Monthly Archives: July 2020
THE FRENCH government has been forced by the mass actions of the health workers’ trade unions to concede pay rises worth 8bn euros (£7.2bn) after millions of French workers hailed their role in fighting coronavirus, and demonstrated every night in support of their strike actions. The deal was signed with...
TORY Home Secretary Priti Patel launched the UK’s first ‘points-based immigration system’ yesterday. The new system will come into force on New Year’s Day, immediately ending freedom of movement with the EU. Under the government’s plan, those wishing to live and work in the UK must gain 70 points. The new...
SAEB EREKAT, the Secretary-General of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has called on Israeli authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Palestinian prisoner and cancer patient Kamal Abu Wa’ar, who on Sunday tested positive for coronavirus. The PLO secretary general warned that an outbreak of coronavirus inside...
ZIAD Abu Amr, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has handed an official letter from President Mahmoud Abbas to his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad briefing him on the overall situation of the Palestinian cause. The letter was handed to Deputy Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal...
THE ZIMBABWEAN government has arrested thirteen nurses who were protesting their deteriorating pay and working conditions. They have since been released on bail – but have been dismissed. The arrests took place at the Harare hospital on 6 July, as nurses protested saying they could no longer survive on their...
LAST week Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled the Tory offensive against the rights, conditions and wages of every worker. This is the strategy behind the ‘kickstart scheme’ which aims at creating an army of 350,000 young people in a cheap labour scheme by paying employers the full amount of their...
Thousands of cancer patients have not received the care they need and their conditions have worsened owing to the focus on Covid-19, the British Medical Association (BMA) has said. Performance figures, published by the NHS on 11 June, reveal the number of cancer patients being seen for urgent check-up after...
FROM NICK AXARLIS IN ATHENS SCORES of Greek armed riot police attacked thousands of workers and students with tear-gas and noise-smoke grenades last Thursday night outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) building in Athens. Riot police and special motorcycle units then charged with their truncheons in the streets of the city centre...
Khadija Saye 1992-2017 236 Westbourne Grove W11 2RH Until August 7th BY LUCY LAVER WITH THE reconvening of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry on Monday and the recent and ongoing global Black Lives Matter uprising, this is a pertinent and timely outdoor exhibition of the remarkable photographic works of the late Khadija...
THE Tory government has now launched war on the elderly, the youth and the working class simultaneously! There is a war on the youth, with Chancellor Sunak’s new £2bn ‘kickstart scheme’ to subsidise just six-month work placements for youth on Universal Credit aged between 16 and 24. For each ‘kickstarter’ job,...
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed on Wednesday his country’s principal stance in support of solving the Palestinian question based on the international legal norms. Speaking during a phone call with President Mahmoud Abbas, Putin and Abbas discussed the latest developments in the Palestinian arena, with particular focus on Israel’s illegal...
GRENFELL survivors and relatives of the 72 people killed in the Grenfell Tower inferno are furious that they have been excluded from the inquiry that re-started on Monday under strict social distancing rules. Despite the fact that the Tories have been driving forward relaxation of these rules when it comes...
GERADO Santiago-Hernandez was a worker at Four Star Greenhouse in Carleton, Michigan. A lawsuit filed in June 2020, on behalf of him and other migrant workers from Mexico, alleges he was cheated of his wages and tricked into being detained by federal immigrant agents and removed to Mexico. In a...
TORY chancellor Rishi Sunak yesterday unveiled his latest attempt to resuscitate British capitalism in the midst of a crisis that has destroyed the economic base of the country and is heading for mass unemployment on a scale exceeding that of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Sunak started by admitting...
FEARFUL of workers’ fury at mass unemployment when furloughing ends, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a plan to try to persuade bosses to keep on workers, for just three months, instead of firing them immediately and pushing unemployment up by up to 8 millions in one huge leap. If employers...
THE TORIES have no plan to deal with a second spike of the deadly coronavirus. A fresh report just released by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warns that the ‘Government does not have either a clear understanding of the equipment needed for clinical and care workers, or how to distribute...
Liberty is calling for the Coronavirus Act 2020 to be scrapped, highlighting that it contains sweeping powers that continue to threaten basic civil rights – and which Parliament can choose to renew indefinitely. The rights group warns: Greatest limitation on liberty of a generation still in force after 100 days;
Most...
PM BORIS Johnson was condemned yesterday after trying to pin the 20,000 plus coronavirus deaths in care homes on care home staff saying: ‘Too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures’ during the coronavirus outbreak. Mark Adams, CEO of charity Community Integrated Care, told the BBC the PM’s comments...
SECRETARY-GENERAL of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Saeb Erekat, said on Sunday that the State of Palestine has been mobilising efforts with the United Nations General Assembly, aimed at creating an international coalition against the Israeli plan to annex portions of the West Bank. Speaking to...
ON SUNDAY the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, created in 1948 by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, was marked by handclapping, with Boris Johnson and Tory health minister Matt Hancock applauding the NHS and health workers in a highly cynical display of support for a vital service that the...
THIRTEEN universities face ‘a very real prospect’ of insolvency following the coronavirus crisis unless they receive a government bailout, a new report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows. The National Union of Students (NUS) said the crisis has ‘exposed many of the flaws inherent in running our education...
WITH MILLIONS of new Universal Credit claimants expected when the Tory ‘job retention’, or ‘furlough’, scheme ends over the next three months, the government is doubling the number of front-line staff at job centres. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is to pledge £800 million to recruit 13,500 extra job centre staff in...
‘YOUNG PEOPLE have been ignored by the government,’ Cat Smith MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Young People said reacting to the new Institute For Fiscal Studies (IFS) report on career disruption to young workers caused by the coronavirus pandemic. She said: ‘After a decade of austerity, young people are facing...
IN HIS FOURTH of July speech on Saturday US president Donald Trump attacked the ‘angry mob’ that opposes him and which he claimed were out to ‘indoctrinate our children’ and ‘trample’ on freedom in America. In his speech that verged on the hysterical Trump attacked the ‘radical left’ and Marxists...
THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic reinforces – not diminishes – the strong case for the NHS workforce to receive a ‘beyond substantial’ pay rise for 2021-22, Unite, Britain and Ireland’s largest union, said yesterday 3 July. Unite has joined with 13 other health unions and professional organisations to launch a campaign to...
THROUGHOUT Britain, the Unite union is reporting, the aerospace industry and job futures for many thousands of workers are ‘at five to midnight’ – ‘staring at the loss of thousands of highly skilled jobs and tens of millions in economic contribution’. Unite is warning too that ‘with a huge decline...
ONE BILLION dollars (£800m) worth of Venezuelan gold in the vaults of the Bank of England has been successfully seized, in an act of piracy, by the Tory government. Venezuela’s central bank, under instruction from the Maduro government, has sued the Bank of England for theft, claiming its right to...
THE ONE-METRE distancing rule is to be abandoned in schools when they open in September, the Tory government announced yesterday to the alarm of teachers, pupils and parents alike. Yet, if parents refuse to send their children back to school, because they feel it is unsafe to do so,...
THE ISRAELI authorities must immediately abandon plans to further ‘annex’ territory in the occupied West Bank which breach international laws and exacerbate decades of systematic human rights violations against Palestinians there, Amnesty International (AI) said on the day the Israeli cabinet was due to begin its deliberations on the...
THE US House of Representatives has hit out at what the US ruling class considers to be its major enemy, the People’s Republic of China, by approving new Hong Kong-related economic sanctions, after Beijing imposed a security law on Hong Kong, which is part of the People’s Republic of...
POPULAR protests against the US and Turkish occupation forces and in rejection of the so-called ‘Caesar Act’ have continued in Syria’s Hasaka province. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, also known as the Caesar Act, is a United States legislation that sanctions the Syrian government, including Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, for alleged war crimes against the Syrian population.
The bill has...
ISRAEL’S illegal annexation of Palestinian land due to start yesterday failed to materialise as the entire scheme was plunged into disarray. July 1 had been set down by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu as the date when Israel would begin implementing Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ which gave Israel...
FATAH issued a warning yesterday that the annexation issue is still a dangerously imminent issue on the table. In a statement, the movement cautioned that Israel’s Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu may be waiting till the various European Parliaments start their summer break so that the international reaction to a possible...
WITH great fanfare the Tories have announced that they are following in the footsteps of President Roosevelt who, in 1933, launched the ‘New Deal’ in the USA, in a situation where the 1929 crash had caused a huge depression which saw millions of US workers sacked and threatening revoluton. At...
THE LINK between outbreaks of Covid-19 at meat processing plants and the sector’s widespread exploitation of migrant workers on low pay and insecure contracts ‘must be addressed’, the union Unite said yesterday. Although conditions within refrigerated meat processing factories have been cited as a risk factor for coronavirus transmission, Unite...