Monthly Archives: March 2019
PALESTINIAN Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Riyad Malki urged Arab countries on Wednesday to take ‘all practical measures’ to confront any country that recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He also urged the Arab countries to implement ‘the resolutions of the Arab League Council’ at various levels to...
LAST Wednesday US national security advisor John Bolton threatened that the US administration was putting every foreign bank ‘on notice’ if they failed to obey the Trump administration’s demand that they stop all financial transactions with the legitimate Venezuelan government of President Maduro. Bolton vowed that the US ‘will not...
HOME Secretary Sajid Javid has met police chiefs from seven forces most affected by the violent crime wave produced by the government’s decade of austerity policies. The meeting came after Met Police chief Cressida Dick, who gave the go ahead to shoot Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, publicly criticised...
AN investment bank, led by an oligarch who collaborated with Prince Charles on charity work, managed a network of offshore companies moving billions out of Russia. The oligarch, Ruben Vardanyan, is the former boss of Moscow investment bank Troika Dialog. Money from the network was sent to the Prince’s Charities...
THE Independent Group of eight ex-Labourites and three ex-Tories is in talks with the Electoral Commission about becoming a fully-fledged political party, group spokesman Chuka Umunna said yesterday. ‘The group had to become a party in order to present an alternative to the broken political system’, he said. By registering as...
Education unions in the UK have reaffirmed the urgent need to protect students and education workers from asbestos in schools, demanding that ‘all asbestos must be removed from all schools’. ‘The NASUWT is deeply troubled to see that in yet another school, asbestos has been removed unsafely,’ said National Association...
AS MANY as 11,000 Bangladesh garment workers were sacked in the wake of the pay strikes they waged in December and January, while many have also been physically threatened, attacked, arrested on trumped-up charges and blacklisted. A shocking report published by the United States trade union body the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity...
TUC GENERAL secretary Frances O’Grady this week re-hashed all the arguments used by the TUC before the 2016 referendum that only by remaining captive in the EU could workers’ rights be protected by judges in Brussels. To their huge shock the working class overwhelmingly rejected these threats but this hasn’t...
MEXICAN maquiladora workers in 70 factories have won big wage increases and bonuses in a strike wave that began in January. Maquiladoras are tariff and duty-free assembly/processing factories using cheap labour. The strikes in the industrial city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border with Brownsville, Texas, have primarily hit auto parts...
FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron, currently fighting a civil war with millions of French workers, has proposed a series of ‘reforms’ that he says will ensure the future of the European Union. Ahead of the European elections in May, he advocates a ban on foreign powers who are allegedly financing European...
NEW GOVERNMENT fire safety guidance fails to include escape plans, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) warned yesterday. RIBA insist that the government’s guidance does not include occasions when the ‘stay-put’ policy has to be abandoned. In the case of the Grenfell Tower fire, which tragically claimed the lives of...
THE NATIONAL Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK and Ireland yesterday condemned an attempt by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Durham Constabulary to silence two journalists. In an extraordinary move the police yesterday made an attempt to silence investigative journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, but they...
A DEBATE was held in Westminster Hall on Monday, attended by MPs, teachers, headteachers, support staff and members of the public to discuss the crisis in education funding. The debate was triggered by a group of head teachers in Gateshead who, late last year, launched an e-petition to increase funding...
BIRMINGHAM city council is selling off its community centres and youth centres with millions of pounds of public property being auctioned off to housing developers, leaving inner city areas decimated. In a vicious cycle, the money raised is being partly used to pay for redundancies from previous cuts. Community centres across...
ON THE eve of the US moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi said: ‘The Trump Administration is intent on leaving no room for doubt about its hostility towards the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights, as well as...
WOMEN who found out their partners were undercover police spies insisted yesterday that they are the ‘victims of a conspiracy to rape’ by the police. An ongoing public inquiry into undercover policing has seen several women win apologies and compensation. Over a number years dozens of undercover officers, part of the...
THE TORIES have allowed train companies to ‘play the system’ collecting more than £1.3bn from the taxpayer for delayed services and passing only a fraction on to commuters, prompting train union RMT to call for the entire system to be taken back under public ownership. Compensation claims handed by rail...
THE PLOTS by the Labour right-wing, led by the deputy leader Tom Watson, to completely split the Labour Party and remove Corbyn have accelerated dramatically over the past few days. Last week Watson, a bag carrier for Gordon Brown when he was Labour leader, declared that he would be setting...
THE GOVERNMENT has dropped the debate and vote on The Financial Services Bill which seeks to secure funds that can be released if there is a no deal Brexit. The debate was scheduled for yesterday. The Treasury Department would not say why the Tories had cancelled the debate and vote,...
IRAN’S Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says all Iranian people are in ‘the same boat’ and must stand united against ‘hegemonic powers’ seeking to cause division among the nation. ‘Iranians, regardless of their political, religious or ethnic inclinations, are aboard the same boat,’ Zarif stressed in a Thursday post on...
THE MASSIVE vote of over 17 million workers and youth to leave the EU on March 29th has driven the ruling class and its political representatives into a major crisis. They are now completely discrediting bourgeois democracy as they twist and turn to try to avoid leaving the EU,...
UN SPECIAL Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen on Friday underlined Syria’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, rejecting a US congressional motion to recognise Israel’s annexation of the occupied territory. ‘Obviously the Security Council is very clear that the Golan is Syrian territory, and the first aspect of Resolution 2254 is...
LABOUR leader Corbyn, on Friday has called upon the UK to freeze arms sales to Israel and to condemn it for killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. In a tweet, Corbyn said: ‘The UN says Israel’s killings of demonstrators in Gaza – including children, paramedics and journalists – may constitute “war...
SIR GRAHAM Brady, the chair of the Tories’ 1922 Committee, said yesterday, ‘the whole country is tired’ and that people should back the PM ‘when the right compromise is offered’. Brady said he is ready to drop his opposition to the Prime Minister’s contentious deal. In a hard-hitting article in The...
AT HIS first rally for the US 2020 presidential bid, Senator Bernie Sanders promised to defeat Donald Trump, calling him ‘the most dangerous president in modern American history’. On Saturday in New York City Sanders was cheered by a crowd at Brooklyn College, where he studied for a year. Greeted...
NATIONAL Offer Day was yesterday, with record numbers of children missing out on their first choice of secondary school. More than half a million families found out yesterday morning which school their child will attend in September. Around 115,000 children across England were left disappointed due to a continuing shortage...
UP to 1,700 workers at a GE Transportation plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, walked out on strike last Tuesday, marking the first large-scale work stoppage in the US manufacturing sector in three years. Union members with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) say the factory’s incoming owner,...
THE CRISIS caused by the privatisation of the probation system in England and Wales has cost taxpayers almost £500m, the government’s National Audit Office says. The privatisation drive which began in 2013, saw private care companies handed the supervision of low and medium-risk offenders. The National Audit Office now says that...
ISRAELI soldiers have violently beaten up a blind and paralysed Palestinian man in front of his wife and children for no apparent reason in the West Bank town of Dawha, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports. Munzer Mizhar, a 47-year-old retired medical technician, was beaten with brass knuckles by Israeli forces...
THE TORIES’ ‘right to rent’ checks are a breach of human rights, the High Court ruled yesterday. These are rules which force landlords to do immigration checks on their tenants, kicking them out if they believe that they are ‘illegal immigrants’ and shopping them to the authorities. The ‘right to rent’...
GIVING children as young as four exams as soon as they start school is ‘pointless’ the National Education Union (NEU) said yesterday, calling for the baseline assessment pilot to be scrapped. Tory education minister Nick Gibb said that the Department for Education (DfE) will be looking for schools to take...
HOSPITALS built under the hated Private Finance Initiative (PFI) do not respond well to ‘never events’ where patients’ lives are put in to serious jeopardy, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) warned yesterday. One such ‘never event’ was an incident where an 85-year-old woman was wrongly given normal air instead...
THE SPOKESMAN for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said last Wednesday that the President ‘is ready for a three-way meeting with Israel in Moscow if Russian President Vladimir Putin calls for one.’ Abu Rudeineh was responding to statements by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had said on...
OVER a million public sector workers across Britain are paid poverty level wages according to a report issued yesterday by the Living Wage Foundation. 1.2 million working in the NHS, in local councils and throughout the public sector are being paid wages of less than £10.55 an hour in London...
THE NSL parking services workers of the GMB trade union started a two-day strike yesterday for the London Living Wage. News Line joined them on the picket line in Vauxhall Bridge Road in Pimlico. With their powerful sound system blasting out music dozens of strikers were furious about their low pay...
KHALIDA Jarrar, a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is free! She was greeted by a cheering crowd after she was released from an Israeli jail, in Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank yesterday morning. Khalida Jarrar was held without trial for 20 months under...