Sea Shepherd flagship impounded in Scottish port after Maltese tuna fishery sues for £850,000 in damages “Eco-pirate” Paul Watson is losing a race against time to recover his flagship boat, the Steve Irwin, which has been impounded in Shetland. The world’s most radical conservationist, Watson is being sued for $1.4m (£850,000) by a Maltese fishing company, Fish and Fish, one of Europe’s leading tuna processors. The law suit against Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was filed last year after activists aboard the Steve Irwin freed 800 bluefin tuna from a pen in the Mediterranean. Watson has just 10 days to raise the bond required to release the boat, which was named after the late Australian conservationist. It has been impounded in the harbour at Lerwick ever since the company sued him for damages. By last night, the society had raised about $500,000, after a global Twitter campaign and appeals to celebrities who have helped Watson in the past. A co-founder of Greenpeace, Watson was picking up volunteer crew and restocking the Steve Irwin in preparation for a trip to protest against whaling in the Faroe Islands when he was served with the writ. The tuna cage that had been intercepted 40 miles off the Libyan coast in June last year held an estimated 35 tons of fish. After a fracas in which there was hand-to-hand fighting between the two crews, Sea Shepherd sent in divers to release the 800 tuna. Joseph Caruana, the owner of Fish and Fish, declined to speak to the Observer , but has claimed in the Maltese press that two of his divers were injured in the encounter, an allegation strongly denied by Watson. “Sea Shepherd cannot continue behaving this way. My aim is for justice to be done. I wanted to show that we mean business and we will fight our cause,” he said. Malta has become a global capital of tuna fishing, exporting £80m-worth of the fish, mainly to the Middle East and Japan. Ships surround the fish with nets and then tow them to cages, where they are fattened for export. Catches are limited to two weeks a year and ship owners have been given strict quotas to meet by governments, but, with little policing, the industry has been able to openly flout the law in Libyan waters. Greenpeace and WWF called last month for a suspension of the Mediterranean tuna fishing season, saying that stocks were at critically low levels. “Mediterranean bluefin tuna is on the slippery slope to collapse,” said Dr Sergi Tudela, of WWF Mediterranean. In a statement last week, Watson said that if Sea Shepherd could not raise the money, the Steve Irwin could be held indefinitely and possibly sold. “This would not only be a financial hardship, but it could threaten our ability to defend whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary from the Japanese whaling fleet this December. Fish and Fish are claiming damages for bluefin tuna we believe were illegally caught after the season had closed,” he said. In a separate incident, the Namibian government has declared Sea Shepherd a “threat to national security” after it tried to film the annual slaughter of 90,000 Cape fur seals on the west African coast. It is a crime to document seal clubbing in Namibia. “The group tried to document the seal slaughter, but was detected by Namibian special forces,” said Watson. “It was a good plan, but Sea Shepherd is no match for the Namibian military.” The group fled to South Africa, having had its rooms burgled and cameras destroyed. Fishing Marine life Malta Endangered species Food Wildlife Conservation John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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America has raised its debt ceiling 140 times since the war without controversy. Now compromise has become a dirty word Barack Obama has not slept in the last week, worried about the impending debt crisis deadline, according to a White House aide. He will not be getting much sleep over the next 48 hours either, as the standoff between the Republicans and Democrats – the biggest ideological collision between the parties for decades – enters its final phase. With only two days left to the deadline that could result in the US defaulting on its borrowing for the first time, there is still no sign of a deal. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a stopgap bill by 218-210 on Friday evening. Two hours later, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted to kill it by 59-41. The Senate, keen to have a deal in place before the markets open on Monday, with the potential for huge falls in share prices, is proposing a bill of its own scheduled to go to a vote on Sunday. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, speaking late on Friday about his new bill, said: “This is likely our last chance to save this nation from
Continue reading …Jon Kyl Continues the "Can’t Raise Taxes on the Job Creators" Nonsense in the Republican Weekly Address
July 30, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media In the Republican Weekly Address , Sen. Jon Kyl continued with more of the GOP’s latest excuse for why no one can ever dare to take tax rates back to where they were when Bill Clinton was in office. Heaven forbid we can’t raise taxes on the “job creators.” Republicans care about job creation, alright … just not in the United States. Maybe once they’ve destroyed our economy entirely where people here will work for a few dollars an hour, those “job creators” will decide to start blessing us again and creating more jobs here at home. Kyl also seems to have a bad case of amnesia if he’s not going to acknowledge just who did that “runaway spending” he’s talking about here. Kyl’s part of the problem with his votes for the Bush tax cuts, the illegal invasions of countries that were not a threat to us and the giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry — not to mention he and his fellow Republicans’ aversion to any type of regulation that might have prevented the financial meltdown and subsequent bailouts that have done terrible harm to our economy. Kyl claims that raising the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts would be irresponsible. Sorry Jon, but your reckless spending that you refused to pay for or even put on the books that caused us to go from a surplus to a deficit in the first place is what’s irresponsible. Now your party just continues to prove that you’re completely incapable of governing as well. Slash, pillage, burn and destroy is all these people understand. Weekly remarks by Sen. Jon Kyl, as provided by Republican Party leadership Good morning. I am Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona. By now, most Americans know that lawmakers in Washington are engaged in a difficult debate about the nation’s ‘debt ceiling,’ the legal limit to the amount of money the federal government can borrow. The debt ceiling is currently set at a little more than 14 trillion dollars, and if Congress and the president don’t reach an agreement to raise it by this coming Tuesday, the Treasury secretary tells us America will no longer be able to pay all its bills. The consequences of missing this deadline could be severe, precisely because Washington…. …borrows so much money — more than 40 cents out of every dollar it spends. So, spending would have to shrink by 40% very quickly. What’s more, markets would likely respond, dropping in value and hurting the retirement savings of millions of Americans. Republicans have tried to work with Democrats to avoid this result and put our country on a better path, but we need them to work with us. We start from the understanding that the reason the debt ceiling is a problem is because of runaway Washington spending. So, Republicans have been united in the belief that raising the debt ceiling without making significant spending reductions would be irresponsible. With debt crises rolling across Europe, we know it is only a matter of time before people start to question whether America can sustain its huge and growing debt. If we don’t do something about our spending problem now, the scenes we’ve seen playing out all across Europe could happen in America. If we don’t change the way Washington operates, we will not get control of our government, or our future. In short, we hoped that the need to increase the debt ceiling could be an opportunity to make some very hard decisions to reduce government spending. Unfortunately, after weeks of negotiations, it became clear that Democrats in Washington did not view this crisis as an opportunity to rein in spending. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to impose huge tax increases on American families and small businesses. President Obama is simply too committed to the European-style of big government that his policies have set in motion. To Democrats in Washington, the answer isn’t to cut spending, but to raise taxes and keep on spending. Democrats claim they would only target the privileged few. But behind the scenes they argue for much broader tax increases. The simple fact is, in order to afford the kind of government this president wants, taxes would have to be increased dramatically — and for middle-income Americans, not just on the wealthy. Job-killing tax increases are the wrong medicine for our struggling economy. Back in 2009, President Obama admitted that you don’t raise taxes in the middle of a recession. This advice is just as true today. At the moment, more than 14 million Americans are looking for work and can’t find it. According to economists, a healthy economy is one in which unemployment is around 5%. The unemployment rate today is 9.2%. And we got more bad news yesterday: Our economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.3% in the second quarter and the first-quarter growth was downgraded to just four tenths of one percent. Raising taxes will only make this worse. And prolonging the debt crisis will only add to the ongoing economic uncertainty. Republicans believe we must solve our debt crisis — and we believe we can solve it if Democrats will work with us. No one will get everything they want, and we can’t solve all of our problems at once, but surely we can reach an agreement that will increase the debt ceiling, impose accountability, and begin reducing the size of our federal government. That may not be what some in Washington really want. But it’s what Americans, and the American economy, really need.
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Tens of thousands flee drought-hit southern Somalia as UN begins food deliveries to war-torn capital Hit by the worst drought in 60 years, tens of thousands of people are leaving the rural areas of central and southern Somalia for the war-ravaged capital, Mogadishu, where last week the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) started an airlift operation to deliver to 20 feeding centres. Despite continuing fighting, with troops of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and African Union-led forces battling the Islamic militants of al-Shabaab, more and more people are coming into the city, hoping to find relief from a drought that is affecting 11 million in Somalia alone. The WFP said it has been able to provide 85,000 meals a day in Mogadishu but with mortar shells frequently hitting civilian areas the TFG military offensive that started last week is likely to hamper the delivery of food. The UN declared a famine in two southern regions of Somalia on 20 July, but Abdirahman Omar Osman, the Somali government’s spokesman, said the emergency is even more serious. Every day about 3,000 people arrive in Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera, the three camps at Dadaab in Kenya, which now have more than 380,000 refugees, 100,000 of whom arrived this year. Barack Obama has said the emergency in east Africa has not had the attention it deserved in the US. Speaking during a meeting with the presidents of Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Niger on Friday, Obama asked Africa to play a bigger role in assisting the people affected by the drought. The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs has predicted that famine will spread to all of southern Somalia, parts of which are controlled by al-Shabaab, which banned foreign aid in 2009. After talks with relief organisations, al-Shabaab has allowed some food to be delivered in the past weeks but so far no regular supplies have reached the areas controlled by the Islamist militants, who are linked to al-Qaida. Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya have been badly hit as well. The scale of the crisis has even prompted long-time refugees in Dadaab to join the relief efforts. Mosques and Islamic associations in the camps are collecting food and clothes to give to the newcomers. “We have also asked the population to give priority to the new refugees at the water points,” says Mahmoud Jama Guled, who chairs a section of Ifo camp. He said that in his area one water tank is now serving more than 6,500 families. Somalia Africa Famine guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …O’Reilly slams National Council of La Raza as ‘a pretty radicalized group’ that ‘opposes any kind of border security’
July 30, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Bill O’Reilly cooked up another way to attack President Obama this week — by suggesting that he was associating with racial radicals again, namely, the National Council of La Raza: O’REILLY: But the president spoke to La Raza this week. La Raza, a pretty radicalized group. I think they’re further left than you are. I mean, they don’t like any kind of border security, they want amnesty for all the people here. They object to almost every kind of measure to control illegal immigration. And yet the president feels comfortable there. Do you think he’s just posturing? This is why O’Reilly enjoys about as much credibility among Latino viewers as Lou Dobbs — which is to say, nearly zero. Because everyone who knows their way around the immigration scene is perfectly aware that NCLR is a very temperate, middle-of-the-road organization — and in fact is frequently criticized by other Latino groups for being too safe and cautious, and for being corporate sellouts. (Your mileage may vary.) Indeed, all O’Reilly and his crack staff would have had to do is visit NCLR’s website to read this: Unfortunately, NCLR has been called an “open-borders advocate” and the “illegal alien lobby” numerous times. NCLR has repeatedly recognized the right of the United States, as a sovereign nation, to control its borders. Moreover, NCLR has supported numerous specific measures to strengthen border enforcement, provided that such enforcement is conducted fairly, humanely, and in a nondiscriminatory fashion. There are a whole bunch of falsehoods about NCLR — beginning with their name — that endure as right-wing myths. I bet O’Reilly has pretty much swallowed those whole, too.
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Jude Law has been one of Britain’s foremost actors. But with fame came intense press scrutiny of his private life. Now, at 38, he says he is looking forward to his ‘most productive decade’ – starting with a West End play Jude Law can’t speak about phone hacking. I’m told this by his publicist before the interview. And when I bring it up during our chat – it’s the day after the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks have given testimonies to the Commons committee – Law smiles and makes a zipping action with his finger across his lips. “I just can’t because I’m in legal proceedings and it’s in various stages with various people, and part of that is classified, and they’ve promised to keep it quiet if I keep it quiet, so I’ve got to be really careful. But believe me, there’s an awful lot I want to say, though. An awful lot.” But then he can’t not speak about it either, because he’s right at the very heart of it all. The peak phone-hacking years coincided with the peak Jude Law tabloid-mania years and he has not one case pending against News International but three. It’s a very big deal, not just to him – his relationship with the tabloid press, and particularly News International, has both defined and circumscribed his life for much of the past decade – but a big deal, too, in terms of what will happen to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. His cases are the very crux of the story. We’re in an empty meeting room at the Jerwood Space in south London, where Law is in the thick of rehearsals for his new play, an Eugene O’Neill revival, Anna Christie . It starts at the Donmar Warehouse this week, and his head is full of it: it’s a gritty love story set in 1920 between a prostitute and a ship’s stoker. “I’ve got really sucked into the world of the play,” he says. “So it’s very much get up, go to rehearse, go home, learn lines, go to bed.” And watch the news. He’s right in the middle of one drama – he plays the ship’s stoker, Mat Burke – but, of course, he can’t help but be compelled by the other thrilling spectacle playing itself out on the television news. “I mean, of course I’m watching it,” he says. “Who isn’t?” It’s just so dramatic, I say, isn’t it? “It’s a movie. It’s a scene from a movie.” And you’ve already got your role sorted, I say, meaning that, of course, if it ever was a film, he could simply play himself. But he doesn’t catch my drift. “James, you mean?” And then realises his mistake. “Oh! You mean myself? Oh dear. I can’t believe I said that.” But, of course, he’d be brilliant as James Murdoch. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before. He’s specialised in characters who have an edge, a slightly slippery elusiveness, and there are obvious overtones of what is still, perhaps, his most famous role – the role that saw him burst into public consciousness in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999: the heir to a shipping fortune, Dickie Greenleaf. There really is more than a touch of Dickie Greenleaf to James Murdoch, isn’t there, I say. “Oh dear,” he says. “I’ve got to be really careful what I say here.” He’s obviously itching to speak about it. Phone hacking, privacy, press intrusion – these are matters that he has thought long and hard about, but because he can’t go into detail, he ends up delivering slightly gnomic one-liners. “The thing is,” he says, “it involves us all.” What do you mean? “It involves us all. All of us . That’s the closest I can come to talking about it. We’re all involved. We’re all complicit. On some level, if you think about what has happened and what will come out in the end. I think it’s easy to think that things are mending if we think, ‘Oh things are over now.’ Or: ‘It’s their fault.’ But we’re all complicit.” Do you think it’s just the beginning, I say. “I hope it’s just the beginning.” And he makes the zipping action across his lips again. “I don’t want to quote myself so I’m going to quote someone else. There was an interesting Thought for the Day on Radio 4 yesterday. I came in halfway through so I don’t know who it was, but he was talking about Murdoch being sorry. No, not being sorry, he was saying that he was asking for atonement. He was asking for forgiveness. And the guy said, he hasn’t been judged yet. He hasn’t any right to ask for that yet because we still have to judge him. And judgment is what this whole thing is about. They judge people. Those papers have judged people. I have been judged. They have yet to all be judged, and I hope they are ready for it.” He’s referring, of course, to the time when, for a while, he was one half of the most glamorous couple on earth, the Jude Law-Sienna Miller coupling, a gift to tabloid editors and celebrity magazines everywhere. He was the Oscar-nominated, chisel-jawed actor (he was shortlisted for his part in The Talented Mr Ripley and Minghella’s next film, Cold Mountain ), and Miller, whose face launched a million boho skirts, was his golden-haired consort. They seemed to embody beauty and talent and a certain slightly louche London-LA lifestyle at the heart of the Primrose Hill-Hollywood Hills nexus, right up until the News of the World printed a story which detailed how Law had had an affair with his children’s nanny and all tabloid hell broke loose. Miller left. Law made a public apology. Soap opera ensued. And then just as that was dying down, in 2009, another story in the News of the World detailed he’d had a fling with an American model, Samantha Burke, who was subsequently carrying his child. They’re obviously not incidents that Law is particularly proud of, but they’re also not incidents which have got anything to do with his day job – acting – and what the phone-hacking case seems to have done, I say, is to throw open the whole concept of privacy. Of precisely who is entitled to a private life and what that means. “Well, again I use this word judgment. It’s someone thinking that they have the right to have a moral judgment when a) there is no recourse. I’m not going to be able to morally judge them back and say, ‘Well, let me look at your life.’ And b) is that healthy? For everyone reading that… what about the person reading that who’s done a similar thing. You know it’s part of life. Don’t make moral judgments, just give me some information. Give me some facts. Get off my page.” The new play, Anna Christie , is part of the final season of the Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Grandage, who in 2009 directed Law in Hamlet , a role that saw him feted by the critics and nominated for an Olivier award. He started out in the theatre and was a successful stage actor long before he was an international film star: he was nominated for his first Olivier (best newcomer) for his first West End play, Les Parents Terribles . I wonder if he’s nostalgic for that period of his life: when he had success without this all-encompassing fame. “I don’t really look back, if I’m honest. I’ve always been someone who’s really tried to live in the here and now. My memory isn’t very good so maybe that’s why, but it just seems like I’ve been living this life, my current chapter, for a really long time and I don’t really remember what it was like before. It’s just been sort of ingrained in me. What I deal with day to day.” He has a whole slew of new films coming out later in the year, but he was also determined to go back to the theatre. “I was still very excited by my experience of playing Hamlet and was keen to keep the relationship with the theatre up. I’d really dropped the baton and had a gap of about seven years and I didn’t want that to happen again.” So he’s back and while Hamlet was a great triumph, it was overshadowed in some ways by the Samantha Burke episode (“Jude knows he’s been a Bard boy” was one of the headlines), and this time around, it’s inevitable that phone hacking will also cast a certain light. But then the play, he says, and his character in particular, is about youth and experience, and loss of innocence, and the gaining of knowledge, themes which are close to his heart too, and which have preoccupied him for much of the last few years. His 30s (he’s 38 now) have been, at best, a mixed time. “I think everyone goes through chapters in their life and there was a time when I wasn’t feeling terribly positive about what I was contributing to film, or wasn’t feeling as if I was going in the direction I wanted and I re-evaluated what I was doing. I’ve never been a fan of just doing. I like to do things for a reason.” As a young man, he was a self-described idealist. “I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I’ve regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general.” What, I say? Everybody? The entire human race? “Well, yeah. I just felt a little bit down on what people seemed to be interested in. And down on what the general consensus of what the interesting things were. It was just so far away from what I found interesting and what I was interested in and what I found fascinating about people. It just felt like this slurry pit.” And at the heart of the slurry pit was the tabloid press. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly his experience of the press seems to have affected his life. And how profoundly, potentially, his life could now influence the press. Because the three cases he is bringing against News International are some of the most crucial, and possibly damaging, of them all. The first accuses the News of the World of tapping his and his assistant’s phone in New York in 2003: the first case to be brought that is alleged to have happened on US soil and which opens the way for News International to be prosecuted in the US, potentially jeopardising Murdoch’s entire American news operation. Another is against the Sun for allegedly hacking into his phone in 2005 and 2006 – when Rebekah Brooks was editor – and which suggests the problem went much wider than just the News of the World . And the third is against the News of the World which has been selected to be a test case in a civil litigation action brought by 30 public figures. His case was selected to determine how far up the chain of command the decision went: Law’s QC alleges it was a “very senior News of the World executive” who authorised Law’s phone to be hacked. But it goes even deeper than that. When looking through old cuttings, I find an interview that Jude Law did with the Observer in 2003 before any of this came to light, in which he talked about two instances in which he called the police to the house he was then sharing with his wife, Sadie Frost, and their children, and which subsequently ended up in the newspapers. And another instance in which his decree nisi was sent directly from the high court to a British tabloid “before it was sent to me”. It was, he claimed, “the high court and then the police selling stories, so how are you going to live in the country and feel safe?” I read back his quotes to him and he nods. “That’s right, yeah. That’s where I’ve been. That’s where a lot of people in this country have been living for years.” You really felt like the establishment wasn’t working? That it was corrupt? “Yes. Truly. That’s certainly how I felt. I was aware back then that certain avenues, even the most official ones, would ultimately lead to media exposure so you were left with a situation where you don’t know quite where to go. I’ve been in scenarios, several times, often involved in being chased, often involved being stalked, having my privacy infringed upon, and not been able to go to the police because having done it in the past I knew that those stories would then end up being leaked. “Having said that, I’ve also been treated really well by the police where they’ve been really respectful and really helpful, so it’s clearly individuals.” But it’s a fundamental pillar of democracy, I say, to have a police force that you can trust… “Apparently, yes. It’s funny, isn’t it? It does come down to fundamentals. I still believe in the democracy of our parliament. Even though none of it has clearly been working. But I still believe in it, I have to. I also, for the first time for a long time, wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, even though it seems like the pillars of our institutions are crumbling. I went through a long period of feeling really uncomfortable in this country, in this town in particular, just feeling really harassed and chased, and really hating it. “And I couldn’t move because my children are growing up here, and their mum lives here, and we’ve got a really good setup where we have a very healthy 50-50 custody arrangement and we live close by, so moving abroad was just impossible. But I came back in 2009 from New York – I’d been living there for three months with the kids – and I completely fell in love with London again.” What he’s done, he says, is to “work out a way around the system”. There’s been a process of renegotiation, of finding a way of being in the city with his children – Rafferty, 14, Iris, 10, and Rudy, eight (he’s also supporting Sophia, 22 months, his daughter born to Samantha Burke in the US). “I’ve created a haven that works for me and my family that hasn’t necessarily involved the law. That’s just my way of doing things. Having said that, it’s not like I’ve been a prisoner in my home. I don’t want some sort of sob story. I still enjoy a very normal life with my kids. We use trains and buses and that’s often the best way. If you build up some sort of psychological bubble around you, I think you’re asking for trouble.” In some ways, it sounds as if Law has got his midlife crisis out of the way early. But then he’s done everything early. Growing up in Blackheath, south-east London, with his teacher parents and an older sister, he joined his first theatre at 12 – the National Youth Music Theatre – left school at 17 to film his first television series, Families , and had his first child by the age of 23. “People often say that to me [that he did things early]. Especially about being a father, but it was just the way I did it. It never felt like an issue at the time… But I really feel that the years between 40 and 50 are going to be the 10 most productive years of my life. It’s just a great age to be an actor. It’s a bit of a minefield being 20 because you’ve got all these aspirations and ideals. Well, I had. I had all these aspirations and artistic ideas that I wanted to fulfil. And then you get cynical. And for me, my 30s have been about re-evaluating what I’m doing. And my 40s and 50s, I think, will be a really interesting time. I want to get back into production, which I’ve done a bit of, and I’ve always been interested in directing and my kids are all at an age where I don’t have to be tied to London necessarily.” He wasn’t even sure, for a time, if he wanted to carry on being an actor. “But I’m a father and I have to provide and that’s my job.” He was named after Jude the Obscure (“my mum just liked the book”) and what he wanted more than anything was to be recognised by the world “but I don’t know if I do any more. I did and I think any performer who claims not to have, at some point in their career, is probably telling a fib. But there’s part of you, or at least part of me, where you think, ‘Oh God. What will people make of this?’ But it doesn’t have a bearing on why you’re doing it. It certainly didn’t when I was doing Hamlet. “It was the doing it which was the achievement. It was a very inner experience.” As a younger man, Law struggled against being defined by his looks. At 38, even heavily muffled by the beard he’s been growing for Anna Christie , he’s still an undeniably handsome man. But there’s a wider range of roles available to him now: he had the looks of a romantic lead, but always hankered after the character roles. “I just think that I felt a bit disappointed that that’s what people wanted me to be, whereas I felt that I had lots of things to offer so I wanted to choose roles that went against it.” Growing older has possibly come as something of a relief. His new films due out later this year include Anna Karenina , with a new script by Tom Stoppard, in which he plays not dashing Vronsky, but cuckolded Karenin opposite Keira Knightley. He is also reunited with two of the cast of The Talented Mr Ripley – Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow – in a hotly anticipated Steven Soderbergh thriller about a killer virus, Contagion . And his role in Anna Christie has made him think about ageing too. “I guess part of it is simply wising up. Growing up. There’s an interesting scene in the play where my character criticises his father, Chris, because he blames the sea for making his life a misery, whereas Mat loves the sea, the sea is everything. You rove the earth, he says, and you don’t give a damn for landlubbers, and yet what you’re actually hearing is the innocence of youth. And what’s happened to Chris is that life has happened to him. He’s lost his wife, he’s lost his brothers, he’s lost his father… life has an effect on us all. It’s why we don’t look younger as we get older.” In Law’s case, getting older, has been accompanied by a rather enforced getting of wisdom. It’s been a long, hard, public process, although I’d read one interview in which he’d described the washing of his dirty laundry in public as “liberating” in some ways. “Well, what else are you going to do? I mean, it’s either going to force you into a hole and you’re going to be a hermit and you’re going to be in some sort of state of shame. Or you are going to go, oh well, all right, then. So what? Well, sorry. Am I saying sorry? I don’t know. It also makes you look at things on a broader level. Don’t tell me there isn’t anyone who has done things they regret, or done things they shouldn’t have. Or done things that are silly. Or said silly things. That’s life, right? That’s what’s wonderful about life. We all do this stuff we shouldn’t do. And then we say, I won’t do that again. I mean, so be it.” The other effect of it has been that he’s wary not just of the press, and interviews, but of talking about anything; his life, his work. “I just want to be seen doing my work and I’m just a bit tired of being talked about for what I’m wearing, or what I’m not wearing, or what my hairline is doing, or who I’ve been seen with. Any of that. Jesus. I don’t want any of this. I don’t even want to talk about my acting, because I think the acting should just talk for itself.” He even doesn’t really want to talk about the causes he supports. I’ve met Law before, on two occasions, when he’s come out to support the work of the Belarus Free Theatre and its artistic director, our mutual friend, the dynamic Natalia Kaliada. On both occasions, he was notably unstarry, simply turning up when asked and doing his best to be supportive in a commendably low-key way. He just doesn’t seem to play the A-list celeb, but then he “hates the word celebrity… which means that I am in some sort of messy, mushy bracket with people who have won reality shows and chefs and socialites, and it’s just not something I see myself as. I don’t invite people into my home and I’ve never courted the press unless I’m talking to them about some work I’m doing. And I don’t do that very much. I used to talk to the press about things like this and I even find that pretty hard now, because there’s just been so much cynicism. Why are you banging your drum about this? Or why are you going on about that?” His other big cause is Peace One Day, an organisation which is attempting to make 21 September recognised as a day of peace throughout the world. In many ways it’s an outlandishly ambitious idea, dreamed up by an Englishman called Jeremy Gilley. Law agreed to make a video appeal for Gilley back in 2007 and ended up travelling out to Afghanistan with him to try and make the ceasefire actually happen. What’s interesting to me about this is that for all Law’s world-weariness, his talk of the “slurry pit” and the self-described “cynicism” that has marked his 30s, this is not the action of a cynic. Two weeks ago, at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, I heard Gilley talk about how he came to set up Peace One Day – a preposterous tale of how he’d had this idea “because basically I was really worried about humanity” and had tried to organise the whole thing from a bedroom in his mum’s house. And how for a decade he struggled to get anyone to pay any attention to it at all, until, that is, he got Law involved. Gilley is an idealist. A dreamer through and through. And to be sucked into his world, I say, it seems quite obvious to me, that you’d have to be something of a dreamer too. And in some ways, it seems as if the trip marked Law’s return to himself. “It’s interesting. Because I’ve never really put those pieces together like that,” he says. “But yes.” And he’s rightly proud of the trip: in 2007, Peace One Day managed to broker a one-day ceasefire between the Taliban and UN forces and to arrange for 1.4
Continue reading …I caught Sherrod Brown talking economic sense for the United States the other day and the need to restore our manufacturing base and do something about putting Americans back to work. Here’s Thom Hartmann on Russia Today addressing the real problem with our economy as well — the jobs crisis. From Thom’s You Tube Channel: So raise the damn debt-ceiling – and get on with addressing the real crisis in America – the crisis created by our insane so-called Free Trade policies and treaties, and greedy corporate CEOs with too much power. Amen brother. It would be nice to see the politicians having their phone lines burnt up over this issue as well instead of just for calls for all of them to compromise with GOP hostage takers on the debt ceiling.
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Thinktank Demos warns poorly planned volunteering stints in developing nations can do more harm than good The multi-million pound gap-year industry is in danger of damaging Britain’s reputation abroad and raising fears that the west is engaged in a new form of colonialism, according to a leading thinktank. Young people planning a gap year should focus on what they can offer their hosts in order to discourage the view that volunteering is merely a new way of exercising power, says a new report by Demos. Those who carefully select the projects in which they take part are likely to make the most of their time, while doing the most to dispel the belief that their trips are merely self-interested, says the report. Nine out of 10 young people surveyed by YouGov for Demos said they had improved their self-confidence, self-reliance and sense of motivation following a stint of volunteering in a developing country. However, the gap-year industry is a £6bn business for western companies, costing volunteers between £1,500 and £4,500 for a mere two-month experience. One in five people who took a gap year said they believed their presence in the place they visited made no positive difference to the lives of those around them. Jonathan Birdwell, author of the Demos report, said there was even evidence that an ill thought-out gap year could be bad for local communities and Britain’s relations with other countries. “There is a risk of such programmes perpetuating negative stereotypes of western ‘colonialism’ and ‘charity’: a new way for the west to assert its power,” he said. Birdwell added that “projects that do not appear to have benefits or make a difference for communities abroad leave volunteers unmotivated and disillusioned”. One respondent to the survey’s report said: “I felt that the local community could have done the work we were doing; there were lots of unemployed people there. I’d have preferred to work with local unemployed and helped them in some way to benefit their community.” The study comes in the wake of the government’s launch of the International Citizen Service which, in the words of the prime minister, is designed to “give thousands of our young people, those who couldn’t otherwise afford it, the chance to see the world and serve others”. The scheme is means tested, allowing those who come from families with a joint income of less than £25,000 the chance of a gap year for free. The pilot of the scheme will involve 1,080 young people visiting 27 different countries. The Demos report found that 64% of 3,000 parents surveyed want their children to take part in the ICS scheme. However, Demos’s research indicated that there were key factors which make a gap year successful and the report recommends the ICS should incorporate them. There should be post-placement support, which allows the young person to continue the work they started abroad once back home, it claims. The report says there should be pre-departure training to ensure that young people are able to offer relevant skills. It says placements which are short are just as likely to have positive outcomes in personal development and civic participation as long-term ones. Young people who live with a host family are also more likely to report positive outcomes in “skills, identity and values”. The report found that the typical UK overseas volunteer tended to be young, affluent, white and female, although those with few qualifications and those from low-income backgrounds reported the most positive experiences. Birdwell said he hoped the ICS would grow to help around 3,000 young people a year and that these would be the least well-off in society. He said: “The new International Citizen Service is an exciting opportunity for young British people to experience the world and gain invaluable experience and skills while helping to contribute to the UK’s international development goals. “However, the ICS is competing with an already crowded gap-year market. In order to be successful, it must ensure that activities benefit communities abroad and it must target recruitment to young people who couldn’t afford commercial gap year programmes.” Gap years Gap year travel Students Volunteering Voluntary sector Daniel Boffey guardian.co.uk
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Coalition’s policy chief on reforms believes excellence would be achieved through fear of losing jobs and real discipline Oliver Letwin, the coalition’s policy minister, has revealed the government’s determination to instil “fear” among those working in the public sector, who he claimed had failed for the past 20 years to improve their productivity. Letwin, architect of the coalition’s plans to reform public services, told a meeting at the offices of a leading consultancy firm that the public sector had atrophied over the past two decades. In controversial comments angering teachers, nurses and doctors, he warned that it was only through “some real discipline and some fear” of job losses that excellence would be achieved in the public sector. Letwin added that some of those running schools and hospitals would not survive the process and that it was an “inevitable and intended” consequence of government policy. “You can’t have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don’t live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them,” he said. “If you have diversity of provision and personal choice and power, some providers will be better and some worse. Inevitably, some will not, whether it’s because they can’t attract the patient or the pupil, for example, or because they can’t get results and hence can’t get paid. Some will not survive. It is an inevitable and intended consequence of what we are talking about.” Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCSU), reacted angrily to Letwin’s comments, describing them as “nonsense”. He added: “Public sector workers are already working in fear – fear of cuts to their job, pension, living standards and of privatisation. Far from improving productivity, the cuts are creating chaos in vital public services.” Letwin was speaking at the launch of a liberal thinktank’s report at the London headquarters of KPMG, one of the biggest recipients of government cash, which won the first contract for NHS commissioning following the decision to scrap primary care trusts and further open the health service to private companies. Letwin’s recent white paper on public sector reform had been dismissed as watered down earlier this month amid speculation that the Liberal Democrats had vetoed radical change. But Letwin said on Wednesday that he believed he was prosecuting “the most ambitious set of public service reforms that any government in modern Britain has undertaken”, adding that productivity had improved across the economy except in the public sector in the past 20 years. A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said he did not know where Letwin had sourced his figures. However, an ONS analysis that works back to 1997, shows that productivity in public services fell on average by 0.3% a year between 1997 and 2008 because the level of inputs, such as staff and equipment, increased faster than the output, such as operations performed and numbers of pupils taught. Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, said last night that she did not recognise Letwin’s portrayal of the public sector. “Death rates in hospitals have been falling, satisfaction levels have been rising,” she said. “What hasn’t changed is the Tories’ antipathy to public services. And the idea that the way to improve public services is to put fear into those who provide them is absolutely grotesque.” A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem with productivity in public services. The government’s policy is to improve it and provide the best value for the taxpayer.” Oliver Letwin Public services policy Public sector cuts Liberal-Conservative coalition Harriet Harman Daniel Boffey Mark Serwotka guardian.co.uk
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Shelter warns that many disreputable landlords are taking advantage of the major changes sweeping the property market Slum landlords of the type that enjoyed a boom in the 1980s are again doing brisk business because of major changes sweeping the property market, say housing experts. Millions of people are being priced out of buying a property as mortgage availability becomes scarce and they struggle to raise a deposit. Latest figures suggest mortgage lending is now a third of what it was at the height of the boom in 2007. A dearth of social housing, which is under acute pressure as local authority budgets are cut, is also contributing to a lack of affordable accommodation. An increasing number of people have no option but to rent, creating intense competition in the private rental market. There are now 3.4 million households living in the private rented sector in England, a 40% rise over the past five years and the biggest increase on record, according to new analysis by Shelter. The trend has alarmed the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) whose officers are charged with ensuring the nation’s housing stock meets adequate standards. “People who are in relatively secure jobs but can’t afford to buy are moving into the rented sector,” said Stephen Battersby, president of the CIEH. “People who have traditionally used the private sector will drop further down the ladder into the hands of the more exploitative, neglectful landlords, if not those who are downright criminal.” The government claims three quarters of private tenants report they are happy with their accommodation, but experts point out that this leaves some 800,000 who have concerns, many with the way they are treated by their landlords. In the past year, Shelter says it has seen complaints about landlords increase by 23%. Almost nine out of 10 environmental health officers say they have encountered landlords harassing or illegally evicting tenants from their homes. And almost all environmental health officers say they have encountered landlords who persistently ignore their responsibilities, with half believing they do this to make as much money as possible “A chronic shortage of social housing and more people priced out of the housing market means that renting is fast becoming the only option for thousands of people in this country,” said Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter. “Yet our figures show a worrying increase in the number of people seeking help regarding problems with their landlord. It would appear that rogue landlords could be cashing in on this growing market.” Housing charities warn there is very little policing of landlords and the condition of their properties. In 2009, the English Housing Survey identified 1.5m homes in the private rented sector as “non-decent”. Of these, 970,000 failed the Decent Home Standard. This has led the CIEH to call for a national register of landlords. “It’s a public health issue that affects us all,” said Battersby. “The NHS is spending £800m a year because of poor housing, factor in social costs and it’s £1.5bn.” Environmental health officers working for Local Housing Authorities (LHAs) are responsible for monitoring standards in private properties rented out to benefit claimants. But, according to new evidence obtained by the CIEH under the Freedom of Information Act, four fifths of LHAs have never carried out a prosecution of a landlord. Cutbacks have prompted fears that this situation is unlikely to improve given the amount of time and manpower a prosecution involves. But experts fear the need to tackle the issue of rogue landlords in the private sector will become more urgent in the coming months. The localism bill currently before parliament allows local authorities to discharge their duties to homeless people by using private rented accommodation, rather than social housing, without the applicant’s agreement. Changes to the amount of housing benefit paid to claimants will also have an impact. “With cuts to housing benefit and changes to the homelessness safety net, we are concerned there will be an influx of people pushed to the bottom end of the private rented sector which will lead to an imbalance between supply and demand for properties,” Robb said. “This could see some rogue landlords exploiting the lack of accommodation, with the most vulnerable tenants left with little choice of who to rent from.” Housing Housing benefit Jamie Doward guardian.co.uk
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