At least 18 people, including a child, have been found dead in Bulgaria in an abandoned lorry near the capital Sofia. Those discovered were from Afghanistan and were being smuggled to Serbia.

“There has been a lack of oxygen to those who were locked in this truck. They were freezing, wet, they have not eaten for several days.”

In the UK, five anti-migrant demonstrations are happening over this weekend and being promoted by the far-right groups Britain First and Patriotic Alternative.

“I fled Syria because of fear of death in my country and now I’m living in fear here,” said one asylum seeker.

One asylum seeker at the hotel in Dunstable said: “We are in a dangerous situation. We are at risk and are scared to go outside the hotel. Everyone is in stress…”

 The head of UNAids, Winnie Byanyima, has strongly criticised pharmaceutical giants for prioritising profits over saving lives, and warned that “racist” inequalities are undermining progress towards ending Aids, especially in Africa.

“The World Trade Organization rules allow lifesaving medications to be traded in the same way we could trade luxury goods. They allow pharmaceutical companies to set the price wherever they want, hoard their technologies and reap billions at the cost of lives,” she said.

The injectable drug cabotegravir, for instance – administered every two months and considered the most effective form of prevention – is only available in high-income countries like the UK and the US, and even there remains largely unaffordable. Last year, Zimbabwe became the first African country to approve the drug for use, but with the country in economic crisis the drug remains effectively unavailable.

Such policies expose racial inequalities and discrimination in health, she said. “To me, that’s racism, even though people don’t want to call it out: valuing the profit of a few people, who happen to be white, over the lives of black and brown people around the world.”

 “For Africa, the lesson was: you must have the capacity to produce yourself.”

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than half of all new infections, with women and marginalised groups facing higher new infection rates. 

Aids-related illnesses were the leading cause of mortality among African women, and adolescent girls and young women were three times more likely than men to get HIV.

Marginalised groups on the continent, including sex workers, gay men and transgender people, accounted for a large proportion of new infections in 2021. 

Thirty-two African countries have laws criminalising same-sex relations, and this often stops LGBTQ+ people accessing sexual and reproductive health services. Gay men in countries with the most severe anti-LGBTQ+ laws were more than three times less likely to know their HIV status than their counterparts in countries with the least restrictive laws,

Kenya spends up to five times more on debt servicing than it does on health.

Big pharma must value African lives above profits, warns head of UNAids | Global development | The Guardian

 The World Food Programme (WFP) said it has been forced to cut food rations for Rohingya refugees by 17% and has warned of “unconscionable” further cuts in April as a result of dwindling international donations. It needs $125m (£104m) urgently to avoid further cuts.

UN officials Tom Andrews and Michael Fakhri explained in a statement, “If these cuts are made, they will be imposed on vulnerable people who are already food insecure. Acute malnutrition levels remain high and chronic malnutrition is pervasive among the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh, with more than a third of children stunted and underweight.”

Close to a million Rohingya live in the world’s largest refugee settlement in Bangladesh and are almost completely reliant on food aid as they are not allowed to work or freely travel beyond the camps. Rohingya refugees say the food they receive is already very limited, forcing them to survive on staples such as rice and lentils, which do not provide all the nutrition they need.

Mohammed Zonaid, a Rohingya youth activist, said that the international community’s failure to provide a solution for his people has left them dependent on food aid, as they are unable to return to Myanmar.

“If they were to cut off this support, we would face immense difficulties that are beyond imagination. I implore the global community to step forward and support us in finding a permanent solution to the Rohingya crisis, and to continue providing us with the food assistance that we need until we are able to stand on our own feet.” 

UN warns of ‘unconscionable’ cuts to Rohingya food rations as donations fall | Global development | The Guardian

  El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are home to at least 9.3 million people in need.

They are facing a challenging reality due to humanitarian impacts related to disasters and the effects of climate change, including the impact of La Niña, high food insecurity, recurring violence plus lack of basic services such as health and education.

 “These issues come against a common backdrop of structural poverty, inequality, economic challenges and limited emergency response capacities,” said Ramesh Rajasingham, Head and Representative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Such conditions are driving more and more people in Northern Central America to move within and across borders. Moreover, people on the move from all over the continent and, in fact, the world, are now regularly crossing through the sub-region.”

 There are at least 7.8 million people experiencing Crisis (IPC Phase 3) or worse levels of food insecurity across the three countries. Some 3.4 million people require water, sanitation and hygiene assistance and 1.25 million people have education needs, while 4.8 million people have protection needs, including from gender-based violence (GBV).

Humanitarians seek $505 million to assist 4.9 million people in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in 2023 – Honduras | ReliefWeb

  The FTSE 100, tracks the 100 largest companies listed on the London stock-exchange and it hit a new all-time high at over 8,000 points on Thursday. 

FTSE 100 dividends are forecast to hit a record high this year, with shareholders expected to receive £85.8bn, up from £79.1bn in 2022.

Share buybacks, where companies acquire and cancel their own share as a way of returning cash to investors, rose during 2022.

In Ukraine, as in any war, normal democratic practices such as strikes and the right to peacefully protest are suspended. However, it has not stopped at those.

In March, at the very start of the war, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) passed a law — On the Organisation of Labour Relations During Martial Law — which meant that certain extreme forms of liberalisation and relaxation of labour rules became a legal reality. It included several provisions which fundamentally undermined the labour rights of those who had been working at the frontlines since the start of the invasion. By allowing employers to unilaterally cancel the provisions of collective agreements without justification, this law destroyed the foundations of trade unionism.

Another law, “On Amending Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine on Optimisation of Employment Relations” was adopted in July 2022, released employers from the obligation to pay an average salary to employees mobilised for the defence of their country.

In the summer of 2022, the Verkhovna Rada passed a law substantially reducing the labour rights of those working for small and medium-sized enterprises (up to 250 employees). This law established a separate regime to regulate labour relations in these enterprises, where an individual employment contract was defined as the main document regulating labour relations. In other words, the employee had to personally negotiate all the specifics of their employment directly with the employer. Yet labour law was created precisely for the collective protection of workers because it is impossible to effectively negotiate all employment terms and conditions with massive corporations and the like.

Another innovation adopted during martial law was the introduction into domestic practice of “non-fixed-hour contracts,” known in the West as “zero-hour contracts.” This type of contract does not define standard working hours and the employee becomes a “call-to-action person.” In 2021, 1-in-5 Ukrainians worked in the informal sector, with no employment rights and no safeguards. The law is intended to regulate the work of freelancers, but in fact, it is applicable to any type of worker.

These legal changes contradict Ukraine’s ambitions of European integration. Article 296 of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU states:

“a Party shall not weaken or reduce the environmental or labour protection afforded by its laws to encourage trade or investment, by waiving or otherwise derogating from, or offering to waive or otherwise derogate from, its laws, regulations or standards, in a manner affecting trade or investment between the Parties.”

The war cannot be used to justify stripping workers of their rights.

A full-scale attack on Ukraine’s labour rights – Democracy and society | IPS Journal (ips-journal.eu)

Researchers from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Chatham House, said, the world is at risk of descending into a climate “doom loop”. Its report said that simply coping with the escalating impacts of the climate crisis could draw resources and focus away from the efforts to slash carbon emissions, making the situation even worse.

The damage caused by global heating across the globe is increasingly clear, and recovering from climate disasters is already costing billions of dollars. Furthermore, these disasters can cause cascading problems including water, food and energy crises, as well as increased migration and conflict, all draining countries’ resources.

A current example of the impact of the climate crisis complicating efforts to reduce emissions and other actions was the debate over whether keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5C – the international goal – was still possible. Those arguing 1.5C was still possible risked perpetuating complacency that today’s slow pace of action was sufficient, the researchers said, while those arguing it was not possible risked supporting fatalism that little that could now be done, or “extreme approaches” such as geoengineering.

The report said: “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the climate crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”

Avoiding a doom loop required a more honest acceptance by politicians of the great risks posed by the climate crisis, the researchers said, including the looming prospect of tipping points and of the huge scale of the economic and societal transformation required to end global heating. 

“We’ve entered, sadly, a new chapter in the climate and ecological crisis,” said Laurie Laybourn, an associate fellow at IPPR. “The phoney war is coming to an end and the real consequences now present us with difficult decisions…” 

“The thing I’m most concerned about is that we’re not factoring in the cascading risks to societies,” said Laybourn. “It’s not just the big city-smashing storms we should be concerned about, it’s the consequences that ripple through our globalised systems. For the UK, it may not necessarily be the sheer cost of responding to disasters that’s the biggest distraction. It could be that it has to deal at the same time with a food price shock and resurgent nativism, playing off fears about so-called climate refugees,” he added.

Laybourn said, greener transport was not simply about switching to electric vehicles, but about better public transport and redesigned cities that meant people were closer to the jobs, education and healthcare they needed. 

Unfairness in climate policy could drive the doom loop, Laybourn said, because if people felt unaffordable changes were being forced on them they would reject the need for a green transition. But, he added: “If you have fairness at the heart of things, it can instead be a virtuous circle, if you’re in a situation where people recognise that switching to a heat pump and having better insulation will be better for them regardless of the climate crisis.”

It noted that Africa’s economy was already losing up to 15% of GDP a year to the worsening effects of global heating.

World risks descending into a climate ‘doom loop’, warn thinktanks | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Fault Lines

The real fault is not subterranean.

Speculators and their compliant state

Caring more for profit than people’s fate,

Or inconvenient regulation

Simply circumscribed by backhanded gifts.

Body after body after body,

Battered, broken, lifted from the shoddy

Where apartments dropped like free falling lifts.

Charity appeals are quickly begun.

Survivors become miracles when dragged

From rubble, as the rest are body bagged

While the media poses, “What can be done?”

Through all societies fault lines are found,

With capital standing on shaky ground.

D. A.   

 Class – Paul Bennett, 9th December 2022

Spycatcher – Howard Moss, 16th December 2022

Has the Crypto bubble finally burst? – Paddy Shannon, 13th January 2023

Extinction Rebellion’s plan to overthrow the government – Adam Buick, 20th January 2023

 Millions of parents use formula milk in what has become a multibillion-dollar global industry. But a study published in the BMJ has found most health and nutritional claims about the products appear to be backed by little or no high-quality scientific evidence, prompting calls for stricter marketing rules to be introduced worldwide. The study found that existing marketing curbs on formula milk are failing to stop companies from using controversial claims to promote their products.

“The wide range of health and nutrition claims made by infant formula products are often not backed by scientific references,” said Dr Ka Yan Cheung and Loukia Petrou, the joint first co-authors of the study. “When they are, the evidence is often weak and biased.”

Cheung and Petrou, from Imperial College London, added: “It’s essential that the industry provides accurate and reliable information to consumers, rather than using vague or unsupported claims as marketing tools.”

They concluded: “Despite previous attempts to change the landscape of infant formula marketing … progress in regulating infant formula claims is slow. Transparency is still lacking about health and nutrition claims linked to infant formula. We have identified a high prevalence of claims on infant formula products in multiple countries that seem to have little or no scientific substantiation.”

Most health claims on formula milk ‘not backed by evidence’ | Nutrition | The Guardian