Things I read

Mitt Romney outspends Newt Gingrich on ads ahead of Florida primary

By Ewen MacAskill

Romney takes lead in polls but is accused of dishonesty and negative campaigning as Republican nomination battle heats up

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is outspending his main rival Newt Gingrich by almost four to one in advertising in Florida, having spent a staggering $13.8m so far.

ABC reported that Romney had spent $5.6m and his super-political action committees $8.2m. Gingrich and his super-PAC has so far spent only $3.9m.

On television stations from Jacksonville in the north to Key West in the south, as well as radio stations, negative ads about Gingrich are near unavoidable, paid for either directly by the Romney campaign or by the super-PACs supporting him. The television spots, popping up regularly between ads for carpets, weather-resistant paint and holidays, focus on Gingrich's tempestuous years as House Speaker and ends with a picture of him with Obama, saying "If Newt wins, this guy (Obama) will be very happy."

The radio ad claim Gingrich has "more baggage than airlines".

Gingrich ads by comparison seem sparse, with a ratio that feels closer to six in one. Gingrich describes himself in the ads as the "true conservative". In another ad, yet to be broadcast, he accuses Romney of lying five times in the CNN debate on Thursday in Jacksonville, Florida.

Romney, clearly buoyed by his debate performance in which he showed a rare aggressive side to his personality and faced an unusually subdued Gingrich, made an oblique reference to his triumph during a campaign stop at Cape Canaveral, Florida, home of the US space industry. He said he had watched Barack Obama's State of the Union speech carefully "because I expect to debate him some day".

A lot of voters have been backing Gingrich because they felt Romney was not strong enough to take on Obama in debate.

In the Jacksonville debate, Romney described a Gingrich ad accusing him of being 'anti-immigrant" as repulsive.

On Friday, Gingrich said the reason he was subdued was because he was shocked by Romney's "totally dishonest" comments throughout the debate. "I think it's the most blatantly dishonest performance by a presidential candidate I've ever seen," he said.

One of the points the Gingrich team claim Romney lied about was that he had never voted for a Democrat but in fact in 1992 he was registered as an independent in Massachusetts and voted in the Democratic primary.

A Quinnipiac university poll, taken before the debate, put Romney ahead by 9% in Florida, compared with only 2% two days ago. It put Romney on 38%, Gingrich 29%, Ron Paul 14% and Rick Santorum 12%.

The space industry is a big issue in central Florida, with many companies dependent on it. Gingrich has promised to revitalise it and vowed that there would be a permanent US base on the moon by the end of his second term as president.

Romney has been less forthcoming. At Cape Canaveral he said "a strong and vibrant space programme is part of being an exceptional nation".

12:44:15 AM, Saturday 28 January 2012 from Guardian

Sarkozy and Karzai agree to press Nato for earlier Afghanistan handover

By

French and Afghan presidents call for withdrawal of all Nato troops in 2013 - a year earlier than US goal

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said on Friday that France and Afghanistan have agreed to ask Nato to bring forward the handover of all combat operations to Afghan forces to 2013.

Sarkozy also announced an accelerated exit for France, the fourth-largest contributor of troops in Afghanistan – marking a break from previous plans to adhere to the US goal of withdrawing combat forces by the end of 2014. The proposal comes a week after four unarmed French troops were killed by an Afghan soldier.

Sarkozy, alongside Afghan president Hamid Karzai who was in Paris for a previously planned visit, said France had told the US of its plan, and will present it at a meeting next week of Nato defence ministers in Brussels. He said he would call the US president, Barack Obama, about it on Saturday.

The new idea floated by Sarkozy would accelerate a gradual drawdown of Nato troops that Obama has planned to see through until the end of 2014.

Sarkozy said France will withdraw combat troops by the end of 2013, a reversal from his repeated commitment in recent months to stick with other allies on a US-led schedule.

At the same time, he said France will restart its training missions of Afghan troops. After the shootings on 20 January, he suspended the training and joint French military patrols with Afghan forces.

12:11:41 AM, Saturday 28 January 2012 from Guardian

Adonis: a life in writing

By Maya Jaggi

'There is a tendency for poets and painters in the Arab world to be politically engaged'

Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, ushers me down a labyrinthine corridor in a stately building in Paris, near the Champs Elysées. The plush offices belong to a benefactor, a Syrian-born businessman funding the poet's latest venture – a cultural journal in Arabic, which he edits. Fetching a bulky manuscript of the imminent third issue of the Other, Adonis hefts it excitedly on to a coffee table, listing the contributors "from west and east", many of them of his grandchildren's generation. He turned 82 this month. His eyes spark: "We want new talents with new ideas."

A Syrian-born poet, critic and essayist, and a staunch secularist who sees himself as a "pagan prophet", Adonis has been writing poetry for 70 years. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, exerting a seismic influence on Arabic poetry comparable to TS Eliot's in the anglophone world. Aged 17, he adopted the name of the Greek fertility god (pronounced Adon-ees, with the stress on the last syllable) to alert napping editors to his precocious talent and his pre-Islamic, pan-Mediterranean muses. Since the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in 2008, it would be hard to argue for a poet of greater stature in a literary culture where poetry is the most prestigious form as well as being popular.

He moved to Paris in 1985, and was named a commander of France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1997. Last year he was the first Arab writer to win the Goethe prize in Germany, and each autumn is credibly tipped for the Nobel in literature – the only Arab recipient of which to date was the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988. Though Adonis was Ladbroke's favourite in the year of the Arab spring, he does not begrudge the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer his laurels, having introduced him to audiences on a tour of Arab countries. When the uprisings began in Tunisia and Egypt last year, he wrote "little poems to express my joy and happiness". Yet joy gave way to caution, and warnings of tragedy. "It's the Arab youth that created this spring, and it's the first time Arabs are not imitating the west – it's extraordinary," he says. "But despite this, it's the Islamists and merchants and Americans who have picked the fruits of this revolutionary moment." His reservations sparked impatience and were widely attacked: Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet, novelist and assistant professor at New York University, claimed that the Arab spring has "consigned Adonis, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, to irrelevance".

There is, Adonis says, a "tendency for poets and painters in the Arab world to be politically engaged. There's a lot to fight for: for human rights and the Palestinians; and against colonialism, Arab despotism and closed thinking among fundamentalists. I'm not against this engagement, or against them – but I'm not like them. A creator always has to be with what's revolutionary, but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can't speak the same language or work in the same political environment." He adds that he is "radically against the use of violence – I'm with Gandhi, not Guevara."

Like VS Naipaul, a friend who has praised him as a "master of our times", Adonis can be a contrarian, though he lacks Naipaul's acidity and irrascibility. For critics, some of his pronouncements on the "extinction" of Arab culture, or the "Arab mind", have an orientalist taint. Yet his translator Khaled Mattawa, an Arab American poet, sees it as measured iconoclasm: "He's been unsparing against the deeply rooted forces of intolerance in Arab thought, but also celebratory of regenerative streaks in Arab culture."

Although English translations of his poetry have lagged behind French, in the past decade there have been five collections: Mattawa's Adonis: Selected Poems won the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for Arabic translation. Adonis will be coming to London for the award ceremony next month, and also to take part in a two-month celebration of his work, "A Tribute to Adonis", at West London's Mosaic Rooms starting on February 3, which includes an exhibition of the poet's recent art works. He began making small collages using Arabic calligraphy 10 years ago, during a listless period of poet's block, and friends suggested he exhibit them. "I found another way to express my relation to things, other than the word." He uses parchments and rags, "bits and pieces of nothing, thrown away. I rarely use colour; I prefer ripped things," adding fragments of his own poems, as well as classical Arabic poetry "as a homage".

Last June, amid the bloody crackdown on the Syrian uprising, Adonis wrote an open letter to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir - "as a citizen," he stresses. Describing Syria as a brutal police state, he attacked the ruling Ba'ath party, called on the president to step down, and warned that "you cannot imprison an entire nation". He was none the less taken to task for addressing a tyrant as an elected president, and criticising the "violent tendencies" of some of his opponents. "That's why I said I'm not like the revolutionaries," he says. "I'm with them, but I don't speak the same language. They're like school teachers telling you how to speak, and to repeat the same words. Whereas I left Syria in 1956 and I've been in conflict with it for more than 50 years. I've never met either Assad [Bashar or his father, Hafez]. I was among the first to criticise the Ba'ath party, because I'm against an ideology based on a singleness of ideas.

"What's really absurd is that the Arab opposition to dictators refuses any critique; it's a vicious circle. So someone who is against despotism in all its forms can't be either with the regime or with those who call themselves its opponents. The opposition is a regime avant la lettre." He adds: "In our tradition, unfortunately, everything is based on unity – the oneness of God, of politics, of the people. We can't ever arrive at democracy with this mentality, because democracy is based on understanding the other as different. You can't think you hold the truth, and that nobody else has it."

His mother, aged 107, still lives in Syria. For 20 years after he left the country (when released from a year's imprisonment for membership of an opposition party), he was unable to see her. From 1976, he visited each year until two years ago, when "friends said it might be dangerous". But he is adamant that family circumstances have "never stopped me from saying what I think". Of those who accuse him of tardiness or equivocation in condemning the Syrian regime, he says wearily: "I've written many articles – I have a book of them coming out that's 200 pages long. These people don't read."

He lives on the outskirts of Paris, beyond la Défense, with his wife, Khalida Said, a literary critic. "For me she's a great critic, one of the best. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree." They have two daughters: Arwad, who is director of the House of World Cultures in Paris; and Ninar, an artist who moves between Paris and Beirut. Adonis shows little sign of having just spent seven months in Lebanon convalescing from two major operations. Before that, he had announced his retirement from poetry. It was while writing a long poem against monotheism, "Concerto for Jerusalem". "Jerusalem is a city of three monotheistic religions," he says. "If there's one God, it should be beautiful. Instead, it's the most inhuman city in the world. I said I was stopping poetry as an act of defiance." But alluding to his muses, he laughs: "The pre-monotheistic goddesses didn't let me retire."

He was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in 1930, in Qassabin in western Syria, a "poor village isolated in the mountains". His parents were farmers, and he had no early formal schooling. "I'd never seen a car, electricity or a telephone till I was 13. I always ask myself how I was transformed into this other person; it was almost miraculous." His love of poetry was nurtured by his father, and at Qur'anic school. Aged 13, when he impressed the president of the newly established Syrian republic by reciting one of his own poems, his reward was a scholarship to the French lycée. He studied philosophy at Damascus university, and later did a doctorate in Lebanon.

During a year in Paris in 1960, he found his voice in the poem Mihyar of Damascus: His Song (1961), with echoes of Noah, Adam, Ulysses and Orpheus. While for him, poetry and religion are rivals, Sufi mysticism is a force for renewal. Sufism and Surrealism – the title of his 1995 book – are united in the idea, as he expressed it in a poem, that reality is "nothing but skin that crumbles as soon as you touch it". He is also drawn to a mystical view that identity is not fixed: "A human being creates his identity in creating his oeuvre." Yet Sufism is more profound than surrealism or existentialism, he says, "because it's related to a revolutionary idea – that the other is me; that I am the other. If I travel towards myself, I must go through the other."

This is no philosophical nicety. His family belonged to the Shia minority Alawites, and it is sometimes suggested that this gives him his sense of being apart. "It's not being Alawite that gives me a sense of difference," he objects, "but the present state of the Arab world. A man isn't Protestant, Catholic, Sunni or Shia by birth; it's through projects and pathways that men become Shia or Alawite. I never subscribed to that." He joined the secular Syrian Social Nationalist party, opposed to the colonisation and partition of Syria, "partly to get out of concepts of minorities and majorities". He was duly jailed during his military service in the mid-1950s. Since he quit the party in 1960, he has never belonged to another. "I was only 14 or 15 when I joined – a child. Later, I said I can't be both poet and politically engaged. Ideology is against art."

Beirut, where he fled with his wife into exile in 1956, was a "second birth". He co-founded influential magazines, Shir (Poetry) and Mawaquif (Position), embracing colloquial Arabic and opposing both Arab nationalism and poetry as propaganda. TS Eliot was one of the first poets they interviewed, and Adonis collaborated on translations of The Waste Land, as well as on the works of Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell. He combined new sources with an encyclopaedic, "virgin" reading of Arabic classics. True creation, he says, is "always modern because it speaks to us – Ovid, Heraclitus, Homer, Dante. What's not modern are the imitators. In classical Arabic poetry, you have to know how to distinguish between the greats and their imitators."

His long poem This Is My Name (1970) was spurred by shock at the Arab defeat of 1967. The Book of Siege (1982) came out of the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which he lived through, before leaving for Paris. As he wrote in the opening lines: "The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. / Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space." The six-day war "was terrible, but I wasn't conscious then of its tragic nature, as I was in 1982," he says.

He had first welcomed the Iranian revolution of 1979, but swiftly rejected its reactionary turn. His book The Fixed and the Changing (1974) on a struggle between creativity and intolerance in the Arab world, identified an Arab malaise of "pastism", which he defines now as seeing the past as the "source you must return to, despite the river running on with time. One has to break this circular time. You can't have a revolution to go back to the past."

As the Arab uprisings spread, Adonis said in a television interview that he could not take part in a revolution that emanated from the mosques. He was accused of siding with the regimes, and being out of touch with the dire circumstance of revolt. Asked whether he supports the peaceful protests, he spreads his arms as though pulling a concertina: "If you have a petition, I'll sign it." Does he worry that his words echo Arab dictators who pose as bulwarks against Islamists? "But with a difference," he says. "I'm against the regimes of Ben Ali and Assad, and against the Islamist opposition, because I don't want to fight one despotism for the sake of another ... If we don't separate religion from the state, and free women from Sharia law, we'll just have more despots. Military dictatorship controls your mind. But religious dictatorship controls your mind and body."

What of Islamist power through the ballot box? "In that case, democracy won't be a criterion of progress, so the notion of democracy has to be rethought. Truth is not always on the side of democracy – what can you do?" He concedes that democracy, "with all its failings, is much less bad than dictatorship". Rule by democratically elected Islamists would, "absolutely be better – but I'd be against it".

With Syria teetering on civil war – and speaking before President al-Assad rejected Arab League calls to step down – Adonis was unequivocal that "the present regime absolutely has to go. The Ba'ath party has to go, and another regime to be put in place that's secular, democratic and pluralist." Yet he is against both armed uprising and foreign intervention. "Guns can't resolve these problems. If everyone took up arms, there'd be civil war." Outside military intervention has "destroyed Arab countries, from Iraq to Libya". As for its humanitarian rationale, "it's not true – it's to colonise. If westerners really want to defend Arab human rights, they have to start by defending the rights of the Palestinians."

Calls for intervention from within Arab countries "are wrong; it doesn't make sense. How can you build the foundations of the state with the help of the same people who colonised these countries before?" At a talk this month in the House of Poetry in Paris, he held up a photograph published in al-Quds of some US soldiers in Iraq apparently desecrating the dead. "American soldiers pissed on Iraqi corpses," he says indignantly. "So these are the same people they want to call in to liberate Arabs, and piss on the living?"

Yet within the west, he argues "there are many wests – of Rimbaud, Whitman and Eliot, and of Bush, Sarkozy and Cameron." Explaining his view of Arab culture as extinct, he says: "What is civilisation? It's the creation of something new, like a painting. A people that no longer creates becomes a consumer of the products of others. That's what I mean by the Arabs being finished – not as a people, but as a creative presence."

Adonis holds no hope that poetry can change society. To do that, "you have to change its structures – family, education, politics. That's work art cannot do". Yet he believes it can change the "relationship between things and words, so a new image of the world can be born." Theorising about poetry is "like speaking about love. There are some things you can't explain. The world is not created to be understood, but to be contemplated and questioned."

10:44:03 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Stephen Lawrence's mother says No 10 must do more on race

By Vikram Dodd

• Cameron 'not doing enough to tackle racial prejudice'
• Murdered boy's brother stopped and searched 20 times
• Trust set up to help deprived youth has money problems

Doreen Lawrence has said David Cameron's government is not doing enough to tackle racial prejudice, which continues to blight society, and has warned that spending cuts will hit working-class and black Britons the hardest.

In a Guardian interview, Lawrence says the government has huge powers to make a difference in leading the fight against racism, but says: "I've not heard them talk about race."

Earlier this month her 18-year battle for justice saw Gary Dobson and David Norris convicted of the 1993 racist murder of her son Stephen by a white gang in south London. The murder led to a public inquiry that exposed police failings and prejudice in the ranks and in wider society.

In the interview, she reveals:

• While the police were failing to catch her son's murderers, they managed to stop his brother 20 times as a criminal suspect.

• Police also managed to stop Mrs Lawrence the year after the murder and told her she was suspected of driving a stolen car. She says continuing racist stereotyping by officers explains why African-Caribbeans are more likely to be stopped.

• She was told she should be "ashamed to show our faces" by a police employee, during a visit to Scotland Yard in 2009 to discuss her son's murder.

• The trust she set up in Stephen's name to help youngsters from deprived backgrounds to realise their ambitions is in financial trouble.

Lawrence criticises the government's record on race, saying they are squandering the opportunity to restart the war against prejudice presented by the conviction of two men for her son's murder.

She says the convictions have at least temporarily put the battle against racial discrimination back on the agenda, after years of the fight having stalled. "There is a lot they can do. People take their lead from the government. If the prime minister said 'this is what I'd like to see happen in our society' ... people will try to work towards that. At the moment, I'm not sure exactly what they are doing around race."

Cameron has tried to cleanse the Tories of their "nasty party" image, but the criticism from one of the leading black figures in Britain raises questions about that. Cameron, Lawrence says, was wrong to attack multiculturalism in a speech last year. "Sometimes people misinterpret what the word means," she says.

Recalling longstanding Conservative hostility – the party opposed the setting up of the Macpherson inquiry, and attacked its findings – she notes some top Tories have changed their tune, such as Boris Johnson, who once attacked the Macpherson reforms but of whom she quips: "He's changed completely. He's my best friend now."

She says she regrets that after the guilty verdicts no minister sent a letter "in recognition of what has been denied for so long". Her surviving son, Stuart, said: "David Cameron has not sent my mum a letter saying sorry it has taken so long. It shows the stance of the Conservative government. I don't think they care at all."

Mrs Lawrence said the government may be preoccupied with the economy, but warned that spending cuts would hurt those who have least. "It is the working class and black people who are going to suffer the most – they are at the bottom of the ladder."

She said some of the reforms proposed by Macpherson had made Britain less racially prejudiced, but much more could have been done: "It's like a missed opportunity. For so long the perception is we've dealt with race, so we can move on. Under the surface they have not dealt with race – it is still there."

People suffering discrimination contact Mrs Lawrence for help – "families feel there is a lot of discrimination happening" – and she believes black Britons have to be four times better than their white counterparts to get as far. Stop and search, which she says police use disproportionately against African-Caribbeans, "has a great effect on their lives" and racist stereotyping is to blame: "Because in their mindset they still believe that they are criminals."

Despite the fact that the Lawrences have been praised by prime ministers and police chiefs as a model law-abiding family, Mrs Lawrence, Stuart and her former husband, Neville, have all been stopped under stop-and-search powers. Stuart has been stopped more than 20 times: "He will be on the phone saying 'mum I can't believe they have stopped me again'."

Once, after she complained, a police chief suggested an officer who had stopped Stuart should meet him and discuss why. The officer refused to do so. Stuart said: "There is no reason I can give, other than I am a young black man, who usually wears a baseball cap in my car, which is my God-given right." Asked if it is possible police were targeting her son because of any suggestion of criminality, she said: "He's a teacher for goodness sake."

Mrs Lawrence reveals she was stopped in 1994, a year after Stephen's murder, by police who first said she might have been drinking. When she pressed them to breathalyse her, they suggested she had been driving erractically, then that it was possible she was driving a stolen car.

She says the police were wrong to claim they were no longer institutionally racist, as Macpherson had found, and said in September 2009, on a visit to Scotland Yard, one staff member had said "we should be ashamed to show our face in the building".

The Metropolitan police said: "The incident that Mrs Lawrence referred to was completely unacceptable and the individual was immediately dealt with by their line manager." The force added it is "immeasurably different to 1993" and that the Lawrence case had "contributed to major changes within policing".

Lawrence described Norris and Dobson as "pure evil". Asked if she, a churchgoing Christian, could see herself forgiving the racists who killed her son, she said: "You can only forgive somebody, something, who asks for forgiveness, who admits their wrongs and they have never done that."

She believes there is very little chance of the other men suspected of her son's murder standing trial. She will now focus her efforts on the Stephen Lawrence trust which gives young people opportunities.

She met Cameron once, when he was in opposition: he came to a memorial service to mark the 15th anniversary of Stephen's death. Cameron and Nick Clegg sent a letter in support of a fundraising dinner for the trust, and the home secretary had visited its south London base, which Lawrence appreciated.

A Downing Street spokesperson said the PM admired Lawrence for her "great bravery" and her family's "tireless fight for justice" and added: "He also recently made clear that he believes that although things have changed for the better, there is still a problem with racism in this country and more work to be done to tackle it."

No 10 added that "a new action plan to tackle hate crime" would be unveiled soon, building on "one of the strongest legislative frameworks anywhere in the world", as would "a new approach to the integration of local communities".

Lawrence said the trust was facing a cash crisis and needs to plug a £150,000 shortfall by the end of March.

• Donations to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust can be given:

• By credit card or paypal at the trust's JustGiving web page click here justgiving.com/slct/donate

• By texting SLCT18 followed by the £ symbol, then the amount to 70070

• By bank deposit to the following account: sort code 30-94-08 account number 02963035

• By cheque, made payable to Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and sent to 39 Brookmill Road, Deptford, London SE8 4HU.

10:30:00 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Stephen Hester bonus puts David Cameron under pressure

By Nicholas Watt, Larry Elliott, Jill Treanor

Row erupts after prime minister claims that MPs had no choice but to agree to RBS head's bonus are challenged by Labour

David Cameron was under fire for failing to intervene to block a bonus of nearly £1m for Royal Bank of Scotland's chief executive, Stephen Hester, and for allegedly misleading parliament after he blamed Labour for negotiating a contract that prevented the government from intervening.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, speaking in Davos, piled the pressure on the prime minister by describing the bonus as "absolutely bewildering". Labour called on Cameron to appear before MPs to explain why he did nothing to block the bonus.

The row erupted on Friday morning when Lord Myners, the former Labour Treasury minister who negotiated the contracts with the new state-controlled banks, challenged the prime minister's claim that ministers had no choice but to agree to the Hester bonus, announced in the same week that the coalition announced proposals to hand shareholders more power to block pay deals.

"There is nothing in the employment contract of Stephen Hester or any director of Royal Bank of Scotland which binds the company or its remuneration committee to pay a mandatory bonus," Myners said. "All matters relating to bonuses are at the full discretion of the board of directors and the shareholders, including UKFI, who have elected them."

The prime minister, who indicated in recent weeks that Hester's bonus would be less than £1m, said the government had little room for manoeuvre because of the contract negotiated by the last government. The bonus is in shares, which rose to £981,000 last night – up from the £963,000 they were valued at by the bank in its announcement late on Thursday. The exact value will be determined in 2014 when he finally receives them while a three-year bonus he was handed in shares shortly after he joined in October 2008 – worth £6.4m – has now been deemed worthless by the bank.

Downing Street said that Hester's contract meant that he had to be considered for a bonus in "good faith". But the prime minister's spokesman admitted that a bonus was not mandatory and that the government, through UK Financial Investments, could have blocked it.

The spokesman said: "The contract says that he should be considered for bonus in good faith. That decision is taken by the board. Yes, shareholders have a role in that. UKFI, as the government's shareholder, takes a very active interest. But we are not the only shareholder in that company … The board is required to act in the interests of all its shareholders and the board takes this decision."

Downing Street admitted that Cameron was not relaxed by the bonus but said that Hester has reduced the RBS balance sheet by £0.5tn and has increased business lending in the last year.

But George Osborne, the chancellor, defended the bonus after a speech in Davos – but also distanced the government from the decision. "I would bet his bonus will be a lot less than the bonuses of other people running banks are going to get and half of what he got last year."

Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays – who was also in Davos, speaking at an event on "building trust" – refused to talk specifically about Hester's bonus, but commented: "If we don't celebrate reward for success we won't have an economy."

Diamond declined to comment on the scale of his own bonus, which could be in the region of £10m.

Osborne added: "The alternatives [to the Hester payout] would have been worse for the taxpayer. Either there would have been a much larger bonus, of the kind he would have got a few years ago. Or the British government would have had to take over complete ownership of RBS and over-ruled the board, and I think that would have cost the taxpayer more as well."

His comments did not appease critics. Ed Miliband, also in Davos, described it as a " disgraceful failure of leadership" by the prime minister. "He owns, through the British government, 83% of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He must now explain, not least to the British people, why he has allowed this to happen."

Labour sought to increase the pressure on the government by writing to the prime minister to ask him to set out to MPs why he said he was bound by a contract which is flexible.

Simon Danczuk, a Labour MP, said in the letter: " I trust you will want to come to the house to explain why you previously told the house that you did not have any such power, as well as to explain why your government has decided, in its role as the majority shareholder in RBS, to approve a bonus to Stephen Hester worth almost £1m."

The TUC's general secretary, Brendan Barber, also in Davos, described the decision to hand Hester a bonus as terrible. "The government might have been able to subcontract the decision [to UK Financial Investments] but they can't sidestep the responsibility." Already doubful that government plans to hand shareholders new powers to tackle high pay would be effective, Barber said: "The government through their stakes in the banks had the possibility of sending the signal. They've really bottled the decision".

It is not clear whether John Hourican, head of the RBS investment bank or Ellen Alemany, head of the US bank, will receive their bonuses this year.

09:10:57 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Labour must do more to be credible on economy, says Douglas Alexander

By Patrick Wintour

Shadow foreign secretary warns that public has not heard enough from Labour party about how it would cut the deficit

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, is warning Labour it has only created a bridgehead towards establishing economic credibility and will need to talk "a lot more" about bringing the deficit down if it is to reap political dividends from the government's economic failure.

Making a rare intervention in the debate on Labour's economic approach, he said in a Guardian interview: "I don't think the public has yet heard us talking enough about dealing with the deficit, as well as talking about the need to boost growth and jobs."

He also warned the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, that he will endanger the patience of Scotland if he is seen to be trying to fix a referendum on independence.

Alexander added that Labour would support a cap on household welfare benefits, saying: "This is a difficult but necessary step but let us be clear we support the principle, of a benefit cap, but with the important caveat that it should not render people homeless."

Regarded as one of the party's key strategists, Alexander's intervention is likely to be taken as a sign of determination within the shadow cabinet not to lose the momentum created by the two big speeches by leader Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, insisting Labour needed to adjust to an era of austerity, including the need for further spending cuts after the 2015 election.

Balls committed the party to a continued public sector pay freeze, so long as extra help is given to the low paid, a move that prompted a furious union response and was described by Miliband as a watershed for his leadership.

Some critics have accused Miliband of running up the white flag on economic policy, and others that the message is still confused. Alexander believes the party now has to go further to convince the electorate of its credentials, and suggests it has to rebalance its rhetorical emphasis from stimulus to deficit.

He said: "There have always been two parts to the Labour argument – a short-term stimulus now to get the economy moving and medium-term cuts to get the deficit down.

"It was always vital that we won the first part of that argument – that the government are going too far and too fast – and I think thanks to Ed Miliband and Ed Balls we are winning that argument.

"But the second half of that argument – that the deficit has to come down – has to be emphasised more, and all of us have a responsibility to make that case. We have talked a lot about the first and we need to talk a lot more about the second"

He added: "We must convince the public of our commitment to both parts of our argument – securing growth and securing deficit reduction. We have to be heard on both sides of our argument to win."

He also praised Balls's announcement on keeping the public sector pay freeze as the best way to keep people in work. "Ed's was just the first tough choice of many – credibility will involve other tough choices. We cannot promise now to reverse every Tory cut, not least because we do not know the state of public finances in 2015.

"To some that may seem controversial, to me it is common sense. Securing economic credibility is never easy, but it is always essential – fiscal realism is the only path to power."

Urging his party not to back away, he said: "We need to step into this conversation and not step away from it. This is not about positioning against the unions or even towards the electorate. It is more fundamental than that - it is about being open about the condition of the economy. For me fiscal realism is not a betrayal of Labour values, it is the foundation by which we win the trust of the public."

Alexander also urged his party to recognise that the public are in the mood to hear realism from politicians, rather than evasions. "My sense is that, given people's real worries about the economy, there is a yearning for politicians to level with the public. They want us to be honest about the difficult decisions we face to ensure that Britain earns its living and pays its way in the world in the tough years ahead."

Faced by the warnings of disaffiliation by some unions in response to the leadership's shift, Alexander said: "Labour has to hold its nerve. Some of our own supporters will be upset, but we cannot have a reverse gear on this. This is just the start of a difficult process – the two speeches were a beachhead."

He also warned his party that the public would not regard Labour as credible simply if Conservative austerity economics turned out to have failed. Such a view, he said, would be wrong and complacent.

With Labour level pegging with the Tories in the polls he says: "At the time of the Autumn statement we saw that economic failure for the Tories did not translate into political success for us. The task for all of us is to ensure that George Osborne's economic failure becomes an electoral failure for him as well . We will not win the next election just because George Osborne is being exposed as making the wrong economic judgements. The Tory economic policy is clear and it is clearly wrong – you cannot simply cut your way to recovery".

But Alexander argued that the party was paying the price for a deeper failure to be straight with the electorate before the 2010 election, saying: "We should have been much clearer much sooner after the crisis in 2008 about the consequences."

That failure created a benign political environment for the Conservatives. He said: "From 2007 to 2011, the Conservatives worked very hard to establish a public language and a public logic that the crisis was caused by Labour's actions in government. Both Ed Balls and Ed Miliband made important steps forward in correcting that in recent speeches. We all have a responsibility to continue that process."

On Scotland, he said Salmond was trying to avoid a straight choice between separation and the status quo by promoting a third option of greater independence within the UK.

He said: "He is on the horns of a dilemma. He knows he is selling a product that the Scottish people do not want to buy – that is why he is scrambling around trying to find a get out of jail card, and his card is devo max. He cannot explain it, he cannot define it but he hopes it will provide a means by which he can claim victory when he suffers defeat over the sovereignty question.

"As I understand it, Salmond said this week that if 99.5% voted for devo max and 50.1% voted for independence, then Scotland would be independent – try explaining that. If he goes on like this, the tolerance of the public will be strained if this looks like an attempt to rig a referendum. We need a clear and decisive question on independence, and soon.

''The Scottish [Labour] party leader Johann Lamont recently said it is as if he is Moses and he has taken people to the top of the mountain, and shown them the promised land, and then said why don't we camp here for two years."

08:59:02 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Twitter users threaten boycott over censorship accusation

By Julian Borger, Charles Arthur

Tweets don't always flow freely – voice of Arab spring accused of imposing gagging system in some countries

"The Tweets must flow", Twitter declared a year ago, and quickly became an instrument of fast-moving revolution across the Arab world, coordinating mass protests in Egypt and sidestepping the state censorship in Syria. But, the microblogging site conceded that the tweets would not flow evenly in every country.

The company was accused of censorship by many users and threatened with a one-day boycott on Saturday after announcing that it could remove tweets in certain countries which have "different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression".

Twitter insisted that it would not use the gagging system in a blanket fashion, but would apply it on a case-by-case basis, as it happens when governments or organisations complain about individual tweets. But the reassurances were not enough to prevent a torrent of outrage from twitter users and freedom of speech campaigners.

Jeff Jarvis, the media commentator, said the move set the microblogging site onto the "slippery slope of censorship". "I understand why Twitter is doing this – they want to be able to enter more countries and deal with the local laws," he said. "But, as Google learned in China, when you become the agent of the censor, there are problems there."

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, put it more simply, posting: "If Twitter starts censoring, I'll stop tweeting".

In a blog on its website, Twitter argued that the change marked an improvement as previously "the only way we could take account of those countries' limits was to remove content globally".

"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world," the blogpost said, citing the prohibition of pro-Nazi content in France and Germany. The company also said that any user whose tweets were withheld would be notified, and stressed that Twitter's transparency would be maintained by flagging any withheld tweets on an independent website, Chillings Effects, maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a group of universities.

The announcement came a day after the first anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, in which Twitter played a prominent role drawing particular criticism from Middle Eastern users. More than half the posts marked with the hashtag #TwitterCensored were in Arabic.

One tweeter from a Gulf Arab state, @abatmeem, parodied the Twitter logo by showing a dead blue bird on its back with feet in the air. "Twitter punctured the silence with its beak, and now it has provoked the tyrants to take revenge," @abatmeem tweeted. "Sorry Twitter bird, you are no longer that bird that could sing all tunes. You have become a parrot that repeats only what is required of it."

Other critical tweets showed the blue bird with a red cross or black strip over its beak. Another Arabic tweeter, @alanoud45 demanded: "How much did they pay you, Twitter?"Twitter insists that the system will only formalise a method it already uses, where tweets are blocked or deleted after full judicial process. Being able to limit tweets to particular countries, rather than blocking them altogether, expands its ability to "let tweets flow".

In theory the system could have been used last year in the UK to block tweets exposing details hidden by superinjunctions about celebrities, or in 2010 when Trafigura used a superinjunction to block the Guardian and BBC from revealing details about a report on activities in Africa. A number of superinjunctions have been abandoned after details leaked on Twitter, to the displeasure of some judges.

Google, Yahoo, eBay and Facebook use similar systems to control what content is shown in which countries.

In China, Google indicates when a search result has been censored. In the same way, blocked tweets will say: "This tweet from [username] is withheld." The blocking can work at the individual tweet or account level.

The US civil liberties website, Demand Progress, opened a petition declaring: "Twitter's importance as an open platform has been demonstrated time and again this year. We need you to keep fighting for and enabling freedom of expression – not rationalize away totalitarianism as a legitimate 'different idea'."

Some bloggers speculated the announcement could have been linked to a $300m (£191m) )investment in Twitter made in December by Saudi prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal, but that was denied by Twitter's counsel, Alex Macgillivray.

Jillian York, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that the change was inevitable, given Twitter's global presence. "This is censorship. There's no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law," she wrote.

"Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content," York argued. "Google lays out its orders in its transparency report. Other companies are less forthright. In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply [read: censor] And if they have 'boots on the ground', so to speak, in the country in question? No choice."

More from Twitter itself:

It will give users the option to define their country as "worldwide", and that "will show all public tweets" (which would include banned ones).

Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said: "We want to reach every person on the planet, and to make Twitter available to people everywhere. The distinction is there are countries which Twitter will not operate in as a business."

Twitter's funding model is to sell adverts against users' tweets, and also to let businesses buy "sponsored" tweets and "trends". By setting up businesses in specific countries, it can sell adverts in those countries for local users. But the service still operates in countries where it does not have its own local operation.

Off message

Twitter is not the first internet giant to control the transmission of content in certain countries.

Yahoo Was sued in 2000 by French civil liberties groups over the sale of Nazi memorabilia via its auction facility. Yahoo had blocked the sale but argued that as it is based in California, Yahoo.com was governed by American law. But US courts ruled they had no jurisdiction in France; the French courts could enforce decisions about Yahoo in their territory.

Twitter Until this week, the entire service could be blocked (as happens in China) or tweets and accounts had to be deleted wholesale, across the world. Now the microblogging service Has a system where tweets and accounts can be blocked in particular countries. It will post them on the Chilling Effects website (which records takedown requests). But observers note that it is giving users clues about who and what has been banned – which could make the original discoverable.

Google Is able to ban content by country: in China it would note when a set of search results had been censored (at the government's order). In Germany and France, searches are filtered.

Facebook Can restrict access to content based on who is viewing it: if it's legal in one country but not in another, Facebook can prevent its viewing in the latter.

eBay In 2000 the auction site changed its policy after public pressure so that Nazi goods and memorabilia cannot not be traded.

08:55:51 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Men charged with murder of man found decapitated in Stockport

By

Two brothers to appear at Stockport magistrates court following discovery of body in blaze

Two men have been charged with the murder of a man whose decapitated body was found on fire.

The body of John Grainger, 32, was discovered by firefighters in Stockport, Greater Manchester, at 5.10am on Thursday when they extinguished a blaze on a verge on Wellington Street, opposite Gala Casino.

Anthony Jenkins, 31, and Joseph Jenkins, 29, both of Covent Gardens, Stockport, will appear before Stockport magistrates court on Saturday.

The brothers were arrested on suspicion of possessing shotgun cartridges before the discovery of the body by police. The head was located nearby.

A postmortem examination found that Grainger died from a blunt-force head injury and a shotgun wound to the head.

A police spokesman said it is believed he was decapitated after being shot.

In a tribute to Grainger, his family said: "John was a cheeky and lovable character who was a fantastic brother and uncle to his niece and nephews.

"He wanted to become a dad one day and was looking forward to what the future held.

"John loved football and was an avid fan of Manchester United."

08:17:17 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony to reflect 'people's Games'

By Owen Gibson

Olympics ceremony titled Isles of Wonder will involve NHS nurses and hundreds of children, says its creator Danny Boyle

"Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises." As a welcome to London for athletes and spectators arriving for the 2012 Olympics, opening ceremony director Danny Boyle has decided Caliban's line from Shakespeare's The Tempest is particularly apposite.

So much so that the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire director has chosen it as the inspiration for a £27m four-hour spectacular that will feature a tribute to the NHS, Europe's largest bell, a torch lighting sequence and a cast and crew of 12,000 – all shot through with "British humour" and set to the music of Underworld.

Unveiling a handful of details of his vision for the first time with exactly six months to go until the ceremony, Boyle said it would not match the jaw-dropping scale and expense of Beijing in 2008 but would aim to repeat the humanity of Sydney in 2000, which earned the sobriquet "the people's Games".

His chosen title, Isles of Wonder, was inspired by a speech in The Tempest. "It is about the wondrous beauty of Caliban's island and his deep, deep devotion to it," explained Boyle.

Stephen Daldry, the Billy Elliot director who is overseeing the artistic vision for all four ceremonies for the Olympics and Paralympics, said it encapsulated the "heritage, diversity, energy, inventiveness, wit and creativity that defines the British Isles".

He said the theme of The Tempest would run through the opening and closing ceremonies for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games: "It is a journey that will celebrate who we are, who we were and indeed who we wish to be."

Previous opening ceremonies have proved iconic and embarrassing in equal measure, but Daldry said the live sense of "jeopardy" was one of the things that made them exciting.

He said further details of the show, which will be watched by 80,000 ticket holders paying up to £2,012 and including 130 heads of state and an estimated 1 billion global television viewers, would be confirmed in April.

The method of the lighting of the Olympic flame, expected to arrive by water after its 8,000-mile journey around the UK, will be among them.

Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Take That and ballerina Darcey Bussell are among those rumoured as potential participants.

The biggest bell ever cast in Europe has been commissioned to hang at one end of the stadium and will be rung at 9pm to signal the point at which the world will tune in to watch the opening ceremony.

Boyle said that the use of a giant bell in his production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre last year had helped persuade him to incorporate it into the ceremony.

After the Games, it will be moved to the Olympic Park – where on Friday the finished Athletes Village was handed over by the Olympic Delivery Authority – where Boyle said he hoped it would "ring for hundreds of years".

Boyle said that for one sequence, all the performers had been recruited from the NHS and local schools. "It is something that we are really proud of. It celebrates something unique about this country," he said.

The four ceremonies will feature a total of 15,000 performers and 25,000 costumes and Daldry equated the task to producing 165 West End musicals at the same time.

Rick Smith and Karl Hyde from dance group Underworld will provide the soundtrack for the opening ceremony. Boyle joked that they would compose marching music at 120bpm in order to speed up the athletes' procession around the stadium. Organisers have promised to avoid the lengthy waits and overruns of previous ceremonies and finish by midnight.

A film of rehearsals involving 15,000 performers across four ceremonies gave a few further clues to how the event will unfold: ballet dancers, painters, huge "zorbing" balls that could roll over the crowd, BMX displays, lasers and cyclists with wings all featured. A total of 900 schoolchildren from the six Olympic boroughs will be involved.

The government recently agreed to provide organisers with an extra £41m from the £9.3bn public sector funding package to double the budget for the Games ceremonies, justifying it by saying it was a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to promote the UK and boost tourism.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "We are absolutely clear this is one of the biggest events that will happen in this country in our lifetimes. We do not underestimate the massive responsibility that entails. We see it as a huge opportunity to profile everything we're proud of in the UK."

Boyle said his opening ceremony would use around a third of the overall £81m budget for the four ceremonies, but was still significantly cheaper than Beijing or Athens.

07:46:00 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Syria violence has risen significantly, says Arab League mission chief

By Martin Chulov

As UN prepares to debate resolution on crisis, at least 100 are thought to have been killed in Homs since Wednesday

The head of the Arab League monitoring mission in Syria has said violence has risen significantly in the country in recent days, as the UN prepares to debate a resolution on the crisis next week.

The flashpoint city of Homs has again been the focal point of clashes, which are thought to have killed at least 100 people since Wednesday. Activists in the besieged city reported a massacre had taken place at the hands of regime forces on Thursday.

European and Arab states are frantically drafting a resolution aimed at ending the violence and seizing power from the president, Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had enjoyed absolute control over Syria until a sustained and increasingly violent challenge to its rule.

However, a key member of the UN security council, Russia, said it would again use its veto to kill any resolution that calls for Assad to stand down. The stance of Moscow, a staunch ally of the Assad regime, appears to end any notion of a short-term solution to the crisis in Syria, where 10 months of violence has killed at least 6,000 people.

The UN said on Friday that 384 children had died since the rebellion began last March. Escalating tensions have since pitted an increasingly armed and organised opposition against a loyalist military.

In his most strident comments since the Arab League monitoring mission began in November, its chief, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, said: "The situation at present, in terms of violence, does not help prepare the atmosphere … to get all sides to sit at the negotiating table."

He identified Hama, Homs and Idlib as key areas of concern. Parts of the capital, Damascus, are also becoming an active conflict zone, although regime forces remain in control of most of the city and death tolls during clashes are not as high.

Western states have remained reluctant to characterise the increasing violence in Syria as a civil war. Neither Britain, France, nor the US has described the violence in Syria, which is increasingly destabilising the country and alarming the region, as anything more than a rebellion, or budding insurgency.

"As the UK, we don't believe it's a civil war at present," said a Foreign Office spokesman. "But the situation is clearly deteriorating steadily, which is why we are pressing for swift action at the UN in support of the Arab League."

US legislators have also described the crisis in Syria in ominous tones, without being prepared to offer a clear descriptor. "It is pretty close to a civil war," said John Kerry, US Senate foreign relations chairman, this week.

There is little debate in academic circles about whether the situation in Syria now meets the defined benchmarks of civil war. "By the coding rules typically used by political scientists and sociologists who study civil war, yes, the conflict in Syria almost surely qualifies," said Jim Fearon, Stanford University political scientist.

"A fairly typical first cut at a definition for civil war would be 'an armed conflict between organised groups fighting over power at the centre or in a region, that has killed at least 1,000 within one year, and at least 100 on both sides.'"

Analysts contacted by the Guardian say the reluctance of governments who are condemning the Syrian regime to accept that the term civil war applies there is driven by three factors: domestic political considerations, a fear that the term would exacerbate the situation, and out of concern to avoid making a moral judgement that could legitimise either side.

"People use the definition in a morally loaded way," said Shashank Joshi, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London. "It can propel sides into action. It has connotations about the actors involved. It's much better for [governments] if they can continue to call the other side rebels because you can then characterise the conflict as rebels versus a dictatorship.

"If you call it a civil war, it gives the [Syrian] government licence to treat it as a civil war. And that is a licence you don't want to give them. We need to recognise that there is still a peaceful process taking place alongside the violence. Western governments are still holding out some hope that they can make political gains without violence."

In a potentially significant development, the secretary general of the Gulf Co-operation Council, which this week withdrew its monitors from the Arab League monitoring mission to Syria, will on Monday meet the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, at the organisation's headquarters.

07:25:39 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

David Cameron in U-turn over fiscal policing of eurozone

By Ian Traynor, Nicholas Watt

Government signals it will not challenge fiscal enforcement role for European commission and European court of justice

The prime minister has abandoned his pledge to block the eurozone from using common EU institutions to police a new regime of fiscal integration and stiff German-style rules for the embattled single currency.

Ahead of Monday's summit of EU leaders, which is due to finalise "political agreement" on the fiscal compact treaty, the government signalled that it would not challenge a role for the European commission and, more sensitively, would also allow resort to the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg to enforce new debt ceilings and fines for fiscal miscreants in the eurozone.

Last month David Cameron shocked the rest of Europe by vetoing new EU laws on fiscal rigour, forcing the other member states instead to turn the pact into an international treaty between participating governments outside the EU treaties. Cameron also vowed to resist a role for EU institutions on the grounds that they served all 27 member states.

Berlin insists that the Luxembourg court should be empowered to rule on whether the new "debt brakes" are being properly enshrined in national law across the eurozone and applied.

A senior German official said the European commission would act as "referee" in deciding whether eurozone members were breaching the new rules. A commission ruling would be accepted by eurozone governments unless overturned by "reverse majority voting" and any signatory government could then take the perceived sinner to the European court.

Senior diplomatic sources in Brussels made clear on Friday that while Britain still had reservations about these provisions, there would be no attempt to block them and no quick legal challenge.

Cameron is understood to have made it clear to José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, in a telephone call on Wednesday that Britain would no longer object to using the ECJ to enforce the new treaty. "There were a number of issues in the heat of the moment," one EU source said of the prime minister's threat in December to block the use of EU institutions to police the fiscal compact. "But they quickly disappeared."

Cameron's concession marks a significant watering down of his previous position and represents a victory for Nick Clegg, who has been urging the prime minister to recover ground after wielding the veto. The deputy prime minister lobbied hard inside Whitehall for Cameron to drop his objections to the use of EU institutions to enforce the compact.

The prime minister raised concerns about the use of the ECJ as recently as 6 January. He told the Today programme on Radio 4: "You can't have a treaty outside the European Union that starts doing what should be done within the European Union and that goes back to the issue of safeguards.

"There are legal difficulties over this. One of the problems is that the European court of justice, we all think it is a great independent arbiter, but the European court of justice tends to come down on the side of whatever 'more Europe' involves. Let me be very clear that they shouldn't do things outside the European Union that are the property of the European Union."

The abrupt change of heart by Cameron may have been prompted by German anger over the British veto. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, highlighted concerns in Berlin about Britain when he blamed Cameron for blocking the EU from embedding the eurozone fiscal compact in the Lisbon treaty.

Asked in Davos on Friday about the failure to agree a revision of the Lisbon treaty, Schäuble said: "I would like to give you the number of David Cameron. Of course, this is not a joke. It would be much better, and better to understand for everyone outside of Europe, if we were to do what we will now have to do in our fiscal compact in the framework of European treaties."

Tory Eurosceptics warned Cameron against diluting his opposition to the use of the ECJ. Bill Cash, the veteran Conservative Eurosceptic who chairs the commons European scrutiny committee, said: "There mustn't be any backsliding. There are serious concerns about the lawfulness of these proposals. The institutions are simply not allowed to use the European commission and the [European] court of justice in an unlawful manner."

07:17:49 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Boko Haram vows to fight until Nigeria establishes sharia law

By Monica Mark

Exclusive: Spokesman for Islamist group says it will not stop deadly attacks until country is ruled according to dictates of Allah

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which has killed almost 1,000 people in Nigeria, will continue its campaign of violence until the country is ruled by sharia law, a senior member has told the Guardian.

"We will consider negotiation only when we have brought the government to their knees," the spokesman, Abu Qaqa, said in the group's first major interview with a western newspaper. "Once we see that things are being done according to the dictates of Allah, and our members are released [from prison], we will only put aside our arms – but we will not lay them down. You don't put down your arms in Islam, you only put them aside."

Qaqa, whose name is a pseudonym, said the group's members were spiritual followers of al-Qaida, and claimed they had met senior figures in the network founded by Osama bin Laden during visits to Saudia Arabia.

The interview comes a week after Boko Haram claimed responsibility for Nigeria's single deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 186 people in the northern city of Kano.

In an audio message posted on YouTube on Friday, the group's current leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened to bomb schools and kidnap family members of government officials.

"If [security forces] are going to places of worship and destroying them, like mosques and Quranic schools, you have primary schools as well, you have secondary schools and universities, and we will start bombing them."

Shekau rejected calls for a negotiated peace from President Goodluck Jonathan, who on Thursday called for the shadowy sect to step out of the shadows and engage in dialogue.

Nigerian officials have voiced hopes for a negotiated settlement with "moderate elements" of the group. "Under the circumstances, if you look hard enough, you can find moderate elements you can communicate with," General Andrew Azazi, the national security adviser to the president, told the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Western diplomats say Boko Haram has splintered and the hardliners leading the factions responsible for the wave of violence that has killed some 250 people this year appear to have rejected any suggestion of dialogue.

The Guardian was able to contact Abu Qaqa through an intermediary from the group's home state. The go-between has been in contact with the group since its inception, and met with its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, several times before he was killed in 2009. For most of the interview he used a voice modulator, but local journalists confirmed that his undisguised voice matched recordings of previous interviews.

Qaqa said Shekau and others had travelled to Saudi Arabia for training and funding. "Al-Qaida are our elder brothers. During the lesser Hajj [last August], our leader travelled to Saudi Arabia and met al-Qaida there. We enjoy financial and technical support from them. Anything we want from them we ask them."

He said recruits from neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger had joined the group. A recent UN report said weapons from Libya may have been smuggled to Boko Haram and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb via Chad, Niger and Nigeria.

Security officials and diplomats in Abuja said they had no evidence of a link with al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia, but an official confirmed that "elements of Boko Haram have made contact with external groups". The extent and frequency of that contact was unknown, the official said.

In the decade since it first appeared, Boko Haram has graduated from crude driveby attacks on beer parlours to bombing security buildings in the northern Muslim heartland. Its most audacious attack targeted the United Nations building in the capital, Abuja, killing 25 in August. In recent weeks, Christians institutions have increasingly come under fire. A Christmas Day bomb attack on a packed church just outside the capital claimed almost 40 lives.

But Qaqa said the rights of the country's 70 million Christians, who represent half of Nigeria's population, "would be protected" under the group's envisioned Islamic state. "Even the prophet Mohammed lived with non-Muslims and he gave them their dues." But he said everyone must abide by sharia law: "There are no exceptions. Even if you are a Muslim and you don't abide by sharia, we will kill you. Even if you are my own father, we will kill you."

Speaking fluent but non-native Hausa, the lingua franca across the Sahelian belt on the cusp of the Sahara desert, he said: "It's the secular state that is responsible for the woes we are seeing today. People should understand that we are not saying we have to rule Nigeria, but we have been motivated by the stark injustice in the land. People underrate us but we have our sights set on [bringing sharia to] the whole world, not just Nigeria."

Sharia law is already in place across 12 states in the Muslim-majority north. Few believe the group's radical ideology has traction in Nigeria's mainly Christian south, which is also home to millions of Muslims and has so far been out of the group's reach.

Raising his voice for the only time during the interview, Qaqa denied reports that some governors in northern Nigeria paid the group monthly allowances in exchange for immunity from attacks. "May God punish anyone that said so," he said, before adding that the group has popular support in the north.

"Poor people are tired of the injustice, people are crying for saviours and they know the messiahs are Boko Haram.

"People were singing songs in [northern cities] Kano and Kaduna saying: 'We want Boko Haram'," Qaqa said, describing how the group can blend into the communities in which it operates. "If the masses don't like us they would have exposed us by now. When Islam comes everyone would be happy," he said.

Diplomats say Nigeria's security services are belatedly attempting to gain control of the situation, which was previously dismissed as an internal, northern squabble often fuelled by politicians with personal grievances.

"There is an ongoing review of all security agencies," the presidential aide Ken Wiwa said. "This is a relatively new phenomenon in Nigeria and the administration is working hard to improve its capacity to respond. There are various other initiatives which will be implemented but this is as much a political as a security issue."

An official said Nigeria's central bank was involved in measures aimed at strangling the group's external funding sources, including speeding up a cashless economy.

06:39:28 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Couple facing deportation to Cameroon released after campaign by writers

By Helen Carter

Leading writers condemned home secretary's decision to deport playwright Lydia Besong and her husband

A couple facing imminent deportation to Cameroon have been unexpectedly released from detention this week after a campaign by leading writers to halt their removal from the UK.

A week ago, leading writers and barristers wrote to the home secretary, Theresa May, to condemn the UK Border Agency's decision to deport Lydia Besong, a playwright, and her husband, Bernard Batey.

The former children's laureate, Michael Morpurgo, Monica Ali, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Ayckbourn, Nick Hornby and Helena Kennedy signed the letter urging May not to deport them. Kennedy, a leading QC, described the agency's decision to deport the couple as "hideous" and "insensitive", and called for an overhaul of the way women are treated in the asylum system.

Besong says she was raped in Cameroon and would be persecuted for speaking out against the government. She was not informed that her husband's latest appeal against deportation had failed on 23 December. On 10 January, the couple were taken into detention as they registered with immigration services in Manchester as normal.

Besong said she spotted a van outside the office and thought to herself: "I hope that's not come for me." She said she feared something would happen as she had had a prophetic dream the night before.

Severely traumatised by her ordeal, Besong's leg trembles as she talks and she is suffering from glaucoma, which has required three operations.

"We had no idea we were about to be released," she said of Wednesday's events. "[I had] an eye appointment at Bedford hospital and I was taken accompanied by security guards. Everyone was looking at me wondering what I'd done, but I was not a prisoner.

"When I returned from the appointment and was told I was being released I just said: 'Hmm.' I didn't feel a lot of emotion after everything I'd been through. Although I was being released, there were still people in Yarl's Wood such as my roommate who'd been there for 10 months."

"Many bad things will happen [if I am returned to Cameroon]," she added. "OK, the media is watching now, but what about when they go away? I would be locked up because of my political views."

The couple's lawyer said the secretary of state's handling of the case "continues to baffle". Gary McIndoe said: "Having confirmed that they are to reconsider their decision on Bernard's asylum claim, UKBA have authorised Bernard and Lydia's release from detention, only 24 hours after communicating to us a refusal to release them."

He said he hoped the substance of risks faced by the couple in Cameroon would now be looked at with greater care and clarity.

During Christmas 2009, Besong was held for four weeks in Yarl's Wood detention centre and she and her husband were threatened with removal to Cameroon. Their flight back was halted by a high court judge and the UKBA said their case would be reviewed.

They were forced to leave their home country in 2006 as a result of their membership of the SCNC, a peaceful organisation which campaigns for the rights of the English-speaking minority of southern Cameroon. The couple were imprisoned and tortured, and Lydia says she was raped by a uniformed prison guard. They say they have both been traumatised by these experiences and have become depressed.

Since arriving in the UK, Besong has written three plays about her life as an asylum seeker and criticised the political situation in her home country.

Besong's latest play, Down with the Dictator, is currently in rehearsal and due to be performed in Greater Manchester and Bristol in March.

Michael Morpurgo said: "How this country treats asylum seekers is the measure of what kind of a people we are. Lydia was oppressed in Cameroon. That there is a risk she will be imprisoned and abused again seems undeniable. That she is extraordinarily brave in her stand against oppression is clear. And that her talents would be of great value to us as a citizen in our society would seem to be obvious."

The couple arrived at a friend's flat in Tottington, near Bury, at 1am on Thursday. Lydia and her husband were waiting for the UKBA to return their house keys so they could go home.

Besong said she feels blessed to have been released, but her second period of detention in Yarl's Wood has left psychological scars.

"There are roll calls at 7.30am, 12, 5 and 9.45pm," she said. "The guards are always checking up on you and you can hear their keys jangling. It is difficult to get any rest at all. When you come out of that place it is sometimes difficult to forget that you are not there because it comes with you as you are living with the memories."

06:09:46 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

Costa Concordia passengers offered compensation settlement

By

Costa Cruises has offered compensation to passengers from the Italian disaster as its US parent company faces legal action

Costa Cruises has offered to pay 11,000 euros ($14,500) in compensation to each of the more than 3,000 passengers aboard the ship that capsized near the island of Giglio two weeks ago, Italian consumer groups said on Friday.

The offer, negotiated by the consumer groups, is an attempt by Costa Cruises to limit the legal fallout of the accident.

Each passenger would also receive a refund on the cruise and costs of their return home. The offer applies to all passengers, whether a child or an adult, who suffered no physical injuries. Injured passengers will be dealt with individually.

Those accepting the offer would have to agree to drop all future litigation and receive payment within seven days.

Costa Cruises' US parent company Carnival Plc is already facing legal action for compensation.

Codacons, a consumer group which did not participate in the negotiation, is collecting names for a class action suit to be filed in Miami requesting 125,000 euros for each passenger.

Carlo Rienzi, president of Codacons, said the offer was insufficient and urged passengers to see a doctor to check whether they had suffered psychological trauma.

Meanwhile, John Arthur Eaves, a US personal injury lawyer, is urging passengers to file individual lawsuits in the United States. Eaves represented families of some of those killed when a US military jet struck and severed cables holding skiers in a cable car in northern Italy in 1998, killing 20.

"The class action is not the right tool for this case," Eaves told Reuters Television. "In this case people need to be treated like individuals. Everyone in this boat had different damages."

But Roberto Corbella, head of Italy's association of tour operators, and who helped Costa negotiate the offer with the consumer protection groups, urged passengers to accept it.

"Lawsuits have uncertain outcomes, they take a long time, there are legal costs, and some studies indicate that it's not at all certain that passengers would get more than the company is offering," he told Reuters Television.

Crew member Gary Lobaton has already filed a lawsuit against Carnival in a US district court. His lawyers said in his court filing that he was not aware of the "dangerous conditions" of the cruise ship until it was too late to abandon it safely.

On Thursday, Italy's top-ranking Coast Guard official, Marco Brusco, said Concordia Captain Francesco Schettino lost "a precious hour", which made evacuating the ship more difficult.

Had the order been given earlier, "the lifeboats could have been launched calmly, people could have been reassured", Brusco said in Senate testimony.

Passengers have complained the evacuation was chaotic, with some left waiting in lifeboats for two hours before being able to leave the ship. Several bodies were found by divers in submerged evacuation assembly points, wearing life vests.

Sixteen bodies have so far been recovered and 16 are still missing after the 290-metre long cruise liner struck a rock near the Tuscan island.

As divers continued to comb the submerged parts of the ship, Dutch salvage team SMIT finalized preparations to remove fuel from the ship's tanks.

"We could finish today the process of inserting valves on six tanks," said a spokesman for the civil protection agency, which is in charge of operations regarding the Concordia. That would open the way for fuel removal to begin on Saturday.

04:01:04 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian

David Cameron's eco-friendly image risks 'retoxification', warns WWF chief

By Juliette Jowit

Prime minister's lack of leadership on green issues among concerns raised by head of charity that helped rebrand party

The head of the charity that helped to arrange David Cameron's memorable husky photoshoot in the Arctic, launching the Conservatives' rebranding as the nice-not-nasty party, has warned that the PM's lack of leadership on environment issues risks "retoxifying" their image.

The striking images of Cameron posing on the ice with huskies on the way to visiting a melting glacier in 2006 marked a turning point for the Conservatives, who had been seen by many voters as uncaring. After the pictures appeared across newspapers and TV back home, Cameron's image-maker and policy guru, Steve Hilton, is said to have received a text from an ally back home: "Simply brilliant – that was worth a thousand speeches."

Reflecting on the 2006 trip, David Nussbaum, the chief executive of WWF UK, said: "What we were most encouraged about was it was part of his detoxification of the Conservative brand. This was a symbolic indication that the Conservative party had changed, [it] wasn't any longer the 'nasty party'."

Almost six years later, however, and with Cameron having been prime minister for nearly two years, Nussbaum's first full verdict on how the Conservative leader has lived up to that trip's promise is mixed, at best.

While on many policies there has been welcome progress, Nussbaum believes there have been too many caveats – some of them large – that have undermined those policies, and too much inconsistency in decisions and speeches from senior Tories.

"Clearly at the moment the polls are pretty positive, but we know polls can move dramatically and quickly," said Nussbaum, whose predecessor as head of WWF UK, Robert Napier, accompanied Cameron, Hilton and the now climate minister Greg Barker to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. He said: "The long-term future of the Conservative party David Cameron is trying to lead is the party which continues to embrace people for whom environmental sustainability, care for the natural world, thinking about what we are leaving our future generations, those are deeply held values.

"The risk of retoxification would be very serious … to the range of people who are potential supporters of a Conservative government."

The day before he flew to Svalbard, Cameron was campaigning for local elections, urging voters to "go green, vote blue". On the return journey from visiting scientists and seeing fast-melting glaciers, he gave a speech to Norwegian conservatives promising to "lead a new green revolution". He added: "This [climate change] is not a natural phenomenon. It has been caused by the way we live."

The two-day schedule was organised by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) after Cameron's aides said he wanted first-hand experience of the problem of climate change caused by global warming.

"[Cameron] wanted this to be based on substance, not just a nice picture of huskies: he was interested and engaged with the scientists," said Nussbaum, who joined WWF a year later in 2007. "This trip helped reinforce his own conviction that this was the right thing to do, on the basis of the science and the evidence."

Four years later, one of Cameron's first acts as PM was to walk down Whitehall to the Department of Energy and Climate Change and declare that he would lead "the greenest government ever" – a pledge also made, but little noted, in the Conservative manifesto.

"What that illustrates is you can write something in a document, but when it comes out of the mouth of the prime minister it makes a difference," said Nussbaum.

The "greenest government ever" pledge has been increasingly thrown back at the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition as disappointment has mounted in the environment movement.

Government supporters point out a number of initiatives in less than two years, despite the economic crisis, including £3bn for the Green Investment Bank, a carbon price floor to boost clean industries, tough new carbon emissions targets, the Green Deal to make homes more energy efficient, and the first natural environment white paper for over 20 years. There are reports, too, that Cameron could do a big environment speech in April.

However the intervention of Nussbaum, a divinity graduate and former accountant whose charity is often controversial in the sector because of its policy of working closely with politicians and businesses, will be taken seriously because of his usual caution. Nussbaum welcomed progress in several areas, including the investment bank, greener homes, carbon targets, and soon-to-be-announced energy market reforms. He also gave the prime minister personal credit for intervening to make sure the bank and the carbon budgets were agreed, despite claims of cabinet divisions.

However, he is concerned the bank will not have borrowing powers until 2015, it is not clear if there is enough money to pay for the Green Deal, and there will be a review of the carbon budgets. Green groups have been angered, too, by proposals for a Thames airport.

The other big problem is with the government's rhetoric on green issues. "Most alarming," said Nussbaum, had been two speeches by George Osborne in which the chancellor suggested that environmental policies might hold back economic development, saying: "We are not going to save the planet by … exporting valuable jobs."

Crucially, inconsistency was undermining the confidence of investors needed to spend billions on new power stations, more energy efficient homes, and better transport, said Nussbaum.

"We understand that coming into government in the economic context, those other concerns have had a bigger place in the government's policies than was anticipated," said Nussbaum. "What we're disappointed about is government hasn't held on to articulating clearly the links and opportunities of care for the environment and economic success and development."

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The government is fully committed to this being the greenest government ever. We are driving the shift to a low-carbon economy, and have an ambitious and well-funded programme of policies to protect and enhance our natural environment, which can be seen in the action the government has taken since May 2010. As we work to get the economy back on track, we will continue to ensure that green growth is the cornerstone of the recovery."

03:54:59 PM, Friday 27 January 2012 from Guardian