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Iranian border guards killed in clash with 'bandits' near Pakistan border
US: White House security official sacked over anonymous tweets
Whether it's Facebook or lads' mags, censorship should always be a last resort | Laurie Penny
Bitcoins seized in Silk Road raid
Chinese state TV shows journalist confessing to taking bribes
The War Poets revisited: a modern-day response to 1914
Poems on war: Simon Armitage is inspired by Ivor Gurney
Poems on war: Gillian Clarke is inspired by Hedd Wyn
Poems on war: Helen Dunmore is inspired by Cynthia Asquith
Poems on war: Jackie Kay is inspired by Siegfried Sassoon
Poems on war: Daljit Nagra is inspired by Sarojini Naidu
Poems on war: Seamus Heaney was inspired by Edward Thomas
Poems on war: Paul Muldoon is inspired by Rupert Brooke
Poems on war: Michael Longley is inspired by Tom McAlindon
Poems on war: Blake Morrison is inspired by Ewart Alan Mackintosh
Poems on war: Andrew Motion is inspired by Siegfried Sassoon
Poems on war: Carol Ann Duffy is inspired by Wilfred Owen
Quincy Jones sues Michael Jackson's estate
JP Morgan agrees to $5.1bn fine with mortgage regulator
Best pictures of the day - live
José Mourinho says boycotting Russia 2018 would not help racism fight
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NSA spying on Angela Merkel? The Roast - video

Iranian border guards killed in clash with 'bandits' near Pakistan border

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 02:09 AM PDT

Clashes, in which at least 14 guards were killed, took place in mountainous region in Sistan-Baluchistan province

At least 14 Iranian border guards have been killed in clashes with "armed bandits" near the frontier with Pakistan, Iran's official news agency has said.

The clashes took place on Friday night in a mountainous region outside the town of Saravan in the south-east Sistan-Baluchistan province.

The Associated Press reported that five other Iranian guards were wounded in the attack. Reuters said 17 guards had been killed.

Authorities were investigating whether the attackers were drug smugglers or armed opposition groups, both of which have occasionally ambushed Iranian troops, the Irna news agency said.

The area also has a history of unrest, with the mainly Sunni Muslim population complaining of discrimination at the hands of Iran's Shia authorities.

Ethnic Baluch armed groups also operate in the area, but recently have been much less active.

US: White House security official sacked over anonymous tweets

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 02:00 AM PDT

Global civil service roundup: right to strike threatened in Canada and fees banned in Nigerian recruitment process

US: White House security official sacked over anonymous tweets

A national security official Jofi Joseph has been fired after he was discovered as the face behind the Twitter account which criticised government figures of the Obama administration.

Joseph was a director of nuclear non-proliferation, and was helping to negotiate nuclear issues with Iran. He has been sending personal insults using the Twitter handle @NatSecWonk for more than two years.

In his Twitter biography, which has been taken down, Joseph described himself as a "keen observer of the foreign policy and national security scene" who "unapologetically says what everyone else only thinks".

In one tweet, he said: "'Has shitty staff.' #ObamaInThreeWords."

Canada: proposed bill would curtail state employees' right to strike

The federal government tabled a bill on 22 October that would give government the exclusive right to decide which services are considered 'essential'. If passed, this would limit civil servants' right to strike.

Treasury Board president Tony Clement defended the proposed legislation, saying that government needs power to modernise public services. He also said more disputes would be resolved through arbitration, which was "better for everybody."

Clement said: "Look, I know some of the union bosses are upset and they're going to light their hair on fire and say how horrible this is. But I actually think having an excellent public service is in the interest of public servants as well as for Canadians."

Nigeria: fees banned in civil service recruitment process

On 23 October the House of Representatives directed the boards of the Nigerian Prisons Service, the Security and Civil Defence Corps and the Immigration Service to stop collecting application fees in their recruitment programmes.

The prisons service has been asked to stop the practice immediately, and refund payments to those who have already paid fees.

Public outcry has prompted investigations into allegations of racketeering in recruitment to the federal civil service and inappropriate selection of applicants.

Greece: number of civil servants with forged degrees exaggerated

Suggestions that large numbers of civil servants would lose their jobs because they were using forged degrees while working in the public sector were misleading, administrative reform minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told MPs on October 22.

The comments were made in August by alternate interior minister Leonidas Grigorakos, who suggested that up to one in 10 civil servants had fake degrees.

The minister said that about 2,100 civil servants had been checked following allegations they had broken the code of conduct. Of these, 223 have been fired and a further 960 suspended pending the outcome of their hearings.

South Africa: public servants banned from doing business with state

Civil servants will no longer be allowed to conduct business with the government, under recommendations put forward by South Africa's public service minister Lindiwe Sisulu.

He said he was worried about conflicting interests when people who are employed by the state also do business with government. He said the move would allow civil servants to concentrate on their jobs without benefiting from the state.

The minister also called for those found guilty of corruption to be blacklisted from working for any government department. Officials under investigation for fraud have been known to resign and join another department to avoid reprisal.

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Whether it's Facebook or lads' mags, censorship should always be a last resort | Laurie Penny

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Kneejerk calls for a ban on Facebook's beheading video obscure the issue: the fate of the victim

The British like to ban things, but we don't like to change things. This week, there's been yet another conflict between Silicon Valley permissiveness and British censoriousness, as our politicians attacked Facebook for hosting graphic videos. Elsewhere, the latest flagship campaign in mainstream UK feminism focuses on pressuring Tesco to remove lads' mags from its shelves, as if by some sympathetic magic sexism might thereby be solved. In a country with no constitutional protection for freedom of speech, calling for censorship lets the moderate left politely ask for progress without really asking.

The question of lads' mags has been irritatingly divisive, at a time when there are a great many pressing issues of structural sexism to consider and only a limited number of hours to argue on Twitter. Many of the feminists I've spoken to agree that getting supermarkets to pull already ailing softcore porn magazines from circulation might not be the Equal Pay Act of our generation – but it was felt that the issue could be a "gateway" to a greater understanding of sexism and sexual objectification, particularly among the young.

If only it worked that way. If only radical ends could be achieved by safe, conservative means. If only we could get the kids on board with banning naughty magazines today and trust that by tomorrow they'd be hanging out in squats after school, snorting lines of lesbian separatist theory from copies of the Scum Manifesto. What is perturbing about this line of thinking is that the debate is assumed to start with censorship, when censorship should always be a last resort.

What does it say about the state of progressive thought when the only language we have to discuss problematic content is to ask whether or not it should be banned? Facebook came under fire for allowing a video apparently showing a woman being beheaded to be shared on the site. The footage was so shocking that David Cameron himself was obliged to publicly reveal how little he understands the internet, saying that it was "irresponsible of Facebook to post beheading videos, especially without a warning", and that "worried parents" deserve an explanation.

I am not a worried parent, but even a still from the video, in which a woman in a pink top is held up by her hair as a man brandishes a weapon, made me want to throw up my own pancreas. Most of the many subsequent news reports, however, focused on the length of time it took for Facebook to pull the clip, the effect such disturbing images might have on young minds, and the ethics of censoring violent content. None of them led with the surely important question of whether the woman in the video is actually OK and, if she isn't, how her killer might be brought to justice.

The trouble with starting these discussions with censorship is that they so often end there. The debate quickly becomes about whether a given product or publication should be banned, rather than about its implications. If, on the left, censorship is our first response to awful things of which we disapprove, we divest ourselves of moral responsibility for confronting that awfulness. We hand judgment over what is problematic in our culture to the state, or to intermediaries such as the Advertising Standards Authority. We allow ourselves an easy dichotomy: either Publication X should be banned, in which case everything it represents disappears and we never have to think about it again, or it shouldn't, in which case it's totally fine and there's nothing more to talk about, because freedom of speech means never speaking back to bigotry.

Those who start shouting about freedom of speech at the first intimation of outrage are worse still than the kneejerk censors. Over several decades of conservative windbaggery, the concept of freedom of speech has been bastardised and recycled to the extent that many now seem to believe freedom of expression to be synonymous with freedom from criticism. We are living through an unprecedented period of global state surveillance.The fight for the principle of free of speech has never been more urgent. That is why we must not allow that fight to be confused with the right of bigots to defend their own racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia .

Scads of otherwise intelligent humans are invested in a species of weaponised stupidity, casting their defence of prejudice as a fight for liberty in which they alone are standing on the barricades, waving the flag for the status quo. In fact, freedom of speech includes the freedom to shout back as loudly and angrily as you can.

That's what those who are invested in social justice should be doing more of, rather than simply calling for a ban on whatever we don't like this week. Among the vanishingly few lessons we can learn about tolerance from the United States, which clings to its fickle First Amendment like a priest clings to a relic, is that censorship is no long-term strategy for cultural change. Facebook may have removed the beheading video, satisfying "worried parents" everywhere, but somewhere out there a woman in a pink top may be lying dead. That her corpse can no longer frighten children on the internet will not comfort her family – and it should not comfort us.

Laurie Penny

Bitcoins seized in Silk Road raid

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 12:02 AM PDT

$28m in digital currency taken by US authorities from Ross William Ulbricht, accused of running online criminal marketplace

Authorities in the US have seized an estimated $28m in bitcoins, a digital currency, from the alleged owner of Silk Road, the online marketplace for drugs and criminal activity that law enforcement shut down three weeks ago.

Federal prosecutors in New York said Friday that the 144,336 bitcoins, which were widely used on the defunct site, were discovered on computer hardware belonging to Ross William Ulbricht, known online as Dread Pirate Roberts, who was arrested 1 October in San Francisco and charged with various conspiracy counts. They said it represented the largest ever bitcoin seizure.

Ulbricht's lawyer could not immediately be reached on Friday evening, though he had previously told reporters that Ulbricht denied the charges.

Since it began operations in 2011 Silk Road had provided an anonymous site where drug dealers, counterfeiters and other criminals could shop for everything from heroin to hitmen, according to the justice department.

More than 900,000 registered users of the site bought and sold drugs using bitcoins, according to authorities. The currency, which has been around since 2008, first came under scrutiny by law enforcement officials in mid-2011 after media reports surfaced linking bitcoins to Silk Road.

With nearly 30,000 bitcoins previously seized, federal agents had so far collected more than $33m worth based on current value, the US attorney's office in Manhattan said.

The seizures were carried out as part of a corresponding civil action against Silk Road and Ulbricht. Ulbricht, who is detained in California, is expected to appear within weeks in Manhattan federal court to face criminal charges of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.

Court documents allege that $1.2bn in bitcoins changed hands through Silk Road during more than two years of operation, with the site charging 8-15% in commissions.

Chinese state TV shows journalist confessing to taking bribes

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:18 PM PDT

Arrest of Chen Yongzhou, who wrote stories about alleged corruption at machinery firm Zoomlion, sparked public outcry

Chinese state television has broadcast a purported confession to accepting bribes by a journalist who had been arrested on charges he fabricated stories to defame a state-owned construction equipment maker. The detention of Chen Yongzhou last week sparked a public outcry, including an unusually bold campaign by his newspaper to have him freed.

Chen's lengthy explanation of how he invented negative stories about Changsha-based Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology is the latest in a series of televised confessions by suspects in high-profile or politicised cases. Rights activists have said that public confessions in China are often forced and violate the accused's right to due process.

"I'm willing to admit my guilt and to repent," Chen said as he sat handcuffed before police in a morning news segment on state broadcaster CCTV. "In this case I've caused damages to Zoomlion, which was the subject, and also the whole news media industry and its ability to earn the public's trust."

New Express, the state-backed tabloid that employed Chen, had published two front-page pleas for police to release him last week, garnering widespread attention and sympathy from the public.

The paper's website did not mention Chen's confession on Saturday morning.

Chen's arrest, which coincides with new curbs on journalists, lawyers and internet users in China, has drawn attention to the role of whistleblowers as the country's leadership moves to eradicate graft.

Chen's reports said Zoomlion engaged in sales fraud, dubious business practices and black public relations tactics, allegations Zoomlion has denied. Chen said in the confession that he had not written the reports but that a third party had given them to him and paid him to publish them.

CCTV said Chen took bribes ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan for the reports.
The CCTV report did not say who had bribed Chen to fabricate reports about Zoomlion. A Zoomlion employee had publicly accused the company's hometown competitor Sany Group of planting the stories. Sany has denied any wrongdoing.

Chen was also paid to visit industry regulators in Beijing and Hong Kong to tell them about Zoomlion's business practices, the CCTV report said. The China Securities Regulatory Commission said it had found no evidence that Zoomlion falsified its sales or financial statements, as Chen alleged, CCTV reported.

The close competition between Sany and Zoomlion, which comes amid a slowdown in the construction equipment market, has sometimes turned ugly, with each company accusing the other of corporate spying. Sany's chairman told a local reporter this year that Zoomlion was involved in kidnapping his son, a charge Zoomlion denied.

The War Poets revisited: a modern-day response to 1914

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:10 PM PDT

To mark the centenary of the first world war, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy invited poets to respond to the poetry, letters and diary entries from the trenches and the home front – including Seamus Heaney, whose specially written poem is posthumously published here for the first time

Poems on war: Simon Armitage is inspired by Ivor Gurney

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Armitage writes new poem, "Avalon", in response to Gurney's "First Time In"

Ivor Gurney has always struck me as the most spontaneous of the war poets; not as confident as Sassoon or as accomplished as Owen, but alert and curious, with an unexpected turn of phrase and an eye for the comradeship of war as well as its horror. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that Gurney felt less tortured and crazed in the trenches than he did as a civilian, particularly in later life when his mind and nerves went to pieces, leading to long periods of hospitalisation. From that confinement, some of his more paranoid poems took the form of long rambling to letters to the police; in my own piece, I picture him escaping from the war in his head to a pacific and spiritual destination in the far distance, where he might find peace and rest.

Avalon by Simon Armitage

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London:
the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone
by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps.
So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps,
I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester
by several million strides, having walked on water.

City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats,
of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes,
city of pelicans, fish-bones and flaking paint,
of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point …
I eat little – a beard of grass, a pinch of oats –
let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out,
but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes
and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side
of the faultline, rocking the world's seesaw.
At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven's seashore:
I watch boats heading home with the day's catch
or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz,
or I face west and let the Pacific slip
in bloodshot glory over the planet's lip,
sense the waterfall at the end of the journey.

I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.

First Time In by Ivor Gurney

The Captain addressed us. Afterglow grew deeper,
Like England, like the west country, and stars grew thicker.
In silence we left the billet, we found the hard roadway
In single file, jangling (silent) and on the grey
Chipped road, moaned over ever by snipers' shots.
Got shelter in the first trench; and the thud of boots
On duck-board wood from grate on rough road stone it changed.
(Verey lights showed ghastly, and a machine-gun ranged.)
Sentry here and there. How the trench wound now! Wires
Hindered, thistles pricked, but few guns spat their fires.
Upward a little … wider a little, the reserve line reached.
Tin hat shapes, dark body shapes and faces as bleached.
And the heart's beat: 'Here men are maimed and shot through,
hit through;
Here iron and lead rain, sandbags rent in two;
And the honours are earned. The stuff of tales is woven.'

Here were whispers of encouragement, about the cloven
Trenches faces showed and west soft somethings were said.
Lucky were signallers who (intellectual) strangely had
Some local independence in line danger, but
In training or on Rest were from honour shut.
Bundling over sky lines to clear trench digging –
On the Plain scorn went with tapping and flag wagging
Directions. And then one took us courteously

Where a sheet lifted, and gold light cautiously
Streamed from an oilsheet slitted vertical into
Half-light of May. We entered, took stranger-view
Of life as lived in the line, the line of war and daily
Papers, despatches, brave-soldier talks, the really, really
Truly line, and these the heroes of story.

Never were quieter folk in teaparty history.
Never in 'Cranford', Trollope, even. And, as it were, home
Closed round us. They told us lore, how and when did come
Minnewerfers and grenades from over there east;
The pleasant and unpleasant habits of the beast
That crafted and tore Europe. What line-mending was
When guns centred and dug-outs rocked in a haze
And hearing was difficult – (wires cut) – all necessary
Common-sense workmanlike cautions of salutary
Wisdom – the mechanic day-lore of modern war-making,
Calm thought discovered in mind and body shaking.
The whole craft and business of bad occasion.
Talk turned personal, and to borders of two nations
Gone out; Cotswold's Black Mountain edges against august
August after-sun's glow, and air a lit dust
With motes and streams of gold. Wales her soul visible
Against all power west Heaven ever could flood full.
And of songs – the 'Slumber Song', and the soft Chant
So beautiful to which Rabelaisian songs were meant
Of South and North Wales; and 'David of the White Rock':
What an evening! What a first time, what a shock
So rare of home-pleasure beyond measure
And always to time 's ending surely a treasure.

Simon Armitage

Poems on war: Gillian Clarke is inspired by Hedd Wyn

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Clarke writes new poem, "Eisteddfod of the Black Chair for Hedd Wyn, 1887-1917", in response to Wyn's "War"

Hedd Wyn is the bardic name of Ellis Evans, eldest of 11 children of a north Wales hill farmer. I take his description of the beauty of France, and his foreboding of fields red with blood, from a letter he wrote home. A friend saw him struck, and fall. The "black chair" is a famously tragic image of the National Eisteddfod where, days later, he was announced as the anonymous poet who had won the chair.

"Eisteddfod of the Black Chair" (for Hedd Wyn, 1887-1917) by Gillian Clarke

Robert Graves met him once,
in the hills above Harlech,
the shepherd poet,
the awdl and the englyn in his blood
like the heft of the mountain
in the breeding of his flock.

In a letter from France, he writes
of poplars whispering, the sun going down
among the foliage like an angel of fire,
and flowers half hidden in leaves
growing in a spent shell.
'Beauty is stronger than war.'

Yet he heard sorrow in the wind, foretold
blood in the rain reddening the fields
under the shadow of crows,
till he fell to his knees at Passchendaele,
grasping two fists-full of earth, a shell to the stomach
opening its scarlet blossom.

At the Eisteddfod they called his name three times,
his audience waiting to rise, thrilled,
to crown him, chair him,
to sing the hymn of peace,
not 'the festival in tears and the poet in his grave',
a black sheet placed across the empty chair.

"War" by Hedd Wyn

Bitter to live in times like these.
While God declines beyond the seas;
Instead, man, king or peasantry,
Raises his gross authority.

When he thinks God has gone away
Man takes up his sword to slay
His brother; we can hear death's roar.
It shadows the hovels of the poor.

Like the old songs they left behind,
We hung our harps in the willows again.
Ballads of boys blow on the wind,
Their blood is mingled with the rain.

Poems on war: Helen Dunmore is inspired by Cynthia Asquith

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Dunmore writes new poem, "The Duration", in response to Cynthia Asquith's diaries

Two of Cynthia Asquith's brothers and many of her close friends were killed in the first world war. It was government policy not to repatriate the bodies of soldiers killed overseas, and so their families never saw a coffin or attended a funeral. Instead, there was silence, or terrible suspense about those "Missing, believed killed". The end of hostilities meant the end of killing, but it also crushed any hope that the dead might, somehow, return. The duration of the war gave way to a permanence of mourning.

"The Duration" by Helen Dunmore

Here they are are on the beach where the boy played
for fifteen summers, before he grew too old
for French cricket, shrimping and rock pools.

Here is the place where he built his dam
year after year. See, the stream still comes down
just as it did, and spreads itself on the sand

into a dozen channels. How he enlisted them:
those splendid spades, those sunbonneted girls
furiously shoring up the ramparts.

Here they are on the beach, just as they were
those fifteen summers. She has a rough towel
ready for him. The boy was always last out of the water.

She would rub him down hard, chafe him like a foal
up on its legs for an hour and trembling, all angles.
She would dry carefully between his toes.

Here they are on the beach, the two of them
sitting on the same square of mackintosh,
the same tartan rug. Quality lasts.

There are children in the water, and mothers patrolling
the sea's edge, calling them back
from the danger zone beyond the breakers.

How her heart would stab when he went too far out.
Once she flustered into the water, shouting
until he swam back. He was ashamed of her then.

Wouldn't speak, wouldn't look at her even.
Her skirt was sopped. She had to wring out the hem.
She wonders if Father remembers.

Later, when they've had their sandwiches
she might speak of it. There are hours yet.
Thousands, by her reckoning.

From "Lady Cynthia Asquith: Diaries 1915-1918"

"I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war."

Poems on war: Jackie Kay is inspired by Siegfried Sassoon

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Kay writes "Bantam" in response to Sassoon's "Survivors"

My grandfather, my father's father, Joseph Kay was sent to war at the age of 17. He was wounded in the Somme and a prisoner of war for nearly a year. He fought with the Highland Light Infantry. Years later, actually after the second world war, in 1946, my grandfather's arm suddenly swelled and the shrapnel was lifted clean out of that old wound. Sassoon was outraged at the hypocrisy of war, how young boys suddenly aged into men, "these boys with their old, scared faces". My dad was telling me about the Bantams. Sassoon, I imagined, would have been haunted by the Bantams too, wee boys picked to fight, sent to battle "grim and glad". I always found Sassoon's poetry among the most powerful of the war poets. I wanted to write about my grandfather surviving, and use the shrapnel as a metaphor for how long war lasts; how long in the boy's arm, in the man's arm. I chose to write a 10-line poem and approximate the rhyme structure, roughly rhyming Somme with airm, as a kind of handshake to the past, and to the survival of war poetry itself.

"Bantam" by Jackie Kay

My father at 87 remembers his father at 17

It wisnae men they sent tae war.
It wis boys like the Bantams
– wee men named efter
a small breed o' chickens,
or later: a jeep, a bike, a camera.
That needy fir soldiers they drapped height
Restriction; so small men came to war.
As a prisoner, my faither's weight fell.
And years later, the shrapnel fray the Somme
Shot oot, a wee jewel hidden in his left airm.

"Survivors" by Siegfried Sassoon

No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're 'longing to go out again,' –
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride …
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

• Craiglockhart, October 1917

Poems on war: Daljit Nagra is inspired by Sarojini Naidu

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Nagra writes new poem, "The Calling", in response to Naidu's "The Gift of India"

Sarojini Naidu's great poem reminds us of the considerable sacrifice made by Indians on behalf of the British empire. Naidu's use of personification appealed to me and inspired me to write about post-empire emigrants from India.

"The Calling" by Daljit Nagra

The night is abrim with the in-between children
they are summoning Mother India

take us back take us back take us back

but the Motherland is piping the old grief
I was down on my knees on my knees

why did you run toward the moon
for the cities with their engines of desire

The night is abrim with the in-between children
their heads are down and are crying

take us back take us back take us back

our songs are afresh with the plough and the oxen,
the smell of open fires where the roti is crackling

and our roses are the roses of home.

"The Gift of India" by Sarojini Naidu

Is there ought you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and the West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of the duty, the sabers of doom.
Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
they are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France
Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep
Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?
Or the pride that thrills thro' my heart's despair
And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?
And the far sad glorious vision I see
Of the torn red banners of victory?
when the terror and the tumult of hate shall cease
And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,
And your love shall offer memorial thanks
To the comrades who fought on the dauntless ranks,
And you honour the deeds of the dauntless ones,
Remember the blood of my martyred sons!

Poems on war: Seamus Heaney was inspired by Edward Thomas

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Heaney wrote "In a field", in response to Thomas's "As the team's head-brass"

"In a field" by Seamus Heaney

And there I was in the middle of a field,
The furrows once called "scores' still with their gloss,
The tractor with its hoisted plough just gone

Snarling at an unexpected speed
Out on the road. Last of the jobs,
The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned

Three ply or four round each of the four sides
Of the breathing land, to mark it off
And out. Within that boundary now

Step the fleshy earth and follow
The long healed footprints of one who arrived
From nowhere, unfamiliar and de-mobbed,

In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,
Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field
To stumble from the windings' magic ring

And take me by a hand to lead me back
Through the same old gate into the yard
Where everyone has suddenly appeared,

All standing waiting.

"As the team's head-brass" by Edward Thomas

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone
From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes: a good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

• Chosen by Julia Copus and Seamus Heaney

Poems on war: Paul Muldoon is inspired by Rupert Brooke

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Muldoon writes new poem "Dromedaries and Dung Beetles" in response to Brooke's "The Soldier"

I'm a huge fan of Rupert Brooke, one of the first poets I read. In fact, the only poet whose work was in my childhood home. I thought it might be interesting to rejig Brooke's idea of the corner of a foreign field and make it "forever Ireland" rather than "England". I also recently visited the battlefields of Gallipoli, not far from where Brooke died, as well as Morocco. I traced what must have been a distant relative who died in the second world war somewhere in north Africa. All of these ideas came together in the poem "Dromedaries and Dung Beetles".

"Dromedaries and Dung Beetles" by Paul Muldoon

An eye-level fleck of straw in the mud wall
is almost as good as gold . . .
I've ventured into this piss-poor urinal
partly to escape the wail
of thirty milch camels with their colts

as they're readied for our trek
across the dunes, partly because I've guzzled
three glasses of the diuretic
gunpowder tea the Tuareg
hold in such esteem. Their mostly business casual

attire accented by a flamboyant
blue or red nylon grab-rope
round their lower jaws, dromedaries point
to a 9 to 5 life of knees bent
in the service of fetching carboys

and carpetbags from A to B across the scarps.
Think Boyne coracles
bucking from wave to wave. Think scarab
beetles rolling their scrips
of dung to a gabfest. These dromedary-gargoyles

are at once menacing and meek
as, railing against their drivers' kicks and clicks,
they fix their beautiful-ugly mugs
on their own Meccas.
The desert sky was so clear last night the galaxies

could be seen to pulse …
The dromedaries were having a right old chinwag,
each musing on its bolus.
Every so often one would dispense some pills
that turned out to be generic

sheep or goat. The dung beetles set great store
not by the bitter cud
nor the often implausible Histories
of Herodotus but the stars
they use to guide

themselves over the same sand dunes
as these thirty milch camels
and their colts. They, too, make a continuous
line through Algeria and Tunisia.
Dung beetles have been known to positively gambol

on the outskirts of Zagora, a boom
town where water finds it hard not to gush
over the date-palms.
Despite the clouds of pumice
above Marrakesh even I might find my way to Kesh,

in the ancient Barony of Lurg,
thanks to Cassiopeia
and her self-regard. Think of how there lurks
in almost all of us a weakness for the allegorical.
Think of a Moroccan swallow's last gasp

near the wattle-and-daub oppidum
where one of my kinsmen clips
the manes of a groaning chariot-team . . .
Think of Private Henry Muldoon putting his stamp
on the mud of Gallipoli

on August 8 1915. It appears
he worked as a miner at Higham Colliery
before serving in the Lancasters and the 8th Welsh Pioneers.
His somewhat pronounced ears
confirm his place in the family gallery.

'It's only a blink,' my father used to say . . . 'Only a blink.'
I myself seem to have developed the gumption
to stride manfully out of a Neo-Napoleonic
latrine and play my part in the march on Casablanca
during the North African campaign.

"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Poems on war: Michael Longley is inspired by Tom McAlindon

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Longley writes new poem "Boy-Soldier" in response to a letter McAlindon wrote about the death of a teenage soldier

In his superb family history Two Brothers Two Wars (Lilliput Press, 2008), Thomas McAlindon quotes a letter sent from the front by his Uncle Tom (Royal Irish Rifles) in which he records the death of Bobbie Kernaghan, a teenage soldier from Belfast: "He looked like a schoolboy asleep when they brought him in." The refinement of Tom's writing reminded me of one of Homer's more tender accounts of death on the battlefield. In "Boy-Soldier", I am predating rather than updating McAlindon's heartbreaking letter.

"Boy-Soldier" by Michael Longley

The spear-point pierces his tender neck.
His armour clatters as he hits the ground.
Blood soaks his hair, bonny as the Graces',
Braids held in place by gold and silver bands.
Think of a smallholder who rears a sapling
In a beauty spot a burn burbles through
(You can hear its music close to your home)
Milky blossoms quivering in the breeze.
A spring blizzard blows in from nowhere
And uproots it, laying its branches out.
Thus Euphorbus, the son of Pantheus,
A boy-soldier – the London Scottish, say,
The Inniskillings, the Duke of Wellington's –
Was killed and despoiled by Menelaus.

Tom McAlindon's letter, from Two Brothers Two Wars

"We had a young volunteer here called Bobbie Kernaghan. He said he was seventeen but looked about fifteen to me. He was just out and so keen to get at the Germans, they had killed his favourite uncle. He was from Balfour Street in Belfast and said it's a small world, a neighbour of his was an Annie O'Hagan from the Mointies. Do you know her? I straightened his pack and checked his rifle (everything we have and wear is plastered with mud) before we went up and over on the 9th. We had hardly gone ten yards when he got it in the chest. He looked like a schoolboy asleep when they brought him in and laid him down. He lay covered over in the bottom of the trench for a few days. Every time I passed him I thought of when I was seventeen and of the nine years I've had since then. You get very callous here after a while, you simply have to, but this lad's death got through all my callousness. The Divisional Commander inspected us this morning and congratulated us on our 'great work at Ovillers'. Great!"

• Tom McAlindon served in the Royal Irish Rifles

Poems on war: Blake Morrison is inspired by Ewart Alan Mackintosh

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Morrison writes new poem, "Redacted", in response to Mackintosh's "Recruiting"

I've been shocked by the tender age of some of the British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan: would armies exist if no one under 25 was allowed to fight? Wilfred Owen has poems that touch on this theme, but I've chosen something less well known that I came across in a 50-year-old anthology – Ewart Alan Mackintosh's "Recruiting", which dissects the jingoistic doublespeak used to persuade young men to go to war. My poem was partly inspired by its plain speaking – but much more so by the death of a young man my son was at school with, Mark Evison, and by the book that his mother Margaret as written about her struggle to discover how and why he died.

"Redacted" by Blake Morrison

"The raw material for the inquest was a substantial document … It was initially so heavily redacted by the MOD that it was almost impossible to understand." – Margaret Evison, Death of a Soldier

This poem has been redacted
In the interests of national security.
It's an inquest into the death of a serving officer
Heard at a Coroner's Court for the MOD.

On May 9th 20____ Lieutenant ____ ______, who had begun
His first posting, at Fort _______ , just 12 days earlier,
Undertook a routine patrol with members of his platoon,
Including two guardsmen and an interpreter.

It was the aftermath of the poppy harvest
And their instructions were to dominate the ___ area of Helmand,
By repelling Taliban insurgents
And winning local hearts and minds.

Five minutes after leaving base they came under fire
And took cover in a compound, behind a high mud wall,
Where Lieutenant ______ tried to radio for reinforcements,
Briefly standing in the entrance doorway to get a signal –

Which was when the bullet hit, finding the gap
Between his body armour and his collar bone
And knocking him flat on the sandy ground.
"Man down," his colleagues shouted, "Man down."

Guardsman ____________ radioed for a helicopter
While Guardsman _____, the team medic, wiped the blood
From the hole in his right shoulder (the size of a 50p coin),
Staunching the flow with a field dressing as best he could.

Still under fire, Lieutenant ______ was placed on a stretcher
And carried through irrigation ditches back to base; the ride
Was bumpy but he kept talking as he lay there
And even asked for (and was given) a cigarette.

While awaiting the arrival of the helicopter team,
He was injected with morphine in his right thigh.
And a Hemcon bandage applied to the wound,
But his pulse was slowing – the bullet had ruptured an artery.

The Blackhawk helicopter arrived forty minutes later.
During the flight Lieutenant ______ suffered a cardiac arrest.
And though operated on in hospital at Camp ____ ____
He failed to recover consciousness.

Further tests at ______ hospital in the UK, following his transfer
By plane, confirmed the absence of brain activity.
Parents and friends spent time at his beside
Before the life support machine was turned off next day.

The poem's sympathies are with his family for their loss
But it is satisfied that everything possible was done
To save the life of Lieutenant ______
And it therefore refutes any suggestion

That his body armour offered scant protection,
That his Bowman Radio did not work properly,
That the medical equipment supplied to the troops was inadequate,
And that the 65-minute delay

Between the bullet hitting and the helicopter landing –
The product of a communication failure or of
A navigation error on the part of the pilot –
Was what cost Lieutenant ______ his life.

Nor can the poem judge whether his deployment
As platoon commander on his first tour of duty
In an area notorious for insurgents and snipers
Was negligent to the point of criminality.

As to claims that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable,
That teenagers are being used as cannon fodder and that
Their deaths serve no purpose whatsoever –
To comment would be inappropriate.

In short, after hearing all the evidence,
The poem concludes that Lieutenant ______ suffered injuries
That were regrettable but unsurvivable.
While on active service for his country,

His death being the result of 1a) necrosis of the brain
Due to 1b) major blood loss due to 1c)
A gunshot wound. Signed, ______ ______ ______, Coroner,
Acting independently for the MOD.

"Recruiting" by Ewart Alan Mackintosh

'Lads, you're wanted, go and help,'
On the railway carriage wall
Stuck the poster, and I thought
Of the hands that penned the call.

Fat civilians wishing they
'Could go and fight the Hun'.
Can't you see them thanking God
That they're over forty-one?

Girls with feathers, vulgar songs –
Washy verse on England's need –
God – and don't we damned well know
How the message ought to read.

'Lads, you're wanted! over there,'
Shiver in the morning dew,
More poor devils like yourselves
Waiting to be killed by you.

Go and help to swell the names
In the casualty lists.
Help to make the column's stuff
For the blasted journalists.

Help to keep them nice and safe
From the wicked German foe.
Don't let him come over here!
'Lads, you're wanted – out you go.'

There 's a better word than that,
Lads, and can't you hear it come
From a million men that call
You to share their martyrdom?

Leave the harlots still to sing
Comic songs about the Hun,
Leave the fat old men to say
Now we've got them on the run.

Better twenty honest years
Than their dull three score and ten.
Lads, you're wanted. Come and learn
To live and die with honest men.

You shall learn what men can do
If you will but pay the price,
Learn the gaiety and strength
In the gallant sacrifice.

Take your risk of life and death
Underneath the open sky.
Live clean or go out quick –
Lads, you're wanted. Come and die.

Poems on war: Andrew Motion is inspired by Siegfried Sassoon

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Motion writes new poem "A Moment of Reflection" in response to Sassoon's statement of departure from the army

In protesting as he did about the continuance of the war, Siegfried Sassoon put himself at considerable risk of being court marshalled. So this document is proof of great courage as well as conviction – courage akin to the bravery he had already shown and would show again as a fighting soldier, and to the unflinchingness of his poems. As things turned out, he was spared this sort of judgment and sent to Craiglockhart War hospital instead, where he met Wilfred Owen and helped him to discover his true identity as a poet. His letter of protest is a pivotal document, then, as well as a powerful and poignant one.

"A Moment of Reflection" (28 June 1914) by Andrew Motion
(with acknowledgments to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West)

Although one assassin has already tried
and failed to blow him to pieces,
Archduke Ferdinand has let it be known
he will soon complete his journey
as planned along the quay at Sarajevo,

but for a moment will pause
here,
at the window of a private room in the Town Hall.

He needs time to recover his composure
after finding the blood of his aide-de-camp
splattered over the manuscript of the speech
he delivered so well earlier this morning;
he needs to look around him.
And indeed,
the prospect of an Austrian brewery in the distance
is reassuring,
likewise the handsome red bricks of the barracks
filled with several thousand soldiers of the fatherland.

This is how those who survive him today
will remember him:

a man thinking his thoughts
while waiting until his wife can join him –
the Countess Chotek
with her pinched yet puddingy features,
to whom he will shortly utter his last words,
'Sophie, live for our children',
into deaf ears.

As for his own memories,
the Head of the Tourist Bureau
has now arrived and taken it upon himself
to suggest the Archduke might be happy to recall the fact
that only last week
he bagged his three thousandth stag,

Was this, the Head dares to enquire,
with the double-barrelled Mannlicher
made for him especially –
the same weapon he used to dispatch
two thousand one hundred and fifty game birds
in a single day,
and sixty boars at a hunt led by the Kaiser?

These are remarkable achievements,
the Head dares to continue,
on the same level as the improvement
the Archduke has suggested in the hunting of hare,
by which the beaters,
forming themselves into a wedge-shape,
squeeze those notoriously elusive runners
towards a particular spot
where he can exceed the tally of every other gun.

In the silence that follows
it is not obvious whether the Archduke
has heard the question.
He has heard it.
He is more interested, however,
in the fact that his mind is now stuffed
with an almost infinite number of ghosts
of woodcock, quail, pheasant and partridge,
wild boars bristling flank to flank,
mallard and teal and wild geese
dangling from the antlers of stags,
layer after layer of rabbits
and other creatures that were mere vermin –

a tally that he expects will increase
once the business of today has been accomplished.

Siegfried Sassoon

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

• Siegfried Sassoon's statement to his commanding officer explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army (Bradford Pioneer, 27 July 1917)

Poems on war: Carol Ann Duffy is inspired by Wilfred Owen

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Duffy writes new poem, "An Unseen", in response to Owen's "The Send-Off"

For me, the loss of Owen as a poet during the second world war is a continuing poetic bereavement each time I read him. He is a presiding spirit of our poetry.

"An Unseen" by Carol Ann Duffy

I watched love leave, turn, wave, want not to go,
depart, return;
late spring, a warm slow blue of air, old-new.
Love was here; not; missing, love was there;
each look, first, last.

Down the quiet road, away, away, towards
the dying time,
love went, brave soldier, the song dwindling;
walked to the edge of absence; all moments going,
gone; bells through rain

to fall on the carved names of the lost.
I saw love's child uttered,
unborn, only by rain, then and now, all future
past, an unseen. Has forever been then? Yes,
forever has been.

"The Send-Off" by Wilfred Owen

Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beating of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
Up half-known roads.

Quincy Jones sues Michael Jackson's estate

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 05:30 PM PDT

Producer claims he is owed at least $10m on royalties from music he co-wrote used in films and shows since singer's death

Music producer Quincy Jones has filed a suit against Michael Jackson's estate, claiming that he is owed millions in royalties and production fees on some of the superstar's greatest hits.

Jones seeks at least $10m from the singer's estate and Sony Music Entertainment, claiming that the entities improperly re-edited songs to deprive him of royalties and production fees. The music has been used in the film This Is It and in a pair of Cirque du Soleil shows based on the King of Pop's songs, the lawsuit states.

Jones also claims that he should have received a producer's credit on the music in This Is It. His lawsuit seeks an accounting of the estate's profits from the works so that Jones can determine how much he is owed.

The producer worked with Jackson on three of his most successful solo albums: Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad.

Jackson's estate wrote in a statement that it was saddened by Jones' lawsuit. "To the best of [our] knowledge, Mr Jones has been appropriately compensated over approximately 35 years for his work with Michael," the statement said.

An after-hours message left at Sony Music's New York offices was not immediately returned.

Jackson's hits Billie Jean, Thriller and Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough are among the songs Jones claims were re-edited to deprive him of royalties and his producer's fee.

Jones's lawsuit states that the producing contracts he signed called for him to have the first opportunity to re-edit or alter the songs, in part to protect his reputation.

JP Morgan agrees to $5.1bn fine with mortgage regulator

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 04:28 PM PDT

Deal settles lawsuit brought by Federal Housing Finance Agency – but has still to agree on bond sales fine

JP Morgan reached a $5.1bn (£3.2bn) settlement with the US mortgage company regulator on Friday as the bank continues to negotiate with the justice department over what is expected to be an even larger fine related to bond sales.

The deal settles a lawsuit brought by Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which regulates government-backed loan firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The FHFA alleged JP Morgan misled Fannie and Freddie about the quality of mortgages it sold to them during the housing boom. The settlement included $4bn to end a lawsuit over securities disclosures and $1.1bn covering mortgage repurchases.

"This is a significant step as the government and JP Morgan Chase move to address outstanding mortgage-related issues," said FHFA acting director Edward DeMarco. He said the resolution "provides greater certainty in the marketplace and is in line with our responsibility for preserving and conserving Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's assets on behalf of taxpayers."

The justice department and the bank continue to negotiate a wider investigation into the bank's past sales of mortgage bonds that could total another $9bn - $4bn in consumer relief, $3bn for investors who purchased poor-performing securities issued by the bank and another $2 billion in penalties.

Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's chief executive office, has been seeking to resolve a batch of issues with regulators and a mass settlement was expected this week.

Talks appear to have foundered, however, after the bank sought to hold government-backed insurer the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) liable for part of the payment, according to reports.

The justice department is opposing the bank's request that the FDIC assumes liability for investors' losses stemming from Washington Mutual, the lender it acquired in 2008 at the government's request at the height of the financial crisis. It is as yet unclear whether the bank will be able to pursue the FDIC for repayment of the FHFA penalties.

The bank has already agreed to pay the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) $100m for "reckless behavior" relating to the $6bn losses made by the so-called London Whale trader.

The bank is also negotiating a settlement with a dozen bondholders including BlackRock and Allianz over the sale of mortgage securities that went wrong. That agreement could land the bank with another $6bn payment.

In addition, the bank is facing a federal investigation into whether it hired the children of top Chinese government officials in an attempt to win business in the country. The hirings could potentially violate the foreign corrupt practices act.

Dominic Rushe

Best pictures of the day - live

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 03:00 PM PDT

The Guardian's photo team brings you a daily round-up from the world of photography

Mee-Lai Stone

José Mourinho says boycotting Russia 2018 would not help racism fight

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 03:00 PM PDT

• Chelsea manager says World Cup needs best players there
• Do not punish fans for 'disgraceful behaviour' of minority

José Mourinho has suggested boycotting the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia would not benefit the fight against racism in the game and urged any players considering such a move not to punish the majority of supporters for the "disgraceful behaviour" of a small minority.

The Manchester City midfielder Yaya Touré had raised the possibility of a boycott of the tournament by black players after complaining of racist abuse from home supporters during his club's Champions League victory at CSKA Moscow on Wednesday. Uefa has opened up disciplinary proceedings against the Russian club, who deny any wrongdoing by their fans, and will rule next week whether sanctions are to be imposed.

An internal investigation is also under way at the governing body as to why the Romanian referee, Ovidiu Hategan, did not follow protocol on the night having been made aware of the chants by Touré. City will be providing witness statements to Uefa with the club's manager, Manuel Pellegrini, wary of prejudicing or prejudging the process. "Yaya did the right thing to say what happened and we will see what Uefa will do about it," the Chilean said. "Everyone knows what happened and we will see in the future what happens."

Mourinho echoed Pellegrini in condemning any racist abuse that may have occurred, and expressed sympathy for Touré, but did not concur with the Ivory Coast midfielder's stance on the World Cup in five years' time. "I respect his opinion, but I disagree," he said. "The history of football was made equally by many races, and the black players make a fantastic contribution to what football is. Go to the World Cup and it's the biggest expression of national team competitions: races, people from different parts of the globe, people from every continent. And the black players are very, very important for that.

"Who is more important? The billions of people in love with the game around the world, or a few thousand that go to football stadia and have a disgraceful behaviour in relation to the black players. If I was a black player, I would say the other billions are much more important. Let's fight the thousands but give to the billions what they want: the best football. Football without black players is not the best football, for sure."

Those comments prompted a furious reaction from Garth Crooks, a trustee at, a trustee at Kick It Out, who stated on the anti-racism organisation's website: "I am disappointed with Mourinho's comments, about how he feels that black players should go into a hostile racial environment in order to show them how good they are. Now there is a man who has never had to suffer racial abuse."

The former Tottenham Hotspur forward was equally scathing with regard to Arsène Wenger who, while denouncing racism, had pointed out that the case against CSKA Moscow was as yet "not proven", pending the Uefa investigation. "For Wenger to ask for further evidence is extraordinary given the fact that Yaya heard the evidence reported and his club have backed their captain on the night." added Crooks.

CSKA were adamant in a statement issued on Thursday that their own investigation into Touré's complaints had not turned up any evidence of racist abuse. Indeed, they had quoted the City midfielder's compatriot, the striker Seydou Doumbia, as claiming he had been "overreacting" to claims of monkey chants at the Khimki Arena. However, the Russian club's stance has been somewhat undermined since when Doumbia insisted on his Facebook fan page that he had never said anything of the sort.

"I want to clarify my position after my Ivory Coast team mate and friend Yaya Touré accused CSKA fans of racism," read a statement posted in both English and French on the page, which appears genuine. "I want to insist that I did not talk to any journalist about these facts so none of the quotes you read in the press came from me." Regardless, the comments were still displayed on the club's own website as part of a story claiming they were "surprised and disappointed" by Touré's allegations.

"Doumbia is a young brother, someone I admire who I have known a long time," said Touré on BBC Afrique, part of the World Service. "We come from the same country. I don't want to say things that will put him in trouble but you can see a little bit the manipulation around all this. I am not deaf. We are all humans. It is not a nice feeling to go and play a football match, to bring joy to the people and to be called a monkey or to hear monkey noises. I don't look like a monkey. Other people must have seen it. But it is so pathetic and so sad to see things [racism] like that. I am ashamed to still have to talk about this subject."

Hategan, too, faces possible sanction, having failed to stop the match and ask for an announcement to be made over the public address system urging spectators to stop the chanting or risk the temporary suspension of the game. Had any abuse persisted, the referee could then have abandoned the match.

Dominic Fifield

Shaun Walker

Comcast opens HBO to US consumers without pricey premium subscription

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 02:47 PM PDT

The country’s largest cable company is supporting HBO's gambit to compete with Netflix, AMC and illegal download websites

Amanda Holpuch

Syria says al-Qaida linked group's leader killed

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 02:30 PM PDT

Country's state-run TV claims the head of Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, died in the coastal province of Latakia

Syrian state media reported the death of the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida linked group fighting the regime of president Bashar al-Assad. Unverified reports said Abu Mohammad al-Golani had been killed in the Latakia area.

If confirmed, his death would be a severe blow to one of the two main jihadi-type formations on the rebel side of the Syrian conflict and a further boost to the government's morale after recent political and military successes.

Pro-Syrian media in Lebanon also reported the news. But social media quoted another Nusra leader, Abu Ilyas, as insisting that Golani was alive.

Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) first announced its existence in early 2012, and it has claimed responsibility for many suicide bombings.

It is thought to have 7,000 fighters and is considered one of the better equipped, trained and financed of the many anti-Assad groups in Libya. The US has designated it as a terrorist organisation.

Little is known about Golani, a secretive figure who hides his face whenever he is in public. His name suggests he is from the Golan Heights in south-western Syria, bordering on and partially occupied by Israel, but his nationality is unknown. He has also been reported killed twice before – in Iraq in 2006 and in Syria in 2008.

In April Golani released an audio message declaring that JAN was not merging with al-Qaida's affiliate in Iraq, and instead pledged allegiance to al-Qaida's overall leadership. Analysts say JAN now appears to be in competition with the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," which controls parts of northern Syria.

Its successes in recent months have fed into the Assad regime's narrative that it is fighting to defend the country against al-Qaida – challenging the west to chose between him and jihadi terrorists.

JAN is also one of a dozen hardline Islamist groups which have rejected the authority of the western-backed Joint Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, which has been struggling to unite armed opposition groups on the ground. It and others also oppose any negotiations with the regime.

In areas JAN controls it has tried to win popular support by distributing fuel, bread and blankets to the needy while controlling food prices to prevent exploitation. It has also set up sharia courts to dispense Islamic law.

It was unclear if Joulani's reported death was linked to a Syrian army ambush earlier on Friday near Damascus that killed between 20 and 40 rebels.

Sana, Syria's state news agency, released grisly photos purporting to show dead "terrorist fighters" strewn along a roadside. It said Nusra fighters were among them.

Ian Black

France refuses to make football clubs exempt from new supertax

Posted: 25 Oct 2013 02:10 PM PDT

President François Hollande stands firm on imposition of 75% rate after football clubs decide to strike in protest

France's president, François Hollande, has said French football clubs will not be exempt from paying a supertax on high salaries in response to their decision to strike next month in protest.

Football clubs are staging their first strike since 1972 over the tax, which employers must pay on salaries exceeding €1m (£854m). Top clubs complain it will add up to €20m to their tax bill.

Hollande said he had accepted a request to meet the head of France's football federation, Noël le Graët, over the 75% supertax, but saw no need to create an exception.

"When the tax law is voted, the law will be the same for all companies regardless of what they are," Hollande told a news conference in Brussels. The bill is due in coming weeks to be passed by parliament. "This does not stop us from having a dialogue on the difficulties facing professional clubs, but everyone needs to be aware of the rules."

Fourteen of the 20 Ligue 1 clubs will be affected by the tax, with Qatar-funded Paris St Germain the hardest hit while Monaco, backed by a Russian billionaire, will be exempt as they do not fall under French tax laws.

PSG, who have spent more than €200m on transfers since being taken over by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011, are expected to pay €20m – just under half of the total the clubs would pay in a year. Because of the strike, Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches will be cancelled for the last weekend of November.

Hollande added that unemployment was stabilising in France despite a rise in jobless claims in September, as the government struggles to reverse rising job losses before the end of the year.

Jobless claims rose last month by the highest margin since the depths of the financial crisis in early 2009, hitting a new record and undermining Hollande's pledge of reversing the rise in unemployment this year.

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