Americans pay around two and a half times as much for prescription drugs as people in other developed countries.

 Prescriptions cost so much because the pharmaceutical industry wields monopoly control to set and keep drug prices high. 

So while the U.S. makes up only 15 percent of the global insulin market, it accounts for nearly half of the revenue that these corporations bring in every year. 

Insulin prices are on average eight times higher in the United States than in 32 other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Turkey.

 In one study, one in three Americans has skipped refilling a prescription.  In another study, one in four Americans who rely on insulin also admitted to rationing it

Opinion | Big Pharma Companies Have All the Power With Families Like Mine at Their Mercy | Annemarie Gibson (commondreams.org)

 Robert Black, the most senior executive at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (TMO), told the public inquiry into the disaster that the obsolete plan showing no more than 12 vulnerable or disabled people was caused by staff not carrying out managers’ instructions allowing the block’s fire safety plan to become 15 years out of date so it failed to account for more than two dozen of the disabled people in the block.

Grenfell flats was in fact home to 37 disabled people and 15 of them died. 

Counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC put it to Black: “In reality, as the chief executive you were ultimately responsible for a failure to keep these documents up to date lower down in your organisation”.

“Pass,” he replied. “It should have been updated. I’m not shying away from that, so that’s my situation.”

 “Information should have been updated by staff,” Black told the inquiry. “The whole thing that I suffered throughout my career working with people is the ability to forget to fill in the paperwork.”

Black also said he had made a decision not to act on warnings that the landlord should draw up specific emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable and disabled people, claiming it was impractical and that the key policy was to tell residents to stay put in the event of a fire.

The inquiry heard how, in the preceding years, the TMO let the idea of producing personal emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable people “drop” despite warnings from safety consultants and the London fire brigade that its fire risk management was falling short. Seven years before the fire a consultancy hired by the TMO said it should develop “formal procedures to deal effectively with fire safety issues associated with disabled or vulnerable tenants and leaseholders … this should include a range of options from relocation in severe cases … and the provision of personal emergency evacuation plans in those less serious cases.”

It indicated this was a “high risk” issue, but asked whether this was done, Black said: “No, we didn’t have individual emergency plans per block.” He didn’t accept that specific fire evacuation plans needed to be made for disabled people, despite being warned that failing to do so would breach fire safety regulations. 

Black also described how he gave the TMO’s director in charge of financial services and IT, Barbara Matthews, responsibility for fire safety, even though he did not check if she had any experience in fire safety.

“Can you account for having a head of health and safety who had no health and safety background?” asked Millett.

“I wouldn’t have had the income to have someone sitting on the executive specifically doing health and safety,” said Black. “Local authority funding across the country had been cut.”

CEO of Grenfell Tower landlord blames staff for outdated fire safety plan | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 While many poor people became poorer, five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Because of recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helping to boost their wealth in 2020 more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time.

Total global wealth grew by 7.4%.

Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said.

Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said, “Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,” 

Wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and  Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”.

 “In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said.

Nannette Hechler-Fayd’herbe, chief investment officer at Credit Suisse, said:  “The lowering of interest rates by central banks has probably had the greatest impact. It is a major reason why share prices and house prices have flourished, and these translate directly into our valuations of household wealth.”

Millions become millionaires in Covid pandemic – BBC News

41 million people in 43 countries are at imminent risk of famine, with nearly 600,000 others in four countries already experiencing famine-like conditions, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

“I am heartbroken at what we’re facing in 2021,” said WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley. “It’s just tragic – these are real people with real names.”

Wars, climate change and economic shocks have been driving the increase in hunger while soaring prices for basic items compound existing pressures on food security this year. Currency depreciation in countries such as Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe is adding to these pressures and driving prices even higher, stoking food insecurity.

World food prices rose in May to their highest levels in a decade, UN figures show, with basics like cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat and sugar up a combined 40 percent versus year-ago levels. Global maize prices have soared almost 90 percent year-on-year, while wheat prices are up almost 30 percent over the same period.

The WFP says about 690 million people, go to bed hungry each night.

UN World Food Programme says 41 million on verge of famine | Hunger News | Al Jazeera

 Verbal abuse, threats of sexual violence and discrimination have not been isolated incidents during the wave of anti-government protests that have been spreading through Colombia since 28 April. There have been at least 113 cases of gender-based violence, according to a report by the Office of the Ombudsman, an official government agency tasked with overseeing the protection of citizens’ human and civil rights.

“They started calling us bitches, whores, sluts,” Karla Cardoso says of the abuse police officers hurled at her and other women during an anti-government protest in Medellín on 20 May. “They asked us what we were doing out at night, threatening to kill us,” the 25-year-old student says.

 The US Department of Agriculture was scheduled to begin sending out payments to Black and minority farmers this month, as part of a $4bn loan forgiveness program. The money was intended as a way to address more than 100 years of discriminatory practices and policies that have historically and disproportionately disadvantaged Black owners of farmland.

But a lawsuit on behalf of white farmers is accusing the Biden administration of discrimination due to an injunction granted this month by a federal judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Around the country, there are other lawsuits against debt relief to Black and minority farmers with claims of discrimination against white farmers, including one in Texas backed by the ex-Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

 According to Rodney Bradshaw, of Jetmore, Kansas  “My feeling before [the injunction] was that we’re finally getting some justice that was due to us after the Pigford agreement [a discrimination settlement in the late 1990s]. Now, it’s that promises to Black farmers are always put on hold,” says Bradshaw. He is a descendant of Black settlers with a more than 100-year legacy of farming in Kansas, but that legacy is as threatened as ever today, he says, because of racism that has been allowed to run rampant, and in some cases been historically supported, by the USDA. “There’s higher concentrations of Black farmers in the south. We had four major Black settlements here in Kansas, and they’re basically all gone – wiped out through systemic racism and discrimination.”

Black farmers peaked in number in 1920 when there were 949,889; today there are only 48,697; they account for only 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million farmers (95% of US farmers are white) and own 0.52% of America’s farmland.

Part of the reason was displacement of Black farmers due to New Deal legislation, whose purpose was to help farmers by paying them to reduce crop production, thereby forcing food prices to rise. But white farmers used the money to purchase mechanical farming equipment and pushed out Black sharecroppers whose work was no longer needed due to the decreased production. Disenfranchisement didn’t stop there. In 1965, the US Commission on Civil Rights found that the USDA discriminated against Black farmers when providing financial assistance payments and loans. In 1999, the Clinton administration admitted that the USDA’s loan practices were discriminatory, in what is now known as the Pigford settlement.

The Pigford settlement was named for the Black farmer Timothy Pigford of North Carolina, who was the lead plaintiff in a victorious 1997 class-action lawsuit – still the largest civil rights settlement ever won against the federal government. It was supposed to pay just over $1bn to Black farmers, but less than 16,000 payments were received, even though more than 22,000 claims were filed. There were also tens of thousands of denied claims due to late filings, which Black farmers and their legal representatives blame on mismanagement of USDA communication of deadlines.

Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, which works to enhance what it calls restorative land justice through a community-controlled land and financial cooperative known as the Black Agrarian Fund,  believes the USDA has previously engaged in deliberate obstructionism, and said in a statement to the Guardian that the Pigford settlement has had disastrous consequences in terms of denying Black families the ability to hold on to their farmlands. She wants more debts forgiven.

 “According to USDA data, only 2,000 out of the 17,000 farmers of color with direct loans with USDA are Black/African American and less than 5% of all Black farmers will receive debt cancellation. We have been grappling with these devastating numbers and the theft of Black farmlands by USDA through the Pigford lawsuit,” McCurty says. On the recent injunction, she says: “A colleague reminded us, ‘It is always going to be all deliberate speed if it’s on white supremacy’s time.’”

Black US farmers dismayed as white farmers’ lawsuit halts relief payments | US news | The Guardian

 The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point”. More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships. But by the end of 2020, 3.9 million Venezuelans were designated as being displaced abroad without formal refugee status – but still judged in need of international protection. Stein said 1,800 to 2,000 people had been leaving Venezuela daily in the past three months, many taking dangerous paths out, including using people traffickers.

It has become the largest external displacement crisis in the region’s history, and the most underfunded.

 Eduardo Stein, special representative of the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), explained, “Whatever fails in one of the largest and richest countries in the subcontinent is going to affect the rest of the region. Latin America will never be the same.”

He claimed “donor fatigue” threatened funding, saying: “This pandemic has hit very hard those developed countries who have been traditional donors.”

Last year’s UN response plan received less than half the $1.41bn requested. The Red Cross has said it needs to raise $264m to support Venezuelans and 17 host countries over the next three years.

Dany Bahar, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington DC, told the Guardian there remained “a big gap” in help for Venezuelan refugees, compared with other modern crises, such as Syria. He said the total funding per capita for Syrian refugees was more than 10 times that for Venezuelans – at $3,150 compared with $265, based on figures for 2020. Venezuela is second only in the world to Syria in terms of external displacement. The majority of refugees are being hosted in Latin America and the Caribbean. Colombia hosts more Venezuelans than any other country, accounting for 1.73 million people.

“Most of the host countries in the Venezuelan refugee crisis are in the region, and are developing countries,” Bahar said, “whereas Europe had much skin in the game in the case of the Syrians. Maybe that triggered much more generous funding.”

Roger Alonso Morgui, at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said the crisis was “not news any more”, adding: “When the big population movement happened a few years ago, there was still some attention. That now has become more silent in a way.”

Dominika Arseniuk, director in Colombia for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said,  “International solidarity and financial support is woefully insufficient and falls desperately short of what is needed to respond to the mass exodus from Venezuela.”

‘Latin America will never be the same’: Venezuela exodus reaches record levels | Global development | The Guardian

 The size of the UK’s nuclear arsenal had been on a downwards trajectory. Britain was set to reduce the number of warheads from 225 in 2010 to 180 by the mid-2020s, a decision made by David Cameron’s coalition government of 2010-15. This downsizing was part of three decades of gradual reductions in the UK’s nuclear arsenal, which included retiring its free-fall nuclear bombs in 1998. Britain now has roughly 195 warheads.

The UK government has now announced it is increasing the number of nuclear warheads for its Trident submarine fleet to 260. It had not been expected that the UK would increase its nuclear arsenal by over 40%. The Office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UK decision was contrary to its obligations under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — in other words, it is illegal under international law. The NPT requires countries that have nuclear weapons to disarm, and those that don’t have them not to get them. 

 Johnson’s government unveiled in its “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”  which has changed Britain’s stance on the use of nuclear weapons. The British government is also threatening to use its nuclear arsenal against non-nuclear weapons states that are said to be heading in the direction of acquiring nuclear weapons — or, as the Integrated Review puts it, those states judged to be “in material breach of their non-proliferation obligations”. The UK now reserves the right to use nuclear weapons not only against nuclear threats but against enemies possessing chemical and biological weapons or “emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact”. 

 It is easily understood as a thinly veiled reference to Iran. The British government has repeatedly said that “Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon”. The Integrated Review says the UK will embark on “a renewed diplomatic effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon”. But London appears to be sending a message to Tehran that is not just about diplomacy. 

The legal opinion also finds that the UK’s change in stance on the use of nuclear weapons is in breach of international law. Any use of nuclear weapons would violate international humanitarian law and a whole raft of legal obligations.

The UK’s new nuclear strategy is illegal and dangerou… (dailymaverick.co.za)

 The size of the UK’s nuclear arsenal had been on a downwards trajectory. Britain was set to reduce the number of warheads from 225 in 2010 to 180 by the mid-2020s, a decision made by David Cameron’s coalition government of 2010-15. This downsizing was part of three decades of gradual reductions in the UK’s nuclear arsenal, which included retiring its free-fall nuclear bombs in 1998. Britain now has roughly 195 warheads.

The UK government has now announced it is increasing the number of nuclear warheads for its Trident submarine fleet to 260. It had not been expected that the UK would increase its nuclear arsenal by over 40%. The Office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UK decision was contrary to its obligations under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — in other words, it is illegal under international law. The NPT requires countries that have nuclear weapons to disarm, and those that don’t have them not to get them. 

 Johnson’s government unveiled in its “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”  which has changed Britain’s stance on the use of nuclear weapons. The British government is also threatening to use its nuclear arsenal against non-nuclear weapons states that are said to be heading in the direction of acquiring nuclear weapons — or, as the Integrated Review puts it, those states judged to be “in material breach of their non-proliferation obligations”. The UK now reserves the right to use nuclear weapons not only against nuclear threats but against enemies possessing chemical and biological weapons or “emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact”. 

 It is easily understood as a thinly veiled reference to Iran. The British government has repeatedly said that “Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon”. The Integrated Review says the UK will embark on “a renewed diplomatic effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon”. But London appears to be sending a message to Tehran that is not just about diplomacy. 

The legal opinion also finds that the UK’s change in stance on the use of nuclear weapons is in breach of international law. Any use of nuclear weapons would violate international humanitarian law and a whole raft of legal obligations.

The UK’s new nuclear strategy is illegal and dangerou… (dailymaverick.co.za)