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Cuttings and links to other online information.
Congo's Tin Soldiers
Jonathan Miller reports on the thousand of tin miners slaving to bring the raw materials that keep the world's electronics turning. (Channel 4, 30 Jun 2005)
Eye of the storm
...Shooting Dead Man's Chest – the third Pirates instalment set for release next year – back-to-back in the Bahamas and West Indies with a combined budget of $300 million, involved more than 600 people.
...Charles Williams, chief of the 3500 remaining natives, told the Los Angeles Times he was furious the film perpetuated the myth that the Caribs were cannibals, stating: "Today, Disney wants to popularise that stigma one more time, this time through film, and film is a powerful tool for propaganda." (Brisbane Courier Mail, 29 Jun 2006)
Terror courts are illegal but Guantanamo will stay open
America's Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to President George W Bush's war on terrorism yesterday by ruling that military tribunals to try suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp are illegal. (Telegraph, 30 Jun 2006)
Jails almost at bursting point
The prison population in England and Wales surged to a record level yesterday, raising fears of a worsening overcrowding crisis.
The number of inmates in the 140 jails stood at 77,865, a few dozen more than the previous high set in November. (Telegraph, 30 Jun 2006)
Palestinian PM condemns Gaza raid
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya has denounced Israel's offensive in Gaza as an attempt to bring down the Hamas-led government. (BBC, 30 Jun 2006)
$37bn debt cut for poor nations
The World Bank is preparing to cancel billions of dollars of debt owed to it by many of the world's poorest nations. (BBC, 30 Jun 2006)
Cost-cutting strategy blows budget by £6m
A controversial project to cut expenditure and streamline services in a council's bungling housing department has cost millions more than planned.
Lambeth's "housing reframing project" was supposed to save the authority £11million within two years of implementation.
The move saw neighbourhood housing offices closed in favour of a central call centre to deal with tenants' enquiries.
The aim was to improve the delivery of repairs to council tenants' homes and to provide a more efficient service at a lower cost.
But the results of an internal audit leaked to the South London Press show the housing department has overspent by more than £6million in implementing the project. (South London Press, 30 Jun 2006)
The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale
A resurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of "benevolent empire". It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. (Guardian, 28 Jun 2006)
PC users 'want greener machines'
Consumers are willing to pay up to an extra £108 ($197) for a PC containing fewer chemicals, a survey has found. (BBC, 26 Jun 2006)
Superstores face block on longer Sunday hours
Ministers are preparing to reject plans to allow supermarkets, garden centres and other large stores to extend opening hours on Sundays, after Labour MPs threatened a revolt. (Times, 24 Jun 2006)
We'll beat you again, Afghans warn British
Many great armies have rolled through Maiwand. Over the centuries Persians, Moghuls and Russians have traversed the ramshackle hamlet on the sunbaked plains of western Kandahar. But nobody has forgotten the British. (Guardian, 26 Jun 2006)
DConsumer group slams hidden promotion of drugs
An international consumer group called for governments on Monday to crack down on drugmakers marketing practices, which it said were leaving patients misinformed about the benefits of medicines.
London-based Consumers International said there was a "shocking" lack of publicly available information about the $60 billion (33 billion pounds) a year spent by pharmaceutical companies on drug promotion.
"The pharmaceutical industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing as it does on research and development, yet consumers know next to nothing about where this money is going," Richard Lloyd, director general of Consumers International, said. (Scotsman, 26 Jun 2006)
Family life faces State 'invasion'
Government surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, will be condemned tomorrow as a Big Brother system.
It was revealed this year that more than half a million children had been entered on a DNA database created to record known offenders, even though many had never been charged with an offence. (Telegraph, 26 Jun 2006)
Local food flourishes after supermarket ban
Local food producers and shops around a Suffolk town have flourished since proposals for a Tesco superstore were rejected, a report says.
Planning permission for the store outside Saxmundham, 20 miles from Ipswich, was refused by Suffolk Coastal council in 1997 after a report concluded that there was no retailing need for a large new superstore in the district. (Telegraph, 26 Jun 2006)
DConsumer group slams hidden promotion of drugs
An international consumer group called for governments on Monday to crack down on drugmakers marketing practices, which it said were leaving patients misinformed about the benefits of medicines.
..."The pharmaceutical industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing as it does on research and development, yet consumers know next to nothing about where this money is going," Richard Lloyd, director general of Consumers International, said. (Scotsman, 26 Jun 2006)
Call to put whites back in charge of 'unhealthy' Aborigines
A senior minister yesterday recommended installing white administrators in some of Australia's more troubled Aboriginal communities, re-igniting argument about a problem that has divided the country for decades. (Telegraph, 22 Jun 2006) (!)
Cold hand of KGB haunts oil-rich wasteland
Even by the desolate standards of Siberia, Nefteyugansk is a forbidding place. Last winter temperatures sank as low as minus 58 Celsius.
... [T]his stretch of Siberian marsh is now perhaps Russia's most valuable piece of real estate. Sitting on some of the planet's largest oil reserves, it has also become central to President Vladimir Putin's plans to turn Russia into a global power once more. (Telegraph, 22 Jun 2006)
Met police chief defiant over job
Metropolitan police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has insisted that "accounts of my demise are premature".
... The Forest Gate affair and last year's shooting dead by police of innocent Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes have resulted in calls for Sir Ian's resignation. (BBC, 21 Jun 2006)
Ministers accused of 'mob rule' agenda
Downing Street yesterday backed further away from new laws on informing the public about paedophiles after the Government was accused of driving the country towards "mob rule" with a populist approach to law and order. (Telegraph, 21 Jun 2006)
Ex-White House man faces jail for corruption
A former White House official was facing up to 20 years in prison yesterday after he became the first victim of America's biggest corruption scandal in two decades. (Telegraph, 21 Jun 2006)
Battle of the boundary
Tenants who live on the first ever council estate built in the UK are at the centre of a fight to stop it being transferred to a new landlord.
The Boundary estate, in Shoreditch, east London was opened in 1900. (Guardian, 21 Jun 2006)
Campaign of the week
...Today is the Women's Institute's National Day of Action on packaging, but we don't think any supermarkets are likely to be left in embers. Nevertheless, there are some pretty stern tickings-off taking place right now. Many WIs have been saving their packaging rubbish for weeks, and are taking bags of the stuff back to their local supermarket to dump, pointedly (although probably without spilling any and making a nasty mess) at the feet of the staff. (Guardian, 20 Jun 2006)
Homosexual's killers given 28-year terms
The Common Serjeant of London, Judge Brian Barker, said at the Old Bailey yesterday that it was likely they would serve longer than that minimum term before being considered for parole.
...Thomas Pickford, 25, unemployed, and Scott Walker, 33, a decorator, admitted murdering Jody Dobrowski, 24, from Stroud, Glos, in an area known for homosexual pick-ups. Mr Dobrowski suffered 33 injuries from punches and kicks and police said his face was "a swollen and bloody pulp". (Telegraph, 17 Jun 2006)
The battle of Huda Ghalia - who really killed girl's family on Gaza beach?
Heartrending pictures of 10-year-old Huda Ghalia running wildly along a Gaza beach crying "father, father, father" and then falling weeping beside his body turned the distraught girl into an instant icon of the Palestinian struggle even before she fully grasped that much of her family was dead. (Guardian, 17 Jun 2006)
Number of prisoners given life doubles in 10 years
The number of prisoners being jailed for life has nearly doubled in the past 10 years and sentences served are now more than 50% longer than they were when first introduced, despite claims that judges are being too lenient. (Guardian, 17 Jun 2006)
Urban population to overtake country dwellers for first time
More people will live in cities than in the countryside next year, for the first time in the history of the human race, a UN report said yesterday - and a growing number of them will be living in slums. (Guardian, 16 Jun 2006)
Terror raid family accuse police of slur over cash discovery
Relations between the police and the Muslim family targeted during the ill-fated anti-terrorist raid in Forest Gate fell to a new low yesterday as details were leaked of how officers found £38,000 cash on their property. (Guardian, 16 Jun 2006)
Free garden waste collection comes at a price
Hundreds of thousands of tons of garden waste are being driven around the streets unnecessarily every year because councils have an incentive to collect it rather than promote home composting. (Telegraph, 14 Jun 2006)
Ruling on 'tortured' Britons' right to sue
Britain's highest court has ruled that four men who were imprisoned and allegedly tortured in Saudi Arabia do not have the right to sue their foreign captors. (Telegraph, 14 Jun 2006)
Neighbouring's golden age ... and the way we live now
Neighbourliness is one of those hazy concepts that seems both too trivial and old-fashioned to matter - like manners or not swearing. To ask whether it is in decline, or whether it might be a matter for serious social debate can seem sentimental. But even in the globalised, consumerist, privatised world of modern Britain, neighbourliness is far from an obsolete concern. (Guardian, 14 Jun 2006)
Migrant amnesty 'not ruled out'
The prospect of an amnesty for illegal immigrants has been raised by the new minister in charge of immigration. (BBC, 14 Jun 2006)
Police 'stormed in like burglars'
The sister of two men arrested after an anti-terror raid said armed police "stormed in" the east London property without identifying themselves.
Humeya Kalam told BBC News: "To us they were just burglars, to us it was pitch dark, just lights and guns everywhere".
Brothers Abul Koyair, 20, and Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the shoulder, were released without charge a week after the raid in Forest Gate. (BBC, 13 Jun 2006)
Young people's protests are easy to mock. But ignore them at your peril
On Wednesday March 29, as Hispanics throughout the US took to the streets to protest punitive immigration legislation, the Spanish teacher Hilda Sotelo was called into the principal's office at Austin high school, in El Paso. (Guardian, 12 Jun 2006)
Met chief faces new criticism on De Menezes
The official report into the police killing of an innocent man who was mistaken for a terrorist will criticise Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, for his attempt to stop an independent inquiry, saying that it allowed officers to tamper with evidence, the Guardian has learned. (Guardian, 12 Jun 2006)
Co-op criticises First Group
An institutional shareholder has thrown its weight behind an unusual resolution calling on the bus and train company First Group to adopt a workplace human rights policy to counter growing concerns about the way it treats its staff. (Guardian, 12 Jun 2006)
Fast-track summary powers 'to cross line on civil liberties'
Tony Blair's renewed determination to "rebalance the criminal justice system" will result in the acceleration of plans to deal with a new swathe of low-level crime outside the courts and the "normal processes of the law".
...The changes that Downing Street is to announce next month are expected to build on a little-noticed paper, Doing Law Differently, published by the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, in April that talked about "re-engineering criminal justice" and argued that many cases heard in court could be better dealt with in other ways. (Guardian, 12 Jun 2006)
Triple suicide at Guantanamo camp
Three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have died in what appears to have been a suicide pact. (BBC, 11 Jun 2006)
Don't blame it on the Buddha
A review of Pankaj Mishra's book 'Temptations of the West', by John Gray.
When the divisions of the cold war were still in place, communist regimes were seen as belonging to an eastern bloc that stood apart from the main body of western civilisation. Given that they were attempts to implement a quintessentially western dream, this was a curious view. Far from being anti-western, communism was hyper-western. Stalinism and Maoism were not versions of oriental despotism - as generations of western scholars have maintained. They were the result of a utopian experiment that aimed to realise the most radical ideals of the European enlightenment. The current view of Islam as being somehow anti-western is just as unreal. In terms of its basic picture of the world Islam belongs in the western tradition of monotheism, and radical Islam is in many ways a hybrid offshoot of Leninism and anarchism - also western ideologies. Like Soviet Russia and Maoist China, Islamist movements owe more to the modern west than we - or they - care to admit. (Guardian, 10 Jun 2006)
Palestinians killed on Gaza beach
Six people, including three children, have been killed by Israeli shells which hit a beach in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials say. (BBC, 9 Jun 2006)
Police persecuted me, says De Menezes whistleblower
The whistleblower who leaked information about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes to a television journalist has described how she was treated as “the worst kind of criminal” by police. (Times, 8 Jun 2006)
Road deaths should be treated as a global disease, say campaigners
Road accidents claim more lives in the world's poorest countries than malaria or tuberculosis, say campaigners urging governments to treat fatal crashes as a global disease. (Guardian, 8 Jun 2006)
Police cleared of Tube shooting blunder
Not a single police officer is to be prosecuted over the shooting dead of an innocent Brazilian who was mistaken for a suicide bomber, it can be revealed. (Mail, 7 Jun 2006)
Government drops council house repair deadline
The government today abandoned its controversial policy of repairing council houses by removing them from local authority control, after fierce opposition from tenants' groups and the Labour rank and file. (Guardian, 7 Jun 2006)
France fined for deporting Jews
France's government and state railway have been ordered to pay compensation for deporting Jews during World War II. (BBC, 7 Jun 2006)
Global migrants reach 191 million
Nearly 200 million people now live outside their country of origin - up by about a quarter since 1990, a United Nations report on migration says. (BBC, 7 Jun 2006)
Fishing for a better future in Senegal
Mbour is a small Senegalese town not more than 100km away from where international delegates have been grappling with the issue of immigration at a conference in the capital, Dakar.
...Instead of spending weeks in the high seas looking for fish, a resource they say is becoming scarce, many young Mbourois would rather head to the Canary Islands, where more than 7,500 migrants have already landed this year in the hope of reaching mainland Spain. (BBC, 7 Jun 2006)
Prisoners should be freed to ease crowding, say MPs
Thousands of remand prisoners, inmates with mental health problems and children should urgently be released from prisons to relieve the growing overcrowding crisis in England and Wales, according to a damning report by MPs published today.
The Commons public accounts committee says the unprecedentedly high prison population of 77,000 is due to rise even higher and will lead to higher suicide rates and a fertile environment for unrest among prisoners. (Guardian, 6 Jun 2006)
Biggest pension fund boycotts Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer and owner of the Asda supermarket chain, is being boycotted by the world's largest pension fund for alleged "serious and systematic" abuses of human and employment rights.
(Guardian, 6 Jun 2006)
If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq
That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.
In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter.
(Guardian, 6 Jun 2006)
Terror raid could 'damage trust'
Trust between the Muslim community and police could be damaged in the wake of a terror raid in east London, a leading Muslim has warned.
Police are questioning two brothers, one of whom was shot during the raid, on suspicion of terrorism involvement. (BBC, 6 Jun 2006)
Bolivian Indians celebrate start of big land giveaway
Evo Morales, the populist Bolivian president, has moved to a new stage of his radical reform agenda by giving away almost 10,000 square miles of land to indigenous peasants. (Telegraph, 5 Jun 2006)
Headmaster confiscates pupils' home computers
A head teacher has raised standards at his school by confiscating computers and television sets from the homes of under-performing pupils.
Duncan Harper, the head of New Woodlands school in Bromley, south London, visits the homes of pupils who are tired or grumpy in lessons and seizes electronic equipment from their bedroom. (Telegraph, 5 Jun 2006)
Blair may face death rap
Britain's top policeman could face charges over the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, it emerged yesterday.
The Crown Prosecution Service will decide in the next few weeks whether to bring Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair, left, before the courts. (Mirror, 4 Jun 2006)
Basra car bomb kills at least 28
A car bomb has left at least 28 people dead and another 62 wounded in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. (BBC, 3 Jun 2006)
New Orleans 'sinking even faster'
Parts of New Orleans had been sinking much faster than previously thought before Hurricane Katrina hit last August, new research suggests. (BBC, 1 Jun 2006)
Child Support Agency to be scrapped
The Child Support Agency will be scrapped this summer and replaced with a pared-down operation to collect cash from the most hardened absent fathers who refuse to pay maintenance. (Times, 1 Jun 2006)
Magazine wholesalers face threat of OFT challenge
Britain's competition watchdog gave warning yesterday that the present arrangements for distributing newspapers and magazines could be anti- competitive and detrimental to consumers. (Times, 1 Jun 2006)
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