This week's news on Falklands.
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Top Stories: Vulcan bomber flypast to mark new Falklands memorial at Alrewas arboretum
16 MayBirmingham Mail
BRITAIN’S only working Vulcan aircraft will fly over the National Memorial Arboretum during the dedication of its new Falklands Memorial.
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Leveson inquiry: Adam Boulton says Brown's pyjama party was 'bonkers'
15 MayGuardian.co.uk - Media News
Sky News presenter could not believe the then prime minister 'indulged' in such intimacy and it would 'end in tears'
The "slumber party" the former prime minister's wife Sarah Brown hosted for guests including Wendi Deng and Rebekah Brooks was "completely bonkers", Sky News political editor Adam Boulton told the Leveson inquiry.
The veteran TV journalist said during his appearance at the inquiry as a witness on Tuesday afternoon that he could not believe it when he heard about the party from a then cabinet minister in 2008.
"At the time I just thought this is completely bonkers that this sort of intimacy is being indulged in by the prime minister and his wife and a proprietor and his wife. I thought it would end in tears," added Boulton.
Asked if he felt relations between newspaper proprietors had become so close that there was a level of "carelessness" involved, he replied: "Yes."
Boulton said he was also surprised to see a succession of prime ministers and opposition leaders turn up at the News Corporation annual summer party. News Corp owns 39.1% of Sky News parent company BSkyB.
"I see nothing wrong in holding a party or inviting people to it, but I was a little surprised that they all felt compelled to turn up," he added.
Sarah Brown, the then prime minister's wife, hosted a "slumber party" at Chequers attended by Brooks, Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng, and his daughter Elisabeth in 2008.
Last month Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive, quipped at the Leveson inquiry that it was probably nothing more than a "bunch of women complaining about their husbands".
Boulton, who has been at Sky for 23 years, said he has only met Rupert Murdoch three times and then it was in the company of others.
He told Leveson he was resolutely opposed to becoming "pally" with politicians because it was inappropriate.
He said relations between the press and politicians hit a new low during the Tony Blair/Alastair Campbell era.
"Things there were handed out as favours," he said in reference to political briefings orchestrated by Campbell, Blair's director of communications.
His remarks come a day after Campbell told Leveson that he came to "loathe" some journalists during his time at No 10.
There is little love lost between Campbell and Boulton – shortly after the 2010 general election they were involved in a bad-tempered on-air row.
Boulton said: "Increasingly there was a sense that you could not really trust what we were being told." This lack of trust "had led to the breakdown of political confidence".
He added that good old-fashioned journalistic tools such as "doorstepping" flourished under Baroness Thatcher in the 80s and early 90s and elicited some of her most famous headlines, including "We are a grandmother" in 1989 and her exhortation to the nation to "Rejoice, rejoice" when South Georgia was recaptured in the Falklands in 1982.
"I am the only person to doorstep the Queen and get her to talk about politics. I regard that as legitimate journalism," he said.
The Blair era heralded a new modus operandi, according to Boulton. Blair refused to answer questions as he was going in and out of No 10 Downing Street, he said, and held a dim view of journalists, whom he was later to describe as "feral beasts".
Boulton told Leveson he had experienced doorstepping first hand when his first marriage broke up. "As it happens I make no complaint about that. I think journalists do have to go to quite long and great extents to get stories but it's not a pleasant process."
He said Blair, however, loved to make the headlines and the now notorious claims that Iraq could bomb Britain within 45 minutes was a typical attempt by his spin doctors at No 10 to make the news.
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Bruce King obituary
15 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Some Esher residents may have known that their elderly paperboy, Bruce King, was also their Labour candidate for the council elections earlier this month, and even that he was responsible for their Surrey hometown becoming a fairtrade zone. But most probably did not know that Bruce, who has died aged 75, was an eminent geomorphologist (a scholar of landscapes) and a pioneer in the science of remote sensing, using data from sources such as aerial photography and satellite images to interpret changes in landforms and land use.
And it is extremely unlikely that many of his neighbours were aware of his staunch commitment to the African National Congress during its most difficult years in the 1960s and 70s, or that he had been "banned" in apartheid-era South Africa for his defiance of the Mixed Marriages Act.
Bruce was born in Woking, Surrey, and died a few miles away in Esher. But his life and work took him all over the world. He was interested in African landscapes and studied geology at the University of Natal, South Africa, where his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement led to his meeting Jamela, whom he married in a Muslim ceremony in Cape Town in 1964, and subsequently in a civil ceremony in Woking. Unable to return to South Africa, he completed a PhD in geomorphology at Edinburgh University, and joined the UK government's Land Resources Division (now part of the Department for International Development).
His first major assignment was in Tanzania, where he co-founded the Bureau for Land Use Planning at Dar es Salaam University, and there applied geomorphological analysis to map land resources. Meanwhile, Jamela broadcast in Afrikaans for the ANC radio station transmitting to South Africa. Their home was always open to members of the ANC, who would drop by to enjoy their hospitality and the (relative) luxury of books and records.
After Dar es Salaam, Bruce worked in Indonesia and Belize on forest and preservation projects. His remote sensing expertise was such that during the Falklands conflict he was secretly "requisitioned" by the MoD to interpret aerial photographs. In retirement, he returned to his interest in South African landscape and embarked on a systematic geomorphological survey of the country.
The whole of Bruce's life was influenced by his egalitarian ideals. After returning to Britain he became an active member of the Labour party, and he was a key trade unionist at Land Resources Division. He is survived by Jamela and his daughter Reyahn.
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Cyber security should be promoted with hard-hitting ad campaign, says Labour
15 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Shadow defence secretary calls for adverts to encourage people to take care online and "kitemarks" for secure businesses
Ministers should treat cyber security in the same way as drink-driving and launch a hard-hitting advertising campaign to encourage people to take more care online, Labour says.
Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said people needed to realise that failing to take responsibility for security should be regarded as unacceptable behaviour that was making life for easy for computer hackers and thieves.
Businesses should also be "kitemarked" on the robustness of their computer systems, he said.
Speaking at a security summit in Westminster on Tuesday, Murphy said it was "not an exaggeration to say that the emergence of cyberspace is amongst the biggest changes in human history". He believes cyber security could be the "arms race of the 21st century".
Murphy committed Labour to ensuring keeping safe online becomes an important part of the UK's national curriculum review, so children realise the dangers as well as the advantages of going online.
"The government should also consider a public awareness campaign along the lines of those conducted against drink-driving, highlighting threats and action that can be taken to strengthen personal responsibility," Murphy said.
"For drink-driving, cultural change combined with government action turned what was once a social norm into an unacceptable behaviour in the eyes of the public and in law. We have to ask ourselves what the right combination of education and regulation is because we must develop a cultural intolerance towards aggressive or criminal internet use."
With so many businesses relying on computers to store and transfer information, he said companies had to spend more on their own defences because any security chain was only as strong as its weakest link.
He said this was especially important in defence projects, where hackers could target small suppliers to get into the systems of the major defence companies.
"Kitemarks for those with high standards of cyber security must become a reality across the private sector," Murphy said. "The defence industry is one of the most at risk sectors and so the Ministry of Defence could work with business to set a series of benchmarks for firms' cyber security performance which would be taken into account when making procurement decisions."
The government may also have to consider paying better salaries to in-house computer experts at the MoD and at GCHQ to stop them being poached by private companies.
The Cabinet Office and GCHQ take a lead on cyber issues in the UK, and there is already a Get Safe Online website to give advice about computer and online security.
Experts believe the government should promote this more aggressively, as well as focusing on the more sophisticated threats.
Murphy spoke a day after Philip Hammond announced the MoD budget for next year, which is known to include more money for cyber security in the department.
In an interview in the Guardian earlier this month, Major General Jonathan Shaw admitted hackers had breached the department's systems. He also admitted the MoD was committed to higher spending in this area to stop further breaches.
A veteran of the Falklands and Iraq wars, Shaw admitted: "My generation … we are far too old for this. It is not what we have grown up with. Our natural recourse is to reach for a pen and paper. And although we can set up structures, we really need to be on listening mode for this one. If we want to work the response, if we want to know really what is happening, we really have to listen to the young kids out in the street. They are telling us what is happening out there."
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British dead and wounded in Afghanistan, month by month
14 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
What is the human cost of the war in Afghanistan for British forces? As British troop deaths reach 414, these are the latest figures - including the most recent wounded and amputation statistics
• Get the data
• Amputation statistics explainer
• Afghanistan civilian casualties
• Interactive guideTwo British soldiers have been killed in an indirect fire attack the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has reported.
The soldiers were serving with the Royal Logistic Corps, attached to 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh Battlegroup, in Helmand province and were killed in an indirect fire attack on Forward Operating Base Ouellette, in the northern part of Nahr-e Saraj district.
Figures from the Ministry of Defence released earlier this week showed that seven British troops injured in Afghanistan suffered amputations in the first quarter of 2012.
The MoD also released the latest annual numbers on amputations (they record data by financial year). 46 UK troops serving in Afghanistan had limbs amputated between April 2011 and March 2012, 18 of them significant multiple amputees. This is a significant reduction from 2010/11, when 75 service personnel suffered amputations.
With the latest deaths caused by the war in Afghanistan, the total number of British troop fatalities during the conflict now stands at 414.
The 400 mark was passed when six British soldiers were killed in an explosion on 6 March.
The number of British deaths in Afghanistan is now much higher than Iraq and even the Falklands conflict.
2009 was the bloodiest year for British troops in Afghanistan. 2010 nearly caught up. But last year, with the deployment of US troops to Helmand, things quietened down. So, when six soldiers die in one incident, the shock is real.
These are the numbers of British fatalities for Afghanistan - and Iraq, too - updated as they change.
We've broken Afghanistan down month by month.
Research has found that the rate at which British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan is almost four times that of their US counterparts, and double the rate which is officially classified as "major combat".
Analysis by the Medical Research Council's biostatistics unit at the University of Cambridge also found that the death rate of UK troops is twice that of 2006, when they were described as being involved in the fiercest fighting since their involvement in Korea 50 years ago.
The researchers said the "UK could expect at least as many military fatalities in 10 weeks in Afghanistan as in 20 weeks in 2006".
The official classification of "major combat" is a killing rate of six per 1,000 personnel years. For the 12 months up to May, the killing rate for British troops in Afghanistan stood at 13.
More complicated are the wounded numbers. Rather than one simple set of statistics, the MoD gives us three - all of which are included as a sheet in the dataset below (and summarised down the page).
• Firstly, you have the Noticas numbers. These are the most seriously wounded cases, where the family has been informed the wounded person has been "listed"
• Then there are the people registered at field hospitals - which go from the seriously to the lightly wounded, from all causes, violent and otherwise
• Lastly there are the personnel who've been evacuated by air, which could be serious combat injuries or illnesses such as dysentryThis is how the MoD defines it:
'"Very Seriously ill/ Injured/wounded" or VSI is the definition we use where the illness or injury is of such severity that life or reason is imminently endangered. "Seriously ill/Injured/Wounded" or SI is the definition we use where the patient's condition is of such severity that there is cause for immediate concern, but there is no imminent danger to life or reason. The VSI and SI categories are defined by Joint Casualty and Compassionate Policy and Procedures. They are not strictly medical categories but are designed to give an indication of the severity of the illness to inform what the individual's next of kin are told.'
What do you think? Can you do anything with the data?
Summary tables
Download the data
• DATA: British dead and wounded, month by month as a spreadsheet - including names of dead
• DATA: US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq
• DATA: how many troops does each country send to Afghanistan
• INTERACTIVE: rollcall of the British deadMore data
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Things To Do In London On The Cheap: 14-20 May
13 MayLondonist
Tooting High Street
Monday: Visit the Tooting Transition Shop, which is “exchanging memories, ideas, images, questions and experiences about the joys and challenges of living now”. That is, if you can find it…. (free).
Tuesday: Vintage store Beyond Retro are celebrating “10 years of sartorial heaven” at their newly spruced-up Cheshire St (off Brick Lane) location with a night of live music and fashion so bad it’s good (free).
Wednesday: An evening of UK jazz at Ray’s in Foyles, Charing Cross Road, with Zhenya Strigalev and Liam Noble performing to promote the former’s new album (free).
Thursday: Will the UK and Argentina ever move beyond their Falklands farrago? The London School of Economics hosts a debate tonight with Alicia Castro, Argentine ambassador to Britain, John Hughes, former UK ambassador to Argentina, and professor of Latin American contemporary politics George Philip discussing the ways forward (free).
Friday: The Free Word Lecture Theatre in Farringdon Road is hosting a debate on the politics of Olympic Architecture (£5)
Saturday: It’s Museums at Night all weekend — a chance to explore the capital’s museums, galleries and collections under the cover of night (free).
Sunday: Visit the newly-reopened Photographer’s Gallery, then head on to the London Photo Festival to snap up some prints of your own (free).
Check out our things to do in London for free page for more.
Photo / Vganarchist
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30th Anniversary of Liberation - New Falkland Islands stamps
13 MayStamp News
The 14th June 2012 marks the 30th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Falkland Islands.This issue of postage stamps focuses on the Falkland's community and how it has thrived, grown and responsibly developed since 1982.
The top value (£1.20) shows two confident children enjoying a spectacular Falklands scene and looking towards a bright uniquely Falklands future.---splitterQSWEDFR---The 14th June 2012 marks the 30th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Falkland Islands.
This issue of postage stamps focuses on the Falkland's community and how it has thrived, grown and responsibly developed since 1982. ---splitterQSWEDFR---Falkland Islands;
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Trapped in a hardline | Simon Hoggart
11 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Why do rightwing Tories think so many people share their views on gay marriage?
✒ Gay marriage is responsible for so much. Back in 2007, when we last had serious floods, some bonkers bishop in the north said they were God's punishment. Rightwing Tory MPs have blamed the party's failures in local elections on gay marriage and Lords reform, as if voters were saying, "Hmm, my children are out of work, and I could be made redundant any day, but that's nothing compared with Cameron's assault on marriage as a sacrament between a man and a woman!"
The fact is that hardliners of all kinds tend to mingle with people who share their views, and can't quite comprehend that most others don't. It's the same on the left. Tony Benn, who used to call opinion polls "the enemy's intelligence reports", simply believed that everyone thought like him because he rarely met anyone who didn't. At the height of some rail strike in the 1970s, he suggested the union should have collecting boxes at mainline stations so that commuters could demonstrate their solidarity with the strikers. Trapped in their own bubble, the hardliners are more out of touch than Cameron and Osborne ever could be.
✒ Why no monument to Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated 200 years ago on Friday? Since he was the only British prime minister to be murdered, it's odd that we don't make more of him. There is no memorial in the Commons, even though he was shot in the lobby itself. Perhaps we secretly compare ourselves with the Americans, whose presidents seem to exist in a hail of gunfire, even those that don't die as a result.
Perceval was an unusual man. In many ways, he was what David Cameron aspires to be. Though he opposed Catholic emancipation, he opposed slavery even more fiercely and diverted the Royal Navy to apprehend illegal slave-runners. This was not popular at the time, at least with people who weren't slaves. He was against foxhunting, but pursued the Peninsular war against Napoleon with great success. It might have been his Falklands. In the days when his hero, Pitt, would regard two bottles of port (just table wine then) as essential ballast before setting off on a speech, he drank very little. He would have loathed the Bullingdon Club. His position on gay marriage remains uncertain.
They hanged his killer, John Bellingham, within a week – some say this was to cover up a conspiracy, like the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. We will probably never know. But it does seem unfair on the poor fellow; a modest bust or plaque might be fitting.
✒ A friend reports from Sussex: "My son has a schoolfriend whose mum likes to think she's really up to the minute. So when she heard that another mum had lost her own mother, she decided what was needed was a sympathetic text. Unfortunately she ended it 'LOL' because she thought it meant 'lots of love'."
✒ This week I made a flying visit to Belfast to give a talk at the excellent Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. It's always a pleasure to go back to Northern Ireland: as I thought when I worked there, they really are the nicest people in the world except when they're trying to kill you.
Driving in from the out-of-town airport, we passed landmarks from my time there … The Crumlin Road jail, from which an IRA football team escaped by climbing over the wall; they got away because they were in their innocent-looking kit. Someone wrote a song, The Crumlin Kangaroos.
There was the Mater hospital, where the IRA's Máire Drumm was murdered by Protestants who fled past her husband in the corridor as he arrived for visiting time. There was the old Court House, soon to be a hotel, with its tunnel leading to the prison; no doubt the passage, where various prisoners tried to beat each other up, will become a chic bar.
We passed a corner where one IRA man was kicked to death by rival IRA men. Belfast has changed immeasurably, but it still wears its scars proudly, like the medals pinned on an old soldier's civvies.
The residents I talked to were getting just a bit weary of the Titanic. It's everywhere you turn, even ads for some grocers: "We put the Tea in Titanic!" As someone said to me: "It's bad enough now. Imagine the fuss if it hadn't sunk."
Though you can now walk safely at night down streets where in the 1970s I would not willingly have driven in a locked car during the noonday rain, some things don't change. Outside Debenhams in the city centre I saw three drunk youths singing the old sectarian song The Sash my Father Wore. But as my friend Piers said: "They were probably on an Arts Council grant."
✒ Air travel just gets horribly worse. At Heathrow security I was trapped behind a woman who needed no fewer than four of those big trays for all the stuff she was taking on board: her coat, her jacket, her laptop, her shoes, various items of metal jewellery, along with her vast carry-on suitcase and her almost as vast handbag. And they didn't even see her underwear, which apparently is the new threat.
No wonder queues take forever. On the Aer Lingus flight I asked for a glass of plain water and they wanted to charge me £2.20 for a half-litre bottle. That's three times as expensive as unleaded petrol.
✒ Two weeks ago I mocked the product placement that has James Bond drinking Heineken lager in his next film. But Lawrence Long writes to point out that in Live and Let Die, the second Bond novel, he is offered "as good a Liebfraumilch as could be found in America" and replies not "bleugh!" but "that sounds fine".
Mind you, back in 1954 even cosmopolitan secret agents could hardly be expected to know better.
✒ Labels: Kate Anderson bought a cat flap, which states: "Warning – this product will not prevent unwanted animals or people including small children from passing through the pet-door."
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From the archive, 11 May 1982: Henry Kissinger on the Falklands
11 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
The former US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs reflects on British and American attitudes to foreign policy
Britain and America have never ceased to play important roles in each other's history. On the whole it has been a productive and creative relationship, perhaps one of the most durable in the history of nations. In the last 200 years, we have approached each other sometimes warily, and dealt with foreign affairs often from different perspectives. Still, on balance, the relationship has been of considerable benefit to world peace.
Britain has rarely proclaimed moral absolutes or rested her faith in the ultimate efficacy of technology, despite her achievements in this field. Philosophically, she remains Hobbesian: she expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. In moral matters Britain has traditionally practised a convenient form of ethical egoism, believing that what was good for Britain
was best for the rest.This requires a certain historical self-confidence, not to say nerve, to carry it off. But she has always practised it with an innate moderation and civilised humaneness such that her presumption was frequently justified.
American foreign policy is the product of a very different tradition. The Founding Fathers were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of power and skilfully manipulated it to win independence. But for a century and more after that America, comfortably protected by two oceans - which in turn were secured by the Royal Navy - developed the idiosyncratic notion that a fortunate accident was a natural state of affairs, that our involvement in world politics was purely a matter of choice.
That two countries with such divergent traditions could form a durable partnership is remarkable in itself. The periods of the close Anglo-American "special relationship," the object of such nostalgia today, were also times of occasional mutual exasperation.
In my negotiations over Rhodesia I worked from a British draft with British spelling, even when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper and a Cabinet-approved document. The practice of collaboration thrives to our day, with occasional ups and downs, but even in the Falklands crisis, an inevitable return to the main theme of the relationship.
Clearly, British membership of Europe has added a new dimension. But the solution, in my view, is not to sacrifice the special intimacy of the Anglo-American connection on the altar of the European idea, but rather to replicate it on a wider plane of America's relations with all its European allies, whether bilaterally or with a politically cohesive European Community - that is for Europe to decide.
In the early stages of the Falklands crisis, America hesitated between its Atlantic and its Western hemisphere vocations. But these disagreements did no lasting damage. In the end we came together; the old friendship prevailed over other considerations.
One of Britain's contributions to the Western alliance has been to supply a needed global perspective: the knowledge, from centuries of experience in Europe, that peace requires some clear-eyed notion of equilibrium and a willingness to maintain it; the insight, from centuries of world leadership, that Europe's security cannot be isolated from the broader context of the global balance; the awareness, from heroic exertions in this century, that those who cherish the values of Western civilisation must be willing to defend them. In the Falklands crisis, Britain is reminding us all that certain basic principles, such as honour, justice, and patriotism, remain valid and must be sustained by more than words.
[This is an edited version of Dr Kissinger's speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs to mark the bicentenary of the office of Foreign Secretary.]
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Questor share tip: WPP has strength in diversity
11 MayTelegraph - Finance
Controversy about chief executive Martin Sorrell's pay and a distasteful Olympic advertisement produced by an Argentinian subsidiary in the Falkland Islands, means advertising agency WPP has had negative press recently. But investors should not let this distract them for the fundamental soundness of its business.
