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- Allied forces launch missiles into Libya
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| Allied forces launch missiles into Libya Posted: 19 Mar 2011 02:20 PM PDT • US announces Operation Odyssey Dawn is under way In a similar vein to that Huffington Post piece, here's something from MensSana in the comments below:
Does going into Libya make Barack Obama a "liberal hawk" and not that much different from his predecessor? Doug Bandow argues at the Huffington Post:
Bandow says Libya is not America's war. He points out the hypocrisy of Washington attacking Gaddafi while standing aside as Saudi forces help Bahrain put down its protests. He curiously argues, without expanding, that the attacks on Libya are not justified on humanitarian grounds. He says America should not be "the world's permanent 911 number". Have been looking around for details of what bombs have been dropped where, and found this tweet from CNN. Whether or not the allies will release a list of their targets overnight or give some sort of briefing remains to be seen. If CNN is correct, it shows that US action hasn't been limited to cruise missile strikes from its ships and subs in the Mediterranean. Spotted this short video dug up by al-Jazeera of a cruise missile being launched from the USS Burke as part of Operation Odyssey Dawn. Predictably enough, Russia has followed China in coming out to condemn the attacks on Libya - consistent with their general attitude towards any foreign intervention in another country. The African Union has also gone on record to call for an immediate halt to the attacks, according to a CNN report. Sky News editor Tim Marshall has been discussing how the Mediterranean is filling up with ships, warplanes and other "military assets" ranged against the Gaddafi regime. He suggested that the overnight campaign of strikes has been mostly about taking down anti-aircraft capability so that the no-fly zone can be enforced and air strikes undertaken with less risk to the allies' aircraft. He also says the coming day might see the allies pause in their assault and offer Gaddafi the chance to put in place a genuine ceasefire. This image shows anti-aircraft fire - its path marked by red tracer bullets - in the night sky over Tripoli, the Libyan capital. Overnight there has been heavy gunfire in Tripoli with reports of military facilities and fuel storage tanks hit. A report from the BBC that Gaddafi's forces have been up to their now-familiar body snatching tricks, previously used to try and conceal the death toll among protesters.
The Chinese government has expressed regret at the American and European attack on Libya. Beijing was one of five governments that abstained from the security council vote authorising military action. Here's a brief report from AP:
We've been slown down by a technical problem but things seem to be back in action now. From Tripoli, Ibn Omar has this disturbing tweet: His feed also claims that pro-Gaddafi forces have been going around removing emergency blood supplies from blood banks in the capital. Here is a timeline of the major developments in Libya since the start of protests inspired by uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. I've chopped this down from a lengthy Press Association filing. It shows that when civilians began taking to the streets calling for change, Gaddafi responded immediately with deadly force.
There have been tributes around the websites of Libyan revolutionaries for Mohammed Nabbous, the multimedia reporter for the opposition movement who was shot dead in Benghazi on Saturday. Here's something from the blog of Louis Abelman who has been posting from the rebel capital.
Allied air strikes and missiles by the "crusader enemy" have hit several parts of Libya's capital Tripoli early on Sunday, state television there is reporting. Meanwhile Gaddafi's Latin American allies - most prominent among them Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president - have lined up to condemn the military strikes. The presidents of Bolivia and Nicuragua, Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega, joined him in denouncing the attacks as being aimed at getting hold of Libya's oil. Fidel Castro, ex-president and father of Cuba's revolution, also chimed in, saying the attacks represent western capitalist excess doing its worst. Chávez had this to say:
Libyan TV has quoted the country's military as saying there are 48 dead and 150 wounded so far from the cruise missile and air strikes. Associated Press is reporting that thousands of Gaddafi loyalists have packed into the heavily fortified Aziziya military compound where he lives in Tripoli "to protect against attacks". My colleague Alan Evans has just sent me a link where you can view US navy photos of some of its missile launches tonight against Libya. Hello, this is Warren Murray taking over the Libya live blog from Richard Adams. It's been a hectic night thus far, so I'll begin with a summary of a few of the main developments. • European countries and the US backed by Arab League members have launched attacks from air and sea against the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The bombing raids by fighter jets, cruise missile strikes and electronic warfare are aimed at knocking out military units and capability being used to attack rebel strongholds such as Benghazi and Misrata. Air defence systems are being targeted to give the jets clear skies. Leaders such as Barack Obama and David Cameron have stressed that they are acting to protect civilians and complying fully within the UN security council resolution. • The capital, Libya, has also been on the receiving end of the onslaught, with heavy anti-aircraft fire indicating that the allies' jets are overhead. • Gaddafi has come out to condemn the "crusader" attacks and declare that the whole Mediterranean and north Africa will be caught up in a disastrous conflict. He has declared that the country's armories are being thrown open so that citizens can defend Libya. At the same time his government has called for an urgent UN security council meeting to discuss the attacks. • In the rebel capital, Benghazi, where the revolutionary council is based, the attacks have been greeted with relief and hope, but also a sense of bitterness that the delay between the UN vote and the beginning of air sorties allowed Gaddafi, as our correspondent Chris McGreal put it, "a last roll of the dice – a bloody assault on the city that was the cradle of the revolution against his despotic 42 year rule". • A team of al-Jazeera journalists has been detained by the regime in Tripoli - they include a Briton, a Norwegian, a Tunisian and a Mauritanian. In the midst of all tonight's action, the bigger picture tweeted:
I'm handing over live blogging duties to my colleague Warren Murray. A statement from Defence Secretary Liam Fox has more details of the British military forces involved:
The UK military has officially confirmed that Royal Air Force planes also took part on the attack on Gaddafi's forces, with flights by GR4 Tornados firing Storm Shadow missiles – a European version of the cruise missile – at targets in Libya: A statement from the Chief of Defence Staff's strategic communications officer Major General John Lorimer:
The US State Department has tonight released an advisory notice recommending against American journalists traveling to Libya. A spokesman said that no US officials remain in the country, and advised that US citizens already in Libya should get out immediately. Qatar's prime minister has told local new channel al-Jazeera that Qatar will definitively participate in the military action in Libya "Qatar will participate in military action because we believe there must be Arab states undertaking this action, because the situation there is intolerable.... it has become an open war involving mercenaries. I think that this is an issue that must stop very quickly," Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said, adding:
My colleague Jonathan Haynes has a round-up of the front page headlines from the British Sunday newspapers: • Sunday Mirror: IT'S WAR! • News of the World: Blown to Brits • Sunday Telegraph: British forces attack Gaddafi • Mail on Sunday: Cruise strikes hit Gaddafi • The Independent on Sunday: The UN strikes back Reuters reports:
CNN has footage clearly showing anti-aircraft tracer, taken within the last 10 minutes. Both CNN and al-Jazeera's correspondents in the centre of the city are now reporting sustained and constant anti-aircraft artillery firing into the skies over Tripoli, following heavy explosions, at after 2.30am local time in Libya. The second wave of attacks may be currently taking place in Libya, with reports of heavy anti-aircraft gunfire and explosions in Tripoli. Turkey appears to be ready to aid the military action against Libya, despite earlier public disapproval of the UN sanctioned intervention. But now Turkey says it will make "the necessary and appropriate national contribution" to implementing a UN no-fly zone over Libya and protect civilians, its foreign ministry said in a statement: "Within that framework the necessary preparations and studies are being made by civil and military authorities". A message on Libyan state television says the Libyan government had decided to end efforts to stop illegal immigration into Europe, citing a security source. It hardly seems like the government's highest priority at the moment, to be honest. The rebel-held city of Misrata has been under siege by Gaddafi's forces for several days – and appears to have been one of the first beneficiaries of Western aerial attacks. Reuters reports:
While all the attention is on Libya today, there are still turmoil in other countries in the region, especially Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. There are multiple reports of tanks patrolling the streets of Daraa in Syria, where there was a brutal security crackdown after protests yesterday. AP reports:
Elsewhere, there are unconfirmed reports that Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, has been arrested in the early hours of the morning. US film-maker Michael Moore has his own view of today's military action, via Twitter:
A correspondent for al-Jazeera reports seeing Danish, Spanish and Canadian planes at the Italian air force base in Sigonella, Sicily, being refueled. Libya has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, after a day of attacks by a coalition of Western states, according to al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya television networks. News is trickling in about the targets of tonight's attacks. Mohammed Ali, a spokesman for the exiled opposition group the Libyan Salvation Front, said the Libyan air force headquarters at the Mateiga air base in eastern Tripoli and the Aviation Academy in Misrata had both been targeted. Reuters interviews people in Benghazi and they respond with enthusiasm to today's air and missile strikes against the Gaddafi regime: Iyad Ali, 37, unemployed: "We think this will end Gaddafi's rule. Libyans will never forget France's stand with them. If it weren't for them, then Benghazi would have been overrun tonight." Khalid al-Ghurfaly, 38, civil servant: "We salute, France, Britain, the United States and the Arab countries for standing with Libya. But we think Gaddafi will take out his anger on civilians. So the West has to hit him hard." Faraj Omar, 55, engineer: "We've all seen the news but we'll see what the results are later. To have any effect Gaddafi must be hit in Aziziyah, this is the head of the snake," he said referring to Gaddafi's heavily-fortified Tripoli compound. Libyan state television is claiming that a French jet was shot down over Libya today. The French immediately denied it, and there's no evidence to support the Libyan claim. Libya's air defences have been "severely disabled" in today's attacks, Reuters quotes an unidentified US official as saying:
Qatar and the UAE will be sending forces to the no-fly zone. AFP is reporting that the United Arab Emirates will be contributing 24 fighter jets – Mirage 2000-9s and F-16s – while Qatar will contribute between four and six Mirage 2000-5s, according to a French official. Al-Jazeera has announced that a British journalist was among the group of four arrested and detained by Libyan forces in Tripoli today. Al-Jazeera said Kamel Atalua was a cameraman for the network, and was arrested with cameraman Ammar al-Hamdan, who is Norwegian, and correspondents Lotfi al-Messaoudi and Ahmed Vall Ould Addin, who are Tunisian and Mauritanian nationals. The group had been reporting from Libya for several days. Listening to Gaddafi's address – conducted over the phone but broadcast on state television – it was only three minutes long but in every other respect it was vintage Gaddafi. There as a chilling warning of the danger to civilians throughout the Mediterranean, with Gaddafi saying:
There are reports that a Libyan journalist, who ran a website detailing the Gaddafi regime's attacks and providing commentary on the uprising, was killed on Saturday in Benghazi. Mohammed al-Nabbous, who founded a livestream channel called Libya al-Hurra, or Free Libya, is said to have been hit by sniper fire as Gaddafi's forces attacked the city. Muammar Gaddafi has spoked by phone to Libyan television, saying he will arm civilians to defend Libya from what he called "crusader aggression" by Western forces that have launched air strikes against him:
Gaddafi warned that the entire Mediterranean and north Africa region were now a battleground, calling tonight's attacks "simply a colonial crusader aggression that may ignite another large-scale crusader war." The Guardian's Chris McGreal is currently in the rebel capital Benghazi and sends this eye-witness account of the first wave of attacks – and the more muted response following a day of heavy fighting:
The Guardian's Washington bureau chief Ewen MacAskill reports that US secretary of defence Robert Gates has been forced to cancel his trip to Russia planned for tomorrow:
Air strikes by Western forces near Libya's city of Misrata have attacked a military airport where Muammar Gaddafi's loyalists are based, two residents have told Reuters, denying reports on Libyan state TV that fuel depots were hit. The base is 7km (four miles) from the city, which is Libya's third largest and is the last rebel holdout in the west of the country. "The international forces struck Gaddafi battalions in the air military college, but some of the (government) forces fled shortly before the attack," resident Abdulbasset told Reuters by phone. Another resident said he had heard a loud explosion coming from the direction of the airbase. The New York Times has significant behind-the-scenes details from the Paris summit, with claims that France's unilateral decision to strike Libya "angered some of the countries gathered at the summit meeting" – and suggestions that France blocked earlier Nato action. The implication is that Nicolas Sarkozy wanted the limelight while the Paris summit was under-way.
To recap, here's details from the statement published earlier by the US Department of Defence:
Libya's state television is reporting that Muammar Gaddafi will shortly make an address to the people of Libya "on the Crusader's aggression". State television is even running the message on screen in English, to make sure the message gets across. Here is the full text of the statement by President Obama, speaking in Brazil after the launch of Operation Odyssey Dawn:
Good evening and welcome to our continuing live coverage as coaliton forces launch military action against Libya. You can read our earlier live blog here. This is a summary of the events so far. • Western planes are leading air strikes against Muammar Gaddafi's military as world leaders ordered the biggest intervention in the Arab world since allied forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The Pentagon announced that the action, codenamed Operation Odyssey Dawn, was under way. • British and US forces have fired more than 110 Tomahawk missiles at targets in Libya. The Pentagon said the aim of the operation was to take out the Libyan air defence systems in order that piloted aircraft could enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone. • Al-Jazeera is reporting that Libya's rebel military council has been co-ordinating with international forces to identify the locations of Gadaffi's forces. Earlier in the day, the rebels lost their only aircraft when it was shot down over Benghazi, possibly by their own side. • In Tripoli, Libyans loyal to Gaddafi scorned the UN resolution and blamed al-Qaida for the rebellion in their country. Ian Black, our Middle East editor, who is in the Libyan capital, says in this report that "patriotic songs boomed out from giant loudspeakers mounted in the centre of Tripoli's Green Square." Read the Guardian's previous live blog of today's events here. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Japan's exhausted nuclear staff make breakthrough Posted: 19 Mar 2011 12:17 PM PDT 'A fearless band of scientists and workers trying to stop a meltdown have inspired the entire country Exhausted engineers attached a power cable to the outside of Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant on Saturday. The operation raised hopes that it may be possible to restart the pumping of water into the plant's stricken reactors and cool down its overheated fuel rods before there are more fires and explosions. "We have connected the external transmission line with the receiving point of the plant and confirmed that electricity can be supplied," said a spokesman for the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power. However, officials said further cabling would have to be completed before they made an attempt to restart the water pumps at the Fukushima plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo. It was also reported that health workers had detected radiation levels in milk and spinach from farms in Fukushima and in neighbouring Ibaraki that breached safety limits, although it was claimed this represented no risk to human health. Officials have asked people living near the plant to follow basic safety advice when going outside: drive, don't walk; wear a mask; wear long sleeves; don't go out in the rain. Radiation levels in Tokyo were also said to be within safe limits. Nevertheless, the city has seen an exodus of tourists, expatriates and many Japanese, who fear a release of radioactive material from Fukushima. At the nuclear plant, firefighters continued to spray water to cool the dangerously overheated fuel rods in order to keep cores in its reactors from overheating and melting. The UN's atomic agency said that conditions at the plant remained grave but were not deteriorating, following Japan's decision to raise the severity rating of the nuclear crisis from level 4 to level 5 on the seven-level international scale. It put the Fukushima fires on a par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in the US in 1979. The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 – which sent a plume of radioactive material into the skies 25 years ago – is the only incident to have reached level 7. Fires and explosions occurred at four of the six reactors at Fukushima last week after the 8.9 Richter earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that hit Japan on 11 March. The earthquake triggered an automatic shutdown of the three reactors that were in operation. The tsunami then damaged diesel generators that were providing back-up power for the pumps driving coolant through these reactors. As a result, heat could no longer be pumped away and temperatures inside the reactors' cores began to rise, eventually setting off a series of chemical fires. "Hollow rods made of zirconium hold each reactor's uranium fuel pellets in place," said Professor Andrew Sherry, director of the Dalton Nuclear Institute in Manchester. "When temperatures rise too much, that zirconium starts to react with the reactor's water. This chemical reaction raises temperatures even further. Hydrogen is also produced. When this hydrogen exploded, it destroyed the buildings that act as each reactor's outer protective shell." The explosions also damaged two storage tanks in which fuel rods – still hot because of the radioactive material inside them – were being stored in water. Water levels dropped, exposing fuel rods and triggering further chemical reactions between zirconium fuel cladding and the steam that had begun to build up. These set off fires in storage tanks at reactors three and four. As a result, plant workers, emergency services personnel and scientists have been battling for the past week to restore the pumping of water to the Fukushima nuclear plant and to prevent a meltdown at one of the reactors. A team of about 300 workers – wearing masks, goggles and protective suits sealed with duct tape and known as the Fukushima 50 because they work in shifts of 50-strong groups – have captured the attention of the Japanese who have taken heart from the toil inside the wrecked atom plant. "My eyes well with tears at the thought of the work they are doing," Kazuya Aoki, a safety official at Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told Reuters. Little is known about this band of heroes, except for the few whose relatives have spoken to Japanese media. One woman said that her father, who had worked for an electricity company for 40 years and who was due to retire in September, had volunteered. "I feel it's my mission to help," he told his daughter. On Wednesday, the government raised the cumulative legal limit of radiation that the Fukushima workers could be exposed to from 100 to 250 millisieverts. That is more than 12 times the annual legal limit for workers dealing with radiation under British law. Each team works as fast as possible for the briefest of periods. The pilots of the helicopters used to "water-bomb" the plant have been restricted to missions lasting less than 40 minutes. Nevertheless, the workers have not only managed to link a power cable to one of the plant's reactors, No 2, but they have also connected diesel generators to the No 5 and No 6 reactors, which have so far not suffered serious damage. "If they are successful in getting the cooling infrastructure up and running, that will be a significant step forward in establishing stability," said Eric Moore, a nuclear power expert at US-based FocalPoint Consulting Group. However, the government has conceded that it was too slow in dealing with the crisis at Fukushima. Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said that "in hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and co-ordinating all that information, and provided it faster". The fires at Fukushima have also triggered serious criticism of the plant's design. The decision to place storage tanks close to reactors has been pinpointed as a key design error. When those reactors caught fire, they quickly triggered reactions in the storage tanks which themselves caught fire, and so the fires spread. In addition, the failure to build defences that could withstand the huge tsunami that struck Japan has also been attacked. "The geological evidence in Japan indicates a history of giant tsunamis over the past several thousand years," said Professor Rolf Aalto, an Exeter University expert on tsunamis. "Unfortunately, an engineering and political decision was made to design protection and plan cities around a hypothesised five-metre tsunami – about the size of those experienced in Japan over the last century. However, it was not a surprise to geologists that a tsunami two to three times larger appeared. Both the earthquake and tsunami were exceptional, but were both well within the realm of what can occur within that tectonic setting." However, Sherry defended the ageing plant – whose six reactors came on line between 1970 and 1979. "These reactors were designed in the 1960s and we have learned a lot since then. Modern plants are much safer. Think of cars in the 1960s: they didn't have crumple zones, airbags or seat belts – features we all take for granted today. It is the same with nuclear reactor design." The Fukushima reactors, known as boiling water reactors, have active safety features – you have to do something to prevent dangerous heating, such as ensuring that the pumps are activated. "By contrast, new reactors are designed to include 'passive' safety systems that are designed to shut down and cool fuel without the need for power being available at the plant," said Barry Marsden, professor of nuclear graphite technology at Manchester University. Modern reactors also have double or triple back-up safety systems. It remains to be seen if such reassurances will have an impact. The sight of explosions erupting from the reactors last week have done nothing for the prospects of the world's nuclear industry. It had been gearing up for a restoration of its fortunes, with governments across the planet turning to the power of the atom as a future energy source – one that does not pose major climate change risks. It now looks like a tarnished option, or at least that is how it will be portrayed by those who oppose an expansion of nuclear plant construction. "European leaders must take note of the growing nuclear crisis in Japan, and act now," said Patricia Lorenz, nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe. "Europe needs a phase-out plan for nuclear, and must open the way for safe solutions to climate change and energy security." There are signs that this message is getting through. Last week, the German government suspended its approval process for new nuclear construction projects. More significantly, China – the world's leader in nuclear expansion, with 28 plants under construction – followed suit. Whether these suspensions will last very long is a different matter. Much depends on the success of the Fukushima 50 and their bid to complete a power link between the stricken plant and the outside world. Failure would certainly do little for the reputation of nuclear power. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| WikiLeaks: US ambassador quits Posted: 19 Mar 2011 09:17 PM PDT Carlos Pascual became embroiled in row with Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, over cables criticising drug war The US ambassador to Mexico has resigned amid a furore over a leaked diplomatic cable in which he complained about inefficiency and infighting among Mexican security forces in the campaign against drug cartels. Hillary Clinton said Carlos Pascual's decision to step down was "based upon his personal desire to ensure the strong relationship between our two countries and to avert issues" raised by the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón. The US secretary of state was not specific, but a furious Calderón has publicly criticised Pascual's criticisms, divulged as part of the US embassy cables by WikiLeaks. Pascual's resignation appears to be the biggest fallout yet from the release of thousands of sensitive US diplomatic cables from around the world. It is the first such public departure by a US ambassador during the Obama administration. Clinton went to lengths to praise Pascual's work in Mexico and said the Obama administration never lost confidence in him. Clinton said Pascual's work with Mexico to build institutions capable of fighting drug traffickers "will serve both our nations for decades". She was "particularly grateful to Carlos for his efforts to sustain the morale and security of American personnel after tragic shootings in Mexico" that killed a US employee and three other people tied to the consulate in the border city of Ciudad Juarez last year. "It is with great reluctance that President Obama and I have acceded to Carlos's request" to step down, Clinton said in a statement. The ambassador's resignation laid bare how difficult relations between the US embassy and the Mexican government had become since the release of the cable in December. Calderón has made no secret of his personal anger at Pascual. "I will not accept or tolerate any type of intervention," Calderón said in an interview with the newspaper El Universal in late February. "But that man's ignorance translates into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico and affects things and creates ill feeling within our own team." There was no immediate reaction from the Mexican government, although an official from Calderón's office said it was preparing a response. Pascual may have ruffled feathers in the Mexican government and Calderón's National Action party by dating the daughter of Francisco Rojas, the congressional leader of the former longtime ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mexican officials and the U.S. Embassy have declined to comment on that matter. One of the leaked diplomatic cables that most angered Calderón referred to friction between Mexico's army and navy while detailing an operation that led to the death of drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva. Pascual said the US, which had information locating Beltran Leyva, originally took it to the army, which refused to move quickly. Beltran Leyva was eventually brought down in a shootout with Mexican marines, who have since taken the lead in other operations against cartel capos. Other cables reported jealousies and a lack of co-ordination between various Mexican security forces. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Security forces kill five in Syria Posted: 19 Mar 2011 11:14 AM PDT Cordon aimed at suppressing spread of conflict following demonstrations and funeral processions Syrian police have sealed off a southern city after security forces killed at least five protesters. Residents of Daraa were being allowed to leave but not enter the city , said prominent Syrian rights activist Mazen Darwish. The cordon seemed aimed at choking off any spread of unrest after earlier clashes and emotional funeral processions for the dead. President Bashar Al-Assad, who has boasted that his country is immune to the demands for change that have already toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, sent a delegation to the southern city to offer his condolences to families of the victims, according to a Syrian official. Serious disturbances in Syria would be a major expansion of the region's unrest. Syria, a predominantly Sunni country ruled by minority Alawites, has a history of brutally crushing dissent. Security forces launched a harsh crackdown on Friday's demonstrations calling for political freedoms. Protests took place in at least five cities, including the capital, Damascus. But only in Daraa did they turn deadly. Accounts from activists and social media say at least five people died in the gravest unrest in years in Syria. A Syrian official acknowledged only two deaths and said authorities would bring those responsible to trial. The official said that even if an investigation shows security officers were guilty, they will be put on trial "no matter how high their rank is". He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations that bar him from being identified by name. Another government official said Syrian leaders held a meeting in which they decided to form a committee to investigate the circumstances and punish those responsible for the deaths in Daraa. "The Syrian president categorically rejects the shedding of any Syrian blood," the official said, also on condition of anonymity. A Syrian lawmaker from Daraa, Khaled Abboud, blamed Islamic extremists for the violence. "There is a group of Islamic extremists, they have a private or foreign agenda," he said. He did not elaborate. Darwish, who said he was in contact with residents of Daraa, said four of the dead were buried in the city . Thousands of people took part in the funeral under the watch of large numbers of security agents but there was no violence, he said. An activist in Damascus also in contact with Daraa residents said security forces fired tear gas at mourners chanting: "God, Syria and freedom only." He said several people were detained and others suffered from tear gas inhalation. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee said that during the funerals security forces raided some homes and detained people. Citing residents in the city, it added that troops were in full control of the streets. Syria places tight restrictions on the movements of journalists in the country when it comes to security issues and state-run media, and officials rarely comment on such sensitive matters. A video of the clashes posted on YouTube showed a bloodied young man, who appeared to be dead, being carried by several people. Shortly afterward, shooting is heard and crowds scatter. The authenticity of the footage could not be confirmed. In Washington, a National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said: "The United States strongly condemns the violence that has taken place in Syria." He added that the US calls on the Syrian government to allow demonstrations to take place peacefully and for those responsible for violence to "be held accountable". The violence was the worst since 2004 when clashes that began in the north-eastern city of Qamishli between Syrian Kurds and security forces left at least 25 people dead and some 100 injured. Although Assad keeps a tight lid on any form of political dissent, he also has considerable popularity for being seen as one of the few Arab leaders willing to stand up to Israel. Assad told the Wall Street Journal in February that Syria is insulated from the upheaval in the Arab world because he understands his people's needs and has united them in common cause against Israel. Abdul-Karim al-Rihawi, head of the Arab League for Human Rights, said 10 women who were detained on Wednesday after protesting in front of the Syrian Interior Ministry in central Damascus have begun a hunger strike. Citing relatives, al-Rihawi said the women were being held in Douma prison on the outskirts of Damascus, adding that one of them is suffering from a "serious condition". The women were among 33 people, most of them relatives of political detainees in Syria, detained on Wednesday. They were charged by a prosecutor on Thursday with damaging the state's image. Separately, Syria said it was reducing compulsory military service by three months, making it 15 months for educated males and 18 months for those who have not completed primary education. The state-run news agency said the new legislation will go into effect by June. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Egyptian poll attracts big turnout Posted: 19 Mar 2011 06:47 AM PDT Referendum is first major test of transition to democracy in wake of Mubarak's resignation Eager for their first taste of a free vote in decades, Egyptians lined up by the hundreds on Saturday to vote on constitutional amendments sponsored by the ruling military. The nationwide referendum is the first major test of the country's transition to democracy after a popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to step down five weeks ago, handing the reins of power to the military. Early signs show an unusually big turnout, with lines forming in the hours before polls opened. They snaked along the streets in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, with men and women standing in separate lines as is customary in the conservative and mainly Muslim nation. The vote promises to be the freest in Egypt since 1952 when the monarchy was ousted and the multiparty democracy that functioned under British colonial rule was ended. Egypt has since been ruled by men of military background, with fraud and extremely low turnout defining every nationwide vote. "This is a historic day for Egypt," deputy prime minister Yahya al-Gamal said after casting his vote in Cairo. "I had never seen such large numbers of voters in Egypt. Finally, the people of Egypt have come to realise that their vote counts." Voters were asked to choose yes or no for the whole package of nine changes, which would open elections to independent candidates, impose presidential term limits and curtail 30-year-old emergency laws that give police near-unlimited powers. Preliminary results will be announced on Sunday. A yes vote would allow parliamentary and presidential elections to be held later this year or early in the next, a time frame that critics say is too soon for the dozens of political groups born out of the 18-day anti-Mubarak uprising to organise themselves and be able to compete in elections. They say the timetable would benefit Mubarak's one-time ruling National Democratic party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood, the two most powerful and best-organised political groups in Egypt. The NDP is blamed for the rampant corruption and fraud that marred every election in Egypt during Mubarak's 29-year rule. The brotherhood, which has strongly campaigned for the adoption of the changes, advocates the instalment of an Islamic government in Egypt. The ambivalence of its position on the role of women and minority Christians worry large segments of society. Leading the no campaign are two presidential hopefuls, the Nobel laureate and former head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency Mohamed ElBaradei, and Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa, who is a former foreign minister in Egypt. "This is a truly democratic process," Moussa said after he voted in Cairo. ElBaradei said in New Delhi that Egypt's newly formed political parties need more time to prepare for elections after decades of repression. Egypt's Coptic Christians were also overwhelmingly against the amendments. Comprising 10% of the population, Christians complain of institutional discrimination and fear their quest for equal rights would suffer a serious setback if the brotherhood gains influence in post-Mubarak Egypt. "If the Brotherhood comes to power, they will not benefit anyone, Muslims or Christians," said Fawziya Lamie, a 39-year-old Christian nanny, after casting a no vote in the Cairo district of Manial. More than half of Egypt's 80 million people are eligible to vote. The military, in a bid to get the vote out, has decreed that voters would be allowed to cast ballots at any polling centre in the country with their national ID cards as the only required proof of identity. They are required to dip their index finger in ink after voting to prevent multiple balloting. "My vote today will make a difference. It's as simple as that," first-time voter Hossam Bishay, 48, said as he waited in line with about 300 others outside a heavily guarded polling centre in Cairo's upmarket Zamalek district. "I am very excited to be doing this," Alaa al-Sharqawy, an engineering lecturer, said. "It's true that the amendments have polarised us, but I am glad we are voting." The constitutional amendments drawn up by a panel of military-appointed legal scholars are intended to bring just enough change to the 1971 constitution, which was suspended by the military, to ensure presidential and parliamentary elections are free and fair. In addition to allowing independent and opposition candidates to run, they would restore full judicial supervision of votes, a measure seen as vital to preventing fraud. They would also limit presidents to two four-year terms and curb the emergency laws that have long been a chief complaint of the people. Critics have used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and full-page advertisements in newspapers to argue that the entire constitution must be scrapped and a new one drawn up to guarantee Egypt is spared future dictators. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2011 04:14 AM PDT The former US secretary of state helped bring peace to Bosnia, tried to achieve a Middle East settlement and railed against nuclear weapons The former US secretary of state Warren Christopher, who helped bring peace to Bosnia and negotiated for the release of American hostages in Iran, has died at the age of 85. Sonja Steptoe of the law firm O'Melveny & Myers, where Christopher was a senior partner, said Christopher died at his home in Los Angeles on Friday due to complications from bladder and kidney cancer. As the top American statesman under Bill Clinton, Christopher was a behind-the-scenes negotiator. Often called the "stealth" secretary of state, Christopher was known for his understated, self-effacing manner. He had taken the job in January 1993 at the age of 68 and clocked up 704,487 air miles travelling the world. A loyal Democrat and meticulous lawyer, Christopher told the Associated Press his proudest accomplishments included a role in promoting a ban on nuclear weapons tests and the extension of curbs on the proliferation of weapons technology. He also tried to promote peace in the Middle East, tirelessly travelling to the region. Christopher made more than 20 trips to Syria alone in a futile effort to promote a settlement with Israel. He was more successful in the negotiations that produced a settlement in 1995 for Bosnia, ending a war among Muslims, Serbs and Croats that claimed 260,000 lives and drove 1.8 million people from their homes. However, some critics said the administration had moved too slowly against the ethnic violence. Christopher gave top priority to supporting reform in Russia and expanding US economic ties to Asia and supervised the contested Florida recount for Al Gore after the 2000 presidential election, While Christopher often preferred a role out of the spotlight, he made news as deputy secretary of state in President Jimmy Carter's administration, conducting the tedious negotiations that gained the release in 1981 of 52 American hostages in Iran. Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. "The best public servant I ever knew," Carter wrote in his memoirs. Christopher chaired a commission that proposed reforms of the Los Angeles police department in the aftermath of the videotaped beating by police of motorist Rodney King in 1991. President Bill Clinton said at the time of Christopher's resignation from the White House that he "left the mark of his hand on history." As Clinton considered a successor, Christopher offered the criteria he would apply if the choice was up to him. "It would be somebody who has the capacity to provide forceful leadership, someone who has great tenacity, someone who has endurance and a lot of stamina," he said. Christopher overcame sleep deprivation, difficult negotiations with the likes of the late Syrian president Hafez Assad and nagging ulcers to keep his eye on American interests. Always crisp, modest and polite, he drove home an agreement in his last year on the job to halt fighting in Lebanon between Israel and extremist Shi'ite guerrillas. "We have achieved the goal of our mission, which was to achieve an agreement that will save lives and end the suffering of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border," Christopher said in Jerusalem after his successful week-long mission. Madeleine Albright stepped in for Clinton's second term and Christopher returned to his law firm of O'Melveny & Myers with Clinton's "deep gratitude" for his service and with the president's playful description of Christopher as "the only man ever to eat M&Ms on Air Force One with a fork". Although critics complained that the Clinton administration's foreign policy lacked dramatic initiatives, the poised and cautious Christopher indicated he was pleased with the results, especially with what he called the "triple play" of a Nafta trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, the expansion of US economic ties to Pacific Rim nations and the Gatt accord on international tariffs and trade. "Taking it overall, we've done very well on the major issues," he said at a news conference in 1993, during which he also cited US support for economic and political reform in Russia and the "partnership for peace" proposal to expand the involvement of former Communist adversaries in Nato. Christopher looked back with gratitude on how far he had come from a childhood in Scranton, North Dakota, marked by bitter winters and modest circumstances. His father was a bank cashier who fell ill, and the family moved to southern California during the Depression. After his father's death, his mother supported the family of five children as a sales clerk. An ensign in the US navy reserves, he was called up to active duty during the second world war and served in the Pacific. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California in 1945 and, after attending Stanford Law School, served as a clerk to supreme court justice William O Douglas in 1949 and 1950. In the late 1960s, he was a deputy attorney general in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. In 2008, Christopher was co-chairman of a bipartisan panel that studied the recurring question of who, under US law, should decide when the country goes to war. It proposed that the president be required to inform congress of any plans to engage in "significant armed conflict" lasting longer than a week. As a successful Los Angeles lawyer, Christopher had a seven-figure income and a beach house in fashionable Santa Barbara. He is survived by his wife Marie, and had four children in two marriages: Lynn, Scott, Thomas, and Kristen. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Budget to ease pain but keep edge Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT Tax changes to help low earners and scrapping a fuel duty increase will make headlines, but the spectre of a double dip recession means the chancellor will still warn of austerity Hundreds of thousands more low-earners will be lifted out of income tax altogether and motorists will be offered relief from soaring petrol prices under plans to be announced by the chancellor, George Osborne, in the budget this week. The pledge to raise the threshold at which income tax becomes payable will form the centrepiece of measures aimed at relieving hard-pressed low-income groups – and boosting growth – as spending cuts bite. With unrest in the Middle East driving up international oil prices, the chancellor will cancel a planned increase in fuel duty, which was due to come in from 1 April and would have added up to 5p to the price of a litre of petrol. Reversing the rise will cost the Treasury almost £2bn, but Osborne is also known to be considering the more radical step of a fuel "stabiliser", which would placate motorists and hauliers by cushioning the blow of rising oil prices. Osborne said last night he would use the budget to help jobless young people find work, funded by money from the government's £2.5bn levy on banks. Official figures released earlier this week showed 974,000 young people out of work in the three months to January, the highest figure since records began in 1992. "Britain has to start making things again," he wrote in the News of the World. "So this week's budget will be unashamedly pro-enterprise and pro-jobs. In particular need of support are our young people. Youth unemployment started rising even before the recession but then reached record levels. That's why I'll be using some of the money our new government has raised from taxing the banks to create the most apprenticeships this country has ever seen, and a big expansion of work-experience places." The decision to announce an increase in the personal allowance is outlined in an article for the Observer by the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the treasury, Danny Alexander. He presents it as helping those most in need, at the same time as taking painful steps to slash the deficit. Alexander says that the budget will set out "further real-terms progress towards our goal of taking anyone earning less than £10,000 out of tax altogether". It is understood that the tax-free threshold will be raised to around £8,000, with the change likely to come into effect in April 2012. In his emergency budget last June, Osborne responded to Lib Dem pressure to assist low earners by raising the personal tax allowance from £6,475 to £7,475, handing about £200 to all basic rate taxpayers, and removing 880,000 people from the tax net altogether. The plan for another increase in the threshold received qualified support. Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which represents low- to middle-income families, said it "would offer some welcome relief to many basic rate taxpayers, but would not offer much to the very lowest earners, who don't pay tax, or middle-income families with children. For many working families, any gains from allowances are likely to be greatly outweighed by cuts to tax credits and the rise in VAT." Matt Oakley, head of enterprise, growth and social policy at the centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange, said it would be unfortunate if help for low earners was paid for by widening the group paying top-rate tax. "Previous increases have been paid for by bringing more people into the 40% rate of income tax, which is not good for growth," Oakley said. James Browne, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the measure was an inefficient way of helping the poorest households. "You're giving a fixed cash amount to all basic rate taxpayers, so relatively little money is going to the people who you're taking out of tax altogether," he said, pointing out that more than 90% of the beneficiaries would be likely to earn more than £10,000 a year. "If you really wanted to target low-earners, perhaps you would be better off to increase the working tax credit." While Osborne is keen to move the focus away from cuts, he will insist that he has no option but to press ahead with his austerity programme if the economy is to be restored to health. The 0.6% contraction in GDP in the final months of 2010 caused alarm at the Treasury and raised the spectre of a double-dip recession, for which Osborne would be likely to take the blame. On Wednesday, he will be forced to announce that the economy will grow more slowly than expected this year and next, prolonging the pain for households facing falling real incomes and rising taxes. Most economists expect the independent Office for Budget Responsibility to downgrade its forecasts for economic growth. Osborne was stung by accusations from outgoing CBI boss Richard Lambert that the government lacked a "growth strategy". The chancellor will announce a plethora of reforms to fix what he has called Britain's "debt-fuelled" economic model. Speaking at the Treasury last week, he said the budget would focus on skills, planning and green technology to resolve some of the long-standing problems in the economy. But in a speech to Labour's Scottish conference, party leader Ed Miliband said the chancellor should instead take urgent action on the "cost of living crisis" facing people across the country, starting by cutting VAT on petrol. "In the interests of justice and prosperity, the government should pay for these measures not by cutting taxes for the banks but by imposing a tax on irresponsible bankers' bonuses," he said. "It's time the people who caused this crisis pay their fair share in putting things right." Friends of the Earth wants Osborne to deliver on the government's promise to be the "greenest ever". Executive director Andy Atkins said Osborne must make it cheaper and easier for people to reduce their reliance on oil, gas and coal." Osborne will also promise a more detailed investigation into proposals to merge tax and national insurance. The idea was recommended in an Office for Tax Simplification report, commissioned by Osborne to come up with proposals to help small businesses. Breaking down the tax barriers and shattering the "contributory principle", under which people qualify for certain benefits only when they have paid into the public coffers – could represent the most radical shakeup of the system since the foundation of the welfare state. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Lansley accused of burying NHS poll Posted: 19 Mar 2011 03:18 PM PDT Ministers are said to be withholding survey results that undermine health secretary's case for urgent radical reforms Ministers have been accused of "burying good news" about the NHS because it will undermine their case for sweeping reforms, after it emerged that they are withholding unpublished polling data that shows record levels of satisfaction with healthcare. The Observer has learned that the polling organisation Ipsos MORI submitted the results last autumn to the Department of Health for inclusion in a government survey of public perceptions of the NHS. The data, commissioned by the department, shows that more members of the public than ever believe the NHS is doing a good job – a finding contrary to health secretary Andrew Lansley's insistence that it is falling short and needs urgent change. The department has had the findings for six months, but has yet to make them public – the most recent information on its website relates to 2007. The decision to "sit on" the positive information has fuelled a row over the way in which the government is rooting out negative statistics about the NHS to justify reforms. Under the plans – rejected by the Liberal Democrats at their spring conference last weekend and opposed by a small band of Tory MPs, as well as by the Labour party – GPs will be handed control of £80bn of the NHS budget, tiers of management will be swept away and the private sector will play a greater role. The department was unable to say yesterday when it would publish the new data, but sources confirmed that the information shows public satisfaction at a record level. In January, John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund thinktank, questioned the way in which ministers were unfavourably comparing the NHS with France. Appleby's article for the British Medical Journal attracted support from several academics and doctors. Professor Raj Bhopal, of the University of Edinburgh, said: "Justifying NHS reforms by picking a few statistics that cast doubts on the UK's renowned healthcare system is worrying, but choosing statistics that are widely questioned reminds me of previous government briefings that led to dodgy dossiers." Labour's health spokesman, John Healey, said that it was clear the department did not want to put out good news because it would embarrass ministers trying to stem criticism of the Lansley plans. Shirley Williams, the Lib Dem peer, said she was angry that the department had "cherry-picked" information – much of it from 2006 – before the extra billions poured into the health service by Labour had begun to take effect. In its 2007 public perception survey, also compiled from Ipsos MORI data, the department reported satisfaction levels at 63%. Then, last December, the British Social Attitudes survey found satisfaction at a record high of 64%. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Huhne: Nuclear power less attractive Posted: 19 Mar 2011 12:45 PM PDT Chris Huhne says he still backs government's 'three-pronged' energy approach but Fukushima could make nuclear unviable Britain may back away from the use of nuclear energy because of safety fears and a potential rise in costs after the Fukushima disaster, says Chris Huhne, the energy secretary. In an interview with the Observer, Huhne insisted that he would not "rush to judgment" until the implications of the disaster were known and a report into the safety of UK nuclear plants by the chief nuclear officer, Dr Mike Weightman, was complete. The interim findings are due in May. "I am not ruling out nuclear now," said Huhne. But he said events in Japan could have profound long-term implications for UK policy, which is based on a three-pronged "portfolio" approach: a commitment to nuclear energy; the development of more renewable energy, such as wind and sea power; and new carbon-capture technology to mitigate the damaging environmental effects of fossil fuel-fired power plants and industrial facilities. Huhne, a Liberal Democrat, said that Britain was in a very different position from Japan, which was vulnerable to strong earthquakes and tsunamis. The UK also used different types of reactors. But he conceded that the Japanese disaster was likely to make it more difficult for private investors to raise capital to build the eight new reactors planned by the government. "There are a lot of issues outside of the realm of nuclear safety, which we will have to assess. One is what the economics of nuclear power post-Fukushima will be, if there is an increase in the cost in capital to nuclear operators." He said that after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in the US 32 years ago, it became more difficult to raise money for nuclear investment. "After Three Mile Island in 1979, nuclear operators found it very hard to finance new projects. Huhne said he remained wedded to the "portfolio" approach, but added that nuclear energy's future, as part of the mix, had become more uncertain as leaders of other nations, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, openly questioned its future. "Globally, this undoubtedly casts a shadow over the renaissance of the nuclear industry. That is blindingly obvious," he said. Any move away from nuclear – while certain to be welcomed by many Lib Dems – would alarm many in the Tory party. Tim Yeo, the Conservative chair of the environment and climate change select committee, said any such shift would be a huge mistake. "If Britain abandons or significantly delays its programme of building new nuclear power stations, there are three inevitable consequences. First, electricity prices will rise. Second, Britain will not be able to meet its carbon emission reduction targets. And third, the risk that the lights will go out will significantly increase. "This is because other forms of low-carbon energy, such as solar or offshore wind, are more expensive than nuclear. Solar and wind are not reliable generators of electricity – on cloudy, still days they produce nothing. So they have to be backed up by reliable sources of power. If nuclear is not used, that means more gas or coal, both of which have far higher carbon emissions." The Department of Energy and Climate Change has carried out its own projections, which show the UK could – with a massive extra commitment to renewable energy and successful use of carbon capture on a grand scale – meet its target of reducing emissions by 80% by 2050 without nuclear energy. Huhne said: "We can do the 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 without new nuclear, but it will require a big effort on carbon capture and storage and renewables." However, Yeo said: "Nuclear currently provides almost one-fifth of our electricity. Nearly all our existing nuclear power stations will shut by 2020. Demand for electricity will rise steadily from now on as cars, vans, etc start to use electricity and the heating of buildings relies more on electricity. It is very likely that without new nuclear power stations we will simply not build enough other forms of reliable electricity generation in time to replace the contribution nuclear currently makes." Huhne has asked Weightman to draw up a report into the safety of UK nuclear plants, assessing their resistance to the kind of natural disasters that could hit this country, including flooding and storms. But ministers acknowledge that, even if plants are declared safe, the public perception of nuclear power has been undermined. The cost of meeting new safety conditions and insuring plants, as well as satisfying evacuation requirements in the event of a disaster, could make new reactors economically unviable. Huhne said ministers needed to show flexibility as untried and untested technology succeeded or failed along the way. "The whole point about a portfolio is that over time – a 20-year view – some of those sources [of energy] will turn out to be much more economic and attractive than others," he said. After the anti-nuclear Lib Dems went into coalition with the Tories last May, Huhne forged a deal under which plans for a new generation of nuclear would go ahead, but without public subsidy. He said at the time that the Lib Dems' preference for meeting the country's energy needs was still to make greater use of renewable energy, such as wind and sea power. The deal marked a departure for Huhne from his stance in opposition. In 2007 he said: "Nuclear is a tried, tested and failed technology and the government must stop putting time, effort and subsidies into this outdated industry." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Chechnya's leader hires football stars Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT Ramzan Kadyrov hopes former international players and Ruud Gullit as coach can help improve his country's image Russian football – and international sport – is about to be confronted with one of its most unlikely success stories. FC Terek Grozny, the newly energised team based in the troubled Caucasus republic of Chechnya, is hoping a slew of high-profile international acquisitions will help it make waves in the Russian premier league, which kicked off last weekend. The ambitions of Ramzan Kadyrov, the republic's leader, however, do not stop there. He is optimistic that the club's footballing glory will help the world forget about his country's bloody past. Chief among the names crucial to Terek's success is Ruud Gullit, the Dutch football legend who signed on for an 18-month contract as coach earlier this year. "The team has started to play more offensively," said club spokesman Kazbek Khadzhiyev. "Gullit likes discipline on the pitch, and for every player to know what he has to do." Last week, in spite of a putting up a decent fight, Terek lost its season opener against league champions Zenit St Petersburg 1-0. But Gullit's role is seen as key. "I'd like to believe that I can bring joy into the lives of the Chechen people through football," the former Dutch national team captain told Soviet Sport. "Of course, I won't deny that I'm getting lots of money from Terek." The money is new. Last year, Kadyrov enlisted the help – and plentiful funds – of Bulat Chagayev, a wealthy Chechen based in Switzerland, who is now club vice-president. Yet Kadyrov would rather not talk about the money. For him, football is a natural outgrowth of the "stability" he has brought to Chechnya, a republic ravaged by two separatist wars since the fall of the Soviet Union. Grozny is rebuilt. But there is an eerie calm – and ubiquitous posters praising Kadyrov and his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, the former leader killed at a stadium bombing in May 2004. Kadyrov rules the republic with an iron fist, regularly leading so-called "anti-terrorist operations" against the families of men suspected of having joined the continuing Islamist opposition that violently opposes his rule. He is also known for his expensive tastes, with a fleet of luxury cars, a private zoo and a collection of gold-plated guns among his many possessions. Now that he has turned his attention to football, he is going all out. "He hasn't missed one match," his spokesman, Alvi Kerimov, said. "And he trains every day – even if he works until midnight, he'll go and play football anyway." Kadyrov is not content with spectating. The world got to witness his skills on 9 March, when he captained a team of Chechen ragtag players in a friendly against a team featuring stars from Brazil's 2002 World Cup winning line-up, including Romário, Cafu and Dunga. Now Terek is focused on acquisitions, club spokesman Kazbek Khadzhiyev said, with Gullit expected to start acting on a wish-list this summer. In this, the club is already learning the hard way that it cannot always get its own way. Recent talks with Diego Forlan of Atletico Madrid fell apart, Khadzhiyev said, because the Uruguayan player's price was too high. Terek looks likely to have competition for players from the Premier League Club of Dagestan, the volatile republic that lies to the east of Chechnya. FC Anzhi Makhachkala was bought in January by Suleiman Kerimov, a Dagestani estimated to be worth $7.8bn by Forbes, making him the 19th richest man in Russia and 118th richest in the world. He has already brought in two major names – former Real Madrid defender Roberto Carlos (whose two-and-a-half year contract is a reported €10m) and one-time Chelsea midfielder Mbark Boussoufa (for reportedly the same sum). Carlos made his debut with Anzhi earlier this month – in Grozny, where the game was held because the Dagestani capital was deemed too dangerous. Terek's men are undeterred by security fears. Maurício, a 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder, said: "We have no problems in Grozny." Yet, he admits, players don't live or train in the Chechen capital, and are based instead in the once fashionable spa town of Kislovodsk, 150 miles west. "When we're in Grozny, we don't go around town," he said in heavily accented Russian. On 9 May, Kadyrov will open a new stadium which is named after his father – officially it is known as the A. A. Kadyrov Republican Football Club Terek Grozny. Invitations to the opening of the 30,000-seat stadium are said to have gone out to Fifa head Sepp Blatter and Uefa chief Michel Platini – Kadyrov wants to hold a match when Russia hosts the World Cup in 2018 – although the Foreign Office and the US State Department advise against travel to Chechnya or the other Caucasus republics. "I do not understand those people who say that Kadyrov is trying to show, through football, that Chechnya is stable," said Kerimov. "We play football in Chechnya because it is stable." Not so the manager's job, however. Gullit's predecessor, Victor Munoz, lasted less than a month before he quit. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT Yann Arthus-Bertrand isn't just an aerial photographer: he's on a mission to save mankind by teaching us to love our beautiful planet. To many, he is France's answer to Al Gore, but why do some think he's an "enormous idiot"? In 2005, while filming the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Yann Arthus-Bertrand fell to earth in a helicopter accident. On the way down, he says, he had no fear of dying, but he was filled with thoughts of "home". When he discovered he'd survived, this feeling crystallised into two separate imperatives. He had an urgent need to phone his wife: "I'm alive!" he announced breathlessly. "Why are you phoning me at three in the morning to tell me that?" she wondered, unamused. And he had a longing for a glass of wine. "Wine is France, it is alive, it is love! I wanted it deeply. It's my terroir!" Arthus-Bertrand is recalling this near-death experience as he uncorks a bottle of lunchtime Burgundy in what is very much his terroir: a small wooden hut in the midst of the dense woodland of the Bois de Boulogne, west of Paris. The hut, which is dominated by a large throne-like chair made of driftwood, lies at the back of the office of GoodPlanet.org, the foundation Arthus-Bertrand has created as his one-man mission to save mankind from its destructive nature. The hut in the trees is where he comes to plan his strategy. His mission is mostly a propaganda war, and one that he is waging on many fronts all at once. Arthus-Bertrand made his name as an aerial photographer; his celebrated book The Earth from the Air, published in 2000, has sold 3.5m copies; large-scale exhibitions of those photographs are currently on display in the streets of 154 of the world's cities. He has used some of the proceeds from that project to help to fund a series of spin-offs that attempt to focus humanity's vision not only on the beauty of the planet, but the ways it is being destroyed. The foundation supports large-scale carbon-offsetting initiatives, and education programmes which take urban children out into the countryside (13 schools in France are named after Arthus-Bertrand at the insistence of their pupils). The foundation has also generated two landmark documentary films: Home, a spectacular bird's-eye polemic that catalogues our impact on the earth's surface (and which has seen Arthus-Bertrand routinely referred to as the "French Al Gore"), and Six Billion Others, which attempts to archive the hopes and dreams of human voices from all corners of the planet. Home, which was distributed free in cinemas (in most of the world, except Britain) is also available to download for nothing online at homethemovie.org (19 million people have watched it so far; the virtual visitors' book attests to its life-changing qualities). Not surprisingly for someone who has looked down on perhaps more of the earth's surface than anyone in history, Arthus-Bertrand gives the impression of having both a stubborn big-picture mentality and an exacting eye for detail. At 65, he brims with restless energy; when I first saw him in his office he was literally running between meetings. His keen young staff have the edgy manner of those always trying to anticipate the latest enthusiasm of their boss. They watch him, and his trademark moustache, as he swoops around the office like a bird of prey. Arthus-Bertrand's most recent obsession has been to get Home shown in cinemas and on TV in America and the UK, the two countries that have proved most resistant to his message. "Why is that?" he wonders, "because I am French? Because it is free? Because the cinemas have to get involved with the project?" Possibly all of the above, I suggest. He is just back from New York, where a successful screening has prompted distribution across 100 cities. Britain is proving more intractable. Arthus-Bertrand has an ally in Prince Charles, who screened the film at Clarence House to an invited audience. But he had no luck with the BBC. "Even Chinese state television broadcast it at primetime," he says. You do not get the sense Arthus-Bertrand is a man who gives up easily. He is the heir (along with five siblings) to the Parisian jewellers that bears his surname and which among other things has held the warrant to supply medals and honours to the French state since the revolution. He left home at 17 with dreams of being a film star. "I had no money; I was in the street," he recalls. "I was cleaning the cinema studio. Then I became the third assistant. But in two years I was getting roles in films, living in St Tropez. I was a bad actor though. I met my first wife, and she happened to have a wild-animal park in France. Together we have made a safari park for 10 years." In that time he suggests, "I rediscovered nature. I was very involved with animals, breeding lions, tigers and so on." At 30, following in the footsteps of the gorilla-conservationists Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, he decided to pursue his passions in Africa. "I quit France," he recalls, "I quit my first wife, and went to live with my second wife and her two children in Kenya, with a family of lions." In the Masai Mara he became friends with the wildlife photographer Jonathan Scott. And through him he discovered cameras. "The lions taught me how to take photographs though, really," he says. "They taught me patience and beauty. To make my living I was flying tourists in a hot-air balloon. And the two things came together, flying and photography." Arthus-Bertrand worked for a while as a photo-journalist for National Geographic and Geo, but he was anxious to make a wider impact. Working on assignment at the 1992 earth summit in Rio, he recognised his destiny. "My life was changed completely by what I saw and heard there," he says. "I was influenced very much at that moment also by the photographer Sebastião Salgado, who was my friend, and who had made these thematic studies of human life. Taking inspiration from him I decided I had to photograph the entire planet from above." It took him some time to organise funding; he mortgaged his home, begged and borrowed money but eventually "for nearly two years I was flying above the planet with my camera. I knew straight away that this was something important to do, just at this moment, a portrait of the planet for the millennium year. I worked in 80 countries, fighting for money all the time. But the book was incredibly successful from the very first day." How, I wonder, does he now measure his success, beyond sales figures? "I don't think it is necessary to measure it exactly," he says. "You want to spread the message. To have success in your professional life is not so hard. To succeed as a man is more difficult. What I am doing now helps me to succeed as a man." The Arthus-Bertrand philosophy is a simple one. "The key of The Earth from Above, and of Home is to show the beauty of the planet, and thereby to promote love for it. I asked a group of 11- to 14-year-olds the other day: 'Do you believe humanity will end soon?'" he says. "And they nearly all said, 'Yes I do believe it.' Our children think our world will end. It's a tragic thing. Adults don't think that. They don't see that we are eating the planet. But we are. If you take all the biomass of vertebrates on the planet, 98% are men and their domestic animals. All the wild animals in the world make up only 2%." Home is full of statistics like this, all intoned (in the English-language version) by Glenn Close's omnipotent voiceover: that 20% of the world's population consumes 80% of its resources, that 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, that species are dying out at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate, that three-quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted… These figures are reinforced by Arthus-Bertrand's stunning visual evidence: of the dried-up River Jordan, of the shrinking ice caps, of the ghosts of irrigation projects in the desert. Arthus-Bertrand co-scripted the film, and he speaks in the Gallic poetry of doom: "Oil will be the new measure of time," he will say, as we count down the days of our chronic dependency. Or, "Our cells still talk the language of trees." Or, of our rapacious need for fossil fuels: "We pick every pocket of stored sunlight." There is something biblical about the scope of his film, though he is anything but religious. Flying above the globe in his all-seeing helicopter, he was struck most often not by a sense of creation but by humility at the epic story of life that we have lately gatecrashed: "You have to understand, to really understand, that when you look at the Grand Canyon what you are looking at is billions and billions of animals reduced to limestone, individual life on an impossible scale layered in a period of time we cannot imagine." When the film came out Arthus-Bertrand had hundreds of letters saying, "You liar! You say the world was made in 4bn years. It was done in seven days." All of these letters, he notes, came from America. He laughs. "Life is an amazing story, but it is not that story. And what it teaches us is that we will disappear one day. When people say save the planet, I think they are wrong: the planet will survive us, of course it will, life will survive us. What we are trying to save is humanity." Arthus-Bertrand, to some, goes about this work in a naïve way. He places his primary hope not only in practical action – though, given his air miles, he is by necessity a world-class offsetter – but more in a "spiritual revolution" that will involve not only individuals but also corporations and governments. He sat next to President Sarkozy for the French launch of Home. His films are supported by a range of commercial sponsors, most of whom can see the benefits of "greenwashing"; he adopts the pragmatic view that it is better that people see his work than question too closely the credentials of those who finance it. "I think," he says "to be an ecologist is to love life in its broadest sense. It is not consumers and big industry on one side, and ecologists on the other. We are all linked." In the pages of France's left-wing press, Yann Arthus-Bertrand is routinely referred to as the "helicologiste", a reference to his preferred mode of transport, as well as the way he can seem to want to rise above some of the world's more intractable questions. His critics suggest he is an opportunist and point to the fact, for example, that he was for many years the official photographer of the (not overly environmentally friendly) Paris-Dakar rally; they dislike the fact that he can afford to say things like: "This morning, running like every morning in the forest of Rambouillet, near my home, and seeing a doe and her fawn flee before me, I remembered my stay with Dian Fossey and the gorillas in Rwanda…" And they take particular exception to his laissez-faire attitude towards corporate sponsorship and advertising in his films. Home is sponsored by PPR, the fashion group whose brands include Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. In the past he has worked with companies such as Air France and energy giant EDF. He is unrepentant. "Often," he says, "the greens are not close enough to the reality of the economy. Perhaps it is because my parents have a factory and I know it is not so easy to hold your principles always and still get things done. In France we are the most cynical and sceptical people in the world – even more than the British. Everything you do, someone says you are hypocrite. I have a lot of attacks here: people say my parents are rich, my movie was helped by sponsors, I am a right winger. All of this. NGOs work on poverty or environment or whatever. But the thing they never speak about is love. For me that is the starting point. It has to be. I used to speak about this all the time in France. [French daily newspaper] Libération called me 'The Great Idiot', 'The Enormous Idiot'. I don't care. I think the new religion is going to be the quest for global survival. And I think that has to start with love: love of the planet, love of the six billion others we share it with, love of life. We have to love if we are to survive." If his aerial vision has taught him any thing it is that nothing exists in isolation from anything else; pollutants do not respect national or any other boundaries. "I live in a forest," he says. "I asked the water company for an analysis of my water. It said I had this much pesticide, I have this many nitrates. But they say they are under the dangerous level, and like all of us I have to take them at their word. If our water and air are contaminated though, it is all of our water and all of our air, not just that bit over there." Even so, he classes himself as an optimist, just because the alternative is not an option. He places faith in the idea that his spiritual revolution can occur, though acknowledging that the evidence stacks up against it. "The planet's population has nearly tripled in my lifetime," he says. "And the problem is everyone wants to live like us." Arthus-Bernard was in Borneo filming Home, in an area of deforestation. He stopped to refuel and spoke to a man driving a huge tractor trailing the chains that uproot swathes of trees. He told him about global warming, about orangutans, the whole story. The man looked him in the eye: "You come in helicopter to tell me how to live? I have to feed my family. I don't care about trees. I want to buy a 4x4." Later the same man took Arthus-Bertrand out on the river through the jungle on a very simple boat. Under a tin roof in a cabin the man's wife was feeding her baby, and watching an American soap opera on a flatscreen television. "She was dreaming of a fast car, and these beautiful clothes," Arthus-Bertrand recalls. "That is what we have created. Everyone naturally wants this paradise that we have, where happiness is to have more things. Always to have more. We have to work out another way." One of the questions he asks his subjects in his mass-communication project Six Billion Others is "What is the hardest challenge you face?" Before I leave his hut in the woods, I turn that question on him. He answers without hesitation: "My challenge is to lose my ego, completely," he says, with feeling. Having spent a couple of hours with him, I can see why that might present an insistent difficulty. "And then to lose my material possessions, to lose that desire. I would love to be like that, but I am not brave enough to do it. In our hearts few of us are. But I will work at it. I will have to; we all will," he drains his glass of wine. "The fact is," he says, "when it comes to our planet, none of us want to believe what we already know." For more information visit goodplanet.org Calling all independent cinemasYann Arthus-Bertrand's epic feature film Home has been seen by 19 million people around the world, but has not been publicly shown in the UK. If you run a cinema and would be interested in organising a special screening in conjunction with the Observer please make contact with us at magazine@observer.co.uk. Details of the screenings will be announced in due course guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Is money worth the same online? Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT The web is a world of plenty, yet we still try to put a price on everything Ever since human beings first began to organise into social groups there has been some kind of exchange market. Filthy lucre in one form or another has insisted on creeping in to dominate our social fabric. The reality is that our modern capitalist metropolises based on physical money are simply the concrete evolutions of our Cro-Magnon days, when the currency was fish, wives or finely crafted stone, with an unexpected detour through Holland during the tulip-mania economic bubble of the 1630s. Georg Simmel, the early-20th-century German sociologist, described money this way: humans have a natural tendency to create unnatural hierarchies that predicate the need for haves and have-nots because, ironically, they serve a very useful role in social cohesion. They force us to interact with one another, and give us insight into who we're dealing with and how the exchange process will play out. The tokens of our economic systems, Simmel continued, define cultural value both tangibly – with metal discs and pieces of paper – and intangibly: through the exchange of skills and information. Rocks, tulip bulbs and over-priced apartments have also served as tokens in other times. So, regardless of its physical or non-physical properties, the function of money has always been the same: to represent the ideological exchange of value and the attribution of social worth upon something someone else wants. Money is also a physical hallmark of trust: the banknote that we often incorrectly think of as cash is nothing but an IOU. The bank will "give to the bearer" the value written on the piece of paper when asked. In other words, money is already removed from the realm of the physical: it is a historical and philosophical construct that holds society together. And it has not changed in millennia. So it's unsurprising that money – as a representative of social value – remains enormously important in the web age, despite our rapid uptake of a technology that has the potential to eradicate the scarcity that defines the rates of exchange. Online, "our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession," as the internet writer John Perry Barlow put it in a 1992 essay, Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net. But this plenty has not dissolved value; it has shifted it into something more intangible. Still, human nature gets in the way. We continue to impose worth online, even though we are able to operate and trade an infinite amount for free (once we have satisfied our basic offline needs, like food and shelter). Even in an environment where we don't need to satisfy basic human needs, we insist on imposing calculable value so we can make a buck. For example, in this system defined by plenty, we seek out impossible rarity and price it accordingly. In virtual communities such as online games, where our online personas have no hunger and no exhaustion, people sell character accounts, piles of virtual currency, game items that have been built up through "click-labour", and even bits of broken code that somehow slipped through the software testing phase, for real money on auction sites such as eBay. There is nothing new in this economic model except the asset that's being exchanged. But there is a difference. The exchange economies of the web are based upon the actions and relationships that make up our online reputations. Risk is high online due to the potential number of new strangers that we can meet, and the anonymity of the web means that the heuristics we use to figure out if someone is trustworthy or not – including reports from friends, brand recognition, clothing and facial expressions – are virtually impossible to identify in this new digital wild west. Trust has become the pinnacle of virtual currency. It's what people depend upon to function online. It is the source of our reputations in the virtual space. But there is no cash to create the tangible IOU, so we create recommendations engines and ratings systems, and rely on links from friends to get worthwhile information. Trust is money online: it's what we have, and what we have not. The web really has done very little to transform our social concept of money – if anything, it's made us more aware of its true philosophical underpinnings, and has divorced it from the paper stuff in our wallets. It puts the pound sterling, the dollar and the yen into perspective if people can make a real-life living from buying and selling virtual items for digital platinum pieces. And the idea that people will ascribe worth to things in an environment that doesn't demand it suggests that Simmel's philosophy of money itself has value. The web offers an extraordinary opportunity to figure it out. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Joan Miró: A life in paintings Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:08 PM PDT Miró's work is loved for its joyful celebration of life and colour. But it also contains ideas of freedom which, in Franco's Spain, were very dear to the Catalan painter. We look again at the man, and trace his personal journey through six great paintings On the death of General Franco in 1975, Joan Miró was asked what he had done to promote opposition to the dictator, who had ruled Spain for nearly 40 years. The artist answered simply: "Free and violent things." The first major Miró exhibition in this country for nearly 50 years, which opens at Tate Modern next month, will cast light on that answer. Miró is not always thought of as a political painter, in the broad or the narrow sense. He was not a creator of manifestos, or a signer of petitions; he was not given to provocative gesture like his contemporary Salvador Dali, nor did he pursue his passions at all costs, like his sometime mentor Picasso. For most of the second half of his long life (he died in 1983 at the age of 90), Miró painted in his studio in Palma, Mallorca, charting a unique course among the movements in postwar painting, and always looking very much his own man. Politics was for Miró, however, unavoidable, an accident of birth. He was the son of a blacksmith and jeweller who lived on the harbourside in Barcelona. He came of age with the Catalan independence movement, and shared its deep-rooted sense of the possibilities of liberty. To begin with, he identified this freedom with internationalism; he longed to be in Paris. But once he had escaped, he held on to his identity as a Catalan, as a freedom fighter, all the more devoutly and from it developed an intimate visual language, which sustained him all of his working life. The Tate show will concentrate on three periods of Miro's constantly reimagined career: his formative years in Catalonia; his exile in Paris in the years of the Spanish civil war and the outbreak of the second world war; and his enthusiasm for the radicalism of the 60s, when he was approaching the late period of his work. Marko Daniel, the co-curator of the exhibition, which will bring together more than 150 works in collaboration with the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, hopes that it will be "a perspective not just on Miró but on the turbulence of the 20th century, the way an artist's life might be shaped by proximity to these great political upheavals". The title of the show, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, comes from a painting, one of a series, that Miró began in 1939 as the Nazi forces were advancing into France. He was living in Normandy at that time and had begun the works as a kind of personal defence against what he knew to be the horrors to come. The series of paintings dwelt on his profound internal sense of connections between things, an entirely singular private universe that he called the Constellations. When he eventually fled with his wife and daughter on the last train out of Paris for Spain, the paintings were rolled under his arm. As the exhibition will make clear, Miró's instinct for political engagement, though heartfelt and full of risk, often lay in these gestures of withdrawal, of self-defence. André Breton, the surrealist, once referred to Miró, for good and bad, as a case of "arrested development", a childlike artist. The label stuck for a long time but this exhibition should go a long way to revealing how hard-won Miro's apparent playfulness was. The ladder in that borrowed exhibition title had long been for him an emergency exit to the safe house of his imagination. In a 1936 interview, with the Spanish civil war a looming reality, he spoke of the need to "resist all societies... if the aim is to impose their demands on us". The word "freedom has meaning for me," he said, "and I will defend it at any cost." Though he was capable of making propaganda images for the Catalan and republican causes, this sense of absolute individual liberty was as much about a sense of wonder at the world; you could find it, he believed, "wherever you see the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists sometimes of staying close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters". In this spirit Miró created for himself the alter ego of a Catalan peasant, indefatigable and ribald, wild bearded under a barretina, the red cap of the rural radical. The surface of his life, despite the great fractures of the times in which he lived, was relatively orderly and measured, but you do not have to look for long at his work, including the pictures on these pages, to see that he reserved all of his formidable energies for his painting. NORD-SUD, 1917Aged 24, Miró longs to leave Barcelona for Paris Miró made this painting in 1917, when he was living in his native Barcelona and dreaming of moving to Paris. He was in the final year of his national service as a soldier; Spain was not involved in the first world war, and he was frustrated that the fighting in France had put his ambitions to enlist in the Parisian avant garde on hold. After a period of depression, he had given up on the career in business that his father had planned for him, and had spent the previous four years, when not in uniform, painting full-time; he had that premature, 24-year-old's sense that life was already passing him by. The presence in his painting of the journal Nord-Sud – founded in Paris that year by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire among others – hints both at this anxiety, and at a solidarity with the ideals of freedom the magazine represented. The caged bird behind it is faced with an open door, but has not yet flown: "I must tell you," Miró wrote to his friend and fellow painter EC Ricart in 1917, "that if I have to live much longer in Barcelona I will be asphyxiated by the atmosphere – so stingy and such a backwater (artistically speaking)." Miró was, above all, desperate, in the spirit of the moment, to be part of an -ism, or, better, to create one. Impressionism was dead, he suggested: "Down with weeping sunsets in canary yellow... Down with all that, made by crybabies!" He was already anticipating the demise of cubism, futurism and fauvism (though the latter in particular has a strong influence on his painting here). The scissors are open ready for him to cut ties with the past and present, with Catalonia (represented in the characteristic vase), and with Goethe-esque rites of passage. But his hopes of finding that new style, that new way of painting seemed to be beyond him, and to the north. Two years later Miró still found himself maddeningly caught in this limbo, and finding new torments in his friends' departures: "Ricart must have told you," he wrote to JF Rafols in August 1919, "that he is determined to go to Paris for a few months. I am afraid that he will get a fright unless he realises that life in Paris is expensive if he does not manage to go there with a good monthly allowance... I am definitely going at the end of November. You have to go there as a fighter and not as a spectator of the fight if you want to do anything..." When Miró eventually did make it to Paris, in 1920, he called on Picasso, whom he had never met, but whose mother was a family friend in Barcelona. Picasso looked out for him, bought a painting that Miró showed him, and helped him into the radical society he had dreamt of. Within a year, Miró's tiny studio at rue Blomet received regular visits from his new friends: the poet Paul Éluard, the playwright Antonin Artaud and the artist Tristan Tzara. Sud had found his way Nord. THE FARM, 1921Broke in Paris, he reflects on his roots "When I first knew Miró," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1934, "he had very little money and very little to eat, and he worked all day every day for nine months painting a very large and wonderful picture called The Farm..." Miro found that his life in Paris allowed him to understand his Catalan roots, that formative light that had seemed so oppressive, with a new and startling clarity. His parents had bought a country house in the Catalan mountains at Mont-roig in 1910, in part to help him recover from depression. It was where he learned to look at the natural world. In The Farm, he later recalled, "I wanted to put everything I loved about the country in the canvas, from a huge tree to a tiny little snail." He brought dry grasses up from Mont-roig to Paris so he could "finish the painting after nature". Because he was working so hard on the painting during the day he took to boxing in the evening at a local gym as a way of relaxing. Among his sparring partners was Hemingway. Miró, so the story goes, impressed the writer first with his punching and then with his painting. Hemingway was determined to buy The Farm. He agreed with Miró's dealer to pay 5,000 francs for it, which, he recalled, "was four thousand two hundred and fifty francs more than I had ever paid for a picture..." When it was time to make the last payment he risked losing the painting because he didn't have the money. On the final day he trawled around every bar he knew in Paris, with his friend John Dos Passos, borrowing cash, and eventually raised the funds. "I would not trade it for any picture in the world," he wrote. "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint those two opposing things." Miró's obsessive attention to a kind of personal storehouse of imagery, the carob tree, the animals and insects of Catalonia, his footprints in the place he fell to earth, begins to find its full expression in this painting. "For me an object is always alive," he later observed. "A cigarette, a matchbook contain a secret life much more intense than certain humans… I see a tree, I get a shock as if it were something breathing..." "After Miró had painted The Farm," Hemingway wrote, "and after James Joyce had written Ulysses, they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did, even when people did not understand them." THE CATALAN LANDSCAPE (THE HUNTER), 1923-4Thanks to André Breton, Miró finds surrealism Only two years after he painted The Farm, Miró was spending more time back in Catalonia, trying out ways to distil the essence of his Catalan identity still further. He had become friends in Paris with André Breton, finding his once longed-for -ism. Surrealism, an artistic response to the power of dreams and the subconscious, was only a brief obsession for Miró but its ideas informed his painting of the mid-1920s, and his methods thereafter. "Every idea has to develop in my unconscious, and sometimes it takes years... The starting point is absolutely irrational, sudden and unconscious: I start off blindly..." The compulsive detailing of his earlier painting had by the time of The Hunter become a kind of playful shorthand. He had a powerful sense of the emptiness of his remembered landscape, animated only momentarily by human action; life becomes explicable as a diagrammatic series of gestures and relationships, "the underlying magic", as Miró described it, and he developed a way of painting that seemed to respond to those energies. He was in search of the essence of things. In The Hunter, his Catalan peasant alter ego is captured simultaneously in the act of shooting a rabbit for his cooking pot and fishing for a sardine for his barbecue. Miró explained the detail of the painting in the following terms to one viewer: "The Catalan peasant has become a triangle with an ear, eye, pipe, the hairs of a beard and a hand. This is a barretina, the Spanish peasant headdress… And the man's heart, entrails and sexual organs. I've shown the Toulouse-Rabat airplane on the left; it used to fly past our house once a week. In the painting I showed it by a propellor, a ladder and the French and Catalan flags. You can see the Paris-Barcelona axis again, and the ladder, which fascinated me. A sea and one boat in the distance, and in the very foreground, a sardine with tail and whiskers gobbling up a fly. A broiler waiting for the rabbit, flames and a pimento on the right..." André Breton acquired The Hunter in 1925, the year after he wrote his Surrealist Manifesto. He believed that Miró had found a way to depict the "poetic reality" of life, in ways that his manifesto had described, but which he had not fully imagined. Miró was not much interested in manifestos, thoughprinciples he pursued were not going to be written by anyone but himself. STILL LIFE WITH OLD SHOE, 1937A family man, in exile from the civil war For a while in his 20s and 30s, Miró had felt his freedom almost unconstrained in Paris. When he returned to the city in 1934, though, now married and a father, he carried a sense of foreboding about the state of Spain and Europe: "I had this unconscious feeling of impending disaster," he later wrote. "Like before it rains; a heavy feeling in the head, aching bones, an asphyxiating dampness..." From the beginning of that year, Miró found himself unable to draw anything but monsters; the human figure became a grotesque of teeth and genitals. The margins of his sketchbooks are populated with visions of nightmarish couplings and weirdly erotic subhuman bodies. He had a sense of himself as prophetic in some way, and was troubled by these portents. "If we do not attempt to discover the magic sense of things, we will do no more than add new sources of degradations to those already offered to people today, which are beyond number... if the powers of backwardness continue to spread, if they push us any further into the dead end of cruelty and incomprehension, that will be the end of all human dignity," he wrote. The outbreak of civil war in Spain and the rise of fascism across Europe confirmed his worst fears. He contributed images for propaganda posters, the raised fist of the Catalan peasant, for the republican cause. But in Paris, in 1937, where he had gone with his wife and daughter to escape the bombing, Miró now found himself a prisoner from the terror at home, and at a loss to know how to respond. He felt he had to begin again from first principles. He came across a gin bottle in the street, brought it home to his apartment, and began to paint a still life, which quickly took on the atmosphere of his apocalyptic anxieties. The painting took him five months to complete from January 1937. His friend and biographer Jacques Dupin calls this painting "Miró's Guernica", his simple riposte to Picasso's epic. Its objects could not be more mundane – a fork, a bottle, an apple, a loaf of bread – yet these homely realities seem threatened by a kind of hallucinogenic doom. "The civil war was all bombings, death, firing squads..." Miró wrote to his dealer Pierre Matisse, (son of Henri). "The composition is realistic because I was paralysed by the general feeling of terror and almost unable to paint at all... We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening in Spain is terrifying in a way you could never imagine. I feel very uprooted here and nostalgic for my country..." In an interview at this time, Miró was asked about his state of mind. "I am pessimistic, I am tragically pessimistic," he said. "No illusions are permitted. More violently than ever before there will be a struggle against everything that represents the pure value of the spirit." He incorporated the old shoe in the picture as a gesture toward Van Gogh; he had the sense that his eye was bringing all the world's psychosis to everything on which it fell; the objects in the painting seem lit by a savage incandescence, the light comes from the direction of the artist. THE ESCAPE LADDER, 1940The artist retreats to an inner universe In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, Miró and his family moved to Varengeville on the Normandy coast, a few miles from Dieppe. Georges Braque was a neighbour. The village was subject to a blackout, and that fact prompted Miro's most luminous and affecting series of paintings, the Constellations (six of which will be included in the Tate show). He explained their genesis in a letter to a friend: "I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren't allowed to do this any more, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the Constellations." Painted on paper, the pictures create the most vibrant expression of Miró's inner universe, with its by now recognisable system of codes and symbols. The ladder of this painting had always been a fascination for him; it had acted as a metaphor for his attempts to put his painting on a different plane of understanding the world, as a path away from mundane realism. Now it becomes an even more urgent gesture toward flight: "I felt a deep desire to escape," he wrote of that period. "I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings." On 20 May, with the advance of the German forces, he managed to get his wife and daughter on the last train for Paris, from where they miraculously found room on a train leaving for Spain. Miró had time to take nothing with him, except a roll of the starry paintings. The family got passage to Palma, Mallorca, where Miro had spent his childhood summers with his grandparents, and where, on 1 August, he resumed work after more than two months of escape. The Constellations, which Miro completed in Barcelona, were among the first artistic documents to reach America after the war, and were exhibited in New York in 1945. Andre Breton, who saw them, talked of how at a "time of extreme perturbation" Miro had escaped into a realm of "the purest, the least changeable..." MAY, 1968Now 75, he backs the Paris uprisings After the war, Miró based himself in Mallorca; if this looked like retreat, though, he still allowed the world to invade his work. In contrast to contemporaries such as Dalí or mentors like Picasso, Miró seemed able to chart a stable course through the latter half of his long life, reserving his energy for his painting. In his biography of his friend, Jacques Dupin marvelled at Miró's ability to live a life that was "utterly free of disorder or excess". In his studio, order ruled. Canvases were neatly filed according to a complicated and rigid system, brushes were cleaned as soon as they were used and arranged in order of size; tubes of paint were laid out in strict sequence. "I have often seen him bent over a sheet of paper, and flick off a grain of dust that has just alighted on it: each time the practised gesture is just the same," Dupin noted. "Nothing is left to chance, not even in his daily habits: there is a time to take a walk, a time to read, there is a time to be with his family and there is a time to work." The work itself, though, was anything but ordered, and deliberately so. Miró reserved all of his anarchy for creation. "We Catalans," he was fond of saying, "believe that you must plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump high in the air. The fact I come down to earth from time to time makes it possible to jump higher." Miró became aware that the energy in painting, like everything else, was moving to America. He saw a Jackson Pollock show in Paris in 1952 and recalled saying to himself: "You can do it too, go to it, you see, it is OK!" He had no interest in pure abstraction, though. "You get freedom by sweating for it," he believed, "by an inner struggle..." Miró liberated his work in different ways, painting with his fingers and on the floor, burning and slashing his canvases in later life. By the 60s he had created a much bolder, more ferocious style. Spain was still under Franco, and even in Mallorca, Miró felt the dead hand of dictatorship, the anti-freedom he had always hated. With the student uprising in Paris in 1968, he hoped to bring more of the spirit of rebellion home. At the age of 75 he hurled his paint at the canvas as a shared act of defiance: "[This painting] is all explained by the title: May 1968," he later said. "Drama and expectation in equal parts: what was and what remained of that unforgettable young people's revolt..." At the opening of an exhibition that included this painting, in 1978, after Franco's demise, Miró paced up and down in front of it, uncharacteristically. His wife, Pilar, told him to sit down, and he refused. "Damn it, let them see me standing up," he said. "I painted these paintings in a frenzy, with real violence so that people will know I'm alive, that I'm breathing, that I have a few more places to go." He was 85. "I'm heading in new directions!" he exclaimed. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Saving the missing Iberian lynx Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT Ten years ago, there were barely 100 Iberian lynx left. But an innovative Spanish conservation programme is rescuing them from the edge of extinction It took a very short time for Dactil the Iberian lynx to prepare his dinner. The four-year-old male clamped his jaws on a rabbit's throat, there were a few twitches of his prey's legs and it was all over. Within minutes, the rabbit had been consumed. Then Dactil wandered off to rejoin his mate, Castanuela, inside their enclosure at the Olivilla breeding centre, near Santa Elena in Andalucía. Such behaviour is difficult to observe in the wild. For a start, Lynx pardinus is a reclusive hunter that leads its life as far as possible from humans. The lynx, with its distinctive large, tufted ears and woolly side whiskers that grow thicker with age, is also extremely rare. Its territory across Spain and Portugal had already started shrinking in the 19th century, before numbers plunged drastically in the 20th. Habitat destruction, loss of prey and indiscriminate trapping by landowners brought this beautiful predator to the brink of extinction. Ten years ago, there were only around a 100 of them, making the Iberian lynx the world's most endangered species of cat. But at Olivilla, an ambitious attempt is being made to transform the animal's fortunes. Here 32 lynxes – a substantial percentage of their total population – are provided with shelter with each cat's behaviour being monitored by more than 100 cameras dotted round the centre's 20 enclosures. These images are studied by staff working in a control room that has enough TV monitors to do justice to a particle accelerator. "We can see everything they do, which is crucial when the lynx reaches its breeding season in March," says Olivilla's director, María José Pérez. "We can help if a mother gets into trouble, for example." The high-tech surveillance and assiduous zoological care performed at Olivilla are critical to the work of the Lynx Life project, which was launched in 2003 and has since raised the animal's population, through carefully orchestrated reintroductions, to more than 300. Zoologists are even talking of moving Lynx pardinus from its category as a "critically endangered" species to "endangered" under the rules of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The story of the Iberian lynx project is therefore a modestly happy one – so far, at least – although we should be cautious. The Iberian lynx is a distinctive, beautiful creature and an iconic animal for Andalucía. Yet it has required a monumental effort by dozens of dedicated young ecologists, vets and others staff to pull it back from the brink of oblivion. Dressed in their distinctive dark fatigues, Lynx Life workers zigzag the region in jeeps, replenishing stocks of rabbits for lynxes to eat, tracking released animals and generally maintaining the animal's wellbeing. Saving the lynx has also required political action: the introduction of laws in Andalucía to halt indiscriminate snare-laying by landowners; an intense PR campaign aimed at persuading owners of hunting estates to love the lynx; and the expenditure of €33m (£28.5m) – most of it provided by the government of Andalucía – to fund conservation. A further €50m (£43m) has been committed for work to reintroduce the lynx to other areas of Spain and Portugal, with the bulk of this coming from the EU. If the story of the Iberian lynx tells us one thing, it is that saving an endangered mammalian predator from extinction is an extraordinarily difficult, expensive business. We should take note when considering how best to save our own threatened predators, in particular the Highland wildcat, whose numbers hover at a dangerously low level. It will not be an easy task. On the other hand, the Lynx Life project demonstrates that it could be done. Spring is the most pleasing season in the Sierra Morena in Andalucía. The region, home to dozens of estates where deer, red partridge and boar are hunted, is bleached and burned for most of summer and autumn. During my visit three weeks ago, the mountains were cool and green. Rivers and streams were in spate, the holm oaks and shrubs – gum cistus, mastic, rockrose and palmetto – were flourishing, while black vultures and Spanish imperial eagles, some of the country's rarest raptors, swooped overhead. Most abundant of all were the rabbits, an animal that is of critical importance to the story of the Iberian lynx. Most carnivores have fairly catholic diets and will kill and eat a range of animals and carrion. The lynx has a very different idea of a good meal, however. It is – more or less – rabbit or nothing, a predilection that is, in turn, closely connected to the lynx's physiology. Lynx pardinus is small compared with other lynx species, including the North American bobcat and the Euroasian lynx from eastern Europe and Siberia. Adults are about two feet tall and three feet long and weigh around 25lb, about twice the size of a well-fed domestic tomcat. The Iberian lynx is a highly effective predator nevertheless. Its hearing is eight times sharper than a human's and its huge eyes allow it to see in extremely dark conditions. It also has powerful jaws and mottled camouflaged markings, features that have combined to make it the most efficient rabbit hunter on the planet. A rabbit caught by a lynx is dead in seconds and consumed in minutes. Only its skin, picked clean and turned inside out, is left. Mice and rats will do – at a pinch – when times are hard. However, without a meal of a rabbit a day, the female Iberian lynx is unlikely to have enough sustenance to reproduce, zoologists say. This rabbit-hunting specialism has brought problems. In the 20th century, two major disease outbreaks – myxomatosis in the 60s and viral haemorrhagic disease in the 90s – devastated rabbit populations in Spain. The scarcity of food added to other stresses suffered by the lynx, including habitat destruction, caused by the spread of farming and townships, and by the large numbers that were being caught in snares set by landowners to get rid of foxes and other vermin. (In fact, the lynx kills foxes easily and will drive them out of areas as competing predators, a point that the Lynx Life team have had to stress to landowners.) However, pockets of rabbits survived around Andújar in the Sierra Morena, its scrubland and fractured granite landscape providing a perfect habitat. Here hovered the last relatively healthy population of lynxes in Spain. After snaring was halted, numbers of lynxes began to expand slightly. And it is this excess that is now being exploited to re-establish populations elsewhere – with rabbits acting as bait. "Saving the lynx has revolved around one simple factor: providing them with rabbits," says Jose Maria Gil-Sanchez, a project worker. "If we can get them enough rabbits then we do a lot for the lynx." Thus Lynx Life developed a twin strategy. Workers began trapping lynxes. Old adults were allowed to go free but adolescents were taken to new regions to set up fresh populations that would be sustained by colonies of rabbits established for their delectation. "To create homes for rabbits, we prune trees and shrubs of their branches, lay these down to cover the ground and the rabbits start to make their homes underneath them," says Simon Miguel, the leader of Lynx Life. Pruning trees of lower branches also improves the growth of nuts and fruits and so deer and boar have more to eat, another factor that has begun to make the project popular with landowners. Before lynxes – typically a young male and female – are released to a new area of wild land, however, they are placed in enclosures and studied to see how they get on with each other. (Usually they do.) These enclosure are surrounded by electrified fences that might belong in Jurassic Park, a testimony to the lithe ease with which Iberian lynxes can climb and jump. I visited one of these enclosures, which housed two young lynxes, Ibera and Eve, which were being prepared for release. Gil-Sanchez and his colleague Maribel Garcia Tardio scanned the scrub with powerful binoculars and we were eventually rewarded with a clear sight of Ibera. He was looking straight at us, our hushed mutterings having long ago given away our position. He stared for a few more seconds, then he lay down in the sun and after a couple of minutes rolled on to his back with his paws in the air like a cat in front of a fire. This was an animal that was reasserting his rightful place in the landscape. The second part of the Lynx Life strategy is more ambitious. This involves taking young animals bred in captivity – at Olivilla and a second centre at El Acebuche, in Doñano on the south coast – and setting them free. This is a trickier process, for these young lynxes have never been taught by their parents how to hunt, a key part of lynx family life. Nevertheless, early signs look promising. Last month, the first captive-bred Iberian lynxes were released into the wild and to judge from their movements, followed thanks to radio transmitters fitted to their collars, they appear to be thriving. It has been a slow, careful business and not everything has gone to plan: an outbreak of kidney disease at one of the breeding centres last year killed a couple of animals and raised fears that reintroductions might have to be halted. Fortunately, the problem was overcome, though such incidents reveal the fragile nature of the lynx's recovery. Omens still look good, however. This month, females have been giving birth at breeding centres and a new generation of Iberian lynxes will be groomed for release into the wild. Already that is having an impact on human behaviour. At Los Pinos hotel, in the mountains, where Gil-Sanchez and his colleagues gather every morning for breakfast before heading for work, they are joined by groups of hunters and walkers who come to the region in their dozens at this time of year. This year, they have been joined by a new set of visitors: tourists, armed with binoculars, whose one ambition is to catch sight of an Iberian lynx. The creature's fame has spread and could, it is hoped, bring new revenue to the region in the form of conservation tourism. This is the lynx effect. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| James Stirling: visionary architect Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:01 PM PDT Tate Britain reappraises James Stirling – who gave his name to Britain's premier architectural prize – and shows he could be good, and bad… but never dull Did the great British architect James Stirling kill architecture in Great Britain? The question has to be asked since, as well as being an original and internationally admired talent, who is sometimes said to be the Francis Bacon of British architecture, he also designed some of the most notoriously malfunctioning buildings of modern times. Worse, two of these buildings were in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, wherein opinion formers spent their formative years. If you want to annoy as much of the establishment as possible, there are few more effective ways than this. In particular he and his partner James Gowan designed the history faculty and library at Cambridge, completed in 1968. Here, as they struggled to study in this alternately freezing/boiling greenhouse, with dodgy acoustics, frequent leaks and falling cladding tiles, future columnists and editors incubated a deep loathing of the building, of Stirling, and by extension all forms of ambitious modern architecture. In the 1970s the young critic Gavin Stamp made his name with a remorseless hatchet job on the history faculty. In the 1980s it narrowly escaped demolition. In 1984 the pro-Stirling critic Reyner Banham wrote that "anyone will know who keeps up with the English highbrow weeklies (professional, intellectual or satirical), the only approvable attitude to James Stirling is one of sustained execration and open or veiled accusations of incompetence." Behind most broadsheet tirades against modern architecture in the last 40 years stands the figure of James Stirling. And, when architects are now subjected to the most elaborate forms of control and project management, squeezing out invention in the interests of reducing risk, it is in order to avoid mishaps much like the Cambridge history faculty. Stirling was seen as the very type of the award-winning architect whose buildings don't work. He was, to boot, arrogant, lecherous and sometimes boorish. At a party in the apartment of the New York architect Paul Rudolph, he chose to express himself by urinating against its huge window, from the terrace outside, facing into the crowd of guests. Yet he continues to hold an honoured place. The Stirling prize, inaugurated shortly after his death in 1992, is named after him. Now, as the wheel of fashion grinds inevitably round, his work is up for reappraisal. Next month Tate Britain will honour him with an exhibition based on the impressive archive of his work owned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. These drawings will reveal him as a more subtle, complex and even charming character. They are skilful, sometimes refined, sometimes informal. Some drawings, composed as presentation pieces after a design was complete, have an abstract elegance. At other times he would cover sheets of writing paper, diary pages and the backs of plane tickets and telegrams with thickets of sketches, as he worked ideas over and over. They might be plans, diagrams or three-dimensional views. They have energy, with much-repeated lines or brisk hatching or Klee-like arrows scurrying through them. They are signs of thinking with his hands, of trying things out, of exploring and excavating. These are not the disdainful doodles that some architects dash off, hoping that it will be taken as a sign of genius that they can be done so thoughtlessly. They show complete faith that the design of buildings is a serious business, to be pursued with time, testing, consideration and debate. He might try several versions of an elevation, with differences that would not be obvious to a casual observer. They also show faith that architecture is something like music or painting or literature, that it is something to be composed, with tensions and harmonies to be resolved within its overall structure. Stirling kept considering his art in relation to that of others, both 20th-century figures like Le Corbusier and the Russian constructivists, and architects of the Italian renaissance, or the grand industrial architecture of Liverpool, where he grew up. His designs and drawings set up multiple dialogues with other works. And, like artists and writers, he wanted to be provocative. He wanted to wake people up. These tensions and elaborations, these interplays of forces and allusions, should make it hard to dismiss his work as mere leaky showmanship. His Florey building for Queen's College Oxford is a sort of inhabited viaduct turned into theatrical U-shaped court, a distant derivation of the Oxford quad, facing the river Cherwell. It is Oxonian and constructivist at once. It is perverse but you would have to be a dullard not to see its drama. Students there now comment on its faults but also on the atmosphere generated by this extraordinary hemi-cauldron. His later work is more likeable and less leaky, as Stirling became slightly less reckless, and as he started building in Germany, where the building industry seemed better equipped to realise his ambitious ideas. His 1984 Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, for example, was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country, on account of the force of the building. In this it was a prototype of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. At its centre is a great circular stone court, like an inside-out mausoleum or a new-built ruin, with vines falling down its walls. A system of ramps takes you through the building, as if you were climbing a hillside and, at the moments when it might become too monumental, bright curves of steel and glass lighten the mood. It is romantic, potent and playful at once, and perfectly captures the balance between monumentality and motion, between eternity and perambulation, which is the essence of museums. The Staatsgalerie wouldn't work without the pushing and pulling of ideas you can see in the drawings. It is worked and wrought in a way few buildings are nowadays. Architects still work hard, and test different ideas, but they search more for a magic formula in the cladding or the form which will make the whole building smoothly beautiful and consistent. There is less sense that a building is composed like a painting, and that the architect should leave some of his sweat and brushmarks on the canvas. Stirling's drawings bring on a nostalgia for a way of designing – among other things, without a computer in sight – that has gone the way of dodos and drafting boards. Does his art justify the malfunctions? There is, to be sure, more than one side to the argument: Stirling's defenders always said that his projects were victims of poor construction, cost-cutting and clumsy clients. It can also be said that time casts a rosy glow over the faults of more distant architects. The shoddiness of Nash, the impracticality of Vanbrugh and the budget-busting of many great architects in history are now almost forgotten and forgiven. The same will probably happen to Stirling. Stirling was a very naughty boy. The pleasures of his successes came at an exorbitant cost, not only in technical failures but also artistic ideas that didn't quite come off. The number of his works that are unequivocally admirable are few. Architects are mostly more careful and responsible now, which is mostly a good thing. But, at his best, Stirling showed what powerful and moving things buildings can be, and the world would have been poorer without him. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Boom for patriotic entrepreneurs Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:05 PM PDT William and Kate's big day means big business for the makers of wedding memorabilia, from china mugs and tea towels to novelty cakes and king-sized condoms. We go behind the scenes to meet our commemorative merchandisers – and Britain's most avid collector The Kirkgate Business Centre in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, is not the kind of place you would automatically associate with the royal wedding. Situated off a busy main road, it consists of a series of looping dirt pathways, each one lined with vast, windowless warehouses advertising bathroom tiles or building supplies. Behind the metal-pronged gates, a forlorn forklift truck looks like a trapped zoo animal. A shallow canal, crisscrossed with weeds and abandoned shopping trolleys, is the sort of location one is more accustomed to seeing on the evening news guarded by a grim-faced policeman and cordoned off by yellow tape. But behind the sludge-coloured corrugated iron and the prefab reception area, there beats the heart of an ardent royalist. For it is here that Peter Jones, a bespectacled, white-haired 69-year-old with the air of a benevolent headmaster, oversees his business empire as one of the UK's foremost purveyors of commemorative china. "When the engagement was announced, we were the first people out – all our designs were ready," he says proudly, sitting in a grey-carpeted office festooned with mugs, plates and tankards emblazoned with images of Prince William and his bride-to-be. "All we were waiting for was the date and the photograph of the engagement announcement to put in the middle of the designs and we were good to go!" He picks up a turquoise-blue mug bearing the couple's glossy likeness framed in circular golden curlicues (retail price: £29.95). "Two years we've had these ready," Peter says, peering at the handiwork appreciatively through wire-framed spectacles, "and now it's our most popular item." A white teddy bear surveys proceedings from the top of a filing cabinet. A glittery bow around its neck is embroidered with the names "William" and "Catherine". A pair of interlocking gold hearts is sewn on to its foot. The Royal Wedding Teddy Bear can be yours for £165, or five monthly payments of £33. "People in lower-income groups still like lovely things," Peter explains. His son-in-law Andrew Cousins, the firm's managing director, chimes in. "That's why we offer the interest-free instalments. It makes it quite affordable in these difficult times," he says, putting his hands on his hips so that he unconsciously mimics the double-handled Prestige Large Size Loving Cup (£295 for a limited edition of 100). But does anyone really buy this stuff? "Oh yes. We've already sold thousands since the engagement was announced in November," Andrew continues. "There's been a lot of interest from overseas – Canada, Australia, America. I think it's because William and Catherine are more popular figures with the general public than the older royals." Peter, who is in the middle of showing me a catalogue page advertising a pair of china dwarves with pictures of the engagement ring painted on their hats, agrees. "The Queen has been around for so long," he says. "People of my age group might respect and admire her, but with Prince William here's a new guy that the younger age group can relate to. We've been amazed at how well this range is selling… It's given us a necessary boost. Business is damn difficult at the moment." Sometimes it is easy to forget, surrounded by the sea of plastic tat and flimsy tourist postcards, that the royal wedding is providing an extraordinary opportunity for British businesses. Amid the disgust of hardened republicans and the knowing cynicism of the Twitterati, one can overlook the fact that for every commemorative plate you see advertised in the back of a mid-market tabloid, there are people like Peter Jones and his family, who rely on national occasions such as this one to make their living. The Centre for Retail Research estimates that Prince William's wedding next month will give a £515.5m boost to retailers, with souvenirs alone bringing in £222m. The rise in online shopping over the past 10 years means sales are expected to exceed those for Charles and Diana's wedding in 1981 or the Golden Jubilee in 2002. For those like Peter, who set up his family-run business in 1963 (his wife Daphne was in charge of mail order until she retired five years ago; his daughter Nickie is involved in design), the upsurge in interest for commemorative memorabilia has come at just the right time. "We thought last year was bad but this year will be another difficult one," he says, sipping coffee from a Wedgwood fine bone china cup and saucer. "Confidence in the high street is dreadful, certainly up north, so we needed this." The Portmeirion pottery has already said it expects a record year thanks to its 250 royal wedding products and fine bone china manufacturers such as Aynsley are expecting a 30-40% rise in sales. "It's been particularly good for the English potteries," admits Peter. "Until 10 years ago, 60-80% of our production was in Stoke-on-Trent. Now Royal Doulton, Wedgwood and Spode have all collapsed and we're being flooded by cheap imports from China." In fact, most of the royal wedding tableware is now made in China and imported to the UK. "It's a British royal event," says Andrew, firmly, "and it should be marked by British-made goods." And it is not just the potteries that are benefiting: for each tankard, dwarf or gold-plated royal wedding bell that Peter Jones Ltd produces, the intricate designs and illustrations are hand-painted by a highly skilled local ceramic artist in his 70s. In a dusty folder is a series of his vividly rendered watercolours of miniature palaces through the years. These images are then transferred digitally on to lithographs and printed on to the china. "There are only a few companies that still do it like we do," says Andrew. "We use skilled artisans, but they're all over 50 and there are no younger people coming up. If we're not careful, we'll see those skills disappear." The three of us lapse into a contemplative silence, letting our eyes glaze over, which seems appropriate given we are discussing pottery. Has a member of the royal family ever bought one of their items? "You sent a Corgi, didn't you?" Andrew asks his father-in-law. "A Corgi china paperweight?" Peter chuckles. "We did this beautiful Corgi model for £165 and, out of the blue, a solicitor who did work for the royal household bought five of them." His voice drops to a whisper. "We suspect it was possible the Queen ordered them through him." "Don't quote us!" Andrew adds. A flicker of concern passes over his features. One never knows when the royals might be listening. But it is not just the traditionalists who have capitalised on the public interest in the royal wedding. The prospect of Kate and William's impending nuptials seems to have prompted a surge in entrepreneurial spirit across the country. It was Napoleon who originally described Britain, somewhat disparagingly, as "a nation of shopkeepers". But now we seem to have become a nation of souvenir-makers, developing increasingly inventive ways of making money in the grip of a recession. In Selkirk, Scotland, the Lochcarron Weavers are producing a royal wedding tartan, while Procter & Gamble has announced plans to launch a commemorative Fairy Liquid bottle. There are souvenir Oyster card holders, Union Jack-themed iPhone pouches and Knit Your Own Royal Wedding kits (in which the bride wears wool). Goldsmiths the jeweller is selling £999 "get the look" engagement rings, while Tesco has produced a cut-price version of the Issa dress Kate wore for the official photographs. In London the events organiser Bedazzled has seen sales of Union Jack bunting rise 45% since the engagement was announced and has bookings for several royal wedding street parties. From April, children across the land will be able to pester their parents for a £24.99 Sylvanian Families Royal Wedding Celebration Set featuring two rabbits called Catherine and William Balmoral. In America, where the memorabilia industry has gone into vicarious patriotic overdrive, you can buy a life-size vinyl cutout of the couple (just in case you want to scare off the burglars with a certain je ne sais quoi). And for those who find it all too much, the London-based illustrator Lydia Leith is selling a series of screen-printed Royal Sick Bags under the name "Throne Up". In fact the Lord Chamberlain's Office, which is responsible for providing guidelines on the use of the royal arms, is currently receiving more than 15 requests a day for royal wedding branding (the sick bag has yet to be officially endorsed). Even William and Kate themselves have got in on the act: when, last December, Buckingham Palace threatened to ban their image appearing on tea towels, the royal couple stepped in to overturn the decision. "They see the memorabilia side of things, including tea towels, as very much part of the whole event," a royal aide confirmed at the time. "It's been very interesting to see how the royal wedding industry has gone in a more playful, fun direction than it has in the past," says Hugh Pomfret, a manufacturer of royal memorabilia, when we speak over the phone. "When we came up with our idea, we felt the royal wedding souvenir industry was quite tired, predictable and not especially romantic. What's romantic about a mug or a plate? We've been peddling this stuff for a good 150 years, and so we took a fresh look at it and thought: 'Actually, what would be an original, refreshing, romantic product?'" There is a small pause. The telephone line crackles. "And condoms were a natural direction for us," he concludes. Pomfret's company, Crown Jewels, produces "unique heritage edition" prophylactics that, according to its website, "combine the strength of a prince with the yielding sensitivity of a princess-to-be… [It is] truly a king among condoms." A box of three, containing a specially commissioned portrait of the couple, can be yours for a mere £5. "They've been selling incredibly well," says Pomfret, who says the condoms are a sideline to his normal professional life, although any questions about his day job are mysteriously deflected. "We've sold 6,500 packs to customers in Russia, Canada, Brazil and Mexico. Someone was quoted in Majesty Magazine saying it was rather hurtful, but I don't think it is. It's not meant to be mean-spirited at all. I would love to try and get Prince William some packs for his stag do." I come across several entrepreneurial types like Pomfret who are rushing to capitalise on the money-spinning opportunities of the royal wedding in ingenious, often humorous ways. The London-based creative agency KK Outlet, which usually makes advertising campaign films, decided to diversify and produce a range of tongue-in-cheek commemorative china plates featuring phrases such as "Will 4 Kate 4 Eva" and "Thanks for the free day off". "The plates we'd seen all looked the same as when Charles and Diana got married," explains Danielle Pender, KK Outlet's gallery and store manager. "People today are a lot more design savvy so we thought something a little bit more alternative and light-hearted might go down well. So far we've sold about 3,000 online. For us that's quite a huge deal." Indeed, the plates have proved so popular that they are now stocked by John Lewis. "I think we've all cottoned on to the wedding more than we might have done because there's so much bad news around and it's nice to have something that's genuinely happy," says Pender. For Harriet Hastings, the founder of Biscuiteers, a company that delivers hand-iced biscuits to mark special occasions, the trend in royal memorabilia has changed markedly over the past few years. "It's quite irreverent now, which I think is interesting," she says, explaining that her company has produced a collection of royal wedding-themed biscuits, complete with edible hand-iced reproductions of the engagement ring, Westminster Abbey and the royal horse-drawn carriage. "This is intended to be humorous, to make you smile, and it's also artisanal, which I think people appreciate in a time of recession: they understand the time and individual effort that's gone into it." We meet in the Biscuiteer factory in Kennington, south London, an industrial-sized kitchen filled with delicious sugary smells and women in hats piping purple icing on to chocolate biscuits like Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas. Upstairs the office is wallpapered in pink paisley patterns and the phones are manned by a bevy of fresh-faced girls, all of whom appear to have names ending in "ie". Harriet's two small dogs bustle around excitedly. What are their names? "Dizzy and Lily," replies someone called Cassie. Although Biscuiteers, which was founded in 2007, is a very different company from Peter Jones Ltd they are both family-run ventures – Harriet, a mother of four, runs the business with her husband Stevie and set it up "because I'm the classic example of a woman who had too many children" – and both are benefiting from the interest generated by the royal wedding in difficult financial times. "There's been a definite spike in orders," says Hastings. And historically the British have long been enamoured of royal-themed goods. The first commemorative mug was issued in 1660 to mark the restoration of Charles II to the throne. Royal weddings were routinely marked with goblets or delft plates, but it was not until the coronation of King George II in 1727 that manufacturers were allowed to reproduce the monarch's likeness. Regulations started to be relaxed around the time of Queen Victoria, and her face appeared on various items, including a tin of peaches. The value of a piece of royal memorabilia varies according to its rarity and age – a mug celebrating the 1936 coronation of Edward VIII, who later abdicated, is only worth a few pounds because they were produced in such huge numbers. By contrast, items actually used by royalty can reap ludicrously extravagant rewards. In 2008 a pair of Queen Victoria's bloomers with a 50in waist sold for £4,500 at auction, which works out at approximately £90 an inch. Who buys this stuff? Where does it all go? Well, a sizable proportion of it probably ends up in the overstuffed living room of Margaret Tyler's modestly proportioned North Wembley home. Mrs Tyler, a 67-year-old divorcée who spent 20 years working for the Down's Syndrome Association, is the enthusiastic curator of what is believed to be the biggest private collection of royal memorabilia in the country. The ground floor of her mock Tudor-fronted house has been so overrun by royal-themed mugs, framed photographs, bunting, VHS videos and back issues of Hello! magazine that walking inside feels like stepping into the set of a terribly confusing film, with a plotline that veers between Carry On England and Nightmare on Elm Street. Mrs Tyler herself is patriotically resplendent in a red jacket, white shirt and navy-blue skirt, with two Kate and William rosettes pinned to her ample chest. She shows me round briskly, delivering a good-humoured commentary as she squeezes through piles of old newspapers and a terrifyingly lifelike cardboard model of Princess Diana. "A friend of mine came round and thought that was me!" she says, laughing gaily. "She was knocking on the window and couldn't understand why I wasn't responding." Mrs Tyler has been collecting from a young age. "Even as a little girl I was very interested in the royal family," she says, sitting on a sofa upholstered with Prince Charles's face. "Now I've got more than 10,000 items. I never sell anything. It's been valued at £40,000 by insurers." She takes a sip of tea from a mug painted with the royal coat of arms. "I pay a premium on that," she adds. "It's not included on normal home insurance, you see." Mrs Tyler is understandably delighted by the forthcoming nuptials and has already made an impressive start on building up an engagement collection. There are 12 framed photographs of Kate and William on various official outings on a coffee table in the front room. "I think she's lovely, so self-assured. There's something of Diana about her – she's a very caring girl." An Aynsley China commemorative engagement plate is propped up on the dining table, jostling for space with a crown-shaped ice bucket that her children bought her for Christmas. "My children are not great royalists themselves, but they do look out for me," says Mrs Tyler. "My eldest son Andrew – he's named after Prince Andrew – lives in America and he'll get a phone call from me and say: 'Hello, Mum, what do you want?' I'll say: 'Oh, I've just seen something on TV…' He got me a book signed by the Duchess of York once." But isn't this hobby rather expensive for a pensioner? "I suppose it is, but I don't go on holiday, I don't smoke, I don't drink or drive a car, so this is what I spend my money on. It's like football fans – they buy the ticket, they buy the programme – my hobby would be an equivalent of that." What is it about collecting that she enjoys so much? "It brings the royal family to life really, doesn't it?" she says, head cocked to one side, white hair set firmly in a semi-permanent wave. "It's not just mugs and plates – it's almost like an extension of my own family." Would she be lonely if she stopped? "I think I would, actually, yes." Back in the Kirkgate Business Centre, Peter Jones and his son-in-law Andrew are only too willing to meet the voracious demand of loyal customers like Mrs Tyler. After 50 years in the business, Peter has come to the conclusion that nothing sells quite like a royal wedding. The firm produces commemorative china for other notable events – they will probably do something for the Olympics in 2012, and last year they designed a mug to mark the advent of the coalition government featuring the dual likenesses of Messrs Cameron and Clegg looking every bit as lovestruck as the royal couple. "It sold quite well," says Peter. "But the engagement has been the big one." What has been their least popular item? Andrew shifts nervously in his seat. "I don't think we could say…" "Gordon Brown," interrupts Peter. "There were no sales. It was a disaster." Fortunately, then, it seems the royal wedding has come just in time. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:04 PM PDT From Lady Gaga's fantastical creations to Katy Perry's tongue-in-cheek costumes - today's female pop stars are in competition to top the charts for outrageous fashion. So what happened to elegant red-carpet styling? And how much more bizarre can their outfits get? Spring is a fertile time. Not just for the lambs and the budding trees, but for fashion and trends. The first months of each year bring the latest round of catwalk shows from New York, London, Milan and Paris, and the concurrent awards season sent the best dressed in film and music trotting up the red carpets to the Grammys, the Brits, the Baftas and the Oscars. Spring is an orgy of style. In the old days, if you wanted to look at the beautifully ridiculous, the conceptual or the just plain silly, the fashion shows were your best bet. Awards ceremonies, by contrast, used to be elegant oceans of pretty, colourful gowns by Valentino, Marchesa and Versace. They were so sedate that, in 2001, when Björk wore a swan dress by fashion designer Marjan Pejoski and laid six eggs on the red carpet at the Oscars, she was lampooned for years. In 2011, a decade later, nobody would blink if Björk had taken off and flown to her seat. This spring, at the Grammys, Katy Perry sported angel wings, 10-year-old actress and pop star Willow Smith turned up in 8in platform trainers, US singer Nicki Minaj added leopard-print highlights to her pompadour hair to match her leopard-print dress and Lady Gaga arrived in an egg, carried like a Roman emperor. The designers' most outrageous creations were papped on celebrities at red-carpet events rather than at the fashion shows. In fact, the most talked-about turn on the catwalk this season wasn't by Kate Moss, Lara Stone or any other model – it was Lady Gaga's debut at the Thierry Mugler womenswear show in Paris. Something odd is happening with celebrities and style. The stars are becoming more daring, more avant garde than the designers. Nowadays, the biggest female names in music don't particularly set themselves apart from their predecessors through musical style – most of them create surprisingly traditional pop – but the way they look is a whole new world. Mainstream pop stars have typically had mainstream styling. (This trend is mainly centred on music – film stars are rarely extreme in their style choices, perhaps because they need to be believable in a versatile range of personas.) The Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Kylie, Girls Aloud, even Madonna – all the platinum-selling female acts of the past decade have fitted within received ideas of fashion and femininity, be it sexy, pretty or cool. Singers typically wore clothes that were easy to sell or easy to copy for the high street: Buffalo trainers, hot pants, hipster jeans. Professor Mathieu Deflem is a sociologist who teaches a course called "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame" at the University of South Carolina. He says Gaga's fashion is a change from that of other pop stars. "Lady Gaga reassembles and restyles familiar items in an unfamiliar way. Her sense of style and sex is different. It is artistic, not commercial. Her fashion is the goal, the expression, not a means." The new generation don't go out without a carapaced catsuit, flame-throwing bras, dresses made of cupcakes or flowers or Muppets, and hair that defies logic and gravity. Singers such as Rihanna, Jessie J and Paloma Faith choose to look kitsch or theatrical or even warrior-like rather than follow a standard idea of beauty. Not only is their style a break from tradition but it's impossible for fans – or retailers – to recreate their looks, well, at least without the aid of a mechanic and a pastry chef. These new stars have unique relationships with the designers. Traditionally, when performers forged partnerships with labels, they were equal. Kylie works with Dolce & Gabbana, an Italian label which shares her often kitsch and flamboyant style. Julien Macdonald is known for pretty dresses and so are Girls Aloud. No one blinked when he created stage outfits for them. But when Giorgio Armani dressed Lady Gaga for the 2010 Grammys, the partnership seemed crazy. The designer is synonymous with restraint and the colour "greige"; Lady Gaga likes wearing a lobster on her head. Armani completely abandoned the style he has developed over 36 years to dress the pop star in spangles. "It wouldn't be possible to give Gaga a look from the collection because she wears pieces of art," a spokesperson admitted. This year, Armani dressed Katy Perry for the Grammys and gave her a custom-made, winged, crystal-encrusted gown. Gaga, meanwhile, went to Hussein Chalayan, who is known as creative and experimental, but it was Lady Gaga who convinced him to make her an egg. That so many of these new pop stars wear custom-made clothes from established names, clothes which differ wildly from the labels' signature looks, marks a shift in the fashion status quo. These pop stars are inspiring designers to change. Particularly with the Gaga/Armani collaboration, it didn't feel that Armani dressed Gaga – more that she inspired him to rethink his idea of a dress. The fashion designers haven't always been so fascinated by these stars. Nicola Formichetti is creative director of the Thierry Mugler label and has worked as a stylist at magazines such as Dazed & Confused, Another and American Harper's Bazaar. He is also Lady Gaga's fashion director, the man responsible for finding the meat dress, the veils and the dildo she wore on the cover of Q magazine. He has said that labels weren't always keen to work with the singer. "At the beginning, fashion designers didn't get her. Nobody would lend her anything. I had to lie and say I needed it for my editorial work." Hussein Chalayan cheerfully admits he wasn't a fan of Lady Gaga or her dress sense until he saw her perform. "I wasn't interested in her at all until I went to see her in concert. She's likable and warm and makes an effort with everyone – I hope she doesn't change. I think what she's doing is a regurgitation of the past, but it's fresh packaging." Being snubbed by the fashion establishment has meant these stars and their stylists have worked hard to find their fantastical looks. Whether the singers are underground or transgressive is debatable; the fact that they've brought new fashion talents into the international spotlight is not. Formichetti tweets the credits for all the clothes Gaga wears, and being worn by Beyoncé or Rihanna is now as important as being name-checked by US Vogue's Anna Wintour. Designers such as David Koma, Gareth Pugh and Francesco Scognamiglio have achieved international reputations in part from working with pop stars. The Blonds, David and Phillipe – otherwise known as David Trujillo and Phillipe Rollano – are a rising New York fashion duo who have made their reputation dressing stars such as Fergie, Rihanna and Katy Perry in sculpted, outrageous outfits. "Over-the-top glamour is our speciality," says David Blond. "The 'Blond' aesthetic and themes hark back to a time when women dressed to kill, like the golden age of Hollywood. Now there is a real need for fantasy and escape from the everyday, and elaborate costume plays a huge role in this. Life is theatre for us and we want to bring a bit of that into everyone's life." The Blonds believe the charisma of the new wave of pop stars is about more than their clothes. "Stars like Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry understand the impact of how they present themselves and we believe that comes from within, because without these women the costumes don't have life." The new stars do seem to be more humorous and self-aware than their pop predecessors. When Jessie J won the Critics' Choice at this year's Brit Awards she wore a Vivienne Westwood minidress. "I look like the evil queen from Snow White," she told reporters. "I just need to go and find my dwarfs now." Similarly, when asked about her big-cat Givenchy couture at this year's Grammys, Minaj described her outfit as "miraculous meets her cub meets ferocity meets fabulosity meets the runway". Katy Perry is more pragmatic. "We're all unique. That's why we all win and we all can exist. People don't just want vanilla. They want 31 flavours. I couldn't do what Rihanna does. I couldn't do what Gaga does. They can't do what I do." What these stars do is create a break in the monotony of style that has smothered culture of late. Trends used to wash from catwalk to stage to club and pavement unhampered. They may not be of vast cultural significance, but these new celebrities' style is vivid and fun. We have come a long way from laughing at a star for laying eggs on a red carpet to applauding one for arriving in an egg. It's going to be entertaining to see how much further we can go. Alice Fisher is commissioning editor of the Observer Magazine guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2011 05:04 PM PDT For more than 25 years, Dr Abhay Bang has dedicated his life to reducing infant mortality in the poorest areas of India. But his dazzling results owe little to the orthodoxy of western medicine and everything to his team of neonatally trained rural women Dr Abhay Bang does not look like a pioneer. He sits across the table in a London conference room, his posture slight and upright, his beard neatly trimmed. He is wearing a grey suit and tie, his hair brushed precisely to the right. And yet despite the conventional appearance, this is the man who has revolutionised healthcare for the poorest people in India and who has overseen a programme that has sent infant mortality rates plummeting in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of the world. Medical experts now believe that Dr Bang's radical beliefs hold the key to tackling the myriad endemic health problems that blight the developing word. "I suppose my name might have something to do with the path I chose," he explains in rapid, accented English. "Abhay in Sanskrit means 'No fear.'" Dr Bang smiles. "'No fear of death.'" It is a particularly fitting moniker for a man who has dedicated his life to turning medical orthodoxy on its head. Instead of accepting the traditional hospital-based treatment model, Dr Bang has spent the last 26 years training up local volunteers in Gadchiroli, one of the most deprived districts in the Indian state of Maharashtra, to treat simple maladies at home. The World Health Organisation and Unicef have recently endorsed his approach to treating newborn babies and the programme is currently being rolled out to parts of Africa. But success has been a long time coming. When Dr Bang and his wife, Rani, set up the charity Search (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health) in Gadchiroli in 1985, their mission was simple. "We wanted to listen to the people," says Dr Bang. "What kind of healthcare did they want?" Dr Bang, who had just graduated with a masters in public health at Johns Hopkins University in the US, started holding regular People's Health Assemblies were the local inhabitants could voice their concerns. Infant mortality emerged as one of the most pressing problems. In 1988, 121 newborn babies were dying out of every 1,000 births in the area. Dr Bang's solution was simple: he trained a group of local women in the basics of neonatal care. They were taught how to diagnose pneumonia (using an abacus to count breaths), how to resuscitate children and how to administer some basic antibiotics. Instead of villagers having to walk for miles to get to the nearest hospital, these health visitors (called arogyadoots, which means "health messengers") went to where they were most needed, carrying a small health pack on their back. As more women were trained, they passed on their knowledge to others and, according to Dr Bang, entire communities became "empowered". Anjana Uikey, 40, who was one of the first arogyadoots to be trained, says that the experience has been one of "enormous [personal] growth". "I'm being useful to the village and on a daily basis I have people who are grateful to me," she explains. "Now I get a lot of respect. Earlier, I was nobody and today the whole village knows my name." The newborn death rate in Gadchiroli has now fallen to 30 per 1,000 live births. In 1988, the death rate here among children who developed pneumonia was 13%. With Dr Bang's intervention, it has come down to 0.8%. The figures have had an extraordinary impact on ordinary women such as Meena Dhit, 28, who delivered her second child – a daughter – at home with the help of health visitors. "It was very well done," says Meena. "These women handled it so well. There is a lot of difference from the old days. Now I feel there is the support for young mothers that my mother did not have. There is someone to take care of me. I have more confidence now and less to worry about." "We are very MUCH part of the community," says Dr Bang, when we meet in London at the launch of No Child Born to Die, a global initiative by Save the Children to achieve a two-thirds reduction in child mortality. "I really can't say where the line of separation is between them and me. It is research with the people, not on the people." As an idea, it might sound obvious, but for decades well-intentioned non-governmental organisations from the developed world had attempted to impose the western model of healthcare on rural India. In Dr Bang's eyes, that clearly wasn't working. "The villagers said they were scared to go to hospital," he says. "When we asked why, they told us something fascinating. They said: 'Your doctors and nurses drape themselves in white clothes. We wrap dead bodies in white shawls. How can you save lives if you are dressed like a dead person?' They said: 'When they admit a patient, we can only visit between 3pm and 6pm and we don't have wristwatches. We don't have anywhere to stay in town, so we go back to the village. The patient doesn't want to stay on their own." Dr Bang's solution was to build a hospital consisting of a series of huts that looked like a tribal village so that patients could stay with their relatives. "To me, with my modern education, it looked old-fashioned," he admits. "But the people said: 'This hospital belongs to us.'" For Dr Bang, it was the culmination of a lifelong dream. His father, a supporter of the Indian independence movement, was a devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi and both Dr Bang and his brother Ashok grew up in Gandhi's ashram in Sabarmarti. Dr Bang was heavily influenced by Gandhi's philosophy of "self-rule". "Gandhi had a vision of how society should be, of how India should be self-ruled," he says now. "But it was not only India that should be allowed to self-rule, it was every human being as well… I took inspiration from that and asked myself, 'How can individuals and communities become autonomous and independent with their own healthcare?'" He remembers walking past a rural village at the age of 13 with his brother and seeing that the inhabitants didn't have enough food and were sick. "My brother said: 'I will improve agriculture when I'm older,' and I said: 'OK, I have no option but to improve their health.'" He emits a high-pitched giggle. Both brothers kept their promise – Ashok now works with farmers in central India while Dr Bang's wife, Rani, a contemporary from medical school, was swiftly co-opted to the healthcare cause. "Her name in the Indian language means 'the Queen'," he says, eyes twinkling. "So I am an ex-officio king." Given that they live and work together under such intense conditions, do they ever argue? "Ooh don't ask me this! Now, at the age of 60, it has reduced. But when we were in our 30s, we were constantly arguing about the best way to do things." Still, in spite of Search's impressive statistical results, the Bangs have been criticised in the past for allowing uneducated women to administer complex medical drugs. In response, Dr Bang insists that, so far, "our workers have given 15,000 injections. The rate of complication has been zero." The insistence that patients must be treated in "techno- centric" hospitals by western-trained physicians is, to his mind, simply not viable in rural India, where lack of transport and an inability to pay for treatment often mean that sick people stay away. "I think this view is, to say it mildly, impractical and to say it forcefully, it's an imperialistic way of thinking. What is do-able in Boston is not do-able in Gadchiroli… Needs are different in different societies." But although he has saved countless lives, Dr Bang remains plagued by the memory of a single baby he could not help. "It was one of the turning points, before the hospital we constructed had been built," he recalls. "One rainy season, it was pouring outside and it was dark. I was relaxing in the evening after a day's work. Suddenly somebody knocked on my door. It was a young woman carrying a tiny child. The child was skin and bones. I held the baby up as there was no examination table and started examining him. He was malnourished and had severe dehydration and pneumonia. Within minutes of arriving at that diagnosis, the baby stopped breathing. I couldn't do anything. "The woman had come from a village 4km away. I asked her: 'Why didn't you come earlier?'" She replied by telling Dr Bang her story: her husband was an alcoholic and spent all his earnings on drink. During pregnancy, she had not eaten because of an ingrained tribal belief that if she did, it would make the baby too heavy to deliver. She developed malaria while pregnant, but there was no money to buy drugs to treat her. When the baby was born, she fed him diluted milk. Then when the baby fell sick, she took him to a witch doctor who sacrificed a chicken for 200 rupees. When that didn't work, she started walking to Dr Bang but a river that lay across her path had swollen and burst its banks. She could not cross because there was no bridge: the government had promised to build one, but it had been lying incomplete for months. So the woman slept rough overnight before resuming her journey the next day, when the water levels had fallen. "I felt very miserable when she told me this story," says Dr Bang. "That baby died because of many factors: poverty, a wrong belief system, an alcoholic husband and corruption, because the bridge had not been constructed [by the government]. I felt terribly hopeless. "But then I looked at the whole situation and asked myself: 'Do I really need to solve all the problems, all the links in the chain of this cause of death?' I started to think: 'Where is the weakest link I can attack?' and that was access to healthcare." He falls silent for a moment. "It was practical compassion, not a flash of genius." And in a world where eight million children a year continue to die before they reach their fifth birthday, perhaps it is Dr Bang's practical compassion that offers the best hope of some kind of solution. Until then, the memory of that woman and her baby haunts him still. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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