Age UK predicts more than 1m will be without support by 2014 Social care in England is “grossly inadequate” and “totally failing” to meet the needs of disabled people aged over 65, according to a new report. Research by Age UK has found that of the 2 million older people in England with care-related needs, just 800,000 receive formal support from public or private sector agencies. But the picture is growing even bleaker, warns the report, Care in Crisis : with spending cuts under way, more than 1 million of the most vulnerable pensioners in England will be left without help or support by 2014, it concludes. “There has been unprecedented debate on the future of care – both its long-term funding and the ‘transformation’ of council provision today,” said the report’s author, Andrew Harrop , Age UK’s director of policy and public affairs. “But in the meantime, local authority spending decisions have changed the facts on the ground, with a significant deterioration in services for older people. “Over the last six years publicly funded social care for older people has been systematically starved of cash,” he said. Elaine McDonald, a 67-year-old former ballerina, is taking her local authority of Kensington and Chelsea to the supreme court for reducing her care package from seven days a week to just one. McDonald has had to use a wheelchair since a stroke in 2007. Since the local authority reduced her care package, she has had two serious falls, one of which led to a broken hip. “I have worked and paid taxes since I was 16, and have lived in the borough for 47 years, so I don’t think I am asking for much in return,” she said. Since 2004, net spending on older people’s social care has risen by 0.1% a year in real terms, a total of £43m, while real spending on the NHS has risen by £25bn. “Spending cuts are projected to reduce spending on older people’s care by a minimum of £300m over four years,” said Harrop. “Real spending on older people’s care will be £250m lower in 2014 than in 2004. Over the same period, the number of people over 85 has risen by two-thirds to 630,000 people.” The Care in Crisis report said that while half of councils provided support to people assessed as having “moderate” needs in 2005, that had fallen to 15% by 2011. The Age UK report found huge regional discrepancies in the quantity and quality of care for older people: Tower Hamlets, the highest-spending local authority, spends five times as much on each older resident as Cornwall, the lowest-spending. “Age UK found that public sector commissioners are underpaying for older people’s care homes by a total of around half a billion pounds,” Harrop said. “The average shortfall per resident is £60 per week, rising to £120 per week in south-east England. Many care homes are demanding that older people and their relatives ‘top up’ their care fees with private money.” It is, he said, a “real injustice” that forces families to subsidise the state’s statutory duties. Especially when, he points out, younger service users are allocated an average of £78 a week per person, compared to £53 a week per older person. Reform, however, cannot be achieved without billions of pounds of new money, the researchers found. “Today taxpayers spend 0.5% of GDP on care for older people in England. If we merely maintain this level we will cause misery and danger for hundreds of thousands of frail older people,” said Harrop. In a costed package of solutions, the report estimates that Britain needs to spend a minimum of 0.9% of GDP on care in later life by the mid-2020s: around £2-3bn a year. The publication of the Age UK report comes as The Dilnot Commission finalises its recommendations on the future funding of care and support in England. The independent commission is due to publish its findings at the beginning of July. Martin Green, chief executive of the English Community Care Association , said: “We need the Dilnot Commission to come up with a solution, but we also need politicians with the guts to actually implement it. Older people Disability Social care Amelia Hill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Age UK predicts more than 1m will be without support by 2014 Social care in England is “grossly inadequate” and “totally failing” to meet the needs of disabled people aged over 65, according to a new report. Research by Age UK has found that of the 2 million older people in England with care-related needs, just 800,000 receive formal support from public or private sector agencies. But the picture is growing even bleaker, warns the report, Care in Crisis : with spending cuts under way, more than 1 million of the most vulnerable pensioners in England will be left without help or support by 2014, it concludes. “There has been unprecedented debate on the future of care – both its long-term funding and the ‘transformation’ of council provision today,” said the report’s author, Andrew Harrop , Age UK’s director of policy and public affairs. “But in the meantime, local authority spending decisions have changed the facts on the ground, with a significant deterioration in services for older people. “Over the last six years publicly funded social care for older people has been systematically starved of cash,” he said. Elaine McDonald, a 67-year-old former ballerina, is taking her local authority of Kensington and Chelsea to the supreme court for reducing her care package from seven days a week to just one. McDonald has had to use a wheelchair since a stroke in 2007. Since the local authority reduced her care package, she has had two serious falls, one of which led to a broken hip. “I have worked and paid taxes since I was 16, and have lived in the borough for 47 years, so I don’t think I am asking for much in return,” she said. Since 2004, net spending on older people’s social care has risen by 0.1% a year in real terms, a total of £43m, while real spending on the NHS has risen by £25bn. “Spending cuts are projected to reduce spending on older people’s care by a minimum of £300m over four years,” said Harrop. “Real spending on older people’s care will be £250m lower in 2014 than in 2004. Over the same period, the number of people over 85 has risen by two-thirds to 630,000 people.” The Care in Crisis report said that while half of councils provided support to people assessed as having “moderate” needs in 2005, that had fallen to 15% by 2011. The Age UK report found huge regional discrepancies in the quantity and quality of care for older people: Tower Hamlets, the highest-spending local authority, spends five times as much on each older resident as Cornwall, the lowest-spending. “Age UK found that public sector commissioners are underpaying for older people’s care homes by a total of around half a billion pounds,” Harrop said. “The average shortfall per resident is £60 per week, rising to £120 per week in south-east England. Many care homes are demanding that older people and their relatives ‘top up’ their care fees with private money.” It is, he said, a “real injustice” that forces families to subsidise the state’s statutory duties. Especially when, he points out, younger service users are allocated an average of £78 a week per person, compared to £53 a week per older person. Reform, however, cannot be achieved without billions of pounds of new money, the researchers found. “Today taxpayers spend 0.5% of GDP on care for older people in England. If we merely maintain this level we will cause misery and danger for hundreds of thousands of frail older people,” said Harrop. In a costed package of solutions, the report estimates that Britain needs to spend a minimum of 0.9% of GDP on care in later life by the mid-2020s: around £2-3bn a year. The publication of the Age UK report comes as The Dilnot Commission finalises its recommendations on the future funding of care and support in England. The independent commission is due to publish its findings at the beginning of July. Martin Green, chief executive of the English Community Care Association , said: “We need the Dilnot Commission to come up with a solution, but we also need politicians with the guts to actually implement it. Older people Disability Social care Amelia Hill guardian.co.uk
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enlarge Ruth Marcus has an op-ed out that is so reflective of Beltway thinking and so wrong that it just shouldn’t be allowed to stand as the final word. Her argument : But being a jerk, even on an Edwardsian scale, is not a felony, which is what federal prosecutors have been pursuing for more than two years. The original theory of the case was that Edwards misused campaign funds to support his mistress, Rielle Hunter. That would have been a serious matter, except the theory fizzled. Yes, that theory fizzled largely because large donors, like Fred Baron and Rachel Mellon decided to pony up the funds to keep Rielle Hunter out of sight and out of the media’s eye. They only did that for one reason: To keep Edwards’ primary bid alive. To that end, they spent nearly one million dollars. Marcus thinks that’s not a felony. Even if you were to conclude that the payments to Hunter constituted impermissible campaign contributions, there is the more serious question of whether criminal prosecution is the appropriate remedy. A single advisory opinion hardly seems like adequate notice that funneling money to Hunter could land Edwards in prison. I am bipartisanly squeamish about the criminalization of politics; I have been as critical of a (Democratic) Texas district attorney’s prosecution of former House majority leader Tom DeLay on money-laundering charges as I am about the threatened Edwards indictment. As is just about everyone in Washington DC. Campaign finance disclosure? Hell, no. Corporate contributions directly to candidates? Sure, why not? The problems in Washington relate directly to campaign finance. It’s driven home over and over and over again. When Republican congressmen whine about the national debt and de-fund piddly little green energy initiatives while voting down repeal of oil and gas subsidies, it’s because their campaign bids are supported by those oil and gas companies. When Democrats water down financial regulation or delay health insurance reform, it’s because of the pressure put on them by the same wealthy interests. So being bipartisanly squeamish about campaign finance, which does not criminalize of politics but does identify corrupt politicians, is a comfortable place to be, but it’s erosive to democracy. This kind of thinking in one of the most respected publications for national politics just drives me crazy. What would have happened if Edwards’ affair with Hunter had not been discovered by the press and he’d gone on to win the nomination and the election. Would those wealthy donors have simply said, oh well, mission accomplished, and it only cost one million? Marcus never takes her thinking to the next step, to the implications of what it really means to have a few wealthy donors in charge of a secret and financing the coverup. Yes. It is likely criminal. I have no issue with the DOJ’s recommendation. I simply wish they would exercise the same kind of principled thinking on issues like John Ensign and Tom Coburn’s payoffs to Ensign’s mistress, Wall Street thuggery, bank fraud, and other areas where wealthy donors wield far more influence.
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Exclusive: Record rise, despite recession, means 2C target almost out of reach Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency . The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol , chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions. Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data. “I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.” Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100 ,” he said. “Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.” Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said. The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree. Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on emissions. John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic . You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.” Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world. But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets. • About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere. “It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol. • Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power. “People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels. • Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol. He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.” Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected. Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said. Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China . Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed. Carbon emissions Nuclear power Energy Global recession Climate change Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk
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The Skype forums are a hive of panic and abuzz with accusations that either the company is bundling crapware with its VoIP app or has a serious security problem. Users are reporting that a strange, new, and difficult to uninstall program is finding its way on to their PCs called EasyBits GO. EasyBits is the company that has powered Skype’s games channel since 2006, but at least until now its wares have not been standalone software. One moderator has declared EasyBits Go is not part of Skype and suggested customers immediately run a malware scan, but mods are volunteers and not official representatives of the company, so we’re taking it with a grain of salt. Another (later) post from a forum admin simply states that Skype is looking into the issue and will release an official statement, though we have no idea when that might actually happen and we’re awaiting reply to our own request for comment. It appears that a rep from EasyBits Media has taken to the forums to quell some of the outrage, but to no avail. Posts from the team are painfully vague, saying that it was part of an update to the gaming platform and apologizing for the misunderstanding, before linking directly to an .exe that it claims will remove the offending software. To say that forum users are wary of the executable would be an understatement (most responses have involved torrents of profanity). Reports are that the suspicious app is installing itself without any approval from users, but we can’t confirm this since any attempts to install in our lab of doom resulted only in errors while downloading. For now, we’ll just have to wait for word from Skype, and the company better move quick — the pain of the recent outage is still fresh in many customers’ minds. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Skype taken to task by angry users over claimed crapware payload originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 May 2011 14:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Statement of support issued amid growing speculation over health secretary’s cabinet future Downing Street has moved to quash growing speculation that health secretary Andrew Lansley will quit if the government’s review of proposed health reforms ends in wholesale changes. It has been reported that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have been discussing how to handle Lansley’s cabinet future when the review by Professor Steve Field concludes in mid-June. Downing Street issued a statement of support for Lansley, saying: “The speculation in the papers is nonsense. Andrew Lansley is doing an excellent job.” Foreign secretary William Hague is said to be advising against pressing ahead with the reforms, while Nick Clegg has argued that the changes required to the health and social care bill are so widespread it will have to go back for a second line-by-line scrutiny by MPs. That would delay the bill by up to six months. Cameron was caught apparently telling Clegg the reforms no longer had anything to do with Lansley, as the two men exchanged angry words about the reforms while waiting to hear Barack Obama address parliament last week. In a sign Lansley has become fed up with horsetrading over his plans, he has said: “I’ve stopped being a politician – I just want to get the NHS to a place where it will deliver results. I don’t want to do any other cabinet job. I’m someone who cares about the NHS who happens to be a politician, not the other way around.” Cameron is caught between needing to show he has listened to the public and professional outcry over the changes, and his need to keep Lansley in the cabinet. Lansley and his fellow ministers believe much of the reassurance required can be provided without big changes, arguing that much of the opposition was based on a misunderstanding of the bill – in part created by the health secretary’s failure to sell the reforms effectively. Lansley is confident his key proposals for GP commissioning will survive, with membership extended to include nurses and possibly other health professionals, such as doctors in acute hospitals. His aides believe the Liberal Democrats will not press for local councillors to join GP commissioning bodies but will demand they are subject to greater scrutiny by health and wellbeing boards on which councillors will sit. Plans for Monitor, the health regulator, to be given a general duty to extend competition in the NHS will be shelved, something Lansley has been prepared to do. He is also likely to support Clegg’s call for no sudden, top-down opening up of all NHS services to any qualified provider. Lansley has been receiving support from the Tory right, as well as from Blairite health reformers including Lord Warner and Prof Julian le Grand of the LSE. In a sign of support from the right, the defence secretary, Liam Fox, gave strong backing to Lansley’s plans. “We have very clear common aims: that we want to get the outcomes of the NHS up, we have to get better health outcomes in this country for the money we spend. We also have to ensure that more decisions are taken by doctors and nurses and fewer by bureaucrats.” Fox is regarded as increasingly difficult to control by Downing Street. During Obama’s visit he chose to go to Washington to speak at an anniversary marking the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. His speech included an apparent snub to Cameron and Obama, saying Thatcher and Reagan never saw the special relationship as “a dewy-eyed Disneyesque emotional love-in”. Fox added: “They were giants of history when history needed giants. We may never see their likes again in our lifetime.” Fox also praised competition, the principle in dispute in the health bill, saying Reagan and Thatcher “believed that competition is to be welcomed not feared – that it is the means by which we judge our talents, one against the other, without recourse to conflict.” Andrew Lansley Health policy Public services policy David Cameron Nick Clegg William Hague Liam Fox Health NHS GPs Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Castles, cathedrals and the Cavern Club: historians make their choices of key sites in Britain’s past for book Which was more important in the making of Britain, a ruined abbey, a Dorset tree, a Liverpool cellar or a painted gable in Northern Ireland? Battle Abbey was where Harold lost his crown and his life to William the Conqueror in 1066; Tolpuddle where in 1830 a group of agricultural labourers discussed forming a union and paid for their audacity with transportation to Australia; and Free Derry Corner looks down on the narrow streets where 13 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the army in 1972. All are among the 100 sites nominated by historians to appear in a book as the places that made the modern nation. The Liverpool cellar nominated by Peter Catterall, lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, was a fruit warehouse, air raid shelter and egg packing station before in 1957 it became a music club and four years later gave the world the Beatles. “I don’t think music was the only element of the 1960s, but it came to be emblematic of it,” Catterall says. “You can’t imagine Swinging London without the music. In a sense the band that made everything possible was the Beatles; it was they who paved the way for the idea that the British were good at music.” David Musgrave, who edited the book, spent months tramping around the ruins, industrial landscapes, archaeological sites, castles and cathedrals, and odd corners once brushed by the hand of history, checking out the 100 places nominated by scores of historians. Many are internationally renowned, including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral and Blenheim Palace. There are surprises. Gerard De Groot, professor of history at St Andrews, chose a nearby stretch of smooth green turf: the Old Course overlooked by the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient golf club. Historians have often ignored the significance of sport, he argues. “It is hugely important in the sense that it’s not just seen as a leisure pursuit. It’s a package of cultural values that have been exported along with the other elements of civilisation that the British feel they have given to the rest of the world.” He added: “Sports have been seen not just as a way to exercise and have fun, but also as a way to convey the cultural values of fair play, decency and honesty. It’s interesting that golf embodies that better than most because it is based on the fundamental honesty between the people playing it.” John Morrill, professor of British and Irish history at Selwyn College, Cambridge, chose a little 16th-century folly in Northamptonshire, Rushton Triangular Lodge, which was built by the unswervingly Roman Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham as a blatant symbol of his belief in the Holy Trinity. “You get a sense of the religious passion and the religious obsession that was to dominate the whole of the political and social life of people in Britain and Ireland over the early modern period. There’s no building I can think of that tells us more of these passions during the century after the Reformation.” The gable with the painted slogan “You are now entering Free Derry” chosen by Claire Fitzpatrick, history lecturer at Plymouth University, stands witness to the long shadow of the wars of religion. “In a place like Northern Ireland which is big on commemoration, it was symbolic to write on that Free Derry wall. This is a nationalist area and they felt locked out of the city, so Free Derry Corner is the ironic response to the city walls. It’s an important part of British history within the context of British identity.” Musgrave, who edits the BBC History magazine, imposed only one criterion on the historians: that all the sites had to be open to the public, so readers can make their own pilgrimages and argue the merit of the choices. He added one of his own, the field in Leicestershire where the Battle of Bosworth was fought in 1485 – which was only pinpointed by archaeologists last year. The battle changed the course of English history when Richard III, the last Plantagenet king and the last monarch to die in battle, literally lost his crown when it fell from his head and rolled under a bush to be retrieved for the victorious Henry Tudor. Musgrave chose his top 10 from the 100 for the Guardian and, forced to choose his absolute favourite, eventually plumped for Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, where in 1939 the grave of an Anglo-Saxon prince was found, his treasure heaped around in him in the ghostly outline of the long since rotted timbers of his ship. The site was nominated by Julian Richards, professor of archaeology at the University of York, who said: “Until the discovery of Sutton Hoo, historians and archaeologists had taken rather a dim view of the Anglo-Saxon barbarians who had stepped into the power vacuum after the departure of the legions.” Musgrave was entranced by its atmosphere: “The place where Anglo-Saxon history comes alive, and the site of one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made. I love it there, the landscape feels like it’s been picked up from Denmark and plonked down in East Anglia – or maybe that’s just me.” Musgrave’s top 10 • Iona: the Scottish island was a key location in the early days of Britain’s Christian story • Sutton Hoo, Suffolk: A find that gave insight into the mysterious Anglo-Saxon world • Battle Abbey: 1066 and all that. A key English battlefield, where Harold lost to William and history took a decisive turn • Dunfermline Abbey: Scottish church where the remains of Robert the Bruce were rediscovered in 1818 • Dolbadarn Castle: a seat of native Welsh power before the Anglo-Normans dominated Britain • Longthorpe Tower: Cambridgeshire medieval tower with surviving 14th-century domestic secular wall paintings • Hampton Court: spectacularly preserved window into the Tudor world • Putney church: the site in south-west London of days of passionate debate on the rights of man during the English civil war • Blaenavon: the best preserved ironworks in south Wales and a key site in the industrial revolution • Belfast Titanic Footprint: The Northern Ireland site where the doomed transatlantic liner was built Heritage History Heritage Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk
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Michael McFaul, architect of Obama’s detente with Russia, given position to show US intent on enhancing ties with Kremlin Michael McFaul, the architect of the Obama administration’s policy of “resetting” US-Russian relations, will be the new American ambassador in Moscow. The appointment of Barack Obama’s chief adviser to a post normally filled by a diplomat is intended as a message to the Kremlin about the importance Washington puts on improving an often testy relationship. McFaul has been a constant White House advocate of the need to
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Italian minister resigns ahead of mayoral election that prime minister has turned into referendum on his government Voters in Milan have gone to the polls for a crucial test of Silvio Berlusconi’s diminished political vigour after his government suffered a fresh blow with the resignation of a minister. Daniela Melchiorre said on Saturday she had quit her job as industry under-secretary because of his public denigration of Italy’s judges and prosecutors during last week’s G8 summit in France. Television cameras showed Barack Obama looking perplexed as Berlusconi told him Italy had become “almost a dictatorship of leftwing judges”. The Italian prime minister is a defendant in three trials and risks indictment in a fourth. On Tuesday, a court in Milan is due to begin hearing evidence in a case in which he is accused of paying an underage prostitute and using his influence to cover up the alleged offence. Government supporters played down the significance of Melchiorre’s departure, questioning her motives and depicting her as an opportunist. The former magistrate was a member of the last centre-left government before switching to the right. But it is such floating MPs who pose the greatest threat to the government’s tenuous majority. There is also a risk that Melchiorre’s defection could be followed by others if Berlusconi loses control of his native Milan. Almost 6 million Italian are eligible to vote in mayoral runoffs in 90 towns. But the showdown in Italy’s business capital is seen as by far the most significant. Berlusconi’s candidate, Letizia Moratti, trailed by six percentage points in the first round of voting on 15 and 16 May 15. Were she to emerge the loser after polls close on Monday, it would be the first time for nearly 20 years that the right had lost Milan – a stronghold not only of Berlusconi’s Freedom People (PdL) movement, but of its coalition partner, the Northern League. Moratti waged a vitriolic campaign in the runup to the second ballot. She and the prime minister, who has turned the vote for mayor into a referendum on his government, railed at the centre-left’s candidate, Giuliano Pisapia. He was accused of wanting to turn Milan into a haven for Roma people and of planning to building a mosque for Islamist extremists. Early turnout figures suggested the tactics might have had some success. By midday on Sunday, Milan was the only major town in which abstentions were lower than in the first round. The right’s inflammatory rhetoric raised the temperature of an already heated contest. Two people were hurt in a brawl on Saturday between supporters of the opposing candidates. In Naples, the next biggest city at stake, a fire swept through a PdL electoral office after a similarly ill-tempered campaign. Berlusconi, who flew to the city for the close of campaigning, said he could “categorically exclude” a government crisis were the right defeated. Much will depend on the reaction of the Northern League, many of whose rank-and-file supporters have declared Berlusconi a liability after the party’s disappointing performance in the first round. But the League’s leader, Umberto Bossi, has been reluctant to break up the governing coalition. Silvio Berlusconi Italy Europe John Hooper guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has no doubt that his former running mate Sarah Palin can defeat President Barack Obama in 2012 if she decides to run. “Can she win the Republican nomination and can she beat Barack Obama?” Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked McCain Sunday. “Of course she can — she can,” McCain insisted. “Now whether she will or not, whether she’ll even run or not, I don’t know.” “A lot of things happen in campaigns, Chris. I was written off a couple of times and was able to come back. It will be a roller coaster ride for all of them before we finally arrive at our nominee. But she certainly is a major factor. And I believe that she can be very competitive,” he added. “What about her high negatives, especially among independents?” Wallace wondered. “I think that the, again, that’s what campaigns are all about. I’ve never seen anyone as mercilessly and relentlessly attacked as I have seen Sarah Palin in the last couple of years. But she also inspires great passion; particularly, among Republican faithful,” the Arizona senator explained. Publications like The New York Times reported last week that Palin is hinting that she might run. The former Republican vice presidential candidate has purchased a house in Arizona, has a movie premiering in Iowa to rehabilitate her image and is launching an East Coast bus tour. A recent Washington Post /ABC News poll found that only 17 percent of Republicans had a “strongly favorable” view of her.
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