Monthly Archives: February 2015
AN Ohio Nurse who spoke out for rights has won a defamation verdict against the hospital which sacked her. Ann Wayt, a 38-year veteran registered nurse with a ‘spotless record’ who was illegally fired and then defamed in retaliation for her outspoken patient advocacy and support for her union, was...
AN agreement has been reached in Minsk to cease fire in Ukraine from midnight Sunday, February 15. Russian President Vladimir Putin commented yesterday that a compromise decision was taken over the disengagement line. Kiev’s troops are to pull back heavy weapons from the current frontline. The self-defence forces will...
BILATERAL talks between Vladimir Putin and Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi were followed by negotiations in expanded format with the participation of the two nations’ delegations. The Russian President’s official visit to Egypt resulted in the signing of a number of documents on bilateral cooperation in nuclear energy and investment, witnessed by...
‘I STAND by what I said in the House of Commons, that Lord Fink was engaged in tax avoidance,’ Labour leader Miliband said during a speech given at his old school, Haverstock in North London yesterday. Lord Fink, ex-treasurer of the Tory party, had challenged Miliband to dare to repeat...
OVER 40,000 Greek workers, many with their families, shop-keepers, professional people and youth rallied at the central Athens Vouli (Greek parliament) square calling on the Greek government ‘not to take even a step back’ against the ‘blackmail and threats of the European Union leaders’. Banners put up in front of...
TEACHERS have expressed their rising anger at their excessive workload by sending a letter to Tory Coalition Secretary of State and the Deputy Prime Minister. Teachers site Ofsted inspections as contributing to their workload. They say that it is not just the ‘fear’ of the Ofsted inspection but ‘the...
GREECE’S Syriza government has drawn up its plan to renegotiate with the EU. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras won a confidence vote on Tuesday evening, with the backing of his coalition partner, the right-wing ANEL party. Tsipras’ government had the support of 162 deputies in the 300-seat parliament, 149 from Syriza...
LABOUR PARTY leader Miliband clashed with Prime Minister Cameron over political donors who held Swiss bank accounts with HSBC, during questions in the House of Commons yesterday. Miliband accused the Tory leader of being a ‘dodgy prime minister surrounded by dodgy donors’. Cameron accused Miliband of being controlled by trade union...
GMB members are demonstrating outside Marks & Spencer store in Regent Street, Swindon from 11am today, 11th February, ‘in protest against modern day slavery at the M&S distribution centre’. This date coincides with the 47th anniversary of the start of an industrial dispute organised by Martin Luther King in Memphis Tennessee...
IN September 2014 HSBC settled claims that it made false representations in selling mortgage bonds to the giant US mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. HSBC paid $550m to the US’s Federal Housing Finance Agency, which had filed 18 lawsuits. The state of Virginia alleged the banks fraudulently misrepresented the...
UNEMPLOYED workers will not be offered homes under a new council ‘re-generation’ scheme, sparking outrage and allegations that the move stinks of ‘social cleansing’. Hastings council stated that it wants a ‘better balance’ of home owners, private tenants and social housing tenants. The council has joined with housing group Amicus Horizon...
THE battle between dockworkers and shipping officials intensified this weekend at the Port of Oakland as the long-running contract dispute at 29 ports on the West Coast dragged on, causing crippling delays and devastating economic losses. The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping lines and terminal operators, and the International...
IN the 1950s and 60s, the name Peter Rachman became synonymous with ‘slum landlord’ and the brutal methods used to drive out tenants whose rents were controlled and replace them with those desperate enough to pay the exorbitant sums he demanded. Today in 21st century Britain, Rachmanism has a different...
THE new Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras made his first speech to the Vouli (Greek parliament) last Sunday night saying he would carry out the promises he made to stop the humanitarian crisis in Greece. Tsipras insisted that his government would not continue with the Austerity Accords. He said that they...
2,000 UK troops and a RAF spy plane are bound for Jordan to ‘combat ISIS’ it emerged yesterday. The UK will send the ‘specialist troops’ and the spy plane to Jordan to ‘aid its efforts to defeat the Islamic State’, a government source has revealed. This is despite Cameron’s pledge to...
TEACHERS are suffering from ‘ludicrous levels of workload pressure’ teachers unions have warned. They were responding to a ‘bitterly disapointing’ new Tory government ‘Workload Challenge Survey’, the recommendations of which, the unions say, would not do anything to reduce teachers workload. Teachers’ family life is affected because when they get home...
THE ‘peace talk’ that suggests Merkel and Hollande are seeking to organise a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, acceptable to all, the imperialist powers, the Kiev junta, the workers of the Donbas and the Russian government constitutes a ‘velvet glove’ to try and fool the world as to...
LEADERS of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France will meet in Belarus’ capital Minsk on Wednesday to discuss a peace plan for eastern Ukraine, Germany says. It comes after leaders of the four countries discussed the ongoing conflict by telephone on Sunday. However, in a dramatic gesture at a gathering of...
THE former head of the US central bank, Alan Greenspan, has predicted that Greece will have to leave the eurozone. Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, said: ‘I believe Greece will eventually leave. ‘I don’t think it helps them or the rest of the eurozone...
‘THE BUSES should be renationalised. They should put the companies under one name then everybody will have the same rights,’ Unite member Michael Wood said during Thursday’s 24-hour bus strike. The strike is the second in a series of four strikes in the escalating struggle for equal pay for all...
TORY changes to the NHS were ‘opposed by patients, the public and NHS staff, but politicians pushed through the changes regardless’ Dr Mark Porter, head of the British Medical Association (BMA) said yesterday. He was responding to a report by think tank ‘The Kings Fund’. This slammed the Tory Health and...
A MAJOR report by the McKinsey Global Institute exposes the historic depth of the crisis gripping the world capitalist system, a debt crisis of such epic proportions that it cannot be resolved through any of the usual economic strategies adopted by governments and central banks. Entitled ‘Debt and (not much)...
SOME 10,000 workers and their families gathered outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) last Thursday evening in Athens in protest against the European Central Bank’s (ECB) and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s hostility to Greece. A call for the protest was issued on Thursday morning through social media, stating, ‘we will...
NEW independent research published by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Wednesday revealed the huge and increasing scale of homelessness in England. The Homelessness Monitor: England 2015 shows how official homelessness figures are masking the true scale of the problem, with 280,000 cases of people facing homelessness last year...
GREECE’S new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has urged Germany not to humiliate the country over its debts. Varoufakis compared Greece’s plight with that of inter-war Germany, speaking ahead of a meeting with his German counterpart. Germany was burdened with massive debts after World War One and threatened by hyperinflation, crippling its...
LONDON bus workers took their second 24-hour strike yesterday demanding that all drivers are paid the same rate of pay. There are further strikes planned for Friday 13 February and Monday 16 February. Unite said: ‘There was solid support across London as up to 20,000 bus workers across the capital’s...
THE UK’s role in fighting the Islamic State is ‘strikingly modest’ and should be stepped up, the House of Commons Defence Select Committee has said after it found out that the UK had carried out just 6% of coalition air strikes against IS in Iraq, and that there were...
THE current death rate in England and Wales is running about one-third higher than its normal rate for this time of year, official statistics show, despite the fact that the winter thus far has been no worse than usual. In the two weeks ending on 23 January, 28,000 people died,...
STEEL workers in the US are engaged in an indefinite strike which began on Sunday at nine large oil refineries. Shell fears that the strike will spread collapsing the price of oil even further. The strikers, who are in the United Steel Workers union (USW), are demanding a pay rise and...
The sacked ERT state TV and radio workers’ union POSPERT has called a mass rally in Athens for Wednesday 11 February. They are demanding that the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and Independent Greeks (ANEL) coalition government immediately reopen the ERT, and reinstate all employees dismissed by...
WORKERS at the National Gallery struck for five days from yesterday over plans to hand all visitor services to a private company, the Public and Commercial Services union said. The well-supported stoppage is putting the spotlight on a sell-off that threatens the reputation of the country’s second most visited major...
WRITING in the ‘Housing Question’ in 1872, Frederick Engels declared that the bourgeoisie was incapable of solving the housing question. He wrote: ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other...
TEACHERS unions on Monday condemned plans for a huge acceleration of the forced academisation of state education, with another 3,320 schools handed over to the privateers, if the Tories are elected in May. Speaking at Kingsmead school, an academy in Enfield, north London, PM Cameron and Tory Education Secretary Nicky...
TEACHERS unions said yesterday that the Tory government’s academy and free school programme has failed and its privatisation agenda amounted to a ‘war on schools’. They were responding to the PM Cameron’s plans, announced yesterday, that up to 3,500 schools ‘requiring improvement’ will be forced to become academies with...
THE Kremlin chief of staff, Sergey Ivanov has been interviewed on World War II history, and Ukraine by the website of pro-government Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on 28 January. Aleksandr Gamov opened saying: ‘Sergey Borisovich, I have a question for you as not only the leader of our president’s staff,...
US imperialism has reacted to the breakdown of talks at the weekend of the Contact Group on Ukrainian reconciliation with threats to massively intervene militarily in the Ukraine to put down the resistance by the workers in the east to the puppet ‘government’ in Kiev. Claiming that these ‘peace talks’...
IN LAST Thursday’s House of Commons Iraq Inquiry debate, originally scheduled to follow the publication of the Chilcot inquiry, all the contentious issues surrounding the 2003-08 illegal war resurfaced. Opening the debate, Tory MP David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) said: ‘I beg to move: “That this House regrets that the...
GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has said he is confident that agreement can be reached with creditors over the repayment of ‘Greece’s debts’, and that he had never intended to act unilaterally and declare the debt null and void. His statement was in response to German Chancellor Merkel’s statement...
OVER 6,000 youth and workers demonstrated last Saturday evening throughout the Athens city centre against a rally organised by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. Marchers held banners and shouted slogans for the ‘death of fascism’. There were no police in sight at all during the march. The Greek government has...
‘SOCIAL housing is our right!’ chanted over three thousand protestors on the March to Defend Council Housing on Saturday. The march began at Shoreditch Church and made its way to London’s City Hall by Tower Bridge where it met another march of thousands that began at the Aylesbury Estate in...