Rivian electric car plant blasted by foes at Georgia meeting


Gov. Brian Kemp stands next to a Rivian electric truck while announcing the company's plans to build a $5 billion plant east of Atlanta projected to employ 7,500 workers, Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021, in Atlanta. Some residents oppose the plant, saying it will spoil their rural quality of life.AP Photo/John Bazemore

Wed, April 20, 2022

MONROE, Ga. (AP) — Opponents trying to derail a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant in Georgia dominated a state meeting this week that was meant to gather suggestions on how to design the plant to mitigate any impact on the environment.

The state assumed oversight over the Rivian Automotive project after opponents overwhelmed Morgan County planning and zoning officials. The plant was announced by the company and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in December, and is the biggest single industrial project in state history. The first meeting of one of the oversight committees was Monday in the city of Monroe.

The Irvine, California-based electric vehicle manufacturer announced last year that it would build the facility on a 2,000-acre (809-hectare) site in Morgan and Walton counties about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of Atlanta along Interstate 20. It plans to produce up to 400,000 vehicles a year there. Rivian, which also has a plant in Normal, Illinois, said it hopes to break ground as early as this summer and begin production in 2024.

The state panel, led by John Eunice, deputy director for the state Environmental Protection Division, did not get much cooperation from a hostile crowd that gathered at Athens Technical College in Monroe, news outlets reported. Opposition to the plant has been heavy from Rutledge-area residents who say the plant will spoil their rural quality of life.

Residents criticized the meeting as a sham, saying it's impossible to make meaningful suggestions when there's not yet a plant design and saying the state is only working to get the plant built.

“I was sitting at home and I saw my governor get on TV and say Rivian, 2,000-acre plant, coming to Rutledge, Georgia and it’s a done deal," said Pam Jones.

Many speakers Monday voiced concerns about possible well-water contamination, light pollution, and the disruption of wildlife habitats and farmland for heavy industry.

“I don’t understand why you are sitting on that side of the table, which is the Rivian side of the table and why you’re not sitting over here asking Rivian and Gov. Kemp to explain this environmental project and how it’s a disaster,” said Edwin Snell of Oconee County.

A Rivian executive was present via video conference but did not speak during the hearing.

A spokesperson for Rivian said the meeting was a valuable opportunity for the company to gather input and that the company is committed to sharing details of their plans for the site once they are complete and “meet our own high design and environmental standards.”

The plant is a subject of contention in Georgia's Republican primary for governor, with former U.S. Sen. David Perdue attacking Kemp for agreeing to the Rivian location without support from neighbors.

Eunice said he does not know when Rivian will file for environmental permits needed to build the facility. He said the division will take public comment on the permits. Monday's meeting was the first of four planned for the site design and environmental committee. The state plans four meetings each with three other committees tasked with examining quality of life, workforce and local business engagement issues.

Filipino boy survives deadly landslide by hiding inside a refrigerator

Ryan General

Thu, April 21, 2022, 

A boy from the Philippines managed to survive a landslide that buried his village in the province of Leyte by hiding inside a refrigerator.

Tropical storm Megi, known as “Agaton” in the Philippines, caused major landslides over villages in the province of Leyte, burying around 210 homes days after it made landfall in the region on April 11.

The 11-year-old boy was discovered inside the fridge by local authorities during a rescue operation in the village of Kantagnos, Baybay City.

The unnamed child was reportedly at home with his family on April 15 when a landslide ravaged their community for the second time in two days..

According to the boy’s uncle, a relative rushed to try to save the child but he refused the rescue. As the landslide was imminent, he opted to hide inside the refrigerator instead in an attempt to save himself.

The boy sustained multiple fractures and is now recovering at a hospital, but his parents were both killed and buried in the landslide.

As of this writing, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) reported 224 deaths, 147 missing and 8 injured as a result of the natural disaster.

ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Texas mother set for execution – yet evidence suggests she did not kill her child



Ed Pilkington
Thu, April 21, 2022

On the evening of 15 February 2007, a team of five police officers in Cameron county, Texas, began an interrogation of a Mexican American mother whom they suspected of having murdered her two-year-old child.

Melissa Lucio was in a vulnerable condition. She was pregnant with twins and in the grip of shock and grief. Just two hours earlier her youngest child Mariah had been pronounced dead having fallen unconscious.

The officers did not let the suspect’s vulnerabilities get in the way of the inquisition. Over almost six hours, stretching late into the night, they applied to Lucio the notorious “Reid Technique” – a controversial interrogation method that has led to numerous wrongful convictions in the US.

As trained to do under the system, the officers put their faces within inches of Lucio’s, screaming at her that she “had to know” what had happened to her child. They had “lots of evidence” that she was to blame for the death, they said, forcing her to view photographs of the girl’s lifeless body.


Then, as the Reid method dictates, they abruptly switched tone. They gently reassured her that she could “put this to rest” if she would only confess to having caused the toddler’s death.

Lucio insisted over 100 times that night that she was innocent. But after more than five hours of aggressive “maximization” and “minimization”, as the technique is known, she reached break point.

She began to repeat the phrases that the investigators had effectively coached her to say.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she told them. “I’m responsible for it … I guess I did it.”

That coerced confession was the core evidence presented at Lucio’s subsequent trial. It was critical to the jury’s guilty verdict, and to the death sentence that followed.

Next Wednesday, pending a last-minute stay, Lucio, 52, will be executed for a crime that significant evidence suggests she did not commit. Not only that, but significant evidence also suggests that the crime for which she will be strapped onto a gurney and injected with lethal drugs never happened in the first place.

A mounting body of intelligence – much of it never heard at trial, some of it actively suppressed by prosecutors – points to a very different conclusion. Mariah was not beaten to death by her mother; she died of internal injuries from an accidental fall.

As the 27 April execution date approaches, concern that an innocent woman is about to be sent to the death chamber has reached fever pitch. Strange bedfellows have come together to call for the execution to be delayed in an eruption of disquiet that has rarely been witnessed in such intensity in Texas.

“There are so many layers of injustice here that it has drawn the support of unlikely allies. People who may believe very strongly in the death penalty are speaking out because they are disturbed that this case has gone terribly wrong,” said Sandra Babcock, a member of Lucio’s defense team and a Cornell law school professor.

Among those calling for a stay of execution are a bipartisan group of 103 members of the Texas legislature – including 32 Republican members of the House and eight Republican state senators. That is an extraordinary display of cross-party unity for such a toxically divided assembly.

Hundreds of religious bodies, along with women’s and domestic violence advocacy groups, have joined celebrities such as Kim Kardashian to plead with the Republican governor Greg Abbott and the state’s board of pardons to intervene. A documentary about the case, The State of Texas v Melissa, was released in 2020.

Five of the jurors who convicted Lucio have also called for a reprieve. They argue that if they had known at the time what has since emerged the outcome would have been different.

The many legal missteps that lie behind Lucio’s death sentence are laid out in a 266-page petition released this week that calls for a postponement of the execution and a new trial. The prisoner’s lawyers begin by exploring the wealth of evidence that Mariah died by mishap rather than in a brutal murder.

As Lucio was being interrogated by Cameron county detectives, in a separate room in the police station some of her other children (she had nine at that time) were also being questioned. They told investigators that their mother had never been abusive or violent in any way.

The children also said that two days before Mariah died, they had seen their sibling accidentally fall down a steep flight of stairs on the outside of the house they were renting. Lucio, who had been busy getting the children ready for school, found the girl at the bottom of the stairs crying.

Over the next 48 hours family witnesses said that Mariah showed signs of distress, including sleeping long hours and being listless. None of that evidence, which could support the diagnosis of an internal brain injury caused by the fall, was presented at trial.

Nor did the jury hear that Mariah had a medical history of difficulty walking that had resulted in previous documented tumbles.

Two days after falling down the stairs, Mariah stopped breathing and became unresponsive. Lucio dialed 911; paramedics tried to revive the child but she died before reaching the hospital.

Babcock told the Guardian that a sequence of mistakes were made by police, the prosecutor and expert witnesses that all flowed from the same source: an initial misreading of the suspect’s mindset. Lucio had been brought up in an extremely poor and troubled family in Lubbock, Texas, in which she had been subjected to sexual assault from the age of six and at 16 had become a child bride in a bid to escape the abuse.

Long years of domestic violence ensued. Her cumulative experiences – never told to the jury – made her singularly vulnerable to making a false confession in the course of a coercive interrogation.

It also helped explain the bemusement of first responders when they turned up at her house having answered the 911 call. They found her slouched on the floor, where she showed no sign of emotion or crying.

Babcock said that was the classic posture of a victim of domestic violence triggered by a traumatic event. “She was numb, in shock, she was dissociating.”

But to police officers and other first responders, she came across as a callous and cold-hearted individual who appeared unmoved by her child’s death. “They saw a woman who didn’t fit their model of how a grieving mother should behave, and they immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a woman who had something to hide.”

At trial, one of the Texas rangers who was first on the scene told the jury that he had found Lucio with her head down, making no eye contact and showing no apparent concern about Mariah. “Right there and then, I knew she did something. That’s one of the most common clues – someone with their shoulders slouched forward: they’re hiding the truth,” he said.

That testimony was false. Several scientific studies have shown that you cannot deduce anything about a suspect’s guilt or innocence from their body language or facial mannerisms.

The medical examiner who carried out the autopsy, Dr Norma Farley, showed a similar willingness to prejudge Lucio’s guilt. In her testimony, Farley made several critical statements that have been shown to be scientifically inaccurate.



The investigation appears to have been significantly prejudiced … and creates a risk of a serious miscarriage of justice

Janice Ophoven

She said that bruising on Mariah’s body must have been caused by a “homicidal” severe beating. False. A medical review of the autopsy reports criticized the medical examiner for failing to detect clear signs that the child had a blood coagulation disorder that would have produced extensive bruising throughout the body.

Farley said that Mariah’s injuries had to have been inflicted within 24 hours of her death – a significant detail as it ruled out as cause of death the fall on the staircase two days before. That was false too. A medical expert who reviewed the evidence pointed out that it is well established that physical manifestations of an injury can take several days to appear.

Farley also told the jury that at least two bite marks had been found on Mariah’s back and that they were caused by an adult’s teeth suggesting a brutal and painful attack. False. Bite mark analysis has been thoroughly discredited.

Numerous scientific studies have shown that there is no way to categorically identify a wound on a body as being a bite mark. Nor is there any way to identify from the wound who might have caused the abrasion.

Dr Janice Ophoven, the pediatric forensic pathologist who reviewed the Lucio materials, concluded: “The investigation into Mariah’s death appears to have been significantly prejudiced … and creates a risk of [a] serious miscarriage of justice in this case.”

This week Lucio was placed on “execution watch” – a system of 24-hour surveillance that all death row inmates are subject to in Texas in their last seven days before execution. Prison authorities say it is to avoid the risk of suicide or self harm, but Babcock told the Guardian that Lucio found the arrangement “very upsetting”.

“She finds the idea of being observed 24/7 extremely stressful, and every day that passes is one day closer to her possible execution. The terror is real.”

Both the court of criminal appeals in Austin, Texas, and the state’s board of pardons are considering Lucio’s plea. A stay of execution is possible, given the many glaring flaws in how she came to be put on death row.

Lucio is a woman of deep faith who hopes and prays that her life will be spared, Babcock said. But she also knows there is no certainty – not in the death penalty and especially not when a state as relentless as Texas is out to take her life.

“This is the cruelty of alternating between hope and despair,” Babcock said. “It is torture, and every day is more torturous than the last.”

Matt Hancock ridiculed for claiming the pandemic is over in the UK

“It's not just the lies to the public; it's also the consequences of those [dangerous] lies."

Basit Mahmood 

Today
Left Foot Forward

Former health secretary Matt Hancock has been ridiculed for claiming that the Covid-19 pandemic is over in the UK, despite 600 people dying of Covid yesterday.

Hancock made the claim during an interview with Sky News’ Beth Rigby, where he was asked if he thought the pandemic was finally over.

Hancock replied: “Yes, in this country. Covid is obviously endemic, meaning that it’s everywhere and lots of people catch it.

“But every week they publish the statistics about how many people have got antibodies that protect you from Covid and it’s now over 99%.”

Although Hancock did stress that it was not over everywhere in the world, saying that it was shocking how some of the countries that went for a zero covid strategy at the start were now in real trouble, he nonetheless drew immediate criticism for his claim that it was over in the UK.

One social media user wrote: “600 people died with Covid reported yesterday, are you really that thick Matt Hancock?”

Dr Zubaida Haque, a member of Independent Sage tweeted: “It’s not just the lies to the public; it’s also the consequences of those [dangerous] lies.

“When asked “is the pandemic finally over”, former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, says “yes – in this country”.

“Over 1600 #covid deaths + ~14,000 hospital admissions in UK in last 7 days”.

Best for Britain tweeted: “The UK had 600 deaths yesterday – the highest in Europe.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

After claiming pandemic is over, Australian Labor Party leader contracts COVID-19

Martin Scott
WSWS.ORG

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese has tested positive for COVID-19 less than two weeks into a six-week election campaign.

Albanese’s infection exposes the lies promoted by both major parties to justify the ending of public health measures and the endangerment of millions of working people in the interests of corporate profit.

Together with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Albanese has presented the pandemic as a thing of the past, superseded by a mythical “economic recovery.”

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese talks to the audience during a debate with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Brisbane, Wednesday, April 20, 2022.

 (Jason Edwards/Pool via AP)

In the first election debate on Wednesday night, both were on stage maskless, in front of a similarly unprotected audience. Fittingly, the forum, at which Albanese was likely infectious, was hosted by Murdoch’s Sky News, notorious for its undermining of public health and science over the past two years.

In their contributions at the debate, Morrison and Albanese said nothing about the 6,842 needless deaths from COVID-19, more than two-thirds of which have occurred since the beginning of the year. Yesterday, a further 51 deaths were reported, the highest single-day figure for more than a month and the 30th-highest since the beginning of the pandemic. Another 46 deaths were reported today.

Around the country, 3,236 people are currently hospitalised with COVID-19. According to official figures, which massively understate the spread of infection due to the conscious dismantling of testing by state and federal governments, almost 5.6 million people in Australia have contracted the virus.

The election campaign has proceeded in an utterly reckless fashion, as large contingents of politicians, staffers and journalists travel around the country for publicity stunts, with no regard for the trail of infection they will leave behind.

This election bubble, completely divorced from the hardships and concerns of working people, and from the real state of the pandemic, has burst. With Albanese’s infection, reality has intruded on an unreal official campaign.

Just hours before testing positive, Albanese visited an aged care facility on the New South Wales (NSW) South Coast, meaning he may have exposed the vulnerable residents to the deadly virus. More than 2,000 aged care residents have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

According to the Australian Financial Review, at least four journalists in Albanese’s entourage had tested positive to the virus prior to the Labor leader. It is not known how many other senior Labor politicians have been exposed.

Despite sharing the debate stage with Albanese on Wednesday night, Morrison is continuing his campaign. The prime minister contracted COVID-19 early last month and is therefore exempt from close-contact rules and not even required to test for the virus.

Media commentators have moronically stated that Morrison is not at risk due to his prior case, in wilful ignorance of the thousands of reinfections documented over the past four months. Not a single corporate pundit has voiced concern over the fact that the prime minister and his entourage may be functioning as a traveling super-spreader of the virus.

The infections are hardly surprising.

Health authorities and government figures around the country, Labor and Liberal-National alike, claim the Omicron BA.2 wave has “peaked.” In fact, more than 50,000 new infections were recorded in Australia yesterday, bringing the total number of active cases to 369,910. In more than two years of the pandemic, there have been only 53 days when more people were infected.

The fact that both Albanese and Morrison have been infected in recent weeks is a clear sign that community transmission is much more widespread than the official figures indicate. Overwhelmingly, the victims are working class. Unlike Albanese and Morrison, workers in factories, warehouses, hospitals and schools have no control of their environment and can do little to protect themselves if a wave of infection sweeps through their workplace.

The catastrophic pandemic is completely off the agenda in the federal election because Labor and the Liberal-Nationals are in total agreement. The continuing crisis, along with Albanese’s infection, is a direct product of the “let it rip” policies adopted by the National Cabinet and every state, territory and federal government, Labor and Liberal alike.

This is fundamentally a class question. Among workers, hardest hit by the health, economic and social impact of the pandemic, there is broad support for the elimination of the virus. But the official parties have made clear that they are interested only in business, not health advice.

Albanese is pitching Labor to the financial elite as the only party capable of carrying out the “big reforms” demanded by big business to “boost productivity” and “build a stronger economy.” This includes the overturning of any public health measures that could possibly stand in the way of corporate profits.

The decision last December by the NSW Liberal-National government to scrap density limits, mask mandates, QR code check-ins and vaccination requirements has been widely criticised as a pivotal moment that massively accelerated the devastating spread of Omicron. In reality, the continuous dismantling of public health measures around the country, while cases surged, has only been possible because of the close collaboration of Labor, particularly Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

On December 15, there were 6,233 cases of COVID-19 in NSW, just 3.4 percent of the 185,898 active in the state yesterday. Yet the entire political establishment, with the eager backing of the corporate media, declares the pandemic over.

The Victorian Labor and NSW Liberal-National state governments announced Wednesday that virtually all of the few remaining public health measures against COVID-19 would be scrapped.

From 6 p.m. in NSW and 11:59 p.m. in Victoria, close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 cases will no longer be required to self-isolate. The Queensland Labor government followed suit today, announcing that close-contact isolation will end from next Thursday.

In NSW and Victoria, masks will no longer be required except for on public transport, in hospitals, aged care facilities, airports and aircraft. Capacity limits for public transport and venues will be removed, and proof of vaccination will no longer be required for entry into venues in Victoria. In NSW, vaccine mandates will be removed for all workers except those in aged care and disability.

From April 30, unvaccinated international travellers will no longer be required to quarantine on arrival in NSW or Victoria. In NSW, they will be required to take a RAT within 24 hours of landing, while in Victoria, post-arrival testing will only be “recommended.”

The removal of the seven-day isolation rule for close contacts was demanded by big business lobbyists because up to 20 percent of workers in many sectors were unable to work due to infection or exposure to COVID-19.

In fact, since late last year, countless industries have been granted exemptions, forcing potentially infectious workers back on the job in order to maintain company profits. Australia’s unions have facilitated this reckless drive, enforcing the slashing of restrictions while cynically calling for rapid antigen tests (RATs), masks and other measures explicitly aimed at keeping factories open.

Demonstrating the role of the unions, Health Services Union (HSU) National President Gerard Hayes last week voiced his support for the removal of isolation rules, declaring: “If you are fully vaxxed, return a negative test and have no symptoms, you should be able to go to work.”

This stands in complete opposition to the health workers supposedly represented by the HSU. During a NSW-wide strike on April 7, a Newcastle health worker interrupted HSU and Labor speakers at a stop-work meeting, saying: “COVID is the biggest issue here. You haven’t mentioned it. We work with COVID every day, numbers of us have been sick.”

Earlier this month, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce blamed the close-contact rules for chaotic scenes and major delays at the nation’s airports. The NSW and Victorian governments moved swiftly to exempt aviation workers, placing staff and passengers at risk while doing nothing to resolve the congestion.

Australian Industry Group boss Innes Willox claimed: “The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.”

In other words, the bipartisan actions of Australian governments have created such a wave of mass infection that society cannot function. The solution demanded by business and now enacted by the Victorian, NSW and Queensland governments is to remove the few remaining measures aimed at preventing illness and pretend the pandemic is over.

The Socialist Equality Party is the only party standing in the elections demanding the immediate repudiation of the homicidal “let it rip” policies and the instatement of scientifically-grounded measures necessary to end the pandemic.

Experience has shown that this requires the intervention of the working class, against all of the official parties.

Rank-and-file committees must be formed in workplaces, schools and neighbourhoods to impose the necessary public health measures and allow workers, not management, to determine what is safe. This includes the provision of high-quality N95 masks and other personal protective equipment, free mass PCR testing, the closure of non-essential business with full compensation for workers and small-business people as well as lockdowns where necessary to eliminate transmission.

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.

Covid-19 three times more deadly than influenza, says study

The analysis found that Covid-19 was associated with higher risk of infection severity and admission to ICU. 

Updated: 22 Apr 2022

Livemint

LONDON : A study that will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal, this year has said that adults hospitalised with Covid-19 are more at risk of complications and death than those infected with influenza.

Marking a number, the study conducted in Spain said that Covid-19 is three times more fatal than influenza.



The European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) will be held in Lisbon, Portugal this year from 23-26 April.

Experts pointed out that Covid-19 despite being younger and having fewer chronic illnesses is more lethal than influenza. The study also suggests that Covid-19 is associated with both longer stays in hospital and intensive care, and costs nearly twice as much to treat.


The analysis found that Covid-19 was associated with higher risk of infection severity and admission to ICU.

The researchers from the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, Spain examined medical records of 187 patients -- average age 76 years and 55 per cent male -- admitted to hospital with seasonal influenza infection between 2017 and 2019.

They also analysed records of 187 Covid-19 patients -- average age 67 years and 49 per cent male -- hospitalised during the first wave of the pandemic between March and May, 2020, who all required oxygen therapy at admission.

In both groups, patients were enrolled consecutively until the required sample size was reached.




The study compared clinical characteristics, healthcare resource use outcomes, including length of stay, admission to intensive care, hospital costs, and death.

Influenza patients tended to have more existing chronic illnesses and problems performing activities of daily living than Covid-19 patients, but were less likely to be overweight or obese.

"Our findings suggest Covid-19 is far more lethal than influenza. Despite influenza patients being older and having more comorbid illnesses, Covid-19 patients had consistently worse health outcomes and were considerably more expensive to treat," said study lead author Inmaculada Lopez Montesinos from the Hospital del Mar.

"Even for those people who are lucky enough to survive COVID-19 and make it out of the hospital, they will be forever scarred by the consequences. It is vital that people get fully vaccinated and boosted against both viruses," Montesinos said.

COVID-19 patients were more likely to experience certain complications such as acute kidney injury, blood clots, and moderate to severe acute respiratory distress syndrome, where the lungs cannot provide the body’s vital organs with enough oxygen.

On the other hand, influenza patients were more likely to suffer from bacterial pneumonia, according to the researchers.

Overall, 29 out of 187 (15 per cent) COVID-19 patients and 10 out of 187 (5 per cent) influenza patients died of any cause within 30-days of hospitalisation, and the death rate after 90 days was even higher, they said.

The authors of the study noted that there were no differences in mortality trends between the three seasonal influenza periods studied.

After accounting for potential confounders including age, comorbidities, sex, disease severity, presence of pneumonia, and corticosteroid treatment, the researchers found that Covid-19 patients were more than three times as likely to die within 30 and 90 days of being admitted to hospital than influenza patients.

Further analyses showed that Covid-19 patients spent far longer in hospital compared with influenza patients, the researchers said.

The average cost of critical care for Covid-19 patients was almost twice as much as for influenza patients, they said, adding pharmacy treatment and testing costs were also significantly higher in the COVID-19 group.

The authors acknowledge that several limitations of their study, including that it was conducted in one tertiary-care hospital in Spain, so the findings might not be generalisable to other populations.

They also noted that no genotyping studies were conducted, and although it is highly likely that COVID-19 patients were affected by wild-type B.1, the results may not reflect the current scenario in which multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants are circulating globally.

UK

Murdoch’s new channel TalkTV gears up for launch

Murdoch's new TV channel launches next week, and its star host Piers Morgan is already whipping up controversy with his Trump interview.

John Lubbock 

Today
Right-Wing Watch

TalkTV, the new channel launched by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK next monday, is already generating controversy before its launch, with a trailer appearing to show that Donald Trump cut short an interview with the channel’s key presenter Piers Morgan.

The interview was also promoted on the front page of Thursday’s Sun newspaper, giving the channel’s launch more publicity. The channel is intended to promote voices from News UK’s other media platforms like The Sun, Times, and TalkRadio, rather than seeking to emulate Murdoch’s Fox News channel in the US.

Donald Trump: "I think I'm a very nice man, more honest than you … turn the camera off."

Don't miss Piers Morgan's exclusive interview with Donald Trump, only on TalkTV 25 April at 8pm.@PiersUncensored | @piersmorgan | #TalkTVpic.twitter.com/7bsuWZhj9n— TalkTV (@TalkTV) April 20, 2022

Avoiding GB News’ launch problems

The launch of TalkTV on April 25 will be a re-entry of Murdoch’s News UK into the television news market after the company sold its stake in Sky News in 2018.

The channel has signed presenters including Tom Newton Dunn and Sharon Osborne to front its evening programmes, while its daytime content will mostly be made up of presenters from the channel’s previous incarnation, TalkRadio. These presenters include Julia Hartley-Brewer, Mike Graham, Ian Collins and Jeremy Kyle.

Press Gazette reported that “It will use talent and programming from across News UK including the Sun, Times, Sunday Times, Times Radio, Talkradio, Talksport and Virgin Radio to air a mixture of new shows and televised content from these brands.”

Piers Morgan has reportedly signed a huge deal with the channel to broadcast his primetime show on TalkTV as well as Fox News in the US and Sky News Australia. The controversial presenter “will also write columns for The Sun and New York Post, host true crime documentaries, and publish his next book through Murdoch’s HarperCollins.”

According to The Drum, “Piers Morgan has been ‘on tour’ in Australia and New York, re-sharpening his TV skills ahead of the biggest moment in his career. He flew into Sydney on a Murdoch family private jet and held forth from Australian breakfast show sofas.”

Tom Newton Dunn was previously the political editor of the Sun, and hosted a show on the other Murdoch radio station Times Radio. While at the Sun, Newton Dunn published an article claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was at the centre of a “network of hard left extremists” which was deleted after criticism that the article had sourced some of its claims from extreme right wing websites like Aryan Unity.

Newton Dunn will host TalkTV’s “flagship news programme”, The News Desk, at 7pm every weeknight, competing directly with Nigel Farage’s slot on GB News. TalkTV recently released images of the studio Piers Morgan is due to broadcast from, and is confident that it can have a more professional launch than GB News, which was dogged by technical problems at its start.

The bespoke TalkTV studio in Ealing has reportedly been designed by “Emmy-winning designer Jim Fenhagen, who made the backdrops for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, not to mention Morgan’s chat show at CNN.”

A diversity of views?

The only left wing broadcaster so far announced to be appearing on the channel is Tribune Magazine’s Grace Blakeley, who explained that while she knew the decision would divide opinion on the Left, “print, broadcast and social media are infrastructures the left has little choice other than to engage with”, and that if she “hadn’t chosen to appear, it wouldn’t have harmed News UK. I’d have been replaced with a liberal.”

Scott Taunton, president of broadcasting at News UK told The Drum that “When you hear the list of names we have coming you won’t be able to point to it and say this is a station that is coming from an ideological position. This is a station that has a broad church of presenters and talent and expects to gain a broad church of consumers who come to watch it in its various forms.”

GB News also said it would platform a variety of views, but has been defined by right wing presenters like Nigel Farage, and a continuous obsession with ‘culture war’ issues.

The channel will be an interesting test of whether content that has worked well on digital platforms and social media can also make a successful television channel. Over the past few years, radio stations like LBC and TalkRadio have had increasing success on platforms like YouTube.

A lot of the most popular right wing YouTube content comes from news, TV or radio platforms like the Sun (2.79 million subscribers), Daily Mail (1.73 million subscribers), GB News (439k subscribers) TalkRadio/TalkTV (292k subscribers) and LBC (393k subscribers). Reusing content already made for TalkRadio means that TalkTV is not starting from scratch and can reduce its costs.

Following his interview with Piers Morgan, Donald Trump hit out at the presenter, saying the trailer for the interview was deceptively edited to make it seem like he had walked out. He said Morgan was part of the “Fake News Media” and “a fool”.

In a statement about his new programme, Morgan said: “I’m delighted to now be returning to live television with a new daily show whose main purpose is to cancel the Cancel Culture which has infected societies around the world.”

“I want it to be a platform for lively vigorous debate, news-making interviews, and that increasingly taboo three-letter word: fun. I also want it to annoy all the right people.”

Following the Trump-Morgan interview, presenters on US news channel MSNBC said that “Rupert Murdoch and his family are trying to “destroy the monster” they created by ambushing Donald Trump with a hostile interview with his erstwhile friend Piers Morgan”, according to Raw Story.

“The Murdochs are quietly — not so quietly moving closer and closer to [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis. People close to them know that they’re ready to throw it all behind Ron DeSantis. They’re ready to move on from Trump”.

It will be interesting to see whether the Murdoch media machine has had enough of Boris Johnson yet, but with the launch of their new channel, it can’t be long until we find out the answer.

John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward

UK

The Institute of Economic Affairs is promoting NHS privatisation again


IEA's Head of Media said the British public was out of love with the NHS and recommended "market based reforms".

John Lubbock 15 April, 2022 

Institute of Economic Affairs’ Head of Media Emily Carver has taken aim at the NHS in an article for Conservative Home, saying that ‘customers’ are “not getting value for money” and recommending “market based reforms”.

The IEA describes itself as a free market think tank, and has received funding from oil giant BP and tobacco companies. In 2018, “an undercover reporter filmed Institute of Economic Affairs director Mark Littlewood offering access to government ministers and civil servants in exchange for funding”, according to DeSmog.

The NHS has already been subject to market based reforms for many years, with NHS trusts competitively tendering many contracts to private companies. NHS reforms undertaken by the Conservative Party have consistently aimed at introducing market competition into the running of many services, so if the British public are not getting value for their tax money, we only have the government to blame.

It is certainly true that public satisfaction with the NHS has fallen. According to the King’s Fund, “The latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey reveals that public satisfaction with the NHS fell by 17 percentage points between 2020 and 2021. Overall satisfaction with the NHS is now at 36 per cent, down 17 percentage points from 2020, the lowest level recorded since 1997 and the largest year-on-year drop in the history of the BSA survey.”

It seems clear that the pressures brought by the pandemic have massively increased dissatisfaction with the NHS. Before the pandemic, NHS funding has been rising by less than inflation year on year, meaning there was a real terms cut to NHS funding. Using this dissatisfaction to argue for more privatisation, rather than more funding and wage increases seems like a cynical attempt to leverage this dissatisfaction for ideological purposes.

In her article for ConHome, Carver suggests that capitalism has made people used to the convenience of ordering groceries in 10 minutes, and that the old fashioned NHS simply cannot keep up with these expectations. “If people are waiting months and years for routine operations, can it really be said that the NHS is still universal? Universally inadequate, perhaps”, Carver says.

More people are also being forced to go private, she says, but this is not the fault of the government, who have put record amounts of money into the system. So what is the solution? The answer to this is just hinted at, with a call for “a more sensible discussion around market-based reforms.”

Taken at face value, this is not actually a bad idea. There should be more discussion of the outsourcing of NHS services, which has accelerated during the pandemic. Almost every new service is farmed out to private companies like Palantir, who are in line to build a data platform for the NHS, or Babylon Health, whose GP At Hand app is now used to give thousands of patients online access to GPs. However, I doubt this is the conversation Carver wants to have.

Of course, the IEA, a free market think tank based in Tufton Street (which has also been home to right wing think tanks like Net Zero Watch and Migration Watch, as well as pro Brexit groups like Leave Means Leave) has long been a critic of the NHS. According to the British Medical Journal, “the IEA has repeatedly denigrated the NHS model in a series of reports and media appearances, using selective performance data.”

In February this year the IEA’s Kristian Niemietz spoke in favour of privatising the NHS in a debate at King’s College London, saying that a private insurance based system like the Dutch one would produce better health outcomes than the NHS. Back in 2018, an IEA report argued that “much-needed discussions of NHS reform are often hampered by the insular nature of healthcare debate in the UK.”

What is wrong with the debate about the NHS then? David Oliver in the BMJ argues that “I suspect what really bothers the IEA is the British public’s persistently proud, emotional—and, to the IEA, illogical—support for the NHS. This is a big obstacle to the market models that the IEA is lobbying for.”

John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward

UK

Company co-founded by Trump supporter Peter Thiel in line to run NHS data platform

Despite a judicial review of Palantir's work on the UK Covid data store, the Silicon Valley firm is in line to be awarded another NHS contract.

John Lubbock

13 April, 2022
Right-Wing Watch

The NHS has tendered a contract to create a Federated Data Platform to host health data across the NHS, with the controversial data firm Palantir thought to be the frontrunner to win the £240 million contract.

At the start of the pandemic, Palantir offered their services to the UK government for just £1 to use Palantir’s Foundry software to manage data about the pandemic. This was one of a number of contracts with big tech firms including Google and Microsoft who also agreed to donate services to the UK government, and have since won further contracts to do similar data processing work.

Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal with Elon Musk. A creation of the War on Terror, Palantir aimed to combine and mine disparate data sets to find interconnections which could help security agencies find potential terrorists. Here’s a photo of Thiel and Musk before they became some of the richest people on earth.

In the US, “Palantir does most of its work for the government, including national security and intelligence operations”, according to Vox. The CIA was one of the company’s earliest investors through its venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, and they have gone on to work with police agencies as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helping to arrest and deport immigrants from the US.

The pandemic has been a gift to Palantir, as governments across the world have sought out its services to try to make use of their data to provide health insights. In the UK, they have won government contracts for ‘back office software’, a number of Ministry of Defence ‘data integration services’ contracts, Government Digital Service contracts, and health sector contracts at NHS trusts, and the Department for Health. In total, they’ve won 11 contracts since the start of the pandemic.

Palantir UK is headed by Louis Mosley, the nephew of the late F1 boss Max Mosley.

In 2021 it was reported that Palantir had made £22 million profit from their contract for the NHS data store. The legal firm Foxglove also sought a judicial review of Palantir’s contract on behalf of OpenDemocracy. Following the legal action “the government… committed not to allow Palantir to start using the NHS datastore for non-Covid matters without consulting the public first.”

LFF approached NHS England for comment on the new contract, and asked specifically how the NHS would guarantee that Palantir would not use NHS data for other purposes. NHS England referred us to the contract tender, but did not answer our specific question.

The contract tender does include a specification that as well as the ‘Federated Data Platform’ itself, there is the need for ‘Privacy-enhancing technology’, which indicates that the company that wins the contract will be required to ensure that data is anonymised.

A ‘Federated Data Platform’ is a database management system which ties together multiple databases and allows different levels of access to different users. This is exactly the kind of task that Palantir’s software is built for, so it seems like a contract designed for the company.

As well as being a Trump supporter, Thiel has also been spending money on electing Republican candidates who share his techno-libertarian leanings in the US. He has backed people like Blake Masters in Republican primary races, who has regularly promoted Thiel’s businesses on the campaign trail, and seems to be seeking to be a kingmaker within the Republican Party.

Following the Foxglove/OpenDemocracy legal case, the UK government said it was scrapping its NHS contract with Palantir. But as OpenDemocracy reported at the time, “the battle is not over”, and that Palantir would not simply give up its ambition of accessing massive amounts of health data.

#Palantir’s @JoannaPeller joined the panel from @NHSConfed as they launched a new report about the future of Integrated Care Systems in England. Learn more: https://t.co/zCiw3jH9Fs— Palantir (@PalantirTech) February 26, 2022



On March 2, the Financial Times reported that Palantir software was being trialled to reduce the backlog of 6 million NHS patients awaiting care. The software will be used over 30 hospital trusts and “the NHS is paying £23.5mn for a two-year licence for the technology, expiring in December 2022.”

Palantir’s website says that “Palantir was founded on the conviction that it’s essential to preserve fundamental principles of privacy and civil liberties while using data.” LFF approached Palantir for comment about what privacy measures they take to ensure that NHS patient data is not used for any purposes not related to patient care, but did not yet receive a reply.

Digital Health reported in 2021 that as a result of the Foxglove judicial review, “Palantir will not be able to process NHS data for non-Covid purposes without consultation including public juries. Data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) will also be required for any contract extension to analyse whether it would be in compliance with data protection laws.”

We asked NHS England and the Department for Health to say whether there would be a public consultation if Palantir is awarded a further contract to work on NHS data. So far we have not received a reply from either.

John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward

Prof Prem Sikka: Tax legislation in the UK benefits the interests of the rich

'UK governments are dressed-up in the garbs of democracy, but continue to privilege the interests of wealthy elites and footloose capital.'

Prem Sikka 

14 April, 2022 
Left Foot Forward

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

In 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln visualised democracy as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Some 160 years later, that dream remains unfulfilled.

UK governments are dressed-up in the garbs of democracy, but continue to privilege the interests of wealthy elites and footloose capital. Occasionally, a few concessions are made to the masses to legitimise the illusion, but they can always be withdrawn as shown by cuts in Universal Credit and suspension of the triple-lock on the state pension.

Taxation policies provide a window for examining the direction of the state and whether it is ‘of the people [and] for the people’. This week, it came to light that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife enjoyed non-dom status for tax purposes enabling her to avoid at least £2.1m in UK taxes whilst her husband wrote the tax rules. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that he too held non-dom status before pursuing a career in politics.

The non-dom tax regime was first introduced in 1799 to enable British colonialists to shelter foreign property from taxes. Today, the perk is available to wealthy elites who live in the UK but claim to have permanent residence (domicile) abroad.

Ordinary Brits pay tax on their worldwide income and gains, but this rule does not apply to non-doms. All non-dom status holders are required to pay income tax on their UK earnings, but avoid income tax and capital gains tax on assets held elsewhere as long as the amounts are not remitted to the UK. This is known as the “remittance basis” of taxation. Non-doms also enjoy valuable inheritance tax, business investment relief and other tax reliefs. Non-dom status is part of a complex offshore and onshore web of tax avoidance.

Non-dom status has no statutory definition and has to be negotiated with HMRC. To secure the ‘remittance basis’ of taxation, an annual charge of £30,000 is payable by individuals residing in the UK for more than 7 out of the past 9 years. This rises to £60,000 for individuals resident in the UK for more than 12 years out of past 14 years. The maximum duration of non-dom status is 15 years. In recent years HMRC has targeted a number of non-doms for suspected tax avoidance.

In 2020, some 75,700 wealthy individuals secured non-dom status and paid no UK tax on their offshore income. Recent research shows that four out of ten individuals earning around £5 million or more claimed non-dom status, compared with less than three in one thousand among those earning less than £100,000. Biggest beneficiaries are concentrated in banking, oil, auto, sports and film industries and 58% of the non-dom taxpayers are based in London.

The government says that non-doms paid £7,853 million in income tax, capital gains tax and national insurance contributions. However, it is silent on what amounts would have been payable if non-doms were taxed on the same basis as ordinary people. No information is provided about the taxes avoided by non-doms.

The government also claims that in 2019, £1,031 million was invested in the UK by non-doms. However, it does not explain whether the investment is in productive assets, or used for speculation which creates bubbles in commodities, securities and property markets. The investment can also be illusory in that it is being used to exploit tax advantages. In any case, the investment can be made independent of the non-dom tax perks.

Such is the state of democracy in the UK that 75,700 footloose ultra-rich people enjoy all the benefits of social infrastructure but are not liable to taxes on the same basis as normal people even when they have lived in the UK for 14 years. Last week, the Finance Act 2022 handed more tax perks to non-doms through its Qualifying Asset Holding Companies regime. At the same time, the government increased income tax and national insurance contributions which would force 27 million people to pay more.

The interests of the rich are embedded in tax legislation elsewhere too. For example, capital gains and dividends, mostly accruing to the rich, are taxed at marginal rates in the range of 10%-28%, and 8.75% to 39.35% respectively, compared to 20%-45% on earned income. Recipients of capital gains do not pay any national insurance. National insurance at the rate of 13.25% is levied on annual earned income between £12,570 and £50,300, but only 3.25% is levied on incomes above £50,300.

The net result of various tax policies is that the poorest 10% of households pay 47.6% of their income in direct and indirect taxes, compared to 33.5% by the richest 10% of the households. Inevitably, poverty is inflicted on the masses. Even before the pandemic 14.5 million people, including 4.3 million children, lived below the poverty line and there is ever increasing reliance upon foodbanks.

No “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could ever be compatible with this treatment of the masses. The ultimate aim of democracy is to enable people to live fulfilling lives and that won’t be achieved without fundamental changes to the political system.

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Boris Johnson urged to speak out against Islamophobia and persecution of Muslims in India while visiting country

Human Rights Watch has warned that Muslims in India have been increasingly at risk since the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014.

Basit Mahmood

 Today
Left Foot Forward

Boris Johnson has been urged to speak out against Islamophobia and the persecution of Muslims in India, during his trip to the country.

The prime minister is currently on a visit to India, where he has been talking trade and investment but hasn’t said much about the persecution of minorities under the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist government led by Narendra Modi.

The BJP has been accused of passing laws that discriminate against Muslims, with Human Rights Watch stating that Muslims in India have been increasingly at risk since the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014.

For example, in December 2019, the Modi government passed the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). Under the act, for the first time in India, religion became a basis for granting citizenship. The law specifically fast-tracked asylum claims of non-Muslim immigrants from the neighbouring Muslim-majority countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

Christians have been targeted by Hindutva extremists too .

Since the BJP first took office, its leaders have repeatedly made Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim remarks in their speeches and interviews. In one example, the BBC highlighted how ‘in the southern city of Hyderabad, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker – who was banned by Facebook in 2020 for hate speech – sang a song with lyrics that said anyone who didn’t chant Hindu deity Ram’s name would be forced to leave India soon.’

In 2019, a fact-checker website (2019) that counted “hate crimes” in India reported that more than 90% of victims in the past 10 years were Muslims. The report highlighted how ‘unprovoked attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs have become routine in India, but they seem to evoke little condemnation from the government.’

Prime minister Modi of India has also been criticised for being too slow to condemn the lynching of Muslims by so called ‘cow vigilantes’ over rumours that they had eaten beef.

Even as Covid-19 gripped the country, officials from Modi’s party, including his ministers, accused Muslim men of engaging in ‘corona Jihad’ and spreading the virus deliberately.

Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority region, was subjected to the longest internet shutdown in any democracy after Modi’s government revoked the region’s autonomous status.

Labour MP Naz Shah is among those who has called on Boris Johnson to raise the issue of Islamophobia in India with prime minister Modi. She tweeted in a thread: “My message to

@BorisJohnson on his visit to India is that our nation’s foreign relations must not just be based on trade & internationalism but also on human rights.

“My plea to the @10DowningStreet is to raise the growing issue of Islamophobia with the Modi Government.

“The rising tide of everyday hate & mob lynching against Muslims in India is becoming worrying. Dr Gregory Stanton who warned of early signs of genocide in Rwanda has now stated “There are early signs and processes of genocide” in India & Kashmir.

“Muslims beaten, threatened of rape and lynched has become a norm in India. In 2019, a fact-checker website (2019) that counted “hate crimes” in India reported that more than 90% of victims in the past 10 years were Muslims. Despite the police rounding up & beating innocent Muslims, authorities bulldozing Muslim-owned homes & armed Hindu nationalists rallying outside mosques.

“The response from the Home Minister is, “If Muslims carry out… attacks, then they should not expect justice.

“There are countless examples of mobs calling for the open RAPE of Muslim women.”

Shah added: “We must not forget the grave situation of human rights in Indian-administered Kashmir. The revocation of Article 370, international black-outs, mass unmarked graves, Kashmir’s half-widows & the people of Kashmir deserve their voices heard.

“We have a historic duty to Kashmir.

“I ask @BorisJohnson when the alarm bells of genocide, the daily lynching of Muslims, calls for rape of Muslim women & the systematic nature Islamophobia in India is being normalised, as someone who claims to be a champion of human rights, will you raise these issues with PM Modi?”

Johnson has also been criticised for posing at a JCB factory in India, while a row rages in the country over the company’s bulldozers being used to raze Muslim-owned properties in New Delhi.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward