President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader has ordered security forces to “fire without warning”. He also said “20,000 bandits” had attacked the city of Almaty, the epicentre of protests sparked by a fuel price rise and blamed foreign-trained “terrorists”. 

Tokayev dismissed calls to hold talks with protesters as “nonsense”, saying: “What kind of talks can we hold with criminals and murderers?” Tokayev gave “special thanks” to Putin for sending troops.

Unrest began when the cost of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) – which many people in Kazakhstan use to fuel their cars – doubled. But protests been prompted  as a result of long-simmering frustrations with the political and economic situation in the country. It has turned into a general protest against corruption, poverty and inequality.

The bosses of Britain’s biggest companies will have made more money in 2022 by breakfast time on Friday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year.

By 9am on 7 January, the fourth working day of the year, a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more on an hourly basis than the UK worker’s annual salary, based on median average remuneration figures for both groups.

FTSE 100 chief executives were paid £2.7m on average in 2020 (the latest full-year figures available), which works out at 86 times the £31,285 average salary for full-time UK workers.

Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company that makes the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, was the highest paid, receiving £15.5m. The other top earners were Experian’s Brian Cassin, who got £10.3m, CRH’s Albert Manifold, with £10m, and Berkeley’s Rob Perrins, who collected £8m.

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said: “The pandemic has shown us all who keeps the country going during a crisis. There are millions of hardworking people in Britain – from carers, to delivery drivers, to shop floor staff – who give more than they get back, but greedy executives are taking home millions while ordinary workers face yet another year of pay squeezes.”

The Unite union’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, said: “Is it the nurse in an intensive care unit saving the lives of those struck by Covid, or an elite investment banker making millions, who contributes most to society? Which of them stood up for all of us during the pandemic?”

Top CEOs to surpass average yearly UK pay after just four days | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, said, “Fat cat bosses trousering 173 times more than the carers who look after our loved ones is a disgrace.”

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, was paid nearly $100m (£74m) last year, a 570% increase on the previous year.

Cook also gained access to share awards worth about $750m as the iPhone maker’s market value approaches $3tn.

His total compensation for the year to September 2021 was $98.7m, up from $14.7m the previous year.

His 2021 pay was boosted by a $82.3m stock award bonus related to Apples’ soaring share price. His base salary was $3m, he also collected $12m in bonuses.

Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that paid to the average Apple employee, who collected a median average of $68,254.

Apple spent more than $700,000 on private flights for Cook, as the company has decided it is too much of a security risk to allow him to fly on scheduled commercial flights. 

The company also paid hundreds of thousands in personal security, pension contributions, life insurance and buying back unused holiday time.

Cook’s personal fortune is more than $1bn

Apple boss Tim Cook was paid nearly $100m last year, filings show | Tim Cook | The Guardian

 Apple’s value now surpasses the nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of six of the world’s top 10 economies, including the United Kingdom ($2.71 trillion), India ($2.62 trillion), France ($2.60 trillion), Italy ($1.89 trillion), Canada ($1.64 trillion) and South Korea ($1.63 trillion).

The nearly 750 billionaires in the United States saw their combined wealth soar by $1 trillion in 2021, a 25% jump.

 Elon Musk led the billionaire pandemic profiteers with $118.2 billion in wealth gains last year, a 77% increase from 2020.

Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, saw their net worths grow by $1.4 billion and $18.3 billion, respectively.

U.S. billionaires now collectively own $5.1 trillion in wealth.

 The bottom 50% of the U.S. population combined owns $3.4 trillion in wealth.

Under current law, the billionaires’ massive windfalls in 2021 will go untaxed because they consist of unrealized capital gains.

 Red Light

The prime minister’s trading principles,

But, to be a leader of the Tories

He or she must flaunt and sell themselves,

And everyone knows what a whore is.

Perhaps be solicited by Labour?

Their leader might be a better looker,

Yet it’s foolish, surely most would concur,

To simply swap a whore for a hooker.

What seems on offer may look seductive,

Offering a good time in full measure,

Capital pimps the state so you’ll believe

Your satisfaction is their pleasure.

But, look again, there’s no mistaking it,

Whatever they say they are faking it.

D.A.

 Sri Lanka is facing a deepening financial and humanitarian crisis with fears it could go bankrupt in 2022 as inflation rises to record levels, food prices rocket and its state coffers run dry.

It is in part caused by the immediate impact of the Covid crisis and the loss of tourism but is compounded by high government spending and tax cuts eroding state revenues, vast debt repayments to China and foreign exchange reserves at their lowest levels in a decade.

The loss of jobs and vital foreign revenue from tourism, which usually contributes more than 10% of GDP, has been substantial, with more than 200,000 people losing their livelihoods in the travel and tourism sectors,

 Inflation has meanwhile been spurred by the government printing money to pay off domestic loans and foreign bonds. Inflation hit a record high of 11.1% in November and escalating prices have left those who were previously well off struggling to feed their families, while basic goods are now unaffordable for many. 

One of the most pressing problems for Sri Lanka is its huge foreign debt burden, in particular to China. It owes China more than $5bn in debt and last year took an additional $1bn loan from Beijing to help with its acute financial crisis, which is being paid in instalments. In the next 12 months, in the government and private sector, Sri Lanka will be required to repay an estimated $7.3bn in domestic and foreign loans, including a $500m international sovereign bond repayment in January. However, as of November, available foreign currency reserves were just $1.6bn.

Government minister Ramesh Pathirana said they hoped to settle their past oil debts with Iran by paying them with tea, sending them $5m worth of tea every month in order to save “ much needed currency”.

The World Bank estimates 500,000 people have fallen below the poverty line since the beginning of the pandemic, the equivalent of five years’ progress in fighting poverty.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared Sri Lanka to be in an economic emergency, the military was given the power to ensure essential items, including rice and sugar, were sold at set government prices – but it has done little to ease people’s plight.

Rajapaksa’s decision in May to ban all fertiliser and pesticides and force farmers to go organic without warning has brought a formerly prosperous agricultural community to its knees as many farmers, who had become used to using – and often overusing – fertiliser and pesticides, were suddenly left without ways to produce healthy crops or combat weeds and insects. Many fearing a loss decided not to cultivate crops at all, adding to the food shortages in Sri Lanka. The government made a dramatic U-turn in late October and farmers are now struggling to cover the high costs of imported fertiliser without help.

The former central bank deputy governor WA Wijewardena warned the struggles of ordinary people would exacerbate the financial crisis, which would in turn make life harder for them. “When the economic crisis deepens beyond redemption, it is inevitable that the country will have a financial crisis too,” he said. “Both will reduce food security by lowering production and failing to import due to foreign exchange scarcities. At that point, it will be a humanitarian crisis.” Wijewardena said the country was at substantial risk of defaulting on its repayments, which would have catastrophic economic consequences.

The government has resorted to temporary relief measures, such as credit lines to import foods, medicines and fuel from its neighbouring ally India, as well as currency swaps from India, China and Bangladesh and loans to purchase petroleum from Oman. However, these loans provide only short-term relief and have to be paid back quickly at high-interest rates, adding to Sri Lanka’s debt load.

‘There is no money left’: Covid crisis leaves Sri Lanka on brink of bankruptcy | Sri Lanka | The Guardian

At a meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons systems – Terminator-type killer robots – and failed to place restrictive controls on the development of such lethal weaponry. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

The Kargu-2, made by a Turkish defense contractor, is a cross between a quadcopter drone and a bomb. It has artificial intelligence for finding and tracking targets, and might have been used autonomously in the Libyan civil war to attack people.

Proliferation may occur when the militaries developing autonomous weapons assume that they will be able to contain and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it’s this: Weapons spread. Market pressures could result in the creation and widespread sale of what can be thought of as the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots that are cheap, effective and almost impossible to contain as they circulate around the globe. “Kalashnikov” autonomous weapons could get into the hands of people outside of government control, including international and domestic terrorists.

Already we witness frequent misidentifications by individual human operators of drone attacks such as the recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan.  When selecting a target, will weaponized Artificial Intelligence weapons be able to distinguish between hostile soldiers and children playing with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat? We already have an example of image recognition software used by Google identifying Black people as actual gorillas. AI systems err and when they err, their makers often don’t know why they did and, therefore, don’t know how to correct them. 

Lastly, how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on trial? The weapon? The soldier supposedly at the touch-pad? The soldier’s commanders issuing the instructions? The corporation that manufactured the soft and hardware of the weapon? 

Taken from here

Opinion | Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails to Agree on ‘Killer Robot’ Ban | James Dawes (commondreams.org)

 Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter and is a vital source of coal supply for power plants in India. India’s Adani Group is preparing to ship the first coal cargo from Australia’s Carmichael mine in outback Queensland state after resisting a seven-year campaign by climate activists and defying a global push away from fossil fuels. 

10 million tonnes per annum of coal will be produced at the Carmichael Mine. The coal will be exported from a terminal at Abbot Point, which Adani bought for $2 billion in 2011 and renamed North Queensland Export Terminal. Analysts said it made sense for Adani to dig the mine to help it make back the massive investment on the coal terminal, which has run nearly half-empty since Adani acquired it.

“It’s about maximising your cash flow returns on the railway line and maximising your profits on Abbot Point,” said Tim Buckley, a director at the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). He said even though the Carmichael mine will become unprofitable as coal prices fall, Adani might have an incentive to expand it to 20 million tonnes a year to keep the port filled when other mines supplying the terminal stop producing.

Meantime, China, has completed the first coal-power 1,000-megawatt unit of the Shanghaimiao plant, the biggest of its kind under construction in the country. China is responsible for more than half of global coal-fired power generation and is expected to see a 9% year-on-year increase in 2021, an International Energy Agency report published this month said.

China has pledged to start reducing coal consumption, but will do so only after 2025, giving developers considerable leeway to raise capacity further in the coming four years. Yhe country is likely to build as much as 150 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity over the 2021-2025 period, bringing the total to 1,230 GW.

India’s Adani nears first coal shipment from Australian mine (trust.org)

China fires up giant coal power plant in face of calls for cuts (trust.org)

In 2019-20 4.3 million children (defined as people under 16, or aged 16 to 19 and in full-time education) were living in households in poverty. 

They accounted for 31% of the UK’s 14 million children.

But there was a wide variation among ethnic groups.

Bangladeshi children are the poorest, with 61% of them living in a poor household. In 2010-11, 61% of Bangladeshi children were living in poor households – exactly the same figure as at the end of the decade.

The figures for the other groups were: Pakistani children (55%); black African or Caribbean or black British (53%); other ethnicity (51%); other Asian (50%); mixed ethnicity (32%); Indian (27%); white (26%); and Chinese (12%).

There are 2.9 million white children living in poverty, making them by far the largest ethnic cohort, comprising 68% of all children living in poverty. 

Black children are the next biggest group: with more than 400,000 living in poverty, they comprise 10% of the child poverty total.

More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty.

Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children.

 The proportion of black children living in poverty went up from 42% in 2010-11 to 53% in 2019-20

Over the last decade, the total number of black children in poor households more than doubled

Halima Begum, chief executive at the Runnymede Trust, said: “These are not cyclical inequalities that are being flagged, but systemic shortcomings that must be reversed quickly.

“But the problems are nuanced. Black children face racism and poverty. But poverty is not defined exclusively by race. So, for more than a decade, the Runnymede Trust has argued that you can’t simply solve the issue of racial inequality without also addressing socio-economic disparities.”

More than half of UK’s black children live in poverty, analysis shows | Race | The Guardian