Russia borders Suomi (Finland)  in the East. Historically, the two countries have not had the most harmonious of relationships. Their present relationship could be described not just as frosty, but as icy.

“Soaring power costs and concerns of electricity blackouts this winter have pushed people in one of the world’s northernmost countries, Finland, to hoard firewood and refit their homes to cut power usage, Reuters has reported.

The loss of oil, gas, and electricity from Russia threatens to have a massive impact on the Nordic nation. Moreover, technical problems have limited output from a new domestic nuclear plant, triggering warnings of blackouts.

“Finland used to bring a third of its energy from Russia and now we are close to zero,” said Riku Huttunen, the director general of energy and climate policy at the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs.

“One could say that if we have minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) in the south and possibly minus 30 degrees up north, the risk of electricity shortage is very near,” Huttunen told Reuters.

Temperatures in Finland in winter often drop below -20C, while the cities get less than six hours of light a day in the darkest months of the year. This makes the country particularly vulnerable to the EU energy crunch, with a loss of power potentially exposing residents to life-threatening conditions in a matter of hours.

According to the Reuters report, since summer, the Finns have been hoarding torches, heat pumps, timers, solar panels, and firewood.

“We went three, four months without time off,” firewood producer Jari Saari told the media outlet, recounting how he received non-stop calls from customers looking to stock up.

“At one point we had 400 people waiting, I started to stress that what if I had promised to do too much,” Saari said.

The firewood producer noted that rising costs of timber, transport, and heating have pushed up the price for consumers, with a rough cubic meter of firewood now costing €120 ($128), up from the pre-crisis €85-90 euros.”

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Dave C.

 More than four months after the floods in Pakistan, up to 4 million children are still living near contaminated and stagnant flood waters, risking their survival and wellbeing, UNICEF warned.

Acute respiratory infections among children, a leading cause of child mortality worldwide, have skyrocketed in flood-stricken areas. 

In addition, the number of cases of children identified as suffering from severe acute malnutrition in flood-affected areas monitored by UNICEF nearly doubled between July and December as compared to 2021; an estimated 1.5 million children are still in need of lifesaving nutrition interventions.

“Children living in Pakistan’s flood-affected areas have been pushed to the brink,” said Abdullah Fadil, UNICEF Representative in Pakistan. “The rains may have ended, but the crisis for children has not. Nearly 10 million girls and boys are still in need of immediate, lifesaving support and are heading into a bitter winter without adequate shelter. Severe acute malnutrition, respiratory and water-borne diseases coupled with the cold are putting millions of young lives at risk.”

He continued, “…We know the climate crisis played a central role in supercharging the cascading calamities evident in Pakistan. We must do everything within our power to ensure girls and boys in Pakistan are able to fully recover from the current disaster, and to protect and safeguard them from the next one.”

Up to 4 million children in Pakistan still living next to stagnant and contaminated floodwater – Pakistan | ReliefWeb

  If the rich can live longer, the rich can get richer longer, compounding the already imbalanced spectrum of money, power, and control, 

Senolytics is a class of treatments that targets aged cells—which biologists call senescent cells—that accumulate in our bodies as we age. These cells seem to drive the ageing process—from causing cancers to neurodegeneration—and, conversely, removing them seems to slow it down, and perhaps even reverse it.

 Experiments in which mice were given a senolytic cocktail of dasatinib (a cancer drug) and quercetin (a molecule found in fruit and veg), not only did they live longer, but they were at lower risk of diseases including cancer, were less frail (they could run further and faster on the tiny mouse-sized treadmills used in the experiments) than their littermates not given the drugs.

Unity Biotechnology, founded by the Mayo Clinic scientists behind that mouse experiment and with investors including Jeff Bezos, which is trialing a range of senolytic drugs against diseases like macular degeneration (a cause of blindness) and lung fibrosis. There are many approaches under investigation, including small proteins that target senescent cells, vaccines to encourage the immune system to clear them out, and even gene therapy by a company called Oisín Biotechnologies, named after an Irish mythological character who travels to Tir na nÓg, the land of eternal youth.

 Other human trials include Proclara Biosciences’ protein GAIM, which clears up sticky “amyloid” proteins, or Verve Therapeutics’ gene therapy to reduce cholesterol by modifying a gene called PCSK9. 

“There are hundreds of millions of dollars being raised by investors to invest in reprogramming, specifically aimed at rejuvenating parts or all of the human body,” says David Sinclair, a researcher at Harvard University.

Anti-aging company Altos Labs is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life. The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process. Investors include Jeff Bezos. Yuri Milner, a Russian-born billionaire, and his wife Julia have invested in Altos through a foundation. 

Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Also joining is Steve Horvath, a UCLA professor and developer of a “biological clock” that can accurately measure human aging. Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, will be an unpaid senior scientist and will chair the company’s scientific advisory board. Yamanaka’s breakthrough discovery was that with the addition of just four proteins, now known as Yamanaka factors, cells can be instructed to revert to a primitive state with the properties of embryonic stem cells. By 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte’s lab had applied these factors to entire living mice, achieving signs of age reversal and leading him to term reprogramming a potential “elixir of life.” Other hires made by Altos include Peter Walter, whose laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, is behind a molecule that shows remarkable effects on memory. Altos is luring university professors by offering sports-star salaries of $1 million a year or more, plus equity, as well as freedom from the hassle of applying for grants. One researcher who confirmed accepting a job offer from Altos, Manuel Serrano of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, in Barcelona, Spain, said the company would pay him five to 10 times what he earns now.

Another is Calico Labs, a longevity company announced in 2013 by Google co-founder, Larry Page. Calico also hired elite scientific figures and gave them generous budgets.

The Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine claims we’ve moved beyond hope in turning anti-aging into reality, and we now sit “at the point between having promise and realizing it.”

The first true anti-ageing medicine will very likely target a specific age-related disease driven by a particular hallmark, rather than ageing writ large. But the success of a drug targeting an aspect of ageing in clinical trials will allow us to consider this loftier goal in the not-too-distant future.

“The longer you’re around, the more your wealth compounds, and the wealthier you are, the more political influence you have,” Christopher Wareham, a bioethicist at Utrecht University, tells FT. The science of longevity will only widen existing gaps, he says.

 If mega-billionaires have all the insights in not only adopting anti-aging science, but then licensing that science out to the masses, not only do the rich get richer, but the rich get richer for … forever.

The Cure for Death Means Billionaires Will Live Forever—and Be Rich Forever (msn.com)

 Mississippi has ranked among the poorest in the U.S. for decades, but only a fraction of its federal welfare money has been going toward direct aid to families. Instead, the Mississippi Department of Human Services allowed well-connected people to fritter away tens of millions of welfare dollars from 2016 to 2019, according to the state auditor and state and federal prosecutors. Elected officials have a long history of condemning federal antipoverty programs.

A welfare scandal has been exposed where millions of dollars were diverted to the rich and powerful — including pro athletes — instead of helping some of the neediest people in the nation.

“It’s shameful and disgusting, especially when we’ve been a state where we hear discussion every year about poor people not needing resources and poor people being lazy and just needing to get up to work,” said  Nsombi Lambright-Haynes, executive director of One Voice, a nonprofit that works to help economically vulnerable communities in Mississippi.

Former Human Services Director John Davis has pleaded guilty to charges tied to welfare misspending in one of the state’s largest public corruption cases. Some of the money that was intended to help low-income families was spent on luxury travel for Davis and on people close to him, drug rehab for a former pro wrestler and boot camp-style gym classes for public officials.

The scandal has ensnared high-profile figures, including retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre, who is one of more than three dozen defendants in a civil lawsuit that the current Human Services director filed to try to recover some of the welfare money wasted while Davis was in charge.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families money helped fund pet projects of the wealthy, including $5 million for a volleyball arena  that Favre supported at his alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi, Mississippi Auditor Shad White said. Favre’s daughter played volleyball at the school starting in 2017.

Another $2.1 million of TANF money went toward an attempt to develop a concussion drug by a company in which Favre was an investor.

Welfare recipients say they found little relief but plenty of bureaucratic headaches from collecting modest monthly TANF payments.

“What may seem like an easy handout program is not,” said Brandy Nichols, a single mother of four children age 8 and younger.

Mississippi requires TANF recipients to prove they are actively looking for employment and Nichols, of Jackson, said the job search is time-consuming.

“It’s work, and sometimes work takes away my ability to find a true, stable job,” she said.

TANF is for families that have at least one child younger than 18. To qualify in Mississippi, the household income must be at or below 185% of the federal poverty level. The current upper-income limit for a family of three is $680 a month.

 Poverty statistics for 1982 through 2021, which show Mississippi was the poorest state for 19 of those 40 years and among the five poorest for 38 years. In 2021, the U.S. poverty rate was 11.6% and Mississippi’s was the highest in the nation, 17.4%. Federal statistics show a dramatic decrease in the number of Mississippi residents receiving individual TANF aid starting in 2012, the first year Republican Phil Bryant was governor, and continuing into the term of current Republican Gov. Tate Reeves. Bryant chose Davis to lead the Department of Human Services.

During the 2012 budget year, 24,180 Mississippians received TANF. By the 2021 budget year, that was down to 2,880 in a state with nearly 3 million residents.

Robert G. “Bob” Anderson, the current Mississippi Department of Human Services executive director, told Democratic state lawmakers in October that about 90% of people who apply for TANF in Mississippi don’t receive it, either because their applications are denied or because they abandon their applications. Those who do qualify get the lowest payments in the country, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

New Hampshire had the highest TANF payment in the country, $862 a month for a single parent and one child. Mississippi’s monthly payment for a family of two was $146. In 2021, Mississippi increased its TANF payments by $90 per month, per family — the state’s first increase since 1999.  It was all paid by federal money, not state money.

The federal government sends Mississippi about $86.5 million a year for TANF and allows states wide leeway in spending. Records show Mississippi does not always spend its entire allotment, sometimes carrying millions of dollars from year to year.

During Mississippi’s 2016 budget year, the Department of Human Services sent $17.3 million in direct aid to recipients, about half of the state’s TANF spending. During the next three years under Davis, the department decreased the amount of TANF money going to individuals.

By the 2019 budget year, Human Services was spending $9.6 million on direct aid, 16% of the TANF money. About $27.6 million, 46% of the money, was going to the Mississippi Community Education Center. The organization — run by Nancy New and one of her sons, Zachary New, who have pleaded guilty to state charges in the welfare misspending case 

Welfare scandal sharpens contrasts in long-poor Mississippi | AP News

 The Capitalists “Bible”, the ‘Financial Times,’ has some disturbing news for the EU working class. A  ‘severe recession’ is a strong possibility.

The  Prussian  Klemens Wenzel Furst von Metternich first said, ‘When France sneezes the whole world catches cold.’ This later became, ‘When America sneezes…’ That  ‘boom and bust’ was an inherent part of capitalism was firstly delineated by Karl Marx. Unlike the common cold there is a cure to prevent  this happening time and again with its devastating effects on the lives of all members of the majority class. The cure is the replacement of capitalism by Socialism.

“The lingering energy crisis is expected to cause further recession in the Eurozone this year, the Financial Times has reported, citing economists.

According to the report, prices in the region will rise by an average of over 6%, and the unemployment rate will increase from the current 6.5% to 7.1% by the end of 2023. High inflation and energy shortages will lead to a further decline in production and worsen the situation in the labour market. Subsequently, by the end of the year, the Eurozone economy will shrink by 0.01%.

“Gas markets in Europe remain a key risk. Additional supply disruptions, or a particularly cold winter, could lead to renewed tensions and prices rising again, forcing another round of adaptation and demand destruction,” Chiara Zangarelli, an economist at Morgan Stanley, was cited as saying.

The energy crisis in the EU worsened over the summer when sanctions and technical setbacks led to the first interruptions in gas supplies from Russia. While most economists have said that Europe is past the worst of the energy crisis this year, many worry that the prospect of energy rationing could return next heating season, especially if the upcoming months are cold and cause increased tapping of gas reserves.

“The tail risk of gas rationing has likely been avoided for this winter, but the question of energy supply for the next winter is still open,” Sylvain Broyer of S&P Global Ratings told FT. Another expert, Carsten Brzeski of ING Bank, said, “next winter will be even more challenging,” as it will be much harder for EU countries to refill gas storage facilities without Russian supplies, even with more gas coming from Norway, the US, and the Middle East.

Economists are also worried about the outcome of further steps to stem inflation by the European Central Bank. Marcello Messori, an economics professor at LUISS University in Rome, warned that further interest rate hikes could “lead to a severe recession in the euro area.””

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Dave C.

The 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends from 2012 through 2021 — more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development according to economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University, in a new paper.

The Lazonick/Tulum research shows that the business model of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies involves far more spending on enriching shareholders and executives than on research and development.

Big Pharma rarely invests in prevention, because it has very little motivation to invest in preparedness for a public health crisis. Drugs for prevention do not contribute to share-holder value and profit. Instead, cures are designed once a public health crisis strikes.

Opinion | When Big Pharma Spends More on Stock Buybacks Than R&D | Common Dreams

Access to and availability of quality health care continues to be a matter of life or death for children globally. Most child deaths occur in the first five years, of which half are within the very first month of life. For these youngest babies, premature birth and complications during labour are the leading causes of death. Similarly, more than 40 per cent of stillbirths occur during labour – most of which are preventable when women have access to quality care throughout pregnancy and birth. For children that survive past their first 28 days, infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria pose the biggest threat.

“It is grossly unjust that a child’s chances of survival can be shaped just by their place of birth, and that there are such vast inequities in their access to lifesaving health services,” said Dr Anshu Banerjee, Director for Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing at the World Health Organization (WHO). 

An estimated 5 million children died before their fifth birthday and another 2.1 million children and youth aged between 5–24 years lost their lives in 2021, according to the latest estimates released by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).

The group found that 1.9 million babies were stillborn during the same period. Tragically, many of these deaths could have been prevented with equitable access and high-quality maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health care.

54 countries will fall short of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals target for under-five mortality. If swift action is not taken to improve health services, warn the agencies, almost 59 million children and youth will die before 2030, and nearly 16 million babies will be lost to stillbirth.

Children continue to face wildly differentiating chances of survival based on where they are born, with sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia shouldering the heaviest burden, the reports show. Though sub-Saharan Africa had just 29 per cent of global live births, the region accounted for 56 per cent of all under-five deaths in 2021, and Southern Asia for 26 per cent of the total. Children born in sub-Saharan Africa are subject to the highest risk of childhood death in the world – 15 times higher than the risk for children in Europe and Northern America.

Mothers in these two regions also endure the painful loss of babies to stillbirth at an exceptional rate, with 77 per cent of all stillbirths in 2021 occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Nearly half of all stillbirths happened in sub-Saharan Africa. The risk of a woman having a stillborn baby in sub-Saharan Africa is seven times more likely than in Europe and North America.

 “Every day, far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes even before their first breath,” said Vidhya Ganesh, UNICEF Director of the Division of Data Analytics, Planning and Monitoring. “Such widespread, preventable tragedy should never be accepted as inevitable. Progress is possible with stronger political will and targeted investment in equitable access to primary health care for every woman and child.”

“Behind these numbers are millions of children and families who are denied their basic rights to health,” said Juan Pablo Uribe, Global Director for Health, Nutrition and Population, World Bank and Director of the Global Financing Facility. 

John Wilmoth, Director, UN DESA Population Division, explained “Only by improving access to quality health care, especially around the time of childbirth, will we be able to reduce these inequities and end preventable deaths of newborns and children worldwide.”

A child or youth died once every 4.4 seconds in 2021 – UN report – World | ReliefWeb

 More than a third of UK adults would find it difficult or impossible to cope with a £20 increase in their monthly outgoings, as the cost of living crisis hits household finances.

Citizens Advice found that 37% of adults would struggle to find an extra £20, with 25% saying they would find it “somewhat difficult”, while 7% said it would be very “very difficult,” and 4% “impossible,” PA reported.

The charity said people were increasingly resorting to desperate measures to get by, for example by eating only cold meals.  

The charity’s chief executive, Dame Clare Moriarty, said: “Millions of households are at financial breaking point: running down savings, going without bare essentials and turning to food banks to get by. We’re already seeing record numbers of people coming to us for crisis support and this research shows people simply cannot cut back any further…”

The Citizens Advice survey, of 2,000 UK adults by Public First between 5 and 9 December, showed nearly a quarter (23%) had spent more money on essentials such as food, toiletries and energy, than they had coming in over the past three months. More than two-thirds of them (67%) said they could only keep this up for six months or less without additional support. A third of people said they had to dip into their savings in the last three months to get by, but more than half (56%) of this group said they had either run out of savings or expected to do so in the next three months.

This persistent financial stress is taking its toll on people, with 28% losing sleep at least once a week over their finances.

Around one in seven said they had been eating cold meals over the winter to reduce their energy costs.

It supported a record number of people in December, helping them access emergency grants and referring them to food banks.

StepChange, the UK’s largest debt advice charity, told the Guardian that more people were using candles or not putting the cooker on “because they’re scared of the bills”.

More than third of UK adults would struggle to find extra £20 | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund released a report showing that more than 11,000 young people have been killed or injured in the conflict, where a Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out attacks since 2015. The known number of maimed children in Yemen is equivalent to about four young people being hurt per day, according to UNICEF.

The true death toll of children is likely far higher, said UNICEF, as millions face hunger and disease.

“Thousands of children have lost their lives, hundreds of thousands more remain at risk of death from preventable disease or starvation,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said.

Roughly 2.2 million Yemeni young people face acute malnourishment, said UNICEF, and one-quarter of those children are under age five. With 10 million children lacking access to healthcare as health clinics have been forced to close, a majority of the country’s children are now at extreme risk for measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses, as well as cholera. 

UN Report: 11,000 Children Killed in Yemen (consortiumnews.com)

 For decades, the biggest inequalities in carbon emissions have been between rich and poor countries. 

Now, inequalities within countries explain more of the gap between clean and dirty lifestyles. 

The top 1% of global earners — somebody earning a yearly salary of about €124,000 ($132,000) — are responsible for one-fifth of the growth in carbon pollution in the last 30 years. They live in cities from Miami to Mumbai. 

“The top 1% use basically a similar amount to the bottom 50% of humanity — and so obviously that, just in terms of scale, is a ridiculous proportion of the carbon budget,” said Anisha Nazareth, a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) studying emissions inequality.

 Oligarch Roman Abramovich’s 162-meter-long boat comes with two helipads and a swimming pool. A study published in 2021 estimated that Abramovich’s yacht emitted more carbon dioxide in 2018 than Tuvalu, a pacific island nation of 11,000 people.

In the EU, half the spending on air travel comes from the richest 20%. In the US and Canada, 19% of adults who take more than four flights a year account for 79% of the flights. 

Shrinking the carbon footprints of the super-rich? – DW – 01/02/2023