The limits on Biden’s power to help save the planet

When Joe Biden takes to the stage in Glasgow later to deliver his speech to COP26, you can be sure he will want to underline one thing.

Just as he did at his news conference last night in Rome at the G20, he will set out his green credentials; American leadership on climate change.

He can point to a gargantuan spending bill about to go before Congress, which has an eye-watering $555bn for clean energy credits and incentives. It will be the biggest investment in US history to tackle global warming.

But, but, but – this legislation hasn’t yet been passed because he’s not sure he’s got the votes.

One of the most significant proposals – a programme that would reward power companies for moving away from fossil fuels and penalising those who don’t – was nixed by a Democratic senator from West Virginia coal country, Joe Manchin.

• The odd couple blocking Biden’s climate agenda

The failure to make progress on this legislation has been frustrating as hell for the White House, who wanted to have the measures passed before Air Force One arrived in Italy.

It doesn’t exactly give the president added leverage over his counterparts. How much moral force is there in saying “look what I would do, if I only had the votes..?”

There was something else in the Rome news conference which made my internal ironymeter hit 10, and it perfectly encapsulates the drag imposed on the US president’s green ambitions.

Whilst attempting to show his leadership on climate, Biden was at the same time trying to persuade the OPEC oil producers to increase production, so as to keep petrol prices down for US consumers.

Drivers are up in arms that they’re having to pay over $3 a gallon. Perhaps Biden should organise for them to visit a few British petrol stations to make Americans thank their lucky stars.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,The car is still king in the US

The US is a country where there is an obsession about weather – and it gets a huge amount of it – tornadoes, polar vortexes, hurricanes, eviscerating heatwaves and on and on.

But that is not matched by a similar interest in climate – even though the country has been experiencing the worst wildfires in history, flood- inducing hurricane seasons, freezing temperatures in Texas and on and on.

But this is where I want to widen the lens.

What President Biden is contending with has its own variation for any number of world leaders who were in Rome and will be heading to Glasgow.

There are parliaments, national assemblies and senates which won’t back what their prime minister or president might want. There are electorates who might just punish the politician who pushes for measures that might threaten their jobs, or increase fuel prices.

• What the COP26 climate summit could mean for us all

In the language that came out of the final communique from the G20 there was plenty of recognition of the urgency of keeping climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius; of being “net-zero” by 2050. But the concrete measures to accompany the noble rhetoric? Well they were harder to find in the final document.

Maybe Glasgow will see the world’s leaders stop behaving like politicians and embrace every measure that the climate activists are demanding. But for better or worse, they will be thinking about how easy the measures will be to sell, whether their country is being put at a competitive disadvantage, whether by adopting radical measures they are opting for self-extinction.

A real projection of US power rolled past me in Rome as Joe Biden’s motorcade – complete with 85 vehicles – made its way to St Peter’s Square.

The US is still the most powerful country in the world – and the US president its most powerful man.

But for all that might, he hasn’t been able to strongarm one recalcitrant senator from West Virginia. And there’ll be a lot weaker leaders than him in Glasgow over the next two weeks.

……………………………………………………………

THE global death toll from Covid-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years

It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, Covid-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke

THE global death toll from Covid-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.

Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middle- or high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The US alone has recorded more than 740,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.

‘This is a defining moment in our lifetime,’ said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health. ‘What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don’t get to another 5 million?’

The death toll, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, Covid-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.

The staggering figure is almost certainly an undercount because of limited testing and people dying at home without medical attention, especially in poor parts of the world, such as India.

Hot spots have shifted over the 22 months since the outbreak began, turning different places on the world map red. Now, the virus is pummeling Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, especially where rumours, misinformation and distrust in government have hobbled vaccination efforts. In Ukraine, only 17 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated; in Armenia, only 7 percent.

‘What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries,’ said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health centre at Columbia University. ‘That’s the irony of Covid-19.’

Wealthier nations with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to Covid-19, El-Sadr noted. Poorer countries tend to have larger shares of children, teens and young adults, who are less likely to fall seriously ill from the coronavirus.

India, despite its terrifying delta surge that peaked in early May, now has a much lower reported daily death rate than wealthier Russia, the US or Britain, though there is uncertainty around its figures.

The seeming disconnect between wealth and health is a paradox that disease experts will be pondering for years. But the pattern that is seen on the grand scale, when nations are compared, is different when examined at closer range. Within each wealthy country, when deaths and infections are mapped, poorer neighbourhoods are hit hardest.

In the US, for example, Covid-19 has taken an outsize toll on Black and Hispanic people, who are more likely than white people to live in poverty and have less access to health care.

‘When we get out our microscopes, we see that within countries, the most vulnerable have suffered most,’ Ko said.

Wealth has also played a role in the global vaccination drive, with rich countries accused of locking up supplies. The US and others are already dispensing booster shots at a time when millions across Africa haven’t received a single dose, though the rich countries are also shipping hundreds of millions of shots to the rest of the world.

Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated region, with just 5 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people fully covered.

‘This devastating milestone reminds us that we are failing much of the world,’ UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a written statement. ‘This is a global shame.’

In Kampala, Uganda, Cissy Kagaba lost her 62-year-old mother on Christmas Day and her 76-year-old father days later.

‘Christmas will never be the same for me,’ said Kagaba, an anti-corruption activist in the East African country that has been through multiple lockdowns against the virus and where a curfew remains in place.

The pandemic has united the globe in grief and pushed survivors to the breaking point.

‘Who else is there now? The responsibility is on me. Covid has changed my life,’ said 32-year-old Reena Kesarwani, a mother of two boys, who was left to manage her late husband’s modest hardware store in a village in India.

Her husband, Anand Babu Kesarwani, died at 38 during India’s crushing coronavirus surge earlier this year. It overwhelmed one of the most chronically underfunded public health systems in the world and killed tens of thousands as hospitals ran out of oxygen and medicine.

In Bergamo, Italy, once the site of the West’s first deadly wave, 51-year-old Fabrizio Fidanza was deprived of a final farewell as his 86-year-old father lay dying in the hospital. He is still trying to come to terms with the loss more than a year later.

‘For the last month, I never saw him,’ Fidanza said during a visit to his father’s grave. ‘It was the worst moment. But coming here every week, helps me.’

Today, 92 percent of Bergamo’s eligible population have had at least one shot, the highest vaccination rate in Italy. The chief of medicine at Pope John XXIII Hospital, Dr. Stefano Fagiuoli, said he believes that’s a clear result of the city’s collective trauma, when the wail of ambulances was constant.

In Lake City, Florida, LaTasha Graham, 38, still gets mail almost daily for her 17-year-old daughter, Jo’Keria, who died of COVID-19 in August, days before starting her senior year of high school. The teen, who was buried in her cap and gown, wanted to be a trauma surgeon.

‘I know that she would have made it. I know that she would have been where she wanted to go,’ her mother said.

In Rio de Janeiro, Erika Machado scanned the list of names engraved on a long, undulating sculpture of oxidized steel that stands in Penitencia cemetery as an homage to some of Brazil’s Covid-19 victims. Then she found him: Wagner Machado, her father.

‘My dad was the love of my life, my best friend,’ said Machado, 40, a saleswoman who travelled from Sao Paulo to see her father’s name. ‘He was everything to me.’

……………………………………………………

Zimbabwean ruling party endorses Mnangagwa as presidential candidate for 2023 elections

According to the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper, the party’s acting spokesperson Mike Bimha said the decision to endorse Mnangagwa was unanimous

ZIMBABWE’S ruling ZANU-PF party has endorsed president Emmerson Mnangagwa as the party’s presidential candidate for the 2023 elections.

Mnangagwa’s candidacy was endorsed by all the party wings after considering the work he had undertaken to develop the country since winning the 2018 harmonized elections.

The endorsement was made at the party’s annual conference which ended Saturday in the town of Bindura, about 60 km north of Harare.

According to the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper, the party’s acting spokesperson Mike Bimha said the decision to endorse Mnangagwa was unanimous.

‘I want to advise you that all the organs and wings of the party have endorsed President Mnangagwa (as the 2023 presidential candidate). This was the main resolution,’ Bimha told the newspaper after the meeting.

Bimha said the conference resolved to re-energize the party in preparation for the 2023 elections.

The party also undertook to discipline members who engaged in violence and other vices such as corruption and abuse of office.

……………………………………………………

Igor Kirillov: TV man known as the face of the USSR dies at 89

Igor Kirillov – the man known as the face and voice of the USSR for three decades – has died in Russia aged 89.

Kirillov was Soviet TV’s chief newsreader and announcer.

With his trademark delivery – unhurried and calm – he informed viewers of the first sputnik in space, and delivered the communiqués of the Communist Party.

He also anchored all major Soviet set-piece events: from Moscow’s Red Square parades to communist congresses. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Soviet Union timeline

Positive stories dominated Soviet news bulletins. Every year, to images of combine harvesters advancing through the fields, Igor Kirillov would declare the grain harvest a triumph.

But did he believe it?

“For me the hardest thing of all was to believe what I was reading out,” Igor Kirillov told me in an interview in 2011.

“Deep down I knew that the texts contained half-truths. But as a newsreader you had to convince yourself it was the complete truth. And I did. I persuaded myself that we really were building communism. That life really would get better. Any doubts I had I managed to overcome. If I hadn’t then I wouldn’t have been able to do my job.”

The news wasn’t always good.

In the 1980s Soviet leaders got into the nasty habit of dying in rapid succession. It was a sombre Igor Kirillov who informed the country of their passing.

It happened so often, in fact, that it sparked this famous Soviet joke: Igor Kirillov goes on air in a black tie and announces: “Comrades, you’re going to laugh, but another irreplaceable leader needs replacing.”

He had trained as an actor. So how did he break into television?

Journalists ‘read too fast’

“At the job interview, I played the guitar and sang,” he told me. “Then they asked me to read something out. Luckily the night before I’d memorised a copy of the newspaper Pravda. So I recited that, right off the top of my head. Afterwards as I was leaving the building, the chief stopped me. ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘You’ve got the job and you’re on air in two hours’.”

The communist newscaster had other jobs, too. He presented Soviet TV’s version of Top of the Pops. It was a little more Lenin than Paul McCartney.

In 1985 he became a global chart-topper, with a little help from Sting, whose hit song Russians kicks off with Igor Kirillov’s voice reading the news.

By the late 1980s television news was changing around the world. Journalists were replacing professional announcers as newsreaders. The USSR was no exception. Soviet TV revamped its nightly news. In came reporters… out went the “dyktory”.

In 1990, during a study year in Moscow, I interviewed Igor Kirillov for a university project. The Soviet Union’s most famous announcer was having a difficult time.

“I read the news for 20 two years on the nightly news Vremya,” he told me. “Now they’ve decided not to use ‘diktory’. There’s a condescending, disdainful attitude now towards announcers.”

He thought that journalists who became anchors delivered the news too fast.

“Russians don’t like fast talking. They have their own way of conversing: in a calm, unhurried, thoughtful way.

……………………………………………………

European Union Delegation affirms commitment to African Court

The European Union Delegation to the African Union has affirmed its commitment to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights stressing that the EU has been a long-time partner to the Court.

The EU has not only been a partner of the African Court, but also committed to other members of the African Human Rights system and the African Governance Architecture (AGA) at large.

“This sustained collaboration with the African Court has proven a positive one for all of us, and the EU is committed to keep engaging alongside the Court and AGA to foster democratic governance and promote and protect Human Rights on the continent,” Mr Alban Biaussat, Policy and Programme Manager-Democratic Governance and Human Rights EU Delegation to the AU.

Mr Biaussat stated at a three-day African Court Media Training for Senior Editors and Journalists in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and noted that, the EU currently supported the AGA via a dedicated 25 million Euros programme which notably directly provided grant funding and complementary needs-based technical assistance the Court.

He said this support specifically aimed at encouraging AU Member States to implement the various AGA-related norms, decisions and recommendations; at raising awareness of the Court’s mandate among African citizens.

It also seeks to encourage collaboration and synergies with other AGA organs and other with regional institutions and civil society organisations across Africa; and to strengthen the Court’s internal capacity, notably on communication.

“We all place great expectations in the capacity of professional media to contribute to inform the African people of the important and difficult work of the African Court, and thus help it achieve its ambitious independent mandate,” he said.

Ms Sophia Gallina, Head of GIZ Implemented Programme Strengthening Good Governance and Human Rights in Africa-AGA on her part noted that the African Court’s relentless and continuous efforts towards the creation of a special pool of skillful and knowledge-based journalists willing to publicize its work in the protection of human rights is highly commendable.

In this era where fake news and disinformation are threatening democracy and contributing to citizen’s dwindling confidence in the justice systems, the role of the traditional media cannot be over emphasized.

She noted that the proliferation of social media platforms notwithstanding, media Senior Editors and Journalists, more than ever, have the fundamental role to continue informing and educating the public about human rights, including; duties and responsibilities, and existing redress mechanisms.

“Specifically, the functioning of Courts, including the African Court, is incomplete if citizens have no knowledge of rule of law or existing redress mechanisms for human rights violations and abuses.

“This underscores the critical importance of this collaboration between the African Court and media, undertaking this training to purposively build the capacity of media practitioners on the Court’s work, facilitating exchange of experience and develop a cohort of senior journalists/editors who can act as future mentors for younger journalists interested in the work of the Court and human rights,” she noted.

Ms Gallina noted: “As the African Court marks its 15th anniversary this year, this is also a moment for all of us to reflect on the successes and challenges the court has faced so far and recommit ourselves to supporting the work of the Court.

“Informed and focused publicity on the work of the African Court will go a long way in ensuring its independence and enhancing the implementation of its judgements at all levels”.

…………………………………………………………