Subjects Archives: Health

Cuba is only a few days away from ending its coronavirus quarantine. Except for Havana, all the other provinces are free of the contagion and have begun moving toward a new normality.

Incarceration is a manifestation and continuation of chronic and interwoven structures of oppression

The Municipal Council of Turin granted the honorary citizenship of that city in the region of Piedmont to Dr. Julio Guerra, head of the Cuban medical brigade that helped fight COVID-19 there.

On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19.

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.3 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 48.7 million workers who were laid off during the preceding fifteen weeks.

People talk about the upcoming school year as if we have a choice between in-person classes or distance learning.

The world is at an existential crossroads involving a pandemic, a deep economic recession, devastating climate change, extreme inequality, and an uprising against racist policies. Running through all of these challenges is the longstanding neglect of extreme poverty by many governments, economists, and human rights advocates.

The unchecked growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America is tearing apart the socio-economic fabric of the countrieslocated in that continent.

I was dear friends with Dr. Alan Berkman and his physician wife and comrade Dr. Barbara Zeller. “They shared a deep moral commitment to make medical care available to all,” as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, “even if it took a revolution to achieve.”

THE ADIRONDACK CORRECTIONAL Facility is tucked away in the mountainous North Country of New York State, less than a two-hour drive from the Canadian border. Three years ago, it was converted to incarcerate teens aged 16 to 17, automatically prosecuted as adults under pernicious state law. As of this May, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, all of the young people were transferred out of the facility: It will now serve as a nursing home prison.

I want to start by acknowledging the significance of what has happened in the last ten days. We’re now in the midst of what we can definitively say is the biggest wave of mass protests in the United States since the 1960’s

In both the case of the sanctions against the ICC and the theft of Venezuela’s gold, the United States and the UK demonstrate their disregard for international institutions and for international law.

The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in December 2019 in Wuhan (China). In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapidly expanding illness a pandemic.

DD Kosambi uses a telling example to illustrate the crisis of Indian feudalism: at the third Battle of Panipat in 1761, the troops on oneside had not had enough to eat, while the troops on the other side just managed to assuage hunger by looting villages in the neighbourhood; neither side in short had arranged provisions for its troops.

In March, COVID-19 breached the considerable defences of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The colossal nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which has played a central role in defending the U.S.’s imperialist interests over the past three decades, proved no match for the virus, which infected more than 1,000 crew members in a matter of days.

The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world.

Venezuela’s rate of infection remains low, despite the U.S. unilateral sanctions that have denied the country the right to import drugs and tests for the population.

We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unravelled the close structural links between the climate crisis and the global capitalist mode of production.

Pandemics such as coronavirus are the result of humanity’s destruction of nature, according to leaders at the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International—and the world has been ignoring this stark reality for decades.