Demonstration followed alleged police violence during protest against Tesco store in Stokes Croft area last week Fifteen people were arrested in Bristol after further protests in the Stokes Croft area resulted in violent clashes between protesters and police. The protest was against alleged police violence after clashes at a demonstration against a Tesco store in the area last week. Officers raided a house and arrested four squatters they said were “a real threat to the local community”. Demonstrators removed roof tiles and used them as missiles when clashes broke out as numbers in the Thursday night protest, on Cheltenham Road, grew to almost 400. Witnesses said officers used batons, and police horses charged at demonstrators at least three times throughout the night. Police said those arrested at the squat, known as Telepathic Heights, last week were suspected of planning to petrol bomb the new Tesco Local. But the squatters insisted they had nothing to do with a local campaign to stop the supermarket chain. Police and protesters said that Thursday night’s disturbances began after several bottles were thrown at police. Officers from Avon and Somerset Constabulary said they did not respond to the taunts, and community mediators spoke to those responsible to appeal for calm. A group of protesters, some of whom donned masks and armed themselves with rocks and bottles, splintered off and started heading towards the city centre, according to a statement released by the Avon and Somerset force. Demonstrators at the scene said police decided to block off protesters at the Stokes Croft and Jamaica Street junction, at which point demonstrators started throwing more bottles. Police said fires were lit and graffiti was daubed throughout the area. “As soon as the police stopped them, passions started running high,” Chris Chalkley, of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, which has been lobbying against the Tesco store, said. “I was hit by a [police] baton, and I saw several others being hit and bottles being thrown. Bins were being pulled across the road, and the police kept coming.” Chalkley insisted that neither local campaigners against Tesco nor squatters were involved in the violence. “People were coming from afar for a ruckus. I didn’t recognise many of them. I can’t say more than that,” he said. Police said officers from several other forces were called in to help contain the violence. They expect more arrests to be made after they have looked through CCTV footage. Assistant Chief Constable Rod Hansen, of Avon and Somerset Constabulary, said: “Throughout the past week, our neighbourhood officers have received the strong message from local residents and traders that they do not want further disruption. “I am satisfied that our tactics were appropriate and proportionate, and feel that the officers involved acted professionally and with great restraint given the threat and personal danger they faced. “To those who are responsible for committing serious crime, I can only reiterate that we have made 15 arrests already and I anticipate making many more from the video evidence we have obtained and using statements from victims and witnesses.” Rick Palmer, the services director of Bristol City council, said: “What we have seen tonight is totally unacceptable behaviour, which is clearly not supported by local people.” Crime Police Protest Rowenna Davis guardian.co.uk
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New governance structures for aid, and greater input from recipient countries, are required for a very different world The decline of western power does not mean the decline of the west. The former is not only a certainty; it is already a reality. Power is relative, so the rise of power elsewhere automatically diminishes the power of others. But it is how the west reacts to these new realities that will determine whether it suffers actual decline or responds to this geopolitical repositioning in such a way as to enhance its own interests and those of others. The west has two options. Either it leads the process, whereby power and responsibility in global governance become more democratic, encouraging all countries to be brought in on a more equal footing (the G20 being a step in this direction). Or it resists (for example on the issue of World Bank and IMF governance), thus squandering long-term influence over the kind of changes that are anyway taking place. One aspect of the west’s dominance has been its control of the aid agenda. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was set up in 1961 as a club of rich, mostly western, nations. It soon established a development assistance committee (DAC) to manage aid flows to poor countries, often ex-colonies. Aid is not just charity – it has been and remains an integral part of foreign policy, shoring up political support and economic opportunities in other parts of the world. That is why so far it has sat fairly comfortably in an OECD committee. The OECD-DAC has been integral in discussions about how aid can be best used to promote development, not just the interests of donors. Arguably the most important role it has played in the last 10 years or so has been to transform pressure from civil society and recipient countries for “better aid” based on recipient-country control (or “ownership”) into a fairly successful international bureaucratic agenda. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (pdf) is not just a good set of principles, it is also a technocratic process of evaluation and monitoring that is leading to some important (if slow) changes. The historic imbalances of power remain the same, and will do so as long as countries need aid as a fundamental part of their economies, rather than as an optional and useful extra source of funds. But the declaration and accompanying process have lent power to the countries insisting that donors support national priorities and systems, and to donors and civil society groups pressuring recipient countries to focus more on the poorest. This should mean that aid has been used more effectively for poverty reduction. So the OECD team responsible for this area of work should be proud of what they have achieved to date. How much harder it will be, then, to relinquish control of this process. But that is the next crucial step if the Paris agenda, and the DAC itself, is to remain useful and legitimate. Why? There are three reasons. First, non-OECD countries, such as China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela, are increasing in importance every year as financial supporters of poorer or smaller countries. DAC aid is about $125bn a year compared with non-DAC aid estimated at between $30bn and $60bn. It is nonsensical for a set of principles to cover part of the aid a country receives but not the rest. The OECD’s instinct is to try to integrate these countries into the Paris process. But however welcoming the OECD tries to be, these new powers don’t want to be part of an old world club – and they don’t need to. They will increasingly be setting their own rules. Second, the OECD’s way of giving aid is outdated. That is partly why the Paris process got started in the first place. It is founded on a post-colonial client relationship that is being broken apart not only by the large new donors, but by the proliferation of smaller-scale south-south co-operation that is demonstrating new ways for countries to support one another’s development. Not only are the terms “donor” and “recipient” anachronistic, but even the word “aid” itself needs to be shelved – all countries benefit from development co-operation, so a word implying charity is misleading. And third, the new era of aid effectiveness will be ever more recipient-led. The Paris process has supported attempts begun by civil society in the 1980s to insist that power over aid strategy and spending be increasingly in the hands of recipient countries. The OECD has overseen the growth of a broad-based working party on aid effectiveness that brings countries together in a more or less balanced way to discuss the policy and process. As we approach the High Level Forum on aid effectiveness in South Korea in November, all the talk is of leadership from recipient countries. Indeed, probably the most important statistic about the Paris agenda to date is that while only 34 recipient countries took part in the initial monitoring survey in 2005, that number rose to 55 for the second survey in 2007, and in the current survey, to be published later this year, 91 countries are expected to return data. But if the OECD can find me one of those 91 recipient country government that believes the DAC should remain the central cog in this process, I would be surprised. New governance structures are required for a very different world. The OECD needs to make a bold statement clearly relinquishing overall co-ordination responsibilities of the aid effectiveness agenda and offering to play a different, although still significant, role in a new way of managing aid effectiveness at a global level. By acting against its instincts in this way, it would ironically secure its influence and vital contribution to the gradual evolution of the role of publicly sourced development finance. Aid Jonathan Glennie guardian.co.uk
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US president Barack Obama to visit Tuscaloosa in Alabama after storms kill 300 across seven southern states President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, are to visit Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to meet victims of the storms that killed 300 people and devastated entire neighbourhoods in seven southern US states. As emergency crews searched rubble for survivors, Obama described the loss of life as “heartbreaking” and called the damage to homes and businesses “nothing short of catastrophic”. He promised strong federal support for rebuilding. Robert Bentley, the governor of Alabama, said his state had confirmed 210 deaths. There were also 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 15 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured, 600 in Tuscaloosa alone. Some of the worst damage was in Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 and home to the university of Alabama. The storms destroyed the city’s emergency management centre, so the Bryant-Denny stadium was turned into a makeshift headquarters. School officials said two students were killed. Over several days, the powerful tornadoes – of which there were more than 160 reported in total – combined with storms to cut a swath of destruction heading west to east. “I think this is going to rank up as one of the worst tornado outbreaks in US history,” said Craig Fugate, director of the federal emergency management agency. There were still unconfirmed reports late on Thursday of “entire towns flattened” in northern parts of the state, Fugate said. “We’re still trying to get people through rescues and locate the missing.” It was the worst US natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which killed up to 1,800 people. The US national weather service said the storms were the most ferocious some of their forecasters had ever seen, and the deadliest since tornadoes in 1974 killed 315 people in the region. Meteorologists said some of the tornadoes that hit this week had winds of around 100mph and stayed on the ground for a few miles. “There’s a pretty good chance some of these were a mile wide, on the ground for tens of miles and had wind speeds over 200mph,” said research meteorologist Harold Brooks at the storm prediction centre . While rescue officials searched for survivors, some who sheltered in bathtubs, closets and basements told of miraculous escapes. “I made it. I got in a closet, put a pillow over my face and held on for dear life because it started sucking me up,” said Angela Smith of Tuscaloosa. In Phil Campbell, a small town of 1,000 in north-west Alabama where 26 people died, a shop, petrol stations and clinic were destroyed by a tornado that the mayor, Jerry Mays, estimated was half a mile wide and travelled some 20 miles. “We’ve lost everything. Let’s just say it like it is,” Mays said. “I’m afraid we might have some suicides because of this.” As many as a million homes and businesses were without power, and Bentley said 2,000 National Guard troops had been called up to help. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia also issued emergency declarations for parts of their states. “We can’t control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it,” Obama said. “And I want every American who has been affected by this disaster to know that the federal government will do everything we can to help you recover and we will stand with you as you rebuild.” Bentley said forecasters did a good job alerting people, but there was only so much they can do to help people prepare. Carbin noted that the warning gave residents enough time to hunker down, but not enough for them to safely leave the area. “You’ve got half an hour to evacuate the north side of Tuscaloosa. How do you do that and when do you do that? Knowing there’s a tornado on the ground right now and the conditions in advance of it, you may inadvertently put people in harm’s way,” he said. The storm system spread destruction from Texas to New York, where dozens of roads were flooded or washed out. Insurance experts were wary of estimating damage costs but believed they would run into the billions of dollars, with the worst impact concentrated in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Natural disasters and extreme weather United States Barack Obama Mark Tran guardian.co.uk
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Ghostly forms float around Vera Lutter’s pinhole-camera shots, mixing modern imagery with antique photographic technology Will-o’-the-wisps seem to dart around New York-based artist Vera Lutter’s uncanny photographs of cityscapes and ancient sites. In her latest black and white series, Egypt , contours of pyramids jut from the paper like wall reliefs. You could almost touch the empty deserts they rise from, dotted with pebbles or rumpled with sand dunes. And the photos fade to white at the edges, so the tombs and sphinxes resemble sculptures stranded on plinths. One of the reasons Lutter’s images feel tangible and yet weird is that they’re realised in negative, so that light forms auras where shadows should be cast and the sky is always black. But it’s also the way she makes them, using one of photography’s simplest and oldest devices – the pinhole camera . This is time-consuming business, requiring long exposures so that the film not only records the outlines of buildings but the ghost-like forms that move in and out of the frame as the clock ticks on. They can be crafted from anything: Lutter has used an old trunk for some of her work, but she’s regularly worked with room-sized boxes to create huge, one-off images. In addition to Egypt, Lutter has photographed the Renaissance architecture of Venice and London’s St Paul’s . But many of her best-known works use antique techniques to capture fast-changing urban landscapes, including glass-fronted buildings and buzzing highways. For Frankfurt Airport VII: April 24, 2001 , she placed a huge pinhole camera next to an aircraft stand and let the image take shape. The planes that parked there appear as overlain traces of each other, so that they seem to judder on the page. While Lutter’s photographs appear to pay homage to mankind’s achievements in stone and metal, they’re really monuments to time, where the only certainty is that all things pass. Why we like her: Rheinbraun, III: August 24-25, 2006 . At almost 2.5m x 6m, this four-panel photo of a vast mine complex in negative is chilling, turning its luminous round HQ – with octopus arms of walkways and massive drills – into an industrial demon under a limitless black sky. Jazz-tech camera: For one of her first experiments with pinhole cameras, Lutter turned her bedroom into a camera obscura, so that the camera effectively photographed itself. Where can I see her? Vera Lutter’s Egypt is at the Davies Street branch of Gagosian Gallery , London W1, until 21 May. Photography New York United States Skye Sherwin guardian.co.uk
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The French pile it high, the Russians cook it in cauldrons and the Germans have a special soup. Only cake is a certainty over here As Jay Rayner has pointed out , speculation over the menu to be served at today’s wedding has entered the realm of the rabid. The Independent reports that Swiss chef Anton Mosimann will be cooking dinner, though reliable sources deny this. The Mail assures us they’ll drink English wine , and three cheers for that. Meanwhile, a Canadian TV station tracked down the Queen’s former chef (one of 20 who follow her “wherever she goes”, like a group of betoqued stalkers) and breathlessly broke the story that “Her Majesty’s royal palate” does not care for garlic or onions. Charles and Camilla’s 2005 wedding dinner was a relatively low-key buffet , and in a time of cuts and penury the Windsors may feel it prudent not to scoff too much foie gras and caviar. Buck House were as cagey with me as they have been with other hacks on the subject of the food, but whatever gets served will be subject to the same two challenges as any wedding: the logistics of mass catering and the influence of tradition. Tradition is always double-edged: nobody wants to feel bound by it, but flouting it can seem wilful or perverse. Mark Niemierko , one of the country’s leading wedding planners, told me: “Some people start off with the idea of serving veal or sashimi, but then they realise Aunty So-and-So is coming and there’s no way she’d eat raw fish.” Previous royal weddings have had their menus written in French, which would look pretty naff now, and it’s also customary to name specific dishes after the guests. Diana’s “suprême de volaille Princesse de Galles” was a chicken breast stuffed with lamb mousse. Coming as it did after quenelles of brill in lobster sauce, it was a meal that would have done little for the bride’s burgeoning bulimia. A wedding is a public act to mark a private action. As such, it’s steeped in ritual and edible custom. In Germany, a fine consommé , the Hochzeitssuppe, is traditional; in Japan it’s hamaguri clams, in Iraq marzipan sweets, in China gingko nuts. The French stack profiteroles into the marital phallus of a croquembouche . A Gamo bride in southern Ethiopia will have her head covered in grass and a butter made from intestines. Through some folkloric memesis these foods become associated with prosperity, fertility or just good luck. In Britain, of course, a cake of some sort will always feature. The British wedding cake may be the descendant of a Roman custom which saw the groom break a barley loaf over his bride’s head, an act that sealed the marriage. At medieval weddings people made a stack of buns, and the couple stood on tiptoe and tried to kiss over the pile without knocking it down or falling over. The fashion for elaborately tiered cakes didn’t emerge until the mid-1800s. Queen Victoria’s 1840 wedding cake, slices of which survive , was distributed among the nobility of Europe. When Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married George VI in 1923, the cake stood 9ft high and weighed 360kg. One of the few culinary details to emerge about the impending nuptials of “Kate ‘n’ Wills” is the information that the groom, like Wayne Rooney, will have his own cake . In Canada it was traditional to hide a nutmeg inside the wedding cake; the person who found was believed to be the next to marry. Feasting is the major constant of weddings – the fasting ceremony is a rare thing. By far the most useful “miracle” in the Bible is the transmutation of water into wine during the marriage at Cana , an episode that shows the Hellenism that then survived in parts of the Middle East. The wedding feast of Camacho in Don Quixote captures the hungry medieval peasant’s almost pornographic desire for satiety. In that banquet, a whole steer was stuffed with two dozen suckling pigs and roasted on an elm-tree spit, served with chickens and geese and eggs and 60 wineskins holding eight gallons of booze apiece. Emma’s wedding in Madame Bovary displays comparable excess for different reasons. When the hero marries Minnehaha in Longfellow’s epic The Song of Hiawatha , the guests eat sturgeon, pike, pemmican, buffalo marrow, “haunch of deer and hump of bison” – though the bride and groom “Tasted not the food before them / Only waited on the others / Only served their guests in silence.” People are not afraid to eat well and widely at modern weddings too. Today’s caterers say that Wags notoriously ask for Christmas dinner with all the trimmings at their weddings – Christmas being the one meal a year in which they let themselves eat properly. Victoria Adams reportedly wanted to serve roast turkey for her and David Beckham’s guests in 1999, but was finally persuaded that it would be difficult to prevent the meat from drying out. The caterer convinced the couple to serve guinea fowl, though neither had heard of it before. Only in south Asia does the feast aspect of weddings seem to be threatened: India has considered introducing a law to restrict wasted wedding food, while in 2004 Pakistan banned “un-Islamic” displays of wealth at the walima or wedding party. This is hardly a commonplace attitude, though: one of the best weddings I ever attended was in El Jadida, Morocco, which was strictly Muslim and where it was taken for granted that everyone should eat their fill and then some. Mark Niemierko says that, in 2009, his flower budget fell while his food budget rose. “I had a client who worked at Goldman Sachs in New York, and he was concerned not to look too ostentatious during the financial crisis. So we focused on getting the food perfect, because everyone has got to eat.” That banker was a canny fellow: a good ” breakfast ” is essential for a successful wedding, whether it be a Niemierko-style £600-per-person blowout at the Connaught, a hog roast in the garden or a Margot Henderson event with food from St John. Without good and generous food a wedding will tend to sag, and you can only reach a merry din once the guests are met and the feast is set. Food & drink Royal wedding Kate Middleton Prince William Monarchy Weddings Oliver Thring guardian.co.uk
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Headteachers are likely to vote at their annual conference over whether to hold their first national strike over pension changes Headteachers are likely to vote this weekend over whether to hold their first national strike in history — a move which could close thousands of schools this summer. Heads are expected to call on the 28,000 members of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) to vote for a ballot over whether to strike over changes to their pensions at the association’s annual conference in Brighton on Sunday. A national strike would be the first in the association’s 100-year-plus history and affect millions of children. It comes after two of the main teaching unions voted to ballot their members for a national strike over pensions earlier this month. Pension reforms, outlined in a government-commissioned report last month by former Labour minister Lord Hutton, call for final-salary schemes to be scrapped and replaced by career averages. Under the plans, teachers would pay higher contributions to their pensions every month and the retirement age would rise to 66 by 2020. At the moment, many headteachers retire at 60. The government has argued that the cost of paying teachers’ pensions is forecast to rise from about £5bn in 2005 to almost £10bn by 2015, as more staff retire and life expectancy increases. Russell Hobby, general secretary of NAHT, said he would encourage heads to vote for a ballot over whether to strike. “The pension reforms would mean the average headteacher would lose £100,000 to £200,000 in retirement and would pay 50% more in contributions, which could cost them £1,000 more each month. This amounts to a pay cut at a time of rising targets in education. Pensions are one of the attractive rewards of the job and we have to stand up for this.” Teaching Schools Trade unions Public sector pay Pensions Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk
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Discussions in hacker forums point to huge numbers of credit card details stolen from Sony’s PlayStation Network, while some owners see fraud – but is it just coincidence? Hackers in underground online forums are claiming to have access to credit card details stolen from Sony’s PlayStation Network in mid-April, though security researchers say it is not possible to verify the claims. The online discussions centre around a haul of 2.2m Sony customer credit card numbers that are claimed to have been copied during the attack, which led Sony to shut down the network for more than a week after it happened between 17 and 19 April. At the same time some of the 77 million PSN users have begun to report discovering new fraudulent charges on their credit cards, though the timing could be coincidence and not linked directly to the breach. Any sufficiently large number of credit card owners is certain to include some who have recently been defrauded by other methods. The claims of fraud include the equivalent of $1,500 spent in a German grocery store on an American credit card, and dozens of people reporting charges on items such as German airline tickets and Japanese stores. Kevin Stevens, a security analyst with Trend Micro, said in a tweet that “the hackers that hacked PSN are selling off the DB [database]. They reportedly have 2.2m credit cards with CVVs” – the latter being the three-figure number required for “card not present” transactions. But Stevens added that he couldn’t be sure the claim was true. The hackers were also claiming to have offered to sell the database back to Sony, but that the company declined it. Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said that as far as he knew there was no truth in that claim. Speculation is growing that the hackers who carried out the attack could be European, based on the names being used in forums, though no further details have emerged so far. One reader of Venturebeat said he had been contacted by Sony and told that his card might have been compromised, and discovered two new charges totalling $400 he hadn’t made. Sony insisted in a blog post that the credit card data it stored was encrypted: “While all credit card information stored in our systems is encrypted and there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. “If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained. Keep in mind, however, that your credit card security code (sometimes called a CVC or CSC number) has not been obtained because we never requested it from anyone who has joined the PlayStation Network or Qriocity, and is therefore not stored anywhere in our system.” PlayStation Sony Hacking Games PS3 Data and computer security Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
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New data suggests world’s biggest population and energy consumer could plateau soon after 2030 There have never been more people on earth and we have never consumed more energy, but could the age of peak man be upon us? For China at least, the answer is yes and perhaps sooner than expected. Two influential reports this week suggest the world’s most populous nation and largest energy consumer is likely to trim its size and appetite soon after 2030. The last national census results, released Thursday , showed China’s population growth has slowed by half in the past decade. Since 2000, about 70 million extra people – the equivalent of a Britain and two Irelands – were added to a nation that is now home to 1.34bn people. This is slightly lower than previous forecasts by Chinese demographers, who expected numbers to peak below 1.5bn by 2035. Partly as a result of such trends, energy demand could taper off earlier than previously predicted. On Wednesday, the influential Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory issued detailed new projections indicating China’s power consumption was likely to flatten out 20 years from now because there will be less need for steel and cement. “…saturation in ownership of appliances, construction of residential and commercial floor area, roadways, railways, fertilizer use, and urbanization will peak around 2030 with slowing population growth.” That would be good news for carbon emissions (another area where China is number one ), which could plateau or even start to decline three years earlier, according to the same set of projections. The government says its family planning policies are largely responsible for the slowdown. In 1970, the average Chinese women gave birth to four children in her lifetime. Today, the figure is less than two. At a news conference to announce the results, Ma Jianting, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said the one-child policy had “eased the pressure on resources and the environment and laid a relatively good foundation for steady and rapid economic and social development.” So, can China and the world breathe more easily? Not yet. The economy will soon have to cope with a shrinking labour force, as well as a growing number of elderly dependents. Society will have to deal with a gender imbalance that will leave tens of millions of men unable to find wives. Such concerns have prompted calls for a relaxation of the family planning policy. Even if it remains as it is now, the environment will also continue to come under immense pressure from a population that is increasingly mobile (one in five people are migrants), affluent and resource hungry. Last year, 50,000 cars were sold every day in China – more than any country at any time in history. Ownership rates are still far lower than in the US and Europe so there is a lot of room to grow. Even if China’s expansion lasts only two decades instead of three or four, that is plenty to time to squeeze scarce global resources. And, of course, even after China’s population and energy demand plateaus, other developing nations will continue to grow. By the time the next Chinese census results are released in 2021, it will probably have been overtaken by India as the world’s most populous nation. On current trends, demographers expect the number of people on earth to rise from roughly 7bn today to 9bn by 2050. My guess is that declining fertility rates and diminishing energy supplies will bring that peak forward and down as resources grow scarcer, the climate changes and food and oil prices rise. But whether 2010, 2030 or 2050, our generation looks set to witness an extraordinary moment in human history – peak human. China Population Energy Climate change Development Jonathan Watts guardian.co.uk
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Khalifa al-Zwawi asks international community for weapons to help push Libyan leader’s forces out of the city The leader of the rebellion in Misrata has made an urgent plea to the international community for weapons that would allow his fighters not just to defend the besieged city, but to topple the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Khalifa al-Zwawi, an appeal court judge who heads Misrata’s transitional council, said that after weeks of fierce fighting, rebel forces would eject the last of Gaddafi’s forces from the city “very soon”. “Once we have done that our target is to eliminate the Gaddafi regime,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “We want to go to Tripoli and set it free, and Libya free. We want to move from defence to attack.” Until now, the rebels in Misrata have relied solely on small arms and weapons captured from loyalist troops, or sent by sea from Benghazi, the rebel capital in the east. But Zwawi said help was now required if his forces were to go on the offensive. “The most important thing for us now is arms. We need weapons that are suitable to take on Gaddafi. As soon as our freedom fighters reach people in other cities they will join our revolt,” he said. Misrata, which is Libya’s third largest city and just 130 miles (210km) east of Tripoli, has been under siege since 20 February, when its people staged an uprising. Two months of street-by-street fighting has left much of the city centre in ruins. While the rebels – ordinary citizens with no previous military experience – appear have won the battle to defend the city, it has come at a high cost. Zwawi, 53, said the number of dead in Misrata – excluding Gaddafi’s forces – exceeded 1,000. More than 4,000 people have injured, with hundreds more kidnapped by loyalist troops and taken to other cities. By keeping control of the port, the rebels have been able to receive supplies by sea, allowing the city to keep functioning. But there is still an urgent need for humanitarian supplies, including medicine and food, Zwawi said. Cash is also required. Since the start of the uprising, most business has ground to a halt, and few people have continued working as normal. Civil servants’ salaries have not been paid, although small cash disbursements have been made to poorer families. “We recently received some funding from Benghazi but it is not enough to keep us going for long,” he said. Zwawi also appealed for technical support to maintain the city’s emergency electricity, and to re-establish the mobile network. Gaddafi’s forces destroyed the city’s power station, cut the main water supply and disabled the telecommunications networks in the early days of the conflict. Unlike the national transitional council in Benghazi , which has been able to operate partly in the open since February, when the city was liberated, Misrata’s leadership council has had to open largely in secret due to the fighting. Until this week, few people here even knew who was on the council, though the evidence of its organisation was clear to see – from the food distribution points to the carefully co-ordinated guerrilla war. Zwawi said the council had initially been established as a judicial committee in the days after the revolution, but now also included includes doctors, engineers, businessmen and military leaders. It has 20 members and meets at secret locations every other day. Zwawi said that during the week after the uprising Gaddafi had sent local intermediaries to negotiate with them. The offered concessions to the rebels, but only if Gaddafi remained in power. “That was immediately rejected. Our position is that he and his companions must leave power for good. They know that they are not appreciated by anyone in Libya. Since then there has been no contact between us and the regime.” Some residents of Misrata are deeply fearful of Gaddafi’s next move, and believe that he will do whatever it takes to crush the city. But Zwawi said he was not concerned. “If we were thinking about Gaddafi’s arsenal, we would never have started this revolution. We went into it with naked chests, with no weapons. We have two choices: we die or we get our freedom.” He also dismissed the claim from Tripoli that local tribes around Misrata could be sent in to fight instead of the army. “This is simply one of Gaddafi’s plots to save time. He is not dealing with tribes, but individuals within tribes. His popular base does not exist.” Zwawi acknowledged that it could be difficult to for outside countries to supply weapons, given that UN security council resolution 1973 only authorised the use of force to defend civilians, not to remove Gaddafi. “We know that Russia and China will block a stronger resolution that could help us. But we are still grateful to the international community. Without them we would be ash.” Libya Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Muammar Gaddafi Xan Rice guardian.co.uk
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It’s thanks to Donald Trump that the myth of Obama as a sinister alien gathered strength – and seems doomed to continue A couple of years ago I was noting with astonishment on this page that 28% of American Republicans believed Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. A further 30% of Republicans were “not sure”, despite the fact that Obama’s birth in Honolulu on 4 August 1961 had been officially registered with the authorities at the time and his birth certificate published in two Hawaiian newspapers. What, I wondered, could persuade these millions of Americans to accept a fact that had been repeatedly investigated and verified? The answer seems to be nothing. No opinion poll has been published on the question since Obama produced his birth certificate for inspection this week; but a poll carried out by CBS News and the New York Times only a week ago showed that the percentage of Republicans believing that he was born in another country had risen to a staggering 45% (and that a quarter of all Americans, including Democrats, were of the same view). This willful denial of a seemingly incontrovertible truth is bewildering. But the myth of the president as a sinister alien and secret subversive has gathered new strength since its adoption by Donald Trump, the real-estate tycoon who is wondering whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination. Obama may have hoped that Trump would be chastened by the sight of his birth certificate, but, if so, he was to be disappointed. “Today, I’m very proud of myself because I accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish,” Trump said, claiming responsibility for its publication. And he promised he would still go on digging into the president’s past, despite the media’s efforts to “protect” him. His next target would be Obama’s college records. Obama had reputedly been “a terrible student” at Occidental College in Los Angeles, said Trump, but he had nevertheless gone on to both Columbia and Harvard universities. “How do you get into Harvard if you’re not a good student?” he asked. Like other leading “birthers”, as those questioning Obama’s origins are called, Trump also refused to accept the birth certificate at face value. He would examine it for authenticity, he said; as did Joseph Farah, the editor of an Obama-obsessed website, who declared that “it raises far more questions than it answers”. Another prominent Obama critic, Orly Taitz, questioned the certificate’s authenticity because it gave Obama’s father’s race as “African”. “It sounds like it would be written today, in the age of political correctness, and not in 1961, when they wrote white or Asian or ‘Negro’,” Taitz said. Be that as it may, the controversy seems doomed to continue. As the Washington Post put it yesterday: “Conspiracy theories have the self-sustaining gift of ramification: they sprout new tendrils, like a mad vine that has invaded from another continent. For the committed conspiracy theorist, there is always another angle to explore, another anomaly to scrutinize.” But in America, unfortunately, the conspiracy theorists are not just a few crazy people but millions of supposedly normal ones. The level of political debate in Britain is often dismal, as when an historic reform of the voting system is discussed mainly in terms of what it would cost and which political party it would hurt the most. But the world’s greatest democracy seems to take the cake. Tyrannical instincts Pride in our western civilisation, with its democratic and liberal values, is to be encouraged, but we shouldn’t overestimate its appeal to others. I remember in the late 1970s sitting with the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in her garden in Delhi as she talked nostalgically about her old friends in the British Labour party and the bookshops on Charing Cross Road and thinking how odd it was that this same woman had imposed a state of emergency on her country and was ruling it by decree. Then there is Saif Gaddafi, described recently by his professor at the London School of Economics as “someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration”, now helping his father in the bloody repression of his people so as to preserve the family dictatorship. Then there is Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. He is an ophthalmologist, looks like an ophthalmologist, and trained at the Western Eye Hospital in London. But his gentle appearance and his experience of the British way of life haven’t stopped him becoming a tyrannical monster. It’s only the royal protocol we need to change The Syrian ambassador to London, Sami Khiyami, speaks very soothingly on television, knows to call Jeremy Paxman “Jeremy” at every opportunity, and comes across as a man of wisdom and moderation. But he is an apologist for the vicious crackdown in Syria, and I am very glad that he won’t, after all, be allowed to attend today’s royal wedding. The invitation extended to him, but bizarrely denied to two former Labour prime ministers, has been explained by reference to rules of protocol that now clearly need to be changed. What sense does it make that only ex-prime ministers who are Knights of the Garter should be asked? But the wedding should not be criticised, as it has been by some, for presenting the world with an old-fashioned image of Britain. A country that rejects its history in order to appear cool and modern simply looks pathetic. Consider the reverence the Americans have for theirs? Obama administration United States US politics Barack Obama Donald Trump Indira Gandhi Bashar Al-Assad Syria Libya Alexander Chancellor guardian.co.uk
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