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

National security: our spy chiefs won't be losing any sleep over their summons by MPs | Andrew Rawnsley

Posted: 03 Nov 2013 12:00 AM PDT

Despite the hype, public quizzing is no substitute for proper democratic scrutiny of our intelligence services

A murder of crows. A congregation of alligators. A bloat of hippopotamuses. What is the collective noun for intelligence chiefs? A cache? An encryption? A shadow?

We need one because this week the three men who run Britain's intelligence agencies will appear together to answer questions from MPs and they will do so in public. The head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, the director of GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban and the director general of MI5, Andrew Parker (the knighthood will come) have a date before the Commons intelligence and security committee and we are all sort of invited.

I guess this is progress since the days when it was illegal to name a spy chief, let alone put three of them in front of a camera. I expect the word "unprecedented" will be bandied about breathlessly. We may also hear excited talk of "historic". To inject theatrical thrill into the occasion, we are told that the session will broadcast with a short time delay in case anything is said that might endanger national security or the safety of those working for the agencies, though you would have thought everyone involved would be too professional to blurt out a state secret.

The group of MPs chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind is hyping the moment. Under pressure to justify its own existence as an effective invigilator, the committee is talking this up as "a very significant event in terms of the openness and transparency of the agencies".

Parliament certainly has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to democratic scrutiny of those who spend our taxes to spy in our name. Since June, a series of scoops in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, based on the revelations about data-mining from the former sub-contractor Edward Snowden, has been disclosing how America's National Security Agency and our own eavesdroppers at GCHQ have been engaged in bulk surveillance of millions of citizens here and around the world. The targets have ranged from the very mighty – Angela Merkel, the German chancellor – to the very ordinary, which is to say the rest of us. The latest to be horrified by these activities – and the invasion of privacy must really be serious if these guys are getting agitated about it – is Google after revelations that the NSA has been slipping through digital back alleyways into its data centres. This has been most deeply embarrassing for the United States, which is taking a huge reputational hit in allied countries amid a storm of outrage in Congress. Say what you like about the governing classes of America: they have responded with a seriousness and a grasp of the implications for freedom that is in stark contrast to the response from Britain's leaders.

Over here, David Cameron rejects calls for a debate by scoffing that it is all "airy-fairy". Over there, Barack Obama acknowledges that there is cause for grave concern. Over here, William Hague says: "The innocent have nothing to fear", that most chilling of reassurances. Over there, John Kerry has conceded that the NSA was allowed to run on "autopilot" and American surveillance "has reached too far inappropriately". Over here, parliament has barely opened a sleepy eyelid. Over there, the chair of the Senate intelligence committee has called for a total review: "Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing."

Bipartisan legislation has already been introduced to Congress to try to address the fundamental issue, which is that the technological capability now available for intelligence gathering has far overtaken the capacity of slow-footed politicians and creaky laws to ensure that its use is proportionate and safeguarded against abuse. The US Freedom Act proposes to prevent the indiscriminate collection of bulk data on American citizens, force both government and companies to be more honest about what they are doing and strengthen judicial supervision. Over here, there is not a hint of a whisper of a British Freedom Act.

If Sir Malcom's committee is truly interested in beginning a new era of "openness and transparency", there are plenty of topical questions that could be posed by the MPs. They should be able to think of the best areas of inquiry themselves, since they are supposed to be much better informed about this than the rest of us, but here are a few that occur to me. The former cabinet minister Chris Huhne has told us that neither the cabinet nor the National Security Council of which he was a member was told about GCHQ's mass surveillance programme called Project Tempora, which taps fibre-optic cables carrying internet traffic. That gives them almost unconstrained access to trillions of phone records, emails, internet searches. The committee might usefully ask the head of GCHQ who it was in government who signed off on that programme and whether the minister or ministers involved understood exactly what they were sanctioning.

When they turn to the head of MI5, the committee might ask him to substantiate his very grave claim that the Snowden revelations have been a "gift" to terrorists. Most reasonable people accept that the state must have its secrets and spying is necessary in the business of protecting democracy from terrorism and foreign powers that wish us harm. But the state never does its case any good when it attempts to shoot the messenger to cover discomfiture. The Conservative MP Dominic Raab, who worked with the intelligence agencies in a previous incarnation as a Foreign Office lawyer, put it well in a parliamentary debate last week when he challenged "the shrill and unsubstantiated assertion that we have somehow lost track of terrorist plotters as a result of the revelations". Mr Raab suggests that cries of national security are being used "to muzzle disclosures that are just plain embarrassing".

The committee might also inquire whether the intelligence services are using their resources wisely. We now know that they can hoover up vast quantities of personal data. Is this actually serving a productive purpose even by their own lights? A danger with all bureaucracies, especially clandestine ones, is that they will expand their scope to do things simply because they can, without pausing to ask whether the activity is actually sensible. As the former US diplomat Peter Galbraith puts it: "In the field of intelligence, more is not necessarily better."

In the case of the United States, the uncontrolled expansion of NSA surveillance has led to the hiring of hundreds of thousands of people – including subcontractors such as Edward Snowden – with the now proved risk of its secrets being leaked. MPs might explore whether bulk surveillance is a costly, largely counterproductive and potentially highly perilous distraction from the detection and apprehension of extremists dedicated to murder and mayhem.

Do I expect these questions to be rigorously pursued when the cache of intelligence chiefs appears before the committee? I can't say I am holding my breath. The event is billed to cover "the terrorist threat, regional instability and weapons proliferation, cybersecurity and espionage". That's a lot to get through in a session scheduled to last 90 minutes. You could devote a day to each of those topics and not deal with them adequately. This will be a platform for the intelligence agencies to shiver our bones about the threats posed to us at home and abroad and to impress us with how well they are doing in countering them.

I don't doubt that there are real and present dangers. Nor do I underestimate the pressure on those responsible for keeping us safe from murderous conspiracies. But talking about threats in general terms is also a very convenient way of avoiding interrogation of the scope, proportionality and legality of the methods used. We have been warned in advance that the committee will not be asking about "details of intelligence capabilities or techniques, ongoing operations or sub judice matters". So don't expect any probing into the really important stuff.

This is the perennial conundrum with invigilating intelligence agencies in a democracy. How do you make them accountable when their activities cannot, by definition, be wholly transparent? The answer is supposed to be the "closed sessions" in which the intelligence and security committee is tasked with investigating on behalf of parliament and the rest of us those areas that are too sensitive to be discussed in public. Perhaps the MPs will seize that opportunity to thoroughly interrogate the intelligence chiefs and demand the production of all relevant documents – it now has new powers to do that. The trouble is we will be asked to take that on trust.

You may enjoy the spectacle of the trio of intelligence chiefs making their first joint outing in the public gaze, but be aware that spectacle is all that it is likely to amount to. This has all the signs of an essentially cosmetic exercise designed to give the appearance that they are accountable to scrutiny without subjecting them to the real thing.

Andrew Rawnsley

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All we ask is for transparency to inform the surveillance debate

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 11:30 PM PDT

The issue of the mass collection of data goes to the heart of democracy

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the Scottish National party the following questions: "If independence is achieved, will the Scottish government continue with the extensive surveillance of the civilian population, allowed under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act? Is it part of the SNP's programme to break free from this surveillance regime or will an independent Scotland remain a client of GCHQ?"

If I say it myself, this goes to the heart of the independence debate. A sovereign Scotland could not possibly remain integrated in the British systems of surveillance, which include the monitoring of internet searches, texts and emails, and hope to be taken seriously as a new nation state.

The answer from the SNP was fascinatingly dull. "The primary function of government is to ensure the security of its citizens and to protect them, their property and way of life against threats. An independent Scotland will have security arrangements that are proportionate, fit for purpose and reflect a full strategic assessment of Scotland's needs and the threats we may face." The SNP knows full well that a statement on this issue either risks offending those Scots who want their new nation to be free from the British surveillance state or those who believe that the bulk collection of data will protect the country from terrorists. Hence the straight bat.

The SNP is as sly about closing down the discussion on mass collection of data as the coalition government in London. Dr Andrew Neal of Edinburgh University is practically the only person north of Hadrian's Wall thinking intelligently about an independent Scotland's security and surveillance needs. He has organised a series of seminars on national security strategy, its relation to national identity and the ticklish problem of disentangling the spying and communications infrastructures. Just one MSP turned up at the first seminar.

The way this debate has been silenced at both ends of the UK is not just deeply depressing – it is extremely dangerous. For it gives the impression that we don't care about our freedom and that as long as we believe we are safe from terrorists, the government can do what the hell it likes with our information, even if that means building an invincible political power over trade unions, dissenting minorities, legitimate protesters, environmental activists, Her Majesty's opposition... you name it!

In contrast to Britain, the reaction in Germany, France, Spain, Brazil and the United States to the NSA leaks has included protest, vigorous debate and in America the admission from the secretary of state, John Kerry, that the NSA has gone too far and the policy of bulk data collection must be looked at again. Last week's disclosure about Europe-wide surveillance of phone and internet traffic, going on, presumably, without the knowledge of democratically elected assemblies, has caused further outrage. And now Brazil and Germany, angered by the NSA and GCHQ's activities, have drafted a resolution for the UN General Assembly, which declares deep concern about "human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications".

This is what democratic response looks like, though you don't see much of it here. In Britain, the government has told us not to worry our silly heads and Labour has remained eloquently silent, because all these problems stem from the casually authoritarian Blair regime, which gave GCHQ the legal powers that are now exposed. Many elements of the media, meanwhile, have suffered some form of moral and intellectual paralysis and accept without question that we should trust the state with the power to access anyone's information.

It seems extraordinary that the Conservative press, so wary of the state in practically every other area, is prepared to trust the intelligence agencies with powers granted under RIPA that are so opaque that they might as well be written in Serbo-Croat. As the Labour MP Tom Watson said of the critical part of RIPA in a Westminster Hall debate on surveillance last week: "Interpreting that section requires the unravelling of a triple-nested inversion of meanings across six cross-referenced subsections linked to a dozen other cross-linked definitions, which are all dependent on a highly ambiguous 'notwithstanding'."

The genius of the law was to mask its own potency, while the genius of the government's response to those concerned about RIPA and its threat to liberty is to dismiss them as extremists and alarmists. The Guardian, which has been lauded all over the world for publishing some of the NSA leaks, is described in the language used for a "treasonous" insurgency, and the prime minister has even murmured threats against the newspaper.

The truth is that opposition to these laws is in fact no more than a politically moderate concern for liberty and democracy. That is all. The debate does occasionally fire up, as in the Westminster Hall event last week, when there were some terrific contributions from its Lib Dem sponsor, Julian Huppert, the Labour MPs Tom Watson, John McDonnell and David Winnick, and the staunch Tory, Dominic Raab. But this was just a debate – RIPA was not being redrafted; no action will be taken to increase oversight of the intelligence agencies; and almost no one heard the arguments, because most papers and TV didn't cover it.

This week, we may expect a further push against open and frank discussion when the heads of the three intelligence agencies appear in front of the Commons oversight committee on TV. That might seem reassuring but let us hope the occasion won't be an attack on those of us who are legitimately concerned about the law and indeed the level of meaningful oversight by parliament.

Happily, these won't be the only voices heard. A meeting, called by me and two friends to support the responsible publication of the NSA leaks by the Guardian and to urge a proper national debate, takes place at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London tomorrow. There will be speakers from all the main parties, NGOs and journalism, including Wolfgang Büchner, editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, which published revelations about the NSA bugging Angela Merkel's phone.

We have received support from a wide range of public figures, including the public law and human rights lawyers Lord Pannick QC, Helena Kennedy QC, Philippe Sands QC, Philip Pullman and John le Carré, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Brian Eno, David Gilmour and Neil Tennant, and the directors Peter Kosminsky and Stephen Frears.

The debate cannot be silenced, north or south of the border.

'Mass surveillance, the debate must not be silenced' is at RIBA, London W1, 6.45pm tomorrow. For tickets email surveillanceevent@gmail.com

Henry Porter

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National service supporters: get fell in, you 'orrible lot | Victoria Coren Mitchell

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 11:05 PM PDT

People who want to force kids into the army are the ones who really need to smarten their ideas up

Did you know that there's a private members' bill to bring back national service?

Most people only heard about it last week, after a news story that The Alan Titchmarsh Show had booked the president of the Cambridge Union to debate national service in their "Daily Ding Dong" feature, then cancelled her because she wasn't a man.

How daft. If they hoped for emotive personal testimony on a specifically male self-image, they should not have approached the Cambridge Union. Debating societies are not about what you (heaven forbid) "feel", but how well you argue.

Still, you can't expect too much commitment to the niceties of serious debate from a feature called "Daily Ding Dong".

It's television. We have to respect the creative industries' right to "cast" performances, outside the normal workplace rules of non-discrimination. In practice, of course, this seems to mean endless inventive reasons why a woman, or an older woman, or more than one woman, would be inappropriate for almost everything – but a generational change is surely inevitable and, in the meantime, putting up with these "creative decisions" is less bad than the alternative.

What's more interesting is why The Alan Titchmarsh Show wanted to discuss national service at all.

This bill will never get through. An era when brave young servicemen and women are being daily killed and injured during the relentless fallout of a ghastly illegal war is no time to sell voters on something that even vaguely smacks of forcing their kids to join the army.

Even those who don't have children and despise everyone else's must recognise that we don't need untrained cannon fodder any more. The future of the British military lies in highly trained computer programmers, probably no more than 12 of them. (No disrespect to the military; you could say the same about pretty much everything else.)

Besides, private members' bills never get through. This particular old chestnut, which I remember debating when I was at school, would cost millions to subsidise and I believe that our last national bank statement read: "Minus a trillion."

So, why do daytime television and its viewers think there is anything to discuss? Sadly, I think there is a wave of popular appeal in compelling anyone to do anything.

That certainly appears to be the view of policymakers. They keep coming up with ideas rooted in compulsion and coercion: the Tories demanding manual labour in return for dole money, for example, or the idea mooted at the Labour conference to remove child benefit from those who refuse the MMR jab.

They wouldn't be doing this if focus groups didn't tell them it might fly. In times of poverty and struggle, people harden towards others. Nobody wants to be compelled to do anything themselves, but there is some comfort in the thought of others being.

Those who are thrilled by the stern finger and enforced obedience might be disappointed to know that the national service bill, proposed by Philip Hollobone (Con, Kettering), would not actually oblige people to do military service.

The obligation is a year of time, between 18 and 26, for charitable work or public service, in which the armed forces would be an option alongside the emergency services, the NHS, elderly or disabled care, social action and overseas development.

The scope of the scheme would include "educational assistance for those participants who have yet to attain basic educational requirements of reading and writing in English and mathematics", as well as "instruction to attain basic levels of fitness, personal discipline, smart appearance, self-respect and respect for others.".

I can't help finding something amusing in this. Mr Hollobone is openly admitting that he does not trust the school system, under his own party's government, to turn out people who can read, write, count, jog, dress themselves or be nice to people.

Just think about that for a moment. He intends to stand up and suggest, to his own party leader, that the children of this prime ministerial generation are likely to leave school obese, illiterate and nasty.

I'll make my own admission: I thought there might be something well-meaning in this bill. After all, some people always slip through the net and leave school underskilled in literacy or numeracy. I also like the idea of incorporating social conscience and charitable awareness into young people's education.

The problem is that 18-26 is not actually young, unless you're an ageing politician (or columnist). These people are adults; 18 is too late to compel anyone to learn anything. The brain is no longer fully formative and the person must be free.

Nevertheless, I did think the bill might be coming from a kindly place. The loudest current "solutions" to social problems seem to be blame and cuts; could this be, at least, a refreshing attempt to offer practical help, with an eye to social cohesion instead of division? And then I read a bit more about Mr Hollobone. He has another private members' bill on the table, seeking to restore the death penalty. He'd like to privatise the BBC. He seeks to ban the burqa and refuses to meet constituents who wear it.

This is not one of your cheery, kindly, well-meaning libertarian Tories. He's an old school, hang-'em-and-flog-'em bully. This bill doesn't have a soft heart; it has a purple face, shrieking over a Courvoisier that a generation of nancies needs to man up a bit.

If we're going to start talking about public service, curriculum charity work, adult literacy or any of the aspects of the bill that might ring people's bells, it is important to know this about the man behind it.

Otherwise, it's like accepting a dinner invitation because you like the sound of the pudding, without knowing that the host is that boy who used to beat you up at school.

www.victoriacoren.com

Victoria Coren Mitchell

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Protest on Manus Island over Bibby Progress

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 10:58 PM PDT

Police called in as islanders demonstrate against floating accommodation for Australian immigration detention staff

Lenore Taylor

Turnbull sets out broadband priorities

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 10:07 PM PDT

Communications minister says areas of poor service will get rollout sooner, while Chinese supplier Huawei will be kept out

Malcolm Turnbull has said marginal seats will not be part of the equation during any revised rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) across Australia.

Turnbull, the communications minister, said a survey was under way to identify parts of Australia with the worst broadband.

"[Places] where the need for upgrade is greatest, they will be prioritised," Turnbull said.

Another priority would be areas where demand for high speed internet was greatest, such as business and industrial parks, he said.

"The NBN Co has to start being operated ... like a rational business that seeks to do its job as quickly and cost-effectively as possible."

Turnbull declined to comment on whether there had been legal claims lodged over asbestos scares at NBN construction sites.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has ruled out overturning a ban on the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei tendering for work on the NBN.

Turnbull said the decision was a question of "managing risk".

"Other companies and other countries have taken different judgments," he said.

He admitted that Huawei had in the past undercut the prices of western suppliers but stopped short of saying it would be cheaper to build the NBN with Huawei's involvement.

Turnbull said Vodafone and Optus used Huawei equipment in their Australian networks and they would attest that it worked properly and was cheaper. "These are things you've got to weigh up," he said.


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BHP Billiton scraps plans for new coal port at Abbot Point in Queensland

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 06:43 PM PDT

Company is also abandoning a proposed rail line that would have taken coal from the mines

Oliver Milman

Protest in Russia: an activity only for the brave and foolhardy

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:06 PM PDT

As anti-corruption protesters look set to join Pussy Riot and Greenpeace activists stuck in cells, Muscovites are growing more fearful

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, in a courthouse nestled amid high-rise apartment blocks in south-west Moscow, nine men are marched into a room in handcuffs and placed in metal cages. They are joined by three others who are also on trial but under house arrest or on bail, two dozen lawyers, several armed policemen with a growling alsatian and an irritable, fatigued judge.

This is the biggest of the "Bolotnaya" trials – court processes against 28 people who were arrested in the aftermath of a rally on Bolotnaya Square on 6 May 2012. It was the day before Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for a new presidential term, and the crowds chanted slogans demanding new elections and a less corrupt government. A year-and- a-half later, the protest movement has been extinguished, though it lingers in the consciousness of Moscow's middle classes, and Putin has embarked on a more socially conservative path to consolidate his support in the heartlands.

The arrests were a warning that Putin would not tolerate the huge protests that preceded his re-election and heralded a crackdown. Among those protesting was charismatic opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was later put on trial in the city of Kirov on embezzlement charges that few found persuasive.

The Bolotnaya arrests were alarming mainly because of their randomness. They were a sign to iPad-toting young Muscovites that protesting was not without consequences. In a way, any of the thousands who protested that day could have ended up in the metal cage. Those on trial are mainly accused of resisting or assaulting police, but although there was isolated violence at the rally there is little to suggest most of those on trial were involved, and police who come to court to testify remember little. At one point on Thursday, one of the defendants asks questions of the policeman on the witness stand, from inside the cage. Vladimir Akimenkov, 26, faces a possible eight-year sentence on charges of throwing a flagpole at a policeman, though the only evidence is oral testimony from one officer. He is losing his sight from a serious eye condition, which is progressing in jail, but the judge refuses to bail him for treatment.

His inquiries on Thursday have little to do with the accusations; instead he asks the police officer on the stand if he has any moral conscience.

"Do you think whatever is good for Gazprom is good for Russia?"

"The question is removed from the record," says the judge.

"Do you follow every single order you are given? If ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters, would you do so?"

"The question is removed from the record," says the judge.

And so it continues, interminably. The prosecution alone has hundreds of witnesses to call, most of them police. Getting through the first 40 has taken months, partly because there are two dozen lawyers, all asking questions, two-thirds of which are struck off the record. At this pace the case will take two years, says lawyer Sergei Badamshin.

Mikhail Kosenko, another one of those accused, was deemed mentally ill and tried separately. Last month he was confined to indefinite forced psychiatric treatment by a judge, despite never having committed a crime or having violent episodes prior to his arrest. Many of the others are simply sitting in pre-trial detention, for over a year already, with no sign of a trial even starting.

Maria Baronova, 29, is one of the 12 on trial, although she is not kept in jail but is allowed to live at home on the condition she does not leave Moscow. She says the trial – and the lack of interest in it from those who once formed the protest movement – shows that the waves of anti-Putin discontent are over.

"It's finished. We lost. That's it. There is no hope," she says. "You can try to help people get out of jail. You can go back to your jobs and try to forget about it. But the fact remains we lost, and nothing is going to change here."

"The sense that protests are cool and something that is fun to be part of has of course gone," says Maria Lipman, of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. She said the arrest of the Bolotnaya 28 has had a devastating impact on the protest mood.

The memory of the protests still remains, however. In the minds of the urban elite, and in the towers of the Kremlin, there is an understanding that the young, progressive class has deserted Putin, in spirit if not in body. This has led to the third-term Putin promoting a less inclusive political agenda and taking a sharp shift towards social conservatism.

"Putin has abandoned his claim to be the leader of all the Russians; now he is the leader of Putin's Russians," says Lipman. "And there are increasing numbers of people who have become 'bad' and 'unpatriotic' Russians, whether it be liberals, gays or blasphemers."

A new law that criminalises "homosexual propaganda" was passed this summer, while NGOsnon-governmental groups which receive money from abroad must register themselves as "foreign agents". State television whips up hysteria about the nefarious influence of the US state department, and Putin has positioned Russia as the last bastion of traditional values in Europe. The punk band Pussy Riot were thrown into prison for hooliganism, and acts like the Greenpeace protest against Arctic drilling are seen as an assault on Russia's sovereignty.

Despite the crackdown, there have been concessions to Moscow's protest-oriented middle class. Under mayor Sergei Sobyanin, life for professional Muscovites has become more liveable. Parks have been redeveloped, the local equivalent of "Boris bikes" were introduced this year, and pleasant cafes and restaurants are springing up. Nightlife is as vibrant as ever and now caters to a fashion-conscious youth obsessed with western trends. A major repaving programme has turned grimy dead zones into pleasant pedestrianised walkways almost overnight. More and more, Moscow is a nice place to live, not just for the super-rich but for the middle class too.

"The main paradox of living in Moscow today is that you can carve out a very New York or London-like existence here," says Michael Idov, editor of GQ Russia. "If you find these dots on the map and connect them and never stray from these routes, life is very comfortable. As long as you don't interact with the state in any way, shape or form."

What to do with the political aspirations of these young people remains a dilemma. There was outrage when Navalny was tried and sentenced to five years. Next day, when the prosecutor launched an unprecedented appeal for his release on bail, it was clear there had been a phone call from Moscow and that someone wanted him free for Moscow's mayoral elections in September. He gained 27% of the vote and his jail term was amended on appeal to a suspended sentence.

But last week new corruption charges were brought against Navalny and his brother, which could mean 10 years in jail. It seems the debate over whether Navalny is more dangerous in or out of jail is still raging.

"The Kremlin is not a cohesive group of like-minded policy makers," says Lipman. "There is always a debate going on about whether softer or harder approaches are best."

Putin is stuck with the classic dilemma of the soft autocrat. Does he allow a controlled liberalisation, with the possibility that he could lose control of the process, or does he crack down? After all, it was exactly the better-off segment of Muscovites, who had enjoyed increasing salaries and exposure to the west, who formed the core of the protest movement that sprang up so unexpectedly two years ago.

To make sure those demands do not become too loud, the Bolotnaya case rumbles on, with its protagonists trying to engage with the absurdity of proceedings, but being struck down repeatedly by the judge, Natalia Nikishina.

Baronova says that people regularly tell her to flee abroad, but she feels a duty to see through the court case. Nevertheless, the process is so byzantine, and its logic so frustrating, that she feels her grasp of reality slipping away.

"It's like Kafka's Castle," she says. "Engaging with the Castle is pointless. Trying to talk to the Castle is pointless. All it will do is send you mad. The whole process is designed to send you completely insane. That's far scarier than a possible prison sentence."

Shaun Walker

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Newspapers: let's end this impasse on press regulation | Observer editorial

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:06 PM PDT

We need more pro-active, durable press regulation built on a bedrock of consensus

New and perplexed readers start here. There is a voluntary royal charter in place for future press regulation, one backed by all three major parties in parliament. It was signed off at the privy council last Wednesday. But the business of printing it on vellum and then constructing the "recognition committee" that will oversee the whole process is grindingly slow. It won't be complete until after the next election, even if the press is minded to join in, which currently it isn't.

Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, are busy setting up their alternative, non-charter regulator called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which should commence operations in the spring of 2014. It may or may not come to command public approval. It may or may not be swept aside by an incoming government and replaced by involuntary legislation. For the moment, though, this is an archetypal no-score draw. Nobody – not the press, politicians or pressure groups – wins.

Blame for this fragile state of affairs may be widely shared. Perhaps David Cameron, struggling to secure all-party support for a solution, spent too much time negotiating with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg and not enough time securing press partnerships. Perhaps Hacked Off overplayed its hand. Perhaps newspapers fought too strident and internally conflicted a campaign, failing to convince the public, let alone the politicians, they were serious. And perhaps Lord Justice Leveson's unwillingness to go beyond his report and actually suggest ways of fulfilling its objectives as the debate floundered back and forth left a vacuum that politicking couldn't fill. None of this matters today. The plain fact, even before Leveson began his deliberations, was that the Press Complaints Commission is a busted flush. Phone hacking and adjacent events have broken its authority. It is good at resolving complaints but not at monitoring or enforcing good behaviour.

If press regulation must be reinforced, as opposed to left to the criminal law, then a new body able to investigate and set standards of editorial conduct is required. There is no real argument about that. The immediate challenge for all sides is to rediscover that bedrock consensus. If we need more proactive, more durable press regulation, then how do we achieve it? Waking up in May 2015, after the next election, to find the old PCC still marking time would be shared failure. 

One difficulty, however, is that the royal charter formula, dreamed up in the Cabinet Office as a less obviously onerous alternative to Leveson's smidgen of statutory underpinning, is a wheeze that has blighted rather than boosted progress. The editor-in-chief of the Guardian and Observer called it a "medieval nonsense". The Independent and Financial Times seem no more enthusiastic. If papers such as these aren't on board then the confection simply isn't fit for purpose: too rigid, too archaic in its rituals, too open to political interference just behind the arras. Vellum or no vellum, there is no realistic prospect of this particular charter winning press acceptance now or in the future.

It's a dud idea and one that amplifies the weaknesses in Sir Brian Leveson's approach. Its appendix detailing who and who isn't a "relevant publisher" within its ambit is quill-pen stuff in an era of sweeping digital change. Its aura, unsurprisingly, is relentlessly legalistic, written by lawyers for lawyers, criss-crossed by the audit trails judges love to follow. We can, perhaps, see where such preoccupations lead at the Old Bailey over the next six months. But the news since Leveson put away his laptop has been wholly different: the giant invasions of privacy practised by America's National Security Agency and its pliant partners. 

Some of these same objections, to be sure, are there as Ipso begins to take shape. It, too, has been fashioned by lawyers, audit trails awinding (and former presidents of the supreme court presiding over recognition tasks). But at least there's no vellum on display, at least there is the flexible possibility of adjusting its practical reach as the digital revolution sweeps on. If phone hacking was a last decade phenomenon, the present decade looks utterly different.

But will Ipso, once up and running, be able to win public approval? Can it possibly break the impasse? The press can't be sanguine here. It hasn't won the public argument. It has not managed to get three influential national newspaper groups (including this one) on board. The background of trials and arrests is awful. A foreground of ritual snipings and snarlings between papers does not help, either. Press freedom means more than the right to belabour competitors. It also, in current circumstances, needs full transparency as appointments to the new regulator are made. Trust means public trust in those asked to do the regulatory job. No smoke, no closed doors as decisions are made.

It would be ridiculous, after so many changes of direction, if the problem that most vexed Leveson – how to make sure Richard Desmond's Express titles had joined the party – was solved, but that manifestly independent editorial voices on press reform had been forced to sit on the sidelines.

So one clear imperative, as Ipso takes shape, is to make sure it represents the whole industry. A matching responsibility, though, lies with government. At no stage, through the year since Leveson reported, has there been a proper, inclusive negotiating process: merely a series of bilaterals over pizza and coffee. Of course, constructing a broader conclave is difficult. But the plain fact is that, on point after point, Ipso is not terribly far away from what Sir Brian Leveson intended, and it might not be incapable of ticking all of his important boxes if, at last, the principals can meet face to face.

This is not, essentially, a problem of political positioning ahead of an election – or of somehow securing a surface "victory" in the struggle to keep our press free by the standards of western democracy. Every grubby antic on one side threatens that freedom. Every unthinking assault on the other warps understanding, too. There are solid reasons to fear the royal charter we have, but will not join. As the Daily Telegraph said last week: "The Guardian's investigation into state spying is exactly the kind of reporting that could spark a moral panic among politicians and give them cause to limit what the press can publish. If parliament can find the numbers to impose a royal charter on the industry, it can also find the numbers to censor it." Edward Snowden's world – as a chastened America thinks again – is beyond medieval nonsenses. So is the more insular world of Westminster and Fleet Street.

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Observer editorial

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George Osborne and the Eurosceptics are not entitled to their own facts

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:06 PM PDT

The launch of a new – and factual – report on the EU reminds us how slippery truth has become in the economic debate

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once told an opponent: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." This astute comment came to mind when that great pro-European Peter Sutherland – he who, among other things, licked the World Trade Organisation into shape – made a nice observation at the recent launch of The UK & Europe: Costs, Benefits, Options, under the auspices of Regent's University, London.

Sutherland recalled an exchange with a Eurosceptic – or "Euroseptic", as Sir Edward Heath would have said – in which his interlocutor accused him of being "biased towards facts".

Subtitled The Regent's Report 2013, the 237-page document is going to be useful to all sides if we do have to go through what I myself regard as an unnecessary and time-wasting referendum on our membership of the European Union.

For a group of authors who are largely pro-European – and some, even now, pro-eurozone – they have produced a remarkably balanced document, with the emphasis on – wait for it – facts. There is plenty of acknowledgement of the tiresome aspects of the EU, and among a plethora of statistics, some obvious ones stand out.

These will not be new to students of the EU, but you can be sure they will not be highlighted by the anti-Europe brigade – many of whom have very nice houses in France, Spain, Italy and other parts of the EU. Suffice it to repeat here that, for all the fuss made by the anti-European press and Ukip, the entire "Brussels budget" amounts to 1% of EU gross domestic product.

Confusion can be worse confounded when it comes to facts. With economic statistics, we are often talking about estimates rather than facts. I have never found any evidence that Keynes made the remark often attributed to him: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

The explanation is simple: Keynes was far too intelligent to believe that facts could change. Facts are facts. Circumstances can change, and new information or more refined calculation can alter previous estimates.

Which brings us to the present position, and what one has to admire as the superb propaganda of the chancellor. According to George Osborne's interpretation of events, the recent crisis was caused by the profligacy of the Brown government, as was the putative need for austerity. And, hey presto, thanks to his brave programme of austerity, focused to a considerable extent on short-sighted cuts in public sector investment and mean-minded attacks on welfare, austerity has produced "recovery" and growth.

On the subject of mean-minded attacks on the poor, my old friend Sir John Major is to be congratulated for his recent observation that too many vulnerable citizens face a choice this winter as to whether to eat or heat.

Far too many people have swallowed Osborne's line, failing to appreciate that, with the obvious exception of Greece, the crisis was caused by the banks and other financial institutions, not public spending. It was the financial crisis that caused the bulk of the increase in the public sector debt. Moreover, a recovery was under way three years ago, until Osborne took measures to abort it.

Now, within a matter of months, some commentators have moved from talking up a recovery that wasn't there to worrying about the pace of the recent upturn, with GDP estimated to have expanded at an annual rate of 3.3% in the third quarter (in real terms). But, as Russell Jones points out in the latest bulletin from Llewellyn Consulting, "issues of the balance and sustainability of [UK] growth remain".

Investment and construction generally are way below their pre-crisis levels, the emphasis being on an old-fashioned consumer boom, but one that is being fuelled not by real incomes – which are depressed – but by cheap credit and consumer decisions that rely on the persistence of unusually low interest rates.

The biggest scandal of all is that policy is concentrating on encouraging a boom not in housebuilding, but in house prices. Like the Bourbons, the coalition and the Bank of England have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The Bank of England? In his early days the new governor, Mark Carney, talked about the need for "escape velocity" in the economy. His innovation was "forward guidance", which was supposed to reassure people that interest rates would remain low for a very long time. But already his chief economist is talking about moving to more "normal" levels of interest rates – which will be a blow to many – and speculating about the end of forward guidance when it has hardly begun.

However, the real coup for the Bourbon strategy is Carney's quite remarkably complacent attitude towards the future of the City of London. He seems to see a future in which a still largely unreformed banking system gets bigger and bigger, with even more of the leverage that made such a marked contribution to the financial crisis. True, he believes there can be reform. I wonder.

This is a dangerous game. Meanwhile, though Labour worries that Osborne may get away with his pre-election boom, the chancellor may be hoist by his own petard. It was Osborne who insisted on a five-year term. I have a feeling that by the summer of 2015 his cynical and reckless policy will have blown up in his face, and be seen for what it has always been.

William Keegan

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Westgate mall attack: how Kenya's vibrant media exposed the army's botched response | Murithi Mutiga

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:06 PM PDT

Kenyans should resist attempts to introduce legislation that would restrict press freedom

Nairobi's gold-chain-wearing senator Mike Sonko is Kenya's answer to Boris Johnson: eccentric, slightly erratic and blessed with a popular touch and a political nous that belie his clownish persona.

Following the Westgate attacks, he came up with a curious wheeze. He bought eight parachutes, the better for him and his staff of seven to glide out of their 25th-floor office at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre and down to safety in the event of terrorists storming the building. The anecdote is the only one that has perhaps brought a smile to Kenyans' faces since the Westgate attack, one of the most tormenting episodes in independent Kenya's 50-year history.

The drawn-out nature of the siege at the mall and the casual cruelty of the attackers, who murdered pregnant women and children attending, of all touchingly innocent things, a cooking competition under the blue Nairobi sky, shocked people around the world. But Kenyans struggling to recover from the horror must also take in the shocking revelations of official bungling on an epic, even criminal scale that characterised the response to the attack.

Kenya has a famously vibrant media sector. It has faced criticism in the past, but after Westgate it was at its finest. The Daily Nation, Kenya's best-selling newspaper, revealed that army special forces soldiers shot the commander of an elite police unit in a friendly-fire incident that prompted the Israeli-trained police squad to pull out of the rescue mission.

The most devastating news was revealed by the private TV stations that have proliferated in the last 20 years and compete fiercely for ratings. Reporters uncovered video footage that showed soldiers helping themselves to expensive phones and other items at Westgate after they had shelled the terrorists' hideout.

That revelation has stunned Kenyans. Unlike the police, who are well known for their appetite for bribes, surveys before the Westgate attack showed that the military was the nation's most trusted institution. Its soldiers are regarded as highly professional and have served with distinction in many United Nations peacekeeping missions. Unlike many of their counterparts in Africa, they have stayed in the barracks and not toppled a civilian head of state (although some junior officers attempted a putsch that was swiftly put down in August 1982).

Their reputation was only enhanced by the success of their mission in Somalia. Western armies could do worse than study the Kenyan mission to oust al-Shabaab from the key port city of Kismayo. The war was won before troops crossed the border. The military engaged in careful alliance-building with the dominant clans in the south of Somalia and won the support of figures such as Sheikh Ahmed Madobe, a henna-bearded former al-Shabaab commander who switched sides and is the commander of the most formidable fighting force in the south.

The fact that the Kenyans fought alongside the main clan group in the region meant it was easy for them to rout al-Shabaab and, more importantly, their alliances with clan leaders meant they didn't face any meaningful local insurgency after al-Shabaab turned tail. But the Kenyan military now has a serious credibility problem following revelations that troops could not resist the temptation to line their pockets.

The government has not dealt well with the negative attention it has received. Its reaction was an error of colossal proportions. On Thursday evening, with only a handful of MPs present, parliament passed a ludicrously harsh media law that could seriously curtail the operations of the most vibrant press on the continent outside South Africa. Media houses and journalists that fall foul of the new law face fines of up to 20m shillings (£145,000). Reporters could be committed to civil jail if they don't pay.

This new law is a big mistake. Freedom of the media in Kenya has deep historical roots. The country's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was an imperious, confident character, part monarch and part political overlord of a young nation. Unlike many of the early African nationalists, Kenyatta felt confident enough to let the press be. At one point, the Kenyatta clan attempted to buy the Nation, but its owner, the Aga Khan, convinced him to drop the plan.

Kenyatta's decision to make Kenya one of the more open societies on the continent and to pursue free-market economic policies at a time when many early nationalists chose the socialist path proved beneficial.

Kenyatta's son, Uhuru, is the current leader, having clinched the presidency in elections seven months ago. He is clearly not as confident as the family patriarch. But cracking down on the media is not a bright idea.

The fact that the press has shone a bright light on official incompetence shows one of the better sides of Kenya. Journalists doing that in many countries in the region would face prison or worse, but this openness is precisely why Kenya is the place where most investors and international organisations choose to set up camp when they come to East Africa. Kenyatta should not seek to drag the country down the path of authoritarianism. Serious security sector reform, with the help of partners in the war against international terrorism, would be a far better option.

Murithi Mutiga

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The internet can harm, but can also be a child's best tool for learning | Sugata Mitra

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:06 PM PDT

Debunking the myths: computers don't make children antisocial

From working with children and the internet for the past 15 years, I have learnt that it can be as harmful as we want it to be. If a child is alone with the internet, and no one else is around, the web can be a deadly, subversive, filthy and perverse place. The internet is our collective consciousness and human consciousness is not always pretty.

When children access the internet on large, publicly visible screens in safe and public surroundings, the net can be their most beneficial friend. Groups of children can learn almost anything by themselves, using the internet. I have evidence of this from all over the world.

There is a perception that the internet is "full of rubbish" and that children will learn incorrect things from it. I have seen no evidence of this. When children work in groups around a computer and research a subject or topic, they invariably find the right answers. This is because they interact with each other and quickly correct erroneous notions.

The internet itself is self-correcting and there is, actually, very little "rubbish" on it that is not marked as rubbish by millions of users. Of course there are issues that have no clear answers at all – such as in religion or politics. Children should be sensitised to avoid these subjects. They will benefit by doing so.

Children who access the internet from such safe, self-organised learning environments gain immensely over ones who don't. They learn to read sooner and better, they gain in self-confidence and they retain what they have researched for much longer than that gained through traditional rote learning.

The internet enables children to talk to people anywhere in the world. If such interaction is in safe, public spaces with large screens and clear audio, the effects can be dramatic. Retired teachers, grandmothers, storytellers, clowns and magicians become available to children everywhere. Since 2009, a "granny cloud" that I helped build has been interacting with children in remote areas with great mutual advantage.

There is a myth that computers make children more isolated and antisocial. Computers don't do anything of the sort. We, the adults, do, by giving children access to the internet alone in their rooms with tiny devices. We ask for trouble and we get it. So, put your computer in the living room, get a big, high-definition monitor that everyone can look at, tell children they can do what they like on it.

Don't put up firewalls; a child confronted with a firewall will desperately want to know what is behind it. Don't buy little tablet phones for children; buy big tablets with a Bluetooth phone. Goodbye privacy – goodbye danger.

But, then, what about all the strange and horrible things we adults do on the internet? The internet is not a monster we have created. It is us. Our collective consciousness and, unfortunately, our collective subconscious. We like our privacy. We don't like others to look at our screens when we do our emailing. We don't "do" Facebook in public. It is our secretiveness that makes the internet a dangerous place.

Here we – in our billions – look at, contribute to, create and lay bare a collective statement of the subconscious of Homo sapiens. Since the time we evolved, our brains have protected our primitiveness by hiding it away in our subconscious. We have chosen to make this public. And then, we worry about our children.

Animals don't get turned on by pornography about their own species because they are not particularly wired for privacy. Did we make a wrong choice somewhere?

We have wired ourselves for privacy, and all our technology is designed around that. We say things to each other that we don't want others to hear. Whose problem is that, the listener's or the speaker's? If someone listens (or taps your phone), he is a criminal. You are not, even if you were ordering a mass execution.

We could change this, with a simple technological design decision. If any communication or computing device were to be built such that any activity on it is visible on all other devices, we would have to build a world without secrets. The subconscious would be delegated to where it belongs.

If most of the natural world can do without secrets, so can we.

Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, and the winner of the $1m TED Prize 2013. He devised the Hole in the Wall experiment, where a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use freely. He aimed to prove young people could be taught computers easily without formal training.

Sugata Mitra

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Brandon Stanton's New York stories

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:05 PM PDT

When Brandon Stanton began photographing the Humans of New York, he didn't imagine ending up with an instant bestseller

See a gallery of Brandon Stanton's photographs here

"If any of you drove by the Brooklyn Navy Yards at 6pm last night, you may have seen a grown man sobbing in an empty parking lot," wrote Brandon Stanton on his blog last week after his book Humans of New York debuted at No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. "It completely blindsided me… It was a miracle."

When Stanton began photographing strangers on the streets of New York four years ago, he never planned for the project to become a blog, let alone a book. Having just lost his job as a bond trader in Chicago (which he landed through a friend who saw trading potential in Stanton's decision to bet a $3,000 student loan on Obama winning the 2008 election), he took the opportunity to travel and focus on photography, his hobby. His travels came to an end in New York when he realised he'd found a project. "I saw all these people; this diversity, this density, and New York was perfectly suited to the type of street photography I'd fallen into."

After much persuasion from a friend, Stanton created Facebook and Tumblr pages to make his photographs public. Within months his fan base numbered hundreds of thousands – "just because they wanted to see two or three photos of people that I'd taken on the streets every day". Today, Stanton has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers.

He says humansofnewyork.com is "more of a storytelling blog than a photography blog", and that the most interesting stories "tend to revolve around very strong emotions, like happiness or sadness or fear". Asking questions such as "What is your greatest struggle right now?" and "If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would you say?", Stanton elicits quirky and poignant responses from complete strangers. It is this that makes his storytelling so compelling.

A self-professed obsessive ("Hey there. I'm Brandon. I get really passionate about things," he introduces himself on the blog), Stanton spends two hours every day ("I do stress that I don't take days off") wandering the streets, and about two in three people he approaches agree to be photographed. He comes from Georgia, and says the sheer number of people he talks to in the city gives New York "a small-town feel – I'm always seeing people that I've photographed".

Nevertheless, a few days after reaching the top of the charts, he "went out photographing and got rejected about 10 times in a row. It was the worst night of photography that I've had in a long time," he recalls, laughing.

"New York is a giant place and no matter how big you get, there's still going to be a ton of people who haven't heard of you."


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Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York – in pictures

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:05 PM PDT

Brandon Stanton's pictures of strangers on the streets of New York have become huge hits on Tumblr and Facebook

Corinne Jones

Los Angeles airport shooting: suspect charged with murder as he fights for life

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:05 PM PDT

US attorney says federal prosecutors could seek death penalty against Paul Ciancia, who is accused of killing security officer

A man accused of shooting a security guard dead in a packed Los Angeles airport terminal was charged with murder as he fought for his life while detectives tried to piece together motives for the attack.

Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, faces charges of murder of a federal officer and committing violence at an international airport, US attorney Andre Birotte said on Saturday night. Under the charges, federal prosecutors could seek the death penalty, he said.

Ciancia opened fire, allegedly killing an unarmed security officer and injuring five others, starting panic among passengers. He was wounded in the leg and face during a gunfight with police.

Detectives said the gunman was dressed in military fatigues and had been carrying 150 rounds of ammunition when he was cornered in a food court. In his bag was found a one-page, handwritten note saying he wanted to kill airport security workers and "pigs".

One law enforcement official told the Associated Press that the note appeared to indicate the gunman was a "pissed-off patriot" who believed his constitutional rights were being violated by airport security searches.

Little is currently known about Ciancia, who moved to California from New Jersey 18 months ago. US media reports said his family, who run a garage in the town of Pennsville, told police before the attack that they had received a text message saying he planned suicide.

"Their younger child got a text message from Paul, stating that there were some comments in there about his wellbeing and he wanted to possibly take his own life," said local police chief Allen Cummings.

FBI agents were searching Ciancia's home in the Los Angeles area on Saturday. Two flatmates questioned by police said they had seen Ciancia a day earlier and he had appeared to be fine.

"Our goal is to do a true scrub on the individual to find out what was the tipping point for this person," FBI special agent David Bowdich told Reuters.

The attack at America's third-busiest airport began at about 9.20am local time on Friday, when the gunman pulled a rifle from his bag inside Terminal 3, pushed his way through security gates into a boarding area and started shooting.

"I really thought I saw death," said Anne Rainer, who had been waiting for a flight to New York.

The incident affected an estimated 1,550 flights carrying more than 167,000 passengers.

Barry Neild

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Khalid Abdalla: from movies to Tahrir Square

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:05 PM PDT

The British-born actor found success in United 93 and The Kite Runner, but has spent much of the last three years camped out in Tahrir Square

When actor and political activist Khalid Abdalla was a young schoolboy, a teacher set his class the task of writing their own obituaries. It has become part of family lore that Abdalla wrote in his that he had been assassinated because he was doing important political work. If there are, as his wife jokes, delusions of grandeur in that anecdote, there is also an early sign of the onerous sense of responsibility that has since driven Abdalla in both his work and his life.

At 33, he doesn't have a filmography so much as a geographical guide to the 21st century's flashpoints. It goes like this: 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt. Or to put it in cinematic terms, United 93, The Kite Runner, Green Zone and In the Last Days of the City and The Square.

The first three films were major productions that seemed to place Abdalla on a Hollywood trajectory towards if not exactly stardom, then a certain kind of respected international status. But an actor only interprets the world. For Abdalla the point was to change it. In 2008 he went to Cairo to make In the Last Days of the City, a low-budget independent film, and ended up becoming a dedicated activist in the revolution that, three years on, finds Egypt under military control.

Abdalla is an unlikely revolutionary. A privately educated Cambridge graduate, he is faultlessly polite and deeply thoughtful, given to long and textured analyses of everything from dramaturgy to nation-building. With a high hairline and a square jaw, his looks are finely balanced between cinematic character actor and theatrical leading man. From either perspective, his near-black eyes provide a penetrating directness to an otherwise self-contained manner. As befits someone who feels equally at home in London and Cairo, his English accent is that of the educated middle class but he also speaks Arabic like a native Egyptian.

Last month I met him outside a small cafe in a beautifully dilapidated cul-de-sac a few minutes' walk from Tahrir Square. Cairo was in a subdued but tense state, with the army maintaining a conspicuous presence on the streets. I walked out of my hotel one morning to be met by three tanks and about 50 armed soldiers. There was a curfew still in operation and Tahrir Square was blocked off with barbed wire and protected by soldiers at sentry points. Within its vast space several tanks sat as further discouragement to assembly. They were also reminders of the square's symbolic importance. Whoever controls it is seen as having the upper hand in the struggle for power.

All revolutions require their focal point, for psychological as well as strategic reasons. The Bastille and the Winter Palace were never quite as significant as they have become in the mythologies of the French and Russian revolutions, but they possess an instrumental aura because in the chaos of social upheaval, a shared sense of a time and space is vital. Dates and places become emotionally charged and therefore politically useful.

The various revolts and rebellions that can be filed under the heading Arab Spring have produced only one location that has entered the global lexicon of popular resistance. Egypt may have come slightly late to the party, beaten to the streets by Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen, but it made up for lost time with a genuine revolutionary space. Although it's traditionally been the scene of protests, Tahrir (which means "Liberation") Square was largely unheard of outside the Arab world until 2011. Since then it's become one of those names, like Tiananmen Square, that form part of history's shorthand.

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Abdalla estimates that altogether he's spent about six months of the last three years living in Tahrir Square. His experience and that of several other protesters is recorded in The Square, an extraordinary documentary that won the Audience Award for best world cinema documentary at the Sundance film festival and has been tipped for an Oscar. Directed by Jehane Noujaim, it offers a visceral sense of what a revolution looks like on the inside – all chaos, fear, adrenaline and urgency – while tracing the events that have convulsed Egyptian society since 2011.

Time called it "a remarkable portrait of Egypt's false dawns". Not only is Abdalla one of the main protagonists, he also helped with the film-making, and his wife was one of the camerawomen. Yet when the protests in Tahrir Square first hit the international news on 25 January 2011, Abdalla had finished his work in Cairo and was living back in London, writing a script. "The following day on the front cover of the Guardian," he recalls, "was the actress who played my ex-girlfriend in the film I'd just finished shooting. She was on the ground with her hand in the air facing a line of police."

Suddenly he felt a need to show solidarity with his friends in Egypt. He sat up all night talking to his girlfriend (now wife) Cressida Trew about what to do. By morning he had decided he had to go.

Trew remembers the drama of that period: "Khalid was going as an Egyptian, but what I felt really profoundly was that he was going as his father's son and as his grandfather's grandson." Both his father and grandfather were outspoken critics of Egyptian state tyranny. "I know it sounds melodramatic but I wasn't sure if I'd ever see him again."

Two days later, on 28 January, Abdalla was on Qasr el-Nil bridge in Cairo, part of a large crowd trying to force its way into Tahrir Square against repeated attacks from the soldiers blocking the way. In the battle a man next to him was killed – a disturbing scene that can be seen in a short YouTube film Abdalla put together.

The conflict raged all day with the crowd being forced back across the bridge, only to regroup and try again. Eventually, come sunset, the sheer weight of numbers carried them across to the other side.

"The story of that day is a very good metaphor for everything that followed," he says. "I will never forget that when I got to the other side, I promised myself that no matter what, I wouldn't be pushed back on to the bridge again. I ended up in a very dangerous position shortly after because of the extraordinary live fire that was shot at us as we entered the square for the first time. We had police closing in on us from both sides, and the only solution was to climb over the wall of the old foreign ministry, and as I did so, another man was shot next to me. Eventually we re-entered the square that night, and it became ours until we toppled Mubarak. If you like, over time, the structure of that story has repeated itself, time and again, but over much longer stretches of time."

It's still not known how many protesters died that Friday night, on what became known as the Day of Rage, but Trew hadn't been melodramatic. Death was very definitely a real possibility. From here on, Abdalla was engaged in the most challenging role he had ever played. And while a camera captured much of what was to follow, there was no script and no rehearsal, and the soldiers, the police, the bloodshed and the killings were far from make-believe. The revolution had begun in earnest and he was now a revolutionary.

The situation Abdalla encountered in Cairo was as galvanisingly simple as it was paralysingly complex. Hosni Mubarak had been in dictatorial control of the country since 1981, following his predecessor Anwar Sadat's assassination. Mubarak's regime was sclerotic, corrupt and deeply unpopular. In the tide of revolt sweeping the Arab world, he was an obvious target for overthrowing.

But one consequence of his authoritarian rule was the absence of any organised opposition other than the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928. The victims of fierce repression, the Brotherhood had survived decades of government crackdowns by operating in secret and creating a tremendous spirit of loyalty among its members. It was disciplined and determined to seize power.

However, the crowds Abdalla joined when he arrived in Tahrir Square were not dominated by Brotherhood supporters. The opposition to Mubarak ran across society. Although the Islamists played a part, the loudest voices were those of the disillusioned urban middle class, liberals, secularists and labour unions.

Had the protests been organised by the Brotherhood, there's little doubt that Mubarak and the military would have been even more ruthless in response. As it was, after first combating the protesters, the military eventually stepped back and on 11 February, it was announced that Mubarak had stepped down. There were wild celebrations in Tahrir Square, where Abdalla had remained throughout. Interviewed by the BBC, the jubilant actor asked why for 30 years Britain and the west had supported Mubarak, knowing that he was a "grotesque dictator".

"It's absolutely not a Muslim revolution," he told viewers. "It's nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalists… It's about the will of the people, ruling their own country."

Less than 18 months later the Brotherhood was in control. If it was not a Muslim revolution, it had resulted in an avowedly Muslim government. But if anything, that only increased Abdalla's revolutionary fervour.

Abdalla was born in Glasgow, where he lived until his family moved to Harrow when he was four. Both his parents are doctors. His father, Hossam, was a leading student activist in the 1970s and was imprisoned five times during Sadat's rule. Forced out of Egypt, he moved to Iraq before settling in Britain in 1979. A well-respected fertility specialist, he heads the Lister Fertility Clinic and has remained an active supporter of political reform in Egypt.

Hossam's father, Ibrahim Saad El-Din was an economist who was imprisoned twice during Nasser's rule, yet was made director of the Institute of Socialist Studies during Nasser's socialist phase. He was also imprisoned under Sadat and, although he died in 2008, he remains a much-admired figure in Egyptian leftist politics.

Given this background it was always going to be difficult for Abdalla to disappear into the English middle-class life for which his education appeared to prepare him. It was at the independent King's College school in Wimbledon, that he discovered acting.

"Like a lot of immigrant kids I was better at the sciences than the arts for a period of time," he says. "It's much easier for your parents to help you at home with maths and science than Henry VIII. When I was 15 my English teacher came up to me and said he was doing this play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and he thought I'd be good in it. I told him he was completely mad."

But he got the part. "I remember entering on stage and suddenly it was this absolutely beautiful world where the rules were completely different."

Abdalla has a tendency to speak in sentences with multiple subclauses when discussing politics, but when he talks of acting, his language becomes simpler, if no less romantic. After King's College school, he read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he met his wife.

"I initially thought he was one of the lecturers," she recalls. "He looked so much older and self-possessed and intense. The thought that went through my mind was, 'That's an extremely attractive man but it would never work with us because he needs to take himself much less seriously.'"

Despite her misgivings, she was impressed by his confidence, particularly when he set up his own theatre company with his friend and star-in-the-making Rebecca Hall. He directed her in a celebrated college production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It was not long after 9/11 and Abdalla made posters to promote the show and transliterated some into Arabic. At the time all things Middle Eastern were deemed suspect and Abdalla was keen to challenge that assumption. "And bear in mind," he adds, "there is this sort of cold war with Martha and George, so there was a kind of relevance to it."

The terror attacks of 11 September had a lasting impact on him, because they raised questions about identity and allegiance that he had no choice but to address. "It's framed my life since then. I have this multiple, transnational identity, and I guess I was slightly slow on the uptake as to how much more defined 9/11 made those lines. For me, two great tragedies took place. The first and greater of which was the killing of 3,000 people. But then there is also 19 hijackers killing 3,000 people in the name of 1.2 billion people around the world with Bin Laden as their figurehead!"

All of which made him reluctant to take the role of Ziad Jarrah, the jihadi pilot in United 93. Not long out of Cambridge, with ambitions firmly set on the theatre, Abdalla was in two minds about auditioning for the film, only doing so because of his respect for its director, Paul Greengrass. Although he voiced his reservations to Greengrass, he was offered the part. Abdalla suspects Greengrass wanted him because he, like Jarrah, was a reluctant participant – Jarrah had attempted to pull out of the attacks and, even on the day, delayed hijacking the plane.

"There was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted Khalid," says Greengrass. "But what I loved about the meeting with him was that he had powerful, principled views and he's a highly intellectually able person."

They spoke about The Battle of Algiers, a film to which they returned in conversation many times. Greengrass sees the revolutionary spirit of that film's director, Gillo Pontecorvo, in The Square, which he describes as "a very personal film that captures what a revolution feels like".

In United 93, Abdalla gave an astonishing performance as Jarrah, at once subtle and potent. He was intent on "according him the respect he never gave anyone else, in humanising him rather than turning him into a flat statistical identity, and through that opening up the process of breaking the taboos".

Of the esteem in which he holds Abdalla, Greengrass says: "I'm not given to hyperbole. I just think he doesn't get the recognition for his outstanding gifts. I think he's one of the finest actors of his generation."

Whether or not he's gained the recognition he deserves, Abdalla has certainly not chosen to cash in on his early breakthrough into cinema. Aside from the two films – United 93 and Green Zone – in which Greengrass has cast him, Abdalla's only other major film so far is The Kite Runner. His performances in all three films are marked by a mixture of intelligence and intensity, a combination that doesn't stop when he's off screen. And you sense he's unwilling to drop beneath that level either in his career or in conversation. As his motto on his Twitter page has it: "Won't do anything I don't believe in."

He spoke several times to Greengrass about unfolding events in Egypt in the lead-up to returning. "He felt it was a once-in-a-lifetime historical situation and as an educated, committed son of Egyptian parents, he wanted to be there," says the director. "I think it was like a calling, a moment of personal commitment."

In the days after Mubarak's fall, there was a palpable sense that the ogre had been slain and the open road of democracy and freedom lay ahead. The reality was that an authoritarian regime was still in control and they soon began attacking and torturing demonstrators. What's more, because there was widespread public support for the military's removal of Mubarak, few Egyptians were interested in stories of brutality and abuse.

Abdalla responded to the apathy by setting up Mosireen, a film collective with the aim of documenting the revolution.

"Mosireen started on 25 February, two weeks after Mubarak was pushed out," Abdalla says. "There was a call to reoccupy the square and a very small number of people went. The whole country was saying, 'Time to go home, let the big boys deal with it.' On that night we were violently removed. A lot of people were tortured in the Egyptian museum."

The collective has played a crucial part in providing an accurate picture of the violence wrought by the state, with its YouTube channel providing a much-needed counterbalance to the propaganda put out by the authorities and their apologists. Abdalla also held screenings for protesters in the square of the footage that Mosireen had gathered, which he called Cinema Tahrir. In The Square, during a Skype conversation, his father questions the political point of all the screenings. "What are you going to do, start a TV station?"

One observer told me that Mosireen was an exclusive hang-out for Cairo's wealthy and well-connected revolutionaries. Abdalla would dispute that charge, but in any case it hasn't stopped Mosireen's events from drawing heated attention from the police and military. I asked Abdalla if he thought his status as an international actor afforded him protection from the authorities.

"I'm recognised by people who have seen The Kite Runner, but I'm not famous. There's a knowledge that if the authorities did something to me, it would kick up a storm – but you can't bank on that. There is also a class protection, which comes into things as well. Although we've always expected it, they've never come and shut down Mosireen. On the other hand there have been people who work at Mosireen who have been shot and gone to hospital."

Having joined Abdalla in Egypt, Trew met director Jehane Noujaim, who asked her to help film The Square. Although she made a rule not to film in situations of violent protest, Trew, along with Abdalla, has been arrested and had her equipment confiscated. When I ask him if he worries about Trew's safety, Abdalla pays tribute to his wife's bravery.

Trew herself says: "One of the things I've learnt is that people have very different reactions to dangerous circumstances. Some respond by believing nothing is going to be fine. I'm one of them. I was utterly terrified. And some believe for absolutely no good reason that everything will be fine – that's Khalid".

Certainly he and his fellow revolutionaries have consistently made themselves prime targets by the premium they have placed on street protests, particularly in Tahrir Square. In the early days of the uprising, it was the only political option available, and as a consequence there was great unity among the protesters.

"There is no such thing as Muslim or Christian," says Ahmed, an idealistic secularist, at the beginning of The Square. "We are all present."

"Soon people will realise that they misunderstood the Muslim Brotherhood," adds his friend Magdy, a member of the Brotherhood. Eventually Ahmed and Magdy find themselves on opposing sides. When protesters reclaimed the square in the summer of 2011, the Brotherhood turned out a few times in a stage-managed show of their power, and then withdrew. They only wanted to use their presence in Tahrir Square as leverage in the secret negotiations they were having with the military.

Then in October of that year, there was a peaceful protest at Maspero, the location of the state TV company, by Coptic Christians who objected to the closure and destruction of churches. Armoured vehicles raced into the crowd, crushing 28 people to death. The public response was at best muted, at worst indifferent. There was indeed such things as Christian and Muslim.

Abdalla says the massacre was his lowest point in the last three years. In The Square we see him interviewed and he says that if what happened at Maspero doesn't provoke outrage then "as a revolution we're in trouble".

"But the lowest points are when you keep walking," he tells me. "That's when change happens and things get defined."

The big change that ended up happening was that the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party won both the prime ministerial and presidential elections, with Mohamed Morsi sworn in as Egypt's first ever legitimately elected president on 30 June 2012. As there was no constitution in place, Morsi was able to draft one that, as Abdalla puts it, would have "created a state in the Brotherhood's image".

Many Egyptians hoped that the FJP would follow a similar path to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-light government in Turkey, which has brought fast economic growth and gradual democratic reform. But things didn't work out that way. Morsi was increasingly seen as a dictator-in-waiting, attaining powers for himself that went beyond even those that Mubarak had held. The economy continued to falter, attacks on Christians increased, and he made a series of clumsy moves that further undermined public confidence. Perhaps the most egregious of these was appointing a member of the hardline Islamist group Gamaa Islamiya as mayor of Luxor, the city in which terrorists linked to the group shot dead 58 tourists in 1997.

Not long afterwards, following mass protests, Morsi's government was removed by the military on 3 July this year. It was a move that had the widespread support of the Egyptian people, who had only a year earlier voted for Morsi, but it left many observers wondering about Egypt's commitment to the democratic process. Abdalla is aware of the criticism.

"There is this line that goes, 'You guys had a revolution, you wanted a democracy, you had democratic elections and you got a president and you didn't like him. That's pretty normal for most of us around the world. You should accept it and let the term go through.'"

He says he doesn't care who leads the country as long as they allow an independent judiciary and unions and a free press and the other key rights and protections. But he has no regrets about Morsi's passing. He just wishes that the mass protests had been allowed to unseat Morsi without the intervention of the military.

"It's this idea of the saviour coming to sort out our problems," he says. "For me that's just creating your own demagogues and dictators. The millions out on the streets were capable of pushing the Brotherhood out themselves, which would have been much more legitimate."

I point out that the Brotherhood would hardly have walked quietly away. What he is talking about, I say, is the kind of large-scale street conflict that, as we know from Syria, could easily degenerate into a civil war. He agrees that such an outcome was a real possibility. As it was, of course, the military committed a massacre against Brotherhood supporters protesting against the imprisonment of Morsi and many senior Brotherhood leaders. On 14 August, 638 people were killed when Egyptian security forces set about clearing two protest camps in Cairo.

If anything, it could be argued that the situation is now worse than before 2011, because the Brotherhood could turn its back on democratic politics in the understandable belief that it has led to nothing but its persecution. Egypt may well be plunged into the terrorism that scarred the country in the 1990s or into an even more devastating schism. And, moreover, unlike in Mubarak's time, there is now overwhelming popular support for the military. Abdalla acknowledges all of this and yet he insists: "I'm deeply optimistic, although I recognise this moment as a very dark one."

He believes that, while the people are willing to accept any solution that provides them with stability, the key question, beyond any discussion of rights and freedoms, is economic performance. And as he doesn't believe the status quo is capable of improving the lot of the average Egyptian, sooner or later the people will voice their disapproval once more.

But what then? Back to Tahrir Square? More protests, more massacres, and the further intervention of the military? How was the revolution going to develop if its only means of political organisation was mass protest? This was a question I kept returning to in our conversations, and each time Abdalla's answers seemed to spiral off into nebulous idealism.

Notwithstanding the danger and the bloodshed, you can see in The Square the exhilarating appeal of revolutionary protest and the fabulous street drama of solidarity and empowerment. Abdalla speaks of the unprecedented political engagement he's witnessed, of staying up all night in passionate debate of political ideals that no one really mentions at any hour in Britain. Yet the life-affirming spectacle of the barricades is a blunt political instrument. And Egyptians are beginning to weary of protests.

Abdalla argues that while there may be a temporary lull, the people are now armed with knowledge that they have the means to bring down governments. This may be true, but the Brotherhood supporters may feel the same way, and they are now armed with a whole renewed martyrdom mythology.

"For me," he replies, "the success of the revolution will be the exit from the binary", by which he means the choice between the military and the Brotherhood. But it is in the Brotherhood that he finds inspiration for the closest he comes to outlining a means of getting from the streets to that exit.

"I think the greatest success of the Brotherhood over its history and particularly for the last 30 years is how they have managed to challenge the culture of this country and this region without holding a single office of political power. And I think part of our challenge is to do the same, reversing a lot of their work and also providing our own vision. The ground for that is very fertile."

The months and years ahead will present Egyptians with many difficult decisions and choices. Abdalla seems to be resolved to play his part in that process, but at the same time he must also grapple with his own dilemmas. In a long and carefully detailed email he sent me after our interview, he explained that he didn't believe that he had put his acting career on hold, noting that there were three feature films currently in post-production in which he had leading parts. One was an animation film with Jeremy Irons, the other two Arab films, including In the Last Days of the City, to which he is ardently committed.

"You can't talk of Arab cinema," he writes, "without a relationship with Arab politics. Eventually it comes down to the same thing. You could say that it is the actor in me that picks up a camera to expose state violence in Egypt, just as much as you could say it is the political activist in me that agrees to do a film that participates in shifting people's perception of wars waged in the region I'm from. Each terrain demands a different participation, of course, but they are two sides of the same coin."

Examining both sides of that coin, it looks as though the prediction in his childhood obituary has come true: he does indeed have important political work to do.

For more information about The Square visit thesquarefilm.com

Andrew Anthony

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Deloitte promotes Mauritius as tax haven to avoid big payouts to poor African nations

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:04 PM PDT

ActionAid charity says poor countries such as Mauritius are losing hundreds of billions of pounds

A global consultancy giant has been accused of advising big business, including UK firms, on how to avoid paying tax in some of Africa's poorest countries.

ActionAid has obtained documentation showing that Deloitte, which employs more than 200,000 people in over 150 countries, has been advising foreign companies on how, by structuring their investments though the tropical island of Mauritius, they can enjoy significant tax advantages.

The charity claims that the strategy could help companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in tax. Deloitte insists the strategy is not about tax avoidance and attracts much-needed investment to the countries involved.

A Deloitte document, "Investing in Africa through Mauritius", passed on to the Observer, advises on investing in African companies via the island nation, which has a population of 1.3 million. The document provides the example of a foreign company investing in Mozambique, where more than 50% of the population live below the poverty line and average life expectancy is 49 years. Normally, the foreign company could expect to pay a withholding tax on the dividends flowing back to it from Mozambique of 20%. A sale of its Mozambique investment would see the company liable for a capital gains tax bill of up to 32%.

However, the Deloitte document explains that, if the foreign company made its investment through a holding company in Mauritius, it could limit the withholding tax it would have to pay to just 8%, while capital gains tax would be reduced to zero. The potential value of capital gains tax to developing economies is considerable. An Italian oil company was recently required by the Mozambique government to pay $400m (£250m) in capital gains tax.

The document explains that Mauritius could tax the holding company's profits at 15%, but that this does not happen in practice. The firm explains that any tax liability in the island is wiped out by a foreign tax credit, issued because the company has been taxed in Mozambique.

Deloitte presented the document at a conference for international businesses two weeks before this year's G8 conference in Loch Erne, Northern Ireland, when world leaders promised action to help impoverished nations improve their tax regimes. It followed claims by David Cameron that aggressive tax avoidance was "morally wrong".

More than 80 major international organisations attended the conference addressed by Deloitte. Representatives from major banks and legal firms, including Clifford Chance, Citibank, JP Morgan, the World Bank, Standard Bank and several Chinese firms, were present.

Tax campaigners are increasingly concerned about how Mauritius is used by big business with interests in Africa. The island has taken steps to aggressively position itself as the "gateway to Africa" for companies looking to invest in the continent. It currently has 14 double taxation treaties in place with African countries and a further 10 under negotiation. But ActionAid said the terms of the treaties could easily be abused by companies seeking to minimise their tax bills.

The charity wants a global clampdown on tax avoidance, which it says costs developing countries hundreds of billions of pounds a year in lost revenue. It said that, if companies paid their fair share of tax, the money could be used to fund food, health and education programmes. It cited the example of a British sugar company operating in Zambia. The money saved by the company through the legitimate use of tax avoidance schemes was enough to put 48,000 of the country's children through primary school every year.

"The tax strategy advised by Deloitte could potentially be used to deprive some of the poorest countries in the world of desperately needed tax revenues," said Toby Quantrill, ActionAid Tax Justice Policy Adviser. "In using the example of Mozambique to illustrate their strategy Deloitte chose a country where the average income is less than two dollars per day and one third of the population is chronically food insecure. Developing countries need to grow their tax revenues, which are vital to help lift people out of poverty. But that can only properly happen if large companies stop avoiding their taxes."

A Deloitte spokeswoman said it was wrong to describe applying double tax treaties, such as that between Mauritius and Mozambique, as tax avoidance: "The absence of such treaties could result in a reduction of investment, and less profit subject to normal business taxes in the countries concerned."

Jamie Doward

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Advertisers can love an activist media

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:04 PM PDT

The importance of balanced reporting grew up when advertisers wanted a safe canvas for mass-market ads. No longer

Should reporters start with blank minds in order to seem trustworthy, fair and balanced? That's the case made by Bill Keller, former executive editor of the exceedingly fair and balanced New York Times. Or can journalists have convictions they pursue and admit openly? Enter Glenn Greenwald, lately the main Guardian man on the Snowden/NSA case, off soon to excavate more sensations for the billionaire founder of eBay.

In the NYT, Keller says: "I believe that impartiality is a worthwhile aspiration … even if it is not perfectly achieved." But Greenwald sees a twofold mission: imparting accurate and vital information, and a "unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on this power". The word "activist" has never been so incendiary.

But here is a fresh side to the argument. International lawyer Fred Davis observes that impartiality mattered when advertisers wanted a balanced environment for their mass-market ads. But a digital world means carefully targeted ads and no need for mushy compromises. Activism and attitude rule OK. Of course, Greenwald's reverence for accuracy and truth matters most. Ends not means. But it's good to remember that, in a digital world, ads are part of the action, not just part of the scenery.

Peter Preston

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Why the Obamacare website was doomed

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:04 PM PDT

The shambles of Barack Obama's healthcare launch recalled many similar British computer meltdowns

One of the most dispiriting spectacles of the last month has been the botched launch of HealthCare.gov, the website created to implement President Obama's landmark healthcare reforms. Obamacare had a desperately turbulent passage through Congress and survived various wrecking attempts by the Tea Party and their accomplices. Then the glorious day dawned and millions of US citizens hit the URL, hoping that, finally, they would be able to find a health insurance plan that they could afford.

Guess what happened. According to the New York Times, of the 20 million people who tried to access the site over its first three weeks only 500,000 managed to complete applications for health cover and an even smaller percentage of them actually succeeded in obtaining insurance. In an unprecedented move, the president had to make a public apology for the shambles.

At this point, British readers will mutter: "Well, at least he had the grace to apologise." Ministers in successive British governments of all stripes have, over the years, presided over some IT cock-ups that put the Obamacare one in the shade. My guess is that upwards of £10bn has been blown over the years in massive government IT projects that turned out to be death marches to cancellation. But usually the bad news was quietly buried and we heard about it only when the National Audit Office lifted the stone to see what lay beneath.

The Obamacare website fiasco has a quaintly antique ring to it. This is the kind of stuff that used to happen in the first internet boom, when any clown with an MBA and an idea for a dotcom could attract investors. In those days, new websites were often overwhelmed on launch. The founders hadn't bought enough servers to handle the surge. But this is 2013 and those kinds of capacity problems don't exist any more. You can rent as many servers as you need from Amazon's cloud, add another hundred in an instant and pay for them on your credit card.

So why was the Obamacare site launch such a disaster? Writing in the New York Times, two politically experienced geeks argue that it's mostly down to the way the government purchases IT services. "Much of the problem," they write, "has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job."

That strikes a chord over here. British civil servants have traditionally been technologically illiterate, so when ministers demand a new IT system to fix some failing that is annoying the Daily Mail, Sir Humphrey breaks into a cold sweat. He knows nothing about this stuff, except that it costs a bomb and that it usually bombs. The spectre of the National Audit Office looms over him. He does not want another IT disaster attached to his personnel file. So what does he do?

Simple: he calls up the big consultancy firms asking for tenders. These in turn call up their chums in brain-dead firms called "system integrators" who know only how to do one thing, namely to build massive integrated IT systems the way they were built in the 1960s. And thus begins another death march to oblivion; another project that is billions over budget and years behind schedule. But Sir Humphrey sleeps easy in his bed. After all, the shambles was approved and designed by the boffins who understand this stuff.

The truly amazing thing about this soap opera is that it was allowed to go on for so long. But eventually the penny dropped: HMG simply had to smarten up. And smarten up it has. The Cabinet Office now has some geeks who can spot consultancy bullshit at 50 paces. The unit they belong to is called the Government Digital Service. Its brief is to build the right technology, using modern methods and approaches, or to employ agile computing firms that regard £100,000 as a lot of money and that are accustomed to delivering on time.

There are not many good news stories in British government at the moment, but GDS seems to be one. I first began to think that when I heard an anecdote from a friend who moves in these exalted circles. He reported an overheard conversation between a senior GDS officer and a system integrator who had feasted for years on government contracts. The GDS guy outlined the new thinking. "But," expostulated the contractor, "this is a completely different way of doing things." "You know," said the civil servant, "I do believe you're beginning to get it." Hallelujah!

John Naughton

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From fertiliser to Zyklon B: 100 years of the scientific discovery that brought life and death

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 05:04 PM PDT

It's 100 years since Fritz Haber found a way to synthesise ammonia – helping to feed billions but also to kill millions, and contributing to the pollution of the planet

Several hundred scientists from across the globe will gather in Ludwigshafen, Germany, next week to discuss a simple topic: "A hundred years of the synthesis of ammonia." As titles go, it is scarcely a grabber. Yet the subject could hardly be of greater importance, for the gathering on 11 November will focus on the centenary of an industrial process that has transformed our planet and threatens to bring even greater, more dramatic changes over the next 100 years.

The ammonia process – which uses nitrogen from the atmosphere as its key ingredient – was invented by German chemist Fritz Haber to solve a problem that faced farmers across the globe. By the early 20th century they were running out of natural fertilisers for their crops. The Haber plant at Ludwigshafen, run by the chemical giant BASF, transformed that grim picture exactly 100 years ago – by churning out ammonia in industrial quantities for the first time, triggering a green revolution. Several billion people are alive today only because Haber found a way to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia fertiliser. "Bread from air," ran the slogan that advertised his work at the time.

But there is another, far darker side to the history of the Haber process. By providing Germany with an industrial source of ammonia, the country was able to extend its fight in the first world war by more than a year, it is estimated. Britain's sea blockade would have ensured Germany quickly ran out of natural fertilisers for its crops. In addition, Germany would also have run out of nitrogen compounds, such as saltpetre, for its explosives. The Haber process met both demands. Trains, bursting with Haber-based explosives and scrawled with "Death to the French", were soon chugging to the front, lengthening the war and Europe's suffering.

"If you look at the impact of the Haber process on the planet, you can see that it has been greater than any other discovery or industrial process over the past 100 years," said Professor Mark Sutton, of Edinburgh University. "On the positive side, there are the billions of people who are alive today thanks to it. Without it, there would have been no food for them. On the other hand, there are all the environmental impacts that a soaring world population, sustained by Haber fertilisers, have had. In addition, there is the pollution triggered by the release of ammonia fertilisers into water supplies across the globe and into the atmosphere.

"And, for good measure, there have been all the deaths caused by explosives created from Haber-manufactured ingredients. These have reached more than 100m since Haber invented the process, according to one estimate. So we can see Haber's work has been a mixed blessing."

Bald and absurdly Teutonic in demeanour, Haber was an ardent German nationalist. He was happy his invention was used to make explosives and was a fervent advocate of gas weapons. As a result, on 22 April 1915 at Ypres, 400 tons of chlorine gas were released under his direction and sent sweeping in clouds over Allied troops. It was the world's first major chemical weapons attack. Around 6,000 men died. Haber later claimed asphyxiation was no worse than blowing a soldier's leg off and letting him bleed to death, but many others disagreed, including his wife, Clara, herself a chemist. A week after the Ypres attack, she took Haber's service revolver and shot herself, dying in the arms of Hermann, their only son.

In 1918 Haber was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, a decision greeted with widespread indignation. Many British, French and US diplomats and scientists refused to attend his award ceremony in Stockholm. After the rise of Hitler, Haber – who had become a rich industrialist – was expelled from Germany because he came from a Jewish family, and died in Switzerland in 1934.

The ironies that afflicted Haber's life continued in death. One of the most effective insecticides he had helped to develop was Zyklon B, which was subsequently used by the Nazis to murder more than a million people, including members of Haber's extended family, including children of his sisters and cousins.

Since then, the use of Haber's process – or more properly the Haber-Bosch process in acknowledgement of Carl Bosch's work in turning Haber's ideas into a practical industrial process – has expanded dramatically. Today more than 100m tonnes of nitrogen are taken from the atmosphere every year and converted into ammonia compounds, in Haber-Bosch plants. These are then spread over the surface of the Earth, turning arid land into fields of plenty. As a result, our planet has been able to feed and sustain an unprecedented number of people. In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. There are now more than 7 billion. Most of the extra mouths have been fed on food sustained by the Haber-Bosch process.

It has been calculated that half the nitrogen atoms in our bodies come from a Haber factory, via its fertilisers and the food nourished by them. As the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has put it in his book Enriching the Earth, the Haber-Bosch process "has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than the airplane, nuclear energy, spaceflight or television".

This has come at a price, however. There is the sheer strain placed on the natural environment by the number of human beings now sustained by artificial fertilisers. In addition, there are problems caused by our ever increasing appetite for ammonium chemicals. Our bodies may accumulate nitrogen atoms from fertiliser plants, but far more of these atoms fail to make it into the food chain and are instead released into the environment. The result, in many areas, has been calamitous. Nitrogen fertilisers get washed into streams, rivers, lakes and coastal areas where they feed algae that spread in thick carpets over the waters, suffocating life below.

Then there is the atmospheric release of all the excess ammonia, says Sutton. "Ammonia is released into the air from fertilisers on farms and can then be deposited on natural habitats with very unwelcome consequences," he said. "Consider the sundew … It can grow in very harsh environments in this country because its sticky leaves allow it to catch insects, which provide it with nitrogen and other important compounds. But when ammonia from artificial fertilisers is dumped nearby other less hardy plants grow and crowd out the sundew."

Sutton believes that while the dangers of fossil fuels and greenhouse gases are well known today, those of the nitrogen cycle, which affects drinking water, contributes to air pollution and affects the health of large parts of the population, have gone unrecognised. "We need nitrogen compounds to sustain our food supply but we need to be much more careful how we use them. That is the real lesson of the Haber process centenary."

Robin McKie

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Nairobi mall attack: how an ex-SAS man and a former Irish soldier helped to save lives

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 03:47 PM PDT

Two security consultants raced to the Westgate mall when al-Shabaab gunmen went on the rampage. Under fire, they organised the rescue of terrified shoppers

A little after half-past midday on a sunny Saturday a disturbing call came through to Mark and John at the Nairobi offices of the oil company for which they work. Gunshots had been heard at Nairobi's plushest shopping mall, Westgate, and it was suspected that a robbery was in progress. The security consultants, one an ex-SAS officer and the other a former Irish Ranger, immediately began work on the assumption that it was a terrorist attack.

Within 10 minutes they had contacted all the firm's staff and ascertained that two were inside the mall. They phoned them, to find they were hiding in Westgate's second-floor sushi restaurant, Onami. They told them to stay where they were and the decision was taken to attempt a rescue.

What followed – reconstructed with witness testimony, photographs, video footage and interviews with friends of one of the security men – gives the clearest account yet of official failures, missed opportunities and individual bravery in what is one of the worst-disclosed terrorist attacks on record.

Arriving in the Kenyan capital's shopping and nightlife district of Westlands, Mark and John (not their real names) found that there was no police cordon in place. Bodies were still strewn across the balcony of a ground-floor cafe and gunshots could be heard echoing inside the mall.

They walked into the basement along the exit ramp from the underground car park and made it most of the way to the entrance stairwell before gunfire forced them to retreat.

Coming back out the way they had gone in, they took cover in the cargo area when Mark noticed a crowd of more than 100 people cowering behind an armoured cash-delivery truck.

They approached the terrified people and organised them into pairs to make the dash to the comparative safety of the main road, where a crowd of survivors and onlookers was already beginning to gather. As panicked shoppers and mall staff ran the gauntlet, Mark and John kept watch on the top of the building. Shots could be heard coming from the rooftop car park.

That was when a bloodied hand waved from the rooftop and they took the fateful decision to climb the external fire escape that led into the Java House coffee shop.

Mark, who served for 18 years in the British army, much of it in the SAS, took charge. They persuaded two plainclothes Kenyan police reservists and two more police with AK-47 assault rifles to accompany them up the fire escape towards the shooting.

At the top they went into the coffee shop storeroom and found another group of 100 people sheltering inside. One of the Kenyan police with a rifle was detailed to secure the exit stairs, while they persuaded the terrified people, many of whom had witnessed a bloodbath in the car park outside, to climb down to the ground floor.

There was carnage in the cafe: at least 20 people were dead and the same number injured, many of them with shrapnel wounds from grenades thrown by the Islamist attackers.

At this point, witnesses confirm that Mark and John split up: Mark went out of the building on to the rooftop car park where the attackers had strafed men, women and youngsters attending a children's cooking competition. Meanwhile, John tried to reach the sushi restaurant on the far side of the building and evacuate the diners.

Among the parked cars and marquees which had been erected for the lunchtime event were mothers clinging to children and people with gunshot wounds under vehicles, where they had tried to take cover.

Local radio host Sadia Ahmed remembers that a white man in a checked shirt appeared and began to try to persuade the walking wounded to leave the dead and follow him into the building and on to the fire escape. Many were reluctant to go, insisting that they must know if their loved ones were dead before they would leave.

Mark methodically covered the dead with red tablecloths from the cooking competition. Witnesses said he paired the injured with the uninjured to help them down the stairs. Some were so badly wounded they had to be carried.

Meanwhile, ex-Ranger John had crossed the second-floor balcony, coming under fire from the attackers, now thought to be from the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab. On reaching Onami, John found the oil company staff and several others hiding in the restaurant storeroom. They were told to hold on to John and two Kenyan policemen for the sprint back across the exposed atrium balcony to the coffee shop.

By 2pm, Mark and John again reached the cargo area. As the Irishman evacuated the firm's personnel to a company car, Mark was seen to approach a police commander and a Kenyan army general who had arrived. A witness described a man in his 50s with short-cropped hair and "an Irish or Welsh accent" pleading with the officers to send help to the car park.

Mark was told that they were waiting for Kenya's equivalent of a Swat team, the "Recce crew", to arrive and would take no action until they did.

Mark and John decided not to wait. They persuaded a non-uniformed Kenyan soldier and a civilian Sikh man, Satpal Singh, who had already helped carry one casualty, to go with them back into the danger zone. "I met an ex-British soldier who said there were still people trapped on the top floor where we came from. He said he had touched the eyes of four people and they were not moving, they were dead," said Singh. "The police officers were armed, they had bulletproof vests, so we [asked them to] … come with us to the top floor and bring these people down. They didn't help us, so we decided to go up again by ourselves."

Back on the roof there was chaos. Volunteers from Kenya's Red Cross had ignored safety warnings and driven an ambulance up into the parking area. They had stretchers and medical kit, but no experience of trauma or triage.

Using the cookery tables as stretchers, the pair worked for an hour alongside the volunteers before a doctor arrived. This is what trauma experts refer to as the "golden hour", the period after major trauma where treatment is most likely to prevent death.

The authorities' failure to secure the roof area probably cost the lives of several of those who later died of their wounds, adding to the known death toll of 67. An unexploded grenade in the midst of the rescue workers was marked with a shopping trolley.

Shortly before 4pm, with only one dead body remaining on the roof and some plainclothes Kenyan soldiers from the General Service Unit arriving, Mark and John decided to leave. That was when one of them, friends said, received a text message saying that someone they knew was still trapped inside. The pair again went back inside the mall, found the man and led him out to the rooftop.

By now, a military helicopter was circling and, worried that they might face "friendly fire", the men retreated back to Java and down the fire escape.

By 4.30pm, there was still no police cordon in place. The pair, two of the unsung heroes of a disastrous government response to the attack, were able to slip away, unidentified, into the crowd.

Daniel Howden

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Los Angeles airport terminal reopens after fatal shooting rampage

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 03:13 PM PDT

Authorities investigate motives of suspected gunman after LAX shooting spree that left TSA agent dead and others wounded

The Los Angeles International Airport terminal where a gunman opened fire on Friday morning, killing an unarmed airport security officer and wounding others, reopened fully on Saturday evening as authorities investigated the motive behind the attack.

Authorities have identified the suspected shooter as Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, and they said he was shot and wounded by police in an exchange of gunfire at the airport's busy Terminal 3.

The gunman shot at least two Transportation Security Administration employees, one fatally, said Special Agent David Bowdich of the FBI. The slain TSA officer, identified as Gerardo Hernandez, 39, was the first from the agency to die in the line of duty.

Los Angeles police officers will be wearing black mourning bands in memory of Hernandez, Chief Charlie Beck of Los Angeles police department said on Twitter.

The Los Angeles airport said on its Twitter feed that it had no timetable for when the FBI would complete its investigation. It said its 100ft pylons would light the night blue until Sunday in Hernandez's honour. "RIP," the post said.

Late on Friday, FBI agents armed with a search warrant combed through Ciancia's home in the Los Angeles area, an FBI spokeswoman, Laura Eimiller, said.

Armed with an assault rifle, the shooter touched off panic and chaos at one of the world's busiest airports. Hundreds of travellers ran for safety or frantically dived for cover behind luggage, and loud alarms blared through the terminal.
Lauren Stephens, 47, said she had just put her luggage on the scale at the ticket counter in Terminal 3 when she heard a series of gunshots.

"Somebody just yelled 'Run' at the top of their lungs. ... I just left my bag and I just ran like hell. Everybody ran."

The gunman, a US citizen who appeared to be acting alone, pushed through the screening gates and ran into an area where passengers were boarding flights, before law enforcement officers caught up with him in a food court, Patrick Gannon, chief of the Los Angeles Airport police, said at a news conference. The officers shot him at least once and took him into custody, he said.

The FBI late on Friday could not provide the total number of people shot in the attack, Eimiller said. Paramedics took five who were wounded at the scene of the shooting to local hospitals, Los Angeles fire department officials said. But they could not say if all of those people had been shot.

The Los Angeles Times reported that among the wounded was Brian Ludmer, 29, who was shot in the leg and works as a high school teacher in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas.

The investigation into the attack will consider the shooting itself as well as the gunman's background and motivation, Bowdich said on Friday. "Our goal is to do a true scrub on the individual to find out what was the tipping point for this person," he said.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has asked that flags on city buildings be flown at half-staff, local media said.

In New Jersey, police and FBI agents descended on Ciancia's family's home in Pennsville Township. Pennsville's police chief, Allen Cummings, said he had been contacted by Ciancia's father before the shooting, prompted by a troubling text message from the young man to his brother.

The police chief declined to say more about what was in the text message but said that family members told investigators they had no previous indications that Ciancia, who moved to California about 18 months ago, was troubled.
A US official who asked not to be identified said federal investigators were trying to determine if the gunman had been targeting TSA agents in the rampage.

Neighbours who live across the street from the Ciancia family said the father, also named Paul, runs an auto body shop in the town.

"I believe he worked for his father," said one neighbour, Jennifer Pagan, of the younger Paul. Her husband, Orlando Pagan, said the elder Ciancia had made several friendly gestures since they had moved into their house 10 years ago. When Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey last year, "he asked if we wanted to take our personal vehicle and put it on his property". The Ciancia property is slightly higher.

The Terminal 3 shooting incident affected an estimated 1,550 arriving and departing flights carrying over 167,000 passengers, an airport spokeswoman, Nancy Castles, said in a statement. A number of those flights were grounded or diverted as police evacuated passengers and shut down three terminals.


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Said & Done – the week in football: Rangers, Fifa and PSG

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 02:18 PM PDT

The week in football: Rangers' fresh start; PSG's 'partner in dreams'; Vampeta's new job; plus model news

Man of the week

Ex-Rangers director Dave King: bidding to return and lead the club's recovery from last year's collapse over unpaid tax. King says press questions over his fitness for the job – two months after his conviction for unpaid tax in South Africa – are "speculative and misinformed".

• Among the difficult moments from King's tax case in South Africa – which ended in August with him repaying £44m to avoid an 82-year prison sentence: a 2010 tribute from judge Mr Justice Southwood: "[Mr King] is extremely arrogant and obviously thinks that whatever he says is so … As his evidence progressed it became clear that he has no respect for the truth and does not hesitate to lie … We are unanimous in finding he is a mendacious witness … [who] showed no sign of embarrassment or any emotion … In our assessment, he is a glib and shameless liar."

Meanwhile: FIfa's week

• Sepp, urging the press not to be one‑eyed over the Qatar slave state evidence, ahead of his fact-finding mission there this week. "It's like a bell that goes ding dong. You have only one end: we have to look at the other side too."

• Award of the week: African confederation head Issa Hayatou, warned by the IOC in 2011 for his part in Fifa's ISL bribery scandal, receiving an Olympic Order of Merit from Algeria's Olympic Committee for "services to football".

• Plus, investment of the week: Fifa revealing their total spending on putting 32 teams into eight groups at December's World Cup draw ceremony in Brazil: £5.6m.

PR news: quote of the week

Paris Saint-Germain CEO Jean-Claude Blanc, confirming their new €150m a year sponsorship deal with Qatar's tourism authority – a deal that makes PSG and Qatar "partners in dreams": "It clearly benefits the image, as well as the results, of the club."

• Qatar's verdict on what it gets for its money: "By partnering with Paris Saint-Germain, Qatar associates itself with Paris, a destination of choice with which we share a sense of prestige, ambition and excellence."

Best generosity

Manchester United sponsors Chevrolet: putting a car worth £15,500 up for auction, signed by United players, to "support the club's community work" – eight months after handing the players a free car each, tailored to suit "their needs and lifestyles". (Michael Carrick on his Corvette GS: "I used to have a Dodge Viper but haven't had a sports car for a while, so this is a great opportunity for me.")

The week in racism

Last week's assessments:

1) CSKA president Evgeny Giner on what lies behind the focus on racist abuse in Russia. "It's nonsense. The British are always making stuff up because they lost their World Cup bid." His wider verdict: "How can there be racism in Russia? Half our country is non-white."

2) Michel Platini, weighing up criticism: "No one is tougher on racism than Uefa."

Most disciplined

Romania: Steaua's Gabriel Iancu – frozen out of the side following last month's €100,000 fine for "unsportsmanlike behaviour" – both punishments "directly ordered by owner Gigi Becali, by phone from prison".

Manager news

Portugal, 25 Oct: Paços de Ferreira owner Carlos Barbosa on fan abuse of coach Costinha. "These fans are nothing. I'm not worried about them threatening me, it's just half a dozen people. We have faith in Costinha." 28 Oct: Sacks him. "That's football."

Mozambique: Chibuto coach Vitor Pontes, reinstated a week after being sacked following "pressure from club sponsors and local government" responding to public opinion. "I was surprised to be fired. I am surprised to return. My journey continues."

Owner to watch

Ex-Brazil player Vampeta: unveiled as Grêmio Osasco's new club president. Vampeta – famous for rolling off the stage while being presented with the national order of merit at Brazil's presidential palace in 2002 "due to drink" – says his approach in the job will be clear. "Juvêncio [president of São Paulo] talks a lot of shit, so I'm going to talk it too."

Best performance

Italy: ex-Parma keeper Lamberto "Bongo" Boranga, 71, on how he pulled off a flying mid-air save from Faustino Asprilla in an exhibition match last month. "It's my instinct – it never leaves you. Growing old brings changes, for better or for worse. But inside, I'll always be a keeper."

Row of the week

Romania: Rapid Suceava executive Florin Prunea, weighing up a criminal complaint brought by the club's fans alleging "a fraudulently bad performance, causing moral injury to over 2,000 spectators". Prunea: "They will pay for their slander. It's the dumbest crap I ever heard."

Plus: Strongest ambition

Brazil: Model Andressa Urach – looking to build on the publicity that followed her alleged "love romp" with Cristiano Ronaldo, which he denied. Urach, posing in a witch outfit, says she's eyeing increased appearance fees in 2014. "Men like evil women. I bewitch them with my essence."

David Hills

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Metropolitan police detained David Miranda for promoting 'political' causes

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 01:00 PM PDT

Justification for airport detention of partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald alarms human rights groups and Tory MP

The detention of the partner of a former Guardian journalist has triggered fresh concerns after it emerged that a key reason cited by police for holding him under terrorism powers was the belief that he was promoting a "political or ideological cause".

The revelation has alarmed leading human rights groups and a Tory MP, who said the justification appeared to be without foundation and threatened to have damaging consequences for investigative journalism.

David Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who – often in collaboration with the Guardian – has broken many stories about the extent and scope of spying by the US National Security Agency. Miranda was stopped at Heathrow airport in August and held by the Metropolitan police for nine hours while on his way home to Brazil.

Miranda, it has been claimed, was carrying some 58,000 encrypted UK intelligence documents. He had spent a week in Berlin visiting a journalist, Laura Poitras, who has worked with Greenwald on many of his stories, which have been based on information leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Now documents referred to in court last week before a judicial review of Miranda's detention shine new light on the Metropolitan police's explanation for invoking terrorism powers – a decision critics have called draconian.

It became apparent during the court hearing that there were several drafts of the Port Circular Notice – the document used to request Miranda's detention under schedule 7 to the 2000 Terrorism Act – before the final version was submitted.

The draft that was finally used states: "Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security. We therefore wish to establish the nature of Miranda's activity, assess the risk that Miranda poses to national security and mitigate as appropriate."

The notice then went on to explain why police officers believed that the terrorism act was appropriate.

"We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people's lives. Additionally the disclosure or threat of disclosure is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism and as such we request that the subject is examined under schedule 7."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the police assessment represented a "chilling" threat to democracy. "More and more we are shocked but not surprised," she said. "Breathtakingly broad anti-terror powers passed under the last government continue to be abused under the coalition that once trumpeted civil liberties.

"The express admission that politics motivated the detention of David Miranda should shame police and legislators alike. It's not just the schedule 7 detention power that needs urgent overhaul, but a definition of terrorism that should chill the blood of any democrat."

Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship, which campaigns for free speech, said that the police's justification for Miranda's detention was "very dangerous" for investigative journalism. "The whole point of such journalism is to find stuff the government doesn't want raised," he said. "The message this gives off is 'don't find this sort of stuff, or you will be treated as a terrorist'."

Greenwald was equally scathing, tweeting: "UK govt beats its mighty chest, now explicitly equates journalism with 'terrorism' and 'espionage'."

The home secretary, Theresa May, has criticised the Guardian's decision to publish the Snowden leaks. May has said she agrees with the assessment of Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, that the newspaper had damaged Britain's national security. But Conservative MP Dominic Raab said: "The assertion that national security has been undermined has been bandied around wildly and not explained in any cogent way."

And he questioned the police's handling of the Miranda affair. "If he was behaving in such a nefarious way why wasn't he arrested, charged and bailed?" Raab said. "If he was guilty of putting national security at risk, then why did they let him go?"

Gwendolen Morgan of Bindmans, Miranda's solicitors, said this week's judicial review will focus on whether the use of schedule 7 was disproportionate and whether it was incompatible with the inalienable right to freedom of expression.

"We will argue that draconian counter-terrorism powers were used in our client's case for an improper purpose," Morgan said. "Not to determine whether our client could in any sense be considered a 'terrorist', but rather to retrieve potentially embarrassing journalistic material in his possession."

The impact of Snowden's leaks on national security is expected to be addressed this week when parliament's intelligence and security committee will question the heads of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ in public for the first time.

Jamie Doward

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NSA: Australia and US used climate change conference to spy on Indonesia

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 12:21 PM PDT

Australian agency helped carry out mass surveillance of hosts as Kevin Rudd walked world stage at 2007 Bali conference

Ewen MacAskill
Lenore Taylor

Toronto mayor Rob Ford refuses to resign over 'crack cocaine' video

Posted: 02 Nov 2013 12:14 PM PDT

Pressure mounts on the mayor of Canada's biggest city after police seize a video that appears to show him smoking drugs

The embattled Toronto mayor Rob Ford reiterated on Saturday that he will not resign despite mounting pressure for him to step aside after police said they had obtained a copy of a video that appears to show the mayor puffing on a crack pipe.

Ford smiled outside his office and said: "No. As I told you before I'm not resigning."

Allegations that the mayor of Canada's largest city had been caught on the video smoking crack cocaine first surfaced in May. Two reporters with the Toronto Star and one from the US website Gawker said they saw the video but did not obtain a copy. Police Chief Bill Blair said he was "disappointed" in Ford at a news conference on Thursday in which he announced that the video had been recovered from a computer hard drive during an investigation of an associate of the mayor's suspected of providing him drugs.

The Toronto Board of Trade called for Ford to take a leave of absence, saying the mayor needs to put the city first. All four major Toronto newspapers have called on Ford to resign.

Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly, a Ford ally, said on Friday that he would meet Ford on Saturday to express the concerns of many city council members. Kelly said he hoped Ford would make the right decision.

More damaging information has also come to light about Ford's bizarre behaviour. A spokeswoman for the city of Toronto released a security incident report from city hall security guards who say they witnessed a "very intoxicated' Ford having trouble walking, sweating profusely and swearing at aides after St Patrick's Day in 2012.

The report states that at 2:30am the mayor "visited the security desk alone with a half empty bottle of St Remy French brandy". The report states the mayor said his car had been stolen and that he wanted to call police. Security informed Ford his car was at home and took the bottle from him before finding him a taxi.

City officials changed course and agreed to release the document after Toronto police confirmed they had obtained the crack video this week.
Toronto City councillor Shelley Carroll said Ford has hurt morale at city hall and urged him to take a leave of absence.

"The mayor's personal life has gradually overtaken his professional life and the findings that came to light over the week confirm many of the urban legends that existed," Carroll said. "We now know that mayor's personal life frequently, on a day to day basis, overshadows what he should be doing as a mayor."

Despite the pressure on Ford, municipal law makes no provision for his forced removal from office unless he is convicted and jailed for a criminal offence. Voters may have the final word in the October 2014 mayoral election in which Ford has said he plans to run.

Police said the video will come out when Ford's associate and occasional driver, Alexander Lisi, goes to trial on drug and extortion charges. Lisi, who was released on bail on Friday morning, is accused of threatening two alleged gang members who had been trying to sell the video to the media.

The mayor himself is not facing any charges. However, police have said they want to talk to him, but his lawyer has so far declined the request.


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