Macron to dismantle last remaining anti-COVID health measures in France

Jacques Valentin

During a cabinet meeting on May 4, French president Emmanuel Macron announced, according to Libération, “some adaptations in the coming weeks” to the measures still in place against COVID-19. Macron intends to end “the obligatory wearing of masks on public transport, obligatory self-isolation after a positive Covid test, and compulsory vaccination for health care workers under pain of suspension.” This would amount to the ending of the last remaining restrictions on the spread of the virus.

In the middle of March, before the presidential elections, Macron had already abandoned the health pass that certifies vaccination status, and also the general wearing of face masks, excepting public transport and health and public establishments.

In carrying out his policy, Macron relied on unanimous support from the established political parties, none of whose candidates in France’s recent presidential election challenged his policy on the pandemic, or proposed a scientifically-based policy to combat the virus.

A resurgence of the pandemic linked to the extremely contagious Omicron variant then followed in April, after the relaxing of measures taken in March.

In France as elsewhere internationally, the ruling class has systematically operated a policy of profits before lives. The pseudo-left parties and trade unions totally lined up behind this policy in every country, thus working to suppress working class opposition to a policy of mass infection.

The various countries are in a race to the bottom in abandoning public health measures. Only China is still carrying out a “Zero-COVID” policy, which faces serious opposition from economic quarters and western leaders, with the official media pouring venomous hostility on China’s policy. The NATO proxy war in Ukraine has been a pretext to avoid virtually any further discussion of the pandemic.

The number of new daily cases in France (seven day average), showing the explosion of the Omicron variant from the end of November 2021 and the resurgence of cases in April. (Santé publique France Meteo-covid.com)

In France, in preparation for completely terminating the fight against COVID-19, Macron declared during the election campaign: “We are going, I think, to exit the acute epidemic phase (…) If we continue in this direction, we are going to experience an endemic phase.”

The reference to “endemic” is totally misleading. Endemicity refers only to the habitual presence of a disease in a region or a specific population. That has nothing to do with the health policy undertaken to deal with the disease itself.

Macron wants to exploit the fall in case rates to argue that COVID-19 will circulate at a low level, with no requirement needed for any specific measures.

The COVID reproduction rate (R0) has indeed fallen below 1 after mid-April, which means the number of cases has been falling regularly for a month. But the level of cases remains high; it has only recently dropped below 50,000, and that is not taking into account the asymptomatic cases, which increasingly are not detected. The level of hospital admissions remains above 20,000. More than 1,000 people are hospitalized every day and more than 100 are taken into intensive care.

The mortality rate remains at a very high and uneven plateau, with over 100 deaths per day since the fall in the mortality rate from COVID at the end of February.

It is not at all certain that France will experience a significant and enduring fall in the number of deaths, especially if the remaining precautionary measures are lifted and a climate of risk denial is deliberately encouraged. The end of masking in mass transit and in health and public establishments would be especially catastrophic.

Once again, measures to combat the virus are being dismantled at the moment when a policy of elimination could be put in place. The consequence is a catastrophic recrudescence of the epidemic.

Again, there is speculation about a possible “herd immunity” to obviate the need to combat COVID. This would be obtained through a high vaccination coverage reinforced by tens of millions of people contaminated by Omicron.

But the effects of the vaccination campaign and booster shots will soon diminish, as studies have shown that the vaccine protection falls rapidly for the Omicron variant. Mortality will therefore inevitably increase. There will again be more serious cases and deaths for the same number of contaminated people, to the extent that the vaccination campaign has stalled and that only 59 percent of the population has had a booster shot.

The French Scientific Council has also warned about the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants which are currently provoking a fifth wave of infection in South Africa and which could provoke an epidemic wave in France at the summer’s end. These variants have already started to spread in France and other countries. They partially elude acquired immunity and vaccines.

The United States is experiencing a resurgent epidemic in connection with another Omicron variant (BA.2.12.1), which is spreading rapidly in New York state. In Europe, other than the BA.4 and BA.5, there is also the XE variant that is gaining ground, notably in the U.K and Spain.

Scientists are also warning of the fact that there is no ground for believing that COVID-19 is evolving constantly toward a more benign form. Whilst the Omicron variant imposed itself because it was more contagious, the appearance of more or less deadly forms is largely a question of chance. Allowing the unhindered spread of the virus over the greater part of the planet can result in the appearance at any moment of a deadly variant.

Epidemiologist Antoine Flahaut, professor at the Geneva Faculty of Medicine, thinks that the virus, because of the explosive character of BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa, could trigger a new wave far earlier than thought, as soon as the first months of summer.

Flahaut also underlined that the high mortality rate in France is in part due to the underutilization of available treatments, in particular Pfizer’s Paxlovid, which the WHO has recommended in preference to other treatments.

In France, only 10,000 prescriptions have been written for the 500,000 cartons purchased. The treatment, which targets people at risk of catching a serious infection (age, excess weight, etc.) has to be administered less than five days after the appearance of the first symptoms to be effective.

It can in theory be prescribed by family doctors since February 3, 2022. But the prescription rules that are in place have all but blocked its use up until recently. This is one illustration of the indifference with which the pandemic is treated.

Macron, like his counterparts in other European countries, has decided to allow an avoidable disease to become a constant feature of daily life in France, which will probably kill tens of thousands of people every year, much more than the worst annual flu epidemics in decades past. Moreover, the pandemic threatens to create a much worse health catastrophe if a more aggressive variant appears. And deaths will be even higher, especially in countries where health systems are less developed than in the richest countries of Europe.

Astronomers publish first imagery of Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole

Bryan Dyne

Astronomers have published the first ever imagery of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”), confirming the hypothesis developed in the 1980s that this compact radio source is in fact a supermassive black hole that sits at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The results were presented at press conferences held simultaneously around the world.

The research was done by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, a grouping of 300 astronomers and hundreds more support staff at 60 universities and institutions in 20 countries. The observing campaign was conducted in April 2017 using eight telescopes in Europe, South America, North America and Antarctica. Thousands of terabytes of data recorded by the telescopes were analyzed and processed for five years using supercomputers around the world to produce the simple but stunning graphical result.

The first imagery of Sagitarrius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole, invisible, resides in the center of the glowing ring of gas surrounding it, known as the accretion disk. Credit: EHT Collaboration

NASA’s Chandra, NuSTAR and Swift telescopes participated in the experiment to complement the EHT’s measurements. The space-based observatories are capable of observing in X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths of light, revealing further details about the large-scale clouds of gas and dust interacting with the black hole.

Sgr A* has been studied for many decades. Karl Jansky, one of the founders of the field of radio astronomy, rose to prominence after detecting radio waves emanating from the center of the Milky Way in 1933. In the decades after, further observations discovered that the source of these observations was a very compact object, suggesting a black hole. Further evidence was presented in the early 2000s when a team of physicists led by Reinhard Genzel at the Max Planck Institute reported on a star orbiting a single massive and invisible object, ruling out the possibility of a cluster of massive dark objects in the galactic core.

Observations of the black hole itself have only been possible thanks to developments in very-long-baseline interferometry. The technique was first developed in the 1960s as a way to combine observations from multiple telescopes in order to emulate a single, larger telescope that is effectively the size of the distance between the two farthest receivers. Over the years, incremental improvements to the technology have allowed astronomers to shrink the wavelengths used in this method from the 1 meter scale down to 1.3 millimeters, with corresponding increases in resolution.

Moreover, since the actual shape of the radio waves have to be recorded and processed, every aspect of the technology needs to improve: the design of the radio telescopes, more precise pointing of the telescopes and the ability to record titanic amounts of data, transmit the data and recombine them. Using advances made in the past 60 years, particularly in fiber optics and atomic clocks, the EHT team was able to take measurements to within a trillionth of a second between observatories that are separated as far as Spain and the South Pole, making a telescope effectively the size of Earth. In doing so, astronomers were able to achieve the necessary precision to directly image the area around the Milky Way’s central black hole.

The data presented is the second set of measurements studying the environment immediately surrounding a black hole, particularly of the radiation produced by matter accreting around and eventually spiraling into the super-dense objects. The first such measurements were also taken by the EHT team and released in 2019, showing the region around the central black hole of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Those results were deemed so significant that the following year, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for research into black holes.

One the most important differences of the observations presented yesterday is that the black holes studied have vastly different masses. The black hole in the center of M87 is 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun and occupies a region of space on the order of the entire Solar System. In comparison, Sgr A* is about 4.1 million times as massive as the Sun and it extends to about the orbit of Mercury, that is, it is 1,600 times smaller in mass and size than the black hole in M87.

A size comparison of the two black holes imaged by EHT. M87* is 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun and located in the heart of galaxy Messier 87. Sgr A* is 4.1 million times the mass of our Sun and sits at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Credit: EHT collaboration (acknowledgment: Lia Medeiros, xkcd)

The peculiarities of general relativity also mean that the timescales just beyond the event horizon of the two black holes (the point at which light can escape) also differ by a factor of about 1,600. Changes in the structure of the hot gas orbiting the black hole in M87, for example, might take one month. The same changes of the matter orbiting Sgr A* take about 30 minutes, making the neighborhood around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole much more dynamic than that of its larger counterpart.

The rapidity of events in the region around Sgr A*, however, made it much more difficult to study. The researchers had to keep track of how structures were evolving over the course of a night, and individual observations could rarely last more than a few minutes. In addition, the much lower flow of material into this black hole makes for a fainter target, making it even harder to acquire quality data. Whole new computer algorithms had to be developed and tested in order to account for and surmount these hurdles.

Once these technical challenges had been overcome, a whole new physical regime could be visualized. Despite the vast differences in size, mass and inflow into the two black holes now imaged, both show a characteristic image form which can only be explained by the warping of spacetime predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. At the same time, the differences between the two black holes confirms the theory holds even under diverse conditions.

The relative quiescence of Sgr A* also provided an opportunity to observe a super-massive black hole in what is likely the normal state of most of these astronomical objects. In doing so, it served as a chance to more deeply understand how they interact with galaxies more generally, how accretion disks are formed and how jets of energy, such as the one being emitted from the center of M87, are launched.

The data also provided a measurement of the spin of the black hole, its most important property after its mass. The researchers were thus able to test the validity of the so-called Kerr metric, the mathematical description of in the theory of general relativity of a rotating black hole. It was also determined that one of the poles of Sgr A* is pointing more or less at Earth.

And more is to come. Similar to their observations of M87, the EHT astronomers also collected the polarization of the light (the orientation of the electromagnetic waves) emitted from the accretion disk around Sgr A*, which will let them reconstruct the magnetic fields around the black hole and provide further insight into the dynamics of its environment.

The collaboration also announced further work, including data collected this past March using an upgraded network of telescopes that will potentially be used to make movies of black holes in the near future. They are also planning to try to observe black holes in the center of even more distant galaxies, particularly those with large accretion disks and emitting colossal amounts of radiation.

Skeptics of science and its materialist inquiry into nature once dismissed black holes as artifacts of the imagination. But through the growth of human technique and material theory, science now has images of relatively close ones self-illuminated by their diet of gas. Through the equally new field of gravitational wave astronomy, the last decade has also produced recordings of the ripples of their mergers in the distant Universe.

Finland’s decision to join NATO marks major escalation of US-led drive to war with Russia

Jordan Shilton

Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced in a joint statement Thursday that the country should join the US-led NATO military alliance “without delay.” The decision, which brings to an end more than seven decades of formal Finnish neutrality, marks a massive escalation in the drive by American and European imperialism towards all-out war with Russia.

Finnish membership will more than double NATO’s border with Russia. The country shares a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia, and its capital city, Helsinki, is just three-and-a-half hours by train from St. Petersburg. The vote in parliament required to formally submit a membership application, expected next week, is considered a formality. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg commented Thursday that the process of Finland joining the alliance would be “smooth and swift.” It is expected to be rapidly followed by the accession of neighbouring Sweden, whose governing Social Democrats are preparing to overturn their decades-long opposition to NATO membership on Sunday. Reports suggest the government will then make a formal announcement on Monday.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, center, participates in a media conference with Finland’s Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, left, and Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde, right, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, Jan. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, File)

Unsurprisingly, Russia responded to the prospect of NATO soldiers, tanks, and other weaponry being stationed within a few hours’ striking distance of its second city by warning of a major escalation of the war danger. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described the decision as “definitely” a threat and warned that Russia would respond with symmetrical measures. Former President Dmitri Medvedev, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, warned in a Telegram post that NATO expansion near Russia’s borders would “increase the likelihood of a direct and open conflict between NATO and Russia instead of their ‘proxy war.’…Such a conflict always has the risk of turning into a full-fledged nuclear war, this will be a catastrophic scenario for everyone.”

In a separate statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated Moscow would be “forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature to stop the threats to its national security.”

The Finnish and Swedish ruling elites, their imperialist masters, and corporate-controlled media outlets around the world fraudulently claim that the Scandinavian countries’ decision to join NATO is a “defensive” reaction to “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. Former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb asserted that NATO membership was a “done deal” the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. Swedish Defence Minister Peter Holtqvist, who publicly declared last November that Stockholm would not join NATO, stated that the invasion proved Putin was “unpredictable and unreliable,” forcing Sweden to rethink its position.

According to the BBC, “Vladimir Putin’s actions have shattered a long-standing sense of stability in northern Europe, leaving Sweden and Finland feeling vulnerable.”

This is nothing but self-serving propaganda. The reality is that Swedish and Finnish NATO membership is a massive provocation that was decided upon in Washington, Berlin, and London far more than in Helsinki and Stockholm. Having goaded Russia into launching an invasion of Ukraine by expanding NATO eastwards over the past three decades and dismissing efforts by the Kremlin to negotiate security guarantees, American, German, and British imperialism are eager to open up a new front in their war drive to subjugate Russia to the status of a semi-colony and overthrow the Putin government.

The ruling elites in Helsinki and Stockholm have systematically deepened their military-strategic ties with the imperialist powers over recent decades. After becoming members of NATO’s “Partnership for Peace” program in the mid-1990s, which was a key mechanism that facilitated the US-led military alliance’s expansion into Eastern Europe, Finnish and Swedish troops participated in a series of exercises and NATO missions. Swedish and Finnish troops joined the neocolonial occupation of Afghanistan, while Swedish Saab-Gripen jets flew bombing raids during the destruction of Libya by the imperialist powers in 2011.

If they delayed applying for full NATO membership, this was above all due to the widespread popular hostility to the aggressive military alliance in both countries. The hysterical anti-Russia campaign and war fever whipped up by governments and the media in the US and Europe following Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine prompted a sharp shift in opinion polls, which was seized on by the Finnish and Swedish governments to implement plans for NATO membership that were prepared long ago and were only awaiting a pretext.

Recognising the opposition to military aggression that remains strong among working people, Niinisto and Marin sought to portray their decision in Thursday’s statement in terms of “national defence.” They declared, “NATO membership would strengthen Finland’s security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance.”

This is a lie. The integration of Finland and Sweden into NATO will in fact transform the entire Nordic region into yet another staging ground for military conflict with Russia. Just as the imperialist powers are pumping tens of billions of dollars in lethal weaponry into Ukraine with the aim of “breaking the back of Russia” irrespective of the devastation inflicted on the country, Finland and Sweden would become frontline garrison states and potential war zones. As Trotsky wrote in War and the Fourth International on the eve of World War II, “(W)e see how naturally formal neutrality is replaced by a system of imperialist pacts and how inevitably war for ‘national defence’ leads to an annexationist peace.” In the case of Helsinki, such “annexations” would undoubtedly include the 10 percent of its pre-World War II territory it lost to the Soviet Union after 1945.

The imperialist powers’ view of Finnish and Swedish membership in NATO opening up another front in the drive to war with Russia was underscored by the visit Wednesday to both countries by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who concluded mutual security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm. During a press conference at the Swedish prime minister’s country residence, Johnson refused to rule out deploying nuclear weapons to protect Sweden and Finland’s sovereignty. Johnson said he would consider “very seriously” that request if either country made it. “What we are saying emphatically is in the event of a disaster or in the event of an attack upon Sweden, then the U.K. would come to the assistance of Sweden with whatever Sweden requested.”

Given Russia’s position that it will not accept Finland and Sweden joining NATO, Johnson effectively committed Britain to war with Russia with incalculable consequences. Expressing the putrefaction of democratic rule in Britain, as among all the imperialist powers, there has been no discussion organised in Parliament on these grave events, let alone among the population.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz invited Marin and Swedish Prime minister Magdalena Andersson to a government retreat at Schloss Meseberg last week to finalise plans for both countries’ NATO membership. Scholz commented after the meeting, stating, “If both these countries should decide they want to belong to the NATO alliance, they can depend on our support.”

For its part, the US military has expanded bilateral training and cooperation with the Finnish military over recent years, and Washington enjoys a decades-long intelligence-sharing relationship with Sweden.

While Finland’s long border with Russia offers NATO the opportunity to launch provocations against Russia and quickly threaten St. Petersburg, Sweden occupies a strategically crucial position on the West coast of the Baltic Sea. The island of Gotland, where the Swedish military maintained for decades a significant Cold War presence, lies just 300 kilometres northwest of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, home to Moscow’s Baltic fleet.

With their push to join NATO, the Finnish and Swedish bourgeoisies are reprising their servile devotion to the most reactionary imperialist forces during the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Immediately after being granted independence for the first time in the modern era by the Soviet government, the Finnish ruling elite responded by massacring tens of thousands of workers with the help of German troops during the country’s civil war. They proceeded to open up Finnish territory for the military operations of counter-revolutionary white forces during the Russian civil war, which were backed by an imperialist intervention aimed at overthrowing the Soviet government and turning Russia into a colony.

After Stalin’s reactionary invasion of Finland in the Winter War of 1939-40, which reflected the bureaucracy’s deep hostility to the socialist and internationalist program that brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, the Finnish ruling elite aligned the country with Nazi Germany. Finnish forces joined ”Operation Barbarossa,” the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, which claimed 27 million lives and led to the Holocaust. For their part, the Swedish ruling class served as one of Nazi Germany’s most important sources of raw materials, above all iron ore, throughout the war.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany and the beginning of the Cold War, the records of the Finnish and Swedish ruling elites forced them to adopt a nonaligned policy of neutrality. Finland was specifically obliged to remain neutral under its peace treaty with the Soviet Union in 1948.

The Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism fundamentally changed the political and geostrategic environment, giving the Finnish and Swedish ruling elites the chance to develop more direct military and security ties with the imperialist powers. Their decision to join NATO marks an acceleration of this process, and intensifies the looming danger of the US-NATO war with Russia spreading beyond Ukraine’s borders and spinning out of control.

BBC Panorama exposes crimes committed against hundreds of sub-postmasters by the Post Office

Barry Mason

An important investigation by BBC current affairs programme Panorama highlighted the terrible plight of hundreds of Post Office sub-postmasters wrongly accused of theft and false accounting.

Over 58 minutes, The Post Office Scandal documents the injustices following the Post Office’s introduction in 1999/2000 of a computerised accounting system, Horizon, to every post office in the country. Panorama described what befell the sub-postmasters as the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history”. This is no exaggeration. Those caught up in the miscarriages of justice were publicly humiliated, losing their homes and livelihoods. Some even ended up in prison.

The Post Office Scandal (Credit: screenshot/bbc.co.uk)

The state-owned Post Office runs over 100 major Crown Post Offices in big population centres but there are more than 11,000 sub-post offices serving suburbs or country areas. They are often run as family businesses.

In the 1990s, the government invited companies to bid to computerise the Post Office accounting network. Japanese multinational IT company Fujitsu and its Horizon system was chosen. Panorama explained that in seven out of 11 categories, Horizon was the cheapest option.

Richard Roll, a former Fujitsu engineer, told the programme, “it was well understood the system was wrong… [it needed] throwing away and starting from scratch.” His boss told him it’s “not going to happen. Do you know how long that would take and how much money it would cost to do it.”

Horizon was installed and it began to wrongly detect the existence of financial discrepancies at many Post Office branches. Under their contracts, sub-postmasters were obliged to make up any losses from their own resources or by borrowing. When no longer able to cover the money, the Post Office would launch an investigation.

Nick Wallis, a freelance journalist and author of the comprehensive book, The Great Post Office Scandal, explained to Panorama that the Post Office has its own private prosecution departments that enabled it to bypass the police and Crown Prosecution Service. He said, “The Post Office was victim, investigator and prosecutor all rolled into one.” There was no clear separation of interest.

Wallis explained, “the sub-postmasters  who were in a position where they couldn’t prove they hadn’t stolen money, were told by the Post Office to plead guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting and theft charges would be dropped.”

A barrister of one of the scandal’s victims, sub-postmaster Noel Thomas, told him if he did not mention the Horizon accounting system, he could avoid jail. However, in 2006 Thomas was given a nine-month prison sentence and ordered to pay back £9,000.

Susan and her husband Michael Rudkin ran a Post Office in Ibstock, Leicestershire. Faced with losses, according to the Horizon system, Susan put her own money in to cover them. However, at a certain point she realised she could not keep doing that and withdrew her money hoping the system would right itself at some point.

Michael had not been aware of the shortfalls as he had left balancing the books to his wife. He was however a representative of the sub-postmasters  federation. As such he was invited to visit Fujitsu’s HQ in Bracknell, Berkshire, to give input on how the Horizon system could be improved.

On his visit a Fujitsu representative demonstrated how it was possible to go into a sub-post office account and alter the data. Rudkin who had believed, as did all other , that only they could alter branch account data, expressed concern. Clarifying that it was live data that was being manipulated he became angry, aware of the implications of data being manipulated externally. Showing his anger, at that point he was escorted from the building.

The next day a Post Office investigator visited the Rudkin’s branch. Susan was told if she pleaded guilty, she would not be sent to prison. In 2009, she was convicted of theft and given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay back £44,000.

The number of convictions kept rising; by 2009 it was a staggering 525.

In May 2009 Computer Weekly published an article highlighting problems with Horizon and casting doubts on the growing number of convictions of sub-postmasters.

Justice For Subpostmaster Alliance website (Credit: screenshot/https://jfsa.org.uk)

In 2009, the first meeting of the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) took place in Warwickshire, with about 25 in attendance. They realised they had all been told the same story by the Post Office—that they were the only ones raising problems with the new Horizon system.

In 2010, two cases were due in court, that of Seema Misra and Rubbina Shaheen. They took succour from the knowledge that other sub-postmasters  had experienced problems with the Horizon system that had led them to appearing in court. Panorama explains that they thought with growing recognition of Horizon’s problems they would be found not guilty.

However, they were up against the duplicity of the Post Office. Panorama showed an email from a senior Post Office lawyer to a Fujitsu engineer appearing as a witness in Misra’s case saying it was his job to preserve the Horizon system. Misra’s lawyer explained that the prosecution had a duty to reveal anything that could undermine their case.

The year before Misra’s trial a request by Post Office HQ staff for an investigation into Horizon’s reliability was turned down.

The programme quoted a Post Office report issued just before Misra’s trial which stated, “Any perception that the Post Office doubts its own system would mean that all prosecutions be stayed—it would also beg a question for the Court of Appeal over past prosecutions and imprisonments.”

Seema Misra (Credit: Nick Wallis/Twitter)

Misra, who was pregnant, was found guilty of theft, given a 15-month prison sentence and ordered to pay £40,000. Rubbina Shaheen, given a 15-month prison sentence for false accounting, lost her job and her house was repossessed. Together with her husband she ended up living in a van on the streets of Shrewsbury.

The Post Office bitterly fought to protect its interests and profits, no matter the human cost. Panorama revealed a July 2010 email sent between two Post Office lawyers referring to Shaheen’s case which read, “it is vital that we win as failure could bring down the whole Royal Mail system.”

The scandal produced more deadly results. In September 2013, Martin Griffiths took his own life by walking in front of a bus. He had been hounded by Post Office investigators for holes in his accounts due to the Horizon system. Prior to the introduction of the new system, he had successfully run the sub-post office in Great Sutton, Cheshire for years.

Post Office chief executive from 2012 to 2019, Paula Vennells, an ordained Church of England priest, was appointed by then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron with a remit to eliminate the £3 million-a-week subsidy to the Post Office the government wanted to make.

The aim of the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition was to sell off the Post Office. Aware that allegations of major problems with its software accounting system would make a sale difficult, Vennells appointed forensic accountants Second Sight to investigate. The Post Office was hopeful any such investigation would clear Horizon.

The Second Sight team examining Martin Griffith’s case concluded he took his own life after the Post Office hounded him and were certain the shortfalls in the account were down to the Horizon system. They prepared a report exonerating him.

Panorama explains that before they had the chance to pass it on to Griffith’s widow Gina, the Post Office countered by offering her a financial settlement on condition she withdrew from the Second Sight investigation and not discuss the settlement. Gina felt the only option was to accept it.

The Post Office was keen to prevent the facts behind Martin Griffith’s suicide becoming public as it would have led to widespread exposure in the media.

In 2014, a group of MPs sympathetic to the sub-postmasters asked Second Sight to look into previous convictions to uncover any possible miscarriages. They looked at the case of Jo Hamilton who had been convicted of false accounting, given a 12-month community sentence and ordered to pay £32,000 in 2007. When a Second Sight investigator read her file, it said the Post Office had been, “unable to find any evidence of theft”. It became clear that it was not just a miscarriage of justice but possible misconduct by prosecutors.

Post Office management sought to stymie Second Sight’s operation. They set up a secret sub-committee called Project Sparrow with a government representative attending. The postal affairs minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills department at the time was the Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson, who would in 2019 go on to lead her party.

At a February 2015 hearing of the parliamentary Business Select Committee, Ian Henderson of Second Sight said the Post Office had prevented them accessing prosecution files. He was contradicted by Vennells, who denied any problem with Horizon and declared that any possible evidence of possible miscarriages of justice would have “surfaced”.

But the Post Office had already received legal advice in August 2013 that some of its convictions may have been unsafe. The Post Office had by this time stopped pursuing prosecutions but failed to explain why. By March 2015, the Post Office had sacked Second Sight and told them to destroy their papers.

By this time the number of convictions of sub-postmasters had reached 736—an average of one a week.

The 20-year period of persecution only came to an end as the result of the determination of the families to get justice.

The Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance sued the Post Office and in 2019 its case was heard at the High Court. The court was shown evidence of a document revealing how a Fujitsu engineer had gone into an individual sub-post office account and changed the figures without the sub-postmaster’s knowledge, making the situation worse. The document read, “We will then be inserting a new message on the counter … the branch is  not aware of this and its’s best that branch is not advised. Journalist Wallis tells Panorama, “it was the smoking gun”. Shown the document by Panorama, Susan Rudkin breaks down in tears asking, “That is disgusting. What I’ve gone through and other people have gone through, how is that humanly right?”

At the end of 2019, the Post Office finally agreed to pay damages to 555 claimants in civil cases.

Last April, the Court of Appeal quashed in a single ruling the convictions against 39 postmasters, part of a total of 72 such rulings to date, with many more expected to go to court. Seema Misra was among the 39. The bill of compensation for the victims of the injustice meted out by the Post Office is estimated to be £1 billion.

Yet to date no one has been held to account or accepted responsibility for these heinous crimes carried out in pursuit of profit. The government is currently carrying out a public inquiry into the Post Office scandal, utilising its tried and tested mechanism to delay and deflect blame and responsibility.

Israel assassinates veteran Al Jazeera reporter in West Bank

Jean Shaoul

Israeli snipers shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian reporter for Al Jazeera Arabic, who was covering the raids by Israeli security forces in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Shireen Abu Akleh (Credit: Arwa/Ibrahim Twitter)

For the past month, Israeli troops have been carrying out almost daily raids across the West Bank, occupied illegally by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. These came in the wake of several attacks that have killed 19 Israeli Jews since March 22, killing dozens of Palestinians and injuring hundreds.

Abu Akleh, a widely respected journalist who was also a US citizen, was one of Al Jazeera’s first on the spot reporters, having worked for the network since 1997. She was wearing a press vest and a helmet when she was killed.

Israeli snipers also shot another journalist, Ali Samoudi, in the back. Speaking in his bed in hospital, Samoudi insisted that the Israeli security forces had deliberately targeted the journalists who were in an open area and would have been clearly visible. He said there was no firing at Israeli forces by Palestinians, nor could he see any Palestinian fighters or even civilians in the area. Samoudi explained, “We were going to film the Israeli army operation and suddenly they shot us without asking us to leave or stop filming.”

He added, “The first bullet hit me and the second bullet hit Shireen… there was no Palestinian military resistance at all at the scene. If there were, we wouldn’t have been in that area.”

Another journalist, Shatha Hanaysha, positioned next to Abu Akleh, confirmed his statement, saying there had been no confrontations between Palestinian fighters and the Israeli army and that the journalists had been targeted. “We were four journalists, we were all wearing vests, all wearing helmets,” Hanaysha told Al Jazeera. “The [Israeli] occupation army did not stop firing even after she collapsed. I couldn’t even extend my arm to pull her because of the shots. The army was adamant on shooting to kill.”

Hours later Israeli police stormed Abu Akleh’s home in East Jerusalem as her family and friends gathered to mourn her death. The police chief demanded a Palestinian flag was taken down and they end the gathering and singing.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett issued a statement denying responsibility for Abu Akleh’s death and sought to pin responsibility for her death on the Palestinians, claiming “It appears likely that armed Palestinians who were firing indiscriminately at the time—were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist.”

Both the government and the army released video clips purporting to show Palestinians aiming their fire at Israeli soldiers. The clips were so blatantly a fraud that the government was forced to retract its claims.

Al-Jazeera interrupted its broadcast to announce Abu Akleh’s death, saying “In a tragic and deliberate crime that violates all international laws and norms, Israeli occupation forces assassinated in cold blood our correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh.” It called the killing a “heinous crime which intends to only prevent the media from conducting their duty.”

The network called on the international community to “condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable for deliberately targeting and killing our colleague” and added, “We pledge to prosecute the perpetrators legally, no matter how hard they try to cover up their crime and bring them to justice.”

Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera, condemned the killing “in the strongest terms,” calling it a “heinous crime,” a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law” and a “blatant attack on media freedom.” The foreign ministry called for “urgent action to prevent occupation authorities from committing further violations of the freedom of expression and to take all measures to stop violence against Palestinians and media workers.”

The US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, merely tweeted that he was “very sad” to learn of Abu Akleh’s death and called for a “thorough investigation.” The US Embassy in Jerusalem issued a statement saying that it was providing Ms Abu Akleh’s family with consular assistance and that the protection of American citizens was a “top priority.”

These pro forma statements are rank hypocrisy. Nothing will be done. A cursory, if any, investigation will exonerate the security forces or administer a slap on the wrist. Washington has for decades allowed Israel, the custodian of US imperialism’s interests in the region, to commit one atrocity after another with impunity, vetoing dozens of UN resolutions condemning its activities.

The Obama, Trump and now the Biden administrations have for more than a decade sought to destroy Julian Assange, who has been languishing in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison for three years while the US seeks his extradition from the UK for revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their efforts are likewise aimed at intimidating journalists and suppressing press freedom.

Akleh’s assassination follows a long line of Israeli attacks on Palestinian journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ database, 24 journalists have been killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories since 1992. While 14 were caught in crossfire, others appear to have been deliberately targeted.

Reporters Without Borders say that at least 144 Palestinian journalists have been wounded by Israeli forces using live fire and rubber bullets, as well as stun grenades, teargas and beatings with batons across the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2018. Some of the most egregious incidents include:

* The attacks on journalists covering the Great March of Return’s weekly protests on Fridays during 2018-19, when Israeli security forces shot and killed two Palestinian journalists, Yaser Murtaja and Ahmad Abu Hussein, filming on the Gaza frontier in 2018. Hundreds if not thousands more were injured.

* In November 2018, Israeli fire injured AP reporter Rashed Rashid in the left ankle while he was covering a protest near the Gaza frontier, even though he was clearly identified as a journalist and was standing with a crowd of other journalists some 600 metres from the Israeli border when he was hit. The military never acknowledged the shooting.

* An Israeli air strike killed journalist Yousif Abu Hussein in his apartment in Gaza City during last May’s war on the besieged enclave. Abu Hussein was a popular broadcaster with Voice of Al-Aqsa radio.

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement in relation to the war saying that it “condemns Israel’s disproportionate use of force against journalists, who should under no circumstances be treated as parties to the armed conflict.”

Israel has long been critical of Al Jazeera's coverage of its treatment of the Palestinians, in no small part because Qatar funds the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas, the bourgeois clerical group that rules Gaza and has been gaining influence in the West Bank at the expense of the hated Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. Last year, police briefly detained Givara Budeiri, another Al Jazeera reporter, during a protest in Jerusalem. She had to be treated for a broken hand after a roughing up by the police. During the 11-day bombardment of Gaza last year, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a multi-story building in Gaza City housing The Associated Press and Al Jazeera’s offices, which Israel claimed Hamas was using as a command centre.

Last month, international and Palestinian journalist groups filed a formal complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Israel of war crimes against journalists, systematically targeting journalists working in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and failing to carry out proper investigations of the killings of news reporters.

The ever-greater persecution of the Palestinians is a sharp expression of a broader turn towards authoritarianism, the suppression of democratic norms and militarism by Israel and governments around the world under the impact of class antagonisms at home and international conflicts abroad.

As Israel’s assassination of journalists and reporters shows, there is no constituency for the defence of democratic rights within the political establishment. While today, the Israeli state uses these methods against the Palestinians, it will have no hesitation in using the same methods against its own citizens, Arab and Jewish.

Bolsonaro advances coup plots with Brazilian military’s support

Tomas Castanheira

With five months to go before Brazil’s presidential elections, an open conspiracy against the democratic process is unfolding before the public’s eyes. The incumbent far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is systematically advancing his campaign for an electoral coup should he be defeated at the polls, with the increasingly direct collaboration of the military’s top brass.

This campaign, based on Bolsonaro’s persistent claims that the upcoming elections will be rigged, is now focused on the demand that the armed forces conduct a parallel vote count.

President Jair Bolsonaro at Army Day Ceremony, April 19, 2022, Brasilia (Credit: Isac Nóbrega/PR)

The military’s participation in the Election Transparency Commission (CTE), convened by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), has turned into a platform for an anti-democratic conspiracy. According to Bolsonaro, one of the suggestions made by Gen. Heber Portella, appointed by the Ministry of Defense to integrate the Commission, is that in the “same duct feeding the computers in the secret room, there should be a branch a little to the right so that we have on the side also a computer from the Armed Forces to count the votes in Brazil.”

This statement was given by the president at a so-called “Civic Act for Freedom of Expression” with allied MPs on April 27. Under the banner of “freedom of expression,” the demonstration saluted the fascistic deputy Daniel Silveira (Brazilian Labor Party—PTB), who a week earlier had been sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison by the Supreme Court (STF) for agitating for a coup among the armed forces and demanding the closure of the legislative and judicial branches. Silveira’s crimes were pardoned by President Bolsonaro, in an unprecedented act by the current political regime.

Bolsonaro’s speech at the “Civic Act” encouraged the calls for pro-coup demonstrations on May 1. With the clear aim of overshadowing the holiday of international working class solidarity with street demonstrations of a fascist character, for the second year in a row, Bolsonaro’s far-right supporters held protests on this date demanding the establishment of a presidential dictatorship. Bolsonaro personally visited a demonstration held in Brasilia and appeared by video at one in São Paulo.

Bolsonaro’s allegation about the military’s demands at the Transparency Commission was preceded by an episode with grave repercussions in the political and military establishment involving Supreme Court (STF) minister Luís Roberto Barroso, who until February presided over the Superior Electoral Court.

In a speech during the webinar “Brazil Summit Europe,” hosted by the German Hertie School on April 24, Barroso warned about the military’s growing incursion into Brazilian politics and said that the armed forces “are being oriented to attack the [electoral] process and try to discredit it.” He recalled recent episodes, such as the unprecedented dismissal of the defense minister and the uniformed military command, and the tank parade staged during the congressional vote on Bolsonaro’s “printed ballots” amendment.

Armored column rolling through Brasilia (Credit: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil}

In response, Defense Minister Gen. Paulo Sergio Nogueira de Oliveira issued an intimidating official note characterizing Barroso’s speech as a “serious offense” against the military institutions. The note stated that the armed forces “presented collaborative, plausible and feasible proposals” to the CTE “to improve the security and transparency of the electoral system.”

The daily Estado de São Paulo reported that the armed forces sent 88 inquiries to the TSE in the last eight months about “alleged risks and weaknesses ... in the electoral process.” According to the newspaper, the “majority of the questions reproduce the electoral discourse of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has cast doubt on the safety of electronic ballot boxes and kept the Court’s own actions under suspicion.”

Exacerbating this critical situation, Oliveira sent, on May 5, an official letter to the TSE demanding public disclosure of the suggestions made by the military to the Commission, “given the broad public interest in the topic in question.” The current president of the TSE, Edson Fachin, submissively accepted the Defense minister’s demand.

Bolsonaro, in turn, responded by doubling down on his coup threats. In a live broadcast, also on May 5, he claimed that the “Armed Forces will not play the role of merely sanctioning the electoral process, participating as spectators,” and that his Liberal Party (PL) will conduct a private audit of the elections.

The political crisis facing Brazil today is undeniably the gravest since 1964, the year of the CIA-backed military coup that ousted the elected president, João Goulart. The Brazilian bourgeoisie and its representatives, although aware of it, are absolutely incapable of stopping the rapid decomposition of democracy in the country.

Estado de São Paulo published an editorial last Saturday beseeching the bourgeois establishment: “It is necessary to react to Bolsonaro’s crimes.” The newspaper declared that “what Jair Bolsonaro has done [in evident and continued fashion] is to incite the Navy, Army and Air Force to feel authorized to act outside their constitutional powers,” and that this is not “an abstract or distant danger,” as demonstrated by the Defense Minister’s demands to the TSE.

Estado praised the commitment of the Judiciary and the Congress to stop the coup plots, citing as an example the “prudent rejection” of Bolsonaro’s “printed ballot” amendment. But the remarkable fact was, in reality, that the proposal was backed by a majority of Congress, and failed to be approved only because a constitutional amendment requires 60 percent of parliamentary votes.

In response to the same movement in preparation for an electoral coup, the TSE, presided over by Barroso, convened the extraordinary Election Transparency Commission with the participation of the military, and even invited Bolsonaro’s former defense minister, Gen. Fernando Azevedo e Silva, to assume the post of general director of the court. The occupation of the electoral system by the military was not characterized in the corporate media as an unacceptable capitulation to the anti-democratic pressures, but rather as a brilliant maneuver by Barroso to neutralize Bolsonaro’s political mobilization of the armed forces. An article by Eliane Catanhêde in Estado, for example, claimed that “Appointing a general to the TSE reduces attacks on elections and threats of a Trump-style coup,” calling the decision a “masterstroke.”

Only a year ago, during the crisis opened up by the dismissal of the military command, the press boasted that the appointment of General Oliveira to the command of the Army represented a defeat for Bolsonaro’s campaign to politicize the armed forces. In a typical commentary, Getulio Vargas Foundation professor Rafael Alcadipani told Reuters that Oliveira was supposedly “even stricter than Pujol [his predecessor] with respect to the separation between the Armed Forces and politics and shows that the president will not have a puppet at his disposal in the Army.” He is referring to the same man who today, promoted to defense minister, leads the attacks on the democratic regime hand-in-hand with Bolsonaro.

Every measure taken by the ruling class to, in theory, contain Bolsonaro’s coup maneuvers has had the effect of deepening the contradictions of the rotten bourgeois political regime and opening new avenues for the advance toward dictatorship.

With the support of the Workers Party (PT) and its pseudo-left satellites, the liberal bourgeoisie has mouthed the mantra that the “constitutional commitment” of the armed forces is the greatest counterweight to the “authoritarian fantasies” of the fascistic president. Those illusions have been completely shattered.

Rather than a product of Bolsonaro’s reactionary ravings, the decomposition of democracy in Brazil grows directly out of the objective crisis of the world capitalist system. The dictatorial threats in Brazil and around the world are driven by the same conditions that gave rise to the social murder policy of the ruling class in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the explosion of global social inequality, and the imperialist powers’ turn to nuclear world war.

“The excessively high tension of the international struggle and the class struggle results in the short circuit of the dictatorship, blowing out the fuses of democracy one after the other,” wrote Leon Trotsky in 1929. He continued: “The process began on the periphery of Europe, in the most backward countries, the weakest links in the capitalist chain. But it is advancing steadily. What is called the crisis of parliamentarism is the political expression of the crisis in the entire system of bourgeois society. Democracy stands or falls with capitalism. By defending a democracy which has outlived itself, Social Democracy drives social development into the blind alley of fascism.”

An analogous process is taking place today. This time, the United States, the heart of world imperialism, is a focus of the global short-circuiting of democratic rule. The coup orchestrated by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, is being followed by a devastating wave of attacks on democratic rights under Biden’s Democratic administration, which prepares a dictatorship domestically and ruthless war abroad.

Trump’s electoral coup serves as an open model for Bolsonaro in Brazil. But there are also immense similarities in the attitude of Brazilian bourgeois parties, especially the PT, to the spineless response of the Democratic Party, which was more concerned with the risk of a social explosion than with the threat of fascism. Biden entrusted the military with the task of preventing the coup openly announced by Trump and called for collaboration with his “Republican colleagues” to govern.

Brazil’s former president Lula, of the PT, while dealing with the coup threats by means of backroom dialogue with the military, is running against Bolsonaro under the banner of “bringing the divergent together” to save democracy. This means a compromise to make the most right-wing government in the PT’s history. As Trotsky said, this path can only lead to the dead end of fascism.

The military has already announced that it is preparing for a US-style “Capitol scenario” in the coming Brazilian elections. Their attitude toward a coup—whether they will support Bolsonaro as dictator, stand against him, or take power themselves in the name of preserving political stability—remains an open question.