The Guardian World News

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• US and UK may arm rebels if Gaddafi clings to power
• Japan 'has lost race' to halt meltdown
• Frontline policing 'will be damaged'
• Syrian president sacks cabinet
• Fake bomb found on cargo plane
• Superinjunction bans naming 'Mr Z'
• Tomlinson inquest sees new footage
• Dozens killed in Iraq council attack
• GMC urges EU-wide GP standards
• North Korea 'on a knife edge'
• Yates defiant over parliament claims
• Miliband shows support for AV
• Pakistan's secret dirty war
• Katy B: One step beyond
• Language lessons with Fabio Capello
• How to fight fire with electricity
• The original celebrity perfumer
• Richard Adams
• Fred West's daughter criticises ITV
• Maxi skirts: how low can you go?
• Rolling with London's bin men

US and UK may arm rebels if Gaddafi clings to power Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:30 PM PDT Hillary Clinton and William Hague claim arming rebel groups may be legal under the recent UN resolution The US and Britain have raised the prospect of arming Libya's rebels if air strikes fail to force Muammar Gaddafi from power. At the end of a conference on Libya in London, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said for the first time that she believed arming rebel groups was legal under UN security council resolution 1973, passed two weeks ago, which also provided the legal justification for air strikes. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, agreed that the resolution made it legal "to give people aid in order to defend themselves in particular circumstances". But Clinton admitted the Americans "do not know as much as we would like to" about the interim national council (INC). In Washington, Admiral James Stavridis, Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe, told the Senate that intelligence analysis had revealed "flickers" of al-Qaida or Hezbollah presence inside the movement, and argued it required further study. America's envoy to the UN, Susan Rice, told Fox News she was "reading much the same stuff" and distanced herself from Stavridis's comments. "I think we can't rule out the possibility that extremist elements could filter into any segment of Libyan society and it's something clearly we will watch carefully for," she said. The west's main Arab ally, Qatar, also said providing weapons to Gaddafi's opponents should be considered if air strikes failed to dislodge him. The Gulf state's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jaber al-Thani, said the effect of air strikes would have to be evaluated in a few days, but added: "We cannot let the people suffer for too long." A prolonged conflict appeared more likely after pro-Gaddafi forces launched a powerful counterattack against Libyan rebelstoday, sending the revolutionaries fleeing from towns they had taken only two days earlier. Mahmoud Shammam, a spokesman for the INC said the opposition lacked weapons. "We don't have arms at all, otherwise we would finish Gaddafi in a few days. We ask for the political support more than we are asking for the arms. But if we get both that would be great." However, international law experts have warned that the US is likely to be in breach of the UN security council's arms embargo on Libya if it sends weapons to the rebels. Lawyers analysing the UN's 26 February arms embargo said it would require a change in the terms for such a move not to breach international law. "The embargo appears to cover everybody in the conflict, which means you can't supply arms to rebels," said Philippe Sands QC, professor of international law at University College London. The French and Italians have also disagreed with Washington and London's interpretation of the UN resolution. Asked about the possibility of arming the rebels, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said: "I remind you it is not part of the UN resolution – which France sticks to – but we are ready to discuss it with our partners." French and Italian officials said the issue had been discussed at the conference in London, contradicting US and British assurances to the contrary. There appeared to be greater consensus on offering Gaddafi a way out of the conflict through exile, with Italy leading the way in seeking a haven prepared to accept the Libyan leader. The UK was not looking for somewhere for him to go, said Hague. "That doesn't exclude other countries from doing so." Barack Obama said in television interviews on Tuesday he thought it was too early to negotiate an exit for Gaddafi. He told CBS News Gaddafi's inner circle was beginning to recognise that "their days are numbered". He said some may be negotiating to leave the regime. "But that information may not have filtered to Gaddafi yet." Clinton said the UN's special envoy to Libya, Abdul Ilah Khatib, was due in Tripoli soon to explore "a political solution that could involve [Gaddafi] leaving the country". The INC was not formally invited to the London conference, and has only been recognised so far by France and Qatar. However, it emerged from the conference with its status enhanced. The group launched its political manifesto, A Vision of a Democratic Libya, from the Foreign Office's official briefing room. Shammam said Clinton herself had "just stopped short of recognition", but she had dispatched a senior US diplomat, Chris Stevens, to Benghazi to strengthen ties. "We have been told here that a lot more delegates will be coming to Benghazi soon," said the INC spokesman. The conference agreed to study a Qatari proposal to sell oil from opposition-held areas of Libya, to provide revenue for the insurgents. Pro-Gaddafi forces bolstered by recent reinforcements bombarded rebel positions in Bin Jawad, 45 miles from the politically and strategically significant town of Sirte on the Libyan coast. Revolutionaries around Bin Jawad eventually fled under the intense assault. The government army moved into the town and then pressed east for 20 miles to within striking distance of Ras Lanuf, which was left dangerously vulnerable. Towns on the road to Benghazi have changed hands several times since the beginning of the uprising two months ago. The rebels' see-sawing military fortunes, which saw them charge down the road to Bin Jawad on Sunday after western air strikes sent Gaddafi's forces fleeing only to charge back up again yesterday, is further confirmation that they are unlikely to be able to defeat the regime without foreign air forces continuing to destroy government tanks and artillery. It was not immediately clear if there had been any air strikes near Sirte or Bin Jawad on Monday, but the advance of the regime's forces did not appear to have been slowed. Rebel fighters demanded to know if Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who is a favourite of the revolutionaries after his government recognised them, was sleeping. Libya Middle East Muammar Gaddafi Hillary Clinton William Hague Arab and Middle East unrest US foreign policy Chris McGreal Julian Borger guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Japan 'has lost race' to halt meltdown Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:53 AM PDT Fukushima meltdown fears rise after radioactive core melts through vessel – but 'no danger of Chernobyl-style catastrophe' • In pictures: Fukushima nuclear emergency - week three • Interactive: Japan earthquake: Ian Sample on efforts to contain the nuclear accident The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site. The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it. Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have "lost the race" to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe. Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors. At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel "lower head" of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said. "The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards." The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released. Lahey said: "It won't come out as one big glob; it'll come out like lava, and that is good because it's easier to cool." The drywell is surrounded by a secondary steel-and-concrete structure designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment. But an earlier hydrogen explosion at the reactor may have damaged this. "The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core," Lahey added. "It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment." The radiation level at a pool of water in the turbine room of reactor two was measured recently at 1,000 millisieverts per hour. At that level, workers could remain in the area for just 15 minutes, under current exposure guidelines. A less serious core meltdown happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. During that incident, engineers managed to cool the molten fuel before it penetrated the steel pressure vessel. The task is a race against time, because as the fuel melts it forms a blob that becomes increasingly difficult to cool. In the light of the Fukushima crisis, Lahey said all countries with nuclear power stations should have "Swat teams" of nuclear reactor safety experts on standby to give swift advice to the authorities in times of emergency, with international groups co-ordinated by the International Atomic Energy Authority. The warning came as the Japanese authorities were being urged to give clearer advice to the public about the safety of food and drinking water contaminated with radioactive substances from Fukushima. Robert Peter Gale, a US medical researcher who was brought in by Soviet authorities after the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986, has met Japanese cabinet ministers to discuss establishing an independent committee charged with taking radiation data from the site and translating it into clear public health advice. "What is fundamentally disturbing the public is reports of drinking water one day being above some limit, and then a day or two later it's suddenly safe to drink. People don't know if the first instance was alarmist or whether the second one was untrue," said Gale. "My recommendation is they should consider establishing a small commission to independently convert the data into comprehensible units of risk for the public so people know what they are dealing with and can take sensible decisions," he added. Japan disaster Japan Nuclear power Energy Physics Ian Sample guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Frontline policing 'will be damaged' Posted: 29 Mar 2011 04:01 PM PDT About two-thirds of police have contact with the public but will be difficult to retain in the face of 20% cuts, says HMIC About two-thirds of the police workforce in England and Wales should be classed as involved in the "frontline" and will be very hard to retain in the face of 20% cuts, Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) warns. In the first official attempt to define what constitutes the frontline in policing, the HMIC study says that 68% of police officers and civilian staff are involved either in everyday "visible" contact with the public or in specialist roles intervening directly to keep people safe and enforce the law. The study suggests that CID, confiscating criminal assets, fingerprint and scenes of crime jobs are all frontline functions while handling intelligence, processing offenders, training, IT and communications could all be regarded as middle-office and back-office roles. Sir Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, stressed that staff in middle or back office jobs were also key and ensured frontline duties were properly carried out. "Quite a lot of functions in there. We can't see that any of them are particularly redundant. You need them all in some form," he said. O'Connor said that while back-office staff were not just disposable assets and some roles did not have to be done by officers, there were areas that were off-limits: "I would want police officers involved in training detectives and people driving cars. There is an element of expertise. Learning how to interrogate people well is not something you can learn from a book," he said. HMIC says in its report, Demanding Times, that it will be a big challenge to make cuts without damaging the frontline. "Even if you imagine that the back office and middle office are ripe for reform, you have only got one third of them to do it with," said O'Connor, implying the rest were off-limits as frontline roles. "The cuts across England and Wales do not cut the same way for every force. For some it is a much bigger challenge. It remains difficult for the frontline to remain in its current form for a number of forces. In its present form it looks very hard to retain." The study was undertaken after ministers and MPs failed to find any consensus within the police over what constitutes the frontline. Peter Fahy of the Association of Chief Police Officers said the HMIC report highlighted the close link between what was seen as frontline and those working out of sight: "Whether it be handling intelligence, delivering training, processing offenders through the criminal justice system or any other task, roles in support of the frontline are as critical to policing as they are in any other large organisation. Simplistic judgments about the value of the work our officers and staff do are not helpful." The report is published after a Labour survey showed that 2,200 of the most experienced officers are to be forcibly retired over the next four years and it was disclosed that Warwickshire police have become the first in the country to tell uniformed officers they will be drafted into back-office roles to cover civilian staff who have taken redundancy. Police Public sector cuts Alan Travis guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Syrian president sacks cabinet Posted: 29 Mar 2011 11:44 AM PDT Bashar al-Assad is expected to lift emergency laws and announce a crackdown on corruption in a speech Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has sacked his cabinet and suggested significant reforms in his first public intervention in a 10-day-old nationwide uprising. The authoritarian leader, whose silence so far has provoked anger among his people, is expected to deliver the most important speech of his career on Wednesday as he tries to win the trust of a rebellious Syrian people insisting on widespread reform and democratic freedoms. Assad is likely to lift emergency laws, which outlaw public gatherings, and introduce a corruption crackdown in a bid to stay ahead of the revolutionary current sweeping the Middle East. Protests of the scale seen over the past week are unprecedented in Syria, where one of the region's most formidable police states has crushed dissent, but largely delivered stability for more than four decades. Large pro-government demonstrations were held in the capital Damascus on Tuesday, a week after running street battles between demonstrators and security forces who opened fire on them in the southern city of Deraa and the northern port of Latakia. They came as Assad, who succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, as president in 2000 and has ruled with the same unchecked power, was clearly calculating how to deliver concessions that would appease citizens without being seen to capitulate to them. "What we have in Syria is not yet a revolution. It is unrest in pursuit of legitimate reform," a Syrian official said. "Assad is a popular president. If there was a vote tomorrow, I think he would win 60% or maybe more. "We have the problem of economic corruption but not political corruption. Assad has a lot of credit in the bank. He needs to cash it in or else we are heading for the unknown. Whatever happens, Syria has changed. The wall of fear for expressing your views has collapsed." Syria's protesters have been galvanised by the region's uprisings and Assad faces a difficult task of convincing the country's largely impoverished citizens that his old guard can offer the same political buy-in that was triumphantly seized by demonstrators in Tunisia and Egypt. "This is what this is all about for us," said a Syrian businessman in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. "We want the same opportunity that everyone else is getting. We will not be taken for granted any more." Another Syrian, who also refused to be named, outlined the fear felt by many in Damascus as the tide of full-blown revolt draws near. "There are a lot of people invested in the status quo," he said. "And there are good reasons for that. Stability has been paramount in Syria and it is a formula that has delivered safety for many and success for some." Syria's ruling class almost exclusively stems from an Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam. Its citizens are majority Sunni Muslims, along with Christian and Druze minorities. Syria has long been prominent in the geopolitics of the region, but has taken on increasing importance over the past three years as the United States has tried to disengage it from Iran, which acts as a main patron. Israel has also tried to lever Syria free from Iran and from the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. While the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has condemned the use of violence by security forces, US politicians have been restrained in their criticism, describing Assad as a reformer and insisting that the western military intervention to protect civilians in Libya will not be repeated in Syria. The US recently sent an ambassador to Damascus after an absence of more than five years, during which the Bush White House had accused Assad of allowing his border with Iraq to be used as a turnstile for insurgents fighting US troops. However, suspicions have remained about Syria's role in the region and its motivations, with near neighbours Iraq and Lebanon convinced that its rulers are continuing to play a pervasive role in their countries. "That is why we are looking at what is happening to Assad with such utter fascination," said one Lebanese member of parliament. "The circle has turned for him and he is learning that he can no longer get by with the thuggish ways of the past." As has been the case in Libya and Bahrain, Syria's rulers have blamed the uprising on outside forces. Buthaina Shaaban, a top adviser to Assad, said that "armed gangs" had been responsible for the chaos. Anti-foreigner sentiment is running high and numerous reporters have been deported. The government has mounted an intensive propaganda campaign, sending demonstrators to the streets of the capital. On Saturday hundreds of families drove through the city waving flags and chanting "God, Syria and Bashar only". Syria Bashar Al-Assad Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fake bomb found on cargo plane Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:40 PM PDT Man arrested in London as investigation is launched into hoax device placed on UPS flight to Istanbul An investigation has been launched into how a fake bomb was transported on a cargo plane from the UK, just five months after the discovery of cargo-hold bombs was supposed to have boosted security. A 26-year-old man was arrested at his home last week suspected of a bomb hoax, police said. He was taken to a north London police station and, bailed to return in May. The Met confirmed that they had searched an address in north London and the incident was not terrorist-related. The suspicious device had apparently been stowed on a UPS flight two weeks ago and travelled to Turkey undetected. The Department for Transport said it was taking the matter "very seriously". A Turkish man delivered the package, consisting of a timer, wires and detonator inside a wedding cake box, to a UPS office in north London, a Turkish source told ITV News. It was only discovered after a security screening in Istanbul. Last October, packages containing explosive material hidden in printer ink cartridges sent from Yemen to the US sparked a global terror alert. One was discovered during a routine stop at East Midlands airport in the UK, and the other was found in Dubai. Both contained the high explosive PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Police said they had been timed to detonate over the eastern seaboard of the United States. At the time, it was promised that airports in the UK would improve their cargo screening. The Department for Transport said yesterday: "The government is aware of this incident and takes it very seriously. We have already begun an investigation which will look at all aspects of this incident, including UPS's procedures. The UK has one of the toughest security regimes for air cargo in the world. All security measures are subject to continuous review." A UPS spokeswoman said: "Two weeks ago, a suspicious package travelled within the UPS network aboard an all-cargo aircraft from the United Kingdom to Istanbul, Turkey. "UPS is co-operating with the UK Department for Transport's investigation of the incident. UPS has a multiple-layered approach to ensure security." Last year, a device found at Windhoek airport in Namibia turned out to have been made in the US to test security. German security experts said it was most likely that either US or African authorities had been behind the test. It is believed that over the years the US transport security administration has carried out multiple tests using undercover agents to put dummy bombs through security scanners at US airports. Crime UK security and terrorism Global terrorism Cargo plane bomb plot Jonathan Paige guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Superinjunction bans naming 'Mr Z' Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:13 PM PDT Latest attempt by UK courts to censor internet material has led to claims free speech is being further eroded A wealthy financier involved in a family dispute has made British legal history by winning anonymity in a libel case. This latest court attempt to censor internet material has led to claims that free speech is being further eroded in Britain. In a novel extension of controversial superinjunctions, Mr Justice Tugendhat forbade anyone in Britain from identifying "Mr Z", who claims to have been defamed by his relatives in a row over a multimillion pound family trust. The judge ordered that the relatives' identities also be kept secret, and that no-one be allowed to detail allegations aired in the secret hearings in the high court in London. His ruling was published under the coded title ZAM v CFW and TFW. This extreme, court-ordered secrecy followed threats on behalf of Z's relations to publicise their accusations globally on the internet, where they could not be suppressed. Z told the judge the allegations were "entirely false", and he was being blackmailed. No defence was produced that the accusations were true. Shortly after Tugendhat issued the gagging order, a lengthy set of allegations appeared online. Supposedly posted by a blogger in Niger, they accused Zof misappropriating money from the trust fund and of a sex offence. The judge's ruling means the Guardian cannot provide any information that would help locate the posting on the internet. But the online document itself would appear to be immune to British court rulings. Google says of its service, blogspot.com, that it usually only censors illegal or hate-speech postings, and provides: "a free service for communication, self-expression and freedom of speech". People in other countries can continue to discuss the allegations. Sources claiming to be close to the man's relatives told the Guardian that they were living in Italy, out of British jurisdiction. The "Niger blogger" had purportedly been sent court documents by accident, and could not now be prevented from circulating them. Superinjunctions, in which all details of court proceedings are concealed, have never been granted in cases of libel, as far as is known. They have been granted in kiss-and-tell or breach of confidence cases. A special legal committee investigating the controversial orders is due to report next month. In the most notorious case, the oil traders Trafigura last year briefly obtained a superinjunction against the Guardian to suppress a leaked report on its toxic waste dumping, which even prevented reporting proceedings in parliament. It is rare, though not unknown, for conventional injunctions to be granted in libel cases. These prevent the disputed allegations being repeated until a case is resolved. But it seems unprecedented, legal observers said, to in addition allow anonymity to all the parties. It is feared it may allow a flood of wealthy libel litigants to seek secrecy injunctions against the media. "This takes the epidemic of super-injunctions down a dangerous new path," said John Kampfner, who heads the free speech body Index on Censorship, among the groups campaigning for reform of the libel laws. "Now they are being used not only to protect supposed privacy, but libel too." Gavin Millar QC, a media specialist, said: "Courts are increasingly granting anonymity to claimants where withholding details of evidence used to be regarded as sufficient. This case seems to be more of the same. Open justice is suffering." During the hearing on 3 March, Richard Spearman QC claimed it would be unfair to identify the financier, even though there was no truth in the allegations, because "the fact that [he] has had to seek relief would be capable of being made into a story in its own right and would be likely to lead to widespread speculation as to what story he has been concerned to prevent the defendants from telling". The court was told that employers and other family members had been contacted with the allegations. Letters had been sent saying "Cleared for worldwide publication" and "on the verge of going viral" and mentioning the "worldwide web". One letter said: "Will some evil person leak the entire proceedings and all the sordid details so that the irresponsible global media … can really get their teeth into them?" Mr Justice Tugendhat said in his ruling: "In this particular case, the public interest in open justice is better served by granting anonymity." Superinjunctions: A threat to free speech? No one knows precisely how many superinjunctions have been issued. They are, by nature, secretive. An informed legal estimate is that as many as 20 have been granted in the UK over the past 18 months. Their notoriety stems from a case in October 2009 involving the oil trading firm Trafigura. The solicitors Carter Ruck warned the Guardian that it would be in contempt of court if it published a parliamentary question about the company. The extraordinary powers attributed to the gagging order triggered alarm about threats to freedom of expression and transparency of justice. Some lawyers caution that the term "superinjunction'' is used too loosely. It might be narrowly defined as a court order prohibiting its existence from being revealed and in which the parties are in some way or another rendered anonymous. In recent months, because of criticism of their clandestine nature, judges have become reluctant to grant superinjunctions so readily and shown a preference for anonymised orders where few details are provided. The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, is chairing a committee examining the use of super injunctions. It is due to report before Easter. In a speech earlier this month, Lord Neuberger recognised that there is a problem. "The concern over super injunctions is that they have, as Professor Zuckerman has put it, developed into an entirely secret form of procedure," he said. "As he put it, 'English administration of justice has not [previously] allowed', that is 'for the entire legal process to be conducted out of the public view and for its very existence to be kept permanently secret under pain of contempt. "English law has not known of such a procedure – of secret justice – since 5 July 1641, when the Long Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber." Elsewhere Zuckerman has attacked super injunctions as "curiousity suppressant orders" that undermine the rule of law. Another variant is the hyperinjunction, a term used for an order which attempted to ban an individual from contacting his MP. The Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who used the protection of parliamentary privilege to talk about it, said the order dated from 2005. Many superinjunctions relate to prominent footballers to prevent allegations about their private lives being published. An injunction awarded to Chelsea captain John Terry preventing the reporting of an alleged affair was repealed earlier this year. Owen Bowcott Libel reform Internet Media law David Leigh guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tomlinson inquest sees new footage Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:09 PM PDT Jury sees images of the newspaper seller lying on the ground after being struck by a police officer at the G20 protests Disturbing new footage that shows Ian Tomlinson lying motionless on the ground shortly after being struck by a policeman at the G20 protests was shown to a jury during the opening day of the inquest into his death. Members of his family wept when the footage was played, revealing previously unseen images of the 47-year-old newspaper seller lying on the ground, being tended to by a female medical student. The jury of 11, attending the International Dispute Resolution Centre in Fleet Street, London, was shown footage of Tomlinson and PC Simon Harwood, the officer filmed striking him moments before his collapse on 1 April 2009. Judge Peter Thornton QC, sitting as assistant deputy coroner, told the jury that Harwood, of the Met police's territorial support group, was not on trial. "This is an inquest, not a public inquiry. But every inquest is an inquiry into the death. That involves looking at the circumstances in which the death arose, but not all of the much broader issues which a public inquiry might consider." Thornton said that Harwood's shoving of Tomlinson at 7.20pm on Royal Exchange Buildings was unlikely to be contested. The jury saw footage of Harwood striking Tomlinson with a baton and pushing him hard in the back. Tomlinson was propelled and fell to the ground. "PC Harwood accepted later that he did those things, and he gave his reasons for doing them," Thornton said. Tomlinson then walked about 100 metres along Cornhill before collapsing. He was pronounced dead at 8.10pm. Thornton said there was likely to be "controversy" over the medical evidence. Freddy Patel, the pathologist who did the first postmortem examination, concluded that Tomlinson died of coronary heart disease. Two other pathologists, Nat Cary and Kenneth Shorrock, said he died of internal bleeding. "It is likely to be a controversial area in the inquest," Thornton said. "There is likely to be controversy about the finding by Dr Patel in the first postmortem about the presence of fluid in the abdomen and the extent it contained blood." The jury was shown footage compiled by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, including video from CCTV cameras, bystanders and police helicopters. It included images obtained from trawling websites such as YouTube and was shown in two batches. The first batch showed Tomlinson at Monument tube station just before 7pm. He was repeatedly turned away from police cordons blocking his route home, before he appeared, at about 7.20pm, on Royal Exchange Buildings. He collapsed on the pavement at Cornhill about three minutes later. Lucy Apps, a medical student, went to his aid. Video showed riot officers arriving on the scene and moving her away. There was no evidence that protesters impeded police medics from treating Tomlinson, who was carried away by police minutes later. The second film batch followed Harwood. Fifteen minutes before he struck Tomlinson he tried to arrest a protester, dragging him into the crowd by his jacket. Harwood could have had confrontations with at least two other people in the minutes before his encounter with Tomlinson. Among the witnesses giving evidence at the hearing was Barry Smith, an Evening Standard seller, who had worked with Tomlinson for more than 20 years. He said Tomlinson had left the stall earlier than usual that day because they had run out of newspapers. Tomlinson's widow, Julia Tomlinson, and his stepson, Paul King, also gave evidence at the inquest. Both described a loving father generous with his time and money, who was "idolised" by his four daughters and five stepchildren. Both also spoke of Tomlinson's problem with alcoholism. Julia said: "He would always walk with his hands in his pockets and his head down, even from the living room to the kitchen. This was partly because he had a limited use of one of his hands from an old injury. But I think this was also because he didn't like to impose himself – he didn't want no bother." Ian Tomlinson Police Paul Lewis guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dozens killed in Iraq council attack Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:49 AM PDT Gunmen in Iraqi military uniforms execute hostages and councillors before blowing themselves up in Tikrit attack At least 56 people have been killed by gunmen wearing military uniforms and suicide bomb belts who stormed a local government headquarters in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. A government spokesman said that among those who died were 15 hostages who were executed before their captors blew themselves up. The attackers set off car bombs, explosive belts and hand grenades as they stormed into the building and took hostages, according to local officials. Among the dead were three provincial council members and an Iraqi journalist. A further 65 people were wounded during the siege, which was eventually brought to an end by security forces after several hours. Seven gunmen are also believed to have been killed. Salahuddin province media adviser Muhammad al-Asi said the attackers shot their hostages in the head as security forces closed in. Three local council members were among them. Al-Asi said he saw the bodies as they were taken from the scene at the provincial council headquarters. Salahuddin governor, Ahmed Abdullah, described a fierce shootout between at least eight gunmen, who took over the council headquarters' second floor, and Iraqi security forces who surrounded the building. He said the attackers were hurling grenades at Iraqi forces. Among the dead was freelance journalist Sabah al-Bazi, 30, who worked for al-Arabiya satellite TV channel as well as Reuters and CNN. A senior intelligence official in Baghdad blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for the attack. "The goal of the attackers was apparently to take hostages," Salahuddin government spokesman Ali al-Saleh said. At least some officials and government employees escaped, he said. Authorities said the attackers blew up a car outside the council headquarters to create a diversion before launching their raid. Wearing military uniforms – including one with a high rank – the gunmen identified themselves as Iraqi soldiers at a security checkpoint outside the government compound but opened fire on guards when they were told they needed to be searched. The provincial council meets at the headquarters every Tuesday, but a spokesman for the governor, Ali Abdul Rihman, said local politicians called off their discussions early because there was little on their agenda. As a result, he said, most had already left the headquarters when the assault began. "The gunmen were armed with grenades, and began their raid by firing at random at a reception room," Rihman said. "Then they opened fire inside." Police imposed a curfew to prevent all road and pedestrian traffic in Tikrit as security forces moved into the building. The senior intelligence official said forces began an operation to free any hostages about two hours after the start of the siege. Rihman likened the attack to a hostage raid last year on a Catholic church in Baghdad that left 68 dead. An al-Qaida-linked group claimed responsibility for that massacre on 31 October, which drove thousands of Iraq's already dwindling Christian population from their homeland in fear. Tikrit, 50 miles north of Baghdad, is mostly populated by Sunni Muslims and was a hotbed for insurgents linked to al-Qaida and anti-American extremists at the height of the Iraq war. Iraq Global terrorism al-Qaida Middle East guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

GMC urges EU-wide GP standards Posted: 29 Mar 2011 06:28 AM PDT British medical regulator calls for urgent checks on differences in medical qualifications 'which could put patients at risk' UK medical regulators have demanded minimum standards for doctors' training across all 27 EU member states, saying the present variety of systems could endanger patients and undermine public confidence in healthcare and in the single market in jobs. The General Medical Council has called for urgent checks of all national medical qualifications to prevent migrant foreign doctors working outside their own country in health systems they may not understand. Lack of information about the nature and content of training in other countries means regulators "cannot have full confidence in each other's medical training and education", it says in its response to a European commission review of a 2005 directive that governs automatic recognition of the different systems. Nearly one in 10 of the 239,300 doctors on the UK register qualified in EU countries, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway. NHS statistics show doctors who qualified outside the UK are more likely to be excluded or suspended from their jobs than those who trained in this country. The GMC's devastating attack is the most outspoken critique yet of the European system which requires states to recognise each other's medical qualifications, meaning that regulators cannot test their competence or language skills, as they can with doctors from other parts of the world. These flaws were revealed by the Guardian's investigation into the case of Daniel Ubani, a German doctor who accidentally killed 70-year-old David Gray in 2008 during his first shift as a locum GP on the out-of-hours service in Cambridgeshire. Ubani, who can still practise in Germany although struck off for incompetence in Britain, works mainly as a cosmetic surgeon and specialist in anti-ageing medicine. The GMC was unable to check whether he had ever worked as a GP in Germany. His qualification alone gave him access to the register in the UK. But the GMC has other concerns. "What is a routine treatment or procedure for a general practitioner in the UK, for example, may not be within the normal scope of a doctor trained from another [European] country." This echoes government concerns that, for instance, GPs in Italy do not traditionally treat children as they are normally seen by specialist paediatricians. "We also have a specific on-call system [in hospitals] which means our doctors have to know the generality of a speciality. "We understand that this is not necessarily common in the rest of Europe and gives rise to a patient safety risk where the expectations placed on a doctor working in one jurisdiction, but trained in another, are not met." The GMC document says current EU legislation "does not allow competent authorities to assure themselves that the migrant doctors they register have kept their skills and competence up to date since the award of their professional qualifications". This, it adds, "inevitably weakens the level of confidence that competent authorities can have in the competence of doctors entering the host state". Although the virulence of the criticism will not surprise officials in Brussels where the government and GMC have been lobbying heavily for change in the wake of the Ubani scandal, the GMC document's analysis that the current regime is unsafe provides plenty of ammunition for those who criticise the wider culture of the EU. Rory Gray, son of the patient killed by Ubani, said: "It is great news the GMC is being so forthright. It has said the present system is a public safety risk. Of course, it is." Sons' battle The searing criticism of EU rules by the GMC is another victory for Rory and Stuart Gray, two of the four sons of David Gray who died after a 10-fold overdose of a painkiller administered by Daniel Ubani. Their tireless research and campaigning to expose the flaws in the English health system and the European single market for jobs highlighted by the accident have already helped fashion big changes in the out of hours system of GP care and monitoring by the NHS. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, as part of his proposed reforms to put GPs in control of most of the NHS budget, has also made clear that he expects more local doctors to be on call for overnight and weekend calls, so that foreign locums are unnecessary. Rory, a satellite engineer in Germany, and Stuart, a GP in the West Midlands, have been driven by a burning desire to lower the risks to other patients. Their vivid articulation of system failures revealed by their father's death at first stung NHS officials in Cambridgeshire, where their father died, ministers at the Department of Health and the GMC alike. Now they marvel at the energy of the pair. A year ago, Rory and Stuart revealed how the cause had almost taken over their lives. GPs Doctors NHS Health European commission European Union Germany James Meikle guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

North Korea 'on a knife edge' Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:26 AM PDT Domestic food production hit by bad weather and disease leave more than 6 million people in urgent need of aid Aid agencies working in North Korea have issued a rare joint appeal for increased food donations, warning that millions of vulnerable citizens are living on a knife edge. The groups, which include Save the Children and the Swiss government's relief agency, say bad weather and livestock disease have hampered domestic production, while high global food and fuel prices are making it harder to import supplies. They fear that unless aid is increased now, it will be too late to support people who are already chronically malnourished through the lean season that begins in May. Their warning comes days after a United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) assessment found the country was "highly vulnerable to a food crisis", with more than 6 million people in urgent need of international food aid. Today's joint statement highlighted the needs of children and mothers, the elderly, disabled and sickand pointed to a need for healthcare, water and sanitation as well as food. "We fear there is donor fatigue with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," said Katharina Zellweger, country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. "So much with the DPRK boils down to political issues and then you forget the humanitarian principles," she said. The North has been beset by chronic food problems since the famine that killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the 1990s, leaving it heavily reliant on aid. However, a change of government in the South saw an end to Seoul's "sunshine policy" of freeflowing aid and other countries have become more reluctant to give because of the North's nuclear and missile tests, the shelling of a southern island and the sinking of a southern warship. The North denies attacking the vessel. Andy Featherstone, the region's director of strategy for Save the Children, said: "We would hope [donors] would review decisions they have taken and be more generous in meeting the appeal [following the WFP assessment]." Ireland's Concern Worldwide, Belgium's Handicap International and France's Triangle Generation Humanitaire also signed the statement. The existing WFP scheme has only a third of the funding it needs, and groups say it must be scaled up in any case. The assessment issued last week said heavy rains during last autumn's harvest, a bitter and prolonged winter and a foot and mouth outbreak had damaged food supplies. Other experts say botched currency and economic reforms have exacerbated the problems. Some critics have also suggested the country could be stockpiling food for next year, because Pyongyang has vowed the North will be fully established as a strong and prosperous nation in 2012. North Korea Aid United Nations Tania Branigan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Yates defiant over parliament claims Posted: 29 Mar 2011 12:54 PM PDT Scotland Yard acting deputy commissioner defends himself after criticism from MPs Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, has continued to fight his corner in the face of further allegations that he misled parliament over the phone-hacking scandal. In written evidence to the home affairs select committee, Chris Bryant MP, who first laid the charge against Yates in the House of Commons earlier this month, claimed that: • Yates had always maintained there were very few victims in the affair, yet a briefing paper produced by Scotland Yard during the original inquiry had recorded that "a vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals have been identified as being accessed without authority." • Yates had told the home affairs committee last September that there was no evidence that MPs' phones had been tapped, yet "at least eight MPs that I am aware of, have now been shown evidence that has been in police possession since 2006 that shows precisely that." • Yates claimed that police had approached all known and suspected victims, yet they had failed to inform a number of people who had now been confirmed as victims including, Bryant said, the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller and her friends and family and interior designer Kelly Hoppen. • Yates had failed to tell select committees that police never fully searched the material which they seized in 2006 from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the affair, and since this had later proved to include 2,978 mobile phone numbers, "it is difficult to see how his assertion that there were very few victims can possibly have been based on fact." Yates emphatically denied he had ever misled parliament. He defended his position on the central point of law which has become the subject of a public dispute between him and the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC. Yates has consistently said that it is an offence to intercept voicemail only if it has not already been heard by its intended recipient. On this narrow interpretation, the hacking affair involved few victims and few offenders. However, the DPP has told the committee in writing that prosecuting counsel in the original inquiry in 2006 never adopted this interpretation and that it played no part in the charges brought against Mulcaire and the News of the World's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, or in the legal proceedings generally. Yates stood his ground. He said Bryant had been wrong to claim in the House of Commons on 10 March that the CPS had never advised police to adopt this narrow interpretation. He provided the committee with a written summary of evidence which he gave last week to the media, culture and sport committee listing a series of occasions on which the CPS had specifically told police that they had to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but this had happened before their intended recipients had heard them. "That advice permeated the entire inquiry," he said. Yates told the committee that the advice had remained unchanged until October 2010, when Scotland Yard started a new inquiry and the CPS advised them to take a broader approach, simply regarding all interception of voicemail as illegal. He said Bryant had been wrong to suggest that in October 2010 the CPS had formally warned police that the previous advice had been wrong. "A different QC had provided some differing advice. It signalled an intention to take the broader view for the future." He said Bryant had now "absolutely conceded" that he had been wrong on the point. However, in his written evidence, Bryant conceded only that "it is true that during the very early days, a lawyer at the CPS may have advised" adopting the narrow version of the law. He quoted the DPP's claim that this advice "had no bearing on the charges brought against the defendants or the legal proceedings generally." He suggested that that the original CPS advice had been set aside during the original inquiry, in August 2006, when David Perry QC was brought in as prosecuting counsel. "Perry expressly wrote to the CPS on October 3 2006 that all that they had to prove was that the message had been listened to by Mulcaire, not that the message was virgin." Bryant went on to accuse Yates of misleading the culture, media and sport committee last week: "Even in his evidence to the DCMS committee last week, he disingenuously only referred to advice prior to August 9th 2006, before the first meeting at which David Perry gave the advice that secured the conviction of Goodman and Mulcaire." The committee chairman, Keith Vaz, said the DPP would be giving evidence on the matter. The committee also asked Yates whether police had ever questioned Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World and the Sun, over her 2003 evidence to a select committee that her journalists had paid the police for information. Yates said she had not been questioned but that Scotland Yard was currently 'researching' the matter to see what had been done about it. Yates was challenged by Mark Reckless MP to explain why he was willing to use public money to pay for lawyers to threaten newspapers whose reports he found objectionable, while victims of the hacking affair had had to spend large amounts of their own money to take civil actions to uncover the truth about crimes committed against them. Yates said the two points were completely separate and that, while he had asked for authority to use public funds for his legal advice, he had no intention of suing. Bryant referred to recent disclosures about a series of dinners where Yates and other senior officers met News of the World editors: "The Met have not helped themselves by having regular meetings with the News of the World at the same time as they are supposed to be investigating them." There was, he said, "a serious risk that they might be perceived to be in collusion with the newspaper." Yates said police were "duty bound to engage at various levels with politicians, businessmen and media" and suggested that he had probably had more lunches with the Guardian than with the News of the World. Bryant told the committee that he commended the current Yard inquiry under Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. But he added: "The Met not only failed to do a full investigation in 2006; they have consistently and repeatedly failed to interrogate the evidence they seized in 2006; they have misled individual victims and potential victims; they have opened themselves to charges of collusion by frequently socialising with journalists and executives at the very organisation they were supposedly investigating; and they have consistently failed to give the full picture to this committee. Most worryingly, they have, for whatever reason, failed to expose the full degree of criminality involved, leaving victims to fend for themselves by dragging information out of the Met in civil court." Phone hacking John Yates Police National newspapers Newspapers Newspapers & magazines Nick Davies guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Miliband shows support for AV Posted: 29 Mar 2011 06:39 AM PDT • Miliband shares stage with Tim Farron and Caroline Lucas • Urges voters not to treat AV poll as a referendum on Clegg Tortuous efforts to set up a cross-party platform in favour of the alternative vote have finally borne fruit with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat president, and Caroline Lucas, the Green party leader, joining forces to back reform. Miliband insisted that voters should not decide which way to vote based on particular personalities. He said, it is not about Nick Clegg, it is about changing your voting system, and not a stick with which to beat the government. In his speech, Miliband said that despite the current Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives, he still believed that AV would help progressive centre-left parties to "build bridges not barriers". "The tragedy for progressive politics in Britain has been that division on the centre and left has handed a united right victory after victory," he said. "For most of the last 80 years, there has been one Conservative party but several competing for progressive votes. No wonder the Tories back the current system. "They know Britain is not a fundamentally Conservative country. But with first-past-the-post, they are more likely to govern whenever progressive forces are divided." Miliband was also joined by former Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords Lady Williams, shadow cabinet members John Denham and Tessa Jowell, as well as former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, is currently in Mexico and was asked by the yes campaign not to attend on the grounds that his current unpopularity might turn voters off. Farron described the no campaign as a bunch of harrumphing majors adding: "a yes vote will put an end to safe seats for MPs". He said the no campaign was "ridiculous, reactionary and very well resourced. They will claim in the next five weeks that if you vote yes your hospital will be closed or your police will be cut or you will be invaded by Norway." He added: "Every MP will have to work hard for your vote rather than being protected by a medieval voting system." He said the MPs' expenses scandal "came out of a culture of complacency and arrogance shored up by the fact that two thirds of MPs have safe seats for life". He claimed "the only people that should vote no are lazy MPs who do not want to do any work, newspaper proprietors that want to make sure the establishment remains intact, and if you have difficulty counting to three," a reference to the no campaign's claim that the AV voting system is too complex. He added the no campaign was "just making up invented cobblers, such as permanent hung parliaments and the need for expensive voting machines". He also called on the no campaign to come clean about its funding, claiming its campaign was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Conservative party. The yes campaign also sought to rebut claims, pushed hard by the no campaign patron and former home secretary Lord Reid that AV will lead to supporters of fringe parties having extra votes once their own chosen party drops out. Farron pointed that the BNP were supporting the no campaign, adding extremist parties would be disadvantaged by AV since "extremists either vote for extremist nutters or not. They do not tend to transfer their second preferences. I have yet to meet a lukewarm fascist." At a largely good-natured event, Farron was forced to admit he had seen the referendum as a staging post to a more proportional voting system, but he accepted this was the only change on offer. Tessa Jowell called the vote a "once in 20 or 30 year chance", and insisted that the referendum was the last that would be held. Jowell is especially important since she needs to raise the turnout in London where there are no local elections. There are warnings that only 20% of eligible Londoners may vote. Kennedy urged Liberal Democrats not to hold back because they were not being offered a fully proportional system on 5 May . Addressing those who "fought long and hard in the wilderness for a proportional system", he said the lesson of history is that you cannot afford the luxury of waiting for a perfect system. "This is the proposition is on the table; this represents the force for political reform and this is the chance that has got to be seized. The NotoAV campaign director, Matthew Elliott, dismissed the yes event as "a Lib Dem convention chaired by Ed Miliband". "The only person missing from their Westminster photo-op is the man who is forcing us to have this expensive referendum – Nick Clegg," he said. "It would be his party – the Lib Dems – that would benefit most from a switch to AV. The yes to AV campaign is just a front for the Lib Dems and they are deceiving the public if they claim otherwise." AV Electoral reform Ed Miliband Nick Clegg Liberal Democrats Liberal-Conservative coalition Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Pakistan's secret dirty war Posted: 29 Mar 2011 03:00 PM PDT In Balochistan, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture keep turning up, among them lawyers, students and farm workers. Why is no one investigating and what have they got to do with the bloody battle for Pakistan's largest province? The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head. This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday. If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all. The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan's greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country's powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men. This is Pakistan's dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years, is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues – US spy bases, Chinese business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold. And in recent months it has grown dramatically worse. At the airport in Quetta, the provincial capital, a brusque man in a cheap suit marches up to my taxi with a rattle of questions. "Who is this? What's he doing here? Where is he staying?" he asks the driver, jerking a thumb towards me. Scribbling the answers, he waves us on. "Intelligence," says the driver. The city itself is tense, ringed by jagged, snow-dusted hills and crowded with military checkposts manned by the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force in charge of security. Schools have recently raised their walls; sand-filled Hesco barricades, like the ones used in Kabul and Baghdad, surround the FC headquarters. In a restaurant the waiter apologises: tandoori meat is off the menu because the nationalists blew up the city's gas pipeline a day earlier. The gas company had plugged the hole that morning, he explains, but then the rebels blew it up again. The home secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrani, a neatly suited, well-spoken man, sits in a dark and chilly office. Pens, staplers and telephones are neatly laid on the wide desk before him, but his computer is blank. The rebels have blown up a main pylon, he explains, so the power is off. Still, he insists, things are fine. "The government agencies are operating in concert, everyone is acting in the best public interest," he says. "This is just a . . . political problem." As we speak, a smiling young man walks in and starts to take my photo; I later learn he works for the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency. We cut across the city, twisting through the backstreets, my guide glancing nervously out the rear window. The car halts before a tall gate that snaps shut behind us. Inside, a 55-year-old woman named Lal Bibi is waiting, wrapped in a shawl that betrays only her eyes, trembling as she holds forth a picture of her dead son Najibullah. The 20-year-old, who ran a shop selling motorbike parts, went missing last April after being arrested at an FC checkpost, she says. His body turned up three months later, dumped in a public park on the edge of Quetta, badly tortured. "He had just two teeth in his mouth," she says in a voice crackling with pain. She turns to her father, a turbaned old man sitting beside her, and leans into his shoulder. He grimaces. Bibi says her family was probably targeted for its nationalist ties – Najibullah's older brother, now dead, had joined the "men in the mountains" years earlier, she says. Now a nephew, 28-year-old Maqbool, is missing. She prays for him, regularly calling the hospitals for any sign of him and, occasionally, the city morgues. Over a week of interviews in Karachi and Quetta, I meet the relatives of seven dead men and nine "disappeared" – men presumed to have been abducted by the security forces. One man produces a mobile phone picture of the body of his 22-year-old cousin, Mumtaz Ali Kurd, his eyes black with swelling and his shirt drenched in blood. A relative of Zaman Khan, one of three lawyers killed in the past nine months, produces court papers. A third trembles as he describes finding his brother's body in an orchard near Quetta. Patterns emerge. The victims were generally men between 20 and 40 years old – nationalist politicians, students, shopkeepers, labourers. In many cases they were abducted in broad daylight – dragged off buses, marched out of shops, detained at FC checkposts – by a combination of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothes intelligence men. Others just vanished. They re-emerge, dead, with an eerie tempo – approximately 15 bodies every month, although the average was disturbed last Saturday when eight bodies were found in three locations across Balochistan. Activists have little doubt who is behind the atrocities. Human Rights Watch says "indisputable" evidence points to the hand of the FC, the ISI and its sister agency, Military Intelligence. A local group, Voice for Missing Persons, says the body count has surpassed 110. "This is becoming a state of terror," says its chairman, Naseerullah Baloch. The army denies the charges, saying its good name is being blemished by impersonators. "Militants are using FC uniforms to kidnap people and malign our good name," says Major General Obaid Ullah Khan Niazi, commander of the 46,000 FC troops stationed in Balochistan. "Our job is to enforce the law, not to break it." Despairing relatives feel cornered. Abdul Rahim, a farmer wearing a jewelled skullcap, is from Khuzdar, a hotbed of insurgent violence. He produces court papers detailing the abduction of his son Saadullah in 2009. First he went to the courts but then his lawyer was shot dead. Then he went to the media but the local press club president was killed. Now, Rahim says, "nobody will help in case they are targeted too. We are hopeless." Balochistan has long been an edgy place. Its vast, empty deserts and long borders are a magnet for provocateurs of every stripe. Taliban fighters slip back and forth along the 800-mile Afghan border; Iranian dissidents hide inside the 570-mile frontier with Iran. Drug criminals cross the border from Helmand, the world's largest source of heroin, on their way to Iran or lonely beaches on the Arabian Sea. Wealthy Arab sheikhs fly into remote airstrips on hunting expeditions for the houbara bustard, a bird they believe improves their lovemaking. At Shamsi, a secretive airbase in a remote valley in the centre of the province, CIA operatives launch drones that attack Islamists in the tribal belt. The US spies appreciate the lack of neighbours – Balochistan covers 44% of Pakistan yet has half the population of Karachi. The province's other big draw is its natural wealth. At Reko Diq, 70 miles from the Afghan border, a Canadian-Chilean mining consortium has struck gold, big-time. The Tethyan company has discovered 4bn tonnes of mineable ore that will produce an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold per year, making it one of the largest such mines in the world. The project is currently stalled by a tangled legal dispute, but offers a tantalising taste of Balochistan's vast mineral riches, which also includes oil, gas, platinum and coal. So far it is largely untapped, though, and what mining exists is scrappy and dangerous. On 21 March, 50 coal workers perished in horrific circumstances when methane gas flooded their mine near Quetta, then catastrophically exploded. Two conflicts are rocking the province. North of Quetta, in a belt of land adjoining the Afghan border, is the ethnic Pashtun belt. Here, Afghan Taliban insurgents shelter in hardline madrasas and lawless refugee camps, taking rest in between bouts of battle with western soldiers in Afghanistan. It is home to the infamous "Quetta shura", the Taliban war council, and western officials say the ISI is assisting them. Some locals agree. "It's an open secret," an elder from Kuchlak tells me. "The ISI gave a fleet of motorbikes to local elders, who distributed them to the fighters crossing the border. Nobody can stop them." The other conflict is unfolding south of Quetta, in a vast sweep that stretches from the Quetta suburbs to the Arabian Sea, in the ethnic Baloch and Brahui area, whose people have always been reluctant Pakistanis. The first Baloch revolt erupted in 1948, barely six months after Pakistan was born; this is the fifth. The rebels are splintered into several factions, the largest of which is the Balochistan Liberation Army. They use classic guerrilla tactics – ambushing military convoys, bombing gas pipelines, occasionally lobbing rockets into Quetta city. Casualties are relatively low: 152 FC soldiers died between 2007 and 2010, according to official figures, compared with more than 8,000 soldiers and rebels in the 1970s conflagration. But this insurgency seems to have spread deeper into Baloch society than ever before. Anti-Pakistani fervour has gripped the province. Baloch schoolchildren refuse to sing the national anthem or fly its flag; women, traditionally secluded, have joined the struggle. Universities have become hotbeds of nationalist sentiment. "This is not just the usual suspects," says Rashed Rahman, editor of the Daily Times, one of few papers that regularly covers the conflict. At a Quetta safehouse I meet Asad Baloch, a wiry, talkative 22-year-old activist with the Baloch Students' Organisation (Azad). "We provide moral and political support to the fighters," he says. "We are making people aware. When they are aware, they act." It is a risky business: about one-third of all "kill and dump" victims were members of the BSO. Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth, Balochistan is desperately poor – barely 25% of the population is literate (the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7% have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of Pakistan's natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the supply grid. The insurgents are demanding immediate control of the natural resources and, ultimately, independence. "We are not part of Pakistan," says Baloch. His phone rings. News comes through that another two bodies have been discovered near the coast. One, Abdul Qayuum, was a BSO activist. Days later, videos posted on YouTube show an angry crowd carrying his bloodied corpse into a mortuary. He had been shot in the head. The FC commander, Maj Gen Niazi, wearing a sharp, dark suit and with neatly combed hair (he has just come from a conference) says he has little time for the rebel demand. "The Baloch are being manipulated by their leaders," he says, noting that the scions of the main nationalist groups live in exile abroad – Hyrbyair Marri in London; Brahamdagh Bugti in Geneva. "They are enjoying the life in Europe while their people suffer in the mountains," he says with a sigh. Worse again, he adds, they were supported by India. The Punjabi general offers no proof for his claim, but US and British intelligence broadly agree, according to the recent WikiLeaks cables. India sees Balochistan as payback for Pakistani meddling in Kashmir – which explains why Pakistani generals despise the nationalists so much. "Paid killers," says Niazi. He vehemently denies involvement in human rights violations. "To us, each and every citizen of Balochistan is equally dear," he says. Civilian officials in the province, however, have another story. Last November, the provincial chief minister, Aslam Raisani, told the BBC that the security forces were "definitely" guilty of some killings; earlier this month, the province's top lawyer, Salahuddin Mengal, told the supreme court the FC was "lifting people at will". He resigned a week later. However, gross human rights abuses are not limited to the army. As the conflict drags on, the insurgents have become increasingly brutal and ruthless. In the past two years, militants have kidnapped aid workers, killed at least four journalists and, most disturbingly, started to target "settlers" – unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Some 113 settlers were killed in cold blood last year, according to government figures – civil servants, shopkeepers, miners. On 21 March, militants riding motorbikes sprayed gunfire into a camp of construction workers near Gwadar, killing 11; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Most grotesque, perhaps, are the attacks on education: 22 school teachers, university lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January 2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs. As attitudes harden, the middle ground is being swept away in tide of bloodshed. "Our politicians have been silenced," says Habib Tahir, a human rights lawyer in Quetta. "They are afraid of the young." I ask a student in Quetta to defend the killing of teachers. "They are not teachers, they work for the intelligence agencies," one student tells me. "They are like thieves coming into our homes. They must go." The Islamabad government seems helpless to halt Balochistan's slide into chaos. Two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari announced a sweeping package of measures intended to assuage Baloch grievances, including thousands of jobs, a ban on new military garrisons and payment of $1.4bn (£800m) in overdue natural gas royalties. But violence has hijacked politics, the plan is largely untouched, and anaemic press coverage means there is little outside pressure for action. Pakistan's foreign allies, obsessed with hunting Islamists, have ignored the problem. "We are the most secular people in the region, and still we are being ignored," says Noordin Mengal, who represents Balochistan on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. In this information vacuum, the powerful do as they please. Lawyer Kachkol Ali witnessed security forces drag three men from his office in April 2009. Their bodies turned up five days later, dead and decomposed. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the country. "In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle," he says by phone from Lørenskog, a small Norwegian town where he won asylum last summer. "Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war criminals," he says. "They don't even respect the dead." Balochistan's dirty little war pales beside Pakistan's larger problems – the Taliban, al-Qaida, political upheaval. But it highlights a very fundamental danger – the ability of Pakistanis to live together in a country that, under its Islamic cloak, is a patchwork of ethnicities and cultures. "Balochistan is a warning of the real battle for Pakistan, which is about power and resources," says Haris Gazdar, a Karachi-based researcher. "And if we don't get it right, we're headed for a major conflict." Before leaving Quetta I meet Faiza Mir, a 36-year-old lecturer in international relations at Quetta's Balochistan University. Militants have murdered four of her colleagues in the past three years, all because they were "Punjabi". Driving on to the campus, she points out the spots where they were killed, knowing she could be next. "I can't leave," says Mir, a sparky woman with an irrepressible smile. "This is my home too." And so she engages in debate with students, sympathising with their concerns. "I try to make them understand that talk is better than war," she says. But some compromises are impossible. Earlier on, students had asked Mir to remove a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, from her office wall. Mir politely refused, and Jinnah – an austere lawyer in a Savile Row suit - still stares down from her wall. But how long will he stay there? "That's difficult to say," she answers. Pakistan Taliban Afghanistan Declan Walsh guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Katy B: One step beyond Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:30 PM PDT Katy B cut her teeth on London's dubstep scene – but now the charts and breakfast TV are calling. The 21-year-old tells Rebecca Nicholson why she'll always be a raver at heart In skinny jeans, red jumper and Vans trainers, her freshly dyed red hair pulled back, South London's Katy B is a different kind of pop star. Somehow she's got all bases covered, juggling white label, pirate-station authenticity and one-of-us, we-could-be-mates appeal. While the media still hypes indie bands, it's an increasingly desperate endeavour: this week, the entire top 40 features just one – Noah and the Whale at No 19. Just as they have for the past two years, pop, dance and R&B continue to reign supreme, and Katy B, whose irresistible pop-dubstep single Katy on a Mission hit the top five last summer, is the current sound of both the clubs and the charts. At the east London headquarters of Rinse FM, the pirate station turned legit broadcaster which has been pushing the dubstep, grime and UK funky of London's underground since its inception, Katy is busy attending to the business of being a pop star, choosing clothes for TV appearances and planning rehearsals for the live show she's about to take on the road. Rinse is also home to her record label and management, and she spends her mornings here, working and hanging out. Today, she drops into the Grimey Breakfast Show, broadcasting from the studio next door, to mess around on air with host Scratcha. She gets her hair and makeup done for a series of photoshoots, gossips with her stylist about celeb-mag favourites Peter Andre and "new love" Elen Rivas, and fills me in on the EastEnders baby-swap storyline. It's like going to the hairdresser, if the hairdresser had a healthy interest in the state of dubstep as well as holidays in Turkey with her mates. Born Kathleen Brien ("the most Irish name ever") to a plumber father and postwoman mother, Katy grew up in Peckham, south-east London and learned her trade as a vocalist on the underground dance scene. She appeared as Baby Katy on DJ NG's Tell Me when she was just 16, working mostly with bedroom producers whose records got picked up by pirate radio stations across the capital. In the four years since then, she has criss-crossed genres, singing over drum'n'bass, house, dubstep and its latest mutation UK funky, finally coming up with a debut album, On a Mission, that mixes up those styles into something both credible and accessible. There are mixed-up elements in Katy herself, too. She finished a degree in popular music at Goldsmiths university last year, at around the same time as she filmed her first music video. Her course involved writing an essay about UK funky, "the social elements around it and how it developed and stuff", which she probably knew more about than the person marking her. Although her relationship with Rinse was well underway, she did the degree regardless: "I just wanted to learn more about music and I didn't want to fall into getting a job and not pursuing it, so I thought it would keep me on that path." And though she found her way into music through club nights and on pirate stations, she's been a performer looking to turn pro since she was a child, auditioning for Annie in the West End when she was eight. "That was the first time I had to sing. I auditioned to be Hermione in Harry Potter as well. They were like, 'Have you read the book?' I was like, 'No.' 'Next!'" When she was 14, she went to the Brit school for performing arts in Croydon, where she was in the year below Adele and Jessie J. "If people think it's all singing, dancing and acting, well that's what I wanted, do you know what I mean?" she says, insisting that going to stage school didn't earn her any stick from the hipper-than-thou dance community. "I met all my best friends and I loved it," she says, before summing up her overground/underground appeal completely. "But I didn't make my music there, I did it outside. The first tune that I released, I did with my friend's brother." Katy's first taste of dance music came from performing at clubs before she was old enough to go to them. "I was 16 when I had my first vinyl out and I did PAs. I wasn't really supposed to be in clubs." By the time she was old enough to go out legally, she had already attracted the attentions of Rinse FM's boss Geeneus, who had heard her tracks across the capital's pirate stations and became her manager. As well as kickstarting her career properly, he got her on to the guestlists of clubs she wanted to go to. "I was 18, so that was the time when you do first start raving. It was wicked. They put on loads of raves, and I could get all my mates in for free. Literally, we just went off on one. I went to FWD [Rinse's legendary dubstep/grime night in east London] every single week. But I had work the next day, so I'd be the first one there at 10, on my own, then I'd leave at 12 to get the night bus home." Where were you working? "In Lewisham, in JD Sports. But it was alright. I didn't even have a hangover, 'cos I couldn't afford to drink." It's odd, then, given how much of a fantastic jumble she is, that Katy has been described as "queen of dubstep". When I mention it, she flinches. "I wouldn't say that's a good thing to say," she explains, cautiously, of the tag that's followed her around since last summer's big hit. "I don't think I represent all things dubstep. I just like clubbing, so those are the sounds I've chosen to work with." She says she has more of a relationship with "clubbing in general" than any sort of dubstep scene. "All my friends were into funky," she explains, of the UK house-garage hybrid, "like all the girls and stuff, 'cos that's more a glamorous scene. When I first started raving I was doing that kind of thing." Dubstep is history Geeneus, who's around all morning, cracking jokes and making plans, cuts in. "I mean dubstep to us is fucking ancient. We're like: 'Dubstep, again. Another dubstep conversation.' But the rest of the world is jumping on dubstep right now. Normally when it gets to that stage, it means we're nearly done with it. Like Katy says, funky is newer than dubstep. And that's where she actually comes from. Her first big hit that crossed over was a dubstep tune, but her first four tracks were garage and funky influenced. So the album's a hybrid of sound that's all of the underground, rather than a genre." Geeneus produced most of Katy's album, along with drum'n'bass producer Zinc (dubstep stars Benga and Magnetic Man contributed too, though on fewer tracks), and has been so involved since he signed her that he claims, with a grin, he could do her makeup and styling if he had to. His Rinse business model, with Katy as its big-name star, is brilliantly optimistic. "We don't take it that serious," he says. "We just make a song, crack on, and hope for the best. If Katy on a Mission had sold 100 copies, we'd have been happy. Even now if Katy dropped out the charts tomorrow and was not selling to this pop audience, we like the music, so we'd carry on doing it. That's the way we are." But Katy B is selling to a pop audience. Katy on a Mission and the follow-up, Lights On, were top five hits without much promotion, press or hype behind them, selling because people had heard them on a night out and liked them. The day we meet, Katy is preparing to perform her new single, Broken Record, on the ITV breakfast show Daybreak. Geeneus admits they were surprised she hit the mainstream, but says it didn't quite come out of nowhere. "We've done a year of her singing over my set when I was DJing, she's done a year of [club nights] FWD and Rinse. She's done drum'n'bass tunes with Zinc. So Katy on a Mission was the final thing. The timing for everything was great. As everyone looked and said, 'What's dubstep?' Katy's there with this track. It was mainly good timing." Katy laughs, mock-offended. "Yeah," she grins. "It's all hype." And with that, it's time for lunch, debated at length, before a majority vote is taken and everyone decides on Nando's. A station assistant brings back an order for what seems like everyone who works at Rinse, and then some. Katy's still trying on clothes, with a pair of enormous, glamorous spike heels ("From Topshop! Topshop's good" chips in Geeneus). They'll look good on TV – she wears them on Daybreak the next day – but I can't imagine you wearing them to a club, I say. "I can't dance in them," she shrugs, tucking into her chicken and slipping back into her Vans. • The album On a Mission is out on Monday. Katy B Urban music Grime Dubstep Pop and rock Rebecca Nicholson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Language lessons with Fabio Capello Posted: 29 Mar 2011 12:00 PM PDT The England manager says he needs only 100 words to communicate with his players. Which other jobs could be done so succinctly? England manager Fabio Capello recently defended his limited grasp of English, saying he needed not more than "100 words maximum" to communicate with his players. Here are some other professions where 100 words of English might suffice. Teacher You sit quiet please everyone now enough gum tie shirt homework yes today excuses no book open page talking stop discipline noise courtesy while others trying learn warning first second final exam board bored absent detention suspend imagery Shakespeare GCSE mock coursework maths note paper whose phone confiscate yes I can speaking class assignment Tuesday read chapter important attention chair face this way why bother hours lack support pay cuts thankless bloody babysitter can't control teach students ignore education why inspire nonsense thanks bunch Jamie fucking Oliver total waste think quit retrain landscape gardener maybe life coach shut it Callum. Health and safety expert No unsafe not improper unable misuse substandard prevent stop inadequate supervision insurance payment broken accident workplace issue risk assessment circumstances statistically liable beyond control checks scaffolding helmet harness handrail ventilation potential harm noise restriction comply glass signage conker licence venue security fire hazard guidelines slippery visibility sharp exposed danger radiation maximum capacity minimum requirement footwear injury strain repetitive tree masonry responsible adult caution fire electric shock loose lighting litigious compensate of course we're all going die madam that's hardly the point due care attention just doing job Daily Mail Littlejohn jerk blame culture lawyers all fun until someone loses eye. Public relations manager Hi very my special new really client clientele like great totally fantastic beautiful legendary iconic fabulous perfect match cutting-edge brilliant world-class true alternative surprising unique buzz angle help relationship synergy we proud partnership longstanding brand profile traditional discerning element visual identity exciting business contact media official press release embargo super idea showcase huge story meet mobile interview Google tweet contact team soon lunch forward look to hearing speak further hesitate don't call email details host launch champagne reception celebrity A-list mwah RSVP please bring invitation with thanks best love bye Christ you quick coffee now fired idiot Taxi driver Where left right lights immigration stop roadworks traffic not being funny but come over here free council houses bloody liberty politicians all same lying sorry which terminal mate cheeky my right of way pillock anyway immigrants EU taxpayer whole country hell handcart Cameron Clegg Obama not racist bone in body but still Berlusconi hand it to him his age complete mess blocked off cops everywhere dunno go round high street this hour Friday night innit North Circular could do petrol Libya unemployment celebrities Amy Winehouse you'll never guess who had back cab other day that Lionel Blair no me neither. Fabio Capello Tim Dowling guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How to fight fire with electricity Posted: 29 Mar 2011 11:59 AM PDT Forget the hose . . . firefighters of the future may be putting out fires with a wave of an electric wand Fire extinguishers may soon be a thing of the past: wave a magic electric wand at a flame and you can snuff it out in milliseconds, according to Dr Ludevico Cademartiri. In a paper presented to the American Chemical Society, Cademartiri's Harvard University team reported that they had been able to extinguish an 18in flame merely by using an electrified metal wire. The beam of electricity came from a 600 watt amplifier, about the same power as a car stereo system; so, the firefighter of the future would only need an ultra-portable power pack and wire rather than a cumbersome hose and large quantities of water or foam. How does it work, though? It's based on the observation made some 200 years ago that electricity can change the shape of flames. Previous experiments involved direct current, or DC. But Cademartiri's team used oscillating AC voltage, and found that the effects were "completely different": the electrical field charges the carbon particles (or soot) generated by the fire, creating an organised "flow" of charged particles inside the flame that literally pushes the flame away from the fuel source, putting it out. "Essentially, the [electrical field] separates the region that's hot and burning from the unburnt fuel, so that fuel will not continue to burn," says Kyle Bishop, a researcher who worked with the team. Cademartiri thinks the method could be a more sophisticated way of putting out fires "than just throwing water at them". And he and his colleagues are looking at applications beyond firefighting: controlling flames at will in the combustion process could, for example, lead to far more efficient coal, oil and gas-fired energy production. Firefighters Jon Henley guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The original celebrity perfumer Posted: 29 Mar 2011 11:59 AM PDT The world-famous actor was also the world's biggest-selling celebrity perfumer – and she had a genuine flair for the business Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor's obituaries may have praised her acting and charity work, but it seems they left out one thing – the "most beautiful woman in the world" was also the world's biggest-selling celebrity perfumer. The actor left an estimated $600m - $1bn fortune, largely the yield of her scent empire, it was revealed yesterday. In 1987 Taylor invented the "celebrity perfume" franchise with her first fragrance, Passion, and released her last, Violet Eyes, in 2010. But while today such merchandise is often the result of a popstar turning up to a photoshoot and pointing at a bottle, Taylor's had a genuine flair. A shrewd businesswoman, she teamed up with the respected Elizabeth Arden company and supervised the entire collection of 11 perfumes, even when her health failed. Unusually, she also always wore her own creation, the top-selling White Diamonds (actor Richard Harris was allegedly kicked out of Taylor's mansion for drinking it), and never took her side job for granted – perhaps because perfumery gave her a fatter paycheck than Hollywood ever did. But how could an actor who had seldom worked in her last decades, and whose beauty had long since been lost to illness and obesity, continue to shift more perfume than Britney and JLo at the peak of their powers? It's simple – Taylor represented true glamour at a time when stars are divided between the po-faced elite and the downmarket oversharers. Nobody wants to smell of soy lattes, yoga mats and macrobiotic baby food. Much less beef curries, Prozac and tears. Taylor instead offered a heady world where men were alpha and women were unapologetically, lethally, feminine. Yet Richard Burton's observation that Taylor was "too bloody much" could just as accurately have been levelled at her potent scents. They pulled no punches and made no allowances for modernity, even while insipid unisex fragrances dominated the market in the 90s. Elizabeth Arden has announced that it has no plans to retire the range in the wake of Taylor's death. Rightly so. Taylor's perfumes still offer us the star quality we crave, and represent a woman whose memory will linger long after they fade. Elizabeth Taylor Sali Hughes guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Richard Adams Posted: 29 Mar 2011 10:00 AM PDT Obama's arguments for US action in Libya draws scorn from Sarah Palin and comparisons with Bush's foreign policy Did the world witness the birth of an "Obama doctrine" in the president's speech on Libya? Or is it just a thinly disguised version of George Bush's doctrine? "It is stunning how similar in tone this speech is to George W Bush's Iraq speeches," was the response of former Republican congressman and TV anchor Joe Scarborough. Later, Scarborough accused Obama's supporters on the left of hypocrisy: How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? Erick Erickson, the influential Republican blogger, derided Obama's justifications for military action. "Here comes the 'I am George Bush, but I don't want you to think I am George Bush' line," Erickson tweeted mid-speech. But otherwise Erickson was unimpressed: Obama's doctrine or lack thereof is the foreign policy equivalent of being a little bit pregnant. Wants Gaddafi gone, but no regime change. Steven Metz, a professor at the US Army War College, heard echoes of Bush's defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Obama's arguments for international participation. "Rumsfeld believed that if the United States minimised its role in the stabilisation and reconstruction of Iraq, other nations would step up," Metz wrote in the New Republic, explaining: Initially Bush was only addressing the September 11 attacks. The big ideas and the doctrines came later. Only time will tell whether an Obama Doctrine will emerge following this pattern. Defining the Obama doctrine proved more difficult. Aaron David Miller, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, told the New York Times: The Obama doctrine is the 'hedge your bets and make sure you have a way out' doctrine. He learned from Afghanistan and Iraq. On the more immediate question of whether the speech would win support for Obama's action, the president found himself with some unusual supporters. One was the neoconservative cheerleader William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, one of a small group of commentators Obama spoke to before his speech: The president was unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, and didn't shrink from defending the use of force or from appealing to American values and interests. Furthermore, the president seems to understand we have to win in Libya. I think we will. On the fringes of the Republican party Obama's speech got qualified support from his 2008 opponent, Senator John McCain. But McCain is regarded with deep suspicion by many Republicans, and the party's congressional leaders instead aimed criticism at Obama's actions, saying he hadn't explained the extent and costs of the US's role and failed to gain approval from Congress. Sarah Palin represented a more mainstream Republican opposition, accusing Obama of a "dodgy" strategy. It was, Palin told Fox News, "full of chaos and questions": [Obama] did not make the case for this intervention. US interests have got to be met if we are going to intervene. And US interests can't just mean validating some kind of post-American theory of intervention wherein we wait for the Arab League and the United Nations to tell us 'thumbs up America, you can go now, you can act', and then we get in the back of the bus and we wait for Nato, we wait for the French to lead us. That's not inspirational. At the National Review, unofficial house organ of the Republican right, the discomfort of America's neocons was on display. While they liked military intervention against Gaddafi, they couldn't rush to support a political opponent. "On paper, I agree with a lot of what Obama is saying," said National Review commentator Jim Geraghty. "But he's stringing together a lot of pretty-sounding phrases without really getting at the questions most skeptical Americans have: why intervene here and not in other places?" Marc Lynch, director of George Washington University's Institute for Middle East Studies, had an answer: "The fact that Cote d'Ivoire is awful is a terrible reason to oppose intervening to save Libyans from slaughter in Benghazi." Update: The New York Times's Michael Shear has a fascinating side-by-side comparison of the language used by Obama and Bush. Barack Obama Libya George Bush Sarah Palin US foreign policy Obama administration Republicans United States Richard Adams guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fred West's daughter criticises ITV Posted: 29 Mar 2011 11:52 AM PDT Anne Marie Davis, 46, says Appropriate Adult will cause 'unimaginable distress' to victims' families Fred West's daughter Anne Marie Davis has broken a 10-year silence to criticise an ITV drama on the "untold story" of how the serial killer and his wife, Rosemary, were brought to justice. Davis, whose mother Rena Costello and half-sisters Charmaine and Heather were all murdered, says the two-part show will revive deeply traumatic memories for the families of the Wests' victims. "I felt physically sick when I heard about the plans to turn the tragic events which devastated so many people's lives into a TV drama," she said. "I haven't spoken about this for 10 years, and the only reason I am speaking now is because I want ITV to realise they will be causing unimaginable distress to the families of the young girls who were murdered. "No one should kid themselves. The object of this drama is to make money. But the programme makers have to recognise that a lot of vulnerable young women died. "They were real people and their loved ones are real people too who are still suffering and their wounds will only be reopened by a TV drama like this." The ITV drama, Appropriate Adult, is to focus on the period between Fred West's arrest and his suicide in prison on New Year's Day 1995, as he awaited trial for 12 murders. Dominic West, the British star of The Wire, is playing the Gloucester builder, and Monica Dolan has been cast as Rosemary West, who is in prison for 10 murders. The "appropriate adult" referred to is the voluntary social worker Janet Leach, who sat in on police interviews with West because of concerns over his ability to understand the proceedings. She is being played by Emily Watson, who has described the drama as "tasteful" and "dark ... but not nasty". Davis, 46, said: "If the story is scripted from my father's arrest it will cover the time when all those poor victims were found. I will never forget the images of police officers carrying their remains out of 25 Cromwell Street in crates. "I know how traumatic my own losses have been, but I cannot possibly imagine the pain the other families have suffered and are continuing to suffer." Davis added: "I knew Fred and Rose were dangerous people, but I didn't realise how dangerous. I knew they were involved in incest and paedophilia, but I thought it was confined to me. "These are not fictional characters, but extremely complex individuals who only shared their darkest secrets with each other." Davis, who works in a Gloucester supermarket, said: "I have had customers come up to me and say, 'Is there anything you can do to stop this programme – or anything we can do?' "All I can say is that a lot of women and young girls lost their lives in desperately tragic circumstances and they deserve to be remembered – not to be seen as mere public property." ITV says Appropriate Adult is being produced by the team responsible for previous dramatisations of the Moors murders and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. An ITV spokeswoman said: "Appropriate Adult is a factual drama which focuses on the involvement of Janet Leach who was appointed as appropriate adult in the police interviews Fred West gave during the investigation. "We have sought to contact as many relatives and victims as we could with assistance from the police, to let them know about the project and try to address any concerns they may have. "We have conducted dozens of interviews with individuals directly involved in the case over several years. It is certainly not ITV's wish to cause distress to the families of the Wests' victims, or their children, and Appropriate Adult does not contain any recreation of the actual crimes themselves. But we believe the factual drama genre is a valid form in which to explore and throw new light on real events." ITV Crime Television industry Television Steven Morris guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Maxi skirts: how low can you go? Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:00 PM PDT Don't be afraid of the new longer length maxi and midi skirts. Here's how to drop your hem and raise your style quotient Admit it. The fashioning-up of the longer skirt has piqued your interest, hasn't it? The maxi skirt and its more awkward younger sister, the midi length, have – after a couple of seasons's hard graft – finally stolen the limelight. It is the trend most likely to convert its catwalk kudos into commercial success and as a grown-up with a real body you're keen to get involved, but more than a little bit wary because – and let's not sugarcoat this – they might be less revealing but they are far from easy to wear. In fact they are downright difficult. The catwalks have been trying to convince us about "longer" for a while. Back in September there was a lot of hoo-ha after a beautiful Jil Sander show focused on floor-length couture-style skirts in pinks and oranges. It was, according to Caroline Issa, fashion director at Tank magazine and darling of the blogosphere, "the moment when I remembered about length". Tilda Swinton – a women who prefers to tackle difficult new fashions head-on – took the look to the red carpet and was given the thumbs-up by the fashion jury. Next, the high street collectively decided that this was the season when they could convince us to drop our hems down a good few notches, and now it looks like we might actually be ready to listen. Already there is a breakthrough star of the longer skirt movement. It is a bright pink plissé-pleated calf-length skirt named Carrie. At £110, it has already sold out once at Whistles. Grazia's fashion editor at large, Melanie Rickey, attests that at least five people in the magazine's office have ordered it already. It's easy to see its hanger appeal – it's feminine but not twee and it stands in the centre of a venn diagram of at least three trends. But its hemline is a styling challenge, to say the least. Carrie's creator, Gemma Bunston, advises wearing it with "a buttoned-up shirt to balance the femininity of the piece, or with a simple body for a ballet style. It's hard to wear anything that might compete with it." Meanwhile Rickey takes a more mathematical approach to longer-hem styling. "Knee boots with a midi is amazing," she says, "but with floor length it has to be flat sandals. You can't wear a heel with long unless it is a wedge. It's a question of logistics. You have to look at it practically." For both lengths, tucking-in is the key to getting the proportions right. An untucked top lacks pace, adds bulk and worse still could veer you towards the hippy look, which is so not the goal with longer hems this season. Those on the style front line are embracing the return of the body (yep, popper fastenings and everything) but if that feels like a Rubicon you are not ready to cross, then tuck in a neat jumper and add a belt. So why are all so suddenly flummoxed by the idea of wearing a longer skirt? According to Rickey it's the fault of the so-called decade of the dress, 10 years of slinging on one piece and not having to think about what to wear with it. "Women don't know how to put together outfits any more. I've found that myself, and I work in fashion. We need a lesson in how to wear separates." And it seems that we had better learn fast. The Carrie is coming back in stock soon and on the evidence of next season's catwalk, longer hems aren't going anywhere for a while. Rickey is convinced. "When I see someone wearing really short now, it just looks wrong. Like they forgot to put their skirts on." You don't want that now, do you? Skirts Fashion Imogen Fox guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Rolling with London's bin men Posted: 29 Mar 2011 04:18 AM PDT How will spending cuts affect recycling targets and staff? Heydon Prowse meets bin men Heydon Prowse

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