Six independent experts appointed by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council on Wednesday warned that “hundreds of Venezuelan cancer patients could die” as a result of U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela. The U.S. in August 2017 began to unilaterally impose sanctions on Venezuela in violation of international law as well as the charter of the Organization of American States and other international treaties the U.S. has signed.

U.S. sanctions “killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans in just their first year (2017–18), and almost certainly tens of thousands more since then,” according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The U.N.-appointed human rights experts argued Wednesday that U.S. sanctions negatively affected a program run by the Simón Bolívar Foundation, the charitable arm of Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a U.S.-based refiner owned by PDVSA.

The program “helped cancer patients, including many children, travel abroad for transplants and for other live-saving treatment,” the experts said. “Hundreds of these patients used to be linked to a national transplant program with the Venezuelan government, but their treatment was discontinued” because of U.S. sanctions.

According to the U.N. Human Rights Council, “There are some 190 cancer patients on a waiting list for foreign treatment, and some 14 children, including three toddlers, died between 2017 and 2020 waiting for treatment under the program.”

“Third countries, groups of countries, banks, and private companies have been overly cautious in dealings with Venezuela because they fear unintentionally violating U.S. sanctions,” said the human rights advocates. “As a consequence, money cannot be transferred out of Venezuela, and some patients have been stranded, destitute, in countries where they went for treatment.”

The U.N.-appointed experts said the U.S. and other countries, “must take full responsibility for the effect their actions have on the fundamental rights to life and health of every individual around the world.”

the U.N. special rapporteurs said that “targeting PDVSA as a way to control the political agenda of Venezuela has had devastating consequences for hundreds of people undergoing treatment for transplant rejection, both in Venezuela and abroad.” They added that “people on a state waiting list for transplants have also been informed that their treatments will not continue.”

“States have an obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of every person affected by direct international action, even those outside their jurisdiction or effective control, no matter what their original intent was,” said the human rights experts.

“The right to health and the right to life are fundamental for every individual around the world,” they added. “We call on all states, banks, and private companies to take full responsibility for the effects of their actions on individuals, and to withdraw sanctions, zero-risk, and over-compliance policies affecting core human rights.”

UN Experts Warn US Sanctions Endangering Lives of Venezuelan Cancer Patients | Common Dreams News

 Across Brazil, Latin America’s most populous nation, researchers say 19 million people have gone hungry since the start of a Covid outbreak that has killed more than 540,000. So far only about 16% of citizens have been fully vaccinated.

An additional 117 million people – more than half of Brazil’s population – experienced food insecurity.

There has been soaring unemployment. Nearly 8m jobs have been lost 

Economist Monica de Bolle said the government’s distribution of emergency payments last year had been wise and partly effective, keeping millions of families and many businesses afloat. But the failure to combine that policy, which has now been dramatically scaled back, with an effective public health response had been disastrous.

 “It’s really a terrible, terrible tragedy because we’ve wasted … the opportunity to bring this thing under control – and if we’d done that we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in now.”

 Things are dire. Residents of Rio’s 1,000-plus favelas, home to perhaps 20% of its population, are facing tough times as rising food prices compound their woes.

‘Hunger has returned’: Covid piles further misery on Brazil’s vulnerable | Brazil | The Guardian

The Chinese Communist Party’s inaugural congress was on 23rd 1921although the centennial celebrations began on the 1st of July. It has been a hundred years of delusion with many political commentators still bestowing praise and plaudits upon the CCP for its progress and perseverance.

China’s economic performance belies the inequality across the country. The have-nots still outnumber the haves by a huge margin. 

The very first line of the Chinese Communist party’s constitution declares it is “the vanguard of the Chinese working class” It mentions “revolution” eight times.

The thoughts of Chairman Mao have been devoid of meaning for years.  Instead the concept of “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics” was added to the party constitution in 1992 which became “Deng Xiaoping Theory”. Now it is President Xi’s position that is prominent and prevalent.

With over 1,058 billionaires, according to the 2021 Hurun Global Rich List, China now has more ultra-wealthy than any other country on Earth – including capitalist bastion the United States. China’s ultra-rich added an unprecedented $1.5 trillion to their wealth in 2020 at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The Communist Party maintains a monopoly of power and control. It is a conservative reactionary party bent on preserving the power of state capitalist elites Corruption thrives in areas under state control, such as land sales and infrastructure. The Chinese Communist Party helped to rationalise the existence of the state, wages, dictatorships, patriotism, investments, savings, inheritance, money, taxes and so forth, by apparently bestowing the title “socialist” as an implied prefix to all this evidence that conspicuously characterise a capitalist society.

According to Wikipedia statistics, the CCP currently has 90.59 million members. As of 30 June 2016, individuals who identify as farmers, herdsmen and fishermen make up 26 million members; members identifying as workers totalled 7.2 million. Another group, the “managing, professional and technical staff in enterprises and public institutions”, made up 12.5 million, 9 million identified as working in administrative staff and 7.4 million described themselves as party cadres.

For the Chinese Communist Party and the elites that buttress the political system, calls for more democracy is seen as a threat to their grip on power.

 Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the French luxury retail chain Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, or LVMH for short — has been vying for first place in the global personal wealth rankings all this spring. He currently sits in the second spot, with  $186.3 billion, behind only Jeff Bezos and in front of Elon Musk.

Arnault’s LVMH owns over 70 luxury brands, everything from Tiffany and Givenchy to Christian Dior. Much of those billions will be coming from that narrow slice of humanity that marketers to the super-rich have dubbed “ultra-high net worth individuals,” affluents who hold at least $30 million in net worth. Global wealth researchers at Knight Frank count some 520,000 of these ultras. LVMH, for its part, counts on their profligacy.  The world’s wealthy have found themselves with the wherewithal to buy enough luxury to make Arnault the world’s leading purveyor of nonessential amenities the richest man on the face of the Earth.

 Arnault, naturally, has a yacht. His 333-foot Symphony cost him $150 million a few years back and features a glass-bottom swimming pool on the main deck. Yachts this enormous require a sizeable outlay for annual expenses. Keeping the Symphony afloat, for instance, takes a 27-person crew. Owners of super yachts need to spend 10 percent of their boat’s purchase price on annual operating costs. Arnault is most likely spending $15 million a year to keep his superyacht in preparedness. Well over 99 percent of the world’s population, we should probably keep in mind, will labour their entire lives and not come close to ever amassing $15 million.

Germany’s Bremerhaven shipyard in March launched an eight-deck 476-foot-long superyacht  that set billionaire Roman Abramovich back $610 million. Abramovich has a nearly $20-billion net worth. If his investments return a modest 5 percent this year, he can pay for his 476-footer and still end the year comfortably richer than he rated when the year started.

Living Ever Larger in the Lap of Luxury – Consortiumnews

 The south-west of England will have the highest proportion of low-income workers affected by a £20-a-week cut later this year in universal credit payments, according to the TUC that says there is a widespread culture of low pay from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.  Four in 10 universal credit claimants in the south-west have a low-paid job that qualifies them for benefits, a larger percentage than any other region.

The rate of claimants who had a job in May was 42.1% in the south-west compared with 41.2% in the east Midlands, the next worst affected, and 36.7% in the West Midlands.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said 2.3 million working families, as well as those who rely solely on benefits, would see their incomes drop by more than £1,000 a year if the government presses ahead with a planned £20-a-week cut in universal credit from October. 

The prime minister’s west London Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat has 9,546 UC claimants of whom 3,665 are in work, 38.4% of the total. In the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire constituency of Richmond nearly half, 48%, of people receiving universal credit are in work. The TUC said: “It shows that even in wealthier parts of the UK the cut to universal credit will impact heavily on low-paid workers.”

6 million families claim UC and its predecessor, working families tax credit – twice the figure before the pandemic. More than 500,000 people were forced to file a claim during just nine days in March 2020 as the virus began to spread and the government announced the first lockdown. In the same month, ministers agreed a £20 rise in universal credit and tax credits as a one-year measure to help new claimants adjust to the extra costs of the pandemic. Estimates suggest it helped 700,000 people stay above the poverty line during the pandemic.

 Millions of people will still be in precarious jobs in October and unable to cope financially after a cut in benefits of more than £1,000 a year. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said more than 500,000 people, including 200,000 children, will be plunged into poverty when the government pushes through what it called “the largest single cut to the basic rate of social security since the second world war”.

About 6 in 10 of all single-parent families will experience their income falling by the equivalent of £1,040 per year after the befit cut, it said, imposing “the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state”.

Workers in south-west England hardest hit by Universal Credit cut | Universal credit | The Guardian

 The south-west of England will have the highest proportion of low-income workers affected by a £20-a-week cut later this year in universal credit payments, according to the TUC that says there is a widespread culture of low pay from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.  Four in 10 universal credit claimants in the south-west have a low-paid job that qualifies them for benefits, a larger percentage than any other region.

The rate of claimants who had a job in May was 42.1% in the south-west compared with 41.2% in the east Midlands, the next worst affected, and 36.7% in the West Midlands.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said 2.3 million working families, as well as those who rely solely on benefits, would see their incomes drop by more than £1,000 a year if the government presses ahead with a planned £20-a-week cut in universal credit from October. 

The prime minister’s west London Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat has 9,546 UC claimants of whom 3,665 are in work, 38.4% of the total. In the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire constituency of Richmond nearly half, 48%, of people receiving universal credit are in work. The TUC said: “It shows that even in wealthier parts of the UK the cut to universal credit will impact heavily on low-paid workers.”

6 million families claim UC and its predecessor, working families tax credit – twice the figure before the pandemic. More than 500,000 people were forced to file a claim during just nine days in March 2020 as the virus began to spread and the government announced the first lockdown. In the same month, ministers agreed a £20 rise in universal credit and tax credits as a one-year measure to help new claimants adjust to the extra costs of the pandemic. Estimates suggest it helped 700,000 people stay above the poverty line during the pandemic.

 Millions of people will still be in precarious jobs in October and unable to cope financially after a cut in benefits of more than £1,000 a year. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said more than 500,000 people, including 200,000 children, will be plunged into poverty when the government pushes through what it called “the largest single cut to the basic rate of social security since the second world war”.

About 6 in 10 of all single-parent families will experience their income falling by the equivalent of £1,040 per year after the befit cut, it said, imposing “the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state”.

Workers in south-west England hardest hit by Universal Credit cut | Universal credit | The Guardian

 Although pharmaceutical companies have raked in tens of billions of dollars in revenue from distributing vaccines, which were developed with public funding, they are hardly closer to enabling low-income countries to protect their populations. 

Last month, Oxfam reported that at the current rate, it would take 57 years for every person in the Global South to be fully vaccinated against the disease.

 Some political commentators claim that we in The Socialist Party only say statist countries like Cuba, the former Soviet Union’s etc have “state capitalism” and “not real socialism” when these regimes are clearly failing. 

In reality, The Socialist Party has always opposed state-run capitalist economies where there is still wage slavery, commodity production, buying and selling, and production only taking place when it is viable to do so.

Globally, one in four cities do not have money available to protect them from the impacts of the climate crisis. In a survey of over 800 cities, it was found that 43% of them, home to 400 million people, did not even have a plan in place to adapt to the looming crisis. 

The harsh reality is, that even if cities can afford to pay for flood prevention and storm damage, they will be completely at the mercy of diminished food supplies which will be obliterated by the monsters about to be unleashed on our unsuspecting global population.

With the planet only warming by just over a degree, natural-disaster loss events have more than tripled in the past forty years. Since 2004, the number of events has already doubled. Extreme storms around the world are anticipated to happen more frequently, and be more destructive, as the planet warms.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), or the Gulf Stream is the ocean current that begins in the warm Gulf of Mexico, carries warm water up the northeast coast of the United States, and across the Atlantic to Northern Europe. The Gulf Stream is often credited with stopping countries like the U.K. and Ireland from freezing over in winter. What has concerned scientists is that the current has been slowing down, and it is possible that it may ‘switch off’ completely. The slowing down is being caused by the increasing amount of freshwater melt coming off the Greenland ice sheets as a result of global warming.

Europe may avoid completely freezing over, the Gulf Stream, along with the North American Polar Jet Stream, are expected to drive extreme weather events. In research published in the journal Nature, scientists predict ‘climate chaos’. They expect the weather to be strongly impacted and temperatures on both sides of the Atlantic to vary more wildly from year to year. 

The jet stream is like the weather distribution manager for North America. It decides where to send high and low pressure, and how strong to make them. When the jet stream is managing the weather effectively, weather rushes along a torrent from west to east, bringing rain every three to five days. Unfortunately, as the Arctic warms, and the temperature difference between the equator and the North Pole narrows, the jet stream acts unpredictably. The flow is strongest when the temperature variance is highest, but as the Arctic is warming faster than the equator, the flow has slowed down.

The June 2019 fires in Alberta, Canada, were caused by a high-pressure ridge hanging out and causing drought and fire. Then further out east, low-pressure ridges cause rain and flooding which festers (33). Likewise, the jet stream was meandering slowly in an Omega pattern (Ω) in July 2021 and this helped cause the record heat and resulting wildfires in Canada and the western US. Whatever weather pattern emerges, be it a drought, heavy rainfall or heatwave; that pattern basically persists for longer and amplifies the associated risks.

It’s not only floods and wildfires that are being blamed on the lingering jet stream. The abnormally high number of tornados that hit America in May 2019, was also thought to be the work of the slower, wavering jet stream. It’s particularly difficult for scientists to pin the blame on climate change for this increase in tornados due to their rareness and the difficulty in observing their changes, but scientists believe a warming climate will help to produce the storms that manufacture tornados. 

Extreme storms around the world are anticipated to happen more frequently, and be more destructive, as the planet warms. From typhoons in the Pacific to cyclones in the Indian Ocean, and hurricanes in the Atlantic, the storms we have seen in the past few years will become the new norm until they too are overtaken by larger, more destructive storms.  

In Asia, there is evidence that typhoons are not only increasing in frequency, but they are getting stronger. They are beginning to threaten the region’s megacities.  Climate experts are warning cities from Tokyo to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Jakarta to prepare for future super-strength typhoons. Even smaller storms are thought to pose a risk to these metropolises as infrastructure losses are expected to rise from $3 trillion in 2005 to $35 trillion in 2070. In the coming decades as the tides surge, the winds rush, and the rains lash at both cityscapes and rural areas straddling the coast, the poorest will be hit hardest, and even at just half a degree of increased warming, 1.5 billion will be at high or extreme risk.

Africa will suffer devastating floods and storms leading to considerable disruption to farming. The population on the African continent is the fastest growing with annual rates of 2.5%, more than double that of any other landmass. As more and more people are added to the population, intense storms and flooding will damage vital food crops. Western and Central Africa will be the worst hit with Niger, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo among the most vulnerable to flooding. Scientists predict that the severe rainfall witnessed today will become seven or eight times more frequent by 2100.

Opinion | Are We Prepared for Pandora’s Box of Climate Catastrophes? | Simon Whalley (commondreams.org)

Johnson & Johnson’second-quarter profit soared 73 percent, thanks to strong sales growth across all of its businesses, particularly as the healthcare industry continued recovering from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The world’s biggest maker of healthcare products on Wednesday reported net income of $6.28bn, or $2.35 per share, in the quarter, up from $3.63bn, or $1.36 per share, a year earlier.

Revenue totalled $23.31bn, up 27.1 percent from $18.34bn in 2020’s second quarter.

J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine brought in just $164m in the quarter and a total of $264m so far this year. The vaccine has been plagued by concerns about some very rare side effects and the shutdown of the Maryland factory of J&J’s US contract manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions, due to contamination problems that have led to tens of millions of vaccine doses having to be trashed. It is unclear when – or if – the United States Food and Drug Administration will allow the factory to resume production. J&J has the only authorized vaccine that only requires one shot, so it had been expected to play a huge role in vaccinating people in rural areas and developing countries. Instead, the company has fallen far short of its supply commitments to the US, other governments and a World Health Organization-backed program to get affordable vaccines to poor and middle-income countries.

J&J’s profits soar 73 percent amid healthcare sector demand spike | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera