More than 100,000 jobs lost in 2010 as Labour accuses Office for Budget Responsibility of getting its forecasts wrong Public sector workers are being laid off much faster than officials forecast, with more than 100,000 jobs being lost over the past 12 months. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed a decline of 111,000 in “general government” workers, 1.9% of the total, during 2010; 66,000 of the jobs were in local government. In its forecast with the budget last June, George Osborne’s Office for Budget Responsibility predicted a decline of 0.1%, equivalent to 5,500 jobs, in general government employment between the financial years of 2009-10 and 2010-11. In its revised November estimates, the OBR shifted its estimate of the number of government employees in 2010-11 down by a further 40,000; but yesterday’s 111,000 figure means job losses are running twice as fast as it expected. Liam Byrne, shadow work and pensions secretary, said: “If the OBR has underestimated the rise in public sector unemployment, then that makes the outlook for jobs even worse.” On the ONS’s wider measure of public sector employment, which includes public sector corporations, the government’s austerity drive claimed 132,000 public sector jobs in 2010, with the rate of job losses gathering pace through the year. Some 45,000 public sector jobs were lost in the final three months of 2010 alone, including 32,000 in schools and colleges, despite the promise to protect education. There was also a surprise rise of 9,000 jobs in “public administration”, raising a question about whether the government is finding true efficiencies. The decline in public sector jobs overall is partly attributed to the government’s recruitment freeze, but the pace suggests cuts are already translating into job losses. It is now known that, overall, 170,000 local government workers have got “at risk” notices, which will take some months to translate into redundancies. The ONS figures show the total of unemployed people increased by 27,000 in the three months to January to reach 2.53m, the highest figure since 1994. Ministers said the figures show that the private sector is picking up staff and offsetting some of the public sector redundancies, citing a 77,000 rise in jobs from non-state employers in the final three months of 2010. The figures also show a 45,000 fall in public sector jobs between October and November 2010. In 2010 there was a 132,000 reduction in public sector employment, a decrease of 2.1%. Of those laid off in the last quarter of 2010, 9,000 were in central government, 24,000 in local government, and 12,000 in quangos and other public corporations. Regions with the biggest falls in public sector jobs were: Yorkshire and Humber (22,000); the north-west (19,000); and the south-west (18,000). In Whitehall the largest losses were in the Department for Work and Pensions (1,670), the Home Office (1,190), and Revenue & Customs (640). Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “These job losses
Continue reading …Here’s a very bad rhyme: It wasn’t long too ago, When Sarah ditched her igloo. Now she’s free, Getting paid by Fox with glee But why are Conservatives now crying? Is comparing her to Al Sharpton very mean? Conservatives flock to her like Charlie Sheen? Bill Kristol has ditched her Roger Ailes just snitched her Oh, how the times have changed. Al Sharpton is a favorite whipping post for the entire Conservative movement and has been for decades so you know when they start to compare her to him, things are not rosy in Moose Country. Palin ‘becoming Al Sharpton’? Palin’s politics of grievance and group identity, according to these critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles. For decades, it was a standard line of the right that liberals cynically promoted victimhood to achieve their goals and that they practiced the politics of identity — race, sex and class—over ideas. (Related: Republicans learn cost of attacking Palin ) Among those taking aim at Palin in recent interviews with POLITICO are George F. Will, the elder statesman of conservative columnists; Peter Wehner, a top strategist in George W. Bush ’s White House, and Heather Mac Donald, a leading voice with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. Matt Labash, a longtime writer for the Weekly Standard, said that because of Palin’s frequent appeals to victimhood and group grievance, “She’s becoming Al Sharpton , Alaska edition.”— This year, the conservative intelligentsia doesn’t just tend to dislike Palin — many fear that her rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right. “This is a problem for the movement,” said Will about what Palin represents. “For conservatism, because it is a creedal movement, this is a disease to which it is susceptible.” The line of modern conservatism that can be traced back to National Review founder William F. Buckley would be broken by Palin, Will said. “There’s no Reagan without Goldwater, no Goldwater without National Review and no National Review without Buckley — and the contrast between he and Ms. Palin is obvious.” Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.” — Columnist Charles Krauthammer, without talking about Palin specifically, noted that “there’s healthy and unhealthy populism,” and there is concern about the rise of the latter. “When populism becomes purely anti-intellectual, it can become unhealthy and destructive,” said Krauthammer. — When former first lady Barbara Bush recently observed tartly that she thought Palin would be happiest staying put in Alaska rather than running for president, the former Alaska governor responded on Laura Ingraham’s radio show that the Bushes are “blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners.” Then there was this morning’s grim polling news : Sarah Palin’s ratings within the Republican Party are slumping, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a potentially troubling sign for the former Alaska governor as she weighs whether to enter the 2012 presidential race. For the first time in Post-ABC News polling, fewer than six in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents see Palin in a favorable light, down from a stratospheric 88 percent in the days after the 2008 Republican National Convention and 70 percent as recently as October The GOP Grand Poobahs really don’t want her to run for President, because they know the Republican primary will turn into a Tea Party donnybrook. Can it get much worse for her when Roger Ailes lets it be known that he’s unhappy with her too? Before Sarah Palin posted her infamous “Blood Libel” video on Facebook on January 12, she placed a call to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Palin was fuming that the media was blaming her heated rhetoric for the actions of a madman that left six people dead and thirteen others injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Palin told Ailes she wanted to respond, according to a person with knowledge of the call. It wasn’t fair the media was making this about her. Ailes told Palin that she should stay quiet. “Lie low,” he said. “There’s no need to inject yourself into the story.” Palin told Ailes that other people had given her that same advice. Her lawyer Bob Barnett is said to have cautioned her about getting involved. The consensus in some corners of Palin’s camp was that she faced considerable risks if she spoke out. But, this being Sarah Palin, she did it anyway. Ailes was not pleased with her decision, which turned out to be a political debacle for Palin, especially her use of the historically loaded term “blood libel” to describe the actions of the media. “The Tucson thing was horrible,” said a person familiar with Ailes’s thinking. “Before she responded, she was making herself look like a victim. She was winning. She went out and did the blood libel thing, and Roger is thinking, ‘Why did you call me for advice?’” Here’s the post I wrote about her blood libel response to the criticisms she took over the target map ad: Calling it ‘Blood Libel’ just opens Sarah Palin to a whole new realm of well-earned criticism Oh, lookie here….A new Al Palin posting on her Facebook page which is titled: T he $4-Per-Gallon President . For a second I thought she meant Bush. I wonder if she even wrote it?
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Raymond Davis flown to US airbase after payments made to relatives of men shot dead by intelligence agent in Lahore Raymond Davis, the CIA spy charged with murder in Pakistan, has flown out of the country after the relatives of two men he killed dropped charges in exchange for “blood money” of at least $1.4m (£874,000) and help in resettling abroad. Davis slipped out of Lahore on a special flight from the old city airport after being released from the sprawling jail where he had been held for almost 10 weeks amid a diplomatic storm that rocked relations between the two allies and sucked in President Barack Obama. A Pakistani official said the 36-year-old US spy was bound for an airbase in Afghanistan, then on to the US. Davis was freed under Islamic laws that allow a murderer to walk free on payment of compensation to the family of his victims. The acquittal took place during a closed hearing at Kot Lakhpat jail where no reporters were present. “The court first indicted him, but the families later told the court that they have accepted the blood money and they have pardoned him,” said Rana Sanaullah, the Punjab law minister. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, thanked the families for pardoning Davis and allowing the American to go. Speaking from Cairo, Clinton said the US had not paid to win Davis’s release. The dramatic case has become an obsession in Pakistan since Davis, a bulky former special forces soldier, opened fire on two men at traffic lights on 27 January. Davis claimed he acted in self-defence against robbers, but prosecutors said he shot one in the back as he ran away. Several officials said the men he killed were linked to Pakistani intelligence. The deal to free Davis was an unusual mix of Islamic law and tense backroom negotiations between American and Pakistani spies and diplomats. A senior Pakistani official said the US paid in the region of $700,000 (£436,000) to relatives of both men, while another $700,000 was paid to family of a third man killed by a US rescue vehicle, also presumed to be driven by CIA employees. Washington also undertook to facilitate the future resettlement of family members in the US or a Gulf state such as Dubai, the official added. “The Americans will be helpful to the families,” he said. But the deal was also a defeat for US diplomacy, which had insisted Davis was a bona fide diplomat who enjoyed immunity from prosecution. In the early stage of the controversy, the US accused Pakistan of “illegally detaining” Davis, while Obama defended him as “our diplomat”. The carefully orchestrated legal events in Lahore belied weeks of negotiations between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which have been at barely concealed loggerheads over the incident. The legal manoeuvres were “a fig leaf”, one official admitted. The idea of a payment was first mooted between Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, and Senator John Kerry in February. But the arrangement first needed the co-operation of Pakistani intelligence, which seemed determined to press its advantage. Relations between the two spy agencies had been fragile for months. In December the CIA station chief had to leave Islamabad after being named in the press; ISI officials were angry that their chief, General Shuja Pasha, had been named in a New York lawsuit brought by victims of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The ISI had been unaware of Davis’s CIA role in Pakistan, where he was employed to protect operatives gathering information about groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group close to Pakistan’s intelligence service and linked to terrorist attacks against India, and relations between the CIA and ISI were strained as a result. The CIA director, Leon Panetta, phoned the ISI chief, General Shuja Pasha, last month to try to smooth relations. Media leaks in the Pakistani press during the stop-start trial kept the pressure on the US, such as the publication last weekend of the names and passport details of other “Raymonds” – Americans suspected of entering Pakistan under false pretences – in a newspaper. The report quoted “official sources”. In return for Davis’s release, the ISI has obtained an undertaking from the CIA about covert operations on their turf, the Pakistani official said. “They will do nothing behind our backs that will result in people getting killed or arrested.” There were other indications that a deal had been worked out. The US embassy press release welcoming Davis’s release was initially dated March 10 – around the same time a deal was struck in Washington. Analysts also noted that General Pasha, who was due to retire this month, obtained an unusual one-year extension of tenure this week. Kerry, head of the Senate foreign affairs committee, who is often used as a go-between in difficult issues, is thought to have raised the issue of compensation with the Pakistan government on a visit to Islamabad on 16 February. Kerry’s visit, devoted to securing Davis’s release, was initially believed to have been a failure. But US officials have been working behind the scenes since then at trying to secure the deal. Kerry said: “This was a very important and necessary step for both of our countries to be able to maintain our relationship and remain focused on progress on bedrock national interests, and I’m deeply grateful for the Pakistani government’s decision. “We deeply regret the loss of life that led to this difficulty in our relationship and the demonstrations on Pakistan’s streets, but neither country could afford for this tragedy to derail our vital relationship. We look forward to working with Pakistan to strengthen our relationship and confront our common challenges.” The US state department released a statement by the US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who accompanied Davis on the flight from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Munter thanked the families of their victims for pardoning Davis. “I am grateful for their generosity.” He stressed that the US justice department has opened an investigation into the shooting in Lahore. He added: “Most of all, I wish to reaffirm the importance that America places in its relationship with Pakistan, and the commitment of the American people to work with their Pakistani counterparts to move ahead in ways that will benefit us all.” As night fell in Lahore, there was a small protest outside the US consulate where Davis claimed to work, led by demonstrators from the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s main religious party. Further protests are expected after prayers on Friday. Meanwhile, the CIA continued drone strikes in the tribal belt, firing three missiles at a car in North Waziristan that reportedly killed five people. It was the 16th drone strike in Pakistan this year. CIA United States Pakistan Declan Walsh Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …It looks like Sharron Angle sees the House of Representatives as an easier win than the US Senate. Today she announced a run for the US House (NV-2) to replace Rep. Dean Heller, who is running for John Ensign’s seat in the Senate. The 2012 elections will be an interesting test for the Tea Party. Assume they’ll be well-funded so blanketing districts with ads and propaganda will be no problem. What may be a problem, however, is how they’re perceived given the overplayed hands unfolding right now in many states as well as the mainstream Republican Party’s frustration with them in the US Congress. Angle’s election to the House of Representatives isn’t a given, but it will be a bellwether for the Tea Party’s viability. And just imagine the fun she can have with Virginia Foxx and Michele Bachmann if she wins.
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Click here to view this media CBS News reported Wednesday that a violent man waving a tea party flag was arrested at a Democratic rally in Houston, Texas after he charged the podium.
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‘Right to be forgotten’ would ensure users of Facebook and other sites could completely erase personal data The European Union is to enshrine a “right to be forgotten online” to ensure that, among other things, prospective employers cannot find old Facebook party photos of someone wearing nothing but a lampshade. In a speech to the European parliament, the EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, warned companies such as Facebook that: “A US-based social network company that has millions of active users in Europe needs to comply with EU rules.” In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, the commissioner intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user. “I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing,” Reding said. “The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary.” Under the proposals, national privacy watchdogs will be endowed with powers to investigate and launch legal proceedings against companies with services that target EU consumers. Reding’s spokesman, Matthew Newman, said: “A year ago she issued Facebook a warning because the privacy settings changed for the worse and now she’s legislating to put flesh on those bones.” Facebook profiles have been accessible by default since January last year. Users have to opt in to ensure that their photographs and other information can be viewed only by friends. Newman said companies “can’t think they’re exempt just because they have their servers in California or do their data processing in Bangalore. If they’re targeting EU citizens, they will have to comply with the rules.” Privacy settings are often so complex that a typical user does not know how to use them, Reding’s staff say. The new legislation will ensure privacy is inbuilt and not tacked on later as an added extra. The rules will also outlaw the surreptitious gathering of data without the user explicitly giving permission. Newman said that the laws would make the EU the first jurisdiction to deliver a “right to be forgotten”. “Maybe you’ve been at a party, up until four in the morning and you or someone you know posts photos of you,” he said. “Well, it’s a harmless bit of fun, but being unable to erase this can threaten your job or access to future employment.” The rules would give consumers a specific right to withdraw their consent to sharing their data. “And after you have withdrawn your consent, there shouldn’t even be a ghost of your data left in some server somewhere. It’s your data and it should be gone for good,” he said. Facebook believes it is already compliant with EU law and says it is working alongside Brussels officials in the revision of data protection legislation that was enacted in 1995, in the early days of the internet. “Facebook is fully engaged in the debates around the review of the European Union’s data protection directive,” said a company spokeswoman, Sophy Silver. “We work closely with data protection authorities across the EU and with the European commission and parliament.. Silver said Facebook users were already able to remove their data completely from view, after which it took a few weeks to clean up the company’s servers. Social networking Facebook European Union Internet Europe Leigh Phillips guardian.co.uk
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One approach is to patronise the locals, another is to immerse yourself in a culture. Failing that you could just hate robots They’ll let just about anyone present a travelogue these days. Caroline Quentin’s got one. Kate Humble’s got one. Justin Lee Collins has got one. So how could you get one too? Here are five things you need to remember … Become famous for something completely unrelated to travel You don’t need to be an experienced travel presenter to present a travelogue. Or a presenter. You don’t even need to particularly enjoy travelling, for that matter. Here, more or less, is how the modern travelogue commissioning process works: one bag contains the names of people off the telly (Griff Rhys Jones, Piers Morgan, Robbie Coltrane, Joanna Lumley, Caroline Quentin, Martin Clunes), and another contains some locations (Dubai, India, the B roads of the United Kingdom, Guernsey, all of Africa as seen from a hot air balloon). Then they get drawn together, FA Cup-style. Have a clear reason for making the travelogue Covering the battle of Anzio for the British army’s Film and Photo Unit instilled in Alan Whicker a deep love of capturing the world on camera. It was this love that prompted him to become an international reporter for BBC’s Tonight , which in turn spurred him on to make a beloved travel-based documentary series of his own. Meanwhile, in the first episode of Channel 5′s recent travelogue Turning Japanese , Justin Lee Collins unveiled a different, but no less worthwhile, motivation: “I’m not particularly well-travelled, I’ve never really been outside of my comfort zone … I don’t like robots”. Which is basically the same thing if you think about it. Please don’t think about it. Where possible, link travel with food If you want to see a country, look at its food. This is why so many travelogues shine a light on the cuisines of far-flung lands. And, if you’re after a food-based travelogue, it’s important to find your niche. There are presenters who’ll eat anything, such as Anthony Bourdain . There are presenters who’ll drink anything, such as James May and Oz Clarke. There are presenters who’ll eat everything, such as Adam Richman from the brilliant Man v Food. However, there has never been a presenter who goes abroad, only ever orders chips regardless of location and still somehow manages to contract an explosive form of food poisoning that rears up at spectacularly inopportune moments. Commissioning editors, call me. Develop advanced condescension skills A great deal of your travelogue will be taken up by your interaction with real locals, and your experiences with a culture that you might not be familiar with. And, while it’s important not to directly judge them, you are allowed to be a bit condescending. Just like Caroline Quentin during her travelogue A Passage Through India, really – especially the moment when she meets a housewife who has to cook for 10 people every day much to Quentin’s obvious dismay. And the moment when a local tells her that the Ganges river has antiseptic properties. And, oh, pretty much everything else she does. Go native If you want to fully immerse yourself in a different culture, like Bruce Parry , then you have to follow a different set of conventions. First you must throw yourself into any gruesome initiation ceremony that your host tribe requests of you, even if it does look like it’s been cooked up to make you look like a fool. And second, always end your travelogue with a shot of a tribeswoman saying how handsome you are. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t actually say you’re handsome because she’s saying it in a language that hardly anyone speaks, so you can just subtitle whatever you like. Not that Bruce Parry does that, you understand. But I would. Travel TV Television Stuart Heritage guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Fox nuclear ‘experts’ sound just like J. Frank Parnell: ‘Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it.’
March 16, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Not only is Fox News now racing to promote the narrative that the meltdown the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, in the wake of this week’s killer earthquake and tsunamis, is really nothing for anyone (and especially not Americans!) to worry about, but the other night on Hannity, one of their “experts” — Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute — tried to claim that everything was working according to plan and no harm would come to anyone’s health as a result of the radiation released. HANNITY: How realistic is this threat? LEHR: Sean, it’s not at all realistic. I can tell you with the utmost confidence there will not be a health impact from anything that’s going on at the Fukushima power plant. Lehr was featured throughout Hannity’s show, and he continued on in this vein — minimizing the health effects of disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and attacking a nuclear engineer for saying that there is at least some concern about fallout drift to the West Coast of the USA. As Digby sez : “Call me nuts but that fellow doesn’t sound all that trustworthy.” He reminds Digby of a movie character, Gen Buck Turgidson. He reminds me, on the other hand, of another character altogether. You remember J. Frank Parnell, don’t you? Click here to view this media J. Frank Parnell: Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it’s bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day – nothing. Swept away. But I’ll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end. Otto: Lobotomy? Isn’t that for loonies? Parnell: Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people – leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It’s so small, no one knows it’s there until – BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That’s what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he’s well again.
Continue reading …Nothing to See Here: Chuck Todd Finds No Controversy in Obama Making NCAA Picks During Crises
March 16, 2011 No Comment
MSNBC's Chuck Todd on Wednesday hyped the fact that Barack Obama will be making his NCAA tournament picks on ESPN. The Daily Rundown anchor enthused, ” You got about 27 hours to get your brackets in. The President has already done his .” Perhaps referencing the devastating earthquake in Japan or the ongoing crisis in Lybia, Todd vaguely
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A contest aims to find which ones make motorists’ heads spin, and which are quite pleasant – in a roundabout way Blooming flower beds, velvety lawns, graceful silver birches, the gentle background hum of happy cars – to Tom Hemmingway, earth hath very little more to show more fair than a little patch of paradise, the roundabout in Nottingham outside the BBC’s offices. He is so impressed by it – “one of the very best in Nottingham and possibly the best in the whole UK”, that he has nominated it in a quest to find the nation’s best (and worst) roundabouts . Hemmingway, who regularly drives past it, is quite lyrical about his promised land: “It even looks gorgeous with its colourful flowers and trees,” he says. “It never struggles to cope even on match days when its proximity to Nottingham’s two football clubs and to Trent Bridge cricket ground means it’s heaving with cars. The roundabout takes it all in its stride and doesn’t miss a beat.” Letchworth Garden City claims the honour of the first UK roundabout, built in 1909, but they really took off in the 1960s, when Swindon acquired its legendary Magic Roundabout, which has been known to reduce motorists to tears. Many stir deep emotions, particularly among those who feel a lifetime is ebbing away during the hours spent trapped in their orbit. If anything the roundabout at Queen’s Gardens in Newcastle-under-Lyme is even more densely planted than Nottingham’s charmer, with grass, several trees and a bristling thicket of spiny shrubs. It fills James Welch, from Stoke, with revulsion. “I have the misfortune to have to navigate this appalling road island twice every working day, and it’s not only a eyesore, it’s also a catastrophe. The Queen’s Gardens roundabout is plagued by constant beeping and motorists struggling to find the right lanes. “The best thing to do would be to take a JCB to it and plough the whole thing up and start again.” The search, inevitably dubbed Roundabout Idol, has been launched by the car leasing firm Central Contracts, which promises to praise the best and name and shame the worst. “Rather than making our journeys easier, certain roundabouts have been plaguing our commutes and have us risking both vehicle and sanity to reach the other side,” a spokesman said. “We are asking motorists to tell us what roundabout makes their head spin, their stomach churn and their temper rise.” Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk
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