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U.S. blockade on Cuba causes record losses during coronavirus pandemic
CUBA’S economy lost more than $9 billion (£6.5bn) amid the coronavirus pandemic last year, due to the impact of the six decade-long U.S. blockade, government officials said on Thursday.
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Rob Wallace on the political economy of pandemics
Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and such leaders across the world are malicious miscreants, convening necropolitical death cults. But the alternatives, also tied to capitalist sociopathy, are only a little bit better. Our “progressives” worship at the altar of the circuits of capital.
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Outrage as COVAX reports blocked vaccine payments, U.S. sanctions blamed
Venezuela’s efforts at the Copa America football tournament have also been derailed after 15 players and staffers caught the virus, prompting calls for an investigation.
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Dossier no. 41: The farmers’ revolt in India
India’s big capital, in close cahoots with the political class, took advantage of privatisation policies to seize public resources (including profitable public sector assets), acquire vast tracts of land by displacing village and forest communities, control the nation’s mineral resources, and undermine public sector banks through a cascading set of fraud and non-payment schemes.
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‘Release the Bhima Koregaon 16 Immediately’: Nobel Laureates, EU MPs Write to Indian Authorities
The signatories, including Noam Chomsky and Olga Tokarczuk, sought that the temporary order to release prisoners in light of COVID-19 be applied to these political prisoners as well.
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Inequalities are shaping how we’re fighting the Pandemic — and how we’ll remember it
COVID-19 infections in most countries have been hugely underestimated—not least because rich countries bought almost all the tests.
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Paltry international support for spending needs sets South further back
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR. With the pandemic setting back past, modest and uneven progress, huge disparities in containing COVID-19 and financing government efforts are widening the North-South gap and other inequalities once again.
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India’s COVID-19 crisis: A call for people’s unity
At the height of India’s COVID-19 crisis, some Chinese netizens saw retribution for the Modi government’s aggressive posture towards China. In this essay, Chinese blogger 红色卫士 (Red Defender) instead insists on internationalist solidarity and a distinction between the right-wing Modi government and the working class and low-caste peoples who suffer the most under his regime.
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Two agonizing years of devastation
Ever since the outbreak of the pandemic, first recorded in India end January 2020, this Modi government’s preoccupation had never been on combating the pandemic in right earnest and saving people’s lives but on continuing to relentlessly pursue the unfolding of the RSS project.
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Chinese paper calls for probe of U.S.’ Fort Detrick biolab amid Wuhan Lab COVID-19 origins fracas
Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2 in early January 2020 and by March of that year had “irrefutably” concluded the virus was not of human design. Since then, the goalposts have shifted repeatedly in an attempt to keep laboratory escape a viable theory, despite no evidence to support the continued supposition.
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Developing countries desperately need COVID-19 financing
International cooperation must ensure significantly more official foreign exchange financing to supplement innovative domestic financing for urgently needed spending for relief, recovery and reform.
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Caste, class and India’s Covid catastrophe
COVID-19 patients dying on the streets gasping for oxygen. Hundreds of wailing, desperate folks searching for hospital beds to access treatment. Even the dead denied dignified funerals, their bodies dumped unceremoniously in the rivers of India.
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Nicaragua’s inspiring response to COVID-19
Little attention has been paid internationally to how the Central American country has managed to keep COVID-19 cases and fatalities low even under a devastating campaign of U.S. sanctions
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The latest argument against federal relief: business claims that workers won’t work
In reality there is little support for the argument that expanded unemployment benefits have created an overly worker-friendly labor market, leaving companies unable to hire and, by extension, meet growing demand.
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This Biden proposal could make the U.S. a “digital dictatorship”
A “new” proposal by the Biden administration to create a health-focused federal agency modeled after DARPA is not what it appears to be. Promoted as a way to “end cancer,” this resuscitated “health DARPA” conceals a dangerous agenda.
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COVID-19: Like in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, Indians are going through nine circles of hell
Akin to how characters in Dante’s poem paid for their sins in hell, Indians are paying with their lives during a pandemic for electing a government that is utterly incompetent and bigoted.
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Patents versus the People
ON October 2, 2020, even before any vaccines against COVID-19 had been approved, India and South Africa had proposed to the WTO that a temporary patent waiver should be granted on all such innovations.
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U.S. Customs to Indian travellers: Don’t carry cow dung in your luggage
In India, doctors recently had to issue a warning against the practice of using cow dung in the belief it will ward off COVID-19, saying there is no scientific evidence for its effectiveness and that it risks spreading other diseases.
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Medical Apartheid: From Israel/Palestine to Canada
Canada has a long history of humanitarian hypocrisy with regard to racial and ethnic discrimination. During World War II, “none is too many” referred to European Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany who were refused admission and sent back to Germany.
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Sacred Bones: Caste and COVID-19 in Delhi’s crematoriums
With an unprecedented volume of dead bodies, Brahmins and workers from other castes are working side by side in the crematoriums of Delhi. But caste defines every choice made among the pyres.