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• An Officer and a Spy review – Robert Harris's thriller based on the Dreyfus Affair
• Crimea crisis deepens as Russia and Ukraine ready forces - live updates
• If DOMA was the Battle of Normandy, this week was the liberation of Paris | Roberta Kaplan
• Crimea crisis: threat of full-scale Russian intervention mounts
• The Birds of Paradise Project | video | @GrrlScientist
• Matteo Renzi has to break Italy from its past| Ashoka Mody
• Scotland: MPs to examine civil service impartiality ahead of referendum
• 'Without music, would we even be Jewish?'
• Lucy Mangan: why I'm unsuited to world domination
• Ellen DeGeneres: The star who came out of the cold
• Fairtrade: how a few pence can make a big difference
• My mother was Emperor Hirohito's poster child
• New York murder fugitive traced to Australia using secret DNA samples
• Australian women make poor start to world surfing event in Gold Coast
• Boston Marathon bombing: Tsarnaev's defence team want charges thrown out
• Mardi Gras under way in Sydney with Queen Elizabeth's blessing
• Thailand protest leader promises to clear streets, moving campaign to park
• Bus attack: two women charged with assaulting partially blind man
• Morwell mine fire: people offered free train trips to escape smoke
• Russian 'invasion' of Crimea fuels fear of Ukraine conflict
• Labour rejects left's candidate for next European commission president
• Ukraine: Night Wolves and unidentified military men seize key Crimea sites
• NHS data will not be sold to insurance companies, Jeremy Hunt says
• Credibility of witness in Texas execution case is questioned

An Officer and a Spy review – Robert Harris's thriller based on the Dreyfus Affair Posted: 02 Mar 2014 03:30 AM PST Robert Harris has crafted a compelling narrative of state corruption and individual principle The Dreyfus Affair constitutes one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about. Even among well educated people there's often little more than a headline understanding of antisemitism, a French miscarriage of justice, Devil's Island and Emile Zola's famous attack on the French establishment's conspiracy against the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus: J'accuse. But the real story is like something from the imagination of Alexandre Dumas, full of intrigue, wrongful imprisonment and heroic effort to establish the truth. In other words, it's a thriller and there is no more deft hand at work in that genre than Robert Harris. But unlike previous Harris thrillers, this is not a historical counterfactual, but, save for a few small fictional details, an almost documentary-like assemblage of what actually took place. Dreyfus was convicted of passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island, where he was forbidden even to speak to his guards. But he was an innocent fall guy, fingered by the military and the government because he was conveniently Jewish, while the real culprit was allowed to continue at dissolute liberty to avoid the embarrassment of the public knowledge that there was a non-Jewish – ie authentic French – spy in the army. The hero of the piece, however, is not Dreyfus, who despite his dreadful suffering, is a minor and not particularly sympathetic character. Instead, Harris unearths the tale of Georges Picquart, the French officer who initially played a part in Dreyfus's arrest, only to be struck by a growing suspicion that the wrong man had been sent away. Although not without his own flaws, including a glint of antisemitism, Picquart is a man who can't let anything lie – even when it is beneficial to him. After Dreyfus's incarceration he is made head of a secret intelligence unit called the "statistical section". But he finds himself a victim of a sinister campaign when he begins to ask uncomfortable questions. While finely attuned to modern resonances of surveillance, cultural identity and patriotic loyalty, Harris stays true to the atmosphere and morals of the period. He has crafted a compelling narrative of state corruption and individual principle, and a memorable whistleblower whose stubborn call can still be heard more than a century later. Fiction History Robert Harris France Europe Thrillers Andrew Anthony theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Crimea crisis deepens as Russia and Ukraine ready forces - live updates Posted: 01 Mar 2014 04:35 AM PST Follow the day's developments as tensions continue to escalate in Crimea and US warns Russia of 'costs' if Moscow intervenes Conal Urquhart

If DOMA was the Battle of Normandy, this week was the liberation of Paris | Roberta Kaplan Posted: 01 Mar 2014 04:30 AM PST Roberta Kaplan: Why the tidal wave of marriage rulings across America won't stop until one case is back at the Supreme Court again Roberta Kaplan

Crimea crisis: threat of full-scale Russian intervention mounts Posted: 01 Mar 2014 02:41 AM PST Kremlin says it will not 'leave unnoticed' request by prime minister of Ukrainian region for Moscow's assistance The prospect of a full-scale Russian military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula mounted on Saturday, as the region's new prime minister asked for Vladimir Putin's assistance and a Kremlin source said it would "not leave unnoticed" the request. The pro-Russian prime minister of the region asked for Moscow's assistance in keeping the peace and claimed he had control of all military, police and other security services. The call by Sergei Aksenov came after armed men described as Russian troops took control of key airports and a communications centre in Crimea on Friday, and Ukraine accused Russia of a "military invasion and occupation". In the reply the Russian foreign ministry said it was "extremely concerned" about the recent developments in Crimea, which it said confirmed the desire of Kiev's politicians to destabilise the situation on the peninsula. The foreign ministry also accused pro-Kiev gunmen of attempting to take over the interior ministry headquarters in the region, claiming several injuries had occurred. "In Russia, we are extremely concerned about the recent developments in Crimea," the foreign ministry said in a statement. "We believe it is extremely irresponsible to further pressure the already tense situation in the Crimea." In the escalating war of words between Kiev and Moscow, Ukraine's defence minister, Ihor Tenyukh, accused Russia of having "recently" brought 6,000 additional personnel into Ukraine and that the Ukrainian military were on high alert in the Crimea region. The Crimean peninsula is home to a key Russian strategic naval base for the Black Sea fleet which it leases from Ukraine under an agreement. Russian officials claimed on Friday that military movements in the region were covered by that agreement – a claim denied by Kiev. The latest statements from both sides in the crisis follow mounting concern in the west, which on Friday prompted a statement from the US president, Barack Obama. Obama warned Moscow on Friday "there will be costs" if it intervenes militarily. His comments came after the British foreign secretary, William Hague, announced he would travel to Kiev on Sunday for talks with the new government there. The latest escalation of tension in Ukraine, where Viktor Yunukovych was deposed as president a week ago following mass demonstrations in whicvh more than 80 people died, came after armed men described as Russian troops took control of key airports and a communications centre in Crimea on Friday. Ukraine's population is divided in loyalties between Russia and the west, with much of western Ukraine advocating closer ties with the European Union while eastern and southern regions look to Russia for support. Crimea, a south-eastern peninsula of Ukraine that has semi-autonomous status, was seized by Russian forces in the 18th century under Catherine the Great. It became part of Ukraine in 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred jurisdiction from Russia, a move that was a mere formality until the 1991 Soviet collapse meant Crimea landed in an independent Ukraine. Moscow has taken a confrontational stance toward its southern neighbour after pro-Russian Yanukovych fled the country. Aksenov, the head of the main pro-Russia party on the peninsula, said in his statement that he appealed to Putin "for assistance in guaranteeing peace and calmness on the territory of the autonomous republic of Crimea." Aksenov was appointed by the Crimean parliament on Thursday after pro-Russian gunmen seized the building and as tensions soared over Crimea's resistance to the new authorities in Kiev, who took power last week. Ukraine Europe Russia Vladimir Putin United States Peter Beaumont theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Birds of Paradise Project | video | @GrrlScientist Posted: 01 Mar 2014 02:37 AM PST A video introduction to the world's most visually stunning and remarkable birds that are hidden away upon the most rugged and inaccessible island on Earth. It's caturday, but today's video will make you think this day should be renamed to honour birds. This is because I am sharing a video that will inspire you and that may change you forever. As a child, I read the book The Malay Archipelago, by influential biogeographer and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and immediately fell in love with the region, particularly with New Guinea and its amazing birds. One of my favourite bird families, the birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), live only on New Guinea, a few nearby islands, and a small area of northern Australia. The birds-of-paradise form a family of songbirds comprised of 39 (or 41) species. These birds, whose ancestor was a member of the crow family, evolved a spectacular range of plumage colours, structures and patterns that the males display in complex courtship dances to woo females. Long known about by Western scientists, artists and explorers, these birds are poorly understood because few people have seen them in nature. They live in the most remote, rugged and inacessible areas on Earth, which makes them almost impossible to watch, to study, and to photograph. "Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained", as Wallace wrote in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1862 (p. 160). Enter the Birds-of-paradise Project. In 2003, wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman was on assignment for National Geographic to photograph the birds-of-paradise. He teamed up with Ed Scholes, a graduate student at the University of Kansas who was studying the Parotia birds-of-paradise for his Ph.D. When Laman's National Geographic article was published in 2007, they had managed to photograph half of all birds-of-paradise species. Of course, this inspired Scholes and Laman to plan to document the remainder of these birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Geographic Expeditions Council, and Conservation International provided the funding necessary for the team to conduct additional expeditions into ever more remote parts of New Guinea. By the time they photographed the last species eight years later, Scholes and Laman had made 18 expeditions, stayed in 51 different field camps, climbed hundreds of trees, built dozens of blinds, made thousands of video and audio recordings, spent more than a year and a half of cumulative time in the field, and taken more than 39,000 photos. The last species they documented? The Jobi manucode, Manucodia jobiensis, a glossy blue-black bird that outshines an obsidian. You can purchase some of Laman and Scholes' remarkable photographs, which are featured in their book, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World's Most Extraordinary Birds [National Geographic, 2012; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US]. But the book is only the beginning -- there is so much more to the Birds-of-paradise Project. This video shows you a little about the project to document all species of the birds-of-paradise on film: [Video link] This autumn, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Geographic will share the Birds-of-Paradise Project with the world. But you can get a sneak peak now: in this sneak peak, you will learn about New Guinea, the scientists and photographers behind this project, and the remarkable birds on the Birds of Paradise Project website. This interactive website includes free lesson plans for your classroom, and lists the dates for when the traveling museum exhibition will pop up in your city. The project is designed to reveal the diverse evolutionary strategies that are at work in this avian family so you can experience one of nature's truly extraordinary wonders. I've been playing with their beautifully-designed website for more than an hour, and there's still so much more to explore. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Although GrrlScientist deeply longs to be in the rainforests of New Guinea, studying birds, she instead can be found here: Maniraptora. She's very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Birds Zoology Animal behaviour Animals Birdwatching Science and nature Papua New Guinea Australasia Australia GrrlScientist theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Matteo Renzi has to break Italy from its past| Ashoka Mody Posted: 01 Mar 2014 02:00 AM PST Italy needs audacious investment in education and infrastructure if it is to embrace the generational change it needs The brash, 39-year-old Matteo Renzi is Italy's third unelected prime minister since November 2011. Mario Monti lasted 13 months, and his successor, Enrico Letta, resigned two weeks ago after less than a year in office. The generational leadership change is an opportunity. But can Italy break from its past? Short-lived Italian governments are the norm. The unending political drama reflects the competition for power and resources amid entrenched economic malaise. Chronically unable to put their economic house in order, Italian elites are again thrashing around for a solution, this time at the risk of losing democratic legitimacy. The simple statistic is that Italian public debt is 132% of GDP – and rising. The International Monetary Fund projects that the debt ratio could start falling if the government undertakes heroic belt-tightening. That means a primary budget surplus (not accounting for interest payments) rising to 5% of GDP, and possibly staying near that high level for years beyond. Such extraordinary levels of persistent austerity can fray the political fabric. They can also be economically disastrous. Austerity is to be accompanied by the elixir of structural reforms to spur growth. Even if these reforms materialise, economist Gauti Eggertsson warns that things get worse before they get better. The decline in prices needed to regain competitiveness will cause the debt burden to rise and demand to fall. Anaemic growth and deflationary conditions will follow relentlessly, and the already distressed banks could be pushed into seizure. In January 2014, annual inflation was down to 0.6% from 2.4% a year earlier. Italy has lived on the edge for four decades. Earlier on, the option existed of inflating the debt away and devaluing the exchange rate to regain a foothold in global markets. The Italian lira underwent repeated devaluations between 1973 and 1976, and the devaluation in 1992 brought the euro's precursor, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, to its knees. The euro was expected to bring new discipline. It demanded discipline because it closed the traditional vents of inflation and exchange rate depreciation. The euro – which failed to garner support in two European national referendums, and would have failed in others – enjoyed support among Italians weary of their irresponsible leaders. But, introduced in January 1999, the euro did not help. Any early signs of a new resolve vanished as the swift fall in interest rates eased the pressure. An October 2001 IMF assessment of Italy concluded: "Growth has disappointed over the past decade … and major fiscal challenges remain." The report spoke of deep-rooted structural problems and "difficult choices in streamlining public spending". Over the succeeding years, nothing changed. The IMF's annual reports predictably repeated the same messages, to no avail. Those admonitions continue to carry an eerie relevance today. The presumption is that the looming threat of disaster will finally summon the political will and the economic patience to endure the grim years ahead, while Italy's bondholders are kept at bay by the European central bank's outright monetary transactions programme. But is Italy up to the challenge? The American scientist and author Jared Diamond has warned that crises do not always lead to renewal. Exhausted societies cannot summon the energy to respond to a new crisis. Italy is stuck producing goods that can be made more cheaply in countries where wages are low. In the OECD's 2012 Programme of International Student Assessment of 15-year-olds in maths, science and reading, Italian students lagged behind their counterparts in advanced countries. Research and development have fallen woefully behind. It is possible that Italy will thread the eye of the needle. But it is easier to foresee scenarios in which Italian growth and inflation are even weaker than now projected, and debt ratios keep rising. At what point do bondholders gratefully take the ECB's offer to repay them? If the legality of that offer is then in question – or because the ECB's purchases are "effectively limited" – things could get ugly. The policy choice is straightforward – to stay the course and keep fingers crossed or to take bolder action now to prevent future catastrophe. Italy can no longer tinker. A true generational change, one that harnesses aspirational energy for a brighter future, requires audacious investment in education and infrastructure. This must be paid for by new budget priorities and, importantly, by negotiating longer, Uruguay-style terms of repayment with creditors. That bargain is in everyone's interests, and is needed to keep Italy in the eurozone. As Letta left office, he sorrowfully remarked to his associates: "It's true: Italy breaks your heart." The stakes are high. Italy may break more than that. Italy Europe Austerity Economics Eurozone crisis European Union European monetary union Banking European banks Financial crisis Financial sector Euro Ashoka Mody theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scotland: MPs to examine civil service impartiality ahead of referendum Posted: 01 Mar 2014 02:00 AM PST Civil service global roundup: World Bank recommends overhaul in Cyprus and half of Italy's new ministers are women Scotland: MPs to examine civil service impartiality ahead of referendum Westminster's public administration select committee has launched an inquiry into the role of the civil service in the lead up to the vote on Scottish independence in September. The inquiry comes after Scottish finance secretary John Swinney complained that advice given to George Osborne from top Treasury civil servant Sir Nicholas Macpherson about a potential currency union had crossed the line of civil service impartiality. The committee will look into the dual obligations Scottish civil servants have to their ministers and the UK civil service as a whole. Cyprus: World Bank recommends overhaul of the civil service A report on restructuring public service by the World Bank suggests that Cyprus needs to overhaul civil service pay scales and the evaluation system so that fewer workers can be promoted. The report found that public sector employees on low salaries receive wages of up to 207% more than their private sector counterparts, while managers and senior officials receive 20% less than corresponding positions in the private sector. The World Bank said the problem lies in a flawed evaluation system. Oman: more than 88% of civil servants now Omanis The latest employment figures show that 88.4% of more than 150,000 civil service staff are Omani citizens. More than 2,700 Omanis replaced expatriates working in the public sector between 2011 and 2013. The drive to introduce more Omani employees into the public sector has been a challenge because of a lack of qualified graduates in areas such as engineering. US: Harvard professor on how to reform the civil service In an interview with the Washington Post, Linda Bilmes, a professor at the John F Kennedy school of government at Harvard University, said the US should change how it thinks about public employees, "as treasures, not as costs". She said managers in federal government do not know how to deal with poor performers and the recruitment system into the civil service "is profoundly in need of reform". Bilmes also suggested that government needed to do more to boost morale and advance technologically. Italy: half of 16 ministers in new government are women The new government formed by prime minister Matteo Renzi is younger and more female than ever before – the average age of cabinet ministers is just 48 and half of them are women. This is despite Italy's high levels of gender inequality and youth unemployment. Italy has a quarter of Europe's 6 million 15- to 24-year-olds who are not in education or employment, and the country's national institute of statistics reported recently that women earn half of what men earn over a lifetime. • Want your say? Email us at public.leaders@theguardian.com. Join the Public Leaders Network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on twitter via @Guardianpublic. Global public leaders series Public service reform Civil service World Bank Cyprus Scotland United States Italy Oman theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

'Without music, would we even be Jewish?' Posted: 01 Mar 2014 01:30 AM PST Women's singing is taboo and so is listening to music in a time of loss – but song is part of every celebration and occasion. Norman Lebrecht explores the history of music and Jews, from King David to Leonard Cohen • Never mind the swastikas: For some Jewish people, UK punk was a home and inspiration .... Early in the 1980s, a pop legend in a mid-life lull reached back into ancient history for inspiration. The song did not come easy. Banging his head in frustration on a hotel-room floor, Leonard Cohen ground out about 80 stanzas before finally achieving the perfect anthem that is "Hallelujah". And no one got it. CBS Records rejected the album. After a 1984 indie release, "Hallelujah" hung in limbo for a decade until Jeff Buckley, sighing deeply over a steel guitar, gave a soft, introspective reinterpretation. Buckley's death by drowning in 1997 added a tragic aura to the song. The producers of Shrek called in Rufus Wainwright to record it for the soundtrack. Cohen, having been fleeced by a felonious manager, went back on the road, singing "Hallelujah" in a trademark brown hat. X Factor hopefuls heard it and one belted it out to victory. Suddenly, "Hallelujah" was being downloaded 100,000 times a day and turning into the most covered pop song of the 21st century. Amid the resurrective clamour, few grasped the leap that Cohen had made into the past. In the depths of despair, he had sought the "secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord" across three millennia of human creation, appealing as one lost Jew to an ancestor for the primal gift of music. I think I know where he was coming from. Growing up in a devout and learned north London home, I became aware of the taboos and tensions that prevailed between Jews and music. I learned, for instance, that Jews, mourning the destruction of their temple in 70AD, were forbidden by rabbis to sing or play music, all the way down to Moses Maimonides in the 12th century. I knew, too, that a woman's voice was proscribed by the Talmud as "nakedness" and that hearing a woman sing was equivalent to having an illicit sexual liaison. Thrilling as that may have seemed to my boyish mind, women's singing really was taboo. As was listening to music for seven and a half dark weeks of the year and at times of personal loss. In sorrow, music was the first thing to be switched off. Yet, amid these constraints, music was everywhere. At any solemnity or celebration, someone would start a tune. There would be singing at all Sabbath meals. Since my father was tone deaf, it was my grownup sisters who floated the melodies that I, at three or four years old, learned to harmonise by ear. Music was our means of togetherness. Without music, I remember thinking, would we even be Jewish? So when Radio 3 commissioned me to make a three-part series about music and the Jews, I made the decision to avoid popular cliches of "Jewish music" – klezmer bands, cantorial wails, Ladino lullabies – and focus on some of the bigger questions. How, for instance, has music shaped the character and history of the Jews? How did Jews influence music? Biggest of all, can music define personal and collective identity? I started where Cohen did, in search of the elusive King David: poet, musician, warrior, sexual malefactor and author of a book of psalms that forms the basis of worship for Jews and Christians alike. Though there isn't  much evidence that David wrote all or any of the 71 psalms that bear his name, we cannot read them today without becoming aware of this musician's private world, his inner ear. Walking on the ramparts of Jerusalem, Yehoshua Engelman, a London-born rabbi turned psychotherapist, and I discuss Psalm 51, the one about sex with Bathsheba, the one where Cohen sings: "Your faith was strong but you needed proof / You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you." How could David, having sent a man to his death so he could steal his wife, sit down and write "Hallelujah"? "With great difficulty," explains Yehoshua. "The Talmud tells us that David was punished for his sin." "How's that?" "He was deprived of his music for 10 years." Time stops still on the wall of David's city. Yehoshua's reading of Psalm 51 is that David was rendered musically, and perhaps sexually, impotent by guilt, an idea that does not exist until Freud adduces it in 20th-century Vienna. Could Jewish guilt be rooted in Jewish music? American composer Steve Reich came to Jerusalem in the 1970s in search of his Jewish roots. His epiphany arrived while listening to the way Yemenites enunciate the Psalms. "I just had to chant a verse [with them]," he recalls, "and a melody popped into my head. What is that? It was an unconscious dredging up of Bulgarian rhythms from Béla Bartók, changing rhythms in The Rite of Spring, all unbidden. But it introduced a new kind of rhythmic writing for me, a specific idea of combining twos and threes into five/eights, seven/eights; something I hadn't done before." Reich considers his psalmic score, Tehillim, to be his towering masterpiece. Tehillim were the songs of the temple. The search for their lost music is a bimillennial obsession. In 1905, a cantor called Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem from South Africa and, like Bartók in the Balkans, began recording old men's songs on wire machines. Applying new techniques of academic musicology, he surmised that the Jews of Yemen came closest to temple music. At the National Sound Archive in Jerusalem, I played Idelsohn's cylinders and consider his boldest conclusion – that Yemenite-Jewish microtones lie at the root of Gregorian chant, and hence of all Christian music. The creative potential of this source remains limitless. The music of modern Israel is driven by Yemenite singers – Bracha Zefira, Shoshana Damari, Ofra Haza and Achinoam Nini, known as Noa. All are women, therefore silenced by Judaism and Islam. "I am Yemenite and I am Jewish," declares Noa, who sang on the Eurovision song contest with a Palestinian, Mira Awad. "You find a way to work around the restrictions and that gives you a lot of strength and develops your creativity to amazing heights." In a Tel Aviv apartment, I meet the anthropologist Tova Gamliel, an authority on mourning, and ask her to demonstrate the oldest known Jewish sound – the keening of Yemenite women. Gamliel stands, composes herself and sings a visceral, chilling trope that freezes my fingers to the chair. "The role," she explains, "is to make people cry, to express sorrow in a very aesthetic performance. But the song has a text – the life of the departed – and the singer can vary that according to what the person deserves, good or bad. She is telling the others: when you die, I may not be so generous." The power of life after death was vested in a woman. "She was the only one who had this right. People were very afraid of her, very respectful," says Gamliel. When the keening ends, the woman recomposes herself, then tells a joke. Life must go on. Myriam Fuks from Brussels is an eighth-generation Yiddish singer whose repertoire has passed from mother to daughter for two centuries. Myriam's mother, Frania, sang in Warsaw theatres, survived the Warsaw ghetto. Myriam wakes in the morning with fragments of Frania's hundreds of songs. Unable to remember the refrain, she asks the pianist Martha Argerich to improvise for her on a new recording. The need to keep memory alive by song, I discover, a driving Jewish motivation. It was the late 1820s before Jews were allowed into western music. There had been isolated intrusions – Salomone Rossi in Monteverdi's Mantua, Lorenzo da Ponte in Mozart's Vienna – but it took a pair of bankers' sons from Berlin, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to change the culture. Mendelssohn, aside from his own concert works, restored Bach's oratorios to public performance – "giving classical music its Old Testament", according to one of my contributors. Meyerbeer blew out the walls of existing opera houses with gargantuan music dramas, paving the way for Richard Wagner and the romantic imagination. Wagner, in a notorious 1850 pamphlet, "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Judaism in Music"), named Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer as symptoms of the Jews' "infinitely small" ability to write music. He demanded the exclusion of Jews from German music, a blueprint for Hitler's ethnic cleansing. Like most bigots, Wagner lived in fear of the other, the unknown, the unimagined. At the end of his century Arnold Schoenberg, exasperated to his Jewish core by the tonal corsets of German music, ripped them off in two creative revolutions, atonal and serial. Orchestral music would never sound the same again. Around the same time, on the front stoops of New York brownstones, the sons of Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms and of former African-Caribbean slaves from the deep south found an unsuspected common taste for busy rhythms, minor keys and blue notes. Their conversation signalled the birth of pop music. How Jewish was that? George Gershwin, the most restless and creative of the early writers, never concealed his Jewish roots. When he sang "It Ain't Necessarily So", he not only challenged Scripture with Talmudic argument, he actually sang it in the traditional mode of Talmudic study. Visiting the Yiddish theatre star grandparents of the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Gershwin talked of the freygish mode as the key to America's popular music. Freygish is Yiddish for questioning. What Jews added to pop music was a quizzical note. Michael Grade, heir to an entertainment dynasty and ex-chair of the BBC, explains why Jews were so big in showbiz. "There's something in the DNA of the Jews that makes us adept at assimilating," he explains. "There's a great openness to what's going on. We are watching the audience, trying to keep in touch with what the audience wants. The best of the impresarios – I'd include my uncles and my late father – would be just ahead, not too far ahead, of public taste. And ready to take a chance on talent. Things are never the same again after the great talent has spoken." Jews became tastemakers, Grade believes, because they had learned to listen out for any change in the wind. A key to survival became a tool in identifying and managing public taste without sacrificing a hardwon identity. Schoenberg's last words on a sheet of music paper were: "Ich bin ein kleiner Judenbub." (I am a little Jewish boy.) Gustav Mahler used to say: "A Jew is like a swimmer with a short arm. He has to work harder to reach shore." Jews made music out of an awareness of their Jewishness. That perspective makes a generic concept of "Jewish music" uninteresting and largely irrelevant beside the transformations that Jews brought to music wherever they lived, and the changes that music wrought in the matter of being Jewish. Could anyone, I have always wondered, be Jewish without music? "It doesn't matter which you heard," sings Leonard Cohen, "the holy, or the broken." Hallelujah! • Music and the Jews begins on Radio 3 on 9 March. Leonard Cohen Judaism Religion theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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Lucy Mangan: why I'm unsuited to world domination Posted: 01 Mar 2014 01:00 AM PST I want working TV remote controls, not pet ostriches Oh, to be in Ukraine, now spring is here and the gates to your deposed president's secret wonderland compound have been stoved in and you're free to wander! Have you seen the photos of former potentate Viktor Yanukovych's 140-hectare spread (that's half the size of Monaco, fact fans)? The private zoo! The hidden golf course! The colonnaded gardens stalked by ostriches! The hovercraft! The helipad! The converted ship/restaurant – for the autocrat who now has everything! Except, as it turned out, the endless adoration of the people. The people is a bit narked. What I love is the consistency. Of course the mind that surveys a shattered fragment of post-Soviet imperium and instead of saying, "Bloody hell. Which way to US and nice pair of blue jeans?" says, "You know what? I could really do something with this", is not going to settle for an ordinary home, or even an ordinary presidential home ("Yeah, big reception – gonna be having some sort-of-a-state dinners – and a couple of columns outside, that should do it"). He's going to start with pet ostriches and work up from there. I find that cheering. There are only two downsides to the compound revelation. The first is that it demonstrates inescapably how unsuited I am to accomplishing the world domination for which I long. When I compile my list of luxuries for my perfect home it begins with "working remotes for telly and all-regions DVD player" and ends with "never running out of Ribena, somehow". That's not the limitless ambition of a born ruler. Then again, I only want to achieve world domination so that I can stop people on social media abbreviating "could", "would", "should" to "cld", "wld" and "shld". We each have our own consistency. (What's that? Oh – because you're effectively making silent letters sounded. You should leave out the unsounded "l"s, otherwise it looks like you mean "cold", "wield/wold/(possibly) world" and "shield". Yes! Now I have shown you the way, you know it makes sense.) The second downside is that it shows how sadly unlikely we are here to start our own revolution. In our septic isle, those who have it (about 17 members of eight families, all told – the faces and occasionally the political stripes change, the essence doesn't) have held it for long enough to become the arbiters of taste rather than transgressors of it. It's easier to rise against someone whose monstrously carbuncled soul is given visible form by his choice of habitation than against someone whose kitchen you secretly covet. We did muster some passing outrage about the floating duck house that became emblematic of the MPs' expenses scandal, but at the same time recognised it for what it was – a joke in a joke country. And the royals, at the top of the socioeconomic heap, avoid our ire by making all that advantage look so boring. Who is jealous of Buckingham Palace? Cold, draughty, full of Tupperware and tatty carpets, and it's on a busy main road. Sandringham? Not a single hovercraft. Unless you get your kicks from well-maintained ha-has, you'd die of boredom before you reached the boundary wall you were planning to leap over to freedom. Next time, Viktor, keep it on the down-low. Less is more, son. Less is more. Viktor Yanukovych Ukraine Europe Lucy Mangan theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ellen DeGeneres: The star who came out of the cold Posted: 28 Feb 2014 11:01 PM PST The US talkshow host and comedian has overcome adversity to become a bona fide American superstar and a household name In September, Ellen DeGeneres told the audience of her talkshow about the pros and cons of hosting the Academy Awards: "Pro: a lot of fancy designers will want to approach me and want me to wear a beautiful, expensive gown. Con: ain't no way in hell I'm wearing a gown." The audience erupted in cheers. Such vocal approval is an indication of how far both DeGeneres's fortunes and US public attitudes towards sexuality and gender have shifted. At the turn of the century, you could have been excused for thinking DeGeneres was down and out. After spending two decades establishing herself as one of the most popular comedians in the US, in 1997 she gambled everything on coming out as a lesbian, both in real life and in character on the hit sitcom that bore her name – and she seemed to lose. Advertisers deserted her show, her relationship with Anne Heche became tabloid fodder, she sank into depression and her career seemed to stall. Look at her now. DeGeneres hasn't just bounced back; she's a bona fide American superstar, with a juggernaut of a talk show, nearly three billion views on her YouTube channel, and more Twitter followers than Oprah Winfrey, CNN or any member of One Direction. She has done it on her own terms. And she definitely wears suits, not gowns – as she will when she hosts the awards for a second time on Sunday. DeGeneres has never been one to think small. Born outside New Orleans in 1958, she once said she decided early in life "I wanted to have money, I wanted to be special, I wanted people to like me, I wanted to be famous." One of the key aspects of her success is that she has achieved this, lost it all and come back stronger without coming across as ambitious or egocentric, let alone nasty or mean. Her amiability and approachability are crucial to her appeal, and perhaps her most politically significant attributes too. Overcoming adversity is a motif that repeats itself in DeGeneres' life. When she was a 21-year-old college dropout, she fought with her girlfriend Kat and left their apartment. When Kat found her at a rock concert and begged her to come home, Ellen ignored her. Minutes later, Kat was killed in a car crash. Devastated, DeGeneres almost fell into self-destruction but found herself in her work. She impulsively embarked on what would become her comedy career, writing a routine called A Phone Call to God that she decided – one day – she would perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Seven years of dedicated gigging later, in 1986, she did just that – and was the first female comedian he invited over for a chat after her routine. In 1994 DeGeneres landed her own ABC sitcom, called Ellen. Like Seinfeld, it combined wry observational standup with stories about social awkwardness: bookstore worker Ellen was basically likeable but clumsy and needy, with a tendency to ramble nervously and veer off on tangents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her penchant for deflection and self-effacement, Ellen was hiding something. Rumours about her sexuality grew and hints were dropped on the show until in 1997 both Ellen the character and DeGeneres the performer came out as gay. Oprah was involved in both cases, as therapist to the former and talkshow host to the latter when DeGeneres appeared on her show. Degeneres also gave an interview to Time magazine, appearing on the cover with the strapline "Yep, I'm Gay". "It's important to remember no one had done anything like that before," says Matt Kane of Glaad, the US lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender media advocacy group. "To come out on that scale – Ellen occupied a position in US pop culture that meant she introduced a lot of viewers to the reality of being gay or lesbian in a way they hadn't confronted." The coming out sparked a mini culture war, with many praising the comedian's courage while others recoiled. The TV evangelist Jerry Falwell branded her "Ellen DeGenerate". Initial support from advertisers and the network slipped away, audiences fell, and in May 1998 Ellen was cancelled. Four months later, Will & Grace – the first network sitcom with a lead character who was out from the start – debuted to considerable success. But Ellen was out in the cold. "I didn't work for three years," she has said. "I was so angry. I thought: I earned this. I didn't get this because I was beautiful; I didn't get this because I had connections in the business. I really worked my way up to a show, a sitcom that was mine that was successful, that was on for five years. I did what was right: I came out, which was good for me and ultimately it was the only thing I could do. And then I got punished for it." Meanwhile, her public profile took a hammering, not least because for the first time the press had a celebrity lesbian couple to fixate on in DeGeneres and Heche. Their unabashed displays of affection, including at the Clinton White House, were a lightning rod for criticism until they split in 2000. By then, DeGeneres was re-establishing herself as a major standup. She was praised when she hosted the Emmys soon after 9/11 – asking "what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?" – and secured a new sitcom on CBS. Momentum was gathering. In 2002, the lesbian culture website AfterEllen launched, its name confirming DeGeneres's coming out as a watershed moment. And in 2003, she stole the film Finding Nemo as scatterbrained Pacific regal blue tang Dory. In 2003, she launched The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Combining celebrity guests and comedy shtick – dancing with the audience, social-media blooper segments – it was fun and feelgood but in a comfy, pally way that contrasted with Oprah's messianic vibe. It won several Emmys in its first year and ratings climbed. They haven't stopped yet. In 2004, DeGeneres started dating the actor Portia di Rossi, whom she married in 2008 and lives with in apparently blissful, tabloid-unfriendly domesticity. "She's a great symbol of how far we've come," says Kane. "From losing nearly all her major sponsors after she came out, she's now one of America's most popular talk show hosts. Her screen presence is very welcoming. She can be quick-witted and sharp without being mean-spirited, which has really endeared her to audiences. She connects by doing what she does best: talking about shared experiences." Prejudice against any given group is harder to maintain once people get to know a member of it. "Housewives who might have been disapproving when Ellen came out have got to know her," says Kane. "They see she's not the frightening activist they might have thought, but someone they want to spend time with on a daily basis." DeGeneres' new mainstream popularity was cemented in 2007 when she hosted the Oscars for the first time. The fact that she was the first openly gay person to do so was perhaps less interesting than the sense that she was tapped because of her upbeat tone, a marked shift from two years of distinctly barbed hosting from Chris Rock and Jon Stewart. Now DeGeneres was the go-to act to keep everyone calm. "These days it seems that everyone loves DeGeneres," W magazine noted. "Her distinctive hip populism cuts across divergent demographics while alienating no one … She just seems so nice and so normal." It might have taken a decade, but DeGeneres had reclaimed her position as a kind of national best buddy. But she has kept getting bigger. Her talk show goes from strength to strength, clocking up ever-growing ratings, 33 Emmys to date and A-list guests (Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep in recent weeks). Last month, the New York Times called her the new Oprah", noting her extraordinary advertising pull and growing range of branded products and media ventures, and suggesting her show has "helped fuel a full-fledged cultural movement, in which bullying is not OK". Certainly, DeGeneres is using her industry clout to push things forward. Through her company, A Very Good Production, she is currently producing sitcom One Big Happy, about a gay woman and a straight man (Elisha Cuthbert and Nick Zano), lifelong friends who have a baby just as he meets the love of his life. DeGeneres will even graduate from comic relief to leading fish in Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, scheduled for release in 2016. And of course she has been invited to host the Oscars again – notably in the wake of another couple of fractious years courtesy of the bizarre Hathaway-Franco double act of 2012 and Seth MacFarlane's bad-taste bonanza in 2013. "When she was first announced as an Oscar host, some people saw it as a risk," says Kane. "Now it seems like a natural fit or even a safer choice." DeGeneres was once asked about the moment when Johnny Carson invited her over to chat after her debut appearance on The Tonight Show. "It catapulted my career," she acknowledged, but "that's not why I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it because … I wanted people to get me." A bumpy three-decade ride later, it's safe to say that America gets Ellen DeGeneres, and it likes her. Potted profile Born 26 January 1958 in Metairie, Louisiana Age 56 Career In 1986 she became the first female comedian to be invited for an on-screen chat with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. From 1994-1998 she appeared in the sitcom Ellen. After that was cancelled, she experienced a hiatus before returning with her talk show. Low point After coming out as a lesbian in Ellen and in real life in 1997, advertisers pulled out of the show and it was cancelled after one more season. High point Her appearance as host of the Emmys soon after 9/11. What she says "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 now, and we don't know where the hell she is." What they say about her "She combines her cosy charm with a coldly brilliant cynic's eye." – Leo Benedictus, the Guardian Oscars 2014 Ellen Degeneres United States Sexuality Celebrity Oscars Ben Walters theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fairtrade: how a few pence can make a big difference Posted: 28 Feb 2014 11:01 PM PST What's the cost of your conscience? Very little, if you buy Fairtrade coffee, tea, cocoa, oranges and bananas What's the cost of your conscience? About £1.18, according to my calculations. That's how much extra it cost me to buy Fairtrade coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas and oranges, compared with the very cheapest non-Fairtrade equivalents I could find at my local Tesco. For some items there is barely any difference in price. Fairtrade oranges are only 5p more at 40p each. Tesco is selling Percol Fairtrade ground coffee from £1.30 per 100g – just 10p more than its standard Lavazza coffee. But bananas are twice the price – 25p each in bags of four if you want Fairtrade, 12p if not, and even cheaper when sold loose. How did bananas get to be just 12p? A quarter of the cost of a Kit Kat. Less than a tenth of the cost of a single bus ride in London. They are even 8p less than the cost of an apple grown in the UK, when bananas are shipped across the Atlantic. The Fairtrade Foundation blames a bitter price war over the past 10 years that has seen British supermarkets almost halve the price of loose bananas while the cost of producing them has doubled. "This is trapping many of the farmers and workers who grow them in poverty," it says. In Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Equador, from where we import 70% of our bananas, living standards among workers on banana plantations have plummeted. "With my hand on my heart, the price we get for our produce is not enough for us to sustain production over here. We don't see real profit from the effort we put in, it's frustrating," says Albeiro Alfonso Cantillo, a Colombian banana farmer working with Fairtrade on behalf of banana farmers globally. Even Tesco admitted to Fairtrade researchers that it made a loss on every loose banana it has sold since mid 2013. The Fairtrade Foundation wants supermarkets to behave more responsibly (it rated Aldi and Lidl worst, by the way) and is petitioning business secretary Vince Cable to take action at government level. Just 3.5% of bananas sold in Tesco are Fairtrade, but it is promising more this year. But the simplest thing is for shoppers to use their buying power and pop into the Co-op, Sainsbury's or Waitrose, whose bananas are 100% Fairtrade. But if you do change your buying habits, will it really make any difference? The critics – led by the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs – accuse supporters of fair trade of being woolly minded liberals. They say only a quarter of the extra that shoppers pay for fair trade products actually reaches the farmers. What's more, these farmers have to stump up silly amounts to be "certified", and the end result is that Fairtrade may actually make Third World farmers poorer. But I've had the good fortune of visiting Fairtrade coffee plantations in Tanzania, which are supported by Starbucks. The difference in prosperity between the Fairtrade co-operatives and those outside the scheme is not quite South Korea v North Korea, but it's not far off. Farmers receive a fixed price for their coffee that reflects the sustainable cost of production, plus a premium that their community can invest in education, healthcare, or ways to improve yields or buy processing facilities. In 2012, farmers across the world received £65m in Fairtrade Premium. It strikes me that the critics of fair trade are ideologically opposed to anything seen as interference in the correct running of markets. But the global agricultural market is laughably distant from the type of perfectly competitive market of buyers and sellers imagined by Adam Smith. It's a market rigged against the poor. In Britain, it seems we chomp through 9,000 bananas every minute, and if we all think a bit more before we buy, we could make a huge difference with just a few pence. • On a totally unrelated subject, did you take out a pre-nuptial agreement before marrying? Horriby unromantic? Or a rational step everyone should take before the big day? We are keen to hear your stories at money@theguardian.com Consumer affairs Fair trade Supermarkets Retail industry Patrick Collinson theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

My mother was Emperor Hirohito's poster child Posted: 28 Feb 2014 11:00 PM PST The picture below is not all it seems – it was set up as a piece of propaganda from a Japanese prison camp in Borneo during the second world war, featuring Sarah Hilary's mother and grandparents I'm sitting next to my grandmother looking through family photograph albums (a favourite pastime since I was tiny) when I find this picture. I haven't seen it before and wonder why it's not in a frame on the wall. It's such a great family photo. I ask my grandmother, who is on the right in the picture, but she can't look at it. She doesn't want to talk about it, although she already has, I realise – when I was a small child sitting with my siblings on her bed, listening to stories of our mother's childhood. This is a photograph from the prison camp where they were held during the second world war. Like the tales our grandmother told us, it's only half the story because the camera lied. "All is well," it lied. This is northwest Borneo under Japanese rule. The child is my mother, seated on my grandmother's lap. The man whose face is only glimpsed is my grandfather. I never knew him. Thousands of people have seen this photograph. People on the other side of the world saw it, when the world was fighting a war of morale and conscience. People I will never meet have seen it. But my grandmother can't look at it. "Look at this happy family," it lies, when the family is imprisoned, impoverished, in fear of their lives. The photograph was taken in the spring of 1944, two years after the Japanese invaded Borneo, capturing the men, women and children of unfriendly nations, Chinese, Dutch, British and Australians among them, to be interned in camps on the third largest island in the world. By 1944, many of those interned had died; more were dying. Domei News, then Japan's only news agency, dispatched reporters to the frontline in Asia and the Pacific. They sent home almost daily the Domei Photo News, which was distributed by the thousands to schools, factories, shops and public places. The Domei News photographer's task was simple: show the world how content our prisoners are. The photos were intended to appease organisations such as the Red Cross, and convince ordinary Japanese families that the war was being fought honourably. My mother was Emperor Hirohito's poster child. No one in the photograph is wearing their own clothes. The white shirt, flowered dress and child's pinafore were loaned by the Japanese and taken back at the end of the photo shoot. My grandmother was made to wash the makeup from her face before returning to the women's camp, where no new clothes or makeup had been seen in two years. As one internee wrote in the diary she kept hidden from the Japanese: "My last towel has now disintegrated, so after washing I am obliged to shake myself like a dog until dry." If you look closely at the photograph, you'll see that my mother is wearing a crucifix. It was carved by the Roman Catholic sisters in the camp, from the Perspex windshield of a military aircraft. I have my mother's crucifix to hand as I write this. It is small, light; pleasingly tactile. A stranger finding it in a house clearance would think it worthless and throw it away. The same stranger might linger over the heart-shaped pendant, also painstakingly carved from Perspex by the nuns, who placed tiny pictures of my mother's parents, no bigger than a thumbnail, into the hollowed heart of the necklace. They did this same kindness for every child in the camp. Other memorabilia survive. A tin the children ate their meals from, toys stuffed with rags and sand, a book whose margins are filled with appointments pencilled by my grandmother, who was hairdresser for the women and children. In the same book: tallies of cigarettes to be bartered with the guards for food and other necessities. My grandmother was 25 and a young mother when she was taken prisoner. Her courage still humbles me. I can't imagine surviving a fate like that, never mind keeping a small child alive and well. Whenever I suggest this idea of courage to my grandmother, she shakes her head, but she will admit that the experience made her stronger. I expect the Japanese photographer tried to win a smile from my mother. Her unhappy expression is a small victory against the casual cruelty of the propagandists. She was taken from her home and loaded on to a truck with dozens of other children and their mothers, shipped to an island leper colony and then by boat to a prison camp where she saw brutality and disease, knew hunger and witnessed death. She saw men dig their own graves. She saw sons dig graves for their fathers. She was not yet five. Within a year of this photograph being taken she would be gravely ill with pneumonia and her father would be dead. Her father, my grandfather, whose face is in shadow in the portrait, risked his life with a group of comrades to spread forbidden news of the war to the other prisoners, news such as the death of Hitler, information that kept many prisoners alive and hoping, long enough to survive until liberation. For doing this my grandfather was taken to a military prison where he died of malaria before he could be executed, with his comrades, by the Japanese. The dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs in 1945 ended the war in the far east. I feel a queasy sense of survivor guilt at the thought that without those atrocious bombs, I wouldn't be here to tell my grandmother's story. No one in the photograph, no one in the prison camp, would have survived the orders from the Japanese high command, to burn the women and children and to bayonet the men. On 11 September 1945, the camp was liberated by Australian troops. Because my grandmother had sold her engagement ring to a guard in exchange for penicillin, my mother survived to see the liberation, to watch with the other children as thousands of red, white and blue leaflets dropped from Allied aircraft into the camp, telling the prisoners to "Be of Good Cheer" and that rescue was on its way. Another photo, smudged and grainy, shows my mother (then six and smiling) in the arms of an Australian soldier. There are no snapshots of my grandmother in the days immediately after the liberation. She was trying to find her husband. She didn't know, then, that he had died. For a long time, I kept my grandmother's story a secret. As she did; returning expatriates were told not to talk about their ordeal, for the good of morale in postwar Britain. Many never spoke of it. My grandmother never talked with her daughter about their ordeal, believing it a blessing that my mother remembered so little of it. Thinking, in fact, that my mother remembered nothing (she remembered snatches). The silence was a kindness, an act of faith between them, to keep the horrors of the past at bay. Only when she had grandchildren did my grandmother start to tell her story. Gently and with humour, setting the horror aside so that we could not have guessed that we were hearing about nearly four years of imprisonment, the constant threat of sickness and death. Every day, in the final years, the children in the camp saw the same flag used to cover coffins of the dead. My grandmother told stories of happy Christmases, our mother learning to write with a stick in the sand, running barefoot, everywhere. We were enthralled, always begging for more, not knowing until we were grown up that there was a secret to the story. I remember the day it clicked into place in my head, vividly and with a sensation like vertigo: a familiar landscape suddenly seen upside down, inside out. My grandmother died in November 2000. She was the best and bravest of women. I remember her sense of mischief and adventure. She inspired so much of what I do. If, as she believed, her spirit was forged in the fire of the prison camp, then it was an indomitable spirit, full of love for life and, yes, courage. She knew I wanted to be a writer so I hope that she told me the story of the prison camp because it needed to be told. Needs to be told. The Domei News Agency was disbanded in 1945. It had served its purpose. Thousands of photographs had convinced millions of people that all was well. Just as Allied propaganda convinced millions of others, of the necessity of dropping the atom bombs. Once you know the truth, it becomes hard to look at the photograph, perhaps because the truth is so obscured by the horrific realities of the time. Each time I see it, I feel something different. Loss of course, and grief. Pride for my grandfather's sacrifice and regret that I never knew him and because my mother grew up without her father; deep sadness for my grandmother's loss, and my mother's. Gratitude for their survival and the happiness they brought to my life. And wonder that two human beings could live through trauma of that magnitude and not be bitter or timid but instead huge-hearted, generous and tender. All that I know about the strength and value of families, I learned from them. I began by saying that this family photograph lied, but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps, despite the borrowed clothes and the studio pose, the photograph shouts a great truth, about love and survival and the unassailable nature of the family. Family Parents and parenting Grandparents and grandparenting Second world war theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

New York murder fugitive traced to Australia using secret DNA samples Posted: 28 Feb 2014 10:58 PM PST New South Wales police tailed Abakar Gadiyev and gathered genetic material from drinking glasses and cigarettes

Australian women make poor start to world surfing event in Gold Coast Posted: 28 Feb 2014 10:17 PM PST Stephanie Gilmore and Sally Fitzgibbons face sudden-death after finishing last in their opening round heats of the Roxy Pro on the Gold Coast

Boston Marathon bombing: Tsarnaev's defence team want charges thrown out Posted: 28 Feb 2014 09:05 PM PST Repetitive counts are prejudicial, say lawyers, while prosecutors claim prisoner has made remarks that harm his case

Mardi Gras under way in Sydney with Queen Elizabeth's blessing Posted: 28 Feb 2014 08:33 PM PST Drag queen Vanity Faire arrives on the bow of cruise ship to get celebrations started

Thailand protest leader promises to clear streets, moving campaign to park Posted: 28 Feb 2014 08:00 PM PST Suthep Thaugsuban keeps up campaign against government but says 'we are returning Bangkok to its owners'

Bus attack: two women charged with assaulting partially blind man Posted: 28 Feb 2014 06:25 PM PST New South Wales pair appear in court after footage of Gold Coast assault is posted online

Morwell mine fire: people offered free train trips to escape smoke Posted: 28 Feb 2014 05:03 PM PST Public transport minister says return tickets to anywhere in Victoria are a goodwill gesture as residents complain about lack of action

Russian 'invasion' of Crimea fuels fear of Ukraine conflict Posted: 28 Feb 2014 04:27 PM PST White House issues warning to Kremlin, as Ukrainian official claims 2,000 Russian troops have arrived in peninsula Russia and the west are on a collision course over Crimea after Moscow was accused of orchestrating a "military invasion and occupation" of the peninsula, as groups of apparently pro-Russian armed men seized control of two airports. Russian troop movements were reported across the territory. One Ukrainian official claimed late on Friday that 2,000 Russian troops had arrived in Crimea during the course of the day, in 13 Russian aircraft. Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, addressed the nation and accused Russia of carrying out a similar strategy to 2008, when it in effect annexed two Georgian territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. "They are trying to provoke a military conflict and are creating a scenario identical to the Abkhaz one, when having provoked a conflict, they annexed territory," he said. Turchynov, installed following the removal of the pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych over the weekend, appealed to Vladimir Putin to halt the incursion: "I am personally addressing President Putin to stop the provocation and call back the military from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and work exclusively within the framework of the signed agreements," he said. On Friday evening the main Crimean air hub at Simferopol was still guarded by unidentified, uniformed men. Later it was announced that the airport had been closed and incoming flights diverted. There were similar scenes at Sevastopol airport. On Thursday pro-Russian gunmen seized the Crimean parliament in Simferopol. "I see what has happened as a military invasion and occupation in violation of all international treaties and norms," said the new Ukrainian interior minister, Arsen Avakov earlier in the day. "This is a direct provocation aimed at armed bloodshed on the territory of a sovereign state." Late on Friday Ukraine's defence ministry put out a statement saying it had information that unknown "radical forces" were planning to try to disarm its military units in Crimea early Saturday morning and warned against such action. The White House said any Russian military intervention in Ukraine would be a "grave mistake", while the UN security council took up the issue at a session on Friday evening. A senior administration official said the US is considering pulling out of the G8 summit in Russia. A US boycott of the June meeting would be a major blow to Putin, particularly if backed by European G8 members – the UK, Italy, Germany and France. "We are consulting with European partners and considering options," the senior administration official told the Guardian. "It is hard to see how we and other European leaders would attend the G8 in Sochi if Russia is intervening in Ukraine." The sudden escalation of the crisis amounts to the most dangerous standoff in the former Soviet Union since the Russia-Georgia war six years ago. As alarm grew during the day, Russia dismissed efforts by the new Ukrainian leadership to discuss the future of Crimea, a territory the size of Belgium which, despite a large Russian majority, has been part of Ukraine since independence two decades ago. Since 1991, Russia has maintained its own fleet at Sevastopol, a force that dwarfs Ukraine's own units in Crimea. The Russian foreign ministry said troop movements were "required to protect deployment places of the Black Sea fleet in Ukraine" and said the manoeuvres were fully in line with bilateral accords. There was still uncertainty as to the precise identity of the gunmen holding the parliament and the airports. They claimed to be part of an informal self-defence group that has sprung up in response to the revolution in Kiev. But experts said they were hardly an impromptu militia. "This is not a ragtag force," said Brigadier Ben Barry, a specialist on land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "When you see a new militia, they will have a jumble-sale look. This lot are uniformly dressed and equipped and seem competent and efficient." Michael McFaul, until last week the US ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: "If gunmen in Crimea are not acting on Kremlin's behalf, it would calming for Russian government to say so. Silence fuels uncertainty, instability." Ukraine's national telephone operator said it had lost landline contact with Crimea. The crisis was sparked by the bloody uprising in Kiev against the pro-Russian leadership that culminated in Yanukovych's flight last weekend. On Friday he resurfaced in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, denouncing the "bandit coup" in Kiev, and reiterating that he remained the legitimate president of Ukraine. In a floundering performance full of slip-ups and confused answers, Yanukovych called on Russia to act decisively, saying he was "surprised" by Putin's restraint. He also said military action was unacceptable and the territorial integrity of Ukraine should not be violated. Yanukovych, who said he would not return to Ukraine until it was safe to do so, said presidential elections scheduled for 25 May were illegitimate. There was an intense bout of international diplomacy over the increased tension, with David Cameron and German chancellor Angela Merkel speaking with Russian president Vladimir Putin. London said Putin and Cameron agreed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity, while a Kremlin readout of the call merely said the leaders had agreed "there should be no further escalation of violence". The foreign secretary William Hague said he would be travelling to Kiev to meet the country's new leaders. Political leaders moved fast in Moscow with the parliament rapidlyintroducing a law that would make it easier for new territories to be added to Russia's existing borders, a move that seemed directly linked to events in Crimea. The bill would allow for regions to join Russia by referendum if its host country does not have a "legitimate government". MP Elena Mizulina said: "If as the result of a referendum, Crimea appeals to Russia with a desire to join us, we should have the legal mechanisms to answer." Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky flew to Crimea and addressed cheering crowds in Sevastopol, promising them financial and psychological support against the new government in Kiev. Another law under discussion would ease the requirements for Russian-speaking Ukrainians to receive Russian citizenship, and late on Friday, the Russian foreign ministry said it had ordered its consulate in Simferopol to begin "urgently" issuing passports to members of the Berkut riot police. The toughest regiments of police in Ukraine, Berkut regiments were used by Yanukovych against peaceful protesters. In the western city of Lviv, Berkut officers got down on their knees and begged forgiveness for the actions of their colleagues, but in Crimea, the returning troops have been greeted as heroes. In Kiev, a new cabinet was voted in by the parliament on Thursday and needs to get to work to ease the appalling state of the economy, with Ukraine's currency weakening and the country facing a serious risk of default. The new government has been recognised as legitimate by most regions of Ukraine outside Crimea, but still has work to do to integrate law-enforcement bodies and restart the functioning of the state. Ukraine's armed forces are dwarfed by Russia's – but would be no pushover if the Kremlin did decide to go for broke. "It is a nightmare for everyone," said Igor Sutyagin, a Russian military expert. "The entry of Russian troops would be a deep humiliation for Ukraine … It would be a second Chechnya." Ukraine Europe Russia Viktor Yanukovych Vladimir Putin Harriet Salem Shaun Walker Ewen MacAskill theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Labour rejects left's candidate for next European commission president Posted: 28 Feb 2014 04:05 PM PST Party to say that 'political priorities' of European parliament president, Martin Schulz, clash with its vision for Europe The Labour party will on Saturday set itself definitively against the federalist vision of Europe when it refuses to endorse the European parliament president Martin Schulz as the Socialists' candidate to be the next European commission president. In a clear signal to its European partners on the left that there are limits to Labour's support for the EU, the party will say that the German's "political priorities" clash with its vision for Europe. Ed Miliband and the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, have decided to speak out against Schulz on the eve of his formal designation at a Party of European Socialists (PES) conference in Rome as the left's candidate for EC president. Labour, which had hoped to press the case of the centre ground Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is married to Lord Kinnock's son Stephen, cannot block Schulz because he is the PES's only candidate. But Alexander and Miliband are making clear that they do not share the vision of Schulz who is seen by Labour as an arch federalist and fiscally irresponsible. He argued strongly against a cut in the next EU budget, whereas Labour campaigned strongly for a real-terms budget cut and tabled a commons vote long before David Cameron secured a cut during EU negotiations. A Labour spokesperson said: "The Labour party will not be endorsing Martin Schulz as the candidate for the next president of the European Commission. Martin Schulz's political priorities in Europe do not represent those of the Labour party. While not being able to support the PES common candidate for this year's election, we continue to support the principle of having common candidates." The main EU political groupings are nominating candidates for the post of EC president, which falls vacant this autumn, because the Lisbon treaty instructs EU leaders to take account of the results of the European parliamentary elections in May when they choose a candidate. José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, will stand down later this year after five years in the post. Jean-Claude Juncker, the federalist former prime minister of Luxembourg, is seen as the frontrunner to be the candidate of the centre right European People's party (EPP) after he won the support of Angela Merkel's CDU party in Germany. The EPP will choose its candidate at a conference in Dublin next weekend. Labour's decision to reject Schulz is designed to show the party believes strongly in co-operation within the EU but has no truck with federalists who want to embrace even greater integration. Schulz is a famous federalist who shot to prominence in 2003 when Silvio Berlusconi, the then Italian prime minister, said he should take a film role as a Nazi concentration camp leader. The rejection of Schulz comes as Labour feels increasingly confident about its decision to dismiss a referendum on Britain's EU membership on the timetable proposed by Cameron – by the end of 2017 following negotiations that have yet to be launched. Alexander said after talks between Miliband and Merkel during her visit to London on Thursday that the gap between what the German chancellor can offer and the demands of Tory backbenchers was as wide as ever. Labour is also objecting to Schulz after he opposed the cut in the EU budget. Schulz said last November: "The European parliament would have preferred a much more ambitious MFF [EU budget from 2014-2020] targeted more towards the key challenges facing the EU today. A more ambitious MFF would have seen higher amounts available in the EU budgets and would have boosted a job-rich recovery." European commission Europe European Union Labour Ed Miliband Douglas Alexander Nicholas Watt theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ukraine: Night Wolves and unidentified military men seize key Crimea sites Posted: 28 Feb 2014 03:36 PM PST Ukraine's new interior minister Arsen Avakov describes takeover on peninsula as a 'military invasion and occupation' As night fell on Friday , there were signs that the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was slipping beyond Kiev's reach. The parliament remained under siege by pro-Russian protesters, armed men of unknown allegiance were guarding the airports and the Night Wolves, a biker gang with close ties to the Kremlin, blockaded the roads. Three hundred men in military uniforms with no identifying insignia had entered the Sevastopol airport compound on Thursday night, witnesses said, in what Ukraine's new interior minister, Arsen Avakov, described as a "military invasion and occupation". "They came very quietly, it was very professional," said a man at the airport who declined to give his name but said he was a captain in the Sevastopol Tactical Aviation Brigade, part of the Ukrainian army. "We don't consider it any invasion of our territory," he added, perhaps hinting at his pro-Russian loyalties. The man said the intruders had AK-47s and sniper rifles, which "are not easy to come by for civilians, but we don't know who they are or where they have come from". A major from the Ukrainian army based at the airport's military side later said senior commanders had been in touch with the gunmen, who said they were there "to prevent unwanted landings of helicopters and planes". But uncertainty over their origins has fuelled speculation about Moscow's involvement, especially as Ukrainian border guard service said that more than 10 Russian military helicopters had flown into Ukrainian airspace over the Crimea region on Friday. On the main and side roads leading to Sevastopol airport, more men in camouflage and military-style helmets were standing guard. A defence unit had gathered outside entrance to the civilian section of the airport, claiming to be locals. "We are here to help protect against panic," said Maxim Lovinetsky, a member of a unit of around 30 men. "I have no political allegiances, I am just here to observe and protect." He said he lived in a nearby village, although his accent was Russian – which he attributed to spending three months in Moscow last year. Lovinetsky, who arrived at the airport at 7am, said the men had come on their own initiative and had not had any contact with the armed men standing just 20 metres away. More suggestions of Russian involvement came in the form of the Sevastopol branch of Night Wolves, a pro-Moscow motorbike gang clad in leathers decorated with black and orange striped ribbons, who built five roadblocks covering all the main routes into the city. "People in Sevastopol are the most patriotic on the planet," said Dmitry Simichein, the leader of the Night Wolves. "They don't need organising, they just come out to protect their country and their families." He said the police were supporting the bikers in their efforts to protect the city. Simichein's comments echoed the sentiments of many in Sevastopol, who see Russia as the motherland. Until 60 years ago Crimea was part of Russian territory: a time many of the peninsula's residents, who identify themselves as ethnic Russian, look back to fondly. Residents gathered outside Sevastopol's administrative buildings on Friday to hear a speech from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist politician and former deputy of the duma, who also toured the barricades surrounding the city. Russian flags were flown and the crowd cheered and clapped as Zhirinovsky assured them of Russia's support. "I want you to know the position of Moscow is that you will not be left alone or be in trouble," he said. "Everyone is afraid of Russia. We have the most modern weapons, the most impressive. This is why Russia is feared by every country," he added. Following the day of drama, the mood in the city centre on Friday night was celebratory. Hundreds of people gathered in a small park to dance to Russian pop music blaring over speakers at a stage with accompanying screen projections. Ukraine Europe Russia Harriet Salem theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

NHS data will not be sold to insurance companies, Jeremy Hunt says Posted: 28 Feb 2014 03:31 PM PST Health secretary to provide assurance that confidential information will not be used for commerical insurance Insurance companies will not be able to buy patient medical records through the NHS data scheme, the health secretary has announced. Jeremy Hunt is to legislate on the care data programme to appease some of the concerns that have been raised about the scheme. Hunt plans to provide "rock-solid" assurance to patients that confidential information will not be sold for commercial insurance purposes, the Department of Health said. He is to put a raft of measures in place including a statutory requirement that any patient's opt-out will be respected and legislation that will prevent the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) – the body which will control the data – from sharing personal information where there is "not a clear health or care benefit for people". A Department of Health spokeswoman said this "puts beyond any doubt that the HSCIC cannot release identifiable, or potentially identifiable, patient data for commercial insurance or other purely commercial purposes." The HSCIC will also be bound by laws to protect patient confidentiality when anonymised data is released. And any researchers who wish to access identifiable data must demonstrate "an ethical reason to do so". A source close to the health secretary said: "The principles around this programme, which will bring real benefits to patients, are fundamentally right, and we completely support them. "But, alongside a new campaign from NHS England to explain the programme to the public and GPs, we also need to ensure that robust legislation is in place to address their concerns." The care.data programme was pushed back until the autumn after NHS England, the body behind the scheme, bowed to pressure from patient and medical groups including the Royal College of GPs and the British Medical Association (BMA). Patients, doctors and other professional organisations, raised concerns that they had not been given enough time to learn about the project. NHS England has said it will work with patients and professional groups to promote awareness of the scheme. The programme is designed to link data from GP records with information from hospitals to give an idea of what happens to patients at all stages of NHS treatment. The data that will be extracted from GP systems includes information on family history, vaccinations, referrals for treatment, diagnoses and information about prescriptions. It will also include biological values such as a patient's blood pressure, body mass index and cholesterol levels. Personal confidential data will also be taken, such as date of birth, postcode, NHS number and gender. The written notes a GP makes during a consultation will not be extracted. The data will be held by the HSCIC and anonymised by officials there. Fully anonymised data will be made available publicly to anyone outside the NHS. Data considered to be potentially identifiable – for example where a patient in a small town has a rare disease – will only be released to approved organisations for the specific purpose of benefiting the health and social care system. Many including a large number of medical research organisations have backed the scheme, saying it will alert the NHS when standards drop, help create a better understanding of what happens to people, especially those with long-term conditions, who are cared for away from hospital, and provide information needed to assist and support research into new medicines, prevention and treatment of disease. NHS Health Jeremy Hunt Public services policy Data protection Data and computer security Privacy Health policy Insurance industry theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Credibility of witness in Texas execution case is questioned Posted: 28 Feb 2014 03:28 PM PST Non-profit cites note in prosecutor's file on Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for arson deaths of three children

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