Quantcast
Channel: World news | The Guardian
Viewing all 98599 articles
Browse latest View live

Egyptian cabinet offers to resign

0
0

The Egyptian cabinet has tendered its resignation to the country's ruling military council. There is confusion as to whether the Supreme Council of Armed Forces has accepted. Follow live coverage here

6.36pm: Egypt's ruling generals have opened crisis talks with civilian political leaders, Jack Shenker writes from Cairo, after the entire government tendered its resignation and widespread street violence continued to plunge the country into turmoil:

With under a week to go until nationwide parliamentary elections are due to begin, beleaguered interim prime minister Essam Sharaf announced he and his cabinet were willing to step down in a bid to quell the growing unrest. But the offer – which has yet to be accepted by the military junta – appeared unlikely to appease demonstrators who continued to flock to city centres across the country demanding that the Scaf cede power and hand Egypt over to civilian rule.

In a late-night statement to the nation, the army generals appealed for calm and expressed 'deep regret' for the deaths of protesters. But as fierce fighting between revolutionaries and armed police showed no sign of letting up and video footage of police and army brutality against unarmed demonstrators continued to circulate, their calls for self-restraint seemed destined to fall on deaf ears.

"The Scaf only have two choices – they obey the will of the people, or Egypt burns," said Ramy el-Swissy, a leading member of the April 6th youth movement which is one of several organisations that has announced plans for a 'million-man' occupation of Tahrir today.

A broad coalition of revolutionary movements from across the political spectrum, including leftist, liberal and Islamist organisations, also threw their full weight behind the protests. "We confirm our readiness to face all the forces that aim to abort the revolution, reproduce the old regime, or drag the country into chaos and turn the revolution into a military coup," said a joint statement by 37 groups.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest organised political movement, added its voice to the chorus of discontent, accusing Scaf of contradicting 'all human, religious and patriotic values' with their callousness and warning that the revolution that overthrew former president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year was able to rise again.

"What happened is a heinous crime, expressing a dark deep desire, an attempt to lure faithful patriotic citizens in order to crush them and spread chaos everywhere," said the Brotherhood in a statement. "All this proves that there are certain parties who have no problem burning Egypt, our homeland, and killing young people in order to herd the entire public into blind obedience, into tyranny and corruption and slavery yet again."

The organisation also announced it was temporarily suspending all electoral activities, but unlike many liberal and leftist parties it has yet to cancel its campaign.

That's it for today, thanks for reading. Check our Middle East page for full coverage of the million man march tomorrow.

6.15pm: The Guardian's leader column asks "what happens now?" in Egypt, with elections due to begin a week today.

As Tahrir battled the birdshot and teargas, clear demands emerged: that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) sets a date for relinquishing power, that a civilian interior minister be appointed, and that the army withdraw to its barracks. Long before this weekend's bloody events, the military had squandered the gratitude of the Egyptians in helping them push a dictator out of power. But after these events, SCAF could soon have as big a problem with its legitimacy as the ousted dictator had.

What happens now? All this is days before a complex six-week long election process is due to start. Just as it did 10 months ago, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood had yesterday to play catchup with the demands of the revolution. One statement issued by its Freedom and Justice Party had to be strengthened by another one. The first called for the military council to investigate crimes committed against the protesters and for demonstrators to exercise restraint. A second one demanded that SCAF releases a timetable for handing over power to a civilian authority next year. The last thing that the Brotherhood wants is to postpone elections which will see it returned as the major political force.

Elections should go ahead, however imperfect they are. If SCAF hangs on as the transitional authority, it will take elections to inject badly needed legitimacy to the political process. If SCAF realises after a mass march planned for Tuesday that the game is up and a civilian authority is formed, elections must also take place. One way or another, the democratic demands of the revolution must prevail. Egypt's military rulers are now only standing in their way.

5.50pm: Amnesty International says Egypt's military rulers have "completely failed" to fulfill their promises to protect human rights, according to AP.

In a report released Tuesday, Amnesty accuses Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of adopting oppressive tactics used by the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, including targeting critics, banning critical media coverage and torturing protesters.

4.42pm: This picture from Tahrir Square gives a sense of the scale of the protesters, with Reuters reporting some 20,000 people have packed into the area.

From Reuters:

As midnight approached, about 20,000 people packed Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the anti-Mubarak revolt early this year, and thousands more milled around in surrounding streets.

"The people want the fall of the marshal," they chanted, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak's defence minister for two decades and head of the army council.

4.33pm: The Scaf has urged calm and called for crisis talks with political forces, according to Reuters.

The council voiced its "deep regret for the victims in these painful incidents", state news agency MENA said.

"It called on all sections of the nation to show the greatest degree of self-restraint so that the matter does not lead to more victims and casualties," the agency added.

The military council did not say whether it would accept the resignation of the cabinet, tendered on Sunday. A military source said it was seeking agreement on a new prime minister.

2.57pm: My colleague Jack Shenker is in Cairo and says the number of people in Tahrir square is growing, irrespective of whether cabinet's resignation has been accepted.

News continues to drip out about the government's mass resignation, which as far as we can tell is yet to be accepted by the military council. But either way the crowds in Tahrir Square – who are calling for the downfall of the ruling generals, not a simple personnel change amongst the political leaders operating on their behalf – seem unmoved by the development and as the evening wears on, numbers are still swelling.

"I don't think this crowd cares at all about the government," said Khalid Abdalla, an actor and activist who has been demonstrating in Tahrir. "This is about a battle on the streets in which people are being killed."

The sentiment that this is far too little, far too late, is one shared by most in the square. If Scaf does believe that Sharaf's dismissal will solve this rapidly-escalating crisis then it appears to have severely misjudged the feeling on the street; it appears the only way that a change of government will calm the unrest is if it is accompanied by the departure of Scaf from political power.

A possible compromise could be if a new government of 'national salvation' is appointed, featuring ministers who carry genuine credibility with the demonstrators, and at the same time Scaf announces a concrete date – some have suggested April 2012 – on which it will return to its barracks.

But right now Tahrir is jam-packed and reverberating with the sound of tens of thousands of people chanting with one voice: 'The people want the downfall of the Field Marshal [Scaf head Mohamed Hussein Tantawi]'. As Mubarak found to his cost, once public momentum is building against you, every concession to your critics seems to only galvanise them further.

2.53pm: Egyptian state TV is said to be reporting that the Scaf has not currently accepted the cabinet's resignation.

2.44pm: Egypt's military council is seeking agreement on a new prime minister before it accepts the resignation submitted by the cabinet of prime minister Essam Sharaf, a military source has told Reuters.

"The source said no formal announcement would be made until the ruling military council had agreed on the candidate. He did not provide further details," Reuters reported.

2.31pm: Just before the Egyptian cabinet tendered its resignation the White House had urged restraint to be shown by security forces and protesters.

AP reports that the Obama administration said the eruption of violence in Egypt should not stand in the way of elections and a rapid transition to democracy.

Spokesman Jay Carney said the US is deeply concerned about the violence and is urging restraint on all sides. He says despite the clashes between security forces and protesters, Egypt must proceed with a timely transition to democracy.

2pm: The Egyptian cabinet has tendered its resignation to the ruling military council.

There is some confusion as to whether the resignation has been accepted by ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (Scaf). The move comes amid widening protests against the ruling military in Egypt, with some 33 protesters reported to have been killed in the last three days.

The cabinet said they will run the nation's day-to-day affairs until elections are held at the end of November, however plans for the elections have been thrown into chaos, with several political parties and individual candidates saying they will suspend their campaigns. Protesters are demanding that the military quickly announce a date for the handover of power to a civilian government.

Here's a summary of the day's events so far.

Thirty-three people are reported to have been killed in the violence over the past three days according to morgue officials. The ministry of health said more than 1,500 have been injured in the latest clashes in and around Tahrir Square - the worst bout of violence in Egypt since the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. Witnesses said protesters had been hit by rubber bullets and suffocated with aggressive tear gas. Video has been circulating of police apparently beating protesters, including some lying on the ground. The International Federation for Human Rights accused the policemen of using live ammunition on protesters. Reports indicated that demonstrators were responding by hurling stones and molotov cocktails.

Crowds in Tahrir Square have been growing and clashes continuing as night has fallen in the Egyptian capital. Riot police are continuing to fire teargas and casualties continue to be taken to the field hospital Chants have called for the trial or execution of Scaf head Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

The Revolutionary Youth Movement has called for a one million man march in the capital and across the country tomorrow. Other groups have reportedly echoed the call.

Elections should go ahead as planned at the end of this month, but political leaders will head to Tahrir to 'protect' the protesters, a conference of political parties has said. The stance has provoked a mixed response from the protesters, who are relieved that the formal civilian political arena is finally joining the movement but are frustrated at an apparent unwillingness to confront Scaf head on.

A spokesman for the military authorities said the victims of the violence were "thugs" rather than peaceful protesters. The Scaf general visited Tahrir Square and insisted the council respected the protesters' right to peaceful protest, the New York Times reported.

Bothaina Kamal, Egypt's only female presidential candidate, has reportedly told a journalist that she was sexually assaulted when she was arrested during yesterday's clashes. Sonia Verma, from Canada's Globe and Mail, tweeted that Kamal told her about the assault during a telephone interview.

Foreign secretary William Hague refused to call for Egypt's Scaf authorities to step down now, saying it was important that they oversaw the elections and then transfered power "as quickly as possible" to civilian rule. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Hague said the violence was "of great concern", but that Britain would not be taking sides.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds



Michelle Obama's Nascar boos | Kay Dilday

0
0

The first lady got a mixed reception at a Nascar rally in Miami, but something other than 'redneck racism' was likely behind it

So, according to ABC News, First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were booed at a Nascar rally on Sunday in Miami-Dade, Florida. Well, of course.

Nascar is a good, old southern sport dreamed up by in Florida in the 1930s. It's a sport whose viewing audience is almost entirely made up of white Southerners and the soundtrack is country music and hard rock. Nascar is all red-state – and urban, ivy league-educated, arugula-loving Michelle Obama is all blue-state. So, to some observers, for the African American wife of the first black president to be booed evokes memories of Jim Crow racism and hatred of "uppity negroes". But it may be that another dynamic was at play. The Nascar folk who booed were a discourteous reminder of a more pervasive national ambivalence about strong women and the role they play in politics.

A Nascar rally would be classic Sarah Palin territory: had she strutted on stage in her Levis, toting her hunting rifle, she would have been emphatically cheered as a strong, plain-speaking, all-American woman. But even during the height of her popularity, while Palin's general approval ratings were sky-high, opinion shifted when her fans were asked about her suitability to be president: the majority of Republicans said she was unqualified for the office.

There we have it again, that split attitude. The public's flip from approval to disapproval may be less about the political affiliation of a woman in high office than about the role she plays within it.

In the March 2011 issue of Presidential News Quarterly, researchers reported that the most popular political spouses in the past two decades have been those who had, for most of their lives, performed the most traditional role. Barbara Bush and Laura Bush generated the highest ratings. Laura Bush, a nice, gentle librarian, who, if she had any thoughts, wasn't going to share them with us, heroically managed to hold on to her high rating even as her husband George W's plummeted – thanks to two unpopular wars, his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and a crashing economy.

The original first lady, Martha Washington, was known as Lady Washington, and was treated much like a queen. And for a century and a half, until the 1930s, the first lady's duties were similar to a queen's. She was expected to dress nicely (in clothes by an American designer), lay an impressive table at state functions, and lend a little White House glamour to various functions.

But modern times have created a conundrum for the poor first lady and her husband: most presidential candidates desire and need a shrewd, well-educated spouse; but the office of first lady has not evolved apace. Granted the first lady is not elected by the public, but then again, many important roles in the president's administration: secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, for example, are also "appointments", and not an appointment the public gets a good look at before they vote for a presidential candidate.

Eleanor Roosevelt caused the first blip when her husband took office in 1933. She publicly admitted that she had thoughts independent of her husband's and that she wasn't simply there to be the soft, womanly embodiment of him at official functions. Mrs Roosevelt wrote a newspaper column and hosted a radio show. For this, she was vilified by her opponents, and it's no surprise that Gallup first decided to poll the American public on their opinions of the first lady during Eleanor Roosevelt's tenure. She proved to have been largely an anomaly: after Eleanor, most subsequent first ladies stuck to their hostess duties.

Until Hillary Clinton. Even as an avowed feminist and an independent career woman, Clinton had to change her name, her hairstyle and her whole presentation to please the public as the wife of a presidential candidate. And she still endured huge hostility, especially when she tried to pilot through major healthcare reform during her husband's first term. Now, as secretary of state, she regularly tops lists of the country's most-admired women. But Michelle Obama is also a top choice for most-admired: she finished fourth after Clinton, Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey, according to Gallup's 2010 poll.

I doubt that Michelle Obama was surprised or dismayed by the boos at the Nascar rally: it's not surprising that the national doubtfulness about first ladies and the strong, accomplished women who are coming to hold the role would emerge in boos from some of the Obama administration's fiercest opponents. Michelle Obama holds a law degree from Harvard, a BA from Princeton and was her family's chief wage-earner for many years, first as a lawyer and then as a hospital administrator.

After all, the boos were not unambiguously for Michelle Obama alone: Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president, accompanied Mrs Obama to the rally and shared the stage. A college professor, Mrs Biden is probably the first wife of a vice president to work while in office, teaching at a local community college in the Washington, DC area. They have learned from Hillary Clinton's bruising first-term first lady experience, both choosing safely "non-political" issues to champion while their husbands are in office: Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity her cause, while Jill Biden promotes breast cancer awareness and community colleges.

There may be boos now for Michelle Obama, but if she's a student of history, then she, like former First Lady and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is baking cookies – or pretending to – and biding her time.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Obama threatens veto on Republicans trying to water down deficit cuts

0
0

Democrats and Republicans push blame each other as supercommittee fails to reach agreement after months of talks

Barack Obama stepped up pressure on Republicans to sign up to a deficit reduction deal on Monday, warning that he will deploy his presidential veto to prevent them blocking billions of dollars in automatic spending cuts that are now scheduled to start in 2013.

The cuts to military and domestic spending were triggged by the collapse of the congressional supercommittee set up to reach a compromise on reducing the national deficit.

The 12-member committee announced on Monday that after months of talks it was unable to bridge the deep ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats.

The announcement was delayed until after Wall Street closed but the markets, anticipating the collapse, dropped sharply. The failure is almost certain to hurt a still fragile economy.

The Republicans blamed the failure on the Democrats. Obama, speaking to reporters at the White House, accused the Republicans of being unwilling to give and take, and refusing "to listen to the voice of reason".

Republicans are concerned that the automatic cuts in military spending, amounting to $600bn over 10 years, will severely damage the Pentagon's ability to maintain national security.

The cuts in military spending will be matched by $600bn in domestic spending.

Defence secretary Leon Panetta has described the size of the military cuts as "devastating".

Two Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, issued a joint statement saying: "As every military and civilian defence official has stated, these cuts represent a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and cannot be allowed to occur."

Republicans have hinted that they may be able to find a way around it in the coming year.

But Obama, speaking at the press conference, told them that he was prepared to again try to reach a compromise with them. He said he would not allow them to circumvent the automatic trigger and would veto any such proposals coming from them.

"I will veto any effort to get rid of automatic spending cuts... There will be no easy off ramps on this one," Obama said. It is extremely rare for Obama to threaten to use his veto.

The failure of the supercommittee, made up of six Republicans and six Democrats, had been expected for days. The committee met for a final time on Monday afternoon in a desperate hunt for a last-minute deal but it was too late.

With only hours left to a Monday midnight deadline, the committee issued a joint statement: "After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee's deadline."

The committee had been asked to reduce the country's $15tn deficit by $1.2tn, through spending cuts or tax rises or a combination of both.

The committee, in its statement, expressed disappointment that it had failed in the task. "Despite our inability to bridge the committee's significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve."

It was the third major showdown this year between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the deficit, firstly in the spring with a Republican threat to close down the federal government unless there was agreement on spending cuts and then another threat in the summer not to raise the country's debt ceiling.

Obama, abandoning attempts to work with the Republicans in Congress, has been campaigning in recent months on a platform that the Republicans are obstructionist. The Republicans have countered that Obama is failing to offer leadership in a time of crisis.

The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, blamed the Democrats for the committee's failure. "In the end, an agreement proved impossible not because Republicans were unwilling to compromise, but because Democrats would not accept any proposal that did not expand the size and scope of government or punish job creators."

The deadlock on the supercommittee was blamed by the Democrats on a long-time Republican political lobbyist, Grover Norquist, who leads a campaign against tax rises. Norquist has persuaded Republican members of Congress over the years to sign pledges never to raise taxes. All six Republicans on the committee had done so.

If they had agreed to tax rises, they would be open to charges of reneging on the pledges they gave to Norquist, potentially damaging when they stand for re-election.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Hewlett Packard's turbulent year ends in earnings slump

0
0

Failed attempt in tablet market and ousting of chief executive contribute to computer company's woes

Hewlett Packard's fourth-quarter earnings dropped 91% as the troubled information technology company dealt with the fallout from its failed foray into tablet computers and the ousting of its chief executive.

The computer firm has had a turbulent year that led to the firing of chief executive Leo Apotheker in September. In the fourth quarter, the company made $239m (£153m), or 12 cents a share, on earnings of $32.1bn. In the same quarter a year ago, HP reported earnings of $2.5bn, or $1.10 a share, on revenue of $33.3bn.

The figures were hit by the $2.1bn the company paid for restructuring, mainly affecting its webOS business that powered the ill-fated TouchPad. HP's iPad rival was scrapped in August and the company said it would no longer support its Palm Pre line of smart phones as sales failed to take off.

Despite the disappointments, HP's quarterly results exceeded Wall Street's modest expectations. Revenue from the company's services division grew 1.7%, while its enterprise servers, storage and networking segment notched a 4% revenue decline.

Sales in HP's core PC business fell 1.6%. Notebook revenue fell 4.1%, while desktop revenue was up 0.5%. Revenue at the company's printer unit dropped 10%.

Early this year, the company considered shedding its personal computer business, the world's largest, before deciding in October to hold on to it.

Shares in the company edged up 2.4% to $27.50 in extended trading, after shedding more than 4% to close at $26.86 on the New York stock exchange.

Recently appointed chief executive Meg Whitman said 2012 was a "rebuilding year" for HP.

"We need to get back to the business fundamentals in fiscal 2012, including making prudent investments in the business and driving more consistent execution," she said.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Unique night-flowering orchid found

0
0

The only orchid among 25,000 species, which flowers for only one night, is found near Papua New Guinea

An orchid that unfurls its petals at night and loses its flowers by day has been found on an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

The plant is the only known night-flowering orchid and was collected by botanists on a field trip to New Britain, an island in the Bismarck archipelago.

The flowers of the species, Bulbophyllum nocturnum, are thought to be pollinated by midges and last for only one night, according to a description of the plant published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.

Orchid specialist Ed de Vogel, from the Netherlands, discovered the unusual flowering after he gathered some of the plants from trees in a logging area on the island and returned home to cultivate the orchids at the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden. Most orchids are epiphytes, which means they take root on trees.

The botanist was particularly eager to see the orchid's flowers because it was a member of the Epicrianthes group of orchids. This group contains several species that have bizarre flowers with strange appendages, which often resemble leggy insects, small hairy spiders or intricate sea-creatures.

The appendages are usually attached by thin filaments, which allow them to move erratically in the slightest breeze.

As de Vogel cultivated the orchids, he noticed flower buds appear but instead of opening to reveal their petals, they simply shrivelled up and died. He finally realised what was happening when he took one of the plants home and saw its flowers open around 10pm one night and close again soon after sunrise.

Flowers that open only at night are seen in a small number of plant species, such as the queen of the night cactus, the midnight horror tree and night blooming jasmine. Bulbophyllum nocturnum is the only orchid among 25,000 species that is known to do so. Many orchids are pollinated by moths and other nocturnal insects, but have flowers that remain open during the day.

In 1862, Charles Darwin correctly predicted that the Christmas star orchid, which is endemic to Madagascar, was pollinated by a moth with a 30cm-long proboscis. The moth in question was not discovered until 20 years after his death.

The small orchid has yellow-green sepals that unfurl to reveal tiny petals adorned with dangling, greyish, thick and thin appendages. The flower, which is 2cm wide, has no noticeable smell, though some nocturnal species can time the release of their scents to attract night time pollinating insects.

Writing in the journal, the authors point out the striking resemblance between the flowers' appendages and the fruiting bodies of certain slime moulds found in the same part of the world. The similarity led the botanists to speculate that the orchids might be pollinated by midges that normally feed on slime moulds or small fungi.

André Schuiteman, an orchid specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew said: "This is another reminder that surprising discoveries can still be made. But it is a race against time to find species like this that only occur in primeval tropical forests. As we all know, such forests are disappearing fast."

Botanists at Kew Gardens hope to get a cutting from the orchid in Leiden to cultivate within the next few years. A specimen preserved in alcohol is already held at the site's herbarium.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Retail and food industry improving palm oil sourcing, says WWF

0
0

WWF praises companies such as Cadbury and Unilever for using sustainable palm oil, but says situation is still bad

Supermarkets and food companies are improving how they source palm oil, a key ingredient in half of all packaged foods – but not fast enough to prevent further environmental damage, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The WWF's Palm Oil Buyers' Scorecard, published on Tuesday, rates 132 mainly European companies, 29 of which received full marks, including 15 from UK such as Cadbury, Boots and Waitrose. No company achieved that level in the last scorecard report in 2009. At the bottom of the 2011 list are big retailers like Aldi, Lidl and Edeka from Germany, who refused to answer any questions about their palm oil policies.

"In the UK in particular we see progress," said Adam Harrison, palm oil expert at WWF UK. "Due to several campaigns highlighting the damage caused by the rapid spread of palm plantations, companies see they are under pressure and respond."

But he added: "Although there has been some progress on sustainable palm oil, new commitments are simply not translating fast enough into increased use of certified sustainable palm oil." The report gives Unilever, the world's biggest buyer of palm oil, 8 out of a possible 9. The list of 132 major retailers and consumer goods manufacturers includes some from Australia and Japan for the first time.

According to WWF, palm oil is used in a vast range of foods and toiletries – often just listed as "vegetable oil/fat" in the ingredients. It crops up in everything from bread and ice cream to soap and shampoo.

Palm trees grow in tropical regions, and tracts of tropical forests are often cleared to make room for plantations to meet export markets. In the major palm oil producing regions, Indonesia and Malaysia, it is estimated that almost one-third of forest loss in the past 10 years has been due to the expansion of oil palm.

Environmentalists regard unsustainable palm oil production as a danger not only for orang-utans, elephants, tigers and rhinos in Asia, but also to the climate of the planet as enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are released when forests or peat lands are destroyed. Furthermore, in some cases it has been reported that local people have been displaced from their land.

"Palm oil itself is not the issue," Harrison noted. "The problem is how and where palm oil is produced." To compile the new report, Harrison and his colleagues used publicly available information to examine each company's commitment to, and use of, palm oil certified to the internationally recognised standards of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Set up in 2004, the RSPO requires members not to clear primary forest or any land that is valuable for communities and wildlife. In 2011, more than 5 million tonnes, or 10% of the global palm oil production, was certified to the RSPO standard. However only half of that was sold. The RSPO has been criticised by green groups for not including greenhouse gas emissions as part of its criteria.

The main questions for the WWF assessment were: whether the company is an active member of the RSPO; has made a public commitment to RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil; publishes how much palm oil it uses and publishes how much of that is RSPO-certified.

Palm oil has been used for centuries as a cooking oil in West Africa, before it was discovered that the oil palm grew well in the Far East. Its big bunches of red fruit are rich in oil that is a cheap ingredient in food production.

Consumption is increasing globally and is set to grow from about 50 million tonnes in 2011 to at least 77 million tonnes in 2050, according to WWF. Its use may possibly grow even more if the demand increases for palm oil as a biofuel. As palm yields more oil per hectare of land than soyabeans, rapeseed or sunflowers "any substitute would need more land", says Harrison.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Egypt's government offers to resign as protests grow

0
0

Generals have opened crisis talks with civilian political leaders after widespread violence continued to plunge Egypt into turmoil

Egypt's ruling generals have opened crisis talks with civilian political leaders after the entire government tendered its resignation and widespread street violence continued to plunge the country into turmoil.

At least 33 people have been killed and more than 2,000 injured following a third day of clashes in Cairo and beyond, with confirmation emerging for the first time that security forces have been firing live ammunition at demonstrators.

With under a week to go until nationwide parliamentary elections are due to begin, beleaguered interim prime minister Essam Sharaf announced he and his cabinet were willing to step down in a bid to quell the growing unrest. But the offer – which at midnight on Monday had yet to be accepted by the military junta – appeared unlikely to appease demonstrators who continued to flock to city centres across the country demanding that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) cede power and hand Egypt over to civilian rule.

In a late-night statement to the nation, the army generals appealed for calm and expressed 'deep regret' for the deaths of protesters. But as fierce fighting between revolutionaries and armed police showed no sign of letting up and video footage of police and army brutality against unarmed demonstrators continued to circulate, their calls for self-restraint seemed destined to fall on deaf ears.

"The Scaf only have two choices – they obey the will of the people, or Egypt burns," said Ramy el-Swissy, a leading member of the April 6th youth movement which is one of several organisations that has announced plans for a 'million-man' occupation of Tahrir today.

A broad coalition of revolutionary movements from across the political spectrum, including leftist, liberal and Islamist organisations, also threw their full weight behind the protests. "We confirm our readiness to face all the forces that aim to abort the revolution, reproduce the old regime, or drag the country into chaos and turn the revolution into a military coup," said a joint statement by 37 groups.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest organised political movement, added its voice to the chorus of discontent, accusing Scaf of contradicting 'all human, religious and patriotic values' with their callousness and warning that the revolution that overthrew former president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year was able to rise again.

"What happened is a heinous crime, expressing a dark deep desire, an attempt to lure faithful patriotic citizens in order to crush them and spread chaos everywhere," said the Brotherhood in a statement. "All this proves that there are certain parties who have no problem burning Egypt, our homeland, and killing young people in order to herd the entire public into blind obedience, into tyranny and corruption and slavery yet again."

The organisation also announced it was temporarily suspending all electoral activities, but unlike many liberal and leftist parties it has yet to cancel its campaign.

Earlier in the day a last-ditch effort by the junta to stem the violence by offering concessions to their critics – including the passing of a long-awaited "treachery law" that would bar former members of Hosni Mubarak's now-disbanded ruling party from running in the upcoming elections, which are now less than a week away – appeared only to galvanise resistance, as did the later announcement of Sharaf's proposed resignation.

"The Egyptians have accepted being beaten, arrested and lied to by their political leaders for sixty years, but after everything we went through, we are not going to accept it anymore." said Gamila Ismail, a parliamentary candidate who has now suspended her campaign and joined the protests in central Cairo.

"The message being sent to Scaf by Egypt's youth is: 'shoot me in the eye, burn away my flesh, and then I will go and fix myself up at the field hospital and come straight back to the struggle'," she added. "They used to dream of cars, houses and leaving the country; now they dream of standing in Tahrir. The age of authoritarianism is over, no one can tell the Egyptians what to do anymore."

Despite continued denials by the authorities, evidence has emerged that some police or army units are using live ammunition on protesters.

Researchers from the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights, a Cairo-based human rights organisation, told the Guardian they had confirmation that the bodies of four people killed by live bullets were in the city's main morgue. The victims were all aged between 19 and 27.

William Hague, the British foreign minister, said the violence was of "great concern" but added that the UK would not be taking sides.

The US urged Egypt to go ahead with the elections and called for restraint on all sides. The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said: "The United States continues to believe that these tragic events should not stand in the way of elections." His comments came as clashes continued in the side streets off Tahrir Square, with the frontline between protesters and armed police shifting back and forth throughout the day.

At one point teargas was fired by the security forces into a makeshift field hospital off the central plaza, forcing volunteer doctors and wounded protesters to flee. Nearby mosques and churches opened their doors to the injured, though medics said they were vastly under-resourced and struggling to keep count of the casualties.

Some demonstrators took to writing the contact details of their families on their arms before joining the fray so they can be identified if killed. Meanwhile Tahrir's main holding station for fatalities said it had run out of coffins, and appealed for a fresh supply.

By nightfall Tahrir had become a surreal mix of the festive and the fearful, with singing, drums and the wail of ambulance sirens echoing through the gloom. Sporadic explosions could be heard on the south-west corner of the square, where heavy fighting continued in the side streets around the interior ministry.

Beyond the capital, unrest has spread to almost every major urban centre in the country, including Ismailia on the Suez Canal and the strategically important town of al-Arish in the northern Sinai peninsula. In Egypt's second-largest city, the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, thousands of students took to the streets after the death of a second protester.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Debt supercommittee live: deficit talks close to failure

0
0

• Supercommittee fails to reach deficit reduction deal
• Obama threatens to veto attempts to reverse automatic cuts
• Committee members look to Congress to solve debt issue
• Read the committee's full statement
• Read a summary of all today's activity

Good morning: Trenchant opposition from Republican Senator Jon Kyl has ended hopes of a deal to shrink the US budget deficit by $1.2tn, with the congressional supercommittee reporting that its talks have ended in stalemate – triggering automatic cuts in defence spending.

A detailed account of the supercommittee's failure in the New York Times places the blame on Arizona Senator Jon Kyl:

Democrats felt particularly aggrieved by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Senate Republican, citing him as the main obstacle to an agreement. Democrats spoke of Mr Kyl as if he were an angry father arriving home to realize the children were having a party, and shutting the whole thing down. "While Kyl is in the group, it sure seems that nothing will happen," said a Democrat close to the negotiations.

But Republicans also point the finger at Democratic members making public statements while failing to take part in the committee's deliberations.

But with two days still remaining before the final deadline for a deal on Wednesday night, the admission of failure with time still on the clock seems only to confirm public discontent with Congress.

The accusations and counter-accusations will continue throughout the day as Congress convenes – follow all the action here live, as Republican presidential candidates start to weigh in and attempt to pin the blame on the White House.

10.10am: Reacting to the accusations in the New York Times that he was the deal wrecker, Senator Jon Kyl was quick to appear on Fox News and attempt to deny the charges of obstruction:

Ha, I don't know where they get that. [Members of the supercommittee] have talked throughout this process and a lot of ideas have come up. I hope that there is some sense that all of the members of the committee have worked very, very hard, and I think that's a characterization that would be very unfair for any of the members of the committee.

On the other hand, Kyl also admitted that there was little hope for a deal in the time remaining: "I wouldn't be optimistic. I don't want to create any false hope here."

10.22am: Senator Jon Kyl has been up early, doing the rounds of the TV studios to push back against claims that he derailed the supercommittee.

The Hill reports that Kyl also popped up on business channel CNBC:

Kyl said on CNBC that the real problem was that incentives were aligned for the Democrats to avoid compromise. Failure, Kyle noted, would lead to " the biggest tax hike in the history of the country" when the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013, automatic cuts to "their favorite program, namely national defense," and the campaign advantage that "the president gets to keep his message there's a dysfunctional Congress."

"The incentives probably did not align as we thought they might... once the other side made the calculation that they needed someone to blame because there wasn't time to make the economy better," Kyl said.

10.30am: So with time still remaining, what can we expect today from the supercommittee? All the talk aside, the committee's co-chairs are to issue a statement this afternoon explaining the failure. But don't hold your breath.

10.41am: Democratic supercommittee member John Kerry is also doing the rounds of the TV news channels – and the bloggers at Think Progress notes that Kerry is blaming Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform who badgers Republican candidates into signing a no-tax-increases pledge, for the Republican roadblock on raising revenues to cut the deficit:

Unfortunately, this thing about the Bush tax cuts and the pledge to Grover Norquist keeps coming up. Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. I can't tell you how many times we hear about 'the pledge, the pledge.' Well all of us took a pledge to uphold the Constitution and to full and faithfully and well-execute our duties and I think that requires us to try and reach an agreement.

10.55am: Jon Kyl isn't the only one getting blamed for thr supercommittee fiasco. For those of you not familiar with Grover Norquist, he's a seminal figure on the right of the modern Republican party and has spent two decades getting politicians to sign a pledge to fight any and all tax increases.

The FT details Norquist's influence (if you can get past its paywall) on the supercommittee proceedings:

Senator Patty Murray, the Democrat co-chair of the committee, said Republicans had constantly cited Mr Norquist's 'Taxpayer Protection Pledge' for their refusal to consider higher taxes.

"His name has come up in meetings time and time again," she told CNN, the broadcaster, saying Republicans were "more in thrall" to a conservative lobbyist than the needs of the rest of the country.

Some fellow Republicans are also angry. Alan Simpson, who co-headed a bipartisan deficit commission, said Mr Norquist was either a "megalomaniac" or "egomaniac".

"He ought to run for president, because that will be his platform, 'No new taxes even if your country goes to hell,' " he told 60 Minutes for a programme devoted to Mr Norquist on Sunday.

With perfect timing, CBS's news magazine 60 Minutes did a profile of Norquist and the GOP on Sunday. It's very good.

11.06am: There is to be a joint statement from the supercommittee co-chairs later this afternoon – when exactly we don't know – but the word is that it's contents are all about "smoothing the pillow of a dying creature" according to a source on the Hill.

Now that's a delightful image. The point being, all that's left now is a dignified exit from the funeral.

11.20am: Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent goes nuclear over the supercommittee breakdown:

Here's why the supercommittee is failing, in one sentence: Democrats wanted the rich to pay more in taxes towards deficit reduction, and Republicans wanted the rich to pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction.

Any news outlet that doesn't convey this basic fact to readers and viewers with total clarity is obscuring, rather than illuminating, what actually happened here.

Snappy but is that true? It's not clear that it is, especially since the Republicans would have been happy to have made the cut in the deficit entirely in spending cuts.

11.30am: Larry Sabato, the political guru from the University of Virginia, tweets an acid take on the failure of Congress's supercommittee:

Having achieved next to nothing, this Congress has decided its one obtainable niche in history is the lowest popularity ever – 0%.

12 noon: With the supercommittee dead or dying, attention now moves to the "automatic cuts" to be triggered by the terms of the deal struck by Congress during the debt ceiling showdown in August – which is the reason why we are all here to begin with.

Now some in Congress are talking about undoing the automatic cuts – leading Jared Bernstein, a former economist at the White House, to look at what it means:

Now that the supercommittee seems to have gridlocked, we default to the automatic cuts – the sequester. The fact that these are split evenly between defense and non-defense has some members of Congress talking about "reconfiguring" the deal to take less from defense, and implicitly more from non-defense spending (entitlements are largely exempted from the sequester).

This is pure bait and switch. I'm sorry they don't like the deal they cooked up to get out of the debt-ceiling mess they created. I'm not a big fan either. But the trigger was structured as tough on defense to make it something they'd want to avoid. And let's remember: the $900bn of cuts already on the books came exclusively from the non-defense part of the budget from important programs that are already strained – Head Start, child care, education, infrastructure, R&D and more.

12.18pm: Meanwhile, New York magazine has a blockbuster profile of Arianna Huffington – sample quote: "Huffington, who, on the one hand, serves as a glittery Earth Mother and, on the other, is the world's best bullshit artist" – which includes a hint that she could vote for a Republican candidate in 2012:

Huffington says now that she is disappointed in Obama and could even see herself voting Republican in the next presidential election. "To me," she says, "the issues are more important than the party." She pauses. "Trust me, I realize how hard it is to change the system, but Obama has demonstrated only the fierce urgency of sometime later, and at the same time the middle class is under assault" – she smiles – "which is of course the topic of my last book."

12.36pm: Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney wasted no time in pinning blame for the supercommittee's failure on President Obama:

I find extraordinary that there would be set up a committee with such an important mission as finding a way to provide fiscal sanity in America and with the penalty if that fiscal sanity is not found of a $600 billion cut to our military.

I would have anticipated that the president of the United States would have spent every day and many nights working with members of the Super Committee trying to find a way to bridge the gap, but instead he's been out doing other things – campaigning and blaming and traveling. This is, in my view, inexcusable.

So it's "inexcusable" for Obama to attend an Apec summit – one that was being hosted in the US? Inexcusable to meet with the president of China? According to Mitt, yes.

12.44pm: Is it really all over bar the shouting? Cox Media's Jamie Dupree sees something going on involving supercommittee members:

IT'S NOT DEAD YET: This Super Committee rump group involves both parties; still trying to find a way to a deal

Yikes. Meanwhile, Dupree has many numbers in this post about the effects of budget cuts that will take place automatically if there is indeed no supercommittee deal.

1.08pm: Speaking to the White House press corp just now, press secretary Jay Carney says the Republicans "walked away" from a deal to shrink the deficit.

1.21pm: A new poll on US public opinion and media consumption from Fairleigh Dickinson University finds that watching Fox News appears to bad for you.

According to the poll, which you can read here in pdf format, "people who watch Fox News ... are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news."

Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson, comments:

[T]he results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don't watch any news at all.

In contrast, reading the USA Today or the New York Times appears to make you smarter.

1.40pm: More from Jay Carney's White House press briefing today, after Carney was asked to react to the supercommittee's failure – and specifically why the president and the White House did not become more engaged in the committee's negotiations:

The president at the beginning of the process – at the beginning of the supercommittee process, a committee established by an act of Congress, put forward a comprehensive proposal that went well beyond the $1.2tn mandated by that act and was a balanced approach to deficit reduction and getting our long-term debt under control.

That has been available to the committee since it first started meeting and is available today, with the waning hours left to it to act, as a road map to how you achieve the kind of balanced approach that Americans demand.

This committee was established by an act of Congress. It was comprised of members of Congress. Instead of pointing fingers and playing the blame game, Congress should act, fulfill its responsibility.

As for the sequester, it was designed, again, in this act of Congress, voted on by members of both parties and signed into law by this president, specifically to be onerous, to hold Congress' feet to the fire.

It was designed so that it never came to pass. Because Congress, understanding the consequences of failure, understanding the consequences of inaction, the consequences of being unwilling to take a balanced approach, were so dire.

Now, let me just say that the Congress still has within its capacity to be responsible and act. [T]he sequester doesn't take effect for a year. Congress could still act and has plenty of time to act. And we call on Congress to fulfill its responsibility.

2.05pm: Nobody is happy about the supercommittee failure, even Traxis Partners hedge fund tycoon Barton Biggs, who tells the FT:

I think it's pathetic that they haven't been able to come to a deal. It shows our political system is really dysfunctional. I've been wrong in being too optimistic about the outcome in the US.

When even Wall St billionaires don't like this outcome you know something has gone terribly wrong.

2.30pm: So now there seems to be some kind of super-supercommittee still holding talks today. Lisa Desjardins of CNN reports: "Meeting of 7 members broke up. [Senator Max] Baucus confirmed there's a new tax idea on table."

2.41pm: With the Iowa caucuses just 42 days away, the outcome is still up in the air. Here is the single most interesting analysis of the state of the Republican campaign in Iowa, by Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register:

The size of campaign staffs organizing in Iowa is smaller this election cycle across the board than four years ago.

On the Democrats' side, Barack Obama had 145 paid employees here as of September 2007, while John Edwards had 130 and Hillary Clinton had 117.

For the Republicans, Romney had the biggest team with 67 people. Next were the Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson campaigns, with 12 each.

This cycle, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have the beefiest of the bunch with 11 paid staffers each. Santorum nine; Romney, five; Herman Cain, four; and Newt Gingrich, two. Paul's aides declined to disclose the latest numbers, but he had at least six in September, campaign disclosure reports show.

Competing in caucuses consume a lot of human resources – organising precinct captains, getting supporters to the sites – that outstrip a conventional ballot-based election.

3.03pm: Jay Carney had to deal with an unusual attack on America's fiscal position from the German media during today's White House press briefing:

Question: The US, as far as I know, has the worst debt-to-GDP ratio as the whole eurozone. We are talking about the eurozone, not about the United States. But Congress can't get its act together.

So from the European perspective, it seems that this country is in a bigger mess than Europe. We are not proud where we are. We know that it's slow and not bold and so on, but at least they are doing something. They're deciding something to try to pull us through. And here nothing is happening [inaudible].

Carney: Well, again, I don't think it's helpful to get into which side of the Atlantic handles its problems better or worse.

Hey, why should Europe be the only economy to benefit from German advice?

3.20pm: It's about time that the contrary, silver-lining pieces start hitting the pixels. First out of the gate is Jonathan Chait in New York magazine explaining why the failure of the supercommittee was actually a Good Thing because...

The supercommittee was the way out. It forced Congress to agree to $1.2tn in deficit reduction, or else automatic budget cuts would go into effect. But the key detail was that the budget cuts would not happen until 2013. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling would be lifted through the 2012 election. Between now and then, the two parties can fight over what to do about the automatic budget cuts scheduled to take effect. That's not really the important thing. The important thing is that the debt ceiling is no longer on the table.

I can see the rationale here but the problem is that the automatic cuts are not set in stone. They can be unravalled by Congress and then nothing has changed – except that yes, the Republicans can't try and trip up Obama over the deficit ceiling again.

3.30pm: Rick Perry knows whose fault the supercommittee failure is:

Ultimately, responsibility for this failure lays at President Obama's feet. The whole reason a supercommittee was created was because the President wasn't willing to lead, wasn't willing to even put on paper his plans for cutting spending. It's amazing to what lengths he will go to avoid making tough decisions. And who pays the price for Washington's failure? The American people and our military personnel, who will now be subjected to a half trillion dollars in national defense cuts?

Cheap joke: there were two other people to blame but Perry couldn't remember who they were.

4pm: Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney gets a profile in People magazine – proving that he's moved into the big leagues. In which he admits to trying crack cocaine and ... no, beer and cigarettes. Once. The interview is in the 5 December issue but here's the exciting part:

People: Have you ever had a beer?

Romney: Never had drinks or tobacco. It's a religious thing. I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again.

Let's assume that "wayward teenager" line is part of the RomneyBot 3000's humour software.

4.19pm: Poetic justice, reports AP:

A New York law firm that specializes in foreclosures and was criticised for a Halloween party that mocked the homeless will close, a spokesman said Monday.

Steven J Baum PC, one of the largest-volume mortgage foreclosure firms in New York, filed notice of mass layoffs with the state Department of Labor and local officials, indicating at least a third of its employees would lose their jobs. On Monday, spokesman Earl Wells III confirmed the law firm would close altogether.

While it had been on the radar of federal and state investigators for some time, the Baum firm became the target of widespread public ire last month after The New York Times published pictures from its 2010 Halloween party, which showed people dressed to look homeless and part of the office decorated to resemble a row of foreclosed homes.

One person had a sign around her neck that read: "3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served," apparently mocking the explanation of some homeowners facing foreclosure proceedings. The Times said the pictures were provided by a former employee.

4.33pm: A statement from the supercommittee coming shortly... it's not looking good.

4.48pm: The full statement from the supercommittee co-chairs Senator Patty Murray and Representative Jeb Hensarling reads:

After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee's deadline.

Despite our inability to bridge the committee's significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve. We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee's work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.

We are deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement, but as we approach the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, we want to express our appreciation to every member of this committee, each of whom came into the process committed to achieving a solution that has eluded many groups before us. Most importantly, we want to thank the American people for sharing thoughts and ideas and for providing support and good will as we worked to accomplish this difficult task.

We would also like to thank our committee staff, in particular Staff Director Mark Prater and Deputy Staff Director Sarah Kuehl, as well as each committee member's staff for the tremendous work they contributed to this effort. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr Douglas Elmendorf and Mr Thomas Barthold and their teams at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, respectively, for the technical support they provided to the committee and its members.

So in a reverse of the usual transformation, the supercommittee went into a phone booth and came out as a weakling wearing glasses.

5pm: What happens next? Well, members of Congress get away in good time for Thanksgiving – and cynics might say that's why the admission of failure comes today rather than on Wednesday night. But the Associated Press lays it out in more detail:

But the big federal deficit reductions that are to be triggered by Monday's supercommittee collapse wouldn't kick in until January 2013. And that allows plenty of time for lawmakers to try to rework the cuts or hope that a new post-election cast of characters – possibly a different president – will reverse them.

Congress' defense hawks will be leading the charge, arguing that the debt accord reached by President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans last summer already inflicted enough damage on the military budget. That agreement set in motion some $450 billion in cuts to future Pentagon accounts over the next decade.

The supercommittee's failure to produce a deficit-cutting plan of at least $1.2 trillion after two months of work is supposed to activate the further, automatic cuts, half from domestic programs, half from defense. Combined with the current reductions, the Pentagon would be looking at nearly $1 trillion in cuts to projected spending over 10 years.

5.08pm: In a sign that the automatic cuts might not stick, Republican Representative Howard McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says he's ready to try and roll back the deep cuts now aimed at the military budget:

I will be introducing legislation in the coming days to prevent cuts that will do catastrophic damage to our men and women in uniform and our national security. Our military has already contributed nearly half a trillion to deficit reduction.

5.14pm: Senate majority leader Harry Reid appears to be hanging tough on any attempts to repeal the automatic cuts: "Without a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by at least as much, I will oppose any efforts to change or roll back the sequester."

5.24pm: President Obama is to make a statement to reporters later this evening – 5.45pm ET – in the wake of the supercommittee failure.

5.28pm: My colleague Dominic Rushe points out the minor irony of the supercommittee statement: "we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed" – just not by the current supercommittee.

5.32pm: According to CNBC, ratings agency Standard & Poors has said that the supercommittee failure will not affect the US's credit rating.

5.46pm: This is Matt Wells taking over from Richard Adams.

5.49pm: Obama is now speaking at the White House. He says the "balanced approach" to reducing at the deficit. has broad support, including among economists and the public. "There are too many Republicans in Congress who have refused to listen to the voices of reason," he says.

The position is different from August, Obama adds. The US is not about to default on its deficit. Plans to cut the deficit are already locked in – at least $2.2tn in the next ten years "one way or another". The president says it would be preferable to cut "with a scalpel, not with a hatchet".

To those on Congress who are trying to undo the automatic cuts that kick in, now that the supercommittee has failed: "My message to them is simple: No," he says. Obama says he will veto any attempt to roll back on the sequester. "Congress must get back to work," he says. There are "no easy off ramps," he says.

5.52pm: The key point to stress from Obama's statement is that he will veto any attempt by Congress to undo the automatic cuts that are due to take effect in 2013.

5.53pm: The anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist is on CNN now. He denies he's to blame for the supercommittee's failure, unsurprisingly.

6.10pm: Speaking of Norquist, our correspondent Ewen MacAskill has put together this profile of the man described by Newt Gingrich as "the single most effective conservative activist in the country".

6.14pm: The AFL-CIO, the biggest trade union grouping in the United States, has released its reaction to the failure to reach a deficit deal. No surprise which side its president, Richard Trumka, comes down on.

Republicans on the Super Committee have once again shown that if they can't get their way, they take their marbles and go home. "Getting their way" means making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, letting the top 1% off the hook on deficit reduction. "Getting their way" means driving the economy further into a ditch -- letting Wall Street run amok, refusing to take responsibility for their actions, and blaming everyone else. This, in a nutshell, is how our economy got broken in the first place.

If we want to fix our economy and put America back to work, we have to start focusing on the 99 percent, not the 1%. Now is the time to start investing in infrastructure that puts people to work right away while laying the groundwork for broadly shared prosperity in the long term. And we have to defend and strengthen the Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment, and Medicare benefits that the 99% depend on. The last thing we should do is make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent.

6.31pm: The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox wonders who to blame for the deficit growth and tax cut mania:

The Democrats are not without fault, though honestly, I'm having trouble coming up with something specific beyond how they ceded so much ground to Republicans when Republican ideas were popular. The good news for them (and us!), now, is that Republican ideas aren't popular.

This is Richard Adams again, taking over from Matt Wells.

6.45pm: The Los Angeles Times excellent Washington team has a very good round-up of all the political reaction to the supercommittee's collapse – including this quote from Obama in his statement tonight:

There are still too many Republicans in Congress who have refused to listen to the voices of reason and compromise that are coming from outside of Washington.

Undoubtedly, Obama's most important comment was this one: "I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts." That's quite a line in the sand.

6.50pm: The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill files his main piece on the fallout from the failure of the supercommittee:

Obama, speaking at the press conference, told them that he was prepared to again try to reach a compromise with them. He said he would not allow them to circumvent the automatic trigger and would veto any such proposals coming from them.

"I will veto any effort to get rid of automatic spending cuts... There will be no easy off ramps on this one," Obama said. It is extremely rare for Obama to threaten to use his veto.

The failure of the supercommittee, made up of six Republicans and six Democrats, had been expected for days. The committee met for a final time on Monday afternoon in a desperate hunt for a last-minute deal but it was too late.

7pm: In retrospect it seems that a supercomittee failure was always on the cards, given the lack of a really hard deadline to force Congress into action.

Without any room for bipartisan dealing as a presidential election loomed, the chances of a serious deal was always going to be difficult – and so it proved to be, too difficult.

Here's a summary of the day's events:

The congressional supercommittee empowered to reduce the US federal budget deficit by $1.2tn admitted failure today after weeks of negotiation failed to produce a deal between the Republicans and Democrats on the committee

The supercommittee's co-chairs made a public admission of defeat in a statement on Monday evening, more than two days before the final deadline for the committee was to recommend spending cuts and revenue increases to meet the $1.2tn target

The statement said in part: "After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee's deadline"

Democrats and Republicans traded blame for the supercommittee's failure, with Democrats saying the Republican members were pressured not to allow any significant tax or revenue increases to help close the deficit

The collapse of the supercommittee structure means that automatic spending cuts of $1.2tn will now kick-in, including reductions in military spending, under legislation passed during August's debt ceiling deal

Several members of Congress vowed to rewrite the spending cuts – but in a statement this evening after the supercommittee's failure was made official President Obama vowed to veto any attempts to discard the automatic cuts

The US stock markets fell over the day's trading, with analysts saying the supercommittee's failure was weighing down sentiment. But ratings agency S&P denied that the US credit rating would be downgraded as a result.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds



Syria gunmen wound Turkish pilgrims on bus - video

0
0

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has warned Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, that he cannot stay in power forever through military force



Occupy movement: police brutality – in pictures

0
0

Throughout the US, the Occupy movement has had repeated clashes with police, sparking accusations of heavy-handedness



Syrian security forces clash with military defectors

0
0

More Syrians have been killed a day after the UN human rights chief called on the international community to protect civilians

At least 25 people have been killed in Syria in further clashes between security forces and military defectors, according to an opposition group.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the pre-dawn skirmish in the north-western city of Idlib killed seven soldiers and police officers, as well as five anti-government army defectors and three civilians.

Security forces also killed a civilian in the southern province of Deraa, six in the central region of Homs and three others in areas near Idlib, the activist group said.

The fighting came a day after the UN's human rights chief called on the international community to protect Syrian civilians.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, told an emergency meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva: "In light of the manifest failure of the Syrian authorities to protect their citizens, the international community needs to take urgent and effective measures to protect the Syrian people."

More than 4,000 people have been killed since the pro-democracy uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's hardline regime began in mid-March.

November was the deadliest month of the uprising so far, with at least 950 killed in violent clashes between security forces and opposition groups.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Hermain Cain suspends presidential campaign

0
0

Former pizza magnate tells supporters he made the decision because of the hurt caused by false allegations against him

Beleaguered Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, whose effort to win the White House was rocked by claims of infidelity and sexual harrassment, suspended his campaign on Saturday.

Cain, a black former pizza magnate turned hero of the Tea Party right, told a crowd of supporters in his home base of Atlanta, Georgia, that he had made the decision because of the hurt caused to his family and message by allegations he insisted were false.

"As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching I am suspending my presidential campaign," Cain told the crowd, who had spent several hours gathered outside a building that was to have opened Saturday as Cain's national campaign headquarters.

Though Cain's popularity was already collapsing, the end of this campaign will likely be a blow to Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney, as Cain's remaining supporters are likely to go to another conservative candidate, such as former congressman Newt Gingrich, and not Romney who has a history of taking more liberal positions he has since disavowed.

Cain strenuously denied allegations of sexual misbehaviour that have been made against him and feverishly reported in the press but said they had deeply hurt his family. "It hurts my wife, it hurts my family, it hurts me and it hurts the American people because you have been denied solutions to our problems," he said.

Cain made the decision after a meeting last night with his wife Gloria; the first time the candidate had met his spouse of 43 years in person since the infidelity allegations had emerged. Gloria Cain joined her husband on the stage as Cain made his announcement, smiling and waving at supporters who chanted her name. Cain repeatedly denied that there was any truth to repeated claims of sexual harassment when he was head of the National Restaurant Association and that he had also conducted a 13-year affair with an Atlanta woman. "I am at peace with my God. I am at peace with my wife and she is at peace with me," he said.

The astonishing scene – not least because Cain effectively ended his presidential bid at a ceremony intended to open a huge new headquarters for it – likely puts a permanent full stop to one of the most unusual campaigns of recent years in America politics. His critics have slammed his bid as little more than a book tour masquerading as a run for the presidency. Cain has certainly spent less time developing the "ground operation" in key early states than some other candidates. But what was not in doubt was the excitement that Cain brought to conservative elements of the Republican base desperate to avoid the nomination of frontrunner Mitt Romney. Cain's radical 9-9-9 tax plan became a national talking point and forced some other candidates to consider flat tax schemes themselves. He also wooed audiences with engaging debate performances, his natural charisma and a gift for comic timing. Cain paid an emotional tribute to his supporters in his Atlanta speech. "Cain supporters are not warm weather supporters and I can't thank all of you enough for what you've done," he said. He also gave a typically barnstorming slam of Washington's political culture, which played into his image as a genuine outsider.

That sort of speech showed why he was able to tap into a deep well of Republican anger at government and surge unexpectedly in the polls throughout October. The flow of support saw Cain become a frontrunner in several key states and national polls, triggering a wave of scrutiny and intense focus from the media.

Cain and his campaign appeared deeply unprepared for their moment in the spotlight. First Cain himself made a series of embarrassing gaffes, including a complete mishandling of a question about Libya in which he appeared to struggle with recognising the North African country. But the most serious problems were accusations that arose from Cain's time as the head of the NRA. Several women came forward in a devastating series of revelations to accuse Cain of acting inappropriately towards them. It culminated last week with the appearance of Ginger White, an Atlanta businesswoman who alleged that she had a long sexual affair with Cain. The candidate denied that, though admitted that he knows White and had helped her financially.

Whatever the veracity of the many allegations now flung at Cain, what is certainly true is that they damaged his chances of ever winning the nomination. Cain's plummet from frontrunner to also-ran was as dramatic as his rise. A swath of professional political pundits slammed the amateurishness of his operation and top conservatives abandoned him for other candidates. His support in Iowa collapsed from 23 percent towards the end of October to just eight percent in one recent survey. During his fiery Atlanta speech Cain finished by saying he would still influence politics in the US by endorsing one of his former rivals and also by the creation of a new online organisation, called Cain Solutions, to promote his beliefs. He also admitted that he had made unspecified mistakes in his conduct. "I have made many mistakes in life. Everybody has. I have made mistakes professionally, personally, as a candidate … and I take responsibility for the mistakes that I have made," he said.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Kurt Vonnegut's dark, sad, cruel side is laid bare

0
0

A biography of the author of Slaughterhouse Five undermines his warm, grandfatherly image

A new biography of acclaimed American author Kurt Vonnegut, beloved by fans worldwide for his work's warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom, has shocked many with a portrayal of a bitter, angry man prone to depression and fits of temper.

The book on Vonnegut, who died in 2007, lifts the lid on the writer's private life, revealing a man far removed from the grandfather-like public figure his millions of devotees adored.

And So It Goes was written by Charles Shields, who also wrote a controversial biography of Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird. The book paints a picture of a man who was often distant from his children, cruel to a long-suffering first wife, caught in an unpleasant second marriage and spent much of his later years depressed and angry. "Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes," wrote one reviewer, Wendy Smith, on the Daily Beast website. The New York Times reviewer, Chris Buckley, called Shields's portrayal "sad, often heartbreaking".

Through novels such as The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle and the classic Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's career spanned five decades, often working in the science fiction genre, and catapulted him into the canon of great American writers. His work, while often dealing with tragedy, was famed for espousing humanitarian, even socialist values, and often had a strong anti-war, anti-capitalist feel. It is full of references to the virtues of small-town life, volunteer firefighters and the Midwest, especially his home city of Indianapolis.

Yet Shields's book is unsparing in its portrayal of Vonnegut's dark side. It reveals that the writer – whose experience as a PoW during the firebombing of Dresden scarred his psyche for life – had no qualms about investing in firms that made napalm or indulged in a host of other morally suspect activities. He fell out with friends, editors and relatives and had a shocking temper. In later life he appeared deeply bitter and lonely. In the opening part of the book Shields describes meeting Vonnegut just a few months before his death. He describes Vonnegut asking him to look up his name in a dictionary (it was not there) and then look up Jack Kerouac (it was there). "How about that?" Vonnegut then states with a frown. The chapter of Shields's book dealing with Vonnegut's final 15 years of life is called simply "Waiting to Die".

"Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose. I think that slants this book," said Jerome Klinkowitz, an academic at the University of Northern Iowa and one of the world's leading experts on Vonnegut.

"It is a little naive to be surprised by this," said Gregory Sumner of the University of Detroit Mercy, who recently wrote a book exploring Vonnegut's work, called Unstuck In Time. "Personal relationships were difficult for him. He had a lot of survivor's guilt."

Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses. The ordeal cropped up continually in his work, but most notably formed the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that made Vonnegut famous.

But there was more to it than just coping with such traumatic situations. In later life, despite being hailed by so many as an American genius, Vonnegut felt that the literary establishment never took him seriously. They interpreted his simplistic style, love of science fiction and Midwestern values as being beneath serious study.

The book will do little to dampen enthusiasm for Vonnegut's work. "He's not a relic of the 1960s. His work is vibrant today even posthumously," said Sumner. "Maybe we just expect too much of our heroes."


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Pandas can help on human rights issues, say Lib Dems

0
0

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader says arrival of Chinese pandas at Edinburgh zoo should spur rights debate

The arrival of two pandas at Edinburgh zoo should be used as a chance to engage China over human rights issues, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie has said.

"The pandas have caught the public's imagination. Now is the time to put human rights front and centre of the political debate while people are listening," he said.

"Alex Salmond has been curiously silent over human rights issues. He must tell us what discussions he has had about human rights during his trip. We must make this about more than the cuddly and cute."

Tian Tian and Yang Guang, an eight-year-old breeding pair, will be the first giant pandas to live in the UK for 17 years.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


One in five ballerinas at La Scala is anorexic, leading dancer claims

0
0

Star tells how pressure to achieve physical perfection has left 'many' of her former colleagues unable to become mothers

On the eve of the new season at Milan's La Scala, one of the ballet company's leading lights has dramatically revealed the extent of bulimia and anorexia among ballerinas.

Breaking an unspoken rule never to discuss eating disorders among Italy's elite dance corps, Mariafrancesca Garritano told the Observer that one in five ballerinas that she knew was anorexic and, as a result, many were now unable to have children. "The chance of getting fired has crossed my mind, but I love La Scala, I care about it, and that's why I really hope things can change," said Garritano, 33, who won a fiercely contested place at the company's academy when she was 16.

One of the world's oldest and most prestigious theatres, La Scala opens its new season on Wednesday with Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The event traditionally draws the cream of Italian politics and industry as well as foreign royalty. To launch its 2012 season, the company will take up an invitation to perform at the newly restored Bolshoi in Moscow before returning to Milan in January for Manzotti's ballet Excelsior, which was first premiered at the theatre in 1881 and will star Roberto Bolle in the new season.

But behind the glittering globe- trotting profile of the company, all is not well with the dancers, said Garritano, who has previously told all in a book, The Truth, Please, About Ballet.

Anorexia and bulimia are two of the most common eating disorders. Both are portrayed in dramatic fashion in the film Black Swan, the Oscar-winning ballet psychodrama starring Natalie Portman.

Repeated warnings about pushing young dancers to punish their bodies in the search for physical perfection have so far been ignored in Milan, said Garritano. "When I was training as a teenager, the instructors would call me 'mozzarella' and 'Chinese dumpling' in front of everyone," she recalled. "I reduced my eating so much that my period stopped for a year and a half when I was 16 and 17, and I dropped to 43 kilos [6.8 stone]."

Garritano said that seven out of 10 dancers at the academy had their menstrual cycles stop as they competed to eat less. "I would get by on an apple and a yoghurt a day, relying on adrenaline to make it through rehearsal," she said.

"Some dancers were rushed to hospital to be fed through tubes, others were hit by depression and still need counselling today.

"I still get serious intestinal pains and frequent bone fractures, which I think are linked to dieting."

Girls would also resort to breast reduction operations to keep their slim frames, she said, adding: "They're crazy – I am a woman first, then a ballerina." Garritano claimed that one in five students had become anorexic and a smaller number bulimic, and the same proportion were still suffering, "not just at La Scala, but in the business. And many now cannot have children."

A spokeswoman for La Scala declined to comment about the danger of anorexia at the academy today. Garritano said she that had been told not to discuss it publicly. "But I talk to people coming through the system, and it seems nothing has changed. Too often the teachers are frustrated former ballerinas who do to others what has happened to them.

"Parents believe their daughters are in good hands, and lose touch as the girls start a religious relationship with the practice mirror, their teachers and then the public."

For Garritano, ballet was an escape from an unhappy childhood in Calabria in southern Italy. After her mother died when she was 11, her father took up with a woman with whom he had been having an affair and dispatched his daughter to live with an aunt. It was her tough upbringing, she says, that offered some protection against the pressure of the academy. "My stubbornness saved me from slipping into anorexia – that and my greedy memories of the fried food I ate in Calabria."

Such hard-headedness prompted the young ballerina to rebel against the servile attitude that was expected of dancers. "I couldn't take it in silence when teachers shrieked at us. If you use military training with ballerinas, you get robots, not artists." After entering the company as the top of her class in 1998, Garritano sued La Scala when she thought she was being overlooked for promotion, finally becoming one of 14 solisti this year. "For months I would not dance after speaking out against managers. I have always been outspoken, but I have seen careers held back and others soaring thanks to who you know."

Now, through her book, Garritano is getting the message out to young dancers that the ballet is gruelling but can be a dream life if you can avoid eating disorders. "I wanted to alert the world to this and, thanks to the book, students and mothers are now asking me questions through Facebook.

"All it would take is for more ballet dancers, who are better known than me, to step forward and tell it like it is."


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds



Economic crisis: The pain in Spain

0
0

A million Britons emigrated to Spain in search of the good life. But the economic meltdown has left many with mounting debts. Duncan Campbell meets the expats caught in the "Costa crisis"

There is lunchtime bingo at the Judge's Chambers, beef-burgers at Sunny Jim's. There are piles of the Daily Mail, Sun and Heat magazine for sale at the News Box and the Bankinter is wooing prospective depositors with the come-on: "It's good when a bank speaks the same language as you." This is Orihuela Costa, the town with the largest percentage of British people anywhere in the world outside the United Kingdom.

In the town hall office, flanked by a framed photograph of King Juan Carlos and the flags of Spain and the European Union, sits Bob Houliston, the quietly spoken Geordie whose surprise election this May allowed the party which he helped to form wrest power from the mighty Partido Popular, which had ruled the roost on this stretch of Spain's Costa Blanca since the end of the Franco era.

"Thirty years ago there were just a few trees here," says Houliston, who spent 10 years in the diplomatic service and a further three decades in the European Commission before retiring here with his Spanish wife, Isabel. "Now there are 30,000 people living here. It's been a very radical change."

Benidorm, further north along the coast, may be the most famously transformed fishing village in the world, but it is mainly a tourist destination, while Orihuela Costa caters for those seeking, in a phrase used unselfconsciously by local estate agents, to "live the dream".

An estimated one million Britons now live for all or part of the year in Spain. It is one of the most remarkable European migrations of the last half century. Large-scale population shifts are normally driven by economic factors, whether desperate necessity or a desire for the "better life", but the great British exodus to Spain had different engines. An escape from gloomy old Britain to a less frenzied existence in the sun.

Fifty years ago, such escape routes were available only to well-off Britons, who could buy a villa in the Bahamas or the Côte d'Azur or Tuscany. Cheap flights, a strong pound and a British property market which created almost instant wealth made a fantasy realisable for hundreds of thousands of people of more modest means. Houses in Spain couldn't be built fast enough. Great swathes of the coast and countryside became clustered with urbanisations, instant housing estates thrown up to cater to what seemed to be an endless stream of Britons, Germans and other northern Europeans now able to live the kind of life abroad of which their parents could only have dreamed. Developers, estate agents, builders, had never had it so good.

Three years ago came la crisis – the economic crash – and with it the collapse of the property market. Now estimates of the number of empty, unsold properties in Spain vary between 700,000 and 1.5m. Abandoned, half-finished, ghostly urbanisations abound. Ten years ago, an expat who wanted to return to Britain could easily sell their Spanish property. No longer.

Last week, the Office for National Statistics announced that emigration from Britain last year was at its lowest since 2001, a potent sign of the end of the great British exodus to Spain. In October this year, the National Institute for Statistics in Spain reported that, for the first time in a decade, the number of immigrants leaving the country outnumbered those coming in. Those departing may be mainly Latin Americans, eastern Europeans and a number of Britons thrown out of work by the collapse of the construction industry, and la crisis has brought to a head many of the unspoken issues that the great British immigration – "colonisation", as some Spaniards see it – had left unspoken. Are the British there to stay or are they semi-detached? What la crisis has done is to force expats to decide: do we head home to grey, unwelcoming Britain or do we remain, either as an active, integrated part of Spanish life or as unwilling strangers, as aloof and distant as in the old days of empire?

Around half of Orihuela Costa's 30,000 inhabitants are British, far outnumbering other expats and the Spanish themselves, who make up only about 10% of the population. Many of the expats voted in the local elections in May for Claro (Cerca del Pueblo, Limpio, Activo, Reformista Orihuelo Costa), the party, formed in 2006, which Houliston represents. The key word there is limpio, the Spanish for "clean", which is understood by voters to mean that the party aimed to end the endemic bribery that has defaced Spanish politics on the coast and given such grief to unwary expats who bought illegally built homes. Figures from all the main parties have been involved, although it is the Partido Popular (PP), which this month takes over as the national government, that has harboured some of the most spectacularly corrupt operators, happy to take bribes to facilitate building on agricultural land or without proper planning permission.

"In the past, it hasn't suited the powers that be to have a big expat population on the coast actively engaged and voting," says Houliston. "It was easy for them to say: here's this big population who have come for the sun; well they've got the sun and that's all they need. There was a sense of injustice and a feeling that the only way to get things done was with a new party. The success of Claro was to create a political consensus on the coast. It was a big surprise to the PP when we won."

The intention, he said, was not to create a Little Britain party but one that reflected the local population, so there are Spanish and German members, and one of his coalition partners is a German Green; political meetings are held in three languages. For Houliston, his election and the increasing political involvement of Britons is a hopeful sign against a backdrop when traditionally expats did not bother involving themselves. "This is all part of Europe," he says. "For me, that's the fascinating thing. Think global, act local, as they say."

A couple of hours north in Xalon, there's a different tale to be told. While Houliston and others like him may be hoping to change the way expats relate to their lives in Spain, others are calling it a day and heading home. In Xalon, there's the familiar evidence of a sizeable expat population: a hairdressers called The Cuts, Harry Stafford's fish and chip shop and Bar 23 offering roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a chance to hear "JJ Jones as Neil Diamond". This has been home to Claire Hibberd, who moved from Chesterfield in Derbyshire, but is in the process of packing up, the office of the real estate firm she ran now full of boxes and well-wishers popping in to say goodbye.

"I've had enough," she says. "I'm sick and tired." She is heading back in the wake of a "malicious and slanderous" campaign which has accused her of running a dodgy business and not paying her taxes. Crude anonymous leaflets about her have been stuffed in hundreds of local letter boxes. She is pretty sure who is behind it – another expat, "with balls of steel" – and she is in the process of making a denuncia (official complaint) about him to the local police, but her bags are packed. Such inter-expat feuds are not uncommon. She will miss Spain, which she made her home after her parents – her mother, Elaine, is a former town clerk of Belper – moved there. Her story – arriving full of enthusiasm but departing disillusioned – is not atypical.

"My parents wanted to live abroad," says Hibberd. "They had wanted to go to France, but the Spanish tend to accept you more. I've met some people here who've reinvented themselves on the plane on the way out – they've suddenly become builders or skilled technicians when they were bin-men back in England. Here, British people tend to stick with other British people and you end up in a clique – but that's the worst thing you can do. I have had people say that they meet hostility because they are English, but that tends to be people who don't integrate. And people don't realise that things are not cheaper here," she says. "Unless you're an alcoholic smoker," her partner, Darren, chips in with a smile. Among her clients are others who had hoped to make a go of it, she said, but have called in to say they can no longer pay the rent and are returning to England.

But if there are committed stayers and unhappy goers, there is a third category: those who would like to return to the UK but cannot do so.

Jo Hamilton, a local government worker from Manchester, bored by her job, decided in 2006 that she and her partner would "live the dream" in a place called Los Altos, not far from Orihuela Costa. Housing rip-offs, burglaries, unhelpful police, isolation, problems with other expats and the end of her relationship made it a hellish experience.

"Deep down I was becoming convinced that Spain was full of expats putting on a brave face and accepting the folly of their decision… with the usual British stiff upper lip," she writes in her cautionary tale, A Place in the Currant Bun. "There is no getting away from the fact that there are many unhappy people stuck in Spain who would love to go home but who are unable to owing to lack of available finances. There must be millions of euros tied up in unloved and unwanted Spanish properties."

Paul Rodwell, a tall, genial, multilingual young man, whose previous career was as a hotelier in Chile, Morocco and France ( you can imagine him effortlessly soothing newly arrived guests) is the British consul in Alicante, one of the world's busiest consulates. Almost a third of all Britons in Spain live in this region and last year the consulate dealt with 507 detentions (number one in the world) and helped 460 bereaved families (number two). He has noticed how the economic crisis has affected some expats.

"A lot of our people here are pensioners and they were faced, three or four years ago, with the fall in the value of the pound, so they saw the reduction of their pensions by 20 to 30%," says Rodwell, sitting in his office in a square of palm trees and coffee bars not too far from the seafront. The exact number of Britons in Spain is unclear since some people live only part of the year there and many full-timers have not registered with the padron – the municipal register which allows foreigners to vote and stand in local elections. Rodwell is quite evangelical about getting people on the padron, both as a way of them integrating better and to give the Spanish authorities a more accurate picture of how many there are.

"There is no statistical evidence of people returning home," says Rodwell, who has just been taking part in a Channel 4 documentary about life at the consulate, and could thus be a television star when it is broadcast in the spring. "There have been incidences of people handing over the keys to the house to the bank, which is often the worst thing you can do as they can come after you. Broadly speaking, the Brits are seen as a pretty good bunch, and they contribute a lot to the economy. The vast majority of them are enjoying life. People do really pursue the dream and it's admirable that they have that get up and go, but if they don't do their homework, it can be a nightmare. It's not easy at 40 or 50 to learn Spanish and it's even harder at 60 or 70."

One of his jobs is trying to help people who have been involved in housing scams or disasters, which are legion. "It has a big impact, a horrific situation for some people. There are heart attacks from the stress and we have had some people who are literally homeless." A third of the expat arrests he has to deal with are for domestic violence. "The incidence has increased, which could be a manifestation that people are under stress at home perhaps, with the money not coming in." Amazingly, around a third of those arrested assumed that they would be dealt with by British rather than Spanish law.

One of the problems, he says, is that some expats can drift into life in Spain without thinking too much about it. "People talk about 'emigrating' to Australia or Canada, but they sometimes don't see moving to Spain in quite the same way. They don't realise that they are cutting ties and they will have to deal with insurance and mortgages and money in a foreign language. They think it will all be eating al fresco and fresh fish, but that can wear off pretty quickly."

Spain is in the midst of its own economic catastrophe and its new government will soon be delivering harsh austerity measures to a country already with 20% unemployment. Whether Britons stay or go is the least of their concerns. But, for expats who came for the sun, those chill economic winds mean that the crunch has come. Those expats who are not checking out return flights tend to fall into two categories: those who have come as traditional migrants, young families seeking a different life and – the majority – those who retired to the sun. In the first category are Emma and Alan Lawton and their 13-year-old daughter, Molly, from St Helens, who are now in their sixth year in Spain. They have their own house in Javea and run a successful excavation and demolition business.

"This is home now," says Emma, sitting outside their home beside the swimming pool and the orange tree. "The quality of life is better. We are together more as a family and we have a wider variety of friends – Spanish, German, Swiss, all nationalities. We drink in local Spanish bars, although the first time we went in it was like a scene from a western – silence, everyone looking round. We were a bit of a novelty, trying to crack a market that was local. We got a frosty reception at first and we have had days when we thought about packing it in, but it's never been more than days and, to be honest, I've had more days like that in England. Here, it is more relaxed, it's no pasa nada [don't worry], but it's hard work and it's not all sunbathing and going out drinking."

She says that the expats who have problems were ones who make little effort. "If you go into a builder's merchants and the first thing you say is, 'Do you speak English?' then the barriers go up. Some people arrive with rose-tinted glasses and maybe not much Spanish apart from 'ola' and 'por favor'," says Emma, who also spoke no Spanish when she arrived but now takes part in a project called hablemos, run by the local town hall, to help people integrate better; groups of around 15 or 16 people, half Spanish-, half English-speaking meet weekly to talk in each other's languages.

Alan, who has just been accepted as a local volunteer bombero (firefighter), is also happy they made the jump. "I've never broken a mobile phone out here and in England it would be one a month thrown at the wall," he says, referring to how stressful he found life back home. "But the English have a bad name here. You get people who move out here and put their brains in storage at Alicante airport. They buy a Mercedes convertible and go out five or six nights a week, and a year later the bank has got their house and they've gone back to Britain. And we know of some people who've taken money for a job and then gone back to England without doing it. It's a totally different way of life from England – you don't look at the local news on TV and think, 'Flipping heck, we'd better put some extra locks on the doors.'"

So are they here for the long haul?

"Whether we stay for ever is a difficult question," says Emma. "If the economy improves we could be here for ever. What annoys me about the coverage of Spain in the British media – all those 'homes from hell' – is that it's not just in Spain people have these problems, it's happening everywhere."

While Emma and Alan represent the new wave of expat, George and Pauline Stevenson are part of the large number of retired Britons on the Costas. George was the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent until 2005 and previously the MEP for Staffordshire East. At their home in Benitachell, there is Antony Beevor's history of the Spanish civil war on the table and photos at hand of the Stevensons with Barbara Castle and Michael Foot. When George retired from politics, they decided that they wanted, in Pauline's words, "a new beginning" in Spain. "We didn't want to descend into our dotage," says George. "We wanted to go to a country we had never lived in. When we moved here in 2005, the exchange rate was €1.70 to the £1 and since then it's been down below €1.10. The first bombshell to hit the expats, many of whom depend on their pensions, was a damn near 30% reduction in the value of their pound. For people who arrived before that – they thought it would go on like that for ever."

"There are two kinds of expats," says Pauline, "and there is a very clear distinction between them: there are the retired ones – they'd been teachers or local government workers, doctors – and they had come intending to stay because they'd had holidays here and liked it. But they also keep a place in the UK so that they can use the health service – get their prescription pills and have their knee done. And there are the others. They come to work and they might have got a job and it went pear-shaped. They're like the birds in the summer – they fly off and then come back again. But I think the Spanish are wonderful. I shall die here."

There is no shortage, however, of the disgruntled Englishman abroad. The Daily Mail, that barometer of British peevishness, is the best-selling paper on the Spanish coast. Many of the seven expat English-language weekly newspapers carry regular baleful columns about the hellishness of life in "multicultural, politically correct, health-and-safety" Britain, complete with apocryphal stories of queue-jumping asylum-seekers, while simultaneously reminding readers of the many perils of being an expat. Some of the five expat radio stations carry the same gloomy conversations.

The Euro Weekly News's resident columnist, Leapy Lee, who had a hit record with "Little Arrows" in 1968 but whose career took a tumble after he was jailed over a fracas involving a bloody pub brawl in the company of the late Alan Lake, husband of Diana Dors, is one example. In October, Leapy, who lives in Mallorca, told his readers that the BNP is now "the only party spouting a bit of common sense". Not a few expats talk, completely without irony, of how Britain has been ruined by immigrants who don't bother to learn the language.

The Costa boom is over. The empty houses and urbanisations carry ever-reducing price-tags. For those expats battered by the economic storms when all they sought was a little quiet sun the choices are stark: stay and make the best of it – al-fresco eating and fresh fish included – or head home to an uncertain future in a land that now looks rather less kindly on new arrivals.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Baloji: 'I want to make music that is very African and very modern'

0
0

Congolese-born Belgian rapper Baloji creates a spellbinding mix of old and new sounds with bitingly modern lyrics. They call him 'the sorcerer'…

Cowering under a statue called Belgium Bringing Civilisation to The Congo, one of four golden effigies in the entrance hall of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, near Brussels, there's a sculpture depicting a miserable African native, naked and blatantly "savage" in the estimation of its colonial creator. For a moment before our interview, Baloji, one of the most innovative rappers and video producers to have emerged from Africa in recent years, loiters near this ludicrous pairing, tall and pensive in his two-piece suit of dark blue plaid, peach pink shirt and Puma trainers.

It's a telling trinity: the pompous European "father", the colonised African "son" and Baloji, "the sorcerer" (the meaning of his name in Swahili), standing there all cool and dapper, like the embodiment of a young and ambitious Africa. Baloji is due to start filming his next video, a radical Congolese reworking of the Marvin Gaye song "I'm Going Home", in the vaults of the museum. He's even persuaded the museum to part-fund the filming, a monumental feat in itself. Baloji is a fighter and few other African artists demonstrate such bone-headed tenacity in their battles against indifferent record labels and scoffing managers. "What takes two weeks for Kanye West takes me a year," he says.

Once a member of Starflam, one of Belgium's most successful hip-hop crews, Baloji began to plough his own furrow in 2007, when he released his first solo album, Hotel Impala. In 2010, he was named one of the year's breakthrough acts by the influential DJ Gilles Peterson and earlier this year he joined Damon Albarn's Africa Express. He's currently limbering up for the worldwide release of album number two, Kinshasa Succursale. It's an ambitious attempt to marry rap with a glittering casket of African and African diaspora styles, from mellifluous soukous through funk and ragga to the raw sound of traditional urban Congolese music. Some of the songs on Kinshasa Succursale are reworked versions of tracks on Hotel Impala but most are completely new. It could almost be the Congo's answer to the Beatles' White Album, a favourite of Baloji's. In fact, several tracks, including the otherworldly "Karibu Ya Bintou", which rides an alien riff by Kinshasa's finest, Konono No 1, are unlike anything that has emerged from Africa before.

But it's Baloji's videos that reveal the true extent of the man's creative power. Self-funded, filmed on location in the Congo by the Belgian directors Spike & Jones and cameraman Nicolas Karakatsanis, Baloji's video clips for the songs "Le Jour d'Après" and "Karibu Ya Bintou" are mini-masterpieces that draw power from his fascination with cinema and photography (his cousin Sammy Baloji is a well-known Congolese photographer).

He was born Baloji Tshiani in Lubumbashi, Congo, in 1978, the product of an indiscreet liaison between a rich businessman and a local girl. At the age of three he was sent to live with his stepfamily in Belgium, first in Ostend and then in the grim mining town of Liège. When he was seven his father lost most of his assets in the ethnic war that ravaged the east of Congo and promptly disappeared from his life. "Every day I wondered where he was," Baloji says. "He was my only link with my own blood."

I ask what it would have been like to meet the 10-year-old Baloji? "Horrible," he replies with a rueful laugh. "I distanced myself from my family. I was angry and aggressive. I failed all my tests at school, so they considered me retarded." He began to run with the migrant Sicilian lowlife of the Liege 'hood, getting up to no good. "Worse than that," he adds. "I just had nothing to lose." He ended up in a special school for delinquents run by nuns, but gave up his formal education at the age of 15. Then rap came along and saved him. Thanks to his brothers, who danced professionally with Technotronic (of "Pump Up the Jam" fame), he discovered American and then French hip-hop. Tonton David and the Marseille crew IAm were early influences, teaching him that his flow didn't have to be simplistic. "This was the first time I heard music that talked about people like me and my mates."

His first rap outfit, Les Malfrats Linguistiques ("The Linguistic Hustlers"), morphed into Starflam and Baloji became something of a Belgian hip-hop heartthrob. Meanwhile, living above a legendary record store, Caroline Music, in Liège did wonders for his musical education. "I heard everything… PiL, Kraftwerk, Queens of the Stone Age, the Smiths…"

Despite suffering from the rampant racism of smalltown Belgium – he was almost deported back to the Congo at the age of 20 – Baloji can thank his adoptive country for the eclecticism of his style. Until recently, however, he hated most African music, especially Congolese soukous, the bedrock style of post-independence pan-African pop. "For me, it was the worst music in the world," he says. Nonetheless, when he received a letter from his mother out of the blue, in 2007, his Congolese heritage came back into his life with a vengeance. It inspired Baloji to return to his roots and record an album – a kind of soundtrack without a film – to tell his mother what his life had been like over the past 20 years. That is how Hotel Impala was born.

Baloji went "home" to the Congo later the same year to film the first video and give the record to his mother in person. He met her in a restaurant in Lubumbashi, dressed "like a little prince". But his mother couldn't understand why he wasn't a rich businessman like his father, rather than a struggling musician. The meeting was a disaster. "She was more or less waiting for the dowry she had never been given by my father," Baloji says. "I didn't dare give her the record there and then. I waited until the eve of my departure. We saw each other again this year and, once again, it went badly."

All this family turmoil has not knocked Baloji off course. He's curious, intelligent and more calmly thoughtful than his bad-boy past might lead you to expect. And his purpose seems clear. "I want to make music that is very African and very modern. You have to be proud of who you are. You can sample Bob James or Curtis Mayfield, but it means more when Talib Kweli or Kanye West sample them because that's their heritage. But we Africans also have an interesting heritage, which has richness and a diversity that is huge and under-exploited. We can also go deep into it and make it modern, celebrate its value, just like the Americans."

It'll take a special kind of musician to conjure up that mix of heritage, modernity and blistering lyrical flow, a style that values Africa's past but is also somehow free of it. It'll take a real baloji perhaps; tall, dapper and fearlessly stubborn.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


In Klosters, three weeks before Christmas, only one thing is missing – snow

0
0

One of the favoured haunts of Britain's rich and famous is suffering, like the rest of the Alps, from mild weather. And with a strong Swiss franc, the cost of winter sports is soaring

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Klosters. Everywhere you go the festive season is evident. Fairy lights twinkle in the trees that hug the Swiss ski resort's main shopping street, Bahnhofstrasse. Illuminated Santas can be spied abseiling down the front of the chalets nestling at the foot of the glowering mountains. Wickerwork reindeer graze in shop windows.

And yet something is missing: snow. The only white stuff to be found in the town is of the spray-on variety. Snow shovels and sledges stand idly outside hardware stores waiting forlornly for customers, like the last turkeys in the shop. Snowgear outlets are offering 30% off snowshoes.

"I was five the last time we had a start to a season like this," said Carina, a 31-year-old shopkeeper.

The Ski Club of Great Britain is also struggling for context. "This is an exceptional start to the season," said Vicky Norman, its PR manager. "In our snow records [which stretch back 18 seasons] we cannot see another season when there has been such a mild and dry start."

Up high, the snow cannons are spewing out fake snow, but lower down it melts too quickly to make the artificial option viable. Only two of the resort's five mountains have managed to open and they offer just a few runs. It is a far cry from last year, when Klosters opened for business on 5 November.

"It was the driest November here for 150 years, since records began," conceded Markus Unterfinger, head of communications for the resort. "And we've had the lowest amount of rainfall for a whole autumn since 1957."

The acute absence of snow has given the town a quiet, contemplative air. On Friday afternoon there were no shoppers to be found in its elegant boutiques and jewellery shops. Ski hire staff paced around waiting for customers. The Rolex concession was doing little business.

In the Swiss Ski and Snowboard School, its assistant director, Christian Rogantini, was putting on a brave face. "There is not much snow but the conditions are awesome; the slopes that are open are really well groomed."

Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the next few days were critical. "We had snow in August and a good load in October but it melted away. But if there's no snow for Christmas, then we will have a problem."

This would dismay the estimated 3,000 Britons who visit the picture-perfect resort each winter, exhibiting the sort of loyalty normally only found in migratory birds.

Financier Nat Rothschild has his main residence in the resort. The banking scion has been seen driving around Klosters' twisting roads in a vintage Ferrari with his friend Peter Mandelson.

Famous ski season regulars include Prince Charles and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. Last week Klosters found itself dragged into a class war when Ed Miliband reminded the British public that George Osborne, whose family skiing holidays reportedly cost £11,000, is also a visitor.

If the chancellor ventures to Klosters this winter, it is unlikely that he will be able to leave the cares and concerns of his day job completely behind. Osborne and the world's financiers and CEOs, who meet every year in the neighbouring resort of Davos, will know better than most that it is not just the absence of snow that is keeping people away from Switzerland's slopes at the moment.

Unterfinger concedes that the strength of the Swiss franc, seen by investors as a safe haven during the euro's travails, is also a mounting concern for the hoteliers of Klosters.

"Holidays in Switzerland have become 25% more expensive for people in the EU compared with last year," Unterfinger said. "This will influence the number of people who come to Switzerland. We hope to give good value for money, but if a currency rises by 25%, people will go to other places. We can't reduce our prices."

Figures out last week revealed that Switzerland's economy grew at the slowest pace in more than two years in the third quarter, as companies cut spending and exports slumped, thanks to the strength of the franc.

Between July and September, gross domestic product increased by just 0.2% compared with the previous quarter, which saw a 0.5% rise, according to the state secretariat for economic affairs. More than 10,000 jobs have been axed by Swiss firms since the summer.

Already, the new exchange rate has had a discernible effect in Klosters. The resort, which is popular with hikers and mountain bikers between May and September, saw a 15% decline in the number of summer visitors from the EU. Now, in the run-up to Christmas, Klosters is hitting back, offering free lift passes to visitors who stay in its hotels.

It is a sign of the tough times the Swiss tourist industry is feeling. But it is of little comfort to the town's hoteliers that they are not alone in feeling the pinch. "Austria, France, Italy, Scandinavia – we all face an exceptional weather situation," Unterfinger said.

The upmarket French resort of Val d'Isère, which generally boasts some of the best snow cover in the Alps, has no snow on its lower pistes and has been forced to postpone its prestigious downhill event that traditionally opens the European ski season. Meanwhile, openings of resorts across Andorra have been postponed by at least a week.

The near 1.1 million Britons who venture on to the slopes each year are being advised to head to North America if they want a pre-Christmas skiing break. Resorts from New England to California were already open last weekend.

But this option is unlikely to be too popular with many Britons. Each year only around 40,000 Britons make it over the Atlantic for their skiing. More than 400,000 go to France, while 250,000 opt for Austria and 150,000 plump for Italy. Despite the chancellor's best efforts to publicise the delights of Switzerland, only around 75,000 Britons ski in the country each year.

And it would be wrong to write off Europe's season so early. "There is a lack of snow cover lower down in the Alps but snow is forecast over the coming weeks and this should dramatically improve conditions," said the Ski Club of Great Britain's Vicky Norman.

The message is one of stoicism. People should just hold their nerve. "People get a little bit nervous when we don't have a load of snow in November," Rogantini of Swiss Ski and Snowboard School in Klosters admitted.

Things can change quickly in the Alps. In Klosters yesterday there was optimistic talk of serious amounts of snow coming in. "The long-term forecast says that around 10 or 11 December a weather front is coming in that will bring snow for the next two weeks," Unterfinger said. "After the driest November we could soon have an awful lot of snow."

This would bring welcome relief to resorts across the Alps. Amid increasingly pessimistic talk of a double dip, they need their equivalent of the eurozone's "big bazooka". As the song goes: "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow."


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


The fresh ideas that can help save our world

0
0

Climate change, ageing, joblessness, a healthcare crisis: tomorrow is a tangle of problems. The solution may lie not in politics, but in a 'social innovation' movement that is generating groundbreaking ideas

Gdynia, near Gdansk, does not compare to San Francisco or Shanghai as one of the great urban centres of ideas and invention. But last month it was giving both cities a good run for their money when it came to buzz and intellectual energy.

This former fishing village in Poland, now a city of 250,000 people, was chosen to host the first international winter school in social innovation, which attracted 70 experts from all corners of the globe, including Korea, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Australia and the UK. All were seeking new, creative solutions to the increasingly serious social challenges of our times. Some were looking to solve problems relating to health; others were exercised by the problem of wealth (or rather the lack of it). Youth joblessness was a theme, as was ageing. No profit motive was attached or product pitch involved. This was just people offering ingenuity and services.

The passion for social innovation is not new. But, as the success of the event in Gdynia demonstrated, an exponential rise in interest seems to be taking place, partly because of the impact of the internet and partly because government coffers are running empty and some of the bigger challenges appear intractable. Often, successful innovation means the addition of a new ingredient to what is already familiar. The arrival of television, for example, plus long-distance learning, created the Open University. Add cars to older people in need of a regular lunch, and meals on wheels is born. Hospices, charity shops, the Samaritans, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides are all examples of social innovation that eventually became part of the nation's furniture.

The first three-day summer international school for social innovation was held in 2008 in San Sebastián in the Basque country. It was organised, among others, by the Young Foundation, Cisco and the Social Innovation Exchange, which allows social innovators around the world to exchange ideas. But Gdynia represented the movement's first foray into the winter months.

In a former wartime Messerschmitt factory, now converted into an innovation centre, the group of 70 came together to assess what's coming round the corner in 2015 and how best we can all cope. The immediate impression was that coping would involve the use of a lot of Post-it notes.

Jim Dator, an expert in futurology (who also acknowledges that almost everything foretold is bound to be wrong – rights for robots and paperless offices instantly come to mind) is fond of saying that, for any prediction to come true, it must first sound ridiculous.

Hence, several years ago, when Gorka Espiau, one of the those in Gdynia, and his colleagues at DenokInn, the Basque Social Centre for Innovation in Bilbao, first began to collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a group of videogame designers on a low-cost folding electric car that opens from the front (so a wheelchair-user can roll in), is "driven" via a laptop by a motorist of any age and ability, and can store secrets about the way we behave (for instance, the vehicle can be programmed not to exceed 50mph), the plan probably sounded too daft for words.

Several million euros later, Hiriko, meaning "from the city" in Basque, launches next month, in Berlin, Malmö, Barcelona, San Francisco and Quito in Ecuador (London missed out).

Espiau says that the car is low-cost, around €12,000 and it will be rented out by the hour at a low rate, but whoever wants you parked in their forecourt – supermarket, cinema or optician – also foots the leasing charge. It will be small-scale in production, with factories sited in areas of high unemployment. So in Malmö, Sweden, according to Espiau, there is 90% unemployment among the largest population of Iraqis living outside their home country. Now a number of them will work on Hiriko.

"This isn't just about a car," says Espiau. "This is about bringing together people from very different professions, architecture, videogames, the web, who are driven by the belief that the poorest can be mobile; even the long-term out-of-work can have jobs. Social innovation sometimes means nice people losing money. Hiriko will show we can make social change."

Some of the original attendees of San Sebastián in 2008 were also at this first winter school. They were told by Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the organisation that promotes social innovation in the UK, that the challenges have not changed in the last four years, only their scale.

In many parts of the world, people are living longer, but spending more of their final years in poorer health. Health and social care is eating into national budgets. So how, for instance, will new social media and different services and organisations help to ride to the rescue on a range of issues such as education?

Femi Longe, based in Nigeria, tells us that 10 years ago the country had only 866,000 telephone lines. Now, in a population of 116 million, there are 88 million mobile subscribers – mostly young people. His newly established Co-Creation Hub, independent from government, is working on 16 different ventures. They include apps that will tell citizens about their constitutional rights (Your Rights in Your Pocket), apps to help students with study, and apps to encourage greater transparency and less corruption in the government's budget (BudgeIT).

In Gdynia, we heard how a partnership between food companies Danone and Lubella, supermarket chain Biedrinka, and the Institute of Mother and Child in Warsaw had produced a breakfast porridge offering 25% of a child's daily vitamins and minerals, costing a few pence and cleverly marketed for "supermums of all income groups". Since its launch in 2006, 50 million portions of Mleczny Start (Milky Start) have been sold, 27% to Poland's poorest families. Profit goes back into promotion. "One bright idea doesn't solve the causes of infant malnutrition," said one of the team, "but at least it gives a child a better start."

Simon Tucker, chief executive of the Young Foundation, said: "Social innovation is the only way to build a future we might actually want to live in. Even after the current financial crisis, challenges such as ageing populations and climate change mean we just cannot continue as we are with minor improvements. Social innovation is a more constructive response than protest, more active than trusting in technocrats – we are together taking responsibility for shaping our future and our children's future."

Yvonne Roberts is a fellow of the Young Foundation

Social innovation around the world

Check You Out!

UsCreates, a design company headed by Zoe Stanton and Mary Rose Cook, worked with the Prince's Trust, Empire Cinemas, Birmingham East and North primary care trust and 60 young people, including 30 selected as "youth ambassadors", in Birmingham to devise a campaign to improve testing for chlamydia. It is the most common sexually transmitted infection in young people, affecting one in 12, and has no symptoms.

At Gdynia, Mary Rose explained how the young people tackled the lack of knowledge and stigma. They came up with the slogan Check You Out!, used themselves as the "face" of the campaign; designed orange wrist bands, offered a free cinema screening with a health trainer in the lavatories who rewarded young people who took the urine test with free popcorn and a soft drink, which achieved a 100% testing rate.

The young people also set up a Facebook page – Check You Out! It now has more than 5,000 followers; they entered a film-making competition and designed billboards and postcards using the ambassadors to push home the message that screening matters. The 12-month strategy has won several awards, including the Best of Health Awards 2010.

Hello Sunday Morning

In 2008, Craig Raine, aged 24, who lives in Brisbane, decided to say goodbye to his habitual Sunday morning hangover and try sobriety for a year. "I wanted to know why I drank and what my motivation was to do it and what it would take to influence the way other people looked at [drinking]. Nobody thought I'd last the 12 months," he said. Hello Sunday Morning was born.

It consists of a website, to which people sign up and pledge not to drink for three months. They blog their progress. Research into behaviour change tells us a public pledge reinforces resolve. Raine resumed drinking after 12 months. "It's part of life," he says, "but Hello Sunday Morning is about when it becomes a problem, when you depend upon it psychologically to have certain experiences or fun."

In 2010, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, established the year before, selected Hello Sunday Morning as one of eight projects and schemes chosen from 258 ideas contributed from all over Australia, to fund and support.

Hello Sunday Morning has been hugely popular, especially among younger people. The target this year is for it to reach 10,000 supporters and then become a worldwide movement towards a better drinking culture. "I signed up to HSM," says Brenton Caffin, head of Centre for Social Innovation. "I didn't have a problem with alcohol but I wanted to see if I could do it. It worked for me."

The Kafka Brigade

Originally established in the Netherlands in the 1990s, the Kafka Brigade now has a UK counterpart in Wales. Its aim is to reduce red tape and regulations and bureaucratic dysfunction. Frontline workers, the public, managers and policymakers are all required to take part, to analyse what's wrong and to come up with a solution.

Some solutions are simple. For instance, in 2007 in Amsterdam, 37,000 people were leaving prison only to reoffend and be involved in petty crime, because of homelessness, delays in receiving benefits and unemployment. The Kafka project meant that prisoners begin applying for benefits before their release; are better supported to find jobs; and homeless ex-offenders are a target cohort for special housing support.

The Kafka Brigade UK has also helped to reduce the numbers of young people not in employment education or training (Neets)in Cardiff and Swansea. In 2010, Swansea was recognised as showing one of the two most improved performances in Wales for supporting Neets. A review published this year described the Kafka Brigade contribution as "a valuable process that helped clarify performance indicators, rationalised the action plan and led to individuals and organisations taking more responsibility for reducing the proportion of young people not in employment education or training".

The Kafka Brigade is a partner with the thinktank Kennisland (Knowledgeland), headed by Chris Sigaloff.

The Water Hackathon

The Water Hackathon took place over two days in October simultaneously in Bangalore, Cairo, Kampala, Lima, London, Nairobi, Tel Aviv and Washington DC.

Lack of adequate safe water and sanitation is the world's single largest cause of illness, responsible for more than two million deaths a year. As the global population grows, and demands on natural resources increase, the sustainable management of water is ever more urgent.

Technologists, engineers, programmers, designers, water experts and people with ideas worked together over one weekend to come up with solutions. At the Co-creation Hub in Lagos, represented at the winter school in Gdynia by Femi Longe, a co-founder, 32 people worked together, as part of Random Hacks of Kindness. The group came up with a number of ideas, including mobile phone games to educate Nigerians on the use of water; a mobile system to name and shame companies whose packaging clogs the drainage system the most and a mobile tool to crowdsource (encourage the public to become citizen watchdogs) and track burst pipes and leakages across the system and get them fixed quickly .

The challenge is turning ideas into concrete projects and scaling them up, but companies such as Microsoft and organisations like the World Bank are investing: they see new markets in the global population explosion.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Homophobic bullying: this hate-filled playground taunting must be eradicated | Observer eEditorial

0
0

There's a casual tolerance that is leading to even harsher brutality

The tragedy of 15-year-old Dominic Crouch, driven to suicide last year after playground taunting that he was gay, was revisited last week when his heartbroken father, Roger, was found dead.

Recently named its "hero of the year" by Stonewall, Roger Crouch, 55, had been working to raise awareness of homophobic bullying in the wake of Dom's death. He had become involved in the fledgling charity Diversity Role Models, set up by teacher Suran Dickson. It aims to tackle what has become perhaps the most pervasive form of intimidation in schools today – homophobic bullying – and found demand for its workshops and services outstripping expectations. The legacy of the notorious Clause 28 has left schools skirting round the issue, afraid of having to talk about homosexual sex when in fact the real issue is about respect and identity.

Schoolchildren endure stress and misery as homophobic abuse and name-calling go unnoticed or unpunished. As casual racism and sexism have become increasingly unacceptable, homophobic name-calling is passing into everyday use.

Schoolchildren say being called gay is the worst possible insult that can be thrown at them. The epithet strikes at self-esteem and confidence and not only disrupts kids' education but leaves them angry or despairing, with lasting consequences. For every Dom, driven to an extreme act, there are dozens, if not hundreds, left scarred by homophobia and by the failure of adults to tackle it.

Bullying is an age-old issue that many schools are now taking seriously, but the same has to happen with homophobic name-calling. It needs to be challenged at every airing. And this isn't happening. Instead, casual anti-homosexual remarks or humour are tolerated, making harsher barbed bullying more acceptable.

Homophobic language needs to be struck from usage to protect our children from the despair experienced by the Crouch family. Call it political correctness, but eradicating prejudice saves lives.


guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Viewing all 98599 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images