Russell Pearce gets belligerent with reporter who wants him to produce Fiesta Bowl invoices
April 21, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Our favorite Nazi-coddling nativist politician , Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, just can’t seem to escape the corruption scandal that’s dogging him daily now — namely, his major role in the distribution of illegal free tickets as part of the Fiesta Bowl’s running malfeasance scandal. Wendy Halloran of Phoenix’s Channel 12 News , while reporting on this weekend’s ugly Tea Party rally in Phoenix (more about that soon), tried to corner Pearce and ask him about his promised delivery of invoices proving he had paid for his tickets, as he has tried to claim. What she got was Pearce walking away from her and getting surly: HALLORAN: Where are your invoices for the Fiesta Bowl? PEARCE: You know what, you’re not going to come in and ambush me with these kind of games. HALLORAN: But with all due respect, where are the invoices, and why won’t — PEARCE: I’m going to go do my job. HALLORAN: Senator Pearce, with all due respect, it’s my job to hold you accountable. Where are your invoices? PEARCE: You know, your job is not to harass. HALLORAN: I’m not trying to harass you, sir. My job is to hold you accountable. Can you just tell me when we’re going to see the invoices, sir? PEARCE: I don’t have to show you anything. The best part of this report came in the form of a coda from Kelly Townsend, one of the local Tea Party organizers in Phoenix, who had earlier explained to Halloran the whole purpose of that day’s rally, what it was about: TOWNSEND: We are going to basically shine a light on our politicians so that there’s no secret — as much as we can possibly do that, and help keep them accountable fiscally, you know, ethically, all those issues, and that’s what this is about today. You betcha! Mission accomplished! No wonder the recall campaign against Pearce is gaining steam. Channel 12 followed up with a report today explaining that, as of today as well, Pearce has produced no documentation that he in fact paid for his pricey sports tickets from Fiesta Bowl lobbyists:
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Click here to view this media It looks like MSNBC felt enough pressure from some of us to bring Andrew Breitbart on Martin Bashir’s show today for a second go-round at what some thought would be a more serious interview. To MSNBC: Just get rid of the racists. Pat Buchanan needs to go and Breitbart should not be allowed to appear on anyone’s show to pimp a book which is an intellectually dishonest screed about how devoted Breitbart is to the truth. This is not free speech suppression. It’s simply NOT NEWS. Yes, Martin Bashir did his best to wade through the contradictions and nonsense, but anyone who has ever seen Andrew Breitbart in action knows he’s a verbal bully who can’t shut up long enough to give a straight answer. All he does is filibuster and distract, because he doesn’t really care about the truth. This is all about him. Every time he gets a platform to go on about himself, he uses it. Even in this meltdown at the end of the interview where he just starts ranting about Media Matters talking points and the like, it’s classic Breitbart. Remember, this is the guy who ” just likes doing things that are wrong .” You know what? All three of my kids threw tantrums when they were two years old too. We didn’t put them on national television. We sent them to their room. Take a lesson, MSNBC.
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A judge has granted an injunction on the grounds that revelations of a couple’s affair could harm the children involved I wasn’t planning to write about privacy again this week, but just when you think the coast is clear another contentious case comes speeding along the injunction superhighway. This week the court of appeal brings us the “Shhh. Not in Front of the Children Order”. Children, it turns out, can be the new passport to privacy. Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to the decision in ETK v News Group Newspapers to stop the News of the World naming the man and woman, both married to other people, who had an affair when working together in the entertainment industry (as the judgment tantalisingly puts it). I do worry, however, about how the appeal judges got there. The News of the World argued that there was a public interest in discussing whether the affair was the true reason “X” (not her real name) was dispensed with by her employer. The court of appeal disagreed. Although the newspaper maintained that the relationship was not confidential because the pair’s co-workers knew about it, the appeal court said that was not enough to put it in the public domain. The case could have been won or lost on an examination of those facts alone, weighing, as the law requires, the right to privacy against freedom of expression, but the court of appeal decided to throw children into the balance on the side of the man seeking the injunction. The children were “bound to be harmed by immediate publicity”, said Lord Justice Ward, because it would undermine the family as a whole and “because the playground is a cruel place where the bullies feed on personal discomfort and embarrassment”. These things may be true, but was the court of appeal right to decide that the harmful effect of disclosure on children should “tip the balance” in favour of injuncting a newspaper? Adopting this approach, the court said that the rights of children to be taken into consideration when an injunction is sought are not confined to their article 8 (privacy) rights, but include the duty of the court, under international law and various international human rights documents, to treat the bests interests of the children as paramount when making any decision concerning them. In other words, the court of appeal treated the application for an injunction as an application concerning children. There are problems with viewing privacy through the prism of child-centred decision-making. Despite Lord Justice Ward’s protestations to the contrary, this case means that children are likely to become the trump card in injunctive proceedings: if an application for an injunction is going to be treated as an application concerning children, it is difficult to see how the effect on them will not frequently (if not always) “tip the balance”. More importantly, perhaps, it creates a two-tier right to a private life, which places privacy rights of people who have children above those who don’t. That looks like discrimination to me. Children Media law Privacy Siobhain Butterworth guardian.co.uk
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Writer and thinktank founder Chandran Nair says billions of Chinese and Indians may aspire to an American standard of living, but it will be a catastrophe if these aspirations are met Chandran Nair is a softspoken man with a radical message. Listening to his hard-hitting analysis, it’s not easy to know whether we are hearing a brave pioneer or a voice crying in the wilderness. His call to arms is clear: a western model of development has dominated the world for the last 60 years, but it will be disastrous if it is allowed to continue unreformed in Asia. Consumption-led economic growth is the orthodoxy that runs the global system. Billions of Chinese and Indians may aspire to an American standard of living, but it will be a catastrophe if such aspirations are ever fulfilled. Across Asia there is now unprecedented pressure on environmental resources such as water, fish, forestry and air quality. Nair’s conclusion is blunt: Asia must develop a new model of capitalism – he calls it constrained capitalism – which limits the use of natural resources and inhibits the behaviour of consumers. “It’s a matter of numbers,” Nair said on a visit to London to speak at the Royal Society of Arts . “What Europe and America does about restricting its impact on the environment is pretty irrelevant. The future will be determined by what happens in Asia. Three billion Asians want what you and I have, but there is not enough to go round. By 2050, there will be 5 billion Asians,” says Nair, who grew up in Malaysia and now lives in Hong Kong. “If Asia continues like the west, the game is over; as people in Asia get richer, they eat further up the food chain. If 500 million Chinese want to eat just one seafood meal a week, it will empty all the seas of Asia. If Asians ate as much chicken as Americans, by 2050 that would amount to 120 billion birds a year instead of today’s 16 billion. To aspire to the western model in Asia is a deadly lie. “If China and India had the levels of car ownership evident across the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], that would amount to 1.5bn more cars – and it would take the entire oil production of Saudi Arabia to run them,” says Nair, whose book Consumptionomics : Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet has just been published. Yet this is the reality that Asians are reluctant to face. Western car manufacturers want to sell cars to Asia, and Asia wants to buy them. No Asian chief executive is prepared to talk publicly about the need for consumer constraint. Only privately, says Nair, will senior government officials and business figures agree that the arguments he makes is crucial to Asia’s future – and has relevance for every part of the developing world. Could Asia offer Africa, for example, an alternative model of development? “Governments need to tell their people that they can’t have everything,” says Nair. “The dream of a lifestyle commensurate with US sitcoms needs to be deconstructed immediately.” Nair has a distinguished career in running the biggest environmental consultancy in Asia, based in Hong Kong, so he has the ear of powerful business interests – but it’s perhaps his background as an activist in the African National Congress in southern Africa in the early 1980s that is standing him in good stead in taking on accepted orthodoxy. Part of Asia’s current predicament, argues Nair, is that for too long it has accepted a western intellectual dominance. Many of the brightest go off to western business schools and universities to be inculcated in the virtues of the free market. Nair set up a thinktank in Hong Kong to begin to develop Asian strategies rather than continue to follow western strictures on what development looked like and on how to run their economies. Twice in the last 15 years, Nair points out, the west has lectured or hectored Asian nations to follow its rules – first, in the IMF’s intervention in the disastrous financial crisis of the late 90s, and second, after the 2008 financial crisis when the US urged the Chinese to consume more – and become more like Americans. Nair even cites an IMF workshop in 2009 in Beijing on how to “catalyse household consumption” – effectively subverting existing systems of consumer constraint. On both occasions, the western intervention has been deeply resented, imposing western-style solutions. But Nair reserves most scorn for the west’s mythology about Asian growth. Yes, millions have been lifted out of poverty but rather than putting this down as a triumph of liberal market capitalism, Nair argues that the model of development has consigned many millions more to continuing abject poverty. Trickle down doesn’t work. Consumption-led growth creates a comparatively small middle class floating nervously in a sea of poverty. Its a cruel illusion to claim that the poor can all one day join the middle classes. Even if 250 million join the middle classes – with all the disastrous consequences that will have on environmental resources – in the next 20 years, that will leave 3 billion still in poverty. “This is my key point. The majority of Asians are being left behind by the current model of growth, and governments will have to change tack or risk losing legitimacy,” argues Nair. He challenges the development model of rapid urbanisation and calls instead for investment in rural areas to improve sustainable farming methods and raise farming incomes. A policy that the Chinese have already adopted. He uses a telling fact: 2.2 billion Asians now have mobile phones, but far fewer have access to drinking water or toilets. The problem is not about needing more technology but about restructuring an economic system to meet human needs. How is it that TVs, playstations and mobile phones are more easily accessible in some of the cities of Asia than a glass of drinking water from a tap? “We live in a world whose values are set by an economic system that incentivises and rewards those who can generate growth for a select group of mostly western institutions,” states Nair in Consumptionomics. It is in the meeting of genuine human need that the future of Asian capitalism must lie: food production, environmental stewardship, and health and education. “It’s harsh for Asians to be told that as latecomers to the capitalist party they will never be able to attain that way of life taken for granted in developing countries,” he admits. What’s needed is a strong interventionist state that can take these difficult long-term decisions – Nair talks of “benign authoritarianism” and insists that the key issue is good governance, not whether it meets democratic criteria. “There is no future unless we constrain human behaviour, how you do that is the question of our time, and the region that will have to crack it is Asia. Asians will have to lead this debate.” India China Global economy Economics Madeleine Bunting guardian.co.uk
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Former Harrods owner mulls challenge to approach from Peel Holdings, which would value film and TV studios at £88m Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, is considering a bid for Pinewood Shepperton film studios. Pinewood, which was home to the fourth instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the final Harry Potter film, has already received a 190p-per-share takeover offer from Peel Holdings valuing the company at £88m. Fayed confirmed in a statement to the City on Thursday that he is “considering making an all-cash offer for Pinewood”. “There can be no certainty that an offer will be forthcoming,” the statement added. Fayed, who sold Harrods last year for £1.5bn, previously owned a studio in Egypt and funded the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire, which his late son Dodi executive produced. Pinewood issued a statement on Wednesday saying that it had “received a further approach from an unconnected third party which also may or may not lead to an offer being made for the company” and later in the day it was reported that this referred to Fayed. Shares in Pinewood, which is chaired by former ITV executive chairman Michael Grade, rose to a 12-month high of 211p on Thursday morning on news of a potential bidding war for the business. Peel, the commercial property group which has leased part of Salford’s MediaCityUK site to the BBC, is Pinewood’s largest shareholder with a stake of 29.78% and could easily block any potential counter-bid from Fayed. Pinewood’s second largest shareholder, Crystal Amber, holds a 28.29% stake and has been critical of the business, calling for Grade to step down as chairman. Pinewood is home to a range of productions including the next Clash of the Titans film starring Avatar actor Sam Worthington and TV shows including Dancing On Ice, Weakest Link and My Family. In March the studio announced an initiative to invest a stake of up to 20% in films with production budgets of about £2m in the hope of following the success of Oscar-winner The King’s Speech, which cost £9m to make and has grossed more than £150m. Earlier this year the studio group also announced a franchise deal in the Dominican Republic which it hopes will give it a foothold in the fast-growing Latin American film and TV market. Other joint venture deals, designed to give the Pinewood brand a global footprint, have resulted in the creation of Pinewood Toronto Studios and Pinewood Malaysia Iskandar Studios, with the latter due to open in 2013. •
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Two new anthologies carve up the canon into reading ‘for boys’ and ‘for girls’. Designed to make poetry fun, the resulting editorial vision is pretty bleak You might think editors who have set themselves the commendable task of marketing poetry to children in an exciting, approachable way would also be averse to such social scourges as gender stereotyping. Not so for the publishers of 100 Great Poems for Boys and 100 Great Poems for Girls . These books go tearing through the greatest poetry of the last 500 years, highlighting in metaphorical blue and pink marker pen to decide who gets what. To their credit, these collections do, as promised, feature the greats – Pope, Blake, Tennyson, Poe, Whitman and Coleridge among others. A defence that could perhaps be made by the editors of the titles is that there is no strict gender rule for contributors to either collection. In fact, 100 Great Poems for Girls features no fewer than 57 poems by men: 18 are attributed to anonymous, with the remaining 24 places given over to female authors. In 100 Great Poems for Boys there is also a gender mix, of sorts: 75 of the poems are by men, 21 are anonymous – and an astonishing four poems are by female poets. Looking at which poets the editors consider to be more suitable for which gender is fascinating. Wordsworth is considered girly enough to have three poems in the female-friendly edition, and none in the book for boys. The dreamy lines of Christina Rossetti are again only for girls, although there are so few women in the boys’ book that this is hardly surprising. The four women considered boisterous enough for boys are Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazurus, Laura Richards and Julia Ward Howe, who snuck in with the warlike “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” alongside the good, solid, masculine fare of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Girls are given great poems – Frost, Manley Hopkins, Shelley – but in terms of subject matter there’s a preponderance of flowers and feelings, garrets and staying inside watching the rain. Why Bunyan for girls, not boys? Because girls are naturally more devout? It’s depressing to consider the thought processes that went into these selections. But pointing out such statistics is unfair, I suppose, because we are told over and over that boys are instinctively perturbed by the sight of a female author’s name, fearing a girly taint if they are caught reading anything by one (thus “JK” rather than “Joanne”). Girls, apparently, have no such hang-ups: in fact, if we’re to believe the evidence of 100 Great Poems for Girls, they prefer a slight masculine slant to their reading. The section headings for the books also demonstrate a sensitive awareness of the target audience’s predilections. Certain sections – such as “Limericks and Tongue Twisters” – are available to both genders, but where boys get to choose from “Battlefields and Heroes” or “Fun to Read Aloud”, girls are offered the choice of “Imagination” and “Nature”. Boys can learn the ancient arts of war and oratory, while girls content themselves with thinking about things and pressing flowers between the pages of books too complicated for them to understand. A weak attempt is made by the editor of 100 Great Poems for Boys, Leslie Pockell, to defend the validity of his book in its introduction (no such attempt is made by Celia Johnson, editor of 100 Great Poems for Girls). Pockell jovially informs us: “You don’t have to be any special age to be a boy. It’s more a state of mind that anything else (even certain girls can qualify, if they have the right attitude!). I was a boy quite a few years ago and, actually, it seems to me that in many ways I still am.” He then concludes rather hurriedly: “I hope you enjoy reading these poems as much as I enjoyed putting them together in this book, whatever your age or gender, and that they will stay with you as inspiring or entertaining companions throughout your reading life!” The suggestion that the “boys” referred to in the title are entirely figurative is somewhat undermined not only by its own ludicrousness but also because Johnson in her introduction doesn’t spend any time suggesting that anyone can be a girl. After all, on the evidence of these books, who’d want to be? Poetry Children and teenagers Victoria Beale guardian.co.uk
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Drilling in Sichuan deemed a success as China seeks to emulate US’s adoption of costly and controversial technique • Fossil fuel firms use ‘biased’ study in massive gas lobbying push China has begun trials of a controversial drilling technique to exploit the world’s largest reserves of shale gas , as it attempts to cope with the increasing energy demands of a fast-growing economy while reducing its dependence on coal. In the past two weeks, engineers have completed the country’s first horizontal shale gas well in Sichuan and government officials have begun drafting a national strategy to identify a trillion cubic metres of exploitable resources by 2020. Supporters say China has the potential to emulate the United States, where extraction of shale gas has tripled the lifespan of US gas reserves and offered a lower-carbon alternative to coal. “Shale gas is a game-changer for the US and should do the same for China,” said Ming Sung, Asia representative of the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force and an advocate of closer energy links between the two nations. “This should be one of the centre-pieces for China’s energy strategy. As with any new technology development, we must balance benefits versus potential environmental impacts. The experiences of the US are valuable here.” The extraction method itself is costly, controversial and challenging. Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” involves the injection of chemically treated water at high pressure through seams of rock, forcing the gas inside to seep out to where it can be captured. Environmentalists warn that this wastes and contaminates millions of tons of water. For fuel-hungry, drought-plagued China, this poses a conundrum. The energy potential is enormous. The ministry of land and resources calculates the size of shale gas reserves at 26tn cubic metres – more than 10 times the country’s known holdings of conventional natural gas. This is a tempting alternative for a country that is eager to improve its energy security in the face of rising oil and coal imports. A global shale gas study released this month by the US Energy Information Administration said China’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves were almost 50% higher than those of the number two nation, the US. But tapping them will be expensive and difficult for a country that is desperately short of water and – until recently – lacking experience in the key technologies. Engineers from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) took a major step towards rectifying the latter problem on 23 March, when it opened the shale gas well 3km below the surface at Weiyuan in Sichuan province. The scale of production is a mere 10,000 cubic metres a day, the equivalent to about 10 tonnes of oil, and the financial returns are unattractive given the low price of gas and the high costs of exploitation – 7% of which are for environmental measures. But the pilot project was deemed a success because it proved the effectiveness of drilling equipment – the final thousand metres of the well being bored in just 34 days. “The success of this well is valuable for the future of horizontal shale gas technology,” said an industry source. “We expect to reach our targets for exploration and development ahead of schedule.” Executives at CNPC – China’s biggest energy company – have said they aim to produce 500m cubic metres of shale gas by 2015. With other firms such as Sinopec, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron lining up to enter the business, the government has begun drawing up a national strategy that is likely to be incorporated into the latest five-year plan. Industry insiders are hopeful that it will include tax incentives and subsidies to develop shale gas reserves. In an effort to wean the economy off coal, China plans to triple the use of natural gas so that it supplies 10% of the country’s energy needs by 2020. Most of this will come from conventional wells and coal-bed methane, but the share from shale is in fact likely to hit 12% by 2020 and continue rising. The US appears to be a willing partner. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao signed a joint shale gas initiative in 2009, covering technology co-operation and assessments of reserves. Liang Digang of the China Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development said many of the technological barriers identified early on have been overcome. “When China started looking at shale gas two years ago, we did not know how to do it so we spent money and invited foreign companies to join us. Now can do it by ourselves.” But experts and industry executives downplayed the prospect of China exploiting shale gas reserves as quickly as the United States because the geology of the two nations is different. They said China’s shale is older and, tonne for tonne, produces less than half the gas of shale in the US. Water shortages will add to the costs. One of China’s two biggest deposits in the country – the Turpan Basin in Xinjiang – is a desert. In the short term, Liang said the costs were likely to curtail China’s shale gas ambitions. “We should not put too much stress on this right now, but in the long run, it is necessary to develop shale gas as a supplement to our conventional gas supply. The development of this industry is not for the present, but for the future.” Shale gas Gas Energy Fossil fuels Gas Energy industry China Oil and gas companies Jonathan Watts guardian.co.uk
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I’ve always been surrounded by animals – sort of. But it took me years to realise having a polar bear in your parlour isn’t normal I was nine years old when my dad brought home his first dead animal. He didn’t kill it himself – which would perhaps have been more normal in the region of rural north Nottinghamshire where we lived. Now I come to think of it, I was almost certainly the only kid in my school to have a stuffed ocelot in his living room, but I don’t remember being too alarmed. I suppose I was used to this kind of behaviour from my dad – a man so enthusiastic about the animal kingdom that he’d once driven the family car into a ditch, from which it had to be winched out, due to excessive staring at a bull. There were an initial cursory couple of questions from me about the ocelot’s name and origin, a long-suffering look from my mum, and a hiss from the family cat. After that, it settled in pretty contentedly – until it was replaced by equally inanimate and often even more exotic peers. A stoat. A koala. These days, taxidermy is almost as much a hip lifestyle statement as it is a pursuit of the socially inept. It’s been branded “in” by the New York Times, with former sparrows and ex-rabbits increasingly present in the background of design magazine photoshoots. That was simply not the case in 1985. Then, perhaps even more than now, there was a certain type of provincial British man who would keep a dead badger in his freezer with no real concern for what society might think. Elsewhere in his house, you’d find sinks lined with a thick film of old hair and window ledges supporting an inexplicable quantity of empty milk cartons. My dad was not this man. Nor was there anything self-consciously eccentric about his newfound interest in taxidermy. That year, he had accepted a somewhat vague part-time position as the artist-in-residence at an educational resource centre just outside Nottingham. Farnley House was a large Georgian building resembling the lair of some shut-in Victorian philanthropist. Down its corridors could be found rooms full of all manner of animals, only some of which – including Fred, the judgemental pet eagle-owl of in-house taxidermist Ben – were alive. Since it was relatively rare that Nottingham’s schools took advantage of this zoological bounty, my dad would simply make the creatures in question feel less neglected by taking them away on breaks – either painting them at home or using them as props for his other job, as a supply teacher in some of Nottingham’s roughest secondary schools. After half a decade in education, my dad had realised that supply teaching was a bite-or-be-bitten world, and the stuffed beasts he brought to his classes from Farnley proved an invaluable distraction: by being Stuffed Animal Guy, he could avoid being Persecuted Supply Teacher Guy. Teachers at his regular schools got used to seeing an inert fox or a baby capybara in the corner of their staff rooms. Though during Ben’s day as guest speaker at one school, the deputy headmistress let out a shriek when she witnessed the large dead owl on the table next to her slowly swivel its head and offer her a single, ominous blink. Ben’s taxidermy wasn’t just limited to dead creatures, as I discovered one day when I came home to find my dad crouched in front of the living room coffee table, on which sat a hard white blob about the size of a builder’s fist. “TOM! COME ‘ERE AND SEE THIS,” said my dad, whose standing as one of the five loudest men in northern Britain was even safer when animals were the subject. “What is it?” I asked. “Ssshhh. You’ve got to be really quiet or you’ll wake him.” I could now see that the white blob had legs and eyeholes. “Is that … a toad?” I asked. “Yes. He’s got his protective winter coating on. Pick him up if you like but be very careful, because he might get angry and break out of it. Like the Incredible Hulk. Then he will bite you.” After I’d lifted the white blob and ascertained that it contained only air, not amphibian, the full story emerged. That morning, a bored Ben had ventured out into the woods behind Farnley, found a toad, snuck up on and chloroformed it, and taken it back to his workroom. He’d covered it in dental putty, being careful to leave a breathing hole, and allowed it to set for the next few hours. At the end of the day, he’d gone back to the woods, cut the dried putty and released the toad, who’d wandered off into the woods like the drugged hostage of some unexpectedly kindly terrorists. Over the next couple of years, the animals kept coming home – some for good, when Farnley moved to smaller premises and they were up for grabs. Though we’d had it to stay with us for a short while, in the end Farnley’s polar bear went to live with the janitor – a man I assume wasn’t subject to many lady-callers – in a small flat in central Nottingham. Strangely, it has taken me over two decades to realise there’s anything truly odd about having a polar bear temporarily guarding your entry hall, and with that comes the inevitable other questions. How exactly did my dad fit it in the boot of a Morris Marina ? When Paul Abbott’s mum called my mum to say Paul couldn’t stay that time, was it really just because Paul “didn’t like sleeping in a new house with the light out”, or was there a (giant, furry) hidden subtext? My parents don’t own any stuffed animals now, and part of me mourns that fact. The various Farnley residents who came to stay for good – a fox, an African mole rat – became casualties of several house moves, or were passed on to friends. Last to go was not a wild animal at all, but a wonky-jawed West Highland terrier who, after his stuffing fell out for the last time, was transported to the local recycling centre. Before that, he put in many unstinting years’ service as our guard dog – the only blip being when we returned from Italy to be informed by our ashen-faced neighbours he had “not moved from the window sill” for an entire fortnight. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to get a replacement of my own – but on a dark night, when it’s rowdy outside and my cats are being particularly arsey, I find that, in a small way, I kind of miss him. Talk To The Tail: Adventures In Cat Ownership And Beyond by Tom Cox is published by Simon And Schuster, £12.99 or £10.39 at the Guardian Bookshop tom-cox.com Animals Craft Tom Cox guardian.co.uk
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Full coverage from the final day of evidence at the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the 2009 G20 protests in London 10.29am: The professor has explained “ventricular fibrillation”, where the heart wobbles. This is what leads to the arrhythmic heart attack that Dr Patel said he believed was the cause of Tomlinson’s death. Channer said it is possible to have so-called “pulseless electrical activity” – the reading present in Tomlinson’s ECG readings – after ventricular fibrillation of the heart. But he said there is a major caveat: The electrical activity that you see there [after ventricular fibrillation], although regular, is very different from the regular activity we saw in this case. 10.21am: Channer is the expert who produced the report on the electro cardio gram (ECG) readings taken from a defibrillator that was attached to Tomlinson by paramedics. The conclusions of his report have already been explained, to some degree, to the jury . 10.15am: Professor Channer, a consultant cardiologist, has taken the stand. He is being questioned by Alison Hewitt , the counsel for the inquest. 10.06am: The jury is coming in – we are about to begin. 9.52am: The inquest into Ian Tomlinson’s death is nearly over. This will be the last day of evidence. Next week, the judge will sum up the case and, the week after, the jury will retire to consider its verdict. I’ve posted a full schedule here . The inquest has been broadly split into two sections. The first part examined Tomlinson’s last minutes alive at the G20 protests in London, and it is likely that the jury will have to decide whether PC Simon Harwood acted lawfully when he shoved the newspaper seller to the ground on 1 April 2009. Harwood offered a defence of his actions over three days of evidence – you can catch up on it here , here and here . This video footage, first obtained by the Guardian, has proved crucial in enabling the jury to decide whether the action Harwood took against Tomlinson was proportionate and reasonable. The second and most recent part has considered the medical cause of Tomlinson’s death. The first pathologist to conduct a postmortem, Dr Freddy Patel , has maintained that the 47-year-old died of an arrhythmic heart attack. The jury has been told that Patel has twice been suspended by the General Medical Council for botched post mortems and dishonesty. All the medical experts who have given evidence have to some degree contested Dr Patel’s findings, including the cardiac pathologist Dr Mary Sheppard , the consultant surgeon Professor Robin Williams , the liver specialist Dr Graeme Alexander and the heart specialist Professor Kevin Channer , who we may hear more from today. The second pathologist to examine the body, Dr Nat Cary , is convinced Tomlinson died of internal bleeding into the abdomen. So too is Dr Kenneth Shorrock , the third pathologist who, as we heard on Friday , was instructed by the Met but concluded that Tomlinson died of injuries “consistent” with an attack by one of its officers. Today, the jury will be told of the findings of Dr Ben Swift , the pathologist instructed by PC Harwood. He, too, found that Tomlinson died of internal bleeding. Ian Tomlinson Police G20 Paul Lewis guardian.co.uk
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• Official figures show chancellor George Osborne is making headway with his deficit reduction plan • Retail sector sees surprise revival, aided by strong food sales The government received a boost today when public borrowing for the last financial year came in nearly £5bn lower than expected and retail sales in March showed a surprise rise. Excluding the impact of bank bailouts, the government borrowed £18.6bn in March, bringing the total for the financial year to £141.1bn, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. This was less than the £145.9bn forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the tax and spending watchdog. George Osborne’s fiscal squeeze – which includes £81bn of spending cuts and hundreds of thousands of job losses – is expected to kick in fully from this month so the City will be watching closely how fast the public finances improve over coming months. “If the UK economy can keep growing and fiscal austerity continues at its planned pace, then there is a very good chance that the government can achieve its aim of a zero structural deficit [that part of the deficit not explained by cyclical fluctuations] within the current parliament,” said ING economist James Knightley. He said: “After last week’s good trade and employment numbers, it perhaps offers hope that the underlying picture of activity isn’t as bad as many analysts believe and that the scaling back of market interest rate hike expectations is overdone.” However, Daiwa Capital Markets economist Hetal Mehta was less impressed, describing the £5bn ‘windfall’ as “very small beer in the grand scheme of things.” She said there was a significant risk of the government overshooting this year’s borrowing projections. “And the government still faces a formidable task if it is to eliminate the deficit within four years.” Osborne will have been cheered by news that Britain’s shoppers staged a surprise revival in March, with retail sales increasing by 0.2%, after dropping by 0.9% in February. The official figures contrasted with the much gloomier picture revealed in surveys of the retail sector, and boosted hopes that the first quarter GDP figure, to be released next Wednesday, will be stronger than some analysts had feared. The ONS said strong food sales helped contribute to the increase in spending in March, which pushed the annual rate of retail sales growth to 1.3%. Garden centres and sports shops also performed strongly, as people took advantage of the dry weather. Government borrowing Economics Budget deficit Tax and spending George Osborne Retail industry Julia Kollewe Heather Stewart guardian.co.uk
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