Let us hope Americans seize their chance to hobble George Bush
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1936235,00.html
Next Tuesday's elections in the US cannot, alas, remove the president.
But they can change the political terms of trade
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
First, let's lay down the mother of all caveats. The conventional
wisdom says Democrats are about to win control of the House of
Representatives and could well take the Senate too. But, and here's the
mega-caveat, the conventional wisdom in Washington is often very, very
wrong. Cast your mind back to election night 2004, when the US media
anointed President John Kerry. The warning this time is that
Republicans might be fewer in number, but more motivated and therefore
likelier to turn out. Note, too, the reports that White House
strategist Karl Rove, the election wizard famed as George Bush's brain,
is in cocky mood. In the contests that matter, Rove reckons Republicans
have the money and the machine to win.
After 46 years of failure, we must change course on Cuba
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1936186,00.html
The US is deaf to the almost unanimous international view: its embargo
is a block on positive change in Havana
Wayne S Smith
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
The annual vote in the UN general assembly on the US embargo against
Cuba is back this month. Last year's result saw 182 member states
oppose the blockade, with only four - the US, Israel, the Marshall
Islands and Palau - voting in favour. The embargo, and indeed overall
US policy towards the island, have virtually no international support.
No wonder: it is a failed approach.
The essential elements of the embargo have been in place since 1960. As
recently declassified documents confirm, the objective of the policy
since the beginning has been to bring about the downfall of the Castro
regime, an ambition pursued in vain for 46 years.
This House of Commons is God's gift to dictatorship
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1936190,00.html
Last night's vote against an inquiry into the Iraq war underlines
parliament's surrender of its democratic function
Simon Jenkins
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
The British parliament is God's gift to dictatorship. If I were an
absolute ruler I would get one immediately. Last night Britons were
offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be
allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigour of the debate,
they were still humiliated by the government's supporters. While
British soldiers ram democracy down others' throats at the point of a
gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy's
simplest ritual, challenging the executive.
The Macbeth effect
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1936188,00.html
The evidence is that we ease our consciences by washing. Does the same
apply on a global scale?
Johnjoe McFadden
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
Can you wash away your sins? The overlap between the language of
morality and personal cleanliness (clean conscience, the stain of
original sin) suggests that our soul and the body share an aversion to
dirt. Most religions practise some purification ritual - baptism,
bathing in the Ganges - where the soul can be washed clean of sin; and
Lady Macbeth's obsessive hand washing ("Out damned spot") sought to
remove the stain of treachery as much from her conscience as from her
hand. But would it work? Research by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie
Liljenquist from the University of Toronto and Northwestern University,
Chicago, suggests that scrubbing may indeed ease a guilty conscience.
Beijing's race for Africa
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,,1936312,00.html
Simon Tisdall
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
China will steal a march in the new race for Africa when it hosts an
ambitious trade, investment and aid summit in Beijing this week for
leaders of 48 African countries. But while the meeting is intended to
fuel China's global drive for resources, raw materials and markets,
concerns are growing that the boosters of Beijing do not have Africa's
best interests at heart and that western countries will be cut out of
future business.
One friday
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1936196,00.html
Criticised for their beliefs, clothing and attitudes; accused of not
being British enough; reviled as the enemy within - not a day passes
without Muslims being attacked in the media. So how does it feel to be
Muslim in Britain today? Guardian writers asked people around the
country - from a rear admiral to an organic farmer, a rapper to a gay
rights campaigner, an accountant to a niqab-wearing teacher - to tell
us how they spent last Friday. A G2 special.
Read part two here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1936427,00.html
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
Umer Saeed, 29
Operational support police officer, Leeds
Friday was the end of a two-week training course on dealing with
counter-terrorism and rescue at a height and I was doing a series of
tests. I had never abseiled before, but I had to swing off a 200ft
quarry and climb down a six-storey building, searching balconies for
explosives as I descended.
I passed - I'm now a rope access operative. My unit supports
counter-terrorist operations and responds to public disorder. I was on
the frontline during the Bradford riots. It was so disheartening to see
my community destroy itself. But I saw the other side, too. The next
day I was shopping, and people were looking at me like, "He's one of
those stone-throwing idiots." I felt like saying, "Actually, I was
taking the bricks, not throwing them."
Kerry's Iraq gaffe throws Bush a lifeline in election battle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1936469,00.html
Suzanne Goldenberg and Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
A gaffe by the former Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry,
put his party on the defensive last night when it was seized on by
George Bush as evidence of lack of patriotism over the Iraq war, a week
before congressional elections.
Senator Kerry told an audience of college students in California that
if they did not study hard they could "get stuck in Iraq", a comment
quickly denounced by Mr Bush as implying that US troops were
uneducated.
New law may cut Chinese death penalties
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1936286,00.html
Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
China is to restrict death sentencing, the government said yesterday
after a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice.
From January, all death penalty cases will be reviewed by the supreme
court in a move some legal scholars believe could reduce hangings,
shootings and lethal injections by up to a third. China is the world's
leading executioner
The state news agency, Xinhua, hailed the step as the most important
reform of capital punishment for 20 years, although western legal
scholars warned that China's justice system needs a far more thorough
overhaul to avoid a crisis of credibility.
A painful lesson in diplomacy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1935325,00.html
Half a century on, memories and echoes of the Suez crisis of 1956 now
seem stronger in Britain than in France, Egypt or Israel, writes Ian
Black.
Tuesday October 31, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
British punters have been hearing a good deal about the Suez crisis
recently: newspaper articles, TV and radio documentaries and books
marking its 50th anniversary have all ploughed over the familiar ground
of the country's biggest foreign policy debacle of the 20th century.
It has certainly received closer attention in the UK than the other
great global event of late October-early November 1956 - the
near-simultaneous Hungarian uprising: that was the moment in the cold
war when Soviet power was brutally exposed for crushing popular demands
with tanks, and communists everywhere saw their dreams fatally
tarnished.
In 2006, Suez still seems like a big deal for Britain because it is
remembered as the end of empire and great power status. But another
reason is the parallels that are now so often drawn between it and the
- still continuing - war in Iraq.
Reid invokes past for technical push against 'war on terror'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1936355,00.html
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian
John Reid yesterday invoked the memory of Barnes Wallis, the inventor
of the Dambusters' raid "bouncing bomb", and Alan Turing, the Enigma
codebreaker, in appealing to British industry to encourage technical
innovation in the "war against terror".
The home secretary, speaking at the launch of new anti-terror search
technology, described "the struggle against Islamist terrorism" as a
constant fight to stay one step ahead and compared it to the
technological battle to "beat the Nazis" in the second world war. "In a
sense it is a recall of the innovators of the past. Just as in the past
innovators such as Barnes Wallis, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers [who
built the first digital computer as a codebreaking device in 1943],
were vital in our battle to beat the Nazis, so now we must be able to
use the skills and expertise of all in our battle against terror."
Republican stronghold in California at risk as environmentalists go on
the attack
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1945760.ece
By Andrew Gumbel in Stockton, California
Published: 01 November 2006
In a year of unpopular Republican incumbents, perhaps no congressman is
more reviled than Richard Pombo of California.
Environmentalists loathe him because, as chair of the House Resources
Committee, he advocated selling off one quarter of the country's
national parks and pushed for oil and gas drilling in the Alaskan
wilderness and the Pacific Ocean. The media has been gunning for him
because he took money from the disgraced Republican Party lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. Republicans in his district have been made queasy by his
deals with developers, who have increased the value of his family-held
landholdings while contributing to his political campaign fund.
Roar of the Asian tiger: How China bought up Africa
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1945762.ece
More than 40 African nations will be represented at a summit in Beijing
this week, a very public indication of the huge investment one of the
world's fastest-growing economies has made in the world's poorest
continent. Clifford Coonan reports
Published: 01 November 2006
The Sphinx, a herd of elephants and the lions of the Serengeti look
down from billboards overhung with construction cranes on to Beijing's
ring roads, teeming with cars, cement mixers and other symbols of a
booming economy. Sharp-suited African politicians discuss oil, timber
and precious metals with equally well-tailored Chinese officials in the
lobbies of Beijing's top hotels.
More than 40 African heads of state are in Beijing for this weekend's
China-Africa forum to discuss the growing importance of trade between
the world's fastest-growing economy and the world's poorest continent.
China's trade with Africa is set to exceed =A327bn this year and the
intense discussions bear out the fact that this is a congress of real
import.
Growing DNA database 'turning Britain into a nation of suspects'
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article1945768.ece
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 01 November 2006
One in four men could soon be included on the national DNA database
which is helping to turn Britain into a nation of suspects, an expert
group has warned.
The database has been established with little or no public consultation
but over the past 10 years has collected DNA profiles on more than 3.5
million people, including 24,000 children and youths under the age of
18.
Reid says terror threat is worse than Cold War
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1945777.ece
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 01 November 2006
John Reid has likened the fight against terrorism to Britain's battle
for survival against the Nazis as he called for a new generation of
innovators to help protect the country from suicide bombers.
The Home Secretary told security experts they should draw inspiration
from Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, as well as from
Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, the computer pioneers who helped crack
German codes.
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