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

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?

Posted: 20 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

What happens to a country when its young people stop having sex? Japan is finding out… Abigail Haworth investigates

Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome".

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.

The sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga pants and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she introduces as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up the gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say whether she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the message to her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.

Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. "It will be quiet in here," she says. Aoyama's first task with most of her clients is encouraging them "to stop apologising for their own physical existence".

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. "Some want a partner, some prefer being single, but few relate to normal love and marriage." However, the pressure to conform to Japan's anachronistic family model of salaryman husband and stay-at-home wife remains. "People don't know where to turn. They're coming to me because they think that, by wanting something different, there's something wrong with them."

Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might eventually perish into extinction".

Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. The country is undergoing major social transition after 20 years of economic stagnation. It is also battling against the effects on its already nuclear-destruction-scarred psyche of 2011's earthquake, tsunami and radioactive meltdown. There is no going back. "Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."

Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist. Japan's punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible for women to combine a career and family, while children are unaffordable unless both parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried parenthood is still unusual, dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.

Aoyama says the sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes.

Some of Aoyama's clients are among the small minority who have taken social withdrawal to a pathological extreme. They are recovering hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first steps to rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term parasaito shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s without managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million unmarried people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around three million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."

Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can't get sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers. "I use therapies, such as yoga and hypnosis, to relax him and help him to understand the way that real human bodies work." Sometimes, for an extra fee, she gets naked with her male clients – "strictly no intercourse" – to physically guide them around the female form. Keen to see her nation thrive, she likens her role in these cases to that of the Edo period courtesans, or oiran, who used to initiate samurai sons into the art of erotic pleasure.

Aversion to marriage and intimacy in modern life is not unique to Japan. Nor is growing preoccupation with digital technology. But what endless Japanese committees have failed to grasp when they stew over the country's procreation-shy youth is that, thanks to official shortsightedness, the decision to stay single often makes perfect sense. This is true for both sexes, but it's especially true for women. "Marriage is a woman's grave," goes an old Japanese saying that refers to wives being ignored in favour of mistresses. For Japanese women today, marriage is the grave of their hard-won careers.

I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday morning coffee in the smart Tokyo district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job she loves in the human resources department of a French-owned bank. A fluent French speaker with two university degrees, she avoids romantic attachments so she can focus on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future came up."

Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for women like me."

Around 70% of Japanese women leave their jobs after their first child. The World Economic Forum consistently ranks Japan as one of the world's worst nations for gender equality at work. Social attitudes don't help. Married working women are sometimes demonised as oniyome, or "devil wives". In a telling Japanese ballet production of Bizet's Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a career woman who stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her lowly security-guard lover José. Her end was not pretty.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe recently trumpeted long-overdue plans to increase female economic participation by improving conditions and daycare, but Tomita says things would have to improve "dramatically" to compel her to become a working wife and mother. "I have a great life. I go out with my girl friends – career women like me – to French and Italian restaurants. I buy stylish clothes and go on nice holidays. I love my independence."

Tomita sometimes has one-night stands with men she meets in bars, but she says sex is not a priority, either. "I often get asked out by married men in the office who want an affair. They assume I'm desperate because I'm single." She grimaces, then shrugs. "Mendokusai."

Mendokusai translates loosely as "Too troublesome" or "I can't be bothered". It's the word I hear both sexes use most often when they talk about their relationship phobia. Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws. And the centuries-old belief that the purpose of marriage is to produce children endures. Japan's Institute of Population and Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like".

The sense of crushing obligation affects men just as much. Satoru Kishino, 31, belongs to a large tribe of men under 40 who are engaging in a kind of passive rebellion against traditional Japanese masculinity. Amid the recession and unsteady wages, men like Kishino feel that the pressure on them to be breadwinning economic warriors for a wife and family is unrealistic. They are rejecting the pursuit of both career and romantic success.

"It's too troublesome," says Kishino, when I ask why he's not interested in having a girlfriend. "I don't earn a huge salary to go on dates and I don't want the responsibility of a woman hoping it might lead to marriage." Japan's media, which has a name for every social kink, refers to men like Kishino as "herbivores" or soshoku danshi (literally, "grass-eating men"). Kishino says he doesn't mind the label because it's become so commonplace. He defines it as "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant".

The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ("Girly Men") was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting "pink sparkly things" and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned.

Kishino, who works at a fashion accessories company as a designer and manager, doesn't knit. But he does like cooking and cycling, and platonic friendships. "I find some of my female friends attractive but I've learned to live without sex. Emotional entanglements are too complicated," he says. "I can't be bothered."

Romantic apathy aside, Kishino, like Tomita, says he enjoys his active single life. Ironically, the salaryman system that produced such segregated marital roles – wives inside the home, husbands at work for 20 hours a day – also created an ideal environment for solo living. Japan's cities are full of conveniences made for one, from stand-up noodle bars to capsule hotels to the ubiquitous konbini (convenience stores), with their shelves of individually wrapped rice balls and disposable underwear. These things originally evolved for salarymen on the go, but there are now female-only cafés, hotel floors and even the odd apartment block. And Japan's cities are extraordinarily crime-free.

Some experts believe the flight from marriage is not merely a rejection of outdated norms and gender roles. It could be a long-term state of affairs. "Remaining single was once the ultimate personal failure," says Tomomi Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born assistant professor of anthropology at Montana State University in America. "But more people are finding they prefer it." Being single by choice is becoming, she believes, "a new reality".

Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures? Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too. Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living at home. But demographer Nicholas Eberstadt argues that a distinctive set of factors is accelerating these trends in Japan. These factors include the lack of a religious authority that ordains marriage and family, the country's precarious earthquake-prone ecology that engenders feelings of futility, and the high cost of living and raising children.

"Gradually but relentlessly, Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction," Eberstadt wrote last year. With a vast army of older people and an ever-dwindling younger generation, Japan may become a "pioneer people" where individuals who never marry exist in significant numbers, he said.

Japan's 20-somethings are the age group to watch. Most are still too young to have concrete future plans, but projections for them are already laid out. According to the government's population institute, women in their early 20s today have a one-in-four chance of never marrying. Their chances of remaining childless are even higher: almost 40%.

They don't seem concerned. Emi Kuwahata, 23, and her friend, Eri Asada, 22, meet me in the shopping district of Shibuya. The café they choose is beneath an art gallery near the train station, wedged in an alley between pachinko pinball parlours and adult video shops. Kuwahata, a fashion graduate, is in a casual relationship with a man 13 years her senior. "We meet once a week to go clubbing," she says. "I don't have time for a regular boyfriend. I'm trying to become a fashion designer." Asada, who studied economics, has no interest in love. "I gave up dating three years ago. I don't miss boyfriends or sex. I don't even like holding hands."

Asada insists nothing happened to put her off physical contact. She just doesn't want a relationship and casual sex is not a good option, she says, because "girls can't have flings without being judged". Although Japan is sexually permissive, the current fantasy ideal for women under 25 is impossibly cute and virginal. Double standards abound.

In the Japan Family Planning Association's 2013 study on sex among young people, there was far more data on men than women. I asked the association's head, Kunio Kitamura, why. "Sexual drive comes from males," said the man who advises the government. "Females do not experience the same levels of desire."

Over iced tea served by skinny-jeaned boys with meticulously tousled hair, Asada and Kuwahata say they share the usual singleton passions of clothes, music and shopping, and have hectic social lives. But, smart phones in hand, they also admit they spend far more time communicating with their friends via online social networks than seeing them in the flesh. Asada adds she's spent "the past two years" obsessed with a virtual game that lets her act as a manager of a sweet shop.

Japanese-American author Roland Kelts, who writes about Japan's youth, says it's inevitable that the future of Japanese relationships will be largely technology driven. "Japan has developed incredibly sophisticated virtual worlds and online communication systems. Its smart phone apps are the world's most imaginative." Kelts says the need to escape into private, virtual worlds in Japan stems from the fact that it's an overcrowded nation with limited physical space. But he also believes the rest of the world is not far behind.

Getting back to basics, former dominatrix Ai Aoyama – Queen Love – is determined to educate her clients on the value of "skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart" intimacy. She accepts that technology will shape the future, but says society must ensure it doesn't take over. "It's not healthy that people are becoming so physically disconnected from each other," she says. "Sex with another person is a human need that produces feel-good hormones and helps people to function better in their daily lives."

Aoyama says she sees daily that people crave human warmth, even if they don't want the hassle of marriage or a long-term relationship. She berates the government for "making it hard for single people to live however they want" and for "whipping up fear about the falling birth rate". Whipping up fear in people, she says, doesn't help anyone. And that's from a woman who knows a bit about whipping.

Abigail Haworth

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George Osborne in China – wide-eyed, innocent and deeply ignorant | Will Hutton

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 11:30 PM PDT

Why was the chancellor so keen to strike deals with China when its values and interests are inimical to our own?

Britain must be an open trading nation, welcoming inward investment just as it seeks to invest in others. But prostituting one's security and economic interests to a country whose values, practices and interests are wholly at odds with one's own is not openness but recklessness. Last week, George Osborne was Bambi in Beijing – wide-eyed and innocent to the threats of the Chinese forest in which he was so ignorantly wandering.

Together, the succession of deals – on banks, nuclear energy and hi-tech – represent such one-sided economic concessions and expose our own fundamental weaknesses that they are embarrassing to the point of humiliation. In each, Britain surrendered sovereignty and exposed itself to economic risks that were not worth the potential gain, especially for anybody with even an elementary understanding of contemporary China.

They also showed how indefensible so much financial and industrial policy has been over the past 30 years. Britain has surrendered its capabilities in sector after sector in the name of liberalisation and privatisation, a strategic policy that Bambi is continuing with unquestioning enthusiasm. I wonder, as he prostrated himself before the Chinese, whether he asked himself why he – and Britain – had ended up kowtowing to such a degree. I doubt it.

The most eye-catching deal was on nuclear power, with the agreement that the Chinese nuclear industry will be able to build and own nuclear power stations in Britain. Lady Thatcher boasted, when the electricity industry was privatised, that she was giving power back to the people. Thirty years later, we learn it's become a gift to the Chinese Communist party, offering its state-owned nuclear power companies price and profit-margin guarantees that privatisation and liberalisation, wholly unrealistically in such a long-term business, were supposed to have left behind for ever.

This is a breathtaking step in an industry where the sensitivities over operating safety, technical efficiency and waste disposal are so acute. Fukushima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are remembered around the world. Chinese state-owned companies are a byword, not least in China, for inefficiency, loss-making and politicisation of decision-making. The party has wrestled for a generation with the reality that these companies, designed by Mao to embody the communist dream of uniting economic and social obligations, abolishing worker exploitation and spearheading modernisation, are sclerotic economic duds.

Of course the party should let go, but it does not operate the kind of market economy that Bambi thought he was admiring. This is a system of Leninist corporatism. The party sustains its monopoly of power by control of the economy; it owns what it considers strategically important and allows private companies to operate only because they submit to a board of communist officials.

There are thus no sources of independent economic and political power. Crucially, the role of the state-owned enterprises is to offer employment, so heading off another potential challenge to party authority from social unrest. The job of the state-owned banks is to provide unconditional credit to the loss-making state-owned enterprises so they can avoid cumulative lay-offs that would otherwise run into tens of millions. Unsurprisingly, this politicised system is opaque and corrupt.

The state-owned nuclear power companies are at its heart. Last week, Transparency International declared that China's companies were the least transparent of any it surveyed. The Chinese nuclear industry is a black box unpenetrated by independent Chinese scrutiny, let alone foreigners. But you can be certain that the regulatory processes and decision-making will be as politicised as everything else. This is China's strategic and military heartland, central to one-party control.

British energy policy, post-privatisation, is a mess. Centrica, which owns British Gas, was EDF's partner in building nuclear power stations. It dropped out claiming that the probable financial returns were not high enough and too uncertain, preferring to spend £500m buying back its own shares to support their price and thus the bonuses of its directors, the kind of capitalism Bambi refuses to reform.

British ownership structures and director remuneration should be reconstructed and reconstituted and Centrica offered a long-term energy policy framework in which to invest. But that would be the sort of interventionist "socialism" that Ed Miliband favours. So, instead, we ask the Chinese Communist party to build nuclear power stations for us. Nor will they be as diligent as EDF has been in ensuring as much work as possible is sourced in Britain: the open ambition is to win work for China. Only Bambi could end up in such a position.

Compounding the error, he has decided to allow Chinese banks to trade in London through branches. Iceland's bankrupted banks operated in Britain through branches. Never again, we said. If a bank wants to function here, it must put its own capital behind its British operations. But desperate to win the City's right to trade in renminbi, Bambi wants to waive this obligation uniquely for Chinese banks. China's banking system is precarious; non-performing loans could be as high as $5trn, proportionally far in excess of pre-crisis Iceland. At least the British taxpayer will be able to underwrite their British operations when the system crashes, as it almost certainly will.

Every executive from a hi-tech company visiting China is advised to travel with a new laptop, so extensive are the cyber attacks. But Bambi, oblivious to this reality, was busy promoting hi-tech collaboration, including with the space industry.

Here, Britain's position is once again crass. Eurosceptic Bambi and his party refuse deeper collaboration with the EU on space, recoil before the overt mercantilism of the Americans and so think China offers a blank cheque book. Chinese hackers need no longer hack the nuclear, space and other industries for insights and codes they can use for military and commercial advantage. Bambi is offering them all on a plate.

A Chinese schoolgirl told him and Thumper, aka Boris Johnson, that China would be concerned if so much of their country was being sold to foreigners. Thumper laughed it off. But with the People's Daily writing that progress had only been possible because of David Cameron's admission that he had mishandled Tibet (where, since 2009, 100 monks and nuns have set fire to themselves in protest against Chinese rule), Britain's abasement was complete. Economically misgoverned for a generation, we are reduced to being principle-free economic mendicants, with Bambi Osborne and Thumper Johnson touring the world for hand-outs. I don't know about you, but I am ashamed.

Will Hutton

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Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha – review

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 11:30 PM PDT

The first volume of this impressive life of Gandhi is at pains to show the true origins of India's national hero

For a man born into the obscurity of a remote village in western India in 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who died at the hand of an assassin in 1948, still enjoys a remarkable and vigorous posthumous reputation. He has inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and even the Dalai Lama. His techniques of nonviolent resistance have been widely copied across the world. During the Arab spring, the radical opposition in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia often displayed Gandhi's photograph during their protests, as a symbol of their methods and aspirations. His famous contemporaries – notably Mao Zedong, Roosevelt and Churchill – enjoy nothing like the same afterlife.

As with many great revolutionaries, Gandhi expressed his ideas in print throughout his career. Between 1903 and 1948, he published his opinions in a weekly newspaper, in Gujarati and English. Accordingly, his Collected Works, published by the Indian government in a series of about a hundred volumes, an accumulation of speeches, essays, editorials and interviews, provide an extraordinarily intimate picture of the man – but from an Indian point of view.

In Gandhi Before India, Ramachandra Guha, one of the subcontinent's most influential historians, has set himself the revisionist task of challenging this Indo-centric self-portrait of the Mahatma, not merely cleaning the family portrait, but uncovering a new backdrop and giving the whole restoration a new frame. Guha's impressive monograph, the first of two volumes, challenges the Gandhi legend as it was portrayed in, for instance, Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning film starring Ben Kingsley.

As well as the childhood in Gujarat and his two years as a student in London, Guha focuses on the now almost forgotten chapter in Gandhi's career, his two decades as a lawyer and community organiser in imperial South Africa before and after the Boer war. Guha is at pains to demonstrate that, up to his final return, aged 46, Gandhi had almost no knowledge of India in the wider sense. When he first went to London, at 19, MK Gandhi had never travelled outside his native Kathiawar. Later, in 1892 and 1902, he spent months in Bombay but, despite visits to Calcutta and Madras in 1896, had never actually "spoken to a single Indian peasant worker living or working in India itself". Rather, Gandhi's ideas, beliefs and deepest political instincts had been shaped by his remarkable career as a crusading lawyer in South Africa.

When Guha lists Gandhi's four major callings – freedom fighter, social reformer, religious pluralist and prophet – he clearly identifies each of these as having their roots in Natal and the Transvaal. Gandhi's most famous contribution to the 20th century, satyagraha (or "truth force"), the technique of mass civil disobedience, was also invented in South Africa. Gandhi's non-Indian side becomes even more distinct when Guha describes the minutiae of his African life and work. The big surprise is the degree to which the future Mahatma was so completely in tune with the wider ethos of the British empire, emerging, somewhat bizarrely, as an empire loyalist.

Indeed, when the Boer war broke out, Gandhi expressed hope for "a British victory". He had, meanwhile, become "the champion of the Indian cause in Natal", although this, as Guha shows, was less to do with his sympathy for the rights of his fellow Indians than the failure of his legal career during a return to Bombay in 1902.

When the call came to return to South Africa, Gandhi saw it as a way out of a professional impasse. Identifying his luck, he moved fast. Soon after his return to the Transvaal, he set up the newspaper, Indian Opinion, that would become the bridgehead for the battle on behalf of his people.

At this moment in the early 1900s, the many competing strands in Gandhi's life were almost wholly focused on South Africa. He was a lawyer working for clients in Johannesburg and Durban, and also campaigning for the rights of Indians in the Transvaal. He was a newspaper propagandist. Finally, he was becoming obsessed with the simple life, by solitude, diet, meditation and celibacy. In 1906, he took the vow of brahmacharya, curtailing all sexual relations with his long-suffering wife. If Guha's work has a weakness it is that, in focusing so intently on its new portrait, it neglects the human toll inflicted on those around the incipient Mahatma.

1906 marked the turning point. Gandhi returned to London briefly, and began to realise – not least through his meeting with the young Winston Churchill – that he and his fellows were irredeemably "alien". Much later, he was asked what he thought of modern civilisation. "I think it would be a good idea," came the reply. No accident, then, that soon after his return home, passive resistance landed him in prison.

As the lawyer morphed into the campaigning ascetic, he decided that "we would all profit from the kind of simplicity and solitude we find in gaol". While the future Gandhi begins to emerge, his contemporaries were already recognising his genius. Guha takes scholarly pride in tracking down the 1909 letter which first describes Gandhi as "a Mahatma" (a great and holy soul), the title bestowed on him by Rabindranath Tagore in 1919.

But this is to run ahead. Guha still wants to nail an Anglocentric Gandhi before his final return to India and now does so with the intriguing revelation that it was none other than GK Chesterton who helped inspire the text, Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule) with which Gandhi would make the transition to his role as the father of Indian independence.

It's a truism of this genre that the closer the biographer comes to his subject, the more elusive they become. In the end, with or without South Africa, Gandhi was a remarkable man, for some a secular saint, with an extraordinary capacity to transcend issues of race, class, religion and even politics. Exactly what this amazing man was really like is rather missing from this volume. No doubt Professor Guha will put that straight in the second half of this ground-breaking study.

Robert McCrum

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The mystery behind the yeti: news and teaching resources round up

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 11:00 PM PDT

As new DNA research shows that the mysterious yeti could be a cross between a polar bear and a brown bear, we run through the best resources to teach genetics in the classroom

The mysterious yeti could be a cross between a polar bear and a brown bear, according to new DNA research. Hair samples from a yeti were found to have a genetic match with an ancient polar bear, and scientists now believe the yeti could be a sub species of brown bear in the High Himalayas.

Professor Sykes, who carried out the research, told the BBC that there may be a real biological animal behind the yeti myth. "It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behaviour is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend."

But how can you explore the yeti's roots in the classroom? We've rounded up the best genetics news stories and resources to help you teach your students about the science behind their discovery.

From the Guardian

'Yeti' DNA matches ancient polar bear, scientists find
Researchers say Himalayan creature known as Bigfoot could be cross between polar bear and brown bear.

Siberia home to yeti, bigfoot enthusiasts insist
A team of scientists say they are "95%" sure that Russia's wintry expanse is home to the mythical yeti, otherwise known as the abominable snowman.

Why yeti hunters must be more scientific
Cryptozoologists claiming to have evidence of the yeti will never be taken seriously without a more academic approach, writes Brian Regal, assistant professor of the history of science at Kean University in New Jersey.

Japanese climbers claim to have found the Yeti's footprints
A team of Japanese climbers claim they found footprints of the legendary abominable snowman in the folds of the eastern Himalayas in Nepal.

From the archive: Yeti scalp (they say it's 240 years old) is here – by air
This article, originally published in 1960, reports that explorers Sir Edmund Hillary and Mr Desmond Doig flew back to London from a yeti-hunting expedition in Nepal, with the scalp of what is believed to be a yeti.

Quiz: can you spot the mythical creatures?
The mystery of the yeti may have been solved, but what about other fantastical creatures? Can your students tell a real ridiculous-sounding beast from a made-up mythical being?

How to draw... a yeti
They're like people, only hairier and much, much bigger. Alex Milway, author of The Mythical 9th Division books, about a band of yetis out to save the world, explains how to make your snowman brilliantly abominable.

On the Guardian Teacher Network

How genetic information is passed on
Teach students about the role of gametes in transferring characteristics from parents to their offspring.

Big picture on thinking
This magazine looks at the new techniques that help us to make advances in biochemistry and genetics.

Inheritance
A lesson plan exploring inheritance and genetic diseases. Teach your students about which characteristics can be inherited, which are caused by environmental factors and why offspring of the same parents are similar but not identical.

Do you want to know a secret? – genetic testing
Students receive a sealed box that contains a chance card. Opening the box represents taking a genetic test. Working in groups, students explore the questions and ethics surrounding genetic testing to help them make an informed choice about whether or not to open their box.

Genetic diversity lesson plan
Lesson plan for a lesson on the Founder Effect and genetic bottlenecks created for AS biology students.

Best of the web

The "Yeti" and Digital Storytelling in Google Earth
Use a letter, taken from the National Archives, which outlines regulations for American expeditions searching for yeti in Nepal, to encourage students to create a digital story in Google Earth.

Genetic timeline
This timeline gives students a historical perspective of the discoveries that led to our present understanding of the human genome, courtesy of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Genetics family tree
Students distinguish between inherited and learned traits by creating a "family tree of traits" using handprints, courtesy of the Genetic Science Learning Centre.

Zoom in on your genome
Watch or download this animation by the Wellcome Trust to find out where and how the human genome is stored within our cells and bodies.

What genes means
This easy-to-understand animation explains the influence that genes have on our everyday lives, from the colour of your eyes to the way your body works, grows and develops.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.

Rebecca Ratcliffe

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Hillary Clinton returns to the campaign trail, hinting at national agenda

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 10:27 PM PDT

Clinton speaks in support of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia governor's election, but all eyes on likely 2016 presidential bid

Queensland solarium ban will save lives, Cancer Council says

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 09:56 PM PDT

Ban will come into force at the end of next year, following other states' response to alarming skin cancer figures

Florida recaptures convicted killers released in error using fake papers

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 07:59 PM PDT

Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker taken back into custody without incident but questions remain over ease of escape

JP Morgan Chase on the verge of $13bn deal over bad mortgage loans

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 06:49 PM PDT

Proposed deal with US government would not absolve the company from criminal liability, reports say

Lebanese and Turkish hostages freed after rare Syrian co-operation

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 06:02 PM PDT

Shia Lebanese pilgrims held for 18 months in Syria released in exchange for Turkish pilots kidnapped in Lebanon

NSW bushfires: fears conditions will soon be far worse than expected

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:40 PM PDT

Premier declares state of emergency and warns of mass evacuations to come in the Blue Mountains

NSW by-election: Labor inflict resounding defeat in seat of Miranda

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:15 PM PDT

Premier Barry O'Farrell says voters were angry about MP's resignation and local council allegations, not his government

Two face charges over blond-haired girl found in Gypsy camp

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:08 PM PDT

Discovery in central Greece reinforces suspicion of Roma involvement in child trafficking, but brings hope to parents of Madeleine McCann

Greek officials have launched an international campaign to try to identify a four-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed girl found in a Gypsy camp in central Greece as the couple believed to have raised her face charges of kidnapping.

"They will appear on Monday before a magistrate on charges of abducting a minor after DNA tests revealed they bore no relationship to her," said Lukas Krikos, a police official in Athens. "An extensive investigation is under way around the Roma camp in Farsala, where she was found."

Police found the child, with her conspicuous deep-set blue eyes and pale skin, when they conducted a raid on the settlement 170 miles north of Athens in search of weapons and drugs. The girl appeared disoriented and confused by the abrupt change in her environment when she was taken into the care of a children's charity.

"She communicates mostly in the Roma dialect and understands only a few words of Greek," said Costas Giannopoulos, who heads the charity, called Smile of the Child.

Greek authorities said it was imperative that they find the child's real parents so they could understand how she ended up in the camp. A global search has been initiated through Interpol and international children's groups.

Police say the suspects, a 40-year-old woman and a 39-year-old man, have given a range of explanations, from the girl being found in a blanket to her having a Canadian father. The woman, who was found to have two identities and 14 children, claimed to have given birth to six of them in the same year. At least three were registered in different parts of Greece.

"This case has reinforced our suspicions of Roma involvement in child trafficking. We have discovered how easy it is for anyone to register children as their own," Giannopoulos told the Observer. "Blond, blue-eyed children are clearly being targeted."

The parents of Madeleine McCann, the toddler who went missing in Portugal in 2007, said the case gave them "great hope". It could also help crack the mystery of Ben Needham, the Sheffield boy who went missing on the island of Kos in 1991.

Helena Smith

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Brazilians prepare to rage against state failures in World Cup summer

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:08 PM PDT

While standards of living have improved for millions, many services remain poor and will be the focal point of unrest in 2014

The night of 30 June was one of intense drama in Rio de Janeiro. Inside the newly refurbished Maracanã stadium, still slick with plaster dust, a gladiatorial atmosphere turned to celebration as Neymar scored Brazil's second goal in a 3-0 victory over Spain in the Confederations Cup final, on the cusp of half-time.

This dramatic game could have been the perfect curtain-raiser for the 2014 World Cup, were it not for the scenes outside the stadium, where thousands of protesters faced off against police in riot gear, the air thick with teargas and insults. Last Tuesday, the story was repeated. As TV Globo showed the 2-0 victory over Poland that clinched England's place in the finals, 10,000 people joined a protest in central Rio in support of striking teachers, a few miles from the Maracanã.

As teachers began to drift home, the sound of carnival drums was replaced by the thump of percussion grenades and the hiss of exploding teargas canisters as hundreds of black-clad youths, known as the "Black Bloc" after the anarchist demonstration tactics they adhere to, began battling outnumbered police.

Protesters advanced across the square through a haze of teargas, using corrugated iron sheets as cover and throwing rocks and fireworks. At one point police retreated, more than once they threw rocks back. Demonstrators trashed bank foyers and cash machines, phone booths and a mobile phone shop. Hundreds were detained.

This was the second teachers' demonstration in a week to end in violence. As in June, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets, demanding better health, transport and education services, or an end to corruption, one rallying cry was: "There won't be any World Cup." Reading news reports the next day, England fans planning 2014 trips must have wondered: whatever happened to Brazil's World Cup party?

Brazil is the B in the Brics –Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the country that, under popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, saw a decade of phenomenal social advances in which 40 million people escaped from poverty and joined a new, emerging lower middle class – known officially as "Class C". Many were able to buy their first mobile phone, computer and car, creating a new army of consumers. What are they protesting about?

It is not just services. Paradoxically, even government experts admit that this social improvement is behind the protests. "These protests have a positive relation to inequality. Inequality fell and protests grew," said Marcelo Neri, acting minister at the government secretariat for strategic subjects, president of the Institute of Applied Economic Research and an acknowledged Class C expert.

"There was a growth of people's income above the growth of GDP. Last year it was 7.9%, and the GDP grew 0.9%," Neri said. "So life inside people's houses is getting better, and outside is not getting better at the same velocity."

Class C now makes up more than half of the Brazilian population. The demographic group once marginalised as "the poor" now plays a confident and central role in Brazilian culture, with its own pop stars, like singer Anitta, and even a hit soap opera on Globo called Brazil Avenue, which for the first time celebrated its brash, colourful suburban style on primetime television and was a nationwide hit.

"Globo soap operas used to be a magic eye, for the poorer people to see the rich," said Antonio Prata, one of the soap's scriptwriters. "Brazil Avenue did the opposite … Class C didn't want to see the rich, they wanted to see themselves reflected."

But what Class C members can buy in terms of consumer goods – often on credit – does not make up for the failing social services around them, particularly in health, education, sanitation and transport. Many live in tiny breezeblock houses, in endless, gritty suburbs, hours away from city centres by bus. Transport was the spark that lit June's protests: an increase in bus fares in São Paulo and Rio.

"These Brazilians are consumers without citizenship, without civil rights. They are not citizens," said celebrated novelist Milton Hatoum. "There is consumerism but no citizenship. The schools for their children are terrible. Education is terrible. Often there is no sanitation."

The World Cup will go ahead: the government is too far down the line for it not to. But Brazilians of all backgrounds are agreed that there will be more protests. World Cup costs are one of the triggers.

"In the last year, Brazil spent twice as much on refurbishing and constructing stadiums for the World Cup as on basic sanitation," said the film director Walter Salles, who made The Motorcycle Diaries and On The Road.

He noted that among the stadiums being built and refurbished at a cost of 8bn real (£2.27bn), among myriad accusations of corruption, are "white elephants" such as those in Brasília and Manaus – cities whose football teams play in lower leagues.

Protesters demand "Fifa standard" health, education and transport. "Knowing the terrible conditions offered in those areas by the Brazilian state, the claims are fully justified," said Salles. Hatoum concurs. "Next year there will be gigantic demonstrations, before and during the World Cup," he said. "The construction of monumental stadiums was an aberration."

The Amazônia arena, built in Hatoum's native Manaus, deep in the Amazon jungle, has cost 600m real – but the local team play to crowds of a few hundred. According to 2012 government figures, 20.2% of houses in Manaus do not have proper plumbing. Nationwide, 15.1% of Brazilian children up to four years old live in areas where sewage runs outdoors.

Brazil spends heavily on education – 18.1% of government expenditure in 2010, according to the World Bank – but achieves little. According to recent OECD figures, Brazil's education spending rose to 5.6% of GDP in 2010 from 3.5% in 2000 – but the number of those aged 15-19 in full-time education in 2011 was only 77% (the OECD average is 84%). Teachers' salaries are low – hence the strike – and public schools desperately lack resources. "We had a distribution of wealth, but not in a way that was thought. Many people got money who did not have education," said Papoula de Almeida, 42, a training consultant. "It is only private schools that function here."

Public health services are intermittent. In some areas, such as central Rio, free health centres function well, but in outlying, poorer suburbs or favelas (shanty towns), they are pitifully lacking. Brazil spent $1,000 per capita on health in 2011, 8.9% of its GDP, according to the World Health Organisation. But even lower-middle-class Brazilians spend money on private health plans.

"If you go to the health centre in my district, you will see that there is much to be improved," said Criolo, an MTV award-winning rapper from the sprawling São Paulo favela of Grajaú. "Imagine a first-world country. People don't stop demanding things. So imagine ours, this fight to improve everything."

Growth in the Brazilian economy has also stalled. In 2010, it hit 7.5%. The Economist celebrated in November 2009 with a cover depicting Rio's famous Christ statue rising like a rocket and the headline "Brazil takes off". Last year the GDP grew just 0.9%. In September, the Economist featured the same statue as a nose-diving rocket and the headline: "Has Brazil blown it?"

Tony Volpon at Nomura Securities in New York, one of the most respected analysts on the Brazilian economy, believes the country is at a crossroads, having relied too long on high prices the Chinese paid for exports such as iron ore and unsustainable, credit-funded consumer spending by Class C.

"There was a very long and important cycle in commodity prices driven by China. This basically made Brazil and other countries wealthier because you are selling what you produce for more," he said. "Brazil unfortunately took that new wealth and decided to consume a great proportion and not invest. That consumption made Brazil a very expensive place."

Brazil has major infrastructure problems – there are virtually no trains, many major roads are crumbling, airports chaotic and overcrowded, mobile phone and internet signals fail regularly. All this frustrates the population, who are increasingly in debt, anyway. "The consumers have [lost money] because you had a party and you consumed a lot and now they're leveraged," said Volpon.

But Brazil is still close to full employment. And despite its problems, people still have more money than ever before. And as Marcelo Neri notes, many of the protesters, particularly in São Paulo, are from middle-class backgrounds. "Even in June, they reached a small part of the population, less than 2%," he said. Neri argues that if Brazil play well, as in the Confederations Cup, protests will be dissipated. "If Brazil had lost," he said, "we don't know …"

But the dissatisfaction in Brazil goes deeper than just public services. Some argue excess consumerism is indeed part of the problem. "This easy money given out did not enrich them. They are in this madness of consumption. Brazilians consume too much, like Americans," said Papoula de Almeida.

Brazilian consumers are also poorly served, by companies that sell them badly produced goods and services at inflated prices. People often take to YouTube or Twitter as the only way to get their complaints dealt with.

So much so that one comedy sketch, in which comedy actor Fábio Porchat gradually loses control as he tries, and fails, to cancel a line with a mobile phone company, became a national sensation and has been seen 11m times on YouTube. "Companies still treat their customers really badly. Brazilians are beginning to lose patience with many things here," said Porchat.

This also plays into protests – many of which targeted the mainstream Brazilian media, particularly Globo. Tens of thousands turned to the independent collective Mídia Ninja, which broadcasts live on the internet from demonstrations via mobile phone.

"There is a gap between what the media shows and what Brazilians see. Particularly in relation to social inequality and human abuses. This contributed a lot to the protests in June," said Bruno Torturra, one of Mídia Ninja's founders.

Following his YouTube success, Porchat and a collective of Rio actors founded Porta dos Fundos (Back Door), which reaches millions of viewers with beautifully filmed and cleverly observed comedy sketches on YouTube. It is like watching The Office when all that television has to show is The Generation Game.

Although Porchat also appears on a family Globo comedy, he says Porta dos Fundos has filled a gap that Brazilian television's conservative nature and obsession with figures has missed.

"We are living a very square moment in terrestrial and cable television here in Brazil," he said. "There is a bigger preoccupation with viewing figures and sponsors and artistic quality has practically been left aside."

Many who sympathise with demonstrators have been put off taking part by the violence with which the police have often dealt with protests. On 20 June, Rio police cleared half a million people off the streets in a matter of hours with teargas, rubber bullets and percussion grenades. Many of these were from poorer backgrounds. "I tried to go to one protest, but there were police and bombs and confusion and I was with my son," said Quel Santos, 30, an unemployed single mother who lives in a favela in Santa Teresa, central Rio. "It was horrible. So we didn't go down."

And a key underlying problem, which Brazilians recognise is fundamental, is the country's endemic corruption – something Dilma Rousseff, the president, has been unable to stamp out. "These are not protests against the Dilma government. They are protests against corrupt politicians, a fragile justice system, corrupt mayors," said Hatoum. "They are liars, greedy opportunists who do not think about the country, they don't think about citizens. This is the perception I have of Brazilian politicians."

Come 2014, if the economy fails to splutter back into life, millions of Brazilians could return to the streets. "There will be confusion. There will be protests. It is not going to end," said Quel Santos. "The people are indignant. And the World Cup will be an opportunity for them to show this to the world."

Dom Phillips

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In Ulan Bator, winter stoves fuel a smog responsible for one in 10 deaths

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:07 PM PDT

Mongolia's capital is the coldest in the world – and in its tented slums, pollution from traditional heating is a killer. But change is on the way

They call Mongolia the "land of blue sky"; its spectacular desert, forest and grasslands are blessed by sun for two-thirds of the year. But climb to a snow-dusted hilltop overlooking Ulan Bator and you see a thick grey band hanging over the city. In the coming weeks, as temperatures plummet, the smog will spread across the streets and into homes, shutting out the light.

While Beijing's "airpocalypse" has made headlines worldwide, it pales beside the haze of the Mongolian capital. Ulan Bator is the world's second-most polluted city, superseded only by Ahvaz in Iran, according to World Health Organisation research.

Pollution is a common problem for quickly developing countries. But the biggest issue is not the smokestacks on the horizon – Mongolia's manufacturing sector remains minute – nor the vehicles jamming the capital's streets. Rather, it is the collision of urbanisation and traditional culture: 60-70% of winter pollution comes from the old-fashioned stoves heating the circular felt tents or gers that sprawl across the slopes around the city.

More than half of the city's 1.2 million inhabitants live in the impoverished ger districts, burning coal, wood and sometimes rubbish to cook and keep warm. Ulan Bator is the world's chilliest capital, with temperatures dipping as low as -40C in January.

"As soon as people start getting cold they start up their stoves, and that's when the smog begins. It looks like thick fog and every year it's getting worse. It's only a bit of an exaggeration to say you could get lost in it," said Otgonsetseg Lodoisambuu, who lives in a district to the north of the city with his children. "The little one stays inside all the time in the winter, but my older son is in first grade now, so we have to take him to school; I just put a scarf over his face. The only time it's OK to let the kids out is between one and two in the afternoon, when people let their fires die down because they have finished cooking.

"In the morning it hurts my throat as soon as I go outside. It must be hurting my lungs, too."

Ulan Bator's pollutant levels of PM2.5 – tiny particulate matter, which can penetrate deep into lungs – are six or seven times higher than the WHO's most lenient air-quality guidelines for developing countries. The result, say researchers, is that one in every 10 deaths is caused by air pollution – on their most conservative estimate.

Ryan Allen, of Simon Fraser University, in Canada, who led the study, said the true figure could be as high as one in five. The study did not consider the effects of indoor air pollution, excluded the deaths of those aged under 30 and was based on data from a centrally located government monitoring site, in a relatively less polluted area of the city.

He and his Mongolian co-researchers are now studying how pollution affects foetuses and whether using air filters could reduce the impact; Ulan Bator's public health institute has warned of a sharp increase in birth defects in the capital as well as a 45% rise in the number of patients with respiratory illnesses between 2004 and 2008. The World Bank has estimated that pollution-related health problems cost the country £290m annually.

Dr Byambaa Onio, vice-director of the Bayanzurkh district hospital, arrived in the capital 46 years ago, when it was "a nice, clean city"; now the pollution levels are "disastrous", he said – and are producing a growing number of patients.

Like many of the capital's residents, he and his wife rarely open the windows in winter. But when they set up an air purifier at home, to test how severe the problem had become, they were shocked to see how dirty the filter became in just two days. "We've continued to use the purifiers, so my wife and I are breathing clean air – but others don't," he said.

Nor do others have the option to buy their children masks and decamp to a home outside the city at weekends, as the couple do, he notes. The residents of ger districts are hit twice over: pollution levels can be double those of the city centre, and they cannot afford to take evasive measures.

Joint research by the World Bank and National University of Mongolia suggests that halving ger stove emissions could cut year-round levels of the larger PM10 particles by a third. Foreign donors and Mongolian authorities have spent millions of dollars subsidising the distribution of 128,000 "clean" stoves in the last year and attempting to step up the production of clean fuels.

Galimbyek Khaltai, deputy head of the city's air pollution agency, says PM2.5 levels have already fallen by around 25% since the programme began. Other experts believe it is too early to judge its effectiveness because the monitoring network is not rigorous enough and unusually high levels of wind and snow last year are likely to have affected data.

Jugder Batmunkh is one of the keenest advocates of the stove replacement project. The 63-year-old is raising her grandchildren in a ger district to the north of the capital; last year she developed asthma, which her doctor blamed on pollution.

Disposing of the ashes from gers is easier and cleaner with the new model. When you take the cover off, the ger does not fill with smoke as it tended to do before. But the biggest advantage for her is its efficiency: it uses just half as much coal. Her family burn through just one bag a day now, saving themselves perhaps 45,000 tugriks (£16) a month – in an area where the average income is around 600,000 tugriks.

Most of her neighbours in Bhayan Khoshuu have bought the appliances, but not all are so enthusiastic. Some have heard rumours that the new stoves might explode; others are unimpressed by their performance.

Twenty-two-year-old Nadmid Rentsenosor's recent purchase is standing idle. "It takes too long to heat up, so it warms the place much more slowly – we are still using the old one instead," she said.

The city is launching a two-month campaign to show people how to use the stoves and minimise emissions. But even if officials can persuade everyone to adapt, the resulting fall in pollution will be vulnerable to fresh shifts in Ulan Bator's development. As its economy grows, construction projects are under way around the city, churning up dust, and more vehicles sit in traffic jams on the streets. The city's population continues to swell and another bitter winter could bring a fresh surge of migrants to the ger districts; many of the current residents moved to the capital from desperation when their livestock died in extreme weather conditions.

"Clean stoves reduce air pollution, but that's a short-term project. Our long-term project has to be to build affordable apartments," said Galimbyek of the air pollution agency.

The scale of demand is daunting and the quality of new buildings will be as important as the quality. Much of the city's housing dates from the Soviet era: it lacks double glazing and in many cases has just 5mm of basic polystyrene insulation on the concrete walls, said Graham McDarby of Gradon Architecture, a British firm now working on flats in the city. Raising current building standards to European levels could dramatically improve energy efficiency. "If you've got quality insulation and it's air-tight, the family in there will generate enough heat," he said.

The country also has its first wind farm, not far from the capital. There are ambitious plans for a new subway system, which should help cut traffic pollution.

But the ultimate problem, said Galimbyek, was that there were simply too many people in the capital: its size has tripled since 1979 and it has over a third of the country's population. It is where all the universities are located, and much of Mongolia's employment. To make Ulan Bator a healthier place, he believes, it has to stop mushrooming, which means that rural areas have to be developed instead. That might sound like a radical prescription, but drastic changes are needed. "For years we thought the effects of air pollution fell on a straight line: if you reduced it by 10 units, it didn't matter whether you were at the higher or lower end. What we seem to be learning more recently is that it is a curve, not a straight line, and actually you get the biggest bang for your buck in lower [pollution] conditions," said Allen.

"In a city like Ulan Bator you would actually need to have quite a dramatic reduction in air pollution before you started to see really good improvements in public health."

Tania Branigan

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Smart robots, driverless cars work – but they bring ethical issues too

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:07 PM PDT

Educational robots, intelligent implants, brain chips: scientists and legal experts will meet this week to debate how to deal with the rapid march of artificial intelligence

From personalised searches of Google to the seductive experience of driverless cars, from educational robots that hone your French to prosthetics that are stronger and faster than our own limbs: artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionise our lives.

Now scientists, legal experts and philosophers are joining forces to scrutinise the promise of intelligent systems and wrangle over their implications. This week in Brighton, the fourth EuCogIII members' conference is set to tackle these issues head on. "Fundamentally we're interested in considering the ethical and societal impact of such systems," says Alan Winfield, professor of electronic engineering at UWE Bristol. It is time, he says, to make some crucial decisions. "If we get it wrong, there are consequences right now."

It's a point well illustrated by IBM's intelligent system, Watson. Two years after thrashing human contestants at the quickfire quiz Jeopardy!, Watson has graduated from gameshows to medical school and could soon be diagnosing diseases. This year commercial products based on Watson were unveiled for clinical use, harnessing the system's ability to crunch through swaths of medical information and make decisions.

"There is a huge amount of knowledge now that doctors can potentially have. Obviously they can't absorb all of it and they can't necessarily remember all of it," says Tony Prescott, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sheffield. With access to the latest developments as well as the medical records of patients, systems such as Watson could suggest an accurate diagnosis faster and more often, as well as predicting an individual's health risks.

But there is a hitch. With intelligent systems accessing medical records comes the fear of compromised privacy and security, as many will be connected via the internet. Could we, or even should we, be allowed to opt out of such an intelligent system? "It is a decision we have to make as a society," says Prescott. "Whether we want to give up some of our privacy in order to get improved services like better healthcare."

But how far can we trust such systems? Putting your faith in a "black box" may seem at best naive, at worst reckless. It is an issue that boils down to trust, making it essential that doctors are closely involved in training such systems, understanding how they work and confirming the diagnoses are spot on.

At the heart of the revolution is you, the consumer. With computers getting smaller, more powerful and more energy-efficient, few areas of our lives will remain untouched by intelligent machines. Driverless cars are expected to cause a storm. "The technology is ready," says Winfield. "The problem is insurance and legislation." While driverless cars could offer many benefits, from bringing independence to the elderly to reducing the number of road accidents, disasters could still happen. Who then pays the damages – the owner, or the car producer?

Last year a European research project, RoboLaw, was created to tackle such legal conundrums and will deliver its guidelines on regulations to the European commission in the spring. One question is whether it's time to rethink liability to ensure safety and justice without compromising the incentive for companies to develop the technology – "for instance, through the usage of compulsory insurance schemes or by assessing so-called 'safe harbours' to shield, in some cases under certain conditions, the liability of the producer of the car," explains Andrea Bertolini, a post-doctoral fellow in private law at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in northern Italy and a member of the RoboLaw team.

And it is not just issues of liability that could be reformed. Fallible humans are constrained by speed limits to reduce the number of crashes, but with an all-encompassing knowledge of road layout and road users, intelligent cars could themselves decide how fast they travel, banishing the need for fixed limits.

One of the greatest issues, says Bertolini, is that there are many types of robots each posing different legal problems. State of the art prosthetic devices – essentially wearable intelligent robots – could soon outperform our natural limbs, raising new concerns that the technology could become available to individuals who may wish to trade in their healthy body parts for a prosthesis. "Should this be regulated, and eventually if it should be regulated, how should it be regulated?" asks Bertolini.

The questions become even more pressing when the possibility of implants are considered – imagine a brain chip that could let you check your email, search the internet or tap in to GPS. It's the ultimate "hands-free" device.

This possibility of becoming "bio-hybrid" may sound futuristic, unlikely even. But when technology develops, it develops quickly. "It is moving way faster than legislation can keep up and yes, it's a problem," says Tony Belpaeme, professor of cognitive systems and robotics at the University of Plymouth.

And the issues are international. "The trouble is that your data is now globally spread and legislation isn't the same across various regions across the planet," says Belpaeme. With recent revelations over the access and use of data by various government agencies still reverberating, issues of data storage, privacy and security need to be aired openly. "How much worse would it be if there were such external and covert constraints on cognitive technology?" asks Dr Ron Chrisley, reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex and one of the conference organisers. With the possibility of technology becoming intertwined with our very bodies, the threat of unauthorised access looms large.

Running scared is not an option. Intelligent systems offer us the chance to hone many fundamental areas of our lives, including education. It's an effect Belpaeme has seen firsthand through his research into use of social robots in education. While current computer systems can support learning, robots, particularly those sporting a face and personalised conversation, evoke a stronger response. "What we found is that if you have a robot there taking you through exactly the same exercises, the children learn faster and better," says Belpaeme.

"I can just see a future where you have one or two robots sitting in the corner of a classroom," he says. "If you just need a little push or you want to be challenged, you get 20 minutes or half an hour with a robot." According to Belpaeme, hospitals could benefit from such technology, with robots teaching children how to manage their medical conditions, while in care homes such robots could help the elderly with their daily exercises.

With such technological leaps set to transform our lives we, the public, need to be involved in the discussion, shaping policy and priorities from the outset. "I think that the greatest risk with these kinds of technologies is that they come along and they are a big surprise to people," says Prescott. Which is why, before the conference, you are invited to post questions for experts to discuss. You can also follow the event on Twitter through the hashtag #robotsandyou.

Intelligent machines could turn education, healthcare and daily life into optimised, tailored experiences. Getting society on side is big, and it's clever.

Nicola Davis

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The force is with Whitbread – for now

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:07 PM PDT

The group's consumer brands seem to have an almost hypnotic hold over consumers at the moment – just ask its executives

When you're chewing on a steak at a Beefeater Grill, having skin removed from the roof of your mouth by a Costa coffee or slipping under the duvet at a Premier Inn, you may occasionally be moved to ponder the choices that drove you there. The answer, it seems, is that you've fallen for a Jedi mind trick, which may explain how shares in the brands' owner, Whitbread, have been among the best performers since the credit crisis.

We know this because David Oliver – Whitbread's head of customer relationship management and loyalty – told delegates at this month's Festival of Marketing conference how they should use behavioural psychology and peer pressure to snare higher revenues.

"Humans are configured to be lazy and make the quick, easy decision," he mused. "We are all open to influence, and one of the key sources of that is how people around us behave. We can play to that as marketers."

The company might expand on how lazy it reckons its customers are this week at its half-year results. Profits should grow, but there's concern in the City that the force may soon desert Whitbread as rival discount hotel chains improve and Costa's relentless growth stalls. There's also a chance that if you prey on lackadaisical customers, they might be driven to try a rival. Basic psychology, some call that.

Asos and China are still quite the fashion

After a week in which the chancellor George Osborne – plus his old pal, London mayor Boris Johnson – have been travelling around China on a sales trip, you'd be forgiven for assuming that doing business with the world's second largest economy is a cinch.

Huge business names ranging from fund manager Fidelity to drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline have shown it can be slightly trickier than that. Osborne himself demonstrated how difficult it is to grasp the huge numbers associated with the country when he claimed that 160 million Chinese are now watching Downton Abbey. (What's more likely is that 160 million will watch British dramas such as Downton in the next three years.)

Still, we will again be reminded of the allure of China with Wednesday's figures from online fashion group Asos. Like China, Asos is massively in vogue and there are few signs of either of the City's infatuations subsiding. Analysts reckon Asos's soaring shares can soar some more – not least because its new Chinese website launches at the end of this month. Meanwhile, China's latest GDP figures show it booming – assuming you believe the data. China's, not Osborne's, that is.

Ryanair on Twitter? That surely won't fly

There are no known cases in history of a despised corporation taking to social media and the result being viewed as a disaster (well, perhaps just a couple).

So there will be nothing to see next week when the hated budget airline Ryanair allows its boss, Michael O'Leary, to engage with punters over Twitter – part of his new customer relations plan to eliminate "things that unnecessarily piss people off".

Silly as it may seem (and the company promises it's not a hoax) this is a rather radical move: it's never been quite clear what O'Leary hates most – new media or the flying public – while in the latter case the loathing has long been mutual.

With all that in mind, tomorrow's test flight of the cuddly new Ryanair image looks odds-on to descend into a Twitter dogfight, with the fruity-mouthed O'Leary no doubt trying to resist posts such as: "We no longer believe all our customers are complete [expletives]"; "The UK Competition Commission is run by total [expletive] [expletives]"; and "The EU is run by even bigger [expletives] than UKCC!"

All of which will surely form the kernel of some debate the next time the professors of Harvard Business School and Insead convene. In the meantime, compelling viewing.

Simon Goodley

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The big grey box in Leipzig where Amazon staff have found their voice

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:07 PM PDT

Amazon had shrugged off talk of bad working conditions at its warehouses, but now one centre in Germany is threatening to spoil its Christmas

Take a tram journey through Leipzig in the former East Germany and you might pass Bertolt-Brecht-Strasse, or Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, named after the communist revolutionary. Or you might see a name more familiar from your internet browser: Amazonstrasse.

Added to the map in 2006, the street is home to the enormous grey shoebox that is the Amazon distribution centre – covering an area the size of 11 football pitches. Here 2,000 workers package orders for the US online retailer and send them off to buyers across Germany. It's a four-stage process, with the army of workers divided into "pickers", "packers", "receivers" and "stowers".

Amazon's logistics centres have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. A much-shared Mother Jones report described the dehumanising working conditions at another, but similar, US firm; in a Financial Times article one employee likened Amazon's centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire, to a "slave camp". In January, German television screened a documentary showing that one centre employed security guards with neo-nazi backgrounds.

In the US, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos did respond to reports of temperatures approaching 40C in its warehouses with a $52m investment in air conditioning, but avoids paying benefits by calling staff "independent contractors".

Leipzig, the city with the highest poverty rate in Germany, is unusual in that it is the first place where the debate has been played out inside an Amazon centre. Along with another site in Bad Hersfeld, in the central Hesse region, this summer it became the first of Amazon's sites to see repeated strike action over pay and working conditions.

Earlier this month the service workers' union Verdi warned that there could be more strikes before Christmas after Amazon refused to enter negotiations about a collective wage agreement that would comply with standards in the German retail sector. Mail order businesses are supposed to pay workers between €11.47 and €11.94 an hour, at least €1 more than Amazon's German workers earn.

The following day, Amazon confirmed rumours that it was planning to open three new logistics centres in Poland – two in Wroclaw and one in Poznan, less than three hours' drive from Berlin; Polish business daily Puls Biznesu claimed that they were intended to take over work from strike-hit Germany.

Amazon said the announcement was "not intended as a counterstrike", but workers in Leipzig are now nervous: has the union overplayed its hand?

On an industrial park in the north-east of the city, next to the largest brothel in the eastern part of the country (prostitution is legal in Germany), Amazon Leipzig looks exactly like any of Amazon's 90 other logistics centres around the world.

Workers enter and leave via a yellow building they call the "banana tower", each time passing through airport-style security checks to confirm that they haven't stolen anything. The size of the building and the security measures mean that at least 10 minutes of their two breaks of 20 and 25 minutes a day are taken up with walking and queuing, according to the union.

On the day I visit Amazonstrasse 1, the smoking area inside the compound is closed because of building works. About 50 workers in high-visibility vests stand huddled in groups in the car park. Security staff in yellow vests watch over them from the banana tower.

The first group I ask about the situation at the centre respond with nervous shakes of the head and tightly closed lips. It is the same with other groups around the car park. Nobody will talk.

Martin Smith, national organiser with Britain's GMB union, describes Amazon as "aggressively anti-union" and has spoken of "an atmosphere of fear" reported by those who have tried to get workers to sign up. A spokeswoman for the union refers to the few Amazon employees in Britain who are union members as "the French resistance", because "they get shot down as soon as they put their head above the parapet".

In Germany, the situation is different mainly because Betriebsräte or works councils – shopfloor organisations that complement national labour negotiations – are legally protected. Preventing a works council election or obstructing a meeting is punishable by law. At Amazon Leipzig, a works council was started in 2009 against the wishes of the management. Now, a local Verdi rep tells me, around a third of the workforce is unionised.

Recruitment takes place discreetly – not by handing out flyers outside the building, but by members putting up sticky notes with thought-provoking questions. "Isn't the walk to your lunch break too long?" or "All the other local retailers got pay rises this month – why didn't we?"

Via a local journalist I eventually manage to contact one Amazon worker, who eventually agrees to meet me in Leipzig city centre, but will only speak on condition of anonymity.

A self-described "all-rounder" in his twenties, he has worked as a packer, picker and receiver, insisting he is "proud" of the work he does at Amazon and crediting the company for helping him back into regular employment.

Having finished an apprenticeship, he had failed to find a job and ended up homeless. After he had been on the street five years, Germany's federal employment agency – much criticised in the wake of the labour market reforms of the early 2000s – placed him on a labour leasing scheme with Amazon. After a few months, he was one of the few workers to be put on a permanent contract.

"There's a social side to Amazon that a lot of people don't see," he says.

Nevertheless, he joined the union and took part in the strikes in June and September. The reason, he says, is that he couldn't otherwise address any of the problems with working conditions. Managers are often rotated between units every two months, and he doesn't feel he can trust them.

"Amazon deliberately moves workers to different parts of the company when they sense a bond forming between them. They like passive workers – they are the ones who are usually hired. The more critical ones, less so." He points to the union's achievements: in 2010, the starting wage at Amazon Leipzig went up from €7.76 to €9.55 an hour. Spontaneous cancellations of shifts have become rarer; there are even rumours about Christmas pay for the first time this year.

Amazon now supplies workers with special belts that don't trigger the alarm during security checks, and people are allowed to bring their own lunch in see-through boxes – although chocolate bars are still forbidden, since Amazon stocks them.

The possibility of Amazon closing down in Leipzig doesn't worry him, he says. Union reps have assured him that the new centres in Poland are more conveniently located for supplying the growing markets in Eastern Europe than those in Germany. "They are trying to flex their muscles and intimidate us. Why wouldn't they?" The previous strikes in June and September "didn't hurt Amazon one bit", he reckons – the company just temporarily moved work to other centres.

He is convinced, however, that there will be more strikes before Christmas, when demand will be too high for it to repeat the manoeuvre. "We hope to shake things up a bit."

A spokesperson for the company said: "Amazon maintains a culture of direct dialogue with employees. We have employee representation in all our locations – either as works councils or as employee forums which represent the interests of employees and regularly meet with the senior management.

"We cherish an open discussion culture and want our leadership teams to foster an open communication at all levels – if there are issues, we will work on those jointly."

Philip Oltermann

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Edward Snowden: public indifference is the real enemy in the NSA affair

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Most people don't seem to worry that government agencies are collecting their personal data. Is it ignorance or apathy?

One of the most disturbing aspects of the public response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the scale of governmental surveillance is how little public disquiet there appears to be about it. A recent YouGov poll, for example, asked respondents whether the British security services have too many or too few powers to carry out surveillance on ordinary people. Forty-two per cent said that they thought the balance was "about right" and a further 22% thought that the security services did not have enough powers. In another question, respondents were asked whether they thought Snowden's revelations were a good or a bad thing; 43% thought they were bad and only 35% thought they were good.

Writing in these pages a few weeks ago, Henry Porter expressed his own frustration at this public complacency. "Today, apparently," he wrote, "we are at ease with a system of near total intrusion that would have horrified every adult Briton 25 years ago. Back then, western spies acknowledged the importance of freedom by honouring the survivors of those networks; now, they spy on their own people. We have changed, that is obvious, and, to be honest, I wonder whether I, and others who care about privacy and freedom, have been left behind by societies that accept surveillance as a part of the sophisticated world we live in."

I share Henry's bafflement. At one point I thought that the level of public complacency about the revelations was a reflection simply of ignorance. After all, most people who use the internet and mobile phones have no idea about how any of this stuff works and so may be naive about the implications of state agencies being able to scoop up everybody's email metadata, call logs, click streams, friendship networks and so on.

But what is, in a way, more alarming is how relaxed many of my professional peers seem to be about it. Many of them are people who do understand how the stuff works. To them, Snowden's revelations probably just confirm what they had kind of suspected all along. And yet the discovery that in less than three decades our societies have achieved Orwellian levels of surveillance provokes, at most, a wry smile or a resigned shrug. And it is this level of passive acceptance that I find really scary.

What's even more alarming is that the one group of professionals who really ought to be alert to the danger are journalists. After all, these are the people who define news as "something that someone powerful does not want published", who pride themselves on "holding government to account" or sometimes, when they've had a few drinks, on "speaking truth to power". And yet, in their reactions to the rolling scoops published by the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, many of them seem to have succumbed either to a weird kind of spiteful envy, or to a desire to act as the unpaid stenographers to the security services and their political masters.

We've seen this before, of course, notably in the visceral hatred directed towards WikiLeaks by the mainstream media in both this country and the US. As I read the vitriol being heaped on Julian Assange, I wondered how the press would have reacted if Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning had handed his CD downloads to the editor of the Des Moines Register who had then published them. Would that editor have been lauded as a champion of freedom, or vilified as a traitor warranting summary assassination?

Last week in the US, we saw a welcome sign that some people in journalism have woken up to the existential threat posed by the NSA to their profession – and, by implication, to political freedom. A group of scholars, journalists and researchers from Columbia Journalism School and the MIT Centre for Civic Media submitted a thoughtful paper on "the effects of mass surveillance on the practice of journalism" to the Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies convened by President Obama.

It's a longish (15-page) submission that is worth reading in full. It argues that what the NSA is doing is "incompatible with the existing law and policy protecting the confidentiality of journalist-source communications", that this is not merely an incompatibility in spirit, "but a series of specific and serious discrepancies between the activities of the intelligence community and existing law, policy, and practice in the rest of the government" and – most importantly – that the climate of secrecy around mass surveillance is actively harmful to journalism, because "sources cannot know when they might be monitored, or how intercepted information might be used against them". In which case, what happens to the freedom that the NSA is supposedly defending?

John Naughton

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Marinaleda: Spain's communist model village

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:05 PM PDT

Marinaleda, in impoverished Andalusia, used to suffer terrible hardships. Led by a charismatic mayor, the village declared itself a communist utopia and took farmland to provide for everyone. Could it be the answer to modern capitalism's failings?

In 2004, I was leafing through a travel guide to Andalusia while on holiday in Seville, and read a fleeting reference to a small, remote village called Marinaleda – "a communist utopia" of revolutionary farm labourers, it said. I was immediately fascinated, but I could find almost no details to feed my fascination. There was so little information about the village available beyond that short summary, either in the guidebook, on the internet, or on the lips of strangers I met in Seville. "Ah yes, the strange little communist village, the utopia," a few of them said. But none of them had visited, or knew anyone who had – and no one could tell me whether it really was a utopia. The best anyone could do was to add the information that it had a charismatic, eccentric mayor, with a prophet's beard and an almost demagogic presence, called Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo.

Eventually I found out more. The first part of Marinaleda's miracle is that when its struggle to create utopia began, in the late 1970s, it was from a position of abject poverty. The village was suffering more than 60% unemployment; it was a farming community with no land, its people frequently forced to go without food for days at a time, in a period of Spanish history mired in uncertainty after the death of the fascist dictator General Franco. The second part of Marinaleda's miracle is that over three extraordinary decades, it won. Some distance along that remarkable journey of struggle and sacrifice, in 1985, Sánchez Gordillo told the newspaper El País: "We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and culture; and to be able to read with respect the word 'peace '. We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present."

As befits a rebel, Sánchez Gordillo is fond of quoting Che Guevara; specifically Che's maxim that "only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality". In one small village in southern Spain, this isn't just a T-shirt slogan.

In spring 2013 unemployment in Andalusia is a staggering 36%; for those aged 16 to 24, the figure is above 55% – figures worse even than the egregious national average. The construction industry boom of the 2000s saw the coast cluttered with cranes and encouraged a generation to skip the end of school and take the €40,000-a-year jobs on offer on the building sites. That work is gone, and nothing is going to replace it. With the European Central Bank looming ominously over his shoulder, prime minister Mariano Rajoy has introduced labour reforms to make it much easier for businesses to sack their employees, quickly and with less compensation, and these new laws are now cutting swaths through the Spanish workforce, in private and public sectors alike.

Spain experienced a massive housing boom from 1996 to 2008. The price of property per square metre tripled in those 12 years: its scale is now tragically reflected in its crisis. Nationally, up to 400,000 families have been evicted since 2008. Again, it is especially acute in the south: 40 families a day in Andalusia have been turfed out of their homes by the banks. To make matters worse, under Spanish housing law, when you're evicted by your mortgage lender, that isn't the end of it: you have to keep paying the mortgage. In final acts of helplessness, suicides by homeowners on the brink of foreclosure have become horrifyingly common – on more than one occasion, while the bailiffs have been coming up the stairs, evictees have hurled themselves out of upstairs windows.

When people refer to la crisis in Spain they mean the eurozone crisis, an economic crisis; but the term means more than that. It is a systemic crisis, a political ecology crack'd from side to side: a crisis of seemingly endemic corruption across the country's elites, including politicians, bankers, royals and bureaucrats, and a crisis of faith in the democratic settlement established after the death of Franco in 1975. A poll conducted by the (state-run) centre for sociological research in December 2012 found that 67.5% of Spaniards said they were unhappy with the way their democracy worked. It's this disdain for the Spanish state in general, rather than merely the effects of the economic crisis, that brought 8 million indignados on to the streets in the spring and summer of 2011, and informed their rallying cry "Democracia Real Ya" (real democracy now).

But in one village in Andalusia's wild heart, there lies stability and order. Like Asterix's village impossibly holding out against the Romans, in this tiny pueblo a great empire has met its match, in a ragtag army of boisterous upstarts yearning for liberty. The bout seems almost laughably unfair – Marinaleda's population is 2,700, Spain's is 47 million – and yet the empire has lost, time and time again.

In 1979, at the age of 30, Sánchez Gordillo became the first elected mayor of Marinaleda, a position he has held ever since – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority. However, holding official state-sanctioned positions of power was only a distraction from the serious business of la lucha – the struggle. In the intense heat of the summer of 1980, the village launched "a hunger strike against hunger" which brought them national and even global recognition. Everything they have done since that summer has increased the notoriety of Sánchez Gordillo and his village, and added to their admirers and enemies across Spain.

Sánchez Gordillo's philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book Andaluces, Levantaos and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings of the peasant pueblos of Andalusia, and their remarkably deep-seated tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being against all authority. "I have never belonged to the communist party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian," Sánchez Gordillo said in an interview in 2011, adding that his political beliefs were drawn from those of Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Marx, Lenin and Che.

In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a string of actions that began, in 40C heat, with the occupation of military land, the seizure of an aristocrat's palace, and a three-week march across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of expropriations from supermarkets, along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union SOC-SAT. They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the cover of Spanish newspapers, but in the world's media, as "the Robin Hood mayor", "the Don Quixote of the Spanish crisis", or "Spain's William Wallace", depending on which newspaper you read.

In the darkness of a winter morning, between 6 and 7am, Marinaleda's workers are clustered around the counter of the orange-painted patisserie Horno el Cedazo. Here they stand, knocking back strong, dark coffee accompanied by orange juice, pastries and pan con tomate: truly one of the world's best breakfasts, a large hunk of toast served alongside a bottle of olive oil and a decanter of sweet, salty, pink tomato pulp. Pour on one, then the other, then a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and you are ready for a day in the fields. Those with stronger stomachs also knock back a shot of one of the lurid-coloured liqueurs arrayed on a high shelf behind the counter; the syrupy, pungent anís is the most popular of these coffee chasers. All work in the Marinaleda co-operative in shifts, depending on what needs harvesting, and how much of it there is. If there's enough work for your group, then you will be told in advance, through the loudspeaker on the van that circles the village in the evenings. It's a strange, quasi-Soviet experience, sitting at home and hearing the van drive past announcing: "Work in the fields tomorrow for group B". The static-muffled announcements get louder and then quieter as the van winds through the village's narrow streets, like someone lost in a maze carrying a transistor radio.

When the 1,200-hectare El Humoso farm was finally won in 1991 – awarded to the village by the regional government following a decade of relentless occupations, strikes and appeals – cultivation began. The new Marinaleda co-operative selected crops that would need the greatest amount of human labour, to create as much work as possible. In addition to the ubiquitous olives and the oil-processing factory, they planted peppers of various kinds, artichokes, fava beans, green beans, broccoli: crops that could be processed, canned, and jarred, to justify the creation of a processing factory that provided a secondary industry back in the village, and thus more employment. "Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs," Sánchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on "efficiency" – a word that has been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices.

Sánchez Gordillo once suggested to me that the aristocratic family of the House of Alba could invest its vast riches (from shares in banks and power companies to multimillion-euro agricultural subsidies for its vast tracts of land) to create jobs, but had never shown any interest in doing so. "We believe the land should belong to the community that works it, and not in the dead hands of the nobility." That's why the big landowners planted wheat, he explained – wheat could be harvested with a machine, overseen by a few labourers; in Marinaleda, crops like artichokes and tomatoes were chosen precisely because they needed lots of labour. Why, the logic runs, should "efficiency" be the most important value in society, to the detriment of human life?

The town co-operative does not distribute profits: any surplus is reinvested to create more jobs. Everyone in the co-op earns the same salary, €47 (£40) a day for six and a half hours of work: it may not sound like a lot, but it's more than double the Spanish minimum wage. Participation in decisions about what crops to farm, and when, is encouraged, and often forms the focus of the village's general assemblies – in this respect, being a cooperativista means being an important part of the functioning of the pueblo as a whole. Where once the day labourers of Andalusia were politically and socially marginalised by their lack of an economic stake in their pueblo, they are now – at least in Marinaleda – called upon to lead the way. Non-co-operativists are by no means excluded from involvement in the town's political, social and cultural life – it's more that if you are a part of the co-operative, you can't avoid being swept up in local activities outside the confines of the working day.

Private enterprise is permitted in the village – perhaps more importantly, it is still an accepted part of life. As with the seven privately owned bars and cafés in the village (the Sindicato bar is owned by the union), if you wanted to open a pizzeria or a little family business of any kind, no one would stand in your way. But if a hypothetical head of regional development and franchising for, say, Carrefour, or Starbucks, with a vicious sense of humour and a masochistic streak, decided this small village was the perfect spot to expand operations, well – they wouldn't get very far. "We just wouldn't allow it," Sánchez Gordillo told me bluntly.

Marinaleda's alternative is decades in the making, but other anti-capitalist alternatives are sprouting in the cracks of the Spanish crisis, in the form of numerous quotidian acts of resistance, not just strikes and protests, but everyday behaviour – the occupation of vacant new-builds by those made homeless by their banks, firemen refusing to evict penniless families, doctors refusing to turn away undocumented immigrants. There is also a new Marinaleda-style farming co-operative in Somonte, a collective farm established on occupied government land in 2012, only an hour or so's drive from the village. When I visited Somonte earlier this year, I met Marinaleños who had left their home to bring Sanchez Gordillo's message of "land belongs to those who work it" to new terrain.

When I visited in February this year, a young man called Román strode bare-chested through the endless fields to greet us, looking strong but tired – they work from dawn until dusk, stopping only to dip into much-needed cauldrons full of pasta, rice and bean stews; surplus vegetables are sold on market day in nearby towns. They were growing beans, pimentos, potatoes and cabbages when I visited, planting trees and trying to resuscitate 400 hectares of idle land – as best they could, with only two dozen pairs of hands. Paradoxically, in light of Spain's staggering unemployment figures, they still need more people to join their co-operative, and have more farmland than they can currently cultivate. One of the murals painted on the Somonte barn wall contained a telling slogan, alongside portraits of Malcolm X, Geronimo and Zapata: "Andalusians, don't emigrate, fight! The land is yours: recover it!" It's a message cried somewhat into the void, as thousands of young Spaniards scurry down the brain drain to Britain, Germany, France and beyond.

But Somonte is not without support. Hundreds of people have visited at weekends or for short stays, from Madrid, Seville and many from overseas, bringing their labour and other resources, to help with the land, to build infrastructure or paint murals, donating secondhand farming equipment, furniture and kitchenware. As we strolled past a small collection of chickens and goats, Florence, a French woman who had been living in Marinaleda before joining the "new struggle" in Somonte, explained that the land was some of the most fertile in Spain, but had for decades been used by the government to grow corn, to bring in European subsidies – it created next to no work, and no produce; the corn was left to rot. Those 400 wasted hectares were about to be auctioned off privately by the government when the Andalusian Workers' Union turned up in March 2012; they occupied it, were evicted by 200 riot police, and in true Marinaleda style, returned the next day to start again. The auction never took place. Somonte is now 18 months old, growing slowly but steadily, and is the kind of Marinaleda domino effect that the crisis may yet bring more of.

No one ever forgets "that strange and moving experience" of believing in a revolution, as George Orwell reflected after arriving in Barcelona on the brink of civil war to a society fizzing with energy as it fleetingly experienced living communism. Marinaleda is neither fully communist nor fully a utopia: but take a step outside the pueblo and into contemporary Spain, and you will see a society pummelled, impoverished and atomised, pulled into death and destruction by an economic system and a political class who seem not to care whether the poor live or die. Sánchez Gordillo's achievements are more than just the concrete gains of land, housing, sustenance and culture, phenomenal though they are: being there is a strange and moving experience, and, as Orwell suggested, an unforgettable one.

In the eight or so years I have known about Marinaleda, I have sometimes had to remind myself of the gap between the grandiose claims made about the village, by left and right alike, and the humble size and intimacy of the place itself. It is a village which means so much to so many people, across the world; but it has only 2,700 inhabitants, and whole hours can pass in which the only noise emanates from a motorcycle speeding down Avenida de la Libertad, or the vocal exercises of a particularly enervated rooster.

It is both poignant and appropriate that Sánchez Gordillo seems to see no bathos, or discrepancy, in devoting as much attention and passion to the local specifics of the pueblo – the need to start planting artichokes this month, not pimentos – as he does to the big picture, persuading the world that only an end to capitalism will restore dignity to the lives of billions.

The indignado movement had informed not just Spain, but the world, that millions of Spaniards were unwilling to brook the crisis. They were desperately looking for an alternative to the current system – and yet, in their midst, there was already one in operation. Faced with the massed ranks protesting in Puerta del Sol in Madrid, in Wall Street in New York, and outside St Paul's Cathedral in London, the damning questions rang out from conservatives and liberals: "What's your alternative? What's your programme? How would it work in practice?"

They may have ignored the village before, or dismissed it with a chuckle as a rural curiosity run by a bearded eccentric; but they can do so no longer. "What's your alternative?' bark the dogs of capitalist realism. Increasingly, the indignados are able to respond: 'Well, how about Marinaleda?'"

This is an edited extract

Dan Hancox is speaking at Bristol Festival of Ideas on 23 October; details at ideasfestival.co.uk

Dan Hancox

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Pierre Omidyar: from eBay to crusading journalism? | the Observer profile

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:04 PM PDT

The founder of the online giant is setting up a hugely ambitious news organisation. Will the combination of his tech savvy and commitment to investigative journalism offer a new media model?

By the time Pierre Omidyar was 31, he was, in his own words, not just regular rich but "ridiculous rich". With enough money to make an impact in pretty much any sphere he chooses, the eBay billionaire last week made a splash in an area that is increasingly attracting the attention of tech titans: news.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald announced that he was leaving the Guardian, where he has broken a series of stories on the National Security Agency, based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new, as yet unnamed, venture will be a general news service backed by Omidyar. It will be the most hotly awaited news startup in years.

Omidyar's move comes just three months after Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, bought the Washington Post. Omidyar, too, had looked at the paper, he wrote in a blog post. "That process got me thinking about what kind of social impact could be created if a similar investment was made in something entirely new, built from the ground up. Something that I would be personally involved in outside of my other efforts as a philanthropist," he wrote.

The $250m he had earmarked for the Post will go into the venture that has already started hiring and whose investigative team will include Laura Poitras, the documentary maker who worked with Greenwald and the Guardian on the Snowden revelations, and Jeremy Scahill, the Nation journalist author and film-maker. Greenwald called it "a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline".

Omidyar is the only child of Iranian exiles. His physician father and linguist mother moved to Washington from Paris, where he was born, when he was six. He founded what would become eBay, the online market giant, in 1995. Three years later, the company went public and Omidyar was instantly vastly rich. Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at $8.5bn.

Unlike many of his billionaire contemporaries, Omidyar largely dropped off the tech radar. Some of the valley's biggest names owe their first fortunes to eBay after selling the PayPal payment system to the auction site. They have since gone on to fund the next set of tech titans. PayPal co-founder Elon Musk has backed grand plans, from Tesla's electric cars to SpaceX, a private space programme. Musk's former partner, Peter Thiel, has gone on to be one of the valley's most important investors and counts Facebook among the startups he funded. He now heads the Founders Fund, an investment firm that has its eyes on the cutting edge of tech, from robotics to biotechnology.

Omidyar and his Hawaii-born wife, Pam, have shown more interest in civics than social networks or space exploration. It's an attitude that has informed Omidyar's career; eBay was founded on a site he had set up to spread information about the ebola virus. He said he started it on the premise that "people are basically good" and the service is certainly one of the best demonstrations yet of how the web can build communities – allowing people across the world to trade their stuff, trusting strangers while rating their interactions. "Be you. Be cool," is the catchline on his Twitter profile.

The pair live in Hawaii and through their foundations have set about financing a series of citizen journalism and community-based projects that share common themes about informing communities and enabling debate.

Omidyar's philanthropic investments include Code For America, which links city governments with web developers and designers in an attempt to use tech to enable clearer communication between government and citizens. Omidyar has also been a supporter of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organisation that gives people access to information on political candidates' donors and lobbying contacts.

The closest venture to his newest one is the Honolulu Civil Beat, founded in 2010, as a for-profit online news organisation covering Hawaii. The mission statements at the time of the launch were all a little wonky: Omidyar described the service as a "civic square for Hawaii". It was, he wrote, "about building a place where we can all... better understand our home".

The then editor, John Temple, announced the site would be launched without news and staffed by "reporter-hosts". The reality has proved less abstruse. "Civil Beat represented a return to fundamentals: shoe-leather reporting, filing Freedom of Information Act requests and examining public records, close coverage of government spending and campaign finance," former Civil Beat reporter Adrienne LaFrance wrote in a recent column for Reuters.

Omidyar's news initiatives so far have been focused and local. But over the summer, his ambitions broadened. Jay Rosen, media critic and NYU professor of journalism, said: "Something happened when he was asked to take a look at the Washington Post."

Rosen points to Omidyar's Twitter feed over the summer as evidence that he was becoming increasingly concerned about the plight of journalism in the US and the picture of the surveillance state that was being drawn out by the NSA revelations. A few weeks ago, he learned that Greenwald had been talking to Poitras and Scahill about a collaboration. "I think all these things just came together," said Rosen.

Media land is eagerly awaiting the debut of the service, not least because it comes at a time when some had been writing off the commercial viability of investigative journalism. Andrew Donohue, senior editor at the Centre for Investigative Reporting, said: "Pretty much every solution we have seen for investigative reporting over the last five years has been about non-profits. The argument has been that private money will not fund investigative reporting, so philanthropy has to step in." The new venture will aim to make money and reinvest that cash in journalism.

Rosen said Omidyar was clearly impressed by Greenwald's driven, partisan style but he believes a broader organisation is needed to help support it. "You need editors, you need other eyes on the stories, you need lawyers, ways to withstand the pressure. You need plane tickets!" he said.

Supporting investigative pieces with less controversial fare is hardly a new idea – not even in new media. Buzzfeed, the media company that made its name spotting pop culture trends and compiling addictively clickable lists, has been increasing its "serious" content. It broke the story of Greenwald's departure.

"Investigative journalism has always been subsidised. We just need to find new forms of subsidy," said Rosen.

And that may be Omidyar's key contribution – besides his cash. "When Bezos bought the Washington Post, here was someone who had made money from scratch, disrupting legacy businesses, sinking money into a legacy business. Why not take the money and start afresh?" said Donohue.

Omidyar's tech background and his focus on communities should prove an invaluable asset to the new company. "The way news systems work right now is still pretty primitive," said Rosen. People who are avidly following a story get the same content as people who just want a summary. There is a lot of talk about personalisation but not a lot of good examples.

At the same time, the forms of journalism that people want are changing. Journalist "brands" are common on TV and in areas such as sport and entertainment. Donohue said it was harder to establish those brands with investigative journalism, where the lead time between stories is much longer. But Greenwald has developed a huge online following and a style that fuses comment and news that appeals to readers looking to drill down on the topics that interest them.

After interviewing Omidyar, Rosen wrote: "Part of the reason he thinks he can succeed with a general news product, where there is a lot of competition, is by finding the proper midpoint between voicey blogging and traditional journalism, in which the best of both are combined."

Omidyar's move sends a significant signal. Far from killing investigative journalism, as many naysayers have predicted, the new media landscape is creating more ways to fund it. "People who say things are over should be over," said Rosen.

Dominic Rushe

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Spending cuts don't help America grow. A shutdown certainly doesn't

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:04 PM PDT

The showdown in Congress reveals how ill-prepared many American legislators are to deal with a global economic crisis

It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. In 2007 the International Monetary Fund was facing a financial crisis of its own. The IMF makes money by borrowing and lending, taking a "turn". In 2007 it was short of customers. Then along came the world financial crisis, and the fund was back in business. Alternative plans for financing itself were shelved.

The recent annual meeting of the IMF in Washington was overshadowed by the threat of another famous organisation facing an operational crisis – no less an entity that the one responsible for overseeing the most powerful economy in the world, namely the government of the United States of America. The shenanigans over the partial shutdown of US government activities, which began some weeks earlier – and the threat of escalation when the legislative ceiling on what the US could borrow was reached – have made a laughing stock of a constitutional system that sees one of its missions to bring democracy to the Middle East and elsewhere.

James Madison, a revered "founding father" of the US constitution, was anxious that minorities should not be tyrannised by majorities. In recent years it has been the remarkable achievement of the extreme rightwing faction of the Republican party to ensure that a minority – the Tea Party – has tyrannised the majority: not only the majority of the Republican party itself, but also the majority of the US electorate, to say nothing of the majority of the rest of the world, given the potential ramifications of a default by the US on its financial obligations.

It got to the stage last weekend when one seasoned observer of the congressional scene said: "In any other country such an impasse would be resolved by the dissolution of the government and a general election. But not here." Under the constitution as it has evolved, the "system" is one of too many checks and not enough balances.

Things have reached a pretty pass when one finds the Chinese regime telling Washington to get its act together. And it took a sensational plunge in the Republican party's ratings in the opinion polls for it finally to come to its senses.

Apart from anything else, as Lawrence Summers pointed out in the Washington Post, the deadlock diverted attention from the need for a fundamental change of economic strategy. "If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to 'budget deals' were devoted instead to 'growth strategies', we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example," wrote Summers.

For all the fuss about the putative "crisis" of the US deficit, the congressional budget office's forecast is that the deficit will fall to 2% of GDP by 2015. By comparison with the UK and eurozone, the US economy has recovered relatively well from the 2008-09 low point – averaging real growth of 2% a year. Its recovery could have been a lot faster, but there has been a conflict between monetary policy (interest rates and quantitative easing) and fiscal policy (taxation and public spending).

Nearly all the public comment is focused on the Federal Reserve, with its brief to aim for low inflation and maximum employment. Yet there is a limit to what is achievable when fiscal policy is working forcibly in the opposite direction. Federal Reserve estimates suggest that, if it were not for the fiscal squeeze, the US economy might reasonably be expected to have grown by 3.5% per cent this year, not 2%, although the recent disruption to government service might have tempered that somewhat.

The point about fiscal policy is that there is a big difference between what's inappropriate in the short term, during recession or emergence from recession, and longer-term issues associated with, for example, an ageing population and the associated implications for the cost of healthcare.

In this context it has been quite remarkable how poor the financial markets have been in judging the prospects for the Fed's actions with regard to cutting back the monetary stimulus. The retiring chairman, Ben Bernanke, has been commendably consistent in pointing out that, while in the long term interest rates will be encouraged to return to normal levels, in the short term unemployment remains significantly higher than before the onset of the financial crisis.

It was pretty obvious from Bernanke's remarks over the summer that a "tightening" of monetary policy would be premature. This impression ought to have been strengthened by concerns about the behaviour of the Republicans in recent months.

There was a certain historical echo in the way that 17 October was the "make or break" day for the debt ceiling. It was on the same day 40 years ago, in 1973, that the Middle East oil producers announced production cuts and oil price increases in the wake of the Yom Kippur war – the "oil shock" that led to a quintupling of the price of crude and the first major recession since the second world war.

Policymakers eventually adapted to the world of dearer energy. In 2009-10 their successors, with the much-maligned Gordon Brown playing a major leadership role, "saved the world". But there are few signs that the present crop of policymakers have understood there is a time and a place for budget-cutting, and that is not when the recovery is still fragile.

William Keegan

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New to nature No 113: Nicrophorus efferens

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:04 PM PDT

These remarkable, if disgusting, beetles bury the corpses of mammals and birds in order to give their larvae the best start in life

When Dr Tonya Mousseau of Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, and Dr Derek S Sikes of the University of Alaska Museum chose efferens as the epithet for a new species of beetle from the Solomon Islands, you knew it had to be good. That is, if you recall a bit of Latin. Their name is from the Latin effero, meaning "to bear to the grave".

Studying carrion beetles in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Mousseau encountered half-a-dozen Bougainville Island specimens that had been collected in the late 1960s and waited patiently for someone with sufficient familiarity with the genus Nicrophorus to recognise that they were different. Unusual microscopic sculpturing of the hardened forewings, or elytra, initially tipped the scientists off to their significance as a potentially new species.

N efferens is the most recent addition to this genus of burying beetles that, as their common name suggests, inhume the cadavers of dead mammals or birds many times their own size. Their trademark black and reddish colours, beautiful when observed from upwind, do not give away their morbid behaviour. Their creation of a grave for such a large host would be impressive enough, but it is just the beginning of a remarkable, if disgusting, life history story. Basting the corpse with secretions exuded from both ends, the soon-to-be new parents are able to slow decomposition, minimising the chance some competing animal will dig it up and giving time for their eggs to hatch. The larvae thus come into the world with a large cache of food close at hand. Parental care is rare among beetles, so far documented only in a handful of groups of which burying beetles are one.

Nicrophorus are well known to entomologists. The genus was named in 1775 and more than 60 species are now assigned to the group. It includes an endangered species in the US, Nicrophorus americanus, that is today found in only about 5% of its original geographic range. As if to add insult to extinction, even the name of this American burying beetle was threatened. It turns out that the name Nicrophorus orientalis was proposed in 1784, predating the well-known name N americanus that dates only to 1790. One of the cornerstones of stability and recognition of intellectual contributions to scientific names is the principle of priority, which states that the first published name is the name to be used. This beetle, however, is a rare exception when an earlier name is set aside in the interest of stability. As it turns out, N orientalis was a forgotten name apparently never used aside from the single paper in which it was proposed, while the younger name, N americanus, has been used in hundreds of papers, including more than 80 in the 50 years leading up to 2000 alone.

While burying beetles are in the business of taking unresponsive birds and mammals to the underworld, one recent ecological study in Canada observed four species of Nicrophorus in an arboreal setting. The ecologists provided soil and carrion in containers mimicking cavities such as tree holes and demonstrated that Nicrophorus can be happy anywhere they find death and dirt. Interestingly, another beetle commonly attracted to carrion, Oiceoptoma noveboracense, was not found in association with the avian remains after they had been interred by Nicrophorus, adding confirmation of the effectiveness of their handling of carcasses. If you are not bored to death by formal species descriptions, you can learn more from the Sikes and Mousseau paper in ZooKeys 311, pages 83-93.

Quentin Wheeler

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Use humans, not animals, for research into treatments | letters

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:01 PM PDT

The most successful tests for Parkinson's were pioneered in human trials

The article on marmosets used in experiments at King's College London ("The ethics of animal tests: inside the lab where marmosets are given Parkinson's", News) painted a remarkably positive picture of life in the laboratory ahead of the series of debates sponsored by a pro-vivisection lobby group.

They might be fed marshmallows and have knitted hammocks, but the brain-poisoned marmosets are also left essentially paralysed, mute, rigid and unable to groom or feed themselves. Yet the result is no more than a crude and simplistic model of Parkinson's disease that is completely unreliable in predicting human outcomes. Contrary to the extraordinary claims quoted in this article, today's most successful treatments for Parkinson's (levodopa, selegiline and apomorphine) were pioneered in human trials. Indeed, it is only by focusing on non-animal research that we can hope to move from treating Parkinson's disease to curing it.

Isobel Hutchinson

Animal Aid

Tonbridge

Kent

Face the facts, Theresa May

Nick Cohen correctly notes that evidence-free beliefs are frequently expressed in terms of feelings rather than facts ("In Mrs May's surreal world, feelings trump facts"). When the believer says "it feels" or "I feel that" (and then expresses a fact or thought rather than a feeling), they are masking their true feelings and voicing their opinion. The device is useful as "I feel" is difficult to argue with. The skill of unpacking beliefs, thoughts and opinions masquerading as feelings would promote an honest exchange of views and values. The real feelings of fear, anger, frustration and resentment that lie behind the public's reported opinions could be addressed openly and may even lead to honest debate.

Dr Anne Brockbank

London N1

Do try to contain yourself

A very interesting article from Harriet Meyer about the use of shipping containers as homes to battle the housing supply crises ("Would-be buyers home in on the DIY solution to Britain's housing crisis", Cash). However, this is nothing new. For many years, shipping containers have been used to house students in Amsterdam. For instance, there's Wenckenhof, a student campus consisting of 1,000 containers. The containers have all the mod-cons, plus a balcony or garden, and are indeed fun and comfortable to live in, judging by the long waiting list.

Willem de Blaauw

Amsterdam

New meaning to a close shave

Perhaps Jonathan Franzen ("The Kraus Project", New Review) might have done better to quote a snappier Karl Kraus prediction of our mobile phone intoxication. In 1909, in an essay called Reforms, Kraus re-enacts the advent of the safety razor to exemplify a modernist "reform". As the new gadget privatises the function of shaving and removes it from the social encounter of the barber's shop, he mock-laments the spiritual void of the customer deprived of the barber's pamperings and chatter, but proposes a mock-resolution: the invention of a talking razor, capable, at the press of a button, of reciting all the unsolicited pleasantries of a barber – the stuff that was anathema to the satirist. Who says Kraus wasn't a modernist?

Gilbert Carr

Stillorgan,

Co Dublin

Not easy to save the children

Your letters page headline was half right ("We all have a duty to step in when the young are in danger", Big Issue). In the immediate postwar period, the general public still felt a collective duty towards local children. Consider how different things may have been for poor James Bulger – and his abductors – had several adults challenged them.

By then, however, the disastrously counterproductive "Stranger Danger" campaign had resulted in most adults choosing to keep away from any children unknown to them. Fearing false accusation, adults still stay aloof even when a child might possibly be in danger. It is not easy to see how some form of in loco parentis can be restored.

Alan Hallsworth (professor emeritus)

Portsmouth

BBC can learn from X Factor

Barbara Ellen rightly applauds the broad ethnic mix of ITV's The X Factor ("Huge plaudits for the X-Factor's colour-blindness", Comment). The BBC's Strictly Come Dancing is careful to include at least one ethnic minority celebrity in each series. But of 38 professional dancing coaches from many countries featured over 11 series, not one has been black or non-white.

Joseph Palley

Richmond

Surrey

I can rise to the occasion

In "It's baking me mad. Why it's time to call a halt to this latest food fetishism" (Viewpoint), Viv Groskop says: "Google the word "duffin", which was not on anyone's radar a week ago." Tell that to the many of us where the name appears on our birth certificates.

I prefer macaroons any day.

Catherine Gerlach, née Duffin

Alton

Hampshire


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London film festival: Pawel Pawlikowski wins best film for Ida

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 04:01 PM PDT

Polish director honoured for 'courageous' tale looking at the legacy of the Holocaust in his homeland

British-based director Pawel Pawlikowski's latest film, Ida, took the top prize at the close of the London film festival on Saturday night.

The Observer's former film critic Philip French announced the Best Film award, saying: "The jury greatly admired Ida, the first film made in his native Poland by a director who came to prominence while living in Britain. We were deeply moved by a courageous film that handles, with subtlety and insight, a painfully controversial historical situation – the German occupation and the Holocaust – which continues to resonate."

The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, was one of many who welcomed Pawlikowski's new work last week. Coming after the director's acclaimed Last Resort, from 2000, and My Summer of Love, made in 2004, it was, he wrote, "a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome". The film tells of an orphan and novice nun who reaches out to her only surviving relative, an aunt.

Johnny Depp made a surprise appearance at the awards dinner to present Sir Christoper Lee with a British Film Institute Fellowship, the highest accolade of the night. "It is very kind and unexpected," Lee said, to a standing ovation. "It means a lot to me that you are here."

Guests at the awards dinner included French's fellow jurors: actress Miranda Richardson; Lone Scherfig, director of the Oscar-nominated An Education; the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto; and the author and screenwriter Deborah Moggach.

Actors Stephen Dillane, Saoirse Ronan, Jim Broadbent, Colin Salmon and Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt also attended and Ronan, the star of How I Live Now, handed Jonathan Asser, screenwriter of Starred Up, the Best British Newcomer award.

The title of Asser's uncompromising debut feature refers to the practice of placing violent young offenders in an adult prison. Amanda Posey, jury president for this award, said: "Starred Up is an original story told with an individual and authentic voice, at once moving, provocative and always gripping.

"The material, even from a new screenwriter, was intelligent and distinctive enough to attract very high quality filmmaking talent and actors, and to help elicit extraordinary work from all involved.

"The whole jury felt Jonathan Asser brought a fresh, resonant and surprising perspective to a classic conflict."

Also picked out for praise by Posey were the performances of Asser's fellow nominees Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas, who star in Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant. "The whole jury was blown away by these two performances and we could not separate them as, together, they are the heart of the film," Posey said.

The Sutherland Award for first feature went to Anthony Chen, director of Ilo Ilo. "The startlingly assured direction and screenwriting of the winning film surprised us all," said Elizabeth Karlsen, the jury president, before also commending Chika Anadu's B For Boy for its "visual and emotional elegance".

The winner of the Grierson Award for best documentary went to My Fathers, My Mother and Me, a portrait of the largest commune in Europe, Friedrichshof, and the life of its residents. According to jury president Kate Ogborn, fellow jurors wanted to recognise the bravery of its director, Paul-Julien Robert. "It is a thought-provoking and disturbing film," she said, "intimate, while also raising larger questions of power, parental responsibility and abuse."

Vanessa Thorpe

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Front National's victory signals French sense of abandonment from mainstream

Posted: 19 Oct 2013 03:40 PM PDT

Anxiety over Front National's latest win is underscored by feeling that anti-immigration and anti-EU parties are gaining prominence

Graphic: the rise of the anti-Europeans

There is a monument on the outskirts of the small southern French town of Brignoles that provides a clue to why, a week ago today, its residents voted decisively to back the candidate from Marine Le Pen's far-right Front National (FN) in local elections.

The statue does not commemorate France's dead from two world wars. Instead it depicts – in a style that is socialist realist in inspiration – the figure of a miner in big boots and helmet, weight behind a drill, marking the passing of the region's bauxite mines, the last of which closed in 1990.

These days Brignoles – at 55 miles from the coast, too far to attract tourists – survives on some agriculture and a little commerce. Its voters – both those who backed the FN candidate, Laurent Lopez, and those who didn't – feel abandoned by Paris and by France's political mainstream, left and right.

If Brignoles, in the words of one French columnist, has exploded "a hand grenade" that has sent shock waves through all levels of a French society battered by the global economic crisis, analysts are still struggling to understand precisely what the result means.

What is clear is that it is not simply about a small town in the Var. Along the length of the old Route National 7 that leads eventually to Fréjus on the coast, the far right is gaining strength in towns just like Brignoles. And it is gaining strength nationally, too. A poll a few days before the second round of the voting in Brignoles that delivered Lopez 53.9% of the electorate suggested that the FN would come top in the European parliament elections next May, putting it ahead of the two mainstream parties for the first time.

There is another factor that has amplified the result of this local election – the sense that France's mainstream politics is in the midst of a wider crisis. The left has lost eight byelections for parliamentary seats and three local byelections in the last 12 months, while the rightwing UMP has been riven by its very public power struggles.

Underscoring the anxiety over the FN's latest victory is the sense that Brignoles is as much a European as a French phenomenon, on a continent where anti-immigration and anti-EU parties are surging. President François Hollande has warned that virulent Euroscepticism is gaining a dangerous momentum across the continent. The Italian prime minister, Enrico Letta, last week predicted that next May's European elections could amount to a humiliation for mainstream pro-Europeans. He told the New York Times: "We have the big risk to have the most 'anti-European' European parliament ever."

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders's Europhobic, anti-immigration Party for Freedom is again riding high in polls. Austria's far-right Freedom party is on the march. In Italy, the political establishment is braced for another surge of Eurosceptic populism next May, after the stunning success of Beppe Grillo at the recent general election. Little wonder that, in Brussels, the Brignoles poll is being treated as a harbinger of dark times to come.

If the town feels sharply familiar to an English visitor, it's because its problems are familiar. Europe – including the UK – is littered with towns and cities such as Brignoles, places that feel both forgotten and far from the centre, civic centres decaying as business has moved to the outskirts. They are places that have been left high and dry by the receding tide of the industries that once sustained them, and which neither globalisation nor central government has replaced.

An anxious crisis of identity has been exacerbated by recent immigration.

In Lopez's own words: "Brignoles is a town that's dying. It has nice neighbourhoods, but businesses are closing and people are throwing up their hands." Speaking after his victory – amid the chants of his supporters that "We're home!" – Lopez directly addressed these victims of change. "I think of those who elected me," he said, "of all these ostracised [and] modest people."

In the bars and shops of this town of 17,000, it is easy to find those who echo the FN's newly modulated line designed for mass consumption. In one of the little hairdressers near the main square a woman talks about her fear of immigration. Others complain about unemployment and petty crime.

And Brignoles, for all its size, is one of those southern French towns where immigration, largely from north Africa, is very visible in comparison with some of its near neighbours. Yet despite being in the FN's traditional Mediterranean heartland, Brignoles is far from being a "racist" or a far-right town.

The town's mayor, Claude Gilardo, is a Communist. His predecessor, Jacques Cestor of the centre-right UMP – re-elected on six occasions – is black, his family originally from Martinique. As Cestor insisted last week to a journalist from Le Figaro: "I'm well placed to tell you this is not a racist vote. It tells you that people are pissed off. It's a problem of poor living standards that have encouraged people to turn to the FN."

In his fishmonger's shop, Gilles Mouttet explains that in the first round of voting many like him were not aware of "the peril" of an FN victory at a time when the Socialists were backing a Communist for the departmental council seat won by Lopez and when the rightwing UMP were disengaged. Like many in the town who voted FN, he complains about the lack of opportunities, the "little incivilities" he has encountered in the town centre – people throwing rubbish and youths smoking hashish.

In the town square, Laurent Biganski, 63, is worried by the FN's victory, but blames a lack of leadership from the main parties and says the middle classes in towns such as Brignoles feel abandoned. Describing himself as a "social democrat who would never vote FN", he complains about unemployment and immigration. "There is no leadership here from the main parties," he adds bitterly. "The FN put up posters and handed out flyers, but there was nothing from the others to challenge what they were claiming."

Former centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to have supplied his own trenchant critique, even as Brignoles voters were preparing to elect Lopez in the second round. "That's what happens," he remarked, "when you have the crappest left and the stupidest right in the world." The FN under Marine Le Pen has attempted to moderate the language of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and is managing through subtly different tactics in the country's north and south to pull voters both from both right and left of the spectrum. Lopez told voters who had abandoned the centre-right that the FN represented "real socialism".

While leading French pollster Jérôme Fourquet of IFOP believes this attempt to appeal across the political spectrum may cause problems for the FN in the future, he says for now it is working. "There is a real dynamic behind the FN now. That doesn't mean, even with the party leading the polls for the European elections, that they have a majority. But in two rounds in Brignoles they took voters in the first round from the Communist candidate and in the second round from the right. They can draw in people from different political horizons.

"When Laurent Lopez says in Brignoles that the FN is the real socialism, what he means to deliver is a populist message – that François Hollande and the PS may be in power, but they are in hock to Europe and the banks."

Fourquet also argues that across Europe rightwing populist parties have recognised that their message is more effective if it appeals to what he calls "welfare chauvinism".

"There are two strands they are utilising. The first insists on the primacy of French values [against multiculturalism]. The second is on benefits for nationals only. It is not the old call of the British far right of 'Pakis go home'. They have recognised immigrants are not going home. The insistence now is on benefits for national citizens."

If this populism is the key, it is one that worries Biganski as he prepares to leave the cafe in Brignoles. "It would be silly to make comparisons with Germany in the 1930s," he says, remarking on the wider rise of the far right in Europe, "but there are some dangerous similarities that worry me."

Peter Beaumont

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