Monthly Archives: November 2021
Palestinian hunger-striker Miqdad al-Qawasmeh, who had refused to take his meals for 112 days, has won his struggle against Israeli prison authorities, who have agreed to free him next February. The director of the Prisoners Information Office on Thursday said al-Qawasmeh ended his hunger strike after Israel agreed to release...
THE FORMER Bank of England Governor Mark Carney yesterday warned that China’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy is ‘at risk of derailing the global economy and driving up inflation’. Carney said that China will have to ‘evolve or pivot’ towards managing the disease through vaccinations, adding: ‘There are real economic consequences if...
THE long-running campaign to secure the future of the historic Rolls-Royce factory of Barnoldswick in Lancashire has finally ended. Following a ballot the workers at the factory, who are members of Unite have accepted an enhanced agreement, extending protections previously secured in 2020, including a commitment that there will be...
THE US is experiencing a surge of strikes – 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike in October, and so did 1,400 Kellogg workers, and now 35,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers are threatening to walk out. Workplace experts generally point to two reasons for this surge. First, after working so...
YET ANOTHER attempt by the Tory government to deport over 50 people to Jamaica on Wednesday came unstuck with the Home Office forced to admit that out of the over 50 earmarked for the flight on Wednesday they only managed to force four onto the plane. The plane, an Airbus...
TWO HUNDRED Sheffield refuse workers voted unanimously on Monday to go on indefinite strike from Monday 22nd November. The vote took place at a mass rally outside Sheffield Town Hall on Monday morning at the end of a noisy ‘End Rubbish Pay!’ march from the workers’ Lumley St depot.
The GMB...
ISRAEL has escalated its campaign of total surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank utilising a mass programme of facial recognition to build a database of every Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is monitoring...
MOST of the people due to be put aboard a controversial deportation flight to Jamaica yesterday have been removed from the flight list! This was after anti-deportation fighters blocked the road in front of a detention centre to prevent detainees from being put on the plane. The activists, calling themselves Stop...
ISRAELI forces detained at least seven Palestinians from various parts of the West Bank overnight, including a mother and her 14-year-old child. Local and security sources said that Israeli forces rounded up a prisoner’s wife along with her 14-year-old boy after storming their home in the town of Silat al-Harithiya,...
LAST Saturday evening, November 6th, the Italian Coast Guard informed the bridge of the German charity rescue ship SEA-EYE 4 that the Italian authorities had designated Trapani as the port of disembarkation for more than 800 rescued people on board. The Italian Foreign Office confirmed the assignment a few minutes...
EX-TORY MP Owen Paterson has been a paid consultant for clinical diagnostics company Randox since 2015, and for meat distributor Lynn’s Country Foods since 2016, earning a total of £100,000 a year on top of his MP’s salary! Paterson was found to have broken conduct rules by: failing to declare...
THE IRANIAN Army has started large-scale military exercises in an area stretching from the eastern sector of the strategic Strait of Hormuz to the northern tip of the Indian Ocean and parts of the Red Sea, with the participation of airborne units, special forces, and rapid reaction brigades. Rear Admiral...
‘LAST WEEK was a very dark week for Parliament,’ speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle said in an extraordinary interview with the media outside Westminster yesterday. ‘I don’t want another week like that,’ he added. He was speaking ahead of an emergency debate on lobbying in the...
EUROPE has erupted in strikes as workers rise up against raging inflation which is driving down living standards to poverty levels across the EU. Germany, the biggest economy in the EU, recorded the highest rate of inflation in 29 years with the official figure hitting 4.1% in September. The other 19...
Members of the University and College Union (UCU) at 17 more UK universities have voted to strike over pay and working conditions, meaning that 54 UK universities are now gearing up for action. Overall, more than seven in 10 members who voted (70.1%) backed strike action with 85% (84.9%) voting...
THE HEAD of Hamas’s political bureau Ismail Haniyeh says all the Palestinian resistance factions firmly support the families of the East al-Quds neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in the face of the Israeli regime’s threat to forcefully evict them from their homes. ‘I say to our people in Sheikh Jarrah: The...
IN ITS LATEST ATROCITY, the University of Oxford has grabbed with both hands more than £12m in dirty money from the Alexander Mosley Trust. This is a ‘charitable fund’ established on the back of money inherited from Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists who spent...
STAFF at 37 universities are to strike over an ‘unprecedented attack on their pensions’, it was announced by their union University College Union (UCU) yesterday. UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: ‘Our members are having their pensions cut after a decade of cuts amounting to £240,000 from their pensions, and...
THE NHS’ latest GP workforce data for England has shown a drop of more than 1,700 full-time GPs – in the last six years. And in response to the most recent publication of England’s GP workforce statistics, Dr Krishna Kasaraneni – the BMA GPs committee’s executive team member – has...
UNIVERSITY lecturers and staff across the country have voted for strike action with an overwhelming 76% ‘YES’ vote. It means 37 universities will join the first wave of strikes with more to follow. They are furious that their pensions are once more under attack. The management attack means that pensions...
A DELEGATION from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) representing members from across the country handed in a 160,000-strong petition to 10 Downing Street yesterday demanding a 12.5% pay increase for nurses. Yesterday, the indicative strike ballot opened for hundreds of thousands of RCN members in a move towards what...
PALESTINE, the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have denounced the infamous Balfour Declaration issued by Britain in 1917, which set the stage for the creation of the Israeli entity and occupation of Palestine. On Tuesday, Palestinian flags were flown at half-mast across the occupied territories on...
THE TORY government was in chaos yesterday following Tuesday’s vote to disband the existing Standards Committee replacing it with a Tory dominated committee to rewrite the ‘sleaze’ rules governing MPs behaviour. The Standards Committee is a cross-party panel of 7 MPs and 7 lay members charged with investigating allegations into...
1,383 MEDICAL professionals last Friday demanded that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) end the Title 42 border expulsions order that has systematically endangered thousands of people who seek asylum in the United States. Including clinicians from 49 US states and territories, as well as the District of...
ON TUESDAY two serving Metropolitan Police officers, PCs Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, admitted in court taking pictures of the bodies of two young women stabbed to death in a London park. Both have been remanded on bail for sentencing with the judge informing them they face a lengthy prison...
THE Syrian parliament has shown the way to the rest of the world by denouncing as ‘invalid’ the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which handed Palestine over to the Zionist Federation and led to millions of Palestinians losing their homes and their homeland and being turned into refugees. The Syrian parliament insisted...
The Australian government is being urged to condemn Israel’s ‘dangerous attack’ on six prominent Palestinian human rights groups after Israeli authorities declared them terrorist organisations. Australian human rights advocates, aid groups and unions have released a statement calling on the government to pressure Israel to reverse the ‘arbitrary’ decisions immediately.
The...
TWO Metropolitan Police officers yesterday admitted taking and sharing photographs of the bodies of two sisters found murdered in north-west London. PC Deniz Jaffer, 47, and PC Jamie Lewis, 33, distributed the images of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman after their deaths in Fryent Country Park. They breached a cordon to...
TRADE unions in the United Kingdom have denounced as outrageous Israel’s decision to designate six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist. ‘We strongly condemn the Israeli government’s outrageous decision to criminalise six Palestinian human rights and civil society groups by designating them as "terrorists",’ the unions said in a joint...
‘ON 17 October 2021, yet another franchise passed into public ownership as a consequence of private sector failure, this time seemingly involving the Serious Fraud Office. The Southeastern franchise joins ScotRail, Wales and Borders, the East Coast Mainline and Northern Rail in public ownership.
Yet the government continues frantically rearranging the...
THE imperialist powers are not only in their greatest crisis ever, they are completely split and divided. The UK is prepared to take legal action against France over the ongoing row about post-Brexit fishing rights. In retaliation, France has threatened to block British boats from some of its ports and cut...
PALESTINIAN President Mahmoud Abbas has enacted a presidential decree ordering the national flag to be flown at half-mast today and tomorrow, and on November 1st and 2nd every year, to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in...
‘Who ARE the murderers? Police are the murderers!’ shouted a demonstration of over 300 on the annual United Families and Friends march from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street on Saturday. The march takes place every year to demand justice for those who’ve died at the hands of the state. The march...
SUDAN has been in the midst of an enormous economic and political crisis since the masses of workers and youth overthrew the UK- and US-backed dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Since then, the security forces have used murderous force against the masses of workers and youth. Hundreds have been...