Monthly Archives: January 2017
‘IT didn’t take long. During the first week of 2017, the new Republican Congress has begun efforts to dismantle America’s health-care system,’ says Bernie Sanders. He added: ‘Their long-standing goal, consistent with their right-wing ideology, is to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, privatise Medicare, make...
AT the end of this month, steel workers at Port Talbot are to vote on a deal struck between their unions and Tata Steel which was lauded as the saviour of the plant, but which the trade union leaders are unable to recommend, leaving the issue up to the...
THE GREATER Glasgow health board has apologised after women in labour were refused admission to a maternity unit because of overcrowding. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said the issue affected five women at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) on Thursday. A NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde spokeswoman confirmed the...
THE political administration of the United States, the most powerful capitalist nation in the world, is publicly tearing itself apart in an open war between its president elect and a capitalist class determined to undermine him before he takes office and even remove him through a judicial coup. The political...
WHILE Aslef drivers are striking today against Southern rail’s attempt to impose driver only operation, the RMT union yesterday announced further strike action on the Tube. Following Sunday and Monday’s rock-solid strike by London Underground station staff, the RMT yesterday said escalated strike action will take place from...
BY RAMZY BAROUD – Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, author, and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story LONG before Dec. 28, when Secretary of State John Kerry took the podium at the Dean Acheson Auditorium in Washington DC...
YESTERDAY both the RCN nurses and the Royal College of Physicians made it perfectly clear that the time has arrived when action to defend the NHS is both vitally necessary and unpostponable if this greatest gain of the working class is to be saved. Janet Davies, Chief Executive and General...
TORY PM May hit out at the British Red Cross at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons yesterday, describing its warnings of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the NHS as ‘irresponsible and overblown’. Labour leader Corbyn accused May of being ‘in denial’ and ignoring medical experts, saying she...
GLOBAL union IndustriALL is calling for an immediate end to the persecution of garment workers, trade union leaders and worker activists in Bangladesh in light of a sinister crackdown by government authorities. In an alarming step backwards for the garment industry in Bangladesh, police have detained at least 11 union...
‘WILLIE, Willie, Willie – Out, Out Out!’ rang out on picket lines around Heathrow Airport in West London yesterday morning, as thousands of British Airways Mixed Fleet Cabin Crew began a 48-hour strike against poverty pay, which continues today. Willie Walsh is CEO of International Airlines Group and has been...
‘WE HAVE been forced to go on strike by an intransigent management that has not been prepared to negotiate with us. Southern are bullies,’ Mick Whelan, general secretary of ASLEF, said on the first day of the three-day Southern drivers strike. Southern had to admit yesterday that there were no...
MONDAY’s speech to the Charity Commission by the unelected Tory prime minister, Theresa May, revealed the weakness of the Tory government and its intense fear of revolution in the UK and throughout Europe. She denounced Blair and Cameron as: ‘Politicians who embraced the twin pillars of liberalism and globalisation as the...
PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad has said that everything in the world is changing regarding Syria on every level, both local, regional, and international. In a statement given to the French media, Assad said: ‘Our mission, according to the constitution and according to the laws, is that we have to liberate every...
YESTERDAY’S speech to the Charity Commission by Tory prime minister, Theresa May, attracted much comment on her proposals on raising the profile of mental health problems in Britain and tackling the ‘stigma of mental health’. The fact that May pledged to deal with the problem of mental health while at the...
‘LONDON is on an almost total shutdown,’ RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said yesterday during the 24-hour tube strike. Pickets were out in force at tube stations around London. At King’s Cross yesterday morning RMT member Andy Littlechild said: ‘The station staff have shown everyone how they can put action...
A PALESTINIAN was shot dead after driving a truck into a group of uniformed Israeli soldiers, killing four soldiers and injuring at least 13 other people last Saturday afternoon, at a bus stop in the illegal Israeli settlement of East Talpiyyot in occupied East Jerusalem. An Israeli police spokesperson confirmed...
A SYRIAN government airplane successfully took off from the Aleppo International Airport on Friday, marking the first time in four years that any aircraft has taken off from its runways. Friday’s flight in east Aleppo was a trial attempt before the Syrian government reopens Syria’s second largest airport. According to...
OVER the weekend the British Red Cross made a call on the May government to allocate the necessary funds for health and social care, stating that there was now ‘a humanitarian crisis’ in the NHS. Its chief executive Mike Adamson stated: ‘We have been called in to support the NHS...
TRADE unions and Labour Party leaders yesterday condemned the government over cuts to the NHS that have put patients at risk. The were responding to the British Red Cross warning of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in hospital and ambulance services. GMB, the union for NHS and ambulance staff said: ‘In the...
‘A CARE disaster of epic proportions looms’ as care for the elderly and disabled reaches such a crisis that the future of social care is under threat, unions warned yesterday. Council homes for the elderly have been all but shut down and private companies now run social care for profit....
THE BANK of England has admitted what it calls a ‘Michael Fish’ moment over its failure to predict the 2007-8 banking crash and its Brexit predictions which it says may turn out to be ‘just scare stories’. The Bank of England’s chief economist has admitted his profession is in crisis...
THE National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) campaign to support vital local news media, as hundreds of local papers are going to the wall, is launching a week of action from Friday 24 March to Saturday 1 April. Calling for support for Local News Matters Week, the NUJ says: ‘Local newspapers,...
YESTERDAY, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) published a detailed report into the effects of the Tory higher education bill due to return to parliament next week. Under this proposed bill, the Tories intend to throw the entire higher education system open to for-profit private companies or ‘alternative providers’. They...
REPORTERS Without Borders (RSF) call for the immediate release of Nazmul Huda, a reporter who was arrested on 24 December 2016 because of his coverage of a strike by garment workers in Ashulia, the Dhaka suburb where Bangladesh’s biggest garment factories are located. The police accuse Huda, who works for...
HEALTH workers at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Dala, Kano State, Nigeria, last Wednesday began an indefinite strike over non-payment of three months’ salary. The workers had earlier gone on a five-day warning strike which expired the previous week. An official of the health workers union who spoke to the News...
NOTHING demonstrates more graphically the increasing polarisation between the working class and the capitalist class than the gigantic and ever-increasing differentials between the obscene levels of pay awarded to the bosses compared to the poverty levels being imposed on workers. This was highlighted in yesterday’s report by the independent think-tank...
PRIVATE companies are acting as a barrier between GPs and the NHS, putting patients’ lives at risk. Millions of pounds are being spent on privately-run schemes to ‘screen’ and prevent patients from being referred by GPs to specialist services, it emerged yesterday. Doctors warn that the danger is that diagnoses...
AS PUPILS return to school after the Christmas break, teachers’ unions warned yesterday that funding cuts are much worse than predicted, hitting working class families hard. The NUT and ATL unions said: ‘In November 2016, the NUT and ATL predicted, when they launched the Schools Cuts website, that the government’s...
THE Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has sent out a New Year warning that global property prices have increased so dramatically that a ‘big correction’ is on its way. The OECD represents the world’s most developed capitalist nations, and when it warns of a ‘big correction’ what it...
THE local MP, France Gelinas, is today, Wednesday 4th January, visiting the Ontario picket line of 140 childcare workers who have been locked out over Christmas by their employer, the Children’s Aid Society of Nipissing and Parry Sound. About 140 members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 2049 began...
IRANIAN President Hassan Rouhani says the Islamic Republic welcomes Syria’s nationwide ceasefire, but warned against the strengthening of terrorists during the truce time in the Arab country. ‘One must watch out that no opportunity will be created during the time of ceasefire for the terrorists’ reinforcement,’ Rouhani said in...
RAIL passengers are being hit by rail fare hikes that are ‘truly staggering’, according to the Labour Party transport spokesman Andy McDonald. The increases, which came into effect on January 1, will see rail passengers paying up to £2,100 more for an annual season ticket than they did in 2010....
‘SOUTHERN Rail is an example of privatisation gone rogue, backed by the Department for Transport. Public ownership of the railways is long overdue,’ NOR4NOR campaign group said yesterday. Their renewed call for re-nationalisation of the rail was in response to the massive hike in train fares yesterday. Fares went up...
A VERY STRETCHED fire service has been hard at work throughout New Year’s Eve and the early hours of New Year’s Day, the London Fire Brigade revealed yesterday. Referring to New Year’s Eve, it said: ‘Firefighters helped 60 people evacuate a residential block of flats following a fire in one...
ISRAEL’S education minister and leader of the far right, pro-settlement Jewish Home Party, Naftali Bennett, said yesterday morning he would propose a bill by the end of the month to annex the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim. According to Israeli news sites, Bennett said during a government meeting that...
PRESIDENT-ELECT Trump’s advisers are planning to invite Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to the president-elect’s inauguration ceremony, so as to publicly stress just how close the leader of the Israeli puppet state is to President Trump the new leader of the US military-industrial bloc. The Israeli media is agog...
PALESTINIANS yesterday marked 52 years since the launch of the revolution against the Israeli occupation and the first military operation. Fatah, which launched the first military operation on January 1st, 1965, marked this anniversary with the lighting on Saturday evening of a torch near the Ramallah grave of Yasser...