Barack Obama said on Tuesday that “human and systemic failures” were to blame for allowing a would-be terrorist on to a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas Day, placing the responsibility for the security blunders at the foot of the US government.
Delivering a hastily arranged statement at a marine base in Hawaii, where he is on holiday, the US president said that the mistakes were “unacceptable” and ordered preliminary investigation results to be delivered to him on Thursday.
There are now 65 generals in the Army, with 43 major-generals, 17 lieutenant-generals and five four-star generals. In addition there are 190 brigadiers, a one-star rank; 20 more than in 1997. The figures were rovided in a written answer in the House of Commons.
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There are more than 30 admirals in post in the Navy: two four-star admirals, six vice-admirals and 25 rear-admirals.
In the RAF there are 36 top brass: three air chief marshals, nine air marshals and 24 air vice-marshals.
Tories believe that the party will reap the benefit of a late “Cameron bounce” north of the Border in the last few days of the coming general election campaign.
Party strategists have pinned their hopes on undecided voters opting to go Conservative because they believe that David Cameron is heading for Downing Street.
Two woman killed in Christmas coach crash
Published on 23 Dec 2009
Two woman have died and 47 other people were injured after a coach overturned on an icy road in Cornwall.
In a letter responding to the Liberal Democrats in Scotland Mervyn King says if [an independent] Scotland kept the pound, the bank's monetary policy committee may set rates with no input from north of the order. The Liberal Democrats initiated the correspondence.Like, at present, the Bank's MPC gives two hoots about any developments whatsoever outside London.
Goldman Sachs has threatened the UK Treasury with plans to move up to 20 per cent of its London-based staff to Spain in a standoff over tax andI'm far from sure that 20% of the staff would be prepared to go. Spain does indeed sound nice for a holiday (and each year I spend three or four months there) but think of the disruption to family life - the children's schooling, the friends and relatives, the cultural life, the need to find property to live in and to dispose of existing housing. And the clincher - relatively few Spaniards speak English.
bonuses.
"Things are getting held up by procedural wrangling," said Miliband. "People can kill this agreement with process arguments. It will be tragedy if we cannot reach an agreement on substance, but it will be a farce if we cannot agree on process."
So Signor Berlusconi doesn't wear a vest. The more fool he. Didn't his mother tell him to wrap up warmly?David McLetchie, the former Scots Tory leader, is to head the party’s general election campaign in Scotland in a move that will be seen as sidelining David Mundell, the Shadow Scottish Secretary and the only Conservative MP north of the Border.
The decision to overlook Mr Mundell as general-election co-ordinator will also fuel speculation that he is unlikely to become Secretary of State for Scotland if David Cameron becomes Prime Minister next year.
Details of private phone calls from Gordon Brown’s Scottish home, including a call of 2 hours 42 minutes call to a mystery address in Canterbury, were made public yesterday.
The time, length and geographical destination of 21 calls were disclosed when the BT bills submitted as part of his expense claims were published by the House of Commons. The numbers were blacked out.
The cigarette and booze industries have been hit by a "hidden" excise charge this year, after the Government failed to cut the duty to make up for higher VAT.
There were no changes to alcohol and tobacco duty rates in yesterday's pre-Budget report, after they had been increased a year ago to offset the temporary reduction in VAT. Industry expects predict that the impact of VAT going back up to 17.5 per cent on 1 January and no respite in the burden on excise duties would add up to 18p on a packet of cigarettes and at least 6p on a pint of beer.
Even before we’ve trawled through the small print on pensions and tax changes, the pre-Budget report has lived up to the billing. Scorched earth, poison pill, you can choose your metaphor but the key point is that this was a political statement designed to protect Labour’s sectional interests, boost its core vote and stuff the Tories at every turn.
The measures likewise: for example, a whacking great increase in the value of the state pension (2.5pc when inflation is negative?!), ditto other benefits, represents a gratuitous increase in the cost of entitlements, in the knowledge that the Conservatives need to review them downwards. Reckless, unaffordable, yet how can the Tories reasonably be expected to reverse that one?
The Tories are now on 38 per cent, down one point since early November, while Labour is up one point at 30 per cent. This is the first single-digit lead found by Populus this year.
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The Liberal Democrats have continued to improve their position this month, up two points at 20 per cent, with other parties two points down at 12 per cent.
The precedents of Bohemian Rhapsody are as much in the 19th-century classical traditions of rhapsodic, quasi-improvisational reveries – like, say, the piano works of Schumann or Chopin or the tone-poems of Strauss of Liszt – as they are in prog-rock or the contemporary pop of 1975. That's because the song manages a sleight of musical hand that only a handful of real master- musicians have managed: the illusion that its huge variety of styles – from intro, to ballad, to operatic excess, to hard-rock, to reflective coda - are unified into a single statement, a drama that somehow makes sense. It's a classic example of the unity in diversity that high-minded musical commentators have heard in the symphonies of Beethoven or the operas of Mozart. And that's exactly what the piece is: a miniature operatic-rhapsodic-symphonic-tone-poem.
... we need to create wealth and quality of life, not by putting carbon into the atmosphere but by taking it out. We need to build, in short, a low carbon economy. And not just at home: our aim must be to do this in every major economy of the world.
This will involve change: a shift from the energy dictatorship of oil and traditional fossil fuels to the efficiency, self-reliance and security of low carbon energy systems, which will be the engine of growth and job creation over the coming decade.
RBS board may quit if £1.5bn bonus plan is vetoed
Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Richmond, and one of David Cameron's closest advisers on the environment, insisted yesterday he would not be corrupted by power, and said politics had to enter a new era of transparency and integrity to regain trust, including on green taxes.
British diplomats are fighting a rearguard action to prevent France from taking the key financial job in Brussels after Baroness Ashton of Upholland’s appointment as foreign affairs chief.
With Paris and Berlin setting their sights on controlling the EU’s economic agenda, a former French Foreign Minister, Michel Barnier, is being tipped to take the plum commission portfolio overseeing the internal market and financial services.
Germany is seeking the industry or energy jobs in the European Commission line-up due to be announced this month, while also preparing its national bank chairman to take over at the European Central Bank.
The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia.
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The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month.
So Washington turned to Colombia, which has not gone down well in the region. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (£2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record.
Colombian forces regularly kill the country's indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths.
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Indications of US willingness to envisage the stationing of nuclear weapons in Colombia are seen as an additional threat to the spirit of nuclear disarmament. After the establishment of the Tlatelolco Treaty in 1967, four more nuclear-weapon-free zones were set up in Africa, the South Pacific, South-east Asia and Central Asia. Between them, the five treaties cover nearly two-thirds of the countries of the world and almost all the southern hemisphere.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world's leading think-tank about disarmament issues, has now expressed its worries about the US-Colombian arrangements. With or
without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI, which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.
Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique "in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".
The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled". ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)
More than two years after the BBC dropped her – sparking accusations of ageism – veteran newsreader Moira Stuart is being lined up for a return to the airwaves on Chris Evans's BBC Radio 2 breakfast show. (here)
Good - but it would have been better to bring back Fran Godfrey, the sexiest voice on radio.
When Belle de Jour, the famous call girl turned blogger and publishing sensation outed herself as a Bristol-based research scientist last weekend, one man was less surprised than the rest of us.
In an intriguing twist to a story which has already had more than its fair share of them, it emerged today that a British blogger solved the hotly debated mystery of Belle's identity soon after Dr Brooke Magnanti began writing her diary of an escort in 2003 – then resolved to help keep her secret.
The crew of a Royal Navy vessel watched a British couple being kidnapped by Somali pirates, but were ordered not to open fire in case they endangered the couple's lives, it emerged last night.
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A spokesman said: "Significant efforts were made by Royal Navy vessels and international maritime forces to locate the Lynn Rival. Everything possible was done without further endangering the lives of Paul and Rachel Chandler."
An official account of the kidnap released last month said only that a Royal Navy vessel found the empty yacht, without disclosing that its crew saw the action unfolding. The full picture emerged when an anonymous crew member leaked the details to the press.
Mr Brown told MPs yesterday that he expected an announcement from President Barack Obama in the next few days about the number of extra US troops being deployed to Afghanistan. But his forecast was played down by a White House spokesman, who said the decision on the the request for 40,000 more troops from General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, was still "weeks and not days" away.
Mr Obama yesterday met members of his war council to discuss the forward strategy in Afghanistan, the eighth such session with the national security team in recent weeks.
...a new survey from Debenhams ... claims (though not always convincingly) to shed some light on men's underwear-buying habits. While the average 23-year-old allegedly buys up to 31 pairs a year "of all styles, tightness and colours", and even 40-year-olds manage a dozen pairs in as many months, once you reach 44 (I'm 46) Debenhams reckons you give up the habit for life. Not because by then you have bought 284 pairs (based on the survey's figures) and never need to fork out for Y-fronts or tangas ever again, but because a woman is doing it for you.
The postal workers union has called off a third round of strikes due to start tomorrow after reaching an "interim" peace deal with Royal Mail management.
Leaders of the Communication Workers Union agreed unanimously to postpone further action until the new year at least while talks take place, overseen by the arbitration service Acas and the Trades Union Congress.
The Christmas post is now secure, much to the relief of Royal Mail, which doubled annual profits to £321m last year but has been haemorrhaging customers.
Lord Martin told the committee on policing and Parliament he had been "let down" by Serjeant at Arms Jill Pay who failed to require a warrant for the search.
But he said when he asked her to explain her conduct, her boss Malcolm Jack, the Commons Clerk and chief executive, had stepped in and suggested she had been influenced by the police.
In Afghanistan's disreputable 2009 presidential election, everyone's a loser. Hamid Karzai's "victory", achieved by fraud and now by default, has left him a tarnished, diminished figure. The US administration that orchestrated the whole process still lacks the credible partner in Kabul it says is essential for success.
The UN's reputation for probity lies critically wounded in the gutter, a victim of inaction and bitter infighting among officials. Nato's mission looks even more rudderless and ill-defined than before. The cause of the Afghan people, bemused and terrorised by turns, is no further forward and may in truth have been set back.
People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Quantitative easing is very imprecise. Knowing whether or not it is proving successful is tricky: its effectiveness depends on faith as much as pure economic reason. Earlier in the year, for example, it was widely thought that QE's success would be reflected in faster money supply growth. Yet there has been little evidence of any acceleration. If it is working, another explanation has to be found.
For me, there are three possibilities. First, QE works merely by boosting people's expectations. Given that interest rates are more or less at zero, it is important for the Bank to demonstrate that all is not lost on the monetary front: QE seems to fit the bill even if no one understands how it works (central bankers, like God, work in mysterious ways). Its introduction may have helped to lift asset prices, consistent with a new wave of economic optimism.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has published budget proposals for the devolution [to Northern Ireland] of policing and justice.
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He said he had written to the party leaders outlining the budget, believed to be in the region of £800m-1bn. Mr Brown said he had made arrangements for the cost of dealing with security emergencies in Northern Ireland to be met from Treasury reserves.
There had been concerns at Stormont that future security problems could have swallowed up devolved budgets for services such as education, housing and health.
A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.
The Government has backed away in the face of speculation that it will impose a windfall tax on banks to punish them for paying excessive bonuses.
The UK faces a "catastrophe" of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister has warned.This from a man who cannot decide upon his favourite biscuit.
Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the "impasse".
He told the Major Economies Forum in London, which brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, there was "no plan B".
The law firm at the centre of the an unprecedented attempt by a British oil trading firm to prevent the Guardian reporting parliamentary proceedings is to be reported to the Law Society, it emerged today.But what about the court that granted the injunction? What was the judge (or judges) thinking of?
Unemployment is rising slower than many economists and, indeed, the government feared.Oh dear, don't they teach them how to write grmmatical English any more?
In a report, the Commons standards and privileges committee said Smith had been in breach of the rules between 2004 and 2009 because she claimed that a house in London that she shared with her sister was her main home. This meant that she could use the parliamentary second home allowance to fund costs associated with her family home in her Redditch constituency.
Anxious on Tuesday to establish the time of George Osborne’s speech expected towards the end of the morning, I approached a senior onservative MP.
“Osborne?” I said, “About 12?”
“Goodness me, no, dear boy. He’s at least 14.”
“What should we do with people who think that this country can become a scientific leader by asking about sausages in batter?”I don't know. Hang 'em and flog 'em, I suppose? On the other hand, would it be ok without the batter? There are more damaging beliefs around at a Tory Conference. (I'm still recovering from the thought of Ms Goldie as a lumberjack.)
The Conservatives say they would pay for their £600m plan to "get Britain working" by cutting the incapacity benefit bill.
People on employment support allowance who are deemed fit to work would be put on the jobseeker's allowance, reducing their benefits by £25 a week.
All incapacity benefit claimants would be assessed to see if they could work.
"Don't like him at all," says Williams, gravely of his bete noir, Obama. "I think he wants to create a socialist country. The people he associates with are very left wing … one is registered as a communist. Obama is following Marxist theory. He's taken over the banks and the car industry. He wants the country to fail."
4.9. The future of the BBC and the licence fee revenue raised within Scotland would be a major consideration in the move to an independent Scotland. It is envisaged that the existing assets, staff and expertise of BBC Scotland would be used as the basis of a Scottish national broadcaster, along with an appropriate share of the BBC's other assets, including its commercial activities.
Gordon Brown lurched from being hailed as a global statesman to intense embarrassment tonight, after it emerged US President had turned down no fewer than five requests from Downing Street to hold a bilateral meeting at the United Nations in New York or at the G20 summit starting in Pittsburgh today.Well what did he expect after the Libyan fiasco? And, despite the No 10 denials, and unlike his counterparts from China, Russia and Japan, Mr Brown never did get his facetime with Mr President.
Education spending could be cut by £2bn by axing thousands of senior staff and restraining pay, the schools secretary for England has indicated.
Ed Balls, the first minister to suggest possible cost-cutting moves, told the Sunday Times one option was to merge comprehensives to form "federations".
The prime minister told the TUC conference in Liverpool the government would "cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets" but he would not support cuts in "vital frontline services on which people depend".
Long military campaigns are rarely won or lost on a decisive pitched battle, even if that’s the way history’s camp-fire storytellers like to cast the tale. The fortunes of war rarely turn on events or moments that can be tagged neatly to a place and date. More often, doubt, anxiety and a calculation of loss build gradually in the back of a nation’s mind, until finally a newsworthy reverse trips a switch, the despair is projected to the front, somebody whispers “let’s get out of here”, and soon everyone is edging for the door, claiming it’s what they thought all along — which it sort of was.
The whispers have begun. Slowly but surely, tentatively at first, with many fits and starts, in flurries of denial, and protesting that all’s well and nothing has changed, we are on our way out of Afghanistan. If a dying Labour Government doesn’t begin edging towards the door, the next Conservative one will. Whatever they say.
DIAGEO appeared to be in line for a major injection of public funds last night after John Swinney revealed the closure of its Johnnie Walker bottling plant in Kilmarnock would cost the local economy £15.5 million each year. [here]
THE attempts by Scottish rugby to make Murrayfield Stadium "sweat" in the past year have resulted in a boost to the country's economy of nearly £130 million.
Edinburgh alone benefited to the tune of £72.9 million, according to figures published yesterday and welcomed by Jim Mather, the Scottish Government's minister for enterprise, energy and tourism. [here]
THE Royal Bank of Scotland was accused of "adding insult to injury" yesterday after it cut the pensions of 60,000 staff, despite having agreed to a £342,500-a-year package for its former chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin.
Appeal judges in Edinburgh were told yesterday that the 57-year-old was convinced that abandoning his long-running appeal against his conviction would "assist in the early determination" of the application to be sent back to Libya.
Maggie Scott QC, the head of Megrahi's legal team, increased suspicion of an unofficial deal by saying her client, who is now very weak, in severe pain and distressed, believed he would get home quickly only if he gave up the appeal.
She hinted that Megrahi believed that keeping the appeal "alive" meant the Scottish government would either block or delay his applications for compassionate release, including a separate prisoner transfer bid to be sent home to continue his sentence in a Libyan jail.
"His absolute priority in the little time he has left is to spend it with his family in his homeland," she told the court. "It's the appellant's belief that instructions to abandon his appeal will assist in the early determination of these applications."
Eight months ago, it looked as though the controversial era of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s ethnic Uzbek warlord, had come to a brutal end. After allegedly beating up a political rival, he disappeared into exile in Turkey. Yet with only three days until Afghanistan’s presidential election, General Dostum, 55, has staged a dramatic return to his homeland as part of a deal to help President Karzai to victory. (here)
Mr Karzai, the West’s indecisive placeman in Afghanistan, eager to please everyone, has quietly signed an amended version of what has become known as the “marital rape law”, to retain popularity with clerics and his male followers. While the clause insisting that a man has the right to sex with his wife a certain number of times a week may have been removed, the Shia Personal Status Law, described as “abhorrent” in its original form by President Obama, remains abhorrent. It allows a man to deny his wife food if she denies him conjugal sex, grants guardianship of children to fathers and
grandfathers, lets rapists pay to avoid being prosecuted, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. (here)
An investigation by the BBC has found evidence of fraud and corruption in Afghanistan's presidential election. Thousands of voting cards have been offered for sale and thousands of dollars offered in bribes to buy votes. The findings come as campaigning closes ahead of Thursday's election in which incumbent President Hamid Karzai faces more than 30 challengers. (here)
TALEBAN commanders have been bribed with cash from the international community to hold off violent attacks in the run up to Thursday's Afghan elections, The Scotsman has learned. (here)
A RECORD amount of class-A drugs like heroin and cocaine were seized by the Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) last year – the largest amount since the organisation was formed.What we don't know is the extent to which there were more drugs available to be recovered. Obviously, if the importation of drugs is growing, then - other things remaining equal - one might expect more to be recovered. But, for obvious reasons, we do not have statistics on the amounts imported (or produced locally). One possible measure of marlet penetration might be price but again for obvious reasons we do not have reliable stats on the street price of cocaine or heroin. So it remains something of a mystery.
The agency's eighth annual report revealed that nearly two tonnes of illegal drugs were recovered, more than half of which fell into the class-A category.The class-A drugs had a street value of £43.5 million. The SCDEA said the action stopped a minimum of two million street deals.
The head of MI6 has told the BBC there is no torture and "no complicity in torture" by the British secret service.
Sir John Scarlett said his officers were committed to human rights and liberal democracy, but also had to protect the UK against terrorism.
We can't be bothered to walk up a few flights of stairs, balk at the idea of running to catch a bus and would rather snooze than have sex with our partners, according to a report published today.
Despite a huge government push to encourage healthy living, Britons are lazier than ever, concludes the study conducted by Nuffield Health, a not for profit health organisation.
One in six people would rather watch a TV programme they didn't like than leave the sofa to change the channel if their remote control was broken. A third (36%) of the 2,000 adults surveyed for the study said they would not run to catch a bus and more than half (59%) would not walk up two flights of stairs to reach their office, choosing instead to take the lift.
SAINSBURY'S IS to create 1300 new jobs in Scotland by next summer as part of a plan to expand its UK floor space by 15%.
The supermarket group, which has completed a successful four-year turnaround plan, said that most of the jobs would come through the openings of two new stores in Strathaven and Prestwick as well as a revamped store at Glasgow's Braehead.
First minister Alex Salmond welcomed the news, predicting that the new investment would provide a "significant boost to the Scottish economy".
He said: "The company's plans to increase its number of Scottish stores and to expand existing outlets will bring new jobs and investment to communities throughout the country."
Immediate action to create a new generation of Gaelic speakers is the only way to save the language, according to Minister for Gaelic Michael Russell and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning Fiona Hyslop, speaking today during a visit to the studios of Stornoway-based Gaelic broadcaster MG Alba.
To address the issue, Ms Hyslop and Mr Russell announced that the Scottish Government and Bòrd na Gà idhlig will work closely over the next three months to identify the critical steps required to deliver such a challenging outcome. By the end of this year Mr Russell will publish an action plan of radical steps which will deliver an increase in Gaelic speakers and users.
Minister for Gaelic Michael Russell said:
"There is legitimate concern about the condition of Gaelic in Scotland. This Government shares that concern and is committed to tackling it head-on. But there is not the luxury of time. We must take action and we must take it now."
... if you're in a mood to fume once more at the way that individual bankers enriched themselves at taxpayers' expense, I commend to you a report published yesterday by the New York State attorney general on fat bonuses paid last year by US banks that were kept alive by public money.
The once-mighty Citigroup, for example, received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and guarantees from American taxpayers, but still paid out $609.1m in bonuses to its top 124 bonus recipients: three individuals received bonuses of $10m or more; 13 pocketed bonuses of $8m or more; 44 individuals trousered bonuses of $5m or more.
Merrill Lynch, which was rescued by Bank of America and generated losses last year of $27.6bn, paid its top four bonus recipients in 2008 a combined $121m and the next four received $62m. The top 149 bonus recipients at Merrill received a combined $858m.
This spectacle of bankers' snouts in the trough feasting thanks to the emergency succour provided by taxpayers was also to be seen at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan.
And all the while a painful global recession - partly caused by bankers' excess - was depriving less fortunate citizens of their livelihoods.
We don't have an equivalent report into the bonuses paid last year by British banks.
Old Trafford 106m
The Emirates 104m
Anfield 101m
St James 101m
The department store, Selfridges, is set to launch on the high street Britain's first range of 'control pants' for men.
The collection, by Equmen, promises to deliver a pert posterior and do for men's bums what brands such as Spanx have done for female thighs.
The range of 'power pants' comprises briefs, at £35, and leg-hugging trunks (colloquially referred to as 'meggings' - the macho form of leggings), £37, which feature Equmen's revolutionary 'Helix-Mapping compression technology', to improve lightweight posture and provide support 'down under', in addition to lifting and smoothing "in all the right places", to quote the press release.
