Asylum-seekers arrested following daring escape

September 4th,2010    by Mia

Two Iraqi refugees facing deportation to Baghdad made a dramatic escape from an asylum detention centre but were recaptured by police using dogs and a helicopter.

Ahmed Hussein Saeed and Mohammed Abdullah, both failed asylum-seekers, fled after scaling a razor-wire perimeter fence at Campsfield House detention centre in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, on Thursday night.

Mr Abdullah was apprehended almost immediately and it appeared that his escape was not reported to police. Mr Saeed managed to travel to London before he was found and arrested yesterday morning.

Last night, he was in hospital with a suspected broken leg and deep cuts that he sustained scaling the fence. A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said: "We can confirm that we received a report at approximately 10.30pm [on Thursday] that a man had escaped from Campsfield detention centre. We understand that the man has now been found."

The two men, both ethnic Kurds, were due to be flown to the Iraqi capital on Monday. The British Government has recently begun flying failed Kurdish asylum-seekers to Baghdad rather than the semi-autonomous Kurdish area of northern Iraq, because the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) refuses to accept anyone who has been brought under duress.

The UK Border Agency tried to remove Mr Saeed to Kurdistan five months ago but he was immediately sent back to Britain after he confirmed to Kurdish airport officials that he had been repatriated against his will.

Fifteen Iraqi refugees have been flown to Baghdad this month, of which several were Kurds. British officials tried to send their flight on to Kurdistan but were told by the KRG that this was not acceptable.

A spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq told The Independent that British authorities now simply left Kurdish refugees in Baghdad with $100 and a hotel room for the night, and instructed them to make their own way back home to Kurdistan from there.

Mr Saeed has lived in Britain for nine years but has been detained for the past 10 months. A friend claimed he had "done nothing wrong here".

"He is running away from tribal violence. They tried to send him back before but the government over there wouldn't accept him into the country. He is desperate not to go back," added the friend, who asked not to be named.

According to the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR), at least 50 more Iraqis are marked down for removal to Baghdad on Monday. The group is leading a campaign to stop all deportations to Iraq while the security and political situation there remains uncertain.

Dashty Jamal, the secretary of the IFIR, said: "These deportations must be stopped. There is a campaign in Iraq of politicians, writers, journalists and many freedom-loving people [who] condemn this collusion, between the puppet militia running Iraq and the British Government, to send back people who were victims of the violence that continues to devastate the country. We call on people in Britain to do the same."

David Wood, the head of criminality and detention services at the UK Border Agency, said: "A detainee escaped from Campsfield immigration removal centre on Thursday evening. He has now been recaptured and is back in detention."

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What new light do Tony Blair's memoirs throw on his time in power?

September 3rd,2010    by Mia

The politician by Peter Mandelson

I greet Tony Blair's book with a large amount of relief. When I published The Third Man in July some people, including a few close to him, said that I was too revelatory or gossipy, almost self-indulgent. Now it appears my sin was to say what I did prematurely.

Reporting of Blair's book, initially, is bound to focus on the Blair-Brown relationship. This was indeed "difficult", as Blair states, and it put a brake on the full extent of the public-service reforms Blair desired. It blunted the Government's achievements, but did not remove them.
Our legacy, among other things, is a real improvement in measured public-service delivery and the creation of a performance culture in the public sector – notably in the health service but also in schools – that hopefully the Coalition Government will build on, rather than destroy through mindless and swingeing spending cuts.

It is easy for outsiders including me – only one step removed from their relationship – to argue that Blair should have grasped the nettle and moved Brown from the Treasury after the first term. In The Third Man, I argue that Blair could and should have done this. Blair could have become master of his own government; and Brown, through this shock therapy, could have come to his senses and realised that he was destroying his own future, as well as some of Blair's legacy, by carrying on in his opposition to the Prime Minister.

But, when it came to it, Blair thought that his government would be weakened by shuffling Brown to the Foreign Office – both by losing a talented chancellor and through the risk of destabilising the Cabinet by further disgruntling Brown. The truth, too, is that Blair never felt he had sufficient strength in the party to take on Brown. He was, after all, an "outsider" to Labour.

This seems a rather incredible thing to say in the light of the enormous electoral success he brought to Labour, unparalleled in the party's history. Yet Blair – and this was a key to his success – was always seen by the public as "not entirely Labour". Perhaps this is difficult for others in the party, including some sympathetic media commentators, to come to terms with. But in a political era in which ideological purity is discounted, and automatic party loyalty has faded among voters, it is vital for a political leader to be seen as somewhat above party politics, capable of transcending them to play a national role.

This goes to the heart of what I believe is the lesson of Blair's memoir. We lost in 2010 not because after 13 years in office change was inevitable, but because we appeared to voters to have lost our way in the final years of government.

We lost not because we were New Labour, as most of the current leadership contenders say, but because we were insufficiently so. When left to his own judgement, Blair gave a consistent sense of New Labour reform and direction, and that he was a leader for all the country, including those in professions and the more affluent, and that he was a practical conviction politician rather than a theorist tied to Labour's past.

It is pure folly for today's leadership contenders not to learn from him, and it is why I argue that to try and create a pre-New Labour future for the party will simply end in electoral defeat.

Lord Mandelson was the MP for Hartlepool from 1992 to 2004 and served in a number of Cabinet positions under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

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Bar chairman backs calls to reconsider drug laws

September 2nd,2010    by Mia

One of Britain's most senior lawyers has delivered a dramatic boost to the campaign to change the law on drugs.

Nicholas Green QC, chairman of the UK Bar Council, has come closer than any previous incumbent of the post to calling for the decriminalisation of personal use of drugs including heroin, cocaine and cannabis.

In his chairman's report to the Bar Council last month, Mr Green wrote: "Another political hot potato is drugs. Drug-related crime costs the economy about £13bn a year.
"A growing body of comparative evidence suggests that decriminalising personal use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health. All this can be achieved without any overall increase in drug usage. If this is so, then it would be rational to follow suit."

He adds: "A rational approach is not usually the response of large parts of the media when it comes to issues relating to criminal justice.

"This is something the Bar Council can address. We are apolitical; we act for the prosecution and the defence and most of the judiciary are former members. We can speak out in favour of an approach which urges policies which work and not those which simply play to the gallery. And this will save money and mean that there is less pressure on the justice system."

His remarks appear in the context of an appeal to colleagues to "fight to prevent further cuts in criminal legal aid fees". But his support for decriminalisation has been seized upon by drugs campaigners as evidence that the policy approach is now winning mainstream acceptance.

Explicit backing for decriminalisation also comes from the editor of one of Britain's leading medical journals. Writing in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Fiona Godlee endorses an article by Steve Rolles, head of research at Transform, the drugs foundation, calling for an end to the war on drugs and its replacement by a legal system of regulation and control.

"In a beautifully argued essay Stephen Rolles calls on us to envisage an alternative to the hopelessly failed war on drugs. He says, and I agree, that we must regulate drug use, not criminalise it," Dr Godlee says.

Evidence that a policy of total prohibition on drugs has not only failed but is counter-productive has been accepted by a succession of committees in the UK including the Police Foundation, the Prime Minister's strategy unit, the Royal Society of Arts and the UK Drug Policy Consortium.

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Butt thrown to the wolves as ICC scrambles to restore game's integrity

September 1st,2010    by Mia

In so many ways it was fitting that Pakistan headed west yesterday. That was exactly where their cricket appears to have been going for most of the past decade.

As the team bus left the London hotel where players' rooms were searched at the weekend by police seeking evidence of misdeeds, discussions were proceeding about salvaging something from the wreckage of their tour. The talks, mostly involving long-distance telephone calls between England, Dubai, Pakistan and South Africa, were aimed primarily at reaching a deal to ensure the rest of the programme can still take place.

By the time the players and the back-room staff had reached Taunton, where they are due to play a warm-up one-day match against Somerset on Thursday, there was agreement. The limited-overs matches between England and Pakistan, starting on Sunday, will proceed despite abundant misgivings.

There is too much money involved both for the six grounds concerned and for the England and Wales Cricket Board, whose broadcasting rights package might be imperilled. But there will be compromises. Salman Butt, the captain, and Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer, the fast bowlers, who were most heavily implicated in the betting scandal, will be suspended while police investigations continue.

It is not quite a done deal. With Pakistani government involvement, matters could change at any time. The ICC is also desperate for the integrity of the game to be restored and for the confidence of the public, as the chief executive Haroon Lorgat said last night. How they acquire all that might be an open question.

Asif and Aamer are the pair alleged by the News of the World to have deliberately bowled no-balls in the fourth Test against England at the behest of a fixer, Mazhar Majeed. Butt was reported to be an instrumental part of the plan. He was not due to be captain of the limited-overs team, making way for Shahid Afridi, but he was in the squad. Although Majeed apparently told the newspaper that he had seven players under his control, that trio seems to be a sufficient trade-off.

If there was sympathy for the 18-year-old Aamer, who was named Pakistan's man of the series after the conclusion of the fourth Test won by England by an innings and 225 runs on Sunday, captain Butt was thrown to the wolves. It was revealed that he was already being investigated for previous possible misdeeds by the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit.

Apart from the natural sadness that the impressionable Aamer might have squandered his chance of greatness, there is also particular agonising about Butt among those who have followed this tour. He has not been a particularly successful international cricketer and has rarely been sure of his place in the team, as 32 Test matches from a possible 54 and 74 one-day internationals from a possible 122 since he made his debut indicate. So he has not frequently been around to influence matches either in terms of results or spot-fixing.

Butt took over as captain in England when his predecessor, Shahid Afridi, suddenly resigned when Pakistan lost to Australia in the first of two neutral Tests in June. Butt was immediately impressive. Pakistan won the following match at Headingley, to halt a sequence of 15 consecutive Test defeats against Australia.

The new captain conducted himself with a quiet dignity, which was in complete contrast to the excitable Afridi. He talked regularly of the young team and how it must be given a chance to learn from mistakes and of the floods back home. The team, he said, must do it to lift the hearts of the people to whom cricket meant so much.

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Will next chapter in Blair's story tell us anything we didn't already know?

August 31st,2010    by Mia

When winston Churchill remarked that "history will be kind to me for I intend to write it", he spoke for the 11 former inhabitants of Number 10 who have published their memoirs before and since. The contribution of the 12th, Tony Blair, will come tomorrow. He can only hope that history will be kinder to him than his contemporary critics, few of whom will have their minds changed either way by the TB version of his decade in power.

Mr Blair may have had the assistance of talented editors, but Churchill's words remain the only ones remotely capable of standing on their merits as Eng Lit, especially the ripping yarns from his time as a correspondent in the Boer War. Then again, Churchill was the only PM to have been a journalist (with the exception of Ted Heath's brief, and bizarre, time as news editor of the Church Times).

Mr Blair's book is already being talked of in terms of its relevance to the next Labour leader; but at least he didn't "spit on the deck" as James Callaghan once put it when his immediate successor took over. Whereas the Thatcher book landed like a howitzer shell in the middle of John Major's trench warfare with his Eurosceptics in the early 1990s, and helped to destabilise his premiership, Mr Blair's take on Gordon Brown can do either man little damage now.
Like all politicians, Mr Brown will make straight for the index and references to himself before turning to the rest of A Journey. Let us hope he does not endure the same mortification that John Major must have when he found "Major, J ... Suitability to succeed MT" at the back of The Downing Street Years.

Few political memoirs tell the whole truth about everything, and neither will Mr Blair's, especially about Iraq. Anthony Eden did not give anything like a full account of Suez (despite a £1m newspaper advance to spill the beans); Margaret Thatcher avoided embarrassments such as the Westland and Spycatcher affairs; HH Asquith was evidently so regretful about opposing votes for women that he forgot the whole episode in his writings.

All very understandable. But for a group who have won the ultimate prize, the ex-PMs are surprisingly ungenerous about the colleagues they eclipsed: Wilson being sarcastic about George Brown's drinking; Thatcher laying into the vanity of Heseltine; and no one has a good word to say about Enoch Powell. Score-settling, a partial version of the truth and a few good anecdotes is the standard ex-PM package. Like the infamous Iraq "dodgy dossier", these memoirs are a case for the defence put together as a clever barrister would. It would thus be a shock if Mr Blair strayed too far from the template.

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Conservatives ready to repay Asil Nadir's donations

August 30th,2010    by Mia

The Tories are ready to repay the £440,000 Asil Nadir donated to the party should the former Polly Peck boss be found guilty of fraud. Party officers have also told staff to refuse further donations even if the tycoon, who returned last Thursday from northern Cyprus to face trial, is cleared of any wrongdoing.

The decision to distance the party from Nadir follows comments that he would be prepared to resume making donations once the trial is over.

Nadir, 69, is due to appear at the Old Bailey this week on fraud charges related to the collapse of Polly Peck, a FTSE 100 company that went bust in 1991 with debts of £1.3bn amid claims of accounting irregularities and fraud.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) pursued the case until Nadir, who founded the company, skipped bail in 1993. Nadir fled the UK after he voiced fears that he would not receive a fair trial.

Accountants investigating Polly Peck found a subsidiary had made a series of donations to the Conservative party between 1985 and 1990 seemingly without the knowledge of the company's board or shareholders. An investigation into the affair by parliament resulted in Sir Norman Fowler, then the Tory party chairman, telling the home affairs select committee the money would be returned should it emerge it had been stolen from shareholders.

Fowler confirmed that the party received £440,000 between 1985 and 1990, but said he was unaware that the sums did not appear in the company's accounts. It is understood that Tory officials, including treasurer Stanley Fink, have agreed to honour Fowler's promise. Officials have also agreed to reject any future offers by Nadir of donations to the party.

Last year, a parliamentary watchdog agreed that the Liberal Democrat party could keep £2.4m donated by the convicted fraudster Michael Brown, saying there was insufficient evidence that the cash was generated through fraud. It is believed the Tories want to avoid a similar inquiry, especially as the party is currently flush with funds and can easily afford to repay Polly Peck creditors or offer the money to charity.

Nadir's trial is expected to cost at least £4m and run for months. He has appointed as his defence lawyer William Clegg QC, the barrister who secured the acquittal of Barry George for the murder of the TV presenter Jill Dando.

Legal experts have voiced fears that the trial could collapse once it becomes evident that too much time has elapsed since Polly Peck went bust. They have also warned that crucial documents may have been lost and that key personnel involved in the company may either have died or be unable to remember important events.

Nadir and his 26-year-old wife, Nur, are staying at a house in Mayfair, central London – reportedly costing £20,000 a month to rent – where he must live under stringent bail conditions.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Dr Manu Vatish, obstetrician

August 28th,2010    by Mia

Consultants in the hospital do three or four caesarean sections every day. Occasionally a baby doesn't make it. People think we're like machines and can turn off, but staff will often break down because they're so affected. There is a lot of soul-searching about whether we could have done something different – often the answer is no, but that doesn't stop us wondering.

I'm on every Monday, and do a ward round in the afternoon. A lot of patients have complex maternal medical problems such as cardiac disease or blood clotting disorders, which can affect mother or baby during the pregnancy.

On Tuesday afternoons I do research at the university into pre-eclampsia, a serious disease which causes high blood pressure and can restrict a baby's growth. Every woman who gets pregnant might get the disease; you have to remind the students that's why the research is so important. Wednesday is another research day.

I also teach medical students at Warwick Medical School. The students have all the enthusiasm and lack some of the knowledge, whereas when you get to be a consultant, you have the knowledge but can sometimes lack the enthusiasm. The look on their faces when you deliver a baby and then give it to them to hold is priceless.

Every Thursday the clinical negligence team, of which I am in charge, meets and makes sure the maternity unit is running safely. On Friday, I do my clinic in the morning – it's very busy because they are overbooked – and in the afternoon there are departmental meetings where we plan strategy and address any generic problems.

Last weekend, I was on call. On Saturday I was called in at 4am as someone was bleeding heavily. The doctor had delivered a baby who was fine, but the mother was bleeding from one of her uterine arteries. It's awkward when you walk in, as the patient is awake and they know someone else has been called. You have to introduce yourself but also get on with dealing with the problem. With this it was simple – we just needed an extra pair of hands.

The relationship you have with an obstetrics patient is different to any other as you're making decisions together. You bond very well. There was a lady who had had 10 miscarriages. She came to me and said, "I'm going to give it my last shot." We treated her with a combination of drugs and she managed to have a baby. That feeling of being able to have a positive influence on someone's life is one of the reasons we do it.

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U2 deliver subtle dig to Medvedev in Moscow

August 27th,2010    by Mia

When a huge rock band with strong political interests played in Russia for the first time, the results were never likely to be sedate.

But as it turned out, the most dramatic moments at U2's debut show in Moscow were not on stage but off it. Although Bono, who has also visited President Dmitry Medvedev this week, did invite a prominent Kremlin critic onstage, the results were strictly musical, with no mention of Russian human rights abuses. Meanwhile, activists complained of police harassment outside the stadium, and five volunteers from Amnesty International were arrested for distributing leaflets.

The presence of the outspoken Russian rock star Yuri Shevchuk on stage was nonetheless interpreted yesterday as an implicit rebuke to the regime. After Bono brought him on stage for an encore at Wednesday night's concert in Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium, the pair sang a rendition of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", to a crowd of more than 50,000 people.

Mr Shevchuk has in recent months become a visible critic of the Russian political system, after confronting the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on television in a heated exchange about political freedoms. But he did not make any political statements at the U2 concert. With the exception of inviting Mr Shevchuk onto the stage, Bono also seemed keen to avoid referencing domestic Russian issues during the concert, focusing his monologues on issues in Burma and Africa.

In a press conference before the concert, he played to patriotic sentiments, saying, "We pretend that we are a great rock group, but as long as we had not played in Russia, that is not true". He did, however, insert a verse of Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up" into the rendition of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" during the concert, perhaps an entreaty to Russians to push for more freedoms.

That question was made particularly acute when five activists from Amnesty International were arrested for handing out leaflets calling for investigations into the murders of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Chechen rights activist Natalya Estemirova. Police said they did not have permission to hand out the fliers, and later released the activists.

Sergei Nikitin, head of Amnesty's Moscow office, said that U2's management had assured them that all the necessary permits were in order. There were also reports that police forced activists from the ONE Campaign against Aids and U2's own charity fund out of the stadium, while Greenpeace said tents it had set up had to be taken down.

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Let them eat cheap cakes

August 26th,2010    by Mia

They were once a bourgeois treat to be nibbled while wearing your Sunday best. Now French pastel-coloured macarons have turned mainstream.

No longer just sold in patisseries, the dainty desserts can now be found on the shelves of supermarkets and McDonald's in France. And this week, Starbucks have also announced that they plan to add the delicacy to their range of cakes available there.

But top patisseries are concerned the newfound ubiquity - not to be confused with the coconut-flavoured macaroon - could give the macaron a bad name, while some food-lovers in Paris are positively disgusted.

Chef Pâtissier Philippe Andrieu, who has worked for La Durée for 12 years, inventing bergamot and green apple macarons for the small, 148-year-old chain of Parisian tea salons and patisseries, said that "production line" desserts are completely different from those that he makes.

"A macaron should crumble in your mouth. We use a meringue-like base that's light and collapses as you eat it," he said. "Macarons made on a production line have a more biscuit-like base, and so don't crumble."

He said inferior macarons are often extremely sweet and lacking in flavour. "It's not for me to judge whether it is good that macarons are being sold everywhere. People certainly have a taste for macarons; at La Durée we have increased our levels of production to cope with demand. But they are completely different and cannot be compared."

He said it could be a good idea to give the high-street macarons a new name, to distinguish them from the hand-made patisserie versions, though he said there wasn't a suitable word in French. Yet.

Isabelle De Cottignies, who works at high-end patisserie Chocolat Foucher in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, was similarly wary. "We sell classical flavours, because people in our area are quite traditional," she explained. "Macarons are now more widely available, but the less expensive macarons are lower quality, which is not necessarily good news. Usually, macarons are made with quite expensive ingredients. Of course, you can taste the difference immediately, and if people who have never tried a macaron before first taste a lower quality product they won't think macarons are good."

Pierre Hermé, head pâtissier at Fauchon, who introduced ketchup, gherkin and black truffle flavoured macarons to Paris, has never tried the high-street version: "There's macaron, and then there's macaron," he said.

Laetitia Brock, a Parisienne blogger living in the US, said: "Macarons are not meant to be mainstream," while another blogger Allison Lightwine said: "I saw them at the McCafé on the Champs-Elysées-just down the street from La Durée! What is the world coming to?!?" She said their presence in McDo, as the French refer to the burger chain, was so incongruous it was like "showing up in a tuxedo to a baseball game".

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The Indian tribe that took on a mining giant – and won

August 25th,2010    by Mia

They said they considered the mountain their god, a living deity that provided them with everything they required to sustain their lives. They said they would fight to the death before seeing the pristine mountain destroyed. Remarkably, they won their battle.

Last night, the tribal people of the Niyamgiri Hills in eastern India were celebrating after the authorities in Delhi ruled that a British-based company would not be permitted to mine there for bauxite. Drawing a line under a "David-versus-Goliath" saga, India's environment minister acknowledged the potential human and social costs of the aluminium project that could have earned billions of pounds for Vedanta Resources Plc. "There has been a very serious violation of laws," Jairam Ramesh said. "Therefore, the project cannot go ahead."

In the state of Orissa, where the Niyamgiri Hills are located, Sitaram Kulesika, a senior member of the Dongria Kondh tribe, told activists by phone: "This is a great day for Kondhs. Mining would be the end of their existence and their god. We thank the Indian government."

Yet the impact of the ruling reverberated far beyond the quiet hills of eastern India, where the 10,000 members of the Dongria Kondh survive as subsistence hunters and farmers. While Vedanta saw 5 per cent tumble from its share price, activists celebrated what they said was a rare triumph for environmental and social justice against the interests of big business.

"This is a victory nobody would have believed possible," said Survival International's Jo Woodman. "The Dongria's campaign became a litmus test of whether a small, marginalised tribe could stand up to a massive multinational with an army of lobbyists and PR firms and the ear of government."

The mining industry in India is powerful and campaigners have long argued that it needs tighter regulation. While the government of Orissa, which supported the project, claimed activists were holding back much-needed development in the state, campaigners said they had faced widespread intimidation. "We strongly welcome this announcement as a vindication of the struggle that has been led by the indigenous people. The laws to protect their rights have been vindicated," said Bratindi Jena, who leads ActionAid India's work for indigenous people.

The controversy over the proposed mine dates back to 2004 and has involved India's highest court as well as a series of special committees. Many believed that fierce lobbying by Vedanta, owned by London-based industrialist Anil Agarwal, and the state government, would ensure permission would be granted to the company to proceed with its plans to mine bauxite for a refinery which it already operates close to the Niyamgiri hills using ore trucked in from a neighbouring state.

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