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Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov – review

Posted: 05 Oct 2013 01:30 AM PDT

Katherine Dovlatov's translation captures the wit and bittersweet irony of her father's Russian rural comedy

"You have great gifts to give this crazy country," Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Sergei Dovlatov. "We are lucky to have you here." Dovlatov had arrived in America in 1979, after emigrating from the Soviet Union, and his stories began to appear in the New Yorker the following year. Vonnegut called them "truly deep and universal".

Dovlatov wrote some of the best Russian novels of the late 20th century. He is hugely popular in Russia, where he was unpublished in his lifetime, but among Anglophone readers he has been inexplicably forgotten. There have been a couple of revamped editions, but no new translations have appeared since shortly after his death in 1990. It is high time for a revival. Dovlatov's themes are topical; his writing is witty, dry and economical.

Pushkin Hills, one of his most popular novels, has never been published before in English; Alma Classics have been searching for a suitable translator for years. Now the writer's daughter, Katherine Dovlatov, has captured her father's style. She describes the novel as "the most personal of all my father's works" and only took on the task of translating it after the publishers rejected a previous translation and numerous samples. This year is the 30th anniversary of its original publication in New York.

From the opening page, Pushkin Hills is a delight. Dovlatov's ironic tone suits his rural comedy ("From Leningrad." "Ah, yeah, I heard of it …"), philosophical observations and quirky asides, such as the tendency to emphasise one large feature in famous people: Marx's beard, Lenin's forehead or Pushkin's sideburns.

"What's your pleasure?" a waiter asks. "'My pleasure,' I said, 'is for everyone to be kind, humble and courteous.'" The narrator, Boris Alikhanov, an alcoholic, unpublished author, is on his way to work as a guide at the old family estate of the poet Alexander Pushkin. The waiter, "having had his fill of life's diversity", says nothing in response, leaving Boris to order vodka, beer and sausage sandwiches.

Boris describes himself as "an almost dissident"; he fits in neither with his reverential fellow-guides nor with Tanya, his pragmatic wife, who is planning to emigrate. In some ways, Dovlatov's drunken narrator is a classic example of that distinctly un-Soviet figure, the "superfluous man", popularised by Turgenev and Lermontov.

The setting and many of the details are autobiographical. The writer himself worked as a summer guide in and around Mikhailovskoe, south of Pskov. The area is one of Russia's zapovedniki (reserves); the novel's original title, Zapovednik, has been made more specific in English as Pushkin Hills, but loses the slightly menacing feel it shared with The Zone, Dovlatov's account of life as a prison guard.

The alternative sense of zapovednik (a wildlife preserve, as well as a museum-estate) hints at the idea of a human zoo. Both the prison and the reserve reflect in miniature the broader insanity of Soviet life. In The Zone, Dovlatov included metafictional letters to his publisher, containing meditations on literature or the nature of evil; similarly, through the earthy dialogues and bittersweet memories of Pushkin Hills he reflects on love, loss and creativity.

Dovlatov was born in 1941 and grew up in Leningrad; his mother was an Armenian actor-turned-proofreader and his father a Jewish theatre director. The Journalists' Union expelled him for publishing stories abroad and the KGB destroyed the letterpresses for his first book. He left the Soviet Union in 1978 and, in the subsequent decade became, after Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, the most famous contemporary Russian writer in the US.

His émigré identity is crucial to Dovlatov's work, whether he's rummaging through an old suitcase for poignant anecdotes, recalling Soviet journalism in The Compromise or writing about New York Russians in A Foreign Woman. But he avoids sentimentality and derides Soviet authors who hanker after embroidered towels and samovars. Boris, considering emigration in Pushkin Hills, says he would miss "my language, my people, my crazy country", but he "couldn't care less about birch trees".

Underneath the jokes are serious debates about writing, censorship and exile. "My readers are here," says Boris. "Who needs my stories in Chicago?" He compares himself with Pushkin, who also had "an uneasy relationship with the government" and trouble with his wife. A feeling for other (often persecuted) Russian authors pervades Dovlatov's work: "First they drive the man into the ground and then begin looking for his personal effects. That's how it was with Dostoevsky, that's how it was with Yesenin, and that's how it'll be with Pasternak."

Dovlatov himself fits this pattern: censored, read in samizdat and celebrated only posthumously in Russia. There were plans recently to convert the log cabin where he lived in Pushkin Hills into a museum. (He describes this cabin in the novel, with its holes in the roof and gaps between floorboards where stray dogs got in.) Dovlatov's ultimate subject matter is the difficult human journey: "The only honest path is the path of mistakes, disappointments and hopes," he writes. "Life is the discovery of the boundaries of good and evil through personal experience. There is no other way."


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Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos – review

Posted: 05 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Villalobos employs another convincing child narrator for his satirical take on poverty and corruption in Mexico

André Breton declared Mexico to be "a surrealist country". The observation was something of a backhanded compliment – the French artist was fed up because the organisers of the conference he was attending had failed to pick him up from the airport. Yet Juan Pablo Villalobos's second novel seems to bear this out: "Weren't fantastic, wonderful things meant to happen to us all the time? Didn't we speak to the dead? Wasn't everyone always saying we were a surrealist country?"

There's no shortage of surrealism in Villalobos's world. The climax of the book is an orgiastic dream vision featuring copulating cattle, flying tortillas and an alien invasion, which piles absurdity upon improbability with gleeful abandon. Yet the book is as much a coruscating parody of Mexican culture as Villalobos's debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian first book award.

Quesadillas, translated by Rosalind Harvey, does for magic realism what Down the Rabbit Hole did for "narco-literature" – the popular South American genre of drugs, gangs and guns. That first book was a short, shocking exercise in sophisticated pulp, in which the violence of contemporary Mexican society was filtered through the limited comprehension of Tochtli, the prepubescent son of a narcotics baron. While Tochtli claimed to know "thirteen or fourteen people" in total, the teenage narrator of Quesadillas has almost as many brothers and sisters, and faces the rather more common experience of bumping along the poverty line.

Orestes, named after the Greek hero but known as Oreo, like the biscuit, is the second eldest of a clan idealistically named by their classics-teacher father: "Aristotle, Archilochus, Callimachus, Electra … we were more like the index of an encyclopaedia than a family." There's so many of them that when the twins Castor and Pollux go missing, Orestes treats their disappearance less as a matter of concern than a cause for celebration that there will be more food to go round.

The proximity of starvation, constant even within a family theoretically belonging to the professional classes, is calculated by Orestes according to an economic formula that might be known as the quesadilla index: "We were all aware of the roller-coaster that was the national economy due to the fluctuating thickness of the quesadillas my mother served at home. We'd even invented categories – inflationary quesadillas, normal quesadillas, devaluation quesadillas …" At the very bottom of the pile come the dreaded "poor man's quesadillas", in which "the presence of cheese was literary: you opened one and instead of adding melted cheese my mother had written the word 'cheese' on the surface of the tortilla".

The high-keyed domestic comedy is enjoyable for its own sake, but provides cover for a satirical assault on the mendacity of Mexican politics. Villalobos sets the action at the beginning of the 1980s, a period of rampant inflation and devaluation of the peso, and ends in 1988, when the notoriously corrupt Carlos Salinas became president amid suspicions of election fraud. By telling the story in retrospect, Villalobos endows Orestes with a credible combination of insight and ignorance. He admits that he would have a more secure grasp of the country's malaise "if it weren't for the fact I was living through that period of supreme selfishness known as adolescence". At the same time he is capable of such astute, adult reflections as the notion that Mexico's problems stem from the 1920s, "when the government decided that the things in heaven belonged to heaven and the things on earth belonged to the government".

He is in many respects an even more impressive creation than the bookishly unworldly preteen persona Villalobos sustained throughout Down the Rabbit Hole. The 1980s setting of Quesadillas is as retro as a Rubik's cube, but it draws attention to the fact that Salinas's Institutional Revolutionary party actually returned to power in 2012. And though it is always dangerous to hunt for autobiographical reasons for a novel's success, it cannot be wholly coincidental that the town in which Orestes lives, Lagos de Moreno, happens to be where Villalobos was himself brought up: "a place where there are more cows than people, more charro horsemen than horses, more priests than cows, and the people like to believe in the existence of ghosts, miracles, spaceships, saints and so forth". Breton may have been right to observe that Mexico is a surrealist country. Villalobos suggests that it's nothing to be proud of.

Alfred Hickling

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Climate Council raises $1m through itObama-style fundraising drive

Posted: 05 Oct 2013 12:28 AM PDT

Body that replaces commission abolished by Tony Abbott says 20,000 Australians have donated an average $50 each

Why Paul Klee was a comic at heart

Posted: 05 Oct 2013 12:00 AM PDT

Comedy is at the heart of Klee's work – from joyously splodgy lines to grotesqueries that poke fun at dictators. On the eve of a major retrospective, Philip Hensher explains why he loves the artist's willingness to combat oppression with laughter

Last winter, the Paul Klee Centre in Berne had a brilliant idea for an exhibition. They partnered a large selection of works by Klee with a broad sampling of the work of Klee's contemporary, Johannes Itten. When I saw it at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin, it was quietly devastating. Itten is one of those figures always referred to as "very interesting" by art historians, meaning almost the opposite. He was a contemporary of Klee's, and, briefly, a colleague when they both taught at the Bauhaus in its Weimar years from 1919. Itten was a curious person: he led a mystical religious movement at the Bauhaus called Mazdaznan, whose followers wore purple robes and ate nothing but garlic (Alma Mahler said that you could tell when you had walked past a Bauhaus student in those early years). Both Klee and he were somewhat mystically inclined, and thought deeply about the significance of colour. Both were restless creators, and their work changes dramatically every two or three years. They ought to be very good companions in a gallery survey.

Instead, you felt intensely sorry for Itten. Every shift in style in Itten's work was expertly achieved, closely argued-for and deathly dull. His grid-pattern abstracts are so tedious they give the impression of boring even their creator. Strikingly, every time Itten moves from one pictorial manner to another, he seems to leave everything behind. There is nothing that would convince you that one of his 1960s abstracts, such as Adieu (1965) was painted by the same artist that reduced a leaning woman to a pattern of lines in Woman with Birds (1945) or a still life of vases in 1922. There is no character there at the core. But Klee has an irreducible centre, and though he changed his style and approach many times in the 40 years of his mature career, there is always something there that makes you say "Klee" without hesitation. When Klee appears in a photograph, I've observed that even people who don't recognise him are drawn to his extraordinary, warm, humorous face – there is an unforgettable one of him with his Great War regiment, his expression turning the spiked Pickelhaube he wears into a moment of pure comedy. His work is much the same. At the calm centre of his enormous fantasy, there is an ego-denying self, looking outwards into the world.

It is a colossal body of work, catalogued in the first instance by Klee himself. The Tate's survey focuses on the key exhibitions that marked the development of Klee's career, and shows the public face of the development of his art. His relationship with his public is a gripping subject, and includes such unwilling representations as the Nazis' Degenerate Art exhibitions. To penetrate into the deeper, private movements of Klee's thought and imagery, some consultation of his own catalogue, and the recent, still more extensive, catalogue raisonné, is indispensable. From 1911, he began to inventory every item of his work, going back to drawings he had made when he was three or four years old. From then until his death in 1940, he catalogued almost everything he produced, numbering it and ascribing it to a year. The huge and magnificent catalogue raisonné produced in Berne by the Paul Klee Foundation consists of nine volumes, accounting for 9,800 drawings, prints, paintings and illustrations: the backbone of it is Klee's orderly cataloguing habit. I have them, and they are thrilling volumes to read through, watching Klee burst out into something entirely new, developing from painting to painting. You can follow every step.

Take a moment in 1922. Klee was a first-rate musician, and music quite often surfaces in his art. Roughly in the middle of his year's production – number 142 of 260 numbered works – he goes back to music. We can see the order in which he created things, the direction that his mind went in, by following the works he created over a few days, in numbered succession. First, there is a colour-gradation exercise between a capital A and an O, called Overture – Klee had been teaching at the Bauhaus for about 18 months, and it seems to start from one of his colour exercises. Then a tiny piece of grotesquery, a drawing called Brewing Witches; a grotesque piece of musical comedy called The Heroic Tenor as a Concert Singer, and then three watercolours that seem to be part of a different pattern of thought, closely resembling each other. The mechanised tenor and his piano, a tiny mechanical box, set something off now, and we have an Old Steamboat, an oil-transfer drawing of impressively clanking appearance. Klee apparently wanders off into something quite different; two enchanting, weightless horticultural watercolours, Plants in the Moonlight and Project for a Garden. The work of these few days seems quite exploratory, quite undirected. But then the three strands of investigation unite in the magnificent Twittering Machine. The garden; the clanking machinery; the vision of music all come together in this vision of four birds at dawn, poised on a branch as their crank is turned and they burst into song.

To pluck moments from Klee's work at random is to be astonished by his variety of subject and approach. The fantastical oil-transfer drawings of the early Bauhaus years are what his name calls up – it was a process he invented, and the messy, joyously splodgy line is, indelibly, his own. But then Klee himself thought the translucent, miniature watercolours of Tunisia from 1914 were at the heart of his work. In his journal, whether written at the time or with subsequent reflection, he wrote of this moment "Colour and I are one. I am a painter." Or there are the grand, massive games of the very last years, where strong, thick lines are refused permission to cross or touch, as in Insula Dulcamara of 1938, or moments when the spray-paint techniques of the early 1920s shift into the centre of investigation.

There is a sudden interest in divisionist techniques in the Düsseldorf period of the early 1930s. Where does it come from? From Seurat, or from a memory of North African architecture? A key work is Portal to a Mosque in a Berlin collection, a graph-paper fantasy summoning up memories of Mamluk glasswork. The units grow smaller; the works ripple out into visions of landscape, like the 1932 Lowlands in a now-unknown location. For a couple of years, the divisionist fantasy is what a Klee looks like. Then it abruptly stops; he starts making geometrical figures out of unbroken lines and paintings and drawings out of short, feathery brush and pencil strokes. To be honest, I don't much like the feathery period, and Klee was glad to be out of it – it was his most fraught and least productive period, coinciding with the triumph of the Nazis. It doesn't matter. The beautiful divisionist period and the unsatisfying feathery period are over just as quickly as each other, and Klee hardly ever returns to either.

I have come to think of Klee as an exemplary artistic figure, facing outwards into the world and not painfully contemplative of the self, drawing mastery not just from his command of the medium, but from the struggles to control his tools. He doesn't necessarily intend to make a big statement; he often simply observes something in front of him, tenderly and exactly. (I never see a dog sleeping on a cushion without thinking of Klee.) In his career, he explores the possibilities of a particular mode or style, does what he can with it and then moves on to something quite different. Klee, you feel, could have carried on for ever. At the core of his work, however, there is something solid and irreducible that never changes, however alluringly different the surface of his work. He reminds one in a way of Stravinsky, who moved from Russian nationalist to cubist to neoclassicist to serialist without ever writing a bar of music that could be mistaken for anyone else's.

Was he, in Isaiah Berlin's famous definition, a fox or a hedgehog? Did the man who created the minimalist landscape Park near Lu in 1938 and the extravagant, grotesque and masterly Aged Phoenix in 1905 possess multiple personalities? Or can we look at the vivid satire of the early engravings and that of the 1930 Conqueror and say that here is someone whose values, at bottom, never changed? What is that central, unmistakable core that Klee possessed and that Itten went without?

The core of Klee, I think, is his comedy. One of the underestimated sources of modern art is commercial, comic art, and the exchange between the newspaper "funnies" and the most advanced art was easier than one might suppose. Artists of the time sought inspiration outside the long tradition of academic training: some in indigenous African or South American art; some (like Klee) in the art of children; others in commercial, advertising and even comic art. The line that goes from Toulouse-Lautrec to Beardsley to the Fauvistes is quite clear. Another line comes from the tradition of expressive distortion in caricature and satire into more expressionist styles – the physical distortions in Egon Schiele's portraits have precedents in Daumier's cartoons.

An extreme example here is the German-American artist Lyonel Feininger. After years of considerable commercial success as a comic artist for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, Feininger took the battery of distortion and simplification he had developed as the creator of Wee Willie Winkie's World into life as an expressionist painter and teacher at the Bauhaus. Klee never had a career as a comic artist in the rich satiric traditions of southern Germany and Switzerland. However, his early exercises in comic distortion and satire never went away. The early Munich images of disgruntled fish eyeing up a hook and line resurface years later, in a 1925 Fish Image, or in Fish Gaze from 1940 – unmistakably very stupid fish, those two – and in other treasured images of animals in their own society, such as a marvellously funny and tender Kingdom of Birds (1918).

Underlying all of this is a dream sensibility of distortion and misogynist grotesquery. The physical presence of humans, especially in the early images, is often shockingly obscene. The disturbing 1906 Puppet on Violet Ribbons has prehensile feet with long fingers, and a closely delineated anus where her vagina would conventionally be. In other works of this period, animals sniff at the pudenda of women; it is not always clear whether it is the animal's mouth or the woman's genitalia that is dripping fluid. Klee was determined to explore his fantasies and deep-rooted beliefs, however bizarre. In the so-called Diaries – not daily records, but examinations of recalled experience – he sets down a startling series of vignettes from early childhood. The traditions of the grotesque image, the dream-fantasy, the rapturous contemplation of the possible and the satiric humour are wedded from Klee's earliest days. "In a dream I saw the maid's sexual organs," he writes. "They consisted of four male (infantile) parts and looked something like a cow's udder (two to three years)."

The satirical grotesquery and his willingness to distort material places Klee in a comic tradition. The well-known engraving Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to be of Higher Rank depicts two emperors, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Wilhelm II of Germany, naked, bowing low. A small anthology could be put together of Klee's satirical jibes at power, emperors, soldiers and dictators. They include such self-explanatory pieces as Pride of the Gatekeeper from 1929 and the evil-looking Sea Snail King from 1933. Satire stretches into beautiful design in the 1930 Conqueror. A small, geometrical figure, alone and running, bears a flag clearly too heavy for him to support. He seems to be running in one direction; a spear or a giant arrow, perhaps, is pointing in quite the other direction. He is going to fall over. Or, still more abstract, later in the 1930s, when the terror of the dictators had become completely clear, he painted the great 1939 Destroyed Labyrinth. Klee had long been drawn to fragments, half-signifying a lost civilisation; there are many images associated with Egyptian themes from earlier in his career. In Destroyed Labyrinth we see the remains of a tyrant; the walls were built to herd and harry and control people. Now they are in fragments; the builder's purpose is lost; across these small fragments, a child could find his way. Like all of Klee's later work, it is, on some level, a beautiful and noble statement against the tyrannies of his time. Like all of Klee's work, it does not itself dictate or control; it allows the eye to find its own way through its patterns and structures.

He is the artist I love best in the world: I love his modesty and his resourcefulness, and his willingness to combat oppression and violence with laughter. His work reflects the idea of Milan Kundera, that the machinery of power works by imposing forgetfulness; that the way the individual can fight back is through laughter. At the time, nothing could have seemed more fragile and pointless a gesture against the armies of Hitler than a painting of fish, gawping at each other, by a Dessau art professor. But nothing remains of Hitler's power, and the structures he built are mostly dust. What certainly does remain are is a little, tender picture of a garden; a sheet of luminous colours; music transformed into an image.

Klee died in great pain in 1940, waiting for the Swiss state to acknowledge that he was a citizen of the country in which he was born. It must have seemed to him that he had died in failure, in a world that he could do nothing about. As the exhibition of his incomparable, funny, inexhaustible work opens at Tate Modern, we can say that here is an artist who got more right than most.

• Philip Hensher's novel about Klee at the Bauhaus, The Emperor Waltz, will be published next year.

Philip Hensher

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Police shut down house party after it turns into a riot in Melbourne

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 10:24 PM PDT

Seventy officers called in to put end to out-of-control festivities in abandoned home after party invite posted on Facebook

Julie Bishop raises case of detained Greenpeace activist with Russians

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 10:01 PM PDT

Foreign minister expresses concern about piracy charge levelled at Australian Colin Russell on sidelines of Apec meeting

Crowds throng Sydney harbour for International Fleet Review

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 08:40 PM PDT

Boating enthusiasts, royal watchers and families keen to enjoy a glorious spring day gather to see the warships on parade

Paul Farrell
Bridie Jabour

Prince Harry attends International Fleet Review – video

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 07:58 PM PDT

Prince Harry joined the governor general, Quentin Bryce, and Tony Abbott in Sydney









Drone crash on Sydney harbour bridge investigated

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 07:33 PM PDT

Counter-terrorism officers monitor police and aviation authority search for owner of quadcopter found near pylon

Bridie Jabour

International Fleet Review day three – in pictures

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 07:12 PM PDT

All the sights in Sydney harbour as Australia's governor general, Quentin Bryce, and Prince Harry attend the 2013 International Fleet Review

US scientists boycott Nasa conference over China ban

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:09 PM PDT

Nasa facing backlash from US researchers due to rejection of Chinese nationals from conference

Nasa is facing an extraordinary backlash from US researchers after it emerged that the space agency has banned Chinese scientists, including those working at US institutions, from a conference on grounds of national security.

Nasa officials rejected applications from Chinese nationals who hoped to attend the meeting at the agency's Ames research centre in California next month citing a law, passed in March, which prohibits anyone from China setting foot in a Nasa building.

The law is part of a broad and aggressive move initiated by congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House appropriations committee, which has jurisdiction over Nasa. It aims to restrict the foreign nationals' access to Nasa facilities, ostensibly to counter espionage.

But the ban has angered many US scientists who say Chinese students and researchers in their labs are being discriminated against. A growing number of US scientists have now decided to boycott the meeting in protest, with senior academics withdrawing individually, or pulling out their entire research groups.

The conference is being held for US and international teams who work on Nasa's Kepler space telescope programme, which has been searching the cosmos for signs of planets beyond our solar system. The meeting is the most important event in the academic calendar for scientists who specialise in the field.

Alan Boss, co-organiser of the Kepler conference, refused to discuss the issue, but said: "This is not science, it's politics unfortunately."

Geoff Marcy, an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been tipped to win a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on exoplanets, or planets outside the solar system, called the ban "completely shameful and unethical".

In an email sent to the conference organisers, Marcy said: "In good conscience, I cannot attend a meeting that discriminates in this way. The meeting is about planets located trillions of miles away, with no national security implications," he wrote.

"It is completely unethical for the United States of America to exclude certain countries from pure science research," Marcy told the Guardian. "It's an ethical breach that is unacceptable. You have to draw the line."

Debra Fischer, professor of astronomy at Yale University, said she became aware of the ban only when a Chinese post-doctoral student in her lab, Ji Wang, was rejected from the conference. When Nasa confirmed that Ji was banned because of his nationality, Fischer decided to pull out of the meeting. She told her students: "I cannot say don't go, but I'm boycotting the meeting." Her team followed suit and has withdrawn from the meeting.

The law allows Nasa to apply for a waiver against the ban in special circumstances, but any appeal would have been rejected under a moratorium that has been introduced by the agency's administrator, Charles Bolden.

Chinese applicants were told they could not attend the conference in an email sent by Mark Messersmith, a Kepler project specialist at Nasa Ames. "Unfortunately … federal legislation passed last March forbids us from hosting any citizens of the People's Republic of China at a conference held at facilities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Regarding those who are already working at other institutions in the US, due to security issues resulting from recent Congressional actions, they are under the same constraints," according to the email, seen by the Guardian.

The recent Congressional action refers to a broader law passed in July which prohibits Nasa funds from being used to participate or collaborate with China in any way. The law has raised fears among some Nasa-funded scientists that they will have to sever ties with their Chinese collaborators, and no longer take on Chinese students.

Marcy said the law would damage relationships built up between US and Chinese researchers that could be valuable lines of communication if conflicts arose between the two nations in the future.

Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, said he "fully supported" Marcy's position and called the ban "a deplorable 'own goal' by the US".

Chris Lintott, an astronomer at Oxford University, called for a total boycott of the conference until the situation had been resolved. "I'm shocked and upset by the way this policy has been applied. Science is supposed to be open to all and restricting those who can attend by nationality goes against years of practice, going right back to cold war conferences of Russian and western physicists," he said. "The Kepler team should move their conference somewhere else – and I hope everyone boycotts until they do."

Ian Sample

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Bob Geldof by Nicola Jennings

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 04:16 PM PDT

Singer songwriter

Nicola Jennings

From the archive, 5 October 1973: The Hon Jessica rebels against oath

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 04:05 PM PDT

The distinguished visiting professor was Miss Jessica Mitford, the Honourable rebel and best-selling muckracker

From Peter Jenkins, Washington, October 4

THE PRESS conference was to introduce the new distinguished visiting professor, and the distinguished professor was Miss Jessica Mitford, the Honourable rebel and best-selling muckracker. She startled the reporters and the authorities of the State University of San Jose, California, by announcing that she had been pledged under duress by the university to sign an oath of allegiance which she regarded as "obnoxious, silly, and demeaning."

In a telephone interview from California today the distinguished professor said that she had been required to swear allegiance not only to the Constitution of the United States, but also to the Constitution of the State of California. "The California Constitution is three hefty volumes," she said. "For example, Article 4, Section 23, prohibits boxing and wrestling matches which exceed fifteen rounds. I told them that for all I knew, fourteen or sixteen rounds might be more appropriate."

"Another clause reinstates the death penalty in California in spite of the fact that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits 'cruel and unusual punishment.'"

Cruel and Unusual Punishment is the sub-title of Miss Mitford's latest book on American prisons.

"Another part of the oath," Miss Mitford continued; "says that I was taking it freely and without any mental reservations. Well, I wasn't. I was taking it under duress. I tried to strike that bit out but they wouldn't let me."

She pointed out to the university authorities that according to the oath, false statements were punishable by one to 14 years in prison. For her to say that she was signing the oath freely and without reservations would constitute a false statement. What is more, she told them, by making her sign it, the university lawyers would be liable to prosecution for suborning perjury.

How did they take all this? "They sounded rather miffed," said Miss Mitford, whose upper-class English accent and slangy way of talk is untouched by her American citizenship since 1944.

Miss Mitford has been in this sort of trouble before. For years she was denied a passport. She was on Senator McCarthy's little list of subversives. But if a reporter asks her if she was ever actually a member of the Communist Party – she certainly isn't now – she says: "I can't tell you publicly but I will tell you in private."

Although she has now signed the oath "under duress," Miss Mitford is holding out against being finger-printed. She says it is not in her contract; the university says no fingerprints, no pay. "I'm told I'll be locked out of my classroom," she said.

That would be a pity, for distinguished Professor Mitford's first week at San Jose sounds like great fun. She is conducting two classes. One is called "techniques of muckraking" and the other "The American Way…" after her best seller The American Way of Death. "I'm loving it," she said, "in spite of the fingerprinting and the oath business. We had an undertaker to speak to the class. The local undertaker wrote to say he would like to be at my disposal to tell the students how he and his staff care for the dead."

Peter Jenkins

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The best pictures of the day

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 03:35 PM PDT

The Guardian's photo team brings you the best from the world of photography today

Joanna Ruck
Bridget Coaker

Silvio Berlusconi believed the world revolved around him – not any more

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 02:58 PM PDT

As a panel considers whether to expel him from the Italian Senate, the former PM's iron self-belief is being tested as never before

One of the most telling anecdotes from Silvio Berlusconi's long career is to be found in a book published in 1994 by a journalist and a sociologist, just as the former Italian leader was entering politics.

The writers' aim was to observe him "in his natural habitat", and they tracked him to a training session for sales reps of the advertising subsidiary of his TV empire.

Every morning, Berlusconi told them, he stood in front of a mirror and repeated: "I like myself. I like myself."

It was a way of building that unassailable self-confidence that has kept him at the top level of international politics for longer than any leader except maybe Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe. Combined with boundless optimism and titanic energy, it has enabled Berlusconi to achieve an ascendancy over the life of his country without parallel in the democratic world.

"Berlusconi believes that the world revolves around him – the ultimate narcissistic fantasy," his American biographer, Alexander Stille, observed. "But he has bent reality to fit his fantasy, so that much of life in Italy does indeed revolve around him."

As he stood in front of his mirror on Thursday morning, however, even Berlusconi must have realised this was suddenly no longer true: for the first time in almost 20 years, he is no longer the undisputed master of his party, and for the first time since 2001, he neither leads the government of Italy nor has any credible prospect of destroying it if it fails to do his bidding.

The previous morning, a visibly humbled Berlusconi announced to an incredulous senate that he would instruct his party to vote against a motion of no confidence in Enrico Letta's left-right coalition government that he himself had inspired.

It was a tacit admission that he had lost the backing of a sizable number of his own politicians and – more importantly – that he no longer had power of veto over government policy.

Berlusconi has climbed back out of his political coffin so many times – in 2001, 2008 and 2012 – that it is a brave commentator who pronounces him politically dead. But the odds are now stacked against him, not just politically, but judicially and even financially. Italians who have achieved undisputed dominance over their contemporaries have usually come to sudden and violent ends. Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by members of the Senate a few hundred metres from where Berlusconi this week addressed their modern-day successors. Cola di Rienzo, who seized power in Rome in the 14th century was hacked to pieces by the mafia. Benito Mussolini was shot dead on the shores of Lake Como, then strung up in a Milan square for passersby to spit at his corpse.

Berlusconi, too, faces execution. But it will be legitimate, democratic and less brutal, though excruciatingly protracted.

First, in all likelihood, will be his expulsion from parliament. Berlusconi is a criminal, convicted in August of tax fraud, and under a law passed last year, he must be thrown out of the senate – a process that began on Friday when a panel voted for his removal. The full house will take a final decision later this month.

By 15 October, he will have to decide on the punishment for his crime. Berlusconi is 76 years old and Italian courts seldom imprison anyone of his age. But that still leaves a choice between community service, which he has discounted as insufferably humiliating, and the constraints of 12 months under house arrest. Neither would necessarily make it impossible for Berlusconi to continue leading his party.

But the looming problem for Berlusconi is which party he can now lead. His crisis moment came on Wednesday as he was changing the name of his party from the Freedom People (PdL) back to Forza Italia! (Come on, Italy!).

Leading the rebellion in his ranks is Angelino Alfano, the 42-year-old interior minister who had an almost filial relationship with Berlusconi until the split. As secretary of the PdL, Alfano is the legal owner of its name.

According to a source close to him, his aim is to lure into – or rather, keep in – the PdL a majority of Berlusconi's elected representatives: a kind of political reverse takeover that could leave the former prime minister as the leader of a radical rightist rump.

Berlusconi's legal situation also looks certain to deteriorate. Under law, defendants have the right to two appeals.

He is currently contesting a one-year sentence for leaking judicial evidence and seven years in the bunga-bunga trial: 12 months for paying for the services of an underage prostitute and six years for taking advantage of his position as prime minister to try to cover up their relationship. He is also under investigation for allegedly paying a senator €3m to switch sides in his 2008 effort to topple the then centre-left government.

The billionaire's iron self-belief has enabled him to achieve remarkable things: embark on the construction of an entirely new town on the outskirts of Milan aged 34; create a party out of nothing and lead it to victory within a year, and – not least – persuade world leaders to hold a G8 summit amid the ruins of an earthquake.

Such a man will not easily accept the time has come for him to leave centre stage and quietly withdraw into the wings.

John Hooper

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Republicans chasing budget deal as US shutdown enters fourth day – live

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 02:29 PM PDT

House speaker John Boehner meeting caucus in an attempt to secure larger budget deal rather than short-term agreement that would re-open government

Tom McCarthy

Government shutdown: which agencies are next in line to close?

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 02:08 PM PDT

Some agencies and services are still operating as usual – but if no deal is struck, backup funds could run out by early next week

We're nearly a week into US government's partial shutdown, which has seen the closure of numerous federal services and the furlough of "non-essential" employees. Congress appears no closer to reaching an agreement, as still-functioning agencies deplete the surplus funds allowing them to operate.

The shutdown has put FDA's food inspectors on furlough, as well as most of Nasa, and it's caused the Department of Veterans Affairs already severe backlog of disability claims to get worse. Though some agencies are still operating as usual, the backup funds keeping them going could run out as early as next week.

Education

The Head Start pre-school program for 967,000 children from low-income families closed on shutdown day. Some states providing contingency funding to keep the programs in place, but five programs have closed so far, affecting more than 5,000 children. The program to close in Georgia is the largest known to have closed.

According to the Washington Post, 23 Head Start programs were up for grant renewals the day the government shut down, including the five that closed.

Public schools will remain open, even though the Education Department is suspending most of its operations.

Domestic violence programs

Rape crisis programs and domestic violence shelters could start closing as early as Monday after the Office of Justice Programs stops disbursing funds on Friday. Each of these programs is reliant on federal funding to a different degree, and the amount of reserve funds can change on a county-by-county and state-by-state basis.

Julie Bornhoeft, a director at Weave, Sacramento's agency for victims of violence and sexual assault, told Think Progress that its funding is diversified enough to provide some stability. However, Bornhoeft said: "For an organization that is predominantly funded through federal grants or federally derived grants, even temporary disruption in cash flow will be detrimental."

The courts

The supreme court will hear its first arguments of the year on Monday, as scheduled. Judges are scheduled to hear six cases next week, including one on political campaign donation limits. The court's building will remain open to the public as normal and boasts one of the few functioning government websites. These measures are only guaranteed through October 11, when an update will be provided if the government is still shut down.

Federal courts, however, only have funds to last through 15 October. Courts will then have to start furloughing employees, but US courts administrative office director Judge John Bates said before the shutdown that courts would still be able to handle most cases.

Veterans services

Most Department of Veterans Affairs services continue because the government pays for its health programs a year in advance. But the agency warned Congress in September that if the government shuts down for more than two or three weeks it will deplete its resources used to make compensation and pension payments. This limit was not included in a field guide to the shutdown for veterans, according to The Washington Post.

Food programs

Funding for the WIC program, which provides low-income pregnant women, new mothers and children up to the age of five with food, has been cut short. The USDA initially said states have funds that could sustain the program for weeks, and multiple states confirmed on Thursday that surplus funds were being used to cover their programs through October. The agency told EdWeek that the funds may not last past October.

The Snap food stamps program is funded through October and has $2bn in contingency funds available after that.

Patent and trademark office

The Commerce Department is responsible for issuing patents and trademark registration, and is operating as usual on reserve fees from last year. The agency said it expects to operate normally for approximately four weeks, but is assessing how it will operate after that time. The office will close if it runs out of reserve funds, while keeping a small staff on hand to accept new applications.

Immigration services

US Citizenship and Immigration Services runs on user fees and is still able to handle applications and keep appointments at local offices. Its e-verify program, which checks the immigration or citizenship status of new employees, went offline with the shutdown, but the government waived that requirement until the shutdown ends.

Amtrak

The country's dominant passenger rail service gets a considerable portion of its funding from the US government, though it's managed by a for-profit company. These funds are allocated by the Transportation Department to the company quarterly and through reimbursements. It may also lose out on ticket revenue because Washington DC is its second-biggest market.

Analysts told Bloomberg News that Amtrak has enough money to last for the next few weeks, but after that period it's unclear whether the company would be able to function normally.

Public health

The National Institutes of Health is not accepting new patients for clinical trials, though those already enrolled in these programs will continue to receive care. An NIH spokesman told the Washington Post that the agency's closure could affect about 200 people who would normally be admitted for clinical trials, per week. A small group of NIH employees are monitoring experiments, since most were furloughed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention furloughed workers that investigate disease outbreaks, and the annual influenza program, which tracks the disease and helps people get flu shots, was shut down.

Amanda Holpuch

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Another church scandal: The Roast - video

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 02:00 PM PDT

The Roast is a daily comedy news show that promises to destroy every bastion of journalism

Weatherwatch: Flashes from the ash

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:30 PM PDT

For lightning junkies, volcanic eruptions sometimes produce the ultimate electrical storm. During the 2011 eruption of Grímsvötn on Iceland for example, a spectacular display of over 16,000 bolts of lightning lit up the sky. But not all volcanoes live up to expectation: the lightning accompanying the 2010 Icelandic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull was limp by comparison. Now an experiment with ash from Grímsvötn has revealed why some volcanoes become more electrically excited than others.

Volcano lightning is sparked by the electrical charge produced when ash particles collide. But why do some ash particles electrify more than others? Karen Aplin, from the University of Oxford, and her colleagues mimicked a volcanic plume in their lab to find out. They dropped Grímsvötn ash particles down a tube and measured the electrical charge generated. By sieving the ash beforehand they were able to experiment with different particle sizes.

In a recent edition of the journal Physical Review Letters, they report that the highest charge (which is likely linked to the most spectacular lightning) is created by ash with the widest range of particle sizes. By contrast ash particles that are all similar in size fail to produce much spark. And they found that the type of ash was important too: Grímsvötn ash charged much more readily than Eyjafjallajökull ash.

This increased understanding could help scientists to develop volcanic eruption forecasts, using lightning detection. Meanwhile, air traffic control could measure electrical charge to distinguish between volcanic plumes and clouds, and find aircraft a safe route.

Kate Ravilious

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Liberty warns of threat to UK citizens facing trial overseas

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:30 PM PDT

Removing suspects' automatic right of appeal against extradition undermines safeguard for UK citizens

Removing suspects' automatic right of appeal against extradition will undermine a major safeguard for British citizens facing trial overseas, Liberty has warned.

In a letter to the Guardian, Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights organisation, accuses the government of "slipping" the clause into the anti-social behaviour, crime and policing bill.

Her letter highlights the case of Talha Ahsan, a British poet and translator who was extradited to the United States a year ago today on charges of supporting terrorism through a pro-jihadi website he is alleged to have operated.

Ahsan is awaiting trial in a supermax state prison in Connecticut. He is said to have Aspergers Syndrome and fought a six-year legal battle against extradition. His supporters point out that the evidence against him was never examined in detail by the British courts.

The letter is also signed by Ahsan's brother, Hamja. "There's been much promise of extradition reform from politicians of all stripes, but little change," it states. "As Talha's ordeal shows, removal can still be ordered without a basic case being made in a UK court – even where the alleged activity took place.

"Worse still, the government now seeks to dilute existing protections; slipping a clause into the anti-social behaviour, crime and policing bill which would scrap the automatic right of appeal altogether.

"Talha ... has already been sent halfway across the world, separated from his loved ones, imprisoned pre-trial and forced to navigate a completely alien legal landscape. This is punishment in itself, irrespective of the end result."

The government's bill slightly relaxes the tight deadlines for lodging an appeal against extradition. In return, however, it removes the automatic right of appeal against removal. In future the high court will have discretion to decide whether an appeal should be heard.

"People like Gary McKinnon [the computer hacker whose extradition to the US was eventually blocked] would not have been given leave to appeal," a Liberty spokesperson added.

"The Home Office is giving with one hand but taking with the other. Removing the automatic right of appeal undermines all the other safeguards.

"Potentially, a very strict test for granting permission could be developed, which could have the effect of depriving the majority of individuals of the chance to challenge the initial decision to extradite them."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "The proposed filter is aimed at stopping individuals using appeals to delay and frustrate the extradition process while still allowing those with a genuine case to be heard.

"Our reforms will make the UK's extradition arrangements more open and transparent and provide greater safeguards for individuals. It is in the overwhelming public interest that our extradition arrangements function properly, are effective and efficient."

Owen Bowcott

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US surpasses Russia as world's top oil and natural gas producer

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:13 PM PDT

New drilling techniques extract oil and gas from US shale rock formations, putting the country's output at 25m barrels per day

The US was on pace to achieve global energy domination on Friday, overtaking Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil and natural gas producer.

New estimates released on Friday by the Energy Information Administration showed America pulling ahead of both countries in oil and natural gas production for 2013.

The rise to the top was fuelled by new drilling techniques, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which have unlocked vast quantities of oil and gas from shale rock formations – especially in North Dakota and Texas.

America was on track to produce just under 25m barrels a day of oil, natural gas and related fuels, the EIA said. Russia was just under 22m barrels a day.

America had already surpassed Russia in natural gas production last year, pulling ahead for the first time since 1982.

But this was the first year the US was on pace to surpass Russia in production of both oil and natural gas.

"Total petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbon production estimates for the United States and Russia for 2011 and 2012 were roughly equivalent — within 1 quadrillion Btu of one another," the EIA said. "In 2013, however, the production estimates widen out, with the United States expected to outproduce Russia by five quadrillion Btu," the agency said.

Most of the new oil was coming from the western states. Oil production in Texas has more than doubled since 2010. In North Dakota, it has tripled, and Oklahoma, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah have also shown steep rises in oil production over the same three years, according to EIA data.

But the EIA said the new natural gas production was coming from across the eastern United States.

Russia is believed to hold one of the world's largest oil-bearing shale formations. But the industry has lagged behind America in its embrace of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to get at the oil and gas.

Meanwhile, energy firms are stepping up production from North Dakota and Texas. Earlier reports from the EIA suggests the trend will continue. The EIA said earlier that US crude oil production rose to an average of 7.6m barrels a day in August, the highest monthly totals since 1989.

It forecast total oil production would average 7.5m barrels a day throughout the year, rising to 8.4m barrels a day in 2014.

Suzanne Goldenberg

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White House and DC police tight-lipped over handling of fatal car chase

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:02 PM PDT

Obama administration refused to comment on police's response to the car chase which left Miriam Carey dead

Police and the Obama administration remained tight-lipped on Friday over the handling of a car chase in Washington DC that ended when officers shot dead an unarmed woman in front of her one-year-old daughter.

Officials from the agencies involved in the incident declined to provide any explanation of their officers' actions, beyond praising them in glowing terms.

Officers from the secret service and Capitol police attempted to detain Miriam Carey, 34, after her car tried to breach a perimeter barrier close to the White House.

Video footage showed police appearing to corner her car before Carey managed to get away. Police gave chase and shot her dead around 1.7 miles from where the incident began. Carey's daughter was in the car at the time.

The White House refused to comment on the police's response to the incident. Spokesman Jay Carney refused to answer when asked how the secret service had handled the situation. Calls to the secret service's public information officer went unreturned.

The Washington Metropolitan Police department, which is leading the investigation, would not say whether officers involved in Carey's death had been suspended.

"I do not have that information. Those officers belong to different agencies. You'd have to reach out to them," MPD spokeswoman Saray Leon told the Guardian.

A spokesman for US Capitol police would not say whether it had suspended the officers responsible for Carey's death. "I can't say much about it right now because it is an ongoing investigation," the spokesman said. He said the Guardian should contact the MPD.

Police were hailed as "heroic" after thwarting the car chase. Congress afforded the officers a standing ovation as members lined up to praise their dedication and bravery. But it was unclear why police had shot the woman dead.

Leon said she could not confirm how many officers had fired their weapons, or how many rounds were discharged. "That's part of the investigation at this time, and we're not giving that information because it's ongoing," she said.

Washington Metropolitan Police chief Cathy Lanier told reporters on Thursday that the driver of the black Nissan had been killed.

"The suspect in the vehicle was struck by gunfire and has been pronounced dead," Lanier said.

"The United States secret service and Capitol police officers, from what I have seen so far in this investigation, acted heroically."

Two officers were injured, one from Capitol police and one from the secret service. One was reportedly hit by Carey's vehicle; the other crashed his police car into a barrier.

The chase began at around 2:15pm, when Carey's car attempted to pass a temporary barrier at 15th and E Streets, about half a mile from the Capitol. Secret service chief Ed Donovan said an officer was injured there, while others chased the woman along Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol. They did not open fire.

Capitol police officers also gave chase, according to Lanier, and a number of police vehicles cornered Carey's car at Garfield Circle, in front of the Capitol Lawn. An officer was injured there after crashing his car.

Video footage filmed from the Capitol showed five law enforcement officials, guns drawn, approaching Carey's black Nissan Infiniti. The officers were within touching distance of the car, but the video showed the car reverse and drive off, making contact with a law enforcement vehicle on the way.

As Carey drove away, seven gunshots were heard. Police caught up with her about 300m away from the Capitol and shot her multiple times. Capitol police chief Kim Dine said "one of our officers rescued the child" after Carey had been killed. The one-year-old was taken to hospital.

The police gunfire caused a "shelter in place" notice to be called in the Capitol, with politicians forced to remain in the building. Tourists outside the building were ordered to the ground.

When the House of Representatives came to order after the lockdown ceased, House minority whip Steny Hoyer addressed his colleagues:

At the outset I know that I join the majority leader in expressing our gratitude to the Capitol police," Hoyer said. There followed a 30 second standing ovation.

I know that that round of applause was heartfelt and deeply meant."

Law enforcement agencies appear to have begun briefing that Carey was mentally ill.

Within hours of her death, congressman Mike McCaul, the chairman of House homeland security committee, said he had been told by the FBI and secret service that investigators "think [Carey] had mental health issues". McCaul's comments were made to CNN just after 6:15pm – almost exactly four hours after the initial confrontation.

Carey's mother told ABC News that she had suffered from post-natal depression, but the incident shocked those who knew the 34-year-old.

"That's impossible. She works, she holds a job," Carey's sister, Amy Carey, told the Washington Post.

"She wouldn't be in DC. She was just in Connecticut two days ago. I spoke to her."

Donald Knowles, a friend, told CBS "she was all smiles" when he saw Carey a few days before she was killed, "like she didn't have a care in the world."

Barry Weiss, a dentist who employed Carey as an assistant, said he fired her in August 2012 after patients complained that she was rough, but remembered her as "an average employee".

"She started out pleasant. There were a few instances of her being headstrong but generally she was an average employee," he told NBC Connecticut. "She did her job and left at the end of the day."

Weiss said he was stunned when he was called by the FBI and the secret service on Thursday.

"Nothing would have led us to think she would have done this," he said.

Adam Gabbatt

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Letters: Support victims of rights abuses in Russia

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT

In Berlin on 7 October we are holding a concert, To Russia With Love, in support of the innocent victims of violence and human rights violations in Russia, and to show solidarity with all those who hold dear Russia's future. On 7 October 2006, the renowned journalist and human rights activist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in Moscow. Over the past decade the death toll and list of dubiously convicted people in Russia have grown exponentially. They include not only journalists and human rights activists, but business people, lawyers and musicians. The names of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, Sergei Magnitsky (the lawyer who died in prison), Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina are known worldwide. These names have become symbols of resistance to arbitrary power and unjust jurisprudence.

The trials are underway of the so-called Bolotnaya prisoners – the young people who dared take to the streets to demand their constitutional rights. An unprecedented harsh sentence has recently been imposed on the rural schoolteacher, Ilya Farber, who fell victim to corrupt officials. And there's the latest arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists accused of piracy for their attempt to attract world attention to ecological distractions caused by Gazprom in the Arctic.

We are musicians. We are a peaceful people. It is naive to believe that our joint action can dramatically change something and justice will prevail. Dostoevsky's famous words that "beauty will save the world" evidently also sound naive. But we do choose idealism and do believe in miracles. Our goal is not only to create wonderful sounds, but also to bring effective help to all those who are in real need. We are asking musicians and artists to send words of encouragement or messages of support which will be published in the programme notes of the concert. Contact us at www.to-russia-with-love.org.
Gidon Kremer
Berlin


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Country diary: Sandy, Bedfordshire: A special delivery arrives beside our doorstep: a hedgehog dropping

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT

Sandy, Bedfordshire: The hedgehog is the nation's favourite animal yet we seem to be loving it towards extinction

A special delivery arrived one night beside our front doorstep. I didn't take it in or even pick it up, but reached for a twig and turned it over and back again. A month later, it is still there, a little shrivelled and broken by alternate spells of sun and rain. There is no question that it is a hedgehog dropping, the size of a child's pinkie, studded with beetle shells; some are shiny black gemstones, others larger and finely ridged. One drops off at the prod of a stick and falls on its back, matt side up. Dislodged and out of context it has lost its beetleness, and bears more of a resemblance to a sunflower seed husk. It is the naturalist's hobby to break open animal droppings. This one has very few beetle shells – perhaps its depositor found a bowl full of cat food or surfeited on slugs.

Of the hedgehog, I've seen nothing. A single dropping is the sum total of this summer and autumn's offerings. The garden is littered with memories that are less than five years old – a path alongside the wood pile strewn with the hedgehog's calling cards, the water butt where a female defended her chastity by wedging her rear against it to fend off a persistent suitor, the pond that was a habitual water hole. Dusk walks no longer turn up a familiar hump-backed shape lodged in a flower bed. And the roads are devoid of spiny flattened carcasses.

Earlier this year, the hedgehog was voted the nation's favourite animal. Figures show that numbers nationwide have halved in 20 years – we are loving it towards extinction. Maybe the phrase "fragmentation of habitat" explains the sudden collapse in this neighbourhood – too many paved front gardens starving them of earth, too many concrete-shuttered fences excluding the creature we all want but do our best to exclude.

This morning I dug a tunnel under next door's new fence to let hedgehogs in and out. Sunlight broke through from the other side. Maybe it was a symbol of hope. I'll just keep watching.

Derek Niemann

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Royal Mail and Twitter: a tale of two sales

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 12:20 PM PDT

The upcoming flotations of the two companies offer some fascinating contrasts – and one key, troubling similarity

Call it a tale of two sales. Last week saw the publication of the stock-market prospectus for a 378-year-old national institution, known around the world for its delivery of messages. This week saw the start of the public offering of a company that didn't even exist in 2005, yet which is already famous for publishing short, sometimes sharp, memos. Which is which? Send your answers on a postcard – or a tweet.

The upcoming flotations of the Royal Mail and Twitter offer some fascinating contrasts – and one key, troubling similarity. The differences are easy to spot. Start with market value. Shares of Twitter will go on sale in November at a price that makes the company worth around $11bn (£6.8bn). In its punting of the Royal Mail, the government reckons the company is worth only between £2bn and £3bn. Looking at those figures, you might assume that Twitter has some kind of licence to print money, while Britain's postal network is a financial basketcase. Not so. Ever since George Osborne relieved the Mail of its pensions liabilities and dumped them on the taxpayer (all the better to execute a firesale), the company has been comfortably in the black. At the last count, operating profits were £403m, more than double on the previous year. And Twitter? The truth comes out early in its S-1 filing: "We have incurred significant operating losses in the past and we may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain profitability." In other words: we haven't yet made a cent – indeed, we might never make a cent.

But Twitter isn't offering tempted investors a steady revenue stream: it's selling them a stake in the future. The Twitter army is swelling fast – in the three months to the end of June, it had 218 million monthly users, up from 151 million over the same period in 2012. The company wants to bombard users with ads. The Mail on the other hand is commonly held to be managing commercial decline: the bulk of the post that flops onto the average doormat is either junkmail or mail-order treats – actual, personal letters are an increasingly rare beast. That said, at current valuations Twitter reckons its users are worth something like $50-$75 each.

Even if it keeps growing its users – very likely, given the booming smartphone market – and they don't get put off by the number of ads, it's still questionable whether Twitter is worth the money. The Mail on the other hand already has a revenue stream and a portfolio of properties. The troubling question for both companies is what they hope to get out of flotation. Apart from allowing early investors to cash out, it's unlikely Twitter's new owners will tolerate its spending on research and development. As for the Royal Mail, going private is unlikely to improve conditions for workers or customers.

Editorial

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Life is Inspiration

Saya senang blogging, untuk sharing apa yang saya fikirkan. Saya menganggap setiap perjalanan hidup memiliki keunikan..

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