Seven months since the rains began, thousands continue to live in open areas, tents, and makeshift homes in Sindh and Balochistan, the two worst-hit provinces stalked by a cold spell, disease and food shortages making life even more perilous. According to the UN, an estimated 5 million people remain exposed to or living close to flooded areas. A post-disaster needs assessment (PDNA) has estimated the damage exceeded 30 bn USD—a tenth of Pakistan’s entire GDP.

A  recent international donors’ conference held in Geneva was deemed a “success” after Pakistan was able to secure $10 billion. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has promised “every penny” of the pledges will be used towards rehabilitation of flood-hit people.

Janib Gul Mohammad, a farmer from Fateh Ali Buledi village in Kamber Shahdadkot, one of the worst affected districts in Sindh province, doubted he would even “get a rupee out of the billions of dollars” received on his behalf.

“Our rulers are clueless about how hungry our kids are,” said Mohammad, whose family has had to ration and reduce their consumption of roti (flat bread) from “two to three to just one at every meal”.  He and his family of 13 are among the more than 33 million Pakistanis affected by last year’s unprecedented floods.

Reminding that pledges were not commitments, Kashmala Kakakhel, a climate finance expert, said she would like to get a clear distinction between the new money and one that is rebottled to address the impact of floods but doubted the government will “ever tell”.

 Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Centre’s South Asia Institute, found the self-congratulatory messaging purely “political” of a government, which he said, was “weak, unpopular and struggling to rein in a cascading economic crisis”. Kugelman said by “only offering pledges, not actual aid, they have given themselves a safety net and a possible way out in case they decide they are not ready to commit to such large figures.” Of the $10bn pledges, $8.7 billion are loans that the government has “conveniently underplayed”, said Wilson Centre’s expert. And these may take several years to arrive.

Ashafque Soomro, heading the Research and Development Foundation, a Sindh-based nongovernmental organization which had been at the forefront of assisting flood-affected communities, is not sure if getting more loans is a good idea at all. In this critical time of economic crunch, he said, the government should have “built a strong case for climate justice” to get grants instead. “I am very concerned that the government is not only forcing us further into a debt trap but risks defaulting on repayment.” 

According to the former finance minister Miftah Ismail, Pakistan owes the world nearly 100 billion USD and has to repay $21bn to lenders during the current fiscal year. “We have no resources to repay our lenders. We will just have to try to borrow from one creditor to pay off another.” 

Kakakhel asked, “Why have an emergency donor conference at all if you are treading the same old traditional path of seeking loans?” 

 Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, a climate expert, was not sure if Pakistan would be able to put all of it to use, given its “track record on delayed implementation of development projects”. Pakistan, he pointed out, was littered with “more than 1,200 unfinished projects worth Rs1.6 trillion ($6.67 billion”.

Pakistan’s 10 Billion Dollar Flood Funding Question | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Rail strikes have cost the UK more than settling the disputes months ago would have, rail minister Huw Merriman has said. The strikes have cost the UK more than £1bn, he conceded. 

Britains richest 1% are now wealthier than 70% of the UK’s population combined. 

The Hinduja family (net worth £28billion), Sir James Dyson (£23bn) and Sir Jim Ratcliffe (£10bn) are among the 685,000 richest people whose total worth exceeds the combined wealth of 48 million Britons. 

The richest 1% of Irish people have more than a quarter of the country’s wealth. The richest 1% in Ireland have gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the last 10 years.

Chief executive of Oxfam Ireland Jim Clarken said: “This rising wealth at the top and rising poverty for the rest are two sides of the same coin, proof that our economic system is functioning exactly how the rich and powerful designed it to…”

Since the first Cop in Berlin in 1995, there have been 27 climate conferences and despite discussion and debate, promises and pledges, warnings and entreaties, emissions have just kept on going up. 

While early Cops welcomed a few thousand attendees, the latest had 35,000 delegates, and it is difficult now to view the events as anything other than travelling circuses that are increasingly ineffectual.

At Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 the fossil-fuel lobbyist invasion had more than 500 delegates representing oil, gas and coal interests. 

At Cop27  hosted by Egypt, the fossil-fuel sector consolidated its position by increasing its contingent to a whopping 636 delegates.

Cop28 will be held in the United Arab Emirates,  an authoritarian petro-state, with the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), Sultan Al Jaber, as the summit president. 

Let’s face reality. Fossil fuel interests have destroyed the Cops – we need something new | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

 A parliamentary report from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee report said, Premiership Rugby club finances are “clearly unsustainable”. 

England and Wales are less ethnically segregated than they have ever been. 

 Rather than treating the Myanmar military junta as a pariah state, many armament corporations are doing lucrative business with it. 

Companies in 13 countries across Europe, Asia and North America are assisting Myanmar’s junta – either indirectly or directly – by supplying materials to the stated-owned entity that produces the military’s weapons, a report by the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) has found. The weapons are then being used to commit human rights atrocities.

The report by the SAC-M found that dozens of companies based in Austria, France, China, Singapore, India, Israel, Ukraine, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US were supplying raw materials, machines, technology and parts to the Directorate of Defence Industries (DDI), a state-owned company responsible for producing military equipment for Myanmar’s armed forces.

“It’s more or less a military-owned enterprise,” said Yanghee Lee, a former UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar and founder of the SAC-M, which is a group of independent experts, including former UN officials. She added that the DDI could use these imported supplies “to suppress and commit human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide”. Countries also have a role in ensuring their companies are not inadvertently facilitating human rights violations, according to the report. “Failing to do so makes them complicit in the Myanmar military’s barbaric crimes,” Lee said.

The Austrian company GFM Steyr is believed to have provided computer numerical control machines for the manufacturing of gun barrels.

 Dassault Systèmes in France is said to have supplied 3D electromagnetic simulation and analysis software, and computer aided design (CAD) software for 3D modelling. 

The Germany-based Siemens Digital Industries Software is thought to have provided multiple types of software.

 Ukraine’s Ukrspecexport is believed to have supplied types of transfer technology for the production of 2SIU self-propelled howitzers, BTR-4 armoured personnel carriers and MMT-40 light tanks.

“The fact that weapons used in … attacks have links to countries who are claiming ‘impartiality’ in the face of brutal and widespread repression of democratic aspirations is simply scandalous,” said Dr Gerard McCarthy, an assistant professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, who specialises in the politics of welfare and development in south-east Asia. “The hypocrisy here is mammoth,” McCarthy said. 

Myanmar’s democratically elected National Unity government had been “stonewalled internationally” in its attempts to procure defence capabilities, he said. “Yet many of the same countries claiming not to want to ‘intervene’ in Myanmar are turning a blind eye to their own companies directly and indirectly arming the dictatorship.”

Western firms facilitating production of Myanmar junta’s weapons, says report | Myanmar | The Guardian

 Dementia is a growth market with 1.6 million people predicted to be living with the disease by 2040, up from 900,000 today. Four out of five older people in residential care homes in England are now looked after by private providers – over 300,000 people – far more than in not-for-profit, council and NHS care homes

Gordon Sanders owns Runwood Homes, the UK’s sixth largest for-profit care home group, which charges residents more than £1,000 a week, with bills often covered by the taxpayer. Runwood bought many of its homes from local councils struggling to afford their operation including several from Essex county council in 2000, six from Nottinghamshire county council for £1.2m in 2011 and five from Doncaster council for £1.5m in 2012.

Problems reported by inspectors include not enough care workers, meaning residents unable to get to the toilet, stuck in bed, lacking activities, feeling “trapped” and “at risk of harm”. Inspectors heard reports of “awful” food and found some staff who were not trained or checked for criminal records. In one home, inspectors found residents were restrained by staff strapping a table top to a chair. Several of the homes breached Care Act regulations including for a lack of staff to look after people safely and protecting people from abuse. In 2018, an official investigation into Runwood’s Dunmurry care home in Northern Ireland found “a horrific catalogue of inhuman and degrading treatment”. The commissioner for older people for Northern Ireland concluded many people spent the last months of their lives “in appalling circumstances”.

Sanders paid himself at least £21m in five years despite inspectors finding multiple breaches of staffing, safety and leadership rules, with residents left in dirty incontinence pads and staff accused of rough handling. He owns a mansion in Essex and a flat in London’s Knightsbridge that Zoopla estimates suggest are worth about £4m and £4.7m respectively. In addition to £18.6m in dividends paid in the last five years to Sanders, who holds 100% of the share capital, Runwood’s accounts show Sanders drew £2.2m in salary in 2017, as the highest paid director. The highest paid director between 2019 and 2021 received £10.1m in total. That person is not named in accounts but may be Sanders, who served as chief executive until last summer, potentially pushing his five-year earnings to £31m.

Runwood also reported it accepted £12.3m in government grants in 2020 and 2021 related to the Covid pandemic, including for infection control and the job retention scheme. Over the same years it awarded salary to the highest paid director and dividends totalling £14.3m.

Another beneficiary has been the former chief executive Nadarajah Logeswaren, 59, who was paid £15.8m in 2018 “in relation to a long-term incentive scheme”, accounts show. Directors’ salaries and dividends drawn from the company totalled £57m over five years.

Runwood provides close to 5,000 beds. In the last two years for which accounts are available the firm made £43m in profit after tax on turnover of £301m – a 14% margin.

Profitability among the largest care home chains in the UK ranges from 11% to 42% of revenue. The five largest groups made £578m in profit in 2020 – a 22% average return when counted using the profit measure known as Ebitdar. Unlike Runwood, which is a family-owned business, several of the other large chains are owned by private equity firms, offshore investors or international investment trusts, making their profits harder to trace.

The earnings illuminate the cash generated by some care businesses at a time when there are warnings of a “national crisis” in care safety. More than half of residential homes in England offering dementia care reported on by inspectors last year were rated “inadequate” or requiring improvement – up from less than a third pre-pandemic.

There are 165,000 staff vacancies and rising in England’s care homes. That is equivalent to more than one in 10 posts unfilled. Wages averaged £9.50 an hour last April. Care assistant jobs are currently being advertised by Runwood at £10 an hour – the same as a McDonald’s crew member. The current national minimum wage for workers aged over 22 is £9.50 rising to £10.42 on 1 April.

Helen Wildbore, the director of the Relatives & Residents Association, said: “There will, rightly, be anger from residents and their families at these eye-watering payouts whilst they are suffering the impact of such poor care.

“Supporting people affected by dementia should be an honour and a privilege, not a way to make millions. This highlights the sad reality of care as a commodity, where owners have very little accountability to those they should be serving.”

Owner of UK care home group paid himself £21m despite safety concerns | Social care | The Guardian

 The government pledged to resettle family members in the UK of Afghans who helped the NATO occupying forces but at the moment there is no mechanism for them to do this.

More than 100 charities and campaigners have accused the government of abandoning Afghans in danger who were promised the right to reunite with family members in the UK.

It has been a year since the scheme for Afghans rescued under Operation Pitting, known as the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS), was launched. The 6,300 Afghans who have been brought to the UK under the scheme but who had to leave their families behind in Afghanistan say their close relatives are in grave danger. They do not know if and when the government will allow them to be reunited with family members.

 Safe Passage International highlights that vulnerable family members – including women, girls and those from persecuted religious and minority ethnic communities – have been forced to live in hiding in Afghanistan, putting their lives at great risk. Campaigners are asking the prime minister to honour the commitments made to Afghan families. The government’s own guidance, published in September 2021, committed to helping families of members of those in the UK under ACRS. A factsheet for Afghans evacuated to the UK, published in April 2022, promised “further information will be made available in due course about options for reuniting’ with family”.

Beth Gardiner-Smith, the chief executive of Safe Passage International, said: “It’s been 18 months since families were torn apart when Kabul fell. The government has effectively abandoned Afghans, leaving them without a process to reunite with loved ones who are at risk despite repeated promises made. Afghans remain one of the top nationalities risking their lives to cross the Channel, but rather than create the safe routes that would allow them to reunite with family, the prime minister prefers to concentrate on new laws to further punish refugees.”

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said, “The lack of any visible action from government is only making the situation worse, with many of the people we support feeling increasingly helpless.”

UK government urged to honour pledge to Afghan refugees’ families | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian