INDIA

Growing Clues That Central Narmada Valley Was Key Hub in Human Story

Saurav Sarkar | 22 Feb 2024

The human skull specimen found in 1982, and over a dozen other fossil bones discovered later, shine a light on the region as a potential hotbed of human evolutionary activity.

In December 1982, a geologist digging in India’s Central Narmada Valley found something he did not expect. Arun Sonakia, who at the time worked for the Geological Survey of India, unearthed a hominid fossil skullcap from the Pleistocene era. The discovery sent shockwaves through the field of paleoanthropology and put South Asia on the map of human prehistory. Some experts concluded that the skull likely belonged to a member of a predecessor species of ours, Homo heidelbergensis, or perhaps was a hybrid of homo species, while Sonakia himself suggested “an affinity… to Homo erectus.”

The specimen remains the oldest human fossil found in the South Asian sub-continent; while expert opinions vary, testing seems to indicate the fossil was between 250,000 and 150,000 years old. For several decades, it was the only ancient human fossil found in South Asia—despite abundant finds of tools and other relics.

But in more recent years, more than a dozen other fossil bones that have been discovered have shined a light on the Central Narmada Valley as a potential hotbed of human evolutionary activity. Paleoanthropologist Anek R. Sankhyan and his team discovered new fossils between 1983 and 1992, followed by further finds between 2005 and 2010.

Sankhyan shared during an interview that only the Central Narmada Valley has so far yielded human fossils from the Pleistocene period in South Asia. The valley, he says, was a key stop along the migration route from Africa to Southeast Asia for Homo erectus. Homo erectus was an archaic human ancestor that lived between about 1.9 million and 100,000 years ago and adapted to regions from Eastern Africa to China to Southeast Asia. It has not been established whether Homo erectus comprises one species spread wide geographically or multiple species involving local variations.

Sankhyan connects the Narmada Valley with some of the more sophisticated Acheulean stone tool cultures that emerged with Homo erectus in Europe and Africa. Acheulean tools are characterised by multiuse-hand axes used for roles ranging from woodcutting to butchering animals.

In the Central Narmada Valley, Sankhyan’s evidence from his paper—published in Advances in Anthropology in 2020—on the subject seems to show at least two distinct types of hominins represented: the large “robust” line uncovered through Sonakia’s skullcap discovery, and an evolving “short and stocky” hominin line from 150,000 to 40,000 years ago discovered by Sankhyan and his team.

Sankhyan says that the traits of the skullcap found by Sonakia vary among Homo erectus, Homo sapiens , and have features that are unique, making identifying it “confusing.” He concluded that the skullcap is also representative of heidelbergensis, and perhaps might be a heidelbergensis -Neanderthal hybrid. A skull with so many traits is a clue that this region may indeed have been a multispecies melting pot that puts our contemporary sense of human differences to shame.

Heidelbergensis was a species that was the ancestor of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and first appeared 700,000 years ago, disappearing 200,000 years ago. It was an intermediate species between Homo erectus and modern human beings and Neandertals. 

Heidelbergensis was likely the first human species to control fire and hunt large game animals. The hominid fossil found by Sonakia likely used tools like an Acheulian pick axe and was found near a crushed molar tooth of a Stegodon, a large, extinct relative of today’s elephants. Sankhyan says that the ecology of the valley during the Lower Paleolithic was that of a warm woodland forest with megafauna like the Stegodon, during his interview.

The “short and stocky” line has been given its own nomenclature: Homo narmadensis by Sankhyan. This species was widespread in the Central Narmada Valley during the “Middle to Upper Paleolithic [era],” and hunted smaller game animals in a “broken forest ecology.” 

Narmadensis was discovered near significant numbers of Mode 3 Acheulean tools, which are more sophisticated than the Mode 2 tools attributed to the heidelbergensis line.

Paleoanthropologist Sankhyan speculates that the “short and stocky” hominin line was the “likely precursor to the ‘short-bodied’ ancient populations of India, including the Andaman pygmy.” Interestingly, he believes that the so-called “hobbit” of Indonesia, Homo floresiensis, also descended from this line. Homo floresiensis was a little more than three-feet tall and lived between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

While Sankhyan says that the government organisation, Anthropological Survey of India, has not conducted further excavations since 2010, according to him, there have been individuals from other departments who “tried sporadic trial digging,” but those digs have not yielded any significant results.

As research continues in this area, we’re likely to get even more insight into the varied hominin types who lived in the Central Narmada Valley in the last hundreds of thousands of years and how they interacted with one another. Regardless, the establishment of South Asia as a centre of human evolutionary activity is likely to have consequences for how the region, and India in particular, understands itself and its prehistory and history.

For decades, nationalists, including representatives of today’s Far-Right Hindu nationalists in India, have promoted the idea that South Asians and Indo-Europeans as a whole originated from within India. Though this theory is false and unnuanced, the evolutionary history of hominins in the Central Narmada Valley offers new ground for Indian nationalists to make the argument that hominins or primates had their roots in India.

But if there are dangers in linking contemporary India with the prehistory of the sub-continent and its place in the world, there are also opportunities. As with India, fossil evidence in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Georgia, and China indicates that these places were repeatedly home to prehistoric population centres—they all have equal claim to being part of a global and gradual humanisation process.

As a result, a non-aligned or regionally connected Global South has a powerful new origin story and better pathways for connections, rooted in evidence outside of the historical narratives imposed on them by the West. Further research will establish what science shows, but it will be politics, geopolitics, and the direction chosen by the world’s people that will contextualise the evidence within the human story.

Saurav Sarkar is a freelance movement writer, editor, and activist living in Long Island, New York. They have also lived in New York City, New Delhi, London, and Washington, D.C. Follow them on Twitter @sauravthewriter and at sauravsarkar.com.

This article was produced by Globetrotter

 INDIA

Kerala: Grameen Bank Workers Strike Work, Urge Creation of National Rural Bank

Neelambaran A | 24 Feb 2024

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The demands of the RRB employees include the formation of NRBI, adequate recruitment, regularisation of temporary workers and services conditions.

 

Cover photo Caption: Employees and Officers of the Kerala Grama Bank headquarters in Malappuram. 

Employees of Regional Rural Banks (RRB) in Kerala held a one-day strike on February 23 on demands including the formation of a National Rural Bank of India (NRBI), filling up of vacancies and other service conditions. The other major demands include regularisation of temporary employees, abolition of appointment of business correspondents and withdrawal of appointment of recovery agencies. 

Ahead of the strike, the Kerala Grama Bank Employees Union (KGBEU) and Kerala Grama Bank Officers Union (KGBOU) held a 60-hour-long day and night dharna from February 21.

The February 23 strike was being held after a series of protests by the All-India Regional Rural Bank Employees Association (AIRRBEA) whose demands failed to elicit any positive response from the department of financial services. 

The major demand of the RRB employees is to delink the banks from the sponsor banks, since the first conference of the AIRRBEA. A statement of the organisation accused the sponsor banks of converting the RRBs, created by an Act of Parliament, into subordinate banks. The deputing of staff, without considering any criteria from the sponsor banks to the RRBs, resulting in the inferior treatment of the staff of the RRBs. 

The AIRRBEA statement added that RRBs were being refused a level-playing field without unique business models and policies. “In the existing set-up, development of RRB-specific business models is becoming a mirage. The boards of RRBs adopt policies and business models of their respective sponsor banks alone. Some RRBs are forced to sell financial products of the sponsor banks which are irrelevant to RRB customers. In that way, the sponsor banks are playing against the RRB customers as well”, the statement added. 

The AIRRBEA strike across the country reportedly affected services to about 40 crore customers since around one lakh employees stayed away from work. 

Badarunissa, general secretary of Kerala School Teachers Federation, inaugurated the 60-hour protest in Malappuram. 

Speaking with Newsclick, Bigesh Unniyan, general secretary of KGBEU said: “The demand for delinking RRBs from the sponsor banks and beginning a NRBI is gaining momentum given the present crisis faced by RRBs across the country. The domination of the sponsor banks is affecting the very purpose of the formation of RRBs itself”.

The KGBEU and KGBOU held a 60-hour dharna from February 21 in front of the Kerala Grama Bank (KGB) headquarters in Malappuram on the charter of demands.

The other major demands include the discontinuation of appointment of Business Correspondents in the banks, since the density of banks is very high in Kerala and the system weakens the banking system.

The unions also demanded the regularisation of temporary employees, appointment of 29 office attendants in existing vacancies and withdrawal of the engagement of recovery agents by the bank. 

'Death Does not Dazzle the Eyes of the Partisans'

Peoples Dispatch | 24 Feb 2024

On the 80th anniversary of the execution of Armenia-born French resistance fighter Missak Manouchian by the Nazi forces in 1944, the French government bestowed national honor on him by interring his remains and his wife Mélinée in the Panthéon in Paris

Missak Manouchian. Photo: ARCHIVES MANOUCHIAN

“Death does not dazzle the eyes of the Partisans,” wrote Louis Aragon in his poem Strophes pour se souvenir (Stanzas in Remembrance) in 1955 in memory of the Manouchian group, resistance fighters shot by the Gestapo in 1944. The poem, said to be loosely inspired by the last letter that Missak Manouchian wrote to his wife Mélinée, is an apt homage as France commemorates the sacrifices of Manouchian and his comrades.

On February 21, in a historic ceremony, the French government entombed Armenia-born French resistance fighter Manouchian and Mélinée in the Panthéon, the mausoleum in Paris housing France’s national heroes. The ceremony was held on the 80th anniversary of the execution of communist fighter Manouchian and 21 of his comrades by Nazi German firing squad at Fort Mont-Valérien near Paris in 1944.

French president Emmanuel Macron and Armenian president Nikol Pashinyan attended the Pantheonization ceremony, while leaders of the French Communist Party (PCF), Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF), and the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) paid tributes to Manouchian, who is now the first foreign resistance fighter and the first communist interred at the Panthéon.

Missak Manouchian was an Armenian poet, a communist, and a survivor of the 1915-16 Armenian genocide. In the 1920s, from an orphanage in Lebanon, he moved to France and eventually became a member of the CGT and the French Communist Party (PCF). Manouchian became the leader of the Relief Committee for Armenia (HOC), an organization associated with the Immigrant Workforce Movement (MOI).

He wrote poems, translated popular French works into Armenian, and published communist-leaning magazines. During the Second World War, Mounchian was persecuted by the occupying Nazi forces and French collaborators. He became active in the French resistance to the Nazi occupation and became the leader of the partisan group Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) mainly composed of immigrant workers in 1943.

Manouchian’s group carried out several operations against Nazi forces in France. He and his comrades were arrested by the collaborationist French police in November 1943, tortured, and handed over to the Gestapo. Following a show trial, Manouchian and 21 of his comrades were executed on February 21, 1944. Another FTP-MOI member, Olga Bancic, was deported and killed in Stuttgart.

The heroics and sacrifice of Manouchian and his brigades was celebrated not only in France and Armenia but also across the erstwhile Soviet Union and other parts of Europe. Manouchian’s story was depicted in many works of art, including cinemas, documentaries, novels, and poems, while several streets, buildings, and parks in France and Armenia were dedicated to him.

A popular campaign launched by several politicians, trade unionists, and progressive groups in 2022, called to move Manouchian’s ashes from the Parisian cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine to the Panthéon, alongside the remains of other French national heroes. The names of all the Manouchian’s comrades shot along with him were also engraved in the vault in which he and Mélinée are interred at the Panthéon.

On February 21, Assan Lakehoule from the MJCF stated “that the role of communists and foreigners in the resistance and the nation is now recognized.” 

The French Communist Party (PCF) stated that “Missak and Mélinée Manouchian entered the Panthéon and with them all those who fought against fascism for their ideals of peace and justice, all those French-hearted who made our Nation live.”

Courtesy: peoples dispatch

 

Canada Oil Faces Fresh Pipeline Shortage

By Irina Slav - Feb 24, 2024

• The expanded Trans Mountain will add 590,000 barrels daily to the country's oil pipeline network
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• With production already on a growth trajectory, it will only provide producers with offtake capacity relief for a very short while.
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• Canadian oil production could hit 5.3 million barrels daily this year, this would be a record high and an excess on the country's pipeline network.
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For years, Canadian oil producers have been struggling with insufficient pipeline capacity to take their products to buyers. Anti-pipeline policies have been a big reason for that, along with environmental opposition.

Now, the same government that has been following the above policies is close to completing the biggest pipeline project in years: the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. But it seems it may be too little, too late for the industry, with warnings already flashing about a coming capacity shortage.

The expanded Trans Mountain will add 590,000 barrels daily to the country's oil pipeline network. That would be 590,000 bpd that could potentially be exported to countries other than the United States, boosting Canadian oil prices that have been depressed for years because of that pipeline shortage that has limited producers' market to their southern neighbor.

Producers are already ramping up production in anticipation of the additional offtake capacity. Reuters reported last year that 2024 and 2025 could see a production increase of 375,000 bpd from the oil sands alone. That would be an 8% increase from the 2022 total number, which was 4.86 million barrels daily.

Those were analyst estimates at a time when the completion of the Trans Mountain expansion was not certain. With a project that has been delayed repeatedly, with snags at every steps, it is easy to see where that lack of certainty came from. Now, the expansion is in its final stage, close to completion, with just 2% left to build. Perhaps it is finally safe to say that the new Trans Mountain pipeline will enter operation, and soon.Related: Shell Backs Out Of Yet Another Floating Offshore Wind Project

The problem that analysts see now is that with production already on a growth trajectory, it will only provide producers with offtake capacity relief for a very short while—a couple of years or so. 

Reuters, for instance, cited BMP analyst Ben Pham as saying that the completed Trans Mountain pipeline would increase Canada's total pipeline capacity to 5.2 million barrels daily. Production is already at around 5 million bpd, so this leaves a margin of 220,000 bpd, according to Pham, as spare capacity.

Yet it will quickly evaporate because production growth will continue, says RBN Energy analyst Martin King. Instead of four or five years of capacity comfort, as originally expected, the Trans Mountain expansion may only provide relief for about a couple of years.

"Originally it was thought TMX would give us a four- or five-year window," the analyst said recently, as quoted by Reuters. "It now looks like that window of spare capacity might actually be a lot smaller."

It would be small indeed if production growth continues to be strong, as recently suggested by a senior Enbridge executive, who said he expected the industry could boost output by half a million barrels daily this year.

The problem with a pipeline shortage is that Canadian producers suffering from a chronic discount on their oil because of the existing shortage and market limitations will continue to endure the discounts.

Initially, enthusiasm around the Trans Mountain expansion drove projections of higher prices and slimmer discounts to WTI, but now reality is setting in, and analysts are changing the tune, warning that the slim discount may not last for long.

There is, however, the international market factor. Even if the new and improved Trans Mountain fills up in no time, there will be a bigger pool of potential buyers with heavy crude in great demand worldwide due to relatively limited supply. This could take care of that discount to WTI, which in the past two years has hovered around $18-19 per barrel, at least for a while.

Canadian oil production could hit 5.3 million barrels daily this year, according to a projection by S&P Global Commodity Insight from last October. This would be a record high and an excess on the country's pipeline network. On the flip side, it could be a short-lived record because it appears to be driven, according to S&P Global, by efficiency gains rather than investment in new production.

"This could be the last really large hurrah before we see a material slowdown in Western Canada supply growth," Kevin Birn, S&P Global chief analyst for Canadian oil markets, said in October, as quoted by CBC. "We do see this plateauing effect really beginning around 2025 and 2026."

If production does plateau, then the pipeline capacity shortage will take care of itself. But if the above projection does not materialize, then Canadian oil producers will have to boost oil train use again to supply their U.S. clients

The Trans Mountain pipeline is scheduled to begin operation in the second quarter of the year. Oil production in Alberta is already rising, hitting record highs in November and December at over 4.2 million bpd, Bloomberg reported this week. The records prompted a surge in oil train loadings and a rationing of capacity on Enbridge's Mainline pipeline system.

If those analysts are right, this won't be the last time pipeline space needs to be rationed and oil trains deployed on a greater scale. If they're right, the Trans Mountain expansion will only provide temporary relief for drillers and oil sands miners.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

 

ÖBB constructs Austria’s first agri-pv installation for green traction power

Solar panels will directly feed neighbouring catenary with 15kv 16.7Hz ac.

AUSTRIAN Railways (ÖBB) will this year build the country’s first agri-pv installation to supply emissions-free power to the national rail network.

A bank of solar panels, to be installed at a 6ha site at Thalsdorf in Carinthia canton, will generate up to 15GWh of green electricity that will be fed directly into the national rail network’s 15kV 16.7Hz ac power supply via the catenary of an adjacent railway line.

The grassland the photo-voltaic (pv) panels will stand on can simultaneously be used as pasture for 6000 chickens and 60 sheep and will be enhanced with other conservation measures, including tree planting and cultivation of native flower species, to increase biodiversity.

The amount of electricity generated at Thalsdorf is the equivalent of that required to power 3800 Railjet journeys between Vienna and Salzburg. The installation, that is due to start supplying power by the end of this year, will help ÖBB achieve its target to be 80% self-sufficient in green traction power by 2030.

 “Since 2018, we have been using 100% green traction electricity,” says ÖBB-Infrastructure board member Mr Johann Pluy. “And since 2019 we have been supplying all buildings, facilities and container terminals with electricity from 100% renewable energy sources.”

“With this innovative system in Thalsdorf, we are not only increasing our own production of green traction power, we are also creating a dual use for the environment and agriculture,” he says.

ÖBB pioneered the world's first solar power plant for traction current on a brownfield site at Wilfleinsdorf in Lower Austria in 2015.

Demand for houseplants has continued to soar since lockdown, says UK supermarket

BETTER THAN PETS, NO ONE RETURNS PLANTS

Sam Russell, PA
Sun, 25 February 2024

A UK supermarket has reported that demand for houseplants has soared by more than 130% since 2019, with what started as a lockdown trend now even more pronounced.

Tesco said one of its suppliers, which had mainly dealt in cut flowers such as lilies, peonies and agapanthus, had switched its indoor production facilities solely to producing house plants to help meet demand.

Bury Lane, a peat-free grower based near Royston in Hertfordshire, now produces more than 500,000 houseplants per year.

Tesco said that demand for houseplants at its stores has soared by more than 130% since 2019, and it suggested that people sharing photos of their living space on social media has played a role in this.

Tesco plants buyer Vicki I’Anson said: “We first noticed the trend during the early months of lockdown and it was caused as a direct result of people having to stay at home and not being able to visit parks and other open spaces.

“But the trend caught on very quickly with people keen to show off on social media how they were adorning their homes with houseplants.

“And it’s now even more pronounced than it was then.

“Importantly, it’s also good news for our partnerships with UK growers, as we’ve been working together to meet the increased demand with brilliant British-grown plants.”

Bury Lane produces more than 500,000 houseplants per year (Joe Giddens/PA)

Grower Bury Lane suggested that younger people, keen on building indoor gardens, were helping to drive the trend.

Will Clayton, Bury Lane’s managing director, said: “The big consumer focus in home plants right now is the leaf rather than the flower, with younger people, especially, being interested in building their own indoor gardens with evergreen plants.

“Not everyone has an outdoor garden and with interest rates high right now we’re seeing younger people who are waiting to get on the housing ladder wanting to make their accommodation as appealing and interesting as possible.

“One easy and inexpensive way to do that is by having calming houseplants around your home and if you go on social media sites you’ll find many people posting the latest additions to their home.”

Tesco said that last April it became the first UK retailer to make the climate-focused move to go peat-free on its British-grown bedding plants, in order to lower its carbon footprint.

It also now only sells compost that is peat-free.

The rich have no more wants and are sitting on cash whilst those in need are getting needier. Why is anyone surprised that the world is getting angrier?

 

Richard Murphy on developing a fairer and sustainable economy

Posted on February 25 2024

As the FT noted yesterday:

Warren Buffett has warned Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that his sprawling $905bn conglomerate has virtually “no possibility of eye-popping performance” in the years ahead, laying bare the challenges that will confront his successors.

They added


The so-called Oracle of Omaha said in his annual letter on Saturday that “There remain only a handful of companies in this country capable of truly moving the needle at Berkshire, and they have been endlessly picked over by us and by others. Outside the US, there are essentially no candidates that are meaningful options for capital deployment at Berkshire."

As the FT also noted, Berkshire's cash pile, has continued to climb. It hit a record $167.6bn at the end of 2023, up $39bn over the course of the year.

If you are unfamiliar with Berkshire Hathaway, the Wikipedia entry is probably good enough to get a feel, because I am sure that the company makes sure it is right. It is a conglomerate led by Warren Buffett, 93, and until last year by Charlie Munger, who died recently at age 99. Then company was transformed from the 1960s onwards by the two of them buying companies that could either be restructured to show a profit or that had the power to grow quickly. Buffett became one of the richest handful of people in the world as a result.

And now, apparently, there is nothing left for Berkshire Hathaway to buy. There is no company worth parting with cash for. About $10 billion went back to shareholders last year. The rest of the company's cash just accumulates, doing nothing for anyone within the economy at large because, as we know, cash balances like this are not the basis on which loans are made, which always come out of new cash creation.

I can't think of a stronger metaphor for American (and so Western) capitalism having come to the end of the road than this. Buffett is not just suffering from old age. He's out of ideas, and the reason why is that there are no ideas in the marketplace that provide any obvious signs that there is profit to be made by parting with his cash pile.

So-called entrepreneurial activity would appear to be over.

Businesses can no longer generate new wants, however much they spend whilst seeking to do so. The reality is that the world's wealthy have all that they need. Persuading them to spend more is a futile exercise: the wealthy cannot drive growth any more when there is nothing else that can materially improve their collective well-being (which, as an aside, is good news for the green agenda).

On the other hand, we live in a world of massive unmet needs. We face crises that demand action. But our politicians are doing all that they can to limit the size of the state, which is the only agency capable of meeting those needs and addressing those crises. They are doing this, they say, so that room is left for what they think to be the essential private sector activity that they think will drive the growth that they believe is the precondition of additional state spending because they think that is paid for with tax and borrowing, when the reality is that it is paid for with money creation.

The inherent conflict should be obvious. The private sector can see nothing to grow. The rich have run out of the desire to spend on new wants, and are sitting on cash. Simultaneously, those in need are ever more desperate as there is said to be no cash to assist them. And the result is an ever more stressed economy, reflecting an ever more stressed society.

This is the world that we now live in. It is divided, broken, purposeless and angry. And all that is because of the absolute determination of our politicians to follow a cult-like belief that the market has an answer to all known questions when it very clearly has not.

What we need are politicians who believe that they have the power to meet needs, as states so very obviously do.

They could do that by spending more and then taxing the wealthy more to remove the inflationary consequences that would otherwise arise.

And, by changing the rules on tax relief for saving, they could redirect investment away from the meaningless and now futile creation of additional wants into the necessary creation of the resources to address the climate, education, health, energy, housing transport, rising water level, and other crises that we now face where very real rates of return for society can be created.

We could have a better world. Curiously, Berkshire Hathaway's inability to spend tells us that this is not just essential but necessary, because the rich have run out of anything to do with their money. What we now need is the clearest possible expression of the alternative that needs to be created now. And then, and only then, might we diffuse the anger that is beginning ti spill over in our society.

 

 

Berkshire Hathaway’s re/insurance businesses generate $5.4bn underwriting gain in 2023

 25th February 2024 - Author: Luke Gallin

Berkshire Hathaway, the Warren Buffett-run holding company and conglomerate, has reported net underwriting earnings across its re/insurance operations of $5.4 billion for the full year 2023 compared with a loss a year earlier.

The positive return of $5.4 billion compares with a loss of $30 million in 2022 and a gain of $870 million in 2021, as all of the firm’s re/insurance businesses performed well in 2023.

Starting with Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group, the underwriting result improved from almost $1.5 billion in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2023, driven by a strong result in the P&C and L&H reinsurance segments.

The P&C reinsurance underwriting result strengthened from $2.2 billion in 2022 to $3.5 billion in 2023, while the L&H reinsurance result rose from $109 million to $354 million. This more than offset a decline to -$1.5 billion in retroactive reinsurance, and a slight dip to $650 million in the unit’s periodic payment annuity.

Berkshire explains that the retrospective adoption of ASU 2018-12 increased the reinsurance arm’s pre-tax underwriting earnings $76 million in 2022 and reduced pre-tax underwriting losses $175 million in 2021 from the amounts previously reported.

In terms of premiums, reinsurance premiums earned grew from $21.8 billion in 2022 to more than $27 billion in 2023, with growth from $16 billion to $22 billion in P&C, and a slight reduction in L&H to $5.1 billion compared with $5.2 billion in 2022.

Within P&C, premiums written in 2023 increased 31.8% over 2022 to $22.4 billion, of which $5.3 billion relates to TransRe Group. The firm attributes the rise in premiums written to net increases in new property business and higher rates.

“We have written considerable levels of property business in recent years and we generally do not retrocede the risks we assume. Our periodic underwriting earnings are subject to considerable volatility from significant catastrophe loss events,” says the firm.

Year-on-year, losses and loss adjustment expenses increased $2.1 billion in 2023 to $12.7 billion, with losses of $3.2 billion from TransRe. Losses incurred from significant current year catastrophes were $900 million in 2023, compared with $2 billion in 2022. The reductions in estimated ultimate liabilities for losses occurring in prior accident years were $1.4 billion in 2023, compared with $1.6 billion in 2022.

Turning to Berkshire Hathaway Primary Group, which consists of several independently managed businesses that provide a variety of primarily commercial insurance solutions, underwriting earnings increased from $393 million in 2022 to $1.4 billion in 2023.

Premiums written increased 24.1% year-on-year to $18.1 billion and premiums earned moved from $13.7 billion in 2022 to $17.1 billion in 2023. Berkshire attributes the growth to increases at BHSI (16%), USLI (16%), BHHC (15%) and MedPro Group (10%) across a variety of coverages and in several markets, and from the acquisition of RSUI and CapSpecialty.

Losses and loss adjustment expenses increased 13.5% year-on-year to $11.2 billion, although losses from significant catastrophes were $37 million in 2023 compared with $641 million in 2022. The loss ratio decreased 6.4 percentage points in 2023 compared to 2022, reflecting lower incurred losses from current year catastrophes and changes in business mix, including the impact of RSUI and CapSpecialty.

At GEICO, primarily a writer of private passenger automobile insurance, underwriting earnings hit $3.6 billion in 2023 compared with a loss of $1.9 billion in 2022, reflecting higher average premiums per auto policy, lower claims frequencies, reductions in prior accident years’ claims estimates, and a reduction in advertising costs.

Despite this, the firm notes that average claims severities continued to rise in 2023 due to higher auto repair parts prices, labor costs, and medical inflation.

Within GEICO, premiums written increased $730 million to $39.8 billion in 2023, while premiums earned increased slightly to $39.3 billion.

At the same time, losses and loss adjustment expenses decreased $4.5 billion, or 12.4% to $31.8 billion in 2023, while the loss ratio came down 12.1 percentage points to 81%, reflecting the impact of higher average premiums per auto policy, lower claims frequencies and increased favorable development of prior accident years’ claims estimates, partially offset by increases in average claims severities.

Across its re/insurance operations, Berkshire has revealed that as at December 31st, 2023, float was approximately $169 billion, up from $164 billion at the end of 2022 and $147 billion at the end of 2021.

“Our combined insurance operations generated pre-tax underwriting gains in 2023 and 2021, and the average cost of float was negative in those years. Our pre-tax underwriting losses in 2022 were $22 million and the cost of float was nominal,” explains the firm.

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Royal Mail sued by delivery drivers in ‘Uber-style’ gig economy legal case

WITH PRIVATIZATION CAME OUTSOURCING

Andrew Kersley
Sun, 25 February 2024 

Parcelforce delivery driver Marc Francis is suing Royal Mail for wrongly classifying him as a self-employed owner driver rather than a worker. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Royal Mail is being sued for classifying delivery drivers as self-employed, enabling it to avoid paying sick pay and the minimum wage, in a case that mirrors a landmark gig economy legal ruling against Uber.

The Royal Mail drivers allege that the practice means Parcelforce – the company’s parcel delivery subsidiary – can also make them pay hundreds of pounds in fines when they call in sick.

Marc Francis, one of the claimants in the case, which is being handled by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and the solicitor Leigh Day, said that after 10 years of working for Parcelforce he has “had enough”.


The drivers argue that Parcelforce and its parent Royal Mail wrongly classify a large number of its delivery drivers such as Francis as self-employed owner drivers.

Despite being classed as self-employed, owner drivers do not have control over the days they work (which are outlined in contracts with Parcelforce), the hours they work (as it is dependent on the number of packages given to them by Parcelforce each morning) or even the route they take (determined by the company’s Route Excellence computer system).

Related: Half of UK gig economy workers earn below minimum wage, study reveals

As self-employed staff, they are not given the same protections as workers, such as holiday pay, sick pay or the minimum wage, and are charged fees when they call in sick.

In September, a flare-up of his ulcerative colitis meant Francis could not work for two weeks. When he came back from sickness, he was asked to pay £764 to Parcelforce to cover the cost of the agency worker who covered his route.

Another of the claimants with a more extensive delivery route was allegedly forced to pay nearly £1,500 to cover his route when he could not work for two weeks.

Francis claimed the practice leaves owner drivers unable to take time off and scared of attending GP appointments given the amount it could cost them.

In one email to his depot managers he shared with the Observer, he informed them he had just been told by doctors that he had developed pneumonia but reassured his bosses that he “will be in, in the morning” for work.

On another occasion, when the planned cover did not turn up for a shift he had to miss, Francis received a letter from Parcelforce threatening to terminate his contract.

Another part of the complaint surrounds pay. Owner drivers agree individual parcel rates with Parcelforce in their contracts. In Francis’s case, his base rate actually reduced a few years into his time as an owner driver, and despite small increases since, he said he regularly fails to make the minimum wage after deducting his costs.

On one day in late January, he made just £58 for a day’s work after paying for fuel and his van lease.

Owner drivers do not get paid for parcels that are not delivered successfully, despite drivers spending time and fuel to attempt the delivery, and can see their pay confiscated if they fail to deliver within strict one-hour time windows determined by Parcelforce’s computer system.

“The reason why owner drivers are much more suitable to the business is purely down to exploitation,” Francis said. “You can talk to me about money all you want but this case is not about that. All I want is legal rights – rights that we’re due,” he added.

The case resembles a seminal legal battle against Uber that went all the way to the supreme court in 2021 in which Uber drivers won the right to be classed as workers rather than self-employed contractors.

Francis and the two other claimants in his case – Phil Thomas and Stephen Wardell – first lodged their complaint with the IWGB union but the case has now been taken on by solicitor Leigh Day.

The legal firm said that it believed the problems faced by the trio were endemic across Parcelforce and that it hoped to launch a wider group claim in future.

“In our view, Parcelforce drivers working for Royal Mail should be entitled to workers’ rights such as receiving holiday pay and being paid the national minimum wage. This issue affects thousands of Parcelforce owner drivers,” said Liana Wood, a senior associate solicitor at Leigh Day.

“Often, these drivers have worked for Royal Mail for many years and seen their working conditions steadily decline. Yet, as they are classified as self-employed contractors, they are denied their basic workers’ rights.”

A Parcelforce spokesperson said: “All of our owner drivers are self-employed and we refute any claims that this is not the case.

“Our self-employed drivers play a valuable role in delivering parcels in the UK and are free to provide their services to other businesses.

“Our owner drivers can choose whether to personally make deliveries and collections or arrange for other drivers to do them. We are unable to comment on an ongoing legal claim.”

Russia has 'dark fleet' of tankers that skirt sanctions to ship banned oil around world

By PATRICK TOOHER
 24 February 2024

Russia has spent almost £2 billion building a 'dark fleet' of tankers that skirt sanctions to ship banned oil around the world, according to a top official.

The scale of the sanctions-swerving, which experts say involves up to 1,800 vessels whose ownership is opaque, is revealed on the second anniversary of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine that sparked international curbs on Russian trade.

But western sanctions – including a $60 cap on a barrel of Russian oil – have been criticised for being ineffective and failing to stop the flow of cash fuelling Russia's war machine.

The price cap – well below the market rate of $80 a barrel – was designed to limit the Kremlin's huge revenues from oil exports without causing another spike in global energy costs. But Russia is still exporting as much oil now as it was two years ago.

It has got round the sanctions by creating a parallel shipping structure that transports Russian oil using complex routes.

'Dark fleet': The scale of the sanctions-swerving, which experts say involves up to 1,800 vessels whose ownership is opaque, is revealed

The shadow fleet is believed to have a large number of vessels older than 15 years – the age at which mainstream oil companies would typically retire them due to wear and tear.

'They would otherwise have gone for scrap,' said Mike Salthouse, of marine insurer NorthStandard.

The size of this parallel fleet has 'grown significantly', added Olga Dimitrescu of the UK Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).

'But that comes at a significant cost to Russia,' which she put at nearly £2 billion. That's $2.25 billion that's spent by the Putin regime on tankers not tanks,' she added.

Experts say the price cap hasn't worked because it has incentivised black market trading in Russian oil. Former spy Christopher Steele thinks secondary sanctions have to be considered because countries like China and Turkey import cheap Russian oil, refine it and export it at 'a great profit' to the UK, he told ITV's Peston programme.

Labour MP and anti-corruption campaigner Dame Margaret Hodge has urged a tougher approach on sanctions following the suspicious death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a Siberian prison.

In a letter to Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, she pointed out that the UK's maritime insurance industry underwrites a third of all Russian oil that was moved by sea cargo between the implementation of sanctions and November 2023.

'Shockingly, some of this oil was sold at prices above the price cap, in clear violation of sanctions,' she said.

Cameron last week unveiled a fresh round of sanctions targeting oil traders and energy projects.

‘Dahomey’ doc on looted African art wins Berlin’s Golden Bear

By AFP
February 25, 2024

Diop said the prize 'not only honours me but the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents'

 - Copyright US Central Command (CENTCOM)/AFP Handout

Deborah COLE

“Dahomey”, a documentary by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop probing the thorny issues surrounding Europe’s return of looted antiquities to Africa, won the Berlin film festival’s top prize Saturday.

Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, the first black jury president at the 74th annual event, announced the seven-member panel’s choice among 20 contenders for the Golden Bear award at a gala ceremony.

Diop said the prize “not only honours me but the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents.

“To rebuild we must first restitute, and what does restitution mean? To restitute is to do justice,” she added.

South Korean arthouse favourite Hong Sang-soo captured the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for “A Traveller’s Needs”, his third collaboration with French screen legend Isabelle Huppert.

Hong, a frequent guest at the 11-day festival, thanked the jury, joking “I don’t know what you saw in this film”.

French auteur Bruno Dumont accepted the third-place Jury Prize for “The Empire”, an intergalactic battle of good and evil set in a French fishing village.

Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias won best director for “Pepe”, his enigmatic docudrama conjuring the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.

– ‘Collusion’ –

Marvel movie star Sebastian Stan picked up the best performance Silver Bear for his appearance in US satire “A Different Man”.

Stan plays an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease causing disfiguring tumours, who is cured with a groundbreaking medical treatment.

The Romanian-American heartthrob called it “a story that’s not only about acceptance, identity and self truth but about disfigurement and disability — a subject matter that’s been long overlooked by our own bias”.

Britain’s Emily Watson clinched the best supporting performance Silver Bear for her turn as a cruel mother superior in “Small Things Like These”.

The film starring Cillian Murphy is about one of modern Ireland’s biggest scandals: the Magdalene laundries network of Roman Catholic penitentiary workhouses for “fallen women”.

She paid tribute to the “thousands and thousands of young women whose lives were devastated by the collusion between the Catholic church and the state in Ireland”.

German writer-director Matthias Glasner took the Silver Bear for best screenplay for his semi-autobiographical tragicomedy “Dying”, a three-hour tour de force by some of the country’s top actors depicting a dysfunctional family.

The Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution was awarded to cinematographer Martin Gschlacht for the chilling Austrian historical horror movie “The Devil’s Bath”, about depressed women in the 18th century who murdered in order to be executed.

A separate Berlinale Documentary Award went to a Palestinian-Israeli activist collective for “No Other Land” about Palestinians displaced by Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank.

Many of the award winners including Diop criticised the war in Gaza from the stage and called for an immediate ceasefire.

– ‘Some kind of miracle’ –

Diop’s taut, dreamlike film traces the 2021 journey home of 26 precious artifacts of the Dahomey kingdom to Benin from a Paris museum.

In the movie, Diop has one of the statues recount in a haunting Fon-language voice-over his land being pillaged by the French, the circumstances of his own exile and his ultimate repatriation in Cotonou museum.

Upon the collection’s arrival, local students debate in fascinating, unscripted scenes the historic importance of the restitution gesture and whether it is cause for rejoice or outrage.

The New York Times called the documentary “some kind of miracle, packing an extraordinary amount of information, inquiry and wild, persuasive imagination into a slim, 68-minute runtime”.

Variety said “Dahomey” was a “striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living”.

Diop’s supernatural Netflix drama “Atlantics” made her the first black woman to compete in Cannes in 2019, when she picked up the runner-up Grand Prix award.

While acknowledging restitution’s importance, Diop told AFP during the festival she had no intention of “celebrating” the gesture by French President Emmanuel Macron/

Only 26 artefacts were returned “against the more than 7,000 works still held captive” in Paris, she noted.