 Hello and welcome to International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major news developments from around the world. Our headlines, Pedro Castillo proclaimed President Desperu's election jury dismisses fraud claims. Frito lay workers go on strike against brutal working conditions in the United States. The political arm of Philippines banned communist parties designated as a terrorist organization. And in our video section, we take a look at the rising COVID-19 cases in England and with the lifting of all curbs. Socialist rural teacher Pedro Castillo has been officially proclaimed as Peru's president-elect. National jury of elections made the announcement on July 19th over 40 days after the election. Castillo has won the runoff held on June 6th with a majority of 50.12%. He defeated right-wing candidate Keko Fujimori by a margin of just over 44,000 votes. However, Fujimori refused to concede the election claiming fraud and regularities. Despite no proper evidence to substantiate these claims, she demanded that 200,000 votes be annulled. Castillo's lawyer stated that Fujimori's popular force party filed over 1,500 challenges. A lawsuit to annull the entire electoral process was rejected on July 18th. The last of the appeals were dismissed on July 19th, paving the way for the official results. Following the declaration on Monday, Castillo called for unity and efforts to make Peru a just and sovereign country. A trade union leader, he has pledged to nationalize key industries including mining and oil. He has also expressed support for rewriting the constitution and has been an outspoken candidate against US imperialism. President-elect Castillo will be sworn into office for a five-year term on July 28th. Meanwhile, Keko Fujimori is now facing an investigation by the prosecutor's office for disrupting the electoral process. As per local reports, this refers to attacks against the right to vote, against judicial function and the modality of procedural fraud. The prosecutor has said to have found 27 receipts for electoral tax rights that have been reused in various, indifferent nullity processes. Fujimori is already being investigated for corruption and money laundering during previous presidential campaigns. We now head to the US where nearly 600 workers in the state of Kansas have entered their third week on strike. Workers at a free-to-lay plant in Topeka are protesting low wages and brutal working conditions. Most of the facilities over 850 workers are serving up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. They call this force overtime suicide shifts, seeing as they get only 8 hours off in between. According to a letter published in the Topeka Capital Journal, workers did not receive hazard pay or bonuses during the pandemic. It further added when a worker collapsed and died on the line, management made them move the body to keep production going. Workers have also told media outlets that several people have committed suicide due to the conditions. Company says, we're shocked they went on strike. How are you shocked? Did you think that we would go to 90 hours before we would hit the streets? Force overtime causes divorces. It caused people to kill themselves that used to work here. Okay, there have been several employees that have killed themselves that have worked here over the years. Okay, this is a continual thing. It destroys marriages. It destroys families. Despite working 84 hours a week, most workers receive wages between $16 to $20 an hour. They also do not receive cost of living or adjustment, which is set at 77 cents an hour in the area. Moreover, as reported by the More Perfect Union, workers have to earn points to get time off. One point requires working 31 days in a row. Workers have also reported not receiving a raise in over 10 years. Meanwhile, free-to-lay made over $4.2 billion in sales in 2020. Its parent company, PepsiCo, also recorded a 14% increase in revenue. The workers at the Topeka facility are members of the local 218 Bakery Confectionary Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union. The strike began on July 5th after the union rejected a contract offered by the company. The deal included an annual wage increase of 2%, which for many workers would mean an increase of less than 50 cents. It also capped overtime at 20 hours on top of a 40-hour week. Negotiations on the contract resumed this Monday. When the workers continued to pick it outside the facility, they were called for a boycott of free-to-lay and PepsiCo products. In our next story, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines has been designated as a terrorist organization. In a resolution made public this week, the country's anti-terror council called it an integral and inseparable part of the Band Communist Party. The party is currently in an armed conflict with the Philippines government. Meanwhile, the NDF is the political arm of the CPP. It is largely led by surrendered or retired militants now, who are involved in peace advocacy. It is composed of trade unions, rights groups and student movements. The anti-terror council has accused the organization of recruiting new people to join the CPP's armed wing, the New People's Army. This is despite the fact that the NDF is the principal organization recognized in the now defunct peace process. The talks which began under President Corazon Aquino in 1987 had made considerable progress in letter signing of key agreements. However, President Rodrigo Duterte unilaterally withdrew from the talks in 2017 and officially declared an end to the process in 2019. Since then, the government has deployed an indiscriminate policy of red tagging against suspected communist rebels. Policy has been used to target indigenous communities, trade unions and activists. Protected peace consultants of the NDF have also been arrested and killed. As reported by Bullatlat, the government has frozen bank accounts and other limited financial assets. The CPP has condemned these actions as an attempt to divert attention from the regime's crimes against humanity. And for our final story, we go to England where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has lifted all COVID-19 curbs. Starting midnight on July 19, the rules mandating masks, indoors and capacity limits on restaurants and public places were revoked. The decision follows just as 87% of adults in the country have received at least one dose. However, the UK is reporting over 50,000 new infections per day, the highest rate of infection since January. Hundreds of thousands of people have also been told to self-isolate by a contact tracing app. Meanwhile, other western nations including the US are also gradually removing restrictions. Here is Dr Satyajit Rathi to talk more about the current situation. The question for you is that UK is opening up and there are figures which indicate that there are about 40,000 cases today. Now, this is a good experiment because there are after all 50, more than 50% of the people are already vaccinated. So how do you take this experiment, how do you look at this experiment with figures as well as in the future? And what does it carry, what lessons does it carry for the rest of the world? So, we are in a very peculiar situation. So let's try and put this in a framework of evidence-based understanding. The UK, the United States both have 50% plus fully vaccinated proportions in the community. And yet in both case numbers are rising. They are rising more slowly in the US and more rapidly in the UK, but in both they are rising. So the straightforward and worrisome question is, is this vaccine failure? And the straightforward evidence-based answer is that it is not. Why am I saying this? Because if half the population is vaccinated, then amongst the cases that are cropping up now, you would expect a very substantial proportion of unvaccinated people coming down with infection. And the reality is, if you look at the seriously ill people, then 98 plus percent of the seriously ill people with COVID-19 are unvaccinated both in the UK and in the US. So clearly the vaccines are providing good protection even against current variants of the virus, as far as serious illness and death are concerned. But even if you look at relatively mild to moderate infections, the data are that the overwhelming majority, 80, 90% plus, of cases currently are amongst the unvaccinated people. And what that says is not simply the good part, which is that the vaccines seem to be working reasonably well. Keep in mind that in the US, they are the mRNA vaccines. In the UK, they are the adenoviral AstraZeneca vaccine, which is what we also use as our major vaccine, Covishield. So that's the good part. But the deeply worrisome part is, what this is saying is that there are major inequities and disparities within these apparent averages of X percent vaccination with communities that are transmitting the virus amongst themselves that are broadly unvaccinated. They are unvaccinated because of lack of access, they are unvaccinated because of justified lack of trust in the state and the establishment amongst marginalized undocumented minority and other disempowered communities. And as a result, what you have is a sharpening of preexisting inequities in the vaccination campaign, creating this situation of paradox where vaccines that work are showing a steady increase in the apparent average, and yet what you have is an increase in numbers. This is exactly what we have begun to see in India, even though the fact of the matter is that India's vaccinated numbers are only about 6.5%. But even so, what we have seen is in the first place, in India, the different localities, neighborhoods, states and regions have very different trajectories of infection. The Northeast, as we have seen, is currently still showing rising case numbers, whereas major metropolitan areas have plateaued and some of those, particularly in Maharashtra and some in Kerala, are actually beginning to show some increases. And in all of this, the fact of the matter is that the inequities of vaccination, rural versus urban, socio-economically better off versus worse off, elite versus disempowered are even sharper divisions in India than they are in the global north. We are going to keep seeing this problem amplify in India. And therefore, we are going to keep seeing outbreaks in communities that are not covered by the vaccination campaign more and more and more paradoxically, as vaccination begins to cover more and more percentage of some communities and some neighborhoods and leave others behind, so to say. We are going to start seeing that disparity become reflected in the pattern of recurring COVID-19 outbreaks as we go into the next few months. And again, the lesson there is if everybody is not vaccinated, then nobody is vaccinated as far as the community response to the pandemic is concerned. That's all. We have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news from around the world. Until then, keep watching People's Dispatch.