Cloaked in black and carrying white buckets filled with artificial blood, the group filed in silence to the entrance of London’s Downing Street, behind a troupe of child and teen activists.

Ringing a bell as they walked, the 45 adults — all participants in Extinction Rebellion, a protest movement seeking rapid action to curb global warming — formed an arc facing the British prime minister’s residence and poured out their buckets, turning the surrounding road into a sea of red.

The liquid, they said, symbolized “the blood of our children,” on the hands of politicians who have failed to act on climate change and stem its impacts, from worsening floods and droughts to growing poverty and water and food shortages.

Among those at the protest in March were three members of Christian Climate Action, a small group of retirees and students who say their religious faith is compelling them to take an increasingly active role in trying to stop climate change.

Climate change “is leading to a social collapse. We need to respond in more caring and collective ways,” said Phil Kingston, 83, a Catholic church member from Bristol who took a train to London to participate in the Downing Street demonstration.

As climate change protests pick up in London and around the world, they are drawing an increasingly broad range of protesters, from students following in the footsteps of 16-year-old Swedish “school strike” leader Greta Thunberg to grandparents concerned about the growing risks their grandchildren face.

Religious groups — from Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and other faiths — are among those joining the protests, out of concern, in some cases, about the moral and spiritual implications of human-driven climate change.

Christian Climate Action took shape about six years ago, initially with just a handful of active members from a range of Christian denominations, said Ruth Jarman, 55, one of the group’s original members.

But as it has become involved with Extinction Rebellion — an emerging movement that uses nonviolent protest to demand action on climate change — interest in the Christian action group is growing, especially among younger generations, members say.

“Finding Extinction Rebellion really fitted in with our values so well. It’s very clear on using nonviolence, being motivated by values of love and care rather than anger,” said Jarman, who lives in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire.

Since November, Christian Climate Action activists have disrupted traffic, spray-painted government buildings with political messages and the Extinction Rebellion hourglass symbol, blockaded entrances — and prayed for action, Jarman said.

An Anglican parishioner, she has been arrested five times for those protests — a risk not all Christians are willing to take, she admitted.

But “for me, it’s the first verse of the Bible that hits home: If God created all that is, what does it mean for us to be destroying it?” she asked. “For us to be participating in its destruction is sacrilegious — not something believing Christians should be doing.”

Faith in action

Faith groups, in Britain and around the world, have taken a growing role in pushing action on climate change, with some churches, mosques and temples pulling their investments out of fossil fuels, championing efforts to cut food waste and raising awareness about climate risks.

Last July, the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod, voted to disinvest by 2023 from fossil fuel companies that fail to meet the aims of the Paris climate agreement.

Under that 2015 deal, world governments agreed to hold global average temperature hikes to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Because faith groups around the world control trillions of dollars in assets, such pledges can help drive action in companies that fear losing investment, or push much-needed cash to greener investments.

Experts say religions, which connect with people’s emotions and personal lives, could help mobilize them in the fight against climate change where facts and politics have failed.

Kingston, of Christian Climate Action, points to Laudato Si – Pope Francis’ 2015 papal encyclical that called on the world to unite against climate change impacts, particularly on the poor and powerless – as one of his motivations for taking action.

Most members of Christian Climate Action have a history of campaigning against climate change by writing letters to politicians, doing charity work or walking in marches, Jarman said.

But over time, they saw their efforts produce little action — one reason the group has stepped up its tactics, she said.

“As Christians, we should be prepared to make any sacrifice necessary to serve and protect God’s creation,” Jarman said.

Father Martin Newell, 51, a Catholic priest who works with the Congregation of the Passion, a religious order devoted to serving vulnerable communities, has been committed to activist causes for decades, having previously advocated against nuclear arms and weapons trading.

These days, however, Newell — who lives at Birmingham’s Austin Smith House, a shelter for refugees and asylum seekers — is also working with the Christian Climate Action.

“I realized when someone asked what keeps me up at night [that] I was having nightmares about climate change,” he said.

When the group asked Newell, who has been arrested many times as part of protests, how to get started taking a more active role in climate campaigning, “I thought this is maybe an answer to my prayer,” he said.

The priest has since educated members of the group on how to effectively use civil disobedience tactics and has become an active member of the group.

In late February, Christian Climate Action held a training session in London that featured everything from prayer and discussions about what the Bible says about non-violent action to practice with protest tactics, according to a flier for the event.

At such events, 83-year-old Kingston said he has “gained much clarity about the nuances of non-violent direct action,” including how to best interact with the police and other authorities.

“Being respectful in word and deed to all persons is the essential component,” he said.

Disapproval

Not all of the Christian Climate Action protesters have had the support of their churches, and some say they have faced strong disapproval.

Kingston’s priest, for instance, was “rather horrified” when the parishioner was sent to court in 2016 for criminal damage, stemming from a protest during which Jarman and Newell were also arrested and fined, Kingston said.

The activists had targeted the Department of Energy and Climate Change building in London, to point out that the U.K. government’s action at home on climate change didn’t match its rhetoric at talks leading up to the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“We painted whitewash — it’s from the Bible, it comes from Jesus talking about hypocrisy — on the building, and we painted in black paint, ‘Department for Extreme Climate Change,'” Jarman said.

“Then we kneeled down on the pavement and prayed, and got arrested.”

Kingston subsequently was banned him “from any kind of public face with the parish” by his priest at the time, the activist said.

But he has pushed ahead, contacting other parishioners through his private email and becoming increasingly public with his views.

“I don’t care — the stakes are too high. The church should be much more upfront and brave,” he said.

The protester said he began seeing climate change as a serious threat when his first grandchild was born nearly two decades ago.

He realized that “my grandchildren and all their generations in front of them … are voiceless” despite being likely to face climate change’s worst impacts, he said.

“It’s a justice issue. The upcoming generations need life, and we are creating tremendous suffering” by destabilizing the planet’s climate, he said.

He said having older protesters working alongside young activists in the Extinction Rebellion protests has its particular benefits.

“What we’ve realised is neither the corporations nor the government want to arrest us,” he said. “We are a liability in terms of health.”

The activists say their protests aim to achieve a few things in particular: big cuts in Britain’s climate-changing emissions, more honesty from politicians about climate threats, and the creation of a formal parliamentary “Citizen’s Assembly” to discuss needed changes to climate policy and advise the government.

The assembly is crucial in order to “do what is right rather than what is politically acceptable,” Jarman said.

But the protest movement is having a secondary effect as well, Jarman said, in bringing together people who might not otherwise have met and joined forces.

Mothiur Rahman, a legal strategist who works with Extinction Rebellion, for instance, said protesters who are members of faith groups have asked their churches to house out-of-town participants arriving to take part in a new round of protests set to begin April 15.

“One church has given their support and will have their doors open for us to sleep over in, and I am speaking to a mosque as well,” Rahman added.

Newell said he thinks faith-based protesters have found a solid welcome among more traditional environmental activists, and have a role to play as climate protests grow.

“The people who started Extinction Rebellion, and environmentalists, tend to be more secular. But they understand faith and trusting God and are open to people joining them,” the priest said.

“We appreciate them and they appreciate us,” he said.

 
…

After generations of trawling the same waters, the fishermen on the coast of Tamil Nadu in southeastern India know where to cast a net or park a boat without resorting to signs or GPS maps.

But their customary rights over this common space – a right won by families who have fished it for centuries – are under threat as the demands of modern life threaten age-old livelihoods and their once fertile habitat.

First, families’ land and precious sea access was usurped by factories and ports. Now, their rights are under fresh attack by a newly amended Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) law.

“Governments have treated the coastline as an empty space that economic actors can take over, forgetting that it is common property of coastal villages, towns and cities,” said Kanchi Kohli, a researcher at think tank Center for Policy Research.

“The changes to the law negate the socio-ecological uniqueness of this space and opens it up to mindless real estate development, mass-scale tourism and industry,” she said.

R.L. Srinivasan, who lives in Kaatukuppam – one of half a dozen villages by Ennore Creek near the city of Chennai – is typical of the fishermen under threat.

The Ennore Creek is drained by two seasonal rivers that empty into the Bay of Bengal through a network of canals, wetlands, salt marshes and mangroves, where villagers once harvested salt, caught crabs and filled their nets with fish.

Home to about 300,000 people, the area was protected by state and federal coastal zone laws, which banned construction, reclamation or alteration of the course of the water bodies.

But as Chennai expanded and industries fled the city, the state greenlighted ports, coal-powered thermal plants, and petroleum and chemicals factories, which destroyed the salt pans, polluted the water and killed the fish and the crabs.

“The Creek has been our life, our livelihood for generations,” said Srinivasan.

“Yet for the government, it is just land that can be used as an industrial zone and a dumping ground. The lives and livelihoods of the fishers do not matter,” he said.

Millions at risk

It is a scene playing out in thousands of coastal settlements dotting India’s 7,500-kilometer- (4,660 mile-) shoreline, from remote rural hamlets to bustling urban colonies.

With reduced no-development zones, and laxer rules for real estate and commercial projects, the new CRZ opens up common-use spaces such as beaches, salt marshes, and boat parking areas for tourism and industry, according to analysts.

More than 4 million people in India are estimated to make a living from fishing and related activities. They are often among the nation’s earliest inhabitants, yet have few formal rights over the land or the water on which they depend.

Amid urbanization and industrialization, India’s coasts have become dumping grounds for sewage, garbage and factory waste, even as they fight the rising threat of erosion and flooding.

The Congress party-led government sought to protect the fishing community and preserve their ecology by enacting the CRZ law in 2011.

But several states diluted it, so as to promote tourism and industry and generate jobs. In 2014, a new government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a review of the CRZ.

Despite protests from coast dwellers and environmentalists, a cut in the no-development zones was announced in January, allowing eco-tourism and waste treatment in sensitive areas.

The government says the law was amended to “conserve and protect the unique environment of coastal stretches and marine areas, besides livelihood security to the fisher communities and other local communities in coastal areas.”

But life is about to get much harder for Srinivasan and his fellow anglers, said Pooja Kumar at the advocacy Coastal Resource Center in Chennai.

“Coastal communities are hanging by a thread,” she said. “The communities have fished and lived in these areas for generations, but with no record of their common spaces, their fishing grounds, they are extremely vulnerable.”

Mapping

Their one hope may be the modern mapping methods they once shunned.

The Coastal Resource Center began mapping coastal villages in Tamil Nadu about five years ago, using handheld GPS devices to mark common spaces – including where fishermen parked their boats and dried the catch – then plotting the spots on a map.

These maps are then sent to district and state officials for their approval, so they can be integrated into official maps under the coastal zone management plan.

Kumar and her colleagues have mapped about 75 of Tamil Nadu’s 650 coastal villages so far.

Not all their maps have been integrated with official survey maps, but they have been used to resolve disputes between fishing communities, and helped stop the construction of a road that would have passed through a coastal settlement, she said.

“The mapping gives the community a sense of confidence and security. They are seen as people with rights, rather than as encroachers,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “There is an urgent need to map the coastal commons. It is the most effective tool for assertion of the community rights.”

Of some 677 ongoing Indian land conflicts documented by research organization Land Conflict Watch, nearly a third involve commons, including forests, grazing lands and coasts.

But with no legal protection for the coastal commons, mapping them and having the states recognize them will still not protect them under the new CRZ notification, said Kohli.

The Congress party, in a manifesto released ahead of a general election starting on April 11, has vowed to reverse the dilutions of the CRZ, and preserve the coasts without affecting the livelihoods of fishing communities.

That may be Kaatukuppam’s only hope, after the state in 2017 released a map that did not show most of Ennore Creek. In its place stood land earmarked for a petrochemical park.

“We have seen the crabs disappear, the fish disappear. We had never seen a river disappear,” Srinivasan said. “But it is not just us who are suffering; people should realize this sort of development hurts everyone.”
…

U.S. federal agents have smashed a worldwide medical care scheme that defrauded U.S. taxpayers of more than $1 billion.

The Justice Department said Tuesday 24 people have been charged, including doctors, telemarketers and the heads of companies that provide back, wrist and knee braces.

“This Department of Justice will not tolerate medical professionals and executives who look to line their pockets by cheating our health care programs,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski said Tuesday.

The extensive and complex scheme stretched from the U.S. to call centers in the Philippines and across Latin America.

Telemarketers would phone patients offering them free medical braces. When call centers verified that the patients were covered by Medicare, they were transferred to telemedicine companies, where doctors — who never examined the patients — would prescribe the braces even if there was no medical reason to have one.

The medical equipment companies would bill the government and kickback a portion of the funds to the others in the scam.

The fraud was detected last year when a number of Medicare beneficiaries smelled what sounded like a scam and called a government hotline.

The FBI, Health and Human Services, and Internal Revenue Service investigated.

“The breadth of this nationwide conspiracy should be frightening to all who rely on some form of health care,” IRS investigations chief Don Fort said. “The conspiracy … details broad corruption, massive amounts of greed and systemic flaws in our health care system that were exploited by the defendants.”
…

China and the European Union agreed Tuesday to strengthen their trade relationship, pledging to work toward making it easier for foreign investors to get access to China, the world’s second biggest economy.

In a joint statement, the two sides said they committed to widening market access and eliminating discriminatory requirements for foreign companies and agreed that businesses should not be forced to transfer their technology — issues that foreign investors in China have long complained about.  

EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang discussed the issues at their summit before claiming a breakthrough in their trade relationship.

“Negotiations have been difficult but ultimately fruitful,” Tusk said.” We managed to agree a joint statement which sets the direction for our partnership based on reciprocity.”

The stakes at the annual summit were high, with two-way trade between the EU and China worth around 575 billion euros ($648 billion) annually. The EU is China’s biggest trading partner, while for the EU, only the United States is bigger.

The EU and China also said they reaffirmed the “rules based multilateral trading system” with the World Trade Organization at its core and plan to intensify discussions aimed at beefing up international rules on industrial subsidies.  

China wants a bigger role in the WTO and other international organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. But China’s ample financial support for state-owned companies has been the target of Western trade officials. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom has in the past called out China for “unfair trade practices” including government subsidies intended to give its companies a competitive advantage.

The summit statement shows “China is willing to make some concessions and that’s important,” said Mikko Huotari, deputy director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank. The promises don’t mean China will quickly transform from a state-led economy into a market driven one, but “it’s about getting back on track with regard to reform promises and ambitions that the Chinese themselves have expressed,” he said.  

The leaders discussed China’s policy of forcing foreign companies to turn over intellectual property as a condition for access to its big and growing market — an issue that Washington has also made a centerpiece of its trade dispute with Beijing.

In their closing statement, they said: “Both sides agree that there should not be forced transfer of technology.”

The EU in December stepped up a WTO legal challenge filed in 2018 against China’s forced tech transfers, calling it a major issue affecting European companies.

Li strongly denied that Beijing is behind industrial espionage, saying the government has never called on Chinese companies to infringe intellectual property rights or steal trade secrets.

The EU’s executive Commission said last month in a strategy report that China was a “systemic rival” which preserves its domestic markets for national champions while placing “onerous requirements” on EU companies doing business there.

Li said after the summit that will change.

“We will not treat EU companies, especially those registered in China, with discriminatory policy, including solely foreign-owned companies in China,” he said. “And likewise Chinese companies should not be discriminated against in their operation in the European Union.”

The summit comes two weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed during a visit to Paris to work with European leaders to seek fairer trade rules.

 
…

The first woman to head one of Bangladesh’s biggest garment associations said on Tuesday she would boost female leadership as most factory workers were women, amid scrutiny over safety.

Rubana Huq, 55, is managing director of Mohammadi Group, which owns a string of factories supplying brands like H&M and Primark in Bangladesh, the world’s second largest garment exporter, employing 4 million people.

“I believe that in an industry where more than 80 percent of the workers are women, they should be given a greater chance to voice their interests,” said Huq, the new president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

“Today, the workforce is largely women but people in the managerial levels are mostly men. That needs to change.”

In Bangladesh’s 4,500 factories, women have traditionally had to negotiate with male managers over pay, workplace safety and respect on the job, a fact Huq wants to change.

Her election comes at a time when Bangladesh’s Supreme Court is deciding whether to shut down a factory inspection mechanism which was set up by European fashion labels after the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in 2013, killing 1,100 people.

Huq said that manufacturers needed to strengthen their own monitoring mechanisms to help the government take over from the Bangladesh Accord – signed by about 200 major brands.

The textile magnate, who was elected unopposed, said her decision to represent manufacturers and exporters was a natural extension of her two-decade career in the industry, where she is one of a handful of senior female executives.

“As a woman there is always a hiccup and always a mindset to change,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Dhaka.

“But I’m here now and, being a woman, I believe my attitude towards the challenges faced by women workers will be different and more empathetic.”

Huq said she planned to educate women workers to secure their futures and step up to mid-managerial levels in factories.

“I would like to have a gender-based leadership program that ensures more women are empowered to take on these roles,” said Huq, who is also an award-winning poet and columnist.

She dismissed allegations of labor abuse in the industry as “isolated, negative practices”.

“The fact that 80 percent of our women are freely working and contributing to the economy is a much bigger narrative,” she said.

Labor rights campaigners said that while Huq had broken through the glass ceiling for women, her loyalties – as head of Mohammadi Group – were more to businesses than workers.

“Her election is good but I am not sure how much impact she will have in an organization that is still dominated by men,” said Nazma Akter, a former child worker and founder of Awaj Foundation, which campaigns for labor rights.

“I wish she would look at issues of living wages, health of workers, maternity benefits and violence in factories.”
…

The International Monetary Fund is downgrading its outlook for growth in the United States, Europe, Japan and the overall global economy and points to heightened trade tensions as a key reason.

The IMF expects the world economy to grow 3.3 percent this year, down from 3.6 percent in 2018. That would match 2016 for the weakest year since 2009. In its previous forecast in January, the IMF had predicted that international growth would reach 3.5 percent this year.

 

For the United States, IMF economists downgraded their growth forecast for this year to 2.3 percent from 2.9 percent in 2018.

 

The IMF’s “World Economic Outlook” comes on the eve of meetings in Washington this week of the fund and its sister lending organization, the World Bank.

 

In Europe, the IMF expects the 19 countries that use the euro currency to expand 1.3 percent collectively in 2019, weaker than last year’s 1.8 percent growth or in any year since 2013.

 

Japan is expected to eke out 1 percent growth this year, up from 0.8% in 2018 but slightly down from the fund’s earlier forecast.

 

The IMF foresees the Chinese economy growing 6.3 percent this year, down from 6.6 percent in 2018. But the fund’s latest 2019 outlook was a slight upgrade from the 6.2 percent growth it had forecast for China in January.

 

China’s prospects brightened, the fund said, after President Donald Trump decided to suspend a planned increase in tariffs on $200 billion worth of U.S.-bound Chinese exports.

 

Still, the fund is expressing worries about tensions between the world’s two biggest economies, which have traded tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of products in a fight over China’s aggressive push to supplant American technological supremacy. The prospect of Britain’s messy departure from the European Union also weighs on the global economy.

 

The IMF expects growth in world trade to drop to 3.4 percent this year — a sharp slowdown from the 4 percent it had expected in January and from 3.8 percent trade growth in 2018.

 

 
…