Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas,  who also holds the title of Promoting the European Way of Life at the Commission, told reporters, “Europe will remain an asylum destination for those fleeing persecution and war. However, those with no right to stay will have to be returned to their countries of origin. Not doing so undermines the credibility of our system and prevents us from protecting those who need it.”

Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), said that while generally voluntary returns were preferable to forced relocations, the EU focused disproportionately on sending people back.

“Asylum decision-making in Europe remains a lottery, with wildly divergent protection rates across the EU. In addition, flight from violence is still not well handled by asylum-systems,” she explained. “This means that people are receiving rejections when they have protection needs and when it is not safe for them to be returned. Member states are returning people to places that are not safe.”

EU presents strategy to send unauthorized migrants back | News | DW | 27.04.2021

 Many of the technologies needed to stop climate change are still in early stages of development, a study of green tech patents has revealed. This is the conclusion of a joint report from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The report “Patents and the energy transition: global trends in clean energy technology innovation” looks at trends in low-carbon energy innovation between 2000 and 2019 in terms of international patent families (IPFs). An IPF represents a unique, high-value invention for which a patent application was filed at two or more patent offices around the globe. Patent applications can be considered an early indicator of future technological trends as they are filed months or years before the products go to market.

The report found that the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies has gone up over the past two decades. However, the average annual growth rate of low-carbon energy patents in recent years is only a quarter of what it was a decade ago. Between 2017 and 2019, the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies around the world grew by an average rate of 3.3% per year. The average growth rate from 2000 to 2013, by contrast, was 12.5%.

“This report is a clear call for action to step up research and innovation into new low-carbon energy technologies and improve existing ones,” said EPO President Antonio Campinos. “While it reveals some encouraging trends across countries and industry sectors, including in key cross-cutting technologies, it also highlights the need to further accelerate innovation in clean-energy technologies, some of which are still only emerging.”

Tech needed to halt climate change still underdeveloped | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 27.04.2021

 China is to report its first population decline in five decades.

Zhiwei Zhang, the Shenzhen-based chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management explains, “The consensus expects China’s population to peak at 2027, based on the projection made by the United Nations. This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected.”

The birth rate has continued to decline. That is partly because urban couples, particularly those born after 1990, value their independence and careers more than raising a family, despite parental pressure to have children. Rising living costs in major cities, where large populations lead to the birth of a huge number of babies, have also deterred couples.

Policymakers will need to come up with family-planning incentives and arrest a falling birth rate, with the world’s most populous country at risk of entering an irreversible population slide if effective measures are not found. Falling birth rates and a fast greying society will add pressure on the working-age population and hit productivity.

“China would likely have to relax the birth control policy completely and put off the retirement age faster,” Zhang said.

“Our projections using the pre-census figures already suggested that the workforce would be declining by 0.5% each year by 2030, with a similar impact on GDP,” Capital Economics wrote.

In 2010, the proportion of the population aged 14 or younger plunged to 16.60% from 22.89% in 2000, an effect of a decades-old one-child policy. Citizens aged 60 and older accounted for 13.26%, up from about 10%. The continuation of those trends will undermine China’s working-age population and weigh on productivity. A shrinking pool of working adults will also test its ability to pay and care for an aging nation.

China to report first population drop in five decades -FT | Reuters

As drought conditions worsen across California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of the  San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water.

The California Water Resources Control Board, is engaged in a protracted dispute between the bottled water company and local environmentalists, who for years have accused Nestlé of draining water supplies at the expense of local communities and ecosystems. Nestlé has sucked up, on average, 25 times as much water as it may have a right to, according to an environmental group that has been fighting to stop the bottled water company’s pumping in California for years. Strawberry Creek, which Nestlé has been pumping from, is a tributary of the Santa Ana river, which provides drinking water for about about 750,000 residents. The region’s watersheds also provide a habitat for deer, fox and mountain lions

Nestlé has maintains that its rights to California spring water dates back to 1865. But a 2017 investigation found that Nestlé was taking far more than its share. Last year the company drew out about 58m gallons, far surpassing the 2.3m gallons per year it could validly claim. The company’s fight water in California mirrors similar fights in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Maine and Michigan. 

Across the US, conservationists have accused Nestlé of leveraging vast lobbying funds to bend local and federal officials to its will.

“The forests that Nestlé is draining – they’re our forests, supported by every US taxpayer,” said Amanda Frye, an activist who provided state officials with documents and research going back at least a century to show Nestlé did not have the right to the water it was pumping.

State officials sent the company a cease and desist letter .

“We have a limited amount of water, said Julé Rizzardo, the assistant deputy director of the Division of Water Rights. “And as we face our second dry year in a row, it’s important that we use our authority to protect the municipal water supply and the environment.”

Drought-hit California moves to halt Nestlé from taking millions of gallons of water | California | The Guardian

ONLY THE CLASS WAR

IS WORTHY OF FIGHTING

 Australia and the war drums.

One of Australia’s most senior security officials has said liberal democracies must brace for war amid elevated global tensions. Home Affairs Department Secretary Mike Pezzullo said the possibility of war was increasing.

“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again…for the curse of war,” Pezzullo said 

The chance of a conflict involving China over Taiwan “should not be discounted,” but Australia will work with its allies in the region to try and maintain peace, Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.  He said that China had been increasingly clear about its reunification ambitions with Taiwan. “People need to be realistic about the activity. There is militarisation of bases across the region. Obviously, there is a significant amount of activity and there is an animosity between Taiwan and China.”

And Australia beefs up its military

Australia will spend A$747 million ($580 million) to upgrade four military bases in its north and expand war games with the United States, Prime Minister Scott Morrison will say on Wednesday.

“Working with the United States, our allies and Indo-Pacific neighbours, we will continue to advance Australia’s interests by investing in the Australian ­Defence Force,” 

 An airstrip in the Northern Territory will be lengthened to support larger aircraft, firing ranges overhauled and new training facilities set up for defence personnel and U.S. marines. This in addition of earlier increased military preparations.

Biden’s first 100-day accomplishment has been the deportation of 300,000 migrants and refugees since January, largely using a illegal under international law policy called Title 42.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) explained earlier this month:

“The Title 42 expulsion policy has effectively closed the U.S. border to nearly all asylum seekers based on the misapplication of an obscure, 75-year-old public health law.” It continued, “That law, the Public Health Service Act of 1944, was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities that would apply to everyone, including U.S. citizens, arriving from a foreign country. Quarantine authority was never meant to be used to determine which noncitizens could or couldn’t be expelled or removed from the U.S.”

According to a report (pdf) released late last month by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and other advocacy groups, the Biden administration used Title 42 to deport more Haitians during its first weeks in power than the Trump administration did in all of Fiscal Year 2020.

 Cynthia Garcia of United We Dream stressed, “President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost.”

Garcia continued, “Reflecting on his time as vice president, President Biden acknowledged that the Obama administration was wrong in deporting over 2.5 million people and vowed to never make that mistake again when he took office. President Biden is well on track to repeat history. Now, he must make a choice: repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration or do everything in his power to end the cruelty of detentions, expulsions, and deportations and show that he is a president of his word.”

National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), a coalition of more than 40 immigrant and refugee rights organizations, echoed United We Dream’s concerns about continued mass deportations during the first 100 days of the Biden administration.

NPNA noted that “there are many changes that the Biden administration can pursue with little to no congressional action, including ending the use of Title 42 expulsions, redesignating [Temporary Protected Status] for Haiti and other countries that are set to expire, and increasing the number of refugees that the U.S. will resettle as part of the presidential determination.”

The group also said, “These are literally life or death decisions that will impact millions of lives. The administration can also take action to expand access to citizenship and justice and to bolster due process protections through an increase of legal representation for those in detention and removal proceedings.”

With 300,000 Deported in First 100 Days, Rights Group Warns Biden ‘Well on Track to Repeat’ Obama Failures | Common Dreams News

 0.0000000000001% of the US population owns 50% of the country’s wealth.

The capitalist system cannot exist without growth, expansion, accumulation of profits, and and these are the fundamental causes of our environmental destruction. The capitalists carry great economic and political power and it is the reason for the  failures of all those previous COP international conferences on climate change. It’s time working people make conscious and collective decisions about our future and our relationship with our environment. 

“Expand or die” is the law of survival in the jungle of the cut–throat market of commodity production where profit counts more than people. It is this logic of capitalism which accounts for the failure to reach agreement to reduce carbon emissions and solve global warming. A business, well-meaning or not, cannot escape market forces. Capitalist competition strangles good intentions. Capitalism is driven by the pursuit for profits and the lucrative returns to be made for particular capitalists will always prevail over the welfare of communities and the countryside. Decisions are made by a tiny handful of capitalists, not in the interests of humanity, but purely to make profit. Capitalism is harming the environment to the verge of catastrophe.

If we want to save the world, we must change the economy of the world. There are no market solutions nor any technological answers.

Capitalism devours nature. It will not be sufficient to substitute fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Production itself must be re-designed to become one where goods are primarily produced not for sale but for peoples actual needs and use in ecologically friendly manufacturing methods.

We’re told green capitalism can save the environment by letting the market work its miracles with its invisible hand  which will bring new technology and futuristic inventions yet it has never been able to  cure preventable diseases or end global hunger when ample food-stocks are already available. Despite many fine words there has been little substantive difference to the world’s worsening environmental situation. Surely every environmentalist must begin to wonder why that is. The reasons are rooted in the economic system.

The vast majority of people want to live in a secure, safe, sustainable world, and enjoy their surroundings in harmony with nature. What the Socialist Party offers is a vision of an alternative society. World socialism is the precondition for a sustainable world. It is neither population numbers nor a greedy human nature but the capitalist mode of production which runs counter to nature. 

 “The erasure of Native people and histories, which existed before and survived in spite of a white supremacist empire, is a foundational sin of a make-believe nation. According to Rick Santorum, the US was founded as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ theocratic state. He might be right about that, but the idea that the first colonizers escaped religious persecution is laughable. Invasion was an economic enterprise for god, glory, and gold.” –   Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and host of the Red Nation podcast

 The ’Ndrangheta – based in the southern region of Calabria, the toe of the Italy – is reputed to be one of the richest and most feared criminal organisations in the world. A study by the Demoskopita Research Institute in 2013 estimated its financial strength as more than that of Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s combined, with an annual turnover of €53bn (£44bn).

 Its success lies in its ability to connect the underworld with the upper world, where often the “upper world” stands for the financial district of the City of London which they use  as an investment and money-laundering base, according to Nicola Gratteri, the state prosecutor. It has established companies in the UK with the alleged purpose of simulating legitimate economic activity.

A 2019 report from Italy’s Anti-mafia Investigative Directorate claimed that criminal organisations laundered billions of pounds each year through UK banks.

Giuseppe Lombardo, the deputy prosecutor of Reggio Calabria, warned that “in a phase of very scarce global liquidity, the goal of the ’Ndrangheta will be to create a banking system parallel to the legal one”, as all the eyes are on the City.

Bosses of the Nirta clan had entrusted the management of their profits to a man who created companies in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Romania which after a few years, all of these companies were systematically transferred to the UK. 

 Col Claudio Petrozziello of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, which monitors illicit flows of capital, said ’Ndrangheta clans in the UK had no interest in controlling the local territory, just the exploitation of the financial system.

“It’s not that there are no rules in London,” he said. “The problem is that the risk of mafia infiltration is underestimated.”

The ’Ndrangheta are as a middle-class phenomenon, which took advantage of Masonic lodges to manage the profits generated by international drugs trafficking. The grand master of the Grande Oriente d’Italia (GOI) lodge, Giuliano di Bernardo, claimed in trials in 2014 and 2019 that linked the ’Ndrangheta with terrorism that he had a discussion with the Duke of Kent, the grand master of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), in the early 1990s over infiltration of the Italian lodges in the south of the country by criminal clans.

UK to come under scrutiny in Italy’s largest mafia trial in decades | Italy | The Guardian