Health minister insists that new infections are dropping as two deaths reported and 300 more E coli cases Germany reported two more deaths and 300 more E coli cases on Wednesday, but its health minister insisted that new infections were dropping, giving some hope that the world’s deadliest E coli outbreak was abating. Health minister Daniel Bahr spoke before an emergency meeting in Berlin with health officials from the EU, which is concerned about Germany’s handling of the crisis. “I cannot yet give an all-clear, but after an analysis of the numbers there’s reason for hope,” Bahr told ARD television. “The numbers are continuously falling – which nonetheless means that there can still be new cases and that one unfortunately has to expect new deaths too – but overall new infections are clearly going down.” Bahr said the death toll has risen to 26 – 25 in Germany plus one in Sweden. Germany’s national disease control centre, the Robert Koch Institute, said the number of reported cases in Germany rose by more than 300 to 2,648. Nearly 700 of those affected are hospitalised with a serious complication that can cause kidney failure. Another 100 E coli cases are in other European countries and the US. The Koch Institute did not fully back Bahr’s optimism. It said there was a declining trend in new cases but added it is not clear whether this is because the outbreak is truly waning or whether it is because consumers are staying away from the raw vegetables believed to be the source of the E coli . EU health chief John Dalli, meanwhile, demanded that German health authorities work more closely with international experts in fighting the deadly epidemic, saying they should use “the experience and expertise in all of Europe and even outside of Europe,” according to the Die Welt newspaper. “The focus of this meeting is to ensure that all the steps are being taken to get to … the final elimination of this contamination as soon as possible and to see whether any more resources and efforts should be made,” Dalli told reporters as he went into the Berlin meeting. Outside health experts and even German lawmakers have strongly criticised the German investigation, saying the infections should have been spotted much sooner. Weeks after the outbreak began on 2 May, German officials are still looking for its cause. Spanish cucumbers were initially blamed, then ruled out after tests showed they had a different strain of E coli . On Sunday, investigators pointed the finger at German sprouts, only to backtrack a day later when initial tests were negative. On Wednesday, the agriculture minister of Lower Saxony, who had first warned of eating sprouts on Sunday, said authorities are still expecting new lab results from an organic farm that has been the focus of their investigation. Gert Lindemann said authorities still considering the farm in Bienenbüttel in northern Germany a possible source for the E coli outbreak. Bahr reiterated that the source of the infection may never been found, a stance US experts have called a cop-out. A warning against eating cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and vegetable sprouts is still in place. Consumers across Europe are shunning fruit and vegetables, with EU farmers claiming losses up to €417m (£372m)) as ripe produce rots in fields and warehouses. E coli Germany Europe Spain guardian.co.uk
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Care homes company announces plan to slash workforce as it battles for survival Up to 3,000 Southern Cross staff are losing their jobs as the stricken care homes company battles to avert financial ruin. The company, which is teetering on the brink of collapse, plans to cut its workforce from 44,000 to 41,000 by October, as part of an operational efficiencies programme. Southern Cross claimed that the cuts would not result in a lower quality of service. However, they are likely to add to the uncertainty currently being suffered by its 31,000 residents and their families. “Southern Cross has a strong set of values and a clear vision to serve the care-related needs of elderly people in our society,” said chief executive Jamie Buchan in a statement to the City. “We are engaging with colleagues to put in place the best possible staffing model for our future needs, and one which fully embraces the best practice available to us.” Southern Cross said that the job cuts would not include home managers, deputy managers, relief managers, activity co-ordinators and administrators. It hopes to minimise the number of redundancies. The full extent of the turmoil at Britain’s largest care home operator was exposed last week, when the company was forced to slash the amount of rent it pays to its landlords by 30%. Without this move, Southern Cross would have ceased trading. The crisis has prompted severe criticism of the way Southern Cross was floated on the stock market in 2006 by private equity firm Blackstone. Its future is now in the hands of its landlords , who must decide whether to strike a deal with Buchan that will keep the company running. Christopher Fisher, chairman of Southern Cross, believes the firm can turn itself around. “Notwithstanding the current financial pressures, Southern Cross is in the process of transforming the quality of its business,” Fisher said. “There is a real momentum behind the ambition of our management team and there is too much of value within our business for it to be lightly discarded.” Southern Cross Healthcare Healthcare industry Job losses Graeme Wearden guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Defiant Morning Joe Defends Burying Weiner-gate: ‘We’ll Talk About What We Feel Like Talking About’
June 8, 2011 No Comment
Yesterday, this column jibed Joe Scarborough & Co. for blacking out, during Morning Joe's first half-hour, coverage of Anthony Weiner's epic news conference of the day before. Today, a defiant Scarborough dismissed the criticism the show received, boasting “we'll talk about what we feel like talking about.” When the show opened today, it at first seemed that Scarborough was about to make amends for yesterday's poor news judgment.
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We hear from doctors, nurses, community workers and those living with HIV and Aids about attitudes towards the virus in their countries Liz Ford Lisa Villani
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Emma Donoghue’s novel is 2/1 favourite to take £30,000 award for women’s writing Room lost out on the Booker to Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, but Emma Donoghue’s story of a boy and his mother locked in a tiny room for years is emerging as the frontrunner to take the Orange prize this evening. Donoghue’s novel, which took as its jumping off point the Josef Fritzl case, was picked yesterday by a “shadow” youth panel of teenage judges as their favourite on the six-strong shortlist, ahead of this evening’s main announcement. It is also 2/1 favourite at William Hill to win the overall Orange prize for fiction, and has sold 470% more copies on Amazon.co.uk than its nearest rival, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, since the shortlist was announced in April. “We all agreed Room stood out. For us, it was the most accessible and gripping, and a real page-turner,” said youth panel member Martha Samano, 16. “It’s an horrific tale told with powerful innocence – we all felt it changes the way you view the world and makes you question your environment.” Donoghue said she was “tickled pink” to be the Orange prize youth panel winner. “When I wrote Room I was imagining a reader anything from 11 up, so I’m really chuffed it’s finding so many young readers,” said the Irish author, who has already seen the book, her seventh novel, shortlisted for the Booker and win the Irish novel of the year award. William Hill made Forna’s tale of post-war Sierra Leone The Memory of Love its second favourite to take the £30,000 Orange prize for women’s writing, at 5/2. Emma Henderson’s Grace Williams Says It Loud and Nicole Krauss’s Great House were both given odds of 5/1, with Kathleen Winter’s debut novel Annabel and Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife at the back of the pack, at 6/1. At Amazon.co.uk, meanwhile, head of books buying Darren Hardy said that Room “has been one of the standout books of the past year”. It “has performed consistently well since being shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2010, spending more than five months in the bestseller list on Amazon.co.uk,” he said. “A win on Wednesday night could see it shoot to the top of the book chart and attract even greater success for the author.” Since the shortlist was announced in April, Room has taken 69% of the shortlist’s sales through Amazon.co.uk. The Memory of Love took 12%, The Tiger’s Wife 8%, Henderson’s novel 7%, Annabel 3% and Krauss’s Great House just 1%, said the online bookseller. Orange prize for fiction Fiction Awards and prizes Emma Donoghue Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
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Social network turns on new feature to automatically identify people in photos, raising questions about privacy implications of the service Facebook has come under fire for quietly expanding the availability of technology to automatically identify people in photos, renewing concerns about its privacy practices. The feature, which the giant social network automatically enabled for its more than 500 million users, has been expanded from the US to “most countries”, Facebook said on its official blog on Tuesday. Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook’s database. He also criticised Facebook’s decision to automatically enable the facial-recognition technology for its users. “I’m not sure that’s the setting that people would want to choose. A better option would be to let people opt-in,” he said. Internet security consultancy Sophos noted that many Facebook users had seen the facial recognition option turned on without any notice in the last few days. “Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,” commented Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos. Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling friends and acquaintances in photos posted on the site. Facebook has been repeatedly criticised for changing settings involving privacy and identity in favour of making more data public in ways that means its users have to opt out of, rather than opt in to, the service. Facebook, which announced in December that it planned to introduce the facial recognition service in the US, acknowledged that the feature was now more widely available. The site also said in an emailed statement that “we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them”. The statement noted that the photo-tagging suggestions are only made when new photos are added to Facebook, that only friends are suggested and that users can disable the feature in their privacy settings. While other photo software and online services such as Google Inc’s Picasa and Apple Inc’s iPhoto use facial recognition technology, its use on a social network like Facebook could raise thorny privacy issues. Google has stepped away from the widespread implementation of its Google Goggles service, which would try to identify people based on facial recognition through mobile phones running its Android operating system. Instead it only uses it for translating text and identifying objects. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said earlier in June that he had concerns about its use with people. “We do have the relevant facial recognition technology at our disposal. But we haven’t implemented this on Google Goggles because we want to consider the privacy implications and how this feature might be added responsibly,” he said. “I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition.” Rotenberg noted that Apple’s iPhoto software gave users control over facial recognition technology by letting them elect whether or not to use it with their personal photo collections. Facebook’s technology, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across a broad swathe of newly uploaded photos. Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint about Facebook’s privacy practices with the US Federal Trade Commission, which Rotenberg said was still pending. He noted that he planned to take a close look at Facebook’s new announcement involving facial recognition technology. Facebook Internet Social networking Privacy Privacy & the media Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
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Men in south-east England live four years longer than Scots, while London’s richest outlive Glasgwegians by decade or more A four-year north-south divide in life expectancy at birth for men is revealed in official figures for the UK published on Wednesday. For men in the south-east of England it is 79.4 years, while in Scotland the figure is 75.4, according to the Office for National Statistics . For women the gap is slightly less: 83.3 in south-east and south-west England against 80.1 in Scotland. But the differences are even more stark at a local level. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, men stand to live 84.4 years and women 89 years. That is more than a decade longer than the Glasgow figure of 71.1 years for men and 77.5 for women. Health areas with lowest life expectancy are Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Hartlepool, Western Isles, Liverpool and Blackburn with Darwen. The pattern in the geographic age gaps remains similar to those of previous years, showing just how stubborn social and economic inequalities remain. Overall we are living longer. Life expectancy at birth across the UK as a whole improved from 76.5 to 77.9 years for men between 2003-05 and 2007-09. In the same period it went up from 80.9 to 82 for women. Office for National Statistics Scotland James Meikle guardian.co.uk
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Business secretary tells MPs the government could alter the tax regime if banks do not keep their side of the Project Merlin deal Banks will face higher taxes if they do not bolster lending to small businesses, Vince Cable said on Wednesday as he warned that restricted credit to businesses could hamper any economic recovery. The business secretary also told the Business Innovation and Skills select committee of MPs that he was “pressing” banks for evidence that executive pay was linked to lending, as had been pledged under Project Merlin . Signed in February after months of prevarication, Merlin involved promises by banks to lend £190bn to businesses and reduce the size of their bonuses. Cable was speaking just hours before the heads of Britain’s four major banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Barclays – were due to appear before the Treasury select committee to discuss the proposals by the independent banking commission. All four banks signed up to Merlin. Cable restated his case that a separation of retail banks from “casino” investment banks was “desirable for the real economy” but said the government was waiting for the final report by Sir John Vickers in September before reaching conclusions on the future shape of the industry. Cable said that there was a “serious problem” with lending to small businesses, that was greater than the banks were prepared to acknowledge. He said that if in a year’s time the banks had not kept their side of the Merlin deal, the government would be “absolved” of its promises not to alter the tax regime. “The chancellor and prime minister have made it clear that if we don’t get results, they have said we should take further action with tax on banks,” Cable said. “Clearly we do have the option of approaching the taxing of profits, or bonuses or balance sheets in a different way.” He added: “It is hard to imagine we could penalise individual banks.” Banks tend to argue that there is a reduced demand for loans because of the fragile economic conditions, while small businesses argue that the banks are restricting supply. The first update on Merlin published in May showed that the industry was missing its commitments . The shortfall was in lending to small and medium-sized businesses, which was £2bn short of targets set by the Treasury, rather than to large businesses. Cable said: “We can debate how much is lack of demand and how much is supply. We believe there is an issue with the supply and cost of finance and it is inhibiting recovery. If it’s not dealt with, it will inhibit recovery as we move into more rapid growth.” Asked if Merlin was producing any change in behaviour, Cable said that small business lending was now discussed at a board level each month at Lloyds, which is 41% owned by the taxpayer after being bailed out in October 2008. He said Lloyds was leading the way “in cultural change”. He also appeared to indicate that Santander was living up to its pledges. As well as the “stick” of higher taxes, Cable said executive pay could also be affected – but said he was disappointed by the evidence of links between pay and lending. Banking Project Merlin Executive pay and bonuses Vince Cable Jill Treanor guardian.co.uk
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Powerful business lobbyist says ministers failing on 12 of 13 environmental indicators after series of policy U-turns The UK government is failing on almost every environmental indicator, the Confederation of British Industry warned on Wednesday, as ministers have damaged business confidence and provided scant detail on their plans. The CBI tracks government aims on the environment and climate change through an online tracker, by which it judges the success of announced measures against the progress that needs to be made to hit the UK’s targets. But in the latest climate change tracker , ministers are shown to have failed on 12 out of 13 key indicators. Improving energy efficiency in buildings has been too slow, while greenhouse gas emissions from transport and industry are likely to remain high as new policies are not taking effect, the CBI said. Katja Hall, chief policy director at the CBI, said: “One year on from pledging to be the ‘greenest government ever’, the coalition has still not delivered the policy landscape needed to ensure we meet tough emissions targets. Decisions being taken now will make or break the UK’s low-carbon economy. Our latest tracker shows that progress is failing to match the government’s ambition.” She pointed to “sudden and unexpected policy shifts”, such as last autumn’s decision to divert funds raised from the carbon reduction commitment to the Treasury , instead of being reinvested in businesses to encourage energy efficiency, as well as the U-turn on feed-in tariffs , when ministers decided to confine the subsidies to households instead of allowing larger solar panel installations to reap the higher rate of tariff. The organisation – one of the UK’s most influential business lobbyists – warned: ” Investor confidence remains low .” Its analysts pointed to separate research which found that the UK had fallen from 3rd to 13th in a global ranking of low-carbon investment . Uncertainty also surrounds a number of major policies, according to the CBI, including electricity market reform, funding for carbon capture and storage technology, the renewable heat initiative and consumer grants for low-carbon vehicles. Hall said: “The carbon floor price and CRC have been dressed up as helping to achieve carbon targets but they risk becoming little more than revenue raisers for the Treasury. Meanwhile, there is also genuine concern about how the green deal and electricity market reform will work.” The Guardian recently revealed research showing that the green deal would not result in savings to consumers at commercial interest rates. The research said the initiative, by which householders can gain access to loans of up to £10,000 to carry out improvements such as insulation and potentially even solar panels , would be worthless unless ministers stepped in to ensure the deal could be provided with interest rates lower than those on offer in the markets. Citing an estimate that £150bn of investment will be needed to decarbonise the energy sector alone, the CBI laid out a series of actions it would like the government to take in the next six months to bring down emissions and stimulate the green economy. They are: Publish the electricity market reform white paper by July, providing greater clarity on the transitional arrangements for renewable energy. • Use the energy-intensive industries strategy to set out plans to protect vulnerable industries from carbon leakage. • Finalise the nuclear generic design assessment and designate the national policy statements for energy as soon as is practical. • Incentivise businesses to invest in energy efficiency measures by simplifying the CRC and wider issues of policy overlap. • Make a decision on the winner of the first carbon capture and storage demonstration plant, and confirm the future funding arrangements for CCS, the renewable heat incentive and the consumer grant for low-carbon vehicles. • Enact the localism bill by the end of 2011 and include provisions to streamline the fast-track process for major infrastructure, and ensure that crucial sub-national infrastructure can be delivered. • Enact the energy bill and work closely with industry to develop the secondary legislation that will successfully deliver the green deal. Carbon emissions Climate change Green politics Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk
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Ben Bernanke says US economic recovery is slow and uneven but appears to rule out third round of fiscal stimulus Stock markets have dropped after a speech by the US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, raised fears over the global economic recovery. Shares fell broadly in London, echoing a late sell-off on Wall Street, after Bernanke appeared to rule out further quantitative easing. Speaking to bankers in Atlanta on Tuesday night, Bernanke said the US economic recovery was “frustratingly slow” and “uneven” but stopped short of indicating that the Federal Reserve would pump more cash into the economy. There had been speculation before the speech that the Fed chair might hint at a third round of fiscal stimulus measures, dubbed QE3, following recent weak economic data . US markets finished down on the news, with the Dow Jones falling 19 points by the close. The MSCI index of Asia-Pacific stocks fell 0.7% overnight, to add to the sell-off. The FTSE 100 fell in early trading too, down 38 points at 5826. According to Chris Weston of IG Index, Bernanke’s comments have left traders “scratching around” for guidance on whether the world economy is faltering. Gary Jenkins of Evolution Securities said Bernanke’s speech had “something for everyone with the exception of those who might favour QE3″. “He has to be careful what he says about further quantitative easing or it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He did say that this quarter’s economic activity has been hampered by supply chain disruptions associated with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the effects of which are likely to dissipate over the coming months. Other Fed members were also speaking yesterday with much the same message coming through: monetary policy is likely to remain accommodative for some time yet, but further QE is looking unlikely at this stage,” Jenkins said. A “frustratingly slow” recovery In the speech, Bernanke said the US recovery was clearly being held back by the troubled jobs and housing markets but there were indications that petrol prices would fall and the impact of Japan’s nuclear disaster on manufacturing was on the wane. “Overall the economic recovery appears to be continuing at a moderate pace, albeit at a rate that is both uneven across sectors and frustratingly slow from the perspective of millions of unemployed and underemployed workers,” Bernanke said. A spate of weak economic data was capped by a report last week that showed the US added only 54,000 jobs in May, the fewest since September last year. The unemployment rate in May rose to 9.1%, from 9% in April. The parlous nature of the US jobs market was underlined once more on Tuesday as the labour department reported that businesses had fewer job openings in April with employers posting 3m ads for jobs in April, down from 3.1m in March. Gavan Nolan, director of credit research at Markit, argued that there were two schools of thought on the economy at present. “The first believes that recent data weakness indicates that demand is dwindling and the economy is in need of further stimulus. The second is convinced that we are in a transitory phase that will abate once the effects of the Japanese earthquake and higher commodity prices are less acute,” Nolan said. US economy Ben Bernanke Stock markets Economics United States Alex Hawkes Dominic Rushe guardian.co.uk
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