Monthly Archives: June 2024
FOXCONN, a key manufacturer of Apple devices, has been systematically excluding married female candidates from assembly jobs at its flagship Indian smartphone plant. Despite both companies’ codes of conduct explicitly stating that workers should not face discrimination based on marital status, this practice continues unabated. Parvathi and Janaki, sisters in their...
THE Israeli cabinet has approved the ‘legalisation’ of five settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, and further sanctions on the Palestinian Authority for supporting cases against the Israeli regime in international courts. ‘The Security Cabinet authorised one outpost for every country that unilaterally recognised Palestine as a state in...
PICKETS were out yesterday morning at the Royal London Hospital on day two of the Junior Doctors’ strike. They are determined to fight whatever government comes in for a 35% pay rise until they win their dispute. On Thursday afternoon 27 June there was a very lively and colourful demonstration of...
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange landed in Australia Wednesday morning, after walking free from a US court in Saipan. He hugged his wife and father at the airport in Canberra, as a small group of supporters cheered his arrival. Julian Assange had pleaded guilty in a US court under a deal allowing...
The Bank of England yesterday warned that the capitalist financial markets are at risk of ‘sharp correction’. In its latest financial stability report the Bank said that high inflation and ‘geopolitical risks’ could trigger a fire sale of assets by the financial speculators who have made fortunes buying up assets...
JUNIOR doctors in England yesterday embarked on a five-day strike, marking the 11th walkout in their prolonged pay dispute. Members of the British Medical Association (BMA) ceased work from 07:00 yesterday, prompting NHS England to warn of substantial disruption to routine hospital services.
The union has stated that this action is...
JUNIOR doctors are staging a full walkout in England beginning at 7am today, Thursday 27 June and ending at 7am on Tuesday 2nd July. The British Medical Association (BMA) said: ‘Over the last few years, junior doctors have made both an enormous contribution and a significant sacrifice. And yet none...
OCCIDENTAL College student workers have voted to join the SEIU union Local 721, allowing over 1,000 undergraduate workers – baristas, tutors, translators, lifeguards, and researchers to collectively bargain with the private liberal arts college in northeast Los Angeles for the first time. SEIU announced the results of the April election...
AN international human rights organisation says Israel is pressing ahead with a ‘systematic policy of targeting civilians’ in the Gaza Strip, including bombardment of shelter centres for displaced people and areas designated as humanitarian zones by the United Nations. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, in a report on Tuesday, said...
The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) released a statement on Monday saying it is ‘appalled by the continued bungling’ of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and is concerned by the ‘inconveniences that arise from such bungling’. SAFTU stated: ‘The persistent problems regarding the NSFAS administration and...
ON Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was freed from the high-security Belmarsh jail after a deal was agreed for him to plead guilty to one minor charge of breaching espionage law in the US. In return for this plea Assange was flown to the US Pacific territory of Saipan yesterday...
JULIAN ASSANGE will ‘be a free man’ once a plea deal with the US is ‘signed off by a judge’, his wife Stella Assange said yesterday. Assange left the UK on Monday following his release from prison thanks to a plea deal brokered with US authorities over his WikiLeaks disclosures. Assange,...
THE WHITE House is reportedly worried that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could use his upcoming speech to the US Congress to publicly criticise President Joe Biden and his administration’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza just months ahead of the US election. The Virginia-headquartered digital newspaper Politico cited an unnamed US...
LAST week the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a whole series of blogs on its website warning that the entire US banking system is at risk from unregulated non-banks, or ‘shadow banks’ as they are called. The growth of the unregulated shadow banks ballooned across the world following...
GUYS and St Thomas’ theatre nurses are to strike over a dangerous rise in hours. Burnt out nurses warn that a further hour extension to shifts risks patient safety, and staff wellbeing. The day surgery theatre nurses will strike after bosses extended their shift finish times by an hour, the union...
DOCTORS are under attack financially, professionally and morally, and calling an election doesn’t get the government off the hook, British Medical Association leader Professor Philip Banfield warns today. Banfield is set to say in a major speech to the BMA conference in Belfast that, despite calling an election, the Prime...
THE Hamas Movement has condemned the ongoing Israeli massacres on the Gaza Strip, saying: ‘The Nazi Zionist enemy continues to brutally target civilians in the Gaza Strip, and implement new massacres against children, women and the elderly.’ In its statement, Hamas denounced ‘the Israeli airstrikes targeting a residential square in...
The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has condemned ongoing attempts to form parallel or alternative frameworks to the PLO and its institutions. The so-called Gaza Civil Administration is being sought by Israel and the United States administration as part of the post-war arrangements.
The PLO Executive Committee stated...
CLASHES have broken out between the Israeli police and anti-regime protesters in Tel Aviv and across the occupied territories, with demonstrators demanding new elections and a prisoner exchange deal with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas. Tens of thousands of Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem joined in a massive wave...
Timi Frank, the former Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Nigeria, on Thursday, called on the leadership of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) to reject any minimum wage offer from the government that is less than 250,000 niara per...
ON FRIDAY, June 21, The Republic of Armenia officially recognised the State of Palestine, raising the number of countries that recognise Palestinian statehood to 149 out of the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly. Only the imperialist powers are refusing to recognise Palestine. In a statement released...
IN an unprecedented 12 hours long rally under a scorching sun and temperatures exceeding 45ºC, hundreds of LARCO industrial workers and miners, along with thousands of supporters, protested last Thursday outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) in Athens against a Bill which allows the sacking of all 850 workers. The Bill...
THE IRISH Trade Union Congress Executive Council member and INTO Deputy General Secretary Deirdre O’Connor delivered a speech on behalf of the workers of Ireland at the International Labour Conference in Geneva earlier this month in a special session organised to discuss the report of the ILO Director General...
THE decision by the Bank of England to keep interest rates at 5.25%, the highest level for 16 years, came as no surprise despite the much acclaimed drop in the inflation rate to 2%. Clearly the Bank didn’t believe that any corner had been turned by the UK economy and...
THE NHS requires an additional £38bn annually by the end of the next parliament to address the care backlog and reduce prolonged treatment delays, political parties have been warned. According to the Health Foundation, the commitments made by Labour and the Conservatives regarding NHS funding ‘fall well short’ of what...
THE NHS will be encouraged to buy up social care beds in a bid to get medically-fit patients out of hospitals faster, Labour has said. Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting claimed patients currently stuck in NHS beds due to a lack of social care provision ‘could fill 26 hospitals’. He said...
Amos Hochstein, a senior United States diplomat, has met Israeli leaders and has also visited Lebanon as part of a push by Washington to ‘defuse tensions between Israel and Hezbollah’. The US envoy arrived in Israel on Monday, and held talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and...
THE top United Nations human rights official has warned of the worsening situation for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the ‘unconscionable death and suffering’ in the Gaza Strip. Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday that 528 Palestinians, 133 of them children, were...
THE US administration of Joe Biden has deployed a record number of American troops to Jordan, a country that sits at the heart of the Middle East with borders with Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south and (crucially for the US) Israel...
Russia’s Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has responded to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s remarks that the bloc’s members are discussing putting their nuclear arsenals on alert. Peskov said: ‘This is nothing else but an escalation.
‘Whenever President Putin comments on the issue of nuclear arms, he does so, in response to...
A NEW report to the US Congress reveals that the Biden administration has deployed a record number of US troops to Jordan as the occupying Israeli regime continues its bloody ground and aerial offensive against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. According to the White House’s war powers report to Congress...
THE head of Oxfam GB, Halima Begum, has damned the UK government for supplying arms to Israel while simultaneously providing humanitarian aid to Gaza as being ‘intellectually and morally incoherent’. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper Begum, who has recently returned from a work trip to Israel and the...
MYANMAR’s trade unions are facing brutal retaliation in the fight for democracy, says Khaing Zar Aung, the President of the Industrial Workers Union of Myanmar. Democratic forces in Myanmar have been fighting for more than three years against a brutal military junta.
Trade unions are a crucial part of the resistance movement,...
THE United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said that children in the besieged Gaza Strip live in ‘constant terror due to Israeli bombardment’. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said the situation for children and families in Gaza is getting ‘worse and worse by the day with the intense heat and families...
OVER 4,000 workers youth and local residents came to Ladbroke Grove in west London on Friday to mark the 7th anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, which happened on June 14th 2017. The Silent Walk is held through the streets of North Kensington near the tower on every anniversary and...
REFUGEE survivors of the Pylos shipwreck off the western shores of Greece, where approximately 600 children, women and men were drowned on 15 June 2023, staged an intense anti-government rally and march in Athens last Friday evening. They demonstrated along with 2,000 youth, workers and delegations of hospital, teachers and...
The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) joined the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (NUMSA) on Friday to condemn Mercedes-Benz South Africa’s (MBSA) decision to sack 700 workers from its East London manufacturing plant. They intend to cut 700 out of the 3,000 jobs.
In their statement, MBSA argues...
NEARLY a quarter of a million French workers have taken part in mass rallies across the country against the French fascists, calling on the working class to rise up and block the right wing from taking office in the snap parliamentary elections called by President Emmanuel Macron. On Saturday, the...
Fuel shortages are driving Gaza’s hospitals to the ‘brink of collapse’, leading to dehydration, disease, and starvation among the population, warns the charity ActionAid. Dr Mohammad Salha, the acting director of al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza, stated that the fuel crisis has severely impacted many of the hospital’s services. In a...
A NEW opinion poll shows that public support for the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and armed confrontation, as the best means to end Israeli occupation, has increased among Palestinians. The results of the poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) come as Israel’s brutal onslaught on...
The Argentinian parliament’s upper house narrowly passed a controversial bill key to President Javier Milei’s economic cuts and privatisation plans as thousands of protesters clashed with police in the streets on Wednesday. Senators voted 37 to 36 to give provisional approval to the plan, embarking on an all-night marathon sitting,...
THE United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says nearly 3,000 children are at risk of dying before the eyes of their families as they have been cut off from treatment for severe acute malnutrition in southern Gaza. The figures, based on reporting from UNICEF’s nutrition partners, come as only two of...
LABOUR leader Keir Starmer launched the party’s ‘business friendly’ election manifesto in Manchester yesterday morning with the promise that a Labour government would put the economic stability of British capitalism above all else. ‘Wealth creation’ Labour proclaimed was at the heart of the manifesto and workers will not be surprised...
ISRAEL has launched air, land, and sea strikes, hitting a so-called safe zone in southern Gaza, where thousands of internally displaced Palestinians have sought shelter. The occupying entity early yesterday carried out intense airstrikes and artillery bombardment, by ‘air, land and sea’, against the al-Mawasi area west of Rafah city...