Monthly Archives: August 2015
STATEMENT BY THE REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST LEAGUE GREEK SECTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL WITH fast-track procedures that ridicule all democratic and constitutional statutes, the clique of a government headed by SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras is pushing through the Vouli (Greek parliament) this Thursday (13th August) the new austerity...
HUNDREDS of migrants have been coralled in scorching temperatures in a makeshift reception centre at a sports stadium on the Greek island of Kos. Hundreds of refugees, including infants, were yesterday still inside the stadium, waiting for papers that would allow them to travel. Witnesses said those waiting had no...
GP leaders yesterday warned the government that its plans to recruit 5,000 new GPs and introduce seven-day opening are undeliverable, as new figures show one in five GP trainee posts in England are currently unfilled. The figures released by the GP National Recruitment Office show that for the 2015 GP...
FAMILIES of British soldiers killed in the Anglo-American March 2003 invasion, and then occupation, of Iraq, were yesterday threatening legal action against the chairman of the inquiry into the war, Sir John Chilcot. ix years after the inquiry finished, he has been unable to present its findings. The delay is...
UK registered unemployment from April to June 2015 was at 1.85 million, up 25,000 from the previous quarter while the ONS figures showed that there were 31.03 million people in work, down by 63,000 compared with the January to March period! So much for the Tory economic miracle! The jobless...
USING fast-track procedures, the Greek government SYRIZA (Coalition of Radical Left) leader Alexis Tsipras is pushing through the Vouli (Greek parliament) today the first set of the new bail-out austerity accords, as dictated by the EC and IMF overlords. A second set of austerity accords is to follow most...
THE AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting is this week, which means visits from presidential candidates: Martin O''Malley, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, and, of course, Hillary Clinton, who has a 1pm date with the union federation tomorrow. There’s also a sole Republican visitor: Mike Huckabee. AFL-CIO’s president, Richard Trumka, along with progressive...
PALESTINIAN hunger striker Mohammad Allan was forcibly removed from Soroka hospital in Beersheba and taken to the Barzilai Medical Centre in Ashdod, by Israeli forces yesterday. He will be held there while an Israeli court deliberates over wether to enforce the Guantánamo Bay procedure of force feeding – an...
IT is definitely no fun being young under the Tories! As is well known, the Tories are absolutely desperate to be the party that hammers migrants and is determined to impose a four-year residency test for migrants before they can get access to any UK benefits as part of...
SIXTH Form Colleges ‘cannot survive on starvation rations.’ One third say that they will go bust and shut down by 2020 if the massive funding cuts continue. Already science and language courses are being axed in Sixth Form Colleges up and down the country as the cuts begin to bite....
NATIONAL Gallery workers were out in force on the first day of their indefinite strike against privatisation and victimisation yesterday. On the picket line outside the National Gallery PCS full-time officer Paul Bemrose told News Line: ‘This is the first day of all-out strike at the National Gallery and...
PATIENT confidentiality will be violated and open to abuse, Unite union said in response to plans to allow high street pharmacies like Boots, Superdrug and Tesco, free access to patients’ medical records. Doctors, nurses and health workers were up in arms at the nationwide plan that will compromise patient...
IT was disclosed this weekend that by Autumn every high street pharmacy, from the local independent pharmacy right through to the giant supermarket chains like Tesco, Boots and Superdrug, will have complete access to every person in England’s medical records. All the confidential data held by GPs on an individual...
THE United Nations has voiced concern over a recently adopted Israeli law allowing the force-feeding of detainees and prisoners on hunger strikes in Israeli prisons. In a statement published Saturday, it said such a law is a ‘cause for concern to those who work to protect the right to health...
THE Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, Andrea Sutcliffe, has warned that huge cuts in funding in recent years have left the social care sector under ‘stress and strain’. According to the Local Government Association, £4.6bn has been cut from social care budgets in the last five years. Sutcliffe said...
LAST week saw the 70th anniversary of one of the greatest war crimes in human history, the dropping of the two Atomic bombs onto Japan, the first one hit Hiroshima and the second three days later Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, there was...
SOME major strike actions are taking place in the USA. In Tucson, Arizona the collective bargaining agreement covering more than 530 Teamster represented employees of Sun Tran expired at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, August. 5, 2015, after negotiations between representatives of Teamsters Local Union 104 and Professional Transit Management, Inc.,...
ABDUL Rahman Haroun is a hero. The Sudanese national walked the full length of the Channel Tunnel (31 miles), dicing with death all of the way both from the trains, and from the electrical system. He was arrested close to Folkestone after his eleven-hour march. Haroun has been charged with...
TUNISIAN Prime Minister Habib Essid has stated that Libya’s current turmoil has largely come about as a result of the foreign military intervention in 2011, which the UK played a leading role in, to overthrow the government of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. After Gadaffi was murdered, the country was divided up...
OVER 100 Fatah-affiliated prisoners in Israeli jails entered their third day on hunger strike yesterday, prisoner representatives said. The 120 prisoners, all held in Nafha jail, are demanding that detainees be returned to their former wings after being moved to other sections last week. They are also demanding family visits,...
‘IT WOULD be foolish to pre-announce’ a date for an interest rate increase, the Bank of England’s deputy governor for monetary policy Ben Broadbent said yesterday. His remarks yesterday followed Thursday’s announcement of the 8-1 vote of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to keep interest rates at their current...
THE Tories yesterday announced that as part of the autumn anti-trade union legislation they will be stopping public sector workers automatically paying subscriptions to trade unions through their salaries. The aim is to cripple trade unions financially so that they cannot pay strike pay. The TUC commented that the...
‘WE’RE out because the fight is over jobs, conditions and work/life balance. And although it isn’t primarily about money, we do expect to be properly remunerated,’ RMT rep Roy Dubois told News Line yesterday. He was speaking on the early morning picket line outside King’s Cross Tube station during the...
ISRAELI settlers last Tuesday night attacked Palestinian homes with stones as they provocatively approached the outskirts of Silat ad-Daher, some 20 kilometres to the south of Jenin in the northern West Bank, security sources told WAFA. The settlers, who also chanted racist slogans against Arabs and Palestinians, provoked a scuffle...
‘HISTORICALLY and contemporarily, police unions serve the interests of police forces as an arm of the state, and not the interests of police as labourers.’ This powerful phrase was contained in a resolution calling for the expulsion of a US police union from the US trade union movement as a...
EX-PM Blair could be made to stand trial for war crimes over the invasion of Iraq, Labour leadership front-runner Jeremy Corbyn has said. Corbyn correctly said that the 2003 conflict was an ‘illegal war’ and that Blair had some decisions he had to ‘confess’. Asked whether Blair should be...
THE TUC has declared its support for Tube workers who are on strike today over the imposition of night working. Commenting on the strike on the London Underground by ASLEF, RMT, TSSA and Unite members, TUC Assistant General Secretary Paul Nowak said yesterday: ‘The Tube network is vital to the...
CITY trader Tom Hayes has been found guilty of rigging global Libor interest rates. He has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. His defence was that everybody was doing it! The Libor rate is a global benchmark interest rate used to set a range of financial deals worth an...
DISCLOSURES by New South Wales (NSW) Government-owned electricity network companies have revealed almost five million dollars was spent in just four years to hire external law firms and private investigators to attack their workforces over disciplinary and industrial matters. Documents released under the Government Information (Public Access) Act revealed Ausgrid,...
HOSPITALS have been told by the Tory government’s regulator to only fill job vacancies that are ‘essential’, raising fears amongst midwives, doctors and nurses that they will be forced to operate with unsafe staffing levels, putting patients’ lives at risk. Monitor, the Tory government’s ‘regulator for health services in England’...
IN A further Tory attack on the working class, landlords will be expected to evict entire families, if they believe them to be ‘illegal immigrants’, and that they can do this without a court order. Under new laws that the Tory government will push through in the new Immigration Bill,...
PRESIDENT Obama has given his authorisation for US air power to be used to support the forces that the US and Turkey are training, in a ‘secure zone’ in northern Syria, for action supposedly against IS. In particular, the Wall Street Journal has revealed that the order has been...
CORNELL William Brooks, President of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) on Saturday led off ‘America’s Journey for Justice March’ in Selma, Alabama. The 860 mile relay march, organised by the NAACP, is planned to go from Selma to Washington D.C. over the course of 40...
PALESTINIAN Authority security forces plan to crack down on acts of terrorism carried out by Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, an official said Saturday. Security spokesman Adnan Dmeiri said: ‘We will take legal procedures and do everything we can do against the Israeli settlers as war criminals...
1,800 Zambian villagers are taking legal action in the High Court in London against UK based mining giant Vedanta Resources Plc and Konkola Copper Mines after they claim their water sources and farming land were poisoned from the copper mining operations of both companies. The 1,800 are members of four...
RESIDENTS of the Palestinian village of Duma in the occupied West Bank are forming voluntary groups to guard against attacks by Israeli settlers. This is just two days after a deadly arson attack left an 18-month-old toddler burnt alive, locals said yesterday. The groups will patrol the village and its...
PEOPLE who do not speak fluent English will be barred from public sector jobs which involve working directly with the public, the government has said. From September, NHS staff and council workers will be among those required to have language skills equivalent to GCSE grade C or above. Managers will...
AN Athens court has sentenced three marchers of the 15 July demonstration against austerity. They were accused of throwing petrol bombs at the riot police and resisting police. One of the demonstrators, an Albanian immigrant worker, was sentenced to 34 months in prison. Two other workers were sentenced to 13...
‘WE hold the Israeli government fully responsible for the brutal assassination of the toddler Ali Saad Dawabsha,’ PLO official Saeb Erekat said in a statement yesterday. President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday that he would appeal to the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into the arson attack carried...
LAST Wednesday, Dave Prentis, general secretary of the country’s second largest union, Unison, made a speech urging a ‘popular uprising in defence of the right to strike’. Fighting words from Prentis speaking at a public meeting organised by the Institute for Employment Rights, and billed as the first large-scale response...
THE National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) is urging the government to halt the rollout of Personal Independence Payment (PIP – which replaces Disability Living Allowance) until deaf young people have a fair chance to successfully claim the benefit. In an attempt to highlight how the current claim process for PIP...