Internationally-acclaimed designer Tom Ford is set to become even more famous.

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It was announced that he will be dressing James Bond in the next movie in the long-running spy thriller franchise. Mr Ford worked with Quantum of Solace's costume designer Louise Frogley and provided made-to-measure tailored clothing and casual wear including evening wear, suits, shirts, knitwear, ties and accessories as well as exclusive eyewear worn by the James Bond character.

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Daniel Craig will play Bond for the second time, though fashionistas have noticed there was no mention of swimwear in today's announcement. This may indicate that Bond will not be reprising his iconic blue pants moment from the last film, Casino Royale.

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A disappointment for Johann Hari, who did make it onto the Pink List.

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The Independent columnist was involved in a fracas with Daniel Craig at an event last year.

Craig called him a "fucking fool" after Hari made the mistake of complimenting him on his physical appearance in Casino Royale. The actor was reported to be unhappy at constant references to his body as opposed to his equally impressive acting.

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Tom Ford now spends much of his time in London as a targeted global expansion plan falls into place. He is to open more than 100 free standing Tom Ford retail stores worldwide.

"I could not be happier to be dressing Daniel Craig in the next James Bond film," said Mr Ford.

"It is an honour to move forward with this iconic character and there is no better man to dress in the world than James Bond."

Tom Ford made his name designing for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent before launching his own brand three years ago.

I would like to quote Langan in relation to his only glimpse of the outside world- a small hole in the wall of his 'cell' that was embraced with a view of an apricot tree; "It kept me going, thinking about the outside world and English values that could be lost, like tea and sympathy and tolerance and basic humanity."

This is a man who has been locked up and psychologically tortured for 3 months, yet he still acknowledges basic English principles: sympathy, tolerance and basic humanity, and the fear that his situation could make him abandon them. It is a shame that a majority of English people are willing to throw these principles away when they are in the warmth, comfort and safety of their own homes and there is the slightest threat of a terrorist attack or they see a group of Polish workers on the way to work.

The article also led me to view the arrogance of those fighting the British in Afghanistan in their views of the West; "Mr C asked me once if it was true that western women married frogs. He had seen a children's fairytale and believed that it was true." This is not something confined to just a minority in Afghanistan. The rise in Islamophobia is fuelled by the fear and belief that all Muslim's want to do is destroy 'Western values' and end British lives. [I put commas around Western values, as i believe a majority of those in power in both Britain and America have no dignified values at all]. In reality, this belief is the upside-down version of the truth. In reality, the majority of those who follow the Islamic faith pose no harm to the West at all. There is however a very small minority of Islamic Fundamentalists who appear to want to (i say appear because really the 9/11 attack was not against the West but an attempt to polarise the people in the Middle East into either fundamentalism or secularism- helped afterwards by America's War on 'Error).

Johann Hari wrote a brilliant piece on the latest Big Brother and how fundamental and secularist Islam is clashing within the Big Brother house. The point of the article is to explain the reality of the current situation. Islam is not about killing as many people who disagree with you as possible, but at the same time, there are fundamentalists who believe it is. This debate tends to be forgotten by the right-wing media, which wrongly portrays Muslims as a threat. Hari suggests that this clash is finally an example of proper reality television. There are many other aspects of Hari's article that i could write on, yet to grasp the context of the debate you should read it yourself.

Judging by how some people are reacting to the threat posed by Fundamental Islam and their over the top reactions to immigration into this country, i would suggest that there is a growing sense of English (British) Fundamentalism growing. If they think that all Muslims are Fundamentalists, then it is safe to say that these English Fundamentalists are just as bad as the Islamic Fundamentalists they are afraid of.

To view the Guardian's article on Langan, click here.

To view the Johann Hari article, click here.

***********************

On a completely separate topic, here is another Langan quote; "I am alive. And I've realised that freedom is the air we breathe." Out of all the things i could say, all i will say is that if the air we breathe is true freedom, then irresponsible oil companies and Governments are clutching onto not only our freedoms, but the freedoms of the next generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that, and on and on. Why, therefore, aren't more people fighting for our own freedoms if not the freedoms of others?

Brendan Roberts: Adult stem cells effective and

valid way to save lives

Monday June 25, 2007

Johann Hari, in his article "Believers stonewall life-saving science", claims that science and religion are based on fundamentally contrasting ways of understanding our world.

How is this so when a United States survey in 1914 found that 42 per cent of US scientists believed in a personal God. And when 80 years later the same questions were posed to US scientists, 39 per cent said they believed in a personal God.

We should not forget the many Christian scientists who have helped shape history. While you surf the net, recall that John von Neumann, a Jewish man who converted to Catholicism, is responsible for the modern computer. When you next go to the doctor take the time to think of Louis Pasteur for discovering the germ theory.

When you next gaze at the stars, remember that Father Nicolaus Copernicus is responsible for discovering the sun-centred model of the universe. These Catholics have contributed greatly.

Hari says that faith in divine revelation is based on hallucination. But how can anyone deny the personal experience of millions who have experienced an encounter with their God when prayers are answered, whether through cures or by finding strength to cope with spirit-breaking situations?

The church is not against "life-saving science". It is only when it conflicts with the dignity of the person - including the most defenceless of society, the unborn - that the church speaks against a particular aspect of science.

Hari's support of embryonic stem-cell research over that of adult stem cell research defies what he calls science's strict empirical observation of the world. But the benefits of embryonic stem-cell research, if any, are temporary. They are known for causing tumours and the immune system can reject them. But adult stem-cell research breakthroughs are spectacular and lasting, including treatment for cancer, auto-immune diseases, and brain degenerative diseases.

Their main use is in regenerative medicine. Stem cells can assist tissues, muscles and even organs to recover from diseases; and help non-healthy cells to recover or even supply desperately needed cells.

Stem cells can come from various parts of the body, including bone marrow, hair follicles, umbilical cord blood, placentas and amniotic fluid.

In fact, bone marrow transplants have been happening for 40 years.

In the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers published their findings that the stem cells in fat can be cultured into muscle for organ repair.

A disadvantage of adult stem cells is that, unlike embryonic stem cells, they were not totipotent - they lacked the ability to become any type of cell if properly prepared.

However, especially with bone marrow cells, the potential for cultivating adult stem cells is narrowing this gap and some researchers are beginning to claim the same flexibility of adult stem cells.

Hari claims that Yale University scientists have been able to use human neural stem cells to make primates with severe Parkinson's disease walk and eat unaided. But he does not tell us that these are in fact adult stem cells.

Hollywood actors have been in the forefront of the battle for embryonic stem-cell research, but it is adult stem-cell research that has produced the really impressive results.

Dr Steven Gill, of the Sussex Centre for Genome Damage and Stability, used stem cells in a trial to treat the brains of five Parkinson's patients. After one year there was a 61 per cent increase in the activities on a "daily living" score.

Hari says embryonic stem-cell research is less costly and gets faster results.

Why does money become a such a factor in the debate? Do not the results produced outweigh the cost factor rather than pouring money into what may be a morally questionable practice?

Why is there such a deafening clamour for government money to go into the funding of embryonic stem-cell research? Does the answer reside in the embryonic stem-cell breakthroughs being able to be patented, as opposed to adult stem cells?

It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that adult stem cells are helping thousands of patients suffering from about 80 different diseases. In contrast, no lasting benefit has yet been reached with embryonic stem cells.

It is a bold and wise decision to limit federal funding on embryonic stem-cell research. It is time to put the energy into harnessing the superb potential of adult stem cells.

Major Lapses in Nuclear Security Are Routine
‘You reach out on the motorway and nuclear weapons are an arm’s length from you’

by Johann Hari
Do you know the story of the grizzly bear that nearly destroyed the world? It sounds like a demented fairytale — but it is true. On the night of 25 October 1962, when the Cold War was at its hottest and Kennedy and Krushchev’s fingers were hovering over the nuclear button, a tall, dark figure tried to climb over the fence into a US military installation near Duluth, Minnesota. A panicked sentry fired at the figure but it kept coming — so he sounded the intruder alarm. But because of faulty wiring, the wrong alarm went off: instead, the klaxon announcing an incoming Soviet nuclear warhead began its apocalyptic wah-wah. Everyone on the base had been told there would be no drills at a time like this. The ashen men manning the station went ahead: they began the chain reaction of retaliation against Moscow.

It was only at the last second that the sentry got through to the station. It was a mistake, he cried — just a bear, growling at the fence. If he had made that call five minutes later, you wouldn’t be reading this article now.

I have been thinking about that bear recently, because there has just been a string of startling security lapses in the British and American nuclear arsenals. In the past year alone, a truck carrying a fully-assembled nuclear weapon has skidded off the road in Wiltshire and crashed, while six nuclear warheads were lost by the US military for 36 hours.

A new documentary called Deadly Cargo, recently premiered in Glasgow, documents a simple and extraordinary fact: every week, fully assembled Weapons of Mass Destruction are driven along the motorways and byways of Britain. Britain’s nuclear submarines are up in Scotland, while the factories that need to test and replenish them are down in Reading — so they are shuttled between them all the time in large green trucks that are followed a half-mile behind by decontamination units. It slipped on ice and crashed not long ago.

The film shows how a group of brave protesters called NukeWatch have been able to figure out the exact route of the convoy and track it. One of them explains, “You reach out on the motorway and they’re an arm’s length from you. That’s how close the British public come to nuclear weapons.” If they could work it out, couldn’t other groups with uglier motives do the same?

Leaked documents from the Ministry of Defence show them fretting that an attack on the convoy “has the potential to lead to damage or destruction of a nuclear warhead within the UK” and “considerable loss of life”.

More amazingly still, Britain’s weapons do not have a secret launch code. They can be fired or detonated by the commander in charge of them simply by opening them up manually and turning some switches and buttons. Every other nuclear power has an authorisation code known only to the country’s leader, which has to be read out to the soldiers in charge of the weapon before it can be used. Not us. Whenever the British government has tried to introduce this basic safety procedure, the Navy has got huffy and refused to participate, saying it is “tantamount” to claiming their officers are not “true gentlemen”.

The Navy dismiss the risk of a hijacking, or a Doctor Strangelove situation where a navy commander goes nuts. But the latter has almost happened. In 1963, a US B-47 bomber crew guarding a nuclear bomb discovered that one of their colleagues had broken all the seals, removed all the safety wires, and turned on the pilot’s readiness switch and the navigator’s control switch on the nuclear bomb. The man seemed to be going through a bout of insanity.

In the US, an even-more startling nuclear lapse occurred last summer: bombs with the force of 60 Hiroshimas were simply lost by the military. On 29 August, a group of US airmen accidentally attached six nuclear warheads to their plane, mistaking them for unarmed cruise missiles intended for a weapons graveyard. They were then flown across the continental United States and left, unwatched by anyone, on an airstrip in Louisiana. Nobody even noticed they were gone for more than a day. This is not, it seems, a freak event: the Air Force’s inspector general found in 2003 that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year were failures. Yes, that’s half.

This is what we know is happening in relatively orderly and open societies. There have almost certainly been incidents in China and North Korea and Pakistan that we will never hear about — until the worst happens.

The dangers of any individual nuclear accident are, of course, very small — but small risks of massive death, accumulating over the 60 years of the nuclear age, suddenly don’t look so negligible any more. Those who campaign for a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons are often referred to as utopian, or naïve. In fact, it is utopian to believe we can carry on like this without an explosion sooner or later.

So it is disturbing that the number of nuclear weapons in the world may be about to dramatically increase. Not in Iran, where (thankfully) sanctions seem to be working, but in Russia and China. The Bush administration, backed by the British government, has been insisting for more than 20 years on building a “nuclear shield” that would, in theory, shoot down any incoming nuclear weapons before they struck the US and its allies. After more than $100bn of military-industrial bungs, the technology still doesn’t work, but they are pushing on with it anyway. Russia and China have been pleading for a treaty that would prevent it because they want to retain the existing balance of power — but the Bush administration has flatly refused.

The result? China and Russia are now saying they will significantly increase their nuclear weapon production. It is, they insist, the only way to ensure they would be able to punch through the US missile shield and so retain some parity with US power.

The more weapons, the more likely an accident — or worse. But when the world should be scaling down the number of nukes, the Bush administration is actually ensuring they are ramped up.

Almost unnoticed in the Presidential race, Barack Obama has proposed the US recommit itself to moving towards a world without nukes. This isn’t out-of-the-blue: his best work as a Senator has been trying to lock up Russia’s barely guarded old weapons — while Bush tried to slash the funding for it. Some 66 per cent of the US public support the zero-nukes goal. Yet Hillary Clinton has been bragging about her ability to “obliterate” Iran instead, while McCain has cheered on the Bush shield-madness. There is no popular movement to pressure them into sanity.

Without the careful multilateral dismantling of these weapons, thousands of them will remain scattered across the earth, waiting — waiting for an accident with a bear, or a hijacked convoy, or a flipped-out submarine commander. Precisely how many nuclear near-death experiences do you want to risk?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

©independent.co.uk

It is easier to write condescendingly from a position of perceived superiority than look at another culture or set of values objectively. And perhaps this sells better too.

This happens for at least two reasons. Firstly, there is the flawed belief that we are “developed”, as if development has a measurable and verifiable endpoint, and that “they” are “underdeveloped” by that concrete yardstick.

On a mundane level, the effete AA Gill regularly patronises other cultures and complains about foreign restaurant meals in his Sunday Times Magazine travel column.

The more dangerous side

But this type of arrogance has far more serious implications.

For example, Western academic arrogance perhaps reached its height in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History, in which he argued that capitalism was the end of the global development process. Indeed!

Frighteningly, this spectacular hubris has filtered into the present and pernicious neo-conservativism in America, and further down into the right-wing and “liberal” press here. But, of course, these beliefs have long been manifest in the United States' Brezinsky doctrine, a geopolitcal programme followed by successive presidents since the 1960s to impose the will, politics and economies of America on weaker countries.

Read anything on Iraq by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondentfor the Telegraph, and it tends to be about what “we” must do, or how our troops are doing, often without even attempting to justify those stories from “the other side”.

The Independent’s Johann Hari, the archetypal liberal apologist for the Iraq invasion, at first reserved his humanitarian bias for our ill-equipped troops, but not for the innocent people being bombed, or those still suffering the effects of sanctions.

Both of these pale in comparison to the Independent’s corpulant, intransigent Bruce Anderson, who rained down paternalistic judgement from afar about our duty to intervene, usually without considering the human impact on Iraqis or Afghanistanis, or the profits for the Anglo-American military industrial complex.

Unpeople

Orwell, that bottomless source of quotes, called those who fall outside the reporter’s remit the “unpeople” - our crimes against whom are so unpalatable, they are best ignored.

This theme has been taken up by journalists and academic mavericks like John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Harold Pinter, who are just as corruscating about the complacent Western Press as they are about the “democracies” it belongs to.

They also take the time and write at length to deal with foreign affairs fairly and comprehensively, even if they usually make comment and judgement.

George Monbiot

If you are looking for a reasoned and incisive comment on foreign development, globalisation, or even the Middle East conflicts, a good port of call is George Monbiot’s website or his artricles for the Guardian.

He is a fine journalist as his comments are less likely to be based on the received and unquestioned facts of Anderson’s armchair journalism, and his research tends to be more thoroughgoing, balanced and independently motivated.

A journalist should be an impartial and critical equal among equals, and whether a travel writer or war correspondent, they have a duty to respect other people and cultures.

The subject is overpopulation. Is our planet over-stuffed with human beings? Are we breeding to excess? These questions are increasingly poking into public debate, and from odd directions. Phillip Mountbatten – husband of the British monarch Elizabeth Windsor – said in a documentary screened this week: "The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really [that there are] too many people. It's a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it." He is not alone. A strange range of people have voiced the same sentiments over the past few months, from the Dalai Lama to Hu Jintao, from Conservative mayor Boris Johnson to Democratic Governor Bill Richardson.

They start by listing the sums, which are indeed startling. Every year, world population grows by 75 million people – equivalent to another Britain and Ireland whooshing fully-populated from the oceans. At the turn of the 18th century, there were 600 million people on earth. At the turn of this century, there were 6.6 billion. By the time I am in my sixties, there will be more than nine billion – at which point there will be more people alive simultaneously than in the first 17 centuries after Christ combined.

The overpopulation lobby say this will inevitably leave more and more people chasing after a diminishing amount of resources on an ecologically-ravaged planet. At their most pessimistic, they say human beings will, in the long sweep of planetary history, look like a big-brained version of a locust cloud. They eat everything in sight and multiply fifty-fold – until they have consumed everything, when they turn in desperation on each other, munch off their siblings' heads, and then fall out of the sky dead.

They say with a frown that this global swarming is driving global warming. How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions? Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?

Yet this subject seems to leech out all the dark toxins of environmentalism – a movement I believe is the most urgent and important in the world. There has always been an element of green thinking that viewed humans as a parasitic infestation, wrecking the Eden of planet earth. The philosopher John Gray calls our species "homo rapiens". The founder of Earth First!, Dave Foreman, called us "Humanpox" and wrote: "The Aids epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population... If [it] didn't exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent [it]."

If environmentalism sounds – or is – misanthropic, we will lose the argument. Most human beings will never think the world would be better off without us. Nobody thinks they are the surplus human being who should not have been born. These strident arguments hand a huge gift to the anti-greens, who always said we were anti-human beneath the surface.

It also looks like displacement. The places where population is growing fastest – sub-Saharan Africa, rural China and Bangladesh – have virtually no carbon emissions, and pitiful food consumption rates. The gap is so huge that to be responsible for as many gas emissions as one British person, a Cambodian woman would need to have 262 children. Can we really sit in our nice homes, with a fridge-full of food we will mostly chuck away and an SUV in the drive, and complain that she is the problem?

Once this gut-reaction has kicked in, I then think of the horrible history of overpopulation predictions. Most famously, the 18th century demographer Thomas Malthus said mass starvation was inevitable because population increases geometrically while food production grows arithmetically. He didn't anticipate the coming of the Industrial Revolution. His successors in the 1960s, like Paul Ehrich and the Club of Rome, similarly didn't see the Green Revolution that was galloping around the corner of history.

So it is tempting to say now that the overpopulation argument will smack into some new technological development. It's not quite true to say there is a diminishing amount of resources, because the genius of human beings is to find new ways to use what is there. Two centuries ago, nobody could have conceived that the sun's rays or the waves in the ocean were a resource to be used – but solar and tidal power make it so.

And yet, and yet ... why do my own arguments leave me echoing with doubt? A dark voice in my head says: you would accept that, to pluck an absurd number, 100 billion people would be too many. You don't think human genius is infinitely expansive; there is a limit to what it can solve. So isn't the question just where you draw the line? If 100 billion is too much, why not nine billion?

Hmm. You should always take on the best arguments of your opponents, not the worst. There are good people – a world away from the British royals or the human-hating fringes – who are sincerely concerned about population levels: people like Professors Chris Rapley and John Guillebaud. They argue that although the swelling billions are not now emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, they will see that we are doing it and will (totally understandably) want to join in the carbon bonfire.

But if this is a problem, is there a solution that isn't abhorrent? Some people seem to reach instinctively for authoritarian answers. The government of China has bragged that its "greatest contribution" to the fight against global warming has been its policy of punishing, imprisoning or sterilising women who have more than one child. Some environmentalists – a small minority – eye this idea jealously.

There is a far better way – and it is something we should be pursuing anyway. It is called feminism. Where women have control over their own bodies – through contraception, abortion and general independence – they choose not to be perpetually pregnant. The UN Fund For Population Activities has calculated that 350 million women in the poorest countries didn't want their last child, but didn't have the means to prevent it. We should be helping them by building a global anti-Vatican, distributing the pill and the words of Mary Wollstonecraft.

So after studying the evidence, I am left in a position I didn't expect. Yes, the argument about overpopulation is distasteful, often discussed inappropriately, and far from being a panacea-solution – but it can't be dismissed entirely. It will be easier for 6 billion people to cope on a heaving, boiling planet than for nine or 10 billion – and we will only get there by freeing women to make their own reproductive choices. To achieve this green goal, it's necessary to mix some oestrogen into the environmentalist palette.

* j.hari@independent.co.uk
* The Independent
* http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-are-there-just-too-many-people-in-the-world-828254.html

Johann Hari und Melanie Phillips fechten es aus.

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honestreporting Media BackSpin, 12. Mai 2008

Statt auf Fragen einzugehen beschimpft Johann Hari Honest Reporting.

Dazu Honest Reportings Antwort auf den britischen Kolumnisten.

Nachzulesen in: Hari versucht Honest Reporting in den Dreck zu ziehen.

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Übersetzung auf Anfrage.

Johann Hari antwortet auf unsere Kritik an seiner Kolumne letzte Woche.

Werden Leute wie Dershowitz, Phillips and Honest Reporting schriller, weil sie spüren könnten, dass ihnen das Argument ausgeht?

Er sollte im Spectator nachlesen.

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They were not straightforwardly bigoted: one single mum said she would vote BNP “if my kids weren’t mixed race.” Instead, they were angry and alienated, and the BNP seemed to them to be the sharpest needle to jab into the eye of the political process; as one fifty-something white woman said, “I just want to tell politicians to fuck off.”" -Johann Hari, The Independent Newspaper

What is Hari up to now? I love and hate Hari from The Indie paper, he either makes me exclaim in joy at his balls or just get pissed off at his book-smart 'yoof' way of life.

But what the heck-he's a good deal for the paper as he seems to be the only one that has the front to push the boundaries or stop droning on about unrealistic idealism.

So Hari has gone to investigate the plight and woes of the BNP. Nothing new and been done so many times before, so I'd understand why you wouldn't find this news worthy or of interest? But like most of Hari's work-it's never ultimately about the content but about the way h approaches the subjects manifesting an engaging story out of something so mundane and 'everyday'.

Ignore his sanctimonious slant and if this is news for you; Hari is giving you a brilliant opening into the somewhat in denial complexed minds of the angry, white and very working class in the Island that never was.

P.s How many bets that these bastards are all from Jewish origins from yearsss ago? I'll bet you now-the self hate of some Jews knows no boundaries...it's fucking East London for chrissake!

"But we also need to address the biggest worries of BNP voters. Most of them are anxious about immigration not because they don’t want different-looking people walking the streets, but because they feel it damages them, in three distinct ways: through housing, wages, and the unequal provision of public services.

Of course we have to start by debunking the Littlejohnian lies. No, asylum seekers are not “hosed down” with benefits: a single asylum seeker struggles by on forty-four quid a week. No, they are not put ahead of you in housing queues: some 90 percent of people in council houses were born in Britain, and only 5 percent each year go to recent arrivals. No, they don’t commit more crime: the Association of Chief Police Officers says so. But not all their concerns are based on myths pumped out by bigots; many are real, and legitimate."

More from here..

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think -– I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

Indem er auf gefälschte Zitate und Geschichtsrevisionismus baut, vergleicht Hari Israel mit Exkrementen. Dazu das neueste Communiqué von HonestReporting Großbritannien: Johann Haris übel riechender Gastkommentar.

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She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

* The Independent
* http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-israel-is-suppressing-a-secret-it-must-face-816661.html

On one hand, there is increasing professionalisation of the industry. Although I've met some journalists who look down on postgraduate NJTC and BJTC accredited courses, most new entrants are increasingly going down that route, either to find their first job or to make themselves more employable.

As a graduate of one of these courses, I learnt a hell of a lot that will stay with me no matter what media job I find myself working in. And unless you've already got yourself nicely set up with a journalism job, I'd recommend them to anybody serious about getting into the industry, especially the courses at Cardiff and City (and Falmouth for broadcasting as well).

However, at around five to six grand, these courses don't come cheap, and a career development loan is often the only option to fund yourself through it. Chances are you'll have done a degree beforehand as well, which comes with several more thousand in the way of debts.

Both postgrads and non-postgrads are then faced with low starting salaries, especially if they head regionally (which is usual - there aren't that many jobs with the nationals for a newly-qualified journo). I know one who started on £11k, while £13-£15k was the common starting salary for a high-trained skilled professional. Pay rises were infrequent.

Even if you skip the postgraduate phase, most media jobs require you to do a lot of unpaid work experience before they'll take you on. Again, living costs over this period mount up. You can rarely walk straight into journalism without plenty of work experience and/or training but it's difficult to balance the finances without income.

And, as Hari notes, there are a lot of would-be or junior-level journalists who simply give up because its not worth it financially. At some point you've got to become decide if journalism is going to pay the bills.

There's a few other aspects to factor in though. Journalism's one of those jobs that has been a surge in popularity and, as is inevitable, there's more would-be journalists than there are entry-level jobs so wages can remain low. For every trainee who passes on a low-paid position because of the salary, there'll be another three who'll bite the editor's hand off for a job.

[Of course some of this can be traced back to the government's ridiculously arbitrary target of 50% of school levers to university, which has hideously depressed wages in the graduate job market and reduced the quality of graduates on offer, especially in the general area of media But that's another complaint for another blog post.]

There is hope. The web provides an alternative way in, not necessarily through the concept of citizen journalists (which is a bit of a loose definition) but through blogging and fan sites and all sorts of similar online ventures.

For example: when I was about 8 or 9 I used to try and create my own newspaper using glue, folded over sheets of paper and crayons (I was a bit of a odd child in many respects, this being just one of them). Sadly there was only ever one copy produced, as I hadn't got access to a printing press, and the only computer was one of those old BBC machines with huge disc drives. Even sadder, nobody picked up on my front page scoop of "Fence being built in Gran's back garden".

But nowadays there's nothing to stop an equally odd kid setting up his own community newsletter online, sent out via email. He won't have to use crayons to illustrate a picture of his Gran's new fence - he can upload a picture via mobile phone, or if he's got access to some kit with video capabilities, a quick video report.

Now fast forward to the end of school. The old Press Gang idea will have changed somewhat. With wi-fi, Twitter, social media sites, and a whole host of Web 2.0 tools they'll be able to beak scoops at any time of the day on their websites and blogs, and won't have to worry about getting the whole thing printed and past the school authorities (naturally, it'll be available for download though).

Now if a teenager approached me with that on his CV already, I'd be pretty impressed. Here's somebody who wants to be a reporter, and knows and understands the web, and has potential. Ok, so they'd still have a lot to learn, and the unpaid work experience would naturally come into the equation, but it's still a hypothetical example of how you don't need to have money to enter journalism.

But back into the here and now, low pay is a huge issue for many of my ex-coursemates or friends from student journalism days. I can immediately think of around a dozen who've voiced ideas about leaving the industry because they're demoralised and simply can't afford to stick with it as a career, while others are freelancing every hour God sends outside of their job to get extra cash. And yes, a lot of them are talented and could make it to the very top, if they could afford it.

That's not to say its all gloom and doom. I know just as many who love what they do, and wouldn't dream of quitting, even if they're not exactly flushed with cash, while there's several others who've landed plum well-paid positions on regionals and nationals either on their first job or through sheer hard graft. But that has often involved a hand-to-mouth existence for the first couple of years in the latter case.

But Hari's wrong about one thing - they don't necessarily move to less-rewarding industries. Although I get twinges of nostalgia, and keep up writing and journalism when I can, I don't regret moving on from my reporting job into PR for one moment - it's a job with difference challenges but one that is no less enjoyable.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire.

Ouch! I take his point of course, I just wish he'd chosen to compare somewhere else with repressive, gay-hating homages to homophobia. Burnley, perhaps. Or Bolton.

I have read your opinion piece in the online edition of The Independent :

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-has-market-fundamentalism-had-its-day-798314.html

and I feel that, while well meaning, your comments may not be directed at the right target.

The present crisis in the world's financial markets cannot be unequivocably blamed on "market fundamentalism". It is not obvious at first, but the large financial institutions (linked closely to the central banks) are not themselves fundamentalists. For if they were, they would not be begging the government or the central banks (institutions of government) to rescue them at this time. They are also not what we might call institutions of the free market, of which profit, but also loss is a fundamental aspect.

Don't believe my word, this is what Alan Greenspan is saying:

"To the extent that there is a central bank, that is not a free market; and most people call it 'regulation'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x56MpWZh88s

If these bad lenders would be allowed to pay for their mistakes (go bankrupt, or shrink their operations), then they can't be called institutions of the free market. "Moral hazard" is often mentioned and real in such a case. Financial institutions have been working on the assumption that they have a lender of last resort and a buyer of last resort. As such, they have been more reckless than otherwise in awarding loans and managing the capital with which they are entrusted.

On the premise of saving the financial markets, the central banks (the US Federal Reserve in particular) have sought to divert resources from other parts of the economy by awarding preferential credit to these loss-stricken companies. In this way, they are pulling away productive capital from elsewhere and pouring it into the Wall Street and the other financial centers.

So not only do we have a massive misallocation of resources from the mortgage crisis, capital is still driven into these proven failed ventures. Instead of being "market fundamentalists" and letting the dice fell where they may, central banks are taking an active role in regulating the markets.

We may disagree about the benefits or shortcomings of markets, but we cannot attribute this crisis on markets per se. Instead, we should look at the non-market forces coming to play and take them into account as well.

Please refer to this little clip for a more down-to-earth explanation of the crisis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM

I hope the above makes sense and I'm looking forward
to your input.

Yours Sincerely,
XXX

With the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., conservatives have been eulogizing him as a pivotal figure in the history of their movement. President Bush declared, "His legacy lives on in the ideas he championed and in the magazine he founded -- National Review."

Not exactly. As Buckley headed into his final years, he became vehemently opposed to the crusading, neoconservative stance that the younger generation at National Review adopted in championing the Iraq War. Indeed, both Buckleys, William F. and his brilliantly talented son Christopher, became acidulous critics of President Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney. The elder Buckley declared that if Bush were serving in a parliamentary democracy, he would have to resign, if not impeached. And Christopher, writing recently in the Washington Monthly, noted that he hopes the GOP loses in 2008: "Who knew, in 2000, that "compassionate conservatism" meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief?"

What lies behind this disenchantment? A book that has not received the attention it deserves, and that goes a long way toward explaining why conservatism has become shipwrecked, is Jeffrey Hart's recent history of the National Review, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. Hart, a longtime contributor to the magazine, makes two important points. The first point is that Buckley wasn't a radical conservative. He didn't believe in trying to destroy the Eastern Establishment; instead, he wanted to reform it. Hart's second, and related, point was that Buckley's devout Catholicism meant that he shunned evangelical Christianity. Buckley believed in hierarchy and tradition and authority, not in personal revelation. He was no fan of the southern evangelicals who wanted to carry on their own little crusade to renew America. Hence the distaste among older, Catholic conservatives such as Buckley and Hart for George W. Bush. According to Hart, Bush "a southern evangelical and moral authoritarian," has championed policies based on a belief that "many moral issues [are] within the sphere of government." Unconservative, in other words.

But what Buckley hated most of all was the rise of neoconservatism within the GOP. (something I also touch upon in today's Los Angeles Times). Buckley didn't believe in a Wilsonian crusade that consisted of fighting wars to create peace. Instead, he viewed such bellicosity as a recipe for another Vietnam, which is what Iraq has become. As Buckley fell out of step with the movement he had helped create, he himself was treated as though had lost it, as the British writer Johann Hari has shown, on a National Review cruise last summer. Buckley's sin was to chastise Norman Podhoretz for clinging to the delusion that the Iraq War was about weapons of mass destruction.

No, Buckley never became a (gasp!) liberal. On the contrary, I suspect that his politics are, in many ways, most closely carried on by the American Conservative, which is published by Patrick J. Buchanan--and whom Buckley essentially expelled from the mainstream conservative movement on grounds of anti-Semitism. But that's another story for a different day.

For now, it's enough to note that Buckley deserves laurels not simply for his elegant flair and tolerant temperament, but also his contempt for radical ideologues on the right--the unhinged types who are now whining that John McCain isn't conservative enough because he has the temerity to recognize that global warming is actually taking place and needs to be stopped. Or who, as the indispensable Spencer Ackerman shows in the Washington Independent, are using an organization called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to sponsor a spinoff called Defense of Democracies to lambaste Democrats for not supporting Bush on spying wiretaps. In other words, a neoconservative organization supposedly devoted to supporting democracy is subverting it in America itself.

These are the kinds of zany ideological excesses that Buckley ultimately recoiled at. He didn't try to edit reality. He lived in it. It's something that conservatives of whatever stripe might want to think about emulating before they charge off on another misbegotten crusade.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.

You can check the speed of your internet connection here.

India's definition of broadband
India’s defines Broadband differently from the rest of the world. Broadband here means a connection that’s at a minimum of 256 kbps (usually around 100-150) and a maximum of 2mbps. Here's a comparison with the rest of the world:

The 2-mbps connection here is more expensive than in other countries. Another comparison:

The recent disruption of undersea cables
The breakdown in an inter-nation undersea cable network near Egypt last week has made things worse. India apparently had to suffer a 50-60 percent cut in bandwidth. But yesterday I read more bad news. Another undersea Internet cable was damaged in the Middle East, in addition to the two other lines cut earlier. This time the Internet Service Providers' Association, is saying that it's going to affect capacity…but at the same time they are saying everything is under control!

What's the future for India?
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has promised that the definition of broadband will change (to a higher speed). The need for investment is being felt keenly as the demand for the internet in small towns is rising beyond anyone's expectations.

Poor connectivity has affected not just call centers, but also e-learning, e-shopping, telemedicine and e-governance. Not to mention the gaming business.

But laying optic fibre cable is a high investment business...and companies are preferring to invest in mobile infrastructure, which is far cheaper and gives quicker returns. It's a long journey ahead for India...

Future of the internet in the world
There are various opinions on this.
1. A Pew survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows that a majority believe that the internet will create an increasingly flat world.

2. There are those who are seriously worried about the ability of the internet to sustain itself. In December 2007 Eurescon wrote about a possibility of an impending slow-down or internet crash in Europe by 2010 due to "ignoring the limits of today’s internet".

3. Early last year Google warned that the "growth in video downloads could create an internet traffic jam." In fact there were reports last year of user experience in downloading videos having decreased.

4. A Nemertes research report published last year "on the ability of Internet infrastructure to cope with burgeoning demand, warns that usage could outstrip network capacity both in North America and worldwide as early as 2010." This study has been a first of it's kind and estimates that a global investment of $137 billion is required to improve broadband access, just to stop services declining.

In the U.S. alone it's predicted that 42 billion to $55 billion is needed to match demand with capacity and this figure is in addition to the $72 billion service providers are already planning to invest.

Today people use bandwidth not just for videos, but also for voice, streaming and interactive video. Mobiles using internet are adding to the burden.

So does this mean that the internet could simply crash one fine day? Not everyone thinks so

5. The Save the Internet Blog says that Internet companies want money and control and research such as the above is motivated.

6. The latest on this was sent to me by Axinia, at the right time, when I was already penning this post. It is an article written by a British journalist Johann Hari just a few days ago and he predicts some dark days ahead.

The massive corporations that provide broadband own the physical highways of the internet: the wires and cables and switches along which web pages travel before they hit your screen. They have been lobbying in the US and Europe for permission to turn this into a two-lane motorway, with different speeds according to how much you can pay.

So if you pay a lot, you get the speed you want, but if you are an unknown blogger, go get stuck in a traffic jam! I guess we in India are lucky, because we are used to it!

This two lane highway may never come into existence as resistance is expected, particularly from people who lean to the left, like Hari himself. This is what he says:

As the internet reshapes our minds and souls in ways we are only beginning to comprehend, we have to fight to keep it equally open to everyone. Otherwise, Tomorrow's World will become a corporate-controlled world, with inequality built into the cables that connect us all.

I am not sure whether Hari's dream can work though. Someone's got to pay.

(Tables are from Business World, the photo of the PC is by me and the photo of Johann Hari is from the BBC)

Related Reading: Internet Advertising to grow in India
High growth in PC ownership in India
E-shopping in India on the upswing
Internet marriage bureaus thriving in India
India's Internet woes

Social Bookmarks:

Ah, Christmas time, mistletoe and wine ... As we begin to drink ourselves into a gleeful Yuletide coma, our minds whizz through an array of reassuring festive customs – cheese-soaked Cliff Richard lyrics, mince pies (why? why?), and giving to charity. Some 40 per cent of our charitable giving takes place in the month when the snow should fall and the turkeys should die. This week alone, millions of people will give money to help the poorest people alive – and from the barrios of Latin America to the mud-towns of sub-Saharan Africa, I've seen how this cash keeps people alive.

But as we give money to help the world's poor on to their feet, this month the European Union – acting on demands from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – is kicking millions of them back to the ground. We are in the middle of a trade negotiation that is undoing our charity and setting great swaths of Africa up to fail.

The story of how this came to pass begins 50 years ago, as the European colonial powers were being forced to leave the African colonies they had pillaged and ruined. In a parting spasm of guilt, we Europeans gave our ex-colonies a handful of special trade deals. We agreed, for example, to let Kenya sell us its green beans without charging any tariffs or taxes. Over time, these niches collectively became some of the most thriving parts of Africa's economy, employing hundreds of millions of people. These special deals continued uncontested until the year 2000 – when the WTO demanded they be axed forever, by the deadline of 1 January 2008.

Why? The WTO was following a tightly-prescribed and blinkered ideology. Since the 1980s, it has enforced the market fundamentalist belief that all tariffs, all subsidies and all protections for poor countries are "market distortions" that need to be abolished. Never mind that every rich country protected its own industries while they were taking their baby-steps. Never mind that the electorates in poor countries democratically oppose this premature crow-barring open of their economies. The WTO – backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – demands they must go, for all but the impossibly weak.

The practical effects of forcing this ideology down the throats of poor countries has been plain for decades now. It kills. Look at Malawi's recent experience. The country's soil has been depleted and corroded by desperate overuse, so the government adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The country's desperately poor farmers were given sacks of fertiliser at a third of the real cost, because without it their plants couldn't grow. Then the market fundamentalists of the World Bank arrived, and announced this was a "market distortion" that had to stop if Malawi wanted to continue receiving loans and aid. So the subsidies were ended – and the crops began to fail in feeble soil, en masse, year after year. The country descended into famine. Mothers watched their children starve.

Then, two years ago, the Malawian government finally had enough. It told the World Bank and IMF and WTO to stick their conditions and their loans, and began to subsidise fertiliser once again. The result? Malawi is now the single biggest seller of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa, and so successful it is actually giving hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. The nightmare of famine has been replaced by an embarrassment of plenty, showing once again that mixed social democratic economies work best.

We all know about the famines caused by communism – Stalin's starvation of Ukraine, Mao's 30 million murdered by collectivisation, and Mengistu's Ethiopian sequel to them both. But who knows about these, the famines of market fundamentalism?

And yet this month, the WTO has forced the EU to ram this failed ideology further into Africa. For hardline free traders, there is no difference between the poor world protecting its feeble industries and the rich world protecting its fattened lobbies. They demand there has to be parity between the two – as if they are competing as equals. So they have ruled that if the African countries are to be allowed to retain their protected access to European markets, they have to give something equally precious in return: they have to "liberalise" their economies by a whopping 80 per cent, allowing EU goods in untariffed and untaxed. Only the very poorest are exempt.

This leaves African countries with a vicious dilemma. If (say) Kenya wants to save its green beans and flower-growing industries – whose protected export to Europe employs millions – it has to now allow European industrial goods to flood into their country in return. This will crush any attempt to develop an industrial base of its own, because there is no way fledgling Kenyan companies can compete with the swish products churned out cheap by Europe. This isn't even a Hobson's choice, it's Sophie's choice – which of your children do you condemn to economic death? The farmers, or the industrial workers?

As if that was not harsh enough, the victim-countries are also being forced rapidly to abolish their tariffs on incoming European goods. For Ghana and Cape Verde, this is 20 per cent of their income – more than their entire health budget.

A few African countries are independent enough of Europe to resist. Nigeria has oil, so it can say no. South Africa has enough trade with other developed parts of the world to hold out. But most African countries have been forced – with the gun of being locked out of European markets after the 1 January deadline at their heads – to give in and sign. Tetteh Hormeku, one of Africa's most distinguished trade campaigners, says: "The EU is a bandit in international negotiations. It is no different to the Americans. The Americans say, 'Give me your beer, or I'll shoot you.' The Europeans say, 'Give me your beer, it is for your own good.'"

The result will be more poverty and more hunger – and you will end up guiltily sending some cash to the victims in Christmases to come. But it makes no sense to give to charity this way and yet not campaign against the acts of economic mutilation by our own governments that make that charity necessary.

I'm not saying you shouldn't give to charity, but it's not enough. We need a global movement, building on Make Poverty History, to replace this WTO-led market fundamentalism of free trade. The alternative is fair trade: an end to subsidies and tariff walls protecting the rich, but a careful extension of them to the poor, where their governments ask for it. Now that would make for a very merry Christmas present – instead of the stinking package Europe has left under Africa's bare and battered tree.

* The Independent
* http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/johann_hari/article3280470.ece

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election – and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the 18th century, and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America's founding fathers decided not to introduce a system where US presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, DC, and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the electoral college. This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 state-wide "electors", who then gather six weeks after the election to pick the President.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of electoral college votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn't know much about out-of-state figures, and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state electoral college votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be President. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and – most tragically for the world – in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the electoral college among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favour. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its electoral college votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 per cent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 per cent of California's electoral votes; if 51 per cent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 per cent of Texas' electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this – but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California's electoral college votes – and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a state-wide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California's electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big state-wide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state's 54 electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this was being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California's forgotten Republicans would be represented in the electoral college, and so would Texas's forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind the campaign. It was set up by Charles "Chep" Hurth III – a Republican donor to Rudy Giuliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk – a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was co-ordinated by Kevin Eckery – a Republican consultant. Its funds were provided by Paul Singer – a Republican billionaire and one of Rudy Giuliani's biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore – who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giuliani. Seeing a pattern yet?

Indeed, this bias is so blatant that the state Republican Party itself has now chipped in $80,000 (£39,000) to the campaign. Of course, the campaign is not marketing itself as a Republican rigging escapade. They insist: "This initiative is not about helping any one party or candidate. It simply ensures that every vote cast in our state counts in the electoral college." But the best they can do to provide "balance" is to point to the fact that one of the men who has given them $20,000, Edward Allred, once also gave $2,300 to the campaign of Democratic contender Bill Richardson. Wow.

There is a real risk they could succeed. They are close to getting the number of signatures they need to secure a referendum in June. (The Los Angeles Downtown News claims to have witnessed signature-gatherers offering homeless people food in return for signing.) The turnout for the referendum is expected to be extremely low, because the state-wide primaries usually held on that date have been moved forward to February. So the Republicans only have to activate a small part of their base to push it through – and they have the cash to do it. California dreamin', on such a winter's day.

The Democrats in response shouldn't be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible electoral college. There is an alternative way to reform it – one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realised there was another way. The Constitution only requires that each state must "appoint" its presidential electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct". That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state simply to commit its delegates to the electoral college to vote 100 per cent for the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would render the electoral college a forgotten technicality. It's very revealing that when the California state senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, with the support of his party.

It shows that the Republicans' rhetoric of wanting "fairness" and "equal representation" in California is a honeyed lie. They want a system that retains their power, even if it subverts the will of the people. It risks becoming Florida Part II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the polling booth... Fasten your seatbelts – it's going to be a bumpy election.

* The Independent
* http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/johann_hari/article3204034.ece

By Johann Hari in Birao, Central African Republic
ICH
10/07/07 "The Independent"

For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world's most notorious killing fields.

I first heard whispers of this war in March, when newspapers reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far north-east of the CAR. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in Central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers here – so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France's forgotten war.

On the battlefield - Birao

I am standing now on its latest battlefield, looking out over abandoned mud streets streaked with ash. The city of Birao is empty and echoing, for the first time in 200 years. All around are miles of burned and abandoned homes, with the odd starved child scampering through the wreckage. What were all these buildings? On one faded green sign it says Ministry of Justice, on a structure reduced to a charcoal husk. In the market square, the people who have returned are selling a few scarce supplies – rice and manioc, the local yeasty staple food – and talking quietly. At the edges of the town, there are African soldiers armed and trained by the French, lolling behind sandbags, with machine guns jutting nervously at passers-by. They are singing weary nationalist anthems and dreaming of home.

To get here, you have to travel for eight hours on a weekly UN flight that carries eight passengers at most, and then ride on the back of a rusting flat-top truck for an hour along ravaged and broken roads. It is hard to know when you have arrived, because you are greeted only by emptiness and silence. What has happened here? Sitting amid the mud and dust and sorrow, I find Mahmoud, one of the 10 per cent of Birao's residents who have returned to the rubble.

He is a thin-faced 45-year-old farmer, and explains, in a low, slow voice, how his home town came to this. "I woke up for morning prayers on 4 March and there was gunfire everywhere. We were very frightened so we stayed in the house and hoped it would stop. But then in the early afternoon my brother's children came running to our house, screaming and crying. They told us the Forcés Armées Centrafricanes [Faca – the army trained and equipped by the French, on behalf of their friendly neighbourhood strongman, President François Bozize] had gone into their house. They wouldn't calm down and explain. So I ran there, and I saw my brother on the floor outside, dead. His wife explained they had forced their way in and rounded him up, along with three men who lived nearby. They took them out on to the street and shot them one by one in the head."

Mahmoud's friend, Idris, lived nearby, and feared he, too, would be shot. He says now: "We could see the villages burning and the children were screaming and really scared, so we ran two kilometres out into the jungle. From there we could see our whole city on fire. We fled along the river and stayed out there. We ate fish, but there weren't many. Some days we couldn't catch anything and we starved. The children were so terrified. Still, when they hear a loud noise, they think there are guns coming and they start shaking." Idris looks off into the distance and continues: "On the fourth day, we saw the French planes come. They each had six rockets that they fired. The explosions were loud. We don't know what they were targeting, or why. Then the French soldiers arrived." A military truck filled with French soldiers rumbles by not long after, its tanned troops wearing designer sunglasses and a "why am I here?" anxiety.

As Mahmoud and Idris talk it gets dark, and a suffocating blackness and silence falls on the city. There is no electricity and no moonlight. They explain in this blackness that the French-backed troops began firing and the French military began bombing in March for one reason: the desperate locals had begun to rise up against President Bozize, because he had done nothing for them. People here were tired of the fact that "there are no schools, no hospitals, and no roads". "We are completely isolated," they explain. "When it rains, we are cut off from the world because the roads turn to mud. We have nothing. All the rebels were asking was for government help." As I stumble around Birao, I hear this every time: the rebels were simply begging for government help for the hungry, abandoned people. Even the bemused French soldiers and the Bozize lackeys sent to the area admit this privately. Yet the French response was with bombs against the rebels' pick-up points. Why? What is there here that they want?

I look out towards the jungle and realise many of Birao's residents are still hiding out there, risking the wild beasts. In the similarly burned-out areas in the north-west, I drive out into the jungle with Unicef and find these clusters of starving families scattered everywhere. In one cleared patch, I find a group of four men with their wives and mothers, clearing an area of ground with their bare hands where they will try to plant peanuts. They are living in handmade huts and set traps to catch mice to eat. Ariette Nulguhom is cradling her eight-month-old grandson with his distended little belly and praying he will survive another night. She tells me: "He's been sick for a long time. We tried to get him to a nurse but there aren't any. We think it is malaria but there is no medicine here. We don't know what will happen... We are all weak and feverish. We're exhausted because we work all day, every day. I have not eaten for days now." When they left behind their houses, they left behind access to clean water, electricity, and medicine. When the Faca burned those homes, they burned away the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries for these families, too.

This is a forgotten corner of a forgotten country. Birao lies and dies in the far north-east of the Central African Republic. CAR itself has a population of just 3.8 million, spread across a territory bigger than Britain's, landlocked at the exact geographical heart of Africa. It is the least-reported country on earth. Even the fact that 212,000 people have been driven out of their homes in this war doesn't register on the global radar. In Birao, I realise I am too close to the immediate horror to find the deeper explanations for this war. I only begin to uncover the origins of this story when I stumble across a very rare find in the CAR – an old man.

A country of children - Paoua

In the CAR, you have beaten the odds if you live to be 42. There are times when this seems like a country of children, swarming around with guns and hardened laughs, without an adult in sight. So when I see Zolo Bartholemew limping past the wreckage of another burned-out town – this time in the distant north-west, outside the city of Paoua – he seems like a mirage. He has no teeth and a creased face, and when I ask, he does not know his age. But he remembers. He remembers the tail-end of the first time the French were here – and why.

"I watched my parents forced to work in the fields when I was a child," he says in Sango, the local language. "When they got tired, they were whipped and beaten and made to go faster. It was constantly like this." The French flag was first hoisted in the heart of Africa on 3 October 1880, seizing the right bank of the Congo for the cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – for the white man. The territory was swiftly divided up between French corporations, who were given the right effectively to enslave the people, like Zolo's parents, and force them to harvest its rubber. This rubber was processed into car tyres for sale in Paris and London and New York. A French missionary called Father Daigre described what he saw: " It is common to meet long files of prisoners, naked and in a pitiful state, being dragged along by a rope round their necks. They are famished, sick, and fall down like flies. The really ill and the little children are left in the villages to die of starvation. The people least affected often killed the dying, for food."

Zolo nods when I mention this. "When the whites were here, we suffered even more," he says. "They forced us to work. We were slaves."

One horrified French administrator wrote in the 1920s that the locals reacted to being enslaved by the corporations by becoming "a troglodyte, subsisting wretchedly on roots until he starves to death, rather than accept these terrible burdens". Areas that had "only a few months ago been rich, populous and firmly established in large villages" became, he wrote, "wasteland, sown with dilapidated villages and deserted plantations".

But in the 1950s, men like Zolo rose and refused to be enslaved. "We followed Boganda," he says. Barthélemy Boganda was born in a Central African village near here in 1910, and, as a child, he saw his mother beaten to death by the guards in charge of gathering rubber for a French corporation. He rose steadily through the Catholic priesthood, married a French woman, and, quite suddenly, became the leader of the CAR's pro-democracy movement. He would begin his speeches to the French by introducing himself as the son of a polygamous cannibal, and then lecture them on the values of the French Revolution with a fluency that left them stunned and shamed. He crafted a vision of a democratic Africa beyond tribe, beyond race and beyond colonialism. He was passionate about the need for a plurality of political parties, a free press, and human rights. He rhapsodised about his vision of a United States of Africa, linking together the countries of Central Africa into a USA Mk II.

"And they killed him," Zolo says, shaking his head and kicking at the earth beneath his feet. On 29 March 1959, not long after the French era of direct rule had ended, President Boganda's plane was blasted out of the air. The French press reported that there had been "suspicious materials " found in the remains of the fuselage – but on the orders of the French government, the local investigation was abandoned. The French installed the dictator David Dacko in his place. He swiftly shut down Boganda's democratic reforms, brought back many French corporations, and reintroduced their old system of forced labour, rebranding it "village work". French rule over the CAR – the whippings Zolo remembers – did not end with "independence". It simply mutated, into a new and slippery form, and it is at the root of the current war.

But the clues to this lie fa