World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk

China and BAE Systems issue warnings over US deadlock - live
Libyan prime minister Zeidan seized by gunmen - live updates
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie looking better by the day
Daily Mail launches multi-weapon assault on The Guardian
Labor leadership ballot draws to a close with doubts over voting deadline
Helping Ivory Coast’s refugee children find their way home – video
Inside the Pallin glacier tunnel, exposed by melting ice - video
X Factor: Simon Cowell taunts Sinead O'Connor with guest judge offer | Media Monkey
World Solar Challenge: winning Dutch car crosses Australia in 33 hours
Edward Snowden's father arrives in Russia 'hoping to see son'
Same-sex marriage: federal goverment will take ACT law to the high court
Obama nominates Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve - video
Edward Snowden's father arrives in Moscow 'hoping to see son'
Gravity 'celebrates presence of God' say US Christian reviewers
Libyan prime minister kidnapped
Red Cross warning on recovery: statistics hide the UK's bottom line
Austerity pushing Europe into social and economic decline, says Red Cross
Dayanita Singh's best photograph – a sulking schoolgirl
Two Dreamliner flights turn back
Tony Abbott defends entitlements, saying he won't be changing the system
Albert Hall hosts first sumo tournament held outside Japan: From the archive, 10 October 1991
Unemployment rate drops to 5.6%, thanks partly to jobs created by federal election
Senator appears to have copied tracts of text for report on European study trip
Kara Walker's art: shadows of slavery
Mark 'Chopper' Read, Ned Kelly and our fascination with dangerous outcasts | Chrsitian Read

China and BAE Systems issue warnings over US deadlock - live

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:41 AM PDT

Chinese premier gives clearest signal yet that Beijing is losing patience over the debt ceiling debacle, as defence firm sends 1,200 workers home following the Federal government shutdown

Graeme Wearden

Libyan prime minister Zeidan seized by gunmen - live updates

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:37 AM PDT

Ali Zeidan was snatched from a hotel in Tripoli by unknown kidnappers before dawn on Thursday

Haroon Siddique

Matthew Weaver

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie looking better by the day

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:29 AM PDT

Writer Jennifer Saunders says movie spin-off of popular TV series prospect is 'attractive'

• Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa - review
• Steve Coogan on adapting Alan Partridge for the big screen

Jennifer Saunders has revealed that a movie spin-off of her hit TV series Absolutely Fabulous is now in active consideration, possibly shooting as early as next year.

Speaking on Radio 4's Front Row, Saunders said: "I've got some little pet projects that I keep tinkering away with. One of them might be the Ab Fab film, I don't know. As we're going into winter, a nice little summertime film seems rather attractive."

Saunders also said: "Everyone's saying 'Why don't you write it?', I'm thinking 'Yeah, why don't I write it? ... It would be quite easy, Joanna Lumley would like it. You know, I might well do it."

Absolutely Fabulous, which revolves around PR guru Edina Monsoon (played by Saunders) and champagne-swigging magazine editor Patsy Stone (played by Lumley) was recently revived for a fondly received three-episode run, at Christmas 2011, New Year 2012 and to mark the 2012 London Olympics.

Saunders, though, was still expressing a note of caution. "You think 'Well we could really mess it up'. And so, why mess up something that is actually still perceived as being quite good?"

Saunders has previously claimed shooting for an Absolutely Fabulous film was about to get under way, most recently in early 2012. But the success of the recent Alan Partridge film may have given the project fresh impetus, as has the closure of the much-hyped Spice Girls musical Viva Forever!, which lasted only six months in London's West End.

Andrew Pulver

Daily Mail launches multi-weapon assault on The Guardian

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:21 AM PDT

We have been told by Daily Mail executives defending the false headline, "The man who hated Britain", that people should read the headline and copy together.

So, applying their helpful advice on how to read newspapers, I was careful to read today's Mail splash headline, "PM backs spy chief's attack on Guardian", in company with the copy.

Look what I discovered. A spokesman on behalf of the prime minister was asked whether David Cameron agreed with the view of MI5 director general Andrew Parker that the revelations of secret files gave terrorists an advantage.

The Mail reports that the spokesman replied: "The prime minister thinks it was an excellent speech and we are, as you would expect, always keeping under review the measures that are needed to contribute to keeping our country safe."

It would have been very odd if a British prime minister showed the least sign of disagreement with a speech by the head of the British internal security services.

So it is hard to imagine a No 10 spokesman saying anything else. But does it amount to a direct criticism by the PM of The Guardian?

A piece on The Guardian's website, by Nicholas Watt, certainly takes the statement on Cameron's behalf at face value and, by extension therefore, validates the Mail's splash.

But the Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, is well known for using the bludgeon rather than the rapier against those it views as his enemies. And he wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to assault The Guardian.

So the paper's leading article, "The paper that helps Britain's enemies", brought out the blunderbuss. And next to it was a lengthy piece by Stephen Glover in which he opened both barrels against Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger:

"I don't accuse Mr Rusbridger of any lack of patriotism. I am sure he loves his country as much as anyone. But he does stand accused of the most stupendous arrogance and presumption."

But there was still more. Douglas Murray, associate director of a neoconservative think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, was given space to snipe at the schoolboy vanity of a few left-wing journalists.

The Mail also had another of its favourite targets in its sights: the BBC. An inside spread, headlined "How the BBC buried the story", claimed that the BBC2's Newsnight "underplayed" MI5's "scathing criticisms of The Guardian".

Sorry, it did not claim that. Reading the copy in company with the headline, I note that a Tory MP called Conor Burns made the claim.

He suggested there was "a conflict of interest" because Newsnight's editor, Ian Katz, was previously The Guardian's deputy editor. I'm not certain that moving from one job to another amounts to a conflict of interest, but I think we get his drift.

The Mail's article then extended Burns's quote into a conspiracy theory involving the whole of the BBC's news and current affairs division, including its security correspondents Frank Gardner and Gordon Corera.

Telegraph and Times run critical articles

Elsewhere, outside the Dacre acres, there were couple of follow-ups to the Parker speech in relation to The Guardian.

The Daily Telegraph carried a page 1 article based on a statement by the deputy national security adviser, Oliver Robbins, to the high court following the detention of David Miranda, partner of The Guardian's journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Inside was a feature by spy novelist Alan Judd, "Who are the bad guys?" He argued that, "realistically" there is "no alternative" to the secret monitoring of emails by security agencies.

A short piece in The Times nosed off on a quote by Professor Anthony Glees, head of the centre for security and intelligence studies at Buckingham university, who suggested that if national security had been damaged by the leaks then "a prosecution [of The Guardian] under the Official Secrets Act should follow."

The Sun's columnist, Rod Liddle, accuses The Guardian of treason.

As for The Guardian, it carried a full page, with a news story, "Debate grows over 'Orwellian' NSA technology" and an analysis of Parker's speech plus an op-ed article by John Kampfner, in which he contended that underlying the criticism of The Guardian is hostility to its stance on press regulation, "Payback for Leveson".

Roy Greenslade

Labor leadership ballot draws to a close with doubts over voting deadline

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:16 AM PDT

Concerns that members have not had enough time to return ballots may become a live issue if the margin is tight

Katharine Murphy

Helping Ivory Coast’s refugee children find their way home – video

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Conflict in Ivory Coast after disputed elections in 2010 left more than 3,000 dead, and thousands fled to refugee camps in Liberia. That's where four-year-old Sam ended up with his mother. She was suffering from psychological trauma, and soon wasn't able to care for him. International aid agencies are working to reunite children like Samuel with their families in Ivory Coast

Inside the Pallin glacier tunnel, exposed by melting ice - video

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Members of Project Pressure go on an expedition to explore a tunnel in the Pallin glacier in northern Sweden that has emerged as the melting glacier has shrunk

X Factor: Simon Cowell taunts Sinead O'Connor with guest judge offer | Media Monkey

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:55 AM PDT

Talent show mogul in tongue-in-cheek tweet after Irish singer called him a 'murderer of music' in wake of Miley Cyrus spat

Simon Cowell has taunted Sinead O'Connor after the Irish singer called him a "murderer of music" – by offering her a job as a guest judge on The X Factor. The Sun reports that the talent show supremo tweeted: "I think Sinead O'Connor would be a real fun guest judge on X Factor." He added: "She loves the show and everything I do. Let me know Sinead." O'Connor – who hit the headlines last week with her open letters warning Miley Cyrus not to "prostitute" herself for the music industry – had told an Irish TV show: "I don't feel sorry for me or for anybody else in the matter, that's not what it's about. The broader issue, I feel sorry for the murder of music. I feel sorry for the murder of rock'n'roll which has happened because of the industry. Because of Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh and the lot of them [talent show judges] have murdered music. They're murderers of music! I stand and say it on behalf of every musician in the world and they will all agree with it. I don't give a shit if I hurt them ... All the sexualisation of young people, all the worship of bling and money and diamonds and Pop Idol stuff, Simon Cowell – it all amounts to the murder of music.'' Perhaps O'Connor should take Cowell up on his offer and tell him what she really thinks.

Monkey

World Solar Challenge: winning Dutch car crosses Australia in 33 hours

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:51 AM PDT

Japanese team pipped at the post after running out of power in the rain, while Australians come in seventh

A Dutch team has won the World Solar Challenge for the fifth time after guiding its solar-powered car from Darwin to Adelaide in little more than 33 hours.

The Nuon team's Nuna7 car finished the 3000km race in light drizzle in Adelaide on Thursday, two hours ahead of Japan's Tokai University. Solar Team Twente, also from the Netherlands, was third.

Nuon's latest victory came on a dramatic final day when Tokai University's car was just minutes behind in second place at the final checkpoint at Port Augusta.

However, as the clouds rolled in the Japanese car ran out of power and had to stop north of Adelaide to recharge its batteries. Nuna7 beat the field with an average speed of 90.71 km/h.

Only 10 of the cars in the main Challenger class that set off from Darwin on Sunday completed the distance, with 10 vehicles pulling out. The highest placed Australian team, Arrow, was seventh.

The north-to-south race aims to showcase the leading solar car designs from around the world. Cars are allowed to be in motion only between 8am and 5pm, with teams camping in the outback before setting off again in the morning.

A maximum of 5kW hours of stored energy is allowed, with the rest of the energy derived from the sun.

Oliver Milman

Edward Snowden's father arrives in Russia 'hoping to see son'

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:47 AM PDT

Lon Snowden, met by son's lawyer at Moscow airport, says he hopes to visit his son at undisclosed location

Edward Snowden's father landed in Moscow on Thursday morning and said he hoped to visit his son, who has not been seen in public since he was granted asylum in Russia in August.

The former NSA contractor, who leaked information about US surveillance programmes to the Guardian, was given the right to remain in Russia for a year after spending five weeks in limbo at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport over the summer.

Lon Snowden arrived at the same airport early on Thursday morning and was escorted through the VIP terminal by Anatoly Kucherena, his son's lawyer. Kucherena has been the only channel to Snowden since the 30-year-old whistleblower left the airport, and has refused to give any details about his location, citing security concerns. Snowden is wanted in the US on espionage charges.

"I am his father, I love my son and ... I certainly hope I will have an opportunity to see my son," said Lon Snowden in brief remarks to Russian television crews at the airport. "I am not sure my son will be returning to the US again," he said.

Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong in June and apparently intended to board an onward flight bound for Latin America. However, US authorities cancelled his passport and he remained stuck at the airport for five weeks, before Russia granted him political asylum.

On Thursday, Lon Snowden spoke of his "extreme gratitude that my son is safe and secure and he's free", words that were run repeatedly during the morning on Russian news channels.

President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB spy, does not have much sympathy for whistleblowers and has described Snowden as "a strange guy", but said that Russia had no choice but to offer him asylum.

Before Snowden was given asylum, Putin said that Russia would offer it only on the condition that the whistleblower stopped his leaks. Lon Snowden said on Thursday he understood his son had not been involved in the publication of new information since his arrival in Russia and is "simply trying to remain healthy and safe".

Some have suggested it is likely that Snowden is being held under guard of the FSB, Russia's security service, but the Russians have insisted that they have neither received, nor attempted to extract, any of Snowden's secrets.

Kucherena has previously said that Snowden does have security, but declined to say whether it is provided by the Russian state or a private firm. He said that Snowden has been able to travel around Russia without being recognised and is busy reading books about the country's history and learning the language.

The website Life News, which has close links to the Russian security services, published what it claimed was the first photo of Edward Snowden in Russia earlier this week, which showed a man resembling the former NSA contractor wheeling a supermarket trolley piled with plastic bags of shopping. There has been no confirmation that the photograph is genuine.

Kucherena said that Lon Snowden planned to hold a press conference "soon", and added that other members of the Snowden family plan to visit Moscow in the near future.

Shaun Walker

Same-sex marriage: federal goverment will take ACT law to the high court

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:43 AM PDT

ACT attorney-general rejects George Brandis's advice to defer start of law pending a court challenge

Obama nominates Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve - video

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:38 AM PDT

Barack Obama nominates Janet Yellen on Wednesday as his choice to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve

Edward Snowden's father arrives in Moscow 'hoping to see son'

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:36 AM PDT

Lon Snowden lands at Sheremetyevo airport and meets lawyer for intelligence contractor who exposed huge NSA data trawl

Lon Snowden, father of the NSA files leaker Edward Snowden, has arrived in Moscow, according to reports.

The Reuters news agency said Lon Snowden had stated he hoped to see his son but added there had been no direct contact between them. He believed his son had not been involved in any further publication of information about the NSA's electronic surveillance activities since he arrived in Russia from Hong Kong.

Russia Today said Lon Snowden's flight touched down on Thursday morning at Sheremetyevo airport where his son spent five weeks in the transit area before receiving asylum in Russia.

Edward Snowden's Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, was seen in the terminal accompanying Lon Snowden and they later spoke briefly to the media but his son was not seen anywhere near the airport, Russia Today said.

It quoted Lon Snowden as saying his son would probably never return to the US: "I have no idea what [Edward's] intentions are but ever since he has been in Russia my understanding is that he has simply been trying to remain healthy and safe and he has nothing to do with future stories." He thanked Russia and President Vladimir Putin for sheltering his son.

Edward Snowden was behind a leak of NSA material that allowed the Guardian and other media outlets to expose massive electronic surveillance by the US government and its allies.

The 30-year-old systems analyst has been charged in federal court in Virginia with violations of the US espionage act.

Gravity 'celebrates presence of God' say US Christian reviewers

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:19 AM PDT

Christian critics in the US praise the spiritual candour and apparent faith in a deity expressed in Alfonso Cuaron's film, which George Clooney denies writing a key scene

• Your questions for Gravity star Sandra Bullock

It has picked up almost universally positive reviews and is being tipped for Oscars glory next year. Now Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity has begun to pick up praise from a surprising source - Christian critics who say the 3D space spectacular celebrates the presence of God in the universe.

Paul Asay of the Christian review blog Plugged In said Gravity showed "the paradoxes of the Christian faith echoed on the screen" and appeared to reference resurrection themes, the concept of a personal interaction with God and of hope in the afterlife.

"The film deals with spirituality honestly, not explicitly from a Christian perspective, but you can take it as such," he told the Christian Post. "If you follow the trail, it will lead right to Christianity."

Craig Detweiler, described as an author, filmmaker, cultural commentator, and associate professor of Communication at Pepperdine University, said the film was explicitly "theistic."

"She literally says thank you," the reviewer told the Christian Post. "You don't hear God called by name, but she does address characters on the other side of life in heaven, clearly believes in an afterlife, and clearly expresses thanks to an unnamed almighty."

Detweiler said Gravity dealt with "life's ultimate questions – why we are here, why live, what happens after we die". He added: "It takes grief seriously and encourages us to press on because of the promise of eternal life."

Finally, Christian reviewer Professor Eric Hann of Biola University said the film showed how a personal God could give new meaning and purpose to a suffering soul. "I don't know that I would make the claim that the film gestures toward Christ himself, but a God who interacts with events, who does miracles – there's a definite argument in that," he said.

Cuaron's film, which features Bullock and George Clooney as an astronaut and medical engineer working together to survive after an accident leaves them cast adrift in space, opened in top spot at the US box office at the weekend with $55.6m (£34.6m), in the process breaking the all-time record for an October debut. It was also released in Australia last week, and is due to debut in UK cinemas on 8 November.

Meanwhile, Clooney has denied writing a key scene in Gravity, despite comments by Cuaron to the contrary. "I didn't write any scene," Clooney told The Wrap. "That scene was there from the minute I was handed the script. The problem they were having was afterward."

Cuaron had earlier told Vulture: "There was one scene we were doing over and over and over, and George overheard that we were dealing with that. And then one night I receive an email from him, saying, 'I heard you were struggling with this. I took a shot with the scene, Read it. Throw it out.' And we ended up using it. This was exactly what we needed."

• Gravity: first look review
• Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón reveals studio pressure to change story

Ben Child

Libyan prime minister kidnapped

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:10 AM PDT

Ali Zeidan taken from hotel in Tripoli by gunmen and driven away to an undisclosed location, government confirms
Libyan PM Zeidan seized by gunmen - live updates

Armed men have kidnapped the Libyan prime minister, Ali Zeidan, from the hotel in Tripoli where he lives.

"The head of the transitional government, Ali Zeidan, was taken to an unknown destination for unknown reasons," the Libyan government said on its website, attributing the kidnapping to a group of men believed to be former rebels.

The abduction early Thursday comes amid anger among Libya's powerful Islamic militant groups over the US special forces raid on Saturday that seized a Libyan al-Qaida suspect known as Abu Anas al-Libi. Several groups accused the government of colluding in or allowing the raid, though the government denied having any prior knowledge of the operation.

Hours before the abduction Zeidan had met with al-Libi's family, the Associated Press said.

Abu Dhabi-based Sky News Arabia quoted Libyan security sources as saying that Zeidan was seized from the hotel and taken to an unknown destination. Dubai-based al-Arabiya carried a similar report.

According to CNN, armed rebels escorted Zeidan from the Corinthian Hotel in Tripol and took him away in a car. The news service quoted a hotel clerk as saying there was no gunfire and the gunmen "caused no trouble".

Zeidan's office initially denied the abduction on Facebook but later stated the denial was made at the order of the kidnappers.

The Libyan cabinet held an emergency meeting on Thursday morning, headed by Zidan's deputy, Abdel-Salam al-Qadi.

Reflecting the divided and chaotic state of Libya's government, Zidan's seizure was depicted by different sources as either an "arrest" or an abduction

Abdel-Moneim al-Hour, an official with the country's Anti-Crime Committee, told the Associated Press that Zidan had been arrested on accusations of harming state security and corruption. But the public prosecutor's office said it had issued no warrant for Zidan's arrest.

A government official said two guards abducted with Zidan were beaten but later released.

US state department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, travelling in Brunei with the secretary of state, John Kerry, said: "We are looking into these reports and we are in close touch with senior US and Libyan officials on the ground."

Red Cross warning on recovery: statistics hide the UK's bottom line

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:09 AM PDT

Relative poverty may have fallen but the poorest are getting poorer in absolute terms

Caught between falling incomes and government cuts, the recession has made a hard life harder for the poorest in Britain. The visible signs of this can be found on the country's streets with rising numbers rough sleeping, the proliferation of food banks and spread of payday lenders. However, the Red Cross report highlights the difficulty of capturing this changing landscape in statistics.

According to the Europe-wide study, income inequality actually fell in the first three years of the recession and the Red Cross implies a drop in relative poverty – that is the number of households existing on less than 60% of median income.

At first sight this appears counterintuitive and jars with personal experience as living standards fall. The reason is prosaic and rooted in the maths of penury.

What has happened in the UK is that the aftermath of the recession saw average incomes fall by near-record amounts - with the result that inequality has dropped to levels last seen in the mid-1990s. Relative poverty too has declined – because the poverty line is also falling. What cannot be denied is that the poorest have been getting worse off in absolute terms.

Consider the latest government figures on poverty, released in June. They show that in one year, an additional 900,000 people fell into absolute low income poverty – that is the legally set baseline of the average 2010 wage.

Or look behind the rhetoric that work is the best route out of destitution. Two in three children in poverty live in households where at least one person works.

Deprivation among working age adults rose in the 12 months to 2012 by 2% despite the private sector creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. About 6.1 million people now find themselves in absolute poverty.

The debate about numbers is not an academic one. The government uses relative poverty figures to make the point that simple redistribution would entrench dependency and ultimately fail to raise living standards across the board.

Iain Duncan Smith, the welfare secretary, argued last year that child poverty targets, enshrined in law, could be hit with an "extra £19bn in welfare transfers".

"That would have been £19bn spent as a one-off, without hope of transformation for those living in poverty. For although income transfers might treat the symptoms, maintaining people just above the relative income line … [but] all too often, the root causes remain unchecked."

However, this rhetoric is built on the idea of relative poverty being an inadequate measure of people's circumstances – the result, while wages are stagnant there are more welfare cuts in the pipeline. This does not help the growing problem of absolute poverty – effectively the impoverishment of entire section of society. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that absolute child poverty projected to stand at 27.2% by 2020/21, compared with the 5% target prescribed by law. For the bottom quarter of society the ladder of opportunity is having its rungs removed before being taken away completely.

Randeep Ramesh

Austerity pushing Europe into social and economic decline, says Red Cross

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:00 AM PDT

Critique of response to EU debt crisis highlights unemployment, widening poverty gap, and growing risk of social unrest

Europe is sinking into a protracted period of deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair as a result of austerity policies adopted in response to the debt and currency crisis of the past four years, according to an extensive study being published on Thursday.

"Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it," says the 68-page report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us."

The damning critique, obtained exclusively by the Guardian, of the policy response to the debt crisis that surfaced in Greece in late 2009 and raised fundamental questions about the viability of the euro single currency, foresees extremely gloomy prospects for tens of millions of Europeans.

Mass unemployment – especially among the young, 120 million Europeans living in or at risk of poverty – increased waves of illegal immigration clashing with rising xenophobia in the host countries, growing risks of social unrest and political instability estimated to be two to three times higher than most other parts of the world, greater levels of insecurity among the traditional middle classes – all combine to make a European future more uncertain than at any time in the postwar era.

"As the economic crisis has planted its roots, millions of Europeans live with insecurity, uncertain about what the future holds. This is one of the worst psychological states of mind for human beings. We see quiet desperation spreading among Europeans, resulting in depression, resignation and loss of hope. Compared to 2009, millions more find themselves queuing for food, unable to buy medicine nor access healthcare. Millions are without a job and many of those who still have work face difficulties to sustain their families due to insufficient wages and skyrocketing prices.

"Many from the middle class have spiralled down to poverty. The amount of people depending on Red Cross food distributions in 22 of the surveyed countries has increased by 75% between 2009 and 2012. More people are getting poor, the poor are getting poorer."

The survey conducted in the first half of this year "mapped" the 28 countries of the EU plus a further 14 in the Balkans, eastern Europe and central Asia.

In the EU, it found that the grave impact of the crisis was not confined to the crisis-ravaged, bailed-out countries of southern Europe and Ireland, but extended to relative European success stories such as Germany and parts of Scandinavia.

Last year the Spanish Red Cross launched a national appeal to help people in Spain, the first ever. Suicides among women in Greece have at least doubled. Many employed in Slovenia have not been paid for months. In France 350,000 people fell below the poverty line from 2008 to 2011. One in five Finns born in 1987 have been treated for psychiatric or mental disorders, associated with the economic slump in Finland in the 1990s.

Despite Germany's vaunted success in avoiding the high levels of unemployment prevalent across much of the EU, a quarter of the country's employed are classified as low-wage earners, almost half of new job contracts since 2008 have been low-paid, flexible, part-time so-called mini-jobs with little security and usually no social benefits. In July last year 600,000 employed in Germany with social insurance did not have enough to live on.

The problems are also affecting Europe's wealthiest societies, such as Denmark and Luxembourg, the study found.

In the Baltic states and Hungary up to 13% of the populations have left in recent years due to economic hardship. The study reports a mounting trend of intra-European migration, mainly from east to west, in search of work.

The jobs crisis is one of the most debilitating issues facing the EU and the eurozone. Of more than 26 million unemployed in the EU, those out of work for longer than a year stands at 11 million, almost double the level of five years ago when the international financial crisis broke out in the US.

The social impact is immense, the study found. In Greece and Spain adult children with families are moving back in with their parents, several generations are living in single households with one breadwinner between them. It is now a common sight to find formerly prosperous middle-class men and women sleeping rough in Milan, Italy's financial capital.

Youth unemployment figures in a quarter of the countries surveyed ranged from 33% to more than 60%. But as destructive to families, the report said, is the soaring jobless levels among 50-64 year-olds which has risen from 2.8 million to 4.6 million in the EU between 2008 and 2012.

"The rate at which unemployment figures have risen in the past 24 months alone is an indication that the crisis is deepening, with severe personal costs as a consequence, and possible unrest and extremism as a risk. Combined with increasing living costs, this is a dangerous combination," the study said.

Despite the perceived success of Germany, Europe's economic engine, the study takes the EU's biggest country to illustrate the widening wealth gap, raising questions about the longevity of the EU's traditional model, the social market economy. According to Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation some 5.5 million Germans have lost their middle-class social status over the past decade and fallen into the ranks of low-income earners while at the same time half a million others made the grade as high-income earners.

Ian Traynor

Dayanita Singh's best photograph – a sulking schoolgirl

Posted: 10 Oct 2013 12:00 AM PDT

'I had an epiphany after taking this. I rushed back to Delhi and rethought all my photographs'

The girl in the photograph is me and the girl in the photograph is you. We've all been there: coming home from school, too much homework to do, hungry. You don't want to deal with anything – you just want to shut yourself off from the world. I still feel that way sometimes. I think everybody does.

I'm friends with the girl in the picture – and her sister, mother and grandmother. I've been photographing her since she was a child. This was taken in her home in Kolkata. I was taking shots of her in her uniform after school and, at a certain point, she got a little irritated with me and went to her room. We were sort of playing when I took this photograph. It was a winter afternoon – Indian winter. I remember the light very well and the feeling of deja vu that came over me.

I called the image Go Away Closer. The words formed in my mind the moment I made the photograph. Go Away Closer is what happens between people: I can't live with you, I can't live without you. It could be another way of describing love. It's also what happens with photography – you try desperately to hold on to something, but the moment you take the photograph it's already in the past.

You could say taking this shot gave me an epiphany. I realised I had taken a lot of photographs that captured the same feeling, but had never used them because they didn't fit in with whatever theme I was working on at the time. I rushed back to Delhi, went through my contact sheets, and saw that there was a more interesting way to edit photographs – not through an obvious "theme" but through what's going on intuitively or subconsciously. When I put my Go Away Closer book together, I was amazed I had ignored these photographs before. They all worked so well together. I called the book a novel without words.

At heart, I photograph to make books. I have always wondered why exhibitions are made up of single images in frames, behind glass, hung on the wall. Now I create portable "museums" – wooden structures that display 30 or 40 images at a time, with up to 100 in reserve. They are like giant books, and allow me to change what's on display during a show. There's a Museum of Embraces, a Museum of Machines, a Museum of Chance. This image is in the Museum of Little Ladies – alongside me as a little lady, photographed by my mother.

The CV

Born: New Delhi, India, 1961.

Studied: Visual communications at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India.

High point: "My show at the Hayward in London. Everything I did up to now was for this."

Low point: "What may have seemed like a low point turned out to be a great thing for me. I was at a Zakir Hussain concert when I was 18 and the organiser stopped me from taking photographs. After the show I spoke to Zakir and he invited me to his rehearsal. That night, I decided to become a photographer – so what initially felt like a rejection had amazing results.

Influences: "Italo Calvino and Gustav Mahler."

Top tip: "Read, read, read. Forget studying photography – just go and study literature. Then you will bring something to the photography."

Theresa Malone

Two Dreamliner flights turn back

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:40 PM PDT

Boeing 787s operated by Japan Airlines abandon flights – one due to broken toilets and the other with a deicing malfunction

Two of Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner planes flown by Japan Airlines have turned back with technical problems in the space of 24 hours.

JAL was forced to turn around its Tokyo-bound flight from Moscow on Thursday due to a problem in the jet's toilet system, a spokesman for the carrier said.

The flight, carrying 141 passengers, departed Moscow on Wednesday evening and returned after about five hours, he said. It is a 10-hour flight between the two cities.

JAL spokesman Takuya Shimoguchi said the toilet malfunction on the flight from Moscow was most likely caused by an electronic glitch and the plane was being repaired.

Separately, a Dreamliner headed to Tokyo was diverted back to San Diego because of a possible problem with its deicing system.

The flight left Lindbergh Field shortly after 1.30pm local time on Wednesday but turned around and landed back in San Diego by 3.10pm, local news reports said.

Airline officials said the pilot received an error message for the deicing system and decided to go back to San Diego for repairs.

The incidents follow a spate of problems since the Dreamliner's first flight in December 2009, including overheating batteries that forced the grounding worldwide of the fleet for three months this year. Boeing redesigned the battery systems to the satisfaction of US aviation regulators.

JAL made headlines this week by signing with Boeing rival Airbus for its next generation of long-haul jets.

The Australian airline Jetstar took delivery of the country's first Dreamliner on Wednesday.

Tony Abbott defends entitlements, saying he won't be changing the system

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:31 PM PDT

'You don't want members of parliament to be prisoners of their offices,' says prime minister as he resists call for an inquiry

Tony Abbott has resisted Labor's call for an inquiry into the parliamentary entitlements scheme, saying he has no plans to change the system.

The prime minister told reporters travelling with him at the East Asian summit in Brunei there would always be quibbles with the system at the margins, but parliamentarians needed to be able to conduct their business.

"I'm not proposing to change the system," Abbott said on Thursday. "If people want to make suggestions, they're welcome to make suggestions, but I'm not proposing to change the system."

Abbott's overseas business this week at Apec and the East Asian summit has been dogged by questions about his use of parliamentary entitlements. Questions about his expenses claims for weddings, for sporting events and for his annual charity bike ride, the pollie pedal, have followed him first to Bali, and now to Brunei.

The prime minister repaid $1,700 in expenses he claimed for attending the 2006 weddings of former Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella and former House of Representatives speaker Peter Slipper.

But he has dug in to defend claims worth thousands of dollars more. He has also rebuffed an overture by Labor to hold an inquiry to achieve more clarity about what can be claimed and what cannot be claimed.

In Brunei on Thursday, Abbott said parliamentarians needed to be able to travel. "I think it is important that members of parliament, ministers, prime ministers, opposition leaders, be able to travel pretty freely around our country in order to do their job," he said.

"You don't want members of parliament to be prisoners of their offices. You don't want members of parliament to be shut up in Canberra.

"If we are going to do our job of representing the people of Australia, we've got to be able to move freely amongst the people of Australia."

Katharine Murphy

Albert Hall hosts first sumo tournament held outside Japan: From the archive, 10 October 1991

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:30 PM PDT

As part of the Japan Festival, the event draws a big crowd willing to pay up to £300 for a ticket

It is unnerving if somewhat exhilarating to find a 25 stone sumo wrestler hurtling towards you as he is tossed out of the ring by his 30 stone opponent.

Still, that's what those kneeling on Japanese cushions in the front of the Royal Albert Hall last night had paid £95 a ticket for. The chance to see sumo wrestlers in all their flesh.

Like most things Japanese it began with a lengthy ritual - a sort of sumo hokey cokey to both national anthems. Much leg shaking, arm shaking, throwing around of salt and 'power water' and bowing to the referee - who was sporting a dagger with which to kill himself should he make a wrong decision.

And then, at last, on they came. Konishiki, the 36st 8lbs Dumptruck , Terao, the Typhoon, Akonishima, the Killer Whale, and Takamisugi, the Temple Gong.

Thrusting out, thrusting in, they bounced and crouched like fat Buddhas, their boiled chicken bottoms quivering with excess weight.

Each bout was announced by the Yobidashi who summoned the 30 or so fighters into the ring with a high pitched nasal whine, rather like a town crier with a cold.

Once in the ring the contestants wear only traditional thick silk belts with starched tassles (if it comes off they are immediately disqualified). Their Yobidashi wore only traditional kimonos - with Hitachi scribbled all over them.

Under a makeshift wooden chapel roof hanging precariously from the ceiling, they could have been some strange tribe of sporting monks performing ancient rites.

To a nation of cricket lovers, the rules of sumo are boringly simple. He who pushes his opponent on to the floor or out of the ring wins.

The crowd roared its appreciation. Those entertaining Japanese businessmen in the corporate hospitality boxes tinkled reassuring applause with pudding forks and their champagne glasses.

It is the first time a 'Basho' has been held outside Japan for 1,500 years and the ticket touts were taking advantage. Thirty minutes before the performance £7.50 seats in the gods were exchanging hands for £300. All five shows, seating 5,500 people, are sold out.

Introduced to Britain by Channel 4, sumo's origins lie in rural Japanese rituals traced back over 2,000 years.

Back home the sportsmen are treated as gods. Each wrestler leads a highly ritualistic life - the equivalent of a sporting monk.

Most join their 'stables' aged 15 and aim to reach 18 stone by force feeding as soon as possible. They rise at dawn, exercise until lunchtime, then eat. And eat. The afternoons are for sleeping and storing calories.

'It's the physical expertise I find so fascinating,' said Beverley Emery, a sports teacher, who paid £60 for her ticket.

'I mean how can they be so balletic yet so big? You'd imagine they'd have bad feet with all that fat to carry and yet their footwork is amazing. They are so quick.'

Her husband likened the event to a bullfight. Except that the Dumptruck is heavier than a bull. And no one gets hurt.

'My family think I'm mad,' said Nigel Freeland. 'Some people see them just as overweight fatties but I think they're professional, they're doing a job.' His wife, a bank clerk, admitted she hadn't told anyone at work that she was coming.

Earlier the dohyo, sumo's equivalent to a boxing ring, was purified by the top ranking referee clothed in the white robes of a Shinto priest. Not only does this transform the ground into sacred terrain it also symbolises a desire that none of the fighters is hurt.

After consecrating the 40 tons of clay and straw by sprinkling a carafe of sake the referee then buried a jar of rice in the centre - presumably just in case the Dumptruck got hungry.

Joanna Coles

Unemployment rate drops to 5.6%, thanks partly to jobs created by federal election

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:09 PM PDT

Analysts believe monthly figures are likely to be a temporary halt before unemployment rises again in subsequent quarters

Manpower recruited for the federal election and a fall in the number of people looking for work have contributed to a fall in the unemployment rate to a four-month low.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.6% in September, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said, beating economists' expectations of 5.8%.

The number of people with jobs rose 9,100 while the participation rate – the proportion of the population that have a job, are looking for work or ready to start work – fell to 64.9% from 65% in August.

The fall in the participation rate – as well as the creation of jobs for the federal election, in roles such as operating polling booths – nudged unemployment lower, National Australia Bank's senior economist, David de Garis, said.

"The employment numbers last month and this month have been flattered somewhat by the election," he said.

"That unemployment rate probably isn't going to be fuel for any talk of a rate cut, next month anyway, unless the consumer price index is really low."

The September CPI will be released by the bureau on 23 October.

Commonwealth Bank senior economist Michael Workman put the lower unemployment rate down to the fall in the participation rate. The figure of 64.9% in September was a seven-year low.

"Employment growth is just not enough to cover the number of new entrants into the workforce," Workman said.

"Generally the unemployment rate should be rising, it's just this oddity with the participation rate in this survey that is producing an unemployment rate that is not going to 6% yet, but is most likely to get there in the next quarter or two."

Workman said he expected the unemployment rate to start stabilising in the first half of 2014 and then to trend downwards.

He said the possibility of the Reserve Bank cutting the cash rate this year was quite unlikely and the chance of a reduction next year was unclear.

"It really depends on how high the unemployment rate gets over the next few quarters on whether the RBA goes again," he said.

ANZ's head of Australian economics, Justin Fabo, said the September unemployment rate was consistent with the stabilisation of other employment market indicators.

"Jobs ads measures have increased modestly recently and firms have reported that the level of spare capacity in their businesses has reduced a little over the past few months," he said.

"Today's data and the slight improvement in the suite of other labour market indicators are consistent with the RBA being on hold for several months."

Fabo said ANZ had changed its forecast for the RBA's cash rate. "Until last week we had pencilled in a rate cut for November but pushed this out to February next year," he said.

"The recent improvement in confidence and stabilisation in labour market conditions is welcome but is still only tentative evidence that economic activity is improving from below-trend rates rather than just stabilising."

Senator appears to have copied tracts of text for report on European study trip

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Statement of findings by Labor's Gavin Marshall – a member of the committee overseeing government publishing standards – contains paragraphs taken from online reports and websites

Paul Farrell

Kara Walker's art: shadows of slavery

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

Kara Walker's racially charged art provokes strong feelings – not least from other black American artists. On the eve of her first major UK show, she tells Laura Barnett why that's good

Two years ago, Kara Walker came across a news story in an edition of the 19th-century Atlanta newspaper the Daily Constitution. The year was 1878; the piece described, in excruciating detail, the recent lynching of a black woman. The mob had tugged down the branch of a blackjack tree, tied the woman's neck to it, and then released the branch, flinging her body high into the air.

This terrible fragment of the past has made its way into a large graphite drawing, now hanging inside the Camden Arts Centre, London, where Walker is about to have her first major UK solo show. Like much of her work, the drawing is both beautiful and disturbing: here, in grotesque, cartoonish monochrome, is the blackjack tree, the lynched woman spilling blood, her assailants laughing as she dies. As I stand and stare, Walker tells me why she was so drawn to the story. "It's this completely absurd, extreme, violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity."

Her London show is not large – just three rooms, with 11 recent works – but it is significant and overdue. Walker is one of the most uncompromising contemporary American artists, not just for the quality of her work – which comprises drawing, film, and her signature medium, silhouettes – but for the fact that her art engages with what many would rather forget: the appalling violence meted out to the black population before and after the American civil war and the abolition of slavery, and the legacy of racism that still shapes the US political agenda.

Another drawing, Urban Relocator, shows a hooded, Klan-like figure next to a bare cotton tree: this is, Walker says, partly inspired by the boll weevil cotton plague that – along with the violence many freed slaves endured – led many black families, including Walker's, to abandon their land in the south for a better life in the northern states. "My own family were once given a piece of land," she says. "I started thinking about what happened to that land; about what made so many people leave the south, whether it was social violence, or domestic terrorism, or economic strife."

Walker is at her most provocative when interrogating the stereotyping that defined race relations in the antebellum south, and still exists today. The largest room in her show is lined with "wall samplers": the cut-out silhouettes that show figures engaged in violent or exaggerated acts: a man bending down to fellate an oversized phallus; a woman in a wide-skirted dress holding a severed head. The effect is to make us question not only the cultural representations of black people (there is, as Walker points out, a whiff of "minstrels and blackface" about some of the figures) but also our assumptions about how skin colour defines anyone's physical characteristics and behaviour.

Walker has exhibited widely in the US, and at 27 (she's now 43) became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" scholarship. But she has also caused controversy. Exhibitions of her work often provoke strong feelings: staff at a library in Newark, New Jersey, recently reacted with outrage when one of her drawings was displayed there, prompting the head librarian to cover it up. And back when she received the MacArthur grant, she was lambasted by several older African-American artists, including Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. "There were two strains of criticism," Walker says. "One was about the work, and who was looking at it, and me feeding into the viewing audience's preconceived ideas about black people. And the other was that I was just some highfalutin so-and-so."

Her father, the artist Larry Walker, published a letter in her defence. It was under his tutelage that she had first decided to become an artist: she started drawing and painting when she was three. She says neither of her parents has ever felt completely comfortable with her work – her mother walked out of a screening of Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, a sexually explicit shadow-puppet film that features in the London show – but her father argued that his generation of black artists had fought to give future generations the right to make art of any sort. "He was saying, basically, that I should be able to do whatever the hell I want. I think that's what I'm always battling against with my work – part of me wants to resist the pull to be doing what's expected of me as a black artist."

It was while studying art as an undergraduate in Atlanta that Walker first felt this pull: an expectation, from her professors and fellow students alike, that as a black artist she should be striving to represent the "black experience" positively. "I was making big paintings, with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side'. These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with."

A key moment came when Walker discovered Adrian Piper, the conceptual artist and philosopher who, in the 1970s, made a series of performance works featuring herself as an androgynous, racially indeterminate young man. "It was the first voice that resonated with me, in talking about race with objectivity and sternness," she says. "Until then, I only knew 'black art' in the romantic sense – that it was only about positive representations of African American life."

Walker began to think about what she really wanted to say. She was born in Stockton, California, and moved to an Atlanta suburb at the age of 13, when her father took a job there. After liberal California, the racial tensions of the south came as a shock. "I just didn't get the rules," she says. "I didn't know what the story was that made people behave in very particular ways that I thought were prescripted and unnatural. I started looking for my own point of origin: maybe the point of origin was being American, or being black, or being a woman. I thought, 'I'll start with the foundation of this idea of a place, of America, and then work my way forward.'"

Walker sees a direct line between the racist historical attitudes she examines in her work and current events. She took a road trip last year with her daughter from Brooklyn, where she lives, to the southern states. They visited diners where the heads of old white men turned to give them "the 20-second stare". They swam in a motel pool, watching the other (white) bathers suddenly vanish; Walker heard a small girl say to her father: "I thought there were no niggers here."

Then there is the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the distasteful obsession with Barack Obama's skin colour. "There's so much suspicion around having a biracial president," she says, "around Obama's presence on the world stage – the fact that the Tea Party gets coverage as anything other than a fringe group. There's nothing Obama can say or do as a black man that they're [willing] to hear."

Walker is by now used to viewers being discomfited not only by the fact that her work dares to speak openly about race and identity, but that it may even be making fun of such viewers. "It makes people queasy," she says. "And I like that queasy feeling."

Laura Barnett

Mark 'Chopper' Read, Ned Kelly and our fascination with dangerous outcasts | Chrsitian Read

Posted: 09 Oct 2013 10:36 PM PDT

Christian Read: Ruthless criminal Mark Read has died, sparking an outpouring of public affection. Australians do love their outlaws, but what's behind this fascination for such violent characters?

Christian Read