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The Original Sound of Cumbia 1948-79 – review

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(Soundway)

Most DJs bitten by a musical bug simply buy up every available record of the genre that's fixated them. Infected by cumbia fever, Britain's Will "Quantic" Holland decamped to Colombia, learned the accordion, the music's defining instrument, and formed his own band. This two-CD compilation is a further result of his grand obsession. Its 55 tracks delve into the roots of cumbia's weezing accordions and shuffling rhythms on Colombia's ragged northern coast, following its elevation into a national music with musicians such as Curro Fuentes and Anibal Velasquez. With sharp packaging and lots of obscurities, it's a magnificent cumbiapedia.

Rating: 4/5


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Face to face with Radovan Karadzic

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Along with an ITN film crew, Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy uncovered the terrifying truth of Serbian-run concentration camps in the Bosnian war. While former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic stands trial at The Hague, Vulliamy is called as a witness – and finds himself cross-examined in a private, close encounter with the man accused of masterminding genocide

The white curtain behind the pane of reinforced glass is raised, and there he is on the other side, not four feet away: wearing a grey jacket and purple tie with a pin attached showing the crest of a double-headed eagle and crossed Cyrillic Cs that stand for "Samo sloga Srbina spasava" – "Only unity saves the Serbs".

It is a tight fit, in the depths of the war crimes tribunal building in The Hague, in the tiny holding cell and visitors' room. On the other side of the thick pane of bulletproof glass is Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the worst slaughter to blight Europe since the Third Reich, thereafter the world's most wanted fugitive – and now on trial in The Hague. We speak through holes in the glass that he is squeezed against. His American lawyer, Peter Robinson, sits next to him.

On my side of the glass, I share a table with Ann Sutherland, a prosecuting trial attorney for the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), due to lead my evidence against Karadzic the next day before the judges, as well as another member of Karadzic's defence team.

This is an interview requested by Karadzic before I give official testimony the following day in open court. Ironically, when the witness unit's call came out of the blue in August 2011, saying that "the defence" had requested an interview, I was driving through pluvial mist up a mountain track in Bosnia to attend the consecration of a small monument to mark a remote mass grave: a crevice into which the bodies of 124 men had been dropped and concealed – a secret well kept by the Serbs for years. The men had been prisoners in concentration camps at Omarska and Keraterm in north-west Bosnia. They had been moved on the very day I arrived, and uncovered the camps along with an ITN crew – 5 August 1992 – to the forest above a hamlet called Hrastova Glavica. Once there, they were taken off buses in groups of three. They were given a last cigarette and shot one by one, their corpses dropped down the cranny in the rock and into the void, to be found and exhumed 15 years later.

I was in The Hague primarily to testify against the man on whose authority I had visited those camps that day: Dr Karadzic. I had also agreed to be interviewed by him – partly out of confusion at the witness unit's phone call that misty day, and partly on the basis that a prosecution witness should be seen by the court to oblige the defence in its requests. And, of course, I was as curious as I was nervous. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the sheer surreality of this encounter.

Karadzic's lawyer, Robinson, began proceedings in the holding cell by saying that, as Karadzic was tired after a day in court, he would ask the initial questions, and have me recall the details of a meeting between myself, the ITN crew and Karadzic two days before we walked through the gates of the Omarska camp. I recounted the strange road to Karadzic's doorstep that summer, four months into Bosnia's carnage, which had begun in April 1992 when the Bosnian Serbs unleashed a hurricane of violence against non-Serbs, carving out an ethnically "pure" swath of territory. In late July 1992, Karadzic appeared on ITN's evening news during yet another fruitless "peace conference" in London, to discuss the slaughter in Bosnia. Karadzic had been questioned about reports of atrocities in concentration camps published in that morning's Guardian. He retorted that they were false, and challenged the paper and ITN to come and see for themselves. I left for Belgrade the next day.

After a delay of several days (while, I now know, the camps were prepared for evacuation and the murder of many inmates), I met Karadzic, outside his headquarters in the Bosnian Serb capital, Pale, at lunchtime on 3 August. He had a weak handshake for someone so reportedly fearsome. Karadzic assured us we would see Omarska. It was, he said, "an investigation centre", while another camp, Trnopolje, was a place where people had come of their own accord – "displaced because their villages had been burned down". We spoke, too, about the camps where Serbs were being held on the other side by Muslim and Croat authorities. There was talk, too, of Serbian history, and its people's long and "celestial" struggle.

We were then passed seamlessly down the chain of command: delivered first into the hands of Karadzic's deputy president, Nikola Koljevic, an Anglophile professor who kept quoting Shakespeare. Koljevic escorted us as far as the largest Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka, where we were passed on to a Major Milutinovic, who drove us past the incinerated and deserted Bosnian Muslim town of Kozarac to Prijedor, from where the camps were administered. There, we met with the "crisis staff", led by Milomir Stakic and his deputy Milan Kovacevic. And from there we proceeded with the Prijedor police chief and camp commander Zeljko Mejakic through the gates of Omarska, to behold men in various states of shocking decay emerging from a great hangar, being drilled across a yard and into a canteen, where they wolfed down watery bean stew like famished dogs. "I don't want to tell any lies," said a man called Dzemal Paratusic, "but I cannot tell the truth. Thank you for coming." (Paratusic survived, and now lives in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.)

We were denied access to the rest of the camp despite Karadzic's guarantee, because, explained our hosts: "We have our orders … you can do this and this and that, but not that." And we were bundled out of Omarska and taken to Trnopolje camp, where we found, behind barbed wire, the remarkable sight of men, some skeletal, who had arrived from yet another camp – Keraterm – that morning. There, they said, there had been a terrible massacre one night, of 150 men in a hangar. One prisoner, Fikret Alic, said he had been assigned to loading the bodies on trucks, but had been unable to do so. We left having seen little, but enough to know that a dark horror of vast but inestimable dimensions was unfolding around Prijedor.

The war dragged on another three years, Karadzic's hand eagerly clasped by British and other diplomats beneath the chandeliers of London, Paris and Geneva as he outmanoeuvred them, basked in their friendship and played with their impotence and cynicism, from one abortive peace plan to the next, while the killing on the ground continued. As war ended, in 1995, Karadzic was indicted for genocide and several counts of persecution and crimes against humanity; those same diplomats now baying for his capture.

With time, the awful truth about the camps emerged. Mass graves were uncovered, the bereaved located, and testimony at this tribunal laid bare Omarska's and Trnopolje's secrets: mass murder, and torture, beating, rape, prior to enforced deportation (I had accompanied one of the convoys). The trials at the Hague followed that chain of command down which we had been passed, in reverse: first, Dusko Tadic, a parish-pump killer and torturer who roamed the camps at large; then groups of guards, then Kovacevic, then Stakic – among many others. Koljevic shot himself in 1997. Now here was Karadzic.

For 13 years Karadzic was variously protected by both Serbia and his own Bosnian Serb fiefdom, and by sections of the same international community that were supposedly hunting him. The European Union made his delivery to The Hague a condition for Serbia's consideration for membership and he was arrested in the summer of 2008 – a wild-haired practitioner of alternative herbal medicine hiding behind a false name and a beard, among friends in Belgrade. During my own search for him for the Observer, I had met and drunk with his entourage, a wild and eccentric bunch who compared his writing to Joyce and Dostoyevsky. Nerma Jelacic, now spokesperson for the tribunal in The Hague, and I had been harangued in my rental car as we reached the mountains in which Karadzic had been sheltered above the town of Foca.

But now I sit opposite him – a man charged with "personal" and "superior" criminal responsibility for genocide, extermination, persecution, murder, deportation, unlawful attacks on civilians, violence "the primary purpose of which is to spread terror". In short, he is – allegedly – one of the most proficient mass-murderers of the second half of the 20th century. The prosecutions are roughly divided into three sections: the siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1995; atrocities and ethnic cleansing across the municipalities of Bosnia in that same period, and the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

This investigation at The Hague – the cases against Karadzic and his military counterpart General Ratko Mladic – has been ongoing for 18 years.

On the other side of the bulletproof glass, Karadzic rouses himself. He is courteous, almost jovial, though not quite endearing.

He asks: "Did you get the impression I was accessible" during the war? On that day, yes, certainly. But after finding the camps, I had not been granted permission to travel in his territory. I tell him that "someone dear to you" had withheld authorisation – referring to his daughter Sonja, who ran the press office in Pale.

His initial line of questioning concerns the Omarska camp itself. Did I know it was a "temporary investigation centre" for suspected Muslim fighters? Yes, I know of this claim, I reply. Did I know that 59% of the prisoners in Omarska were sent to a camp for prisoners of war, and 41% were "released to Trnopolje"? No I didn't, until we found the camp.

Did I investigate camps in which Serbian prisoners had been detained? Yes, I did, I reply. Within days of finding Omarska, I was heading for the town of Capljina, and revealed the camp nearby, called Dretelj, run by a Croat-Muslim militia called HOS.

Then, after an hour and a quarter, the "interview" reaches its intended climax. Karadzic produces an old revisionist chestnut of an argument, which claimed that ITN and I had fabricated our reports about the camp at Trnopolje, and that the pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire were those of refugees free to come and go. There was no point in going through it all again: this tired notion advanced by a "media expert", Thomas Deichmann, five years after we found the camp, had been attempted and quashed by successive defendants convicted at successive trials, and had been the subject of a civil court action in London between ITN and the theory's British champion, Living Marxism magazine, in 2000, with the jury finding soundly for ITN.

This revisionist accusation was also endorsed in the late 1990s by British "intellectuals", and has been raised again recently by the distinguished linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. Now Karadzic gives it a whirl: he plays a video of recut Bosnian Serb TV material to make his point. I reply that I was convinced then, and remain convinced, that the men in those pictures were prisoners arrived from Omarska and Keraterm, under guard, and that the camps were real.

I don't sleep that night before my appearance as a witness for the prosecution. I hate doing this; it is disturbing, tremulous, humbling and formidable in its way. As I enter the courtroom the next day I exchange a nod of greeting with Karadzic, who puts on his headphones, raises his eyebrows and makes a facial gesture towards his computer screen, as though to say, "Let's get to it", with gladiatorial fraternity.

On the bench are four judges, with Korean Judge O-Gon Kwon presiding. Ann Sutherland submits evidence from a previous trial, that of Milomir Stakic – sentenced to life, reduced to 40 years on appeal – and outlines the meeting with Karadzic and the discovery of the camps, illustrated with ITN's footage. Of Omarska, in an interview after our discovery of the camp, Karadzic says: "We have 13 prisons and the prison in Omarska is the worst one." Karadzic boasts he could close Omarska "even in two days" if the Muslim side agreed to a prisoner exchange.

In Omarska, there is the film of us trying to see the camp properly – quarters in which we now know thousands of men were crammed, and from which they were called for torture and mass execution – on Karadzic's authority; and being denied access. And now the judges turn to the man who allegedly gave those orders, that he might begin his cross-examination of the witness. Karadzic cuts to the quick: "Do you think that you managed to retain your objectivity?" I try to explain something to the judges: that in the past I have misused the word "objectivity" when I mean "neutrality". "When something is fact-specific, I remain objective," I say, but "I do not attempt to try to be neutral. I'm not neutral between the camp guards and the prisoners, between the raped women and the rapists … I can't in all honesty sit here in court and say I am or want to be neutral over this kind of violence."

Karadzic challenges my use of the word "racialist" to describe his programme – the Muslims of Bosnia are "Serbs who converted to Islam, and that is what Lord [David] Owen thinks as well,", he says. I reply that "the inmates in the camps were either Bosnian Muslims or Croats, and the people running them were Bosnian Serbs … and where I come from, if one self-defined ethnicity seeks to obliterate or clear the territory of all members of another ethnicity and to obliterate any memory of them, that is racialism."

There follows questioning that amounts almost to a general chat about politics: how both Serbs and Croats were, says Karadzic "in favour of a decentralised Bosnia consisting of three entities whereas the Muslim side wanted to have a unitary Bosnia". I agreed with his analysis, but couldn't resist an observation that "there's a jump between the policy and mass murder". Judge Kwon kindly puts an end to this meandering discussion; time for the first break. Then back into the arena. There is no gladiatorial camaraderie from Karadzic this time, as we re-enter the court; his face has hardened, his eyes steeled. And his voice too. Do I remember that Karadzic accepted some of the peace plans? Yes, I remember "endless plans, treaties, none of which amounted to very much on the ground. The killing carried on." Do I know about the "fighting" around Prijedor? My initial article from the camps quotes a prisoner who had been involved. I say that what resistance there was had been subjugated by the time we arrived – this discourse continues a good while.

Then he asks about Omarska, quoting my article: "There was no visible evidence of serious violence, let alone systematic extermination." I reply that we were trying to get into the hangar "where we had suspicions that appalling things were taking place. Hindsight has shown that they were". "How do you know?" asked Karadzic. "I've heard from scores of people who were in Omarska that there was widespread and systematic killing... The tribunal's own record over the years would, I think, suffice."

Karadzic questions the veracity of a quote from a boy talking about a massacre of 200 men in the Keraterm camp. I reply that: "He got the number wrong, but the massacre did take place." Then Karadzic insists: "If I told you, Mr Vulliamy, that none of this is true, and that all those who said anything about killings saw a single killing of a person who was mentally disturbed, would you believe me or would you believe them? … It seems you choose to believe things which are detrimental to the Serbs quite easily."

A single killing? I have to let this sink in. Does he really believe this? "I don't choose to believe things that are detrimental to one side or the other. I don't believe that only one person was killed in Omarska and Keraterm put together … I do believe that very many more than one single mentally disturbed person was killed … Sorry, with respect, I have to say that if you tell me it is only one, I don't believe you, sir. Nothing personal … And the detriment to the Serbs is irrelevant. That's not how I measure these things."

"With all due respect," retorts Karadzic, "it would be relevant if it were true. However, I told you that they all saw a single killing. They all discussed killings, but only saw one." Then we move on to Trnopolje. In my initial report, says Karadzic rightly, I said that Trnopolje could not be called a concentration camp, but I have since changed my mind. Judge Baird, sitting on the end of the bench, asks for clarification.

I try to explain that in the immediate aftermath of our discovery, I thought the invocation of the Holocaust by much of the mass media was not useful to our coverage, and use of the term "concentration camp" encouraged it. But that on reflection "I have decided," I told the bench, "after consultation with people at the Holocaust museum and survivors [of the Holocaust] to use the term very much with reference to its proper definition which comes from the Boer war in South Africa. It's fair to say that Trnopolje was exactly that [a concentration camp], where thousands of civilians were concentrated prior to enforced deportation and death."

Karadzic pushes his theme. Did I know civilians had been "evacuated from a combat zone" to Trnopolje? "That was not deportation … this was evacuation … based on requests made by these persons". I reply that I had been on a deportation convoy "of people who [had] told me something different … that soldiers and policemen had come around to their houses and given them ultimata to leave … The people on the convoy that I travelled with were leaving anything but voluntarily." On the same route four nights later, "large numbers of people were taken off the buses and executed on Mount Vlasic, known to this tribunal as the Vlasic massacre".

By now Karadzic's tone is harsh, combative. He refers again to the accusation that ITN and I somehow "staged" the camp at Trnopolje. Karadzic plays a section of Bosnian Serb TV making a film about us. "Our thesis [is]," he says, "that the fence around the building tools is what we saw … You, in your turn, contest that, right?" "Yes I do. This thesis, as you call it, was advanced in 1996 or 1997, we heard nothing about it between 1992 and that year from you or anyone else … Those men were detained and under guard." And on we go: "Do you see the wheelbarrows?" "I didn't notice them at the time, there were other things to look at … I'm saying that my description of them as prisoners had been proved accurate over and over again."

Karadzic produces the famous picture of the skeletal Fikret Alic behind the barbed-wire fence. "How can you be so certain that this is not just the way he normally looks?" "I know that's not how he normally looks … I met him in Slovenia the following spring, and he was of normal build." "Are you saying that within two months his condition deteriorated so much that he was on the verge of extinction?" "Yes … perhaps the conditions in Keraterm were so appalling that his condition had deteriorated in two months." "Did you see him half naked when you saw him in Ljubljana?" "No, he was clothed".

Karadzic questions my use of the term "mass murder". "Did you establish it yourself, or did you hear it from others and believe it?" "I had met hundreds if not scores of people who have survived the camps, and hundreds if not scores of people bereaved by the camps." "Do you believe that people were also killed in combat?" "Yes, I do, without doubt."

Karadzic, justifiably, finds some of the sillier things I have written about him. The first is a headline in a Bosnian magazine: "I live for the day when I'm going to take the stand in The Hague against Karadzic". He asks whether this makes me an impartial witness against him. I don't recall if I had said that or not, but I answer: "No disrespect, I have not lived for this day."

There's another article, even more embarrassing, in which I called Karadzic a "tin-pot tyrant" with a "cocksure swagger". "Do you have any proof that I was a tyrant?" he asks. I concede that he was, indeed, elected on his own territory, though not across Bosnia. And: "Forgive the cocksure swagger," I reply, "You did have one at the time. The language is a little strong, I'll admit." Throughout the exchange, Karadzic pursues his theme of my being "anti-Serb". "The Serbs consider you highly partial, most partial, isn't that right?" To which I reply: "Well if so, that's unfortunate. I am, as I tried to explain when we were talking about neutrality, highly partial about extreme violence. I'm not highly partial about any race of people or ethnicity or whatever. In fact, I'm highly partial against racialism. So I'm not anti-Serb, I'm anti what was done in the name, tragically, of Serbia".

Later, I stress that I took "this allegation of anti-Serbian sentiment extremely seriously" and had "proceeded immediately to investigate camps with Serbian prisoners … and I made it my business to do so in the interests of impartiality, and partiality over the practice of putting people into camps". Judge Morrison intervened: "As you know, Dr Karadzic … it isn't the Serbian people who are indicted in this case, nor the Serbian state. It's you, and you need to concentrate on that reality." To which Karadzic replies: "Thank you, Excellency. However, as things stand, I have been indicted … for everything that every crook did on the ground. I am trying to prove that I had nothing to do with the system whatsoever."

In his parting remarks, Karadzic insists that my descriptions of the terrible state of prisoners in Omarska were made only after President George H Bush had expressed his horror at our discovery. I reply that my original story described the inmates as "horribly thin, raw-boned, some almost cadaverous…"

I can see what Karadzic is driving at: I was glory-hunting, and cranked it up in order to give interviews on radio and win awards. This hurts, and I explain that I care not a damn about giving interviews or winning prizes, and: "Do I wish history had never had Omarska in it? Yes." Complimenting my initial report from the camps, Karadzic adds, at an intense pitch, that "the rest is nothing but a big story, and I'm really sorry that you put yourself in that position and that you were finally proclaimed an anti-Serb". This is searing stuff, and Judge Kwon rules it "necessary comment. Unless [he turns to me] you wish to comment on that." Which I do: "Just to say that I have nothing against the Serbian people whatsoever, my complaint is against what was done in their name."

The following week, I watch another witness facing Karadzic – a doctor whom I had met the day we entered the camps in Trnopolje. Idriz Merdzanic had tried his best to run a "medical centre" in the camp, treating beaten prisoners and raped girls with whatever medicines he could scavenge from surrounding houses. He had been transported to Trnopolje after attempting to treat the wounded, included a badly injured girl of 13, as the Serbs "cleansed" the town of Kozarac, near Prijedor. On the day we visited the camps, he gave ITN an extraordinary interview, on a knife-edge between what he wanted to say and what he felt he could say and live – much of it with a roll of the eyes.

The doctor was ITN's only inmate witness when it sued and defeated Living Marxism at the high court in London over its thesis that Trnopolje was a lie. When I asked the doctor how he felt about those who followed Karadzic's cue in saying reports of the camp were fabricated, he replied: "It's hard to explain my feelings. I have no words for this behaviour. On one hand, we are trying to survive what happened to us, on the other we have these people telling us that it is a lie, that it did not happen. It is hard enough to find words to describe the camps and what happened, but there are no words to describe what these people do."

For a book I am writing, I had visited Merdzanic this summer at home with his family in Kiel, northern Germany. Now working as a surgeon, he said: "I report what I have seen to The Hague, but I never relive it. We do not talk about it, it's a defence mechanism, we lock it away. Everyone has their way of coping, and the experiences are different. Everyone in their own way tries to deal with their own experience of their contact with that hell."

"It is with us all the time," his wife, Amira, added (both her parents were murdered in Prijedor), "and it will be with us all the time until the end of the line. What we do to survive is to keep the door closed."

When the tribunal was established by the UN security council in 1993, its mandate was "to bring to justice those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991". There was an additional charge: "And thus contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace in the region." This second is an ambitious claim for a court of law, and begs the questions: what has been achieved, and what next, when the trials of Karadzic and Mladic are over?

The mandate is a statement of contrition as well as ambition. For three long, bloody years, Bosnia's war was arguably one of the worst failures of diplomacy the UN has ever endured, along with its mishandling of the genocide in Rwanda, where it also established a tribunal. In its diplomacy, the UN did little more than appease – and often encourage – the pogrom Karadzic is accused of masterminding. UN "protection force" troops stood haplessly by as the slaughter continued, and their commander, General Bernard Janvier, took lunch with Mladic three days before the Srebrenica massacre, which Mladic and Karadzic are accused of ordering; 8,000 men and boys were executed after Dutch UN troops evicted much of the UN-declared "safe area's" population from their compound and looked on as the Serbs separated out males from females, for brazenly obvious motives.

And there is a thread between these origins and what has become a weariness with the tribunal's work on the ground, and among the victims themselves. After Karadzic's arrest in 2008, the streets of Bosnian cities were lined with honking cars, but after that of Ratko Mladic last year, there was no such celebration. The chief prosecutor at The Hague, Serge Brammertz, echoed the wider brief when he said: "These victims have endured unimaginable horrors – including the genocide in Srebrenica – and redress for their suffering is long overdue … We believe that it can have a positive impact on reconciliation in the region." While Sabaheta Fejzic, who lost her son and husband in the Srebrenica massacre, says: "I am not that happy. I was disappointed so many times by the work of the Hague tribunal."

Certainly, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has become part of a burgeoning industry of war crimes trials – and a boon to those who would defend war criminals. One British defence lawyer, who had worked on two of the trials, was reported to me as making up to $100,000 a month advising and defending those accused of war crimes around the world. The practice of "fee-splitting" between lavishly paid defence counsel and their criminal clients became so widespread and lucrative by 2002 that it provoked a protest from the US state department. But also groundbreaking achievements are plain to see. Even apart from landmark legal successes, the narrative of Bosnia's catastrophe has been told for history's record by its victims from those blue chairs at the witness stands – even if only to empty press and public galleries. Leaders have been made accountable, international law developed, strengthened, clarified and made applicable to internal conflict.

Mark Harmon is a former public defender in California, who recently retired as senior prosecutor for the ICTY – having been with the tribunal from the start. He has worked on the cases that climbed the pyramids of crime and power in Bosnia, from the days he first muddied his boots on the soil of mass graves in Srebrenica to his work on the Karadzic case. Harmon knows better than anyone how the war Karadzic and Mladic are accused of masterminding was ordered and executed, and how they came to arrive at The Hague.

Harmon recalls the very first trial in 1996 – that of Dusko Tadic, who toured the Omarska and Keraterm camps, killing and beating. There was much criticism at the time about the expense of trying a minnow in the war, and disbelief that Karadzic or Mladic would ever grace the same dock. "Tadic was one of the most important cases," reflects Harmon. "It established the existence of a large crime base, it confirmed the jurisdiction of the tribunal and it established that the violations applied to an internal armed conflict. Tadic shifted the paradigm of protections in international armed conflict to internal armed conflict. The law was set, the platform established that we were capable of trying the cases we were charged to try."

As the crime base was established, and the tribunal scaled the ladders of command towards Karadzic and Mladic, the cases became more dependent, says Harmon, on "access to relevant documents, rather than blood and guts". In September this year, the tribunal convicted Momcilo Perisic, former chief of general staff of the Yugoslav army in Belgrade, a case on which Harmon worked, "which showed a man directing the war from his desk in Serbia – no direct contact with victims at all. Building up the pyramid, the work was based less on the victim testimony of earlier trials than facing down the difficulties of direct government obstruction of our efforts...the trials become more sterile and lose the victims' voice, because the trials at the top, with the likes of Karadzic, are all about proving linkages, with the atrocities already established".

In his most remarkable case, Harmon led the investigation, prosecution and conviction of General Radoslav Krstic, General Mladic's senior officer in command of the Srebrenica massacre. Krstic was one of the very few cases in which the prosecution had a penitent witness from the perpetrating side, a soldier in the Bosnian Serb army called Drazen Erdemovic, who came to The Hague remorseful at what he had done, pleaded guilty and was given a lenient sentence. Thereafter, he testified in numerous Srebrenica cases as a prosecution witness. Erdemovic told the court about unrelenting execution after the fall at Srebrenica, so that the death squads had to mass-murder in shifts. He testified to his wish that he be relieved of his execution duties. Most importantly Erdemovic gave information leading Harmon's chief investigator on the case, Jean Rene Ruez, to an execution site about which the world knew nothing, at the Cultural Centre in the town of Pilica.

"Erdemovic, and the Krstic case, had a huge impact", says Harmon. "This was at a time of total Srebrenica denial by the Serbs. And there was Erdemovic, saying he couldn't kill any more, sitting in a café having a cup of coffee while over the road – closer than the wall of this café here – 500 people were being killed. We would never have known if Erdemovic hadn't told us. As it is, Jean Rene Ruez went to the Pilica Cultural Centre and discovered a grisly massacre scene. Blood smeared the walls, and under the stage of the cultural centre, there were stalactites of coagulated blood". At the same time, Harmon and the investigating teams began to trace the mass graves where the 8,000 executed around Srebrenica were buried, after US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made the apposite satellite images available. "We were able to see the freshly dug holes – and trace how the Serbs had moved body parts from one mass grave to another to try and conceal the evidence, and lay the ground for exhumations."

Harmon says the wider legacy of the tribunal, as a deterrent for future war crimes and criminals, "is hard to measure. You can't measure deterrence, and we must not overclaim. But it was a pioneering institution; it took some baby steps towards holding people who commit war crimes to account. It developed and refined international law and criminal procedure. The international criminal court down the road is here today because of the success of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. If we had failed, it would probably still be in the laboratory. Out of that experiment, people have been trained – inoculated if you will – to become major players in these other tribunals, for the prosecution and the defence – because these cases are about doing justice.

"And I don't think it ever occurred to Karadzic and Mladic, when they were doing these things, that they would be where they are today".

Among the tribunal's critics are people who have a didactic or political interest in undermining it, or like to jeer pointlessly. But there are others who wish it well and have followed its progress. Among the latter is the expert on the landmark trials at Nuremberg that were the ICTY's inspiration – Peter Maguire, author of Law and War, a book about Nuremberg, and another on the genocide in Cambodia.

"The biggest problem facing all of the UN courts today," he says, "is that they were so grossly oversold by human rights advocates during the 1990s. At best, a war crimes trial can convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent in a timely manner. To ask trials to teach historical lessons or provide some form of therapeutic legalism is asking too much of any trial. The idea that war crimes trials can 're-educate' societies is based upon the assumption that the Nuremberg trials did more than punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent, they also transformed Nazis into law abiding democrats. The fact is that neither assumption stands up to analysis."

Maguire argues that "by the end of the 1990s, 'the legacy of Nuremberg' had become little more than a rhetorical tool used to justify any and all war crimes trials and the long march towards an international criminal court with universal jurisdiction. My former teacher, the late Telford Taylor [a prosecutor at Nuremberg], taught me that war crimes prosecutions – under any circumstance – signified failure: failure to act, failure to deter, and finally failure to prevent. Simply put, trials never can make up for disgraceful inaction in the face of preventable atrocities. Nobody in their right mind opposes the punishment of war crimes perpetrators, but coming after the bloodiest century in the history of man, is it enough to seek salvation in new codes of international criminal law and world courts?"

The woman on whose shoulders much of the tribunal's extra-legal mandate – its legacy on the ground – falls, is its head of outreach, Nerma Jelacic – also head of communications for the ICTY. She is from Visegrad, a town on the Drina river in eastern Bosnia, scene of horrific violence. Jelacic's plans are to impact the tribunal's work in a country more torn than at any time during the war: "They involve entrenching the current outreach offices and moving the operation and the defence lines from The Hague to the Balkans: not just to Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade and Pristina - but to the municipalities, the villages themselves.

"The work of the tribunal," she says, "is still being undermined by elements of society which should and could have a healing effect, but they don't: politicians, media, religious leaders - some still maintain the divisions in society. And that is one big machinery to fight against. These divisions are entrenched now and it will take many years for those societies to emerge even partially healed from the traumas they faced. The truth is that no people or nation in former Yugoslavia is ready to see its own reflection; to accept what they see and come to terms with its own past.

"What has happened at the tribunal," adds Jelacic, "is that an unprecedented amount of work has been done by this tribunal and it has changed history. But if you ask anyone 'Has the tribunal brought reconciliation?' the answer is of course, 'No it hasn't.' By itself, it never could have. But if you ask me whether I am going to get to work on unfertile ground and try to bring recognition of the importance of the enormous amount of work done by this court, especially if you compare it to other conflict countries and the attention they received in the 90s, the answer is, 'Yes'."

"What I want to do is to break down the barriers, on the individual basis that a raped Muslim woman has a lot in common with a raped Serbian woman. If people can one day recognise the commonalities between the people who were reaped, beaten, tortured and had their loved ones killed, something of what has happened here at this tribunal will have contributed to that recognition".

Towards the close of our session in the holding cells it seemed churlish for there not to be a little banter with Karadzic. Talk turned to what a "fantasy" Yugoslav football team would have looked like at the next World Cup, had the country not torn itself apart: Vidic of Serbia in defence, Modric of Croatia and Dzeko of Bosnia in attack. "We'd win it," Karadzic says, a keen football fan who was once a psychiatric consultant to the FK Sarajevo football team which now plays in what he calls "Muslim Sarajevo".

Karadzic's final aside in the holding cells is directed towards his prosecutor, Ann Sutherland: "Ah, you see how hard Miss Sutherland is trying to convict me. It will make my freedom even sweeter!"

The War is Dead, Long Live the War by Ed Vulliamy will be published by The Bodley Head in the spring


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Undance – review

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Sadler's Wells, London

Undance is a collaboration between the visual artist Mark Wallinger, the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. All three are practitioners working within the exploratory, questioning sector of their disciplines, so when Sadler's Wells commissioned a collaborative performance piece from them, expectations for a challenging result were high.

Wallinger took the lead, providing Turnage and McGregor with a series of starting points. These included the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering investigations of human action and locomotion, and the 1967-8 "Verb List" of the contemporary sculptor Richard Serra, which Serra used as a starting point for much of his work. Having travelled to a number of conflict zones, Wallinger had been struck by the ambiguity of the UN (United Nations) signs that he saw. After a time, he says, he began to read them as un-, as in the sense of a reversal of a previous action. This undoing notion – could the UN undo political strife, he wondered – fed into the Muybridge and Verb List ideas, and is also evident in Wallinger's set, which sees the grid before which Muybridge placed his subjects translated into a kind of wire fence set between two UN compound gates.

In play, then, we have the forensic examination of human actions (Muybridge's researches multiplied by Serra's list of verbs), and the idea of their mirroring, undoing and reversal. Wallinger's cage-like set also sends a strong message relating to confinement. Turnage has responded with a score that is highly varied in texture and colour. Themes are introduced, laid open, symmetrically flipped, and reduced to single shafts of sound that hang blade-like in the air. McGregor, meanwhile, as if in recognition of the possibility of a multi-vehicle conceptual pile-up, has kept things lambently simple. Actions are stated, enacted, and subjected to reversal by the 10 fine dancers of his company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance. Projected on the grid behind them, like a ghostly corps de ballet, we see those same actions filmed from a different angle, or relayed a few seconds out of sync.

Surprisingly, given the ideas-intensive nature of the project, it is the aesthetics of the piece that one carries away. The fluttering angularity of Turnage's score, and the counterpoint between the stern confinement of Wallinger's set and the detailed playfulness of McGregor's choreography. There are moments of overt reference, when McGregor recreates Muybridge's wrestling men, for example, or constructs a circular sequence set to strobe lights imitating a zoetrope, but for the most part this is the choreographer in unconfrontational mode, attending to grace-notes and details, and courteous in his deference to Turnage's score. In an extended duet for Alexander Whitley and Fukiko Takase we see hints of the old spikiness, but McGregor's framing of the pair is airily beautiful, and there are moments when its mechanics and emotional loading recall the finer pas de deux of Kenneth MacMillan. Quite a surprise, then. I thought that there was a danger of this piece sinking under the weight of its theory, but happily, everyone swims.


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Afghanistan – Britain's invisible conflict

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On the eve of the international Afghanistan conference in Bonn, Britain has yet to spell out its position on ending the war

Ten years after the fall of the Taliban, with a withdrawal date fixed and economic problems crowding in at home, Afghanistan risks becoming Britain's invisible conflict. But in the days and months ahead the scale of our military effort and sacrifice must be matched by a renewal of our diplomatic effort.

This week representatives of more than 90 countries are expected to attend the Bonn conference – but you would be forgiven for having missed the national debate around Britain's approach.

The prime minister last made a statement on Afghanistan in the House at the start of July and the Foreign Office has yet to set out a detailed position going into these vital talks.

The British people rightly give their unqualified support to our forces in Afghanistan but they are sceptical that politicians have a clear strategy for ending this war.

That is partly a consequence of 10 years of fighting and the heavy price our military personnel and their families have paid. But it does mean there is a heavy responsibility on political leaders to be constantly explaining not just why we are in Afghanistan but what our strategy is for leaving behind a country that does not threaten our security again and does justice to the blood and treasure we have already lost.

Of course big international summits like this tend to focus on broad themes but in truth there is now only a narrow window of opportunity for meaningful action as the US prepares to withdraw most of its combat forces by 2014. So no opportunity should be wasted between now and the Nato summit in Chicago next May.

The Bonn summit should focus on the three pillars needed to build a safer, more stable and more sustainable Afghanistan – continued military pressure, the handover to the Afghan army and a lasting political settlement.

Although fatalities among international forces are down, a recent UN report said in the first eight months of 2011 the average monthly number of security incidents was 2,108, a 39% increase on the same period a year earlier.

This discrepancy may in part reflect the fact that insurgents are targeting officials and other civilians who threaten their political interests rather than just international forces.

Spectacular attacks, such as the one on Kabul's Intercontinental hotel, may be a sign of the insurgents' strategic weakness but they do have a negative impact on ordinary Afghans' faith in the security infrastructure.

Sustained military pressure is producing results in central Helmand and our special forces are killing and capturing a growing proportion of senior Taliban leadership.

Yet what is the strategy for dealing with this latest increase in violence?

The Afghan army and police combined currently number about 308,000, and are due to reach their peak strength of 352,000 by next November. But their ability to keep control is hampered by figures suggesting that the current proportion of southern Pashtuns in the army is less than 4% while estimates of Pashtuns in the wider population tend range between 40-45%.

There is also an unresolved and increasingly urgent funding problem. The Afghan government will still need at least $10bn (£6.4bn) annually from foreign donors after 2014, $6bn of which will be needed for the Afghan army and police; the United States is already making it clear it will not fund the full amount on its own.

At the same time concerns about central government in Afghanistan remain. Transparency International surveys of local opinion show Afghanistan to be the third most corrupt state in the world, with 60% of those polled saying that corruption had increased in previous years.

Underlying all of this is the third pillar necessary to end the war: an inclusive political settlement, with the tribes in, and al-Qaida out.

Military commanders on the ground tell you that they cannot kill or capture their way out of an insurgency. Battlefield advances on their own are not enough. Work could and should be under way now to try and ensure long-term security guarantees that Afghanistan will not host al-Qaida again. For example, a "status of forces" agreement to regulate any continuing role for international forces should now be under discussion.

The Afghan high peace council established at the London conference in 2010 should continue work to reach a consensus on constitutional arrangements and ensure that women have a proper role in Afghanistan's future. It is likely that Afghanistan's thousands of villages and valleys will need a less centralised system than the present constitution and that is a process that should be explored now.

Regional players such as China and, most importantly, Pakistan – which is boycotting Bonn in protest at the Nato cross-border raid that killed 24 of its soldiers – need to be brought into this process to help guarantee its durability and stability.

Progress is possible but big decisions need to be taken quickly – and not just talked about. The military and development efforts continue in the country. But on the timescale laid down for transition to Afghan control, only politics can complete the bridge between where Afghanistan is and where Afghanistan needs to be.

We now have an end date in Afghanistan. It is through urgent diplomatic work at Bonn and beyond that we can also get an end state worthy of the sacrifices endured during the decade-long struggle.


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Revealed: true cost of the Christmas toys we buy from China's factories

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Undercover investigation alleges hours of overtime, late wages and fines for using the toilet without permission

With Christmas three weeks away, an undercover investigation has revealed the bleak realities of life in Chinese toy factories serving a market worth £2.8bn a year in the UK alone.

Big brands such as Disney, Lego and Marks & Spencer pay only a fraction of the shop price of products to the factories that make their toys. Last summer – as factories geared up to cope with demand for the Christmas period – investigators spent three weeks in the industrial cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan. In some cases, they found that employees:

■ worked up to 140 hours overtime a month;

■ were paid up to a month late;

■ claimed they were expected to work with dangerous tools and machines without training or safety measures;

■ had to work in silence and were fined up to £5 for going to the toilet without permission.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the long hours and poor wages was how it tore families apart, separating mothers and fathers from their children for all but a few days a year. Many workers were too afraid to speak to the investigators from human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom), but two women did agree to talk on condition that their names were changed.

Wang Fengping, 27, has two daughters, seven and five. They live a 10-hour train journey away from the On Tai Toys factory. She and her husband earn £200 a month making toys for Disney and others, but cannot afford to bring the children to the city. Instead, the girls are cared for by their grandparents. Wang calls them two or three times a week. The younger one always asks her when she is coming home. "Very soon," Wang always replies.

The reality is that they will meet only once a year, at Chinese new year. She keeps her spirits up by telling her workmates stories of how well the girls are doing at school. Sometimes she sings them songs the girls have learned at school and then sung to her down the phone. "Our family will not die from hunger, but cannot be fed with this wage level," she said.

Ma Hui, 25, works for the Hung Hing Printing Group, making items for M&S, Lego and Disney. She has a two-year-old daughter, whom she had to leave behind when the child was just three months old in the hope that she could earn enough to one day return home to set up her own business and reunite the family. She, too, only sees her child once a year and has hung a picture of her daughter on the dormitory wall next to her bed.

Sacom accuses big global brands of failing to pay the factories enough, with workers suffering because factories undercut one another in an attempt to secure contracts. The report also criticises the industry's own regulator for failing to clamp down on rights abuses.

Spokeswoman Debby Chan Sze Wan said: "In the run-up to Christmas, toys are a popular choice as presents for children. They probably bring joy to consumers and the toy companies, but the workers cannot afford toys or books for their beloved children.

"The hardship of workers is due to the exploitation in the global supply chain. If the brands do not raise the unit price and change their purchasing practices, no structural change in working conditions in the toy industry is feasible."

Investigators targeted three factories, including On Tai Toys Company, which manufactures for Disney and a number of other international brands, and Hung Hing. All the factories are certified as decent toy manufacturers by the International Council of Toy Industries, which is supposed to police ethical standards in more than 2,400 factories that employ an estimated 1.7 million people worldwide. But Sacom has accused ICTI of permitting "rampant labour rights violations" in factories it has certified.

At the Hung Hing factory the researcher found that the 8,000 workers put in up to 100 hours of overtime a month, far in excess of the legal maximum. Workers say they have to sign a document agreeing to work additional overtime on top of the legal maximum. The basic wage was £132 a month (up to £250 with maximum overtime payments) but wages were paid up to three weeks late.

Workers complained of inadequate training with the factory machines and last year one worker died when he fell into a machine. They said there were frequent injuries and concerns over the chemicals used. There were also complaints about the standard of the dormitories, where water for washing and flushing toilets is turned off at 10pm.

At the On Tai Toy Company the researcher found that most of the 1,500 workers were aged between 30 and 50, though around 300 students are drafted in to help cope with the peak season.

The researcher spent three weeks in the factory and found workers put in up to 140 hours of overtime every month, nearly four times the 36 hours a month legal limit.

Basic pay is £110 a month, but wages were paid a month late, in breach of labour law. During the peak summer season workers could make up to £240 a month, including overtime, but that falls to £140 during low season.

A typical working day during the peak season starts at 8am and does not end until 10pm. Workers routinely put in six-day weeks, but if the factory is busy there are no days off.

Workers complained that they were banned from talking to one another on the production line and were fined up to £5 if they went to the toilet without applying for an "off-duty" permit. They reported regular burns from soldering irons and electric shocks from old hair dryers used to set glue, along with concerns about the effect on their health of unmarked chemicals they have to work with. The law requires the chemicals to be identified and for workers to be instructed in what to do in case of an accident. Up to 10 workers share each 20 square metres dormitory room, which is fitted with bunk beds. Dozens share the toilet and the outside of the building is piled deep with rubbish, which is home to rats.

In response to the Sacam researchers' allegations, Disney said: "The Walt Disney Company and its affiliates take claims of unfair labour practices very seriously, and investigate any such allegations thoroughly."

Lego said the investigation into working practices at the factory had raised very serious issues, which it took very seriously and which it had asked its licensing partner, Dorling Kindersley, to investigate.

"Ensuring respect for workers' rights is very important to the Lego Group and all our partners agree to adhere to a strict set of guidelines – our code of conduct. The Lego Group requires all of its licensing partners to give a written assurance that their vendors, too, comply with the Lego Group's code of conduct, and to audit their suppliers on an annual basis. Adhering to the code of conduct is something that we prioritise in our engagement with our partners. It appears that in this case the code may have been broken and we are addressing this urgently. Once we have the full facts we will take decisive action."

Dorling Kindersley said that it was deeply concerned by the allegations and had contacted Hung Hing to express its view: "We have strict ethical sourcing standards covering all the issues identified by this investigation. The allegations, if true, would demonstrate a breach of these standards." It said the factory had recently been audited, but that would now be reviewed, adding: "Our terms of business are absolutely clear, that any supplier in breach of our ethical standards is required to change their practices or face termination."

A spokesman for Marks & Spencer said: "We are a very small customer of the Hung Hing Printing Group – less than 0.5% of its business. We take any allegation that suggests a breach of our strict ethical standards very seriously and work closely with all our suppliers, including this factory, to ensure they adhere to our strict standards."

Hung Hing responded with a four- page letter from general manager Dennis Wong in which it admitted that workers could be asked to do overtime of up to 92 hours a month in July and August. The letter said that last month overtime ranged between 23 and 77 hours. The company said workers who refused to do the extra hours were not penalised.

It blamed late payment of wages on the complexity of calculating the rates for more than 8,000 workers, and argued this was a standard industry practice. It insisted that workers did receive safety training, but warned that individual managers would be held responsible for future lapses and would have pay deducted.

The company said that providing water to the toilets after 10pm was wasteful and that barrels of water were available for workers to use to flush.


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Carole Caplin is worth more than Alastair's apology | Barbara Ellen

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Cherie Blair's former adviser has been undeservedly vilified for too long

Some people don't half make you jump. During the Leveson inquiry, there suddenly appeared the velour-tracksuited, crystal-waving spectre of Carole Caplin, as conjured by Alastair Campbell. It transpired Campbell felt bad about accusing Caplin, Cherie Blair's "lifestyle guru", of leaking stories during the Blair years. He has since conceded the high probability that her phone was hacked.

Was this an apology or more of an excuse? Campbell's account, including a tirade by the former newshound against the "putrid" press, certainly gave the impression of someone who was very sorry – sorry that he, a blameless man, had been tricked by outside forces into making wrongful accusations. Oh, right, that kind of "sorry".

In fairness, one of the keynotes of the hacking scandal has been how swiftly victims' lives became noxious swamps of distrust. However, Campbell also told of how he became suspicious that phones were being hacked when meetings with the then culture secretary Tessa Jowell were mysteriously intercepted.

Jowell was culture secretary between 2001 and 2007. This suggests that during the same time period that "media-savvy" Alastair suspected that phones were being hacked, "clueless" Alastair would have been accusing the likes of Caplin of leaking hither and thither, like a Westminster Tena lady. Excuse me, but I'm muddled. Either Campbell was completely oblivious to the hacking or he wasn't? Not even the Sultan of Spin can have it both ways.

By Caplin's account and, it seems, everyone else's, Campbell was vile to her. Never mind her unwitting tryst with conman Peter Foster. From the start, Campbell accused Caplin of being untrustworthy, "trouble" and plotting to sell her story on the Blairs. This seems a special kind of cruelty, not least because it undermined Caplin's friendship with Cherie Blair. I was the journalist at "Lippygate", where Caplin caused a media storm by applying Cherie's lipstick on the PM's bed. Hilarious though it was, even I could see how badly Cherie needed a close female friend.

Moreover, Caplin was trying to earn a living, being denounced as "trouble" can't have been good for business. Nor was it fair, considering that Caplin's only "crimes" were to light fragrant candles and hold colour swatches to Cherie's face. What does all this say about Campbell, a man neck-deep in a toxic political snake pit, who nevertheless makes a life coach his chief point of concern?

Some might ask: who cares about Carole Caplin? Well, maybe we should because, although surrounded by the powerful, she was the "little person" in all this and innocent with it. Only last month, she was in court, receiving newspaper damages for yet another allegation that she was planning to "tell all" on the Blairs, something she's sworn she'll never do.

Which is more than some could say. All that mud slung at Caplin and yet it was Campbell and the rest who got busy, churning out their memoirs. It turns out that the Blairs were right to be loyal to Caplin – she turned out to be more loyal to them than the bulk of Tony Blair's cabinet. Caplin is even loyal to Campbell, having the grace to accept the micro "apologies" that have trickled her way in recent times.

I wonder though – doesn't Caplin deserve more? The Leveson inquiry was always going to be complex, but this doesn't mean it can be used as a blanket amnesty for all misdemeanours, followed by mealy-mouthed self-justifications. As in: "Yeah, sorry about totally assassinating your character, and all that, but I didn't realise about the hacking. Well, I suspected a bit, but you know what I mean?"

Well, not really. To my mind, hacking shouldn't become a convenient one-size-fits-all excuse for everything wrong a hackee ever said or did during their entire public lives. Perhaps Campbell should stop pontificating and self-justifying and, where appropriate, try apologising unreservedly.

If only these silly old men would act their age

Now we know. Jeremy Clarkson prearranged with The One Show that he would say "something" about the strikers, but then got carried away and ranted about executing them in front of their families. Well, it could happen to anyone. Or maybe not.

When Clarkson reflects upon his latest escapade, what are the odds that he will chalk it up to being outrageous, controversial, a petrolhead, non-PC, Norman Mailer character? And what are the odds of him being deluded?

Likewise the former IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahnhan, who now says that his lack of sexual inhibition led to his downfall?

Ah, the old Berlusconi "Flesh is weak" defence. It is invariably trotted out when somebody wants their abject moral incontinence to look red-blooded and wild. As in: "I'm not a bad guy, I'm just too sexy for my shorts!"

Whatever happened to the Grown Man? Women will know what I mean: the sort of man who wouldn't dream of running around in a state of permanent sexual arousal or letting rip about public executions on teatime telly; the kind of man who could be relied upon to be in control of all his thoughts, deeds and utterances, or at least cognisant of them.

Instead, we have the likes of Clarkson and Strauss-Kahn, who appear to view their worst impulses as balloons to let go and watch helplessly as they fly farting around the room.

Sometimes, Clarkson doesn't seem such a bad cove. Then he does something bizarre and depressing like this, afterwards shrugging bashfully, as if he were just a boy caught scrumping apples. "I didn't mean it, mister!"

It seems telling that these types are usually "larger than life" – perhaps kidding themselves that they are every woman's dream. Haven't they seen females dribbling over Mad Men's urbane Don Draper? Maybe there is a lesson there, namely, that mature men behaving like crazed adolescent loons may not be as attractive or forgivable as they think.

Anyone can be a winner of The X Factor… unless you're over 25

There's much gloating about X Factor being a "ratings disaster", but Simon Cowell needn't rush back to save the day on my account. Chez Ellen, we've had a hoot. Marcus Collins owes me a few quid for the times I've drunkenly voted for him, but I don't hold a grudge. The only point of irritation is that every 10 seconds, someone feels the need to chirrup: "Little Mix should win because girl bands never win X Factor."

Your point? No band, male or female, has won X Factor. Winners have always been either "boys" or "girls". Indeed, while I love X Factor's vibrant, liberal, multicultural mix of black, white, male, female, straight, gay (three homosexuals and a lesbian on this series alone), the fact remains that the, ahem, "experienced" are wasting their time.

The over-25s are never taken seriously. Even judge Louis Walsh is routinely viciously attacked for being "old" (hence "irrelevant").

So sorry, Little Mix, talented though you are, but it's besides the point that a girl band hasn't won.

From where I'm sitting, X Factor doesn't have a problem with young girls in bands or, indeed, young anybody.

X Factor has a problem with ageism.


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Burmese authorities concede reforms at end of high-profile visit by Clinton

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Decision to permit protests and ceasefire with Shan rebels announced as US secretary of state concludes trip

Burma has approved a new law permitting peaceful protest for the first time at the end of a high-profile visit by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the first by such a senior US government official in five decades.

The new law, signed by President Thein Sein and reported by Burmese state media, requires protesters to seek permission at least five days in advance.

Demonstrations of any kind were previously banned in the traditionally repressive nation, where authorities have cracked down hard on anti-government protests.

The loosening of the blanket ban on protest – which has yet to be tested – is the latest in a series of purported reforms enacted by Burma's "civilian" government – in reality made up of former senior military officials — since the military junta handed over power earlier this year.

State media also announced the government had agreed a ceasefire with the Shan State Army South, an armed ethnic group.

The announcements followed the conclusion of Clinton's three-day visit. The US secretary of state, who met pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, had called for greater reform from a government accustomed to iron-fisted rule. She invoked the promise of a new era of relations with the US if the country delivered democratic change.

The Burmese government continues to hold hundreds of political prisoners and the country is still plagued by ethnic conflicts. The US maintains tight sanctions on senior leaders in Burma, which was ruled by a military junta from 1962 until 2010. Although the army handed power to a civilian government last year, military primacy is entrenched in the constitution.

"The United States wants to be a partner with Burma," Clinton said at Aung San Suu Kyi's home. "We want to work with you as you further democratisation, as you release all political prisoners, as you begin the difficult but necessary process of ending the ethnic conflicts that have gone on far too long, as you hold elections that are free, fair, and credible."

Despite the risk of giving legitimacy to a brutal military regime, the Obama administration sees Burma's democratic stirrings as a unique opportunity to champion democracy for almost 50 million people who have struggled under more than two decades of dictatorship. By reopening the discussions at such a high level, the administration also raised the chances of making inroads for US foreign policy in China's backyard.

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won elections in 1990 that were ignored by the then-military junta but who now plans to run in upcoming polls, endorsed that approach and called for the immediate release of all political prisoners and ceasefires to end the ethnic conflicts.

A heroine for pro-democracy advocates around the world, she said Clinton's visit represented "a historical moment for both our countries".

Clinton said after meeting Aung San Suu Kyi: "We have been inspired by her fearlessness in the face of intimidation and her serenity through decades of isolation, but most of all through her devotion to her country and to the freedom and dignity of her fellow citizens."

The US secretary of state said the two had discussed the "ups and downs and slings and arrows of political participation" at dinner, and that Aung San Suu Kyi would be an "excellent member" of Burma's parliament but declined to discuss any electoral advice she may have given her.


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Scandal-weary France votes on outlawing prostitution

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As the public mood shifts, MPs consider six-month jail term for those caught paying for sex

Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec painted them; Hugo, Balzac and Zola wrote about them; Napoleon licensed them and disgraced former presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn says he has a "horror" of them. Some even argue that they are part of France's cultural heritage. Prostitutes have been a feature of French artistic, literary and political circles – and a target for politicians – for centuries.

On Tuesday, following the New York sex scandal earlier this year that made headlines around the world and effectively ended Strauss-Kahn's hopes of becoming the next French president, MPs will discuss a bill that would make prostitution a crime punishable by six months in prison. Anyone caught buying sex would face a €3,000 (£2,600) fine.

Since the end of the second world war prostitution in France has been considered a matter of private choice and is not illegal. However, the government has become increasingly abolitionist and the public mood may be hardening following the Strauss-Kahn debacle. A series of unsavoury revelations regarding a high-end prostitution ring based at a luxury hotel in the northern city of Lille will also be in MPs' minds as they vote on the bill.

In the busy Rue Saint-Denis, one of the oldest streets in Paris and a famed red light area, the prospect of forthcoming legislation was of little concern. The average age of a Parisian prostitute is said to be 40, although the age range here appears to be wide. Most are propped up in tatty doorways, or lolling on the walls between cheap clothing wholesalers, sex shops, a church and a nursery school. They share the pavements with the Indian parcel runners with their metal trolleys, curious tourists trying not to stare, parents waiting to collect children and, presumably, the punters the bill would outlaw.

The women, among the 20,000 said to work as prostitutes in France, are mostly French, independent, own their own studio flats and pay taxes. They consider themselves a higher class of working girl than the Africans, Ukrainians, and Moldovans they accuse of invading their patch and the oriental workers who hang around the nearby boulevards.

Christiane, who says she has been working the area for 39 years, is sceptical about the proposed new law.

"It's just blah, blah, blah, because there's an election coming up. They'll forget about us afterwards," she says. "I own my own apartment, I pay my taxes, what are they going to do? It's not us they're after, it's them," she nods in the direction of the Asian prostitutes. Sylvie adds: "It's the old independent prostitutes like us who will suffer, not the pimps who exploit the black people and the Chinese."

Several of the prostitutes are planning to take a day off and demonstrate outside the National Assembly when the bill has its first reading on Tuesday.

"Maitresse Gilda", spokewoman for Strass, the union for sex workers, says that the cross-party team behind the bill is trying to impose puritanical northern European sexual and moral mores on France.

"If you spark prohibition you play into the hands of the pimps and mafia networks," she said. "This law is just an excuse to clean up the streets and expel the Africans and east Europeans, among others, who work on them. It will push the women into hiding and therefore into more danger."

The unions and associations representing French sex workers say their members are providing a "service" requiring a certain savoir-faire and experience. Abolitionists argue that prostitution is a form of violence and slavery and an affront to human dignity.

MP Guy Geoffroy, of the ruling right-of-centre UMP party, who is presenting the bill, argues the prostitutes claiming they work by choice are a minority. "They are fewer and fewer and older and older. Today, most are foreigners and part of mafia organisations where they suffer terrible treatment," he said.


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Who will rid us of hate channels such as Press TV? | Nick Cohen

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Ofcom is allowing an Iranian broadcaster to undermine our sense of broadcasting balance

As they search for reasons to be cheerful about Britain, the liberal-minded can latch on to the comforting notion that at least we do not allow the propaganda channels of American television on to our screens. We may have Jeremy Clarkson, Frankie Boyle and every other variety of media braggart and bully, but our regulators spare us a local version of Fox News.

The Broadcasting Code guarantees the fairness of television in Britain. It tells stations that they must display "due impartiality and due accuracy" and forbids them from giving "undue prominence" to their owners' favoured views. These rules are all that stand between the British and the state- or oligarch-controlled broadcasters much of the rest of humanity must endure. I cannot find polls or research to justify this hunch but I guess most people believe in broadcasting impartiality and are grateful for the benefits it brings.

For how much longer, I wonder. When I spoke to Tony Close, director of standards at Ofcom, who is meant to enforce the code, his language was suspiciously woozy and prevaricating. Instead of enunciating the clear, hard principles, which have kept broadcasting honest, he began to babble about fostering "diversity" and granting "flexibility" to foreign broadcasters transmitting in Britain.

The foreign broadcaster he had in mind was Press TV, the state network of Iran, a hostile foreign power, whose agents have just looted the British embassy in Tehran. To describe the regime's output as more propagandistic than anything the Murdoch clan produces is to understate the case in two respects.

If whites ran Press TV, one would have no difficulty in saying it was a neo-Nazi network. It welcomes British Holocaust-deniers such as Nicholas Kollerstrom, fascist ideologues such as Peter Rushton, the leader of the White Nationalist party – an organisation that disproves the notion that the only thing further to the right of the BNP is the wall – along with, until recently, Ken Livingstone, Labour's candidate for mayor of London, who showed no embarrassment about the company his Iranian paymasters kept.

Press TV is not just a home for those with exterminationist fantasies about wiping Israel off the map, but a platform for the full fascist conspiracy theory of supernatural Jewish power. Other fantasies follow. The 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York and 7/7 attacks on London were inside jobs, according to its commentators. Plots emanating from Buckingham Palace, and orchestrated by that sinister figure, the Queen, threaten its journalists.

As pertinently, the hatreds it fosters are as much directed against Iranians as the regime's enemies. Press TV shows once again that the first task for servants of a dictatorship is to control their own people. Writing on Gozaar, an invaluable website from Iran's democratic opposition, a former journalist described how eager his colleagues were to justify the suppression of Iran's 2009 uprising. A handful of anchors and photographers quit their jobs, he said, but most had no problem churning out reports that labelled protesters as terrorists.

The loyal hacks were not only Iranian mozdoor – "mercenaries" – as they are known in Tehran, but foreign journalists too. "The majority of the American-Iranian and British-Iranian staffers championed Press TV's coverage as a counterbalance to what they considered biased warping of the story by western media," the ex-reporter said. "Iranian knee-jerk conspiracy thinking was embossed in their minds."

Not much "due impartiality and due accuracy" in Press TV's reporting of the Iranian revolution then: it was all cover-up and no coverage. Nor did the network give due prominence or right of reply to those who opposed Iran's support for Syria's suppression of its revolutionaries. Jody Sabral, who by her own account was a rather naive reporter, took a job as Press TV's Istanbul correspondent. She thought it would be her "lucky break" into broadcasting. She wised up fast and appealed to liberal-leftists who make excuses for anti-western tyrannies – come on, you know who you are – to hear her out.

After months of ignoring the Syrian revolt against Iran's clients in the ruling Alawite clique, a Press TV editor allowed her to go to Turkey's border with Syria to talk to the refugees running for their lives. On no account was she to discuss their suffering, however. The real "story" was that Turkey was smuggling weapons to the Syrian revolutionaries. "When I asked what our source was, he couldn't answer, and instead he replied, 'Turkey will do anything to get into the EU.' It was a laughable response and I obviously refused to go."

She resigned and told tyrannophile westerners that the "next time you blindly back an alternative voice such as Press TV because it suits your own political view take a moment to question the quality of that information".

Ofcom won't perform that basic task. It can be shocked. The regulator announced it had been amazed to discover that Press TV (London) is controlled from Tehran – who would have thought it? – and instructed it to amend its licence accordingly. It can impose punishments. Last week, Ofcom fined it £100,000 for broadcasting an interview with the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari and forgetting to tell the viewers that his "confessions" had been obtained under duress in an Iranian jail. But it will not revoke its broadcasting licence.

If the clerical state bought British newspapers or set up websites, I would not call for regulators to compel them to be accurate and impartial, and ban them if they refused. I would argue against the clerics' doctrines and conspiracy theories, but accept that they had a right to put their views. They deny that same free speech to the subject population of Iran, but no matter: liberty means allowing freedom to people who have done nothing to deserve it.

Enforced impartiality in broadcasting, however, is still a cause that is worth defending from the attacks by corporations and governments which are aching for the right to propagandise and the betrayals of Ofcom officials who subvert fairness in the name of "diversity". Society is entitled to say that there should be a corner in the marketplace of ideas where journalists and their managers and owners must respect notions of fairness and balance, particularly when radio and television stations continue to be controlled by the state or by wealthy individuals and corporations.

You do not need to go to America or Iran to see what foul broadcasting follows when those principles are abandoned. Thanks to Ofcom, you can find it on your Sky box right here in Blighty.


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Film reveals vision of a carefree Amy Winehouse at remote Irish festival

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Striking footage shows singer aged 23, playing a church gig at Other Voices festival – before she was overwhelmed by fame

Watch Spiritualized and Wild Beasts live at Other Voices tonight.

Dingle, on the wild west coast of Ireland, is known for being untamed and beguiling. Five years ago this weekend the little town provided both a backdrop and sanctuary for a young talent that was to prove its match.

Amy Winehouse, on the cusp of worldwide fame, had been booked to perform at the Other Voices music series that takes place each year in venues around Dingle's fishing quay and the small marina.

Startling footage of the singer's short  time in Co Kerry, including a revealing interview and an intimate concert staged in a small church, is to be broadcast on BBC2 early in the new year.

"These unexpected experiences, when a musician or performer is placed for a while in a new situation, can often be very telling, a bit like Bob Dylan's first visit to Britain," said Anthony Wall, the veteran editor of the BBC's Arena arts programme, who has made the documentary using film shot during Other Voices in 2006.

The singer from north London was 23 and had released her second album Back to Black less than two months earlier. Accustomed to the fast pace of the music industry in London, she was unprepared for her visit to a place that is not so much locked in the past as existing in its own time.

Dingle had an immediate visual impact, too, surrounded as it is by the sea, with the deserted Blasket islands distantly visible.

"It is not just the beauty of that part of Ireland, it is that little town, too," said Wall. "And the interview with her really manages to capture her in a relaxed mood.

"There is no side to her at all in the interview. In fact, there is a black hole where someone's 'side' might usually be. She is so straightforward."

Those who met and worked with Winehouse at Dingle remember how the late star gave one of her most powerful recorded sets that night in the St James' church.

As a result, the new Arena programme hopes to offer a gentler tribute to her lost talent. "It is not that her performance there is so much more valid than all her later performances or anything like that," explained Wall. "It's just that watching it might inadvertently be an antidote to some of the stuff that has come during her last months and since her death."

Winehouse performed at Dingle with just two guitarists, because her drummer had been held up by bad weather. Wall believes this prompted a particularly striking show. "Without a drummer there was nowhere to hide. She simply had to sing out," he said.

After the gig, and before consuming a plate of oysters, Winehouse was interviewed in Dingle's Benners Hotel by the presenter of Other Voices, John Kelly.

Made up with her trademark eye-liner and beehive hairstyle, Winehouse initially gushed about how talented her boyfriend was and then made fun of herself for being so gauche. The singer, who died this summer at the age of 27 after a struggle with drink and drugs, also talked at length about her growing interest in gospel music.

"There is nothing more pure than your relationship with your god, apart from with your music. So gospel to me is very inspirational," she said, going on to talk about her early experiences of listening to music at home.

Soul music, too, she confesses, is a relatively recent love for her, following years of listening to jazz classics and hip-hop: "It took me a while to get around to it."

This weekend sees the tenth anniversary of Other Voices, which is presented this year on Irish television by the actor Aidan Gillen.

"I only became an actor in the hope of one day getting on Desert Island Discs and playing records – this is way better," he said. "I've spent a large part of the last few years at the end of the Dingle peninsula and witnessed first hand how well this festival fits this place."

The bands and performers at the Other Voices festival this year include Frank Turner, Jimi Goodwin of Doves, Lisa Hannigan, Spiritualized, The Coronas, The Frames and Wild Beasts.

A new festival of light, or Féile na Soilse, will run alongside the Other Voices events to celebrate the culture, music, food and community of Dingle, with open-air farmers' markets and Christmas carol choral competitions and a children's lantern parade through the town.

Those unable to squeeze into the church venue can watch the performances on screens in some of Dingle's pubs, and tomorrow the Irish Music Rights Organisation will be providing a platform for Ireland's best up-and-coming artists.

"We have a truly exciting bill this year, some close old friends will join with some of the most cutting-edge artists out there, to build a wonderfully vibrant musical feast," said Philip King, the creator of Other Voices. "We have been hoping to lure Jimi Goodwin for many years now and we are truly honoured to welcome songwriter extraordinaire Edwyn Collins."


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Congo election: Joseph Kabila leads in early results

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Incumbent president has just over 50% share of vote, but opponents accuse him of trying to engineer 'carnage'

Congo's president, seeking a second term in a nation reeling from poverty, was leading in early results but his opponents insisted he step aside and accused him of trying to engineer "carnage."

Joseph Kabila had 50.3% of the vote in early results from an election marred by technical problems and accusations of favouritism. Analysts had predicted he would win because the opposition candidates are likely to split the vote.

In a show of unity, the 10 opposition parties held a press conference and accused Kabila of attempting to engineer a situation like Kenya, Zimbabwe or the Ivory Coast, all countries where rulers used the army to try to silence dissent and cling to power after losing at the polls.

"I think that Joseph Kabila could go down in history ... if he were to say 'I'm a good sport and I lost,'" said opposition candidate Vital Kamerhe, a former speaker of Parliament. "He is preparing carnage."

International observers noted irregularities in the vote, including possible instances of fraud, but most said the shortcomings seemed to be due to technical glitches rather than a systematic attempt to rig the poll.

Due to bad weather, planes carrying ballots did not take off in time to reach the remote interior of the gigantic nation. Monday's vote had to be extended for three days in order to give porters time to reach the distant corners of Congo.

Province by province tallies released on Saturday amounted to 33% of all voting bureaus, showing Kabila ahead with 3.27 million of the 6.48 million votes counted so far. Opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi was trailing with 2.23 million votes, or 34.4%.

The gap between them is likely to close when results from Kinshasa are released. Poll workers in the four warehouses processing votes were visibly overwhelmed.

Sacks of ballots were brought in on the backs of poll workers. There were so many they had to be piled in the parking lot outside. Some had split open, and ballots had fallen into the mud or the cement floor of the warehouse, where they were being trampled by election workers.

On Friday, under 5% of the ballots in one of the four warehouses had been processed, said one worker who asked not to be named. The election official complained that they were not being brought food or water, and several of the poll workers were asleep.

The results released from Kinshasa represent only 3% of the capital's precincts. In the small sample that was released, Tshisekedi had so far received roughly twice as many votes as Kabila. Over 3 million voters are registered in Kinshasa, so Tshisekedi may be able to catch Kabila.

Still, the opposition has clearly been hurt by its inability to unite behind a single candidate. In the results released so far, nearly a million votes had been cast for the nine opposition candidates besides the 78-year-old Tshisekedi.The opposition leaders said they are seeking a group of "African sages" to act as mediators in order to tell Kabila to step aside.


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Newt Gingrich leads in new Iowa presidential poll

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Newt Gingrich is the new front-runner in Iowa, which holds the first of next year's US presidential nominating contests

A surge in support for Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich has made him the new front-runner in Iowa, which holds the first of next year's US presidential nominating contests, according to a closely watched opinion poll.

Gingrich, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, has support from 25% of likely Republican caucus-goers, up from just 7% in late October, the poll conducted for The Des Moines Register newspaper found.

Texas Representative Ron Paul and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney finished second and third, with support at 18% and 16%, respectively.

Support for Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann and former pizza magnate Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race on Saturday, was tied at 8%.

Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum each drew 6%, and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman rounded out the field at 2%.

The Iowa caucuses, set for 3 January, kick off the state-by-state contests to choose the party presidential nominee who will challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.

Cain led the field in the poll conducted in October. His departure, which came after the latest poll was conducted, shapes the wide-open Republican race more clearly into a matchup between Romney and Gingrich.

Reuters/Ipsos poll data released this week showed Gingrich and Romney would benefit most if Cain quit.

Gingrich just this week opened a campaign office in Iowa and has rehired staff, including two campaign advisers who had resigned in June.

"We've got some Newt-mentum going for us here," said Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond.

"We're not hiding the fact that our ground game is a little behind the ball. But what we lack in time we'll make up with intensity and intelligence," said Hammond.

"Iowa is a top priority," he said.

The latest Iowa Poll shows a slip in support for Romney, who had 22% support in late October. Iowa has a large bloc of conservative voters distrustful of Romney's past support for abortion rights and a Massachusetts healthcare overhaul that was a precursor of Obama's federal law.

Still, Romney got some good news on Saturday as he drew the endorsement of the Sioux City Journal, which described him as the candidate most capable of "articulating a blueprint for a stronger economy and the restoration of fiscal sanity in Washington."

Campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said in an email that Romney would be back in Iowa next week to continue making the case that he is the best candidate to beat Obama.

The Iowa Poll was conducted 27-30 November and was based on telephone interviews with 401 Republicans who are likely to attend the caucuses. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

The poll indicated that voter preferences are far from set in stone - 60% of Republicans likely to participate in a caucus said they are still willing to change their mind about which candidate to support.

In 2008, the poll correctly predicted wins for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in the Republican contest and Obama, then a senator, in the Democratic caucus.


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Russians vote in national elections

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Vladmir Putin's United Russia party expected to see its support fall as people tire of prime minister's strongman style

By JIM HEINTZ (Associated Press)

MOSCOW (AP) – Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in national parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote that opinion polls indicate could water down the strength of the party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite the government's relentless marginalization of opposition groups.

Although Putin and his United Russia party have dominated Russian politics for more than a decade, popular discontent appears to be growing with Putin's strongman style, widespread corruption among officials and the gap between ordinary Russians and the country's floridly super-rich.

United Russia holds a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. But a survey last month by the independent Levada Center polling agency indicated the party could get only about 53 percent of the vote in this election, depriving it of the number of seats necessary to change the constitution unchallenged.

Party leaders have signaled concern, with Putin warning that a parliament with a wide array of parties would lead to political instability and claiming that Western governments want to undermine the election. A Western-funded independent election-monitoring group has come under strong pressure.

Only seven parties have been allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups have been denied registration and barred from campaigning.

The Communist Party and the liberal Yabloko party complained Sunday of extensive election violations aimed at boosting United Russia's vote count, including party observers being hindered in their work.

In Vladivostok, voters complained to police that United Russia was offering free food in exchange for promises to vote for the party. In St. Petersburg, an Associated Press photographer saw a United Russia emblem affixed to the curtains on a voting booth.

United Russia's dominance of politics has induced a grudging sense of impotence in some Russians. In Vladivostok, voter Artysh Munzuk noted the contrast between the desire to do one's civic duty and the feeling that it doesn't matter.

"It's very important to come to the polling stations and vote, but many say that it's useless," said the 20-year-old university student.

Turnout in many areas appeared low. In the Pacific Coast regions of Sakhalin and Kamchatka, turnout was just 45 to 48 percent with two hours to go until the polls closed.

Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev made final appeals for the party Friday, the last day of campaigning, warning that a parliament made up of diverse political camps would be incapable of making decisions.

The view underlines Russian authorities' continuing discomfort with political pluralism and preference for top-down operation.

As president in 2000-2008, Putin's autocratic leadership style won wide support among Russians exhausted by a decade of post-Soviet uncertainty. But United Russia has become increasingly disliked, seen as stifling opposition, representing a corrupt bureaucracy and often called "the party of crooks and thieves."

Putin needs the party to do well in the parliamentary election to pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away.

With so much at stake, there are doubts about how honestly the election will be conducted. An interim report from an elections-monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted that "most parties have expressed a lack of trust in the fairness of the electoral process."

The websites of Ekho Moskvy, a prominent, independent-minded radio station, and Golos, the country's only independent election-monitoring group, were down on Sunday. Both claimed the failures were due to denial-of-service hacker attacks.

"The attack on the site on election day is obviously connected to attempts to interfere with publication of information about violations," Ekho Moskvy editor Alexey Venediktov said in a Twitter post.

Golos has come under strong pressure in the week leading up to the vote.

Its leader, Lilya Shibanova, was held at a Moscow airport for 12 hours upon her Friday return from Poland after refusing to give her laptop computer to security officers, said Golos' deputy director Grigory Melkonyants. On Friday, the group was fined the equivalent of $1,000 by a Moscow court for violating a law that prohibits publication of election opinion research for five days before a vote.

Putin last Sunday accused Western governments of trying to influence the election. Golos is funded by grants from the United States and Europe.

The group has compiled some 5,300 complaints of election-law violations ahead of the vote. Most are linked to United Russia. Roughly a third of the complainants – mostly government employees and students – say employers and professors are pressuring them to vote for the party.


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Lars von Trier's Melancholia takes top prize at European film awards

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A good night for Britons at ceremony with Colin Firth and Tilda Swinton, Terry Gilliam and Stephen Frears winning prizes

The apocalypse came with an added happy ending at the 24th annual European film awards in Berlin, as Lars von Trier's Melancholia, an extravagant drama about the end of the world, took the crowning best film prize. The moment also marked a redemption of sorts for the picture's Danish director, following a turbulent year that saw him ejected from the Cannes film festival after joking that he was a Nazi. Von Trier was not at the ceremony but sent his wife, Bente Froge, to collect the award on his behalf.

Taking to the stage, Froge explained that her husband had taken a vow of silence in the wake of the Nazi row. "I should say from Lars that he has no statement for you," she told the guests. "But he did ask that I should wave to you in a kind and gentle way."

Melancholia stars the American actor Kirsten Dunst as a brittle manic-depressive who rises to the occasion when a rogue planet threatens imminent global destruction. In addition to its best film award, it also won for cinematography and production design.

It was a good night for British talent. Colin Firth was named best actor for his Oscar-winning turn in The King's Speech, while Tilda Swinton took the best actress prize for her acclaimed performance as an anguished American mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin. The award for the best short film went to Terry Gilliam for The Wholly Family, the director's 20-minute fantasy about a boy's adventures in Naples.

Elsewhere, director Stephen Frears was on hand to collect this year's lifetime achievement award, honouring an eclectic career that extends back from The Queen to films such as The Drifters, Dangerous Liaisons and My Beautiful Laundrette.

"This is a great honour and I'll try not to take it too seriously," Frears told the assembled members of the European film academy. "The truth is, I'm everything you don't approve of. I'm not an auteur and I don't write the scripts. I'm just a bloke who makes films and hopes the audience likes them." The members cheered him indulgently all the same

The Danish film-maker Susanne Bier was named best director for her hard-hitting drama In a Better World, while Pina, Wim Wenders' 3D homage to choreographer Pina Bausch, scooped the documentary prize. Arguably the biggest loser of the night was The Artist, which is already being tipped as a frontrunner at next year's Oscars. Michel Hazanavicius's silent-screen romance had to be content with just one award, for its composer Ludovic Bource.

But then the EFAs, which are voted for by 2500 members of the European film academy, has traditionally positioned itself as a riposte to the star-spangled, Hollywood-dominated Oscars. Outside the Tempodrom, near Potsdamer Platz, the red carpet was gleefully turned over to the likes of Volker Schlondorff and the Dardennes brothers, while the ceremony itself unfolded in a spirit of amiable chaos.

Yet what the EFAs lacked in showbiz professionalism, they made up for in conviviality. "Many European summits are being held at this time of crisis," explained Academy president Wim Wenders. "Those make us feel insecure. This one is different. It is about celebrating European culture and film. And looking at the films on offer, one could say that Europe is in very good health."

For all that, many of the films on the EFA shortlist seemed to reflect wider tensions in the continent at large. There were tales of violence and racism, poverty and armageddon, while the "European Discovery" award went to the Belgian drama Oxygen, solemnly described by its presenter as "a tender film about terminal lung disease".

At one stage the stormy subject matter appeared to get too much for the event's host, German comedian Anke Engelke. "Last year you took your sweetheart to the movies," she quipped. "This year you had to take your therapist."


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Sócrates

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Formidable captain of the Brazilian team in the 1982 World Cup

Sócrates – Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira – who has died of septic shock aged 57, was one of the most unlikely of Brazil's resplendent footballers. Bearded and seemingly indestructible, he stood 1.91m (6ft 3in) tall, once admitting: "I am an anti-athlete. I cannot deny myself certain lapses from the strict regime of a sportsman. You have to take me as I am."

He was, in fact, a formidable attacking midfielder, prominent in two World Cups in the 1980s, initially a centre forward but, for most of his international career, a dominating figure in every sense, in central midfield. He smoked incessantly, rather like Gérson, a previous general of the Brazilian midfield, he drank large quantities of beer, and if, eventually, such indulgences may have caught up with him, they never seem to have impinged on his extensive football career.

The first child of a self-educated intellectual father, who named three of his sons after Greek philosophers, Sócrates was born in Belém, the city on the banks of the Amazon estuary and capital of the north Brazilian state of Pará. But it was in Ribeirão Preto, 290km (180 miles) north-west of São Paulo, that Sócrates played with the Botafogo club (1974-78). The greater part of his career (1978-84) was spent with the Corinthians club of São Paulo.

In his early days there, he was notably unwilling to join in the wild celebrations of his team-mates when he scored a goal (of which there were 172 over the course of 297 matches); so much so that the fans complained to the club president. He, in turn, begged Sócrates to be more demonstrative, and Sócrates obliged, in future, with parodic celebrations, kneeling on the ground, throwing up his arms and invoking success from whatever gods there might be.

Though he may have seemed to trot unhurriedly about the ground, Sócrates could suddenly and formidably accelerate. When the ball was in the air, his great height and a notable leap made him irresistible, and he had a fierce right-footed drive. Taking penalties was a particular forte, though, strangely enough, he was not often used by the Brazilian national team to execute them.

Altogether he played 60 games for Brazil from 1979, scoring 22 goals. Telê Santana, the Brazil manager, made him captain of the team. In this role he was known for encouraging his team-mates with word and flamboyant gesture rather than criticising them.

In the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain, Brazil opened against Russia in Seville, deploying a midfield of tremendous talent. Against the Russians, Sócrates was ubiquitous and outstanding, now in the firing line, now unselfishly dropping deep to cover for the attacking left back, Júnior. After 75 minutes, he struck the equaliser with a fulminating right-footed shot and Brazil went on to win 2-1.

In their next match, won 4-1 against a Scotland team which, like Russia, had actually taken the lead, Sócrates neatly set up Brazil's fourth goal for his fellow midfielder, Falcão. In a second-round group match that his team, in Barcelona, was very unlucky to lose to Italy, Sócrates scored another spectacular goal. Receiving a perfectly angled pass from Zico, he somehow found a gap between Italy's goalkeeper, Dino Zoff, and the near post, a shot of tremendous power which found its billet. But Brazil, which needed only a draw to reach the semi-finals, lost 3-2 and went out in one of the most dramatic games in the history of the tournament.

There had been suggestions that Sócrates would cut short his playing career, but he was still in the Brazilian team, now captained by Edinho, for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. The heroes of midfield, however, Sócrates somewhat wearily among them, were largely tired or injured and there were ructions at the training camp. In Guadalajara, against Spain, Sócrates scored another World Cup goal, though this one looked offside, after the centre forward, Careca, had shot against the bar. That came eight minutes from the end and gave Brazil a 1-0 victory.

Brazil improved: Northern Ireland were swept aside 3-0 and, again in Guadalajara, Sócrates was for once deputed to take a penalty from which he duly scored, in a 4-0 victory against Poland. Should he have taken the vital penalty, on the same ground, in the quarter-final against France? But Zico took it and missed, and Brazil were eliminated on penalties, with Sócrates one of the non-scorers. At the time, Sócrates struck me as "strolling about the field in samba rhythm – never hurried, always inventive, occasionally breaking into a brisk trot". It was his last World Cup match, and he went out with the flourish of having two headers saved by the French goalkeeper, Joël Bats.

Though he had once said, in 1981, that he would never go to play in Italy for money, Sócrates did, in fact, join Fiorentina in the 1984-85 season. The 1986-87 season saw him back in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, playing for Flamengo, and from there he went to Santos, back in the São Paulo state league, in 1988-89.

There was also a 12-minute cameo appearance with Garforth Town against Tadcaster Albion in a Northern League match in 2004, but he was clearly a decade or so too old to play. The whole thing smacked of a publicity stunt.

Sócrates's younger brother, Raí, was a Brazilian international midfielder and a member of the Brazil squad that won the 1994 World Cup.

Sócrates is survived by his wife and six children.

Gavin McOwan writes: Sócrates was one of the very few qualified medical doctors to play the game at the very highest level, captaining Brazil in the 1982 World Cup, widely recognised as one of the best teams (along with Hungary in 1954 and Holland in 1974) never to win the tournament. His style of play was unmistakable; elegant and effortless almost to the point of nonchalance, and with a penchant for the back-heel that prompted Pelé to remark that Socrates played better going backwards than most footballers going forward.

He also possessed an intellect that complemented his name. I was lucky enough to interview "The Doctor" in 2002 and was awed by his wisdom and good humour – not to mention the number of beers he could knock back. He was clearly one of football's great sages, but also held court on everything from his surreal meeting in the Libyan desert with Colonel Gaddafi (who urged Sócrates to run for Brazilian president) to his love of Ché Guevara.

But for Brazilians who lived through the 21 years of the country's military dictatorship, Sócrates will also be remembered as a social activist and campaigner for democracy, both within the game and on the wider political stage.

While a player at Corinthians, he co-founded the Corinthians Democracy movement, an idealistic but effective political cell which fought against the authoritarian way the club's management controlled its players, a microcosm of the way the country was governed by the military. Sócrates, together with teammate Wladimir, organised the players to discuss and then vote with a simple show of hands on all matters which affected them, from simple things like what time they would eat lunch to challenging the dreaded concentracão, a common practice in Brazil where players are practically locked up in a hotel for one or two days before a game.

After winning battles within football, Corinthians Democracy broadened, using football's popularity as a catalyst to strive for political change. In November 1982, despite warnings from the Brazilian football association, the players wore shirts with "Vote on the 15th" printed on the back, urging the public to take part in the upcoming elections that were one of the first moves towards ending the dictatorship.

At a time when most people were still afraid to speak out against the regime, he politicised football in a way no other player has even attempted, before or since. And he was as proud of his team's valiant contribution in helping dismantle the dictatorship as he was his considerable football achievements. At the end of 1982, Corinthians won the São Paulo state championship with "Democracia" printed on the back of their black shirts. Sócrates said it was "perhaps the most perfect moment I ever lived. And I'm sure it was for 95% of [my teammates] too".

Sócrates (Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira), footballer, born 19 February 1954; died 4 December 2011


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Britain spends £10m to fight deforestation in Brazil

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Multimillion-pound project to help restore natural habitats, protect wildlife and halt climate change in central Brazil

Britain is spending £10m to tackle deforestation in Brazil in an effort to protect wildlife and reduce carbon emissions.

The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, said the money would help farmers in Cerrado, central Brazil, restore natural habitats, reduce forest fires and ease the pressure for more deforestation to provide land for agriculture.

Speaking at the International Forest Day conference in Durban, South Africa, where the latest round of UN climate talks are being held, Spelman said: "The Cerrado is rich in biodiversity and yet, alarmingly, it has almost halved in size, because of wildfires and the demand for agricultural products.

"If we're going to stop the loss of biodiversity, we need to protect our forests, which house the majority of the world's wildlife. We won't succeed in tackling climate change unless we deal with deforestation."

The move comes as environmental groups warn changes to Brazil's laws on protecting its forests, being voted on this week, will weaken them and make it hard for the country to meet its pledges to reduce carbon emissions. They say it will also undermine international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases from deforestation which are being discussed at the current UN talks.

According to the WWF wildlife charity, the changes to the forest code laws, which looks set to be approved by Brazil's senate this week, will provide an amnesty for illegal deforestation, which occurred by 2008, stop illegally deforested areas being fully restored and allow non-native species to be planted.

WWF says Brazilian government data shows that 79m hectares of forest in Brazil – an area the size of the UK and France combine – could be left unprotected and 29bn tonnes of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere or not captured in restored forests as a result of the changes.

Carlos Rittl, climate change and energy programme co-ordinator at WWF-Brazil, said: "Brazil could go from being a global leader in reducing deforestation to potentially shooting up the list of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters."

Brazil's environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, said the country had been leading a consistent policy to reduce deforestation.

Brazil's success in cutting deforestation in the Amazon from 27,000 sq km in 2004 to 7,000 in 2010, had led the government to broaden work to other affected areas such as the Cerrado, which covers a quarter of the country, she said as she welcomed the UK's bilateral move.

The UK has pledged £2.9bn for projects to tackle climate change, with a significant proportion going to efforts to reduce emissions associated with deforestation, which comprise almost a fifth of annual global emissions.


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Eyewitness: Blood ritual

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Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series



Syria given 24 hours to sign Arab League deal or face sanctions

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AOfficials given ultimatum after missing deadline to let in international monitors amid rising death toll

Syria has been given a final deadline by the Arab League to accept international observers into the country or face sanctions.

The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, said on Saturday that the league had given Bashar al-Assad's regime 24 hours to sign its initiative. "If they want to come [and sign] tomorrow they can," he said, after a meeting of the Arab League ministerial committee in Doha.

He later told al-Jazeera television: "If the signing does not happen tomorrow, and I doubt it will … if the signing does not happen soon, then the Arab sanctions that have been approved will be in effect."

The Arab League's sanctions committee confirmed it would freeze the assets of 19 top Syrian officials and Assad associates, and ban them from entering other Arab countries. The number of flights to Syria would be halved. Thani warned that more measures could be imposed if Syria did not stop the crackdown against protesters.

The Arab League agreed to impose sanctions a week ago after Syria missed a previous deadline to allow monitors into the country, amid an escalating death toll. The UN's human rights chief, Navi Pillay said this week that the death toll from the crackdown against protesters in the nine-month uprising had reached "much more" than 4,000 and included 307 children. The UN human rights council has appointed a special investigator for Syria.

Despite the Arab League's efforts, the bloodshed has continued unabated. The Local Co-ordination Committees, which reports on protests, said 22 people, including two children, were killed on Saturday. They claimed 848 people were killed in November alone, including 59 children, making it the deadliest month since the uprising began. Restrictions on access for foreign press make it difficult to independently verify activists' reports.

The Syrian government claims it is fighting foreign-backed "terrorist groups" trying to create civil war who have killed around 1,100 soldiers and police officers since March. It has pointed to the emergence of the renegade Free Syrian Army (FSA), which has been launching attacks on the regular army, as evidence it is facing an armed insurgency. The main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, has urged the FSA to only use violence in defence of protesters.

Syria says sanctions by the Arab League amount to economic war and has accused the league of "internationalising" the crisis. Last week, Turkey, which was until recently a close ally of the Assad regime, increased pressure on the president by freezing financial assets and cutting strategic links with Damascus. China and Russia oppose sanctions against Syria and, in October, vetoed western efforts to pass a UN security council resolution condemning Assad's government.


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Woman, 85, claims she was strip-searched at JFK airport

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Lenore Zimmerman says she was made to remove her clothes after she asked not to go through a body scanner

An 85-year-old woman said she was injured and humiliated when she was strip-searched at an airport after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner.

Transport security officials have denied allegations by Lenore Zimmerman, who said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her clothes after she asked to forgo the screening because she was worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She missed her flight and had to take one two-and-a-half hours later, she said.

"I'm hunched over. I'm in a wheelchair. I weigh under 110lb (50kg)," she said. "Do I look like a terrorist?"

But in a statement the Transportation Security Administration said no strip search had been carried out.

"While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case," the statement read.

Zimmerman was dropped off by her son at JFK airport in New York for a 1pm flight on Tuesday to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on JetBlue, she said. She arrived at the ticket counter at about 12.20pm and headed for security in a wheelchair, her metal walker in her lap.

She said she had been traveling to Florida for at least a decade and had never had a problem being patted down until now. "I worry about my heart, so I don't want to go through those things," she said, referring to the advanced image technology screening machines at the airport.

As a result, she said, she was taken into the private screening room by a female agent and made to strip.

"Private screening was requested by the passenger, it was granted and lasted approximately 11 minutes," the TSA said. "TSA screening procedures are conducted in a manner designed to treat all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy and that occurred in this instance."

The private screening was not recorded.

Jonathan Allen, a TSA spokesman, said a review of closed-circuit television at the airport had showed that proper procedures before and after the screening had been followed.

Zimmerman said she banged her shin during the process and it bled "like a pig,", partly because she is on blood-thinning medication. She said an emergency medical technician patched her up, but she was told to see a doctor when she arrived in Florida to make sure the wound did not get infected. There are no records indicating medical attention was called on her behalf.

"I don't know what triggered this. I don't know why they singled me out," she said.

Her son, Bruce Zimmerman, said: "My mother is a little old woman. She's not disruptive or unco-operative. I don't understand how this happened."

He said she had had an increasingly difficult time travelling, especially since her husband died a few years ago. She has two grandchildren and her older son, a doctor, died in 2007.


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Bomb explodes near British embassy in Bahrain

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Bahrain's interior ministry says small blast near embassy in Manama was caused by bomb under a parked minibus

A bomb has exploded near the British embassy in Manama, the Bahraini capital, according to the country's interior ministry.

"Given the strength of the explosion and the debris it scattered, it was a highly explosive substance that was used," a ministry spokesman tweeted from a news conference. "The explosion was the result of a package placed under the front tyre," he said. He described the vehicle as a minibus parked some 50 metres from the embassy compound.

A Foreign Office spokesman said there were no casualties or damage to the compound as a result of the blast, which occurred at around 1.30am. "We are working with Bahrain's interior ministry and we have requested a temporary increase in security," he said. "We cannot yet identify the cause or the responsibility."

There has been widespread tension in Bahrain since pro-democracy protests erupted in February after revolts in Egypt and Tunisia. The government imposed martial law for nearly three months and ordered mass detentions and trials to crush the protests.

The government, dominated by the Sunni Muslim Al Khalifa family, said the protests, led by majority Shias, had sectarian motives and were fomented by Iran. A government-sponsored fact-finding commission led by international rights lawyers said last month there was no evidence of Iranian interference but Bahrain said there was incitement by the Iranian media.

A diplomatic crisis between Iran and Britain deepened last week after youths stormed the British embassy in Tehran to protest against economic sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear energy programme.

London withdrew its diplomats from Tehran and expelled Iranian diplomats from Britain. Other European countries withdrew envoys from Tehran last week in support of Britain. Iran denies its nuclear programme is aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

A Dubai-based defence and security analyst, Theodore Karasik, said the blast could mark an escalation of social strife in Bahrain, where there are daily clashes between Shia protesters and riot police.

The timing of the explosion has been described as significant because Shias are marking the religious mourning rites of Ashura this week, which marks the death of Imam Hussein, the prophet Muhammad's grandson.

"The timing is important because it occurred during Ashura," Karasik said. "What we might be seeing now is a cell or two that are being set up by disgruntled Bahraini Shias who now use bombs to achieve their goals. It's a jump to a new level."


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