Monthly Archives: November 2020
TEACHERS’ unions in France held a nationwide day of protests and strikes on Tuesday to call for stricter sanitary measures in schools as coronavirus infections continued to soar across the country. Students in the French capital clashed with police on Monday in more angry protests over health risks posed by...
IN HIS opening statements to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, the lawyer acting for the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence condemned the inquiry for granting anonymity to police spies who mounted an undercover surveillance operation against the family and their supporters. Doreen Lawrence said she still had no idea why...
RAN says the United States’ presidential election that toppled Donald Trump bears a message for all those Middle East countries which take the risk of clinching enormous arms deals with his administration in the hope of buying security. The election carries a ‘great message’ for the region, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed...
THE UK’s unemployment rate has risen to 4.8% in the three months to September, up from 4.5%, as the coronavirus continues to blitz workers’ jobs. Redundancies rose to a record high of 314,000 in the same period, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, when employers were anticipating the end...
‘SUSPEND Ofsted inspections’ demanded Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) yesterday, responding to Ofsted’s second report into the impact of the pandemic across education settings. Dr Bousted said: ‘Inspections should be suspended, certainly those planned for January.’ Outlining how government budget cuts to schools have affected...
FLANKED by Brigadier Joe Fossey, Tory PM Johnson set out the mass testing programme trialled in Liverpool in which 2,000 troops have been sent into the city in an extraordinary broadening of the role of the state. Johnson was speaking yesterday afternoon at a press briefing where he first spoke...
OVER 4,000 miners, members of the Sintracarbón union, have entered the third month of a bitter strike at the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia. The action began on August 31 after negotiations with management collapsed. The Cerrejón mine is jointly owned by three multi-national mining companies, Anglo American, BHP and Glencore. A...
STEPHEN Welton, head of the small business investors group the Business Growth Fund (BFG), warned this weekend that the UK economy is in the middle of a ‘perfect storm’ of bankruptcies and insolvencies that could ‘materially affect the economy for generations.’ The BFG was created by the UK’s biggest banks...
THREE UK towns are to have hundreds of British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force military personnel mobilised onto their streets organising mass coronavirus testing – after Liverpool’s city-wide swabbing programme was launched last Friday. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce today that more than 100,000 people...
SYRIA’S permanent representative to the United Nations, Dr Bashar al-Jaafari, reiterated that Syria has not and will not use chemical weapons and does not possess them. He added that Syria is committed to cooperating with Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and its technical secretariat to settle all outstanding issues in order...
PRESIDENT TRUMP has stated that he has no intention of leaving the White House and the presidency voluntarily. He said on Saturday: ‘We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: They don’t...
HEALTH staff in Unison across the north of Ireland – including nurses, paramedics, cleaners, domestics and porters – are urging the UK government to give an early, significant pay rise of at least £2,000 to every NHS worker. Staff in Unison branches, based in NHS hospitals, clinics and ambulance stations,...
STUDENTS have torn down prison-like fencing erected around their campus on the first day of the new nationwide lockdown. As the Tories allowed the second wave of coronavirus to rip through the country, students living in halls were put into forced lockdown. The lecturers’ union UCU warned the government that...
THE CLOSURE of the Alexander Dennis (ADL) plant in Guildford this week after 125 years of vehicle building with the loss of 200 jobs was ‘cynically fast-tracked’ using the global pandemic as an excuse says Unite. The union said the Guildford closure was ‘extra shameful’ as there were already 150...
TORY PM Johnson was joined by head of NHS England Simon Stevens at a joint press conference yesterday afternoon in which they reported 492 deaths from coronavirus in the last 24 hours alone. Stevens warned: ‘We have 11,000 coronavirus patients in hospital at the moment, that is the equivalent of...
TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday that the furlough scheme will be extended until the end of March next year, with the government continuing to subsidise firms by paying up to 80% of the wages of workers laid off due to the new coronavirus lockdown measures passed on Wednesday. The...
AROUND 80 Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) workers protested outside the Port Elizabeth City Hall on Tuesday, demanding that the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality rescind a recent resolution against insourcing them. Workers are demanding the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality hire them on a permanent basis, and have accused it of...
THE US presidential election is on a knife edge, with Republican President Trump and his Democrat rival Joe Biden both claiming to have won. Trump has vowed to launch a Supreme Court challenge to prevent electoral fraud while Biden insists he is on a track to victory. More than 100 million...
ON TUESDAY, November 3, the electoral campaign for the parliamentary elections of December 6, 2020 begins based on the schedule set by the National Electoral Council (CNE), as established by the Constitution of the Republic Bolivarian of Venezuela. Until next December 3rd, the more than 14 thousand candidates for deputies...
THE US presidential election is on a knife edge as Donald Trump confounded all the polls that predicted a landslide for his Democratic Party opponent Joe Biden. The Democrats clung to the belief that the election would be a walkover for the 77-year-old Biden and that the only way Trump...
STUDENTS and university staff are furious after the Tory government inst-ructed them to remain in their student halls and not to return home before the lockdown begins tomorrow. Simultaneously, Johnson’s government has ordered that face-to-face teaching must continue despite the lecturers’ union UCU calling for on-line teaching only. Students have been...
The public inquiry into the actions of police spies over several decades got underway on Monday and is expected to last for three years. Members of trade unions were blacklisted from work after the groups were infiltrated by police, and family justice campaigns, including that for murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence,...
ON NOVEMBER 2nd 1917, during the first great imperialist war, the UK ruling class committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century when it ‘gave’ Palestine to the Zionist Federation, sentencing millions of Palestinians to hunger, exile and death. On that day British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour wrote...
DEATHS from coronavirus will be twice as high this winter than in the first wave of the pandemic, Tory PM Boris Johnson told Parliament yesterday afternoon, ‘unless we take action’. He said there is ‘no alternative’ as he sought to win support for a planned four-week lockdown in England from...
‘CALLING for the freedom of one Palestinian political prisoner is what Israel expects from the international community. ‘The latest detainee to go on hunger strike protesting against the administrative detention order that keeps him in prison indefinitely with neither formal charges nor trial is Maher Al-Akhras. ‘His protest has now exceeded...
REPORTS emerged over the weekend that the Bank of England is on the verge of announcing another massive round of money printing to pay for the cost of keeping bankrupt British capitalism afloat in the face of a double-dip recession. Economists are predicting that the second partial lockdown will be...
LABOUR Party leader Sir Keir Starmer volunteered yesterday to ‘work with the Prime Minister in the national interest.’ Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, he said: ‘I would work with the Prime Minister in the national interest to try to get the infection rate down.’ Starmer went on: ‘I think...
A SAUDI court has proceeded with a case against a child defendant at risk of the death penalty, contradicting the Saudi government’s claim it has abolished capital punishment for children. In a hearing last Thursday, Saudi public prosecutors moved forward with their case against Mohammed al-Faraj, who was 15 years...
THE EDITORIALS in Friday’s and Saturday’s Daily Telegraph scream out for action to be taken by Labour leader Starmer to throw Corbyn and his supporters out of the Labour Party. On Friday, it screamed: ‘Now, purge the rest of this sickening Cult’, while on Saturday it shrieked: ‘Sir Keir needs...