In 2021, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 955 people have already died trying to reach Europe by sea. NGOs believe these figures are underestimated.
According to the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), coastal states have a legal obligation to organise and assist searches in the event of a distress signal.
They are ignoring that obligation.
Scientists have warned that China, Russia, Brazil and Australia all have energy policies associated with 5C rises in atmospheric temperatures, a heating hike that would bring devastation to much of the planet.
These countries are committed to climate targets that would lead to disastrous global warming and remain reliant on continued fossil-fuel burning that would trigger temperature rises of 5C if followed by the rest of the world.
This dramatic discrepancy reveals a deep division over the energy and environment policies of the world’s richest nations.
“Without more ambition from China, Brazil, Russia and Australia, Cop26 will fail to deliver the future our planet needs,” warned Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.
Yann Robiou du Pont, the lead researcher for the Paris Equity Tracker analysis explained, “The research underlines what many of us fear: major economies are simply not doing enough to tackle the climate crisis and, in many cases, G20 countries are leaving us on track for a world of more heatwaves, flooding and extreme weather events.”
“The G20 is failing to deliver,” said the activist network Avaaz.
A world 5C hotter would be one in which a quarter of the global population would face extreme drought for at least one month a year; rainforests would be destroyed, and melting ice sheets would result in dangerous sea-level rises. In addition, loss of reflective ice from the poles could cause oceans to absorb more solar radiation while melting permafrost in Siberia and other regions would release plumes of methane, another pernicious greenhouse gas. Inevitably, temperatures would soar even further.
Pay for nurses and other NHS staff in England will have fallen in real terms by more than 7% since 2010, even if they accept the latest offer from the government.
Figures produced by the TUC show that remuneration for nurses, community nurses, medical secretaries, speech therapists, physiotherapists, paramedics and radiographers will have dropped by between 7.3% and 7.6% in real terms in just over a decade, even after factoring in the 3% rise offered last week.
The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, told the Observer: “It’s easy to understand the anger from NHS staff when you see what’s been done to their pay. It’s not just about the 3% – it’s the way their wages have been held back year after year. All our key workers deserve a decent standard of living for their family. But too often their hard work does not pay. And after the hardest year of their working lives, they deserve better.”
Unions representing teachers also reacted with fury after it was announced that pay for most of their members would be frozen. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) last week highlighted how the decision on teachers’ pay went back on previous pledges from ministers and risked damaging recruitment into the profession.
The IFS said:
“At the last election, the Conservative party manifesto committed to increasing teacher starting salaries in England to £30,000 per year by September 2022. However, to ease pressure on school budgets and the public finances, the government has now announced a freeze on teacher pay levels in England for September 2021, and pushed back starting salaries of £30,000 to September 2023. The level of teacher pay is important. It plays a big part in determining the recruitment and retention pressures faced by schools. With the cost of employing teachers accounting for over half of school spending, what happens to salary levels also has a large bearing on the overall resource pressures faced by schools. And it is a key determinant of material living standards for over 500,000 teachers in England.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Following a year in which teachers and leaders have worked flat out on managing a battery of Covid control measures, as well as assessing students following the government’s decision to cancel public exams, the decision to implement a pay freeze is an absolute insult.”
Nurses’ pay in England to fall 7% in a decade even after government offer | NHS | The Guardian
When a disaster strikes the media highlight the international sympathy and the aid offered by world NGOs and how the government mobilises assistance. This article on the recent floods in Germany draws attention to the involvement of local people in providing relief to one another.
“The greatest help is provided by the local people,” observed the Berlin disaster researcher Martin Voss. “First of all, from those who are not yet so affected so that they can still do something: They lend a hand.”
Many, who otherwise perceive people as selfish and competitive, are amazed at the huge wave of helpfulness. However, research has shown for decades that people in disaster situations genuinely show solidarity, says Martin Voss. “At the moment when people get into this kind of emergency, the primary behaviour clearly becomes being there for another.”
The solidarity, the willingness to help is enormous, as also is the effort put into going beyond the state or organisations to get involved.
Hubert Schilles, a man in his mid-sixties from an hour west in the Eifel region had unblocked the drain of a dam with his 30-ton excavator, risking his life in the process. He saved more than 10,000 people directly affected by a possible dam breach.
Karsten Steiner uses a heavy excavator in Sinzig to lift mud and garbage debris piled meters high to clear the road. Three days after the disaster, Steiner had driven his excavator onto his low-loader nearly 300 kilometres north of here to help, at his own expense. When asked about the loss of earnings, Steiner only replies: “Look around: the people here are much worse off than me”
“The doers are the real heroes in this situation,” says disaster researcher, Wolf Dombrowsky. “Those who get started right away and get things done. And the best are also those who coordinate and divide up the tasks, telling the others ‘you do this, you do that.’ ” The Bremen-based disaster researcher emphasizes how much the normal competitive mechanisms in society are overridden in a disaster situation. “Here the people are stripped of everything. And anyone who helps is a hero.”
Dombrowsky expects individual aid initiatives to decline. “The people who go there and help mostly have jobs. They have families, children, relatives… And then comes the feeling, that I have to go back to work or my family needs me too.” At that point, at least, the professional aid effort has to step up, says Dombrowsky. “But then even the worst is over and spontaneous help is no longer necessary.”
That’s when the reconstruction phase begins.
Thousands of residents have fled flooded communities and swollen rivers in the Philippine capital, Manila, and outlying provinces after days of torrential monsoon rains. The northern Philippines has been swamped by days of monsoon rains that flooded low-lying villages and set off minor landslides. Officials say they are struggling to open more emergency shelters. In the city of Marikina in the capital region, nearly 15,000 residents were evacuated to safety overnight as waters rose alarmingly in a major river.
Marikina mayor, Marcelino Teodoro blamed years of illegal logging in nearby mountains and heavy siltation in the Marikina River for constant flooding in his city.
Extreme weather events have hit nearly all corners of the globe in recent weeks, bringing floods to China, India and Western Europe and heat waves to North America and Russia’s Siberia, highlighting fears about the impact of climate change. The Philippines is hit by about 20 tropical storms a year but a warmer Pacific Ocean will make storms more powerful and bring heavier rain, meteorologists say.
The Philippines is also suffering one of the worst outbreaks of Covid-19 in Asia and has tightened curbs to prevent the spread of the more infectious Delta variant.
With more than 1.54mn cases and 27,131 deaths, the Philippines has the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections and fatalities in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia. Authorities are struggling to allow social distancing among the displaced residents and prevent evacuation camps from turning into epicentres of Covid-19 infections
Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’
Venue: Fircroft College, Birmingham
Dates: 14th-16th July 2000
Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’ – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)
Transferred from tape cassettes. Some of the discussion sections are of very poor quality. The worst parts have been deleted and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.
1 An Evening With William Morris – Edwin Walters (14th July 2000)
2 The Utopian Tradition – Steve Coleman (15th July 2000)
3 Morris and the Romantic Movement – Ron Cook (15th July 2000)
4 The Stateless Society – Richard Headicar (15th July 2000)
5 A Dream of John Ball – Adam Buick (16th July 2000)
6 From Nowhere to Somewhere – Paddy Shannon and Stan Parker (16th July 2000)
Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’
Venue: Fircroft College, Birmingham
Dates: 14th-16th July 2000
Summer School 2000 – ‘William Morris’ – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)
Transferred from tape cassettes. Some of the discussion sections are of very poor quality. The worst parts have been deleted and replaced with 2 seconds of silence.
1 An Evening With William Morris – Edwin Walters (14th July 2000)
2 The Utopian Tradition – Steve Coleman (15th July 2000)
3 Morris and the Romantic Movement – Ron Cook (15th July 2000)
4 The Stateless Society – Richard Headicar (15th July 2000)
5 A Dream of John Ball – Adam Buick (16th July 2000)
6 From Nowhere to Somewhere – Paddy Shannon and Stan Parker (16th July 2000)
Breaking the Silence (BtS), an Israeli charity staffed by IDF veterans, said its new publication shows that the Israeli military is increasingly part of sustaining an “ecosystem of violence” in the Palestinian occupied territories because they provide a “cloak of protection” for the settlers who are becoming more aggressive. Israel’s security forces are complicit in a “drastic surge” in violence committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
BtS’s advocacy director, Ori Givati, their new report, shows “that there is no action nor will from the government or the military to stop settlers from attacking”. He explained that “This is part of a very well-planned strategic mission of the settlers to take over more and more of Palestinian land,” he said.
He said that “Settler violence is not committed in a vacuum. They are the biggest criminal enterprise in Israel, and not only are they immune from repercussions but they receive embracement from the military and government.”
BtS said its report illustrates the impunity of violent settlers to legal consequence, the lack of clear orders for soldiers regarding managing settlers and what the group calls the “duplicitous relationship’” between settlers and soldiers, “at times nurturing close relationship with the soldiers, and at the next moment enacting violence towards them”.
Data from the United Nations and, separately, data collated by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, shows a marked increase in violent incidents committed by Israeli settlers compared with previous years.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows that more Palestinians were injured either by settlers or members of the Israeli security forces in attacks in the first six months of this year than in the whole of 2020. This was almost on par with the yearly total in 2019.
According to B’Tselem, they have logged a 33 per cent increase in attacks during the first six months of 2021 compared with the same period last year. The group said this was “enacted with an increasingly open cooperation by Israel’s security forces and with the full backing of Israeli authorities”.
B’Tselem told The Independent. “This violence is a constant element of Israel’s apartheid regime, aspiring to remove Palestinians from their lands in order to facilitate their takeover,” it added.
According to Israeli monitoring group Peace Now, the surge in violence also tallies with a spike in settlement expansion in the West Bank – in particular, the soaring numbers of outposts.
“Settlers see themselves as a state within a state,” the former captain said. “Some of them openly talk about arming militia groups in order to fight the Israeli army if they ever change policy and try to enforce the laws against the Palestinians against them.”
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