U.S.-led airstrikes have killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians.

 The group noted that “the gap between these two figures reflects the many unknowns when it comes to civilian harm in war. Belligerents rarely track the effects of their own actions—and even then do so poorly,” researchers wrote. “It is left to local communities, civil society, and international agencies to count the costs.”

The Pentagon has declared a minimum of 91,340 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. But it does not include the number of air attacks by its allies in NATO.

Joe Dyke, investigator at Airwars, explained that “For much of the last 20 years people living in Washington or New York could have been forgiven for forgetting their country was at war. Whether a drone strike in a Yemeni village or a military base in rural Afghanistan, it often felt far removed—almost another world—but that isn’t how it felt for those millions of people living in those conflicts.” 

US Airstrikes Have Killed Up to 48,000 Civilians Since 9/11: Analysis | Common Dreams News

 Afghanistan today is a devastated country. Given the role European NATO  countries have played in these military interventions, one would think that the fate of the Afghan citizens would be one of the main preoccupations and concerns of European politicians. Video of desperate Afghans clinging on to aeroplanes taking off from Kabul and falling to their deaths shocked many.

European politicians have done relatively little to help Afghans in view of their moral responsibility for their plight.

France and the United Kingdom have gone only as far as proposing the creation of a United Nations-run safe zone in Kabul for those wanting to flee Taliban rule, while Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has said “evacuations, immediate humanitarian aid, longer-term development aid” were discussed at a G7 meeting.

 Afghanistan is facing an imminent humanitarian catastrophe and an exodus of people seeking asylum, so this is by far not enough. 

Worse still, some European politicians have started using the Afghan crisis as an opportunity to score political points.

Nigel Farage was quick to raise the fear of a flood of Muslims. “You can now see a wave of people leaving Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with,” he said. “How do we know that the Taliban and other extremist groups aren’t using this route to get their operatives into our country?”

Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League and Italy’s former interior minister, echoed Farage in his August 18 tweet, saying: “Humanitarian corridors for women and children in danger, certainly yes. Doors open for thousands of men, including potential terrorists, absolutely not.” 

So much for preserving family values by splitting families up. 

Only those Afghans who directly assisted the German military should receive asylum, the right-wing Alternative for Germany candidate,  Tino Chrupalla, said, and that all other Afghans should be turned away at the German border.

French President Emmanuel Macron said France should “anticipate and protect itself from a wave of migrants” from Afghanistan. 

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has gone as far as suggesting that Europe should keep Europe-bound Afghan refugees in third countries.

The European Union ministers of home affairs made it clear that their main priority is preventing “illegal immigration”. They declared that the EU “remain determined to effectively protect the EU external borders and prevent unauthorised entries” adding that the bloc should “strengthen the support to the countries in Afghanistan’s immediate neighbourhood to ensure that those in need receive adequate protection primarily in the region”.

Such proposals to externalise migration management and humanitarian protection through the creation of “buffer zones” or offshore reception centres are not new.

The EU signed deals with Turkey, Libya and others to stop refugees from entering the bloc, and take back “all migrants not in need of international protection.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister has already made it clear that his country is not willing to agree to a similar, disastrous deal in the aftermath of the US’s exit from Afghanistan. 

Exporting the migration crisis to third countries and adopting anti-migrant rhetoric may provide quick fixes for European leaders. But such strategies, as seen many times in the recent past, will not pay off in the long run. “Fortress Europe” does not keep the EU safe and prosperous, but instead fuels ethnonationalism and hate within the bloc’s borders.

Europe is politicising Afghan refugees instead of helping them | Opinions | Al Jazeera

The refugee crossings of the English Channel continues. 

The official UK government position is reflected by a statement from Dan O’Mahoney, at the Home Office, who said: “This unacceptable rise in dangerous crossings is being driven by criminal gangs and a surge in illegal migration across Europe. We’re determined to target the criminals at every level, so far we have secured nearly 300 arrests, 65 convictions and prevented more than 10,000 migrant attempts.”

Tim Naor Hilton, the chief executive of Refugee Action, said:

 “Refugees feel there is little choice other than to cross the Channel in flimsy boats because the government refuses to open up alternative routes to safety. The shocking images we’ve seen in Afghanistan has shown what forces people to leave their country. That same terror is happening in other countries such as Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and elsewhere.”

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said:

 “The government needs to recognise that while there is war, persecution and violence, people will be forced to take dangerous journeys to seek safety. We are talking about ordinary men, women and children who are forced to flee their home through no fault of their own. The odds are stacked against them but they struggle on to survive.” Solomon added, “This government must change its approach and instead of seeking to punish or push away people seeking safety because of the type of journey they have made to the UK, they must create and commit to more safe routes. As a country we can save lives and empower people, who have already been through so much, to give back to the communities that welcome them.”

Concern for migrants’ safety as hundreds resume Channel crossings | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

 Millions of India’s poor have been excluded from Modi’s flagship food security scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Ghareeb Kalyan Ann Yojana (PMGKAY). Reason: they do not own a ration card.

The ration card is a document issued by various state governments to households eligible to purchase subsidised food grains from the public distribution system under the National Food Security Act (NFSA).

The PMGKAY, which boasts of being the largest food security programme in the world, aims to feed India’s poorest during the pandemic. It provides five kilogrammes (11 pounds) of free rice or wheat and one kilogramme (two pounds) of pulses per person to each family holding a ration card, in addition to regular entitlements that come with the card.

However, Delhi state has exhausted its quota of the number of people who can be issued a ration card. In 2021, 22 out of 29 states in India had less than 5 percent of their quota remaining. That is because the quota is based on the 2011 census, making it a gross underestimate. The next census, scheduled to be completed this year, has been delayed indefinitely due to the pandemic.

“Such is an underestimate of ration card quotas that almost half of Delhi’s population that needs food security in a pandemic is excluded from the primary food security scheme,” Amrita Johri, a member of the Right to Food campaign, told Al Jazeera. “If this is the condition in the national capital, what would be the state in India’s rural areas?”

Meanwhile, in a decade, there has been a substantial increase in the number of people not covered under the NFSA. The NFSA covers 50 percent of India’s urban and 75 percent of the rural population, providing them subsidised food grains under the public distribution system through ration cards. The distribution of cards by state was last determined by India’s Planning Commission, using National Sample Survey (NSS) Household Consumption Survey data for 2011-2012. More than 10 years have elapsed since the publication of that data, with experts such as Dipa Sinha, assistant professor of economics at New Delhi’s Ambedkar University, calling it “policy blindness”.

“The government is aware of this huge gap on paper and on the ground. They don’t want to increase the subsidy on food grains because increasing the subsidy would directly increase India’s fiscal deficit. This despite surplus grains available in India,” Sinha explained. 

Currently, India’s granaries, controlled by the Food Corporation of India, are overflowing with a record 100 million metric tonnes of grains – about three times the norm for buffer stock.

 India’s Supreme Court acknowledged that most migrant workers suffering from hunger and extreme poverty were excluded from the public distribution system since they did not have ration cards. The government in May 2020 announced that it would provide ration to 80 million people who do not have ration cards, but only for the months of May and June. However, even this was not implemented properly. Data shows that government could identify and distribute food grains to only 28 million beneficiaries.  States such as Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttarakhand distributed less than 3 percent of the food grains sanctioned to them. When a similar situation arose in 2021, the government told the top court that it had instructed states to set up their own schemes according to needs. Some states gave no grain to those without ration cards while some states provided a one-time relief.

In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that food grains should not be denied in absence of a ration card to those who need it. This year, the top court reiterated its order, adding that the quota should be revised to the current estimates of the population. The court also directed all state governments to provide dry rations to the hungry for as long as the pandemic continues in India.

“However, no such scheme has been devised so far by the state governments,” activist Anjali Bhardwaj told Al Jazeera. She said she has sent legal notices to several states, asking why they failed to comply with the direction of the Supreme Court.  The federal ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution said any revision in quota estimates will be possible only after the publication of the next census.

“Most likely, the next census will be published once the pandemic is over. What will these people do during the pandemic? Will they starve?” asked Bhardwaj.

India was ranked 94th in the Global Hunger Index 2020 of 107 countries.

“The government is not accepting that people are starving. There is a general notion that lockdown causes hunger, while all is well after that. There are no jobs, the informal economy is hugely impacted by the pandemic and the government refuses to see it,” Sinha said and added, “The government does not realise that exclusion error is more serious than inclusion error. Often, the poor quality of cereals and grains that are provided under the public distribution system is a fine line between death and life.” 

Bhardwaj commented, “Time and again, the courts have upheld not just a citizen’s right to life but also citizen’s right to live with dignity. What dignity is left when a person is forced to beg for food?”

 Dirty air is the world’s biggest environmental killer, responsible for at least 4m early deaths a year.  Air pollution kills more people than HIV/Aids, malaria, and tuberculosis combined

Governments around the world gave 20% more in overseas aid funding to fossil fuel projects in 2019 and 2020 than to programmes to cut the air pollution they cause.

When compared in terms of years of life lost, HIV/Aids projects received 34 times more funding, while malnutrition programmes received seven times more. Increasing funding to similar levels to tackle air pollution would save many lives, experts said.

Jane Burston, at the Clean Air Fund explained, “We’re not saying malnutrition, water and sanitation, and HIV/Aids projects should get less money. Deaths from these are absolutely dropping off as a consequence of large amounts of funding being spent well, but air pollution just isn’t on the same scale at all,” adding: “When you see the incredibly and chronically low levels of funding on the one hand, and the chronically high levels of public health impacts on the other, it becomes quite obvious that more funding is needed.

Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said air quality funding did not match the scale of the problem: “Our relentless burning of fossil fuels pollutes our air, costing the global economy billions of dollars each year. Ending the financing of fossil-fuel development and instead investing in growing clean, carbon-free economies will bring immediate benefits. It will save many lives.”  Unep found that one third of the world’s countries have no legal limits in air pollution and that, in those nations that do, the limits are often weaker than WHO guidelines.

More global aid goes to fossil fuel projects than tackling dirty air – study | Air pollution | The Guardian

Sneek is a digital surveillance platform that every minute or so would capture a live photo of home-workers via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you caught someone not working as he or she should be, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.

Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that…”

 It is part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance known as “tattleware” or “bossware” and one that’s poised to become a standard feature of life on the job.

“There’s no real sign of this trend slowing down,” says Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne. “No sign of legislative change in any jurisdiction I can name, and no sign of pushback from employees, even when they’re aware of it happening.”

 If an employee uses a spy-enabled, work-sponsored computer outside of hours, their employer could easily access their personal data, down to internet banking passwords and Facebook messages.

In April last year, Google queries for “remote monitoring” were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they’d continued to surge by another 243%.

ActivTrak, Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff have all seen similar growth from prospective customers. FlexiSpy offers call-tapping; Spytech, which is known for mobile device access; and NetVizor, which has a remote takeover feature.

In April 2020, Zoom quickly backtracked on a short-lived “attention tracking” setting, which alerted a call host when a participant was focused away from the meeting for more than 30 seconds. And in December, Microsoft bowed to tech experts’ outcry over the release of a “productivity score” feature for its 365 suite, which rated individuals on criteria that included email use and network connectivity; the tool no longer identifies users by name.

Elizabeth Lyons, an associate professor of management at the University of California San Diego, suggests that “In other studies we’ve looked at, the workers were essentially saying, ‘If the manager is going to watch everything I do, then I’m not going to do anything above and beyond what they expect of me,’” 

Bosses turn to ‘tattleware’ to keep tabs on employees working from home | Technology | The Guardian

 While the FBI, CIA, police and the newly created Department of Homeland Security scoured the country and the world for radicalized Muslims, an existing threat was overlooked – white supremacist extremists already in the US, whose numbers and influence have continued to grow in the last two decades.

In 2020 far-right extremists were responsible for 16 of 17 extremist killings, in the US, according to the Anti-Defamation League, while in 2019, 41 of the 42 extremist killings were linked to the far right. Between 2009 and 2018 the far right was responsible for 73% of extremist-related fatalities in the US, while rightwing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, when a bomb planted by an anti-government extremist killed 168 people in a federal building in Oklahoma City.

 A gunman killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas, after allegedly posting a manifesto with white nationalist and anti-immigrant themes online. In it, he wrote that he planned to carry out an attack in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.

In February 2019, a US Coast Guard lieutenant who was a self-described “white nationalist” was arrested after he stockpiled weapons and compiled a hitlist of media and government figures. 

Nine black church members were murdered in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2017, by a 22-year-old who confessed to the FBI that he hoped to bring back segregation or start a race war.

Despite the statistical dominance of far-right and white supremacist killings in the US, America’s intelligence agencies have devoted far more resources to the perceived threat from Islamic terror. Successive governments have spent most of the last two decades putting the majority of their resources towards investigating Muslims, both in the US and abroad. In 2019 the FBI said 80% of its counter-terrorism agents were focused on international terrorism, with 20% devoted to domestic terrorism.

Between 2005 and 2009 an average of fewer than 330 FBI agents were assigned to domestic terrorism investigation, out of a total of nearly 2,000 counter-terrorism agents.

“There was a lack of attention from authorities – resources – but some of the actual interventions that authorities made were Islamophobic. And so they fostered some of this Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment,”  Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right and a professor at American University, where she runs the school’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, said.

Michael German, a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations, said the influence of money and big business had a role, as industries lobbied lawmakers and even the FBI itself to instead pursue anti-capitalist and environmental protest groups.

“The FBI needs resources. And to get resources, it needs to convince members of Congress. And Congress works most effectively when there are wealthy patrons who contribute to their campaigns,” German said. “So the FBI has to cultivate a base of support in the wealthy community, and how can they do that? Well, by going to corporate boards, and telling them, you know, the FBI needs more resources.

“And then of course, that gets the corporate boards a lot of influence over what the FBI does. And what those corporate boards were saying wasn’t that there are minority communities in the United States that are being targeted by white supremacists, what are you doing about it? They were saying: ‘Hey these [anti-corporate or environmental] protesters are a real pain and you know, there’s a potential they could become violent.’”

German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program further explains, “Giant corporations hold a lot of private information about Americans, and getting access to that information became important to the FBI, so pleasing those corporations became part of the mission.” Alongside that issue is the fact that there are “lingering racism problems within the FBI”, German said, with the agency still a predominantly white and male organization. “So that’s one end of the spectrum, the people who are either explicitly racist or implicitly racist. Because white supremacists don’t threaten their community so they don’t see it as a threat. The white male agent who goes home to a white suburban community doesn’t really see a lot of white supremacist skinheads causing problems in his community. So it becomes a lesser threat.”

Close to home: how US far-right terror flourished in post-9/11 focus on Islam | US news | The Guardian

 A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years’ worth of taxes the company did not pay. 

The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits.

Between 2008 and 2014, Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report.

 In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. 

The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75.

 Roma communities driven from Romania’s booming city of Cluj-Napoca say the authorities treat them like human garbage.  Pata Rat is the country’s biggest landfill and long one of its most glaring environmental sins. For decades, pollution leached from untreated waste and garbage fires blazed. Under pressure from the European Union, the city began work on closing the site in 2015. Some 2.5 million metric tons (2.8 million US tons) of waste, accumulated over 70 years. Two “temporary storage” landfills set up beside the old one in 2015 are still growing steadily, and experts say the old waste was never properly dealt with.

 1,500 Roma people are still living here with  the environmental hazard on their doorstep.

This was not an ecological landfill; it was not built in line with European standards,” said Ciprian-Valentin Nodis, a researcher from northern Romania and founding member of the Interethnic Association of Dumitrița.

“All these toxic substances went into the soil, into the groundwater. Everything in the area is polluted.”

The Roma residents of Pata Rat began to arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were driven by poverty to move to the landfill and work as waste pickers, but most have come in successive waves of evictions since Cluj-Napoca began to see a real estate boom in the 2000s. The last was in 2010, when local authorities evicted 350 inhabitants from Coastei Street near the city center. Their new home was to be a complex of small, modular units nestled between Pata Rat’s existing camps. 

The Roma community on Coastei Street was well integrated. They had been there for generations, they paid rent and utilities on their publicly owned homes, and their children attended local schools and kindergartens. Yet suddenly they were being dumped on the city’s trash heap. “They considered us garbage, not humans,” said Linda Greta Zsiga, “and they thought we deserve to live there.”

Seven out of ten Romanians said they don’t trust the Roma. 

Between 20% and 30% said Roma people have too many rights, that the state should be allowed to use violence against Roma, or that discrimination and hate speech against the Roma should not be punished.

Such attitudes are not unique to Romania. Across Europe, racism against the continent’s largest ethnic minority results in denial of basic civil rights, exclusion from employment and public services, and — perhaps most strikingly — the marginalization of Roma communities to areas that lack adequate water, sanitation and waste management. 

 A study published last year by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on “”environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe” found that the Roma were “disproportionately exposed to environmental degradation and pollution stemming from waste dumps and landfills, contaminated sites, or dirty industries.”

The EEB study describes one of the major factors in environmental racism against the Roma as forced eviction from “places with high economic value.” 

The Coastei community wasn’t given a reason for their eviction. But Zsiga has no doubt why they were moved. “They wanted to ‘clean’ Cluj of Roma,” she said. “Now very few Roma still live in the city.” 

A 2012 report by the UN Development Program found that 22% of adults living at Pata Rat suffered from chronic disease or some form of disability. Researchers documented a high incidence of skin infections, asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure and heart and stomach problems, and a report by the European Roma Rights Centre found that over two years following their eviction, reported health problems more than doubled among the Coastei community. 

An NGO worker in the area said respiratory diseases remain common, including among children. And economically, the closure of the dump has made life in Pata Rat even harder. 

Residents had been taking matters into their own hands. In 2012, Zsiga and others from Coastei camp set up an association that’s working with other NGOs to campaign for housing solutions for Pata Rat, and suing the authorities over the evictions. They are currently awaiting a decision on their case from the European Court of Human Rights.

Living in a sea of trash: Roma fight environmental racism in Romania | Global Ideas | DW | 05.09.2021

 A feeling of being away from industrial pollution has encouraged a sense that climate change is not an urgent and crucial issue for New Zealanders. How wrong that it is not a priority.

New Zealand has recorded its warmest ever winter, and scientists say that climate change is driving temperatures ever higher. 

The underlying warming trend could be tracked through carbon dioxide concentration, which had increased in New Zealand from 320 parts per million 50 years ago to about 412 parts per million today.

Snowfall at lower elevations was well below average this winter as it was often replaced with rain, which could make for lower river levels later in the year because there would be less snowmelt. That could impact irrigation for farms.

There were also more extreme weather events, Fedaeff said, including severe flooding in some places and dry spells in others.

Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington, said the changes were also putting pressure on natural ecosystems and that over time more species would face extinction. It was imperative for humans to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. 

“If we don’t get on top of warming soon, there is going to be grief for large sections of the world.”

Prof. Renwick said New Zealand had talked a lot about climate change but had so far done little to curb its emissions. He said there were plenty of natural resources like wind, sun and water that could provide renewable power for the nation’s energy needs.

“New Zealand could become world-leading in green energy and a green economy.”

New Zealand records its warmest ever winter with average temperature of 9.8C | New Zealand | The Guardian

Why not investigate the World Socialist Party (New Zealand), a global party for the elimination of global problems.

World Socialist Party (New Zealand) P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI, New Zealand

E-mail: moggiegrayson@gmail.com