Application deadlines vary between courses but range from 28 February to 10 April 2023. Please check the deadline carefully with the university you plan to apply to, in order to avoid disappointment.
Tell Me About British Council Scholarships for Women in STEM:
For the second year running, the British Council has launched a scholarship programme in partnership with 26 UK universities with the aim of benefiting women from the Americas, South Asia, South East Asia, Egypt, Turkey and Ukraine. We are looking for women with a background in STEM, who can demonstrate their need for financial support and who wish to inspire future generations of women to pursue careers in STEM.
Why a scholarship programme?
This scholarship programme aims to increase opportunities in STEM for girls and women. According to data from the UN Scientific Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), fewer than 30 percent of researchers worldwide are women and only 30 percent of female students select STEM-related fields in higher education.
Globally, female students’ enrolment is particularly low in Information and Communications Technology (three percent), natural science, mathematics and statistics (five percent), and engineering, manufacturing and construction (eight percent).
What Type of Scholarship is this?
Master, Fellowship
Who can apply for British Council Scholarships for Women in STEM?
Applicants can apply from the following countries
For both Master’s Scholarships and Early Academic Fellowships
Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam
For Masters Scholarships only
Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Ukraine
We are looking for women who:
are able to take up a course of study in the UK for the academic year from September/October 2023 – 2024
can demonstrate a need for financial support
have an undergraduate degree that will enable them to gain access onto one of the pre-selected postgraduate courses at a UK university
can attain the level of English required for postgraduate study/research at a UK university
are active in the field with work experience or a proven interest in their subject area
are passionate about their course of study and are willing to engage as committed British Council scholarship alumni
Full eligibility criteria are available below in the documents section.
Which Countries are Eligible?
Women from the Americas, South Asia, South East Asia, Egypt, Turkey and Ukraine.
Where will Award be Taken?
UK
How Many Scholarships will be Given?
Numerous
What is the Benefit of British Council Scholarships for Women in STEM?
Main benefits
academic prestige – the UK’s universities are amongst the world’s leaders in STEM subjects
economic support will include tuition fees, stipend, travel costs, visa and health coverage fees
special support for mothers
English language support
How to Apply for British Council Scholarships for Women in STEM:
Applications should be made directly to the participating universities. Please follow the links below (information will be updated as the application process in each participating university becomes live).
Three years after the UK left the European Union (EU), the Conservative government has sealed an agreement with the bloc over the vexed issue of the post-Brexit trading rules in Northern Ireland.
The “Windsor framework” deal was secured Monday, after hundreds of hours of negotiations, and announced in a joint press conference by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak welcomes the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to Windsor to discuss the Northern Ireland talks. [Photo by Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY 2.0]
The deal amends the “Northern Ireland protocol”, which formed a crucial part of the Brexit deal former prime minister Boris Johnson signed with the EU in 2019. Painting the deal as all things to all people, Sunak declared, “Today’s agreement delivers smooth-flowing trade within the whole United Kingdom, protects Northern Ireland’s place in our union and safeguards sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland.”
Under the agreement, two new routes for goods will be introduced when they are travelling from Britain’s mainland into Northern Ireland. Goods passing through Northern Ireland destined for the Republic of Ireland—an EU member—must go via a “red lane”, ensuring they pass all customs checks they need to before crossing the Irish Sea. In a clause Sunak said would end “burdensome customs bureaucracy,” products set to stay in Northern Ireland—and therefore in the UK—will go via a “green lane”.
In a bid to win the support of the hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sunak and the EU have agreed to give members of the Northern Ireland Assembly a say on any changes to EU law by offering them “the Stormont brake”. This will allow the UK, at the request of 30 members from at least two parties in the Northern Ireland legislative assembly, to oppose updates to new EU goods law in exceptional circumstances.
The deal Johnson put in place contained compromise arrangements to prevent a “hard border” on the island of Ireland, to allow trade flows from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. Preventing such a hard border was necessary to satisfy the provisions of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of armed conflict between the Irish Republican Army and its political arm Sinn Féin, and the British state forces and their Unionist and loyalist allies.
The Northern Ireland protocol was opposed from the outset by the DUP. Replacing the external EU customs checks on trade from the North/South border to ports in Northern Ireland and the UK, the protocol resulted in significant problems and higher costs for business. By last year checks on goods from the UK at Northern Irish ports represented 20 percent of all checks at the EU’s borders.
The DUP’s opposition to the protocol was essential to its rejection of power sharing, over a year ago, with Sinn Fein in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive. The DUP demanded the protocol be dropped before either institution could reopen and power-sharing resume.
The DUP set up “seven tests” under which any deal the UK government reached with the EU would be judged. These include cutting border red tape and giving the Stormont Assembly a veto over rules that apply in the region. The most frothing unionists will not sign up to any UK/EU deal. While not being in its tests, the DUP stressed as a London/Brussels deal edged closer that there is an end to the primacy of EU laws or no role at all for the European Court of Justice in Northern Ireland. On Sunday, the Daily Mail reported that DUP Chief Whip Sammy Wilson had told its reporters that “there should be no EU law applying to this part of the UK”.
The agreement also faces opposition from the Tories substantial hardline pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG), with a rebellion by up to 100 of the ERG and other Tories being mooted as a possibility only a few days ago if the deal is put to a vote of MPs in Parliament.
Sunak is seeking to ensure that a rebellion is kept down to between 20 or 30 of his backbenchers. He is counting on a DUP majority supporting the deal, convincing most of the euro-sceptic wing of his own party to fall into line. Their mood was summed up by former Tory minister Sir Edward Leigh who told Sunak after the deal was announced, “I can assure him, many of his colleagues on these benches are watching the DUP very carefully, and we will go where they go… It all depends on our colleagues in the DUP. Because unless this exercise gets Stormont up and running, it’s pretty futile, indeed it might be downright dangerous.”
Sunak’s deal has the backing of some leading Brexiteers. As the Financial Times noted, “Steve Baker, Northern Ireland minister and self-described ‘hard man of Brexit’, scotched rumours he might quit, calling the pact ‘a really great deal’. David Davis, former Brexit secretary, also backed the agreement.”
A main player behind the scenes is the United States, which has crucial economic and political interests in ensuring a deal and stability on the island of Ireland. The US has long insisted that nothing must imperil the Good Friday Agreement it played a major role in securing, alongside the Blair Labour government, in 1998. As well as the Republic of Ireland, due to its status as a low tax haven, being a vital European hub for some of the largest US corporations; the Irish American lobby is a significant force in the ruling Democratic Party in the US.
Sunak also faces opposition from his predecessor Johnson, who is operating a campaign to undermine and hopefully replace Sunak as Tory leader. The Guardian noted Monday, “Although most Conservative MPs warmly welcomed the breakthrough after two years of negotiations, Johnson stayed away from the House of Commons chamber and is said not to have made up his mind about whether to endorse or oppose the ‘Windsor framework’”.
For weeks Johnson has publicly demanded that Sunak pass his stalled Northern Ireland Protocol Bill—giving the UK the right to unilaterally suspend aspects of the protocol in an emergency—which was drafted when Johnson was in office, in order to extract more concessions from the EU. However, the Sunday Times reported, “Privately, Johnson was more robust in an extraordinary confrontation in the Commons chamber with his former lord chancellor, Sir Robert Buckland, who lobbied Johnson to back the deal, arguing that it was necessary to cement relations with President Joe Biden. In a move that startled MPs, Johnson was overheard replying: ‘F*** the Americans!’”.
No vote is being held on the deal in Parliament this week, to allow the DUP’s 12 party officers to study the legal text and the Tory’s ERG to scrutinise it with the assistance of a “star chamber” of lawyers it is assembling. Sunak announced that MPs would “have a vote at the appropriate time”. DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson gave a guarded response, saying that while “significant progress” had been made, EU rules would still apply in Northern Ireland. He asked, “The key issue is why is EU law being applied and what is the purpose of that?”
It is highly likely that a vote in Parliament would pass the deal, as it has the backing of the main opposition Labour Party (with 196 MPs) in the 650-seat legislature. Speaking in Belfast last month, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said, “I say to the Prime Minister, if there is a deal to do in coming weeks, do it. Whatever political cover you need, whatever mechanisms in Westminster you require, if it delivers for our national interest and the people of Northern Ireland, we will support you. The time for action on the protocol is now. The time to stand up to the ERG is now.”
Starmer was a former leading Remain in the EU supporter, but has determined to accept Brexit—not least because he fears reopening divisions would politically destabilise the UK and prevent Labour taking office by again losing a substantial number of Brexit voting constituencies in the north of England.
On Saturday, the French military’s Operation Orion 2023 (Orion 23) began with hundreds of parachutists being dropped in the Tarn region of southern France. On Sunday morning, an amphibious assault was simulated at Sète on the Mediterranean coast.
This undated photo provided Thursday January 5, 2023, by the French Army shows AMX-10 RC tanks. [AP Photo/Jeremy Bessat/Armee de Terre]
This first stage of Orion 2023, which continues until the end of the week, involves 7,000 troops from France, the US, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the UK, which are all part of the NATO alliance that is waging war against Russia in Ukraine. Over this week, as many as 2,300 military vehicles will be involved in the war games. These include 40 warplanes, over 100 drones, 30 warships and the Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier.
According to General Yves Métayer, who led the organization of the operation, “We have never done an exercise of this magnitude over such a long period of time.” Another officer told France3: “The amount of resources made available, the degree of synergy between the different armies, is unheard of since I joined the army.”
However, the status of this week’s war games as the largest ever on French soil will only last a few weeks. A second stage of Operation Orion, involving over 12,000 troops, is scheduled to begin in mid-April in the Champagne region.
In the capitalist press, Orion 23 is being all but explicitly acknowledged as part of far-advanced preparations for an all-out NATO land war with Russia. Indeed, by supplying offensive weaponry to Ukraine, the NATO powers are already engaged in a de facto war on Russia.
State-run news agency France24 reported that the war games “should enable the French army to prepare for a high-intensity conflict against an enemy state of equal strength. … In a context of global geopolitical upheaval, the use of force is no longer taboo, and the prospect of a major conflict is no longer science fiction.”
While France’s bloody imperialist war in Mali allowed the military to hone its use of modern fighter-bomber aircraft and drones, its ground operations relied on smaller special forces groups. General Vincent Desportes told France24 that Orion 23 is essential to “regain the know-how in terms of managing large joint forces that we have lost because for two decades we have focused on small operations.”
The fictionalized scenario in this week’s war game is widely reported in the media. In a thinly veiled reference to Russia, a hostile power called “Mercure” has invaded a French ally named “Arnland,” and the French army’s goal is to establish a bridgehead in occupied Arnland and begin to push back Mercure forces. Such a scenario played out in occupied southern Ukraine or Crimea is undoubtedly a critical part of NATO’s battlefield plans for direct confrontation with Russia.
Another goal of Orion 23 is also to prepare to place the French state on a war footing. The Orion operation involved a simulated “information war,” where both sides struggle to control reportage on their actions. This is in line with the NATO powers’ efforts to suppress public knowledge of role played by Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias in the war against Russia, in addition to whitewashing war crimes committed by Ukrainian forces.
According to the French Defense ministry’s web site, the exercise will also involve many non-military government ministries and “will bring together the energies of civilian and military personnel working on the cohesion of the French nation.” In other words, police and other nominally civilian sections of the French state machine are also readying themselves for propaganda operations and intensified repression of strikes at protests, in the event of all-out war.
Operation Orion comes amid an explosion of the class struggle in France, as millions march against French President Emmanuel Macron’s widely despised pensions reform, which he justifies with the claim that “there is no more money.”
When it comes to pursuing the imperialist ambitions of the French ruling class and its NATO allies, however, hundreds of billions of euros are thrown around like small change. Orion 23, which cost €35 million to organize and involves billions of euros in military equipment, is only part of a far larger French military rearmament. In January, Macron pledged to spend €413 billion on the French military by 2030 (compared to under €300 billion for 2020-2025). A special amendment adopted in October last year also added an extra €3 billion to the military’s 2023 budget.
Since the beginning of the conflict, France has spent around €2 billion on arms deliveries and other aid to Ukraine. In January 2023, Macron was the first NATO leader to commit to tank deliveries to Ukrainian forces, pledging dozens of AMX-10 RCR light tanks. This year, France will complete the delivery of 30 self-propelled Howitzers to Ukraine, which have a unit cost of €7.5 million. Moreover, 2,000 Ukrainian troops are currently being trained on French soil.
This undated photo provided Thursday January 5, 2023, by the French Army shows AMX-10 RC tanks. [AP Photo/Jeremy Bessat/Armee de Terre]
With millions marching against Macron’s widely despised pension reform and deep popular opposition to further French arming of Ukraine against Russia, the French military’s open preparation for war with Russia with the Orion 23 exercises necessarily raises the question: How is Macron able to so brazenly funnel hundreds of billions to the military and prepare a bloody war against Russia?
The president has only been able to carry out his policy due to the support of the pseudo-left parties and trade union bureaucracies. While nominally opposed to Macron’s pension reform, pseudo-left Unsubmissive France leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon—and his NUPES (New Popular Ecological and Social Union) coalition with French social democrats and Stalinists—claims there is no link between the funding for the war and Macron’s attack on the working class.
Mélenchon and the unions have supported NATO’s arms deliveries to Ukraine since the beginning of the war and continues to whitewash NATO’s years-long efforts to provoke Putin into his reactionary invasion of Ukraine, which ultimately succeeded in February of last year.
The same forces also support massive investment into French rearmament. Earlier this month, a parliamentary report co-authored by Anna Pic, a member of the Socialist Party (PS), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s NUPES coalition called for even more funding for exercises to prepare France for “the hypothesis of a major conflict.”
The total confirmed loss of life in the February 6 earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria exceeded 51,000 yesterday, as a magnitude 5.6 aftershock rocked Malatya. At least one person died and more than 100 were injured. Experts say aftershocks in the region could continue for a year.
People who lost their houses in the devastating earthquake, sit outside their tent at a makeshift camp, in Iskenderun city, southern Turkey, on Feb. 14, 2023. [AP Photo/Hussein Malla]
With countless buildings and workplaces damaged and workers lacking housing and other basic needs, the capitalist class is forcing workers in the quake zone to work, demanding that production continues unabated. In response, workers are resisting this onslaught with wildcat strikes. Even before the quake, millions of workers were struggling against the extraordinary cost of living, as official inflation exceeded 80 percent.
Around 600 workers at the construction site of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in Mersin walked off the job last week, demanding a wage increase. Workers at the Russian-built site, which will be Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, stopped working on Wednesday after their demand for a 30 percent wage increase was rejected.
Intens Construction, another company operating at the same construction site, responded to workers’ demand for a wage increase by firing those who had gone to the earthquake zone to help.
Workers who went to the earthquake zone in solidarity and to participate in search and rescue operations said that when they returned, their entry cards were not issued. No executive gave them an explanation. “We asked for equipment for the earthquake and were not given it, and now they are firing us for going to help,” a worker told Sol Haber.
“They went to the earthquake zone with the call of the main company. They have arrived at the earthquake zone before the state, but they are fired. Is this right?” he said to the daily Evrensel.
Workers in the affected area are increasingly driven into struggle. An Iskur İplik thread worker in the Dulkadiroğlu district of Kahramanmaraş told Evrensel: “There was a fire in the factory because of collapsed floors [due to the quakes]. Other factories in the neighborhood also collapsed, but there were no casualties.”
The worker added that they are forced to work in unsafe factory buildings: “The whole place is shaking. What will happen if a concrete block falls on me in a new earthquake? If I lose an arm or a leg, management will say ‘it’s not my problem.’ Who will give me my rights?”
Shortly afterwards, a worker forced to work in a badly-damaged metal factory in the same district was killed and four others injured in a collapse. The company boss reportedly had forced workers to take the remaining products out of the factory.
A 23-year-old worker at the Haliloğlu weaving factory in Gaziantep, an industrial city in the earthquake zone, told the Gerçek Gündem that after the 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Hatay on February 20, the supervisor told them, “Get used to these earthquakes, get back to your machines.”
A worker from the Şireci textile factory in Gaziantep said the columns of the factory where he worked cracked after the earthquakes, but they were covered with plaster and workers were called in to work. The factory had sent a message promising 2,000 lira in aid to persuade workers who did not want to come to work.
Another worker at Şireci said, “Our factory exports to Russia. Trucks are waiting at the gate. The management has the ambition to keep the business going… The bosses are fine with it… It’s like in the military when they put the infantry in front, ‘let’s win this war, at any cost.’”
In Malatya, the majority of Mil-May textile workers did not go to work despite threats from management. On February 16, the company sent a message to the workers threatening them with dismissal without compensation if they did not continue working. Workers in textile factories in Adıyaman also said that their employers had called them to ask if they would return to work.
In many places, workers launched wildcat strikes, refusing to work in buildings damaged in the quake and facing dangerous new aftershocks. Workers at Şireci textile, Kaplanser carpet and Gür thread factories were among them.
Amid this growing backlash from workers, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a decree banning layoffs and introducing short-time working allowances for the affected area. Although the decree purportedly bans “layoffs” in the region, companies can dismiss workers by paying a fine of only one gross minimum wage.
For those who do not benefit from short-time working or unemployment allowance and remain unemployed, the Unemployment Insurance Fund will pay a very inadequate sum of 133 Turkish liras (TL) per day or around 4,000 TL (US$210) per month, during the state of emergency. The workers will be covered by General Health Insurance. However, the poverty line for a family of four already exceeds 30,000 TL (US$1,590).
This decree actually strengthens the hand of corporations. A similar decree was issued after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The “ban on dismissal” does not provide job security. It allows employers to dismiss workers for reasons such as “failure to comply with the rules of morality and goodwill” and “closure of the workplace” in the Labor Code.
Moreover, workers can be dismissed on trumped-up grounds, without notice or severance pay. Those who find a new job because the short-time working allowance is insufficient and want to start a new life outside the affected area cannot benefit from severance pay.
The capitalist class and the political establishment do not want to allow the earthquake disaster, which has caused massive destruction and loss of life, to stop the wheels of production and thus cause a prolonged disruption in the extraction of profit from workers. Companies are more worried about the loss of labor power than the social destruction faced by masses of workers. It is estimated that 3 or 4 million people have migrated from the 11 provinces in the affected region.
Hikmet Çinçin, the chair of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Antakya, one of the cities hardest hit by the quakes, told Ekonomim.com: “Businesses need to maintain their minimum human resources to survive. I think the healthy male population should not leave the city.”
Food stamp benefits are being reduced across the board Wednesday, with 42 million Americans, all of them poor and many of them children, seeing cuts ranging from $95 to $235 a month per household. The average per capita payment will fall to $6.10 a day, or about $2 a meal.
This monstrous attack on the most vulnerable in American society is being carried through on a bipartisan basis. An emergency increase of food stamp benefits enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic was ended, effective March 1, 2023, by the omnibus budget bill passed by Congress last December and signed into law by President Biden.
Further cuts for the poorest Americans are already in the pipeline, either as part of the budget legislation or because of Biden’s decision to end the Public Health Emergency (PHE) and declare the COVID-19 pandemic over, effective May 11, 2023. This declaration flies in the face of the grim reality that hundreds continue to die every day from COVID-19 in the US alone and thousands worldwide.
The cuts will include the restart of eligibility determination for food stamps, Medicaid and other social benefits, which was halted in March 2020 when the eruption of the pandemic compelled the Trump administration to declare a national emergency. Hundreds of thousands of families and individuals will be cut off month by month and millions by the end of the year.
The reduction in food stamps (officially SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) actually began on February 1, when 18 states, all of them Republican-controlled, began the cuts as soon as it was legally possible. The one month phase-in of the cuts ends March 1, when 32 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and the US Virgin Islands, will put them in place.
The numbers affected on March 1, state by state, are staggering. The top 16 include: California, 2.93 million people; New York, 1.61 million; Texas, 1.34 million; Illinois, 1.06 million; Pennsylvania, 1.04 million; North Carolina, 813,000; Michigan, 705,000; Ohio, 673,000; Massachusetts, 629,000; Washington, 518,000; Virginia, 470,000; Oregon, 416,000; Alabama, 393,000; New Jersey, 388,000; Maryland, 360,000; and Wisconsin, 347,000.
The food stamp cuts are particularly perverse and reactionary because they take place under conditions of high inflation in food prices. According to the US Department of Agriculture, food prices rose by 11.4 percent in 2022 overall, faster last year than in 2021. Eggs led the way, up 32.2 percent, in part because of the avian flu epidemic. Fats and oils were up 18.5 percent, poultry was up 14.6 percent, other meat up 14.2 percent. Cereals and bakery products were up 13 percent.
Millions of low income people, most of them drawn from the “working poor,” must now pay these higher prices from a food stamp allotment that has been slashed significantly and will stay there. The Congressional Budget Office projects that overall food stamp outlays will fall this year because of the cutoff of emergency benefits and remain flat for the next decade.
The result, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and lobbying group in Washington, is that millions will go over a “hunger cliff.” The organization warned, “The steepest cliff will be for older adults at the minimum benefit level who will have their monthly SNAP benefits fall from $281 to $23.”
Mass hunger will grow, and there will be increasing demand on the pathetically inadequate resources of food banks and other charities. In Georgia, where the cuts have already taken effect, the Atlanta Community Food Bank reported a 34 percent increase in visits.
The Biden administration has declared that Russia is guilty of “crimes against humanity” in the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the American government is carrying out what can only be called a “crime against humanity” within the United States. But there have been no presidential speeches about the cuts to food stamps, and no “courageous” secret visits to Michigan, Mississippi or West Virginia for the president to show his solidarity and sympathy with those struggling to survive. That is because Biden himself is the author of this crime, along with those he likes to call his “Republican friends.”
Biden’s war against Russia and his war against the poor and the working class at home are directly connected. The US government has already spent $110 billion on the war against Russia in Ukraine, which was deliberately provoked by the expansion of NATO through Eastern Europe to Russia’s borders. This is roughly the same as the $113 billion annual cost of the entire SNAP program, and more than triple the amount that will be “saved” through the cutbacks being imposed on March 1.
The total number of Americans affected by the food stamps cutoff, 42 million, is even larger than the population of Ukraine, 39 million. The US ruling elite cares nothing about either one. The people of Ukraine are being used as cannon fodder for a war against Russia that has been instigated by Washington as part of its drive to dominate the Eurasian land mass. The recipients of food stamps are being further impoverished in order to pay for that war and provide the even greater sums required for the worldwide operations of the American military machine, including an impending war with China.
There are no screaming newspaper headlines or emergency bulletins on cable news about the impending disaster for 42 million Americans, who would comprise the largest state in the country if taken as a unit. Not a single congressional leader, Democratic or Republican, has issued a statement of protest. That is, of course, because they all agreed to this policy with their votes last December.
Particular note should be taken of the silence from the so-called left wing of the Democratic Party. Senator Bernie Sanders has said nothing. On his Senate website, one can find him declaring that food stamp cuts by the Republican administration of Donald Trump were “unconscionable.” But when the cuts come now under the Democratic administration of Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” loses his voice.
Likewise, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squad” of House members, who belong to or are supported by the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America, have said nothing against the food stamp cuts. Ocasio-Cortez too denounced the food stamp cuts by Trump, declaring that the program was vital to working people, and that her own family “may have starved” without it. But under Democrat Joe Biden, and with a six-figure congressional salary, the starving masses are no longer her concern.
In the most violent settler attack on Palestinians in decades, 400 Israeli vigilantes went on the rampage in Huwara, a town close to the northern city of Nablus in the West Bank, Sunday evening. At least one Palestinian was killed and more than 100 were injured on the pogrom-style attack.
There were horrific scenes of settlers, some masked and carrying guns and other weapons, setting fire to scores of homes and shops, destroying 35 and damaging at least 40 more. They torched more than 400 cars and destroyed agricultural property, leaving the town aflame for hours afterwards. Nine Palestinian families had to be rescued from their homes, according to Israel’s public broadcaster, Channel 12 news.
Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers stand next to a damaged Palestinian building in the town of Hawara, near the West Bank city of Nablus, February 27, 2023. Scores of Israeli settlers went on a violent rampage in the northern West Bank, setting cars and homes on fire. Palestinian officials say one man was killed and four others were badly wounded. [AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg]
Palestinian health authorities said that a 37-year-old man had been shot and killed by Israeli fire. Two people were wounded by gunfire, a third was stabbed and a fourth was beaten with an iron bar. Ninety-five others were being treated for teargas inhalation, stabbings and beatings. Settlers also attacked other towns in the area, as well as Ramallah and Salfit.
One Israeli commentator made the comparison with Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” the state-orchestrated pogrom carried out by the Nazis against the Jews in Germany in 1938.
The intention of the attackers is to provoke a wider conflagration and create the basis for stepped up ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and possibly an all-out war by Israel.
The attack came in the wake of the killing by a Palestinian of two Israeli brothers who lived in one of the nearby settlements that surround Huwara as they drove through the town earlier Sunday morning. It had been widely trailed on social media, with settlers announcing a rally through the town, posting flyers and giving out leaflets calling for revenge.
Despite this, the constant military patrols in the area and the regional headquarters of the Samaria just two minutes away, neither the Border Police nor the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) deployed troops to stop the vigilantes. As in all previous settler attacks, those soldiers that were there simply stood by, protecting the vigilantes not the victims. The next day, the streets were empty, bar the settlers who chanted racist slogans and gave the thumbs up signal, taunting the residents.
Sunday’s violence caps weeks of escalating violence and criminality by Israeli security forces that have shot 67 Palestinians, including 13 children, as they carried out mass operations aimed at arresting alleged terrorists, including a Palestinian gunman who killed seven Israelis in a settlement in East Jerusalem.
These killing sprees, extra-judicial executions, are provocations designed to precipitate revenge attacks on Jewish Israelis. They come just two months after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power at the head of a coalition of fascist, racist and ultra-orthodox religious nationalist parties that are determined to annex the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied illegally since the 1967 Arab Israeli war.
Settler attacks on Palestinians, their homes, property and land, in the occupied territories, a recurrent feature for decades, spreading to attacks on Israel’s own Palestinian citizens in the last year, have escalated in tandem. They have been aided and abetted by the most advanced military machine in the Middle East.
Instead of protecting the Palestinians as required under international law, Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas grenades, rubber bullets and live rounds to drive Palestinians from their own lands and sometimes even joined the settlers in their attacks.
In 2022, Israeli security forces injured more than 2,000 Palestinians in settler-related incidents, four times more than in 2021. There was a near 50 percent increase in settler violence in 2022 compared to 2021. The last weekend in January saw 144 settler attacks on Palestinians and their property in just the northern part of the West Bank, according to Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official.
Lior Amihai, executive director of Yesh Din, an Israeli legal advocacy group that defends Palestinians in legal cases, says that the Palestinians have no recourse to help when they are attacked. “They are completely alone. It’s the Wild West. That’s why it’s like a pogrom.” Peace Now and B’Tselem, Israeli NGOs, also described the settler attacks as a “pogrom” supported by the government.
Recent weeks have seen Ben-Gvir, the Israeli security minister, take increasingly punitive measures against Palestinian prisoners in Israel jails, believed to number around 5,000, who, he said, were being treated too softly. These measures include the increased use of solitary confinement, searches of cells, bans on visits, the closure of prison-run bakeries and a four-minute time limit on showers, as well as legislative proposals to limit medical treatment.
The pogrom-like rampage in Huwara followed the call by Finance Minister and Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich for the IDF to “strike the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters.” He said that Israel should act “in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.” He had earlier liked a tweet by a settler leader saying that “the village of Huwara should be wiped out today,” deleting it only after the revenge raid.
Not a single cabinet minister condemned the vigilantes or the security forces’ failure to restrain them. Netanyahu responded by immediately announcing that Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, had passed legislation approving the death penalty for those convicted of terrorism offences against Israelis. He and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and National Security Minister, made pious statements, saying, “This is not the way.” But Ben-Gvir gave voice to his real agenda, declaring, “The government of Israel, the state of Israel, the IDF, the security forces—they are the ones who have to crush our enemies.”
Jewish Power legislator Zvika Fogel gave his full-throated support for the burning down of Palestinian villages in revenge for attacks on Jewish Israelis. He said Monday, “A closed, burnt Huwara—that’s what I want to see. That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act.” He also said, “We need to stop shying away from collective punishment,” a crime under international humanitarian law. Members of Netanyahu’s Likud party supported the settlers.
While the United Nations, the United States and the major European powers have condemned the violence and called for a “de-escalation of tensions,” they have supported Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians for decades. They have all given Netanyahu’s fascistic government the green light to terrorise the Palestinians with ever greater force in pursuit of its agenda of annexing the Palestinian territories and implementing apartheid rule, as embodied in the “Nation-State Law” enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state.
The raid on Huwara, orchestrated by the Netanyahu government and given de facto support by the Israeli military, came just hours after officials from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt and the US met in the Jordanian port city of Aqaba. The talks “reaffirmed the need to commit to de-escalation on the ground and to prevent further violence”, in an effort ostensibly aimed at de-escalating the tensions in the West Bank and preventing a broader conflagration spilling over into neighbouring countries. The Jordan foreign ministry published a concluding statement saying Israel had agreed to pause the expansion of the settlements and the legalization of settlements outposts, illegal even under Israeli law, but Netanyahu immediately repudiated any such agreement.
The killing of two Israeli settlers Sunday was the response by groups who fear the Palestinians are being betrayed and disarmed by the Palestinian Authority and the Arab regimes in the face of Israel’s intention to drive them out of large swathes of the West Bank. 'The Hawara operation is a natural response to the occupation's crimes, the latest of which was the Nablus massacre,' a spokesperson for Hamas said.
Facing the clear threat of a worsening pandemic in Brazil, driven by the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant, the Workers Party (PT) government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has signaled its intention to declare the pandemic over and get the Brazilian population used to “living” with the coronavirus.
On February 16, the Health Ministry announced that it will start releasing COVID-19 data of cases, deaths and vaccination rates weekly and no longer daily, starting March 3. Trying to justify what in practice means a further departure from monitoring the pandemic in the country, the Health Ministry’s director of immunization, Eder Gatti, stated that only nine of the 27 Brazilian states update the data daily, which supposedly does not “allow an epidemiological analysis.” Still, he claimed, “We are not restricting data. ... What we want here is to facilitate the work with the data and send weekly data that is more accurate.”
This claim is patently false. If the Lula government had a genuine concern about the pandemic, the least it could do is coordinate a national effort and assist the states in implementing a system to monitor the pandemic on a daily basis, with a mass testing program, genetic sequencing of the variants in circulation, among other measures completely ignored by the “herd immunity” policy of the former fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.
However, almost two months after taking office, the Lula government has not reversed the Bolsonaro government’s measures to prioritize corporate interests over human lives, including its ending of the National Public Health Emergency due to COVID-19 as early as April 2022. The Lula government has also failed to implement awareness campaigns about the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the importance of wearing quality masks and distributing them for free, as well as other basic public health measures that would have an almost immediate impact and could prevent cases and deaths.
The Brazilian bourgeois media has aided the Lula government in its effort to hide the pandemic. In a move that set the stage for the Lula government’s decision to begin limiting the release of COVID-19 data to a weekly basis, in late January, Brazil’s major dailies ended their joint daily pandemic tracking system, launched in June 2020 when the Bolsonaro government attempted to censor COVID-19 data in Brazil.
Throughout February, the news about the pandemic in Brazil and around the world virtually disappeared from the Brazilian media, especially with the approach of Carnival, which became the focus of the news in recent weeks and was deliberately seized upon by the Lula government to announce the change in the release of pandemic data in Brazil. In fact, two of the most important Brazilian newspapers, Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de S. Paulo, did not even report this change by the Health Ministry.
Screenshot of Health Minister Nísia Trindade during her speech on February 17 (Twitter) [Photo: Twitter]
Later, the Lula government took a step further in its attempt to cover up the pandemic in Brazil. On February 17, Health Minister Nísia Trindade released a video saying, as if the pandemic was over, that “finally, the time has come for us to celebrate the biggest popular party in our country.” This statement on the eve of Carnival, when the service and tourism sectors in Brazil reap billions in profits, also expressed the Lula government’s intention not to put any restrictions on the economy, even with the worsening of the pandemic.
The Brazilian Carnival threatens to become a new superspreader event for the coronavirus and drive another wave in Brazil. This situation may be further aggravated by the spread of the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant, which is more transmissible and more vaccine-resistant. It was first detected in São Paulo in early January, and a month later XBB.1.5 was responsible for 80 percent of the cases in the state.
Parroting the anti-scientific claim advanced by the world’s capitalist elite that vaccination alone is enough to control a disease as infectious as COVID-19, Trindade also said in the video, “our great ally [right now] is vaccination. The more people with full vaccination, the more we will be protected in the face of the severe forms of the disease.”
Although vaccines protect against severe COVID-19, they do not prevent people from getting infected and suffering all its effects, particularly Long COVID. Considering this, the Lula government’s health minister is saying to the population that it can ignore all the other tools that science has used for decades to fight infectious diseases, such as social distancing and the use of masks, and take the risk of getting infected and suffering all the consequences.
This, in fact, has been put in place since the PT’s election victory, with the habit of Trindade and government officials—including Lula himself, who is 77 years old and has already tested positive for COVID-19—of attending closed and crowded events without wearing masks. After the wearing of masks, as well as the tracking of the pandemic, were relentlessly targeted by the “herd immunity” policy of Bolsonaro government—policies which the PT supposedly “fought”—this bad example leaves society totally unprepared for the risk of a new outbreak, which now threatens Brazil.
Since the beginning of February, there has been a reversal in the drop of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Brazil after a wave driven by the Omicron BQ.1 subvariant last year. On February 22, Isaac Schrarstzhaupt, the coordinator of the COVID-19 Network, one of the few initiatives still tracking the pandemic in Brazil, confirmed this trend, drawing particular attention to the increase in the occupancy of nursing beds in São Paulo from 750 on February 7 to 1,050 on February 21. Nationally, only the Southern region is not registering a worsening of the pandemic. In the Northern region, the state of Amazonas registered a 546 percent increase in hospitalizations and a 1,200 percent increase in cases in the first 15 days of February.
Data from the last few days further confirms this trend. After the failure to release COVID-19 data between February 18 and 21, due to Carnival, on Wednesday, Brazil registered 453 deaths and 11,616 cases, while on Thursday 334 deaths and 9,646 cases were recorded. Due to massive under-reporting, the average number of cases between February 11 and 17 decreased from 8,192 to 3,544 between February 18 and 23, while the average number of deaths increased from 55 to 131 in the same period.
In contrast to the position of the Lula government’s health minister, leading neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis has issued a series of warnings on Twitter in recent days. “The pandemic has been totally removed from the agenda and political speeches,” he wrote last Thursday. “Two days before the beginning of Carnival, which promises to have the largest crowds in decades, there is no official communication from the MH [Ministry of Health] to alert the population about the spread of new Omicron variants! No strategy to break transmission, other than vaccines, announced.”
On Monday, Nicolelis added: “The MH [Ministry of Health] should not join the negligence and lack of health responsibility of states that fail to publish daily COVID-19 data. It should instead determine that this data be made available daily. This conduct is shameful and extremely disappointing.”
Although Bolsonaro represents the most vicious expression of “herd immunity,” recent events expose the PT’s embrace of this homicidal policy. This, however, had already been made clear in previous waves of the pandemic in Brazil. In the second deadly wave, in 2021, Nicolelis, himself a longtime PT supporter, left the scientific committee of the Northeastern states in the face of inaction by the region’s governors, including four of them from the PT.
Then, during the peak of the Omicron BA.1 subvariant wave early last year, Nicolelis again denounced the PT’s policy, saying in an interview with the WSWS: “the PT governors, who I know very well because I worked with them, stopped doing what had to be done a long time ago. So, who are the progressives in this story? I have seen conduct by so-called progressive people that was very similar to Bolsonaro’s. They just had the varnish and the stamp of progressives.” The same thing could now be said of the Lula government.
This development confirms the warnings of the Rank-And-File Committee for Safe Education in Brazil (CBES-BR) that the Lula government would follow the example of other capitalist leaders who, with each wave of the pandemic, withdrew the mitigation measures still in place. This, in turn, has allowed its wide circulation and the emergence of a subvariant such as XBB1.5, which has spurred a deadly wave in the US recently and now threatens Brazil.
At least 59 migrants have been killed after their wooden vessel shipwrecked on the rocks off the Calabrian coast in Italy. A newborn baby and 19 other children were among the dead. Many of the bodies washed up on shore near a seaside resort.
Another 81 people are known to have survived, 20 of whom have been taken to hospital, one to intensive care. According to survivors, roughly 150 people were originally on board. They had set sail from Turkey three or four days previously.
Responsibility for this terrible crime lies with all the governments of Europe, who have conspired to turn the continent into a “fortress” against desperate people, and with the United States and its allies whose imperialist violence has dismembered societies across the Middle East and Africa, forcing unprecedented numbers to flee their homes.
Rescuers recover a body after a migrant boat broke apart in rough seas, at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. Rescue officials say an undetermined number of migrants have died and dozens have been rescued after their boat broke apart off southern Italy. [AP Photo/Giuseppe Pipita]
With repulsive hypocrisy, the fascist Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni proclaimed her “deep sorrow,” before pledging more of the policies responsible for bloodbath on Europe’s borders, a crackdown on routes to Europe by “preventing departures.” Her interior minister boasted last week that such measures, implemented with Libya and Tunisia, had already “averted the arrival” of close to 21,000 people—trapping them in hellish conditions in those countries and pushing countless others to risk more dangerous journeys.
The same message as the fascist Meloni could be heard from any of Europe’s rulers.
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said she was “deeply saddened” by the deaths, before adding, “We must redouble our efforts on the (EU) Pact on Migration and Asylum and on the Action Plan on the Central Mediterranean.” Its details were spelt out at an EU summit earlier this month which discussed an “integrated package of mobile and stationary infrastructures… from vehicles to cameras, from watchtowers to electronic surveillance” to deny entry to asylum seekers and plans to make easier the mass deportation of refugees and to strengthen collaboration with the brutal regimes policing the North African coast.
“Fortress Europe” has already seen 2,406 people recorded as dead or missing in the Mediterranean by the International Organization for Migration in 2022. Nearly 26,000 have been lost since 2014. This says nothing of the horrors suffered on the road to the Turkish or North African coast, or the network of internment camps in which tens of thousands of refugees are imprisoned and denied basic democratic rights.
Since the 2015 picture of a young Syrian boy lying dead on the beach in Turkey produced an outpouring of popular shock and anger, government policy has made dead children washing up on the shore a regular event. In November 2020, a five-year-old boy was found dead on the shores of the Greek island Samos. His father lost hold of him as their boat capsized on rocks. He is now facing 10 years in prison, charged with endangering his son’s life. He was taken in handcuffs to identify the body.
The next month, the bodies four children aged between 5 and 10 were found on the beach west of the Libyan capital Tripoli. Five months later, another three children, including a six-month-old baby and a three-year-old, were found dead on the same stretch of coast. A month after that, a one-year-old was found on the Norwegian coast after drowning with his family trying to cross from France to the UK.
In May 2021, Guardian analysis linked 2,000 deaths to the EU’s pushback operations, illegal under international law, to force migrants away from Europe’s borders, including the use of violence and humiliation. This is the tip of an iceberg of suffering, with the worst abuse outsourced to forces in Libya and Tunisia, intercepting migrant vessels and returning refugees to camps in which torture, rape, extortion, murder and slavery are rife.
Another strategy has been to abandon refugees to the sea. A 2021 report by the European Commissioner for Human Rights found that European governments had been redeploying ships away from areas where they were most likely to find migrants in distress.
Many small NGOs have stepped in to uphold the international obligation to save lives at sea. Meloni’s government is spearheading efforts to outlaw these emergency efforts. On Thursday, the parliament passed a law requiring rescue vessels to immediately sail to a port after completing a rescue, rather than find other boats in distress.
A body and the wreckage from a capsized boat are seen at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. Rescue officials say an undetermined number of migrants have died and dozens have been rescued after their boat broke apart off southern Italy. [AP Photo/Giuseppe Pipita]
But while the Italian government has gone the furthest in law, it is only codifying the common policy of all the European powers. On Friday, 15 EU states issued a statement calling for financial support for “all types of border protection infrastructure including physical barriers.” They added that “the support of Frontex should also be increased and fully deployed in the most affected member states,” and demanded “more possibilities for accelerated [deportation] procedures followed by rejections in case of unfounded asylum applications.”
Rescue ships filled with hundreds of refugees are regularly left stranded at sea for weeks as country after country refuses access to its ports. In 2020, Amnesty International published a report, “Solidarity on trial in Fortress Europe,” condemning how “human rights defenders and civil society organizations that have helped refugees and migrants have been subjected to unfounded criminal proceedings, undue restrictions of their activities, intimidation, harassment, and smear campaigns in several European countries.”
One case cited was the Greek government’s ongoing investigation of a group of 24 volunteer workers who rescued migrants off the coast of Lesbos for alleged human trafficking, money laundering and fraud. Initial charges of espionage had to be dropped. The group includes Sarah Mardini, whose story of helping fellow refugees cross the sea from Turkey to Greece inspired the film The Swimmers.
Mardini fled the devastating war in Syria waged between NATO’s Islamist proxy forces and the government of Bashar al-Assad. The refugees drowned Sunday hailed from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Iran—also the subject of US occupations, military interventions, indiscriminate drone strikes and crippling sanctions and the victims of global inequality and climate change. These factors have created a record forcibly displaced population of more than 100 million people, considered so much human debris by the world’s capitalist governments.
Nearly four million displaced people are living in Turkey, including, until recently, those shipwrecked in Calabria. Another 6.6 million are internally displaced in Syria. Many had their lives devastated a second time by the earthquake earlier this month which killed at least 50,000 people and has left millions homeless.
The response of the European governments says everything about the ruling class’s priorities. So far the European Commission has pledged just €6.5 million in aid for victims of the earthquake, while last year €754 million was made available for its border force Frontex. The agency, along with the Greek government, has stepped up patrols around the Aegean in anticipation of larger numbers of people seeking to escape the disaster. “The mass movement of millions of people is not the solution,” threatened Greece’s migration minister Notis Mitarachi.
The assault on migrants and denial of democratic rights is playing out globally. Last week, US President Joe Biden announced an immigration policy barring entry and asylum to almost all migrants at the southern US border in a gross violation of international law.
Events like these tear apart the fiction that the US and European powers are waging a war for “democracy” and “freedom” again Russia in Ukraine. In fact, NATO’s war and the attacks on migrants are inextricably linked. A major war in Europe is incompatible with democratic rights and demands a massive assault on the living standards of the working class, which will fall fastest and heaviest on its most vulnerable sections, already forced to flee their homes and communities.
