US lays out case against ‘unlawful’ China maritime claims
Agence France-Presse / 07:16 AM January 13, 2022

On July 12, 2016, the United Nations-backed Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines, invalidating China’s claim of historic rights to resources within the South China Sea within its “nine-dash line.” (INQUIRER FILES)

WASHINGTON – The United States on Wednesday laid out its most detailed case yet against Beijing’s “unlawful” claims in the South China Sea, rejecting both the geographic and historic bases for its vast, divisive map.

In a 47-page research paper, the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs said China had no basis under international law for claims that have put Beijing on a collision course with the Philippines, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations.

“The overall effect of these maritime claims is that the PRC unlawfully claims sovereignty or some form of exclusive jurisdiction over most of the South China Sea,” the paper said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

“These claims gravely undermine the rule of law in the oceans and numerous universally recognized provisions of international law reflected in the Convention,” it said, referring to a 1982 UN treaty on the law of the sea ratified by China — but not the United States.

Releasing the study, a State Department statement called again on Beijing “to cease its unlawful and coercive activities in the South China Sea.”

Around 220 Chinese militia vessels were spotted moored at Julian Felipe Reef in the West Philippine Sea last March 7, 2021. (NTF WPS)

The paper is an update of a 2014 study that similarly disputed the so-called “nine-dash line” that forms the basis for much of Beijing’s stance.

In 2016, an international court sided with the Philippines in its complaints over China’s claims. Beijing replied by offering new justifications, including saying that China had “historic rights” over the area.

The State Department paper said that such historical-based claims had “no legal basis” and that China had not offered specifics.

It also took issue with geographic justifications for China’s claims, saying that more than 100 features Beijing highlights in the South China Sea are submerged by water during high tide and therefore are “beyond the lawful limits of any state’s territorial sea.”

Beijing cites such geographic features to claim four “island groups,” which the State Department study said did not meet criteria for baselines under the UN convention.

The report was issued as the United States increasingly challenges China on the global stage, identifying the rising communist power as its chief long-term threat.

In 2020, then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo explicitly backed claims of Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, going beyond the past US stance of challenging China without taking an issue on which countries were right.

The South China Sea is home to valuable oil and gas deposits and shipping lanes, and Beijing’s neighbors have frequently voiced concern that their giant neighbor was seeking to expand its reach.

New US report dismisses Beijing's claim to South China Sea 'historical rights'

JANUARY 12, 2022

ByROBERT DELANEY

OWEN CHURCHILL

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

Chinese coastguard ships in the South China Sea on July 15, 2014.
Reuters file

The US government stepped up its criticism of China's territorial claims in the South China Sea on Wednesday (Jan 12), issuing a report that declares "historical rights" a meaningless term.

Referencing the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and an international ruling dismissing most of China's claims in the South China Sea, the US State Department said in its report, titled Limits in the Seas, that they "gravely undermine the rule of law in the oceans".

The report comes amid ongoing tensions between China and rival claimants in the South and East China Seas, and follows recent reports in the Japanese media that Japanese warships have conducted freedom of navigation patrols near the disputed Spratly Islands in a bid to deter Beijing.

Beijing asserts "historic rights" over more than 80 per cent of the South China Sea region, including the Spratlys, via its "nine-dash line"— an area stretching as far as 2,000km from the mainland and reaching waters close to Indonesia and Malaysia.

The July 2016 ruling by an international tribunal in The Hague determined that China had no "historic rights" in the South China Sea and ruled that some of the rocky outcrops claimed by several countries could not legally be used as the basis for territorial claims.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last year, amid a dispute with the Philippines over a massing of hundreds of Chinese ships near the Spratly Islands, that the ruling was "an invalid waste of paper".

Indonesia asserts authority near South China Sea amid Chinese intrusions


"No provision of the Convention contains the term 'historic rights', nor is there a uniform understanding of what, specifically, the term means as a matter of international law," the State Department's report said.

"Any claim to such rights would need to conform to the Convention's provisions, including with respect to the areas of [exclusive economic zone], continental shelf and high seas," it said.

The report also disputed China's claims to more than 100 features in the South China Sea that are submerged during high tide — precluding them from sovereignty claims under international law.

It stressed that any feature's legal status must be assessed based on its "natural state", an apparent reference to China's creation over the past decade of thousands of acres of new land in the Spratly Islands through dredging and artificial island building.

"Land reclamation or other human activities that alter the natural state of a low-tide elevation or fully submerged feature cannot transform the feature into an island," the report said.

Alongside Wednesday's report, the 150th in a 52-year series examining the validity of maritime claims around the world, the State Department also released Chinese and Vietnamese translations of its executive summary.

The document builds on previous warnings about China's territorial claims in the South China Sea by US President Joe Biden's administration and that of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

In July, the Biden administration endorsed a determination by the Trump administration that virtually all of China's maritime claims in the South China Sea were unlawful, and vowed to act militarily if China were to attack any Filipino vessel or aircraft in the region.

Disputes between Beijing and Washington over the South China Sea have been escalating since Beijing began land reclamation operations in 2016 in some of the features it controls in the ocean's Spratly archipelago.

The Biden administration contends that Beijing's actions in the South China Sea threaten some US$3 trillion (S$4 trillion) worth of commerce that passes through the region each year.

During a tour of Southeast Asian nations last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed that the US, along with other countries who claim territories in the South China Sea, would "continue to push back on such behaviour".

China's embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the State Department report, which is likely to anger the Chinese government.

"It is not China that has long been stirring up trouble in the South China Sea and posing a grave threat and major risks to regional peace and stability under the pretext of 'freedom of navigation'," Zhao said in December following Blinken's remarks. "I'm sure we all know which country is in the habit of doing all these. I hope US officials will not misrepresent facts."

READ ALSO: Philippines says China is ‘the trespasser’ as it refuses to move ship from disputed South China Sea shoal

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.

100,000 Filipino healthcare workers with pending US work visa as demand soars — Romualdez

By: Christia Marie Ramos - Reporter / @CMRamosINQ
INQUIRER.net /  January 13, 2022

(File photo from the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

MANILA, Philippines — There are at least 100,000 Filipino healthcare workers who have pending visas to work in the United States amid a “very high demand” for nurses and doctors in the said country, which is currently facing a high COVID-19 infection rate, Manila’s envoy there said.

“There are quite a number of pending visas for nurses from the Philippines that I think are being considered now very seriously that they’d like to bring them over. These are nurses that have already been approved [of] moving to the United States as health workers,” Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Romualdez said in an ANC interview on Thursday.

“I would think that [there is] probably at least 100,000 visas…that are pending right now to come to the United States,” he added.

Asked if there is a preference for Filipino health workers in the United States, Romualdez said: “Definitely, there’s no doubt about that.”


(INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / RICHARD A. REYES)

“In all my discussions with the U.S. government people, we inevitably always talk about the nurses, most especially, the kind of people that we have here working in the hospitals. There’s so much appreciation, the demand is very high for Filipinos nurses and doctors actually,” he added.

At present, there are around 150,000 to 200,000 Filipino healthcare workers in the U.S., Romualdez noted.

US infection rate

According to Romualdez, the infection rate in the U.S. is “quite high.”

“They only have about a 62 percent rate of those who are vaccinated, that’s why their hospitals are a bit overwhelmed,” he added.

In terms of the vaccination status among Filipinos in the U.S., Romualdez said “most” have already been inoculated and have received their booster shot.

Philippine Ambassador to the U.S. Jose Manuel Romualdez 

(INQUIRER FILE/ MARIANNE BERMUDEZ)

“Most Filipinos follow the rules very closely, most Filipinos we know, at least from the reports we get from our consulates from Guam all the way to New York, most are vaccinated and they’ve all had their booster shots. So, we’re happy with that,” he said.

According to a Reuters tally, the U.S. reported 1.35 million new COVID-19 cases last Jan. 10, which is the highest daily total for any country in the world.

In the Philippines, the Department of Health on Wednesday logged 32,246 more COVID-19 cases, pushing the country’s active tally to 208,164.

Fox News Airs 11-Year-Old Photo of Empty Shelves in Japan to Slam ‘Bare Shelves Biden’
By Michael Luciano

Jan 12th, 2022, 

During the opening segment of Wednesday’s Fox News Primetime, the network displayed a graphic of bare shelves at a grocery store to underscore rising inflation. Earlier in the day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. experienced 7% inflation since last December. That’s a 39-year high.

The graphic showed an image of President Joe Biden superimposed over a photo of the empty shelves. But as one eagle-eyed Twitter user pointed out, the image is actually from a 2011 NPR story (photo #15) about residents fleeing the disaster area near the Fukushima nuclear power plant.




After airing clips of shoppers noting higher prices at the grocery store, guest host Rachel Campos Duffy asked, “How can you expect to feed a family in Biden’s America with those food prices?”

She added, “Throughout the country supermarket shelves remain barren. From New York to Virginia, all the way to Alaska, people are left without groceries and can’t put dinner on the table. And they are upset. No surprise, #BareShelvesBiden was trending on Twitter. But, perhaps, what is most troubling is this might only be the beginning.”

This isn’t the first time Fox News has used photos of empty shelves that have nothing to do with the contemporary U.S. economy. In October, The Ingraham Angle issued a correction after it aired photos from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic during a segment about global supply chain problems.

During the correction, Laura Ingraham showed photos of empty shelves in the U.S. she said had been taken within the last few days

“I hope that clears some things up for the fact-checkers who were very concerned with the eight seconds from our October 19th show,” she said.

Iran, US lock horns over sanctions relief, nuclear curbs in Vienna talks

 

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Iran and the United States are displaying little flexibility on core issues in indirect nuclear talks, raising questions about whether a compromise can be found soon to renew a 2015 deal, diplomats say.

EU delegation representatives attending a meeting of the joint commission

 on negotiations aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal in Vienna, Austria 

on 27 December, 2021.

 Photo: Handout / various sources / AFP

After eight rounds of talks the thorniest points remain the speed and scope of lifting sanctions on Tehran, including Iran's demand for a US guarantee of no further punitive steps, and how and when to restore curbs on Iran's atomic work.

The nuclear deal limited Iran's uranium enrichment activity to make it harder for it to develop nuclear arms - an ambition Tehran denies - in return for lifting international sanctions.

But former US President Donald Trump ditched the pact in 2018, saying it did not do enough to curb Iran's nuclear activities, ballistic missile program and regional influence, and reimposed sanctions that badly damaged Iran's economy.

After waiting for a year, Iran responded to Trump's pressure by gradually breaching the accord, including rebuilding stockpiles of enriched uranium, refining it to higher fissile purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up output.

Following months of stop-start talks that began after Joe Biden replaced Trump in the White House, Western officials now say time is running out to resurrect the pact. But Iranian officials deny they are under time pressure, arguing the economy can survive thanks to oil sales to China.

'We need guarantees' - Iran official

A former Iranian official said Iran's rulers "are certain that their uncompromising, maximalist approach will give results".

France said on Tuesday that despite some progress at the end of December, Iran and world powers were still far away from reviving the deal.

The United States on Wednesday cited "modest progress" in recent weeks, but not enough.

"Modest progress is also not sufficient if we are going to" revive the 2015 deal, State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters.

Iran insists on immediate removal of all Trump-era sanctions in a verifiable process. Washington has said it would remove curbs inconsistent with the 2015 pact if Iran resumed compliance with the deal, implying it would leave in place others such as those imposed under terrorism or human rights measures.

"Americans should give assurances that no new sanctions under any label would be imposed on Iran in future. We need guarantees that America will not abandon the deal again," said a senior Iranian official.

Iran's Nournews, a media outlet affiliated to the Supreme National Security Council, reported on Wednesday that Iran's key conditions at the talks "are assurances and verifications."

US officials were not immediately available to comment on the question of guarantees. However, US officials have said Biden cannot promise the US government will not renege on the agreement because the nuclear deal is a non-binding political understanding, not a legally-binding treaty.

Asked to comment on that US constitutional reality, an Iranian official said: "It's their internal problem".

On the issue of obtaining verification that sanctions have been removed - at which point Iran would have to revive curbs on its nuclear programme - the senior Iranian official said Iran and Washington differed over the timetable.

"Iran needs a couple of weeks to verify sanctions removal (before it reverses its nuclear steps). But the other party says a few days would be enough to load oil on a ship, export it and transfer its money through banking system," the official said.

Threats

Shadowing the background of the talks have been threats by Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear weaponry but which sees Iran as a existential threat, to attack Iranian nuclear installations if it deems diplomacy ultimately futile in containing Tehran's atomic abilities and potential.

Iran says it would hit back hard if it were attacked.

A Western diplomat said "early-February is a realistic end-date for Vienna talks" as the longer Iran remains outside the deal, the more nuclear expertise it will gain, shortening the time it might need to race to build a bomb if it chose to.

"Still we are not sure whether Iran really wants a deal," said another Western diplomat.

Iran has ruled out adhering to any "artificial" deadline.

"Several times, they asked Iran to slow down its nuclear work during the talks, and even Americans conveyed messages about an interim deal through other parties," said a second Iranian official, close to Iran's negotiating team.

"It was rejected by Iran."

Asked for comment, a State Department spokesperson who declined to be identified told Reuters: "Of course we - and the whole international community - want Iran to slow down their nuclear program and have communicated that very clearly."

"Beyond that, we don't negotiate the details in public, but these reports are far off."

Other points of contention include Iran's advanced nuclear centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium for use as fuel in atomic power plants or, if purified to a high level, weapons.

"Discussions continue on Iran's demand to store and seal its advanced centrifuges ... They wanted those centrifuges to be dismantled and shipped abroad," the first official said.

Asked to comment on this question, a Western diplomat said: "We are looking for ways to overcome our differences with Iran about verification process".

Ottawa admits B.C. man robbed of justice after extradition to U.S. for Wounded Knee execution

"It’s a travesty of justice...When the FBI came to me in 1987 and 1988, they threatened me if I didn’t cooperate with them."

Author of the article: Ian Mulgrew
Publishing date :Jan 12, 2022 • 

Naneek Graham with a photo of her father John in Vancouver Jan. 11, 2022. B.C. resident John Graham is appealing his extradition to the United States. Graham, a former Yukoner who lived in Vancouver, is accused of killing Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash,a Mi'kmaq activist from Nova Scotia,in 1975 during protests in South Dakota. 

PHOTO BY ARLEN REDEKOP /PNG

Article content

John Graham sees himself as little different than the 19th century Ghost Dancers blamed for the original massacre at Wounded Knee — a scapegoat, only this time for the violent American Indian Movement and the 1973 standoff at the iconic Indigenous site.

Extradited more than a decade ago and later convicted in the blood-soaked South Dakota Badlands execution of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a 30-year-old Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq woman, Graham maintains his innocence.

Ottawa admitted in the B.C. Court of Appeal this week the now 67-year-old was robbed of procedural fairness by a previous Conservative justice minister in 2010 who amended the original extradition order via a waiver without telling him.

In a brief interview Wednesday from the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, Graham said he hadn’t been able to watch the two-day Zoom hearing.

He spoke of it giving him hope but exhaled with bitterness:

“I’ve been incarcerated since 2007. I’ve been fighting this case since my U.S. federal indictment in 2003. …They always knew they came to Canada with a defective indictment, without jurisdiction on this case, but they came anyway. … They duped my defence lawyer and the court into this extradition. … I don’t know what to think about it all. It makes me sick to think about it. … I’ve never had a voice, I’ve never been heard.

“It’s a travesty of justice. It’s a miscarriage of justice. …When the FBI came to me in 1987 and 1988, they threatened me if I didn’t cooperate with them. They offered me an immunity deal. I told them I didn’t need immunity, I’ve never done anything where I would need immunity. The theory they laid out, that people in the leadership of AIM ordered Anna Mae to be killed, that never happened. Never ever happened. Not with me, it didn’t.”

He searched for words: “I’ve lost family members, I’ve lost my parents. My youngest daughter is fighting for her life with cancer. I’ve lost nephews. I’ve lost relations. I should be at home with these things.”

Naneek Graham holds a photo of her father John in Vancouver Jan. 11, 2022. B.C. resident John Graham is appealing his extradition to the united states. Graham, a former Yukoner who lived in Vancouver, is accused of killing Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash,a Mi’kmaq activist from Nova Scotia,in 1975 during protests in South Dakota. 

PHOTO BY ARLEN REDEKOP /PNG

Born in Whitehorse, Graham is a member of the Southern Tutchone Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.

His daughter, Naneek, moved to Vancouver from Yukon in 2004 to support her father and act as a surety. His five children have been behind him throughout.

Naneek was afraid to hope, too, after sitting through the hearing.

“I went through this before,” she confided. “God, I feel like I hold my breath. Just anxious. It’s a waiting game of not knowing. It’s hard because I went through this before and we had such a bad outcome before. It’s hard for me to let myself get too ahead of myself. I just have to wait.

“It’s just so frustrating and aggravating to be honest. It took me a long time to be able to speak about it. I was just so hurt. I was so angry, so angry I could feel it coming out of my pores. Just being angry about the government on both sides. My dad’s rights were breached big time and he was taken away from us. … They just took him, we didn’t get to say goodbye to him, give him a hug or anything. It was really hard on my sister and I. Then when we got down there, the lawyers put on a big show while my dad was being railroaded the whole time.”

The case rips a scab off an old and deep Canadian legal wound — the decision in December 1976 to extradite AIM leader Leonard Peltier based on evidence fabricated or pressured out of witnesses.

Peltier was convicted in 1977 of the first-degree murder of two FBI agents during the 1975 shootout following the notorious AIM occupation at the site of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry’s 1890 massacre of Oglala Lakota Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Aquash was shot in the back of the head in 1976 supposedly because she heard Peltier confess.

At the turn of the century, new information surfaced about her slaying and indictments were issued against Graham and Arlo Looking Cloud, an AIM comrade.

Looking Cloud was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Graham was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2003, but released on strict conditions while he waged a high-profile battle against extradition. He was returned to the U.S. on Dec. 6, 2007.

After two years of trying to proceed in federal court, however, American prosecutors asked Ottawa to agree to allow Graham to be tried in state court because the justice department lacked jurisdiction.

Graham did not see the decision until August 2011, after he was convicted in the killing of Aquash, a mother of two young girls and a fellow AIM soldier reportedly suspected of being an FBI informant.

A jury acquitted Graham of premeditated murder but convicted him of felony murder and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. His conviction was confirmed on appeal.

Upon learning of the justice minister’s decision, Graham challenged the validity of his extradition and the lawfulness of his subsequent trial.

The U.S. Eighth Circuit Appeal Court said in 2018 it did not have jurisdiction to review the Canadian minister’s decision and Graham must first deal with that before an American court could act.

He remained skeptical he will see freedom:

“Because I won’t lie for the FBI they want me to die in prison, they are trying to make me die in prison. They’ve never produced a case. They have a theory of a case but they have never proven anything. They can’t even place me in the state when this happened. I wasn’t even in South Dakota when this crime happened. I keep telling them over and over. It’s a manufactured case. It’s a fraudulent case.”

He fumed.

“The only people right now really suffering from this case is me and my family. I ask the judges and the minister to put a stop to this. Put a stop to it.”

The panel appeared to agree the waiver should be quashed but the remedy for such breaches usually includes asking the minister to reconsider.

That gave the justices pause because federal lawyers characterized what happened as a kind of technical glitch while robustly dismissing the merits of any argument Graham might raise.

They insisted though that should not suggest the minister had a closed mind.

Graham would be happy to have the waiver simply quashed so he could use the ruling to ask a U.S. court for release.

The division reserved its decision.

From Paris to Chicago: The global fight to close schools and save lives

Evan Blake@evanblake17
WSWS.ORG

Amid a record surge of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, a growing movement of the working class is developing internationally to stop the pandemic and save lives. Today, an estimated 75 percent of all primary school teachers across France are taking part in a nationwide strike that is expected to shut down half of all French schools.

On Wednesday, a record 3,145,916 people were officially infected with COVID-19 worldwide, including 814,494 in the United States, 363,719 in France, and 241,976 in India, with five other countries reporting more than 100,000 official new cases. Hospitalizations are surging worldwide, with more than 140,000 people now hospitalized for COVID-19 in the US, over 23,000 in France and nearly 20,000 in the United Kingdom.

Teachers, parents and children march in the Brooklyn borough of New York to protest the reopening of city public schools amid the threat of a teachers strike, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Before the strike in France, last week 25,000 Chicago teachers took part in a powerful collective action to stop in-person learning, in defiance of the school reopening policies pursued by the Democratic Party at the local, state and national levels and supported by all the teachers unions.

On Monday, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) abruptly reached an agreement with Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reopen the city’s schools. Facing widespread disgust among rank-and-file teachers, the union rammed the deal through by giving teachers only one day to vote, with only 41 percent of all CTU members voting in favor of the deal and 20 percent of members abstaining.

Inspired by the struggle of Chicago teachers, educators in San Francisco and Oakland, California, organized wildcat sickout strikes last week to stop in-person learning. Rank-and-file committees, built independently of the unions by educators across the US—including in New York City, Michigan, Pennsylvania, throughout the South and along the West Coast—have organized widely-attended online meetings over the past two weeks and are expanding in each region of the country.

Throughout this week, high school students in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Oakland, Portland, and other US cities have circulated petitions calling for a remote learning option, garnering thousands of signatures. On Tuesday, nearly 1,000 students at over 30 K-12 schools in New York City walked out of class calling to demand a switch to remote learning, and similar demonstrations are planned in Chicago and Oakland in the coming days. According to a poll conducted last weekend, the majority of US adults support remote learning, including 63 percent of those with an income less than $50,000.

In the United Kingdom, where COVID-19 infections and hospitalization among children have reached record levels, educators and parents are deepening their struggle to stop unsafe school reopenings. The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee (UK) held a widely attended meeting Tuesday, which presented a plan of action to force the switch to fully remote learning.

In a video posted Wednesday, British parent Lisa Diaz, who has led a series of school strikes since October, voiced her support for Chicago teachers, declaring, “You’re making a stand, not just for yourselves, but for the children.” She concluded, “I just want to send all my solidarity from the UK and say thank you for taking a stand. And whilst I’m here, well done to all the teachers from France who are doing the same, and the kids in the US who are walking out.”

In Hidalgo and Baja, Mexico, strikes have begun involving tens of thousands of teachers. While the primary focus is on contract issues related to pay, these strikes coincide with the forced reopening of schools amid skyrocketing COVID-19 infections.

The growing international struggle of educators and youth against school reopenings comes in response to the global implementation of this deadly policy by world governments on behalf of the corporate and financial elite.

Throughout the world and, in particular, in the United States and across Europe, capitalist governments have responded to the emergence of the Omicron variant by dropping all pretense that they aim to stop the pandemic. All talk of “mitigations” and “ending the pandemic” has disappeared. Instead, they now openly support the “herd immunity” strategy formerly pursued by only the most right-wing governments. They are determined to allow the uncontrolled spread of the virus, based on the unscientific belief that it will quickly run out of hosts and become endemic.

In the US, the Biden administration and its representatives ever more explicitly state they intend to allow the entire population to become infected. On Tuesday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies—one of the leading think tanks of American imperialism—posted a “Fireside Chat with Dr. Anthony Fauci.” In the interview, Biden’s chief medical adviser declared with callous indifference that Omicron “will, ultimately, find just about everybody.”

Regarding vaccinated people, Fauci stated, “Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected” and will “do reasonably well.” Fauci added, “those who are still unvaccinated are going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” and some fraction “are going to get seriously ill and are going to die.” Fauci lamented only the fact that this “will challenge our health system.”

The reopening of schools is central to the “herd immunity” strategy for two reasons. First, returning students to class is necessary to force parents back to work. Second, overcrowded and poorly ventilated school buildings are hotbeds of viral transmission, enabling COVID-19 to spread as rapidly as possible and quickly infect students, educators, their families and their communities.

What sparked today’s strike by French teachers were efforts by the Macron government to quietly change reopening guidelines in such a manner as to keep schools open as COVID-19 cases explode. Within one week, these protocols were clearly disastrous, prompting rank-and-file teachers to demand strike action.

In Chicago, the CTU is now enforcing a policy whereby individual schools will only close if more than 30 percent of staff or 40 percent of children are either infected with COVID-19 or in quarantine due to exposure. In other words, their deal is predicated on accepting mass infections in schools and communities.

The fight against “herd immunity” is a common global struggle that is increasingly being taken up by the international working class, in direct opposition to the capitalist system. By its very nature, the pandemic cannot be fought on a national basis or through appeals to the powers that be. COVID-19 will be eliminated only through a globally coordinated mass movement to impose temporary lockdowns, shut down schools and nonessential production and deploy all available public health measures.

One of the great challenges confronting workers in every country is to not see their struggles as isolated incidents but rather as part of a global process. To generalize their experiences and coordinate their struggles globally, workers require new forms of organization, rank-and-file committees, that are democratically run and answerable to the workers themselves.

Numerous such committees have been established among educators, autoworkers, health care workers, logistics workers, and other sections of the working class, which are now united under the aegis of the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). This network of committees must forge ever closer links and actively fight to unify and lead the growing movement of the working class to stop the pandemic and save lives.

Those who wish to become seriously involved and to build a rank-and-file committee at your school, neighborhood or workplace, fill out the form below, and the World Socialist Web Site will contact you today.

French teachers go on strike over handling of pandemic

File - Students attend the first day of school for the 2021-2022 year at Gounod Lavoisier Primary school, Lille, northern France, Thursday, Sept. 2 2021. Less than two weeks after the winter term started, French teachers are already exhausted by the pressures of surging COVID-19 cases and they are walking out in nationwide strike organized by their unions to protest virus-linked class disruptions and ever-changing isolation rules. 

(AP Photo/Michel Spingler, File) | Photo: AP

Updated: January 13, 2022 


PARIS (AP) - Less than two weeks after the winter term started, French teachers are already exhausted by the pressures of surging COVID-19 cases.

On Thursday, French teachers are walking out in a nationwide strike organized by teacher's unions to protest virus-linked class disruptions and ever-changing isolation rules.

France is at the epicenter of Europe's current fight against COVID-19, with new infections topping 360,000 a day in recent days, driven by the highly contagious omicron variant. Teachers are upset and want clarifications on rules and more protections, such as extra masks and tests to help with the strain.

"The month of January is a tough one (for schools)," Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer acknowledged on France 2 television. His ministry counted 50,000 new COVID-19 cases among students in "recent days" and a huge number of classes shut down due to the virus: 10,553. The figures are expected to worsen in the coming weeks.

The SNUIPP teacher's union says discontentment is rising among French teachers. Since Jan. 6, authorities have already imposed two changes to the rules on testing schoolchildren, leaving many with whiplash. The union expects that some 75% of teachers will go out on strike, with half of the schools closed across the country.

"The situation since the start of the January school year has created an indescribable mess and a strong feeling of abandonment and anger among school staff," the union said.

Chicago Teachers Berate Union Chiefs Over Return-to-Work Deal Before Narrow Vote

BY DANIEL VILLARREAL ON 1/12/22 

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union berated their union's chiefs for accepting a return-to-work deal that left out many of the safety measures and reassurances that educators wanted amid rising COVID-19 case numbers.

The deal was accepted by only 55.5 percent of the union's 600 members. The agreement will end five days of canceled classes amid union negotiations.

On Wednesday evening, union chiefs presented the deal to union members during a virtual meeting. Chiefs called the deal "more than nothing, but less than what we wanted," according to the Chicago Sun-Times. During the meeting, teachers yelled at union officials for negotiating an agreement that fell short of their desired safety demands.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey blamed Chicago Lori Lightfoot for rejecting key union requests such as the ability to randomly test students for COVID-19 and move to virtual learning as the city experiences an unprecedented spike in new COVID-19 cases.

"This vote is a clear show of dissatisfaction with the boss," Sharkey said in a statement. "Put bluntly, we have a boss who does not know how to negotiate, does not know how to hear real concerns and is not willing to respect our rank and file enough to listen to us when we tell her we need more protection."

The agreement guaranteed more masks, test screenings and time-off related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agreement established metrics for shutting down individual schools, based on the number of students and staff members absent due to COVID-19. It also said that the district would purchase KN95 masks for students and teachers and provide daily COVID-19 screening questions for anyone entering schools.

Additionally, the agreement added incentives for hiring more substitute teachers in case of worker shortages. Teachers will be allowed to take unpaid leave related to COVID-19, to help care for their own illness or their increased risk of exposure, WGN-TV reported.

It also expands COVID-19 testing for teachers and students, but it didn't implement the union's desired program for randomly testing all students unless parents opted out.

Chicago teachers have agreed to go back into the classroom after union negotiations, with more masks, test screenings and time-off related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this photo, thousands of Chicago teachers' union members march through the streets near City Hall during the 11th day of an ongoing teachers strike on October 31, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois.SCOTT HEINS/GETTY

UNDER THE COVER OF NIGHT

US acknowledges shipping Idaho radioactive waste to Nevada

KEN RITTER, 

Associated Press
Jan. 12, 2022

Nuclear waste is stored in underground containers at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls, Idaho, on May 11, 2015. The federal government is acknowledging it has shipped mixed radioactive waste from a nuclear-era cleanup site in Idaho to Nevada for disposal. In a statement Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022, that followed a protest letter from U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, the U.S. Department of Energy said 13,625 cubic meters of material had been sent from a former dump at the Idaho National Laboratory to the Nevada National Security Site.

Keith Ridler/AP


LAS VEGAS (AP) — The federal government acknowledged it has been shipping mixed radioactive waste from a nuclear cleanup site in Idaho to Nevada and New Mexico for disposal.

In a statement Tuesday that followed a protest letter from U.S. Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, the U.S. Department of Energy said 13,625 cubic meters of material has been sent safely from a former dump at the Idaho National Laboratory to the Nevada National Security Site.

The material was characterized as “low level waste/mixed low level waste,” the department said. The amount would fill more than five Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Shipments began in 2009 and are ongoing, the department said, while noting that most of the Idaho waste was being sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

Nevada and the federal government have clashed several times in the past over shipments of radioactive materials to the vast former government nuclear test site in the state.

In a Monday letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Titus said “the fact that dangerous materials could be sharing the roads with my constituents and visitors raise a number of questions for me about this shipment of nuclear materials.”

Titus, a Democrat from Las Vegas, is a retired University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor and an expert on atomic testing and American politics. She has fought for years to prevent the federal government from building a permanent storage facility for the nation’s most radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, some 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Las Vegas.

In her letter, Titus called for the Energy Department to disclose the amount of waste to be shipped to Nevada and its classification.

“Nevada is not America’s dumping ground,” she said.

A Nevada-based spokesman for the Energy Department, Jesse Sleezer, said in a statement Wednesday that since 1999, the department has transported more than 32,000 waste shipments to the Nevada National Security Site, "with no release of contamination resulting from these shipments.”

The department said the Nevada state Division of Environmental Protection participates with other experts in pre-disposal documentation and review of an “extensive waste profile" of materials shipped to the site.

“All offsite wastes shipped to and disposed at the NNSS are handled safely and securely and must meet all applicable federal and state regulations as well as the rigorous NNSS Waste Acceptance Criteria,” the department said in its statement Tuesday.

Nevada state Division of Environmental Protection Chief David Fogerson referred an inquiry about the shipments to Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak's office. The governor's aide, Meghin Delaney, did not immediately respond to questions.

The Energy Department said last month it was completing the removal of targeted waste buried decades ago in storage drums and boxes in unlined pits at a sprawling site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory, 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of the city of Idaho Falls.

The buried waste included plutonium-contaminated filters, graphite molds, sludges containing solvents and oxidized uranium generated during nuclear weapons production work at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.

The Nevada National Security Site is a vast federal reservation nearly the size of the state of Rhode Island where the government conducted more than 1,000 above- and below-ground nuclear detonations from 1951 to 1992. It serves today as a research and training site and for U.S. studies of nuclear, chemical, biological and other weapons.

The Energy Department agreed last year to pay Nevada $65,000 to settle a dispute about five years of shipments of mischaracterized waste from the Energy Department’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the Nevada site. The state called the shipments “an unfortunate misstep.”

An earlier dispute involved the clandestine shipment of one-half metric ton (1,100 pounds) of weapons-grade plutonium from a Department of Energy facility in South Carolina. Under that settlement, the government agreed to start removing the waste from the Nevada site last year.

THE STATE THAT OUTLAWED ABORTION
Outside Experts Give Texas Roadmap to Decrease Sky-high Rates of Foster Kids Sleeping in Offices, Hotels

BY SARA TIANO
The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has faced criticism for housing foster youth in hotels or social workers’ offices when unable to find them safe housing. During a hearing Tuesday, a panel of independent child welfare experts made recommendations to the state that included lessening its reliance on congregate care.

More than a decade into a federal lawsuit aimed at repairing Texas’ beleaguered child welfare system, U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack has laid into state leaders anew, using words like “incompetence” and “negligence” to describe their care of the state’s foster children.

Conditions on the ground discussed at a virtual hearing Tuesday focused on the vast number of foster children that the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) has been unable to find safe homes for, instead housing them for weeks at a time in social workers’ offices, hotels and other unlicensed and ill-equipped settings. The problem, according to experts studying the issue, has been steadily growing for years and hit a crisis point in July, affecting 416 kids that month alone.

“The numbers of children in Texas that are cycling in and out of these unlicensed placements is just really unacceptable,” said Judith Meltzer, president of the national nonprofit Center for the Study of Social Policy. “There are roots of this problem that go back many years, and they reflect the need for fairly significant, systemic reforms.”


A set of recommendations generated by a panel of independent child welfare experts including Meltzer led Tuesday’s hearing. The expert panel is calling for a reduction in reliance on congregate care, increased access to mental health care and greater resources for community-based services to keep kids safe in family homes.

Absent such investments, foster children housed in office buildings, hotels and unlicensed rental units staffed by child protection workers have been subject to dangerous and chaotic conditions that recreate trauma rather than helping children heal, according to court-appointed monitors who conducted on-site visits and interviews.

“They were subjected to sex with hotel staff members,” Judge Jack said, emphasizing the tragic failures cited in the monitor’s report released Monday. “They were tased by security officers hired by DFPS to stay at these unlicensed placement areas. Two 13-year-olds were pepper sprayed, children were slapped. This is what happened.”

Many of the children interviewed were not enrolled in school, and staff often did not know where they were. Medications were inconsistently administered and sometimes not provided at all. After a new law passed in June that barred foster children from sleeping in offices, the child welfare department leased private homes, some of which were directly adjacent to abandoned, blighted buildings with broken windows and covered inside and out with graffiti.

These abandoned homes in Texas are directly adjacent to unlicensed rentals where the Department of Family and Protective Services has been housing kids they can’t find foster placements for. Photo via court document.

Key among the experts’ recommendations — immediate fixes as well as longer term reforms — is bolstering the state’s array of mental health resources for youth and families, improving coordination between child-serving agencies and increasing support for kinship caregivers, especially those caring for children with complex needs.

Recommendations by the expert panel, which also includes Ann Stanley, a managing director for Casey Family Programs, and Paul Vincent, an independent consultant who formerly led reforms in Alabama’s child welfare system, are not legally binding. But commissioners with the Department of Family and Protective Services and the Health and Human Services Commission indicated their intention to cooperate with the proposals.

After years of a contentious lawsuit and the deteriorating conditions for children, advocates and child welfare professionals told The Imprint they were encouraged by the concrete, evidence-based path forward provided by the expert panel.

“We now have clear next steps that DFPS, the Legislature, and the Governor can take to make sure that kids in foster care can live with a foster family or an aunt and uncle instead of sleeping in an institution or a CPS office or a dangerous, unlicensed foster home,” Kate Murphy, senior policy associate with Texans Care for Children, said in an email.

Expanding mental health services

According to the expert panel’s research over the past six weeks, the vast majority of children who lacked placements are older youth, most deemed to have higher needs due to behavioral or mental health concerns.

In November, nearly a quarter of the 236 children without placements had been released from psychiatric hospitals with no discharge plan in place. Eighteen percent had run away from their previous placement, and 17% were coming out of group homes or residential treatment facilities and their social workers had failed to find a new home for them.

Expanding mental health care options is “essential to solving the problem of children without placement,” the experts reported to the court. That could also address children coming into foster care because their parents can’t handle their mental and behavioral health needs: Since 2017, 4,661 Texas children have been relinquished to foster care because they were unable to access services and supports within their families, the report states.

The expert panel recommends tapping into a Medicaid funding stream to provide mobile crisis intervention services and applying for a Medicaid waiver to fund community-based mental health services to prevent the need for children to be hospitalized or placed in residential care.

They also recommend the state expand an existing program serving families at risk of relinquishing their children to foster care.

In response, on Tuesday, Judge Jack ordered the commissioners of the Department of Family and Protective Services and the Health and Human Services Commission to devise a plan to expand mental health services within 90 days.

Curbing congregate care and out-of-state placements

With news spreading that children are sleeping in hotels and offices, child welfare authorities and foster care providers say part of the problem is heightened scrutiny on residential group facilities, and the resulting closures of such facilities. Prior to the court hearing, the state submitted plans indicating their intent to build back group home capacity, in contrast with nationwide moves against such settings for foster youth.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Jack and the expert panelists soundly countered that plan.

“We think the solution to the problem is not more congregate care,” panelist Meltzer said. “There is an overemphasis on the use of congregate settings, and I have a real concern about that.”

Jack was more biting in her rebuttal: “There isn’t a single expert in the field of child protection that recommends congregate care except in exceptional circumstances. Yet here we are struggling in this situation, with a department that not only believes in congregate care for whatever reasons — for the private, for-profit congregate care people, for the not-for-profit congregate care people and the lobbyists they support — and it’s just a chain.”

Jack also hammered the agency for its failure to comply with the federal Family First Prevention Services Act, which strictly limits group care to instances of clinical necessity, and requires it be provided only on a limited basis, in vetted and licensed “quality residential treatment programs,” or QRTPs.

By failing to meet these new standards, which took effect in October, Texas is forfeiting $43 million in federal funding over the next two years, the visibly angry judge pointed out multiple times.

The experts and the court urged the department to move more quickly toward implementing Family First by bringing local treatment centers up to standards or attracting new providers already licensed to run QRTPs to develop programs in Texas.

In their report, the panel also raised concerns about the state’s increasing reliance on out-of-state placements to house children they struggle to find local foster homes for. They note that the Department of Family and Protective Services spent $2.9 million between January and October of last year placing these children in out-of-state facilities.

“When we talk about redirecting resources to services in the community to support families, that’s one of the ways you can get the funds you need,” Meltzer said, “by limiting these really expensive, not helpful and frequently very dangerous out-of-state placements.”

Jack ordered the department to develop a plan to bring children back from out-of-state placements within 90 days. Within 30 days, the department must determine if they can implement the experts’ recommendation to establish community liaisons tasked with finding a way to move children out of congregate care settings and into families.

Texas Department of Family and Protective Services 

Commissioner Jaime Masters.

 Photo from the DFPS website.

The expert panel also laid out recommendations for avoiding foster care placements outside of family networks, life disruptions that can cause youth to flounder. Members said the state needs to raise the pay for relatives caring for foster youth: Right now they receive $11.55 per day, regardless of the child’s level of need, while non-relative foster families are paid anywhere from $47.37 to $92.43 per day.

The panel reported that relatives should be the first choice to care for foster youth, under an intensive “family finding” program. Utilizing Title IV-E federal funds to provide kinship navigators was noted as a short-term fix that could help strengthen those placements.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Jack issued a stern warning to DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters, who suggested her resources to implement all of the recommendations may be limited.

“The constitutional rights that have to be protected of these children are not driven by monetary factors. Money is not an issue for these factors,” Jack said. “You must comply with safe placements, period. I’m going to have to start doing contempt — I’m going to do it in the next month if we don’t get some response here.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Tiano is a senior reporter for The Imprint.