Committee’s focus on forests sell-off allows environment secretary to avoid difficult questions on flood defence spending After nearly an hour of her grilling by MPs had gone by without a question on forests, Caroline Spelman might have hoped she was going to get away with it. No such luck. After a brief break for the MPs to vote on the police reform bill, the onslaught began in earnest. Spelman was at the environment, food and rural affairs committee on Wednesday, being interviewed as part of its report on last year’s comprehensive spending review. This committee is better known for questions about dead sheep than for savaging ministers. So an easy lob from Tom Blenkinsop, the Labour member for Middlesborough South and East Cleveland, gave Spelman an ideal opportunity. What, he asked, were the main achievements of her tenure so far? After reeling off her many triumphs (talking to trade unions, dealing with arms-length bodies, safeguarding spending on canals) Spelman eventually made it to the B-minus section of her report form. Forests. “Of course,” the secretary of state began: “I could not talk about last year without touching on the experiences with regard to forestry, which were very difficult, as I’m sure you saw, Mr Blenkinsop.” This “difficult experience” was, we should recall, the most humiliating climbdown of the coalition government’s first year. Floating the idea of a sell-off of the entire national forest estate last year , the coalition was stunned by the extraordinarily broad range of voters who protested against it. Tory knights of the shires roused themselves, ramblers combined with online bloggers, and the National Trust found common cause with the Socialist Workers’ party to stop the government in its tracks. Half a million people signed a petition to protest against the plan. Finally, in February, after repeated insistence that the government would not be deflected from its course, David Cameron sent Spelman into the House of Commons chamber to apologise to MPs and the country for her mistake. But, as Spelman recounted, all of the fuss was perfectly smoothed over by the unusual appearance of a secretary of state in the House of Commons to say sorry . (Not that she repeated that word, of course.) We were swiftly hurried on from that “difficult experience” to a paean of thanks to her civil servants. Ministers, we heard, had been “very pleasantly surprised” at how wonderfully they had been assisted by the officials who are paid to assist them. “All this has resulted in a very good working relationship with civil servants,” Spelman told the MPs. Who’d have thought it. The lengthy and fulsome praise was a clear attempt to scotch persistent rumours that Spelman has not enjoyed the most supportive of relations with her officials, who were said during the forestry debacle to be miffed both at her refusal to seek or take their advice, and by her repeated assertions that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was a “flabby” department with too many people in it. Telling your staff that they are useless is not a technique that features in many management handbooks. Spelman also made a curious assertion – answering a question as to whether she had sought the opinions of “stakeholders” such as the National Trust ahead of pursuing the sell-off, she said firmly that she had, and that she spoke to all “stakeholders” constantly. This is very strange – Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, categorically denies that Spelman ever spoke to her about the policy before it was announced. She found out about the policy through the media. But the MPs failed to pursue the point, though Spelman’s repeated mea culpa did not get the minister off the hook entirely. Questioned again on why she wanted to sell off the forests, Spelman insisted that every government for the last 30 years had been quietly selling off forestry land (true), and all she wanted was to make the process more transparent. And the only reason people took against this admirable aim was because those awful people in the media had created a “mythology” about the forests. All this took some time. Which meant that, after a few more questions on subsidy payments to farmers (delayed, for many) and how the government could buy more British food products, there was very little time for anything else. At 5pm, after two hours of such “grilling”, the chairwoman Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Thirsk and Malton) asked for briefer questions and answers. But the minister had other plans – she thought the time was up. After some haggling, we got 10 more minutes. And at last someone – in this case Amber Rudd, the new Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye (in the marshes) – asked the real question. About 145,000 homes would be better protected from flooding under Spelman’s plans. But what about the many thousands of other homes and businesses that would not receive the new or upgraded defences that had been planned ? This is a crucial point. Despite repeated assurances from Cameron that flood defence spending would be “protected”, Defra’s budget cuts mean that hundreds of flood defence schemes will no longer go ahead. These include some huge measures – the city of Leeds, for instance, threatened several times in recent years with major floods that would disable its business district and affect thousands of homes, is to be left without flood defences because the budget for its £100m planned defence project has been cut. The same is true for flood defence schemes across the country, spelling a potential disaster for thousands of homes and businesses. Spelman sailed blithely through. Private sector funding would fill up the breach, she told MPs. The Association of British Insurers was delighted that the abdication of the public sector from its duty to protect citizens meant that private companies were now freed to spend their own money on safeguarding homes. And that was it. There was no questioning of the secretary of state’s highly questionable assertion that private companies are just begging to build floodwalls and divert rivers. Five minutes on flooding. Less than was spent on pig farming. Much less than on the future of English and Welsh waterways (government funding of £39m a year to continue to 2022). And the time spent on owning up to the forestry debacle now looked like a very handy way to deflect attention from the real scandal of Defra’s budget: the fact that, in a clear betrayal of the prime minister’s promise to ringfence flood defence spending, the budget is being cut and thousands of homes and businesses, and several major cities, will be left unprotected, even as scientists warn that more severe storms and floods are on the way. But before the assembled MPs could register how they had been flummoxed, the bell rang again for a division. The committee rose, and Spelman beamed. The minister had got away with it after all! Home and dry. England’s forest sell-off Forests Flooding Rural affairs Green politics Tax and spending Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk
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Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary says cost of compensating stranded passengers means add-on fee is airline’s only option Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has denied the airline is “punishing” millions of passengers by imposing a £2 levy (€2 in Europe) on fares to pay for customers stranded during last year’s snow, volcano and air traffic control chaos. The chief executive of Europe’s largest short-haul carrier said the airline had no choice but to introduce a new add-on charge from next week after the European Union failed to reform its EU261 compensation law. O’Leary said the £110m raised by the fee over the next 12 months will cover the cost of providing hotels and compensation to passengers stranded by last year’s severe weather, the Icelandic volcano eruption and air traffic control strikes in Belgium, France and Spain. ” If you are not allowed, as EU261 regulation states, to recover these costs then the passenger must pay,” said O’Leary, repeating calls for a ” force majeure ” clause that would waive compensation for delays and cancellations outside an airline’s control. O’Leary denied he was punishing passengers this year in order to pay for customers stranded last year who, for instance, had to spend an extra fortnight in hotels in Tenerife due to the Icelandic volcano that shut down European airspace in April . “Nobody has argued that Ryanair punishes people given that we offer the lowest fares and are the most punctual airline,” O’Leary said. He also predicted that other airlines will soon follow suit if there is no EU261 reform. “If the EU says airlines should become the insurer of last resort then we have to be allowed to recover the costs from passengers.” The Ryanair boss pledged to reduce the levy to zero next year if the airline incurs no “unfair” EU261 costs over the next 12 months. The levy represents a 6% increase on last year’s average fare of £30. The consumer group Which? said Ryanair should use the proceeds from the levy to ensure that all EU261 payments are dealt with swiftly in the future. Rochelle Turner, head of research for Which? Travel, said: “Since this charge is going to be passed on to all Ryanair passengers from now on, we will be watching closely to see how it deals with claims made under EU261. With more money to put towards resources for processing claims, Ryanair will have no excuse for delays in dealing with them.” Ryanair Airline industry Michael O’Leary Flights Consumer affairs Dan Milmo guardian.co.uk
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Christopher La Jaunie, who shot film of PC Simon Harwood shoving newspaper vendor to ground, gives evidence Ian Tomlinson was “not confrontational at all” when he was “violently shoved” by a police officer at the London G20 protests, the man who filmed the incident told an inquest. Christopher La Jaunie, from New York, on Thursday said he was in the City for a conference and decided to take a colleague to watch the protests. Once the police brought dogs out on the streets he took out a compact digital camera and commenced filming. La Jaunie later passed his film to The Guardian, casting doubt on earlier police claims that Tomlinson, a 47-year-old newspaper vendor, who died within an hour of being struck by a police baton and pushed to the ground, had suffered a heart attack unrelated to his treatment. La Jaunie told Alison Hewitt, counsel to the inquest, that he was about 10ft from the police “frontline” when tension began rising shortly after 6.30pm on 1 April 2009. “There was a bit of a frontline with the police and protestors. One protester had obviously had some kind of altercation, he was bleeding from the head and so I went to see what was going on.” He said that police started kettling the protesters towards the Royal Exchange building in Cornhill after bottles were thrown. “Once the police had brought the dogs out there was certainly more an air of fear and people started to back away from that line. A few people dared to go close and I saw Mr Tomlinson just sort of wandering very close to that line. He was obviously trying to get through. That’s what caught my attention. “It looked to me as if he was trying to get through. They let a few people through but once they cut the line off no one could get through. “My impression of him was that he certainly was not involved in what was going on, he was not a protester. He was caught in the crowd and just wanted to get somewhere.” Asked about his impression of Tomlinson, he said: “He was moving slowly but nothing more than that. “I am not sure he was really engaged with the protests itself. I think he was more determined to just be on his way. Anyone who got too close to the line I think risked some type of action by the police. “Mr Tomlinson piqued my interest because he was getting very close to the police and they did not look accommodating to someone approaching them. “He was facing the police and basically trying to negotiate, like he was just trying to get there and being turned away. Just by hand gestures it looked like he was trying to explain to them, ‘I need to get over here’ and then was obviously refused.” Asked again about Tomlinson’s demeanour by Hewitt, La Jaune replied: “So you are asking me if I thought he was intoxicated? No, not particularly. “He was not confrontational at all, he had his hands in his pockets, it was clear now he wasn’t going to get through so he turned his back to walk away. “Once his back was turned, I mean a push is a very polite term. He was rather violently shoved. His hands were in his pockets so when he flew forward he was unable to break his fall.” Describing the film he was shooting he said: “His head goes out of the frame but I saw it. He hit the ground, his head hit the ground.” La Jaune said he saw the police officer responsible “with no badge and a balaclava and riot gear. I saw who it was, I couldn’t see his face”. He added that he saw the officer pull out a baton, which he used to strike Tomlinson before shoving him. Although the officer had his baton out, from where he was standing he “mostly saw the shove”. And he admitted that he was afraid to draw attention to himself by focussing on the officer with his camera in case “he would come after me”. La Jaune said Tomlinson “eventually sat up and someone came to his aid and from what I could tell … he appeared to ask ‘Why did you do that?’ The police didn’t respond and he eventually got up and stumbled away.” Shortly after, La Jaune saw a man lying on the pavement some distance away. “It was further up Cornhill, don’t remember, it was quite chaotic. I saw him lying there on his back. He looked very unwell, somewhat ashen, he looked like he was about to pass out.” La Jaune said it was clear to him that it was the same man he had filmed. Tomlinson died after being struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by Metropolitan police officer Pc Simon Harwood in the City of London at around 7.20pm on 1 April 2009. Earlier, PC Andrew Hayes, who was working alongside PC Harwood as a carrier driver in the Territorial Support Group on the day, told the inquest that PC Harwood had not told him about striking and pushing Tomlinson when they were writing up their notes on the day’s events. Matthew Ryder QC, counsel for Tomlinson’s family, asked Hayes: “Did he at any time tell you that he had made baton strikes on what appeared to be a middle-aged man?” Hayes replied: “No.” “Did he at any time tell you that he had pushed a man to the floor?” “No.” “Or that the man had been helped by a younger person, or anything of that kind?” “No.” The inquest continues. Ian Tomlinson Police David Sharrock guardian.co.uk
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The former Smog man is back with a new album, Apocalypse, that deals with America, emotions and the ‘cattle inside you’. Just don’t tell him it’s a change of direction … Just as Bill Callahan is pondering which seat to chose in a half-deserted London hotel lobby, a news item about the sex offenders register comes on the TV in the corner. “If my name comes up,” Callahan requests – deliberately turning his back to the screen – “please let me know.” As beginnings of interviews with Callahan go, this is about as good as it gets. And not only because the laconic one-liner with a sleazy undertow is one his lyrical calling cards. Alongside the resonant baritone and mordant wit that have – in the course of a career now stretching into its third decade – earned him the right to be considered the post-punk Leonard Cohen, this most saturnine of American troubadours has also built a fearsome reputation as a uncommunicative and sometimes even malevolent interviewee. So his decision to kick things off with a gag certainly bodes well. Recently, there have been welcome signs of Callahan’s stern public visage cracking into a smile. “A couple of years ago,” he explains, “I realised that I was an entertainer” – he pauses for a moment, as if waiting for an unseen drummer to round off a punchline – “and that helped me immensely. From the first time you can look in the paper and you accept that you’re the entertainment for some people that night,” he continues, “it becomes so much more enjoyable to play live. Before that I was always wondering, ‘What am I?’” Callahan’s moment of clarity has benefited both audience and performer. First, he abandoned the wilfully off-putting stage name Smog (on the characteristically gnomic grounds that “hanging on to it any longer didn’t seem healthy”). Then 2009′s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle – the second album released under his own name, and one of his most accessible records to date – struck a chord with a wider audience. By an irony that will not be lost on its writer, the song which did more than any other to bring him a new audience was Eid Ma Clack Shaw – a hilariously unsparing depiction of the vanity of the artist, in which a lovelorn Callahan “dreams the perfect song”, then wakes to find the lyrics are gibberish. For those who are already devotees, it will suffice to say that Callahan’s new album, Apocalypse, bears roughly the same relation to its surprisingly accessible predecessor as 2005′s blues-tinged A River Ain’t Too Much to Love did to 2004′s unexpectedly palatable Supper; while less accessible, it flows with a sinuous unity every bit as captivating. For those not yet properly acquainted with this man’s compendious oeuvre, a riveting encyclopedia of human frailty awaits your exploration. I think Callahan’s best work – any of the three albums named above, as well as earlier creative highlights Wild Love, The Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls and Knock Knock – ranks alongside that of his friend and Drag City (and formerly Domino) labelmate Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) as the finest English-language songwriting of the last 20 years. And while not so explicit a departure in terms of subject matter as, say, Sonic Youth’s Dirty or PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, Apocalypse registers an intriguing shift away from the forensic self-examination that has been his traditional stock-in-trade towards a more external, geopolitically rooted brand of lyricism. Callahan – who once observed that his tendency to instinctively refute all statements made by interviewers was “natural in any exchange between someone who has the answers and someone who doesn’t” – is having none of this. Apocalypse’s opening number is a thrilling frontiersman’s lament called Drover, which switches viewpoints from cowboy to herd with a generosity of spirit not seen in Callahan’s most celebrated previous excursion into extended animal metaphor – the exquisitely heartless Smog classic I Break Horses. When asked if the line, “The pain and frustration is not mine – it belongs to the cattle”, signals a more empathetic, outward-looking approach, Callahan demurs with some force. “I think this is a really inward-looking record in a way that I haven’t really done in the past,” he insists (I thought everything was going a little too smoothly). “The cattle in that song are things inside you, so I suppose it’s about corralling the emotions.” Is it possible that he could write something which seemed more inward-looking than usual to him, while having external ramifications other people might see more clearly than he did? “Yeah,” Callahan admits grudgingly, “I guess that’s possible. To me, this record is like a lot of mirrors, and I suppose if you hold up a mirror to yourself and then you turn it around, it reflects outwards … also, if you look in a mirror you might see someone standing behind you who you’d didn’t know was there…” Like Uncle Sam, for instance. America! – the song on Apocalypse that most leaps out at the listener on first hearing – is partly a touring performer’s yearning for the land of his birth (“I watch David Letterman in Australia”), and partly a defiant celebration of cultural imperialism, in which Callahan seems to be enlisting “Captain Kristofferson, Bucks sergeant [Mickey] Newbury … Sergeant Cash” into an imaginary army of patriotic singer-songwriters. “Those are the ranks those people actually achieved in real life”, Callahan corrects me sternly, “I did research.” America! seems to be looking on almost enviously at his musical forbears who had the opportunity to serve their country. “It’s more like an observation: these people made great music and they did that other thing as well … so maybe I should’ve too.” Some might think that the global reputation of the US military is at a low enough ebb already, without Callahan bearing arms, but that, in a way, is exactly his point. “I know that since 9/11 the world has sort of turned against America,” he explains, “and America turned on itself too – ‘everyone hates us, and maybe we do kind of suck’. But with the election of Obama our self-esteem almost came up again. Then that kind of fizzled out too – even though it wasn’t necessarily his fault – so the song was concerns the thinking that America could still actually be a good place to come from.” The pioneering tone that Drover sets seems to carry through the whole album, and the suggestion that Apocalypse might have been conceived – and can certainly be listened to – as a Western meets with a surprisingly favourable response. “Maybe because it starts with a cattle drive,” Callahan nods. “Then the second song, Baby’s Breath, is about what happens when you finally choose where you’re going to settle down and get your own plot of land. After that comes America!, which is looking at the bigger picture of stuff that’s gone before in terms of the whole country.” Before the shock of Callahan collaborating in an analytical discussion of his own music has had a chance to really take hold, he’s run through all seven tracks. He graciously concedes that Apocalypse’s “most inward-looking” song, Universal Applicant, could best be described as a metaphysical boat ride, and identifies the ecstatic Riding for the Feeling as “the point where the searching stops and everything is much freer, to the point where you’re able to just … experience”. The strangely titled Free’s, the shortest song on the record, is, he explains, “supposed to sum up the whole thing in the broadest possible terms – that’s why there’s no character in it”. And the tear-jerkingly transcendent 8:45 finale One Fine Morning seems as close as a Bill Callahan album is ever going to get to a riding-off-into-the-sunset moment. “I wanted that open feeling Westerns give you,” he almost enthuses. “They’re kind of minimalist because the landscape is so blank and stark, which means that when people appear, they stand out, and their personalities are magnified because there’s nothing much else around.” That is pretty much how Bill Callahan interviews used to play out – the long pauses were like the mythic expanses of Monument Valley, and the songs he was so reluctant to talk about were the isolated lawmen. Anyone nostalgic for the inscrutable enigma of the Smog era will find him elegantly memorialised in the pages of Callahan’s recently published “epistolary novelette”, Letters to Emma Bowlcut. This slim and discreet volume will be a great disappointment to those hoping for prurient insights into the exact circumstances of his real-life romances with alt-country pin-ups Joanna Newsom and Cat Power, but its glimpse of the inner Bill could hardly be more revealing. “I don’t fill the silences often” the unerringly Callahan-esque writer of Letters to Emma Bowlcut’s titular missives warns at one point. “About our visit,” he advises at another, “I’m not mild-mannered, but you may want to bring a book.” Taking advantage of the new mood of glasnost to pose a question few would have dared to ask the remorselessly closed-off Callahan of 10 or 15 years ago, I wonder if this creator of so many memorable equine-themed lyrics can actually ride a horse? Callahan dissembles nervously for a few moments before seeing the opportunity for a suitably provocative and salacious last word: “There’s nothing like riding an animal,” he maintains, totally deadpan, “it doesn’t even have to be a horse …” Apocalypse is out Monday Bill Callahan Pop and rock Indie Folk music Ben Thompson guardian.co.uk
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Two participants in the black bloc protest at Saturday’s anti-cuts rally tell Stephen Moss why they’re the true face of protest “Meet us outside the British Library. That seems appropriate.” I’m due to interview two men in their late 20s who were part of the “black bloc” direct action wing of last Saturday’s anti-cuts protest . We’d originally agreed to meet at a bar in King’s Cross, but they tell me later it was “too media” for their security concerns. I conduct an interview of sorts, but they are reluctant to tell me much about themselves other than that one is a “low-paid public sector worker”. In any case, they have come armed with handwritten answers to questions they have posed to themselves. Anarchists like to be in control. I agree to edit those answers for length, then show them the edited version. Their “self-interview” appears below. I never do learn their names. The media, police and other sections of the left have called the black bloc “criminals”, “hooligans” and “cowards”. How do you respond? In the legal sense, those who damage property or fight the police have committed crimes, so yes they are criminals. But in everyday language, a criminal is someone who lives by criminal means. We saw plenty of nurses, education workers, tech workers, unemployed workers, students, campaigners and charity workers on the bloc on Saturday, but we didn’t see any criminals. As for being hooligans or cowards, the black bloc formation is used for tactical purposes. We aren’t trying to be “hard” or to give ourselves a thrill. We are trying to give uncompromising opposition to capitalism an appropriate image on the streets – and not end up in jail. True cowardice would be not fighting an economic system that wants to destroy us. The black bloc is not a group or organisation; it’s something that happens on marches or actions. It’s not pre-planned; it relies on people turning up with the same ideas and clothes. That is why there is a “uniform”: people who want to take direct action and resist containment arrive on the day in black and identify people with the same ideas this way. We had no idea of the numbers before the event on Saturday, and no idea it would be so radical in its actions. The black bloc idea spread like a ripple through the march. As people saw others in black, they changed into black themselves. Some marchers even left the protest to buy black clothing. Is it not fair to say you hijacked the TUC march? No. To hijack it would have meant taking the front of the march and leading it away. What happened was that thousands of marchers left of their own accord to support our direct action and do some of their own. The black bloc largely avoided the march route, only dropping into it twice, briefly. We support the other marchers who didn’t take direct action, just like many of them supported us. Don’t you think the violence has invalidated your message? Our only collective points were the promotion of a confrontational attitude and the use of symbolic direct action to show that direct action in the wider society was both valid and possible, and that there is a radical movement in this country that’s going to put up a fight. We made these points. Anyway, you cannot be “violent” to property. The police chose to attack and arrest people in their defence of property, and got themselves hurt in the attempt. If they had acted rationally, and decided a cracked window was not worth a protester’s cracked skull, they would have been fine. Is the black bloc a reaction to police heavy-handedness? We don’t do “good cops” versus “bad cops”; whether they smile or snarl while they do it, their primary function is to defend the rule of the wealthy. We do not want the police to control us “more justly” in the interests of capitalism. We want them to stand back for a just society to be created. If they don’t, they have picked their side, and they will have to be opposed. Was the bloc anarchist? From the red and black flags in the crowd it seemed to be, but there is nothing inherently anarchist about masking up. By the evening thousands of people had left Hyde Park and were taking action all over central London; the open class warfare of the cuts has convinced far more than the UK’s minority of radicals that only actions count. Do you consider the black bloc to be the most radical part of the new movement? No. Occupations of universities and town halls are far more important, and this is where the anti-cuts movement has been heading. To develop, it needs to spread into workplaces next. The black bloc tactic was appropriate to give the day a confrontational edge, and to target the real enemies: the rich. The aim was to make people realise this is not an abstract struggle between “the economy” and us, but between a group of super-rich exploiters and those they are exploiting – the workers. There is now talk of a “mask law” in response to Saturday’s action. Don’t you feel responsible for that? Introducing a mask law would be a serious misjudgment. Already we’ve seen how the tactic of kettling has backfired on the police, creating a desire among the crowd to be mobile and in effect unpoliceable. A mask law would probably just make more people wear masks. If last Saturday is anything to go by, they already are. Protest Public sector cuts TUC Public services policy Public finance Trade unions Stephen Moss guardian.co.uk
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Two injured after parcel bomb explodes in offices of Swissnuclear Two people have been injured after a parcel bomb exploded in the offices of the Swiss nuclear lobby, police said. The two female employees of Swissnuclear were taken to hospital with superficial burns and hearing damage, a police spokesman said, adding that it was not yet known who sent the parcel. Police cordoned off the office on the fourth floor of a building in the northern town of Olten. The police spokesman said forensic specialists were on the ground. Earlier this month, Switzerland suspended the approvals process for three new nuclear power stations so that safety standards could be reviewed after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant. Swissnuclear says it works to promote the safe and efficient use of nuclear power and represents Swiss utilities Alpiq, Axpo, BKW, CKW and EGL, which run the nuclear plants that produce about 40% of Swiss electricity. Olten is home to the headquarters of Alpiq, where about 50 Greenpeace protesters held a demonstration on Thursday calling for the company to withdraw its application to build a new nuclear plant. A police spokesman said they were investigating whether there was any connection between the explosion and the demonstration. Greenpeace said it had nothing to do with the attack. “We are shocked that such action can be used for political purposes. Greenpeace is committed to non-violent protest,” said energy campaigner Florian Kasser. The centre-left Social Democrats and the Greens are calling for Switzerland to abandon nuclear power after the Japanese disaster. However, the energy minister, Doris Leuthard, has cautioned against a hasty decision, warning that abandonment would mean more gas power stations and a subsequent rise in carbon emissions. In 1990, Swiss voters backed a 10-year moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants but they rejected extending the freeze in 2003, opening the way for the government to consider new plants to replace those that needed to be retired. Last month, voters narrowly approved the building of a plant in Muehleberg to replace the old one there, which is 20% owned by Germany’s E.ON. Switzerland Nuclear power Europe Energy guardian.co.uk
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Digital channel orders three hour-long episodes of comedy drama based on Douglas Adams novel BBC4 has recommissioned Dirk Gently, the adaptation of the late Douglas Adams novel starring Stephen Mangan. The digital channel has ordered another three hour-long episodes of the comedy drama, following the pilot broadcast in late 2010, for later this year. Adapted by the Bafta-winning writer Howard Overman – who is also behind Misfits, Vexed and Merlin – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency follows the exploits of Adams’s chaotic character as he uses his unusual methods to solve crimes. The Dirk Gently books have formed the basis of a play and a BBC Radio 4 series, but this is the first time they have been adapted for TV. Dirk Gently is being made by ITV Studios in association with the Welded Tandem Picture Company. The executive producers are Saurabh Kakkar for ITV Studios and Eleanor Moran for the BBC. The drama was commissioned by Ben Stephenson, controller of BBC drama commissioning, and BBC4 controller Richard Klein. •
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Grandparents should be included in contact agreements but have no legal right to access, according to a government review Grandparents should be included in agreements on the future of their grandchildren following a divorce, under proposals for family law reform unveiled in a government review , but would not have rights of contact set down in law. The importance of grandparents would be incorporated in Parenting Agreements – reached without going to court if possible, with separating parents able to access online and phone help – which would focus on where the child spends time rather than defining “contact” and “residence”. The importance of relationships with both parents, grandparents and other relatives, and friends valued by the child, would be included. However, said David Norgrove, chair of the Family Justice Review Panel, who led the review, talk of grandparents’ “legal rights” was approaching the situation from the wrong perspective. “We don’t come at this from the rights of adults,” he said on the Radio4 Today programme. “We are approaching this from the best interests of the children.” The interim report recommends a simplified and speeded-up system, to end the present confusion of different agencies and courts. A new family justice service led by a national family justice board is proposed, with a unified courts system, and specialist judges hearing each case from start to finish. Norwood said a year of interviewing children, parents and people working in the sector had convinced him that the present system is not working, and is complex, very slow, and very expensive. “Children are the most important people in the family justice system,” he said. “Family justice is under huge strain. Cases take far too long and delays are likely to rise. Children can wait well over a year for their futures to be settled. This is shocking.” The panel also wants to see the system speeded up where a child is in danger and must be taken into care, with a timetable for resolving the situation set for each child, and less reliance on unnecessary expert reports, which, it concludes, also cause delay. There will now be a period of public consultations on the recommendations before the panel presents its final report in December. Family law Children Family Divorce Older people guardian.co.uk
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Texas judge says request for country legend to sing for his freedom was simply a joke that ‘got out of hand’ Willie Nelson may not be singing his way out of jail after all. A judge has corrected earlier reports that the terms of a plea deal would require the country legend to perform a song at a Texas courthouse . To resolve his November arrest for possession of marijuana , Nelson may simply pay a fine by post. According to judge Becky Dean-Walker, the story of a judicial serenade was simply a runaway punchline. Last week, Hudspeth County prosecutor Kit Bramblett said they would waive Nelson’s drugs charge if he agreed to “pay a small fine and … sing Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain with his guitar right there in the courtroom”. Yesterday, Dean-Walker told the Associated Press that Bramblett was trying to be funny “and it got out of hand”. Nelson must still pay about $378 (£236) in fines and fees, however. Nelson was arrested on 26 November 2010, when border patrol officers found a small quantity of marijuana on his tour bus. “I had forgotten that there was this little bag of weed on the bus that had been in the back there for weeks when I had been gone,” Nelson told Rolling Stone . “Naturally when they stopped us there the dogs came on and the first thing they went to was that little bag of pot.” The singer initially faced up to 180 days in jail. Willie Nelson Country Drugs United States Sean Michaels guardian.co.uk
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Five-year-old victim named as Thusha Kamaleswaran still in hospital along with 35-year-old man who was also wounded The five-year-old girl believed to be the youngest victim of London’s escalating gang shootings has been named as Thusha Kamaleswaran. She was gravely injured on Tuesday night when shot in the chest by teenagers on bicycles who opened fire on a south London shop, while trying to kill two rival gang members hiding inside. A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said her condition remains “critical but stable” in hospital. A 35-year-old man, believed to live upstairs from the shop in Stockwell, south London, was also shot in the face and critically injured. Both victims are of Sri Lankan origin. The girl was visiting relatives at the shop with her family when the shooting started, just after 9pm. Community sources say the area has been plagued by youth gang violence that has spiked in recent months. Police introduced hardline section 60 stop-and-search powers covering a large swath of the borough, meaning they can search somebody without suspecting an offence has been committed. Police say two youths ran into the Stockwell Food and Wine shop seeking shelter from three boys pursuing them on bicycles. One opened fire, shooting into the shop with handguns, it is believed, and then fled. Kirubakaran Nantheesparan, a family friend of the shop owners, saw the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the shooting. “They were screaming at each other and throwing bottles,” he said. “Then I saw one pull out a gun and fire the shots. I saw the gun right next to me. I heard the shots fired and we all backed down. “At first we thought they had been hit by bottles but there was too much blood. “We didn’t know that the girl had been shot. She was lying down in the shop in shock. “The girl was lying on the ground and the mum ran over to her. She screamed: ‘Call the police, call the police!’ There was so much blood.” Mareh Silva, 34, who was coming out of the shop, said she saw three boys, aged between 14 and 17, drop their bikes outside. She said their faces were covered with black scarves and balaclavas and she could only see their eyes as they ran into the shop. “I looked in and saw a lot of blood on the floor but I didn’t want to look at what had happened; I was very scared.” Detective Chief Inspector Tony Boughton urged the intended targets to come forward: “They are an important part in helping us understand exactly what was happening and should be able to direct us to those responsible.” A youth worker, who gave only the name Jason, said one of the targets was an 18-year-old man he knew. “It’s just fights and retaliation. It’s nothing to do with drugs. It’s a back-and-forth dispute.” Community sources said the viciousness of the gang wars was shown by an incident last Thursday when a 16-year-old was stabbed in daylight in Brixton by up to 10 youths. The victim was wearing a stab vest and his attackers had plunged the knife into him about 20 times. The three gangs involved in the violence in the borough of Lambeth include one called the GAS gang and another known as AMD. Lee Jasper, an adviser on policing to former London mayor Ken Livingstone, said: “Lambeth is in the grip of a vicious war between three gangs. Every week there are casualties. This tragedy is the latest of a series of vicious attacks over the last month. Attempting to tackle this issue through enforcement alone will not work. That’s been the main strategic approach of the last three years and we are still seeing a rise in youth violence, violence generally.” Figures for Lambeth show increases in knife and gun crime, as well as in serious youth violence, according to police figures for the year to April 2010. Gun crime Crime London Gangs Vikram Dodd Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk
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