The Traveller Movement, which represents the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, said it had been “surprised” by the government’s promises to better protect the community against hate speech following the backlash to Jimmy Carr’s joke.

It accused the government of hypocrisy after ministers condemned a Holocaust joke by Jimmy Carr while pushing through a raft of legislation hostile to their way of life.

Greg Sproston, policy and campaigns manager for the Traveller Movement, said the government was currently trying to pass three bills – on policing, nationality and borders and elections – all of which will “have disproportionately negative impacts” on the GRT community. He added that a national strategy to reduce inequality in the community announced over two years ago “still has not materialised”.

“If the government is serious about protecting and supporting these communities, they would scrap this discriminatory legislation and bring forward the strategy without delay,” he said.

The policing bill is especially controversial within the GRT community as it would give police powers to move travellers’ camps if anyone complained, regardless of whether a crime had been committed.

A recent survey by University of Birmingham researchers found that 44% of people in the UK had negative attitudes towards GRT people, making them the “least liked group”, nearly double the level for Muslims, who were the second group to receive the most prejudice.

Research by the Traveller Movement in 2017 found that 91% of GRT people had experienced discrimination, which it described as “the last acceptable form of racism”. These attitudes have a profound impact on areas such as employment and education, where GRT people underperform, and the criminal justice system, where they are over-represented.

Rosa Cisneros, a member of the GRT community who researches Romani culture at Coventry University, said she was “sad but not surprised” by Carr’s joke.

“This situation has highlighted that anti-Gypsyism and Romaphobia still exists today. For me, it isn’t about censoring Jimmy Carr or being offended or me being part of the ‘woke’ brigade that I want to just cancel a show or infringe on someone’s freedom of speech and his rights. No, I am utterly horrified that we live in a space where such harmful and hateful speech is accepted and seen as a joke.”

Roma accuse government of hypocrisy over Jimmy Carr joke | Jimmy Carr | The Guardian

 Just 15.5% of the world’s coastal regions remain ecologically intact, according to a study, led by researchers at the University of Queensland, that used satellite data to examine the extent to which human activities have encroached on coastlines around the globe.

It found that up to 2013 – the latest year for which the data was available – few intact coastlines remained.  The situation certainly would not have improved since 2013.

The small areas of the coast that remain undamaged by pressures such as fishing, agriculture, urban development, mining and roads were mostly in Canada, followed by Russia, Greenland, Chile, Australia and the United States.

Very few intact areas and often high levels of degradation were found in island nations, much of Europe, and countries including Vietnam, India and Singapore.

Coastal regions containing seagrasses, savannah and coral reefs had the highest levels of human pressure.

James Watson, of the University of Queensland, said remoteness didn’t guarantee coastlines would remain intact, pointing to mining and particularly fishing as industries causing environmental decline in those places.

He said he had expected Madagascar, Namibia and northern Australia would all retain large areas of intact coastline, but it had not proved to be consistently the case.

“It shocks me how pervasive fishing is. It’s just everywhere. You can’t avoid it,” he said. “These remote places around the world, you’re seeing fishing impacts.”

Barely 15% of the world’s coastal regions remain ecologically intact, study says | Coastlines | The Guardian

 The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has forecast that fewer births and lower-than-expected life expectancy will end “natural” population growth. 

By 2025 there will be more deaths than births in the UK, the statistics agency said. 

The ONS estimated in 2014 that the population would reach almost 75m by 2040. But statisticians now say it will reach just 71m by 2045.

 This means immigration will be the only driver of population growth from 2030 onwards:

This year, for the first time in recent history, India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement levels, which means its population is set to start shrinking much earlier than thought. 

As a result, UN projections about population growth will probably have to be revised, and we will reach the point at which the world’s population is shrinking sooner than we all thought. 

The War Prayer

 BP and Shell are on course to make a combined profit of almost £40bn this year from the rocketing price of petrol and gas. Gas prices increased ninefold from a year earlier in the run-up to Christmas and remain five times higher than the level in January 2020. Oil prices have jumped from below $40 a barrel in the first lockdown to more than $80 a barrel. Several oil industry analysts have forecast oil prices continuing to rise above $100 a barrel this year, pushing oil company profits even higher.

Anti-poverty campaigners described the profits of oil producers as “obscene”.

BP, which extracts oil in the North Sea, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, is this week expected to announce annual pre-tax profits in 2021 of more than £12bn, before signalling that it is on course to make a £15.5bn profit in 2022.

Last week Shell reported annual profits of £14.3bn, which analysts believe will grow to £23.6bn by the end of its financial year in June.

Shell and BP have channelled £147bn to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks over the past decade, with rival North Sea producers and the big six energy suppliers contributing another £47bn. BP is expected to use its stronger cashflows to hand a larger dividend to shareholders and buyback shares to improve its value on the stock market.

Danni Hewson, a financial analyst at the stockbroker AJ Bell, said, “It’s hard not to paint big energy companies as villains when they and their shareholders are profiting from the rising prices that are making life miserable for many hardworking people. Both businesses have made huge pledges but the proportion of spend they apportion to green projects is still woefully tiny. Such a gesture would take the sting out of their current good fortune, while benefiting both shareholders and the general public.”

Tessa Khan, an international climate change and human rights lawyer and founder of campaign group Uplift, said it was “obscene” Shell’s shareholders were getting rich at a time when people face “real hardship”.

“In 2020, not only did Shell not pay any tax in the UK, the only country in which it operates where it didn’t, Shell picked up nearly £100m from taxpayers in rebates.”

£40bn profits for BP and Shell fuel calls for windfall tax on energy firms | Cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Awareness of Romania’s role in the Holocaust, at home and abroad, is far less than that of the Nazis’ role. But in Romanian-controlled territories under the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews, plus some 12,000 Roma, were killed during the war. 

 In Transnistria, a territory in occupied southern Ukraine that was controlled by Romania, a close ally to Nazi Germany for most of the war, there existed  150 camps and ghettos operated where hundreds of thousands of Jews were brutalized, exploited, and murdered. Many died of starvation; some succumbed to disease or exposure; some were executed. At the Pechera camp, the gates of which sported a wooden sign that read “Death Camp,” hunger was such that cases of cannibalism were reported

A late 2021 study by the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania “Elie Wiesel,” showed that 40% of respondents were not interested in the Holocaust. Nearly two-thirds of the 32% who agreed that the Holocaust took place in Romania mistakenly identified the deportation of Jews to “camps controlled by Nazi Germany.”

Stefan Cristian Ionescu, a historian and Holocaust expert at Northwestern University, said that most Romanians “think that it’s a responsibility of Nazi Germany.”

“I think a lot of Romanians still have a problem accepting that the Antonescu regime and the Romanian authorities … were involved in the Holocaust,” he said. “In the mass murder, deportation, and dispossession of Jews in Romania, and in occupied territories such as Transnistria.” 

Romanian lawmakers passed a bill last fall to add Holocaust education to the national school curriculum, a move that was applauded by many. But it was met with controversy in January when the far-right Alliance for Romanian Unity, which holds seats in parliament, called it a “minor topic” and an “ideological experiment.”

Book aims to shine light on Romanian role in the Holocaust | AP News

British households face the worst squeeze on record, as chancellor Rishi Sunak warned that even middle earners will “feel the pinch” in the months ahead.

“The price rise is so significant that it’s not just those families who are on benefits that are going to feel the pinch, it’s actually middle-income families as well. Families that are working hard, they’re not on welfare; this will be a significant increase for them,” Mr Sunak told reporters.

 The Bank of England  Andrew Bailey said inflation was not expected to return to normal levels until early 2024, with pay rise struggling to keep up.

Bailey told BBC Radio’s Today programme: “It is going to be a difficult period ahead, I readily admit, because we all get we are already seeing and we’re going to see a reduction in real income. 

With workers’ pay rises averaging below 5 per cent and taxes set to rise in April too, it means households here face the biggest fall in their real incomes since comparable records began 30 years ago.

 Woodside is a wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb.  It is home to some tech oligarchs such as Scott Cook and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. 

The median home price in the town is $5.5m, and the median household income is more than $250,000. The landscape is scattered with sizable mansions.

The wealthy have said it cannot approve the development of new duplexes or fourplexes to ease the statewide housing shortage. As California pushes to expand housing amid a crisis of housing affordability and homelessness, communities across the state have resisted efforts to build more densely, often using the state’s strict environmental laws as a shield. With SB 9 taking effect this year, cities across the state also sought to pass design restrictions, or designate historic districts and sites in a scramble to find loopholes in the law.

SB 9 is a a new California measure that makes it easier to build multi-unit housing in neighborhoods previously reserved for single-family homes. But a clause in the measure exempts areas that are considered habitat for protected species. “Given that Woodside – in its entirety” is habitat for mountain lions that environmental groups are petitioning to list as threatened or endangered under the state’s Endangered Species Act, “no parcel within Woodside is currently eligible for an SB 9 project”, the town’s planning director wrote. 

Housing advocates, have accused the town of cynically using environmental concerns to avoid compliance with state law. “This is nimbyism disguised as environmentalism,” said Scott Wiener, a California senator who co-authored SB 9. “The notion that building duplexes hurts mountain lions – it’s just ridiculous.”

Winston Vickers, director of the Mountain Lion Project at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, explained, “Any development should be done with careful consideration of whether it is going to impact a nearby travel corridor, green belt or large adjacent habitat area for mountain lions,” Vickers said. “But to say that any expansion of housing, anywhere in a given city, would likely impact mountain lions is likely a bit of a stretch.”

Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing | California | The Guardian

 10% of the 8 billion people on earth are already undernourished with 3 billion lacking healthy diets, and the land and water resources farmers rely on stressed to “a breaking point.” And by 2050 there will be 2 billion more mouths to feed, warns a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

 “Human-induced degradation affects 34% (1,660 million hectares) of agricultural land, the FAO reports. “The treatment of soils with inorganic fertilizers to increase or sustain yields has had significant adverse effects on soil health, and has contributed to freshwater pollution induced by run-off and drainage.”

The FAO reports also that globally, agriculture accounts for 72 percent of all surface and groundwater withdrawals, mainly for irrigation, which is depleting groundwater aquifers in many regions. 

Climate change exacerbates farmers’ challenges by making weather more extreme and less reliable. The FAO reports that 31% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agri-food systems. Extreme heat can stress crops and farm workers while increasing evaporation of water from soil and transpiration from plants, thus amplifying agricultural water demands. Here too, it’s not all bad news: Agricultural productivity is expected to increase in regions that are currently relatively cold, but decrease in places that are hotter and drier, especially as climate change exacerbates droughts.

For example, as the primary or sole producer of many of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, California effectively acts as America’s garden. But climate change is exacerbating droughts and water shortages in the state, and farmers are struggling to adapt. About 80% of all almonds in the world are grown in California, generating $6 billion in annual revenue, but almonds are a very water-intensive crop. As a result, some farmers have been forced to tear up their lucrative almond orchards. It’s a stark reminder that “adaptation” can sound easy on paper, but in practice can sometimes be painful and costly.

Regenerative agriculture is a simple idea, instead of using pesticides, irrigation systems, and heavy tilling machinery, cover crops are used during the off season to keep the moisture and nutrients in the soil. That also controls the weeds. Rotations of crops and livestock from season to season, allows worms do the work that machines do elsewhere. 

The state of the world’s land and water resources for food and agriculture | Land & Water | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations | Land & Water | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org)

 Each year on average more than 3 million people die from zoonotic diseases, those that spill over from wildlife into humans. The analysis assesses every zoonotic virus over the last century known to have killed more than 10 people, including the Spanish flu, repeated bird flu outbreaks, Marburg virus, Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, Nipah, West Nile, Sars, Chikungunya, Zika and Covid-19.

Wildlife is known to harbour vast numbers of viruses, and outbreaks are increasing in frequency and severity. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, experts have repeatedly warned that the root causes must be tackled. Inaction has left the world playing an “ill-fated game of Russian roulette with pathogens”, they have said, and protecting nature is vital to escape an “era of pandemics”.

  Scientists heavily criticise approaches by global bodies and governments that focus only on preventing the spread of new viruses once they have infected humans, rather than tackling the root causes as well. “That premise is one of the greatest pieces of folly of modern times,” said Prof Aaron Bernstein, of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. 

“Our salvation comes cheap because prevention is much cheaper than cures,” Bernstein said. “If Covid-19 taught us anything, it is that we absolutely cannot rely on post-spillover strategies alone to protect us. Spending only five cents on the dollar can help prevent the next tsunami of lives lost to pandemics by stopping the wave from ever emerging, instead of paying trillions to pick up the pieces.”

Bernstein said action to stop pandemics at source had been ignored because “ this primary prevention does not result in profits for corporations,” he said.

Failure to prevent pandemics at source is ‘greatest folly’, say scientists | Conservation | The Guardian