Wave of COVID-19 Delta variant in Europe spirals out of control
The Delta variant is driving a surge of COVID-19 cases across Europe. Reuters reports that in the last two weeks, 42 of Europe’s 47 countries have seen a rise in cases.
A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)
In the last seven days, Worldometers.info recorded an increase of 81 percent in France’s weekly cases to 35,059, Greece’s 97 percent to 16,758, Italy’s 75 percent to 10,135, Spain’s 61 percent to 143,478, Belgium’s 103 percent to 9,227, the UK’s 28 percent to 243,392 and the Netherlands 411 percent increase to 58,646. Except for the UK (52 percent fully vaccinated), these countries have less than 50 percent of their population vaccinated.
French neofascist candidate Le Pen denounces Franco-German alliance
German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived yesterday in Washington for talks with US President Joe Biden amid signs of deepening divisions between the major imperialist powers. Tensions in particular between Berlin and Paris, the central powers in the European Union (EU) but who have also fought three bloody wars over the last 150 years, are mounting rapidly.
Marine Le Pen
In Paris, the right-wing daily
Le Figaro ran an article yesterday titled “Among Europeans, Washington picks Berlin over Paris.” It wrote, “For several months, an invisible power play was on in diplomatic circles, in Paris and Berlin, to get the first slot. France, knowing it was the underdog, for a time hoped that Joe Biden would choose the Franco-German tandem for his first bilateral European meeting.”
About 30,000 nurses, healthcare
assistants and midwives in public hospitals around New
Zealand voted earlier this month to hold another three
nationwide strikes. The members of the New Zealand Nurses
Organisation (NZNO) held an eight-hour strike on June 9
after rejecting a derisory pay rise offer of just 1.38
percent. The District Health Boards’ offer was effectively
a pay cut relative to inflation and contained nothing to
address the staffing crisis in hospitals.
The Labour
Party-led government announced a wage freeze in May for the
next three years for the vast majority of public sector
employees, including healthcare workers and teachers. The
government is imposing severe austerity measures to make
Quebec public sector workers’ struggle at the crossroads
Demonstration of health care workers protesting inhumane working conditions, including lack of PPE and endless hours of forced overtime, during the pandemic’s first wave in spring 2020.
The struggle Quebec’s 550,000 public sector workers are waging against the efforts of the right-wing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) provincial government to impose new wage-cutting contracts on them is in grave danger. The province’s major labour federations the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL), the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) and the
Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ) have all announced in recent days that they have reached “global agreements” with the government of the ex-Air Transat CEO François Legualt.
The mass demonstrations against Bolsonaro and the fight for socialism in Brazil
Demonstrators march on in Paulista Avenue to demand that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro resign, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Saturday, July 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Nelson Antoine)
Over the past month, Brazil has seen three days of nationwide demonstrations that have brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets against President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration and its criminal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The scale of the demonstrations and the persistence of the protesters express the growing discontent among broad layers of the Brazilian population with the existing social order and point to the urgency of the fight for genuine socialist politics in Brazil.