Monthly Archives: December 2018
‘SIR Graham Brady has confirmed that he has received 48 letters from Conservative MPs so there will now be a vote of confidence in my leadership of the Conservative Party. I will contest that vote with everything I have got,’ Tory PM May said yesterday morning. The final letters came...
A full translated transcript of an audio recording of the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2nd shows that the killing was pre-planned – and refutes Ryiadh’s claims. A source, who read the translated version and who has been briefed on...
THERESA May’s leadership crashed and burned on Monday when she suddenly announced that there would be no vote on her deal with the EU. For weeks everyone, including her chief whip, has been warning May that the entire House of Commons is united in opposing the deal which is...
FIFTEEN protesters who locked themselves around a plane at Stansted Airport, successfully stopping those aboard from being deported back to countries where they faced torture or death, have been convicted of ‘terrorism offences’. These are the first activists involved in a non-violent direct action protest to be convicted under...
TORY PM Theresa May hotfooted off to Brussels yesterday to beg the EU for concessions after ‘postponing’ the vote on her Brexit deal on Monday, after it became clear that she was going to be monumentally defeated. However, yesterday morning President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker made his position...
HEZBOLLAH deputy secretary general says there is nowhere in Israel outside the range of the Lebanese resistance movement’s missiles. ‘There is not a single point in the occupied territories out of reach of Hezbollah’s missiles,’ Sheikh Naim Qassem told Tehran-based al-Vefagh newspaper in remarks published on Sunday. Israel has launched...
AT THE WEEKEND the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record published leaked documents that claims to reveal that a small ‘charity’, based in Fife and funded by the Tory government, has been carrying out propaganda attacks on social media aimed at discrediting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his closest advisors. This...
‘ONCE AGAIN, we see the reality of bandit capitalism and its toxic impact on our public services,’ Transport union RMT said yesterday, calling for all Interserve contracts to be taken back in-house as shares in the outsourcing giant nosedived, collapsing by as much as 70%. And the union Unite,...
‘ON ONE issue on the Northern Ireland backstop there remains widespread and deep concern. As a result, if we went ahead and held the vote tomorrow it would be rejected by the different parties,’ May admitted to Parliament yesterday announcing: ‘We will therefore postpone the vote scheduled for...
ON the occasion of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Asma al-Assad, wife of President Assad, participated last Monday in a celebration held by the Syrian Organisation for Persons with Disabilities (AAMAL). The celebration included video selections and drama shows about the necessity of integration and cooperation between the...
IN PARIS, on Saturday, against the advice of the more moderate members of the ‘Yellow Vests’ movement, 10,000 French workers and youth demonstrated their determination that Macron and his regime must go, with a number of demonstrators carrying banners demanding a ‘Frexit’. They had been warned that the state would...
‘We have to prepare for no deal... We have to prepare convincingly for no deal,’ former Tory Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show yesterday morning. Speaking ahead of tomorrow’s House of Commons vote on the EU Withdrawal Agreement, Johnson said he did not want a ‘no-deal’...
STRIKE ballots proposing industrial action at Further Education (FE) colleges are currently underway, the University and College Union (UCU) have announced, and will close on December 19. At the same time, UCU is warning that a pay offer of just 1% – from college representatives the Association of Colleges...
TORY PM May’s crisis over her Brexit deal, which is a complete capitulation to the EU, is reaching explosion point. She was the one who consistently repeated ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’. The only thing all parties, Brexiteers and Remainers, are in agreement on is...
THOUSANDS of Greek school and university students staged protest marches in Athens and 20 cities throughout the country last Thursday on the 10th anniversary of the killing of 15-year-old school student Alexis Grigoropoulos by a policeman. They shouted slogans against education cuts and police oppression. The midday Athens march was...
MORE than 130,000 homeless children will be living in temporary accommodation this Christmas in Britain, according to estimates by the homeless charity Shelter. In the borough in which Parliament sits, Westminster, one in every eleven children is homeless. In Kensington and Chelsea, one of the richest boroughs in the...
THE OUTRAGE of a West Midlands NHS Trust now facing a massive bill of some £400 million has led to Unite, one of the main unions representing NHS staff, calling for an ‘immediate criminal investigation’ into NHS contractor and privateer Carillion – which collapsed last January Unite, which is in...
A ‘ROGUE’ landlord has been threatened by a judge with nine years in jail if he doesn’t pay a record-breaking £1.5 million fine for cramming families into insanitary, grossly overcrowded rooms in his properties across north London. Vispasp Sarkari from Harrow in north London was ordered by the courts to pay...
FRENCH President Macron has been forced to completely back down and abandon his hated fuel tax hike. Spurred on by their victory the ‘Yellow Vests’ protesters have planned major demonstrations for this Saturday that promise to grind Paris to a standstill. Addressing the French National Assembly on ...
JOHN McDONNELL, Labour’s shadow chancellor said yesterday that Labour will vote down May’s Brexit deal, will not accept No Deal, and instead will propose a deal with exactly the same relationship between the EU and the UK as now, in other words Remain. He was speaking at a special session...
President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday received Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Ri Yong-ho and the accompanying delegation. Talks during the meeting touched on the historic friendly relations between Syria and the DPRK and means to enhance them. Minister Ri relayed to President al-Assad and the...
BRITISH parliamentary democracy was exposed as nothing more than a chaotic and rapidly collapsing sham on Tuesday when, for the first time in history, a vote that the Tory government was in contempt of parliament was carried, and yet not only did it not resign, the Labour opposition did...
THERE is a risk MPs will ‘steal Brexit from the British people’ if Theresa May’s proposed ‘backstop’ deal is rejected, senior cabinet minister Liam Fox warned yesterday. Fox said there was a ‘natural Remain majority’ in Parliament but any attempt to overturn the 2016 referendum vote would be...
Hundreds of Palestinian farmers and fishermen protested on Monday at al-Saraya Square in Gaza City demanding an end to the siege and the Palestinian division of the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. The protest march set off from al-Saraya Square towards the Unknown Soldier’s Square. Protesters shouted...
OH HOW the mighty have fallen! ‘Emperor Macron’, in the tradition of Napoleon III, has made no secret that he considers himself the master of France and that the masses will either have to dance to his tune or not at all. His foreign policy was an extension of this...
‘IT IS I think unprecedented for this House to find government ministers in contempt,’ Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit Secretary said yesterday, after a a motion found May’s government in contempt of Parliament. The motion was carried with 311 MPs voting for the motion and 293 against. Starmer continued:...
THE FIREFIGHTERS’ East Sussex union branch has unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the senior leadership team of East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service (ESFRS). This happened at an emergency meeting of members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) East Sussex Committee. The final straw prompting the no...
SYRIAN feature film ‘The Father’ has collected the Best Screenplay Award at the ending ceremony of the International Resistance Film Festival in Tehran. The Friday ceremony honoured the film’s director Bassel al-Khatib, who co-authored the screenplay along with his brother Waddah al-Khatib. The prize was given to Syria’s Director-General of...
THE FINANCIAL ‘doom loop’ that is tightening around the necks of the Italian banking system will send the Italian banks and the Italian state itself crashing into bankruptcy and will spread like an infection across Europe and the UK, the Bank of England (BoE) warned at the weekend. Italy...
‘PREMEDITATED cruelty,’ is how Norfolk campaigners have described Universal Credit, which they call to be immediately scrapped. They have organised a meeting at City Hall tonight. Many families and single people have been forced onto Universal Credit in the last week, meaning that as every claimant has to...
‘I MAKE no bones about it I would have preferred to have seen a unilateral right of termination in this backstop,’ Tory Attorney General Geoffrey Cox admitted, answering questions in the House of Commons yesterday on the legality of May’s Brexit deal. In this he admited that the deal...
ALMOST 95% of RCM members in Northern Ireland who responded to a consultation about industrial action, including strike action, over pay conditions have voted in favour. The RCM board received the results of the consultation on Saturday. Pay for midwives and MSWs in Northern Ireland has fallen behind the rest...
THE British ruling class is in big trouble indeed when it has to turn to Karl Marx and his ‘18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ to try to find out just how deep a crisis it is in, and if there is any way out of it. This is precisely what...
THE Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported that more than two hundred civilians lost their lives as the US-led coalition carried out airstrikes on Syria’s troubled eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr in November. As many as 206 civilians were killed in the air raids last...
All opposition parties in the House of Commons plan to join forces today in a bid to force the government to publish the full legal advice it received ahead of the publication of Theresa May’s EU Withdrawal Agreement. Last month MPs approved a motion demanding full publication of the government’s...
‘WE are at a crisis in secondary teacher recruitment,’ said Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, commenting on the release of the trainee number census for 2018-19. Courtney was writing on the same day that the NEU’s fellow-general secretary, Mary Bousted, had written urging the...
ALL RUSSIAN men aged between 16-60 have been banned from entering the Ukraine in a further ratcheting up of tensions by the Poroshenko dictatorship, which sees this playing with fire as the only way that it can stay in power. The ban follows the extreme right-wing President of Ukraine Poroshenko...
THE HEAD of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) said yesterday that global free trade is facing its ‘worst crisis’ since 1947. Roberto Azevedo said that the current protectionist wave led by the US and President Trump is threatening free trade. The escalating trade war between the US and China is...