Lead story

A chance to protect the NHS?

by Daphne Liddle

A PRIVATE member’s Bill moved by Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham will receive its second reading in the House of Commons. It aims to undo some of the damage done by the Con-Dem Coalition’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

Efford’s National Health Service (amended duties and powers) bill aims to stop the increasing the increasing privatisation of our NHS, to protect it from the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and to make the Secretary of State for Health directly responsible for running the NHS.

“The NHS as we know it today will disappear if we continue to allow services to be contracted out to private companies.” explained Efford.

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Palestinian anger erupts in Jerusalem

by our Arab affairs correspondent

Violence is sweeping the occupied territories as Palestinians rage against Zionist settler provocations and new Israeli attempts to encroach on the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a major Muslim shrine on the Temple Mount, which is also hugely symbolic for Jews.

Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun attacked worshippers at a synagogue in Jerusalem on Tuesday, killing five Israelis before the attackers were shot dead. Six Israelis were also injured. It was the deadliest such incident to hit Jerusalem since 2008.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to wage a “harsh response” while US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the attack as an “act of pure terror.” The killings came a day after a Palestinian bus driver was found hanged in his vehicle in what Israeli authorities claim was suicide. But the man’s relatives say bruises on his body show he was tortured and then murdered in cold blood.

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Editorial

More rubbish at the United Nations

NOTHING illustrates the hypocrisy of imperialism better than the cynical use of the “human rights” gang at the United Nations to further imperialist attempts to isolate and sanction any country that stands in the way of the “new world order”.

This week the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran were singled out for alleged human rights abuses based on a hate campaign directed by the Americans and based on the dubious reports of defectors and agents of imperialism.

Russia, People’s China and Cuba made a principled stand against this gross interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The imperialists mobilised their lackeys at the UN General Assembly to vote in favour of draft resolutions condemning the DPRK and Iran that will soon be referred to the UN Security Council. But those on the front-line against imperialism stood by Democratic Korea and Iran and an even larger number refused to be stampeded by the Americans and simply abstained.

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