11 Warning Signs Your Career Has Stalled By Charles Purdy, Monster Senior Editor Your career can lose power for many reasons: a lack of opportunities, industry changes and plain old boredom are just a few of them. Are you wondering whether your career has stalled? Here are some of the top warning signs, according to experts: 1. Your role and responsibilities haven't changed in a few years or more. 2. You've bounced from employer to employer without much change in job title or salary. 3. You can't remember the last time you learned something new about your industry or field. 4. People hired after you have been promoted faster than you. 5. You're not invited to important discussions or meetings of the kind you used to attend. 6. You have fewer job duties than you used to. 7. Your performance reviews contain terms like "consistently meets expectations" or "adequate performance." 8. No one at work asks for your help -- or no one in your professional network asks for advice. 9. You dread going to work in the morning. 10. Your manager and coworkers stop communicating with you -- in general, your phone rings less and you get fewer emails. 11. You spend a lot of time complaining about work, or and when you tell stories about work, you are the story's "victim," not its hero. Sound familiar? Never fear -- there are plenty of ways to get your career back in the fast lane. Here are some ideas: Talk to Your Boss A first step is to address problems head-on. For instance, if you've been stalled in the same position at the same employer, request a copy of the title hierarchy and job descriptions in your organization, says Debra Yergen, author of the Creating Job Security Resource Guide. “Work with human resources and your boss to find out what steps you need to take to move from where you are to the next step up,” she says. Alternatively, tell your boss you're ready for new challenges and new assignments. If you've been quietly doing your job and keeping your head down, he may not realize that you're feeling unfulfilled. Ask for What You Need Alan G. Bauer, president of recruiter Bauer Consulting Group, says you can ask your manager for tips on what you need to improve. Also, he says you can ask your HR department what's going on with an overdue raise. "If your merit increases are lower than your coworkers', there may be an issue,” he says. “The company budgeted a certain amount for salary increases -- if you aren't getting your share, you need to find out why." Brad Karsh, founder and president of the career-services firm JobBound, says to look for ways to be more effective, efficient and strategic. “Ask your manager about the possibility of a rotational program to see the inner workings of the company and gain fresh perspective and new ideas," he says. Take Initiative Karsh also suggests figuring out what keeps your boss up at night. “Find a way to solve that problem,” he says. “You need to be a key player." You can also take some classes or work toward a degree, suggests Mary Greenwood, author of How to Interview Like a Pro. Or consider on-the-job training. "If you value continuous learning, you can volunteer for a project that will require new skills,” says executive coach Elene Cafasso. “Perhaps you can transfer to another area of the business or learn what's needed to back up a coworker." Rick Dacri, author of Uncomplicating Management, suggests getting actively involved in a professional association. “Get a leadership role, speak before the group or write an article for the newsletter, for instance," he says. Adjust Your Attitude Negativity is one of the worst career killers. "If you are spending a great deal of your energy moaning and whining about your circumstances, it's time to try and make a new start before you become so emotionally expensive that the organization feels the need to cut you," says Cy Wakeman, author of Reality-Based Leadership. Identifying your dissatisfaction and taking steps to resolve it is the first step. The next step may be to update your resume and start looking for a new job. "It may be that hanging on to an unhealthy or unproductive employment relationship is what's holding you back,” Yergen says. “I've witnessed a handful of people this year who have identified their dissatisfaction and set a date to quit -- even without a job waiting -- and found something just before or just after the date of their resignation. Sometimes you just have to take that step." If your career is stalled, perhaps a new career is the right answer. Start exploring options by reaching out to your professional network, job shadowing or talking to your HR department about an internal transfer. Related Articles: Pushing Past a Career Slump Six Signs of Career Derailment Five Ways to Keep Your Career Moving Forward Kick Your Career into Gear Are You Engaged?

What does the Arab world do when its water runs out?

Water usage in north Africa and the Middle East is unsustainable and shortages are likely to lead to further instability – unless governments take action to solve the impending crisis

• Failure to act on crop shortages fuelling political instability

• • John Vidal  The Observer, Sunday 20 February 2011

A camel takes a drink in Jordan. The Middle East faces conflict if its water shortage is not tackled. Photograph: Neal Clark/Robert Harding Collection

Poverty, repression, decades of injustice and mass unemployment have all been cited as causes of the political convulsions in the Middle East and north Africa these last weeks. But a less recognised reason for the turmoil in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and now Iran has been rising food prices, directly linked to a growing regional water crisis.

The diverse states that make up the Arab world, stretching from the Atlantic coast to Iraq, have some of the world's greatest oil reserves, but this disguises the fact that they mostly occupy hyper-arid places. Rivers are few, water demand is increasing as populations grow, underground reserves are shrinking and nearly all depend on imported staple foods that are now trading at record prices.

For a region that expects populations to double to more than 600 million within 40 years, and climate change to raise temperatures, these structural problems are political dynamite and already destabilising countries, say the World Bank, the UN and many independent studies.

In recent reports they separately warn that the riots and demonstrations after the three major food-price rises of the last five years in north Africa and the Middle East might be just a taste of greater troubles to come unless countries start to share their natural resources, and reduce their profligate energy and water use.

"In the future the main geopolitical resource in the Middle East will be water rather than oil. The situation is alarming," said Swiss foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey last week, as she launched a Swiss and Swedish government-funded report for the EU.

The Blue Peace report examined long-term prospects for seven countries, including Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel. Five already suffer major structural shortages, it said, and the amount of water being taken from dwindling sources across the region cannot continue much longer.

"Unless there is a technological breakthrough or a miraculous discovery, the Middle East will not escape a serious [water] shortage," said Sundeep Waslekar, a researcher from the Strategic Foresight Group who wrote the report.

Autocratic, oil-rich rulers have been able to control their people by controlling nature and have kept the lid on political turmoil at home by heavily subsidising "virtual" or "embedded" water in the form of staple grains imported from the US and elsewhere.

But, says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic Studies, existing political relationships are liable to break down when, as now, the price of food hits record levels and the demand for water and energy soars.

"Water is a fundamental part of the social contract in Middle Eastern countries. Along with subsidised food and fuel, governments provide cheap or even free water to ensure the consent of the governed. But when subsidised commodities have been cut, instability has often followed.

"Water's own role in prompting unrest has so far been relatively limited, but that is unlikely to hold. Future water scarcity will be much more permanent than past shortages, and the techniques governments have used in responding to past disturbances may not be enough," he says.

"The problem will only get worse. Arab countries depend on other countries for their food security – they're as sensitive to floods in Australia and big freezes in Canada as on the yield in Algeria or Egypt itself," says political analyst and Middle East author Vicken Cheterian.

"In 2008/9, Arab countries' food imports cost $30bn. Then, rising prices caused waves of rioting and left the unemployed and impoverished millions in Arab countries even more exposed. The paradox of Arab economies is that they depend on oil prices, while increased energy prices make their food more expensive," says Cheterian.

The region's most food- and water-insecure country is Yemen, the poorest in the Arab world, which gets less than 200 cubic metres of water per person a year – well below the international water poverty line of 1,000m³ – and must import 80-90% o f its food.

According to Mahmoud Shidiwah, chair of the Yemeni water and environment protection agency, 19 of the country's 21 main aquifers are no longer being replenished and the government has considered moving Sana'a, the capital city, with around two million people, which is expected to run dry within six years.

"Water shortages have increased political tensions between groups. We have a very big problem," he says.

Two internal conflicts are already raging in Yemen and the capital has been rocked by riots this month. "There is an obvious link between high food prices and unrest [in the region]. Drought, population and water scarcity are aggravating factors. The pressure on natural resources is increasing, and the pressure on the land is great," said Giancarlo Cirri, the UN World Food Programme representative in Yemen.

"If you look at the recent Small Arms Survey [in Yemen], they try to document the increase in what they call social violence due to this pressure on water and land. This social violence is increasing, and related deaths and casualties are pretty high. The death tolls in the northern conflict and the southern conflict are a result of these pressures," said Cirri.

Other Arab countries are not faring much better. Jordan, which expects water demand to double in the next 20 years, faces massive shortages because of population growth and a longstanding water dispute with Israel. Its per capita water supply will fall from the current 200m³ per person to 91m³ within 30 years, says the World Bank. Palestine and Israel fiercely dispute fragile water resources.

Algeria and Tunisia, along with the seven emirates in the UAE, Morocco, Iraq and Iran are all in "water deficit" – using far more than they receive in rain or snowfall. Only Turkey has a major surplus, but it is unwilling to share. Abu Dhabi, the world's most profligate water user, says it will run out of its ancient fossil water reserves in 40 years; Libya has spent $20bn pumping unreplenishable water from deep wells in the desert but has no idea how long the resource will last; Saudi Arabian water demand has increased by 500% in 25 years and is expected to double again in 20 years – as power demand surges as much as 10% a year.

The Blue Peace report highlights the rapid decline in many of the region's major water sources. The water level in the Dead Sea has dropped by nearly 150ft since the 1960s. The marshlands in Iraq have shrunk by 90% and the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) is at risk of becoming irreversibly salinised by salt water springs below it.

Meanwhile, says the UN, farm land is becoming unusable as irrigation schemes and intensive farming lead to waterlogging and desalination.

Some oil-rich Arab countries are belatedly beginning to address the problem. Having drained underground aquifers to grow inappropriate crops for many years, they have turned en masse to desalination. More than 1,500 massive plants now line the Gulf and the Mediterranean and provide much of north Africa and the Middle East's drinking water – and two-thirds of the world's desalinated water.

The plants take salty or brackish water, and either warm it, vaporise it and separate off the salts and impurities, or pass it through filters. According to the WWF, it's an "expensive, energy intensive and greenhouse gas-emitting way to get fresh water", but costs are falling and the industry is booming.

Solar-powered plants are being built for small communities but no way has been found to avoid the concentrated salt stream that the plants produce. The impurities extracted from the water mostly end up back in the sea or in aquifers and kill marine life.

Only now are countries starting to see the downsides of desalination. Salt levels in the Arabian Gulf are eight times higher in some places than they should be, as power-hungry water plants return salt to an already saline sea. The higher salinity of the seawater intake reduces the plant's efficiency and, in some areas, marine life is suffering badly, affecting coral and fishing catches.

Desalination has allowed dictators and elites to continue to waste water on a massive scale. Nearly 20% of all Saudi oil money in the 1970s and 80s was used to provide clean water to grow wheat and other crops in regions that would not naturally be able to do so. Parks, golf courses, roadside verges and household gardens are all still watered with expensively produced clean drinking water. The energy – and therefore water – needed to keep barely insulated buildings super-cold in Gulf states is astonishing.

A few Arab leaders recognise that water and energy profligacy must be curbed if ecological disaster is to be avoided. In Abu Dhabi, which is building Masdar, the $20bn futuristic city to be run on renewable energy, the environment agency is spearheading a massive drive to reduce water use. Concrete is replacing water-hungry grass verges and new laws demand water-saving devices in all buildings.

"We cannot go on giving free water and energy. It's not benefiting anyone. We have to change and we will change. We know we must find common solutions," says Razan Khalifa al-Mubarak, assistant head of the environment agency.

"Allah does not like those who waste," says Talib al-Shehhi, director of preaching at the ministry of Islamic affairs. "Safeguarding resources and water especially is central to religion. The Qu'ran says water is a pillar of life and consequently orders us to save [it], and Muhammad instructs us to do so."

Water awareness is definitely growing, says Kala Krishnan, member of an eco club at the large Indian school in Abu Dhabi. "People were amazed when we showed them how much they use in a day. We stacked up 550 one-litre bottles and they refused to believe it. Now schools are competing with each other to reduce water wastage."

More than 2,000 mosques in Abu Dhabi have been fitted with water-saving devices, which is saving millions of gallons of water a year when people wash before prayer. Other UAE states are expected to follow.

The more drastic response to the crisis is to shift farming elsewhere and to build reserves. Saudi Arabia said in 2008 it would cut domestic wheat output by 12.5% a year to save its water supplies. It is now subsidising traders to buy land in Africa. Since the troubles in Egypt and north Africa, it has said it aims to double its wheat reserves to 1.4m tonnes, enough to satisfy demand for a year.

Countries now recognise how vulnerable they are to conflict. The UAE, which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai, has started to build the world's largest underground reservoir, with 26,000,000m³ of desalinated water. It will store enough water for 90 days when completed. The reasoning is that the UAE is now wholly dependent on desalination to survive.

"Wars can erupt because of water," said Mohammed Khalfan al-Rumaithi, director general of the UAE's National Emergency and Crisis Management Authority last week. "Using groundwater for agriculture is risky. If it doesn't harm us it will harm other generations," he told the Federal National Council.

"We suffer from a shortage of water and we should think about solutions to preserve it rather than using it for agriculture," he said.

Water shortages, concludes the Blue Peace report, are now so alarming that in a few years opposing camps will have little choice but to co-operate and share resources, or face ruinous conflict. That way, it says, instead of a potential accelerator of conflict, the water crisis can become an opportunity for a new form of peace where any two countries with access to adequate, clean and sustainable water resources do not feel motivated to engage in a military conflict. It sounds optimistic, but the wind of change blowing through the region suggests everything is possible.

IN NUMBERS: Middle East water facts

10.7% Food-price inflation in Egypt during 2010.

25% Expected increase in Saudi water demand up to 2020.

2.9% Yemen population growth each year.

14 cubic kilometres of water loss from Dead Sea in the past 30 years (1980-2010).

240 cubic metres per person annual water use in Israel.

75 cubic metres per person annual water use in Palestinian West Bank.

$0.53 Cost per cubic metre of desalinated water.

120 Desalination plants throughout UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran.

Dominic Lawson: A Libyan stain on Britain's reputation

It was entirely predictable that Gaddafi would order annihilating force to be brought against internal opponents  Tuesday, 22 February 2011

For sheer blood-curdling menace, the televised address by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi takes some beating. His broadcast to the Libyan nation included the threat that his father's regime would "fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet ... instead of crying over 200 deaths we will cry over hundreds and thousands of deaths".

He did bizarre as well as bloodcurdling, offering the demonstrators the concessions of "a new flag, a new national anthem"; and he accused other rioters of being "on hallucinogens or drugs" – although his own rambling delivery gave every impression that Muammar Gadaffi's son was under the influence.

Related articles

• Libya: Gaddafi vows to fight on
• Cruel. Vainglorious. Steeped in blood. And now, surely, after more than four decades of terror and oppression, on his way out?
• Bahrain king orders release of political prisoners
• Gaddafi: 'I'm not in France, I'm not in Venezuela, I'm still here'
• Oil and gold jump on fears for stability of Middle East
• Cameron attacked for Egypt visit with defence sales team in tow
• Donald Macintyre: This display of eccentricity and menace reinforces sense of a threatened autocracy
• Bursting with potential, the region's economies fail to deliver wealth
• I will not stand again, says Sudan's Bashir
• Letters: Arab revolution creeps nearer to the oilfields
• Leading article: Hugged a little too close for comfort
• Unrest forces Bahrain to postpone Grand Prix
• Search the news archive for more stories

Yet this was the man promoted as the entirely acceptable face of a 40-year-long dictatorship, not least in this country. He was feted by the last government, especially by Peter Mandelson, with whom he would socialise in the grand style. He was also fawned on by academia. Nine months ago, he was accorded the accolade of giving the Ralph Miliband lecture at the London School of Economics (presumably the late professor's sons, David and Ed, were invited along).

Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi's very own foundation had written out a cheque for £1.5m to the LSE. Or perhaps not; anyway Professor David Held of the politics faculty at the LSE gave an excruciatingly smarmy introduction, telling the audience that "the Gaddafi Foundation devotes itself to humanitarian work ... especially in the field of human rights" and that "deep liberal values are at the core of his inspiration".

Tell that to the unarmed demonstrators under machine-gun assault from the Gaddafi family's mercenary shock troops. Yesterday, the LSE rushed out a statement saying that "the school has had a number of links with Libya in recent years. In view of the highly distressing news from Libya over the weekend, the school has reconsidered those links as a matter of urgency". Too late!

The same "reconsidering" is presumably taking place within government, although the developments in Libya are infinitely less embarrassing for the Coalition than they would have been for the previous administration. It was Tony Blair who made it part of his foreign policy mission to chummy up to Muammar Gaddafi and it was Gordon Brown who ordered the SAS to train the Libyan dictator's special forces.

Two weeks ago, official papers were released which demonstrated that Labour, despite its furious denials, had, in the words of the Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell, "developed [a policy] that Her Majesty's Government should do all it could ... to facilitate an appeal by the Libyans to the Scottish government for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi's release". The freeing on "compassionate grounds" of the only man convicted for the Lockerbie bombing – the biggest mass murder ever to take place in this country – was just part of the wider effort to "normalise" relations between Britain and Libya.

At the time, I wrote in this column that it was ludicrous to become steamed up about the release of Megrahi while continuing to treat Gaddafi himself as a cuddly old darling: "On the assumption – shared by both the Scottish and British governments – that Megrahi was rightfully convicted, then what of Colonel Gaddafi himself? Is it seriously suggested that Megrahi, a long-serving officer in the Libyan intelligence service, had acted without orders from above? If anyone can be accused of being the malevolent power behind the slaughter of so many innocents heading home for Christmas with their families, that man is Muammar Abu Minyar al- Gaddafi. Yet this is also the man whose celebrations of 40 years of dictatorship are to be attended by prime ministers and presidents from across the globe."

Well, that is the way of the world. Once Gaddafi had foresworn his previous policy of financing acts of terror internationally (including by the IRA) then all is forgiven – especially if the man in question is sitting on top of billions of barrels of easily extractable crude oil. The Americans have been critical of Britain's open praise of the "new" Gaddafi, and were understandably furious about the release of Megrahi, but their own policy since 2004 has been equally friendly, at least as far as military business is concerned: two years ago, for example, the US firm General Dynamics signed a $165m contract to supply sophisticated communications systems to the Libyan Armed Forces' elite 32 Brigade.

The unsurprising truth is that while Gaddafi's confrontational attitude towards the West may have changed – he was deeply impressed by President Bush's removal of Saddam Hussein and did not want to be next on the hit-list – his character and methods remained the same as far as his own people were concerned. It was entirely predictable that he would order annihilating force to be brought to bear against any internal opponents, even unarmed student demonstrators. Any shock expressed by the British Foreign Office is itself shocking. They know – have always known – that this is the nature of Gaddafi's regime. After all, it was not so long ago that an uprising of political prisoners in Tripoli's Abu Salim jail was quelled by the massacre of more than 1,200 inmates.

Doubtless the British wooing of Saif Gaddafi was based partly on the notion that he would be a moderating influence on his father. While the old man was, to put it at its very mildest, eccentric, of all his sons Saif seemed the most westernised and the most – well, like us. He had a doctorate from the LSE; he mastered the language of international conferences; he could be invited to a country-house shoot and be relied upon to use a Purdey rather than a sub-machine gun; he was always to be seen wearing impeccable Savile Row suits – indeed he was thus attired when delivering his bloodthirsty address to the Libyan people on Sunday night.

It is a perennial weakness of British officials that they assume if a man has had a good education and wears the right sort of clothes it makes him somehow more trustworthy. They thought that about Robert Mugabe, finding it hard to imagine that a man educated by British missionaries and who insisted that his entire Cabinet abandon tribal costumes and wear British suits, could at the same time be capable of mass murder. But, of course, he could (and was awarded an honorary knighthood even after his troops had slaughtered up to 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland).

The behaviour of rulers such as Mugabe and Gaddafi can be explained, though not excused, by their fear of what might happen if they were to lose power. Completely ruthless themselves, they assume all their opponents (even, or especially, those professing to be democrats) would treat them as savagely if they ever got the chance; and, of course, the more people they have murdered, the more their suspicions are justified.

This would apply as much to the apparently civilised Saif Gaddafi as it does to his demented father. He is encouraging the regime's mercenary troops and remaining supporters in acts of extreme violence because he knows that should they fail to suppress the opposition he, along with his father, is likely to be slaughtered – assuming they don't escape to a foreign bolthole first.

According to one of last weekend's property supplements, Saif Gaddafi is offering his London home (complete with cinema and suede-lined walls) for rent at £9,500 a week. Say goodbye to it, Saif.

Mary Ann Sieghart: The dawning of Arab democracy

Most Jordanians don't want a revolution of the French kind; they just want a king who reigns rather than rules  Monday, 21 February 2011

Two men in the Middle East have been watching Bahrain with particular horror. The Kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan weren't quite so worried when it was only pesky dictators being overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia. However undemocratic their regimes, the Kings could always count on their people believing they had a certain legitimacy and lineage. But now that a real King is being threatened? The thrones in Amman and Riyadh must surely be trembling.

I have just come back from a week in Jordan, and the population there is gulping down the air of the new Arab Spring. Egypt and Tunisia pepper every conversation but when the subject turns to their own King Abdullah II, voices lower to a whisper. It's illegal to criticise the King there, and most people still see the monarchy as a source of stability in a country which could otherwise be grievously divided. But, as in the rest of the Middle East, people of all backgrounds want greater democracy, lower prices, less corruption and more jobs.

Related articles

• Gaddafi's hold on Libya weakens in protest wave
• Gaddafi regime: We will fight to the end
• Yemen's president refuses to quit
• Bahrain Grand Prix cancelled amid unrest
• BP suspends operations in Libya
• Five dead in bank burned by Morocco protesters, says government
• Robert Fisk in Manama: Bahrain – an uprising on the verge of revolution
• Molly Tarhuni: Libyans are tired of living in fear – tired of corruption
• Inspired by Egypt, thousands protest on Moroccan streets
• King Abdullah finally has his say on reforms
• Yemen: President's offer of talks is rejected by political opposition
• Security forces stop rallies on the streets of Tehran
• Leading article: A new age of uncertainty, with no end in sight
• Search the news archive for more stories

These economic and political reforms are in the gift of the King. Yes, Jordan has a Parliament, but elections are widely seen to be rigged, and the King has the power to sack Governments and dissolve Parliaments at will. Yesterday, he gave his first speech since the protests began, promising that he would bring in a new electoral law to give Parliament more power and that he would encourage his Government to tackle corruption. But he didn't say whether he was prepared to give up his power to appoint the Prime Minister.

King Abdullah of Jordan is at least responsive to public opinion, even if he seems to be reacting to demands rather than pre-empting them. As soon as the President of Tunisia was ousted and before Egypt followed suit, the King sacked his Government and brought in a new Prime Minister and Cabinet. In the past, this might have been enough to placate the citizenry. But with all that was happening in the rest of the Middle East, it soon looked like too little.

Every Friday in Jordan for seven weeks there have been protests in the streets. Last Friday, there was violence too; opposition groups claimed the Government had sent in its own armed thugs and that the police refused to intervene. The opposition is an extraordinarily diverse bunch: a newly formed youth movement has lined up with the Muslim Brotherhood, westernized middle-class professionals, Bedouin tribesmen and former army generals to call for reform.

So far Jordan hasn't cracked down on its protesters the way Bahrain did or Libya is still doing. The King has been under pressure from his ally, America, to bring in more reforms and to do so peacefully. Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a personal visit to King Abdullah. Jordan matters greatly to the West: it shares a long border with Israel, a shorter one with Iraq, and it is a beacon of relative moderation in the region.

It is also the home to nearly three million Palestinians, roughly half the total population. Most of them have Jordanian citizenship. Supporters of the King claim that only the overarching institution of the monarchy can bridge the divide between citizens of Jordanian and Palestinian origin, and that the overthrow of the King would lead to civil war.

For this reason, it is unlikely that King Abdullah will soon be packing his bags and heading for sanctuary in Jeddah or London. But many of his people are still fed up with him and his wife, Queen Rania, and are now, finally, prepared to say so, whatever the consequences.

The King has always been buttressed by the powerful Bedouin tribes (known as East Bankers) and the Army, both are which are ethnically Jordanian, not Palestinian. So a taboo was shattered last May when a group of former generals sent him an open letter complaining about corruption, favours for Palestinians, the rigging of elections, the unaccountability of government, and political interference by the Queen.

Then, two weeks ago, another letter was sent to the King, this time by 36 tribesmen, also complaining about the Queen, the enrichment of her family, and her interference in politics. Queen Rania is of Palestinian origin, which of course doesn't endear her to the East Bankers. But they outspokenly accused her and her family of "looting the country and the people", of "building centres of power for her own interest" and of "wasting public money to improve her personal image abroad at our expense".

Few Jordanians believe that any of this would have happened under Abdullah's father, King Hussein. Hussein was charismatic and wily in equal measure. Abdullah has little charisma and not enough cunning to placate the supporters he needs to keep on side. Hussein was widely seen as the father of the nation; his posters are still all over Jordan, 12 years after his death. Abdullah, by contrast, is turning into a Wizard of Oz figure: a patriarchal symbol the country wants to believe in, but who is underwhelming in the flesh.

It was in the home of Fares Fayez, a member of the Bani Sakher tribe, that this controversial letter was drafted. A grizzled, kindly-looking man, he received me in resplendent Bedouin dress, on kilim cushions, but took care to tell me that he also had a PhD in Political Science. "We want to go back to the 1952 constitution – it's our Magna Carta," he explained. That constitution gave the King many fewer powers than he has now.

"The absence of democracy has led to big problems of corruption," claims Fayez. "There are two classes in Jordan: 5 per cent of the people control 90 per cent of the riches of the country, and 95 per cent of the public control only 10 per cent. This has made poverty a big problem. Now, because of rising food prices, there is a lot of hunger and not just poverty."

And these are the words of a candid friend. "We're not his enemies; we're his advisers. We advise him better than the hypocrites who clap next to him." Is he worried he will be punished? He shakes with laughter. "For my country, for my land, we should sacrifice! I am like Oliver Cromwell."

This is why King Abdullah should be worried. I wasn't surprised to hear open criticism of him or his regime from youth leaders or from the Muslim Brotherhood. But when his traditional supporters are turning on him, that bodes ill.

So the next few weeks will be critical for a regime that is strategically important for the West. Most Jordanians now want a King who reigns but does not rule. They want a new election law that ensures the party with the most parliamentary seats will form a Government. They want corruption rooted out and they want to earn enough money to feed and clothe their families properly.

For the King to survive, he needs to enact all these reforms now, to get ahead of the curve of public opinion rather than being dragged reluctantly behind it. Most Jordanians don't want a revolution of the French kind; they just want a peaceful transition to democracy.

And if Abdullah's promises of greater democracy don't deliver? Then things could turn ugly. As the political analyst Labib Kamhawi told me: "The King has to initiate reforms or we force these reforms on him. It's simple." The Middle East always used to be complex. But now it's getting simpler by the day.

Africa will not put up with a colonialist China

A strategy of striking deals with corrupt leaders and seizing control of African industries will ultimately backfire

• 
• • Sanou Mbaye
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 February 2011 08.00 GMT
  China has attempted to portray its current dealings with Africa as 'win-win'. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

  China's sacred text is not a holy book like the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur'an. Instead, it is The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Sun's core belief is that the "ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting."

  Nowadays, we are witnessing the application of Sun's ideas in Africa, where China's prime objectives are to secure energy and mineral supplies to fuel its breakneck economic expansion, open up new markets, curtail Taiwan's influence on the continent, consolidate its burgeoning global authority, and clinch for itself African-allocated export quotas. (The Chinese takeovers of South African and Nigerian textile industries are good examples of this strategy. The textiles exported the world over by these industries are deemed African exports when in reality they are now Chinese exports.)

  Astutely, China has sought to place its African investments and diplomacy within the context of the old non-aligned movement and "Bandung spirit", an era when many Africans viewed China as a brotherly oppressed nation, and thus supported efforts by the People's Republic to gain a permanent seat on the United Nations security council, to replace Taiwan. And, of course, China offered firm backing for Africa's anticolonial struggles and efforts to end apartheid.

  In trying to depict its current dealings with Africa as "win-win" co-operation, China deliberately seeks to portray Africa's current relations with the west as exploitative. Unlike China, its leaders claim, the west continues to hold African countries hostage through a combination of unequal trade deals, lack of access to capital markets, aid dependency, financial deregulation and economic liberalisation, budget austerity, crippling debt, political meddling and military intervention.

  What the Chinese are silent about is that their country's growing engagement in Africa has created both opportunities and risks for African development. Although China's trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and aid may broaden Africa's growth options, they also promote what can only be called a win-lose situation. For, excluding oil, Africa has a negative trade balance with China.

  Making matters worse, African exports to China are even less technology-intensive than its exports to the world. China's share of Africa's unprocessed primary products was more than 80% of its total imports from Africa. Equally, imports consist of cheap Chinese products of appallingly poor quality.

  The level of Chinese FDI flowing into Africa at present is staggering. But this Chinese FDI is bundled together with concessional loans, and there is much double-counting, with the same ventures being recorded both as aid flows and as inflows of FDI. Given the heavy volume of concessionary loans provided by China, concern about African countries' future debt burden is growing. And no matter how much China publicises its record in Africa, the greatest contributor of financial inflows to the continent is the African diaspora. Indeed, South Africa, not China, is the country making the largest investments in the rest of Africa.

  China's credo of "non-interference in domestic affairs" and "separation of business and politics" is, not surprisingly, music to the ears of African leaders, who fall over each other to sing the praises of Chinese co-operation with their countries. These leaders' attitudes recall the worst behaviour of their predecessors, many of whom engaged centuries ago with the west's rising imperial powers to halt the growth of indigenous industry. Instead, these potentates of the past chose to import manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for their own subjects, whom they exported as slaves.

  When slavery was abolished, the terms of partnership with western colonisers changed from trade in slaves to trade in commodities. After independence in the early 1960s, during the cold war, they played the west against the Soviet bloc for the same purpose.

  Today, many African leaders pursue similar policies with China, which has struck bargains across Africa to secure crude oil, minerals, and metals in exchange for infrastructure built by Chinese companies. Hence, the import of Chinese labour into a continent not lacking in able-bodied workers. Indeed, within a mere decade, more Chinese have come to live in Africa than there are Europeans on the continent, even after many centuries of European colonial and neocolonial rule. With apartheid-style practices – including the gunning down of local workers by a Chinese manager in Zambia – Chinese managers impose appalling working conditions on their African employees.

  Today, China has seized control of a huge swath of local African industries, in the process grabbing their allocated export quotas. As China's global economic role increases, its labour costs will rise and its currency will appreciate, eroding its competitiveness. Might Chinese manufacturers then look to Africa as a base for production, using the facilities they have built and the hordes of workers they have been steadily exporting there?

  Chinese leaders pride themselves on a keen sense of history, and on taking a longterm view of China's development. Still, in perpetuating a partnership with the same breed of corrupt leaders that colluded with Africa's previous invaders and exploiters, the Chinese have forgotten that Africans, albeit often their own worst enemies, have nonetheless gained the upper hand over their foes in the end.

  The descendants of slave traders and slave owners in the United States now have a black man as their president; Africa's colonisers have all been defeated and kicked out; and apartheid's proponents are now governed by those they despised and abused for generations. Unless the Chinese mend their ways, the same fate awaits them in Africa. Sun Tzu would understand that.

  Copyright: Project Syndicate 1995–2011

• 
  

Appeasement is the proper policy towards Confucian China

We all learned at school how the status quo powers mismanaged the spectacular rise of Germany before World War I, a strategic revolution so like the rise of China today.

China?s leaders should be careful not to succumb to the Wilhelmine illusion that economic and strategic momentum is the same as actual power Photo: REUTERS

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor 6:07PM GMT 23 Jan 2011

Comment

And we all learned how the Kaiser overplayed his hand. That much was obvious.

Yet it is difficult to pin-point exactly when the normal pattern of great power jostling began to metamorphose into something more dangerous, leading to two rival, entrenched, and heavily armed alliance structures unable or unwilling to avert the drift towards conflict. The Long Peace died by a thousand cuts, a snub here, a Dreadnought there, the race for oil.

The German historian Fritz Fischer has in a sense muddied the waters with his seminal work, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power). He draws on imperial archives in Potsdam to claim that Germany’s general staff was angling for a pre-emptive war to smash France and dismember the Russian Empire before it emerged as an industrial colossus. Sarajevo provided the “propitious moment”.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s court allegedly made up its mind after the Social Democrats (then Marxists) won a Reichstag majority in 1912, seeing war as a way to contain radical dissent. This assessment was tragically correct. War split the Social Democrats irrevocably, allowing the Nazis to exploit a divided Left under Weimar.

The Fischer version of events is a little too reassuring, and not just because the Entente allies had already fed Germany’s self-fulfilling fears of encirclement and emboldened Tsarist Russia to push its luck in the Balkans. A deeper cause was at work.

Related Articles

• The 10 most prosperous countries in the world – in pictures

  23 Jan 2011

• SocGen crafts strategy for China hard-landing

  20 Jan 2011

• America's poorer half trapped in Depression as Wall St booms

  09 Jan 2011

• China preparing for armed conflict

  29 Dec 2010

• China’s young officers and the 1930s syndrome

  07 Sep 2010

"The only condition which could lead to improvement of German-English relations would be if we bridled our economic development, and this is not possible," said Deutsche Bank chief Karl Helfferich as early as 1897. German steel output jumped tenfold from 1880 to 1900, leaping past British production. Sound familiar?

Is China now where Germany was in 1900? Possibly. There are certainly hints of menace from some quarters in Beijing. Defence minister Liang Guanglie said over New Year that China’s armed forces are “pushing forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction”.

Professor Huang Jing from Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew School and a former adviser to China’s Army, said Beijing is losing its grip on the colonels.

“The young officers are taking control of strategy and it is like young officers in Japan in the 1930s. This is very dangerous. They are on a collision course with a US-dominated system,” he said.

Yet nothing is foreordained. Which is why it was so unsettling to learn that most of the leadership of the US Congress declined to attend the state banquet at the White House for Chinese President Hu Jintao, including the Speaker of House.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a “dictator”. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?

Or for premier Wen Jiabao, who visited students in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, narrowly surviving the “insubordination purge” that followed? These leaders may be wrong in their assessment of how much democracy China can handle without flying out of control, but despots they are not.

President Barack Obama has bent over backwards to draw China into the international system through the G20, the World Bank and the IMF, in practical terms recognizing Beijing as co-equal in global condominium.

You could say Mr Obaba has won little in return for reaching out, but as Napoleon put it, “a leader is a dealer in hope”. What, pray, would a policy of crude containment do to China’s psyche?

Heaven protect us from unreconstructed Neo-cons such as ex-UN ambassador John Bolton, who wants to send aircraft carrier battle groups into the Straits of Taiwan, as if we were still living in that lost world of American pre-eminence in 1996, when China was still too weak to respond, and did not have operational missiles able to sink US carriers far at sea. Yet variants of the Bolton view are gaining ground on Capitol Hill.

Yes, China’s leaders should be careful not to succumb to the Wilhelmine illusion that economic and strategic momentum is the same as actual power.

There is a new edge to Chinese naval policy in the South China Sea, causing Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines to cleave closer to the US alliance. Has Beijing studied how German naval ambitions upset the careful diplomatic legacy of Bismarck and pushed an ambivalent Britain towards the Entente, even to the point of accepting alliance with Tsarist autocracy?

Factions in Beijing appear to think that China will win a trade war if Washington ever imposes sanctions to counter Chinese mercantilism. That is a fatal misjudgement. The lesson of Smoot-Hawley and the 1930s is that surplus states suffer crippling depressions when the guillotine comes down on free trade; while deficit states can muddle through, reviving their industries behind barriers. Demand is the most precious commodity of all in a world of excess supply.

The political reality is that China’s export of manufacturing over-capacity is hollowing out the US industrial core, and a plethora of tricks to stop Western firms competing in the Chinese market rubs salt in the wound. It is preventing full recovery in the US, where half the population is falling out of the bottom of the Affluent Society. Some 43.2m people are now on food stamps. The US labour force participation rate has fallen to 64.3pc, worse than a year ago. Only the richer half is recovering.

The roots of this imbalance lie in the structure of globalisation and East-West capital flows – and no doubt the deficiencies of US school education – but China plays a central role, and this will not tolerated for much longer if Beijing is also perceived to be a strategic enemy. China’s economic and military goals are in conflict. One defeats the other.

The undervalued yuan is merely the visible tip of the mercantilist iceberg, and is a diminishing factor in any case as leaked dollar stimulus from the Fed’s QE drives up Chinese wage inflation. What matters is that China’s entire credit, tax, and regulatory system is geared towards subsidised capital for exporters.

Professor Michael Pettis from Beijing University argues that a key reason why Chinese consumption has collapsed from 48pc to 36pc of GDP over 12 years – and therefore why China cannot eliminate the trade surplus with the US – is that the banking system has been bailed out with an interest rate subsidy extracted from depositors, shifting income from the people to corporate debtors. Unfortunately, this is about to happen again.

A cocky China needs to watch its step, as does a rancorous America, before resentments feed on each other in a Wilhelmine spiral.

The Chinese have no recent history of sweeping territorial expansion (except Tibet). The one-child policy has left a dearth of young men, and implies a chronic aging crisis within a decade. This is not the demographic profile of a fundamentally bellicose nation.

The correct statecraft for the West is to treat Beijing politely but firmly as a member of global club, gambling that the Confucian ethic will over time incline China to a quest for global as well as national concord. Until we face irrefutable evidence that this Confucian bet has failed, 'Boltonism’ must be crushed.

Appeasement, your hour has come.

The year climate science was redefined

The 12 months since the leaking of emails written by climate change scientists have seen major shifts in environmental debate

• Climate change: science's fresh fight to win over the sceptics
• Phil Jones: I did nothing wrong

 

•    Mike Hulme   guardian.co.uk, 16.11. 2010 09.28 GMT

Storm of controversy: The politics of climate change can be even more volatile than the Earth's weather. Photograph: Douglas Van Reeth/AP

One year ago tomorrow more than a thousand emails between scientists in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and their international colleagues were uploaded, unauthorised, on to a Russian FTP server. The story immediately went viral online, with lurid accusations of deception and illegality, and was soon picked up by the mainstream media.

How has the climate change story changed since then? And how important was "climategate" in catalysing this change? I believe there have been major shifts in how climate science is conducted, how the climate debate is framed and how climate policy is being formed. And I believe "climategate" played a role in all three.

It is difficult to re-capture – or even quite believe – the cultural and political mood around climate change in the autumn of 2009. There was a rising wave of expectation that the world leaders gathering for the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December would change the world – and the climate – for ever.

People were fasting for climate justice, Gordon Brown was saying that Copenhagen was the last chance to reach a climate deal and there were calls for Obama to play decisively his climate card. No one 12 months ago was calling for a review of the practices of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations' main climate science assessment panel. Contrarian voices, while loud, were not really being listened to. This inflated optimism had to burst and "climategate" proved to be the pin.

So, 12 months later, I suggest three things of particular significance have altered.

First, there has been a discernible change in some of the practices of climate science. Most obvious has been an opening up and re-analysis of some of the core observational datasets which underpin the detection of climate change trends. The Met Office is leading a thorough international re-analysis of 150 years of land and marine temperature data. Calls for greater transparency around scientific analysis have boosted the embryonic project of the Climate Code Foundation and its efforts to make all climate computer code open-source.

The Inter-Academy Council review has recommended some significance changes in the way the IPCC assesses knowledge, in particular how it documents areas of both agreement and disagreement in the underlying science. And the Royal Society, reflecting this new mood, has issued a new guide to climate change science which separates "aspects of wide agreement", "aspects of continuing debate" and "aspects not well understood". The objective of these reflexive responses in science has been to demonstrate transparency and rebuild trust.

Second, there has been a re-framing of climate change. The simple linear frame of "here's the consensus science, now let's make climate policy" has lost out to the more ambiguous frame: "What combination of contested political values, diverse human ideals and emergent scientific evidence can drive climate policy?" The events of the past year have finally buried the notion that scientific predictions about future climate change can be certain or precise enough to force global policy-making.

The meta-framing of climate change has therefore moved from being bi-polar – that either the scientific evidence is strong enough for action or else it is too weak for action – to being multi-polar – that narratives of climate change mobilise widely differing values which can't be homogenised through appeals to science. Those actors who have long favoured a linear connection between climate science and climate policy – spanning environmentalists, contrarians and some scientists and politicians – have been forced to rethink. It is clearer today that the battle lines around climate change have to be drawn using the language of politics, values and ethics rather than the one-dimensional language of scientific consensus or lack thereof.

Third, and perhaps most dramatically, has been the fragmentation of climate policy-making. It has been remarkable how quickly faith has evaporated in the multilateral process of the UNFCCC. Its new head, Christiana Figueres, concedes that "there won't be a final agreement on climate change in my lifetime". The post-mortem of COP15 showed how implausible the FAB deal wanted by NGOs – Fair, Ambitious and Binding – really was. The US Senate screwed Obama's cap-and-trade bill. And no one believes that COP16 in Cancun later this month will be any different.

Instead, there is a new pragmatism in the air. This pragmatism has many colours and shades, but at the heart of it are three principles:

• an emphasis on the climate co-benefits of other policy innovations, such as those on health and poverty

• a necessity to drive forward new publicly-funded investments in low-carbon energy technology

• the cultivation of multi-level polycentric institutions and partnerships through which policy innovation may occur, rather than relying exclusively on the UN process

These three changes are reflective of much larger cultural and political struggles regarding knowledge and power in the contemporary world which will become more salient during the next decade: the challenges to the norms of science coming from deep social and digital connectivity; the struggle to establish the appropriate cultural authority for science; and the struggles to bring democratic accountability to emergent international and global forms of governance. The shifts we are seeing around climate change are therefore symptomic of these wider struggles.

The 12 months since 17 November 2009 have shown brutally that the social, political and cultural dynamics at work around the idea of climate change are more volatile than the slowly changing and causally entangled climate dynamics of the Earth's biogeophysical systems. Furthermore, supercomputers may mean climate science can attempt century-long predictions but that does not mean political, cultural and other unpredictable changes will not be as important.

Another IPCC assessment of scientific knowledge in four years' time is not going to make policy-making around climate change any easier. Indeed, the chances are that with scientific uncertainties and complexities about the future proliferating, and with new policy strategies such as climate geo-engineering entering the fray, further policy fragmentation around climate change is inevitable. But if such fragmentation reflects the plural, partial and provisional knowledge humans possess about the future then climate policy-making will better reflect reality. And that, I think, may be no bad thing.

Mike Hulme is professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

'Please give me a job': Desperate teen, 18, takes to the streets with sandwich board begging for work after applying for 80 posts

By Daily Mail Reporter   01.11.2010

An unemployed teenager is so desperate for work she has taken to the streets with a sandwich board begging: 'Please give me a job'.

Claire Fear, 18, was forced to ditch her dreams of becoming a dietician because of concern over building up huge debts at university and is now trying for any type of job.

The former health sciences student has applied for more than 80 jobs since finishing her college course in June.

Desperate measures: Claire Fear, 18, from Bridgwater, Somerset, has resorted to walking the streets of her home town begging for work

Claire's efforts have echoes of efforts made by the unemployed during the Depression

She has now resorted to walking the streets of her home town of Bridgwater, Somerset, holding a sign pleading with employers to give her a chance.

Claire said: 'There are no jobs and no prospects in this town so I'm having to take matters in my own hands.

'I registered with an employment agency when I finished college, but I have only had a tiny bit of work since then. None of it is full-time.

'I have applied for so many jobs. I did want to be a dietician, but I did not want to go to university - lots of people have told me it is not worth it because of the debts.  'I am desperate for work and I will do pretty much anything.'

Claire left Bridgwater College with a Level 3 BTEC in health sciences this summer and has been searching for work ever since.  In one day alone she visited 50 shops in the town centre asking for a job - but none had any work.

Claire is baffled as to why she is repeatedly rejected but believes she is stuck in a 'catch 22' situation where she does not have sufficient experience for most jobs.  She now spends up to three hours a day walking the streets with her sandwich board.

The idea of using the board came from her mother.  Claire said: 'My mum mentioned doing this as a joke a few weeks ago - I don't think she thought I would take her seriously.  'I have had mostly positive responses from people - one person even pulled over and said he hoped things work out for me. But there have been no job offers.'

Spending review: how did the banks get off so lightly?

As the taxpayer endures yet more pain, Jill Treanor asks: will the City's day of reckoning ever come?

•   Jill Treanor  guardian.co.uk,  21.10.2010
• 
  

Two years ago this month, a pale and visibly shocked Gordon Brown promised that "irresponsible behaviour" by Britain's bankers would be "punished". The prime minister was angry at the level of public money needed to support banks, which eventually ran into hundreds of billions, after the credit-fuelled system expanded out of control in the run-up to the banking crisis of October 2008.

Two years on, as the taxpayer endures more pain while the government that replaced Brown's axes £81bn from public spending, the banks have returned to practices they enjoyed in the good years, seemingly bearing few scars of the punishment promised. After the coalition unveiled its £2.5bn-a-year bank levy yesterday, unions were quick to seize upon the apparent unfairness in the treatment of banks while the poorest and most vulnerable in society were being hardest hit by George Osborne's austerity Britain.

"Those who caused the recession will be cracking open the champagne today, while the full extent of the attacks on the living standards of poor and middle income Britain are starting to sink in," said Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC. Referring to MPs who endorsed the cutting of benefits in the chancellor's spending review, Barber said: "With government MPs cheering cuts in support for some of the most vulnerable in society, it looks like we have gone back to the 1980s 'greed is good' culture."

As Osborne wielded his axe and warned of the loss of almost 500,000 public sector jobs, banks had given a taste of the bonuses staff may enjoy this year. Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street bank with a large British operation, was attempting to show restraint but managed to set aside $370,000 (£236,000) per employee in "compensation" for the first nine months of the year.

It is less than the $527,000 seen at this stage a year ago, but still demonstrates the potential payouts being lined up in the City for February, when they are traditionally handed out.

Britain's major banks give their updates on trading next month, and are expected to once again show healthy profits – and big payouts being stored up in bonus pots. The Centre for Economics and Business Research has predicted £7bn is likely to be paid out this year, while acknowledging that some jobs have been lost in the City too.

Gavin Hayes, general secretary of centre left pressure group Compass, blames politicians: "Our political leaders haven't stood up to the banks. They haven't taken the action necessary."

While Labour missed opportunities, the new government was too slow to initiate change. "David Cameron said there would a day of reckoning for the banks. He simply hasn't delivered it," said Hayes.

Why? One reason is that the City and the banking industry has an army of highly paid lobbyists. The British Bankers' Association was quick to point out that the banks paid £26bn in taxes to the Treasury last year while the Corporation of London points out that the City in its broadest sense provided £66bn of tax revenues in 2009, employed a million people, and accounted for 10% of GDP.

"UK is still over-reliant on financial services for tax and growth. Whilst that's the case the politicians are not going to stand up to them," said Hayes.

Tony Greenham, at the New Economics Foundation thinktank, points out that the current government is also less inclined to blame banks for ideological reasons. "Blaming the banks is a bit inconvenient for a government that wants to blame the overspend in the public sector," said Greenham.

The banks argue they can hardly be blamed for causing the crisis. Angela Knight, chief executive of the BBA, said today that lax monetary policy and regulation could also take the blame, as could government borrowing. "It's extraordinary to think that £2.5bn is 'nothing'. It's just wrong," Knight said.

Greenham also argues that it may be too soon to judge the government. "They do promise that they are looking at a financial activities tax, and looking at actions on bonuses. You might have to reserve judgment for now," he said.

The government has certainly made other pledges to target banks. Osborne insisted this week that the government was still looking at a financial activities tax, or FAT, on profits and pay in the broader international context. The coalition has also set up an independent commission to look at whether big banks should be broken up to encourage competition and reduce the risk of another taxpayer bailout – a move that has infuriated big banks such as Barclays and HSBC, which have issued veiled threats about moving overseas.

The City minister, Mark Hoban, defended the government's recordtonight, and hit out against the previous government, which had imposed a bonus tax last December that brought in £2.3bn for the exchequer. "Whilst the previous Labour government opposed our plans to introduce a permanent levy, we have gone ahead and done so. This will yield more every year than the bank payroll tax delivered in one year.

"The levy also actively encourages banks to move away from riskier funding that threatens financial stability, and the money raised will go towards reducing the record budget deficit we inherited. We think this balances fairness with the competitiveness of the UK banking sector," Hoban said.

The coalition also promises to stop "unacceptable bonuses". The business secretary, Vince Cable, warned in September of the "train crash" facing banking if big bonuses were paid out this year without outlining specific policies.

The Financial Services Authority has changed the structure of bonuses – if not the level – ensuring that bonuses paid totally in cash are no longer feasible. Instead they must be deferred over three to five years and, under European proposals from the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, must be no more than 20% in cash with the rest in shares.

Knight said: "Most of the bonuses are being decided outside the UK [by foreign banks] and other countries don't see bonuses in the same way [as the UK]. The overwhelming majority of bonuses are for £3,000 or £4,000; for larger bonuses, the targets have to be approved by the FSA and be paid in shares and held back for several years."

Bonuses are the potential melting pot for public anger, says Hayes: "I do think there will be huge public anger when the banks report their bonuses."

Cable's business department got a taste this week when it was stormed by protesters angry at public sector cuts. Such a scene may yet be commonplace, and make the government honour pledges to punish the "irresponsible behaviour" some blame for the economic crisis.

Silence of the dissenters: How south-east Asia keeps web users in line

Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines are all moving towards Chinese-style internet censorship
• Interactive guide: censorship in Asia

• Ben Doherty in Bangkok  guardian.co.uk,  21.10.2010
  

Governments across south-east Asia are following China's authoritarian censorship of the digital world to keep political dissent in check, the Guardian can reveal.

Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines have all moved or are moving towards monitoring internet use, blocking international sites regarded as critical and ruthlessly silencing web dissidents.

• In Vietnam, the Communist party wants to be your "friend" on the state-run version of Facebook, provided you are willing to share all personal details.

• In Burma, political unrest can be silenced by cutting off the country from the internet.

• In Thailand, website moderators can face decades in jail for a posted comment they did not even write, if the government deems it injurious tothe monarchy.

While much is made of China's authoritarian attitudetowards internet access, a majority of south-east Asian governments have similar controls and , rather than relaxing restrictions on internet use, many are moving towards tighter regulation.

The Guardian has spoken to five leading bloggers across the region about the present restrictions they face and future fears.

Interactive: Meet five key bloggers who fear a crackdown on freedom of expression.

Raymond Palatino, a Filipino MP and editor with Global Voices, says governments, in addition to crudely blocking websites, are starting to use arguments of morality and decency to censor access to information and quash criticism.

"There is direct censorship to block political dissent. You have repressive laws in Myanmar [Burma], in Vietnam, in Singapore. In fact I think Vietnam is catching up with China in terms of building strong firewalls to prevent dissidents from accessing critical content on the internet.

"But we also see governments using the excuse of protecting the public morality in order to censor internet content. Governments use the excuse of censoring pornography as a safe argument to make censorship acceptable to the public."

More than a decade ago, George W Bush asked people to "imagine if the internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread". But rather than emerging as a catalyst for democracy, the internet has become another way to to stifle dissent.

Palatino sees governments using the internet for their own selfish advantage. "They are learning how to prevent people for using the internet to criticise government. Instead of being a potent tool for empowering the people, the internet will be in the hands of an authoritative, repressive government."

With a population of more than 600 million, south-east Asia has about 123 million internet users. But penetration ratesvary from 0.2% in Burma and Timor-Leste to more than 80% in Brunei Darussalam and 77% in Singapore. But south-east Asian use is still dwarfed by China's384 million users.

In the Philippines, cybercrime legislation before the parliament would outlaw anything deemed obscene or indecent. Palatino says: "The laws are deliberately broad and vague so they can be used to shut down anything subversive."

Cambodia's government is seeking to monitor all internet use inside the country, by appointing the state-owned telephone company to operate the sole internet exchange.

Websites will be monitored to filter out pornography, officials say, but opponents say sites critical of the government are also likely to be blocked.

In Thailand, century-old lese-majesty legislation is combined with new computer-related crime laws, to mute criticism on the web.

Lese-majesty laws – defaming the monarchy - are imposed inconsistently in Thailand, but wielded often enough, and against defendants of sufficient profile, to stifle almost any discussion of the monarchy's role in a country riven by political factionalism. Chiranuch Premchiaporn, the editor of Thailand's English-language news website Prachatai.com, faces up to 70 years in jail for allowing the monarch to be insulted online.

The charges relate to five of 200 comments posted about an interview with a Thai man who was charged for refusing to stand for the anthem in a theatre.

Premchiaporn, known as Jiew, did not write the comments, and pulled them from the website but, according to police, allowed them to stay up ''longer than the appropriate period'', a period never defined by authorities before or since the charge.

Now on bail, the prospect of jail weighs heavily on her. "And it isn't just about 'Oh, how long I will have to spend in the cell', my whole life is uncertain. I cannot plan my life because of this legal charge, it makes everything hard."

Thailand's strict laws, and harsh punishments, have had a chilling effect on political discussion on webboards and blogs.

"I think the biggest problem in Thai media is self-censorship … but we started Prachatai for the ideals of believing in the rights of people to access information … from many sources and not be dominated by just one source," Jiew says.

Prachatai is blocked in Thailand, under order of the emergency decree after the red-shirt uprising of May. It is one of more than 100,000 websites blocked in the country. "We want to promote the rights of the people to speak up about their issues, not just only people who have a big name, or who are important in government."

In Vietnam, web-users can become "friends" with their communist government, joining the country's own version of Facebook. A trial version of go.vn was launched in May. A full version is expected online by the end of the year.

The functions are familiar to those versed in social networking. Users can update their status, post photos and links, and send messages back and forth.

There are news links, historical articles on founding father Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionary heroes, and members can also play state-approved network games (in one particularly violent example, players join a band of militants sworn to fight the spread of global capitalism).

The site is closely monitored by the government's security services, and while, for many, the attraction of the internet lies in its anonymity, to join go.vn users must submit their full names and state-issued identity numbers to the government.

The Vietnamese government says it expects to have 40 million members, half the country, in five years. Perhaps because web dissidents are dealt with so ruthlessly by the communist regime – four bloggers were recently jailed for 16 years for anti-government posts – five months on, take-up of go.vn is a bare few thousand.

Burma has one of the poorest records on internet freedom in the region.

All .mm sites and email addresses are closely monitored by the ruling military junta, and international sites banned, but the tiny internet cafes that dot the former capital, Yangon, are adept at bypassing the government's firewalls, using proxy servers to evade the censors and access banned sites.

Outfoxed on technology, the junta responds during times of stress by simply unplugging the internet, especially to stop unwelcome news getting out of the country.

At the height of the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007, the junta's generals shut down access completely, later claiming a break in an underwater cable had cut the country off.

With Burma heading towards its first elections in a generation early next month, and the anticipated release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi a week later, there is an expectation the web blackout may be repeated.

Fidel Castro says his economic system is failing

Former Cuban president says state-run model 'doesn't even work for us' in offhand remark to US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg

• Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, 09.09.2010
  

Fidel Castro, pictured earlier this month, criticised Cuba's state-dominated system. Photograph: Desmond Boylan/Reuters

It was a casual remark over a lunch of salad, fish and red wine but future historians are likely to parse and ponder every word: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us any more."

Fidel Castro's nine-word confession, dropped into conversation with a visiting US journalist and policy analyst, undercuts half a century of thundering revolutionary certitude about Cuban socialism.

That the island's economy is a disaster is hardly news but that the micro-managing "maximum leader" would so breezily acknowledge it has astonished observers.

Towards the end of a long, relaxed lunch in Havana, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, asked Castro if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting. The reply left him dumbfounded. "Did the leader of the revolution just say, in essence, 'Never mind'?" Goldberg wrote on his blog.

The 84-year-old retired president did not elaborate but the implication, according to Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert from the Council on Foreign Relations who also attended the lunch, was that the state had too big a role in the economy.

Raúl Castro has been saying the same thing in public and private since succeeding his older brother two years ago. With infrastructure crumbling, food shortages acute and an average monthly salary of just $25 (£16), it has become apparent that near-total state control of the economy does not work.

But for Fidel to acknowledge the fact could be compared to Napoleon musing that the march on Moscow was not, on reflection, a great success.

"Frankly, I have been somewhat amazed by Fidel's new frankness," said Stephen Wilkinson, a Cuba expert at the London Metropolitan University. "This is the latest of a series of recent utterances that strike me as being indicative of a change in the old man's character."

The remark should not, however, be interpreted as a condemnation of socialism, added Wilkinson. "That is clearly not what he means, but it is an acknowledgement that the way in which the Cuban system is organised has to change. It is an implicit indication also that he has abdicated governing entirely to Raúl, who has argued this position for some time. We can now expect a lot more changes and perhaps more rapid changes as a consequence."

Raúl has said Cuba cannot blame the decades-old US embargo for all its economic ills and that serious reforms are needed. Fidel's statement could bolster the president's behind-the-scenes tussle with apparatchiks resisting change, said Sweig.

Agriculture has been a big disappointment. The lush Caribbean island of 11 million people could be a major food exporter but central planning and state-run co-operatives have produced chronic shortages, prompting an old, bitter joke that the revolution's three biggest failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner. Raúl's reforms are not going well: food production fell 7.5% in the first half of the year.

Once propped up by the Soviet Union, Cuba's lifeline is now cheap oil from Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez considers Fidel a mentor.

Chávez swiftly followed another surprise statement of Castro's – accusing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of antisemitism – with an announcement that he would meet Venezuelan Jewish leaders. The move was "a direct result of Fidel's statement", according to Goldberg.

• This article was amended on 10 September. Headings on the original characterised Fidel Castro as saying that communism does not work. This has been corrected.

Marxist reforms?

The remarks about Cuban economic policy are not the only surprise statements made recently by the former Cuban leader. Others include:

• He feels responsible for the "great injustice" of the persecution of Cuban homosexuals in the 1970s.

• He laments Jewish suffering over the centuries, defends Israel's right to exist and accuses Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of antisemitism.

• He appears to regret urging the Soviet Union to nuke the US during the 1962 missile crisis. "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all."

Narco-censorship - how drug traffickers silence the Mexican media

Los Angeles Times reporter Tracy Wilkinson introduces us to a new journalistic expression: narco-censorship.

 

It's the description specific to the media's coverage of the drug war in Mexico where reporters and editors, out of fear or caution, are being forced to write either what the drug lords demand, or to remain silent by not writing anything at all.

 

In a country where journalists have been intimidated, kidnapped and killed, Wilkinson writes: "One of the devastating by-products of the carnage is the drug traffickers' chilling ability to co-opt underpaid and under-protected journalists — who are haunted by the knowledge that they are failing in their journalistic mission of informing society.

 

She quotes an editor in Reynosa, in the border state of Tamaulipas, who tells her: "You love journalism, you love the pursuit of truth, you love to perform a civic service and inform your community. But you love your life more... We don't like the silence. But it's survival."

 

An estimated 30 reporters have been killed or have disappeared since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006, making Mexico one of the deadliest countries for journalists in the world.

 

Ten days ago the UN belatedly sent its first such mission to Mexico to examine the resulting dangers to freedom of expression.

 

Few killings are ever investigated, and the climate of impunity leads to more bloodshed, says an upcoming report from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.   "It is not a lack of valour on the part of the journalists. It is a lack of backing," says broadcaster Jaime Aguirre. "If they kill me, nothing happens."

 

When a large drug gang attacked an army garrison in Reynosa in April, trapping soldiers inside, it was front- page news in the Los Angeles Times. It went unreported in Reynosa.

 

Reporters and editors say they routinely receive telephoned warnings when they publish something the traffickers don't like. More often, knowing their publications are being watched and their newsrooms infiltrated, they avoid publishing anything considered risky.

 

Social media networks, such as Twitter, have filled some of the breach, with residents frantically sending danger alerts.   And a secretive "narco blog" has started posting numerous videos of henchmen and their victims. But traffickers also use social media to spread rumours and stoke panic.

 

In Durango, where more newsmen were killed in 2009 than in any other state, broadcast reporter Ruben Cardenas says journalists can no longer do their job.

Blood diamonds and Charles Taylor: the inside story

The 'blood diamonds' trade, which is at the heart of the war-crimes trial of Charles Taylor, ex-president of Liberia - in which Naomi Campbell has become embroiled - was partly run by his brother-in-law, Cindor Reeves. In this exclusive interview he tells Colin Freeman about his role 

By Colin Freeman   15.08.2010

The now infamous dinner with Naomi Campbell, Charles Taylor and Mia Farrow Photo: REX

Naomi Campbell giving evdience to the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor Photo: AP

 

Should Naomi Campbell ever wish for some more dodgy diamonds to grace her supermodel limbs, Cindor Reeves knows the right people to call. It is a long way from his new home in Canada to the war-ravaged gem fields of his native West Africa, and a long time since the trade in "blood diamonds" was officially banned, but as long as Ms Campbell sticks to her habit of not asking where they came from, he says a deal could probably be done.

 

"I tell you, I could get on the phone to people out there tomorrow, and they will fly them to wherever you want," he says, shaking his head. "They are supposed to have brought this trade under control, but it still goes on, and as long as it does, we will have wars in Africa."

Related Articles

• Naomi Campbell and blood diamond: the whole picture

• Profile: Charles Taylor, warlord and ex-president of Liberia on trial for war crimes

• Charles Taylor displays icy charm at war crime hearing

On the subject of illegal gemstones, it is fair to say that Mr Reeves is uniquely well connected, even if many of his best contacts are now either dead, on the run, or in jail.

 

The tall, quietly spoken 38-year-old is the brother-in-law, no less, of Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator who gave Ms Campbell a gift of uncut diamonds in 1997, according to her recent testimony at his war crimes trial in the Hague.  For four turbulent years, he was at the centre of the blood diamonds trade, acting as Taylor's personal envoy in his infamous arms-for-gems deals with the rebels in next door Sierra Leone, whose drug-crazed recruits raped, maimed and slaughtered their way through a war that claimed some 150,000 lives.

 

As such, he also knows about the appalling price in human misery that was paid so that "the chief", as his brother-in-law was known, could flatter pretty girls at parties. The gifts Taylor used to hand out to the likes of Ms Campbell were the proceeds of dozens of clandestine trips that Mr Reeves made into the Sierra Leone bush, where he would swap truckloads of weapons for tiny but highly valuable packages of stones, many from rebel-held mines being run as virtual slave camps.

 

Today, though, Mr Reeves' diamond smuggling days are over. Appalled by the slaughter that the trade was fuelling, in 2001 he turned against his own family and secretly approached the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, providing inside information that helped build much of the prosecution case against the former president and his cronies. He claims Taylor tried to have a hit squad kill him before he left Africa, and after an attempted kidnapping in Paris in 2004, allegedly conducted by a notorious Ukrainian arms dealer, he fled to Canada.

 

Today, rather like the Mafioso-turned-informant Henry Hill, whose life was depicted in the film Goodfellas, he lives in suburban anonymity, although even here his mobile phone still rings with death threats.

 

"Taylor still has a lot of supporters," he told me, looking out over a street lined with station wagons, neatly kept lawns and garages with basketball hoops. "Nobody has done anything yet, but they tell me they know where my kids go to school."

 

Last week, though, on condition that his location was not disclosed, Mr Reeves agreed to an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, shedding first-hand light on the violent, sordid world that Ms Campbell became the chance beneficiary of during her meeting with Taylor at a party at Nelson Mandela's house in 1997.

 

While the supermodel professed almost complete ignorance of the blood gems trade, describing Taylor's gift only as "dirty pebbles", Mr Reeves saw its every facet: the psychotic rebel commanders who ran the mines, the traumatised civilians forced to work in them, and the networks of shady middlemen who connected the trade with the outside world, including arms dealers and alleged agents of both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

 

His story begins at a more innocent time, however, back in the early 1980s, when Taylor, then a senior figure in Liberia's military government, married Mr Reeves's elder sister Agnes. Then, as now, Mr Reeves recalls his brother-in-law as someone who was generous with gifts but ruthless if crossed: the uniformed figure who would buy him ice cream and sweets once beat up one of Agnes's other suitors in front of him.

 

After being sacked for embezzlement and banished to the US, where he served time in jail, Taylor returned to Liberia to fight his way to power with a guerrilla army. During the 1990s he also backed the Revolutionary United Front rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone, whose troops were notorious for recruiting child soldiers into their ranks and mutilating civilians.

 

One reason for his support for such a brutal movement was that Taylor was a pal of the RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, who had trained with him in Libya as part of Colonel Gaddafi's now defunct programme for grooming foreign revolutionaries.

 

Another, though, was that the RUF had seized control of some of the richest diamond fields in the world, Sierra Leone being one of the rare spots on the planet where they practically spring up out of the ground.   "A rough diamond looks a bit like a sugar lump, it's only when you wash it and the sunlight hits it that you see the gemstone beneath," said Mr Reeves, his eyes gleaming a little. "The diamonds from Sierra Leone are like no others. They are much less rough than those from Angola, South Africa or Australia – all they need is a little cutting."

 

While diamonds in other countries are mostly accessible only by mining firms, in Sierra Leone they can be dug by anyone with a spade and panning set. The result, in such a poor, weakly-governed country, has for decades been an anarchic free-for-all, from which criminal gangs and armed groups have grown powerful.

 

Ironically, it was to inject a little honesty and transparency into the business that Taylor first recruited his brother-in-law. The Liberian leader was already thought to be earning millions from the trade, funding a lifestyle that included designer suits, Mercedes cars, his own personal throne and at least 30 children by different women.

 

However, he grew exasperated at the way his diamond packages were often pilfered in transit, and turned to his relative as one of the few people he felt he could trust. From 1998 onwards, Mr Reeves would accompany a heavily armed convoy that would drive along the sunbaked tracks into Sierra Leone's RUF strongholds, trade weapons and ammunition for diamonds, and then ensure that every stone came home accounted for.

 

None of the parties involved in these deals were the kind of people whom it was wise to double-cross. On Mr Reeves's side was Taylor's diamond-buyer, a Senegalese-born jihadist who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and trained with Hezbollah, plus members of the president's feared "special security service". On the RUF side was commander Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie, a former disco-dancer and hairdresser known for his fondness for hacking off the limbs, ears and lips of his victims. His footsoldiers, meanwhile, had a fondness for drink and marijuana.

 

"Commanders would come in with parcels of diamonds wrapped in paper and tied with Scotch tape," said Mr Reeves. "We would meet in Bockarie's house and then stick a chair in the middle of the room for the diamonds to be counted on, with a white sheet draped underneath so that if any got dropped we could see them. Then I would declare how many we had received, and Bockarie would tell the commanders, 'Look, President Taylor's brother-in-law is here in person, so nothing is going to go missing'."

 

As Taylor's own emissary, Mr Reeves had little fear of being robbed en route: in his possession was a special ID card identifying him as a member of the First Family, which guaranteed him passage through any militia checkpoint, and warned that he should not be "molested" in any way.

 

Even so, he would never let the diamonds out of his sight. "At night, I would put them in my front pocket and sleep face down so that nobody could get at them, although any robber would have been crazy to try. The guards would have shot them if they saw so much as a movement in the bushes."

 

Back in the crumbling Liberian capital, Monrovia, Mr Reeves would deliver the packages to Taylor: in similar fashion to the delivery to Naomi Campbell, the president preferred the hand-over to be done in the small hours. The stones duly checked by an expert, Taylor would then call the international dealers he retained, who included members of the Lebanese diaspora that has long operated all over Africa, and Europeans connected to the diamond market in Antwerp.

 

All had a remarkable ability to summon millions of dollars in cash at short notice, although if they ran short, Taylor was always happy to help. On one occasion, when a buyer turned up with $240,000 in travellers' cheques, his security men forced a bank in Monrovia to cash the lot on the spot. "They didn't normally take travellers' cheques, but were told that this particular 'tourist' was special," Mr Reeves recalled.

 

On one occasion in 1999, Mr Reeves even accompanied a dealer to Antwerp, where a dozen local diamantaires were invited to submit sealed bids for a pile of stones laid out in the middle of a hotel room. The dealer pocketed $2.35 million that afternoon, with no questions asked. "It was long before anybody knew about blood diamonds," said Mr Reeve. "As far as they were concerned, there was nothing wrong at all."

 

He knew otherwise, having visited the RUF-controlled mines, where men, women and children were being conscripted to work in appalling conditions. "It was horrific – at one point I saw three or four guards beating a guy with their rifle butts just because he had stopped for a drink of water. They thought he was trying to steal a diamond, and at one point they were going to force-feed him laxative so that it would come out. When I saw that with my own eyes, I began to realise just how bad it all was."

 

Despite the danger it put him in, Mr Reeves quietly turned supergrass, working with prosecutors from the special court, and, allegedly, with Britain's M16. He handed them records of every transaction he had done, and during field trips began to gather evidence of the atrocities carried out by militia commanders. While he is not expected to give direct evidence to the Hague court, owing partly to a falling-out over the way court officials handled his witness protection provision, he is one of the key sources of information for a trial in which very few people have been brave enough to tell the truth. Among those who have been afraid to do so, he reckons, is Ms Campbell, who denied in court knowing that the stones she got were actually from Mr Taylor. "You could see the fear in her eyes, because she knows who Taylor is now," he said.

 

Mr Reeves was surprised to hear testimony that he told bodyguards to give her the diamonds in the middle of the night. "For one thing, she is a supermodel – strangers wouldn't be allowed to come knocking on her bedroom door just like that. And Taylor is a flamboyant character – he would want to give her the diamonds in person, because he liked impressing people.

 

If fact, if she hadn't been there, he would have probably given them to Nelson Mandela."

Revealed: brutal guide to punishing jailed youths (UK)

• 'Drive fingers into groin', says prison service manual
• Disclosures follow parents' freedom of information fight

• Mark Townsend   The Observer,   18.07. 2010

Carol Pounder from Burnley, whose 14-year-old son Adam Rickwood was found dead at Hassockfield secure training centre in County Durham in August 2004. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Shocking details of techniques used to inflict pain deliberately on children in privately run jails have been revealed for the first time in a government document obtained by the Observer.

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

■ "Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee's sternum and drive inward and upward."

■ "Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person's ribs until a release is achieved."

■ "Drive straight fingers into the young person's face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person's groin area."

The disclosure of the prison service manual follows a five-year freedom of information battle. The manual was condemned last night by campaigners as "state authorisation of institutionalised child abuse".

Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.

Instructions to staff warn that the techniques risk giving children a "fracture to the skull" and "temporary or permanent blindness caused by rupture to eyeball or detached retina".

The guidance, designed to cope with unruly children, also acknowledges that the measures could cause asphyxia. One passage, explaining how to administer a head-hold on children, adds that "if breathing is compromised the situation ceases to be a restraint and becomes a medical emergency".

Carolyne Willow, national co-ordinator of the Children's Rights Alliance for England (CRAE), which led the campaign for disclosure following the deaths of two teenage boys in secure training centres, said: "The manual is deeply disturbing and stands as state authorisation of institutionalised child abuse. What made former ministers believe that children as young as 12 could get so out of control so often that staff should be taught how to ram their knuckles into their rib cages? Would we allow paediatricians, teachers or children's home staff to be trained in how to deliberately hurt and humiliate children?"

The campaign for publication began following the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood. Myatt, 15, died while being held down by three staff at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre in Warwickshire. Myatt choked on his own vomit and died.

In the same year, 2004, 14-year-old Rickwood, from Burnley, hanged himself at the Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in County Durham. A judge ruled last year that the carers who restrained Rickwood shortly before his death had used unlawful force.

His mother, Carol Pounder, was said to be "relieved" that other parents would now know the truth behind the use of restraint.

Deborah Coles, co-director of the charity Inquest, which campaigns on the issue of contentious deaths in custody, claimed their deaths emanated from a "culture of obfuscation, secrecy and complacency… in which dangerous, unlawful and ultimately lethal practices continued unchecked".

Earlier this month the government was prepared to go to a tribunal to fight against the disclosure of the manual, despite the information commissioner ruling that the public interest was so grave the document should be released. The Ministry of Justice backed down and last week released the entire 119-page document. Previously, officials had even refused to give a copy to the parliamentary human rights committee.

Phillip Noyes, director of strategy and development at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said: "These shocking revelations graphically illustrate the cruel and degrading violence inflicted at times on children in custody. On occasions these restraint techniques have resulted in children suffering broken arms, noses, wrists and fingers. Painful restraint is a clear breach of children's human rights against some of the most vulnerable youngsters in society and does not have a place in decent society."

One former manager of a secure children's home with almost 20 years' experience said the revelations were "horrifying" and described the self-defence techniques as "child abuse".

"Nose distraction" techniques – sharp blows to the nose – have already been found by the Court of Appeal to have been routinely and unlawfully used in at least one centre.

The legal director for CRAE, Katy Swaine, said the contents of the manual offered evidence that the treatment of children in secure training centres had contravened human rights laws. She said: "The guidance given in this state-authorised manual violates human rights because it allows staff to deliberately hurt children outside cases of life-threatening necessity."

During the 12 months up to March 2009, restraint was used 1,776 times in the UK's four secure training centres.

Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the former children's commissioner for England and emeritus professor of child health at University College London, said: "It's time the whole country knows what is going on under their noses. This is just part of a brutal system, and we welcome the fact this is finally in the open."

Malcolm Stevens, a former government policy adviser and director of secure training centres who helped to develop the government's guidance for staff working in secure centres during the 1990s, said he could not understand why pain-inducing techniques were endorsed. He said: "I have never seen the need to use pain-compliant techniques, and after 15 years my view has not changed. I have no truck with distraction techniques."

The document also describes the application of steel handcuffs: children are forced to "adopt a kneeling position" while a second staff member "takes control of the head" by grabbing the back of the neck while cupping the chin.

Willow, who has drawn up 30 parliamentary questions to be tabled by MPs this week to ascertain how many times these self-defence techniques have been used in the past five years, said: "The ritualistic humiliation of making children kneel down to get handcuffs on and off is truly sickening and a clear abuse of human rights. Techniques include holding a 'child's forehead to the floor with another hand on the back of the neck'."

The Ministry of Justice said: "For young people under 18, the use of restraint is always a last resort. But where young people's behaviour puts themselves or others at serious risk, staff need to be able to intervene effectively, to protect the safety of all involved." The ministry added that the manual "is an aid for instructors" who train staff on the use of restraint techniques.

Classified documents reveal UK's role in abuse of its own citizens

Previously secret papers show true extent of involvement in abduction and torture following al-Qaida attacks of 2001

• Ian Cobain and Owen Bowcott   guardian.co.uk,  14.07.2010
  

Former Guantanamo Bay detainees Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga. MI5 officers interviewed Omar Deghayes in Afghanistan Kabul for three hours on the evening of 3 July 2002. He commented that he was treated better by the Pakistanis. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images/Reuters/PA

The true extent of the Labour government's involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens after the al-Qaida attacks of September 2001 has been spelled out in stark detail with the disclosure during high court proceedings of a mass of highly classified documents.

Previously secret papers that have been disclosed include a number implicating Tony Blair's office in many of the events that are to be the subject of the judicial inquiry that David Cameron announced last week.

Among the most damning documents are a series of interrogation reports from MI5 officers that betray their disregard for the suffering of a British resident whom they were questioning at a US airbase in Afghanistan. The documents also show that the officers were content to see the mistreatment continue.

One of the most startling documents is chapter 32 of MI6's general procedural manual, entitled "Detainees and Detention Operations", which advises officers that among the "particular sensitivities" they need to consider before becoming directly involved in an operation to detain a terrorism suspect is the question of whether "detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation".

Other disclosed documents show how:

• The Foreign Office decided in January 2002 that the transfer of British citizens from Afghanistan to Guantánamo was its "preferred option".

• Jack Straw asked for that rendition to be delayed until MI5 had been able to interrogate those citizens.

• Downing Street was said to have overruled FO attempts to provide a British citizen detained in Zambia with consular support in an attempt to prevent his return to the UK, with the result that he too was "rendered" to Guantánamo.

The papers have been disclosed as a result of civil proceedings brought by six former Guantánamo inmates against MI5 and MI6, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the Attorney General's Office, which they allege were complicit in their illegal detention and torture.

The government has been responding to disclosure requests by maintaining that it has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant, and says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinise them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade. It has failed to hand over many of the documents that the men's lawyers have asked for, and on Friday failed to meet a deadline imposed by the high court for the disclosure of the secret interrogation policy that governed MI5 and MI6 officers between 2004 and earlier this year.

So far just 900 papers have been disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago. However, a number of highly revealing documents are among the released papers, as well as fragments of heavily censored emails, memos and policy documents.

Some are difficult to decipher, but together they paint a picture of a government that was determined not only to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States as it embarked upon its programme of "extraordinary rendition" and torture of terrorism suspects in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but to actively participate in that programme.

In May, after the appeal court dismissed attempts to suppress evidence of complicity in their mistreatment, the government indicated that it would attempt to settle out of court.

Today the government failed in an attempt to bring a temporary halt to the proceedings that have resulted in the disclosure of the documents. Its lawyers argued that the case should be delayed while attempts were made to mediate with the six men, in the hope that their claims could be withdrawn in advance of the judicial inquiry. Lawyers for the former Guantánamo inmates said it was far from certain that mediation would succeed, and insisted the disclosure process continue.

In rejecting the government's application, the court said it had considered the need for its lawyers to press ahead with the task of processing the 500,000 documents in any event, as the cases of the six men are among those that will be considered by the inquiry headed by Sir Peter Gibson. Last week, in announcing the inquiry, Cameron told MPs: "This inquiry will be able to look at all the information relevant to its work, including secret information. It will have access to all relevant government papers – including those held by the intelligence services."

Cameron also made clear that the sort of material that has so far been made public with the limited disclosure in the Guantánamo cases would be kept firmly under wraps during the inquiry. "Let's be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret," he said. "So any intelligence material provided to the inquiry panel will not be made public and nor will intelligence officers be asked to give evidence in public."

The coalition government is anxious to draw a line under what is currently described in Whitehall as "detainee legacy issues". It hopes that mediation, followed by the inquiry, will lift the burden of litigation that it is currently facing while restoring public confidence in MI5 and MI6.

It also wishes to preserve what it calls "liaison relationships" – operational links with overseas intelligence agencies, including those known to use torture – on the grounds that they are a vital part of the country's counter-terrorism strategy.

Zimbabwe's street-children challenge the illusion of change

Child scavengers in Harare bear tragic witness to how little has changed in a society brutalised by Robert Mugabe's cynical rule

• Tracy McVeigh in Harare  The Observer,  27.06.2010
• 
  

Kudzai Mupereki, 19, a homeless woman in Harare, is eight-months pregnant. Photograph: Tracy McVeigh

Rotting food scraps picked out of the dirt and the bins of the backstreets of Harare are piled together in a slimy heap on the ground with torn cardboard as a serving plate.

Elias, 15, squats and pushes both hands into the pile, scooping out a chunk of something pink. He gnaws on it, then shouts: "Dinner! Come and eat."

The other boys shush him. "The police will come," says Lloyd, "and we will have to run." There are more than 20 of them, gathered on a small piece of waste ground around a thin fire. The youngest is 8, the eldest 18. Lloyd used to have a blanket, but the police took it last time he was rounded up. He is among the older children who have been living on the streets since President Robert Mugabe's infamous Operation Murambatsvina, the slum clearances that began in 2005 and left hundreds homeless. But now they are seeing new, younger kids drifting in day after day from the countryside, looking for protection and a share of whatever has been scavenged or stolen or begged.

"Zimbabwean society is splintering, breaking, the family is not working the way it used to," said an official at the ministry of health. "The gap is increasing between the rich and the poor, the middle classes are moving out into the high-density suburbs where the poor used to live, and the poor are ending up on the streets."

At the Makumbi children's home, half an hour's drive from the city, Sister Alois is upset to report she has had to turn away three abandoned babies brought in by social workers in the last week.

"More and more children abandoned, it's not the African way. There are so many now. They are being left in the bush, some are eaten by the ants," said the nun, who has always been strict on taking in a manageable number of orphans to give each child the best possible chance: 10 children to each of her "house mothers". She says "poverty, and poverty leading to girls being abused", is the cause.

But after years of financial mismanagement at the hands of an ageing dictator and his corrupt cronies that saw this country decline into chaos amid food and energy shortages, sky-high inflation and political violence, Zimbabwe is entering a new era. In the two years since the election that nearly tore the country apart before resulting in a national unity government between Mugabe and opposition leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, there have been dramatic changes.

There is food on the shelves now, and the trillion-dollar banknotes are gone. Since 2009 citizens have been free to use the South African rand or the US dollar, and all do. A human rights commission has been sworn in. A media commission has licensed newspapers independent of government control and one, Newsday, began publishing this month. There are more cars on the road, some traffic lights work and the big four-wheeled drives no longer mainly have white faces behind the wheel. Vast diamond fields discovered at Marange have the potential to bring prosperity, and work on a new constitution is under way.

But what has really changed? Zimbabweans still top the world list of asylum-seekers. On Monday, Mugabe was ranked the world's second-worst dictator behind Kim Jong-il of North Korea, and Zimbabwe rated in the top 10 failed states.

The report by the US-based Fund for Peace stated: "Mugabe has arrested and tortured the opposition, squeezed his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation, and funnelled off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts."

On Thursday, the international watchdog, the Kimberley Process, failed to reach agreement on Zimbabwe's diamonds, concerned at human rights abuses and corruption. So the ban on the country exporting diamonds remains in place. And Mugabe's government remains disdainful of international opinion.

 The mines minister, Obert Mpofu, responded by saying Zimbabwe would sell them anyway. "Those of you who dream of regime change," he told his critics, "there will never be regime change in Zimbabwe. We fought for our liberation and we are ready to fight again."

Tsvangirai has been accused of ineffectual leadership, of doing the "Mugabe shuffle" – making small changes that mean nothing for the people. As one businessman told the Observer: "There is a saying in Shona, 'It's best to take an enemy inside your hut and there kill him'. That is what Mugabe has done to Tsvangirai. We are betrayed."

The government is in another paralysis of disagreement, with reports that Tsvangirai and Mugabe are not speaking. The state newspaper last week ran a front-page picture of the recently widowed Tsvangirai sitting near a woman it alleged was his new girlfriend. Rumours abound of MDC officials accepting farms from Mugabe just as he rewards the loyalty of his own Zanu-PF officials. The suggestion is denied vehemently, but worn-out Zimbabweans believe it.

The controversies and rumours are helping to raise the profile of a new player on the field. Zapu, the party of the late liberation hero Joshua Nkomo, has officially extricated itself from Zanu-PF and is showing signs of winning support outside its Matabeleland stronghold.

"Their pockets and their necks are getting fatter, there is no difference between the MDC and Zanu any more," Dr Dumiso Dabengwa, interim chairman of Zapu, said, insisting that cross-tribal support was already coming their way.

And while the political leaders are failing to fix a broken Zimbabwe, those who try to help on the streets are overwhelmed by the scale of the country's problems. A charity operating to help the growing bands of homeless children, Streets Ahead, is a drop-in day centre where kids can come and wash, attend art and drama classes, have a meal. Staff used to do night outreach work to find kids newly arrived on the city streets before the pimps and the abusers got to them, but donations are drying up. "So many kids we could take back home now, but we don't have the money or the truck to take them," said outreach worker Pauline Manigo, close to tears.

Duduzile Moyo, executive director of the centre, said: "We are soldiering on. The donations are scaling back big time, economic pressures everywhere. But it is the same pressures that are causing the problems that mean we cannot fix them." A census in August found 705 children living in Harare's city centre. "Poverty is the underlying cause and the economic downturn is making everything worse. We are seeing new kids arriving all the time now. The gap between the rich and the poor is getting very wide now."

A 34-year-old woman, in a retail management job, told of her despair that she was about to give up her small flat to move to the sprawling townships around the city where electricity and running water are seen as a luxury, not a necessity.

"I have always worked hard, always. But now I just don't know how I can manage any more, so I am going to have to move out. My wages have been cut and cut and now my rent is $300 a month and my income is $320.

"I am middle-class, my parents had a nice house, but if I want my kids to go to school then they're not going to have a nice house."

But her two children are still luckier than some. A few streets away, at a bus stop, a row of bodies are huddled under thin sheets. Connie Tatianashe is four months pregnant. Her three-year-old son sleeps by her side. They lost their home because her husband had to take a pay cut while the rents just kept on rising. Beside her, a shivering girl called Memory Muringai looks younger than the 13 she claims to be and has been here only a few days. So far none of the older boys has claimed her as a "girlfriend".

"I asked the bus driver and he brought me here, to Harare," she says. "My father died and my stepmother poured hot water on my back, so I ran away to find my aunt, but I can't find her. The shop owners gave me something to eat, but the boys chase me away. I am cold and I am scared."

The UK-based charity Street Invest supports Streets Ahead and other similar projects worldwide.

G20 summit: A moment missed  The Guardian 29.06.2010.

It is not yet 15 months since the G20 economic powers met in London to co-ordinate global action against the financial crisis and the recession. But it feels more like 15 years. When the London summit ended, Gordon Brown invoked a shared sense of historic crisis and spoke grandly of the world coming together to deal with it. He promised long-lasting plans, with shining new global financial architecture supported by committed alliances. 

Prosperity was indivisible, he intoned. Global problems had to be addressed by global solutions. We were witnessing a new consensus among the nations, a common approach, and even the birth of a new world order laying the foundations of a progressive era of international co-operation.

How terribly 2009 all that now seems. Reading the Toronto G20 summit declaration and, even more, listening to David Cameron's report to MPs about the summit yesterday, it was difficult to accept that the new prime minister has just attended a meeting of the same group of nations.

The G20, once so unified and mighty in Mr Brown's vision, seemed to have shrunk in Mr Cameron's into a dull working seminar in which the participants gave their reports but let one another get on with their own national business. It was still the right forum for discussing vital economic issues, the prime minister allowed. But all the weekend summitry – which included a G8 meeting and a series of leaders' get-togethers in the margins – added up not so much to a new world order as to "a good opportunity to build Britain's bilateral relationships" – marred only by watching the football in the company of Chancellor Merkel. It says a lot about the new government's approach that MPs spent more of their time after listening to Mr Cameron's report talking about Afghanistan than they did about the world economy.

Mr Brown's inability to participate in any summit without boasting that it had all jumped to his masterly tune grew extremely wearisome. But Mr Cameron's general insouciance about the G20, while refreshing in a way and authentically Tory, risks going too far in the opposite direction. It is certainly no bad thing to jettison some of the excessive claims about the G20 process.

There is also a need, as the government is hinting, to scale down the cost and disruption of summitry generally. Yet there is little doubt that if the G20 did not exist it would have to be invented. It was born out of twin necessities – first to widen the share of responsibility for international financial decision-making from the industrial powers that made up the increasingly ineffective G8 and, second, to confront the collapse of the banking system and of world trade. Neither of these problems has gone away. Nor has the importance of an institution that can deal with the world's chronic economic imbalances on something more than a crisis management basis.

Mr Cameron's attempt to claim that the main outcome of the G20 was that the other 19 gave their blessing to British and European deficit reduction programmes is misleading. The Toronto text certainly signs off in a general sense on the fiscal consolidation in last week's budget. Yet the text also insists that such measures must be growth-friendly and repeats that the G20's highest priorities are to boost demand and rebalance growth. This is certainly not the impression that Mr Cameron, with his deficit cutting preoccupation, either gave or wished to give.

It all adds to the concern that the G20 has flunked too many big issues. Philosophical and practical divides about fiscal strategy are deeper than before. Other divisions continue between countries whose banks are healthy and those whose banks are not. It is hard not to feel that the Toronto G20 missed its moment. In the past the G20 aimed too high and promised too much. In 2010 the risk is the reverse, that it has aimed too low and promised too little for a still fragile and volatile global economy.

David Willetts hints that university students will face higher fees

Students should consider university fees 'more as an obligation to pay higher income tax' than a debt

Jessica Shepherd, education correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 09.06.2010

  Vince Cable and David Willetts arrive to attend the weekly cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

In an interview with the Guardian, David Willetts warned that the cost of hundreds of thousands of students' degree courses was a "burden on the taxpayer that had to be tackled".

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, and Vince Cable his former deputy have pledged not to vote in favour of higher fees. To avoid division, the coalition government has agreed to allow Lib Dems to abstain from voting on the issue in parliament. The review into fees, which is being led by Browne, the former chief executive of BP , is likely to report in the autumn.

He said he had asked the Higher Education Funding Council for England to write to all higher education institutions requesting they publish their records of how many graduates are in jobs and how they prepare students for the workplace.The aim is to have the information ready for 2011, he said.

Michael Winner is a respected writer, film-maker and  food critic.  In his mid-70's, he is often provocative, creating an instant reaction from readers, tongue-in-cheek and self-opinionated, he makes me laugh.  His thoughts below on exercise machines for seniors in Hyde Park (London), amuse me and are shared for your enjoyment.

A playground for seniors? They must have a death wish!

By Michael Winner   21.05.2010

   Feeling the strain: Michael Winner at the new Pensioners' Playground at Hyde Park in central London

 

Famine is result of a failing food system

The root cause of hunger and famine is rarely crop failure. It is about who controls and benefits from land and its resources

Growing population, dependence on monoculture, a food economy geared to exports and concentrated in the hands of a few players, neoliberal economics meeting climate shock ending in catastrophic failure of food supply – we could be talking about common concerns over food security in the coming decades. But now tweak the language: big families, single staple potato crop, land controlled by absentee landlords and their agents producing meat and butter not for the locals but to ship to England, laissez-faire economics, then blight, leading to mass starvation. The conditions that create hunger and famine around the world have followed a pattern for centuries – and still do today.

Last weekend, I joined several hundred people gathered under a blazing sky in Ireland's County Mayo for the annual Famine Walk from Doolough Lake to the tiny town of Louisburgh organised by the Irish campaign group Afri. The breathtaking beauty of the mountain scenery belies the tragedy that it had witnessed back in 1849. The walk retraces the path taken by hundreds of starving Irish tenant farmers who had struggled into Louisburgh to be inspected by the English commissioners in the hope of being granted emergency rations, only to be told to walk 10 miles up to the grand house by Doolough lake instead.

Already enfeebled by hunger, many died en route and in the months immediately after. During the great hunger around 1 million Irish people died and a further 1 million were forced into emigration for want of food. Yet, throughout the period, 1845-52, Ireland exported large amounts of food to England. Even had it not, the almost destitute peasantry created by large English landholdings, rent-collecting middlemen and increasing population, had no money to buy the food. They planted lumper potatoes because that high-yielding but disease-prone variety was the only crop capable of producing sufficient calories for their families on endlessly divided plots of land.

The root cause of hunger and famine is rarely crop failure alone. It is about who controls and benefits from the land and its resources. About 1 billion people, or one in six of the global population, go hungry today, even though more food is being produced than ever. And yet, around the same number of people are overweight or obese and likely to have their lives cut short by diet-related disease. We have, in other words, a food system that is failing.

It is a food system that is profligate with finite resources – with fossil fuels for agrochemicals, artificial fertiliser, processing, packaging and transport, with water that is increasingly scarce, and with soil that is being eroded and degraded.

It delivers an excess of food that is unhealthy for the affluent and yet is incapable of producing enough calories for the poor. And it is a system in which the value of the food chain has been captured at each point, from seed to field to factory to shop, by powerful transnational corporations. (Rich countries don't like to do empire these days so they have privatised it.)

Three giant corporates dominate global seed sales and have turned the raw material of food into patents; six corporates dominate agrochemical production; three companies control the bulk of global grain trade; in most European countries a handful of processors now dominate the supply in key food sectors such as meat and milk; and, in many countries, just three or four retailers are now the gatekeepers for access to consumers. Meanwhile, all but the most intensive and large-scale farmers are being driven off the land, many of the poorest forced into migration.

It is a system of extraordinary sophistication and yet also of startling fragility, vulnerable to climate shocks and energy price spikes. But it has not been created by accident. US and European government policies postwar have fostered it – with agricultural subsidies that have encouraged surplus of their own commodity crops, and with trade agreements and loans through international financial institutions that have forced markets in poorer countries open to take those crops and the processed junk diets their manufacturers like to make of them.

The hundreds walking through the Mayo valley last weekend were not just engaged in an act of remembrance. They were voting with their feet for change.

China puts the eco back in economy

Covering an area of 600 square kilometers in Hubei Province, Shennongjia Nature Reserve is famed for its high and elegant mountain peaks, limpid spring water and rare animals and plants. Photograph: Xinhua/Corbis

Amid all the doom and gloom during the past week about the global loss of biodiversity, there have been a couple of potentially positive steps forward by the usual villain of the piece: China.

These steps suggest China is moving in tandem with United Nation recommendations that environmental costs should be factored into the global economy.

Serious money is involved. The State Forestry Administration estimated last week that forest ecosystems contribute 10 trillion yuan, or about a third of China's gross domestic product.

This figure - which takes into account carbon sequestration, water conservation, biodiversity protection and biomass production – suggests the administration is seeking not just a new set of values, but a new role for itself now that the nation's forests are logged out and 2,000 species reportedly threatened with extinction.

More intriguing still are reports that the government is drafting an ecological compensation scheme, which would expand and strengthen existing measures such as payment for wildlife reserves, environmental levies imposed on mines, compensation from upstream river polluters to downstream users and economic redistribution schemes that aim to close the income gap between manufacturing hubs on the east coast and rural hinterland.

On the other hand, if the price of nature is set too low and regulation is too weak - both currently the case – then this policy could accelerate the unsustainable extraction of resources.
The ministry of environmental protection – arguably the most idealistic but weakest branch of the government - has a tough task ahead in calculating regional ecological accounts.

Update:  20.03.2010.  It's not often that I air my political, social or moral beliefs in public, or that I lose control of my emotions, and overflow into anger; but it has happened twice this week, within a few days.

Millions of Chinese rural migrants denied education for their children  Link to this video

Parents face dilemma as hereditary registration system limits access to urban services

Caroline Saunders  13.01.2010. Haiti needs our help

Today's earthquake should focus our attention on this ill-fate nation, where corruption has stopped aid from reaching the poor An earthquake of magnitude seven would be devastating for any country. In the wake of such force, death and destruction is tragically inevitable. However, the repercussions for Haiti, this small ill-fated Caribbean country, will be worse than almost anywhere else in the world, because of the long-term political, economic and cultural context that surrounds today's natural disaster.

There is a story often told among Haitians that when the Spanish came to Hispaniola (the small island shared between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) they surrendered Haiti to the devil in order to dedicate the Dominican Republic to God. When you consider their relative situations it is not hard to see why this myth is so commonly believed.

Even before today's tragic events Haiti was the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Nearly 80% of its population live on less than US$2 a day. Only 62% of its adult population are literate and 25% are in any form of employment and 30% have sanitation in their homes. By crossing a seemingly meaningless geographical border into the Dominican Republic the average person could expect their life expectancy to increase by over 12 years and to be seven times wealthier, according to the World Bank.

The political situation in Haiti has much to do with its continued economic ruin. Whereas the Dominican Republic has been able to make tourist industry hay, with its warm climate and Caribbean beaches, Haiti's long history of political instability has led it to be considered "dangerous" by most foreign offices. In 2006 a democratically elected leftwing government came to power, with the promise of a new beginning for Haiti's poor.

 

Predictably very little progress has been made in the last four years despite substantial amounts of aid pouring in.

Speaking to state officials in Port au Prince last month, for a project working with vulnerable children for Jubilee Action, almost all agreed with the analysis of foreign NGOs on the cause of this stagnation: corruption. Tales of foreign aid being used on palatial homes for ministers or as bribes by officials standing for election are told and laughed about in the halls of power. Perhaps there is faint hope that today's earthquake will concentrate the minds of those who control aid to Haiti on the humanitarian cost of the government's failure to make any progress in providing suitable homes for its population, never mind education or healthcare. 
 

Haiti's cultural traditions also have their part to play in making the standard of living there lower than anywhere in the Caribbean and most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The prevailing belief in voodoo continues to mean that many Haitians reject modern medicine in favour of more traditional practices. A visit to the village witch doctor is for many Haitian parents the first port of call when their child falls ill. Without access to clean water and without treatment for basic illnesses the child mortality rate in Haiti is one in five, with diarrhoea, malaria and TB the most common causes of death.

Ironically for the only country ever to have had a successful slave revolt, child enslavement is also a culturally accepted practice in Haiti. Across the country it is estimated that 300,000 children between eight and 15 are kept as restaveks, unpaid domestic labourers, by wealthier host families. Over 75% of the restaveks are girls and sexual abuse by the men of the house is common. 
 

It is clear to anyone who has been to Port au Prince that this recent disaster, like the hurricanes in 2008, will be catastrophic for the Haitian people who already live with nothing. The fear is that like in 2008, aid will pour into the country from well-meaning donors, only to be siphoned off, one state level at a time. This time the international community must acknowledge the wider issues Haiti faces and, once the immediate emergency is over, develop an approach to Haiti with its people and its children at the core.

 

There is hope, when the EU gave money to build roads to a contractor not the government, Haiti got its first serviceable roads. We can help the Haitian people, not just in the immediate aftermath, but in the long-term. We have models for how this can be achieved. Now it would be irresponsible not to.

Our personal view, for what it's worth, is that given time, Haiti will join the United States, as a Member of the Union, as a necessary mans of survival.  Send your comments...

Students more worried about getting a job than saving the planet  By Alastair Jamieson   09.01.2010.

This survey is the nearest I can find reflecting students attitudes.  Although it has a younger sampling base (8 - 14) than most students who visit this website (18 - 25), from past experiences, the results are similar, and not surprising. 
 
Our observations, and correspondence from students indicates that students worry about their family and relationships, study performance and grades, job opportunities and finances.  AC.

Students are more worried about getting a job than about the environment, crime or war, according to a poll.

In Britain, 42 per cent of children use social networking sites compared to a European average of 26 per cent

 

A European survey of 3,000 children aged between eight and 14 found almost one quarter of those in the UK listed unemployment as their top future concern, in contrast to other countries where green issues were the biggest fear.

 

The poll also found British 'tweenagers' were almost twice as likely to use the internet for social development compared to their European counterparts yet still prefer to contact their friends in person rather than using computers or mobile phone texts.  

 

The results of the survey, carried out in for television channel Disney XD, suggest the first generation to have grown up in a world of instant communication may be savvier about the opportunities and drawbacks of digital technology.

 

Three in five (59 per cent) British 'tweens' said they could not imagine life without the internet and computers – well ahead of Spain (50 per cent), Italy and Germany and France (35 per cent).

 

In the UK, 42 per cent said they use social networking sites and 33 per cent use online clubs compared to a European average of 26 per cent and 15 per cent respectively.

However, 36 per cent of all those surveyed prefer to contact their friends in person compared to 21 per cent using mobile phone or texts.

 

Across Europe, 'tweens' are more keen to talk to the friends they already have than make new friends online: 53 per cent feel the internet improves their life by helping them keep in touch with existing friends outside school while 24 per cent say it helps them make new friends.

 

"This is useful evidence that young people are more aware of the opportunities and the limitations of the internet and social media than we give them credit for, said Tom Dunmore, consulting editor of Stuff magazine.

 

"The fact that British children are more socially engaged online reflects the importance of the internet in our culture, with organisations like the BBC pushing more content online.

"Far from being a distraction to academic study, the internet is massively beneficial to learning."

 

Despite being more concerned about jobs than the environment, UK children were the greenest in practice, with 87 per cent recycling – the highest percentage in Europe, with Spain following at 71 per cent.

 

British boys most want to be a footballer (22 per cent) while most girls want to be a vet (17 per cent).

 

Perhaps surprisingly, three quarters agreed with the suggestion that their parents understand technology really well and can teach them about devices.

 

Mr Dunmore added: "This is the perhaps the first generation whose parents have been comfortable and familiar with the same sort of technology, rather than baffled by it."

Half of British children – 49 per cent of boys and 55 per cent of girls – chose their mother as the person they most admired, with around a quarter choosing their father. Only four per cent chose their favourite sports player.

 

Across Europe, all children ranked their family as the most important thing in their life, ahead of health, happiness, a good job and having money.

 

The survey also provided hope for future entrepreneurs: across Europe, 64 per cent of 'tweens' would rather work for themselves compared to 36 per cent who would prefer to work for someone else, while children in Britain and Poland named Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates among the five famous figures they most admired.

 

Across Europe, most tweens would like to be a vet (13 per cent), followed by a teacher or footballer (9 per cent each), doctor (7 per cent) and police officer (5 per cent).

 

The top three things "that make someone popular" were identified as helping friends (67 per cent), being funny (51 per cent) and being generous (39 per cent).

 

Top five famous people British boys admire were: David Beckham; Cristiano Ronaldo; Barack Obama; Daniel Radcliffe and Bill Gates.

 

Top five famous people British girls admire were: Miley Cyrus; Cheryl Cole; Lady Gaga; Zac Efron and The Queen.

 

France was the only country where both boys and girls named Barack Obama as their most admired famous person.

 

Victoria Hardy, executive director of Europe research for Disney Channels, said: "These children have grown up in a world dominated by fast-track celebrity yet still place family values above everything in their priority list.

 

"While some are as young as eight, our research has found that these children have a heightened understanding of socio-economic issues and are already demonstrating behavioural patterns that will have a deep impact on the future."
 

Cold? Try Siberian winters like I did!  By Edward Lucas   04.01.2010.
Edward Lucas is eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist

Deep snow: Britain comes to a halt when it snows. Here, a man digs a path on the North Yorkshire Moors