Notices served against BP, Transocean and Halliburton by US government over Deepwater Horizon disaster BP and its partners on the doomed Deepwater Horizon oil rig face fines of up to $45m after receiving formal notice of a series of safety violations leading up to the Gulf of Mexico disaster. In a first step of a long legal battle, the interior department said BP, rig operator Transocean and contractor Halliburton between them broke 15 rules governing offshore drilling ahead of the 20 April 2010 explosion. Eleven workers were killed and 4.9m barrels of oil were pumped into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped. Wednesday’s notices mark the first time the US government has gone after contractors – in this case Transocean and Halliburton – in addition to oil companies. The tactic could influence lawsuits between BP and its partners over their responsiblility. BP still faces separate penalties of up to $21bn for environmental violations. The notices have come a day before executives from all three companies are due to testify before Congress on the findings from the latest investigation. A coast guard finding last month said cost-cutting by BP and its partners were “contributing causes” of the fatal blowout. Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said in a statement that the notices of non-compliance were a first step in addressing the violations detailed in that investigation. “Companies that violate federal regulations must be held accountable,” he said. “The joint investigation clearly revealed the violation of numerous federal regulations designed to protect the integrity of offshore operations.” BP received seven of the notices, including failure to maintain control over the well, failure to prevent pollutants from leaking into the Gulf and health and safety violations. Transocean was cited four times, for failing to control the well and the blowout preventer, the last line of defence against a disaster. Halliburton was cited four times, for failure to cement the well properly and for health and safety violations. The relevant fines are capped at $35,000 a day per incident – an amount that Bromwich has in the past described as too low to be an effective deterrent. It would cap the fines on BP and the other companies at about $45m if they were held to be in violation for the duration of the 87-day spill. BP faces far stiffer penalties under the US Clean Water Act, which is assessed on the amount of oil spilled and could cost the companies up to $21bn. The companies have 60 days to appeal against the sanctions. Transocean said it would appeal. All three companies are pursuing lawsuits against one another and BP said in a statement that the notices showed its partners were partly to blame. “We continue to encourage other parties, including Transocean and Halliburton, to acknowledge their responsibilities in the accident.” BP Oil spills BP oil spill United States Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk
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Another critically injured after gunman opens fire in Salon Meritage in coastal town of Seal Beach Eight people have been killed and another critically injured in a shooting at a California hair salon. The shooting happened at 1.21pm local time at the Salon Meritage on Pacific Coast Highway in the coastal town of Seal Beach, an Orange County fire official said. Six victims died at the scene and another two of the three critically injured victims died later in Long Beach Memorial hospital, said Seal Beach police sergeant Steve Bowles . Police officers arrested the suspected gunman half a mile from the scene after fleeing in a car and he was taken into custody. “We feel very confident at this point that we do have the single and only suspect in custody,” Bowles said. “He appeared cooperative and did not resist our officers at all when he was detained.” The officer also told local KCAL-TV that multiple weapons were seized. Bowles said detectives were trying to establish a motive for the violence but believed there was some kind of relationship between the gunman and someone inside the salon, which was filled with customers at the time. He did not know how many of the victims were employees or how many were clients. All eight of the dead were believed to have been shot inside the salon, and one man who was wounded was found outside, but it was not clear where he was struck, the officer said. “There are survivors from inside the salon that escaped without harm,” he added. The coastal town of about 25,000 inhabitants is about 30 miles south-east of Los Angeles. California Gun crime United States guardian.co.uk
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Fighters celebrate ‘capture’ of Gaddafi’s son Mutassim and tighten grip on troops loyal to former leader The Libyan coastal city of Sirte was on the brink of falling to government forces as fighters loyal to the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi were trapped in a tightening pocket 500 metres wide and twice as long. The latest gains for the forces of the National Transitional Council (NTC) came as its officials said Gaddafi’s son Mutassim, who had been commanding the city’s defences, had been captured in a car trying to flee with his family on Tuesday evening and taken to Benghazi for questioning. News of the capture, which was announced by Colonel Abdullah Naker of the NTC, spread quickly around jubilant government fighters in the area who fired tracer and anti-aircraft rounds into the air to celebrate. The reported arrest of Mutassim – referred to as “Number 1″ on pro-Gaddafi forces radio traffic – underlined the depth of the collapse of Sirte’s loyalist defenders in the past week. Mutassim is the first major figure in Gaddafi’s inner circle to have been captured by the NTC. “More than 80% of Sirte is now under our control. Gaddafi’s men are still in parts of neighbourhood No 2 and the ‘Dollar’ neighbourhood,” said NTC field commander, Mustah Hamza, early in the day. By afternoon, it appeared that barely 5% of the city remained under the control of those fighting for Gaddafi, who is still on the run after ruling Libya for 42 years. As government forces completed the clearing of the city’s east, rumours began to circulate that it had finally capitulated. “Sirte is free!” said one man heading to join the fighting in the city centre. Behind him, about 30 heavily armed pickup trucks had gathered in Green Square, firing weapons in the air near a group of prisoners. As loyalist fighters cleared houses, posters depicting Gaddafi were doused in petrol and set on fire while green flags – the symbol of Gaddafi’s rule – were torn down or shot through. “We have to clear these streets and houses one by one,” said Lofti al-Amin, a fighter wearing a peaked airline pilot’s hat. “We have found 10 guns so far and taken seven prisoners. We go into the houses and, if there are people there, we ask if they have guns. If they don’t, we try to help them leave.” In one street, surrounded by the sound of conflict, a family tried to pack straw under the wheels of their bogged-down car so they could escape the fighting. There was widespread looting and a steady procession of expensive cars – many damaged by gunfire – were being towed out of the city. Libya’s de facto leader, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, said he was optimistic that the ex-rebels would declare total victory in less than a week, opening the way for a new transitional government to be formed within a month. “I hope that liberation will be declared in less than a week, after we free Sirte, and within less than a month we will form a transitional government and the youth and women will have a role in that,” he said. Libya’s new rulers have promised to declare victory after the capture of Sirte and to name a new government that will guide the oil-rich north African nation to elections within eight months. Gaddafi’s supporters hold the desert enclave of Bani Walid, but the new leaders say Sirte’s capture will give them full control of the country’s ports and harbours, allowing them to move forward with efforts to establish a democracy. With nowhere to escape and hemmed in from three sides, a hardcore of the defenders of Gaddafi’s home town – perhaps fearful of the treatment they believed they would receive if captured – continued to fight it out against hopeless odds. At times, government fighters were forced to try to advance through thigh-deep water and sewage flooding large parts of the streets of District 2, the western neighbourhood and last location where Gaddafi forces are still holding out. Shots from the high buildings ahead of them threw up small spouts of water. Occasionally a pro-Gaddafi fighter could be seen on a rooftop. According to government fighters, the area had been deliberately flooded to slow them as they cleared the last streets under Gaddafi control. Despite the inevitability of defeat in Sirte, machine gunners on the rooftops continued to target the government forces while others fired RPGs and mortars. In one frontline area where fighters were gathering, one building was repeatedly hit, bullets ripping across its top floors. The government forces replied with volleys of rockets and anti-aircraft fire that left the buildings being targeted blackened and shattered. The already angry mood towards the loyalists hardened with the discovery, in three locations in the city, of 30 captured men who had been cuffed and executed. According to government commanders, the men had been killed on Tuesday. International Medical Corps, a non-profit organisation, said it visited the Ibn Sina hospital in Sirte on Tuesday and said it was “functioning at the bare minimum”. The organisation is providing staffing and support to the field hospital, 30 miles outside Sirte. It says more than 600 patients have been seen at the field hospital, 359 seen in the first week of October and 226 on 7 October alone, when forces loyal to the interim government launched their major offensive on Sirte. The IMC director for Libya, Hakan Bilgin, said: “We have got people who are being injured directly related to the conflict, we’ve got people having respiratory problems owing to stress, people not having proper medication, people suffering from fatigue. We’ve been to the Ibn Sina hospital. It is in very bad shape, almost destroyed. It is unusable.” Libya Muammar Gaddafi Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Peter Beaumont guardian.co.uk
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Report says kill-or-capture raids are not a surgical tactic as claimed and use of the word ‘leader’ is suspect The success of one of Nato’s principal tactics against the Taliban – targeted night raids aimed at killing or capturing leaders of the insurgency – may have been exaggerated to make the military campaign in Afghanistan look more effective, according to a report published on Wednesday. The study shows that for every “leader” killed in the raids, eight other people also died, although the raids were designed to be a precise weapon aimed at decapitating the Taliban on the battlefield by removing their commanders. The report notes that in briefings to the US media, aggregate claims made for the number of Taliban leaders killed or detained over a given period were sometimes much greater than the numbers recorded in the daily press releases. The report, by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, looked at the daily press releases published by the Nato-led International Stability Assistance Force (Isaf) to create a profile of the “kill-or-capture raids” from December 2009 to the end of September this year. Strick van Linschoten also said Isaf’s definition of the word leader was “so broad as to be meaningless”. He said the words leader and “facilitator” were sometimes used interchangeably in the Isaf press releases, although facilitator could just be someone whose house an insurgent group was thought to have used. A previous study of night raids had found that many people classified as leaders captured in night raids had subsequently been released by Isaf. “The use of the word ‘leader’ is intended to convey the impression that the masterminds of the Taliban are being taking off the battlefield. That’s a misrepresentation,” Strick van Linschoten said. “It is meant to be taken as meaning that we are taking out the brains behind the Taliban off the battlefield, but that claim doesn’t really measure up.” The report, entitled A Knock on the Door, echoes a study published last month by the Open Society Foundations. That study said that although Isaf had made strides in reducing the number of civilian casualties, the 12 to 20 raids a night over a sustained period, with thousands of arrests, many of them of non-combatants, were alienating the population and undermining the international coalition’s aims in Afghanistan. “The raids are a far blunter weapon than we have been led to believe, and they have an indiscriminate impact,” said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundations and co-author of the
Continue reading …Report says kill-or-capture raids are not a surgical tactic as claimed and use of the word ‘leader’ is suspect The success of one of Nato’s principal tactics against the Taliban – targeted night raids aimed at killing or capturing leaders of the insurgency – may have been exaggerated to make the military campaign in Afghanistan look more effective, according to a report published on Wednesday. The study shows that for every “leader” killed in the raids, eight other people also died, although the raids were designed to be a precise weapon aimed at decapitating the Taliban on the battlefield by removing their commanders. The report notes that in briefings to the US media, aggregate claims made for the number of Taliban leaders killed or detained over a given period were sometimes much greater than the numbers recorded in the daily press releases. The report, by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, looked at the daily press releases published by the Nato-led International Stability Assistance Force (Isaf) to create a profile of the “kill-or-capture raids” from December 2009 to the end of September this year. Strick van Linschoten also said Isaf’s definition of the word leader was “so broad as to be meaningless”. He said the words leader and “facilitator” were sometimes used interchangeably in the Isaf press releases, although facilitator could just be someone whose house an insurgent group was thought to have used. A previous study of night raids had found that many people classified as leaders captured in night raids had subsequently been released by Isaf. “The use of the word ‘leader’ is intended to convey the impression that the masterminds of the Taliban are being taking off the battlefield. That’s a misrepresentation,” Strick van Linschoten said. “It is meant to be taken as meaning that we are taking out the brains behind the Taliban off the battlefield, but that claim doesn’t really measure up.” The report, entitled A Knock on the Door, echoes a study published last month by the Open Society Foundations. That study said that although Isaf had made strides in reducing the number of civilian casualties, the 12 to 20 raids a night over a sustained period, with thousands of arrests, many of them of non-combatants, were alienating the population and undermining the international coalition’s aims in Afghanistan. “The raids are a far blunter weapon than we have been led to believe, and they have an indiscriminate impact,” said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundations and co-author of the
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Northern Ireland police report no injuries as City of Culture offices are targeted for the second time A bomb detonated outside the City of Culture office in Derry on Wednesday night, police said. There were no reports of injuries and police have yet to reveal details on the extent of the damage caused. It is the second time that the office has been targeted after a pipe bomb planted by dissident republicans in January caused minor damage to the building. Derry’s successful bid for title of UK City of Culture has secured cross-community support in Northern Ireland. The city’s Shipquay Street was closed off on Wednesday night by officers investigating the blast, which they reported at around 11pm. SDLP Foyle MP Mark Durkan condemned those responsible for the explosion, saying they ‘have shown complete and utter contempt for the people of Derry’. “Derry is a city with many challenges and with many difficulties. But the City of Culture is one of the opportunities we have,” Durkan said. “It has been strongly supported across our city, not just for the positive ongoing work to make it a memorable and successful year for Derry, but for the legacy that it will create long after 2013 as a springboard for future investment here.” He added: “This callous and dangerous act flies in the face of the efforts made by so many people to improve life here. Thankfully no one has been injured but those graces are no thanks to those who are behind this attack. “They are out to destroy and they don’t care if they injure or kill when they are at it.” Northern Ireland guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Northern Ireland police report no injuries as City of Culture offices are targeted for the second time A bomb detonated outside the City of Culture office in Derry on Wednesday night, police said. There were no reports of injuries and police have yet to reveal details on the extent of the damage caused. It is the second time that the office has been targeted after a pipe bomb planted by dissident republicans in January caused minor damage to the building. Derry’s successful bid for title of UK City of Culture has secured cross-community support in Northern Ireland. The city’s Shipquay Street was closed off on Wednesday night by officers investigating the blast, which they reported at around 11pm. SDLP Foyle MP Mark Durkan condemned those responsible for the explosion, saying they ‘have shown complete and utter contempt for the people of Derry’. “Derry is a city with many challenges and with many difficulties. But the City of Culture is one of the opportunities we have,” Durkan said. “It has been strongly supported across our city, not just for the positive ongoing work to make it a memorable and successful year for Derry, but for the legacy that it will create long after 2013 as a springboard for future investment here.” He added: “This callous and dangerous act flies in the face of the efforts made by so many people to improve life here. Thankfully no one has been injured but those graces are no thanks to those who are behind this attack. “They are out to destroy and they don’t care if they injure or kill when they are at it.” Northern Ireland guardian.co.uk
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Home secretary wants curfews to create ‘no-go’ areas during serious outbreaks of disorder The home secretary, Theresa May, is to press ahead with seeking public order curfew powers for the police to create “no-go” areas during riots. The powers are expected to include immediate curfews over large areas to tackle the kind of fast-moving disturbances that swept across many of England’s major cities in August. May also wants to extend existing powers to impose curfews on individual teenagers aged under 16. The launch of official consultation on wider public order powers is being announced as May and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, host an international forum on gangs with experts from six countries. They include Bill Bratton, the retired US police chief. The consultation paper includes stronger police powers to order protesters and rioters to remove face masks. The home secretary first suggested this in March after the anti-cuts march in London in which 56 police officers were injured. May said in August that existing dispersal orders, which have to be applied for in advance, were no longer adequate to meet the fast-moving nature of modern public disorder. Human rights groups predicted that blanket curfews would prove ineffective in a riot situation and criticised the idea as a “headline-grabbing initiative”. The consultation will look at repealing section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act, which outlaws “insulting words or behaviour”. There are claims the provision hampers free speech and it has been the subject of a strong Liberal Democrat campaign. Parliament’s joint human rights committee has called for the removal of the word “insulting” to raise the threshold of the offence, citing a case in which a teenager was arrested for calling Scientology a cult. Those supporting the reform say it would still cover threatening, abusive or disorderly behavour. Evangelical Christians have complained about the use of section 5 to fine street preachers who proclaim that homosexuality is sinful or immoral. The Home Office forum on tackling gangs is one of the initiatives announced by David Cameron immediately following the riots. The victims’ commissioner, Louise Casey, has been named as head of the government’s unit to tackle 120,000 of the most troubled families as one of the measures. This week Bratton denied he had been appointed by Cameron as his “gangs tsar” and said he was acting only as a consultant to the Home Office conference. Police UK riots Theresa May Alan Travis guardian.co.uk
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Care Quality Commission says too many staff fail to feed patients properly or treat them with dignity Too many hospital staff do not ensure older patients eat and drink properly, fail to respect their dignity and talk to them in a condescending manner, the NHS watchdog warns. In a highly critical report the Care Quality Commission said that more than half of all hospitals in England were not meeting key standards for dignity and nutrition in elderly people, a finding it called “truly alarming and deeply disappointing”. It castigated a handful of them for providing “unacceptable care”. Of 100 acute hospitals that received unannounced visits by inspectors between March and June, 45 met the NHS’s standards relating to both patients’ dignity and nutrition. Thirty-five did met both standards but needed to make improvements in one or both areas. And 20 – one in five – did not meet either one or both of them. Too often staff did not treat patients with kindness and compassion, it found. Campaigners for the elderly seized on the findings – the latest evidence of poor care of older patients who are often seriously ill or physically incapacitated. “Nearly one in five hospitals completely fails to ensure that patients are eating and treated with dignity and in total nearly half of all hospitals are not doing enough,” said Age UK’s charity director Michelle Mitchell. “This shows shocking complacency on the part of those hospitals towards an essential part of good healthcare and there are no excuses.” At Sandwell general hospital in West Bromwich inspectors witnessed a patient who had been incontinent not being washed for 90 minutes, despite requesting help. The hospital later shut the ward concerned and replaced it with two other specialist wards. The behaviour of staff at Alexandra hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire, prompted inspectors to decide there were major concerns about its levels of care, though improvements were then made. And after identifying moderate concerns about nutrition and dignity at James Paget university hospitals foundation trust in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, on a follow-up visit the commission found some patients were not receiving enough support with eating and drinking and that some who needed intravenous fluids were not getting it. The regulator issued the trust with a warning notice telling it to make urgent improvements or risk being prosecuted or having restrictions put on its operating licence. In hospitals where essential standards were not being met inspectors found patients’ call bells being put out of their reach or not responded to quickly enough, staff talking to them in a condescending or dismissive way, patients not receiving the help they needed to eat and people being interrupted during a meal and thus not finishingit. Dame Jo Williams, the commission’s chair, said: “Too often our inspectors saw the delivery of care treated as a task that needed to be completed. Those responsible for the training and development of staff, particularly in nursing, need to look long and hard at why the focus has become the unit of work rather than the person who needs to be looked after – and how this can be changed. Task-focused care is not person-centred care. Often what is needed is kindness and compassion, which cost nothing.” The entire NHS needed to ensure that it made big improvements to end the scandal of poor care, she added. Poor leadership in NHS organisations had let “unacceptable care … become the norm”, while the attitude of some staff resulted in “too many cases where patients were treated by staff in a way that stripped them of their dignity and respect”, said the report. Inspectors also found unacceptable care on well-staffed wards and, equally, excellent care on understaffed ones. Age UK wants the commission to undertake more spot checks and for ministers to force hospitals to publish accessible information showing rates of malnutrition on their wards. Health secretary Andrew Lansley, who asked the commission to carry out the research, said poor care needed to be identified and stamped out. “Everyone admitted to hospital deserves to be treated as an individual, with compassion and dignity. We must never lose sight of the fact that the most important people in the NHS are its patients. The CQC saw some exemplary care, but some hospitals were not even getting the basics right. That is simply unacceptable.” In future the planned new local HealthWatch organisations should be able to carry out their own unannounced inspections, he suggested. NHS Health Andrew Lansley Denis Campbell guardian.co.uk
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Shelter reveals that families are being priced out of the ‘out-of-control’ rental market in 55% of English local authorities Families have been priced out of rental property in the majority of local authorities in England, according to the homeless charity Shelter . The Shelter Rent Watch found that average private rents were unaffordable for ordinary working families in 55% of local authorities in England. Typical rents charged by private landlords were more than a third of median take-home pay, the widely accepted measure of affordability. Shelter said research showed that 38% of families with children who were renting privately had cut down on food to pay their rent. Although renting has traditionally been regarded as a cheaper alternative to home ownership, the credit crunch and high house prices have forced many potential homebuyers to remain as tenants. At the same time, growing numbers of people who would normally qualify for social housing have been pushed into the private sector by an acute shortage of local authority and housing association property. The number of tenants renting privately has increased by nearly one million in the past five years. The increased demand has pushed up rents , particularly in London boroughs, which are the most expensive in England. At £1,360, an average rent for a two-bedroom home in the capital is almost two-and-a-half times the average in the rest of the country (£568). The least affordable local authority area outside London is Oxford, where typical rents account for 55% of average earnings. Tenants on benefits in these areas are already having problems finding properties to rent within the new local housing allowance limits , implemented in April for new tenants and from the beginning of next year for those in existing tenancies. Shelter said tenants in many rural areas were also bearing the brunt of high rents and low earnings. It found it is cheaper to rent in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham than in north Devon, north Dorset or Herefordshire. In Yorkshire, properties in Bradford and Sheffield are more affordable to rent than in the rural areas of Ryedale and Richmondshire. Shelter’s analysis showed that in England 8% of local authorities were extremely unaffordable to rent in, with a median rent of 50% or more of median full-time take-home pay; 21% were very unaffordable with a median rent equivalent of 40% to 49% of median full-time take-home pay; and 29% were fairly unaffordable with the median rent equivalent to 35% to 39% of the median full-time take-home pay. Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: “With huge differences in affordability across the country, there are now worrying signs that families are likely to be displaced by our out-of-control rental market. “We have become depressingly familiar with first-time buyers being priced out of the housing market, but the impact of unaffordable rents is more dramatic. With no cheaper alternative, ordinary people are forced to cut their spending on essentials like food and heating, or uproot and move away from jobs, schools and families.” Robb said it was time for the government to urgently consider how private renting could become a stable, affordable option for families “and not a heavy financial burden that makes parents choose between buying food for their children and paying the rent.” Alice Barnard, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance , said the lack of affordable housing to rent or buy was one of the most pressing issues facing rural communities. “The countryside has seen its population grow at twice the rate of urban areas, which has driven up prices, forcing families to make sacrifices to meet spiralling rental costs and pricing young families out of the communities in which they have grown up,” she said. “If we want our rural communities to flourish then the government needs to urgently review the rental market in rural areas to enable rural communities to meet their housing needs.” Melissa Brown, a part-time yoga teacher, and her husband David*, a college lecturer, found it impossible to rent a decent affordable property when their landlord decided to sell their existing home. The couple, who live in Brighton with their three children, had been renting a three-bedroom terrace house for £1,250 a month for two-and-a-half years but last January were told they had to move out because the landlord wanted to sell up. It took them six months to find somewhere that was still close enough to their children’s school and they ended up moving in September into a three-bedroom house for £1,550 a month. The house is in a poor state of repair with damp and needs decorating and other work, but Melissa said that most of the properties they looked at was “eye-wateringly bad”. “Most of the rented houses around here are not suitable for families because the lounges have been turned into bedrooms so landlords can put students in there and make more money. Even groups of professionals are living in shared houses with no lounge,” she said. “We’ve been renting for years and it’s never been as bad as this. It’s all driven by greed.” She added: “We did ask about repairs to this house and the landlord is paying for paint, but she has been told she could rent the house out to students for £1,650 a month and already thinks she’s doing us a favour.” Their couple’s household income is about £2,000 a month and they are already really struggling to make ends meet. The family is planning to use the loft area as an extra bedroom for a lodger to raise money. Melissa said: “The landlord doesn’t mind how we raise the rent, so we are considering becoming landlords ourselves. If you can’t beat them join them.” *The names have been changed in this case study Renting property Property First-time buyers House prices Housing Housing benefit Jill Insley guardian.co.uk
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