Monthly Archives: February 2020
INDUSTRIAL production in the eurozone plummeted dramatically in December with factory output falling by 4.1 per cent in the final month of the year compared with the same month a year earlier, according to figures published by Eurostat yesterday. Germany was among the states which suffered the most, as production...
THE Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has welcomed this week’s release of the United Nations database of companies involved in supporting Israeli settlements. ‘We welcome the release of the UN database of companies involved in Israeli settlements, and thank the UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet for fulfilling the mandate given...
‘WHAT GIVES you the right to annex these lands?’ Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas demanded, referring to Israel’s plan to seize even more of Palestine under Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’. He appeared before the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in New York in a special session on US President Trump’s...
A TOTAL of 17 people were deported on a chartered flight by the Johnson government to Jamaica early on Tuesday morning. The action was condemned by campaigners, including 170 cross-party MPs, as ‘forcing families apart’. Late on Monday, a Court of Appeal judge ruled that the government should not deport 25...
THE US independent ‘democratic socialist’ Senator Bernie Sanders has become front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination to stand against Trump in the presidential election due this year. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary on Tuesday, Sanders took the lead with 26% of the vote for the 78-year-old veteran left-winger with...
VICIOUS Tory cuts to the tune of £140 million mean that fire and rescue services are fighting with one hand tied behind their back. Lives are being put at greater risk during severe weather events, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) warned yesterday. Floods, power outages, stranded cars and people, roads...
SINN Féin was celebrating the results of the Irish elections yesterday which saw them as the second biggest party, winning 37 seats – an increase of 14 on the 2016 election. They only fielded 42 candidates, had they fielded 160 they would now be the government with a large majority. Fine...
THE British Medical Association’s (BMA) GP England (GPCE) committee has voted to accept a dangerous package of changes to the GP contract for 2020-21. On 23rd December 2019, the new draft specifications for the English national GP contract for the year 2020/21 were published by NHS England (NHSE), the market-orientated...
THE UK economy stagnated with no growth in the last quarter of 2019, according to official figures from the ONS (Office for National Statistics). Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the total wealth produced by the country – remained completely flat between October and the end of December. The UK economy grew...
‘THE PALESTINIAN leadership is committed to achieving a political solution of the Middle East conflict, based on the creation of an independent Palestinian state and internationally recognised principles,’ Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa on Sunday. ‘Our minds and hearts are open for serious...
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) can no longer act as the world’s ‘lender of last resort’ according to a task force of currency experts established by the G20 group of the leading world economies. This warning has huge implications for the fast developing financial crash that is gripping the entire...
‘WE ARE already at the height of the process of mapping the area that, according to the Trump plan, will become part of the state of Israel. It won’t take too long’, Netanyahu told an election campaign rally in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim on Saturday. The...
THOUSANDS of Palestinians joined the funeral procession of a Palestinian police lieutenant on Friday who was killed a day earlier from Israeli military gunfire. Thousands of Palestinians flocked to Azzun town, east of Qalqilia, to attend the funeral procession of Tareq Ahmad Badwan, 25, who succumbed to his critical injuries...
THE PLANNED deportation of 50 people to Jamaica, many of whom came to the UK as children, shows that the Tories racist hounding of immigrant workers and their families is alive and kicking today. This forced deportation is being rushed through in defiance of the recommendations of the review commissioned by...
AN ANGRY demonstration of over 200 shouting ‘Stop charter flights’ blocked Whitehall for an hour on Thursday evening. The protest was called to prevent a charter flight to Jamaica on February 11th, where up to 50 people may be deported. Campaigners claim that among those facing deportation are people who have...
‘THE WORKSHOP of the world is closed,’ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Telegraph on Thursday predicting a colossal disaster for capitalism if the massive foreign-owned plants in China are unable to function because of the coronavirus epidemic, and the worldwide economy is closed down. The dire state of world capitalism...
THE GOVERNMENT must end the deportation of foreign-born offenders who came to the UK as children, according to a draft report into the Windrush scandal. The findings come in a draft of the Windrush Lessons Learned review, leaked to the Labour MP David Lammy and seen exclusively by Newsnight.
Sajid Javid...
‘NO ONE should be immune from prosecution. The firefighters certainly weren’t and the manufacturers of the cladding definitely should not be,’ Lucy Masoud FBU member and Grenfell campaigner said yesterday. She was responding to the news that Martin Moore-Bick, chairman of the inquiry into the Grenfell disaster, yesterday said he...
FOR the first time, Israel has provided a list of names and place of burial of 123 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and whose bodies have been withheld by Israel since then, said the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre (JLAC) on Wednesday. It said in a statement that...
WHILE US president Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night was met with impotent angry silence by Democrats, there were two notable exceptions when their loathing of Trump was overcome in a wave of bi-partisan support. When Trump crowed about how he had personally ordered...
THE GRENFELL INQUIRY HAS BEEN HALTED! Hearings have been cancelled until the charman of the inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick considers a demand from lawyers representing architects, builders and corporations. These witnesses have said that they will not give evidence unless they have copper-bottom assurances that their evidence will not be used...
UNLESS London bus privateers stop the ‘race to the bottom’ and cease their onslaught on working conditions all-out strike action will swiftly ensue, Unite warned on Tuesday. The union is launching a consultative ballot of all London bus driver members tomorrow, Friday 7 February, over long hours, fatigue and exhaustion.
If,...
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump delivered his formal State of the Union address on Tuesday night with the usual boast that under the three years of his presidency ‘America’s fortunes are on the rise’, jobs are booming, incomes soaring and ‘our country is thriving and highly respected again!’ Trump then spent...
STAFF at 74 universities across the length and breadth of the country and in the north of Ireland are to strike in February and March, their union the UCU announced yesterday. The action will start on Thursday 20 February and escalate each week, culminating with a week-long walkout from Monday...
DURING sweeping operations in the newly-liberated city of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province, Syrian Arab Army units have discovered a fortified Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organisation headquarters under the city’s museum on an area of approximately 1,000 square metres. The underground headquarters is equipped with tunnels and ventilation networks and was...
THE TURKISH government has said it will not hesitate to invade Syria to prevent the Syrian army pressing ahead with its counter-terrorism offensive to liberate the last major terrorist-held territory in Syria, the northwestern province of Idlib. The Syrian army is seeking to bring the whole of Syria back under...
TORY PM Johnson clashed yesterday with the EU’s Barnier over the thorny issue of Europeans fishing in UK waters and vice-versa. Speaking in Greenwich, Johnson said: ‘We are ready to consider an agreement on fisheries, but it must reflect the fact that the UK will be an independent coastal state....
HEAD of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, has written to all presidents, kings, and emirs of Arab and Islamic countries; Secretary-General of the Arab League Aboul Gheit; Secretary-General of The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Yousef Al-Othaimeen; and the Chair of the African Union Commission Moussa Faki to express the...
TORY prime minster Boris Johnson yesterday delivered a speech composed entirely of wishful thinking from which reality was completely excluded. In Johnson’s fairy-tale world British capitalism is ‘re-emerging after decades of hibernation’, that it has settled the question of ‘sovereign authority’ and can now venture out into the world with...
JUSTICE for Grenfell yesterday branded as ‘outrageous’ and ‘atrocious’ the demand by company officials called before the Grenfell Inquiry for immunity from prosecution. The Grenfell Inquiry official website’s latest posting dated 31st January states: ‘The start date of module 1 oral evidence has been put back in the light of...
THE MOTHER of all strikes is imminent – as Zimbabwe’s massive union, ZCTU (the Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions), mobilises other unions to avert victimisation. ZCTU has come out to say they are talking to other unions to organise a massive strike so that the government through state security agencies...
THOUSANDS OF ISRAELIS rallied in Tel Aviv on Saturday night against the ‘deal of the century’, which they said was a plan for ‘transfer’ and ‘apartheid’. ‘This isn’t a peace plan – it’s not even a plan,’ said MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz). It’s a recipe for annexation, transfer, violence and...
THE COMPANIES that carried out the Grenfell Tower refurbishment killed 72 people ‘just as surely as if they had taken careful aim with a gun and pulled the trigger,’ Sam Stein QC representing a group of the bereaved and survivors told the Grenfell inquiry on Thursday. The charge was made...
AT ELEVEN pm last night, Britain officially left the European Union. After a long, hard and determined struggle Brexit has actually happened and the UK is now officially no longer part of the European Union. There is no doubt that it was the working class that did it. When it...