Paris police have detained two women wearing Islamic veils at a protest on the first day of France’s ban on the burqa and niqab Live updates from Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Paris police have detained two women wearing Islamic veils at a protest on the first day of France’s ban on the face coverings. The ban makes France the first country in the world to forbid the veils anywhere in public. About a dozen people, including three women wearing veils, staged a protest in front of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on Monday, and two women were taken away in a van. A police officer on the site said at least one of the women was detained because the protest was not authorised and the protesters refused to disperse. It is unclear whether she was also fined. Two male colleagues of the veiled women were also detained by police. France’s ban on face veils went into force on Monday, and anyone wearing the niqab or burqa in public could now face a fine of €150 (£132), or lessons in French citizenship. The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website. Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification. Widely criticised by Muslims abroad as impinging on their religious freedom, the law has provoked a limited backlash in France where a strict separation of church and state is seen as central to maintaining a peaceful civil society. A property dealer is urging women to engage in “civil disobedience” by continuing to wear the veil if they so desire and had called on supporters to hold a silent prayer in protest at the ban in front of Notre Dame. Rachid Nekkaz, who is a Muslim, said in a webcast he would help pay fines and was putting a property worth around €2m up for sale to fund his campaign. “The street is the universal home of freedom and nobody should challenge that so long as these women are not impinging on anyone else’s freedom,” he said. “I am calling on all free women who so wish to wear the veil in the street and engage in civil disobedience,” he said. In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police. “It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.” France has five million Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed to wear a face veil. Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it. On Saturday, French police arrested around 60 people who turned up for a banned protest over the veil ban which had been called by a Muslim group in Britain. One of the protesters was arrested on his arrival from Britain, a police spokesman said. The timing is all the more sensitive after France’s ruling UMP party called a debate on the role of Islam in French society, a forum that some criticised as unfairly singling out a portion of the population as problematic. The guide sent out last week to police notes that the burqa ban does not apply inside private cars, but it reminds officers that such cases can be dealt with under road safety rules. France Europe Religion Islam French burqa and niqab ban guardian.co.uk
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TV host comes under criticism from government and media for allowing six-year-old boy to mimic a striptease dancer The Philippines’ most popular TV game show was pulled off the air on Monday amid a public uproar over the host letting a crying six-year-old boy mimic a striptease dancer. Willie Revillame, who hosts the show Willing Willie, said he was taking two weeks of leave after which he will announce whether he’ll return to television. Angry viewers and commentators have launched a campaign on social networking sites to remove Revillame from the show, which offers cash prizes for singing, dancing, storytelling and playing games. They say Revillame showed poor taste and mocked his mostly impoverished viewers by allowing the crying boy to gyrate as a striptease dancer. The boy was a contestant and earned 10,000 pesos (£142) for his dance. The outcry led major sponsors to pull out, including Procter and Gamble, Del Monte Pacific, Unilever and Philippine fast-food giant Jollibee Foods. The 12 March episode also has prompted soul-searching discussions about the quality of TV entertainment in the Philippines. TV5 network said it wants to improve the programme and work with television and advertising industry stakeholders on guidelines for the participation of children in all game and reality TV shows. Philippine-born theatre actress Monique Wilson, in a widely circulated email carried by local media, argued that such TV shows “dumb down audiences [and] disempower them by creating a mendicant society with game shows that promise ‘quick money’”. Benjamin Pimentel, a US-based columnist for Inquirer.net, the online edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, criticised Revillame for “shining a harsh, cruel spotlight” on poverty “for cheap laughs and for ratings”. Social welfare secretary Corazon Soliman last month condemned “the emotional abuse and humiliation” the boy suffered and said the programme violated a law against child abuse. It was not clear if Revillame and TV5 will face charges. The government’s commission on human rights and the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board said they were investigating. Revillame has apologised but said his detractors had mounted a campaign “until they bury me alive”. He blamed his former network and competitor ABS-CBN television for trying to destroy his career and threatened to sue colleagues who criticised him. The Philippines’ highest paid TV host has ruffled feathers in the past for his often brash language and lewd jokes. In 2006 a stampede in a waiting line at a Manila stadium where Revillame’s show was to be broadcast killed 74 people. Criminal charges of negligence against Revillame and executives at ABS-CBN, where he worked at the time, were later dropped. Philippines Reality TV Television Children guardian.co.uk
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This would-be puff for the preservation of vanishing species highlights instead the hopelessness of the task For our grandparents, Donald Duck’s big-screen exploits were a carefree pleasure. Nowadays it seems, the wacky escapades of animated creatures must be predicated on an eco-sermon. Animals United brought our children up to speed on biodiversity . Now, Rio confronts that topic’s cutting edge: extinction . The hero, Blu, and the heroine, Jewel, are the last surviving specimens of the Blue Macaw . Unless they can mate successfully, their species will die out. Efforts to prevent this dire outcome generate the film’s thrills and spills. In fact, there are several species of macaw that happen to be blue. Rio’s story is based on the predicament of one of these, Spix’s Macaw . Like its fictional counterpart, this species is presumed extinct in the wild , and its future depends on a captive breeding programme . A hardly less gloomy fate awaits many other birds. Of the world’s feathered species, 13 per cent are now listed as endangered . This, you might think, is a theme that should surely grip our youngsters, eco-sanctimonious as so many now are. Nonetheless, it’s been more or less forgotten by the end of the film. When Blu and Jewel make out at last, we’re not even told whether issue flowed from their union. For Rio wants no real truck with jeopardy, either immediate or theoretical. Like its Ice Age predecessors, it swamps any hint of dread in either slapstick or exuberance. Nor does it set much store by the glory of nature’s profusion. A plethora of colourful feathered creatures flutter their way through Brazil’s lurid landscapes. Yet they don’t assert the importance of biodiversity. As it turns out, they do the opposite. Various though these avian life-forms may appear, they’re in fact all members of just one species. It isn’t even a bird. It’s a mammal called Homo sapiens. Blu explains himself thus: “I can’t fly, I pick my beak, and once in a while I pee in the birdbath!” As in other such anthropomorphic exercises, it’s not the diversity of the biosphere that brute multiformity celebrates, but the variegation of human personality. Rio’s birds proudly display the traits of which only humanity can boast. They’re vain, competitive, ingenious, witty, sulky, timorous, creative, ironic, adaptable, adventurous, quarrelsome, collaborative and romantic. What a piece of work are they! Inevitably, therefore, the message that the film offers its young audiences isn’t that wildlife is wonderful but that people are amazing. The spectacle provided by the incomparably rich birdlife of South America is easily outclassed by the magnificent extravaganza that is the Rio carnival in 3D CGI. This is of course paradoxical. For it’s humankind which is driving the very Sixth Extinction that’s propelling birdies like Blu and Jewel into the history books. As the palaeontologist Richard Leakey put it, “Homo sapiens is poised to become the greatest catastrophic agent since a giant asteroid collided with the Earth 65 million years ago , wiping out half the world’s species in a geological instant.” So is the Murdoch empire stuffing our children’s heads with dangerous nonsense while pretending to edify them? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just letting them know what’s really what. It’s clear that many of our planet’s current species are indeed on their way out, and that preachy films won’t be able to save them. This is because of the way people are. They’re just like the birds in Rio, unbridled, shameless and unstoppable. There are 6.7 billion of us already, and billions more are on the way . We all want to eat well and enjoy ourselves. If that means raping the habitat of our fellow creatures, and it does , we don’t really care. This phenomenon isn’t an ugly aberration: it’s more or less what you’d expect. Evolution doesn’t just create new species; it destroys old ones as well. The survival of the fittest implies the displacement of the weak. So far, 99.9 per cent of all the life forms that have ever existed have already become extinct , for one reason or another. Maybe Spix’s Macaw is doomed to join them ere long. If so, too bad. Enjoy the movie, kiddies. Animation David Cox guardian.co.uk
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Women wearing a face veil in public could now be fined or given lessons in French citizenship France’s ban on face veils, a first in Europe, went into force on Monday, and anyone wearing the niqab or burqa in public could now face a fine of €150 (£132), or lessons in French citizenship. The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website. Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification. Widely criticised by Muslims abroad as impinging on their religious freedom, the law has provoked a limited backlash in France where a strict separation of church and state is seen as central to maintaining a peaceful civil society. A property dealer is urging women to engage in “civil disobedience” by continuing to wear the veil if they so desire and has called on supporters to hold a silent prayer in protest of the ban in front of Notre Dame cathedral. Rachid Nekkaz, who is a Muslim, said in a webcast he would help pay fines and was putting a property worth around €2m up for sale to fund his campaign. “The street is the universal home of freedom and nobody should challenge that so long as these woman are not impinging on anyone else’s freedom,” he said. “I am calling on all free women who so wish to wear the veil in the street and engage in civil disobedience,” he said. In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police. “It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.” France has 5m Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed actually to wear a face veil. Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it. On Saturday, French police arrested around 60 people who turned up for a banned protest over the veil ban which had been called by a Muslim group in Britain. One of the protesters was arrested on his arrival from Britain, a police spokesman said. The timing is all the more sensitive after France’s ruling UMP party called a debate on the role of Islam in French society, a forum that some criticised as unfairly singling out a portion of the population as problematic. The guide sent out last week to police notes that the burqa ban does not apply inside private cars, but it reminds officers that such cases can be dealt with under road safety rules. France Europe Islam Religion Women guardian.co.uk
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Bob Shennan defends station from attacks by commercial rivals and BBC Trust, saying he is not chasing a younger audience The Radio 2 controller, Bob Shennan, has defended his station from criticism by its commercial rivals and the BBC Trust, saying “entertainment is not a dirty word”. The station, which with nearly 14 million listeners is by far the most popular in the UK, has faced calls to take more risks with its daytime output and reverse a decline in the number of its older listeners. Shennan rejected suggestions that he was chasing a younger audience and said he had already taken steps to increase the amount of public service content in its mainstream schedule. “I would maintain that we have made Radio 2 even more distinctive,” added Shennan. “Which commercial radio station is launching a children’s writing competition in their breakfast show to bring 50 kids to the Hay Festival [as Chris Evans has done]? We are doing standup comedy awards on Steve Wright’s show, Simon Mayo’s launched a book club in drivetime. I don’t think there are any of those on [Global Radio's commercial network] Heart. “Chris Evans played six Matt Monro songs in one programme the other week. I don’t think I’m going to hear that on commercial radio. What we don’t do is test music to find out what we think the audience loves then feed it to them remorselessly. We lead tastes, we don’t pander to them.” The BBC Trust, in a review of Radio 2 published in February last year, said the station needed to put more comedy and documentaries in its peak-time schedule and take action to reverse the decline in the number of its listeners aged over 65. It echoed concerns expressed by commercial radio trade body, the Radio Centre, which has accused it of having an “obsession with youth” and marginalising its public service content in the “inexorable pursuit of popularity”. But Shennan said the average age of the station was 51, the same as it was five years ago. “Radio 2 is an entertainment and music service and I make no apology for that,” he said. “Entertainment is not a dirty word.” The Radio 2 controller also oversees BBC 6 Music and said the digital music station had the capacity to double its current audience to 2 million. But Shennan was cautious on the issue of digital radio switchover – initially mooted for 2015 but now likely to be much later than that – and the date that Radio 2 would be in a position to go digital-only. “The feeling was that 2015 was ambitious,” said Shennan. “What’s clear is that we are going to be in a hybrid world for some time. This is a slower process than television [switchover] and we will live in a multiplatform world for the foreseeable future.” A total of 21.1% of all listening to Radio 2 is via digital platforms, according to industry figures, lagging behind the industry average of 25% and the BBC radio average of 25.5%. The BBC Trust, in its review last year, said Radio 2 had been “less successful than other BBC stations at encouraging its audience to listen digitally or go online” and called on the station to “use its influence to promote the benefits of digital media so that hard to reach groups do not get left behind”. “We’d obviously like to see it grow, that’s one of the challenges,” said Shennan. But he declined to put a figure on how much of its total listening would have to be on digital before he would consider switching off Radio 2′s analogue FM signal. “Obviously I have to look after the interests of my audience and not just wilfully deprive them of something whilst encouraging them to move towards digital. That’s the balance we’ve got to strike,” Shennan said. “We are not quite sure where that tipping point is. We’d need to be really confident that we could migrate our audience,” he added. •
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Suspect has been accused of poisoning milk from two dairies, which killed three children in Gansu province Investigators have found that a tainted milk incident in north-west China which killed three children appears to be a case of intentional poisoning and have detained a suspect, state media said. Investigators found that nitrite, an industrial salt that can be deadly, was added to fresh milk from two dairies last week in Gansu province in order to harm people, the China Daily newspaper reported on Monday. A suspect in Pingliang, where the poisoning took place, had been taken into custody. The three children who died were all under two, with the youngest being 36 days old, the China Daily said. An earlier report in the Pingliang News, a local government-run paper, said 36 other people, mostly children, became ill in the incident. China’s worst food safety scandal in recent years involved fresh milk, infant formula and other dairy products tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which can cause kidney stones and kidney failure. Melamine was widely used by Chinese dairy manufacturers to artificially boost protein levels and profits. It ended up killing six children and making more than 300,000 others ill in 2008. Much of the food in China is still produced by backyard farms and small-scale manufacturers, which makes enforcing food safety standards difficult. A series of embarrassing problems, including the 2008 tainted milk scandal, prompted China to pass tougher food safety regulations and step up inspections, though many problems remain. In a separate report on Monday, the China Daily said authorities in the central province of Henan had detained 95 people involved in a profit-seeking tainted pork scandal. The detainees allegedly made, sold or used pig feed laced with clenbuterol, a banned drug that causes pigs to convert fat to muscle quickly. Clenbuterol is illegal because it can cause nausea, dizziness, headaches and heart palpitations in humans, but pig farmers like to use it because it helps yield more lean meat, which is costlier than fatty meat. The investigation was launched after tainted pork was found being sold by Shuanghui Group, China’s largest meat processor. Authorities traced the contamination back to an illegal chemical factory that sold raw clenbuterol to middlemen who mixed it with starch and resold it to farmers, who mixed it into their feed, it said. Authorities found 18 tonnes of clenbuterol-tainted feed in Henan, and a random check of nine farms in the province found that 52 out of 1,512 pigs tested positive for the drug. China guardian.co.uk
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• Arsenal will be 10th Premier League club in foreign hands • American businessman to acquire majority shares Arsenal will make a statement to the stock exchange on Monday announcing that Stan Kroenke has control of 62% of the club, making them the 10th Premier League side to fall into foreign ownership. Kroenke is already Arsenal’s largest single shareholder, and a board member of the club. Now the American is believed to have secured formal undertakings for share sales from both Danny Fiszman and
Continue reading …Okay, his viewership dropped by more than a million viewers in a year. Sure, 400 advertisers pulled their sponsorship of his program. If we were talking about any other media figure, conservatives would say that was the “free market” talking, deciding that the public wanted a different product than the one this media figure was selling. But not if you’re Glenn Beck. According to Howie Kurtz, radically losing viewership and advertising dollars has nothing to do with Beck losing his job. It’s all about him chafing under the restrictions of the suit (rather large suit, in the form of FNC President Roger Ailes) who provided all the chalkboards and underwrote and advertised your vanity rally in DC. How non-supportive of Ailes. Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik (who has also castigated MSNBC’s prime-time hosts as fascists ) thinks that Beck’s ever-expanding messianic complex (an accurate diagnosis by video if I ever saw one) just outgrew the confines of Fox News, especially when the legitimate newspeople (*cough, cough*) of Fox News felt more and more marginalized by Beck’s insanity. Howie acknowledges that the “liberal media” had it out for Beck. Yeah, that evil liberal media (which is apparently only Media Matters for Kurtz–wow, how overwhelming. Hard to believe conservatives had a chance against that ). But Amy Holmes is eager to point out that a similarly outrageous string of clips could be culled from MSNBC hosts. Really? Are there MSNBC hosts repeatedly making completely outrageous, fact-free claims night after night? Are MSNBC hosts agitating and fomenting violence? Take your false equivalency and shut the hell up, Holmes. It’s Bill Press who gets the money quote that will forever paint Beck’s tenure at Fox: Only Glenn Beck could make Bill O’Reilly look like a statesman. A-frakin-men. The simple truth is that news is a business now. Glenn Beck was bad for business and therefore, the management was no longer willing to keep him on the air. The free market, you tea-baggers, at work. Your ideas just don’t work in the marketplace of ideas.
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Click here to view this media (h/t Dave at VideoCafe ) Ah, the bliss of being an Ayn Rand devotee . Reality doesn’t need to apply, because your whole economic outlook is wrapped around a badly written book of fiction cum philosophical treatise. The word “fiction” should clue you in that it does not–and cannot–exist in reality. But that doesn’t stop Paul Ryan from creating a budget and economic plan for the entire country based on similarly fictional premises : are Ryan’s numbers just driven by the Heritage Foundation’s laughable macroeconomic projections ? The answer is that, no, they’re not. The reason is that Ryan’s proposals are all oriented around shares of GDP. On taxes, for example, he proposes cuts in the income tax rates paid by high-income people and then stipulates that total revenue will nonetheless equal the Bush share of GDP via a mysterious middle class tax increase . Similarly, what he does with Medicare is first privatize it, and then stipulate that the private vouchers will grow at the rate of general inflation plus one percent. Under that plan, Medicare spending as a share of GDP shrinks by definition. This also means that every time the engineers in Silicon Valley find out a way to make a cheaper computer, your Medicare benefits go down. And he does something similar to Medicaid, and then he does it again to basically every anti-poverty program out there. The math of this part of his agenda is totally impeccable. What’s deficient is the public policy and this is where Heritage’s bad math kicks in. After all, why would you enact this crazy agenda? Now in the case of Paul Ryan the answer is pretty clear—he’s an Ayn Rand fanatic who believes that any effort, whether public or private, to help the poor is immoral. Which is why a rather large grain of salt MUST be taken by Ryan’s Randian assurances that killing Medicare and Social Security will end up costing seniors less . Is that why KV Pharmaceutical suddenly upped the price of Makena $5,000 when given the exclusive patent rights? Truly, there’s nothing that makes sense of Ryan’s Randian claims. The reason Medicare is going bankrupt is because we continually opt to take money away from social programs in order to make up for corporate and upper income tax breaks. This is very much a case where “throwing money at it” *would* solve the problem. But this is part and parcel of the 30 year campaign to eliminate the social safety net, as Jon Perr writes . But as with my discussion in the Bobblehead thread , this is where I get stuck with Ryan’s plan: the consequences. Seniors may be living longer, but they need medical care for those additional years. Under Ryan’s plan, the government won’t be paying it…but those costs don’t go away. Who do you think is paying for it? Seniors don’t have that additional income–especially if Ryan gets his way and dismantles Social Security to boot. So who makes up that cost? It’s an easy answer: you do. And your children, and your grandchildren. Those costs get passed on to all of us. And that’s not cost effective, or economical. But try telling that to a Randian.
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American safety campaigners say the dummies in car crash simulations should be bigger to reflect an increasingly obese population Age: 60 or so. Appearance: Nervous. My favourite Canadian folk-rock group! This must be something to do with last Friday’s cover story. Must it? Of course it must. First G2′s writers talk about the songs that get their tears flowing, then readers chip with their stories, and finally a consensus emerges that nothing sets off the waterworks like the 1990s hit Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm. How does it go again? Ah yes: “Mmm mmm mmm mmm.” You’re thinking Crash Test Dummies with a capital C, T and D. We’re talking about the mannequins that are strapped into cars and driven into walls. Them? Why are they are in the news? Childhood obesity. American safety campaigners are particularly worried that as kids get fatter, the mini-dummies used to test child seats become less and less relevant. There are similar fears about the adult versions. Couldn’t you just shove a few sacks of potatoes up their jumpers? It’s not quite that simple. Dummies have come a long way since “Sierra Sam”, which the US air force used to test its ejection seats in the 50s. They’re now full of electronic kit, plus their bodies are carefully designed to flail around in the same way as a flesh-and-blood human. This might sound tasteless . . . That doesn’t usually stop you. . . . but couldn’t you use corpses instead? Wouldn’t they give more realistic results? It’s been tried – but no two dead bodies react in the same way. Then there’s the fact that by nature they’re already damaged. Animals, then? Live pigs were used for a while. That didn’t go down well with animal welfare groups. I can only see one quick and easy solution to the problem. Stop driving children everywhere so they lose a bit of weight? Actually I was thinking of tying helium balloons to them so they float. The sad thing is, that’s actually much more achievable. Do say: “I’m just off to Weight Watchers . . .” Don’t say: “. . . So can I borrow the
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