U.S. appeals court temporarily halts Biden administration vaccine mandate for private employers
Such circuit decisions normally apply to states within a district — Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, in this case — but Landry said the language employed by the judges gave the decision a national scope.
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The government must provide an expedited reply to the motion for a permanent injunction Monday, followed by petitioners’ reply on Tuesday.
US-trained Afghan intelligence agents, elite troops reported joining ISIS
Given US imperialism’s record in Afghanistan and the CIA’s intimate connections to the emergence of ISIS, there is every reason to ask whether this bloody campaign is backed by Washington with the aim of destabilizing Afghanistan and preventing the emergence of any regime not under its thumb.
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A report issued in June by the United Nations cites information that the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an Islamist separatist group dedicated to carving out a Uyghur state in Xinjiang, China had “established corridors for moving fighters between the Syrian Arab Republic, where the group exists in far larger numbers, and Afghanistan, to reinforce its combat strength” and “facilitate the movement of fighters from Afghanistan to China.” The ETIM has aligned itself with ISIS-K against the Taliban government.
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US imperialism views Afghanistan through the prism of its declared military strategy centered on “great power” confrontation with China and Russia. Just as US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski promoted the CIA-orchestrated mujahedeen war of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of giving the Soviet Union its “own Vietnam,” today Washington sees an Afghanistan in chaos undermining Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia and potentially provoking terrorist campaigns against both countries.
Top US general reduces time frame for war with China to two years
The only means for halting the drive to war between the two nuclear-armed powers is the intervention of the international working class through the building of a unified anti-war movement directed at abolishing the capitalist system—the root cause of geo-strategic conflict.
Good luck with that!
A Review and Autopsy of Two COVID Immunity Studies
Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated. Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated. In fact, it is discriminatory.
Many of the Covid recovered were exposed to the virus as essential workers during the height of the pandemic before vaccines were available. They kept the rest of society afloat, processing food, delivering goods, unloading ships, picking up garbage, policing the streets, maintaining the electricity network, putting out fires, and caring for the old and sick, to name a few.
They are now being fired and excluded despite having stronger immunity than the vaccinated work-from-home administrators that are firing them.
Employers who adopt a “mandatory vaccination policy” can comply with the ETS even if some employees are not actually vaccinated. OSHA allows the following exceptions: “those for whom a vaccine is medically contraindicated, those for whom medical necessity requires a delay in vaccination, or those legally entitled to a reasonable accommodation under federal civil rights laws because they have a disability or sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, or observances that conflict with the vaccination requirement.” It seems those unvaccinated employees don’t have to wear masks or be tested each week, since those safeguards apply only to businesses that require employees to choose between vaccination and testing plus masking.
If so, a legal challenge could argue, OSHA is implicitly conceding that testing and masking of unvaccinated employees is not truly “necessary.” In the example OSHA offers, 5 percent of a company’s employees “are entitled to reasonable accommodation.” In terms of COVID-19 risk, that situation is indistinguishable from a workplace where 5 percent of employees simply choose not to be vaccinated.
The vaccination exceptions allowed by OSHA do not include people who are resistant to COVID-19 because they were previously infected. While there is considerable debate about how the protection offered by naturally acquired immunity compares to the protection offered by vaccination, the lack of an exception for people who have recovered from COVID-19 could be another basis for questioning the necessity of OSHA’s requirements.
Related:
EXPLAINER-The legal challenges awaiting Biden’s vaccine mandate
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 