Civil Defence first-responders carry a man who was wounded after his handheld pager exploded, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, September 17, 2024
FOLLOWING Israel’s murderous exploding-pager stunt in Lebanon, Labour’s Emily Thornberry is asking questions every Cabinet minister should answer.
It is all very well for the Foreign Office to call for “calm heads and de-escalation” every time Israel bombs or assassinates people in neighbouring countries.
Since Israel faces no consequences for repeated escalation, it will continue to escalate: and, as Iran warned after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, this means a failure to respond to Israel’s provocations is itself escalatory, likely to lead to wider war.
Iran called on the UN security council to rein Israel in: since Israeli allies Britain, France and the US have a majority on that council, and since all are also involved in supplying arms to Israel and providing logistical support for its war on Palestine, the particular responsibility to act rests with Tel Aviv’s Western backers.
Thornberry, newly elected chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Commons, asks: “Why is this happening now? And what will the result be?
“…Is this the first step, and what will Israel do next? Is it part of a larger plan? It is very worrying and I would certainly be expecting Israel’s friends to be speaking very seriously to them, and saying: ‘What on Earth are you doing’?”
Thornberry could go a lot further. She could call out the pager operation for what it was: a callous act of terrorism committed in a country with which Israel is not at war.
ActionAid says ‘parasitic behaviour’ is fuelling the climate crisis and represents ‘corporate capture’ of public finance
More than $650bn (£494bn) a year in public subsidies goes to fossil fuel companies, intensive agriculture and other harmful industries in the developing world, new data has shown.
The subsidies entrench high greenhouse gas emissions and are fuelling the destruction of the natural world, according to a report from the charity ActionAid.
Developed countries are also actively subsidising such harmful activities. The UK, for instance, devotes about $7.3bn a year to effective subsidies for fossil fuels.
Taken altogether, the sums involved in the developing world would be enough to pay for the education of all children in sub-Saharan Africa three and a half times over, each year.
Firefighters in a boat make their way past a car submerged by the floods in Rust im Tullnerfeld, Austria, on September 16, 2024. (Photo: Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images)
“We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change,” said one campaigner.
The international climate group Greenpeace on Friday called on European leaders to “reciprocate” the courage shown by first responders in several countries over the weekend by forcing fossil fuel giants to pay for climate damages.
Calling out leaders including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and Romania Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, Greenpeace campaigner Ian Duff said Central and Eastern European countries should end their “support for fossil fuels and [make] climate polluters pay for this disaster,” as emergency workers rescued people from catastrophic flooding.
The death toll on Monday rose to at least 16, with many more people missing and hundreds of thousands of people displaced in countries including Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia after the low-pressure system Storm Boris dumped torrential rains on the region for days starting late last week.
Two men, aged 70 and 80, drowned in their homes in northeastern Lower Austria after being trapped by rising floodwater, and confirmed deaths in Poland rose to six.
About 70% of Litovel, about 140 miles east of the Czech capital of Prague, was underwater Monday, while a power plant servicing the country’s third-largest city was forced to shut down and leave residents without heat and hot water.
“Greenpeace is horrified by damages brought by floods across Central and Eastern Europe, claiming lives, leaving homes without power and farmers with ruined fields, after being already ravaged by drought,” said Duff, head of Greenpeace’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change.”
In the U.S., the notion of big polluters being required to pay for damages caused by the climate crisis has recently gained traction, with lawmakers introducing a bill in Congress last week.
In Europe, a “polluter pays” principle is followed for many kinds of pollution, but advocates have called for it to be applied to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
The flooding in Europe comes, as London-based meteorologist Scott Duncan explained on the social media platform X, after “an exceptional summer for the Mediterranean Sea,” with heat records broken—just as scientists have warned this year that record heat in the North Atlantic and other oceans around the globe would mean “a busy hurricane season.”
“Warmer sea surface temperatures allow more moisture to evaporate, like fuel for a storm. The warmer the water, the greater the evaporation,” said Duncan.
Liz Stephens, science lead for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, noted that in Central and Eastern Europe, “climate change is known to be playing a role in increasing the risk of flooding,” with the World Weather Attribution saying in 2021 that disastrous flooding that hit Germany and Belgium was tied to “a rapidly warming climate.”
Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stephens added, “have indicated that we have already observed an upward trend in heavy rainfall, surface water, and river flooding, and climate models show high confidence of further increases into the future.”
“The flooding looks set to be the worst in the region since 2002,” she said. “Lessons will have been learned from previous big European floods, but forecasts for some locations are for flooding of unprecedented magnitude, and history tells us that people are often surprised by the seemingly unimaginable consequences of such events.”
Journalist and climate advocate George Monbiot pointed out on Al Jazeera that storms previously described as “once-in-1,000-year occurrences [are] happening several times now in the past decade. We’re seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events, and unfortunately this is exactly what climate scientists were predicting.”
.@GeorgeMonbiot: "I've seen what were described as once in a 1,000 year occurrences happening several times now in the past decade. We're seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events" pic.twitter.com/wzgntdDpbq
Climate action group Friends of the Earthechoed Greenpeace’s demand to “leave fossil fuels in the ground and instead invest in a green future,” and Duff emphasized that communities across Central and Eastern Europe are far from the only ones “reeling from deadly floods and torrential rains,” with Typhoon Yagi causing flooding and landslides that killed at least 250 people in Southeast Asia in recent days and heavy rains across West and Central Africa leading to floods that killed more than 1,000 people.
“The fossil fuel industry,” said Duff, “is worsening weather extremes everywhere.”
Former Labour Party leader and now Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn on stage to address a march in central London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, July 6, 2024
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on speakers highlighting global conflicts, from Gaza to Manipur, as Jeremy Corbyn’s initiative gathers leading lights of the left to grapple with Britain’s progressive political future
EVERY morning, Lubna Masarwa repeats the same task. She views footage and photographs and decides what her news outlet will publish. Except that these are no ordinary images. These are the pictures coming from Gaza and now the West Bank, and, according to Masarwa, they can be summed up in a single word: horrible.
“I have never witnessed such a thing,” said Masarwa, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the news website Middle East Eye, who has been covering Israel’s genocide in Gaza since it began.
The material she is forced to view includes “mothers grieving near Nasser hospital trying to recognise the bodies of their children,” says Masarwa, children who are often only identifiable by the shoes they were wearing that day or even their teeth. “I would say Israel went mad,” she said.
Masarwa was the opening speaker of a day-long conference last Saturday in London, hosted by the Peace and Justice Project (PJP), an initiative launched in December 2020 by Jeremy Corbyn and his wife, Laura Alvarez. The PJP said Corbyn was designed to be “a political home for the politically homeless.”
More than 1.7 million households plan on keeping their heating off this year, survey reveals
LIVES will be lost, campaigners warned today after a survey revealed that more than 1.7 million households do not plan on turning on their heating this year.
The number of those who said they will keep the heating off in polling for Uswitch is nearly double the 972,000 who said they did not heat their homes last year.
Fifty-five per cent of those blamed the continued rise of the cost of living, while 25 per cent of those over 65 said their decision followed the loss of winter fuel payments.
Another one million households will not turn on the heating until December to keep costs down, according to the poll.
About 43 per cent of households said they will only turn the heating on if they are too cold while 31 per cent will only heat some rooms in their home.
