The Guardian World News

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• Call for closed EU borders in wake of Arab protests
• Syria violence may incur sanctions
• PlayStation hack affects 77m users
• Met warned just 36 over hacking
• Olympic sales surge on deadline
• Marr 'uneasy' about superinjunction
• Labour: Say yes to AV to hurt Tories
• France Telecom worker kills himself
• Sri Lanka report alleges war crimes
• Fifth suspect package found
• 65 Taliban prison escapees caught
• Uganda may drop gay death penalty
• Fees protest: Meadows faces charge
• Countries' debts worse than expected
• Man holds on to his front door in a flattened favela
• Bafta TV award nominations in full
• Madame Nhu obituary
• Nice little urner
• Jonathan Freedland
• Alien finding institute Seti out of cash
• Masdar City – a glimpse of the future

Call for closed EU borders in wake of Arab protests Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:55 PM PDT Sarkozy and Berlusconi want passport-free travel within the EU suspended as north African migrants flee north France and Italy have thrown down the gauntlet over Europe's system of passport-free travel, saying a crisis of immigration sparked by the Arab spring was calling into question the borderless regime enjoyed by more than 400 million people in 25 countries. Challenging one of the biggest achievements of European integration of recent decades, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi also launched a joint effort to stem immigration and demanded European deportation pacts with the countries of revolutionary north Africa to send new arrivals packing. The French president and the Italian prime minister, at a summit in Rome, opted to pile the pressure on Brussels and the governments of the other 25 EU states, demanding an "in-depth revision" of European law regulating the passport-free travel that takes in almost all of the EU with the exception of Britain and Ireland. Prompted by the influx to Italy of almost 30,000 immigrants, mainly from Tunisia, in recent months, the two leaders warned that the upheavals in north Africa "could swiftly become an out-and-out crisis capable of undermining the trust our fellow citizens place in the free circulation within the Schengen area". The passport-free travel system known as the Schengen regime was agreed by a handful of countries in 1985 and put into practice in 1995. Since then it has been embraced by 22 EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, but spurned by Britain and Ireland. It is widely seen, along with the euro single currency, as Europe's signature unification project of recent decades. But like the euro, fighting its biggest crisis over the past year, the Schengen regime is being tested amid mounting populism and the renationalisation of politics across the EU. In other setbacks to borderless Europe, Germany, France and other countries have been blocking the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen in recent months, while the arrival of thousands of Middle Eastern migrants in Greece has fed exasperation with Athens's inability to control the EU's southern border. The Franco-Italian move, following weeks of bad-tempered exchanges between Paris and Rome over how to deal with the Tunisian influx, is the biggest threat yet to the Schengen regime. "For the treaty to stay alive, it must be reformed," Sarkozy said. Berlusconi added: "We both believe that in exceptional circumstances there should be variations to the Schengen treaty." They sent a joint letter to the European commission and European council chiefs, José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, urging proposals from Brussels and agreement on a new system at an EU summit of government heads in June. The commission said it was drawing up new proposals, tinkering with the current system, to be unveiled next week. But it has resisted, with the support of most EU governments, intense Italian pressure to label the arrivals from north Africa an emergency. Under European law the border-free regime can be suspended only for reasons of national security, routinely invoked in recent years by member states hosting major international sporting events such as the World Cup or the European football championships, where individual countries contend with a huge, one-off influx of foreigners. Sarkozy and Berlusconi insisted the rules be changed to allow more restrictions on freedom of travel. A new deal was "indispensable", they said. The June summit should "examine the possibility of temporarily re-establishing internal frontier controls in case of exceptional difficulty in the management of the [EU's] common external frontiers". This, however, would clearly not be in the interests of Italy, which fears an end to the hostilities in Libya could spark an even bigger exodus. In that event, the letter said, the EU should provide "mechanisms of specific solidarity" including the distribution of immigrants among member states. This will prove extremely divisive and will be rejected by countries such as Germany and Sweden, which have much higher numbers of asylum seekers than Italy, less restrictive immigration policies, and little sympathy for Italy's plight. The concerted Franco-Italian initiative also called for accords between the EU and north African countries on repatriating immigrants, a policy certain to spark outrage among human rights groups, the refugee lobby, and more liberal EU governments. Promising strong support for the democratic revolutions sweeping the Maghreb and the Middle East, Sarkozy and Berlusconi added: "In exchange we have the right to expect from our partner countries a commitment to a rapid and efficacious co-operation with the European Union and its member states in fighting illegal immigration." Tuesday's move followed weeks of feuding between Rome and Paris over the Tunisian exodus. Furious at the failure of other EU countries to "share the burden", the Italians granted visas to the immigrants enabling them to move elsewhere in the EU. The Germans and the Austrians complained. The Belgians accused Rome of "cheating" on the Schengen rulebook. The French government promptly closed a part of the border with Italy briefly, re-erecting passport controls to halt trains. But Berlusconi and Sarkozy, seeking to curry favour with the strong far-right constituencies in both countries, sought to bury their differences by urging the rest of Europe to buy into their anti-immigration agenda. European Union Arab and Middle East unrest Immigration and asylum Libya Egypt Tunisia Middle East John Hooper Ian Traynor guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Syria violence may incur sanctions Posted: 26 Apr 2011 11:54 AM PDT Opposition activists report attacks in Deraa and mass arrests in Douma as Sarkozy and Berlusconi call for end to the violence EU countries are discussing imposing sanctions on Syria if the regime continues its violent suppression of pro-democracy protests. The foreign secretary, William Hague, said Damascus faced "a fork in the road" as opposition activists reported continuing government attacks in the southern town of Deraa and mass arrests and tanks in areas including Douma near the capital and Baniyas on the coast. In Rome, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi issued a joint call for an end to violence against the demonstrators. The French president described the situation as "unacceptable" but also made it clear that he was not contemplating direct intervention of the sort he championed against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. "We are not going to intervene everywhere in the world and not all situations are necessarily the same," Sarkozy said. Possible EU sanctions would probably include travel bans and asset freezes targeting members of President Bashar al-Assad's family and other senior regime figures, and would be co-ordinated with US punitive measures being prepared by the Obama administration. "Syria is now at a fork in the road," Hague told MPs. "Its government can still choose to bring about the radical reform which alone can provide peace and stability in Syria and for the long term, and we urge it to do so. Or it can choose ever more violent repression, which can only bring short-term security for the authorities there. If it does so we will work with our European partners and others to take measures, including sanctions, that will have an impact on the regime." But the difficulties of concerted international action were illustrated when members of the UN security council debated a statement criticising Syria as Russian diplomats sought to water down a European draft. The statement would not have the legal force or direct impact of earlier resolutions against Libya. Diplomats said the Syrian government had more defenders on the international stage, and – having endured years of US sanctions already – was less vulnerable to new pressure. The Syrian human rights organisation Sawasiah said at least 400 civilians had been killed during a month of protests including at least 35 in Deraa since Monday. It said 500 people had been arrested in the past few days after the abrogation of the country's decades-old emergency law, one of several concessions by Assad widely dismissed as too little and too late. Despite an attempted media blackout, reports from Syria described more troops, snipers and armoured vehicles in Deraa, where the uprising began last month. Al-Jazeera Arabic quoted residents as saying shelling had killed 20 victims, including women and children. Water, electricity and phone lines had been cut but information was filtering out via locals using Jordanian mobile phones. Amnesty International said at least 23 people had been killed by tank fire. "Sometimes you hear a burst of heavy machine-gun fire coming in all directions as though to just scare people," one resident told Reuters. The central city of Homs was also described by opposition sources as "under siege", as was the northern town of Baniyas, where Sunnis live in the heart of an area dominated by the minority Alawite sect, to which the Assad family belong. Violence peaked at the weekend with 150 people killed in just three days. Opposition supporters abroad said on Tuesday that there were now fewer videos emerging of the violence, apparently reflecting the arrest of activists and a more effective security crackdown. Arab media also highlighted claims of defections from the Syrian army, but it was hard to assess the scale and significance of this. Views of the situation have hardened since last Friday's violence, and the storming of Deraa on Monday showed Assad had decided to use brute force, not further reforms, to deal with the protests. But for all the talk of sanctions, the emphasis in Europe was still on offering Damascus an opportunity to change its behaviour. Hague said he had been in contact with the Turkish government over Syria, most recently on Monday night with its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. The Foreign Office sees Turkey as the most important intermediary in contacts with Damascus, a role that Ankara has sought to cultivate over recent years. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has telephoned Assad to urge "restraint", while Turkey's ambassador to Syria expressed his country's "deep concern and sorrow over the loss of many lives" in a meeting with the Syrian prime minister, Adel Safar. Syria Nicolas Sarkozy William Hague Foreign policy Silvio Berlusconi Middle East Julian Borger Ian Black guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

PlayStation hack affects 77m users Posted: 26 Apr 2011 03:41 PM PDT Sony says hackers have accessed personal information, but says there is no evidence of credit card details theft Sony has warned that the names, addresses and other personal data of about 77 million people with accounts on its PlayStation Network (PSN) have been stolen. Gamers have been locked out of the network for a week, but the company has revealed that the system has been suspended since it was hacked last Wednesday. Sony said it discovered that between 17 and 19 April an "illegal and unauthorised person" got access to people's names, addresses, email address, birthdates, usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and more. Children with accounts established by their parents also may have had their data exposed, according to Sony, which put the warning on its US PlayStation blog – although the warning about the compromise might not be immediately visible to passing readers. The company is also emailing people who might be affected. The intrusion is potentially one of the biggest ever into a store of credit cards. Sony's PSN is one of the world's biggest holders of credit cards, though not as large as Amazon, eBay, PayPal or Apple's iTunes, which each hold more than 100m accounts. The previous largest hacking attacks were on Heartland Payment Systems in January 2009, when up to 100m US credit and debit card details were stolen, and TK Maxx in March 2007, when up to 46m credit card details were stolen. The company said that it saw no evidence that credit card numbers were stolen, but it added: "Out of an abundance of caution, we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained," The online marketplace launched in autumn 2006 and allows users to purchase and play video games, music and films on their PlayStation consoles. The hack attack has put it out of action and it says that it may be up to a week before it is operational again. Sony said it had hired an outside security firm to investigate what happened and has taken steps to rebuild its system to provide greater protection for personal information. PlayStation members are required to submit credit card and personal details to play online games and download software, films and music. Warning users of the network to be on the look out for telephone and email scams, Sony said: "To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant to review your account statements and to monitor your credit or similar types of reports." PlayStation Network posted an apology to users through the Sony website saying it would email those who are suspected to be victims of the hacking. It said: "We don't have an exact date to share at this moment as to when we will have the services turned on, but are working day and night to ensure it is as quickly as possible. "Please note that we are as upset as you are regarding this attack and are going to proceed aggressively to track down those that are responsible." Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, told the BBC that the theft of so much detailed customer information would be seen as a "public relations disaster". "This is a big one," he said. PlayStation Sony Games Hacking Internet Ben Quinn Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Met warned just 36 over hacking Posted: 26 Apr 2011 01:14 PM PDT Disclosure of formerly secret number exposes Met to complaint it breached agreement to warn potential victims The Metropolitan police has admitted that during the first four years of the phone-hacking affair it warned only 36 people they may have been targeted by the News of the World's private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. Scotland Yard's latest inquiry, which was launched in January, is believed to be contacting up to 4,000 people whose names and personal details were found in Mulcaire's possession during the original police investigation in 2006. The disclosure of the number – which Scotland Yard had previously insisted on keeping secret – exposes the Met to the complaint that it breached an agreement with the director of public prosecutions that it would warn all "potential victims" in the affair. It will also revive criticism that it has consistently played down the scale of criminal activity commissioned by the News of the World. Scotland Yard has previously repeatedly refused to disclose the number of victims it had warned, rejecting applications under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that releasing it would necessarily disclose the identities of those warned, and that this would breach their privacy. However, in a sharp change of policy, the Met's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, volunteered that during the 2006 inquiry police had warned 28 people they may have been victims; and that after the Guardian revived the affair in July 2009 they warned eight more. In a letter to John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, Yates – who was responsible for dealing with the hacking affair for nearly 20 months – gave no explanation for the failure to inform more than 36 potential victims. He said: "I have accepted that more could and should have been done in relation to those who may have been potential victims." The new inquiry, which is not being overseen by Yates, is known to have approached scores of politicians, police officers, actors, sports personalities and others who had previously been unaware that the Met held evidence to suggest their voicemail messages may have been intercepted by Mulcaire. Many are now suing News International, which owns the News of the World. Some are also seeking a judicial review of the Met's actions. Yates's disclosure appears to contradict evidence he gave to the media select committee in February last year. On that occasion he said that where there was evidence that "interception was or may have been attempted by Mulcaire, the Met police has been diligent and taken all proper steps to ensure those individuals have been informed." In September he told the home affairs select committee that Met policy was "out of a spirit of abundance of caution to make sure that we were ensuring that those who may have been hacked were contacted by us". In his letter to Whittingdale, Yates also confirmed that during a brief investigation last autumn, police interviewed a total of four people under caution. Yates did not name them, but they included Sean Hoare, the former News of the World journalist who told the New York Times that he had been actively encouraged to hack voicemail by his editor, Andy Coulson, who went on to become the prime minister's media adviser and who has always denied all knowledge of illegal activity. When Yates's officers cautioned Hoare that anything he said might be used in evidence against him, he declined to answer questions. The Yates letter also disclosed more details of his social contacts with senior editors from News International. He acknowledges that he had dinner with the News of the World editor Colin Myler at the Ivy, one of London's most exclusive restaurants; that he had two dinners with the editor of the Sunday Times; and a further dinner with the editor and crime editor of the News of the World four months after he had decided in July 2009 that there was no basis to reopen an investigation into the paper. Yates reveals in his letter that he failed to disclose a meeting with Neil Wallis, who was deputy editor at the paper at the time of the original hacking inquiry and left in August 2009 after six years in the job. He described a meeting with Wallis earlier this year as a "private engagement" and said "relevant senior officers" at Scotland Yard "have been made aware that Mr Wallis and I know each other". Whittingdale has now written to Yates again asking him who at the Met was informed about his relationship with Wallis and when. The investigation into phone-hacking, which is being led by the deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, has resulted in the arrest of three News of the World executives, including two who are still employed by the paper, this month. All of them were released without charge. Separately, the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham told MPs on the Home Affairs select committee on Tuesday that the law on phone-hacking is confusing and in urgent need of clarification. ends Phone hacking Newspapers & magazines News of the World News International National newspapers Newspapers Metropolitan police Police Nick Davies James Robinson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Olympic sales surge on deadline Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:06 PM PDT London 2012 surprise hits include archery and rhythmic gymnastics, as well as predicted high demand events Archery and rhythmic gymnastics were among the surprise hits as applications for Olympic tickets surged before the deadline. Such was the last-minute demand that the deadline was extended by an hour after the website on which the public could register for tickets experienced problems from about 10.30pm as the clock ticked down to the 11.59pm cut-off point. A spokesman said: "Some people experienced temporary delay in accessing the Olympic ticketing site following a surge of applications around 10.30pm this evening. This surge has now evened out and the system is working normally. Applications were still being processed during this period." Members of the public were met by a holding message but after a lengthy waiting period it timed out, leaving some users with a new page that read simply: "Sorry, we cannot process your request. Please try again later." Despite a 42-day sales period, London 2012 organisers reported a surge of interest over the bank holiday weekend. Applications for oversubscribed tickets will now go into a ballot. Olympic organisers were buoyed by strong demand for some less high-profile sports alongside the predicted strong appeal of the opening and closing ceremonies, the velodrome, the pool and athletics track. Group applications from ballet classes and gymnastics clubs have helped fuel demand for the rhythmic gymnastics sessions at Wembley Arena. The popularity of water polo among expat communities combined with relatively cheap tickets, and the appeal of seeing archery across the hallowed turf at Lord's, the home of cricket, have attracted applications for those sports. Other events now expected to require a ballot for tickets include the canoe slalom at the impressive new Broxbourne whitewater course – which became the first new Olympic venue to open to the public last week – and the badminton finals. The popularity of the latter is being put down to recent British successes and its familiarity to casual players in leisure centres and village halls. "We have seen really strong demand for the ceremonies, athletics, swimming, rowing and track cycling, which is what we expected," said Paul Deighton, chief executive of the London 2012 organising committee. "But there has also been heavy demand for finals for events with particular fan bases. Things like canoe slalom, archery and badminton have been high. Rhythmic gymnastics is very popular and I think a lot of gymnastics and ballet clubs have said: 'Let's take the class and go and see world-class performers as we might not get another chance.'" Deighton also defended the ticket application process, which has come in for criticism because prospective purchasers don't know exactly where they will be sitting or what their chances of success are. Organisers are increasingly confident they will hit their goal of bringing in 80% of their total ticket revenue target of £500m by the end of the public ballot process. But they have also conceded that the target may not be met until they have conducted further rounds of sales, which are likely to continue until the end of the year and involve going back to those who have failed to secure tickets for certain events and offering them alternatives. Organisers have boldly pledged that the 8.8m Olympic tickets, 6.6m of which are on sale to the general public, will eventually sell out. But they also concede that some are likely to be on sale right up until the day of the event. Sports such as volleyball, basketball, hockey and handball – which have lots of sessions at venues with relatively high capacities – are understood to be unlikely to sell out in this first ticketing phase. Weightlifting, meanwhile, appears to have proved less popular than some of the other sports taking place at the cavernous ExCel centre in London's docklands. Football will present the biggest challenge, with more than 1m tickets to be sold to the men's and women's competitions just weeks after Euro 2012, and in the midst of an ongoing row over whether Britain will be able to field a team comprising players from all the home nations. Payment will be taken between 10 May and 10 June for successful ticket applications, but applicants will not know which tickets they have until as late as 24 June. There has also been some criticism of the prices, which range from £20 to £2,012. Organisers argue that 90% of tickets are below £100 and point to special "pay your age" prices for children and reduced prices for senior citizens in some sessions. "We looked at several alternatives and determined that this was the fairest and most open way," said Deighton. "I don't think people have gone in for massive over-subscription, I think people are too sensible to box themselves into a corner where they will end up with masses of tickets they don't want and can't afford." Those who end up with unwanted tickets that they can't use or can't afford will be able to resell them through a Locog ticket exchange site, but that is not expected to be operational until next year. The £500m revenue target, a quarter of Locog's overall budget, also includes Paralympic tickets that will go on sale later this year, sales to sponsors and overseas sales. Olympic Games 2012 Olympics 2012: Archery Olympics 2012: Athletics Olympics 2012: Cycling Olympics 2012: Gymnastics Olympics 2012: Fencing Olympics 2012: Water polo Olympics 2012: Weightlifting Olympics 2012: Canoeing Olympics 2012: Badminton Olympic Stadium London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) Owen Gibson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Marr 'uneasy' about superinjunction Posted: 26 Apr 2011 01:25 PM PDT Private Eye editor criticises 'Kafkaesque' anonymised court order preventing mention of legal proceedings Challenging the superinjunction obtained by Andrew Marr to suppress reports of the BBC presenter's extramarital affair cost tens of thousands of pounds and took several years, the editor of Private Eye has said. Ian Hislop was celebrating a legal victory after the easing of the restrictive terms of a "Kafkaesque" injunction taken out by Marr, one that prevented even the mention of any legal proceedings. But Hislop said he deplored the expense of fighting to have it done. The decision by Marr to allow the terms of the gagging order to be relaxed, which came after the threat of legal action by Hislop, is the latest twist in the row over the proliferation of superinjunctions and anonymised court orders. The development of privacy protection through successive celebrity cases has provoked anxiety about the powers wielded by courts to prevent claimants being identified. "The Marr case was the most absurd possible," Hislop told the Guardian. "The story [about allegedly fathering a child during an affair] wasn't even true. It headed into Kafkaesque territory. Tens of thousands of pounds have been spent [challenging] this order. We went to his lawyers and said we were going to court and after a lot of bargaining … he said we could vary it again. "How are we meant to know about these superinjunctions if we don't even get sent them? It's bonkers. Our problem [in challenging them] is that we need to concentrate the few resources we have on the cases we think might be important." Marr, the BBC's former political editor, won a high court order in January 2008 to silence the media following an extramarital affair eight years ago with a national newspaper journalist. She had a child, but Marr is not the father. On Tuesday's BBC Today programme, Hislop accused Marr of hypocrisy. "As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist," Hislop said. Meanwhile, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Marr – married to Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley – said he felt "uneasy" about the order. "I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists," he said. "Am I embarrassed by it? Yes." But he added: "I still believe there was, under those circumstances, no public interest in it." He acknowledged, however, that injunctions now seemed to be "running out of control". Last week the prime minister intervened in the superinjunction debate, warning that judges were establishing far-reaching precedents in suppressing the identification of individuals through their interpretation of article eight of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees "the right to respect for private and family life". David Cameron said: "The judges are creating a sort of privacy law, whereas what ought to happen in a parliamentary democracy is parliament … should decide how much protection do we want … so I am a little uneasy about what is happening." Chastened by adverse publicity in the wake of the Trafigura case – where a superinjunction was obtained restricting reporting of a draft confidential report about a toxic waste incident in west Africa – the courts appear to have modified their methods. Fewer long-term superinjunctions – those that forbid reporting of even the order's existence – have been granted in recent months. Instead, the judicial pattern has switched to short-term superinjunctions, allowing papers to be served, at which point it becomes an order in which only some details are anonymised. Precisely how many orders have been granted is unknown. Best estimates suggest that there are between 20 and 30 currently in force; there may have been as few as five correctly described as "superinjunctions" over the same period. In an attempt to provided a more informed platform for public debate, the Ministry of Justice has said it will provide figures. "The MoJ's chief statistician is currently examining the issue of how reliable data on the number of injunctions issued by the courts might be collated in the future," it said. A legal review of the use of superinjunctions to suppress media reporting, conducted by the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, will publish its findings next month. It is expected to recommend procedural changes to the way the courts handle such cases rather than changes to the law. Will Richmond-Coggan, a solicitor advocate with the law firm Pitmans who specialises in applying for injunctions, said there may have been "hundreds" of superinjunctions in commercial cases that did not involve Premier League footballers or celebrity infidelities. "The broader professional public are unaware of cases involving freezing or seizing assets," he said. "There are commercial sensitivities where even the fact that a firm has obtained an injunction would be damaging." Index on Censorship welcomed Marr's decision to abandon the superinjunction. John Kampfner, its chief executive, said: "While there may be exceptional circumstances in which injunctions may be necessary, we are seeing gagging orders being used to hide the wealthy from embarrassment and even commercial damage. We are in danger of creating a secret network of secret rich man's justice." Andrew Marr Superinjunctions Private Eye David Cameron Trafigura Newspapers & magazines Magazines Owen Bowcott guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Labour: Say yes to AV to hurt Tories Posted: 26 Apr 2011 11:18 AM PDT With polls pointing to win for no campaign at AV referendum, mobilising Labour vote seen as yes camp's last chance Labour voters will be urged to kick Cameron not Clegg in the 5 May referendum on the Commons voting system, as the party's yes campaign steps up its drive to corral swing Labour voters into backing the alternative vote. As the latest polling shows a strong lead for the no campaign, a swing to yes from undecided Labour voters is seen as the last chance for the yes team. Labour Yes will produce a set of posters showing a happy David Cameron and George Osborne with the caption: "Wipe the smile off their faces. Hit them twice on May 5th. Vote Labour in the council elections and yes." The poster is an admission that the yes campaign is only likely to win if it turns the referendum into a verdict on the prime minister, and persuades Labour voters not to see it primarily as a chance to punish the Lib Dems' decision to form the coalition with the Conservatives. It also marks a shift away from the claim that a yes vote will be a blow to the "complacent" culture that led to the MPs expenses scandal. Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, called the no campaign "a Tory campaign almost exclusively funded by Tory donors". He said: "The no campaign is not a genuine cross-party campaign. If Labour voters and others are fed up with the Tory-led coalition, they should send a clear signal by voting yes to AV." Johnson will be joined on Wednesday by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence party, and Tim Farron, the president of the Liberal Democrats. But another former Labour home secretary, David Blunkett, said: "The Labour no campaign now includes over half of Labour's MPs, four out of five councillors, and thousands of Labour activists." The renewed efforts to win over the critical undecided Labour supporters came as another poll suggested the no camp is likely to win, mainly due to a hardening of Tory voter opinion against change. An Angus Reid poll published on Tuesday showed the no camp leading 41% to 30%, a 13-point increase in the no vote since its last survey in mid-April. The yes camp has slipped 2 points from the same date. Once the "don't knows" are removed, the result is 58% to 42%. The pollsters said: "The big jump in support for the no side is coming from people who voted for the Conservative party in the May 2010 general election. In January, 30% of these voters were in the no column. The proportion rose to 43% earlier this month, and has now reached 65 %." The proportion of respondents who are "very informed" or "moderately informed" about the alternative vote system continues to rise as referendum date draws near, and now stands at 67%, up 10 points since mid-April. The pollsters add: "The drastic shift observed in this survey can be traced back to Cameron's speech on 18 April, where he described the alternative vote system as 'obscure, unfair and expensive'." The yes camp is only ahead in London and Scotland, but there is expected to be a low turnout in the capital. Putting forward the yes camp's latest argument , Lord Mandelson said: "If there's not a no vote successfully obtained, the Tory party will never forgive David Cameron. "It will put an instrument, a weapon, in the hands of his critics and detractors in the party and greatly destabilise him and might even cost him his leadership. "What I'm saying to my party is, think strategically. How is it best to collapse the coalition? In my view, you have to pull the rug from under David Cameron much more significantly than any damage you might inflict on Nick Clegg." One Labour yes campaigner argued: "Clegg is already down and he is going to stay down." The same campaigner nevertheless vented fury at the way in which Clegg had decided to raise his profile in the campaign, saying: "Every time he pops up, our poll rating goes down."Clegg's friends claim privately there has been a breach of trust since Cameron promised he would not take a high-profile role. They say he has instead made the no case a central feature of his local election campaign. The yes and no camps have been struck by the extent to which the campaign has turned into a bout between party politicians, rather than a wider debate about the future of democracy. AV referendum Alternative vote Labour Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

France Telecom worker kills himself Posted: 26 Apr 2011 05:29 PM PDT Union says 57-year-old who set himself alight in Merignac had struggled with frequently having to change jobs A France Telecom-Orange worker has died after setting himself alight outside his office, the latest in a wave of suicides at the company. The 57-year-old married father of four, described as a sociable member of staff, set himself on fire in the car park of a site at Merignac, near Bordeaux, after arriving for a morning shift. He had worked for the company for 30 years, most recently at a call centre dealing with company accounts, and was a trade union member who monitored safety and work conditions. Paramedics could do nothing to save him. François Deschamps, of the CFE-CGC Unsa union, suggested the man had struggled with being made to frequently change jobs. "Those enforced changes meant he had to sell his house. He had written to the management on several occasions and in my understanding had no reply," Deschamps told AFP. "I saw him two or three weeks ago. I did not feel like he was on the verge of suicide." France Telecom is Europe's third largest mobile phone operator and biggest provider of broadband internet services. But in recent years it has become synonymous with death and despair in what management called a "suicide contagion effect". At least 23 of its employees killed themselves last year, and there were more than 30 reported suicides in 2008 and 2009, as well as many more attempts. Among those who were found dead at their homes, some had left notes explicitly linking their suicide to their jobs. Unions complained of a climate of bullying, extreme pressure, poor management methods and restructuring cuts that forced people to repeatedly change jobs. A 28-year-old worker who was found dead in his garage in Besançon in the east of France in August 2009 had left a note that talked of his girlfriend, but also mentioned how he felt "helpless" and "angry" over issues at work. A French prosecutor said it was impossible to formally establish a link between France Telecom and the suicide, but workers held a protest march over his death. A month earlier, a 52-year-old employee killed himself in Marseille, leaving a note blaming "overwork" and "management by terror". He wrote: "I am committing suicide because of my work at France Telecom. That's the only reason." Other deaths included that of a 51-year-old who threw himself off a bridge in the Alps after being moved from a back-office job to one in a call centre. Staff said the climate had worsened since privatisation. Some staff complained of divorce, family breakdown and being forced to sell homes due to random job changes. Last October an official report found that the plan, begun in 2006, to slim down the company and scrap 22,000 jobs in three months was behind the feeling of distress among staff. In recent months, the company has increased the presence of psychological support workers and pledged to reduce workplace stress and staff difficulties. Its former head, Didier Lombard, who had warned of a "spiral of death" stood down last year and was replaced by his deputy as a sign that management was taking the crisis seriously. Lombard had been criticised by unions for his poor choice of language in describing a "suicide trend" at France Telecom. The former state-owned monopoly was privatised in 1997, although the French government remained the biggest shareholder. Under government pressure, the company was ordered to put in place measures to monitor and counsel staff thought to be suicidal, and at one point froze 500 employee transfers that were part of restructuring plans. France Orange Angelique Chrisafis guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Sri Lanka report alleges war crimes Posted: 26 Apr 2011 03:09 AM PDT UN chief says independent inquiry would only be launched with country's agreement, despite report finding 'credible allegations' The Sri Lankan government appears unlikely to face a full international inquiry into alleged war crimes during the final stages of its civil war in 2009, despite a UN report that claims tens of thousands of civilians were killed, most of them in shelling by government forces. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said on Tuesday he would only launch an international investigation if the Sri Lankan government agrees or an "international forum" such as the United Nations security council calls for an inquiry. Ban's statement comes in the wake of the release of the report (pdf) of an "expert panel" appointed by the UN to look into the events at the end of the 26-year long separatist conflict in the spring of 2009. The report, posted on a UN website late on Monday night, accuses both sides in the conflict of potential war crimes. It charges the Tamil Tiger separatists (the LTTE) with using civilians as human shields as troops closed in on their final positions in the north-east of the island, and says "multiple sources of evidence" back claims that up to 40,000 non-combatants were killed by indiscriminate shelling on no-fire zones by the Sri Lankan national army. The Sri Lankan government had attempted to stall the publication of the report, the findings of which had been widely leaked. A government statement said its findings were "baseless, biased and unilateral". The panel's report calls for further investigation both of the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tiger rebels. It said there were "credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law was committed both by the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity". The final weeks of the war saw thousands of fighters from the LTTE corralled into a small patch of land by the sea. With them were hundreds of thousands of refugees. Though media were denied access to the battlezone at the time of the fighting, reports of the civilian casualties provoked outrage in the west. Sri Lanka's allies, particularly China and Russia, consistently protected the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa against such criticism. The same nations are now likely to block any moves to continue investigations beyond the panel. Human rights groups have called on the UN to continue inquiries into possible war crimes. "The expert panel's finding that the government and Tamil Tigers committed abuses and that the government has failed to hold its forces accountable shows the need for an international investigation," said Brad Adams, Asia director at campaign group Human Rights Watch. In addition to using civilians as human shields, the report accused the LTTE of killing refugees fleeing areas they controlled and forcibly conscripting children and teenagers. Government forces killed civilians through widespread and indiscriminate shelling, and deprived people in the war zone of humanitarian aid, the report says. Hospitals were hit despite the fact that their locations were known. The report also alleged that some people whom the government separated out from displaced civilians during screening were summarily executed, some women may have been raped and others may have been "disappeared". One controversial and widely criticised measure taken by the government was the temporary internment of hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of fighters. Officials said this was necessary while villages in the war zone were cleared of mines; almost all have now been released and returned home. The panel found that the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, set up by the government to investigate wrong-doing during the conflict in response to international pressure, was "deeply flawed". As the content of the report leaked, the Sri Lankan government mounted a diplomatic campaign to rebut its chief findings. The Sri Lankan foreign minister, Gamini Peiris, told reporters that the UN panel's 10-month investigation had overstepped its mandate. "It's wrong to publish the report. It's equally wrong and unacceptable to take any steps at all on the basis of any findings or recommendations contained in the report," he said. "We are very conscious of the fact that the need of the hour is reconciliation. Does [the report] further that objective, or does it make the accomplishment of that objective more difficult than it needs to be?" The panel also criticised UN bodies and international officials for not acting to protect civilian lives and not publicising casualty figures to show the human toll of the war. Rajapaksa, who was re-elected in a landslide election last year, remains popular with voters from Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority, particularly in rural areas. He has said that economic development will bring reconciliation and allay concerns among the nation's Tamil minority about discrimination. Last week Rajapaksa called for May Day celebrations to be used as an opportunity for Sri Lankans to show "solidarity" in the face of an "injustice done to the country before the world". Sri Lankan state television has pledged days of demonstrations on the island nation to protest the release of the report. Sri Lanka United Nations Tamil Tigers Jason Burke guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fifth suspect package found Posted: 26 Apr 2011 05:30 PM PDT Latest package – reportedly destined for Republican supporters' group in Scotland – intercepted in Northern Ireland Police investigating an attempted letter bomb campaign against Celtic manager Neil Lennon and two high-profile supporters of the club have said that another suspect package has been discovered. The latest package, the fifth to be found and believed to be a parcel bomb, was intercepted by postal staff in Northern Ireland. It was reported that the package, which was found on 12 April, was sent to Cairde Na H'Eireann, a Republican supporters' group based in Scotland. Two other bombs were sent to Lennon, one was sent to his lawyer Paul McBride, and another was sent to the Celtic fan and former MSP, Trish Godman. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said it was alerted after the latest package was found at a sorting office in Belfast which handles returned mail. The item, which was intercepted at the National Return Letter Centre, had been returned undelivered from an address in Scotland and was "similar in nature" to the packages being investigated by Strathclyde police. It is understood the parcel did not originate in Northern Ireland.In a separate development, two men have appeared in court charged with posting bigoted and sectarian statements on the internet relating to Glasgow football. David Craig, 23, from Paisley, and Stephen Birrell, 27, from Glasgow, were charged with breach of the peace after being arrested by police at their homes early on Saturday. They made no plea and were released on bail. Their arrests, which led to the seizure of mobile phones and computers, are not connected to a police operation to identify those behind an attempted letter bomb campaign against Lennon and the others. Four viable devices, which used bottles of explosive liquids wrapped in nails and were capable of causing "real harm", were posted to Lennon, McBride and Godman over a seven-week period from the Irvine and Kilwinning areas of north Ayrshire. Meanwhile, in an unconnected development, police in Northern Ireland said they would investigate any complaint made about apparent threats against Lennon allegedly made by Steve Moore, the British National party's candidate in the Stormont assembly election.Matthew Collins from the anti-Nazi magazine Searchlight, said the comments "really eflect how stuck in the dark ages the BNP are with regard to Northern Ireland". Collins added: "A couple of months ago the BNP were backing dissident Republicans, now they're taking enjoyment in the threats to the life of a football manager. This party is suffering from time warp sickness." This is the BNP's first major foray into Ulster politics where the British far right have traditionally failed to make a breakthrough. In the early 1980s the National Front was humiliated in a local government election after their candidate in North Belfast received just 26 votes. The attempted letter bomb attacks stunned Scottish football, and the legal and political establishment, leading to the personal intervention last week of the prime minister, David Cameron, and the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, the head of the Scottish prosecution system. It is understood both were in direct contact with Stephen House, the Strathclyde Police chief constable, last week. Cameron suggested the Scottish authorities had failed to tackle sectarianism.Moore said: "No idea what this is or where it came from.We certainly don't advocate violence of any kind. It is of course not the first time I or fellow members of the party have been subject to hacking, false Facebook accounts, false Twitter accounts and just downright lies. I have not had an account on Facebook for sometime, and when I did it was under my own name. Crime Scotland Football violence Northern Ireland Severin Carrell Henry McDonald guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

65 Taliban prison escapees caught Posted: 26 Apr 2011 05:30 AM PDT Afghan officials say at least 65 of the 480 escaped prisoners caught as Nato claims air strike killed al-Qaida commander Afghan forces have recaptured at least 65 of the 480 inmates who escaped from the south's largest prison, the government said on Tuesday. Prison officials discovered early on Monday morning that the inmates – nearly all of them Taliban militants – were missing from their cells, and then found the tunnel through which they appeared to have made their getaway. The Taliban said the jailbreak was five months in the making, with diggers starting the tunnel from under a nearby house while they arranged for inmates to get cell keys. The Kandahar provincial governor's office said that Afghan and international forces are working together to recapture the missing prisoners. It said the troops have already caught 65 and killed two who tried to resist. Authorities have biometric data on each prisoner, the statement added. The prison break came less than two weeks after the Kandahar police chief was killed by a suicide bomber inside his heavily defended office compound. "How can we trust or rely on a government that can't protect the police chief inside the police headquarters and can't keep prisoners in the prison?" asked Islamullah Agha Bashir, who sells washing machines and other appliances in Kandahar city. "Last night while we were eating dinner I told my two sons not to go out as much because I am afraid that now when the morale of the Taliban is high, they will attack more." In Kabul, officials started to piece through the details of the escape and place blame. The justice minister, Habibullah Ghalib, sent a formal letter to President Hamid Karzai acknowledging that it was likely that prison officials or guards acted as accomplices but adding that Afghan and international security forces should have detected the plot. "The escape of all the prisoners from one tunnel ... shows that collaborators inside the prison somehow provided an opportunity," it said. However, Ghalib also noted that Afghan police searched the compound from which the tunnel originated about two and a half months before the prison break and he said that Canadian and US forces have been responsible for security improvements to the prison. A full investigation was under way. Kandahar city has been a major focus of the international troop surge over the past year, with Nato officials saying that establishing security there will be key to securing the region. Last summer, Afghan forces created a ring of checkpoints around the city and started pushing out into Taliban areas on its outskirts in a plan to establish the government's authority before the rise in attacks that usually comes with warmer weather in the spring and summer. The Taliban have responding by starting off the spring fighting season with a string of attacks apparently designed to undermine trust in the capabilities of the Afghan government. Within the past two weeks, Taliban agents have also launched deadly attacks from inside the defence ministry a shared Afghan-US military base in eastern Laghman province. The attacks have exposed weaknesses that have also raised doubt over the readiness of the Afghan government to start taking over authority for security parts of the country as planned. Nato-led coalition forces announced on Tuesday that a key al-Qaida operative in Afghanistan had been killed in an air strike on 13 April in Dangam district of eastern Kunar province. Nato said Abu Hafs al-Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani, was a regional commander in charge of suicide bombings and cash flow. The strike also killed a number of other insurgents, including another al-Qaida leader known as Waqas. In eastern Paktia province on Tuesday, the provincial governor narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt by insurgents. A roadside bomb exploded just behind a vehicle taking Juma Khan Hamdard to his office, said Rohallah Samon, a spokesman. Hamdard was not hurt, but three policemen who were in a chase vehicle were slightly injured, Samon said. Afghanistan Taliban Nato al-Qaida Global terrorism US foreign policy guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Uganda may drop gay death penalty Posted: 26 Apr 2011 01:19 PM PDT MP behind globally-condemned legislation said he will 'concede' if committee recommends that death sentence be removed The MP behind anti-gay legislation that has been condemned worldwide said yesterday the death penalty is likely to be dropped from the bill. David Bahati said if the committee studying the bill recommends the death penalty be removed, "I would concede." Proposed 18 months ago, the bill attracted international condemnation, including from President Barack Obama. Under the legislation, anyone convicted of a homosexual act would face life imprisonment. The original bill would have mandated a death sentence for active homosexuals living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape. Stephen Tashobya, the chairman of the legal and parliamentary affairs committee, said the legislation may come up for a vote before parliament's session ends 12 May. "We shall try and see how far we can go with the bill. It may be possible. We are doing all we can. We have limited time," he said on Tuesday, before adding: "Many people have expressed concern about that provision providing for the death sentence and I'm sure when we start hearings on that bill we will hear many more concerns." Bahati said he thinks the bill would become law if voted on by legislators. "I can guarantee you I have not seen any member of parliament who is opposed to it," he said. Frank Mugisha, the director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a gay rights group, said anti-gay sentiment in Uganda had increased since the bill's introduction. More gays are being harassed, he said, because of media attention and because church leaders have been preaching for the bill's passage to congregations. Bahati's original bill carried harsh provisions. The original bill would mandate a death sentence for active homosexuals living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape. "Serial offenders" also could face capital punishment, but the legislation did not define the term. Anyone convicted of a homosexual act would face life imprisonment. Anyone who "aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage of acts of homosexuality" would face seven years in prison. Landlords who rent rooms or homes to homosexuals also could get seven years. "If the bill passes we cannot even be allowed to do our work," Mugisha said. Last year a tabloid newspaper published the names and photos of men it alleged were gay. One cover included the words: "Hang them." Shortly afterward, in January, a prominent gay rights activist whose picture was published was killed, though authorities contend David Kato's sexual orientation had nothing to do with the killing. Bahati called Kato's death regrettable. "My reaction is that I extend condolences to the family, parents of Kato. It's regrettable that they could find themselves in this situation, and also regrettable that he could be allowed to be used to recruit our children. "But the death of Kato had nothing to do with the bill in parliament," he said. Bahati, 36, is serving his first term. He said that the bill has helped raise public awareness about what he calls "the dangers to our children". Many Ugandan leaders who support the bill say that gay Ugandans recruit school children to become homosexual. Uganda Gay rights Human rights guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fees protest: Meadows faces charge Posted: 26 Apr 2011 04:04 PM PDT Meadows – who had brain surgery after allegedly being hit by truncheon – charged with violent disorder A student who had to have brain surgery after he was allegedly hit by a truncheon during the tuition fees protests in central London on 9 December is among 11 males aged between 15 and 25 charged in connection with violence at the event. Alfie Meadows, 20, faces a charge of violent disorder. It brings the total number of people charged as a result of the disturbances to 13, a figure which may increase, according to the Metropolitan police. Meadows is said to have fallen unconscious on the way to hospital after being struck as he tried to leave an area outside Westminster Abbey during the protests. The incident has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The 11 men include six who are facing charges of violent disorder, one who faces two counts of criminal damage, and another who was charged with affray. Three males aged 15, 16 and 17 were charged with violent disorder and will appear at west London youth court on 24 May, while the eight older individuals will appear at City of Westminster magistrates court on 9 June. In addition, a 16-year-old youth also received a final warning for possession of cannabis, and affray. More than 50 people were injured during the disturbances, including Meadows and a police officer who sustained serious neck injuries, while dozens of arrests were made. According to police, scuffles first broke out after the protest, which had been called by a loose coalition of student groups who deviated from an agreed route. Tuition fees Students Higher education Protest Police London Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Countries' debts worse than expected Posted: 26 Apr 2011 11:05 AM PDT Greece's annual deficit was 10.5% of national output last year and Portugal's was 9.1% – both more than assumed by the European commission Greece and Portugal are deeper in debt than previously estimated, according to official figures that show attempts to contain their financial woes have so far failed. The statistics agency Eurostat said Greece's deficit hit 10.5% of economic output in 2010, well above the 9.6% the European commission expected last autumn. Portugal, which is negotiating a bailout similar to those for Greece and Ireland, saw its debts reach 9.1%, far ahead of the 7.3% the commission used as a benchmark until only a few months ago. The rise in the annual debt levels are a blow to efforts in Brussels to ease growing fears among investors that Greece will be overwhelmed by its financial situation and default on hits debt. The country had to be saved from bankruptcy with €110bn (£98bn) in rescue loans last May, but continues to struggle to raise revenue as its economy shrinks. Most economists consider a Greek default a foregone conclusion, with either some debt forgiveness or a radically longer timetable of repayments. They argue only about the timing. Ben May, of research house Capital Economics, said a Greek default was inevitable but unlikely to happen this year. He believes the EU will keep the country afloat until a multibillion-euro bailout fund, known as the European Stability Mechanism, becomes available in 2013. At the weekend a prominent member of the European Central Bank said a Greek debt restructuring would be a disaster for the eurozone with knock-on effects on banks in France, Britain and Germany that hold Greek debt. "A restructuring would have legal and systemic consquences that are difficult to calculate right now but would in all probability be bigger than after the collapse of Lehman Brothers," said José Manuel González-Paramo, an ECB executive board member. Prominent figures such as the International Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn have insisted the Greeks will honour their commitments to repay. However, one adviser to German chancellor Angela Merkel hinted that Greece's escalating debts could bring forward the need for a bailout. "I don't think that Greece will succeed in this consolidation strategy without any restructuring in the future, or perhaps also in the near future," Lars Feld, a member of the German prime minister's council of economic advisers, told the news service Bloomberg. "Greece should restructure sooner rather than later." Investor concerns pushed Greek bond yields to record highs with two-year bonds adding 64 basis points, or 0.64 percentage points, to 23.6%, while yields on 10-year bonds reached 15.26%. Portugal's two-year bond yields touched 11.6%, before easing to 11.5%. EU officials said there were reasons to be cheerful following a decline in the average debt across the 17 member eurozone from 6.3% in 2009 to 6%. A majority of countries managed to repay some of their debts over the last year. The Greek finance ministry attributed the larger deficit to a deeper than expected recession, which cut into tax revenues and social security contributions. It conceded more needed to be done to stop tax and social security evasion and cut costs in hospitals, local administration and public enterprises. "The Greek government remains committed to achieving its deficit targets under the economic adjustment programme and will take all necessary measures in that direction," the ministry said in a statement. The government has already revealed plans to cut an extra €23bn in expenditure by 2015 and privatise €50bn in public assets. Its failure to impose tax rises and spending cuts has sent the country's debt spiralling to 142% of national income. Portugal's total has reached 93% of GDP. Ireland's hit 96%, Italy's 119% and Belgium's 97%. Britain's annual debt of 10.5% last year pushed its total to 80%, compared with Germany's 83% and France's 82%. There was some good news for Spain, the country that most analysts view as the next weakest link in the eurozone. Its deficit was 9.2% of GDP, slightly below the 9.3% forecast by the commission. Investors are more concerned about the control governments are exercising over spending than their total debts. Italy has persistently spent more than it earned, but has kept its overspending low during the financial crisis, mainly because its banks stayed clear of the exotic financial instruments that rocked so many European banks. Euro Portugal Greece European commission European Central Bank Spain Currencies Europe European Union Europe Phillip Inman guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Man holds on to his front door in a flattened favela Posted: 26 Apr 2011 07:57 AM PDT Homes are being torn down and pests and squatters are taking over the rubble of Favela do Metrô, but hundreds of families remain with nowhere else to go From the roof of his home in the Favela do Metrô, Eomar Freitas enjoys one of the best views in town. Look south and you see the Christ the Redeemer statue towering over Rio's mountains. To the north stands the green and pink headquarters of Mangueira, the city's best-loved samba school. And in between, one of the world's top sporting venues, the blue and grey Maracanã stadium, which will host the final of the 2014 football World Cup. "We worked hard to build this place," said Freitas, 35 and unemployed, whose family moved to Rio from Brazil's impoverished north-east 20 years ago. They built a four-storey home where their wooden shack once stood. "It was a great place to live," he said. Not any more. Since February, nearly all of the buildings surrounding Freitas's home have been levelled as part of work to revamp the city's infrastructure before the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Redbrick shacks have been cracked open by earth-diggers. Streets are covered in a thick carpet of rubble, litter and twisted metal. By night, crack addicts squat in abandoned shacks, filling sitting rooms with empty bottles, filthy mattresses and crack pipes improvised from plastic cups. The stench of human excrement hangs in the air. "It looks like you are in Iraq or Libya," Freitas said, wading across mounds of debris that now encircle his home. "I don't have any neighbours left. It's a ghost town." Founded by railway construction workers in the late 1970s, the Favela do Metrô, in north Rio, was until recently home to about 1,000 Brazilians. By the government's count, 358 families have already been rehoused. About 320 remain, according to Francicleide da Costa Souza, president of the favela's community association. Among them are elderly women and children, including a four-year-old boy with microcephaly and cerebral palsy. "We ask God to support us, so our hearts don't give out," said 77-year-old Sebastiana de Souza, who has spent 13 years in the favela, sharing a damp, cramped apartment with her daughter and four-year-old great-grandson who now plays football next to a heap of broken concrete, abandoned furniture and discarded toys. Souza said she hoped to be relocated to a nearby estate. "It's sad. It used to be pretty around here." The reasons for the favela's demolition are disputed. Locals believe authorities plan to replace it with a car park for the nearby stadium, a story endorsed by one demolition worker. "The World Cup is on its way and they want this area," said Freitas. "I think it is inhumane." Rio's housing secretary, Jorge Bittar, said the demolition was part of a £285m project to "transform" the region around the Maracanã, itself the centre of a £330m pre-World Cup revamp. Cultural centres, tree-lined plazas and a cinema would be built, he said. "This is a very poor community, with very precarious homes [built] in an inappropriate area and we are offering these families dignity," he said. Campaigners claim the Favela do Metrô is just the tip of the iceberg. Julio Cesar Condaque, an activist fighting the demolitions, claims other Brazilian cities would be affected by the infrastructure facelift. "Between now and the 2014 World Cup, 1.5 million families will be removed from their homes across the whole of Brazil." This week Amnesty International's secretary-general, Salil Shetty, is visiting Brazil to meet activists fighting eviction. "We are asking authorities at all levels that this development does not take place at the cost of human rights," said Patrick Wilcken, the group's Brazil researcher. "While hosting the World Cup and the Olympics is a great opportunity for Rio and other capital cities around Brazil, they should be events for all Brazilians, whether they are rich or poor." Wilcken said he had received reports that slum residents who refused to accept compensation packages had effectively been forced out after authorities began partial demolitions. "They come, demolish the house, leave the rubble, frequently damage neighbouring houses and the infrastructure – breaking mains pipes, cutting through electricity lines and making community unviable – and then bring in these problems of drug addicts, of plagues of rats and plagues of cockroaches that basically force the rest of the community to move, often in very, very unfavorable circumstances," he said. Asked why demolition had started while hundreds of people were still living in the favela, Bittar blamed a construction company's failure to complete a new housing estate for the displaced residents on time. Leaving children to live and play amid the wreckage was unacceptable, he conceded. "We will try to improve this. We will isolate the demolished areas [and] the areas that are still inhabited. I recognise that this has caused a nuisance to the residents and we will try and correct this." He vowed to relocate all remaining families by the end of May. "I will not let them knock my house down – as long as I have strength my house is not going anywhere," said Freitas, only to admit minutes later that his exit was inevitable. "I don't have any hope left." Brazil World Cup 2014 Olympic Games 2016 Tom Phillips guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Bafta TV award nominations in full Posted: 26 Apr 2011 06:34 AM PDT E4's Misfits leads the nominations, as other nods include Matt Smith in Doctor Who

Madame Nhu obituary Posted: 26 Apr 2011 10:57 AM PDT Immensely powerful political figure in 1960s South Vietnam dubbed 'an oriental Lucrezia Borgia' Madame Nhu, who has died aged 87, was the archetypal "dragon lady" of Asian politics, a svelte and sinister woman who wielded immense power in the South Vietnamese regime of president Ngo Dinh Diem , her brother-in-law, until his assassination in 1963. She accumulated vast wealth and power, but was reviled for her puritanical social campaigns and her callous dismissal of Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death to protest against the brutal rule of Diem and her husband Ngo Dinh Nhu. "I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the madness of others," she wrote in a letter to the New York Times. The world was stunned by photographs of monks sitting shrouded in flames; Madame Nhu simply offered to bring along some mustard for the next self-immolation. She later accused monks of lacking patriotism for setting themselves alight with imported petrol. Those remarks solidified the enmity felt for a woman whom the American press had optimistically described in the mid-1950s as her country's Joan of Arc. Less than a decade later, as the US was drawn into the conflict between North and South Vietnam, she came to be seen as "an oriental Lucrezia Borgia". This tiny woman, who stood less that 5ft tall, at first intoxicated the US with her lacquered glamour; later the US press, shocked by her icy hauteur and political machinations, turned her into the personification of the remoteness and corruption that afflicted Diem's government. Madame Nhu, the name by which she was always known, although she was born Tran Le Xuan, preferred to see herself as continuing the tradition of the Trung sisters, two aristocratic women who led a revolt against Chinese rule in the first century. To aid South Vietnam's fight against the communist insurgency, she founded a women's paramilitary, known as the Women's Solidarity Movement. This force, whose members were paid twice the wages of conscripted men, drained money from the army and rarely did more than parade for the cameras while Madame Nhu took the salute. Her only official position was as a deputy to the National Assembly, voted in by a group of Roman Catholic refugees from North Vietnam who enjoyed her enormous powers of patronage. But her power came from her proximity to Diem , an ascetic bachelor who rarely ventured outside the palace. Her husband, Diem's supposed political theoretician and closest adviser, ran a menacing secret police that dispatched opponents to the awful former French penal colonies on Poulo Condore and Phu Quoc islands. Madame Nhu revelled in her position. Her often repeated motto was: "Power is wonderful. Total power is totally wonderful." Raised a Buddhist, Madame Nhu had converted to Catholicism when she married, and took to it with a convert's zeal. She rammed a bill through parliament that outlawed divorce, abortion and contraception. Describing the craze for dancing the twist as an "unhealthy activity", she had it banned as well. Wrestling, cock fighting and boxing soon followed on the list of forbidden activities. An attempt to outlaw popular padded brassieres was stopped only when the problems of enforcement were raised. Some of her actions, which were portrayed as ludicrously puritanical, were aimed at improving the lot of women. She had laws passed that ended concubinage and polygamy. Divorce was only allowed by presidential decree, but that ended the power Vietnamese men had held to shed their wives on a whim. During Diem's rule, women achieved something close to parity with men. Rumours among the Saigonese were that Madame Nhu passed the ban to stop her sister divorcing her philandering husband to marry a Frenchman. Her personal style, which had once captivated many Americans, began to repel them. She favoured heavily kohl-rimmed eyes, beehive hairstyles and the figure-hugging ao dai tunic worn by Vietnamese women. She was widely imitated; to this day the type of low-cut, ultra-fitted ao dai she wore is still known as the Tran Le Xuan style. But her elegance had its sinister side. She was described as being "moulded into her dress like a dagger in its sheath". Even her carved ivory fan, used mostly for coquettish effect, could clack shut like a gunshot and be used to rap home a point. Born in Hanoi, she grew up in isolated privilege as the daughter of one of Vietnam's wealthiest businessmen, who had married a cousin of the Emperor Bao Dai. She was raised by a multitude of servants, who took her to French and ballet lessons, and was educated in Hanoi and Saigon. In 1943, aged 18, she married Nhu, one of six brothers from the prominent mandarin Ngo clan. Two years later she was captured, along with her eldest child, and was held briefly in a communist-controlled village. When scolding American officials for being insufficiently fervent in their anti-communism, she frequently referred to these months of deprivation, during which she was forced to subsist on just two bowls of rice a day and had only one coat to wear, in her words "a very fashionable wasp-waisted number from Paris". Diem came to power in 1955, when Vietnam was divided into the communist North and the American-backed South. Almost immediately Madame Nhu began scheming; she was eventually banished to a convent in Hong Kong as her brother-in-law delicately consolidated his power over a country run by pirates, gangsters and armed religious cults. When she was allowed back, she stepped up her efforts to enhance her influence while maintaining the pretence that she was nothing more than the president's demure hostess for official functions. Despite Diem's efforts, the communist insurgency that stepped up in 1960 took its toll on his rule, which became increasingly vicious. His brother and sister-in-law began to make more decisions and kept close to the isolated president, even sharing his official residence. Madame Nhu was always on hand to cajole or even berate Diem; she was said to have frequently flown into violent rages if he showed any signs of weakness against the regime's many opponents. In February 1962, Madame Nhu survived the bombing of the presidential palace by two rebellious South Vietnamese pilots. Blinded by the flames and smoke, she raced to her children sleeping next door but fell through a hole left by the explosion and ended up two floors below, in the basement. She believed the attack had been secretly encouraged by the US, which had grown disappointed withDiem and disgusted with both Nhus. As the Buddhist crisis raged in 1963, she toured America's campuses to defend the clan's rule. The tour disintegrated into farce; even her father – South Vietnam's ambassador to Washington – refused to meet her. She was photographed with her daughter, both in satin evening gowns, peering into the dark windows of the empty ambassador's residence that her parents had left to avoid meeting her. At Ivy League colleges, where she planned to make the case for a more muscular offensive against communism, students enraged by the growing repression in Saigon pelted her with eggs and abuse. While in the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles on 2 November, Madame Nhu was informed of a coup against Diem by his generals. The president and his brother had fled to a church in Saigon's Chinatown. As they were removed from this sanctuary they were killed; the official version put out was that they had killed themselves, but photographs showed them bound and bloody from beatings. They had been shot in the back of an army truck. Her children were allowed to leave Saigon and join her in Paris, where she began her exile in an apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. She soon moved to Rome, where another brother-in-law, the archbishop of Hue, Ngo Dinh Thuc, had also found asylum. The only other surviving brother of the murdered president was later executed. Exile was a bitter time. Madame Nhu earned some money initially by charging for interviews and photographs. She soon disappeared from the limelight only to make a brief reappearance in 1975, when South Vietnam finally fell to the communist North. She claimed none of that would have happened if the Ngo clan had remained in power. Her elder daughter was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1967, and in 1986 her brother, Tran Van Khiem was charged with suffocating their elderly parents to death, in a dispute over his inheritance. He was found to be mentally ill, claiming in court that Zionist conspirators had murdered his parents. Madame Nhu is survived by two sons and a daughter. • Madame Ngô Ðình Nhu (Tran Le Xuan), political consort, born 15 April 1924; died 24 April 2011 • Open Vault interview with Madame Nhu, 1982 Vietnam United States Buddhism Catholicism guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Nice little urner Posted: 26 Apr 2011 09:58 AM PDT Grandson given valuable vase in exchange for carrying gardening work An urn that auctioneers used as a doorstop at their showroom before they sold it for a few pounds has been identified as a rare relic worth up to £15,000. Matthew Collinson, from Bradford, who inherited the urn in exchange for some gardening work, has found out that it is Chinese, dates from the 13th or 14th century, and is worth up to £15,000. In the early 1970s, Collinson's grandfather, Hugh Lambert, a geologist and goldminer, spotted the urn at the sale room in Bradford. He bought it for a couple of pounds and later gave it to his grandson for helping him with the gardening. Collinson, 31, who works in a secondhand shop in the city, said: "He went to an auction house to buy a painting, I think, and after the sale he spotted the urn [which] was being used as a doorstop. It just caught his eye. He didn't know what it was. He asked if he could buy it, and got it for just a couple of pounds and always kept it at his home. "A few years ago, he gave the urn to me for helping him with his gardening. I didn't want paying, but he said I could have the urn, which I moved into my own house, when I got one. I was absolutely stunned when I was told that it was nearly 1,000 years old. I am going to sell it, and I think we will have a big family holiday." China Steven Morris guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jonathan Freedland Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:29 PM PDT It's hard to get excited about such a small tweak to the system but a vote for the alternative vote could lead to more far-reaching changes By a quirk of the calendar, the next eight days will bring two defining national events. One will give the people of Britain a chance to express themselves on the system under which the country has been run for longer than anyone can remember. And the other is the AV referendum. No one should be surprised that the royal marriage has garnered more attention than a plebiscite on our voting system – or that the collective reaction to Friday's wedding may well reveal more about us than the ballot on the alternative vote six days later. That's partly a testament to the enduring hold the Windsor family exerts on our national imagination, but largely a function of an electoral reform that is described even by its chief advocate as no more than a "baby step in the right direction". (That is Nick Clegg's description of a change he once indirectly referred to as a "miserable little compromise".) Which is why perhaps the most astute verdict on the referendum campaign has borrowed Larry David's verbal shrug to declare neither Yes to AV, nor No to AV, but rather Meh to AV. It's hard to get excited by a change that is little more than a tweak to our current method of counting votes, that promises nothing so grand as proportionality, that still plays a winner-takes-all game in which 50%+1 majorities are all that count. AV can't even provide the clarity of a partisan boost one way or the other. The evidence about which of the two main parties would benefit is murky; most experts believe that none of the decisive electoral outcomes in the postwar era would have turned out differently under AV, with some variation only in the most borderline cases. Perhaps this explains the vitriol hurled in recent days by the yes and no campaigns, which happen to map broadly on to the two partners in the coalition. As Henry Kissinger observed of academic politics, they are vicious because the stakes are so low. That view, though tempting, is surely mistaken. Next Thursday's vote will have consequences, starting with a shift in the balance of power within the coalition. If yes wins, David Cameron will lose face in the eyes of the Tory right, adding to his failure to win a general election a year ago. He will be in no mood, and no position, to cede more ground to the Lib Dems. If no prevails, then it will be the Lib Dems who will need placating: some are quietly looking forward to a defeated Clegg demanding Lords reform to soothe his troops, a consolation prize that could prove shinier than the original trophy. And, whichever way it breaks, the coalition will need healing. I initially shared the cynicism about the recent run of Tory-Lib Dem rows, a spate of spats conveniently timed before polling day to persuade the faithful that neither side had rolled over to the dreaded other: a coalition insider has conceded to me that some past bust-ups were indeed "pre-co-ordinated". But when a cabinet minister accuses his own chancellor of lying – as Chris Huhne has done in a letter to George Osborne – the notion that this is entirely stage-managed loses plausibility. However it started, the coalition's future credibility is seriously damaged now that ministers have publicly accused their closest colleagues of "lies, misinformation and deceit". Labour voters are not mere onlookers in this: the pollsters reckon that with Tories and Lib Dems broadly aligned on each side of the divide, it's the Labour vote that will swing it. Given all that, what's a Guardian reader to do? For the tribal Labour supporter, there is, to repeat, no clear arithmetical upside or downside to AV. Humiliating Clegg would provide an instant sugar rush, but it would come at the cost of strengthening Cameron – who is, don't forget, a Tory prime minister. This may be one of those rare occasions where a political decision is best reached not by calculating selfish advantage, but by weighing the actual arguments. The no case has been put vigorously, with the Tories helpfully reinforced by Labour's old guard. It argues that AV costs big bucks, helps the BNP, unfairly gives some people more votes than others, leads to coalitions, and prompts politicians to huddle together in the bland middle. Happily, most of those arguments don't wash. AV won't cost more, because ballots will still be counted by hand not by expensive machines. It won't help the BNP, who will have next to no chance of winning a seat under a system that requires candidates to appeal to supporters of other parties: that's why the BNP is urging a no vote. AV does not give some people multiple votes: it will be one person, one vote in each successive round – whether for your original choice, if that candidate is still in contention, or for your fallback option. In Lib Dem Jo Swinson's memorable analogy, if I ask you to get me a Mars from the canteen, or a Twix if they've run out of Mars, then I still only get one chocolate bar. As for the claim that AV leads to more coalitions, the number-crunchers say that's far from clear. Of course this argument would be easier to swallow if it were not coming from Tory ministers serving in, er, a coalition government born under first-past-the-post. The most powerful objection is the one from the left, arguing that AV will see both Labour and the Tories chasing the second preferences of the remaining rump of Lib Dems, "Orange Bookers … [who] now favour Conservative over Labour", thereby tilting our politics rightward, according to Labour blogger Anthony Painter. The trouble is, as Painter concedes, the current system already pushes the main parties to chase after a sliver of centrist voters – so voting no doesn't much help. Of course AV is miles from perfect, even if it does allow voters to express more fully their true preferences; most reformers would prefer PR. But it's naive to think that defeat next week would keep progressives' powder dry, allowing for a future push for full-blooded electoral reform. That's rarely how politics works. It's success, not failure, that breeds success. That lesson was taught in 1999, when Australia held a referendum on whether to remove the Queen as head of state. The alternative on offer was another "miserable little compromise" – with MPs, not the people, electing a new head of state – and some republicans preferred to let it fail and wait for something better. They're still waiting – and Elizabeth II is still Queen of Australia. Which brings us to the royal wedding and its unlikely connection with the AV vote. The monarchy remains strong in Britain partly because it answers the genuine human need for continuity. Yet sometimes continuity can feel like paralysis, as if we are powerless to change our country even when we want to. The stubborn longevity of an unelected House of Lords, despite a century of attempts at reform, is the clearest example. The most depressing anti-AV arguments suggest we have to stick with first-past-the-post because that's how things have always been done – that, in the words of John Reid, anything else would not be "British". That's a depressingly frozen view, one that would deny today's Britons the right inherent in every democratic society: to be masters of our own fate. I'll be voting yes next Thursday to break the taboo that says our creaking, outdated and unrepresentative electoral system – which can grant large majorities to parties who win just 35% of the vote – is too sacred to be changed. Once we've shown that it can be improved, even a little bit, we can improve it again. But first we have to break that taboo. freedland@guardian.co.uk Alternative vote Electoral reform Labour Conservatives Liberal Democrats BNP Royal wedding Jonathan Freedland guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Alien finding institute Seti out of cash Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:28 PM PDT Organisation's brand new $50m array put in hibernation, reducing chances of finding elusive extraterrestrial signal It is the scientific institute made famous in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, the organisation for which the main character, Ellie Arroway – played by Jodie Foster in the 1997 film version – worked day and night looking for signs of intelligent life in outer space. In real life, the Seti Institute has spent five decades hunting the skies for radio signals from deep space, possible communications which may indicate we are not alone in the universe. Now it has fallen prey to a very earthly problem: it has run out of cash. The institute's chief executive, Tom Pierson, has announced that there are "serious challenges" in finding operating funds and that from this week the organisation's brand new $50m (£30m) telescope array will be placed into hibernation. "This means that the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff," he said in a letter to private donors to the institute. The problems revolve around the operation of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a set of radio dishes dedicated to looking for alien signals. Though it was paid for by the Seti Institute, the array, at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 300 miles north-east of San Francisco, is managed and operated by the radio astronomy lab of the University of California, Berkeley. According to Seti senior astronomer Seth Shostak, the facility needs about $2m-$3m a year to function and to keep the scientific research programmes going. The scientists need an additional $5m to fund a two-year project to listen for possible radio signals coming from the Earth-like exoplanets found by Nasa's Kepler satellite. Launched in 2009, it has already identified more than 1,000 candidate planets, which the Seti Institute wants to use to narrow its search. The money needed to operate the observatory has until now come from a mixture of private donations, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the state government of California. "As it happens, Berkeley's budget is way down – the state of California is in terrible financial circumstances because of the economic downturn," Shostak said. "Consequently, they don't have the money to keep the doors open and pay the electric bills and pay the staff at the antenna. And we don't either, because we run our Seti projects mostly based on private donations, and those are down as well." Funding from the NSF has also been cut, to about a tenth of its former level. Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, said the ATA facility was "the gold standard for Seti observations and acts as an emblem for the entire worldwide research effort. It would be an utter tragedy if a unique research programme is abandoned for the cost of a few miles of motorway". He added: "Our society squanders vast sums on trivia and entertainment, yet cannot find some small change to address the burning issue of whether we are alone in the universe." There is some hope of raising funds by working with the US air force on future projects, according to Pierson, with one idea being to use the ATA in collaboration with the USAF's space surveillance network to track debris in space, which can damage satellites and space vehicles. But this is also uncertain, given impending cuts in federal funding for the military. "The other possibility is that private donations could bring the telescope back to life and keep it working," said Shostak. In the past, science fiction author Arthur C Clarke and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Bill Hewlett and David Packard had helped fund Seti, he said, and "if Richard Branson or somebody … wanted to help us out now, they can get in touch". The ATA is the Seti Institute's biggest facility by far, and its only dedicated one. Its shutdown means astronomers will need to rely on data collected during downtime from other telescopes around the world and this will reduce its chances of finding that elusive alien signal. Shostak said the future of the ATA had to be decided sooner rather than later, as there was only enough money to keep it in hibernation mode for a few months. Until the funding crisis can be solved, the institute said it would continue its work on developing equipment and software that supports the overall search for alien signals. This includes an increased focus on involving citizens in its work: astronomers have already developed the successful Seti@Home project, a programme that uses the downtime on people's home computers to sort through the masses of data collected by the institute's experiments. The next step is SetiQuest.Org, an application that allows "citizen scientist volunteers to look for patterns in data from the ATA that might be missed by current algorithms, and help us explore frequency bands that are so full of signals that our detectors get confused", said Pierson. Given the improvements in radar technology, Shostak said it would be a shame to stop searching now for signals from ET. "If this experiment is going to work, it's going to work in a few dozen years, simply on the basis of the rapid improvement of the technology afforded by Moore's Law. The equipment keeps getting faster and faster, so I think success is not very far off if you keep doing this." He added: "In the grand scheme of things, this is not a whole lot of money and, clearly, Seti is an uncertain proposition. But Seti has a long lever-arm because, clearly, if we were to find a signal showing there was intelligent life, that would be an extraordinarily interesting thing. Not only for us but for every generation that follows us." Seti history Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was conceived in 1960 by astronomer Frank Drake. He pointed the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia towards the star Tau Ceti and began looking for anomalous radio signals that might have been sent by intelligent life. Eventually, the Seti Institute was set up in California and began to use the downtime on radar telescopes around the world to scour for signals. Most recently, the search has been helped by building a dedicated set of antennae, the $50m Allen Telescope Array, 300 miles north-east of San Francisco. Part-funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the array has 42 radio dishes, each 6m in diameter, and is the first step in an ambitious plan to build up to 350 antennae to look for radio signals day and night. Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) California Arthur C Clarke Richard Branson United States Alok Jha guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Masdar City – a glimpse of the future Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:51 PM PDT Solar power, magnetic cars and a green Big Brother. Does this experiment near Abu Dhabi work? Masdar City – in pictures A dusty construction site on the edge of an Arabian desert is an unlikely place for a model of green living. But this is Masdar City, an $18bn (£11bn) Norman Foster-designed project where just a few hundred people are guinea pigs in the world's most advanced laboratory for hi-tech environmental technology. Here, residents live with driverless electric cars, shaded streets cooled by a huge wind tower and a Big Brother-style "green policeman" monitoring their energy use. Conceived in 2006, phase one of the city is now complete after three years' work and a spend of $1.4bn. The development, near Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, consists of six main buildings, one street, 101 small apartments, a large electronic library, and the Masdar Institute. This offshoot campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has 167 students and 43 academics, most of whom are from other countries, the US, Europe, Asia and elsewhere in the Middle East. On campus there is a bank, a sushi bar, canteen, organic food shop and a concrete basement where 10 driverless vehicles whiz people along the 800 metres from the entrance of the city to the institute. Here are some of Masdar City's other features. The 45-metre Teflon-coated wind tower shows citizens how much energy the community is using; argon gas insulates the rammed earth and steel walls; solar air-conditioning and desalination plants are being tested, as are thermal energy and "beam down" solar plants that use mirrors to concentrate the sun and heat water to generate electricity. Phase two, due to be finished this year, will add 222 more apartments, and more streets and shops. An $800m HQ, which will house the new International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), should be finished by 2013. By 2015, Masdar City is expected to have 7,000 residents and 12,000 people commuting from Abu Dhabi. "It felt like culture shock," Laura Stupin, a young American engineer and one of the first inhabitants of the city, wrote on her blog. "The buildings are beautiful here, and they look so different from anything I've ever seen, anywhere. I keep telling people that it feels like I'm living in a psychology experiment. Every time I flip a light switch in the living room and the faucet in the bathroom starts running, or I desperately push all the buttons on the stove to try to turn on a burner, I can't help looking over my shoulder and wondering if there's a scientist observing my behaviour and reactions in this strange environment." That's because of the monitors, which analyse every human and mechanical action requiring electricity. Every machine the students use, every fridge door they open, or light they leave on, is recorded via an intelligent digital grid that senses and controls energy use and lets the power provider intervene. Showers turn off after a few minutes, sensors switch on fridges and lights. Temperature and water use can be centrally controlled. "The city is a laboratory for the future," says Martyn Potter, director of operations at the institute and dubbed the "green policeman". The Big Brother approach to cutting energy is likely to become the norm as computerised smart grids are rolled out in Europe and the US, he adds. "I want to know exactly how these buildings work. I can pinpoint who is using most energy and water, whether in an apartment or the academy. Certain students have been used to having the air conditioning on at 16C (61F), here it is 24C. Yes, they complain. But I have told them that's how it is." Fred Moavenzadeh, head of the institute, and a Harvard professor, says: "The shock of having to conserve energy is part of the Masdar human experiment. We are living and experiencing what we are trying to … educate people about … We're using roughly half the energy of a normal building of this size. We are producing no carbon because it's all renewable. Our water consumption is less and our waste generation is relatively low." The plan was to make Masdar the world's first zero-carbon city, but as the global "cleantech" market stalls in the recession, compromises are made. Foster planned to accommodate 50,000 residents and 40,000 commuters and the city was due be completed by 2016; now the final population will probably not exceed 40,000 and the completion date has been put at 2021 or 2025. The idea of a second Masdar City has been dropped; a $2.2bn hydrogen power project has been called off, as has a "thin film" solar manufacturing plant, intended for Abu Dhabi. "The Masdar master plan is changing as the world economy changes," says Dale Rollins, a former Shell executive, now Masdar's chief operating officer. "It's unfair to say that what was decided in 2006 will hold for ever more. The objectives have not changed but we have re-worked the master plan. The technology and the market has moved on. We say we can do it better and we can do it in less expensive ways." Foster's vision was for Masdar's streets to be pedestrian-only with pilotless vehicles running via magnets and fibre-optic cables. But this is now thought a white elephant. The rest of the city will be built on one floor, saving hundreds of millions of pounds. And people might move about in "golf buggy" taxis. The master plan was to desalinate groundwater with solar energy, but for now water is piped in from one of Abu Dhabi's gas-fired, high-energy, desalination plants. The revised plan no longer counts on-site energy generation as the only source of power. The idea of coveringA scheme for covering all roofs with solar panels was found to be more costly than a centralised power plant. Meanwhile, the photovoltaic panels outside the city are proving less efficient than expected because of dust storms and haze, which can cut solar insolation by 30% – the panels must be cleaned by hand. People living in the city say they quickly get used to the technology but not the setting. "It's quite a mind flip to be in such a strangely beautiful environment, then look out of a window and see flat dusty landscape stretching out to the horizon. It makes me feel like I'm living in a science fiction novel," wrote Stupin. Green economy Ethical and green living Energy United Arab Emirates Ethical business Middle East Norman Foster John Vidal guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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