Following Biden’s friendly overtures to  Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), France’s President Macron warmly greets the man responsible for the assassination of a journalist as well as the instigator of bombings in Yemen. 

The fiancee of the late Khashoggi expressed outrage at the visit. “I am scandalised and outraged that Emmanuel Macron is receiving with all the honours the executioner of my fiancee, Jamal Khashoggi,” Hatice Cengiz said.

“I feel profoundly troubled by the visit, because of what it means for our world and what it means for Jamal (Khashoggi) and people like him,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard explained, describing MBS as a man who “does not tolerate any dissent…The visit by MBS to France and Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia do not change the fact that MBS is anything other than a killer,” said Callamard, who at the time of the killing was the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings and led the independent probe.

Saudi Arabia is seen by many in the West as an essential partner due to its energy resources, purchases of weaponry and staunch opposition to Iran’s theocratic regime. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made the oil and gas reserves of the kingdom all the more important for the West.

Callamard expressed concern that “values were being obliterated in the face of concern about the rising price of oil”.

Camille Lons, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said that the war in Ukraine has put “energy-producing countries back in the spotlight, and they are taking advantage of it. This gives them political leverage that they will use to reassert their importance on the international stage”

 The United Nations Special Rapporteur on migrants’ rights has said Polish authorities must stop locking up migrants near the Belarus border and put an end to the “very different” treatment of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees.

Felipe Gonzalez Morales praised the actions of Polish authorities and citizens who have given protection and assistance to more than two million Ukrainian refugees and lodged them in their homes since the start of Russia’s invasion in February. But non-Ukrainian nationals fleeing that country have faced difficulties obtaining residence permits and proper shelter and have not enjoyed the same legal protections, he said.

Some people fleeing the war have been from third countries, often in the Middle East, Asia or Africa, who had been studying or working in Ukraine at the time of the invasion.

“I note with concern that this double standard approach has led to feelings of being discriminated among third-country nationals,” Morales said.

As well as the fallout from the war in Ukraine, Poland has faced attempts by tens of thousands of migrants and refugees since mid-2021 to cross its border with Belarus and enter the European Union.

Poland to set up an emergency zone, build a steel border barrier and introduce a campaign of pushbacks. Meanwhile, estimates suggested at least 20 migrants and refugees have died in the area’s freezing forests and bogs. Morales said these migrants and refugees, many of whom are from the Middle East and Afghanistan, were “routinely” being locked up in de facto detention centres in Poland near the border, including children, in violation of international humanitarian law.

End ‘double standards’ on refugees, UN expert urges Poland | Migration News | Al Jazeera

 Climate experts are concerned that the impacts of global heating will be even more drastic than previously thought.

Friederike Otto, a senior climate lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, said: “In Europe and other parts of the world we are seeing more and more record-breaking heatwaves causing extreme temperatures that have become hotter faster than in most climate models.

“It’s a worrying finding that suggests that if carbon emissions are not rapidly cut, the consequences of climate change on extreme heat in Europe, which already is extremely deadly, could be even worse than we previously thought.”

Meteorologists have said the results of this study are “sobering” as they confirm what was previously feared – that climate change is having a large impact on temperatures, making extreme heat more likely.

Fraser Lott, a climate monitoring and attribution scientist at the Met Office, said: “Two years ago, scientists at the UK Met Office found the chance of seeing 40C in the UK was one in 100 in any given year, up from one in 1,000 in the natural climate. It has been sobering to see such an event happen so soon after that study, to see the raw data coming back from our weather stations.

Experts have called for rapid cuts in emissions to prevent the situation from worsening. Extreme heat kills thousands of people across Europe, and it is thought hundreds of excess deaths in the UK were caused by the recent heatwave.

“Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather event in Europe, killing thousands each year,” said Roop Singh of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “But they don’t have to be. Many of these deaths are preventable if adequate adaptation plans are in place. Without rapid and comprehensive adaptation and emissions cuts, the situation will only get worse.”

Climate breakdown made UK heatwave 10 times more likely, study finds | Extreme weather | The Guardian

 Yemen is facing unprecedented rises in the price of food putting millions more people in danger of catastrophic hunger, Oxfam warned. 

Ferran Puig, Oxfam in Yemen Country Director, said: “This unprecedented rise in food prices threatens the lives of millions of people who are now in real danger of starvation. Families who have been pushed to the brink by seven years of conflict are being tipped over the edge as the prices of basic food rises beyond their reach. World leaders must act immediately to prevent catastrophic hunger and a worsening humanitarian crisis.”

Yemen has been hit hard by the worsening global food crises. The prices of wheat, flour, cooking oil, eggs and sugar have all increased by more than a third since March. Such price hikes haven’t been seen since the country was subject to a blockade and never for such a prolonged period. 

Around 56 per cent of the four million internally displaced people have no source of income at all. Women and children who make up around 77 per cent of the displaced population are at greatest risk of starvation.

Between March and June this year, the price of basic foods increased by up to 45 per cent.

Flour increased by 38 per centCooking oil increased by 45 per centSugar increased by 36 per centRice increased by 30 per centCanned beans increased by 38 per centPowder milk increased by 36 per centEggs increased by 35 per centPetrol and diesel prices also increased by 43 per cent in the first quarter of the year.

The average national price of the Minimum Food Basket (MFB) has increased by 48 per cent since December 2021 and 25 per cent since the start of the year, with the increasing costs of food imports further exacerbated by exchange rate fluctuations. Yemen’s national currency, the rial, has lost its value by 28 per cent since the beginning of the year.

Yemen imports 90 per cent of its food, including 42 per cent of its wheat from Ukraine. Importers have warned that stocks may run out in the coming months and that global increase in costs will challenge their ability to secure wheat imports into Yemen.  In a country where many people depend on bread for most of their daily food to survive, this could push millions towards starvation. Any drop in global prices could well be short-lived and may not translate into a reduction in cost for ordinary Yemenis. 

 An unseasonable drought caused by rising temperatures globally have caused more suffering, especially for farmers. Many Yemenis depend on agriculture and livestock as a main source of income but have seen their crops damaged or delayed and livestock dying during the current drought.

The lack of resources and funding has come with devastating consequences. The World Food Program has been forced to reduce the amount of aid it provides, with five million recipients of food aid now set to receive less than half of their daily calorie requirement. Eight million will receive just 25 per cent.

Unprecedented spike in food prices puts Yemenis at risk of extreme hunger – Yemen | ReliefWeb

 Families are spending an average of £89 more a month on energy, food and fuel than they were before the pandemic, Lloyds Banking Group said.

Lloyds’ chief executive, Charlie Nunn, said about 20% of the bank’s customers had had to adapt their spending “significantly” to rising prices, forcing them to refrain from purchases such as white goods and computers. He added that customers had cancelled or blocked 2.2m subscriptions services such as Netflix since the summer of 2021.

 UK banks have largely benefited from nine consecutive months of interest rate rises by the Bank of England, where policymakers have been trying to get soaring inflation under control. Rising rates are usually good news for bank finances, since banks are able to charge borrowers more for loans and mortgages, which in turn increases their net interest margin – a key measure of profitability and growth. Lloyds pre-tax profits for the three months to the end of June were in line with the same period last year at just over £2bn, exceeding analyst estimates of £1.6bn.

Lloyds’ net interest margin – the difference between what it earns from loans and pays for deposits – rose to 2.87% in the second quarter compared with 2.5% last year.

Lloyds lays bare impact of soaring inflation on everyday customers | Lloyds Banking Group | The Guardian

 According to Save the Children, families in Myanmar have lost on average more than half of their income since the political crisis and escalation of conflict in February 2021. The economic crisis drove an increase in the share of households experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity between August and October 2020. Since February last year, the country has suffered further economic decline, with mass job losses, business closures and a weakening of the Myanmar currency (kyat), which has affected households across the country.

Shaheen Chughtai, Regional Advocacy Director for Save the Children in Asia, said: “More than a year on from the coup, millions of children do not have enough to eat and families are having to beg or borrow to survive. These new figures are especially sobering at a time where humanitarian response is severely underfunded. At a time when children in Myanmar need us most, they are being let down by the international community…”

The economic impact of the political crisis, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, has left families struggling to feed themselves and their children.

Some 80% of families said food was their primary concern, with adults in one in five households cutting back on meals in order to feed their children. 

A third of households are borrowing food or relying on help from others to feed their families.

Families are reporting an average price increase of between 30% and 70% for basic foods.

Even middle-income households are now being pushed below the poverty line.

Earlier this year, Save the Children reported that at least 150,000 children had been forced to flee their homes due to violence, and last month reports showed that the number of children out of school had doubled over the past two years.

https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/families-myanmar-lose-more-half-their-income-year-conflict-says-save-children

 Shell reports record profit of $11.5 billion

Oil giant Shell has doubled its profits in the last quarter, thanks to the surge in energy prices since the Ukraine war began which are hammering households and businesses.

Shell has reported record adjusted earnings of $11.47bn (£9.4bn) for the last quarter, up from $5.5bn in April-June 2021, as it benefitted from higher realised prices, higher refining margins, and stronger gas and power trading. That smashes Shell’s record quarterly profit of $9.1bn racked up in January-March, and above analyst forecasts.

The company will funnel more cash to investors, announcing a share buyback programme of $6bn in the third quarter.

  Meanwhile, the UK’s energy price cap could hit £3,850 per year in January. BFY Group, a utilities consultancy, warns that more vulnerable households, on prepayment meters, could see energy bills of £500 for the month of January alone. Consumers were also warned that annual charges of more than £3,500 a year, or £300 a month, could become the norm “well into 2024”.

(1) Shell’s profits hit record $11.5bn, as UK households face winter energy bill pain – business live (theguardian.com)

Although our attitude towards nationalism has been stated many times, there are still those who do not understand it or cannot reconcile it with what they are supposed to be the socialist point of view. It is not easy to oppose the emotionalism of powerful patriotic movements but that difficulty is not removed by being acquiescent and avoiding adopting the Marxist analysis

Let us set out the Socialist Party’s answer to the appeals of the patriot that all citizens ought to defend the independence of the country in which they live. Our answer is plain and definite. Under capitalism all the workers in every land are wage slaves. In wars between capitalist nations, victory or defeat,  leaves their position in society unchanged. Even the standard of living of the workers in both the “victorious” and “defeated” countries alters little. The abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism is the sole issue for the Socialist Party.

Should workers support wars waged by capitalist States? Should workers support nationalist movements? The Socialist Party’s reply to both questions is an unambiguous no! We support no capitalist war and we support no nationalist movement. Wars waged by capitalist State involves no working-class issues, and on no account would socialists support them. The Socialist Party alone in this country consistently opposed every capitalist war. 

 The only enemy of the working class is the capitalist class. Therefore to urge the workers to fight for Britain, China, Russia or Ukraine is to ask them to neglect the problems and the interests of their class. Such propaganda under capitalism, on whatever pretext, is anti-socialist. In comparison with the loss of working class life and limb in war, the difference between exploitation by domestic capitalists and exploitation by foreign capitalists matters nothing at all to workers. We hold an attitude of unqualified hostility to capitalist wars. 

We are interested in one struggle only, class struggle the endeavour by wage earners to overthrow capitalist private property and all forms of the wages system. The national movements blazing away in different parts of the world are not working-class, but capitalist, in their aim. We, therefore, oppose them. Patriotism has the effect of binding together the classes in each geographical area. The Socialist Party desires that conflicting class interests shall be recognised, not obscured.

Socialism and patriotism are irreconcilably antagonistic. Patriotism is anti-working class and Russian nationalism is no less so than is British. The one encourages the other. We wish to stifle both so neither can thrive.  The assumption by some on the left-wing that the enemies of the Western powers are necessarily the friends of socialism is too shallow to need refutation.  It has been argued that  that the existence of foreign control enables capitalist politicians to blame the evils of their system on to the “foreigner.” Against this, however, must be placed the great harm wrought by the exaggeration of national feeling, and hatred of foreigners. This breeds a state of mind quite unsuited to working-class organisations: and saps the solidarity of members of the working-class with each other.

Consequently, the Socialist Party is frequently branded as a“puppet” of imperialism because we tell the workers that rule by one section of the capitalist class does not differ in essentials from rule by another section. Instead, we tell the truth, which is that another nation’s “independence” should concern no more the workers there than does British “independence” matter to us. Their governments are all operating on behalf of the capitalist class. Just as we told fellow workers in past wars not to support the wars of the ruling class, so we tell the Russian and Ukrainian workers now.  Does any objective observer believe for one moment that Ukrainian capitalists are one whit less brutal in their exploitation of their workers than  the Russia, or for that matter are UK, EU, US, or any other Imperialist capitalist class?  The Ukrainian workers will be no better off when they have had a change of masters imposed.

Capitalism as a world system is not weakened by the victory or defeat of our respective nation-states. The lives of workers are needlessly sacrificed to satisfy the interests of the ruling class. The Socialist Party can proudly boast that it has never urged the workers to fight in or prepare for capitalist wars, and has never, directly or indirectly, aided any political party doing so.

Our advice to both Ukraine’s and Russia’s workers is to build up organisations to fight their own capitalist class—they will need them soon enough. Our advice to all workers is to acquaint themselves with their own class interests and get rid of the illusion that they can dictate foreign policy to their masters.

 In a speech in Washington at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the UK’s national security adviser warned, the West risks the initiation of nuclear conflict with China or Russia because of a “breakdown of communication” with the two countries.

He believed the deterioration of communication with China and Russia had created a higher risk of “rapid escalation to strategic conflict”.

“The cold war’s two monolithic blocks of the USSR and Nato – though not without alarming bumps – were able to reach a shared understanding of doctrine that is today absent,” he said. “Doctrine is opaque in Moscow and Beijing, let alone Pyongyang or Tehran.”

Lovegrove, who was appointed to Whitehall’s most senior defence role in March 2021, added: “During the cold war, we benefited from a series of negotiations and dialogues that improved our understanding of Soviet doctrine and capabilities and vice versa. This gave us both a higher level of confidence that we would not miscalculate our way into nuclear war. Today, we do not have the same foundations with others who may threaten us in the future – particularly with China…”

Poor communication ‘raises risk of nuclear war with China or Russia’ | Nuclear weapons | The Guardian

 Mexico is facing its worst water crisis in 30 years as reservoirs serving about 23 million people dry up. The climate crisis has caused consistently hotter summers, and this year’s La Niña weather patterns created the perfect conditions for severe drought. More than half of Mexico is suffering from drought, and the national water authority, Conagua, declared a state of emergency in four northern states. Several cities have now reached the point of critical water scarcity when water supplies ran out.

While drought grips Mexican cities like Monterrey with people lining up with buckets for brackish water Coca-Cola and other firms are still extracting groundwater. The drought in North Mexico means taps run dry. People cannot afford bottled water so water tankers (pipas)  are the only way to deliver water to homes and businesses. Monterrey is facing a “sanitary crisis” as those who cannot afford bottled water drink unclean water from the pipas.

Anger is growing that beverage companies with bottling plants, including Coca Cola and Heineken, are extracting billions of litres of water from public reservoirs. Several brewers and soft drinks companies have factories in the city, and these use about 60 times the amount consumed by the city’s population, nearly 90bn litres a year in total, and over half of that – nearly 50bn litres a year (or 50m cubic metres) – is water from public reservoirs. activists have popularised the phrase: activists have popularised the phrase: “No es sequía, es saqueo” (“It’s not drought, it’s plunder”) 

Jaime Noyola, director of the Alliance of Users of Public Services, says his organisation predicted the crisis months ago. The public-interest group regularly protests outside government buildings. They allege that local leaders, including the governor of Nuevo León state, Samuel García, are directly profiting from drinks companies’ water use.

“From the behaviour of the companies, we don’t see anything that indicates they will give up water voluntarily,” Noyola says. “And on the part of the local and state government, there’s a crisis of ineptitude, and they blame everyone but themselves.”

Though a group of drinks companies, including Arca Continental and Coca-Cola, have collectively pledged to give up 28% of the water they use while the drought continues, the companies did not mention lowering prices of the essential drinking water they sell.

“How do you assign a price to water? It’s a human right,” says Noyola. “But these companies, namely Coca-Cola, in selling bottled water as the only potable water source, have made their product obligatory. Now water costs nearly as much as gasoline.” 

Mexico is the world’s largest per-capita consumer of bottled water. Noyola adds: “Even if they stop production, they are still selling their products while people are suffering and infections are spreading [from people drinking water from the pipas].”

The water crisis has sparked protests and violence along class lines, as wealthier areas are given higher water quotas than poorer areas, and still have tap water for up to 12 hours a day. On 16 July, residents of two impoverished Monterrey suburbs learned that a portion of the remaining water from a nearby reservoir would be diverted to the city. In response, they blocked a highway with a barricade of cars, tyres, rocks and tree branches, stalling traffic for two days. Then they burned the water pipes.

“I won’t be surprised if people get together and start hijacking the pipas,” Noyola says.

‘It’s plunder’: Mexico desperate for water while drinks companies use billions of litres | Global development | The Guardian