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It's baking me mad. Why it's time to call a halt to this latest food fetishism
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai – review
Bill Shorten is the new Labor leader – it's time for members to get behind him | Kimberley Ramplin
Labor leadership: party ultimately happy to pick up the Bill
Malala: remember the young girl behind the public persona | Catherine Bennett
Quentin Bryce offers to quit but Tony Abbott declines
Indians flee east coast as cyclone Phailin makes landfall
Peru bus crash kills all 51 on board
Bill Shorten wins Labor leadership and pledges to renew trust in party
Peter Slipper says coalition MPs should be charged over expenses
Enda Kenny confirms December date for Ireland's bailout exit
Baby Hope death: police arrest relative
Anna Friel joins campaign against oil exploration in Democratic Republic of the Congo
Commonwealth summit mired in row over Briton shot in Sri Lanka
World shivers with fear as US heads for new debt crisis
Her film about an 'honour' killing won an Emmy. Now it's being used to train police
The ethics of animal tests: inside the lab where marmosets are given Parkinson's
Irish entrepreneurs show signs of life amid positive growth forecasts
The US fears back-door routes into the net because it's building them too
One in six gay or bisexual people has suffered hate crimes, poll reveals
Swiss climber's 'greatest' Himalayan ascent
David Morrissey: 'It's about asking people: Are you happy with what's being done in your name?'
Who pays the price for our cheap goods? | Observer editorial
Huge plaudits for the X-Factor's colour-blindness | Barbara Ellen
Snowden and the press: score-settling is stifling the debate on security and liberty | Observer editorial

It's baking me mad. Why it's time to call a halt to this latest food fetishism

Posted: 13 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

The nation has gone cake crazy – from the adulation for Mary Berry to rows over foodie mashups. Perhaps it's all gone a little too far …

Just in time for national baking week – and just when you thought the whole "gate" thing couldn't get any sillier – along came #duffingate. The row last week between a not so humble London bakery and Starbucks was the icing on the cake for the American "Franken-pastry" trend that has engulfed the foodie world.

Bakery owner Bea Vo, of Bea's of Bloomsbury, who runs four cafes across London, was shocked to discover that "her" invention, the duffin, a cross between a doughnut and a muffin (what was wrong with "muffnut"?), has been trademarked by Starbucks supplier Rich's Products. Supposedly irritating though this may be for the parties involved, it has been a stroke of PR genius for both Bea's and Starbucks, which has never had enjoyed so much fanfare about a new menu item. Google the word "duffin", which was not on anyone's radar a week ago, and you get 2.6m results.

Starbucks says it has no intention of preventing Bea's from making duffins. Which is a good job, because anyone who owns Nigella Lawson's How To Be a Domestic Goddess may have been rolling them in melted butter and granulated sugar at home ever since the book came out in 2000. They're in the section on children's baking. She calls them "jam doughnut muffins".

The duffin row, apart from inspiring such brilliant headlines as "Baking Bad", is a mark of the way baked goods have become big business. Demand for freshly baked bread products in the UK has risen by 20% since 2011, according to international bakery group Lantmannen Unibake. Artisan bakers are also seeing an upsurge in demand for "gourmet bread": sourdough at £4 a loaf and others such as Borodinsky (made with Russian rye).

But it's as much of a DIY thing as a retail trend. When David Cameron struggled recently to guesstimate the price of a loaf of bread – "Well north of a pound?" – he said it was because he likes to bake his own. And as the semi-finals of the Great British Bake Off draw near – now, improbably, in its fourth series and pulling audiences upwards of eight million – the whole nation has gone baking mad. Anything the show touches turns to gold. Even the outfits worn by judge Mary Berry see a sales spike after featuring on the show: a floral bomber jacket by Zara flew out of stores. Berry's autobiography, Recipe for Life, published last month, is already riding high in the bestseller charts.

Just as Delia Smith once quadrupled cranberry sales in 24 hours, the Bake Off effect is well-documented. Last year sales of cake stands at Marks and Spencer rose by 243% in the runup to the series finale. Even flour sales surged (wholemeal up 69%; plain up 20%; self-raising up 10%). John Lewis sold 70% more breadmakers, and baking product sales increased by 67%.

The Women's Institute reports signing up more than 50,000 new members during the first two series. "The show has captured the imagination of the nation and this is reflected in people signing up," it said.

"I think it's a reaction against the mundaneness of so many ready-made baked things," says master baker Dan Lepard, a judge on the Great Australian Bake Off (yes, this brand is now global) and author of Short & Sweet: The Best of Home Baking (Fourth Estate, £25). "We'd all love to open a box of cakes from the supermarket and find that they're extraordinary, but the reality is that they rarely are. Home baking is giving people the results they'd hoped for, and a buzz from knowing they've done it themselves. I know this because people send me their proud pics daily."

In the previous few hours people had tweeted him pictures of oat and sour cherry cookies, chocolate pecan cake and black millionaire's shortbread.

Keen home baker, mother of two daughters and Bake Off superfan Rachel Krys sees the popularity of the show as "a sort of austerity response": "It just feels so frugal to use some leftover butter and a bit of drying fruit to create something delicious. And it's more of a collective activity. I learnt to bake with my nana and my mum. It was something they liked to do. This is probably why I bake with my children: it entertains them while being something I actually need to do."

It feels like there is a tension, though, between rediscovering the innocent pleasures of home baking and pushing the limits of frenzied, trend-hungry consumerism. Duffingate is the economic side of foodie fetishism. Bea Vo, a former head pastry chef at Michelin-starred restaurant Nobu in London, said: "They own the trademark. The only purpose of owning the trademark is to protect the name. But they're protecting something that they clearly aren't the originator of."

Vo has been selling "duffins" since 2011. "It's like saying we trademarked the word fairycake and we're going to let this one person make fairy cakes because they've come up with it. But everyone else, well, we're going to fuck them over." And the lowest blow is that the Starbucks product "isn't even a true doughnut-muffin," Vo sniffs. "It's a jam-filled muffin."

The duffin is a byproduct of the "cronut" (croissant-doughnut) craze that took off in May in New York when an experiment with rose Tahitian vanilla pastries at Dominique Ansel's bakery went viral. On the first day it made a batch of 50. On the third day it had sold out of 200 by 9.30am. One customer responded to news of this by sticking his finger up to staff. Then, although the $5 luxury cronut is said to be best consumed within six hours of purchase, a secondary market sprang up online at Craigslist, where they change hands for $25.

Since then bakeries have been rushing to invent their own mashups and trademark the name. The US press has already dubbed the trend "the overhyped hybrid pastry fad". The Starbucks consumerist seal of approval either represents the end of a foodie trend or the start of a whole new Franken-pastry era.

Among amateur bakers online, the craze has already spawned dozens of sickening/exciting (delete according to taste) "me too" creations: doughnut macaroons, ice-cream cupcakes, croissant pretzels, doughnut brownies and "pie cakes" (a pie with a sponge base).

Already many of the offerings on the Great British Bake Off are veering into this territory. Only in an obsessive foodie-focused culture could you present a prune and armagnac pudding with armagnac butterscotch sauce (Bake Off week seven) or a rose, almond and raspberry filo pie. The Great British Bake Off represents the Britain many people wish they lived in. But it's also supposedly a place where it's completely normal to keep cardamom, crystallised roses and harissa in your larder. Last week's "Signature Wheat-Free Bake" offering from Bake Off favourite Ruby Tandoh? Mango and nigella seed spelt cob.

My grandad, a grocer who got up at 6am six days a week for 30 years to take delivery of a lorryful of simple jam doughnuts, would have wept with shame.

Viv Groskop

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai – review

Posted: 13 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

A year after she was shot by the Taliban, this extraordinary schoolgirl's words are a reminder of all that is best in human nature

Like many Pashtun girls in the Swat valley in Pakistan, Tor Pekai attended school briefly at the age of six. Many years later, in her 30s, on Tuesday 9 October 2012, she went back to restart her education. In a terrible irony, it was also the day that her 15-year-old daughter, Malala Yousafzai, who had campaigned passionately since the age of 11 for the right of girls to have an education, was shot in the head at point-blank range by the Taliban. "Who is Malala?" the gunman had demanded of the pupils on the school bus. A year later, there cannot be many in the world who do not know.

On her 16th birthday in July this year, having been hours from death and endured several operations, deafness and facial paralysis, Malala addressed the United Nations Youth Assembly in New York. "Here I stand, one girl among many," she said. "I raise my voice… so that those without a voice can be heard."

The UN reports that 57 million children were denied an education in 2011. In Malala, who began by keeping a diary of life under the Taliban for BBC Urdu and who went on to speak out fearlessly, in spite of threats and intimidation, they have a crusader who has the composure, fluency and wisdom of far more mature years, yet she also remains a fun-loving teenager of modesty, spirit, humour and charm. "I think they may be regretting that they shot Malala," she said wittily of the Taliban in a recent interview, relishing that a joy in learning can prove such powerful propaganda.

I Am Malala is skilfully ghosted by Christina Lamb, the highly respected foreign correspondent. The teenager's voice is never lost. The youngest-ever nominee for the Nobel peace prize is, of course, extraordinary. However, the book also reveals that she is the daughter of a man of exceptional courage with a profound belief in the right of every child to fulfil his or her potential. In a land that esteems boys and commiserates with the family when a girl is born, Ziauddin was the exception. "Malala will be free as a bird," he vowed. He named his daughter after Malalai of Maiwand, the Pashtun's own Joan of Arc, who rallied Afghan men in 1880 to defeat the British, losing her own life in the process.

Ziauddin, poverty stricken, fought for his own education and went on to found schools for boys and girls. He had a love marriage with Tor Pekai and continued his student activism into adult life.

Then came the Taliban. Led by a school drop-out, Maulana Fazlullah, the men in black turbans wearing badges pledging "sharia law or martyrdom" banned dancing, DVDs (Ugly Betty is a Malala favourite), CDs and beauty parlours. Public whippings, executions and injustice became rife. Malala refers to a 13-year-old girl raped and imprisoned for adultery.

By the end of 2008, the Taliban had destroyed 400 schools. Malala, 11 years old and mostly top of her class, tried to occupy herself with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Rida, a girl from a destroyed school, joined Malala and her best friend, Moniba – "Three is a tricky number," Malala comments, not helped by others "putting masala in the situation".

On 14 January 2009, all the girls' schools were permanently closed. Eleven days earlier, Malala had begun blogging for the BBC, under the pseudonym Gul Makai (cornflower). She gave television interviews. "They can stop me going to school but they can't stop me learning," she said defiantly. Nobody believed the Taliban would kill a child.

Almost 2 million people fled the Swat valley that spring. In May, the Yousafzai family locked up their house and joined the exodus, moving to four cities in two months.

Floods, an earthquake, the Taliban – Malala resolved to become a politician because "there are so many crises and no real leaders". Aged 14, she reflects: "Sometimes I think it's easier to be a Twilight vampire than a girl in Swat." Then came her would-be assassin.

The medical team that saved Malala; her own stoicism and resilience; the support of her family, now, again in exile, this time in Birmingham; Malala's level-headed resolve to continue to champion education and children's rights – these are all powerful reminders of the best in human nature. Much of the money Malala has been awarded has gone to the Malala fund. "Please join my mission," she asks. It's vital that those of us who can, do.

Yvonne Roberts

Bill Shorten is the new Labor leader – it's time for members to get behind him | Kimberley Ramplin

Posted: 13 Oct 2013 12:27 AM PDT

Kimberley Ramplin: Bill Shorten may have received 6,000 fewer rank and file votes than Anthony Albanese, but Labor members should not get caught up in that. The fight against Tories starts now

Kimberley Ramplin

Labor leadership: party ultimately happy to pick up the Bill

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 11:21 PM PDT

In the end the Labor insiders decided that Bill Shorten has always been after this job, so best let him have it

To understand the Shorten victory and the strength of his endorsement by the Labor caucus we really need to talk about "the Bill factor".

It was spoken of, variously, throughout the weeks of the leadership ballot. "The Bill factor" was both an unbridled positive for the Victorian rightwinger in terms of the result and something more shaded in terms of internal perceptions.

The positive internal view of Shorten is that he represents the genuine "next generation" candidate for Labor – the person who, despite his own highly specific role in the intrigues and failures of the period from 2010 to 2013, had most vested interest in moving on from all that and building something entirely new.

There's a more shaded internal view, and it's this. Shorten is a candidate who cannot be avoided – the rationale being that leading the Labor party has been squarely in his sights from the moment he set foot in the parliament, so best let him have it.

Perhaps this view reflects the inevitable backwash of the past six years: Labor people who have learned through having to endure the consequences of the soap opera that was "Julia versus Kevin versus Julia" that some people in politics just won't give up. Whatever its merits, whether it's a fair, close-in "read" on Shorten, or whether it's more about collective post-traumatic stress, it's a view.

This collective internal formulation – "the inevitability of Bill" – suited a number of people in different ways.

It suited the people who genuinely believe Shorten has the little sprinkle of magic and charisma required for successful political leadership. It suited the rightwingers who stood back deliberately from this 2013 leadership contest on the basis that now was not the right time for them. Let him run his course and see what happens. And it suited people who don't know if Shorten's got the magic or not, but really want to find out on the basis that it is best discovered now than closer to the point when Labor might have a shot of taking back government.

Ah yes, new politics (not so much).

Shorten was also benefited specifically in this contest because the right faction rallied, both in the parliamentary wing and in some of the key trade unions, to stop the left leading the party (yes, at some levels, it really was that crude). Albanese was a genuine leftwing candidate, not the right's left candidate (yes, I'm looking at you Julia GIllard) – and the whole democratisation push is viewed by some on the right as a means of boosting the influence of the left.

Quite apart from the merits of Shorten's own talents, the right faction wanted to shore up its own hegemony, to get past the deeply unproductive splits of the Rudd/Gillard period and back to the productive and highly rewarding business of being the significant organising force in the ALP – the enforcers, the disciplinarians, the pragmatists who win elections.

The leadership ballot was an important test case for getting the right back together, back on track, with a common purpose. And the right was proven correct in one sense about democratisation. It certainly did see the left flex its muscle – Albanese almost got there on the strength of the vote from the membership. The membership mightn't identify itself as "left" in a strict factional sense, but it certainly leans progressive.

In any case, the party moves on. Parliament will be back in a few weeks.

Shorten's endorsement from the caucus bodes reasonably well for stability and unity in the period ahead, even if the membership might feel bruised by being asked for its view and having a different reality emerge.

Institutional Labor has locked behind the new leader, who now has the opportunity to seize his moment and show those watching very closely both within and without whether he is, for Labor, really truly the man of the hour.

Katharine Murphy

Malala: remember the young girl behind the public persona | Catherine Bennett

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 10:50 PM PDT

With her huge intelligence and courage it's easy to forget that she is still a teenager. Let's give her space to grow

Soon after the attempt to kill her, and long before she addressed the UN on education and was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, Malala Yousafzai's name was being connected with that of Joan of Arc, burned for heresy at the age of 19. Recent appearances, in which Malala has demonstrated undiminished bravery and defiance of the Taliban have made the comparison yet more popular, even in parts of the media that do not normally encourage child warriors. This is Joan of Arc, at her trial: "One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying."

And this is Malala, at the UN: "The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage were born."

Although it is intended as the highest compliment to Malala's character, the awed invocation of a 15th-century martyr is not, you might think, the most propitious of analogies, or not for a brave, precociously wise teenager whose enemies still want to kill her. As she described to Jon Stewart, last week, how she would, effectively, turn the other cheek to an assassin, the Taliban was reiterating its own threat to destroy her, "whenever we have the chance".

Yousafzai's new book, I am Malala, written with the journalist Christina Lamb, suggests that willed sacrifice is not something from which she, any more than the Taliban, recoils, having been raised, she explains, under the code of Pashtunwali: "The most important value is nang or honour." She was, moreover, named after a revered regional martyr, the 19th-century Malalai of Maiwand. According to Malala, in her moving and illuminating memoir, the early Malalai, the daughter of a shepherd, rallied men fighting the British, with this cry: "Young love! If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand then, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame." Malalai died aged 18; the British were routed.

"In Malalai," Malala writes, "we Pashtuns have our very own Joan of Arc." Her father used to sing her a song that urges Malalai of Maiwand: "Rise once more to make Pashtuns understand the song of honour." There was also room in her life, before the Taliban almost ended it, for cricket, Justin Bieber and the Twilight films.

After journalists recognised her potential, Malala heard about another young martyr. A BBC correspondent, Abdul Hai Kakar, was looking for a schoolgirl to write a blog about life under the Taliban and Malala, then aged 11, volunteered. "He told me about Anne Frank, a 13-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis," Malala writes. "It was very sad as in the end the family was betrayed."

Her family did not think she could be a target, as a child. Rather, her father hoped her appearance, at the centre of a US television documentary about the Taliban's closure of girls' schools would be "our megaphone to the outside world". She said she wanted to be a doctor. "But my father told me that 'you have to become a politician'." As well as dictating a BBC blog, she would make numerous television appearances before her whereabouts were discovered and she was shot on the way home from school.

One of her early patrons, a local journalist, Syed Irfan Ashraf, regretted his part in Malala's transformation into an international, but still utterly vulnerable figure. Interviewed for Vanity Fair by Marie Brenner, he described his actions as "criminal" and told her: "I lured in a child of 11." Writing in Pakistan's English language paper, Dawn, after the attempted murder, Ashraf had deplored the "commodification" of Malala, by both politicians and journalists, and "the media's role in dragging bright young people into dirty wars with horrible consequences for the innocent".

Following Malala's survival (with life-changing injuries), her emigration and the international response to her campaign for girls' education, it became possible, after all, to see her almost tragedy as inspirational and even, with her apparent compliance, as her destiny. Although I am sure her book I am Malala is drenched in homesickness for Swat, "the most beautiful place in all the world", many passages recall nothing so much as those lives of the divines, in which everything, however painful, was meant to be. Malala learns, for instance, a hard lesson about stealing; other parables have her moved to pity by children on a rubbish dump or determined, from her earliest years, to become a politician (not a doctor, any more). "I had been spared for a reason," she finishes her book, "to use my life for helping people."

If that is a fairly extreme thing for a teenager to put on the record, Malala's staggering intelligence and fluency tend to prohibit feeble questions, from comparative cowards, about this commitment to sacrifice. Assuming Malala is happy for her father to describe her as not just his own child, but "the daughter of the world", maybe the world is right to accept her, gratefully, as a valuable emblem of female potential. Her every appearance is a reproach to politicians who have tolerated women's subordination as, at best, a cultural inevitability, at worst, as irrelevant. In any case, given the Pashtun horror of losing face, it is difficult to see how Malala could ever change course, as standard adolescents often do (at least according to champions of Ralph Miliband) and pursue fulfilment elsewhere. A book whose lessons could, and perhaps should have formed a triumphant conclusion to this prize-winning period on the public stage, has committed her, in a final rebuke to her enemies, to never leaving it, not even to complete her education in peace. "My father always says that heroism is in the Pashtun DNA," she writes.

So strong is belief in Malala's power to change the world, and the fear of sustaining her enemies, that you would think, from the uninflected enthusiasm for her mission, that it was entirely without risk. True, Edgbaston is safer than Pakistan, the Swat Valley in particular, but the effervescent editorial mood, as the murder threats keep coming in, is in marked contrast, to anyone old enough to remember, to the concern for Salman Rushdie's wellbeing, when he too was condemned to death by foreign Islamists. And Rushdie was an adult. To endorse Malala's lifelong stand against the Taliban, especially now she has added prime ministerial ambition, like Benazir's, to her vocation, may not be, quite, to promote martyrdom, but it suggests that protecting her is still not the overriding priority, any more than it was when the BBC enlisted her poorly anonymised services in Swat.

In fact, if her assassin's hand had not been shaking, the BBC might still be regretting that it ever encouraged an 11-year-old child to align herself with an iconic victim, as opposed to introducing the now 16-year-old GCSE student as a repository for international hopes. It still seems a lot to ask.

Catherine Bennett

Quentin Bryce offers to quit but Tony Abbott declines

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 10:33 PM PDT

Australian governor general wanted to avoid perception of bias after son-in-law Bill Shorten's election as Labor leader

Tony Abbott has revealed Quentin Bryce offered to resign as Australia's governor general in anticipation of Bill Shorten's election as leader of the opposition Labor party.

Bryce, who is the mother-in-law of Mr Shorten, wanted to avoid any perception of bias.

"I have thanked her for her magnanimity but declined to accept her resignation," Abbott, the prime minister, said in a statement on Sunday.

Instead the prime minister asked Bryce to stay on until March 2014 when her term is due to end.

Bryce's agreement to stay was a measure of her personal commitment to provide continuity at a time of political turbulence, Abbott said. "She should be commended for her dedication to public service."

It was only "fit and proper" that Bryce be permitted to conclude her term and be accorded the appropriate farewell that her exemplary service merited, Abbott said.

Indians flee east coast as cyclone Phailin makes landfall

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 10:02 PM PDT

Half a million people estimated to be seeking shelter or heading inland as widespread destruction and disruption is forecast

Almost half a million people have fled the eastern Indian coast, many leaving just hours before a "super cyclone" hit the country.

The vast weather system – cyclone Phailin – was generating winds of up to 220km/h (136mph) and forcing huge waves far inland before it struck the shores of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh states just after 9pm local time.

Aid and disaster management officials estimated that up to 12 million people lie in its path. They forecast widespread destruction and disruption though believed casualty levels would be "negligible" compared with those in 1999 when a storm killed 10,000 people. "The community is prepared, the government is prepared, the [NGOs] are prepared this time," said Manish Choudhary of the Indian Red Cross Society.

Choudhary said the group had set up 75 cyclone centres and five relief camps and was sending tarpaulins as well as water sanitation equipment to the disaster zone.

Even before landfall, coconut trees in villages along the coast had been bent and broken by the gusting wind. Electricity poles were brought down and roads were littered with debris.

In the first reported deaths, two people were killed by falling trees while a third died when the walls of her mud house collapsed. Another two people died as the storm pressed inland, authorities said.

Reporters described terrified children clinging to their mothers as they sought shelter. Most towns along the coast were deserted but there were still some people trying to flee.

Authorities combed coastal areas for fishing communities unwilling to abandon their boats or others still in the danger zone. Police forcibly evacuated thousands, officials said. Some people took refuge in temples, others crammed into auto-rickshaws and headed inland.

Large numbers of troops were deployed and huge amounts of emergency food stockpiled, Indian media reported.

"This is one of the largest evacuations undertaken in India," said Shashidhar Reddy, vice-chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, who estimated that more than 440,000 people had fled from their homes. Other estimates were as high as 550,000.

Phailin was expected to bring a 3.4-metre (11ft) surge in sea levels when it hit the coast, meteorologists said. Forecasters also warned of extensive damage to mud houses, major disruption to power and communication lines, and the flooding of railways and roads. Flying debris was another threat.

"In a storm of this magnitude there is the potential for widespread damage to crops and livestock in the low-lying coastal areas and houses completely wiped away," said Kunal Shah, the head of the aid group World Vision's emergency response team in India.

London-based agency Tropical Storm Risk classed the storm in category five – the highest such rating. The US Navy's weather service said wind speeds at sea were gusting at 195mph (314km/h).

The storm was expected to cross half of India before losing strength over the central highlands of the vast country by the middle of next week.

Jason Burke

Peru bus crash kills all 51 on board

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 09:53 PM PDT

Authorities say 14 children among dead after vehicle returning from party plunged 200 metres down ravine

A makeshift bus carrying 51 people back from a party in south-eastern Peru has plunged off a cliff into a river, killing everyone on board including 14 children.

The accident happened as the red and yellow cargo truck made its way back from a party in the provincial capital of Santa Teresa, an area about 310 miles (500km) south-east of Lima. It went off the road and fell about 200 metres into a deep ravine, ending up in the Chaupimayo river below.

Rescuers equipped with little more than flashlights spent the night searching without success for survivors amid the twisted steel and large boulders, pulling bodies from the water. Authorities said victims were found as far as 100 metres from the impact site, suggesting they were thrown from the vehicle.

"We haven't found a single survivor," said firefighter Captain David Taboada, who was leading the rescue operation.

Firefighters had said 52 people died in the accident but later in the day Santa Rita police issued a press release saying the official death toll was 51, including 14 children.

The cause of the accident had not been determined, Taboada said, adding that the vehicle was "coming from a party in Santa Teresa at which a lot of alcohol was consumed".

Firefighters were placing the recovered bodies on a soccer field above where the crash took place. Throughout the following day relatives of the victims arrived to identify their loved ones.

Fedia Castro, mayor of the district where Santa Teresa is located, told Canal N television that rural farmers must rely on informal forms of transport, such as this cargo truck, because no public buses exist in the area.

The high-altitude roads of the Peruvian Andes are notorious for bus plunges, with poor farmers comprising many of the victims. Last year, more than 4,000 people were killed in such accidents.

Bill Shorten wins Labor leadership and pledges to renew trust in party

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 09:25 PM PDT

First ever vote involving grassroots members means Victorian rightwinger will lead Australian Labor party into opposition

Bill Shorten will take the Australian Labor party into opposition after the September election defeat, having prevailed in the first leadership ballot in the party's history that included the votes of grassroots party members.

Shorten's victory was built on strong endorsement from the ALP parliamentary caucus, where he attracted 63.95% of the vote.

The rival candidate, the New South Wales leftwinger and former deputy prime minister Anthony Albanese, was the wider party members' choice, securing almost 60% support in the grassroots ballot.

Shorten, the Victorian rightwinger, emerged on Sunday victorious with 52.02% of the combined vote. The two ballots, from caucus and the members, held equal weight.

Caucus meets on Monday to elect a new shadow frontbench. Shorten said he would allocate portfolios by Friday. The new opposition leader on Sunday also made it clear that he would like the New South Wales leftwinger and former health minister Tanya Plibersek to serve as his deputy leader.

The resolution of the Labor leadership after the month-long ballot process triggered a statement by the prime minister, Tony Abbott, concerning the immediate future of the governor general, Quentin Bryce.

Abbott said he had refused an offer of early resignation from Bryce, who is Shorten's mother-in-law. Bryce is due to step down from her post next March. "The governor general offered to leave office early to avoid any perception of bias," Abbott said.

"But due to the fact that she will retire in March next year and that the government commands the House of Representatives with a significant margin, I have thanked her for her magnanimity but declined to accept her resignation, instead asking that she conclude her full term.

"I am grateful that she has kindly agreed to my request."

Shorten said on Sunday that the resolution of the leadership contest "provides for the first time in a very long time not only a break from the some of the past disunity, but indeed a very solid platform for the leadership of Labor and for the Labor party to be able to offer a united alternative to the Coalition."

He acknowledged his comparative lack of support among party members. "I ... know that this ballot shows that there are still things for me to learn," Shorten said.

"I enjoyed the strong support of the parliamentary party and of course thousands of members of the Labor party, but there are lessons here for me to learn going forward, and I certainly look forward to working with Anthony Albanese to understand some of those lessons."

Shorten backed the party's carbon price, saying he would support continuing the policy in opposition. He confirmed Labor under his leadership would vote against Tony Abbott's first piece of legislation: the repeal of carbon pricing, expected to be debated when parliament resumes in mid-November.

He promised a collaborative approach to policy development in opposition. "This ballot is the start of the process of developing the right policies which are then explained with persistence," Shorten said.

"It is the opportunity for Labor to start again the process of renewing the trust of hundreds of thousands of Australians who moved their vote away from Labor in the last two elections."

Shorten said caucus would develop future policy and "I will certainly spend more time listening to my caucus than talking at them".

Key rightwing figures on Sunday positioned themselves to undo some elements of the democratisation reforms advanced by Kevin Rudd that underpinned this leadership ballot.

In addition to grassroots participation in leadership ballots, Rudd in July emerged with agreement that a caucus super-majority of 75% be required to trigger a future leadership spill when the party is in government. The majority required when the party is in opposition would be 60%.

The former New South Wales state secretary and senator-elect Sam Dastyari said Labor needed to dump the super-majority. "I think that's a sensible thing to change," Dastyari told Sky News, arguing the Labor leadership should be decided by a simple majority.

For his part Shorten backed the reforms allowing members to vote for the party leader but said of the super-majority: "I am open on that question."

Anthony Albanese issued a public warning on Sunday against efforts to unwind the recent party reforms. "This is not the end point of democratisation of the Australian Labor party, this is just the beginning, and I say to those who have questioned this process, just try and dismantle it, because having been given a vote, the membership want more," he said.

Albanese predicted implicitly that factional leaders would move to shore up their own power. "If I can be forgiven for quoting another Italian, Michael Corleone, in Godfather III: 'Real power cannot be given, it must be taken.' It was taken off the factional bosses and given to the rank and file," Albanese said. Party membership had grown as a consequence of the changes, he added.

Albanese endorsed Shorten's leadership. "Bill Shorten will be, as I said during the campaign, a great Labor leader. He has my total loyalty in that position." Following his defeat in the ballot he would resume being a "team player", Albanese said.

Albanese warned colleagues against outbreaks of ill-discipline. "[Bill Shorten] needs to run a disciplined show. If anyone steps out of line he needs to discipline them and I will be there standing by him to assist in that process."

Katharine Murphy

Peter Slipper says coalition MPs should be charged over expenses

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 07:32 PM PDT

Former speaker of Australian parliament says prosecuting him is a double standard and Liberal party conspired against him

Peter Slipper, the disgraced former speaker of the Australian parliament, says it is a double standard for him to be facing charges of misusing taxpayer-funded cab dockets when other MPs have been allowed to pay back travel entitlements they wrongly claimed.

Recent revelations include senior figures in the new coalition government claiming travel allowances for attending weddings, as well as Tony Abbott, the incoming prime minister, getting taxpayers to cover his flights and accommodation when he entered various sporting events.

A number of MPs have since paid back money.

"I think that either the charges against me should be dropped or everyone else should be charged," Slipper told ABC TV on Sunday.

"There's a double standard here."

An emotional Slipper claimed the stress of a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by former staffer James Ashby cost his wife, Inge-Jane Hall, a chance at motherhood. She had abandoned IVF treatment following the "politically motivated allegations".

"Inge was just getting to a situation where she felt her state of mind was such that she could go through that traumatic process [IVF] again, then all of a sudden Ashbygate descended," he said.

"She now feels that [the case] cost her the opportunity to be a mother."

Slipper said his life had been destroyed by the "conspiracy" against him. "There's no doubt in my view that Ashbygate reaches to the highest level of the Liberal party," he said.

"It was part of a plot to not only destroy my speakership, political career, but also bring down the newly elected government of Australia."

Federal court Judge Steven Rares ruled in December that Ashby had "pursued a political attack" against his former boss, "in combination" with others including Mal Brough, who was a minister under former prime minister John Howard.

Brough denies any wrongdoing. He ousted Slipper from parliament in the September federal election, winning the seat of Fisher on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Slipper has pleaded not guilty to charges arising from his use of a government Cabcharge card for a tour of wineries in the Canberra area.

Enda Kenny confirms December date for Ireland's bailout exit

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 05:23 PM PDT

Republic's prime minister says country is on course to 'retrieve economic sovereignty and independence'

Ireland will leave the international bailout programme run by Europe and the IMF on 15 December, the republic's prime minister has promised.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the country was now on course to "retrieve our economic sovereignty and independence".

The exit from the IMF/EU bailout will fulfill one of the key goals of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition since it came to power. The last Fianna Fáil-led government had to go cap in hand to the IMF and the EU back in November 2010 to seek a multibillion euro rescue package and save the country from national bankruptcy.

Kenny told his Fine Gael party's annual conference in Limerick on Saturday night: "There's still a long way to go. But at last, the era of the bailout will be no-more. The economic emergency will be over. "

Warning that there was still a long way to go to rebuild the Irish economy after the Celtic Tiger's collapse, Kenny said: "Ireland is at long last on the road back to recovery and to work. Yes, our competitiveness has improved. We have 34,000 new jobs in the last year alone."

He said: "Yes, there are too many people still out of work. Yes, there are too many people still leaving the country. But you know something, there's a change happening.

"Job creation is now at its highest level in five years. The live-register number has fallen every month for 15 consecutive months. That's progress.

"Before we came to office, Ireland was losing 7,000 jobs a month. Now we're creating 3,000 new jobs every month."

The Irish premier added: "After some disastrous years, confidence is gradually being restored. Despite a tough international environment, our economy has started to grow … Across the world, investors are watching Ireland and they like what they see."

Henry McDonald

Baby Hope death: police arrest relative

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:43 PM PDT

Identity of child whose malnourished body was discovered inside a picnic cooler in 1991 has been revealed for first time

New York City police say they have arrested a relative in the death of a child nicknamed Baby Hope whose naked, malnourished body was discovered inside a picnic cooler in 1991 and has remained unidentified until now.

During an interrogation, the four-year-old girl's cousin, Conrado Juarez, admitted sexually assaulting and smothering her, said police commissioner Raymond Kelly.

The child's name and the circumstances of her death had been a mystery for two decades, but police received a new tipoff this week and a DNA test had allowed them to finally identify the baby's mother. Police have revealed the girl's name as Anjelica Castillo.

Police said Juarez, 52, lived in the Bronx, but that the family had been living in Queens at the time of the killing. They said Juarez claimed that a relative helped him dispose of the child's body.

Anjelica's naked, malnourished corpse was discovered on 23 July 1991, beside the Henry Hudson Parkway. Setectives thought she might have been suffocated but had few other clues as to what happened.

The case became an obsession for some investigators. Hundreds of people attended a funeral for the unknown girl in 1993. Her body was exhumed for DNA testing in 2007,and then again in 2011.

In July, detectives tried another round of publicity on the 22nd anniversary of the discovery. They canvassed the neighborhood where her body was found, hung fliers, circulated sketches of the girl and a photograph of the cooler and announced a $12,000 (£7,500) reward for information leading to an arrest.

Former detective Jerry Giorgio, who oversaw the case from 1991 until his retirement this summer, said he remained confident the case could be solved. "You know that expression 'I'm on cloud nine'?" Giorgia said. "Well I'm on cloud nine."

Anna Friel joins campaign against oil exploration in Democratic Republic of the Congo

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Actress spearheads WWF bid to stop development of area around Lake Victoria

Anna Friel is to help publicise a newly invigorated campaign against plans to explore for oil in one of the world's most important regions for wildlife.

British-based oil and gas company Soco began aerial surveys of the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo this month, despite pleas from environmental campaigners and the British government.

Friel flew to neighbouring Uganda earlier this year to make a documentary about the plight of the remaining 700 mountain gorillas in the region. The short film, Virunga, made to support the WWF's Draw the Line campaign, will be shown in Odeon cinemas throughout October.

The actress travelled with her eight-year-old daughter, Grace, to witness the wildlife around Lake Victoria and Lake Edward, where some of the proposed oil exploration would take place. This corner of Uganda and the DRC contains some of the richest wildlife on Earth, while also supporting a population afflicted by war and poverty. The balance is a tenuous one.

More than 30,000 fishermen rely on Lake Edward in Virunga for their livelihoods and there are fears that any contamination of the lake, a vital source of water and protein as well as one of the sources of the Nile, could have a huge impact.

"My experience of Africa before this journey with WWF was so different to anything I could have imagined this place to be," Friel told the Observer. "The landscape was the most breathtaking I have ever experienced and the wildlife – gorillas, hippos, elephants, birds – seemed more beautiful than any creatures I had seen before, perhaps because there was such a vulnerability with all the threats facing them."

She said she was deeply affected by meeting local people. "One of the most moving experiences of my time in Uganda was visiting a fishing village within Queen Elizabeth national park and therefore benefits from the tourist trade. The fishermen didn't know anything about oil exploration and the devastating effect it could have on the lake that provides their family's livelihood. It is the people as well as the wildlife who rely on Lake Edward and its surrounding areas, and this could be so easily taken from them."

You can join the campaign at wwf.org.uk/virunga

Tracy McVeigh

Commonwealth summit mired in row over Briton shot in Sri Lanka

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Prince Charles offers his help as allegations against political fixer and calls for boycott cast shadow over heads of government meeting

Prince Charles offered to help in the effort to win justice for a British man who was murdered in Sri Lanka – allegedly by a close political ally of the country's prime minister.

The high-profile case of Khuram Shaikh, a 32-year-old Red Cross worker from Rochdale who was killed in 2011, has cast a shadow over the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Colombo next month, which is due to be chaired by Prince Charles and attended by David Cameron.

Shaikh, whose girlfriend was the victim of a serious assault in the same attack, was allegedly killed by a figure who is a close friend of the Sri Lankan prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and a key political fixer for his Sri Lanka Freedom party in the country's south.

Despite forensic evidence linking Rajapaksa's ally to the crime, no charges have been brought, and this has prompted allegations of a coverup.

The disclosure that Prince Charles has taken a private interest in the case comes the week after Cameron was put under pressure over the case at prime minister's questions by Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk. That led the prime minister to promise that he would personally raise concerns with Rajapaksa.

Now the Observer understands that Prince Charles has discussed the case, though when contacted about the Prince's intervention, Clarence House insisted that it had had no contact with the Sri Lankan government.

The discreet intervention comes as Danczuk is repeating his request that Cameron boycott the meeting unless there is clear progress in the stalled murder investigation.

The decision to hold the heads of government meeting in Colombo has been dogged by controversy from the start. Canada has said it will boycott the summit because of its concerns about the host country's human rights record and continuing extrajudicial killings, while Cameron has also faced calls to boycott the meeting.

Critics say the lack of justice for Shaikh is emblematic of the widespread impunity enjoyed by those accused of human rights abuses in the country. Shaikh was stabbed in the throat and shot dead after he complained about a group of men sexually harassing his Russian girlfriend as they enjoyed a drink at a small hotel in Tangalle in the south of Sri Lanka in the early hours of Christmas Day 2011.

The subsequent beating into unconsciousness and gang-rape of Shaikh's girlfriend is recorded in the Sri Lankan police file on the case, despite recent attempts by the Sri Lankan government's chief whip, Dinesh Gunawardena, to deny that the rape took place. Eight people, including the politician, were arrested and bailed last year.

Although Sri Lankan police completed their investigation months ago, including the examination of DNA evidence said to link the accused to the crime, no charges have been laid.

According to Sri Lankan media, officers from the country's CID presented the DNA evidence last month at the magistrates' court in Tangalle, where the murder took place, stating that it linked the accused politician and two others to the crime.

Speaking to the Observer on Friday, Shaikh's bother, Nasir, described the continuing anguish that has been suffered by his family as the case has dragged on inconclusively.

"My father still visits the grave every day. It has been so hard for the family. But this isn't going to go away.

"When we visited Sri Lanka we were told that what was holding up the case was the collection of the final witness statements and the DNA evidence, which was described as the last piece of the jigsaw. But they have had that material for months and still there have not been charges."

Nasir Shaikh is in two minds about whether Cameron should join the Canadians in boycotting the summit. "It is a difficult question," he said.

However, Danczuk said he was "not sure that Cameron should go and that a British prime minister should shake hands" with his Sri Lankan counterpart until the issue was resolved. "He should not go unless we have seen charges by the time of the summit."

The Sri Lankan government has tried to deflect criticism over the slow progress of the investigation but, despite promises on numerous occasions that the case was about to come to a head, nothing has happened.

In December last year Neville de Silva, Sri Lanka's acting high commissioner to the UK, in an interview with the Guardian, dismissed suggestions of government interference or deliberate delay, adding that he had been told by the attorney general's department that "non-summary inquiries" were due to begin shortly.

The Shaikh affair has fed into a wider pattern of concern over human rights in Sri Lanka, given new focus by the decision by Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, to boycott the summit. Harper announced that he would not be attending during a visit to Bali earlier this month, and said the absence of accountability for serious violations of human rights, both during and after the country's civil war, was unacceptable.

"It is clear that the Sri Lankan government has failed to uphold the Commonwealth's core values, which are cherished by Canadians," he said.

Peter Beaumont

World shivers with fear as US heads for new debt crisis

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

The American economy, already hit by a government shutdown, is about to run out of cash, with dire global repercussions. Why?

Without a budget in place, the US government has run out of the cash needed to pay thousands of government workers in Washington and keep national parks open. But this week an even more critical issue comes to the fore. On Thursday, the country will be forced to default on its $16.8 trillion in borrowings if it does not secure a rise in the debt ceiling.

Republican leaders, aware that their intransigence over the budget has hit the party's popularity, last week proposed a six-week postponement of the deadline. John Boehner, leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, has dropped a previous demand that talks could only take place following a Democrat concession to review President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act – or "Obamacare" – although a format for discussions has yet to be agreed.

How did we get here?

The road towards a default that would risk plunging the world economy into recession began last year in the wake of Obama's return to the White House. The radical Tea Party wing of the Republicans decided that the only way to block Obamacare, which for them exemplifies hated "big government", was to hold up the president's entire budget plan.

Why has Washington suffered a shutdown?

A six-month fight over the budget between the two houses of government – the Republican lower house and the Democrat-controlled Senate – has meant no formal funding has been agreed and left government departments struggling to pay their bills. For the first time in 17 years, parts of government spending have been shut down. Some 800,000 government workers were initially sent home – equivalent to the combined workforces of Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Google and giant US retailer Target.

Even the Pentagon sent home 350,000 staff in that initial wave, though it later called them back when funds were made available. National parks remain closed and applications for most permits and licences are being badly delayed. Schools are open and hospitals are unaffected, though health research has been disrupted.

What is the debt ceiling?

This is the government borrowing limit set by Congress. The government actually bumped up against the $16.7tn limit five months ago as the budget dispute got under way. Ever since, the treasury department has taken a series of "extraordinary measures" to raise an extra $303bn. But that money will not last much longer.

Why is 17 October significant?

US treasury secretary Jack Lew has warned that this is when the treasury will exhaust those extraordinary measures. Without the means to pay both multibillion-dollar interest payments and social security bills, it will default.

What are the implications?

Nobody knows what a default would mean in practice. Investors around the world have lent the US money by buying its treasury bonds. In theory, a failure to pay a single interest payment on a tranche of debt will trigger a demand from all bondholders for their money back. In practice this is unlikely.

What will happen to the US economy?

American businesses with public-sector contracts will suffer a delay in payments and could go bust – unemployment has already risen as a result of the shutdown. More broadly, the US economy has been the main driver of global growth. Should the government be forced to default, it could trigger an estimated 4.5% fall in GDP and the rest of the world would fall back into recession.

The extent of nerves in the markets was shown when the news of a possible six-week extension of the borrowing limit sent the Dow Jones index of leading shares soaring by more than 300 points.

What about the UK?

Britain would be hit hard by a US recession. Many of our exports go to America, especially manufactured goods. Without growth in the US, the UK could see its still-fragile recovery snuffed out. Already, BAE Systems, Britain's biggest manufacturing employer, is warning of problems ahead should the two-week-old shutdown become a crisis. BAE has half its business in the US and has already frozen the wages of 1,200 staff in Washington. Fellow arms firm Chemring saw its shares plummet on Friday after it warned the shutdown would affect its profits. Meanwhile, outsourcing firms G4S and Serco have US staff unable to work.

And the rest of the world?

The Chinese are panicked. China's Xinhua news agency labelled US domestic politicians "dangerously irresponsible" for wrangling over debt. In an editorial, the state-run media organisation said the rest of the world had been "kidnapped" by American politics, which was involved in "a game of chicken". The Germans are also anxious. Anton Böner, president of the Federal Association for German Wholesalers and Foreign Trade, warned: "If the Americans shoot themselves in the foot right now, it is highly dangerous for the entire global economy, and of course for the German export economy."

Why are the Republicans proposing a six-week delay to the debt ceiling?

An opinion poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last week gave the Republican party the lowest standing in the history of the poll. It showed that more than twice as many Americans had a negative view of it than a positive one. While 31% held Obama responsible for the shutdown, 53% blamed Republicans. Boehner said he wanted six weeks to debate all aspects of the budget, but White House sources said they were convinced his aim was still to scupper Obamacare.

Phillip Inman

Her film about an 'honour' killing won an Emmy. Now it's being used to train police

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Deeyah Khan hopes her documentary about the murder of Banaz Mahmod can help to highlight the social pressures behind such crimes and help bring change

Amid the glitter and glamour of this month's Emmy awards in Los Angeles, one winner dressed in a sober black suit and polo neck looked more than a little dazed as she collected her statuette.

"I had to be pushed out of my seat when they announced that Banaz had won. I just sat there," said Deeyah Khan, a music producer and former pop star who picked up the Emmy for best international documentary. "I was perfectly happy just to be there and proud that a clip was being shown. I was really pleased but utterly shocked to win."

It was a remarkable accolade for a low-budget first film that was not only an outsider among other big-budget documentaries on the shortlist, but was also heavily based around poor quality police video footage of a young woman talking shyly and sometimes inaudibly to officers at a London police station.

Banaz: A Love Story is the account of an "honour" killing in south London in January 2006 when Banaz Mahmod, aged 20, was murdered by her family, Iraqi Kurds who felt she had dishonoured their community by deserting her abusive rapist husband and later falling in love with a man of her own choosing.

Banaz went five times to the police to ask for their help and tell them she believed her life was at risk. She even named her future killers on videotape with the words: "If anything happens to me, it's them."

She was raped and strangled and her body was buried in a suitcase.

The Emmy has made Khan a new force in documentary-making but what has made her proudest is the news that it is now to be shown as part of the UK's police training programmes to educate officers on the real threat that face many young women trapped inside honour-based cultures in Britain. In so doing they will be bringing full circle a case that brought reprimand from the Independent Police Complaints Commission for the way officers failed Banaz Mahmod in life, as well as praise for the Scotland Yard team who secured justice for her in death, travelling to Iraq to capture the murderers.

"You cannot celebrate an award when a girl is dead," said Khan. "My friends all said what dress will you wear to the ceremony? But I went in black, how could I think about a dress?

"But I hope that if Banaz's story has done anything, it's made more people realise that this can happen, it exists. Now that it is to be used by police for training is extraordinary. That is one step, they have implemented more tools for frontline officers and crime investigation teams. There is a flagging system now in some parts of the UK.

"I'm pleased because I didn't want the film to be an excuse for people to justify their prejudices, against Muslims or against immigrants. 'Honour' killings and forced marriages are not a Muslim thing, they happen in Sikh, in Hindu, even in Christian societies structured so that the rights of the group are enforced at the expense of the individual."

Banaz's father and uncle were jailed for life for murder in 2007. Two other men, who had fled the country after the murder, were brought back, the first ever extradition from Iraq to the UK, by Detective Inspector Caroline Goode and jailed for more than 20 years each.

"I only intended the film to be something for women's groups and maybe a few film festivals. I was active in women's rights and I was following my heart in doing this film on 'honour' killings. But when I sat down to talk to Caroline, everything changed," said Khan.

"She told me that she felt that the people who should have loved Banaz didn't, so she had decided she loved her. The fact that this white woman, a policewoman, carries such love for this Asian girl – it was extraordinary. If you cut out Caroline then you feel nothing but disgust and tremendous sadness. But you add her in and you have real hope.

"People do the most remarkable things in the most difficult of circumstances. That's why this case was so important. It has all the failings but also all the lessons."

Khan, 36, born in Norway to immigrant Punjabi and Pashtun parents, was a successful singer, dubbed the "Muslim Madonna", until constant threats and attacks led her to give up the stage for her own safety. She moved to London and became a music producer and an activist, working alongside several women's rights groups including the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, which says the number of incidents of this type of crime being recorded in the UK is rising.

The charity Karma Nirvana, which helps young women facing forced marriage, is so concerned at the unchecked prevalence of forced marriage it is presently campaigning for headteachers to face reprimands for failing to report any child who disappears from their school registers.

"It's hard to explain the nuances of the rigid patriarchal structures of social cultures like Banaz's and mine," said Khan. "Our young people are suffocated and suppressed. Banaz is the most extreme outcome, but many, many other girls like Banaz are still walking around among us facing the abuse meted out on women in these honour-based social structures."

Khan's next project is looking at the radicalisation of British young men. "I know some women's rights activists have seen so much abuse that they can't stand men but I have a sense of empathy with the men. Without excusing the abuse they are capable of, many of them are trapped within these communities and bound by expectations they didn't necessarily ask for.

"There are men who suffer different types of abuses, where can they get help? I don't think men such as Banaz's father should get more lenient sentences. In countries like Germany they are trying to understand perpetrators as victims of their own culture and sentencing accordingly. We need to understand, not excuse," said Khan.

She believes Britain needs to focus less on what may or may not be racism and more on ignorance.

"Maybe there's racism, but at heart it is ignorance. How many generations have brown people been here? For the burdens and the benefits, we have to understand each other's stuff.

"The answer isn't that they can just all go home. We have to learn about each other. We need to claim girls like Banaz as our own. We need to move beyond cultural sensitivity and let people ask questions. The moment people feel they can ask the silly or awkward question that they haven't dared to ask, the layers start to come off.

"There's a lot of work to be done. Old, deeply engrained systems take time to change but we can't leave it to time. People – police, teachers, health workers or in the media – are in a position to help. When there is as much outrage when a young Asian girl disappears from the school roll as there is when a white girl runs off to France with her teacher, we can move on to have gender equality. But we have to be equal to white women before we can be equal to men."

Khan had almost finished making her film when she was given the two hours of police videos. She said: "I didn't know Banaz in life and seeing her in the interviews, a girl so shy it pains her to say the word penis, it's so courageous. Imagine what it must have taken for a girl like her to ask the police for help: she did as much as she could to save her own life.

"The majority do not ask for help. They compromise for the sake of community honour, and sacrifice themselves, not contributing to our society. There is a sickeningly large number of kids in the UK suffering a living death."

Tracy McVeigh

The ethics of animal tests: inside the lab where marmosets are given Parkinson's

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

As a national debate is launched on animal research, Robin McKie meets the London scientists whose work goes to the heart of an ethical controversy

The marmosets in Room One of the animal laboratories of King's College London are typical of their species. They are lively and curious. No bigger than small cats, these little natives of South America crowd to the front of their cages when visitors or scientists enter their rooms.

The animals are natural dwellers of rainforest canopies and instinctively head to the top of their cages to peer down on newcomers. They are also highly active and have tyres, swings and tubes to play with. In addition, Callithrix jacchus has a very sweet tooth, with a particular fondness for marshmallows.

By contrast, the marmosets in the next room are noticeably different in demeanour. They are slow and hesitant. Several shake distinctly and, despite marshmallows being sprinkled near them, none would move from their perches during my visit last week. The animals remained watchful, however.

The difference in behaviour between the two groups has a simple explanation. The second set had been given a drug known as 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine – or MPTP, a neurotoxin that causes permanent symptoms of Parkinson's disease in monkeys (and humans) by destroying the pathways used by the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Hence the animals' shaking, lack of mobility, and hesitancy.

As to the reason for creating marmosets with Parkinson's, that is straightforward, say researchers. The animals – which are not taken from the wild but come from breeding centres – are used to test drugs that can halt the progress of the disease and reduce side-effects of current treatments. More than 100,000 people in the UK suffer from Parkinson's, which causes tremors, stiffness and slowed movements. There is no cure and, although new treatments have greatly alleviated patients' suffering, new drugs are still urgently needed. Hence the use of marmosets. These are small creatures but they nevertheless mimic many human cognitive attributes and have already helped develop new medicines.

"About 80% of all drugs for Parkinson's have been developed and tested using marmosets from this laboratory," says Professor Roger Morris, the scientist in charge of the facility at King's. "Of all species, only they provide a reliable model of the disease in humans."

This progress comes at a cost, of course. The lab is home to a few dozen marmosets who have to endure the symptoms of Parkinson's before they are put down after six years. (Marmosets live up to 14 years in the wild.) Such work is vehemently opposed by groups who believe that animal experiments are ethically inexcusable and who deny they help produce new drugs.

It is a highly divisive issue and will be the focus of a remarkable project this week when dozens of debates will be held across the UK, Ireland and the US as part of the Big Animal Research Debate. At universities and other centres, debaters and speakers will argue the case for and against animal research. Those involved will include David Willetts, UK minister for universities and science, a supporter of animal experiments. The fate of the King's College marmosets, therefore, acts as a perfect focus for the discussions about animal research – though they are certainly not the only creatures used in experiments. At King's, mice, rats, snakes, frogs, guinea pigs, fruit flies and zebrafish are also exploited in research that ranges from immunology to embryo development to basic research on diseases such as Huntington's disease and other ailments.

However, it is the marmoset – furry, curious and humanlike – that triggers the most intense emotional responses, a point acknowledged by Mary (who asked not to be fully identified), the senior research technician in charge of the animals at King's, who devotes her time to the animals' welfare, right down to knitting hammocks for them to sleep in. "You end up having favourites. You cannot help it. And when, after six years, they have to be put down, it is very hard. You have to block it off."

And that perhaps was the most unexpected part of my visit – to realise the staff's innate love of animals. (One senior technician , having cared for animals at King's during the week, works as a part-time keeper at London zoo at weekends.) This is not a place of distress or misery and it is not run by callous individuals indifferent to animal suffering.

That does not, on its own, justify animal research, of course. For that Morris uses a different argument. "When we used to address groups of Parkinson's patients years ago, they were a mass of uncontrollable movement, jerking and waving their hands and arms.

"These devastating symptoms were the side-effects of the drugs we then used to treat the disease. Research on marmosets has allowed us to develop medicines that have allowed patients to control their movements again and to run their lives normally. Essentially, we have given them back their lives."

• Comments on this article will be opened on Sunday morning

Robin McKie

Irish entrepreneurs show signs of life amid positive growth forecasts

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

After a spectacularly bleak period of austerity, Ireland is forecast to grow by more than 2% next year. Three people involved in its hardest-hit business sectors discuss their hopes for a chastened – and still fragile – economy

Five years after the Irish government decided to stand behind its crippled banks – in a bailout that cost €70bn (£60bn) and forced the country to go cap in hand to the EU and International Monetary Fund for its own rescue package – Ireland is officially out of recession. Growth is projected to be 2.7% next year.

It has been a very rough road – 14% wiped off GDP, house prices down by more than 50%, unemployment peaking at 15% – and recovery is not yet guaranteed. This week, finance minister Michael Noonan will deliver the country's seventh consecutive austerity budget, with deep cuts to social welfare spending and other controversial measures expected.

Given how crucial this budget may be in terms of guiding the economy back to growth and prosperity, the Irish cabinet is holding an unprecedented emergency meeting on Sunday to hammer out every detail in this year's financial plan for the country.

But three sectors of the republic's economy that suffered gravely in the Celtic Tiger's collapse – construction, small businesses and tourism – are all reporting some signs of recovery.

Each is arguing against any VAT hikes or indirect tax rises, and for the government to create a more favourable, flexible environment to boost private business, big and small.

With the budget looming and Ireland on course to leave the international bailout programme and recover its economic sovereignty in the coming year, three people working in the three sectors hit hardest by the economic collapse – construction, small business and tourism – look ahead to their own and their nation's prospects.

THE BUILDER

When Brian McKeon's brother was coming in to land last week on a flight from Turin, he noted with pride two yellow cranes below, just to the north of Dublin bay. They were among very little construction plant visible anywhere in the city, where property prices have crashed more than 50%.

"He told me that he could see our cranes as the plane was coming into Dublin airport. There were hardly any others down there on the ground," says Brian McKeon.

His family firm, MKN, has been increasing its workforce on the site, which has spectacular views out to Howth, the Irish sea and the Dublin mountains in the far background.

They started back on the site in March with 30 workers and will eventually employ up to 150 people to complete the building of high-grade luxury apartments – exactly the type of properties most battered by the housing crash.

Over the last weekend of September and first week of October, McKeon also completed the sale of 20 new houses, in the town of Swords, near Dublin airport. He hopes he can repeat the same trend-bucking sales achievement when the job in north Dublin is finally finished next spring.

"We sold the homes up at Swords over the space of two weekends," he says, "and it shows that there is a demand for houses out there once more. There was even a slight increase in the prices of the homes – by a couple of thousand euros here and there."

MKN's construction director says that the last thing the Irish building industry needs in Tuesday's budget is an increase in VAT on the vital materials they need to keep their project going.

"Each house we build, we have to give a percentage in tax already to the taxman – but if VAT went up for things like concrete, flooring and the other materials you need to build apartments and houses, then we would have no choice to pass these rises onto the consumer."

McKeon passionately believes the coalition government should create, for the first time, the post of minister of construction in the cabinet. His suggestion chimes with the republic's Construction Industry Federation. Some 60% of all the jobs lost in the recession were in that sector, and of the 9,600 new jobs created in the first two quarters of 2013, around 6,400 were people being recruited back into the building trade.

McKeon says a minister of construction would be just as vital to the economy as the three ministers who currently look after farming and agriculture in Ireland, and he is irritated that the building business gets little government support.

"If PayPal creates 15 extra jobs in the hi-tech quarter of Dublin, you get Enda Kenny or a big minister turning up," he says. "I am employing 30 people here, with the hope of another 120 workers coming on to the site, and we get no recognition.

"The trouble is building and construction got a bad name because of the bad apples that played the property casino in the boom years. But they have all gone from the industry, leaving the genuine builders and developers left to get the industry moving again.

"We didn't make the mistake of overstretching ourselves in the boom like they did, as they built everything, everywhere, without any controls. But people still need houses to live in, and there is a shortage of decent homes in this country."

A survivor of the building bust, McKeon praises the coalition government in the UK for stimulating the construction sector with its Help to Buy newbuild scheme and other programmes.

"They have created incentives to build over in Britain now, with the removal of red tape and so many regulations. Our problem coming down the track here is that we are about to introduce some of the most stringent regulations in the industrialised world on building.

"For example, when these new regulations come in, I am going to have to employ an independent architect to check every day that we are adhering to all the new regulations and controls. I have to pay this architect, which adds to our costs every single day. But overall, I'm still optimistic: I can see the green shoots."

THE CAFE OWNER

A possible increase in VAT is also the thing Garrett McMahon and his partner Triona fear in the budget.

A few months ago the couple defied the doomsayers and took an enormous gamble by setting up a coffee shop in Glasnevin, close to Dublin's Botanical Gardens and the river Tolka.

Having invested their life savings in what appears so far to be a thriving small business, McMahon worries that any rise in VAT in the hospitality industry from its current 9% would severely dent profits and put their dream in danger.

The Irish government lowered VAT in the sector from 13% to 9% to boost consumer demand, which has been one of the main deadweights on the domestic economy.

"If they were to put it back up to 13%, that would mean 4% off every euro we make. Raising VAT again would shut down some small businesses and weaken demand," McMahon says, inside the small but extremely busy cafe, which sells a range of products from breakfast bagels to homemade banana bread.

"We don't want to be passing on higher prices to our customers, especially since we are still building a base here, because we have been pleasantly surprised by the footfall coming through the door.

"There is demand in this area for a better product, for nice food, and it's great that in Glasnevin we are not reliant on one single market. You have the workers from the Met Office up the road, and the builders over there working on extending the Botanical Gardens. You have pensioners coming in, parents with young children on a day off looking for a nice coffee. People are still willing to spend money out if the product is right."

As well as hoping for an unchanged VAT rate, McMahon says the climate for small businesses like theirs needs to be less restrictive: "We pay €2,500 rates to Dublin city council. We pay for our water, we pay for our bins and we still have to sweep our own footpath every day. There are too many regulations which constrict small to medium-sized businesses. It limits what we can do."

Garrett and Triona are putting in 12 hours a day, getting up at 5am to prepare fresh food. While they admit they are exhausted when Sunday comes and they can take time off, they remain upbeat about their prospects.

"Am I optimistic? Absolutely! From opening this business a couple of months ago the sales have increased at the till every week. We have all had to endure several really tough years but I do think we are pulling ourselves up bit by bit," Garrett says.

THE MARKETING MAN

More passengers have arrived and departed from Dublin's airport this year than in the last year of the Celtic tiger boom.

Paul O'Kane, the ebulliently optimistic public affairs director at the airport, notes that between January and July this year there was a 14% increase in traveller numbers: "For the first time since 2007 there has been monthly growth in numbers coming through our doors. That is a sign of real improvement in business."

O'Kane puts down the rise to several factors: a huge spike in transatlantic traffic; the presence on Irish soil of the US customs and immigration service, which means passengers don't have to go through heavy security checks after landing in the US; the growing presence of Gulf-state-owned airlines in Dublin; and the recession-proof Irish wanderlust.

"We are becoming more attractive to travellers from Northern Ireland and Britain who are going to the States and Canada, because you can go through all the security and customs checks by American staff here before you even touch down in north America," he says. "We also have more routes across the Atlantic than many British and European cities: there are now 224 flights per week from Dublin to north American destinations."

To cope with the boom in transatlantic business, Irish state carrier Aer Lingus is opening up new routes to San Francisco and Toronto in spring next year. Other airlines, such as United, have begun flying from Dublin to Washington DC, while US Airways now flies direct to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Cynics in Ireland grumble that the 700,000-plus passenger figures are boosted by a massive number of young emigrants seeking jobs and a new life outside recession-blighted Ireland. O'Kane, however, dismisses this theory as a myth.

"It's a nonsense to say the extra numbers are made of emigrants getting out. If these figure were to constitute up to even 100,000 leaving through Dublin airport due to emigration, there would be whole villages and towns completely empty across Ireland. It just doesn't add up," he says.

"The real reasons for this number are the extra tourists coming into Ireland and the additional numbers from Northern Ireland, Britain and further afield using Dublin as their hub connection to North America – and the Far East, Australia and New Zealand with Etihad and Emirates."

Others, particularly in the Irish government, claim that a recent tourist campaign, "The Gathering", aimed at appealing to the worldwide Irish diaspora (including those who claim Irish lineage several generations back), has contributed to the surge in traffic at Dublin airport.

The number of passengers from Northern Ireland taking advantage of the ever-improving road links on the eastern side of the island has definitely played a part.

"Last year 521,000 Northern Ireland passengers travelled through Dublin airport, which is equivalent to almost 30% of the population of the north," O'Kane, a northerner himself, says. He believes the numbers from across the border will increase next year.

As for the budget, the one thing O'Kane doesn't want to see is any increase in the €3 flat-rate tax imposed on all flights, whether long- or short-haul. Given that tourism is one of the republic's main invisible exports, and that the government has invested heavily in "The Gathering", that would seem unlikely.

Henry McDonald

The US fears back-door routes into the net because it's building them too

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

If the Snowden revelations have taught us anything, it's that the NSA has been up to the sort of covert practices it claims to be so concerned about

At a remarkable conference held at the Aspen Institute in 2011, General Michael Hayden, a former head of both the NSA and the CIA, said something very interesting. In a discussion of how to secure the "critical infrastructure" of the United States he described the phenomenon of compromised computer hardware – namely, chips that have hidden "back doors" inserted into them at the design or manufacturing stage – as "the problem from hell". And, he went on, "frankly, it's not a problem that can be solved".

Now General Hayden is an engaging, voluble, likable fellow. He's popular with the hacking crowd because he doesn't talk like a government suit. But sometimes one wonders if his agreeable persona is actually a front for something a bit more disingenuous. Earlier in the Aspen discussion, for example, he talked about the Stuxnet worm – which was used to destroy centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear programme – as something that was obviously created by a nation-state, but affected not to know that the US was one of the nation-states involved.

Given Hayden's background and level of security clearance, it seems inconceivable that he didn't know who built Stuxnet. So already one had begun to take his contributions with a modicum of salt. Nevertheless, his observation about the intractability of the problem of compromised hardware seemed incontrovertible. This is because covertly modified hardware is hard to detect – much more so than dodgy software. The hardware in a computer can do things like access data in ways that are completely invisible even to the machine's security software. At the Black Hat security conference in August last year, for example, a researcher named Jonathan Brossard demonstrated software that can be burned into the hardware of a PC, creating a back door that would allow secret remote access over the internet. And – here's the really scary bit – the secret entrance couldn't even be closed by switching off the computer's hard disk or reinstalling its operating system.

The reason this is so scary is because virtually every bit of kit that runs the internet – the machine on which you compose your emails, the tablet or smartphone with which you browse the net, the routers that pass on the data packets that comprise your email or your web search, everything – is a computer. So the thought that all this stuff might covertly be compromised in ways that are impossible to detect is terrifying. It's this fear that underpins American (and British) reservations about network products made by the Chinese company Huawei – the suspicions (vehemently denied by Huawei, of course) that the kit has secret back doors installed in it to facilitate the Chinese's cyber-army's penetration of western networks.

So Hayden was right: it is a problem from hell. If the hardware that runs the internet has been polluted or infiltrated then we're all screwed, because there's no bit of cyberspace you can trust. And I know, I know: it sounds like paranoia – until you discover that Darpa, the research arm of the US department of defence (DoD), has launched a massive research project into compromised hardware.

The department's growing dependence on the global supply chain, it says, "makes device, software and firmware security an imperative. Back doors, malicious software and other vulnerabilities unknown to the user could enable an adversary to use a device to accomplish a variety of harmful objectives, including the exfiltration [extraction] of sensitive data and the sabotage of critical operations. Determining the security of every device DoD uses in a timely fashion is beyond current capabilities."

At this point we enter a Kafkaesque world of smoke and mirrors. Because one of the most obvious inferences from the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica recently is that the NSA has indeed been up to the business of inserting covert back doors in networking and other computing kit.

The reports say that, in addition to undermining all of the mainstream cryptographic software used to protect online commerce, the NSA has been "collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products".

These reports have, needless to say, been strenuously denied by the companies, such as Cisco, that make this networking kit. Perhaps the NSA omitted to tell Darpa what it was up to? In the meantime, I hear that some governments have decided that their embassies should no longer use electronic communications at all, and are returning to employing couriers who travel the world handcuffed to locked dispatch cases. We're back to the future, again.

John Naughton

One in six gay or bisexual people has suffered hate crimes, poll reveals

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Some 630,000 people have been victims in past three years says poll, which calls for police to take the problem more seriously

One in six gay or bisexual people – about 630,000 individuals – has been victim of a homophobic hate crime or incident in the past three years, according to a report to be published this week.

The alarming findings, based on a YouGov poll of 2,500 gay people and published in the Gay British Crime Survey 2013, will reinforce calls for the problem to be taken more seriously.

The poll, commissioned by gay rights charity Stonewall, found that two-thirds of victims of hate crime did not report the incident to anyone. More than three-quarters did not report it to the police. Fewer than one in 10 victims who did report hate crimes to the police said it led to a conviction. And half of victims who reported a hate crime to police said it was recorded with no further action taken.

There are also concerns about the attitude of the wider criminal justice system to homophobic hate crime.

Just a quarter of those who reported a crime or incident to the police were referred to a support group. And only one in five gay or bisexual people said they were confident that their police and crime commissioner would do something to address the problem in their region.

"No one should live in fear of verbal or physical violence just because of the way they were born," said Stonewall's deputy chief executive, Ruth Hunt. "Despite radical steps to make police forces more accountable to the public, these figures show the disturbing levels of violence and intimidation faced every day by lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Britain. Most victims don't report abuse and, if they do turn to the police, they have low expectations that anyone will listen or act."

However, in a sign that the police are keen to be seen to be taking the problem seriously, the survey will be launched at a seminar on Tuesday at New Scotland Yard by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe. The seminar will also see the launch of a guide to help police and crime commissioners tackle homophobic hate crime.

The Stonewall survey found that one in 10 of those who had experienced a homophobic hate crime or incident had been physically assaulted. Almost a fifth of victims had been threatened with violence. One in eight experienced unwanted sexual contact. Half of hate crime perpetrators were said to be strangers and aged under 25.

The picture that emerges from the survey is of a society in which many lesbian, gay and bisexual people feel unsafe in their homes and in their community. Two-thirds said that they felt at bigger risk of being insulted or harassed than heterosexual people. A quarter said they had felt a need to alter their behaviour so as not to be perceived as gay in order to avoid being the victim of crime.

Many are repeat victims. Just over a third who had been insulted, intimidated or harassed said it had happened on four or more occasions.

A burgeoning concern is the rising level of online abuse directed at gay, lesbian and bisexual people. One in 20 said they had been the target of homophobic abuse online in the past year, including 7% of those aged 18 to 24. Almost half of those aged 18 to 24 had encountered homophobic abuse directed at someone else.Stonewall is calling for better training of police officers and control room staff to identify and record hate crimes. It also said there was a need for both the police and crime commissioners to engage more meaningfully with the gay community.

"Britain's gay taxpayers contribute some £700m a year to the cost of policing," Hunt said. "While there's been some real progress in tackling hate crime in recent years, this evidence demonstrates starkly just how much more needs to be done."

Jamie Doward

Swiss climber's 'greatest' Himalayan ascent

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Ueli Steck, in the headlines after a row with Sherpas on Everest earlier this year, has made the first ever solo climb of Annapurna's feared south face, a feat that has amazed his fellow mountaineers

This spring the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, one of the world's most accomplished and fastest mountaineers, was thrust into the glare of the media spotlight after he was attacked with two companions by a group of angry Sherpas on Everest.

Now Steck, 37, is being talked about for a different reason – a ropeless and lightning-fast solo ascent of Annapurna's gigantic south face – which is already being hailed as one of the greatest in modern Himalayan mountaineering.

Although the details remain sketchy, it appears that Steck – nicknamed the "Swiss machine" – made the 2,500-metre face's first ever solo ascent, without oxygen and in a single push from his base camp to the 8,091-metre summit and back.

Steck recorded his achievement with a short text message on his return to base camp: "Summit, alone, south face."

The British climber Jon Griffith – who is a friend of Steck and was with him during the altercation on Everest earlier this year, when they were attacked by a large group of Sherpas, some armed with rocks – confirmed the ascent and described his friend as "shattered".

"He has just gone and soloed it," he told the Observer from his home in Chamonix in the French Alps on Friday. "When Ueli releases all the details it will be recognised for what it is – truly phenomenal – a mind-blowing effort."

The ascent was quickly applauded by Climbing magazine's Dougald Macdonald as a "landmark ascent in Himalayan mountaineering".

Before setting off for Annapurna, Steck wrote of his motivation on his blog: "To walk through life in a comfortable way is not my goal. That is why I want to try to climb Annapurna a third time … I would like to turn my dreams and visions into reality."

Steck's ascent last week came at his third attempt on the face in recent years, the details of which put his achievement in context.

Although Annapurna was the first of 14 Himalayan 8,000-metre peaks to be climbed – by a French expedition in 1950 – the first ascent of the towering south face would wait another 20 years. Then it was climbed in 1970 by an expedition led by Sir Chris Bonington, whose companions Dougal Haston and Don Whillans reached the summit.

Annapurna is regarded as the most dangerous of the 8,000-metre peaks while its south face, which funnels avalanches and rock falls, is regarded as one of its toughest undertakings.

Steck's own first attempt on the face in 2007 saw him attempt a hard new unclimbed line. It was first attempted unsuccessfully by Pierre Béghin and Jean-Christophe Lafaille in 1992. Beghin fell to his death and Lafaille was forced to climb down the face alone in one of mountaineering's greatest feats of survival.

On that first attempt, however, Steck only narrowly survived himself after falling some 300 metres down the face after being hit by rock fall.

He abandoned a second solo attempt the following year to join an effort to rescue another stricken climber, the Spaniard Iñaki Ochoa de Olza, who had suffered a seizure on the mountain and later died. After the tragedy on that attempt, Steck admitted he needed time before returning to the mountain.

Steck, who has previously climbed the Eiger's notorious north face in winter in less than four hours, is regarded as one of the leading exponents of extremely fast, lightweight mountaineering, carrying little except food and liquids and climbing non-stop.

Bonington, 79, who has met Steck, was effusive in his praise. "He is a fantastic climber as well as a very nice guy," he said. "It is a really spectacular undertaking and a sign that Himalayan climbing is very much alive, despite all the media attention on the queues on Everest each year."

Steck's ascent is doubly impressive given that he was forced to quit Everest earlier this year following the Sherpa incident high on the mountain's slopes. He had reportedly left the Himalayas feeling despondent.

Speaking to the news website Swissinfo before returning to Nepal, he had been phlegmatic. "After what happened in spring, coming back to Nepal is really important for me … the spring expedition is over, and it was certainly not the greatest story I've ever had, but it happened.

"The south face of Annapurna is an old project," he added. "I have attempted it twice already and I guess you need patience if you want to climb hard routes on an 8,000-metre peak."

On this attempt Steck had been with the Canadian climber Don Bowie, who had accompanied him on several acclimatisation trips lower on the mountain. On Saturday the two men were returning to the town of Pokhara, promising more updates when they arrived.

Peter Beaumont

David Morrissey: 'It's about asking people: Are you happy with what's being done in your name?'

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:05 PM PDT

The actor discusses his role as one of the narrators in an animated film, Guantánamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes

Actors David Morrissey and Peter Capaldi narrate Guantánamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes using the words of those still held inside. Here, Morrissey talks about his involvement.

Why did you decide to do the film?
I've always been a supporter of Clive Stafford Smith and Reprieve [the organisation Stafford Smith founded in 1999 to provide legal support to prisoners who are unable to pay for it themselves]. I first became aware of Clive after seeing the 1988 film Fourteen Days in May [Paul Hamann's documentary featuring Stafford Smith about a man on death row in the US], and I got involved with Reprieve about five years ago. He's just a great campaigner for human rights and has been fighting for those on death row for a long time. This animated film about Guantánamo Bay is part of an effort to keep the men who are prisoners there and the hunger strikes that are going on [as a protest against the conditions they are kept in] in our minds and at the forefront of a very packed news agenda.

Why is it important that people know what's going on inside Guantánamo Bay?
We're living through a time when there's a lot of kneejerk response to world events – there's a lot of paranoia around. The fallout from which is that a lot of innocent people are being picked up, herded and victimised. It's our job to keep people informed. It's extremely important to highlight the truth about Guantánamo Bay – the fact that men who've not been charged with any crime and have been scheduled for release are still being held and that nothing is happening. It's about throwing those facts to the public and saying: "This is happening in your name. Are you happy about it?"

Were the testimonies of the detainees upsetting to read?
They were, yes. These men are going through huge suffering and pain on a daily basis. When you're reading their words you're trying to take your own feelings away from what they're saying and just get to the stark reality of what it's like for them.

You're an actor who is known for getting into the minds of the characters you play yet with the animation you sound like you're deliberately playing it straight...
The more dispassionate the read, the more powerful it is sometimes. Peter Capaldi and I are not trying to "be" these men; we're not characterising them, we're not doing accents. It can make for a much more powerful read if you take out the passion from your voice... which is actually quite difficult to do. When we listened back to ourselves in the studio, there was a sense that there was this emotion creeping in and we worked to remove that. The facts speak for themselves – they don't need embellishing. I'm not reading it as an actor, I'm not doing a characterisation. It doesn't need that.

Can animation create the required emotional reaction in an audience?
Well, the public's access to these men is nil; a documentary is out of the question. The problem is that sometimes a re-enactment using actors reaches a very fine line between what is real and what is not. That was part of the debate around Yasiin Bey [in July, the rapper formerly known as Mos Def was filmed live being force-fed to draw attention to conditions inside Guantánamo] – whether his force-feeding was a dramatisation or not. In that case it wasn't – everything you see was real. So avoiding acting helps us get to the stark reality very quickly, and it's also a way to get the message out.

By narrating the film you are figuratively and literally giving voice to the detainees...
I think we all have to act as their voice for the outside world, and that's why I wanted to try and get the message out to as much of the public as possible. It's impossible for the detainees. Their phone calls are monitored. Any conversations they have can have subtle repercussions for them.

You've just come back from filming in the US. Does Guantánamo Bay crop up in conversation much over there?
Among some people, it does. I guess, as an actor, I exist in a liberal world. In terms of the wider public, I'm not sure. It's hard to get this message through. That's why it seems Obama has lost his will to act to close the prison. There's no political capital to ensure its closure for a man who led his campaign trail on it. It's very disappointing for us.

Mark Townsend

Who pays the price for our cheap goods? | Observer editorial

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:04 PM PDT

Getting maximum work from employees at minimum cost to employers has become the damaging template for far too much of business

Last Monday, the quiet, dignified voice of housebound Sally Lubanov, aged 83, told millions of radio listeners what it means to be an invisible victim of Britain's much-touted, lightly regulated, highly competitive "flexible" labour market.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four's Today programme, she explained that, although she pays for a daily 30-minute visit from a carer, that does not allow for the essentials in life. "I cannot bathe myself because I have two bad hips," Mrs Lubanov explained matter-of-factly. "I cannot change my bed… What I would like most is for people to have enough time to have a chat or to cook a hot meal and have it with you…"

According to a scathing report published last week by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), councils are forcing down the price they pay agencies to provide care for older people in their homes.

As a result, a chain of misery is in place. Demoralised carers, in practice working for far less than the minimum wage, are at times having to put older people to bed for the night in the early afternoon, leaving them unwashed in soiled sheets and even without food or water.

Extracting the maximum amount of "flexibility" and labour from the workforce at a minimum cost to employers for the short-term benefit of the shareholder has become the highly damaging template for too much of business.

Hope that the financial meltdown of 2008 would lead to a radical overhaul of the rules, a reshaping of capitalism, has long since died. Instead, in too many quarters, the wage share of the average man and woman is being driven down while companies ignore moral obligations on taxation and set aside basic human rights. The justification is the impact of globalisation and the accessibility of excessively cheap labour and the imperative to provide us, the consumers, with lower and lower prices.

This compact in which many of us are complicit works well until the hidden world behind the price tag is revealed. The £12bn-a-year Bangladeshi garment industry, for instance, employs 4 million and supplies many of our high street chains such as Mango.

In April, Rana Plaza, an eight-storey commercial building, collapsed in Dhaka. More than 1,100 died. What emerged from the ruins was a picture of slave labour in appalling conditions for wages as little as £24 a month.

Urged on by pressure groups such as the admirable Labour Behind the Label, the demand now is for greater corporate social responsibility for the global supply chain. Work by the TUC indicated that a Bangladeshi worker receives 2p from every £6 T-shirt. Increase that by 100% and profits would still be robust, but that has yet to happen.

Instead, more than 50 major chains, including Primark and Matalan, have signed the Bangladesh Safety Accord to improve conditions. Yet, still the death toll rises. Last week, fire in another Bangladeshi clothing factory killed nine. The New York Times last year exposed conditions at the Foxconn technology plant in China. Workers assembling iPads and other Apple devices often worked seven days a week, handled hazardous waste and suffered injury for very low wages.

A campaign by the Sunday Times has also highlighted modern-day slavery in the UK. People are trafficked into the country and forced to work in food factories and farms that supply our leading supermarkets.

Last year, for instance, a joint operation that included police and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) freed 32 Lithuanians, assigned by a licensed labour provider, working for Britain's largest egg-producing company, Noble Foods, suppliers to Marks & Spencer and Tesco. Often unpaid, the workers endured 17-hour shifts, slept 15 to a room and were beaten if they dissented. Such degrading practices also damp down prices and provide huge profits. So what's to be done?

More precisely, what can be done when we have passed the 40th month of a wage squeeze and are enduring a major cost of living crisis? Economist Duncan Weldon of the TUC correctly says the main issue is not in the hike in the cost of living but a widespread crisis in low pay. Four out of five new jobs created since 2010 have been in low-pay sectors such as retail, waiting and residential care. On Friday, it emerged that 29% of apprentices were paid less than the legal minimum wage in 2012. The number of apprentices paid below the correct minimum wage (£2.68 an hour for an apprentice under 19) increased by an enormous 45%. The adoption of a higher minimum wage in some sectors such as finance and levers such as procurement to encourage the voluntary living wage would help, as would stronger unions. "If we earn more, we may be prepared to pay more," Weldon says.

A modern anti-slavery bill to tackle trafficking has also been promised. Yet the powers of the GLA, set up to protect workers from exploitation for instance as fruit pickers in agriculture, have recently been diluted, presumably to assist further the deregulated market. Bringing Home the Bacon, a report published last year by Manchester University, is a rigorous investigation into the pig meat supply chain that reveals far wider problems in the whole food and farming sector worth £88bn a year. The report argues that low prices are achieved by playing suppliers off against each other, continual renegotiation of contracts, short termism and reducing margins for the "little man" while aiming to please shareholders with quarterly results.

This is the "free" market at work: competition in extremis; the upshot is that 60% of pig meat is imported and the UK is losing out to high-wage northern European producers and processors. A rebalanced higher skill, higher wage economy and tighter regulations would give long-term stability, improve productivity and exports, protect reasonably paid jobs and mean a marginal increase in prices that would still generate a fair profit.

The wage slave in Bangladesh, the worker in the British food industry, the factory employee in China and Mrs Lubanov's carers arguably share a common ambition: a decent day's pay for a decent day's work. At a global political level, the Chinese government is not alone in realising that the era of rock bottom prices and contemporary serfdom is coming to an end. Human rights have a value too. As one speaker at a recent anti-slavery conference put it: "The pot is boiling. Simply putting more weights on the lid is not a sustainable solution."

Observer editorial

Huge plaudits for the X-Factor's colour-blindness | Barbara Ellen

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:04 PM PDT

Say what you like about Simon Cowell's show, it is one of the least racist annexes of the UK music industry

Gracious, it's already the time of year when aggrieved music lovers traditionally surge forth to condemn The X Factor. Should we expect another po-faced campaign to rob Simon Cowell of the Christmas No 1? Or just more industrial-level whinging from those who fret about how it's destroying British music. That it is not about "real" music (maan!), just bubblegum pap, and televised slop, for the masses. How such shows clog up the industry, suck up all the resources, make it impossible for new artists to catch a break.

Maybe The X Factor could be judged guilty of all these things, and more (British music should not be wholly forged in weekend TV).

However, perhaps the British music industry could also learn something from The X Factor – a show that not only promotes working-class kids but also, far less famously, gives black performers a fair hearing.

It seems to me that The X Factor is fast becoming one of the least racist, and most colourblind, annexes of the modern British music industry.

Of the 12 acts that made it to this year's live shows, almost half were non-white – two of the girls, two of the groups, and one in the over-26 category. Out of many thousands of auditionees, roughly 40% of those selected were black, or mixed race.

Would the rest of the British music industry (particularly those who disdain Cowell's TV-juggernaut) care to offer up their numbers – give out their percentages of how many new black artists they took on board, nurtured and promoted this year?

Indeed, it's a recurring scandal how black British artists struggle to get signed, or find themselves sidelined, under-marketed, and finally dropped – particularly females, many of whom end up providing backing vocals.

The likes of Heather Small and Estelle have remarked on the racist (and, in the former's case, sexist) aspects of the industry. The Mercury prize chair, Simon Frith, commenting on 2009's winner, Speech Debelle, said that black female artists "always had a particularly tough time".

Fair enough, but then we come to The X Factor, a huge primetime show with a decent track record regarding black/Asian/mixed-race artists, boasting two winners (Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke) and a slew of finalists and contenders (including One Direction, JLS, Rebecca Ferguson, Little Mix, Mischa B and Marcus Collins). Moreover, a show whose audience thinks nothing of a final 12 where 40% of the performers are black.

Some might say that the audience is the point – that some artists are selected because they reflect large swaths of The X Factor demographic (young and broke), and the show is cynically peddling fantasies of escape, reward and validation.

How to put this politely? Just get over it. What does anyone expect when these young people have often grown up in environments where poverty and lack of opportunity are not sob stories to be mocked but harsh facts of life?

This has long been The X Factor's strength. For a show featuring four judges, crucially, it does not prejudge its contestants. Rather wonderfully, this appears to extend to the "marketability" of the colour of their skin. Unlike other areas of the industry, race doesn't seem to be an issue.

So how did we get here? Britain prides itself on being anti-racist – it gave the world the likes of 2 Tone and Rock against Racism. How could it be, in 2013, that one of the most level playing fields available to black artists appears to be a primetime TV talent show?

While The X Factor is far from perfect, and generally more about good telly than great music, kudos should be given for its stubbornly colour-blind approach.

Only Sally's tots redeem her tatts from being tatty

Why has the Speaker's wife, Sally Bercow, decided to get a tattoo? Why would anyone get a tattoo, who's not under 25, on a beach in Goa, smashed on tequila?

Obviously there are serious tattoo aficionados, whose dedication must be respected, even if some of them are going to go into old age resembling crumpled copies of Whizzer and Chips.

At least the real illustrated community are serious about it. The part-timers, the tatt-tourists and their half-baked vanilla scribblings, however, are another breed altogether. Do they really need those 2mm butterflies, shooting stars and hummingbirds on their wrists or ankles for the rest of their lives? As if to say: "Look at me, I got a really tiny feeble tattoo you can hardly see just to prove that I'm totally pathetic."

Bercow had her children's names inked, tweeting: "I will never regret having tatt of my kids."

In fairness, this may be the only tattoo that makes sense for the part-timer – certainly better than meaningless doodles or names of lovers who may come and go. Only our children are as permanent as the ink is going to be.

Some of us would kill for 10 hours' kip

Research from Penn State University says that weekend lie-ins don't recharge the batteries as much as we might have hoped, or fully compensate for hectic overworked weeks. While the extra rest at the weekend did make people less sleepy, gave them lower stress levels and had myriad other benefits, according to the research, their attention spans showed no improvement.

The researchers put 30 people on a schedule emulating a busy working week, with six hours of sleep a night, followed by two nights where they were allowed to sleep for 10 hours. Ten hours! What unimaginable luxury is this? If I slept for 10 hours it would be so unusual I'd be pronounced dead. I'd wake up to a compact mirror held to my mouth, and someone riffling through the knicker drawer for the will.

One also suspects that the 30 people in this study didn't have small children. For a parent to get 10 hours' sleep, the kids would have to be taken into care (not that this wouldn't be negotiable). Moreover, parents would agree to anything to get those 10-hour-long kips, including pretending to have enhanced attention spans.

The only other thing to induce such squalid desperation is a really spiky hangover. "Whatever you want to prove with this study, I'll say it, just please let me sleep."

Indeed, the knackered, the hungover, the parents of young children, and those poor damned souls who are a combination of all three, cannot cope with such random concepts as an uninterrupted blissful 10 hours' sleep. These are people who would cook their own grandmother for just an extra 20 minutes in their pit.

Fine and laudable though Penn State's study is, they may need to go back and repeat the whole thing, using a more realistic time-scale.

Barbara Ellen

Snowden and the press: score-settling is stifling the debate on security and liberty | Observer editorial

Posted: 12 Oct 2013 04:03 PM PDT

Edward Snowden's disclosures in the Guardian have led to rancour from the right, rather than reasoned argument

The behaviour of much of the British press over the last week has been bewilderingly inconsistent. Papers that are against the power of the state as a defining editorial principle have swung behind the government and MI5 to attack the Guardian's publication of the Snowden leaks and have come close to calling for the paper's prosecution. The Daily Mail, which once fiercely opposed the erosion of liberties under the Labour government, now finds itself in the curious position of not only vilifying journalism but supporting the state's right to carry out blanket surveillance of everyone's communications.

On the one hand, the Mail and others on the right of centre passionately resist the role of the state (most recently in regulating newspapers), but on the other are relaxed about a massive extension of the state's power over individuals' lives. In normal circumstances, this would incur the wrath of those papers. But these are not normal circumstances and so the state is privileged, in this instance, over the individual. Funny, that.

At no stage have these news organisations acknowledged that Snowden's disclosures should prompt an urgent debate on the balance between liberty and security, as they have done in the US, where President Obama has conceded the need for an overhaul of the National Security Agency's surveillance programmes. And James Clapper, director of National Intelligence in the US, has said that "some of the debate needed to happen"'.

But last week there was precious little interest in hosting a debate. There was no shade, nuance or complexity on view. Instead, some newspapers pursued what looked decidedly like a grudge against the Guardian, resentful at that paper's role in the phone-hacking scandal that led to the Leveson inquiry. It is unfortunate that British journalism is unable to distinguish between our own interests and a matter of principle that affects all our readers. Using the Snowden revelations as an excuse to grind old axes doesn't serve Britons or Britain very well.

Observer editorial