The global “middle class” (or perhaps better described as the middle-income)  shrank last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, with almost two-thirds of households in developing economies reporting they suffered a loss in income, according to two new estimates based on World Bank data.

Researchers at the non-partisan Pew Research Center found that the ranks of the global “middle class” – those earning $10-$50 per day – fell by 90 million people to almost 2.5 billion last year to swell the ranks of the poor, (those living on less than $2 a day), by 131 million.

The Pew data on the middle class actually understates the impact because an estimated 62 million high-income people, or those earning $50 or more per day, dropped into the middle tier as a result of the pandemic. That meant the number of people who went into the crisis as members of the global “middle class” and fell out actually topped 150 million last year. South Asia accounted for more than a third of the decrease in the ranks of the middle class seen last year

“In modern history it is hard to come up with examples where you saw such a sharp downturn in global economic growth,” Rakesh Kochhar, the study’s author said.

The World Bank expects the ranks of the world’s poor to continue to grow this year. Its estimate show as many as 124 million people fell below its $1.90 line for extreme poverty in 2020. That number of new poor is projected to continue growing this year to as many as 163 million people.

In a separate study based on surveys of 47,000 households in 34 developing countries, researchers at the World Bank found that 36% of households saw job losses last year and almost two-thirds saw incomes fall. The result was the first increase in global poverty seen since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the bank’s researchers wrote.

As in many rich countries, the surveys of countries ranging from Burkina Faso to Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam show the burden of the economic hit disproportionately fell on women, young people and the self-employed in urban centers. But they also point to the consequences that slower recoveries are expected to have. While the U.S. has unleashed unprecedented fiscal rescue efforts for its economy, many developing economies have had smaller resources to draw on.  As of September 2020, advanced economies had on average spent 7.4% of gross domestic product on rescuing businesses and people hit by the pandemic versus 3.8% of GDP in emerging markets and 2.4% in low-income developing countries.

Global middle class shrinks for first time since 1990s | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera

About 500,000 Jewish settlers live in more than 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Settlers in the occupied West Bank, who long depended on Israeli soldiers for protection, have now established their own security force in every settlement, which works hand-in-hand with the Israeli military.

 According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 94 violent attacks took place against Palestinian civilians between December 21, 2020, to March 13, 2021. Settlers have also forced the closure of main roads in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin.

Munir Kadus, a researcher with the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, described the recent attacks as an “unprecedented escalation of violence against Palestinians across all of the West Bank”.

 A group known as the “Hilltop Youths” is accused of attacking Palestinians and their property.

Idan Zendi, an Israeli from the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, said the area is “Israeli land, not Palestinian”. He declared, “Palestinians have many lands to live in – Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt – they have many lands. We have only one land,” Zendi said 

The Israeli military told Al Jazeera that its authority is limited to separating the two sides when clashes occur, saying it has no power to arrest, detain or investigate settlers occupying the West Bank, which is the responsibility of Israeli police.

“The Israeli security forces must take decisive and effective steps to prevent any friction between settlers and Palestinians, because it is in the interest of Israeli security to maintain a state of calm and stability, not to create security chaos through settler violence against Palestinians,” David Chacham, a former Arab affairs adviser for the Israeli defence ministry, explained.

Israeli settler attacks surge against Palestinians | Occupied West Bank News | Al Jazeera

The horrendous killings of children in military conflicts and civil wars – both by national armed forces and militant groups – have triggered widespread condemnation by human rights organizations worldwide. But a “list of shame” singling out some of these perpetrators have been politicized leaving out some of these countries.

According to Human Rights Watch, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been repeatedly criticized for letting national armed forces and non-state armed groups off the hook for grave violations against children in war. In 2020, Guterres “delisted” the coalition led by Saudi and United Arab Emirates for killing and maiming children in Yemen, as well as Myanmar’s army for recruiting and using child soldiers.

Yet each was responsible for hundreds of violations the previous year, according to the report. o Becker, Advocacy Director, Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS that Guterres has been reluctant to hold all perpetrators to account since he first took office about four years ago.

Asked whether Guterres is paying politics in a year he is seeking re-election, Becker said: “So his failure to list all perpetrators is definitely not just an issue of this being an “election year.” She said the UN Security Council first requested the annual list, and over the past two decades, has carefully created the UN’s framework for children and armed conflict. As the architects of the agenda, they should insist that the Secretary-General ensure it functions as it was intended, and that he list all perpetrators, without exception, Becker declared.

The numbers, however, are staggering, according to a new report released by the Eminent Persons Group, including Lt-General (Ret) Romeo Dallaire, the former UN force commander during Rwanda’s genocide; Yanghee Lee, former chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child; Benyam Dawit Mezmur, a child rights expert; and Allan Rock, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

Afghan security forces have reportedly killed or injured more than 4,000 children since 2014 but have not been listed.

In 2014, Israeli forces killed 557 Palestinian children and injured 4,249, largely during fighting in Gaza. But Israeli forces were not on the list of shame– even though the number of children killed was the third highest in the world that year.

In Somalia, the armed group Al-Shabab has been repeatedly listed for sexual violence against children, but the Somali National Army has not been listed, despite comparable numbers of cases.

Without an accurate list, the UN’s children and armed conflict framework is seriously undermined. The experts urged the secretary-general to change his approach and list all perpetrators “without fear or favor.” Without such action, they warn, children will be put at even greater risk, said HRW. “The secretary-general should take the experts’ recommendations to heart and put the protection of children first”.

Mouin Rabbani, Senior Fellow with the Institute for Palestine Studies and Co-Editor, Jadaliyya, an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute, told IPS, “It seems to me indisputable that political factors are in play. In part this consists of the traditional deference to the powerful and their clients, which is compensated for with sanctimonious outrage – which would otherwise be justified – against the weak and marginalized”.  He argued, it reflects electoral considerations, with Guterres gearing up for election to a second term. And in part it reflects financial concerns, with the UN continuing to suffer a budget crunch and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia being once again given a pass.

UN Sanitizes Killings of Children in Armed Conflicts | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Further to this earlier post the number of Indians in the middle class or middle income, those earning between $10 and $20 a day, shrank by about 32 million, compared with the number that could have been reached in the absence of a pandemic.

A year into the pandemic, the numbers of those in the ‘middle class’ has shrunk to 66 million, down a third from a pre-pandemic estimate of 99 million, it added.

“India is estimated to have seen a greater decrease in the middle class and a much sharper rise in poverty than China in the COVID-19 downturn,” the Pew Research Centre said.

 Pew estimated the number of poor people, with incomes of $2 or less each day, has gone up by 75 million as the recession brought by the virus clawed back years of progress. A rise of nearly 10 percent in domestic fuel prices this year, job losses and salary cuts have further hurt millions of households, forcing many people to seek jobs overseas.

COVID pushed 32 million Indians out of middle class: Pew research | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

In 1980, big company CEOs averaged 42 times more compensation than their typical workers. These gaps rapidly expanded in the 1990s, as wages stagnated for most workers and stock-based executive pay exploded. During the 21st century, the annual gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has averaged about 350 to 1.

 Only 1 percent of CEOs at our country’s 500 largest corporations are Black, 2.4 percent are East or South Asians, 3.4 percent are Latino, and 6 percent are women.

 In the three years leading up to the 2008-09 meltdown, the top five executives at the 20 biggest bailed out banks had averaged $32 million each in personal compensation.

Coca-Cola: None of the soft drink maker’s top executives met their bonus targets last year, but the board gave them all bonuses anyway. CEO James Quincey wound up with a total compensation package worth more than $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company’s typical worker pay.

Carnival: The pandemic has been devastating for the cruise industry. At Carnival, CEO Arnold Donald not surprisingly failed to meet his pre-Covid bonus targets. He also accepted a cut in his base salary from $1.5 million in 2019 to $857,413 in 2020. But thanks to a special “retention and incentive” award, Donald’s total 2020 compensation grew to $13.3 million — nearly $2.2 million more than in 2019. He received the bulk of his special stock awards on August 28, 2020. 

After the industry shut down in mid-March amid Covid-19 outbreaks on several ships, Carnival and other cruise lines focused on getting paying customers home while leaving employees stranded on board for months without pay. The company reportedly even charged the abandoned workers for basic necessities like soap.

Tyson Foods: The meat processing company’s top executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets either. So what did the board do? The Tyson directors gave them stock awards to make up the difference. Frontline employees, meanwhile, were facing high risks on the job. More than 12,000 of the company’s workers have contracted Covid-19, and at least 38 have lost their lives to the virus—more than at any other meatpacking company. One of the executives who benefited from the Tyson board’s special Covid stock awards is company chair John Tyson, who was hardly in dire need of support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 62 percent during the pandemic—to $2.4 billion.

According to research by the Institute for Policy Studies colleagues and Americans for Tax Fairness, the nation’s 657 billionaires have enjoyed a stock-fueled boost in their net wealth of 44 percent since the rough start of the pandemic crisis. 

As of March 10, 2021, their combined fortunes stood at $4.2 trillion—up $1.3 trillion since March 18, 2020. Many of these billionaires owe their fortunes to their years as CEOs.

More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary during April and May 2020 while his total compensation for the year rose 22 percent to more than $17 million.

A 2017 Bloomberg survey found that U.S. CEOs were making more than twice as much, on average, as German CEOs, more than six times as much as Japanese CEOs, and nearly eight times as much as their Chinese counterparts.

A report for the Institute for Policy Studies found that 80 percent of S&P 500 firms paid their CEO over 100 times more than their median worker in 2018.

Opinion | The Single Most Dramatic Driver of Our Country’s Economic Divide: The Growing Gap Between CEO and Worker Pay (commondreams.org)

 The drug manufacturing industry during the pandemic has presented its humanitarian caring face during the Covid 19 pandemic and its PR departments have done well in giving the image that they are not taking any mercenary advantage of the health emergency. Short term tactics however are not the same as a long term marketing strategy.

Executives at Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer—the pharmaceutical corporations that supplied the Covid-19 vaccines —are quietly planning to hike prices on doses “in the near future,” once they decide the pandemic is over.

Many epidemiologists expect the coronavirus to continue to mutate, requiring booster shots on a regular basis and the pharmaceutical companies understand the business opportunities about cashing in.

Pfizer is very clear about the enormous moneymaking opportunity they see in the vaccines.

“As this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us,” Pfizer’s Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio said during a recent healthcare conference sponsored by Barclays Bank. The potential need for booster shots, D’Amelio added, provides “a significant opportunity for our vaccine from a demand perspective, from a pricing perspective, given the clinical profile of our vaccine.” 

Carter Lewis Gould, an analyst with Barclays Bank, noted that Pfizer faced the particular challenges with “optics” but asked when the company could “pursue higher pricing down the road.” The current pricing, answered D’Amelio, is “clearly not being driven by what I’ll call normal market conditions, normal market forces,” but rather the “pandemic state that we’ve been in and the needs of governments to really secure doses from the various vaccine suppliers.” Once the pandemic ends, he continued, there will be “significant opportunity” for Pfizer.

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have indicated to investors that they plan to return to more ‘commercial’ pricing as early as later this year.”

Moderna President Stephen Hoge said that “post-pandemic, as we get into those what I will call seasonal epidemics that you would expect to happen with a SARS-CoV-2 virus, we would expect more normal pricing based on value.”

And at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference earlier this month, Johnson & Johnson’s Executive Vice President Joseph Wolk told investors that the company would “reevaluate the vaccine for ‘pricing that’s much more in line with a commercial opportunity’ when the pandemic is over.”

The Covid-19 vaccines are already poised to be some of the most lucrative drugs of all time and will be expected to bring in billions in profit this year alone. But a one-time bonanza is not enough, a steady constant stream of revenue is what the stock-market seeks. 

Through its massive army of lobbyists, Big Pharma has been fighting calls to regulate drug prices as well as the India and South Africa-led proposal to temporarily waive the World Trade Organization’s patent protections, which currently enable a handful of private companies to monopolize knowledge and technology related to coronavirus tests, treatments, and vaccines.

 Pfizer’s Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla told investors during a call that “the company had little to worry about in terms of political opposition.”

“We believe the industry has generated a great deal of goodwill with Congress and public opinion through our Covid-19 treatment and vaccine efforts,” said Bourla.

Companies like Pfizer, which has not made the vaccine available to 85% of the world’s population, are enjoying immense popularity in the U.S. and Europe because of the fact that they got the vaccines done fast, and they seem to work well. That’s an unusually good position for pharma, they’re not used to being thought of as benefactors and saviors.

Big Pharma’s profit-maximizing behavior is that they are now waiting for the opportune time to raise prices once enough people have been vaccinated.

Last year routine visits to the doctor’s office and demand for new prescription medications fell sharply as a result of the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry made up for lost revenue by raising prices on more than 300 drugs in the U.S. on January 1.

As Bernie Sanders indicated, “It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge multibillion dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere, including in the Global South.”

Covid Vaccine Makers Promise Investors They’ll Hike Prices (theintercept.com)

 “In just the last six months, there have been 12.6 million people internally displaced around the world and over 80% of these forced displacements have been caused by disasters, most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes,” said Helen Brunt of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“Asia suffers much more than any other region from climate disaster-related displacements,” noted Brunt, IFRC’s Asia Pacific Migration and Displacement coordinator. “These upheavals are taking a terrible toll on some of the poorest communities already reeling from the economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The new report, entitled Responding to Disasters and Displacement in a Changing Climate (pdf), draws data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. According to the IDMC, about 2.3 million displacements over the past six months are related to conflict compared with 10.3 million due to disasters.

The IFRC has responded to various humanitarian needs across Asia, with case studies about assisting communities affected by drought in Afghanistan; seasonal cyclones and monsoon rains, which lead to flooding and landslides, in Bangladesh; and a dzud, a term for extreme winter conditions that cause mass livestock loss, in Mongolia.

“We are seeing an alarming trend of people displaced by more extreme weather events such as Typhoon Goni, the world’s most ferocious storm last year, that smashed into the Philippines,” said Brunt. “Three storms hit the Philippines in as many weeks, leaving over three million people destitute.”

“Things are getting worse as climate change aggravates existing factors like poverty, conflict, and political instability,” Brunt told Reuters. “The compounded impact makes recovery longer and more difficult: people barely have time to recover and they’re slammed with another disaster.”

An analysis released last year by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace found that as the global population climbs toward 10 billion by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 10% of humanity.

Climate Crisis Displaced Over 10 Million People in Past Six Months: Red Cross | Common Dreams News

The Paris Commune was a radical  and revolutionary movement that took charge of Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871 when the Franco-Prussian War led to the collapse of the Second French Empire. The Commune refused to accept the authority of the new Third Republic government. The Communards controlled Paris for two months, until it was eventually suppressed in “The Bloody Week” beginning on 21 May 1871.

 Marx celebrated the Paris Commune of 1871 on the grounds that it was ‘a Revolution against the State itself’. 

Some so-called Marxists insist that Marx and Engels opinion about capturing the State changed with the Paris Commune and will frequently quote from ‘The Civil War in France’:

“[The Paris Commune]… had shown that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” 

But Engels specifically points out specifically that this quote “is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes.”

This, for instance, is what Marx write about the Paris Commune of 1871:

“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms  . . . Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the official of all other branches of the Administration…Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsive and revocable”

The Commune was an instance of majority control based upon democratic elections. There was no suppression of the newspapers or the propaganda of the minority, and no denial of their right to vote. The Communards, having once obtained control of the State, set about democratising the machinery of legislation and administration. For example, they filled all positions of administration, justice, etc., through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by. their constituents. They also paid for all services at the workmen’s rate of pay. This was an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

 Marx and Engels never possessed any contempt for democracy. They did not wish to destroy it, but on the contrary sought to enlarge and perfect it.



 Engels in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s Civil War in France: it was a ‘new and truly democratic’ form of government. It showed how the ‘transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states’, could be avoided. And the means, it is interesting to note, were:

(i) ‘election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time, by the same electors’ of all administrative, judicial and educational officials;

(ii) ‘an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism’ by reducing the wages of the high officials to the level of those of the workers.

 Reclaiming…

In a blinking moment a life is lost,

Blow struck in anger or calculation

Delivers a blow of devastation

And all must bear some measure of the cost.

The cry goes up, ‘Reclaim the streets!’ But then,

Reclaim the homes where too many blows fall,

Or those police cells when officers fail

To be colour blind. It is also men

And boys and girls of all ethnicities,

When the blow is by bomb, bullet or shell

Dispatching them not to heaven, but hell:

Reclaim villages and towns and cities.

Reclaim a world where all such blows will stall,

Where welfare of one is the welfare of all.

D.A.

 The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations,

The effects of burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas from factories, cars and other sources has long been evident. From the 1960s a mass of historical documents from corporate archives at libraries in the US and Canada, scientific journals and paperwork released in legal cases shows the oil industry had begun to grasp the damage to health caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and climate change.

In an internal technical report in 1968, Shell went further, warning that air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health” and acknowledging the oil industry “reluctantly” must accept that cars “are by far the greatest sources of air pollution”. 

In 1971, Esso, a forerunner to Exxon, sampled particles in New York City and found, for the first time, the air was rife with tiny fragments of aluminum, magnesium and other metals. Esso scientists noted that gases from industrial smokestacks were “hot, dirty and contain high concentrations of pollutants” and suggested further testing was needed for symptoms including “eye irritation, excess coughing, or bronchial effects”.

By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences of cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring.” Esso experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful pollution.

Following a further major report in 1993, known as the Harvard “six cities” study, which found air pollution was spurring deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, pressure began to mount on the US Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the smallest particles, known as PM2.5 as they measure less than 2.5 micrometers across, or about a 30th of the diameter of a human hair. 

Arden Pope, an air pollution expert at Brigham Young University who said he got a “lot of pushback” from industry over his work, which includes the six cities study. “But the evidence has grown dramatically and, boy, it’s just hard to deny now,” he said. It’s overwhelming.”

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a US oil and gas industry group, promptly told a congressional hearing in 1997 the link between air pollution and mortality was “weak”, before Exxon pushed out its own study claiming “there is no substantive basis” for believing PM2.5 was causing more deaths.

This undermining of air-pollution science is likened by some researchers to efforts by tobacco companies to muddy the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer.

“The fossil-fuel industry was sowing uncertainty to maintain business as usual, and in all likelihood they were collaborating with other groups, such as the tobacco industry,” said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law. “When you look at these historical documents in context it becomes clear that the oil and gas industry has a playbook they’ve used again and again for an array of pollutants. They used it around climate change but absolutely we are seeing it around PM2.5 as well. It’s the same pattern.”

Undeterred, oil and gas interests have sought to stymie tighter standards on air pollution while mobilizing an effort to cast doubt over this science. A gathering called by the Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank, in 2006 on clean-air rules helped set the tone – two speakers were from Exxon and the title of one session was “Uncertainty of NAAQS (National Ambient Air Quality Standards) Health Science”.

Industry-funded consultants published studies disputing the link between emissions and deteriorating health or simply disparaged the work of other researchers. “Their goal is to undermine the scientific method, science itself,” said  George Thurston, an environmental health expert at New York University who co-authored a landmark 1987 study that found the smaller particles were far more deadly than larger fragments that could be coughed out.

“We’ve seen the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaign come full circle with the renewed attacks on research that tells us what we’ve known for decades – air pollution kills,” said Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center

Exxon has told the EPA that estimating a risk of death from particulate matter is “unreliable and misleading” while, in 2017, API demanded the agency relax standards around nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant linked to asthma in children and higher mortality in adults from heart disease and cancer – claiming there was no proven association with harm and existing rules were “more stringent than necessary.”

The industry’s approach bore fruit during Donald Trump’s administration, where senior executives from Exxon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and API met the then-US president in the White House. A cavalcade of clean air regulations were scaled back, such as rules to limit pollution from cars and trucks, while a so-called “transparency” rule for science risked invalidating studies based on confidential medical data, which is vital for bedrock air pollution research. Last year, in the midst of an historic pandemic of respiratory disease, Trump’s EPA decided to not strengthen standards around fine soot particles. Under Trump, Tony Cox, a researcher who received funding from API and allowed the lobby group to copy edit his findings, was named as chairman of a key EPA clean air advisory board. Cox, whose previous work has questioned the harm caused by particulates, accused EPA experts of bad science and subjectivity when they found that particles can be deadly even in low concentrations.

Right now, the residents of St James Parish, located in the heart of what is known as “cancer alley” in Louisiana are desperately resisting the operations of a petrochemical complex. In 2019 it was found that the air around the site has more cancer-causing chemicals than 99.6 percent of the country’s industrialized areas. 

Formosa Plastics Group’s director of community and government relations, Janile Parks pleads, “The entire petrochemical industry is under attack by national environmental activist groups opposed to all industrial development.” 

Resident of St James Parish accuse the state’s leading Democrats, specifically Gov. John Bel Edwards and former Rep. Cedric Richmond, of ignoring those in Cancer Alley and refusing to protect them from deadly pollution. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency recognizing there are elevated cancer risks in the area, Louisiana authorities have done little to enforce environmental regulations and elected officials who represent St. James have been largely silent about the deaths and those dying in Cancer Alley.

Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files reveal | Environment | The Guardian