to strip mentally ill people of their state benefits if they do not agree to undergo treatment for anxiety and depression, and then return to work, after some privateer, especially hired for the job, declares that they are ‘fit to work’. Ministers are at this very...
UP TO ten thousand people demonstrated on Friday evening in front of the Israeli embassy in London to protest against Israel’s continued military assault on Gaza. The turnout was so massive that police tried to prevent people from joining the protest, but protesters surged through the police barriersand completely...
ZWELINZIMA Vavi, General Secretary of COSATU, addressed the FAWU (Food and Allied Workers Union) Eastern Cape Regional Congress last Friday. He said: ‘We meet at a time of great upheaval in the labour market. 220,000 NUMSA members in the engineering and metals sectors are on strike, in support of fully...
TWO million teachers, education support workers, lecturers, local government workers, firefighters, civil servants and other public sector workers went on a 24-hour strike on Thursday 10th July, furious at the Tory coalition government’s attacks on their pay, pensions and the services they provide. There were thousands of picket lines outside...
ACCORDING to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 100 Palestinians have been killed and over 600 injured in Israel’s assault on the besieged coastal enclave. The Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Dr Riyad Mansour, addressed the United Nations Security Council on Thursday. He said: ‘We call on the Security Council to act immediately...
US Secretary of State John Kerry has had to make an emergency trip to Afghanistan where the much vaunted democratic election has ended up with both party leaders, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, claiming victory. They are also each vowing not to accept the other...
PALESTINIAN President Mahmud Abbas has said that ‘We shall be taking the case of the martyrdom of the youth Muhammad Abu-Khudayr to all international forums, until the criminals are punished and we restore our rights in full.’ Abbas made these statements when he received at the Presidential Headquarters in Ramallah...
TWO million public sector workers took one-day strike action yesterday, against pay cuts and government attacks on pensions. There were rallies, and protests all round the country, with picket lines outside Town Halls, schools, and fire stations set up by trade unionists determined to defeat the Tory attacks. In London,...
AS millions of public sector workers, teachers, firefighters, local government workers and many other sections took strike action yesterday, Prime Minister Cameron pledged to bring in more anti-union laws to make it impossible to have a legal strike action. He said: ‘I think the time has come for setting a...
‘TODAY’S huge strike of public sector workers expresses the great anger felt throughout the working class at the huge austerity cuts, including pay cuts, the government has imposed on the working class. ‘Now we must go forward and demand the TUC calls an indefinite general strike at September’s TUC Congress,...
ISRAELI Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Israel would ‘not tolerate the firing of rockets on our cities and towns’. His remarks came after the security cabinet approved the call-up of some 40,000 reservists, as a senior official said the military was preparing all options to stamp out the...
THE 220,000 Numsa (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) members in the metals and engineering industry have now completed more than one week on strike, with their leaders meeting this week to decide on the best way forward with regard to their colleagues employed at the power utility,...
WHEN Shakespeare had his character Marcellus observe in the play Hamlet that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ he had in mind the fact that a dead fish rots from the head down and so with societies – the rot becomes most apparent at the very top. Today...
‘YOU have to stand up for what you think is right. It’s all about passenger safety. All the rules are being broken on a daily basis.’ Unite member Nigel Browne was talking to News Line on the picket line outside the London Underground (LU) Power Control Room, opposite Southwark tube...
MP’s are voting today in parliament over controversial plans to cut legal aid which legal charity Reprieve say will see ‘torture victims denied their day in court’. Reprieve further warns that cuts to legal aid will ‘leave the government immune from legal challenges for wrongdoing overseas’. The measures, known as the...
AN Israeli court on Sunday placed under house arrest a Palestinian-American teenager who was filmed being brutally beaten by police during clashes in Jerusalem. Tarek Abu Khedeir, 15, who is the cousin of murdered West Bank teenager Mohammed Abu Khedeir, was released to house arrest for nine days, an attorney...
THE Tory-led coalition, faced with this Thursday’s one-day strike by two million workers, is driving forward preparations for new anti-union laws which will make strikes completely illegal and render the unions powerless to defend their members from the savage austerity demanded to keep the banks and capitalism from collapsing...
Three of six Israelis held over the abduction and killing of 16-year-old Palestinian teenager Muhammed Abu Khdeir last week have now confessed to his murder. They are being held in custody in Israeli jails. Muhammed’s autopsy showed soot in his lungs and respiratory tract, revealing that he was burnt alive. Muhammed’s 15-year-old...
AFTER the 15-year-old American cousin of murdered Palestinan teenager Mohammed Abu Khedair was beaten up by Israeli security forces last week, the US State Department has demanded ‘full accountability for any excessive use of force’. Tariq Khedeir, 15, a high school sophomore in Tampa, Florida, was visiting his Palestinian relatives...
UNITE and Unison rebutted threats issued by Cabinet Secretary Francis Maude yesterday morning, in which he poured Tory vitriol on this Thursday’s mass one-day public sector strike and reiterated plans for new legislation to ban strikes. A Unison spokesperson told News Line: ‘We will be looking for a big turnout...
WHEN the Tory education minister, Michael Gove, dumped the Labour peer Sally Morgan from her post as Chair of Ofsted, last January, his action was denounced by even his LibDem partners in the coalition as an ‘attempt to politicise’ the schools inspectorate and was part and parcel of Gove’s...
‘FREE, free Palestine! Occupation no more! Israel is a terror state!’ chanted workers and youth at a 3,000-strong protest outside the Israeli embassy in West London on Saturday. The demonstration was called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign against collective punishment of Palestinians in the wake of the deaths of three...
THREE thousand doctors, NHS staff, patients and supporters last Saturday marched from Aldgate to London Fields in east London. The march was organised to protest against the closures of the GP surgeries in Tower Hamlets. At the front of the march was the Save Our Surgeries banner with the quote by...
THE High Court has declared the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Act 2013 incompatible with the right to a fair trial guaranteed by Article 6(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights. It granted a declaration of incompatibility of the primary legislation with the right to a fair trial after...
YESTERDAY, the convicted News of the World journalists who had carried out ‘industrial scale’ hacking on behalf of Murdoch’s News International received lenient sentences. At the end of an eight-month trial costing millions of pounds, Andy Coulson got 18 months in an open prison, Neville Thurlbeck (chief reporter) and Greg...
THEY are smashing up the NHS as founded in 1948. The health service in England Wales and Northern Ireland is in huge crisis. Cuts and ‘reconfiguration’ are being used to pulverise, general practice, hospital care, mental health services and all community services, midwifery, to the ambulance service and care...
WITH 23,000 beds being cut from hospital wards over the last four years alone, the entire trade union movement must immediately move into action to defend the NHS and stop the cuts, closures and the privatisation of hospitals. Figures have shown that, in just four years between 2009 and 2013,...
MASSIVE Arts Council cuts were announced on Tuesday, hitting many superb professional theatre companies, opera companies, galleries and other arts bodies for six. But in each case, the first response of the workers in the bodies was defiance, refusing to accept that these Tory cuts must lead to closure of...
UNISON has demanded a ‘full disclosure’ of moves to privatise Staffordshire cancer services and warned NHS commissioners that ‘secrecy is against the public interest’. The union has written to the four Clinical Commissioning Groups that have quietly embarked on the £1bn tender for health services in Staffordshire. Unison said in a...
A WikiLeaks exposé has revealed the true intent behind secret 50-country negotiations on a new ‘financial services’ chapter of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) at the WTO in Geneva. The draft agreement being discussed by government officials is aimed at weakening financial regulation and giving extra market access to...
A PALESTINIAN teenager from occupied East Jerusalem was kidnapped and killed early on Wednesday in revenge for the killing of three Israeli settler youth near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Footage from surveillance cameras shows Israelis stepping out of a Hyundai in front of Abu Khdeir’s house and...
POWER workers and technicians trades union GENOP have been threatened with ‘conscription’ by the Greek government. They began ‘rolling’ 48-hour strikes from midnight last night against a Greek coalition government Bill to carve up and sell off 30 per cent of the Public Electricity Corporation (DEH). Mass meetings supporting the strike...
‘WE are launching a war against low wages’ Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner announced yesterday on the second day of their annual conference. Unite said: ‘Supermarkets and hotel groups paying below the living wage are to be targeted as part of a renewed effort to shame wealthy companies...
THE Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF’s) Minimum Income Standard 2014 study has found that the amount a family need to enjoy even a ‘basic standard of living’ has risen five times faster than wages. The report’s summary said: ‘This annual update of JRF’s Minimum Income Standard (MIS) looks afresh at...
ON MONDAY evening Russia invited Ukrainian border guards and international observers to oversee the Russian side of the border with Ukraine, in an 11th-hour move to try to get Kiev to extend a ‘ceasefire’ and to deter the EU from imposing wider economic sanctions onto Russia. Moscow made this concession...
LEN McCluskey, addressing the Unite policy conference in Liverpool yesterday, stated that the unions and the NHS face ‘the fight of our lives’ to see off a Tory government in the 2015 general election and pledged to throw the financial weight of the union behind the Labour campaign on the grounds...
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that Syria’s moderate opposition could play a role in fighting against and pushing back jihadists who have seized swathe of territory in neighbouring Iraq. Kerry was speaking in Saudi Arabia, where he met Western-backed Syrian National Coalition leader Ahmad Jarba. ‘The moderate...
LOW interests rates ‘risk sparking a new crisis’ across Europe, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) warned in its annual report released yesterday. The BIS further warned that historically low interest rates are threatening to make the global economy ‘permanently unstable’. Jaime Caruana, General Manager of the BIS, at the...