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

02.15 Ibra 0 komentar

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

Shaun Ryder on UFOs: 'It's not that I want to believe – it's impossible not to'

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 01:00 AM PDT

As singer with the Happy Mondays Shaun Ryder used to do a lot of drugs. But that doesn't explain the encounters with aliens he has turned into a new TV show, he insists

Shaun Ryder was 15 when he first saw one. He'd just started as a messenger boy at the post office, and was walking to the bus stop on Hilton Lane, Little Hulton. It was 6.45am, pitch black when he looked up into the sky. "At first it was still, and then it went, 'Voooooooom!' And then again: 'Voooooooom!' Classic zig-zag, hovered, then went off at 10,000 miles an hour. Like Star Trek. Boom. Gone. Yeah!"

Another bus stop a few months later in 1978. This time he's at Irlams o' Th' Height in Salford, it's around 5pm. "Hundreds of lights going across the sky really slow, and I'm thinking, 'God, are we being invaded?' The next day in the papers it said: 'Mysterious lights in the sky – lights at Salford rugby ground have gone mad.' And that was bullshit because when the lights at rugby grounds start moving around, it's nothing like these."

Ever since, Ryder has been obsessed with Ufology and extraterrestrial forms of life. The former Happy Mondays and Black Grape frontman gets narked with people who assume he was off his head when he saw his UFOs. Fair enough, he has spent much of his life off his head, but he insists that any time he's seen anything otherworldly he's been clean and sober.

Ryder, 50, defined the Madchester era of ecstacy-inspired dance music in the 1980s. He ranted his brilliant nonsense lyrics ("You're twistin' my melon man/ You know you talk so hip man/ You're twistin' my melon man") to an inspired, jingly-jangly rock-funk-northern-soul-house-hiphop backdrop, and somehow managed to combine pop stardom with crack-dealing and drug-fuelled psychosis. Then, in 2010, he found populist redemption in the Australian jungle with Ant and Dec and became an unlikely national treasure. Before that, television producers were terrified of what he might come out with before the watershed. He was regarded as a liability. After I'm a Celebrity, they couldn't get enough of the newly cuddly Ryder. With all the drugs he'd ingested, he should have been dead; but here he was back with spanking new teeth, a family-friendly smile, and great patter. He was invited to go on numerous reality shows, but turned them down. So telly people asked what they could do to get him back on air. UFOs, he said. And aliens.

Two years after he started investigating UFOs, Ryder is back as an author and documentary film-maker, having travelled the world looking for spooky sightings. His conclusion? He's more convinced than ever that we are not alone.

Ryder makes a convincing presenter – warm, engaging, a bit bonkers, spooked, occasionally sceptical, never cynical. He has travelled to Chile, where more UFOs have been spotted than anywhere else in the world, hooked up with legendary abductee Travis Walton, and met a perfectly normal Yorkshire family who tell him about the dazzling UFO that almost blinded them on the way back from a meal out at The Little Chef.

I ask Ryder if he went out there determined to prove that his childhood experiences were real. He looks at me with stary eyes. "It's not that I want to believe, it's just impossible not to." His voice is getting louder. "We're not the only life in the universe. We're just not. It's ridiculously impossible. If you look at the way kids are being taught now … when I was a kid at school, you was taught there was no life out there – that was it. But now kids are being taught there's water, so where there's water there will be life forms or whatever. So it's not that I want to believe, that's how it is."

He puffs hard on his electronic cigarette. No drugs these days for Ryder. He knows he can't cope with them. Funny thing is, he says, his dad can sit at home spliffing the day away, but not him. Just electronic fags, and the occasional real one. "I've gone from smoking 25 a day to about five 'cos of these. It wasn't really that I wanted to give up smoking, it's just that you can't smoke anywhere these days. The first one I got, you didn't really get the hard hit at the back, so I got these ultra ones. And these are just the best."

He inhales joyously, and talks about the road trip he went on with Travis Walton. In 1975 Walton was a logger when he and his crew came across a luminous flying saucer in a remote part of Arizona. The terrified crew raced to their wagon and got the hell out. When they realised they had left Walton behind, they went back to look for him. There was no sign of him. They went into town and reported the incident to the deputy sherriff. For days the whole town searched. Nothing. Five days later he reappeared and said he had been abducted by aliens. Over the years he and the crew have passed numerous polygraph tests. Walton, a man with heavy, bloodshot eyes and a lugubrious moustache, is still haunted by his expereince. "He looked like he's got post-traumatic stress disorder, like he'd walked into Vietnam, and spent two years there and come out," Ryder says. "Just imagine, even if one appeared in front of you, it would traumatise you properly. You'd go grey. Your whole world would change. Everything. It's just day one again. So you're going to look traumatised. And you spend some time with him and you just know."

Ryder and Walton make for an unlikely team, but they strike up a melancholy rapport. As a 29-year-old, Ryder says, Walton believed he'd been kidnapped and experimented on by a malign force. But now, like so many people who have come into contact with extraterrestrials, he believes they were kind; that they probably saved his life. "Now he reckons he was hit by some sort of forcefield that probably stopped his heart. These guys then took him inside and give him some medical treatmentand then let him go. That's how he looks at it now. As he's got older, he's changed how he feels about it." That's the thing, Ryder, says – for decades, everybody assumed extraterrestrials are the enemy, but it's obvious that they're not. "These guys have got technology that's millions of years in advance of us, and if you think about it, they could have took us out just like that, and they haven't. They're certainly not hostile. We wouldn't be here if they were."

Ryder is far from convinced by everybody he met. Some Ufologists are just chancers out there for the fantasy ride. He knows they've not seen the real thing because they are too glib about it. "They say: 'Yes, I've been abducted, wahey! Wahoo! Some of the people I've met are mad as a box of frogs."

When he was young, did his interest in UFOs make him want to experience more out-of-body experiences through drugs? He answers in a typical round-the-houses Ryder way. "Well, see, here's the weird thing. From being a little kid, I've always been interested in space. Star Trek and Close Encounters – not Star Wars." He spits out "Star Wars" with contempt. "Skies, stars, the moon landing – even as a six-year-old I was glued to that. So I've always been interested in that. And then when I had my first acid trip, did it open my brain even further? Of course it did." Did his fascination with space make him interested in science at school? He laughs. "No, I was a thick kid, I didn't even learn me alphabet til I was 20-odd, I was too busy doing something else. I had a platinum fucking disc before I learned me alphabet. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, where it was still acceptable to say, 'Well, you're not academic, so that's fine, you'll do it some other way.' Nowadays it's like everybody's got to be academic. My kids are – they can spell, they can punctuate. My 11-year-old can spell anything. My lad Oliver is 19 and he's going to do music law."

It's amazing that he was illiterate and is now an author. Ah, Ryder says, well, if he's being strictly honest, the writing's not really down to him, that's his ghostwriter, the journalist Luke Bainbridge. In fact, Ryder says, the first time he looked at the proofs of What Planet Am I On?, the book accompanying the series, he got a bit of a shock, because Bainbridge had captured his voice too accurately. "Here's the thing," he says. "We're doing a book, and the TV show is PG – it can be shown in the day to kids on the History channel. So you want a book to accompany the TV series. So I get a draft of the book and it's, 'fucking this, fucking that, fucking dick, fuckin twat,' and I'm like, 'Luke! You can't!' I'm not very proud of me grammar, of me fucking vocabulary, but with a book here to accompany the TV series, don't be 'Fuck that fuckin' fuckin' fuckin' alien, this fuckin' here, that cunt there'. You know what I mean?" So you had to de-fuck it? He grins. "Aye, I had to de-fuck it."

Do his family and friends share his passion for UFOs? "No, not really." His manager, Warren, is sitting in the room with us. He went on the trip to Chile with Ryder. Is he a believer? "No, he's not."

In Chile his team photographed something flitting across the sky that Ryder thought was a UFO at the time, but now he's not so sure. Does that mean he hasn't seen any since his teens? He doesn't answer. He looks at Warren for advice, suddenly coy. "I'm gonna say yeah … even though that's not strictly true."

What d'you mean, I say. You can't lie to me.

"Nonononono." He looks at Warren, unnerved. "Should I tell him because this is just going to look like bullshit?"

We're here for the truth, I say.

His sentences become disjointed. "Well, all I'll tell yous, right, is that I've seen one, really close up, about 50 foot above, and it looks like a cartoon. It doesn't look real. It looks like it's made out of Airfix kit. They look like toys. When you've seen something as close as I've seen – and bullshit drink, drugs, bollox, none of it, absolutely normal and straight – and you see it and you know they're here … "

Tell me more, I say. "I can't go into any more detail, apart from that it was literally 50 foot above me." Did he have any contact with it? "No, no, but the thing is I wasn't frightened one bit. I was very peaceful and placid when I was looking at the thing." He says it happened after he finished making the documentary series.

Are you not telling me the full version because you're saving it for a new show?

"No, I'm not telling you because if I start coming out with that story now, it will be, 'Oh I hear you've got a show now and you're just promoting it …'" He comes to a stop. "I thought someone was playing a fucking joke. I thought someone had made something out of a gigantic 40-foot Airfix kit."

Has the latest sighting changed him? "Yeah, it's made me think all sorts of shit. If you've seen something 50 foot away, right, and it's as clear as daylight, it really does make you think. It was early morning. It was ironic that I go out doing this show, looking in certain hotspots, and then boom! You see it here! How no one in the Swinton Worsley bit of Salford can not have seen that craft, only me, is beyond belief."

At one point, in the TV series, he says he thinks he quite fancies being abducted. I ask him whether, if aliens had come out of this ship and taken him off, he would really have been so blasé? I notice beads of sweat on his forehead. The sweat quickly spreads down his neck. He looks genuinely terrified. "Phrrrrrrr," he says, grabbing his upper arms. "I mean, I really wouldn't like to be taken from anywhere without giving permission. I wouldn't like to be just fuckin' zapped up and took off, and think 'This is great.' I would absolutely freak."

Shaun Ryder on UFOs starts on History on Sunday 10 November, 8pm.

Simon Hattenstone

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Sleeping with the enemy: My aunt's wartime secret

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Nicholas Shakespeare was always intrigued by his aunt Priscilla, who had a glamorous if mysterious presence in his childhood. After her death, he delved into her past in wartime France and found she had been hiding a dark secret

My aunt Priscilla, my mother's sister, was a figure of unusual glamour and mystery in my childhood. She lived on a farm on the West Sussex coast with her second husband, Raymond, a mushroom farmer and a jealous man who never let her far from his sight.

Priscilla invited us for weekends at their home in East Wittering and whenever her name was mentioned on the journey from London I craned forward in the back of my parents' car. From an early age, I was conscious that my aunt was the sort of woman that men fell for. Both my parents loved her, but were unable to puzzle out the riddle of her relationship with Raymond.

Inevitably, as our mauve Singer Gazelle turned into the lane leading to Church Farm, there would be speculation about how late we were going to be and whether Raymond, a tyrant for punctuality, would – this time – serve mushrooms. The promise of a mushroom is hard to recapture today; cheap production has rendered the taste mundane. But to a seven-year-old boy in the early 1960s a mushroom was a fantastic thing – almost as exotic, in its way, as my aunt.

Priscilla's home was a redbrick farmhouse built next to a 12th-century church. There was a courtyard with stacks of empty fish boxes for growing the mushrooms in. The "growing rooms" were sinister-looking Nissen huts, 30 of them side by side. I was under firm orders not to enter. My shoes risked picking up a dangerous virus called La France disease, which, if spread, could wipe out Raymond's crop. So I never saw inside a hut. But I remember buckets of disinfectant and the damp, musty smell of compost. "Kept in the dark and fed on shit," was Raymond's formula for a successful flush.

The extent to which Raymond controlled Priscilla was blatant even to me. When you enter a room and everyone's talking, you end up being drawn to the silent one. Even though I was only a child and Priscilla a woman in her late 40s, I felt protective of her.

Priscilla spent long periods alone in her room upstairs. I have a vivid memory of the room because at the foot of the double bed was the first television I laid eyes on.

From the beginning, I am sure of two things. First, her sheer attractiveness. She reminded me of Grace Kelly in one of the films I watched in her bedroom. She laughed, and I remembered my grandfather, his smoky laughter rising across the South Downs. Her laugh was rejuvenating and I noticed that my parents changed in her company, perhaps returned to the young man and woman they were before they had children, when they lived in France. In a strange way, she was the delicacy that we went to Church Farm always hoping to savour, our champignon de Paris.

The second thing I am sure of was her sadness. She seemed weighed down by a past that I could never work out, and nor could my parents. My father said: "I suspected she'd had an extraordinary past, but she never spoke about it and one would never ask her." This aloof, indefinable sadness was her bedrock.

My parents gave me some basic facts. Priscilla had grown up in Paris, where she had trained as a ballerina. She had worked in prewar Paris as a model.

She had lived in France during the occupation and spent time in a concentration camp. My mother said: "That's what I was told by her when I was 17 – at Church Farm. She was captured and tortured by the Germans. I presumed she couldn't have children because she had been raped and caught an infection."

She had been a vicomtesse; her first husband, an aristocratic Frenchman who never ceased to love her. I was curious about his nickname for her – "my little cork". Why he called her this was not explained.

Priscilla died in 1982, but her fate obscurely moved me. What had she done in the war? Why did she not return to England after getting out of the concentration camp? Why did her father, SPB Mais – a well-known author and broadcaster – never mention on the airwaves or to my mother the fact that his eldest daughter was isolated throughout the war in occupied France? I pictured her crouched before an illegal radio-set in a Paris atelier, listening to my grandfather's voice on the BBC. A pioneer of radio, he had inaugurated the Kitchen Front series, and in 1940 received up to 500 fan letters a day, causing even Winston Churchill to say of him: "That man Mais makes me feel tired." Did he ever transmit to Priscilla a personal message that only she could interpret, like one of those mystifying coded messages to the resistance, such as "The hippo is not carnivorous"? Could she have been in the resistance?

A year or so after Priscilla died, my mother revealed to me that she had been kept in the dark about Priscilla's existence until the last months of the war. She was in her first term at Cheltenham Ladies' College when she received a letter from her father, who, pricked into action by Priscilla's return from occupied France, was writing to break the news that my mother had an older half-sister and that her father had been married before. The reason he'd had to keep this secret, apparently, was because the BBC refused to employ divorced people; he was afraid for his job.

About the upbringing of her sister, and about the circumstances of Priscilla's life until 1944, my mother admitted that she possessed, even now, only the haziest outline. The idea that my mother had been unaware of her father's other family until the age of 13 was too irresistible not to follow up and I contacted Priscilla's stepdaughter, Tracey. I explained how curious I still felt about Priscilla and asked if my aunt might have left behind any personal papers. "It's odd that you should ring up now," Tracey said. She had in her possession a cardboard box filled with photographs, love letters, diaries and manuscripts, including a stab at a novel, which Tracey had salvaged soon after Priscilla's death, from the striped padded chest at the end of her bed – on which the telly used to sit. The papers all related to Priscilla's time in occupied France. They were more or less everything that someone seeking to unravel Priscilla's enigma could hope for.

The story that unfolded from this box of papers was one of an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances. I discovered that Priscilla, after leaving the internment camp at Besançon, had gone underground, but not to join the resistance; rather, to dissolve into the crowd. And if, to keep warm and secure a meal, she did things that Priscilla Mais or Vicomtesse Doynel de la Sausserie might have known in her inward conscience was wrong, then she was also part of the mass.

This is not a criticism or disparagement. The impulse to cast people as heroes or traitors ignores the muddled and shifting reality of the overwhelming part of the population who drifted with the stream. Prudent, unaffiliated, not committing themselves to resistance or collaboration, not fitting into a neat moral category, playing a number of ambiguous and provisional roles, ready at any instant to change direction with the current. At this dark moment in France's history, a friend of André Gide said he felt "like a cork floating on the filthiest water". That summed up Priscilla.

She was one of remarkably few English women to have lived in Paris through the occupation – perhaps one of fewer than 200. She learned what it was to be faced with decisions that her family and friends in England never had to confront, yet which they judged others for having made.

Her story turned out to be not about an elite coming to terms with fascism, but about ordinary people – ordinary women especially – adjusting, screwing up and developing survival skills of a deeply primitive and totally understandable, if ruthless, kind. This included sleeping with the enemy.

One evening, after piecing together her sister's story, I telephoned my mother. I told her that it looked as though one of Priscilla's lovers in Paris, who had invited her to dine at Maxim's and dressed her in Schiaparelli and Patou, may have been the prominent Nazi intelligence officer in charge of Bureau Otto and had overseen the systematic plunder of France. My mother's reaction? "Nothing would surprise me in the war. Absolutely nothing. It's a question of survival. You never knew who you were going to meet, and you lived from day to day. I'm sure that you would have collaborated if you had wanted to live."

Nicholas Shakespeare

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Senate: Greens and Sports Party turf out ALP and Palmer party in WA

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 12:19 AM PDT

Scott Ludlam for the Greens and Wayne Dropulich of the Sports Party declared winners in controversial recount

Drone kills Pakistani Taliban leader

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 11:13 PM PDT

Mehsud killed when missile struck compound in village near capital of North Waziristan

The CIA's secret drone campaign claimed one of its highest profile scalps on Friday with the killing of the chief of the Pakistani Taliban by an unmanned aircraft in the country's lawless tribal areas.

Hakimullah Mehsud, the feared leader of an alliance of militant groups attempting to topple the Pakistani state, was killed when a missile struck a compound in the village near the capital of North Waziristan, according to militant, US and Pakistani sources.

Although his death has been misreported in the past, informants in the tribal area said they were confident one of the country's most vicious militant leaders was dead.

"He was targeted as he was returning to his home from a nearby mosque where he had been holding discussions with his comrades," said a military officer based in a city close to the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is home to many Islamist terrorist groups.

"He was right at his front door and at least three missiles were fired."

A senior US intelligence official told the Associated Press the US received positive confirmation on Friday morning that he had been killed.

A Pakistani Taliban fighter said on Saturday Mehsud's body was "damaged but recognisable", Reuters reported. Taliban commanders said Mehsud's funeral would be held on Saturday and commanders were debating his replacement.

Officials and Taliban commanders interviewed by phone told Associated Press two candidates were Mullah Fazlullah, the Pakistani Taliban chief for the north-west Swat Valley, and Khan Sayed, the leader in the South Waziristan tribal area.

Militant and official sources said Mehsud's driver and bodyguard were also among a total of five people killed.

Although Mehsud's four year tenure as head of Pakistan's most feared militant group has been marked by horrific attacks that have killed scores of soldiers, government officials and civilians, his death looked set to spark fury among some politicians who believe the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) should be brought in to peace talks.

All political parties unanimously supported government attempts to negotiate with the TTP at a meeting in September. Just this week Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced that talks between the two sides had finally begun.

A government official claimed Mehsud had been discussing the matter with fellow fighters just before he was killed, while the Taliban said a government peace delegation was in Miran Shah at the time of the attack.

The country's rightwing religious parties are likely to interpret the drone strike as a deliberate attempt by the US to scupper peace talks with an organisation that swears allegiance to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, which fights against Nato troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Sharif, who held meetings with US president Barack Obama in Washington DC last week, has repeatedly called for an end to drone strikes, despite persistent suspicions that Pakistan continues to give secret backing to the attacks.

But the US was never likely to turn up an opportunity to kill Mehsud, the mastermind of a devastating suicide bomb attack on a CIA station in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan in 2009 in which seven CIA officers died.

The ingenious plot involved a Jordanian triple agent who the CIA believed was working for them but was in fact taking orders from Mehsud. The suicide bomber was ushered into the military base to brief CIA officers on al-Qaida, and detonated his explosive vest once he had reached the inside of the base.

Mehsud later appeared in a video alongside the Jordanian, who said he carried out the attack in retribution for the death of another former Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in an American drone strike in August 2009.

Saifullah Mahsud, director of the Pakistani thinktank FATA Research Centre, said the movement was unlikely to be overly affected the killing of its leader.

"It's a very decentralised organisation," he said. "They've lost leaders to drone strikes before."

A burly man in his mid-30s who wore shoulder length hair, Hakimullah Mehsud became leader of the TTP following the killing of former leader and fellow tribesman Baitullah Mehsud.

Hakimullah Mehsud's death comes just weeks after the TTP chief took the risky and unusual step of granting an interview to a BBC cameraman who had travelled to Pakistan's lawless north-west.

The interview was conducted in open air despite the non-stop presence of drones in the sky.

Earlier on Friday Pakistan's foreign ministry condemned the drone attack as a "violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity".

In May, a drone strike killed Mehsud's second-in-command, and one of his most trusted lieutenants was captured in Afghanistan last month.

Jon Boone

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Egyptian TV station suspends satirist Bassem Youssef's show

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 06:16 PM PDT

CBC channel stops broadcast of comedian's show after he mocked Egypt's widespread pro-army sentiment

An Egyptian television station has refused to air the latest episode of its star satirist's comedy series, after his show drew criticism for mocking the current fervour for Egypt's army.

Private channel CBC stopped the Friday night broadcast of Bassem Youssef's show minutes before its 10pm airtime. Instead, a broadcaster read out a statement explaining that Youssef's production team was involved in a dispute with the channel's board over contractual and content issues.

The channel did not give further details. But earlier this week a CBC newscaster read a statement distancing the channel from Youssef's criticism of Egypt's widespread pro-army sentiment, censuring him for using "phrases and innuendos that may lead to mocking national sentiment or symbols of the Egyptian state." It came amid a bitter backlash against Youssef – from both the government and parts of the public. On Tuesday, prosecutors launched an investigation into the first episode of Youssef's new series, in which he controversially warned "that fascism in the name of religion will be replaced by fascism in the name of patriotism and national security" – a clear criticism of the policies of Egypt's new army-backed government. A day later army supporters held a protest outside the studio in central Cairo in which his second – and now cancelled – episode was being filmed.

Bassem Youssef – known in the west as Egypt's Jon Stewart, after the American political satirist – rose to global prominence last year for lampooning Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president who was ousted in July. Then as now, his satire led to an official state investigation into his work. But whereas CBC stood by their star when he came under attack by the Morsi administration, six months later Youssef's channel appears unwilling to back his criticism of Morsi's successors.

While the show was pulled by Youssef's employers, rather than the government, its removal will worry those who saw his show as a bellwether for free speech in post-Mubarak Egypt. There are currently few other anti-establishment voices in both private and state media, with media barons either solidly supportive of the current government, or too afraid to criticise it.

Youssef flew to the United Arab Emirates on Friday morning, but it is understood that his trip is unrelated to the show's cancellation.

Patrick Kingsley

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Australians detained in Sri Lanka arrive home protesting at 'harassment'

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 05:54 PM PDT

International Federation of Journalists says detention of its representatives was an attempt to intimidate the media

Los Angeles airport shooting suspect identified as Paul Ciancia – Friday 1 November

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 05:38 PM PDT

• Gunman opened fire at terminal 3 security checkpoint
• One security agent died, others wounded
• Officers tracked suspect 'deep' into airport 
• Suspect now in custody and area is secured
• Read our latest news story

Adam Gabbatt
Ben Quinn

Best pictures of the day - live

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 04:16 PM PDT

The Guardian's photo team brings you a daily round-up from the world of photography

Sudan fires up its would-be Alan Sugars with TV show

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 04:03 PM PDT

Dozen young hopefuls to compete for startup cash, in country where only the rich can get credit

Abda Yahia el-Mahdi has never heard of Alan Sugar, but she may soon be the Sudanese incarnation of the pugnacious Apprentice star. Sudan's most-watched television network – Blue Nile – will shortly broadcast the country's first Apprentice-style reality show, a format that programmers hope will shake up Sudanese television and indirectly boost Sudan's tanking economy. And Mahdi, a former finance minister, is being courted as one of the show's judges.

Mashrouy – Arabic for "my project" – will present 12 young Sudanese entrepreneurs pitching and developing their ideas for a creative start-up firm over the course of several episodes. The dozen hopefuls will be mentored – and ultimately eliminated – by four leading Sudanese businesspeople and economists – before viewers vote on the winner from a shortlist.

The Sudanese are no strangers to reality television, but locals say the premise of such a business-oriented show – which has drawn comparisons with Dragon's Den and the Apprentice – is unprecedented.

"Even the term 'creative entrepreneurship' is new in Sudan," said Mahir Elfiel, one of the show's co-ordinators. "There was no specific word for it before. And that's the idea behind the whole project – to introduce the concept here."

Sudan has a youth unemployment rate of 34% – one of several contributing factors to recent anti-regime demonstrations in which more than 200 protesters were killed by state officials.

The cash-strapped government was once able to keep unemployment under control by employing many young jobseekers within the bowels of its ministries, but its empty coffers – reduced by state mismanagement and international sanctions – no longer allow for this.

"There is a limit to how many they can employ," said Mahdi. "The vacancies are in the hundreds, but the unemployed are in the thousands."

As a result, there is an increasing desire, inside and outside government, to encourage more investment in private enterprise – and Mashrouy, allocated a primetime slot on Sudan's most popular channel, is one attempt to inspire this change.

"If we can duplicate this kind of programme, I hope it will make a difference," said Mahdi. "It will help people get beyond the traditional thinking of getting employment in the government sector."

Most private enterprise in Sudan currently involves small, low-budget projects funded by micro-finance. Mashrouy aims to encourage graduates to create larger and more ambitious entrepreneurial projects – and to encourage banks to invest in them more readily.

Contestants include Mustafa Shaib, the hacker behind what he says will be Sudan's first tech company to focus exclusively on internet security, and English teacher Yassim Gasim, who wants to export spicy peanut butter – a popular Sudanese delicacy that is little known outside the country.

Gasim's previous experiences highlight why Sudan's business community is so excited about Mashrouy. Gasim first had the idea for his business five years ago – but couldn't find anyone willing to finance him, such are the restrictions on – and lethargy towards – investment in Sudan. As a result, he imagined that his horizons were limited to small low-tech micro-finance projects such as chicken-breeding. But more ambitious entrepreneurial projects seemed out of Gasim's reach – and even his vocabulary.

"The first time I read the word riyada," said 38-year-old Gasim, referring to the word for entrepreneurship, "was when I saw the billboard for this show four months ago."

Sudan has no shortage of entrepreneurial small traders or self-employed day labourers. But with credit only available to those from rich families, the concept of a western-style entrepreneur – armed with a long term business plan, and backed by investors – is less well established.

So too is a business-based television show. "It's been challenging," said Elfiel, whose colleagues were forced to postpone filming because of the unrest in September. "We have stuff like American Idol, but nothing business-oriented like Apprentice or Dragons Den. No TV station has done this before."

Patrick Kingsley

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The secrets of the world's happiest cities

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 04:00 PM PDT

What makes a city a great place to live – your commute, property prices or good conversation?

Two bodyguards trotted behind Enrique Peñalosa, their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his profession – and his locale. Peñalosa was a politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a reputation for kidnapping and assassination. What was unusual was this: Peñalosa didn't climb into the armoured SUV. Instead, he hopped on a mountain bike. His bodyguards and I pedalled madly behind, like a throng of teenagers in the wake of a rock star.

A few years earlier, this ride would have been a radical and – in the opinion of many Bogotáns – suicidal act. If you wanted to be assaulted, asphyxiated by exhaust fumes or run over, the city's streets were the place to be. But Peñalosa insisted that things had changed. "We're living an experiment," he yelled back at me. "We might not be able to fix the economy. But we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier."

I first saw the Mayor of Happiness work his rhetorical magic back in the spring of 2006. The United Nations had just announced that some day in the following months, one more child would be born in an urban hospital or a migrant would stumble into a metropolitan shantytown, and from that moment on, more than half the world's people would be living in cities. By 2030, almost 5 billion of us will be urban.

Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the city's simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets, sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared from Bogotá's streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed. Peñalosa's first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars.

He threw out the ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and the city's first rapid transit system (the TransMilenio), using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for more than half a century.

In the third year of his term, Peñalosa challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment. As of dawn on 24 February 2000, cars were banned from streets for the day. It was the first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned. People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life than they had been in years.

One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me, perhaps because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes find in cities. Peñalosa, who was running for re-election, needed to be seen out on his bicycle that day. He hollered "Cómo le va?" ("How's it going?") at anyone who appeared to recognise him. But this did not explain his haste or his quickening pace as we traversed the north end of the city towards the Andean foothills. It was all I could do to keep up with him, block after block, until we arrived at a compound ringed by a high iron fence.

Boys in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through a gate. One of them, a bright-eyed 10-year-old, pushed a miniature version of Peñalosa's bicycle through the crowd. Suddenly I understood his haste. He had been rushing to pick up his son from school, like other parents were doing that very moment up and down the time zone. Here, in the heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the hemisphere, father and son would roll away from the school gate for a carefree ride across the metropolis. This was an unthinkable act in most modern cities. As the sun fell and the Andes caught fire, we arced our way along the wide-open avenues, then west along a highway built for bicycles. The kid raced ahead. At that point, I wasn't sure about Peñalosa's ideology. Who was to say that one way of moving was better than another? How could anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to prescribe the ideal city for happiness?

But for a moment I forgot my questions. I let go of my handlebars and raised my arms in the air of the cooling breeze, and I remembered my own childhood of country roads, after-school wanderings, lazy rides and pure freedom. I felt fine. The city was mine. The journey began.

Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration, because the happy city message is taking root around the world. "The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all," Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic. "I'm talking about the US Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by cars."

If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew.

Just before the crash of 2008, a team of Italian economists, led by Stefano Bartolini, tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between rising income and flatlining happiness in the US. The Italians tried removing various components of economic and social data from their models, and found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down people's self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country's declining social capital: the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor.

As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.

There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A Swedish study found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40% more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work.

A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, "How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?"

Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling On Happiness, explained the commuting paradox this way: "Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery."

The sad part is that the more we flock to high‑status cities for the good life – money, opportunity, novelty – the more crowded, expensive, polluted and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that Londoners are among the least happy people in the UK, despite the city being the richest region in the UK.

When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how various places look, and perhaps how it feels to be there. But to stop there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them. Robert Judge, a 48-year-old husband and father, once wrote to a Canadian radio show explaining how much he enjoyed going grocery shopping on his bicycle. Judge's confession would have been unremarkable if he did not happen to live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the average temperature in January hovers around -17C. The city stays frozen and snowy for almost half the year. Judge's pleasure in an experience that seems slower, more difficult and considerably more uncomfortable than the alternative might seem bizarre. He explained it by way of a story: sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself.

Drivers experience plenty of emotional dividends. They report feeling much more in charge of their lives than public transport users. An upmarket vehicle is loaded with symbolic value that offers a powerful, if temporary, boost in status. Yet despite these romantic feelings, half of commuters living in big cities and suburbs claim to dislike the heroic journey they must make every day. The urban system neutralises their power.

Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill. Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters.

But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam, like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles.

Why would travelling more slowly and using more effort offer more satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human physiology. We were born to move. Immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a state closer to death: it hastens it.

Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, fitted dozens of students with pedometers, then sent them back to their regular lives. Over the course of 20 days, the volunteers answered survey questions about their moods, attitudes, diet and happiness. Within that volunteer group, people who walked more were happier.

The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a quarter of the energy. They may not all attain Judge's level of transcendence, but cyclists report feeling connected to the world around them in a way that is simply not possible in the sealed environment of a car, bus or train. Their journeys are both sensual and kinesthetic.

In 1969, a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist, Eric Britton, with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. Cities should strive to embrace complexity, not only in transportation systems but in human experience, says Britton, who is still working in that field and lives in Paris. He advises cities and corporations to abandon old mobility, a system rigidly organised entirely around one way of moving, and embrace new mobility, a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways.

"We all know old mobility," Britton said. "It's you sitting in your car, stuck in traffic. It's you driving around for hours, searching for a parking spot. Old mobility is also the 55-year-old woman with a bad leg, waiting in the rain for a bus that she can't be certain will come. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled."

To demonstrate how radically urban systems can build freedom in motion, Britton led me down from his office, out on to Rue Joseph Bara. We paused by a row of sturdy-looking bicycles. Britton swept his wallet above a metallic post and pulled one free from its berth. "Et voilà! Freedom!" he said, grinning. Since the Paris bike scheme, Vélib', was introduced, it has utterly changed the face of mobility. Each bicycle in the Vélib' fleet gets used between three and nine times every day. That's as many as 200,000 trips a day. Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes, including Lyon, Montreal, Melbourne, New York. In 2010, London introduced a system, dubbed Boris Bikes for the city's bike-mad mayor, Boris Johnson. In Paris, and around the world, new systems of sharing are setting drivers free. As more people took to bicycles in Vélib's first year, the number of bike accidents rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems to repeat wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets become for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers.

So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone, not only the brave. Anyone who is really serious about building freedom in their cities eventually makes the pilgrimage to Copenhagen. I joined Copenhagen rush hour on a September morning with Lasse Lindholm, an employee of the city's traffic department. The sun was burning through the autumn haze as we made our way across Queen Louise's Bridge. Vapour rose from the lake, swans drifted and preened, and the bridge seethed with a rush-hour scene like none I have ever witnessed. With each light change, cyclists rolled toward us in their hundreds. They did not look the way cyclists are supposed to look. They did not wear helmets or reflective gear. Some of the men wore pinstriped suits. No one was breaking a sweat.

Lindholm rolled off a list of statistics: more people that morning would travel by bicycle than by any other mode of transport (37%). If you didn't count the suburbs, the percentage of cyclists in Copenhagen would hit 55%. They aren't choosing to cycle because of any deep-seated altruism or commitment to the environment; they are motivated by self-interest. "They just want to get themselves from A to B," Lindholm said, "and it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike."

The Bogotá experiment may not have made up for all the city's grinding inequities, but it was a spectacular beginning and, to the surprise of many, it made life better for almost everyone.

The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa's term, people were crashing their cars less often and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality, too. Bogotáns got healthier. The city experienced a spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades.

Bogotá's fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public transport needs sustained public investment. Optimism has withered. But Bogotá's transformative years still offer an enduring lesson for rich cities. By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone's experience, we can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active and more free. We just have to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change.


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

NSA Prism program slides

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 03:40 PM PDT

Prism, according to the Snowden documents, is the biggest single contributor to the NSA's intelligence reports. As a 'downstream' program, it collects data from Google, Facebook, Apple and others

Snowden document reveals key role of companies in NSA data collection

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:40 PM PDT

NSA leverages relationships with commercial partners to collect vast quantities of data from fibre-optic cables, file shows

• Tapping fibre-optic cables – see the NSA slide

The key role private companies play in National Security Agency surveillance programs is detailed in a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published for the first time on Friday.

One slide in the undated PowerPoint presentation, published as part of the Guardian's NSA Files: Decoded project, illustrates the number of intelligence reports being generated from data collected from the companies.

In the five weeks from June 5 2010, the period covered by the document, data from Yahoo generated by far the most reports, followed by Microsoft and then Google.

Between them, the three companies accounted for more than 2,000 reports in that period – all but a tiny fraction of the total produced under one of the NSA's main foreign intelligence authorities, the Fisa Amendents Act (FAA).

It is unclear how the information in the NSA slide relates to the companies' own transparency reports, which document the number of requests for information received from authorities around the world.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google deny they co-operate voluntarily with the intelligence agencies, and say they hand over data only after being forced to do so when served with warrants. The NSA told the Guardian that the companies' co-operation was "legally compelled".

But this week the Washington Post reported that the NSA and its UK equivalent GCHQ has been secretly intercepting the main communication links carrying Google and Yahoo users' data around the world, and could collect information "at will" from among hundreds of millions of user accounts.

The NSA's ability to collect vast quantities of data from the fibre-optic cables relies on relationships with the companies, the document published on Friday shows.

The presentation, titled "Corporate Partner Access" was prepared by the agency's Special Source Operations division, which is responsible for running those programs.

In an opening section that deals primarily with the telecom companies, the SSO baldly sets out its mission: "Leverage unique key corporate partnerships to gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables, switches and/or routes throughout the world."

The NSA is helped by the fact that much of the world's communications traffic passes through the US or its close ally the UK – what the agencies refer to as "home-field advantage".

The new revelations come at a time of increasing strain in relations between the intelligence community and the private sector. Google and Yahoo reacted angrily on Wednesday to the Washington Post's report on the interception of their data.

The Guardian approached all three companies for comment on the latest document.

"This points out once again the need for greater transparency," a Google spokesman said.

He referred to a letter the company and other Silicon Valley giants sent to the Senate judiciary committee on Thursday. "The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed in recent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it more difficult to identify appropriate policy prescriptions," the letter said.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: "We are deeply disturbed by these allegations, and if true they represent a significant breach of trust by the US and UK governments. It is clear that there need to be serious reforms to better protect customer privacy."

Yahoo had not responded by the time of publication.

The companies are also fighting through the courts to be allowed to release more detailed figures for the number of data requests they handle from US intelligence agencies. Along with AOL, Apple and Facebook, they wrote to the Senate judiciary committee this week calling for greater transparency and "substantial" reform of the NSA.

Google, the first to publish a transparency report, has reported US authorities' requests for user data increased by 85% between 2010 and 2012 (from 8,888 in 2010 to 16,407 in 2012). But the vast majority of those are requests from local law enforcement looking for information about potential drug traffickers, fraudsters and other domestic criminal activity.

Legally compelled NSA request relating to foreign terrorist targets, which none of the firms are allowed to disclose, are thought to represent a tiny fraction of the overall figure.

While the internet companies are listed by name in the NSA document, the telecoms companies are hidden behind covernames.

The names of these "corporate partners" are so sensitive that they are classified as "ECI" – Exceptionally Controlled Information – a higher classification level than the Snowden documents cover. Artifice, Lithium and Serenade are listed in other documents as covernames for SSO corporate partners, while Steelknight is described as an NSA partner facility.

In a statement defending its surveillance programs, the NSA said: "What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of foreign intelligence value, irrespective of the provider that carries them. US service provider communications make use of the same information superhighways as a variety of other commercial service providers.

"NSA must understand and take that into account in order to eliminate information that is not related to foreign intelligence.

"NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate."

UPDATE: Microsoft issued a further statement after publication of the Guardian's story. A spokesperson said: "Microsoft only discloses customer data when served with valid legal orders and in June we published a complete view of the volume of orders we received from the US government.

"But it is clear that much more transparency is needed to help the companies and their customers understand these issues."

Ewen MacAskill
Dominic Rushe

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says US 'treats dissent as defection'

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:18 PM PDT

Former analyst writes letter to German government over response to his 'act of political expression'

Tom McCarthy

Germany allows babies to be registered as 'undetermined sex'

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:11 PM PDT

German parliament first in Europe to approve move easing pressure on parents to commit to surgery immediately after birth

A German law that allows parents to register their newborn babies as neither male nor female if they are born with traits of both sexes came into force on Friday. The German parliament approved the law in January, making it the first country in Europe to join a small group of nations that recognise a third or "undetermined" sex when registering births.

The change is seen as the country's first legal acknowledgment that it is possible for a human to be neither male nor female – which could have far-reaching consequences in many legal areas.

The German Ethics Council, an advisory group, had urged the change to take the pressure off parents to make a hasty decision and possibly commit to surgery immediately after birth, the DPA news agency reported. The council had argued, among other things, that many people born with both sex characteristics who were operated on as children say they wouldn't have consented to the surgery.

Parents had previously been required by law to register their children's name and gender within one week.


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Letters: A feisty portrait of Jane Austen

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:00 PM PDT

I see Jane Austin's sister Cassandra's drawing of her as a feisty, determined, thoughtful and observant portrait (Comment, 1 November); her mouth expressing a steely intolerance of bullshit; in her eyes a certain exasperation with the world. It's characterful, a real person, completely without artifice or pretension. A brave and stalwart person, who, it is easy to imagine, could have patiently engaged herself in writing those books. Tanya Gold falls into the trap she complains of, describing Cassandra's portrayal of Jane as "a wonky cross patch, staring with mild malevolence out of the past". Look closer, Tanya. You are perpetuating the confusion over what is and isn't an acceptable image of women, thus contributing to the reason why we are going to have on our £10 notes, via the airbrushed watercolour of Jane, a mindless, doe-eyed, dim-witted, fearful girl who could never in a million years have had the depth of thought and feeling, the sparkling integrity, to write those books.
Judy Marsh
Nottingham

• Tanya Gold bemoans the prettification of Jane Austen on the English tenner as further evidence of the malign influence of deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes. But she should take note of a more enlightened approach north of the border. For years the back of Clydesdale Bank's £10 note has been graced by a less than flattering portrait of the 19th-century Scottish missionary, Mary Slessor. She's the only non-royal female to appear on a banknote, I gather. And a female recognised for her achievements – not her looks. I'll send one down Tanya. But be warned, due to another form of discrimination, you may have some trouble using it in London.
Colin Montgomery
Edinburgh


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Country diary: Broom, Bedfordshire: The grebe juvenile still relies on its parent for a catch

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:00 PM PDT

Broom, Bedfordshire: The adult dives and the young bird sticks its head under the surface, as if looking for its submerged father or mother

Behind a barbed wire fence was a bare-sided bathtub of a flooded gravel pit with nothing much on show. A few round-backed coots dozed close to the shore, a smattering of blobs sat farther out on the water. The first few drops in the autumn air hinted at showers on the way – it should have been time to move on. A nagging voice came from somewhere on the lake – a tirade of high piping calls, a begging salvo that belonged to spring or summer. I lifted my binoculars and scrutinised each blob in turn, ticking off mallards, tufted ducks and pochards. I had spotted two great crested grebes ahead, angular birds swimming close together.

Now one grebe was in my sights, still wearing its tangerine frill of breeding plumes. I shifted left and saw that though it was fully grown in shape and size, the second bird was not its mate, but its offspring, the black and white striped livery of its downy youth breaking up with approaching adulthood.

The juvenile opened its beak, lowered its head and neck towards the water and surged towards its parent, cheeping plaintively. The adult dived and the young bird stuck its head under the surface, as if looking for its submerged father or mother. The performance was repeated four times and each time the adult popped back up with an empty beak. The youngster seemed to grow more frantic, exaggerating its begging charges by throwing its head from side to side. When the parent sank for its fifth dive, the juvenile chased after a second adult grebe, which rebuffed it with a throw of its head over its back. Grebe chicks are divided between the parents at just a few weeks old: wheedling had no effect.

The diving parent rose again, this time with a broad fish dangling by its tail. It dropped its catch in the water in front of its offspring and the youngster lunged forward to snatch and gulp it down. The two birds now swam together, parent and child. Winter will surely break this relationship of dependency.

Derek Niemann

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Letters: Reed and sexuality

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:59 PM PDT

Your obituary of Lou Reed (29 October) refers to Lou Reed's sexuality, character and environment in the diction of a homophobic 1950s judge poised to pass sentence: "aberrant sexual behaviour", "sexually ambiguous underworld", "transgressive sex", "electroconvulsive therapy intended to cure him of … homosexual instincts", "lived openly for several years with a transvestite". While sheltering behind outdated cliches and failing to consider what impact it might have had on Reed's adolescent character to be given electroconvulsive therapy to "cure" him of homosexuality – or rather bisexuality – it betrays no awareness of how far this extraordinary singer-musician-poet's creativity was surely shaped and spurred by his sexual nature and his affinity, when adult, with the sexually unconventional and stigmatised to whom the obituary merely alludes
Nicholas de Jongh
London


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Two Golden Dawn members killed

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:49 PM PDT

Third member of far-right Greek party severely injured in what police call 'terrorist attack'

Crisis-plagued Greece was thrown into further turmoil on Friday after two members of the far-right Golden Dawn party were shot dead in what police called a "terrorist attack" outside one of the organisation's offices in Athens.

Two men, described as a 20 and 23-year-old, died instantly in the drive-by shooting, according to a statement released by the extremist group.

"Two helmeted terrorists on a motorbike stopped in front of Golden Dawn's offices in [the northern Athens suburb of] Neo Iraklio while the office was open and a lot of people were [gathered around] its entrance," said the party.

"The co-rider got off [the bike] and in cold blood executed two young men at a distance of about half a metre. Before leaving the terrorists fired again … they literally emptied their weapons [of bullets] on top of them."

A third Golden Dawn member, identified as a 29-year-old father of one, was fighting for his life in an Athens hospital after being severely injured in the hail of gunfire.

"His situation is very critical," the country's health minister Adonis Georgiadis told Skai TV.

Police said the attack, conducted with an MB5 machine gun, bore all the hallmarks of a well-organised terrorist operation although government officials insisted they were not ruling out any scenario.

Greece's public order minister Nikos Dendias issued a carefully-worded statement shortly after 8.30pm local time, approximately one hour after the attack. "I express my sorrow at the death of two young men," he said. "The law will prevail. The country will not be allowed to become a battle field for the settling of scores."

The attack comes almost two months after a leftwing hip-hop artist, Pavlos Fyssas, was fatally stabbed by a self-confessed member of Golden Dawn in a working class area of Athens. The murder set in motion a crackdown on the neo-Nazi party that has since seen its leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, and several of his leading cadres imprisoned on charges of using the virulently anti-immigrant organisation to operate a

a criminal gang that sowed wanton terror on the streets of Greece.

In an explosive political atmosphere already poisoned by the despair wrought by cuts demanded in return for rescue funds to prop up the country's debt-stricken economy, the crackdown has heightened tensions.

"Some are preparing to lead this country to civil war," said Panos Kammenos, leader of the rightwing Independent Greeks party, reacting to the killings. "Clearly there are those who want to destabilise this country politically," he added suggesting that "foreign centres" were among the dark forces working against Greece.

The cold-blooded murders were quick to send a chill through Athens' entire political establishment. Insiders said it had sent tremors through the fragile coalition government with many describing the mood in Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' office as being "numb" with shock.

"The murderers, whoever they are, will be treated mercilessly," said Simos Kedigoglou, a government spokesman, emerging from a crisis meeting called by Samaras.

Across the board there were fears of the backlash the murders could unleash.

"It's a very dangerous development that could lead to a vicious cycle of blood being shed in a country that is already being torn apart," said Andreas Papadopoulos, spokesman of the small Democratic Left party, which withdrew from the tripartite government in disgust over its economic policies in the summer.

Analysts worried on Friday that Golden Dawn, which has accused the political establishment of waging a war to destroy it, will use the tragedy to once again boost its ratings in the polls. "My fear is that Golden Dawn will exploit this to make the point that it too is being persecuted, that it's own members are being cold-bloodedly murdered," said the political commentator Dimitris Tsiodras.

Catapulted into parliament for the first time in June 2012, the neo-fascist party remains the country's third biggest political force, although its support has plummeted since the 18 September murder of Fyssas. Last week, the Greek parliament voted to cut off funding for the party as the campaign intensified to marginalise it.

Helena Smith

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

LAX shooting: passengers take shelter after gunman opens fire – in pictures

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:49 PM PDT

Gunman opened fire inside Los Angeles international airport on Friday, killing a security agent and causing flights to be grounded

Ramy Ashour goes it alone as world No1 seeking 50th victory running

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:28 PM PDT

The Egyptian with no entourage faces Nick Matthew, the last man to beat him, in the semi-finals of the world squash championships in Manchester

Ramy Ashour, the world's best squash player, does not have a coach. He does not have a physiotherapist, full-time manager, fitness coach or psychologist either. In fact he travels alone. But the Egyptian tops the world rankings with the highest points average in the history of the professional tour and has not lost a meaningful match since May 2012.

On Saturday in Manchester he faces England's Nick Matthew in the semi-finals of the world championships and is beginning to feel he needs some help.

"I haven't been enjoying my squash for the last few days and [the quarter-final] was the first day I've been enjoying my squash since the beginning of the tournament – so I'm happy. I am [training] myself. I might not be doing it right but obviously I'm doing something right to get to this level but I think I might need [a fitness coach] for a little more polishing."

The championships are taking place in a magnificent all-glass show court in Manchester Central, near Oxford Road Station. The crowd sit all the way round the court and this, plus the low-level lighting, is suggestive of a boxing bout, which is exactly the point. A showman like Ashour is perfectly suited to such an environment. His elegance in shot-making, his movement, his enormous personal charisma, all make him a mesmerising poster boy for a sport desperately in need of one.

Squash is the only racket sport where the players share playing space and that proximity demands supreme mental toughness. "Sometimes it gets pretty dark inside our heads," says Ashour, 26. "And that's the constant fight between you and your second enemy – which is you as well."

If the "demons", as Ashour terms his internal battles, are with him now, his 49-game unbeaten run on tour suggests they are under control. The last time the Egyptian lost was in the British Open final in May 2012, where he was beaten by Yorkshire's Matthew, the man he faces on Saturday.

Matthew, the world No4, is optimistic and even sees an advantage in facing an opponent on a 17-month winning streak. "Everyone just expects him to win every time he goes out on court. We're all out to knock him off his perch. It's our job to sort of talk him up as such a favourite that he gets [this] in his own head and we can then capitalise."

Ashour acknowledges the truth in this: "The more you get to the top the more things are harder for you sometimes to wake up and to push yourself. But for me to go on court and to win: that's my ultimate pleasure. I just feel I need nothing else. Every time you push yourself you break something in your head mentally. I'm not happy doing it, I'm doing it for the aim of satisfaction and for the aim of feeling good about myself. You just do it because it's very meaningful putting yourself through things you think you're never going to do."

He has travelled alone for the past 10 years. His mother, who manages him, first allowed him to do so when he turned 16. Since Ashour's parents worked for EgyptAir, he finds the disjointed life on tour normal. "Even in the tournaments I just stay on my own because I know I'm a bit silly, I have my regimes and I don't want to bother anyone with my regimes so I just take a single room, basically."

It helps that the PSA Tour is thronged with Ashour's compatriots. There are five Egyptians in the world top 10 alone and they regularly support each other at games. Egypt is a hotspot for squash, with Hosni Mubarak's enthusiasm for the game often cited as the reason. The deposed former president provided the sport with one of its iconic images: a court close by the Pyramids.

Now that Egypt is better known for violent demonstrations and unrest, Ashour is keen to show another side. While trying to avoid politics, he just longs for stability. "It was a bit silly in the beginning for us but everyone realised that the military implemented this curfew for a good reason and for the benefit of us," he said. "So everyone has to bear with them until they get a grip on things."


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Foxhunting season expected to attract hundreds of first-timers

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:10 PM PDT

Facebook used to recruit novices, with rural alliance estimating number of hunters up a quarter since ban on hunting with dogs

Hundreds of foxhunting novices are expected to saddle up today for the first "Tally ho" of the new hunting season – but in a departure from the traditional "blooding" on the first day's hunting, many of them have been drawn into the pack by the lure of social media.

Facebook has become the huntsman's friend when it comes to recruitment, with many hunts reporting a doubling of interest from first-time hunters compared with last year, after using new media to publicise their activities.

Scores of British hunts have been taking to Facebook to advertise newcomer days this week, culminating at the traditional start of the season today. Most of more than 20 groups contacted by the Guardian reported dozens of new recruits, with children as young as four and six riding to hounds for the first time.

"Facebook has made a huge difference," said Mark Ferguson, of the Woodland Pytchley Hunt, in Northamptonshire. "It is so much easier, we can get to more and more people."

A spokeswoman for the Surrey Union Hunt said more than 100 people had turned up for the organisation's first meet, of whom about three-quarters were newcomers: "It's been unbelievably successful. We had notices locally, but mostly it was through social media." Rachael Morley, of the Meynell and South Staffordshire Hunt, said more than 20 newcomers had turned out at their pre-meet, and Sue Simmons of the Holcombe Harriers in Lancashire reported more than 60 people, up from around 20.

The Countryside Alliance confirmed the resurgence in the number of hunters, estimating that at least 45,000 people are likely to take to the lanes and fields of England this year to pursue "drags" or "trails" – usually made by dipping rags in fox urine, sometimes imported from the US, and dragging them along on long poles. That number is up by about a quarter since before the hunting ban on hunting with dogs.

Young recruits have been particularly in evidence, huntsmen report, though some new hunters have been as old as 80. At the Woodland Pytchley Hunt, an experienced nanny will be on hand to accompany small children today, and at the Surrey Union a prize of £20 was offered for the "best turned out under 16 year old". Many hunts are offering novices an easier route around their drag or trail-hunting course, in order to avoid hard jumps, and most relax their rules on "hunting pink" to allow newcomers to ride in any gear that is "comfortable, warm, clean and tidy". The resurgence of interest in hunting comes as some Tories have called for a softening of the ban on hunting with hounds, buoyed by supportive words from David Cameron. A full repeal is still possible, but an alternative is that the ban could be weakened by allowing more than two hounds – the current maximum – to flush out foxes, either to kill them or for them to be shot.

Between 2005 and 2011, a total of 332 individuals were prosecuted under the Hunting Act. Of these, 239 were found guilty.

Hunters want a full repeal, allowing them to freely hunt foxes and other wildlife with dogs again. Tim Bonner, director of campaigns at the Countryside Alliance, said: "We are now going into the ninth hunting season under the Hunting Act – an act that is not working for hunts, antis, the courts or the wildlife it claims to safeguard. The government has made some positive noises about a common sense amendment to the act [that], while a small amendment, would send a significant message to the countryside."

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "The coalition government pledged to put forward a motion to allow a free vote on the Hunting Act. This will take place at an appropriate time and if parliament were to vote in favour of repeal, the government would introduce a repeal bill in the house of parliament in due course."

Anti-hunting campaigners warned that some hunts were likely to use illegal means to try to get round the law. Joe Duckworth, chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, said: "Hunters found to be flouting the law need to watch out. Our team of investigators and the Hunting Act are here to stay."

The expansion of the hunting scene has included all social classes, according to huntsmen. One said: "It has become more socially acceptable – people who before might not have wanted to say to their peers in the pub that they hunted are now able to [because the pursuit no longer involves killing an animal]."

Most of the people helping to organise the hunts through social media are volunteers, and their own enthusiasm is evident. One woman was still in hospital, at a spinal injury unit, having fallen from her horse a few weeks ago but said: "I have to thank the hunt masters, who saved my life. But I'm delighted to see so many new people come along. I hope I will be able to hunt again before the end of the season."

Some remnants of old attitudes seem to remain, however. One huntsman who boasted of the openness and social inclusion of his hunt said the ban was "all the result of some trouble with the great unwashed".

Fiona Harvey

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

White House rejects criticism of Obama over NSA surveillance

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:10 PM PDT

Veteran diplomats question NSA director's assertion that ambassadors request monitoring of foreign leaders

The White House sought on Friday to distance itself from the National Security Agency's monitoring of foreign leaders, rejecting criticism that President Barack Obama was understating his knowledge of the agency's activities.

In a further sign of the growing blame game within Washington over the affair, spokesman Jay Carney said Obama paid close attention to terrorism intercepts but had no need to personally bug the phones of allies.

"The president is a very deliberate consumer of the intelligence gathered for him on national security matters," said Carney. "But when the president wants to find out what the heads of state of friendly nations think, he calls them."

The White House comments followed an admission on Thursday from secretary of state John Kerry that some surveillance practices were carried out "on auto-pilot" and had not been known to the president. That was followed on Thursday night by the NSA director, Keith Alexander, blaming Kerry's own department for driving its spying on friendly world leaders.

"The intelligence agencies don't come up with the requirements. The policymakers come up with the requirements," Alexander said. "One of those groups would have been, let me think, hold on, oh: ambassadors."

Alexander said the NSA collected information when it was asked by policy officials to discover the "leadership intentions" of foreign countries. "If you want to know leadership intentions, these are the issues," he said.

On Friday, veteran US diplomats questioned that assertion.

Thomas Pickering, who served as ambassador to Russia, India, Israel, Jordan and the United Nations, said he found it puzzling that intelligence agencies would interpret requests for information as a green light to bug the phones of friendly government leaders.

"To point the finger at ambassadors as being responsible for generating these requests seems, in my experience, to be far fetched," Pickering told the Guardian.

"In my time, intelligence requirements were never based on collection methods, they were based on intelligence interests. That an ambassador may have been interested in the views of a foreign leader is not a reason to say they had any responsibility for how that information was gathered."

Pickering, who recently led a White House review of the 2012 assassination of the US ambassador to Libya, said he had no direct knowledge but would be surprised to find the NSA was taking direction from ambassadors on such matters.

"It would be self-evident that embassies would be interested in knowing, but it is a huge jump to imagine that an ambassador could somehow be so persuasive as to persuade the intelligence community," he said.

Alexander's explanation also drew scorn from James Carew Rosapepe, who served as an ambassador under the Clinton administration, who said "we generally don't do that in democratic societies" during an event at the the Baltimore Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday.

Pressed over the apparent "inconsistency" between comments by Alexander and Kerry, Jen Psaki, the state department's chief spokeswoman, said on Friday: "I don't actually think there was an inconsistency … I would just refute the notion of the question."

She added that the reviews into surveillance programs announced by the White House included all branches of government, and that Kerry's remarks applied not just to the state department.

"When the secretary made his comments yesterday, he said 'we'," she said. "He is talking about a collective 'we', as in the entire government is looking at these programs."

Dan Roberts
Paul Lewis

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Is there a doctor on the plane?

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:00 PM PDT

At any given moment, more than half a million people are in the air. What happens when one of them gets seriously ill – or even dies – mid-flight?

It was less than an hour into Ryanair flight FR7033 when John Duffy noticed the man. Duffy, a 37-year-old IT worker, was flying home to Dublin from Faro in January this year when he got up to go to the toilet. As he walked down the aisle, he saw that a passenger a few rows in front looked unwell. "He had his hands up around his neck. I was standing in the aisle waiting and had a bird's-eye view of what happened: it was as if someone pulled the plug. He just collapsed and his head hit the back of the seat. The air hostess standing next to me picked up the phone and said, 'We've got a situation.' "

Lena Pettersson was going on holiday to Tanzania last year, a 10-hour Kenya Airways flight from her native Sweden. She and her travelling companion were sitting at the back of the plane. On the far side of the same row, they noticed a man who, even before takeoff, was clearly in a bad way. "He was sweating and the crew were all around him," Pettersson says. "They were coming and going with water, and he was not looking well at all. We took off and five minutes after that he became worse, had cramps and a really big problem. They asked if there was a doctor on the plane, and six came forward."

Shortly after that, the man collapsed. Cabin crew laid him in the aisle and the doctors continued to work on him for an hour. "We were flying over Europe," Pettersson says. "They could have come down anywhere. But they just went on flying. And then suddenly one of the doctors made the sign of the cross and started to pray. And I said, 'Oh my God, this is not possible. It's not possible.' "

The number of people travelling by air is rising. According to the International Air Transport Association, the volume of passengers taking commercial flights each year will reach 3.3 billion worldwide by 2014, up 30% on five years ago. Of those, roughly 800 million will fly in Europe, a quarter of them in the UK. The Federal Aviation Administration believes that by 2034, more than a billion passengers will fly per year in the US alone.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that, every other week in the US, there is a news story about someone dying in the air of natural causes. (For it to make international news, there has to be some extra element, such as the pilot dying, or a fellow passenger suing the airline for compensation.) Events and behaviours considered unremarkable on the ground have extra weight in-flight, tapping into our deep, atavistic insecurities about flying and exacerbated by a simple fact: as Patrick Smith, a commercial airline pilot and author of Cockpit Confidential, puts it, "People just get weird around planes."

Bangor airport serves an area in Maine with a population of 35,000. It has no scheduled international flights and mainly caters to short domestic runs around the American north-east. Nonetheless, it has an international terminal with four gates, a $700,000 towing vehicle capable of moving the Airbus A380 superjet – the world's largest passenger plane – and immigration officials permanently on stand-by. After flights leave the coast of Ireland, it is the first port of call on the transatlantic route; in the past 10 years, it has received more than 600 diverted flights, usually because of fuel emergencies. (In strong headwinds, planes burn more fuel and may hit the coast of America with the needle on empty.) It is also a landing option for flight crews dealing with medical emergencies over the Atlantic. As Eugene Foren, the chief dispatcher at the airport, told the Wall Street Journal last year, "This job is 98% boredom and 2% sheer terror."

"You have to think of the flying population as a virtual city. At any given moment, there are around 600,000 people flying. If you keep that city flying for 12 hours, some people will die."

A few months ago, Tobias Morter was doing the drinks service on a transatlantic flight out of London. At 19, he is the youngest member of staff on a British carrier that transports millions of passengers around the world each year. A passenger got up from his seat and Morter leaned back to let him pass. "As I was moving, he fell on the floor. He was having a fit. It was a good job it happened out there and not in the loo." A call was put out for a doctor on board. ("You have to say 'doctor of medicine'," Morter says, "or else you get all sorts of people coming up.") As flight crew performed chest compressions and someone ran for the defibrillator, a decision was made to divert to Bangor. At the same time, from the flight deck, a call was put in to the emergency services – in this case MedAire, a company that provides 120 airlines with on-the-ground medical support.

The MedAire dispatch centre is in a hospital emergency room in Phoenix, Arizona, where calls from flight decks around the world are put through to serving doctors. It is a phenomenally difficult job: to talk a flight attendant trained in first aid through a medical emergency and, based on the information, advise the pilot whether or not to divert. As Heidi MacFarlane, vice-president of the company's strategic development, says, "It's like stepping into any other treatment room in the ER, except blindfold and with their hands tied."

The whole business of "Is there a doctor on board?" is one about which MedAire and companies like it are deeply ambivalent. Dr Paulo Alves, a cardiologist and former airline medical director who is now vice-president of aviation health for MedAire, would rather talk directly to cabin crew than to the unknown quantity of a volunteer. "Don't get me wrong – we're extremely grateful to volunteer medical people," he says. "But a medical person on the flight is primarily another passenger. We don't know anything about his or her background training, we don't what condition they're in. Were they drinking? Did someone just wake them up? How fit they are to provide a sound medical judgment isn't known. MedAire alleviates the pressure on that volunteer."

It also takes the pressure off cabin crew who, given the cost and inconvenience, may be reluctant to recommend that the plane land. (Most airlines will move heaven and earth to avoid a diversion.) Only about 2% of MedAire's emergency calls result in diversions and a fraction of that number in the death of a passenger. "You have to think of the flying population as a virtual city," Alves says. "So at any given moment, there are around 600,000 people flying. If you keep that city flying for 12 hours, some people will die."

"The biggest problem when a passenger dies is where to put them. On a full flight, there isn't space. There were a couple of times when people were placed in a lavatory, rigor mortis set in and they couldn't get them out."

In his 20 years in the business, Richard Havers had mercifully few onboard medical emergencies and just one in-flight passenger death – on a Continental Airlines flight from Gatwick to Houston, diverting to Bangor, by which time the passenger was already dead. Havers, the author of Airline Confidential, was Continental's vice-president for Europe and well versed in the kinds of hair-raising stories that circulate around the industry. "The biggest problem," he says, "and this is slightly disturbing, is that when a passenger dies, it's a question of where to put them on the aircraft. They have to find a quiet place, but on a full flight, there isn't space. That creates a problem. And there were a couple of times when people were placed in a lavatory, rigor mortis set in and they couldn't get them out."

"Unfortunately, most flights are full," says Heather Poole, a flight attendant for a major US carrier and author of Cruising Attitude, an account of her experiences in the air. "So it's not always possible to move an incapacitated passenger to an empty row of seats. Singapore Airlines is the most prepared. Some of their planes feature a 'corpse cupboard', a compartment for storing a dead body if the situation arises."

Kenya Airways does not have this provision, as Pettersson discovered first-hand on her flight to Dar es Salaam. After cabin crew asked passengers sitting in the middle of her row to move, they put a blanket over the dead man's head and laid his body across three seats.

"But he was quite a tall man," Pettersson says, "so his feet were sticking out into the aisle, pretty close to me. I asked if maybe I could move. And they said, no, there were no other seats." She travelled like this for nine hours. "I felt very, very sorry for this man." But she also felt uncomfortable sitting next to a corpse, and was ultimately given a refund. (Kenya Airways never revealed the man's identity or cause of death, but when Pettersson spoke to one of the doctors who had tried to save him, "she thought he was probably a drug addict or dealer and had swallowed something in a plastic bag that had broken inside his stomach. That was her theory.")

Like train drivers traumatised when someone throws themselves on to the tracks, cabin crew can be damaged by these kinds of onboard emergencies. At Morter's airline, staff are offered four or five counselling sessions, although he says there's a general lack of empathy from management. This is best illustrated by the number of people turning up on the manifest with a "conditions of carriage" note beside their name. Effectively an airline-issued asbo, this should ban them from flying for non-medical reasons – but there they are, in the air again.

When a passenger falls ill, Morter says, the biggest problem is usually their family. "If the family is hysterical, they're the ones you need to control more than anyone else." After mechanical or security problems, the biggest challenge is managing potential passenger panic. Someone dying on board shouldn't rattle passengers elsewhere on the plane; it's not contagious. But one feels more vulnerable in-flight, strapped in and with nowhere to go.

"We took off out of New York and had to come back because a passenger was sick, and we ended up having to jettison I don't know how many thousands of pounds of fuel, because we couldn't land overweight.

Patrick Smith, who has been flying commercial passenger planes for 20 years, takes a dim view of some passenger psychology. "Some people are legitimately ill and it's a serious concern," he says, "but sometimes I think passengers who are ill don't always realise what a big deal it is to divert a plane, especially on an international flight. It's not like a bus, where you can just pull over and drop the person off. It can wind up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Is it alarming for a pilot, to have to divert?

"Yeah, it's a lot of work. The worst-case scenario is you're over the polar region somewhere, or in the middle of the ocean, and have to divert to one of your pre-planned diversion airports. The logistics are challenging."

All long-haul flights have divert airports written into the flight plan, but depending on how far into the flight the emergency happens, pilots can have a tough time landing. "Sometimes a divert entails jettisoning fuel, which is extremely expensive and time-consuming," Smith says. "I had a case about six months ago where we took off out of New York and had to come back because a passenger was sick, and we ended up having to jettison I don't know how many thousands of pounds of fuel, because we couldn't land overweight. That took the better part of an hour. Then that became a maintenance issue and the plane had to undergo an inspection before it could fly again. All because one person decided he wanted to get off."

Of course, without knowing it, most of us have flown on planes with dead bodies, which are being repatriated, in the hold. (Pilots, Smith says, are generally informed only if it's a VIP.) Passengers who die in-flight, meanwhile, are not technically dead until pronounced so by a doctor or coroner: "So no one ever actually dies on an aircraft," says Havers, who avoided the topic in Airline Confidential; it was intended for in-flight reading and he didn't want to unnerve his readers. Soothing nervous flyers is something airlines have approached in varying ways over the years. When Havers started out in the airline industry in 1969, on a defunct carrier called British United Airways, cabin crew in the UK were exclusively hired from debutante circles. Havers laughs. "And when airlines first started – this may be apocryphal, but I don't think it is – most of the people they employed as stewards were actually nurses."

Even today, with low-cost carriers undermining the mystique of air travel, there is still something vaguely magical about flight crew, these people to whom one looks for reassurance in the event of scary turbulence. Post-9/11, they are trained to be cautious even in the face of a medical emergency. "You want to be there for that passenger, but you never know if it's a decoy," Morter says. "There might be a passenger pretending to have a fit and someone trying to get into the flight deck at the same time."

Or, Poole says, it may be the case that the passenger has merely taken a sleeping pill and passed out. ("I'll never forget that lady. We checked for breathing. Checked for a pulse. Cleared a row of passengers and were just about to get her body flat on the ground when she came to. Turned out she'd taken a sleeping pill. That's why we prefer passengers to take them after we've pushed away from the gate and we're up in the air, in case there's a delay and we have to disembark. Flight attendants can do a lot of things, but there's no way we're going to be able to drag half a plane full of disoriented wet noodles by the ankles off the plane.")

On long-haul flights, one of the most common emergency calls relates to what looks like gastroenteritis: it could be a bug, food poisoning, or the prelude to a heart attack

For the doctors at MedAire, the most common emergencies are often the trickiest. Fainting is particularly difficult to deal with remotely, MacFarlane says, "because it looks as if the person is dying. As soon as someone loses consciousness, it goes to a different level in everyone's mind. It looks really bad. Same thing with seizures. It presents very poorly."

On long-haul flights, one of the most common emergency calls relates to what looks like gastroenteritis. This, too, is difficult to diagnose from the ground: it could be a bug, food poisoning, or the prelude to a heart attack. The usual rules of medical practice are inverted: on the ground, treat the cause, not the symptom; in-flight, treat the symptom just to buy enough time to get the sufferer safely to the ground.

Once the aircraft landed in Bangor, the man who fell ill on Morter's flight recovered. (One of the services offered by MedAire is dealing with the bureaucratic headache on the ground prior to a diverted plane landing. "You come with an ill person, and they need to be cleared by drug enforcement, or the health authorities," Alves says. Or immigration, all of which can impede a passenger's progress to hospital.)

Last January, as the Ryanair plane flew over the south coast of Britain, John Duffy helped the crew lift and carry the sick man up the aisle to the front, where he was laid on the floor. Passengers were told the plane would be diverting to Bristol. A short while later, they were told that, actually, it was going on to Dublin as planned. "It was clear that he was dead," Duffy says. "His face was completely purple. And the doctors had tried CPR. He was on the floor, still at the front of the plane. The doctor who was two rows in front of me said, 'He'll be tended to when he gets into Dublin.' He obviously didn't want passengers to hear there was a dead body on board."

After landing in Dublin, passengers were asked to exit through the rear of the aircraft. The man's wife, Duffy says, was in a state of shock, but there were no hysterics. While they were still trying to save her husband's life, the doctor had come over and whispered something inaudible in her ear, to which Duffy had heard her reply, with dreadful quietude and in echo of the flight attendant's general consolation: "These things happen."

Emma Brockes

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Olympic Air to become subsidiary of Aegean Airlines in €72m deal

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 12:50 PM PDT

European commission concludes merger was only way of preventing the carrier's collapse and is expected to save millions

It was the airline that put lavish into luxury: its crews wore Pierre Cardin, its cutlery was gold-plated, its glasses crystal in economy and first class. As the carrier for cosmopolitan jetters, Olympic Air not only reflected the taste of its founder, Aristotle Onassis, but in many ways lived up to his reputation as the Golden Greek.

When its first Boeing 707 jets arrived in Athens, Onassis ensured they were decked out with pianos for the exclusive purpose of entertaining those travelling up front.

In leaner times, the airline made less salubrious headlines. Sold by Onassis to the Greek state in 1975, it soon became the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the country's public sector: corrupt, unwieldy, inefficient and a hotbed of political favouritism and party politics.

By the 1990s after years of mismanagement under successive socialist governments – in which staff perks included free flights on the Athens to Sydney route – Olympic made history again, only this time as one of the biggest loss-making companies in the aviation industry.

On the eve of its sale to the Athens-based Marfin Investment Group in 2009 it was costing the Greek taxpayer about €1,500 a day.

This week, after more than half a century commanding the Greek skies, the airline changed hands again. Unable to turn profit in a climate of forbidding recession – Greece's economy contracted for a sixth straight year in 2013 – the carrier has been taken over by Aegean Airlines.

Under the €72m (£62m) deal, Olympic will become a subsidiary of Aegean, Greece's largest airline, after the European commission concluded the merger was the only way of preventing the carrier's collapse.

A previous bid by Aegean to acquire its domestic rival in 2011 was rejected on the grounds it would hand the firm a near monopoly of the Greek market and defy the rules of fair competition. But the eurozone crisis changed thinking in Brussels and earlier this month the EU competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said: "It is clear that, due to the ongoing Greek crisis and Olympic's own very difficult financial situation, Olympic would be forced to leave the market soon. We approved the merger because it has no additional negative effect on competition."

Greek air travel has been affected by the country's debt crisis with domestic demand down 28% last year compared with 2009, according to Aegean's figures.

In the first half of 2013, as the effects of biting spending cuts became apparent and poverty and unemployment reached record levels, demand fell by a further 6.3%.

By contrast, demand on Aegean's 32 routes abroad has increased by 85% in the past four years – with most of its 8 million passengers flying to regional airports around Greece.

Announcing the deal, Aegean's vice-president, Eftichios Vassilakis, said the merger would combine the history of Olympic and the business savvy of a carrier that with the exception of 2010 has been voted Europe's best regional airline company for the past four years.

The merger, which will see the two airlines combining their administrative services and call centres, is expected to save the company up to €35m annually.

"Our goal is for Aegean and Olympic Air to lead in the changes in the tourism market in the country and in the region," he said, adding the new airline would seek to improve fares and connections to far-flung islands and other remote areas badly hit by the crisis.

More than 17 million tourists visited Greece this year – a vital lifeline for a nation whose economy is largely dependent on the industry. Combined, Aegean and Olympic Air will service more than 250 routes of which 205 will be to and from destinations overseas.

"At this time Greece needs a strong air carrier," said Vassilakis, insisting that the company would add 15 new routes to its portfolio next year. "It needs a strong carrier … in order to be able to respond to domestic demands but even more to demands overseas [given that] tourism is the lung of the country."

Helena Smith

theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Albania: hundreds fall ill after harvesting cannabis

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 12:31 PM PDT

Hospital in the southern city of Gjirokastër says 700 people sought treatment for effects of handling cannabis since June

Doctors in Albania say hundreds of people have fallen ill from harvesting cannabis in a lawless region that for years has been out of bounds to police, local media reported on Friday.

The hospital in the southern city of Gjirokastër said 700 people had sought treatment since June for the effects of planting, harvesting, pressing and packing the cannabis in the village of Lazarat.

"In the last two months about seven to eight people arrive in the emergency ward each day and many more have come earlier with disorders from hashish," Hysni Lluka, a Gjirokastër doctor, told Top Channel television.

Some 2,000 people, including poor Roma who have set up a camp near Lazarat, have been working for months in the cannabis fields, where producers pay €8 per 10 kilos of processed drug.

The illegal practice has flourished in Lazarat over two decades of turbulent transition in Albania since the end of hardline communist rule. Lazarat has become a byword for lawlessness in Albania, with cannabis growers brazen enough to shoot at police officers who venture near their fields. Aerial pictures suggest some 60 hectares have been cultivated in Lazarat, with 300,000 cannabis plants, capable of yielding 500 tonnes or half the total cannabis production in Albania.

Lluka said women and teenagers, who account for some 40% of those working in Lazarat, had sought help for bouts of vomiting, stomach pain, irregular heartbeats and high blood pressure. Last week one patient came in a critical state. Lazarat is a stronghold of the Democratic party, which was in power for eight years before losing a June election to the Socialist party. The Democrats promised to tackle Albania's cannabis problem but police shied away from striking Lazarat.

Artan Didi, the new director of police appointed by the Socialists, has said the police will no longer "back down to Lazarat".

The US State Department's international narcotics control report for 2013 listed Albania as a transit and destination country for cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

Authorities seized more than 21 tonnes of cannabis in 2012, double the amount of the previous year, it said, although that could reflect increased production.


theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


About the author

Life is Inspiration

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

Posting Komentar

Langganan: Posting Komentar (Atom)