Monthly Archives: October 2017
PORT truck drivers from Los Angeles, Long Beach and New Jersey took their fight for justice on the job to Capitol Hill last Thursday. The truckers are mis-classified as contractors and face wage theft and other exploitation. US Representatives Napolitano and Nadler are introducing two bills – the Port Drivers’...
PAUL MANAFORT and his former business associate Rick Gates were indicted on Monday on money laundering, and tax and foreign lobbying charges, a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has targeted President Trump in his first year in office. Trump’s former presidential campaign manager, Manafort,...
SPAIN’s chief prosecutor has brought back the Franco dictatorship by calling for charges including rebellion to be laid against Catalan leaders following the region’s declaration of independence. José Manuel Maza said the charges should also include sedition and provocation by regional officials. The crime of rebellion carries a maximum...
THE EXTENT of the full-scale looting of the country’s public buildings by giant offshore private companies has been highlighted in a report by a think tank that investigates Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals. The report by the European Services Strategy Unit reveals that nine offshore investment funds own between 50%...
‘WE ARE calling for a general strike against the privatisation of the NHS,’ Hands off Huddersfield Royal Infirmary spokesman, Mike Foster, told a demonstration in defence of South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw NHS Services last Saturday afternoon. He was speaking after more than 300 angry NHS staff and members of the...
CATALAN leader Carles Puigdemont has called for a ‘democratic opposition’ to the imposition of direct rule from Madrid after the Spanish government terminated his government, closed down the assembly, and announced that it will be holding ‘elections’ in Catalonia to elect the government of its choice. Puigdemont condemned the suspension...
THE NUMBER of firefighters has been cut by nearly a quarter over the past decade, a newly released Home Office report has shockingly revealed with the firefighters union warning that taking the Grenfell tragedy into account these cuts are a ‘huge threat’ to the public. In 2017, 33,049 firefighters were...
IN A virtually unprecedented break with the normal language of international diplomacy, the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riyad Malki, has deservedly torn into British Prime Minister Theresa May over her speech to the House of Commons last Wednesday, where she praised the Balfour Declaration. Calling her remarks ‘offensive and unacceptable’, Malki...
ON WEDNESDAY evening, Solano County, California workers represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1021 overwhelmingly ratified a two-year contract with the County. The ratification vote comes after two strikes and four months of negotiations. The two-year contract term includes three per cent wage increases per year, a...
CROWDS outside the Catalan parliament erupted in celebration, letting off fireworks as Catalonia declared its independence from Spain yesterday afternoon, after a vote of 70 ‘SI’ (Yes) to ten ‘NO’, defying both the Spanish state and the EU. The Catalan parliament required 68 votes to declare its independence. Before the...
‘LENIN started out from a position that Art is the most powerful means of political propaganda for the triumph of the Socialist cause,’ Margy Kinmonth the director of ‘Revolution – New Art for a New World’ told News Line in an exclusive interview with her in west London. She is...
FOLLOWING massive opposition from the public, patients and staff, Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has temporarily suspended plans to pilot a scheme to pay private individuals £1,500 a month for using their homes to look after discharged patients in order to free up hospital beds. Southend Hospital in Essex...
THE NUMBER of NHS beds has halved in the last 30 years and proposals to slash bed numbers even further will make the ‘NHS a Grenfell disaster waiting to happen’ doctors have warned. The King’s Fund report showed that overall, bed numbers have dropped from 299,000 to 142,000 since 1987, at...
MORE than a thousand parents, teachers, heads and support staff converged on Westminster on Tuesday to lobby MPs on school funding. Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner warned at a rally that teachers are turning to food banks to feed their families. Rayner said: ‘It’s an absolute tragedy that we have...
CAPITALISM is not delivering on its promise to raise living standards, Lord Adair Turner, a former head of the business lobby the CBI, has said, recognising the obvious, while he tries to smuggle in the notion that capitalism was ever interested in anything else than making superprofits. Turner said in...
THE LONDON Fire Brigade has accused the Tory government of ‘playing with children’s lives,’ by barring the installation of sprinklers in schools. There are about 700 school fires in England annually. London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton said yesterday that she was ‘appalled’ when she discovered that the DfE (Department...
THE RMT transport union yesterday called on Southern rail staff to stand together and reject a divisive and tainted company plan to destroy safety and access. It urged staff to continue to stand united and reject the latest company and government proposals to extend Driver Only Operation (DOO) which would...
IT has become crystal clear that the Universal Credit system equals universal misery for the growing masses of the working poor in the UK. As with Thatcher’s Poll Tax, this system is now hated, even in its infancy, as it is being ‘rolled out’. Its purpose has become clear –...
MORE than 12,000 OPSEU (Ontario Public Service Employees Union) college faculty members have been striking at 24 Ontario colleges since Monday October 16. The over 12,000 professors, counsellors and librarians at the 24 colleges are fighting against short-term, insecure employment. They are demanding that at least half of all faculty...
A PALESTINIAN prisoner in Israeli jails has been on an open-ended hunger strike for 12 consecutive days to protest over his administrative detention without charge or trial, said the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) on Sunday. The detainee, who was identified as 19-year-old Hasan Shokeh, is only consuming water and...
ANY LINGERING doubts about the morbid terror that is gripping the capitalist class were dispelled this weekend when 50 of the leading bosses from finance and business lined up to despairingly admit that the capitalist system is ‘broken’. The occasion for this collective outpouring of grief and tangible fear for...
‘WE are going through our potential financial commitments line by line,’ Tory PM Theresa May said in a statement to Parliament yesterday afternoon about last week’s European Council meeting about Brexit. At that meeting the EU concluded that ‘sufficient progress had not been made’ on how much the UK is...
AS IS to be expected the Labour leadership has been unable to hold fast to the Corbyn line that the party will support Brexit. It is now stampeding to form a common front with Tory, Lib Dem, Scottish Nationalists and other MPs to organise Parliament to vote down Brexit...
THE GMB trade union has exposed a shocking Treasury report which Chancellor Philip Hammond tried to hide showing public sector wages are now below those in the private sector for the first time since the 2007-08 banking crash. The union has accused the Treasury of ‘covering up’ the study –...
THE Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), the biggest union in South Africa’s ‘platinum belt’, says that Marikana has once again become a ‘killing field’ after yet another member was gunned down last week. ‘The bloodshed continues and the body count keeps climbing. Amcu is in mourning. Our members...
‘THIS is the third high-profile money-laundering scandal to involve major British banks this year,’ John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, said yesterday, responding to reports allegedly linking British banks to money-laundering and a serious corruption scandal in South Africa. London has become notorious as a global centre for money-laundering … It’s...
MEMBERS of the University and College Union (UCU) will walk out on strike on Monday and Tuesday against moves by the university to sack as many as 140 lecturers and staff. The Labour shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has given her support to striking staff at the University of Manchester....
A SIT-IN was held in al-Umawyeen Square in Damascus on Thursday to express solidarity with the two detainees who are on hunger strike in the Turkish regime’s prisons. The event, organised by the Turkish People’s Front and the Anti-Imperialism International Front in Syria, aimed at expressing solidarity with the Turkish...
AN EXTRA 94,000 people were in work at the end of the latest three-month period, however it now emerges that the unemployment figures have only fallen because more and more people are being driven into low-paid insecure work, with the amount on zero-hours contracts at an all-time high. When taking...
WEDNESDAY’S debate and vote in parliament on the issue of the roll-out of Universal Credit has been hailed as a ‘symbolic defeat’ for the Tories. The Labour motion up for debate calling for Tory ministers to ‘pause and fix’ Universal Credit was carried by a vote of 299 in...
ISRAELI army, intelligence, and civil administration forces raided several offices of Palestinian media outlets and arrested two journalists overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday. They also confiscating equipment and shut down eight offices under the pretext that the organisations were ‘broadcasting inciting material’. In the northern occupied West Bank city of...
UK BANKS HSBC and Standard Chartered have been linked to a serious corruption scandal in South Africa, with the Serious Fraud Office looking to investigate how deeply they are involved. It comes after Peter Hain said the banks may ‘inadvertently have been conduits’ for laundered money. The Labour peer told...
THE GIGANTIC scale of personal debt in Britain has been revealed in the publication yesterday of the biggest ever survey of households conducted by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The FCA, which is the official body responsible for the regulation of banks and financial institutions investigated 13,000 households, an investigation...
SMOKERS and people suffering from obesity will be barred from surgery under plans which the Royal College of Surgeons warn tear up the fundamental principle of the NHS. This is that services are provided free at the point of use and that everyone is eligible for care (even people temporarily...
IRANIAN President Hassan Rouhani made a defiant televised speech to the nation on Saturday night in response to the anti-Iran stances of US President Donald Trump. ‘I would like to inform the great people of Iran, after the words of the current president of the United States were heard, that...
‘PUBLIC sector workers are at breaking point,’ the GMB union said yesterday after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that inflation has hit three per cent, up from 2.9 per cent – a five-and-a-half year high. The rise means more than five million public sector workers will see an...
ON MONDAY shock figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed that Britain is £490 billion poorer than it was thought to be by the Tory government. A surplus of £469 billion has turned into a net deficit of £22 billion. Under the Tories, the so-called natural rulers,...
– Rally 10 Downing St November 4 ‘WE DEMAND an apology for the Balfour Declaration and we demand repatriation and recognition of the Palestinian state,’ Palestinian Ambassador Manuel Hassassian told News Line on Monday. He was responding to the call by the Fatah Central Committee for demonstrations outside British embassies all...
ALL THE talk by the Tories, and echoed by the Labour Party leadership, that capitalist Britain is fundamentally in good health economically, has just been delivered a shattering blow with the shock revelation that the country is in fact half a trillion pounds poorer than admitted. The Office for National...
REVISED figures from Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) ‘Blue Book’, which measures economic activity in the UK, show that Britain’s global investments have collapsed by £490 billion. Mark Capleton, UK rates strategist at Bank of America, commented: ‘Half a trillion pounds has gone missing.’ Britain has gone from a...
AMERICAN Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) President Lee Saunders issued the following statement in response to President Trump’s decision to end vital health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. He said: ‘With this decision, the president has ushered in the era of Trumpcare, under which Americans...
FOLLOWING 17m plus workers voting to ‘Leave’ in the 2016 EU Referendum, the UK is leaving the EU on March 29th 2019, two years after article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty was activated. Article 50 spells out that any EU member state may decide to quit the EU, but that...
UNISON last Friday challenged all five Health Trust Boards in Northern Ireland to refuse to comply with a Tory government demand for £70 million cuts. In addresses to all five Trust Board meetings, Unison representatives said: ‘Chair, board members, we start our contribution by paying tribute to the public and...
PARLIAMENT can stop the UK leaving the EU without negotiating a deal, Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell claimed yesterday. He said he could ‘not countenance’ such a situation and Parliament had the power to force the government to concede a ‘meaningful vote’ on the final deal, by amending the EU...