Monthly Archives: July 2021
SAVE the Children has condemned the excessive use of force by Israeli forces against children in the occupied Palestinian territory, which has resulted in the deaths of three children across the West Bank in the past week. Save the Children added in a press statement that on Wednesday a 12-year-old...
‘PANDEMIC PROFITEERING has to stop’ says RMT as FirstGroup ann-ounces a £500 million shareholder payout and boasts that new National Rail Contracts will ‘support attractive dividends’. RMT has called on the government to stop FirstGroup paying out a planned £500 million to shareholders this year, a sum it increased recently,...
SYRIA’S permanent representative to the United Nations has denounced Israeli assaults on Syrian territories as a ‘continuing, flagrant violation of the UN Charter, of international law and of all Security Council resolutions’ urging respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Speaking on Wednesday at a UN Security Council briefing on...
REFUGEES are being held in office space in Kent, with as many as 56 women and children crammed into a single room, sleeping together in shocking conditions putting them all at risk of contracting Covid-19. The Home Affairs MPs Select Committee has produced a damning report which exposes the illegal...
THE ROYAL College of GPs (RCGP) has sounded the alarm over the crisis in general practice, calling yesterday for an urgent emergency rescue plan. Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, says that the job of GPs was ‘largely undoable’ even before Covid-19, but that general practice...
US SECRETARY of Defence Lloyd Austin says his country is committed to protecting its Southeast Asian allies against what he called China’s aggression. ‘Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law,’ Austin said in a conference in Singapore hosted by the...
THE NUMBER of British businesses in immense financial distress and on the brink of collapse has soared by 25% to 650,000 during the past year, according to the insolvency specialists, Begbies Traynor. The company is UK capitalism’s leading business rescue and recovery specialist. It insists that the issue is well...
Since MYANMAR’S military coup in February this year, 4,800 miners have been on strike in Monywa township in a solid five-month action which has undermined the revenue of the military regime. The miners’ strike has taken a toll on Myanmar’s copper exports. In February, copper exports to China fell 55...
PRIME Minister Boris Johnson has declared war on youth in the UK with his ‘Beating Crime Plan’ which labels youth as ‘criminal’ and targets youth for working on ‘chain gangs’, as in the southern states of the USA. These ‘chain gangs’ of youth are to ‘combat crime and anti-social behaviour’....
UNITE yesterday welcomed the news that the government will bring Sheffield Forgemasters into public ownership. The news came as the giant Honda plant in Swindon is set to close tomorrow, with the loss of thousands of jobs. Unite’s assistant general secretary for manufacturing, Steve Turner said of Forgemasters: ‘This is the...
THE TORY government yesterday put forward proposals for even more sweeping police powers. They include taking off all restrictions on Stop and Search. Under the Beating Crime Plan, more of those released from jail would have their location monitored with electronic tags 24 hours a day after leaving prison.
The document...
Bangladeshi authorities must end the crackdown on right to freedom of expression online and urgently repeal or amend the draconian Digital Security Act (DSA), Amnesty International said in a new briefing released on Monday. Introduced in October 2018, the DSA – a law that contains overbroad and vague provisions granting...
THE NUJ is warning that Home Office plans to ‘reform’ The Official Secrets Act ‘are a severe threat to journalism’. It is calling on the UK government ‘to introduce a public interest defence in law for journalists investigating and reporting on state wrongdoing.’ The Home Office plans to create new...
DOCTORS and nurses working in Zimbabwe’s public health institutions will no longer be allowed to go on strike for an uninterrupted period spanning more than three days under changes to the Health Services Act. Any worker representative who incites or organises an illegal job action could face up to three...
THE CHINESE People’s REPUBLIC is now the number one enemy for US imperialism and its UK ‘running dog’. The war is on all fronts, and ends the period when China was the ‘workshop of the world’ for the imperialist powers. It has not endeared China to the US and UK...
THE TORY government is preparing to simultaneously end the ‘triple lock’ pensions guarantee and raise the employee national insurance contribution (NIC) by one per cent, in order to raise £10bn to pay for PM Johnson’s planned ‘social care reforms’, it was reported yesterday. According to ‘senior government sources’ quoted in...
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the House of Commons, has produced two reports on ‘significant financial risks for decades to come’ for taxpayers, as a result of government spend during the Covid pandemic. The key theme is: ‘Pandemic lessons cannot wait for a government inquiry’ with massive taxpayer exposure...
THE war for the recovery of the land of Palestine is building up rapidly as the heroic Palestinian nation, men women and children battle bravely with the land-grabbing Israeli government, its army, and its hordes of armed settlers. Last Saturday, Israeli settlers took over an area east of Tubas in...
THE BURNING issue of NHS workers’ pay is so explosive that the Tories left it to the very last day that Parliament sits before the summer recess to release the pay offer of 3% for some NHS workers and 0% for many others. NHS workers have waited for over 100...
STAFF isolation exemptions are absolutely the wrong answer to the government’s failure to control spiralling infection rates, says doctors’ union the BMA. Responding to news that a number of double-vaccinated staff in key industries won’t have to self-isolate for work if they have been pinged, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA council...
HEALTH workers, furious about the government’s offer of a below-inflation 3% pay deal are to be consulted by their unions, the BMA, RCM, RCN, GMB, Unison and Unite over taking industrial action. After once again bypassing Parliament with the Tory Health Secretary’s announcement on Wednesday evening, the Speaker of the...
REVIEW BY FRA HUGHES THE strange death of Dr. David Kelly was exposed on celluloid at the premiere of the Killing Kelly documentary screened at the Everyman cinema Muswell Hill north London on Saturday, July 17 2021 at 9pm.
I was invited to attend.
This is the second in what could well...
IF THE Tories hoped that the last minute scramble to head off the anger of NHS workers by increasing the derisory and insulting 1% pay offer to 3% on Wednesday evening, then they badly underestimated the determination of health workers to smash the government wage-cutting offensive. This announcement was met...
TORY Social Care Minister Helen Whately was yesterday afternoon unable to give an update on the government’s NHS pay offer. All she could say was that the government is still considering the recommendations of the Pay Review Body, which stands at a pitiful 1%. Labour’s Rosena Allin-Khan, shadow health minister, commented:...
AROUND 600 Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, have been on strike for over three weeks, since Monday 5th July, against low pay and forced overtime and 84-hour working weeks. The strike was said to have started after an employee collapsed and died on the factory floor and instead of stopping...
UK PUBLIC services will be slashed by up to £17 billion, the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned, as Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak sets out to achieve his goal of ‘balancing the books’ over government spending. The IFS said the government was on track to spend between £14bn...
THE SOCIAL Mobility Commission in its State of the Nation report 2021, published yesterday, has unveiled in detail the devastating impact of coronavirus on children. The Commission stated: ‘Attainment gaps between disadvantaged and privileged children at school are already widening and young people from poorer backgrounds have been more likely...
SAFTU (South African Federation of Trade Unions) has acknowledged mass unemployment and poverty precipitated the continuing uprising in the country. In a statement last Friday, SAFTU ‘noted the form and character of the ongoing looting of shops, retailers, wholesalers and cargo containers.’ It continued: ‘Having begun as a demonstration demanding the...
THE POLITICAL bankruptcy of the Labour Party is now matched by its financial bankruptcy as, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, it has become nothing more than a cheerleader for the Tories and capitalism, and is determined to rupture any remaining links with the working class. Yesterday, Labour’s ruling National...
SEAFARERS’ union RMT has raised alarm over government legislation criminalising seafarers for saving lives at sea. The proposals, contained in the government’s Nationality and Borders Bill, were debated by MPs yesterday. RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said: ‘Quite simply, the government is legislating to criminalise seafarers for saving lives at sea. ‘The...
ISRAEL is once again trying to whitewash its crimes against Lebanon by offering the country ‘humanitarian aid’. Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz said Israel was ‘ready to act’ and that he’d made his offer via UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, through Israeli army liaisons.
With Lebanon’s currency losing 90...
A DETAILED investigation carried out by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based non-profit media organisation, the human rights group Amnesty International and world media organisations has lifted the lid on the unprecedented scale of hacking software produced by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group. The hacking software, called Pegasus, has been sold...
PM JOHNSON and Chancellor Sunak were forced into a humiliating u-turn yesterday morning, having initially sought to avoid self-isolating after having been ‘pinged’ following their Downing St meeting with Covid-positive Health Secretary Javid last Friday. At 8.30am on Sky News, Trevor Phillips said: ‘We have just received a Downing Street...
THE Prime Minister and Chancellor are to ‘now self-isolate as normal’ after both met with Health Secretary Sajid Javid who had tested positively for coronavirus. This disabled government will now be working from ministers’ homes with PM Johnson conducting meetings remotely. The government is being badly beaten by the virus,...
CRUCIAL valves to stop gas from fuelling the Grenfell Tower fire may have been built over during refurbishment, the ongoing inquiry into the fire heard last Wednesday. The gas then fed the fire – turning the tower into the equivalent of a gas oven. Then, when the gas was finally...
TORY PM Johnson’s new Health and Care Bill currently going through Parliament, is a fresh attack on the NHS by a Conservative Party that has hated the NHS from its very inception in 1948. This is an NHS that has been savaged by over a decade of cuts and closures...
‘COVID hospital numbers could get scary!’ Professor Chris Whitty said yesterday, adding that the UK is ‘not out of the woods yet’. ‘People should act with caution as Covid restrictions in England end on Monday,’ Whitty added. He continued that Covid hospitalisations were doubling every three weeks and could hit ‘scary...
SOUTH Africa has erupted with the announcement yesterday that the ANC government plans to deploy 25,000 troops after days of violent uprising by workers and youth that has torn the country apart. What on the surface appeared to start as a confrontation between two opposing factions of the ruling African...
ON the sixth anniversary of the landmark Iran nuclear deal, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has highlighted the failure of the United States’ so-called ‘maximum pressure campaign’ and sanctions, citing Tehran’s progress, including in the nuclear field, despite the bans. In a tweet on Wednesday, Zarif marked the anniversary of...
THE UK government has ignored a catalogue of warnings about the nursing workforce crisis since 2016, a new report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) released yesterday stated. A new Health and Social Care Bill is going through Parliament, but the RCN maintains it is not fit for purpose...
LABOUR said yesterday that it will oppose the government’s Health and Social Care Bill. ‘With more than one-in-10 people on waiting lists for treatment in some areas, now is not the time to reorganise the NHS,’ it said.
Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Jonathan Ashworth MP, said: ‘This is...
THE UK HOME OFFICE has called for comment on proposed new laws with greater reach and harsher penalties to ‘counter state threats’. These are intended to replace and enlarge Britain’s aged Official Secrets Acts.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) issued a statement on Monday warning that although portrayed as aimed...