Molar of ancient human Denisovan species discovered in northern Laos

Frank Gaglioti

The recent discovery of a Denisovan tooth in Laos represents the first fossil discovery of the enigmatic hominid species outside of Russia and Tibet. Although the genetic structure of modern-day Australian Aboriginals and Pacific Islanders shows the presence of Denisovan genes, indicating the species was widely dispersed through Australia, Papua New Guinea and Oceania, no fossils had been discovered before this in the region.

The fossilized molar of what is believed to be a young female of the Denisovan hominid species (Credit: Fabrice Demeter, by permission)

Denisovans, first discovered in the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, are thought to have existed from 30,000 to 500,000 years ago and have only been known from very limited fossil evidence found in Russia and Tibet. DNA analysis found that the Denisovans had split from Neanderthals 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. 

The discovery was reported in a paper titled “A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan molar from the Annamite Chain of northern Laos,” published in Nature Communications on May 17. 

“We knew that Denisovans should be here. It’s nice to have some tangible evidence of their existence in this area,” Laura Shackelford, co-author of the paper and a paleoanthropologist at the University of Illinois, told the New York Times.

The discovery was made in the Ngu Hao 2 cave in Huà Pan Province in the Annamese Mountains in northern Laos. Local children directed the scientists to the site at the end of their field season in 2018. The cave walls were studded with fossil bones, mostly belonging to extinct mammals such as pigs and pygmy elephants. It is thought that the bones were brought to the cave by porcupines using them to sharpen their teeth.

The entrance to the cave in northern Laos. (Credit: Fabrice Demeter, by permission)

One of the discoveries was a lower left molar that the scientists recognized as belonging to an extinct hominid species. The tooth was thought to have belonged to a female child aged between 3.5 to 8.5 years due to its underdeveloped root structure.

The paper stated, “the morphology of the tooth is compatible with an attribution to either a first or a second lower molar.”

Radioactive dating of minerals in the cave estimated the age of the fossil at between 131,000 and 164,000 years before the present, well before modern humans were known to have been in the area. The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils in the area, discovered in 2009, were dated at between 46,000 and 63,000 years ago.

Fossils embedded in the cave wall. (Credit: Fabrice Demeter, by permission)

A number of hominid species are known to have been in Southeast Asia. A Homo erectus skull and femur, known as Java man, was discovered in Indonesia in 1892. It was estimated to be between 700,000 and 1 million years old. It is thought that H. erectus continued in the region until about 250,000 years ago. 

More recent species have been discovered, including Homo floresiensis, known as the Hobbit due to its diminutive size. It was discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia and was extant from 50,000 to 190,000 years ago. Homo luzonensis fossils discovered on the island of Luzon in the Philippines have been established to have been extant 50,000 years ago.

Scientists have discovered evidence of Denisovan DNA in Australian Aboriginals, Papua New Guineans and Pacific Islanders, indicating that the species was widespread throughout the region. “However, there is still no fossil evidence explaining the Denisovans genetic imprint on modern southeast Asian populations and—due to the paucity of the Middle Pleistocene fossil record—it is still unknown whether one or more human lineages (co)existed in continental southern Asia,” the authors of the paper stated.

Intriguingly, scientists doing DNA analysis of the Denisova cave’s finger bone found evidence of the interbreeding of Denisovans with Neanderthals, which was published in 2018.

A scientist examining the fossilized molar. (Credit: Fabrice Demeter, by permission)

The researchers examined other fossils from the Laotian cave but found no traces of DNA, so the molar was considered unlikely to have any DNA, as genetic material degrades very rapidly in humid conditions. Analysis of protein extracted from the tooth enamel proved inconclusive. Protein analysis has become an increasingly important tool in recent times as it degrades less readily than DNA.

The designation of the tooth as Denisovan was finally made through a detailed examination of the tooth’s surface structure. This was compared to 400 molars of living and extinct humans.

The scientists stated that “morphometric analyses of the external and internal crown structural organization allow us to reject a number of hypotheses regarding species assignment. TNH2-1 has large crown dimensions and a complex occlusal surface that differentiates it from the smaller and morphologically simpler teeth of H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis and H. sapiens. The … shape shows a mixture of Neanderthal-like and H. erectus-like features, closely resembling the … morphology of the Denisovan specimen from Xiahe.”

Xiahe is on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, where a Denisovan mandible was discovered in 1980.

The researchers at first thought the tooth belonged to H. erectus but ruled this out as it was too complex. 

“Although it (the tooth) shares some characteristics with Neanderthal teeth, it is also “large, and kind of weird”, said palaeoanthropologist at the University of Toronto Bence Viola. “Denisovans have absolutely gigantic teeth... So, it seems like a good assumption that this is likely a Denisovan.”

Some scientists have disagreed with the Denisovan classification due to the badly degraded nature of the tooth, lack of any accompanying fossils or DNA evidence.

Katerina Douka, an archaeological scientist at the University of Vienna, told Nature “the reality is that we cannot know whether this single and badly preserved molar belonged to a Denisovan.”

On the other hand, Bence Viola said that it was in the “right place and right time” to belong to a Denisovan. 

This discovery underscores that Asia and southeast Asia in particular may provide enormous opportunities for further discoveries that will enable deeper elucidation of the evolution of Denisovans, that are only known through a few fossils and some intriguing DNA evidence.

The study concluded that “the tooth from Tam Ngu Hao 2 Cave in Laos thus provides direct evidence of a most likely Denisovan female individual with associated fauna in mainland Southeast Asia by 164-131 thousand years ago. This discovery further attests that this region was a hotspot of diversity for the genus Homo, with the presence of at least five late Middle to Late Pleistocene species: H. erectus, Denisovans/Neanderthals, H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis and H. sapiens.”

“When we started looking in Laos, everyone thought we were crazy … But if we can find things like this tooth—which we weren’t even anticipating—then there are probably more hominin fossils to be found,” said Shackelford.

Shanghai emerges out of lockdown after beating back Omicron

Benjamin Mateus

Shanghai, a city of 26 million inhabitants and China’s commercial hub, has beaten back the Omicron variant in just two months with fewer than 600 deaths. The infrastructure and economy of the metropolis are intact, and steps are being taken now to lift the lockdown. Health and city officials announced Saturday they intend to formally end its lockdown after Wednesday, having already relaxed restrictions last week.

Meanwhile, Europe and the US have repeatedly lied to their population that little could be done against the contagious variant and had to go it alone as the opening of the economy essentially remains a priority. These lies have been accompanied by a scurrilous slander campaign against China, portraying its highly successful and widely popular Zero-COVID policy as an unacceptable infringement on the rights of the people.

US President Joe Biden joined the chorus last week, dismissing China’s pandemic policy as a failure while hailing India’s disastrous results as a triumph of democracy.

To put Biden’s blatant lie into context, China and India have comparable populations of over 1.4 billion people each. India’s official COVID death count is nearing 525,000, while China’s is just over 5,000, a hundred times less.

The disparity is actually even more dramatic. According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent report on global excess deaths from January 2020 to December 2021, a more accurate measure of the impact of the pandemic, India suffered 4.74 million excess deaths, the most of any country.

During the same period, China experienced fewer deaths than would have been predicted, with a figure of negative 52,000 excess deaths. The measures taken to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic actually had a spillover effect in reducing deaths from other causes as well.

It also bears comparing the US and China on the state of the COVID pandemic considering Biden’s malicious statement. Since the pandemic, the US has reported over a million COVID deaths, with a population 4.2 times smaller than China’s. On a per capita rate, the “leader of the free world” killed one in every 330 of its own citizens. China’s per capita rate was an infinitesimal one in every 250,000 people.

At last count, the total number of COVID deaths in “autocratic” China has reached 5,226 across 31 provincial-level regions, far below even Hong Kong’s foray with Omicron that claimed over 9,000 lives with just 7.5 million people.

The Omicron surge in China commenced at the beginning of March. While daily infections were quickly stabilized in the northern province of Jilin, the delay in initiating strict measures in Shanghai led to an ever-accelerating community transmission there. On March 27, the spreading infections in the metropolis prompted a phased lockdown that placed the entire region into strict isolation.

Despite initial missteps and confusion stemming from a never-before-initiated and massive public health effort, the process of mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantining, including administering medical care to those infected, within little more than two months, the tide of infections was reversed.

The COVID trendline in China since March 1. (Source: WSWS media)

After reaching a peak in the seven-day average of 26,109 daily cases on April 15, the seven-day average has declined to a low of 426 cases per day. According to the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, the country reported 293 new COVID cases yesterday, of which 211 were asymptomatic and 82 symptomatic. Seventy-eight of these cases were imported, leaving 215 cases of local transmission.

In Shanghai, the epicenter of the Omicron outbreak in mainland China, there were only 122 COVID cases reported over the last 24 hours. There were no reported deaths yesterday, leaving the total COVID deaths in Shanghai at 591.

By comparison, the US registered close to 110,000 COVID cases yesterday. However, given the near-complete dismantling of the COVID trackers across most states, these numbers are a gross undercounting. Despite the persistence of media discussion about the pandemic in the past tense, the seven-day average of deaths has up-ticked to over 370 per day, meaning more Americans will die in two days during the supposed lull in cases than Chinese citizens died in three months of an outbreak. In the time it has taken China to beat back COVID, with barely 600 deaths, another 50,000 Americans died from the disease.

Though the transition to normal operations in Shanghai comes at a deliberate pace, people are allowed out of their homes and local businesses are reopening. Most of the population is currently living in the lowest risk “prevention” category, meaning no cases have been detected in over two weeks.

From June 1, the city is loosening its PCR testing requirements from 48 hours to 72 hours for using public transportation or entry into public buildings. For those planning to leave the city, a PCR test within 48 hours is required, followed by a rapid antigen test within 24 hours, and entry into the city needs a PCR test within 48 hours.

According to Wu Huanyu, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, when a community-acquired infection is detected, contact tracers proceed to the site and investigate close and secondary contacts to contain the spread and the resurgence. Additionally, these cases are gene sequenced to determine the origin of the COVID infection.

According to the city publication, Shine, “Nearly 1,700 key production companies, 450 financial institutions, and 580 foreign trade companies have restored operations in Pudong. A total of 660 supermarkets and 41 wet markets have reopened, along with landmark shopping malls such as the Taikoo Li Qiantan and 1 Yaohan, which have been receiving customers. All bus lines within Pudong will be restored from Monday, along with all community service centers.”

The capital city of Beijing responded quickly to the April 22 outbreak that threatened the city. Reuters reported yesterday that a government spokesman said during a recent news conference that the outbreak has been brought “effectively under control” without having to resort to a city-wide lockdown.

In the eight of Beijing’s 16 districts, with zero community cases for seven consecutive days, shopping malls, libraries, museums, theaters and gyms were opened on Sunday. Public transportation will resume in three districts, including the largest, Chaoyang. Indoor dining remains banned city-wide.

If the counterfactual outcome were posed, a recent peer-reviewed study from Shanghai’s Fudan University, published in the journal Nature Medicine, found that if China abandoned its Zero-COVID policy, Omicron would lead to 112 million symptomatic cases within six months, 5.1 million hospital admissions, and 1.6 million deaths.

Besides the complete overwhelming of their health systems, such an approach would have dire long-term consequences that include subjugating millions more to Long COVID and the possible emergence of new virulent strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The financial press has not even discussed the question of the impact on the global economy if China abandoned Zero-COVID. The current attempts to blame China for the world’s economic downturn are purely political.  If the virus were allowed to spread without any public health measures to stem the tide of infections, the results would be catastrophic both to the population and to the world’s economy.

With new waves of infections being forecast, the ongoing toll of infections and reinfections on the population’s health would have untold consequences that would last for generations. Neither China nor any other country can suppress a global pandemic. Only the international working class can enforce a policy of global Zero-COVID, disregarding all the claims of corporate profit and “national security” that dictate the policies of all capitalist states.

Chinese premier details mounting problems for economy

Nick Beams

The Chinese economy is facing some of its most serious problems in more than three decades as the government continues to battle to end the outbreak of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 through lockdowns of major cities and other public health measures.

Workers labor near a construction site with cranes near the central business district skyline in Beijing, China, October 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Last week Premier Li warned that China would struggle to reach positive economic growth in the second quarter of this year, after recording a 4.8 percent expansion in the first.

The situation was “to some degree worse” than it had been at the start of the pandemic in early 2020 when the Chinese economy contracted by 6.9 percent. Economic indicators had fallen significantly, and “difficulties in some aspects and to a certain extent are greater than when the epidemic hit us severely in 2020.”

“We will try to make sure the economy grows in the second quarter. This is not a high target and a far cry from our 5.5 percent goal. But we have to do so,” he said.

The official unemployment rate in China, which only covers urban dwellers, had increased to 6.1 percent. Li noted that unemployment for people aged 16 to 24 had risen to an historic high of 18.2 percent, with the jobless rate for migrant workers also increasing sharply.

Li’s focus on the growth and jobless rates is significant because the government regards strong growth as essential for maintaining what it calls “social stability.”

In a report of the address, based on transcripts, the Financial Times said Li had noted that “corporate liquidation had soared by more than 23 percent year on year in April when the whole of Shanghai entered a full lockdown that affected commercial operations across eastern China. Largely private sector small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs], which account for more than half or more of government revenues, economic output and employment, have been hit the hardest.”

The premier emphasised the importance of COVID prevention while maintaining production. “We must ensure both the smooth functioning of supply chains and COVID prevention are achieved,” he said, adding that “many SMEs and local authorities told me their worst days have come.”

Progress, he said, was not satisfactory, with some provinces reporting that only 30 percent of their businesses had reopened. “The ratio must be raised to 80 percent within a short period of time.”

Li reported that power generation, freight transport and new bank loans had all fallen in the first half of this month.

Data on the economy underscore the growing problems confronting government authorities. Earlier this month it was reported that industrial production, one of the key drivers of the Chinese economy, had fallen 2.9 percent in April, retail sales had dropped 11 percent and car sales had almost halved.

Since those figures were released, it has been revealed that industrial groups recorded their worst decline in profits since the start of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, falling 8.5 percent compared to a year earlier.

A senior official at the National Bureau of Statistics, Zhu Hong, said that in April the Omicron outbreak “had a large impact on the production and operation of industrial firms and that manufacturing companies’ profits fell by 22 percent.

Authorities have eased financial conditions with the central bank cutting its five-year prime rate, used to set mortgages, from 4.6 percent to 4.45 percent. But such measures will do little to ease the crisis in the real estate sector where the giant Evergrande company is already in default. The problems in real estate, when all the flow-on effects are considered, are not being resolved as home sales continue to fall. The sector accounts for between 25 percent and 30 percent of the Chinese economy.

Earlier this month, China’s third-largest developer, Sunac, reported that it had missed a payment on a $742 million offshore bond.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the government and financial authorities were able to boost the economy through a massive stimulus package, involving increased spending and the expansion of credit. The stimulus was equivalent to around 13 percent of GDP.

That road is now closed because of the transformation in global financial conditions. All the major central banks, led by the US Fed, are now lifting interest rates in response to the surge in inflation. Fearing this will bring an upsurge of workers’ struggles in support of wage demands, they are seeking through higher rates to put a clamp on economic growth to counter this growing movement.

Global financial conditions are heavily impacting on China. The value of the yuan is falling—it dropped 4.5 percent in April—prompting a capital outflow.

As Sydney Morning Herald economics writer Stephen Bartholomeusz noted in a comment published last week: “The Chinese authorities are very aware that lowering their own [interest] rates too aggressively to try to stimulate activity could turn what’s already a steady outflow of capital into a fully-fledged and destabilising capital flight.”

The central government also appears to be pushing back against demands from local government authorities for increased assistance.

In his remarks to last week’s teleconference, Li said several provinces had appealed to the central government for support, but indicated resources were limited. “I am here to let you know my bottom line. There is a reserve fund managed by the premier. Other than that, local governments must raise funds [on your own.]”

China is also facing a food crisis in at least one part of the country. According to Li, Jilin, a large agricultural region in the north-east had been severely affected and grain output could “barely” match demand and warned that a bad summer harvest would create “huge problems.”

China was already experiencing major economic problems before the onset of Omicron—notably in the highly-indebted real estate sector.

But they have been significantly compounded by the refusal of governments worldwide to develop an international strategy for the elimination of COVID-19. Consequently, China is faced with the task of trying to deal with the virus on a national basis, under conditions where it is continually open to the reintroduction of infections from the rest of the world.

The growing demand from governments, corporations and finance capital is that China abandons its zero COVID program and adopt the “let it rip” policy, which has led to millions of unnecessary deaths in the rest of the world. If this were adopted it would lead to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of deaths.

This in turn would create a crisis for the Xi Jinping regime because the zero COVID policy, despite some of the bureaucratic excesses in its implementation, enjoys wide support among the population.

The attitude of the major powers towards China on COVID is another expression of the policy they have essentially adopted from the outset—that nothing must be done that would impede the flow of profit and so they are demanding that China “open up.”

But their refusal to take action to eliminate the virus in order to prop up financial markets is now rebounding on the global economy, leading to the largest inflation hike in more than four decades and a significant slowdown, if not outright contraction, in the world’s second-largest economy which will exacerbate international recessionary trends.

UN Human Rights High Commissioner condemned over China trip

Peter Symonds

The United Nations’ top human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, completed a six-day visit to China on Saturday with a press conference that offered muted criticisms of the country’s lack of basic democratic rights across a range of areas, including its labour laws and heavy use of the death sentence, and state policy in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Michelle Bachelet (Flickr/UN Women)

The trip, however, provoked a storm of criticism and denunciation for its failure to meet the propaganda requirements of Washington and its allies for a denunciation of the Chinese government over its treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang in the country’s west.

While stopping short of branding Bachelet a Chinese stooge, American officials, Uyghur exile organisations and the Western media dismissed the trip as a stage-managed affair that amounted to a cover-up and failed to aggressively expose China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concern that “the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment in the PRC, including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing.”

Washington’s denunciations of China for genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang are the centrepiece of its hypocritical campaign against China over “human rights.” As with the illegal US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the vilification of Beijing is the propaganda component of American imperialism's economic and military preparations for conflict with China.

Blinken’s “concern” over Bachelet’s visit followed days after a keynote speech in which he declared China to be “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”—that is, the post-World War II order dominated by the US.

The declaration that China is engaged in “genocide” of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is a big lie—endlessly repeated without a shred of evidence through the mouthpieces of Western propaganda. Insofar that any attempt is made to substantiate the allegation of “genocide,” it is based on the tendentious claims of right-wing academics that China’s crude population controls are leading to the elimination of the Uyghur minority—even though similar heavy-handed methods are applied across China.

As Bachelet began her tour of China, the far-right, US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation published documents purportedly hacked from police computer servers in Xinjiang, which it claimed include speeches by senior Chinese officials, local policing protocols, spreadsheets with records on more than 23,000 detainees, and images of people detained in 2018.

Adrian Zenz, who received and released the documents, is also responsible for the bogus “research” that centrally underpins the allegations of “genocide” and assertions that a million Uyghurs have been forcibly detained in re-education camps. He is a right-wing German commentator and born-again Christian who is closely connected to a network of anti-communist European and American think tanks and, undoubtedly through them, to the foreign policy and intelligence establishments.

Blinken’s “concerns” over Bachelet’s trip were amplified in more strident terms by Sophie Richardson, China Director of the US-based Human Rights Watch—an “independent” organisation that closely mirrors the “human rights” campaigns of the US State Department.

Richardson declared that she was “appalled and alarmed” that “the world’s leading human rights diplomat just failed to challenge the second most powerful government on earth over some of the gravest crimes under international human rights law.” She continued: “It is unacceptable to fail to robustly investigate crimes against humanity.”

Luke de Pulford, coordinator of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, lashed out at Bachelet, saying her trip “hit all the wrong notes.” He continued: “The whole debacle represents an appalling dereliction of duty and betrayal of Uyghurs.” The Alliance is an international grouping of politicians that includes some of the most rabid anti-China hawks such as US Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez.

Uyghur exiles associated with the CIA-backed World Uyghur Congress and American Uyghur Association have also joined the chorus of denunciation. Dilxat Raxit, spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress, declared that “resignation is the only meaningful thing she [Bachelet] can do for the [UN] Human Rights Council.”

Bachelet’s visit was the first by a UN High Commissioner for human rights in 17 years and was the subject of lengthy negotiations with the Chinese government. Her trip included two major cities in Xinjiang—Kashgar and Urumqi—with a visit to a prison and a former Vocational Education and Training Centre (VETC) in Kashgar. Bachelet met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and online with President Xi Jinping, as well as civil society organisations, academics, and community and religious leaders.

Seeking to counter criticism of the trip, Bachelet stated: “I would say that, to that prison, the access was pretty open, pretty transparent. We asked many, many questions, and they answered all of them.” While subject to COVID-19 restrictions, she said: “With the people we were able to speak to, it was in an unsupervised manner.”

The Chinese government’s harsher measures in Xinjiang are imposed in the name of countering terrorism and extremism following a series of attacks by Uyghur separatists on Han Chinese. Bachelet raised concerns about allegations of the use of force at the vocational centres and unduly severe restrictions on religious practice. “It is critical that counter-terrorism responses do not result in human rights violations,” she said.

Also in response to her critics, Bachelet explained that a thorough and detailed investigation was never going to be possible and was not the purpose of her six-day trip. She suggested that Chinese authorities could “potentially rethink policies that we believe may impact negatively on human rights”—touching on Tibet, Hong Kong, the death penalty, and the implementation of labour laws among other areas.

In broad outline, Bachelet voiced the anti-China “human rights” agenda that the US and its allies have been advancing for years. The public attacks on her trip for not being sufficiently strident and condemning reflect the advanced character of the US-led confrontation with China. Even as it is pursuing a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US is escalating its efforts to isolate, encircle and weaken China in preparation for conflict.

A question posed at Batchelet’s press conference on Saturday pointed to the utter hypocrisy of the US “human rights” campaigns against China and other countries. A reporter from state-owned China Central Television asked Batchelet whether her office planned to investigate human-rights violations by the US, noting the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Bachelet simply noted that her office had published a report on systemic racism involving US police.

Far more egregious human rights abuses and crimes against humanity can be laid at the door of US imperialism. In the name of the war on terror, for instance, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and levelling social and physical infrastructure. The US not only carried out systematic torture and set up the hellhole of Guantanamo Bay, but made deep inroads into democratic rights within the US in the name of combatting terrorism.

It goes without saying that no action has been taken by the UN or the UN Human Rights Commission over these monstrous crimes. China, along with all the major powers, gave its tacit support for these illegal wars.

UNESCO Mid-Level Professionals Programme 2022

Application Deadline?

June 2022

Tell Me About Award:

The Mid-Level Professionals Programme (MLPP) is a new recruitment initiative for talented and highly qualified mid-level professionals who wish to start and/or advance their careers as International Civil Servants at UNESCO.

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Fellowship

Who can apply?

Must be a national of a UNESCO Member State. Qualified candidates from non- and under-represented Member States are strongly encouraged to apply.

The MLPP selection process is based on the standard UNESCO recruitment process. Standard educational and work experience requirements for professional positions at P-3 and P-4 level apply.

Language requirements

Candidates should demonstrate an excellent knowledge of at least one working language of the Secretariat (English or French). A good knowledge of the other working language is an asset, or in some cases, is required.

Knowledge of Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Spanish could be required or would be an additional asset.

Which Countries are Eligible?

While recruitment is open to candidates from all UNESCO’s Member States, priority consideration, at equal competence, will be given to candidates from non- and under-represented Member States and to internal candidates.

How to Apply for Fellowship?

Positions included in the MLPP are advertised for two months. Before applying, please check the requirements carefully to ensure that you are eligible and qualified.

Please note that all candidates must complete an on-line application and provide complete and accurate information. No changes can be made to the application once submitted.

To apply, please visit the UNESCO Careers website.

Pre-screening

Applications will be reviewed to determine if candidates meet the basic eligibility requirements (i.e., experience, education, language, etc.).

Assessments and Interviews

Evaluation of candidates is based on the criteria established in the vacancy notice and may include pre-recorded video interviews, written tests and/or other assessments, and competency-based interviews with live panels. 

Only candidates selected for further evaluation/assessment will be contacted.

Notification of Appointment Decisions

Candidates will be notified of the outcome of their application.

Unsuccessful interviewed candidates will receive feedback.

Apply here!

Visit Award Webpage for Details

UK cost of living surges, dwarfing Sunak’s one-off payments

Simon Whelan

Household energy bills will grow 23 times faster than wages and 38 times faster than benefits by the end of this year, according to research published yesterday by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

October’s scheduled £800 rise in fuel bills—on top of April’s 32 percent increase—means gas and electricity bills will have risen by 119 percent in just one year. By contrast, wages will have increased by just 5.2 percent, while benefits will have risen by only 3.1 percent.

(Credit: PxHere)

Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £15 billion Cost of Living package will make barely a dent in the cost-of-living crisis engulfing tens of millions of people.

14.5 million people are living in poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Data from Loughborough University reveals that goods and services for a typical family with two young children are about £400 a month more expensive than they were last year. Rising energy prices added another £120 to families’ monthly costs, with cheaper tariffs ended.

While the Johnson government has claimed that “work is the best route out of poverty”, 57 percent of impoverished Britons—some 8 million people—are already in work. Wages are lower now than in 2008, with the Office for Budget Responsibility predicting that pay will not return to pre-2008 levels until 2025.

“If real weekly wages had continued growing at the pre-2008 rate, they’d now be £111 per week higher than they are”, the TUC found. Public sector pay fell by £30 in March alone, while average weekly earnings fell by £16 per week. These figures are a staggering self-indictment of the TUC and its affiliated unions that have presided over 17-years of outright wage suppression—the longest wage freeze on some measures since the Battle of Waterloo.

Delivering his package of measures on Thursday, Sunak declared, “no government can solve every problem, particularly the complex and global challenge of inflation.” But the surge in energy and food prices is a direct outcome of policies pursued by capitalist governments to enrich the financial oligarchy.

Surging corporate profits are responsible for 60 percent of increases in inflation, according to a recent report on global income inequality published by Oxfam. The charity found that corporate profits grew more during the pandemic than in the previous 23 years, as governments directed trillions of “bail-out” funds into the coffers of the banks and corporations.

This year’s Sunday Times Rich List showed the wealth of the top 20 entrants grew by £30 billion in the past 12 months and has more than doubled in the past 10 years. The High Pay Centre (HPC) that monitors the income of top earners, reported this week that if household wealth had grown at the same rate as the top 20 Rich List entrants since 2012, every UK household would be £205,000 better off.

The HPC commented, “Imagine the difference that the £30 billion increase in the wealth of the top 20 people on the list could have made if invested in hospitals, schools, green energy, public transport or support for the world’s poorest countries, rather than accruing to people who were already billionaires anyway.”

US government awards $10 billion NSA cloud contract to Amazon

Ray Coleman

After months of evaluation, the National Security Agency of the United States decided in April to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS), over an outcry from rival tech giant Microsoft.

Known as “Wild and Stormy,” the contract is not the same as the much reported and similarly priced $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract from the Department of Defense that was also the subject of competing bids from AWS and Microsoft.

That contract was scrapped in July 2021 by the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden after years of squabbling between the two contenders, in the wake of the DoD’s decision under then-President Donald Trump to award the bid to Microsoft, a transparent effort to punish Amazon and its then CEO Jeff Bezos.

Although the NSA originally awarded the Wild and Stormy cloud contract to AWS in the summer of 2021, a challenge from Microsoft led the Government Accountability Office to direct the agency last October to reevaluate contract proposals from both bidders. The NSA ultimately went with the original AWS bid.

Commenting on the 10-year federal contract, an NSA spokesperson told Federal News Network the Wild and Stormy contract “is a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the agency.” Microsoft has said it will not challenge the decision.

NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland [Photo by Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office / CC BY 4.0]

The Wild and Stormy contract stipulates that AWS will be the sole bidder holding the rights to the construction of the NSA’s cloud facility.

This is a reversal from the government’s previous decision to void the JEDI contract last year. At that time, the decision to scrap the single-provider method for a “multi-vendor” approach was favored because it “puts the agency a little more in the driver’s seat to select what they want,” stated Shawn McCarthy of the government analytics firm IDC Government Insights to the FNN.

The Hybrid Compute Initiative is a sweeping plan by the NSA to modernize its GovCloud environment. It aims to move massive amounts of data and computing power away from the agency’s global network of internal servers to cloud networks, provided by private vendors.

According to John Sherman, former Chief Information Officer of the Intelligence Community in 2020 when Hybrid Cloud Initiative was announced, such private networks would contain “very significant [signals intelligence] holdings.”

After the September 11, 2001 attacks and the passage of laws like the Patriot Act, the Total Information Act of 2002 and similar measures gave the US government sweeping powers to spy on people around the world. The NSA suddenly found itself in need of data storage capabilities to handle the increasing amount of data it collected.

A February report released by the NSA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) noted hundreds of “concerns” that a “wide swath” of the agency’s surveillance activities had the potential to be criminally abused.

For years, the agency addressed the problem of storage by adding new servers. But by 2010 it became clear cloud computing would provide the most efficient means of sharing classified data among various intelligence agencies. This also made information discoverable by analysts performing queries in one common space.

Reporting on the Wild and Stormy contract has largely been limited to government and tech-focused publications, but some commentators in and around the Democratic Party have expressed anxiety over the award. Speaking on The Hill’s “Rising” TV program earlier this month, Jacobin editor David Sirota said, “We don’t actually know the details of this contract. It’s shrouded in secrecy” due to “national security” reasons, Sirota complained.

Other commentators have pointed to the Biden administration’s alleged “hypocrisy” in awarding the NSA cloud contract to Amazon despite the White House’s previous pledges that it would prioritize contractors that allow their employees to join unions.

Writing for Salon, journalist Chris Hedges noted Biden “invited Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls and union workers from Starbucks and other organizations to the White House at the same time it re-awarded a $10 billion contract to the union-busting Amazon and the National Security Agency for cloud computing.”

In a revealing statement, Hedges continued, “Withholding the federal contracts until Amazon permitted free and open union organizing would be a powerful stand on behalf of workers.”

Far from hypocrisy, the awarding of the contract to Amazon confirms the important role that the company plays as a part of the critical US infrastructure, as well as the military-intelligence apparatus. Hedges does not explain how helping the NSA to improve and update its surveillance tools would be taking “a powerful stand on behalf of workers.”

The Biden administration is not promoting various trade union apparatuses at Amazon because they are “pro-worker.” On the contrary, it is a way to both restrain the class movement of workers in this key part of the economy, as well as a way to more closely coordinate its policies of class war at home and war with Russia and China abroad with its private sector partners.

Study finds that vaccines offer little protection from Long COVID after breakthrough infection

Benjamin Mateus

In no uncertain terms, the vaccine-only strategy has proven to be an abysmal failure, not only in protecting society as a whole from the COVID-19 pandemic. It also does little to protect against Long COVID (technically known as post-acute COVID-19 syndrome) or death after the post-acute phase of a breakthrough infection. 

The insistence on a vaccine-only strategy lies not in any health care rationale, but in the need to protect the capitalist class from any intrusion on their insatiable appetite for extracting surplus value out of the workforce.

The findings in a recent study published in Nature Medicine, conducted by the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have significant public health implications. They confirm once again that the basic public health measures proven so effective for centuries, including quarantining, contact-tracing and eliminating an infection entirely (Zero-COVID, not “living with the virus”), remain the only assured strategies to protect the life and well-being of the population against a dangerous pandemic.

The stated purpose of the VA study was to address an important knowledge gap. Given the waning immunity from previous vaccinations and rising risk of breakthrough infections, did people with breakthrough infections develop Long COVID and at what rates? As the authors noted, “Addressing this knowledge gap is important to guide public health policy and post-acute COVID-19 care strategies.”

For their study, they compared nearly 34,000 documented breakthrough infection cases (COVID patients who had proof of previous vaccination) to almost 5 million contemporary patients of similar age, gender and medical co-morbidities who had no documentation of prior infection. (This huge number is made possible by the large population served and monitored by the VA).

Though the study didn’t state the age of their studied population, a report prepared by the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics in March 2019 found the median age of VA patients was around 64 and they were predominantly male. Based on economic status, they fared slightly better than non-veterans.

The study found the incidence of breakthrough infections was approximately one for every 100 individuals at six months after being fully vaccinated. The study period was from January 1, 2021, to October 31, 2021, prior to the Omicron phase of the pandemic.

According to the authors of the study, those who survived breakthrough infections still had nearly twice the rate of death when compared to the contemporary VA patients who never were infected. Their excess rate of death by six months after the breakthrough infection was about one in every 75.

This compares to one out of every 73 elderly people—those over 65 and older—who have died of COVID complications directly. In other words, elderly people who have a breakthrough infection are no better off than elderly people who were never vaccinated at all.

The study found that the risk of death was highest in the first three months after a breakthrough infection, and the higher death rates persisted at least until six months, the duration of the study. Other research found excess death from COVID continued for at least a year.

Additionally, the study noted that the increased risk of dying persisted even for those who had mild disease and did not need hospitalization after their breakthrough infection. On the other hand, those with breakthrough infections that required ICU admission had a nearly six-fold increase in dying in the first six months after they had recovered from COVID.

Those who had breakthrough infections also had an increased risk of symptoms associated with Long COVID, at rates 50 percent higher than their uninfected counterparts.

All people infected with COVID, both those with breakthrough infections and those unvaccinated, are at risk for developing health conditions that threaten their well-being and life. These include higher risks of cardiovascular, blood clotting, kidney, neurological, gastrointestinal and pulmonary disorders. They also suffered from fatigue, mental health disturbances, and muscle and joint pains. 

When compared to previously unvaccinated individuals who became infected with COVID, those with BTI had a lower risk of excess death by one-third, meaning that vaccines protected them from death in the six months after recovering from COVID, but only slightly. 

The lead author of the study, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University Medical School, told Healthline, “Essentially, we wanted to know if vaccines can protect us from Long COVID and how much protection is conferred by vaccination. We were hoping to see that vaccines would be protective, but, alas, the results showed otherwise,” calling the vaccines an “imperfect shield.”

The Omicron surge appears to have impacted the elderly even more than Delta, despite the relatively high rate of vaccination for those over 65. Nearly two-thirds of people that died during the Omicron surge were over the age of 75. This figure was only one-third during the Delta phase.

A New York Times analysis indicated that the share of COVID deaths among people over 65 started climbing since its low in September 2021 in part due to waning immunity, though vaccines have reportedly continued to be effective against severe disease, hospitalization, and deaths in the acute phase of the infection.

Share of breakthrough infections during Delta and Omicron waves across Washington state

Also, the proportion of breakthrough infections has been much higher during the Omicron phase. Some of the most comprehensive data on breakthrough infections comes from the Washington state Department of Health. During January 2022, at the peak of the Omicron wave, more than 50 percent of COVID cases were breakthrough infections, with 44 percent on average during December 2021 through February 2022. 

Additionally, Harvard School of Medicine recently published findings that Omicron was intrinsically as virulent as previous strains of SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that the claims of “milder” cases were in large part due to the high level of antibodies in the population from prior infections and vaccinations. 

And a recent New England Journal of Medicine study underscored the important fact that after a booster shot, vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease, let alone breakthrough infections, declined to 40 percent after six months, making essentially everyone at risk for reinfection.

Less publicized, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also published data on Long COVID for those infected between March 2020 to November 2021. They found that one in five adults 18 years and older subsequently developed health conditions related to their previous COVID infection, corroborating the VA data. 

According to Long COVID Initiative, a website of resources for patients and communities, nearly 23 million US residents, or 7 percent of the population, are living with Long COVID. Seven million are experiencing disabling Long COVID. The expected financial burden for the current year stands at $386 billion. These figures do not include costs incurred by businesses or governmental agencies which will be pushed on to the backs of the afflicted.

The most common symptoms that last at least seven months include brain fog (58 percent), post-exertional malaise (72 percent), and fatigue (80 percent) implying that it may be impossible to perform demanding jobs for a significant number in the population, who face the growing economic hardships caused by the present inflationary crisis that is sweeping the globe. 

These figures from the VA study, when applied on a world scale, suggest the staggering impact on the international working class of the policy of “learning to live with the virus.” If the vaccines offer little protection against Long COVID, as Arijit Chakravarty of Fractal Therapeutics told us recently, “If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow, and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current strategy, we could well have over a billion people living with Long COVID.”

Indeed, the pandemic in permanence means that the more than 1 million dead in the US and 20 million across the globe are just the beginning of the continued death and debilitation that will befall the world’s humanity. Despite these horrific and grim figures and the success of a Zero-COVID policy best exemplified by China, the ruling elites demand all consideration of human health be subordinated to the health and prosperity of the markets.