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Monthly Archives: August 2018

‘EAT, heat or pay rent’ that is the stark choice facing millions of low paid and unemployed workers living in private rented accommodation in Britain today. This is the inevitable outcome of the Tory policy instituted in 2016 of a four-year freeze on housing benefit. According to research carried out...
PALESTINIAN civil society groups issued a statement on Wednesday urging the UK Labour Party and trade unions to reject the ‘biased, anti-Palestinian’ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism which seeks to conflate anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel. In the statement the groups claim the definition ‘aims to...
JUNIOR doctors are being left in charge of A&Es for entire shifts without a single senior doctor on the ward, new figures have revealed, with at least 8,000 doctors’ shifts left uncovered last year in London alone. This, junior doctors rightly insist, have led to the remaining staff feeling burned...
THE PROPORTION of households in the UK where no-one is working is at its lowest point for over 20 years, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday, indicating that 800,000 have been driven into low paid jobs on zero hours contracts. The figures show 14.3% of households containing working-age...
THE US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, speaking on Tuesday at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, said that the Palestinians’ right of return should not be raised in any future Israeli-Palestinian talks. Asked whether the issue should be ‘off the table’ Haley replied, ‘I do agree...
THE South African Federation of Trade Unions stands fully in support of the long-overdue introduction of a national health insurance (NHI) system, and welcomes this week’s conference convened by Public Service International to discuss how the unions should intervene in the process. SAFTU is clear that the NHI is the...
THE TRUMP administration has decided to cut more than $200 million in bilateral assistance to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the State Department said last Friday. The money will be redirected to ‘high priority projects elsewhere,’ a notice sent to Congress stated. The amount cut by...
THE MOTHER and sister of Dexter Bristol (57), who died suddenly earlier this year after being classified as an illegal immigrant, angrily walked out of his inquest yesterday after the coroner ruled that the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ Windrush policy played no role in his death. Dexter, who had come to...
NEXT week the British government will be hauled kicking and screaming before judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague over the despicable treatment of the Chagos Islanders at the hands of British and US imperialism. 50 years ago Britain seized control of the Chagos Islands, a...
MORE THAN one million people from all around the world attended the two-day Notting Hill Carnival yesterday and on Sunday, with its fantastic floats with bursts of colour, tremendous costumes and masses of dancers. The booming sound systems were silenced for 72 seconds on each afternoon to remember...
AT this year’s annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) the right-wing of the trade union bureaucracy will attempt to commit the working class to staying in the bosses’ and bankers’ EU at all costs. A motion to the TUC Congress proposed by the giant Unite union makes this...
IRAN’S Defence Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami has warned of extra-regional countries’ plots to sow discord in Syria, vowing the Islamic Republic’s full support for the war-ravaged country in a bid to preserve its territorial integrity and improve its stability. ‘Iran will spare no effort to maintain Syria’s territorial integrity,...
YESTERDAY’S editorial of the bosses’ and bankers’ Sunday Telegraph gave its marching orders to Labour’s right wing and fake lefts, saying of Labour leader Corbyn: ‘Anyone who remains in his party given what we now know about him is morally compromised – either they must fight to bring him...
SOUTH African unions say they will resist power utility Eskom’s intention to cut 7,000 jobs through natural attrition with strike action. ‘Eskom intends to reduce the headcount from 48,678 to 41,613 by 2023 across all levels through normal attrition,’ Marion Hughes, a senior manager at the utility said in a...
MORE than 123,000 children and their families have spent their school holiday homeless, an increase of around 53,000 since the summer holidays of 2011, councils revealed on Saturday. The Local Government Association (LGA) warned that the numbers of homeless children that councils are housing in temporary accommodation has increased by...
THE RCN Council has called an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) which will take place on 28/09/18 at 11.00 am at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Centenary Square, Broad Street, Birmingham, B1 2EP. An external review into the governance and process surrounding the RCN’s understanding and communication of the 2018 NHS pay...
Syria denounced as ‘misinformation’ a recent statement by the US, Britain and France on the alleged use of chemical weapons. The Damascus government said the trio is leading a campaign of misinformation against the Arab country in line with their support for terrorists. An official source at the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
HUMAN Rights Watch has indicted a so-called investigatory body, overseen by Saudi Arabia, which has for more than two years been covering up war crimes committed by the kingdom in Yemen. The rights organisation released a 90-page analysis on the investigative work of the body, known as the Joint Incidents...
TORY Brexit secretary Dominic Raab yesterday set out what he called ‘practical and proportionate’ advice in case the UK leaves the EU with no deal. He announced the publication of 25 ‘technical notices’ setting out what the government is doing to prepare for no-deal. Raab told a press conference: ‘The...
A LEBANESE lawmaker affiliated to Hezbollah says Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has recently offered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad huge sums of money for the reconstruction of his conflict-plagued country in case the latter severs relations with Iran and the Lebanese resistance movement. Speaking in an exclusive interview with...
BREXIT Secretary Raab announced yesterday that ‘Today, I want to set out the steps we in government and you in business, the public sector and voluntary sector should take, in order that we can make sure the United Kingdom goes from strength to strength. ‘Even in the unlikely event that...
FOREIGN Secretary Hunt’s debut in the USA saw him prostrate himself in front of US imperialism in the most fawning and sychophantic manner. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt from 1898: ‘There comes a time in the life of a nation, as in the life of an individual, when it must...
IRAN has unveiled its first domestically designed and manufactured fighter jet, named ‘Kowsar’, at a defence show in Tehran. The aircraft conducted its first public display flight during Tuesday’s ceremony in the presence of President Hassan Rouhani, Defence Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami and other senior military officials. President...
LETTING agents are discriminating against tenants on housing benefit, an undercover investigation has found. Shelter and the National Housing Federation found one-in-ten agents in England refused to let to those on the benefit. The undercover investigation found the policy was enforced even if tenants could afford the rent. Stephen Tyler told...
AVERAGE weekly earnings in the UK are £13 lower than they were a decade ago, a think tank study has found. Job insecurity is now ‘widespread’, with 800,000 workers on zero-hours contracts, according to the Resolution Foundation (RF). The RF asked: ‘So who has found work? The evidence shows that...
‘AUSTERITY must end now,’ Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey said yesterday, on the eve of the TUC Congress, following the announcement that the UK has had its biggest July budget surplus in 18 years. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday that public sector net borrowing, excluding state-owned banks,...
By Palestinian Ambassador Manuel Hassassian ‘JEREMY Corbyn’s principled stance has been watched with bated breath by all Palestinians in occupied Palestine and the diaspora. After last week’s dramatic intervention by Benjamin Netanyahu into British politics, the dynamics of the debate on Israel, the IHRA, anti-semitism and a Labour Party staying...
HARD PRESSED councils facing the threat of bankruptcy at the hands of the Tory government, and facing the prospect of having government commissioners imposed on them to force through savage cuts, are now employing strong-arm bailiffs to ‘visit’ council residents to make them pay what the councils say is...
ADALAH, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, warned on Monday that the Israeli government’s response to the petition, filed to the Israeli Supreme Court, signals Israel’s intention to proceed with annexation of the occupied West Bank. The Israeli government submitted legal materials to the Israeli Supreme Court...
THE US State Department has formed an ‘Iran Action Group’ to coordinate and run an aggressive US policy toward the Islamic Republic on the eve of the 65th anniversary of a previous American action against Iran – the CIA-led 1953 coup against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. US...
GREECE has completed a three-year eurozone emergency loan programme worth 61.9bn euros (£55bn; $70.8bn). This was part of the biggest bailout in global financial history, totalling some 289bn euros, which was secured only through the imposition of massive austerity measures, and which will take the Greek working class and...
A REVOLUTION that will bring the platinum mining industry to its knees and cripple SA’s economy is imminent, says Joseph Mathunjwa, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu). In the past several months, mining houses have threatened to shed thousands of jobs. Speaking at the rally to...
THE PALESTINIAN President, Mahmoud Abbas has called for more popular resistance and warned ‘We should not underestimate it’. He has called for further visits to the village of Khan al-Ahmar, east of Jerusalem, which is facing an imminent threat of demolition by the Israeli occupation authorities. Abbas said: ‘Everyone, officials...
THE TORY civil war is continuing with reports yesterday that as many as 100 Tory MPs are preparing to rebel against PM May unless she scraps her controversial Chequers plan for Brexit. Chris Green, a former aide in the Department for Transport, urged May to listen to...
AMERICA’s United Farm Workers union (UFW) is fighting an attack by Darigold, the largest dairy processor and cooperative in the Pacific Northwest. UFW says: ‘While their public image brags about family farms and local milk production, there is a dark underside to the business … Just ask dairy workers. ‘Approximately...
THE TRADE Union Congress has conducted a survey which indicates that more than half of workers in the UK, some 56%, are being monitored by their boss. Bosses are reading workers’ emails, filming them through hidden cameras, searching employees in the morning on the way into work and before...
IN A LETTER to the British press, fourteen leading UK playwrights and theatre directors, have condemned the destruction of the Said al-Mishal Cultural Centre in Gaza, which was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes six days earlier. They wrote: ‘As theatre practitioners who have worked closely with Palestinian artists, we write to...
COMMUNICATION Workers Union (CWU) deputy general postal secretary, Terry Pullinger, has reminded the communications industry regulator that its primary statutory duty is ‘to protect the UK’s universal postal service, not to damage Royal Mail’. Pullinger was responding to the enormous £50m fine the company has been hit with. Pullinger described...
‘The nursing shortage in England is harming some of the most vulnerable members of society,’ a senior nurse and Royal College of Nursing (RCN) leader warned on Tuesday. Learning disability care is facing a major crisis as the latest workforce data shows a 40 per cent drop in specialist...
THIS week, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a load of emails and transcripts of phone conversations between senior executives of RBS, the UK bank that collapsed in 2008 after the prime mortgage crisis in the American housing market brought every bank in the world to its knees....
AXING student grants while hiking up university fees to an eyewatering £9,500 a year has driven tens of thousands of students out of education, new figures released on A-level results day have shown. The number of UK students accepted on to degree courses within the country has fallen to 353,960,...
‘BINYAMIN Netanyahu’s arrogant intervention into British politics is not surprising from someone who has always condoned Israeli state terror. Jeremy Corbyn, in contrast, has always stayed true to his humanistic values in his courageous support of human rights,’ Palestinian ambassador to the UK Manuel Hassassian said on Tuesday. He continued:...
RESEARCH into FTSE 100 chief executives’ pay packages and the just-published findings have confirmed to angry workers that they have been taken for a ride by the bosses. While the working class and the middle class, including commuters into the big cities, have been the victims of super-austerity,...
RMT General Secretary Mick Cash yesterday warned Transport Secretary Grayling against trying to impose a ‘pay cap’ on railworkers. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling wants future fare and pay increases to be based on the lower Consumer Prices Index, rather than the higher Retail Price Index. This...
BY THE END of this week Raigmore Hospital in Inverness Scotland will lose its last radiologist, prompting the Royal College of Radiologists to declare a ‘red alert!’ highlighting an acute shortage across the entire country. Radiologists play a key role in interpreting X-rays and scans, and are essential for Accident...