A thought for Donald Trump: If you’re going to make a big deal out of releasing your birth certificate and demanding the president does the same , you might want to check you’ve got the right document. New York City officials say the document Trump released to NewsMax is not an…
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• Miliband shares stage with Tim Farron and Caroline Lucas • Urges voters not to treat AV poll as a referendum on Clegg Tortuous efforts to set up a cross-party platform in favour of the alternative vote have finally borne fruit with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat president, and Caroline Lucas, the Green party leader, joining forces to back reform. Miliband insisted that voters should not decide which way to vote based on particular personalities. He said, it is not about Nick Clegg, it is about changing your voting system, and not a stick with which to beat the government. In his speech, Miliband said that despite the current Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives, he still believed that AV would help progressive centre-left parties to “build bridges not barriers”. “The tragedy for progressive politics in Britain has been that division on the centre and left has handed a united right victory after victory,” he said. “For most of the last 80 years, there has been one Conservative party but several competing for progressive votes. No wonder the Tories back the current system. “They know Britain is not a fundamentally Conservative country. But with first-past-the-post, they are more likely to govern whenever progressive forces are divided.” Miliband was also joined by former Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords Lady Williams, shadow cabinet members John Denham and Tessa Jowell, as well as former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, is currently in Mexico and was asked by the yes campaign not to attend on the grounds that his current unpopularity might turn voters off . Farron described the no campaign as a bunch of harrumphing majors adding: “a yes vote will put an end to safe seats for MPs”. He said the no campaign was “ridiculous, reactionary and very well resourced. They will claim in the next five weeks that if you vote yes your hospital will be closed or your police will be cut or you will be invaded by Norway.” He added: “Every MP will have to work hard for your vote rather than being protected by a medieval voting system.” He said the MPs’ expenses scandal “came out of a culture of complacency and arrogance shored up by the fact that two thirds of MPs have safe seats for life”. He claimed “the only people that should vote no are lazy MPs who do not want to do any work, newspaper proprietors that want to make sure the establishment remains intact, and if you have difficulty counting to three,” a reference to the no campaign’s claim that the AV voting system is too complex. He added the no campaign was “just making up invented cobblers, such as permanent hung parliaments and the need for expensive voting machines”. He also called on the no campaign to come clean about its funding, claiming its campaign was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Conservative party. The yes campaign also sought to rebut claims, pushed hard by the no campaign patron and former home secretary Lord Reid that AV will lead to supporters of fringe parties having extra votes once their own chosen party drops out. Farron pointed that the BNP were supporting the no campaign, adding extremist parties would be disadvantaged by AV since “extremists either vote for extremist nutters or not. They do not tend to transfer their second preferences. I have yet to meet a lukewarm fascist.” At a largely good-natured event, Farron was forced to admit he had seen the referendum as a staging post to a more proportional voting system, but he accepted this was the only change on offer. Tessa Jowell called the vote a “once in 20 or 30 year chance”, and insisted that the referendum was the last that would be held. Jowell is especially important since she needs to raise the turnout in London where there are no local elections. There are warnings that only 20% of eligible Londoners may vote. Kennedy urged Liberal Democrats not to hold back because they were not being offered a fully proportional system on 5 May . Addressing those who “fought long and hard in the wilderness for a proportional system”, he said the lesson of history is that you cannot afford the luxury of waiting for a perfect system. “This is the proposition is on the table; this represents the force for political reform and this is the chance that has got to be seized. The NotoAV campaign director, Matthew Elliott, dismissed the yes event as “a Lib Dem convention chaired by Ed Miliband”. “The only person missing from their Westminster photo-op is the man who is forcing us to have this expensive referendum – Nick Clegg,” he said. “It would be his party – the Lib Dems – that would benefit most from a switch to AV. The yes to AV campaign is just a front for the Lib Dems and they are deceiving the public if they claim otherwise.” AV Electoral reform Ed Miliband Nick Clegg Liberal Democrats Liberal-Conservative coalition Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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British medical regulator calls for urgent checks on differences in medical qualifications ‘which could put patients at risk’ UK medical regulators have demanded minimum standards for doctors’ training across all 27 EU member states, saying the present variety of systems could endanger patients and undermine public confidence in healthcare and in the single market in jobs. The General Medical Council has called for urgent checks of all national medical qualifications to prevent migrant foreign doctors working outside their own country in health systems they may not understand. Lack of information about the nature and content of training in other countries means regulators “cannot have full confidence in each other’s medical training and education”, it says in its response to a European commission review of a 2005 directive that governs automatic recognition of the different systems. Nearly one in 10 of the 239,300 doctors on the UK register qualified in EU countries, Switzerland, Lithuania and Norway. NHS statistics show doctors who qualified outside the UK are more likely to be excluded or suspended from their jobs than those who trained in this country. The GMC’s devastating attack is the most outspoken critique yet of the European system which requires states to recognise each other’s medical qualifications, meaning that regulators cannot test their competence or language skills, as they can with doctors from other parts of the world. Even employers have limited powers to assess whether candidates are suitable for a particular job. These flaws were revealed by the Guardian’s investigation into the case of Daniel Ubani, a German doctor who accidentally killed 70-year-old David Gray in 2008 during his first shift as a locum GP on the out-of-hours service in Cambridgeshire. Ubani, who can still practise in Germany although struck off for incompetence in Britain, works mainly as a cosmetic surgeon and specialist in anti-ageing medicine. The GMC was unable to check whether he had ever worked as a GP in Germany. His qualification alone gave him access to the register in the UK. But the GMC has other concerns. “What is a routine treatment or procedure for a general practitioner in the UK, for example, may not be within the normal scope of a doctor trained from another [European] country.” This echoes government concerns that, for instance, GPs in Italy do not traditionally treat children as they are normally seen by specialist paediatricians. “We also have a specific on-call system [in hospitals] which means our doctors have to know the generality of a speciality. “We understand that this is not necessarily common in the rest of Europe and gives rise to a patient safety risk where the expectations placed on a doctor working in one jurisdiction, but trained in another, are not met.” The GMC document says current EU legislation “does not allow competent authorities to assure themselves that the migrant doctors they register have kept their skills and competence up to date since the award of their professional qualifications”. This, it adds, “inevitably weakens the level of confidence that competent authorities can have in the competence of doctors entering the host state”. Although the virulence of the criticism will not surprise officials in Brussels where the government and GMC have been lobbying heavily for change in the wake of the Ubani scandal, the GMC document’s analysis that the current regime is unsafe provides plenty of ammunition for those who criticise the wider culture of the EU. Rory Gray, son of the patient killed by Ubani, said: “It is great news the GMC is being so forthright. It has said the present system is a public safety risk. Of course, it is.” Sons’ battle The searing criticism of EU rules by the GMC is another victory for Rory and Stuart Gray, two of the four sons of David Gray who died after a 10-fold overdose of a painkiller administered by Daniel Ubani. Their tireless research and campaigning to expose the flaws in the English health system and the European single market for jobs highlighted by the accident have already helped fashion big changes in the out of hours system of GP care and monitoring by the NHS. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, as part of his proposed reforms to put GPs in control of most of the NHS budget, has also made clear that he expects more local doctors to be on call for overnight and weekend calls, so that foreign locums are unnecessary. Rory, a satellite engineer in Germany, and Stuart, a GP in the West Midlands, have been driven by a burning desire to lower the risks to other patients. Their vivid articulation of system failures revealed by their father’s death has stung NHS officials in Cambridgeshire, where their father died, ministers at the Department of Health and the GMC alike. A year ago, Rory and Stuart revealed how the cause had almost taken over their lives. GPs Doctors NHS Health European commission European Union Germany James Meikle guardian.co.uk
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President Bashar al-Assad accepts resignations amid speculation over scrapping of emergency laws The entire Syrian cabinet has resigned amid the country’s worst unrest in decades, state television has announced. President Bashar al-Assad accepted the cabinet’s resignation after a meeting on Tuesday. The move is the latest concession by the government after more than a week of mass protests calling for more political freedom . But it will not affect Assad, who holds the lion’s share of power in the regime. The president, whose family has controlled Syria for four decades and has a history of crushing dissent, is expected to address the nation in the next 24 hours in a speech that may include a promise to abolish emergency laws. Earlier, hundreds of thousands of regime supporters poured on to the streets of the capital, Damascus, and at least four other major cities, waving pictures of the president and flags as the government tried to show it has mass support. Assad is facing down the most serious threat to his family’s longstanding authority in this predominantly Sunni Muslim country, ruled by the minority Alawite sect . Assad, who has been president for 11 years and is one of the most anti-western leaders in the Middle East , is wavering between cracking down and compromising in the face of protests that began in a southern city on 18 March and spread to other areas. There was a swift crackdown by security forces and at least 61 people have been killed, according to Human Rights Watch. The unrest in this country of 23 million people could have implications beyond its borders, given its role as Iran’s leading Arab ally and as a frontline state against Israel. The government-sanctioned rallies brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in the provinces of Aleppo and Hasakeh, in the north, and the central cities of Hama and Homs. Schoolchildren were given the day off while bank employees and other workers were given a two-hour break to attend the demonstrations. “The people want Bashar Assad!” chanted protesters in a central Damascus square. Men, women and children gathered in front of a huge picture of Assad put up on the central bank building. “No to sectarianism and no to civil strife,” read one placard. When the Middle East protests hit Syria, it was a dramatic turn for Assad, a British-trained opthalmologist who inherited power from his father in 2000 after three decades of iron rule. In January, he said his country was immune to such unrest because he was in tune with his people’s needs. The disturbances, prompted by the arrest of several teenagers who had scrawled anti-government graffiti on to a wall in the southern agricultural city of Deraa, quickly spread to other provinces. The protests and violence have eased in the past few days but tensions persist in Deraa and the Mediterranean city of Latakia. Troops on Monday fired teargas into a crowd of some 4,000 people in Deraa who were calling for more political freedoms, witnesses said. They also fired live ammunition into the air to disperse the crowd. Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Moammar Gadhafi’s youngest son had to skip his visit to West Point last month—he had an uprising to crush at home. Khamis Gadhafi, who leads a notoriously brutal brigade in the Libyan military, had been due to visit the military academy as part of a month-long internship in the…
Continue reading …Scientific research in China has been booming along with the economy, and the nation could overtake the US as the world’s leading producer of research as early as 2013, according to a report from Britain’s Royal Society for Science. The report credits massive investment in China in education and in…
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Film star became famous for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock classics such as Strangers on a Train and Rope The actor Farley Granger, most famous for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Rope, has died of natural causes at the age of 85 in New York. In the 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train, Granger starred alongside Robert Walker as a nice guy tennis player who becomes embroiled in a reciprocal murder scheme. In Rope, released three years earlier, he starred as one of two students of a dubious professor, played by James Stewart, who are persuaded to carry out an elaborate homicide. In 2007 he released his memoir, Include Me Out, in which he told of his bisexuality and flings with Ava Gardner, Patricia Neal, Shelley Winters and the composer Leonard Bernstein. His long-time partner Robert Calhoun, with whom he had been in a relationship since 1963, died three years ago. Alfred Hitchcock Thriller United States Ian J Griffiths guardian.co.uk
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Is British TV still the envy of the world? In our series discussing the health of UK television, Mark Lawson examines the current state of UK television drama • The state of British TV: entertainment The most telling detail about the current state of TV drama is that, within living memory, it used to be habitual for the Brits to patronise American television fiction. The yanks were OK for glossy shows about cops with a distinctive physical characteristic – bald Kojak, fat Cannon, wheelchair-user Ironside – but the serious stuff was made here: classy costume dramas, the bold and campaigning Play for Today. Viewers, reviewers and executives who remember when the phrase “wall-to-wall Dallas” served as a terrible warning of the possible consequences of the Americanisation of British drama regard the current era with astonishment. Now an envy of American television drama is one of the governing emotions at UK networks, while polls of the greatest ever shows are dominated by The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, The West Wing and other awe-inspiring imports. And, revealingly, the three most depressing aspects of our home-grown programming all stand in stark contrast to the situation in the US – under-representation of ethnic minorities, short runs, and uniformity. Yet against these depressing tendencies can be set reasons to be cheerful about British small-screen fiction – including the joy of ad-free TV, the standard of acting, and hits such as last summer’s Sherlock. The weaknesses of British television Race : Although sparked by accident, through a comment in an interview, the row over the almost wholly white casting in ITV1′s Midsomer Murders has fortuitously exposed a crisis in British television. The dominance of dramas set either in the actual past (all those Austen and Dickens adaptations) or a make-believe present (such as Midsomer) means that our drama is often criminally unrepresentative and star acting talent – Adrian Lester, Sophie Okonedo, Chiwetel Ejiofor – is driven to America for better parts. Series length : American TV companies have the courage and funding to back the big vision: committing to 20-episode runs with quick-fire options on further runs. In the UK, partly because of the tradition of single authorship rather than team-writing, commissioning is too often short and cautious, so that when a hit emerges – Sherlock, Downton Abbey – enthusiastic viewers/advertisers have a very lengthy wait for more. Yet, paradoxically, once a franchise is established, we’re too loathe to let it go, even when (Taggart, Silent Witness, Midsomer) the central actors leave. Uniformity : And then there is the problem of uniformity. Literally so. It seems almost obligatory for UK drama series to involve either cops or docs: even Peter Bowker, one of our most original writers, has succumbed to the surgical-procedural with Monroe. Yet notice that the fabled recent American series have unconventional settings (a funeral parlour, a 60s ad agency, the White House) or unexpected heroes: Mafia gangster, corrupt politicians and cops. The strengths of British television Sherlock : As yet another adaptation of our most famous detective, Sherlock sounded potentially conservative. Yet the series combined high-class plot and dialogue from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, with visually innovative direction and smart casting – including spotting that Benedict Cumberbatch was on the cusp of greatness – to create a drama that combined British tradition with American pizzazz. Kudos : Despite recent sci-flop Outsiders, Stephen Garrett’s and Jane Featherstone’s independent production company remains aptly named, having re-energised TV drama in recent years with high-gloss, high-concept series including Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Hustle and Spooks. The latter, in particular, has shown how to combine compelling narratives with serious political and psychological ideas, while consistently refreshing a long-running franchise. Acting : One of the joys of watching UK TV dramas is the sheer depth of acting talent available: from veterans (Sheila Hancock, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi) through the generation heading for knighthoods (Simon Russell Beale) to the younger set who immediately impress (Hattie Morahan, Benedict Cumberbatch). With the single exception of racial inequality – see above – casting options in Britain are consistently greater than in the US. Realism : Ever since Play for Today and the early work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, British TV fiction has led the way in quasi-documentary or journalistic pieces. The biggest weakness of the American product is that almost everything tends towards a high gloss. In the UK, the greater strength of television documentary sees directors – most recently, Peter Kosminsky with Channel 4′s The Promise – applying their factual background to fiction. Ad-free TV : Although much great TV drama, in both the US and the UK, has been screened with commercial interruptions, creating a narrative that climaxes every quarter of an hour is a challenge to writers, actors and viewers. Authors and audiences here are lucky to have, at the BBC, the opportunity of following a story straight through, without a break. Drama Television Mark Lawson guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Men wearing suicide belts are holding an unknown number of people at a government building in Tikrit, officials say Gunmen wearing suicide bomb belts are holding local legislators and employees hostage at a government building in central Iraq, officials have said. A policeman and a senior Iraqi intelligence official said it was unknown how many people were being held at the Salahuddin provincial council headquarters, in Tikrit. Police immediately imposed a curfew to prevent all road and pedestrian traffic in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. The intelligence official compared the attack to a deadly siege at a church in Baghdad last autumn. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were unauthorised to release the information. Iraq Middle East guardian.co.uk
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How will spending cuts affect recycling targets and staff? Heydon Prowse meets bin men in Westminster Heydon Prowse
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