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Remember, no one really knows what will happen, or when. They're simply stating their opinions based on what they perceive to be happening in Iraq... RON *** Nader From The Mid East I just published a video with...the 5 dinar banknote. [see video below] But I don't know if it's the real thing or not. I have no idea. The guy took the video and sent it to me. I was excited to see it...and I wanted everybody to see it...the only thing he said, the new notes will not be out before 2023. We'll see what's going on. He's my friend. He's from Iraq. He works in a bank... *** RVAlready Interesting situation. Sounds more and more that UN will force an agreement for the good of Iraq. *** Pimpy [Response toNader's 5 dinar note video shown above] And the crowd goes wild! Apparently a new lower denominated dinar is flying around the dinar community. People are celebrating...If indeed the central bank was issuing five dinar bills well then that would mean the dinar exchange rate would have to be up there high enough to give us some type of value. Who knows maybe...1 dinar for 1 U.S. dollar. Maybe 2 U.S. dollars for 1 dinar...if a lower denomination was indeed issued then that would mean that a rate change is coming and that's what everybody's excited about... [Post 1 of 2] *** Pimpy [Response to Guru Nader's 5 dinar note video above...] Let's take a look at it...this is a bill...As a collector this is exactly how I'd love to see it - Nice, flat, crisp, centered, no marks, no folds, nothing and a protector just like this. But that's just it. It's a collectable people. This is from the 1980s. This is not a new bill...(See eBay - Iraq P-70 5 dinars year 1980 Waterfall Uncirculated Banknote )...it's a beautiful note. I like the colors but sorry people that is not a new banknote...[Post 2 of 2] *** Frank26 A picture of a five Iraqi dinar. Everybody's saying, 'Look there's a new small category note. There is no zeros on there. That's a five.' All you have to do is look at the batch number. Blow it up and you can see the batch number and then you'll know exactly those are from the Saddam/Swiss era..[See video above]

No casualties reported as Italy reports navy ships, patrol boats and other vessels picked up migrants crammed aboard various craft off the Libyan coast Agence France-Presse Sunday 23 August 2015 00.22 BST Italy’s coastguard has successfully coordinated the rescue of about 3,000 migrants in the Mediterranean, after receiving distress calls from more than 20 overcrowded vessels drifting in waters off Libya. One of the biggest single-day rescue operations to date appeared to have been concluded on Saturday without any reports of casualties. Two navy ships, the Cigala Fulgosi and the Vega, picked up 507 and 432 migrants respectively from two wooden boats in danger of sinking just off Libya, said the navy. The coastguard said its patrol boats had boarded a total of just less than 1,000 people from various unseaworthy fishing boats and inflatables that had left Libya overnight on Friday-Saturday. At least another 1,000 rescued migrants and refugees were reported to be headed for Italian ports on other boats as the wave of new arrivals triggered increasingly virulent attacks on centre-left prime minister Matteo Renzi’s handling of the migration crisis. “This must [be] a joke. We are using our own forces to do the people smugglers’ business for them and ensure we are invaded,” said Maurizio Gasparri, a senator for Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party. Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration Northern League, called on the government to park the migrants on disused Italian oil rigs off Libya. “Help them, rescue them and take care of them: but don’t let them land here,” wrote Salvini on his Facebook page. The rescued migrants included 311, with a newborn baby, who were on a boat belonging to humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières that was expected to dock on Monday in Vibo Valentia in Calabria, according to port authorities there. A further 370 had been picked up by the Italian customs police and were headed for Messina in Sicily, while the Norwegian boat Siem Pilot was also carrying hundreds of people to port. Just over 170,000 migrants and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and south Asia landed at Italy’s southern ports in 2014 after being rescued in the Mediterranean, while the total for 2015 has already topped 104,000. A further 135,000-plus have landed in Greece since January, and more than 2,300 people have died at sea while trying to make it to Europe with the help of traffickers. Police in Palermo, Sicily, announced on Saturday that they arrested six Egyptian nationals on suspicion of people-smuggling following the rescue of a stricken boat on 19 August. Testimony from the 432 migrants on board suggested the vessel had been packed with more than 10 times the number of people it was designed for, with many of the passengers, including a number of women and children, locked below decks. They had each paid the traffickers €2,000 (£1,450...$2,283) for the passage from Egypt to Italy, according to statements given to police. On board, the crew were reported to have demanded further payment to allow those locked in the hold to come up temporarily for air. Humanitarian organisations have called on European governments to shoulder more of the burden of absorbing the waves of asylum-seeking migrants and to help create safer routes for them to reach Europe.

Banners at Old Dominion University in Virginia were aimed at parents of new female students and included ‘hope your baby girl is ready for a good time’ Rebecca Ratcliffe Tuesday 25 August 2015 10.07 BST A fraternity at Old Dominion University in Virginia has been suspended after it displayed sexually suggestive banners aimed at the parents of new female students. The banners, thought to have been hung by members of the Sigma Nu fraternity, included statements such as: “Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time”, “Freshman daughter drop off” and “Go ahead and drop off mom too”. The national Sigma Nu fraternity has since suspended the activities of its chapter at ODU, pending an investigation into the incident. In a statement shared on the university’s Facebook page, Brad Beacham, executive director of the fraternity, called the signs “derogatory and demeaning”, adding: “Any fraternity member found to be responsible for this reprehensible display will be held accountable by the fraternity. “The fraternity will remain in close communication with ODU administrators throughout its investigation and review,” he said. The signs drew condemnation on social media: ( see tweets and pic in link) The university’s student government association released a statement criticising the incident: “Not only do these actions taken by a few individuals undermine the countless efforts at Old Dominion University to prevent sexual assault, they are also unwelcoming, offensive and unacceptable.” In a letter to staff and students, John R Broderick, president of Old Dominion University, said it has zero tolerance for sexual harassment. “While we constantly educate students, faculty and staff about sexual assault and sexual harassment, this incident confirms our collective efforts are still failing to register with some. “This incident will be reviewed immediately by those on campus empowered to do so. Any student found to have violated the code of conduct will be subject to disciplinary action.” He said that sessions on preventing discrimination and sexual assault had been given to all new students at the weekend. He added that the student government association had recently developed a campaign “educating our students on prevention of sexual and relationship violence, bystander intervention, and off-campus responsible behaviour”. He said: “Through video, online and in-person content, we layer education on these topics for all of our students throughout the year.” The university has also released a video condemning the banners. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/25/us-university-suspends-fraternity-over-sexually-suggestive-banners

Syria’s ancient city prospered by integrating migrants and allowing worship of many gods. It couldn’t be further from Isis’s monocultural savagery Tuesday 25 August 2015 13.32 BST By Tim Whitmarsh In May 2015, Islamic State captured the modern city of Palmyra. The adjoining Unesco world heritage site is a breathtaking archaeological complex like no other. In the 2nd century AD this oasis city in the Syrian desert was one of the grandest and wealthiest places in the world, with a total population about the size of modern Cardiff. Much of the ancient civic and sacred architecture still survives. Perhaps most evocative is the colonnaded street more than 1km in length: in antiquity, caravan traders from all over the Middle East would have processed along this road with their spices and silks towards the city’s religious heart, the magnificent temple of Bel, eyed from above by hundreds of statues of Palmyrene benefactors. The future of this extraordinary site is precarious. At the time of the initial occupation, an anti-Assad Syrian radio station carried with Abu Laith al-Saoudi, an Isis commander, who vouched that only the idolatrous statues would be destroyed; “concerning the historical city we will preserve it and it will not undergo damages inshallah (‘if God wills it’)”. Whatever deity reigns in Isis fantasy firmament, however, must have been in a capricious and malign mood. On 23 August 2015 it was reported that the temple of Baal Shamin, one of the best-preserved and most unique buildings on the site, had been levelled by explosives. Palmyra is not just a spectacular archaeological site, beautifully preserved, excavated and curated. It also offers antiquity’s best counterexample to Isis’s fascistic monoculturalism. The ancient city’s prosperity arose thanks to its citizens’ ability to trade with everyone, to integrate new populations, to take on board diverse cultural influences, to worship many gods without conflict. Painful though it is to say it, and unlikely though it is that its asinine followers realise it, Isis have chosen their target exceptionally well. The city rose to prominence in the 1st century AD. Located in a fertile oasis in the middle of the Syrian desert, it was a natural stopping-off point for those travelling from the western cities of Damascus, Emesa (modern Homs) or Apamea, to the Euphrates valley in the north. Most valuable of all for its prosperity, however, were the southern and south-eastern routes down to the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, which brought exotic goods from India, Indonesia and China. The archeological remains testify to the moment when the entire Eurasian land mass joined up, culturally speaking. It grew rich from the taxes (up to 25%) levied on market goods – and, of course, on the water and provisions that a bustling oasis city could monopolise. Ethnically, the first settlers were Arabs and Aramaeans. As the city grew, local nomads put down roots, and then immigrants from further afield. Incoming communities preserved cultural links by retaining the gods of their homelands. Palmyra had an extraordinary variety of gods, deriving from territories as far afield as modern Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine and Lebanon. There was also the mysterious “god with no name” – the object of much scholarly speculation. But the city had a strong collective identity too. Ancient middle-eastern cities tended to worship gods in triads, and Palmyra was no exception: Bel, Yarhibol and Aglibol were acclaimed by the whole city, regardless of ethnicity. The imposing, iconic temple of Bel still stands, at the end of that kilometre-long colonnade – for now, at least. It is surely high on the Isis hit list. Ancient Palmyra was also defined by its political geography. To the east lay the massive empire of the Zoroastrian Parthians, centred in modern Iran. To the west was the Mediterranean basin, dominated by Rome. It was Rome that first pushed its boundaries eastwards to encompass Palmyra, adding another layer of cultural richness. But the columns, capitals and pediments that dominate the temple architecture, and the theatre, baths and aqueduct, were not forcibly imposed by the Romans; the Palmyrenes actively chose to absorb these features of a distant civilisation, having first attracted the craftsmen to build them. They also opted for Greek forms of civic governance for their city, which was managed by a council made up of the local gentry – exactly the same set-up as in Athens, Corinth or Delphi. This combination of cultural hybridity and economic savvy was in fact so successful that Palmyra developed imperial ambitions of its own, which erupted forcefully in the 3rd century AD, when Zenobia famously proclaimed herself Queen, and for a time seized from the Romans large parts of Syria, and Arabia too, threatening to expand into Egypt. The Emperor Aurelian eventually put down the insurrection and re-established Roman control. Zenobia’s defeat marked the beginning of the end of Palmyra’s exuberant diversity and archaeological splendour. Within 100 years, the Roman Empire was Christian, and the opportunities for theological and hence architectural inventiveness were gone. In the 7th century came Muslim occupation, and in time the city was absorbed into the Damascus-based Umayyad caliphate. Although Christians and Muslim occupiers repurposed the ancient city’s buildings as churches, fortresses and mosques, however, they left them largely intact. It has taken a savagery distinctive to the 21st century to threaten their destruction altogether. Syria’s heritage is under attack now from an unprecedentedly toxic combination of religious absolutism, facile identity politics, postcolonial grievance, incendiary technology and adolescent folly. That it is Palmyra at risk, antiquity’s icon of cultural diversity, is a horrible irony. 1 2 ‘Palmyra is not just a spectacular archaeological site, beautifully preserved, excavated and curated.’ Photograph: Christophe Charon/AFP/Getty Images 2 2 ‘But the columns, capitals and pediments that dominate the temple architecture, and the theatre, baths and aqueduct, were not forcibly imposed by the Romans.’ Photograph: Uncredited/AP http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/25/palmyra-tolerant-multicultural-isis-ancient-city-migrants-savagery

Official says group destroyed Baal Shamin in city described as being of outstanding universal value and first appearing in 19th century BC Agence France-Presse in Damascus Monday 24 August 2015 07.17 BST Islamic State blew up the ancient temple of Baal Shamin in the Unesco-listed Syrian city of Palmyra, the country’s antiquities chief has said. “Daesh placed a large quantity of explosives in the temple of Baal Shamin ... and then blew it up causing much damage to the temple,” said Maamoun Abdulkarim, using another name for Isis. Isis, which controls swaths of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, captured Palmyra on 21 May, sparking international concern about the fate of the heritage site described by Unesco as of outstanding universal value. “The [inner area of the temple] was destroyed and the columns around collapsed,” said Abdulkarim. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the country’s civil war, confirmed the destruction of the temple. Baal Shamin was built in 17AD and it was expanded under the reign of Roman emperor Hadrian in 130AD. Known as the Pearl of the Desert, Palmyra, which means City of Palms, is a well-preserved oasis 130 miles north-east of Damascus. Its name first appeared on a tablet in the 19th century BC as a stopping point for caravans travelling on the Silk Road and between the Gulf and the Mediterranean. But it was during the Roman Empire – beginning in the first century BC and lasting another 400 years – that Palmyra rose to prominence. Before the arrival of Christianity in the second century, Palmyra worshipped the trinity of the Babylonian god Bel, Yarhibol (the sun) and Aglibol (the moon). “Our darkest predictions are unfortunately taking place,” said Abdulkarim. He said the jihadis carried out executions in Palmyra’s ancient theatre, destroyed the famous Lion of Al-lāt in July and transformed the museum into a prison and a courtroom. Isis mined the ancient site in June before destroying the lion statue, a unique piece made of limestone that stood more than three metres high (10 feet) that stood outside a museum. Funerary busts were also destroyed. Isis’s harsh version of Islam considers statues and grave markers to be idolatrous and the group has destroyed antiquities and heritage sites in territory under its control in Syria and Iraq. The latest developments come just days after Isis jihadis beheaded the 82-year-old retired chief archaeologist of Palmyra. On Sunday, the family of Khaled al-Assaad said the jihadists had mutilated his body after killing him execution-style on Tuesday. Temple of Baal Shamin, which has been apparently blown up by Isis. Photograph: G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/isis-blows-up-temple-dating-back-to-17ad-in-unesco-listed-syrian-city

Traditional practitioners of female genital mutilation have established deep roots in Sierra Leonean culture and politics, creating a culture of fear among young women and posing a major obstacle to opponents of the custom Lisa O'Carroll in Makeni Monday 24 August 2015 07.00 BST When 16-year-old Mariatu* goes to bed at night she is scared of going to sleep. She fears members of powerful, all-female secret societies are going to break into her room with the consent of her parents and kidnap her. Mariatu has good reason to be afraid. She has already fled her village in northern Sierra Leone to avoid female genital mutilation (FGM) and expects to go on the run again to avoid being cut. “I am not safe in this house. I’m not safe in this community,” she said. “I am afraid, when I lie down to sleep, that one day they will grab me, tie me up and take me to that place.” She is referring to the “Bondo” bush, an area of secluded forest where FGM takes place. Mariatu’s story goes to the heart of the challenges for anti-FGM campaigners in Sierra Leone, touching on the silent power of the secret societies, who carry out the cutting as an initiation into the group. It also speaks of the cultural and political significance of the country’s ancient structures. In an unprecedented step, soweis, the women who hold the most senior rank in the societies, agreed to speak to the Guardian. The soweis are unhappy with attempts to force them to abandon the practice, seeing it as an attack on their culture, which is rooted in ancient rituals designed to protect the community against evil spirits and regulate the passage of adolescents to womanhood. The societies exist in every village and town across Sierra Leone and are a vital communications link between politicians and rural communities. This gives them the power to tell women how to vote. Abolishing the societies and ending FGM – known as Bondo – is taboo for the political elite. “This is our tradition, when someone has matured they must go through Bondo before they can be respected,” said Baromie Kamara, a senior sowei granted permission to speak by the village chief. After the cutting, girls are traditionally kept in a Bondo house in the forest for days, weeks or sometimes months to heal and receive lessons on adulthood. “We teach the girls that when you marry you need to do the laundry, sweep and cook. You must get on with the new mother-in-law and the father in-law; all the small brothers, you need to treat them properly. So that is why we put them in Bondo,” said Kamara. For the teaching, the sowei is paid in cash or with food. “If the girls come back into town and can’t do these things it will cause the sowei problems. They will always curse us,” explained Kamara. A silver lining to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone was a temporary ban on FGM. Before the Ebola outbreak, it is estimated that 88% of Sierra Leonean girls were cut, the seventh highest rate of the 28 countries in Africa where FGM is practised. The World Health Organisation defines FGM as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons”. The country recently ratified the Maputo protocol, an African charter of women’s rights agreed in 2003 that calls for the elimination of harmful practices including FGM. As a result, the social welfare minister indicated in July that the cabinet had discussed outlawing FGM for under 18s. A draft strategy paper has been compiled by the Sierra Leonean academic Owolabi Bjälkander, with input from district soweis, the family planning unit of the police, and the minister. Attempts to outlaw FGM in the past have foundered on political interests. Journalist Umaru Fofana tells how the paramount chiefs, who represent all 149 chiefdoms, insisted that a ban on FGM be removed from the Child Rights Act in 2007. Such is the power of the societies that in July, when a rumour circulated that the government was going to ban them – and by inference their FGM ceremonies – women in the public gallery threatened to walk out of parliament Hostility towards opponents of the practice was underlined in 2009, when four female journalists in the city of Kenema were forced to strip before being frogmarched through the streets because “they spoke unfavourably on radio against FGM”. Anti-FGM campaigners are divided on whether an under-18 ban will have any impact. Some believe it is a small step in the right direction, others say it will matter little as traditionally a parent makes the decision for a daughter, irrespective of age. “As long as your parents are alive, you are a child. Even if you are 40, your mother can slap you. The child has to give respect to her mother, so even at that age your parents can force you to have Bondo,” says local activist Ann-Marie Caulker, of the National Movement for Emancipation and Progress, a coalition campaigning against harmful practices. In Mariatu’s village, FGM has not been banned, but the chief supports anyone who does not want it done. In a neighbouring village, however, chief Abubakar Kabia bannedthe practice – which he believes holds back development in the community – five years ago. If the soweis had replacement incomes or were taught how to farm the surrounding land, much of which is uncultivated, Kabia is convinced they would drop the knife. This is disputed by the Forum against Harmful Traditional Practices, a coalition of 16 women’s groups fighting FGM, who said the strategy did not work when tested in villages three years ago. “They said: ‘We will take the money and stop the initiation when we are ready’,” said the forum’s head, Rugiatu Turay. The more successful agent of change has been education, said Turay: “There are people in some rural areas where they have accepted change. They have said they want to replace Bondo with school.” Mariatu has missed two years of school as punishment for refusing to be cut. “I feel lonely,” she says. “They [her family] say I am the one who brought shame to the family. “Anyone who doesn’t join the society they say is dirty, they make me feel ashamed. “Older married women they tell me, I want to ****** their husbands. The outsiders they will all come and sing songs to provoke me, to shame me.” With 10 soweis in her extended family, she knows she is at risk of being forcibly cut. “She is very brave, there are other girls who have not been initiated but they don’t speak out. She is unusual,” said Aminata Sheriff, project coordinator of the NGO Plan International. Mariatu said she almost lost her resolve not to be cut but, when she heard about the NGO in the village, determined: “Well, I won’t join.” Plan has been working in 20 communities around Makeni to help girls escape Bondo. Taking advantage of the Ebola ban, the NGO has increased its awareness-raising programmes in the past year. “It’s not cultural, it’s power. When politicians want to talk to communities, they call for the soweis,” said Sheriff. One senior parliamentarian is said to have gone further and sponsored the circumcision of several dozen initiates in the south-eastern cities of Bo and Kailahun in return for votes. “We need to distract people from thinking it is a vote-gainer,” said Turay. “The moment we do that, it loses its value.” Sheriff added: “She [Mariatu] will come under pressure, but we are praying that she will not be taken and that she will be safe.” * Names have been changed 1 4 ‘Mariatu’, 16, seen here facing two soweis, has bravely refused to undergo female genital mutilation. Photograph: Michael Duff Baromie Kamara, deputy head sowei in her chiefdom, is unhappy the village chief has banned cutting ceremonies. Photograph: Michael Duff A group of soweis, the most senior women in the Bondo secret societies. The chiefdom’s head sowei, seen here wearing a pink dress, is Jeanette Bangura. In the centre, wearing a yellow and blue dress, is Ann-Marie Caulker, an anti-FGM campaigner. Photograph: Michael Duff Bondo bush, the area of forest in Makeni, northern Sierra Leone, where the cutting is performed. Photograph: Michael Duff http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/24/sierra-leone-female-genital-mutilation-soweis-secret-societies-fear

International Rescue Committee says more ferries are needed to take migrants to Athens as some 2,000 people arrive on island each day Agence France-Presse Wednesday 19 August 2015 00.15 BST An unprecedented spike in refugee arrivals on Greek shores is pushing the resort island of Lesbos to “breaking point”, with some 2,000 people landing there every day, an aid group warned on Tuesday. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) warned that the sheer volume of the arrivals was overwhelming the already limited support structure on Lesbos. In the last week alone, 20,843 migrants – virtually all of them fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – have arrived in Greece, which has seen around 160,000 migrants land on its shores since January. People taking perilous, and sometimes deadly, journeys in inflatable boats from Turkey towards Greek islands such as Lesbos then travel to Athens and onward to northern Europe. “A dramatic increase in the number of refugees arriving in Lesbos and a lack of available space on ferries to the mainland risks leaving thousands stranded and overwhelming the limited support on the island,” the IRC said in a statement. Some 6,500 refugees were on Lesbos on Monday night, the IRC said, and ferries to the mainland are booked until the middle of next week, while the number of arrivals continues to rise at a time when thousands of tourists are also on the island. “Unless further ships are made available, the total number of refugees on Lesbos, which normally has a population of nearly 90,000 people, could rise to more than 20,000 before the ferry service is able to accommodate them,” the IRC said. “The spike in the number of arrivals over the past few days and the inability for refugees to leave the island risks Lesbos reaching breaking point,” said Kirk Day, the group’s emergency field coordinator on the island. On the island of Kos, which is also experiencing hundreds of new migrant arrivals each night, the situation has somewhat improved since Sunday when Greek authorities started registering and hosting Syrians on board a ferry, speeding up the registration process. With the ferry nearing full capacity on Tuesday, however, there were unconfirmed reports that it would take 1,750 refugees to the mainland on Wednesday night and then return to the island. At the weekend, travel agencies and ferry ticket offices faced long queues of tourists and migrants looking for tickets to Athens. One travel agent in Kos said there is still a two-day delay for tickets to Athens. The delay appears to affect migrants more, as many visitors to Kos had booked their seats to the capital before taking their holiday. However unlike Lesbos, Kos has no transit camp, leaving some 2,500 people on the resort island sleeping rough until they are able to leave. “The situation is still very complicated,” said UN refugee agency emergency coordinator Roberto Mignone. Day said: “It is vital that anyone who escapes war or survived an extremely traumatic journey are properly supported with food, water, shelter and medical checks when they arrive. “Unfortunately this basic level of reception has not been possible as there hasn’t been the funding or political will to properly tackle the refugee crisis in Greece.” Syrian migrants wait to register with authorities on the isle of Lesbos. An aid charity says the island is overwhelmed by the number of people arriving. Photograph: Achilleas Zavallis/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/spike-refugee-arrivals-pushing-greek-island-lesbos-breaking-point

Islamic State militants hung body of Khaled Asaad, 82, in a main square of Palmyra, national antiquities chief says Reuters Tuesday 18 August 2015 22.50 BST Islamic State militants beheaded an antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his body on a column in a main square of the historic site, Syria’s antiquities chief said on Tuesday. Isis, whose insurgents control swathes of Syria and Iraq, captured Palmyra in central Syria from government forces in May, but is not known to have damaged its monumental Roman-era ruins despite a reputation for destroying artefacts militants view as idolatrous under their puritanical interpretation of Islam. Syrian state antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said the family of Khaled Asaad had informed him that the 82-year-old scholar who worked for over 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra was killed by Isis on Tuesday. Asaad had been detained and interrogated for over a month by the ultra-radical Sunni Muslim militants, Abdulkarim told Reuters. “Just imagine that such a scholar who gave such memorable services to the place and to history would be beheaded ... and his corpse still hanging from one of the ancient columns in the centre of a square in Palmyra,” Abdulkarim said. “The continued presence of these criminals in this city is a curse and bad omen on (Palmyra) and every column and every archaeological piece in it.” Abdulkarim said Asaad was known for several scholarly works published in international archaeological journals on Palmyra, which in antiquity flourished as an important trading hub along the Silk Road. He also worked over the past few decades with US, French, German and Swiss archaeological missions on excavations and research in Palmyra’s famed 2,000-year-old ruins, a Unesco World Heritage Site that includes Roman tombs and the Temple of Bel. Before the city’s capture by Isis, Syrian officials said they moved hundreds of ancient statues to safe locations out of concern they would be destroyed by the militants. In June, Isis did blow up two ancient shrines in Palmyra that were not part of its Roman-era structures but which the militants regarded as pagan and sacrilegious. Undated photo of Khaled al-Asaad released 18 August 2015 by the Syrian official news agency SANA. Photograph: Uncredited/AP Photo released on 17 May 2015 by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows the general view of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. Photograph: AP http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/18/isis-beheads-archaeologist-syria

Up to 40 people are thought to have died as Italian Navy rescues 300 more from boat 21 miles off coast of Libya Chris Johnston and agencies Sunday 16 August 2015 11.07 BST At least 40 migrants have died from inhaling exhaust fumes in the hold of a boat in the Mediterranean. Commander Massimo Tozzi, speaking from the navy ship Cigala Fulgosi, which came to the aid of the overcrowded boat, said: “The dead were found in the hold.” He said the migrants appeared to have died after inhaling exhaust fumes. When rescuers boarded the boat, the migrants’ bodies were found “lying in water, fuel, human excrement” in the hold, Tozzi said. The death toll could still rise further. “They are still counting the victims,” Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, said. About 320 people had been rescued by the navy from the boat, which was 21 miles (33km) off the coast of Libya. Tozzi said the survivors included three children and 45 women, some of whom “were crying for their husbands [and] their children who died in the crossing”. The navy said that the survivors were later transferred to a Norwegian ship with the Frontex mission, a European effort to save migrant lives in the Mediterranean, to be taken to a southern Italian port. At least 2,100 migrants have died at sea this year trying to make the crossing from the shores of Libya, where human traffickers are based, to Europe in a bid to flee war, persecution and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Smugglers have taken advantage of the increased chaos and fighting among Libya’s tribes and militias, some of whom are loyal to the Islamic State group, following the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. “Either the international community is able to resolve the Libyan question, or today’s [migrant tragedy] won’t be the last,” Alfano said. Survivors of the hazardous crossing often tell of traffickers locking migrants who pay less for the voyage in the hold. They not only risk drowning if the rickety boats capsize, but many also die after being overcome by diesel fumes. The International Organisation for Migration said that Italy has rescued 93,540 people so far this year, while Greece has reported 134,988 arrivals from Turkey. Along with migrants landing in Spain and Malta, 237,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year, the agency said, compared with 219,000 in the whole of 2014. The EU said on Friday that Europe was facing its worst refugee crisis since the second world war. A photograph provided by the Italian navy shows migrants being rescued from the vessel on board which at least 40 died. Photograph: EPA http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/15/migrants-suffocated-in-overcrowded-hold-of-boat-reports-say Greece sends cruise ship to ease Kos migrant crisis Vessel to function as floating registration centre as officals attempt to speed up processing of up to 7,000 refugees stranded on island Patrick Kingsley in Kos and Jon Henley in Athens Thursday 13 August 2015 15.43 BST Syrian refugees rest on a Kos street as they await registration. Photograph: Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/greece-sends-cruise-ship-kos-migrant-crisis

Among the women paying $1,000 for a massage and the men lounging in $100m homes in the billionaires’ playground of the Hamptons is a largely unseen, mostly Latino, workforce toiling all summer in order to survive the winter Rupert Neate in Southampton, New York Friday 14 August 2015 12.30 BST Every summer, the Hamptons becomes a billionaires’ playground. In the collection of historic towns and villages on the Atlantic Ocean where beachfront mansions change hands for more than a $100m (£64m), the streets are lined with designer boutiques and the roads are clogged bumper-to-bumper with Ferraris, Range Rovers and Maseratis. Life is not so much fun, however, for the army of local people and recent immigrants who work to keep the swelling numbers of the super-rich happy. And as Labor Day approaches – the unofficial end of the American summer – life is likely to get worse. “This is not paradise for me,” said Natacha Castillo, 19, who came from the Dominican Republic to Southampton, which is regarded as the most luxurious area of the Hamptons, in search of a better life three years ago. She didn’t find it. Castillo works in a luxury beauty salon washing the hair of the world’s richest and most famous women for $9-an-hour. Her clients, who Castillo says don’t bat an eyelid at paying $60 for a blow dry or $1,000 for a massage, often ignore her “and sometimes they treat us like we are servants”. But they do tip well. Castillo, who is studying cosmetology at college, can make $650 a week with tips, but “without tips I can do nothing”. Castillo is part of the largely unseen, mostly Latino, workforce toiling all summer clearing plates in the restaurants, scrubbing the mansions and maintaining their privet hedges. “I don’t like this town,” Castillo said as she walked home in the twilight after a long day at the salon. “You spend all your summer working to have something to live on in the winter.” Her family – a stay-at-home mother, carpenter step-father and younger brother and sister – struggle to get by just a few miles from some of the most expensive real estate in the world. “Those of us who live here, we are not rich, we have to work to make money, even more in the summer. If we want to be OK in the winter we have to work a lot in the summer, so we can hardly enjoy the summer.” Castillo doesn’t have any friends who live “south of the highway” – the Manhattan-to-Montauk highway that divides the richest of the world’s rich from the people who serve them. Her friends are without exception other Latinos, mostly from Mexico and Colombia. Her best friend, Eliana Sabogal, 18, works “stupid hours” at McDonald’s, when she’s not studying. She said three generations of her family, who live in a small bungalow a few hundred yards north of the highway, are only able to survive by relying on the kindness of the church in winter. While working at McDonald’s gives her little time to sleep over the summer, it’s preferable to her previous job: cleaning billionaires’ homes. “I went to one of those houses to work, to clean it,” she said as her 63-year-old grandmother listens and prays with rosary beads. “I almost didn’t finish cleaning it because it was so big. I was alone in so much luxury. “It was like walking into a palace for me because I had never been in a house like this.” It’s a safe bet that the house Sabogal cleaned cost several million dollars. The median selling price for homes on Southampton’s most desirable streets exceeds $18m and some have sold for in excess of $100m. “If you’re going to be on the ocean, I just don’t see how you can touch it for less than …” Hamptons real estate Nancy Hardy trails off as she tries to think how much the cheapest beachfront house might cost. No one has ever asked her the price of the cheapest, she explained as she took the Guardian on a tour of the properties she has on the market. “People normally only want to talk about the most expensive.” “A teardown house [would] maybe cost $35m (£22.5m), and up from there,” Hardy says after some consideration. “And, I’m always the conservative one so I may be understating that number.” Hardy, 56, who has been selling houses for 20 years, pauses to point out the window as she drives past acre after acre of luscious hedgerows grown 20ft high to shield the wealthy from prying eyes. “We’re going past one that was sold for almost $100m. It traded twice in the past year,” she said. “It had belonged to the man [shoe designer Vince Camuto] that owned [ladies fashion brand] Nine West.” A couple doors down on Gin Lane, which has been dubbed “the Fifth Avenue of the Hamptons”, is Vera Wang’s mansion, and the estates of late retail billionaire Alfred Taubman, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy. The houses are almost without exception second homes that allow their owners to escape the heat of Manhattan on summer weekends, and can be just one home in a portfolio of seven, eight or nine houses in luxury enclaves across the world. “I mean people have $60m houses that they use for 16 weekends out of the year, literally,” said Ann-Marie Horan, Hardy’s colleague at Halstead Property. “As soon as Labor Day hits they’re gone, and they’re in Bermuda, Palm Beach or Aspen.” For those hoping to join billionaire and Republican political activist David Koch, private equity king Leon Black or designer Calvin Klein on Meadow Lane, but who don’t quite have the tens of millions required to buy, there is always the possibility of renting – but even a modest oceanfront home can cost more than $1m just for the summer. “Some are $1m for the month of August,” explained Hardy. The rich don’t come alone, Horan said, they bring a team of assistants, nannies (“at least one per child”), cooks and drivers. “I just had some Saudis for the weekend spending $10,000 a night, and they came with four security [personnel], three nannies and I provided them with housekeeping,” she said. “This is the way people roll. They have a lot of staff.” The help also travel in style, joining their employers on private jets or helicopters into East Hampton airport, where the parking lot is packed with Porches and Rolls-Royces with blacked out windows. More than 4,200 helicopter landings were registered at East Hampton airport, which is 35 minutes from the Manhattan heliport, last summer. The growing desire for bands of travelling household staff has solved a problem for realtors: how to rent a house that doesn’t have a pool. “It’s a big problem if you don’t have room for a pool. [in the past] if we had a 10 renters come to a house, nine-and-a-half had to have a pool,” Hardy said. “Now … they’re being rented as staff houses [because] they [the rich renters] don’t want to pay for the maintenance of the pool. So they’re putting their chef, they’re putting their driver, they’re putting their housekeeping in a separate house. It would be a very nice house, everyone’s got their own bedroom and bath.” Larry Cantwell, the town supervisor and life-long resident of East Hampton, which lies 13 miles up the Long Island coast from Southampton, explains that while 50% of homes in the town are the summer homes of rich people, the rest are occupied by those who live and work there year-round. “That’s the working class part of our community, including some who are poor and in need as well,” he said. Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother, said he often thinks he presides over a town comprising two very different worlds living just minutes apart. “In terms of income and wealth, yes, completely different worlds,” he said. “But you know you also have a situation where some of the people who are very wealthy, famous, probably well-known, certainly in this country or even throughout the world, have people that are working for them that live five miles away in a much less expensive home.” But he fears the gap between the wealthy and the “locals” is only gaping larger, especially for the area’s youth growing up in working class families with very limited local job prospects and a severe lack of public transport. “It’s very difficult for young people,” Cantwell said. “I mean, look, the land and housing values here are so high that you have a situation where many people struggle. In our town we have husbands and wives combining their incomes to try and raise a family, some of the them are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet.” So many local people struggle to get by – with 7% of the population below the poverty line – that food banks have been set up to accept donations and make sure children and their parents don’t go hungry in the the winter when the mansions close and jobs for locals dry up. “We have food pantries here in East Hampton and many of the people from different parts of the community and different walks of life contributing a great deal to help feed people,” Cantwell said. There is such concern about the prospects for the Hamptons’ youth that a special taskforce of various local government agencies have come together to try to draw attention to the difficulties of growing up in a low-to-middle income household surrounded by such luxury. The group’s first report detailed high incidences of drink and drug abuse (with drug abuse prevention counselling now being made available from as early as kindergarten in some Hamptons schools), teen pregnancy, mental health problems and some schools providing more than half of students with free lunches, an indicator of families living below the poverty line. Nancy Lynott, Southampton Town’s youth bureau director, said the report was part of an attempt to paint a true picture of what life’s like in the Hamptons for the young people who live there. “Sunshine, holidays and parties, that’s the perception – that life out here is a big party,” she said. “What’s pictured in the media for life out here is the folks who live on estates, the celebrities … a lot of celebrities, they’re the ones that are making the news, not the folks that are doing the everyday work,” she said. “It’s wealth that blows my mind. Just the number of houses, the amount of disposable income, the options that some of these folks have, that most of us including myself could never dream of having in our lives. And then you have the other side, which is the folks who need help heating their homes, feeding their children, those kinds of things.” 1 4 Eliana Sabogal, 18, (from left), her grandmother Luz Sanabria, 63, and her friend Natacha Castillo, 19, sit on the porch of Sabogal’s family home in Southampton, New York. Photograph: Bastien Inzaurralde for the Guardian More pics and video in link http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/14/hamptons-super-rich-inequality

John Kerry reopens embassy and proclaims ‘Cuba’s future is for Cubans’ as American flag is raised over building for the first time in more than half a century Tom McCarthy in New York Friday 14 August 2015 15.54 BST John Kerry formally reopened the US embassy in Cuba with a flag-raising ceremony on Friday, during the first visit to the country by a US secretary of state since 1945. Standing in an outdoor courtyard with a calm Caribbean sea across the street behind him, Kerry pronounced “a day for pushing aside old barriers and pursuing new possibilities”. “For more than half a century, US-Cuba relations have been suspended in the amber of cold war politics,” Kerry said. “It’s time to unfurl our flags and let the world know, we wish each other well.” Occasionally translating himself into Spanish, Kerry warned against “unrealistic expectations” of immediate changes to follow the normalization of diplomatic relations. “Cuba’s future is for Cubans to shape,” he said. “We urge the Cuban government to make it less difficult for their citizens to start businesses, to go online, to engage in trade,” Kerry said. “We are certain that the time is now to reach out to one another as two people who are no longer enemies or rivals, but neighbors.” The flag-raising did not change the status of the building, which like its Cuban counterpart in Washington was converted from an interests section to an embassy in July. Cuban foreign minister Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez visited Washington last month to reopen the Cuban embassy. Normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries was announced last December. Kerry was accompanied by a delegation including assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs Roberta Jacobson, and senators Barbara Boxer, Jeff Flake, Amy Klobuchar and Patrick Leahy. A Cuban delegation to the ceremony was led by Josefina Vidal, head of US affairs at the Cuban foreign ministry. Obama administration critics have said the White House should have sought more concessions from the Castro regime on human rights as part of the diplomatic thaw. Senator Marco Rubio, who is running for president and whose parents emigrated to the US from Cuba before Castro’s presidency, said in a speech on foreign policy in New York City on Friday that as president he would “roll back President Obama’s concessions to the Castro regime”. “First, on day one, I will give the Castros a choice: either continue repressing your people and lose the diplomatic relations and benefits provided by President Obama, or carry out meaningful political and human rights reforms and receive increased US trade, investment, and support,” Rubio said, according to prepared remarks. A US economic embargo on Cuba, which can only be lifted by Congress, remains in place, although the Obama administration has taken steps to loosen restrictions on economic activity on the island and has promised more of the same. “After 54 years of seeing zero progress, one of the things we negotiated is the ability of our diplomats to be able to meet with people in Cuba and not to be restrained,” Kerry said Thursday. “And I believe the people of Cuba benefit by the virtue of that presence and that ability.” The event did not include Cuban dissidents, who were not invited out of deference to the Cuban government. Three Marines who had participated in a ceremony to take the flag down in 1961 were guests at the flag raising. Kerry was expected to meet with dissidents and others at an event Friday afternoon at the home of the US chief of mission. Kerry met with senior Cuban government officials but did not have plans to meet with president Raúl Castro or his brother Fidel. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/14/us-embassy-cuba-formally-reopens

Oath Keepers group say police allowed their weapons at protests, while group of young black men found to be unarmed after arrest on suspicion of carrying guns Oliver Laughland and Jon Swaine in Ferguson, Missouri and Joanna Walters in New York Wednesday 12 August 2015 09.00 BST A group of young black men were incorrectly arrested on suspicion of firearm possession during a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, as a group of white militiamen, armed with rifles and wearing body armour and camouflage claimed they were granted permission to walk through the protests by police officers. Hundreds of protesters descended on West Florissant Avenue on Monday night as part of ongoing demonstrations to mark the one-year anniversary of the fatal police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer, an event that sparked a nationwide discussion about race and policing. Sporadic scuffles between protesters and police occurred into the night on Monday and 22 arrests were made, following a day of civil disobedience protests around Ferguson and St Louis. County officials had declared a state of emergency in the area after a black 18-year-old was shot by officers on Sunday, after he allegedly opened fire on them during chaotic protests late in the evening. On Monday night, a group of at least three black men who were standing by a car next to a hair salon on West Florissant Avenue were arrested after a phalanx of St Louis County police surged towards them, using pepper spray and batons. A spokesman for police department told the Guardian by email on Tuesday that officers had received information “that the occupants or folks near that vehicle were possibly armed with handguns”. But the spokesman later confirmed that none of those arrested during the swoop were in possession of any weapons. The treatment of these suspects, who were wrestled to the ground and placed in plastic flexicuffs, came in seemingly stark contrast to a group of white militiamen, who arrived at the protest at around 1am, after the arrests occurred, carrying loaded M-15 rifles with several magazine cartridges strapped across their body armour. The men belonged to a group named the Oath Keepers, a collective of former and current military servicemen and police officers who claim to defend the US constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. The group is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “fiercely anti-government, militaristic group”. Dennis Kenney, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College in New York, said that the organization prides itself on being provocative. “Their movement is anti-government and they believe they have to stay armed because they have to be ready to overthrow the government. They are as much trying to pick a fight with the police as anyone else.” A spokesman for the group, who declined to give his name but was later identified as John Karriman, leader of the Missouri Oath Keeper chapter, told reporters they were present to protect journalists working for the conspiracy-minded news site Info Wars and had received permission from police to walk among protesters. “We checked in with law enforcement when we got here, we told them what we were doing and who we were with,” said Karriman. “We walked up and they [police] came over and we shook hands and smiled. We said we’re here to protecting Info Wars. They nodded and said, ‘Good on ya, just, if you would, please don’t walk through us’,” Karriman added. On Tuesday morning, St Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, who was present during the protests on Monday, distanced himself from these claims describing their presence as “both unnecessary and inflammatory”. A spokesman for the county executive office told the Guardian on Tuesday it had not yet been established whether the Oath Keepers had violated any laws in appearing on the streets but the situation was being examined by the county police. When asked about Karriman’s claims of interactions between militiamen and police on Monday evening, Sergeant Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the county police, said he was not aware which officers Karriman spoke to. Schellman said the department’s commanding officers were not aware Oath Keepers would be at the protest and they “did not ask for or receive permission” to attend. He added that the St Louis County police department would consult with the St Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office about “the legalities of the issue”. In September last year, Missouri lawmakers voted to expand gun ownership laws allowing concealed carry of firearms. Ferguson is currently operating under a county-imposed state of emergency following Sunday’s violence, but it is unclear whether this has any effect on firearm regulation. Members of the group had also arrived in Ferguson during protests and riots last year. They explained their mission was to protect local businesses from looting, but they have previously been ordered to cease their informal armed security patrols by the local police. “Members of the heavily armed militia group plan to return to the streets of Ferguson on Tuesday evening, Karriman told the Guardian. There would also be many “plainclothes” members keeping watch on proceedings covertly in the area, he said. “We are not a bunch of thugs. We are trained, we are patriots, we love our country, our constitution and our fellow men and we want people to behave themselves,” he said. Joe Biggs, a reporter for infowars.com who is currently reporting in Ferguson, told the Guardian that he was contacted by members of the local Oath Keepers chapter prior to arriving in the town late on Monday night, offering to provide security for him while he is working there. “When they showed up last night, everyone was shocked. But then people, black and white, came over to have a dialogue with them and then they were cool and calm.” Biggs said journalists had been injured during demonstrations in Ferguson and maintained that he was hit by a rubber bullet fired by police during one of the nights of rioting last summer and had encountered some local hostility. He said he had accepted the offer of voluntary security services from the Oath Keepers during this visit. “Me and another [infowars] reporter were side by side and these guys stood around us and made a perimeter. We walked in front of the cops and they walked behind us and it was cool,” Biggs said. Marcia McCormick, a professor of law at St Louis University, said of the Oath Keepers’ presence at the protests: “Where tensions are high, such as in Ferguson at the moment, and people already feel besieged, it just exacerbates the tension.” Indeed, the presence of these heavily armed men drew the ire of many protesters on Monday night. During one heated exchange a member of the Oath Keepers was accused of belonging to a racist group. He responded: “We got black people, white people, Asian people, Indian people in our group. There’s no racists in our group.” He was then asked where the men intended to point their guns if “**** kicked off”. “End of story we got your back,” the man responded. Asked by the Guardian how he believed a group of black men with assault rifles would be treated at the protests, Karriman responded: “If they want[ed] to protect their place of business and their home that would probably be appropriate. If they want[ed] to just walk up the street and draw attention, that would be silly.” A log of the dozens of arrests made in Ferguson over Monday night, which was released by St Louis County later on Tuesday, listed several men as having been arrested around the same time and location as those who were detained initially on suspicion of possessing handguns. The log said the arrested men were charged with offences such as interfering with an officer and unlawful assembly, and that two had outstanding charges in other jurisdictions. A St Louis County police spokesman said in an email, however, that he could not confirm whether or not these were the same men who were seized based on information that they had firearms, nor what happened to this group after the discovery they had no weapons. 1 2 Police arrest protesters in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday night. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media 2 2 Members of the Oath Keepers in Ferguson on Monday night. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/11/oath-keepers-ferguson-automatic-rifles

Marjorie Owens, WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth 11:02 a.m. EDT August 8, 2015 ARLINGTON, Texas — A white officer-in-training shot and killed an unarmed college football player who drove an SUV through the glass doors of a car dealership, police said. The Arlington Police Department has no video of the incident because the department has not yet put in place a pilot program in which officers will wear body cameras, said a police spokesman, Sgt. Paul Rodriguez. It also was unclear whether the dealership's security cameras captured what happened. Police responded at about 1 a.m. CT Friday to Classic Buick GMC dealership on an Interstate 20 service road after reports of a sport-utility vehicle being driven through the front of the building, Rodriguez said. Authorities initially called the driver a burglary suspect. "Officers established a perimeter and approached the suspect inside," he said. "As officers confronted the suspect, there was an altercation during which at least one officer discharged his weapon." Christian Taylor, 19, of Arlington, Texas, died at the scene, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office. It was not immediately known whether Taylor was intoxicated. Officer Brad Miller, 49, under supervised field training at the time of the shooting, fired his weapon, police said. He joined the department in September and graduated from its police academy in March. "The preservation of life and safety is our highest priority," Rodriguez said. "The Arlington Police Department is saddened by this loss of life and will provide the community a clear and transparent investigation." Rodriguez had graduated from high school in Arlington and was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he played on the football team as a defensive back. He was planning to return to school Sunday to continue football practice. In a Twitter post, the university's football coach, Will Wagner, said, "Heart is hurting." Within hours of Taylor's death, his name began trending on Twitter. In the past 24 hours, the hashtag #ChristianTaylor has been used more than 55,000 times, according to the social analytics site Topsy. Taylor's great uncle, Clyde Fuller of Grand Prairie, Texas, described Taylor as a good kid and said he didn't believe that Taylor was trying to commit a crime. Taylor has no convictions but was sentenced to six months of probation in December on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, according to the Star-Telegram. If he were not arrested again during his probationary period, he would not face jail time. The charges stemmed from a September 2013 traffic stop where Taylor had 11 hydrocodone tablets that were not prescribed to him, the paper said. He successfully completed probation in June and his case was dismissed July 14. Late last month, about two weeks after his record was wiped clean, he tweeted: "I don't wanna die too younggggg." "They say he's burglarizing the place by running up in there? Nuh-uh. Something doesn't sound right," Fuller told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Miller had no prior police experience before joining the Arlington department, Rodriguez said. He is on administrative leave during separate criminal and administrative investigations. So far this month, 21 people have been killed by police officers across the USA, two others on Friday in California and Nevada, according to a database kept by The Guardian in London, which is tracking deaths caused by law-enforcement officers this year. Taylor is at least the 696th person killed so far in 2015, and the 171st black male. Sunday marks the first anniversary of the death of another unarmed black teen, Michael Brown, who was 18 when he was killed Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., by then-officer Darren Wilson. Hundreds of protesters descended on the St. Louis suburb after Brown's death, and that town faced weeks of unrest. Contributing: The Associated Press (Photo: Courtesy of Marina Farrow) http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/07/unarmed-black-man-shot-texas/31324897/

Conservative activist Erick Erickson, organizer of major gathering, says mogul went ‘a bridge too far’ in discussing Fox News moderator’s tough questioning Ben Jacobs in Atlanta Saturday 8 August 2015 05.50 BST Donald Trump has been officially banned from one of the biggest gatherings of conservative activists after implying he received hostile questioning during the first Republican presidential debate because the television moderator was menstruating. Trump was uninvited from the RedState Gathering late on Friday after saying in a CNN interview that Fox News’s Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”, while questioning him during Thursday night’s debate. The real estate mogul had been scheduled to appear at a special tailgate at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta at the close of RedState Gathering on Saturday night. Erick Erickson, the organizer of the event and a major conservative activist tweeted late on Friday night, “I have rescinded my invitation to Mr. Trump. While I have tried to give him great latitude, his remark about Megyn Kelly was a bridge too far.” In a follow-up blog post, Erickson amplified why he was disinviting Trump: “there are even lines blunt talkers and unprofessional politicians should not cross,” he wrote. “Decency is one of those lines.” The falling-out marked the first major break with Trump from a key figure in the mainstream conservative movement. Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak told the Guardian: “This is the first time that a significant figure in the conservative movement has stood up to Trump and it’s cost him anything. “I expect Trump to lash out at Erick but Erick wins when he fights and has a huge microphone and speaks to a lot of conservatives across the country.” Mackowiak added it also represents a missed opportunity for Trump to speak to conservative activists and reporters who had gathered for the event. Trump’s latest comments about Kelly also met with an immediate rebuke from the only woman running for the Republican nomination. Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina tweeted on Friday night, “Mr. Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.” Fiorina added in a follow-up tweet: “I stand with @megynkelly.” The escalation over women’s issues represented only the latest in Trump’s series of controversial remarks. He had previously implied Mexicans crossing the border into the United States were rapists, said longtime prisoner-of-war and torture victim John McCain was not a war hero and retweeted a comment that Kelly was “a bimbo” earlier on Friday. Yet for all of Trump’s controversial remarks, the billionaire and former host of the Celebrity Apprentice remained at the top of polls in the Republican presidential primary heading into the weekend following the debate. In a late-night interview with the Guardian, Erickson said he initially approached Trump’s campaign about the Kelly statement and that “they wouldn’t deny” it was a reference to menstruation. In the opinion of the conservative activist, “I don’t think I should have anyone on stage while my wife and daughter are watching who would say that on a female journalist.” Erickson thought with the latest comments “Trump had disqualified himself” and the episode would be “the beginning of the end” of Trump’s campaign. “I think it crossed a line of decency no one running for president should ever cross whether you are a professional or amateur politician,” Erickson said. “This is my event, that I’m paying for and I can do whatever I want,” he said. “I wanted to have him here as a legitimate candidate, but no legitimate candidate suggests a female asking questions does so because she’s hormonal.” A Trump campaign spokesperson responded: “This is just another example of weakness through being politically correct. For all of the people who were looking forward to Mr Trump coming, we will miss you. Blame Erick Erickson, your weak and pathetic leader. We’ll now be doing another campaign stop at another location.” Donald Trump had been scheduled to appear at a special tailgate at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta at the close of RedState Gathering on Saturday night. Photograph: The Plain Dealer /Landov / Barcr/The Plain Dealer /Landov / Barcr http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/08/donald-trump-black-balled-by-conservatives-over-menstruation-comment

by Matthew Grimson and Elisha Fieldstadt Aug 9 2015, 12:30 pm ET Five children and three adults were found dead in a Texas home on Saturday night after a police stand-off, authorities said. A 49-year-old male suspect, identified as David Conley, surrendered to police and was taken into custody after firing a gun when officers entered the house in suburban Houston, police said. It was not yet known whether Conley is related to the victims, or how they died, according to Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Thomas Gilliland. He said police were still searching for a motive. The suspect is charged with multiple counts of capital murder, including murder of a person under six years old, according to Harris County Jail records. Previous records show Conley has faced various misdemeanor and felony records dating back to 1999. Gilliland said officers were called to the house in Harris County just after 9 p.m. Saturday, and upon arrival discovered that the man inside had an outstanding warrant for the aggravated assault of a family member.elis He said the High Risk Operations Unit was then called in to run the arrest, but officers decided to move in after seeing the body of a child through a window. "A sergeant and three deputies made entry into the house and at that point the 49-year-old subject began to shoot a weapon in the house. Our deputies pulled back and formed a perimeter," Gilliland said. The negotiator was called in and the suspect was arrested about an hour later, Gilliland said. Officers were then able to enter the house, at which point they discovered the eight bodies. He said officers were trying to establish the relationship of the deceased, including "who belongs in the house ... who was supposed to be there and who was not." Homicide detectives have taken control of the scene. Gilliland said the number of victims means "we will be here for quite a while." Gilliland said the violence brought back grueling memories of the Stay family murders near Harris last year, in which four children and their parents were shot dead by a relative. "Again it's played out for Harris County citizens to endure this," Gilliland said. "It's a hard job to be a patrolman in this town. Our deputies do a yeoman's job every day when they are forced to see the horrific nature, something so callous," he said. A body is removed from a home that was the scene of multiple fatalities and loaded onto a truck on Sunday, in Houston. David J. Phillip / AP http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/8-found-dead-including-5-children-after-stand-harris-county-n406636

Anja Reschke uses regular slot on evening news to lambast hate-filled commentators whose language she says incites arson attacks on refugee homes Kate Connolly in Berlin Thursday 6 August 2015 17.32 BST A television presenter in Germany has triggered a huge online debate after calling for a public stand against the growth of racist attacks on refugees. Anja Reschke used a commentary slot on Tagesthemen, the nationwide news bulletin of German public broadcaster ARD,to lambast hate-filled commentators whose language she said had helped incite arson attacks on refugee homes. She said she was shocked at how socially acceptable it had become to publish racist rants under real names. “Until recently, such commentators were hidden behind pseudonyms, but now these things are being aired under real names,” she said. “Apparently it’s no longer embarrassing – on the contrary, in reaction to phrases like ‘filthy vermin should drown in the sea’, you get excited consensus and a lot of ‘likes’. “If up until then you had been a little racist nobody, of course you suddenly feel great,” she said in the two-minute commentary. The segment went viral within minutes of being broadcast, and by Thursday afternoon had been viewed more than 9m times, clocked up more than 250,000 likes, 20,000 comments, and had been shared more than 83,000 times on Facebook. Reschke said the “hate tirades” had sparked “group dynamic processes” that had led to “a rise in extreme rightwing acts”. Calling on “decent” Germans to act, she said: “If you’re not of the opinion that all refugees are spongers who should be hunted down, burned or gassed, then you should make that known, oppose it, open your mouth, maintain an attitude, pillory people in public.” Her appeal came a day after the head of the intelligence service, Hans-Georg Maassen, warned that a small number of rightwing extremists were in danger of escalating a wave of attacks. He made specific mention of the group Der III Weg or “The Third Way”, calling them “dangerous rabble-rousers”. Comments to the television station’s own website and on social media overwhelmingly supported Reschke, whose closing lines had been: “And I’m already looking forward to the comments on this comment.” But it also triggered a predictable spate of hate-filled reaction, such as the Bournemouth-based @Der_GERMANE, who tweeted “Rather a Nazi on a street than a foreign social welfare freeloader.” Others accused Reschke of trying to stifle free speech. Reschke later tweeted a link to a website that has collected some of the more rabid remarks she was referring to, and which publishes links to commentators’ Facebook pages. Called Pearls from Freital, it refers to the Saxon town of the same name where refugees have been subjected to arson attacks and racist abuse, including Nazi salutes and rallies calling for them to leave. The comments included references to gassing migrants while others embedded videos of Hitler and antisemitic propaganda into posts. At a time when the number of refugees arriving in Germany is expected to more than double to a record 450,000 from the 200,000 who arrived last year, tensions are rising in some parts of the country. In the first half of this year alone there were a recorded 200 attacks on asylum-seekers, including 150 arson or other attacks that have destroyed refugee shelters or made them uninhabitable. Last week Red Cross workers setting up a tent city for Syrian refugees were attacked by far-right protesters. Some commentators have said the attacks recall Kristallnacht, the organised anti-Jewish pogroms which took place in November 1938. The response is arguably so emotional because of Germany’s past and the paradoxical situation it finds itself in. The country has one of Europe’s most hospitable asylum systems, introduced as a way of helping it make amends for the Holocaust, but which itself has unleashed some loathsome responses as the numbers have continued to rise – reminiscent of some of the bleakest moments in its history. The aggressive response towards foreigners is seen as a minority reacting to the changing face of Germany where one fifth of the population is now of a migrant background, according to statistics out this week. In contrast, the mainstream debate has been overwhelmingly positive, with many communities and individual families welcoming refugees, most of whom have fled conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The positive response notwithstanding, the government is coming under growing pressure to increase aid to communities that are struggling to cope, as well as to speed up the decision-making process as to who might stay in Germany. There is also the urgent question of how to house refugees, as temporary accommodation such as schools, camping sites and shipping-container villages are clearly not durable solutions. “It’s not only the fact that the school holidays are soon coming to an end, and people will have to move out of the schools,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung in an editorial. “Winter is coming and the people won’t be able to be kept in tents any more ... not only that but hundreds of thousands more will join them in the next few years and they’ll all need a humane place to live in the long term.” There are also growing calls across the political parties for the introduction of an immigration law to enable a better distinction between political and economic refugees, which would also allow a more efficient integration of immigrants into a labour market that needs them because it is suffering from a skills shortage. Interviewed on Thursday, Reschke said she had been astounded by the response her commentary had received, which she had felt keen to deliver because politicians’ reactions to the racist incidents had been “wholly inadequate”. “It’s about saying that the majority of Germans don’t think this way,” she told the news bulletin Tagesschau. “There’s a really big willingness to help here in Germany and a mind-boggling number of people that are doing lots for refugees, who are not racist, and I think it’s their voice that should be dominant rather than a handful of simpletons who think they should stir up hatred.” This article was amended on 7 August 2015 to correct the name of the news programme on which Reschke made her comments http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/german-tv-presenter-anja-reschke-sparks-debate-support-refugees

An encounter with an ‘intoxicated’ 14-year-old outside the conference to discuss police brutality ends with a transit officer spraying the crowd Afi Scruggs in Cleveland Monday 27 July 2015 04.59 BST A transit police officer has pepper-sprayed a crowd in Cleveland protesting the arrest of a 14-year-old at a Black Lives Matter conference inspired by police brutality. The incident occurred near Cleveland State University in the city’s downtown where the first Black Lives Matter conference was taking place. More than 1,200 participants spent the weekend organizing and discussing a range of social justice issues. According to the Greater Cleveland regional transit authority, its officers were taking an intoxicated teenage bus rider to a police station just as the conference was ending about 5pm. A large crowd blocked the squad car and tried to get the youngster out. One of the officers turned and began pepper-spraying the crowd. Other law enforcement agencies responded, including Cleveland police department. The youngster was taken examined in an emergency medical service unit, and released to his mother about 6pm. No arrests were made. The transit authority did not release the officer’s name. The agency’s officers are not affiliated with the city’s police department. A video of the incident quickly went viral, and lit a community that is tense from three police-related deaths. For months, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson and its top law enforcement officers, as well as Cuyahoga county prosecutor Timothy McGinty, have been pressured by activists unhappy with the handling of the cases of Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson and Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. Rice, a 12-year-old, was fatally shot in November when Cleveland patrolman Timothy Loehmann mistook his toy gun for the real thing. Neither Loehmann nor his partner, Frank Garmback, have been charged. Anderson died that same month after police restrained her during a mental health episode. And Russell and Williams were killed in November 2012 after a high-speed chase when dozens of police officers mistook a car backfiring for a gunshot. The lone officer charged, Michael Brelo, was acquitted of manslaughter. Local activism in response to those cases – as well as the Department of Justice investigation into the police department’s use of force – convinced organizers to hold the conference in the city. “Cleveland looks just like Ferguson, looks just like Baltimore, looks just like all of these places that have high oppression,” local organizer Malaya Davis told the Northeast Ohio Media Group referring to the cities which have seen unrest in the wake of black men at the hands of police. “We wanted to highlight that and bring some attention to what’s going on in this city and the state of Ohio as well.” http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/27/white-officer-pepper-sprays-crowd-at-black-lives-matter-summit-in-cleveland

Rapid development and testing of drug may bring current epidemic in west Africa to an end and control future outbreaks, experts say Sarah Boseley Health editor Friday 31 July 2015 13.00 BST A vaccine against Ebola has been shown to be 100% successful in trials conducted during the outbreak in Guinea and is likely to bring the west African epidemic to an end, experts say. The results of the trials involving 4,000 people are remarkable because of the unprecedented speed with which the development of the vaccine and the testing were carried out. Scientists, doctors, donors and drug companies collaborated to race the vaccine through a process that usually takes more than a decade in just 12 months. “Having seen the devastating effects of Ebola on communities and even whole countries with my own eyes, I am very encouraged by today’s news,” said Børge Brende, the foreign minister of Norway, which helped fund the trial. “This new vaccine, if the results hold up, may be the silver bullet against Ebola, helping to bring the current outbreak to zero and to control future outbreaks of this kind. I would like to thank all partners who have contributed to achieve this sensational result, due to an extraordinary and rapid collaborative effort,” he said on Friday. There have been a total of 27,748 cases of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone up to 26 July, with 11,279 reported deaths, although the outcome of many cases is unknown and the toll will be significantly higher. In the week ending 26 July, there were just four new cases in Guinea and three in Sierra Leone. Because of the diminishing number of Ebola cases in west Africa and the shifting nature of the epidemic, with many sudden small outbreaks occurring across the region, researchers hit on a novel design for the trial. The “gold standard” approach would be to take a population at risk of Ebola and vaccinate half of them while giving the other half a placebo. Instead, the researchers used a “ring” design, similar to that which helped prove the smallpox vaccine worked in the 1970s. When Ebola flared up in a village, researchers vaccinated all the contacts of the sick person who were willing – the family, friends and neighbours – and their immediate contacts. Children, adolescents and pregnant women were excluded because of an absence of safety data for them. In practice about 50% of people in these clusters were vaccinated. To test how well the vaccine protected people, the cluster outbreaks were randomly assigned either to receive the vaccine immediately or three weeks after Ebola was confirmed. Among the 2,014 people vaccinated immediately, there were no cases of Ebola from 10 days after vaccination - allowing time for immunity to develop - according to the results published online in the Lancet medical journal (pdf). In the clusters with delayed vaccination, there were 16 cases out of 2,380. In another precedent-breaker, the trial was sponsored by the World Health Organisation because “nobody wanted to step into this role so we took the risk”, said assistant director-general, Dr Marie-Paule Kieny. Funding came from the Wellcome Trust and other partners including the governments of Norway and Canada. Others involved included Médecins sans Frontières, whose volunteer doctors were on the frontline, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. About 90% of the trial staff were from Guinea, a country where no clinical research had been carried out before. The vaccine is made by Merck. Kieny said: “We believe that the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine.” The trial will continue, but without randomisation, which means that in Guinea, where there have been 3,786 cases and 2,520 confirmed deaths, every contact of a person who develops Ebola – and their contacts – will be offered it. Work in Gabon has now established that the vaccine is safe for children and adolescents, so they will be offered it too. In terms of vaccines which are usually trialled in hundreds of thousands of people, Kierny said the numbers were small but highly promising. It is likely when larger numbers are collected that efficacy will be between 75% and 100%. The future of two other potential Ebola vaccines, one from GlaxoSmithKline and the other from Johnson and Johnson, is now in question, because there are too few cases of Ebola for their trials to be completed. The authors of the research said the ring design made it “logistically feasible” to conduct trials even in poor countries in the middle of a fading epidemic and it was a promising strategy for the future. “This trial dared to use a highly innovative and pragmatic design, which allowed the team in Guinea to assess this vaccine in the middle of an epidemic,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and one of the world’s leading experts on infectious disease. “It is a remarkable result which shows the power of equitable international partnerships and flexibility. “Our hope is that this vaccine will now help bring this epidemic to an end and be available for the inevitable future Ebola epidemics. This partnership also shows that such critical work is possible in the midst of a terrible epidemic. It should change how the world responds to such emerging infectious disease threats.” John-Arne Røttingen, the head of infectious disease control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and chair of the trial’s steering group, said it had been a race against time in the most challenging circumstances. “We are really pleased with the interim results,” he said. “It is really important to add the vaccine to the traditional hygiene measures we have used in the response so far. I believe this will be an important contribution to getting down to zero cases.” Médecins sans Frontières said it was keen for the vaccine to be used in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where there were still cases. Bertrand Draguez, MSF’s medical director, said: “In parallel with the ring vaccination we are also conducting a trial of the same vaccine on frontline workers. These people have worked tirelessly and put their lives at risk every day to take care of sick people. If the vaccine is effective, then we are already protecting them from the virus. “With such high efficacy, all affected countries should immediately start and multiply ring vaccinations to break chains of transmission and vaccinate all frontline workers to protect them.” Margaret Chan, the director general of of the WHO, said the vaccine trial’s success was a promising development. “The credit goes to the Guinean government, the people living in the communities and our partners in this project.” Trial data will now go to regulatory agencies in the hope of getting a licence for the vaccine which will allow it to be stockpiled for future Ebola epidemics. It is likely to be used only for people at risk in outbreaks and not given to whole populations. The rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is sometimes known as the Canadian vaccine as it was originally developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada before being sold to Merck to bring conclude the testing. A woman is vaccinated in Conakry, Guinea, during the first clinical trials of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine against the Ebola virus. Photograph: Cellou Binani/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/31/ebola-vaccine-trial-proves-100-successful-in-guinea

Visiting his father’s Kenyan homeland, US president says ‘bad things happen’ when governments get into habit of treating people differently David Smith in Nairobi Saturday 25 July 2015 16.11 BST The US president, Barack Obama, has launched an unprecedented defence of *** rights in Africa, telling Kenya’s president that the state has no right to punish people because of “who they love”. Obama, visiting his late father’s homeland for the first time as US president, confronted Uhuru Kenyatta and millions of Kenyans watching on television with his “unequivocal” views. Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya and surveys show nine in 10 people find them unacceptable. Obama personalised the issue by comparing homophobia to racial discrimination that he had encountered in the United States. Never before has such a powerful foreign leader challenged Africans so directly on their own soil. “I’ve been consistent all across Africa on this,” he said, during a joint press conference at the state house in Nairobi. “When you start treating people differently, because they’re different, that’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode. And bad things happen. “When a government gets in the habit of treating people differently, those habits can spread. As an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently, under the law, and there were all sorts of rationalisations that were provided by the power structure for decades in the United States for segregation and Jim Crow and slavery, and they were wrong. So I’m unequivocal on this.” There had been speculation that Obama would duck the issue and focus on security and trade with Kenya. But in line with his recently emboldened actions and statements on a number of topics, he pulled no punches as Kenyatta looked on in silence. He added that for “a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business, and working at a job and obeying the traffic signs and not harming anybody, the idea they will be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong, full stop.” The Kenyan president publicly disagreed with Obama. “There are some things that we must admit we don’t share,” Kenyatta said, insisting that *** rights “is not really an issue on the foremost mind of Kenyans”. He added: “It’s very difficult for us to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.” There was a ripple of applause from people in the state house audience. Africa has been described as the world’s most homophobic continent with same-sex relations illegal in 36 of 54 countries and punishable by death in a handful. Obama also had firm words for Kenya on corruption, describing it as “the single biggest impediment to Kenya growing even faster”, and saying people were being “consistently sapped by corruption at a high level and at a low level.” Obama’s comments were swiftly criticised by Irungu Kang’ata, an MP in Kenyatta’s governing party. “They are in bad taste,” he said. “It’s a breach of the principle of sovereignty and equality of states. What if Kenyatta goes to America and says it should abolish the death penalty? Or for example it is like Obama goes to London or Madrid or The Hague or even Japan and says your monarchy is oppressive and a waste of money and should be done away with. In the same manner he can’t come to Kenya to tell us things that are unacceptable.” The US president, Barack Obama, left, arrives with the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, for a bilateral meeting at State House in Nairobi on Saturday. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/25/barack-obama-african-states-abandon-anti-***-discrimination

For the first time in my life I feel like I don’t belong. British Muslim communities have so many worries about your plans to tackle extremism, so why don’t you communicate with us? Friday 24 July 2015 19.16 BST By Siema Iqbal Dear Mr Cameron, What did your speech on radicalisation this week actually mean to someone like me? Despite being born in Manchester, growing up here and being a proud Mancunian (let’s overlook my support for Liverpool FC), for the first time in 37 years I feel as though I don’t belong. And yes, I am Muslim. Just a British Muslim. I used to hear the term “Muslim community” and think of a peaceful hard-working community who settled in the UK to create a better future for generations to come. Now I hear that and it paints a picture of a misunderstood, frightened community under attack and feeling the need to continually apologise and defend its religious beliefs. There have been many responses to your speech, and some well-researched analyses. But I need you to listen to someone like me. I need to have confidence that the person shaping my children’s future has an understanding of the impact of legislation imposed by you and your government. Let’s start with the proposal regarding passports. You said this week that parents will have the power to confiscate their child’s passport if they fear they will travel to Syria or Iraq to fight for Isis. No parent wants their child to do that – and not just Muslim parents. Why anyone would join Isis is beyond my comprehension, so having the ability as a parent to stop my child ever coming to harm would be welcome. But just out of curiosity, if my child’s passport is confiscated, would they then be labelled a “non-violent extremist” and, if so, what would be the consequences for them? There is a lot of talk at the moment of “ideology”. To be clear, “ideology” doesn’t make me feel isolated. “Ideology” doesn’t drive radicalisation. Islamophobia, foreign policy and double standards make me feel isolated and scared and, I suspect, are the real driving force behind radicalisation. Like others before you, including Tony Blair, you say your objection isn’t to Muslims and Islam but towards violent jihadism. It’s difficult for me to believe in your sincerity though, when you’ve created a society where just talking about certain aspects of Islam is now considered extremist. Muslims and Islam have been vilified and demonised by society and the media. Islamophobic attacks are on the rise. And no, I haven’t been the target of an Islamophobic attack yet, but I’m also not naive enough to think it won’t happen to me just because I don’t wear a headscarf or because my clothing is more westernised. I dread opening my news app in case there’s another unfair, biased headline for which I will then have to apologise, whether it’s about child grooming or a violent killing. I was pleased to hear you mention Islamophobia, but what have you done to counter it? Did I miss that in your speech, David? Prior to the general election, Theresa May proposed Islamophobia being recorded as a separate crime, but is this actually going to happen? The media’s prejudiced use of the term “terrorism” has created the link between the word Muslim and terrorism, embedding it in people’s minds and propagating hate towards the Muslim community. Anders Behring Breivik was labelled a terrorist until he was found not to be Muslim; then many chose to brand him a “mass murderer” instead. Dylann Roof was described by many people simply as a “shooter”, despite having a manifesto of hate. Had they been Muslim, both would surely have been straightforwardly deemed “terrorists”. Why should I have to stop my children from watching the news or reading the papers? The media is using the actions of a few – who quite clearly do not understand the meaning of Islam – to tarnish 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide and demonise a peaceful religion. The media needs to take some responsibility for the way in which Muslims are being treated in the UK and for the rise in Islamophobia. David, you need to ensure the media is fair in its reporting. This double standard, inadequately monitored by the regulator Ipso – the supposedly independent body created after the Leveson inquiry – contributes towards people’s lack of a “sense of belonging” and to radicalisation. You completely failed to mention foreign policy. Do you really believe we didn’t notice the huge elephant in the room? I am not going to go into the politics of the numerous bombings that have been embarked upon, but how do I explain to my children that 519 Palestinian children were killed last year and the UK did nothing, while approximately half a million people were killed in Iraq on the basis of a hunt for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist? Can you come and explain that to my two boys? I wonder what the future holds for them. Will they be able to practise their faith or will they have to do it discreetly for fear of a teacher reporting them under the current Prevent legislation? Will any signs of increased religious practise be seen as a sign of “radicalisation” under this legislation? This same legislation was called a failure in an open letter to a major national newspaper this month by British academics, not just Muslims. Any human being, regardless of whether they are a teacher or doctor, would stop harm happening to others. As a GP I don’t need legislation to tell me to report someone I feel will harm others: I find that insulting. Do you think I have spent the past 12 years of my career allowing harm to occur? What will the job opportunities be like for my children? You expressed disgust at those who believed “Muslims were taking over the government” when all they would like to do is engage with the system – and surely this fits in with “British values”. But how will you ensure this happens fairly? You failed to mention how you will tackle the discrimination currently faced by Muslims in the workplace. Where is the policy intervention to address this issue so Muslims feel like they “belong”? You say you want to “empower” moderate voices among British Muslims. I welcome that wholeheartedly. So when will you be replacing the Quilliam foundation with people who represent me and have some credibility and respect among British Muslims? There are “moderate” practising Muslims and organisations who are willing to work with you to tackle the threat of radicalisation and who are representative of the 2.7 million British Muslims living in the UK. The thoughts and worries are endless. This is the reality of being a Muslim in Britain at the moment. If you are genuine about tackling “extremism” talk to the people who matter and address the issues that really count. I await your reply. Prime minister David Cameron. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/david-cameron-radicalisation-speech-muslim-woman

Families of children named after the US president in the region where his father grew up speak of their hopes and ambitions Murithi Mutiga in K’Ogelo Friday 24 July 2015 11.37 BST Five-year-old Barack Obama Oyoo wants to be president when he’s older – and it’s not really world peace that he’s after. “When I’m president like Obama I’ll ride in big cars and big planes,” he says at his family’s small home in Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the walls are decorated by giant posters of the US head of state flanked by the Kenyan and American flags. A frenzy of excitement has gripped Kenya before the arrival of Barack Obama in the land of his father’s birth. But few will watch the visit with more expectation than the dozens of households in Kisumu – the largest city in the region where the US president’s father grew up – with a young Barack in the family. In a society where a name is seen as a marker of future prospects, being called “Barack Obama” is a display of parental ambition. “In my child I’m seeing President Obama,” says Dan Oyoo, a primary school teacher. “That name alone is like magic. When it is mentioned, it stirs something in me. I know he will go far. He’s not somebody to remain down here.” Not far away at Dunga Beach, where schoolchildren in neat starched uniforms enjoy ice-cream and short, wobbly boat rides in the lake, class teacher Phoebe Akinyi Ong’udi calls most pupils by their first names. “Don’t jump into the water, JoyFridah,” she yells. But five-year-old Barack Otieno Odhiambo and Barack Otieno Obama, six, must be summoned by their full names to avoid confusion. The two boys glow when asked what they think about sharing a name with one of the world’s most famous men. Barack Otieno Obama’s mother, Jasmine Ochieng, jokes that few people get lost when looking for her house in Manyatta, a sprawling, densely populated settlement of the city. “You simply say you want to go to Mama Obama’s house and you are directed here without a problem.” But she is more serious when reflecting on her son’s life. Her Barack faced grim odds when he was born on 31 July 2009. The baby was delivered in the lowlands of the Kenyan Rift Valley in Pokot, a land of craggy hills and breathtaking vistas where healthcare facilities are so basic that the infant mortality rate is more than double the national average. American missionaries had arrived to work at the local healthcare centre hours before Ochieng was due and suggested a name to the mother later that night: why not name him Barack Obama, the man whose historic election as US president months earlier had attracted so much attention in Kenya? She enthusiastically agreed. “My expectation is that Obama will excel in school and get to university. I want him to be a doctor because he has suffered poor health. When he becomes a doctor, he will uplift the economic situation of our family which is poor at the moment.” Young Barack’s ambitions regarding the trip are more modest. “When Obama comes to Kenya, I want to see him come to Kisumu,” he says. “I will shake his hand with my own hand.” Many parents of young Obamas say they hope to meet the president and tell him their stories – much as Tony Blair met young Kosovan Albanians named after him on a visit to Pristina. “My dream is that my son Malcolm Obama becomes president one day so that he can help me and my young twins who are now only four months old,” says Rose Adhiambo Ochieng, a 26-year-old whose chef husband, Joanes Ochieng, is a big fan of the US leader. She says her son excels at school and expresses the hope her family will meet the president and get a scholarship for Malcolm. “The name Obama makes me very proud,” says eight-year-old Malcolm. “When people call me Obama it means I can grow up to be like Obama, and I can help the people who call me Obama, and even other people.” But he says he will settle for something else if he can’t be president and urges his famous namesake to help him attain his dream. “If I met Obama I’d ask him to educate me, and also to educate the rest of my family so that I become a doctor. And I will work hard, and help my nation.” There is no shortage of young Barack Obamas in the sleepy village of K’Ogelo, where many families still live in cylindrical mud huts, getting by with maize and sorghum crops and a few domestic animals – much as the US president’s father, Barack Sr, must have done decades ago. Two Obama dads, George Ochieng Onyango, a bicycle taxi rider, and Christopher Ouma Okello, a small-scale farmer, want the president to make time to see them and find ways to support young Kenyans. George Ochieng says he recalls being served porridge at school by Sarah Obama, the president’s step-grandmother. He sees the remarkable rise of the Obama family, in which a father move from modest beginnings herding goats in K’Ogelo to studying in America and fathering a future president in one generation, as “biblical”. “Whenever a parent is advising a child,” Oyoo says, “they will always refer to President Obama: ‘Do you see how Obama started from a humble background, and do you see where he has ended up?’ So we usually tell the children to follow his footsteps.” Four of the Barack Obamas interviewed about their namesake’s visit to Kenya Sarah Obama, step-grandmother to the US president, smiles at her homestead in K’Ogelo. Photograph: Thomas Mukoy/Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/kenyan-barack-obamas-vist-kisumu

Five Star Movement’s populist leader compares Greek bailout talks to ‘explicit nazism’ and says Italy must use its €2tn ($2.19T) debt as leverage against Germany Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome Thursday 23 July 2015 14.35 BST The populist leader of Italy’s second largest political party has called for the nationalisation of Italian banks and exit from the euro, and said the country should prepare to use its “enormous debt” as a weapon against Germany. Former comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, who transformed Italian politics when he launched his anti-establishment Five Star Movement in 2009, has long been a bombastic critic of the euro. But his stance hardened significantly in a blogpost on Thursday in which he compared the Greek bailout negotiations to “explicit nazism”. Grillo constructed what he called a “Plan B” for Italy, which he said needed to heed the lessons of Greece so that it was ready “when the debtors come round”. His plan called for Italy to adopt a clear anti-euro stance and to shake off its belief that – if forced to accept tough austerity – other “peripheral” countries would come to its aid. Grillo said Italy had to use its enormous €2tn (£1.4bn) debt as leverage against Germany, implying that the potential global damage of an Italian default would stop Germany from “interfering” with Italy’s “legitimate right” to convert its debt into another currency. He said Greece’s hand had been forced by the threat of bankruptcy to its banks, and that Italy therefore needed to nationalise its banks and shift to another currency. “[This] is how not to lose the first battle we will face when the time comes to break away from the union and the European Central Bank,” Grillo wrote. Setting aside Grillo’s colourful language and analogies, analyst Vincenzo Scarpetta of Open Europe said there was some merit to his arguments. “That blogpost does have some elements of truth,” Scarpetta said. “The lesson from Greece was that if you want to be in the eurozone you have to agree to rules of austerity.” The strength of anti-euro sentiment in Italy is easy to overlook since Matteo Renzi, the centre-left prime minister and head of the Democratic party, is a strong defender of Italy’s role in the eurozone. But Scarpetta pointed out that supporters of the Five Star Movement, coupled with supporters of the rightwing Northern League, which is also anti-euro, means that about 40% of Italians are at least sympathetic to anti-euro sentiments. “The Greek deal and negotiations have helped them [anti-euro Italian leaders] make the case that it is impossible to reform the euro from the inside, and that is why they say that Italy should leave,” Scarpetta added. Grillo also took a broad swipe at Washington and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) trade agreement, claiming it would turn Europe into a subject of the US in the same way Europe had become a subject of Germany. The blog could make for especially tough reading for Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras. “It would have been hard to defend the interests of the Greek people worse than Tspiras did,” Grillo said. The Five Star Movement broke through in the 2013 general election, and has emerged as a strong anti-corruption voice. Grillo has supported sustainable domestic energy sources, campaigned against an expensive high speed rail project that environmentalists have criticised, and long argued that the euro favours large institutions rather than small investors. He has been criticised in some quarters for his populism and for Five Star Movement’s lack of detailed policy proposals. Grillo, who cannot stand for parliament because of a conviction for manslaughter, garnered unwanted attention in September last year by posting a blacked-up picture of a government minister on his blog, a day after implying Italy’s immigration policy could be “re-importing” tuberculosis. Beppe Grillo, the former comedian-turned-politician, has long been a bombastic critic of the euro. Photograph: Fotogramma/Splash News/Corbis http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/23/beppe-grillo-calls-for-nationalisation-of-italian-banks-and-exit-from-euro

The Islamic republic is turning to western-inspired pop culture and underground musicians to save the revolution. A recent music video is the latest example, argues Narges Bajoghli Narges Bajoghli for Tehran Bureau Monday 20 July 2015 05.00 BST The Iranian rapper Amir Tataloo released a new music video the day before the Iran deal was finalized on 14 July. It was called Nuclear Energy and took the Iranian web sphere by storm. The clip features members of the Islamic republic navy on a warship singing “This is our absolute right, to have an armed Persian Gulf”. The video, with clear support from the regime and its military apparatus, has shocked many Iranians, given that officials have snubbed rappers as “westernised” thugs at best, and fomenters of evil, at worst. Tataloo, a 32-year-old rapper with millions of followers on social media, had to produce his music underground until just a year ago. He was arrested in December 2013 for his alleged cooperation with foreign satellite stations. The military’s participation in a music video with an underground artist who flaunts his tattoos, long-hair, and piercings, appears to be a conundrum. But it’s not. It reinforces a strategy that the regime’s cultural producers have been advancing for the past decade. The Islamic republic’s cultural elite believe that it is of the utmost importance to garner the support of Iran’s youthful population, support they fear has been shaky since the street protests of the disputed 2009 presidential election. Tataloo’s video is only the latest example of the ways in which the regime’s cultural centres have funded, supported, and promoted nationalism in lieu of Islamism to attract the youth, often appropriating banned popular culture in the process. With the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, Iran found itself surrounded by military forces and categorised by president George W Bush as part of an “axis of evil”. Unsure of the Bush administration’s next move after the fall of Baghdad, and the meddling of American and Israeli intelligence services fomenting unrest among its ethnic minorities, the Islamic establishment knew it had to shore up public support. Some in Iran’s pro-regime cultural centres felt they had a problem though: very few young people were interested in state-sponsored media. Media makers had spent the past 20 years creating films, television series, and books about the “Sacred Defence”, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But, from the 1990s onwards, ticket and book sales were dipping, according to their own accounts. For the most part, large numbers of young Iranians were not responding to films and books about the war and the past of the Islamic republic as “sacred”. If the United States were to attack Iran, some pro-regime filmmakers pondered, would young Iranians rise up to defend their nation? Fearing that the answer would be no, they took it upon themselves to tweak their historical narrative as one less reliant on religion and more rooted in nationalism. “Frankly, we turned young people off with the propaganda we produced in the 1980s and 1990s,” one prominent pro-regime film producer, who served all eight years of the war at the front as a volunteer soldier and was later a high-ranking officer in the Revolutionary Guard, told me. “We have to learn to speak the language of youth and use their codes if we want them to like our work. In short, we have to entertain them.” Observing an increasing trend in displays of nationalism in the general population, the regime’s cultural producers and the political elite sensed an opportunity. Noting a spike in pre-Islamic Persian names for babies and the ever-present farvahar pendant, the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian symbol, they turned to nationalism to connect with people. As international pressures against the country increased, including stifling sanctions and an intensified proxy war with Saudi Arabia, the sense of nationalism continued to rise in Iran. State media-makers began to highlight this sentiment in all their cultural productions, from museums to films and books - and now music. A prominent example is the newly built multi-million dollar Museum of the Sacred Defence in northern Tehran, funded by the office of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the city’s mayor and a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, which opened in late 2012. It presents a different narrative of the Iran-Iraq war from the older, more traditional martyrs’ museums that dot every city and town in the country. The latter memorialise the war in purely religious terms, celebrating martyrs who died for “Imam Khomeini and Islam”, while the former takes great pains to frame it in national terms. One of the main exhibits in the new museum displays large maps that demonstrate the expanse of the Persian empire ruling swaths of Asia over 3,000 years ago. It juxtaposes it against shrinking Iranian territory throughout the centuries. Iran’s size today is minuscule in comparison to the glorified empire painted on the wall. The message of the museum: past kingdoms gave away territory, thinking more about stuffing their own pockets than the well-being of the nation...until the Islamic republic came about and defended Iran’s borders, and by extension, its dignity as an ancient civilisation. This museum, in line with the new strategy pursued by these cultural producers, moves away from celebrating martyrs to offering a narrative heavy on nationalism, dignity, and pride. “This youngest generation doesn’t understand our religious language,” a key filmmaker said at one meeting of pro-regime cultural producers where I was present. “We have to reframe our heroes for them - give them heroes they can relate to.” In this light, large amounts of state funds and funding from the Revolutionary Guards have gone to make films with “relatable” heroes who defended Iran as much as they professed an allegiance to the revolution. Most notable among them has been Ebrahim Hatamikia’s Che (2014), a film about Mostafa Chamran, the first defence minister after the revolution. The film casts Chamran not so much as a defender of Islam but as a man who fought to defend the oppressed, in essence as the Iranian Che Guevara young Iranians could admire. Seeking larger audiences, filmmakers such as Masoud Dehnamaki, former leader of the militant conservative group Ansar-e Hezbollah, appropriates youth pop culture. In his trilogy, The Outcasts, Dehnamaki borrows liberally from banned Iranian pop music in depicting a group of social outcasts - drug addicts, thieves and general thugs - who are “redeemed” and turned into ideal citizens with the help of kind supporters of the regime. Following the box office successes of Dehnamaki’s films, another prominent regime film producer began to seek out underground rock musicians to score music for new war films. “I don’t care that they’re banned and that some of our politicians think that they’re bad people,” he told me. “This is what young people listen to and we need to embrace that and have them work for us.” Whether such efforts work or not is hard to assess. It is noteworthy, however, that a public funeral held last month for the recently discovered bodies of 175 military divers from the Iran-Iraq war drew unprecedented crowds of all social and political stripes, including those who would not usually attend state-sponsored events. They were celebrated as national heroes who defended Iran’s sovereignty. “The divers were the bravest of us. They gave their lives for the independence of our country and the success of our revolution,” Mohsen Rezaei, who led the Revolutionary Guards in the war, said in an address at the ceremony. Tataloo’s music video unfolds within this context and uses familiar tropes seen throughout the past decade. The ultimate goal of all state-sponsored cultural work, and the vast funding required to produce it, is to keep the revolution alive. http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/jul/20/iran-military-goes-hip-hop-for-youth-appeal-amir-tataloo

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian Paul Mason Friday 17 July 2015 11.00 BST The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did. If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism. As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started. Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all. Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely. Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis. You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.” ... The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold. Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody. That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism. The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs. Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology. ... We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory. But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist. During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.” You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results. If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too. For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx. ... The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”. In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines. Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”. In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched. Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever. In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”. With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening. Networks restore “granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar. The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels. Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.” Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”. True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country. By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being. ... This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I’m concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the “big boys” of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity. In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of “networks you can’t default on” – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant. So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like. I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious “economic” thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built. Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self. The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas. A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs. The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating. The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold. The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society. Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero. Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and “despite” capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on. If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide. ... The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company. As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models. The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next. ... Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which *** men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom? It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago. All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as The Road or Elysium. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages? Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true. We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it. Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July. Paul Mason will be asking whether capitalism has had its day at a sold-out Guardian Live event on 22 July. Let us know your thoughts beforehand at theguardian.com/membership. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

German chancellor had said ‘Politics is sometimes hard’ after Palestinian teenager burst into tears over deportation fears during televised debate Agence France-Presse in Berlin Friday 17 July 2015 20.52 BST Last modified on Saturday 18 July 2015 00.02 BST A teenage Palestinian asylum seeker who burst into tears in front of Angela Merkel during a televised debate will be allowed to stay in Germany, officials said on Friday. Merkel’s encounter with the teenager named Reem – who speaks perfect German – went viral on the internet. The debate, entitled Good Life in Germany, took place in the northern city of Rostock “I don’t know the personal situation of this young girl, but she speaks fluent German and has visibly lived here for a long time,” said the minister for integration, Aydan Ozoguz, according to the website of Spiegel weekly. “This is exactly why we changed the law, so that well-integrated youths can have a new residency permit through a new immigration law that came into force in August.” During the discussion, Reem told Merkel that she and her family, who arrived in Rostock from a Lebanese refugee camp four years ago, faced deportation. “I have goals like anyone else. I want to study like them ... it’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can’t myself,” she said. The mayor of Rostock’s spokesman told the daily Tagesspiegel that he had no intention of sending Reem and her family back. Merkel had responded to Reem by saying she understood, but that “politics is sometimes hard”. “You’re right in front of me now and you’re an extremely nice person. But you also know in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are thousands and thousands and if we were to say you can all come ... we just can’t manage it,” Merkel had said. Some critics said the incident showed Merkel’s insensitivity, while others hailed her for not lying to the teenager. Angela Merkel comforting a Palestinian teenager who confronted the German chancellor over deportation fears and immigration. Photograph: Steffen Kugler/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Germany took in 200,000 asylum seekers last year and expects as many as 450,000 this year. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/17/teenage-reem-asylum-seeker-merkel-tv-allowed-stay-germany