Soon such weather events will be so commonplace that they will no longer make the news.

Four people were killed by blazes that swept through the Turkish tourist regions of Antalya and Muğla, forcing thousands of holidaymakers to be evacuated from their hotels by a flotilla of boats.

Throughout the country, firefighters battled more than 50 blazes. Dozens were hospitalised by the smoke. The Turkish meteorological office sees little likelihood of respite in the week ahead. Next week, Ankara and several other sites are set for temperatures more than 12C higher than the August average.

The heat intensity of wildfires in Turkey on Thursday was four times higher than anything on record for the nation. Conditions at the sites of dozens of other blazes throughout the country were tinder dry. Turkey’s 60-year temperature record had been broken the previous week when Cizre, a town in the south-east, registered 49.1C.

“Those numbers are off the scale compared to the last 19 years,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist in the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Residents of affected towns told reporters they had never seen anything like it.

 Ibrahim Aydın, a farmer, said he had lost all his livestock and nearly been killed while fighting the flames. “Everything I had was burned to the ground. I lost lambs and other animals.” He pointed out. “This is not normal. This was like hell.”

Climate scientists have long predicted the Mediterranean will be hit hard by rising temperatures and changes in rainfall, driven by human emissions. Future wildfire risk is projected to increase in southern Europe, according to the last report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This year looks likely to continue the trend. The World Meteorological Organisation tweeted that extreme heat is hitting the wider Mediterranean region with temperatures forecast to rise well above 40C in inland areas of Italy, Greece, Tunisia and Turkey. It has urged preparations to prevent health and water supply problems.

Wildfires have already hit southern Greece, forcing evacuations of villages outside the western port city of Patras. Blazes are also reported in Bulgaria and Albania. The EU has issued its highest fire risk alert to places in Italy, Portugal, Spain and parts of North Africa. A large fire broke out on Thursday in Lebanon, where one person has died.

Turkish fires sweeping through tourist areas are the hottest on record | Turkey | The Guardian

Not very long ago nurses were earning praise for their commitment and dedication during the worse of the pandemic.  Now nurses around the US are holding strikes, protesting deteriorating working conditions and severe understaffing issues.

For over four months, more than 700 nurses at the Tenet Healthcare-owned Saint Vincent hospital have been on strike, the second-longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts’ history. The hospital has brought in replacement workers throughout the strike and have spent more than $30,000 a day on police coverage during the strike.

Dominique Muldoon, a nurse for more than 20 years at Saint Vincent’s hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, explains, “Most of us felt like we went from heroes to zeroes quickly.”   Nurses had worked through breaks and past scheduled shifts to try to ensure patient care. Understaffing and cuts were the “new normal” at the hospital.

Marlena Pellegrino, a nurse at Saint Vincent hospital, said, We worked through some very tumultuous times where our employer could have stepped up to assist us instead of being an obstacle in our way of trying to care for our patients.” 

In Chicago, about 300 nurses at Community First medical center held a one-day strike on 26 July over hospital failures during the pandemic and new contract negotiations.

Kathy Haff, an emergency room nurse at Community First medical center for 29 years, explained the hospital lost a significant number of nurses on staff during the pandemic, including three nurses who died from the virus, and now nurses are working severely understaffed and with inadequate equipment to perform their duties.

“They don’t appreciate us. They claim to, but they don’t. They just take advantage of us left and right,” said Haff. “We’re working at half staff basically. They don’t care that we’re short. They just keep loading us up and keep criticizing if you’re not moving fast enough. There is no appreciation. All those ‘healthcare heroes’ signs were garbage. We didn’t believe one bit of them. We’re like, yeah whatever. We’re like healthcare suckers because they didn’t protect us.”

 1,400 nurses at USC Keck hospital and USC Norris Cancer hospital in Los Angeles held a two-day strike on 13 and 14 July over understaffing and patient safety concerns.

Thousands of nurses represented by National Nurses United at hospitals throughout California and Texas held a day of action on 21 July to call attention to workplace issues highlighted by the pandemic.

Juan Anchondo, a nurse for nearly 18 years at Las Palmas medical center in El Paso, Texas, explained staffing issues at his hospital have worsened throughout the pandemic as nearby hospitals have lured workers away with bonuses and better pay, and support nurses from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) left several months ago after assisting with Covid-19 surges in the region.

“People don’t take breaks,” said Anchondo. “One of the things we’re trying to negotiate is a relief break nurse…”

Kimberly Smith, an ICU nurse for 12 years at the Corpus Christi medical center in Texas, said unsafe staffing was a prevailing issue in new union contract negotiations but that these important issues to nurses have fallen by the wayside for the sake of profits and public relations campaigns asserting nurses are heroes for working on the frontlines during the pandemic and empty thank you events where nurses were given free hotdogs.

“I just want to be safe at work. I don’t need a hotdog. You’re telling me I’m a hero and how wonderful I am. Just make the working conditions safe. That’s all nurses want. We want to feel like we’re able to give the best care we can and have enough resources to do it,” said Smith, who added that nurses regularly skip breaks because there is no staff to relieve them. ‘‘Even before the pandemic the staffing wasn’t this bad. It’s been a horrible year. Nurses have passed away, are getting out of the profession, they’re retiring.”

‘We went from heroes to zeroes’: US nurses strike over work conditions | Nursing | The Guardian

The answer is a resounding no

Advanz Pharma – and its former private equity owners HgCapital and Cinven inflated thyroid drug prices over 10n years by up to 6,000% paid out more than £400m to shareholders and directors during the same period. So much for the usual defence of high prices and lucrative profits that it is for the expense of research and development costs.

Advanz and its subsidiaries were found to have charged “excessive and unfair prices” between 2009 and 2017 for liothyronine tablets, primarily used to treat hypothyroidism and were fined a combined £100m by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

During the period that the CMA found that drug prices were inflated, Companies House filings show that dividends were paid to entities controlled either from Luxembourg or Jersey.

The shareholder payouts were channelled through Mercury Pharma Group, part of the Advanz Pharma network of companies and one of the firms fined in the CMA’s crackdown.

Between 2009 and 2012, Mercury Pharma Group paid £44.4m in dividends while under the ultimate ownership of Hg Capital, via a Luxembourg-based entity called Midas.

In 2012, fellow private equity group Cinven bought Mercury from Hg and merged it with Amdipharm, which it had purchased that year, combining them under the control of a Jersey-based entity called Amdipharm Mercury.

Under the ownership of this new entity, Mercury paid a £12.8m dividend.

Cinven sold Amdipharm Mercury to Canadian drugs company Concordia Healthcare in a £2.3bn deal in 2015, but the Jersey-based structure remained in place.

Now under Concordia’s control, Mercury paid dividends of £240.3m in 2016 and £85.4m in 2017, both to the Canadian firm’s London-based subsidiary Concordia Investment Holdings (UK) Limited. 

This firm paid no income tax over the period, instead claiming tax credits worth a combined £42m. It was able to do so in part because it made significant losses over the three years, partly due to £344m in debt interest that it paid on £1.47bn in loans that carried an interest rate of 10.5%.

As well as paying the Jersey entity hundreds of millions of pounds in interest, Concordia Investment Holdings (UK) also paid it dividends worth a combined £65m.

Also over the eight-year period covered by the CMA’s fine for inflating drug prices, Advanz Pharma also handed significant payouts to senior managers. The Guardian analysis found the company rewarded directors handsomely via a complex system of dividend payments and intra-company loans involving offshore entities. A subsidiary paid directors, who never numbered more than three people, about £21m over the period of the drug price inflation.

Drug firm that hiked prices by 6,000% paid shareholders £400m | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

Not very long ago nurses were earning praise for their commitment and dedication during the worse of the pandemic.  Now nurses around the US are holding strikes, protesting deteriorating working conditions and severe understaffing issues.

For over four months, more than 700 nurses at the Tenet Healthcare-owned Saint Vincent hospital have been on strike, the second-longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts’ history. The hospital has brought in replacement workers throughout the strike and have spent more than $30,000 a day on police coverage during the strike.

Dominique Muldoon, a nurse for more than 20 years at Saint Vincent’s hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, explains, “Most of us felt like we went from heroes to zeroes quickly.”   Nurses had worked through breaks and past scheduled shifts to try to ensure patient care. Understaffing and cuts were the “new normal” at the hospital.

Marlena Pellegrino, a nurse at Saint Vincent hospital, said, We worked through some very tumultuous times where our employer could have stepped up to assist us instead of being an obstacle in our way of trying to care for our patients.” 

In Chicago, about 300 nurses at Community First medical center held a one-day strike on 26 July over hospital failures during the pandemic and new contract negotiations.

Kathy Haff, an emergency room nurse at Community First medical center for 29 years, explained the hospital lost a significant number of nurses on staff during the pandemic, including three nurses who died from the virus, and now nurses are working severely understaffed and with inadequate equipment to perform their duties.

“They don’t appreciate us. They claim to, but they don’t. They just take advantage of us left and right,” said Haff. “We’re working at half staff basically. They don’t care that we’re short. They just keep loading us up and keep criticizing if you’re not moving fast enough. There is no appreciation. All those ‘healthcare heroes’ signs were garbage. We didn’t believe one bit of them. We’re like, yeah whatever. We’re like healthcare suckers because they didn’t protect us.”

 1,400 nurses at USC Keck hospital and USC Norris Cancer hospital in Los Angeles held a two-day strike on 13 and 14 July over understaffing and patient safety concerns.

Thousands of nurses represented by National Nurses United at hospitals throughout California and Texas held a day of action on 21 July to call attention to workplace issues highlighted by the pandemic.

Juan Anchondo, a nurse for nearly 18 years at Las Palmas medical center in El Paso, Texas, explained staffing issues at his hospital have worsened throughout the pandemic as nearby hospitals have lured workers away with bonuses and better pay, and support nurses from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) left several months ago after assisting with Covid-19 surges in the region.

“People don’t take breaks,” said Anchondo. “One of the things we’re trying to negotiate is a relief break nurse…”

Kimberly Smith, an ICU nurse for 12 years at the Corpus Christi medical center in Texas, said unsafe staffing was a prevailing issue in new union contract negotiations but that these important issues to nurses have fallen by the wayside for the sake of profits and public relations campaigns asserting nurses are heroes for working on the frontlines during the pandemic and empty thank you events where nurses were given free hotdogs.

“I just want to be safe at work. I don’t need a hotdog. You’re telling me I’m a hero and how wonderful I am. Just make the working conditions safe. That’s all nurses want. We want to feel like we’re able to give the best care we can and have enough resources to do it,” said Smith, who added that nurses regularly skip breaks because there is no staff to relieve them. ‘‘Even before the pandemic the staffing wasn’t this bad. It’s been a horrible year. Nurses have passed away, are getting out of the profession, they’re retiring.”

‘We went from heroes to zeroes’: US nurses strike over work conditions | Nursing | The Guardian

UK companies announced bumper payouts to investors with a combined £7.2bn in dividends and share buybacks as the economy rebounds and Covid fears recede.

Big oil and miners dominated the dividend bonanza, with mining firm Anglo-American revealing the largest payout, worth a total of $4.1bn, after reporting its strongest half-year profit in the company’s 104-year history.

 It followed similar moves by Shell, drinks company Diageo and Lloyds Banking Group, which helped round out a bonanza day for shareholders.

Rising commodity prices, which lifted miners and oil majors, as well as the Bank of England’s gradual removal of Covid dividend caps for the UK’s largest banks, fuelled the increase.

Quarterly dividend payouts – based on when they were distributed rather than when they were announced – have already grown 51.2% to £25.7bn in the three months to June, compared to 2020.

Soaring global oil prices helped Shell report its highest profit in two years, allowing the board to raise its dividend by nearly 40% and launch share buybacks worth $2bn.

Meanwhile, the house buying boom and the return of consumer spending raised economic forecasts at Lloyds Banking Group, which swung back to profit and announced the resumption of dividends, with an aggregate £473m payout to shareholders.

Drinks company Diageo – which owns brands like Johnnie Walker whisky and Smirnoff vodka – announced share buybacks and dividends totalling £1bn.

 Rio Tinto announced the largest interim dividend in its history, saying it planned to pay shareholders $9.1bn.

 Barclays, meanwhile, said that it planned to buy back up to £500m of shares from its investors, while also paying a half-year dividend of 2p a share, resulting in a total £800m return for investors.

Danni Hewson, a financial analyst at AJ Bell, said. “Amidst all the gloom and angst of the last months, this is the kind of day investors will have been hoping for.”

“Companies that have seen a strong rebound in their earnings and cash flows have returned to good levels of dividends earlier than our initial expectations,” David Smith, fund manager of Henderson High Income Trust, said. “Also with the significant growth in dividends from the mining sector and restrictions on payments from banks removed, the outlook for aggregate market dividend growth for the rest of the year is positive.”

UK-listed companies report combined £7.2bn in dividends and share buybacks | Oil | The Guardian

A report from the Living Wage Foundation puts the number of people in insecure work at 3.7 million. The Foundation shows that those most at risk from insecure work are, for example, the very youngest and the very oldest workers.

 It further highlights how unpredictable working hours can be and the impact job insecurity has on the family life, health and the ability of workers to do things most of us take for granted: planning our lives and suchlike.

Of those paid less than the living wage, the survey found 12 per cent received under 24 hours’ notice of working hours, shifts or work schedules, nearly half (49 per cent) received less than a week’s notice and more than two thirds (68 per cent) were given less than four weeks’ notice. Forty-two per cent had experienced unexpected cancellations of shifts and of those, 28 per cent received no payment. Nearly all lost some pay. Short notice periods that hit the ability to plan working and personal lives and threaten to tip shaky household finances off a cliff are a problem for hundreds of thousands of workers.

The Living Wage Foundation now has given birth to the Living Hours campaign.

Living Wage Foundation rails against insecure work as Labour belatedly wakes up | The Independent

Allegra Stratton, Boris Johnson’s former press secretary, who is now his spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit,  told the Independent newspaper, responding to a question about what people should do if they believed government actions on the climate emergency were too unambitious.

“When people say to me, ‘what can they do?’, they can do many things, they can join Greenpeace, they can join the Green party, they can join the Tory party. So there’s lots of ways they can get involved in politics, but for those people who wouldn’t, how do you start to change your life in manageable, achievable, feasible, small ways?”

In the Telegraph she outlined possible “micro steps” people could take to reduce their personal environmental impact.Ideas included not rinsing plates before putting them in a dishwasher, buying shower gel as a cardboard-wrapped bar, and freezing rather than throwing out half-used loaves of bread. She said she was ‘“not pretending these steps will stop climate change” on their own, but that they could contribute.

PM’s spokesperson for Cop26 suggests joining Greens to solve climate crisis | Cop26: Glasgow climate change conference 2021 | The Guardian

 Questionable Climate

When the last levee is breached by the flood,

Who will bail out the drowning and the drowned?

When the last drop of rain falls on parched ground,

How many’ll become nostalgic for mud?

When the last house is whirlwinded away,

Where will refugees migrate for shelter?

When at last it snows on the equator,

What then might the scoffers and sceptics say?

When the last ice floes turn into steam,

Shall penguins and polar bears develop gills?

When the last heather burns black on the hills,

Will they still drill oil or hew a coal seam?

Better that minds, not climate, change; still time

Before the very last clock’s final chime.

D. A. 

In many parts of coal-rich Ramgarh district in Jharkhand state of India, mining of the polluting fossil fuel has sucked much of the water from once-plentiful sources.

As a child, Fagu Besra swam in gurgling streams and drank “sweet and cold water” from the wells in his village of Pundi.

“Water never dried up in our streams and canals even in the summer months. Our wells had water even though they were just 10 feet (3 metres) deep,” Besra, 50, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Today, none are left. “We now get water from borewells that are 700-800 ft deep,” added the political activist who campaigns against displacement of people by mining operations.

As in countless other villages in India’s coal mining hubs, Pundi’s residents must dig deeper, tap nearby rivers or buy water shipped in by tankers to tackle worsening water scarcity.

Himanshu Thakkar, of the nonprofit South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, said that when coal mines are dug, they fill up with groundwater, which then has to be pumped out.” This has led to depletion of groundwater in all mining areas, in addition to pollution,” he said. Loss of vegetation to make way for mines also hampers groundwater recharge, campaigners and researchers say.

As India pushes to expand its coal mining, environmentalists fear the problem will only worsen in the coming years. India is already the world’s second-largest coal producer after China, but it is not mining enough to meet the power needs of its domestic industries. That is why the government is ramping up coal production, setting a target for state-run Coal India Limited (CIL) – the world’s largest coal mining company – to produce 1 billion tonnes annually by 2024, up from about 800 million tonnes now. Its plans to boost coal production include supplying water to local people as part of efforts to protect communities and the environment. Researchers say those efforts fall far short of mitigating mining’s effects on natural resources.

“Groundwater is India’s water lifeline. The situation will keep getting worse. We need to protect natural recharge areas… (but) we haven’t even begun to do that yet,” said Thakkar.

In 2018, the government policy think-tank NITI Aayog warned nearly 600 million people faced “high to extreme water stress”, describing India’s water crisis as the worst in its history. According to data submitted in parliament last year, more than 60% of monitored wells had registered a decline in groundwater levels. Indian cities rely on tanker services in hot summer months, but those living in mining hubs have a much bigger struggle.

Ilyas Ansari, 35, of Chepa Khurd village about 50 km from Pundi, has campaigned against coal mining in his area for years. Its soot-covered homes and declining harvests tell of the damage done by coal mining, villagers say. 

“We grew wheat and sugarcane. Now we don’t even have drinking water,” Ansari said.

This year, Chepa Khurd villagers dug two borewells, about 275 metres deep, and split the cost between themselves.

“We get water tankers but that is not potable water and we can only use it for washing clothes and bathing,” Ansari said.

In Payali Bhatali village, a major coal mining hub in western Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district in central India, tap water comes from the nearby Erai river, the only water source since local wells ran dry about two decades ago. The government dug a well next to the river and set up pumps to send it to households through a pipeline via a water treatment plant. While the system ensures a supply of clean water, it is far less reliable than the former wells. Unscheduled power cuts interrupt pumping and limit supply.

 “We have power bills of about 400,000 Indian rupees ($5,360) pending… and this power consumption is entirely for the water treatment plant operation,” said Subhash Tukaram Gaurkar, a senior member of the Payali Bhatali village council.

Pumping water from rivers is a method being used more frequently in coal-mining areas, despite its shortcomings. In Jharkhand’s Ramgarh district, officials are racing to get 150,000 rural households supplied with taps by 2024, a target set by the federal government in a water plan for rural India. Rajesh Ranjan, an executive engineer with Jharkhand’s drinking water and sanitation department, said about 54,000 households were reached by July, piping in water from rivers. But Suresh Chopane, president of the Chandrapur-based nonprofit Green Planet Society, warned the rivers were dying.

“They are feeding industries and cities. This is not sustainable,” he said.

Water scarcity in coal-rich areas is usually resolved once mining activity ends.

“The water begins to store in the (former) mining area, surrounding groundwater regimes are recharged again and the mining area is full of water,” said Jayant Bhattacharya, professor of mining engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

Parched villages in India’s coal-mining hubs hunt for water (trust.org)

IT NEEDS WORLD SOCIALISM

 Researchers said in an article published in the journal BioScience on Wednesday that governments had consistently failed to address “the overexploitation of the Earth”, which they described as the root cause of the crisis.

They noted an “unprecedented surge” in climate-related disasters, including flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-shattering heatwaves and wildfires in Australia and the US, and devastating cyclones in Africa and South Asia.

 To measure the health of the planet, scientists relied on “vital signs” including deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thickness and sea-ice extent and deforestation. Out of 31 signs, they found that 18 hit record highs or lows. For example, despite a dip in pollution linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane hit all-time highs in 2021. Greenland and Antarctica recently showed all-time low levels of ice mass and glaciers are melting 31-percent faster than they did just 15 years ago, the authors said. Ocean heat and global sea levels set new records since 2019, and the annual loss rate of the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year high in 2020.

The authors repeated previous calls for transformative change in six areas: eliminating fossil fuels, slashing pollutants, restoring ecosystems, switching to plant-based diets, moving away from indefinite growth models and stabilising the human population.

While science may be correct that global warming is a result of over-exploitation of the planet’s resources, they lack the socialist insight of what causes it. They are either ignorant or ignore the economic foundation of capitalism which is capital accumulation driven by the profit motive which requires constant growth and market expansion and the commodification of anything outwith the exchange economy. 

This is the root cause that climate scientists shy away from.

Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points ‘imminent’ | Climate News | Al Jazeera