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Badger culls in England and Wales - timeline

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Key events in the controversial government badger culls in England and Wales

27 February 2008
An all-party committee of MPs says controlled culling of badgers may take place in England to control the spread of bovine TB.

13 January 2010
A badger cull is to go ahead in Wales to counter TB in cattle.

15 September 2010
The government sets out its plans for badger culling in England.

9 March 2011
Wales gives the go-ahead for revised badger culls; legal challenges halted trials last year.

11 July 2011
Lord Krebs, a former government scientific advisor, says evidence from previous trials shows culling is not effective against bovine TB.

19 July 2011
Environment secretary Caroline Spelman tells MPs she is 'strongly minded' to allow badgers to be culled by shooting.

14 December 2011
The environment secretary announces that culling will go ahead next year.

19 January 2012
Areas in Gloucestershire and Somerset are named as the first badger cull pilot areas.

28 February 2012
The legal battle over culling begins.

20 March 2012
The Welsh government scraps their plan for culling in favour of vaccination.

12 July 2012
The high court rules that badger culling is legal in England, paving the way for culls in the autumn.

11 September 2012
A legal challenge to stop the culling fails at the appeals court.

17 September 2012
The first culling licence in England is issued.

24 September 2012
An e-petition to stop the culling launched by Queen guitarist Brian May attracts over 100,000 signatures.

21 October 2012
The Badger Trust mounts a last-minute legal challenge over the validity of licences for culling.

23 October 2012
Owen Paterson tells the Commons badger culling will be postponed until next summer.

25 October 2012
MPs vote 147 to 28 to abandon badger culling.

27 February 2013
Pilot culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset are confirmed by the environment secretary.

28 April 2013
The RSPCA has come under fire for criticising the proposed badger culls.

5 June 2013
Labour fails in an attempt to stop the culls with a Commons vote.

4 July 2013
Environment secretary Owen Paterson vows to eradicate bovine TB from England within 25 years, as he releases plans that include culling and vaccination.

8 August 2013
David Cameron defends the culling, calling it 'the right thing to do.'

22 August 2013
A high court judge issues an order protecting cull farmers from harassment, banning protesters from entering private land without permission.

27 August 2013
Badger culls begin in Goucestershire and Somerset, as the environment secretary defends the move and Labour attacks Defra's decision.

30 August 2013
Brian May's anti-culling protest song reaches the charts.

6 September 2013
Four protesters are arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass in the Gloucestershire cull zone.

24 September 2013
Police officers threaten to pass details of anti-cull protesters to the National Farmers' Union and hand out NFU leaflets; civil liberties lawyers accuse them of bias.

9 October 2013
Environment secretary Owen Paterson says 'the badgers are moving the goalposts' as the culls fall short of targets.

11 October 2013
The Somerset cull is extended by three weeks, in an attempt to reach the kill targets.

17 October 2013
The cull in Goucestershire falls short of its target as marksmen only kill 30% of the population, and may be extended.

19 October 2013
The badger cull is hit by legal action from the Badger Trust.

23 October 2013
Sir David Attenborough slams the UK government for 'ignoring' science over culling, as illegal gassing and shooting is reported in the trial counties.

5 November 2013
The extended badger cull in Somerset fails to reach its target.

29 November 2013
The badger cull in Gloucestershire is abandoned, as Nature England revokes the licence over a failure to meet reduced targets. The cull may have increased the risk of TB in cattle.

14 January 2014
Data shows the cost of policing badger culls in Somerset and Glucestershire was more than double earlier estimates.

23 January 2014
Figures show that only 24% of badgers culled were killed by controlled shooting, the method the pilot schemes were designed to test.

28 February 2014
Independent expert assessments obtained by the Guardian show that badger culls in England failed on both humaneness and effectiveness.


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Politics Weekly podcast: Ukraine, IRA letters and the Daily Mail v Harriet Harman

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The crisis in Ukraine continues this week amid a power vacuum, a currency crash and the manoeuvrings and military incursions of its neighbours.

Kiev has requested the attention of the UN security council as Russian forces amass in the largely pro-Moscow and historically Russian region of Crimea.

Joining Tom Clark in the studio are the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding, political columnist Michael White and political diarist Hugh Muir.

Also this week: the collapse of the trial of a suspected former IRA killer has led to a judicial inquiry and the near resignation of Northern Ireland's first minister. The suspect – John Downey – was able to produce a letter from the British government that amounted to a "get out of jail free" card dating from the peace talks during Tony Blair's time as prime minister.

Plus: the Daily Mail, which last year branded Ed Miliband's father Ralph "the man who hated Britain", has been campaigning to extract an apology from senior Labour figures who worked at the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s. The NCCL, it transpires, allowed a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange to gain affiliate status. Several of its members were later convicted of sex offences. Has the row done lasting damage to Labour?

Leave your thoughts below.



Ukraine accuses Russia of 'armed invasion' after airport seizure - live updates

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Follow live updates as Ukraine accuses Russia of taking over two airports in Crimea









How Neil Gaiman took the road to En-Dor

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An autobiographical account of an ingenious plan to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp in 1917 still thrills the author

I did not steal the book. I did something worse. I found the book in the old school library. The library was next door to the office in which the school's matron (fat and funny and nice), her deputy (sharp-faced and suspicious) and a variety of young helpers (sympathetic teenagers with red cheeks) would read magazines and drink tea. It took a certain amount of bravery to tell them I had a headache. They would give me a cynical look, then dissolve an aspirin in a glass of water, and after I had drunk it I would be sent to sit in the library until my headache went away.

Sometimes I really did have a headache.

The book had a red cover, and it was called The Road to En-Dor. It had a sheet that folded out attached to the back cover with glue: a sort of chart, showing objects and numbers and such, and common phrases. I did not understand what the sheet was, and so I read the book.

The Road to En-Dor is an autobiographical account of life in, and escape from, a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp, Yozgad, in 1917. It was written by EH Jones, and explains how his use of a Ouija board to entertain his friends became, with the assistance of Australian officer (and amateur magician) Cedric Hill, an escape attempt, using the cupidity of their captors. Jones and Hill convinced the Turks (and many of the British officers) that they were mediums in telepathic communication, and, under the direction of a spirit guide, would be able to find hidden gold. Their escape attempt ended in their imprisonment in a Turkish insane asylum, and in repatriation shortly before the end of the war. I was 10 years old when I read The Road to En-Dor and was utterly fascinated.

Reading the book, I was in Yozgad with Jones as he learned to fake the Ouija board, with Jones and Hill as they began to fool the Commandant. I followed them on a journey into nightmares, as what seemed to be a simple escape plan (simple? A lunatic escape plan of infinite complexity and unlikelihood, more like) transmuted and transformed, forever being thwarted by their own side. It was a journey into madness and self-delusion, in which a terrifying folie à deux somehow kept them both sane. It was a strange thing for a 10-year-old boy to be reading.

Somewhere along the way I understood what the chart in the book was: a mind-reading code. Two people could learn it and communicate information with a simple phrase such as "Quick now, what am I looking at?" I had heard of such things – my mother's aunt and uncle had a mind-reading act – but now I was looking at a way to do it.

I removed the chart from the back of the book and took it home, certain that I would one day meet someone who would be the Hill to my Jones, and we would create an astonishing mind-reading act together, but I never did.

I did not forget the book. The book was unforgettable.

Thirty years later, magician Penn Jillette told me in an email that there had never been a fake medium who had ever had a noble or good reason for doing what they did, in hoodwinking the easily hoodwinked, and I agreed with him. Up to a point, anyway. "Except for The Road to En-Dor," I said.

Being Penn, he had found a second-hand copy of the book on the internet within minutes of receiving my email. Also being Penn, he read the book and emailed me within the week, and told me he thought it would make a good film, and that we should write it together.

I reread it. I was surprised at how much I had remembered of the book, and amazed at how much better, deeper and, eventually, darker it was than I had remembered.

We set out on a quest to find who owned the film rights, which led us to Hilary Bevan Jones (granddaughter of EH Jones), who has, in the decade since, become one of my best friends. We even wrote the film script. We learned how much Lieutenant Jones underplayed the horrors that he and Hill went through. We learned of the other film people who had wanted to bring the story to the world. We learned how much love there is for this apparently forgotten book.

I wonder sometimes where the mind-reading chart that I stole from the book is today: somewhere in the attic, at a guess, or in some random papers. I would never have thrown it out. It was the key to the mysteries.

I am so glad that a new edition of the book is now available. It is a true story, underplayed, a story of heroism, of magic and of madness. And you can wonder, as I wonder now, as I wondered when I was 10, whether what Hill and Jones went through was worth it – whether their madness actually kept them sane.


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My stage protest against sexual violence

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Yaël Farber's award-winning play Nirbhaya, written after the gang rape in Delhi, is based on the testimonies of survivors of sexual violence. She records her journey from India to the London stage

December 2012, Montreal. As I wake in the silent predawn, the streets lie pristine with snow. My daughter, then five years old, purrs softly through open sleeping mouth. Her small limbs lie splayed across my sheets as though in mid-flight. Her abandon is of one who does not yet know the statistics of a world dangerous for girls. A sound from my smartphone burns a hole where sleep should be.

My newsfeed is saturated this early morning with details of a gang rape in Delhi. I can think of nothing else. The press has dubbed her "Nirbhaya" (Fearless). Gang-raped and sodomised by six men for 90 minutes on a moving bus, sexually assaulted with an iron bar so violently that only 5% of her intestines remained intact, and then thrown naked into the streets, where for two hours no one stopped to help. When the police finally arrived, they argued among themselves and refused to lift the victim into the waiting vehicle. They did not want blood on their uniforms. Her male friend – gravely injured – lifted her himself into the waiting car.

In a world saturated with daily horrors of sexual violence, this story has punctured our collective indifference. The streets of India have erupted in fierce protest. I watch the media frenzy rise. Some of it is sensationalist; some astoundingly neo-colonial.

At 5am a message appears in my inbox from a Poorna Jagannathan. We have never met but she has seen my theatre work featuring the testimonials of real people before. "I am a victim of sexual violence who has been silent all these years. By keeping quiet, I consider myself a part of what happened on that bus. Come here. Women in India are ready to break their silence and speak. There is no turning back."

January 2013, Bombay. The road is unforgiving. In a rickshaw, every nuance of the tarmac makes itself known. We are searching for the individuals who will constitute the cast for this production. Beside me sits Poorna. She smiles as I take in the beautiful chaos. On her own dime (hard earned as an actor) she has flown me and my daughter across the world so that we can begin.

The sexual crime statistics of my native South Africa and of India are often mentioned in the same breath. Six weeks after Nirbhaya's attack, Anene Booysens, a South African teenager, was found with parts of her intestines next to her in the dirt at a construction site. She had been gang raped and, after naming one of her attackers from her hospital bed, died. This rape has drawn widespread condemnation. But where India's streets have risen in protest for Nirbhaya, the turnout in support of Booysens is comparatively pathetic. Are South Africans still capable of the revolutionary rage that cast off the shackles of apartheid, I wonder. Or are freedom and human rights the reserve of men alone?

Despite Nirbhaya's death being a dark hour for India, it is a source of blazing light. "This way" the men and women marching towards India Gate seem to be saying to the rest of the world as they face down water cannons and baton-wielding police. They are calling us from our stupor.

Now the rickshaw pulls off into Bombay's evening. I look back over my shoulder and in the twilight I see her: a figure walking among us, though no longer here. She does not speak. She simply sings. And as she passes us, the living, the stories that reside in silence are stirred. Thus it begins. The first image for this new work is born. She boards a bus, singing quietly to herself.

April 2013, London. I have flown directly from Bombay. I still have India's dust on me as I sit opposite the director William Burdett-Coutts. We toast a successful opening of Mies Julie. "What's happening with the India piece?" William asks. "We are hoping to raise funds by the year's end." I answer, with no idea where the funding will come from. "We must do it this year," he says simply. "For Edinburgh. This time next year, the anger people are feeling will have numbed again." The timeline is impossibly short. But he is right. Poorna puts a call out on Facebook for survivors of sexual violence – ideally performers – in India to come forward. The response is overwhelming.

June 2013, Delhi. It is 4am. I walk along the dark passage on the ashram to the urn. By night I am the playwright. By day, the facilitator and director. The mosquitos whine their small, ubiquitous song. Beyond the walls of this beautiful haven on the outskirts of Delhi, the city seethes. The cast has made it clear: going out at night alone as a woman is not an option. I have walked a long road with testimonial theatre in South Africa and feel I'm a capable pilot during the day. But at night my heart races as I draft and redraft five women's testimonies.

Sneha Jawale – one of the cast members – is awake and sitting on the step outside her door as I return from the urn. We smile but say little at this hour. She was a dowry bride, but her husband and inlaws doused her in kerosene and set her alight. Her five-year-old son witnessed the horror, and though she survived she has never seen her son again. Sapna Bhavnani, Poorna Jagannathan, Priyanka Bose, Rukhsar Kabir all sleep nearby. Ankur Vikal is the only male cast-member. He will enact all facets of male presence in each woman's testimony. Japjit Kaur will incarnate Nirbhaya.

August 2013, Edinburgh. A young woman is talking to Rukhsar after the show. A large Scottish man stands holding Sneha's hand. He is weeping but without words. The cast stands outside the venue after each show so that the audience can break their own silence by whispering their stories into the performers' ears. Each day at 4pm, I have sat in the Assembly Hall and watched as each performer steps up to the stage from the auditorium with her hand raised. The gesture comes from a moving image taken of a young woman protesting Jyothi's death. She is walking towards India Gate, through the high velocity water cannon meant to cower her. Her hand is raised above her head in a three-finger prong of defiance. Each day I watch the audience get to their feet in the blackout, as though to rise and join us there.

February 2014, Bombay. I was awakened at dawn by the cacophony of hooting cars and black crows on my window ledge. We are preparing the play for a run at the Southbank Centre in London in March, and then back to India for our national tour. It is a year since I first stepped off the plane into Bombay's midnight heat. It is more than a year since I first read the name Nirbhaya and raised my hand, with this unique cast, against the silence.


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Nigel Farage speaks at Ukip's spring conference: Politics live blog

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Andrew Sparrow’s rolling coverage of the Ukip spring conference in Torquay, including Nigel Farage’s speech









Bus attack: two women charged with assaulting partially blind man

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New South Wales pair appear in court after footage of Gold Coast assault is posted online









Thailand protest leader promises to clear streets, moving campaign to park

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Suthep Thaugsuban keeps up campaign against government but says ‘we are returning Bangkok to its owners’










Mardi Gras under way in Sydney with Queen Elizabeth's blessing

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Drag queen Vanity Faire arrives on the bow of cruise ship to get celebrations started









Boston Marathon bombing: Tsarnaev's defence team want charges thrown out

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Repetitive counts are prejudicial, say lawyers, while prosecutors claim prisoner has made remarks that harm his case









Australian women make poor start to world surfing event in Gold Coast

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Stephanie Gilmore and Sally Fitzgibbons face sudden-death after finishing last in their opening round heats of the Roxy Pro on the Gold Coast









New York murder fugitive traced to Australia using secret DNA samples

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New South Wales police tailed Abakar Gadiyev and gathered genetic material from drinking glasses and cigarettes









My mother was Emperor Hirohito's poster child

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The picture below is not all it seems – it was set up as a piece of propaganda from a Japanese prison camp in Borneo during the second world war, featuring Sarah Hilary's mother and grandparents

I'm sitting next to my grandmother looking through family photograph albums (a favourite pastime since I was tiny) when I find this picture. I haven't seen it before and wonder why it's not in a frame on the wall. It's such a great family photo. I ask my grandmother, who is on the right in the picture, but she can't look at it. She doesn't want to talk about it, although she already has, I realise – when I was a small child sitting with my siblings on her bed, listening to stories of our mother's childhood.

This is a photograph from the prison camp where they were held during the second world war. Like the tales our grandmother told us, it's only half the story because the camera lied.

"All is well," it lied. This is northwest Borneo under Japanese rule. The child is my mother, seated on my grandmother's lap. The man whose face is only glimpsed is my grandfather. I never knew him.

Thousands of people have seen this photograph. People on the other side of the world saw it, when the world was fighting a war of morale and conscience. People I will never meet have seen it. But my grandmother can't look at it. "Look at this happy family," it lies, when the family is imprisoned, impoverished, in fear of their lives.

The photograph was taken in the spring of 1944, two years after the Japanese invaded Borneo, capturing the men, women and children of unfriendly nations, Chinese, Dutch, British and Australians among them, to be interned in camps on the third largest island in the world. By 1944, many of those interned had died; more were dying.

Domei News, then Japan's only news agency, dispatched reporters to the frontline in Asia and the Pacific. They sent home almost daily the Domei Photo News, which was distributed by the thousands to schools, factories, shops and public places. The Domei News photographer's task was simple: show the world how content our prisoners are. The photos were intended to appease organisations such as the Red Cross, and convince ordinary Japanese families that the war was being fought honourably.

My mother was Emperor Hirohito's poster child.

No one in the photograph is wearing their own clothes. The white shirt, flowered dress and child's pinafore were loaned by the Japanese and taken back at the end of the photo shoot. My grandmother was made to wash the makeup from her face before returning to the women's camp, where no new clothes or makeup had been seen in two years. As one internee wrote in the diary she kept hidden from the Japanese: "My last towel has now disintegrated, so after washing I am obliged to shake myself like a dog until dry."

If you look closely at the photograph, you'll see that my mother is wearing a crucifix. It was carved by the Roman Catholic sisters in the camp, from the Perspex windshield of a military aircraft. I have my mother's crucifix to hand as I write this. It is small, light; pleasingly tactile. A stranger finding it in a house clearance would think it worthless and throw it away. The same stranger might linger over the heart-shaped pendant, also painstakingly carved from Perspex by the nuns, who placed tiny pictures of my mother's parents, no bigger than a thumbnail, into the hollowed heart of the necklace. They did this same kindness for every child in the camp.

Other memorabilia survive. A tin the children ate their meals from, toys stuffed with rags and sand, a book whose margins are filled with appointments pencilled by my grandmother, who was hairdresser for the women and children. In the same book: tallies of cigarettes to be bartered with the guards for food and other necessities.

My grandmother was 25 and a young mother when she was taken prisoner. Her courage still humbles me. I can't imagine surviving a fate like that, never mind keeping a small child alive and well. Whenever I suggest this idea of courage to my grandmother, she shakes her head, but she will admit that the experience made her stronger.

I expect the Japanese photographer tried to win a smile from my mother. Her unhappy expression is a small victory against the casual cruelty of the propagandists. She was taken from her home and loaded on to a truck with dozens of other children and their mothers, shipped to an island leper colony and then by boat to a prison camp where she saw brutality and disease, knew hunger and witnessed death. She saw men dig their own graves. She saw sons dig graves for their fathers. She was not yet five. Within a year of this photograph being taken she would be gravely ill with pneumonia and her father would be dead.

Her father, my grandfather, whose face is in shadow in the portrait, risked his life with a group of comrades to spread forbidden news of the war to the other prisoners, news such as the death of Hitler, information that kept many prisoners alive and hoping, long enough to survive until liberation. For doing this my grandfather was taken to a military prison where he died of malaria before he could be executed, with his comrades, by the Japanese.

The dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs in 1945 ended the war in the far east. I feel a queasy sense of survivor guilt at the thought that without those atrocious bombs, I wouldn't be here to tell my grandmother's story. No one in the photograph, no one in the prison camp, would have survived the orders from the Japanese high command, to burn the women and children and to bayonet the men.

On 11 September 1945, the camp was liberated by Australian troops. Because my grandmother had sold her engagement ring to a guard in exchange for penicillin, my mother survived to see the liberation, to watch with the other children as thousands of red, white and blue leaflets dropped from Allied aircraft into the camp, telling the prisoners to "Be of Good Cheer" and that rescue was on its way.

Another photo, smudged and grainy, shows my mother (then six and smiling) in the arms of an Australian soldier. There are no snapshots of my grandmother in the days immediately after the liberation. She was trying to find her husband. She didn't know, then, that he had died.

For a long time, I kept my grandmother's story a secret. As she did; returning expatriates were told not to talk about their ordeal, for the good of morale in postwar Britain. Many never spoke of it. My grandmother never talked with her daughter about their ordeal, believing it a blessing that my mother remembered so little of it. Thinking, in fact, that my mother remembered nothing (she remembered snatches). The silence was a kindness, an act of faith between them, to keep the horrors of the past at bay.

Only when she had grandchildren did my grandmother start to tell her story. Gently and with humour, setting the horror aside so that we could not have guessed that we were hearing about nearly four years of imprisonment, the constant threat of sickness and death. Every day, in the final years, the children in the camp saw the same flag used to cover coffins of the dead.

My grandmother told stories of happy Christmases, our mother learning to write with a stick in the sand, running barefoot, everywhere. We were enthralled, always begging for more, not knowing until we were grown up that there was a secret to the story. I remember the day it clicked into place in my head, vividly and with a sensation like vertigo: a familiar landscape suddenly seen upside down, inside out.

My grandmother died in November 2000. She was the best and bravest of women. I remember her sense of mischief and adventure. She inspired so much of what I do. If, as she believed, her spirit was forged in the fire of the prison camp, then it was an indomitable spirit, full of love for life and, yes, courage. She knew I wanted to be a writer so I hope that she told me the story of the prison camp because it needed to be told. Needs to be told.

The Domei News Agency was disbanded in 1945. It had served its purpose. Thousands of photographs had convinced millions of people that all was well. Just as Allied propaganda convinced millions of others, of the necessity of dropping the atom bombs.

Once you know the truth, it becomes hard to look at the photograph, perhaps because the truth is so obscured by the horrific realities of the time. Each time I see it, I feel something different. Loss of course, and grief. Pride for my grandfather's sacrifice and regret that I never knew him and because my mother grew up without her father; deep sadness for my grandmother's loss, and my mother's. Gratitude for their survival and the happiness they brought to my life. And wonder that two human beings could live through trauma of that magnitude and not be bitter or timid but instead huge-hearted, generous and tender. All that I know about the strength and value of families, I learned from them.

I began by saying that this family photograph lied, but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps, despite the borrowed clothes and the studio pose, the photograph shouts a great truth, about love and survival and the unassailable nature of the family.


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Fairtrade: how a few pence can make a big difference

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What's the cost of your conscience? Very little, if you buy Fairtrade coffee, tea, cocoa, oranges and bananas

What's the cost of your conscience? About £1.18, according to my calculations. That's how much extra it cost me to buy Fairtrade coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas and oranges, compared with the very cheapest non-Fairtrade equivalents I could find at my local Tesco.

For some items there is barely any difference in price. Fairtrade oranges are only 5p more at 40p each. Tesco is selling Percol Fairtrade ground coffee from £1.30 per 100g – just 10p more than its standard Lavazza coffee. But bananas are twice the price – 25p each in bags of four if you want Fairtrade, 12p if not, and even cheaper when sold loose.

How did bananas get to be just 12p? A quarter of the cost of a Kit Kat. Less than a tenth of the cost of a single bus ride in London. They are even 8p less than the cost of an apple grown in the UK, when bananas are shipped across the Atlantic. The Fairtrade Foundation blames a bitter price war over the past 10 years that has seen British supermarkets almost halve the price of loose bananas while the cost of producing them has doubled. "This is trapping many of the farmers and workers who grow them in poverty," it says.

In Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Equador, from where we import 70% of our bananas, living standards among workers on banana plantations have plummeted. "With my hand on my heart, the price we get for our produce is not enough for us to sustain production over here. We don't see real profit from the effort we put in, it's frustrating," says Albeiro Alfonso Cantillo, a Colombian banana farmer working with Fairtrade on behalf of banana farmers globally. Even Tesco admitted to Fairtrade researchers that it made a loss on every loose banana it has sold since mid 2013.

The Fairtrade Foundation wants supermarkets to behave more responsibly (it rated Aldi and Lidl worst, by the way) and is petitioning business secretary Vince Cable to take action at government level. Just 3.5% of bananas sold in Tesco are Fairtrade, but it is promising more this year. But the simplest thing is for shoppers to use their buying power and pop into the Co-op, Sainsbury's or Waitrose, whose bananas are 100% Fairtrade.

But if you do change your buying habits, will it really make any difference? The critics – led by the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs – accuse supporters of fair trade of being woolly minded liberals. They say only a quarter of the extra that shoppers pay for fair trade products actually reaches the farmers. What's more, these farmers have to stump up silly amounts to be "certified", and the end result is that Fairtrade may actually make Third World farmers poorer.

But I've had the good fortune of visiting Fairtrade coffee plantations in Tanzania, which are supported by Starbucks. The difference in prosperity between the Fairtrade co-operatives and those outside the scheme is not quite South Korea v North Korea, but it's not far off. Farmers receive a fixed price for their coffee that reflects the sustainable cost of production, plus a premium that their community can invest in education, healthcare, or ways to improve yields or buy processing facilities. In 2012, farmers across the world received £65m in Fairtrade Premium.

It strikes me that the critics of fair trade are ideologically opposed to anything seen as interference in the correct running of markets. But the global agricultural market is laughably distant from the type of perfectly competitive market of buyers and sellers imagined by Adam Smith. It's a market rigged against the poor. In Britain, it seems we chomp through 9,000 bananas every minute, and if we all think a bit more before we buy, we could make a huge difference with just a few pence.

• On a totally unrelated subject, did you take out a pre-nuptial agreement before marrying? Horriby unromantic? Or a rational step everyone should take before the big day? We are keen to hear your stories at money@theguardian.com


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Ellen DeGeneres: The star who came out of the cold

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The US talkshow host and comedian has overcome adversity to become a bona fide American superstar and a household name

In September, Ellen DeGeneres told the audience of her talkshow about the pros and cons of hosting the Academy Awards: "Pro: a lot of fancy designers will want to approach me and want me to wear a beautiful, expensive gown. Con: ain't no way in hell I'm wearing a gown." The audience erupted in cheers.

Such vocal approval is an indication of how far both DeGeneres's fortunes and US public attitudes towards sexuality and gender have shifted. At the turn of the century, you could have been excused for thinking DeGeneres was down and out.

After spending two decades establishing herself as one of the most popular comedians in the US, in 1997 she gambled everything on coming out as a lesbian, both in real life and in character on the hit sitcom that bore her name – and she seemed to lose. Advertisers deserted her show, her relationship with Anne Heche became tabloid fodder, she sank into depression and her career seemed to stall.

Look at her now. DeGeneres hasn't just bounced back; she's a bona fide American superstar, with a juggernaut of a talk show, nearly three billion views on her YouTube channel, and more Twitter followers than Oprah Winfrey, CNN or any member of One Direction. She has done it on her own terms. And she definitely wears suits, not gowns – as she will when she hosts the awards for a second time on Sunday.

DeGeneres has never been one to think small. Born outside New Orleans in 1958, she once said she decided early in life "I wanted to have money, I wanted to be special, I wanted people to like me, I wanted to be famous." One of the key aspects of her success is that she has achieved this, lost it all and come back stronger without coming across as ambitious or egocentric, let alone nasty or mean. Her amiability and approachability are crucial to her appeal, and perhaps her most politically significant attributes too.

Overcoming adversity is a motif that repeats itself in DeGeneres' life. When she was a 21-year-old college dropout, she fought with her girlfriend Kat and left their apartment. When Kat found her at a rock concert and begged her to come home, Ellen ignored her. Minutes later, Kat was killed in a car crash. Devastated, DeGeneres almost fell into self-destruction but found herself in her work. She impulsively embarked on what would become her comedy career, writing a routine called A Phone Call to God that she decided – one day – she would perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Seven years of dedicated gigging later, in 1986, she did just that – and was the first female comedian he invited over for a chat after her routine.

In 1994 DeGeneres landed her own ABC sitcom, called Ellen. Like Seinfeld, it combined wry observational standup with stories about social awkwardness: bookstore worker Ellen was basically likeable but clumsy and needy, with a tendency to ramble nervously and veer off on tangents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her penchant for deflection and self-effacement, Ellen was hiding something.

Rumours about her sexuality grew and hints were dropped on the show until in 1997 both Ellen the character and DeGeneres the performer came out as gay. Oprah was involved in both cases, as therapist to the former and talkshow host to the latter when DeGeneres appeared on her show. Degeneres also gave an interview to Time magazine, appearing on the cover with the strapline "Yep, I'm Gay".

"It's important to remember no one had done anything like that before," says Matt Kane of Glaad, the US lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender media advocacy group. "To come out on that scale – Ellen occupied a position in US pop culture that meant she introduced a lot of viewers to the reality of being gay or lesbian in a way they hadn't confronted."

The coming out sparked a mini culture war, with many praising the comedian's courage while others recoiled. The TV evangelist Jerry Falwell branded her "Ellen DeGenerate".

Initial support from advertisers and the network slipped away, audiences fell, and in May 1998 Ellen was cancelled. Four months later, Will & Grace – the first network sitcom with a lead character who was out from the start – debuted to considerable success. But Ellen was out in the cold. "I didn't work for three years," she has said. "I was so angry. I thought: I earned this. I didn't get this because I was beautiful; I didn't get this because I had connections in the business. I really worked my way up to a show, a sitcom that was mine that was successful, that was on for five years. I did what was right: I came out, which was good for me and ultimately it was the only thing I could do. And then I got punished for it." Meanwhile, her public profile took a hammering, not least because for the first time the press had a celebrity lesbian couple to fixate on in DeGeneres and Heche. Their unabashed displays of affection, including at the Clinton White House, were a lightning rod for criticism until they split in 2000.

By then, DeGeneres was re-establishing herself as a major standup. She was praised when she hosted the Emmys soon after 9/11 – asking "what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?" – and secured a new sitcom on CBS. Momentum was gathering. In 2002, the lesbian culture website AfterEllen launched, its name confirming DeGeneres's coming out as a watershed moment. And in 2003, she stole the film Finding Nemo as scatterbrained Pacific regal blue tang Dory.

In 2003, she launched The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Combining celebrity guests and comedy shtick – dancing with the audience, social-media blooper segments – it was fun and feelgood but in a comfy, pally way that contrasted with Oprah's messianic vibe. It won several Emmys in its first year and ratings climbed. They haven't stopped yet.

In 2004, DeGeneres started dating the actor Portia di Rossi, whom she married in 2008 and lives with in apparently blissful, tabloid-unfriendly domesticity.

"She's a great symbol of how far we've come," says Kane. "From losing nearly all her major sponsors after she came out, she's now one of America's most popular talk show hosts. Her screen presence is very welcoming. She can be quick-witted and sharp without being mean-spirited, which has really endeared her to audiences. She connects by doing what she does best: talking about shared experiences."

Prejudice against any given group is harder to maintain once people get to know a member of it. "Housewives who might have been disapproving when Ellen came out have got to know her," says Kane. "They see she's not the frightening activist they might have thought, but someone they want to spend time with on a daily basis."

DeGeneres' new mainstream popularity was cemented in 2007 when she hosted the Oscars for the first time. The fact that she was the first openly gay person to do so was perhaps less interesting than the sense that she was tapped because of her upbeat tone, a marked shift from two years of distinctly barbed hosting from Chris Rock and Jon Stewart. Now DeGeneres was the go-to act to keep everyone calm.

"These days it seems that everyone loves DeGeneres," W magazine noted. "Her distinctive hip populism cuts across divergent demographics while alienating no one … She just seems so nice and so normal." It might have taken a decade, but DeGeneres had reclaimed her position as a kind of national best buddy. But she has kept getting bigger. Her talk show goes from strength to strength, clocking up ever-growing ratings, 33 Emmys to date and A-list guests (Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep in recent weeks). Last month, the New York Times called her the new Oprah", noting her extraordinary advertising pull and growing range of branded products and media ventures, and suggesting her show has "helped fuel a full-fledged cultural movement, in which bullying is not OK".

Certainly, DeGeneres is using her industry clout to push things forward. Through her company, A Very Good Production, she is currently producing sitcom One Big Happy, about a gay woman and a straight man (Elisha Cuthbert and Nick Zano), lifelong friends who have a baby just as he meets the love of his life. DeGeneres will even graduate from comic relief to leading fish in Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, scheduled for release in 2016.

And of course she has been invited to host the Oscars again – notably in the wake of another couple of fractious years courtesy of the bizarre Hathaway-Franco double act of 2012 and Seth MacFarlane's bad-taste bonanza in 2013. "When she was first announced as an Oscar host, some people saw it as a risk," says Kane. "Now it seems like a natural fit or even a safer choice."

DeGeneres was once asked about the moment when Johnny Carson invited her over to chat after her debut appearance on The Tonight Show. "It catapulted my career," she acknowledged, but "that's not why I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it because … I wanted people to get me." A bumpy three-decade ride later, it's safe to say that America gets Ellen DeGeneres, and it likes her.

Potted profile

Born 26 January 1958 in Metairie, Louisiana

Age 56

Career In 1986 she became the first female comedian to be invited for an on-screen chat with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. From 1994-1998 she appeared in the sitcom Ellen. After that was cancelled, she experienced a hiatus before returning with her talk show.

Low point After coming out as a lesbian in Ellen and in real life in 1997, advertisers pulled out of the show and it was cancelled after one more season.

High point Her appearance as host of the Emmys soon after 9/11.

What she says "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 now, and we don't know where the hell she is."

What they say about her "She combines her cosy charm with a coldly brilliant cynic's eye." – Leo Benedictus, the Guardian


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Lucy Mangan: why I'm unsuited to world domination

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I want working TV remote controls, not pet ostriches

Oh, to be in Ukraine, now spring is here and the gates to your deposed president's secret wonderland compound have been stoved in and you're free to wander! Have you seen the photos of former potentate Viktor Yanukovych's 140-hectare spread (that's half the size of Monaco, fact fans)? The private zoo! The hidden golf course! The colonnaded gardens stalked by ostriches! The hovercraft! The helipad! The converted ship/restaurant – for the autocrat who now has everything! Except, as it turned out, the endless adoration of the people. The people is a bit narked.

What I love is the consistency. Of course the mind that surveys a shattered fragment of post-Soviet imperium and instead of saying, "Bloody hell. Which way to US and nice pair of blue jeans?" says, "You know what? I could really do something with this", is not going to settle for an ordinary home, or even an ordinary presidential home ("Yeah, big reception – gonna be having some sort-of-a-state dinners – and a couple of columns outside, that should do it"). He's going to start with pet ostriches and work up from there. I find that cheering.

There are only two downsides to the compound revelation. The first is that it demonstrates inescapably how unsuited I am to accomplishing the world domination for which I long. When I compile my list of luxuries for my perfect home it begins with "working remotes for telly and all-regions DVD player" and ends with "never running out of Ribena, somehow". That's not the limitless ambition of a born ruler. Then again, I only want to achieve world domination so that I can stop people on social media abbreviating "could", "would", "should" to "cld", "wld" and "shld". We each have our own consistency. (What's that? Oh – because you're effectively making silent letters sounded. You should leave out the unsounded "l"s, otherwise it looks like you mean "cold", "wield/wold/(possibly) world" and "shield". Yes! Now I have shown you the way, you know it makes sense.)

The second downside is that it shows how sadly unlikely we are here to start our own revolution. In our septic isle, those who have it (about 17 members of eight families, all told – the faces and occasionally the political stripes change, the essence doesn't) have held it for long enough to become the arbiters of taste rather than transgressors of it. It's easier to rise against someone whose monstrously carbuncled soul is given visible form by his choice of habitation than against someone whose kitchen you secretly covet. We did muster some passing outrage about the floating duck house that became emblematic of the MPs' expenses scandal, but at the same time recognised it for what it was – a joke in a joke country.

And the royals, at the top of the socioeconomic heap, avoid our ire by making all that advantage look so boring. Who is jealous of Buckingham Palace? Cold, draughty, full of Tupperware and tatty carpets, and it's on a busy main road. Sandringham? Not a single hovercraft. Unless you get your kicks from well-maintained ha-has, you'd die of boredom before you reached the boundary wall you were planning to leap over to freedom.

Next time, Viktor, keep it on the down-low. Less is more, son. Less is more.


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'Without music, would we even be Jewish?'

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Women's singing is taboo and so is listening to music in a time of loss – but song is part of every celebration and occasion. Norman Lebrecht explores the history of music and Jews, from King David to Leonard Cohen

Never mind the swastikas: For some Jewish people, UK punk was a home and inspiration ....

Early in the 1980s, a pop legend in a mid-life lull reached back into ancient history for inspiration. The song did not come easy. Banging his head in frustration on a hotel-room floor, Leonard Cohen ground out about 80 stanzas before finally achieving the perfect anthem that is "Hallelujah".

And no one got it.

CBS Records rejected the album. After a 1984 indie release, "Hallelujah" hung in limbo for a decade until Jeff Buckley, sighing deeply over a steel guitar, gave a soft, introspective reinterpretation. Buckley's death by drowning in 1997 added a tragic aura to the song. The producers of Shrek called in Rufus Wainwright to record it for the soundtrack.

Cohen, having been fleeced by a felonious manager, went back on the road, singing "Hallelujah" in a trademark brown hat. X Factor hopefuls heard it and one belted it out to victory. Suddenly, "Hallelujah" was being downloaded 100,000 times a day and turning into the most covered pop song of the 21st century.

Amid the resurrective clamour, few grasped the leap that Cohen had made into the past. In the depths of despair, he had sought the "secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord" across three millennia of human creation, appealing as one lost Jew to an ancestor for the primal gift of music.

I think I know where he was coming from. Growing up in a devout and learned north London home, I became aware of the taboos and tensions that prevailed between Jews and music. I learned, for instance, that Jews, mourning the destruction of their temple in 70AD, were forbidden by rabbis to sing or play music, all the way down to Moses Maimonides in the 12th century.

I knew, too, that a woman's voice was proscribed by the Talmud as "nakedness" and that hearing a woman sing was equivalent to having an illicit sexual liaison. Thrilling as that may have seemed to my boyish mind, women's singing really was taboo. As was listening to music for seven and a half dark weeks of the year and at times of personal loss. In sorrow, music was the first thing to be switched off.

Yet, amid these constraints, music was everywhere. At any solemnity or celebration, someone would start a tune. There would be singing at all Sabbath meals. Since my father was tone deaf, it was my grownup sisters who floated the melodies that I, at three or four years old, learned to harmonise by ear. Music was our means of togetherness. Without music, I remember thinking, would we even be Jewish?

So when Radio 3 commissioned me to make a three-part series about music and the Jews, I made the decision to avoid popular cliches of "Jewish music" – klezmer bands, cantorial wails, Ladino lullabies – and focus on some of the bigger questions. How, for instance, has music shaped the character and history of the Jews? How did Jews influence music? Biggest of all, can music define personal and collective identity?

I started where Cohen did, in search of the elusive King David: poet, musician, warrior, sexual malefactor and author of a book of psalms that forms the basis of worship for Jews and Christians alike. Though there isn't  much evidence that David wrote all or any of the 71 psalms that bear his name, we cannot read them today without becoming aware of this musician's private world, his inner ear.

Walking on the ramparts of Jerusalem, Yehoshua Engelman, a London-born rabbi turned psychotherapist, and I discuss Psalm 51, the one about sex with Bathsheba, the one where Cohen sings: "Your faith was strong but you needed proof / You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you."

How could David, having sent a man to his death so he could steal his wife, sit down and write "Hallelujah"? "With great difficulty," explains Yehoshua. "The Talmud tells us that David was punished for his sin."

"How's that?"

"He was deprived of his music for 10 years."

Time stops still on the wall of David's city. Yehoshua's reading of Psalm 51 is that David was rendered musically, and perhaps sexually, impotent by guilt, an idea that does not exist until Freud adduces it in 20th-century Vienna. Could Jewish guilt be rooted in Jewish music?

American composer Steve Reich came to Jerusalem in the 1970s in search of his Jewish roots. His epiphany arrived while listening to the way Yemenites enunciate the Psalms. "I just had to chant a verse [with them]," he recalls, "and a melody popped into my head. What is that? It was an unconscious dredging up of Bulgarian rhythms from Béla Bartók, changing rhythms in The Rite of Spring, all unbidden. But it introduced a new kind of rhythmic writing for me, a specific idea of combining twos and threes into five/eights, seven/eights; something I hadn't done before." Reich considers his psalmic score, Tehillim, to be his towering masterpiece.

Tehillim were the songs of the temple. The search for their lost music is a bimillennial obsession. In 1905, a cantor called Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem from South Africa and, like Bartók in the Balkans, began recording old men's songs on wire machines. Applying new techniques of academic musicology, he surmised that the Jews of Yemen came closest to temple music. At the National Sound Archive in Jerusalem, I played Idelsohn's cylinders and consider his boldest conclusion – that Yemenite-Jewish microtones lie at the root of Gregorian chant, and hence of all Christian music.

The creative potential of this source remains limitless. The music of modern Israel is driven by Yemenite singers – Bracha Zefira, Shoshana Damari, Ofra Haza and Achinoam Nini, known as Noa. All are women, therefore silenced by Judaism and Islam. "I am Yemenite and I am Jewish," declares Noa, who sang on the Eurovision song contest with a Palestinian, Mira Awad. "You find a way to work around the restrictions and that gives you a lot of strength and develops your creativity to amazing heights."

In a Tel Aviv apartment, I meet the anthropologist Tova Gamliel, an authority on mourning, and ask her to demonstrate the oldest known Jewish sound – the keening of Yemenite women. Gamliel stands, composes herself and sings a visceral, chilling trope that freezes my fingers to the chair. "The role," she explains, "is to make people cry, to express sorrow in a very aesthetic performance. But the song has a text – the life of the departed – and the singer can vary that according to what the person deserves, good or bad. She is telling the others: when you die, I may not be so generous."

The power of life after death was vested in a woman. "She was the only one who had this right. People were very afraid of her, very respectful," says Gamliel. When the keening ends, the woman recomposes herself, then tells a joke. Life must go on.

Myriam Fuks from Brussels is an eighth-generation Yiddish singer whose repertoire has passed from mother to daughter for two centuries. Myriam's mother, Frania, sang in Warsaw theatres, survived the Warsaw ghetto. Myriam wakes in the morning with fragments of Frania's hundreds of songs. Unable to remember the refrain, she asks the pianist Martha Argerich to improvise for her on a new recording. The need to keep memory alive by song, I discover, a driving Jewish motivation.

It was the late 1820s before Jews were allowed into western music. There had been isolated intrusions – Salomone Rossi in Monteverdi's Mantua, Lorenzo da Ponte in Mozart's Vienna – but it took a pair of bankers' sons from Berlin, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to change the culture. Mendelssohn, aside from his own concert works, restored Bach's oratorios to public performance – "giving classical music its Old Testament", according to one of my contributors. Meyerbeer blew out the walls of existing opera houses with gargantuan music dramas, paving the way for Richard Wagner and the romantic imagination.

Wagner, in a notorious 1850 pamphlet, "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Judaism in Music"), named Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer as symptoms of the Jews' "infinitely small" ability to write music. He demanded the exclusion of Jews from German music, a blueprint for Hitler's ethnic cleansing. Like most bigots, Wagner lived in fear of the other, the unknown, the unimagined. At the end of his century Arnold Schoenberg, exasperated to his Jewish core by the tonal corsets of German music, ripped them off in two creative revolutions, atonal and serial. Orchestral music would never sound the same again.

Around the same time, on the front stoops of New York brownstones, the sons of Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms and of former African-Caribbean slaves from the deep south found an unsuspected common taste for busy rhythms, minor keys and blue notes. Their conversation signalled the birth of pop music.

How Jewish was that? George Gershwin, the most restless and creative of the early writers, never concealed his Jewish roots. When he sang "It Ain't Necessarily So", he not only challenged Scripture with Talmudic argument, he actually sang it in the traditional mode of Talmudic study. Visiting the Yiddish theatre star grandparents of the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Gershwin talked of the freygish mode as the key to America's popular music. Freygish is Yiddish for questioning. What Jews added to pop music was a quizzical note.

Michael Grade, heir to an entertainment dynasty and ex-chair of the BBC, explains why Jews were so big in showbiz. "There's something in the DNA of the Jews that makes us adept at assimilating," he explains. "There's a great openness to what's going on. We are watching the audience, trying to keep in touch with what the audience wants. The best of the impresarios – I'd include my uncles and my late father – would be just ahead, not too far ahead, of public taste. And ready to take a chance on talent. Things are never the same again after the great talent has spoken."

Jews became tastemakers, Grade believes, because they had learned to listen out for any change in the wind. A key to survival became a tool in identifying and managing public taste without sacrificing a hardwon identity.

Schoenberg's last words on a sheet of music paper were: "Ich bin ein kleiner Judenbub." (I am a little Jewish boy.) Gustav Mahler used to say: "A Jew is like a swimmer with a short arm. He has to work harder to reach shore." Jews made music out of an awareness of their Jewishness.

That perspective makes a generic concept of "Jewish music" uninteresting and largely irrelevant beside the transformations that Jews brought to music wherever they lived, and the changes that music wrought in the matter of being Jewish. Could anyone, I have always wondered, be Jewish without music? "It doesn't matter which you heard," sings Leonard Cohen, "the holy, or the broken." Hallelujah!

• Music and the Jews begins on Radio 3 on 9 March.


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Scotland: MPs to examine civil service impartiality ahead of referendum

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Civil service global roundup: World Bank recommends overhaul in Cyprus and half of Italy's new ministers are women

Scotland: MPs to examine civil service impartiality ahead of referendum

Westminster's public administration select committee has launched an inquiry into the role of the civil service in the lead up to the vote on Scottish independence in September.

The inquiry comes after Scottish finance secretary John Swinney complained that advice given to George Osborne from top Treasury civil servant Sir Nicholas Macpherson about a potential currency union had crossed the line of civil service impartiality.

The committee will look into the dual obligations Scottish civil servants have to their ministers and the UK civil service as a whole.

Cyprus: World Bank recommends overhaul of the civil service

A report on restructuring public service by the World Bank suggests that Cyprus needs to overhaul civil service pay scales and the evaluation system so that fewer workers can be promoted.

The report found that public sector employees on low salaries receive wages of up to 207% more than their private sector counterparts, while managers and senior officials receive 20% less than corresponding positions in the private sector.

The World Bank said the problem lies in a flawed evaluation system.

Oman: more than 88% of civil servants now Omanis

The latest employment figures show that 88.4% of more than 150,000 civil service staff are Omani citizens.

More than 2,700 Omanis replaced expatriates working in the public sector between 2011 and 2013.

The drive to introduce more Omani employees into the public sector has been a challenge because of a lack of qualified graduates in areas such as engineering.

US: Harvard professor on how to reform the civil service

In an interview with the Washington Post, Linda Bilmes, a professor at the John F Kennedy school of government at Harvard University, said the US should change how it thinks about public employees, "as treasures, not as costs".

She said managers in federal government do not know how to deal with poor performers and the recruitment system into the civil service "is profoundly in need of reform".

Bilmes also suggested that government needed to do more to boost morale and advance technologically.

Italy: half of 16 ministers in new government are women

The new government formed by prime minister Matteo Renzi is younger and more female than ever before– the average age of cabinet ministers is just 48 and half of them are women.

This is despite Italy's high levels of gender inequality and youth unemployment. Italy has a quarter of Europe's 6 million 15- to 24-year-olds who are not in education or employment, and the country's national institute of statistics reported recently that women earn half of what men earn over a lifetime.

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Matteo Renzi has to break Italy from its past| Ashoka Mody

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Italy needs audacious investment in education and infrastructure if it is to embrace the generational change it needs

The brash, 39-year-old Matteo Renzi is Italy's third unelected prime minister since November 2011. Mario Monti lasted 13 months, and his successor, Enrico Letta, resigned two weeks ago after less than a year in office. The generational leadership change is an opportunity. But can Italy break from its past?

Short-lived Italian governments are the norm. The unending political drama reflects the competition for power and resources amid entrenched economic malaise. Chronically unable to put their economic house in order, Italian elites are again thrashing around for a solution, this time at the risk of losing democratic legitimacy.

The simple statistic is that Italian public debt is 132% of GDP – and rising. The International Monetary Fund projects that the debt ratio could start falling if the government undertakes heroic belt-tightening. That means a primary budget surplus (not accounting for interest payments) rising to 5% of GDP, and possibly staying near that high level for years beyond.

Such extraordinary levels of persistent austerity can fray the political fabric. They can also be economically disastrous.

Austerity is to be accompanied by the elixir of structural reforms to spur growth. Even if these reforms materialise, economist Gauti Eggertsson warns that things get worse before they get better. The decline in prices needed to regain competitiveness will cause the debt burden to rise and demand to fall. Anaemic growth and deflationary conditions will follow relentlessly, and the already distressed banks could be pushed into seizure. In January 2014, annual inflation was down to 0.6% from 2.4% a year earlier.

Italy has lived on the edge for four decades. Earlier on, the option existed of inflating the debt away and devaluing the exchange rate to regain a foothold in global markets. The Italian lira underwent repeated devaluations between 1973 and 1976, and the devaluation in 1992 brought the euro's precursor, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, to its knees.

The euro was expected to bring new discipline. It demanded discipline because it closed the traditional vents of inflation and exchange rate depreciation. The euro – which failed to garner support in two European national referendums, and would have failed in others – enjoyed support among Italians weary of their irresponsible leaders.

But, introduced in January 1999, the euro did not help. Any early signs of a new resolve vanished as the swift fall in interest rates eased the pressure.

An October 2001 IMF assessment of Italy concluded: "Growth has disappointed over the past decade … and major fiscal challenges remain." The report spoke of deep-rooted structural problems and "difficult choices in streamlining public spending". Over the succeeding years, nothing changed. The IMF's annual reports predictably repeated the same messages, to no avail. Those admonitions continue to carry an eerie relevance today.

The presumption is that the looming threat of disaster will finally summon the political will and the economic patience to endure the grim years ahead, while Italy's bondholders are kept at bay by the European central bank's outright monetary transactions programme. But is Italy up to the challenge?

The American scientist and author Jared Diamond has warned that crises do not always lead to renewal. Exhausted societies cannot summon the energy to respond to a new crisis. Italy is stuck producing goods that can be made more cheaply in countries where wages are low. In the OECD's 2012 Programme of International Student Assessment of 15-year-olds in maths, science and reading, Italian students lagged behind their counterparts in advanced countries. Research and development have fallen woefully behind.

It is possible that Italy will thread the eye of the needle. But it is easier to foresee scenarios in which Italian growth and inflation are even weaker than now projected, and debt ratios keep rising. At what point do bondholders gratefully take the ECB's offer to repay them? If the legality of that offer is then in question – or because the ECB's purchases are "effectively limited" – things could get ugly.

The policy choice is straightforward – to stay the course and keep fingers crossed or to take bolder action now to prevent future catastrophe.

Italy can no longer tinker. A true generational change, one that harnesses aspirational energy for a brighter future, requires audacious investment in education and infrastructure. This must be paid for by new budget priorities and, importantly, by negotiating longer, Uruguay-style terms of repayment with creditors. That bargain is in everyone's interests, and is needed to keep Italy in the eurozone.

As Letta left office, he sorrowfully remarked to his associates: "It's true: Italy breaks your heart." The stakes are high. Italy may break more than that.


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The Birds of Paradise Project | video | @GrrlScientist

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A video introduction to the world's most visually stunning and remarkable birds that are hidden away upon the most rugged and inaccessible island on Earth.

It's caturday, but today's video will make you think this day should be renamed to honour birds. This is because I am sharing a video that will inspire you and that may change you forever.

As a child, I read the book The Malay Archipelago, by influential biogeographer and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and immediately fell in love with the region, particularly with New Guinea and its amazing birds. One of my favourite bird families, the birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), live only on New Guinea, a few nearby islands, and a small area of northern Australia. The birds-of-paradise form a family of songbirds comprised of 39 (or 41) species. These birds, whose ancestor was a member of the crow family, evolved a spectacular range of plumage colours, structures and patterns that the males display in complex courtship dances to woo females.

Long known about by Western scientists, artists and explorers, these birds are poorly understood because few people have seen them in nature. They live in the most remote, rugged and inacessible areas on Earth, which makes them almost impossible to watch, to study, and to photograph.

"Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained", as Wallace wrote in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1862 (p. 160).

Enter the Birds-of-paradise Project. In 2003, wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman was on assignment for National Geographic to photograph the birds-of-paradise. He teamed up with Ed Scholes, a graduate student at the University of Kansas who was studying the Parotia birds-of-paradise for his Ph.D.

When Laman's National Geographic article was published in 2007, they had managed to photograph half of all birds-of-paradise species. Of course, this inspired Scholes and Laman to plan to document the remainder of these birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Geographic Expeditions Council, and Conservation International provided the funding necessary for the team to conduct additional expeditions into ever more remote parts of New Guinea.

By the time they photographed the last species eight years later, Scholes and Laman had made 18 expeditions, stayed in 51 different field camps, climbed hundreds of trees, built dozens of blinds, made thousands of video and audio recordings, spent more than a year and a half of cumulative time in the field, and taken more than 39,000 photos. The last species they documented? The Jobi manucode, Manucodia jobiensis, a glossy blue-black bird that outshines an obsidian.

You can purchase some of Laman and Scholes' remarkable photographs, which are featured in their book, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World's Most Extraordinary Birds [National Geographic, 2012; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US]. But the book is only the beginning -- there is so much more to the Birds-of-paradise Project.

This video shows you a little about the project to document all species of the birds-of-paradise on film:

Reading on mobile? Click here to see more about the birds-of-paradise project

This autumn, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Geographic will share the Birds-of-Paradise Project with the world. But you can get a sneak peak now: in this sneak peak, you will learn about New Guinea, the scientists and photographers behind this project, and the remarkable birds on the Birds of Paradise Project website. This interactive website includes free lesson plans for your classroom, and lists the dates for when the traveling museum exhibition will pop up in your city. The project is designed to reveal the diverse evolutionary strategies that are at work in this avian family so you can experience one of nature's truly extraordinary wonders. I've been playing with their beautifully-designed website for more than an hour, and there's still so much more to explore.

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Although GrrlScientist deeply longs to be in the rainforests of New Guinea, studying birds, she instead can be found here: Maniraptora. She's very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.


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