| Written by a star Tinie Tempah tells the stories behind his debut album's lyrics bbc.co.uk |
Lord Browne review: university teaching budgets slashed by 80% Unpopular university courses will be forced to shut under new plans to cut direct state funding for degrees, it has emerged. telegraph.co.uk |
BBC sheds top brass to save pounds Ed gets measured; Novel win for humour; Thames turns tide; Dun Roman; Slipway into history; Art falls on stony rulesThe BBC is hacking away at itself, in a desperate bid to stave off the threat of imposed cuts. Senior management is so far taking the brunt of the pain, as director-general Mark Thompson makes good his promise to cut 25% of the Corporation's top jobs by the end of 2012.Among the latest to go are Sharon Bayley, hired in May last year as director of "marketing, communications and audience". The Β£310,000 ($490,000) post, whatever it means, will remain vacant. Two Corporation board members, Peter Salmon and Lucy Adams, are also being dropped. Salmon heads BBC North, but angered fellow managers when he said this summer that he would not move to Salford when the Corporation opens its new head office there next month. Adams was paid Β£320,000 to be the BBC's director of people or, in plain English, personnel manager.The good times in broadcasting have not quite stopped rolling. Those being culled from the senior ranks will have handsome payoffs. And there are plenty of eager beavers willing to take their place. One such is Danny Cohen who has been appointed controller of BBC1, the Corporation's flagship television channel, at the ripe young age of 36. He will be paid Β£260,000 a year to oversee an annual budget of Β£1.13bn.The BBC is anxious to rid itself of a fat-cat image in the midst of savage public-spending cuts. It is also keenly aware that many Conservatives loathe the very idea of public-service broadcasting, and believe the Corporation to be staffed entirely by mad lefties.Ed gets measuredOf the many agonies of being leader of the opposition, prime minister's questions is the second-worst. (The first, of course, is not being prime minister). Ed Miliband, the new leader of the Labour party, had his first PMQs last week and, to the surprise of many parliament-watchers, he made rather a good fist of it.The actual questions and answers were of the usual yah-boo-sucks sort, dripping with sarcasm and larded with soundbytes for the telly. But β and this is the important thing β Miliband made David Cameron sound shrill and petulant, while he himself came over as measured, even statesmanlike. He even turned one of Cameron's better rhetorical remarks to his own advantage. "I may be new to this game," he said, "but I think that I ask the questions and he gives the answers."Labour backbenchers, most of whom had voted for David Miliband to be party leader, were delighted with his little brother's performance. Their resounding cheers must have been music in the ears of the man who would be prime minister.Novel win for humourAnother delighted debutante last week was Howard Jacobson, who has at long last won the Man Booker prize for his novel The Finkler Question. The announcement stunned the literary world, for the book is a comedy, and the Man Booker judges are not noted for an excessive sense of humour.Jacobson, on the other hand, is fully capable of laughing at himself. He's also quite good at eating his own words, declaring himself thrilled to have won a prize that he has often rudely derided. He said he would use the Β£50,000 award to buy his wife a handbag, asking: "Have you seen the price of handbags?"Critics have noted that The Finkler Question might be a laugh-out-loud exploration of British Jewishness, but that it is also deeply serious. Sir Andrew Motion, the Booker award chairman, described it as "a very sad melancholic, book. It is comic, it is laughter, but it is laughter in the dark".Thames turns tideMore than 50 years ago, the Thames was a chemical cocktail. It was biologically dead; a sad, filthy waterway choked with rubbish and human waste. Today, by almost magic comparison, the river is alive again. The Thames and its tributaries are home to 125 fish species alone, including salmon, trout, sole and bass.The revived Thames has now been given a top worldwide conservation prize. The International Thiess river prize is awarded annually in Australia and comes with $346,000 to be spent on further restoration work.More good riverine news: the otter, which was thought just 30 years ago to be on the brink of extinction, is making a strong comeback over most of the country except the extreme south-easterly county of Kent. The recovery is attributed to a 1970s ban on organo-chlorine pesticides, which used to pollute farmland run-off. Now our rivers, not only the Thames, are running clean again.Dun RomanFor nearly 20 years, ever since the Church of England began to ordain women, there has been a steady trickle of high-church defectors to Roman Catholicism. In a phrase much used by the bells-and-smells tendency, they have gone home to Rome.The simmering row over the ordination of women has intensified in recent years, as the debate moves on to the probability of female priests becoming bishops. Traditionalists who simply can't bear that idea have been further tempted to defect by Pope Benedict XVI's offer of a separate home within the Catholic church for Anglicans who want to continue practising some of their own traditional rites.The arcane issues dividing Anglican and Roman Catholics have been highlighted with the decision by an entire C of E parish in Folkestone, Kent, to decamp to Rome en masse (so to speak). The congregation of St Peter's, who almost certainly must now worship elsewhere, is likely to be joined on the road to Rome by at least three Anglican bishops.Slipway into historyA new Royal Navy warship has been launched into the River Clyde in Glasgow. Not much new there, you might think, and you'd be right. The Clyde has witnessed thousands of such launches, from piffling little cargo ships to giant ocean-going liners, as well as fighting vessels.What was newsworthy about last week's slipway launch is that it was the last. In the future, if we build warships at all, they will be put together in dry docks and floated out, or else assembled like giant model kits. It won't seem the same.Nor does the Navy's latest ship exactly echo the lean, rakish lines of earlier generations of Britain's Bulwarks, as they were once known. The type-45 anti-air destroyer is undeniably big at 7,100 tonnes, but its sternly angular, functional lines are likely to impress geeks more than romantics. At least its name evokes traditions: it will be called HMS Duncan, after the admiral who defeated a Dutch fleet at Camperdown in 1797.Art falls on stony rulesThe Tate Modern gallery doesn't do things by halves. The latest installation in its cavernous Turbine Hall consists of tiny handmade, handpainted ceramic sunflower seeds. A hundred million of them.Conceived by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the idea was for visitors to walk through the exhibit, giving it a tactile as well as visual impact. It was immensely popular, and lasted all of two days before it was fenced off from the public. The reason? That old music-hall act, Health and Safety, feared that gallery-goers might breathe in tiny particles of ceramic dust and become ill.So now the sea of seeds is unchurned by human feet. It lies still and tranquil and rather silly. Still, not so many seeds are being quietly pocketed by art lovers.Derek Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Villa rocked by injury to Petrov Aston Villa captain Stiliyan Petrov will be out for two months with a knee injury. news.bbc.co.uk |
Iraq war logs: who did the killing? | Michael White Whatever the mitigation, the man who pulls the trigger, sets the timer or plunges in the blade bears some responsibility for his actions. Yes?Of all the extraordinary and chilling details about the Iraq war logs which have tumbled out of Wikileaks' files into the pages of the Guardian this weekend, two strike me as being insufficiently commented upon. One is about the scale of the killing, the other concerns who exactly was doing most of it β which was not Americans. Here's David Leigh's summary. Here's James Meek's harrowing summary of a single day's carnage at the height of the quasi-civil war, 17 October 2006. Here's Simon Rogers's more extended analysis of the deaths with a warning footnote by Jacob Shapiro at Princeton University.It's grim stuff and does not detract from the core failure of the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Having easily removed Saddam Hussein from power and unwisely dispersed his army and bureaucratic machine, the coalition forces failed to impose order and secure the safety of ordinary Iraqis, large numbers of whom perished as a result. That failure has loomed large in the imagination of western liberals hostile to the war, as has the inept occupation which followed. But it has also obscured a central feature of the conflict β and blame β which was domestic and sectarian. Keen to blame George Bush and Tony Blair for all that went wrong, critics prefer to ignore the local angle.From what I have read so far of the 400,000 previously unpublished military field reports β expert and media analysis will take as much time and effort as Westminster MPs' expenses claims did β the labels "Sunni" and "Shia" appear less than one would expect. Perhaps it is the heat of war, perhaps some other reason.Yet consider the figures set out in Simon Rogers's tables. The war logs suggest 109,032 deaths, including 15,000 that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) survey was unaware of, far fewer than others claim, as Jacob Shapiro points out in his warning note.I'll come back to that. But look at the breakdown of the 109,032. Some 34,814 are ascribed to murder. We can argue about categories here. "Direct fire" is listed as causing 4,766 civilian deaths β presumably direct coalition fire β and "indirect fire" a further 2,087, alongside a lot of enemy and insurrectionist deaths, incidentally.But I take murder to mean what it sounds like and what James Meek's report suggests: mostly sectarian and criminal killings. Indeed, the breakdown reveals nine coalition troops murdered, 2,169 Iraqi forces, 73 enemy (the US definition) and a startling 32,563 civilians.The pattern is repeated under the second biggest category of deaths: improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused 31,780 fatalities. These were not, I think, a coalition weapon, so can safely be attributed to Iraqi insurgents/criminals/terrorists, whatever label you prefer.Among the dead were 2,107 coalition troops whom you might have expected to be the main target of such devices and whose armour was often deficient, 5,990 Iraqi forces (ditto) and 3,455 "enemy" β presumably a mixture of suicide bombers and what the army in Belfast used to call "own goals".Among civilians β remember the marketplace bombs and the labourers queueing for work β the total was 32,563. That tallies up to two thirds of the deaths recorded in the war logs total as Iraqi on Iraqi or, let's not forget them, Iranian-funded jihadi on Iraqi, Muslim on Muslim.None of that exculpates an occupation that failed to fix security. But it does provide a context. After 30 years of brutal domestic oppression and aggressive wars against its neighbours β cynically back by western governments for geopolitical reasons β a Sunni tyranny was overthrown by the invasion.Into the domestic vacuum stepped all sorts of hobgoblins. The Sunni fought to reassert their lost privileges, to resist both the occupation and Iranian-backed Shia majoritarianism, long suppressed. They attacked those uppity oil-rich Kurds in the north and struggled to garner support from anxious and enfeebled regimes elsewhere in the wider Sunni Arab world. Attacked in their holy shrines and elsewhere, the Shia and Kurds were duly provoked.Whatever the mitigation, the man who pulls the trigger, sets the timer or plunges in the blade bears some responsibility for his actions. Yes?Not for the first time β think Israel/Palestine or Northern Ireland β everyone had the luxury of persuading themselves they were a beleaguered minority, feeling as fearful and sorry for themselves as trigger-happy Americans on patrol in east Baghdad. What a combustible mixture!So the war logs read as war logs would if we'd ever had them online before. In his early work, Naples '44, the writer Norman Lewis, a hand-to-mouth British intelligence officer with the allied invasion forces, reaches the painful conclusion that US forces had orders to shoot German prisoners in certain circumstances β and that some Mississippi farm boys had worked it out for themselves that this was wrong.So the shooting of two would-be-surrendering insurgents from a US helicopter (one with form of this kind, it seems) may be deplorable, but not surprising. Did not the late Captain Robert Maxwell MC β of pension theft fame β carry the taint of (allegedly) shooting German prisoners in his British uniform? He did. War is hell.Hand suspects over to fellow-Iraqi torturers? I bet they did and β deplorable though it may be β it does not take much imagination to see why. These guys shot my buddy last month β maybe β blew up five kids and a widow yesterday β maybe β and tortured someone's uncle β maybe β under Saddam Hussein. Should I worry too much what his fellow citizens may do to him in custody? Plenty of people behave nobly in war β and sometimes get killed for it β but plenty don't.I am therefore surprised the logs are not even worse and relieved that β as in so much US bibliography of the Iraq war β that British complicity or offence has (so far) surfaced only twice. The lads will be working on that.I don't join those maligning the Wikileaks operation's motives, its internal cohesion or impugning its patriotism. The Pentagon played God in Iraq, it is only fair that the other side gets a chance to see if it can play God too and achieve a better result.What I do feel moved to point out is that leaks are an asymmetrical form of warfare β like Apache helicopters or IEDs on the Afghan or Basra road β bound to damage the US and Britain more than it does their critics and enemies.Why? Because they are, for all their faults, open societies in which freedom of information laws exist as do very imperfect laws to protect whistleblowers. No bullet in the back of the neck for them. David Kelly's wife believes her husband killed himself, so does the pathologist, so even does Andrew Gilligan, on whose conscience the weapons scientist may rest as much as on Geoff Hoon's.So people do not leak with impunity β not more than once, anyway β important secrets from China, from Putin's Russia, from any states in the Middle East β even Israel, since Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in jail for leaking its nuclear secrets to the Sunday Times in 1986 and has been back inside for parole violations since.So FoI is largely a western weapon, more easily deployed against the west, and we can only hope β as I certainly believe β that honesty is the best policy in the long run. Let's believe we are right because we will not be allowed to say so if we are proved wrong.One last point here. As Shapiro points out, the war logs cannot be the last word on the Iraq war and occupation's death toll. But, even allowing for its likely failings, the war log total of 109,032 is still way short of the 655,000 deaths β including indirect ones β reported by Johns Hopkins University via the Lancet magazine in October 2006.Yet again, the Lancet's figures fail to tally with another source by some distance. The war logs surfaced too late for last week's edition. Let's see how the debate unfolds.IraqMiddle EastPolitics pastDefence policyMilitaryGlobal terrorismTerrorism policyUK security and terrorismIraq: The war logsMichael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |