Last year in the UK there were nearly 40,000 excess deaths – that is, deaths above a five-year average.

 In the last two weeks of 2022, deaths were a fifth higher than the average from 2016 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and that’s taking into account factors such as a bigger, ageing population.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens. Some of those who died may have been vulnerable or infirm, but in other circumstances years away from death. As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.

By the beginning of last year, the number of deaths was similar to 2019. As the actuary Stuart McDonald points out, we had been through the worst of a pandemic in which many frail members of society died, and normally mortality falls year on year, so to only equal the death toll of 2019 was already indicative of a worrying trend.

There were about 2,200 additional deaths in England associated with A&E delays in December alone. Average ambulance response times in England are now the worst on record, and more than half of patients are waiting for more than four hours at A&E for the first time since records began in 2011.

Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid | Owen Jones | The Guardian

India’s top 1% owned more than 40.5% of its total wealth in 2021, according to Oxfam.

In 2022, the number of billionaires in the country increased to 166 from from 102 in 2020.

 An analysis which tracked all child deaths in England between 2019 and 2022, found overall mortality dipped during the pandemic due to a decrease in infectious illnesses, but that numbers of deaths have since returned to pre-pandemic levels. This included a 32% increase in trauma deaths and a 13% rise in sudden unexpected death in infancy or childhood (Sudic) last year compared with pre-pandemic rates.

Prof Karen Luyt, the programme lead for the National Child Mortality Database, based at the University of Bristol, said the figures could be “the first mortality signal” from families struggling with the cost of living crisis.

“This is worrying and I think we’re likely to see things getting worse,” she said. “Certainly for childhood illness and mortality, we know there’s a strong social gradient and we know that more families are now living in poverty.”

Of the children who died in the Sudic category, four times as many came from the most deprived fifth of the population, compared with the least deprived fifth.

Prof Monica Lakhanpaul, at University College London, who has studied the effects of homelessness on child health, said the link between child mortality and poverty was well-established and described the latest figures as a “tragic” result of worsening inequalities.

“The poorer the children, the higher the risk of mortality, but nothing’s been done,” she said. “We’re in a high-income country and this is on our doorstep…We talk about parental neglect a lot … but I see this as societal neglect.”

Child mortality from trauma and sudden death rising in England, study shows | Poverty | The Guardian

  Tunisian protests come 12 years to the day after the ousting of former autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and 14 January is seen by most Tunisians as the anniversary of the revolution and the start of what was called the Arab Spring. 

 President Kais Saied has usurped almost total power. In 2021, the president sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and pushed through a constitution enshrining his one-man rule. The new constitution gave the head of state full executive control and supreme command of the army.

Saied shut down the elected parliament in 2021 but low turnout for December’s election of a new, mostly powerless, legislature revealed little public appetite for his changes.

 Only 8.8% of the roughly nine-million-strong electorate had voted in the parliamentary elections.

Tunisia: Thousands rally against President Saied – BBC News

Tens of thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and in two other major cities on Saturday night, protesting  Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the legal system and weaken the Supreme Court. Critics say Netanyahu would cripple judicial independence, foster corruption, set back minority rights, and deprive Israel’s court system of credibility.

 Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered police to take tough action if protesters displayed Palestinian flags at Saturday’s protest. Social media footage showed a number of Palestinian flags on display in defiance. 

 A lethal bird flu outbreak that has been circling the globe since 2021 peaked in Japan this week, as an agriculture ministry official said the country plans to cull more than 10 million chickens. The H5N1 strain now sweeping Japan is uniquely contagious and deadly. It poses such high risk to farmed birds, such as chickens and turkeys, that a single infection on a farm condemns the entire flock to be killed. 

Around the globe, record-breaking death tolls due to the virus are becoming the norm. There has been a global death toll of more than 140 million so far is still cause for deep concern. The result has been loss of income for farmers, and soaring prices for poultry and eggs – both essential sources of affordable protein.

“In terms of the numbers of birds, farms, and countries affected, the number of birds that have been killed and the duration of the outbreak, the current epidemic is truly the largest we’ve seen in history,” says Ian Brown, chair of the joint World Organisation for Animal Health and Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN’s Scientific Network on Animal Influenza. 

Europe is in the midst of its worst-ever spate of bird flu infections with 2,500 outbreaks on farms stretching across 37 countries from October 2021-September 2022. Some 50 million birds have been culled across the continent, although the vast majority of poultry infections occurred in France. More than twelve months since the virus was first detected in late 2021, infections have remained consistently high and show little sign of slowing. In fact, they seem to be gathering pace – European data shows that in autumn 2022 the epidemic was more virulent than the same time the previous year and the number of infected farms 35 percent higher.  

 In the US, more states than ever before have reported instances of bird flu with an all-time high of nearly 58 million poultry affected as of January 2023. 

The bird flu virus was first detected among domestic waterfowl in Southern China in 1996. The H5N1 strain currently circulating originated among wild birds whose migration patterns have accelerated its global propagation. The rate of reproduction is high; one bird is able to infect up to 100 others.

In Scotland, the coast provides a haven for migratory and sea birds and a crucial habitat for many endangered species. Great skuas currently have a total population of just 16,000, more than half of which inhabit the northwest coast. When numbers of the seabird started to die off in the summer of 2021 it was the first indicator that the H5N1 virus had arrived.  

Claire Smith, policy officer for UK bird protection charity the RSPB, said deaths among great skuas, gannets, gulls, geese and even eagles continued through summer, then impacting both migratory and domestic species. By July, the Scottish government had closed off access to some seabird islands.

 “There were just dead birds everywhere,” Smith says. 

  many species around the world have suffered similar decimation. Populations of penguins in South Africa, dalmatian pelicans in the Balkans and cranes in Israel have diminished.  In the UK, birdlife that wouldn’t normally be prone to bird flu, such as barn owls and kestrels, have recently been infected. “The theory,” Smith says, “is that lots of big poultry operations have rodents, and the rodents aren’t necessarily dying of bird flu but are carrying the virus on their fur, then those barn owls and kestrels are catching them.” 

Against a backdrop of environmental threats such as climate change, many may never recover their numbers. “It’s not dramatic to say there are some endangered species of wild birds that could become extinct,” Brown says.  As human life has been said to be entering an age of pandemics in the wake of Covid, the same is now true for birds. “We are facing a continuous threat that these outbreaks might occur every four or five years,” says Brown.

This outbreak marks the first time bird flu has been detected in Latin America with outbreaks in Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Ecuador, posing a potential risk to farmed and wild birds including the unique species that inhabit the Galapagos. 

Human infections are also rare and mild, although a handful of cases have been reported. “At the moment, it does not have a high ability to spread and infect people, but we can’t assume that will always be the case,” says Brown. “These viruses change and mutate over time.” 

Largest global bird flu outbreak ‘in history’ shows no sign of slowing (france24.com)

 “While House Republicans want to make huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because of their ‘serious concern’ about the deficit, they voted to provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to large corporations and the top one percent,” Bernie Sanders said in a statement Friday. “The situation has become so absurd that over a third of the largest and most profitable corporations in our country pay nothing in federal income taxes.”

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in December 2017, slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and authorized a slew of other giveaways that made it easier for large businesses and wealthy individuals to lower their tax bills.

A study released Friday by the Government Accountability Office found that “average effective tax rates—the percentage of income paid after tax breaks—among profitable large corporations fell from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2018.”

According to the GAO, the share of profitable large corporations that owed $0 in federal income taxes after credits rose from around 22% in 2014 to 34% in 2018.

“Each year from 2014-2018, about half of large corporations and a quarter of profitable ones didn’t owe federal taxes,” the GAO noted. “For example, profitable corporations may not owe taxes due to prior years’ losses.”

Another separate analyses from outside organizations such as the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) have identified such corporations. In 2021, ITEP found that at least 55 large U.S. corporations including Nike, FedEx, HP, and Kinder Morgan paid $0 in federal taxes on 2020 profits.

Steve Wamhoff, ITEP’s federal policy director, wrote in a blog post on Friday that the GAO’s new study confirms that “the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was an unprecedented gift to corporations.”

34% of Big, Profitable US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 1st Year of Trump Tax Law (commondreams.org)

Refugees from Afghanistan may be escaping Taliban rule. Those from Turkey, Iraq and Syria may be fleeing wars. Economic migrants from Tunisia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Algeria and Morocco are determined to reach the EU to escape poverty, earn living wages and build a better life. Yet the EU welcomes them all with razor wire and refugee camps.

Around 1800 kilometres of border walls and fences have been built on the perimeter of the EU in the past decade. The hefty prices include cameras, heat sensors, drones, armed vehicles and guards to patrol and keep the migrants and asylum seekers out.

Serbia is constructing a fence on its border with North Macedonia and plans another to prevent crossings from Bulgaria. 

Greece is planning to extend its high-tech 40-kilometre-long, 5-metre-high steel, concrete and barbed wire fence on the border with Turkey by a further 140 kilometres.

Over the past two years Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have fortified their borders with Belarus by erecting fences of steel and barbed wire at a cost of more than half a billion euros.

Hungary spent €1.64bn erecting steel and razor-wire barriers on its borders with Serbia and Croatia.

The new militarised borders are unlikely to stop the refugees. If the fences can’t be scaled with ladders, they can be walked around: the wall on the Polish-Belarusian border maybe 186 kilometres long, but that leaves 232 kilometres of the border unfenced. The barriers do force would-be migrants to take more dangerous routes. The long journeys of asylum seekers include dangerous crossings of seas or rivers, sleeping rough in cold and heat, and abuse by people smugglers. According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 25,000 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean alone since 2014.

They also permit higher profits for smugglers and traffickers of people. 

 The war in Ukraine drove four times as many refugees into the EU in 2022 than the conflict in Syria did in 2015-16. In contrast, the status of Ukrainian refugees is regulated.

Over 4.8 million of them, mostly women and children, have registered for the EU’s temporary protection scheme or other national programmes, including over 1m in Poland and Germany, and over 100,000 in the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, the UK, Bulgaria and France. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive allows Ukrainians to move freely between member states, gives them instant rights to live and work, and offers access to benefits like housing and medical care for up to three years. While migrants are a net cost in the short run, in the long run they are taxpayers. Some will assimilate and settle in the EU, thus helping relieve its worker shortage and demographic crisis.

Why not adopt the same policies for others? Governments can provide asylum-seekers with temporary accommodation, legal pathways to obtain jobs, language classes and modest financial support. Once employed or in school, the young men – most of these migrants are young men – can productively contribute to the host society. The fears that natives lose jobs to migrants are largely overstated, because migrants tend to take less desirable jobs. Moreover, they create new jobs within and outside diaspora communities – in other words, groups of migrants in host countries who have come from the same original culture.

Local diasporas and personal sponsors can be asked to support new migrants and bear some responsibility for their housing, language training and employment. With more support and mentoring available, migrants will be better able to assimilate into the EU culture.

The new Slovenian government is removing a 143-kilometre razor-wired border fence with Croatia, built during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, due to its ineffectiveness. Let’s hope that other countries will follow.

Opinion | Fortress Europe Is Cruel, Misguided, and Doomed to Fail | Common Dreams

 The largest military and defence corporations of NATO member states have seen a 21.5% boost in market value in 2022 amid the military operation in Ukraine and rearmament in Western Europe, Moscow daily Vedomosti reported on Wednesday.

The newspaper was citing data from Defence News and Trading View analytics.

The corporations’ combined market capitalization increased from $579 billion in December 2021 to $703 billion in December 2022, according to the estimates.

The ranking included 25 companies with a capitalization of over $1 billion which are traded on the stock market and have military products dominating in their revenues, and are also actively involved in arms supplies to Ukraine.

Authors of the report name German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall as the top gainer over the last 12 months, with a 122% surge in share price. French drone and missile producer Thales saw its market value rise 54%. American defence contractor Northrop Grumman was up 44%, while stock in HIMARS rocket launchers maker Lockheed Martin gained 42%.

Other notable mentions in the report include BAE Systems (+40%), Kongsberg Gruppen (+37%), General Dynamics (+24%), and Raytheon Technologies (+19%).

The report pointed out that the value of NATO’s military giants was soaring while the overall Western corporate sector sank by 16% last year, according to the S&P 1200 index, suggesting that arms manufacturers were likely the main beneficiaries of the political crisis in Europe.

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Dave C.