The fellowship will provide scholarships for up to 100 selected applicants annually, to help enhance the pool of qualified young women in the nuclear field. It also aims to support an inclusive workforce of both men and women for the future, contributing to global scientific and technological innovation from all over the world as diversity gives opportunity to greater creativity and productivity.
The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Programme (MSCFP) aims to help increase the number of women in the nuclear field, supporting an inclusive workforce of both men and women who contribute to and drive global scientific and technological innovation.
Named after pioneer physicist and twice Nobel Prize laureate Marie Sklodowska-Curie, the Programme aims to inspire and encourage young women to pursue a career in the nuclear field, by providing highly motivated female students with scholarships for Master’s programmesand an opportunity to pursue an internship facilitated by the IAEA.
Selected students receive a scholarship for Master’s programmes in nuclear related studies at accredited universities. They are also provided with an opportunity to pursue an internship facilitated by the IAEA for up to 12 months.
Scholarships are awarded annually to 100 plus students depending on the availability of funds. Consideration is given to field of study, and geographic and linguistic diversity.
The Importance Of Women In Science
Scientific breakthroughs have given the world previously unimaginable benefits. Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s pioneering work on radioactivity in the late 1800s enabled us to harness the power of the atom, producing countless benefits to humankind.
As the world faces pressures from a changing climate, growing populations, food insecurity and increased energy demand, maintaining a qualified workforce to drive innovation and productivity is all the more crucial. Nuclear related studies can help countries tackle several of these challenges, and the demand is high for qualified professionals in this field and will continue to grow.
In its unique mandate to accelerate and enlarge the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the IAEA is at the forefront of research and technology transfer and depends on a stable pool of qualified technical professionals to fulfil its mission. This workforce does and must include women.
Women, however, are far from being adequately represented in the nuclear field. They often face barriers to enter and progress in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), right from their school years. The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Programme seeks to enable more women from around the world to pursue a career in the nuclear field. The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Programme builds up gender-balanced capacities relevant to nuclear energy, other nuclear applications, nuclear safety and nuclear security, as well as non‑proliferation.
Eligible Field(s): Specialisations in nuclear science and technology, nuclear safety and security or non-proliferation.
Type: Masters
ELIGIBILITY:
The fellowship programme is open to female students from IAEA Member States who have been accepted or are enrolled in a Master’s programme at an accredited university. Consideration will be given to geographic distribution, the field of study distribution and linguistic diversity.
Eligible Countries: Any
To be Taken at (Country): Any
Number of Awards: 100+
VALUE OF AWARD:
Applicants awarded the MSCFP scholarship will be given up to 10,000 euros per year for covering tuition fee and up to 10,000 euros for supporting their living costs based on the costs of living at the university’s location, for a maximum of a two-year period of study.
Duration of Award: 2 years
HOW TO APPLY:
Candidates have until midnight on 30 Sept 2023 toapply for the first 100 scholarships.
It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.
China’s economy is going through some of the same growing pains that Japan once experienced: lower consumer spending, overbuilding on homes and offices, local government debt that runs into the trillions of dollars, and high unemployment among young people. The run of impressive growth rates seems to be over; it’s now hovering around three percent.
By just about any measure—GDP, exports, prices of goods and services—China’s economy is growing much more slowly than before the COVID pandemic hit. The Xi Jinping regime is trying to get people to spend more, get the real estate market to halt construction of office buildings without renters, and get local governments to become more financially responsible.
China had been the world’s leading exporter. Exports have driven a good deal of China’s rise, and account for about a fifth of the economy. But as happened in Japan in the 1980s, Chinese exports have slumped badly, with exports to the US falling most of all. China’s imports are down too.
Mexico has replaced China as the US’s biggest trade partner. Chinese officials are wooing foreign investors with talk of 2023 as the “Year of Investment in China.” But investors are wary, and many are abandoning China for more favorable climes.
Is China, like Japan back then, on the verge of long-term stagnation? Should US and European leaders be happy about that? Will Xi need to pump up the economy with some kind of stimulus program?
Questions of this sort point to just how important China’s economy is to the world, not to mention to the fate of China’s party-state leadership. Some China watchers think Beijing’s economic woes are behind the renewed interest in dialogue with the US.
Keith Bradsher of the New York Times, for instance, writes: “Now the faltering economy appears to have helped prompt a shift in the willingness of senior Chinese officials to engage in diplomatic talks with geopolitical rivals abroad, and to show more openness on economic policy at home.”
I don’t know what’s behind “appears to have helped,” since—as I’ve written recently on treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s China trip—resumption of dialogue with US officials has not altered either side’s position on the most pressing issues that divide the two countries.
I think the connection Bradsher tries to make between economic weakness and greater foreign policy flexibility is flawed, just as it was last November, following the Biden-Xi summit meeting in Bali, when some top US officials also thought Beijing was ripe for making concessions because of its economic and social challenges.
Then came the spy balloon incident and all bets were off. Bradsher is more accurate when he writes later in his article:
“Still, analysts noted that any softening in approach remained limited to economic or business policies that did not involve China’s national security, which has become a defining feature of Chinese policy in recent years. And there are few signs that the top leader, Xi Jinping, has endorsed a broad policy shift toward the United States, a step that would be necessary for any change to take root.”
Except for the months following the balloon incident, China’s leaders have consistently been open to talks with the US. US leaders have been the same. Talking is not the stumbling block; acting in ways that reduce tensions and convey respect is.
A “dual strike” of writers and actors has effectively halted the US entertainment industry, and with it a large portion of global movie and television production. On July 14, some 65,000 actors, members of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), joined 10,000 writers from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who have been striking since May 2. This is the first combined strike of writers and actors since 1960.
A militant, determined mood prevails among the strikers. In the lead-up to the initial July 1 deadline, thousands of actors—including prominent figures—signed a sharp open letter to the SAG-AFTRA leadership warning that actors needed nothing short of a “transformative deal.”
The letter told the union leadership, “We hope you’ve heard the message from us: This is an unprecedented inflection point in our industry, and what might be considered a good deal in any other years is simply not enough… We feel that our wages, our craft, our creative freedom, and the power of our union have all been undermined in the last decade.”
The actors were speaking not just for themselves, but large numbers of workers who similarly feel they are at an “inflection point,” following years of attack on their jobs and livelihoods.
Strikers July 14 in New York City
In only a week, 340,000 UPS workers could go on strike over low pay and insufficient hours. In seven weeks, the contract expires for 170,000 autoworkers in the US and Canada. Autoworkers are fighting against the tier system, plant closures and job cuts imposed on them by the company and the unions, the UAW and Unifor.
In taking up what many entertainment workers rightfully see as a historic, even “existential” struggle against the giant firms such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Amazon and the rest, it is critical that actors and writers understand the fundamental driving forces behind the assault on their profession.
Yes, greed flourishes in entertainment. Just ten individuals—the heads of the major entertainment companies—made over $2 billion in the last five years, according to CNBC. The ‘average’ American, making $55,000 a year, would have to work over 3,600 years to match these overlords’ pay. While Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, froths at the mouth over the “very disturbing… unrealistic” strike of actors, he takes home almost $200 million every five years.
However, greed is not the root cause of the assault underway on the livelihood of actors and writers. The entertainment companies’ ferocious competition for “eyeballs” and profit is driven not primarily by the psychologies of those involved. Behind this, there is the developing crisis, not just of the entertainment industry, but of the capitalist economy as a whole.
Residuals
At the center of the writers and actors’ strike is a battle over residual payments from streaming.
Residuals refer to the pay actors, writers and some other “creative” workers receive in addition to their base pay. These are longer-term payments to actors, writers and others who worked on films and television shows, as Fortune explains, “for reruns and other airings after the initial release. … Traditionally, actors and writers are paid for each time a show runs on broadcast or cable television, or when someone buys a DVD, a Blu-ray disc or (long ago) a VHS tape.”
The payments, “which decline over time, are pegged to several factors including the length of a movie or show, the size of a role, the budget of a production, and where the film or show is offered. While streaming companies technically pay residuals, both unions and their members say the amounts and pay timelines leave actors and writers with a pittance of what they once received—and those who were once paid for reruns of network shows often get nothing now.”
Because most actors and writers spend the majority of their time auditioning, pitching, and struggling to get work, it is extremely rare to be continuously employed in the industry. The vast majority of actors in SAG-AFTRA struggle to make the $26,470 required to be eligible for the union health care plan. Before COVID it was less than 20 percent of the membership! Variety, in May, estimated that only 5-15 percent of actors qualified.
Residuals were adopted in 1960 by SAG as a means to provide a steadier form of income for so-called “working actors.” Working actors are not “A-list” stars making huge amounts, or even “B-list” celebrities. The term refers to the lesser-known actors taking relatively smaller parts in movies and television series, who are nonetheless essential to the continuation of the industry. In SAG-AFTRA, there are some thousands of such “working actors”—neither big stars nor unsuccessful–who are trying to cobble together a living in the industry. Many of them have to work outside of the profession to live.
In the last dual strike of actors and writers, in 1960, SAG won residuals for its membership. However, the leadership of the union (then under future President Ronald Reagan) gave up all claims to residuals for previous content.
For decades, residuals have been a steady source of income for actors in between jobs. In the 2008 contract struggle, residuals became a major issue when it came to streaming. The entertainment companies tried to push for no residuals for streaming. It was settled that actors would get some residuals for streaming but that it would be substantially less than television; in effect the issue was pushed off towards a later date. The WGA claimed it had reached a “historic” deal. Everything that is happening now proves that was a lie.
Another issue in the payment of streaming residuals arises from its dependence on the viewership of a particular series or film. However, the streaming companies refuse to share viewership data, leaving workers in the dark as to how pay is fully calculated.
Phil, a writer the WSWS interviewed on the picket line, remarked that “back in the day, you know, once you were off a show, you may not work for a long time, but writers could live on their residuals.” Today, though “they’re minuscule.”
Shana, an actress we spoke to, explained that “residuals keeps us alive… it’s kind of like being a waiter and you get paid barely anything and then they give you a tip, you live on tips, that’s our residuals.” She added they were essential to making the cut for healthcare when you did not have work.
The issue of residuals has become more widely understood in the last few weeks, especially following a viral TikTok video showing actress Kimiko Glenn’s measly $27.30 in quarterly residuals from Netflix. She appeared in 45 episodes of the hit series Orange Is the New Black. The show was instrumental in Netflix’s growth as an original content creator. Major shareholders and executives have made a killing as a result, the actors almost nothing.
Streaming
The film and television companies, including the new tech streaming companies (Amazon and Apple), are using the historic shift away from traditional film and television to carry out a massive pay cut at the expense of their workforce, by lowering residuals and pay generally. In effect, the entertainment companies are dealing with their own mounting problems by foisting the difficulties onto their workforce, trying to make them poorer and more disposable.
Netflix began the first major streaming subscriber service in 2007. This was followed by Hulu (2010), Prime Video (2011), Disney Plus (2019), HBO Max (2020) and several others. In 2019, global subscriptions stood at 642 million. Within a year, subscriptions had increased to 1.1 billion, partially driven by the pandemic. By 2025, global subscriptions are expected to climb to 1.6 billion.
The surge in streaming subscriptions reflects, first and foremost, the decline of traditional TV and cable use worldwide. More and more, people use their laptops or televisions to log in to streaming services, not traditional television. This is particularly the case with younger generations.
But streaming growth is also driven by the proliferation of such services. Globally there are now more than 200 major streaming services, including many new platforms oriented towards specific countries and regions. Most people in the US and Europe have probably never heard of Shahid, Canal Plus, iQIYI or Showmax, but these are popular streaming services in Africa, Asia, and other regions in the developing world.
Netflix, once the only major service, now faces intense competition. Not just in the distribution of films and television, but in its production too. This is reflected in the relative plateauing of Netflix’s subscriber basis at around 220 million subscribers in 2021, after years of rapid growth. More than two-thirds of Netflix subscribers reside outside the US.
A ferocious zero-sum game has emerged among the major streaming services. Netflix has begun a “password-sharing crackdown,” which in its most recent earnings report is credited for adding 5.9 million viewers. But still, lower than expected revenues caused the company’s stock to plummet by more than 20 percent over the past week.
In regard to Netflix’s sliding stock price, ABC News commented that “the reaction on Wall Street marks the latest indication of a profound shift in investor priorities away from subscriber growth and toward the bottom line, which holds implications for striking writers and actors.”
The entertainment industry and the global economic crisis
A major factor influencing this “profound shift… toward the bottom line” is the broader crisis of the capitalist economy. Following decades of growth, the US, Europe and the other major capitalist countries now face a future of stagnation, intensifying competition and worker rebellion.
Competition rages in every industry, from auto, tech and pharmaceuticals to entertainment. Only a few major companies now dominate each industry, running massive vertically and horizontally integrated conglomerates. Thin margins ensure that only the largest players survive.
The rapid rise of interest rates over the last year has also taken away the seemingly endless stream of cheap credit major companies relied on for years. This reversal in monetary policy has facilitated this shift from corporate growth to austerity typified by Netflix.
The net result of all these changes is an intensified assault by the ruling class against workers.
Left and right, companies are putting pressure on wages and benefits. Healthcare and retirement plans are being slashed, or furtively degraded. Pay, especially when adjusted for inflation, is being lowered.
Actors are not some special section of the workforce—whatever the peculiarities of their profession. Their deteriorating conditions reflect a global trend. The move to substantially reduce their pay and residuals is part of this and can only be combated on the same terms, as a struggle against capitalist exploitation.
The growth of the internet and other competition
A final, major source of difficulty for the movie and television industry is the vast expansion of other forms of entertainment content that eat into and erode its traditional viewership.
Twenty-five years ago, the internet was not yet widespread. While home videos existed, they were clunky affairs largely accessible only to the well-to-do. Social media had not really begun, and phones were still relatively primitive devices.
Today, the “entertainment industry” is transformed. Access to the internet provides a portal to an endless stream of free content, from websites to discussion forums, to social media, to music, to videos and games.
These sites, to the extent that they are monetized, largely operate on the basis of small amounts of advertising revenue. Facebook, Google and Twitter can all, in a sense, be seen as entertainment companies. While some of them directly invest money in entertainment production (Google), they are all purveyors of entertainment, taking away viewers from film and television. What is more, most of the ‘entertainment’ that exists on social media—on YouTube, for example—is made by the users for free.
According to Pew Research, today one in five teenagers are “almost constantly on YouTube” throughout the day. Another 41 percent of teens watch YouTube several times a day.
Gaming is also another major competitor that has exploded over the last 25 years, surpassing film and television. Since 2018 alone the global gaming industry has grown from $131 billion to $227 billion in revenue. In contrast, the global film and television industry was worth $94 billion in 2022. In fact, many actors, once working exclusively in film and television, increasingly find themselves doing voice acting for video games. These contracts, however, pay significantly less, and almost never have residuals.
Collectively, the surging use of the internet, free video streaming platforms like YouTube and TikTok, social media platforms and videos games have cut into the relative power of television and film in the overall entertainment industry. As the availability of free content grows and grows (both through amateur creations and older, more easily accessed material), the competition between the remaining corporate producers of entertainment intensifies.
Resisting the class assault on actors and writers
The entertainment industry is a pressure-cooker. Beset by problems and intensifying competitive pressures, the Wall Street backers of the major entertainment companies demand ruthless cuts to enforce the “bottom line.”
Actors and writers are no more immune than anyone else to the vagaries of the global economy, where the same Wall Street players order giant multinational corporations to enforce cuts to living standards to preserve profits.
Though unique in some regards, the entertainment industry is beset by the same woes of competition and austerity that characterize capitalism as a whole today. The battle being fought by actors and writers, in this sense, is not just a local skirmish, but a fight against banks, corporations and hedge funds that span the world, influencing every industry. It is a global fight of workers as a whole against the ruling financial and corporate class.
Fifty-one percent of Australians would struggle financially if they had to cover the costs of an unexpected major expense, according to recent polling conducted for Nine media. Of the more than 1,600 people surveyed, 40 percent believe the economy will get worse over the next year.
Unemployed workers registering to receive social welfare outside Centrelink office in Sydney in 2020.
The percentage of Australians who would struggle to cover unexpected costs, such as the repair of a car, or the replacement of major household appliances, has in fact increased by 10 points since a previous poll in February. Among low-income earners, the figures are higher, with 64 percent unable to cover a sudden expense, but the survey showed that 49 percent of respondents on medium incomes and 46 percent of those earning higher incomes share similar concerns.
Workers confront economic pressure on multiple fronts—interest rate hikes, growing housing costs, and surging inflation in the price of essentials, such as utilities and groceries.
Over the past year, across Australia’s capital cities, average house rents have increased 11.5 percent, while apartment prices have soared more than 26 percent.
The cost of living is increasing at a far higher rate than wages, with low-paid workers particularly affected. The official inflation rate for the 12 months ending in March was 7 percent, while the Wage Price Index increased by just 3.7 percent over the same period.
As a result, increasing numbers of workers are having to rely on credit cards for ordinary bills. More and more Australians are falling behind on debt repayments, with one in six struggling to pay off credit card debt, according to credit reporting agency Illion. Over the past year, there has been a 5 percent increase in “delinquent” home loans, i.e., those with payments more than 30 days overdue. Across the country, savings account balances have fallen by at least 40 percent since October last year.
Electricity and gas bills are soaring. At the start of July, many customers were hit with sudden increases of 50 percent or more in the price of electricity. At the same time, energy companies are recording massive profits.
The Commonwealth Bank’s Household Spending Intentions index for June showed an overall month-on-month decline of 1.7 percent in customers’ planned expenditure. While a 26.2 percent decline in home buying plans was the main contributor, the report also noted a 5.6 percent drop on health and fitness, 5.4 percent on entertainment and 2.5 percent on travel.
While there has been a significant reduction in “discretionary” spending, recently leaked data from major supermarket chain Coles confirm that Australians are now cutting back on cleaning products and other basic essentials. This includes a 33 percent drop in spending on bath soap and body wash, as workers reduce their consumption or opt for cheaper brands.
But this increasingly frugal and cautious spending has not hurt supermarket chain’s bottom line. In the second half of 2022, Coles increased its gross profit margin by 0.43 percentage points to 26.5 percent and recorded a 10.6 percent rise in before-tax earnings to $991 million.
Other retailers are also reporting a downturn in customer spending. Discount department store chain Best & Less declared recently that sales in May and June were 11.7 percent lower than the same period last year. According to the Australian Financial Review, sales in the last week of May were 20 percent lower than in 2022 for Premier Investments clothing and stationery businesses, which include Smiggle and Just Jeans.
The growing financial pressure has also led to an increase in the number of people relying on charitable organisations for basic groceries. Around one million people each month use Foodbank Australia, the country’s largest provider of food relief. For some, it is a matter of starving or not starving, even for those with paid work. Some 54 percent of food-insecure households have at least one person employed.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has recorded an increase of 19,000 multiple job-holders since the December quarter, with one in fifteen Australians holding more than one job. This is the result of decades of stagnant or declining wages and the destruction of full-time jobs, starting with the federal Labor governments of the 1980s and 90s and aided by the corporatised trade unions.
The cost of living crisis has seen a surge in calls to organisations such as Lifeline, a suicide prevention service, with research showing that individuals confronted with financial stress are more likely to experience psychological issues such as depression.
In the face of this mounting social crisis, the federal Labor government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, delivered a Budget in May that offered only sham relief, including one-off rebates for power bills and an insulting $40 per fortnight increase in welfare payments. It was, all in all, an offensive against the working class, with cuts to social spending such as health and education and vast sums set aside for military expansion and tax cuts for the wealthy.
Past promises of rising wages and a “better future” are a distant memory, with workers now being told to make sacrifices and instructed that there are hard days to come. Labor governments at the state and federal level are imposing real wage cuts throughout the public sector, while the Albanese government recently backed the Fair Work Commission’s decision to slash the real wages of 2.5 million low-income workers.
In lockstep with Labor, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the country’s central bank, has lifted interest rates 12 times since May 2022 and is warning of further increases. This is placing even more pressure on working-class households, with average monthly mortgage repayments already up by $1,200. While RBA governor Philip Lowe has acknowledged that wage growth is not the source of inflation, it is workers that are being forced to pay the price.
In fact, the RBA and the federal Labor government share the same goal—driving down wages and increasing unemployment, even if means crashing the economy.
On Monday, just before the Knesset’s summer recess, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, of his right-wing Likud Party, ultra-religious parties and fascist parties based on settlers on the West Bank, rammed through the first in a series of laws aimed at curtailing the powers of the Supreme Court.
The bill passed 64-0 after the opposition boycotted the vote in protest and stormed out of the chamber chanting “shame.” There are 56 members in the various opposition parties, so Netanyahu’s bid for absolute power by ending judicial oversight of his government is based on a narrow majority.
The law, enacted as a Basic Law that is the nearest Israel has to a constitution, ends the Court’s power to strike down the decisions of elected officials on the grounds of “unreasonableness,” by granting the Knesset the power to overturn the Court’s ruling with a simple majority.
Demonstrators block the traffic on a highway crossing the city during a protest against Netanyahu's dictatorial measures aimed at the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Monday, July 24, 2023. [AP Photo/ Oded Balilty]
It will enable Netanyahu to reappoint his key ally, Shas party leader Aryeh Deri, as head of the Health and Interior Ministries, an action the Supreme Court overturned as being “unreasonable” due to Deri’s multiple convictions for fraud, bribery and tax evasion, as well as his pledge as part of a plea bargain not to seek public office again.
Even more importantly, the legislation will enable Netanyahu to press ahead with other dictatorial measures secure in the knowledge that the Court—the only state institution that is able to hold Israel’s single-chamber parliament to account and which his right-wing cabal does not control—will be unable to overturn them. It would also facilitate legal moves that would enable Netanyahu, currently on trial on corruption charges that could put him behind bars for years, to evade conviction or see his case dismissed.
Netanyahu’s fascistic coalition partners are openly bragging about their power to do whatever they like. They have long railed against the Court for its occasional restrictions on the settler outposts, deemed illegal even under Israeli law. Speaking to reporters after the bill became law, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader who heads the fascistic Jewish Power, said the passage of the law was “only the beginning” and that “There are many more laws we need to pass as part of the judicial overhaul.”
Netanyahu has pledged to defy international law and annex the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 war with its Arab neighbours. This land seizure is in pursuit of his coalition’s twin aims of establishing a Jewish-supremacist state in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and increasing the power of the religious authorities over everyday life.
Far-right ministers have called for laws banning Arab parties from participating in elections and discriminating against Israel’s own Palestinian citizens, as well as gay and non-religious people, and enforcing gender separation in public places. Their next step is legislation granting the government greater power in appointing the judiciary.
Monday’s passage of the “reasonableness override” law took place in the face of the largest demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday that Israel has ever seen, a movement that Netanyahu says is endangering Israel’s democratic system.
Demonstrators block the traffic on a highway crossing the city during a protest against Netanyahu's dictatorial measures aimed at the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Monday, July 24, 2023. [AP Photo/ Oded Balilty]
Tens of thousands took part in a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in scorching heat to protest outside the Knesset on Saturday, while more than 100,000 people flocked to Tel Aviv on Saturday evening for the 29th consecutive week of demonstrations, and similar numbers took part in rallies in towns and cities across the country. Israel’s doctors went on a two-hour strike in protest, while tens of thousands of protesters shut down roads and infrastructure, sparking fears of violent confrontations between protesters and the government’s far-right supporters.
More than 10,000 army reservists—including hundreds of air force pilots, cyber warfare experts, and commanders of elite units upon which the IDF depends—have announced they will refuse to serve if the judicial coup goes ahead, saying they are unwilling to continue risking their lives for a government that is no longer democratic. Netanyahu has lambasted them for “crossing a red line” when Israel faces external threats and depends upon a reservist army. Security and defence officials have written to the government warning that this could have a significant impact on the air force and its operational readiness.
The unprecedented opposition to the Netanyahu government’s abandonment of bourgeois-democratic norms is fueled as well by the widespread economic hardships produced by the soaring cost of living, including the sky-high cost of housing, as well as deepening concerns over failing public services, such as education, health and transport, and the increasing role of ultra-orthodox religious groups over everyday life. No less important are the deep fears that the US-NATO-led war in Ukraine against Russia will escalate into a far broader conflagration, even as the government stokes war against the Palestinians, Iran and its allies in the region.
It is expected that the Supreme Court will review the legislation and strike it down, leading to a constitutional showdown with the government and a broader political crisis that commentators fear could escalate into civil war.
The Movement for Quality Government argues that the law is unconstitutional, as “it fundamentally changes the basic structure of Israeli parliamentary democracy and the nature of the regime, while de facto abolishing the judiciary and seriously damaging the delicate fabric of the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances in the State of Israel.” It has petitioned the Court to rule against the law, saying, “The government of destruction has raised its malicious hand against the State of Israel; now it’s the Supreme Court’s turn to step up and prevent this legislation.”
Mass rallies against the bill continued on Monday, with protesters blocking roads, to which the police responded by using water cannon to disperse them and arresting at least 20 people. Israel’s Medical Association has announced a 24-hour hospital strike for Tuesday.
The self-proclaimed opposition leaders, including former ministers, generals and security and intelligence officials, many of whom have served under Netanyahu, have pledged to continue the anti-government demonstrations and rallies. They have no fundamental policy differences with the government, but fear that Netanyahu is going too far in establishing a personalist dictatorship based on fascist and ultra-religious groups, which will destabilize the country politically and socially. Israel is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with enormous wealth accumulated by a handful of super-rich families, while most Israeli workers, Jewish and Arab alike, struggle to survive.
Like former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defence Minister Benny Gantz, they are no less committed than Israel’s far-right government to the Zionist state and its oppression of the Palestinian people. They have drowned the mass rallies in a sea of Israeli flags and refused to make any appeal to Israel’s Palestinian citizens, much less to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, who have long suffered under Israel’s savage military repression and brazen vigilante and settler violence—all upheld by the Supreme Court and reinforced by the protest “leaders” when they were in office.
These opposition leaders sought to “negotiate” with Netanyahu—fruitlessly as it turned out--after he agreed to “pause” the legislation at the end of March in the face of the largest outpouring of popular opposition in Israel’s history, which included massive street protests and a full-scale walkout by large sections of the Israeli working class.
Lapid and Gantz duly fell in line and gave Netanyahu their full-throated support when he used the “pause” to mount a series of criminal provocations against the Palestinians in the West Bank, which Israel has illegally occupied for 56 years. They also backed his military operations against Iran, Syria and Lebanon, whose aim was to deflect tensions outwards and create a sense of national unity.
Now Lapid has promised to petition the High Court against the new law, calling it an abuse of power, while urging military reservists to wait before pulling out of military service, saying, “Don’t stop serving, while we still don’t know the High Court of Justice’s ruling.”
The working class has the power to bring down Netanyahu’s far-right coalition through a general strike, which would have the support of the majority of the Israeli population. However, a major obstacle has been the corporatist Histadrut trade union federation that has from its establishment been committed to the Zionist project. It has refused to mobilise its members against the government, pushing frantically for some kind of “mediation” or compromise. The only time in the last seven months of mass weekly protests that Histadrut chief Arnon Bar-David called a general strike was in response to Netanyahu’s sacking of his defence minister Yoav Gallant after Gallant had called on him to abandon the plan to neuter the judiciary because the political conflict over it was splitting the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Now Bar-David, who is coming under increasing pressure to call a strike, is preparing a token stoppage to allow his members to let off steam. He declared, “From this moment on any unilateral advancement of the reform will have grave consequences, up to and including a full strike” of workers’ unions throughout the country. No trust can be placed in this faithful servant of the Israeli bourgeoisie.
Early Monday morning local time, Ukrainian forces carried out drone strikes on Moscow, including on a building affiliated with the Ministry of Defense. No casualties were reported. Ukrainian officials boasted of their responsibility for the drone strikes.
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Monday also accused Ukraine of launching 17 drones on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, which Russia annexed in 2014. The Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea with the Russian mainland, was attacked by Ukraine last Monday.
Shortly after the attack on the Kerch Bridge, Russia announced its withdrawal from a deal that had been brokered by the United Nations and Turkey between Moscow and Kiev to ensure grain shipments from Ukraine through the Black Sea to international markets. Russia and Ukraine both count among the world’s largest agricultural producers, supplying above all countries in Africa and Asia.
The agreement provided for monitored Ukrainian grain supplies via a planned route through the Black Sea, large portions of which are controlled by the Russian navy and mined by both Russia and Ukraine.
The Kremlin said it withdrew because the obligations toward Russia as part of the deal had not been met. At the same time, Moscow indicated that Russia would consider rejoining the deal if these obligations were fulfilled and if financial sanctions on the Russian Agricultural Bank were lifted. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that the grain deal had “lost its meaning” and assured African countries that Russia could make up for Ukrainian grain supplies.
Following the collapse of the deal, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared it would impose a “blockade” on Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea and that, from July 20 onward, it would consider any foreign ship seeking to enter Ukrainian Black Sea ports a legitimate target.
The Zelensky government has insisted that it would continue grain shipments regardless.
In response, Russia has launched a series of strikes on Ukrainian port cities. Over the past week, Russia launched several missile strikes on Odessa, a strategic port city on the shores of the Black Sea. Missile strikes have also hit the ports in Nikolaev and Chernomorsk. Further strikes since have hit Reni and Izmail, two port cities on the Danube River, which flows into the Black Sea. Russian media reports suggest that a number of both grain and ammunition depots were destroyed in those strikes. The Ukrainian military has confirmed that the grain depot of the Odessa port was destroyed.
Romania, a NATO member on the Black Sea, has declared that it would make its Constanta port on the Danube River available to Ukraine for additional shipments until mid-August.
In addition to its role in the global food supply, the Black Sea is of fundamental geostrategic significance to both the imperialist powers and to Russia, as well as countries like Turkey. The Black Sea forms a bridge between Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia and the resource-rich Caucasus and Middle East. In a 2021 webinar by the hawkish Washington D.C.-based think tank Atlantic Council, Alton Buland, the director for European policy at the US Department of Defense, described the Black Sea as “Russia’s geostrategic center of gravity” and its “gateway south, the gateway to the Middle East [and] … the gateway to Asia.”
Because of the immense significance of the Black Sea for Russia, the country’s encirclement by the imperialist powers since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has centrally involved the incorporation of most countries bordering the Black Sea into NATO. Apart from Russia, the only non-NATO member states on the Black Sea are Georgia and Ukraine, which is heavily supplied by NATO weapons and integrated into NATO’s war machine.
The escalating fighting in the Black Sea region also has significant implications for Turkey, which so far has tried to maintain a precarious balancing act between Russia and NATO in the conflict. Over the years, the Erdogan government has developed extensive military ties with Ukraine, and Turkey has never recognized Crimea and the waters off the peninsula as part of Russia. Ankara also recently dropped its previous opposition to Swedish membership in NATO and declared that Ukraine “deserves” NATO membership.
However, Turkey has not aggressively sided with NATO in the conflict and continues to maintain close economic ties with Russia. Erdogan has announced that he would be speaking with Putin in an effort to rescue the grain deal.
In the wake of the collapse of the grain deal, retired Admiral Cem Gürdeniz declared that conflicts over the grain deal could end Turkey’s policy of “active neutrality” in the Black Sea, i.e., potentially trigger Turkey’s direct military involvement in the conflict. He warned that Turkey would commit “geopolitical suicide” if Ankara were to allow for Ukrainian grain shipments through its straits in the Black Sea, in opposition to Russia.
A meeting between the newly created NATO-Ukraine Council is scheduled for Wednesday to discuss the situation in the Black Sea.
The escalation of the conflict between Russia and NATO in the Black Sea region began just days after the NATO summit in Vilnius concluded in mid-July. Held amidst the debacle of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is taking a tremendous human toll and has cost tens of billions of dollars without resulting in any serious military gains, the summit was focused on discussing plans for global conflict in a new imperialist redivision of the world, including an expansion of the war against Russia.
In addition to the infighting in the Black Sea region, the summit has also been followed by growing tensions between Russia and Poland. In the lead-up to the Vilnius summit, former NATO General Secretary Anders Rasmussen had raised the prospect that countries like Poland and the Baltic states might “engage even stronger … maybe including the possibility of troops on the ground.”
On Friday, in a meeting with his national security council, Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the prospect of a direct military conflict with Poland. Commenting on reports that Poland is planning to deploy a newly founded Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Corps (LITPOLUKRCORPS) to West Ukraine, Putin said that such a deployment would mark the beginning of a Polish “occupation of West Ukraine” and that Russia would respond militarily.
In a meeting with Putin on Sunday and Monday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reportedly showed Putin a map of Polish troop deployments to just 40 kilometers off the Belarusian border city of Brest. In a press conference, Lukashenko hinted that troops of the mercenary leader Evgeny Prigozhin, who launched an insurrection a month ago, are now stationed in Belarus and could be deployed in such a conflict. The Wagner troops were, in Lukashenko’s words, “in a bad mood” and eager “to go on an excursion” to Poland. Lukashenko then said that he was still holding them back and urged Putin to do the same.
In the weeks following the coup attempt, which Prigozhin launched with an open appeal to pro-NATO forces within the Russian oligarchy and state, Prigozhin and Wagner have effectively been given carte blanche. Neither Prigozhin nor his mercenaries have faced criminal charges, and Putin met with 35 Wagner commanders, including Prigozhin, just five days after the coup attempt.
In an indication of ongoing conflicts within the Russian military and state apparatus, the Kremlin on Friday arrested Igor Strelkov (Girkin), a well-known ultranationalist and longtime separatist leader in East Ukraine, charging him with “extremism” based on allegations of a former Wagner employee. Strelkov denounced Prigozhin’s coup attempt as treason but has also long criticized Putin’s conduct of the war, demanding that the president enact a mass mobilization. Most recently, Strelkov attacked Putin as a “nonentity,” stating, “the country will not survive another six years under the rule of that cowardly mediocrity.”
Even with the extreme scarcity of available data, there is sufficient information from the limited reporting on levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater to conclude a summer surge in COVID infections is well under way in the United States. It began even before mid-May, when President Joe Biden terminated the national COVID emergency response, effectively turning out all the lights on any direct measurement of the state of the pandemic.
As shown by the CDC graph below, in April 2023 levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater began to rise steadily, an indirect indicator of community-level spread. Over the month of June, there was a more than 60 percent rise in wastewater levels of the virus, with more than 1,300 sites participating in providing the public health agency with data.
It is worrisome however that in the last two weeks of July there has been a precipitous drop in the number of sites reporting these figures (a 22 percent decline) with a corresponding blunting of the SARS-CoV-2 levels reported. Although the CDC explained that this is a normal lag and data would be added retroactively, given the agency’s previous lack of transparency, such assurances cannot be taken as read.
Percent of sites in each percent change category over time, United States. [Photo: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]
For instance, a similar phenomenon occurred in late December 2022 when there was a precipitous drop in SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels with a corresponding drop in the number of sites reporting, amid an ongoing winter surge of infections.
The CDC blamed the Christmas holiday season for the aberration, but this was completely irresponsible. Precisely when a massive surge in cases was under way, the necessary data to “inform the public” was conveniently unavailable. There was a huge drop in the virus level, but that is likely due to the sites that contribute most, in metropolitan areas, going dark.
It would not be surprising to see this effective blackout repeated, so that in the next few weeks we might hear the CDC claim that the summer break led to a decline in participating facilities, hiding the advance of another surge.
If one were to extrapolate the end of June projections into July, they suggest not only has the peak in cases not been reached, but that it will match or exceed the level of COVID in previous winter and summer peaks. Data from Biobot Analytics, which is considered more reliable than the limited CDC reporting, confirms the ongoing surge in wastewater coronavirus right up to the present.
Biobot explained that they use statistical techniques that adjust for dilution and population size and, as wastewater-based epidemiology advances, they will adjust to account for the technical factors and introduce “the concept of effective concentration as a transparent and future-proof approach” that will ensure the data reliably reflects trends in the population-wide COVID-19 burden.”
As Biobot noted, the current epicenters for the summer 2023 COVID surge are in the Northeast and South, where in conjunction with the rise in wastewater virus levels, the heat wave and the air pollution from the Canadian forest fires have driven people indoors. In California, Los Angeles has recently reported a rise in COVID cases although their figures, as they note, represent only a fraction of actual COVID cases, suggesting the summer COVID wave is just beginning in the second largest US city.
The reliance by the CDC on wastewater surveillance underscores the reality that such indicators lack any real-time value, are prone to manipulation and provide little clinical guidance to direct local public health authorities and health systems. The agency uses wastewater tracking to inure the population against the threat posed by COVID or any other pathogen, while maintaining the farce that the national public health edifice is functioning to protect the population, although hardly anyone believes that any more.
As data scientist and modeler JWeiland noted on his Twitter social media account, the current wastewater SARS-CoV-2 levels correspond to an estimated daily infection rate of more than 310,000 or a ratio of one in every 1,060 people becoming infected every day and at least one percent of the population currently infected. Irrespective of the current low fatality rate which is still higher than the flu and could skyrocket should viral evolution produce a more deadly variant, as it has in the past, one in 10 people infected with Omicron sub-variants develop Long COVID, regardless of disease severity or age.
US COVID Projections July 18, 2023. [Photo by J. Weiland]
As Dr. Marc Sala of Northwestern University Medicine recently said, “You will have many patients come to us still in good numbers to fill up our clinic with maybe the third, fourth, fifth infection and now having finally developed post-COVID syndrome … with symptoms that are enough to be disabling to their lives as previously known.” Although these patients are filling up hospitals and ICUs as in the past, the long-term implications are even worse. Long COVID is already the third leading cause of neurological disorders.
In children, the lingering effects after a COVID infection can include various neurocognitive complaints like loss of smell, fatigue, and brain fog. These lead to the inability to think or remember clearly. More serious signs include atrophy of the brain’s grey matter, which can be associated with cognitive dysfunction and symptoms like anxiety and depression. These findings have been repeated internationally and will have long-lasting consequences and harken back to the lie perpetrated during the first years of the pandemic that children are immune to the ravages of the disease.
Nonetheless, the current surge has finally provided the first clinical glimpse of its impact on the national arena despite the very limited surveillance capacity. Emergency room visits climbed 7.1 percent compared to the previous week. The test positivity rate, which must be considered flawed data due to extremely limited numbers actually being reported, is up a half-percent to 6.3, though it is higher in areas corresponding to the highest wastewater metrics. And according to Weiland’s modeling, COVID hospital admissions may triple by the end of August.
Despite all this, there is no urgency on the part of the Biden administration to heed the data, as they prefer to tell the country to forget about the coronavirus. Meanwhile, they are amply briefed on the state of these pathogens and take measure to employ every means possible to protect themselves, including using frequent testing, as Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted last week.
A reporter found that a COVID-positive delegation from Israel had recently visited the White House, and asked whether Biden had been potentially exposed. Jean-Pierre replied, “As you know we have testing protocols whenever someone meets with the president. So, I can tell you that anyone that meets with the president gets tested. I do. We all do.”
As experience at the meeting of the world’s elites at Davos, Switzerland, had shown, no expense or technology is spared to protect the wealthiest. Meanwhile, any talk of future COVID vaccines for the mass of the population has assumed a rhetorical character. Only 17 percent of the US population has received the updated “bivalent” boosters, meaning population immunity to any of the subvariants is essentially negligible. And rather than bringing attention to the current surge and moving to vaccinate the immunocompromised and the elderly, the shift to a newer monovalent COVID vaccine for the fall using the XBB subvariant is moving at a snail’s pace.
By the time the latest and greatest vaccines are finally on the commercial market by late September, as is being promised, new strains such as EG.5 and XBB.2.3, which are gaining momentum, will become dominant, making these vaccines outmoded once more.
