Monthly Archives: August 2018
New types of complex injuries in the occupied Palestinian territory are leading to lifelong disabilities as prompt comprehensive care is beyond the scope of already fractured health services, reports Jonathan Owen, in the BMJ published on 10th August. More than a thousand people in Gaza have been left with life...
THESE are truly desperate times for the Tories. Their government is selling out Brexit. Their party is split and divided, with Boris Johnson challenging PM May on a daily basis, and they live in fear of losing their slender majority – provided by the DUP – and being brought...
SAFTU (South African Federation of Trade Unions) is incensed at the report in the Mail & Guardian that there is a plan lay off 30,000 public servants in the next three years as part of the government’s cost-cutting measures. The report, based on statements by ‘government insiders who attended this...
Last Friday the Turkish currency, the lira, crashed spectacularly, dropping as much as 16% relative to the dollar – it lost a third of its value in just one week. By Monday morning the world’s central bankers and financial institutions were suddenly waking up to the carnage that the...
DOCTOR Hadiza Bawa-Garba, who was struck of the medical register, and not allowed to treat patients ever again, has won her appeal, reversing the decision and will now be allowed to start working as a doctor again, the High Court ruled yesterday afternoon. Outside the High Court Doctor Bob Gill...
MANUFACTURE is now in recession! GMB union responds to the latest ONS ‘damning’ figures which shows the start of a major slump. GMB, the union which represents thousands of manufacturing workers, has responded to the latest UK manufacturing figures which point to a sector now technically in recession,...
THE LATEST statistics produced by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show clearly that Israeli domination of the occupied Palestinian territories has lead to appalling, ever worsening conditions of existence for the Palestinian people. They are left with no alternative but to establish their own state, whatever the sacrifices that...
JUNIOR doctors, furious at being offered only a 2 per cent pay rise last month, are considering strike action. The British Medical Association (BMA) junior doctors committee has been polling members to assess their ‘strength of feeling’ and appetite for industrial action. The provisional findings from a survey of about...
THE FBU has revealed that firefighters dealt with more incidents, more fires and saw more fire deaths last year than for most of the last decade in England, yet the Westminster government continues to starve fire authorities of the central funding necessary to keep the public safe. Fire deaths in...
THE NHS is in ‘all-year-round crisis’, Dr Rob Harwood, BMA consultants committee chair, said on Thursday. He was responding to new figures A&E attendances & emergency admission statistics that show July had the highest ever number of attendances. Dr Rob Harwood, continued: ‘With more than half a million people waiting...
TWENTY-one libraries closing, rubbish collections and road maintenance stripped to the bone, hundreds of council workers sacked, children’s services axed – these were amongst the catastrophic cuts voted through by Northamptonshire council on Thursday to the horror of the local residents. One resident Bianca Todd warned: ‘When people die...
YESTERDAY the Palestinian Mission hosted a press conference for Dr Swee Ang, the first female orthopaedic and trauma consultant surgeon at St Bartholomew and the Royal London Hospitals. Dr Ang, a long-time friend and staunch supporter of the Palestinian people since her experience as a doctor working for the Palestinian...
THE POUND was sent crashing down yesterday against the US dollar and the euro prompting the bourgeois press to howl about ‘the end of the world’. On Wednesday, it was reported that sterling had hit its lowest level against the US dollar in almost a year with the pound...
THE ISRAELI military has carried out over 140 air strikes against the Gaza Strip, threatening another full-scale military offensive against the blockaded coastal enclave amid escalating tensions there. The Israeli army said on Thursday morning that it had pounded more than 140 targets in Gaza belonging to the Palestinian Hamas...
TESTIMONIES by a number of Palestinian children to the Prisoners’ Affairs Commission show they were subjected to systematic beating and torture during and after arrest by Israeli forces, the commission said on Tuesday. Commission attorney Hiba Ighbarieh documented testimonies from three children held at Majido prison regarding what they went...
NORTH Korea’s Foreign Minister in Tehran on Wednesday criticised the US’ decision to re-impose sanctions on Iran as a ‘wrong move’, that runs contrary to international law. In a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Ri Yong-ho said Washington’s withdrawal in May from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and...
AN EMERGENCY General meeting will be held by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in September, in response to a petition with over 1,000 signatures expressing members’ outrage at their pay deal ‘miscommunication’. Late last month, RCN chief executive Janet Davies was forced to issue an apology to members who...
PRESIDENT Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton has stated that the United States is exerting ‘unprecedented pressure on the government of Iran to change its behaviour.’ In fact, as everybody knows – including the US ruling class – the leaders of the Iranian revolution have no intention of changing...
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has warned other countries against doing business with Tehran, saying he had imposed ‘the most biting’ sanctions on the country. ‘The Iran sanctions have officially been cast. These are the most biting sanctions ever imposed, and in November they ratchet up to yet another level,’...
THOUSANDS of Zimbabwe capital Harare City Council (HCC) workers have threatened to go on strike to force their employer to settle salary arrears stretching back four months. They claim the HCC last paid them in March. The impending strike comes as outgoing Mayor Bernard Manyenyeni warned the local authority to...
MILLIONS of workers in Britain face the prospect of seeing their jobs replaced by machines in the next ten years, according to a report based on studies carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) into the impact of new computer technology on the economy and employment. More...
VIRGIN Care has been awarded over £2bn of NHS contracts in the last five years alone, ringing alarm bells over the further privatisation of the NHS. In a single year, Virgin Care won deals worth £1bn to provide services to the NHS. Virgin, which is usually associated with trains and...
NURSES’ anger over the NHS pay sell-out has forced the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to call an Emergency General Meeting in ‘late September’, after an online petition among members achieved the required 1,000 signatures. Chair of the RCN Council, Maria Trewern said: ‘We will be letting you know the...
SEIU Local 1 janitors in Detroit, Michigan, joined by supporters and elected officials, have announced their historic contract victory which includes raises to $15 dollars per hour in year three of their four-year contract. Their win is the first in the energetic movement to build One Detroit: a city in...
VENEZUELA’S President Nicolas Maduro has survived an assassination attempt during a military parade celebrating the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard in the capital, Caracas. There is not the slightest doubt that the USA and its terrorist President Trump is behind that attack, and that the US state provided...
TURKEY’S Constitutional Court has ruled that the cabinet decree banning IndustriALL’s affiliate United Metalworkers’ Union (Birleflik Metal-Is) decision to strike in 2015 is a clear violation of the trade union rights enshrined in the country’s constitution. The Court also ruled the Turkish government to pay compensation to Birleflik Metal-Is. In January...
‘RENTQUAKE’ has hit middle England as rents race above wages in market towns, said housing charity Shelter yesterday. Rents have risen 60% faster than average wages across England according to new research by Shelter. The new figures released yesterday show that private rents have risen by 16% since 2011, far...
SUPERMARKET and on-line shopping giants are making a bee-line for our public services, licking their lips at the prospect of multi-million pound profits out of health, education and housing. Internet giant Amazon has just been awarded a £600 million five-year contract to sell everything from paper clips to bandages...
THE residents of the village of Kardala in the northern Jordan Valley said this week that Israeli forces came to their village and destroyed a water pipeline that was supplying fresh water to the village, claiming that this happened while it was searching what it claims were ‘illegal’ water...
YESTERDAY’S announcement by the Bank of England of an increase in interest rates from 0.5% to 0.75% will be disastrous for the vast majority of workers and sections of the middle class who are only just scraping by or surviving from day to day on debt. This increase of 0.25%...
INTERNET retail giant Amazon being awarded a £600 million contract to provide for our public services is a ‘sick joke’ given the company’s ‘record of exploitation’, trade union GMB said yesterday. Amazon has secured a contract to sell everything from paper clips to bandages to Yorkshire’s schools, social care providers...
THERE is a huge increase in the number of teenagers going hungry during the summer holidays, a National Education Union (NEU) poll finds today. A snapshot survey of 657 secondary teachers by the NEU shows the growing concern amongst teachers that young people are not getting enough food to...
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Tory County Council has imposed emergency spending controls twice in the last six months and is now in a ‘truly perilous state’, having to impose ‘unprecedented cuts’ to save £70 million by next March. These ‘completely unprecedented’ cuts will force the Tory Council to break all legal duties....
Universal Credit (UC) is allowing ‘abusers’ to take control of family finances, an investigation by a parliamentary committee has heard. UC is paid to one person per household and the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee heard examples of men being paid a month’s welfare income on behalf...
THE BOURGEOIS media and Labour’s right wing pro-Zionists have no shame, as their attempts to label Labour leader Corbyn an anti-Semite show – otherwise they would die of it! Behind their onslaught is their fear that the end of the May government is near, and that a Labour government...
BANGLADESH garment workers’ organisations will picket the wage board office in Dhaka on August 5th to demand Tk 16,000 as the minimum monthly wage for the ready-made garment sector. The decision was announced on Sunday at a meeting at the central office of the Communist Party of Bangladesh in...
THREE hundred asylum seekers are threatened with eviction by private company Serco. It has already begun to change the locks, throwing them onto the streets of Glasgow. Serco, which houses thousands of asylum seekers in Glasgow, issued the first six ‘lock change’ notices on Monday, giving residents just...