Monthly Archives: August 2019
THE EVENTS in Hong Kong over the past month have seen thousands of people storming the Hong Kong parliament and raising the Union Jack flag – known as the ‘Butcher’s Apron’, a visible symbol of the former brutal occupation by British imperialism over China, that began with the notorious...
CORNWALL Partnership Foundation Trust is withholding rent payments to NHS Property Services to force it to take urgent action over fire safety. Patients have had to be evacuated from two wards at Camborne and Redruth Community Hospital, because the risk is so high. The Trust warns that if a fire did...
MALTESE authorities on Monday refused the Ocean Viking rescue ship permission to refuel in their harbours while on its search and rescue mission off the coast of Libya. According to SOS Mediterranee, which operates the ship together with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF – Doctors Without Borders), the Ocean Viking was...
JOHN BOLTON, President Trump’s National Security Adviser, was in town yesterday recruiting mercenaries to the US cause, including its trade war with China and the EU, and its war plan against Iran. His campaign started at the very top with Prime Minister Johnson. He came bearing potential gifts to bribe...
HOMELESS people are to be forcibly evicted from the Westminister underpass, which leads to Parliament, by installing rolldown shutters blocking the shelter off. In December 2018, rough sleeper Gyula Remes was found dead in the underpass. The underpass is part of the Parliamentary estate. Parliament announced over the weekend that it...
US AIRCRAFT are flying over Iraqi territory collecting intelligence on the country’s popular forces, a senior Iraqi expert said, adding that a drone that crashed this week was on a mission to raid Hashd al-Shaabi (the Iraqi popular resistance) forces. Kazzem al-Haaj told the al-Ma’aloumeh news website on Sunday that...
A NEWSPAPER investigation has revealed that the Home Office has been making huge profits out of the human misery of the Tories’ ‘hostile environment’ campaign against every foreign-born worker and their families in the UK. According to the report, the Home Office has been profiteering from the soaring immigration fees...
TORY PM Johnson’s new police state measures allowing police unlimited stop and search powers have been condemned by Stopwatch, while Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott described them as a ‘recipe for unrest’. In an article in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday newspapper, Johnson announced the removal of restrictions on using ‘Section...
IRAN says it considers possible Israeli presence in a US-led coalition in the Persian Gulf as a clear threat to its national security, and reserves the right to counter it. Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi last Friday referred to the ‘illegitimate existence’ of the Israeli regime in the Middle East...
TORY Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom has said that a special committee will look at what happened last Friday, when a huge power cut affected millions of people, with train passengers stranded, traffic lights failing to work, passengers at King’s Cross forced to use the lights on their phones to...
LONDON Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for the Labour Party to consider backing the creation of a government of ‘national unity’ to stop Brexit. He said yesterday that while the ‘starting point for any conversations’ should be that it is led by Jeremy Corbyn, other options should not be excluded. He...
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn has written to Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill asking him to rule out a no-deal Brexit on October 31, reneging on Labour’s 2017 General Election manifesto pledge to support the ‘Leave’ result of the 2016 EU referendum. This pledge saw Labour wipe out then-PM May’s parliamentary majority,...
DOCTORS have welcomed a series of concessions by the Treasury, altering the effect on them of punitive pension rules which are in fact forcing many to retire early or ratchet down work hours. In his initial response Chaand Nagpaul, the council chair of doctors’ union the BMA, (British Medical Association),...
IN THE LATEST attempt to block a no-deal Brexit, Labour leader Corbyn has called on the civil service to move into action and do the bidding of the Remainer MPs in Parliament. Corbyn has written to senior civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, seeking confirmation that Boris Johnson could not...
SOUTH Wales Police have launched a facial recognition app which is to be installed on their officers’ phones, prompting human rights campaigners Liberty to exclaim: ‘This technology is intrusive, unnecessary, and has no place on our streets.’ In a three-month trial of the new police facial recognition app which has...
SOUTH Africa’s automotive sector, already reeling from poor sales, now seems set to suffer a further blow – as carworkers threaten to take strike action should their wage demands not be met. The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), which represents the bulk of the workers in the sector, and...
THE FRONT page of The Daily Telegraph yesterday led with an article headed: ‘John McDonnell threatens to march on the palace and tell the Queen: “We’re taking over”, if Boris Johnson loses a no confidence vote’. This referred to Labour’s shadow chancellor saying that he would be ‘sending Jeremy Corbyn...
LABOUR shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has thrown a political bomb into the middle of the Labour Party with his pledge to the Scottish Nationalists that a future Labour government will give the go-ahead for a Scottish referendum on leaving the UK. In an interview at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he...
THE RMT warned on Tuesday that the long-awaited Government Rail Review – set up on the watch of serial failure Chris Grayling – is set to be a wholesale sell-out to the private operators. It will enable the privateers to tighten their grip on the rail network through the creation...
IN AN interview in Edinburgh on Tuesday Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell brazenly broke with the official Labour Party policy of opposition to a second Scottish independence referendum and its commitment that a future Labour government would block any demands from the nationalist SNP to call one. McDonnell stated that...
THE TORIES’ Hostile Environment is alive and kicking with a new extortionate fee of £2,033 charged every 30 months, targeting people whose immigration status is labelled ‘limited leave to remain’. The Home Office’s draconian approach to those with ‘limited leave to remain’ status particularly affects young people. The fees have...
THE PALESTINIAN Presidency on Monday ‘reiterated the firm position of the State of Palestine that supports the right of the People’s Republic of China to maintain its territorial unity and sovereignty, especially in Hong Kong, and express its rejection of any foreign intervention and attempts to destabilise it,’ reports...
HARLAND AND WOLFF shipyard has been occupied by the workforce to prevent its closure. However on Monday, the unions involved revealed that staff had already been given redundancy notices and that the business would cease trading that evening. The yard went into administration yesterday. This is now an emergency situation! The...
WORKERS vowed to continue their occupation and stop the closure of Harland and Wolff shipbuilding industry in Belfast, after the yard went into administration yesterday afternoon. Joe Passmore, Unite representative and worker at Harland and Wolff, said: ‘This requires government money to keep this going. We will stay here and...
RESPONDING to PM Johnson’s comments in the weekend’s Sunday Times newspaper, in which he pledged a £1.8bn cash injection into the NHS BMA council chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul insisted that sustained levels of investment were needed. ‘For the NHS to provide high quality services fit for the 21st Century and...
THE GOVERNMENT of French president Emmanuel Macron went into a full blown crisis this week with riots in Nantes on Saturday where thousands of demonstrators marched through the western city outraged at the death of a young music fan who drowned after being tear-gassed by police. 24 year old Steve...
A health board is paying over a million pounds a month to a private consortium for a hospital it cannot use. The new children’s hospital in Edinburgh was due to open in July, but last-minute inspections found safety concerns over its ventilation systems. NHS Lothian has confirmed repayments for the hospital...
‘THROUGH our Universal Credit Fact Versus Fiction campaign, PCS is exposing the massive problems with a system that we say needs to be scrapped and replaced,’ the civil servants union said launching a fresh fight to put an end to the hated benefit system. The union said: ‘PCS continues to...
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York was seized on by President Bush as the green light for an onslaught on Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, using the infamous ‘weapons of mass destruction’ lie as its cover, and enlisting the then UK Labour...
THE US has begun a new arms race with President Trump’s announcement of the US’ formal withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). This was was signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. It banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km...
UP to 600,000 children have now been affected by the Tory government’s two-child limit to ‘Universal Credit’ benefits, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has warned in a crisis analysis, urging the government to end its ‘two- child limit’ for payment of benefits to families. At least 161,000 families have...
AN EXTREMELY controversial for-profit college has gone bust leaving staff and students stranded, prompting unions to demand that the privatisation of education be stopped and all private companies be kicked out of education. GSM London, one of the largest for-profit private providers of higher education in England has gone into...
THE US CENTRAL Federal Reserve Bank on Wednesday performed an abrupt U-turn on its policy of attempting to hold back the vast amount of worthless paper money being pumped into the banks and financial institutions when it announced that it would be cutting interest rates by 0.25%. This marks the...
SOUTH Africa’s administrative capital Tshwane (Pretoria) was gridlocked for a second day on Tuesday as bus drivers disabled their vehicles and the City insisted that strikers’ wage increase demands were spurious. In the middle of a gridlocked Tshwane Central Business District (CBD) where motorists struggled to manoeuvre for a second...
THE OCCUPATION of Harland and Wolff, in Belfast in the north of Ireland, is going from strength to strength, now into its fourth day with the GMB General Secretary Tim Roache visiting the shipyard to show his support for the shipbuilders. Roache said: ‘I’m here to stand shoulder to shoulder...
THE BMA doctors’ union has hailed the Court of Appeal ruling on rest breaks as ‘a significant victory for junior doctors’. Commenting on the Court of Appeal ruling over junior doctors’ rest breaks in which senior judges concluded that Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s arrangements for monitoring breaks were in...
AFTER ALL the bluster from Boris Johnson about delivering Brexit and that leaving the EU by October 31st was a ‘do or die’ issue, it is becoming increasingly clear that he has no intention of carrying this pledge through. Earlier this week, Johnson retreated from all the boastful rhetoric designed...