The Agonist - United Kingdom

Foreign Office warns Mann to 'keep quiet'

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:36:30 -0800

Brian Brady and David Randall | Nov 8

The Independent - Plenty of powerful people have an interest in the mercenary behind the 'Wonga Coup' keeping his own counsel

Simon Mann has been urged by Foreign Office officials to remain silent about the coup attempt that left him languishing in an African prison, and settle for a "quiet life" with his wife and family in the UK, The Independent on Sunday has learnt.

The veteran mercenary returned to Britain last week after he was pardoned by oil-rich Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema – the man he had planned to overthrow five years ago. Mann, with the gratitude of a man sprung 34 years before his sentence was due to run out, apologised for the plot that ended with his incarceration in the notorious Black Beach jail. He swiftly made it clear he wanted revenge on those he believes made him the "fall guy" – notably the Lebanese millionaire, Ely Calil, and Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former British prime minister.

Mann's friends confirmed yesterday that he wanted "justice" for both men – not only for allegedly leaving him to carry the can for the disastrous coup attempt, but also for failing to look after his wife and children while he was in captivity thousands of miles away.

Yet they also revealed that Mann has already been subjected to government pressure to keep his mouth shut. "The Foreign Office didn't do anything to help get him out of that place, but they have been very quick to try to get him to play ball now he is back," one close friend said. "Simon has been told it would be in everyone's best interests if he could just draw a line under this whole thing. We know the Foreign Office wants to get on-side with EG [Equatorial Guinea] as quickly as possible but, frankly, it is also in their own interests for people to stop asking questions about this whole affair."

ttempted coup, initially denied that the Government knew about it in advance, but was later forced to admit that he did know. Whether any attempt was made to stop it, or encourage it, is not known. Mann has claimed that the UK, US, and Spanish governments all had prior knowledge.

It is clear that, despite the blissful photographs with his wife, Amanda, in the New Forest, Mann's return home is no neat and happy ending to the sorry saga. For many individuals, organisations and foreign governments, it could initiate an uncomfortable fresh chapter as questions are asked about the circumstances behind the audacious attempt to depose a hardline ruler and take control of his nation's oil supplies.

This weekend, as Mann ponders going public with his story – via a newspaper buy-up or, eventually, a book deal – the first significant questions over the credibility of the "coup plot" are beginning to emerge. Not least among them is whether the operation was ever a real "goer", as one critic described it: how an experienced former SAS man seriously expected to capture an entire state with just 60 men, and why stopping in Zimbabwe en route was deemed a sensible part of the strategy. Their plane, a Boeing 727, was reportedly on the military side of the airfield, and beside it were 50 heavy machine guns, 20 light machine guns, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 61 assault rifles and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Inconspicuous is not a word that leaps to mind, which, in turn, suggests possible explanations. It was either a bafflingly naive diversion for a team so steeped in the ways of Africa to make. Or the conspirators thought the necessary people in Zimbabwe had been squared.

Hey Obama

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:16:54 -0800

Nov 1

BBC - UK: Government to create bank chains

The government is to create three new High Street banking chains by 2015 as part of a major overhaul of the sector.

They will be set up by selling off parts of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Northern Rock - the banks which had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.

Ministers and the European Competition Commissioner are in talks over the move, which would go some way to recoup the public money invested in the banks.

There is speculation that buyers might include Tesco and Virgin.

The new chains will be standard retail banks concentrating on deposits and mortgages.

In order to boost competition, they will only be sold to new entrants to the UK banking market and not to existing financial institutions.

Ministers say that creating more competitors on the High Street in this way will invigorate the mortgage market and ultimately lead to a better deal for customers.

Ehud Olmert could face war crimes arrest if he visits UK

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:03:29 -0700

Ian Black | Oct 28

The Guardian - Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister during the Gaza war, would probably face arrest on war crimes charges if he visited Britain, according to a UK lawyer who is working to expand the application of "universal jurisdiction" for offences involving serious human rights abuses committed anywhere in the world.

Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions, predicted Daniel Machover, who is involved in intensifying legal work after the controversial Goldstone report on the three-week conflict. Neither are ministers any longer.

Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defence minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month, he said. In the Barak case a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip.

"This needs to be tested at the right time and in the right place," Machover said. "One day one of these people will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."

AA Gill shot baboon 'to see what it would be like to kill someone'

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:23:56 -0700

Robert Booth | Oct 27

The Guardian - • Restaurant critic says he felt urge to be a primate killer
• Animal campaigners attack 'indefensible' action

Animal welfare groups voiced outrage today after the restaurant critic AA Gill said he shot a baboon on safari "to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone".

In a Sunday Times column, Gill recounted in detail how he shot the creature from 250 yards while hunting in "a truck full of guns and other blokes" in Tanzania. He said he felt the urge to be "a recreational primate killer" before shooting the animal through the lung.

"This is morally completely indefensible," said Steve Taylor, a spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports. "If he wants to know what it like to shoot a human, he should take aim at his own leg. When man interacts with animals he owes a duty of care. If you are killing to eat, that is a different matter. This is killing for fun".

Gill wrote: "I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I'm told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out."

Claire Bass, wildlife manager at the World Society for the Protection of Animals: "It's hard to say what's sadder – the unnecessary death of a healthy baboon or that he has so little regard for the life of another creature. The vast majority of visitors to the Serengeti have a fantastic time shooting with cameras, not guns. We condemn the killing and the crude portrayal of it as 'entertainment' in Gill's column."

What an ass!

Damn Brits

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:35:30 -0700

always trying to one up us...

Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:42:19 -0700

James Glanz | Maisoncelle, France | Oct 25

NYT - The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.

No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.

But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.

The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.

Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.

“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.

The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.

The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.

Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.

Mr. Crane said that some of his own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France. Agincourt was perhaps the most stirring victory the English would ever achieve on French soil during the conflict.

The Hundred Years’ War never made it into the field manual — the name itself may have served as a deterrent — but after sounding numerous cautions on the vast differences in time, technology and political aims, historians working in the area say that there are some uncanny parallels with contemporary foreign conflicts.

For one thing, by the time Henry landed near the mouth of the Seine on Aug. 14, 1415, and began a rather uninspiring siege of a town called Harfleur, France was on the verge of a civil war, with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his “local security forces” in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.

M&S makes palm oil pledge to save forests

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:53:09 -0700

Martin Hickman | Oct 24

The Observer - Commitment aimed at halting ecological damage done in South-east Asia

Marks & Spencer will commit to paying more for sustainable palm oil across its entire range of products today in an attempt to limit environmental damage in south-east Asia.

In a rolling programme over the next six years, M&S will buy GreenPalm certificates for sustainably produced palm oil equivalent to the amount it uses in almost 1,000 food, beauty and home products. Like other food manufacturers, M&S pours palm oil, the world's cheapest vegetable fat, into a wide variety of food and household products such as biscuits and convenience foods.

By early next year, the retailer said nine products, including 200g packs of oatcakes, a 500g cookie selection and seven types of cooked potatoes, would be covered by the GreenPalm scheme. By 2015, it promised to buy certificates for all relevant products. M&S, which would not disclose the cost of the commitment, is also funding a 120-acre wildlife corridor between plantations in Borneo.

UK: Guardian Hacked

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:41:31 -0700

October 25

Times Online - The Guardian warned users of its jobs website last night that their personal details might have been stolen by hackers.

Guardian Jobs, which has 1.4m users a month and stores the CVs of a wide range of professionals, including public-sector workers, told users it was the victim of a “sophisticated and deliberate hack”. They were advised by e-mail to contact an agency that helps the victims of identity fraud.

The security breach was detected on Friday and is being investigated by the Metropolitan police.

London protesters rail against 'futile' war

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:18:20 -0700

Dan Bell | October 24

BBC - As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, thousands of people have gathered in central London to protest against what they say is a futile and unwinnable conflict. The organisers of the march say the protest reflects a sea change not only in public opinion, but in the views of military rank and file, who now want UK troops brought home, they claim.

62-year-old Joan Humphreys from Dundee said quietly: "My grandson was killed 54 days ago on 31 August in Afghanistan. "Nothing's going to be achieved. I've read back from 1840 to now, all the different conflicts [in Afghanistan] until now - and there have been a lot - and everyone has left without anything improving."

A YouGov survey for Channel 4 News that found 62% of those questioned wanted British troops withdrawn in the coming year at the latest. However, despite the survey evidence, the demonstration had only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people that turned out to protest against the invasion of Iraq.

Scientists study possible health benefits of LSD and ecstasy

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:05:58 -0700

Denis Campbell | Oct 23

The Guardian - A growing number of people are taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy to help them cope with a variety of conditions including anorexia nervosa, cluster headaches and chronic anxiety attacks.

The emergence of a community that passes the drugs between users on the basis of friendship, support and need – with money rarely involved – comes amid a resurgence of research into the possible therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. This is leading to a growing optimism among those using the drugs that soon they may be able to obtain medicines based on psychedelics from their doctor, rather than risk jail for taking illicit drugs.

UK economy in its longest recession on record

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:49:14 -0700

Ashley Seager, Julia Kollewe & Kathryn Hopkins | London | October 23

The Guardian - The British economy is mired in its longest recession on record, as government figures out this morning showed a shock 0.4% drop in gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter of the year.

The figures confounded widespread hopes that the economy had returned to growth after five consecutive quarters of recession.

City economists had almost unanimously expected a small increase in GDP. Quarterly records go back to 1955 and show there has never until now been six quarters of contraction in a row.

The pound fell sharply against the dollar and euro as dealers digested the bad news. The figure left output 5.2% lower than the same quarter last year and about 6% lower overall in this recession.

Straight after the figures were released, Alistair Darling reiterated his view that growth will return to Britain by the end of the year. "I've always been clear that growth will return at the turn of the year, as my budget forecast confirmed," he said. "We're facing the worst global financial crisis and recession in 60 years. We've always said that we remain cautious as a result of the high degree of economic uncertainty."

Economists were unimpressed. Nick Parsons at National Australia Bank said: "Darling says he stands by his 2009 growth forecast. This is utter nonsense. He forecast -3.5% at budget time and if we are to hit the forecast, we would need to see growth of more than 4% in the fourth quarter.

Economists revolt over surprise recession data

The Times, By GraÍnne Gilmore and Rebecca O'Connor, October 23

Economists today cast doubt on official data showing that British gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 0.4 per cent between July and September, claiming the surprise fall is far worse than economic reality.

The shock figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that the country remained mired in recession during the third quarter — the sixth consecutive quarter of contraction, signalling the country’s longest downturn since records began in 1955.

Economists had widely expected that the country had emerged from recession between July and September.

Longest recession on record grips UK

Press Association, By Russell Lynch, October 23

The UK is now in the grip of the longest recession since records began, according to gloomy official figures published today.

Hopes for an end to recession were scuppered as the economy shrank by a shock 0.4 per cent between July and September - a record sixth quarter in a row of decline.

Output has now slumped 5.9 per cent since the onset of recession - almost as bad as the 6 per cent slump seen in the early 1980s - the Office for National Statistics said.

Hillary Clinton "misspeaks" again

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:08:31 -0700

David Sharrock | London | October 19

The London Times - Addressing the Northern Ireland Assembly last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that on the previous occasion she visited Belfast, with huband BIll Clinton, they stayed in the Hotel Europa, renowned as the most bombed hotel in Europe.

It was, she said, boarded up as a result of bomb damage. However, local journalists soon discovered that the last bomb to explode near the Europa Hotel had been over two years before and that all the renovations were completed 22 months before the Clintons' visit to the city.

Pope Sets Plan for Disaffected Anglicans to Join Catholics

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:26:00 -0700

Rachel Donadio & Laurie Goodstein | Vatican City | OCtober 20

NYT - In an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse, the Vatican on Tuesday announced that it would make it easier for Anglicans who are uncomfortable with their church’s acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops to join the Roman Catholic Church.

A new canonical entity will allow groups of Anglicans “to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” Cardinal William Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at a news conference here.

Though both Catholic and Anglican leaders sought on Tuesday to present the move as a more coherent, unified response to those seeking conversion, the Vatican appeared to have announced the move to the Anglican Communion only in recent weeks and as a fait accompli. And many Anglican and Catholic leaders expressed surprise, even shock, at something they said would undermine efforts at ecumenical dialogue and capitalize on deep divisions within the Anglican Church over issues likethe ordination of gay bishops and blessing same-sex unions.

The move could have wide impact in England, where large numbers of traditionalist Anglicans have protested the Church of England’s embrace in recent years of liberal theological reforms like ordaining women bishops. These Anglicans, and others in places like Australia, might be attracted to the Roman Catholic fold because they have had nowhere else to go. If entire parishes or even dioceses leave the Church of England for the Catholic church, it will probably set off battles over ownership of church buildings and land.

[...]

In recent decades, the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church have sought to heal those centuries of division, and some feared that the Vatican’s move might jeopardize decades of dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans seeking common ground by implying that the ultimate aim of that dialogue is conversion.

Officials of both the Vatican and the Anglican Communion made clear on Tuesday that the move was intended to address the doctrinal issues surrounding conversion, not the diplomatic issues of interfaith dialogue.

The move creates a formal structure to oversee conversions that had previously been evaluated case by case, including those of married Anglican priests, who are permitted to remain married after they convert to Catholicism. Called Personal Ordinariates, the structure will consist of local Catholic faithful overseen by Anglican prelates who will provide guidance to Anglicans — including entire parishes or even dioceses — seeking to convert.

[...]

As such, the structure could conceivably create a new, separate and hybrid Catholic Church in a place like Britain, where Anglicans now vastly outnumber Catholics.

Cardinal Levada, who flew back to Rome from London Monday evening, acknowledged that the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and leading cleric of the Anglican Church, had only been informed about the Vatican’s decision within the past month.

'Magnetic electricity' discovered

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:15:16 -0700

Jason Palmer | Oxford, England | October 14

BBC - Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity.

The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

[...]

In September this year, two research groups independently reported the existence of monopoles - "particles" which carry an overall magnetic charge. But they exist only in the spin ice crystals.

These crystals are made up of pyramids of charged atoms, or ions, arranged in such a way that when cooled to exceptionally low temperatures, the materials show tiny, discrete packets of magnetic charge.

Now one of those teams has gone on to show that these "quasi-particles" of magnetic charge can move together, forming a magnetic current just like the electric current formed by moving electrons.

Minton report: Carter-Ruck give up bid to keep Trafigura study secret

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:15:28 -0700

David Leigh | Oct 17

The Guardian - • Guardian 'released from restrictions forthwith'
• Report called firm's oil waste 'potentially toxic'
• Read the Trafigura study: the Minton report (pdf)

Lawyers for oil traders Trafigura finally abandoned attempts to keep secret a scientific report about toxic waste dumping in west Africa, that was shown to the Guardian.

Just after 7.30pm Carter-Ruck, libel lawyers for Trafigura, wrote a letter to the Guardian which said the newspaper should regard itself as "released forthwith" from any reporting restrictions. An MP revealed the report's existence to parliament this week, after the Guardian was hit with a "super-injunction" banning all mention of it and other UK media were then subsequently notified of, and therefore bound by it.

The Minton report, commissioned in 2006 from the London-based firm's scientific consultants, said that based on the "limited" information they had been given Trafigura's oil waste, dumped cheaply the month before in a city in Ivory Coast, was potentially toxic, and "capable of causing severe human health effects".

The study said early reports of large scale medical problems among the inhabitants of Abidjan, were consistent with a release of a cloud of potentially lethal hydrogen sulphide gas over the city. The effects could have included severe burns to the skin and lungs, eye damage, permanent ulceration, coma and death.

The author of this initial draft study, John Minton, of consultants Minton, Treharne & Davies, said dumping the waste would have been illegal in Europe and the proper method of disposal should have been a specialist chemical treatment called wet air oxidation.

Although the report was cautious, pointing out that unreliable press reports and "mass hysteria" might have led to exaggeration of alleged ill effects, its contents were unwelcome.

Trafigura subsequently did not use the report in the personal injury report in the claim against them and did not dislcose the report's existence.