Monthly Archives: December 2017
ONE of the Birmingham Six, wrongly convicted of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1975, branded the British legal system as unable ‘to spell the word justice’, declassified government documents reveal. Paddy Hill added that successive Irish governments abandoned the Birmingham Six in their fight for freedom to please the...
New Year Manifesto by the News Line Editorial Board THE News Line Editorial Board sends its warmest revolutionary greetings for 2018 to all our readers, to the working class, young people and the poor of the world. In 2017 their continued mass interventions in defence of their living conditions, wages, benefits...
LABOUR’S next manifesto will include a pledge to reduce eviction powers for landlords and tip housing rules back in favour of renters, party leader Jeremy Corbyn has announced. In an interview, he said at the next election Labour would overhaul housing legislation by scrapping laws which allow landlords to kick...
THE PRIVATE Finance Initiative (PFI) that Gordon Brown introduced during the Brown-Blair Labour governments has provided a cash bonanza of hundreds of billions for the big banks, and played a major role in pauperising the NHS and getting it ready for the banks to own the lot, that is...
JAPANESE Foreign Minister Taro Kono pledged during a visit to Al-Quds University on Wednesday to work to strengthen the working relationship between the Palestinian university and the government of Japan. ‘Honoured and happy’ to be at Al-Quds University, Taro told the president of Al-Quds University Imad Abu Kishek. He said...
THE occupied East Jerusalem suburb of Issawiyeh has long been a flashpoint for confrontations between Israeli soldiers and its Palestinian residents. But even by Israel’s repressive standards, the crackdown to which the town has been subjected over the past three years has been extreme. In July 2014, and like in...
MICHAEL HESELTINE, a Tory Deputy Prime Minister under John Major and a notorious enemy of the trade unions, has revealed that he prefers a Labour government to that of PM May, and that he considers that such a government would keep the UK in the EU. His major discovery...
THE just-published Resolution Foundation report says that real wage growth will be flat in 2018 and that many households are already pessimistic about their finances. It warned that the trend will worsen in the first few months of next year before ‘levelling out’. This will result in zero real...
TOGETHER for Catalonia (JxTCat) leader, Carles Puigdemont, has called on Spain’s government to allow him to return home in time for the opening session of the Catalan parliament so that he can become the region’s next president. ‘I want to come back to Catalonia as soon as possible. It would...
PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas will light a torch next Sunday evening in Ramallah to mark the 53rd anniversary of the launch of the Palestinian revolution and the Fatah movement, member of Fatah Central Committee, Jamal Moheisen, said yesterday. He told the official Voice of Palestine radio that a march will...
THE UN Security Council last Friday unanimously adopted a new set of draconian US-proposed sanctions against North Korea to further strangle its energy supplies and tighten restrictions on smuggling and the employment of North Korean workers overseas. Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said after the vote was carried:...
LONMIN billionaire Cyril Ramaphosa could favour mining bosses’ agenda of restructuring to revive profits and unleash a renewed jobs bloodbath, the Association of Mining and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) warned on Tuesday. AMCU slammed the Deputy President’s election as African National Congress (ANC) president, saying his ‘New Deal’ economic policies...
AS THE NHS winter crisis sets in, savage cuts to the health service have pushed services to the point of collapse. A severe lack of nurses, midwives, paramedics, doctors, ancillary staff, ambulances and beds have created a ‘perfect storm’ driving up mortality rates and driving an already overworked and...
‘THIS is a result which no one can dispute,’ deposed Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont told a news conference in Brussels yesterday. ‘The Spanish state was defeated. (Spanish Prime Minister Mariano) Rajoy and his allies lost. Mariano Rajoy has received a slap in the face from Catalonia,’ he told reporters...
‘IT is more important for them to save money than save lives!’ Halla Kim, RCN member and nurse at Ealing Hospital declared yesterday morning during the Xmas picket outside the west London hospital. Over 50 local residents and supporters joined the mass picket called by the West London...
ON WEDNESDAY PM May was finally forced to sack her Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green following an inquiry by officials from the Cabinet Office which concluded that he had lied about the existence of pornographic images on a computer seized by the police back in 2008. Green’s sacking is a...
ON WEDNESDAY PM May was finally forced to sack her Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green following an inquiry by officials from the Cabinet Office which concluded that he had lied about the existence of pornographic images on a computer seized by the police back in 2008. Green’s sacking is a...
HOMELESSNESS in England is a ‘national crisis’ and the Tory government is ‘unacceptably complacent’ about it, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said yesterday. The PAC reported that there are more than 9,000 rough sleepers and 78,000 families living in temporary accommodation, including 120,000 children. The number of people...
THE US Senate has approved by 51 votes to 48 a measure slashing the taxes of the rich and the major banks and companies by $1.5tn. The tax cuts over the next decade will be added to the existing $20tn US national debt – and will take effect in January....
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump on Monday outlined his new national security strategy. He stressed: ‘When the American people speak, all of us should listen... On November 8, 2016, you voted to make America great again. You embraced new leadership and very new strategies, and also a glorious new...
‘UP and down the country our A&E departments are in meltdown, our staff are at breaking point and we need your help,’ Rob Galloway, an A&E consultant from Brighton, wrote in an open letter about the intensifying crisis in the NHS. The letter reads: ‘Patients are being left in corridors...
‘SANTA pigs’ demonstrated outside four south London hospitals yesterday against the bullying of cleaners by managers of the private company they work for, ISS. Under the slogan ‘Stop Taking The *ISS’, the protests were at The Maudsley Hospital, Lambeth Hospital, Bethlem Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich. The union...
PALESTINIAN president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement on Saturday called for a massive demonstration this week to protest against a visit to Jerusalem by US Vice President Mike Pence after Washington said it would recognise the holy city as Israel’s capital. Breaking with decades of US policy, President Donald Trump also...
FROM January 1st banks and building societies will be legally obliged to check the current accounts of 76 million account holders and compare them with a government database of people deemed by the Tories to be ‘illegal immigrants’. Any matches must then be reported to the Home Office who will...
DESPERATE to avoid a Tory Party split, Prime Minister May has agreed with her rebels to amend her EU Withdrawal Bill to include a ‘flexible’ leaving date. The Brexit ‘war cabinet’, a sub-committee of senior ministers chaired by May, will meet today, with a meeting of the full Cabinet scheduled...
THE MAY government is now in a full Brexit retreat, a retreat that is turning into a rout! There is to be a vote this week putting into law that the UK will leave the EU on March 29th 2019. However, May has capitulated to Tory pro-EU MPs who...
OVER two thousand people silently marched through the streets of Notting Hill on Thursday night to mark the six months anniversary of the Grenfell Fire which took the lives of so many men, women and children. There is a deep rooted anger in the community and society at large at...
NURSES, firefighters, and teachers are so badly paid that many are doing second jobs in order to survive! A vast majority rely on in-work benefits, many are driven to food-banks to feed their families. Now the Local Goverment Ombudsman’s ‘No Place Like Home’ report shows that many full time wage...
STUDENT poverty and debt will not be solved by just curbing vice-chancellors’ pay, says the NUS, student grants must be restored. Sky-high pay among university chiefs is ‘hard to stomach’ but tackling it will not alone solve the higher education funding crisis, a National Union of Students official has told...
THE WORKING poor have now become the working homeless, as nurses, teachers and firefighters are among those being thrown out of their homes by bailiffs and then left languishing in squalid B&Bs and hostels by the local councils, a new Ombudsman’s report has exposed. The special report by...
PRESIDENT ABBAS addressed the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday in Istanbul. ‘We are here today, and behind us all our nation and peoples, all Muslims and Christians in our region and the world, in order to save and protect Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Jerusalem) and to confront...
TORY PM Theresa May attended a summit in Brussels yesterday, hours after 11 Tory rebels and almost the entire Labour Party and all the Liberals and Scottish Nationalists voted in the House of Commons to defeat the government on a key Brexit vote by 309-305. With the notable exception of...
WEDNESDAY’S humiliating defeat of the Tory government over the EU Withdrawal Bill signalled the emergence of a bloc between the Labour Party, now firmly under the domination of its right-wing, and eleven Tory anti-Brexit MPs. This bloc has only one aim, to overturn the referendum result to leave the EU....
NURSES, midwives, doctors, paramedics and NHS staff are being driven out of the profession because of overwork and low pay... creating a ‘severe staff shortage’, Health Education England (HEE) warned in a damning new report released yesterday. If the NHS does not urgently recruit another 190,000 more staff to tackle...
PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas told the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday that, ‘We are here today for all of us to speak in a clear language: Jerusalem has been, and will remain forever, the capital of the State of Palestine and its crown without which...
THE BANK of England has revealed that banks extended new mortgage commitments to borrowers worth £69.6bn in the three months to the end of September, an increase of 14% on the same period in 2016 and the highest amount recorded over a three-month period since the start of 2008. This...
AHEAD of tonight’s Silent March to mark the six-month anniversary of the Grenfell Tower inferno, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has condemned the inclusion of a leading supporter and organiser of fire service cuts as an ‘expert witness’ to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (GTI). The march starts at 6.30pm tonight...
INFLATION rose to 3.1% in November, the highest in nearly six years, as the squeeze on households continued and prices rose, slashing further into workers’ wages. The most recent data shows that average weekly wages are growing at just 2.2%. Millions of workers have seen their pay held down by...
LAST Wednesday night the Trump administration declared war on America’s public sector unions. In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice (DoJ) reversed its position on the constitutionality of mandatory fees for public employees. The DoJ now believes that public sector unions may not charge these...
SEVEN-day-GP access was rolled out yesterday across the whole of London, despite warnings from doctors that GP services are already stretched to breaking point. GP services are facing a major funding crisis, which is forcing surgery after surgery to close, while others are so short staffed they are having to...
THE ANC leadership is influenced by ‘liars and rogues,’ anti-apartheid activist and retired Constitutional Court judge Zak Yacoob said. Reflecting on his judicial work which began in the apartheid era‚ Yacoob said: ‘Although I have said publicly that (President) Jacob Zuma and the majority of people that influence the African...