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| BA seeks High Court injunction to stop Christmas strike British Airways is going to the High Court to battle cabin staff to stop their potentially disastrous 12-day Christmas strike. telegraph.co.uk |
NKorea weapons smugglers left trail around world BANGKOK (AP) -- Thai authorities' high-profile inspection of 35 tons of North Korean weapons was nearing completion Friday, as clues emerging around the world shed light on the business of arms trafficking - and the lengths smugglers take to hide their identities.... hosted.ap.org |
High-speed rail will bleed us all for a few rich travellers | Simon Jenkins The politicians can drool over their new trains, but a crowded island needs a well-managed network, not an expensive fantasyBeware. We are entering the valley of the shadow of the pledge. It is a time of maximum danger. Politicians make wild pre-election promises, and feel obliged to keep at least some of them. The campaign has hardly begun, and David Cameron this week promised billions on family tax allowances and a new quango to regulate supermarkets. He knows no shame. But the horrors are the heffalumps, gargantuan projects to build aircraft carriers, supercomputers and railways. They win a headline for a day and cost a lifetime of money.The largest such project in living history already has politicians drooling. It is for a new high-speed railway route from London to Scotland by various controversial routes. A year ago the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, set up a quango called HS2 to lobby in favour, which it duly did last month. He spent Christmas pushing it in the press.Adonis on high-speed trains is like Jeremy Clarkson on Ferraris. They are the climax of the "incredible democratisation of travel", and will make Britain a "pioneer in low-cost, mass-market high speed transportation", as Adonis wrote ecstatically last week. His Tory shadow, Theresa Villiers, is no less enthusiastic. "If we win," she exults, "construction can start in 2015." Who could not thrill to big, sleek silvery things snaking across England's fields, especially when the French have them?Business leaders reportedly believe the project would "generate £55 billion", which is odd as no businessman will conceivably pay for it. We are talking £30bn-£50bn, the kind of money only a chancellor has in his back pocket. It is just possible that some new high-speed track makes sense somewhere, but it remains to be proved by independent, rather than interest-dominated, analysis. It certainly should be proved against the value of similar sums devoted to upgrading the existing track, eliminating bottlenecks and improving the reliability of rolling stock and signals.Consider the similar case of London's Crossrail, which a more courageous Boris Johnson would have scrapped on day one of his mayoralty. It is his £16bn version of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper. Transport for London (TfL) executives wail at the project, which has parted company with all known economics.When Tim O'Toole, the outgoing boss of TfL, spoke at his farewell dinner last April, he warned that Crossrail was a disaster that would eat money, time and effort. It would jam up London, infuriate the public and distract everyone from improving the tube. And all this to benefit, at taxpayers' expense, a cadre of City workers for whom the existing Central line gets a little overcrowded. Why not spend a fraction of the money on more trains and better management, and tell the bankers to shut up?I love railways but have no illusions. Whitehall's combination of privatisation and over-regulation has rendered them wildly expensive to build and run: an abyss of engineers, health-and-safety inspectors and unions. The London tube is absurdly costly to maintain. Adonis's comparison of high-speed trains to competitive air travel is fantasy – largely through the doings of his own office.Trains are romantic but not particularly green. No mechanised transport is that, least of all one that sends multi-tonne train sets trundling three-quarters empty across the country or racing city to city at 200mph. In addition, special tracks are unlikely to knock more than tens of minutes off existing high-speed journey times. Britain has not the long distances and dispersed destinations of France or Spain. In rail terms, England is one huge metropolis in which the chief constraint on time is not technology but the number of stops.One HS2 route has the train to Scotland stopping at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle. Even the Eurostar already stops at Ebbsfleet or Ashford, and may yet have to stop at Stratford. But frequent stops are what a crowded island demands, and vitiate the case for faster journeys.Adonis bases his case for new track on a vague concept of "predict and provide", to meet rising demand from mass-market travellers. How this tallies with the astronomical cost of rail fares, and the even higher cost of high-speed fares, is not explained. Cars, coaches and jets are today's low-cost, mass-market transport. Yet Adonis builds few roads or runways for them. Why is he so enamoured of a transport mode that is essentially for the rich?Britain's railways have, since pseudo-privatisation, consumed more subsidies and more top-down regulation than ever under nationalisation. Brown's government struggles to run them with roughly 20 times the number of bureaucrats needed for British Rail. Trains, even more than schools and hospitals, have been the graveyard of the Blairite thesis that public service is best delivered by private enterprises regulated by state targets constantly enforced at law.This has put fares and service at the mercy not of professional managers, but of politicians, lawyers and officials at the Office of Rail Regulation, the Health and Safety Executive and the Department of Transport – all poring over hundred-page contracts and risk assessments, measuring costs against a complex structure of subsidies and fines. There is no room for inspirational leadership or commercial discipline. The recent east-coast mainline contract lasted barely two years before Adonis threw his toys out of the pram and banned National Express from running any trains anywhere. Today's rail directors are as good as their last Whitehall meeting.Train services cross-country or to coastal Britain are deplorable. Stations are mostly miserable places. The Hatfield crash – the 9/11 of the railway – led Whitehall's hyper-safe inspectors to panic. They raised the cost of track maintenance by five times (according to Modern Railways magazine) as against British Rail. Meanwhile, 15 years after privatisation the west of England track is still not electrified, a contrast with Europe that is more glaring than the absence of a bullet-nosed glamour project. The trouble is that making services run on time is politically boring.A sensible policy of rationing road-space by congestion has driven up rail passenger numbers some 40% in a decade. But it still needs to be proved that a project costing untold billions is better value for money than upgrading and properly managing the existing railway. Crossrail shows that one thing is certain. A new high-speed network would bleed the rest of the railway of money and care. Is that what travellers really want?Rail transportRail travelTransport policyTransportSimon Jenkinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Venezuelan ice-cream parlour's 860 flavours The largest number of ice-cream flavours in the world can be sampled in a Venezuelan shop, Will Grant discovers. news.bbc.co.uk |
France's attack on the veil is a huge blunder | Raphaël Liogier The ill-founded push to ban the face covering is rooted in a wider crisis of French identity and influenceAfter more than six months straining to convince itself of the immense, nationwide danger of a phenomenon that involves fewer than 0.1% of France's Muslim population, a parliamentary committee yesterday Ârecommended the banning of the full veil in many of France's public places. There is nothing eccentric about asking why they are getting so bothered.As usual, when France confronts such debates, a panoply of intellectuals, politicians and artists gasp their indignation over an alleged assault on "our values", wheeling out their rhetorical big guns to denounce the "philosophical scandal" of refusing to show one's face publicly.We have been systematically treated to five justifications, all hammered home with the aim of getting the full veil banned for good: the feminist, the theological, the humanistic, the Âsecuritarian and, finally, the prophylactic. None of these justifications has been convincing. For a start, the vast majority of women concerned have clearly actively chosen to wear the veil, sometimes in the face of opposition from their family. Moreover, many see their veils as a means of expressing independence, even sometimes as a vehicle of feminine empowerment.In the 70s, Muslim women who had recently arrived from north Africa were often kept behind suburban doors by the heavy-handed control of their Âhusbands. Sometimes they were forced to wear the veil, but we hardly gave a damn. But, paradoxically, once the veil had emerged as a voluntary item during the 80s, visibly flaunted in the street by a new generation of determined young Frenchwomen, concern began to rise. Pseudo-feminist rhetoric cannot conceal the fact that it is indeed the voluntary veil which is being fought, and not the imposed article.As to the second, theological justification, it is almost laughable to see members of the government and the president himself pompously arguing that such a veil is not truly Muslim, as if more knowledgeable than the Muslims themselves about the orthodox prescriptions of their own lifestyle. A peculiar facet of so-called French secularism sees government ministers assuming the fashionable role of imams.Others will opine that one cannot be a true citizen if one hides one's face, because one is thus refusing human interaction. Yet some people wear dark glasses out of shyness or pure Âobnoxiousness, and nobody would think of denying them their right to humanity. The security-based objection, requiring one to bare one's face in order to have the right to pick up one's children from school, for instance, or if so required by a police patrol, is legitimate in the abstract, but only if one conveniently forgets the fact that in practice, the new generation of women – among the many we have surveyed – do not in fact refuse to comply.It is no coincidence that the debate on French national identity is Âoccurring simultaneously, for they are Âtactically complementary – picking on Muslim women, or Muslims in general, or all immigrants, as scapegoats, so we can avoid facing our current symbolic crisis. The French are confronted every day with the declining influence of their language, art and cinema – moreover the "grey panther" generation is realising that their own children could not care less, deeply enmeshed as they are in the globalisation of culture.To compensate for such losses, people over 40 are to be heard chanting mantras about the importance of French universal values and pointing fingers at those guilty of threatening them from inside France. In fact, they are thus digging into a deep narcissistic wound, their helplessness facing globalisation and the waning of the "French exception", driving them blindly to trash our most sacred fundamental values while pretending to defend them.Whatever form the committee's recommendation takes in law or decree, it will probably not be enforced, but a symbolic gesture, and a symbol of capitulation. The French Republic has become so weak, so morally corrupted, that it is ready to kick over its most cherished principles: liberty, equality, fraternity, on the part of the political elite, out of cynicism and petty tactics; on the part of the general public, out of irrational panic, even hatred for Muslims. In any case, those women concerned, in the case of a ban, will either refuse to discard a garment that they feel does no harm to anybody, go underground at home, becoming still more economically dependent on their families, or obey – but with a desperate feeling of frustration making them vulnerable to recruitment by Islamist groups.The worst about all this fuss is that we are completely off target. Women Âdonning the full veil are not against modernity but represent rather its sophisticated product, just like Âwesternised Buddhists. The veil, Âsurprising as this may seem, is good news for modern values. Some smart young women keep a niqab in their bag but only wear it in Paris's Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, in order to draw attention to the fact that they belong to the best Muslim set, that they really have got that Muslim chic, something like the equivalent Âbehaviour in a gay district. This deep western social movement is no threat to modern values, but rather vindicates the Âlatter under unexpected aesthetic guise: it is so Âindividualistic and depoliticised that it is more of a real threat for Islamism and terrorist Ânetworks themselves.It is a massive blunder to fight this new, ultra-modern Islam. And it is not only France that is heading towards a colossal error of understanding – Âpolitically capable of spinning into Âhistoric Âproportions – but also Europe, the United States, and all the other Âpost-industrial countries, blinkered by Islamophobia, who turn out to be Âincapable of catching up on their own deep cultural changes and recognising their own best interests. It is a kind of collective, Âgenerational jet lag. FranceIslamWomen in politicsReligionRaphaël Liogierguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |