Test

Review Private water companies have left Tanzanians high and dry ≥ page 

Global views on world events | guardianweekly.co.uk | August 31-September 6 2007 International news Turkish girls are being told by their families to commit suicide → page  Science Birds prove a match for the brightest primates → page  UK news ‘Friendly fire’ kills three British soldiers → page  Le Monde An internet cafe may have to be home for Japan’s youth → page  Whose victim? The late Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin Jens Schleuter/AFP/Getty Images

Washington Post The ancient tradition of ‘sworn virgins’ lives on in Albania → page 

Russia arrests 10 for dissident’s murder Politkovskaya plot ‘was planned abroad’ Berezovsky denies claim of involvement Luke Harding Moscow Matthew Taylor Russia’s chief prosecutor, Yuri Chaika, announced this week that 10 people had been arrested in connection with the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He blamed her death on a Chechen mafia boss and rogue elements in the security services.

He hinted that the mastermind was a Russian citizen living abroad, who had arranged the murder to discredit the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin. Asked whether he meant the

exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Mr Chaika refused to answer but smiled.

He said the killing was a provocation plotted by “forces interested in destabilising the country, changing its constitutional order, and stoking a crisis”. They wanted “a return to the old system where money and oligarchs ruled” and were interested in discrediting the national leadership.

But human rights group were sceptical that Mr Berezovsky, who is based in London, had ordered the assassination. They were not convinced by the Kremlin’s explanation for the killing of Ms Politkovskaya, 48, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya.

Mr Berezovsky denied any involvement in the murder but said he was not surprised that the Kremlin should hint that he was behind the killing. “Politkovskaya was not my close friend,”

he said, “but she was my friend, and it was those who were angered by what she published who eliminated her.”

She was shot dead last October in the lift of her Moscow apartment block.

A CCTV camera captured a young man in a baseball cap entering the building just before she was shot three times in the chest and once in the head.

Alexey Simonov, of the Moscow human rights group Glasnost Defence Foundation, said: “I’m not sure the prosecution will be able to find the real people who ordered this killing.

I’m afraid that the case will be turned towards London, and to people like . . . Boris Berezovsky.”

Most independent observers believe the death was linked to Ms Politkovskaya’s professional work, with suspicion falling on Russia’s security services and the proMoscow Chechen forces that

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2 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

News

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Russia arrests 10 for murder of dissident

World roundup

≤Continued from page 1 control Chechnya. Ms Politkovskaya was about to publish an article on torture and kidnappings there carried out by pro-government gangs.

Mr Chaika said: “A native of Chechnya, the leader of a Moscow organised criminal ring specialised in contract killings, was behind this.” He said that serving members of Russia’s federal security service (FSB), successor to the KGB, also had a hand in her murder. They had worked with officers in Russia’s interior ministry and police; all had been sacked. Five law enforcement officers had trailed Ms Politkovskaya, collecting evidence about her movements and passed them to her assassin, Mr Chaika said.

The revelation is startling given that the FSB was headed by Mr Putin before he became president in 2000. But Mr Chaika ruled out the possibility that the FSB or the interior ministry had arranged Ms Politkovskaya’s death.

“I exclude this absolutely. Every family has a black sheep,” he said.

He failed to offer evidence against Mr Berezovsky; the Kremlin also accuses him of being behind the murder of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

Instead Mr Chaika launched an elaborate attack on Britain, accusing officials of refusing to cooperate with Moscow’s requests for Mr Berezovsky’s extradition. “Unfortunately the British judiciary is not taking a very constructive stand on this issue, which in my opinion runs counter to international law.” He claimed the Chechen-Berezovsky-FSB gang could have been behind other high-profile murders, including that of US journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004.

Ms Politkovskaya’s paper, Novaya Gazeta, welcomed the arrests but said it was “premature to speak about her murder being solved . . . The people who carried this out, their helpers and the real people who ordered this, must be identified and convicted.”

Vyacheslav Izmailov, a friend and columnist, confirmed the trail appeared to lead to Chechnya. Asked whether those arrested had carried out the killing, he said: “I don’t know.”

Dmitry Muratov, Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, described the arrests as “serious”. Suspects included “former and acting member of the siloviki, Russia’s military and security services. “These people in their free time . . . carried out criminal businesses, including contract murders.”

Ms Politkovskaya reserved her strongest criticism for Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro-Moscow president. She was fiercely critical of Mr Putin. He first chose to ignore the murder but later described her as a “rather sharp critic . . . which is good”.

Asia/Pacific

guardian.co.uk/russia ≥

Phone US/Can 1 888 834 1106 Aus/NZ +61 (0) 2 9327 1266 UK/world +44 (0) 161 876 1848

Bombs kill 42 in Hyderabad Islamic extremists may have been behind bombs that exploded in the Indian city of Hyderabad, killing at least 42 people. Investigators claimed to have some clues as to the identity of the bombers, but gave no details; media reports named the Bangladesh-based Harkatul Jihad Al-Islami organisation.

China blamed for smog Smog is affecting Japanese cities for the first time in 30 years and reaching rural areas for the first time, causing experts, although not yet the government, to accuse China of being to blame. Warnings about high levels of hazardous smog have been issued in a record 28 prefectures.

Flu stops Australian races

Continuity . . . Nanu Ram Jogi, 90, with his 21st daughter Sanjit Das/Barcroft Media

his description of French leader Nicolas Sarkozy as “a citizen of Africa”. Mr Mbeki had written to Mr Sarkozy to praise him for a speech that had been widely condemned elsewhere on the continent as racist and old-fashioned.

many years could have speeded the rusting of its steel beams. Structural engineers had been aware of the problem since 1987.

Europe

Gdansk shipyard needs aid Australia’s multibillion-dollar horseracing industry has been seriously affected by an outbreak of

Americas

Jailed for Klan murders A white supremacist was sentenced to three life terms for his role in the murder of two black teenagers 43 years ago. James Ford Seale, 72, was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy; he and other Ku Klux Klansmen beat the boys and drowned them in the Mississippi.

Quarantine . . . Sydney equestrian centre

equine influenza, with race meetings and other events cancelled across the country to contain the spread of the disease.

Father at the age of 90 A 90-year-old Indian farmer has had his 21st child. Nanu Ram Jogi says he plans to continue having children until he is 100. His eldest daughter was born in 1943 and his youngest daughter, by his fourth wife, arrived two weeks ago.

Thais back constitution Thailand took another step towards democracy after voters in the country’s first referendum endorsed a new constitution. Between 60% and 70% supported the draft constitution, clearing the way for elections in December.

Putin wants to own skies Noriega to be extradited A US judge has refused to block the extradition of Panama’s former leader General Manuel Noriega, 72, to France, where he faces 10 years in prison for money laundering.

The judge rejected arguments that his status as a US prisoner of war meant he could not be sent. Noriega will soon end 15 years in jail for racketeering and drug-trafficking.

Bird link to bridge collapse Inspectors searching for the causes of the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota, US, which killed at least 13 people, have identified pigeon droppings as a possible factor. The build-up of ammoniac guano over

President Vladimir Putin has announced ambitious plans to revive Russia’s military power and restore its role as the world’s leading producer of combat aircraft, including nuclear bombers. The Russian air show at which he had spoken later claimed record sales of planes.

Eta bombings resume Two police officers were injured by flying glass when a huge bomb exploded outside a barracks in Durango in the Basque region. It was the first bombing by Eta separatists since the end of a ceasefire in June.

Middle East

Lebanese camp evacuated

Africa

Row over ‘racist’ speech South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, has been forced to defend

The Gdansk shipyard in Poland, birthplace of the Solidarity movement, has submitted a last-ditch rescue plan to the EU to prevent its closure and privatisation, with a Ukrainian or Italian company taking a majority stake. Under EU rules, governments can give financial aid only if there are plans to make the firms viable in the long term.

Structural failure . . . pigeons blamed

The families of militants have been evacuated from the besieged Palestinian Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, near Tripoli, after a truce with the Lebanese army. The women and children were mostly relatives of Fatah Islam fighters and their evacuation clears the way for a final military assault.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 3

International news

Voting with their feet Record numbers of people are leaving an ageing Britain UK news page 15≥

Hundreds die in Turkey as honour suicides replace killings Families force daughters to take their own lives for choosing the wrong boyfriend or wearing tight clothes. One city saw seven deaths in a month Helena Smith Batman Nuran Uca never made it to 61 Aydin Arslan Street. If she had reached the building, she might be alive today.

There, with counsellors from the Kam-er support group, she could have talked about the “crime” of falling in love with a man she could never marry. Instead, on June 14 the Kurdish woman succumbed to a phenomenon that is claiming lives in this Kurdish area of south-east Anatolia: she hanged herself in her bathroom.

“She was just 25, and it was especially tragic because both were teachers, educated people,” said Remziye Tural at Kam-er, the women’s organisation that has become a lifeline in Turkey’s poor south-east for those who face death because of a perception of dishonour. “She was modern and wore tight clothes, which is why his family rejected her. She was banned by her parents from seeing or speaking to him, and then they stopped her leaving the house. In the end the pressure was too much.”

In Batman, a city of 250,000, more than 300 women have attempted suicide since 2001. Seven died in one month alone. The rising number of suicides has brought schoolgirls marching in protest to Batman’s cemetery crying “stop the violence”, a courageous act given the city’s conservative mores.

“The numbers are increasing,” said Ms Tural. “By June this year, 19 had tried to take their lives and most were successful. That’s just in Batman. All over, in villages and towns, young girls are committing suicide.”

There were those who had jumped into the Tigris, others who had fallen off rooftops or cut their wrists, and some, like Nuran Uca, who had opted to end their lives abruptly as they were doing chores around the house.

Women’s groups and human rights advocates believe the suicides are tantamount to murder.

Stories have been heard of girls as young as 12 being locked in rooms for days with rope, poison or a pistol.

“There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that these are, in fact, honour killings passed off as suicides — that these girls are being forced to take their own lives,” said Aytekin Sir, a psychiatrist

Lost . . . the family of a 14-year-old who killed herself in the city of Diyarbakir in Anatolia Lynsey Addario/Corbis who has studied the practice. Last year Yakin Erturk, a special UN envoy, said honour suicides had begun to replace honour killings, with the deaths being disguised as accidents.

There is no evidence that Nuran Uca’s family forced their daughter to kill herself.

For a long time the potent forces of fear and shame stopped young women visiting the Kam-er centre. But recently at least four girls a day have gone there, often in fear of death sentences issued by fathers and brothers for infractions perceived to have brought shame on their families. Nearly a fifth of those

City of misery GEORGIA

Istanbul

Ankara TURKEY Batman

CYPRUS MEDITERRANEAN SEA

IRAN

SYRIA IRAQ

who have consulted the organisation since it started in 1997 complained of threats from their families. Some had received text messages saying typically: “You have blackened our name.

Kill yourself or we will kill you.”

Vildan Aycicek, at Kam-er’s headquarters in Diyarbakir, west of Batman, said: “Women apply to us when they think they cannot survive the violence any longer. Most are illiterate and don’t know their legal rights.”

She said Kurdish and Turkish women had called Kam-er’s hotline from other countries saying they feared for their lives. Worldwide, the numbers of “honour” killings are difficult to estimate.

But in Turkey it is cited by academics as the cause of death for hundreds of women, far above the official annual figure of 70. Sometimes adultery, or a wish for divorce, prompts an all-male family council to order a killing. But the list of “offences” is long: rape, incest, pregnancy caused by both, ringing a radio chat show, exchanging eye contact with a boy or wearing skimpy clothing.

A villager near Diyarbakir explained

the attitude of his area. “Without rules you have chaos,” Seyikan Arslan said.

“If my sister or my mother made a mistake, we [men] would have to make it right. They would have to pay to cleanse our honour.”

Few places illustrate the clash in Turkey between tradition and modernity better than Anatolia. Both Diyarbakir and Batman, site of Turkey’s first oil refinery, have seen a surge in migration from poor rural areas. The culture clash has played a large part in exacerbating tensions within families. “Migration is behind the big rise in honour and suicide killings,” said Dr Sir, whose research found that support for deaths far outstripped other penalties, such as a woman having her nose cut off or head shaved.

Ironically, the suicides have also been blamed on Turkey’s efforts to stop honour crimes. With the government determined to enter the EU, it has toughened laws against the killings. Lenient sentences are no longer possible. So, to save men from a life in prison, experts believe families are forcing women to kill themselves.

Leader comment, page 20 ≥

4 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

International news

Bush promises to stay in Iraq Guardian reporters George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq “surge” strategy last week by making for the first time a risky comparison with the bloodshed and chaos that followed the US pullout from Vietnam.

Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, Mr Bush signalled that US troops, whom he hailed as the “greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known”, will be in Iraq as long as he is president. He said the consequences of leaving “without getting the job done would be devastating”.

In a speech to army veterans in Kansas City, Mr Bush invoked one of the US’s biggest military disasters in support of his intention to keep troops in Iraq. “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields’.”

The speech was aimed primarily at Democratic congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal. The issue will come to a head

US soldiers will stay in Iraq as long as George Bush is president Reuters next month when the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, gives a progress report to Congress.

Gordon Brown also dismissed pressure to set an early timetable for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq.

The prime minister said he thought it an option that would betray international obligations and threaten the

safety of the remaining troops there.

Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, and fellow leaders in Iraq have meanwhile reached consensus on key areas of national reconciliation, under mounting US pressure to demonstrate political progress on the eve of General Petraeus’s report.

The Shia prime minister appeared on television flanked by Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president, and the Sunni vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, to announce a deal on easing restrictions on former members of the Ba’ath party joining the civil service and military — a vital step if disenchanted Sunnis, who formed the backbone of Saddam Hussein’s regime and, since its fall, of the insurgency, are to be persuaded to take part in political life.

• Ali Hassan al-Majid, the notorious “Chemical Ali”, faced charges of crimes against humanity last week at the start of his trial for crushing the Iraqi Shia rebellion at the end of the 1991 Gulf war. Majid, a first cousin of Saddam Hussein, was the most prominent of 15 of the executed dictator’s closest aides and henchmen in the dock in Baghdad. He already has been given a death penalty in another trial.

Bonuses expand US army, page 8 ≥

Scandal-hit attorney general finally resigns Ewen MacAskill Washington George Bush finally lost the battle to hang on to his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, after months of congressional pressure over scandals that included the firing of nine state prosecutors, wiretapping and torture.

Mr Bush blamed the Democrats, accusing them of dragging a decent and talented man through the mud for political reasons. The resignation

Penultimate . . . Alberto Gonzales

of yet another high-profile colleague demonstrated how weak he has become in the waning months of his presidency.

Mr Gonzales formally announced his resignation, effective on September 17, on Monday after earlier informing Mr Bush by phone at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. His departure leaves the vice-president, Dick Cheney, as the only original member of the team that entered the White House with Mr Bush in 2001.

Europe helps Greece fight forest fires Helena Smith Mytilini Firefighters and planes from across Europe, backed by soldiers, police, officials and hundreds of thousands of volunteers on Monday joined the fight against forest fires that have brought unprecedented death and destruction across Greece.

Italy, France, Germany, Norway and Spain sent aircraft and commandos to a nation that appeared unable to combat blazes which have already claimed at least 60 lives, consumed vast tracts of land and forced thousands from their homes.

On the Peloponnesehe authorities were trying to save two world heritage sites — Olympia and the fifth-century BC theatre of Epidavros — from the flames. Officials did not rule out that hundreds more people could be missing, victims of disorganisation and bungled evacuation plans.

Since the first fires in this outbreak began last Friday, the southern peninsula, a popular destination for British holidaymakers, has been hardest hit by fires fanned by high temperatures and gale force winds. “The damage is terrible, without precedent. We are doing everything we possibly can to help people, to save lives,” said the acting interior minister, Spyros Flogaitis.

Television showed harrowing scenes of people burned alive in their cars as they tried to flee the flames.

One baby died in its mother’s arms The foreign intervention came less than a day after the prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, declared a state of emergency and appealed to the European Union for help. With an estimated 170 fires on 42 fronts and new ones erupting every hour, the situation was too much for Greece to cope with by itself, he said.

On the web this week

After the quake Peruvian Johan Sandro Otoya Calle explains what it felt like to experience the disaster first-hand. guardianweekly.co.uk/ fragileplanet ≥

The magic of microfinance Fazlur Rahman describes how microfinance is changing the lives of the impoverished in Bangladesh. guardianweekly.co.uk/ 21stcenturylife ≥

Teaching refugees Peter Salnikowski on education for the 150,000 refugees on the ThaiBurmese border, and what happens to them once school’s out. guardianweekly.co.uk/education ≥

Suffering for art Iqbal Hussain opened a gallery and restaurant in Lahore to support his mother and sister, both sex workers. Despite regular threats, he continues to exhibit his paintings of the women of the Heera Mandi. guardianweekly.co.uk/culture ≥

Guardian Weekly podcast Our snapshot of global affairs contains the best of the Guardian’s audio output, as well as our own special features guardianweekly.co.uk/podcast ≥

Volunteering on a budget Bypass the expensive organisations and you can save your cash for those who need it most. guardianabroad.co.uk/ngos ≥ Legacy of ‘Happy Valley’ In Kenya white mischief lingers on in the lore of the local people, and in the corruption of their natural kinship with their surroundings. guardianabroad.co.uk/lifestyle/ ≥

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6 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

International news

Iran releases US academic in ‘spying’ case Robert Tait Tehran An American-Iranian academic detained for the past three months on charges of espionage and plotting to topple the Islamic regime was released last week after her family paid $322,500 bail.

Haleh Esfandiari, Middle East director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre, was freed after an ordeal that included intensive interrogations, solitary confinement and a televised “confession” of involvement in an alleged US-backed conspiracy to incite a “soft revolution”. Judiciary officials confirmed that she had been allowed to leave Tehran’s Evin prison after her 93-year-old mother had used the deeds of her flat to post bail.

It was not clear whether Ms Esfandiari would face trial or be allowed to leave Iran. Hassan Haddad, Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, told Mehr news agency that the legal inquiry remained active, but that no ruling had yet been issued to confirm the charges against her. He said further investigations would be undertaken. Ms Esfandiari’s lawyer, the Nobel peace prize laureate

Bailed . . . Iranian TV shows Haleh Esfandiari after her release AFP/Getty Shirin Ebadi, who had complained of being denied access to her client or her files, voiced relief she had been freed.

Ms Esfandiari, 67, had been held since early May in Evin’s high-security unit for political detainees following a long spell of house arrest. Intelligence agents arrested her after she travelled to Iran to see her mother, who is ill.

She was prevented from leaving Iran

when masked men wielding knives ambushed her car on December 30 while on her way to Tehran’s Mehrabad airport to catch a flight to the US. They threatened to kill her before stealing her bags and passports.

The semi-official ISNA news agency suggested that Ms Esfandiari’s release might be followed soon by that of another Iranian-born US academic,

Kian Tajbakhsh, who faces identical charges. Mr Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant linked to the Soros Open Society Institute in New York, was also arrested in May but remains in detention.

Mr Haddad said this month that a decision on Ms Esfandiari and Mr Tajbakhsh would be made after they had undertaken “some written work”, possible code for confessions. Last month both appeared in an Iranian state television broadcast and acknowledged links to groups dedicated to bringing political change in Iran.

Neither directly admitted spying. The programme alleged that the US was using Iranian-born academics with US thinktanks to forge links with civic groups in Iran in an attempt to foment a “velvet revolution”.

George Bush has demanded the release of Ms Esfandiari, Mr Tajbakhsh and two other American-Iranians: Ali Shakeri, of the Centre for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, who is in prison, and Pernaz Azima, a journalist with the US-funded Radio Farda, who is on bail but banned from leaving Iran.

Crackdown on Burma protests Ian MacKinnon

Aziz knows how hard it is being a teenager.

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The fights with the Taliban.

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First–person experiences Global perspectives guardianweekly.co.uk

At least eight Burmese pro-democracy activists were seized on the streets of Rangoon last week as armed police and supporters of the junta intervened to disperse hundreds of demonstrators protesting at a dramatic increase in fuel prices and economic hardship.

About 300 marchers walked from the commercial capital’s outskirts as thousands of people, some cheering, looked on. The latest in a growing series of protests came hours after 13 leading activists, including the senior leadership of the 88 Student Generation group, were arrested in the most serious clampdown by the Burmese junta in a decade. Houses of the leadership were searched and documents removed in night raids. The official media reported that the activists could face prison terms of 20 years.

The attempt to head off the developing protest movement against Burma’s dire economic situation reflects the junta’s fears that the unrest could match the 1988 protests, in which the army killed hundreds of students.

Earlier this month 400 demonstrators marched through Rangoon to express anger at an unexpected increase in fuel prices. Natural gas prices rose by 500% while petrol and diesel al-

most doubled, forcing a huge rise in public transport fares. The fare rise hit poor labourers particularly hard, swallowing up to half their daily income.

Other prices have begun to increase as a result, fuelling an inflation rate of about 40%. No explanation was given for the price rises, but analysts cite economic mismanagement and the crippling $1bn construction bill for Burma’s new capital.

Anger over the economic situation has been rising, with a number of small protests since February. A new group, the Myanmar Development Committee, concerned with the economy rather than democratic freedoms, has emerged. Three of its leaders were among those seized in the raids, along with five student activists. The seven people seized from the 88 Student Generation group represent perhaps the regime’s greatest concern, because they appeared to be uniting the disparate opposition.

Sunai Thasuk, a Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch, believes the economic crisis matches that of two decades ago. “The conditions that led to the crackdown in 1988 are very similar to those now,” he said. “We’ve got hyper-inflation but the people continue to be robbed by the regime.

People are extremely angry.”

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 7

International news Sierra Leone opposition win Jean-Philippe Rémy Le Monde

Nawaz Sharif’s backers mark his imminent return Tariq Mahmood/AFP/Getty

Pakistan ‘can ride out political crisis’ PM says no plans for state of emergency as president’s woes grow Declan Walsh Islamabad Pakistan will not impose a state of emergency to end the ballooning political crisis and will instead hold free and fair elections, the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, has pledged.

“We have no intention of imposing an emergency because we don’t believe that will really solve anything,” Mr Aziz said.

Speculation that the president, Pervez Musharraf, would resort to drastic measures resurfaced last weekend after a supreme court ruling allowing the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to return home after seven years in exile. A spokesman said that Mr Sharif, who was ousted by Gen Musharraf in a bloodless coup in 1999 and lives in London, was “expected to embark for Pakistan in a few days”.

The development has plunged Pakistani politics into confusion. Local media reported that Gen Musharraf had sent an envoy to London to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the other exiled opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto. He is also reportedly holding back-channel talks with other opposition leaders.

But Ms Bhutto may be reluctant to associate publicly with an increasingly unpopular leader, and may set a high political price for any deal. The main stumbling block is his uniform — Gen Musharraf hopes to get re-elected by the parliament before October 15, but without resigning as army chief.

The general’s allies, led by Mr Aziz,

are likely to be the first casualties of the approaching political storm. But the prime minister said he was confident the government could ride the crisis out. “The president will be supported by our coalition, we have a comfortable majority in parliament, and we are very confident of his re-election,” he said, adding that Gen Musharraf was “a symbol of unity, a symbol of progress for Pakistan”.

The uniform issue held little interest for most people, Mr Aziz said. “For the average person in Pakistan this is not a big issue at all. What they want is a better life, better future, better health and education, housing and justice.”

The return of Mr Sharif or Ms Bhutto in the coming weeks is likely to reignite the debate about corruption.

Gen Musharraf and Mr Aziz accuse the opposition leaders of gross incompetence and corruption during their tenures in the 1990s. But the latest figures from Transparency International suggest that Pakistan has fared little better under the military-led government — corruption levels remain virtually unchanged since 2001.

• Pakistan’s decision to release Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 28, a suspected al-Qaida expert accused of training suicide bombers and plotting to attack London’s Heathrow airport, met with surprise and dismay in London and Washington last week.

Pakistan’s supreme court heard that he had returned home after three years’ detention at the hands of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. His release comes amid unprecedented action by the supreme court, which is pressing the government to locate hundreds of people detained without trial. guardian.co.uk/pakistan ≥

The opposition has won the general election in Sierra Leone, the electoral commission in Freetown announced.

The All People’s Congress (APC) won 59 seats, leaving 43 to former president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s Sierra Leone People’s party (SLPP) and 10 for the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC).

The election, combining a presidential round and a parliamentary poll, saw an upsurge in democratic enthusiasm after the end of the war of 1991-2002 and culminated in a serious defeat for the ruling SLPP. The electoral commission has announced that a second round is necessary for the presidential election.

The SLPP candidate Salomon Berewa surprisingly ended up in second place, with only 38.3% of the vote, trailing his APC rival, Ernest Bai Koroma.

In the second round voters seem likely to show the same desperate energy. More than 75% of the electorate turned out for the first round — that’s the number of people living below the poverty line. Five years after the end of the conflict the government has delivered no more than peace.

Top of poll . . . Ernest Koroma

The SLPP, which was triumphantly elected in 2002 with more than 70% of the vote, is now in danger of losing power to an alliance of the main opposition parties. After the results were announced Charles Margai, of the PMDC, said: “My wish is to unify the nation, which is why we will be backing the APC for the second round of the presidential election.”

But before that can happen voters will have to set aside their geographical and ethnic differences. A regional barrier supposedly separates APC voters, most of whom belong to the Temne ethnic group in Freetown and the north, from PMDC and SLPP supporters in the Mende south and east.

In the 1970s and 1980s the APC monopolised power and its leaders stripped the country of its assets.

Members of the opposition SLPP rotted in gaol, then seized power during the conflict, only to continue plundering a country that produces some of the world’s finest diamonds.

The UK has injected €1.5bn into Sierra Leone since 2000, making it the top beneficiary of British aid. But this money has made little difference to most people. However, if the current rulers lose power, they lose their immunity after years of corruption, with the risk of prosecution.

The question now is whether the political parties will play fair in the second presidential round. The Revolutionary United Front (which started the rebellion) has disappeared, but the three main parties have recruited forces of veterans, soldiers, rebels and the Kamajor militia, all of whom have been at a loose end since the war and want to settle scores.

At Bo, the second largest city, a former Kamajor leader said: “It is hardly surprising there is almost nothing left in the shops. A lot of people are just waiting for the first sign of disorder to start looting.”

Plea to free Saudi ‘reformists’ Ian Black Saudi intellectuals have made a rare public appeal to King Abdullah to release a group of reformists said to have been falsely accused of financing terrorism.

A petition signed by 76 public figures called on the human rights commission to free 10 Islamists held since February because they had allegedly collected money for “suspicious elements” — an apparent reference to insurgents in Iraq, where many jihadis are Saudis.

Lawyers and colleagues of the men say

the arrests were made to halt plans to establish a political group.

Neither the detentions nor the campaign to free them have been reported

by Saudi media or pan-Arab organisations. “These men have spent more than six months in detention pending investigations and we demand their release according to the penal code,” the petition stated.

The detainees are mainly Islamist reformers who signed petitions to the royal family in 2003. The day before their arrest three signed a petition calling for a constitutional monarchy.

8 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

International news

Texas rejects plea to halt 400th execution Dan Glaister Los Angeles David Batty The state of Texas reached a milestone last week with the execution of Johnny Ray Conner for a murder he committed nearly 10 years ago. He was the 400th person to be executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982, a figure that is considerably higher than in other US states with capital punishment.

Twenty prisoners have been executed this year in Texas, and three more are scheduled to die by lethal injection this week. Five further executions are scheduled for September.

Since 1976, 1,091 prisoners have been executed in the US. Last year, 53 people were executed in the country, putting it behind China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan in a ranking of countries with the most executions.

The grisly milestone prompted the European Union, which has banned the death penalty, to appeal to the Texas governor, Rick Perry, “to exercise all powers vested in his office to halt all upcoming executions and to consider the introduction of a moratorium in the state”.

The request met with a blunt re-

sponse. “Two hundred and thirty years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination,” said the governor’s spokesman.

“Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.”

Conner was convicted of killing a shopkeeper, Kathyanna Nguyen, during a robbery in 1998. Witnesses identified him as the man seen running from the scene, but a federal court ruled that he should have a new trial because evidence that he had a leg injury that would have prevented him from running was not presented at his Conner was the 400th person to be executed in Texas since the state restored the death penalty in 1982

Johnny Ray Conner’s sisters after the execution Paul Zoeller/AP original trial. That ruling, however, was reversed.

Conner’s trial lawyers said the injury never was an issue because he told them his broken leg had healed.

The appeals court said there was no testimony at his trial about his limp and none of his lawyers ever noticed one. Conner’s lawyers had asked the supreme court to stop the execution.

In the death chamber, Connor said: “What is happening to me is unjust and the system is broken.” He also asked for forgiveness and told his family and his victim’s family that he loved them.

“This is destiny. This is life,” he said. “This is something Allah wants me to do. I’m not mad at you. When I get to the gates of heaven I’m going to be waiting for you. Please forgive me.”

He was pronounced dead eight minutes after the drugs were injected.

The execution came as the US justice department reviews legal procedures to speed up executions to prevent prisoners spending decades on death row. It is making the final details to the changes. The public have until September 23 to lodge an opinion, after which the new rules can be implemented.

US army pays ‘quick-start’ recruits year’s salary as bonus Josh White Washington Washington Post More than 90% of the US army’s new recruits since late July have accepted a $20,000 “quick-ship” bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of September, putting thousands of Americans into uniform almost immediately.

Many recruits who take the bonus — scoring in many cases the equivalent of more than a year’s pay — leave their homes within days, recruiters say. The initiative is part of an effort by army officials to meet year-end recruiting goals after a two-month slump earlier this year. With the fiscal year ending on September 30, the army hopes the extra cash motivates those interested in joining or entices those just considering enlisting.

In the first three weeks of the programme the army had enlisted 3,814 recruits using the bonus, the US Army Recruiting Command in Fort Knox, Kentucky, reported. Those recruits accounted for 92% of the 4,149

individuals who signed contracts in that period.

The $20,000 bonus is a hefty sum for many of the people the army targets most aggressively: young men and women who have not settled on a career. The army estimates that soldiers coming out of initial training are paid $17,400 a year on average.

But experts said the effort could pose problems for the army in the coming months, because those who might have helped fill recruiting quotas later this year or in early 2008 are instead joining now.

Military personnel experts said the signing bonuses were a transparent way for the army to meet its annual goal of 80,000 recruits amid an increasingly difficult recruiting environment. They also said the rush to get people into uniform might have more to do with meeting numerical targets than with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, although many of those who join the army face the possibility of deployment to combat soon.

“To me it signals something that

we’ve been seeing already from the army, a trade-off in terms of quality and quantity,” said Cindy Williams, an analyst at the security studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “My sense is that right now they’re willing to take anybody who is willing to walk in the door and ship by September 30.”

Army officials have lowered standards and increased waivers in recent years to meet their recruiting goals, in part to deal with the strain of the wars and to quickly expand force. But the army has been more concerned with nose-diving public opinion about the war in Iraq and the role of “influencers” — parents, teachers and coaches — who have been increasingly unwill-

92%

Percentage of new recruits who have received the $20,000 ‘quick-ship’ bonus since it was introduced

ing to recommend the military as a career option to young people.

The $20,000 bonus can be enticing, especially to those who lack a steady job, languish in debt or are worried about their future. The way the bonus works is simple: recruits willing to ship out within the next month will receive $10,000 upon completion of basic training and advanced individual training. Then, over the course of their initial active-duty enlistment, they will receive $10,000 in even annual sums.

For a young recruit with no college education, the bonus, which is taxable, could be the equivalent of a year of pay over the course of a three-year enlistment. And the recruit can still qualify for other sign-up bonuses.

Sergeant Willie Thomas, a recruiter in the Woodbridge, Virginia, office, said the quick-ship bonus was helpful as an eye-catcher, but it was not enough to change attitudes about the military or the Iraq war. Although his office has a sign advertising the bonus, he said it was one of the last things he mentioned to a potential recruit.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 9

International news

Strange fruit The history of Billie Holiday’s signature song Culture, page 32 ≥

Communities get tough with the illegal immigrants they need but don’t want Washington diary Ewen MacAskill

F

aced with the failure of the federal government to act on illegal immigration, Americans are taking matters into their own hands and, in some cases, behaving like vigilantes. Individual counties are passing directives aimed at punishing illegal immigrants. One of the biggest backlashes is in the wealthy counties that border Washington DC, such as Loudoun county, a rural suburb in Virginia. Active in the campaign to “Help Save Virginia”, it has passed harsh measures that would deny almost any public service to illegal immigrants and impose tough penalties on employers who hire them.

According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports restrictive policies such as those introduced in Loudoun county, more than 171 state and local immigration laws and directives have been passed this year in 41 states. But there are other councils, also in Virginia, that have passed resolutions condemning the moves, insisting that most Hispanics are not illegal and should not be stigmatised.

There are millions of illegal immigrants in the US, and they form an integral part of the economy. Even if the US wanted to deport them all, it could not. They have long occupied a contradictory position in which they are needed, but not wanted.

The motives of those behind the crackdown are mixed. For many, it is unease at finding large numbers of Hispanics in their communities and being unhappy with the changes, such as hearing Spanish rather than English spoken. Others complain that illegal immigrants, most of whom are from Mexico or central America, are swamping the health, education and benefits system, and the long-term residents are having to foot the bills with higher taxes.

Illegal immigration is one of the biggest issues in the US after the Iraq war, and one that neither the Bush administration nor Congress has been able to deal with. As a result, states and counties have taken action on their own. President Bush tried to push through a bill before the summer that would have produced reform of sorts. It would have

allowed illegal immigrants already in the US — no one knows for certain how many there are, with estimates ranging from 12 million to 20 million — to apply to become citizens.

It was part of an electoral strategy enthusiastically championed by his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, who has since retired from the White House. Rove wanted to tie the Hispanic vote to the Republican party.

But Bush’s problem is that many Republicans were less interested in the party’s long-term prospects than their present hostility towards Hispanics. They did not see why someone who had come in illegally should be rewarded with citizenship while those outside who were going through the proper procedures were having to endure years of waiting.

Bush tried to sweeten his propos-

More than 171 state and local laws on immigration have been passed this year in 41 states

als with promises of tougher controls along the Mexican border, but to no avail. Even those Republican members of Congress sympathetic to reform changed their minds on returning to their states and registering the extent of the hostility. The result is a series of ad hoc, chaotic and contradictory responses. Some state officials, responding to the outpouring of local initiatives, insist the counties have no right to enact punitive measures against illegal immigrants, insisting that responsibility for border control is a matter for the federal rather than state government.

T

ypical of the mess is the Pennsylvania city of Hazelton. It boasts of being “the toughest place on illegal immigrants in America”, and was among those introducing laws penalising illegal immigrants. A federal judge ruled against the moves, prompting Hazelton to appeal and warn it will go all the way to the supreme court if necessary.

Another example of the confusion is the next census. It could provide a better approximation of the number of illegal immigrants in the country.

Federal law stipulates that one of the questions to be asked is whether

someone is an illegal immigrant. The US Census Bureau, which is to conduct the 2010 survey, has asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to lay off raids on illegal immigrants in the run-up to the census because otherwise many will refuse to participate. The immigration department has turned down the request.

Over the past few months the immigration department has been more active, with a series of raids and deportations, among them a woman who had come to personify the plight of the immigrants, Elvira Arellano, who had taken sanctuary in a church. She was deported after making a risky public appearance.

Arellano had held a low-paid job as a cleaner. She is at the crux of the US’s inadequate immigration laws.

The US economy needs — and regularly exploits — workers like her. Go almost anywhere in the US, from the dairy farms of New Hampshire to construction sites in Washington DC, and Hispanics will be visible, doing the hard or menial work. More than 70% of US farm workers are estimated to be illegal immigrants.

But there is no chance of meaningful reform before January 2009, when Bush leaves office, and no guarantee that any of his successors will deal with the issue either.

10 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

International news

Dissidents freed as Cuba changes tack Rory Carroll Raúl Castro has started to make cautious changes in Cuba that could signal plans for political and economic reform. Since he took over from his brother Fidel, dozens of dissidents have been freed, an olive branch has been extended to the US and there is talk of easing communist controls on property and agriculture.

Three political prisoners have been released this month, the latest being Armando Betancourt Reina, a journalist jailed for 15 months after reporting on a family eviction in Camagüey.

Analysts said the pragmatic defence minister Raúl, 76, who has been acting president since illness forced Fidel, 81, to step down last year, was experimenting with reforms to improve living conditions and morale without eroding government control.

The changes signal a desire to ease the poverty and sense of claustrophobia that afflict many Cubans, a senior western diplomat said. “There is a real effort to look at what doesn’t work and to change it. Raúl wants to make life more bearable. The hope is that by addressing some specific complaints the system can continue.”

Mr Betancourt, who worked for Miami-based website Nueva Prensa Cuba, was freed last Monday, said the Committee to Protect Journal-

ists, based in New York. Francisco Chaviano, a human rights activist, and Lázaro González Adán, a labour union activist, were also released this month. The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation said that more than a fifth of the island’s 316 political prisoners had been freed in the past year.

Curbs on free speech and opposition politics continue. However, some analysts say the government is exploring new policies with a view to emulating Vietnam, where communists preside over market-driven prosperity.

Cuba’s education and health systems remain intact, but severe shortages of food, transport and housing cause deep resentment, which has reportedly shaken Raúl and other officials. Controls on agricultural production have been loosened to give farmers more incentive to produce, and there is speculation that it will become legal to buy a car without government permission. Hundreds of buses are being imported from China to ease the overcrowding that dogs public transport, and an overhaul of resorts is under way to try to win back tourists from Caribbean rivals.

The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, has shipped in 90,000 subsidised barrels of oil daily, easing an energy crisis. guardian.co.uk/cuba ≥

Dangerous crossing Refugee boat rescued

A total of 120 sub-Saharan illegal immigrants, among them nine children, arrive at Los Cristianos port in the Canaries last week. Their

boat was towed after losing power.

Arrivals this summer have been down on last year’s record of more than 31,000 Manuel Lrida/EPA

Actors held in Belarus

UN has ‘sufficient’ pledges for Darfur force

Tom Parfitt Moscow

A hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping force for the Darfur region of Sudan has received sufficient pledges for participation, although critical needs remain for technical support and an engineering corps, a senior United Nations official said.

“It is unprecedented what we are trying to do here,” Jane Holl Lute, the UN assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, said about the coordination between the African Union and the UN. Ms Lute spoke in Washington, where last week she met officials at the National Security Council before returning to New York. But “the political process is the heart of the peacekeeping mission. It can only walk alongside the process, not substitute it,” she said.

Ms Lute said the headquarters for the 31,000-member force would be op-

Police special forces stormed the performance of a play by an underground theatre group in Belarus last week and arrested 50 people.

The British playwright Tom Stoppard, who has supported the Free Theatre for years, heard of the raid through a text message sent by one of the theatre’s directors, who was detained in the Belarussian capital, Minsk. “Belarus is as close to a totalitarian state as you can get in Europe,” Mr Stoppard said.

Members of the theatre were about to begin a performance of Eleven Vests by Edward Bond at a house in a Minsk suburb when armed officers of the Omon unit entered and detained everyone. The performers and spectators were taken by bus to a police station, but released three hours later.

Nora Boustany Washington Post

erational in El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, by the first week of October. Ms Lute said supplies blocked at the harbour in Khartoum have been released for unloading.

The Darfur conflict began in 2003, when Sudan’s government responded to a rebellion with indiscriminate killings and by unleashing militias, human rights groups say. As many as 450,000 people have died from violence and disease, and 2.5 million have fled from their homes. Sudan recently agreed to the deployment of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping entity, which will absorb a 7,000-member African Amnesty says this helicopter photographed in Darfur shows that Sudan is flouting a UN arms ban

Union force that has failed to stop the region’s violence.

Most of the participants in the force will come from African countries.

Other nations, including India, Bangladesh and Nepal, are contributing logistical units, and China is providing engineering units. About 19,500 soldiers will be armed. The annual cost of the force would be $2.4bn to $2.6bn, with the US covering about a quarter.

• The Guardian’s Ian Black reports: Sudan has expelled a top Canadian diplomat and the European commission’s envoy as it faces pressure over Darfur. The two were summoned last week to the foreign ministry in Khartoum, which confirmed that it had declared them persona non grata for “intervention in the internal affairs of Sudan”, a euphemism for spying.

Amnesty International has accused the Sudanese regime of continuing to deploy offensive military equipment in Darfur despite a UN arms embargo.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 11

International news

A bold step away from guilt Liverpool’s new slavery museum Comment, page 22≥

Chinese province has 165 boys per 100 girls Jonathan Watts Beijing Observer China is planning to tighten punishments for sex-selective abortions amid concerns that its widening gender imbalance will lead to wife trafficking, sexual crimes and social frustration.

Figures released by the state media show that the worst affected city, Lianyungang in Jiangsu province, has a ratio of 165 boys to 100 girls among children aged one to four.

Nationwide, six males are born for every five females, far above the international average. With the gap growing every year as a result of increased access to ultrasound sex-checking technology, a senior official warned that China faced the “most serious gender imbalance in the world”.

State demographers forecast that 37 million men will be unable to find wives by 2020. Already there are 18 million more men than women of marriageable age. The main reason for the imbalance is a traditional preference for boys, particularly in the countryside. Males are considered necessary to carry on the family line, care for elderly

A girl eats dinner at home in Zhengxin, Gansu province Eugene Hoshiko/AP parents and earn money. Many farmers believe raising a girl is a waste because she will marry into another family.

China’s problem is compounded by a strict family planning policy that limits many couples to one child. The government credits these restrictions for preventing 400 million births since the

rules were introduced in 1979. Without them, it says the world’s largest population — now 1.3bn — would have gone out of control. But the result is an increasingly lopsided demography.

In the past unwanted girls were abandoned. Now they are more likely to be aborted. As China has become

Activist’s wife kept from award ceremony Jonathan Watts The wife of a jailed Chinese activist was prevented from leaving the country last weekend as she attempted to travel to collect a human rights award on behalf of her husband.

Yuan Weijing was detained at Beijing airport, her passport revoked and her mobile phone confiscated, friends reported.

They fear she will be sent back to her village in Shandong province, less than two months after she escaped from house arrest and around-theclock surveillance by local police.

The former English teacher was attempting to fly to the Philippines to pick up a Magsaysay award — sometimes referred to as Asia’s Nobel prize — on behalf of her husband, the blind peasant activist Chen Guangcheng.

Mr Chen was one of seven winners this year. The award foundation cited his “irrepressible passion for justice in leading ordinary Chinese citizens to assert their legitimate rights under the law”.

Mr Chen was sentenced to four years in prison last August, ostensibly for disrupting traffic and damaging property. The conviction came after he was abducted by police from the streets of Beijing and placed

under house arrest because he tried to expose a programme of forced lateterm abortions in Lingyi city, Shandong province.

“He was very excited to hear he had won the award,” Ms Yuan, 31, told the Guardian. “He wanted to go to the Philippines to collect it himself, but the prison guards said that is impossible.”

His wife was aware that she would probably not be allowed to leave. She received a call from Shandong officials telling her that her passport was invalid under a statute that blocked overseas travel for those deemed likely to harm the nation’s interests.

Yuan Weijing: passport revoked

“She was sad, worried and angry.

She told us she could not fall asleep,” said Hu Jia, a civic activist who has also been under house arrest for much of the last year.

Foreign journalists who went to report on Ms Yuan’s departure from Mr Hu’s house were briefly detained by police. A British diplomat who visited the airport to see if Ms Yuan would be allowed to leave told the Reuters news agency that she was concerned about harassment.

“This is a case we’ve raised at the highest levels with the Chinese,” Lucy Hughes told the agency. “We are concerned both for the safety of human rights defenders and for the ability of journalists to report freely.”

It is not the first time that China has prevented its nationals from collecting Magsaysay awards. In the past five years the authorities also blocked the departures of the army doctor Jiang Yanyong, who revealed the true scale of the 2003 Sars outbreak, and Gao Yaojie, the doctor who helped to expose an HIV blood contamination scandal in Henan province.

Earlier Ms Yuan had urged the Chinese government to grant an amnesty to Mr Chen and other prisoners of conscience before the Olympic Games in Beijing next August.

wealthier, more couples have access to ultrasound checks.

Although there are two laws banning doctors from telling pregnant women the sex of the foetus, the practice is common. Local media report that one common way around the regulations is for doctors silently to give a thumbs-up if the foetus is a boy. While Lianyungang had the worst imbalance, it was one of 99 cities with a ratio of more than 125 boys for every 100 girls, the staterun Xinhua news agency reported.

The authorities have found gender balance harder to manage than population growth. In 2003 the government introduced a “care for girls” policy, which provided incentives — such as tax breaks and exemptions from fees — for families raising girls.

It also intensified a propaganda campaign in the countryside, where many buildings are daubed with slogans proclaiming “Girls are as valuable as boys”. Such old-style propaganda campaigns are clearly not working, however. This summer the government said it would begin to punish any medical institution that tells couples the sex of unborn babies.

Student riot rocks Dhaka Randeep Ramesh Bangladesh’s military-backed government last week enforced for one day a curfew brought in to quell student riots.

The restriction was lifted after security forces arrested four university professors who were arch-critics of the regime. The academics were seized in dawn raids and hours later the government announced it was temporarily suspending the curfew.

Among those taken into custody were Harun ur-Rashid, dean of Dhaka university’s social science faculty, and Anwar Hossain, dean of bioscience and a prominent leader of the university’s teachers’ association.

Both had been active in the protests last week, which began after soldiers clashed with students during a football match at Dhaka University. Another two lecturers were arrested at their homes in northwestern Bangladesh, where last week violence claimed the life of one student.

Bangladesh has been effectively under army control since January, although officials say that new elections will be held by the end of 2008.

12 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

UK news

Close combat . . . the Royal Welsh help clear Taliban units from a compound in Helmand, Afghanistan, where three soldiers died Sergeant Will Craig

American jet kills three British soldiers during Taliban attack Investigation under way after latest friendly fire incident in Afghanistan Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill Washington A US fighter plane killed three British soldiers and seriously injured two others last week after it was called in to support UK troops fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

In the worst friendly fire incident involving British forces in the country, a US F-15 long-range strike aircraft dropped a single 500lb bomb, killing Private Robert Foster, 19, and Privates Aaron McClure, 19, and John Thrumble, 21, of the 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment.

An investigation will now attempt to determine whether the accident was the result of a communications or technical failure, why a US rather than a British plane was involved and why such a large bomb was dropped close to British positions.

The soldiers were part of a 60-man patrol deployed to disrupt Taliban movements north-west of Kajaki, the

site of a hydroelectric dam under repair and irrigation projects for Helmand province. The patrol was attacked by Taliban fighters and came under heavy fire from several directions.

The Ministry of Defence said: “Close air support was called in from two US F-15 aircraft to repel the enemy. A single bomb was dropped and it is believed the explosion killed all three soldiers who were declared dead at the scene.”

Nine soldiers from the same battalion have been killed in the past four months. The latest incident is thought to be the second time British soldiers have been killed by the US in Afghanistan. Eight British military personnel have been killed by US fire in Iraq since the start of the war in 2003.

Lt Colonel Charlie Mayo, the British army spokesman in Helmand, said: “There are a handful of different rea-

Opium production soars The UN has identified an explosion in opium production in Afghanistan, led by Taliban-backed farmers in the volatile south. Opium production soared by 34% to 8,200 tonnes, accounting for 93% of world supply and most of the heroin sold in Britain and Europe, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported. The record crop was fuelled by Helmand, where opium cultivation surged by 48%.

The province is now the world’s single largest source of illegal drugs.

UNODC said no other country had produced illegal narcotics on such a scale since China in the 19th century.

Cultivation fell in the north, however, where the number of drug-free provinces doubled from six to 13.

Balkh, which cultivated 7,200 hectares last year, eliminated opium production entirely. Declan Walsh

sons why this tragic incident has happened and we are not in a position at the moment, and I don’t think we will be for some time, to find out exactly what has happened.”

The MoD said British troops in Afghanistan often relied on US and British air support. Andrew Brookes, a former pilot now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the F-15 was the only help available. “We have not enough assets to the job. It’s no use blaming the Americans.”

The British government is stressing there is no assumption that the US is to blame. Des Browne, the defence secretary, said such incidents were rare. “Combat environments are very complex environments. Human error is always a possibility.”

In Washington Lt Colonel Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “We express deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the British soldiers who died and we wish those who were injured a full recovery.”

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 13

11-year-old shot dead outside Liverpool pub ‘by teenager’ Guardian reporters An 11-year-old schoolboy was shot in the neck outside a pub in the Croxteth area of Liverpool last week, apparently by a teenager riding a BMX bicycle.

Rhys Jones died in the arms of his mother, Melanie, 41.

Sources suggest that Rhys, who was about to move on to secondary school, could have been the innocent victim of a row over a girl, caught by one of three shots aimed at a BMW in the car park of the Fir Tree pub in Croxteth.

Merseyside police arrested and released six teenagers in connection with the killing. Officers, who complained of a disappointing initial public response, said they had traced a woman who might have seen the killer minutes before he opened fire. A Merseyside police spokesman confirmed the woman, who was pushing a pram outside the Fir Tree pub, was helping with the investigation.

The area is known for its gang culture. A feud between two gangs, the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Gang of Norris Green, came to a head last year when Liam “Smigger” Smith, 19, a member of the Strand Gang, was shot in the head after visiting a friend in prison. This month three teenagers were convicted of his murder, sparking fear of reprisals. At the trial the jury heard that the gangs had fired on each on at least 17 occasions since 2004.

A member of the Nogzy gang from a local estate told the Guardian about gang life. “It’s not a nice thing to be

Rhys Jones died after he was shot in Croxteth, Liverpool Reuters into, fighting and shooting and that.

But that’s it. It can be with fists or with knives, whatever someone prefers. Or guns. . . . I don’t have one but I could get one if I wanted to. You can get a gun practically anywhere here . . . I don’t know what happened with that kid.

It’s really terrible. He was only 11 and had nothing to do with any of this . . .

Maybe it was just someone shooting off a gun and he fucked up.”

Following the killing Labour and

Conservative party ministers clashed over gun crime statistics. Jack Straw, the justice secretary, told the BBC that gun crime was falling. But David Cameron, the Tory leader, accused him of complacency and accused ministers of spinning statistics.

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, proposed setting up drop-off zones where people could hand in guns or offer tip-offs anonymously. The proposals were met with scorn by the shadow justice secretary, Nick Herbert, who said ministers had failed to address the scale of the problem.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, wrote to Ms Smith, quoting figures from Home Office documents claiming that gun-related crime had increased fourfold since 1998 and claiming that ministers were putting out misleading figures. Mr Straw insisted that gun crime was now coming down as a result of the steps taken by the government.

“We are concerned that within the overall record, which is a good one, of crime going down in the last 10 to 11 years, the number of gun-related incidents has gone up,” he said. “But it has now started to fall.”

The number of people shot dead dropped from 77 in 2004-05 to 49 the following year, but police say they are worried about the rise of a teenage gang and gun culture. In London the average age of victims has fallen from 24 to 19 and gun crime is now mainly committed by men aged 16 to 25.

News in brief

UK news • Patients will be given the right to know the success rates of every specialist unit in every hospital under plans presented by surgeons and government officials. They are expected to be included in an “operating framework” for the NHS in 2008-09 to be issued by David Nicholson, the chief executive, this year.

• John Prescott is to step down as an MP at the next general election. The former deputy prime minister and MP for Hull East, 69, is expected to go to the House of Lords.

• The Council of HM Circuit Judges says a proposal for a violent offender order, allowing police to impose bans and requirements on offenders leaving prison, lacks intellectual rigour. The orders are a cornerstone of a criminal justice bill to be debated on the day parliament returns.

• Claims that Scottish airports were secretly used by the CIA to take Islamist terror suspects to be tortured in covert prisons are to be investigated. Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, is to give the lord advocate a report from the legal rights group Reprieve alleging that Scottish airports were used 107 times for refuelling.

• A former mayor was awarded £7,000 by Bury county court after suing her council for sex discrimination. When Pauleen Lane, 41,

Why is Towton forgotten? page 19 ≥

Most Britons want an alternative to prisons Julian Glover Most British voters think the government should scrap its prison building programme, a Guardian/ICM poll found. Of those questioned, 51% want it to find other ways to punish criminals and deter crime.

Concern about the prison system is particularly strong among women.

Only 40% think the government should aim to send more convicted criminals to prison, against 57% who want to see other, non-custodial forms of punishment. Only among pensioners is there a majority in favour of expanding the prison population.

Only 42% of all voters, and 39% of women, think prisons are an effective punishment, against 49%, and 52% of women, who say they fail to work.

Conservative voters are most likely to back prisons, Liberal Democrats most likely to oppose them. Among Labour voters, 52% do not want to see more prisons built and 46% do.

The findings follow a sharp rise in prison numbers, and overcrowding forced the justice department to order some prisoners to be released early.

The prison population last week was 80,693, just 654 below total capacity.

In 1997 there were on average 61,114

57%

The percentage of voters who want to see more non-custodial penalties, against 40% who want to more jail terms

prisoners in England and Wales. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, talked of “anarchy in the UK” last week, saying crime-fighting measures would fail “if we don’t build the prisons and train the necessary staff to run them”.

The government has sought bids to build two new prisons, the first in Britain since 2005, as part of a programme to create 9,500 additional prison spaces by 2012.

The poll shows public unease about the effectiveness of this programme is not part of a wider hostility to a tough law and order policy. Asked whether they think courts should pass tougher sentences, 77% of all voters agree.

Only 2% say sentences are already too harsh, and only 18% believe the courts have got the balance about right.

Victory . . . Pauleen Lane and son

became mayor of Trafford council in Greater Manchester, she was told she could not take her baby to engagements in the mayoral Volvo.

• The European Union has lifted a ban on exports of British livestock, meat and dairy products imposed after the foot and mouth outbreak.

The movement ban on live animals within the UK is also being ended outside the 10km surveillance zone around the farms in Surrey where the disease was found.

14 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

UK news Week in Britain Derek Brown Success and failure in the GCSE exam mill The latest GCSE exam results for 16year-olds have produced some phenomenal individual results. Hamish Auld, for example, has notched up 14 passes at the top A* grade. Hibo Ali, who spoke no English when she arrived from Somalia three years ago, scored one A* and nine straight As in her 10 chosen subjects.

Matthew Blagdon recovered from leukaemia to secure 10 A* grades.

Overall nearly 20% of pupils gained passes at A or A* level.

These heartening results have predictably prompted charges of dumbing-down in secondary education, and an unhealthy fixation with results and league tables. There are also more objective concerns, for example in the lamentable decline in modern language learning.

The number of pupils taking GCSE exams in German fell by 10.24% from last year, while French entries were down by 8.24%. News from the English classroom is scarcely more encouraging: examiners found pupils being given “incomprehensively” high marks for pieces of creative writing that were poorly plotted and riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Even more disturbingly, many of the stories featured sickeningly violent content. A popular title was The Assassin.

Poll-watching Ken embraces the Poles Ken Livingstone is gearing up for a third successive term as mayor of London. His latest vote-winning ploys include tears and dumplings.

The tears flowed during the mayor’s emotional apology for the capital’s role in the slave trade, abolished 200 years ago. Before an audience of politicians, writers and dignitaries, he said that London continued to benefit from the fortunes made through slaving. Generations of slaves had been tortured and murdered, he said, and went on: “To justify this murder and torture, black people had to be declared inferior or not human. We live with the consequences today.” As he spoke a visiting US civil rights campaigner, the Rev Jesse Jackson, walked over and put his arm round the mayor.

The man who used to be called Red Ken has become adept at spotting valuable blocs of voters. In London’s polyglot population, one such usefully cohesive group are Polish immigrants, of whom there are tens, if not hundreds, of thou-

threefold increase in visitors.

This is not, it seems, a passing trend in the notoriously faddy tourism business. The gawping sector, as it could perhaps be called, is worth a jaw-dropping £2.6bn a year to the national economy, according to research funded by bodies in the film, television and tourist industries.

Library uncovers hidden treasure

Biting . . . Jeremy Paxman flays BBC smugness in a speech in Edinburgh Murdo MacLeod

sands. At a reception for community leaders and the vernacular local media, the major’s charm offensive included lashings of pierogi (Polish dumplings). He has hinted at a Polish festival for the capital and subsidies for Polish Saturday schools.

with live reporting. “The need is for constant sensation,” he said. “The consequence is that reporting now prizes emotion over much else. We have a dynamic in news now that is less about uncovering things than it is about covering them.”

Mandarins of the BBC Besotted nation goes undergo self-criticism on the location trail The world of telly is in a tizz over trust — the latest buzzword in the media. In all TV networks there is dismay over recent revelations of rigged phone-in competitions, doctored documentary footage and dishonest editing of so-called reality shows. The director-general of the BBC, no less, has attacked critics who say that television bosses are overreacting. Mark Thompson, writing in the Guardian, revealed that every BBC programme-maker takes part in seminars and training to explore the issue of trust. He went on: “Anyone who does not believe that this episode has damaged public trust in us is deluding themselves.”

The self-flagellation is not confined to the broadcasting moguls.

Jeremy Paxman, often described as the BBC’s interviewing rottweiler, said that the summer of scandals had left the industry suffering a “catastrophic loss of nerve”. He even questioned the BBC’s future: “Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. The BBC is going to have to justify its existence not by the way it broadcasts . . . but by what it broadcasts.”

Paxman landed a shrewd blow when he denounced 24-hour rolling news presentation and obsession

With honourable exceptions, we are a nation besotted by on-screen celebrity. Almost literally, we worship the ground our two-dimensional heroes walk on. That’s why tourists are increasingly flocking to locations selected as backdrops for films and telly series. Dad’s Army tours are still popular in Thetford, Norfolk, nearly 40 years after it was recruited as the fictional Walmington-on-Sea. Alnwick Castle in Northumberland has seen visitor numbers rise by 120% since first appearing as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films.

The release of the ridiculous Da Vinci Code movie saw visitor numbers increase by 26% at Lincoln Cathedral, 33% at Rosslyn Chapel in the Lothians, and 500% at the Temple church in London. Most famously, locations owned by the National Trust and featured in the 1995 glossy BBC series of Pride and Prejudice have benefited from a

Celebrity . . . Alnwick Castle, aka Hogwarts

British museums are notoriously stuffed with artefacts that are rarely put on display and sometimes remain uncatalogued for decades. A startling example has just emerged from the British Library, which has discovered a treasure trove of valuable 19th-century sketches, drawings and letters tucked into a collection of art books bequeathed to the nation in 1902. Among the most arresting discoveries is a delicate sketch of Hyam Church by John Constable.

The drawings and documents were incorporated in a collection built up by a Victorian textile manufacturer and art lover, John Platt — 1,600 portraits, views, engravings, drawings and letters relating to JMW Turner and his contemporaries. His collection was luxuriously bound in 13 red morocco leather volumes, each housed in leather slip cases. The hoard of loose items has lain hidden among the pages at the British Museum since 1902, transferring to the British Library in the 1970s.

Salmond awards himself top marks Alex Salmond, the pro-independence first minister of Scotland, has published his own report card after his first 100 days in office at the head of a minority government. Not surprisingly, he has given himself excellent marks, and his ministers claim to have begun a fundamental overhaul of the government of Scotland.

Critics of the Scottish National party administration say it has reneged on a number of election promises, including one to abolish student debts and council taxes. But the Nats are riding high in the opinion polls, which indicates that the Scots, although they have shown little zeal for outright independence, like to be governed by those whose political strings are not being pulled by the big parties in Westminster.

The SNP can point to the scrapping of key bridge tolls, hiring of 300 more teachers, and intervening to prevent closure of accident and emergency units in two hospitals.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 15

UK news

Record numbers leave ageing Britain Polly Curtis Record numbers of Britons are leaving in search of a sunnier life abroad, population figures show.

Nearly 200,000 British-born citizens moved overseas last year, mostly to Australia, Spain and France — the highest number since current records began in 1991, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. In total 385,000 people quit the UK; the figure was raised further by a rise in foreigners returning to their home countries.

Figures suggest that Britons who move abroad are looking for two things: the sun and other British people to share it with. But there has also been an increase in economic migration. Stephen Evans, chief economist at the Social Market Foundation, said: “We’re living in an increasingly integrated world — it is easier and easier for people to move here and for us to move abroad. I don’t know whether TV programmes about moving abroad fuel the rise, or whether they reflect the trend, but they certainly raise the visibility.”

The statistics reveal that Australia is the biggest draw, with 71,000 Britons emigrating there in 2004 and 2005. A further 58,000 moved to Spain and 42,000 to France.

Dean Morgan, of the website workpermit.com, said bad summer

Flight . . . Maroubra in Sydney, popular with Britons Torsten Blackwood/AFP weather had led to more inquiries about emigration. “Normally in July and August time it’s quite quiet, but this year we’ve been inundated,” he said. “Perception of crime is another of the main reasons for people wanting to leave. Also, people are worried about their children and they worry about their jobs and their future here and possibly the economy as well.”

The annual demographic report reveals that in the year to mid-2006 the overall population grew by 350,000 to

60,587,000. A mini baby-boom, people living longer and a net increase in immigration to the UK fuelled the rise.

The figures confirm fears about an ageing population. The number of older people in Britain is increasing at a faster rate than any other age group.

There was a 6% rise in the over-85s, boosting the average age of a Briton to 39 compared with 34 in 1971.

But the findings also demonstrate the impact immigration is having. A quarter of British babies are now born

to a foreign parent and in some parts of London, Oxford and Essex the population has grown by up to 14% in five years, largely as a result of immigration. Experts believe that without it the population could go into decline, shrinking the working age population and compounding the problem of how to support an ageing society.

Peter Goldblatt, who is co-director of the ONS centre for demography, said the figures illustrated that the UK had an increasingly transient population. “Without more people coming to the UK we would have a smaller and possibly even falling population. With a large rise in the number of over-85s we need more people of working ages to support them,” he said.

The figures suggest that a significant amount of migration out of the country is by people returning to the countries they were born in — it includes the first evidence that the recent boom in immigration from eastern Europe is not permanent. About 16,000 people from the eastern European states, including Poland, Slovakia and Estonia, left the UK last year after living here for more than a year. The previous year only 3,000 eastern Europeans left.

London Councils, which represents the 33 councils in the capital, said the figures were flawed because they did not include people who spent less than a year in residence.

2007 election risky for Brown, poll suggests Maternity units closed

Julian Glover

Gordon Brown would risk the possible loss of his parliamentary majority if he held an early general election this autumn, a Guardian/ICM poll found.

It shows Labour’s lead narrowing slightly to five points amid signs of rising Conservative support.

The poll came after an offensive by the Conservative leader, David Cameron, against threatened ward closures in 29 NHS hospitals ran into trouble last week when Henry Bellingham, Tory MP for North West Norfolk, said services in his local hospital were not at risk from restructuring.

Labour said that at least eight of the 29 hospitals named in Mr Cameron’s list faced no threat to maternity services or accident and emergency departments. Some hospital officials also said their services were not at risk.

The poll confirms that Labour is in a stronger position than it was before Mr Brown took over as leader. Support for the party stands at 39%, up one point on last month. But Conservative sup-

port has increased by two points to 34%. Both parties are squeezing the Liberal Democrats, down two points to 18%, a trend seen in other polls.

If those figures were repeated at a general election, Labour and the Conservatives would gain seats, with Labour retaining a majority of about 50 and winning about 370 seats. But Labour’s lead is not enough to guarantee such success, which may encourage Mr Brown to wait. He has to call a contest at the latest by 2010.

The poll shows that Mr Brown has gone a long way to turn around Labour’s position. Although 55% of voters agree that it is “time for a change”, that figure was 70% in September.

Now 31% agree that “continuity is imLabour is in a stronger position now than before Gordon Brown took office but Tory support has also increased

portant, stick with Labour”, up from 23% in 2006. Voters think that Labour, more than the Conservative party, is likely to deliver rising house prices, higher educational standards, a fairer distribution of income and an effective approach to climate change.

But in 1996 Labour led the Conservatives by 30 points as the party best placed to improve educational standards. Now it leads by three. On law and order Labour’s 1996 lead of 16% has turned into a 10-point deficit.

Mr Cameron is also making progress on health, despite the controversy surrounding his list of ward closures. In 1996, the Tories led Labour by 48 points as the party most likely to worsen the state of the NHS. Now voters think that Labour is the biggest threat, leading the Conservatives by nine points.

On a regional tour of hospitals in his first week back at work, Mr Cameron stood by his list and his threat to give Mr Brown a “bare-knuckle fight” over NHS closures, which he blames on short-term financial concerns.

David Hencke The health secretary, Alan Johnson, chose the eve of a bank holiday weekend to announce the closure of maternity units at four hospitals across the Greater Manchester area.

Among them is one at Hope hospital, in the Salford constituency of the communities secretary, Hazel Blears, who had opposed its closure. Other MPs and health organisations responded angrily, but Ms Blears, whose constituency will still have a standalone midwifery unit, said mothers could still have their babies in Salford.

• The government is trying to preempt union plans for a winter of industrial action by improving pay deals for millions of low-paid workers before a TUC conference in September. The biggest change is an offer to local government workers, breaking the 2% norm by offering a 2.45% settlement with a 3.88% rise for the lowest paid.

16 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Finance

Arctic boom Scientists are leading the international rush for ‘black gold’ Weekly review, page 29 ≥

Finance in brief

Money can’t buy happiness Marriage, stability and faith make us healthier than long hours of work and higher incomes Larry Elliott So how did you feel when you heard that the UK economy grew by 3% over the past year? You weren’t on the edge of your seat to see if Britain was maintaining the longest spell of uninterrupted growth since the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Nobody really notices these days what has been happening to gross domestic product, which itself is a sign of the times. Britain might be getting richer in goods and services, but it isn’t getting any happier.

Politicians have latched on to this. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, has talked about the need to supplement GDP with alternative measures of wellbeing, and Labour is eager to show that the moral decay of Britain has not been accelerated by a decade of selfish materialism.

Happiness has also been taken up as an issue by economists. David Blanchflower, who with Andrew Oswald, has been at the forefront of research into happiness, may be one of the nine people who set interest rates each month but he believes that policy in the 21st century will probably have to concentrate more on non-materialistic goals, including wellbeing.

Richard Layard has become a strong advocate of policies designed to maximise happiness and says that the goal of maximising income per head is a bad yardstick for economic policy, since what counts in happiness is not how much you earn, but how much you earn relative to everybody else.

People quickly become accustomed to higher incomes, leaving them no happier and making decisions that are not in their best interests, such as working long hours. Layard has made the case for government intervention to improve happiness: redistributive taxation, a shorter working week and a big increase in public spending.

Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod have recently taken issue with Layard. It’s true, they argue, that there doesn’t appear to be much correlation between economic growth and happiness. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation with public spending, crime, greater sexual equality or rising life expectancy.

That people rapidly become accustomed to higher income is not the same as saying that they would be indifferent to having their car taken

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• Nasdaq, the US exchange, is seeking to sell up to half of its 31% stake in the London Stock Exchange to the German Deutsche Borse for more than $800m, according to City sources.

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• An influential Moscow regulator has alleged that some British-listed energy and mining companies were “cheating” investors by exaggerating their reserves.

The Kremlin has taken back Russian assets from UK companies, such as Shell and BP, which it believes were obtained too cheaply.

• Five airline executives have been named in a US class-action suit seeking damages over the fuel surcharge price-fixing for which British Airways has been fined. In US criminal proceedings, 10 BA staff are expected to be named as suspects by the department of justice: they could then be extradited to the US to face charges.

Low returns

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• City of London financial service sector bonuses have increased by 30% to a record £14bn this year. The rise is twice as big as in 2006, and comes against a background elsewhere in the UK economy of record personal debt, rising bankruptcies and home repossessions.

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away and being prevented from going abroad. Although the data suggests that we were happy back in the 1950s, it is hard to imagine that many people would want to live there.

Avner Offer, economic history professor at All Souls, Oxford, has a riposte to this. We have shifted from the purchase of labour-saving devices like washing machines to time-using devices such as iPods and DVD players.

These bring only momentary pleasure and then — egged on by advertising — we are on to the next thing.

Johns and Ormerod are suspicious of Offer, whose thought they say smacks of post-war planning when the man in Whitehall knew best, “undemocratic and unattractively paternalistic”.

Politicians have been quick to show awareness of the limitations of GDP as a measure of national wellbeing, but are far more cautious in curtailing individual freedom (as in the dilemma over whether to allow the expansion of air travel despite concern about climate change).

Cameron’s dilemma is whether

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to make marriage a big part of his agenda. Oswald’s extensive research has shown a strong link between wellbeing and wedlock. Because two can live almost as cheaply as one, it means higher real incomes; it is a source of emotional support — providing a buffer against stress and enhancing feelings of attachment; and married people tend to engage less in risky activities and more in healthy ones.

The evidence is that stable family life, being married, financial security, health, having religious faith and feelings of living in a cohesive community where people can be trusted all contribute to happiness.

There is a policy agenda in the making here, for while many on the left are attracted by the idea that money isn’t everything, they have a problem with remedies for unhappiness. As Johns and Ormerod note “increased support for marriage, reductions in incentives to single parents, and the promotion of religious faith . . . are not policy conclusions that most proponents of happiness research tend to emphasise”.

• Ford and General Motors have threatened to leave Detroit and take their car manufacturing operations overseas if unions do not agree to a massive pay cut for hourly paid workers.

• Profits at British companies are growing at their fastest pace in 13 years while wages of ordinary workers are rising at their slowest pace (3.6%) since 2002. The profit rise was widespread across different types of companies.

Foreign exchanges Sterling rates Australia Canada Denmark Euro Hong Kong Japan New Zealand Norway Singapore Sweden Switzerland USA

(at close) Aug 27 2.43 2.12 10.99 1.48 15.75 233.80 2.80 11.75 3.06 13.85 2.43 2.01

Aug 21 2.48 2.10 10.96 1.47 15.53 227.99 2.84 11.77 3.03 13.77 2.40 1.99

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 17

Comment&Debate

Gadget has turned the beach into the office Jonathan Freedland

They might make us feel indispensable, but Blackberries are bad for relationships, work and the soul

This is an ‘age of interruption’ of instant messages, email, spam. Who can think or write under such conditions?

I

ought to warn you. If you email me, I won’t reply. At least not immediately. That’s because, as you read these words, I shall be on holiday, as far away from my inbox as it’s possible to be. I shall be bucking a growing trend and travelling without a portable email device. The only blackberries I hope to see on my holiday are the kind you eat.

Among a certain demographic that makes me a rarity.

There are now an estimated 9 million BlackBerry users worldwide and the number in the UK is rising daily.

Gather together a group of professional or business folk and they’ll soon confess the depth of their addiction. Or you’ll see it for yourself, as they pull out the gadget at intervals to check it and check it again. Most of my contemporaries have packed a BlackBerry in their holiday bag, even if they insist they’ll only sneak the occasional peek.

But we’re mild junkies compared to the Crackberry heads of the US. A survey in July found that six in every 10 Americans with a portable email device check messages in bed, while 37% confessed to sending emails while driving. Most alarming, four in 10 keep their BlackBerrys close by while they sleep, so they can sense the vibration or see the little red light announcing the arrival of a new message. A similar number said they actually replied to email in the dead of night.

The depth of America’s addiction was confirmed in April when a technical glitch denied service to 5 million BlackBerry users, a sudden, collective plunge into cold turkey. Dependents reported reactions ranging from paranoia, feelings of isolation and severe longing — all classic symptoms of drug withdrawal. Some users speak of “phantom vibrations”, sensing an alert even when they’re apart from their BlackBerry — even, for heaven’s sake, when they’re in the shower.

I understand these addicts because, briefly, I was one of them. For a few months I became transfixed by the palm-sized device, my eye returning constantly to its top-right corner, to see if the red light was winking. If it was, the curiosity was unbearable. Sure, you knew it was bound to be spam or an office round-robin, but what if it was something else, something exciting. Just one click.

I once took it on holiday, making excuses to pop out and steal a glance. My wife hated it. Indeed, spousal loathing is a common, and cross-cultural, side-effect of BlackBerry addiction. At a recent Jewish-Muslim dialogue, a Muslim businessman told me his wife referred to the hated gizmo as his “mistress”, demanding he lock it in a drawer from Friday night until Sunday evening,

so badly had it disrupted their weekends. Eventually my BlackBerry hit technical trouble and, like an accidental hole knocked in a prison wall, that gave me my chance to escape. I’ve been clean for more than two years now.

And, like any reformed addict, I’ve come to see the full menace of the habit that once had me in its grip.

The first casualty is home life. The BlackBerry user is never really at home. He may be in the room, but his mind is at work. The temptation to check is too great, even if you’re meant to be cooking supper or bathing the kids. I know a father who eventually took his son to a counsellor for behavioural problems, only to be diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder — the deficit was in the amount of attention he was giving his son. Parents of the multi-tasking generation think we’re pulling off miracles, chatting to our children while firing off a quick response to Matt in Accounts — but the kids notice our distraction. And when you interrupt a conversation to glance down at a screen, adults notice it too.

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or, strangely enough, is portable email much good for your work. BlackBerrys encourage the instant, brief response, when often a longer, more considered answer is required. But once you’ve hit reply on the BlackBerry, thumbing out some holding message — “interesting, will get back to you” — the substantial response you should have written disappears over the horizon. More importantly, no one works well if they don’t switch off occasionally, if only — and here’s a metaphor the addicts should understand — to recharge their batteries.

Above all, these machines are bad for your soul. I came to that admittedly extreme conclusion on a recent night at the theatre. At the end of each scene, a double glow appeared from the row in front: a couple were checking their BlackBerrys. No matter what emotional depths were plumbed on stage, these two could not be reached. The gadget was a barrier to their hearts.

Users boast that once you have a BlackBerry no time is dead time. Ten minutes waiting for a train are no longer lost, but used to plough through the email backlog. I asked one Crackberry head how he would spend those minutes in the past, before he was hooked. “Watching the crowd go by,” he said, wistfully. Moments like that are never wasted; they can be a rare chance to step off the hamster wheel and see the world.

Those are also the moments, I suspect, when an idea comes, when inspiration strikes. Yet now we are living in what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls the “age of interruption”, in which we “interrupt each other or ourselves with instant messages, email, spam or cellphone rings. Who can think or write or innovate under such conditions?”

“Ah, but my BlackBerry is actually liberating,” says the addict. “It allows me to reduce the mountain of work waiting for me at the office.” Except notice how there’s still plenty for them to do when they get there; if anything, the mountain only seems to get bigger.

A more truthful explanation is that the BlackBerry began as a status symbol. The device suggests indispensability and this is the sensation that hooks the user. Of course I have to be contactable: people need me!

The line you almost never hear is “my employer makes me carry this thing”. The truth is, we’re doing it to ourselves and this is surely the BlackBerry’s most pernicious feature. A whole cohort of workers are turning themselves into virtual slaves. Their work now intrudes into their bathrooms, their bedrooms, even their sleep.

The mobile device was sold as a form of liberation: now your office can be the beach. The trouble is, it’s turned the beach into the office.

Paid time off work was a right that had to be fought for and won. Yet now we are giving it away voluntarily, seduced by a neat, shiny little gadget. Disagree? I’ll get back to you, when my holiday is over.

18 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Comment&Debate

Neoliberals stole the wealth of nations George Monbiot

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

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or the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product.

Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one that collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society’s founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, suited the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human

beings from the slavery of the state — minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions — just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

So the question is this: given that the crises I have listed are predictable effects of the dismantling of public services and the deregulation of markets, given that it damages the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to dominate public life?

Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that “we are all Keynesians now”. Even the Republicans supported the interventionist doctrines of John Maynard Keynes. But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher kept telling us that “there is no alternative”, and by implementing her programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and the other leaders of what were once progressive parties appear to prove her right.

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Daniel Pudles

The conditions that it demands just happen to make the elite even richer, while leaving the rest of us to sink or swim

he first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations — Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others — have poured hundreds of millions into setting up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking. The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project. Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language that would mask the real intent of the programme — restoring the power of the elite — and package it as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.

Their project was assisted by ideas that arose in a very different quarter. The revolutionary movements of 1968 also sought greater individual liberties, and many of the soixante-huitards saw the state as their oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted their language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I know still voice notions almost identical to those of the neoliberals: the intent is different, but the consequences very similar.

Hayek’s disciples were also able to make use of economic crises. The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in Chile following Pinochet’s coup, with the backing of the US government and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand the same policies.

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those ideas that threaten their interests are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations’ tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language. Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats.

These terms, all promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 19

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Why has Towton been forgotten?

Martin Kettle

Today’s mindless killings show that something of our historic day of wrath still lives within us

F

or some years I had a New Yorker cartoon taped to my fridge door. In the cartoon a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman are conversing at a cocktail party.

The woman is asking: “One question. If this is the information age, how come nobody knows anything?”

A group of us, all intelligent, well-educated and middle-aged, were sitting around the table just the other day when I mentioned a fact I am always surprised is so little-known. And guess what? None of the rest of the group knew anything about it either. This week I asked a few colleagues at random what this thing meant to them.

Once again, I drew a blank.

So here is my question. What does the word Towton mean to you? If you have the answer, as lots of you will, I’m glad, because you should. Yet if you don’t, you are in very good company.

And here is the answer. Towton is a village about 16km southwest of York. It owes what fame it has to the fact that it was once the scene of a battle. But this was not just any battle. At the battle of Towton, more English people were killed than on any other day ever.

It is often said that the bloodiest day in our history was July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when 19,200 soldiers went over the top and were mown down by German guns. As a result, the Somme has become synonymous with the frightful, mindless slaughter of a whole generation of young British men. It traumatised the survivors so much that they barely spoke of it.

But it hangs over our country still, nearly a century later.

Merely to think of it can make one weep.

Yet Towton was bloodier than the Somme. When night fell on March 29, 1461 — it was Palm Sunday, and much of the battle took place in a snowstorm — the Yorkist and Lancastrian dead numbered more than 20,000.

It should be said that the figures are much disputed and rise to as many as 28,000 in some accounts, and there were countless wounded besides.

Now remember two other things while you absorb that. First, that while the population of Britain in 1916 was more than 40 million, that of England in 1461 was

considerably less than 4 million, so the proportionate impact on the country must have been seismic. One in every hundred Englishmen died at Towton. Its impact must have been a bit like an English Hiroshima.

And, second, that — this being 1461 — not a shot was fired. This was not industrial killing from a distance.

Every Englishman who died at Towton was pierced by arrows, stabbed, bludgeoned or crushed by another Englishman. As a scene of hand-to-hand human brutality on a mass scale, Towton has absolutely no equal in our history. It was our very own day of wrath.

Towton is not a secret. It is in the books and on the maps. If you visit, there is a memorial. If you study the Wars of the Roses, you learn it was a decisive Yorkist victory. If you go online you can discover some of the detective work done by the University of Bradford on mutilated skeletons exhumed from some of Towton’s mass graves. And if you go to a performance of Henry VI Part 3, you will see that the national poet himself set potent scenes at Towton, where, in the thick of battle, a father finds he has killed his son and a son that he has killed his father, and where the watching and hapless Lancastrian king wishes himself among the dead — “For what is in this world but grief and woe?”

Towton undoubtedly meant something to Shakespeare and his audiences. He uses it to warn against the great fear of all Tudors, the catastrophe of civil strife. We have no fear of civil war today. Such things belong to the past. And yet . . . might something other than the fact that it all happened a long time ago partly explain our expunging of Towton from the national memory?

Perhaps Towton is simply too brutal, too senseless and thus too traumatic to acknowledge today. I wonder whether Towton denial is even something we inherit in our DNA, an experience we do not want to confront because its slaughter does not fit with our national selfesteem and enduring need for meaning and optimism.

Yet when I think about the mindless killings of our own times, whether in the streets of Liverpool or in the bombing of distant cities and villages, it seems clear that something of the savage spirit of Towton still lives on within us, even today — and that we should know about it.

20 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

theguardianweekly Turkey

September 5, 1916

Islam and democracy Barring some unforeseen event, Abdullah Gul, a devout Muslim who once flirted with Islamism, will become the president of Turkey this week. In a parliamentary vote last Monday he failed to win the prescribed two-thirds majority, but he will almost certainly secure victory in a later ballot where only a simple majority is required.

Mr Gul, who is currently foreign minister, was first nominated for the presidency back in April by the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). The army — which regards itself as the guardian of Ataturk’s secular revolution and suspects Mr Gul of still harbouring an Islamist agenda — objected.

Undaunted by the military, Erdogan called an early general election in July, which his party won handsomely.

In anticipation of becoming president, Mr Gul has made some reassuring noises and even called in an Austrian couturier, whose clothes have adorned Catherine Zeta-Jones, to redesign his wife’s politically charged Islamic headscarves. The military, if it is wise, will let parliamentary events take their course. The army has toppled four Turkish governments during the past 50 years, and to do so again would be bad for the military itself (since the AKP has a clear mandate), bad for Turkey and,

indeed, bad for the rest of the Muslim world.

Despite the AKP’s core of religious support, it has behaved in power with remarkable pragmatism, pursuing economic and political reforms that should pave the way for eventual EU membership. Tellingly the party’s victory was greeted by record prices on the Turkish stock market. Secularists and the military fear a hidden agenda, but the Turkish brand of secularism has its unattractive side too, associated as it is with the wealthy elite and politics that at times can be far from progressive.

Beyond party politics there are certainly religious tussles taking place in Turkey, such as the attempt by municipal officials to ban posters advertising skimpy swimsuits from the streets of Istanbul earlier this year. Turkey has also become the main propagation centre (with encouragement from Christian fundamentalists) for an Islamic version of creationism. But, according to one study, only 9% of Turks want an Islamic state.

From a European liberal perspective, some of this is worrying, but in parts of the Middle East — among reformers in Egypt, for example — it is often seen as a model. If Islam and democracy can be proved compatible in Turkey, why not elsewhere? Mr Gul’s coming presidency, and the army’s response to it, will make waves far beyond the Bosphorus.

France

Sarkozy’s test Some predicted riots when Nicolas Sarkozy moved into the Elysée Palace. They were wrong. France’s president has just marked the hundredth day of a hyperactive presidency. By luring Socialists into his cabinet he blind-sided the opposition and then picked up a majority in parliamentary elections. Tax on overtime was abolished. His wife Cecilia flew to Libya to secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses jailed on trumped-up charges — a publicity coup marred only by the discovery that France had agreed to sell anti-tank missiles to Muammar Gadafy. Soon Mr Sarkozy was signalling France’s willingness to act in Darfur and eating burgers with a genial George Bush.

But the honeymoon is coming to an end. Mr Sarkozy returned from his US holiday last Monday to find his approval rating had fallen to 61%.

As France heads back to work he faces formidable obstacles. The first is the state of the economy. The success of his income-tax cut depends on a growing economy with demand for overtime, and his attempt to give another tax break to homeowners burdened with large mortgages has just been ruled unconstitutional.

Mr Sarkozy is undaunted. But his plans to reform France’s lamentable university system

have already been watered down and from 2008 one in three vacancies in the civil service will go unfilled; it was to have been one in two.

As a result, France’s budget deficit is forecast to worsen. Tough negotiations with the unions over pensions and health insurance await the president in the autumn.

Flaws in the president’s character were laid bare last week with the publication of a book by a playwright who shadowed him during the presidential campaign. Mr Sarkozy emerges as a vain and often impatient man with utter faith in his own judgment. Others see an authoritarian streak. Confronted with the news that a paedophile who allegedly raped a five-year-old after his release from jail had been prescribed Viagra by a prison doctor, the president proposed chemical castration, saying that paedophiles deemed dangerous would be confined to secure hospitals.

For all his energy, Mr Sarkozy has not yet convinced the French of the wisdom of his reforms. If Socialist politicians can resist the temptation to blame each other, they will find plenty to criticise. The president is still confident that he can bamboozle what remains of France’s opposition.

Clogs as works of fashionable art The strong prejudice shown by even the poorest Londoners against clogs — which the high price of leather is said to be weakening — would have seemed ridiculous in the 18th century when clogs were worn by women of all classes.

The more refined variety had a thin wooden sole, which was cut transversely in two pieces, attached to each other by a hinge. Anne Bracegirdle, the most beautiful actress of her time, wore clogs. Horace Walpole notes in one of his letters that “Mrs. Bracegirdle breakfasted with me this morning. As she went out and wanted her clogs she turned to me and said, ‘I remember at the playhouse, they used to call for Mrs Oldfield’s chair, Mrs. Barry’s clogs, and Mrs. Bracegirdle’s pattens.’”

Pattens consisted of a wooden sole with a large iron ring attached to the bottom for the purpose of raising the wearer above the wet and mud.

They were fastened round the instep, and made a greater clatter than clogs. Many churches used to exhibit notices requesting worshippers to leave their pattens in the porch so as to avoid disturbing the congregation.

Now clogs are worn in at least one Lancashire town merely for work (writes a correspondent), and as soon as that is ended the workers put on their “everyday” boots as distinguished from “Sunday” boots. There are the conservative exceptions who still retain clogs for evening use, but even they have been influenced so far as to have a change, the working pair giving way to a lighter make.

These latter are often works of art. The heel is high and comparatively slender, and the sole is thin, deeply curved, and finishes with a sharply pointed, upturned toe. A rim of highly-polished brass nails fastening the uppers to the soles stands in bold contrast to the equally highly-polished black leather, upon which various designs are traced.

Further ornamentation is sometimes achieved by numerous lace-holes edged with brass and bored in a triangular group with the base lying on the instep, one pair I have seen having no fewer than 56 lace holes.

Corrections and Clarifications

• The Letter From Kenya in last week’s edition (August 24) was missing its byline. It was written by Michael Schwandt.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 21

Reply

119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, United Kingdom. email: weekly.letters@guardian.co.uk

After reading Jonathan Steele’s article on the current state of affairs in Iraq, I felt I should copy it and hand it out to almost every American I know (Third of Iraqis need humanitarian aid, August 3).

The utter lack of concern here for Iraqi civilians is mind-boggling, the attitude being that they are Islamic savages and have to sort themselves out. And now that they have decided that the war was a bad thing, those Americans who were so gung-ho for George Bush’s illegal war are extremely vocal in wanting to bring the troops home — a bit late, chaps.

About the only sensible comment Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, ever made during his sorry participation in this mess was something to the effect that if we break Iraq, then we will have to fix it. How horribly badly broken the country is.

So many Americans I know are completely ignorant of daily life in Iraq since we “liberated” the country, and, worse, couldn’t care. When I remember the Republicans clamouring to impeach Bill Clinton for his sexual peccadilloes, I do wonder what fate should lie in store for Bush (and Tony Blair) given the blood on their hands and the almost total breakdown of anything resembling normal life in Iraq.

Maggie Coombs Las Cruces, New Mexico, US

Cheney’s reign is not news It’s deeply frustrating to see a leading world newspaper asking at this point whether Dick Cheney and his cronies have really been the ones running the current US presidency — as if it were news (Who runs the White House? August 3). We were many who knew it long ago, in the winter of 2003 when we were crying out desperately in the streets for the impending war to be stopped.

The policies of the Bush administration don’t correspond to the character of the improbable president we elected — a nice guy who, in his first term at least, knew little about the world, and was intellectually scarcely capable of devising plans for the US domination of the Middle East and its resources, for instance.

The foreign policy imposed on our secretary of state and our allies has been that of power-hungry, devious and hard-hearted officials who didn’t care about consequences, or about public opinion except as they could manipulate it. How could any thoughtful person believe that the US was actually going to attack an Islamic Arab country instead of listening to the weapons inspectors?

Those behind it had to be insulated somehow from the real world, and so the vice-president was

Matt Kenyon

Blood on their hands

— hidden behind the persona of the president.

The US bears the main responsibility for the war, of course. But Europeans, with a more profound sense of history than Americans, ought to have recognised this power constellation more readily, so that the media could describe it much sooner. This administration was, then at least, close to being a regency.

Isabel Best Belmont, Massachusetts, US

Don’t forget Vietnam The only surprising thing about the conduct of America’s war in Afghanistan is the shortness of collective memory about what might be expected from the leadership and conduct of US troops since the second world war (British officer wants US out of Afghan zone; Exhaustion cripples the US army, August 17). Many of the elements that were present in Vietnam are here again 40 years later.

Recruitment from the poor, the black and the brown in American society leads to the deployment of unskilled, undisciplined, gun-happy units. This is then made worse by the large-scale departure of potential leaders and officers from military careers, as is the case with the reported shortage of 3,000 commissioned officers. Add to that the over-reliance on air support and indiscriminate bombing, as the Anzac troops in the Mekong found to their own cost, and as British and other troops and Afghan civilians are finding now.

Then there is the destabilisation of civilian government by a combination of fawning support and too much largesse for those local leaders who speak English with American accents and look good on US television. And, of course, there is the complete misunderstanding of how to stabilise a traumatised society through the use of local leaders with real support amongst the population, however ugly they may look on Fox News.

And, finally, there is the inhuman treatment and massacre of civilians

We do not publish letters where only an email address is supplied: please include a full postal address and a reference to

the article. If you do not want your email address published please say so. We may edit letters.

(does no one remember My Lai?) The “unnamed British officers” were right: get the Americans out of the zones where British troops are operating. Above all, do not rely on the US army or air force for air support. Then there is a chance of stabilisation and progress. Without a radical change, the only way is increasing chaos, leading ultimately to ignominious withdrawal. This time it might be RAF helicopters from the British embassy roof.

Paul Hampton Espelette, France

doned the atomic theory in everything but name. In that theory an atom is indivisible, not (as in our modern theory) a complex of parts each of which in turn is further divisible, and all ultimately convertible to energy. So in this respect as well, Galileo was wrong.

Third, Callow’s moral is shallow.

Theocracies may be undesirable, but the more fundamental question raised by the Galileo case concerns the justifiability of political authority — religious or otherwise — over scientific research. That question is much harder to answer — such authority seems justified in some cases, not in others — and so it misses the most relevant point (for us) to treat that whole sad affair as nothing but the fruit of theocratic prejudice.

Finally, Callow remarks that the Catholic Church “remains unrepentant” about the whole affair. This is a strange way to sum up the previous pope’s apology for his Church’s treatment of Galileo.

Stephen Buckle Sydney, Australia

Exporting ideas In quoting material from a recent UN report, Pui-Guan Man and Angela Balakrishnan make some excellent points about the relationship between the “brain drain” and longterm growth in developing countries (The best migrate, the rest suffer, August 3). They finish with a glowing report of how the value of Ugandan fish exports more than tripled from 1997 to 2003 as a result of scientifically based business education and new facilities.

But does this example really represent a boon to the exporting country? Is the 2003 export rate sustainable for the long term, and are poorer Ugandans still able to buy fish? Without further information, it is not clear to me that fish export is greatly different from the “low value-added commodity production” deplored in the quoted Unctad study. Perhaps the quoted dollar values are misleading in relation to product volumes.

Charles R Neill Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Prejudice against Galileo Simon Callow’s review of Michael White’s book on Galileo accepts, like White himself, the standard view of Galileo: that he held out for scientific truth against oppressive religious authority, and so shows “the horrors of theocracy” (Silencing a voice of scientific reason, August 17).

This view is a mixture of the dubitable and the shallow. In the first place, the “truths” for which he was persecuted — the two mentioned are that the Earth moves, and the atomic theory of matter — have, in the sense they were meant, both been abandoned by modern science.

First, Einstein’s theory of relativity holds that motion is relative to a frame of reference. There is no absolute rest or absolute motion.

So there is no single right answer to the question: does the Earth move?

So, Galileo’s insistence that it does move turns out to have been just as wrong as the Catholic Church’s antimovement view.

Second, modern science has aban-

Briefly • Surely even the much-loved Nancy Banks-Smith would not have dared pen such a sentence as was written about Idi Amin’s former wife: “Sarah, nicknamed ‘Suicide Sarah’ after her time as a go-go dancer in the Ugandan Army’s Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band” (August 10). You’re not going to just leave us there are you?

Gavin Thomson Ringwood, Hampshire, UK • Richard Ingrams’ claim that Bill Deedes never published his memoirs seems as fanciful as Hillary Clinton having a love affair with an alien possessing a foot-long tongue (August 24.) Thanks to Guardian Books I have the Deedes tome on my shelf.

I know nothing of Hillary’s love life, yet have personally bought a burger from Elvis in Kalamazoo.

Dave Robinson Gladesville, NSW, Australia • My concern with a universal DNA bank is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(August 10). An innocent suspect can easily be framed by a corrupt policeman dropping the innocent’s DNA at the scene of the crime.

Basil Johnson Weston, ACT, Australia • Congratulations on your headline of the year: Crackdown on reincarnation (August 17). Wonderful. What will the intrepid subeditor go for next: Ghosts held in dawn swoop, or Emperor’s new clothes, special offer?

Leaf Fielding Vieuzos, France

22 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Comment&Debate

Tristram Hunt

Liverpool’s new slavery museum embodies an approach to the past that moves beyond the tired reparations debate

F

rom the Pier Head to St George’s Hall via Jamaica Street, slavery is etched into the very fabric of Liverpool. At its peak the city controlled 80% of the British slave trade, dispatching thousands of ships across the Atlantic and murdering tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Last week Liverpool confronted this past by opening the world’s first International Slavery Museum. It is a fitting tribute to this year’s highly successful reflection on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Eighteen months ago I suggested we needed to be “easy on the euphoria” in marking 1807. On the one hand the ending of the slave trade was a proud moment in British history: the product of moral bravery, a mobilised civil society and an evangelical mindset. On the other, too many institutions were tainted with its blood (from the Church of England to the royal family), slavery continued in British colonies until the mid-1830s, and racist ideologies only intensified during the 19th century.

There was a balance in the historical ledger to be struck between the heroism of Wilberforce and Georgian society’s sanction of the triangle trade. Across our museums, galleries and even the houses of parliament, that equivocation has been evident in numerous pioneering exhibits. The Uncomfortable Truths installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum was an excellent example of a cultural institution investigating the legacy of slavery in its own collections. In Bristol and London, museums have looked at their city’s economic development on the back of slavery. Just as importantly, in its Cotton Threads exhibition, Bury Art Gallery and Museum has used the records of the local Hutchinson family to explore the vital connection of the northwest textile industry to slavery. And, at last, the African voice has started to be heard. Rightly, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is focusing on Olaudah Equiano and how he turned the West Midlands into a centre of anti-slavery activism, paving the way for other black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington and Amanda Smith.

Equally encouraging has been the involvement of the Historic Houses Association. From William Blathwayt’s Dyrham Park to Edwin Lascelles’s Harewood House, blood money from ships, slaves and plantations was laundered through England’s most sumptuous country seats. And now their modern custodians have sought to explore their historic origins within a global nexus of slavery. Tissington Hall in Derbyshire has hosted Bittersweet, an exhibition looking at West Indian plantation life and the funnelling of profits into the FitzHerbert family. Kenwood House in London has focused on the tale of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and his African great niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle.

This progressive, rigorous approach to the past has led the debate away from the dead end of apologies and guilt.

While the media has obsessed about the wording of the government’s “expression of regret”, community groups and educational workers have got on with explaining the history and its meanings. There now seems a far greater concern with addressing modern-day slavery and trafficking than the tired old reparations argument.

G Helen Wakefield

A bold step away from guilt and apology

iven that Liverpool boasts one of the oldest black communities in Britain, it is right the conversation culminates in Merseyside. The city once laid claim to the largest fleet of slave ships in the history of the trade as its merchants overtook Bristol and London in dominating the Middle Passage. About 5,000 ships sailed from the city in the 18th century and the multi-storeyed merchants’ houses of Bold Street testified to the healthy returns. The frieze of the town hall, with its exotic, “African” iconography of elephants, lions and slaves, embodied the city’s official sanction of slavery. Notoriously, Liverpool voted out the abolitionist MP William Roscoe and supported the slaveowning south during the American civil war.

Today elements of that racist bequest live on. The murder of black teenager Anthony Walker and the unwelcome appearance of the BNP have revealed the danger. And inner-city communities are struggling this summer with a noxious cocktail of guns, gangs and joblessness. Which is why the museum’s commitment to challenging the legacies of slavery is so important.

The commemoration’s payoff should not come in the form of shiny buildings and curatorial posts but in new audiences and appreciations of the past. In contrast to other former slave-trading European nations we are a long way down that road. But the heritage sector needs to be more ambitious, to think globally and develop stronger connections in the Caribbean and west Africa.

Ultimately, all the 1807 activities should echo the horribly prophetic words of the former slave William Prescott.

“They will remember that we were sold but they won’t remember that we were strong. They will remember that we were bought, but not that we were brave.” Hopefully, Liverpool represents a further step in proving him wrong.

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𰁘𰁆𰁆𰁌𰁍𰀁𰁚 𰀁 𰁓𰁆𰁗𰁊𰁆𰁘𰀁 Food miles fury African farmers fear ruin if they lose organic status International Development, page 42 ≥

The water margin Tanzania was happy to have a British-led consortium to run the privatised water system in its capital. Then the prices went up and up. By Xan Rice

T

hree Britons were detained by the police in Tanzania on June 1, 2005.

Cliff Stone, Michael Livermore and Roger Harrington were the senior managers at City Water, a consortium responsible for managing Dar es Salaam’s water supply. They were served with notices describing them as “undesirable immigrants”, told to leave the country and escorted on to a plane bound for London.

Their departure was the end of a World Bank privatisation deal trumpeted as a modern solution to public water supply in an underdeveloped country. And it was the beginning of a legal action that has proved controversial as Biwater plc, which is owned

by Adrian White, an ex-BBC governor, and which led the consortium, pitted itself against the government of a poor country.

The story of water in most cities in the developing world is that the poor pay most because they have to

resort to vendors who peddle it around the streets.

But in Dar es Salaam it is not only the poor. Decades of neglect and underinvestment in the infrastructure mean that fewer than 100,000 households — in a city of 3.5 million people — have running water.

Take Tabata, a low- to middle-income suburb whose houses of brick and concrete are set along beach-sand roads: most have electricity, few have water. Sitting outside her house, Janet Gilliad, 25, talks about her job: fetching water for the family — her month-old son, her husband, who works as a builder, and her sister. She must find, every day, 120 litres for drinking, cooking and washing.

If she is lucky — two or three times a week — a neighbour’s tap will have water. Along with dozens of others, she will fill six 20-litre buckets at a cost of half a cent each. If the tap is dry, she must buy from the pushcart men who pull wagons piled with plastic jerry cans through the streets. They charge between six cents and 90 cents for 20 litres. “It’s expensive

for us,” Gilliad says. “But what can we do? We need water to live.”

Plans to improve the system began more than a decade ago, when the government was trying to rebuild the economy after former president Julius Nyerere’s failed experiment in socialism. Many of the nearly 400 state-controlled organisations and services were put up for sale. Leading the privatisation was the World Bank. Britain, which pumps in more aid to Tanzania — $200m this year — than to any other sub-Saharan country, provided the background. The Department for International Development gave a $888,000 contract to Adam Smith International, a British free-market consultancy, mainly to do public-relations work for the project.

The conflicting motives of foreign companies, which want to maximise profit, and governments, which seek — in theory at least — to improve access to water for people with limited means, means that so far there have been few Continued on page 24≥

24 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Weekly review ≤Continued from page 23 privatisation success stories. Still, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had little doubt that it was the best way forward for the Dar es Salaam Water and Sewage Authority (Dawasa). They made the privatisation of its assets a condition for Tanzania receiving massive debt relief. When no buyer emerged, the bank removed its demand that the assets be sold. But it made clear that a $143.5m loan for upgrading the city’s water infrastructure would be forthcoming only if a private company operated the system.

Three firms expressed interest. Two were from France, the third from the City Water consortium.

Led by Biwater, the consortium’s other partners were a German engineering firm, Gauff, and the Tanzanian Superdoll Trailer Manufacturing Company.

Biwater had made its name and helped earn White a fortune during Margaret Thatcher’s push for privatisation in Britain. It had a decent reputation for building and running water treatment plants, but had never taken charge of such a huge operation before. When the French companies declined to submit a final tender, Biwater’s consortium won. “City Water submitted its bid at a rock-bottom price,” says a British water consultant. He believes it was unaware that it was the only bidder. Even if it performed well, making money would be a challenge.

The fundamentals of the deal were that Dawasa would still own the infrastructure, while City Water would operate the system, billing, collecting revenue, making new connections, and doing routine maintenance. City Water had to invest a modest $8.5m — mainly in removable assets such as computers — during the 10-year contract; and it had a six-year tax holiday.

On August 1, 2003, City Water took charge, and started haemorrhaging money. Not only was it unable to meet revenue collection targets agreed in the contract — crucial if it was to make a profit — it was collecting less money than its state-run predecessor. But people saw their water bills rising. City Water repeatedly complained to the water ministry that its bid was based on flawed information supplied by Dawasa. According to a World Bank report, City Water stopped paying its monthly fee for leasing Dawasa’s piping and other infrastructure in July 2004, less than a year into the contract. The company also insisted that its operating fee be raised.

Asked by Dawasa to assess if this was justified, auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers and the British engineering consultants Howard Humphreys rejected City Water’s arguments. (Biwater blames Dawasa, saying that it had “barely started” big capital-works projects on which rehabilitation of the system depended.) Other reports were also critical of City Water. A study commissioned by the German Development Cooperation concluded: “It is clear that City Water performed badly.”

World Bank investigations showed that members of its technical team had reservations about the City Water offer from the outset. The team felt that Biwater’s record in operating smaller versions of lease contracts in South Africa, Mexico and Britain was patchy and it had put forward an inexperienced team to lead the operation. These and other concerns had led the team to ask their water experts at head office to review the project’s design.

But the World Bank’s quality assurance group in Washington awarded the project a “highly satisfactory” ranking — the top score. As Biwater said later in a statement to the Guardian: “The World Bank approved [City Water’s] bid after an exhaustive financial and technical assessment process lasting several months.” Biwater pointed out it operated dozens of contracts in South America, Asia, Britain and Africa, with “some outstanding results” in the

Women’s work . . . one family (previous page) must haul the household’s daily water supply, while Janet Gilliad (above) must buy it in the dry suburbs of Dar es Salaam Gideon Mendel/Xan Rice

South African city of Nelspruit. Several members of its Tanzania team had spent more than a decade in management positions in Africa.

Privatisation contracts are a business arrangement, and City Water’s was no different. Separate from the agreed capital spending, its one social obligation was to contribute towards a fund “to be used to connect new, mostly poor, households to the piped system”, according to Maj Fiil, who followed operations as a director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental organisation based in Washington.

“It was never created.”

There were changes in senior management in Dar

es Salaam, but the company’s problems proliferated.

Superdoll refused to put in more equity without a bigger say in management. Local staff were unhappy.

Mathias Mulagwanda, an engineer hired along with 1,300 other employees, says: “The chiefs were all whites. There was a distance between them and us, and they did not want to listen to our ideas. There was no teamwork and we did not really know what was going on.”

Biwater’s argument was that the core problem was the low operator tariff — its source of revenue. White twice flew to Dar es Salaam with his chief executive to try to renegotiate the contract, putting the case that the tariff was proving unfair to the company.

The public mood was worsening. Few people had seen any benefits from privatisation. By agreement between Biwater and the government, prices had risen sharply, yet there had been no discernible improvement in supply, reliability and quality. With an election looming, the government was under pressure to act. In a final attempt to save the deal, it appointed Tony Ballance, of the British water regulator Ofwat, to mediate. Various proposals were put forward, but none was acceptable to both sides.

Tanzania’s government had had enough. On May 13, 2005, it decided to cancel the contract.

Many aid and development agencies and water experts believe that the government had done little wrong up to this point. “If I was them, I would have given City Water one month’s notice and then kicked them out,” says the British consultant who

had observed the bid process. But the government, and the then-water minister, Edward Lowassa (who has since become prime minister), chose a more dramatic method. They announced the cancellation at a televised press conference, giving the case a political hue, before making an expensive decision: forcing the three men on to a plane.

Within weeks, a Biwater advertisement critical of the Tanzanian government appeared in several African publications. “When aid flows through political pipes, it sometime leaks,” it said. The company followed this by lodging its case at a little-known affiliate of the World Bank, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, which sits in The Hague and other global centres. Biwater asked the tribunal’s three arbitrators to rule that Tanzania should pay it between $20m-$25m for actions amounting to expropriation of its investment, assets and revenues.

Biwater said “we have been left with no choice”, adding later that “if a signal goes out that governments are free to expropriate foreign investments with impunity” then potential investors would think twice, an outcome that would “deal a massive blow to the development goals of Tanzania and other countries in Africa”.

Lawyers for Tanzania’s government, whose

‘It’s expensive for us.

But what can we do?

We need water to live’ — Janet Gilliad

participation in a tribunal process is among the terms of a bilateral investment treaty signed with Britain in 1994, argue that Biwater failed in its contractual obligations. If the government was to meet its citizens’ need for safe water, it had no choice but to terminate the arrangement just 22 months into what was meant to be a 10-year contract.

Despite the secrecy of proceedings — the tribunal is closed to the public, and Biwater sought and was granted a ruling that both parties refrain from speaking publicly to the media during the hearing that began in The Hague this April — interested parties will be closely monitoring the outcome after proceedings wrapped up in July.

The World Bank faces the possibility of seeing the country penalised in a tribunal of the bank’s creation.

A bank spokesman declined to comment, but says that a consultant had recently been appointed to review the affair: “It is important for us to learn from what went wrong.” And if the tribunal rules against Tanzania, then Britain could end up funding any payout. Future participation in privatisation deals by other water and utility companies also stand to be influenced by the decision. Aid and development campaigners see the case as an example of global corporations trampling over the interests of the developing world.

A decade ago, it would have been unusual for a company to launch a formal claim against a foreign government. What has changed that is the explosion in the number of bilateral investment treaties.

These are signed between states to give commercial companies certain guarantees when they invest overseas. Included is the right of companies to lodge claims against governments at the settlements tribunal. According to a report by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, and Food and Water Watch, there are more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties, compared to 385 in 1989. And of the 255 investor-state lawsuits filed under these treaties, more than two-thirds have been lodged in the past four years.

The report’s breakdown of cases brought to the tribunal also shows that most claims filed since 2002 have been aimed at the governments of developing countries and that more than two-thirds of cases have ended with a government paying compensation. Argentina is facing 32 actions from foreign companies seeking recompense for the effects of emergency measures imposed during the economic crisis of 2001-02. Only 1% of current claims are aimed at the G8 group of leading industrialised nations.

Some aid and development groups say the investment treaties diminish a country’s sovereignty, and criticise the closed-door tribunal. There is no right of appeal. The Biwater case has outraged such groups. In May, Bolivia gave notice to the World Bank that it would be withdrawing from the tribunal and cited the high costs of defending cases brought by companies. Venezuela has hinted that it may do the same. Whether withdrawal makes a country immune from such lawsuits is uncertain.

Since City Water’s contract was ended, Dar es Salaam’s supply has been managed by Alex Kaaya, based in an office on the airport road. He seems oddly optimistic. Revenue collection is up by 40%, and costs have been cut, he claims. A new billing system is in place. He says he expects improvements to come as a product of privatisation, which he supported when he was working at the water ministry.

The total amount of money collected from customers in 2006 was $13.6m, Kaaya calculates. If the Hague tribunal upholds Biwater’s claim, the government’s payout will absorb the equivalent of two years’ of water payments by the people of Dar es Salaam.

My two cents

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 25

Fruit rage: a very American indulgence George Saunders

R

ecently a friend sent me a YouTube link to a video of him blowing up a watermelon with a firecracker.

This was, it turns out, far from the only video of an American blowing up fruit. In fact, YouTube is rife with videos of Americans blowing up fruit. Google it, you’ll see: lemons, bananas, kiwi. Basically, if it’s fruit, we Americans are blowing it up.

The preferred technique is: jam firecracker into fruit, light, stand back, laugh upon explosion, as if no one but you could be so cunning.

Americans can also be seen blowing up canned food which, it turns out, can be exploded by putting it in a campfire.

Other food — a nasty-looking rice dish, for example — can be exploded via overheating in a microwave, while The Exploder’s mother complains in the background that the dish should be covered.

This is funny. The Exploder’s mother thinks The Exploder is heating up the food to eat it! While The Exploder knows (as do we) she is just blowing it up to film it and put it on YouTube.

Why are Americans so inclined to blow up their food? I think it’s because we’re so fat. The human body is being pushed into new territory, fatwise, by us, as if we are enacting a bold experiment with the skeleton to see how much it will hold before it snaps. Ergo, subconsciously, we are angry at our food.

But there’s a flaw in my theory. If it is correct, shouldn’t we be blowing up those foods most responsible for our fatness? Potato chips? McDonald’s burgers, high-fructose-containing snack foods loaded with artificial colours?

But no, I can’t find a single video of an American blowing up any of these.

Mostly we are just blowing up our fruit.

Actually, this makes perverse sense.

Perhaps we feel threatened by fruit.

Fruit, we feel, is smug. Fruit just sits there, quietly passing judgment on the pleasure-giving arrivals in the Food Kingdom, such as Doritos CherryBlast, Sweet-’n’-Sassy-Tropical Lard Rinds, Burger King’s Chicken/Pig Combo Crowns. Americans are a tolerant people, but we will not tolerate intolerance.

And we feel our fruit is intolerant of other food. Ergo, we are disciplining our fruit for intimidating us. If I’m right, we should soon see a rash of YouTube videos of Americans exploding other things by which we feel intimidated.

Works of literature, say; articulate, honest politicians; decent TV; pacifists.

26 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Weekly review

Home is a cubicle in an internet cafe Philippe Pons in Tokyo meets the reluctant young dropouts of Japan’s revived economy

A

favourite haunt of young Japanese is round-the-clock internet cafes, with their snug atmosphere, DVD and manga libraries and comfy armchairs separated by waist-high partitions and vending machines.

Most customers come to surf the web, kill time, watch television or rest in the half-light where they can escape the noise of busy Tokyo.

But some actually live there — the cafes are their bolt-holes: they are internet refugees, people between 20 and 30 who drift from one badly paid job to another and cannot afford a flat or a room. In the suburbs of Tokyo they can spend six hours in an internet cafe for $13. Larger establishments can offer about 100 cubicles.

It is after midnight. A youngish man is standing in front of the hot drinks dispenser waiting for his plastic cup to fill. He has a crew-cut, jeans, a T-shirt: he is cool, just like the thousands of other young Japanese in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.

“Looking for an example of the new poor?” he asks. “You’ve got it in one. I’m 30. I’ve drifted in and out of some 20 or so jobs. For the past three months, I’ve been living here with a small bag and disposable underwear. I’m a one-call worker, registered with an employment agency that calls me on my mobile when a job comes up. I earn about $8.75 an hour. It costs me about $13 to spend the night here. I eat at McDonald’s. Pretty humiliating.

“The government talks about giving losers like me a second chance. But I’m fed up. It’s not worth praying for a stroke of luck. I just want a decent life.

My name? I’m a nobody in this society.”

He picks up his cup and goes off to his cubicle.

Internet cafes are a microcosm of contemporary Japanese society, which is superficially prosperous, well-oiled and efficient, but has invisible strands of malaise and dysfunctionality. In internet cafes in the liveliest parts of town, reception is on a par with that of a hotel. The atmosphere is hushed and many services are available. The young misfits melt into the crowd since there is nothing in their appearance to distinguish them.

After a decade of recession, Japan’s production machine is back in action, but it has left many young people by the wayside. They are freeters, thought to be a combination of the English “free” and the German “arbeiter” (worker), meaning people who go from one short-term job to another, without prospects.

After growing up in the Japan that thrived in the financial bubble of the late 80s, freeters arrived on the job market at the end of the subsequent recession, when cost-cutting companies slashed regular staff and relied on temporary employees. Freeters are “the lost generation” in the words of the daily newspaper Asahi.

The government estimates the number of freeters of both sexes at 1.8 million. At the beginning of

this decade, they were thought to represent the individualistic values of a generation more interested in personal gratification than their parents, who were dedicated to their employers. But many freeters have discovered that their situation had less to do with freedom than with a lack of job security.

There are others who are left out of Japan’s economic recovery, besides freeters: young people from rural areas who cannot afford to pay rent, let alone the three-month down payment demanded for accommodation, are people described by British sociologists as “Neets” (not in education, employment or training). They are drifters who have given up on life. Most of them are introverted teenagers who refuse to go to school (an alarmingly large phenomenon in contemporary Japan). When they become adults, they remain in their shells.

There may be as many as 800,000 of them. Japanese society has become fiercely competitive and condemns their inability to adjust, which it regards as laziness. They see this as a denial of their right to exist. Neets form a large proportion of young people who commit suicide. Like Neets, freeters feel they have been caught in a net.

Japan’s 2,000 internet cafes cost less than an allnight sauna or a locker-like cubicle in a capsule hotel.

And drinks are free. The biggest such cafes remain packed throughout the night.

Apart from regulars, who account for 10% of visitors according to cafe staff, and who stay for several weeks, if not months, there are always office workers who have missed their last train. They take off their shoes before entering their 2m² cubicle and snore in reclining armchairs with their feet on the computer table.

In some of the cubicles that seat two people, young couples take advantage of the half-light to canoodle. They include high-school students who tell their parents they are spending the night at a friend’s house.

High-heel shoes can be seen placed outside other cubicles: those belong to barmaids and other female night workers who are waiting for their first morning train home. In the early hours, customers make their way to the shower rooms. Some cafes even have fitness rooms.

Internet refugees are one facet of Japan’s new poor, and the result of growing inequality between those who have a steady job and those who do not.

That disparity now follows a generational divide.

Le Monde

‘I’ve been living here with a small bag and disposable underwear. I just want a decent life’

Half-hearted revolt by amateur rebels

K

arin Amamiya says: “We no longer live in the age of the proletariat, but in that of the precariat,” using a word coined to describe a permanent lack of job security. A former singer and author of a book We Are Entitled to Live: The Precarious Situation of Young People, the 32-year-old Amamiya has decided to speak up for dropouts and misfits.

Twice a week she hosts a radio talk show aimed at them. A live debate in front of a small audience covers anything from new developments in capitalism to trivial events, with a few barbs at politicians and the media. She denounces the structural discrimination that results in a lack of job security.

She feels that the malaise that has affected some young people is due less to their psychology than to changes in the job market, such as the increase in the number of intermittent workers (on fixedterm contracts, temporary assignments, odd jobs, casual work), who account for 33% of the working population compared with 16% some 20 years ago.

Many with degrees regarded as worthless have no chance of acquiring the necessary skills.

Until the financial collapse at the beginning of

Letter from Mexico

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 27

Slow stay and quick fix . . . people from all walks of life visit Tokyo’s internet cafes Jose Azel/Aurora/Getty Images /Jonathan Watts

the 1990s, Japanese society was booming, with job creation, incomes and social advancement all on the increase. Today, those from a disadvantaged background have little chance of becoming middle class. Poverty has engulfed young people with no job security who have no chance of achieving their parents’ goals. Besides statistical disparities, they suffer from a feeling of inequality and an awareness that they are disposable.

At the Amateurs’ Cafe in Koenji, an area half an hour by train from downtown Tokyo that has long been the haunt of poor youth, freeters get together in the evening. The owner of the cafe, Hajime Matsumoto, has also opened shops selling recycled clothes and electrical equipment.

Some freeters , “the far right of the internet”,

vent their frustration in xenophobic blogs attacking Chinese or South Koreans. Others rebel halfheartedly against society. They do not indulge in vandalism, which is rare in Japan. They protest by joining alternative trade unions that appeared in the wake of small movements hostile to the war in Iraq. “They’re against the establishment and into rebellion and shirking,” says sociologist Nozomu Shibuya. “They know they can’t change society, so they invent new forms of resistance, building up their own networks of solidarity and forging a libertarian culture of losers, so they can live out their non-conformism in a less fragmented way.” Matsumoto describes this as the “amateur rebellion”.

According to Shigeru Yamamoto, who heads the Young People’s Challenge movement, freeters’ ambitions tend to be individual rather than collective and they suffer from their feeling of isolation.

Our aim is not so much to mobilise them politically as to make them aware that they are not alone in their lack of job security and have things to share.”

He has set up workshops to debate and exchange practical information.

“Be the hero of your own life” reads a sign, in French, outside a clothes boutique in Koenji. It causes hilarity in the Amateurs’ Cafe. Matsumoto prefers to say: “We create our world, and it’s up to you to join us.” Philippe Pons Le Monde

Nude art only disguises the naked truth Kurt Hollander

L

arge quantities of skin have never been very visible on the streets around the Zócalo, the main plaza in the centre of Mexico City, so its presence always attracts attention.

Tourists’ blanched knees and exposed shoulders stand out in sharp contrast to the long dresses, trousers and sleeves of the locals. The prostitutes who parade their assets in an alleyway a few blocks from the Zócalo attract large crowds of eyeballers, although the curves on their bodies are composed mostly of bellies and love handles. The conchero dancers and drummers, dressed only in short skirts or loincloths, seem like a healthy return to the sexually liberated culture of the pre-Hispanic people. But these firm-bodied neo-Aztecs are not interested in sexual liberation. They blame women, gays and Jews for bringing the mighty Aztec warriors to their knees and advocate the expulsion of all foreigners from Mexico.

These days, the rise of international youth tourism and a generation of urban consumers restless to buy clothes that best reveal their gym-sculpted tummies have helped lift hemlines and uncover belly buttons. But when hemlines on skirts go up, so do the rents and the displacement of less privileged people.

The city centre, with its new bars, clubs, galleries and museums, is becoming a showcase for this new breed of local and imported bodies, and the protection of their private parts (both anatomical and economic) is increasingly used to justify the transformation of this public space into a consumer playground free of social protesters and non-formal commerce.

In the middle of this social transformation, Spencer Tunic arrived to carry out one of his photo shoots of nude bodies in public spaces. Almost 20,000 people answered the casting call of the New York photographer, creating the largest concentration of naked bodies ever assembled. Yet the way Tunic arranged the nude people in straight rows was like a yoga class or a military formation, the opposite of how people actually intermingle on the streets of Mexico City.

For the city government, estate agents and art world, public space and lower-class people are seen as problems to be controlled. To assure the safety of his models’ private parts, Tunic had the Zócalo emptied of protesters, street vendors and other working-class stiffs, achieving in a day what the local government has been trying to do for years.

28 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Weekly review

‘I want total equity or nothing’ . . . Shkurtan Hasanpapaj served as local secretary of the Communist party. Her authority was unquestioned Dones Media

Choosing to be the man of the house An ancient tradition of the sworn virgin living as a male still survives in Albania, writes Joshua Zumbrun

W

hen the Albanian journalist and author Elvira Dones was travelling in the mountains of northern Albania, she asked for directions from a “man” walking his mule through a village, rifle on shoulder. After the exchange, her guide whispered: “That is one of them.”

Dones had just met an adherent of an ancient tradition in which women take an oath of lifelong virginity in exchange for the right to live as men.

The process is not surgical. Rather, sworn virgins cut their hair and wear men’s clothes and take up work as shepherds or truck drivers or even political leaders.

And those around them ignore their anatomy and treat them as men.

The idea that a woman would need to live as a man to control her own fate seems primitive. But in the context of a culture before feminism, it can be seen as progressive. The existence of sworn virgins reveals a cultural belief that a biological woman can do all the work of a man.

“Why live like a man?’’ Lule Ivanaj asks rhetorically in an television documentary made by Dones.

She looks like a man in his 50s, with short hair and thick arms. “Because I value my freedom. I suppose I was ahead of my time.”

Dones, 47, learned about sworn virgins 25 years ago but the practice has existed at least since the 15th

century, when the traditions of the region were first codified. It was for emergencies: if the patriarch of a family died and there was no other male, a provision was needed so that a woman could run her family.

When Dones was young, the country was under the control of the dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled for more than 40 years until his death in 1985. His communist regime tightly controlled the media and travel to the north was not allowed. In 1988, Dones, then a journalist for state-run television, defected to the Italian-language region of Switzerland, where she worked for Swiss television and wrote novels.

Three years ago, she moved to the US, but the traditions of her homeland continue to interest her.

She is a popular novelist in Italy and Albania: her most recent novel is about a woman who comes to regret her decision to live as a sworn virgin. Until recently Dones had never met a sworn virgin, except for that brief, unwitting encounter with the rifle-toting virgin while filming a documentary on another topic. “I was happy with the novel, but I wanted to see them,” Dones says, “I was obsessed by them.”

Only 30 to 40 remain in Albania, Dones says, with perhaps a few in the neighbouring mountains of Kosovo and Serbia and Montenegro. Last year she interviewed 12, from the elderly to 20-somethings.

In the mountains of northern Albania women have always had very few rights. They cannot vote in local elections, they cannot buy land, many jobs are barred to them; they cannot even enter some establishments. An ancient set of laws called the Kanun still helps govern the region and it claims “a woman is a sack made to endure”. But leaders in Tirana never cared if a woman in the remote mountains wanted to dress and labour as a man.

Some women took the oath if the patriarch of the family died, others out of a fierce streak of independ-

ence and others because it was the only way to avoid an arranged marriage.

Shkurtan Hasanpapaj served as the local secretary of the Communist party, the top office in her region, her authority unquestioned. Asked if she would have felt restricted in a marriage, she answered: “More like squashed than restricted . . . Even when there’s love and harmony, only men have the right to decide. I want total equity or nothing.’’

Dones said: “I found an extreme sense of beauty in the sworn virgins. They are not bitter. They carry the stories with such dignity. They are so comfortable with their role.’’ But the virgins in Dones’ documentary acknowledge many sacrifices. They may enjoy the rights of men, but they are denied their womanhood. They will never experience the pleasures of having a lifelong partner or bearing children.

Sanie Vatoci, 50, who took the oath as a teenager when her father died, has come to regret her life as a solitary truck driver. “While looking at other couples, reading books, watching movies, I began to wonder: why don’t I have a partner? There must have been a man out there for me.” But she could never go back on her oath. Breaking it was once punishable by death, and even today, she would be shunned for breaking it and never be accepted as a woman.

It’s easy now for people to come down from the mountains. Travel is no longer restricted. And just as many members of the new generation leave their ancestral homelands for a modern life. Modern life is seeping into the mountains. The choice between being a woman and having the rights of men is no longer absolute.

“I asked the young girls of the region what they think of the sworn virgins,’’ Dones says. “They said they respect them, but they would never follow their path. Not now.”

Washington Post

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 29

Weekly review

Research boom in Arctic at sniff of oil Several countries are battling for control of ocean tracts thought to be replete with fossil fuels, says David Adam

T

he Norwegian islands of Svalbard make an unlikely property hotspot, barely 1,000km from the North Pole and shrouded in freezing darkness for several months of the year. Yet at Ny-Alesund, a tiny settlement on the west side, an international boom is under way.

The Chinese have moved in, bringing two marble lions that stand guard outside their Arctic Yellow River research station, and so too have Japan and South Korea. Scientists from India’s first expedition to the Arctic will join them. In June, a visiting delegation from Washington talked of beefing up US interests at Ny-Alesund, while the Russians are in negotiations. Should they move in, they will join established bases run by Norway, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain.

On the surface, the multinational invasion of NyAlesund — a bumpy airstrip and a scattering of colourful wooden buildings — is in the name of science.

Experts who visit Svalbard are in an ideal position to study the atmosphere, glaciers and unique wildlife.

The Svalbard islands have become a popular summer tourist destination. Last month a party of 17 were injured when their ship got too close to a melting glacier. In April last year, the British Conservative leader, David Cameron, made a trip to the glaciers to witness the effects of climate change.

But for the growing international community, there is another agenda: oil and gas reserves. “An awful lot of the reason that countries are here is flag waving,” says Nick Cox, an Arctic and Antarctic

US

500 MILES

Arctic Circle

Average minimum extent of sea ice

CANADA

ARCTIC OCEAN

RUSSIA

North Pole

Ny-Alesund

GREENLAND (DENMARK)

SVALBARD

Tromsø

NORWAY

FINLAND

veteran who runs the British station for the government-funded Natural Environment Research Council. “The Arctic has become very important politically and that will only increase the pressure for countries to be represented.”

The Chinese lions face east, but the real story is to the north. This month the Russians fired the latest shots in a long-running battle for control over huge tracts of the Arctic Ocean surrounding the North Pole, below which oil and gas is believed to lie.

Canada and Denmark are preparing similar claims, which rely on showing that a chain of underwater mountains that runs across the region are connected to their continental shelves.

Norway is convinced the sea around Svalbard also harbours reserves of oil and gas. And as the frozen cover of ice that once protected the ocean from drill ships retreats further north, nations are jostling for position to exploit them. Several oil companies already sponsor research in the region. Kim Holmen, head of research at the Norwegian Polar Institute,

In the name of science . . . Britain’s Conservative leader, David Cameron, on Svalbard Andrew Parsons/PA

said: “Everything on Svalbard is sticky. It is all about politics and there are other dimensions that must be considered.”

Norway was granted sovereignty of the Svalbard archipelago, 600km off its north coast, in 1925, but an unusual clause grants other nations equal rights to its natural resources. Norway claims the agreement covers terrestrial matters only, and does not include the offshore fossil-fuel bounty.

Other countries take a different view, and the British Foreign Office sparked a minor diplomatic row when it failed to invite Norway to a meeting with the US and Russia to discuss the future of the islands.

Norway, world leaders in hydroelectric power, ran an unprofitable coal mine at Ny-Alesund until an explosion in 1962 killed 21 people and forced its closure.

Attention switched to science, and Norway, Britain and France have had bases here for years. Critics argue such scientific efforts are an expensive and unproductive cover for strategic goals — the same accusation made against research in Antarctica.

For the Antarctic, that changed in the 1980s when British scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer, causing worldwide action and a ban on the CFC chemicals responsible. Now, scientists working at Ny-Alesund believe their research has been vindicated too, by the emergence of another environmental crisis: climate change.

“The Arctic warms first and it warms the fastest,” says Dr Holmen. “If we don’t want to be surprised by what is going to happen then we need to study the Arctic.”

The state of the ice is well known. The Kongsvegen glacier, down the coast from Ny-Alesund, is shrinking fast. But global warming can still surprise: just ask Nia Whiteley and Sam Rastrick, biologists from the University of Wales, Bangor, who arrived in Svalbard via Tromso, a town on the Norwegian mainland inside the Arctic Circle.

Looking for amphipods, shrimp-like crustaceans along the Tromso shoreline, they were forced to negotiate day trippers enjoying unseasonably warm weather. Dr Whiteley said: “We turned up in our Arctic survival gear and there were families having barbecues on the beach and people jumping into the sea in their shorts.”

There are signs of change at Ny-Alesund. The neighbouring fjord has failed to freeze over during the previous two winters — although scientists think this is due to unusual wind conditions and an influx of warm water, rather than rising temperatures.

The Arctic atmosphere is filthy. Pollutants are swept to the top of the world by air currents, so air filters at Ny-Alesund reveal streaks of soot, while levels of mercury and industrial chemicals such as flame retardants can be higher than in the countries that produce them. Scientists have long known these substances can work their way up the food chain to the top predators such as the polar bears. (Bears on Svalbard force scientists, doing nothing more hazardous than counting birds’ nests, to carry a 0.44 Magnum handgun.)

Now they have found evidence that these chemicals are having a damaging effect. Geir Gabrielsen, a biologist with the Norwegian Polar Institute, said: “We’ve found that the gulls exposed to the most chemicals take much longer to find food. As scientists all we can do is observe and point out these changes. It is up to the politicians and the people to decide what to do about it.”

30 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Short Cuts Spain ends live TV bullfights

Chewing for 5,000 years

I

t was once, along with football matches featuring Real Madrid, the lifeblood of Spain’s public television. In the late afternoon bars with television sets would fill up, families would settle down together in their living rooms, and the country’s most famous television presenter would appear on the screen to announce the day’s star attraction — the bullfight.

This year, some 51 years after state television channel TVE made its first bullfighting broadcast, it looks set not to show a single live bullfight.

The disappearance of live bullfighting from the Spanish equivalent of the BBC has enraged aficionados while provoking satisfaction among a growing lobby that wants the socalled national fiesta banned.

The public broadcaster continues to show bullfighting highlights late at night, but says restrictions on what can be shown during children’s viewing times make it increasingly difficult to programme a live fight.

The disappearance of bullfighting from TVE does not, however, mean it is no longer on the country’s screens. The recent proliferation of TV channels means there is probably more now than ever.

Giles Tremlett

The net finds its female side

F

orget the 20-something man playing online fantasy football and selling motorbike parts on eBay. The internet in Britain has a new user.

For years cyberspace has been tailored to an audience of mainly young men but for the first time women web users have taken the lead in key age groups. At the same time an army of silver surfers has emerged and the over-65s are spending more hours online than any other age group.

The latest snapshot of Britain’s communications market by regulator Ofcom turns the established assumptions about web users upside down. It also shows all of us spending more time online and on our mobiles than ever before.

Watching television, surfing the web, making phone calls and listening to the radio now take up an average 50 hours a week. While TV watching, radio listening and home phone use have all fallen since 2002, our daily minutes on the web have doubled. The UK has the most ac-

A Matador no more . . . Spanish TV has stopped showing live bullfights Jon Nazca/Reuters

tive internet population in Europe thanks to widely available broadband connections that are getting cheaper every year.

One significant trend is an apparent feminisation of the internet. “Ever since it kicked off in the early 90s the web has been male-dominated. For the first time this year women are spending more time on the internet than men,” says Peter Phillips, strategy and market developments partner at Ofcom, referring to web users in the 25 to 49 age bracket.

Much has been made of the trend among children to use various media simultaneously, such as browsing the web while watching TV. But for all the multi-tasking, their growing take-up of mobile phones and the web, where they spend an average two hours a day, still comes at the expense of older media. Playing on computer games, listening to the radio and watching DVDs have all fallen.

One in six over-65s uses the web, particularly in search of news and local information. Pensioners have predictably come late to the internet just as they did to mobile phones and digital TV. But once online, they make use of their retirement

The pope’s new airline will fly to Lourdes

to spend longer surfing than anyone else. Their 42 hours online every month dwarfs the 25 hours teenagers spend on the web.

Katie Allen

Why not fly with the Lord?

T

he Vatican may have territorial limits, its own post office and even a football tournament, but it has hitherto lacked what all real states offer: an airline.

That will be put right this month as the Vatican launches its first charter flights for pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes, with some of the world’s top religious destinations to follow, including the shrine of Fatima in Portugal and the shrine of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico.

“The spirit of this new initiative is to meet the growing demand by pilgrims to visit the most important sites for the faith,” Father Cesare Atuire at the Vatican pilgrimage office, the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi, told La Repubblica. He said that with 8 million visitors a year, Lourdes was an obvious first destination.

The flights come thanks to a deal with Italian charter airline Mistral, whose blue and yellow colours coincidentally match the Vatican’s, noted CEO Valerio Vaglio. He said the headrests on passengers’ seats would sport the logo “I’m Searching for Your Face, Lord”, while religious guides would be on hand, alongside the usual stewards.

Vaglio said that at night, the aircraft flying pilgrimage routes will have their seats removed and be converted back to flying sacks of mail.

Father Atuire hinted that luxury would not be a selling point. “The cost of the packages will bear in mind that the customers will be pilgrims,” he said.

Tom Kington

5,000-year-old piece of chewing gum has been found by a British archaeology student.

The Neolithic gum, made from birch bark tar, was discovered by Sarah Pickin, 23, during a dig on the west coast of Finland. The gum had tooth prints in it.

Trevor Brown, her tutor at the University of Derby, said: “Birch bark tar contains phenols, which are antiseptic compounds. It is generally believed that Neolithic people found that by chewing this stuff if they had gum infections it helped to treat the condition.”

Sini Annala, from the Kierikki Centre, a museum and archaeological exhibition in Finland, said: “The actual material is some kind of tar, that was made by heating birch bark. After the tar was made . . . it was boiled, and when it cooled, it became solid. When it was heated again, it became softer, and it was used as some kind of chewing gum.”

Helen Carter

Maslanka answers Puzzles on page 41 1 If the barber shaves himself then he doesn’t only shave those who do not shave themselves; for he shaves himself who does shave himself. If he does not shave himself, then he doesn’t shave all those who do not shave themselves. One way round this is for the barber to be a woman. Then the remarks about shaving or not shaving do not refer to her.

2 The same. Selecting a number for the posse is logically the same as selecting the remaining men to be members of a notional non-posse; so the number of ways of selecting 495 men out of 954 is the same as the number of ways of selecting (954 – 495) = 459. 3 Reflect the shape in the diagonal and we can see we have to deal with half a cross (top right). Then by symmetry our route is clear, to bisect with another diagonal which meets the existing one at right angles (bottom right). 4 3464 x 7 = 24248. [*4*4 x 7 = *4*4*; we know the last digit of the answer must be an 8, since 7 x 4 = 28; so *4*4 x 7 = *4*48.

28 gives a carry of 2, which is responsible for 2 of the 4 in the tens digit of the answer.

The digit multiplied by 7 in the multiplicand must be 6 (6 x 7 = 42) to give the other 2. So we have *464 x 7 = *4*48. A little consideration shows that the final digit of the multiplicand must be 3, giving 3464 x 7 = 24248.] 5 We can think of the variables as the labels of 5 bundles the sum of the contents of which must total 10. To symbolise this think of 10 tally sticks and 4 asterisks as separators. Thus the solution 1111*1*111**11 would stand for v = 4, w = 1, x = 3, y = 0 and z = 2. The 4 asterisks suffice to separate the bundles of units. The number of distinct arrangements is (10 + 4)!⁄(10!4!), since we have 10 indistinguishable tally sticks and 4 indistinguishable asterisks. This amounts to 14.13.12.11⁄4.3.2.1 = 1001.

Wordplay: Wordpool b), d), a) On the Homophone eg: “We should draw lots” Info INundation; FOundation Cryptic MILES Missing Links a) equal/pay/master b) corks/crew/ cut c) wings/pan/handle d) whip/hand/some e) think/tank/top f) sleeping/car/boy

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 31

Dispatches

Science

Great apes’ sophisticated tool use is equalled by the crow, below Thomas Breuer/AP/Alex Taylor/PA

Birds match great apes New Caledonian crows’ ability to use ‘metatools’ has parallels with early human evolution James Randerson A tool-using strategy that was key to the advancement of early humans has been observed by scientists in a bird. “Metatool use”, the ability to use one tool on another, is something that humans and great apes such as chimps and orang-utans are capable of, but with which monkeys struggle.

However, a study has shown that New Caledonian crows can manage this task easily. Researchers offered the crows a tasty morsel of meat that was out of reach in a box. To reach the food the birds had to use a long stick. But this stick was inaccessible in another box. To reach the long stick, the birds had to prise it out with a smaller stick which they could reach.

“It was surprising to find that these creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem,” said Russell Gray, of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. “Six out of seven birds tried to get the long stick with the short stick at their first attempt at solving the problem.”

The test revealed that the birds knew the short

stick was too small to reach the food but that the longer stick would solve the problem. “They had to inhibit their normal response of trying to get the food directly with the short stick and realise that they could use the short stick to get the long stick,” he said. New Caledonian crows previously have been shown to adapt tools for a specific job, something only a few primates can manage.

Metatool use, involving making more complex and useful tools, was vital in our ancestors’ development, say the researchers. “[It] may reflect the ‘cognitive leap’ that initiated technological evolution,” they write in the journal Current Biology.

The ability is conceptually hard, they argue, because the applying of one tool to another represents another step removed from the goal itself. First the animal has to realise that tools can be used on nonfood objects, second it has to suppress the urge to go straight for the food itself, and third, it has to perform a sequence of actions in the correct order.

To see the solution requires “analogical reasoning”, the ability to see a new situation as essentially similar to a previous one.

To ensure the birds were not simply probing randomly with the short stick and getting the long stick by trial and error, the test involved yet another box with a stone inside. Only one bird tried poking the short stick into this box — and that was after she had already solved the problem.

Diamonds are oldest parts of Earth’s crust A clutch of ancient diamonds plucked from the hills of Western Australia have been identified as the oldest remnants of the Earth’s crust ever recovered. The precious stones, which date back more than 4bn years, were found inside rocks lodged in the sediments of a 80km-long coastal ridge known as the Jack Hills.

The stones shed light on the darkest age of Earth’s evolution — the period between the planet’s creation 4.5bn years ago and the formation of the oldest known rocks 500m years later. The formal name given to the period — the Hadean — paints a picture of Earth as a hellish mass of molten lava, but analysis of the diamonds by a team from Westfalische Wilhelms University in Munster, Germany, suggests the blackened landscape may have cooled much more quickly than thought. Ian Sample

Virus link to obesity A common virus that causes throat and eye infections may also play a role in obesity, say US scientists. Laboratory tests found that the virus triggered changes in human fat tissue that left people with more, and larger, fat cells than people who were not infected. The scientists at Louisiana State University acknowledge the virus may be only a contributing factor to growing obesity rates, but they believe that understanding how fat cells respond to infection could lead to vaccines to prevent weight gain and possibly to fat-promoting treatments for rare wasting conditions. IS

Moving secret of T rex The most formidable dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, could have chased down all but the fastest humans if they roamed the world today, British scientists claim. The beast was capable of nearly 29km/h. Researchers at Manchester University used powerful computers to model the skeletons and musculature of five meat-eating dinosaurs and three living species, including humans. With a top speed of 28.8km/h, the T rex was the second slowest of all the creatures, but still outpaced the human.“Our findings suggest T rex was far too quick to be a scavenger,” said Dr Bill Sellers, whose research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. IS

Huntington’s drug hope Scientists have raised the first hope of a cure for Huntington’s disease after unlocking the secrets of what goes wrong in the brains of sufferers. The research at Leeds University suggests that a drug being developed to treat breast cancer in America could be adapted for use in Huntington’s patients to slow or even halt the deterioration in their brains.

Polly Curtis

32 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Culture

Haunting strains of a bloody past So horrific are the images it conjures up, Billie Holiday always closed her eyes to sing ‘Strange Fruit’. Playwright Caryl Phillips traces its history

I

n late 1979, I called my first play, about a single mother’s relationship with her two rebellious sons, Strange Fruit. I took the title from the Billie Holiday song of the same name, but at the time I knew very little about its history, only that the name made reference to racially motivated American violence.

The play premiered at the Sheffield Crucible Studio Theatre in 1980, and a year or so later it was produced in London. I don’t remember doing any press interviews, so no journalist ever asked me what I intended by the name of the play. Perhaps more surprisingly, neither the director nor any of the actors questioned me about the significance of the title. I just assumed that everybody understood that the play’s title made reference to the dilemma of intergenerational communication.

Two years later, in early 1983, I was in Alabama, being driven the 200km from Birmingham to Tuskegee by the father of one of the four girls who had been killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963. Chris McNair is a gregarious and charismatic man who, at the time, was running for political office; he was scheduled to make a speech at the famous historically black college, Tuskegee Institute. As he was driving through the Alabama countryside, he took the opportunity to quiz me about my life and nascent career as a writer.

When I told him the title of my first play, he turned and stared at me, then he looked back to the road.

“So what do you know about lynching?” I swallowed deeply and looked through the car windshield as the southern trees flashed by. I knew full well that “Strange Fruit” meant something very different in the US; in fact, something disturbingly specific in the south, particularly to African Americans. A pleasant, free-flowing conversation with my host now appeared to be shipwrecked on the rocks of cultural appropriation.

I had always assumed that Billie Holiday composed the music and lyrics to “Strange Fruit”. She did not. The song began life as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a schoolteacher who was living in the Bronx and teaching English at the De Witt Clinton High School, where his students would have included the playwright Neil Simon and the novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Meeropol was a trade union activist and a closet member of the Communist party; his poem was first published in 1937 as “Bitter Fruit”, in a union magazine called the New York School Teacher. In common with many Jewish people in the US during this period, Meeropol was worried about anti-semitism and chose to publish his poem under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, the first names of his two stillborn children.

Meeropol was motivated to write the poem after seeing a photograph of two black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been lynched in

Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930. Their bodies were hanging limply from a tree. His poem opens with the following lines: Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Hoping to reach a wider audience, Meeropol set his poem to music, and the song “Strange Fruit” was first performed at a New York City Teachers Union meeting. It created an immediate stir. Meeropol sang it himself, but as it grew in popularity, his wife began to perform the song.

According to figures kept by the Tuskegee Institute, between 1889 and 1940, 3,833 people were lynched in the US — the overwhelming majority of the victims being in the southern states, and black.

The brutality of this mob “justice” invariably went unpunished, and when Meeropol was asked, in 1971, why he wrote the song, he replied: “Because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.”

Those who heard “Strange Fruit” in the late 30s were shocked, for the true barbarity of southern violence was generally only discussed in black newspapers. To be introduced to such realities by a song was unprecedented and was considered by many to be in poor taste.

In the late 30s, the 24-year-old Billie Holiday was headlining at a recently opened Greenwich Village nightclub called Cafe Society. It was the only integrated nightclub in New York City, and a place that advertised itself as “the wrong place for the Right people”. The manager of the club, Barney Josephson, introduced Billie Holiday to Meeropol and his new song, which had an immediate impact on her. She decided to sing it at Cafe Society, where it was received with perfect, haunting silence. Soon she was closing her shows with the song. It was understood that only when the waiters had stopped serving, and the lights dimmed to a single spotlight, would she begin singing, with her eyes closed. Once she had finished, she would walk off stage and never return to take a bow.

The song was revolutionary — not only because of the explicit nature of the lyrics, but because it reversed the black singer’s relationship with a white audience. Traditionally, singers such as Billie

‘Nothing can dehumanise men as can the way of segregation’— Lillian Smith

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 33

Revolutionary . . . ‘Strange Fruit’, written after the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, above, and sung by Billie Holiday, left, did not always go down well at the lively Cafe Society nightclub, below Gjon Mili/Getty/Corbis

Holiday were expected to entertain and to “serve” their audiences. With this song, however, Holiday found a means by which she could demand that the audience stop and listen, and she was able to force them to take on board something with which they were not comfortable. She often used the song as a hammer with which to beat what she perceived to be ignorant audiences, and her insistence on singing the song with such gravitas meant that she was not always safe. Some people did not fully appreciate the dark song when they had stepped out for the evening to hear “Fine and Mellow” and other cocktail-lounge ditties.

Holiday was keen to record “Strange Fruit” on her label, Columbia, but her producer, John Hammond,

was concerned that it was too political and he refused to allow her to go into the studio with it. But the singer would not back down. In April 1939, she recorded it for Commodore Records. It became a bestseller and was thereafter associated with her.

When Josephson introduced her to Meeropol and his song, Holiday knew that she could sing it like nobody else could, or would. She glimpsed truth in it and that was enough. She, perhaps more than most artists, understood that if you live the truth, you will pay a price, but without the truth there is no art.

Whenever she performed the song, she could see the two teenagers, Shipp and Smith, hanging from the tree — which is why she closed her eyes whenever she sang it.

Five years later, a southern writer published a novel called Strange Fruit. Lillian Smith was born in 1897 in Florida, the eighth of 10 children. Hers was a relatively comfortable, white, middle-class background and her childhood was divided between Florida and a summerhouse in the mountains of Georgia, where her father ran a camp for girls called Laurel Falls.

As a young woman, Smith travelled to Baltimore to study music, and she then spent a few years teaching in China. In 1925, she returned to the US and became principal of the Laurel Falls camp, placing a great emphasis on the arts in the curriculum, and on music and drama in particular. In 1936, having grown increasingly aware of southern injustice and oppression, she founded a literary magazine, Pseudopodia, which became South Today in 1942. Smith published writing by blacks and whites that agitated for social change in the south, and her politically progressive magazine quickly gained notoriety.

In 1944, she published Strange Fruit, which told the story of an interracial relationship in the south before the first world war. The narrative charts the mounting violence that eventually overtakes the relationship and it thematically examines the same

issues that inform Meeropol’s lyrics. Despite being banned by many bookshops, the novel was the nation’s bestselling title in 1944 and sold more than a million copies. It was adapted for the Broadway stage, and by the time of Smith’s death in 1966 it had sold 3m copies.

In the year of her death, while being honoured by the all-black Fisk University in Tennessee, Smith succinctly identified the enemy against which she had worked as both a teacher and a southern writer.

“Segregation is evil,” she declared. “There is no pattern of life which can dehumanise men as can the way of segregation.” And segregation’s natural corollary is violence.

On that hot southern morning as we drove through Alabama, I knew little about the background to the Billie Holiday song, and I had never heard of Lillian Smith. After a few minutes of silence, McNair began to talk to me about the history of violence against African-American people in the southern states. This was a painful conversation for a man who had lost his daughter to a Ku Klux Klan bomb. I had, by then, confessed that my play had nothing to do with the US, with African Americans, with racial violence, or even with Billie Holiday. And, being a generous man, he had nodded patiently, and addressed himself to my education. However, I did have some knowledge of the realities of the south. While I was staying at a hotel in Atlanta, a young waiter had warned me against venturing out after dark because the Klan would be rallying on Stone Mountain that evening, and after their gathering they often came downtown for some “fun”.

That afternoon, in a packed hall in Tuskegee Institute, McNair began what sounded to me like a typical campaign speech. He was preaching to the converted, and a light shower of applause began to punctuate his words as he hit his oratorical stride.

But then he stopped abruptly, and he announced that today, for the first time, he was going to talk about his daughter. “I don’t know why, because I’ve never done this before. But Denise is on my mind.”

He studiously avoided making eye contact with me.

A hush fell over the audience. “You all know who my daughter is. Denise McNair. Today she would have been 31 years old.” Indeed, strange fruit.

34 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Reviews Classical Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

Royal Albert Hall, London I am not sure anything quite like Gustavo Dudamel and his extraordinary group of young musicians has hit the Proms before. Whatever you have read about the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra — and the Venezuelan system of musical education that brought it into being — can’t convey the brilliance and disarming exuberance of their playing, or the importance of Dudamel’s role in channelling that energy.

What seemed slightly odd on paper turned out to be perfectly judged in performance. Starting with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony allowed Dudamel to lay down his and his orchestra’s musical credentials from the start. The long first movement was traced in a single, continuous arc, with beautifully moulded solo playing from the woodwind, and the scherzo started at a speed that seemed scarcely sustainable, though Dudamel and the orchestra did so without any sign of stress. Perhaps the slow movement did not plumb all the emotional depths some older con-

based choreographer Trisha Brown. As it begins, two dancers stand stock still. One valiantly remains so throughout with another running backwards in wide arcs, pistons for elbows. The monotony is unexpectedly compelling as the choreography slides from slow motion to a precise minimalism. Atmosphere is explored, not drama, as dancers in fleshcoloured leotards move in a shadowy city against an Alvin Curran soundtrack. It’s a form of transport to another place — a womb-like urban jungle.

On either side of this meditation are two fastflowing rivers of dance. Ride the Beast, a world premiere by another New Yorker, Stephen Petronio set to music by Radiohead, creates a vibrant horizontal axis for the company, drawing them as booty-shaking contemporary Athenians on a Greek vase.

Petronio focuses on limbs in opposition, slicing, cutting, leaning; building a complex architectural structure for his work. He wills the Beast to be hip, exciting and fun. But Petronio’s dance feels just a little too clean, not quite in tune with the gutsy sexiness of the passionate sounds.

Page’s award-winning Fearful Symmetries ends the evening with a flourish. Speed is of the essence here. The company are motoring on full attack and there are flashes of cutting-edge brilliance in the relentless spins and whirls through an American dreamscape. While the score by the 60-year-old composer John Adams, a much-used favourite of choreographers, is the motivating star of the piece, Page’s dance works hard to keep up. Alice Bain

Theatre Richard II / Henry IV Parts One and Two

Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon

Exuberance . . . the energetic Gustavo Dudamel

ductors lay bare, but it was more than compensated for by the tension and drama generated elsewhere by the huge orchestra. After the interval came the “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story and a suite from Alberto Ginastera’s ballet Estancia. In between, there were two Mexican pieces, José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango, and Arturo Márquez’s Danzon No 2, which gave the orchestra further chances to enjoy itself.

The emotional temperature rose steadily, and by the encores, with conductor and orchestra waving their instruments and promenading around, everyone in the hall was on their feet. Andrew Clements

Dance Scottish Ballet

Playhouse, Edinburgh Scotland’s national dance company, in its third year at the Edinburgh festival, is as fit and eager as ever, offering an American-flavoured, urban-centred mix, optimistically served with high energy. Strangely, most of the magic is in the oldest, most subtle piece, For MG: The Movie (1991), by veteran New York-

The RSC’s grand plan of staging a complete eightplay cycle of Shakespeare’s Histories comes closer to fruition with this mature trilogy. But, while it is exciting to see all three plays in one mammoth 12hour day, one also becomes aware of limitations in Michael Boyd’s approach which were not visible in the opening tetralogy of Henry VI and Richard III. Boyd uses a vertical method of staging so characters make aerial descents like SAS commandos.

He also delights in ritual as much as realism, often using bodies in massed ranks. But he believes in the idea expressed by T S Eliot in Four Quartets, of “time future contained in time past”. The dead not only return to haunt the living but past actions determine the political future. While it is a deeply Shakespearean concept that gives visual coherence, it also sometimes overlays the differences between plays.

Here it works best in Richard II. At the very beginning, as the gilded monarch processes towards his throne, he steps gingerly over the corpse of Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. It is a vital image in that Richard’s implication in Gloucester’s murder leads to the unravelling of the king’s authority.

However, Jonathan Slinger, having already played Richard III, is a comparably sardonic Richard II. Henry IV Part One seems slightly routine. There are fine visual touches, but the Eastcheap tavern scenes lack their usual sap. If Part Two works infinitely better, it is partly because David Warner’s Falstaff comes into his own. In the play about death, disease and decay, he has the right sense of lengthening shadows and exquisite melancholy. Returning to the company after a long gap, Warner vindicates Auden’s comparison of Falstaff to Jesus Christ. Michael Billington

On television

Culture The magical mystery motorway tour Nancy Banks-Smith

L

ucy and Ray Pearce, an elderly couple, eat regularly in a motorway service station.

Ray explained eagerly: “We like coming here because the staff make a fuss of us. There’s a disabled loo, which I can use.” (Lucy gave him a sharp, wifely slap.) He added that he once met Andrew Flintoff there, he had practised his Malay on another customer and there was a Zulu working on the staff. Lucy’s silence had, by now, become quite shrill. A passing bat would have flinched. “Lucy, why do you like coming here?” asked the director. “I don’t particularly,” said Lucy.

You met all sorts bowling along The Secret Life of the Motorway (BBC4), including people with impenetrable occupations, such as human geographer, shopping historian and loo-of-the-year inspector. The series runs over three nights: falling in love, honeymoon and end of the affair. In the heady honeymoon, service stations had the exotic charm of faraway places with strange names. Watford Gap. Newport Pagnell.

Admittedly, Watford Gap was caught on the hop by the completion of the M1 and had to serve sandwiches out of sheds, but Newport Pagnell, with the fairy dust of Forte sprinkled over it, attracted the Beatles to its glittering Grill and Griddle.

Service stations replaced the little railway stations annihilated by the mad axeman Dr Beeching who appeared, complete with chins, in the first episode.

Flanders and Swann wrote a song, “The Slow Train”, about the 2,000 stations Beeching axed, using the evocative names like an incantation. Mow Cop and Scholar Green. Midsomer Norton and Formby Four Crosses: “No one departs, no one arrives/ From Selby to Goole from St Erth to St Ives/ They’ve all passed out of our lives/ On the slow train.”

If the Beatles wrote a song celebrating Newport Pagnell, I missed it.

Traffic expands to fill the motorways available. Robbie Coltrane’s celebration of B-roads in B-Road Britain (ITV1) is in direct opposition to The Secret Life of the Motorway, which records the death throes of the dream. In case you were tempted to look on the bright side, Will Self read a poem of inspissated gloom: “Every single one of the distance markers, Birmingham 86,/ Has been crudely tipped to the horizontal, forming a series of steel biers./ On top of them are the decomposing corpses of motorway chieftains/ Lain out for excarnation prior to interment.” Oh, I say.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 35

Obituaries

Grace Paley US writer of subtle and discursive short stories, poet and ‘combative pacifist’

G

race Paley, the American short-story writer and a prominent activist during the Vietnam period, has died of breast cancer aged 84. Her “combative pacifism”, as she called it, took her to Hanoi in 1969, to Chile during the precarious rule of Salvador Allende, and to Nicaragua in 1985. Paley was what is known, in the US, as a “movement” person, which meant that political activism was part of her life, not an off-again, on-again response to crises. She joined the War Resisters League in the 1960s and for years could be found every Saturday handing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.

Paley’s unglamorous, day-to-day activism caused her to be admired by other movement people, but it was her short stories that made her loved. She grew up in a Jewish immigrant family amid the sounds of Russian, Yiddish and English, and became as acquainted with the idiom of New York street talk as with the language of respectable literature. Paley created in her fiction a world of voices and an ethnic style all of her own. With her humour and humanism in mind, some critics compared her with the Russian-Yiddish storyteller Sholom Aleichem. But the oral folk tradition was not lying around waiting to be inherited. Her literary manner, which has the effect of simplicity and naturalness, owes a great deal to modernist selfconsciousness about questions of style and form.

The confidence that enabled Paley to write like a turn-of-the-century Russian or a female Mark Twain in the Bronx owed a great deal to her happy early years. Her parents, Isaac and Manya Goodside, were revolutionary students in Russia. They escaped to the US in 1905 and settled in New York’s Lower East Side. Paley’s father studied for a medical degree and by the time she was born the Goodsides were comfortable, although not rich, and had moved to the Bronx, then (1922) primarily Jewish

Leona Helmsley The ‘Queen of Mean’, ruthless property boss jailed for fraud

T

he Queen of Mean was never the apposite title for Leona Helmsley, who has died aged 87. When she became the face of New York’s Helmsley Palace hotel, she acted up to ad copy — “It’s the only palace in the world where the queen stands guard”. Her family had lived under Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and when her inner autocrat was unleashed she thought of herself as an empress. She died about the 250th richest person in the world, lonely, forgetful and litigious.

The third daughter of Morris and Ida Rosenthal from Poland dropped out of school, renamed herself Leona Roberts and at about 18 married lawyer Leo Panzier; their son Jay was born in 1942. Her

‘A language of new and rich emotional subtleties’ . . . Grace Paley at home in Vermont Tony Talbot/AP and middle class. Paley was the much-loved baby in a household that included her father’s mother, her parents and an aunt, a brother of 16 and a sister already 14. She recalled being fussed over and encouraged to accomplish all she could. Paley evokes her childhood confidence in “The Loudest Voice”, which depicts little Shirley Abramovitz belting out the story of Jesus in a school pageant.

At 19 Grace attended Hunter College and briefly New York University, but, abandoning her formal education in 1942, she married Jess Paley, a cameraman and film-maker. Because her husband was serving in the army from 1942 to 1944 she lived among women in army camps. Here she said she first became conscious that the ordinary lives of women were an actuality of great importance largely ignored in formal literature. She was writing poetry and continued after the war, when she had her children, Nora in 1949 and Daniel in 1951.

In the 1950s Paley turned to writing stories.

Critics greeted Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), with superlatives.

Philip Roth praised her for “a language of new and

rich emotional subtleties, with a kind of backhanded grace and irony all its own”. Despite this reception and many fellowships and awards, it was 15 years before Paley published a second collection of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

In those years she had to fit her writing in among activism and teaching, and raising her children.

She and Jess divorced in 1971 and in 1972 she married a fellow writer, Robert Nichols.

Paley dedicated Later the Same Day (1985) to her children, “without whom my life and literature would be pretty slim”. She published Long Walks and Intimate Talks in 1991, a thin medley of stories and poems that should be read alongside her attractive New and Collected Poems (1992). A new book of poetry, tentatively titled Fidelity: A Book of Poems, will be published next year. She is survived by her husband, son and daughter.

Mark Krupnick

second, and third, marriages ended in divorce.

She worked as a secretary in a property company but she had a gift for high fantasy and low dealing, charm and bullying, and rose to be president of Sutton & Towne Residential.

But she was still only property nobility. Harry Helmsley was property king. He managed office space, including the Empire State Building, and owned hotels. She claimed he “heard of my reputation and he told one of his executives, ‘Whoever she is, get her.’ Finally, he gave me a deal I couldn’t refuse.” A more plausible scenario is that she hunted him down at an industry dinner in 1969.

Harry divorced his wife of 33 years and married Leona in his penthouse in 1972. In 1980 he appointed her president of Helmsley hotels. Leona swanked about in ads, growing grander to match the palace’s “queen” slogan. But to the staff, she was a tsarina. She fired waiters for having dirty fingernails or maids for leaving a lampshade askew.

The most significant line attributed to her is not “Only the little people pay taxes” (quoted by a servant in court) but “That’s how the rich get

richer”, when she ordered a jeweller to rewrite a bill to save $4 sales tax. The Helmsleys had gussied up their place in Connecticut with a million-dollar marble floor and contractors complained in 1987 that they were cheated out of fees and forced to collude in invoice fraud. Investigations led to 235 state and federal counts. The Helmsleys were accused of evading more than $4m of income tax.

Harry, 89, who had had a stroke, was found unfit to stand trial. In 1989 Leona, 69, was convicted of 33 counts and evading $1.2m in tax. She was given four years’ jail and ordered to pay $1.7m.

Harry died in 1997, leaving her all his $1.7bn, and she sold much of their property. At her son’s funeral in 1982 she abused his wife, and soon evicted his family. She sued her four grandchildren’s estate almost to bankruptcy. They and her 13 great-grandchildren survive her.

Veronica Horwell

Grace Paley, writer, born December 11, 1922; died August 22, 2007. This obituary has been revised and updated since the death of its writer in 2003

Leona Helmsley (Lena Mindy Rosenthal), businesswoman and felon, born July 4, 1920; died August 20, 2007

36 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Books

Born of fear, fed by fear Tom Templeton on two powerful explorations of Hizbullah’s relationship with Israel Summer Rain

by Annette Levy Willard Psychology News Press 192pp £9.99 The 33-Day War

by Gilbert Achcar and Michel Warschawski Saqi Books 136pp £12.99 Annette Levy Willard, a senior reporter with the French newspaper Libération, kept a diary of life in Israel during last summer’s month-long conflict with the Hizbullah militia of Lebanon. The result, Summer Rain, is an immediate and intimate portrait of a tiny country at war: militarily mighty, hated and feared by its neighbours and living in a permanent state of fear itself.

On July 12, 2006, Hizbullah, whose members operate a “state within a state” in southern Lebanon, fired rockets into kibbutzim over the border while their fighters sneaked into Israel, killed three soldiers and kidnapped two others, expecting to then trade prisoners with Israel. Unusually neither the Israeli prime minister nor the defence or foreign ministers had military backgrounds. “They will want to show they have balls,” explains a friend of Levy Willard’s.

So Israel used the kidnapping as the excuse it needed to launch a long-prepared war plan, Operation Exterminator, for the destruction of Hizbullah.

During the following 33 days, more than 1,500 people were killed, two-thirds of them Lebanese civilians. The aerial bombardment left Lebanon in ruins and on the verge of civil war and the Israeli military’s reputation badly damaged, as it failed to dislodge Hizbullah and regain its captured soldiers.

Hizbullah, whose weaponry and tactics far exceeded Israeli expectations, was politically strengthened.

As Levy Willard puts it, having spent time under the whistling Katyusha rockets: “this is not a band of suicidal terrorists in scruffy jeans who squabble among themselves.”

Summer Rain is partly a parody of the machismo of war reporting — Levy Willard has to argue with her children to let her go to the front line. It also includes intriguing apercus on modern warfare — the general who secretly sells his stock portfolio, the war photographer caught “Photoshopping” more dead babies into his pictures, a song said to be popular with teenage Israelis: “Our Country Is Crap But It’s The Only One We Have.” She interviewed Israeli commandos on a 48-hour leave from combat.

“Some of the soldiers chose to injure themselves so that they wouldn’t have to go back . . . some fell down stairs deliberately in the hope of breaking a bone.”

All this captures how fluid political opinions have become with modern media coverage. At first many of the Israeli Arabs living in Haifa were on the side of their government, but as images of the devastation in Lebanon were fed back by satellite TV, this changed. Ditto many non-Arab Israelis. The novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed in the conflict, made a powerful speech in Tel Aviv months later, stating: “We have discovered in this war that military power cannot ultimately guarantee our

Product of a colonial mindset . . . survivors of an Israeli strike on Yaroun, Lebanon Ali Hashisho/Reuters

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 37

Strong and engaging poetry with nerve existence.” On Israeli TV an amateur video was screened showing an officer telling exhausted soldiers about the terrorists they will face in Lebanon.

“Why call them terrorists?” says one of his men.

“They are soldiers like us.”

On August 16 a UN-brokered ceasefire was implemented and both sides declared victory. “The military offensive has eliminated Hizbullah’s state within the state of Lebanon,” claimed Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert. He only just survived a subsequent inquiry into the war’s failings.

According to Gilbert Achcar and Michel Warschawski’s The 33-Day War, a poll of the Arab street conducted after the war found that Hizbullah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was the most popular political figure in the region. The most unpopular figure, George Bush, had broadcast his private beliefs by mistake six days into the conflict. The US government refused to join the EU and UN in calling for a ceasefire, saying Israel must be allowed to root out the “A-Team of terrorists”. Bush then set out a road map for the UN to end the conflict. “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it’s all over. . .”

The degree of ignorance in Bush’s formulation is made clear in this dry but penetrating book. The selfproclaimed pacifist academics (one from Lebanon, one from Israel) paint a picture of an exceptionally complex and politically fluid Lebanon, the most religiously and ethnically mixed country in the region, racked by a 15-year civil war. Hizbullah was born in this period and drove Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon in 2000.

Although Hizbullah is funded by Iran and Syria, it is a broadly independent organisation that runs schools, hospitals and social services in south Lebanon and enjoys huge support there, not only among the Shias, Lebanon’s largest sect. Hizbullah enjoys far greater autonomy and popular support than characterised in the neocon world-view.

Looking at Israel, the authors draw the controversial conclusion that its recent military failings and willingness to kill Lebanese civilians stem from a “colonial” inability to respect their adversary. In former prime minister Barak’s words Israel is “the modern and prosperous villa in the jungle” of the Middle East, and Israel now formulates its fight for survival as a battle of civilisation versus brutality.

This concept is used to justify the apparent imbalance in the value of Arab and Israeli life. Hence 429 Hizbullah prisoners were exchanged for one kidnapped Israeli businessman in 2004 and in last summer’s conflict, the civilian body count was 1,070 Lebanese and 43 Israelis.

According to this book, Barak’s “civilisation” analysis seems to have been bought wholesale by Washington and by Tony Blair in the wake of 9/11.

Blair, now a Middle East peace envoy, described the fighting last year as part of an ongoing struggle between “democracy and freedom” against an “arc of extremism right across the region”. Something that ignores the fact that popular feeling in the Middle East, as expressed democratically in the election of Hamas, supports so-called extremism.

While Hizbullah leads the reconstruction effort in southern Lebanon and digs a new set of fortifications, and Israel tops up on bunker-busters ready for the next round, both of these fine books make it clear that the region’s increased stock of fear is keeping no one safe. Observer

A Treatise of Civil Power

by Geoffrey Hill Penguin 52pp £9.99 Peter McDonald The days when a new volume by Geoffrey Hill was a rare event are becoming hard to remember. Only four collections appeared between 1959 and 1996 and since then there have been five hefty books of poetry, and this year brings a sixth, in the shape of A Treatise of Civil Power. Hill’s recent productivity has been startling, but there is more than its sheer volume that makes this poetry surprising, for Hill seems not to be settling into one late style, but exploring several. Now in his 76th year, he shows no signs of relaxing into the manners and mannerisms of a tried and tested poetic routine.

A Treatise marks a point of departure in different ways. The book is less lyrical than its predecessor, Without Title, and addresses more public concerns than personal ones. In terms of style, it is far removed from the condensed energies in the sometimes noisy poems of Speech! Speech! (2000) and from the beautiful, but syntactically strange and disorienting, long poems of The Orchards of Syon (2002). Instead, A Treatise adopts a direct style, facing up to the ways “civil power” expresses itself, and is exercised, in the contemporary world.

The directness of style serves to intensify the difficulty of the situation. As Hill puts it in a poem on the music of Handel, the “figures” are “in harmony with their right consorts,/ with the world also, broadly understood/ each of itself a treatise of civil power,/ every phrase instinct with deliberation/ both upon power and towards civility”. Clearly, the parallel with Hill’s own practice is to be registered here. The level of ambition, too, is impossible to miss.

What Hill has to report is not exactly good news nor, direct though its expression may be, is it easy to digest: “Civil power now smuggles more retractions/ than hitherto/ public apology ad libs its charter,/ well-misjudged villainy gets compensated./ I still can’t tell you what that power is.” “Well-misjudged” is typically packed with complication (“well-judged” would be one thing, and “misjudged” another — Hill’s coinage suggests both these varieties of “villainy” in the public sphere will have their compensations — those also, of course, being ambiguous).

The fact that “civil power” escapes definition is, from one angle, something of a let-down — and Hill’s line admitting as much, “though it were disappointed with itself”, is a designedly flat pentameter.

We are all aware that there is such a thing as “civil power”, and that it affects our lives, but the poems of A Treatise unnervingly blur the line between that public reality and our private selves. There are limits, here, to what any of us can understand.

Hill’s supposed difficulty as a poet has been too much debated in recent years, in a sterile series of exchanges about poetry and accessibility, often self-serving on both sides. The result has been that readers’ attention is deflected from the primary, and pressing, difficulty of the things Hill is writing about. This has always mattered but this new book makes it harder to miss, at a time when power, and the grounds on which we rely on, consent to, or are abused by it are issues of grave (though perhaps

seldom noticed) moral and political choices.

It may seem odd to suggest that a poet’s best audience might be those who find little of relevance or value in contemporary poetry generally, and who want instead the stimulus of intellectual risk-taking and uncomfortable ethical debate. But there are good reasons why some intelligent people find little of value in the sentimental consensus of modern poetry. Hill’s writing, which speaks to those disputed conditions in which civil and spiritual, as well as personal, lives are actually led, offers readers something more rewarding than the usual panaceas. The poetry makes demands of its readers’ intelligence, engages them in a discourse about things that matter.

Hill’s poems grapple with the relationship between “civil power” and the people who both make and suffer under that power. This now entails, for the poet, an openness and a more general admission of what he calls (or rather cites as) “the inward and irremediable/ disposition of man”. The words belong to Milton as, in part, does Hill’s title (Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes was published in 1659) and the poet of Paradise Lost, an expert on man’s fallen nature, is a pervasive presence in the book. However, the cast list is long, and includes the Tudor poets Wyatt and Surrey, Oliver Cromwell, William Blake, Edmund Burke and many others.

Inevitably, there is a sense of the “bookish” — and Hill goes out of his way to court such a jibe by titling some poems “On reading . . .” (with names of scholarly tomes appended). But for Hill, books are disconcertingly lively things, and his bringing to life of the past is more than an affected literariness. A sonnet on Ben Jonson’s masques ends with a London not academically conditioned but imaginatively vivid: “dung and detritus in the crazy streets,/ the big coaches bellying in their skirts/ pothole to pothole, and the men of fire,/ the link-boys slouching and the rainy wind.” As always with Hill, the past is far from dead. The passionate disputes of 17th-century politics are everywhere — four sonnets alone concern Cromwell — but the issues are modern ones.

Not for the first time, there is a suspicion that Hill knows his authors so well that he can dislike them and even mean them harm. Bacon’s essay, “Of the

Living past . . . Cromwell features in four sonnets

38 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Books A star-studded fable

True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates”, haunts and irritates one poem, until finally Hill reminds his subject that “So many had, and have, nothing”, writing of how “My parents/ never owned a house”: “The poor are bunglers: my people, whom I/ nonetheless honour, who bought no landmark/ other than their graves. I wish I could keep/ Baconian counsel, wish I could keep resentment/ out of my voice.” The voice is clear and moving: neither the resentment nor the wish is a rhetorical sham, and this is proved on the pulses of phrasing and rhythm in the verse.

Great poetic styles are great because of their plainness as well as their complexities. Milton’s Treatise ends by condemning “pomp and ostentation of reading” in favour of “the scripture so copious and plain we have all that can properly be called true strength and nerve”. Hill’s new volume is without the kinds of pomp that buoy up a lot of successful modern writing, and his eclectic “scriptures” go beyond those of his predecessor, but no collection published this year — or for many years past — can match this demonstration of poetry’s “true strength and nerve”.

Starbook

by Ben Okri Rider Books 422pp £12.99 Ben Brown Observer

The American way of war Almost a Miracle

by John Ferling Oxford University 679pp $29.95 Jon Meacham Washington Post In late 1779, John Adams, then America’s “minister plenipotentiary for peace”, set out across the Atlantic for France. It was a difficult moment.

The revolution was turning into a long war. It had been more than four years since the battles of Lexington and Concord and three since the Declaration of Independence; the American forces and their French allies had just lost an important engagement in Savannah. Adams had much to do, and his journey marked the beginning of yet another lengthy separation from Abigail. Sacrifices, however, were necessary, Adams said, adding: “We shall be happy, whenever our Country is so.”

But as John Ferling makes clear in Almost a Miracle, his comprehensive and engaging history of the revolution, that day of national happiness was nowhere near. Ferling’s book is a sprawling account of the military side of the war and the details of the clash of the world’s mightiest empire with a guerrilla force remain compelling. Ferling’s attitude, recounted in his preface, is a common one: “It was war on a grand scale. Near its end, John Adams remarked that the American Revolution had set the world ablaze, and indeed the War of Independence grew to be a world war, with men fighting from Florida to Canada, from the Caribbean to Africa to India, and across broad reaches of high seas.”

Grand stuff and sweeping themes. But reading the book now, in the fifth summer of another American war, one is also struck by the echo, however faint, of how asymmetrical warfare waged by native peoples can bedevil even the finest professional soldiers.

The rebels had honed their unconventional tactics long before the revolution, mostly in combat against Native Americans. “The colonists learned how to minimise the chances of an enemy ambush, sometimes employed a hit-and-run style of fighting, often

Bloody . . . militiamen at Lexington Mary Evans utilised a mobile strategy, and not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies . . . warfare in the colonies came to be associated with a manner of fighting that England’s career soldiers variously called ‘irregular war’, ‘bush war’ or simply the ‘American way of war’.” There was also a clash of cultures between the independent-minded Americans and the haughtier British officers in the years before the revolution; there were scourges and beatings and hangings.

The intersection of brute tactics, the Brits’ resentment of the rebels, and the fury of many Americans turned the revolution into a grim and bloody conflict. In South Carolina, for example, there was what Ferling calls “a saturnalia of bloodshed” at the Waxhaws crossroads, a massacre of “severed hands and limbs, crushed skulls, and breached arteries”.

The decisive moment came in the hot, distant fields of the South. Ferling recreates the relentless misery of the war in Georgia and the Carolinas, an essential theatre overlooked in many popular recountings. The British failure to subdue the region was almost immediately followed by what turned out to be the final showdown at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. George Washington was surprised to receive a note from Cornwallis requesting a ceasefire so the British might sue for peace; no one had surrendered to Washington before.

Word spread rapidly. As a dispatch rider galloped north with the news, a 15-year-old Virginia militiaman guarding prisoners near the Appomattox river recalled that “every American present” threw “his cocked hat up in the air”, shouting “America is ours”.

In London, Lord North, the prime minister, paced and muttered, “Oh God, it is all over!” And in Philadelphia, Congress processed to a Lutheran Church to give thanks to God. The people, as John Adams had hoped, were as happy as their country.

From Gabriel García Márquez to Salman Rushdie, there has been a form of literature in which the fiercely political has been fused with the radiantly imaginative, the prosaic yoked to the poetic. Some called it magic realism, but the phrase has the stale sound of academic compartmentalisation. These authors were following William Blake, among others, reinventing the symbols of the sacred, putting inverted commas around the “real” world and threading the particular tragedies and tyrannies of history through transformative narratives.

Booker prize-winning Ben Okri’s first novel in five years stands in the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, although the book has a vision and voice uniquely its own. “This is a story my mother began to tell me when I was a child. The rest I gleaned from the book of life among the stars, in which all things are known.” The opening sentences are typical of the overall style, the apparent simplicity of fable, the unselfconscious mysticism.

Like many fables, there is a king whose son, the prince, will be tested through trials and tribulations, who must suffer on his path to greater insight and maturity. During this journey, he’ll meet a maiden, who comes from a secretive tribe of master artists, and fall in love. On this level of love story, the novel tells a tale that is archetypal, the desire and pursuit of the whole, but it consistently operates on many levels of meaning, its apparent simplicity, in fact, part of a rich fabric of symbol, echo and allusion.

It is also about art and its capacity to creatively reconfigure the cruelties of the world. The maiden’s tribe, we are told, “did not favour such simple things in its art as order, balance, harmony. These were easy, and had been fully explored for generations. The tribe had advanced to the higher harmony of broken cadences, discord as beauty”. Okri loves paradox, one of the striking affinities he has with Blake, and uses words to point at the hidden, the space where the sacred lives and breathes. “To understand too quickly was a failure. It was a blinding. Understanding stopped them from seeing and looking.”

For a book of indirections and paradoxes, it is a surprise when the land of the novel is directly named as Africa. Into this Africa comes “a strange plague . . . a cold white wind and wherever it blew it created vacant spaces . . . the white wind began to erase hills and valleys, it erased the memories of people, it erased villages and towns”. The intrusion of humanity’s inhumanity anchors the metaphysical lyricism, reminds us that all the best fairytales hold a mirror up to the darkness and terror of the world.

This is a vision of a paradise both found and lost.

Okri’s vision, so spiritualised, so peculiarly optimistic, will not be to everyone’s taste. No cynicism or knowingness — the ironic, the distanced, are remarkable by their absence. But the imaginative generosity and peculiar purity touch the heart.

Starbook is at “the mercy of ultimate mysteries”.

Okri does not wish to solve or reduce these mysteries; he reveres them, so he seduces the reader with a rapt recounting of the infinite within the particular.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 39

Books

Extraordinary denizen of the ocean’s deepest reaches . . . Meduse benthocodon sp Monterey Bay Research Institute

Beauties and beasts of the midnight zone The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss edited by Claire Nouvian Chicago 256pp £23 Tim Radford Us land dwellers are confined to a mosaic of habitats somewhere between the first metres of soil and the forest canopy. But sharks, jellyfish, copepods, krill, squid, fish, marine mammals and all the other extraordinary denizens of the oceans have the run of one vast, open-plan apartment block that covers more than 70% of the planet’s surface, to an average depth of 3,800m.

Put that way, 99% of the planet’s living room is ocean. Most of the sunlight that powers plant growth, and thus almost all life on Earth, is absorbed in the first 150m or so of water. Below 1,000m there is no light at all and therefore no primary production, so tenants of the midnight zone must eat each other.

The creatures at basement level grub along on a steady fall of scraps, carrion, excrement and tiny skeletons from the surface. Every now and then 40 tonnes or more of dead whale will tumble to the abyssal ooze, to deliver a bonanza of decomposing flesh and oil-rich bone that becomes home first to sleeper sharks and hagfish, then snails, worms and crustaceans, and finally snot worms, clams and mussels with a taste for the sulphides of decay.

In the active zones in the ocean ridges creatures skip the leftovers of photosynthesis and go for a di-

rect thermochemical fix: tubeworms, shrimps, clams and other specialised forms exploit the bacteria that, in turn, derive their energy from superheated, sulphide-rich brines that gush from submarine volcanic vents.

But for the most part life in the deep ocean is cold, harsh and hungry, and the herbivores that live in the dark must rise towards the solar-powered supper table at dusk, returning each dawn, in their billions, and with them must go the carnivores. Biologists call it the greatest synchronised animal movement on the planet. Some animals swim, paddle, or use water-powered jet propulsion. Siphonophores pump carbon monoxide into their air bladders to float towards the feeding zone. Bathyscaphoid squid fill their buoyancy tanks with ammonium ions, to become lighter than water. Sharks get extra hydrodynamic lift from the surplus of oil in their livers.

The diner may also become dinner. So the creatures of the deep invest a great deal of evolutionary ingenuity in survival, as the stunning pictures in this book make clear. The transparent octopus moves under a cloak of invisibility: it is, much of the time, indistinguishable from the water around it. Most exploit bioluminescence — light generated by natural chemical processes — to find food or puzzle predators.

Blue light is best for sea water. Most marine eyes don’t have the pigment that picks up red wavelengths. The dragon fish is an exception: it uses a red beam as a kind of sniper-scope to pick off prey by stealth and switches on blue headlights with high beams for more distant probes. Some hunters just light up and wait. Bioluminescent bacteria, feeding on decomposing tissue, send a kind of eatme signal to small animals, so some predators dangle luminous lures that mimic a bacterial beanfeast to entice unsuspecting diners.

Some creatures evade capture with belly lights called photophores that will blur into a light field

that exactly matches the colour and intensity of the filtered sunlight from the surface. The bent-tooth bristle-mouth, Cyclothone acclinidens, may be the most abundant vertebrate on the planet, says one contributor to The Deep, but it uses its camouflage so perfectly most people have never seen one.

The silky medusa Colobonema sericeum has tentacles that glow and drop off at moments of danger.

By the time the predator realises it has a mouthful of cobweb, its chosen lunch has disappeared into the blackness.

The sea has been home to complex life for 600m years, and probably more. It is still largely unexplored. Humans know the topography of the far side of the moon better than they know their own planet. Trawl nets tell tantalisingly little, because most of the haul disintegrates on the long journey to the surface. The first human eyes to look directly into the abyss did so only about 70 years ago: the first systematic exploration had to wait for the development of submersibles that could withstand the crushing pressures.

The Deep provides an extraordinary procession of beauties, some of them never photographed before.

They include the black-eyed squid Gonatus onyx, tenderly hugging its 2,000 eggs in a pouch that it will tug around for up to nine months; the siphonophore Praya dubia, a poisonous superorganism that grows up to 40m long, snaking gently through the deep like a wisp of gleaming rope; and the glowing sucker octopus Stauroteuthis syrtensis, flourishing a skirt like a tutu and string of tiny lanterns on each tentacle, 2km below the surface.

The book’s pictures are backed up by brief essays from some of the big players in ocean research. All tell the story of evolution’s marvellous variety. But many warn that this newly observed richness is already at risk, from deep-water trawling, pollution and global warming. We never knew it was there, and soon, perhaps, it won’t be.

40 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Diversions Bridge Zia Mahmood

Notes & Queries It’s a rather splendid day for a good hanging Who and when was the last poor wretch hanged, drawn and quartered in England?

The last people sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered were Colonel Edward Marcus Despard and his supposed co-conspirators in a plot to assassinate George III. In the face of public disquiet, the sentence was commuted to hanging and beheading in February 1803.

Despard was a victim of a paranoid government that saw terrorists everywhere and spent much of its time rounding up innocent people and holding them without charge.

(Some things never change.) The whole sorry tale is recounted in Mike Jay’s book, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard.

Chris Coates, Colchester, UK • Samuel Pepys, having witnessed the hanging, drawing and quartering of Major General Harrison, goes on to record in his diary that, “from thence to my Lords and took Capt Cuttance and Mrs Sheply to the Sunne tavern and did give them some oysters . . . by water home where I was angry with my wife for leaving her things about . . . within all afternoon putting up shelves in my study.” Cool or what?

Peter Turnbull, Leeds, UK

Only one applicant needed Does anyone have a truly unique job?

Santa Claus.

Jim Dewar, Gosford, NSW, Australia • Yes, God (except, of course, for Trinitarian Christians).

James Stevens, Volos, Greece

It’s not just in hospitals

Fine day for a hanging . . . Samuel Pepys

• The chief eunuch in a harem.

Adrian Cooper, Queens Park, NSW, Australia • Not quite unique but the person at Notes & Queries who decides what to publish — the Umpire for Notes & Queries (Unque) — comes close.

Gavin Mooney, Perth, Western Australia

Swearing by the oath Do newly qualified doctors still take a Hippocratic oath?

Last year our son received his degree in medicine from George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington DC. Not only did the graduates take the Hippocratic Oath but they were joined in reciting it by all the doctors among the families and friends attending the ceremony.

Patricia Gilman, Denver, Colorado, US

MRSA infects many hospitals. Why doesn’t it also infect homes?

It infects (and colonises) people, rather than hospitals or homes. If you wonder why it is not found outside them, the truth is that it is. Remember that golden staphylococcus is a normal skin bug, which most of the time sits on our skins, and is said to be colonising, rather than infecting.

Other times, it causes problems such as infecting a wound, causing skin infections such as cellulitis, systemic infections in more severe cases or more minor infections.

MRSA is just a more resistant version of this bug, and does all these things just as well. It is presumed that this resistance developed as a result of antibiotic usage and therefore that hospitals are a fertile ground for it, but it is found on people who have never been in hospital.

MRSA itself is no more virulent than the less resistant version.

Robert Venn, Auckland, New Zealand • Ask the hospital staph.

Krishnan Parayath, Pinellas Park, Florida, US

Any answers?

Why have the Dutch become the world’s tallest people, while the British have become the fattest in Europe?

Phil Watts, London, UK How deep is a desert?

Tracy Hickling, Melbourne, Australia Send answers to weekly.n&q@ guardian.co.uk or Guardian Weekly, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, UK

Nature watch Paul Evans “Now in midsummer,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens, “and a long way to the first autumnal inhalations . . . the mind lays by its trouble.”

Not this year it didn’t. Apart from all the other troubles in the world, midsummer was tipped from its axis by weather trouble. Those dog-days howled at the door.

But now “the first autumnal inhalations” really do feel calmer. Breathing the fragrance of fermenting and rot; giving in to the impulse to eat and drink the world; watching the sunlight flash through clouds that become suddenly luminous, clenching bars of rainbow — these things have a stilling effect. Even though the weather is still feisty and there

is fierce energy in the sky, there is something more peaceful, more at ease when autumn comes early.

As the seasons stumble blindfolded through time, we have to grab at their corners and hang on to the adventure. If we wait for what we recognise to be at ease with the world, we will be left standing, bemoaning only lost certainties.

A few days ago I went to Ynyslas,

a sand dune peninsula at the mouth of the River Dovy on the Welsh coast. A beautiful sunny, breezy day in the dunes. Where were the semi-feral kids diving off the dunes and rummaging through the marram grass for bugs? There are great, life-affirming and important things in the world that go unnoticed, unwondered at, un-pursued. Enough of this, let’s go and find them. I’m packing up for a camping trip. I expect it will be an exercise in finding the worst weather and pitching a tent in it. We go to join others who’ve already had to ride out a force 9 gale, so it should be exciting — an opportunity to feel the changes closely and let trouble trouble itself.

Would you rather the opponents found the best opening lead against your contracts, or the worst? Take a look at this deal from a teams match.

Love all, dealer East:

W mKQJ96 nA4 oAK876 p4

N m875 n 10 9 3 2 oJ pJ 9 5 3 2

S m 10 2 n865 o Q 10 9 2 p A K 10 6

E m A 10 3 nKQJ7 o543 pQ87

Would you like to be in six spades on the East-West cards? It seems if the opponents find the best opening lead of a club, the contract is hopeless? And if the opponents don’t lead a club, you can discard the club loser from the West hand on one of dummy’s heart winners, and then establish the diamond suit.

When the deal arose, the auctions at the two tables followed different courses. At the first, East-West were playing a strong no trump, and this was the bidding: West North East South 1♥ Pass 1♠ Pass 1NT Pass 3♦ Pass 3♠ Pass 4NT Pass 5♦ Pass 6♠ Pass Pass Pass With West as declarer, North decided that rather than lead a club (the unbid suit) he would try his singleton diamond — if his partner had either the ♦ A or the ♠ A, the contract would quickly go down on a diamond ruff. Charmed by the lead, West drew trumps in three rounds, cashed dummy’s heart winners to discard his club loser, and played a diamond to the king. When North discarded, the contract could no longer be made, since South retained two winners in the diamond suit.

At the other table, East-West were using the weak no trump: West North East South 1NT Pass 2 ♥ 1 Pass 2♠ Pass 3♦ Pass 3♠ Pass 4NT Pass 5♦ Pass 6♠ Pass Pass Pass 1) A transfer bid showing a spade suit

South naturally led the ♣ A against the slam. Suddenly, the contract could not be defeated — South switched to a heart at the second trick, and declarer won with dummy’s ace. He played five rounds of spades and then three of hearts, and South found himself looking at ♦ 3 to the ♣ Q K. Since East had the ♣ Q and dummy had ♦ A K 8, East made his slam.

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 41

Diversions

Online diversions Find more games and quizzes at guardianabroad.co.uk/games≥

Chess Leonard Barden

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9.

3 8 6 5

The solution will be published next week.

2 1

Free tough puzzles at guardian.co.uk/sudoku ≥ 1 8 3 9 4 7 2 6 5

4 5 6 1 3 2 8 7 9

9 7 2 6 5 8 3 4 1

8 9 4 2 6 5 7 1 3

6 1 7 4 9 3 5 2 8

2 3 5 7 8 1 6 9 4

3 2 1 8 7 9 4 5 6

7 4 8 5 1 6 9 3 2

5 6 9 3 2 4 1 8 7

Last week’s solution

1 5 7 5

9 2

2 5 2 6

8 7 1 6

3 7 4 9 No 710

Puzzles Chris Maslanka Pyrgic puzzles 1 “I shave all those men and only those men who do not shave themselves,” the town barber told Geach. Hmm, thought the philosopher, quick to pick up on a paradox, a chap either shaves himself or is shaved by the town barber. Now which group does the barber belong to?

2 Marshal Law (motto: esse est posse) dreamed he had to choose a posse of 495 men out of 954 volunteers.

Dreams are like that. Cutting a corner he decided instead to opt for a slightly smaller posse of 459 men.

Are there more ways, fewer ways or the same number of ways of choosing 459 out of 954 as of choosing 495?

3 Some say that they see in this shape (left) a gigantic hound looking to the left; others the head of a goat bent down cropping the grass; others yet compare the shape to an axe head. Whichever you look at, the task remains the same: to cut the silhouette with a single straightline cut into two pieces having the same size and shape. Well?

4 The following calculation — seen on Professor Didipotamus’s fridge door — has some of its digits missing, each missing digit has been replaced by an asterisk (*). Can you restore the calculation? *4*4 X 7 = *4*4* 5 How many distinct solutions has the equation v + w + x + y + z = 10?

All the variables must be whole numbers greater than or equal to zero. email: guardian@puzzlemaster.co.uk

Wordplay

two interpretations?

Wordpool In each case find the correct definition: CLYPEUS a) upper deck of a trireme b) part of an insect’s head c) hare-lip d) shoulder-blade SINIGRIN a) Hebrew religious court or process b) mustard-flower c) Manchurian warlord d) potassium myronate KYAT a) unit of currency in Myanmar b) Mongolian stockade c) kind of tent used in the Gobi desert d) drink made with fermented arrowroot

Info Identify the two words whose spelling differs only in the letters shown: IN******** FO********

On the homophone The first suggested following an aleatory procedure, the second understood that they ought to invest much time in sketching. Which sentence is capable of these

Cryptic Boy to go the distance (5) Missing Links Find a word that follows the first word in the clue and precedes the second in each case making a fresh word or phrase. Eg: the answer to fish mix could be cake (fishcake & cake mix) and to bat man it could be he (bathe & he-man)... a) equal master b) corks cut c) wings handle d) whip some e) think top f) sleeping boy © CMM 2007. Solutions on page 30

London’s Staunton Memorial, now in its fifth year, is an evocative event for chess history. The Shakespearean scholar Howard Staunton was the best player in the world in the 1840s, and gave his name to what has become the universally accepted pattern for chess pieces.

The tournament venue, Simpsons in the Strand, was a habitat for 19thcentury grandmasters, who could pass profitable hours by taking on amateurs for a shilling a game.

Simpsons still displays a set and board on which the world champions Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker strutted their skills.

In a modern sense, too, the Staunton harks back. Just 20 years ago London had a thriving chess scene with major tournaments such as the GLC Kings at County Hall and the Lloyds Bank Masters at Marble Arch.

Garry Kasparov played world title matches in London in 1986, 1993 and 2000, while ordinary players could cross pawns with experts at the capital’s strong weekend opens.

Now the Staunton is a solitary survivor. The England No 1 Michael Adams and the Netherlands’ Loek Van Wely are the top seeds, and at one point they shared the lead, both unbeaten, on 7/9.

Nc6 5 Nc3 a6 6 Nxc6 bxc6 7 Bd3 d5 8 O-O Nf6 9 Re1 Be7 10 e5 Nd7 11 Qg4 g6 12 Bh6 c5 13 b3 Bb7 14 Na4 Qc7 15 Qf4 Bf8 16 Bxf8 Kxf8 17 c4 d4 18 Qh6+ Kg8 19 Be4 Rb8 20 Nb2 Qd8 21 Nd3 Qf8 22 Qd2 Bxe4 23 Rxe4 Kg7 24 h4 h5 25 b4 cxb4 26 Rxd4 Qe7 27 Rd6 Rhc8 28 Qe3 Rb7 29 Qd4 Nb8 30 c5 a5 31 Rd1 Nc6 32 Qe4 Na7 33 Nf4 Rxc5 34 Rxe6! fxe6 35 Qxg6+ Kh8 36 Qh6+ Kg8 37 Ng6 1-0 No 2997 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

N de Firmian v I Thingstad, Tromso 2007. How did the Norwegian (Black, to move) shock the three-time US champion?

M Adams v J Werle 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 e6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4

No 2997: 1 . . . Qd1+ 2 Ka2 Qb3+! 3 Rxb3 cxb3+ and Rd1 mate

Sudoku classic Hard

Quick crossword Across 1 Source of political authority (5,4) 8 Loosen (4) 9 Clerical worker with a tedious job (9) 10 Highland garb (4) 13 Blurred (5) 15 Responsible at law (6) 16 “I’ve found it!” (6) 17 Slake (6) 19 Kiss and cuddle (6) 20 Strange — eccentric (5) 21 Way out sign (4) 24 Trivial (9) 25 Main point (of the matter) (4) 26 Noisy wranglings (4-5)

Down 2 3 4 5 6

7 11 12

Portent (4) See (4) Rich shellfish soup (6) Sordid political behaviour? (6) Crime committed by or with the assistance of someone on the premises (6,3) Odontalgia (9) Fluency of speech (9) Flippant (9)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22

23

24 25 26

13 Push with the finger — film (5) 14 Mmmmm! (5) 18 Intense feeling of fear (6) 19 Low-paid worker (6) 22 Earnest request (4) 23 Manure (4)

Last week’s solution, No 11,629

S P S I

No 11,636

S U C K E R P U N C H

G A P E N D T R V U M E M R R S I S T E E I N E S T V C I S I O E N O N E Y S T L

S B H R I F T A G H P H A S I E M R W I N D O S D MO T H E I G N P O R O O E U C K L E S E

S Y R K

42 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 42

Climate change versus poverty African exports are facing a ban on the use of the term organic Aidan Hartley Kenya’s Kikuyu farmers are preparing for war with Britain. There isn’t an AK-47 in sight, though there are plenty of organic cucumbers, carrots, French beans and cauliflowers. It’s a battle over who is to blame for climate change — poor African farmers who export their produce by air, or western consumers who care about the environmental impact of food miles.

“Who emits more greenhouse gases?” asks Charles Kimani among his avocado trees. “A Kenyan or a Briton?”

The average Briton emits 30 times more carbon than a Kenyan, according to World Bank figures — 9.4 tonnes of CO2 compared with 0.3 tonnes.

Organic produce is the fastest growth area of Africa’s horticultural industry, with cut flowers and other high-value products such as dried herbs and essential oils. In Kenya, where two-thirds of people live on less than 50p a day, horticulture is the largest export after tourism. The story is much the same in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania.

The UK’s Soil Association (SA) has proposed to ban imports of organic produce from poor countries such as Kenya because of their food miles, the carbon emitted by air transport. The consultation finishes next month, when it will decide on a total or partial ban.

A ban would mean labelling airfreighted products so that they lose their organic status, destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of

Crops such as Senegalese cotton rely on the organic label Panapress/Getty smallholders across Africa in one of the continent’s most enterprising export industries. “A ban on our export market will be death for us,” says Kimani, who has put his children through school and college from the profits made from fruit and vegetables on just under three hectares of land.

The food miles debate deepens the scepticism that many Africans already have towards western rhetoric about ending poverty in the continent. Most farmers in upcountry Kenyan areas such as Kiambu do not look to increased aid as the way out of poverty. Devout Christians with a tradition of hard work and self-help, Kikuyu farmers see wealth coming from access to lucrative western markets. “The SA proposal is just another non-tariff barrier to trade among the many that already exist,” says Eustace Kiarii, chief of an organisation representing Kenyan organic farmers.

“Over the years we have developed

an enterprising culture that should not be undermined. Farmers from Kenya and developing countries are not asking for special trade access, but to be allowed to trade competitively.”

Kenyan organic farmers receive no subsidies, whereas European Union farmers were given €50bn ($67bn) in aid last year. A taskforce in Nairobi has commissioned a study hoping to prove the food miles lobby wrong by looking at African farming in comparison to European organic agriculture.

The food miles lobby argues that air-freighting food emits more CO2 than any other method of transportation. To fly 1kg of mangetout peas from Nairobi to London takes 4kg of carbon.

But Cranfield University in London calculated that growing roses in Kenya, which relies heavily on renewable energies such as solar or thermal power, and air-freighting them to Europe saved more carbon than if the flowers were grown in the Netherlands.

Nets halve Kenya’s malaria child deaths Xan Rice A mass free distribution of mosquito nets in Kenya that has nearly halved child deaths from malaria in high-risk areas has led the World Health Organisation to recommend for the first time that nets should be given away, rather than sold, in the developing world.

In a project that is being hailed as a model for other African countries, Kenya’s ministry of health has distributed 13.5m insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) across the country since 2003.

As a result, the number of children sleeping under a net increased from 5% to 52% in less than five years.

The scale of the distribution is unprecedented in Africa, where malaria kills a million people a year, more than any other disease.

Early results from the Kenyan programme show that in some areas the number of childhood deaths from malaria has fallen by 44%. Three hosEvery year 34,000 Kenyans die after being bitten by mosquitos and families spend $20 on treatment

pitals in malarial-prone coastal areas reported a drop in admissions of 57% in 2006, compared with 1999. Dr Willis Akhwale, head of malaria control at the health ministry, said: “We have shown the war on malaria can be won.”

It has long been known that ITNs are one of the most effective ways to prevent malaria, but distribution in Africa has been low because of a lack of funding and capacity at both donor and government level, The WHO suggested all community members should now be targeted, rather than only pregnant women and children under five, who have been the main beneficiaries of ITN campaigns.

Field notes

International Development • North Korea’s worst flooding in more than 30 years threatens to turn into a health disaster as survivors fall prey to waterborne diseases, the Red Cross warned last week in appealing for $5.5m of medicines and supplies. With 30% to 40% of the country’s health facilities and drug supplies damaged or destroyed, the humanitarian organisation said emergency help was needed to support the 89,000 people left homeless.

• Saudi Arabia has removed seven brands of Chinese toothpaste from shops after they were found to contain a poisonous chemical, the ministry of trade and industry said. Routine tests had shown traces of diethylene glycol, used in coolants and solvents but too toxic for use in food and medicine.

• Thousands of local UN employees in Democratic Republic of Congo stopped work last week to protest at pay and working conditions, hampering the world’s largest peacekeeping operation.

About 500 protestors blowing whistles and chanting slogans gathered in the capital Kinshasa outside the headquarters of the UN mission.

• Cases of waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea and dysentery in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, have been rising since the Zimbabwe National Water Authority started diverting

Drinking water in Harare

untreated human waste into Lake Chivero, the city’s main source of water. The authority has been unable to raise money to repair the capital’s sewage treatment plant.

• Dozens of Bhutanese refugees have fled UN-run camps in eastern Nepal, citing growing insecurity linked to resettlement hopes. Worst hit was the Beldangi camp in Jhapa district, the daily Kathmandu Post reported.

Compiled by Harriet Horobin-Worley

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 43 International Development Appointments

THE AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK Established in 1964, the African Development Bank is the premier pan-African development institution fostering economic growth and social progress in Africa. The Bank’s primary goal is to reduce poverty and improve living standards by mobilising resources in and outside Africa and providing financial and technical assistance for development projects and programs in Africa. The ADB has a total of 77 member states comprising 53 regional (African) and 24 non-regional countries.

The ADB currently has the following vacancies: PRINCIPAL FINANCIAL ACCOUNTANT - EXPENDITURE CONTROL Perform verifications ensuring compliance with International Accounting Standards; ensure efficient transaction processing services, including effective controls to safeguard the Bank’s assets; deliver business process improvements; identify cost-savings and promote an efficient use of Bank’s resources; provide guidance on accounting and classifications of financial transactions, carry out checks on Administrative Expenses; prepare SAP reports, follow-up outstanding issues internally; participate in the review and formulation of accounting procedures, policies and practices; assess best practices from other organizations, issue recommendations on their suitability to the Bank's environment and advise management on methods to improve the control environment in the Department in particular and in the Bank in general.

Closing Date: 3 September 2007 PRINCIPAL TREASURY OFFICER Currently, the Division manages a borrowing/debt portfolio of about US$ 9 billion, ADF contributions of about US$ 19 billion, ADB capital subscriptions of US$ 34 billion and a derivative portfolio of about US$ 7.5 billion. You will monitor bond markets and lead discussions with counterparts in investment banks; formulate and execute the strategy for bond issuance; take full responsibility for funding transactions and organize roadshows and meetings with international bond investors. Contribute to the development of the capital markets of regional member countries by assessing local capital markets issuance opportunities; recommend strategies to meet management objectives and review legal documentation. Perform Asset and Liability management activities by Supervision Analysis of maturity structure of the Bank’s existing bonds; evaluate and manage the risk exposure of bond portfolios. Advise management and participate in discussions on capital increases. Coordinate the Bank’s annual rating review exercise; propose modifications to financial policies for discussion and presentation to rating agencies. Review financial policies and guidelines, advise the management and present proposals to the Board. Prepare the Bank’s annual borrowing program for Board approval; monitor the Bank’s key financial ratios and provide projections on the basis of various scenarios.

Closing Date: 3 September 2007

PRINCIPAL LIVESTOCK OFFICER Initiate and lead project identification, preparation and appraisal missions in Regional Member Countries, prepare Terms of Reference for sector studies and recommend feasible and viable livestock projects/programmes for Bank’s funding; monitor the implementation of livestock projects, programmes and studies financed by the Bank; contribute to and monitor the development of national livestock policies and strategies; assist countries in designing sector strategies and implementing projects and programmes in the livestock sector; cooperate with other organizational units of the Bank to ensure that livestock development constraints and opportunities are adequately addressed in project investments; develop and support strategic thinking both inside and outside the Bank Group on livestock development; represent the Bank Group in continental and international livestock-related initiatives; support general quality assurance activities.

Closing Date: September 15, 2007 PRINCIPAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT OFFICER Assess the adequacy and effectiveness of financial management systems at the Executing Agencies and Project Implementation Units; review the reliability, accuracy and integrity of financial and automated management information systems; evaluate Borrower’s accounting systems and controls and provide advisory technical support to the project/program team on matters of financial analysis and management; support capacitybuilding of the Executing Agencies in the area of financial management; establish procedures and safeguards against fraud and fund losses; report to management on significant issues related to the financial management of the Bank Group’s projects portfolio; facilitate and undertake training seminars/workshops on project financial management for Borrowers, Executing Agencies and Bank Staff; prepare financial management guidelines, manuals, guidance notes on various issues for use by the Operations and other departments; submit budget estimates and supplemental budget requirements for the Department.

Closing Date: September 15, 2007 LEAD ECONOMISTS (3 Positions)

SENIOR AGRONOMIST Contribute by technical inputs to the Bank Group’s operational activities on agriculture and agro-industry activities, through the review of the technical design and institutional arrangements for agricultural projects/programmes proposed for Bank’s funding and assessing their feasibility from the perspective of present and future benefits impact. Participate in agricultural sector review and in developing a pipeline of agricultural and agro industry projects/programmes; undertake field missions to supervise project implementation and project completion reviews. Review procurement documents in line with the Bank’s procurement procedures; review project feasibility studies and progress reports; select consultants for missions and supervise technical aspects of their work.

Provide quality control and guidance in the preparation of country strategies and lead in drafting regional assistance strategies, advise on country-level dialogue with governments, stakeholders and donors, ensuring compliance to the Bank’s commitments under the Paris Declaration; promote development policies to improve project and sector work and ensure that the Department taps into knowledge-sharing networks and is fully appraised of innovative theories and practices in development economics; represent the Bank at key economic meetings and missions; be the spokesperson on economic issues to external constituencies and expert economic groups; develop and build client relations at senior level and play a promotional role in generating new business for the Bank. All three positions require excellent written and verbal communication skills in French and English and for one in particular, a good knowledge of Portuguese.

Closing Date: 15 September, 2007

Closing Date: 20 September 2007

The ADB offers an internationally competitive remuneration and benefits package, which includes a tax-free salary, generous education grant for children, annual leave, home leave every two years, medical care, staff retirement benefit, group accident and life insurance policies and diplomatic immunity and privileges.

Women are strongly encouraged to apply.

Detailed job descriptions are available on the Bank’s website at www.afdb.org Please forward your application to: recruit@afdb.org or write to: Division Manager Staff Planning and Recruitment Division Human Resources Management Dpt African Development Bank Temporary Relocation Agency (TRA) Angle des trois rues, Avenue du Ghana, Rue Pierre de Courbertin, Rue Hedi Nouira BP 323 1002 Tunis Belvedere TUNISIA

Fax: (216) 71 831 472

www.afdb.org

EFL Teachers Opportunities in Saudi Arabia Bell International seeks qualified, enthusiastic and dedicated EFL teachers for a foundation programme at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

International medical relief - Country Health Directors

www.bell-centres.com

£22,990 - £28,181 plus benefits

Please complete a downloadable application form available at: http://www.bell-centres.com/jobs/worldwide or contact us on jobs. saudi@bell-centres.com with a CV and covering note.

Registered Charity Number: 311585

Join the Guardian Weekly team as they discuss what’s happened in the world this week.

Listen over a nice cup of tea.

Or a vodka, depending where you are in the world.

- Finance & Administration Managers £18,540 - £23,731 plus benefits

overseas based Merlin is the only specialist UK charity which responds worldwide with vital health care and medical relief for vulnerable people caught up in natural disasters, conflict, disease and health system collapse. Each year, Merlin helps more than 15 million people in up to 20 countries.

We are looking for highly motivated medical and financial professionals to work in Asia and Africa.

You will be professionally qualified with highly developed specialist knowledge. As a proven leader and project manager, you will have excellent representation skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a culturally diverse group of people.

In return we will offer you the opportunity to make a sustainable difference to some of the most vulnerable people in the world and play your part in the development of a dynamic aid agency.

Merlin also runs the following week-long training courses for anyone wanting to gain skills in international aid work:

- Introduction to Relief and Emergencies - Public Health in Crisis and Transitional Contexts The Guardian Weekly podcasts guardianweekly.co.uk/podcast

For further details on vacancies and training, please visit www.merlin.org.uk Merlin is committed to providing equal opportunities for all current and prospective staff

44 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 International Development Appointments & Courses

You’ll never take your eye off the ball

Humanitarian Director | £60,000 + relocation package | Based in Oxford, with international travel Humanitarian crises can happen anywhere in the world, at any time.

And you’ll need to be ready for them. In this exceptionally high profile role, the challenges will come thick and fast and the pressure will be constant. But then no other job in the world could offer the incredible sense of fulfilment and personal achievement you’ll experience here.

When you’re not co-ordinating our relief operations around the world, you’ll be making an influential contribution to global policy. With that in mind, an established reputation in the humanitarian sector is

www.oxfam.org.uk/jobs

Mango: international specialists in financial management for NGOs. Mango helps NGOs manage their money better, by: running training courses, sourcing finance staff, advising NGOs and publishing free tools & guides.

Mango Training: Taking the fear out of finance Practical short courses including: Getting the Basics Right, Managing for Financial Sustainability and Grant Management and many others, coming up in: * Gabarone, Botswana, * Bangkok, Thailand, * Amman, Jordan

* Arusha, Tanzania, * Dhaka, Bangladesh, * The UK and elsewhere.

“Mango training was a great investment for our NGO.” Details: www.mango.org.uk/training

Mango Recruitment: Finance staff who make a difference Recruiting finance staff? We can help, from our register of individually selected finance professionals, dedicated to working with NGOs, available for long or short term positions. No appointment, no fee!

Finance professional working with NGOs? Apply to join our register to access new jobs in head office and field locations, globally.

“Your candidates were the clear winners against a global field.”

Details: www.mango.org.uk/recruitment

Mango Publications: Practical advice & tools, ready to use Free tools and advice written specially for NGOs. Download our highly rated Health Check, available in 7 languages. Also: a complete finance system; Mango’s training manual; practical advice. All written for busy NGO staff in simple language, without jargon.

“The best capacity building resources I have ever come across.”

Available: www.mango.org.uk/guide Mango is a UK registered charity, no: 1081406

critical. You’ll also need to bring fresh ideas, inspirational leadership skills and director-level experience. Above all, you must be prepared to work tirelessly to raise the international standards of humanitarian protection and response, and the quality of life for millions of people across the globe. The ball’s in your court. Find out more and apply at www.oxfam.org.uk/jobs/humdir quoting ref: INT2332.

Interview date: 12th October 2007.

Oxfam works with others to overcome poverty and suffering.

Papua New Guinea Advisory Support Facility

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 45 International Development Appointments

RESEARCH COORDINATION ADVISER National Research Institute Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea • Attractive international remuneration package including generous allowances • 12 month contract with possible extension The PNG Advisory Support Facility seeks a Research Coordination Adviser for the PNG National Research Institute (NRI) to assist in the continued development of relevant, sustainable, coordinated and focussed research activities. To be considered for this position, you will need to demonstrate previous experience in planning and managing research programs combined with strong knowledge of contemporary research methodologies and have the ability to apply these in a developing country context.

ASFII provides capacity building assistance to key PNG government agencies. Working as an ASF Adviser is challenging and rewarding with the satisfaction of working alongside PNG counterparts to achieve developmental goals. Women are encouraged to apply for this position.

T h e P N G A S F, an AusAID f u n d e d f a c i l i t y, is managed by C o ff e y International Development.

Detailed background information plus ESSENTIAL application procedures for this position are available on our website at http://www.coffey.com/recruitment/ id or from Kylie Green at Ph (618) 8418 1500 Email: Kylie_Green@coffey.com quoting reference number PNGASF 58/2-147. For further information: Dr Tracey Johnson Ph (675) 320 1926 or Ms Elise Skinner at Elise_Skinner@coffey.com Applications close 5.00pm (ACDT) Monday 10 September 2007

PNG is a diverse and exciting country, providing opportunities for recreation, travel and cultural experiences. Tax free status may be possible for fulltime ASF positions over 90 days.

46 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 Appointments & Courses

ALL SOULS COLLEGE

OXFORD, ENGLAND Senior Research Fellowships University

Post

Closes

Ref.

P/AP/SL Private Law University Archivist Director of Finance/University Bursar

9.9.07 14.9.07 15.10.07

W54934 W54911 W54920

L Earth Sciences P Biophotonics P Nanophotonics

24.9.07 28.9.07 28.9.07

W54933 W54914 W54915

SL/L Applied Mathematics Chairs in Education L English Medical Imaging Lecturer SL/L Transport Design Senior Tutor/Tutor Industrial Design Associate Director Student Learning Support

28.9.07 30.9.07 30.9.07 7.9.07 30.9.07 17.9.07 14.9.07

W54931 W54905 W54917 W54926 W54906 W54932 W54930

Vice Chancellor

31.10.07

W54913

L Humanities & English

14.9.07

W54909

AFRICA & CARIBBEAN Cape Town (South Africa) West Indies (Jamaica) West Indies (Jamaica)

AUSTRALIA New England (Armidale) Swinburne (Victoria) Swinburne (Victoria)

NEW ZEALAND Auckland Canterbury Canterbury Christchurch Poly. Inst. Tech.

Massey (Auckland) Massey (Wellington) Waikato

All Souls College intends to elect three Senior Research Fellows with effect from 1st October 2008 (or an agreed later date): in Philosophy, in History, and in Theoretical Life Sciences (all subjects broadly conceived). The Fellowships are open to women and men.

The College regards a Senior Research Fellowship as being of comparable academic standing to an Oxford University Professorship, and applicants are expected to have a correspondingly distinguished record of achievement in research.

Further particulars, including details of emoluments and terms of appointment, application form, and copies of a memorandum for referees may be obtained from the Warden’s Secretary, All Souls College, Oxford OX1 4AL; mary.yoe@all-souls.ox.ac.uk. See also the College’s website: www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk.

Applications, on the application form, should reach the Warden not later than Monday, 10th September 2007.

PACIFIC South Pacific (Fiji)

UNITED KINGDOM Aga Khan (London)

Abbreviations: P – Professor; AP - Associate Professor; SL - Senior Lecturer; L – Lecturer.

For further details of any of the above staff vacancies please contact ACU Advertising, Woburn House, 20-24 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9HF, UK (internat. tel. +44 (0)20 7380 6706 [UK office hours]; fax +44 (0)20 7380 6776; e-mail: adverts@acu.ac.uk), quoting reference number of post(s). For full details and a wide range of information on employment opportunities in Commonwealth Universities visit our website http://www.acu.ac.uk/adverts.

Promoting educational co-operation throughout the Commonwealth

Teaching and Senior Vacancies Worldwide International House World 146 schools in over 40 countries.

Stimulating and rewarding jobs for every stage of your ELT career - in schools where quality matters.

Visit our website for details of all our current vacancies and apply online now! www.ihworld.com/recruitment Email: worldrecruit@ihworld.co.uk

The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07 47

Sport Sports diary Barney Ronay ‘It is not good to lose’

Britain’s best tennis player of the past decade has been dogged by a back injury that may or may not be a reaction to 10 years of performing the same awkward fist-pumping gesture. “This was as good as I could have been,” he said of a career that brought 11 singles titles, six grand slam semi-finals and thousands of dotty women wrapped in union flag tea towels shouting “Go on Tim!” for two weeks every year.

After a couple of weeks of egalitarianism, the Premier League got back to what it does best: big teams winning. Manchester United crunched their season into gear with a 1-0 win at home to Tottenham. It was the champions’ first victory in four games and Nani’s winner was their first goal at Old Trafford since April.

Manchester City’s mixture of homegrown youngsters and players Sven Goran Eriksson’s found on YouTube dropped their first points in a 1-0 defeat at Arsenal. “It is not good to lose,” Sven reflected, revealing that his gift for repartee, at least, remains intact. Chelsea leapfrogged City to the top of the table with a 1-0 win at home to Portsmouth. Frank Lampard scored, following on from his goal in England’s 2-1 friendly defeat by Germany, a game notable for the blunder that looks to have cost Paul Robinson his place for the European qualifiers.

to two. In the last round of rugby union World Cup warm-up games France thrashed Wales 34-7 and Scotland lost 27-3 at home to South Africa. “We just need to sharpen up on the rugby,” said Scotland skipper Jason White, putting his finger on it.

Dull end of the rugby

What? No burgers?

No fairytales in Rugby League’s Challenge Cup final as St Helens beat French upstarts Catalans Dragons 30-8. A full house at Wembley stadium saw a Catalans side featuring eight Australians lose out by five tries

England was ahead of India 2-1 in a seven-rubber series after Monday’s one-day international. Andrew Flintoff made his latest comeback from injury in England’s opening victory at the Rose Bowl. India sneaked

Who let the dogs out?

No more tea towels . . . Tim Henman has announced his retirement AFP/Getty Images

home by nine runs at Bristol, a game that saw Sachin Tendulkar dismissed for 99 for the second time this summer. In Zimbabwe South Africa trounced their hosts 3-0 in a quickfire one-day series. It was the first time for two years a major cricket nation had played there. They might not be back for a while though: players complained of not being able to order meat in the fast-food restaurants.

Tim’s not going on Tim Henman announced that the US Open will be his last tournament.

More proof that nobody does sportrelated violent crime quite like the US: NFL quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty this week to federal dog fighting charges. Vick stands to lose his $130m contract with the Atlanta Falcons, not to mention his liberty, after admitting running an interstate pit bull colony called Bad Newz Kennels. Better news for the spectator who caught Barry Bonds’ record home run baseball. Matt Murphy, a student from New York, has decided to sell the ball at auction.

Sotheby’s have estimated its value at $500,000. “The scramble for the ball was the longest minute of my life — one gentleman kicked me in the head,” he laughed, dollar signs whizzing around in his eyes.

Cryptic crossword by Rover Across 1 Romantic setting for meal with an old flame? (11) 9 One may hold a key to the past (7) 10 It’s eaten when seated in state (7) 11 She washes the French strip (9) 12 This cat is not heavy (5) 13 Post to Southend (4) 14 Look suspiciously at detective: arsenic and a neck broken!

(3,7) 16 Our violent transformation (10) 19 In Ayr, they are barely in it (4) 21 The time when Lancelot, say, lost his head (5) 22 Bags of vicious cruelties (9) 24 A painter’s cheery greeting? (7)

25 In the main, this calf is dangerous (7) 26 Wife, said to be ready for the photographer, made up an example (5,6)

16 17

Down

18

1 “... put a girdle round the earth ...”

(15) 2 Famous college sent down duke (5) 3 Nearly 100 involved in stealing (7) 4 Family of grasshoppers irritated scout in Los Angeles (7) 5 Factory where talk is effective (8) 6 Where prospective teachers got to bed?

(15) 7 Sign of a fish, but not Pisces (6) 8 Please supply African wood (6) 15 The most insipid

20

Guardian News and Media Ltd. All rights reserved.

Published by Guardian News and Media Ltd., 1 Scott Place, Manchester, M3 3GG.

23

accommodation survey (8) Fame achieved

by Wren on reconstruction (6) Connected from beginning to end (7) This orc running is one that can’t fly (7) Amount required to cook salvia (6) Rubber pancake? (5)

1

2

3

4

5

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Puzzle 24, 163 published in the Guardian 23 August 2008.

Last week’s solution, No 24, 151: D I A T R I B O T O E S T A R T O F S B A O E L E C T O R R G E E S T A U D I C O N S UMM A I L E NO V I C E T E I H E R ON S U S E S E E S AW

E F S E A P B D

A S C P A R A C M I AMT S Y T E E V R I E R N A R E C E E R R

T R E TM E E D I R A L

I D I O S D I A I I N S

S M S T L Y R R F OO T B L I E R E

Le Monde translation: Harry Forster.

Printed by GPC. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.

16

17

21

22

24

18

19

20

23

25

26

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48 The Guardian Weekly 31.08.07

Sport

American delivers on his boast Gay pips Powell at the last to claim 100m title

near his home, has slowly been progressing on the world 100m scene but never like this year, when he won the US trials in style and earlier in the season ran a wind-assisted 9.76 in New York. Although it did not count — Powell has run the world record of 9.77 three times — it woke the sport up to his ability and that performance gave him he confidence to know he could win here.

His victory so stunned Powell, faster out of the blocks and stormingly overtaken, that the Jamaican tied up, letting the Bahamian Derrick Atkins through for the silver in 9.91, a national record.

Marlon Devonish, the only Briton to make the final after Craig Pickering and Mark Lewis-Francis were eliminated in the semi-finals, was sixth in 10.14.

Giving Britain its first medal, Kelly Sotherton won heptathlon bronze and immediately questioned the validity of the silver medallist Lyudmila Blonska, who had returned to the sport after a drugs suspension to beat the British athlete into third place.

The 30-year-old Sotherton, the Olympic bronze medallist in Athens, scored 6,510 points. Sweden’s Carolina Kluft retained the title.

The Ukrainian Blonska was banned in 2003 for two years after testing positive for stanozolol, the anabolic steroid used by the disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson. But when Sotherton was asked about competing against her, she said: “We will find out in a couple of months if she does a test.

Hopefully she is clean. But you want to beat people who are dirty to prove it’s not worth cheating anyway.”

World Championships Michael Phillips Osaka Tyson Gay was as good as his word. He has predicted all season he could win the world 100 metres title and, when he was put alongside Asafa Powell — they were in adjacent lanes — the American delivered.

As quiet descended around the Nagia Stadium last Sunday, with a crowd of 60,000, including Emperor Akihito, focused on the shoot-out for which the sport has been waiting all summer, Gay produced a run of stunning power to overcome the Jamaican with a final burst, clocking 9.85sec.

There was no world record — even though this lightning-fast track looked made for one — but there were dedications and predictions all round from the champion — first to his mother, then to his coach, who is in prison, and finally to announce that he hoped his achievements would be the start of lifting the drugs gloom that has engulfed the blue-riband event since his fellow American Justin Gatlin tested positive last year. “I want to thank everyone for not asking me questions all week about drugs,” said Gay. “I’m glad to have won it clean. I’ve tried to get the clouds away and now I hope the whole doping situation disappears.”

Gay, 25, who was born in Kentucky and gained his love for speed by attending horse racing’s famous derby

As promised . . . Tyson Gay wins the 100 metres Michael Dalder/Reuters

sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics ≥

Masterful Massa gives Ferrari fresh impetus Formula One Alan Henry Istanbul Felipe Massa helped Ferrari stay in McLaren’s rear-view mirror last Sunday with a decisive victory in the Turkish grand prix, successfully fending off the challenge from his team-mate Kimi Raikkonen to finish just 2.2sec clear.

With Lewis Hamilton’s world championship momentum being checked by a spectacular front tyre failure, which dropped him from third behind the Ferraris to fifth at the last, it was left to Fernando Alonso to save the day for McLaren, the world champion vaulting through to take third place after Hamilton limped into the pits on three wheels to fit a replacement right front tyre at the end of lap 43.

This was Massa’s second successive win here and a success that left Ferrari with renewed optimism going into the Italian team’s home race at Monza on September 9, although most formula one insiders believe that the Ferrari F2007 and the McLaren MP4-22 will be even more closely matched than usual when the title battle moves on to the high-speed, low-downforce parkland circuit near Milan.

The outcome of last Sunday’s largely processional event left Hamilton, who said before the race that he planned to move away from Britain to escape the pressure on his personal life, still leading the championship battle on 84 points, five clear of Alonso on 79, with Massa and Raikkonen next up on 69 and 68 points respectively.

“After three grands prix and two wins here, it’s a really special circuit for me,” said Massa as he descended from the podium.

“It was certainly a difficult race, but I kept my concentration. At one point Kimi began running two-tenths quicker, then I made a small, small mistake going into turn seven, which made my life a little bit more difficult.

But I managed to pull it back and get things under control again.”

Massa also confessed that he had an uncomfortably turbulent ride for five or six laps when a cooling vent on the top of his helmet worked loose and he spent some time grappling to tear it off before continuing on his unflustered path to the chequered flag.

“I am also proud to win here again

in front of my father and my mother too,” Massa said, showing obvious emotion.

Having dominated last year’s race here in flawless style ahead of Alonso’s Renault and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari, the 26-year-old from Sao Paulo once again showcased his ability on the Istanbul Park circuit by prising pole position from Hamilton’s grasp in the final moments of the final qualifying top-10 shoot-out.

“Yes, it was tough, qualifying was very tight,” the Brazilian said. “You could see that every single [sector] was always a big fight between all four drivers, and in the last one, I managed to put together a great lap and I’m very proud, especially after a very bad result in Hungary.”