316 people are shot every day in the U.S.A  and 106 of them die.

To get a full picture of the gun violence epidemic, many experts say it’s important to look at not just the number of people killed but those who have survived gunshots and will likely need support for years to come.

  316 people are shot every day in the U.S.A  and 106 of them die.

To get a full picture of the gun violence epidemic, many experts say it’s important to look at not just the number of people killed but those who have survived gunshots and will likely need support for years to come.

Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’

Venue: Fircroft College, Birmingham

Dates: 14th-16th July 2000

Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’ – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

Transferred from tape cassettes. Some of the discussion sections are of very poor quality. The worst parts have been deleted and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.

1 An Evening With William Morris – Edwin Walters (14th July 2000)

2 The Utopian Tradition – Steve Coleman (15th July 2000)

3 Morris and the Romantic Movement – Ron Cook (15th July 2000)

4 The Stateless Society – Richard Headicar (15th July 2000)

5 A Dream of John Ball – Adam Buick (16th July 2000)

6 From Nowhere to Somewhere – Paddy Shannon and Stan Parker (16th July 2000)

Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’

Venue: Fircroft College, Birmingham

Dates: 14th-16th July 2000

Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’ – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

Transferred from tape cassettes. Some of the discussion sections are of very poor quality. The worst parts have been deleted and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.

1 An Evening With William Morris – Edwin Walters (14th July 2000)

2 The Utopian Tradition – Steve Coleman (15th July 2000)

3 Morris and the Romantic Movement – Ron Cook (15th July 2000)

4 The Stateless Society – Richard Headicar (15th July 2000)

5 A Dream of John Ball – Adam Buick (16th July 2000)

6 From Nowhere to Somewhere – Paddy Shannon and Stan Parker (16th July 2000)

 Breaking the Silence (BtS), an Israeli charity staffed by IDF  veterans, said its new publication shows that the Israeli military is increasingly part of sustaining an “ecosystem of violence” in the Palestinian occupied territories because they provide a “cloak of protection” for the settlers who are becoming more aggressive. Israel’s security forces are complicit in a “drastic surge” in violence committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

BtS’s advocacy director, Ori Givati, their new report, shows “that there is no action nor will from the government or the military to stop settlers from attacking”. He explained that “This is part of a very well-planned strategic mission of the settlers to take over more and more of Palestinian land,” he said.

He said that “Settler violence is not committed in a vacuum. They are the biggest criminal enterprise in Israel, and not only are they immune from repercussions but they receive embracement from the military and government.”

BtS said its report illustrates the impunity of violent settlers to legal consequence, the lack of clear orders for soldiers regarding managing settlers and what the group calls the “duplicitous relationship’” between settlers and soldiers, “at times nurturing close relationship with the soldiers, and at the next moment enacting violence towards them”.

Data from the United Nations and, separately, data collated by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, shows a marked increase in violent incidents committed by Israeli settlers compared with previous years.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows that more Palestinians were injured either by settlers or members of the Israeli security forces in attacks in the first six months of this year than in the whole of 2020. This was almost on par with the yearly total in 2019.

According to B’Tselem, they have logged a 33 per cent increase in attacks during the first six months of 2021 compared with the same period last year. The group said this was “enacted with an increasingly open cooperation by Israel’s security forces and with the full backing of Israeli authorities”.

 B’Tselem told The Independent. “This violence is a constant element of Israel’s apartheid regime, aspiring to remove Palestinians from their lands in order to facilitate their takeover,” it added.

According to Israeli monitoring group Peace Now, the surge in violence also tallies with a spike in settlement expansion in the West Bank – in particular, the soaring numbers of outposts.

“Settlers see themselves as a state within a state,” the former captain said. “Some of them openly talk about arming militia groups in order to fight the Israeli army if they ever change policy and try to enforce the laws against the Palestinians against them.”

 Thousands of Hungarians have joined the annual Budapest Pride march to support LGBTQ people and protest against a law that limits teaching about homosexuality and transgender issues in schools.

Demonstrators at the march through the streets of central Budapest on Saturday said the legislation was divisive. Organisers said in a statement the rally would show opposition to “power-hungry politicians” and reject intimidation of LGBTQ people.

“Instead of protecting minorities, the Fidesz-Christian Democrat government is using laws to make members of the LGBTQ community outcasts in their own country,” they said.

Populist Victor Orbán owes much of his success to a tough line on immigration but that issue has receded from the political agenda, so his focus has shifted to gender and sexuality.

 Adding to the woes of Lebanon is a report from the United Nations that has warned that more than four million people in Lebanon, including one million refugees, risk losing access to safe water.

“UNICEF estimates that most water pumping will gradually cease across the country in the next four to six weeks.”

The UN agency said that maintenance costs incurred in US dollars, funding shortages and the parallel collapse of the power grid were rapidly destroying the water sector.

UNICEF said that should the public water supply system collapse, water costs could jump by 200 percent a month as water would be secured from private water suppliers.

The UN agency said it needed $40m a year to secure the minimum levels of fuel, chlorine, spare parts and maintenance required to keep critical systems operational.

“Unless urgent action is taken, hospitals, schools and essential public facilities will be unable to function,” UNICEF Representative in Lebanon, Yukie Mokuo, said.

Lebanon’s economic meltdown has propelled more than half of its population into poverty and seen its currency lose more than 90 percent of its value in less than two years. The financial crisis has translated into severe shortages of basic goods such as fuel and medicine as dollars run dry. The Lebanese pound, which for years was pegged to the US dollar, has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the past 18 months. Electricity in most places is barely available an hour a day while the fuel needed to power generators is also in short supply. Basic medicines have been missing from pharmacy shelves for months and private hospitals warned on Thursday they were “hours away” from losing all power supply.

Millions of Lebanese risk losing access to safe water: UNICEF | Middle East News | Al Jazeera

 Is it a coincidence or evidence of a global pattern?

The monsoon season in India lasts from June to September each year.

Torrential downpours have lashed India’s western coast in recent days, leaving dozens missing near the financial capital of Mumbai and causing the worst floods in decades in the resort state of Goa and  Maharashtra.

“People have lost virtually everything,” said Goa’s health minister, Vishwajit Rane, adding the state had not seen such heavy rains in half a century.

In Maharashtra, major rivers are at risk of bursting their banks. Some 90,000 people have been evacuated so far in the state.

Roxy Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said the monsoon flooding was “unprecedented, but not unexpected”. He tweeted: “We already see a threefold rise in widespread extreme rains that cause floods across India.”

The climate crisis is making India’s monsoons stronger, according to a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report published in April that forecast dire consequences for food, farming and the economy affecting nearly a fifth of the world’s population.

India floods: rescuers search for survivors among mud and debris | India | The Guardian

 About 9 million Americans are estimated to have lost work due to the pandemic but received no unemployment benefits.

Millions of workers experienced severe problems in receiving benefits throughout the pandemic. Workers across America faced long delays in receiving unemployment benefits as state systems were quickly overwhelmed with the mass influx of applications that caused months-long backlogs. Meanwhile, workers who made errors on their applications had missing records or had their claims flagged had their benefits stopped – and often had difficulty restarting them once problems were resolved.

The impacts were detrimental to workers around the US, who fell behind on rent or mortgage or car payments, experienced utility shutoffs and relied on food banks and assistance programs to feed themselves and their families.

‘My savings were gone’: millions who lost work during Covid faced benefit system chaos | US news | The Guardian

Private equity is also known as the “billionaire factory”, where already super-rich firms have used low-interest rates and their considerable financial firepower to embark on a multi-billion dollar buying spree this year. The money-spinning and highly secretive private equity industry – which buys up companies, often using more debt than stock market investors would tolerate, then floats or sells them on again.

The London firm Bridgepoint floated on the stock market and left 166 of Bridgepoint’s employees sitting on a combined £2.5bn windfall. The firm’s executive chair, William Jackson, sold £7.8m worth of shares, and hung on to a stake worth about £42m. Frédéric Pescatori, Bridgepoint’s head in France and southern Europe, cashed in about £16.5m and still had shares worth almost £85m. The finance chief, Adam Jones, sold £4m worth but retained shares worth £22.8m, following the stock’s 29% surge on its debut on Wednesday.

Bridgepoint also extended its largesse to well-known City figures persuaded to join the board. Archie Norman, chair of Marks & Spencer, received a £1.75m fee to become senior independent director (on top of his annual £200,000 fee for serving on the board). Three other non-execs, including Carolyn McCall, chief executive of ITV, were also handed £500,000 for joining the board.

Bridgepoint –  previously owning Pret A Manger and is now the owner of Burger King UK and the arts and crafts supplier Hobbycraft, and has a minority stake in the food chain Itsu among its £23bn of assets under management – is just one of dozens of private equity firms across the world reporting record-breaking returns as cheap debt and lockdowns, which have forced many companies to seek investment, have created the perfect conditions for deals.

Lord Prem Sikka, emeritus professor of accounting at the University of Essex said private equity firms had “devoured Debenhams, Maplins, Toys R Us, Bernard Matthews, care homes and much more”, adding that high leverage and aggressive tax planning were the industry’s prime tools.

Private equity firms have struck a record 6,298 deals worth $513bn (£373bn) so far this year – the most since records began in 1980. So far this year, PE firms have announced 124 deals for UK companies (both takeovers and minority stakes) with a combined value of £41.5bn.

Ludovic Phalippou, a professor of financial economics at Oxford University’s Saïd business school, accused private equity chiefs of paying themselves vast management fees.

In the paper, entitled An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory, Phalippou said private equity chiefs had paid themselves about $230bn in performance fees since 2006 despite on average achieving about the same return as a simple US stock market tracker.

“This wealth transfer from several hundred million pension scheme members to a few thousand people working in private equity might be one of the largest in the history of modern finance,” Phalippou said. He said the fees, which were ultimately paid by investors into private equity funds such as pensions, had helped turn 19 more private equity bosses into billionaires since 2005, taking the total number of private equity chiefs with nine zero fortunes to 22.

Bonanzas in private equity world spark call for tax relief limit (theguardian.com)