Women in Istanbul took to the streets on Saturday to protest Turkish President Erdogan’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, effective July 1.  Conservatives in Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party)  claim the convention actually encourages violence by undermining Turkey’s traditional family structures. Protesters gathered on the streets of Istanbul on Saturday to voice their anger. Melek Ondas of the Women’s Council association was quoted by AFP as saying that women came from 70 provinces to the rally in Istanbul.

“We believe in the strength of our organizations. And whether the decision is overturned or not, we will continue our struggle in every way possible,” Ondas told AFP.

The convention targets violence against women and domestic violence. The convention requires signatory states to investigate allegations of violence and prosecute those responsible. Additionally, signatories agree to promote gender equality through legislation and education. Turkey was the convention’s first signatory in 2011, lending it the name of its commercial capital. Since then the convention has been signed by 45 countries, along with the European Union.

In Turkey, at least 300 women were murdered in Turkey last year. In May alone, 17 cases of confirmed femicides were reported and another 20 suspected cases were reported.

“These murders often go unpunished,” said Marc Pierini, a visiting scholar from Carnegie Europe. This is why the Istanbul Convention was such a “crucial reassurance” for Turkish women.

Turkey: Women rally ahead of rights treaty official exit | News | DW | 19.06.2021

Covid vaccines will substantially benefit a number of pharmaceutical companies.

 The global market for vaccines is worth $70bn (£50bn) this year. Pfizer and Moderna, which are charging $30-plus per person for the required two shots in Europe and the US, will take the lion’s share.

Pfizer and Moderna stand to make tens of billions of dollars from their Covid-19 vaccines this year and next, given G7 governments’ pledge to vaccinate the entire world by the end of 2022.

Pfizer predicted it would make $26bn from its jab in 2021, a third of annual revenue. This was based on orders received by mid-April, so is likely to be an underestimate. Analysts at Morgan Stanley led by David Risinger raised their estimates for Pfizer to $33bn in 2021 and $32bn in 2022, halving to $16.5bn in 2023 and $8.2bn in 2024. Barclays analyst Carter Gould predicts even higher revenues for Pfizer this year – $38bn, falling to about $17bn in 2022, $8.5bn in 2023 and $6.3bn in 2024.

Moderna expects it to generate revenue of $19.2bn, as it aims to produce 1bn doses this year, and up to 3bn doses next year. Barclays analyst Gena Wang forecast slightly higher sales of $19.6bn, falling to $12.2bn in 2022 and about $11bn in each of the following two years. Morgan Stanley analysts have pencilled in $13.5bn next year, falling to $12.5bn in 2023 and 2024.

Johnson & Johnson, which charges the US government $10 per dose for its single-jab vaccine, is likely to generate $6.6bn in revenue this year, according to calculations made by Barclays in March, followed by $1.2bn in 2022 and $383m in 2023.

For AstraZeneca, which charges between $4.30 and $10 for two doses, Barclays forecasts $5.2bn in sales in 2021, falling to $2.3bn and $475m in the next two years.

Other Covid vaccines that could bring in billions of dollars for their makers include the CoronaVac jab developed by China’s Sinovac and the Russian Sputnik V. Nasdaq-listed Sinovac has built factories capable of producing 2 billion doses a year and reported a fourfold increase in sales to $328m between October and December.

  A Novavax report of 90% efficacy after trials in the US and Mexico sent its shares soaring last week. Its chief executive, Stan Erck, talked of “the potential for several billion dollars in revenue in the next 12 months”. Barclays forecasts $7.7bn revenues for Novavax in 2021, falling to $1.8bn and $538m in the next two years.

Covid jabs for billions of humans will earn their makers billions of dollars | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

 In ‘The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America’, Shawn Rochester offers a statistical breakdown of the economic figures which shed light on slavery’s legacy and the debilitating laws enacted during the grim Jim Crow era and the wealth gaps that have widened even more in recent decades.

“Around $50 trillion of economic resources and labor has not been paid to Black people since slavery…”

By the end of 2020, the homeownership rate for Black families stood around 44%, compared with 75% for white families.

A typical middle-class Black household a wealth amount of approximately $13,024 compared to a staggering average of $149,703.

In 1968, a typical middle-class black household had $6,674 in wealth compared with $70,786 for the typical middle-class white household, according to data adjusted for inflation. 

In 2016, the typical middle-class black household had $13,024 in wealth versus $149,703 for the median white household, an even larger gap in percentage terms.

Black households had $8,762 in cash or equivalent liquid assets, compared with $49,529 for white households in 2016.

The real reason why Juneteenth is a point of contention for the GOP – Alternet.org

 The tobacco industry survives and thrives. It adapts to legislative and regulatory attempts to hinder the sale, promotion, and use of its products.

The number of smokers has increased from 0·99 billion in 1990 to 1·14 billion in 2019, who consumed 7·41 trillion cigarette-equivalents of tobacco in 2019. 

5·96 million (77·5%) of 7·69 million smoking-attributable deaths in 2019 occurred in low-income and middle-income countries and that 66 (93%) of 71 countries that had significant increases in such deaths were low-income and middle-income countries.

WHO reported that although global tobacco cultivation decreased by 15·7% between 2012 and 2018, it increased by 3·4% in Africa. The number of adult users of tobacco in Africa increased from 64 million in 2000 to 73 million in 2018.

 Cigarette taxes could be set high enough to crush the tobacco industry, but no governments will go that far. They rely on this revenue for deficit reduction and for things other than curbing smoking.

The vaunted 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the US state attorneys general and the tobacco industry, ostensibly to recover medical costs for disease caused by smoking, epitomises government addiction to tobacco money. States have spent only 3% of the annual payments to them from the industry to fight smoking, which in some instances is less than before the Master Settlement Agreement.

 Increases in tobacco taxation might have reduced sales to the poorest consumers, but US cigarette manufacturers are still making huge profits and tobacco stocks remain a healthy investment.

In contrast to the trillions of dollars allocated by US Congress to address COVID-19, no major funding has ever been approved to fight smoking and its promotion.

 The number of displaced people has doubled in the last decade.

The number of people leaving their homes due to persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations has increased to 82.4 million, according to the Global Trends report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 

The vast majority of refugees around the world are hosted by countries that are low- and middle-income nations. The world’s least developed countries host 27% of the world’s refugees.

At the end of last year, there were 20.7 million refugees under the UNHCR mandate, 5.7 million Palestinian refugees, and 3.9 million Venezuelans who fled their homes.

Turkey hosts the highest with 3.7 million refugees. Colombia was second with more than 1.7 million, including Venezuelans displaced abroad. Germany hosted the third-largest number with nearly 1.5 million.

A further 48 million people were displaced within their own country while there are 4.1 million asylum-seekers.

The UN estimates that almost 1 million children were born as refugees between 2018 and 2020. Furthermore, 42% of displaced persons are girls and boys under the age of 18. Many of them are at risk of remaining in exile for years to come, some potentially for the rest of their lives.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, more than 160 countries closed their borders while 99 countries made no exception for people who had sought international protection. Only 34,400 applications for resettlement were accepted — the lowest figure in 20 years. 

June 17 is the UN-designated day related to turning degraded land into healthy.

In many countries, a drought will bring hunger and the need for migration to working people, but when the Western states of the USA suffer a serious drought, its inhabitants need to be told that there is a water shortage.

“Not everybody in California understands how bad this drought is…and how bad it could be,” said State Water Resources Water Control Board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus when the report was first released.  “There are communities in danger of running out of water all over the state.”

“This is a real emergency that requires a real emergency response,” argues Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If Southern California does not step up and conserve its water, and if the drought continues on its epic course, there is nothing more that our water managers can do for us. Water availability in Southern California would be drastically reduced. With those reductions, we should expect skyrocketing water, food and energy prices, as well as the demise of agriculture.”

Groundwater, which is being treated as an endless and bountiful resource, maybe making up for recent water loss, but for how long remains to be seen.  Without significant rainfall, groundwater will not be replenished.

 America’s largest reservoir is at an all-time low. Lake Mead has the potential to hold an impressive 26.12 million acre-feet of water when it’s full. However, as of June 14, 2021, the reservoir held roughly 9 million acre-feet of water, about 36% of its full capacity after the region experienced over two decades of drought.

A study by University of California researchers that reported that the state has issued far more water rights than there is water to supply them.

 In Oregon, federal authorities announced that there would be no further release of water from the reserves in the Klamath Basin for irrigation schemes downstream. Protesters affiliated with right-wing People’s Rights Network are threatening to unilaterally opening the sluice gates of a reservoir. 

The protesters claim to represent the interests of farmers, they have been disavowed by agricultural leaders, including Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, said the protesters were “idiots who have no business being here”, who were using the crisis as “a soapbox to push their agenda”.

 Progressive

The world is in perpetual motion,

Flux of change never rests: Whatever is

For a moment, will no longer be. This

Natural algorithm of creation

Generates broad oceans and continents,

Flora and fauna, births and extinctions,

Tribes and empires, settlements and migrations,

Societies and their discontents.

Those who declare themselves for radical change

Have such aspirations well grounded,

Who speaks otherwise shall be confounded;

Where the old’s conserved, the new must impinge.

No matter how distant the prospect seems,

Time can realise what the present dreams.

D. A.

“Energy imbalance” refers to the difference between how much of the Sun’s “radiative energy” is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and surface, compared to how much “thermal infrared radiation” bounces back into space. “A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up,” Nasa said

Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth’s “energy imbalance approximately doubled” from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as “alarming”. The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an “unprecedented” increase amid the climate crisis.

The study found that this doubling is the result, in part, by an increase in greenhouse gases and water vapor, as well as decreases in clouds and ice.

 Unless the rate of heat uptake slows, greater shifts in climate should be expected.

Earth is trapping ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, Nasa says | Climate change | The Guardian

 At least 1.5 billion people have been directly affected by drought since 2000.

Changing rainfall patterns as a result of climate breakdown is a key driver of drought, but the report also identifies the inefficient use of water resources and the degradation of land under intensive agriculture and poor farming practices as playing a role. Deforestation, the overuse of fertilisers and pesticides, overgrazing and over-extraction of water for farming are also major problems, it says.

Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it. Most of the world will be living with water stress in the next few years. Demand will outstrip supply during certain periods. Drought is a major factor in land degradation and the decline of yields for major crops.”

Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-author of the report,  pointed to the Danube in Europe, where recurring drought in recent years has affected transport, tourism, industry and energy generation. 

The report, entitled Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction: Special Report on Drought 2021, 

“We need to have a modernised view of drought,” he said. “We need to look at how to manage resources such as rivers and large watersheds.”

‘The next pandemic’: drought is a hidden global crisis, UN says | Drought | The Guardian

 Boris Johnson secretly met Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the country’s prime minister, and his senior officials to discuss a free trade deal with the Gulf states and agreed to “further strengthen our economic, security and diplomatic cooperation”.

 Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, a director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), said: 

“If Britain is truly seeking a free trade deal with a regime that holds political prisoners as hostages, tortures children and throws even mild critics in jail, it is imperative that human rights issues are at the core of any future trade relationship.”

Reprieve, the campaign group against the death penalty, pointed to the cases of Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa – two men that have been facing execution since at least 2017 for what they “confessed” under torture. In a joint report coinciding with the visit, Reprieve and Bird said: “Between 2011 and 2020, Bahrain has sentenced at least 51 people to death. Between 2001 and 2010, the decade before the Arab spring, the number executed was seven.” They claimed that per head of the population, Bahrain’s record was not substantially better than Iran’s.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Scriven said:

 “I am dismayed but unfortunately not surprised that the prime minister rolled out the red carpet and put trade over torture with his meeting with the crown prince today. Even the official press release fails to mention human rights abuses.”

Boris Johnson criticised for meeting Bahrain’s crown prince | Human rights | The Guardian