Charities, businesses, landowners and communities may be invited to propose ideas for ‘ecological restoration zones’ The government should hold a competition to create 12 wilderness areas to enhance ecological protection in England, the first white paper on the natural environment in 20 years will propose on Tuesday. Stung by accusations that it has failed to live up to its promise to be the “greenest-ever” government , the coalition will try to redress the continuing loss of biodiversity and wildlife habitat in England by encouraging planners and organisations to put an economic value on all nature. The white paper is also expected to announce the phase-out of the extraction of peat for horticulture and to enhance the role of volunteers in conservation. The idea of a competition to develop “ecological restoration zones” was recommended last year by Prof John Lawton , then chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which was abolished by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as part of spending cuts . The commission’s review of England’s network of nature reserves, national parks and other protected areas found that they were failing in four out of five key areas, and that up to £1.1bn was needed to help rebuild nature in England. Many of the new zones are expected to be modelled on the idea used in Africa of wildlife corridors linking areas. Restored industrial areas such as old quarries could be linked to forests, moors and marshlands, or heathland areas put together to recreate stretches of protected land. Charities, businesses, landowners and communities will all be invited to propose and develop ideas. The first white paper on the natural environment in a generation attracted more than 15,000 comments from the public and interest groups – the most for any Defra policy document – suggesting public concern over loss of habitat and biodiversity is high, despite a Defra survey published in April showing nearly a third of Britons had never heard of biodiversity . People responding to the consultation said they wanted England’s woodland to be doubled in size by 2050, a halt to the loss of biodiversity and more access for horseriding and other country pursuits. It is understood that some money will be made available to establish the first new wild zones, but with public conservation already cut to the bone in a series of measures in the past three years, charities and communities are likely to be given an enhanced voluntary role. Environment groups called for a new vision of nature protection over the next 20 years and warned that a few eye-catching initiatives would not be enough. “Simply selecting a limited number of natural habitats for protection won’t be enough to safeguard the £30bn in health and welfare benefits that Britain’s natural environment contributes to the economy each year “, said Paul de Zylva, a Friends of the Earth campaigner. “Putting a price on nature is no substitute for political change that helps the natural world we all depend on to thrive – such as protecting forests from development and supporting planet-friendly farming,” he said. Martin Harper, RSPB’s conservation director, said: “The most important thing for us is that there are measurable targets, so we know where we are going and we know when we are not on the right track. Without some kind of indicators of progress the government’s rhetoric is just that, and we will not have confidence that the promises in the paper will make a practical difference for our environment.” Biodiversity Wildlife Conservation Green politics John Vidal guardian.co.uk
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A force of around 80 marines was said to be on board a naval support ship, RFA Fort Victoria, off the coast of Yemen Royal Marines are on standby off the coast of Yemen, ready to assist in the possible evacuation of British nationals. A force of around 80 marines are said to be on board a naval support ship , RFA Fort Victoria, close to the strife-torn Arab state, the BBC reported on Monday night. The Ministry of Defence confirmed that there were British military assets in the region but refused to go into detail. “As part of routine deployment, UK military assets are in the region, although we are not prepared to comment further on their exact operational tasking,” a spokesman said. Following the latest upsurge in violence, the Foreign Office has been advising British nationals to leave the country while commercial flights are still available. The foreign secretary, William Hague, warned at the weekend that it was “extremely unlikely” Britain would be able to stage an evacuation operation, telling any remaining UK nationals not to “plan for or expect” any government assistance. Nevertheless, the presence of the Royal Marines off the Yemeni coast is likely to be seen as evidence of the contingency planning in case events take a significant turn for the worse. The Fort Victoria is part of the navy’s response force task group, which has been conducting a series of exercises, mainly in the Mediterranean, over the past weeks. The helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, which has been used as a launch pad for Apache attack helicopters engaged in operations in Libya, is part of the the same group. The BBC reported that the auxiliary landing vessel RFA Cardigan Bay was also now heading for Yemen where it will replace another support vessel, RFA Argus, which has been operating in the region. Yemen Middle East Defence policy Military guardian.co.uk
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Only 51% of British workers are saving adequately for old age, according to the latest annual Scottish Widows pension report Nearly half the working population are not saving enough for retirement, and one fifth are failing to save anything at all, according to a major study on pensions. People want, on average, an annual retirement income of £24,300 to live comfortably, down from the pre-recession figure of £27,900. Although three-quarters of those questioned understand the need to take personal responsibility for their future, only 51% save adequately for their old age. This drops to around 25% when those with a final salary pension are excluded. The seventh annual Scottish Widows UK pension report, based on interviews with 5,200 adults, shows there is “widespread and ingrained inertia” across the country, with savings levels remaining broadly consistent during the past five years, regardless of the economic downturn. The Scottish Widows average savings ratio – which tracks the percentage of income being saved for retirement by UK workers not expecting to get their main retirement income from a final salary pension – remains at just over 9%. This is a 3% shortfall on the 12% the insurer believes people should be saving to achieve a comfortable retirement. Despite recent moves to abolish the default retirement age (the minimum age at which employers could force staff to retire) and raise the state pension age, the average age people would like to retire at remains the same as last year at 61 years and eight months. Only one in five said they would be happy to carry on working until the age of 70. Ian Naismith of Scottish Widows said: “Put simply, people need to save an extra £58 per month on average to prepare adequately for retirement and make up the shortfall we are seeing currently. That is roughly the cost of a cup of coffee every day. “Even though for many this is realistic, and is in under the average £97.10 per month people say they can afford, we appreciate the difficulty in setting aside extra money. It’s about breaking through that inertia. And for some the amount that needs to be saved will be higher but it’s about taking small steps, getting on to the savings ladder and, more importantly, staying on it. Much higher saving levels are needed to get towards the average £24,300 a year people aspire to. The message is that everyone should be putting aside as much as they can afford for their retirement.” Tom McPhail, pension expert with independent financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown said that according to Office for National Statistics figures, the average pension savings of people retiring between the ages of 50 to 64 last year was £91,900, enough to produce an annual income of about £3,500 to £4,000 depending on your sex and the type of annuity you buy. “To produce an income of about £24,000, you would need a pension pot of about £400,000 once the state pension has been taken into account,” he said. “People today face a very simple choice: to save more, retire later, or live on less in retirement.” Pensions Savings Consumer affairs Retirement age Jill Insley guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …MSNBC.com Accuses Walter Williams of Making Racist Statements on Fox’s ‘Stossel’
June 6, 2011 No Comment
MSNBC.com on Monday accused economist Dr. Walter Williams of making racist statements during his interview with Fox News's John Stossel last week. The charge was associated with an “Ed Show” segment in which the host disgracefully cherry-picked one of Williams' comments about welfare and slavery (video follows with transcript and commentary): ED SCHULTZ, HOST: And in Psycho Talk tonight, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite fill-in host Walter Williams. We welcome him to the zone tonight. He’s the perfect substitute for Limbaugh because last year he went on the radio and said he believes in keeping wives under control. But sexism isn’t all that he’s good at. Here’s what happened when Fox’s John Stossel put Walter on the TV this weekend. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JOHN STOSSEL: Government is like a giant drug pusher? WALTER WILLIAMS, ECONOMIST: That's absolutely right. The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, the harshest Jim Crow laws and racism could not have done, namely break up the black family. (END VIDEO CLIP) SCHULTZ: Walter Williams should know better than to compare slavery and welfare. Slavery is perhaps the biggest stain on American history. It turned human beings into property. It doesn’t get much worse than that, does it? Meanwhile, welfare programs help American families survive when they’re destitute. Welfare helps folks meet their basic needs while they lift themselves up and get back on their feet. So for Walter Williams to say welfare has hurt black families more than slavery, pretty cruel psycho talk, don’t you think? Why don't we see Williams' entire answer (video courtesy Daily Caller ): STOSSEL: Government is like a giant drug pusher? WILLIAMS: That's absolutely right. The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, the harshest Jim Crow laws and racism could not have done, namely break up the black family. That is, today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two parent families. Historically, from 1870s on up to about 1940s, and depending on the city, 75 to 90 percent of black kids lived in two parent families. Illegitimacy rate is 70 percent among blacks where that is unprecedented in our history. Now, it's not just a matter of a racial thing, in Sweden is the mother of the welfare state and illegitimacy in Sweden is 54 percent. STOSSEL: And why does a welfare state create illegitimacy? WILLIAMS: Well, because, look, if you subsidize anything, you're going to get surpluses of it, and if you tax something you're going to get less of it. If you did not get welfare, then people would decide, I'm going to go out and get a job, I'm going to live more responsibly. STOSSEL: I'm going to get married before I have children. WILLIAMS: That's absolutely right. STOSSEL: But the welfare state actually discouraged some men from marrying the woman, she would lose the check. WILLIAMS: That's right, the government has said to many young women, I am the father. And so the father, black males, have become dispensable. STOSSEL: Black illegitimacy was 19 percent in 1940, but it skyrocketed during the Great Society and now it's over 70 percent. WILLIAMS: Yes, and that's a heck of a start in life, that is, to be born — you don't know who or where your father is, that's not really great start in life. Makes a little more sense with all of the actual data, doesn't it? But the folks at MSNBC weren't done, for at the website's video page for “The Ed Show,” the following advertised the segment in question: Not only did these geniuses accuse Williams of racism, they actually misspelled racist. Sadly, this wasn't the only such accusation at MSNBC Monday, for earlier in the day, Al Sharpton filling in for Cenk Uygur on “MSNBC Live” falsely pointed the finger of racism at just-named Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum for having the nerve to say America was a great country before 1965. It's really a fabulous news organization, isn't it? Comcast, General Electric, and NBC must be so proud.
Continue reading …New York Congressman Anthony Weiner Admits Online Relationships With Various Women
June 6, 2011 No Comment
A spontaneous press conference was called for 4 p.m. at a New York City Sheraton where New York Congressman Anthony Weiner confessed to posting a lewd picture on his Twitter feed and carrying on inappropriate online relationships with half a dozen women. In a tearful admission Monday afternoon, Anthony Weiner explained that he had lied
Continue reading …You don’t have to be a political junkie to identify Sarah Palin. Anyone would recognize her. Anyone, that is, except her employer, Fox News. On Sunday, the station aired a segment about Palin being “50-50″ on getting into the 2012 campaign. Thinking it was the former Alaska governor, Fox used a picture of 30 Rock’s Tina Fey,
Continue reading …Rick Santorum Makes It Official. He’s ‘In It To Win It’ On The Republican Presidential Nomination
June 6, 2011 No CommentHe better hope supporters don’t Google his name to find his campaign website : Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum formally launched his campaign for president Monday, offering himself as a tested leader with the “courage to fight for freedom . . . to fight for America” against the power of an expanding social-welfare state. “President Obama took that faith that America gave him and wrecked our economy and centralized power in Washington, D.C., and robbed people of their freedom,” a smiling but combative Santorum told several hundred supporters jammed on the plaza of the Somerset County Courthouse. A former two-term senator who lost his seat in 2006 to Democrat Bob Casey by 18 percentage points, Santorum has been most known in his career as a leader of social-issues conservatives, but the case he built against Obama on Monday was mostly economic and spiritual, in the sense that Santorum argued an increased reliance of citizens on government threatens the national character. “I believe now that Americans are not looking for someone that they can believe in – they’re looking for a president who believes in them,” Santorum said.[..] As he has on the campaign trail in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Santorum said the “linchpin” of efforts to erode personal freedom was Obama’s health-care overhaul, which requires people to buy health insurance. “Why do you think they ignored the polls and jammed it down the throats of the American people?” Santorum said. “Power. . . . They want to hook you, they don’t want to free you. “They don’t want to give you opportunity. They don’t believe in you. They believe in themselves, the smart people, the planners, the folks in Washington who can make decisions better than you can.” Far be it for me to point out that once again, Santorum is completely missing the pulse of the American people, aka the voters that would vote for him. Overhauling Medicare is proving to be a loser idea as polling shows and to actually threaten current recipients’ benefits? Well, those are not the ideas that will propel you into the White House. But hey, l’m all in favor of Santorum out there while people are hurting and scared and demonstrating just how heartless and inhumane his particular brand of conservatism is. Maybe that’s what we need to invalidate these ideas one and for all.
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Click here to view this media In an interview released by ABC News Monday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said that he had no reason to doubt Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s warning that the U.S would start defaulting on its obligations if the debt limit was not raised by Aug. 2. “Secretary Geithner feels August 2 is his deadline,” Cantor told ABC News Jonathan Karl . “I don’t question the Secretary of the Treasury other than to say we’re trying to get in place real spending reductions — trillions of dollars of spending reductions — if the president wants us to increase the credit limit of this country by trillions of dollars.” Cantor’s message seemed to be at odds with newly elected tea party Republican congressmen who said they weren’t convinced after meeting with Geithner. “There were a lot of groans,” Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) told The Hill . “I think the urgency factor isn’t the deadline, it’s the perception of the market that you are running up to that deadline,” Rep. Jon Runyan (R-NJ) said. “Is the market going to start to slip before that fact in anticipation, because that’s more of a soft-deadline, where’s that deadline?” Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, also a tea party favorite, said Sunday that she didn’t believe Geithner’s warning. “I don’t believe Tim Geithner as he cries wolf for the fourth time now, telling us that there is a drop-dead date and crisis will ensue, and economic woes will befall us even greater than they already are if we don’t increase the debt limit,” she told Fox News’ Chris Wallace .
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New York congressman says he is sorry for his conduct but insists he did not break any law and won’t resign A painfully embarrassing week for the New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner was brought to an excruciating denouement when he admitted that he had sent sexually suggestive photographs of himself over the internet, confessed to lying to cover it up but said that he was not resigning. In a half-hour press conference during which he at several times was fighting back tears, Weiner made a total and grovelling apology. After days in which he had at first claimed the photographs were hacked out of his computer and sent without his knowledge, he said he took responsibility for his “dumb” actions. “To be clear, the picture was of me, and I sent it. I’m deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife, and our family, my constituents, my friends, my supporters and my staff,” he said. Weiner said several times that he would not stand down from the New York district that he has represented for 13 years, saying he had broken no rules or laws. But the wheels of the Democratic party machine were quickly cranking into action against him. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the minority Democratic group in the House of Representatives, called for an ethics committee investigation to investigate him – a move that will pile on the pressure on Weiner who was until recently seen as a rising star of the party. The congressman’s confession came after it became clear that his story could not hold. A few hours before he spoke, the conservative website that had first broken the story, BigGovernment.com, had come out with a new set of photographs showing Weiner in semi-clad postures that the site said had been sent to an unnamed woman last month. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the website, hijacked Weiner’s press conference, taking to the stage before the congressman appeared to berate him and the media for accepting his lie that the photographs had been hacked. Weiner said that he had had inappropriate internet communications with six women, some of which had happened after he had married Huma Abedin, a close aide to the secretary of state Hillary Clinton. But he insisted the relationships had never been physical and he had never met any of the individuals involved. The first communication to be uncovered was a photograph of a man in his underwear sent from his Twitter feed to a 21-year-old woman. He said he had sent it as a joke, then tried to cover it up by claiming his account had been hacked. “I lied because I was ashamed at what I had done, and I didn’t want to get caught.” United States New York US politics Democrats Twitter Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Administration Puts Little Effort Into Stemming The Tide Of Foreclosures From The Unemployed
June 6, 2011 No CommentHousing prices have dropped to their lowest level in almost a decade. And while the rate of homes falling into foreclosure has slowed, the reason is delays in the paperwork, not a housing recovery, says RealtyTrac. There were 219,258 foreclosure filings in April, the latest month available. The housing crash continues to affect the rest of the economy. But, as we recently heard from former White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein, the administration was too worried someone might get help who didn’t actually deserve it — this, despite widespread fraud that makes it almost impossible to assess blame. To quote Atrios, “Maybe someone should do something? ” The Obama administration’s main program to keep distressed homeowners from falling into foreclosure has been aimed at those who took out subprime loans or other risky mortgages during the heady days of the housing boom. But these days, the primary cause of foreclosures is unemployment. As a result, there is a mismatch between the homeowner program’s design and the country’s economic realities — and a new round of finger-pointing about how best to fix it. The administration’s housing effort does include programs to help unemployed homeowners, but they have been plagued by delays, dubious benefits and abysmal participation. For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months . As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants. “So far, I think the public record will show that programs to help unemployed homeowners have not been very successful,” said Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, an executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Data released last week suggests that the administration’s task is only growing more difficult as the problems created by unemployment and housing persist. New job growth in May was anemic, and unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.
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