Better data key in ambitious EU plan to eradicate homelessness by 2030

Sun, 6 March 2022


The European Union this week agreed a plan to eradicate homelessness by 2030. One of the main objectives is get a more accurate view of how many people are without fixed accommodation across the 27 member states and adapt policies accordingly.

"2030 is a marker, an ideal, so that we can all share the same objective," the French minister of housing Emmanuelle Wargon told the press earlier this week when the agreement was announced.

Adopted under France’s rotating presidency of the bloc which began in January, the plan was initiated in June 2021 by Portugal and is coordinated by Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme.


"We’ll try and target zero, but there will always be people who fall through the cracks," European Commissioner for Social Issues, Nicolas Schmit said.

"But we must reduce the number and above all shorten the length of time that people stay homeless."

The European parliament has already started a new census that will be carried out over a short period of time which aims to get a better idea of how many homeless people there are across the member states at any one time.

Using this kind of approach allowed the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (Feantsa) to estimate that in 2020, there were around 700,000 people sleeping rough or in emergency centres every night across the bloc.
Comparative data

As of 2023, the organisation Eurostat will gather all data about the number of people previously recorded as homeless in order to measure changes in living conditions.

"It’s the first time that there will be comparable data for all member states," Freek Spinnewijn, director of the Feantsa told French news agency AFP.

"Even if it concerns people who were homeless in the past, it will allow us to compare and see in a very coherent way, where the problems lie, and where they stem from. I think that will be very useful," he says.

"If you see there are more single men, or women, or young people without housing, then you can adapt the policies accordingly. Having solid statistics is fundamental to have the right policies."

The European Commission will work with the OECD to establish different categories for the data and harmonise them across the Union, something which has been lacking until now.

This will help distinguish those people who sleep in the street, or squat in old buildings, from those in emergency housing, or those who have found temporary housing with relatives or friends.
Improving objectives

Some countries regularly count their homeless people – for example every month in Ireland - while others have more sporadic ways of keeping track.

France’s last census on the subject, carried out by the National Statistics Body (Insee) dates back to 2012, and the next one will not be released until 2025.


France to maintain 43,000 homeless beds for another 10 months

Although the policies for housing does not depend directly on European rules, knowing how each country handles the issue is key to improving the situation globally.

"When we know the population that will be affected by these policies, then we can improve the objectives," president of the European platform for the anti-homelessness project Yves Leterme told AFP.

But difficulties remain when it comes to the methods for gathering reliable data.

France's 'Nuit de la Solidarité' (Night of Solidarity) regularly counts the number of homeless people in cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Saint-Etienne but they rely on volunteers who are not necessarily trained for this kind of work, rendering it less efficient.

This year on the night of 20 January, 2,600 people were counted by the 350 teams sent out across the city of Paris.
Practical approach

"What we’re looking for is not necessarily figures, it’s also the qualitative aspect," European director for the Abbé-Pierre Foundation, Sarah Coupechoux told AFP.

"That is to say, we need to look at people not just in terms of their gender, age or family situation but also their background, how they ended up needing our services," she explains.

Health crisis has exacerbated poverty in France, says food charity

"We can’t afford to spend years debating over the perfect, harmonious definition,” adds Ruth Owen, vice-president of the Feantsa. "Let’s be practical. Reinventing the wheel won’t work, it’s not what we want and we don’t have time," she says.

Other projects in the EU plan include the creation of a prize to award the best initiatives for helping homeless people and an information campaign in 2024 to encourage member states to contribute more funding to accommodation and housing.

UK

‘They took my world’: fashion giant Shein accused of art theft

Shanti Das

The Guardian
Sun, 6 March 2022,

Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Artists say firm with murky ethical record is stealing their designs

Vanessa Bowman paints the world around her: the 19th-century village church, her back garden, the leaves on the trees in the fields where she walks her dog.

Once she has chosen a scene from her rural Dorset idyll, she puts brush to canvas, sometimes poring over the details for days in her studio.

Over three decades she has honed a unique style and earned a loyal fanbase, with 20,000 followers on Instagram and commissions from House & Garden, Prince Charles’s Highgrove shop and Farrow & Ball.

But when she received an email from a fan in Canada, asking whether she was collaborating with online fashion firm Shein, she was baffled.

The £17 jumper in the image attached to the email had a picture printed on it that was unmistakably hers. But Bowman had not partnered with the multibillion dollar Chinese clothing behemoth. Instead, she alleges it plastered her picture on its product without ever getting in touch.

“They didn’t remotely bother trying to change anything,” she said. “The things I paint are my garden and my little village: it’s my life. And they’ve just taken my world to China and whacked it on an acrylic jumper.”

While copyright infringement is far from new, Bowman’s experience is part of a wider trend.

The oil painter, 51, is the latest member of a fast-growing club of artists and designers who claim their work has been stolen by Shein.

Launched in Nanjing in 2008, and based in Singapore, the world’s biggest online fashion firm has a murky ethical track record, including on the environment and workers’ rights.

But despite its reputation, it has thrived, gaining almost cult-like status among teenage fans drawn to its constantly updated product range and ultra-low prices.

On TikTok alone, videos showing customers unpacking orders with dozens of items, labelled with the hashtag #SheinHaul, have racked up more than 4.5 billion views.

As its customer base has grown, so too has the list of alleged copyright breaches.

Dozens of people have posted about their designs being stolen online, sometimes using the slogan #ShameOnShein. One illustrator, who claimed to have their skeleton artwork lifted, tweeted: “Shein stole my art and slapped it on a phone case, not sure if I should be flattered or mad.”

Another UK-based artist said she had spent “hours creating new and fresh designs” and felt “a little bit of a sick feeling” when a fan told her that her frog artwork had been used on stickers sold on Shein. “I really don’t want to be associated with them at all,” she wrote.

Some companies who claim to have had their designs copied have taken legal action, including Dr Martens and Levi Strauss. But, for many independent designers and artists, the time and energy involved with pursuing a complaint is too great to face.

Aside from posting on social media, Bowman thought her chance of success was so slim it was not worth spending more time agonising over. “I was really angry that somebody could just take something I’ve worked so hard to produce. They obviously don’t care,” she said. “But all I want to do is paint in my studio; I don’t want to get involved with lawyers and could feel myself getting really stressed. It was a bit David and Goliath and I was completely overwhelmed.”

For those who do choose to take on the firm, it can often be a losing battle.

Elora Pautrat, 26, an illustrator and digital artist based in Edinburgh, sent a stern email to Shein after a fan messaged her on Instagram to tell her one of her ethereal purple cityscapes was being used on a mousemat. “They didn’t have my authorisation and never asked me anything,” she said.

At first she didn’t receive a reply. But when she posted her complaint on social media, Shein – a rival to Asos, Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing – wrote back and apologised. After an exchange, Pautrat was paid some money from the sales of the product and promised it would never happen again. But since that first incident, in 2020, she claims the company has lifted her work on about 10 further occasions and used it on products including stickers and prints.

Each time, she patiently writes to the copyright infringement team and calls them out on social media. But a few months later, it happens again.

“It’s frustrating because they do have power and resources to make proper collaborations with artists and still make a lot of money out of it,” said Pautrat, who says the latest alleged violation was in January. “But they just keep stealing for some reason, which just isn’t fair.”

William Miles, an intellectual property lawyer and partner at Briffa, a specialist art law firm, said the problem of designs being lifted was becoming “ever more prevalent” in the fast fashion sector.

His firm is seeing two or three infringement cases per month. “The fundamental issue, I think, is that fashion companies are under pressure to produce large volumes of new and fashionable goods, so their designers often go for the quick fix,” he said.

“A change that has happened is that these things often aren’t dealt with by the court: they’re dealt with by the court of public opinion,” he added. “The person puts side-by-side pictures on social media, everyone gets really angry, and it looks bad for the fast fashion label. But some seem to have slightly thicker skin than others.”

The Artists’ Union, which represents more than 500 members in England, called for regulatory action to hold repeat offenders to account.

Zita Holbourne, the organisation’s national chair, said it was “constantly representing artists in these kinds of cases. This is about companies trying to exploit art for their own benefit and profit without a thought for the rights of those artists. They need to be exposed, challenged and named and shamed,” she said.

Shein said it “respects designers and artists, and the intellectual property rights of others”, and takes “all claims of infringement seriously”.

“When legitimate complaints are raised by valid IP rights holders, Shein promptly addresses the situation,” it said.

It added that suppliers were required to certify that their products did not infringe the intellectual property of third parties, with “appropriate action” taken when “non-compliance is found”.

PEOPLE OF COLOUR

Foreigners who fled Ukraine team up to help others escape

By CHINEDU ASADU and CARA ANNA

1 of 11

Nigeria students in Ukraine wait at the platform in Lviv railway station, Feb. 27, 2022, in Lviv, west Ukraine. Jarred by discriminatory treatment and left to evacuate themselves from Ukraine, people from African, Asian and Latin American countries who succeed in getting out are forming impromptu networks to help thousands of others hoping to flee. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)

Jarred by discriminatory treatment and left to evacuate themselves from Ukraine, people from African, Asian and Latin American countries who succeed in getting out are forming impromptu networks to help thousands of others hoping to flee.

Stepping into the gap was an easy decision for Alexander Somto Orah, 25, a Nigerian student in Ukraine who, like some others, described xenophobia and threats of violence as he approached the border with Poland shortly after Russia’s invasion.

Ukrainian border guards “separated Africans, together with Indians, from the rest and directed us to the Romanian border” scores of miles away, Orah said. “They told us that if we try to push our way through, they are going to shoot us.” Video shared with The Associated Press shows the confrontation.

United by fear and outrage after days in the freezing weather, the young foreigners started to protest. “We raised our hands and told them we are students and just want to go home,” Orah said. Eventually, they were allowed to cross.

Since reaching Poland’s capital, Warsaw, he has returned to the border multiple times to help other foreigners leave Ukraine, drawing on his experience.

Almost 80,000 third-country nationals from 138 countries have fled, the International Organization for Migration said Friday.

Some have reported being denied access to bomb shelters, transportation and even access to consulates of their countries of origin in neighboring countries, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Tendayi Achiume, said Thursday, calling the racist and xenophobic treatment “life-threatening.”

The experiences are shaping the grassroots efforts to help others leave.

Ojonugwa Zakari, 21, a medical student from Nigeria, said she and hundreds of other foreigners remain stuck in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine. As they wake to the sound of shelling, their phones now fill with tips on how to escape: Phone numbers of friendly locals across the border. Guidance on emergency supplies and what documents to show at checkpoints.

“Basically, the basic war advice,” said Zakari, who’s never been in war before.

She added: “It’s no longer about where people are from. People are just trying to make sure that if you’re a foreigner in Ukraine, you get to safety.”

Ukraine’s government has addressed allegations of discrimination against fleeing foreigners amid sharp comments like the one by the African Union continental body, which called dissimilar treatment of Africans “shockingly racist” and in breach of international law.

“Africans seeking evacuation are our friends and need to have equal opportunities to return to their home countries safely,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Wednesday,. He later shared on Twitter a hotline number established to help African, Asian and other students wishing to leave.

Within 12 hours, the phone number had been retweeted more than 21,000 times. The following day, however, the hotline rang unanswered.

Other official statements of aid, even from foreigners’ home countries, have felt remote as well.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion started on Feb. 24, Zimbabwe’s government told its citizens in Ukraine to contact their embassy in Germany, on the other side of Poland. Kenya’s government suggested its embassy in Austria, similarly far away.

Since then, some countries have announced deals with Ukraine’s neighbors to facilitate the entry of their citizens. Others are trying to evacuate those who can’t make it out. But the death of an Indian student in Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, created new urgency.

Worried students and others have created WhatsApp and Telegram messaging groups for Africans, Brazilians and other populations with large numbers trying to leave. Some platforms offer financial or even mental health assistance.

Faith Chemari said she has helped over 50 Zimbabwean students by coordinating their bus travel toward Poland.

”I was putting students in groups, with boys leaving first, so as to give feedback to the rest of the students on whether it was safe,” she said.

Along Ukraine’s borders, a global community has begun to gather to welcome exhausted countrymen making their way out. Others inside Ukraine assist travelers to the next destination. “In Odesa, our Azeri people welcomed us and they helped us get to the Moldova border,” said Elxan Salmanov Ilham, a 28-year old student from Azerbaijan who fled Kharkiv.

As support grows, some locals in Ukraine’s neighboring countries are taking part.

After spending the night at the train station in the western Ukrainian city of Lyiv, Nigerian student Sanusi Salihu urgently needed food and shelter. He found both from a resident he met shortly after entering Slovakia.

“We are seven in his house,” Salihu said. “He just took us all out for lunch (and) ... has been very nice.”

Now, Salihu, too, does what he can from his new position of safety, messaging foreigners still in Ukraine.

___

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Grace Ekpu in Lagos, Nigeria, contributed.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

The people of Ukraine need our solidarity. But not just because they’re ‘like us’

Kenan Malik
Sun, 6 March 2022


The outpouring of sympathy and help for Ukrainian refugees has prompted debate about European attitudes to identity and ethnicity

In 1857, the English poet and Chartist leader Ernest Jones wrote a series of articles in the People’s Paper about the “Indian Mutiny” of that year. It was, he observed, no “mutiny” but a “national insurrection” that Britons should support as much as they had supported similar struggles in Europe. Britons were “on the side of Poland” when it “struggled for its freedom against Russia”. If Poland was “right”, Jones insisted, then “so is Hindostan”.

I was reminded of his argument as I read and listened to some of the commentary about Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. The invasion is brutal and unacceptable, an assault on democracy and sovereignty. We should oppose it just as we should oppose the Saudi assault on Yemen. We should support the people of Ukraine just as we should the people of Syria.

Not so, says the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley. On BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot, he insisted that Ukraine moves us more than Syria or Yemen because it is “a European country” and “the young men volunteering or being conscripted could be our sons or fathers”. Apparently, it’s so much more difficult to imagine what a father or son must feel facing the prospect of war in Yemen or Iraq.

For the Tory lord and former MEP Daniel Hannan the Ukraine conflict is shocking because “they seem so like us”, living in “a European country” where “people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts”. “Civilisation itself is under attack in Ukraine,” he concluded. Unlike in the destruction of Syria or Afghanistan.

Many others on both sides of the Atlantic have proffered similar views. What is expressed here is not simply the shock of witnessing a brutal conflict in a relatively peaceful and prosperous continent like Europe (though it’s barely 30 years since the Balkans were ripped apart by an even more vicious conflict). It is, rather, the belief that our capacity to empathise with people’s hopes, fears and suffering is defined by whether they are “like us”. It’s an argument that circumscribes solidarity along lines of identity. One of the ironies of much rightwing criticism of identity politics is the obliviousness to their own wallowing in the swamp of identity.

There is an irony, too, in that the place of eastern Europeans and of Russians in the western imagination has always been ambiguous. Today, Europeans might embrace Ukrainians as “one of us”. It has not always been so. There is a long history of bigotry towards Slavs, of viewing them as primitive and “Asiatic”.

For the influential 19th-century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, “hatred of Slavs… is deep in our blood” because the Slav is “a born slave”. Edward Ross, one of America’s leading sociologists at the turn of the 20th century, called for Slavic migrants to be barred from America because they “belong in skins in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age”. “A Slav can live in dirt that would kill a white man”, he wrote.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was cast by many in racial terms. The prominent white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard viewed the Russian population as “made up chiefly of primitive racial strains… which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilisation”. Another American writer, Clinton Stoddard Burr, saw Bolshevism as “fundamentally an Asiatic conception which is repugnant to the western mind”. For Hitler, the “real frontier” was not between Europe and Asia but “the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world”. He saw Ukrainians as the “redskins” of Europe: “We’ll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads and everything that colonial people like”, he contemptuously remarked.

Such sentiments still find expression. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article on Putin’s diplomacy headlined “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past”.

The issue is one not of numbers but of political will and of the social and imaginative boundaries we draw

The boundaries of those who are “like us”, of those who are European, of even those who are considered “white”, are not fixed but shift according to political and social need. And those ever-changing boundaries are defined as much by those deemed to be not like us as by those whom we acknowledge are.

This is most noticeable in discussions about refugees. In the space of a week, a million refugees have fled Ukraine, half of them to Poland. That figure could rise in the coming weeks to four million. There has been much chaos and desperation in the rush to leave Ukraine. But in the receiving countries, the refugees have been met with great generosity, with open arms and open borders. (A notable exception is Britain, where the public supports a liberal policy but the government continues to drag its feet.)

Compare this to the debate on the “refugee crisis” of 2015 when Europe was apparently overwhelmed by an “invasion”. That year, Europe received 1.3m asylum applications, a sharp jump in numbers because of the Syrian war. The figures before and since have been much lower. Yet that one year, in which the total number of asylum seekers was barely more than that in a week from Ukraine, has become totemic of an overwhelmed continent, the reason for strengthening Fortress Europe and for holding hundreds of thousands inthe most appalling conditions on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The issue is one not of numbers but of political will and of the social and imaginative boundaries we draw. The EU president Ursula von der Leyen last week insisted that Ukraine “belongs in the European family”. One of her first acts on becoming EU president in 2019 was to move responsibility for immigration into a new portfolio for “Promoting Our European Way of Life”, the task of which included protecting it from “irregular migration”. Refugees from Ukraine are part of the “European way of life”. Those from beyond are not. That is how boundaries are marked to delimit empathy and solidarity.

In 1857, an editorial in the People’s Paper acknowledged that “we have avowedly shown ourselves on the Indian side” because support for “democracy must be consistent”. Anyone who says: “‘I am for Hungary, and against India’”, it observed, “ lies against himself, against principle, against truth, against honour.” Ernest Jones and the People’s Paper understood that solidarity means little if it is constrained by race and identity. There are many today who still need to learn that lesson.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

Doesn’t Russian oil smell of Ukrainian blood, Kyiv minister asks Shell

Aine Fox, PA
Sat, 5 March 2022


Ukraine’s foreign minister has criticised Shell for buying oil from Russia and called on the public to demand big companies cut all business ties with Vladimir Putin’s country.

The oil giant confirmed it made a purchase of crude oil on Friday but said it had “no alternative” in this instance and described the decision as “difficult”.

Dmytro Kuleba hit out publicly, asking the firm on Twitter: “Doesn’t Russian oil smell Ukrainian blood for you?”

It comes after Shell announced on Monday plans to sell its stake in all joint ventures with Russian partner Gazprom, calling the Ukrainian invasion “senseless” and a threat to European security.

Mr Kuleba tweeted: “I am told that Shell discretely bought some Russian oil yesterday. One question to @Shell: doesn’t Russian oil smell Ukrainian blood for you?

“I call on all conscious people around the globe to demand multinational companies to cut all business ties with Russia.”

A spokesman for Shell confirmed to the PA news agency it had bought a consignment of Russian crude oil on Friday but said the company is trying to maintain supplies of essential fuels and in this case it had no alternative crude supplies which would reach Europe in time.

In a statement, the firm said it remains “appalled by the war in Ukraine” and said it has stopped most activities involving Russian oil but added that the situation with supplies is “highly complex”.

A spokesman said: “Our refineries produce petrol and diesel as well as other products that people rely on every day.

“To be clear, without an uninterrupted supply of crude oil to refineries, the energy industry cannot assure continued provision of essential products to people across Europe over the weeks ahead.

“Cargoes from alternative sources would not have arrived in time to avoid disruptions to market supply.

“We didn’t take this decision lightly and we understand the strength of feeling around it.”

The company said while it will “continue to choose alternatives to Russian oil wherever possible” the change “cannot happen overnight because of how significant Russia is to global supply”.

The spokesman added: “We have been in intense talks with governments and continue to follow their guidance around this issue of security of supply, and are acutely aware we have to navigate this dilemma with the utmost care.

“We welcome any direction or insights from governments and policymakers as we try to keep Europe moving and in business.”

Shell has vowed to commit profits “from the limited amount of Russian oil we have to purchase” to a dedicated fund and work with aid partners and humanitarian agencies to “determine where the monies from this fund are best placed to alleviate the terrible consequences that this war is having on the people of the Ukraine”.

On Monday, the company said it would sell its 27.5% stake in a Russian liquefied natural gas facility, a 50% stake in an oilfield project in Siberia and an energy joint venture.

It will also end its involvement in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, which has been put on hold by ministers in Berlin.

Far right and far left alike admired Putin. Now we’ve all turned against strongmen

Nick Cohen
Sat, 5 March 2022

Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters

After the Ukraine invasion, his former defenders are rushing to distance themselves


The worst people in the west were pro-Putin. They excused his imperialist ideology and crimes against humanity and never paid a price for bootlicking a dictatorship. On the contrary, they took Britain out of the European Union and took over the Labour party. They won the presidencies of the United States and the Czech Republic and seized control of politics and the media in Hungary.

The savagery of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukrainian democracy has sent them into headlong retreat. Nothing better illustrates their panic than Marine Le Pen having to deny that she had ordered the destruction of 1.2m election leaflets that featured pictures of her giving Putin a firm handshake, as if to thank him for all the money he had loaned her


Another French far right leader, Éric Zemmour, announced his affinity with the fascist tradition by defending Vichy’s collaboration with the Nazis and the persecutors of Albert Dreyfus. With the first round of the French presidential election opening on 10 April, he returned the support the Kremlin has given him by saying that the French should not treat Putin’s victims as refugees because they would “submerge” France under a wave of immigration.

Cheeringly, Zemmour’s image of Ukrainians pushing French heads under water, as if they were aggressors rather than victims, did nothing to stop the decline in his support. In Hungary, the victory of the Putin wannabe Viktor Orbán in the elections on 3 April no longer seems the certainty it once was.

In the UK, the Labour leadership ordered MPs from the rump of the Corbyn left to disassociate themselves from a letter blaming Putin’s war on Nato or lose the whip. Even Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are backing away from Putin now and when rats that size abandon ship we know we are in uncharted waters.

Writers have struggled to find a label for the movements that have transformed the west. “Populist” is too vague. “Nationalist” works well until you remember that they hate large numbers of their fellow citizens and are more than willing to ally with their nations’ enemies. “Racist”? Certainly in some cases but how does that oft-repeated insult cover the religious sectarianism of a Modi or Erdoğan? “Fascist?” In the rhetorical echoes and common heritage, of course, but not in goose-stepping fact.

But they have all been “Putinist”, and not only because they have flattered the Kremlin.

The appeal of the Russian empire to parts of the far left remains both a cause of outrage and a pitiable demonstration of moral and intellectual decay. From Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde, every 19th-century liberal and socialist knew imperial Russia was the greatest fortress of European reaction. (Wilde was so moved by the struggle against it he wrote Vera; or, The Nihilists, a forgotten and truly terrible play to honour an attempt to assassinate the tsarist governor of St Petersburg.)

Boris Johnson also likes to pose as a strongman, who can get Brexit done

The appeal of Putin’s revival of tsarism to the modern far right may be grotesque but at least it makes sense. Putin is anti-democratic and so are they, as Orbán’s quasi-dictatorship and Trump’s attempts to overturn elections show. Putin despises human rights and so do they. Putin trades on a dark nostalgia and so do they. Above all, Putin is a strongman and it is as the tough guys who make their countries great again through a sheer act of will that they have sold themselves to tens of millions of voters.

Did I call them the “far right”? Forgive me, for “far right” doesn’t quite cover it. As I said, the Labour mainstream used the invasion to move against the tyrannophile left. We have seen nothing comparable on the supposedly mainstream right.

No pieces in the Mail or Telegraph agonising over how they ever came to be fooled by Farage and Arron Banks. No speeches from Boris Johnson warning against the seductions of tyrannical thinking and power worship. The silence shows that the border between the centre right and the far right has fallen into disrepair.

For Johnson also likes to pose as a strongman, who can get Brexit done. He too wallows in nostalgia for the past rather than hope for the future and defines himself against a large portion of his fellow countrymen: the remoaners, the naysayers, the libtards and the woke.

In the most desperate of circumstances, Ukraine cries to be allowed into the European Union, that same European Union a generation of unforgivably trivial Tories have dedicated their lives to destroying. Putin shows his fear of Russians learning the truth about his war by blocking their access to the BBC, the same BBC that Johnson underfunds and promises to ruin whenever he needs to toss red meat to the Tory right.

Predicting anything in this hellish week is a fool’s endeavour but of one thing I am sure: Putin has destroyed the appeal of strongman politics in the 2020s as effectively as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin did in the 1930s.

The career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy explains why. He has not played the Putinist game of divide and rule or created a personality cult. At his inauguration, he asked government workers to end the Soviet practice of putting pictures of the ruler on their office wall. “Hang your kids’ photos instead and look at them each time you are making a decision,” he said.

Just before Putin’s forces attacked, Zelenskiy appealed to Russians in their own language to reject Putin and emphasised his determination to protect Russian minorities in Ukraine. The broad appeal of his leadership helped create the broad resistance to invasion.

Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, told me there was nothing soppy about leaders doing all in their power to seek national unity. A nation’s resilience depends on governments seeking to avoid needless dividing lines. “We must unite the country in peacetime so we can defend ourselves in an emergency.”

We are now in an economic war that will send fuel and food prices ever higher. The poorest will hurt the most and in the name of national unity they deserve emergency help. Worse may be on the way than inflation and recession. As things stand, the most fitting epitaph to the Trumps, Farages and Le Pens who prostrated themselves before Putin is that if economic war is all he brings down on us, we can count ourselves lucky.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

BREAD RIOTS CREATE REVOLUTION

Russian war in world’s ‘breadbasket’ threatens food supply

By JOSEPH WILSON, SAMY MAGDY, AYA BATRAWY and CHINEDU ASADU

1 of 5

A worker collects Egyptian traditional 'baladi' flatbread, at a bakery, in el-Sharabia, Shubra district, Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, March 2, 2022. The Russian tanks and missiles besieging Ukraine also are threatening the food supply and livelihoods of people in Europe, Africa and Asia who rely on the vast, fertile farmlands of the Black Sea region. That could create food insecurity and throw more people into poverty in places like Egypt and Lebanon, where diets are dominated by government-subsidized bread.

 (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)


BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The Russian tanks and missiles besieging Ukraine also are threatening the food supply and livelihoods of people in Europe, Africa and Asia who rely on the vast, fertile farmlands of the Black Sea region — known as the “breadbasket of the world.”

Ukrainian farmers have been forced to neglect their fields as millions flee, fight or try to stay alive. Ports are shut down that send wheat and other food staples worldwide to be made into bread, noodles and animal feed. And there are worries Russia, another agricultural powerhouse, could have its grain exports upended by Western sanctions.

While there have not yet been global disruptions to wheat supplies, prices have surged 55% since a week before the invasion amid concerns about what could happen next. If the war is prolonged, countries that rely on affordable wheat exports from Ukraine could face shortages starting in July, International Grains Council director Petit Arnold told The Associated Press.

That could create food insecurity and throw more people into poverty in places like Egypt and Lebanon, where diets are dominated by government-subsidized bread. In Europe, officials are preparing for potential shortages of products from Ukraine and increased prices for livestock feed that could mean more expensive meat and dairy if farmers are forced to pass along costs to customers.

Russia and Ukraine combine for nearly a third of the world’s wheat and barley exports. Ukraine also is a major supplier of corn and the global leader in sunflower oil, used in food processing. The war could reduce food supplies just when prices are at their highest levels since 2011.

A prolonged conflict would have a big impact some 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) away in Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer. Millions rely on subsidized bread made from Ukrainian grains to survive, with about a third of people living in poverty.

“Wars mean shortages, and shortages mean (price) hikes,” Ahmed Salah, a 47-year-old father of seven, said in Cairo. “Any hikes will be catastrophic not only for me, but for the majority of the people.”

Anna Nagurney, a professor of supply chains, logistics and economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said, “Wheat, corn, oils, barley, flour are extremely important to food security ... especially in the poorer parts of the globe.”

With Ukrainian men being called on to fight, she said, “Who’s going to be doing the harvesting? Who’d be doing the transportation?”

Egypt’s state procurer of wheat, which normally buys heavily from Russia and Ukraine, had to cancel two orders in less than a week: one for overpricing, the other because a lack of companies offered to sell their supplies. Sharp spikes in the cost of wheat globally could severely affect Egypt’s ability to keep bread prices at their current subsidized level.

“Bread is extremely heavily subsidized in Egypt, and successive governments have found that cuts to those subsidies are the one straw that should be kept off the camel’s back at all costs,” Mirette Mabrouk, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, wrote in a recent analysis.

War-ravaged Syria recently announced it would cut spending and ration staples. In nearby Lebanon, where a massive explosion at the Beirut port in 2020 destroyed the country’s main grain silos, authorities are scrambling to make up for a predicted wheat shortage, with Ukraine providing 60% of its supply. They are in talks with the U.S., India and Canada to find other sources for a country already in financial meltdown.

Even before the war threatened to affect wheat supplies in sub-Saharan Africa, people in Kenya were demanding #lowerfoodprices on social media as inflation eroded their spending power. Now, they’re bracing for worse.

African countries imported agricultural products worth $4 billion from Russia in 2020, and about 90% was wheat, said Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist for the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa.

In Nigeria, flour millers believe a shortage of wheat supplies from Russia would affect the price of products like bread, a common food in Africa’s most populous country.

“All of us need to look elsewhere” in the future, said Tope Ogun with Honeywell Flour Mills Plc, one of Nigeria’s biggest flour milling companies. “We might not get what we need to, and there is likely going to be an increase in the price.”

Nigeria has taken pains to reduce its reliance on Russian grains, with farmers moving to plant more wheat fields to try to meet 70% of the country’s demand in five years, said Gambo Sale, national secretary of the Wheat Farmers Association of Nigeria.

“We have the land, we have the people, we have the money, we have whatever we can need in Nigeria” to grow wheat, he said. “All we need now is time.”

The disruption can be felt as far away as Indonesia, where wheat is used to make instant noodles, bread, fried foods and snacks.

Ukraine was Indonesia’s second-largest wheat supplier last year, providing 26% of wheat consumed. Rising prices for noodles, in turn, would hurt lower-income people, said Kasan Muhri, who heads the trade ministry’s research division.

Ukraine and Russia also combine for 75% of global sunflower oil exports, accounting for 10% of all cooking oils, IHS Markit said.

Raad Hebsi, a wholesale retailer in Baghdad, said he and other Iraqis are bracing to pay more for their cooking oil.

“Once the items stored are sold, we will see an increase in prices of these items,” he said. “We will likely purchase alternatives from Turkey, and Turkey will no doubt take advantage of the situation in Ukraine and raise its prices.”

Farmers in the United States, the world’s leading corn exporter and a major wheat supplier, are watching to see if U.S. wheat exports spike. In the European Union, farmers are concerned about rising costs for livestock feed.

Ukraine supplies the EU with just under 60% of its corn and nearly half of a key component in the grains needed to feed livestock. Russia, which provides the EU with 40% of its natural gas needs, is similarly a major supplier of fertilizer, wheat and other staples.

Spain is feeling the pinch both in sunflower oil, which supermarkets are rationing, and grains for the all-important breeding industry. Those imported grains go to feed some 55 million pigs.

Jaume Bernis, a 58-year-old breeder with 1,200 swine on his farm in northeast Spain, fears the war will further increase the pain his business is facing because of climate change and drought.

Since October, Spanish pork products have been taking a loss from high costs, Bernis said. Those costs are driven by China stockpiling feed for its pigs as it claws its way out of a devastating outbreak of African swine fever.

In the first two days of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the price of grain for animal feed jumped 10% on the open market in Spain.

“We are facing a moment of very elevated costs, and we don’t know what lies ahead,” Bernis said. “This is another cost of waging a war in the 21st century.”

___

Batrawy reported from Dubai, Magdy from Cairo and Asadu from Lagos, Nigeria. AP reporters Paul Wiseman in Washington; Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad; Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya; Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia; and Roxana Hegeman in Belle Plaine, Kansas, contributed.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the tensions between Russia and Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

‘War destroys everything’: Russian culture workers denounce war in Ukraine

From high-profile musicians to museum staff, thousands of arts workers are taking a public stand against the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine. New Russian laws mean speaking out puts their livelihoods, freedom and safety at even higher risk.

© Kirill Kudryavtsev, AFP

Joanna YORK 

As the war in Ukraine has entered its second week, more than 17,000 Russian culture sector workers have signed an open letter demanding Russia's withdrawal of troops and calling the war “senseless and pointless.”

“The reasoning behind this so-called “special military operation” is a construct made entirely by the representatives of the Russian state. We are in opposition to this war being carried out in our name,” they wrote.

High-profile Russian figures on the international arts scene have also denounced the Russian invasion.

On February 25, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Kirill Petrenko described Vladimir Putin’s actions as an “insidious attack on Ukraine”.

Artists Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva withdrew themselves from the Venice Biennale with a statement on Instagram saying, “there is no place for art when civilians are dying under the fire of missiles”.

And almost 20 musicians gave statements against the war to classical music magazine Van. “How do I feel now? Pain, devastation, shame,” wrote pianist Polina Osetinskaya.
'The stakes are high'

Such outspoken opposition to decisions made by the Russian president is rare and dangerous. According to the independent monitoring group OVD, more than 8,000 people had been detained for attending anti-war protests in Russia as of March 4, nine days after Putin invaded Ukraine.

On March 4, the Russian parliament upped the ante by passing a new law with harsher punishments for public dissent. Russians who are seen to discredit the armed forces, spread ‘fake information’ or call for unsanctioned public action, could now face a variety of punishments including lengthy jail terms.

“The stakes are high,” Amnesty International’s Russia researcher Natalia Prilutskaya told FRANCE 24. “The problems they could face go from losing their job to administrative prosecution but also criminal prosecution, which now involves 15-years' imprisonment in the worst-case scenario and very heavy fines.”

At the same time, increasing media restrictions in Russia make it unlikely that counter-narratives about opponents to the regime will be able to surface. Some high-profile opponents have already been the subject of online messages sharing their image with words such as “traitor” or “enemy” scrawled across them.

“It's not clear who's behind these, it could be just one person or the Telegram channel,” Prilutskaya said. “What is really worrying is that there are groups in society that do support the war and we can expect that there would be acts when some of those people might want to attack those who speak out.”

Most of the 17,000 signatories of the letter are museum curators or art critics working in the culture sector, who are not high-profile enough to be the subject of such messages. This does not mean they are safe. “Ordinary people are risking a lot, especially those who live in smaller towns. There are all sorts of dangers that they're facing,” said Prilutskaya. “But still they found it was necessary to speak out on this.”
‘War destroys everything’

Meanwhile, western countries are rapidly removing Russian culture from their schedules.

As well as being barred from international events such as the Eurovision Song Contest, the Cannes, Glasgow and Stockholm film festivals have likewise announced a boycott of Russian delegations.

In New York and London, opera houses and classical music venues have cancelled performances of Russian music and ballets. New York’s Metropolitan Opera added that it would no longer work with performers or institutions that support Putin’s policies.

In the Netherlands, the Hermitage Amsterdam, which is a branch of Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, has cut ties with the Russian institution. “War destroys everything. Even 30 years of collaboration,” it said in a statement on March 3.

A global rejection of Russian art and culture poses its own risks, said Prilutskaya. “If this goes on, there is a fear that those people [in Russia] who are speaking out and those people who want to be heard would be effectively imprisoned in their country.”

“And Russian propaganda is also quite skillful in terms of perverting what is going on, so they can say, ‘We've been telling you for ages. The West is against Russia as a whole. It’s not against Putin, or against any one of the oligarchs, it's against Russia.’”
'An act of cowardice'

Some Russian artists have already found themselves caught between the demands of western cultural institutions and Russian authorities.

The Munich Philharmonic sacked renowned conductor Valery Gergiev on March 1 for refusing to denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Gergiev has known the Russian president for three decades and has a long history of supporting him. He was also fired from his position as honorary conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Opera star Anna Netrebko has also lost engagements in Germany, Switzerland and the US due to her ties to Putin. The soprano celebrated her 50th birthday by singing at the Kremlin, and publicly supported the president’s 2014 election campaign.

In a Facebook post she has since said she was “opposed to this war”, but stopped short of mentioning Putin by name. She added, “I am not a political person. Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.”

Even so, given her strong ties to Putin, The Metropolitan Opera in New York has said it is “hard to imagine a scenario” in which she would ever perform at the venue again.

“One argument is that art and politics should be separate, but not speaking out in this particular situation is about whether you support the war and absolutely brutal, useless, senseless killing,” said Prilutskaya.

“Some very high-profile artists have for a long time enjoyed a closeness to the top leadership in Russia. It could be their position, that they are fine with what is going on [in Ukraine]. Or, is it an act of cowardice from people who are probably in a better position that many of those 17,000 people that signed the open letter?”

While the balance of power may be stacked against them, the culture workers who have denounced the war are not alone. Russian medical professionals started their own open letter that had gathered 15,000 signatures by February 28. Some 30,000 Russian IT workers and 600 scientists have also done the same.

In a country of 144 million people, these acts are still what Prilutskaya calls “little shoots” of resistance that need support to grow stronger. But, she added, “there is hope. The bigger the anti-war movement, the more there's a chance that Russian aggression will at least diminish.”

“And the scale of the protests and the fact that there are all these letters from different parts of society is unprecedented.”

PHOTO ESSAY

At Ukraine's largest art museum, a race to protect heritage

APTOPIX Russia Ukraine War Saving Heritage
Workers move the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin of the Bohorodchany Iconostasis in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum as part of safety preparations in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. 

(AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

BERNAT ARMANGUÉ
Sun, 6 March 2022

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The director of Ukraine's largest art museum walked its hallways, supervising as staff packed away its collections to protect their national heritage in case the Russian invasion advances west.

In one partially empty gallery of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, employees placed carefully wrapped baroque pieces into cardboard boxes. A few meters away, a group walked down the majestic main staircase carrying a giant piece of sacred art, the 18th century Bohorodchany iconostasis.

“Sometimes the tears are coming because a lot of labor has been put in here. It takes time, energy. You are doing something good, you feel pleased. Today you see empty walls, so it feels bitter, sad. We didn’t believe it till the last minute that this could happen,” museum General Director Ihor Kozhan said Friday.

The doors of the museum in the western city of Lviv have been closed since Russia's war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. Korzhan said he receives daily calls from other European cultural institutions offering to help as he and his staff race to preserve the museum's works.

Anna Naurobska, the head of the rare manuscripts and books department, said she still doesn’t know where to safely store the collection of more than 12,000 items being packed into boxes.

The relocation process and the fear that the collection is in danger in the event of an attack on the city overwhelms her.

“This is our story; this is our life. It is very important to us,” Naurobska said.

She walked into another room and held up a massive tome, tears forming in her eyes. “It’s a Russian book," she said, putting it back on the shelf. "I’m so angry.”

Like the museum, other sites in Lviv are rushing to protect works of artistic or cultural importance. The display cabinets at the Museum of the History of Religion are almost empty. Workers are assembling metal containers in the patio to safely store the remaining items before placing them in basements. At the Latin Cathedral, the sculptures have been covered with cardboard, foam and plastic to protect them from possible shrapnel.

Amid the bare walls and shrouded statues, Kozhan lamented the empty museum, which has survived two world wars.

“Museum has to live. People have to be there, and first of all children. They have to learn the basics of their culture,” he said.

A sheet covers a sculpture of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia's war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Workers move a baroque sacred art piece in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum as part of safety preparations in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



A woman walks past the Museum of the History of Religion in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. Workers are assembling metal containers in the patio at the museum to safely store the remaining items before placing them in basements in case the Russian invasion advances west. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



A worker of the Museum of the History of Religion builds a box to protect artifacts in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Cabinets in a hallway of the Museum of the History of Religion sit empty in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. Workers are assembling metal containers in the patio at the museum to safely store the remaining items before placing them in basements in case the Russian invasion advances west. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



The glass of a display cabinet containing human remains of the Vysotska culture is reinforced with tape at the Museum of the History of Religion in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. Workers are assembling metal containers in the patio at the museum to safely store the remaining items before placing them in basements in case the Russian invasion advances west. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Workers and volunteers of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum store Baroque pieces in cardboard boxes as safety preparations in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Workers move the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin of the Bohorodchany Iconostasis in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum as part of safety preparations in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Busts of Soviet iconography are stored in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia's war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Workers move a piece of the Bohorodchany Iconostasis in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum as safety preparations in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia's war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Ihor Kozhan, Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum general director works in his office in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia's war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24. "We didn’t believe it till the last minute that this could happen,” Kozhan said. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)




Workers at the rare manuscripts and old printed books department of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum store them in cardboard boxes to reduce the risk of damage in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)



Old books rest on shelves at the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)


Workers at the rare manuscripts and old printed books department of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum store them in cardboard boxes to reduce the risk of damage in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)


Lenin sculptures are placed on the patio of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. The doors of the museum have been closed since Russia’s war on Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and heritage sites across the country face danger as the fighting continues. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Anti-feminist conservative or foul-mouthed liberal? South Korea to pick new president

Author: AFP|

Update: 06.03.2022

Former prosecutor Yoon Suk-yeol and maverick ex-governor Lee Jae-myung (pictured) are in a neck-and-neck race to become the next leader of South Korea / © AFP

South Korea will elect a new president Wednesday and voters face a stark choice: a feminist-bashing conservative or a scandal-plagued liberal? So far, it's a dead heat.

The two frontrunners, dour former prosecutor Yoon Suk-yeol of the People Power party and the incumbent Democratic party's maverick ex-governor Lee Jae-myung are trapped in a neck-and-neck race to become the next leader of Asia's fourth largest economy.

And what propels one of them to victory will not be their populist campaign promises or North Korea policy, analysts say. Instead, it's what the papers have dubbed a "cycle of revenge" in South Korea's famously adversarial politics.


"This election is a battle between two opposite forces -- the progressives and conservatives," said political analyst Park Sang-byoung.

South Korean presidents are allowed by law to serve a single five year term, and every living former president has been investigated and jailed for corruption after leaving office.

Newspapers say South Korea's famously adversarial politics are trapped in a "cycle of revenge" / © AFP

Outgoing President Moon Jae-in himself swept to power in 2017 after his disgraced predecessor Park Geun-hye was impeached over an influence-peddling scandal that also put a Samsung heir behind bars.

Now, Park's conservatives are eager for revenge.

Ironically, their candidate Yoon was chief prosecutor under Moon and pursued Park when she was impeached -- an experience that boosted his profile and popularity and pushed him to enter politics.

- Realpolitik -

South Korean politics has seen a "deepening division" in recent years, with elections more focused on party rivalry than policy, analyst Yoo Jung-hoon told AFP.

"Many conservatives still hold a grudge over the impeachment of Park Geun-hye," he said.

Yoon is appealing to these disgruntled voters, offering a chance at "revenge" for Park's ousting -- even going so far as to threaten to investigate Moon for unspecified "irregularities".

"We should do it," Yoon said last month, referring to prosecuting Moon and his administration.

His comments earned a rare rebuke from the presidential Blue House and the ruling Democratic party's candidate Lee said they indicated his rival was not fit to lead the nation.

But analysts say it's just political business as usual in Seoul.

Dour prosecutor Yoon Suk-yeol is appealing to disgruntled voters angry about the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye / © AFP

"The Moon administration has prosecuted many former officials in the name of rooting out deep-rooted corruption," Shin Yul, a political science professor at Myongji University.

"I expect the same standard to be applied under the Yoon government should wrongdoings be found," he said.

Yoon's wife in January gave an unwitting insight into the realpolitik to come, claiming enemies and critics would be prosecuted if her husband won because that's "the nature of power," according to taped comments released after a court battle.

- Where's the policy? -

Polls show that voters' top concerns this election cycle are skyrocketing house prices in the capital Seoul, stagnant growth, and stubborn youth unemployment -- but campaigning has been dominated by mud-slinging.

Lee, a former mayor and provincial governor, has a slew of fresh policy offerings -- from universal basic income to free school uniforms -- but they've been overshadowed by media coverage of his scandals.

He is being scrutinised over a suspect land development deal, with two key witnesses to the case having killed themselves.

He was forced to start his campaign by apologising for a profanity-laden family phone call, his wife was accused of misappropriating public funds, and he's been dogged by rumours of mafia-links.

Lee, a former mayor and provincial governor, has a slew of fresh policy offerings -- from universal basic income to free school uniforms -- but they've been overshadowed by media coverage of his scandals / © AFP

His rival Yoon has himself made a series of gaffes, most recently having to delete a "tone deaf" tweet on Ukraine which included a tangerine with an angry face drawn on -- a bizarre reference to that country's Orange Revolution.

Moreover, Yoon's most memorable policy is an offer to abolish the gender equality ministry, on the basis that -- despite voluminous data to the contrary -- South Korean women do not suffer "systemic gender discrimination," he says.

Yoon is more hawkish than Lee on North Korea, threatening a pre-emptive strike on the South's nuclear-armed neighbour if needed.

But, despite a record-breaking seven weapons tests in a month in January, North Korea is not a major deciding factor in the vote, analysts say.

"The North's launches have minimal impact in elections because South Korea's competition for supremacy with the North is long over," said analyst Yoo.

"South Korean elections have revolved around political rivalry rather than policy issues for many years."

ALBERTA TOO
America is finally cleaning up its abandoned, leaking oil wells




Oil leaks from equipment at the Placerita Oil Field, in Santa Clarita, California on February 22, 2022, where the state is plugging 56 abandoned wells

 (AFP/Robyn BECK)

Chris Stein
Sat, March 5, 2022

Bill Suan bought his family's cattle farm in the mountains of West Virginia a decade-and-a-half ago with little thought for the two gas wells drilled on the property -- but then they started leaking oil onto his fields and sickening his cows.

After taking the operator to court, Suan was successful in plugging one well, but the company has since disappeared, leaving him to contend with a small-scale environmental disaster that's a symptom of the larger problem of orphaned oil wells across the United States.

"It's shocking to think that it was like that for decades," Suan said.

From rural areas in the east where modern oil production began to cities in southern California, where pumpjacks loom not far from homes, the United States is pockmarked with perhaps millions of oil wells that are unsealed, haven't produced in decades, and sometimes do not have an identifiable owner.

The detritus of lax regulation and the petroleum industry's booms and busts, many states have struggled to deal with these wells, which can leak oil and brine into water supplies as well as emit methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

In a first, Washington is making a concerted effort to plug these wells through a $4.7 billion fund, passed as part of an expansive overhaul of the nation's infrastructure.

"The money available to the states (has) never been commensurate to the scale of the problem, and now for the first time it will be," said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) nonprofit.

The funds will likely not be enough to solve the problem entirely, though, and environmentalists warn that the patchwork of state laws governing oil production include many loopholes that could allow companies to continue abandoning wells.

- Disappearing owners -

Since the first commercial barrel of oil was extracted in Pennsylvania in 1859, the United States has been at the center of global petroleum production.

But in many US states, it took more than a century to pass regulations governing record-keeping for wells and their sealing, or plugging.

Today, the exact number of abandoned wells nationwide is unknown, but the Environmental Protection Agency this year estimated it to be around 3.5 million.

The EDF estimates around nine million Americans live within a mile of a well that's considered orphaned, meaning that it's neither operating, nor has a documented owner.

In southern California's Kern County, the Central California Environmental Justice Network has received reports of abandoned petroleum infrastructure leaking oil next to schools and homes.

"A lot of the infrastructure that was built, that was now abandoned... is very much centered around poor communities," said Gustavo Aguirre Jr., the network's director in the county.

States have largely been left to their own devices when it comes to addressing these wells.

California plugs a few dozen per-year, according to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), and is currently in the process of sealing 56 near the city of Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles, some of which date back to 1949.

The bulk of America's orphaned wells are thought to be in eastern states where the industry was born, and where more than 160 years later, it's not unheard of for landowners to find a hole in the ground or a pipe protruding from the earth that's leaking oil or brine.

Pennsylvania, which is thought to have the most, plugged 18 orphaned wells in 2020, according to the IOGCC. In the same year, West Virginia, which has thousands of documented orphaned wells, plugged one.

"It's been decades of neglect, just letting them get away with it, not forcing the plugging regulations," said Suan, who has had to fence off the unplugged well on his land to keep cattle from getting into the leaked oil.

"And now we're stuck with all of them."

- 'Every slice' -

The federal infrastructure bill Congress approved last year will likely allow a chunk of these wells to be sealed, said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, which studies energy in the eastern region where oil production began.

However, he warned that in some states there aren't enough inspectors or financial requirements to keep drillers from continuing to walk away from their wells.

"This is just a drop, then, and the bonding coverage is so inadequate," Boettner said.

A McGill University study published last year ranked abandoned wells as the 10th greatest methane emitter in the United States, far below industries like cattle and natural gas production.

But with President Joe Biden's administration trying to curb the country's emissions where it can, and as estimates of future damage by climate change grow increasingly dire, Peltz characterized the plugging investment as a start.

"If we have to give every slice of the pie, which we do, we have to get this slice of the pie," he said.

cs/des/md