Recession fears in the UK are forcing businesses to mothball hiring plans to keep costs at a minimum, a survey by auditing company KPMG and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) released on Tuesday showed.

Hiring for permanent staff in the UK slumped for a third month in December, falling at the quickest pace since the pandemic lockdowns of early 2021. Vacancies grew at the slowest rate since February 2021 and were accompanied by the weakest pay raise in 20 months, the report said.

“The jobs market looks less than rosy at the start of 2023,” a partner in skills and productivity at KPMG UK, Claire Warnes said, adding that “vacancy growth rates are trending down again this month from a historically high peak in July 2021.”

According to REC CEO Neil Carberry, a slowdown in permanent placements is not unusual in December but “this one comes as part of a wider softening trend in the permanent market.”

Starting salaries for permanent staff and pay rates for temporary workers grew at the slowest rate since April 2021, the survey showed, indicating that employers have grown more cautious about hiring and halted plans to take on workers until January, awaiting the next report on this year’s outlook.

“Industrial relations turmoil in many sectors, along with the scarcity of available staff in all sectors, means that wage inflation may soften only slightly in the near term,” Warnes said.

Inflation remains one of the biggest concerns of recruitment companies in the UK amid forecasts that the British economy looks set to contract in 2023. The Bank of England has lifted its key rate nine times since December 2021 in an effort to rein in spiralling price growth.

RT 11\1\23

Dave C.

Tressell And Me: A Radio Ballad | Alun Parry (bandcamp.com)

Going Spare

The illusion is that news is the news,

When it’s the media, by its selection,

Practicing the art of misdirection

Through deciding what the spectator views

In serious tones designed to convince,

Workers, who’re struggling for half decent pay

While services fail and inflation holds sway,

What a bonus is a disgruntled prince.

Extended interviews entertaining

The notion his life alone is unique.

Then, via book deals and his chance to speak,

Capitalise on his sad complaining.

Certain confirmation this world’s not fair

Being presented with a prince going spare.

D. A.

 As trade unionists once again face the prospect of persecution by the State with new proposed anti-strike laws, it is a timely to remember the Shrewsbury Two, pickets who ended up in jail, Desmond Warren and Ricky Tomlinson (now the famous actor).

Taken from The Key To My Cell by Des Warren.

I have spent a week in jail, and people in there and various other people, not including my counsel, have told me that it was always a mistake to make a speech from the dock, because whatever you are going to get will be doubled. I tried to explain to them that the system that operates is purely for the upper class, and I don’t expect any leniency or mercy from it, so I’ll continue anyway.

It has been said in this court that this trial had nothing do with politics. Among ten million trade unionists in this country I doubt if you would find one who would agree with that statement. It is a fact of life that Acts of Parliament have been passed and picketing and strikes are looked upon as a political act …

At this point, Mr. Justice Mais interrupted to say: ‘You must not use this opportunity as a political platform,’ but I ignored him and continued:

It therefore follows that every action taken in furtherance of an industrial dispute also becomes a political act. There are even those who say it is a challenge to the law of the land if a man decides not to work more than an agreed number of hours, and bans overtime. This is something known to many trade unionists as politically motivated interference by governments acting on behalf of, and under political pressure from the employers, and it now means that no trade unionist can enter freely into negotiations with the employers, and they can’t withdraw their labour – the only thing they possess as a bargaining lever – without being accused of setting out to wreck the economy or break the law.

On the other hand, employers, by their contempt of laws governing safety requirements, are guilty of causing the deaths of a great many workers, and yet they are not dealt with before the courts. Mr. Bumble said: ‘The law is an ass.’ If he were here now he might draw the conclusion that the law is, quite clearly, an instrument of the state, to be used in the interests of a tiny minority against the majority. It is biased; it is class law, and nowhere has that been demonstrated more than in the prosecution case in this trial. The very nature of the charges, the delving into ancient Acts of Parliament, dredging up conspiracy, shows this to be so.

Was there a conspiracy? Ten members of the jury have said there was. There was a conspiracy, but not by the pickets. The conspiracy began with the miners giving the government a good hiding last year. It developed when the government was forced to perform legal gymnastics in getting five dockers out of jail after they had only just been put there. The conspiracy was between the Home Secretary, the employers and the police. It was not done with a nod and a wink. It was conceived after pressure from Tory Members of Parliament who demanded changes in picketing laws.

Of course, there was a very important reason why no police witness said he had seen any evidence of conspiracy, unlawful assembly or affray. The question was hovering over the case from the very first day: why were there no arrests on the 6 September? That would have led to the even more important question of when was the decision to proceed taken. Where did it come from? What instructions were issued to the police? And by whom? There was your conspiracy.

‘I’m innocent of the charges and I shall appeal. But there will be a more important appeal going out to every member of the trade union movement in this country. Nobody here must think they can walk away from here and forget what has happened here. Villains or victims, we are all part of something bigger than this trial.

The working class movement cannot allow this verdict to go unchallenged. It is yet one more step along the road to fascism, and I would remind you that the greatest heroes in Nazi Germany were those who challenged the law, when it was used as a political weapon by a fanatical gang for a minority of greedy, evil men.

The jury in this trial were asked to look upon the word ‘intimidation’ as having the ordinary everyday meaning. My interpretation is ‘to make timid’, or ‘to dispirit’, and when the pickets came to this town to speak to the building workers it was not with the intention of intimidating them. We came here with the intention of instilling the trade union spirit into them, and not to make them timid, but to give them the courage to fight the intimidation of the employers in this area.

Ricky Tomlinson wrote a poem about this travesty of justice and Alun Parry put music to it.

Alun Parry’s tribute to Des Warren

Pharmaceutical giant Moderna faced angry backlash on Tuesday following the CEO’s announcement that the firm is considering pricing its Covid-19 vaccine somewhere between $100 and $130 per dose in the United States. Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s billionaire CEO, defended the proposed price range in an interview on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, telling The Wall Street Journal that he believes “this type of pricing is consistent with the value” of the vaccine.

The upper end of that range, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), would represent a 4,000% markup above the cost of manufacturing the shot, which experts have pegged at roughly $2.85 per dose.

“The sheer greed is obscene,” said PVA policy co-lead Julia Kosgei. “This vaccine isn’t just Moderna’s, it was developed in collaboration with a government agency based on decades of publicly-funded research,” Kosgei said. “It is the people’s vaccine—and it should be available and affordable for everyone, everywhere.” In 2020, Moderna admitted that 100% of the funding for its vaccine development program came from the federal government.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) warned in a recent policy brief that the commercial price of coronavirus shots “could discourage vaccination.”

“The suggested average price for Covid-19 vaccines after commercialization ($96 to $115 per dose) is significantly higher than the commercial price for the annual flu vaccine ($18 to 28 per dose), and could be a cost barrier for the uninsured and underinsured, who have no guaranteed mechanism for receiving COVID-19 (or any) vaccines once federal supplies are depleted.”

‘The Sheer Greed Is Obscene’: Moderna Plans 4,000% Markup for Covid Vaccine (commondreams.org)

Northern and western Europe experienced prolonged and intense heatwaves over the year. Much of the continent endured drought, and summer wildfire emissions were at their highest for 15 years.

Twelve European countries broke monthly temperature records in 2022 as the continent recorded its hottest ever summer, new analysis shows. In each case, the anomalies were more than 1.9C above the average temperature recorded between 1991 and 2020 for at least one month.

In Austria, the average across October 2022 was 3.3C warmer than the average October temperature recorded between 1991 and 2020. France and Slovenia also recorded temperature anomalies of 3C or more that month. Croatia and Greece both experienced 3C in December. Italy was warmer than average for all but two months of the year. It recorded its highest ever monthly temperature anomaly for three different months, in May, October and December. Spain and Portugal broke records for monthly anomalies on three different occasions.

Globally, 2022 was the fifth warmest year on record, with the last eight years collectively being the eight warmest on record, according to Copernicus. The average global temperature in 2022 was 1.2C higher than the average across the reference period 1850-1900.

In response to the findings, Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, said: “We are beginning to see increasing droughts, heatwaves and floods affecting large regions of the world that are not used to them. The rate of change means we need to adapt our way of life quicker than we ever have before.”

Meanwhile, the USA endured a particularly painful year as communities wrestled with the growing impacts of the climate crisis, with 18 major disasters wreaking havoc across the country as planet-heating emissions continued to climb. A total of 474 people died last year from these major calamities, the annual report found.

Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165bn in damages in the US last year, $10bn more than the 2021 total and the third most costly year since records of major losses began in 1980. 

Since 2016, there have been 122 separate billion-dollar weather and climate events that have, in total, killed more than 5,000 people and caused more than $1tn in damages.

Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), explained, “We are seeing several trends of climate-enhanced disasters,” said Smith, noting that the US is seeing longer, more intense wildfire seasons, severe rainfall events and the sort of huge, category four and five hurricanes in the past few years that Noaa has not documented before in its historical record, which stretches back to 1851. Smith added, “It does not seem likely that these trends will reverse. Perhaps we need to be more prepared for a future that has rapidly become our present.”

In the meantime, experts have said, as increasingly extreme weather is a mounting danger to refugees and migrants, already vulnerable displaced people, and is potentially pushing more people to flee their homes. However, little work has been done on addressing the plight of migrants afflicted by climate breakdown, or on the risk that more extremes of weather will push more people into moving. 

David Miliband, the chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said: “We have done a really bad job of working together on this. That’s especially damaging given that these migrants and displaced people are the most vulnerable people, in conflict-driven parts of the world. These people have done the least to contribute to the climate crisis, but are among the most severely impacted… “Climate change has a direct and indirect effect on migration, and forced migration. It generally leads to internal displacement, to migration flows within countries.”

Miliband warned that poor countries needed more funds to protect themselves from the effects of extreme weather, to help prevent people being forced to flee. On current forecasts, more than 200 million people are likely to be displaced around the world by 2030, by a variety of factors including the climate crisis. Most of them are likely to stay within their country borders, but the impact will be vast.

Andrew Harper, the special adviser on climate action at the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees, said, “Climate change has turbocharged extreme weather events. And those extreme weather events are in turn displacing people.”

Twelve European countries broke temperature records in 2022 | Extreme weather | The Guardian

Extreme weather left 474 people dead and cost $165bn in the US last year | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Governments urged to confront effects of climate crisis on migrants | Climate crisis | The Guardian

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.”

RT 8\1\23

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