French government determined to keep schools open as virus spreads

Samuel Tissot

As the spread of more infectious and dangerous variants of the coronavirus strain French hospitals, the Macron government is doubling down on its efforts to keep schools open. His policy is driven by the interests of the capitalist class, which is demanding that schools be kept open as holding pens for children so that their parents can continue to work.

On Monday night, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer gave an interview to LCI in an effort to win support for the government’s policy. Despite his personal oversight of attacks on school funding in the 2018 high school reforms and the elimination of 2,650 public school positions in 2019, he feigned concern for the toll of school closures on children’s mental health.

“Keeping schools open is my deepest conviction,” he said. “Being deprived of school can be very serious for children on the educational, social, psychological and even health levels.” Dismissing the deaths resulting from this policy, he boasted, “France is the country that has experienced the most school days in 2020.”

A family watches French President Emmanuel Macron's televised speech, Monday April 13, 2020, in Lyon, central France. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

Blanquer stated, “I am not convinced at this stage that this solution [closing schools] could reduce the contamination.” This is a bald-faced lie that contradicts international scientific studies showing that schools act as transmission vectors for the virus. Earlier on Monday, Eric Caumes, the head of infectious diseases at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, stated on RMC, “It’s circulating in schools, there’s no reason why France should be the only country in the world where it’s not circulating in schools … there’s a cost that we’re going to have to pay.”

Later in Blanquer’s interview, he attempted to shift blame from his government’s murderous “herd immunity” policy onto school children and their parents. Dismissing suggestions of extending the February vacation, he claimed that “vacations can be more contaminating than school periods.”

Yesterday, 3,041 individuals were treated for COVID-19 in hospital intensive care units in France. The figure has risen by over 1,000 in the last two days alone. This is the first time that ICU occupancy has exceeded 3,000 since November. On Monday, another 445 people died from the virus, and the seven-day average for new infections reached a two-week high of 20,447. Since the premature reopening of schools in September, over 40,000 people have died from the virus in France.

Reports indicate that the UK and South African variants may pose even greater risks to children and youth than the previously dominant strains. Last month Imperial College London virologist Wendy Barclay suggested that it may “put children on a more level playing-field.” In Israel, 40 percent of positive cases of the UK variant have been amongst school age children. Last week Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem opened a pediatric COVID-19 ICU to treat “very sick” children. In an interview on Monday, a South African health care worker told LCI, “It [the South African variant] is serious. A lot of people are dying. Even children are dying now.”

Both variants are present and spreading in France. A report from the National Health and Medical Research Institute last week stated that the UK variant could become “dominant” in France between the “end of February and mid-March.” Variants first identified in California and Brazil, the effects of which are currently unknown, have also been detected in France. On Monday, the president of the government’s scientific council, Jean-Francois Delfraissy, warned, “These variants are the equivalent of a second pandemic. And I am weighing my words.”

The immediate closure of schools and all nonessential workplaces is a question of life and death for tens of thousands. The Macron government is pursuing a policy that has caused and knows it will cause mass death. A January 22 article by RTL cited the statements of Prime Minister Jean Castex and Health Minister Olivier Véran stating that “we will not escape” being overwhelmed by the new strain of the virus. Yet the government has refused any serious measures to stop the its spread.

Blanquer’s lies are only an extension of the government’s criminal tactics to conceal the true extent of the outbreak in schools. Teachers and parents in schools throughout the country have exposed cases of schools remaining open despite outbreaks.

On January 18, a school in Oise remained open despite recording 26 positive cases following an outbreak amongst students. On January 25, a school in Roise-en-Brie received 12 positive test results but nonetheless remained open. In a farcical episode, the Jean-Zay nursery in Cherbourg-en-Contentin had its entire staff infected but was shortly reopened on January 18 with a full team of replacements. This new team immediately contracted the virus, presumably from five toddlers who later tested positive, forcing the nursery to close again.

Yesterday, the government announced that Macron, who had been due to announce some form of heightened restrictions this evening, will not speak until at least Saturday. The government’s policy runs against popular sentiment. On January 13, a BFMTV survey found that 75 percent were in favor of a new lockdown.

Despite mass anger toward Macron’s herd immunity policy and its refusal to take any meaningful measures to stem the deadly spread of the virus, the unions and “left” political parties have refused to mobilize teachers and workers against the government’s “herd immunity” policy. On Tuesday, the education unions called a one-day strike for education funding, making no mention of closing schools in response to the virus.

Huge COVID-19 outbreak at Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency exposes fraudulent UK lockdown

Thomas Scripps

A massive, sustained COVID-19 outbreak at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) offices and call centre in Swansea, Wales has exposed the Conservative government’s fraudulent “national lockdown” and contempt for workers’ lives.

The DVLA is a government agency under the Department of Transport. Since September, 535 workers have tested positive, the largest known number of infections linked to a single employer and workplace. The DVLA has a total workforce of 6,000 people, meaning more than one in 12 have been infected in the last five months.

It is certain that these infections have contributed to the appalling toll of infections and deaths in the Swansea Bay area, where more than 26,000 cases have been registered and 828 COVID-related deaths.

The DVLA headquarters in Swansea (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

This disaster is the direct result of actions taken by management at DVLA and the loosened restrictions implemented during this lockdown compared to the original shutdown in March--despite the development of a more infectious strain of the virus and the overwhelming pressure on the National Health Service (NHS). It has been facilitated by the Labour Party and the trade unions, who have suppressed all opposition to the Tories’ herd immunity policy, exposing huge numbers of people to the virus in order to keep the economy producing profits.

According to the Guardian, roughly 1,800 workers are currently being asked to come into the office. During the lockdown last spring, just 250 workers were kept on site. One employee told the newspaper, “We sit back-to-back, just one metre apart. They say ‘the two-metre rule only applies if you’re face to face’.” He said the virus had “spread like wildfire. Loads have tested positive. More than I can count’.”

Another employee explained, “On each floor there are only two sets of toilets: ladies and gents. There are four kitchens on each floor too. All the teams are sharing the facilities—It’s high risk. There are cases on every floor now.” Workers were “all worried. We are all scared. Lots and lots of people have been ill. We have had staff in hospital.”

The outbreak has been so severe, she explained, and so widely known, that local people have been wary of contact with DVLA employees. “People will not go into local shops if DVLA staff are there because they are scared of catching it from us. I have family I have been unable to visit because I work in DVLA.”

Neither worker gave their real name for fear of victimisation.

Managers have actively sought to prevent the outbreak being recognised and contained. A complaint received by Public Health Wales’s outbreak control team warned that DVLA workers had been asked to turn off test-and-trace apps so that they were not notified of close contact with an infectious person and required to self-isolate.

Workers report that any COVID-related absence they do take is counted against their sick leave, with absences lasting longer than 10 days resulting in a warning. Employees with symptoms have reportedly been told to come in to work and vulnerable workers have been refused requests to work from home.

The DVLA outbreak has a long history, with nothing done to prevent it by any responsible bodies.

A few days after the first national lockdown began on March 23, Wales Online reported workers’ concerns: “We have to walk past people on a daily basis, the hand sanitiser is nearly finished, staff are distraught”, “we all have to use the same lifts, pass scanners and doors”, “The office cleanliness is below par, and the toilets are unclean.”

Referring to the number of people still being asked to come into work, others warned, “There’s no need to have that many staff there and it's hard to keep distance.”

One employee said a colleague had suffered an anxiety attack after being told they would have to take unpaid leave if they wanted to keep out of the building.

The threat of a mass walkout forced the DVLA to significantly reduce its services and the number of workers coming into the offices. In response, the agency called on the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), led by putative “left” Mark Serwotka, and with thousands of members in the DVLA offices, to help enforce a return to work. The union issued an update on July 31 noting briefly, “In DVLA, where telephony and IT cannot be managed from home, staff have continued to do essential work, and a more gradual return to the office continues as the workplace is being made safe.”

The same day, the BBC reported that the DVLA was recruiting 400 additional staff to clear a backlog of work.

By the end of the year, the results of the collusion between the employers and the PCS were clear. Between September and December 21, there were 352 cases at the agency’s offices.

Workers at that time were telling Wales Online that they were being asked to hot desk with different teams, working across different floors of the building. Others said, “Staff are being forced to work in a building with no opening windows,” and that “Staff are not being informed if they have been in close contact with someone in work who has tested positive for the virus.”

One worker warned, “The hygiene levels are very poor. Each desk has plastic screens in front of them, these are never cleaned. We are told that Public Health Wales and Swansea Council have been on site, I suspect that the areas they are being shown are selected and are not a true reflection.”

“Staff with underlying health conditions have been asked to sign ‘waivers’ which are then sent to HR for those who wish to attend work, knowing that these people suffer from severe illness.”

The DVLA was forced to admit an outbreak and close one their offices from December 24 to January 4. The company’s main site was allowed to reopen with the pathetic “concession” that all requests for leave would be granted, so long as the employee had leave left to take, between December 22 and January 4.

All sites were reopened on January 4 with the PCS declaring, “It is our preference that the contact centre remains closed,” promising only to “to press for the contact centre to be closed until the risk of Covid is much lower.”

After all this, Serwotka had the gall to declare on behalf of the PCS, in response to the new outbreak, “It is a scandal that DVLA are not doing more to reduce numbers.”

If it is “a scandal” that the company has put in place policies allowing the mass infection of the workforce, what word best describes the union which let it happen? Serwotka proposes nothing more than handing responsibility back to the criminals in the Tory government whose every policy has been aimed at keeping workers in unsafe workplaces: “Ministers must intervene and ensure DVLA are doing their utmost to enable staff to work from home and temporarily cease non-critical services,” he said.

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) warned that the government’s assurances that employers would follow safety guidelines, watched over by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), were rotten lies. This was confirmed by outbreak after outbreak in workplaces—in warehouses, food distribution centres, food processing factories, textile factories, Royal Mail depots, bus garages and large farms.

Philip Taylor, a Professor of Work and Employment Studies at the University of Strathclyde, conducted a survey of call centre workers, reported by the WSWS, which he said “lifts the lid on the nightmare being endured by many agents.” Significant outbreaks have since occurred at call centres in Doncaster, Motherwell and Newcastle.

Every warning has been confirmed under the current lockdown. The Observer reported January 17 that “no enforcement notices have been served on companies by Health and Safety Executive… inspectors for Covid safety breaches since the country went into the latest lockdown, despite being contacted 2,945 times about workplace safety issues between 6 and 14 January. Overall, just 0.1% of the nearly 97,000 Covid safety cases dealt with by the agency during the pandemic appear to have resulted in an improvement or prohibition safety notice, with not a single company prosecuted for Covid-related breaches of safety laws.”

The DVLA outbreak makes clear that the exposure of the working class to the virus is the result of policy, not oversight. The facts must be uncovered and charges brought against those responsible in court, including the chief culprit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Millions of Brazilian students refuse to take exam amid rising opposition to back to school campaign

Eduardo Parati

While the second wave of the coronavirus is resulting in record numbers of cases and deaths and overwhelming Brazil’s health care system, all sections of the ruling class are imposing the “herd immunity” policy, with several state governments announcing a return to school in the coming weeks.

Last Thursday, the country registered 1,382 new coronavirus deaths in 24 hours, the highest number since August 4 during the height of the first wave of the pandemic. The seven-day daily average has surpassed 1,000 deaths once again, amid a grossly mismanaged rollout of the COVID vaccine. São Paulo State Health Secretary Jean Gorinchteyn has stated that the vaccine will have no impact on the number of cases for six months.

Under these conditions, the country’s 2020 national college admission exam, the ENEM, was held last week throughout the country, after being postponed for a couple of months. In the state of Amazonas, where the health care system collapsed with COVID-19 patients dying due to the lack of oxygen tanks, the ENEM was merely postponed for a few more weeks.

Students responded to the holding of the exam with a 51.5 percent absence rate, which corresponds to more than 2.8 million candidates. Between 2009 and 2019, absence on the first day of the exam was 28 percent on average. The unprecedented absence during one of the most important national yearly exams, taken by millions of students every year and widely seen as a way out of poverty, amounts to a statement of opposition to the herd immunity policy and the reopening of schools and universities throughout the country.

Students waiting in line to enter classrooms during exams in the state of Pará (Ricardo Amanajás/Ag.Pará/Fotos Públicas)

The ENEM forced millions of young people to choose between risking infection or, what means in many cases, abandoning higher education. In a BBC report, one young student stated bluntly, “I won’t be able to attend college if I’m dead,” while another in the same report said, “I’ve been preparing for this test all year, but I thought about my family and my health.”

There is no doubt that many are being forced to abandon the chance of obtaining a college degree due to financial pressures. Between 2017 and 2019, the number of ENEM candidates fell by 1.3 million, indicating the growing need felt by many to enter the job market earlier. The number of subscriptions in May fell to its lowest number since 2010.

Last year also saw efforts to introduce private distance learning platforms in the school curricula, with state governments making deals with mobile communication corporations and Google and Amazon to implement mass education platforms. These deals were worked out without any concerted effort to train students in the use of these platforms, let alone provide them with digital equipment, resulting in the exclusion of the majority from access to quality education throughout the year. State governments limited themselves to providing SIM cards for teachers and students, who in many cases share one mobile phone with their entire household.

The second coronavirus wave that began at the end of November, which has been most criminally expressed in the horrific scenes in Manaus during the weeks leading up to the ENEM and continuing to this day, certainly had an impact upon students.

Photos on social media showed hundreds of students crowded near the entrances to schools and universities. One video shared on Twitter shows a queue of students waiting to enter the classrooms before the exam starts. There were similar scenes after the reopening of schools in Manaus in August, resulting in the spread of coronavirus in dozens of schools.

One day before the exam, the Federal University of Santa Catarina said that the INEP, the government institution responsible for the ENEM, would be keeping classrooms at 80 percent occupancy during the test. There were reports in three states, however, of candidates being informed a few minutes before the exam that they could not participate due to classrooms reaching 50 percent capacity.

One student voiced her outrage on Twitter: “Half stayed in and half stayed outside because INEP said yesterday classes must be reduced in half. Perhaps there will be another test in February, but we have other exams! What about the anxiety? The fear? The lack of safety? Injustice!”

The students’ outrage exposed the lie told by the INEP president, “We had a smooth application from the health security point of view.” Expressing the indifference of the ruling class toward the outbreak of cases and deaths that will certainly follow both the exams and the reopening of schools, Education Minister Milton Ribeiro declared that holding the ENEM in the middle of a pandemic should be seen “as a victory, by not delaying the lives of millions of students.”

Holding the ENEM during the deadly second wave of the coronavirus is part of the ruling elite’s back-to-school campaign. Over the past year, state governors, including those of the Workers Party (PT) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), have responded to opposition by teachers, students and parents to the reopening of schools with hypocritical statements about “educational damage” and “children’s mental health” during the pandemic.

Yet in recent years, these same governors have implemented consecutive cuts to education parallel to the austerity campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, including several state-level “pension reforms” imposed through violent repression.

This campaign has been intensified since December, with several states declaring basic education an essential service, in which schools are to remain open even in “red phase” areas. São Paulo Education Secretary Rossieli Soares announced last week that 2021 will have mandatory in-person classes during a third of the school year.

The government took the decision to hold the ENEM over the opposition of students, who in the weeks leading up to the exam had demanded on social media that it be postponed.

Meanwhile, a nationwide Datafolha poll conducted between December 8 and 10 showed that 66 percent of Brazilians support closing schools as a means of containing the spread of the virus. The majority also supported the closure of nonessential services, such as bars, stores, and gyms. According to the Peninsula Institute, 65 percent of the nation’s teachers want to keep schools closed.

The teachers and students unions are trying to divert and suppress the enormous opposition against the back-to-school campaign with appeals to the capitalist institutions. On Wednesday, the São Paulo teachers union APEOESP issued a statement opposing the “school-year planning in schools” and sent a “Collective Security Mandate” to the state court.

Although APEOESP issued statements against the reopening of schools during the pandemic, its actions consisted of holding meetings in the state legislative assembly with Secretary Soares and initiating legal proceedings against the state government. The “motorcade for life” in July was planned to go to the state governor’s house to demand an end to the reopenings and to head off a teachers strike. At the end of last year, amid calls for a general strike and strikes of Methodist teachers in several states, the unions did everything to stall and prevent teachers from waging a struggle.

Today, the unions want teachers to trust the government to coordinate a successful vaccination campaign for health workers, the elderly and the teachers. APEOESP is calling for prioritizing teachers, even after Secretary Soares stated last week that “waiting for a vaccine is not an epidemiological justification. Otherwise, they would have to close all other essential sectors.” This misleading campaign is being repeated by trade unions in all states, each one promoting its state government and judicial authorities while keeping the teachers’ struggles divided.

In the states governed by the PT and the PCdoB, the reopening of schools is being treated by the unions as a foregone conclusion, while they are anxiously asking that teachers be given priority in the vaccine rollout. In Ceará, currently the state with the fourth highest number of COVID-19 deaths, Governor Camilo Santana of the PT declared last month, “We will be back starting on February, but making sure that we have in-person and remote classes.” In Maranhão, PCdoB Governor Flávio Dino announced coronavirus testing for teachers, which can only mean that schools will reopen.

The anger felt by millions of students and youth facing the criminal policies of the ruling class raises the specter of the 2015-16 school occupations. After years of cuts in education by then-President Dilma Rousseff of the PT, the right-wing Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) state government in São Paulo announced a “school reorganization” that would shut down nearly 100 schools and affect hundreds of thousands of students and teachers. Students responded by starting school occupations that spread to thousands of schools and universities throughout the country and lasted more than a year.

The suppression of these protests and occupations was carried out by the unions controlled by the PT and the pseudoleft, which sowed confidence in the PT government at every step of the students struggle, even as Rousseff introduced new austerity measures against the working class.

The Brazilian Union of Secondary School Students (UBES) and the National Union of Students (UNE), which played a critical role in suppressing the student occupations in 2015, published a joint statement 10 days before the ENEM, limiting their opposition to calling for the government to postpone the date of the exam. After describing the critical situation of the second wave of the pandemic, the statement points out, “Faced with the current situation, once again, the Education Ministry does not enter into dialogue with entities and society about the situation of the ENEM, and how it can be carried out safely, even though this has been asked for several times by the UNE and UBES.” Such a declaration amounts to supporting the government’s criminal policy, which will have the endorsement of the pro-PT organizations and the pseudoleft in carrying forward the reopening of schools, so long as cosmetic measures are in place.

Students and teachers must demand an immediate suspension of any in-person exams and oppose the back-to-school campaign. They can carry forward this struggle only by forming independent rank-and-file committees in opposition to the trade unions and all organizations of the pseudoleft. They must fight to shut down schools and all nonessential production until the population has been vaccinated, while demanding full income for every household.

Nevada sees record number of COVID-19 deaths

Hong Jian & Dan Conway

Workers throughout the state of Nevada and city of Las Vegas have been extremely hard hit by the escalating coronavirus pandemic as it sweeps through the West of the United States. The policy of herd immunity is being deliberately cultivated as casinos, logistics and other industries have continued to operate as normal with little to no protections in place to stop the spread of the virus.

Las Vegas Boulevard South (Credit: D-Stanley)

In the last week and a half, Nevada has set single-day records for COVID-19 deaths three times, with 62 and 63 people succumbing to the virus on January 14 and 15, respectively, and then again on January 19, when 71 people died. By contrast, there were 83 deaths in the state in the entire month of June when the state began a limited reopening of nonessential businesses. The three-day death toll this month was more than half the number of deaths for the month of July when the reopening began in earnest.

There were 311 coronavirus deaths two weeks ago, setting a weekly record for Nevada. Previously, the highest number of deaths recording in a week was for the week ending December 19, when there were 231 deaths.

Test positivity rates decreased recently, from 21.6 percent to 19.8 percent, to much fanfare from the establishment media. However, the recent rates were still orders of magnitude higher than the September test positivity rate of 6.2 percent.

It was also only two weeks ago that state health officials declared COVID-19 the leading cause of death for the month of December, when the pandemic claimed 981 lives. The total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in December was 981 and the January figure stands at 886, with another week still to go.

With a population of over 3.1 million, Nevada has had 270,006 cumulative cases of COVID-19. The 14-day average of new cases stands at 1,783 and there were 1,549 hospitalizations on January 22. Thus far, the state has seen a total of 4,027 deaths from COVID-19. Out of 1,050 intensive care unit beds available, 73 percent are currently occupied; of the 762 beds that are occupied, 418 are due to COVID-19.

Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak’s response to these grisly numbers has been to continue the economic “pause” instituted in September until the middle of February, which is also when the state plans to reopen schools for in-person instruction. The “pause” simply limits the size of public gatherings to 50 persons and the occupancy rates of (most) businesses to 25 percent. In other words, putting a hold on conventions and limiting attendance at gyms, but doing little to stop the spread of the virus at crowded, poorly ventilated casinos.

Sisolak also announced the signing of a “directive that will place a moratorium on most residential evictions in Nevada, through March 31. The moratorium will apply to tenants unable to pay rent and will not prohibit certain evictions; including for example, lease breaches for things like unlawful activity or nuisance.” The moratorium means that those who are unable to pay now will be forced to repay all back rent at a later date or lose their housing.

The rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in Nevada began on December 14, 2020, and as of January 23, 94,188 doses had been administered. The state plans on vaccinating 40,000 to 45,000 people a week but has yet to reach those goals. Further complicating the vaccine rollout, a University of Nevada-Reno study released this weekend claims that over a third of Nevadans say they will refuse the vaccine due to fear and mistrust.

The miserably low rate of vaccine distribution is mainly due, however, to the subordination of public health concerns to the interests of profit and not to individual skepticism. Moreover, a concerted attempt is being made to blame the high rate of COVID-19 infections and low numbers of vaccinations on racism and “white privilege” in order to tamp down popular outrage over the coronavirus catastrophe.

The Las Vegas Review Journal, for example, noting that in the 89110 Vegas area Zip Code there were over 10,000 infections out of a population of 70,000, writes, “The area has a majority Hispanic population, nearly 54 percent, compared with 33 percent in the city overall, according to 2019 data from the US Census Bureau. That helps explain why the disease has run rampant in the area, which encompasses Eldorado and Desert Pines high schools and the Sunrise Library, as Latinos have been hit especially hard by the virus.”

In fact, the population affected by COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly poor and working class, regardless of race. These workers for the most part are engaged in the service economy with little to no medical benefits and a high percentage of intergenerational familial living arrangements. Forty percent of those living in the 89110 Zip Code area are classified as white and have suffered grievously from the pandemic as well.

According to the Review Journal, one solution to the pandemic is through a homicidal school reopening policy. Opening schools will allow children to receive free meals and help parents get back to work, they argue. Nothing is mentioned, however, about studies indicating that children often carry a viral load 10 to 100 times more than adults even if they are less likely to exhibit symptoms. There is also the alarming emergence of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome or MIS-C in children across the country.

The Nevada government, like its counterparts throughout the US, has worked hand in glove with corporations and the wealthy in their response to the pandemic. The multi-billion-dollar Las Vegas casino industry, in particular, has benefited handsomely from lax coronavirus regulations. Casinos have been operating at or above 50 percent capacity since the city’s reopening in July.

Moreover, the casinos are under no obligation to accurately count infection rates among workers, particularly among floor workers who have regular face to face interactions with customers at gaming tables and other areas.

One worker who spoke to the WSWS and wished to remain anonymous related how her coworkers all of a sudden “disappear” from the floor without explanation. Those who remain wonder what’s happened until they receive confirmation on social media or through direct contact that a coworker is positive for COVID-19. They are left wondering if they’ll be the next to leave the floor, knowing that they had been in close proximity to the affected worker.

The Culinary Union represents about 60,000 workers at casino and resort properties throughout Nevada and has done little to protect workers from the ravages of the virus other than initiate a few lawsuits against individual casinos. The only planned job action to date was planned in order to force Wynn Resorts to schedule full-time employees for 40-hour workweeks. After Wynn threatened to lay off workers, the union caved and shelved all talk of strike action.

The UAW, which represents dealers, slot attendants, cage and count workers as well as retail workers at some properties, has also done nothing to protect its members. Workers who spoke with the WSWS said they haven’t heard a word from the union since they came back from furlough. One worker said that a lot of people were worried, but there was not much that they could do. A lot of the older workers are opting for early retirement if they can afford it, and most people are taking as many no-times (day off with no pay) as they can afford.

Coronavirus testing is almost nonexistent at most casinos while even temperature screening, which is only slightly better than useless for detecting coronavirus cases, is only performed sporadically and, at least at one casino, only on employees. At another casino, where smoking is allowed, one dice dealer stated, “Which I find to be ridiculous,” as it completely negates the mask mandate as they lean back and exhale. The dealer also said that while they used to clean the chips at regular intervals, it has become more sporadic as time has passed.

Fascist vote surges as conservatives win Portuguese presidential election

Paul Mitchell

Sunday’s presidential election in Portugal saw a victory for right-wing incumbent Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and a surge in votes for the fascistic Chega (Enough) party.

The election took place as coronavirus deaths continue to explode in Portugal. Deaths have more than doubled since the beginning of the year to a record of 275 on Sunday, bringing the total toll to 10,194 in this country of just 10.2 million people.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (Wikimedia Commons/Agência Lusa)

Fear of the virus and the absence of postal or electronic voting were partially responsible for the record low turnout of 39.5 percent. However, turnout has steadily declined over decades—from 84.4 percent, after the toppling of Antonio Salazar’s fascist dictatorship in the 1974 Carnation Revolution, to 51.3 percent in 2016—as disaffection mounted with the political establishment. The 2019 parliamentary elections saw just 48.6 percent of voters take part.

This year, de Sousa, the candidate of the conservative Social-Democratic Party (PSD), won a second term with 60.7 percent of the vote. He received unofficial support from social-democratic Socialist Party (PS) Prime Minister António Costa and other PS leaders. PS official Carlos César congratulated Rebelo de Sousa on his re-election, saying it was “good news” for the PS, as it allows close “institutional cooperation” between the government and the president to continue.

The primary preoccupation of the PS and its pseudo-left allies was to stifle the mounting anger at social inequality and the pandemic in the working class and block a turn to the left. The PS, working desperately to bolster the right-winger de Sousa, did not field its own candidate. Ana Gomes, a Maoist-turned-PS member of the European Parliament who stood as an independent, won just 13 percent.

The other parties allied to the PS polled badly. The Stalinist Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) candidate, João Ferreira, received 4.3 percent, and Marisa Matias of the pseudo-left Left Bloc (BE) collapsed to 4 percent—down from 10.1 percent in 2016. Both parties have for years worked in a de-facto coalition with the PS.

Chega, a party set up in 2019, polled 11.9 percent. This marked a large increase in its support: in October 2019, when its leader André Ventura was the first fascistic candidate since the 1974 revolution to win election, it won 1.3 percent. This month, Marine le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party in France, was guest of honour on Ventura’s campaign trail.

On election night, Ventura declared the election “historic,” adding that he had crushed “the extreme left in Portugal,” by which he meant the PCP and the BE. He claimed that Chega had “managed to break through the usual blockade in Portugal to create an overwhelming anti-system force.”

Like other fascist demagogues, Ventura viciously blames socialism, the “corrupt political establishment” and the most oppressed sections of society for the economic and social crisis. He attacks Roma “gypsies” and workers forced to rely on welfare, declaring that “socialism and corruption are killing our nation.” He wants to scrap the post-dictatorship Constitution, which calls on paper for “a socialist society” and the abolition of imperialism, colonialism and “all other forms of aggression.”

Fascist sentiment is rising in the ruling class. After Ventura met last year with Portuguese businessmen to discuss his law-and-order, pro-business program, João Maria Bravo, owner of the Sodarca group, a major defence contractor to the Portuguese Armed Forces, told reporters: “Since 1974, the country has sunk, and this is already the most expensive government ever. André is the only one who puts his finger on the wound and talks about what we want to hear. He makes honest proposals, intends to put the country in order, fight impunity and make the economy flourish.”

He added, “As you can imagine, I have excellent contacts in the police and military forces, and I guarantee that he has a lot of support. There are no more declared supporters in these areas at the moment because they cannot manifest themselves.”

The rise of a fascist candidate in Portugal, only weeks after former US President Donald Trump attempted a fascist coup on the Capitol in Washington, is a warning to workers internationally. The response of the bourgeoisie to growing working class anger at murderous “herd immunity” policies on COVID-19 and toxic levels of social inequality is to turn towards fascism. Parties like Chega in Portugal and Vox in Spain—in countries where fascist regimes fell only in the 1970s and are still well within living memory—are rising amid an insoluble, international crisis of capitalism.

The forces principally responsible for the rise of Chega are the anti-worker, pseudo-left parties that Ventura falsely called the “extreme left.”

In 2015, the BE along with the PCP and Green Party (PEV) supported Costa’s new pro-austerity, pro-European Union (EU) minority PS government. It rescued the PS, which had been discredited for imposing austerity while in power from 2005 to 2011 and faced the prospect of disintegrating like its sister PASOK party in Greece.

The BE enthusiastically gave Costa its support merely “on the condition that he give up some of his programme’s more neo-liberal policies.” All its pre-election rhetoric about repudiating Portugal’s debt and breaking with the European Union was jettisoned. The pact with the PS became the route through which BE’s petty-bourgeois base was thoroughly integrated into the machinery of EU austerity. This created a social disaster for the working class.

After years of a BE-backed PS government, Portugal is among the most socially unequal countries in the EU. One in five workers in Portugal are on the minimum monthly wage of €635 ($700), the lowest in western Europe. Portugal’s monthly median wage is less than €900 per month, compared to more than €2,000 for the whole EU. At the same time, the super-rich have gotten richer. According to Statista.com, “By 2022 it is estimated the number of individuals in Portugal with a net worth of over five million US dollars will reach 5,650, an expected increase of nearly 1,100 from 2017.”

Last year, amid the disaster caused by the pandemic, the BE admitted that the PS governments it had supported pursued “a strategy of transferring resources to the private sector.” Now, Portugal’s public health system is on the verge of collapse as hospitals run out of intensive care beds. “We are already treating patients beyond our installed capacity...and we are not the only hospital where this is happening,” said Daniel Ferro, director of Lisbon’s biggest hospital, Santa Maria.

When workers mobilized against the PS government, the pseudo-left were violently hostile. When Portuguese workers struck and “yellow vest” protests spread in Portugal following those in France, BE leader Francisco Louçã denounced them as fascists: “This is a far-right operation. They are using social media to whip up aggressive politicization in far-right terms.” In 2019, BE and the Portuguese unions isolated a nationwide trucking strike as the PS government called out the army to force the truckers back to work.

Two weeks after Chinese gold mine explosion: 11 rescued, 10 dead and 1 missing

Lily Zhao

Yesterday, two weeks after a still officially unexplained explosion in a gold mine at Qixia in China’s coastal Shandong Province, 11 trapped workers were rescued, and the bodies of nine were found. The confirmed death toll is now 10, while the last of the trapped workers remains missing.

The disaster occurred in the early afternoon on January 10. An explosion occurred in a shaft, shattering all the shaft entrances. About an hour and a half later, a second explosion took place in the shaft, sending a strong shock wave. The second explosion severely damaged the equipment around the shaft entrance and added more rubble to the already blocked shaft passage.

A trapped miner is lifted from a gold mine in Qixia City, east China's Shandong Province, on Jan. 24, 2021.(Xinhua/Chen Hao)

Among the workers whose bodies were found, five of them were around 420 meters underground, and another four were located around 500 meters underground. At a press conference yesterday, the emergency task force in charge of the rescue work concluded that all nine attempted to climb out through the shaft after the first explosion, but were killed by the second blast.

The rescue operation took place amid widespread public concern in China and worldwide after it became known that the mining company, Shandong Wucailong Investment, did not report the disaster for more than 30 hours. The hashtag “Qixia gold mine incident” has been viewed many million of times on the social media site Weibo.

A week after the explosion, on January 17, the rescue team was able to establish contact with 11 workers trapped at 586.8 meters underground. Emergency supplies, including food and medicines, were delivered to them through a drilled passage. The workers had survived by drinking mud water every day. One worker among them was severely injured and was in a coma. He had lost all signs of life by January 20.

According to these 11 workers, another person was trapped at a place about 50 meters deeper. This is the worker who remains missing.

The rescue operation confronted huge obstacles. According to the task force, between 350 and 446 meters down the shaft, the passage was clogged by more than 70 tons of debris from the explosions. It was originally estimated that 15 days were needed to drill through this area. Drilling also had to be done extremely carefully to avoid flooding the regions where workers were trapped.

Fortunately, rescue teams found out that a lot of empty space existed in the material clogging the shaft, which reduced the difficulty of clearing the passage and the time needed to reach the trapped workers. On January 24, it only took about an hour to push forward 40 meters, and then virtually nothing needed to be cleared out of the way.

When the rescue team reached about 546 meters underground, only 40 meters above the 11 workers, they surprisingly found another worker trapped alone at this level. He had spent 14 days in solitude and without supplies since the explosion. According to a doctor at Qixia People’s Hospital, this worker was extremely weak when he was rescued, with multiple ulcers and wounds on his hip and feet.

Later that day, the 11 workers who previously established contact with the rescue team were all elevated out of the mine. The one who was in a coma was confirmed dead. According to the same doctor, all the 10 rescued workers were conscious and could speak normally. Five workers, including the one trapped in solitude, remain in the ICU at Qixia People’s Hospital, while the others were hospitalized in regular wards.

On the same day, January 25, the bodies of the other nine workers were found. The task force declared at a press conference that all search work in regions above the 11 rescued workers were complete, and they continued to dig deeper to search for the very last missing worker. He is thought to be trapped about 50 meters deeper, in very dangerous conditions.

Huge amounts of water have accumulated in the mine, and the water levels have been rising. The task force said it was unclear if the next 50 meters in the shaft is heavily clogged. So it was not possible to estimate how long it could take to reach the last worker.

Xinhua News, an official news agency of the Chinese state, hailed the rescue of 11 workers as “a miracle of life.” While it is welcome news to know some workers were rescued, this tragedy led to the deaths of at least nine workers who could possibly have been saved if rescue efforts had begun sooner.

At the same press conference, provincial officials offered a few empty promises to increase awareness of safe production. But similar statements have been repeated after every major mining accident that attracted large public attention. The officials further proclaimed they were “doing what [they] can do save lives of workers.” This is a hypocritical claim, made after the disaster has happened, because the health and life of workers are treated as dispensable when it comes to corporate profits.

Shandong Wucailong Investment is a subsidiary of Zhaojin Mining, China’s fourth largest gold miner, which was listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in December 2006. The country’s lucrative gold mining industry is the world’s biggest, and developments in technology have paved the way for deep mining, as was planned via the long shafts being constructed at the Qixia mine.

The resulting tragedy points to how the drive for increased output and profits inevitably leads to the compromising of safety, resulting in terrible accidents.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) apparatus has responded with its usual search for scapegoats. The Qixia party secretary and mayor have been sacked and several unit leaders blamed for the 30-hour reporting delay have been taken into custody, but the underlying driving forces of such mine deaths remain.

Increased flooding in Indonesia linked to deforestation

Robert Campion

A state of emergency was declared for South Kalimantan, Borneo, as torrential rain triggered flooding and landslides, affecting 342,987 people and bringing the death toll to 21 as of last week. According to the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), 54,950 houses were flooded, and over 70,000 were displaced.

Rescuers assist an elderly man to climb into their boat at a flooded village in Banjar, South Kalimantan on Borneo Island, Indonesia, in this Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021 photo. (AP Photo/Putra)

The floods inundated all but 1 of Kalimantan’s 13 districts, the worst affected being Balangan, Banjar, Barito Kuala, Central Hulu Sungai, and Tanah Laut with 209,884 hectares of agricultural land being destroyed, according to the Indonesian Farmers Union. Most of the land was active farmland, comprising rice fields, agriculture and fish farming ponds.

Floodwaters also disabled 21 bridges, including the main bridge in Mataraman District, Banjar Regency, hampering rescue efforts. Government officials have described them as the worst foods to hit the province in 50 years.

Initial estimates by the Agency for The Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) report total economic losses of 1.349 Rupiah ($US96.1 million), factoring in long term effects and remediation.

The events occurred in what has been a destructive start of natural disasters to the new year. The BNPB reported a total of 185 natural disasters which had hit Indonesia in the first three weeks of 2021.

“Most are in the form of floods, hurricanes and landslides,” BNPB representative Professor Wiku stated in a press conference this week.

While this is a smaller number than last year, 166 people have died so far in January 2021, as compared to 91 from January 2020.

Weather reports indicate that heavy rains are expected to continue in South Kalimantan until February, and Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) has warned of an increase in “multiple disaster risks” up until March 2021.

President Joko Widodo travelled to the affected areas last week, inspecting damaged buildings, evacuation efforts and aid logistics. He stated that the floods were the unavoidable outcome of unusually high rainfall, causing the central Barito river to overflow.

His comments prompted rebukes from environmental scientists and advocates, who pointed to the devastating effects of deforestation from palm oil and mining operations. Such activities had led to a reduction in the storage capacity of the Barito River watershed, leading to more destructive flooding.

Indonesia is the largest producer of palm oil in the world, which is used in many household products. In 2019, Indonesia produced an estimated 48.42 million metric tons of crude palm oil.

Despite efforts to boycott the commodity, the Indonesian government is proceeding with a plan to develop domestic fuel sourced entirely from its palm oil plantations. Currently the biodiesel blend (B30) sold at gas stations contains 30 percent palm oil. In order to better meet domestic fuel demand, the government estimates it will need to establish 15 million hectares of new plantations.

In an interview with Tempo magazine, Indonesian Forum for the Environment (WALHI) of South Kalimantan Director, Kisworo Dwi Cahyono, stated, “If [the President] only blames the rain, it would have been better that he had not come here.”

“South Kalimantan stretches 3.7 million hectares that has 13 regencies and cities, but is burdened by 50 percent mining permits, 33 percent are palm oil fields,” he stated, adding that such an ecological disaster had been repeatedly warned about by the area’s branch office.

“The government is yet again ill-prepared. The people are once again who must bear the consequences,” said Kisworo.

Arie Rompas from the Indonesian section of Greenpeace echoed these concerns to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), stating that floods and landslides were among the chief natural disasters in recent years.

“It’s strongly related to the accumulated damage to forests that have an impact on climate change,” he said.

The government’s own research agency, BPPT, confirmed these assessments when it stated that a reduction in high density vegetation in upstream areas had compromised water storage functions, according to the Indonesian Nusa Daily.

In 2019, 324,000 hectares of primary forest was cleared, according to Global Forest Watch. Since 2001 this brings the total land cleared to 9.4 million hectares of primary forest.

In South Kalimantan, two thirds of the natural forest in its water catchment area has been cleared since 1991, according to government data cited by Mongabay, an environmental news website. Greenpeace has recorded a similar trend using satellite imagery which revealed that 304,000 hectares had been lost between 2001 and 2019.

As well as exacerbating the effects of flooding, the landscape has changed to one highly susceptible to landslides caused by erosion and fragile soil.

The government has doubled down on Widodo’s position, dismissing what it claims is “misinformation” and “invalid data” being pushed by other parties.

The environmental director at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Lana Saria, went so far as to say that mining activity in the region makes a positive contribution to the forests.

“It in fact improves the capability of the watershed to become a water catchment area,” she said.

Mining activity presents serious problems caused by acid mine drainage in which surface water reacts with rocks containing sulphur-bearing minerals, creating sulphuric acid. This can then leach away heavy metals from exposed rocks becoming highly toxic.

Calls for more stringent measures to protect the environment have fallen on deaf ears. Indonesia suffered its first recession in 20 years in the third quarter of 2020. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani estimated a GDP contraction of 1.7–2.2 per cent for 2020 earlier this year and projected a rebound of 4.5–5.5 per cent in 2021.

This rebound is contingent on the government’s strategy to scrap legislation for mining companies and plantations that will pave the way for the acceleration of deforestation.

Last year’s pro-business omnibus law, rammed through parliament despite popular opposition, revises 26 articles and shreds another seven from the 2014 Plantation Law. Most critical is the relaxing of environmental permits for developers, who are now given slap-on-the-wrist sanctions if found to be without permits and a three-year grace period to obtain them.

Environmental impact assessments are not required unless the operation is deemed to be “high risk”, and those found neglecting the environment or lacking firefighting equipment will not lose their permits.

Oxfam: Inequality expected to rise in every country “simultaneously”

Jacob Crosse

A new report issued by the UK-based charity Oxfam International ahead of this week's virtual World Economic Forum, which is usually held annually in Davos, Switzerland, underlined the effect of government policies enacted in response to the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. The report shows that deliberate policies enacted by capitalist governments around the world has resulted in a further concentration of wealth among the financial oligarchy while exacerbating already historic levels of global wealth inequality.

A homeless man is given assistance by a homeless outreach worker in the 207th Street station for the A train, Thursday, April 30, 2020, in the Manhattan borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Testifying to the interconnected character of the global capitalist system, the report notes that for the first time since 1870, the oldest tax records available to Oxfam, “per capita incomes are expected to decline in all regions. This means it is likely that COVID-19 will drive up inequality in virtually every country on earth simultaneously. This will be the first time that this has happened since records of inequality began, over a century ago.”

Despite annual reports from Oxfam highlighting the ever-worsening inequality endemic to the capitalist system, the authors write: “The total number of billionaires nearly doubled in the ten years after the financial crisis of 2008, and between 2017-2018 a new billionaire was created every two days.” Meanwhile, Oxfam estimates that globally 56 percent of the population lives on between $2 and $10 a day.

While more than three billionaires were being minted every week before the pandemic emerged Oxfam wrote, “billions of people were already living on the edge...they did not have any resources or support to weather the economic and social storm it created. Over three billion people did not have access to healthcare, three-quarters of workers had no access to social protection like unemployment benefits or sick leave, and in low-and lower-middle-income countries over half of workers were in working poverty.”

The report notes that while millions of workers the world over have lost their jobs, wealth and loved ones over the last year, billionaires' collective wealth has increased by a stupefying $3.9 trillion between March 18 and December 31, 2020. The 10 richest “pandemic profiteers,” including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Zhong Shanshan, founder of beverage company Nongfu Spring and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, have seen their wealth increase by over $540 billion over the same period.

The $540 billion hoarded by just 10 people, Oxfam writes, “is more than enough to prevent anyone on Earth from falling into poverty because of the virus and to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine for all.”

Collectively the world’s billionaires, less than 2,300 people, control approximately $11.95 trillion in wealth, which Oxfam notes is the, “equivalent to what G20 governments (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) have spent collectively in response to the pandemic.”

While billionaires’ wealth and lives have been protected throughout the pandemic, COVID-19 infection and mortality rates, Oxfam notes, “have a clear social gradient. COVID-19 mortality in the most deprived 10% areas in England is twice that of the least deprived 10%. Similar trends have been reported in France, Brazil, Nepal, Spain and India.”

While governments the world over have spent relatively little on measures to contain and eradicate the spread of the coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 2.1 million people worldwide—430,000 of these deaths the US alone—they have opened their coffers to provide the financial oligarchy with trillions of dollars in bailouts, while demanding that workers risk their lives in disease-ridden workplaces and schools in order to continue the extraction of surplus labor value.

The clearest example of this was the staggering quickness in which the world’s top billionaires recovered their wealth after the pandemic sent stocks plummeting in March 2020. Oxfam noted that it took the world’s top 1,000 billionaires nine months to recover their wealth while it may take the world's poor, which Oxfam estimates to have increased between 200 and 500 million globally throughout the pandemic, over a decade to return to “pre-crisis” levels.

The resulting growth of inequality and further concentration of wealth for a select few is a deliberate policy choice enacted by capitalist governments around the world, placing profits before lives.

This was seen in the US with near unanimous passage of the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act at the end of March 2020. The bill did not allocate billions to workers and their families in order to stay home while resources were used to train and hire thousands of doctors and nurses to care for the sick, implement a nationwide testing and contact tracing program, or build new hospitals.

Instead, the bipartisan measure provided a pittance to jobless workers, essentially blackmailing workers to go back on the job, while promising Wall Street unlimited funds through quantitative easing policies via the Federal Reserve. This class policy safeguarded and increased the wealth of the ruling class, whose fortunes are predicated on the never-ending rise of the stock market.

While the CARES Act provided a one-time $1,200 check for adults and short-term enhanced unemployment benefits, the expiration of these benefits has since led to an increase in poverty in the US according to new research by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the University of Notre Dame.

The authors of the study note that while poverty declined in the first few months of the pandemic, from 10.8 percentage points in January 2020 down to 9.3 percent in June, by the end of July, which saw the expiration of the $600 unemployment payments in the CARES Act, poverty began to increase in the following months, ending December 2020 at 11.8 percent. The increase of 2.5 percentage points from July translates to some 8.1 million people, nearly equivalent to the population of Switzerland.

Anywhere between 200-500 million people around the world have been pushed into poverty this year, and roughly 3 billion people prior to the pandemic survived on less than $5.50 a day, or about $2,000 a year. The Oxfam report cited analysis by the World Bank that estimates that as of October 7, 2020 the pandemic has pushed between 88 and 115 million people into “extreme poverty,” that is, surviving on less than $1.90 a day, or about $694 a year.

The widening inequality was reflected, Oxfam notes, in the fact that the top 25 US corporations earned “11% more profits in 2020 compared with the previous year,” while “small businesses in the US looked likely to lose over 85% of their profits in the second quarter of the year.”

Ever rising corporate profits and the increasing wealth of billionaires is due to deliberate policy decisions. Oxfam writes, “between 1985 and 2019, the global average statutory corporate tax rate fell from 49% to 23%, and since 1980 the top rate of personal income tax in the US has almost halved, from 70% to 37%. On top of losses due to lower tax rates, the Tax Justice Network estimates that countries are losing a total of over $427 billion in tax each year to international corporate tax abuse and private tax evasion, ‘costing countries altogether the equivalent of nearly 34 million nurses’ annual salaries every year – or one nurse’s annual salary every second.’”

While the concentration of wealth is most starkly expressed in the US, the same processes are taking place throughout the world. Oxfam notes that between March and August 2020, billionaires in the Middle East and North Africa increased their wealth by 20 percent, “almost five times the value of the United Nations’ COVID-19 humanitarian appeal for the region.” Likewise, in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), “the combined wealth of billionaires increased by 17% between March and July 2020...more than five times the amount needed to prevent 12.4 million people from falling into extreme poverty in the LAC region for a year.”

The latest Oxfam report is a damning indictment of the capitalist system, but like previous reports issued by the charity it fails to correctly identify the problem, and therefore offers reactionary solutions for dealing with the historic crisis. Adopting the identity-politics language of the postmodernists, the authors point to “patriarchy” “structural racism” and “ingrained...white supremacy” as the “root causes of injustice and poverty.”

Ignoring their own findings, which clearly show that global inequality is not a question of race or gender but the capitalist economic system, the authors advocate for world governments to move beyond measuring the Gross Domestic Product of a country as a measure of economic success and well-being, and instead adopt new indicators centered around “wellbeing, sustainable development, inequality, and the environment.” The authors positively cited the capitalist government of New Zealand as an example.

The fact is, despite nearly a decade of such reports and recommendations from Oxfam, the situation has only worsened. With the pandemic, which the World Socialist Web Site has identified as a “trigger event” in world history, similar to the outbreak of World War I, the solution will not be found in appealing to the current ruling elites for change. Just as soldiers in the war were sent to the trenches to die for each warring nation's bourgeoisie over 100 years ago, teachers are being funneled back into deadly classrooms in order to watch children so parents can risk infection by going to work in order to keep the profits flowing upward.

And while President Joe Biden and the Democratic party utilize the same language Oxfam employs, pledging to combat “white supremacy” and “patriarchy,” the fact is that both accept capitalism as unquestionable and eternal. Their “solutions” are nothing but hot air meant to dissipate growing social anger towards the existing system and chloroform the international working class from carrying out its historic tasks.