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• Introducing the software that can predict new leaders of terror groups
• Tony Abbott's ministry likely to reflect election team, says Julie Bishop
• Kenya's tech visionaries lead the way
• Catastrophe by Max Hastings; 100 Days to Victory by Saul David; Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden – review
• Mers - will it start the next global pandemic?
• Cambodian election protesters march through Phnom Penh
• Afghanistan coal mine collapse kills and injures dozens
• My veil epiphany | Victoria Coren Mitchell
• Colorado floods: rescuers warn of weeks without power
• Football match fixing: Victoria police make arrests
• Vladimir Putin: arch manipulator with a mission to check US will | Observer profile
• Hurricane Ingrid and tropical storm Manuel converge on Mexico
• New Labor leader won't lack legitimacy, says Chris Bowen
• My favourite work: Neither Pride nor Courage by Vernon Ah Kee - video
• PNG attack survivors set up trust fund for injured porters
• Poked, prodded and live on the pandacam. Can't a girl get any peace in the zoo?
• 'British Jews are a success story, but not yet free of anxiety'
• The Tudor pile that's home to a thinktank set on shaking up Britain's drug laws
• Britain's Jews fall in number but grow in self-confidence
• Drugs: let's welcome this new starting point for legalisation | Observer editorial
• After Edward Snowden's revelations, why trust US cloud providers?
• The Grand Gesture – review
• Richard Dawkins: 'I don't think I am strident or aggressive'
• Campaigners call for new deal for India's women in wake of gang-rape convictions
• Domenico Quirico: My 150-day ordeal as a hostage of Syria's rebels

Introducing the software that can predict new leaders of terror groups Posted: 15 Sep 2013 01:01 AM PDT Software developed by US academics, called Stone, uses open source data to identify successors of captured terrorist leaders as well as predicting how their groups will change One of the basic functions of any intelligence agency is to capture, and those who participate in the capture of notorious terrorists are rightly viewed as heroes. These operations can cost taxpayers huge amounts of money: for instance, the US reportedly spent more than $1 trillion in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But the capture of a terrorist leader does not always degrade operational efficacy of the group. The capture of an incompetent leader may strengthen a terrorist organisation if a more competent leader takes over. Alternatively, the shakeup after a capture can make the organisation stronger or more bloodthirsty. Moreover, specific capture attempts could lead to a terrorist backlash, leading to a loss of civilian lives. Today, most intelligence agencies, often in response to an outraged public, go after the big fish responsible for terrorist attacks. A University of Maryland team made up of myself, computer scientist Francesca Spezzano and public policy researcher Aaron Mannes has developed new software that uses open source data to identify successors of captured terrorist leaders, as well as to predict how the terrorist network will reshape afterwards. The system is called Stone (shaping terrorist organisation network efficacy) It uses information about individual terrorists (such as rank, role, ability to plan and execute attacks) as well as connections between terrorists to identify likely replacements. Connections exist between two terrorists if they attended a school or training camp together, if they were both involved in planning an attack, if they were known to have attended a meeting together, and if they served on a council together. For example, a connection between al-Qaida's Bin Laden and Riduan Isamuddin (or Hambali, head of al-Qaida's south-east Asia affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah) was formed when the two held meetings in the 1990s. Stone researchers hypothesised that a terrorist was likely to succeed a captured terrorist if he had high rank, a high degree of influence in the organisation and was well connected to the leader's connections. In order to measure influence, Stone leveraged a technical concept later used in Google's PageRank algorithm to identify influential pages on the web. Stone does not completely automate the process of identifying likely successors. Analysts identify individual characteristics relevant to who will be the successor, such as requiring that future top leaders are members of the organisation's central committee. Similarly, predicted replacements should be functionally capable of performing the role performed by the captured terrorist ( for example a bombmaker may not replace an ideologue) Stone tested this hypothesis on the cases of leaders removed from al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008) using networks gleaned from open-source data. In these cases, Stone usually returned three or four possible replacements for a leader and, in 80% of these cases, the replacement was within the set returned by Stone. Stone requires human participation to analyse the suggested replacements and incorporate factors not considered by computational methods. Stone predicts not only the successor of a removed terrorist, but also the successor's successor. V S Subrahmanian is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and director of the university's centre for digital international government. al-Qaida Software Mumbai terror attacks Hezbollah Hamas Computing theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tony Abbott's ministry likely to reflect election team, says Julie Bishop Posted: 15 Sep 2013 12:06 AM PDT Deputy Liberal leader says prime minister-elect wants to maintain stability

Kenya's tech visionaries lead the way Posted: 15 Sep 2013 12:01 AM PDT A boom in mobile phone use is creating an explosion of innovation that is changing lives, lifestyles and the economy It is mid-morning in Nairobi's iHub, a community space for techies and a kids' hackathon – where children as young as 10 are learning some of the basics of coding – is in full swing. The hangar-like space boasts table football, a coffee bar and an ambience that is more Seattle than African savannah. Amid the eager people huddled over laptops and tablets is the towering figure of Erik Hersman, with his bald head and reddish beard. Known to most Kenyans online as @WhiteAfrican, the American, who grew up in East Africa, has become one of the most effective evangelists for the technological future of his adopted country. The co-founder of both the iHub and Ushahidi, software, which has been used from Haiti to New Zealand to crowd-source information and map crises, wants to challenge the notion of Africa being a single entity blighted by wars and famine. "In the US I still get asked if they (Africans) have computers and mobile phones," he says. When it comes to phones and Kenya, they certainly do. Six years ago the leading local telecom firm, Safaricom, noticed that its customers were sending mobile phone airtime to each other in lieu of cash. They decided to formalise this, calling it M-Pesa, from the Swahili for "cash", and enable subscribers to deposit money into a mobile account that they could then send to others or pay for things. Simple and text based, it worked on the most basic phones. Today, Safaricom has almost as many subscribers as Kenya has adults and M-Pesa is used for everything from paying electricity bills and school fees to sending money to relatives upcountry. Cash equivalent to nearly one-third of Kenya's GDP [US$37.2bn in 2012] washed through the money-transfer service last year. That success has given Kenya a global reputation as an outlier in the mobile money sector, while the impact of Ushahidi means that Nairobi is now looked to for software innovation. This has been Africa's "mobile decade"; there are 74 mobile phones for every 100 Kenyans and, of those who access the internet, 99% do it via a mobile device. The challenge, says Hersman, will be ensuring that "five or 10 years from now Nairobi is Africa's tech hub", ahead of the more populous Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city, or South Africa's wealthier Cape Town. There are signs everywhere that this is happening. Along the corridor in the same building as the iHub is a new office for the GSMA, the global telecoms trade association. Its executive director, Anne Bouverot, says "the rapid pace of mobile adoption has delivered an explosion of innovation and huge economic benefits" and has pumped £20bn into the sub-Saharan African economy. She believes the mobile industry could also fuel the creation of nearly 15 million new jobs by 2020. Much of that innovation is likely to happen within a few blocks of the iHub, an area now dubbed the "silicon savannah". Down Nairobi's busy Ngong Road two more tech hubs have been set up: "88mph", a seed fund and incubator, and Innovation 4 Africa, a similar venture that shares the same space. A venture capital outfit, looking to invest in startups, called the Savannah Fund, in which Hersman is a partner, has opened above a fashionable bar on the same road. And it's not just the locals who are interested in Nairobi. From the balcony of the iHub you can see an impressive new tower block that has sprung up to house the IBM Innovation Centre, the firm's first research lab in Africa. Fellow tech giants Intel, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are already in the city. Sceptics have begun to ask where are the other success stories to rival M-Pesa but Phares Kariuki, who left the world of banking to mentor entrepreneurs, says they are looking in the wrong place. "In Kenya everyone's opening a mobile venture trying to solve a problem that nobody has," says Kariuki. Rather than smartphone apps for the small base of affluent consumers, the boom is happening in software that enables companies to do business. These ventures are boring by comparison but are part of the reason why Kenya's export of technology-related services exploded from £11m in 2002 to £240m by 2010. Current estimates put that figure at more than £300m. There is still a danger that the hype might suffocate innovation. While the Kenyan government deserves credit for delivering the undersea broadband cables that have helped internet access to treble since 2009, the tech boom has been largely a private enterprise. The authorities are pinning their strategy on a site 40 miles outside Nairobi called Konza Techno City, which boosters claim will turn the scrubland into a futuristic business district. Others are worried that Kenya will mortgage its future on a £10bn white elephant out on the savannah. Kenya Mobile phones Africa theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Catastrophe by Max Hastings; 100 Days to Victory by Saul David; Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden – review Posted: 15 Sep 2013 12:01 AM PDT Amid a slew of books to mark the coming centenary of the first world war's outbreak, Max Hastings has little doubt who to blame These days, anniversaries come early. The centenary of the outbreak of the first world war is still a year off, but already we are knee-deep in books on the subject. So far they have come in three main varieties: lively portraits of the world avant le déluge by Florian Illies and Charles Emerson; new interpretations of how the disaster came about by Margaret MacMillan and Christopher Clark; and military narratives repackaged for a younger generation of readers. Max Hastings's Catastrophe goes one better, offering both the diplomatic build-up and an account of the first five months of the war. It's hardly surprising that historians keep returning to the war's origins. A century after the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, we still don't really know why that single act of terrorism plunged Europe into a war that cost the lives of more than 15 million people and toppled four empires. Of course, the basic narrative has long been agreed. Austria, with the backing of her German ally, issued an ultimatum to Serbia; Russia came to the support of her little Slav neighbour; France was allied to Russia and Britain eventually joined in, after Germany invaded Belgium. But much about the motives, intentions and actions of the central players remains unclear. For many years the general view was that "we were all guilty" – that events and military timetables took over – but in the 1960s the German historian Fritz Fischer found archival evidence that the Kaiser's Germany was determined to go to war in 1914, before Russia could modernise her army; and had manipulated events (and her Austro-Hungarian ally) to that end; only then to discover that Britain, instead of remaining neutral, was coming in on the other side. This quickly became the consensus view. But as times change so do judgments about the past: the end of the cold war, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the 9/11 attack on New York have shifted perspectives. Last year, in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argued that Serbia was a rogue state whose government knew perfectly well what the assassin Princip was up to; that Austria was quite entitled to seek proper redress; and that, if the Germans were imperialistic and paranoid, so were the other nations. In fact, said Clark, it was pointless to treat the events of 1914 as an Agatha Christie mystery and go looking for a smoking gun, because none would ever be found. The whole blame game was futile. This return to the old "we were all guilty" line was buttressed with a wealth of archival evidence. Max Hastings is having none of that. Like a colonel dealing with defeatist talk in the mess, he forcefully reasserts the thesis of German guilt in Catastrophe. His version is not always convincing – he has admitted elsewhere that "for most historians, the consequence of studying 1914 is to precipitate a brainstorm, because the evidence is so conflicting, the range of contradictory evidence so great" – but it is certainly very readable. Where Clark was out to convey the complexity of events and asked his readers to follow him patiently through a long diplomatic quadrille and many a Balkan imbroglio, Hastings keeps it simple and pacy. His rule of thumb is: when in doubt, blame the Kraut. And he doesn't stand for any nonsense about Britain not joining in, either. We had no choice, if the European balance of power was to be maintained. And that's only the overture. Most of Catastrophe consists of a narrative of the war to the end of 1914, blending top-down and bottom-up testimony as in Hastings's books on the second world war. His account of the fighting on the eastern front draws on powerful and unfamiliar material from soldiers' letters and diaries found by his researchers in archives in Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Belgrade and Ljubljana, but never quite builds into an authoritative text; many quotations, though rich and poignant, come across as disembodied soundbites. The problem is partly that the confused fighting in the east hardly lends itself to conventional military narrative; partly that Hastings has only a superficial knowledge of the peasant societies of eastern Europe from which the unwilling soldiery was mostly drawn. By contrast, Catastrophe is magnificent on the western front. Never mind that this is a very familiar story – the Germans, following the Schlieffen plan, sweep through Belgium and northern France and, despite gallant British rearguard actions, seem to have victory in sight, only for the French generals, Joffre and Gallieni, to summon up the "miracle on the Marne" – Sir Max has retold it as well as any of his predecessors. Character, pace, sense of landscape, battlefield detail – all are superbly done. Hastings is particularly good on the sufferings of the French soldier, the logistical constraints that brought the German advance to a halt, and the frailties of British generalship – a lifetime of observing our princes and paladins has left him with scant respect for any of them. His description of Admiral Beatty as "a hero on the bridge and the chaise longue" is just one of many tongue-lashings. At times the Daily Mail columnist comes through, and the prose coarsens and the tone grows shrill, but overall it's a splendid read. So, in a different way, is Saul David's 100 Days to Victory, which offers 100 snapshots of individual days during the war, including all the obvious set pieces – the first day of the Somme, the sinking of the Lusitania, the German offensive in March 1918 – plus a few surprises. A specialist in 19th century colonial wars and a fine writer, David has intelligently boiled down recent scholarship on the war by the likes of Hew Strachan, Gary Sheffield and David Stevenson. However, there's a trade-off. As Steven Spielberg found in Saving Private Ryan, if you start in the thick of it and plunge the reader straight into the action, you grab his attention but you also set yourself problems with character and back story. While the formula works well with simple episodes such as the arrest of Mata Hari, it struggles to contain the complexities of Verdun or the Somme. Some of the best material involves the experiences of David's relatives, but the only passage that reduced me to tears was, unsurprisingly, Vera Brittain's account of seeing her dead lover's bloodstained tunic after the blockheads at the war office had sent it back to his family. Richard van Emden's Meeting the Enemy is a meticulously researched account of contacts between the British and Germans during the war, mainly in the trenches, but also as prisoners of war and as "enemy alien" wives. It is full of fascinating information and will appeal particularly to great war gluttons, the people who can't get enough of the stuff. I'd advise anyone who, by contrast, is coming fresh to the subject, to ignore all these books and stick to classics like Tuchman's August 1914, the great memoirs by Brittain, Junger, Sasssoon and Graves and the novels of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Ford Madox Ford. History First world war Ben Shephard theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Mers - will it start the next global pandemic? Posted: 15 Sep 2013 12:01 AM PDT Our expert assesses the risks of the new virus Since April 2012, 108 cases of a new virus have been reported in humans, resulting in 50 deaths. Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) is in the same family as Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and the common cold (coronaviruses), but is more closely related to viruses found in bats. The potential emergence of a new virus for which there is no treatment or vaccine is cause for concern. Still, it is far from certain that Mers will result in a pandemic. The term pandemic refers to any epidemic that spreads globally, rather than being confined to a particular location. Not all pandemics result in major mortality. Influenza pandemics occurred in 1957, 1968 and 2009, but none led to a large number of deaths. However, the great influenza pandemic of 1918 may have killed as many as 100 million people, and is one reason there is so much concern whenever a potentially pandemic virus such as Mers emerges. Pandemics of new viruses have the potential to kill so many not because mortality rates are necessarily high, but because nearly the entire population is susceptible. Even the 1918 pandemic killed only one to three people out of every 100 infected, but it infected as much as 50% of the world's population. In 2002, Sars emerged in the human population in China. Sars is likely to have jumped to humans from palm civets sold in wet markets, and quickly spread to four continents. More than 8,000 people were infected by the summer of 2003, and 10% of those died. But Sars never spread widely in the general community, and died out without causing the severe pandemic that was feared. As of 3 September, 108 cases of Mers had been reported in countries as diverse as Jordan, Italy and the UK. The vast majority have occurred in Saudi Arabia, and all chains of transmission have originated in the Middle East. Like Sars, Mers can be transmitted through the air and appears to spread particularly well in healthcare settings – most confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission have occurred in hospitals. The distribution of Mers cases suggests that incidence has been sustained by animal-to-human transmission. Mers is closely related to bat viruses, but no link to bat exposure has been proved. While other candidates have been suggested (camels, for instance), the animal source of Mers remains unknown. Because the virus has successfully passed between humans, there is reason to be concerned that it may grow into a pandemic. However, human-to-human transmission is not enough. For a pandemic to occur, each person infected needs to, on average, infect one or more others. So far, this does not appear to be happening. Transmission is the result of biology, social interaction and the environment. Mers may evolve the ability to spread in humans, or already have this ability under some social or climatic conditions. A particular concern is the millions who will converge on Saudi Arabia in mid-October for the hajj. So Mers poses dangers, but there is reason for caution, not panic. Much was learned about how to control respiratory viruses in hospitals during the Sars pandemic, and these lessons may help to keep Mers contained. But even if Mers does not become pandemic, mammalian coronaviruses clearly warrant close scrutiny. If we are witnessing a potential pandemic, we have limited opportunities to prevent it. In either case, open communication is essential in the scientific and public health response to the emergence of Mers. Dr Justin Lessler is an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Infectious diseases Microbiology Sars Medical research theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Cambodian election protesters march through Phnom Penh Posted: 14 Sep 2013 11:07 PM PDT Thousands of demonstrators defy road blocks and a jail threat to march in protest over election results

Afghanistan coal mine collapse kills and injures dozens Posted: 14 Sep 2013 10:58 PM PDT Tunnel collapse kills at least 24 mine workers and injures 20 more, says government official Officials say a tunnel collapse in a coal mine in Afghanistan's north has killed at least 24 workers and left three missing. Provincial government spokesman Sediqullah Azizi said on Sunday that 20 more were injured. The accident occurred Saturday in Ruyi Du Ab district of Samangan province, one of the safer parts of the country from the standpoint of insurgency-related violence. Aminullah, a police official who like many Afghans goes by one name, says more than 1,000 area residents rushed to help, using shovels to try to rescue the workers. Workplace safety standards are poor in Afghanistan as in many developing nations, and such accidents are common. The government hopes to develop a wealth of mineral resources on its territory, a challenging goal as it battles a Taliban insurgency. Afghanistan theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

My veil epiphany | Victoria Coren Mitchell Posted: 14 Sep 2013 10:52 PM PDT Just what was Birmingham Met thinking of when it tried to stop women wearing the niqab? As Birmingham Metropolitan College, one of Britain's largest institutes of higher education, bans Muslim women from wearing veils on the grounds of "security risk" – then changes its mind within days – we ask: what, precisely, were they imagining? Was it a sort of Mr Toad scenario, where a villain creeps about disguised as a woman? Or that Muslim girls themselves would tuck Berettas under their veils, ready to whip out if a teacher prescribed too much geography homework? I suppose either is possible and the former has, I think, actually happened once or twice in human history – but this offers only an opportunity to quote, as so often in these paranoid days of ID checks and CCTV cameras, the old Ben Franklin line: "He who values security above liberty deserves neither." The problem, though, is that there are two potential threats to liberty in this scenario, which clash with each other. Bear with me; I feel one of my epiphanies coming on. I'll just take my pills, and then I'll be with you… OK. Let me start by saying that I know very few Muslim women who veil their faces. The Muslim women I know well dress the same way I do (although they wear jeans, which I never would because I'd look like one of the Moomins.) The only veiled women I've met are casino wives who sit quietly behind their husbands during play, and all I've really thought is: "So she has to wear the full niqab but you're allowed to gamble, eh?" This is the nub of what I am going to call, because I've always secretly wanted to be a mathematician, the "Birmingham Liberty Paradox". Forbidding the veil is an infringement of liberty. But so, it would seem, is wearing it. What should the well-meaning white liberal think? (Hurray! The editor of the Observer gives £5 to anyone who manages to work that question into a column. If you can legitimately make it "the well-meaning black liberal", you get £10.) Whatever veiled women say about modesty, tradition or feeling closer to God, we in the £5-aspirant group worry that they are oppressed: that it is about being hidden and silenced. Naturally, one wants students to integrate and mingle. Half the point of education is to build peer groups and social bonds. To the uninitiated, a veiled face inspires shyness; one is less likely to start a conversation, nervous of everything from intruding on privacy to failing to recognise that person if you meet them again. (Lord knows I forget people's names when I've seen them naked, never mind fully veiled). But these were not the grounds on which Birmingham Metropolitan College rolled out their ban. The talk of "security risk" itself hardly sounded like a friendly hug across the cultural divide. They have now altered the rule to say that veils will be allowed, but hoodies won't – presumably hoping that those who put their religion as "Jedi" didn't really mean it. Still, one worries that veiling the face inhibits free social action and that it is intended to. Many of us feel despondent that it applies to women only, and fear that it is supposed to make them invisible. Here comes the epiphany, and I apologise for bringing it down to my personal concerns – but I have to believe I'm not the only one in this boat. It's about my name. I had an instinct to take my husband's name when I got married. It felt like a romantic statement of pride, love and permanence, and of doing what's always been done in my family. But I was scared that it might be mistaken for a blow against feminism. Scared that it might be a blow against feminism, or at least disrespectful of it. And nervous that, without the label I'd soldiered under for nigh on 40 years, I might feel like I had disappeared. ("Mitchell" is a pretty inconspicuous surname anyway; I'm fond of my curious birth name that people mispronounce and spell as "Cohen" one email in three.) Please don't suggest that my husband could change his. If a fashion is new enough to be remarkable, then it's not for him; he'd be as comfortable re-launching under his wife's name as he would getting a Harry Styles haircut and twerking in London's hottest nightclub. I chose, complicatedly but honestly, to use a range of names for a while: mine, his (ours), and sometimes both at once in the American tradition. I decided to try the long version in the Observer this week, with the feminist defence that a married woman changing her name is, like giving up her job to raise children, oppressive when it's obligatory, but confident and happy as a choice. And then it hit me, perhaps more slowly than it's already hit you: that's what women say about the veil, isn't it? That it's a strong and happy choice; that their grandmothers (or young cousins in Saudi Arabia) might not have had that choice, but they do in Britain today and they make it in glad and grateful acknowledgement that it isn't mandatory. Of course, bystanders murmur that they simply don't realise how deeply they are in the grip of the patriarchy that devised the system. Just like some people might say about me. And maybe they're right! Maybe I just think I'm enjoying the freedom to choose my own name, when I'm actually brainwashed by an antiquated patriarchal idea from which others have rightly sprung away. But I know this much: I will never again think that a veiled woman is strange or unknowable. Whether we're both right or both wrong, I will recognise her as very familiar – only, perhaps, having made her choices more decisively than I make mine. And you only need to see someone's eyes to know if they're smiling back. www.victoriacoren.com Women Islam Religion Birmingham Higher education Victoria Coren Mitchell theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Colorado floods: rescuers warn of weeks without power Posted: 14 Sep 2013 10:44 PM PDT Four people have been confirmed dead since floods began on Wednesday, with hundreds of others not yet accounted for Rescuers broke through to flood-ravaged Colorado towns, issuing a stern warning to anyone thinking of staying behind: leave now or be prepared to endure weeks without electricity, running water and basic supplies. National Guard helicopters and truck convoys carried the message into paralyzed canyon communities where thousands of stranded residents were eager to escape the Rocky Mountain foothills. But not everybody was willing to go. Dozens of people in the isolated community of Jamestown wanted to stay to watch over their homes. Authorities made clear that residents who chose not to leave might not get another chance for a while. Rescuers won't go back for people who insist on staying, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said. "We're not trying to force anyone from their home. We're not trying to be forceful, but we're trying to be very factual and definitive about the consequences of their decision, and we hope that they will come down," he said. Special education teacher Brian Shultz, 38, was torn about leaving his Jamestown home. "I was thinking about staying. I could have lasted at least a year. I have a lot of training in wilderness survival," he said, adding that he probably had enough beer to last the whole time. Across the foothills, rescuers made progress against the floodwaters. But they were still unable to go up many narrow canyon roads that were either underwater or washed out. On Saturday, the surge of water reached the plains east of the mountains, cutting off more communities and diverting some rescue operations. Four people were confirmed dead since the harrowing floods began Wednesday. Hundreds of others have not been heard from in the flood zone, which has grown to cover portions of an area nearly the size of Connecticut. Some of those who were unaccounted for may be stranded or injured. Others might have gotten out but not yet contacted friends and relatives, officials said. Police expected to find more bodies as the full scope of damage emerges. A woman was missing and presumed dead after witnesses saw floodwaters from the Big Thompson River destroy her home in the Cedar Cove area, Larimer County sheriff's spokesman John Schulz said. Two fatalities were identified by the Boulder County coroner Saturday as Wesley Quinlan and Wiyanna Nelson, both 19. Authorities believe the couple died when they were swept away after driving into floodwaters and then leaving their vehicle. Their cause of death is under investigation. The military put more troops on the ground and helicopters in the air to aid in the search-and-rescue effort. By Saturday night, 1,750 people and 300 pets had been evacuated from Boulder and Larimer County, National Guard Lt. James Goff said. The airlifts were to continue Sunday with helicopter crews expanding their searches east to include Longmont, Fort Collins and Weld County. It was not clear how many people were still stranded. A helicopter taking Gov. John Hickenlooper on a tour of the flooded areas even got in the act, stopping twice to pick up six stranded people and their two pets. More than 85 fifth-graders from Louisville were greeted by their parents and friends Saturday after they were rescued from an outdoor education center near Jamestown. Above Larimer County, rescue crews airlifted 475 people to safety and planned to resume helicopter searches on Sunday, weather permitting. Rain was expected to start up again in the mountains and foothills, with up to 2 inches (51 millimeters) forecast to fall overnight, according to the National Weather Service. Crews also used inflatable boats to pick up families and pets from farmhouses on Saturday. Some evacuees on horseback had to be escorted to safe ground. In neighboring New Mexico, state police on Saturday reported the first death related to massive flooding in the state this week from record heavy rains and overflowing rivers. A man died after his vehicle washed into a ravine covered in mud near the Elephant Butte dam, probably Friday during flooding, said New Mexico State Police Sgt. Emmanuel Gutierrez. Colorado Flooding Natural disasters and extreme weather theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Football match fixing: Victoria police make arrests Posted: 14 Sep 2013 10:17 PM PDT • Investigation believed to involve Southern Stars FC • Players from United Kingdom arrested Ten people have been arrested in a multi-million dollar match-fixing scandal that has rocked Australian football. Victorian police made the arrests after executing search warrants, with all the players and staff arrested believed to be from bottom-placed Victorian Premier League club Southern Stars FC. Police said many of the players arrested were from the United Kingdom and playing in Australia in their off-season. They said they would be looking to prosecute members of an overseas syndicate, believed to have been operating throughout Europe. The police operation began in August following information received from Football Federation Australia about irregular betting patterns and unusual results. There were estimated betting winnings in Australia and overseas of more than $2m identified in connection with the alleged match-fixing ring, police said. The deputy commissioner Graham Ashton said it was the biggest case of alleged match-fixing in Australian sports history. "This is the first case we've uncovered of this level of match-fixing in Australia," said Ashton, who warned that Australia was susceptible to international match fixing. "Further match-fixing risks are imminent in Australia, partly because of localised overseas betting on Australian sporting events due to our favourable time zone," Ashton said. "It is vital that we continue gathering intelligence to take preventative action to make it difficult for organised crime to infiltrate our sporting codes. He added: "We hope this sends the message that we're not a soft touch ... we'll be onto it." The Southern Stars have played 21 matches this season for 16 losses and four draws, with their only win a 1-0 victory over top-placed club Northcote City last month. Those arrested are expected to face match-fixing charges, which can attract a 10-year maximum penalty. The FFA CEO, David Gallop, welcomed the investigation relating to suspicious betting activity and welcomed the investigation by the Sports Integrity Intelligence Unit within the force. "The integrity of football is paramount," said Gallop. "We provided information to Victoria Police within 24 hours of receiving an alert from our international betting integrity monitoring agents Sportradar, who then worked closely with the investigation team. "The arrests today show that the integrity measures put in place by FFA are working to detect illegal betting activity. "We're determined to keep football clean. Alongside other sports bodies in Australia and globally, we must eradicate corrupt behaviour from sport." In addition to the criminal proceedings in Victoria, the FFA will charge the people arrested on Sunday under the FFA's national code of conduct. They will face a range of sanctions including life bans from football which would apply worldwide. Match-fixing Australia sport Australia theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Vladimir Putin: arch manipulator with a mission to check US will | Observer profile Posted: 14 Sep 2013 09:38 PM PDT The Russian president has been vilified for his stance on Syria, but his manoeuvres over American foreign policy indicate his astuteness – and cunning – as a statesman In novelist Victor Pelevin's pungent satire on contemporary Russia, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, its narrator, a 2,000-year-old shape-shifter, kisses Alexander, a brutish but alluring officer with the FSB, the Russian security service – who is a werewolf, like all his colleagues. In doing so, she unwittingly transforms his inner animal from that of a sleek grey wolf into a black dog that is at first rejected by, and then finally returns to, his former FSB employers. As an invocation of post-Soviet Russia under the heirs of Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin in particular, it is a necessary text in understanding both Putin and Russia today. The world Pelevin describes is one where there are no absolutes of truth or even reality – only what people say is true. The country's new wealth is summoned as if by magic out of the soil by the howling servants of the state. Historic continuity with the Soviet past is visible in the expressions of Alexander and his colleagues: "Faces that used to be around a lot in the old days." It speaks to – and of – a deep uncertainty. For while Russia may not be the military power it once was at the height of the cold war – the once sharp-toothed grey wolf – it still harbours a lingering nostalgia for that time. The black dog still hankers to be lupine. All of which has underpinned Putin's slick manoeuvres over the last week that have left Barack Obama's foreign policy looking leaden and wrong-footed. Also, perhaps the White House and State Department in their clumsy and literal interpretation of Putin's motives have fallen for the conjuror's old trick of misdirection. They have taken the Kremlin's interest in Damascus at face value, rather than understanding it for what it is – an expression of Putin's notion of Russia's place in the world. And so, over the last six months and more, Putin, the former KGB officer, has been a step ahead of Obama, the former constitutional lawyer with his penchant for thinking out loud. First, Putin tweaked Obama's nose with the granting of "temporary asylum" to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Now, with the offer to deliver the disarmament of Syria's chemical weapons in response to an apparently off-the-cuff suggestion by secretary of state, John Kerry, he appears to have wrongfooted the White House again. The fact that Putin appears to enjoy a more astute understanding than Obama of what the US public wants to hear right now is a reminder of the credo of another of Pelevin's cynical creations, the Russian adman from the novel Homo Zapiens. He declares: "First you try to understand what people will like and then you hand it to them in the form of a lie." And that, by and large, is what Putin pulled off last week in his op-ed for the New York Times, brokered by his US PR firm Ketchum, with an appeal made directly to the American people's desire to avoid another Middle East military entanglement. Its cleverness was that it dressed up a self-interested and sometimes credibility-stretching argument, not least over the continuing claims that Syrian rebels were behind the gas attack in Ghouta on 21 August, with enough legitimate criticism of US policy to provide a veneer of credibility. What is surprising in all this is not only the enthusiasm for the Putin initiative from some quarters, but also that it's not very hard to divine what Putin really wants on the world stage. In February this year, he made the Putin doctrine explicit, presenting the Russian Federation's new foreign policy framework to his security council. Rejecting the efforts seen during Dmitry Medvedev's presidency for greater integration with the west, Putin's emphasis is both more local, eyeing his immediate backyard, and more assertive internationally. If there is a striking difference between Putin and Obama, it is that the former appears to understand both the limits of post-Russian power and the tools available to him, while the Obama administration, and the US more widely, has failed to internalise its relative decline in power and influence over the last decade. Putin's assessment of the "polycentric" nature of the global landscape, for now at least, seems the more astute, not least in his bet that the west will no longer be able to "dominate in the world economy and politics". Putin's op-ed for the New York Times was scathing about the notion of US "exceptionalism" as the indispensable nation. However, to a Russian audience, he is happy to claim the same mantle of "uniqueness" when it comes to seeing Moscow's role – not least on the UN Security Council – as a counterweight to US ambitions. For Putin, the front line in this struggle is not the fate of Syria or even the risk of instability in wider Middle East, but resisting "implementation of policies aimed at overthrowing lawful governments", not least through the auspices of the UN and through US-democracy promotion. As the author and analyst David Rohde argued in an opinion piece for Reuters: "There is nothing complicated or altruistic about Putin's strategy in Syria. He is defending Assad in order to preserve his key ally in the Middle East and his own rule in Russia." Rohde added that Putin sees Syria as the sort of American intervention that has unseated rulers. "Dismissing protests against himself and other autocrats as CIA plots, he probably fears he may be next." While Putin has been mocked for some of his pretensions, not least his penchant for being photographed in the midst of "manly" pursuits, that is seriously to underestimate his nous. This is particularly true when he is speaking to his constituency, an alliance of nationalists, conservatives and a vast, sprawling middle ground. According to Clifford Gaddy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Putin interposed himself as a key political fixer under the patronage of Yeltsin-era figure Anatoly Chubais in the mid-1990s. Putin, he says, "understood the principles of the British intelligence chief John Masterman's double-cross system: don't destroy your enemies. Manipulate them and use them for your own goals". Putin did, and continues to do, precisely that. He has targeted the oligarchs whose secrets he captured in his rise to power, first as the prime minister, under whose auspices the brutal second Chechen war was prosecuted. He has broken those who have stepped out of line. The manipulation is done, as David Remnick, the New Yorker editor, remarked two years ago, with a disarming cynicism. Remnick described an encounter with Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, as indicative of the house style. "When [Peskov] lies, he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know. The smile is also meant to convey another message to foreign visitors: so, we're cynical. And you're not?" And while Putin's popularity has certainly declined, not least in large parts of the country's better educated middle class, he has been clever enough to cement his position. Last week, amid the thumb-sucking in large parts of the US commentariat over whether Putin had thrown a hapless Obama a "lifeline" over the Syrian crisis, it took Human Rights Watch's Anna Neistat to point out the Russian president's multiple evasions, including the transfer of arms to Assad. She noted: "From the very start of this conflict, Russia has vetoed or blocked any Security Council action that may bring relief to Syria's civilians or bring perpetrators of abuses in Syria to account." She also underlined how difficult it is to take seriously talk about "democratic values and international law" when his government at home "continues to throw activists in jail, threatens to close NGOs, and rubber-stamps draconian and discriminatory laws". The reality is that Putin has won this latest round. He has narrowed the terms of the present debate on the war he is arming – which has claimed 100,000 lives and displaced 6.5 million – to the narrow question of disarmament of Syria's chemical weapons, a task that would be difficult enough to accomplish in peacetime. Already, it is clear, not least from the comments of Assad on Russian television, that the negotiation over the details of that disarmament will be spun out. In the meantime, the horror of the war in Syria will drag on and on. On the question of red lines, Obama's has been crossed to no effect, while Putin's red line on western intervention has been defended at the cost of yet more Syrian lives on both sides of the war and no real prospect of a negotiated peace. Somewhere, a black dog is smiling a wolfish grin. Vladimir Putin United States Syria Russia Europe Peter Beaumont theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Hurricane Ingrid and tropical storm Manuel converge on Mexico Posted: 14 Sep 2013 09:01 PM PDT Several thousand people evacuated on Gulf Coast as storms threaten flash floods and mudslides Ingrid strengthened on Saturday after becoming Mexico's second hurricane of the Atlantic storm season, prompting the evacuation of several thousand people while an increasingly powerful tropical storm Manuel threatened to become a hurricane as well, dumping rains that could cause flash floods and mudslides as it nears landfall on Sunday. On Saturday evening, Hurricane Ingrid was packing maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph). The storm was centered about 185 miles (300 km) east of Tampico, Mexico and moving north at 7 mph (11 km). The US National Hurricane Center in Miami said that if Ingrid stays on the forecast track, it is likely to reach the coast of Mexico on Monday. A hurricane warning was in effect from Cabo Rojo to La Pesca. In Tamaulipas state to the north, where Ingrid is expected to make landfall, the government said in a statement that Independence Day festivities were cancelled in the cities of Tampico, Madero and Altamira. The September 15 and 16 celebrations commemorate Mexico's battle of independence from Spain. Officials in the Gulf state of Veracruz began evacuating coastal residents on Friday night, and local civil protection authorities said that more than 5,300 people had been moved to safer ground. Of those, about 3,500 people were being housed in official shelters with the rest staying with family and friends. There were no immediate reports of injuries blamed on the storm. More than 1,000 homes in Veracruz state have been affected by the storm to varying degrees, and 20 highways and 12 bridges have suffered damages, according to the state's civil protection authority. A bridge collapsed near the northern Veracruz city of Misantla Friday, cutting off the area from the state capital. Thirteen people died when a landslide buried their homes in heavy rains spawned by tropical depression Fernand on Monday. State officials imposed an orange alert, the highest possible, in parts of southern Veracruz. Off Mexico's Pacific coast, tropical storm Manuel was also getting stronger, moving with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph) and expected to be nearing the southwestern coast of Mexico by Sunday morning, possibly as a hurricane. Late Saturday, it was about 55 miles (90 kilometers) off the city of Lazaro Cardenas and 180 miles (290 kilometers) southeast of Manzanillo as it moved northward at 6 mph (9 kph). The Mexican government late Saturday issued a hurricane warning for the country's Pacific Coast from Lazaro Cardenas to Manzanillo. Manuel was expected to produce 10 to 15 inches of rain over parts of the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, with isolated amounts of up to 25 inches possible in some areas. Life-threatening flash floods and mudslides were considered likely, especially in mountainous areas. Mexico Hurricanes Natural disasters and extreme weather theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

New Labor leader won't lack legitimacy, says Chris Bowen Posted: 14 Sep 2013 06:23 PM PDT Acting Labor leader dismisses suggestions that new ballot process could undermine the winner's authority Chris Bowen has dismissed suggestions that whoever wins Labor's leadership ballot may lack legitimacy if they don't have the support of both caucus and rank-and-file members. The acting Labor leader says the month-long leadership contest between Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten will open up and galvanise the party, with members and parliamentarians given an equal say under new party rules. Albanese is tipped to win the support of rank-and-file supporters, but Shorten is said to have majority backing in caucus, raising questions about whether the eventual leader's authority could be undermined by the ballot process. But Bowen says the new leader will have more legitimacy than "any other political leader in Australia's history", as the candidates will have sought the backing of the party's 40,000 members. "I think this is a good process having Bill and Anthony go around the country ... talking to ordinary people, ordinary Labor supporters and putting the case as to why they can best be the alternative prime minister of Australia," Bowen told Sky News on Sunday. "If they can put that case to Labor party members and supporters, then they can put the case to the Australian people over the next three years." However, he admitted it would be impossible to win the leadership without significant backing in caucus. "It will be impossible to get very little support in the caucus and big support in the branch membership," he said. "That's just not going to happen." Mr Bowen says Labor – racked by leadership instability over the past three years – needs to implement a new culture around how it chooses its leader. He also expected other political parties to follow its lead on rank-and-file involvement. "Throwing open the doors, inviting 40,000 people to share with members of the caucus the decision on who should lead the party, is important," he said. The former treasurer also revealed both leadership candidates had asked him to become shadow treasurer in their frontbench teams. Albanese also said the ballot would provide the new leader with "enormous legitimacy". He said the national executive will meet on Monday to determine whether debates will be just for party members or open to the public, but added that he was "pretty relaxed" about the eventual format of the events. "This is an opportunity for Labor to show that we're inclusive, that we're open, that we're not frightened of debating ideas," he told Sky News. "If this is done right, this can give us enormous momentum at the beginning of what is going to be a difficult period." Asked if there was a risk that one candidate could have the support of party members, and the other of caucus, Albanese said "the great thing about a ballot of 40,000 people is that no one knows". "You can't have three or four people in a room or in a restaurant deciding the future of the Labor party - I think that's a good thing, I think that brings with it enormous legitimacy," Albanese said. "I don't think that there is anyone who would argue that either Bill or I don't have very broad support within the caucus." Shorten told the Seven Network that his first job as leader would be to work on party unity, saying Labor had learnt from the instability of the past few years. "(Albanese) and I have both agreed that whoever wins, that we've got to, one, conduct next 28 days civilly, and two, that once the verdict's over then that's it, and we get behind each other for the next three years," Shorten said. "Because that's what our voters and that's what Australians expect of their political representatives, to think about them and not themselves." Labor party Australian politics theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

My favourite work: Neither Pride nor Courage by Vernon Ah Kee - video Posted: 14 Sep 2013 05:41 PM PDT Brisbane festival: Bruce McLean curator of Indigenous Art at Qagoma talks about his favourite piece of art: Neither Pride nor Courage, a triptych by Vernon Ah Kee Christian Bennett Van Badham

PNG attack survivors set up trust fund for injured porters Posted: 14 Sep 2013 05:31 PM PDT Machete attack victims ask for donations to help porters get the services they need The survivors of a machete attack in Papua New Guinea have set up a trust fund for the local porters who were injured in the ambush. On Tuesday guides Kuia Kerry and Matthew Lasong were hacked to death when they and eight Australians, one New Zealander and a group of porters were set upon by six men on the Black Cat trail in PNG's Morobe province. Mackay man Nick Bennett was injured when he was hit on the head with a gun. On Sunday he told ABC radio all the trekkers had returned home and were coming to terms with the horrific experience. But he says while the trekkers are traumatised, their injuries are insignificant compared to what had happened to the porters, some of whom had limbs hacked off and would never walk again. "We've set up a trust fund and we're asking people ... just to provide a few dollars into an account that we've got set up to help them get the services that they need," he said. "We've made a commitment to ensuring that we support those porters and their families who've absolutely been devastated by this. "We really need help and we're appealing to people to be generous. Anything - a peso, a dollar, a pound - would be helpful right now for these guys." Mr Bennett says he and the others will live with the memory of what he described as some 30 minutes of "brutalised savagery". But he described the incident as an anomaly. "It's not a normal thing," he said. "There was no expectation this was going to happen. "The PNG people are generally gentle and caring ... they're hurting as much as we are." Details of the Black Cat Porters Trust Fund are available on the ABC website. Papua New Guinea Australia theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Poked, prodded and live on the pandacam. Can't a girl get any peace in the zoo? Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT Scotland expects the (possibly) pregnant Tian Tian to do her duty this week. But who'd want to bare all before millions of gawpers… Will she? Won't she? As the window begins to close on the time allotted for Edinburgh zoo's female giant panda to give birth, the city is in a frightful ferment. At some point this week Jim White, Sky Sports' prince of the football transfer window, will surely be summoned to preside over a celebrity arrival. If by the following weekend it emerges that it was a phantom pregnancy all along, then who cares? The period of Tian Tian's alleged confinement has brought out the crowds, and another chunk of the £700,000 annual rental for Tian Tian and her mate, Yang Guang, has been repaid to China. On the live webcam on Edinburgh zoo's official website on Friday night you could only get pre-recorded footage of Tian Tian and her mate joking around together. "We still think Yang Guang is reacting to Tian Tian's hormones and chemical cues and is a bit unwell and tired at the moment," the website states by way of explanation. "Our veterinary team are keeping an eye on him and we're continuing to give him the choice to be off show." Such an enlightened approach to panda self-governance melts the hardest of hearts. "Big man, are you in or oot today?" "A'm in, so will you just give me peace and switch off that 'effin panda cam?" It would be surprising if "off colour" is all a panda feels after being shunted between zoos for years before being gawped at by millions of we idiot punters in his tiny detention centre. They should check the big chap out after another eight years of this torture has elapsed. By then he'll be doing the Gangnam Style in his madness. Just after 10am on Saturday around 40 of us gathered in the panda enclosure, having been told that Tian Tian was up and about. And there she was, circumnavigating her rocky enclave again and again. She has been due "any day now" for the last month since first showing signs of being pregnant. The reason why no one can be sure is that she won't let anyone near enough for an ultrasound, and knocking her out is not considered a viable option. Her forced artificial insemination, performed solely for maximising the beasties' marketability, occurred in April. According to Jim, the Visitor Experience chap, her keepers now believe that implantation (pandas practise delayed implantation, where the egg won't implant into the uterus for some time after conception) occurred later than they had previously thought. The gestation period for a giant panda baby is 55 days, and the thought occurs that she might give birth any time now. Exhibiting typical male queasiness at the prospect of anything gynaecological, I am eager to beat a hasty retreat. Surely she'll be spared the indignity of having 40-odd human gawpers observing her birth pangs? This is doubtful though, as it seems that no humiliation is considered too abject in maintaining this black-and-white freak show. Already she's been poked, prodded and knocked up by a syringe. A visit by Keith Lemon must surely beckon. It's difficult though to get too censorious about humans who want to gaze at her misery in a glass prison. One young mum said: "My daughter was given a book about pandas by her teacher and so we've been preparing for this big day out ever since." Who would cavil at an eternal childhood memory for a little girl? It was revealed last week that pandas are causing a diplomatic row in Belgium after it was decided that two bears due to be sent from China will reside in the French-speaking part of the country and not the Dutch-speaking region. From now on it will be much easier to answer that pesky pub quiz question: name a famous Belgian other than Hercule Poirot and Tintin. If Edinburgh zoo were genuinely concerned with the future health and welfare of giant pandas, its £700,000 a year might more usefully have been invested in the World Wildlife Fund's adopt-a-panda scheme. The WWF points out on its website that as few as 1,600 of the beasts remain in the wild, and that monthly donations will provide the funds to create "green corridors" linking isolated pandas. The money would also assist efforts to protect the species from poaching and help to curb the illegal logging of the panda's surrounding habitat. Giant pandas are one of the least fecund mammals in the world, and a mating pair will only have concupiscence for a brief few moments inside a two-hour window, so they were always going to feel at home in Scotland's capital. If Tian Tian has twins, she will devote all her attention to one while rejecting the other. In Scotland it's called the private school system. If Tian Tian does give birth, my wish for her new baby is that Scotland retains the naming rights. Having wretchedly agreed to give the cub to China as part of the pre-nup, the least we can do is to ensure that there is some corner of a foreign bamboo field that will be forever Scottish. The child must be called Tam. Jean if it's a girl. Endangered species Wildlife Animals Edinburgh Scotland Conservation Kevin McKenna theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

'British Jews are a success story, but not yet free of anxiety' Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT Leading community figures on what it means to be Jewish in Britain today, and how their identity is changing JONATHAN FREEDLAND Columnist for the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle Britain's Jews are a success story. They are comfortable and well-integrated, confident that these days no area is closed off to them: individual Jews have reached the top in the law, politics, business, entertainment and academe. Yet they are not free of anxiety. Internal worries are bound to fill the in-tray of the new chief rabbi. Can orthodox Judaism accommodate demands by women for equality in synagogue? Can this still-tiny community remain united despite its multiple strands, the fastest-growing of which – ultra-orthodoxy – has next to no relationship with the others? Will the next generation want to remain Jewish at all? Jews sense danger from without too. Antisemitism remains real and present; not for nothing does every Jewish school in the country have a security guard on the door. And Jews' place in Britain is often complicated by their – our - relationship with Israel. When hostility to that country rises, as it has in recent years, British Jews feel the impact. They are not responsible for the action Israel takes, yet they feel bound up with its fate and its people. They can't help but take attacks on Israel personally. As the laureate of Anglo-Jewry, the novelist Howard Jacobson, puts it, when British Jews look at Israel, "they see a version of themselves JAMES EDER Founder of The Beans Group, studentbeans.com Young people are the future of our community. The key challenge is how to engage and empower young Jewish people to get involved in a bigger way. In modern life there are lots of distractions, and there is a perception that every generation becomes less connected to our history. With the social pressures around us to fit in, it is important for British Jews to remain connected and grounded by our roots. For me it is about keeping traditions alive, while modernising to adapt to the changing globalised world we now live in. To do this effectively, it is about supporting the community leaders of today, and simultaneously developing the leaders of tomorrow. Working in the student space, we know that Jewish societies at universities still play a key role, even though there are certain cities where numbers have dropped. Bristol's Hillel House hall of residence closed in 2005 because of low demand, but eight years later and it's reopening, in response to a rise in Jewish students applying to study in the city. MAUREEN LIPMAN Actress If I were to say that the biggest issue facing the Jewish community today is increasing antisemitism cloaked in the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism, many of your readers would say, after Mandy Rice-Davis: "Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?" Well, yes, I would, because history shows us, time after time, that when the economy bites, the Jews invariably get the toothmark. We assimilate so readily in the diaspora that we fail to stay vigilant. Our television is loaded with Jewish satire which brings us into the warm cuddly mainstream while leftwing newspapers increasingly berate Israel and a magazine like the Oldie rarely lets an issue go by without some ghastly mention of Jewish millionaire lobbies. Simon Schama is brilliantly showing us that history isn't just the story of the dead but the story of the living and, sadly, living Jews can never truly relax. JULIA NEUBERGER Liberal Democrat peer, writer and rabbi at West London synagogue We need to live up to new chief rabbi Mirvis's message to work together- and his deliberate and welcome inclusiveness. Can we stop arguing among ourselves? Internationally, we need to challenge the Jewish Agency for Israel's statement that all Ethiopian Jews (the Falash Mura) have now been taken to Israel, when some 7,000 people who claim Jewish roots have been abandoned in Ethiopia, and need help. Locally, we need to extend our excellent care for our growing numbers of older people living alone, and recognise how lonely they can be. We need to work with other faith groups within the UK and, in a very unsettled Middle East, we need to work with all sides to support Israel's democracy, protect everyone's human rights and bring about lasting peace with the Palestinians. NOREENA HERTZ Author of Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World The rise in antisemitism in Europe is a big issue. In 2012 there was a 58% increase in antisemitic incidents in France; in Spain 53% of people surveyed expressed antisemitic views. While in the UK not only was last year the third worst year on record for antisemitic hate crimes, but we are increasingly seeing antisemitism dressed up as criticism of Israel. While Israel is not a state beyond reproach, I find it both worrying and depressing that the only truly democratic state in the Middle East - and one with a free press - is increasingly the subject of academic and cultural boycotts. LINDA GRANT Novelist and winner of the Orange prize for Fiction Last month my nephew married his Iranian-Canadian fiancée, whom he met in a club in Hoxton. The ceremony was a Jewish-Persian mashup devised by themselves and presided over by a gay rabbi. The challenge facing the mainstream Jewish community is to recognise that in an age of identity politics, Jewish identity is stronger than it has been since the 1950s, but is taking new and experimental forms. This won't satisfy religious purists but part of the essence of Jewishness (as well as Judaism) is its ability to transform itself to meet new times and new places. Judaism Religion Communities theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Tudor pile that's home to a thinktank set on shaking up Britain's drug laws Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT From her Oxfordshire home, Amanda Feilding leads a group with the sort of academic and political influence that could see cannabis being legalised – and, crucially, regulated Beckley Park, a moated stately home in Oxfordshire, built during the reign of Henry VIII, seems the sort of place that inspires writers to hyperbole. Its gardens boast perfect boxwood topiary, fires burn in huge grates and nobility look down imperiously from thick stone walls. So it is no surprise to learn that Beckley has featured in at least one novel. The author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, set his first book, a satirical novel called Crome Yellow, at Beckley. Huxley, who wrote The Doors of Perception, an exploration of the altered state of consciousness he experienced while taking the drug mescaline, was a visitor to the house in the 1920s. But not even a visionary such as him could have foreseen that Beckley would go on pushing at the doors of perception long after he had died. The Grade I-listed home is the headquarters of the Beckley Foundation, a thinktank that is testing the boundaries of drugs policy reform with a persistence that has seen it amass a strong body of academic and political support, but has also drawn huge controversy. Headed by Amanda Feilding, who is Countess of Wemyss and March but prefers not to use the title, the foundation has helped frame open letters published in national newspapers signed by past and present presidents, businessmen and other global leaders pushing the case for reform of the UN's prohibitionist drugs conventions. "Drugs are more heavily regulated than nuclear weapons," said Feilding, an adviser to Guatemala's president, Otto Pérez Molina, the leading advocate for global drug policy reform. "I'm not for making drugs available at Tesco," she added, "but common sense suggests the answer is regulation. We have got caught in a terrible misconception about drugs. We all know people who have died and suffered from them. But 200,000 people a year around the world die from using illegal drugs, compared with five million from tobacco." Beckley was responsible for producing, in 2007, a scale of harm register for drugs, both legal and illegal, that ranks substances according to the risks they pose to users. The register has been taken up widely across Europe, but it does not help the foundation's cause that Feilding's belief in the medicinal properties of illegal drugs has led to her being portrayed as a sort of refugee from the 1960s who wants to revive the decade's hippie counter-culture. Feilding has instigated, co-authored and funded research conducted by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, into how magic mushrooms used with psychotherapy can produce what she claims is an almost 100% success rate in helping people overcome addictions. She has also worked with several prestigious British universities, looking into issues including whether MDMA (ecstasy) can help people with post-traumatic stress disorder, and whether cannabis can be a useful analgesic. It is this latter drug that is occupying much of Feilding's attention at present. This week, Beckley will publish a 143- page cost-benefit analysis examining what would happen if cannabis was licensed, and regulated, in England and Wales. The study, conducted by the widely respected Institute for Social and Economic Research, is a model of rigorous academic analysis, carefully caveating its findings and outlining three scenarios illustrating what could happen to demand if cannabis was decriminalised. Few such studies have been attempted, and most have made wild assumptions. "One of the difficulties in working in this area is that the public debate is of such low quality," said one of the report's authors, Stephen Pudney, professor of economics at the University of Essex. "There are lots of people taking one side or another. Our intention was almost to draw up a shopping list of things you would need to achieve [in terms of regulation] to have a better debate." The ISER research is likely to be studied closely by politicians in the US states of Colorado and Washington, who have voted to legalise marijuana, as well as those in Uruguay, which is to become the first country to introduce a legal, regulated market for cannabis, encouraging growers and sellers to produce in large enough quantities to put drug traffickers out of business. The report examines 13 factors, including the cost to policing and courts, mental health services, the cost of regulating the new market and potential increases in crime as a result of more people using cannabis. It assumes cannabis would be taxed at 70% (compared with 72% for alcohol and 83% for tobacco) and that its level of tetrahydrocannabinol – THC, the mind-altering substance found in cannabis – would be restricted to 10%. Much of the cannabis currently sold on Britain's streets contains around 15% THC. Agreeing a level of taxation is difficult, Pudney admits. Too low and there would be claims that the government is promoting drug consumption. Too high and the illicit market would continue to thrive. "It's the same debate as with tobacco," he added. "If you raise taxes it encourages smuggling." Under the most plausible scenarios outlined in the report, a licensed cannabis market would see consumption of the drug in volume terms rise between 15% and 20%, while the illicit share would be somewhere between 20% and 30%. The report states: "We estimate that tax revenue from licensed cannabis supply in England and Wales would fall somewhere in the range £0.4bn-£0.9bn." And once the reduced costs, such as for policing, and the extra costs, such as regulation, are factored in, the authors say the contribution of cannabis licensing in England and Wales to the exchequer "is expected to lie in the range £0.5bn-1.25bn." But to focus simply on the numbers would be to miss the key point, Pudney argues. Regulation would allow the government to control the licensed drug's content. For example, the government could insist that the cannabidiol (CBD) content of the drug, the anti-psychotic component that balances out THC, be increased, or THC levels reduced. In this way, a regulated market might help counter the huge explosion in skunk, the potent strain of high THC cannabis that is linked to psychosis. Pudney is the first to admit there are many unknowns. Would, for example, the UK experience a rise in drug tourism, with its associated costs? And on the question of cannabis becoming a gateway to other, possibly more dangerous drugs, Pudney and his team are dubious. "In our view, the evidence for a large gateway effect among cannabis consumers is weak," they write. Feilding said the ISER report showed the case for regulation was strong. "If you are going to protect the young, then I believe governments can do a better job of that than the cartels," Feilding said. "People like changing their consciousness, and they're going to go on liking it." Huxley would surely agree. Drugs policy Drugs trade Thinktanks Jamie Doward theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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Britain's Jews fall in number but grow in self-confidence Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT A new chief rabbi, a national centre boasting appearances by some of the country's most admired cultural figures, and a BBC2 history of the Jews by Simon Schama – the Jewish community is celebrating New Year in good heart. Ned Temko surveys the huge changes of recent years Head north-west from central London, past Lord's Cricket Ground and St John's Wood, and a mile or so farther along, you'll find a new, low-slung, glass-fronted building tucked just off the Finchley Road. If your eyesight isn't perfect, or if you're paying more attention to your driving, you could be forgiven for assuming that it's just an office building, or even for missing it altogether. Yet the modest sign on its third-floor window announces what could prove to be a dramatic new departure for the Jews of Britain: JW3 – the London Jewish Community Centre. Nearly 10 years in the making, at a cost of £50m, and named for the postal district (NW3) in which it sits, it is due to open this month. Its initial menu of nearly 1,000 events features well-known figures including Kevin Spacey, Nicholas Hytner, Zoë Wanamaker and Ruby Wax, as well as the former editor of the Times, James Harding, who is now head of BBC news. These are heady days for British Jews. On the religious calendar, they are emerging from the Yamim Noraim – the "Days of Awe" beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with the fast of Yom Kippur. They're starting the Jewish New Year with a new chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, after his predecessor, Jonathan Sacks, was given a communal send-off replete with tributes from assorted prime ministers, fellow faith leaders and Prince Charles. BBC2 has just begun airing a new series called The Story of the Jews, narrated by the acclaimed – and unabashedly Jewish – historian and broadcaster Simon Schama. Yet the significance of – and, according to its founders, the need for – JW3 is that the Jewish community of Britain has changed seismically in recent years. For one thing, it has grown much smaller. The numbers have shrunk by nearly half since its high-water mark immediately after the second world war, with tens of thousands of Jews marrying out, or just opting out, of the faith, while others emigrated to the new state of Israel. Despite their major impact in areas such as the professions, science, culture and the arts, the Jews of Britain now comprise a grand total of some 260,000 souls – less than 0.5% of the population. Outwardly, they are more self-confident, especially younger Jews who have grown up in an increasingly multicultural Britain. But you need only to have visited any synagogue for Saturday's Yom Kippur observance – with young security volunteers checking each arrival and patrolling the exterior – to be aware of an abiding, post-9/11 concern over the possibility of anti-Jewish vandalism, or worse. Amid the controversy surrounding Israel's stalled peace process with the Palestinians, some Jews, especially university students, have also found campaigns such as the push for an academic boycott increasingly unsettling. Whatever their own views on Israeli policies, for many Jews on British campuses, "anti-Israel" invective has sometimes come to feel not a lot different from antisemitism. Still, the main shift for British Jews is that there is no longer just one Jewish community, but a mosaic of several, in some ways divergent, communities. The only group increasing in number is the charedim, the strictly orthodox. They are still a minority within a minority, accounting for about one in seven British Jews. But their traditions and practice, and their high birth rate, have insulated them from the demographic buffeting experienced by the rest of British Jewry. They have preserved not just the customs and clothing of the old eastern European shtetl, but a tight, inward-looking sense of themselves. Ever wary of secular Britain, the rabbis of Stamford Hill in north London, the focal point of charedi life in the capital, recently set up a hotline to invite calls on "breaches of modesty" in behaviour or dress. They're almost equally reticent about contact with the mainstream of British Jewry. But changes in Jewish life in Britain go deeper than the divide between the charedim and the rest, says Stephen Miller, emeritus professor of social research at City University and a leading analyst of trends in Jewish identity. In the 1990s two-thirds of Jews affiliated to a synagogue were members of mainstream orthodox communities grouped largely under the umbrella of the United Synagogue, the body that picks the chief rabbi. Now, the proportion is barely 50%. Some of the decline is because synagogal movements to the religious left of the orthodox – Masorti, Reform and Liberal Judaism – have been growing, if modestly. "Yet the basic structure of Jewish identity has transformed itself," says Miller. "In the 1980s and 1990s, British Jews differentiated themselves largely in terms of their level of observance. This was the single, best predictor of how strongly Jewish they felt. Now, that link is far weaker. Many of those who regard themselves as strongly identified Jews have little or no connection with religious practice. "They may identify ethnically, culturally, socially or through an engagement with Israel; they may describe themselves as 'secular Jews'. But the research shows their sense of belonging and pride in their Jewishness are, on average, not very different from their more observant counterparts." The good news for those who have feared for the very survival of the non-charedi community – rabbi Sacks himself, who took office in the 1990s, wondered publicly whether "we will have Jewish grand children" – is that there are signs of new life there as well. Old-style British Jewishness used to be done quietly. Synagogues were, for many, as much about tradition or habit, as active religious involvement. Now, it is a rare synagogue that does not have a programme of Jewish learning, whether for children or adults. And where British Jews once aspired above all to blend in, many are sending their children to a growing network of Jewish day schools. That, says Benjamin Perl, an Israeli-born businessman who settled in Britain in the 1970s, may be key to sustaining a fabric of Jewish community life. In addition to helping establish a Jewish secondary school, he has been central in setting up a dozen new primaries in the London suburbs. Though orthodox himself, he also wants to bring the rest of the community into Jewish education. He estimates 65% of Jewish children now go to Jewish schools. But the figure is boosted by the far higher rate among observant orthodox families. "My aim is not just to help set up these schools as Jewish schools," he says, "but to make them the best state schools in the areas where they're located." But what of the Jews who don't go to synagogue? The "cultural" Jews. Secular Jews. Or, in a famous quip from the cultural polymath Jonathan Miller, those who insist they aren't Jews at all. Just Jew-ish. That, at least in part, is where JW3 hopes to make its mark. It is not ignoring the already committed. Its inaugural programme has a rich mixture of Torah and Talmud sessions, debates on Israel and other communal staples. But there will also be comedy nights, jazz sessions, dance and fitness classes, even a taxidermy workshop – after which there will be time for socialising in a kosher restaurant run by proteges of the celebrated Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi. But with its aim to reach out further, what is most striking – and in British community terms, most audacious – about JW3 is the explicitly American Jewish model on which it is based. The project was the brainchild of the philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield, and she took her inspiration from a crown jewel of Jewish community life in the most vibrant diaspora on earth: the Jewish Community Centre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She and her fellow funders scaled back on some of the New York bells and whistles – they had planned a swimming pool and health club. But the West Side ethos, the comfortable exuberance of New York Jews, has survived in JW3. The very name, taken from the Finchley Road postcode, is a mix of playfulness and a bid for street cred. "Our Jewish community is so British," says Raymond Simonson, the 40-year-old CEO of the new centre. "We have always looked at our American cousins as being a bit gauche, a bit loud." But JW3 will, he hopes, "turn up the volume". JW3 is about opening up, and opening out, he says. "We have tended to keep behind closed doors. We build buildings with high walls." He hopes to bring in not only the widest range of affiliated Jews, but others. "People who aren't going to synagogue. People who may have married non-Jewish partners. People who haven't been involved in anything Jewish since they were teenagers." People who have stayed away because, in his words, they may have feared "they would be judged". The sign on the window – the one so easy to miss as you weave through the traffic on Finchley Road – is only temporary, he adds. Awaiting formal council approval is a bigger, bolder, permanent one that will decorate the complex's glass perimeter wall: "JW3 – the New Postcode for Jewish Life." Ned Temko was editor of the Jewish Chronicle from 1990 until 2005 Judaism Zoe Wanamaker Nicholas Hytner Kevin Spacey James Harding Religion Simon Schama Ned Temko theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Drugs: let's welcome this new starting point for legalisation | Observer editorial Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT As countries across the world relax their drug laws, it is wrong to ignore a growing trend In 2002, about 15% of the cannabis sold in Britain had high levels of THC, the ingredient linked to psychosis and commonly found in the strain of the drug known as skunk. By 2008, this figure had increased to 80%. The proportion may be even higher now: the paucity of data makes what is happening in Britain's drugs culture difficult to track. Indeed, it can be argued that if Britain wants to tackle its drugs problem, it needs to address its information problem first. The hysteria surrounding the threat posed by skunk and a failure to understand the dynamics that have made it popular are axiomatic. Fear thrives on ignorance. But, in a polarised, often emotive, debate, there is little room for the facts to get in the way of ideology. You are either for prohibition or you are against. It is clear, though, that this view cannot be sustained. Across the world, countries are deviating from the prohibition line. The US states of Colorado and Washington have voted in favour of cannabis legalisation. In South Australia, possession of small quantities of cannabis has been decriminalised. Uruguay is introducing a legal marijuana cultivation business. It is pointless ignoring this trend. Countries cannot hold back the tide. The best they can do is to understand the problem and follow the evidence of what works. Therefore, the publication of today's report by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, examining how a licensed and regulated cannabis market could look in the UK, is a welcome development. The institute is not claiming its report offers anything other than an impression of what the policy could entail. It accepts many factors are unknowns. But it does provide a starting point for an important debate that will not go away. Understanding the drugs economy helps us better understand how regulation can play a part in that debate. Skunk, after all, can be seen as a market response. It is produced domestically, indoors, and under intense growing conditions. History suggests that prohibition results in ever stronger strains of drugs. If this is what we want we are going about it the right way. Drugs policy Drugs Drugs trade Cannabis Observer editorial theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

After Edward Snowden's revelations, why trust US cloud providers? Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:06 PM PDT The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses 'It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity." Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services – a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing. The second own goal (or unintended consequence, to give it its technical name) came from the revelation that the NSA had cracked or circumvented the encryption systems used by internet companies, banks and other organisations to persuade consumers that online transactions could be confidential and secure. Given that one of the great triumphs of the industry had been to persuade initially sceptical users that it was safe to conduct transactions online, this was a staggering revelation, the implications of which will be very far-reaching. And it brought to mind a conversation I had last year with a fairly senior executive of a major internet company, who casually mentioned that his organisation's head of security "wouldn't dream of using online banking". I thought it was amusing at the time and filed it away as a curiosity: geeks, after all, are notoriously paranoid about these things. Now I wish I had been more perceptive. But, in a way, even more disturbing was the realisation that the NSA seems to have covertly suborned the process by which encryption standards are set by the supposedly independent US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In 2006, NIST published the standard (ie technical protocol) for encryption on the web that was subsequently adopted by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), which has 163 countries as members. What nobody knew until Edward Snowden revealed it was that the 2006 standard was effectively written by the NSA and that it had inserted a secret back door into the encryption system for its own use. "The road to developing this standard was smooth once the journey began," a NSA memo noted. "However, beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse." I'll bet it was. Technical standards are to networking as oxygen is to life. And, broadly speaking, the way they are shaped has always been co-operative and open. In the internet world, for example, it's done by groups of engineers with specialist expertise in a particular area who gather to hammer out, by a process of open discussion, successive versions of a protocol until they converge on something that is agreed to be workable. "We believe," one of the pioneers of the process wrote, "in rough consensus and running code." But at the heart of the process is the assumption that everyone participating – whether from companies or academia – is working in the public interest rather than trying to advance the narrower interests of their organisation. That's why the discovery that the NSA abused that kind of trust is so depressing. And, in a way, it represents the biggest own goal of all, because it fatally undermines one of the fundamental tenets of US foreign policy, namely that governance of the internet is best left in American hands. As the net became increasingly global, this was already looking like a threadbare proposition. The NSA has ensured that it is now untenable. Which brings us back to birds and their nests. I forgot to mention that of course the official seal of the US president is… an eagle. Cloud computing The NSA files NSA Edward Snowden Internet John Naughton theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Grand Gesture – review Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:06 PM PDT Harrogate theatre A banned Russian play from the 1920s is given a northern spin in this powerful adaptation A hungry man goes into the kitchen to snaffle a midnight sausage. His family and neighbours imagine he's putting a gun in his mouth in an attempt at suicide. Worn down by poverty and unemployment, the man decides to make their misunderstanding a reality. It's not an obviously comic scenario, yet the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky almost fell out of his chair laughing when he first read the text. The man's landlord decides to profit from this decision by selling his prospective death to a number of interested parties. Each wants the man to write a suicide note declaring that he's killing himself for the sake of their particular cause (politics/ art/ business/ religion/ love). A dead man, they declare, is eloquent; people will pay attention to what he says. In the late 1920s, the element of social critique that this introduces into the plot did not amuse the Soviet head of state, Joseph Stalin. "The Suicide", as it's titled in Russian, was banned and its author, Nikolai Erdman, subsequently banished to Siberia. Deborah McAndrew's sharp, sparky and slangy adaptation for Northern Broadsides/ Harrogate theatre transposes the action to an unspecified contemporary town in north-west England. A tendency to sentimentality and extreme caricature blunts the political points that could make the story sting today's leaders, but the laughter has not been lost in translation. Hilarious performances (fantastic comic turns include Angela Bain's mother-in-law, Robert Pickavance's intellectual and Alan McMahon's Catholic priest) sometimes mask the viciousness of the characters; but under Conrad Nelson's ever-theatrical direction situations satisfyingly seesaw between gleeful absurdity and gut-wrenching gravity. Michael Hugo's "hero" delivers some powerful emotional punches as, pushed towards death, he discovers reasons to live. Rating: 4/5 Theatre Joseph Stalin Russia Clare Brennan theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Richard Dawkins: 'I don't think I am strident or aggressive' Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:05 PM PDT Richard Dawkins is outspoken in denouncing religion. But what really drives him, he says, is the wonder, and truth, of Darwinism On the top floor of Random House's offices in London, the world's number one thinker – according to Prospect magazine's annual poll – walks in from the roof terrace and shakes my hand. Richard Dawkins is a trim 72-year-old with one of those faces that, no matter the accumulation of lines, will always draw the adjective "boyish". There's a smoothness to the way he carries himself – a touch of the Nigel Havers – that could no doubt be construed as an arrogance befitting his intellectual status, but in conversation he is restrained, even hesitant, and faultlessly modest throughout our interview. Perhaps the renowned evolutionary biologist and the world's most famous atheist was feeling especially cautious. The day before I met him he had become embroiled in a Twitterstorm, which grew into a broader media monsoon, after he had tweeted the following: "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the middle ages, though." He defended himself in the ensuing furore by saying that he was merely stating a fact. And it's true, it was a fact. Many objected that it was a fact used to demonise Muslims, that it was racist (Dawkins responded by pointing out that Islam is not a race), and that, out of context, it was, at the very least, mischievous and misleading. Reading this on mobile? Click here to watch video I returned later to this dispute, but first of all we got down to discussing his memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, a sort of portrait of the scientist as a young man. The first of two volumes, it takes us from boyhood to the publication of his landmark bestseller, The Selfish Gene. The story begins with his colonial childhood in Kenya and Nyasaland (now Malawi), and is full of dusty anecdotes of our young hero rummaging without a care in the great African outdoors. Does he look back with nostalgia at that now largely disappeared way of life? "Yes," he says slowly, as if watchful for hidden traps. "It's now unfashionable and in many ways it's something we British have to live down. But yes, there is a nostalgia for it and, although I was never in India, I get it reading novels of the Raj. It's a lost era that you can't help having a certain affection for, even if you disapprove politically." His parents were hardy, practical types, unflustered by war or life in the bush or, it seems, anything else. His father was a botanist, working in the agricultural office in Nyasaland, so Dawkins grew up in a family that took a scientific interest in living organisms, though he insists he never inherited his parents' extensive knowledge of flora and fauna. He moved to England when he was nine and went through a very typical public school experience for the era, except that he managed to fend off the sexual predations of older boys. Other than in relation to genetic research, sex doesn't raise its titillating head at all in the book – apart from one occasion. We learn that at the ripe age of 22 he lost his virginity to a cellist in London. She "removed her skirt in order to play to me in her bedsitter (you can't play the cello in a tight skirt) – and then removed everything else." But that's all that Dawkins allows in terms of romance. "Well that was a little token to say, 'This is all you're going to get,' " he says firmly. "I wanted to announce that this is not going to be that kind of autobiography." Why not? "Fear of betraying confidences," he says, shifting in his chair. "These things are private. Some people let it all hang out but I prefer not to." You can say that again. Dawkins may have an appetite for wonder, but he is positively anorexic when it comes to personal revelation. Perhaps the most confessional section – and it can hardly be called exposing – deals with his years teaching at Berkeley in the late 60s, when the campus was a hotbed of countercultural revolt. Dawkins took part in protests against the Vietnam war, of which he remains proud, but also got caught up in a local militant initiative to take over some university waste ground and turn it into a "people's park". "With hindsight," he writes, "it was a trumped-up excuse for radical activism for its own sake." I suggest that radical movements invariably function on peer pressure and he agrees that he succumbed to the impulse to belong. "There was a sort of feeling of flower power and drugs," he says. "I never actually took drugs, oddly enough. I never had the opportunity. But the music of the time and the atmosphere – there was a feeling of loyalty to the protesters: these are my people. The same people who marched against the Vietnam war marched for the people's park and it was an automatic decision to join them. One should be more independent-minded than that." That's Dawkins at his most self-reflective. He avoids any details of interest about his first marriage – to the ethologist Marian Stamp. And according to him, he is unlikely to be any more forthcoming in the second volume about his second marriage to Eve Barham, or his third to the actress Lalla Ward, a former assistant to Dr Who, who was introduced to him by his late friend Douglas Adams. The couple live in Oxford, where Dawkins has resided almost all of his adult life, and where he spent 13 years until his retirement in 2008 as the professor for public understanding of life. As he was free in that role to pursue his own interests, he says his "nominal retirement" has made no difference at all. The memoir is strong on the professional excitement of his early years as an academic, but it assiduously sidesteps the rivalries and disputes that mark even the most unremarkable scientific careers, let alone one as distinguished as Dawkins's. He didn't want any score settling, he says, or to "appear hostile". So although he notes that the biologists Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose were two of the rare voices who criticised The Selfish Gene on its widely acclaimed publication in 1976, he fails to discuss their arguments or his thoughts on them, other than to say that both came from the "political left". Did he think their case against him was political rather than scientific? "Yes, I think politics," he says after another anxious pause. "I actually wrote a fairly savage review of the joint book they produced later [Not in Our Genes] which I suppose I'll probably mention in volume two." He weighs his words again and then adds, "It was sarcastic rather than savage." Dawkins seems determined in both the memoir and our interview to present a calm, conciliatory side to his character that has not always been associated with his public image. Later the photographer, Andy Hall, will tell me that Dawkins requested to look at the screen on Hall's camera to see what he had captured during the shoot. "You've made me look too harsh," complained the biologist. Hall told him he was merely giving him appropriate gravitas. "I don't want fucking gravitas," Dawkins snapped. "I want humanity." One senses that for all the recognition he's garnered – the world's leading intellectual, the bestselling books, the rapt audiences etc – Dawkins would like to be a little more loved. I ask him if he thinks he's misunderstood by the media and the general public. "Yes," he says without hesitation. "I seem to be perceived as aggressive and strident and I don't actually think I am strident and aggressive. What I think is that we have all become so accustomed to seeing religion ring-fenced by a wall of special protection that when someone delivers even a mild criticism of religion, it's heard as aggressive when it isn't. I like to think I'm more thoughtful and reflective." Although he has only written one book specifically about religion – The God Delusion – it's the subject that has increasingly come to define Dawkins. He may have spread the message of evolution to millions, and he may have helped revolutionise our understanding of genetic biology, but it's his pronouncements on the irrationality and absurdity of religion that stick most prominently in the public's imagination. He's that bloke. Reading this on mobile? Click here to watch video Dawkins has long maintained that there is no real difference between his work on evolution and his anti-religion position as an atheist. To some extent, he has a point. As he puts it: "I suppose my particular branch of biology is kind of in the front-line trench where religion is fighting evolution. So in a way even my science books are forced to take a stance, not against posh theologians who accept evolution but surely the absolute majority of religious people in the world who literally believe that every species was separately created and even, in the case of the Abrahamic religions, believe that Adam and Eve were created 6,000 years ago. Chemists and other scientists don't have to battle with that." While this may be true, no other evolutionary biologist has been quite as outspoken as Dawkins in his denunciation of religion and, indeed, the religious. As a consequence, he's the go-to guy for a scathing quote on dissembling theologies and their gullible believers. He was led into attacking Peter Kay (although he later said he was unaware of who Kay was) when the comedian said that he found religion comforting; savaged the historian Paul Johnson for the "ignominious, contemptible, retarded" basis on which he held his religious beliefs; and described the British Airways employee who was suspended for wearing a gold cross at work as having "one of the most stupid faces I have ever seen". His comments about religion grew noticeably less restrained after the 9/11 attacks in America. It was those religiously inspired acts of terrorism that prompted Dawkins to write The God Delusion. He had wanted to write the book immediately after the twin towers were destroyed but was dissuaded by his agent, who told him that America would never buy a book that was so avowedly critical of religion. He waited several years and the book was eventually published in 2006. But as many observers have since noted, the people who flew planes into the World Trade Centre were motivated by a powerful belief in Islam, while The God Delusion was a sustained critique of Christianity. "It concentrates on Christianity," he says, "because it's the religion I know a lot about, having been brought up in Christian schools." All the same, it seemed a little perverse to be galvanised by the acts of followers of one religion to set about debunking the presumptions of another, especially as Christianity, particularly in Europe, and specifically in Britain, had become largely a toothless affair which had almost reformed itself out of existence. Did he really think that Christianity matters very much nowadays? "Ayaan Hirsi Ali has at times suggested that Christianity might [in relative terms] be a good thing, like the Hilaire Belloc line: 'Always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse'. I'm occasionally tempted by that view that maybe it would be a shame if Christianity died." But then he goes on to insist that a more muscular and sinister version of Christianity is flourishing in many parts of the world. Douglas Murray, an outspoken critic of many aspects of Islam, recently lambasted Dawkins for taking the easy target of Christianity and ignoring the more problematic question of the Islamic world. "He can't have read anything I've actually written," Dawkins says. "Just this week I'm assailed mightily for going after Islam and had been for a very long time before that." This "going after Islam" refers to his Twitter contribution on the number of Muslim Nobel laureates. But there's a distinction to be made between "going after Islam" – ie criticising the Koran and the Islamic prophet, Muhammad – and going after Muslims. The latter is likely to lead to accusations of racism and bigotry, which Dawkins duly received, while the former can bring far more threatening consequences He insists that he wasn't speaking of Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. He merely wanted to highlight how Islam, which produced algebra and kept safe the Greek philosophers of antiquity in the middle ages, had lost its way scientifically by focusing too much on the study of religion. "The point I wished to make is that something about the Muslim cultural tradition seems to be inimical to doing science. I mean an Egyptian Muslim, a Pakistani Muslim and an Indonesian Muslim, they are not all the same, clearly. One thing they have in common is their religion. And one could make the case that the Islamic religion is not friendly to science. That's not saying anything about all Muslims." He sounds genuinely offended that anyone could think otherwise. He does regret, he says, the comparison with Trinity College. He wishes he had set contemporary Muslim academic achievement against that of the Jews. "Something like between 20% and 25% of all Nobel prizes have gone to Jews, who are less than 1% of the world's population. That's a very embarrassing comparison." I suggest that this may not have been wise. Leaving aside the sensitivities surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, you can also argue that Jews are a race. "No you can't!" he replies. "It's just total nonsense to talk about Jews being a race. That's precisely where Hitler went wrong." By now my controversy seismometer is going off the Richter scale: Muslims, Jews, Hitler – it's like a mass invitation to every irate commentator in the blogosphere. For while Dawkins's arguments tend to be studiously rational, they are not always couched in the language of provisos, exceptions and disclaimers that is necessary to avoid the minefield of cultural sensitivities. Instead he places a high premium on clarity, which his critics often see as simplicity or a lack of intellectual sophistication. In a sort of half-compliment towards his demystifying style of writing on evolutionary biology, Fay Weldon once called him a "poetic reductionist". Sometimes in his commentary on religion, the poetry can go missing. The Spectator rather cruelly called him "the Mary Whitehouse of our day", as if the religious debate had turned him into a busybody bore. When I ask him if he's not tempted to back away from public pronouncements on religion, given all the grief it generates, not least for himself, he says, a little wearily: "No, I don't think so. It is important. I think it is worthwhile." But it seems apparent that some air has gone out of the New Atheist balloon, particularly with the death of Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins agrees. "He was irreplaceable, probably the greatest orator I've ever heard. Such articulate cogency and a splendid voice like Richard Burton." Of course, while there are endless ways to describe an omnipotent god, and his various moral commands, there are a limited number of ways to state his non-existence. For Hitchens, says Dawkins, the argument was political. "He saw god as a kind of divine North Korea." But Dawkins maintains that his own beef has always been scientific. "I'm passionately interested in the truth about the universe and I've always thought of the existence of an intelligent creator as a scientific hypothesis. A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe scientifically speaking than one without." But he also has an aesthetic opposition. "Yes," he agrees, "because I do think that the scientific worldview is so wonderful and poetically uplifting that the children who don't get it and are being fed a second-rate alternative are being short-changed." It's not the most profound psychological insight to suggest that Dawkins's intolerance of religion may stem from his own brief period of "religious frenzy" as a teenager at Oundle school. His belief in a supreme creator was only deepened by his love of Elvis Presley, a fellow believer. What saved him was a schoolfriend who persuaded him of the brilliance of Darwin's idea. Everything comes back to the science with Dawkins, and sooner or later everything comes back to evolution. I ask him if Darwinism informs his everyday apprehension of life. "Well, in one way it does. My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. That's never far from my thoughts, that sense of amazement. On the other hand I certainly don't allow Darwinism to influence my feelings about human social life." Apart from anything else, that last sentence is a necessary defence against the accusation that Dawkins sees humans simply as the "survival machines" he described in The Selfish Gene, organisms whose only purpose is gene reproduction. Dawkins argues that we as individuals can opt out of Darwinism. For while we may be compelled by biology, we are freed by consciousness. This sets up a fascinating battle between, as it were, the mind and the body, the conscious self and the survival machine. Dawkins agrees and says that it's a question that requires much more research. But he cites pain as one of the potential battlefields that ought to be examined. "From a Darwinian perspective it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: don't do that again. If you burn yourself you're never going to pick up a live coal again. But you might think a little red flag in the brain would be enough to do that. Why does pain have to be so damned painful?" His answer is that our brains have evolved to treat certain things as rewards and others as punishments. "And those can run away so that you can become hedonistic to the extent that you neglect your Darwinian responsibilities, and we do all the time. So it could be that this tussle between the genetic imperative and the brain leads to pain becoming so painful that, as it were, the hedonistic brain can't overrule." But clearly hedonistic consciousness is capable of overcoming our biological programming. The more materially successful a society becomes, the better educated and more physically comfortable, the less inclined its members are to reproduce. If we, like Dawkins, view the evolutionary determinant as the survival of the gene rather than the species, then is that not a problem for genes whose survival machines are reluctant to reproduce? "Well this worried my dear colleague Bill Hamilton," he answers, "and he got a lot of stick for it. It is an unfashionable point of view and one of the reasons it has become unfashionable is Hitler. In pre-Hitler times eugenics was very much a cause of the left, and Hitler did for all that. It's not a view I go out of my way to espouse but it possibly is a worry. R A Fisher, probably the greatest Darwinian of the first half of the 20th century, deliberately had lots of children because he knew he was bright." This is not an accusation that could be levelled at Dawkins. He has one child, a 29-year-old daughter from his second marriage. But just in case I walk away with the wrong idea, in spite of his own example, he adds: "So while it's probably true that there is something a bit dysgenic about what you've just identified, I would absolutely hate to see any kind of draconian attempts to reduce the reproduction of some people at the expense of others." That's a relief. Twitter would probably have crashed under the strain of that backlash and who knows what would have happened to the Guardian website. Instead we part company on a benign note, without controversy or dispute, the great humanist having succeeded in showing his humanity. Richard Dawkins Evolution Autobiography and memoir Douglas Adams Peter Kay Ayaan Hirsi Ali Christopher Hitchens Charles Darwin Andrew Anthony theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Campaigners call for new deal for India's women in wake of gang-rape convictions Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:04 PM PDT Report calls for wide-ranging changes to country's culture and infrastructure following death sentences in Delhi gang-rape trial Campaigners are calling for a new deal for India's women in the wake of the death sentences handed down by a Delhi judge to four men who tricked a woman and her male friend on to an out-of-service bus before gang-raping her so brutally that she died later from her injuries. The case brought women's rights protesters across India on to the streets in angry demonstrations against the country's culture of violence against women, from female foeticide to rape. But activists fear the intense focus on the court case will do nothing to improve the safety of women on city streets. A new report by three Indian academics supports those concerns and says it is India's infrastructure that needs to change, from bus services to public toilets. Pending an appeal expected to be lodged this week, four of the six guilty men – one died in jail and another was sent to a young offenders' prison – will be hanged under changes made to Indian law as a direct response to the case, making aggravated rape punishable by death and fast-tracking sexual offence cases through the courts. Issuing his decision, Judge Yogesh Khanna said the attack "shocked the collective conscience" of India. "In these times, when crime against women is on the rise, the courts cannot turn a blind eye toward such gruesome crimes." There were nearly 25,000 reported cases of rape in 2012 in India. In Delhi, with a population of 15 million, more than 1,000 cases were reported in the year to mid-August 2013, against 433 reported in the same period last year. In Jharkhand state, to the south-east, more than 800 cases have been reported in the past seven months, including a gang rape of a schoolgirl. There were 460 reported cases in all of 2012. The rise may be in part due to increased reporting, but India's National Crime Records Bureau says registered rape cases in India have increased by almost 900% over 40 years, to 24,206 incidents in 2011. Some activists say one in 10 rapes is reported; others one in 100. In a 2011 poll nearly one in four Indian men admitted to having committed some act of sexual violence. But the report Invisible Women, by academics Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan – due to appear in the next issue of Index on Censorship magazine – reflects a real fear that at the end of the Delhi trial the media spotlight will move on from mistreatment of women. The report argues that India's infrastructure needs to be transformed to give women an equal and safer place in cities. They write that the Delhi rape "was facilitated in part by the lack of adequate public transport, which meant that she was travelling in a private bus". The women point out that transport, lighting, toilets and other public facilities are designed with an "invariably male" user in mind. As a result, women's toilets "are dark and unfriendly" and often close at 9pm, "sending the clear message that women are not expected to – and not supposed to – be out in public at night". This means women "have to learn extreme bladder control and to negotiate dark streets and unfriendly parks". The link between access to toilets and rape is an issue in rural areas as well. In May it was reported that most rapes in the state of Bihar occurred when women went outside to the toilet at night. The authors claimed shopping malls were the only places in India's cities where women felt safe. Streets need to be well-lit, public transport needs to be regulated and to run day and night, and safe toilets need to be available. "We need to move beyond the struggle against violence and articulate women's right to the city in terms of the quest for pleasure," the report says. The victim in the bus rape had been to the cinema. "Changing attitudes may take time but the provision of infrastructure can be a simple one-time policy decision, which reinforces the point that women belong in public space." In Mumbai, a scheme for women-only train carriages was seen as a great success because it "enshrined their right to be there", the authors write. The report illustrates the determination of activists to keep the issue from fading. "It is the beginning of our movement," said Anuradha Kapoor of civil rights group Maitree, who was arrested in June at a women's rights protest. "We won't give up so easily." Writer Nilanjana Roy agreed: "The rapes might not stop, but this conversation isn't stopping either." India Rape Tracy McVeigh theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Domenico Quirico: My 150-day ordeal as a hostage of Syria's rebels Posted: 14 Sep 2013 04:04 PM PDT The Italian journalist was taken prisoner by an anti-Assad revolutionary brigade. The horror that followed led him to rename the country 'the land of evil' The night was as sweet as wine: I had come, on 8 April, to al-Qusayr, 22 miles south of Homs, to report on another chapter of the Syrian war. Instead, 152 days of imprisonment followed, in small dark rooms where I battled against time and fear and endless humiliations; against hunger and against the absence of pity. Where I endured two mock executions and the silence of God, my family and the outside world. I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by a revolution that had lost its way and become the property of fanatics and bandits. In this place, when the hostage weeps, everyone laughs at the spectacle of his pain and sees it as a sign of weakness. Syria has become the Country of Evil, the land where evil triumphs and thrives like grapes on the vine under a Middle Eastern sun, and where evil displays all its aspects: greed, hatred, fanaticism, the absence of mercy; where even children and the old rejoice in their malevolence. My captors prayed to their God standing next to me, the suffering prisoner. They prayed content, without remorse and attentive to their rituals. What were they saying to their God? We had arrived at al-Qusayr in a convoy bringing supplies from the Free Syrian Army, after a long night driving without lights through the mountains because the roads were controlled by the regime. The city had already been devastated and half-destroyed by air bombardment and we decided to go back to where we had come from to try to get to Damascus. On leaving the city, we were stopped by two pick-up trucks full of masked men. They made us get out, took us to a house and beat us up, claiming to be police officers working for the regime. In the following days [I and a fellow hostage, Belgian teacher Pierre Piccinin da Prata] discovered that they were fervent Islamists who prayed five times a day to their God in solemn tones. On the Friday, they listened to the sermon of a preacher urging jihad against Bashar al-Assad. The decisive proof came when we were bombarded from the air. It was clear we were being held by rebel forces. The leader of the group holding us was a self-appointed "emir" who liked to be addressed as Abu Omar, a nickname. He had formed his brigade by taking people from the area, mostly bandits rather than Islamists or revolutionaries. Abu Omar gave an Islamic gloss to the criminal activities of his band and had links with al-Farouk, the group that then took control of us. Al-Farouk is a well-known brigade in the Syrian revolution, part of the Syrian National Council, and its representatives have held meetings with European governments. The west trusts them, but I learned to my cost that we are talking about a new and disturbing phenomenon in the revolt: the emergence of groups of Somali-style bandits who use an Islamic veneer and the context of the revolution to control pieces of territory, extort money from the population, kidnap people and generally fill their boots. To begin with, we were held in a house in the suburbs of al-Qusayr. The district was bombed and we were moved to another house. When the same thing happened again, we were handed over for a week to the Syrian al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra. This was the only time we were to be treated like human beings and even, in some ways, kindly. For example, they gave us the same food as they ate themselves. Al-Qaida fighters at war live an ascetic existence. They are fanatics who hope to construct an Islamic state in Syria and then throughout the Middle East. But towards their enemies – and being white, Christian and western, we were their enemies – they have a sense of honour and respect. Al-Nusra is on the list of terrorist organisations compiled by America, but they were the only ones who showed us any respect. Then we were handed back to Abu Omar … One day Abu Omar was sitting like a lord under a tree, surrounded by his little court of fighters. He called me because he wanted me to sit down by his side. He wanted to pretend to be our friend to deceive some others in the area who were wondering who these westerners were, so badly dressed and physically wasted after two months of prison. I asked him for his phone, telling him that my loved ones almost certainly thought I was dead and that he was destroying my life and my family. He laughed, and said there was no signal in the area. It wasn't true. A soldier from the Free Syrian army gave me a phone in front of Abu Omar. It was the only act of mercy towards me in the 152 days. No one else demonstrated what we would call pity, mercy or compassion. Even the children and old people tried to hurt us. In Syria I encountered the land of evil. I managed to talk to home for just 20 seconds. After the desperate cry I heard on the other end of the line, it went dead. They kept us like animals, lying on straw mattresses in tiny rooms with closed windows, notwithstanding the terrible heat. They gave us their leftovers to eat. I'd never experienced the daily humiliations relating to simple things like not being able to go to the toilet, or having to ask for everything and always hearing the answer "no". I think there was a deep satisfaction for them in seeing the rich westerner reduced to the status of a beggar. The first time we tried to escape, our guard had probably fallen asleep. We left the house and headed to what we thought were the lights of al-Qusayr. After 200 metres we were caught. The second time we were in another area, during the final phase of our detention. Our captors were often careless about looking after their stuff. We got our hands on two grenades and hid them in a sofa. One night they failed to lock the door. We left and tried to make it to the Syrian-Turkish border at Bab al-Hawa after stopping a car using Kalashnikovs also taken from the house. But there was a checkpoint. We were taken back to our captors to face our punishment. They shut us in a storage room with our hands tied behind our backs and kept us there for three days. Our value to them was as merchandise. Merchandise cannot be destroyed without losing the proper price for it. You feel like a sack of grain, something that has value only to the extent it can be sold. They can kick you but they can't kill you, because if they finish you off they can't sell you. Twice they put me up against the wall. We were near al-Qusayr. One of them approached with a pistol. He showed me that it was loaded and then told me to put my head against the wall. He put the pistol against my temple. Long moments followed. You become ashamed of yourself. You hear the breath of the man next to you, who exudes the pleasure of having another man completely in his power. He knows you are afraid. So you become angry about being afraid. It's similar to when children, who can be terribly cruel, pull the tail off a lizard or the legs from a fly. The same terrible ferocity. For a laugh, our captors would tell us every now and then: "It'll be two or three days, or a week, and then you'll be free in Italy." It was just to see our desperation when they added the word "Inshallah" (God willing). It was their way of lying without seeming to lie. They continually said "bukrah" (tomorrow), and then the next day nobody went anywhere. Finally, I sensed the moment had really come. This time there was no "Inshallah". They made us get out of the cars on the other side of the border, telling us to walk. I thought they might shoot us in the back. It was dark, it was a Sunday night, after sunset. I thought to myself that if I heard the sound of guns preparing to fire I would throw myself on the ground. I was sure they were going to eliminate us. I had seen their faces, I knew their names. But no one used their Kalashnikov. Inshallah, this was the moment of our liberation. This is an edited extract of an original article that appeared in La Stampa Syria Middle East and North Africa theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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