China fights to contain outbreak of COVID-19 delta variant

Alex Lantier

Health authorities are scrambling to contain an outbreak of COVID-19 spreading across China, after the delta variant infected workers at Lukou Airport in Nanjing. It had seen 381 cases across China by the end of July, 75 new cases on August 1, and 98 on August 2.

Though China was the initial epicenter of COVID-19 after it emerged in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, a scientific policy of strict lockdowns, contact tracing and mass vaccination halted domestic spread of the coronavirus by June 2020. Since then there have been isolated outbreaks from individuals arriving in China after having been infected abroad. Now the most serious such outbreak is underway, due to the delta variant’s extraordinary virulence.

The contrast between the response of the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime and that of the imperialist powers of North America and Europe is staggering. The number of cases found so far in China in this outbreak is under 1,000—dozens of times less than the 27,000 daily cases found in France or 89,000 in the United States. Yet while officials in NATO powers insist that workers must “learn to live with the virus,” in French President Emmanuel Macron’s words, Chinese health authorities are mounting a public health offensive to halt the contagion.

Yesterday, China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) confirmed that on July 20, it had received a report that cleaning staff at Lukou Airport, vaccinated with Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines, had showed positive in PCR tests. Testing of staff and travelers reportedly found that the virus came aboard Air China flight CA910 from Moscow. Chinese authorities have repeatedly suspended CA910 after COVID-19 cases were imported aboard this flight.

Yesterday afternoon, top officials in China’s Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is located, held a press conference. They reported that contact tracing and testing has revealed that 44 percent of cases in Nanjing are among airport cleaning staff, 52 percent are among their contacts (primarily families), and the remainder are travelers who were infected abroad, before their arrival in China. Of the 220 cases, 82 are asymptomatic and six are severe.

Several reports in Chinese state media said cost-cutting and poor safety measures for workers at subcontracting firms working for the Lukou Airport and its corporate parent, Eastern Airport Group, caused the outbreak. The state-run People’s Daily contacted several of the subcontracting firms, who either denied that they were involved or refused to answer journalists’ questions. 

Chen Mou, a manager at Nanjing Property Management, told the paper, “The cleaning of the airport and of airplane cabins at Nanjing-Lukou was given to several subcontracting firms… The reason why such a big problem occurred this time is that the airport did not carry out proper daily supervision, and in order to save money, the subcontracting firm did not properly separate workers in domestic and international operations.”

The People’s Daily wrote that overwork of cleaning staff played a major role: “In order to save money, subcontractors had the work originally assigned to two people carried out by only one.”

The People’s Daily reported that on July 23, CCP Jiangsu provincial committee secretary Feng Jun was fired from his post and as a member of the Eastern Airport Group’s corporate board. The paper criticized Feng for “not having handled the operations of the Eastern Airport Group in a professional manner, allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to spread.”

A vast public health campaign to eradicate the delta variant in China is underway.

Entire city districts are being placed on lockdown, and tens of millions of people tested for COVID-19 to identify, isolate and care for the sick, and prevent further contagion. The entire populations of Nanjing (8 million) and Wuhan (11 million) are to be tested. Mass testing is also underway in Yangzhou, Xiamen, Chongqing, partially flooded Zhengzhou, and the capital, Beijing.

Mass testing and contact tracing rapidly tracked the spread of the virus across China. As of the end of July, the 381 cases included 243 in Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is located; 91 in Yunnan province, 12 in Henan and Hunan provinces, 8 in Sichuan province, and 5 in northeastern China’s Liaoning province. There were two in Beijing, Chongqing, and in Fujian; and one each in Guangdong, Shandong, Ningxia and Hubei provinces. Since then, further cases have been found in Shanghai and in Shaanxi and Fujian provinces.

The town of Zhangjiajie, a tourist destination in Hunan province, is hard hit with 13 cases detected as of yesterday and is in lockdown. The town’s WeChat social media account is naming those infected and identifying where they have gone in the town, to alert inhabitants or tourists who may have come into contact with them. Schoolteachers and other public sector workers are ordered to shelter at home and await mass mobilization orders on epidemic control operations.

Hunan authorities said that the situation in nearby Zhuzhou, where there is community spread of the delta variant and over one million people are in lockdown, is “grim and complicated.”

The efforts of Chinese workers and health authorities expose the criminality of COVID-19 policies in most of the rest of the world. Calls to “live with the virus” also predominated in the Brazilian regime of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Hindu-supremacist regime, and the post-Soviet capitalist kleptocracy run by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Above all, the imperialist powers rejected scientific policies, making their own British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s infamous call, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

The result is that since the pandemic began, fewer than 5,000 people died in China, the original epicenter of the virus, while in the NATO alliance, grouping the world’s wealthiest imperialist powers in Europe and America, 1.7 million people have died. 

This is not because, as is claimed in NATO countries’ media propaganda, eradicating the virus is impossible. It is because the degenerate political criminals who run these governments pursued a policy that the BMJ (British Medical Journal) correctly branded “social murder.” While giving trillions of dollars, euros and pounds to the financial aristocracy in bank and corporate bailouts, they rejected scientific social distancing policies that have saved millions of lives in China.

It is not to excuse the CCP’s indubitable corruption—inseparable from its restoration of capitalism in 1989, and its exploitation of the Chinese working class—to state that this corruption is not the main cause of the contagion spreading from Nanjing. Outbreaks like that of today, of January 2021 centered in Shijiazhuang, or of May-June 2021 in Guangzhou are caused above all by circulation of COVID-19 outside China, as infected travelers or contaminated frozen goods arrived from overseas.

The pandemic is a world catastrophe that can be halted only by the coordinated, global implementation of the scientific measures now being adopted in China. Imposing such policies requires building an international movement of the working class against capitalism. This underlies the utter bankruptcy of the Stalinist CCP’s nationalist policy. Unable and unwilling to appeal to workers internationally, it has no way of halting the pandemic disaster unfolding outside China’s borders.

Viewed from the standpoint of workers internationally, however, events in China have a different significance. While protests in Europe against science and vaccination are led by neo-fascists, popular support in China for “mass mobilization” and scientific policies against COVID-19 are a distant echo of great struggles of the 20th century like the 1949 Chinese revolution. It testifies to the vast potential for science and revolutionary struggle to resolve even horrific problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

US, UK and Israel threaten Iran after lethal drone attack on Israeli-operated ship

Jean Shaoul

A drone attack on an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Oman July 29 killed a Briton and a Romanian. It has provoked a belligerent response from Washington, London and Tel Aviv who have blamed Iran for the attack, heightening tensions between Tehran and the imperialist powers and increasing the likelihood of a military confrontation.

Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett, left, smiles as he speaks to Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid during a special session of the Knesset, whereby Israeli lawmakers elect a new president, at the plenum in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem on Wednesday, June 2, 2021. (Ronen Zvulun/Pool Photo via AP)

The MV Mercer Street, enroute from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates with no cargo, was carrying a Liberian flag of convenience. Owned by a Japanese company, it is managed by the London-based Zodiac Maritime, in which Eyal Ofer—from a family of Israeli shipping magnates—has a stake.

After a first drone attack, the ship’s Romanian captain and the British chief security officer sounded the alert, went to the command bridge, and were hit by a second drone that killed them both. The attack is apparently the first in a spate of attacks on shipping in or near the Persian Gulf, a vital trade route and a choke point for crude oil exports from the resource-rich region, that has resulted in a loss of life.

On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington was “confident that Iran conducted this attack,” apparently after intelligence sent by Israeli officials linking Tehran to the strike, although he presented no evidence to back up his claim. It was, he said, one in a series of attacks by Iran over many months and that he was not sure it was 'anything new or augurs anything one way or another for the new government.'

He added that such actions “threaten freedom of navigation through this crucial waterway, international shipping and commerce and the lives of those on the vessels involved.”

He emphasised, 'We are in very close contact in coordination with the United Kingdom, Israel, Romania, and other countries. And there will be there will be a collective response' to the attack.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab released a statement condemning the attack and saying the UK believed it is 'highly likely' that Iran carried it out. Britain believed the attack “was deliberate, targeted, and a clear violation of international law by Iran.” He threatened, “Iran must end such attacks, and vessels must be allowed to navigate freely in accordance with international law,” adding, “The UK is working with our international partners on a concerted response to this unacceptable attack.”

The UK Foreign Office said that since February, there had been at least three other attacks on Israel-linked ships in the region and claimed that Iran was “almost certainly responsible” for attacks on two vessels that caused little damage in the Gulf of Oman in 2019. The attacks took place a year after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear accord with Tehran and imposed a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign that has led to soaring poverty rates in Iran and stymied the country’s attempts to obtain vital medical supplies to combat an accelerating spread of the coronavirus.

Israel had earlier blamed Iran for the attack. Newly installed Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned that Israel was capable of acting against Iran, with or without Blinken’s “collective response,” saying that 'Iran knows the price that we exact when someone threatens our security.'

While his government was working to ensure international support, Bennett insisted, 'But meanwhile, we also know how to act alone. The Iranians must understand that it's not possible to sit calmly in Tehran and set the whole Middle East on fire. That is over.'

The US, UK and Israeli threats are supposedly based on intelligence gathered and shared by the three countries. Last week, Britain’s Sky News reported on leaked intelligence documents, purportedly created by Intelligence Group 13, a unit belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp, dubbed, “Iran’s secret cyber files.” The files, extensively discussed in a Ha’aretz article, reportedly revealed Iran’s efforts to find ways, based on openly available information, to use cyberattacks to target vessels and cargo ships, for example by causing their fuel pumps to malfunction and explode—although sources claimed they were probably more for defensive than offensive purposes.

Tehran rejected Israel’s claims, with Iran’s foreign ministry warning Israel, “If you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind”. However, Reuters cited unnamed sources as reporting that Iran’s state-owned Arabic-language television network Al-Alam, had said the attack on the ship was a response to a suspected Israeli attack on Dabaa airport in Syria. That attack on July 22, one of hundreds of Israeli strikes against Iran-linked military targets during the 10 year-long proxy war for regime change in Syria, killed two people linked to the Iranian “axis of resistance,” implying pro-Iranian groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The attack on MV Mercer Street comes amid heightened tensions between Israel and Iran and takes place after a long-running, covert offensive by Israel’s naval, air, security and intelligence forces against Iran. This has included assassinations of key nuclear scientists, theft of documents, attacks on its main uranium enrichment site at Natanz and explosions at crucial infrastructure facilities.

In March, the Wall Street Journal, citing US officials, revealed that Israel had in the previous two and a half years attacked at least a dozen ships bound for Syria. Most were carrying Iranian oil, while some were carrying weaponry to Tehran’s allies in Syria, including Hezbollah.

According to Ha’aretz, around 20 Iranian tankers were sabotaged but not sunk, with an estimated loss to Al Quds, Hezbollah and the Shi’ite militias of $500,000 over two and a half years. These attacks, which damaged but deliberately avoided sinking the vessels, were for the dual purpose of disrupting Iran’s supply of oil to Syria and choking off the revenue stream that paid the Shi’ite militias and Hezbollah supporting the Syrian regime forces. The newspaper confirmed earlier Syrian and Iranian claims about an explosion on an Iranian tanker in the Red Sea in late 2019.

The leaks to the Journal, like the leaks to the New York Times in April about Israel’s mining of the cargo ship MV Saviz—owned by the state-linked Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, in the Red Sea—are believed to have come from officials opposed to Israel’s efforts to torpedo the talks in Vienna aimed at restoring the nuclear accord with Iran and isolating China. Once the covert naval war became public, Iran had no option but to open its own naval offensive targeting merchant boats linked, however tenuously, to Israel.

The attack on MV Mercer Street comes as the talks in Vienna have paused until after today’s inauguration of President Ebrahim Raisi. While the Iranian delegation had originally expressed optimism that outstanding obstacles could be resolved, the Biden administration has thus far insisted that Iran roll back its increases in enrichment and stockpiles of uranium built up in response to Washington’s unilateral abrogation of the agreement and illegal reimposition of sanctions. Washington is reportedly pressing Tehran for further concessions on its conventional missile programme as well as demanding it surrenders its influence in the broader Middle East, bowing to the US quest for hegemony.

No less a factor in the mounting tensions is the political crisis in Israel. While Israeli politicians routinely tout Iran’s nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is for civilian purposes only, as an existential threat to the Zionist state, the greatest danger to the interests of the country’s capitalist ruling class comes from within. Last May saw widespread and unprecedented demonstrations and a general strike by Israel’s Palestinian citizens in opposition to the criminal assault on Gaza, the lethal crackdowns on Palestinians worshipping at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians won small but significant support from Jewish Israelis, who like the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel, face increasing poverty while a handful of families that control the economy grow ever richer. It is the fear on the part of Israel’s plutocrats of a unified opposition to its rule by Israeli Palestinians, who make up 20 percent of the population, and the Jewish working class, as was seen in recent struggles by health care and social care workers, that has driven Israel’s rabid nationalism and anti-Arab chauvinism as well as its efforts to divert growing social tensions outward through unrelenting militarism.

Belarusian athlete flees to Poland, as opposition activist is found hanged in Kiev

Clara Weiss

Belarusian athlete Kristina Timonovskaya, who competed for the country at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, has defected to Poland after the Belarusian government sought to force her return to the country. Shortly after the incident, Vitaly Shishov, a Belarusian activist with ties to the Ukrainian far-right, was found hanged in Kiev.

Both cases have garnered international headlines, as the bourgeois press continues to drum up support for the pro-Western opposition to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, which brutally cracked down on strikes and mass protests last fall.

Timonovskaya, a 24-year old sprinter, was set to compete in the Olympics for a 200 meters race. However, her coaches apparently put her in the 4×400 metres relay against her will. Following a post by Timonovskaya on her Instagram account in which she criticized the Belarusian Olympic Committee for forcing her to compete in a race she never trained for, Belarusian state TV launched a massive campaign against her. The Belarusian Olympic Committee is headed by Viktor Lukashenko, the son of the president. Both had earlier been barred from attending the games.

Timonovskaya’s family reportedly warned her to not return to Belarus as she could face arrest or forcible detention in a psychiatric clinic. When two officials, one of them from the National Olympic Committee and one team doctor, escorted her to the airport, she refused to board the plane and sought refuge with Tokyo police. She applied for asylum in Poland, which was granted quickly, while her husband fled Belarus for Ukraine. On Wednesday, she boarded a flight to Vienna.

Unlike over 1,000 other Belarusian athletes, who signed an open letter against the Lukashenko regime following the outbreak of mass protests and strikes last August, Timonovskaya reportedly had not openly supported the mass protest movement. Her husband told the media that they never had any ties to the opposition and never got involved in politics. Hundreds of athletes who prominently supported the protests last year have been imprisoned in Belarus, with some reportedly tortured, and many barred from competing at the Olympics and other major sports events.

In a CNN interview on Tuesday, Timonovskaya reiterated that she did not want to make any statements about Lukashenko. She said, “They took away my dream of performing at the Olympics. They took this chance away from me.” She added, “We have to have freedom of speech and people must state their opinion.”

The gangster-like attempt to force Timonovskaya to return to Belarus over a seemingly minor critique of the Belarusian Olympic Committee comes just about two months after the Lukashenko regime hijacked a plane to arrest Roman Protasevich, a prominent, right-wing opposition journalist. Both incidents are part of a massive crackdown by the government on all expressions of political and social opposition. The fundamental target of these attacks is the working class, whose strikes last fall almost brought the Belarusian economy to a standstill.

The Lukashenko regime, which routinely glorifies the crimes of Stalinism, has now all but abolished the right to strike. Workers, thousands of whom engaged in strikes last fall, are now facing immediate firing if they ever were arrested for political protests or encourage others to join a strike. The raising of political demands during a strike has been outlawed entirely.

Even as the incident around Timonovskaya was still evolving, the exiled Belarusian opposition activist Vitaly Shishov was found hanged in a local park on Tuesday. The Ukrainian police are investigating his death for both suicide and a potential murder disguised as suicide. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has taken the case under his personal control. Bellingcat, a NATO-affiliated outlet posturing as an “investigative” site, has announced that it would “devote all its resources” to investigating Shishov’s case. The site has recently been heavily involved in the imperialist-backed campaign over Russian right-wing oppositionist Alexei Navalny.

Shishov was the head of the House of Belarus in Kiev which helps other Belarusian refugees and has lobbied the Ukrainian parliament for more sanctions against Belarus. He had fled Belarus for Ukraine in the fall of 2020 amid the mass protests to avoid arrest. The pro-Western Belarusian opposition has suggested that the Lukashenko regime is behind Shishov’s death, pointing out that the Belarusian secret service, still called KGB, has been increasingly active in Ukraine amid the substantial Belarusian diaspora. Shishov himself believed that he was being surveilled and had reportedly received threats.

News reports also suggest, however, that Shishov maintained ties to Ukraine’s violent neo-Nazi scene which itself is heavily backed by the Ukrainian state and US imperialism. Shishov co-founded the House of Belarus in Kiev together with Radio Batulin, a Latvian neo-fascist, who was involved in a far-right attack on former President Petro Poroshenko in 2019. Moreover, according to the US-funded Radio Svoboda Belarus, the House is tied to the neo-Nazi Sergei Korotkikh. Korotkikh has been a prominent neo-Nazi for decades, including in both Russia and Belarus. In Ukraine, he was first an instructor and then an intelligence commander for the neo-fascist Azov Battalion which played a key role in the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine that ousted the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich.

Korotkikh was personally handed a Ukrainian passport by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for his services in the Azov Battalion and the 2014 coup. Since then, he has repeatedly been accused of murder, including in the cases of Yaroslav Babich, an ideologist of the Azov Battalion, who was found hanged in July 2015, and opposition journalist Pavel Sheremet, who was assassinated in a car bomb attack in 2016. Between 2015 and 2017, Korotkikh headed the Police Department for the Security of Strategic Objects, under the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s Department of the State Security Service. He also has reported ties to Arsen Avakov, who just resigned from his post as Minister of the Interior.

Similar ties between the US-backed and state-funded Ukrainian neo-Nazis and the Belarusian pro-Western opposition have also emerged in the figure of the arrested journalist Roman Protasevich. Protasevich at least accompanied the Azov Battalion during its combat against pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine in 2014.

Whatever the immediate background of Shishov’s death, these ties to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis starkly expose the reactionary character of the Belarusian pro-Western opposition. Far from representing the interests of the working class and fighting for democratic rights, it speaks for sections of the bourgeoisie and middle class that are ferociously nationalist and seek a closer alliance with Western imperialism.

The most prominent opposition figure, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory in last year’s presidential elections against Lukashenko, just completed a tour in Washington where she met with US President Joe Biden and declared, “With Biden’s help, we will prevail.” She made no reference to the raging pandemic or the attacks on the right to strike by the Lukashenko regime.

The enduring significance of the Hubble Deep Field

Bryan Dyne

Among the most enduring scientific achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope is the Hubble Deep Field image, which revealed a far richer and more complex structure of the cosmos than ever imagined. NASA is this week celebrating the advance enabled by the Deep Field and its subsequent scientific results.

The Hubble Deep Field was taken over 10 consecutive days between December 18 and 28, 1995. It consists of 342 separate exposures taken over more than 140 hours by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), all of which are in a small region in the constellation Ursa Major (of which the Big Dipper is a part). Looking through telescopes on Earth’s surface, this is one of the most featureless areas of the night sky, with almost zero dust from the Milky Way and only a handful of stars. The area observed encompasses a tiny 1 part in 24 million of the total sky.

The Hubble Deep Field was imaged over ten days in 1995. It contains an estimated 3,000 galaxies, including some of the most distant and oldest known. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

At the time, it was unclear to astronomers what would actually be seen. There were many like astrophysicist John Bahcall, who argued in a paper in the journal Science that Hubble would not be any better than ground-based instruments at observing distant galaxies. This position was strengthened immediately after Hubble’s launch in 1990, when the first images showed that the telescope had an optical defect that put the whole project in jeopardy. It was only after the optics were corrected during Hubble’s first servicing mission, undertaken by astronauts carried to orbit by the Space Shuttle Endeavour, that the telescope began producing sharper images than could be acquired from the ground.

In the immediate aftermath of the fix, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is the science operations center for Hubble, used the space telescope for a Medium Deep Field survey to take advantage of the improved imaging capabilities. During this campaign, the WFPC2 took images of random fields while other instruments performed scheduled observations. The most intriguing of these images revealed hints of objects that seemed much further away than Hubble’s actual targets and were in areas of otherwise dark sky.

To follow up, Robert Williams, the director of Hubble’s operations, decided to use what is known as director’s discretionary time to perform a much longer exposure, to more systematically peer into the seeming darkness. For 10 days, Hubble was directed to stare at this largely unobserved and previously thought uninteresting part of the sky.

The results turned out to be spectacular. The first Hubble Deep Field was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1996. “We were all stunned,” noted one astronomer present at the meeting. The imagery showed nearly 3,000 distinct galaxies of all shapes and sizes, some of which were 4 billion times fainter than what the human eye can see. The image made clear that the Universe is not empty in areas where ground-based telescopes then saw very little, but rather teeming with galaxies and other cosmic structures in every direction.

It was understood that through these images, Hubble was not just probing space, but also time. Even light, which is more than 1.3 million times faster than the average passenger plane, can take millions or even billions of years to cross the vast distances between galaxies and galactic clusters. Observing such distant objects means that we are seeing them as they were millions and billions of years ago, times which constitute definite nodal points in the history of the Universe.

The Hubble xTreme Deep Field was released in 2012, peering back in time approximately 13.2 billion years. It contains about 5,500 of the most distant galaxies ever imaged by an optical telescope. Credit: NASA, European Space Agency, Hubble

The field of observational cosmology was revolutionized as astronomers absorbed these insights. While very bright and compact objects known as quasars had been observed at far distances (“at high redshifts” in astronomical parlance), there were few such distant galaxies known before the Hubble Deep Field. For the first time, astronomers directly observed galaxies from 12 billion years ago, only a billion or so years after the Big Bang.

The sheer number of galaxies in the deep field images also helped confirm evolving conceptions of star formation rates across the Universe’s history. The data show that this rate peaked 8-10 billion years ago, and has fallen by about an order of magnitude since then, largely a product of the decreasing density of the Universe and the decreasing frequency of galactic mergers, which trigger episodes of star formation.

With the success of the original Deep Field image, numerous further observations were carried out. These include the Hubble Deep Field South (1998), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2004), the Hubble Deep Field-Infrared (2009) and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (2012). In each, thousands of galaxies have been imaged, again confirming that galaxies are everywhere, and probing more deeply the structure of the cosmos.

Starting in 2013 and continuing through 2017, a new campaign began, combining the observational capabilities of Hubble and its sister Great Observatories, the Spitzer Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, in the Frontier Fields project. The extensive campaign resulted in 12 new deep field images that detailed the farthest reaches of the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum—visible, infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays—providing insights that each of the telescopes separately would never been able to achieve.

One of the most significant observations was of the Abell 370 galactic cluster, which was first observed in the 1980s to act as a gravitational lens. Gravitational lensing is a prediction of general relativity that the path light travels is bent by the gravity of a massive object such as a star or galaxy. When a whole galactic cluster acts as a lens, as in the case of Abell 370, it effectively turns into a cosmic-scale telescope that magnifies and brightens objects behind it in a way that is beyond the imaging capabilities of the best telescopes, a property used to great effect by Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.

Abell 370 is a galactic cluster made up of hundreds of galaxies. Their combined mass produces a lensing effect which allows astronomers to peer further back in time and farther away than otherwise possible. The lensing also produces the arcing of the background galaxies seen in this image, as well as the illusion of multiple copies of the same galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Bouwens and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)

There is also an interesting social aspect to the deep field experiments. The amount of data collected in each necessitated a far broader collaboration by astronomers than ever previously conceived to process and understand the physics contained within, both nationally and internationally. Alongside, the development of the internet allowed massive public and open datasets to be built, which has allowed the broader working class to engage with deep questions of astronomy and cosmology in a way that had been impossible before the 1990s.

The significant investment of telescope time and scientific expertise in generating deep fields makes them rare milestones, but they are absolutely critical to our understanding of the Universe. Many other observations to map far distant galaxies and place them within broader structures are ongoing, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys, which make detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe on scales of galactic clusters and larger. Through deep fields, humanity sees both deep into space and far back in time, piecing together the history of the stars and our place within cosmic development.

Egypt’s el-Sisi steps up repression as opposition mounts to mass poverty and inequality

Jean Shaoul

Egypt’s military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is using the courts, new laws and censorship of the internet and social media to suppress all opposition to his brutal regime.

His central objective is to defend Egyptian and foreign capital in the country against a social explosion of the working class who face mass poverty, social inequality, a military kleptocracy and a mounting death toll from COVID-19.

President of Egypt Abdel Fatah el-Sisi (en.kremlin.ru)

El-Sisi, who took power in a bloody coup against the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated government of President Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, has cracked down not just on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest political opposition party that has been branded a terrorist organisation and outlawed, but opponents across the political spectrum.

He rules Egypt through forcible disappearances, mass arrests, the torture of 60,000 political prisoners, many of whom have never stood trial, and executions, whose recorded number, believed to be only a partial list, jumped from 32 in 2019 to 107 in 2020, according to Amnesty International.

He renewed Egypt’s state of emergency for the 18th time since April 2017 outlawing public meetings and demonstrations, sanctioning the detention of people without trial or even without charge and censoring the media. Hundreds of people, including politicians, lawyers, researchers and journalists, have been arrested and tried by the State Security Court, including most recently Ahmed Samir Santawi, a postgraduate student at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Santawi was sentenced to four years imprisonment for belonging to a terrorist organization and spreading false news on social media, after he and other members of “the hope alliance” were detained for their attempt to run for the 2020 parliamentary elections.

On July 28, the Damanhour Criminal Court imposed the death sentence on 24 Muslim Brotherhood members for the killing of police officers in 2014 and 2015 in two separate cases. Eight of the 24 accused were tried in absentia.

The same day, the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest court, rejected appeals against their life sentences in 2014 by Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood’s leader, his deputy Khairat El-Shater and several others. They were accused of 'collaborating with Hamas,' the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that won the last Palestinian elections in 2006 and controls Gaza, to destabilise national security and stability. This takes place even as Egypt has made peace with Qatar, which has supported Hamas, and begun a rapprochement with Turkey, which it has long accused of providing a safe-haven for the Brotherhood.

On July 25, the State Security Court asked the government to call on Interpol to arrest three Egyptian nationals, including Mohamed Ali, a former construction contractor for el-Sisi and now a critic in exile in Spain, for inciting the public against the government—a reference to the September 2020 protests. The other two are accused of joining the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Two weeks ago, the authorities detained Abdel Nasser Salama, who was editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, the country's leading state-owned newspaper, in the years 2012-2014, on charges of “financing terrorism,” spreading fake news on social media and undermining state agencies and institutions. It follows his Facebook post calling on el-Sisi to resign over his handling of Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam that has led to a “heavy defeat” for Egypt. Ethiopia has started filling the reservoir behind the huge hydro-electric dam on the Blue Nile that provides about 80 percent of the waters of the Nile River flowing into Sudan and Egypt, sparking fears that the two countries may suffer water shortages in drought years.

In June, Yahya Najm, a former Egyptian ambassador to Venezuela who spoke out against the government’s “mismanagement” of the dam crisis was detained and sentenced to 15 days imprisonment pending investigation for 'joining a terrorist group, spreading false news, and misusing social media.'

In June, Egypt’s highest civilian court upheld the death sentence for 12 Muslim Brotherhood members in connection with the mass demonstrations in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in August 2013 against el-Sisi’s coup. El-Sisi’s forces carried out one of the most blood-thirsty massacres in recent history, killing at least 1,000 demonstrators. While none of the security forces were prosecuted, the 12 Brotherhood members were convicted of “arming criminal gangs which attacked residents and resisted policemen as well as possessing firearms… ammunition… and bomb-making material” and “killing policemen… resisting authorities… and occupation and destruction of public property.”

In April, at least nine people were executed over similar trumped-up charges relating to the 2013 massacre.

The International Commission of Jurists has called the Egyptian judiciary a “tool of repression”, while the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have widely condemned the country’s judicial system.

El-Sisi’s bloody repression takes place as the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated workers’ living conditions. The sudden halt to tourism, which at the onset of the crisis accounted for around 15 percent of GDP, the drop in remittances from workers in the Gulf and foreign currency earnings, the withdrawal by investors of at least $13 billion from Egypt’s debt and equity markets and the partial lockdowns have led to just 35 percent of Egyptians of working age in employment, as 800,000 graduates enter the job market every year. The government, already struggling to keep afloat before the pandemic after its Gulf benefactors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that had brought el-Sisi to power in 2013 withdrew their support after he failed to support their criminal war in Yemen, faces debt levels approaching 95 percent of GDP.

In return for two loans from the International Monetary Fund, el-Sisi has implemented its diktats: slashed subsidies on basic domestic and agricultural commodities, raised fuel prices, new taxes including a value added tax, cut the health and education budgets, fired government employees and allowed the currency to float. These measures have hiked up the cost of living, ruining much of Egypt’s middle class and leading to soaring poverty rates.

The regime has refused to do anything that would impact on the corporations’ profits, instead providing $6.4 billion for business to offset the impact of the pandemic and announcing a series of measures aimed at curtailing freedom of movement and social behaviour, with little governmental financial support for those who lost their livelihoods, plunging millions into destitution.

Egypt’s dilapidated health care system has proved incapable of coping with the pandemic. Starved of resources, medical staff have emigrated, while hospitals and clinics lack basic equipment, including ventilators, oxygen supplies and personal protection equipment for their staff. Even though more than 500 doctors have died of the disease, doctors have been arrested and harassed if they speak out about the crisis in the country or question the government's figures, while held responsible for patients’ deaths. Less than 2 percent of Egypt’s 100 million people have been vaccinated.

Last week, 2,000 workers at a razor blade factory in the port city of Alexandria went on strike demanding their wages be increased to the minimum monthly wage of at least EGP 2,400 ($150), up from the current average wage of about EGP 2,000 ($127). It is one of a growing number of strikes and protests. According to the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), there were 80 labour protests in the first quarter of 2021, including suicides, because of the deterioration of living conditions, and 44 protests in the second quarter. One of the largest protests took place in June when hundreds took to the streets in the working-class Nadi Al-Seed area of Alexandria to protest the planned demolition of their homes to make way for new business and entertainment compounds where they faced hundreds of riot police accompanying the demolition crews.

The first two weeks of July saw five social protests and two labour strikes, of which the more important was by workers of the Nile Linen Group, based in Alexandria’s special economic zone, over the company’s refusal to implement its agreement to raise the minimum wage.

The crisis of the capitalist system and its abject failure to address the social catastrophe affecting the masses is manifested across the Middle East and North Africa. It was the fear of Egypt’s acute economic and social tensions erupting that prompted the military dictator to support Tunisia's President Kais Saeid’s assumption of emergency powers, his sacking of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, suspension of parliament, imposition of a curfew and clampdown on the media, raiding Al Jazeera 's bureau and sacking the head of national TV. According to Middle East Eye, Egyptian security officials were present when the Tunisian prime minister was beaten in the presidential palace before agreeing to resign.

Flood victims in Germany criticise authorities for failure to provide warnings

Elisabeth Zimmermann

It is becoming increasingly clear that the consequences of the flood catastrophe in Germany three weeks ago were not simply the result of a natural disaster of “unimaginable proportions,” but of the irresponsibility of politicians and authorities at the federal, state and local levels.

In Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia alone, 185 deaths have been confirmed so far. The destruction of houses, flats, businesses, roads, bridges and critical infrastructure such as water and electricity is devastating.

Cleanup in the Ahr Valley (photo WSWS)

In Belgium, where from July 14 to 15 extreme amounts of heavy rain submerged parts of Wallonia, the flood disaster claimed at least 41 lives.

The World Socialist Web Site has in previous articles documented the fact that the disaster was not an unavoidable natural event. The fact that the floods killed so many people and caused such devastating damage is a direct result of the criminal inaction of government at all levels.

Well before people were caught in the deadly waters, governments and authorities had been warned. But they remained inactive and refused to initiate evacuations and protective measures. They did not even inform the population about the approaching danger.

In the Ahr valley in Rhineland-Palatinate, where the floods have claimed a particularly large number of lives, 138 people have died to date and 59 are still missing.

On Monday, the public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz announced that it had “initiated preliminary proceedings based on the suspicion of negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm.” Specifically, the case concerns the district of Ahrweiler: Were the responsible authorities too late in warning of the imminent but foreseeable floods, and did people come to harm and die as a result?

At the weekend, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the district of Ahrweiler had been directly warned about the flood. A level of almost seven metres was forecast for the Ahr—normally a small, peaceful river—for the night of July 14 to 15. The warnings came from the State Office for the Environment in Rhineland-Palatinate. Nevertheless, the district did not declare a disaster until late in the evening and did not initiate an evacuation of the threatened residential areas.

By the time an emergency was declared at 11 p.m., it was already too late for evacuations. The rushing flood waters washed away numerous houses and deluged and killed many people, including 12 who drowned in their rooms on the ground floor of a facility for the severely disabled in Sinzig.

Crisis expert Frank Gottlieb told the Rhein-Zeitung, “Many deaths could have been prevented.”

Gottlieb holds the district administrator for Ahrweiler, Jürgen Pföhler (Christian Democratic Union--CDU), primarily responsible for the disaster-control failure and the lack of timely warning to the population.

Gottlieb does not accept the enormous scale of the flood as an excuse. “The dimensions of floods 200 years ago were even greater,” he said. “It was similar 100 years ago. Moreover, there were warnings at an early stage. Therefore, there is no reason not to have been prepared that evening.”

The crisis expert places the main responsibility on the district administrator. However, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Environment as well as the entire state government of Rhineland-Palatinate along with the federal government, cannot be exempted from their responsibility for the scale of death and destruction from the flood.

In an interview with business daily Handelsblatt shortly after the disaster, the climate and environment minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Anna Spiegel of the Green Party, arrogantly stated that it was not possible to be protected from every extreme weather event.

Asked about flood prevention, Spiegel, who is deputy head of the state government, claimed, “But one must also say quite clearly: with the event we’ve had now, no flood prevention concept will help anymore.” In the interview, she repeatedly alluded to the financial limits of the state budget and demanded more help from the federal government.

Her statements, which are full of contempt for the needs of the people, express the real priorities of capitalist politicians at all levels. They have nothing to do with the need of the working class, the vast majority of the population, for safe working and living conditions. As in the pandemic, the policy of the capitalist class and its political representatives is profits before lives.

While hundreds of billions of euros are pumped into the accounts of the banks and corporations, swelling the fortunes of the super-rich, and billions more are spent on armaments and war, the claim is that there is “no money” for the protection of the population from disasters, including the pandemic, or for the fight against poverty and social inequality. The same applies to the need for massive support for the people affected by the flood disaster.

The situation in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), where 47 people lost their lives and thousands face the destruction of their livelihoods and severe damage to their houses, businesses, schools, hospitals, roads and bridges, is similar to that in Rhineland-Palatinate.

NRW Minister-President Armin Laschet (CDU) faced criticism and anger from people affected by the catastrophe during recent visits to the flood-ravaged area. Among other things, he was called a “failure” Monday when he travelled to Swisstal near Bonn and to Schleiden. On Tuesday, he visited Stollberg near Aachen. To demonstrate the unity of the ruling class, he was accompanied by Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party--SPD), his rival in the fight for the chancellorship in this fall’s elections.

One man in Swisstal complained there had been no support from the state government or the local administration. People had helped each other, he said, and volunteers, especially young people, had helped clean up.

The same experience--a complete lack of warnings and precautions and, after the disaster had occurred, of governmental help and support--was also had by flood victims in Ahrweiler. This was confirmed by several residents and people affected by the catastrophe in a video report on the World Socialist Web Site.

“They could have gone through from 5 o’clock [warning people]. Then we wouldn’t have any dead people here!” said Alwin.

Flood disaster: “They could have gone through from 5 o’clock [warning people]. Then we wouldn’t have any dead people here!"

Bettina reported that absolutely nothing was done to provide warnings and evacuate people. She attributed this to austerity measures and other priorities of the politicians, such as arms spending.

All those affected described the inability and unwillingness of those politically responsible to warn people, to provide assistance and to save lives. Evacuation orders came so late that they could no longer be implemented.

The video, which has been online since 30 July, has now been viewed over 185,000 times. Many have commented approvingly on the statements of the affected residents and volunteers, because they speak from the heart and hit the nail on the head.

Games & More writes: “According to the statements of those responsible, everyone was warned. Here are hundreds of witnesses who can testify to the contrary. Who do you believe? The person who saw/heard neighbours die, or the person in charge who has a vested interest in dismissing the blame so he can continue to hold office and not lose his emoluments?”

Pheuer one writes: “The woman at the beginning is 100 percent right. Nothing was done because the government didn't want to spend money on evacuations. etc.”

Bin online writes: “I am watching your report for the second time. It is simply authentic. One looks for such reports in vain in the mainstream. Those that are there are cut together briefly. I am sitting on the terrace under the awning, and it is starting to rain. Slowly, the rain is getting heavier, and I shudder to think how the people in the Ahr valley fared that night. Best regards from southern Thuringia and much strength to all those affected.”

Need Username writes: “Thank you for the report on the complete and total failure of politics, public broadcasting and administration to warn the population. Most responsible for the failure in the Ahr valley is Malu Dreyer of the SPD! In the past, loudspeaker trucks drove around and warned of a flood. Now, nothing! You can also warn from a helicopter with very powerful loudspeakers. There has been nothing!”

The fact that the flood disaster and its victims hardly play a role in the official election campaign shows that the official parties and politicians are indifferent to the fate of people whose deaths could have been avoided.

World marks 200 million cases of coronavirus pandemic

Bryan Dyne

The world this week marked the 200 millionth confirmed case of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest in a series of grim milestones amid a pandemic that has been plaguing humanity for the past 20 months. Alongside that sobering figure, the virus has prematurely taken more than 4.26 million human lives from their coworkers, friends and families.

This week is also the sixth week in a row that daily new cases have increased and the fourth week in a row that daily deaths have risen. As of August 3, there was an average of more than 605,000 new known cases each day, and more than 9,300 fatalities. An ominous warning was given by Dr. Catherine O’Neal, Chief Medical Officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, “that these are the DARKEST DAYS of this pandemic.”

Dr. Joseph Varon, right, leads a team as they try to save the life of a patient unsuccessfully inside the Coronavirus Unit at United Memorial Medical Center last month. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The three most hard-hit countries are the United States, with 36.1 million cases and 631,000 deaths, India, with 31.8 million cases and 426,000 deaths, and Brazil, with 19.9 million cases and 559,000 deaths, totaling more than 44 percent of the world’s cases and nearly 38 percent of official deaths.

Overall, there are 19 countries with more than two million confirmed cases and 12 with more than four million. Twelve countries have also reported at least 100,000 deaths, the aforementioned three and Mexico, Peru, Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Colombia, France, Argentina and Indonesia.

The scale of the pandemic across continents is equally revealing. Asia and the Pacific have suffered more than 63 million cases, followed by 52 million in Europe, 43 million in North America, 35 million in South America and nearly 7 million in Africa. In percentage terms, 8.2 out of 100 people in South America have been infected, 7.2 out of 100 in North America, 6.9 out of 100 in Europe, 1.3 out of 100 in Asia, and 0.5 out of 100 in Africa.

And in reality, the figures are far worse when unreported cases and deaths are taken into account. An estimate by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) calculates that, based on excess death counts internationally, nearly 9.2 million men, women and children have lost their lives to the pandemic. A similar count by the Economist found that there are between 8–16 million dead. Given that the average infection fatality rate of the coronavirus is about 0.5 percent, these calculations indicate that the real number of cases stands at about 2 billion, ten times official figures.

That such mass death and colossal social misery has occurred is a damning indictment of the world’s capitalist governments and the socioeconomic system which they defend. The world’s ruling elites have had ample opportunities to stem the tide, including the chance to stop the spread before it fully took hold around the globe in January and February 2020, to allow the global lockdowns in March and April of last year, which had begun to lower infection rates, to continue, and to the widespread deployment of highly effective vaccines, begun in January 2021.

They have instead done the exact opposite, pursuing ever more openly the homicidal policy of herd immunity. In the United States, then-US President Republican Donald Trump resisted any measures to contain the pandemic until plans had been put into place to transfer trillions of dollars to Wall Street and the major corporations through the CARES Act. Trump then fought viciously to end the lockdowns that had been implemented and to get workers back into unsafe conditions in their offices, plants and factories to pay for the astronomical transfer of wealth to the financial oligarchy.

Trump’s policies resulted in just under 427,000 official deaths in the United States during his tenure. Internationally, other world leaders followed suit, leading to nearly 2.2 million dead overall.

These processes have only accelerated under Biden. Another 204,000 people have lost their lives in the United States and more than 2 million around the world. Come the fall, all restrictions on in-person schooling are being done away with, setting the stage for a further acceleration of the pandemic.

The ongoing crisis has been made continually worse by the emergence of newer and more infectious variants. The Alpha variant was first detected last fall in the United Kingdom and rapidly spread around the world, causing the peaks of cases and deaths witnessed in January. Data from the UK clearly showed that the Alpha variant was about twice as infectious as the wild variant and caused more hospitalizations.

At about the same time, the Gamma variant was first sampled in Brazil and became the dominant variant in South America. It is not only more infectious, but also more deadly, especially among young people. Reports have also emerged that it is capable of reinfecting those who were previously infected by the wild variant, raising the specter of a never ending cycle of infection and death that is not held back by natural immunity.

Now, the world lives under the deadly shadow of the Delta variant. It first emerged in India and was responsible for the skyrocketing cases in that country in April, when cases in that country soared to nearly 400,000 a day, at the time about half of the world’s cases. From an epidemiological standpoint, the massive spread is caused by the fact that the Delta variant is 2.5 times as transmissible as the original variant of the disease, a result of the virus mutating and optimizing itself for human infection over the course of the past 18 months and hundreds of millions of cases.

The Delta variant is also at least partially resistant to vaccines, the panacea promoted by the Biden administration as the reason mask mandates and public health measures are no longer needed to end the pandemic. A recently leaked internal report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that there are an estimated 35,000 symptomatic cases of COVID-19 each week in the US among vaccinated people.

Those vaccinated can also spread the disease, which has been found to live in the mouth and sinus canals, avoiding the body’s immune system for some time, meaning that being vaccinated doesn’t automatically remove one from the chain of transmission. This is especially concerning given how infectious the Delta variant is, more easily spread than the common cold.

The sheer virulence of the Delta variant also undermines the effectiveness of vaccines. It is so infectious that, even with the current 50 percent full vaccination rate in the US, the Delta variant is able to spread faster than the wild variant was able to when there was no vaccination. In other words, even with vaccines, the emergence of the Delta variant has induced a spread of the coronavirus that is worse than what occurred in March 2020. That Florida is currently experiencing record hospitalizations must be taken as a warning of the dangers facing the whole population.

In countries with lower vaccination rates, which remains the vast majority of the world, the Delta variant is causing even greater havoc. Multiple countries had very low case rates until April, when the Delta variant reached them and caused cases and deaths to explode out of control. Thailand, for example, which has a full vaccination rate of less than six percent, had less than 100 coronavirus-related deaths before April, and now has more than 5,300.

And there are more variants on the horizon. The Lambda variant has been shown to be resistant to vaccines and three other variants, Eta, Iota and Kappa, have been described as “potential threats” by researchers looking into the infectiousness and evasiveness of the coronavirus as it mutates.