TGIF Edition 5 June 2009

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ISSN 1172-4153 | Volume 2 | Issue 37 |

unilateral action to declare their expenses – firstly the Greens and tonight the Act party.

Their actions, while largely symbolic, leave Labour and National outflanked on the issue of public disclosure.

Dunedin

| 5 June 2009

There’s been little public scrutiny of MPs’ expenses beyond what has emerged into the public domain through other means, such as Jonathan Hunt’s taxi bills or Alliance MP Phillida Bunkle’s accommodation living allowance claims.

on the

INSIDE

By Ian Wishart

As the British government implodes over a growing MPs’expenses scandal,the New Zealand government is seriously considering whether there needs to be greater disclosure of MPs’expense accounts here.

A spokesman for Prime Minister John Key tonight reiterated that the PM has not taken a decisive line on the issue yet, choosing instead to ask a parliamentary working party to consider the issue. Publicity over the Richard Worth ‘affair’ has overshadowed that move, which Key announced at this week’s post-cabinet news conference.

However, it’s understood National is keenly aware that the British scandal has raised the profile of MPs’ expense accounts not just in the UK but around the world, and that finding a way to achieve better transparency is now top-of-mind.

Currently, politicians’ expense accounts are controlled by Parliamentary Services and the Internal Affairs Department’s Ministerial Services unit.The Parliamentary Services programme is one of the few government agencies not subject to the Official Information Act, meaning that news media and the public are not entitled to know what individual politicians have been claiming on their expense accounts.

TGIF Edition ran into this brick wall last year when trying to investigate the Yang Liu citizenship scandal, because we were denied access to the phone records of MPs involved, despite the fact that taxpayers had covered their phone bills.

But this week two smaller parties have taken

BACKFIRED Global warming?

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OBAMESSIAH Reax to the speech Page 8

BAIN FREE Christchurch, June 5 - David Bain’s defence team celebrated victory after 15 years tonight while denouncing the proceedings as “a ridiculously expensive trial that should never have been brought”.

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MISSING

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Goff, Key trade blows over woman Wellington, June 5 – Prime Minister John Key is being accused by Labour of backing down from meeting one of the women who complained about former government minister Richard Worth’s behaviour.

However, Mr Key says he is willing to meet her, but after she meets his chief of staff Wayne Eagleson.

The woman, who does not want to be identified, has said she received 40 text messages and 60 phone calls from Dr Worth between November 26 and

February 23, some of which she said were sexually explicit and vulgar.

At the time Dr Worth was minister of internal affairs.

He resigned on Tuesday after it became known that police had launched an investigation into another, completely separate, complaint against him.

Labour leader Phil Goff called Mr Key early last month and told him about DrWorth’s behaviour.DrWorth was subsequently questioned by Mr Key’s office.

Mr Key said today Dr Worth had emphatically denied the allegations.

Mr Goff said the woman had been hurt by Mr Key’s acceptance of Dr Worth’s version of events and wanted to meet the prime minister.

Mr Key said this morning he would meet her.

“I am happy to rearrange my schedule and meet her as quickly as I can,”Mr Key said.

But this afternoon Mr Key said on Radio Live he wanted his staff to meet her first.

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“My chief of staff, my office, has been in contact with her today, they will arrange a meeting with her when she presents the text messages and her version of events,”Mr Key said.

“If they are of a nature that would warrant a meeting, we will have a meeting with her.”

Mr Goff said today Labour had tried to arrange a number of meetings between Mr Key and the woman on different terms without success.

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NEW ZEALAND

off BEAT Husband dobs wife for stealing kid’s money CHICAGO – After learning a surveillance camera had captured his wife grabbing a child’s ice cream money in a Deerfield, Ill., Baskin-Robbins, the husband did what any loving spouse would do under the circumstances.

He turned her in.

The man approached a patrol officer and confessed that his wife was the woman in the video, police said.

“All of a sudden a guy says, ‘Hey, I think you’re looking for my wife,’ “ said Deerfield Deputy Police Chief Tom Keane.

The ice cream caper began May 15, when a 12year-old girl placed a $20 bill on the counter of the store and pondered her choices. A woman described as a regular customer in her 40s grabbed her own ice cream and the girl’s money in the same motion and departed with three young children in tow, police said.

The case was cracked when video surveillance was released last week and a friend recognized the woman and informed the family, Keane said.

Claiming she mistakenly pocketed the money, the unidentified Deerfield woman promised to pay it back and won’t face criminal charges.

“It was an accident and was not intentional,” Keane said. “She realizes that now, and she’s going to make restitution.”

A Baskin-Robbins spokeswoman said Wednesday that the company still plans to offer the girl an ice cream party or gift certificates.

Proof dope-smoking makes you stupid TACOMA, Wash. – The teachers wanted persuasive.

And they got it.

At the end of his speech Wednesday urging legalization of marijuana, a 17-year-old US high school student pulled out a joint, lit it and smoked away. Then he ate the remains.

For that he got a quick escort to the school office and then a ride to juvenile jail.

The stunt was celebrated among some of the teen’s peers but was frowned on to say the least by law enforcement officers and district administrators.

“We believe in freedom of speech and encourage it, but illegal activities are absolutely not going to be tolerated in our district,” schools Superintendent Terry Bouck said.

Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said, “If people want that law changed, they need to go about it the right way.”

He did acknowledge, though, that the student’s action will prompt discussion.

“It sure will probably bring a lot of attention to the issue,” Troyer said.

Lost ring found after 42 years VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., June 4 (UPI) – A Virginia man who lost his wedding ring while washing his car 42 years ago says his son found it in the family’s backyard.

Paul Sawyer, 63, of Virginia Beach, said his wife, Ruth Ann, 61, refused to believe he had accidentally lost the ring when he noticed it missing after washing his car in 1966, the year after the couple’s wedding, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reported Thursday.

“You threw it away,” he quoted her as saying. “You just didn’t want the girls you used to hang with to know you were married.”

Sawyer said his wife was finally proven wrong late last month when their oldest son, Paul Jr., found the ring caked in dirt several inches deep in the soil of their backyard. Sawyer said he cried when he saw the ring.

“The prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Sawyer said. “After all this time, I finally have it back.”

Sawyer said his son’s discovery finally resolved his 42-year-old argument with Ruth Ann. “I finally proved her wrong. I really didn’t throw it away,” he said.

5 June 2009

“Millions have been spent,” said the head of the defence team, Michael Reed QC.“Millions on legal aid it’s a tragedy really.”

Bain was acquitted after five hours 50 minutes of deliberation by the jury in the High Court at Christchurch on the 58th day of his retrial on charges of murdering his whole family in Dunedin in 1994.

He faced up to a huge scrum of media and cheering and clapping public outside the courthouse on a crisp Christchurch evening to thank his supporters and particularly former All Black rugby fullback Joe Karam.

“All I can say is that without Joe and his solid strength, without the love of the people that have supported me since day one, I wouldn’t have made it through this far.

“Joe has been there, through everything for me,” he said.

Bain smiled at the jury as the verdicts were read, and was immediately discharged by Justice Graham Panckhurst and left the dock a free man.

He was taken back into the cells to compose himself after the verdicts were delivered about 4.45pm to a courtroom where the public gallery burst into applause.

Mr Karam told the public gallery that Bain, who has already served 13 years in prison after being found guilty at his first trial in 1995, was emotional and in tears after the verdicts.

He stayed in the cells while the judge thanked the jury, and spent some time composing himself there before coming out of the court building.

A large crowd had gathered to hear the verdicts at

the end of the three month trial. Even jury members were clapped and cheered as they came out of the building.

The defence had worked hard to call the police case into question, and had put the blame on David Bain’s father Robin, saying he had murdered the family and then committed suicide.

Bain emerged from the courthouse arm-in-arm with Mr Karam.

“What really matters is that the truth as I said it

whole lot of myths and legends,”he said.

He said he had never had any doubts about David Bain’s innocence since 1996.

“I always said give us a day in court. No jury will ever convict this man.”

Mr Reed then said:“It’s all over, thank God it’s all over.”

The defence team had all been fantastic, he said.

That also applied to Bain “He’s totally and utterly overcome.”

“This has been a ridiculously expensive trial that should never have been brought,”said Mr Reed.

A large crowd “Millions have been spent. Millions on legal aid it’s a tragedy really.” had gathered to He said it was magnificent that Joe Karam had hear the verdicts at stood by David Bain all those years.

The question of compensation was a matter the end of the three that was ahead. He believed that Bain should be month trial. Even jury compensated for 13 years in prison. It would be a members were clapped question for Cabinet.

For the police, Detective Superintendent Malcolm and cheered as they Burgess said they were disappointed but accepted came out of the building the jury’s verdict.

“We believe we put the best possible evidence 13 years ago has now fallen where it’s always been,” before the court. Obviously, it wasn’t sufficient to Mr Karam said. convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt.”

He said it had all come about because of “a very Once the decision had been made to go ahead with unfortunate attitude by various authorities”. the trial, it had to proceed regardless of the cost.

After Bain spoke briefly and haltingly, largely He did not accept the criticism of the police invesdrowned out by the noise of the crowd, Mr Karam tigation which had emerged during the trial. thanked members of the defence team.

Asked what the police team would be doing He said he and Bain wanted to “go and have a tonight, he said:“Reflecting.” tipple right now”.

– NZPA Back to the front page “An innocent man has been beaten down by a

Louise Nicholas, centre, leaves the High Court after former police officers Bob Schollum, Brad Shipton and Assistant Police Commissioner Clint Rickards had been found not guilty on 12 counts of rape and sexual assault against her by a jury.

NZPA/Wayne Drought

Inquisitorial court trials mooted in sex cases Wellington, June 5 – Researchers are investigating whether employing judges as inquisitors in sexual abuse cases would be fairer than the current adversarial trial model.

The proposed inquisitorial-style trial would depart from the current type, where the complainant was questioned by the crown prosecutor, then cross-examined by the defence lawyer.

The trial judge, rather than the parties, would determine which witnesses were called and how they were questioned.

The search for an improved model was spurred by the Louise Nicholas case,researcher andVictoria University Law professor Elisabeth McDonald said.

Mrs Nicholas said former assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards and former police officers Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum sexually abused her when she was an 18-year-old in Rotorua in the 1980s.

The men were cleared in 2007, though at the time,

Shipton and Schollum were serving sentences for another pack-rape of young woman in Mt Maunganui in 1987.

The legal research would tie in with a large study by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs looking at the experience of complainants, and work by the Law Commission and the Taskforce on Sexual Violence.

“There’s been a lot of work done, and a lot of public concern coming out of those cases. It’s not a new thing ,”she said.

“It’s that balance -- having concern for the wellbeing of the complainants, but also carrying a presumption of innocence, and sexual offending carries heavy penalties. It’s about trying to get that right.”

Usually, in inquisitorial-style trials, there tends to be a greater emphasis on written evidence and factfinding by the judge, with tighter judicial control over the types of questions asked.

The investigation also addressed “concerns that

have arisen from the victim’s perspective”, Prof McDonald told NZPA. “It really is time we started looking at the inquisitorial models and what they might provide.We are looking particularly at the parts from overseas jurisdictions that can be imported.”

The three academics carrying out the $85,000 feasibility study, were also looking at the rules around disclosing previous convictions, she said.

The inquisitorial model was already used in South Africa, where it has resulted in higher conviction rates for sexual assault, and had been recommended for use in Victoria in Australia, where it is used to try child sexual offending cases.

In New Zealand, similar systems were already used to try domestic violence cases.

“It’s a case of `let’s see what’s out there,and see what other models we can adopt’,”Prof McDonald said.

– NZPA

NEW ZEALAND

5 June 2009

Mr Key said the woman had refused to meet his staff and he was still willing to meet her after she meets Mr Eagleson.

Mr Goff said the woman had wanted to meet Mr Key because he had undermined her credibility and had promised to meet her.

“That would be natural justice, he talked to Worth, he should talk to her,”Mr Goff said “I am astounded this matter will now drag on simply because John Key isn’t willing to honour the promise he gave this morning.”

Mr Key has previously said that if the woman’s allegations can be proved,that would be sufficient reason to expel Dr Worth from the National Party caucus.

Earlier today Mr Key said that when Mr Goff first raised the issue with him he did not have any other information apart from Mr Goff’s phone call.

“Phil Goff knew in November of 2008. It took six months to get back to me and when I went back to him he still had weeks and still didn’t do anything about it..

The woman said in her statement Dr Worth met offered her jobs, sent inappropriate texts and made vulgar phone calls.DrWorth is facing a police investigation after a different allegation of a sexual nature.

It was reported today that Dr Worth had invited the woman who has laid a complaint with police to Parliament, hosted her in his ministerial capacity and then took her to a hotel room where “a sexual encounter”took place.

The New Zealand Herald said it met the AuckYields have been rising because of concerns about land businesswoman yesterday but she was too the amount of debt issuance and on worries about distressed to discuss the incident.

Her friend,who helped her lay a complaint with police inflation.

“We thought there would be a flattening after and then took her to see National MPTau Henare so that Standard and Poor’s took the country off negative Mr Key could be informed,outlined her allegation.

The incident happened in March and the woman watch. There was an initial reaction but because bonds have sold off in the US and Australia the New complained to the police about two weeks ago.

Dr Worth announced his resignation as a minister Zealand market has follow suit,”Mr Borkin said.

He said the higher long term interest rates had on Tuesday, citing personal reasons.

He issued a statement yesterday, saying he was delivered a tightening of monetary conditions innocent of any crime and the rumours had damaged “when things are still pretty weak”.

“We do think they will be concerned about that,” his career and hurt his family and friends, he said.

– NZPA he said.

Long term home loan rates rise Wellington, June 5 – ASB has raised its longer term home loan rates, with the five-year rate rising to 8 percent.

ASB has raised its three-year rate by 20 basis points to 6.95 percent, its four-year rate by 30 basis points to 7.55 percent and its five-year rate by 50 basis points to 8 percent.

Other banks have been raising longer term fixed rates but the move to 8 percent in the five-year rate is seen as a big one.

Many banks had five-year fixed rates of 6.5 percent in March but started hiking them when rates in the wholesale swap market started rising.

Higher mortgage rates are expected to anger the

Reserve Bank of New Zealand ahead of its monetary policy statement next Thursday.

Economists are divided on what the bank will do in that statement, with some expecting the bank to keep its official cash rate at 2.5 percent and others expecting a 25 basis point cut.

The central bank has said it expected to keep the rate at or below 2.5 percent until the latter part of 2010.

ANZ economist Philip Borkin said he expected the bank to repeat the message that rates will remain low. He said there has been a continued steepening of yield curves around the world.This means yields have been rising for longer dated instruments such as swaps and bonds.

– NZPA

Back to the front page

Some like it hot…

Cancer patient treatment experiences inquiry The survey, a first for New Zealand, would be a benchmark and help those providing cancer treatment with some insights into service gaps and issues.

It would also help provide some of the information needed to ensure that people affected by cancer received the best possible care from the health system , Dame Cath said.

The survey would target people who have received outpatient cancer treatment in the past 12 months.

The council, a ministerial advisory committee, provided independent strategic advice to the health minister on all matters relating to cancer.

The advice is aimed at reducing the incidence and impact of cancer and reducing inequalities in cancer treatment.

C&S5424MC

Wellington, June 5 – A survey to gauge the experiences of cancer patients in the New Zealand health system is being carried out by the Cancer Control Council.

There had been strong calls from the cancer sector for better information about service provision and understanding what patients expected compared to what they actually got from the health system, council chairwoman Dame Cath Tizard said today.

“We looked overseas for a credible tool to measure people’s experiences with cancer treatment and have settled on the patient experiences survey conducted by IPSOS, which is used by such countries as Canada and Australia.

“It also means we can compare New Zealand health services with those overseas.”

The council would ask 3500 people about their experiences as cancer patients, she said.

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NEW ZEALAND

5 June 2009

Fonterra told to supply rivals

By Kent Atkinson of NZPA

Wellington, June 5 – The Commerce Commission has confirmed that Kaimai Cheese Company Ltd and the Grate Kiwi Cheese Company Ltd are legitimate“independent processors”– a status that effectively forces Fonterra farmers to supply them with cheap milk.

Now Fonterra not only has to deliver the milk where its smaller rivals want it, but those companies can each claim up to 50 million litres a year of the low-cost milkflows, even though they may be linked to the same manufacturer.

The commission today released a final determination that potentially opens up Fonterra to a proliferation of small food processors each seeking a share of the 600 million litres of “statutory”milk it has to provide at cost price.

“Kaimai and Grate Kiwi are `independent processors’ ... and are entitled to be supplied with milk

by Fonterra,” the commission said in a 46-page decision.

It said the Dairy Industry Restructuring (Raw Milk) Regulations 2001 allows independent processors to require milk to be delivered to a nominated delivery address – which could be the same factory for a series of small companies.

“An interpretation of the term `independent processor’in the regulations that allows an independent processor the freedom to contract a third party to perform some or all of the production process for milk, milksolids or dairy products best gives ... efficient operation of dairy markets,”said Deborah Battell, the commission’s director of competition.

Fonterra lost on all fronts in the case, in which the commission said:“Fonterra has breached the regulations by not supplying Kaimai and Grate Kiwi with milk under the regulations since October 1, 2008.

“The commission has ordered Fonterra to pay compensation to Kaimai and Grate Kiwi for the loss associated with the fact that they did not receive milk”.

If the parties can’t agree on the amount of compensation, the commission can order the amount to be paid.

The supply of raw milk to smaller rivals was a key trade-off that Fonterra farmers made to avoid commission scrutiny of the mega-merger that set up their company.

Kaimai and Grate Kiwi each sought 50 million litres of milk, but Fonterra argued they were not processors of raw milk, and were actually indirectly linked to Open Country Cheese.

Grate Kiwi began grating and blending cheese for the New Zealand market in 1991 and says it intends over time to expand into processing raw milk into cheese.Waharoa-based Kaimai only began operations this year to supply a range of soft, hard and semi-hard cheeses.

Former MP Wyatt Creech and the Dairy Investment Fund were co-founders of Open Country, and Mr Creech is a director of both Open Country and Kaimai.

Grate Kiwi – originally called Oceanic Foods – has a deal to pack retail cheeses for Fonterra’s biggest domestic rival, Goodman Fielder, and has signed a deal with Open Country Dairy Ltd – which is controlled by meat company Affco Holdings Ltd. Singapore-based global dairy trader Olam International owns a 25 percent stake in Open Country, which is now the nation’s second-biggest dairy processor, and operates dairy factories at Waharoa in Waikato and Awarua in Southland.They process more than 450 million litres of milk into cheeses, powders and butter oil, with a third plant at Wanganui taking the company’s milk processing capacity to over 800 million litres.

Goodman Fielder’s fresh dairy business, based on the Tararua, Puhoi Valley Cheese and Meadow Fresh brands, does not have any farmer suppliers of its own and relies on receiving 250 million litres a year of Fonterra milk at cost price – an arrangement expected to lapse over the next five years.

Chicken fiddling questions raised Wellington, June 5 – New Zealand food safety authorities say that they have not tested local chicken breasts to see if they have been plumped up with injections of“protein powders”from pigs or cattle.

The practice has sparked a row in Europe, particularly among Moslems, Jews and Hindus who observe religious bans on some animal meat.

The New Zealand Food Safety Authority said today it was aware of the practice but is“confident that this is not the case in New Zealand”.

It said the Poultry Industry Association had “assured NZFSA that only vegetable proteins are used by the industry”.

“As we have no reason to suspect that non-avian animal proteins are in use we have no reason to carry out testing,” said a spokesman for the food safety authority.

Michael Brooks, executive director of the Auck-

land-based Poultry Industry Association, told NZPA he had confirmed with local companies that they didn’t copy the European practice of injecting animal proteins into chicken breasts.

“As companies here do not do it, there is no need for testing by the companies,”he said.

Britain’s Independent newspaper reported that cafes and restaurants across that country have been selling chicken secretly injected with beef and pork waste.

Food manufacturers are making bulking agents out of porcine and bovine gristle and bones that help inflate chicken breasts, so that they fetch a higher price.

The swindle was detected by the UK Food Standards Agency when it used new scientific techniques because the non-chicken material had been so highly processed it passed standard DNA tests.

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NZ dollar consolidates Wellington, June 5 – The New Zealand dollar showed some composure on Friday, closing near where it opened.

Around 5pm today the NZ dollar was buying US63.48c, little changed from US63.42 at 8am, and up from US62.97c at 5pm yesterday.

Dealers said the currency traded in a tight range in its domestic session after slipping to a week low of US62.20c overnight.

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EDITORIAL

5 June 2009

Editorial

Family Matters

The Gore effect in Auckland There’s a funny little coincidence lovingly dubbed the ‘Al Gore effect’ in the global warming industry.

Essentially, everywhere Gore turns up to preach his global warming message, it gets cold. Like the great global warming awareness march in Washington recently that got hit by an unseasonal snow blizzard.

Well, here in New Zealand, those happy-go-lucky guys and gals at the political lobby group Oxfam staged a global warming awareness day in Auckland this morning; been in planning for months, cast of millions, loads of gullible celebrities who’d turn up to the opening of an envelope if there was a camera – you know the routine.

Sadly for Oxfam, their global warming awareness day was blessed with the deepest frost Auckland has seen in years, and officially Auckland’s coldest day

of the year. The ice sculpture of a “melting” John Key defiantly took ages to melt.

To add icing to this particular cake, the past few days have provided ample evidence of how Auckland’s temperatures are actually recording higher because of urban heat island effect. At 8.30 each morning, Newstalk ZB has announced air temperatures of between 4 and 6 degrees Celsius in central Auckland.

At exactly the same moment, in a farm paddock on the city’s border,the temperature has been measured at between -2 degrees and 0 degrees Celsius.

Conclusion: big city temperatures are reading artificially high because of heat pollution.

Little wonder NIWA has been forced to reveal that last month was one of the coldest Mays on record in this country.A little global warming would SUBSCRIBE TO TGIF! go a long way right now.

By Steve Rosen

NZPA / Wayne Drought

Comment

Reactions to Obama’s speech range from pride to concern to disappointment McClatchy Newspapers

CAIRO, Egypt – Experts, U.S. lawmakers and ordinary people involved in Middle East politics voiced a variety of reactions to President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday to a global Muslim audience. A sampling: Ayman Nour, perhaps Egypt’s best-known political reformer:“I don’t think the speech fell short, but he gave the bare minimum.There’s only so much he can do in a one-hour speech ... (it would) not engage 95 percent of the Egyptian population.Tomorrow it’s business as usual.We are beginning to see fences being mended, but that’s as far as I can see today.”

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the founder and president of The Israel Project:“I am very concerned about President Obama’s comments that Iran has a right to nuclear materials for energy given the dangerous fact that some of those materials could get into the hands of terrorists including Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

Glen S. Lewy, the national chairman, and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director, of the AntiDefamation League: “Speaking directly to the Muslim people, he broached issues that have never really been addressed to the Arab world before now.

We share the president’s genuine quest for respect, tolerance and peace. ...We are disappointed that the president found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars.”

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “We are facing a new and different policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. The message is for Israel: It is time to stop the settlements, it is time to build a Palestinian state.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.:“I think it (the speech) was an absolute triumph. He made us all very proud by speaking in a very positive way about a new beginning with the Muslim world and how we can work together, the necessity to fight – to work together against violence.And I was so pleased that he addressed many of the human rights issues, including women’s rights.”

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia (the only Jewish House Republican):“I am still very concerned about the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue vis-a-vis Iran. What I did not hear is enough emphasis on the root causes of what is going on in the Middle East, and that is the sponsorship of terrorist activity by the regime in Iran.”

Rep.John Boehner of Ohio,the House Republican leader:“I think, the president delivered a thoughtful and optimistic speech. But I do have some concerns. ... With regard to the Palestinian-Israel issue, he seemed to place equal blame on the Israelis and the

Palestinians. I have concerns about this.The Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”

Menna El Massry, 19, a law student: “A lot of people expect Obama to be the savior and create a world of utopia, but policy is policy. ... It is paving the way for change. But will there be a state of Palestine in Obama’s administration? I doubt it.

Not because I don’t think there should be a state – I do – but because I don’t think the world is ready for that yet.”

Mohammed Salem, aka Sand Monkey, an Egyptian blogger and government critic:“It’s not really a new beginning as much as it eased everybody’s minds. It all depends on his actions.”

Wael Abbas, a blogger who’s exposed torture by Egyptian police:“I was hoping for more (on democracy and human rights abuses). He was not really direct.”

Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League and a former Egyptian foreign minister: “We had high expectations, and I believe he met our expectations in terms of the vision and how he sees the world.”

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman:“We know that one impressive speech will not erase years of mistrust and missed opportunities, just as Dr. King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech did not complete the civil rights movement. Deeds will have to follow words. ... But in addressing these challenges directly, President Obama has created an historic opportunity to find a new beginning.”

Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.:“It was a well-balanced speech. It touched on everyone’s concerns. I don’t mind him mentioning settlements. He mentioned

other things as well.And the president has Israel’s best interest at heart. This president will never do anything to loosen that bond.”

(Compiled by Dion Nissenbaum, Margaret Talev and McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent Aya Batrawy in Cairo and David Lightman in Washington, from interviews and statements.)

-Made redundant? Tell your kids why Your salary was frozen, your hours were cut, and now your boss has dropped a pink slip on your desk.

How will you break the news to your children?

Whether the layoff was a big surprise or you’d been bracing for it for many long weeks, it’s crucial that you explain to your children in some fashion what happened.

Keep your conversation honest and straightforward, and don’t scare the kids by dwelling on the negatives but explain the situation.

“You really want the whole family to be aware,” says financial planner Sheryl Garrett.

Ideally, you’ve been talking to your children about what’s been going on in the workplace and about money all along. If children understand the broad topics, it makes it easier to explain why Mum or Dad is going to be around the house a lot more when they get home from school, logging computer time to work on a resume, and working the phones to line up meetings with potential employers.

But if money has been an elusive topic at the dinner table, this is an opportunity for a crucial teachable moment.

Garrett, founder of the Garrett Planning Network, suggested the following framework for starting a discussion with your children: Start by telling them: “Everything will be OK, we’ll still have a roof over our heads, there will be food on the table, but we may have to tighten our belts.”

Then paint the picture of what that might mean. For example, allowances will be cut, the summer vacation everyone’s been dreaming about will be put on hold, or the occasional $20 a pop in spending money at the mall may be coming to an end.

How much information should you throw on the table?

Only you can make that call, based on how much you think your children can grasp.

Here’s where providing some perspective might help your son or daughter understand what’s going on in the workplace.

An example: Explain that Mum or Dad didn’t lose their job because of doing something wrong. Talk about how the company was trying to make its budget and needed to cut costs, and that, unfortunately, some people had to be let go because salary is such a big part of the budget. Even if you haven’t lost your job, this would be good ground to cover.

But out of crisis also comes opportunity for family members to step up, said Todd Minear, a financial.

Ask your children to help as you or your spouse begins the job search. Younger children might plant a vegetable garden this spring or set up the weekend lemonade stand to make money. Ask your older children to research and make recommendations on Internet resume and job posting sites. One teen, for example, actually posted a “Hire My Dad” video recently on the YouTube social networking site.

Getting the children involved - whether it’s using their own money to buy gas or helping tweak Dad’s resume gives them “something to focus on instead of the family’s stress,” says Chris Celio, a registered psychologist.

Shielding your children from the “layoff talk” may get you over an immediate emotional hump, but keep in mind that youngsters are pretty savvy when it comes to picking up signals quickly.

No matter how painful or difficult it was to lose your job, it pays to talk. Besides, you might be surprised at how much your children can help you nail down your next job.

ANALYSIS

5 June 2009

Bain retrial breaks new ground in many ways Christchurch, June 5 – Crown versus Bain was a trial that was in everyone’s face.

For three months,there has been no escape from it.

Not for the players in court, those who have been living with the tiny detail of the case for years in some cases.

Not for the media – rows of them packed into Christchurch’s No 1 High Court.

Not for the public who have pored over the coverage and turned up at the courthouse to pack out the public gallery and a jury waiting area where television feeds from the court have been set up for them.

And certainly not for the jury. It was in their faces more than anybody else.

This was the first time the Jedi system had been used in a criminal trial, to put computer images of evidence on screen instantly in front of everyone who needed to see.

There were screens between every pair of jurors in the jury box, one in the witness box, and for each of the lawyers and judge.

It was a very fast and efficient way of getting people to the right picture, rather than having them thumbing through books of photographs.

But it was too much for some, and especially David Cullen Bain who was accused of the murder of his entire family on June 20, 1994, in Dunedin.

He had to turn away often rather than confront the terrible images in front of him.

The jury was not only dealing with a trial that took them away from their lives for three months, but one with five bodies, five crime scenes, and hundreds of these pictures.

The stress of hours each day with those images flashing up in front of them quickly began to take its toll.

The court did what it could to help with advice on how to cope and it was agreed that when images were not actually being referred to by witnesses or counsel, they would be taken off screen.

That helped, but the drama would always remain with this trial.

It had so much more than a normal trial, even a normal murder trial if there is such a thing.

Here the crime was so much greater – a whole family gone – and the man claiming his innocence had already served 13 years for it.

In this trial, the defence did not just require the Crown to prove that the accused man did the crime, they made it a central theme that someone else had done it.

The jury always had that choice right from the opening – right from the first trial in 1995 if they remembered it.

In court, the clash of personalities was palpable.

There were frustrations that boiled over regularly.

Defence counsel Michael Reed QC targeted the police investigation and tried to allege the planting of evidence.At least one police officer was handled very roughly in the witness box – the roughest that some court veterans have ever seen.

Another witness got such a verbal slap that there was a collective gasp from the public gallery upstairs.

And there was the spectacle of crown prosecutor Kieran Raftery’s closing – hours of it without reference to notes.

The trial heard evidence from 130 crown witnesses, including briefs read from some who had died in the intervening 15 years. It heard from 54 defence witnesses.

The transcript of evidence runs to 3707 pages, which the jury was presented with to consider in case it needed to refresh its memory, when it retired on the 5463rd day since the Bain family murders.

The trial broke new ground everywhere.

Typists were listening in and keying in the transcript in Auckland, a system that has been used in the District Court but is new to the High Court. It cut weeks off the trial.

The hearing drew attention to the new rules about juries not having to select their foreperson straight

In this trial, the defence did not just require the Crown to prove that the accused man did the crime, they made it a central theme that someone else had done it away, and not necessarily having to be shut away overnight as they deliberate on their verdicts.

Streaming of television coverage with a small delay was tried.

Whole chunks of the trial were available on-line.

For the first time, the public at home (or at their office if they dared) could see and hear a whole closing address.

Media were filing coverage almost instantly from computers in court.

Surely there can never have been this level of interest in a trial.

Almost certainly, it has changed things forever.

– NZPA

Obama is hugely popular with ordinary citizens here – some 200,000 turned out for a campaign speech the president held in downtown Berlin last summer.

First he took Manhattan…

Now Obama takes Berlin

By Stefan Nicola

BERLIN – After trying to mend ties with the Arab world, U.S. President Barack Obama sets his eyes on old ally Europe.

The visit to Germany and France this weekend is aimed at burying once and for all the tensions that accompanied the presidency of George W. Bush.

The groundwork to do so has already been laid.

Several of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives, including bids to mend ties with Iran and Russia, a revamped Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy and ambitious measures to fight climate change have gone down well with European leaders.Moreover,Obama is hugely popular with ordinary citizens here – some 200,000 turned out for a campaign speech the president held in downtown Berlin last summer.

Among German politicians, however, Obamania has subsided a bit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have felt snubbed by the president recently. Not only did it take weeks for a video conference to be scheduled

with the president (such conferences were held regularly with the former president), Merkel also failed in scoring a bilateral with Obama ahead of the Group of 20 summit in London.

Last week the high-ranking German negotiation team tasked with rescuing car maker Opel, a General Motors daughter, was very upset when the U.S. Treasury Department sent only a lower-level official to the negotiation table.

Even the current trip sparked frustration. Merkel had tried to bring Obama to Berlin, but the president refused.

The chancellor would have liked to clinch a photoop with Obama ahead of regional and national elections this year in Germany.

Berlin is ripe with speculation as to what the reasons for the refusal may be.

Some say it’s due to a lack of personal chemistry; others say it’s a private revenge for Merkel’s refusal to have Obama speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Germany’s symbol of the peaceful anti-communist revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall.

But a third reason may be more likely:The German leadership simply isn’t that flexible right now.

Washington has long tried to get Berlin to send more troops to Afghanistan and to dispatch a portion of them into the volatile southern provinces, where U.S., British and Dutch troops are suffering casualties in firefights with the Taliban.

Obama knows that before September, when Germans go to the polls to elect a new government, not much will happen in Berlin in terms of concrete security cooperation pledges.

That cooperation to fight extremism pays off is one of the central messages Obama will bring to Europe this week.

After arriving in Dresden tonight, the president is due tomorrow to visit the former Buchenwald concentration camp, which was liberated in 1945 by U.S. troops. Charles Payne, Obama’s great-uncle, was part of a U.S. infantry division that in April 1945 liberated Ohrdruf, a satellite camp to Buchenwald.

Obama will finish off his visit to Germany by

touring Ramstein Air Base and meeting with U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at the Landstuhl military hospital. He will then go to France for bilateral talks with President Nicolas Sarkozy and extensive celebrations commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in Paris and Normandy.

Sarkozy, nicknamed L’Americain by his fellow citizens, courted Obama long before he became president.This has paid off. It seems that at the moment, America’s relations with France are trumping those with Germany – a historic first in many decades.

Obama told French television he enjoyed a wonderful relationship with Sarkozy, lauding the French president’s commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and his strong stance against Iran’s nuclear program.

Paris is ripe with excitement ahead of Obama’s visit to the City of Lights.First lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha, will join him there Saturday. They may even dine atop the Eiffel Tower, the French press has speculated.

– UPI

ANALYSIS

5 June 2009

Chavez proudly wears dictator title

By Joel Brinkley McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Just as oil-rich Venezuela sinks deeper into debt, Hugo Chavez, its flamboyant and megalomaniacal president, has crossed the line and can now quite accurately be called a dictator.

A rush of new orders and decrees in recent days is silencing critics, neutering political opponents, shutting down the last of Venezuela’s independent media and purging the military of all but the most sycophantic officers.

Chavez’s behavior is reminiscent of President Hosni Mubarak’s heavy-handed approach in Egypt.

About all that’s missing is the political prisoners.

But, like Mubarak, Chavez does not hesitate to attack his critics with utterly nonsensical allegations, apparently without the slightest care about how ridiculous it looks.

In Egypt last week, opposition politician Ayman Nour, just out of prison, announced that he would run for president again. As he left home the very next day, a man waiting for him on a motorcycle threw a fire bomb in his face.We had nothing to do with it, the government averred.

Chavez is not usually so violent, but he can be just as blatant. Last week his government announced that it would file charges against Guillermo Zuloaga, who owns Globovision, the nation’s last standing independent television station.

A week earlier, Chavez attacked Globovision, saying it had slandered one of his ministers.“We cannot allow for the bourgeoisie, driven mad by hatred, to continue shooting a machine gun every day against the morals of the people,”he said.“They have to pay that with jail.”

A few days later came the court charge.What law had Zuloaga violated? He owns a car dealership and is storing some of the unsold vehicles at his home. Police“raided”his home and said they found 24 Toyotas on the property. Zuloaga explained that he was keeping the cars there because one of his dealerships had been robbed. He accused the government of trying to intimidate him. Chavez denied that, of course, and called Zuloaga a “gangster.”

I am not an expert on Venezuelan law.But Zuloaga owns the dealerships, which includes the cars he has for sale.What business is it of the government where he chooses to keep them? You know someone has become an unrepentant dictator when he can drum

Chavez has been on a gradual authoritarian path for many years. But until recently, much of his destructive energy has been focused abroad.

up a charge like that and keep a straight face.

There’s more. Much more. Chavez is pulling books off public library shelves that do not comport with his socialist goals – 60,000 of them, the Miami Herald reported. Meantime, last week the government began distributing more than 2 million free books nationwide including“Social Movements in the 21st Century”and“Empire’s Spider Web,”an unflattering appraisal of U.S. foreign policy.

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, speaking in Caracas last week, warned that “the threat in the area of liberties, freedom of expression and the press has increased significantly.”

Undeterred, Chavez is following through on his threat to undermine elected regional governors from competing political parties. He is creating new administrative positions in those regions and handing off the governors’ powers to his own

bureaucrats. Chavez proposes to call these people “vice presidents.”

Chavez has been on a gradual authoritarian path for many years. But until recently, much of his destructive energy has been focused abroad. He has used Venezuelan oil money to bestow gifts upon poor people in neighboring countries – even in the United States.But with oil prices down by more than 50 percent over a year ago,and the world’s economy in recession, Chavez can no longer afford his foreign policy.

By one reliable accounting,his“foreign aid”spending will drop by more than 90 percent this year.

What’s a dictator to do? Nationalize companies.

Make their income your own. Last week, the government seized control of a pasta factory owned by Cargill, the American food conglomerate. As the excuse, the government claimed that the plant was producing the wrong kind of pasta.It wanted Cargill to make larger

quantities of a cheaper pasta sold at government-controlled prices.Failure to do so,the government said,was a“clear transgression of the law.”

Through all this, paradoxically, Chavez is falling deeper into debt.That must be galling for the former oil billionaire.A few days ago, Brazil’s federal development bank agreed to lend Venezuela $4.3 billion for infrastructure projects. Fudging a bit when he announced this, Chavez said he was creating a“joint, multi-billion dollar fund with Brazil.”But if there’s any doubt that it was simply a loan, it comes on top of several earlier loans, including $8 billion from China and $3.5 billion from Japan.

Oh, how far the mighty can fall.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkley@ foreign-matters.com

Stasi spy changed German history

By Stefan Nicola

BERLIN – Germany will have to rewrite part of its history: The man who in 1967 fired the shot that went on to change West Germany was a spy working for communist East Germany.

Until last week, Karl-Heinz Kurras had his place in history as the fascist cop who shot an unarmed student, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head at a demonstration in Berlin in 1967.

The killing and the fact that a Berlin court later acquitted Kurras only strengthened the left-wing movement, which staged massive demonstrations in 1968. Ohnesorg became a martyr. His killing and Kurras’acquittal before a Berlin court, the students argued, was the clear proof for a violent an unjust state that, some two decades after World War II, was still run by fascist villains.

The left-wing student movement changed West Germany from a conservative state into the liberal society it is today; but it also gave rise to the Red Army Faction, the far-left group that went on to terrorize the country with its bombings and assassinations targeted for some two decades.

An important part of that post-war history will now have to be rewritten: It surfaced last week that Kurras, now 81, had already been working as an informant for the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, long before he shot Ohnesorg. In 1955, Kurras,

a young policeman from West Berlin, approached East German authorities with the wish to resettle in East Germany to serve what he saw as the better half of the country. The Stasi, however, quickly realized Kurras could be of much more help to East Germany if he stayed on in West Berlin.They hired him as a spy tasked with infiltrating the West German police.

For the next 12 years Kurras rose in the Berlin Police Department while at the same time sending intelligence through the Iron Curtain. He became especially valuable to the Stasi when he was promoted into a special unit tasked with uncovering spies from East Germany. Until he shot Ohnesorg, Kurras got roughly 20,000 marks for his services, a pretty decent amount, German news magazine Der Spiegel reports. After the killing, the Stasi terminated the cooperation with Kurras.

All this was left in the dark until last week, when two researchers working for a government agency designed to oversee the Stasi files found 17 folders filled with documents chronicling Kurras’ secret career.The fascist cop, the match that lit Germany’s left-wing radicals, was a communist spy in disguise.

In an interview with German daily Bild, Kurras admitted that he was a member of East Germany’s communist party, the SED.As for the Stasi, he replied,“And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.”

Well, maybe it does.

The news has sparked a frenzied debate here in Germany. It circles around the Stasis’s role in shaping German history and its penetration into West German police, spy and political circles. Was Kurras an agent provocateur who was authored to destabilize West Germany? And who else may have worked for the Stasi who shaped West German policy in those years?

The first question can’t be answered with absolute security.The documents that documented Kurras’ Stasi activities do not contain evidence that Kurras got the order to destabilize, much less shoot anyone.

It’s very well possible that Kurras, who was a weapons fanatic, overreacted.

But it’s pretty sure that if the man’s Stasi links had surfaced in 1967, the student reaction would have probably been less swift and less fierce. And the police, who with their testimonies helped bring about his acquittal, may not have covered for Kurras if they had known he was working for the other side.

It also reminds Germans that a large part of the Stasi files, and thus the agency’s reach into Western Germany, has not yet been fully researched.

The Stasi’s penetration in East Germany had always been great.

The secret police in 1989 employed 91,000 people and had built up a network of more than 150,000

civilian informants who spied on politically subversive citizens and activists, but also on anyone they were told to.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said she was approached by the Stasi but denied working there, telling the officer she was too gossipy for the job.

Officials of the agency estimated that 6,000 West Germans have worked as informants for the Stasi; it is known that the agency trained Western German terrorists and helped members of the Red Army Faction escape into East Germany. A Stasi spy, Guenter Guillaume, even became a top aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt, ultimately bringing about his resignation.

But the Stasi’s lower-tier links in Western Germany have not yet been uncovered.

Western Berlin’s police force, for example, has not been checked for Stasi connections; neither have most members of Parliament.

Several German politicians have in the past years unsuccessfully filed petitions to have all parliamentarians checked for Stasi links.The last such request was denied by the current government in 2007, with most of Merkel’s party colleagues among those refusing to back it, citing privacy rights and other legal difficulties. Those are arguments most people are not willing to buy anymore.

– UPI

WORLD

update

in 60 seconds Message to Obama: ‘we still hate you’ TEHRAN, June 5 (UPI) – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said this afternoon beautiful speeches cannot overcome Muslims’ hatred of the United States.

Khamenei spoke at a ceremony in Tehran marking the 20th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei’s death, The Washington Post reported. “People of the Middle East, the Muslim region and North Africa – people of these regions – hate America from the bottom of their heart,” Khamenei said. “For a long time, these people have witnessed aggressive actions by America, and that’s why they hate them.”

Obama said the United States and Muslim world need a new beginning but Khamenei said any change would take more than beautiful speeches.

Khamenei denied Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, describing them as contrary to the principles of Islam.

In his speech, Obama said Iran has a right to a nuclear power program and warned of the danger of a Middle East arms race.

Kung Fu star found hanged Bangkok (dpa) – US actor David Carradine was found hanged in a Bangkok hotel suite Thursday in what police believe was a suicide, media reports said.

The body of Carradine, 72, who first shot to fame in the Kung Fu television series, was found in the closet of his suite at the five-star Park Nai Lert Hotel, The Nation online news service reported.

Carradine was in Bangkok shooting a film. Colleagues became concerned when he failed to show up for a dinner Wednesday night and they could not reach him by telephone in his room.

A hotel maid found his body in the morning while cleaning his room, The Nation reported.

A police investigation showed that he had hung himself with cord used for curtains, the newspaper said.

Officers found no signs of an assault.

Carradine recently starred in Quentin Tarantino’s twopart movie Kill Bill. His first major role was as the fugitive half-Chinese Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s TV drama Kung Fu. Carradine joins a line of kung fu stars to have died tragically, including Bruce Lee in 1973 and Lee’s son Brandon in 1993.

Watch video of Carradine vs Brandon Lee

Britain’s Labour government on verge of toppling London (dpa) – A third British minister resigned from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government late this morning and called on the leader to step down.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell announced his resignation in a letter to Brown sent to several newspapers after polls had closed in European and local elections.

Purnell wrote that Brown should quit his position for the good of the Labour Party and that his leadership made a victory by the opposition Conservatives likely in the next election.

“I owe it to our Party to say what I believe no matter how hard that may be,” Purnell wrote. “I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely.”

He said Brown should “stand aside to give our Party a fighting chance of winning.”

Brown was today reported to be working on a fundamental re-shaping of his government which he hopes will ensure his own political survival and draw a line under the damaging scandal over parliamentary expenses.

5 June 2009

Obama calls for alliance of civilizations that had hurt America’s standing in the world, and he vowed to pull out all U.S. troops by 2012. He reiterated his order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism detainees.

The president defended his orders to send more troops to Afghanistan, however, and to push Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban, saying they were justified in order to contain al-Qa’ida.

He acknowledged that the United States had provoked Iran’s anger decades ago, saying that “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,”and declared that no nation should impose any system of government on another nation.

He spoke of the damage that colonialism had done to fuel animosity against the West, and said that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by a narrow group of extremists likewise had turned some Americans against Islam overall.

“This cycle of suspicion and discord must end,” he said.

Obama’s criticisms weren’t focused solely on Israel and the West.

He said Muslims must do their part by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, acknowledging the Holocaust U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo on June 4, 2009. President Obama called for a “new beginand supporting religious tolerance. He said that ning between the United States and Muslims.” (UPI Photo/Chuck Kennedy/White House) denying the Holocaust was“baseless, it is ignorant and it is hateful.”He acknowledged support for the

By Margaret Talev and Dion Nissenbaum “We had high expectations, and I believe he met militant Islamist group Hamas among Palestinians McClatchy Newspapers our expectations in terms of the vision and how he but said “Palestinians must abandon violence.”He sees the world,”said Amr Moussa, a former Egyptian spoke of how black Americans succeeded through CAIRO – In a speech watched by millions of Muslims foreign minister who serves as the secretary-general the nonviolent civil rights movement. around the world,President Barack Obama declared of the Arab League.

The audience, many listening via headset translaunequivocally that the United States doesn’t accept “The balanced approach is the best approach, tion, cheered with approval when Obama used his the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in Palestinian and the failure of policy is always linked with a own full name, complete with middle name Husterritory and that“just as Israel’s right to exist can- biased approach,”Moussa said.“Now we see a bal- sein, and acknowledged his familial connection to not be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” anced one.”

Islam.

The president also declared that“America is not Some democracy activists thought that Obama They applauded his greeting to them in Arabic, the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire,” hadn’t been tough enough on regional authoritari- “As-salamu alaykum,” or “peace be upon you”; his acknowledging the consequences of past U.S. for- anism, however, while some Israel advocates felt quotations from the Quran; and his statement that eign-policy decisions while defending his own moves betrayed. fighting negative stereotypes of Muslims was his in the Middle East.

The executive director of the Republican Jew- responsibility as president.

“We must say openly the things we hold in our ish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, issued a statement Many Egyptians in the audience responded to his hearts, and that too often are said only behind saying that “American policy should not be bal- call for women to be offered educational opportuniclosed doors,”Obama said in the 55-minute address anced, it should side with those who fight terror, ties equal to men and to his advocacy of government from Cairo University. not those who either engage in it or are too weak in which “you must maintain your power through “I have come here to seek a new beginning to prevent it.” consent, not coercion.” between the United States and Muslims around Others liked the message but were skeptical of Egyptian security forces closed off traffic and the world,”he told more than 3,000 invited guests its impact. Menna El Massry, 19, a law student who lined the roads to secure Obama’s passage as he who had cleared heavy security to enter the main was wearing a rainbow head scarf, said that “a lot zipped from a meeting with Mubarak to a mosque auditorium. In their midst were many Egyptian of people expect Obama to be the saviour,”but she visit, then to the speech and then to see the Pyradissidents, as well as the son of Egyptian President thought that any change would come slowly. mids and the Sphinx.

Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak himself didn’t attend, but “Will there be a state of Palestine in Obama’s Obama is scheduled to stop in Germany and Obama met with him earlier in the day. administration? I doubt it,”she said.“Not because I France over the next two days, to visit the BuchMany Muslims and Palestinians – and groups don’t think there should be a state – I do – but because enwald concentration camp and to commemorate that represented liberal to moderate Jews – received I don’t think the world is ready for that yet.” the 65th anniversary of D-Day, before returning to the speech optimistically.

Obama also called the Iraq war“a war of choice” Washington on Sunday.

Obama not our messiah – Hezbollah Beirut – The Hezbollah-run television station in Lebanon said today that US President Barack Obama had given a sermon and not a speech in Cairo earlier in the day.

Al Manar television’s main news anchor started the night news bulletin by saying“Obama appeared like he was a giving a sermon or acting like a preacher during his speech which

was addressed to the Islamic world.”

“It is a historic speech with no doubt, but it requires careful reading between its words and lines,”the Al Manar anchor said.

He added that the US president and his aides “exerted heavy efforts in choosing the right words... to address the people in this part of the world.

“But despite all the efforts, Obama stayed on the political line which the US has been following, especially on the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli

conflict...which he alone does not have the keys to,” the Hezbollah-run television said.

The station said that Obama did not offer anything new regarding the Iranian nuclear issue.

The militant group’s TV station broadcast Obama’s speech as he was speaking in Cairo University earlier in the day.

The group has not yet itself issued an official reaction to the speech.

– DPA

UN applauds world peace speech New York – US President Barack Obama’s speech in Egypt calling for an end to the rift between the West and the world’s Muslims was a“crucial step”in bridging differences, the United Nations said today.

“I strongly welcome its message of peace, understanding and reconciliation,”UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.

“President Obama’s speech is a crucial step in bridging divides and promoting intercultural understanding, which is a major objective of the United Nations.”

Ban said Obama’s message heralds a new chapter in the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world and he was optimistic that it

would favourably impact efforts to end the conflicts in the Middle East.

In a speech at Cairo University, Obama said:“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.”

– DPA

WORLD

5 June 2009

Mystery still surrounds flight’s last moments

Searchers prepare to uplift wreckage of the downed Airbus.

NOTIMEX

Sao Paulo/Paris – As the search intensified today for an explanation of why an Air France jetliner with 228 people aboard plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, searchers began plucking fragments of the aircraft out of the water.

The search has been narrowed to an area of approximately 6,000 square kilometers, Brazilian air force spokesman Ramon Borges Cardoso said in the port city of Recife.

The zone is located about 1,200 kilometres northeast of Recife, near the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Islets, a small, uninhabited archipelago that is home to a Brazilian Navy scientific station.

Fragments of the plane have been taken out of the

sea to be flown first to the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha and then transferred to Recife.

The pieces apparently came from the interior of the Airbus 330-200 and were described by Cardoso as two yellow, one brown and one white piece of wreckage.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner traveled to Rio de Janeiro this morning to take part in a memorial for the victims of the crash at the Igreja Candelaria in the city centre with his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim.

Many of the relatives of the crash victims broke down in tears during the multi-denominational service.

Meanwhile, the search continued for the cause of the accident.The Spanish daily El Mundo reported today that two pilots for the Spanish airline Air Comet and a passenger saw a white flash in the area where the plane had plunged into the Atlantic, raising the possibility that it was brought down by an explosion.

The Air Comet plane was traveling the route between Lima, Peru, and Madrid when the three people“suddenly saw far away a strong and intense flash of white light”which then plunged vertically downwards and disappeared in six seconds, one of the pilots wrote in a report to his airline.

The sighting took place early Monday, when the Airbus A330-200, flying from Rio de Janeiro

to Paris, fell into the sea while encountering bad weather.The sighting could also have been a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere and burning up.

The pilot also said that he observed storms with intense electrical activity and cloud formations near his route. Air Comet said it had passed the report on to the Spanish civil aviation authorities,Airbus and Air France.

The report revived the hypothesis of an explosion as the cause of the accident, adding another element to the search for an explanation for what caused the worst commercial air disaster since 2001.

The French daily Le Figaro reported this morning that an individual close to the investigation into the crash said that the aircraft may have been torn apart by an explosion or by a very powerful storm.

“We can see fragments (of the plane) spread over a distance of more than 300 kilometres,” the individual said, speaking on condition that his name not be used.

“This first element suggests an explosion that struck the aircraft in full flight, rather than destruction in contact with the sea.”

This hypothesis does not contradict the possibility of a terrorist bomb or a sudden disintegration caused by violent weather.

However, a German aviation expert told the German Press Agency dpa that the final messages sent by the aircraft before it plunged into the sea early Monday appear to contradict the theory of a violent explosion.

In an interview with the German Press Agency dpa, Heinrich Grossbongardt described a fourminute time span between 0210 and 0214 GMT Monday in which the Airbus A330-200 apparently experienced severe technical problems before all contact was lost.

At 0210, the plane’s system reported that the crew had turned off the automatic pilot in order to fly the plane manually.

This means that the cause of the disaster was probably not violent, because “it shows that the pilots tried to deal with the problem.”

– DPA

UK scandal may push voters toward far-right taxes on an apartment transaction. Exiting the prime minister’s office on Thursday evening, she wore a brooch that read:“Rocking the boat.”News LONDON – Britain’s political crisis has escalated of her resignation broke just before Brown was due with new calls for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to appear in Parliament at midday, and opposition to quit amid a sudden string of resignations by his politicians were quick to attack.

Cabinet officials and Labor Party allies. Opposition “The government is collapsing before our eyes,” politicians charged the government was“collapsing” Conservative Party leader David Cameron charged and“in total meltdown.” during a verbal slugfest with Brown, repeating calls The timing of resignations of senior government for a general election as soon as possible. officials couldn’t have been worse, coming on the eve “The country doesn’t have a government, it has of today’s national elections for local councils and a void – Labor is finished,” chimed in Nick Clegg, European parliamentary seats. Polls have found the leader of the Liberal Democrats.“The prime Labor with abysmal public support, with voters minister is thrashing around, fighting for his own indicating that they may vent their disgust by political survival.”Clegg warned of the danger that turning to fringe and far-right parties that want “people feel there’s no one in charge.” to distance Britain from the European Union. A Brown, who’s fought back from near-political similar increase in support for far-right parties is death before, gave a robust defense in the House seen elsewhere in Europe. of Commons.

All three of Britain’s main political parties, Public disgust over the expenses scandal has Labor, Conservative and Liberal Democrat, have reached such a point that the Archbishop of Canterbeen damaged by a recent scandal over abuse of bury, the leader of the Church of England, recently expense accounts by members of Parliament, but made an unprecedented statement recently urging Brown’s Labor government is bearing the brunt of voters not to support far-right groups such as the the criticism.

British National Party.

The expenses-related resignations this week of The anti-immigration group, which was formed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who was responsi- by former members of the extremist National Front ble for immigration, policing and the intelligence and wants Britain to break away from the EU, is the services, and then Communities Secretary Hazel fastest growing political party in Britain. It’s been Blears, who was responsible for running the local on the rise since the 1980s. elections Thursday, moved the scandal a step closer Matthew Goodwin, a research fellow at the Unito Brown. versity of Manchester, said the BNP could also benBrown recently criticized Blears, a 4-foot 10-inch efit from voter apathy on Thursday.“When we have redhead who often rides a motorcycle in full leather low turnout, we tend to have stronger performance jacket and pants, for failing to pay capital-gains for the BNP,”Goodwin said.

By Julie Sell McClatchy Newspapers

Brown, who’s fought back from near-political death before, gave a robust defense in the House of Commons Recent polls suggest the BNP could attract 7 percent of the vote today, enough to win it a seat in the European Parliament. The party already has more than 50 elected local councilors across Britain and a seat on the Greater London Assembly.

The UK Independence Party, another conservative party also known as Ukip, is expected to pick up protest votes from Britons disillusioned with the major parties, Goodwin said. Ukip, which also wants Britain to leave the EU, has polled as high as

16 percent in the run-up to Election Day. Goodwin said far-right parties across Europe – in Britain, France, Hungary, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Belgium – are cooperating more closely than in the past.

Their aim is to form“a unified bloc”in the European Parliament that can oppose Turkey’s entry into the EU and push for more limits on immigration.French, Italian and Belgian far-right parties already have a significant presence in the European Parliament.

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SPORT

5 June 2009

11

Midfield crisis could see McAlister summoned

By Chris Barclay of NZPA

Auckland, June 5 – Luke McAlister might be back in black as early as next week as New Zealand’s rugby selectors confront a growing injury crisis before next week’s season-opening test against France.

A low-key get together in Auckland, designed to usher in three debutants-in-waiting and familiarise the old hands with another set of new laws, ended on a subdued note today when Richard Kahui, fellow-centre Conrad Smith and flanker Jerome Kaino were added to the list of confirmed defections for the Dunedin test.

The trio join squad members Ali Williams and Brendon Leonard as non-starters, while premier loosehead prop Tony Woodcock continues to recover from a debilitating virus.

Lump in the absence of automatic choices Richie McCaw,Dan Carter,Richie McCaw,Rodney So’oialo and Sitiveni Sivivatu from June’s three-test programme and the All Blacks coaches could be forgiven for approaching Carisbrook with a sense of trepidation.

The midfield looms as the key concern after Kahui revealed he needs a season-ending shoulder reconstruction while Smith sat out training with a strapped left hamstring.

Kahui faces at least six months on the sideline – which will equate to a year-long break to his fledgling eight-cap career.

After nursing a fragile left shoulder since April last year, a collision during last weekend’s Super 14 loss to the Bulls made surgery inevitable.

Concern over Smith’s leg means the squad is

suddenly short of specialist midfielders, with Ma’a Nonu and Isaia Toeava likely to pair up in Dunedin barring any further injuries.

Henry would not specify a replacement for Kahui until Monday – a delay that enables the coaching triumvirate to assess McAlister’s form for the Barbarians against the Wallabies in Sydney tomorrow night. McAlister will start that game in the unfamiliar role of first five-eighth.

The Junior All Blacks also assemble in Auckland on Monday ahead of the Pacific Nations Cup, offering Tamati Ellison and Anthony Tuitavake a chance at promotion.

However, the double setback may provide McAlister, who made the last of his 22 test appearances against France in the 2007 World Cup quarterfinal, with a saloon passage back into the All Blacks environment.

Henry said McAlister, who was to mark his return to New Zealand rugby with the Junior All Blacks, would be under consideration.

There were other unspecified candidates,although he scoffed at suggestions former rugby league international Sonny Bill Williams – who also turns out for the Baabaas – was in contention.

On a more serious note, the All Blacks 22-man test squad has practically selected itself already given the attrition rate.

Halfback Leonard, whose hamstring strain ruled him out of the Chiefs semifinal and final, should be available for the second French test in Wellington on June 20, likewise Kaino who has been hampered by a knee injury.

NZPA/Ross Setford

Jimmy Cowan, who was promoted to the All Blacks leadership group for the first time this week, will start behind the pack while Kaino’s unavailability guarantees New Zealand will field a loose trio boasting no more than 13 caps.

Designated No 8 Liam Messam, blindside flanker Kieran Read and Adam Thomson seem certain to run on with the uncapped openside Tanerau Latimer in reserve.

In the front row, 49-test prop Woodcock continues to shrug off illness, though he did pack down today.

“It’s not totally clear of his system, he’s playing pretty well considering,”Henry said.

He was also confident Toeava could handle a

position he struggled with earlier in his burgeoning 20-test career.

He has made eight starts at centre, most recently against Romania at the World Cup. “He’s like gold to us really,”Henry said.

“He can play 12,13, wing, fullback. That’s very rare. It’s big ask for him but he handles it well.”

Henry at least had some good news to ponder, scrum coach Mike Cron has re-signed through to the 2011 World Cup. “He’s got a great relationship with the guys, they respect him. We’ve always had a positive scrum,” he said.

“It’s a very important signing for New Zealand rugby.”

Mortlock told to ‘smash Sonny’ Tiger Woods set for

major tuneup at Memorial

By Mark Geenty of NZPA

Sydney, June 5 – Wallabies rugby captain Stirling Mortlock has been getting some unusual requests on the street this week – particularly regarding his opposite number Sonny Bill Williams.

“I’ve had a few people come up and say ‘put a shot on him for me’ or whatever, but I think it’s all a bit tongue and cheek,”he said.

Serious or not, the former Kiwis and Bulldogs rugby league megastar has polarised Sydney sports followers, and will be the most-watched man at the Sydney Football Stadium tomorrow night.

Just seven months after he walked out on the Bulldogs for French club Toulon, one year into a five-year contract, he faces a stern test of his rugby ability with the Barbarians so early in his career.

Against one of the premier centres in world rugby, no less.

“I’m gonna be put under a lot of pressure, I think.

I’m pretty sure they’ll target me out there,”Williams admitted this week.

But, he was determined to show he was a genuine rugby player, not a league player in disguise.

Mortlock and his Wallabies had obtained footage of Williams at Toulon but the skipper admitted it was little use without knowing how he fitted into the Barbarians’attacking and defensive patterns.

“We’re not too sure what to expect.”

Williams has never combined with All Blacks first five-eighth Luke McAlister, and the man he’ll partner in the centres, former Highlander and Samoan international Seilala Mapusua.

Mortlock observed Williams’ novel buildup in Brisbane last week, when he revealed his impressive 107kg frame and swatted aside a boxing challenge from Auckland bouncer-basher Gary ‘The Baboon’Gurr.

He’d also noted Williams was sinbinned early in his Toulon career for a shoulder charge, which used to strike cold fear into his National Rugby League (NRL) opponents.

“I think he learned that pretty quickly in union that shoulder charges are illegal, just as lucky for us that uppercuts are illegal too,”Mortlock said.

“Sonny’s a world class athlete and he’s proved his worth in league and he’s going very well overseas

By Marla Ridenour Akron Beacon Journal

in union. Last week he was in the ring doing a bit of damage there as well.

“I’ve got no doubt he’ll be looking forward to playing on the biggest stage in rugby and he’ll be up for it.”

Williams’ Barbarians teammates have watched Sonny Bill-mania with interest this week.

They are almost equally in the dark about their new teammate, with French club rugby difficult to find on British television.

Former England and Lions winger Josh Lewsey said Williams’ success would hinge on the type of ball he was provided by an experienced Barbarians pack. If the Wallabies dominate, it could be a quiet night for the lad from Auckland.

“Having played in the centres this season you realise you need everything to click around you to have a good game,”Lewsey said.

“There’s obviously a lot of attention on the guy, a lot of pressure on him as well. I hope he comes away from the week having enjoyed it.

“To start your test union career in the Barbarians is perhaps a little bit misleading in many ways. He seems like a great player and he’s obviously a class act in league and I’m sure he’ll make the transition well.”

– NZPA

DUBLIN, Ohio – The PGA Tour’s golden goose still chuckles about the days he spent as a kid fleecing pigeons for quarters.

At least until his father stepped in.

Tiger Woods’ scam took place at Heartwell, an 18-hole par-3 course in Long Beach, close to his home in Cypress, Calif.

So small as a youngster that he couldn’t see over the counter to pay, Woods said the man collecting greens fees would stick his head out and he would hand over the money he had made the previous day on the putting green.

The prodigy would spend his afternoons setting up games with unsuspecting players. He said his standard line was “Want to putt? Want to play for some skins?”

“I used to come home with a pocket full of quarters,”Woods recalled this week as he prepared for the Memorial Tournament this weekend at Muirfield Village Golf Club.“After a couple weeks of that, my dad got real frustrated. So he said,‘No more playing for quarters.’

“Next day I come home with a pocketful of dollars.”

Even after the crafty Woods had upped the ante, the late Earl Woods did not relent.

“Basically he said, ‘No more gambling,’”Woods said.

The world’s No. 1 player, now 33, is no longer scrounging for quarters, having earned more than US$84 million in his career and competing for a $1.35 million first-place prize at Muirfield.But he comes to suburban Columbus with questions to answer.

With a three-week layoff since he finished eighth at the Players Championship, Woods will use the Memorial as a tuneup for the U.S. Open on June 18-21 at Bethpage Black in New York.Woods won the most recent Open that was played at Bethpage, beating Phil Mickelson by 3 shots in 2002.

This will be Woods’ second major since his stunning one-legged victory in the 2008 U.S. Open at Tor-

rey Pines. Woods underwent surgery to repair the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee days after winning a 19-hole playoff against Rocco Mediate and did not return to the PGA Tour until March.

Woods has one victory in 2009, at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, and five top-10 finishes in six starts. But a tie for sixth at the Masters when magic failed to materialize in a dramatic Sunday pairing with Mickelson has revived speculation about how Woods is faring in his comeback.

Memorial founder Jack Nicklaus observed that Woods has changed his swing since the surgery.

“I don’t think he moves out of the way of the ball like he used to,” Nicklaus said.“I think that’s probably protective, and it’s probably a good move on his part.”

Woods confirmed Nicklaus’assessment.

“Absolutely no doubt, had to be that way,” said Woods, who has won the Memorial three times (1999-2001).“Worst thing you can do is stretch out the ligament right away. The surgery would have been all for naught.That’s one of the reasons it takes most athletes a lot longer to come back.

“I haven’t been able to hit balls as far as I normally do, but that’s coming. Each week I’m able to hit a little bit longer. It’s great. Just a little longer before I’m able to get all of that back.”

Nicklaus has no doubt that Woods, with 14 major victories, will still eclipse his record of 18.

“It’s not a gimme,”Nicklaus said.“The pace he has and the quality of player he is, even if he doesn’t play well I think he’ll probably still break my record.

“You start out anybody’s career at age 33 and say you’re going to win five majors, the chance of most people is probably going to be no. But in Tiger’s case, probably yes.”

Nicklaus considered Woods’ focus and work ethic and predicted it will happen in the next three years.

“If it’s the next three years, that’s fine with me,” said Nicklaus, 69.“Then he can go get it over with and I can go shake his hand. And I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to travel to shake his hand.”

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WEEKEND

5 June 2009

13

TV & Film

Up

0Voices: Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer 0Directors: Pete Doctor, Bob Peterson 0Length: 96 minutes 0Rated: PG (some peril and action) As ambitious and strange as its title is simple, Up tells the story of Carl Fredricksen (voice by Ed Asner), a curmudgeonly widower who thus far has refused to sell his house to a construction firm that has turned his once-charming neighborhood into a slick and soulless development.

Still reeling from the death of his beloved Ellie,Carl decides to tie thousands of helium-filled balloons to his house and create a kind of makeshift hot air balloon that will take him to South America – the place where,for many decades,he had hoped to travel with Ellie.The plan works but for the emergence of young Russell (voice by Jordan Nagai), an 8-year-old boy, who just so happens to be on the front porch when Carl’s house goes lurching into the sky.

Placing a depressed septuagenarian at the center of a children’s film is its own kind of eccentricity – though we’ve come to expect nothing less from the extraordinary Pixar Animation Studios, which in recent years has served up portraits of post-apocalyptic despair (Wall-E) and gourmand rodents (Ratatouille).

The real surprise of Up, directed by Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson from a screenplay by Peterson, is the boldness of the storytelling and the unexpected depth of the emotions. A miscarriage, a terminal illness, a young boy’s inability to connect with his father – it’s all touched upon here with a grace and delicacy that pays the audience a tremendous compliment.This is a children’s film that refuses to condescend to anyone.

Like so many of Pixar’s features, it’s also a singularly imagined visual experience, a movie in which each lovingly crafted frame enriches the themes and feelings. Initially rendered in bright candy colors – an explosion of Skittles-shaded balloons set against a dreamy blue sky – the color palette turns more lush and saturated as Carl and Russell float their way to the mountains of South America, where they meet a giant squawking bird trying to protect its babies. (A side note:The press screening I attended was in traditional 2-D, so I only imagine how much more eye-popping the experience is in 3-D.) At every turn, Up keeps subverting expectations and creating its own rules. Carl’s quixotic mission, to settle the house on a cliff as a tribute to Ellie, brings to mind the perverse drama of Werner Herzog’s

Easy Virtue

0Cast: Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes, Colin Firth 0Director: Stephen Elliott 0Length: 100 minutes 0Rated: PG (contains sexual references)

A miscarriage, a terminal illness, a young boy’s inability to connect with his father – it’s all touched upon here with a grace and delicacy that pays the audience a tremendous compliment Fitzcarraldo, about a guy trying to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. The bizarre dream logic of all this – complete with a menacing pack of dogs whose master has developed a high-tech collar that allows the canines to talk – brings to mind the most brazenly experimental works of David Lynch, like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

The images of Carl and Russell traipsing across through the jungle as the now-deflating house hovers just above them seem a vision that belongs in a Terry Gilliam fantasy.

But Up never tips over into pretentious or arthouse fussiness – two criticisms much more readily lodged at Wall-E, with its nearly silent opening 40 minutes and mile-a-minute references to 2001.

This new film instead strikes just the right balance between the thoughtful and the raucous, the intelligent and the playful – perhaps because the filmmakers never lose sight of the emotional journeys of their beautifully rendered main characters.

Carl turns out to be a man who has allowed everyday regrets to blind him to the true adventure that was (and still is) his life. Russell, on the other stand, is all spirit and derring-do – but sorely lacking an adult influence who can encourage his wild-

est dreams. One of the main dialogue exchanges between the two of them – a gentle ode to how the “boring parts” of life are sometimes the most memorable – is pretty much guaranteed to bring you to tears.

When I first saw Up in mid-April, I questioned whether the main villain (voice by Christopher Plummer) and his pack of talking animals (voices

by Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranft and Josh Colley) were a little too obvious – a sop to the littlest kids in the crowd who need a snarling bad guy and few talking animals to divert them.

But as I’ve turned the movie over in my head, even these more conventional elements of the film seem all of a piece. Like Pixar’s greatest works – and I wouldn’t hesitate to rank this one right alongside Finding Nemo and the original Toy Story – Up draws on both old-fashioned traditions and newly invented ones: It’s a rollicking Indiana Jones -style explorer adventure with the heart and anguish of an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama.

You’ve never seen anything like it,and pretty much the instant it’s over, you will want to see it again.

Watch the trailer

– By Christopher Kelly

The director of the bubbly Priscilla, Queen of the Desert tackles the bubbly playwright Noel Coward for Easy Virtue, a loose but spirited adaptation of Coward’s scandalous Jazz Age romp. All that bubbling means that some of the froth floats off this confection. But it’s still a winning, witty fox trot through the Roaring ‘20s, when men were men, women were liberating themselves and the “to the manner born” were losing their grip on their manners – and manors.

The Whittakers are English landed gentry saddled with a World War I vet patriarch (Colin Firth) who came back from the war “lost,” a micro-managing matriarch (Kristin Scott Thomas) who hasn’t married off her not-quite-spinsters daughters and who has no control over her playboy son (Ben Barnes, aka Prince Caspian).

But Johnny’s latest stunt takes everyone’s breath away.

He’s run off and married a pants-wearing flapper ... a smoker ... a race car driver ... a peroxide blonde ... an American!

The newlyweds arrive on the family estate and the battle is joined. No way Mother is tolerating “this bauble of a woman.”

And the “bauble” (Jessica Biel) knows her image problems.

She is “the harlot stealing into the nursery” and “a gold digger burrowing in from the land of opportunists.” What’s worse, she has a reputation as a woman of “easy virtue.”

Johnny doesn’t care. He’s smitten. He keeps crooning “Let’s Misbehave” to his love.

The open warfare between the women – with the selfassured Biel holding her own with the always-flinty Thomas – is the fun of Easy Virtue. Coward’s droll wit makes most every line quotable. Oddly, the filmmakers pepper the soundtrack not only with hits of the day, but with jazz singer versions of songs such as “When the Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going).” Wacky.

Alas, the froth only lasts through the first two acts. Director Stephen Elliott and his co-adapter Sheridan Jobbins match Coward’s zingers with a few of their own, yet cannot maintain the lightness when third act “revelations” take the movie (as they do the play) into darker places.

Still, the wit carries us and it’s great seeing Biel show the Brits that no, Keira isn’t the only Twitter Age hottie who can hold her own in a period piece – with ease.

Watch the trailer – By Roger Moore

REVIEWS

14

5 June 2009

Music

Coldplay brings hot tunes, free CDs

By Jordan Levin

Despite being the adored,much analyzed and fantasized about lead singer of one of the planet’s biggest rock bands,Chris Martin of Coldplay is practical,even humble about his role.Sitting on the floor of a rented house in Los Angeles, enjoying the California sunshine and the taste of the strawberry he’s just finished, Martin is deliberately and charmingly low-key.

“It just comes from pure gratitude at being given this job, particularly in a period of time when music is hard to be employed by,”Martin says of the free

CDs that Coldplay is giving to concert-goers on their U.S. tour, which kicked off last Friday night.

“We wanted to give something to the people who have paid money to come see us or buy the album,” he adds, referring to“Viva La Vida,”the best-selling album in the world in 2008.“It’s like a reward system in a grocery store.”

Material sustenance is not what most fans think of when it comes to Coldplay’s music or its live shows, which are known for the passionate connection that Martin makes with audiences. The free CD,“LeftRightLeftRightLeft,”with nine live songs

culled from the band’s last tour, is partly an attempt to capture that link.

“It is like a snapshot of where we’re at at the moment as a band,” Martin says.“Hopefully nine little morsels of where we are at the moment. It’s supposed to give an overview of how we sound now and mostly how our audience is with that.”

Given that Coldplay is returning to the United States so soon after finishing another North American tour last November, audiences seem to like whatever the band does. The combination of Martin’s charisma and emotionally introspective, obliquely

poetic lyrics, and Coldplay’s darkly anthemic, lushly melodic music has proved to be potent.The group has grown steadily in stature and sales since debuting in 2000 with “Parachutes,” quickly shooting from indie darlings to the top of the U.S. and global charts.Their third album, 2005’s “X&Y,”sold eight million copies in the first year, while“Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends”sold 6.7 million physical and downloaded copies – stellar figures in an age of free downloads and splintering audiences.

The press, however, has been divided on Coldplay and on Martin himself.The band’s music has been criticized as indulgent and repetitive, while Martin, who is married to actor Gwyneth Paltrow (the couple have two children, Apple, 5 and Moses, 3) is sometimes faulted for being arrogant, a vegetarian, righteously well-behaved, and generally avoiding the classically entertaining rock star behavior of excessive drugs, drinking and screwing around.

(Although he has been known to wrestle with paparazzi and appear in comedies like the movie Shaun of the Dead.)

Martin is, in fact, unabashedly middle class.The oldest son of five children of an accountant father and a music-teacher mother, he met his Coldplay bandmates in 1996, while all were earning degrees at London University (they refused to tour or release their first record until they’d taken final exams, and vowed to kick out anyone who used hard drugs). He has campaigned on issues of fair trade and global poverty, and spoken out against the Iraq war.While social themes don’t inspire Coldplay’s songs, Martin says he feels a responsibility to try and affect the world in a positive way.

“It appeases the guilt I sometimes feel for being given such an incredible job,”he says.“I think when you are contributing to or talking about something that you know is important on an activist level, it somehow feels better than if you’re just sitting back taking coke.”As well as assuaging his own anxieties.“I don’t really like to stop and feel comfortable,”Martin says.“So I guess social activism is part of that.”

But he is realistic about how much effect he can have on the world, beyond making people feel better for the length of a song or a show.“If I’m a bit down and worried about something then if I listen to ‘I’m On Fire’by Bruce Springsteen I feel better,” Martin says.“We can only influence our little world in our little bubble.”

Yellow

They just keep on loving you…

By Mike Osegueda

Kevin Cronin recently spied his son Josh walking down the hall singing“Rock You Like a Hurricane.”

This is noteworthy because Josh is 9, nowhere close to old enough to remember 1984.

But there the kid was, singing like the Scorpions.

In Kevin Cronin’s world this is a victory – not just as a dad, but as a singer for a classic-rock band.

“When you’re 9, you have no concept of what’s cool on MTV, you don’t know when a record was released,”says Cronin, lead singer for 70s/80s rockers REO Speedwagon, which has embarked on a“Can’t Stop Rockin’”tour with Styx and .38 Special.

“All you know when you’re 9 is that you like a song or you don’t like a song. These young kids, they’re into REO, they’re into Styx, they’re into all my buddies’music, and they have no prejudice.”

And these young kids Cronin talks about are discovering the music in a way that’s original to their generation – video games.

Games like “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” are introducing button-tapping players to the music their dads grew up on.

It’s why“Rock Band”is the main sponsor behind this“Can’t Stop Rockin’”tour.

Classic rock, believe it or not, is cool again.

“The truth is games like ‘Rock Band and ‘Guitar Hero’have definitely introduced the young audience to classic rock,” says Carter, the program director

and on-air personality at Fresno classic rock station KJFX-FM. “We have youngsters calling in all the time requesting specific songs that they’re hearing in ‘Rock Band.’The cool thing is that it’s tying the kids and the parents together, because it’s the music their parents grew up on.”

One such youngster is 18-year-old Lacey Stevenson of Fresno.

“I had grown up listening to a lot of classic rock from my dad, but I never grew to appreciate it,” she says.

She lists off the artists she listens to, putting Lady Gaga next to Heart and Demi Lovato next to Bon Jovi.

“People are starting to go back to the older classic rock,”Stevenson says.“It’s kind of cool that you can go back and listen to a lot of stuff that a lot of people aren’t listening to.”

As for video games, those help her and others her age appreciate the music in a different way too.

She plays guitar and sings (http://myspace.com/laceystevenson), so the musical video games appeal in that way too.

“The game helps you realize all that goes into playing the guitar and playing the drums,”Stevenson says.“You really appreciate all the work that it takes to put that together.”

Cronin sees playing “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” as the musical equivalent of dipping your

foot in the swimming pool.

“I hope kids will get the experience of how cool is is to play in a band and that will motivate them to take guitar lessons or drum lessons,”he says.

Or, if nothing else, come out to a concert.

“At one of our shows recently there was a group of kids who looked like they were at a Disturbed concert or something,”Cronin says.“They’re in the front row. I figured they were there to heckle us or something.As the show went on, I noticed they were singing along to every song and I realized these kids are into it.”

So he got them backstage passes and asked why they were there.

The answer? They listen to classic rock radio and dig the music.

It’s a combination of video games, radio, parents influence and whatever else.

“There’s a Broadway show called ‘Rock of Ages,’ it’s all classic rock music,”Cronin says.“It’s television commercials that use songs and use other classic rock songs. For whatever reason, and I certainly don’t know the secret, this music has become like country in a way – it just lives on.”

And with that, comes another new life for classic rock bands like REO Speedwagon.

“I just like the fact,” Cronin says,“that young people are open minded enough to check out our music.”

Keep On Loving You

All you know when you’re 9 is that you like a song or you don’t like a song. These young kids, they’re into REO, they’re into Styx, they’re into all my buddies’ music, and they have no prejudice

REVIEWS

5 June 2009

NEW CD RELEASES Elvis Costello

0Secret, Profane and Sugarcane 0Hear Music Elvis Costello’s third collaboration with T-Bone Burnett splits the difference between his first two: It’s better than 1989’s all-over-theplace “Spike,” but not as good as 1986’s sharply focused“King of America.”It’s a set of ballads with subtle acoustic country and bluegrass backing, not quite so atmospheric as Burnett’s most recent noteworthy production, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’“Raising Sand.”

The cable talk-show host is never at a loss for words or new songs, but here he also reinterprets tunes previously targeted for other projects. The standout, and one welcome up-tempo cut,“Hidden Shame,” for instance, originally was written for Johnny Cash and also was released as a demo version on Costello’s 2001 album “All This Useless Beauty.”

Emmylou Harris sings harmony on the quite lovely fiddle-fired “The Crooked Line,” cowritten

by Burnett, and “I Felt the Chill” is a choked and touching lament cowritten with Loretta Lynn that’s a comeback, of sorts, to Lynn’s “When the Tingle Becomes A Chill.”Too many mid-tempo tunes lined up back-to-back, but otherwise a solid addition to the Costello oeuvre.

– Dan DeLuca

The Sounds

0Crossing the Rubicon 0Amioki/Original Signal Once hailed as Sweden’s answer to Blondie but actually not far removed from Canada’s Metric, the Sounds tackle this third album as if being timed, visibly itching to launch into every neon-bright chorus. Maja Ivarsson’s heavily treated vocals combine with ‘80stinged guitars and synths for big, punchy pop that doesn’t bother being particularly original.Yet the first half of the album is spoiled by Ivarsson’s smug delivery and condescending lyrics. The tacky “My Lover”mars its fluttering electronics with woefully willful singing, and “Beatbox”takes a lame stab at replicating Blondie’s “Rapture.”The second half, thankfully, is less in-your-face and overproduced, free of self-conscious kiss-offs and concessions to radio. The result is an album that teeters uncomfortably between smarmy and sweet, bloated and efficient.

– Doug Wallen

Kat Edmonson

Books

Tour the darkness with torture and suicide bombers On the cusp of winter, two of crime fiction’s heaviest hitters offer up imaginative, gripping thrillers that remind us how entertaining reading the dark stuff can be.

The Scarecrow

0Michael Connelly 0Little, Brown (384 pages, $27.99) Michael Connelly’s latest standalone novel is, not surprisingly, a riveting thriller with a flawed, fully fleshed hero, a nasty serial killer and the expected page-turning tension. But The Scarecrow is also a moving, often-angry elegy to the dying newspaper industry, of which Connelly was a part way back in the days before Harry Bosch.

The Scarecrow also harkens back to The Poet. It’s mostly narrated by Los Angeles Times reporter Jack McEvoy, whose brother was one of that killer’s victims. McEvoy has reappeared from time to time in Connelly’s books as a minor character, but here he takes centre stage, even as he’s handed a pink slip.

Jack holds no illusions about the current state of journalism:“The newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies.Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit.Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded?

Our government? No way.TV, the blogs? Forget it.”

But Jack isn’t leaving“The Velvet Coffin”– where Connelly once worked as a reporter – without one last enticing story. The rather routine arrest of a project kid who confessed to the torture murder of an exotic dancer catches his eye. An in-depth profile of where the kid and society went wrong is the stuff of prize winners, Jack thinks, and decides to spend his last two weeks working the story, if only to stick it to the oily, greedy corporate weasels who destroyed his newspaper and career. But as he delves into the case – his younger, cheaper, more attractive female replacement by his side – he discovers that the murder isn’t as simple as the cops think.

The backbone of The Scarecrow is, of course, the main serial-killer plot, but Connelly also deftly evokes a bittersweet mood through Jack’s fury and eventual acceptance of the brave new world of journalism.

– By Connie Ogle

0Take to the Sky 0Convivium Records

Gone Tomorrow

0Lee Child 0Delacorte (421 pages, $27)

Every generation gets to reinterpret the Great American Songbook.

Kat Edmonson, 25, more than leaves her mark.

She puts her kewpie-doll voice here to a succession of familiar standards, from George Gershwin’s“Summertime”to Carole King’s “One Fine Day,” and comes out with reasonable marks. She’s direct and packs an eerie voice that has the markings of personality.

The singer, based in Austin, Texas, sang Peggy Lee’s “Fever” on “American Idol” in 2002 and was dismissed, though not before prickly judge Simon Cowell compared her to Doris Day. Norah Jones would be closer to the mark. Edmonson is spookily delicate and a bit of an acquired taste, but her china-doll sensibility scores points in a jazz room. The settings with reedman John Ellis, bassist Eric Revis, and producer/pianist Kevin Lovejoy give a rich finish to this accessible set.

– Karl Stark

15

“Suicide bombers are easy to spot,” Jack Reacher tells us in the opening lines of Child’s 13th suspense novel. “They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first-timers.”

Once a military man, now a wanderer free of possessions but with a bad habit of involvement in high-stakes violence, the imposing Reacher studied the bullet points on potential bombers with an Israeli army captain 20 years ago (11 clues for women, 12 for men:“Male bombers take off their beards. It helps them blend in. Makes them less suspicious.The result is paler skin on the lower half of the face.”) What he doesn’t expect is to be running down the list of warning signs in his head at 2 a.m. in a sparsely populated NewYork subway car.

But he is, because there’s a woman sitting nearby who meets all the criteria.

Child is famous for his can’t-catch-your-breath openings, and Gone Tomorrow features one of his most provocative.The explosive confrontation that follows leads to a dangerous web of deceit, murder and international treachery (as well as more localized treachery, thanks to some squirmy, covert governmental agencies).There are also more than a few gruesome, blood-soaked sequences; Child’s novels are not for the queasy. Edgy, nerve-wracking and thoroughly engrossing, Gone Tomorrow is so insanely fast-paced that it’s simply over too soon.

Books extrapolate business insights, lessons from rock ‘n’ roll As much as I am obsessed with biz books, I often find business wisdom in tomes that seem to have nothing to do with commerce. A few years ago, for example, I reviewed a book about the underground culture of pick-up artists, since many of their principles and practices were applicable to sales, marketing, promotion – even human resources.

I once read a biography of NeilYoung strictly for pleasure and realized that it, too, was a biz book, with lessons on branding, product development, marketing, logistics and more. Plus, he owned Lionel Trains at the time. I switched gears and reviewed the biography from a business perspective and got a lot of great feedback.The review was picked up by newspapers all over the country; even in Australia, much to my surprise and delight.

Here are two recent books from people who learned valuable business lessons from their rock ‘n’ roll experiences.

Jam! Amp Your Team, Rock Your Business 0Jeff Carlisi and Dan Lipson with Jay Busbee 0Jossey-Bass, 254 pages ($24.95).

Jeff Carlisi was a guitarist and songwriter in the Jacksonville, Fla.-based band .38 Special. I’d worked with him a few times and was always impressed with his positive,professional demeanor.It should have been no surprise,then, to read this upbeat book that uses his career trajectory as the basis for some very smart and practical business and personal guidance.

Carlisi, now a principal in a corporate consultancy specializing in team building, is joined here by his partner, Dan Lipson, and professional writer Jay Busbee.The trio tells the story of how the band got started and developed, up until he left in 1997.

Carlisi’s carefully selected anecdotes emphasize hard work, collaboration, tenacity and other vital attributes. While there are few, if any, surprises herein, his breezy and entertaining text presents a solid primer for success in most any profession or endeavor. I’m sending a copy, in fact, to an itinerant musician I know who might benefit from learning these fundamentals.

Rock to the Top: What I Learned About Success From the World’s Greatest Rock Stars 0Dayna Steele 0Brown Books, 135 pages ($17.95).

Steele was a rock jock and radio station music director in Houston and her book is a bit more nutsand-bolts than Carlisi’s. She also utilizes an impressive resume in an entertaining and instructive way, but her unique perspective – from both the talent and the business end – offers a view from each side of the stage.

The glitz and glamour of the music business dur-

ing the latter part of the last century belied much its hard economic realities. Nowadays, it’s far from uncommon to encounter entertainers who are more involved in their business than in their art. Steele’s observations from the back and front of the stage are witty, incisive and applicable to a variety of situations. True tales of encounters with Michael Jackson, Sammy Hagar, David Crosby and others add flavor and atmospherics but the real value of this book is Steele’s levelheaded and intelligent insights and extrapolations.

Gene Simmons,relentless marketer andTV personality,contributes the book’s foreword and he was either paid a fortune to do so or recognizes and respects the author’s expertise. My money is on the latter.

– By Richard Pachter

Book Expo exposes problems with publishing industry The declining state of traditional book publishing could be read very clearly at the recent Book Expo 2009 tradeshow in New York. If anything, the show exposed how an elite industry is having trouble coming to terms with an information-based culture, full of self-publishers with digital devices that know no barriers to entry.

The annual Book Expo is where publishers typically come out in force to tout new titles and cozy up to customers, including the nation’s librarians. But since the last Expo in NewYork in 2007, the number of attendees this year dropped by 11 percent to about 12,000, not counting exhibitors.

A few telling nuggets from this year’s event: • Major publishing houses, such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, cut so far back on floor space that they held meetings in windowless basement rooms.

• The Associated Press described this year’s Expo as “a low-budget, low-celebrity convention, with fewer parties and fewer advanced copies of books than in the past, and a sense that the best way to meet expectations was to lower them.”

• Instead of continuing as a three-day weekend show, next year’s Expo is likely to be scaled down, maybe held mid-week over two days, and maybe open to the public. In detailing the despair evident at this year’s Expo, New York Magazine’s Boris Kachka suggested that opening next year’s event to the public would turn the Expo into “a nerdier Auto Show or a less nerdy Comic-Con.” In fairness, Expo organizers did try different strategies this year, such as promoting the new, iPod-inspired e-reader, Cool-Er, and handing out 1,000 copies of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, The Unnamed.

But writing in their blogs, even exhibitors at the show questioned its future.

Clearly, digital formats have turned traditional publishing on its ear – in effect toppling the Ivory Tower where publishers once lived. Now it’s as if the industry is becoming unmasked.

We always knew it was smug. But we could at least hope for a level of respect,or even a desire to understand the real customer, which is the everyday reader.

What would happen if the public were invited in, say to stand in line for free copies of Ferris’novel?

Publishers would come face to face with the customers they are trying to know better.They might also learn a few things about what average readers think, what they want and how they intend to consume books in the future.

There is an old saying in business, something along the lines that if you don’t eat your lunch, someone else will eat it for you.

The threat to publishers is not whether the public will come to next year’s convention. The threat is that the tables will turn, and elitism will take such a turn that the book-buying public will one day say to publishers,“Let them eat cake.”

– By Diane Evans

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SCIENCE & TECH 17

5 June 2009

discovery

in 60 seconds

Study: Web collects more information than you know

By Matt Krupnick Contra Costa Times

BERKELEY, Calif. – Web users are tracked far more widely than they know, University of California at Berkeley researchers revealed this week.

Companies often provide information about people who visit their Web sites to others, despite assertions to the contrary, the study concluded. Some tracking software collects detailed information on how people use the Internet.

“Some third party will then know that a computer from your (location) visited a Web page, and they’ll know the content of the page you viewed,”said Ashkan Soltani, one of three UC Berkeley graduate students who compiled the study as part of their master’s project before graduating last week.

“There’s no transparency about how that information is used,”he said.

Although it has long been known that companies track Web users, researchers were surprised by how ubiquitous the practice is and how few sites mention the practice in their privacy policies.

Popular blogging sites were among the most active trackers, the students found. Blogspot, for

example, had 100“bugs”– or tracking beacons – on its site, while Typepad had 75.

Despite privacy policies that assure users that companies do not collect personal information on theirWeb sites, many find loopholes that allow them to do just that,said Brian Carver,a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information who advised the students.

“They may not be sharing the information themselves, but they’re inviting other companies onto their sites to collect the information,”he said.

The study also found Google-related trackers on 88 percent of the nearly 394,000 bug-equipped domains examined by researchers.

“Google’s sheer dominance of the tracking market surprised us,”Carver said.

Google representatives did not return a phone message Wednesday.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the Internet giant’s tracking practices at the behest of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based organization. FTC representatives declined to comment Wednesday.

“Google is in a better position than any other company to control Internet activity,” Rotenberg

Although it has long been known that companies track Web users, researchers were surprised by how ubiquitous the practice is and how few sites mention the practice in their privacy policies said.“It simply has more information than any other company.”

Although computer users can buy or download software to protect them against more malicious tracking programs that steal personal information such as credit card numbers, defending against Web bugs is significantly more difficult, researchers said.

The few tools that do exist can make it nearly impossible to surf the Web. “Even for the advanced user,”Carver said,“it can make browsing the Web extremely frustrating.”

Windows 7 to hit market in October

By Sharon Pian Chan The Seattle Times

SEATTLE – To attract holiday shoppers, Microsoft said it will begin selling Windows 7, the next version of its flagship operating system, on Oct. 22.

The company confirmed the date Wednesday, and posted the news on its Windows 7 Team blog in the afternoon.

Windows 7 will succeed Vista, which was released to the broader market at the beginning of 2007.

That operating system suffered incompatibility glitches when it first came out and, though many were resolved,Vista never quite overcame its early reputation.

Versions of Windows 7 will be ready for PC manufacturers to install on new computers at the end of July, a milestone also known as the release-to-manufacturing date. Retail copies of Windows will go on

sale on Oct. 22, as well as computers installed with Windows 7.

As it did with Vista, Microsoft plans to offer a few versions of Windows 7, differing in price and aimed at differing uses – netbooks, home desktops and business users.

Shoppers who buy a new PC preinstalled with Vista before Oct. 22 will have the option of a free upgrade to Windows 7.The company, however, did not have details Tuesday on when the offer will begin.

Executives say they developed the latest version of Windows to simplify PC use. For instance,Windows 7 has reduced the number of steps it takes to set up a home network and to share music and photos between computers.

The desktop screen area has been decluttered of

icons except for the recycle bin.Applications appear in a taskbar across the bottom of the screen, and when a cursor hovers over the bar, preview screens of each application pop up.

Microsoft is currently conducting a public test of a Windows 7 sample version called the release candidate.

“I’ve been using the release candidate and it seems to be in good shape,”said Michael Cherry, an analyst at independent Kirkland firm Directions on Microsoft. He said businesses would appreciate a new Direct Access feature that makes it easier for employees to work remotely.

“For regular users, some of the changes they’ve made to the interface may make it easier for people to discover things they do and to use all the features,” Cherry said.

Earth more habitable because of meteorites LONDON, June 5 (UPI) – British scientists say large bombardments of meteorites 4 billion years ago might have made early Earth and Mars more habitable for life.

Imperial College London researchers said millions of meteor strikes during what’s called the Late Heavy Bombardment about 3.9 billion years ago pelted Earth and Mars during a period of about 20 million years, possibly modifying the atmosphere on both planets.

Researchers explained that when a meteor enters a planet’s atmosphere, extreme heat causes some of its outer crust minerals and organic matter to be released as water and carbon dioxide before it breaks up and hits the ground.

The researchers suggest the delivery of that water could have made Earth’s and Mars’s atmospheres wetter, while the release of the CO2 could have trapped more energy from sunlight to make both planets warm enough to sustain liquid oceans.

Using published models of meteoritic impact rates during the heavy bombardment period, the researchers calculated 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide and 10 billion tons of water vapor could have been delivered to the atmospheres of Earth and Mars each year, for millions of years.

The study is detailed in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Midges keep invasive mosquitoes in check CHAMPAIGN, Ind., June 5 (UPI) – U.S. medical entomologists have discovered tiny flies known as midges can be used to control invasive Asian tiger mosquitoes that can carry dengue fever.

University of Illinois scientists led by Barry Alto said the larvae of midges (Corethrella appendiculata) eat more of the larvae of the invasive mosquito than of the native Eastern treehole mosquito (Aedes triseriatus). That, the scientists said, allows the native mosquitoes to survive even though the invasive mosquitoes are better at consuming resources.

The researchers found inherent size differences between the mosquito species – the treehole mosquito is larger than the Asian tiger mosquito, which makes it less vulnerable to predation from the small, but voracious, predatory midge.

Size is having a major effect in terms of how the prey are getting consumed, said Alto. This is another mechanism that allows the native mosquito to hang on and co-exist with the invasive mosquitoes in certain areas where predators are present.

The study that included UI researchers Banugopan Kesavaraju and Steven Juliano, along with Philip Lounibos of the University of Florida, appears in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology.

New robotic marine vehicle dives 11 kilometres WOODS HOLE, Mass., June 5 (UPI) – A new deep-sea U.S. robotic vehicle called Nereus has become the world’s deepest-diving vehicle and the first to explore the Mariana Trench since 1998.

The remotely-controlled vehicle developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute dived 6.8 miles (11km) May 31 in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest known part of the ocean. Reaching such extreme depths represents the pinnacle of technical challenges and the team is very pleased Nereus has been successful in reaching the very bottom to return imagery and samples from such a hostile world, said Andy Bowen, the vehicle’s principle developer.

WHOI Director Susan Avery said: “With this engineering trial successfully behind us, we’re eager for Nereus to become widely used to explore the most inaccessible reaches of the ocean. With no part of the deep seafloor beyond our reach, it’s exciting to think of the discoveries that await.”

Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russell Family Foundation and WHOI.

DISCOVERY

18

5 June 2009

IF YOU GO WHERE TO STAY Hotel Caruso, Ravello. This property occupies what was once the D’Afflitto Palace, and any of the 50 rooms will feel palatial. Half of them are suites and most of them have sea views. The infinity pool is spectacular, the staff is attentive, and the spa offers a signature treatment, Scent of Citrus, which begins with a pink grapefruit-scented foot bath and continues with an all-over body exfoliation rich with essences of neroli and bergamot. The hotel can arrange for side trips to Positano and other spots along the Amalfi Coast; if you want a guide, ask them to arrange for Angela. Room rates start at US$699 a night. For rates and reservations, call 1-800-237-1236 or go to www. hotelcaruso.com.

WHERE TO EAT You can’t go wrong anywhere on the Amalfi Coast. Exquisite food served in exotic settings creates memorable dining experiences. A few suggestions: • La Torre Normanna in Maiori is inside a tower that was used in the Middle Ages as a defense against Saracen raids.

The food and the view are equally spectacular. My favorite dish was the fried anchovies with just a hint of olive oil.

• Acqua Pazza in the fishing village of Cetara makes for a perfect lunch spot. Thanks to the co-owners – two amiable cousins, both named Gennaro, one the chef and the other the maitre d’ – the food, the wine and the laughs just keep on coming.

• Il Frescale is a country house high in the hills above Ravello where the food and the hospitality are both of epic proportions. If you have dinner here (the hotel can book for you), the owner will end the evening by offering you a Concerto, a liqueur sampling of 42 different infusions, ranging from strawberry to fennel.

Wind through history on Italy’s Amalfi Coast

By Patti Nickell McClatchy Newspapers

RAVELLO, Italy – There are some places in the world so excruciatingly beautiful that it is difficult – even for one who makes her living doing so – to put that beauty into words: New Zealand’s Southern Alps, Kauai’s Na Pali Cliffs, England’s Lake District, and the fjord regions of Norway and Chile.To this list, I can now add Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

Southeast of Naples in the Campagnia Region, the Amalfi Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known for its dazzling drive; a tapestry of cliffside villages; steeply vertical vineyards; and orange, lemon and olive groves perched at dizzying heights above the Mediterranean Sea. It officially begins in Positano and extends almost to Salerno, the road snaking and twisting through the towns of Amalfi, Maiori, Cetara,Vietri Sul Mare and Ravello, where I chose to make my base.

It proved an excellent choice. Apart from its beauty – in common with its sister villages – and the fact that it is much less crowded than the tourist havens of Amalfi and Positano, Ravello has an undeniable cachet. The place virtually reeks of glamour, as the rich and famous have been flocking here for years.

Composer Richard Wagner has a cobblestone street named for him, and the Bloomsbury Group of writers, most notably Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, cavorted here. Author Gore Vidal owned a house in Ravello (a stark white villa hugging a mountainside above the sea), and dancer Rudolf Nureyev owned an entire island just off the coast.

In the 1930s, actress Greta Garbo had a tryst with conductor Leopold Stokowski in the secluded Villa Cimbrone, and 30 years later, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, upset over her husband’s dalliance with Marilyn Monroe, packed up daughter Caroline and temporarily fled to the seaside villa of her friend Gianni Agnelli, president of Fiat.

I had my own celebrity encounter: I ran into actors and newlyweds Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in the bar of the Hotel Caruso, where we were all staying.

As for the Caruso, it has been a preferred rest stop of discriminating guests since 1893, when Pantaleone Caruso – a relative of the famed tenor Enrico Caruso – opened five rooms of the 11thcentury D’Afflitto Palace as the Belvedere. Over the years, the hotel has hosted famous guests including King Farouk of Egypt, the Hungarian royal family, and film stars Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida.

Since its purchase a decade ago by the Orient Express Co., the Caruso has undergone an extensive renovation that has restored it to the splendor of its time as a royal palace.There are Roman-style mosaics in the entrance lobby; frescoes on the walls of public and guest rooms;a restored Baroque chapel in shades of salmon and saffron; and classical columns and statuary lining the terraces of gardens fragrant with roses, jasmine, calla lilies and clematis.

One feature that the Marquis D’Afflitto no doubt wished had been there in his day is the hotel’s justifiably lauded infinity pool, which appears to be suspended on the edge of the cliff and offers a spectacular view of the bay and the winding coast road below.

From the Hotel Caruso, it’s an easy walk to Ravello’s central square, where you might be tempted to laze away an entire morning or afternoon over limoncellos at one of the lively cafes that face the cathedral, or to spend it roaming the narrow, twisting lanes in search of bargains (Ravello is known for its exquisitely hand-painted ceramic pottery).

Ravello also is known for two of the Amalfi Coast’s most famous spots – the Villa Rufolo and the Villa Cimbrone. Dating from the 12th century, the Villa Rufolo combines a variety of architectural styles, including a square Norman tower and an elaborate Moorish cloister. Its most famous features, however, are the beautiful gardens.A terrace garden overlooking the sea is the main site of the Ravello Festival, an annual event (June to September), combining opera, dance and orchestral music. Another of the Villa’s gardens is said to have been the inspiration of Wagner’s Klingsor Garden in his opera Parsiful.

It’s a long, arduous climb up to the Villa Cimbrone, but once you have a chance to take in the

Composer Richard Wagner has a cobblestone street named for him, and the Bloomsbury Group of writers, most notably Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, cavorted here breathtaking views from the top of the mountain, you’ll consider it worth the effort.The villa’s origins date back to the 4th century, when Roman noblemen fleeing the dissolution of the empire sought refuge in the mountains along the Amalfi Coast.

The current incarnation, however, owes its charm to an eccentric Englishman, Lord Grimthorpe, an Edwardian-era politician who fell in love with it while on a tour and bought it in 1904.

The Villa is now a hotel, but visitors are welcome to wander the grounds and admire the gorgeous gardens, temples and pavilions, and busts of Roman emperors that line the sweeping terrace overlooking the sea. (Gardens are open 9 a.m. to sunset every day; admission is 6 euros, or about US$8.)

After a day of working my calf and thigh muscles scampering up and down Ravello’s steep cobbled streets, I was ready for something a bit more relaxing. Guests at the Hotel Caruso can avail themselves of the property’s 44-foot boat, which takes them on a complimentary half-day cruise of the Amalfi Coast,

including a stop at the Emerald Grotto, Amalfi’s answer to Capri’s Blue Grotto.

Just as at the Blue Grotto, you transfer to a rowboat, where a loquacious boatman gives you a tour of the underground cavern.There are several differences, however, between the two grottos: Here, the water is emerald green rather than a clear sapphire blue. Boats line up at the entrance to the Blue Grotto like planes on an airport tarmac, but on the day I was at the Emerald Grotto, my boat was the only one waiting to get in. As a bonus, the water is so clear that you can easily see a submerged nativity scene, where, according to my guide, every Christmas season, scuba divers adorn the baby Jesus with a garland of flowers.

In this seductive slice of southern Italy, where lemons grow to the size of baseballs and the air is perpetually scented with the aromas of blossoms and spices, it is easy to understand what Amalfians mean when they describe their part of the world – between sky and sea – as a journey of the soul.

NEWSFOCUS

5 June 2009

19

What went through the jury’s minds

By NZPA staff

Christchurch, June 5 – To get its not guilty verdicts, the David Bain defence team needed to provide grounds for reasonable doubt and a convincing villain.

They needed to make the trial about David’s father Robin.

They needed to make him appear potentially suicidal, and they had to make him strong enough to win the fight to the death with his 14-year-old son, Stephen, and physically capable of shooting himself in the head with a rifle.

The Crown said the suicide was too difficult: that he would not have been able to juggle the heavy .22 calibre rifle, with the silencer on the end, and hold it at the improbable angle required to shoot himself in the temple.

But there was a day when all that changed.

Wednesday April 8.

On that day, about a month into the three-month High Court hearing in Christchurch, the trial came alive.

The defence said the suicide was viable and produced seven photographs to show how Robin could have killed himself with the rifle.

Suddenly, suicide was at least a possibility and Robin was back in the picture.

The experts would argue the details, and disagree for weeks.

For some, the rifle was held close to the head, and for others it was more distant.

Photographs were examined minutely. Every blemish on the skin of Robin Bain seemed to be on trial there for a time.

And the bottom line is that some of the highly qualified experts who came along to High Court No 1 to give evidence had to be just plain wrong.

The defence spent weeks establishing the black and bleak world view of school principal Robin Bain, struggling with his health, his job, his marriage.

His life was a mess whether living in an old Commer van near Taieri Beach School south of Dunedin during the week, or living in a caravan at the family home at Every Street, in the city, at the weekends.

His life was coming apart, the defence said.

And on the night before the killings it all came to a ghastly head with a family meeting and presumably the revelation that Robin had been sexually abusing his 18-year-old daughter Laniet for years.

It seems that so many of the Bain family had to die because they knew something.

This strange, dysfunctional family had secrets and their house with its eccentric lines, slumps, faded and peeling paint, looks rather like a metaphor for the oddities within.

Robin was painted as being at the edge of reason, disorganised, hopeless, ill and frail – a walking cadaver one witness said.

Margaret was a mother who wanted to bulldoze the place and build again, but not a house, a retreat.

She was a mother who had new age spiritual beliefs, and once decided that she was going to go to bed for six weeks.

Arawa, aged 19, seems to have been the one who kept the household ticking over.

Laniet no longer lived there but stayed that night. She had been working in the sex industry but had given it up. Portrayed by the Crown as a flake, a girl who claimed to have had three children by different fathers and an abortion by the age of 12-and-a-half.

The defence said she was in an incestuous relationship with her father, and she mentioned that time and again – not just to her friends, her workmates, but even to the grocer who lived across the road from her flat.

Stephen was a fit, strong boy and he undid the killer’s plan.

How could a teenage boy be such a danger?

By waking up, probably.

When the killing began in the morning, Laniet Bain was probably the first to be shot.

In fact, she seems to have been at the centre of the maelstrom that engulfed the family in that pre-

NZPA / The Press

NZPA/Christchurch Press

dawn hour on June 20, 1994, at number 65 in the street with the oddly inappropriate name, Every Street.

Then the killer shot Margaret, killed in her bed.

There was only a curtain between her bedroom and Stephen’s room and it seems like the sound must have woken the boy.

He got up. He was moving when the killer entered through the curtain and he put up a fight that upset all the plans for the quiet dispatch of the family.

The first shot went through Stephen’s raised hand and glanced off his head.There was blood spurting and the boy fought for his life.

He scratched, struggled, and had to be strangled into submission with his own t-shirt twisted around his neck. It seems he was still conscious as the killer took the rifle and fired the final head shot that killed him. He had his hand up to the rifle even then.

For reasonable doubt, the jury had to accept that Robin Bain was capable of getting into this fight and winning.

The Crown said it could not be Robin, because he was too small and not strong enough. Stephen was 55kg and Robin was 72kg.

But Robin’s brother, Michael Bain, said last time

he saw Robin, he was able to pick up a very heavy bag that he couldn’t lift himself.

The defence made the point that Stephen had been shot in the head and probably through the hand as the brutal encounter began.

He may have been stunned, shocked, in pain and one-handed. Could that have been enough to give the older man the advantage?

But it begs the question: why did the killer wear gloves – white opera gloves that belonged to David and were found covered in blood in Stephen’s room?

What was Robin’s plan if he needed to conceal his fingerprints? Before he supposedly made the decision to kill himself, can it be that he was hoping to frame David for the murders?

If it was only David who had any reason to wear gloves, what was the defence’s reply?

It was simply this: Don’t try to make up a rational explanation for someone who was acting irrationally.

The defence had to contrast the two men, forcefully and in detail.

It said the elder man was suicidal, depressed, revealed as a sex abuser, while his son David loved his family and had everything to live for.

David was portrayed as jovial, convivial right

up to the day before the murders – a man who had made a music CD the week before and might have had a career ahead as an opera singer.

The difference too was that David Bain was right there in court looking calm, normal, rational.

He was confronted by the crime’s ghastly images on the court’s computer screens as much as anyone else, and looked away.

He was seen every day walking between the defence team’s lodgings nearby and the Court House.

When he arrived at the courts on the day of the defence closing by Michael Reed QC, a group at the doors clapped and wished him luck.

On one Saturday early in the trial, he could be seen with a coffee in hand, taking a punt ride on the Avon River near the courts.

It was done without media attention, except for a court reporter waiting at a bus stop.The normality of it was stunning.

The defence played upon his presence with skill, with Mr Reed’s very last exhortation to the jury: “Put David out of his misery, return him to freedom with a not guilty verdict on all charges.”

– NZPA