Russian dancer who quit Bolshoi Ballet in invasion protest unites on stage with Ukrainian ballerina

Tuesday 5 April 2022,

Olga Smirnova, left, and Anastasya Gurskaya, pose for a photograph in Naples.

Credit: Associated Press

A Ukrainian ballerina who fled the war in her homeland and a Russian ballerina who quit the Bolshoi Ballet over the Russian invasion, united on stage on Monday for a show in Italy, to raise money for the Red Cross.

Naples’ San Carlo Theater billed the event: “Stand with Ukraine — Ballet for Peace.”

Among the stars at the event was prima ballerina Olga Smirnova, who quit the Bolshoi last month and is now dancing with the Dutch National Ballet.

She danced alongside Anastasia Gurskaya, a top ballerina in Kyiv’s Opera, who fled the fighting in Ukraine.

“I think it’s important in this situation, in this time, to be together on the stage. To do little things, the smallest things, what we can do for Ukraine," Smirnova told reporters in the theatre ahead of the final rehearsal.

"This is the main goal for all of us. That’s why we are here, that’s why we are dancing tonight."

Bolshoi's former etoile, Olga Smirnova performs during a benefit performance for Ukraine in Naples. Credit: AP

Fellow prima ballerina Gurskaya said her performance is one way to help Ukraine.

She said: “My life is upside down now. And I’ve never been in Italy in this city, and I’ve never danced with stars like today, with world ballet stars, and I am so excited about it. And I don’t know why this happened to me."

"I am really happy I am here and I can help and support my country with my dancing today."

The theatre's artistic director, Alessio Carbone, hailed Smirnova's participation, saying: "Olga is a very strong image for us, because obviously she was the first dancer who publicly opposed the (Putin) regime. So to have her with us tonight is an inspiration of courage."

Despite this, the prospect of Russian dancers dancing on the same stage with Ukrainians reportedly angered Ukraine’s consul in Naples.

The Italian daily La Repubblica quoted the consul as telling fellow Ukrainians in the southern Italian city to shun the performance.

About a dozen protesters, some holding Ukrainian flags, demonstrated outside the theatre before the event to show discontent over the participation of Russian dancers.

People show placards outside the San Carlo opera house in Naples

Credit: Associated Press

Before the rehearsal, one of the Ukrainian dancers spoke about a small town near Kyiv where the chilling discoveries of civilian bodies have emerged.

According to Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, the bodies of 410 civilians have been removed from Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces.

Journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people around Bucha, northwest of the capital.

Stanislav Olshanskyi, who has danced at the Kyiv Opera House since 2018, says he had lived in Bucha for five years.

He said: “It’s my city. I know this city, I walked in the streets.

"These photos ... it’s horrible. I can’t think about this, it’s like it’s not in this world, it can’t be true. But I know it’s true and we’ll never forgive this.”

Law forcing energy companies to insulate UK homes runs out as bills soar

By Caroline Molloy, originally published by Open Democracy

April 5, 2022

Tens of thousands of Britain’s poorest energy customers could miss out on a chance to bring their bills down before winter – because the government allowed its flagship insulation scheme to run out.

On Friday, following questions from openDemocracy, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced an 11th-hour extension to the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), which forces energy suppliers to stump up for insulation and other energy-efficiency improvements for people on low incomes. The ECO had expired hours earlier without a replacement in train.

Suppliers can continue to provide insulation upgrades under the old rules while the details of the replacement scheme are worked out. But the last-minute move appeared to catch energy companies themselves on the hop – and fuel poverty charity National Energy Action has warned that they may be reluctant to carry out the work, as the scheme is no longer backed by legislation.

Asked by openDemocracy about the ECO’s lapse last week, British Gas was the only energy firm to respond, saying it was still waiting for the energy regulator Ofgem to tell it what to do.

The ECO has run in three phases since 2013, the most recent of which ended on Thursday. The government now has limited time to rush through legislation for an official fourth phase.

The UK’s energy price cap jumped 54% on Friday, taking average gas and electricity bills from £1,277 to £1,971 a year. The price cap, which currently covers 22 million households, is predicted to rise another £600 in October.

The delays to formalising the new ECO scheme come at the “worst possible time”, a National Energy Action spokesperson told openDemocracy, adding that the optimal time to be installing new installation measures is between now and the autumn. “Tens of thousands of households could miss out and be in a really difficult position,” he added.

Last year, the ECO paid for nearly 400,000 improvements to more than 150,000 homes – mostly wall and loft insulation and more efficient home-heating systems.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak told MPs in March that the ECO was helping “hundreds of thousands of people in fuel poverty”. But just days before the scheme expired, Ofgem told openDemocracy that an extension had “yet to be confirmed” – and that it would only engage with suppliers “once there is more certainty about the requirements of the next phase of the scheme”.

Parliament is not expected to have a chance to extend the scheme formally until the summer, and it could be squeezed out by other legislation that the government wants to pass before July, when the annual parliamentary recess begins.

Matt Copeland, head of policy at National Energy Action, told openDemocracy that any “long delay” or “continued hiatus” in implementing a full replacement scheme “could badly damage the health, wealth and well-being of the poorest households”.

“The last time we had any delay, we had the worst quarter of energy efficiency in a decade,” he added. “We hope that won’t happen again, and it’s critical the government acts now. Will energy suppliers have the confidence to take on an additional risk burden to do the work now, in advance of legislation clearing parliament?”

The government is due to launch its delayed energy security strategy this week, amid ministerial wrangling about the merits of wind power and nuclear, but openDemocracy understands the strategy is likely to say little about home energy efficiency.

Shadow climate secretary Ed Miliband slammed what he called the government’s “empty rhetoric and false promises on energy efficiency”, telling openDemocracy:

“The government’s energy relaunch will have no credibility unless it finally delivers on energy efficiency, the best, most effective way to reduce energy bills, cut our demand for fossil fuels and bring down carbon emissions.

“It is simply not good enough if there are serious delays in households getting access to support – especially as we need a national effort to insulate homes ahead of next winter. They must provide the urgent, national insulation plan that the country needs, and they need to do so now.”

The government has set itself a statutory target that no one in fuel poverty should be living in an ‘energy inefficient’ home by 2030.

But based on current progress, Copeland said, “instead of eight years, it will take over 60 years for that to happen”.

The ECO and its predecessors have been unpopular with suppliers, who have lobbied to have the rules cancelled or watered down. In 2014, David Cameron cut the amount suppliers needed to spend insulating homes, though the Johnson government’s October 2021 heat and buildings strategy pledged to increase them back to around the level they were before Cameron’s cuts.

Energy companies are currently resisting political pressure for a windfall tax on their profits. Centrica (the parent company of British Gas) made just under £1bn in profit last year.

 

Teaser photo credit: Cross-section of home insulation. By ‘Matthew G. Bisanz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7977520

The US Is Losing the EV Battery Race
Wednesday, 6 April, 2022 -

Anjani Trivedi

In recent months, a string of carmakers and electric vehicle battery producers have announced their intentions to build facilities in the US. Manufacturers from across the world are throwing around billions of dollars of investments into EV battery technology, too.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era provision to help increase the domestic availability of raw materials like lithium and graphite to boost battery manufacturing and reduce dependence on foreign supply chains. “We need to end our long-term reliance on China and other countries for inputs that will power the future,” he said.

As promising as all this is, it’s unlikely to move the needle. The US has waited far too long to ramp up and prioritize the core of any electric vehicle strategy: batteries and how to charge them. For starters, factories won’t be up and running for a while, so they won’t be churning out power packs anytime soon. Capital isn’t being directed in a focused way, either. Even with Biden kicking off a top-down, Beijing-style industrial policy, China is likely to stay well ahead in the battery race.

It’s also down to poor timing and planning. The hype around EVs has been present for a while. That’s pushed up demand and consumer awareness (think of all those EV advertisements during Super Bowl.) Yet, only last June did the US release a blueprint for battery supply chain build-out to “help guide investments.” Upstarts have been trying to crack the right technologies for a while now, and manufactures have been talking up big changes to auto-making for cleaner vehicles.

What’s worse, as US carmakers get desperate to make good on promises of investing billions of dollars in green cars to meet emissions regulation targets, they’re pressuring their Korean battery partners for technology. Ironically, it’s a tactic often associated with China’s technology dominance goals, but it is also indicative of the lackluster progress on development of viable and scalable powerpack options.

China, on the other hand, continues to hurtle toward making batteries for most electric vehicles in the world. It has cornered 60% of battery production. Despite a faltering Covid-19 policy and supply chain delays, it’s been filling the growing gap between demand and supply.

Tesla Inc. was able to churn out cars, export them across the world and open its Europe gigafactory because of a Chinese battery partnership and wide-scale manufacturing. Other carmakers have turned to Chinese suppliers of parts and raw materials for energy storage. One of the world’s largest car companies, Volkswagen AG, recently signed agreements with Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co. and Tsingshan Holding Group to ensure supply of nickel and cobalt for 160 gigawatt hours of batteries. Meanwhile, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. is scouting out sites across North America for a $5 billion plant.

It isn’t just about scale and China’s manufacturing heft, though. The world largest battery maker, CATL, has been working on a third generation battery with cell-to-pack technology that’s almost 13% more efficient than Tesla’s much-awaited 4680 battery in terms of space utilization, according to Daiwa Securities Co. analysts. The company is also developing key thermal control technology, an important safety feature to ensure fires don’t spread in the latest types of powerpacks which are prone to combustion. If the US can’t lead on a key area of innovation now, it’s hard to say how the future for EVs will play out there.

The woes of the EV ecosystem have been compounded by a market imbalance and high raw material prices. That means it will only be harder to gather supplies and make affordable batteries. Chinese officials, though, have already started talking about more collaboration across their supply chain to ensure manufacturing isn’t hit. The US isn’t quite there yet when it comes to addressing this big — and likely prolonged — barrier because it doesn’t even have a robust supply chain.

What options does the US have now? Recreating everything from scratch may leave it further behind. Acknowledging that circumventing China won’t be an option in the near future would be a good place to start. Channeling funds toward manufacturing and focusing on battery tech startups that are close to large-scale production could ensure a more streamlined approach for funding. In addition, facilitating greater production from the few — and small — existing mines in the US may help integrate them into future manufacturing plans. Meanwhile, ensuring it can get a reliable supply of battery metals from its northern neighbor Canada — a current favorite for many manufacturers — would also help.

When it comes to electric vehicles and batteries, the US will have to move beyond flaunting billions of dollars of investments and ambitious plans if it really wants to get ahead.


Bloomberg

India’s EV Sales Seen Doubling Led by Battery-Powered Scooters

Ragini Saxena, Bloomberg News

Employees assemble Ather Energy electric scooters in Hosur, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Retail sales in India of electric vehicles led by battery-powered scooters and rickshaws will almost double in the current fiscal year started April 1 as demand for such transportation picks up, according to a dealers’ body.

As many as 800,000 electric vehicles will be sold in India in the year through March 2023, compared with 429,217 units in the previous period, Vinkesh Gulati, president of the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, said at an event Tuesday. Two-wheelers clocked sales of 231,338 units in 2022.

The switch to clean transport in the South Asian nation is slower than other countries such as China and the U.S. By 2040, just 53% of new automobile sales in India will be electric, compared with 77% in China, according to BloombergNEF. Expensive price tags, lack of options in electric models and insufficient charging stations have led to sluggish adoption of battery vehicles in India.

India’s electric transition is “marred” by a slow increase in production capacity, even though demand is rising, Gulati said. Electric vehicle sales can cross 1 million units next year if automakers scale-up capacity, he said.

India needs stricter regulation for electric vehicles to improve safety standards, Gulati said. Low-speed electric vehicles, powered by a 250 watt motor, don’t have to be registered and can be driven without a license, resulting in safety issues, he said. 

Hero Electric Vehicles Pvt., which dominates the local electric two-wheeler market with 28% share, sold 65,303 units in fiscal 2022 versus 14,771 in the previous year. Sales of Okinawa Autotech Pvt., with 20% market share, jumped 566% to 46,447 this year, while Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. sold 14,371 units and controls 6.2% of the sector.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

 

Not so Black and White: Belfast in the 1960s

Review of Kenneth Brannagh's film Belfast (2021)

by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / April 5th, 2022

For those not familiar with the vicissitudes of Northern Ireland, Kenneth Branagh’s 2021 film Belfast may not give one a full idea of the terrible things that happened there over a period of three decades- euphemistically known as ‘the Troubles’. Many died in a war of colonial origins involving Irish nationalists, Protestant loyalists and unionists, and the direct involvement of the British Army and Government.

However, that was then and this is now. A quieter, slowly changing, more peaceful air hangs over Northern Ireland since 2005 when the IRA announced the end of its armed campaign.

Despite some flare-ups, the peace is holding and hopefully creating the conditions for a more tempered mutual understanding of two communities that underwent so much division for so long. Branagh’s film sits neatly into that crevice arguing for a basic human understanding and empathy, to encourage unity and mutual acceptance.

Brannagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay (seven nominations at the 94th Academy Awards, winning for Best Original Screenplay) tells the story of nine-year-old Buddy from a working-class Ulster Protestant family. He lives on a terraced street of mixed Protestant and Catholic families who all know each other well and get on with each other well. A group of Protestant loyalists attack the homes and businesses of the Catholics, as well as putting pressure on Buddy’s father to participate in the violent sectarianism which he refuses to do. Buddy becomes very attracted to a fellow high-achieving Catholic classmate, Catherine, and they become friends. Buddy’s father works in England and comes home as regularly as he can while his wife struggles with their accrued debts.

Brannagh’s story avoids sectarian rhetoric and shows us that the Catholics and Protestants had much in common: their working class struggles with poverty and emigration.

Apart from historical differences of origin, and Unionist politics notwithstanding, the people had much in common culturally to unite them. Throughout Irish history since the 18th century Protestants have been leaders of movements that emphasised British heritage, as well as movements that asserted Irish identity.

These similarities have created confusion even amongst the people themselves as the visual differences between Catholic and Protestant are not obvious in Ireland.

Thus, Buddy tries to figure out the differences, through tutelage, about the sorts of names and spellings Catholics use as distinct from Protestants. One example of naming traditions stands out from recent history – the TV debate between Mr Ken Maginnis (the Ulster Unionist security spokesman) and Mr Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein’s senior negotiator), as reported in the Irish Times in 1997.

The debate highlighted the similarities as much as the differences between two politicians who used different spelling versions of the same name (Mac Aonghusa). (The name, Aonghus (One Strength), resulted in not one, but two famous drinks, the other being Hennessy’s brandy (the O’hAonghusas). Both Maginnis and McGuinness are formed from the colonial phonetics of a coloniser who could not speak Gaelic, confronted with the colonised who could not read or write. They simply wrote down what they heard, often accurately recording the local accents. Over time the names became shibboleths for different sets of ideas, both names being determined by the coloniser.

Although descendants of colonists who arrived from Britain in the early 17th century, by the 18th century many Protestants had, in the words of Albert Memmi’s famous theory of the ‘coloniser who refuses’, formed the Irish Volunteers (local militias) in Ireland in 1778. The Volunteers were made up of Anglican Protestants, Presbyterians and a limited number of Catholics. Taking advantage of the British preoccupation with the American Revolutionary War, the Volunteers paraded fully armed and demanded an end to the tariffs that Irish goods had been subject to upon entering Britain (unlike British goods which could be imported freely into Ireland). Many of the Volunteers were concerned with “securing Irish free trade and opposing English governmental interference in Ireland. This resulted in them pledging support for resolutions advocating legislative independence for Ireland whilst proclaiming their loyalty to the British Crown.”

Orangemen marching in Bangor on the Twelfth of July 2010

In the pre-partioned Ireland of the 19th century many Protestants were nationalists. For example, Thomas Davis, the Irish nationalist, was well known for a doctrine of nationality that he propagated through the newspaper, The Nation, of which he was one of the founders. He described his tenets as “a nationality that would embrace all creeds, races and classes within the island […] which would establish internal union and external independence”. As a Protestant of mixed English and Anglo-Irish parentage, his nationalist views and writings put him into conflict with the colonial strategies of the empire. By proclaiming the slogan “gan teanga, gan tír” (no language, no nation) he tried to redress some of the worst effects of colonial policies.

Indeed, the six counties of Northern Ireland had communities of Irish speakers. The census figures of 1851 and 1891 demonstrated the presence of Irish-speakers respectively as follows: Antrim 3,033 (1.2%) and 885 (0.4%); Armagh 13,736 (7.0%) and 3,486 (2.4%); Derry 5,406 (2.8%) and 2,723 (1,8%); Down 1,153 (0.4%) and 590 (0.3%); Fermanagh 2,704 (2.3%) and 561 (0.8%) and Tyrone 12,892 (5.0%) 6,687 (3.9%). There were minor Gaeltachtaí (Irish-language communities) in Tyrone, the Sperrins (Derry), the Antrim Glens and Rathlin Island that had all but died out by the 1940s.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising many of the revolutionaries were interned in a camp at Frongoch in Merionethshire, Wales. There were some Protestant internees, such as Arthur Shields, Harry Nichols and Ellett Elmes (Dublin); Sam Ruttle (Tralee and Kildare) and Alf Cotton (Tralee and Belfast) whose background in the Volunteers, Citizen Army and Conradh na Gaeilge demonstrated the non-sectarian outlook of the revolutionary movement.

The first president of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (1863-1949), was the son of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) minister and had been influenced by nationalist circles while studying for a Doctorate of Laws in Trinity College. However, it was his speech “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” in 1892 that heralded a qualitative change in the struggle to maintain and develop the popular basis of support for the Irish language. Hyde elaborated on his call for de-Anglicisation, which he emphasised, was not conceived out of Anglophobia:

When we speak of ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation’ we mean it, not as a protest against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English.

Maybe because of his Church of Ireland background, Douglas Hyde stayed away from direct involvement in politics but had he been alive he would have most likely supported the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), signed on 10 April 1998 which established in law basic principles such as:

The British government would uphold the right of the people of Northern Ireland to decide between the Union with Great Britain or a united Ireland.  The people of the island of Ireland, North and South, had the exclusive right to solve the issues between North and South by mutual consent. The Irish government would try to address unionist fears of a united Ireland by amending the Irish Constitution according to the principle of consent.

In other words, there would be no change to the status of Northern Ireland without the express consent of the people.

On 28 July 2005, the IRA announced the end of its campaign, and promised complete decommissioning of all its weapons, to be witnessed by clergymen from Catholic and Protestant churches.

A republican mural in Beechfield Street, Short Strand, Belfast, during the mid-1990s, with the Gaelic text Slan Abhaile “safe home” to British troops. Security normalisation was one of the key points of the Good Friday Agreement. (Photo credit:  Jimmy Harris, taken 1995, Flickr)

In 2007, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) agreed to share power with republican party Sinn Fein, and Paisley and McGuinness became First Minister and Deputy First Minister. McGuinness said after Paisley’s death:

Our relationship confounded many. Of course, our political differences continued; his allegiance was to Britain and mine to Ireland. But we were able to work effectively together in the interests of all our people.

More recently Linda Ervine (whose brother-in-law is the former UVF commander and politician David Ervine) started the Turas Irish Language Project in east Belfast 10 years ago. She noted that the programme has gone from strength to strength as Protestant, loyalists and unionists in Belfast are learning the Irish language in increasing numbers.

Whatever the decisions the Protestant people make about their future in the UK or a united Ireland the cultural similarities born of sharing the same place will remain of utmost importance. Ervine notes:

I think what was interesting at the time – now this was 11 years ago – the Protestant women were really intrigued, because we’d never had the opportunity, and the Catholic women were much more interested in the royal wedding that was coming up and what Kate’s dress was going to look like.

Branagh’s film Belfast is an important reminder that all our futures are dependent on what unites us rather than what divides us.FacebookTwitter

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

AGAINST THE CURRENT
Colorado Governor Signs into Law Women's Right to Abortion​​​​​​​

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (C), Denver, Colorado, U.S., April 4, 2022. 

| Photo: Twitter/ @Naija_PR

Published 5 April 2022

"No matter what the Supreme Court does in the future, people in Colorado will be able to choose when and if they have children," Governor Polis said.

On Monday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies women's right to make reproductive health-care decisions free from government interference.

"In the State of Colorado, the serious decision to start or end a pregnancy with medical assistance will remain between a person, their doctor, and their faith," he said.

"No matter what the Supreme Court does in the future, people in Colorado will be able to choose when and if they have children," Polis also told the media at a bill signing ceremony at the governor's mansion in downtown Denver.

The Colorado legislature approved a bill last month, with Republicans spending hours arguing against the measure's passage. The bill was debated in the House for 24 consecutive hours in what was one of the longest debates in the legislature's history.



Abortion in Colorado is currently legal at all stages of pregnancy. It is one of seven states without any term restrictions as to when a pregnancy can be terminated. In a recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of adults said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

"A vast majority of women support their own right to an abortion," Richardson, a policy advisor during the Reagan administration, said.

"But the voices of the current religious extremists - voices against the stated desires of America's founding fathers, who wanted a separation of church and state - are succeeding in pulling America back into the Stone Ages, against the overwhelming will of the people," Richardson added.

 

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTES IN FAVOUR OF CLOSING THE GENDER PAY GAP

Today, the European Parliament voted in favour of the mandate for the Pay Transparency Directive. This directive is a crucial tool in the fight against the gender pay gap, currently at 13% EU-wide. The Parliament's vote was brought on by members of the EPP and ECR who challenged the directive last month. With today's vote, the Parliament has given its go ahead for inter-institutional negotiations to start. The Greens/EFA Group applaud the progress for women's rights taken today, and have long pushed for action to be taken to close the gender pay gap.

Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, Greens/EFA MEP and European Parliament rapporteur for the Pay Transparency directive in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, comments:

“Today, the European Parliament has shown that we can be a parliament for progress and women's rights. Pay transparency is the best tool we have to close the gender pay gap and I am very happy to start trilogue negotiations with such an ambitious and strong mandate from this chamber. This legislation has the potential to eradicate unjust gender differences at workplaces across the EU.

“However, we are extremely disappointed that the EPP recommended their members to vote against the best tool we have to close the gender pay gap. This attempt to block progress on women's rights is especially upsetting because we left the negotiations in the committees with a balanced text and a broad support for the compromises.”

Terry Reintke MEP, Greens/EFA shadow rapporteur for the Pay Transparency directive in the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, comments:

“In the EU, women still earn 13 percent less per hour than men. This shows that the gender pay gap will not just disappear by miracle. If we are to tackle this problem, we need joint action.

“Our position at committee level was agreed upon by the negotiating teams of all democratic groups in the European Parliament, including the EPP. That’s why it is particularly disappointing that so many EPP Members changed their position and voted against the Parliament's negotiation mandate with the Council. It’s time that conservative MEPs finally match their words with actions and stand with women.

“This text is ambitious, far-reaching and has the potential to make a real difference. We will defend this mandate in the negotiations with the Council to finally close the gender pay gap in the near future."

More:

The adopted European Parliament position on the Pay Transparency directive wants to lower the number of workers a company must employ in order to be required to publish its pay gap. The Commission proposed companies with +250 employees, but the Parliament says +50 employees with the option to lower it further after a few years. With the Parliament's tightening, this would cover about 60% of all employees in the EU. Moreover, the Parliament states that workers representatives should be democratically elected by employees and not cherry picked by management.

Total wealth of world’s billionaires has fallen to $12.7tn, says Forbes

Number of billionaires worldwide falls by 329 amid Russian sanctions, according to Forbes

Rihanna has made the billionaire list for the first time. 

Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by Rihanna


Rupert Neate

Tue 5 Apr 2022

The total wealth of the world’s billionaires has dipped from a record high last year amid a drop in global stock markets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the planet’s richest people still holding a combined $12.7tn (£9.7tn) in assets.

According to the annual Forbes magazine ranking of the world richest people, the number of billionaires worldwide fell by 329 to 2,668, with the total value of their combined assets falling slightly from $13.1tn on the 2021 list.

It said that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – and the avalanche of sanctions that followed – sent the Russian stock market and the rouble plummeting, resulting in 34 fewer Russian billionaires on the list. Those from the country with billionaire status almost all saw their fortunes stagnate or decline, with their total wealth dropping by more than $260bn compared with a year earlier.

Elon Musk’s $2.9bn stake in Twitter comes with few upsides
Nils Pratley

Forbes said the decline in the total number of billionaires from 2,755 to 2,668 was the largest since the 2009 financial crisis, but followed an increase of more than 600 in 2021 when global stock bounced back from pandemic lows.

Elon Musk, the maverick boss of Tesla and SpaceX, was named the world’s richest man for the first time with a $219bn fortune, up $68bn on the previous year because of the carmaker’s soaring share price.

Musk leapfrogged Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose fortune dropped to $171bn after a small decline in the company’s share price and donations to charity.

Bezos’s estimated $1.5bn charitable gifts pale in comparison with his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who has given away $12.5bn to more than 1,250 organisations in less than two years. Scott, who collected a $38bn settlement in her divorce from Bezos in 2019, has fallen from the 22nd-richest person on the planet to the 30th with a $43.6bn fortune.

Among those falling out of the ranking are 169 “one-year wonders” – newcomers to the list in 2021 but who have already dropped off. They include the exercise bike company Peloton’s John Foley and the dating app Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Some 236 people joined the billionaire club for the first time, including the pop star Rihanna, the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and the venture capitalist Joshua Kushner. Barbados, Bulgaria, Estonia and Uruguay gained their first billionaires.

Millionaires for Humanity, a coalition of rich people calling for a global wealth tax on the super-rich to tackle inequality, said the Forbes list was “a slap in the face of society”.

Djaffar Shalchi, a Danish multimillionaire businessman and founder of the initiative, said: “The Forbes rich list is a stark reminder of the obscenely unequal world in which we live. While most people around the globe have struggled to adapt and survive to the pandemic, many having lost their jobs, plunged deeper into poverty, those on the Forbes rich list have been able to sit back and watch their wealth soar.”

“It is an affront to humanity, an insult to the claim that we are all in this together, and a slap in the face to those of us who believe that we share this planet and its resources equally.

“The time for a wealth tax on people like me is long overdue. Inequality is bad for everyone. Even in the US we are looking at the prospect of President Biden introducing a billionaire tax. This would be an important step in the right direction.”

Turkey ranks last among OECD and EU countries in health spending

By Turkish Minute
- April 5, 2022

Turkey spent 4.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health services in 2020, the lowest score among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union, Euronews Turkish service reported, citing official data.

According to the report, Turkey’s percentage is nearly half the OECD average of 8.8 percent.

Turkey’s health spending covered by the public budget accounts for 3.6 percent of GDP while the remaining 1.1 percent represents the part paid for by private health insurers and the patients themselves.

According to data from 2020 and 2019, the United States ranks first, spending 16.8 percent of its GDP on health services, followed by the United Kingdom, which spent 12.8 percent.

Germany spent 12.5 percent of its GDP on health services, while France and Canada allocated 12.4 and 11.6 percent, respectively.

The Turkish medical community is suffering from low wages, an excessive workload and violence from patients, all of which reached new heights during the coronavirus pandemic.

Attacks and threats against doctors and other medical personnel by patients or their relatives are frequent in Turkey. Doctors face violence, in some instances even death, for allegedly not giving sufficient or belated treatment to a person in Turkey’s overcrowded hospitals.

In the face of these problems, many healthcare professionals have resigned in recent years, with a number of them seeking to move abroad.

While 1,405 doctors left their jobs in Turkey to work abroad in 2021, 197 more emigrated in January alone, according to the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) figures. Local media reports say that thousands more are getting ready to leave as the Turkish government fails to meet their demands.

The doctors’ departures are a sad indictment of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who burnished his own reputation by expanding universal health care over his 20 years in power. But the strains of those overhauls wrought by Erdoğan, in addition to those brought by the pandemic and increasing inflation, have undermined the very professionals on whom the health system depends.

TURKEY

Columnist for left-wing daily indicted on Erdoğan insult charges due to article
on forest fires

By Turkish Minute
- April 5, 2022

A columnist for the left-wing Evrensel newspaper has been indicted on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an opinion piece in which he criticized the government response to wildfires in the country in the summer of 2021, Evrensel reported.

Columnist Ender İmrek faces charges of insulting the president in an article titled “Türkiye yanıyor, saray izliyor” (Turkey burns, the palace [a reference to Erdoğan] watches” dated July 31, 2021.

An investigation was launched into İmrek in December by an İstanbul prosecutor on accusations of insulting the president and provoking hatred and enmity among the public. The prosecutor indicted the journalist at the conclusion of the investigation.

The columnist is accused in the indictment of making statements in his article that were likely to tarnish the honor and prestige of the president and thus committing the crime of insulting the president.

In his article İmrek criticized the inadequate number of firefighting aircraft to contain the wildfires, saying the government could have purchased many such planes with the money spent on Erdoğan’s luxurious presidential palace in Ankara.

Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government attracted widespread criticism over their poor response and inadequate preparedness for the large-scale wildfires that ravaged the country’s southern and western coasts in late July and claimed the lives of eight people and thousands of animals, also destroying large swathes of forestland, until they were fully contained in mid-August.

The harsh criticism by opposition figures and the public targeting Turkish authorities centered around Erdoğan’s inaction and the small number of firefighting planes actively used to respond to the fires.

İmrek denied the insult charges in his defense statement and said his criticism was within the limits of freedom of the press.

They want to silence us,” İmrek tweeted on Tuesday, sharing a copy of his article, which he said included no elements of any crime.

Insulting the president is subject to criminal charges under the controversial Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK), and thousands of people in the country are under investigation, with most of them facing the threat of imprisonment over alleged insults of Erdoğan. Whoever insults the president can face up to four years in prison, a sentence that can be increased if the crime was committed through the mass media.

The insult cases generally stem from social media posts shared by Erdoğan opponents. The Turkish police and judiciary perceive even the most minor criticism of Erdoğan or his government as an insult.