Monthly Archives: December 2021
New Year’s statement by the News Line Editorial Board THE NEWS LINE Editorial Board sends revolutionary greetings for 2022 to all our readers and to the working class, youth and poor across the world who are rising up against a capitalist system that is in its death agony.
For nearly two...
THE BMA (British Medical Asociation) has asked the government for more clarity on staffing of new Nightingale facilities. Commenting on the planned new Nightingale facilities announced by NHSE (NHSEngland), Dr Vishal Sharma, BMA consultants committee chair, said: ‘The government is once again putting plans into place to attempt to cope...
THE Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is today (Thursday 30 December) raising the alarm over morale, sickness absence and the prospect of rising vacancies in the profession in the early months of 2022. The RCN’s 2021 biennial Employment Survey, carried out before the Omicron wave hit the UK, found many...
SYRIA has strongly condemned the controversial Israeli plan to double the settler population in the Golan Heights, warning against the ‘unprecedented and dangerous’ uptick in the Tel Aviv regime’s land expropriation and settlement expansion activities in the strategic area. The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in a statement...
US DEFENCE Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered the US fleet of warships to remain in the Mediterranean Sea, driving up the tensions between the NATO imperialist alliance and Russia with its plan to bring the Ukraine into NATO. The USS Harry S. Truman, and the five American warships accompanying it,...
‘OUR TIME has come’ said Israeli Premier Naftali Bennett on Sunday adding that the Tel Aviv regime intends to double the number of illegal settlements in the strategic Golan Heights. The plan has the support of the United States and is a result of the normalisaton deal between some Arab...
ISRAEL’S PM is ecstatic. ‘Our time has come’ Naftali Bennett declared to the world after US President Biden gave the Golan Heights to Israel, and the go-ahead for Israel to build hundreds of settlements on the Heights, and to double the number of Israeli settlers. ‘This is our moment. This...
UK ENERGY bills are set to rise even higher, with suppliers warning of a ‘nationwide crisis’ and a 2008-style financial crash. Several ‘providers’ including Good Energy, EDF and the trade body Energy UK have called on the government to intervene as a matter of urgency.
Stephen Fitzpatrick, the Ovo Energy boss...
A SENIOR Iranian judiciary official says Iran and Iraq have issued a joint statement on an investigation into the ‘criminal and terrorist’ assassination by the United States of top anti-terror commanders from the two countries in Baghdad early last year. Kazem Gharibabadi, the judiciary chief’s deputy for international affairs and...
SCORES of armed Israeli settlers attacked the homes of Palestinians in the village of Sebastia in the occupied West Bank province of Nablus on Saturday night. The Zionist settlers, armed with rifles, opened fire and pelted the homes with stones. Hundreds of local residents rushed to the scene to fend...
RUSSIAN president Vladimir Putin slammed the Western powers in his annual end-of-year press conference yesterday, telling the assembled journalists that Russia was cheated by the West when in the 1990s NATO promised Russia that the US led military bloc would not move ‘an inch to the east’. That this turned...
THE US State Department has approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Lithuania in a $125 million deal amid escalating tensions between Russia and the US over Ukraine. Announcing the potential weapons sale on Tuesday, the US Defence Department further stated that the total package of the missile deal...
‘OUR actions will not depend on negotiations they will depend on the unconditional compliance with the Russian security demands in a historic context. ‘We have made it clear that any movement of NATO to the east is unacceptable,’ Russian President Putin said yesterday at his annual end-of-year press conference. ‘There is...
SENIOR nurses in New South Wales, Australia, took two hours of strike action on Monday, saying that chronic staff shortages have pushed them to breaking point and warning that some members are working 22 hours straight through! Senior nursing staff across western New South Wales walked off the job in...
AS CHRISTMAS approaches, the strike wave sweeping Britain is far from abating, in fact it is growing in strength and determination by the day as workers demonstrate their strength in the struggle against a capitalist system determined to make workers and their families pay to keep the bosses in...
THE UNITE trade union has hit out at the Johnson government for once again failing to recognise the impact of Covid restrictions on the UK’s aviation sector, a key source of local jobs and central to the country’s economy. The union said that the government is again failing to support...
A POWERFUL demonstration against mass railway ticket office hours cuts and total closures was held outside London’s Kings Cross Station early yesterday morning, with delegations of transport union RMT members attending from as far afield as Birmingham and Newcastle. Kathy Mazur, RMT Organiser London and Anglia, told News Line: ‘There...
‘WE HAVE responded, I think generously today, the grants that we have outlined, up to £6,000 are comparable to the grants that we provided to hospitality businesses when they were completely closed earlier this year,’ Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak said yesterday. However, businesses have said that such a paltry sum...
Rising Covid cases have left London fire and rescue with ‘unprecedented’ staff shortages, meaning that up to a third of London’s fire engines have been out of action in the last week. According to London Fire Brigade statistics 40 fire engines were unavailable both day and night on Thursday 16th...
THE Omicron strain of the Coronavirus now accounts for more than 73% of new US cases of Covid-19, up from 13% just a week ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported. Figures for the week ending on December 18, released on Monday, show that Omicron has become...
AS THE Omicron crisis grips the capital, Labour politicians yesterday called for public ownership of London Transport cleaning services. The MPs and peers made the demand in a letter to Transport for London (TfL) boss Andy Byford calling on him to ‘do the right thing’ for London’s Underground cleaners and...
THE TORY government ‘can’t make hard, fast guarantees’ that there will not be a Christmas lockdown, Deputy PM Dominic Raab said yesterday. The cabinet met yesterday afternoon to discuss further measures as cases of Omicron soar. The three options on the table are: 1. Urging the public to limit social mixing, without...
THE WEEKEND strike action on London Underground (LU) on the Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly & Victoria Tube lines was rock solid. The striking Tube driver transport union RMT members are determined to defeat management’s unilateral abolition of the category of night-tube driver, slashing 200 jobs, tearing up negotiated agreements and...
EMPLOYEES at the European Central Bank (ECB) are the latest to join workers across Europe in demanding wage increases to meet the spiralling inflation that is raging across the continent and plunging millions of workers into poverty. Carlos Bowles, an economist at the ECB and vice president of the IPSO...
HEALTH Secretary Sajid Javid indicated yesterday that the Tory government is set to impose new Covid restrictions, as the Omicron variant spreads around the country. A further 10,000 Omicron cases were confirmed in the UK yesterday and a major incident was declared in London, where cases are highest. Brexit minister Lord...
LOCAL residents of several villages in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasakah have in coordination with government forces prevented a number of US military convoys from passing through their communities. Syria’s official news agency SANA reported that a US convoy of five armoured vehicles, escorted by a vehicle belonging to US-backed Kurdish militants...
LORD FROST has delivered a heavy blow at the John- son government with his resignation letter of last Saturday. He wrote: ‘You know my concerns about the current direction of travel. I hope we will move as fast as possible to where we need to get to – a lightly...
THE VOTE came in at 4am on Friday morning for the North Shropshire by-election. The Liberal Democrats won, taking a seat the Tories have held for nearly 200 years. Winner Helen Morgan took the seat by nearly 6,000 votes, overturning a Conservative majority of almost 23,000. Tory co-chairman Oliver Dowden...
ON TUESDAY 14th December exactly four years and six months since the Grenfell Tower inferno campaigners stepped up their demand for justice. Grenfell Community Campaigners protested outside the Celotex Factory in Hadleigh, Ipswich, in their fight for justice for victims, survivors and bereaved.
Celotex materials were used in the Grenfell Tower...
THE Tory Party has lost the ‘farming country’ North Shropshire seat’ that it has held for nearly 200 years to the Liberal Democrats, in a by-election kick in the guts for PM Boris Johnson. The winner Lib Dem Helen Morgan overturned a Tory majority of almost 23,000, declaring that the...
THE POLITBURO chief of Palestine’s Hamas resistance movement says the Israeli regime will not be able to change the reality on the ground across the occupied lands, including the holy city of al-Quds, (Jerusalem) no matter what manipulative or aggressive course of action it resorts to. ‘The measures that the...
THE TORY move to make strikes illegal and ban trade unions stepped up yesterday with the official annual report on the fire service. The report by Tomas Winsor, Chief Inspector for Fire and Police Services, recommended that the Tory government strip the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) of their right to...
THE FIRE Brigades Union has responded to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services State of Fire and Rescue 2021 report released yesterday. The report includes an attack on firefighters’ right to democratically organise, including a recommendation to consider removing firefighters’ right to strike. It also criticises...
UNITE general secretary Sharon Graham yesterday said below inflation rises are a wage cut with workers paying the price of the pandemic. Speaking after new official figures showed CPI inflation at 5.1 per cent, Graham said the union will continue to base claims on the RPI figure rather than CPI...
GRENFELL survivors and supporters marched in North Kensington on Tuesday evening demanding ‘Prosecutions now!’ ‘Today we are changing our tone, we are demanding change, enough is enough!’ said Karim Mussily of Grenfell United to the over 500 marchers, four years and six months since the Grenfell Tower inferno. He continued: ‘For...
OIL PRICES in Lebanon registered an additional hike on Tuesday, December 14th, as the country’s currency slid to a new low against the US dollar. Lebanon has seen mass protests from impoverished workers and youth.
Delivery app drivers protesting against the cost of fuel clashed with police in October.
Demonstrators, some of...
100 TORY MPs voted against Boris Johnson’s ‘Plan B’ Covid restriction on Tuesday night, defying predictions earlier that Johnson had ‘won over’ a large number of rebels when he addressed the influential backbench 1922 Committee, just hours before the vote. The vote made clear that, far from winning over Tory...
JOHNSON’S ‘Plan B’ measures to attempt to slow the advance of the new Omicron strain of coronavirus only passed in Parliament yesterday with the support of the Labour Party. Over 100 Tory MPs voted against the Covid passport measures, which require people to show vaccination proof or a negative test...
MARKING four-and-a-half years since the horrific Grenfell Tower fire on June 14, 2017, survivors and campaigners are demanding police accelerate their criminal investigation into the disaster so prosecutors can bring charges immediately, as enough evidence has emerged to deliver justice for their 72 loved ones. Yesterday they launched a “#chargesnow”...
THE RWDSU (Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union) has issued a devastating ‘Statement on the Amazon Warehouse Collapse,’ after at least six workers were killed inside in last Friday’s tornado hit in Illinois, describing the company’s requirement that employees work through the tornado as ‘inexcusable’. Forty-five people made it out...
THE JOHNSON government is now paying the price for refusing to follow the example of China by organising a national lockdown, with no loss of wages or jobs by workers, until the Covid-19 plague is defeated. The Tories always put the profits of the bosses first. Now, with the Covid...
THE PALESTINIAN Islamic Jihad resistance movement strongly condemned the United Arab Emirates (UAE) officials yesterday for receiving Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, stressing that any normalisation and alliance with the Tel Aviv regime amounts to ‘a betrayal of Palestine.’ ‘Bennett’s reception would help the criminal (Israeli) regime beef up its security...
FORMER US president Donald Trump has launched another verbal attack on his one-time close ally Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the ex-Israeli prime minister did not want to make peace with the Palestinians. He made the remarks in a series of interviews with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid earlier this year for his...
YESTERDAY Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett met with the leader of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayad al-Nahyan, in the first official state visit since the UAE and Israel established diplomatic ties last year after that country signed up to the so-called Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords were a...