Thames Valley Police said cameras that were switched off in August 2010 for cost-cutting reasons will be turned back on Speed cameras in Oxfordshire, which were switched off for cost-cutting reasons, have been turned back on again following publication of higher casualty figures. The withdrawal of central government funding for roadside cameras is creating an “on or off” dilemma at the end of every financial year for councils faced with competing pressures from motorists and safety campaigners. Thames Valley Police said 72 fixed camera sites and 89 mobile sites in Oxfordshire will start operating again from today. They were switched off on August 1 2010 after Oxfordshire County Council cut the authority’s road safety grant. Superintendent Rob Povey, head of roads policing for Thames Valley, said: “This is important because we know that speed kills and speed is dangerous. We have shown in Oxfordshire that speed has increased through monitoring limits and we have noticed an increase in fatalities and the number of people seriously injured in 2010.” Data released by Thames Valley Police shows in the six months after they were switched off, 83 people were injured in 62 accidents at the site of fixed cameras. The figure for the same period of the previous the year (August 2009 to January 2010) was 68 injuries in 60 accidents. Across Oxford, 18 people were killed in road traffic accidents in the period, compared with 12 people the year before. The number of people seriously injured rose by 19 to 179. Supt Povey said the money for switching back on the cameras came from cutting back office costs and from funding diverted from speed awareness courses. One local resident unlikely to be rejoicing is the BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson who filmed a TV advert in which he demolished speed cameras with a rocket launcher mounted on a Porsche. While Oxfordshire was turning its back on again, cameras were being turned off in Bristol and Portsmouth due to the financial squeeze on resources. The Department of Transport has washed its hands of such apparent contradictions saying it was up to each council to decide its spending prioirites. The road safety minister Mike Penning said: “The coalition government is committed to further improving road safety but it is right that local councils decide how best to tackle specific problems in their areas. We ended central government funding for new fixed speed cameras because we don’t believe we should dictate to councils that they use them as the default solution in reducing accidents.” According to the AA, speed camera offfences have almost halved since their peak in 2005 when around two million tickets were issued. Part of the decline is due to a change in the penalty system which allows those caught for the first time driving at a marginally higher speed than the limit can attend a speed awareness course. The cash from those courses is now being directed back into funding speed cameras, providing a new revenue stream to sustain the devices. Publicly announcing that cameras are being turned off, the AA spokesman said, undermined their deterrence value. “You want to maintain the threat,” the AA spokesman said. “You can do that by ensuring that enough people are prosecuted and complain to their local paper about it.” Julie Townsend, director of the road safety campaign Brake, said: “Switching speed cameras in Oxfordshire back on is great news for communities across the county, who have suffered from increased vehicle speeds and more dangerous roads in the past few months. “At the same time, it is outrageous that speed cameras are still being switched off in some parts of the country. Turning off cameras removes a vital deterrent against speeding – a dangerous and illegal act that all too often leads to tragedy – and leaves communities exposed to the perils of fast traffic.” Transport Owen Bowcott guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Some 32,788 people died on American roads in 2010, the smallest number since Harry Truman was in the White House—and there were a lot fewer people on the roads back then. Last year saw the fewest traffic accident deaths since 1949, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…
Continue reading …The father of renowned family piano group The 5 Browns has been sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in jail for sexually abusing his three daughters when they were children. Keith Brown pleaded guilty to three counts of abuse but the judge, who described brown as Brown a pedophile…
Continue reading …“You’ve come a long way, baby,” said the old Virginia Slims ads. But now American woman are making another advance—fewer of them are dying of lung cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute’s latest report on cancer in America. The steady decline from a 2002 peak in female lung…
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Claims that a couple breastfed their baby to death play to prejudices in a land where ‘breasts are for your husband, not your baby’ Now and again a story comes along that utterly confirms all our prejudices. This week it was France’s turn to wallow in the warm glow of I-told-you-so when vegan parents were accused of breastfeeding their child to death . All that was missing for the perfect flush of French prejudices was for the baby to have worn a hijab. Veganism is so way out in a country wedded to steak frites and four portions a day (of baguette) that the bizarre details of the case – such as the clay poultices the sickly child was treated with – went clean over people’s heads. Everyone, however, knows the dangers of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding destroys lives. It starts by robbing women of their most powerful weapons of seduction, then their style and then their feminine mystery. Before you know it your baby is sleeping in your bed, and you are carrying her around like an African villager and avoiding so many proper French foods that you may as well be doing Ramadan. Lovemaking and une vraie vie de couple becomes impossible, sending husbands running into the arms of their mistresses or gay colleagues who they can be sure will never turn into brooding sucklers. Breastfeeding – particularly after two or three months – is regarded in France as something akin to drinking your own urine. Strange foreigners may do it, but that is no reason a nation brought up to idolise Liberté in the form of Marianne’s perfect breasts should. As a gynaecologist reminded a friend of mine the day she confirmed her pregnancy: “Your breasts are for your husband, not your baby.” France has the lowest breastfeeding rate in the western world, a statistic that doesn’t look like it is going to change any time soon if its health system or its most-read feminist philosophers have anything to do with it. One of this year’s biggest bestsellers, The Conflict: The Woman and the Mother , warns that breastfeeding is a trojan horse rolling back the gains of the women’s movement and shackling women to “despotic, gluttonous babies who devour their mothers”. The philosopher Elisabeth Badinter argues that women must beat back their babies with bottles of formula milk and rigid feeding regimes if they are to retain their independence and their sex lives. You won’t be in the least surprised to learn that breastfeeding, like so many other grave threats to civilisation, was invented in America. You may think of La Leche League as a group of sleep-deprived hippies, but to Badinter it is the most powerful and nefarious lobby on earth, a coven of Catholic fundamentalists bent on using the World Health Organisation to turn back the clock to an unscientific patriarchal “naturalism”. French women, she claims, are being bombarded by the league’s breast-is-best propaganda designed to make them feel guilty for not overcoming their “disgust” at putting their babies to their breasts. If that is really the case, they are putting up remarkable resistance. By Badinter’s own figures, the number of French mothers still breastfeeding after six months is so negligible that it doesn’t even make the graph. Frankly, as my partner and I discovered, getting a mother out of a French maternity ward while she is still breastfeeding is something of a miracle. We were repeatedly told that we would never get our premature child home unless we gave it a bottle. Everyone agreed breast milk was best – in theory – but the hospital (one of the most advanced in the country) preferred if the mothers pumped their milk so it could be given to the babies by a gastric tube or by bottle, usually pasteurised. We gently resisted the offers of free formula (and the four baby milk posters in our room) and our daughter became known as le bébé au sein (the breastfed baby), such a freak of nature that France Télévisions wanted to make a documentary about how I carried her skin-to-skin, a standard practice for premature children for decades elsewhere. A psychologist, a diehard Freudian (as the law dictates all should be in France), later suggested that my partner breastfed because she was getting a sexual kick out of it. Most of our friends who do manage to breastfeed hit a wall at between four and nine weeks when their doctors tell them they don’t have enough milk, and they must pass to the l’étape biberon (the bottle stage). This peculiarly French phenomenon may have something to do with the fact that women are beginning to think about going back to work at that point, maternity leave being on average less than half of what it is in the UK. A paediatrician as good as confirmed this to me, claiming that he was doing women a favour by allowing them to rediscover their vie de femme . It is possible to work and breastfeed in France, although the only woman we know who dares to bring a pump to the office is a human rights lawyer who spends her days putting the fear of God into central Asian dictators and Algerian generals. Which is where fathers come in. Within days of my daughter’s birth, doctors, nurses and friends were reminding me of my primary duty as a père de famille – to couper le cordon , to cut the cord, and save my partner from turning into a mama-vache , une bovine , une tétine géante (a giant dummy), as one put it. She will get her perinea retrained to return her to peak sexual performance – a wonderful French tradition that is actually about preventing incontinence, and which the NHS would do well to copy – and my job was to make sure the baby did not get in the way of her vie de femme . In that, I am afraid, I have mostly failed as a French father. My daughter is, at 17 months, still a boob baby and we all sleep in the same bed. But that is our little secret, OK? I don’t want those documentary makers knocking on the door again, this time for one of the regular reports on weirdos who still allow a sneaky suckle at two or even three years of age! That, as one radio presenter said, is quite possibly sexual abuse. Breastfeeding France Parents and parenting Children Europe Health Fiachra Gibbons guardian.co.uk
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Inquest opens on murdered Sian O’Callaghan as police examine remains of second woman The murdered Swindon woman Sian O’Callaghan is likely to have died from head injuries, a coroner has heard as an inquest into her death was opened and adjourned. The 22-year-old personal assistant went missing from the Suju nightclub in Swindon on 19 March. Her body was found near the Uffington white horse in Oxfordshire last week. A Home Office forensic pathologist is still working to confirm a precise cause of death while Wiltshire police continue to examine the remains of a second woman which were discovered in Gloucestershire. Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher confirmed that O’Callaghan’s death was formally certified last Thursday, following the arrest of taxi driver Christopher Halliwell, who has subsequently appeared in court charged with her murder. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, sitting at Oxford coroner’s court, said examinations were continuing to determine exactly how the young woman died. “I think the actual cause of death has not yet been defined but is likely to be head injuries of some description.” O’Callaghan was formally identified by Pete Shawe, the partner of her mother, Elaine, who had known her for four years. The 10-minute hearing on Friday came after Mrs O’Callaghan described news of her daughter’s death as “the worst of the worst” she could imagine. “I always had hope but I still tried to prepare myself for the worst,” she told the Swindon Advertiser. “It was the worst of the worst that I could’ve imagined. But they’d found her. “It was a relief in a way. I would have hated to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and looking at every brunette girl, wondering if it was her.” O’Callaghan had been out with friends before she disappeared in the early hours. She was last seen alive in CCTV footage filmed close to the nightclub, only half a mile from the flat she shared with her boyfriend, Kevin Reape, 25. On Wednesday, Halliwell, 47, appeared at Bristol crown court accused of her murder. O’Callaghan’s family were not present for the brief hearing, which was held in order to expedite her funeral arrangements. However, she cannot be buried until Halliwell’s defence team have decided whether to request a second postmortem examination, as is their right. Outside court, Fulcher said O’Callaghan’s family were “bearing up” but added: “It is a horrific trauma for them. “I want them to have closure and they need to organise her funeral. That can’t happen until the defence have decided whether or not they want to have a second examination.” The hearing is expected to be resumed and adjourned once criminal proceedings have concluded. Crime guardian.co.uk
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Police spokesman in northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif says demonstrators killed at least eight UN employees The UN mission in Afghanistan has been thrown into a deep crisis after a furious mob of protesters killed and wounded a number of its staff in one of the country’s most peaceful cities. One police source in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif claimed at least eight foreign UN employees were killed after a demonstration in the thriving commercial hub turned violent. Other officials reported different figures. Provincial police spokesman Sherjan Durrani said the demonstrators poured out of mosques in the city in the early afternoon, shortly after Friday prayers where worshippers had been angered by reports that a Florida pastor had burned a copy of the Qur’an. Last year Terry Jones, a US fundamentalist Christian leader, did threaten to burn copies of the Muslim holy book. He backed down after warnings that Islamic opinion around the world could be inflamed and the lives of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq endangered. But on 21 March Wayne Sapp set light to a Qur’an with Jones standing by. Durrani said that while most protesters were peaceful, others were seeking targets to attack, including shops and the UN compound. Whatever the final death toll, the incident is seen as a disaster for the UN, coming just over a week after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, announced that Mazar-e-Sharif would be one of the first areas of the wartorn country to be transferred from Nato to Afghan government security control. If the number of UN staff killed is high, the organisation will be obliged to consider closing down or dramatically reducing all its operations in the country – something it came perilously close to doing in late 2009 when an attack on a UN guesthouse in Kabul killed five staff. The UN has already issued a “white city” order, which forces all staff in the country into lockdown in their compounds. Earlier in the day hundreds of Afghans marched on the US embassy in Kabul. In a statement the UN confirmed that some of its staff members had been killed. “The situation is still confusing and we are currently working to ascertain all the facts and take care of all our staff. The special representative of the secretary general, Staffan de Mistura, is on his way to Mazar-e-Sharif now to deal with the situation personally on the ground.” Afghanistan United Nations United States Religion Islam Christianity Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The Pentagon is about to pull its attack planes out of the international air campaign in Libya, hoping NATO partners can take up the slack. The announcement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that American combat missions will end Saturday drew incredulous reactions from…
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Moshi TV will include cartoons of popular ‘moshlings’ such as Lady Googoo, Dustbin Beaver and 49 Pence, as well as users’ animations Moshi Monsters, the UK social networking website for children, has revealed plans to move into online television with a free iPlayer-style service. The website, which started in 2008, invites children to adopt a monster, play games and communicate with each other. The online TV player, Moshi TV, will include cartoons of popular Moshi characters, or “moshlings”, such as Lady Googoo, Dustbin Beaver and 49 Pence, as well as animations uploaded by users. Due to launch later this year, Moshi TV has the advantage of tapping into an existing audience of nearly 38m registered users worldwide, mostly aged between six and 11. Michael Acton Smith, founder of parent company Mind Candy, said there was a widespread demand among children for a safe, socially powered video website entirely for them. “That’s how kids want to enjoy media. They don’t want to sit and be broadcast to – they want to interact and share and comment,” he said. “We’re flipping traditional TV on its head and letting the kids decide what’s popular by voting things up and making them more discoverable.” Moshi employs 20 moderators and a safety officer, and insists it will vet every piece of uploaded content. Children will be able to upload their own animations and short films, but not footage of themselves or other children. Moshi Monsters is profitable: while signing up to the site is free, a subscription fee enables its members to collect more moshlings, and merchandise sales alone are forecast to reach $100m (£62m) in 2011. Acton Smith said Moshi TV was being spun off as a new business, and expects to have recruited nearly 30 staff by the end of the year. Rather than charging children or running adverts, Moshi TV may charge content owners to put their output on the site. Though Moshi claims rapid growth in the US, which now accounts for 35% of its total audience, it still faces an intensely competitive market. In the UK the Disney-owned Club Penguin dominates, with an estimated 1.224m monthly users in February, according to comScore. Moshimonsters.com recorded 927,000, Stardoll 754,000 and Habbo 481,000. Acton Smith said time and thought had been invested in creating a distinctive, edgy visual style of Moshi Monsters, initially created by illustrator Vincent Bechet. “Pixar is one of the companies we’ve been inspired by, and it puts hundreds of millions of dollars into each film,” he said. “Secondly, it’s the realisation that social is key – kids love to show off and communicate just as much as adults do, and we’ve built safe tools for them to do that.” He added: “The internet is a winner-takes-all market. Facebook has won social, LinkedIn has won business and Zynga has won social gaming. But no one has gone deep in the kids’ space, even though it’s a multibillion offline industry. We want to be the top player so we’re expanding rapidly.” Social networking Children’s TV Internet LinkedIn Facebook Pixar Disney Channel Jemima Kiss guardian.co.uk
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Committees would ensure brides are modestly dressed and male and female guests do not mix under a new law There is an awful lot of flesh on display at Qasre Aros in central Kabul. Arms and shoulders are free to the elements, while necklines plunge daringly low on garish ballgowns made of every shade of synthetic material imaginable and encrusted with fake jewels. Though the skin may be the orangey plastic of the dozens of mannequins lining the walls, the dresses are worn every night by real Afghan brides. But the days when brides-to-be would flock to the shops of central Kabul’s Shar-e-Now Park may be numbered. Conservative elements of Hamid Karzai’s government are pushing for far-reaching restrictions on weddings the likes of which have not been seen since the Taliban regime. Under a new law proposed by the country’s justice ministry and soon to be considered by Karzai’s cabinet, “garments contrary to Islamic sharia” will be banned. Those dealing in “outfits that are semi-naked, naked, transparent, or tight in a way that reveals part of the woman’s body” will be fined and, if they persist, closed down. When plans to regulate Afghanistan’s booming wedding industry were announced earlier in the year, the government said it merely wanted to curb the country’s mania for lavish weddings that drag people into serious debt. But according to drafts of the law seen by the Guardian, the government is also aiming to introduce various public morality provisions in yet another sign of the casual erosion of the small freedoms women have won since 2001. And in an echo of the Taliban regime, which used to police weddings to ensure they complied with hardline rulings including a ban on music, the government also intends to set up “committees” to monitor weddings. The groups, which will include representatives of the religious affairs ministry, will be expected to patrol private ceremonies held in the garish, multistorey wedding halls on the edge of Kabul that light up the night sky with their elaborate neon facades. Among their duties will be ensuring male and female guests do not mix in the same rooms – already a standard practice in most Afghan weddings – and that the bride is modestly attired. Muhiuddin Alizada, the owner of Qasre Aros, looked bewildered when he was shown a copy of the draft law for the first time this week. “This is pointless because the mullahs will not be happy unless the women are wearing burqas,” he said. “It is all because of pressure from the Taliban.” Human rights activists are similarly aghast. “A number of experts who have looked at the draft law are of the view that it interferes with private family life and could well be inconsistent with sharia principles and the constitution,” said Georgette Gagnon, the UN director of human rights in Afghanistan. Other shopkeepers were more understanding, even though none of them had a single item of stock that was “sharia compliant”. “We are Muslims and women should dress modestly,” said Muhammad Shah, a young entrepreneur whose shop is packed full of brightly coloured dresses that look all the more lurid under the pink fluorescent bulbs of the shop. But moments later he concluded that there was no way such a law could be enforced. “Even during the Taliban regimes people were still wearing these types of dresses,” said Shah. “Gambling is haram but the government can’t even stop that.” Sadia, a 26-year-old who got married on Thursday, was outraged by the idea that the government might try to stop her wearing the white, bare-shouldered glittery creation she chose for her wedding. “When I’m wearing this dress I feel very beautiful. Why shouldn’t I wear it?” she told the Guardian during a four-hour session in a beauty parlour on the morning of her wedding. “If I don’t wear it people will think I have a very bad husband who says I cannot wear these things. This is a day I will remember all my life and every girl is hoping to wear these clothes.” Under the proposed law, not only would she have to be more frumpily attired, she would also have to go for something far cheaper. The government wants to impose a maximum spend on wedding dresses of just over $100. Alizada says his cheapest frock is $222, a dowdy thing that has been used more than four times. Most brides rent their dresses, paying anything between $200 and $400. If they buy they have to pay more than $1,000. The law also bans large parties in wedding halls to celebrate the many other ceremonies associated with an Afghan wedding including henna night, engagement, and a post-wedding event known as Takht Jami. Wedding guests will be limited to 300 and selections of food will be regulated by local government officials to ensure no more than $5 is spent per person. The erosion of women’s freedoms Afghanistan’s restriction on low-cut wedding dresses is the latest government initiative to alarm human rights activists. Last year the supreme court instructed judges to jail women who run away from home, while another draft regulation sought to transfer the management of women’s shelters from charities to the government. Social conservatives have also been flexing their political muscles in ways rarely noted by local or international media. Musa Khan, the governor of Ghazni province, once associated with the fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, marked international women’s day on 8 March. Unfortunately, he appeared to have missed the point of the event. According to Alex Dietrich, the head of a US military female engagement team operating in Ghazni, in a morning of speeches, only two women were invited onstage to participate. Instead ranks of burqa-clad women watched a group of men dominate proceedings with speeches on the importance of practising marital obedience. Khan told them they should not leave their homes without permission from their husbands. “At the end the men sat down for a feast, while the women waited outside in the cold for some of their leftovers,” Dietrich said. This week the deputy governor of Helmand was sacked by President Hamid Karzai after elders objected to a successful concert in the once warring provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, which was attended by 12,000 people. Their objection: some of the female singers performed without headscarves. Afghanistan Weddings Women Gender Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
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