Australia has seen its lowest birthrate in more than a decade.

In 2020, there were 295,796 babies born to 291,712 mothers. This represents a fall from 66 women per 1,000 giving birth in 2007 to 56 per 1,000 in 2020.

There has also been an increase in the average age of first-time mothers, from 28.3 years in 2010 to 29.6 years in 2020. The average age of all mothers has continued to increase over time, with mothers now giving birth at an average age of 30.9 years, up from 30 years in 2010.

It also shows there was a decline in the proportion of teenage mothers, from 3.8% in 2010 to 1.8% in 2020. Two in every seven mothers aged 35 or over were giving birth for the first time.

Australian birthrate falls to lowest in over a decade | Australia news | The Guardian

 Thousands of Israeli settlers have attempted to set up new illegal settlement outposts in six locations across the occupied West Bank. The event was organised by the Nachala settler movement, which says that its goal is “to establish new communities in Judea and Samaria,” using the Hebrew name for the occupied West Bank.

Groups of Israeli youth and families arrived at the earmarked locations in buses, on foot and in vehicles throughout Wednesday, bearing Israeli flags and camping tents under the protection of the Israeli army and police. They gathered in locations near the occupied West Bank cities of Ramallah, Salfit and Hebron.

The Israeli settlers were allowed to spend the night at the locations but the majority of the encampments were removed by Thursday, according to Israeli media reports. Israeli forces blocked roads and set up checkpoints for Palestinians across entrances to towns and villages.

Palestinians fear revenge attacks after settler outposts removal | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.

The vast total captured by petro-states and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. 

“I was really surprised by such high numbers – they are enormous,” said Verbruggen, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a former lead author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “It’s a huge amount of money,” he said. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

The rents captured by exploiting the natural resources are unearned, Verbruggen said: “It’s real, pure profit. They captured 1% of all the wealth in the world without doing anything for it.” 

The average annual profit from 1970-2020 was $1tn but he said he expected this to be twice as high in 2022.

The profit-grabbing is holding back the world’s action on the climate emergency, he said: “It’s really stripping money from the alternatives. In every country, people have so much difficulty just to pay the gas and electricity bills and oil [petrol] bill, that we don’t have money left over to invest in renewables.”

 Prof Paul Ekins, at University College London, says, “But the fact remains that, over the last 50 years, companies have made a huge amount of money by producing fossil fuels, the burning of which is the major cause of climate change. This is already causing untold misery round the world and is a major threat to future human civilisation.

Verbruggen said oil-rich nations, such as Russia and those in the OPEC cartel, including Saudi Arabia, kept rents high by restricting supply: “They change the fundamentals of the markets.” Military action, such as the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and political action, such as the embargo on oil exports from Iran, had also increased the rents, he said. If all available oil and gas could be freely supplied to the market, the price of conventional oil would be $20-30 a barrel, Verbruggen said, compared with about $100 today.

 If the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C, the target agreed by nations in the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Mark Campanale, at Carbon Tracker, said, “ …this means [international oil companies alone] forgoing around $100 trillion of potential revenues. You can see why oil oligarchs and nations controlled by political elites want to keep their fossil fuel rents, the source of their power.”

May Boeve, the head of campaign group 350.org, said: “These profits have enabled the fossil fuel industry to combat all efforts to switch our energy systems…”

Revealed: oil sector’s ‘staggering’ $3bn-a-day profits for last 50 years | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

The climate and ecological crises are a legacy of systemic racism and people of colour suffer disproportionately from their harms, a Greenpeace UK report says. Globally, the report says, it is people of colour who, despite having contributed the least to the climate emergency, are now “disproportionately losing their lives and livelihoods” by the millions because of it.

“The environmental emergency is the legacy of colonialism,” the report says. This was because colonialism had “established a model through which the air and lands of the global south have been … used as places to dump waste the global north does not want”, the report says. It adds that similar inequalities are visible in the UK, where almost half of all of the waste-burning incinerators are in areas with high populations of people of colour. 

In London, black people are more likely to breathe illegal levels of air pollution, and black people in England are nearly four times as likely as white people to have no access to outdoor space at home, it says.

The report traces the roots of the environmental emergency to colonialism, slavery and the plunder of resources from the global south. Greenpeace says it is making environmental justice a central pillar of its work.

“We argue that the outcomes of the environmental emergency cannot be understood without reference to the history of British and European colonialism, which set in motion a global model for racialised resource extraction from people of colour.”

Climate emergency is a legacy of colonialism, says Greenpeace UK | Greenpeace | The Guardian

 Sri Lanka’s president may have changed, but the dire conditions of the people hasn’t.

6.7 million people are now in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Families are facing shortages of food, fuel, cooking gas, essential supplies, and medicines as the humanitarian impacts of the economic crisis continue to multiply.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) holds particularly grave concerns for 2.4 million people already living below the poverty line who are among the most affected by the loss of livelihoods, food shortages and spiralling cost of essential items.

Sri Lanka Red Cross Secretary General, Mahesh Gunasekara, said: “We need international support now to help millions of people pull their lives back together and avoid the worse. We need to act early to ensure lives can be saved.”

IFRC’s Special advisor for Humanitarian Crises and Emergencies Maryann Horne said: With no income, people are barely able to cope, and are now selling their assets, getting into debt, being forced to cut down on food while many children are not able to go to school. The emergency appeal will allow the most urgent humanitarian needs to be met. It will help prevent those most vulnerable at a time people have no cash, no jobs, and no fuel.”

Sri Lanka on brink of humanitarian crisis – Sri Lanka | ReliefWeb

Some of the arguments of the peace movements begin with the plausibly-sounding statement that “war is the most urgent of problems, so it must be solved first.” We claim that the Socialist Party and its companion parties have the only real case against war. This must be thought about by workers not as a cheap bit of self-promotion “pushing the party,” but as a serious statement, which, we think, all the evidence upholds.

 Around the world, millions of refugees and migrants in vulnerable situations, such as low-skilled migrant workers, face poorer health outcomes than their host communities, especially where living and working conditions are sub-standard, according to the first WHO World report on the health of refugees and migrants. 

For example, a recent meta-analysis of more than 17 million participants from 16 countries across five WHO regions found that, compared with non-migrant workers, migrant workers were less likely to use health services and more likely to have an occupational injury. Evidence also showed that a significant number of the 169 million migrant workers globally are engaged in dirty, dangerous, and demanding jobs and are at greater risk of occupational accidents, injuries, and work-related health problems than their non-migrant counterparts, conditions exacerbated by their often limited or restricted access to and use of health services.

“Today there are some one billion migrants globally, about one in eight people. The experience of migration is a key determinant of health and wellbeing, and refugees and migrants remain among the most vulnerable and neglected members of many societies,” said Dr Tedros, Director-General World Health Organization. “This report is the first to offer a global review of refugee and migrant health; it calls for urgent and collective action to ensure they can access health care services that are sensitive to their needs. It also illustrates the pressing need to address the root causes of ill health and to radically reorient health systems to respond to a world increasingly in motion.”

“Health does not begin or end at a country’s border. Migratory status should therefore not be a discriminatory factor but a policy driver on which to build and strengthen healthcare and social and financial protection. We must reorient existing health systems into integrated and inclusive health services for refugees and migrants, in line with the principles of primary health care and universal health coverage,” said Dr Santino Severoni, Director of WHO’s Health and Migration Programme.

World report on the health of refugees and migrants – World | ReliefWeb

WHO Report

https://tinyurl.com/3ep89t54

 The World Health Organization estimates that more than two-thirds of people living with HIV are in Africa and that 460,000 people on the continent – 67% of the global total – died from HIV-related causes in 2020.

Approved in the US in December and in the UK the following month, cabotegravir is an injectable, long-acting medicine that needs to be taken only every few months, as opposed to the daily pills that characterise most pre-exposure prophylaxis (PReP) regimes.

It is proving to be one of the most effective methods to prevent HIV transmission and the ease of taking it means it could be a lifeline for so many, including young women who fear of stigma if they are seen taking medication for HIV, gay men and transgender people facing repression and homophobia, and sex workers who need better options.

However, the drug is understood to be too expensive for low- and middle-income countries and funders.

“While many in the global north are getting access to long-acting HIV prevention tools and medicines, Africans are overwhelmingly denied the opportunity,” said Lilian Mworeko, regional coordinator of the International Community of Women Living with HIV Eastern Africa (ICWEA). “It is worse for groups who continue to be left behind like adolescent girls and young women. As long as the price is unaffordably high for our governments and for funders to purchase, we will continue to be locked out from being able to access them. They are vital to preventing new HIV infections and they could become transformational in treatment. Our message is simple: all of our lives matter.”

Leading figures urge drugs firm to lower price of ‘game-changing’ HIV prevention drug | Global health | The Guardian

For many, the threat of Covid-19 has receded and they have moved on. 

For many others, it remains a risk.

 Just one in seven people in low-income countries fully vaccinated. By comparison, nearly three in four people in high-income nations have been vaccinated for around a year.

The international target to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population against Covid by mid-2022 was missed because poorer countries were at the “back of the queue” when vaccines were rolled out.

“Unless we achieve equitable action in addressing this pandemic, it will always remain with us in the world,” said Kavengo Matundu, Africa coordinator for Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), who has been working with frontline groups on the Covid response. “It has shown that it is capable of mutating into anything, and can become something more dangerous than the original.”

 “As much as there’s all this naive and hopeful talk, when push comes to shove, we cannot count on rich countries to do the right thing,” said Maaza Seyoum, Global South convenor of the People’s Vaccine Alliance.  “The poorest countries in the world have ended up at the back of the queue, creating the sense that some lives matter more than others.”

According to figures as of 10 July, only 15.8% of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated, compared with 55% in lower-middle income countries, 73.5% in high-income countries and 78.7% in upper-middle income countries. Africa has the lowest number of vaccinated people. Seven of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest rates of full-vaccination are in Africa. The other three countries are Papua New Guinea, Haiti and Yemen. The UK’s booster vaccination rate is already far higher than these countries’ standard vaccination rates.

For the period up to 9 June, shows that Canada, Australia and the UK have bought enough vaccine doses to vaccinate their populations several times over: 11.1, 9.9 and 7.6 doses per person, respectively. In contrast, South Africa was able to buy the equivalent of 0.5 doses per person. The African Union’s purchase of 330m doses of Moderna and Janssen vaccines equated to just 0.2 doses a person across the bloc. Neither AstraZeneca vaccine and Moderna are suitable for countries without decent transport and cold chain infrastructure.

Seyoum said: “Rich countries keep thinking that if they just protect themselves, they’re going to get out of the pandemic, but that is, on a public health front, completely ridiculous. It sounds trite, but as the head of WHO said last year: none of us is safe until we’re all safe.”

Covid vaccine figures lay bare global inequality as global target missed | Global development | The Guardian

 It was reported in 2019 that thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border to donate blood as often as twice a week, earning as much as $400 per month. Selling blood has been illegal in Mexico since 1987. The Mexican nationals selling their blood previously entered the U.S. on what are known as B-1 or B-2 visas, documents that allow visitors to shop, do business or visit tourist sites.

Since the United States blocked Mexicans from entering the country to sell their blood, the two global pharmaceutical companies, Grifols and CSL, that operate the largest number of plasma clinics along the border say they have seen a sharp drop in supply.