The Omicron variant has shattered the lie that the pandemic can be ended without a globally-coordinated strategy aimed at the elimination and eradication of Sars-CoV-2.
The accident is not the product of individual error but of an unsafe environment which has persisted for years at the auto parts maker, the product of continuous speedup and long working hours that are common throughout the industry.
Testimony by US Fed chair Jerome Powell to the Senate Banking Committee yesterday set off the second significant fall on Wall Street in three days as he indicated that the central bank was moving to tighten its monetary policy.
US corporations are enjoying the largest profit margins since 1950 as the Biden administration pledges to oppose any public health measures in response to the pandemic that might impinge on profits.
The four-year deal will result in an effective wage cut for exploited student-workers at the world’s wealthiest university.
Opposition to school reopenings is a significant element in the wider hostility toward the political establishment and its callous indifference to the lives and well-being of working people that Australia’s new electoral laws are designed to silence.
Government officials and sections of the corporate media have said they hope the new mutation spreads, based on unsubstantiated assertions that it “may be” less lethal.
The unions’ blatant acts of censorship are a desperate attempt to keep a lid on seething opposition from rank-and-file Kaiser workers.
The global logistics company last week locked out workers for two full shifts after they began four-hour work stoppages.
A 15-year-old student opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun at a high school in suburban Detroit on Tuesday, killing three classmates and injuring eight others, including one teacher.
The anti-communist task force, endorsed by Robredo, is a heavily funded and murderous apparatus of McCarthyism.
The increasing number of infections and deaths in indigenous communities was both predicted and preventable, but the warnings of health experts and community leaders were ignored.
The travel history of the five Omicron cases in Canada, four of which are in Ontario and one in Quebec, suggests that the variant has been spreading widely throughout Africa for some time. All five, none of whom are related, returned from Nigeria via Montreal.
The decision to put a general in charge of its COVID-19 crisis team permits only one conclusion: the German government in waiting does not regard the pandemic as a medical problem, but rather as a security issue.
A documentary unveils the trauma and unresolved grief at the root of a renowned Korean artist’s most famous work.
Following the trend in the Midwest and Upstate New York, cases are resurging through Ohio after a brief respite, and hospital admissions are once more climbing.
Amid an explosive new coronavirus wave, a clear 62 percent majority in Switzerland voted on Sunday to keep the COVID-19 law in place.
Mohamed Shekha Ahmad’s harrowing account exposes the contempt for human life that prevails at top levels of the French and British state.
Alongside the health authorities and company managements, the trade unions and their affiliated works councils ensure that infection rates are concealed and business operations continue as workers fall ill.
The sellout in Sheffield is in line with the GMB’s role in curbing rising opposition across the UK among refuse workers.
Saiqa Parveen and Samantha Willis are two of the 13 pregnant or postpartum women killed by COVID-19 just since July in Britain.
Hospitalizations of those infected with coronavirus reached a record high of 4,185 people across the state of Michigan on Monday.
In his statement Monday, the US president delivered a message to the financial markets that nothing will stand in the way of boosting the profits and wealth of the super-rich.
The report conservatively estimates that if China followed the US “herd immunity” policy the number of daily cases would exceed 637,000, and the daily tally of serious cases would be more than 22,000, quickly overloading the country’s health system.
Notwithstanding the rebound, Friday’s sharp fall again underscored the fragility of the entire financial system and its dependence on the flow of cheap money from the world’s central banks.
The stoppage reflects widespread anger over soaring workloads, stagnant wages and the dangerous reopening of the schools, all of which have been enforced by the unions.
Staggering from crisis to crisis, the government is anxious to avoid any parliamentary debate that would further expose the rifts tearing it apart.
The Rajapakse government rushed to reopen schools not out of concern for the education of children but to defend capitalist profits.
“This disease is not to be taken lightly. We need to find a way to eradicate it.”
The Omicron variant has been detected in at least 17 countries, including five of the G7 nations. The US is one of the exceptions, likely due to its poor testing system.
The Australian authorities did nothing when they were repeatedly told that Assange’s life was in danger.
To understand the battle Kaiser workers face against both the company and the unions, it is necessary to review briefly the evolution of this incestous relationship.
Republican Governor Bill Lee signed a bill earlier this month which bans mask mandates and provides unemployment benefits to those refusing employer-mandated vaccination against COVID-19.
After a partial lockdown had already been imposed in Austria, stricter measures and contact restrictions were also imposed in Slovakia and the Czech Republic last week.
Despite support from hundreds of celebrities, including the former Israeli ambassador to Germany Avi Primor and the renowned historian and anti-Semitism expert Moshe Zimmermann, nothing could save El-Hassan.
Last weekend alone, 80 people from Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia were flown out to the north and west of the country by air force troop carriers for treatment.
At five out of the 15 colleges that were meant to strike starting in September, the UCU reached deals with the employers before the strike began.
Farmworkers in Sonora state rebelled against terrible working conditions and seized control of a migrant camp. Transit workers in Buenos Aires staged a wildcat strike demanding a wage increase and year-end bonuses.
“It’s not just science that decides,” said Quebec’s director of public health, Horacio Arruda, in defense of the government’s policy of putting profits before human lives.
The #Disrupt Texts website is a pernicious advocate of displacing Shakespeare and other significant figures and works, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The rapid spread of the new variant has been greeted with passivity by governments around the world, which have rejected the closures of schools and nonessential businesses even as the current surge of the Delta variant has led to record COVID-19 cases.
Amid the deepening surge of the Delta variant in the US and the growing spread of the Omicron variant globally, White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci explicitly opposed a strategy aimed at eliminating and eradicating COVID-19.
Season 3 of HBO’s Succession, the black comedy-drama series created by Jesse Armstrong, brings out the anti-democratic rot at the heart of contemporary American politics, business and media.
“People should join the SEP because social equality is fair and for everybody” – Sally-Ann, a former aged care worker.
Educators and parents in Washington state demand urgent action to halt a massive surge of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths predicted for the winter months ahead.
Autoworkers spoke to the WSWS about the threat posed by the rise in cases, even as the discovery of the Omicron variant underscores the impossibility of “living with the virus.”
Last week’s sick-leave strike was called by the Health Professionals Collective to dissipate health workers’ anger, but the mass response demonstrates workers’ determination to fight the government’s social assault.
Australian governments, like their counterparts internationally, are insisting that the new variant must not disrupt the profit-driven drive to lift all safety restrictions.
During the event, the far-right Colorado lawmaker insinuated that Omar, one of two Muslims serving in Congress, was a potential suicide bomber, smearing her as a member of the “Jihad Squad.”
The NZ Labour-Green Party government’s record demonstrates that it has no concern for the rights of migrant workers, but the same is true for all the establishment parties.
This was not a “sit-in” in any real sense and the small audience further revealed the NTEU’s loss of support among university workers.
Anthony Broadwater, 61, and Kevin Strickland, 62, were exonerated in separate hearings last week for crimes they never committed.
The state government headed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has abandoned any effort to fight the right-wing campaign against mask mandates and other executive orders which she issued in the course of 2020.
Although the number of official coronavirus deaths in Germany has exceeded 100,000, the infection figures are escalating and a new, dangerous variant (Omicron) of the virus is spreading, all the bourgeois parties refuse to take the necessary protective measures.
As infections reach new highs and the highly-mutated Omicron variant appears in Europe, the French government aims to let the virus spread.
The Johnson government and its chief advisors on SAGE are muzzling science and transforming public health policy into a macabre form of roulette.
Russia and Ukraine have been reporting record deaths as NATO and the US stoke a dangerous military crisis in the Black Sea.
This column profiles important historical events which took place during this week, 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago and 100 years ago.
The willingness to fight by Higher Education staff is combined with a growing understanding that the University College Union will not wage a serious struggle.
In a sweeping report, Smit reviews US masking policies during the pandemic and makes clear which types of masks can prevent airborne transmission.
Trade union collaboration with employers to impose harsh working conditions and attacks on workers’ democratic rights has emboldened tea estate managers.
The emergence of the Omicron strain of COVID-19 is a devastating exposure of the herd immunity policy implemented by capitalist governments, which oppose lockdowns and other critical public health measures necessary to stop the spread of the disease.
As the number of new cases grows, inequality is also sharply escalating.
The Morrison government is increasingly paralysed by internal revolts, but Labor’s support remains at near-historic lows.
The Democratic administration of Governor Whitmer has responded to unprecedented case numbers with a thoroughly inadequate public health advisory.
What businesses really mean by “labour shortage” is a lack of workers prepared to work for poverty-level wages.
Initial indications are that an unusual constellation of mutations makes the variant far more infectious than the Delta variant and potentially vaccine-resistant.
There is now a shortage of at least 100,000 nurses in German hospitals, and more and more nurses are suffering burn-out—under conditions where infection rates are exploding.
In his first hundred days as Peru’s president, Castillo has managed to move faster and further to the right than any of his predecessors.
The true horror of the deadly pandemic is visible “on the faces of the patients, their children and life partners. And it is reflected in the eyes of the medical staff.”
The report fails even to mention the role that Cuomo played in legislation that protected the owners of nursing homes and hospitals from liability in COVID deaths.
The far-right organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally knowingly engaged in a conspiracy to commit violent acts.
The deaths of 51 people at a Russian mine, at which 914 safety violations were registered this year alone, is a social crime.
Midwives along with students of midwifery and support staff up and down the country held protest vigils on November 21, drawing attention to the dire conditions and staff shortages affecting maternity services across the UK.
In Glasgow, such was the strength of feeling among low paid bin workers that GMB officials were unable to call off the COP26 strikes without consulting workers, fearing they would lose control of the situation.
India: West Bengal hospital nurses demand wage rise; Cambodian workers blockade garment factory over victimisation; New South Wales and Queensland bus drivers’ strike; Auckland supermarket distribution workers walk out over pay
The strikes show the enormous willingness of nurses, educators and other public sector workers to fight, even as the unions prepare a sellout.
Unite is already undermining a joint struggle by deciding on separate action. Bus drivers at the garages in Barnsley and Rotherham will strike from November 27 until December 3, while action in Sheffield will run from November 28 to December 4.
Information available to date about the new variant is chilling. South Africa’s surge has seen cases double in just two weeks, with fears the new variant accounts for most of them.
As a winter wave of infections and death gathers pace, Trudeau’s government is eliminating pandemic relief for workers and abetting the provinces in scrapping virtually all remaining safety measures.
Scientists have detected a new variant of COVID-19, called B.1.1.529 (or Omicron), which appears to have originated in South Africa but has already been detected in several other countries.
The “traffic light coalition” has declared war on the working population before it even takes power.
“I needed to find a party that I am confident and happy to support and that is the SEP.”
With headline inflation in the US now running at more than 6 percent, and showing no signs of abating, the key question is when and by how much the Fed may start to move.
The Podemos party, which sits in the Spanish government, is attempting to achieve via trade union treachery what it could not obtain from police violence against the strike.
Health Minister Véran announced the government’s response to the skyrocketing of COVID-19 cases, with over 33,000 cases reported in 24 hours.
Federal advisers are reporting pre-pandemic levels of travelers during the Thanksgiving holidays. With COVID-19 infections rising across the US and all mitigation measures essentially lifted, health experts warn of a massive surge this winter.
The Australian government has immediately seized on the unrest, dispatching 23 members of the heavily armed and riot-trained “Specialist Response Group” of the Australian Federal Police, as well as 93 members of the military.
Opposition is growing as healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente prepare to vote December 8 on a concessions contract being promoted by the Alliance of Health Care Unions.
The central question raised by recent events at the Windsor plant is: why has there been no sustained worker resistance to management’s insistence that they toil in unsafe conditions during the pandemic, or its plans to cut a further 1,800 jobs?
Warning strikes continue in German public sector pay dispute in hospitals, day-care centres, schools and other public services; protests across England and Wales by midwives and student midwives organised independently of unions on social media highlight staff shortages; protests across Tunisia over axing of job creation measures; thousands of dairy industry workers across South Africa start indefinite strike over pay and jobs
Mandatory vaccinations are not an attack on democratic rights, as claimed by CMU leader Sylvester Jayakody, but a necessary tool in a range of scientific measures that must be fought for by the international working class to eliminate COVID-19.
Indifferent to 430 lives in immediate danger in the Mediterranean, the deaths of 27 people in the English Channel Wednesday has been the occasion for a tirade of accusations and nationalist outbursts in Britain and France.
French pseudo-left groups are lining up behind Podemos, which sits in a government that is sending armored vehicles and riot police to attack strikers in Cádiz.
“If you own a £1m house in the home counties, over 90% of your assets are protected. If you’ve got a terraced house in Hartlepool (worth £70k) you can lose almost everything.”
The photo of an elderly patient lying in the entrance to the Emergency Department of the Royal Bournemouth Hospital received thousands of shares and comments.
Amazon’s Black Friday profits will not be jeopardised by the #MakeAmazonPay coalition, whose top-down protests are aimed at suppressing a worldwide rebellion by workers against social inequality and capitalist exploitation.
Warehouse workers at the B&Q distribution centre in Worksop in the east Midlands are due to begin industrial action for a pay increase from November 28. The workers are employed directly by logistics firm Wincanton Ltd.
“An actor’s personal life is one thing but the film is something different. Why should someone’s personal life be used to censor Minamata?”
The strike by the Maharashtra state bus transport workers is being mounted by rank-and-file workers in opposition to the wishes of the bureaucratic leadership of more than two dozen trade unions and in defiance of a Bombay High Court ruling banning the strike.
