Forces that no longer record ethnicity are those most likely to stop disproportionate numbers of black people Police forces with some of the worst records of targeting black people have decided to stop recording the ethnicity of the people their officers stop and ask to account for their movements, the Guardian has learned. Five out of the 10 forces most likely to use stop-and-account powers disproportionately against black people – West Midlands, Avon and Somerset, Thames Valley, Sussex and Hertfordshire – have halted recording the race of people they have stopped. They have used a government change in the rules introduced in March, which was aimed at cutting bureaucracy. In total, 21 out of 43 forces in England and Wales will stop recording details, according to responses to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. A high court challenge is being brought over the decision. The collection of data about the race of people stopped is one of the key legacies of the 1999 Stephen Lawrence inquiry into police racism. The figures have shown that black people are more likely to be subject to the powers, and those figures have been used to pressure the police into cleaning up discrimination in the ranks. New totals show that the worst offender is the West Midlands force, which is seven times more likely to stop an African-Caribbean person than a white person. The force, Britain’s second biggest, is one of those that has decided to stop recording the ethnicity of people subjected to stop and account by its officers. According to analysis by Dr Michael Shiner of the London School of Economics, there are wide variations in how much more likely different forces are to use stop-and-account powers against black people. . Some do not appear to be discriminating.Among those ceasing the recording of ethnicity, But Gwent has the second highest disproportionality rate of five times, while African-Caribbean people in West Mercia, Avon and Somerset and Warwickshire are all roughly three times more likely than their white fellow citizens to face stop and account. Shiner, who prepared his data for Stopwatch , which campaigns for fairness in police stop powers, said: “Figures such as these may be a source of embarrassment to the police. Getting rid of recording may relieve the embarrassment but prevents us from dealing with the problem.” A UN committee this month warned that the changes could “encourage racial and ethnic stereotyping” among officers. Stop and account is the most commonly used power by officers to question people in the street. In 2008-09, the last year for which official figures are available , there were 1,126,258 stop and searches compared with 2,211,598 stop and accounts. One experienced officer said colleagues could use the power, which does not require reasonable suspicion of criminality, to justify searching someone, which does: “It could lead to a suspicion to arise. Why are you not talking to me? Why aren’t you answering questions?” Forces will continue recording the race of people stopped and searched, with officers arguing that in a time of limited resources, it is better if the money is spent on that rather than on collecting data from stop and account. Three forces who have ended recording the data – Hampshire, Thames Valley and Hertfordshire – will feature in a test case brought by Hugh Diedrick, an electrical engineer, who says he has been subjected to various stops as he travels around the country for work. In one incident he claims to have been strip-searched and in the latest, in July 2011, he alleges that Hertfordshire officers picked on him because of the colour of his skin in order to subject him to a stop and account. The legal case will assert that the decision by police forces to stop recording the ethnicity data was taken without proper consultation and will break their legal obligations to ensure equality. Sarah McSherry, the solicitor bringing the high court claim, said: “These statistics can help chief constables tackle potential racism. But scrapping these figures smacks of a complete lack of will to tackle discrimination, which has affected many people, such as my client, Mr Diedrick.” The decision to record the ethnicity of people subjected to stop powers was a key recommendation of the inquiry into police failings that allowed the killers of Stephen Lawrence to escape justice. The Macpherson report said anyone stopped by the police should be given a record stating the reason for the stop, and their ethnicity should be recorded. That came into force in 2005, but police claimed it was too time-consuming. Dr Rebekah Delsol of the Open Society Justice Initiative said: “Cutting one of the few mechanisms for accountability at this time – of all times – is reckless and irresponsible as it risks fuelling the tensions that have scarred police-community relations for 30 years.” Craig Mackey, who leads for the Association of Chief Police Officers on stop-and-search issues, told the Guardian: “The premise that somehow forces chose to discontinue the recording of ethnicity as part of stop and account on the basis of hiding some sort of practice, there is absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever.” Mackey added that stop and account was not really a police power and that people could ignore requests for information from an officer. The assistant chief constable of Thames Valley police, Richard Bennett, said: “In common with most other forces, we no longer record stop-and-account activity following the removal of the mandatory national requirement.” The Home Office said: “From 7 March 2011 we have removed the national requirement to record stop and account, in order to reduce police bureaucracy. “These changes will save hundreds of thousands of hours of police time.” A report from the United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination condemned the changes, warning: “The committee is concerned that these measures may not only encourage racial and ethnic stereotyping by police officers but may also encourage impunity and fail to promote accountability in the police service for possible abuses.” Police Race issues Stop and search UK criminal justice Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Pakistan is shoving back against US accusations and ultimatums over its connection with the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, denying any involvement and warning the US against crossing the border to deal with the insurgents unilaterally. “The Pakistan nation will not allow the boots on our ground, never,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik…
Continue reading …For one gay teen, it didn’t get better, and Lady Gaga plans to do something about it. The singer took to Twitter following the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer —who ended his life because he could no longer face bullying at his school—first expressing sadness (“The past days I’ve spent…
Continue reading …Worry no longer about an impending double-dip recession—it’s already here, says George Soros. “I think we are in it already,” the billionaire investor told CNBC , citing Republicans’ rejection of fiscal stimulus as a key problem. “We have a slowdown and basically a conflict about whether the rich ought to…
Continue reading …Ron Paul isn’t going to be the next president, or even the GOP nominee. “And yet, in a sense, Ron Paul is winning the 2012 Republican presidential primary,” writes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post . Because Paul’s real goal is to push his Austrian economic theories into the mainstream, and…
Continue reading …Say hello to my little friend … again. Sort of. Universal Pictures is preparing to make (but not remake) a third Scarface, which it says will not be a rehashing of or sequel to either the 1932 or 1983 films, but a new version, reports Deadline . It’ll share the same premise…
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Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper describing the experiment. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result. Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: “We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. “When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn’t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. “If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out.” The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: “If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.” The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 “bricks” of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes. Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato’s team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team’s result is six standard deviations. Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was so radical. “Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent,” he said. Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting. “It’s such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,” he told the Guardian. One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum. “With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the limiting speed in nature is the speed of light,” he said. “It might actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly.” Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there. Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century. “If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing such a unified theory,” Kostelecky said. Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said. But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said: “Neutrino experimental results are not historically all that reliable, so the words ‘don’t hold your breath’ do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like this.” Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them. Particle physics Cern Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper describing the experiment. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result. Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: “We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. “When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn’t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. “If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out.” The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: “If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.” The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 “bricks” of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes. Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato’s team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team’s result is six standard deviations. Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was so radical. “Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent,” he said. Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting. “It’s such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,” he told the Guardian. One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum. “With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the limiting speed in nature is the speed of light,” he said. “It might actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly.” Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there. Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century. “If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing such a unified theory,” Kostelecky said. Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said. But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said: “Neutrino experimental results are not historically all that reliable, so the words ‘don’t hold your breath’ do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like this.” Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them. Particle physics Cern Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper describing the experiment. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result. Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: “We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. “When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn’t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. “If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out.” The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: “If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.” The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 “bricks” of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes. Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato’s team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team’s result is six standard deviations. Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was so radical. “Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent,” he said. Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting. “It’s such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,” he told the Guardian. One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum. “With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the limiting speed in nature is the speed of light,” he said. “It might actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly.” Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there. Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century. “If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing such a unified theory,” Kostelecky said. Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said. But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said: “Neutrino experimental results are not historically all that reliable, so the words ‘don’t hold your breath’ do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like this.” Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them. Particle physics Cern Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
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• Former eBay boss chosen to replace Léo Apotheker at HP • Lawyers will be studying small print in Autonomy offer Léo Apotheker has been fired as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and replaced with Meg Whitman, the giant technology company announced on Thursday evening. Whitman, 55, the former chief executive of eBay and candidate for California governor, and a member of the HP board since January, was confirmed as the replacement following a board meeting yesterday. Apothekerhad been at the helm at HP for only 11 months. Rumours about Apotheker’s replacement began swirling on Wednesday and came to a head in the meeting, the outcome of which was announced after stock markets had closed. The stock was down by about 1% in after-hours trading. Ray Lane, who has moved from non-executive chairman to executive chairman of HP’s board, said: “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.” Lane said the board believes “the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes”. The board also plans to appoint an independent director. HP is one of the world’s biggest technology companies, with more than 320,000 staff, annual revenues of $120bn (£78bn) – mainly from large “enterprise” customers – and profits of about $5.5bn. The management shake-up represents yet another turnaround strategy at one of Silicon Valley’s oldest – but most publicly dysfunctional – firms. Since joining HP in November, Apotheker’s strategic decisions had been a drastic reversal of the company’s self-image as an inventor of hardware: he announced that it would spin off its PC business, the world’s biggest, closed down its TouchPad tablet and webOS division, and announced a move into services, including the purchase of the British company Autonomy for $11.7bn. It is unclear whether the latter purchase will go ahead under Whitman. HP has four main divisions: Services; Storage & Networking; Personal Systems Group; and Imaging & Printing. Of those, PSG, which is the world’s largest supplier of PCs, is the biggest by revenue – but its 6% profit margin is the lowest within the company by some way. The Guardian’s own analysis shows that if the PSG division could be spun off without harming other divisions, HP’s overall profitability would rise from 7.7% to 12%. But investors were not pleased by the prospect held out by Apotheker, who got terrible ratings from his own staff. The abrupt dismissal follows the revelation that some members of the board did not even meet Apotheker before approving his hiring in late November because they were “tired of all the infighting” that had led up to the dismissal of the previous incumbent, Mark Hurd, in August 2010. That in turn is almost certain to lead to lawsuits from disgruntled stockholders who have seen the value of their holdings fall by nearly 50% in Apotheker’s time in charge of the company. It already faces such a lawsuit filed earlier this week, over the closure of the webOS division, on the basis that it had previously suggested the $1.2bn acquisition of webOS with Palm in July 2010 would play a vital part in the company’s future. Instead Apotheker shut it within 48 days of the TouchPad going on sale. Whitman has been a member of the HP board since January, and so is not tainted by the decision last year to hire Apotheker. But members of the tech community were doubtful that she was the right person for the job. Charles House, a veteran HP engineer, told the New York Times that she would be “an unmitigated disaster”, while Roger McNamee, managing director of Elevation Partners – which sold an interest in Palm when it was acquired by HP in 2009 for more than $1bn – said that “the notion that HP can be fixed by adding a celebrity chief executive is laughable.” Wall Street should react favourably to a new leader, even if it would be HP’s third in six years, after Carly Fiorina (fired in 2005) and Mark Hurd (fired in 2010). But not all analysts were convinced. Although Whitman, 55, grew eBay from a 30-strong company with $86m revenues to one with 15,000 people and almost $8bn revenues, she also oversaw the ineffective $2.8bn purchase of Skype, and left in 2008. Her strengths are consumer-facing, not in the enterprise. Carter Lusher, chief analyst at Ovum, said: “Whitman would do little for the confidence of HP’s enterprise customers. Whitman’s expertise lies primarily in the consumer market, and an interim leader will just prolong the sense of uncertainty.” Apotheker, who joined from the customer management software company SAP in early November, was unable to even turn to his employees for support: his approval rating among them was just 25%, according to the recruitment site Glassdoor. Hewlett-Packard Autonomy Technology sector Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
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