‘Served its purpose’: Humza Yousaf ends power-sharing deal with Greens – video
The historic power-sharing agreement between the Scottish National party and Scottish Greens is to end after a crisis over the government’s climate strategy.
Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, said he had told the Scottish Green co-leaders he was terminating the Bute House agreement with immediate effect.
It means the Green co-leaders, Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie, are no longer part of the Scottish government and the SNP will operate as a minority administration.
The Bute House agreement was signed in August 2021 by the then SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, and Harvie, bringing the Greens into government for the first time in the UK.
Yousaf, Sturgeon’s successor as first minister, convened an emergency cabinet meeting early on Thursday after SNP backbenchers began openly attacking the deal.
Coordinated withdrawal agreed after several member states and UK have quit energy charter treaty
European lawmakers have voted to escape a treaty that lets investors sue governments in private courts for pursuing policies that stop the planet from heating.
Fossil fuel companies have used the energy charter treaty (ECT), an international trade agreement from the 1990s, to demand billions of euros of taxpayers’ money in opaque tribunals set up to protect investors.
Several European countries have already announced their exit from the treaty but efforts to coordinate an EU-wide withdrawal had met resistance from member states.
Anna Cavazzini, a German MEP from the Green group who was in charge of the proposal, said the “absurd” treaty had slowed down climate protection and cost billions in taxpayers’ money.
“International fossil fuel investors no longer have the option of bypassing ordinary courts and attacking climate policy with extrajudicial lawsuits,” she said.
Energy companies have sued governments for profits that they expect to have lost through decisions such as phasing out coal and banning offshore oil exploration.
Even as scientists have warned that the supply of fossil fuels must drop sharply to prevent extreme weather from growing more violent, governments seeking to curb the industry’s expansion have found themselves under attack from investors.
A study from the World Bank showed that the pandemic had halted poverty reduction schemes. Photograph: Friedrich Stark/Alamy
The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2% tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise £250bn a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.
In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Spain say a 2% tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.
“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece.
“One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”
Brazil chairs the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries and put a billionaire tax on the agenda at a meeting of finance ministers earlier this year.
Students march across campus following a walkout at University of Massachusetts Amherst on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The Department of Education is probing claims that the school discriminated against Palestinian and Arab students amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst in response to a complaint that alleges that the school took months to address the harassment of Palestinian and Arab students.
In the previously unreported civil rights complaint, 18 students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.” The result, the students said, was a hostile environment for all Arab and Palestinian students, those perceived to be Palestinian, and their allies on campus. Among the most chilling allegations involves a student yelling“kill all Arabs” at fellow students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.
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Over the past six months, students across the country have conducted protests, sit-ins, and other demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and for their institutions to divest from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. While universities have largely responded with an iron fist, the Department of Education has been increasingly brought in to investigate civil rights claims. Since October 7, Palestine Legal has filed five complaints with the OCR, including against Northwestern Law and the University of North Carolina. Conversely, pro-Israel groups have used the civil rights law to target students speaking out in support of Palestinian rights.
Tariq Habash, a former political appointee in the Department of Education who resigned in January in protest of President Joe Biden’s policies on the Gaza war, said that universities’ widespread crackdowns against anti-war protests is connected to the discrimination students have complained of.
“The condemnation has been so swift against largely peaceful, non-violent anti-war protests that are calling for an end to an ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” Habash said. “They’re arresting faculty who are trying to protect students who are in the middle of prayers. They are suspending students. They are kicking them out of their dorms and throwing their belongings into alleyways — this is not how you create safe, inclusive environments. This is not how you prevent discrimination. This is how you enable it and how you make it normalized.”
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The 49-page complaint lays out allegations of harassment going as far back as the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. The complaint alleges that a student began appearing at Students for Justice in Palestine and other related off-campus protests, “shouting threats such as ‘Kill all Arabs,’ playing a speaker with a recording of the sounds of bombs and other explosions and attempting to ram student protestors with an electric scooter.”
Body bags are laid in front of the White House as part of a protest calling for a Gaza cease-fire. (Photo: Lauren Murphy/Amnesty International USA)
“What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Amnesty’s secretary-general said.
Government aggression and the rise of Big Tech are threatening the rules-based international order and global human rights, Amnesty International warned in its annual State of the World’s Human Rights report, released Wednesday.
The organization expressed particular alarm over Israel’s war on Gaza and the inability or unwillingness of its allies to rein in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from bombing civilian populations, displacing more than 1.9 million people, and restricting the flow of aid into the besieged Gaza Strip. This and other conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, had led to a “near breakdown of international law,” Amnesty said.
“For millions the world over, Gaza now symbolizes utter moral failure by many of the architects of the post-World War Two system; their failure to uphold the absolute commitment to universality, our common humanity, and to our ‘never again’ commitment,” Amnesty International’s secretary-general Agnès Callamard wrote in the preface to the report.
“One country, one government is allowed to annihilate international law, to put its middle finger in the eye of international law.”
Amnesty wrote that Israel had made a “mockery” of some of the key tenants of international humanitarian law such as proportionality and distinction by targeting civilization populations and infrastructure such as refugee camps, hospitals, bakeries, and United Nations schools. As of the end of 2023, Israel had killed 21,600 Palestinians, a third of them children. At present, the death toll has surpassed 34,200, though that is likely an undercount as many remain buried beneath rubble.
Around the world, the international community is FAILING to protect tens of thousands of civilians. Evidence of war crimes continue to mount as governments make a mockery of international law. Our State of the World report is out now, read for yourself 👉 https://t.co/3vISzxUvcxpic.twitter.com/8wM5vgI8ww
Amnesty International researcher Budour Hassan toldDeutsche Welle that it was “utterly disappointing” that “one country, one government is allowed to annihilate international law, to put its middle finger in the eye of international law, and go on as if nothing has happened, normalizing the abnormal, normalizing the atrocities that have been happening, so that the crime that was an atrocity two days ago would become normal.”
Hassan said there were things that the international community could do to try to stop the violence, such as cutting off weapons sales to Israel and Palestinian armed groups.
“It’s just that the international community has proven desperately unwilling and incapable of upholding these norms,” Hassan added, saying that, by failing to act, it could be “signing a death sentence to the whole international order.”
At the release of @amnesty 's 'State of the World's Human Rights' report, Amnesty International researcher Budour Hassan criticized the international community for "normalizing the atrocities" happening in Gaza and called for more pressure on Israel to stop the war. pic.twitter.com/K3ZsGjQ5FI
In particular, Amnesty criticized the U.S. for spending months vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire, as well as European Union countries like Germany and the U.K. that called out their opponents’ human rights abuses but continued to back Israel.
“What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Callamard said.
In addition to Israel and its Western allies, Amnesty also pointed to Russia and its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, as well as China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghur and financial backing of the Myanmar military, which killed at least 1,000 civilians in 2023.
“We have here three very large countries, superpowers in many ways, sitting on the Security Council that have emptied out the Security Council of its potentials, and that have emptied out international law of its ability to protect people,” Callamard toldThe Associated Press of the U.S., Russia, and China.
In addition to state actors, Amnesty International sounded the alarm about the growing power of large technology companies, and, in particular, the rollout of artificial intelligence. The human rights group said that both new and existing technologies were making it easier for governments to target vulnerable groups like women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. For example, the New York City Police Department informed Amnesty that it used facial recognition technology to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter activists, while Israel used it in the West Bank to help control Palestinian movement. The organization warned of how under-regulated technologies could exacerbate the scapegoating of marginalized groups as many countries hold elections in 2024.
“Big Tech’s surveillance business model is pouring fuel on this fire of hate, enabling those with malintent to hound, dehumanize, and amplify dangerous narratives to consolidate power or polling,” Callarmard said. “It’s a chilling specter of what’s to come as technological advances rapaciously outpace accountability.”
Callarmard called for reforms to the U.N. Security Council so that no country could use its veto power to obstruct action and for better governmental regulation of developing technologies.
The silver lining is that ordinary people around the world continue to demonstrate for human rights, both their own and others. Amnesty cited the international movement for a cease-fire in Gaza; abortion rights protests in the U.S., El Salvador, and Poland; and the Fridays for Future youth movement to phase out fossil fuels and address the climate emergency.
“People have made it abundantly clear that they want human rights; the onus is on governments to show that they are listening,” Callamard said.
