Application Deadline: Various. Check the courses for the different deadlines
Eligible Countries: Developing Countries
To be taken at (country): Singapore
Type: Training, Fellowship (Career)
Eligibility:
The fellowships/scholarships are intended for participants nominated by their respective Governments.
Nominating Governments should preferably nominate not more than 2 candidates for each course and advise which candidate should take priority if more than one candidate is nominated.
Number of Scholarships: Not specified
Value of Scholarship: The Government of Singapore will bear the training fees, daily allowance of Sixty Singapore Dollars (S$60) and hotel accommodation for participants accepted for the programmes.
Complimentary breakfast will be provided at the hotel and lunch at SAA during training days. Travel arrangements are to be made and costs borne by the nominating Governments.
Hotel accommodation will be provided for the training duration, i.e. one day before course commencement (after 2 pm) and one day after the course (till 12 noon).
Daily allowance will be limited to the training duration, i.e. from the start of the course up to the last day of the course.
Expenses to be incurred for stay beyond this duration will not be covered.
Travel arrangements are to be made and costs borne by the nominating Governments.
How to Apply: Apply below
It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before apply
A new report published last week by the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism found that an “all-time high” number of “white supremacist propaganda” incidents occurred in the United States in 2022, eclipsing the previous year’s record total of 4,876 by nearly 2,000.
“Our data shows,” the ADL wrote, “a 38 percent increase in incidents from the previous year, with a total of 6,751 … the highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents ADL has ever recorded.”
In addition to an increase in white supremacist incidents, the ADL recorded a more than doubling of “antisemitic propaganda” incidents, rising from 352 in 2021 to 852 in 2022. These included banner drops on roadways, in-person demonstrations, leafleting neighborhoods and projecting images on buildings and stadiums.
The ADL found that propaganda efforts were undertaken in every US state except Hawaii, with the most active states being Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Utah, Florida, Connecticut and Georgia. These propaganda efforts were organized by “at least 50 different white supremacist groups” according to the ADL, however, “three of them—Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League (GDL) and White Lives Matter (WLM)—were responsible for 93 percent of the activity.”
White supremacist “events” such as demonstrations at state capitols, parades and local businesses, organized by WLM, GDL, Patriot Front, the Proud Boys and others increased by 55 percent last year, from 108 in 2021 to 167 in 2022.
The only area where ADL recorded a decrease in fascist activity was on school campuses, where the ADL found 219 incidents of white supremacist propaganda in 2022, a slight 6 percent decrease from 2021. Fascist propaganda, overwhelmingly distributed by Patriot Front (74 percent of all incidents), was discovered on campuses in 39 different states, led by Texas, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan.
This is the second report released by the ADL in the last month that has documented an historic rise in far-right agitation and violence in the US.
Last month, the ADL reported that every single “extremist” mass killing in 2022 was linked to far-right ideology. Notably, the ADL did not mention that every mass killing linked to in their report was directly inspired by Republican Party politicians and their sycophants in right-wing media. This is also the case in the March report, which likewise does not mention Trump or the role of the Republican Party in cultivating these right-wing and openly fascist elements.
While the Republicans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, have advanced some 420 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation so far in 2023, violent Republican rhetoric is translating into threats of real-world fascist terrorist violence.
Last week, less than a week after a heavily armed fascist was arrested after threatening to kill “anyone that is Jewish” in the Michigan government, another Michigan man, Randall Robert Berka II, was arrested on charges of unlawfully owning guns after he threatened online to kill LGBTQ people and leading Democratic politicians, including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and President Joe Biden.
According to the March 9 criminal complaint, Google forwarded the FBI several threats posted by an account linked to Berka that were made between February and March 2023.
“Trans freaks and gays lgbt freaks [they] all need [to] die and be genocided its all I talk about anymore is wanting to kill trans freaks,” the account linked to Berka allegedly posted online. The complaint included over two pages of threats allegedly made by Berka over the last month.
The complaint noted that Berka had been involuntarily committed for mental health treatment in 2012. Despite his previous commitment preventing him from legally owning firearms, Berka’s mom, Michelle, according to the complaint, admitted that within the last year she had purchased four guns for her son.
In the complaint, Michelle confirmed with the FBI that her son has ammunition for all of his weapons, which he kept “staged” at his apartment along with body armor. In the complaint, Michelle said she is scared of her son and that he “should be arrested and put in prison.”
The day after the FBI arrested Berka, one person was arrested on assault charges at an anti-trans demonstration held in Sacramento, California, on March 10. Police have refused to confirm if the person arrested was part of the small crowd of neo-Nazis or part of the larger group of counter-demonstrators.
Social media video posted online appears to show a woman, identified as Aurelia Moore, pointing a gun at counter-protesters. Separate photos show previously identified neo-Nazis dressed in black and armed with brass knuckles.
The day after the anti-trans rally in Sacramento, over 100 neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, Patriot Front and White Lives Matter fascists descended on a drag queen story hour held Saturday at Wadsworth Memorial Park in Ohio.
The armed Nazis, led by Chris Pohlhaus from the Nazi group “Blood Tribe,” wore red sweaters, black pants and waved black and white flags with swastikas on them, screaming “Sieg Heil!” “There will be blood!” “Pedophiles get the rope!” along with chants of “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions.”
Photos from the event show the Nazis protected by police as they scream obscenities at the children and parents gathered at the public park.
The Akron Beacon Journal reported on Monday that at the end of the event, two people were charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and arrested after a fight broke out in which an opponent of the neo-Nazis pepper-sprayed a fascist in chain mail. After a brief scuffle, a man pointed what appeared to be a gun into the crowd, although police have since claimed that the “metallic object” was a not a gun, but a weapon used to shoot pepper-spray balls.
In Florida, police have yet to announce an arrest after a man attacked the Chabad Jewish Center of Cape Coral shortly after services ended Saturday night. According to multiple witnesses, the enraged man used a brick to try and break into the center, even as worshipers were still inside.
“We hear this loud noise,” Rabbi Yossi Labkowski told NBC 2, “I was approaching the door and I see somebody picking up a brick and just yanking it, throwing it at the door.”
Jacob Ben-Haim, who was inside the building at the time of the attack, told NBC he thought someone was shooting through the door.
“Four or five loud bangs on the door. So I thought for a moment, somebody’s shooting at the door … I was looking, where’s the bullets?”
Rabbi Yossi said that after the man was unable to break through the door, he proceeded to vandalize a painting of a menorah and smash the windshield of the rabbi’s vehicle.
“He was targeting the Jewish community,” Labkowski said.
This past Tuesday, police in Lakewood, New Jersey, arrested 22-year-old Max Sanchez after multiple people reported the man was exhibiting disturbing behavior while armed with a large knife outside the Satmar Shul synagogue. In a statement, police captain Gregory Staffordsmith said that while there were “no specific threats made to any of the victims,” the area where Sanchez was menacing people is home to “a large portion of Orthodox Jewish families.”
Fiji’s former prime minister and coup leader Frank Bainimarama was arrested last Thursday and spent a night in custody before being granted bail by a Suva court and released. Bainimarama and former police commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho pleaded not guilty to one charge each of abuse of office.
Fiji prime minister and FijiFirst leader Frank Bainimarama addressing climate conference in 2017. [Photo by Flickr/James Dowson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.5]
Both men were ordered to hand over their travel documents and reside at a permanent address. The magistrate also instructed them not to interfere with witnesses. They are expected in court again on May 11.
Fiji police laid the charges after questioning Bainimarama and Qiliho over the past month regarding allegations that they directed police to close investigations into senior officials at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in 2019. Director of Public Prosecutions Christopher Pryde has indicated that nine more charges are pending.
Fiji Police chief of intelligence, prosecutions and acting assistant commissioner Sakeo Raikaci told a media conference a special taskforce was undertaking “further investigations into other matters arising from this case.” He declared he wanted to “clear the air” and “reassure” the public about the “independence of the investigation process.”
Bainimarama, who led Fiji for 16 years following his 2006 military coup, lost December’s general election and was suspended last month from parliament for three years. As opposition leader Bainimarama delivered a belligerent speech on the opening day of parliament, accusing the new government and Fiji’s president, Ratu Wiliame Katonivere of “setting out to destroy constitutional democracy” and appealed to the military, which he once commanded, to act.
The installation of the new government has seen an ongoing power struggle between Bainimarama and Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, another former military coup leader, and the contesting factions of the divided ruling elite that back them. Rabuka heads a fragile three-party coalition including his People’s Alliance Party, the National Federation Party and the Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA)—a minority party holding the balance of power with just three MPs.
The swirling political crisis escalated in January when the military head Major General Jone Kalouniwai released an extraordinary media statement declaring that the armed forces had “quietly observed with growing concern… the ambition and speed of the government,” claiming it had “the potential to bring about fateful, long-term national security consequences.” Under Section 131 of the 2013 Constitution, drawn up by Bainimarama, the military has unrestrained powers to ensure the “safety and security of the country.”
Two weeks after his suspension, Bainimarama last Wednesday abruptly announced his resignation from parliament “with immediate effect” but vowed to remain leader of his FijiFirst Party. He denounced his “unwarranted and most certainly unjustified” suspension and declared he would “engage more actively outside parliament with our FijiFirst supporters and the growing number of unsatisfied Fijians” disillusioned with the government.
Rabuka has quickly moved to replace key personnel in the civil service seen as Bainimarama’s political appointees. These include Qiliho, a former military officer with connections to previous coups, and corrections services boss Francis Kean. Both ran infamously brutal and corrupt operations under Bainimarama.
The charges against Bainimarama and Qiliho centre on allegations the pair terminated a police investigation into misuse of money at the USP in 2019. The regional university, headquartered in Suva, is owned by 12 Pacific states with part funding from Australia and New Zealand.
The USP vice-chancellor, Pal Ahluwalia, was witch-hunted and suspended from his post in 2020 by the university council for “material misconduct,” after exposing alleged corruption and mismanagement under the leadership group, with millions of dollars missing. Hundreds of students and staff protested the professor’s suspension and demanded the removal of the USP Executive Committee.
Ahluwalia’s removal prompted warnings that the university’s autonomy and academic freedom was under threat. Ahluwalia was later reinstated and cleared of the bogus allegations. After he submitted a report to the council, Auckland accountancy consultancy BDO was hired to investigate. When the damning BDO report reached the council, it was suppressed and details kept from the public.
The government then froze a $A28 million university grant, again prompting condemnation. The BDO report was leaked, naming 25 senior staff accused of manipulating allowances to pay themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars they were not entitled to. The government flatly refused to accept the BDO’s findings.
In February 2021 immigration, police and military officials carried out a midnight raid at the home of Ahluwalia, who is a Canadian national, and his wife, summarily deporting them. The pair was presented with a letter stating they had been declared “prohibited immigrants” by Bainimarama as minister for immigration for unspecified “repeated breaches” of the immigration act and of their visa conditions.
New Zealand journalist Michael Field wrote on Pacific Newsroom that there was clear evidence that the attacks on the vice chancellor were primarily directed by USP pro-chancellor Winston Thompson, a former Fijian ambassador to the United States, who had close links to the regime.
Ahluwalia’s expulsion was denounced by students, staff and alumni as a “coup,” and likened to “gestapo tactics.” Fiji’s Law Society joined the condemnation, while civil society group Civicus said it would create a “chilling effect for whistle-blowers and those who want to speak up and expose violations by officials in Fiji.” A police presence was established at the USP’s Laucala campus to intimidate any protests.
The issue escalated into a region-wide controversy. USP Chancellor Lionel Aingimea, who is president of Nauru, accused a “small group” of Fiji officials of “hijacking” the institution. Samoa’s then prime minister, Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, declared he would seek to “rehouse” the university in his country. He said the deportation was only the latest in a series of issues at the USP which “came as no surprise,” adding that “many big organisations have actually left Fiji in a similar fashion.”
Among Rabuka’s first moves on taking office in January was to bring Ahluwalia back from exile and reinstate him at the university. Clearly intended as a shot over Bainimarama’s bow, Rabuka delivered an effusive public apology at the USP, declaring: “It doesn’t matter who did it. As far as the world is concerned, Fiji did it to you.” He promised to pay the first instalment of $10 million in owed grants.
Rabuka’s public rehabilitation of Ahluwalia, followed by Bainimarama’s arrest, is also part of Rabuka’s posturing about liberalising and undoing aspects of the previous unpopular dictatorial regime. An oppressive media law that allows fines and prison sentences for news reports deemed against the “national interest” is to be replaced. The trade unions are being brought in from the cold through a tripartite wage fixing system that will offer them “consultation” alongside government and employers.
Rabuka however, has no less of an authoritarian history than Bainimarama. He ruled as prime minister from 1992 to 1999 after leading two military coups in 1987 to boost the position of ethnic Fijians against Indo-Fijians, many of whom fled the country.
Rabuka is now reviving contentious communalist politics, aimed at cementing the position of the ethnic iTaukei Fijian elite at the expense of Indo-Fijians and the working class, including the re-establishment of the privileged Great Council of Chiefs. That body was shut down in 2012 by Bainimarama, who accused it of exacerbating racial divisions “to the detriment of Fiji’s pursuit of a common and equal citizenry.”
Rabuka’s positioning is a response to fears within the ruling elite of simmering anger in the working class. Fiji’s workers are suffering skyrocketing inflation, the destruction of thousands of jobs, and fractured supply chains for food, energy and basic goods. The poverty rate is nearly 30 percent and the social catastrophe has been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As they are internationally, more austerity measures are on the way.
Should Rabuka’s strategy fail to contain widespread social struggles, the army still stands waiting in the wings.
Schools in England are in such perilous state of structural degradation after years of cutbacks and lack of maintenance that many could collapse, putting both pupils and staff in danger. The Conservative government has been forced to acknowledge this, but will not guarantee the necessary remedial work to make them safe.
For the past two months the Department for Education (DfE) has refused to make public its Building Conditions Survey Data. This report lists the schools in need of urgent repair. They fear an outcry from parents and school staff, which could further ignite the wave of strikes over the cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the devastating consequences of the pandemic and Ukraine war.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets Secretary of State for Education Gillian Keegan, October 25, 2022. London, United Kingdom. [Photo by UK Government/Flickr / CC BY 2.0]
A coalition of trade unions recently wrote an open letter to Education Secretary Gillian Keegan February 16 highlighting the “shocking” state of schools which could end up “costing lives”, asking the government what action it was taking to eradicate the risk of building collapse. They also raised the issue of asbestos in school buildings, a material associated with deadly cancers. Signatories included the National Education Union (NEU), NASUWT, Unison, Unite, GMB and Community.
The government’s response was to shrug off responsibility for ensuring the safety of children and staff, saying that if they are made aware of imminent risk of building collapse then “immediate action is taken to ensure safety and remediate the situation.”
The government is fully aware some schools are at risk of collapse. In its annual report released in December, the DfE wrote, “There is a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools which are at or approaching the end of their designed life-expectancy and structural integrity is impaired. The risk predominantly exists in those buildings built in the years 1945 to 1970 which used ‘system build’ light frame techniques.”
The “light frame techniques” refers to the use of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), a cheaper alternative to concrete, which becomes life-expired after 30 years. Its use continued into the 1980’s, being thermally efficient, fire resistance and lightweight making for speedier construction.
Aerated autoclaved concrete, close-up view [Photo by Marco Bernardini, own work / CC BY-SA 3.0]
According to the DfE, “The likelihood of the school buildings safety risk increased in October 2021 due to the increased numbers of serious structural issues identified. The impact and likelihood are unlikely to reduce in 2022, as there was no agreement to increase condition funding or the scale of the rebuilding programme at SR21 [spending review 2021].”
The report raised the risk of building collapse from “critical-likely” as of April 2021 to “critical-very likely” in March 2022, after “serious structural issues” were found in five schools in the year to October 2021.
The schools included St Anne’s in Liverpool, closed for a long-term rebuild, Fearnville Primary in Bradford, when a teacher was hospitalised after being hit by a falling ceiling tile, and Fortis Academy in Birmingham after a concrete ceiling panel hit a desk.
In January this year, a piece of cladding fell off the roof of a school in Sheffield injuring a parent. The parent, Carla, was waiting to pick up her two children outside Dore Primary School whena 12-15ft-long fascia board with 4in nails fell off the roof and hit her on the head. Carla suffered a black eye, underwent an MRI scan and had to take three weeks off work. She has since suffered from tinnitus and has trouble reading.
“It is horrifying that we’ve got to this point,” she told the Guardian. “Our children’s school buildings are literally falling apart and it feels like it is only a matter of time before something even more serious happens.
“My injuries are bad enough but the fact that this could so easily have been a child doesn’t bear thinking about. I know the school is doing everything they can, but I also know that they don’t have the funds.”
This is only the latest in a series the past year involving school buildings with potentially fatal consequences.
In December, the Angel Road Junior School site in Norfolk was forced to close permanently, such was the state of disrepair. The Evolution Academy Trust said it could “no longer guarantee the safety of pupils, staff and visitors.”
In July, the ceiling of a classroom at the Winston Churchill School in Woking collapsed during school time. Luckily, there were no casualties.
In June, firefighters were called to school in Brent when the top half of a tower collapsed onto the roof of the sports hall. Fortunately, no one was injured.
In March, Burnside Academy in Sunderland was forced to close after “structural movement” was precipitated by routine maintenance work.
Several schools have suffered partial roof collapses directly attributable to the use of RAAC in building materials. The situation is complicated by the fact that there is no official record of the materials used to build schools.
The DfE’s permanent secretary Susan Acland Hood was recently questioned by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee concerning the safety of the school estate. She told MPs that “a big clump of school buildings in England are coming to the end of their design life, all at the same time.”
The government is carrying out structural surveys on all schools in England, over five years, but they are visual and very limited.
The amount of remedial work is not determined by need but what the government is prepared to spend. Schools need £11.4 billion immediately for repairs to make them safe, but the government is only offering £1.8 billion for this year out of £13 billion it earmarked for building improvements since 2015. The government has a target of upgrading and remediating merely 500 schools out of a total of 32,226even though a third of schools were built between 1960-1980 when RAAC was used widely.
According to National Achievement Survey research by the House of Commons library, capital spending on school buildings fell from 2009/10 to 2021/2022 by 37 percent, or 50 percent in real terms. The school estate is being run down as part of austerity cuts to pay for the banking collapse in 2008/9, the pandemic bailout, and the defence budget increases to pay for the war in Ukraine—all at the expense of the health and safety of pupils and staff.
The education unions did nothing to secure the safety of their members or pupils in their charge during the pandemic. During the current pay strikes, they make no mention that their members work in buildings that could collapse on them but are busy negotiating below inflation pay deals.
The Labour Party whether led by Jeremy Corbyn or Sir Keir Starmer have marched in lockstep with the Tories in all the austerity cuts since 2010. Current party leader Starmer made clear that Labour in office would put the economy, i.e. profits, first. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader (2015-2019), he co-wrote a letter along with his Chancellor John McDonnell instructing local Labour councils to impose Tory cuts.
The fatal shootings in Hamburg killed eight people on Thursday evening at the premises of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious community. The victims include four men and two women, between 33 and 60 years, as well as the unborn child of another woman. The dead also include the suspected murderer, Philipp Fusz, who, according to the investigating authorities, “executed himself” following the crime. Eight other people were injured, four seriously, with several needing immediate hospitalization.
Corpses are carried out of a Jehovah's Witness building and loaded into hearses in Hamburg, Germany Friday, March 10, 2023. Shots were fired inside the building used by Jehovah's Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, with multiple people killed and wounded, police said. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber ]
In a statement on its website Friday, the religious community said it was “deeply saddened” by the horrific rampage on the members of its congregation. “Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of the victims as well as to the traumatized eyewitnesses. The chaplains of the local community are doing their best to offer them assistance in this difficult hour.” According to the latest reports, four of the wounded are still fighting for their lives. The Jehovah’s Witnesses reject blood transfusions.
While many questions remain unanswered, there is no question that this was one of the worst fatal attacks in Germany in recent memory. At a joint press conference Friday noon, the Hamburg state Interior Ministry, the investigating public prosecutor’s office and spokesmen for the Hamburg police provided the following account of the crime:
Philipp Fusz (35)—armed with a semi-automatic handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition—shortly before 9 p.m., entered the parking lot of the building where the service was being held. There, he had first fired ten shots at the car of a witness, who was able to save herself, being only slightly injured, and make an initial emergency call. Subsequently, Fusz had opened fire through the windowpanes on the 36 worshippers gathered in the hall and had gained access to the interior of the building “constantly using [his] firearms.” In total, the alleged perpetrator fired 135 shots at his victims—a massacre.
Video taken by a resident shows a person dressed in black repeatedly shooting into the building from the outside through a broken window until the person finally enters the building and continues shooting inside. According to consistent statements from police and uninvolved witnesses, one person fled to the second floor when emergency personnel arrived. While the police secured the first floor and proceeded upstairs, a final shot was heard, whereupon the suspected perpetrator and the murder weapon were found.
Chief of Operations Matthias Tresp told the press that it was a “lucky coincidence” that members of a special unit of the Hamburg riot police were in the vicinity. A total of almost 1,000 officers were deployed in the police operation, including 52 federal police officers and special forces from Schleswig-Holstein. Later, 15 more magazines and 200 additional rounds of ammunition were found in Fusz’s apartment; data media and writings were also seized.
In recent days, more information about the alleged perpetrator has become known. Apparently, Fusz had developed psychological problems and a strong hatred for the religious community to which he himself had belonged until a year and a half ago. According to Hamburg’s Interior Senator (state minister) Andy Grote (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Fusz had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses “voluntarily, but not on good terms.” Media reports shedding light on Fusz’s background paint a picture of a personality who was outwardly inconspicuous but also characterized by self-aggrandizement, doom-mongering and ideological delusions.
On his website, Fusz presented himself as a “multicultural” and “self-confessed European” and offered his services internationally as a “business consultant”—for a daily rate of €250,000. He justified the horrendous fee by claiming that his “work” should provide clients with “leverage or added value of at least €2.5 million.” At the same time, Fusz propagated a crude, religious worldview laced with right-wing extremist elements.
In late 2022, he published a tract titled “The Truth About God, Jesus Christ and Satan: A New Reflected View of Epochal Dimensions.” The pamphlet, which Fusz describes on his website as a “standard work ... for all sciences related to humanity, public relations, politics, economics and ethics,” has since been deleted from Amazon and other online platforms. According to media reports, it also contains anti-Semitic messages, calling Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “human instrument of Jesus Christ” and the persecution of Jews an “act of heaven.” Hitler, he says, received his idea of a “millennial kingdom” from Jesus and wanted to implement it for him.
While it is unclear whether and to what extent Fusz’s religious glorification of Hitler motivated the rampage—Jehovah’s Witnesses were brutally persecuted by the Nazis—the perpetrator was known to authorities. In December, the Hamburg firearms authority had issued him a weapons permit. According to Hamburg Police Chief Ralf Martin Meyer, an anonymous letter had been received by the police in January asking the authorities to “check Fusz’s behaviour and weapons permit.”
In February, Fusz was then visited by the firearms authorities. But although the officers immediately found that some of the ammunition was not properly stored, this only resulted in a verbal warning. According to Meyer, there were no indications in publicly available sources that Fusz was an extremist. This claim is obviously false and raises serious questions about the role of the security services, which in Germany are riddled with right-wing extremists.
If leading government politicians, such as federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD), are now calling for tighter gun laws in response to the massacre, this is also intended to distract from the deeper causes of the violence. Massacres are becoming more frequent not only in the US, where more than 70 people have already died in mass shootings this year, but also in Germany. Following the far-right terrorist attacks in Munich (July 2016), Halle (October 2019) and Hanau (February 2020), which specifically targeted immigrants and Jews, four massacres have occurred at educational institutions alone since the beginning of 2022.
In January 2022, an 18-year-old student shot and killed a young woman and injured three others in a lecture hall at Heidelberg University.
In May 2022, a 21-year-old former student at Lloyd Gymnasium in Bremerhaven shot a school secretary with a crossbow, critically injuring her.
In June 2022, a 34-year-old man in Hamm killed a 30-year-old female teaching assistant and injured two 22-year-old female students and a 22-year-old male student in a rampage at Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences.
In January 2023, a 55-year-old teacher was stabbed to death at a vocational college in Ibbenbüren. The alleged perpetrator, a 17-year-old student, turned himself in to the police.
The increase in this mass violence cannot simply be explained by individual motives and problems. It has deeper social causes that are systematically ignored by politicians and the media. Against what social and political background did the rampage in Hamburg take place? These are only some of the most obvious aspects:
In Ukraine, the NATO powers are waging a murderous proxy war against the nuclear power Russia. Although hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers die every day and the conflict conjures up the threat of a devastating third world war, the German government rejects a negotiated settlement. The ruling class is using the war as an opportunity to reassert itself as a major military power after its horrific crimes in two world wars.
The military offensive is accompanied by deafening war propaganda. Deadly weapons such as rockets and tanks are cynically glorified as messengers of peace, and Nazism is trivialized (“Hitler was not vicious”) by university professors who are courted by the media. While the military has been given €100 billion virtually overnight, spending on education, social services and health care is being massively cut. Mass layoffs are the order of the day; poverty, stress, insecurity and fear characterize the lives of millions.
Added to this is the experience of the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 170,000 people in Germany alone. Over the last three years, human life has been systematically subordinated to profit. Leading politicians conducted a fascistic debate about how many lives should be sacrificed to the interests of the economy and declared that human dignity did not necessarily include the right to life and was thus not “absolutely” protected by the constitution.
Meta, the $500 billion parent company of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it will lay off 10,000 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce.
Meta's logo on a sign at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022. [AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez]
In a memo to the Meta staff posted on his Facebook profile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan, and that “we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”
Zuckerberg wrote that, with less hiring, the layoffs would immediately impact and “further reduce the size of our recruiting team” and will hit the company’s tech groups in late April and business groups in late May. The job cuts and firing freeze will also impact the Meta international teams.
The new announcement follows 13,000 job cuts in November and brings the layoffs at the largest social media company in the world to 23,000 out of 87,000 workers, or 26 percent, within five months. In addition to Facebook, which has 2.9 billion worldwide active users, Meta also owns the popular platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, each with 2 billion worldwide active users.
The Meta layoffs also increased the total number of tech workers laid off in the US in 2023 to 138,302 by 485 companies, as tracked by the website Layoffs.fyi. The other large layoffs in tech this year have included 12,000 at Google, 10,000 at Microsoft, 8,000 at Amazon, 8,000 at Salesforce and 6,650 cuts at Dell.
Meanwhile, media reports on Tuesday said that Apple—the most valuable company on Wall Street with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion—would be delaying bonuses for some of its divisions and is planning to freeze hiring in an effort to cut costs. Bloomberg reported that people, who asked not to be identified, said the frequency of bonuses would be reduced and “limiting hiring for more jobs and leaving additional positions open when employees depart.”
While half of the 300,000 tech layoffs since the beginning of 2022 are among a few dozen of the largest corporations, the other half of the eliminated jobs have been lost by over 1,000 smaller companies. These firms have been hard hit by the economic slowdown and rapid rise in interest rates, both spearheaded by the Federal Reserve Bank.
Layoffs have also been carried out in the entertainment, retail, banking and auto industries with job cuts announced recently at Disney, Waymo, Citigroup, General Motors and Rivian.
The job cuts at Meta are being demanded by powerful financial interests among Wall Street investors, who watched their share values fall from a peak of $378 in September 2021 to a low of $90.79 in early November 2022 or a decline of 76 percent. Since the first round of layoff announcements late last year, the Meta stock value has more than doubled and stands at $194.02 as of this writing.
In his memo CEO Zuckerberg is presenting the layoffs at Meta as part of a strategic vision called “Year of Efficiency,” involving the “flattening of our orgs” and “building a better technology company.” He also wrote, “A leaner organization will execute its highest priorities faster.”
However, the motivating hand of Wall Street still found its way into his buzzword-laden justifications for the massive attack on the Meta workforce. He wrote, “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”
In other words, investors are putting Zuckerberg on notice that his cost cutting is not going fast enough. As reported by The Byte, “investors are growing more and more upset at CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. … Disgruntled investors have had—and will continue to have—only one choice while he’s still in power: sell, sell, sell.”
The timing of the new round of Meta layoffs points to a connection between the ongoing destruction of tech jobs, the Federal Reserve Bank’s rapid interest rate increases and the failure of the tech industry-focused Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) over the weekend.
Even though hundreds of thousands of jobs have been shed in the tech sector because of the Fed rate increases that began in March 2022, the value of Wall Street tech stocks fell by nearly $4 trillion last year, and the investors are demand further massive cost cutting.
Meanwhile, the Fed rate increases led to the insolvency of SVB because the bank’s management and top tech customer depositors sought to make risky investments in government bonds that fell dramatically in value over the past year.
The collapse and bailout of SVB has further destabilized the tech industry globally. For example, Wired reported on Monday that the insolvency of SVB “has reverberated across India’s tech sector.” The Santa Clara, California-based bank had “a large number of Indian companies with US venture capital funding, and much of India’s $13 billion software-as-a-service industry, which services American clients.”
According to Anand Krishna, founder of fintech startup Inkle, “This was a global catastrophe. A serious number of jobs were at risk everywhere from small towns in India that you’ve never heard of to San Francisco. A lot of startups in India are still remote, and those jobs were at serious risk because people were running out.”
On Tuesday, an American MQ-9 Reaper military drone crashed near the Russian coastline during an encounter with two Russian fighter jets 6,000 miles from US territory.
Whether the American aircraft was rammed by a Russian jet, as the Americans claim, or crashed after it was forced to take evasive action, as the Russians assert, it was the first time that the Russian Air Force had downed an American aircraft since the end of the Cold War.
MQ-9 Reaper drone [credit: US Air Force]
The crash marks yet another dangerous milestone in the spiraling war between the United States and Russia, which is expanding in intensity and metastasizing on a global scale.
In its press briefing, the Pentagon did not provide any meaningful information on the incident. It refused to explain where the drone was, what it was doing near Russian airspace, whether it was armed, or what kind of mission it was performing, beyond “surveillance.”
The Pentagon did not deny claims by Russia that the drone had its transponder turned off and that it was headed toward Russian airspace.
A US official told the New York Times the aircraft was flying about 75 miles southwest of Crimea, which would have put it perhaps 100-150 miles from the Russian mainland.
US surveillance operations over the Black Sea and NATO airspace are a critical component of the operations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which are not only funded and armed by the US military, but directed by it.
In February the Washington Post reported that nearly all long-range missile strikes launched by the Ukrainian military relied on targeting provided by the United States.
In October, Canadian Broadcasting Company reporter David Common flew aboard a NATO reconnaissance flight near the Ukrainian border. He noted that NATO “allies share this intelligence in real time with the Ukrainians.” He also stated that the airman “describe watching Russian radar signatures disappear after being engaged by Ukrainian jets and missiles.”
He concluded that this reality “does give you a sense of how NATO does have involvement, really, in the Ukrainian conflict.”
Pentagon spokespeople responded to Tuesday’s crash with platitudes bordering on the ridiculous. The crash was the result of “juvenile,” “unsafe,” and “unprofessional” action on the part of the Russian fighter crews, they claimed.
The flight was “routine,” as if providing targeting information for combat troops in the largest war in Europe since World War II was “routine.”
Such statements explain nothing. As Rand Corporation political scientist Samuel Charap explained, “I would bet the MQ-9 was operating in an area that was of particular military significance to Moscow.” He continued, “The Russians would have had a clear military reason for what they did—this wasn’t a random act of lashing out. And Russian pilots would have been following instructions from ground control, not freelancing.”
In order to understand this incident, it is necessary to understand its context.
On January 20, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley pledged that Ukraine and its allies would “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” This sweeping declaration pledged the entire credibility of NATO and the United States to the military defeat of Russia.
But less than two months later, it has become clear that this goal is unlikely, even with the massive commitment of funds and military hardware that has already been deployed, without a massive expansion of US involvement in the conflict.
On Monday, the day before the downing of the jet, the Washington Post published its most pessimistic assessment of the conflict to date.
“Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses, pessimism grow,” the article was headlined. It stated, “The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.”
It added, “US and European officials have estimated that as many as 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of Russia’s invasion early last year.”
The Ukrainian forces are “suffering from basic shortages of ammunition, including artillery shells and mortar bombs, according to military personnel in the field.” A Ukrainian commander the Post interviewed said that the “few soldiers with combat experience” were “all already dead or wounded.”
The commander added, “There’s always belief in a miracle,” noting it might be “a massacre and corpses,” but “there will be a counteroffensive either way.” He described the turnover in his unit: “Of about 500 soldiers, roughly 100 were killed in action and another 400 wounded, leading to complete turnover.”
For the US and NATO powers, Ukrainians are nothing more than cannon fodder in the conflict with Russia. Even with the gargantuan US military investment in Ukraine, however, the present levels of mass death in the war, which British Defence Minister Ben Wallace said was approaching “First World War levels of attrition,” is tilting the balance of forces toward Russia, whose population is three times larger.
According to internal US government documents published as part of the Pentagon Papers, the preeminent reason for US involvement in Vietnam was to avoid a “humiliating defeat.” It is just such a prospect that the United States faces, unless it massively expands its involvement in the war.
Just such an expansion is being actively prepared. On Tuesday, just hours after the Pentagon announced the downing of the drone, Politico reported that a group of senators from both US political parties called on the Pentagon to prepare to send F-16 fighters to Ukraine.
Declaring that “we are now at a critical juncture in the conflict,” the senators called on the Pentagon to “take a hard look at providing F-16 aircraft to Ukraine.”
Ultimately, the achievement of the United States’ goals in the conflict are impossible outside of the direct deployment of NATO troops to the war zone.
But given the total lack of popular support for such an action, it will take some massive event to galvanize public support for the required intervention.
Whatever mission the US surveillance drone was flying, it was no doubt related to the Washington’s next steps in the conflict, which threaten to make all the blood spilled so far just a down payment.
