Nearly 70,000 people in England are likely to die waiting for access to adult social care before the changes revealed this week by Boris Johnson come into force.
A further 72,883 adults are also likely to have died while waiting for social care in the 26 months between July 2019 – when Johnson said he had “a clear plan we have prepared” – and the point this month when details were finally released.
A World Bank report has found climate change could push more than 200 million people to leave their homes in the next three decades and create migration hotspots unless urgent action is taken to reduce global emissions.
The impacts of climate change upon such as water scarcity, decreasing crop productivity and rising sea levels could lead to millions of what the report describes as “climate migrants” by 2050 under three different scenarios with varying degrees of climate action and development.
Under the most pessimistic scenario, with a high level of emissions and unequal development, the report forecasts up to 216 million people moving within their own countries across the six regions analyzed. Those regions are Latin America; North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Eastern Europe and Central Asia; South Asia; and East Asia and the Pacific. The worst-case scenario is “plausible” if collective action to reduce emissions and invest in development isn’t taken, especially in the next decade.
In the most climate-friendly scenario, with a low level of emissions and inclusive, sustainable development, the number of migrants could be as much as 80% lower but still result in the move of 44 million people.
A more inclusive development scenario, which is the middle scenario will mean 91 million displaced by climate change.
In the worst-case scenario, Sub-Saharan Africa — the most vulnerable region due to desertification, fragile coastlines and the population’s dependence on agriculture — would see the most movement, with up to 86 million climate migrants moving within national borders. North Africa, however, is predicted to have the largest proportion of climate migrants, with 19 million people moving, equivalent to roughly 9% of its total population, due mainly to increased water scarcity.
Bangladesh is particularly affected by flooding and crop failures accounting for almost half of the predicted climate migrants, with 19.9 million people, including an increasing share of women, moving by 2050 under the pessimistic scenario.
The report did not look at climate migration across borders.
“Globally we know that three out of four people that move stay within countries,” said Dr. Kanta Kumari Rigaud, a lead environmental specialist at the World Bank and co-author of the report.
Still, migration patterns from rural to urban areas often precede movements across borders.
Climate change could move 200 million people by 2050, report says | PBS NewsHour
The media focus on the worst-case scenario because disasters make good reporting but even the optimistic alternative means misery and suffering for many millions of people.
Up to half of the estimated $14 trillion that the Pentagon has spent in the two decades since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors, with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics receiving much of the money.
That’s according to a new paper (pdf) authored by William Hartung—director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy.
According to Hartung’s analysis, from “one-third to one-half” of the Pentagon’s $14 trillion in spending since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan on October 2001 went to defense contractors, which spend heavily on government lobbying.
“A large portion of these contracts—one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years—have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman,” Hartung writes. “The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion.”
Those five corporations are far from the only companies that profited from the increase in U.S. Defense Department outlays following the Afghanistan invasion. numerous other firms—including Erik Prince’s since-rebranded Blackwater, the Dick Cheney-tied company Halliburton, and DynCorp—benefited handsomely from the Pentagon spending.
Hartung argues that the Pentagon’s growing reliance on private contractors to carry out U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks “raises multiple questions of accountability, transparency, and effectiveness.”
“This is problematic because privatizing key functions can reduce the U.S. military’s control of activities that occur in war zones while increasing risks of waste, fraud, and abuse,” he writes. “Additionally, that the waging of war is a source of profits can contradict the goal of having the U.S. lead with diplomacy in seeking to resolve conflicts.”
“Reducing the profits of war ultimately depends on reducing the resort to war in the first place,” Hartung writes. “Likewise, making war less profitable decreases the incentive to go to war…”
Oxford Nanopore
Oxford Nanopore’s flotation on the London stock exchange is expected to exceed a £2.4bn valuation achieved at a fundraising round in May, and plans to tap into the growing genomic sequencing market, estimated to be worth $5.7bn.
HeiQ
The London-listed, Swiss-based company has developed a surgical mask with an ultra-thin copper coating that destroys viruses and bacteria. HeiQ launched its “Viroblock” technology in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit, and today it is used by 150 major brands. Revenues were up by 80% last year. By the end of 2020 the company had listed on the London stock exchange, raising £60m. Chief executive Carlo Centonze called the pandemic a “tipping point for antimicrobial textiles”.
Synairgen
Synairgen’s share price has soared by 342% since July 2020 when the University of Southampton spinout made a major breakthrough with a coronavirus treatment. The company has gone from fewer than 20 employees before Covid to about 100, including freelancers. Analysts at Numis are forecasting revenue of up to £582m from the Covid treatment next year.
Oxford Biomedica
Oxford Biomedica is one of the companies making the Covid-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca. Biomedica has made tens of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca jab and doubled its estimate for vaccine revenues to £100m in May. It expects “significant” growth in operating profits this year from last year’s £7.3m.
Croda International
Croda supplies the particles for the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, and is involved in more than 100 Covid-19 projects worldwide. This has sent its sales and profits soaring, and catapulted its share price to record levels.
The company is on track to make at least $200m from lipid systems this year, twice as much as originally thought, as Pfizer and BioNTech have ramped up vaccine production and aim to produce 3 billion jabs this year and 4 billion next. Annual profits, Croda said in late July, would be “significantly ahead” of forecasts, after a record first-half profit of £230m, up 50% on 2020 and 35% on 2019.
Test providers
The pandemic has spawned a new breed of Covid-19 test makers, such as Abingdon Health, Novacyt, Omega Diagnostics and Genedrive.
Novacyt, an Anglo-French firm listed in London, launched the first coronavirus test in Europe in January 2020 and clinched lucrative government contracts. Chief executive Graham Mullis hailed a “year of transformation” in 2020 in which the future of Novacyt had been secured and it had repaid all long-term debt. Novacyt’s revenues in the six months to June rose 50% to £95m, with £41m from the government still in dispute.
Abingdon’s share price jumped in late August when it launched a £32.85 fingerprick test that tells people whether they are protected against coronavirus after vaccination or infection.
Russ Mould of stockbroker AJ Bell says: “Should the virus refuse to go away, that could yet stir fresh enthusiasm for these firms and their prospects, and even if Covid is finally beaten off, many employers and individuals could yet stick with testing programmes by way of reassurance or even as a means of reopening for business.”
The New York Times and Washington Post say the strike the USA proclaimed as a targeted drone strike against an Islamic State terrorist who was an imminent threat actually killed an aid worker on daily duties in Kabul.
The Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone on 29 August killed 10 members of one family, including six children.
The NYT and the WP analysed videos and photographic evidence, spoke to experts and witnesses, and both concluded that the evidence suggested there were no explosives in the vehicle which undermines the evidence of US military reports that explosives in the car caused a secondary blast. There is scant evidence of this. Images of the scene to experts for analysis. One, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, said it was highly unlikely there was a substantial amount of explosives in the car. He said fuel vapours may have triggered a secondary blast. Post-blast assessments expert Brian Castner said the second blast was probably “just the car burning or related to the gas or oil”. Three other weapons experts pointed to the lack of nearby explosive evidence – only one dent on a nearby gate, no blown-out walls, no sign that a second car in the courtyard was overturned and no destroyed vegetation.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, at the time called it a “righteous strike” against the Islamic State group. The US military said it tracked the vehicle from an IS safe-house and it made several suspicious stops that involved collection and delivery of items.
The dead driver turned out to be Ezmarai Ahmadi, 43, who worked for the California-based Nutrition and Education International (NEI) aid group and who was applying for resettlement in the US. Ahmadi was dropping off colleagues at various places in Kabul, picking up laptops and water bottles. Ahmadi later drove back home. Ahmadi had worked for NEI since 2006, lived at the compound with two of his brothers and their families. The 10 victims were all related to him, including three of his own children, aged between 10 and 20, and five other relatives aged two to seven.
NEI president Steven Kwon said the charity owned the white Toyota sedan. He denied the compound had any links to IS.
“We’re trying to help people. Why would we have explosives to kill people?” he asked.
Afghanistan: US media cast doubt on Kabul drone strike – BBC News
Up to 660,000 jobs will be at serious risk if the UK continues to fall behind other countries in the amount it invests in green infrastructure and jobs research by the TUC reveals.
79,000 jobs are at risk in the UK rubber and plastic sector, 63,200 in the UK chemicals sector and 26,900 in iron and steel. In total it says that 260,000 manufacturing jobs could be at risk as well as 407,000 in supply chains.
The report by the TUC makes clear that the impact on employment in the UK as a result of jobs moving “offshore” to countries in the vanguard of green investment and technology will be particularly acute in the UK’s industrial heartlands in the north-west, Yorkshire and the Humber.
The TUC in June found that the UK is second from bottom in the league table of G7 economies for its record in investment in green investment and jobs.
While the UK is expected to invest only about £180 per person on green recovery and jobs over the next decade, Biden plans to allocate more than £2,960 per person on a green recovery in the US: jobs and programmes involving public transport, electric vehicles and energy efficiency retrofits.
Relative to population, the UK’s green recovery investment is just 24% that of France, 21% that of Canada, and 6% that of the US.
Jobs in UK sectors such as the steel industry are at grave risk because manufacturing is still dependent on the environmentally damaging process of burning coal at high temperatures. Other countries are blazing a trail in technologies that allow “green” production of high-grade steel without coal and these pioneers will prosper and expand while “dirty” old producers will wither and die.
The TUC is calling on the government to fund an £85bn green recovery package to create 1.24 million green jobs.
Job protection schemes exist in Germany, Japan and many US states, producing significant savings on redundancies, training and hiring costs, and enabling firms to keep skilled staff on their books.
The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “The world is moving very clearly in one direction – away from carbon and toward net zero. The UK must keep up with the pace of change. There’s still time to protect vital jobs in manufacturing and its supply chains. But the clock is ticking. Unless the government urgently scales up investment in green tech and industry, we risk losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to competitor nations. If we move quickly, we can still safeguard Britain’s industrial heartlands.”
660,000 jobs at risk as UK’s green investment lags | Green jobs | The Guardian
British American Tobacco (BAT) one of Britain’s biggest companies, paid a bribe to the former Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.
Documents show it was involved in negotiations to pay between US$300,000 and US$500,000 to Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in 2013.
It is against UK law for a British company to pay bribes, no matter where the payment takes place.
Other documents also reveal BAT was paying bribes in South Africa and using illegal surveillance to damage rivals.
BAT funded a network of almost 200 secret informants in southern Africa. Most of this work was outsourced to a South African private security company called Forensic Security Services (FSS).
FSS staff were instructed to close down three cigarette factories run by BAT’s competitors in Zimbabwe.
British American Tobacco negotiated bribe for Mugabe, new evidence suggests – BBC News
Don’t hold your breath for any criminal prosecutions to take place.
Behind the dark cloud of terror, there was a silver lining for the wealthy.
Big Tech corporations are “complicit in” and have “profited from” the so-called war on terror by at least $44 billion since 2001, according to the report, Big Tech Sells War by the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE), MPower Change, and LittleSis.
Corportions such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been providing tools ranging “from databases to drones” to U.S. government agencies to prop up the ‘war on terror’ for nearly two decades since the Patriot Act “opened the doors for Big Tech to become, first and foremost, the brokers of our personal data, selling to government agencies and private companies at home and abroad and unleashing the era of the data economy.”
The arms industry feeds fear so that nations’ budgets are spent on the latest improvements in the weaponry of warfare. They goad politicians into bellicose policies. In 2020, the five biggest armament contractors spent $60 million on lobbying. In the last twenty years the defense industry has spent $2.5 billion on lobbying and directed another $285 million in donations to political candidates. Their aim is always to make a profit out of war. The label “merchants of death” has long since disappeared from the media’s vocabulary. Corporations dependant on wars are respectable enterprises, their CEOs are highly regarded and lucratively rewarded.
A report by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, found that the US government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy. US politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, yet they’ve said the State cannot afford the social spending to address the most urgent issues facing U.S. families and their communities. It might seem logical to end the money invested in the military-industrial complex and its ever more expensive weaponry but it is an option capitalism never chooses.
The “forever war” the media progressives have adopted as their anti-militarirst mantra is really the class war
America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz compared this in a speech to the actions of the German Nazis he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”
“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”
Today is Wigan’s Digger Festival, a day commemorating the Diggers, or the True Levellers, from the time of the English Revolution.
The ideas of common ownership are part of the history of the working people of Britain. A number of people, including Gerrard Winstanley, started to build houses, and dig and plant their crops on the common land at St George’s Hill in Surrey. The Diggers, or True Levellers as they described themselves, were communists who wanted to abolish private property and unlike any other radical grouping, they tried to put it into practice. However, the Digger communes lasted barely a year. They were broken by the violent hostility of the landlords and the indifference of the poor. Ruffians were sent to the commons to physically attack the Diggers, tearing down their houses and trampling crops. The landlords took them to court and prosecuted them for trespass. A smaller group of the original St.Georges Hill Diggers who moved to close by Little Heath near Cobham received similar treatment, as did other communes established in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in then Middlesex, Bosworth in Gloucestershire and a further one in Nottinghamshire. Indeed, nine of the Wellingborough Diggers were arrested and imprisoned in Northampton jail and although no charges could be proved against them the justice refused to release them. The Diggers’ communist ideas were a powerful attraction to the poor. Winstanley produced a utopian blueprint entitled Law of Freedom, a detailed plan for a future society.
“The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped, and carried into barns and storehouses by the assistance of every family; and if any man or family want corn, or other provision, they may go to the store-houses, and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers, and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling . . .” Gerald Winstanley c.1652
While the Levellers and the Diggers are both relatively well-known groups, the Ranters have attracted less attention, but they were perhaps the most radical of all the sects and groups existing in this period. A prominent Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, called the abolition of property “a most glorious design” and called for it to be replaced with “equality, community and universal love.”
Many countries are holding meetings with banks, financial institutions and NGOs to clarify how to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without breaching US or UN counterterror sanctions. The takeover of the country by the Taliban, which is internationally designated as a terrorist organisation, presents a legal minefield for charities trying to provide aid to the population.
The UN has imposed two sets of sanctions resolutions against more than 130 members of the Taliban – many now members of the government – and five Taliban “entities” including the entire Haqqani network. The US has long imposed broader sanctions on the Taliban as an organisation, raising questions about how banks or other financial channels can send aid into Afghanistan without risking falling foul of US Treasury penalties.
A senior UK Foreign Office official, said, it would be a complex task to find “safe, legal and transparent payment options into Afghanistan”.
Afghanistan’s population of 38 million people risks being plunged into near-universal poverty faced with a “catastrophic deterioration” of the country’s heavily aid-dependent economy, according to a warning issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The study, which examines a series of scenarios facing the already impoverished country under the Taliban’s new hardline rule, suggests a worst-case scenario where as many as 97% of Afghans would sink below the poverty line by next year – a staggering increase of 25%.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pleaded with the international community to maintain a dialogue with the Taliban in Afghanistan, warning that an “economic collapse” with possibly millions dying must be avoided.
“We must maintain a dialogue with the Taliban, where we affirm our principles directly — a dialogue with a feeling of solidarity with the Afghan people,” he said. “Our duty is to extend our solidarity to a people who suffer greatly, where millions and millions risk dying of hunger,” Guterres added.
Kanni Wignaraja, the UN assistant secretary general, explained, “We are facing a full-on development collapse on top of humanitarian and economic crises.” The report warns of the need to avert a “national implosion at all costs”.
“Half of the population is already in need of humanitarian support. This analysis suggests that we are on course for rapid, catastrophic deterioration in the lives of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable people. A transition to new authorities, a pandemic, a drought, an oncoming winter season – each of these on their own would already pose a major challenge. Taken together, they form a crisis that demands urgent action,” Wignaraja said.
Deborah Lyons, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan said, the freezing of funds in a bid to keep money out of the hands of the Taliban could end up causing a lot more harm to the people of Afghanistan. Lyons pointed out that if funding were to stop there would be “a severe economic downturn that could throw many more millions into poverty and hunger, may generate a massive wave of refugees from Afghanistan and indeed set Afghanistan back for generations.”
An injection of money into Afghanistan is needed “to prevent a total breakdown of the economy and social order,” Lyons said. Much of the Afghan central bank’s assets are not held in the country and the Taliban is unable to access the International Monetary Fund’s $440 million (€372,000) emergency reserve.
China’s deputy UN ambassador Geng Shuang, said the US using the Afghan central banks assets as a bargaining chip is ultimately hurting the people of Afghanistan. “These assets belong to Afghanistan and should be used for Afghanistan, not as leverage for threats,”
The UNDP appraisal itself paints a grim picture, showing the worsening situation can only drive more people into displacement.
It says: “Afghanistan is facing a financial crisis following the takeover, with much of the international aid that had propped up the economy frozen. With skyrocketing food prices and an interruption in economic activities and essential services, food insecurity is rising precipitously. The health status of much of the population, already compounded by Covid-19, is also of immediate concern. These ‘life shocks’ are felt hardest in poor urban and rural communities, where the most vulnerable are facing the unenviable choice of either finding a way to sustain their livelihoods while remaining in place or joining the large numbers already displaced.”
Even before the Taliban takeover, nearly half the population needed some humanitarian aid and more than half of all children under the age of 5 were expected to face acute malnutrition. Nearly 11 million people in Afghanistan, the almost one-third of the population, are already in desperate need as a result of drought, displacement, chronic poverty and a sharp increase in hostilities as the Taliban swept to power last month have pushed the country to the brink of economic collapse. A trickle of aid has been reaching the country, including from Pakistan and Qatar, since the Taliban took power, but with shortages of cash and some countries and institutions suspending aid, concern has been mounting rapidly. The Taliban’s current annual income, much of which is raised from taxation and criminal activities, is estimated to be somewhere between $300m and $1.5bn. While those funds bankrolled a successful insurgency, it is nowhere near meeting the needs of running a nation, experts say.
Most Afghans live on less than $2 a day, 80% of the country’s budget has been covered by international funds over the past 20 years, and no industries of note have emerged to provide employment to a mostly young population. Tens of thousands of Afghans have fled, most of them members of the educated professions, taking their much-needed knowledge and skills with them.
Afghans at risk of near-universal poverty, UN report warns | Global development | The Guardian
