Monthly Archives: March 2023
MORE than half a million workers are striking today in Britain’s biggest day of strike action for decades. Hundreds of thousands of members of eight unions – the UCU, NEU, Aslef, RMT, BMA and HCSA, Prospect and NUJ – are striking. The NEU teachers’ union, which has over 250,000 members on...
TENS of thousands of workers with their families, students and youth demonstrated throughout Greece on Sunday against the government of K Mitsotakis whom they hold responsible for the railway massacre in Tempi two weeks ago with over 100 people dead, most of them university students. The General Confederation of Workers...
LAST Friday the US Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was closed and its assets seized by the American Federal Reserve in the biggest banking crash since the world financial crisis in 2008. SVB specialised in financing tech companies in the US and around the world, including up to 300 UK tech...
SEVENTY-FIVE thousand junior doctors began their 72-hour strike yesterday, they are continuing it today and are being joined by hundreds of thousands of teachers, civil servants, Tube drivers and other workers on strike tomorrow. There was militant determination on hundreds of picket lines all over London and around the country. Over...
TENS of thousands of junior doctor members of the British Medical Association (BMA) are holding a 72-hour strike from today until Wednesday. At the weekend the leaders of the junior doctors issued a defiant response to a last-minute invitation from Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay to enter into formal pay...
MORE than 10,000 NHS workers, other trade unionists and members of the public marched from UCLH hospital in Euston, central London, to a mass rally opposite Downing Street in Whitehall on Saturday afternoon. The demonstration was called by SOS NHS, with the lead banner declaring: ‘Support the Strikes – Fund...
BOTH the BBC and the Tories were in a state of meltdown over the weekend following the decision of the BBC bosses, urged on by Tory MPs and the right-wing media, to ban Gary Lineker from presenting Match of the Day. Lineker was subjected to a mass pile on by...
THOUSANDS of demonstrators have blocked traffic into the departures area at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, where Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin landed for talks. Austin had to hastily reschedule the visit due to a surge in street protests against prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary which...
SHARES in banks around the world have crashed after a crisis at one US bank triggered fears of a wider crisis and the collapse of the the entire financial system. On Thursday, shares in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a key lender to technology start-ups, plunged after it announced plans to...
UNIONS representing teachers and school leaders in England are united in calling on the School Teachers’ Review Body to make urgent recommendations on pay, workload and conditions of service to address the critical pay issues and the recruitment and retention crisis in the profession. The joint statement calls on the...
THE VOLCANO of people’s rage which was building up its fury over the last few months, erupted in Greece on Wednesday in an unprecedented explosion of some 200,000 youth and workers with their families flooding the streets of central Athens and of all cities and towns in Greece. The anger...
AN unrepentant Gary Lineker insisted yesterday that he stood fully with his tweets condemning the Tory ‘Illegal Migrants Bill’ and that he has no intention of backing down and apologising for comparing the language used by the Tories to ‘that used by Germany in the 30s’. Lineker, presenter of BBC’s...
AMERICAN arms manufacturers face a lawsuit for ‘aiding and abetting’ war crimes in Yemen, which is suffering a full-blown humanitarian crisis as a result of the 8-year Saudi-led war of aggression. US defence contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and, General Dynamics, have been sued by a group of seven Yemeni nationals...
THE United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has condemned the Tory government for illegally ‘extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the UK’. The UNHC responded to Tory Home Secretary Braverman’s Illegal Immigrant Bill by declaring that that to deport refugees without hearing their asylum claims amounts to a ‘clear...
The secretary general of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement says unfolding developments in the occupied territories suggest that annihilation of the Israeli regime is not a wish anymore, but a reality that will come true in the near future. ‘The course of developments in the occupied Palestine indicates that Zionists...
THE TUC, the Equality Trust, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and Runnymede Trust on Tuesday warned that the Strikes Bill, currently about to go to the House of Lords, will be a huge step backwards for tackling racism at work in Britain. In fact it...
‘AFTER the regional days of strike action across the union, the next action will be 15 and 16 March, by teachers in all state funded schools in England and Wales and support staff in Wales,’ says the National Education Union (NEU). ‘Our dispute will not end until the government begins...
YESTERDAY the Tories unveiled their ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ along with the admission that the bill itself is illegal under international law, not that this is any deterrent to a Tory government prepared to not just criminalise asylum seekers but the entire trade union movement. Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman –...
‘THIS is the most draconian anti-refugee legalisation yet, as Rishi Sunak bids to make the UK off-limits to any refugees other than those his government hand-picks,’ Care4Calais declared yesterday. The volunteer-run refugee charity denounced Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Illegal Immigration Bill which she put before Parliament yesterday afternoon.
The Tories...
THE RAGE of youth and workers in Greece over last Tuesday’s horrific rail crash is now threatening to overthrow the right-wing government of Prime Minister K Mitsotakis as railworkers’ trade unions have called a general strike for tomorrow, Wednesday 8th March. Nearly all of Greece’s City Trades Councils have decided...
THOUSANDS of Greek workers, students and youth took to the streets at the weekend in a further extension of the anger that has erupted over the train crash last Tuesday which left 57 confirmed dead so far, and dozens more still missing in the wreckage. Almost all those killed were...
TOP US military officer General Mark Milley has visited American occupation forces in northern Syria just one day after he’d met with the Israeli regime’s officials in the occupied territories. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff made a stop at an undisclosed occupied base in northern Syria...
‘OUR FAMILY cannot wait any longer, ’ said the family of Chris Kaba yesterday, the six-months anniversary of the 24-year-old black man’s fatal shooting by a Metropolitan Police firearms officer in a stake-out shortly after 10pm on 5 September 2022 in Kirkstall Gardens, Streatham Hill south-west London. On Saturday 4th...
A judge in New York ruled on Friday that Starbucks had violated federal labour law dozens of times in responding to a union campaign in the Buffalo area of the state shortly after the campaign began roughly 18 months ago. Michael A. Rosas, a judge for the National Labour Relations...
THE Fire Brigades Union is justly proud to have coordinated the following statement, which was passed as a resolution at its Executive Council last week: ‘In recent weeks, we have seen an alarming rise in violence and intimidation organised by the far right against refugees and refugee accommodation. ‘The government is...
A GROUP of hundreds of Israeli economists have issued a fresh warning that a financial meltdown could occur more ‘powerfully and faster’ than they had originally forecast – because a controversial and far-reaching judicial shakeup being advanced by prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition could have grave implications. ‘Since we...
A DELEGATION from the European Union along with representatives of about 20 countries visited yesterday the Palestinian town of Huwwara, south of Nablus, and the neighbouring village of Za’tara, to express their solidarity with their residents in the aftermath of the terrorist rampage by Israeli settlers last week. The delegation...
GP LEADERS are dismayed as the UK Secretary of State refuses to give additional help to GP practices. The Health and Social Care Secretary is refusing to support GP practices at a time when they are experiencing unprecedented pressures and increasingly unable to meet the needs of patients. Following the BMA’s...
‘THERE was no deal. There was nothing, nothing on the table,’ said Junior Doctors’ Co-chair, Robert Laurenson outside the Department of Health, yesterday morning. Laurenson continued: ‘We are disappointed the Secretary of State for Health Barclay couldn’t offer anything, saying he did not have a mandate to do so and...
THE judge-led inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing at an Ariana Grand concert in May 2017 finally published its finding yesterday after a two-and-a-half-year investigation. The atrocity, which killed 22 young people attending the event with hundreds injured, was carried out by Salam Abedi a 22-year-old British born son of...
GREEK transport unions laid the blame for the country’s ‘worst ever’ rail crash directly at the door of government cuts yesterday, as they demanded the resignation of the political leadership of the Ministry of Transport ‘en masse’. A passenger train and a cargo train collided head on at around 1am...
Since 2017, the United States has imposed numerous sanctions on Venezuela, targeting its oil industry, financial sector, and political leaders. These sanctions have severely damaged the country’s economy. As a result, the people of Venezuela have been left to bear the brunt of the sanctions, with devastating consequences.
One of the...
PALESTINE’S UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour has called on the UN Security Council to ensure ‘protection’ for Palestinians, who have increasingly come under deadly attacks by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank. Speaking to reporters after a closed-door UNSC meeting on Tuesday, Mansour said it was incumbent on...
HUWARA, a Palestinian town in the north of the occupied West Bank, was almost entirely set ablaze on Sunday night as extensive fires engulfed large portions of its neighbourhoods. Located to the south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus and surrounded by lush green slopes, the small town...
ON MONDAY night, Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen announced that, after a high level meeting, Britain and the EU had signed off an agreement that finally achieved Brexit. Sunak said at the start of the meeting that the UK and EU have...
LONG A&E waiting times contributed to some 23,000 ‘excess patient deaths’ last year, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said yesterday. In 2022, 1.66 million people in England waited for more than 12 hours in A&E from the moment they arrived in the emergency department, said the College, warning...