Newham council,  one of the UK’s poorest boroughs, said its universal free school meals (USFM) scheme was no longer affordable as a result of funding cuts, leaving thousands of deprived youngsters at risk of missing out on a nutritious dinner.

The USFM, which has run for 11 years, guarantees all three- to 11-year-olds in the east London borough a free dinner during term time. The proposed cut would force thousands of families to contribute up to £270 a year for each of their children in years 3 to 6. 

Half of all children in Newham live in poverty, making it the second poorest borough in England after Tower Hamlets. Hunger is a growing problem in the borough during the pandemic, and already just under a quarter of Newham’s children are food insecure, meaning they regularly miss meals or go hungry. 

Sarah Ruiz, Newham council’s cabinet member for education and children social care, said the unprecedented economic situation facing the borough “leaves us with no choice but to look very carefully at how best to make the savings we need”.

 Ben Levinson, the headteacher at Kensington primary school in Newham, said the UFSM scheme had made a “life-changing” difference to the community, especially to children from struggling working families and migrant households, neither of whom were eligible for free school meals.

Free school meals scheme in one of UK’s poorest areas faces axe | School meals | The Guardian

Managing director of Kingspan’s insulation boards division and as a director of the plc, Peter Wilson will stand down.

Wilson was in charge of the insulation division since 2001, during which time it launched Kooltherm K15, a plastic foam insulation used on the Grenfell tower. Kingspan tested the foam in fire in 2005 and it passed, but then changed the chemical composition which made it more flammable, the public inquiry into the disaster heard. However, it continued to use the previous test pass and said it was safe for tall buildings.

Kingspan has an annual turnover of €3.5bn and its share price has fallen 15% in the last month. Shortly before evidence about Kingspan was revealed at the public inquiry, triggering a share price fall, Wilson sold share options worth £1.6m, sparking anger among bereaved and survivors. 

Gene Murtagh, the chief executive and Gilbert McCarthy, another director, also sold shares worth £3.1m and £1.8m respectively.

 The number of people in temporary accommodation, 253,000, in England is at its highest level in 14 years, says a new report by charity Shelter.

Shelter’s chief executive Polly Neate said: “Over a quarter of a million people – half of them children – are homeless and stuck in temporary accommodation. This should shame us all.” She explained that, “With this deadly virus on the loose, 2020 has taught us the value of a safe home like never before. But too many are going without, because of the chronic lack of social homes.”

 68% of all homeless people living in temporary accommodation are in London, which amounts to 1 in 52 of the city’s population. Outside of London, Luton has the highest rate of people in temporary accommodation (1 in 55), followed by Brighton and Hove (1 in 78), Manchester (1 in 93) and Birmingham (1 in 94).

More families ‘trapped in temporary accommodation’ in England – BBC News

 According to an analysis by the Washington Post, 45 of the 50 most highly valued U.S. companies have “turned a profit” in 2020. Despite their financial success, 27 of those firms cut staff this year, laying off more than 100,000.

Instead of using the wealth produced by workers to keep employees on payroll, corporations “put Americans out of work and used their profits to increase the wealth of shareholders,” the Post found. “Companies sent thousands of employees packing while sending billions of dollars to shareholders,” the Post noted. 

Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while laying off 1,200 corporate office employees. Walmart was not alone. Apple gave back tens of billions of dollars to shareholders. Apple spent $41 billion buying shares and paying cash dividends between April and September, more than twice as much as the company with the next highest total, Microsoft

Salesforce,  a company sitting on more than $9 billion in cash and short-term investments which generated $2.7 billion in profit during the first six months of the pandemic, its CEO Marc Benioff, was a signatory to the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement on corporate purpose and a proponent of so-called stakeholder capitalism, is one of the executives who continued to prioritize the interests of shareholders in 2020 —laying off 1,000 workers despite a 28% increase in revenue compared to last year—even after promising not to do so during the pandemic’s early stages. Layoffs “were announced one day after the software giant announced its biggest quarter of profit and revenue in history, sending its stock soaring 30 percent.”

Gary Walker, a systems engineer who was one of 1,000 employees Salesforce laid off in late August, told the newspaper that “the choices that they make are governed by, essentially, maximizing shareholder value.”

Chuck Robbins, chief executive of Cisco, a $180 billion software and networking giant, said large companies like his shouldn’t lay off workers during a global crisis because, even in a bad year, they had the resources to maintain payrolls. Four months later, Cisco began implementing a plan to lay off thousands of employees.

“The majority of Americans who lost jobs this year were laid off from small businesses, many of which had no option but to cut workers to stave off financial collapse,” the Post noted. “But larger companies actually laid off a greater portion of their workforces over that period—9 percent for large firms vs. 7 percent for smaller firms—despite having more resources to survive the downturn.”

‘Sick’: Most Profitable US Companies Fired Workers, Enriched Shareholders During Pandemic | Common Dreams News

 Concerns over use of force and the deaths of black people in police custody had been a focus of Black Lives Matter 

Police use force against black people five times more frequently than against white people in England and Wales, new figures show. Officers in London used force against black people four times more than against white people 

A Home Office document said black people were “involved in proportionally more incidents” where police used guns and Tasers, as well as batons and ground restraint in the year to March. The rate was almost three times higher for people perceived as being from an “other” ethnic group.

Black people were also seven times more likely to be involved in incidents involving Tasers than white people outside London, and five times more in London. 

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said black men were disproportionately more likely to be arrested or have altercations with the police overall

Police five times more likely to use force against black people than white people in England and Wales | The Independent

 Unfounded accusations of criminality are a long-standing tool of racism and bigotry and such claims should be challenged.

In the United States Sociologists Michael Light, Jingying He, and Jason Robey used crime and immigration data from Texas from 2012 to 2018 to find that relative to undocumented immigrants thatU.S.-born citizens are:

2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes;

2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes; 

4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.

Trump’s Lies About Immigrants Should End With His Presidency | Common Dreams Views

 Covax, the global scheme to deliver Covid-19 vaccines to poorer countries faces a “very high” risk of failure, potentially leaving billions of people with no access to vaccines until as late as 2024. The bleak warning is contained in a financial risk assessment commissioned by Gavi, an alliance of governments, drug companies, charities and international organisations that arranges global vaccination campaigns and is the WHO’s partner in the Covax scheme. The Covax programme is the main global scheme to vaccinate people in poor and middle income countries against the coronavirus. It aims to deliver at least 2bn vaccine doses by the end of 2021 to cover 20% of the most vulnerable people in 91 countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It has been beset by a number of issues, including a shortage of doses of approved vaccines, and a decision by India’s Serum Institute, which was initially earmarked to supply Covax, saying it would prioritise supplying India first. The cheaper and easier to transport vaccines that the scheme has banked on, including the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine, have been slower in testing and getting regulatory approval.

Gavi says the programme is struggling from a lack of funds, supply risks and complex contractual arrangements, which could make it impossible to achieve its goals.

“The risk of a failure to establish a successful Covax facility is very high,” says an internal report to the board of Gavi. 

The risk of failure is higher because the scheme was set up so quickly, operating in “uncharted territory”, the report says. It also warns that issues with contracts that allow countries to back out of buying doses they have committed to could push up the cost of doses from the $5.20 benchmark and ultimately make the scheme no longer viable.

Scheme to get Covid vaccine to poorer countries at ‘high risk’ of failure | Coronavirus | The Guardian

  Super-cyclone Amphan, which battered the south of Bangladesh in late May. Bangladesh’s disaster management department has said 300,000 people have been affected by the flooding. About 50,000 people are still displaced. They have spent the months since Amphan living on government land, camped out by the riverside or near roads or in cyclone shelters.

“We are able to successfully evacuate millions of people and it can prevent loss of life but people are still losing their homes, land and livelihoods. There is a lack of support after the cyclone,” Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development explained.

The long-term effects of flooding are pushing Bangladesh’s rural populations into already crowded cities, expanding their slums.

“Unfortunately, with climate change and rising sea levels, people in the lower coastal districts of Bangladesh will gradually lose their livelihoods as fishermen and farmers, They will be forcibly displaced. This needs to be actively addressed by both the national government and the international community,’ he pointed out.

‘It’s over for us’: how extreme weather is emptying Bangladesh’s villages | Global development | The Guardian

 Adrian Williamson QC, counsel for the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell fire disaster, said the evidence revealed “an industry in which Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan were content to push hazardous products into the marketplace and sought to market them dishonestly”.

In 2013 Celotex executives had known that “in the event of a fire [its insulation] would burn”. In 2007 Kingspan’s tests had also caused “a raging inferno”. In 2009 an Arconic executive had shared images of a burning tower fitted with similar panels to those it sold to Grenfell “to show you how dangerous PE [polyethylene] can be when it comes to architecture”.

Kingspan altered the foam’s chemical mix. When tested in 2007 the new formula had become a 600C “raging inferno”. Despite the new formula, Kingspan had stuck to using the 2005 test pass to help sell the foam boards. Ivor Meredith,   a technical manager for Kingspan, had run more tests “to get the technology to pass, to justify our lie”, he said. Meredith’s job was to maintain the impression that the material could be used in line with building regulations. More full-scale tests failed in 2007 and 2008 but the results had not been communicated to clients, Meredith said.

The British Board of Agrément (BBA) rules on a material’s performance; Local Authority Building Control (LABC) decrees if a material meets regulations; and NHBC, a warranty and insurance provider for new homes, assesses risk. They are supposed to guarantee safety but product manufacturers at Grenfell treated them as “mere marketing tools”, the inquiry heard.

It was “great news” in 2009, when  technical manager Philip Heath  told colleagues that LABC had awarded K15 a certificate for use on high-rise buildings, saying that it was “limited combustibility” based on a certificate acquired the previous year, which had made no mention that it related only to testing of a specific use of the material against a masonry wall. Heath told a colleague they had thrown so much data at the LABC certificator “we probably blocked his server”. In 2014 the NHBC called the LABC certificate “all garbage”. Brian Martin, the government official responsible for building regulations about fire, had also heard about foam insulation being used on high-rise residential towers and had emailed NHBC with “a friendly warning” that such foam insulations were not of limited combustibility. But Kingspan had pushed back saying there had been two successful tests, even though the inquiry heard one of these had been a fail. It was “a deliberate lie”. When the NHBC had warned it might advise builders not to use K15, Kingspan had threatened legal action.

Nor had Kingspan told the BBA about the change in the foam’s chemistry making it burn like a “raging inferno”. when the BBA had been alerted to concerns about its certificate, Heath had told his colleagues to “let the file gather dust”. The reason for stalling, Meredith explained, had been that if changes were made “it could limit sales”.

In October 2014 Kingspan hired the engineering consultancy Arup to ratify its test data. Its expert was “deeply concerned”, she told NHBC. “The use of highly combustible materials in residential buildings is now simply an accident waiting to happen.” But sales on high-rises had continued.

Celotex had watched Kingspan’s success with envy, the inquiry was told. Its method had suggested a path to seizing part of a £10m-a-year insulation market. It had called it “the Kingspan route”.

Kingspan “do not have a piece of paper that states they can specifically be used behind any cladding panel”, Jonathan Roper, who was then an assistant product manager at Celotex had told his colleagues. Roper had cautioned they might “take the view that our product realistically shouldn’t be used behind most cladding panels” because it might burn. But they had pressed ahead anyway, copying Kingspan. Celotex provided most of the foam insulation on Grenfell. 

Roper, a 23-year-old business studies graduate in his first job, had spotted a crucial fact: “Contractors do not know enough about the fire test to challenge it.” The firm’s first test in February 2014 had failed in 26 minutes. So Celotex had tried again, this time concealing a thin sheet of fire retardant magnesium oxide board behind the main cladding panel to reduce the chance of flames reaching the top of the test rig and triggering a fail. Celotex executives knew it had been “unreflective” of how cladding was actually used, Roper told the inquiry. “The rig was being over-engineered to achieve a pass,” he said. After the system passed, his boss, Paul Evans, had told him the product would be sold and “the decision had been made to omit the magnesium oxide from any reference going forward”.  Celotex’s action had been an “intentional, deliberate and dishonest” attempt to mislead customers, Roper agreed.

A new product manager, Deborah Berger, asked to see the BRE test report after the product launch in October 2014 and was so alarmed at the picture of the test rig showing the fire-resistant magnesium oxide panels she scrawled “WTF?” in the margin.

“I thought Celotex was a good company that prided itself on doing the right thing, on being honest,” she said. “I was really shocked.”

 The inquiry heard that for years before that Claude Wehrle and his colleagues at Arconic had known of the danger they posed. Just 18 months before the Grenfell fire, the technical manager at the French division of the US materials giant had emailed the sales team about a fire at a building beside a tower which used the same material as Grenfell. In 2013, there had been a fire in a high-rise in Dubai using aluminium composite material (ACM) panels. Arconic’s representative in the UK, Richard Geater, had emailed fabricators to say that the cladding “is like a chimney which transports the fire from bottom to top … within shortest time”. He added: “We have taken random samples and done a live test in Bangkok in front of architects, they almost fainted. Indeed, this panel is a whole cheat and burns fiercely.”

Arconic had pressed on selling. In May 2013, Deborah French, a UK sales executive, had emailed customers saying: “We supply both PE and FR [fire retardant] core and can control and understand what core is being used in all projects.” But FR was not proposed at Grenfell. By the Summer of 2015 Wehrle had emailed colleagues with what he admitted as an “anti-commercial” opinion: “PE is dangerous on facades, and everything should be transferred to fire-resistant as a matter of urgency.” Arconic gave the instruction to no longer use PE on projects in France in May 2016, said Barwise. But no warning had been given to Grenfell.

Kingspan apologised for “process shortcomings and unacceptable conduct”.

Celotex said it was not a manufacturer’s responsibility to meet building regulations, but admitted “unacceptable conduct on the part of a number of former employees”.

Arconic said it was entitled to expect the UK regulatory regime to maintain safety, that its product had been “misused” and “the principal cause of the Grenfell tragedy was the failure by those responsible for the refurbishment of the tower”.

‘A raging inferno’: testimony reveals how deadly cladding ended up on Grenfell Tower | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

None of which is much consolation for those who died, their families  or the survivors that money and profit justified gambling with people’s lives.

 The blog as an advocate of world socialism makes no apologies for drawing attention to the various national inequalities of the pandemic.

Billions of the world’s population may not have access to a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022, according to a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with wealthier nations reserving more than half of next year’s potential doses. Eager to increase their chances of having access to at least one of the dozens of vaccines in development, many nations have snapped up allocations of several different drugs. Wealthy nations — accounting for just 14 percent of the global population — have pre-ordered just over half of the vaccine doses expected to be produced by the 13 leading developers next year.

Even if the drug makers all produce effective, safe vaccines and meet their maximum global manufacturing targets, the study said “at least a fifth of the world’s population would not have access to vaccines until 2022”.

The research, published in the BMJ medical journal, looked at publicly available data and found that as of mid-November, reservations totalled 7.48 billion doses — equivalent to 3.76 billion immunisation courses, because most vaccines require two jabs. That is out of a total maximum projected manufacturing capacity of 5.96 billion courses by the end of 2021.  Only 40 percent of the vaccine courses from the leading manufacturers might be available for low- and middle-income countries, but said this would depend on how rich countries share what they have bought.

The implications could go well beyond health.

“To varying degrees, trade with and travel to countries might face continued disruption until access to effective preventive or treatment measures, such as Covid-19 vaccines, becomes more widely available,” the report said.

In the BMJ editorial, Jason Schwartz, of the Yale School of Public Health, said the requirement for two doses and the very low temperatures needed to store some of the vaccines added to the challenges for many countries.

“The operational challenges of the global Covid-19 vaccination programme will be at least as difficult as the scientific challenges associated with rapidly developing safe and effective vaccines.”