Monthly Archives: February 2018
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi, on Monday, condemned the decision of the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislation to strip the High Court of jurisdiction over Palestinian cases regarding land and property confiscation, and refer them to the Jerusalem District Court, so as to entrench the Israeli military occupation...
STUDENTS from poorer backgrounds are being forced to become ‘student commuters’, living in their home town and then commuting back and forth on a daily basis to university because they cannot afford the rents in halls, a new report by the Sutton Trust reveals. Students from working class families...
ZWELINZIMA VAVI, SAFTU general secretary, addressed the THOR Congress at the Plaza hotel, Durban 24-25 Feb 2018. He said: ‘THOR (Transport Action Retail & General Workers Union) is organising in the Transport sector. where only 24% of workers belong to unions. Only 11% of workers belong to unions...
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn’s speech yesterday defining Labour’s position on Brexit negotiations was nothing more than an abject and cowardly surrender to the bosses and bankers and a complete trashing of the Labour Party manifesto pledge to quit the EU. It also displayed the contempt Corbyn has towards the...
TEACHERS across West Virginia walked off the job last Thursday and Friday amid a dispute over pay and benefits, causing more than 277,000 public school students to miss classes as educators swarmed into the state Capitol in Charleston to protest. All 55 counties in the state closed schools during...
AT THE same time as the Nusra Front and the remnants of IS were shelling Damascus, and the Turkish imperialists were killing Kurds in northern Syria, the UN Security Council decided to impose a 30-day ceasefire on Syria. The US is now threatening military action against Syria if...
LECTURERS at 64 universities across the UK began 14 days of strike action on Thursday against imposed changes to their pensions. They were out again on Friday and take another three days of strike action next week Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday there is a national march on...
‘WE ARE not animals!’ women incarcerated in the notorious Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre have scrawled across their T-shirts. More than 120 women have been on hunger strike since last Wednesday, against being detained indefinitely. Yarl’s Wood is run by the private company Serco. When the facility was first opened...
THE UNIVERSITY lecturers’ strikes are having a a massive impact, and, with the overwhelming support of the vast majority of students, the Vice-Chancellors have been driven onto the back foot. Yesterday, Sussex student protesters occupied the headquarters of Universities UK. This came after at least 15 vice-chancellors –...
ON WEDNESDAY more civilians were killed or injured and material damage caused to the citizens’ houses and public facilities in Afrin city and its villages in the countryside of Aleppo because of the aggression waged on the area by the forces of the Turkish regime and its mercenaries. SANA’s reporter...
YESTERDAY’S meeting of the Tory ‘Brexit War Cabinet’ at Chequers was convened under conditions where the entire Tory leadership was openly at war with itself, split and divided as never before and with May having to deny that she had agreed a strategy of keeping British capitalism tied to...
‘WHAT do we want? Fair pensions! How do we get it? Strike! Strike! Strike!’ students and lecturers at Sheffield University shouted yesterday while taking part in the nationwide strike. Lecturers at 64 universities across the length and breadth of the country began 14 days of strike action, coming out...
Disney unions in Orlando have filed a federal labour complaint against the theme park company for withholding $1,000 bonuses from unionised workers unless they approve the company’s wage proposal. ‘Disney is discriminating against 38,000 of some of its lowest-paid cast members,’ said Angie McKinnon, a representative for one of the...
THE British capitalist press is seeking to whip up a storm over what it calls two days of ‘hysterical violence’ by Assad forces in Eastern Ghouta, near to Damascus, and is warning of a ‘humanitarian catastrophe in the seven-year war’. In fact, the capitalist media are ignoring the Turkish invasion...
THERE was a big turnout of over 60 striking NEU (National Education Union) members and supporters on the picket line outside The Village School in Kingsbury, north west London yesterday morning. Strikers against forced academisation were chanting: ‘We don’t want to work for an academy – we want to work...
THE National Union of Students’ verdict on PM May’s review into post-18 education and funding is that ‘she is choosing to move the deckchairs around a ship she already acknowledges to be sinking.’
The NUS continues: ‘To truly make education fair and accessible, the government must acknowledge that the education...
‘TREATING staff with such contempt only hardens their resolve,’ University and College Union (UCU) general secretary Sally Hunt said in response to a new attack by university management on the eve of the lecturers’ strike. Two universities have warned lecturers that if they go on strike they will be partly...
HUDDERSFIELD Royal Infirmary (HRI) workers are determined to strike to defeat the closure of their hospital and the privatisation of their jobs. About 380 porters, gardeners, cleaners and maintenance workers have voted 95% in favour of going on strike after being threatened with having their jobs privatised. It was...
STAFF at three council-run schools in Newham, east London, are to take part in a simultaneous strike this Thursday against an attempt to force them to transform into privately run academies. Teachers and support workers at Avenue Primary School will be taking part in their seventh day of strike...
THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) has responded to the State of the Nation Address delivered by newly elected South African President, billionaire Cyril Ramaphosa. Firstly, SAFTU congratulates the newly elected President of the Republic, His Excellency Cyril Ramaphosa. We wish him well as he ascends to...
IN 2008 the world financial system stood on the very brink of the abyss with banks and industries facing the immediate prospect of crashing overnight, drowned in a sea of debt. The initial cause was the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank, a giant US investment bank that specialised...
YOUNG fast food workers in Portland, Oregon, USA, who are fighting for a $5 an hour rise above the US state’s minimum wage and union recognition, have launched a ‘Boycott Burgerville’ campaign. The Oregon minimum wage is just $10.25 an hour. The formation of the Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU), in...
THE Palestinian government has condemned the Saturday night-Sunday morning Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip which killed two Palestinian youth and injured many others. Palestinian eyewitnesses said the two were killed east of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza after Israel launched a series of airstrikes and...
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn has responded angrily to a witch-hunt launched by Murdoch’s Sun, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail which claimed he passed information to former Czech spy Jan Sarkocy in the 1980s. A spokesperson for Corbyn said: ‘As Svetlana Ptacnikova, director of the Czech...
ANKARA and Washington have reached an agreement to work together in their occupation of part of northern Syria, where the two NATO allies have been on a collision course over the US’ support for the Kurdish YPG. Speaking at a joint press conference following a meeting in Ankara, US...
‘SHOULD the chiefs take that ultimate decision, we will challenge that legally and will challenge it industrially,’ Barry Downey, regional FBU representative for Hereford and Worcester told News Line yesterday. He was responding to the fire authority’s threat to sack every single firefighters in two weeks’ time and...
DUTCH teachers are on strike, demanding decent salaries and a normal workload, and urging the government to clearly and firmly address burn-out and a shortage in teachers in primary education. The first regional strike of the planned Code Rood (Code Red) sequence was held in the provinces of Groningen, Friesland...
‘71 DEAD. And still no arrests? How come?’ read three large billboards on trucks demanding justice following the Grenfell Tower fire. They were driven through London by campaigners from 7:00am on Thursday. The billboards hit the nail on the head. Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union...
JACOB Zuma resigned as president of South Africa on Wednesday ahead of a vote of no confidence over uncontainable corruption scandals, and has been replaced by billionaire Cyril Ramaphosa, leader of the ANC since December. Zuma had held power since 2009. The newly founded South African Federation of Trade Unions...
550,000 CHILDREN (1 in 7) with a parent working in the public sector will be forced to live in poverty by the end of this financial year according to research carried out by the TUC. This analysis, published yesterday, showed that since 2010 an extra 150,000 children of public...
IN THE WAKE of the collapse of Carillion, another outsourcing giant, Serco has taken over 15 healthcare contracts at a bargain basement price in what has been described as a ‘fire sale’ of NHS services. Carillion went into liquidation in January leaving NHS services in a desperate crisis, as Carillion...
The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) yesterday welcomed ‘the long overdue recall of Jacob Zuma as President of South Africa’. The ANC had given Zuma until the end of yesterday to resign or a motion of no-confidence in him would be heard today. However, shortly after ANC chief...
Knesset’s vote to extend Israeli law to academic institutions in the illegal settlements and place them under the authority of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. She said in a press release that ‘this decision represents another dangerous step in the annexation of the occupied West Bank.’ HANAN Ashrawi,...
UNDER the Localism Act 2011, councils were granted greater powers to restrict access to social housing. Vulnerable people are now unable to access social housing. They are trapped ‘in a cycle of homelessness’, due to this change in the law. Since 2011, 700,000 households have disappeared from waiting lists...
WINDSOR and Maidenhead council have made it a crime to be homeless, issuing fines of £100 criminalising destitute people in an attempt to drive them off the streets before the royal wedding. When the council first announced plans to get the police to drive the homeless and the poor off...
‘THE GOVERNMENT is failing to get unsafe products out of people’s homes as new fire figures reveal that faulty washing machines, tumble dryers and fridge freezers are causing more than 60 house fires a week’, a Which? report released yesterday shows. The report, entitled ‘Fanning the Flames’, looked...
CONSTABLE Itumeleng Ntsileng from the police’s K9 Unit and two of his fellow officers have told South Africa’s City Press newspaper how at least one of their colleagues and others from the police’s special task force shot striking mineworkers in Marikana on 16th August 2012 – who had surrendered...
THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) has noted the shocking testimony given to City Press by police officers who were among those at Marikana on 16 August 2012 when 34 mineworkers were killed and 112 injured,’ SAFTU said in a statement issued on Monday February 12th. It added:...
THE Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) on Sunday said three Palestinian minors were assaulted by Israeli forces during detention in January. PPS’s attorney said he visited the three minors in the Israeli prison of Ofer, where they shared experiences of being assaulted by Israeli soldiers. One of the detainees is 17-year-old...
IN A DRAMATIC about face, US Vice President Mike Pence stated yesterday that the Trump administration is now looking at holding diplomatic talks with North Korea without any pre-conditions. Speaking to the Washington Post on his way back from the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, Pence raised the...
