Justastory

Today the Guardian published an article from the head of Penguin books, John Makinson – a man with an interesting career path, more varied than most in the publishing world – showing that the growth of ebooks seems to be following the same path as, say, digital music or digital movies. Me, I still got my vinyl, still got my books. As I said my colleague Andrew earlier today with books I like the navigation….

John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that’s what publishers must give them

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.
But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

This disturbing article from the Washington Post, which consistently knocks British papers into a cocked hat for the quality of its reportage, shows that Mexican drug gangs have become a force powerful enough to subvert the progress of democracy in Central America.

SAN SALVADOR — Drug cartel violence in Mexico is quickly spilling south into Central America and is threatening to destabilize fragile countries already rife with crime and corruption, according to the United Nations, U.S. officials and regional law enforcement agents.

The Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — has long been a major smuggling corridor for contraband heading to the United States. But as Mexican President Felipe Calderón fights a U.S.-backed war against his nation’s drug lords, trafficking networks are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world.

The Mexican cartels “are spreading their horizons to states where they feel, quite frankly, more comfortable. These governments in Central America face a very real challenge in confronting these organizations,” said David Gaddis, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. attention has mostly focused on Mexico. But the homicide rate there — 14 for every 100,000 residents — is dwarfed by the murder statistics in the Northern Triangle, where per-capita killings are four times higher and rising.

In El Salvador, the region’s most violent country, homicides jumped 37 percent last year, to 71 murders per 100,000 residents, as warring gangs vied for territory and trafficking routes. Police and military officials in El Salvador said cartels are increasingly paying local smugglers in product, rather than cash, driving up cocaine use and the drug dealing and turf battles that come with it.

“The more pressure there is in Mexico, the more the drug cartels will come to Central America looking for a safe haven,” Gen. David Munguía Payés, El Salvador’s defense minister, said in an interview here.

The amount of cocaine moving through the region has risen sharply, although the overall volume entering the United States is falling. Cocaine seizures in Central America nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2007, according to the most recent U.N. data.

The United States has allocated $258 million in anti-narcotics assistance for Central America since 2007 as part of the three-year, $1.6 billion Merida Initiative. But a report this month by the Government Accountability Office found that only 9 percent of the money promised under the initiative has been spent and that U.S. officials had no reliable way to determine whether it was making a difference in the drug war.

‘A paradise for criminals’

In remote, lawless regions of Guatemala, the Mexican organized crime syndicate known as the Zetas is setting up training camps and recruiting elite ex-soldiers to serve as assassins, arming them with weapons diverted from the country’s military arsenals.

Last month, four human heads were left near the Guatemalan Congress and elsewhere in the capital. The national police spokesman, Donald González, said the grisly display was the work of the Zetas and other Mexican traffickers.

“Guatemala has become a paradise for criminals, who have little to fear from prosecutors owing to high levels of impunity,” the International Crisis Group, a conflict research organization, said in a June report. “High-profile assassinations and the government’s inability to reduce murders have produced paralyzing fear, a sense of helplessness and frustration.”

Over the past two years, Guatemala’s top anti-narcotics official, two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives. In May, the Guatemalan president appointed, then removed after international protests, an attorney general who U.N. prosecutors say has ties to mobsters.

In Honduras, where a military coup last year toppled the president, Mexican cartels have established command-and-control centers to orchestrate cocaine shipments by sea and air along the still-wild Caribbean coast, often with the help of local authorities, according to DEA and U.N. officials. Ten anti-narcotics officers were caught smuggling 142 kilos of cocaine last July. In December, Honduras’s drug czar, Gen. Julián Arístides González, was killed after trying to shut down clandestine landing strips Read the rest of this entry »

As everyone knows a psychic Octopus named Paul has correctly forecast all the world cup results so far. National feelings run deep however, and Paul has been threatened with death because of the accuracy of his predictions according to the Washington Post. William Hill admit to losing £100,000 as a result of his predictions. But remember folks, a closer look at Paul will tell you that betting is for suckers.

paul the psychic octopus

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) – Paul the oracle octopus was given a replica of the World Cup on Monday as a reward for his perfect eight-for-eight record in picking matches as bettors worldwide collected their winnings based on his selections.
The two-year-old octopus with possible psychic powers turned into a worldwide celebrity for accurately predicting the winner of Germany’s five World Cup wins as well as their two defeats. Paul also tipped Spain to beat Netherlands in Sunday’s final.
“We’ve had a lot of offers for Paul but he will definitely be staying with us and returning to his old job — making children smile,” Sea Life spokeswoman Tanja Munzig in Oberhausen told Reuters after presenting Paul with the World Cup replica.
“There’s no rational reason why he always got it right.”
Bettors around the world made small fortunes based on Paul’s uncanny picks, said Graham Sharpe, media relations director at William Hill in London, one of Britain’s largest bookmakers.
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime but this is the first time I’ve ever seen people making their picks based on what an octopus tells them,” Sharpe told Reuters.

“We had people coming in saying they didn’t know how to place a bet but heard about this German octopus and wanted to bet with him. It’s ludicrous. But he kept getting it right,” said Sharpe. “It’s one of the finest tipping feats ever.”
Sharpe said that anyone who had placed a 10-pound accumulator bet on Paul’s picks from the start of the World Cup would have won 3,000 pounds ($4,500) by the end of the tournament.
Paul’s home at Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen has been inundated with visitors and media from across Europe. Many networks broadcast his picks live. Hundreds were on hand to watch the World Cup replica lowered into his tank on Monday.
WINNING BETS
“Paul now wants to say good-bye to the whole world,” Daniel Fey, a supervisor at Sea Life, told Reuters. “He really enjoyed all the media attention but now he’s returning to his old job.”
Yet interest in the 50-cm long octopus remained intense, especially after his last two picks on Friday were once again accurate. Germany won Saturday’s match for third place and Spain won Sunday’s final — as Paul had called it on Friday.
Last week Germans were shocked and distraught when he picked Spain to beat Germany in the semi-final after tipping German wins over Argentina, England, Ghana and Australia.
And after Spain beat Germany, many wanted to publicly grill him. Sea Life installed extra security to protect their octopus.
“We have to remember he’s quite old now — 2-1/2 years is quite old for an octopus,” Fey said.
Probability experts were quoted in media reports saying the likelihood of getting eight consecutive picks right is 1/256. Sharpe said the odds of getting eight straight right was over 1/300. Humbled professors were quoted saying Paul got lucky.
The octopus, considered by some to be the most intelligent of all invertebrates, had a choice of picking food from two different transparent containers lowered into his tank — each with a national flag on it.
The container Paul opened first was regarded as his pick.
Sharpe at William Hill said he had at first been skeptical about the oracle octopus. But he became a believer.
“I suspect that Paul’s predictions could have made about a half a million pounds,” Sharpe said, adding he estimated William Hill paid out 100,000 pounds on his picks at its 2,300 outlets.
“We had people coming in asking who Paul had picked before they placed their bets,” Sharpe said. “I’m sure there were a lot more people too who were too embarrassed to tell you they made their bet based on what the octopus said.”
He said it was the first time in 30 years of work that he had seen “such widely orchestrated use of a non-human tipster.”
Sharpe said he, unfortunately, did not follow Paul’s advice. “It’d have been too embarrassing,” he said. But Sharpe said he was going on holiday soon. “I’m going to the seaside and intend to eat as much octopus as I can cram down as revenge,” he said.

I spoke to my brother on the phone this afternoon and he was at Newmarket races having a traditional flutter. This fascinating article from the Economist shows how the world of betting has been radically changed by the internet. That having been said, there is nothing like the sight of those beautiful creatures in the summer sunlight to stir the soul, especially with the jockey’s bright colours….hope you didn’t lose too much bro’…….

ON APRIL 9th nearly 45,000 people crammed into Oaklawn, a 106-year-old track nestling in the foothills of the Ouachita mountains in central Arkansas, to watch Zenyatta, a spirited six-year-old mare, win her 16th consecutive race. The next day’s event—the Arkansas derby, which in recent years has become a preview ground for the more famous derby held three weeks later in Kentucky—drew over 60,000 fans. In those two days punters at the track bet nearly $6.5m. Attendance was 38% up on the previous year. Neither the charming old track nor the town itself, with a population of just under 40,000, was built for such crowds. Enterprising locals turned their lawns and shopfronts into parking lots at $20-25 a go.

For racing fans everywhere such a turnout is reason to celebrate; it shows that the sport of kings has not lost its attractions. And indeed attendance remains strong at marquee events, such as the Arkansas and Kentucky derbies or Britain’s Grand National. But although sports betting does well online, horseracing has a particular problem. The business model that has kept it going up to now is being superseded by new and increasingly popular betting methods offered by the internet.

For all the national differences, racing in most parts of the world has two things in common. First, it has provided one of the few legal forms of wagering and bookmaking available to most of the public for much of the past two centuries. Second, the sport depends on money from betting. Practically every national racing association the world over takes its cut from bets placed on races. In Britain 10% of bookmakers’ profits go to the Horserace Betting Levy Board, a statutory body that distributes the funds to British racing interests (mainly purses but also courses, breeders and veterinary science). The levy was put in place when punters had to bet through parimutuel pools (in which odds depend on the number of punters backing a bet) or licensed bookmakers. But now they have other options, so in 2008-09 the total levy collected reached its lowest level in six years, at about £92m.

As other forms of gambling became legal, betting on racing fell. Between 2003 and 2008 the amount wagered on racing dropped by 10% in America and close to a third in Britain. But betting at the track is falling even faster. Punters in America have turned to advance-deposit wagering companies (ADWs) such as Youbet, TVG and Twinspires, which combine the functions of bookmakers and television networks, showing races from around the world. They allow punters to bet using a computer, mobile phone or television remote-control. Dedicated race fans in America can bet on European races in the morning, American ones throughout the day and Australian and Asian ones at night, all without having to leave home. And just as casinos offer free accommodation and meals to big players, ADWs offer redeemable reward points as an added incentive.

Punters in Britain and Australia have an even more attractive option: betting exchanges. The largest is Betfair, which bought TVG in January 2009. Betfair’s revenue last year was £303m, up 27% from the previous year. Around 90% of bets placed through exchanges and more than half of bets made online in Britain are through Betfair. Exchanges allow people to bet with each other, rather than going through a licensed bookie or a parimutuel pool. Betfair makes money by charging a small commission, based on a user’s net profit in a given market.

Unlike traditional operators, the exchanges also permit betting throughout races. Yet although Betfair’s model attracts savvy punters who understand how markets work, its numbers-heavy interface may intimidate casual sport punters. Noting that the odds Read the rest of this entry »

As regular readers know I have long been a kind of inverted fan of The Daily Mail, the newspaper which came out in official support of the British Union of Fascists back in 1934 with their headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Well, today the Mail is running a great story about the German national football team – and how the Germans in it are not true Germans but a whole bunch of foreigners. German nationalism is obviously an important issue for the Mail – or perhaps it’s more of a dirty cheating Germans story in anticipation of….no I won’t say it. I have to say we were treated to the sight for the first time ever in the World Cup of the two Boateng brothers playing on opposite sides in Germany versus Ghana this week. And Boateng is a traditional Ghanaian name rather than a German one…..My goodness I am beginning to sound like a Daily Mail reader. One read clearly has a lasting effect.

Whatever, this is a great story by true pro journalist Adam Tozer in today’s Mail.

To long-suffering England fans, Germany’s footballers are an all-too familiar foe.

But the side that the Three Lions will face in Sunday’s World Cup clash is anything but representative of the old Germany.

In fact, many of them wouldn’t have even been able to play for the three-times World Cup winners, until a recent change in the country’s strict citizenship laws.

German Squad – Old foe, new faces: The German World Cup squad who face England on Sunday. Numbered are those players who, before 1999, could not have become German citizens

A total of 11 of the current 23-strong German squad would have been branded foreigners under rules dating back to before the Nazis and would have therefore been ineligible to play only a decade ago.

Names such as Jurgen, Klaus, Franz and Lothar have been replaced with those of Mezut, Mario and Cacau.

Under strict citizenship laws dating back to 1913 and the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, only children born in Germany to parents who were both Germans themselves could be considered German. At the time Germany was in a frenzy of nationalism as it armed in preparation for the First World War.

They were not repealed until 1999 as Germany – mindful of having the most dramatically declining birthrate in the world – finally made it easier to become a citizen of the Fatherland.

The new-look German side is collectively known as ‘Generation M’ for ‘multi-cultural’.

Observers say it the change has led to an influx of exciting new players for the German team.

By contrast, the England side has been regularly benefiting from players of immigrant backgrounds since the 1970s, and eight of the current squad are black or mixed-race.

Parallels will also be drawn with the French World Cup-winning side of 1998 which featured many members of France’s large ethnic minority communities and was credited with advancing race relations in France.

A majority of that team had foreign-born parents, including star player Zinedine Zidane, whose parents moved to France from Algeria.

England? They’re stupid and burnt out says (guess who) Franz Beckenbauer

It’s not really a game that needs any extra rivalry.

But that hasn’t stopped Germany’s greatest ever footballer from stoking up the tensions ahead of his country’s World Cup clash with England on Sunday.

Franz Beckenbauer yesterday intensified his criticism of the England team, calling them ‘stupid’ and ‘burnt out’.

AND WE’RE IN RED SHIRTS AGAIN…

After dusting off their ‘lucky’ all-red strip for the first time in 40 years for the win against Slovenia on Wednesday, England-will wear it for Sunday’s match against Germany.

England have never lost in five games wearing red shirts, shorts and socks – winning four games – yet last wore the combination in 1970.

The team have usually worn red shirts, white shorts and red socks as an alternative kit when facing opposition in similar colours, such as Germany.

‘The Kaiser’, who won the World Cup with Germany as a player and a manager and now works for football’s governing body, Fifa, had already slated England for playing ‘kick and rush’ football Read the rest of this entry »

Children of lesbian parents do better than their peers according to New Scientist magazine in this interesting article written by Jim Giles.

The children of lesbian parents outscore their peers on academic and social tests, according to results from the longest-running study of same-sex families.

The researchers behind the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study say the results should change attitudes to adoption of children by gay and lesbian couples, which is prohibited in some parts of the US.

The finding is based on 78 children who were all born to lesbian couples who used donor insemination to become pregnant and were interviewed and tested at age 17.

The new tests have left no doubt as to the success of these couples as parents, says Nanette Gartrell at the University of California, San Francisco, who has worked on the study since it began in 1986.

Compared with a group of control adolescents born to heterosexual parents with similar educational and financial backgrounds, the children of lesbian couples scored better on academic and social tests and lower on measures of rule-breaking and aggression.

A previous study of same-sex parenting, based on long-term health data, also found no difference in the health of children in either group.

“This confirms what most developmental scientists have suspected,” says Stephen Russell, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Kids growing up with same-sex parents fare just as well as other kids.”

The results should be considered by those who oppose the right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, adds Gartrell. A handful of states, including Florida, prohibit same-sex or unmarried couples from adopting, although many of the state laws are being challenged in the courts.

“It’s a great tragedy in this country,” says Gartrell. “There are so many children who are available for adoption but cannot be adopted by same-sex couples.”

Over 100,000 children are awaiting adoption in the US, says the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and advocacy organisation based in New York. The institute estimates that just 4 per cent of all adopted children – around 65,000 – live with gay or lesbian parents, despite research suggesting that same-sex couples may be more willing than heterosexual couples to adopt.

Journal reference: Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-3153

At times like this it is always interesting and amusing to see how the outside world views Britain. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Dry as a bone. But harder than our wishy washy liberal press. Is it OK to say that any more? Or will I be arrested by the liberal Tory Home Secretary…or perhaps not….

LONDON—Conservative Party leader David Cameron on Tuesday completed a tortuous journey to become Britain’s prime minister, and essentially clinched a fragile power-sharing deal with the country’s No. 3 political party in the wake of Thursday’s inconclusive election.

Five frenetic days after a general election that resulted in a so-called hung Parliament—in which no party holds a majority—Mr. Cameron’s Tories agreed on a power-sharing deal with the Liberal Democrat Party headed by Nick Clegg, subject to official approval by the two parties.

The 43-year-old Mr. Cameron became Britain’s youngest prime minister since 1812 after the incumbent, Labour Party leader Gordon Brown, abandoned his own party’s hopes of making a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the men executed Britain’s carefully choreographed change-of-power ritual, in which Mr. Brown visited the queen to resign and Mr. Cameron followed shortly thereafter to assume power.

The move returns the Tories to the premiership for the first time since 1997—but they return to Downing Street under far-from-ideal circumstances. The country faces problems that include a massive budget deficit and an economy that has been slow to recover from the recession.

Mr. Cameron will have to tackle those woes without the big parliamentary majority he was long expected to have, but squandered in the final months of a historic, topsy-turvy campaign. Instead, he faces the prospect of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.

Sweeping into a newly vacated Downing Street amid cheers, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that a coalition government will present challenges.

“Our country has a hung Parliament…and we have some deep and progressing problems, a huge deficit, deep social problems and a political system in need of reform,” he said.

That coalition will force the Conservatives to concede key policy ground on issues such as taxes and electoral reform—despite the fact that the Tories won five times more parliamentary seats in Thursday’s election. Mr. Clegg will be deputy prime minister, and discussions were under way late Tuesday that would also award cabinet posts in the government to the Liberal Democrats, with the Conservative’s George Osborne and William Hague taking Treasury chief and foreign secretary respectively.

For any coalition deal to be completed, the leadership of both parties must still ask members of their respective groups to back the deal. And that may not be a certainty given a huge gulf that divides them on everything from managing the economy to immigration and relations with Europe.

If the two sides don’t manage to agree on the coalition, the Tories can still go it alone in a minority administration. But they would be dependent on support from other parties to pass legislation.

Either way, the Conservatives are faced with keeping a government together as they try to push through aggressive spending cuts to Britain’s much-loved public services, with £6 billion to come this year alone.

The new government must do this without upending a fragile economic recovery and must deal with other issues, such as public anger if progress isn’t seen in the unpopular war in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday night, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were close to finalizing terms on a coalition after an attempt by the newly deposed Labour Party to seal a deal with the Liberal Democrats failed. The party’s last toss of the dice, after 13 years in power, crashed amid opposition from Labour Party lawmakers and the realization that any coalition, which would need the help of other parties, would be too fragile to survive.

The High and Lows of Labour’s 13-Year Reign

May 1997: Labour’s Tony Blair becomes U.K. prime minister in landslide victory, ending 18 years of Conservative rule.

May 1997: Labour’s Tony Blair becomes U.K. prime minister in landslide victory, ending 18 years of Conservative rule.

April 1998: Blair helps broker historic peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

June 2001: With economy growing, Blair re-elected by wide margins.

September 2001: Terrorists attack the U.S.; Blair subsequently backs U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

March 2003: Blair backs U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which quickly becomes a political liability for Labour.

September 2004: Protesters storm Parliament in opposition to Labour’s proposed ban on fox hunting.

May 2005: Blair re-elected again, but Labour’s majority in Parliament shrinks.

July 2005: Terrorist bombings of London’s transit system kill dozens.

June 2007: Facing low approval ratings and internal party pressure, Blair resigns, handing power to Gordon Brown.

September 2007: Mortgage lender Northern Rock requires rescue by Bank of England, in harbinger of financial crisis.

October 2008: Brown unveils bailout of several big U.K. banks, serving as a model for U.S. and other government rescues.

April 2010: Brown asks the queen to dissolve Parliament Read the rest of this entry »

I loved this story well put together by Tom Lamont in the Observer this weekend. My keep-fit-mad 17 year old son is a prime candidate for this US survivalist stuff. Hand him an AK47 and wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, “social anarchy”, solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground “assurance of life” resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that “Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis”, and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist’s surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. “Virtually any meal” can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes “baked potato soup” but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Only in Liverpool. Two women try to smuggle a corpse onto their easyjet flight, The Ottawa Citizen reports. Obviously these low cost flights are now producing some stiff competition.

LONDON — Two women allegedly put their dead relative in a wheelchair, dressed him in sunglasses and claimed he was simply asleep as they tried to check in at Liverpool airport for a flight to Germany.

The women convinced a taxi driver that 91-year-old Curt Willi Jarant was well enough for the 45-minute drive to the airport.

However, when they arrived, staff at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool noticed something was wrong.

Andrew Millea, a worker who greeted the group with a wheelchair, said one of the women asked for help lifting her father from the car.

“I did my best to help by lifting the man from his seat,” he said. “To my horror his face fell sideways against mine, it was ice-cold. I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he ‘always sleeps like that.’

“I could see the driver of the taxi was shocked too, he was white as a sheet and looked very shaken, so I placed the body into the wheelchair and pushed the man to the back of the easyJet queue.”

Millea contacted security who tried to check the man’s pulse, but were ushered away by the women. He claimed the younger woman, who was with two children, “encouraged them to ’tell the man that’s how your grandad sleeps’”.

When officials established that the man was dead, one of the women asked if she could still board the flight.

The German women are thought to have decided to sneak Jarant — thought to have died of natural causes — on the flight rather than pay up to $7,650 in repatriation fees for the body.

Police arrested Jarant’s wife, Gitta, 66, and his stepdaughter, Anke Anusic, 44, on suspicion of failing to give notification of death.

Police sources suggested that Mr Jarant died from natural causes on Good Friday – 24 hours before his arrival at the airport. Anusic said: “They would think that for 24 hours we would carry a dead person? This is ridiculous. He was moving, he was breathing. Eight people saw him.”

This nicely written story by Lyndsey Layton appeared in the Washington Post this week. Americans have been disguising food as something more upmarket and selling it at vastly inflated prices. “Sturgeon caviar” was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish. I bet it happens in the UK.

The expensive “sheep’s milk” cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow’s milk. And a jar of “Sturgeon caviar” was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish.
Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.
And last year, a Fairfax man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.
“Food fraud” has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multimillion companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA.
Such deception has been happening since Roman times, but it is getting new attention as more products are imported and a tight economy heightens competition. And the U.S. food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.
“It’s growing very rapidly, and there’s more of it than you might think,” said James Morehouse, a senior partner at A.T. Kearney Inc., which is studying the issue for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the food and beverage industry.
John Spink, an expert on food and packaging fraud at Michigan State University, estimates that 5 to 7 percent of the U.S. food supply is affected but acknowledges the number could be greater. “We know what we seized at the border, but we have no idea what we didn’t seize,” he said.
The job of ensuring that food is accurately labeled largely rests with the Food and Drug Administration. But it has been overwhelmed in trying to prevent food contamination, and fraud has remained on a back burner.
The recent development of high-tech tools — including DNA testing — has made it easier to detect fraud that might have gone unnoticed a decade ago. DNA can be extracted from cells of fish and meat and from other foods, such as rice and even coffee. Technicians then identify the species by comparing the DNA to a database of samples.
Another tool, isotope ratio analysis, can determine subtle differences between food — whether a fish was farmed or wild, for example, or whether caviar came from Finland or a U.S. stream.
The techniques have become so accessible that two New York City high school students, working with scientists at the Rockefeller University and the American Museum of Natural History last year, discovered after analyzing DNA in 11 of 66 foods — including the sheep’s milk cheese and caviar — bought randomly at markets in Manhattan were mislabeled.
“We put so much emphasis on food and purity of ingredients and where they come from,” said Mark Stoeckle, a physician and DNA expert at Rockefeller University who advised the students. “But then there are things selling that are not what they say on the label. There’s an important issue here in terms of economics and consumer safety.”
It is not clear how many food manufacturers, importers and retailers are testing products, but large companies with valuable brands to protect have been increasingly using the new technology, said Vincent Paez, director of food safety business development at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Read the rest of this entry »

The Hadron Collider uses a special kind of liquid helium that is incredibly expensive to produce – even worse it is physically very difficult to contain – across 27 kilometers of its run I would say it’s next to impossible. No surprises this morning when they tried to run it again it had to stop within minutes. 2.6 billion quid. The Telegraph covers it more kindly than I would today.

Dubbed the world’s largest scientific experiment, the giant atom smasher holds the promise of revealing details about theoretical particles and microforces, scientists say.
But initial attempts on Tuesday were unsuccessful because problems developed with the beams, said scientists working on the massive machine.

That meant that the protons had to be “dumped” from the collider and new beams had to be injected.
“It’s a very complicated machine and we have ups and downs,” said Michael Barnett of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Right now we have a down.”
Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.
The beams were pushed to 3.5 trillion electron volts in recent days, the highest energy achieved by any physics accelerator — some three times greater than the previous record.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is trying to use the powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles.
They could have been successful immediately, but such huge machines can be so tricky to run that it could take days.
When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.
Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, describes the challenge of lining up the beams as being akin to “firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
He said the problems on Tuesday started with a power supply that tripped and had to be reset. The second time, the system designed to protect the machine shut it down.
That was likely to have been a misreading by the system rather than any basic problem, said Barnett.
The collisions will come over the objections of some people who fear they could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes — subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
CERN and many scientists dismiss any threat to Earth or people on it, saying that any such holes would be Read the rest of this entry »

This article is from the New York Times – for the first time in many years workers have failed to return from the (Chinese) New Year break – no longer drawn from the agricultural fields by the lure of industrial readies, instead the signing bonus is being introduced for factory workers…whatever next for the Chinese economy – now virtually the only source for cheap Western consumer goods…

GUANGZHOU, China — Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage.

As American workers struggle with near double-digit unemployment, unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses.

Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months.

Telemarketers are turning away potential customers because recruiters have fully booked them to cold-call people and offer them jobs.

Some manufacturers, already weeks behind schedule because they can’t find enough workers, are closing down production lines and considering raising prices. Such increases would most likely drive up the prices American consumers pay for all sorts of Chinese-made goods.

Rising wages could also lead to greater inflation in China. In the past, inflation has sown social unrest.

The immediate cause of the shortage is that millions of migrant workers who traveled home for the long lunar New Year earlier this month are not returning to the coast. Thanks to a half-trillion-dollar government stimulus program, jobs are being created in the interior.

But many economists say the recent global downturn also obscured a longer-term trend: China has drained its once vast reserves of unemployed workers in rural areas and is running out of fresh laborers for its factories.

Since China does not release reliable, timely statistics on employment, wages are considered the best barometer of labor shortages. And temp agencies here in Guangzhou raised their rate for factory workers this week to $1.17 an hour, from 95 cents an hour before the new year holiday.

The rate was 80 cents an hour two years ago, before the global financial crisis Read the rest of this entry »

I found this amazing article in New Scientist magazine. It’s about a parasitic worm that lives in your body for a year, grows to a meter in length then bursts out of your body just like in the film Alien. And you thought you had it bad.

IT STARTS with a painful blister – a very painful blister. It feels, people say, like being stabbed with a red-hot needle. When the blister bursts, the head of a worm pops out, thin, white and very much alive.
The rest of the worm, about a metre long, remains inside your body. It can take up to two months to pull it out, inch by agonising inch, during which time it may be impossible to walk. In extreme cases, you may host up to sixty of them, anywhere on your body. The worms can cause paralysis or lethal bacterial infections, and even if you survive mostly unscathed, next year it can happen all over again.
The guinea worm (Dracunculus, or little dragon) is probably the closest living equivalent to the monsters in the Alien movies – except we’re beating this enemy. Guinea worm was once widespread in Africa, the Middle East and many parts of Asia. In 1986, there were nearly 4 million cases a year in 20 countries across south Asia and Africa. Last year, there were just 3142 in four countries in Africa. The worm could be extinct by 2012, making dracunculiasis the second human disease ever to be eradicated – the first being smallpox.
Guinea worms start out as minuscule larvae living inside water fleas of the genus Cyclops. These millimetre-long crustaceans live in stagnant water, and people can swallow them when they drink from ponds, ditches or shallow wells. Stomach acids dissolve the water fleas but can leave the larvae untouched. The free larvae then burrow out of the intestine and cross to the chest or abdominal wall, where the male and female worms mature and mate. The males eventually die, but the growing females tunnel imperceptibly to, and then under, the skin.
Even as the females grow up to a metre long, their hosts remain unaware of their presence. The worms prevent pain by secreting opiates and dodge the immune system by coating themselves with human proteins. It may be just as well people don’t know they are infected as nothing can help at this stage. Read the rest of this entry »

Kathryn Bigelow has always been one of my favourite film makers ever since Strange Days – a film I would most highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t yet seen it. I was delighted to hear she won an Oscar today, the first woman to win Best Director. My son has just got The Hurt Locker for us to watch – which is why this piece from the New York Times particularly caught my eye today. It kind of speaks for itself– written by Michael Jernigan, a man who knows.

I was eager to see “The Hurt Locker” since it is one of the first movies about my war.
I found it very interesting. I saw a lot of reality there. I have seen and dealt with, to a limited extent, the addiction to adrenaline. I do not know of anyone who loved it more than their wife and child, but I do know that it can be extremely addictive. Jumping out of an airplane affords great odds of survival. Combat or disarming a bomb does not afford such great odds. Your body will react similarly but with more intensity. When this occurs daily or more than once daily your body craves it like a drug addict craves a drug. I found the movie entertaining, but given my experience, I imagine it was scary to me on a different level than most.

War movies in general are great for what they are: entertainment. I grew up in the 1980s and saw almost all of the good war movies of that time. I was in the theater for “Full Metal Jacket” and have a copy of “Platoon” at home. I own “The Boys in Company C,” “Kelly’s Heroes,” “Sands of Iwo Jima” and a few others. Like I said, they are good entertainment. But of course there is a darker side.
These movies glorify a situation that has no real glory in it. Turn to one of your relatives or friends who has been in combat and ask them what they think of war. I am sure that they will tell you that it is scary, gruesome and requires extreme intestinal fortitude. There are no Sgt. Strykers or Gunny Highways in the real Corps. We don’t have a director who can step in when all hell is breaking loose and yell, “Cut!”
I joined the Marine Corps because I was looking for a way to get my life on track. My grandfather did 28 years in the Corps (Korea and Vietnam) and my father did eight years in the Corps (Vietnam), then 13 in the Army. When I was given the opportunity to go to war in Iraq I was as happy as you can imagine. That was what I grew up watching in the movies. I wanted to be my own “Animal Mother” (see: “Full Metal Jacket”).
When I got to Iraq I soon learned that it was not the movies. In my first few weeks we drove over an I.E.D. We caught the guys as they were driving away by riddling their car with bullets from machine guns and few M-16’s. The driver was struck twice and the passenger was not shot but I think he was having a heart attack when we got over to them.

A few days later while on a foot patrol I spotted a blue blinking light in the road and walked up to it. It was a phone taped to a canister. While running for my life the thing exploded. I was not injured but was very shaken up.
We went to Falluja in April of 2004. Our company saw two to three firefights a day. It was the first time I saw one of my friends get shot. In one month we took light casualties (thankfully, no dead Marines). We then went to Zaidon and a handful of Marines received serious wounds. Our radio man lost his foot; one of our rifleman lost his arm. A friend of mine took shrapnel to the throat and there were other serious wounds. Thankfully, no dead Marines. After that it was back to Mahmudiya: on the second day there we drove over an I.E.D. The only casualty was our Marine “Big Country” getting a concussion from the overpressure.
Later in the deployment my Humvee was hit by a large I.E.D. I had my forehead crushed in, lost both eyes, had to have my right hand fully reconstructed and took severe damage to my left knee. One buddy lost a foot; one of the others took shrapnel to the forehead but lived; one took superficial shrapnel wounds to the arm and one of my best friends died.
Would you bring your children out to the battlefield to witness it live and in person?
On a later deployment to Iraq that I did not go on, I lost three more friends to I.E.D.’s. One of them was the Navy Corpsman (Marine medic) who saved my life on the battlefield back in Mahmudiya. I have a tattoo over my left breast (where my heart is) that says “Semper Fidelis,” the Marine Corps motto. It is Latin for “Always Faithful” and refers to always accomplishing the mission. Around the “Semper Fidelis” are four names. “Thompson,” “Belchik,” Cockerham” and “Hodshire.” All great guys that I would let date my sister.
“The Hurt Locker” and all the other movies I mentioned, whether they are good or bad as entertainment, Read the rest of this entry »

I heard on Steve Hewlett’s Radio 4 media show that the Observer has declined in circulation again – this story is from there – and for once I have kept the original headline because it is great, real “surgeon priest in palace sex probe” material. I wonder how many people will read this without thinking about trying some of this strange…new….chatroulette….

An addictive new website that links strangers’ webcams is gaining popularity – and notoriety

A new website that has been described as “surreal”, “addictive” and “frightening” is proving a sensation around the world – and attracting a reputation as a haven for no-holds-barred, explicit material.

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with ­random strangers.

When users visit the site and switch on their webcams, they are suddenly connected to another, randomly chosen person who is doing precisely the same thing somewhere else in the world.

Once they are logged in together, chatters can do anything they like: talk to each other, type messages, entertain each other – or just say goodbye, hit the “next” button and move on in an attempt to find somebody more interesting.

Chatroulette describes itself as a “brand new service for one-on-one text, webcam and microphone-based chat with people around the world”, but no one is sure who started the site. The owners did not respond to an attempt to contact them by email, and they have gone to great pains to protect their identities. This may be because ­Chatroulette appears to operate largely as an ­unregulated service and, as a result, has rapidly become a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs.

A large contingent of people seem intent on using the service’s string of random connections as the basis for some sort of sex game.

Users regularly describe unwanted encounters with all sorts of unsavoury characters, and it has become the defining aspect of the site for some. Veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who has spent years documenting some of the web’s most weird and wonderful corners, tried the site and then wrote about witnessing nudity, sexual activity and strange behaviour.

“I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many, many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, [and] several girls who disconnected after seeing my face,” he said, adding that he also witnessed “three couples having sex and 11 erect p******s”.

Yet despite the highly offensive nature of much of the site’s content, Kottke – like thousands of others – has been hypnotised by the glimpses the site offers into other people’s lives. “Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now,” he wrote.

Although the site says that it “does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material” and offers users the option to report unsuitable content, the restrictions do not seem to prevent users from broadcasting explicit videos of themselves online.

However, like the chatroom explosion in the late 1990s or the early days of YouTube, spending time inside Chatroulette is becoming a peculiarly modern form of entertainment, particularly popular with students in campuses around the world. In just a couple of months the site has expanded significantly as it tears through universities by word of mouth, spreading virally in a similar manner to sites Read the rest of this entry »

This story just had everything: social networking, police, anti-banks, riots, drink, drugs, parties you name it it’s all there. Quite a few papers ran it at the end of the week — – the version I’ve chosen is from the Telegraph

A Facebook-organised party at a squat in a Park Lane town house was broken up by police after hundreds of youths caused havoc in the streets around the £10 million property.
Riot police dispersed crowds in the streets and cleared the building after partygoers pelted them with bottles and bricks from the roof and balcony.

Officers had been summoned to the party, allegedly organised by two teenagers from London, at 11pm after a wave of complaints from terrified neighbours.

Two members of the public were thought to have been injured as the partygoers jumped on cars, threw fire extinguishers and plant pots from windows and drew graffiti before the chaos subsided in the early hours of yesterday morning.

The property was bought for £10m in 2007 by Read the rest of this entry »

Saw this in today’s Washington Post. Sign me up.

Google, the world’s biggest online search engine, wants to turbocharge your Internet connection.

The company said Wednesday it is getting into the broadband service business with trials for fiber networks that will deliver Internet access speeds that are 100 times faster than what most Americans are getting today.

The company said in a blog that it will build fiber-to-the-home connections to a small number of locations across the country that will deliver Internet access speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The company didn’t say what areas would be part of its experiment, but said prices would be competitive and that its network would reach at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people. A source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the company doesn’t currently have plans to expand beyond the initial tests but will evaluate as the tests progress.

“Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone,” wrote product managers Minni Ingersoll and James Kelly in the blog titled, “Think big with a gig: our experimental fiber network.”

Some of the fastest connections through cable, DSL and fiber access cap off around 20 to 50 megabits a second. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told The Washington Post during a visit late last year that ultra-high-speed Internet connections were imperative for a next generation of applications to take off for the Web. Currently, he said, most network services fall short.

At such speeds, a rural health center could receive streaming three-dimensional medial imaging over the Web and discuss health issues with a physician in a Los Angeles, for example. Downloading high-definition, full-length feature films would take about five minutes, Google said.

We have all seen and heard this story about successful attempts at communicating with people in a Vegetative State – this is a very well informed article about the topic from the New Scientist this week written by Celeste Biever.

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work.

In an earlier experiment, published in 2006, Owen’s team asked a woman previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state (VS) to picture herself carrying out one of two different activities. The resulting brain activity suggested she understood the commands and was therefore conscious.

Now Owen’s team has taken the idea a step further. A man also diagnosed with VS was able to answer yes and no to specific questions by imagining himself engaging in the same activities.

The results suggest that it is possible to give a degree of choice to some people who have no other way of communicating with the outside world. “We are not just showing they are conscious, we are giving them a voice and a way to communicate,” says neurologist Steven Laureys of the University of Liège in Belgium, Owen’s collaborator.

When someone is in a VS, they can breathe unaided, have intact reflexes but seem completely unaware. But it is becoming clear that some people who appear to be vegetative are in fact minimally conscious. They are in a kind of twilight state in which they may feel some pain, experience emotion and communicate to a limited extent. These two states can be distinguished from each other via bedside behavioural tests – but these tests are not perfect and can miss patients who are aware but unable to move. So researchers Read the rest of this entry »

Hooray for Scunthorpe. This story in the Economist adds a certain ambiance to the town that put the umber into South Humberside…as well as casting light upon the growing publicity surrounding the workaholic beaver and its eponymous publication. No the beavers are not in Scunthorpe they are in Canada….anyway read the story

CANADIANS have long been proud of the industrious beaver, an animal capable of cutting down 216 trees a year with its teeth and of surviving the long winter in a purpose-built lodge made of mud, twigs and bark. The largest rodent in North America is a national emblem. The first Canadian postage stamp, the 1851 Three-Penny Beaver, carried its image. And one of Canada’s oldest magazines carries its name.

But soon it will not. From April The Beaver will be renamed. A journal of popular history founded in 1920 by the Hudson Bay Company to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it is now owned by others. Its evocation of the fur that had made the trading company’s fortunes no longer struck the right note—especially since the word has become slang for female pubic hair.

The editors had known for some time that a name change was needed. Market research indicated that many women and people under the age of 45 said they would not subscribe solely because of the name. But it was the internet that struck the fatal blow.

The Beaver website was attracting (albeit briefly) readers who had little interest in Samuel de Champlain’s astrolabe or what prairie settlers ate for breakfast. They lasted about eight seconds before moving on. E-mails to potential subscribers were blocked by internet obscenity filters. This is known online as the Scunthorpe problem, after the town in Britain whose residents were initially unable to register with AOL because its name contained an obscenity.

The Beaver Club, a classy dining room in Montreal, and the SS Beaver, a replica of an 1835 steamship operating in British Columbia, remain unperturbed by any ambiguity. As for The Beaver, it hopes to expand its 50,000 circulation as Canada’s History. Dull, yes, but at least it will do what it says on the tin.

Hmmm. The French resolves weakens on the burkah issue according to the Guardian. Instead of forcing other people to wear French couture in public the French have relented a little….

France will today take the first step towards barring Muslim women from wearing the full veil when using public services, but will stop short of calling for an outright ban after critics argued that such a move would be socially divisive and hard to enforce.

A cross-party committee of MPs was set up last year to explore the controversial issue in France of burkas and niqabs. The committee will recommend to ­parliament that Muslim women should be allowed to continue covering their faces in the street.

Its final report will, however, recommend that anyone covering their face be barred from entering public sector property, including hospitals and schools, or using public transport.

“The full veil is the visible part of this black tide of fundamentalism,” said Communist MP André Gerin, the committee’s president, in an interview last week. Eric Raoult, a rightwing MP heavily involved in the report, said yesterday that the imposition of a full ban – if it were to occur – would have to wait. “We have tried to do something that is coherent and enforceable,” he said, adding that a ban that was unenforceable would “make everyone look ridiculous”.

Under the proposals, a woman who fails to remove her veil inside when using any realm of the statethose public servicin such cases would not face a fine for breaking the law, but would be refused access to the service. She would not, for instance, be allowed to collect her child benefit payments or take the bus.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has repeatedly said that the full veil “is not welcome” on French soil, is believed to favour this partial legislation, rather than more radical suggestions from recalcitrant members of his rightwing UMP party.

The president has been warned that an outright ban on the full veil could be found to be unconstitutional and almost impossible to put into practice. Sarkozy, who has stressed the need to find a solution in which “no one feels stigmatised”, is also keen to play down speculation that his policies are doing more to aggravate social divisions than to bridge them.

Steps to ban the burka, which have been opposed by the Muslim Council of France and other religious groups, have coincided with the French government’s “big debate” on national identity. Critics of the government, from the left and right, have accused Sarkozy of encouraging dangerous rhetoric which has seen the country’s 5 million Muslims become the object of increasing critiques.

Tomorrow’s cross-party report – whose contents were leaked to the French press last week – looks likely to recommend the ­passing of a non-binding parliamentary resolution setting out the country’s “symbolic” opposition to the full veil.

After that, steps should be taken to vote into law a series of “separate, but multiple bans” which would make clear the garment’s practical incompatibility with French values of sexual equality and freedom, the report will say.

“We have to make life impossible for them in order to curb the phenomenon,” one MP told the French daily Le Figaro. However, opponents have said that banning the full veil either outright or partially would serve merely to reinforce the isolation of women already partially alienated from mainstream society.

The 32-member panel, which has been meeting and questioning experts on the issue for the past six months, was set up by Sarkozy last summer after he declared that the full veil was “a sign of subservience [and] debasement”.

Gerin has not made any secret of his desire to see a ban on what he has denounced as a “walking prison”. His feelings have tapped into growing concern in France over an item of clothing worn by a small minority of Muslim women.

According to police figures, no more than 2,000 women – most of them young and a quarter of them converts – wear a face-covering veil. But in a country which places a high value on laïcité – secularism – and which in 2004 banned headscarves in schools, it is unsurprising that such an overt display of religion has raised eyebrows. The major political parties, leading feminists and even one prominent imam have made clear their dislike for the full veil, which they view as an affront to women’s rights and a sign of an emerging strand of fundamentalist Islam.

Despite wide-ranging opposition to the garment and polls showing that most French citizens favour a ban, opinions have differed on how to go about discouraging women from covering their faces.

The Socialist party, while condemning the full veil, refused to support a ban.

The UMP’s Jean-François Copé, a politician with half an eye on the 2012 presidential elections, grabbed the headlines with a proposal to outlaw the full veil anywhere on French streets and to fine wearers €750 each – a suggestion rejected by the committee.

I read this story on the BBC website today. US sharpshooters are using a sophisticated light-enhancing gunsight – par for the course in this day and age of advanced weaponry. However the sights are engraved with Biblical texts. Reminded me of Pulp Fiction when the scary hitman (samuel Jackson) reads you a passage from the Bible before bumping you off. Also made me think of a recent conversation with a friend about Holy War – it’s getting just like it used to be in the days of the Crusades.

acog gunsight $998 retail

Coded references to biblical passages are inscribed on gunsights widely used by the US and British military in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has emerged.

The markings include “2COR4:6″ and “JN8:12″, relating to verses in the books of II Corinthians and John.

Trijicon, the US-based manufacturer, was founded by a devout Christian, and says it runs to “Biblical standards”.

But military officials in the US and UK have expressed concern over the way the markings will be perceived.

The company has added the references to its sights for many years, but the issue surfaced only recently when soldiers complained to an advocacy group.

Versions of Trijicon’s Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (Acog) are used by the US Special Operations Forces, the US Marine Corps and the US Army.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has just ordered 480 Acog sights for use on its new Sharpshooter rifles – to be used by troops in Afghanistan. Other versions of the Acog sight are “widely in service”, the ministry says.

The inscriptions are subtle and appear in raised lettering at the end of the stock number.

John 8:12 reads: “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

The nod to part of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, found on the company’s Reflex sight, references the text: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

An MoD spokesman told the BBC the ministry appreciated the biblical references could cause offence and was talking to its supplier, but was “not aware at the time of purchase that these markings had any broader significance”.

The US Defense Department is a major customer of Trijicon’s, signing deals for $66m (£40.3m) of the company’s products in 2009 alone.

The US Marine Corps told the BBC they were “concerned with how this may be perceived” and were meeting with the company to “discuss future sight procurements”.

We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals
Trijicon

The US Army said it was looking into any potential policy violation.

The issue has been thrust into the spotlight by the US Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) – an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.

On 14 January, the MRFF received an e-mail, purportedly from a Muslim US Army infantryman, complaining about the markings.

“Many soldiers know of them and are very confused as to why they are there and what it is supposed to mean.”

The email adds: “Everyone is worried that if they were captured in combat that the enemy would use the Bible quotes against them in captivity or some other form of propaganda.”

MRFF president Mikey Weinstein says the inscriptions could give the Taliban and other enemy forces a propaganda tool.

“I don’t have to wonder for a nanosecond how the American public would react if citations from the Koran were being inscribed onto these US armed forces gunsights instead of New Testament citations,” he said.

A Trijicon spokesman told the BBC the company “has been working to provide America’s military men and women with high quality, innovative sighting systems for the weapons they use”.

“Our effort is simple and straightforward: to help our servicemen and women win the war on terror and come home safe to their families.

“As part of our faith and our belief in service to our country, Trijicon has put scripture references on our products for more than two decades.

“As long as we have men and women in danger, we will continue to do everything we can to provide them with both state-of-the-art technology and the never-ending support and prayers of a grateful nation,” the spokesman added.

The company states on its website: “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.”

I found this story in the Observer over the Christmas period, but upon further investigation it had originally appeared in the Guardian at the end of last year.
This is exactly the kind of thing which could lead to the untimely demise of yours truly here – new age, Native American (or First Nation as my politically correct colleagues would say), self improving, a bit hippy dippy, meditative, counter cultural. In short I am wide open to the kind of exploitation which has clearly gone on here in Arizona. Oh dear.

Two weeks ago on a retreat with new age guru James Arthur Ray, three people died in a sweat lodge. What went wrong?

Kirby Brown was a fit, outgoing 38-year-old woman from New York state who made a decent living decorating well-appointed houses in Mexico, and attached considerable importance to her spiritual wellbeing. She practised yoga, became interested in new age philosophies and, earlier this month, took part in a “Spiritual Warrior” retreat in the idyllic Arizona resort town of Sedona, under the leadership of a charismatic new age secular preacher called James Arthur Ray.

The programme promised several days of introspection, life-affirming (perhaps even life-altering) lectures, spiritual cleansing exercises and fasting. She paid more than $9,000 for the privilege; a price no doubt inflated by Ray’s frequent television appearances on Oprah and Larry King, and by his participation in the 2006 viral new age video, The Secret.

On her fifth day in the red-rock canyons of northern Arizona, having already reportedly undergone 36 hours of fasting in the desert heat, Brown and her fellow retreat members took part in a “sweat lodge”, an ancient Native American purging ritual, popularised by the new age movement, which exposes participants to sustained, extreme heat under an enclosed canopy. Brown didn’t make it out alive.

Usually, sweat lodges consist of no more than 20 people. Native American practitioners say they always pay extremely close attention to the physical wellbeing of the participants as hot rocks are brought into the central fire pit to raise the temperature. If anyone faints or falls ill, they are taken out. That does not appear to have happened at the Angel Valley Retreat Centre.

According to local police, at 3pm on Thursday 8 October – the final day of the retreat, and following a buffet meal to break their fast – more than 60 people crammed into a space measuring just 415 sq ft. An initial 12 hot rocks were thrown into the fire pit, then doused with water and sandalwood to create steam and a scent of incense. By the time the ceremony was halted two hours later, another 46 hot rocks had reportedly been added to the pyre, turning the enclosure into a human cooking pot. A 911 emergency call reported that two people had no pulse and were not breathing.

Arizona police investigators are sure to focus on why participants who had become distressed did not leave the sweat lodge structure, which had been built specifically for this five-day retreat. Ultimately, three participants died: Brown and 40-year-old James Shore from Wisconsin at the scene, and 49-year-old Liz Neuman of Minnesota 10 days later in hospital, having lapsed into a coma as a result of severe dehydration.

A nurse hired by Ray was present during the session, but may have been overwhelmed by the number of people needing emergency resuscitation. A further 18 people were taken to hospital, all of whom have now recovered.

Ray, the retreat’s mercurial impresario, does not appear to have suffered any physical ill-effects himself. But he did not stick around to tend to the sick and dying, or to explain himself to the local authorities. He refused to give a statement to the county police in Sedona and promptly left Arizona for his home in California, leaving his communications in the hands of a veteran Hollywood publicist, who has said next to nothing.

At first, Ray simply informed his followers he was “meditating”. But he has since led two more scheduled retreats, in Los Angeles (where he is reported to have broken down in tears as he discussed the deaths with followers) and San Diego. Ray also claimed he had hired his own team of investigators to look into the tragedy, but Arizona police say he has yet to talk to them, even though they have put him on notice that they are treating the deaths as homicides.

Ray’s only public utterances have been a series of notes posted on his Facebook page in the wake of Neuman’s death. The first was a short expression of condolence, but the second took on a more defensive tone.

“People are throwing out accusations and disparaging me and our mission,” he wrote. “Yet despite that, and despite considerable criticism, I have chosen to continue with my work. It’s too important not to. One of the lessons I teach is that you have to confront and embrace adversity and learn and grow from it. I promise you I am doing a lot of learning and growing.”

That attitude has, unsurprisingly, sparked criticism that Ray seems more preoccupied with the impact of the disaster on his own wellbeing than anyone else’s.

“That’s great that you want to continue your work James!” wrote a rival motivational speaker, Todd Dean, in response. “Are you going to offer refunds to those who register for your programmes if you are arrested? . . . Apparently [Liz Neuman's] family found out through family in Arizona and media that she was ill. Do you teach these techniques in your seminars? Perhaps you should offer a new one called ‘101 Ways to Shirk Responsibility’.”

Conference call with survivors

Reports have also emerged of a private conference call Ray held with survivors of the Arizona retreat – one of whom recorded it and gave a transcript to the Associated Press. Again, Ray apparently talked about the importance of carrying on his work, while struggling to explain why he decamped rather than staying in Arizona with the people who had been taken ill.

“I really wanted to be with you all on the final night,” he reportedly said, “and my thoughts were consistently with everyone who was having challenges. I just kept thinking: I have to take care of my people.”

Ray’s organisation has acknowledged the conference call took place, but made no comment on its contents. One of his staff members, called Barb, was quoted from the same call by Associated Press as saying that those who died “left their bodies during the ceremony and had so much fun they chose not to come back, and that was their choice that they made”.

According to witness testimony gathered by Yurgey, some strange games took place during the desert fast, in which Ray took on the role of God and ordered various participants to play dead. The witness told Yurgey that at one point, she saw Brown clutching herself and crying. When someone asked her why she didn’t just get up and leave, she responded that she didn’t want to ruin the game for anyone else.

Some followers have rushed to Ray’s defence. “I’m sure James had his issues, and was out of balance energetically to attract this and bring him back to earth, but we all have these problems,” one supporter called Anthony Wemyss said. “I sense James will learn some great lessons about getting ‘high’ on his life.”

Patchwork philosophy

Ray is one of a crop of new age gurus who like to peddle themselves as visionary geniuses, but have come under heavy criticism for spouting a patchwork philosophy largely borrowed from other sources and using it to enrich themselves hugely. Ray’s philosophy can be boiled down to a few simple precepts, known variously as The Law of Attraction or, simply, The Secret.

Essentially, the premise is we all have the power to determine our fate because the energy we receive from the universe is equal to the energy we put into it. In other words, if we want money or a fulfilling love life, or a new necklace, all we have to do is envision those things and they will come to pass. As Ray has told his followers: “You were born into greatness, and you’ve been conditioned into mediocrity . . . Go out and create the universe you deserve.”

According to the 2006 viral video, this is The Secret that the rich and powerful have been keeping to themselves (cue images of evil business leaders conspiring in a boardroom) so ordinary people can’t enjoy the same spoils. Yet in fact, books suggesting very similar “revelations” have been published as far back as Wallace D Wattles’ 1910 bestseller, The Science of Getting Rich. Critics variously describe this worldview as “pernicious drivel” (because it essentially blames poor or disadvantaged people for their troubles) and “quantum flapdoodle” (because it claims to be rooted in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and other tenets of modern physics).

It is, though, too early to make a full assessment of Ray’s methods and the extent to which they might or might not be dangerous to his retreat participants. The postmortem results are not yet in, and the police are keeping tight-lipped, other than to announce that they are interviewing survivors and family members, and have conducted a search of Ray’s corporate headquarters outside San Diego.

Pushing people out of balance

Ray himself makes no secret of the fact that he likes to test the endurance of his followers. He’s not interested in people living a balanced life – balance is “bogus”, he says; it is only by pushing yourself and throwing things temporarily out of balance that you can achieve anything. Rather, he is after achieving “harmony” – as in the title of one of his bestselling books, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want.

One thing seems certain in the wake of the Arizona tragedy: sweat lodges will never be the same again. According to some Native American practitioners, this was a calamity waiting to happen – indeed, reports of occasional deaths from sweat lodges have peppered local news for years. And the very notion of charging people money for a sweat lodge is anathema – in Native American culture, they are community events, not a stunt performed for some vague goal of personal fulfilment.

“Running a sweat lodge ceremony is not simply constructing a lodge, heating rocks, and pouring water,” says Johnny Flynn, a part-time professor at Indiana University and a sweat lodge practitioner and leader of 40 years’ standing. “The wrong stones can explode in the fire or worse, in the lodge. They can give off toxic fumes or not heat properly . . . News accounts out of Sedona indicate that Ray’s sweat lodge was covered in plastic sheeting. As I have tracked the news stories and anecdotes of sweat lodge deaths and near-disasters, every one of them was covered with plastic sheeting or plastic tarps.”

Ray has insisted he is cooperating with the investigation, but that conflicts with what the local police are saying. “As of now we have not spoken to Mr Ray though we would very much like to,” Yavapai county sheriff’s spokesman Dwight Develyn said. “We hear from the media that he is interested in giving us a statement, but we have not received one yet.”

Spiritual cleansing: The tradition of the sweat lodge

The idea of using heat and steam to “sweat out” impurities has long had a place in many different cultures. Steam baths were popular in Ancient Greece and were later adopted by the Romans; Turkey has the hamam, Russia the banya and Scandinavia the sauna. The sweat lodge is an important part of Native American culture and, unlike steam baths or saunas, which have generally been used for cleansing and relaxation purposes – forms a sacred place for ceremonial and spiritual ritual.

According to Joseph Bruchac, author of The Native American Sweat Lodge, the rituals vary from tribe to tribe, but the idea is the same. The sweat lodge is usually a small dome-shaped structure, about 10ft wide, with a frame usually built from willow or ash saplings. This would have been traditionally covered with animal hides, but canvas tarpaulins or woollen blankets are commonly used today. Those taking part in the rite, typically no more than 12, sit around a central fire pit, and fire-heated stones are brought into the lodge. Water is poured on to them to create steam, and most rituals, led by a lodge leader, include drumming and offering prayers and songs, as well as sitting in silence. There are believed to be health benefits – practitioners believe that extreme heat can kill bacteria and viruses — but the main purpose is spiritual cleansing, reflection and healing.

As soon as the Europeans arrived in North America, Native American religious rituals were quickly targeted; in 1873, the government banned all sweat lodges. Although some lodges survived underground, many of the traditions were lost. In the 1960s, as new age therapies and an exploration of Native American traditions became more popular, sweat lodges began to be used as retreats across the US. This time, though, lodges are often run by non-Native Americans, with some charging thousands of dollars for the experience.

Emine Saner

This last month I have been reading Henry Thoreau’s work “Walden” which is all about jacking in the materialist rat race and going off to live next to the land in a small shack out in the woods. When I found this article in the Guardian it was almost identical – but here and now rather than 1845 (Thoreau was way ahead of his time) so here it is for an alternative Christmas story…..as I am so heartily sick of the mainstream ones!

In six years of studying economics, not once did I hear the word “ecology”. So if it hadn’t have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi in the final term of my degree, I’d probably have ended up earning a fine living in a very respectable job persuading Indian farmers to go GM, or something useful like that. The little chap in the loincloth taught me one huge lesson – to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Trouble was, I had no idea back then what that change was.

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even “ethical business” would never be quite enough, an afternoon’s philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world’s issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we’re completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I’d relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it’s not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don’t own a plasma screen TV, people think you’re an extremist.

People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.

Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community. In a subsequent blog he responds to the comments below.

I was drinking with two neighbours last night who were off to Germany today using …yes…Eurostar. Why do I mention it? Germany commonly copes with six foot of snow, let alone a couple of inches. Yet here we are massively disrupted by a not unexpected outbreak of fairly mild wintry weather as seen in today’s Telegraph, Ho hum.

All Eurostar services remained suspended for a third consecutive day, while airports and domestic rail networks across the country suffered delays.
As bus replacement services were put into action, the AA warned that some minor roads had effectively turned into “ice-rinks”.
At least four people died in car crashes related to the bad weather over the weekend, while extra breakdown patrols were out in force in more remote areas.
With temperatures forecast to remain below freezing until Christmas Eve, there seems little respite from the chaos.
The three days of cancellation by Eurostar has left 55,000 people with travel plans in tatters as they try and find alternative transport at one of the busiest times of the year.
The company is encouraging those who don’t have to travel in the next few days to Those whose trains were cancelled have been offered refunds, aas well as the costs of any hotel accommodation – up to three star – transport and meals.
But that provides little comfort for those Britons stranded in France, and those trying to get home to France and Belgium for the holiday.
Several flights arriving from the US – where there is also considerable snow – were delayed arriving into London Heathrow and Gatwick.
Some passengers at Manchester Airport were still waiting to take off on flights which were due to have taken off on Sunday, while cancellations and delays continued at Bristol, Luton, Southampton, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Inverness airports.
A Manchester airport spokeswoman said: “We are trying our best to get the backlog cleared up. It has been a constant battle with snow and freezing temperatures.
“The snow has stopped falling now and the forecast looks clear but the problem now is clearing the runway of ice. The current temperature out there is minus 4 degrees. We have ordered in 50,000 litres of de-icer today to help with that.”
To try and ease the congestion between London and France, British Airways said it was operating larger aircraft on many flights both ways between Heathrow and Paris, including a 340-seater Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
BA was operating an additional flight from Heathrow to New York this evening.
UK carrier Flybe said it was increasing capacity to help stranded Eurostar passengers – laying on larger aircraft from both Birmingham and Southampton to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for the next four days.
However, budget airline easyJet, which had to cancel a number of flights today, reported that French aviation authorities had imposed flight restrictions on easyJet at Charles de Gaulle Airport and that the airline was experiencing delays and cancellations to Paris.
Ferry operator P&O said it had laid on a fleet of coaches to get the passengers across the Channel and on to Paris or Brussels.
Spokesman Chris Laming said: “At one point we had 500 Eurostar passengers at Dover and at Calais.
“We’ve spoken to Eurostar about this arrangement and they’ve agreed to pick up the tab, and we’ll certainly send them the bill.”
Rail services were delayed in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, while London Midland services between London and Tring in Hertfordshire were cancelled and there were delays to Virgin West Coast trains.
Bus replacement services were put in place by Southern railways and Kent and Sussex suffered from the continuing poor weather.
On the roads, a jack-knifed lorry led to a lane closure on the M6 in Lancashire and another accident resulted in two lanes of the M6 in Cumbria being closed.
The AA said it had extra patrols out on duty and was putting extra snow-busting Land Rovers in place to rescue people in inaccessible areas.
AA president Edmund King said: “Many minor roads are treacherous – they’re like ice rinks – with numerous shunts and cars stuck in ditches.”

There has been an outbreak of blatant Christianity according to the Telegraph.  Or as they put it, two prominent Anglican bishops have urged Christians to turn back the tide of political correctness by wearing religious symbols during the Christmas  period. Actually I have to agree. Don’t you really hate that pagan midwinter festival thing that left wing councils do?

The Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, the Bishop of Lichfield, told worshippers to wear crosses or fish symbols to demonstrate that Christmas is a religious holiday.

He also criticised “politically-correct” companies and local councils who sought to make the period a secular celebration.

Bishop Gledhill said: “Companies’ sacking those who want to wear a cross or fish lapel badge and councils rebranding Christmas out of fear of offending ethnic minorities are decisions made out of sheer ignorance.

“I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if in December all Christians wore a fish badge or cross necklace and sent out a loud message that Christians aren’t going to disappear quietly from the Christmas market place.”

His intervention has been welcomed by other bishops and comes only one week after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes should not be displayed in Italy’s schools.

The landmark judgment could force a Europe-wide review of the use of religious symbols in state-run schools. A panel of seven judges in Strasbourg said the display of Christian crosses violated the principle of secular education.

Only last week Dundee City Council renamed its Christmas Lights switch-on the ‘Dundee Winter Light Night’ in apparent fear of offending members of other religions. The traditional telling of the Christmas story has also been dropped from the council’s festive programme.

Many Nativity plays have been banned and Christ’s birth is often celebrated as “Wintermass’’ rather than Christmas.

Rt Rev John Hind, the Bishop of Chichester, called for Anglicans to speak up more loudly for their faith and religious traditions. He said: “Our faith cannot avoid being a public matter as it affects every aspect of our lives including our social and political attitudes.

“In other words, we can’t keep it to ourselves. There is growing hostility in the public towards witnessing our faith in society and this has been shown in a number of recent attempts to marginalise the meaning of Christmas or to suppress the rights of believers. I hope all Christians respond enthusiastically both by wearing external symbols of our faith.”

I suppose we all enjoy stories which involve a holy person’s fall from grace. Lucifer Star of The Morning springs to mind. This story – again brought to my attention by the noble Richard Dean – ran in today’s Times. I was going to make some politically incorrect remark about having a nose for a toot, but as I am going to invite my Manchester Jewish friend Kevin to read this story, perhaps not.

An eminent rabbi was so exhausted after three days of constant cocaine-fuelled partying with escorts that his pimp grew worried and cancelled that day’s supply of girls, a jury was told.
Rabbi Baruch Chalomish, 55, who has a £6 million fortune, was a scholarly academic, an accomplished businessman, a charity giver and a dutiful family man until his first wife died of cancer and his world fell apart.
He turned to alcohol in his depression, then took refuge in cocaine, spending up to £1,000 a week. He lived in squalor, seeking comfort from prostitutes, Manchester Crown Court was told.
The prosecution said that Chalomish was the financier in a commercial cocaine supply business while Nasir Abbas, 54, a convicted drug dealer, provided the drugs and the customers.
The pair rented a luxury flat in Manchester and for ten days over the new year enjoyed a non-stop party. Mr Abbas admitted to police that he procured a supply of girls from an agency called Pure Class. They were also offered cocaine.
The court was told that on the ninth day, and after the rabbi had stayed up for three straight days, Mr Abbas was so concerned about his health that he scrapped that day’s supply of prostitutes. In a text message to a woman called Clio he wrote: “Hi Clio, I have tried to wake Shel up but I don’t want to wake him. He was very tired because he had no sleep for three days, needed to rest, because he is going to his office to work on Monday at 8. Please cancel the party today.”
Michael Goldwater, for the prosecution, said that at 9am on January 5 police raided the flat finding evidence of a substantial drugs operation including cocaine, cutting agents and scales. Officers found an equal amount of the drug at Chalomish’s home in Prestwich, in the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox Jewish community, as well as cutting agents and more than £15,000 in cash.
Chalomish denies supplying the drug but admits having it. Mr Abbas, who said that he was too scared to attend the trial after the rabbi “sent around some heavies” to threaten him, faces charges of having cocaine with intent to supply.
Jonathan Goldberg, QC, for the defence, said that the rabbi’s fall from grace was a tragedy. He said that his client never supplied the drug but hoarded large supplies of pure cocaine to evade “unscrupulous dealers” known to use rat poison and other dangerous mixing agents. The trial continues.

Fort Hood, 60 miles north of Austin, is the largest Army base in the United States. More than 53,000 troops are stationed there, and more than 17,000 family members live on the base. An army psychiatrist went on a shooting spree there yesterday. His aunt talks about him and his life below, from the Washington Post, home of proper and good reporting since forever.

He prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, a devout Muslim who, despite asking to be discharged from the U.S. Army, was on the eve of his first deployment to war. Yesterday, authorities said Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a 39-year-old Arlington-born psychiatrist, shot and killed at least 12 people at Fort Hood, Tex.
In an interview, his aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, said he had endured name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had sought for several years to be discharged from the military.
“I know what that is like,” she said. “Some people can take it, and some cannot. He had listened to all of that, and he wanted out of the military, and they would not let him leave even after he offered to repay” for his medical training.
An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. George Wright, said he could not confirm that Hasan requested a discharge.
As authorities scrambled to figure out what happened at Fort Hood, a hazy and contradictory picture emerged of a man who received his medical training from the military and spent his career in the Army, yet allegedly turned so violently against his own. Hasan spent nearly all of his professional life at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District, caring for the victims of trauma, yet he spoke openly of his deep opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hasan, who was shot while being taken into custody, was reported in stable condition at a hospital Thursday night, authorities said.
The Associated Press reported that Hasan attracted the attention of law enforcement authorities in recent months after an Internet posting under the screen name “NidalHasan” compared Islamic suicide bombers to Japanese kamikaze pilots. “To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate,” the posting read. “It’s more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause.”
He steered clear of female colleagues, co-workers said, and despite devout religious practices, listed himself in Army records as having no religious preference.
A longtime Walter Reed colleague who referred patients to psychiatrists said co-workers avoided sending service members to Hasan because of his unusual manner and solitary work habits.
Hasan is a 1997 graduate of Virginia Tech who went on to get a doctorate in psychiatry from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. From 2003 through last summer, he was an intern, resident and then fellow at Walter Reed, where he worked as a liaison between wounded soldiers and the hospital’s psychiatry staff. He was also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda military medical school.
He had been affected by the physical and mental injuries he saw while working as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed for nearly eight years, according to his aunt. “He must have snapped,” Noel Hasan said. “They ignored him. It was not hard to know when he was upset. He was not a fighter, even as a child and young man. But when he became upset, his face turns red.” She said Hasan had consulted with an attorney about getting out of the service.
On the rare occasions when he spoke of his work in any detail, the aunt said, Hasan told her of soldiers wracked by what they had seen. One patient had suffered burns to his face so intense “that his face had nearly melted,” she said. “He told us how upsetting that was to him.”Hasan “did not make many friends” and “did not make friends fast,” his aunt said. He had no girlfriend and was not married. “He would tell us the military was his life,” she said.
The psychiatrist once said that “Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” and that the United States shouldn’t be fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, according to an interview with Col. Terry Lee, a co-worker, on Fox News.
At the Muslim Community Center, Hasan stood out because he would sometimes show up in Army fatigues, said Faizul Khan, the former imam there.
“He came to mosque one or two times to see if there were any suitable girls to marry,” Khan said. “I don’t think he ever had a match, because he had too many conditions. He wanted a girl who was very religious, prays five times a day.”
In search of a partner in marriage, Hasan wrote in an application filed with a local Muslim matching service that “I am quiet and reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring and personable.”
“He was a very quiet and private person. I can’t say that people knew him very well other than attending prayers,” said Arshad Qureshi, chairman of the board of trustees at the Muslim Community Center of Silver Spring. “You didn’t see him attend anything — school for children or celebrations. He did not go out of the way to engage people. We have thousands of people who come through to pray; he was just one of them.”
A co-worker at Walter Reed said Hasan would not allow his photo to be taken with female co-workers, which became an issue during Christmas season when employees often took group photos. Co-workers would find a solo photo of Hasan and post it on the bulletin board without his permission.
Lee told Fox News that Hasan “was hoping that President Obama would pull troops out. . . . When things weren’t going that way, he became more agitated, more frustrated with the conflicts over there. . . . He made his views well known about how he felt about the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And when he talked about fighting “the aggressor,” he said that his fellow soldiers “should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan,” Lee said.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told reporters after a briefing on the shootings that Hasan was born in Virginia to parents who emigrated from Jordan. The congressman said that Hasan “took a lot of advanced training in shooting.”
Hasan was polite and respectful, according to 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, who was treated by the psychiatrist at Walter Reed while recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in Iraq.
Whiteside remembers Hasan as serious. During his initial evaluation of her, she tried to make light when he coughed by saying, “Bless you.” Hasan replied that he had coughed and not sneezed.Hasan was “like my sons,” his aunt said, spending holidays and free time at her house. Born at Arlington Hospital, Nidal Hasan graduated from high school in Roanoke, where his parents had moved. He enlisted in the Army after high school and attended Virginia Tech, majoring in biochemistry.
Hasan’s parents died about 10 years ago. He had joined the military over their objections, Noel Hasan said. She said he has two brothers, Eyad, a businessman in Sterling, and Anas, a lawyer in Jerusalem.
When Army officials called Eyad Hasan to relay the news from Fort Hood on Thursday, Noel Hasan said, the brother “fainted when he heard it.” Initially, she said, Eyad was told his brother was injured and in surgery and later was erroneously told he had died.
Hasan was an avid Redskins fan. “That was his main entertainment,” his aunt said. “He was not a movie watcher. He worked hard and had been studying for years. He buried himself in his work.”
Noel Hasan was unaware of her nephew’s pending deployment. “He didn’t call or send an e-mail saying anything like that,” she said.
His last e-mail to her, she said, was a little more than a week ago “and it was just, “Hi, Aunt Noel. How are you doing?’ “

Thanks once again to Richard Dean for this story, It appeared in today’s Guardian – and gives a lovely account of a Brazilian chap turning up alive at his own funeral. Who was the other guy? That’s what I want to know.

A Brazilian bricklayer reportedly killed in a car crash shocked his mourning family by showing up alive at his funeral.
Relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves, 59, had identified him as the victim of a car crash on Sunday night in Parana state in southern Brazil, police said.
As is customary in Brazil, the funeral was held the following day, which happened to be the holiday of Finados, when Brazilians visit cemeteries to honour the dead.
What family members didn’t know was that Goncalves had spent the night at a truck stop talking with friends and drinking a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca, his niece Rosa Sampaio told the O Globo newspaper. He did not hear about his own funeral until it was already happening on Monday morning.
A police spokesman in the town of Santo Antonio da Platina said Goncalves rushed to the funeral to let family members know he was not dead.
“The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing,” said the police spokesman, who talked on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorised to discuss the case. “People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies, and I think that is what happened in this case.”
Sampaio told O Globo that some family members were not sure the body was Goncalves.
“My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification,” she told O Globo. “But an aunt and four of his friends identified the body, so what were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral.”
The police spokesman confirmed there were doubts: “His mum looked at the body in the casket and thought something was strange. She looked and looked and couldn’t believe it was her son,” Sampaio said. “Before long, the walking dead appeared at the funeral. It was a relief.”
The body was correctly identified later on Monday, the police spokesman said, and had been buried in another state. He declined to release the actual victim’s name.

One of the good things about British society has been our unarmed police policy. However, by some strange back door manouevre, it’s suddenly vanished and armed police are here on the streets of London in Brixton and Haringey. Right here, right now. Maybe some part of us doesn’t want to admit what the nice Rasta in Brockwell Park said to me the other morning about where my wife and I used to live in Brixton: “It’s like a war zone, so it is man.”  What bothers me, is that like the villains, the police are toting automatic weapons. Machine guns in streets of crowded people. Has it really come to this? This coverage is from the Independent.

Armed police officers are to patrol the streets of London for the first time in an attempt to tackle a rise in gang-related gun crime.

Traditionally officers from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist firearms unit – codenamed CO19 – have been deployed on the streets only when a response to incidents of gun crime is necessary or to protect VIPs.

The new initiative, announced yesterday, will see CO19 officers patrolling the capital’s most dangerous streets and housing estates alongside neighbourhood officers. It has been described as a “proactive” response to the 17 per cent increase in gun crime over the past six months.

But it was immediately denounced by members of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), the body which governs the actions of Scotland Yard, which was apparently not consulted on the controversial decision. One MPA member described the move as “totally unacceptable” while another called for an emergency meeting.

Joanne McCartney said: “We want fewer guns on the streets not more, and people to feel safe in their community – not scared of those who are supposed to protect them.

“There has been no debate, no consultation and apparently no consideration to the strong opposition that exists to arming the police. This is more than just an operational decision and should be brought before the police authority as a matter of urgency.”

Jenny Jones, another MPA member, added: “This is a totally unacceptable departure from normal policing tactics. I can’t believe that the sight of a policeman with a machine gun will make people feel safer.

“Are we heading down a slippery slope towards armed rather than community policing? I hope the Met will rethink this terrible decision immediately and think of a genuinely proactive way to prevent gun crime.”

Pilot patrols have already begun in Brixton as well as Haringey and Tottenham, where three Turkish men were shot dead earlier this month in an apparent war between rival heroin gangs.

It is the first time the Metropolitan Police has deployed armed officers for routine patrols outside of protected sites such as Parliament and Royal homes. However a similar project did run in Nottinghamshire in 2000 in an attempt to address the issue of drive-by shootings that afflicted the city.

Yet the fact that Britain’s police officers, unlike their American counterparts, remain predominately unarmed is a source of continuing pride to traditionalists who believe that officers should police through consent rather than force.

But Inspector Derek Carroll, who leads the armed unit, said officers have received positive feedback from residents.

He said: “Historically, CO19 was only called out when someone rang up to report a gun crime. But a lot of streets in London have young people in postcode gangs, aged 14 and upwards, and a lot of communities feel that they are controlling areas of estates. We are looking at gangs that have access to firearms and will be robust in dealing with them.”

I read this story on the BBC News service this afternoon. It’s a bit grim – but hmmmmm.

A man accused of strangling a woman recorded the rough area of where he buried her body in the memory of his car’s sat nav system, a jury was told.

Lukasz Reszpondek, 30, had been seeing Ermatati “Tati” Rodgers, 41, Mold Crown Court heard.

Mr Reszpondek, who denies murder, said she died of natural causes and he had buried her near Wrexham in a panic.

But the prosecution told the jury that “quite simply” innocent people did not bury bodies. The case continues.

Mr Reszpondek, a Polish national and married man, has admitted preventing Ms Rodgers’s “lawful and decent burial”.

At the opening of the trial, the jury was told he had buried her but tried to dig her body up again as police closed in on him.

But he could not recover the body and went to the police.

Ms Rodgers was missing for 14 months before her body was eventually found by police in March 2009.

Prosecuting barrister Michael Chambers QC said Mr Reszpondek killed Ms Rodgers, who was originally from Indonesia, on the day he returned early from Poland by car without his family on 4 January, 2008.

He said he had lost his temper and strangled her “against a background of the emotional and conflicting demands of the eternal triangle of a wife and another woman”.

The defendant watched the police looking for the body from the top of a nearby slag heap, hiding in bushes, wearing camouflage clothing and using binoculars

He then set about disposing of the body and might well have got away with it if he had not made certain fundamental errors, the prosecutor claimed.

Quite simply, innocent people do not bury bodies, Mr Chambers told the jury.

Mr Reszpondek and Ms Rodgers met in the summer of 2004 when they both worked together at a dairy at Marchwiel near Wrexham.

They formed a close relationship which continued after the defendant’s wife came over from Poland to join him in Wrexham.

At Christmas 2007 the defendant – a father of two – returned to Poland. His family travelled by plane but he went separately by car.

He returned to Wrexham on 4 January, 2008 and took Ms Rodgers to his house in Rhostyllen after a 900-mile car journey. It was there that he killed her, said the prosecutor.

In police interview, Mr Reszpondek claimed he had gone upstairs to take a shower and had come back down to discover her collapsed and dead.

He claimed that he had buried the body because he had panicked, the court heard.

The following day he bought a spade, a large suitcase and other items which he used to help him bury the body, with his credit card which police were able to trace.

He then recorded the approximate area of the burial site in the memory of his car satellite navigation system and named it “Tt”, the court was told.

Police surveillance found he kept returning to that area and when they began digging in the surrounding fields looking for her body, “the defendant made the error of taking the bait”, said Mr Chambers.

“The defendant watched the police looking for the body from the top of a nearby slag heap, hiding in bushes, wearing camouflage clothing and using binoculars,” he said.

“What he did not know was that the police were watching him, watching them.”

By Sunday afternoon, 22 March, the police digging was getting close to the actual field which contained the body, Mr Chambers told the jury.

“The defendant must have thought that on the Monday morning they were likely to move into the actual field and find the body,” he said.

“So on that Sunday night, he tried to move it.

“However it was more difficult that he anticipated so after about three hours he had to stop.

“It was only at that stage that he went to Wrexham police station.

“He gave the account that she had suddenly collapsed and died, he had panicked, and buried her.”

Home Office pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers conducted a post-mortem examination and he said that there was no sign of any natural causes which would have explained her sudden death.

But he did find bruising and a fractured thyroid cartilage consistent with strangulation.

Mr Chambers told the jury that police had found deleted “glamour photographs” of Mrs Rodgers on his digital camera which included her in under-wear and semi naked poses.

That, he said, indicated the nature of their relationship.

He said that it could be inferred that the defendant lost his temper and strangled her in the “context of the emotional and conflicting demands of the eternal triangular relationship of wife and another woman.”

The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, continues.

I read this in The New Scientist today – my son is a keen juggler and no doubt would agree with this story… build up your white cells (not your grey cells) with a few juggling lessons….

Juggling boosts the connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of the brain’s “white matter” – a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.

White matter describes all areas of the brain that contain mostly axons – outgrowths of nerve cells that connect different cells. It might be expected that learning a new, complex task such as juggling should strengthen these connections, but previous work looking for changes in the brains of people who had learned how to juggle had only studied increases in grey matter, which contains the nerve cells’ bodies.

Now Jan Scholz and his colleagues at the University of Oxford have discovered that juggling changes white matter, too. They gave 24 young men and women training packs for juggling and had them practise for half an hour a day for six weeks. Before and after this training period, the researchers scanned the brains of the jugglers along with those of 24 people who didn’t do any juggling, using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging that reveals the structure of white matter.

They found that there was no change in the brains of the non-jugglers, but the jugglers grew more white matter in a part of the parietal lobe – an area involved in connecting what we see to how we move.

The same transformation was seen in all the jugglers, regardless of how well they could perform. This suggests that it’s the learning process itself that is important for brain development, not how good you are.
Learning matters

Arne May of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, who led the previous work on juggling and grey matter, finds this result “fascinating”. “It suggests that learning a skill is more important than exercising what you are good at already – the brain wants to be puzzled and learn something new,” he says.

Like May, Scholz’s group found increases in grey matter, but differences in the size and timing of the grey- and white-matter changes suggest they are independent. Nevertheless, both are probably necessary to learn how to juggle, argues Scholz.

“More white matter on its own might mean you can move more quickly, but you’d need the grey matter to make sure your hands were in the right place,” he says.
Don’t use it, don’t lose it

The group scanned the jugglers’ brains again after four weeks without juggling. They found that the new white matter had stayed put and the amount of grey matter had even increased. This could be why, when we learn a new skill, we retain some ability, no matter how long ago we last practised.

“It’s like riding a bike,” Scholz says. “Either you can juggle or you can’t. It takes a lot of training to learn, but once it clicks, you don’t forget it.”

Scholz also hopes that it might be possible to develop juggling-based training programmes to help people with brain injuries, or that further study of how juggling changes the architecture of the brain may lead to the discovery of drugs that could boost this plasticity. “If we could use training or drugs to help stroke patients regenerate damaged parts of their brains, that would be fantastic,” he says.

The Bulgarian lottery has been going for fifty odd years. This week the same numbers came up twice in a row. What are the odds? Over four million to one. The Bulgarians say it’s coincidence.. ..this story is from Reuters.

SOFIA (Reuters) – The draw of the same six winning numbers twice in a row in Bulgaria’s national lottery was a freak coincidence, officials said Thursday.

Sports Minister Svilen Neikov ordered an investigation after the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were selected, in a different order, by a machine live on television on September 6 and 10. The results caused suspicions of manipulation.

An investigation found no wrongdoing in the draw or determining the winners, its chairman Konstantin Simeonov said.

“We cannot talk about any manipulation,” he said.

The chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in two consecutive rounds was one in more than 4 million but was not impossible, respected mathematician Michail Konstantinov has said.

An unprecedented 18 people guessed all six numbers when they were drawn the second time and each got 10,164 levs ($7,700). Nobody won the top prize the first time.

The lottery organizers say it is impossible to tamper with the lottery machine. The draws take place in the presence of a special committee and is broadcast live on national television which guarantee no cheating, they say.

“This is happening for the first time in the 52-year history of the lottery. We are absolutely stunned to see such a freak coincidence but it did happen,” a spokeswoman said.

(Reporting by Anna Mudeva)

Only In America would we find such a superbly written story about bog paper – by David Farenthold in The Washington Post. The US wants the softest toilet roll – but this means cutting down the oldest trees. The article is rich in unintended double meanings. It’s a Hummer product.  Greenpeace should have pushed for more. Talking about logging. The Bottom Line. Oh dear.
I don’t usually include a video but this one is priceless. Especially the faces of the consumer testers checking the Unnecessary Plumbing Issues.

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for “soft” (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).

It’s a menace, environmental groups say — and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

It has been slow going. Big toilet-paper makers say that they’ve taken steps to become more Earth-friendly but that their customers still want the soft stuff, so they’re still selling it.

This summer, two of the best-known combatants in this fight signed a surprising truce, with a big tissue maker promising to do better. But the larger battle goes on — the ultimate test of how green Americans will be when nobody’s watching.

“At what price softness?” said Tim Spring, chief executive of Marcal Manufacturing, a New Jersey paper maker that is trying to persuade customers to try 100 percent recycled paper. “Should I contribute to clear-cutting and deforestation because the big [marketing] machine has told me that softness is important?”

He added: “You’re not giving up the world here.”

Toilet paper is far from being the biggest threat to the world’s forests: together with facial tissue, it accounts for 5 percent of the U.S. forest-products industry, according to industry figures. Paper and cardboard packaging makes up 26 percent of the industry, although more than half is made from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3 percent.

But environmentalists say 5 percent is still too much.

Felling these trees removes a valuable scrubber of carbon dioxide, they say. If the trees come from “farms” in places such as Brazil, Indonesia or the southeastern United States, natural forests are being displaced. If they come from Canada’s forested north — a major source of imported wood pulp — ecosystems valuable to bears, caribou and migratory birds are being damaged.

And, activists say, there’s just the foolish idea of the thing: old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends.It’s like the Hummer product for the paper industry,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We don’t need old-growth forests . . . to wipe our behinds.”

The reason for this fight lies in toilet-paper engineering. Each sheet is a web of wood fibers, and fibers from old trees are longer, which produces a smoother and more supple web. Fibers made from recycled paper — in this case magazines, newspapers or computer printouts — are shorter. The web often is rougher.
So, when toilet paper is made for the “away from home” market, the no-choice bathrooms in restaurants, offices and schools, manufacturers use recycled fiber about 75 percent of the time.
But for the “at home” market, the paper customers buy for themselves, 5 percent at most is fully recycled. The rest is mostly or totally “virgin” fiber, taken from newly cut trees, according to the market analysis firm RISI Inc.
Big tissue makers say they’ve tried to make their products as green as possible, including by buying more wood pulp from forest operations certified as sustainable.
But despite environmentalists’ concerns, they say customers are unwavering in their desire for the softest paper possible.
“That’s a segment [of consumers] that is quite demanding of products that are soft,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia-Pacific. Sales figures seem to make that clear: Quilted Northern Ultra Plush, the three-ply stuff, sold 24 million packages in the past year, bringing in more than $144 million, according to the market research firm Information Resources Inc.
Last month, Greenpeace announced an agreement that it said would change this industry from the inside.
The environmental group had spent 4 1/2 years attacking Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex and Cottonelle toilet paper, for getting wood from old-growth forests in Canada. But the group said it is calling off the “Kleercut” campaign: Kimberly-Clark had agreed to make its practices greener.
By 2011, the company said, 40 percent of the fiber in all its tissue products will come from recycled paper or sustainable forests.
“We could have campaigned forever,” said Lindsey Allen, a senior forest campaigner with Greenpeace. But this was enough, she said, because Kimberly-Clark’s changes could alter the entire wood-pulp supply chain: “They have a policy that . . . will shift the entire way that tissue companies work.”
Still, some environmental activists said that Greenpeace should have pushed for more.”The problem is not yet getting better,” said Chris Henschel, of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, talking about logging in Canada’s boreal forests. He said real change will come only when consumers change their habits: “It’s unbelievable that this global treasure of Canadian boreal forests is being turned into toilet paper. . . . I think every reasonable person would have trouble understanding how that would be okay.”

That part could be difficult, because — in the U.S. market, at least — soft is to toilet paper what fat is to bacon, the essence of the appeal.
Earlier this year, Consumer Reports tested toilet paper brands and found that recycled-tissue brands such as Seventh Generation and Marcal’s Small Steps weren’t unpleasant. But they gave their highest rating to the three-ply Quilted Northern.
“We do believe that you’re going to feel a difference,” said Bob Markovich, an editor at Consumer Reports.
Marcal, the maker of recycled toilet paper here in New Jersey, is trying to change that with a two-pronged sales pitch. The first is that soft is overrated.
“Strength of toilet paper is more important, for obvious reasons,” said Spring, the chief executive, guiding a golf cart among the machinery that whizzes up vast stacks of old paper, whips it into a slurry, and dries it into rolls of toilet paper big enough for King Kong. He said his final product is as strong as any of the big-name brands. “If the paper breaks during your use of toilet paper, obviously, that’s very, very important.”
The second half of the pitch is that Marcal’s toilet paper is almost as soft as the other guy’s anyway.
“Handle it like you’re going to take care of business,” company manager Michael Bonin said, putting this reporter through a blind test of virgin vs. recycled toilet paper. Two rolls were hidden in a cardboard box: the test was to reach in without looking and wad them up, considering the “three aspects of softness,” which are surface smoothness, bulky feel and “drapability,” or lack of rigidity.
The reporter wadded. The officials waited. The one on the right felt slightly softer.
That was not the answer they wanted: The recycled paper was on the left.

The second medical story of the week. If you fall ill in August your chances of recovery are significantly less. Because that’s when the newly qualified doctors are on the wards. So BBC news and The Guardian would have us know.

There is never a good time to have a heart attack, but the wise person afflicted with clogging arteries might want to be especially careful in future to avoid stress and watch the diet as August rolls around.

The NHS, it is revealed today, has its very own black Wednesday, when death rates go up by an average of 6%; and there is a somewhat disturbing underlying cause – the arrival on the wards of a new intake of junior doctors.

On the first Wednesday in August every year, a freshly qualified set of junior doctors arrives on the wards. Pristine and eager and brilliant they no doubt are, but while they are finding their way around something unexplained and slightly perplexing appears to happen.

Researchers from the Dr Foster unit and the department of acute medicine at Imperial College London say there has been a suspicion for years that more people die on the day the new doctors arrive, but for the first time they have established that it happens – although they say the rise in deaths is very small.

They do not blame the doctors’ inexperience or confusion in the hospital and say it is also possible that only the severest cases are admitted in that week, because of the changeover.

Their study has international implications, the researchers say. “A similar effect has been recorded in the US (known as the ‘July phenomenon’),” they write in their paper, published today in the open-access journal PloS (Public Library of Science) One. But previous studies have looked only at a few hospitals.

The Imperial study is far bigger, scrutinising data from nearly 300,000 patients in 175 hospital trusts between 2000 and 2008. It compared death rates on the first Wednesday in August with the last Wednesday in July. The difference was most marked in medical cases, such as heart attacks and strokes, where there was an 8% increase in deaths; there was no difference in surgical cases.

“We wanted to find out whether mortality rates changed on the first Wednesday in August, when junior doctors take up their new posts,” said senior author Paul Aylin. “What we have found looks like an interesting pattern and we would now like to look at this in more detail to find out what might be causing the increase.

“Our study does not mean that people should avoid going into hospital that week. This is a relatively small difference in mortality rates, and the numbers of excess deaths are very low. It’s too early to say what might be causing it.”

Shree Datta, chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctor committee, said the study had to be judged alongside others looking at mortality rates before and after junior doctors start their new jobs, but added: “Clearly even a small increase in death rates is of great concern and we need further research to see whether this is a real effect or an anomaly.”

I found this appalling story in The Independent this week. Fancy being told you were all clear then – oh surely some mistake, you have got cancer after all….

Fourteen women in Britain have been told they have breast cancer after a hospital radiologist wrongly gave them the all-clear.

The unnamed member of staff at Accrington Victoria Hospital, Lancashire, was responsible for 355 screenings that later came under scrutiny.

A total of 85 women were asked to have a second breast examination and of these the 14 were found to have cancer.

They have yet to learn whether the late diagnosis will affect their chances of survival.

A further four patients were found to have abnormal cells. However, health officials said the prognosis in each of these cases was unaffected by the radiologist’s errors.

Senior officials at East Lancashire NHS Trust have confirmed that the radiologist has since left the hospital.

Accrington Victoria carries out breast cancer screenings for the whole of East Lancashire.

The women affected by the error are understood to live in and around Burnley, Blackburn, Darwen, Accrington, Rossendale and the Ribble Valley.

Rineke Schram, the trust’s medical director, issued an apology “for any distress and anxiety caused.”

She went on: “The delay in identifying the women with breast cancer does mean there has been a delay in these cancers being treated.

“It is unfortunately not possible to state with certainty whether this delay in treatment has affected the prognosis, other than to state that early-stage breast cancers have a good prognosis.

“The cancers have been picked up through screening, albeit with a delay.”

Regional breast cancer experts were drafted in to Accrington after the initial concerns were raised last year.

An independent review concentrated its attention on the work carried out by a single radiologist over a period of three years.

Officials have refused to reveal the extent of the delay between the original scans and the eventual diagnosis in each case.

It is known that the radiologist involved in the alert carried out his last screenings in December. He left the trust in April.

Mrs Schram said: “The work of the trust’s other breast screening radiologists has been independently assessed and found to be of a high standard.

“The trust will be commissioning a further independent review to provide further assurance and ensure lessons are learned.”

Dr Ellis Friedman, director of public health for NHS East Lancashire, said: “The incident team, which I chaired, has thoroughly reviewed the incident and will ensure that lessons will be learned.”

Hmm. Highly intellectual. But made me laugh I have to say. The lying down game strikes in Swindon and seven doctors are suspended. This story is from the Times.

Seven doctors and nurses have been suspended from duty at a hospital accident and emergency department after taking part in the latest internet craze: the Lying Down Game.

Don't try this at home. You are not a doctor.

Participants are required to post photographs of themselves lying face down, arms neatly by their sides, in various unlikely situations on Facebook, the social networking website.
The medical staff, who were working an overnight shift at the hospital in Swindon on August 14 and August 15, took it in turns to be photographed on resuscitation trolleys, ward floors and the building’s helipad. More than 18 staff were pictured on a Facebook page set up by the Secret Swindon Emergency Department Group. The seven staff members are considered to have breached health and safety and infection control regulations and face disciplinary proceedings. They were suspended on full pay after managers at the Great Western Hospital were alerted to the prank.

The Lying Down Game is described on Facebook as “parkour [free-running] for those who can’t be arsed”. It became popular worldwide this summer when pictures were published of participants lying on ironing boards, cars, inside a jet engine and even on top of a life-size sculpture of a bear.

The latest photograph posted on the lyingdowngame.net website is of a youth lying on a rock beside a Norwegian fjord. Closer to home, more than 100 people took part in a mass pose in Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday.

The Lying Down Game Facebook group has more than 54,000 members from around the world.

The prank at the accident and emergency unit at the Great Western Hospital has turned into a “nightmare” for those involved, according to an employee of the Swindon NHS Trust. He said: “The person who started it is really worried. It reflects badly on the department and some people may lose their jobs. It was just some nurses and doctors on nights having fun, but photos got on to Facebook and management found out.”

The Secret Swindon Emergency Department Group has since been removed by Facebook.

A spokesman for the hospital confirmed that health and safety and infection control regulations had been broken as well as NHS codes of conduct. He refused to rule out sackings and said: “The disciplinary hearings are yet to take place and we cannot predict the outcome.”

Alf Troughton, medical director for Great Western Hospital NHS Trust, said that patient care had not been affected. “This did not involve patients and we are satisfied that at no time was patient care compromised.”

He added: “The Great Western Hospital takes any such breaches extremely seriously. The allegations have been thoroughly investigated and seven members of staff remain suspended pending formal disciplinary hearings.”

a lying down game example

Simon Newell, a spokesman for Unison, which represents nearly 250,000 nurses, has urged the Swindon health trust to “consider past service” before dismissing any of the staff involved.

He said: “We would urge the trust, when deciding upon the future of these highly skilled staff, to consider recent events within the context of the good services these staff have provided in the past.”

The Facebook page for the Lying Down Game claims that the idea was devised by Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon, from Somerset. It describes itself as a “group for all those who enjoy the sport of lying down in random public places to confuse people”.

The rules of the game are simple. The website states: “There are two aims: 1) The more public the better 2) The more people involved the better. Please be aware that the palms of your hands must be flat against your side and the tips of your toes pointing at the ground. Just as if you were standing, but vertically challenged.”

The website adds: “The originators of the Lying Down Game cannot be held liable for any accidents, injuries or criminal proceedings resulting from participating in the Game.”

I heard this story on BBC radio this morning and here it is from the Daily Telegraph. I have more details to add: the man’s dog was in the car and survived and walked home. The driver apparently has two broken legs. I love this North Devon spot at Hartland Point and have walked there often with my family.

 

Police called the coastguard just before 5am this morning after the car was seen to drive over the precipice.

Hartland and Westward Ho! Coastguard Rescue Teams began searching for the car and any occupants. At 5.24am the car was found on the beach below.

Lights and equipment were set up on scene and the fire service was called to help. A rescue helicopter was also scrambled along with an ambulance.

Two coastguard cliffmen were placed on a line and lowered to the site of the silver car, where they found one man inside alive.

A winchman was lowered onto the beach from the helicopter. The man was freed from the car and flown to North Devon District Hospital.

The extent of his injuries are not yet known, although he was able to communicate with his rescuers.

Steve Jones, the watch manager, said: ”We are still uncertain as to the circumstances of why the car was driven over the cliff. However the single occupant was alive when extracted from the car and able to communicate with our rescue team.

”Fortunately the weather was benign this morning which helped the extraction. The car is in no danger of being overtaken by the tide and a plan will be drawn up on how to remove the vehicle from its present position.”

Thanks once again to the heroic Richard Dean for this story – which ran in the Daily Telegraph originally. Apparently a huge nuclear plant in Scotland is being effectively cleansed of plutonium deposits using Cillit Bang – which also did a very good job on the greasy deposits in my cooker extraction hood last weekend incidentally. Hmm I wonder whether Cillit Bang do affiliate links……

Decontamination experts at the former nuclear site at Dounreay, northern Scotland, are using the Cillit Bang household cleaner to remove radioactive plutonium stains.The huge site in Caithness is in the process of being decommissioned but workers found their normal cleaning fluid was slowing down the job of dismantling an experimental chemical plant used in the 1980s to recycle plutonium liquor.

One of the team suggested £1.99 Cillit Bang after watching a television advertisement that shows dirt being stripped from a 10p coin.

The four-storey chemical plant consists of a series of vessels, pipes and boxes made from steel and toughened glass. The solutions which ran through it left the steel stained with plutonium, creating a hazard for the team taking it apart.

David Hanson, project manager with Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd, said the efficacy of Cillit Bang was helping drive down the £2.6 billion cost of demolishing the site.

He said: “We need to decontaminate as much of the surfaces as possible before we can cut them up. The normal agents we’d use on steel and glass need time to dry and this slowed us down.

“The acids that had been used years ago also created problems. It meant we had to think carefully about the most effective way to wipe the plutonium from the steelwork before we could cut it up.

“One of the guys suggested Cillit Bang. He remembered seeing it dissolve the grime on a coin in an advert on TV and thought it was worth looking at. I’m very glad we did. We tested it and found it very effective.”

The 15-strong clean-up team wear whole-body plastic suits with their own oxygen supply and often need four or even five layers of gloves to protect them from radiation.

Mr Manson added: “The ductwork is stainless steel and contamination levels have been significantly reduced following spray and wipedown with Cillit Bang.”

Bosses at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, which is also being decommissioned, are among those who have been in touch to learn more about the discovery.

This article in the New Scientist caught my eye today – and then I thought – what if this weapon DID catch your eye? It would still be shocking you while you were reeling from a serious and very painful injury.

THE manufacturer of the Taser stun gun is sparking new controversy with the commercial launch of a long-range version that can be fired from a 12-bore shotgun.

Government-funded tests on initial versions of the new Extended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) have revealed possible health risks to people on the receiving end, New Scientist has learned. The manufacturer, Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona, says the issue has been addressed in redesigned devices, but these have yet to be independently tested.

Unlike the current Taser X26, which fires darts attached to short wires, the XREP is wire-free. Its projectile, the size of a shotgun cartridge, is designed to pierce the target’s skin and contains battery-powered circuits that deliver a debilitating shock. It has a range of 20 metres or more, compared with 5 metres for previous Tasers.

A team led by Cynthia Bir, a trauma injury specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, found that some of the 275 XREP cartridges that Taser supplied for testing last year were capable of delivering an electric shock for more than 5 minutes, rather than the 20 seconds of shocking current they are supposed to generate. Previous Taser stun guns shock for only 5 seconds per discharge, though that can be repeated.

Bir’s team reported their findings at a conference on non-lethal weapons in Ettlingen, Germany, in May. Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK, who has studied electric shock weapons, says Bir’s report that the device can carry on shocking for 5 minutes is worrying. The effects of prolonged shocking are not known, he says, but the finding raises concerns about the potential damage to a victim’s mental health.

Bir also found problems with the weapon’s accuracy. In test firings, it proved difficult to aim, as the aerodynamics of the projectile caused it to fall below the aiming point at a range of 20 metres. “Any lack of accuracy means a greater risk of hitting an unintended part of the body and therefore greater risk of injury,” says security researcher Neil Davison, author of a recent book on non-lethal weapons.

Steve Tuttle, a vice-president of Taser International, says the XREP munitions supplied for Bir’s tests were early pre-production versions. He says a redesign of the projectile has greatly improved its aerodynamic accuracy, and the fault in the munition’s “firmware” – its built-in software – that led to it being capable of providing an extended shock has also been corrected.

The two production versions of the XREP device include features said to improve aiming accuracy. One version, for use with rifled shotguns, has a plastic cap that engages with the rifling and gives the projectile a stabilising spin. The version for smooth-bore shotguns sprouts stabilising fins when it leaves the barrel.

Tuttle says, however, that Taser did ship some pre-production batches to US police departments.

Bir and her team have not had a chance to test the newly modified production rounds that Taser says are more accurate and reliable. Some of them have, however, already been purchased, delivered and used by unnamed “agencies” in the US, Tuttle says. Tests funded by Taser showed the rounds to be safe in terms of their impact effects on cadavers, he says. “There was no internal damage in the vicinity of the XREP impact.” There is no requirement under US law for them to undergo independent pre-sales testing.

Bir’s tests are being funded by the UK Home Office, the US National Institute of Justice and the Canadian Police Research Centre. All want to know whether the weapon can do what Taser International claims: allow police officers to incapacitate people at greater distance.

For this, the ability to take precise aim is seen as crucial. “In public disorder situations accuracy at range will be particularly important, perhaps to target individuals within a tightly packed group,” a review of “less-lethal” technologies by the Home Office states. Such weapons will help contain crowds or prevent them re-forming, the review says.

Shooting cadavers is one thing. But what happens when the weapons are fired at pregnant women, people with health problems or the very young, Wright asks.

Thanks again to Richard Dean for this story from the Guardian – it’s a bar in Bolivia where they serve you a drink and….yes a toot of your choice. Hmmmmmm. I have seen something similar in Thailand but of course it wasn’t a toot on offer. Coming soon to a British city of your choice? To be honest, despite my determinedly liberal outlook part of me hopes not.

Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram.” The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. “We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM,” says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world’s first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

“Since they are an after-hours club and serve cocaine the neighbours tend to complain pretty fast. So they move all the time. Maybe if they are lucky they last three months in the same place, but often it is just two weeks. Route 36 is a movable feast,” says a Bolivian newspaper editor who asked not to be named. “One day it is in one zone and then it pops up in another area. Certainly it is the most famous among the backpacker crowd but there are several other places that are offering cocaine as well. Because Route 36 changes addresses so much there is a lot of confusion about how many cocaine bars are out there.”

This new trend of ‘cocaine tourism’ can be put down to a combination of Bolivia’s notoriously corrupt public officials, the chaotic “anything goes” attitude of La Paz, and the national example of President Evo Morales, himself a coca grower. (Coca is the leaf, and cocaine is the highly manufactured and refined powder.) Morales has diligently fought for the rights of coca growers and tossed the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) out of Bolivia. While he has said he will crack down on cocaine production, he appears to be swimming against the current. In early July, the largest ever cocaine factory was discovered in eastern Bolivia. Capable of producing 100kg a day, the lab was run by Colombians and provided the latest evidence that Bolivia is now home to sophisticated cocaine laboratories. The lab was the fourth large facility to be found in Bolivia this year.

Nowhere in South America is cocaine production growing faster than Bolivia. Reports by the UN show that in Colombia, production dropped 28% last year [2008], while in Bolivia it rose nearly 10%. “There is more interest and and investment in purifying coca paste here and exporting it, rather than sending it to Colombia for purification,” Oscar Nina, Bolivia’s top anti-drug official, said recently.

As the US and Colombian military put pressure on drug traffickers, operations are migrating into nearby countries, especially Bolivia, where the turf for illegal operations is as fertile as the valleys where the locals have grown coca for the last five centuries. Stopping cocaine tourism in La Paz could be as difficult as keeping Americans from drinking during prohibition.

Down in Route 36’s main room, the scene is chilled. A half-hearted disco ball sporadically bathes the room in red and green light. Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested. There’s a lot of mingling from table to table. Everyone here has stories – the latest adventures from Ecuador, the best bus to Peru – and even the most wired “why-won’t-he-shut-up?” traveller is given a generous welcome before being sent back to his table, where he can repeat those stories another 10 times.

“Everyone knows about this place,” says Jonas, a backpacker who arrived two days earlier. “My mate came to Bolivia last year and he said, ‘Route 36 is the best lounge in all of South America.’” It is certainly the most bizarre and brazen. Though cocaine is illegal in Bolivia, Route 36 is fast becoming an essential stop for thousands of tourists who come here every year and happily sample the country’s cocaine, which is famous for both its availability, price (around €15 a gram) and purity.

The scene here is peaceful; there seems no fear that anyone will be caught. (”The owner has paid off all the right people,” one waiter says with a smile.) A female backpacker from Newcastle slips on to one of the four couches arranged around the table. “We’ve brought some [cocaine] virgins here. This will be their first time, so we are just rubbing it on their lips. But they are lucky – you could never get such pure coke back home. In London you pay 50 quid for a gram that’s been cut so much, all it does it make your lips numb and sends you to the bathroom.”

Travellers’ blogs also give the place a good writeup. “I travelled the world for nine months, and for sure La Paz was the craziest city and Route 36 the best bar of my entire trip,” writes one, while another says, “Like to burn the candle at both ends? Well, here you can bloody well torch the whole candle.”

And torch your brain as well. Cocaine, as everybody knows, is highly addictive, destructive and easy to abuse. The rationale for outlawing cocaine was to protect public health – but instead the now 40-year experiment in prohibition has done little to protect the lives of millions of users worldwide who will snort whatever white substance is placed before them. The billions in annual profits have corrupted governments worldwide, and La Paz, without intending it, seems to have mutated into the front line of this failed drug war.