Monthly Archives: February 2023
A NUMBER of Arab parliament speakers and senior legislators have arrived in Damascus amid attempts by certain countries, above all Iraq, to restore Syria’s membership to the Arab League, more than a decade after it was suspended from the 22-member bloc. The high-profile lawmakers landed at Damascus International Airport on...
ON SUNDAY, a meeting in Jordan between top Israeli and Palestinian officials, called in a bid to halt the surge in deadly violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, ended with a joint statement that ‘reaffirmed the need to commit to de-escalation on the ground...
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh yesterday denounced the ‘heinous crimes’ committed on Sunday by Zionist settlers in the northern West Bank town of Huwara near Nablus and surrounding villages. At least one Palestinian was killed and dozens more injured during organised settler attacks there. More than 30 homes and scores of...
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian Foreign Minister, has discussed security cooperation with Iraqi government officials during a visit to the neighbouring country, stressing that this cooperation will improve the security and stability of both states. The Iranian minister, who is in Iraq for an official visit, held separate meetings with a...
WORKERS throughout Europe are on the march against NATO’s developing war against Russia and the massive attacks on their living standards that it has brought about. Italian workers demonstrated in Rome, Florence and Genoa against the Western sanctions imposed on Russia and the transfer of lethal military hardware to Ukraine,...
THE Arab League Council yesterday condemned Israeli crimes and massacres of Palestinians and demanded the provision of international protection to the Palestinian people. The Council convened an extraordinary meeting at the Permanent Representative level in Cairo to discuss the ongoing deadly Israeli army incursions across the occupied West Bank, including...
THOUSANDS of people have turned out for the funeral procession of eleven Palestinian men killed by Israeli military forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, amid heightened tensions that have drawn fears of a further escalation in violence. The mourners carried the bodies of the...
GOVERNMENT proposals to force GPs to sign fewer sick notes for workers have been rejected by Doctors in Unite, which represents GPs and doctors operating in the NHS. Detailed government proposals were first briefed to the media earlier this month, indicating that the Chancellor could announce in next month’s budget...
YESTERDAY, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer delivered what was billed as a keynote speech that would outline once and for all the policies Labour would fight the next general election on. Prior to the speech in Manchester, Starmer claimed the five ‘national missions’ he would be proclaiming would form the...
‘THE CONFEDERATION has brought together all of its federations in order to continue the mobilisation against the pension reform and to prepare for “France at a standstill”, from March 7. All responded present,’ said Frederic Souillot General Secretary of Force Ouvrière. He continued: ‘To do this, the federations are calling...
DISMISSING the government’s 3.5 per cent proposal on NHS pay announced on Tuesday as a ‘sick joke’, Unite said yesterday that ‘this will accelerate a Spring of strikes across the health service’. Sharon Graham, Unite general secretary, said: ‘This has to be some sort of sick joke. ‘On the day when...
Two Palestinians died on Tuesday, including a teenager, in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank as Israel’s new far-right government intensified its deadly raids in the territories. Since the start of the year, 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, including 11 children and one woman. Mahmoud Majed Mohammad al-Ayedi,...
THE BRITISH ruling class has now made it crystal clear that it favours a class war on two interconnected fronts. On the home front it is bringing in legislation to ban trade union strike actions so as to be all the better at driving the working class back to the...
TORY Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s refusal to join today’s meeting between doctors’ leaders and the Department of Health is ‘beyond belief when the stakes are so high,’ the British Medical Association said yesterday. The doctors’ union said the meeting is the last chance for the BMA to consider any proposal...
Russian president Vladimir Putin, in his address to the Russian parliament yesterday, lay the responsibility for the Russian military action in the Ukraine entirely with the imperialist NATO powers. Putin insisted that the fascist-backed Ukrainian government, at the urging of the imperialist powers, is ready to launch a large-scale attack...
BLACK men are seven times more likely to die following police restraint but racism is not being addressed, the charity Inquest has found. Families of Black people who die following police contact cannot get accountability for racism from a system that is not ‘fit for purpose’, Inquest’s new report reveals.
In...
JUNIOR doctors in England have voted by an overwhelming 98% for strike action in their fight for pay restoration. Almost every junior doctor who cast a vote voted in favour and the turnout was in excess of 77%. More than 47,600 junior doctors in England were eligible to vote in the...
COINCIDING with a rare public hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) this week, ten women who were deceived into relationships with ‘spycops’ have issued the following statement: Statement by ‘Bea’, Donna McLean, ‘Ellie’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Jessica’, ‘Lindsey’, ‘Lizzie’, ‘Madeleine’, ‘Monica’ and ‘Sara’ ‘We are ten women who were deceived into sexual...
THE ECONOMIC crisis engulfing British capitalism is causing a seismic split in the Tory government, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a rebellion from his own MPs over plans to increase corporation tax on big business from 19 to 25 per cent in the budget next month. According to an...
THE SUSPENSION of national strike action across 150 universities by the UCU lecturers union was condemned by a leading London member of the union yesterday. The University and College Union (UCU) announced on Saturday that it had called off seven days of strikes planned to take place this week and...
UKRAINE’S ambassador to Germany has provoked outrage for paying homage to the notorious founding forefather of what is known today as the nationalistic ‘Azov’ outfit. Andriy Melnyk, who appears regularly on international talk shows, described as a national hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera, who was the World War II-era pro-Nazi...
AN ‘ever-increasing’ number of households in the UK, including teachers, pensioners, and employees of the NHS, are turning to food banks for assistance as a result of the current massive inflation, according to new statistics. The research conducted by the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN), shared with the Observer, found...
THOUSANDS of postal workers have voted in favour of more strikes in the long-running dispute over pay. More than 95% of staff who voted in the ballot wanted strike action, said the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents more than 110,000 postal workers at Royal Mail. A spokesperson from Royal Mail...
SIR KEIR Starmer, the ex-Director of Public Prosecutions, and currently the leader of the Labour Party, has just engaged in a second key mission for the major imperialist powers the UK and the USA. With the Tory party under massive attack from workers whose standard of living has been shredded...
THOUSANDS of determined drama and arts schools’ students along with primary and secondary teachers marched through the Athens city centre last Wednesday in a most militant demonstration against the vicious attack on their rights by the right-wing Greek government of Prime Minister K. Mitsotakis. Over 2,000 drama and arts students...
BY KHALED TAYEH EVER since Israeli Jewish supremacist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, became officially a part of the new Israeli far-right government, he made it a mission as holy as a promise to impose new sanctions on Palestinians, to make their lives even more miserable than it already...
BRITISH Gas’ owner Centrica has posted huge profits after oil and gas prices soared last year as the US and the UK stoked up the crisis in the Ukraine, backing the Ukrainian fascists, and pledging an unlimited arms supply to enable the fascists to fight Russia. Meanwhile, Centrica has never...
AN ISRAELI army force on Wednesday demolished a residence and uprooted 100 saplings in Masafer Yatta, in the south of the occupied West Bank. Local activist Rateb al-Jabour told WAFA that soldiers broke into the Shaab al-Battem area in Masafer Yatta and demolished a home for local resident Othman Jabarin,...
SIR KEIR Starmer announced the institution of a witch-hunting regime in the Labour Party at a 30-minute press conference in East London yesterday. He insisted that his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn would not be standing as a Labour Candidate in the next general election. In a speech littered with claims that Corbyn’s...
The offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in India have been raided and searched by the country’s income tax authorities on Tuesday, according to reports. The searches were carried out in New Delhi and Mumbai, and the timing of them has raised suspicions due to the broadcaster having recently...
JEREMY Corbyn will not be a Labour candidate at the next general election, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has said. Corbyn the former Labour leader had hoped to be readmitted so he could stand for re-election as a Labour candidate. Corbyn was suspended and sits as an independent because...
THE LEBANESE Hezbollah resistance movement has dispatched a humanitarian aid convoy to earthquake-affected areas in Syria, at the same time, condemning Western governments’ ‘fake advocacy’ for human rights. The aid convoy of 22 trucks arrived in Syria’s western city of Lattakia, which is located on the Mediterranean Sea, on Monday and...
THE OFFICE for National Statistics (ONS) revealed yesterday that the number of days lost due to strikes last year was the highest since 1989. In December alone, 843,000 working days were hit by strikes – the highest monthly figure in over ten years as NHS, rail and postal workers along...
‘YOU are the finest workers in the UK. You deserve fair pay, job security and not threats,’ PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka told strikers at a rally outside the British Museum in London yesterday. The strikers were in a confident mood on the second day of their week-long strike until...
Campaigners fighting for the freedom of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, attended a ‘Night Carnival’ in London on Saturday. Approximately 2,000 people gathered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields before marching past Parliament Square at around 6.00pm. The procession was led by a large golden effigy of Lady Justice and many of...
FRANCE was in flames on Saturday as hundreds of thousands of workers and youth took to the streets in mass demonstrations across the country against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to push the minimum retirement age up from 62 to 64. This was the fourth in a series of mass protests...
THE LONG running industrial dispute involving over 1,800 bus drivers employed by Abellio in London has ended after workers accepted a greatly improved pay offer. Following a workplace ballot, the workers, who are members of Unite have accepted a pay increase that will see drivers with over two years’ service being...
OVER 2,000 campaigners fighting for the freedom of Julian Assange attended a Night Carnival in London on Saturday. The carnival organised by the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign gathered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields before marching past Parliament Square at around 6pm. Assange has been in detention at HMP Belmarsh since he was...
FORMER acting Pentagon chief Christopher C. Miller said the United States must hold senior American military leadership accountable for the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Miller who served as acting US secretary of defence from November 9, 2020, to January 20, 2021 wrote in ‘Soldier Secretary,’ a memoir released...
THE UK working class is on the march, spurred forward by the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system, with Britain very much the weakest link in the chain of the major capitalist powers. Its last PM, Truss lasted just days after she abolished the higher rate of income tax for...
THE Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) has just announced in a statement that Ahmed Badr Abdullah Abu Ali, a resident of Yatta city in the south of the occupied West Bank city of al-Khalil, died at Soroka Medical Centre on Friday morning. The 48-year-old Abu Ali, whose family says was suffering...
A SOLIDARITY gathering with Haitian unions has reinforced the need to respect the right of the Haitian people to decide their own future, and to support their efforts to end the crisis that has gripped the country, says Canadian public sector union CUPE. CUPE took part in the meeting with the...
‘WE’RE striking for better working conditions, pay and the service for patients,’ Unison member Scott Tyler emergency medical technician told News Line on the Waterloo ambulance workers picket line yesterday. He continued ‘we are overworked. The service is at capacity. The services for the community are suffering.
‘Because of that we...