Monthly Archives: March 2018
MILLIONS of pounds of taxpayers’ money being stuffed into privately-run academy schools are being siphoned off to line the pockets of the academy bosses. Meanwhile, council-run state schools are being starved to the bare bones. The head of the Harris Federation academy chain, Sir Dan Moynihan, is on £425,000 a...
THE parliament in Catalonia has declared its support for former leader Carles Puigdemont’s right to re-appointment as president of the northeastern Spanish region. Pro-independence parties in Catalonia’s parliament announced on Wednesday that they would recognise Puigdemont’s right to candidacy for heading the regional government again. Puigdemont went on the run...
ISRAELI forces opened fire on Friday afternoon at thousands of Palestinians who participated in the Great March of Return along Gaza borders, killing at least eight and injuring over 500 others. A Palestinian farmer was killed and another injured several hours before the Great March of Return began, as...
OVER a quarter of Syria’s Palestinian refugees displaced as a result of the long conflict are facing recurrent tragedies outside Syria, according to a new report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) published on Wednesday. The report, titled ‘Palestinian Syrians: Displaced Once Again. An eye on the appaling humanitarian...
NINE months after the fire at Grenfell Tower that caused the horrific deaths of 71 people, all the Tory pledges that never again would the lives of innocent families be put at risk, that all those who had suffered from this appalling fire would be helped, have turned out...
ECUADOR has cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet and stopped all visits after he tweeted about the arrest of Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont. Meanwhile junior UK Foreign Office minister, Alan Duncan launched a vicious attack on Assange in Parliament. Duncan said: ‘It’s of great regret that Julian Assange remains...
General Secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) Zwelinzima Vavi said on Tuesday that Saftu does not agree with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) that the proposed R20 per hour national minimum wage was ‘a good start and a step in the right...
IN his ‘Letter to American Workers’, published in Pravda on August 22 1918, after the victorious Russian revolution, Lenin wrote, ‘We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.’ Lenin fought for the world...
‘MASS rationing of operations to London’s patients’ is being planned under the London Choosing Wisely Programme, which was launched by the Healthy London Partnership on 12th March. The Healthy London Partnership was created in 2015 and comprises the Mayor of London, NHS England, London Councils, Public Health England and...
ISRAEL is pushing forward with its plans to construct over 100 new settler units in southern West Bank! This is in grave contravention of international law and a United Nations Security Council resolution against the Tel Aviv regime’s land expropriation and settlement expansion policies in occupied Palestinian lands. Meanwhile sports...
THE JEWISH Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies on Monday night launched a demonstration outside the House of Commons accusing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of being a ‘poster boy for anti-Semitism’. They insulted workers by alleging there are ‘no safe spaces’ in the Labour Party for Jews, and that...
ISRAELI jets pounded Hamas positions in Gaza overnight after Palestinians staged a cross-border raid into southern Israel, the military said early on Sunday. ‘Israel Air Force fighter jets targeted a terror target in a military compound belonging to the Hamas terror organisation in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip,’ it said...
THE DEAL reached last week between the majority of health unions and the Tories must be thrown out by NHS workers. The deal, which is being recommended by 12 of the 13 unions involved in the negotiations, is a treacherous sell-out of NHS workers’ pay that contains a poison...
EVEN in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the government has refused to put an end to ‘light touch regulation’ and it still will not insist that all building materials are rigorously tested for how combustible they are. The government has refused to rule-out ‘desktop assessments’ of building...
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that yesterday’s decision by western states to expel Russian diplomats was a mistake and a mirror response will be applied. ‘Of course, the mirror response will be applied in each such case,’ Peskov told journalists after the USA announced that it is to expel...
ANGRY members of IndustriALL Global Union affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), took to the streets of Johannesburg protesting proposed amendments to the labour laws. The union says they will reverse the hard-won gains on workers’ rights. NUMSA has called for a general strike on...
LABOUR leader Corbyn has been accused of organising a ‘Stalinist purge’ after he sacked ex-leadership contender and Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Owen Smith on Friday, after Smith wrote an article in the Guardian advocating the UK remain in the EU. Smith is demanding that a second EU referendum be called...
UNIVERSITY and College Union (UCU) branch representatives will meet at 11am on Wednesday 28 March to discuss members’ feedback on a new pensions offer from Universities UK (UUK) employers. The union’s Higher Education Committee will meet after that meeting to set out the next steps. UCU said on Friday: ‘Following...
SYRIA’S permanent representative to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, said on Thursday that the United Nations’ bodies and some of its member states adopt the wrong approach in implementing the UN Security Council resolutions on combating terrorism. That came in a press release entitled ‘Death targets innocent civilians in Damascus...
‘POLICE, including Special Branches, supplied information that appeared on the blacklist, funded by the country’s major construction firms, the Consulting Association and/or other agencies, in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998.’ That the police and Special Branch acted illegally is now a finding of the Independent Police Complaints Commission....
GMB, the union for construction workers, has described the Metropolitan Police’s admission of their role in the blacklisting scandal as a constitutional crisis which needs a public inquiry. Scotland Yard today admitted Special Branch officers passed information to a controversial network that blacklisted construction workers. GMB took the first blacklisting...
YESTERDAY, French workers and youth took to the streets in a massive confrontation with the government of Emmanuel Macron and his plans to privatise the French National Railways and tear up the employment rights of every single public sector worker in the country. Following the announcement last week that Macron...
‘NO justice, No peace’ and ‘Sack Judge Mitting now,’ were the cries from campaigners and victims of political policing as they blocked the main entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice, after storming out of the latest hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) on Wednesday. The ‘public inquiry’ into...
PALESTINIAN president Mahmud Abbas labelled the US ambassador to Israel David Friedman a ‘son of a dog’ on Monday during an attack on Donald Trump’s policies. The scathing comments come with US President Trump still expected to launch a plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians despite Abbas boycotting...
AN ACADEMIC who created an app which ‘harvested’ data from 50 million people now says he has been made ‘a scapegoat’ for the scandal of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. The academic, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, completed work for Cambridge Analytica in 2014, but said he had no idea the data would...
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) are marching in Gauteng today, Human Rights Day, to protest against the proposed new labour laws that come into effect in May. In a statement, Numsa national spokesperson, Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, said the union is marching as part of a coalition...
SCOTTISH fishermen and their colleagues throughout the UK are up in arms over the surrender of the May government to the EU bureaucrats. Davis and May have agreed that the EU will retain full control over the UK’s fishing waters from Brexit day, on 29 March 2019 when the...
BRITISH Museum cleaners, porters and security staff, who used to be employed by collapsed contractor Carillion, are demanding that they are brought back in-house and employed directly by the museum as part of the public services. Over 60 PCS members and supporters rallied outside the museum yesterday lunchtime. PCS...
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates has strongly condemned the successive waves of colonisation and the frequent calls of extreme Israeli officials to annex the occupied territories. The race between the right wing leaders in Israel is escalating towards colonialist calls for the annexation of the occupied...
JEROME Powell the new chairman of the US central Bank, the Fed, will be pushing for an increase in interest rates this week with a further three increases expected this year. The result of these increases will be catastrophic for the developing countries according to the charity the Jubilee...
COVENTRY University is in danger of becoming a ‘pariah institution’ lecturers union the UCU warned yesterday. The union launched a campaign against the university’s ‘anti-union dirty tricks’ and has threatened an ‘academic boycott’. Coventry university has set up a subsidiary company within the university, exploiting a legal loophole allowing it...
‘REFUGEES are welcome here!’ shouted over 10,000 protesters on a March Against Racism through central London on Saturday. Labour’s shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, Gary Younge, Ray BLK, and Kensington MP, Emma Dent Coad joined trade unionists, faith and community leaders, campaigners and thousands more workers and youth. March organisers...
ACADEMY school budgets are in a desperate state with eight out of 10 in deficit, say their accountants. ‘Two more years like this and the entire sector could face insolvency,’ says a just-published report from the Kreston UK accountancy network which looked at 450 academy schools. The 450 schools are...
‘RUSSIA had nothing to do with’ the nerve attack in Salisbury, Russian ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov insisted yesterday. He went on to tell the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that it was more likely that the British state was involved. Dismissing UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson and PM May’s...
SOUTH Africa’s former North West deputy police commissioner William Mpembe is one of nine people who appeared in the Rustenburg Magistrates Court on Thursday in connection with two cases linked to the 2012 Marikana killings. Mpembe was arrested on Thursday morning on charges brought against him as a result of...
FIRE doors in the Grenfell Tower failed, providing further evidence that this horrific tragedy could have been prevented. There is not a shadow of doubt that substandard fire doors, in combination with flammable cladding aided the rapid spread of the inferno which claimed the lives of so many men,...
STUDENTS and other supporters at the University of Sheffield rallied outside Firth Court yesterday and welcomed Chris Townsend, representing the three-day-old student occupation of Sheffield University Arts Tower in full solidarity with the lecturers’ strike action. They were marking the last day of this round of 14 days of strike...
DOCTORS must have at least 46 hours rest after a string of night shifts in order to combat fatigue at work, according to a new ‘Sleep Charter’ compiled by doctors’ union BMA which insists that doctors must get enough sleep to treat patients safely. Junior doctors organised multiple strikes during...
THE low priority given to children and young people’s health threatens prosperity, argues an expert writing in The BMJ Today. Professor Russell Viner at University College London’s Institute of Child Health, says countries that invest in child health ‘reap impressive economic rewards, with each pound spent on children’s health returning...
THERESA May’s virtual declaration of war against Russia last Wednesday received its most enthusiastic support from right-wing Labour MPs who rushed forward to declare their complete unity with the Tories and offered themselves up as willing partners in a unity government to wage the war. The Tories have deliberately...
