Embassies attacked over killing of more than 200 people ahead of vote calling for President Bashar al-Assad to resign

More than 200 people have been killed in shelling by Syrian forces in the city of Homs, according to activists, as the UN security council prepares to vote on a draft resolution backing an Arab call for President Bashar al-Assad to resign.

As news of the violence spread, a crowd of Syrians stormed their country's embassy in Cairo and protests broke out outside Syrian missions in Britain, Germany and the United States.

Death tolls cited by activists and opposition groups ranged from 217 to 260, making the Homs attack the deadliest so far in Assad's crackdown on protests that erupted 11 months ago inspired by uprisings that overthrew three Arab leaders.

Residents said Syrian forces began shelling the Khalidiya neighbourhood at around 8pm on Friday using artillery and mortars. They said at least 36 houses were destroyed with families inside.

"We were sitting inside our house when we started hearing the shelling. We felt shells were falling on our heads," said Waleed, a resident of Khalidiya.

It was not immediately clear what had prompted Syrian forces to launch such an intense bombardment, just as diplomats at the security council were discussing the draft resolution supporting the Arab League demand for Assad to step aside.

Some activists said the violence was triggered by a wave of army defections in Homs, a stronghold of protests and armed insurgents whom Assad has vowed to crush.

"The death toll is now at least 217 people killed in Homs, 138 of them killed in the Khalidiya district," Rami Abdulrahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters, citing witnesses.

"Syrian forces are shelling the district with mortars from several locations, some buildings are on fire. There are also buildings which got destroyed."

A Syrian activist said Assad forces bombarded Khalidiya, a key anti-Assad district, to scare other rebel neighbourhoods. "It does not seem that they get it. Even if they kill 10 million of us, the people will not stop until we topple him."

The opposition Syrian National Council said 260 civilians were killed, describing it as "one of the most horrific massacres since the beginning of the uprising in Syria". It added that it believed Assad's forces were preparing for similar attacks around Damascus and in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour.

Another group, the Local Co-ordination Committees, gave a death toll of more than 200. It is not possible to verify activist or state media reports as Syria restricts independent media access.

Video footage on the Internet showed at least eight bodies assembled in a room, one of them with the top half of its head blown off. A voice on the video said the bombardment was continuing as the footage was filmed.

One activist said residents were using primitive tools to rescue people. They feared many were buried under rubble.

"We are not getting any help, there are no ambulances or anything. We are removing the people with our own hands," he said, adding there were only two field hospitals treating the wounded. Each one had a capacity to deal with 30 people, but he estimated the total number of wounded at 500.

"We have dug out at least 100 bodies so far, they are placed in the two mosques."

At the UN, the Security Council is due to vote on Saturday on a draft resolution endorsing an Arab League plan calling for Assad to resign.

It is unclear if Russia will abstain or use its veto. Moscow has opposed significant security council action on Syria.

Western diplomats in New York said the latest violence might make it more difficult for Russia to block it. "Would they dare, with what is happening in Homs?" one told Reuters.

Russia has balked at any language that would open to door to "regime change" in Syria, its crucial Middle East ally where Moscow operates a naval base.

In Cairo a crowd stormed the Syrian embassy, smashing furniture and setting fire to parts of the building in protest over the Homs bloodshed, an embassy official and a witness said.

The gate of the embassy was broken and furniture was smashed on the second floor of the building, a Reuters witness said. It was the second attack on the mission in a week.

In London more than 100 Syrians hurled stones at the Syrian embassy overnight, smashing windows and shouting slogans, and five people were arrested after trying to break in, according to reports.

At a rally in Washington people shouted "Syria soon will be free" outside the mission, according to TV footage.

In the Syrian cities of Hama and Idlib activists said hundreds of people took to the streets in solidarity. "Homs is bombarded and you are still sleeping?" they chanted in Idlib.

In Hama armed forces shot dead one person on Friday as they moved to break up a protest marking the anniversary of a 1982 massacre by troops loyal to Assad's father, activists said.

The Observatory said forces dispersed protests in the Janoub al-Malaab district of Hama where people had planned to release 1,000 red balloons to mark the killing of more than 10,000 people when Hafez al-Assad's forces crushed an Islamist uprising.

Violence also returned to the commercial hub Aleppo, which had largely remained on the sidelines of the uprising.

2/4/2012 12:25:00 AM

Anti-government protesters march through Russian capital as Putin supporters stage counter-rally

Tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators are marching through Moscow and other Russian cities in protest at Vladimir Putin's grip on power.

Thousands of Putin supporters are also staging a rally in the capital a month before the presidential election that the prime minister is expected to win, putting him in power for six more years.

The rival demonstrators were undeterred by the freezing temperatures, which have plunged as low as -20C, with opposition leaders saying that up to 100,000 people had joined the protest in Moscow on Saturday.

The opposition is trying to maintain the momentum against Putin after the protests on 10 and 24 December, which were the biggest demonstrations in Russia since Putin was first elected president in 2000.

"We have already reached a point of no return. People have stopped being afraid and see how strong they are together," said anti-government protester Ivan Kositsky. The 49-year-old said Putin "wants stability, but you can only find stability in the graveyard".

Moscow police said up to 90,000 people were at the pro-Putin rally a few miles away.

Teachers have said trade unions pressured them to attend the pro-Putin rally.

"Trade union representatives called us together and said at least five to 10 people had to go to the Putin rally," said Sergei Bedchuk, a 54-year-old headteacher at the opposition protest in Moscow.

"I have something I believe in. We could not go there," he said, his daughter at his side with white ribbons in her hair – the symbol of the protest movement.

The protesters want a rerun of the parliamentary election held in early December, the release of prisoners jailed for political reasons, reform of the political system, dismissal of the central election commission chief and registration of more political parties. They have called on sympathisers not to cast a single vote for Putin on 4 March.

Putin was president from 2000 until 2008, when he ushered Dmitry Medvedev into the Kremlin because of a constitutional ban on anyone holding the presidency for three successive terms. Putin then became prime minister but remained the dominant leader.

2/4/2012 5:42:04 AM

• UN report says 3,021 civilians killed in 2011
• 8% increase on 2010 and fifth consecutive rise
• Number of suicide bombings static but toll rises 80%

The civilian death toll for the war in Afghanistan reached a record high last year with 3,021 deaths, according to the United Nations.

The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths.

The number of deaths caused by suicide bombings jumped to 450, an 80% increase over the previous year, even though the number of suicide attacks remained about the same.

"A decade after the war began, the human cost of it is still rising," said Georgette Gagnon, director for human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan.

The single deadliest suicide attack since 2008 occurred on 6 December, when a bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest at the entrance of a mosque in Kabul, killing 56 worshippers during the Shia Muslim rituals of Ashoura.

Roadside bombs remain the biggest killer of civilians. The homemade explosives – which can be triggered by a footstep or a vehicle and are often rigged with enough explosives to destroy a tank – killed 967 people in 2011, nearly a third of the total.

The figures come as Nato begins to map out plans for international troops to withdraw and hand over responsibility for security to Afghan security forces.

The presence of western forces has managed to reduce civilian casualties in the troubled southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. But the UN found that insurgents had focused instead on areas along the country's border with Pakistan. They were also relying more on roadside bombs and suicide attacks in places like bazaars, school grounds, footpaths and bus stations.

"The tactics have changed," said Jan Kubis, the UN secretary general's special representative to Afghanistan. "The anti-government forces being squeezed in certain areas ... move to some other areas and again use these inhuman, undiscriminating weapons like human-activated explosive devices and suicide attacks."

Kubis said the Taliban banned the use of land mines as "un-Islamic and anti-human" in 1998 when they ruled Afghanistan with their harsh interpretation of Islamic law. But the UN report said there was little difference between mines and the buried homemade bombs used by the Taliban. The majority of improvised devices have about 20kg (9lb) of explosives and are triggered when a person steps on, or a vehicle drives over rigged pressure plates.

"These are basically land mines," Kubis said of the roadside bombs. "So why is this 'inhuman and un-Islamic' weapon being increasingly used?"

The number of roadside bombs planted last year overwhelmed security forces' improved ability to detect and defuse them. An average of 23 roadside bombs a day were either detonated or discovered and defused last year, twice the daily average in 2010, the report said. Actual explosions increased by 6%.

The UN attributed 77% of the deaths to insurgent attacks and 14% to actions by international and Afghan troops. The cause of the remaining 9% were classified as unknown.

2/4/2012 6:53:22 AM

Revolutionary Guards exercises follow threats by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against US and Israel

Iran's Revolutionary Guards are carrying out military exercises amid rising tensions over the country's nuclear programme and rumours of a possible strike by Israel or the US.

The manoeuvres in southern Iran involve ground forces and follow threats by the Islamic regime to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz in retaliation to western sanctions.

The show of military strength also follows a warning by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that any military strike by the US or Israel would only make Iran stronger. Khamenei also pledged that Iran will help any nation or group that confronts the "cancer" Israel,

He affirmed that Iran had assisted militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas – a well-known policy, but one that Iranian leaders rarely acknowledge explicitly.

"We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, and in the 22-day war" between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip, he said.

Israel's large-scale military incursion against Hamas in 2008-09 in Gaza ended in a ceasefire, with Israel claiming to have inflicted heavy damage on the militant organisation. The war in Lebanon ended with a UN-brokered truce that sent thousands of Lebanese troops and international peacekeepers into southern Lebanon to prevent another outbreak.

"From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this," said Khamenei. He said Israel was a "cancerous tumour that should be cut and will be cut".

His speech followed suggestions by Israel that military strikes are an increasing possibility if sanctions fail to halt the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said he wasn't surprised by Khamenei's remarks. "It's the same kind of hate speech that we've been seeing from Iran for many years now," Yigal Palmor said.

Khamenei said the US would suffer defeat and lose standing in the region if Washington decided to use military force.

"Iran will not withdraw. Then what happens?" asked Khamenei. "In conclusion, the west's hegemony and threats will be discredited" in the Middle East. "The hegemony of Iran will be promoted. In fact, this will be in our service."

Western forces have recently bolstered their naval presence in the Gulf led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

Last month, Iran's navy carried out 10 days of exercises in the Gulf. The manoeuvres by the Revolutionary Guard, under the direct control of Khamenei, were announced by Iranian state media.

2/4/2012 6:46:00 AM

Six arrested in Belgrave Square after windows smashed as activists target embassies in Egypt, Germany, Spain and US

Six people have been arrested during a demonstration at the Syrian embassy in London, Scotland Yard said.

About 150 demonstrators descended on the in Belgrave Square, London, at around 2am and windows were smashed.

A Metropolitan police spokesman said five men were arrested for forcing entry into the premises, while a sixth was held for assaulting police. All six remain in custody.

Rallies also held at Syria's embassies in Germany, Spain, Sweden and the US, according to reports.

One protester in London told the BBC: "We don't know what message the Syrian regime is giving out with this massacre today – given the UN security council vote ... we don't really understand what they're doing. But we must stop the bloodshed in Syria."

In Egypt, enraged Syrians again stormed the embassy in central Cairo, smashing furniture and equipment and setting fire to parts of the building. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at a police station a few streets away to demand the release of six Syrians who they said were detained during the protest at the mission.

In Kuwait, witnesses said demonstrators stormed the Syrian embassy compound, breaking windows, tearing down the Syrian flag and hoisting the colours of the opposition movement.

Ronan McNern, a supporter of the Occupy London movement, attended the London protest. "The protesters are being held on the other side of the road from the embassy," he said.

"There are 150 people surrounded by a ring of about 60 police officers, who are carrying truncheons. There are also about 12 police vans. It seems all right at the moment.

"The protesters are keeping their spirits up by singing, dancing and playing drums, and they seem to be free to leave the ring. Some of them are waving Syrian flags."

The UN security council is meeting on Saturday to take up a much-negotiated resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria.

At least 5,500 people have died in the country since pro-democracy campaigners took to the streets last year protesting against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The movement at the UN came as activists said Syrian forces used tanks and machine guns to kill at least 200 people and wound hundreds in Homs, in what appeared to be the bloodiest episode since the uprising began.

2/4/2012 6:14:00 AM

Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series

2/4/2012 6:07:59 AM

No British professional footballer has come out as gay since my uncle, Justin Fashanu. Hopefully this charter will change that

After what feels like an eternity since the tragic death of my uncle, Justin Fashanu, almost 14 years ago, there are signs that the football authorities may finally be taking a stand. Or is this just a public front amid growing concerns about their lack of effort to tackle homophobia and transphobia in sport?

Last Monday, I presented a BBC3 documentary asking why none of the 5,000-or-so professional footballers currently playing in Britain has come out publicly as gay.

Maybe the programme had some effect, because on Thursday it emerged that Premier League clubs are now expected to sign the Sports Charter, which includes a pledge to combat homophobia.

For me, the Sports Charter is long overdue. It begins by saying that "everyone should be able to participate in and enjoy sport – whoever they are and whatever their background". That seems to be such basic common sense it's amazing it had to be written down. Nonetheless, it should not detract from the charter's importance in pushing towards a welcoming environment for football players of all sexualities.

Maybe what John Amaechi, the gay basketball player, said to me in the documentary is no longer entirely accurate. Maybe the "white men in boardrooms" (as he described Britain's football elite) have, in fact, realised that the game is no longer played in the realms of the dark ages.

I am constantly reminded of a vivid statement my dad, John Fashanu, made during the documentary. In the most assured voice he stated that there was more chance of a black pope than of a football player "coming out" as homosexual.

Yes, the Sports Charter shines a welcome light on this long-standing taboo, but whether or not it will reassure any players wanting to reveal their true identity and having a safe environment in which to do so is another matter – a matter I feel the English game is still a very long way from laying to rest.

The lack of players who are willing to speak on the issue of homophobia shows that turning the charter into reality is still going to be a struggle – though it has the potential to act as the much-needed catalyst to encourage the game's high-profile stars to address the subject.

For the documentary, I did find some Millwall players who were prepared to talk about it – which is a positive sign, even if many more are still reluctant to do so.

Without sounding like a cynical heartbroken niece, I welcome the Sports Charter and above all hope it will finally bring tolerance and change in one of the most loved games in the world.

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2/4/2012 4:59:01 AM

Michael Wagnon testified that he only shot his gun in defence during Afghan deployment in which civilians were killed for sport

The US military has dropped all charges against the fifth soldier it had accused of killing Afghan civilians for sport during a 2010 deployment.

Specialist Michael Wagnon, 31, had been charged with the unlawful killing of one Afghan civilian in February 2010. He was expected to go on trial in March.

Four other soldiers from a Lewis-McChord Stryker brigade have been jailed in connection with the killings of three unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province.

In all, 12 soldiers were charged in connection with alleged misconduct that, in addition to murder, included smoking hash, collecting illicit weapons, the mutilation and photography of Afghan remains and the gang-beating of a soldier who reported the drug use. Eleven soldiers were convicted on various counts.

An army investigating officer had twice recommended that prosecutors dismiss the case against Wagnon.

The case hinged on an account from a "kill team" participant, Specialist Jeremy Morlock, who is serving 24 years after admitting his involvement in all three killings. Morlock testified that Wagnon knowingly participated in a scheme to kill a civilian.

Wagnon had testified that he shot at an Afghan on the day in question because he believed the man had fired a weapon at Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs. In November, Gibbs was sentenced to life in prison over the killing of three Afghans, including the man in the February 2010 encounter.

Wagnon "was simply a soldier pulling security who responded to the firing of weapons and came to support another soldier", Vokey said. "That's all Michael Wagnon ever did."

In a statement, the Lewis-McChord joint base said the charges were dismissed "in the interest of justice".

Wagnon was released from custody last June. He has been living unrestricted at the base and working as a soldier, his lawyer, Colby Vokey said.

Wagnon was ecstatic at the news, "very, very relieved" and eager to tell his wife, Vokey said.

"The witnesses coming forward that we were able to speak to all confirmed the same thing – that Michael Wagnon had nothing to do with any kind of illegal activity."

An army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Dangerfield, said Wagnon "should be able to continue his normal duties as a soldier".

2/4/2012 3:34:51 AM

Cairo embassy is trashed, while police in London detain five people and missions are targeted in other countries

Five people have been arrested during a demonstration at the Syrian embassy in London, Scotland Yard said. There have been further demonstrations at Syrian missions in other countries over the massacre of civilians in Homs.

In Cairo, Egypt, enraged Syrians again stormed their country's embassy, smashing furniture and equipment and setting fire to parts of the building.

The gate of the embassy in central Cairo was broken and furniture and computers were smashed on the second floor of the building, said a witness. Parts of the first floor were burned, he said.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at a police station a few streets from the embassy to demand the release of six Syrians who they said were detained during the protest at the mission.

In Kuwait, witnesses said demonstrators stormed into the Syrian embassy compound, breaking windows, tearing down the Syrian flag and hoisting the colours of the opposition movement.

About 150 demonstrators descended on the London embassy in Belgrave Square.

A Metropolitan police spokesman said a number of people were arrested for public order offences after the demonstration broke out at 2am. Windows were reportedly smashed at the building as the protest broke out.

Rallies also broke out at Syria's embassies in Germany, Spain, Sweden and the US, according to reports.

One protester in London told the BBC: "We don't know what message the Syrian regime is giving out with this massacre today – given the UN security council vote ... we don't really understand what they're doing. But we must stop the bloodshed in Syria."

Ronan McNern, a supporter of the Occupy London movement, attended the London protest.

"The protesters are being held on the other side of the road from the embassy," he said.

"There are 150 people surrounded by a ring of about 60 police officers, who are carrying truncheons. There are also about 12 police vans.

"It seems all right at the moment.

"The protesters are keeping their spirits up by singing, dancing and playing drums, and they seem to be free to leave the ring. Some of them are waving Syrian flags."

Paint appeared to have been thrown on a door of the embassy, he said.

The United Nations security council is meeting on Saturday to take up a much-negotiated resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria.
At least 5,500 people have died in the country since pro-democracy campaigners took to the streets last year protesting against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The movement at the UN came as activists said Syrian forces used tanks and machine guns to kill at least 200 people and wound hundreds in Homs, in what appeared to be the bloodiest episode since the uprising began.

2/4/2012 12:47:00 AM

Emmy-winning stage, film and television actor was known for intense countenance that won him tough-guy roles

• Ben Gazzara obituary

The actor Ben Gazzara, known for his brooding tough-guy presence in dozens of films, television shows and stage productions over his long career, died of pancreatic cancer on Friday at a Manhattan hospital, his lawyer said. He was 81.

The New York-born performer died at Bellevue hospital centre with members of his family at his side, according to his attorney, Jay Julien.

Born Biagio Anthony Gazzara to Italian immigrant parents, he began his career in live theatre, most notably with the role of Brick in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. The role was played by Paul Newman in the 1958 film version.

A three-time Tony award nominee for his stage work, Gazzara made his film debut as a sociopathic military academy cadet in the 1957 drama The Strange One, followed by his breakout role as an accused killer in Otto Preminger's 1959 hit courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder.

The actor, best known for playing emotionally complex men and villains, went on to work with numerous high-profile Hollywood directors, including John Cassavetes, with whom he collaborated on several films, including the 1976 gangster drama The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

His credits also included a role as porn-film producer Jackie Treehorn in the Coen Brothers' 1998 cult comedy classic The Big Lebowski and a supporting role in the 1999 remake of the art heist drama The Thomas Crown Affair starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.

On television Gazzara starred from 1965 to 1968 on the NBC prime-time drama Run for Your Life. He played wealthy, successful lawyer Paul Bryan, who quits his practice after learning he has a terminal illness and embarks on a globetrotting quest for adventure before he dies.

The role earned him two Emmy nominations as best actor in a lead dramatic role. He picked up a third Emmy nomination for his 1985 role in the made-for-TV movie An Early Frost, and won an Emmy for his supporting work in the 2002 HBO television film Hysterical Blindness.

He earned Tony nominations for his appearances in three Broadway productions of the 1970s, a revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his dual roles in a double bill of the plays Hughie and Duet.

Gazzara was married three times, with his first two ending in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Elke, and daughter, Elizabeth.

2/3/2012 10:56:00 PM

Prolific actor built a career in the US and Europe, embracing many roles across stage, film and television

Few screen debuts have equalled the searing malevolence of Ben Gazzara's Iago-inspired Jocko de Paris in The Strange One (1957). The role, which he had created on stage, became forever associated with this intense graduate of New York's method school of acting.

Gazzara, who has died aged 81, continued his stage career in modern classics including Epitaph for George Dillon and as the humiliated and vengeful George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also achieved popular acclaim through television series – notably Run for Your Life – and in movies for his friend John Cassavetes and other directors including Otto Preminger, Peter Bogdanovich, David Mamet, Todd Solandz and the Coen brothers.

Gazzara was born to Sicilian immigrants and grew up on Manhattan's lower east side. He began acting at the Madison Square Boy's Club and made a teenage debut in a TV dramatisation of a short play by Tennessee Williams. After gaining a scholarship to Erwin Piscator's drama workshop, he eventually moved to the equally legendary Actor's Studio headed by Lee Strasberg.

His stage debut was in Pennsylvania, then on tour, in Jezebel's Husband but his career took off when – aged 23 – he created Jocko in Calder Willingham's adaptation of his own novel End as a Man. When a revised version of the play transferred to the Vanderbilt Theatre, Gazzara received the New York critics' award as "most promising young actor".

Its director, Jack Garfein, an assistant to Elia Kazan, took four years to get the movie version financed and in the interim Gazzara gained experience as the original Brick in Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and as the drug-addicted Johnny in A Hatful of Rain, where his darkly handsome features and forceful acting were distinct assets.

Although The Strange One looked overly theatrical, Gazzara's pared-down performance survived the lumpen direction, revealing a natural screen presence. The sombre work about a duplicitous cadet leader, who manipulates an army camp in the deep south, was not a popular success and Gazzara returned to the stage until cast as the equally venal, though more enigmatic, soldier Lieutenant Manion in Preminger's courtroom masterpiece Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

These movies were hard acts to follow and Gazzara, who spoke Italian before he learned English, returned to his roots to star opposite Anna Magnani in The Passionate Thief (1960). It was the start of a lifetime affair with Italy, where he was to work and live for many months each year and where he eventually bought a villa in Umbria.

The following year Gazzara married Janice Rule (having divorced his first wife in 1957) and took the role of the idealistic pathologist in The Young Doctors. He then co-starred opposite David Niven in The Captive City, a lacklustre war movie set in Athens. A challenging role as the convicted murderer turned painter John Resko better reflected Gazzara's ambitions, but Convicts Four was not a hit and he moved into television, first as the detective in Arrest and Trial and then as the dying Paul Bryan in Run For Your Life (1965-68).

Gazzara was one of several stars coaxed into a cameo role in If It's Tuesday, This Must be Belgium (1969). Fortuitously, another was Cassavetes and, after working on the liberal documentary King: A Filmed Record ... Montgomery to Memphis, Gazzara joined Peter Falk and Cassavetes as the eponymous Husbands in the latter's improvised study of marital discord.

Gazzara took a decidedly less comedic role as the murderous stripclub owner Cosmo Vitelli in Cassavetes's edgy thriller The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and a year later played Manny Victor in the director's masterpiece Opening Night. After the director's untimely death, Gazzara appeared in several documentaries about his friend, notably Anything for John (1995), which reflected the admiration felt by his peers for that maverick filmmaker.

Gazzara had established a willingness to work outside the commercial mainstream, specialising in anti-social characters including a plumply brutish Al Capone, but his career wavered between quality and dross, film and television and work in the US, Italy and a few other countries, notching up over 80 movies in the years following his initial collaboration with Cassavetes.

These included the free-spirited Saint Jack (1979) in Peter Bogdanovich's elegant rendition of Paul Theroux's novel and – two years later, also for Bogdanovich – a co-starring role opposite Audrey Hepburn in They All Laughed, an underrated but commercially disastrous variation on love's roundabout.

Following a second divorce Gazzara worked for a decade in Italy, returning to the US only for lucrative TV movies, including A Question of Honour (1982), A Letter to Three Wives and the Aids drama An Early Frost (both 1985), Road House (1989) and Blindsided (1993).

In Europe he portrayed the disillusioned beat poet Charles Bukowski in Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), was a professor in Il Camorrista (1985) and a less amiable Don in Don Bosco (1988). Although he had directed episodes of Columbo for his friend Peter Falk, he only graduated to the big screen in 1990 with the little-seen Beyond the Ocean, shot in Bali.

Soon after that Italian-financed movie he again concentrated on work in America, averaging five films or TV movies each year, while dividing his time between homes in Umbria, New York City, and Sag Harbor, New York state.

Highlights of this busy period included Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (1997), where he played the mysterious Mr Klein; cult success Buffalo '66; the black comedy The Big Lebowski; and the controversial Happiness (all 1988). He was well cast as a gang leader in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam and moved to the other side of the fence as a smooth lawyer in the glossy The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

Dozens of other films were routine and he freely admitted that "these days I turn nothing down in order to maintain a comfortable and happy life with my third and last wife".

Despite debilitating treatment for throat cancer, in 1999 he published an autobiography and worked steadily for the next decade, notching up over 30 credits, from television series to leading roles in features, many made in Europe, often in his beloved Italy. There he worked in TV, was on location in Calabria for Secret Heart (2003), in Umbria for a brilliant cameo in Christophe Roth and moved to Spain for Schubert, to Belgium for Chez Nico and for the title role in Godbye Michel. In 2008 he took the name role in Looking for Palladin, about a former Hollywood star who hides from fame in Guatemala.

He enjoyed his role as the Vatican's banker in Holy Money, but most rewarding of the many films were a short, Eve, cleverly directed by Natalie Portman, with Lauren Bacall, and the two films with Gena Rowlands, echoing their John Cassavetes days. He took a supporting cameo to her lead in the superior television movie Hysterical Blindness (2002), and four years later they played a two-hander as part of the portmanteau film Paris, Je t'aime, in a bittersweet episode where, as in later works, a recent stroke affected his speech, though never his courage or professionalism.

Ben Gazzara: born Biagio Anthony Gazzara, 28 August 1930, New York City; died Friday 3 February 2012, New York City.

Married Louise Erickson (1951-1957); Janice Rule (1961-1979); Elke Krivat (1982)

2/3/2012 9:42:26 PM

Soldier charged with biggest leak of classified information in US history to face 22 counts, including aiding the enemy

A US army officer has ordered a court martial for Bradley Manning, the soldier charged in the biggest leak of classified information in American history.

Military district of Washington commander Major General Michael Linnington referred all charges against Manning to a general court martial on Friday, the army said in a statement.

The referral means Manning, 24, will stand trial for allegedly giving more than 700,000 secret US documents and a classified combat video to WikiLeaks for publication. He faces 22 counts, including aiding the enemy, and could be imprisoned for life if convicted of that charge.

A judge yet to be appointed will set the trial date.

Defence lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there from late 2009 to mid-2010.

At a preliminary hearing in December, military prosecutors produced evidence that Manning downloaded and electronically transferred to WikiLeaks nearly half a million sensitive battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 army helicopter attack that WikiLeaks dubbed "Collateral Murder".

Manning's lawyers countered that others had access to his workplace's computers. They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the US armed forces. The defence also claims Manning's apparent disregard for security rules during training in the US and his increasingly violent outbursts after deployment were red flags that should have prevented him from having been given access to classified material. Manning's lawyers also contend that the material WikiLeaks published did little or no harm to national security.

In the December hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, prosecutors also presented excerpts of online chats found on Manning's personal computer that allegedly document collaboration between him and the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

Federal prosecutors in northern Virginia are investigating Assange and others for allegedly facilitating the disclosures.

2/3/2012 7:19:52 PM

Observers claim deaths came after shelling by security forces on eve of UN vote on removal of Bashar al-Assad

More than 200 people were reported to have been killed yesterday in the Syrian city of Homs as security forces continued their efforts to take back opposition-held areas on the eve of a vote by the UN security council on a much-disputed resolution on the country.

Hundreds more were killed in shelling of the city, according to the the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which cited witnesses.

Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the campaign group, said that women and children were among 217 people killed, many of them in the Khalidya district of the city.

"Syrian forces are shelling the district with mortars from several locations, some buildings are on fire. There are also buildings which got destroyed," Abdulrahman told Reuters.

The UN Security Council is expected to meet on Saturday morning to vote on a European-Arab draft resolution endorsing an Arab League plan calling for Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, to give up power, council members announced.

Britain's UN mission announced on Twitter that the meeting would take place at 9am, although diplomats told Reuters that it was unclear if Russia, which has opposed significant council action on Syria since an uprising started there 11 months ago, would vote in favour of, abstain from or veto the resolution.

Russia, which threatened on Thursday to veto the text, had promised to submit suggestions for revising the draft on Friday. Diplomats said the drafters had received no proposals from the Russian delegation so far.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, spoke on Friday by telephone with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in an effort to overcome Russian opposition to any statement that explicitly calls for regime change or military intervention in Syria.

A spokesperson for Clinton said that she and Lavrov agreed to have US and Russian diplomats continue to work on a Syria resolution and were planning to meet for more talks in the German city of Munich, where both figures are attending a security conference.

Russia's deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, also said on Friday that Moscow could not support the resolution in its current form but he expressed optimism that an agreement could be reached, according to state news agency RIA Novosti.

The latest draft includes changes made by Arab and European negotiators to meet some of Russia's concerns. It calls for a "Syrian-led political transition," does not criticise arms sales to Syria and leaves out some of the details of what the Arab plan entails, such as Assad transferring power to a deputy. But the draft still says the council "fully supports" the Arab plan, language Moscow has said it dislikes.

Israel's deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, meanwhile predicted on Friday that Assad will fall from power eventually but the process could be "long and bloody".

"Assad has no real challenge unfortunately from the international community as his case is being barred from discussion in the security council because of some members of the security council, and because he continues to get material, financial and military help from the ayatollahs in Iran and Hezbollah," he said.

2/3/2012 6:19:55 PM

One year ago, a father's racist politics had poisoned the relationship with his son. Now, the birth of a child has brought about a subtle change

After more than a day of labour, Baby Finn forced his way into the world: 5lb 11oz, beautiful, healthy and wondrous. Dizzy with pride for my partner and son, I wanted to tell the entire world, one by one. Except, that is, for my own father.

He'd made clear his lack of interest in our mixed-race child, so what must be life's greatest phone call was taken from me by his irrational hatred of difference. In truth though, nothing could sully the joy of Finn's arrival. If the third world war had broken out, it would have been a footnote to my day.

Collecting myself in the autumn air outside St Thomas' hospital, London, where not even the gothic splendour of the Palace of Westminster could impress after seeing what Mira had gone through to bring Finn into the world, I rang Mira's mother. The happiness doubled and the news would be distributed among the Patels at a speed Twitter could only dream of.

Now for my lot. If I rang the family home, the only person in the world I didn't want to speak to would answer. We hadn't spoken in months and he didn't deserve – or desire – the good news. On this day, especially, I didn't want to hear his voice.

Given the length of the labour, I had been able to warn my mum that we were heading for the hospital and to turn her mobile phone on. (For reasons best known to the elderly, mobile phones are usually turned off when not in use to "save the battery", even when childbirth is imminent.)

Mum was overwhelmed to hear the news that she had a fifth grandchild. It was an unexpected treat for her late in life as it had been 16 years since the last one, and he's already shaving. She knew how happy Mira and I were, and hoped we'd bring her a baby to love. Her prayers and my father's fears were answered simultaneously.

For the first few weeks of Finn's life I'd pick my mum up to bring her to see the baby without speaking to my dad. She couldn't have been more delighted. Well, perhaps if her husband shared her profound glee, she could.

Mira's family were regular visitors and made a fuss of Finn, showering him with affection and gifts, as well as providing great support.

The situation with my father couldn't go on. He's approaching 90 and it was intolerable to think that Finn would not meet his grandfather. I don't know why he finally decided to get in touch, but détente was reached at his request.

He didn't apologise, but wanted us to put our differences aside. He said he had his reasons for his objections. I told him I didn't care what they were – they would make no sense to me. We were talking about an innocent baby, his grandchild, I told him. He agreed. A newborn baby was to be cherished. He wanted to meet him. We would not reach an understanding, simply a slightly chafing accommodation.

When Finn was three months old, I took him to see my father. When I put my son in his arms, even with his faltering eyesight and unsteady grasp, he was visibly moved to hold him, to gaze down on those big brown eyes and declare him handsome.

Now he regularly rings up to ask: "How's my beautiful grandson?" before telling me how alert and lovely he is, just like any proud grandad. It still surprises me, but I'm gratified and – more than anything – relieved. As an added bonus, he hasn't said anything offensively racist to me for months. I think of it as Babies 1, BNP 0.

He hasn't changed his politics, of course, but he has at least stopped his small-minded bigotry poisoning the bond with his own blood. Although our relationship will never be the same, it is at least cordial and Finn at last has a grandfather (Mira's father died some years ago).

Race was not an issue for Mira's family. Both her sisters are married to white Englishmen and have beautiful children. The family has had many happy mixed marriages since they came to England from east Africa in the 1970s.

It took a baby to shake my father from his rigid stance, and I suppose it is the same for many families. The thing you fear turns out to be nothing at all.

I still brace myself for an offensive outburst when we take Finn to see my parents. But he takes most of the attention, so the state of the modern world comes up less. Last time, my dad piped up: "It doesn't make sense. Our government has just given £4m to the starving Somalis …" I tensed, fearing the rest of the sentence but he said, "Yet Manchester City has just spent £35m on a footballer." Perspective is the last thing I expected from him.

Mostly, though, I am glad that he is proud of the baby we made, a child we couldn't love more, who will grow up to hear that his grandad has some good points. I can tell him he was a war hero who risked his life and gave part of his sanity, in my opinion, to protect this country from the evil force of nazism.

It still shocks and saddens me that my father, along with others of his generation and experience, embraces the racist ideology they fought against in the battle that defined their lives. Do they really wish they had been on the other side?

"I didn't fight for this," he used to say about our multicultural society. I could never satisfactorily explain it to him, but he did fight for this – for Britain to determine its own future and for its people to be free to live their lives and love whoever they loved. And he fought for Finn, and all his grandchildren, so they need never fear a knock at the door from a regime based on hate, division and brutality. For that I will always be grateful.

Names have been changed

2/3/2012 6:05:21 PM

US and Mexican coastguards search for 30-year-old seen falling from deck of world's largest cruise ship

A British passenger on the world's biggest cruise ship has apparently gone overboard in waters near Mexico.

The 30-year-old man was seen falling over the railings by another passenger on the Allure of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean International cruise firm said. He could also be seen falling over in CCTV footage.

The man went overboard as the ship was sailing to Cozumel, Mexico, and the Mexican navy and coastguard are assisting in the search.The company added: "The ship made multiple public announcements and began a complete search of the ship, in efforts to locate the guest.

"When the guest did not respond and was not found on board, the captain alerted the local authorities.

"The location of the ship at the time the guest went overboard was marked on the ship's GPS and the US and Mexican coastguard were alerted.

"Our care team is providing support to the guest's family and our thoughts and prayers are with them," the statement said.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said: "We are aware of the reports and are looking into them."

2/3/2012 5:38:36 PM

The Nevada caucus belongs to Mitt Romney, but watch for Ron Paul: by my reading, pollsters are underestimating his appeal

Mitt Romney won a wide and deep victory in Florida. He won most demographics and carried the state of Florida by 14.5 percentage points. The limited polling we have for Saturday's Nevada caucus indicates that Romney is heading towards his largest win of the nomination season.

A look across the aggregates of 538, HuffPollster, and a simple average of the only two polls to come out in the last week all come to the same conclusion: Romney gets over 50% of the vote and leads Newt Gingrich by about 25 percentage points. Ron Paul is in third, with Rick Santorum is a very distant fourth.

The only question I have regarding the polls is whether Ron Paul will do better than expected. For those who have been following my post election wrap-ups, you may remember that in the last three contests (New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida), the candidate with the highest polling error has been Ron Paul. His young supporters are difficult to poll. In both South Carolina and Florida, the polls were too optimistic for Paul's chances, but in New Hampshire, Paul's percentage of the vote was underestimated by 3.9%.

Considering that Nevada's caucus awards delegates on a purely proportional basis, a New Hampshire-type error could gain Paul an extra delegate. But will it happen? 

Let's remember that caucuses are low turnout affairs. In 2008, only 44,315 people voted in the Nevada caucus. With that small a voting population, it's very difficult for pollsters to get an accurate reading of the electorate. The polling for the Republican Nevada caucus was nothing short of atrocious in 2008 (though polling for the Democratic side was far better). The polling for the similarly low turnout 2012 Iowa caucus produced the greatest candidate polling error this year, at over 5%.

Let's also keep in mind that Paul has done better in every contest this year relative to his percentage of the vote in the same contests in 2008. 

In fact, he's at least doubled his percentage in every state so far. As Paul received 13.7% of the vote in the 2008 Nevada, I'd expect (without looking at the polling data) that he would garner closer to 20% of the 2012 vote. This belief is reinforced by Paul's great organization in the state. 

One thing we definitely know is that Romney's victory has been all but guaranteed for months. Nevada's large Mormon population, which will vote on the order of 80%, to perhaps as high as 95%, for Romney, makes this one of Romney's easiest victories. Indeed, the fact remains that Romney hasn't won in any state that he hasn't been expected to – and Tuesday's non-binding Missouri primary will see him, once again, facing a more conservative-leaning elecorate.

2/3/2012 5:25:32 PM

Diarrhoea kills more children than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined – and its main cause is food and water contaminated with human waste. Liberia's president is trying to change all that

For the worst country in the world, Liberia looks lush. All along the long road to Fish Town, the sumptuous rainforest on either side is a comfort, a green bath to soothe the dreadful red dust that is constant and the potholes that cause nose-bleeds, head-bumps and nausea even in this well-cushioned Toyota Land Cruiser belonging to WaterAid. We are scrunched into this car for days, because that's how long it takes to get to Fish Town, only a few hours from Liberia's capital Monrovia if you're a crow, but 36 hours otherwise, because the country has only one decent main road.

To get there, we must loop north, brushing the border with Guinea, before swooping back down to a town that isn't much of a town, the joke goes, and doesn't have much fish. But it's busy these days because NGO 4x4s such as ours are zooming through on their way to help refugees escaping from Ivory Coast, the latest poor sods in this region to be kicked out of their country by war.

We, though, are not zooming towards refugees but towards something far less newsworthy. It is my sixth visit to Liberia. The first was in 2004, six months into the country's first peace in 20 years. Liberia had suffered years of stunningly brutal civil wars, orchestrated largely by Charles Taylor, now on trial in the Hague for war crimes (a man who once sued a journalist for saying he had eaten a human heart, and lost); and by other warlords with names such as General Butt Naked, General Peanut Butter and Devil. And this war's stories were more horrific than most: mass rape; boy soldiers kept going by drugs, looting and raping; parents killed by their own boys; checkpoints made from intestines. Imagine the worst and, if you looked, you'd find it here doubled.

By 2003, when the Economist called Liberia the worst country in the world, it was wrecked. Yet it hadn't always been that way. Founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century, Liberia had had good times. Its ex-slave colonists built graceful mansions, installed themselves as rulers over local tribes and instituted a Liberian English that still has the infectious drawl of the American South. They named their capital after US president James Monroe; they called their currency the dollar; they let the US use them as a listening station in the second world war. Liberians – flying a US-lite flag of stripes and one star – thought they lived in the 51st state, or "Bitty America". But it was a one-way relationship: during battles so terrible that they were called world wars I, II and III, a US warship holding 2,000 marines anchored itself on the horizon and did nothing to help. Only when rebels attacked Monrovia was Taylor persuaded to leave and a UN force brought in.

The receding war left ugly tides. At least 70% of women raped. Nearly the entire population refugees of one sort or another. A huge brain drain. No functioning electricity grid. A decimated healthcare system. And, thanks to the plundering Taylor, a national debt of $4.9bn. In 2004, when I first visited, all Liberia seemed to have was 9,000 UN peacekeepers and some cautious hope.

But the world's worst country has been busy. In 2006, it elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to be its president. A Harvard-trained former World Bank economist, Sirleaf is Africa's first female head of state, Ma Ellen to three million or so Liberians and a president with a dizzying to-do list. Eighty-five per cent of Liberians have less than a dollar a day to spend. A dollar goes further in Liberia, but not that far, when rice costs $45 a bag. You can always find a decent Club Beer in Monrovia, but you won't find a post office, electricity grid, sewage treatment, taxes or decent road system. One suburb of the capital is called Red Light, because it used to have a traffic light. It doesn't any more.

How do you fix a ruined country? Start with the money. If you can, get that $4.9bn of debt forgiven. Increase the national budget from $80m a year to $360m. Then figure out how to earn more. Open for business and sell everything you can: oil, gas and mineral rights; timber concessions. Open your ports and improve your roads for all the mining and logging equipment to trundle down. Talk about developing tourism. Invite the Chinese, so that after hours on a road to the remotest part of the country, you'll find young Chinese lads taking a break from building bridges to take each other's photograph, as well as new universities and hospitals with suspiciously Chinese-looking roofs.

All that is basic nation-building. But there is also something that's not on most nation-building lists. Liberians elected a woman who understood that something basic could save millions of dollars, something most people don't want to talk about. Most people, but not Ma Ellen, the only serving head of state to have written in a major newspaper about the need for toilets. That's right. Toilets. Because of that, I request an interview with her; and because I am here with WaterAid and have written a book about toilets, she grants it.

We meet in the foreign ministry, where the president moved after the executive mansion caught fire. Ma Ellen's personal guards, female Indian peacekeepers, stand at the gate like statues. (Someone tells me he saw them beat up rioters one day, then go to church in their saris the next, "looking so sweet and lovely".) Monrovia's mayor is also a woman, as is the director of the port, a crucial position. Sometimes I feel as if I've landed in a Patricia Cornwell novel, where all positions of authority are held by women. It's great.

In her spacious office, impeccably dressed in her trademark African cloths and turban, the president is warm and gracious, despite a stern reputation. I have been warned to stick to the agreed topic of sanitation. Stray off it – to accusations of endemic corruption, nepotism and human rights issues, for example – "and you will see her change in an instant", a Liberian friend tells me.

Sirleaf took a while to understand the place of good sanitation. Like countless Liberians, she grew up on the family farm, where the only toilet was the bush. "It came naturally," she says, when I double-check that the president has just admitted to open defecation – or, as Liberians say, doing poo-poo in the bush. "That was what it was."

Like the six out of seven Liberians who still do the same thing, or the 2.6 billion worldwide who have no toilet, Sirleaf didn't see what was wrong with it. All that forest: what harm can a little poo-poo do? Now she knows better. She knows that diarrhoea – caused largely by people ingesting water or food contaminated by human waste – kills more children worldwide than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined. She knows that even the greenest, widest forest can't prevent faecal particles being tramped into a village on feet and flies and fingers, to be dipped into food and water, to become diarrhoea, dysentery or cholera. She knows, as an economist should, that good sanitation could reap millions of dollars a year in savings. India, where two-thirds of the population are toiletless, loses $58bn a year in wages and medical bills to the 50 diseases that can travel in human excrement. Half the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering the consequences of bad sanitation. But, of course, the president sees endless statistics. Only when she looked into why so many Liberian women were dying in childbirth, and why children were dying of something as banal as the squits, did she realise "there is a relationship with water and sanitation. I needed to understand why that was so, and partly it's because people don't have access to clean water. That was an eye-opener for us."

Ma Ellen is amazing, but she is a politician. She is fluent in euphemism. When she says "clean water", she really means "water without human excrement in it". That's what "clean water" means, because that is what dirty water is dirtied with.

At the end of a long, red road, a bone-shaking hour's ride from Fish Town, we arrive at Jaytoken, an ordinary village like thousands of others, with huts grouped around a green football pitch and surrounded by that ever-so-green forest. Women do chores; men are at the farm or the illicit gold-mine nearby. The closest clinic is a four-hour walk away. The road is so bad only motorbikes or 4x4s can negotiate it in the dry season; hardly anything can pass in the rains. People walk and walk and walk. The only fat bellies here are the ones filled with worms. Why? Because of the creek.

The creek is everything. It carried dead bodies in times of war. It still carries animal carcasses. Boas swim in it. It carries the excrement of upstream villagers who use it as a toilet. It provides drinking and washing water. And it brings death – it is the water into which hopeful mothers with diarrhoea-afflicted children mix oral rehydration salts, dispensed for free by that clinic four hours away, without boiling it. I don't know why they do that – they have had countless hygiene lessons.

They tell me their dirty water causes "running stomach" and that running stomach sometimes causes death, such as that of Marie Saylee, nine months old, who got sick last November. I ask her father, Pastor Saylee, why she wasn't taken to the clinic. There was no time, he says. He goes to fetch the country medicine he would have given her, had she been older. It is a leaf called wudirrubu, or "goat-eat leaf", because goats eat it. You pound it, mix it with creek water – again, unboiled – and drink it. Marie's mother gave her pepper soup, coconut milk, clean water from the hand-pump. Nothing worked. Marie took three days to die from something most of us consider a stomach bug.

The people of Jaytoken, like people in countless other villages, knew that creek water was deadly water. And still they didn't boil it. They had soap for sale cheaply in the local shop, along with affordable water-purification sachets, but nobody bought them. They could build their own houses; they crafted chairs and lovely bamboo window shutters – but they would not build latrines. Like the president, going for poo-poo 60 years ago, they didn't see the necessity. They had other things to think about, such as not having a decent road or clinic or money. Sanitation was a luxury. So along came WaterAid, trying to reshuffle those needs into a list that puts sanitation near the top. Jaytoken's green fields are atop rock, so they brought rock-breaking equipment to sink water pumps. But the villagers kept going to the goal-pole latrine in the bush – so-called because it is formed of a perch that looks like a goal – so WaterAid brought in a Liberian NGO to perform a process known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS). That jargon hides a fascinating concept: that people are stubborn and so must be shocked out of their wrong behaviour. The NGO does this with tricks. By dipping a hair they say has been dipped in shit into a glass of water and then asking people to drink it. No? How is that different from the water they drink every day? Or by putting food next to a piece of excrement and watching the flies jump from one to the other. Are they different flies? No? By that point, the penny is supposed to have dropped. "The basic assumption," says the CLTS handbook, "is that no one can remain unmoved once they have learned that they are ingesting other people's shit."

Liberians don't use that word. "Poo-poo" is bad enough. But not bad enough for the president to be shy about it when I ask what language she uses to talk about sanitation. "I say poo-poo," she says. "Of course. If you tell people 'defecate', they won't understand."

CLTS is wildly popular in the world of poo-poo activists. It has been hugely successful in many parts of the world. When it works, it works dramatically. People rush off to build latrines, then they clean up the rest of their villages. They are encouraged with prizes and – in India – awards handed out by the president and covered on national TV. WaterAid is one of dozens of NGOs currently using the technique.

But it doesn't always work. The trouble with sanitation is that it involves human nature. People don't usually respond well to health messages or nagging – many doctors smoke when they know they shouldn't, for example. At Jaytoken school, the blackboards are covered with appropriate hygiene messages, written especially for our visit. A young woman named Grace puts up her hand when I ask if anyone has ever been bitten by a snake while going to the latrine. She is a 24-year-old in a primary school, because her school years were swallowed by war. She was bitten by a snake because the school was built by a Liberian charity that gave up before providing toilets. Snake bites are one risk; sexual assault is another. None of the women of Jaytoken admits to being raped, but it is endemic, and using latrines in the bush leaves them vulnerable. Water may be life, goes the slogan, but a decent toilet is dignity.

Dignity doesn't get the attention that clean water does, though. The people of Jaytoken and nearby Nyonken – a three-hour walk away – are proud of the new pumps provided by WaterAid. But, like seven out of 10 other Liberians, they still haven't built latrines. Far too many NGOs rush to provide a clean water supply without bothering to install sanitation along with it. If there is a better method for polluting a clean water supply than having little fingers covered with faecal particles, I don't know what it is.

I ask the president about this disparity. Sanitation makes economic sense, after all. CLTS, for example, is cheap – no expensive concrete latrines, no sewerage systems, just some clever persuaders changing people's hearts and minds.

"The problem is," she answers, "these public services don't have a high profile. People want to see their footprint – a building that everyone can see, or a road. No one pays attention to the three-room latrine in the back yard. There has to be a whole change of consciousness."

And not only by donors. In the welcome meetings, villager after villager stands up with a petition. Thank you for the water, they say, but give us more. Give us roads. Give us a clinic. They don't ask for latrines. A man from the ministry of works expresses what I'm thinking: "You can build your houses. Why don't you build latrines? If a hinge falls off a door, will you expect an NGO to come and fix it?"

The president would be unimpressed, but unsurprised. "People say they want health clinics," she says, "but they don't ask for sanitation. They say their children get malaria or dysentery, but they don't ask for sanitation. We have to bring to their consciousness that sanitation is linked to health."

On the way back to Monrovia, with the roof of the truck now holding a live chicken that the villagers of Nyonken gave us to honour us (and which ends up in a pot in a Fish Town restaurant), we pass more 4x4s zooming towards the border and the refugees. I feel frustrated. In Monrovia, ministers and NGOs hold a weekly crisis meeting about refugees, but not about the 18% of Liberians who die because they have no toilets or clean water.

Towards the end of our interview, I ask the president why that is. We had followed in her footsteps to Fish Town because she had also gone to see the state of the Ivorian refugees, most of them welcomed by Liberians who had to think back only a few years to a time when they were themselves refugees. Ma Ellen is too polite to shrug, but her words do. "The humanitarian system responds to these things that get sensational," she says. "They want to be seen as responsive. The ordinary village, that no one is taking care of, that doesn't come to mind." And with that she takes her leave, to get back to the job of fixing her country, one latrine at a time.

2/3/2012 4:59:00 PM

'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'

One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies beside his sleeping lover Albertine and masturbates against her. "It seemed to me at those moments," writes Proust in Carol Clark's recent Penguin translation, "that I possessed her more completely, like an unconscious part of dumb nature." Professor Rose, feminist and psychoanalytic critic, bristled. "I thought 'This is ridiculous – she'd have woken up by now!' I had my feminist reaction – which is not my most obvious default position – which is just let the woman speak."

So Rose decided to awaken Proust's lover from her implausible slumber. In her 2001 novel, Albertine, the protagonist was not, or not merely, a wronged woman needing feminist liberation from a suffocating male neurotic's dismal sex act. Rose says: "The postcard version is: 'Poor girl falls in love with rich, sick aesthete. He traps her in his apartment. She dies.' There's a real feminist gothic narrative here – a horror story in a way."

She didn't want to tell that story. Rose's aim, as Alex Clark put it in her Guardian review, was to "return to Albertine her intelligence". "It's not that I wanted her to be innocent," says Rose. "I wanted to unravel her from the inside." But there was a limit to how much Rose could unravel. "People have been very cross with me for not representing her as an antisemite. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't enter into the skin in that way."

That compunction is both understandable – what Jew wants to ventriloquise an antisemite? – and mystifying since Rose's vocation is that of fearless critic, ready to fight with Ted Hughes over her interpretation of Sylvia Plath's poetry and to battle against those who hate her for daring to psychoanalyse Israel. In Proust, to whom she returns repeatedly in her work, Rose found a Jewish writer of greater imaginative ruthlessness. It is Proust who goes right into the psychic space of his enemy. For instance, Proust writes about the Baron de Charlus who, in one incendiary passage of antisemitic sex fantasy, imagines a Jewish acquaintance's mother being beaten. "It would make an excellent show," salivates Charlus, "the sort of thing we like, eh, my young friend … to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving a well-earned punishment to that old cow."

Rose quotes this passage in her new book, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, as an example of "the logic of projection". It's the European baron, not hated, exoticised, Jewish (m)other, who, Rose writes, "truly deserves, longs for, a thrashing".

"This is Melanie Klein stuff," she says. "You project on to the other the bits of yourself that you can't stand, but the function is to utterly purify yourself of the feeling. So your innocence is a form of violence against others." Proust got to this thought before Freud and his successors; indeed, Rose teaches an MA seminar at Queen Mary's College, London, to test her idea that there is no thought Freud had that Proust didn't have with greater complexity.

What will scandalise some about Rose's new book is that she uses psychoanalysis on Israel. But isn't putting the Jewish state on the couch shaming? Rose retorts: "I think it's Nietzsche who says somewhere that it's the people who are walking around happy, as if everything's perfect, who have something to be ashamed of. For psychoanalysis, psychic difficulty is your birthright and it's our attempt to repudiate it that makes it worse. So the point for me in using psychoanalysis to understand why a traumatised people might find locking themselves into a traumatised identity is to treat them with the greatest respect."

Not all Zionist positions warrant psychoanalytical critique. "The strand of Zionism I'm interested in is the one that seems unable to see the Palestinians and seems unable to recognise the darkness of its own history." It is the strand that won't recognise what Jews did to Palestinians in 1948 and Israel's role in facilitating the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982.

Rose denies she's anti-Zionist. "It more than makes sense as a nationalist movement. A wonderful Russian formalist thinker called Victor Shklovsky, talking about the aesthetic choices facing the avant garde under Stalinism, said: 'There is no third way and that is the one we're going to take'. I don't see myself as an anti-Zionist or a Zionist: I see myself as a reader of Zionism trying to understand why it's so powerful and why it does seem to find it very hard to look at its own past."

Critics, especially those who oppose the Independent Jewish Voices group she helped establish in 2007, doubt Rose's third way. Mail columnist Melanie Phillips charged Rose with being a Jewish persecutor of Israel who implicitly suggested that "the Jews are responsible for their own destruction", while a Jerusalem Post review of books about Zionism, which included Rose's 2005 The Question of Zion, suggested that "Iran's president is not alone in wanting to wipe Israel off the map."

Unabashed, Rose writes in her new book that the history of the Jewish people "makes it perhaps uniquely hard for Israel as a nation to see itself ever as the agent of the violence of its own history". Rose provides me with the gloss: "Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished."

An essential part of Jewish history she considers in the new book is the Dreyfus affair, about which Proust wrote and agitated. The wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew in the French army accused of spying for the Germans in 1894, and its aftermath convinced Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, there was no future for Jews in Europe. "When I discovered that it's not just 'The Holocaust therefore Israel' but 'Because of Dreyfus therefore Israel', my ears pricked up," says Rose. She recognises that either justification of Israel is contentious, and that for many Zionists the state's existence is justified not by the Holocaust but by ancestral rights to Palestine.

Rose was born in London in 1949 into a Holocaust-traumatised family. Her grandmother's family perished in Chelmno concentration camp. Hers was, as she puts, "one type of North London Jewish survivor family who, to survive, internally entrenched itself in Jewish ritual".

"It was observant and desperate that we continue the faith. There was no mixing of meat and milk, there were two sinks in the kitchen and if anything got mixed up it had to buried in the mud outside. It was very powerful but it also went with a set of prohibitions about what we could talk about." The Holocaust, in particular, was never discussed. Non-Jewish boyfriends were intolerable.

As Rose tells me this, in the living room of her West Hampstead flat, I think of what she writes in her new book about Proust's father, the epidemiologist who devised the notion of the cordon sanitaire. Her family similarly erected a post-Holocaust cordon sanitaire, what Rose calls a "defensive form of Jewishness closed in on itself, with no sense of Jewishness as culture, knowledge or history". No wonder she finds Proust so important: it was he who, more than any other writer, thought about, she says, "the uncertainties of hearts and minds and the porousness of boundaries between self and other, both as pleasure and as danger".

But her family's history is more nuanced: yes, her grandparents entrenched the family in Jewish ritual, but Rose's own parents felt thwarted by it. "My mother was very hostile to being Jewish because it had been such a restrictive life for her. It had stopped her taking up a place as a medical student; she was married at 20 – because that was what you did."

The next generation found a Shklovskyan third way of being Jewish between entrenchment and rejection. Rose notes that around the same time as elder sister Gillian was working on Emil Fackenheim's Holocaust theology, cousin Braham Murray (artistic director of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre) was producing a Holocaust interpretation of Macbeth, and she was working on the Holocaust in her interpretation of Sylvia's Plath's poem "Daddy". "We all three turned to this at about the same time in our lives, and it was an attempt to retrieve those parts of Jewishness and Judaism and Jewish history which, because of the weight of what it meant to be Jewish in that generation, we felt we hadn't been able really to explore."

The brilliant Rose sisters crossed their family's cordon sanitaire. Both went to St Hilda's College, Oxford – Gillian to study philosophy, Jacqueline English. But Gillian was quickly lured across the border from anglophone philosophy to study German idealist philosophy. Wasn't Gillian's embrace of German thought a family scandal? "She would say, rather as I'm using Proust and Freud, that she's working with the tools to predict, dismantle and forestall what happened in Nazi Germany."

After graduating, Jacqueline was lured to Paris. There she did a maitrise in comparative literature and started a doctorate about children's literature inflected with her new passion, Freud. "I loved Paris so much. I loved living in a foreign language." And more than that. The feminist critic Julia Kristeva became, as she puts it, her ego-ideal. "I just thought: 'Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.'" When she returned to England aged 23, she passed off the initials on her Yves Saint Laurent scarf to leftwing friends as standing for Young Socialist League. She doesn't say whether anyone believed her.

Why return? "I just thought wouldn't it be interesting to go back and become involved in a dialogue between French theory and English culture and the differences between them. It was like making myself a stranger in my own land. If you're Jewish, you always feel a bit of a stranger in your own land."

Back home she met Juliet Mitchell whose 1973 Feminism and Psychoanalysis enthralled her. "I remember thinking 'Thank heaven for this book. I can be a feminist and interested in psychoanalysis.'" She and Mitchell later translated some of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's texts into English, and his ideas percolated into the PhD she wrote on JM Barrie's Peter Pan under supervisor Frank Kermode. "I think Peter Pan is about adult desire. It's about the fantasy of a child, of a moment that he will never have to relinquish. But if you think of it as an injunction on the child, Lacan would say you are refusing to allow the child to be released into their desire, which is that they must become this asexual screen of utter purity which is what Peter Pan is. It's a collective passion [Barrie's] tapped into."

Does your treatment of Peter Pan connect with your later work? "I think it does because so much of my writing is about the myth of innocence in relationship to feminism, Sylvia Plath, and Zionism." Rose fell for Plath while teaching a women's writing course at the University of Sussex in the 1980s. She put Plath on the syllabus. "I read the criticism and it was so misogynist, pathologising, overconfident, disgusting. And then I read the feminist response and I thought it was over-idealising her in a way, so I knew there was something going on that was explosive around her."

Plath was a perfect subject for Rose, in that the poet confirmed the critic's conviction that feminism needed to take on board the psychoanalytical project and, in particular, that women's fight for redress of historic injustices must "be backed by an understanding of our own psychic investment as women in everything we engage in, including our own oppression". In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Rose wrote: "One does not become pure as the other falls into the dirt."

Plath, she says, "had so much to be angry about and she produces the most devastating indictment of a certain kind of patriarchal mindset in her writing. But it never stops her thinking about her own implication in those structures and the complexity of female psychic life. That's why 'The Rabbit Catcher' for me was such an important poem because the trap everybody identifies with patriarchy, with Hughes described as a piece of female anatomy, almost." But that interpretation angered Hughes when he saw the manuscript. He thought Rose was calling his dead wife a lesbian. "Hughes said: 'In some countries it was grounds for homicide to speculate on a mother's sexual identity.' Would I please remove my interpretation of 'The Rabbit Catcher'? And I wrote back saying: 'Look, I'm thinking about Freud here and his critique of civilised normatised identity,' which I thought would appeal to Hughes."

It didn't, but Rose didn't back down. Later she felt more sympathetic: "I think it's impossible for him. If you've had the tragedy that he has had, how can you not read the poetry biographically and how can you not read interpretation biographically? I must say I came to understand the situation better on the publication of my sister's book Love's Work" – Gillian's memoir written as she was dying – "because you can see how difficult it is for a family to deal with a book that touches upon things that are so private."

Gillian's early death from cancer in 1995, aged 48, cast Jacqueline into a mourning that, she says "will never be complete, nor would I want it to be". The first book she wrote after her sister's death was the novel Albertine. "I didn't feel I could write in an academic way. It's exhilarating and frightening letting the floodgates open."

Around the same time as her sister's death, Jacqueline and her then partner, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, adopted a baby girl from China. Intially, she thought of writing a book about Mia. "In five minutes I thought this is wrong, it's her story, even though she was a baby at the time. So then I took off with the Albertine project." Mia is now 17 and hoping to study photography at university. Rose's current partner is Jonathan Sklar, the psychoanalyst.

In her living room is something unexpected – a box of Marilyn Monroe DVDs. Rose has been boning up on Monroe for a lecture, which will eventually form part of a book provisionally entitled Women in Dark Times: From Rosa Luxembourg to Marilyn Monroe. It will be her return to feminist theorising. How do Rosa and Marilyn connect? "They both straddle the divide between political and inner life. I read Rosa's letters and the relationship between her political concept of spontaneity and the unknownness of revolutionary life and the unknownness and intimacy of personal life. It seemed her notion of revolutionary and personal lives were inextricably linked."

Why is Monroe interesting? "There's been so much written about her as a screen on to which everybody projects their fantasies. I think that's complicit with her victimisation. I think she knew exactly what was happening to her. I think she was casting herself as a sort of lead in the detritus of postwar American culture. Everything from the commodity to the sexualisation of women to the crass materialism to McCarthyism." Classic Jacqueline Rose feminism: woman as more than victim, implicated in and maybe even conniving at her own oppression.

Enough about feminism. After the interview Rose emails me, hoping I can stress that she isn't done with the Middle East conflict. She's written four books dealing with that conflict and, if she has her way, there will be more. "As Edward Said wrote about getting involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict – once you're in you're you're there for life. I spent five years with Plath and then said goodbye. You don't say goodbye to this."

2/3/2012 4:55:08 PM

US jobless numbers are falling, but not far or fast enough. We should forget about the budget deficit until unemployment is 5%

The most significant aspect of January's jobs report is political. The fact that America's labor market continues to improve is good news for the White House. But as a practical matter, the improvement is less significant for the American workforce.

President Obama's only chance for rebutting Republican claims that he's responsible for a bad economy is to point to a positive trend. Voters respond to economic trends as much as they respond to absolute levels of economic activity. Under ordinary circumstances, January's unemployment rate of 8.3% would be terrible. But compared to September's 9.1%, it looks quite good. And the trend line – 9% in October, 8.6% in November, 8.5% in December, and now 8.3% – is enough to make Democrats gleeful. 

But the US labor market is far from healthy. America's job deficit is still mammoth. Our working-age population has grown by nearly 10 million since the recession officially began in December 2007, but many of these people never entered the workforce. Millions of others are still too discouraged to look for work.

The most direct way of measuring the jobs deficit is to look at the share of the working-age population in jobs. Before the recession, 63.3% of working-age Americans had jobs. That employment-to-population ratio reached a low last summer of 58.2%. Now it's 58.5%. That's better than it was, but not by much. The trend line here isn't quite as encouraging.

Given how many people have lost their jobs and how much larger the total working-age population is now, we've got a long road ahead. At January's rate of job gains – 243,000 – the nation wouldn't return to full employment for another seven years.

When they're not blaming Obama for a bad economy, Republicans are decrying the federal budget deficit and demanding more cuts. But America's jobs deficit continues to be a much larger problem than the budget deficit.

In fact, we can't possibly achieve the growth needed to reduce the budget deficit as a proportion of the total economy unless far more people are employed. Workers are consumers, and consumer spending is 70% of economic activity. And cutting the budget means fewer workers, directly (as government continues to shed workers) and indirectly (as government contractors have to lay off workers), and, therefore, fewer consumers.

Yet deficit hawks continue to circle. State and local budgets are still being slashed. The federal government is scheduled to begin major spending cuts less than a year from now. Republicans are calling for more cuts in the short term. Austerity economics continues to gain traction.

Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to renew extended unemployment benefits. This should be a no-brainer. The long-term unemployed, who have been jobless for more than six months, comprise a growing share of the unemployed. (In January, they rose from 42.5% to 42.9%.)

Republicans say unemployment benefits are prolonging unemployment, that people won't get jobs if they get unemployment checks from the government. That's claptrap, especially when there's only one job opening for every four people who need a job. Republicans also say we can't afford to extend jobless benefits. Also untrue. Jobless workers spend whatever money they get, and their spending keeps other people in jobs.

Government should extend unemployment benefits, and not cut spending until the nation's rate of unemployment is down to 5%. Then, and only then, should we move toward budget austerity.

The job situation is better than it was – but it's still awful. The jobs deficit is still our No 1 economic problem. Forget the budget deficit until we tame it.

• This article was first published on the author's blog, and is crossposted here by permission

2/3/2012 4:54:41 PM

It's tied for first place with Pakistan as the world's deadliest country for journalists

At the end of January I was at the Royal Courts of Justice to hear Jonathan Heawood, of English PEN, speak to the Leveson inquiry about the importance of a free press. By Friday I had moved continents, going from the unseasonably warm grey of an English winter to the unseasonably chill blue of a Mexican one. A strange dislocation but, by the time my week was done, I realised how strong is the thread joining its beginning to its end.

Mexico City is a grand old town. Its magnificent central square, the Zócalo, built out of the destruction of an earlier civilisation, is sinking slowly into the marshes from which it had once been claimed. A similar process has now all but buried free expression: Mexico has the dubious distinction of being tied for first place with Pakistan as the world's deadliest country for journalists.

In Britain we worry about the chilling effect of the over-regulation of the press: in Mexico they cut to the chase and shoot (or decapitate) the messenger. Since 2000, 67 Mexican journalists have been killed – a number that President Calderón's war on drugs has only helped to increase. In 90% of these cases, no one has been prosecuted, never mind convicted. Which is why I was there. I was part of a PEN International delegation that, in collaboration with Mexican PEN, aimed to draw worldwide attention to the culture of impunity that silences not only the people who speak out, but the word itself.

The trip turned out to be an eye-opener, revealing the way in which competing drug cartels, inept or corrupt government, the police and terrified media join together in the suppression of free expression. We met politicians and prosecutors, writers and journalists, ambassadors and NGOs, our visit culminating in a public event, "PEN Protesta", where dozens of Mexican writers gave eloquent insight into their country's malaise. The tone was set by one of the first speakers who, paraphrasing Mandelstam, told us that "if you kill poets it means you don't respect poetry but if you kill journalists you don't respect society." Mexico, said another, is a country that "vomits blood"; a third described it as "a magical country full of assassinated people and no apparent assassins". It's a country where, according to one of Mexico's pre-eminent writers, Elena Poniatowska, "reporters are hunted like rabbits."

After the event, I was left with a lasting image of the diminutive, red-clad Poniatowska. While we drank tequila from champagne glasses, she posed for photographs with a lineup of members of the Banda de Tlayacapan. The band was a mixed bunch – women in poncho-topped long dresses, old men and boys, their faces almost drowned by large brimmed hats – and their sound that of strident Mexican brass, strangely slowed. "It's a dirge," the novelist Jennifer Clement explained. "They play at funerals. Seemed right, given we are holding a wake for free expression."

Mentions of funerals were on many lips. Journalists spoke movingly about the loss of their friends and colleagues and of a resulting powerlessness so intense that all they could do was bury their dead. Mexico City itself is relatively safe but at least once a week organisations that protect journalists are asked to hide people from other parts of the country for whom the threats have grown particularly serious. And not only are journalists kidnapped: so are their stories. Airports are turned into information black holes as stories disappear into them.

Asked what could be done to help, the requests became eerily familiar: journalists need training in their craft, various people told us, but more than anything they need training in how to protect themselves. Despite the appointment of a special prosecutor to protect journalists, impunity continues almost completely unchallenged. Of the 55 indictments brought by the special prosecutor to the federal courts, only five cases have been allowed to proceed, and from these, not a single person has yet been convicted. It's almost as bad for community radio practitioners who act as the voice of social movements: they are continually harassed or charged with using the airwaves without a licence, and the law has been designed to prevent them from procuring the advertising revenues that might make them even half solvent.

Clement, who is also president of Mexican PEN, had kicked off PEN Protesta by saying that "words are the rocks we throw at each other". By the end of my trip I understood what she meant. For when it comes to the practice of journalism, and to the prosecution of the murderers of journalists, Mexico is caught in a series of interlocking catch-22s. The government blames the deaths on organised crime. But, according to the London-based free expression group Article 19, up to 70% of aggressions against the media are government-inspired. Most of these can be laid at the door of local and regional government, about which the national government says it can do little. Added to this, an inept or corrupted police force joins with a similarly corrupted media to portray the murders as crimes of passion, which means they are never properly investigated.

The big media corporations often lead the charge in denigrating murdered journalists, even accusing them of being linked to the same cartels they were trying to denounce. This obliteration of a free press is not surprising: when a cartel targets a town for take-over it first compromises the mayor with threats or money and then it takes care of the police. Having taken control, it cannot let the press talk about the extent of its corruption and so has to move in on this, the third leg of the stool.

"There is silence in our country," we were told, "and it is the silence of death." Yet even now, courageous journalists risk speaking out. As I flew back to a freezing London, I realised how brave they are and also how much my visit reinforced my belief in the importance of a free press not just for journalists but for a whole society.

• Gillian Slovo is the president of English PEN.

2/3/2012 4:54:02 PM

Mitt Romney has a big lead ahead of the Nevada caucuses while sharp fall in joblessness is good news for Obama

5pm: So as the Obama administration continues to harm the recovery (according to Mitt Romney), somehow the Dow Jones industrial average of leading stocks closed trading at 12,862 – its highest level since May 2008 and the start of the financial crisis. As of today, the Dow is up 70% since Obama signed the stimulus bill in 2009.

The more the economy recovers – assuming it continues, and one month's data doesn't make a summer – that harder it gets for Mitt Romney to argue that it requires his skills as a businessman. As you can see from the video above, the Democratic party is ready to make Romney suffer.

4.28pm: Newt Gingrich keeps throwing everything he can think of at Mitt Romney in the hope that some of it sticks.

But today Gingrich did make one sophisticated point against Romney's claims to understand how the economy works – specifically the difference between finance and economics:

The truth is he doesn't understand the free market. He understands a lot about finance, but finance is not the free market, and Wall Street is not Main Street, and giant businesses are not small businesses.

Peter Hamby of CNN notes this strange point by Gingrich today:

He attacked out-of-touch news media "elites" who reside in Manhattan high rises and "ride the subway" (perhaps unaware of who rides public transportation in New York City).

Elites traveling on public transport? Cue that quote attributed to Gingrich's hero Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

4pm: The Nevada caucuses are tomorrow – and it's clear that Mitt Romney is going to romp home as the winner.

In 2008 Nevada was one of the few bright spots for Romney's failed presidential bid, when he won 51% of the caucus. And presumably he'll repeat that tomorrow, given the weaker field against him.

There has been little polling done of the state – and caucuses are notoriously difficult to poll because of the tricky turnout calculation. But the last two show big leads for Romney.

The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill says there is a reason why Romney performs so strongly in Nevada – Mormons:

Although they only make up about 5% of the adult population in Nevada, they accounted for an estimated 25% of Republican caucus-goers four years ago. Does it follow that a Mormon will automatically vote for a candidate of the same faith? Well, in 2008, 5% voted for someone else. But the staggering statistic is the other 95% voted for Romney.

Will Ron Paul manage a second place finish over Newt Gingrich? And for how long can Rick Santorum stomach coming in fourth?

The Nevada caucuses themselves will be a long, drawn out process, since each of the state's 17 counties can set their own rules and times. The latest is a caucus in Las Vegas that starts at 7pm PT (10pm ET), so expect a result sometime after that.

And then on 7 February it's on to Maine, Minnesota and Colorado – more caucuses, all of them in the bag for Romney. We'll have to wait until the Arizona primary on 28 February for anything resembling a real contest.

3.11pm: Here's that new Newt Gingrich web-ad mentioned earlier. As usual, it's a brutal attack on Mitt Romney.

Ha ha ha: "I'm George Soros and I approve this candidate"

2.33pm: Oh dear, poor Rick Santorum. According to Buzzfeed Politics, Santorum couldn't raise the 500 signatures needed on a petition to get on the Indiana primary ballot:

The Marion County chief deputy of voter registration on the Democratic side, Scott Carr, confirmed that Santorum had not submitted 500 valid signatures. An Indiana Republican source said Santorum is "a couple dozen" signatures short, but that Newt Gingrich will be on the ballot.

The Indiana Primary won't be held until May 8, and is unlikely to be decisive in any event, but Santorum's shortfall cuts against some of his supporters hopes that he will rise as Newt Gingrich falls to provide a final challenger to Mitt Romney.

2.04pm: Newt Gingrich is in Nevada, appearing at Stoney's Rockin' Country Cafe in Las Vegas. It looks like the sort of place in keeping with Newt Gingrich's dignity and gravitas.

Gingrich is trailing Mitt Romney by a long way ahead of tomorrow's caucus but today he's back on the warpath against Romney, and kick off by reciting a new web-ad he's running with a clip of George Soros saying there is no difference between Romney and Obama.

Naturally, Gingrich also challenges Romney to one of his fabled Lincoln-Douglas debates. Which I would gladly buy on pay-per-view.

But the real zinger comes when Gingrich uses a strange comparison: "Obama is big food stamp, [Romney] is little food stamp." Quite what that means I don't know precisely but it's not nice.

Apparently Gingrich is getting a good crowd at Stoney's Rockin' Cafe.

1.26pm: Now Lance Armstrong, the well-known cyclist and cancer survivor, wades into the Komen v Planned Parenthood fracas, with a $100,000 donation to Planned Parenthood and this statement:

For 15 years, the Lance Armstrong Foundation has served people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities. We join Mayor Bloomberg and our partners in the philanthropic community today in their efforts to preserve access to cancer screening for women throughout the US. The Lance Armstrong Foundation will add an additional $100,000 to Mayor Bloomberg's matching challenge for Planned Parenthood's cancer services fund.

As Dr King said, "there is no greater injustice than inequality in health care." Cancer, on the other hand, respects no boundaries. It's a big, vicious disease that has no regard for race, gender, income or which side of the aisle we call home. Its survivors – 12 million of us throughout the US – deserve every bit of support we can muster. The Lance Armstrong Foundation will continue working to expand access to healthcare as we always have.

(Side thought: if the US had a single-payer, national health service then would neither Planned Parenthood nor the Komen foundation need to exist?)

1.04pm: The Susan G Komen foundation versus Planned Parenthood isn't going away, despite the Komen board's apology.

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent talks to a Komen board member about the Komen's future funding for Planned Parenthood:

I asked Komen board member John Raffaelli to respond to those who are now saying that the announcement doesn't necessarily constitute a reversal until Planned Parenthood actually sees more funding. He insisted it would be unfair to expect the group to commit to future grants.

"It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn't go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission," Raffaelli told me. "We're a humaniatrian organization. We have a mission. Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.

For background, here's an earlier piece: Five myths about Planned Parenthood

12.47pm: The New York Times's Nate Silver explains in detail why the US unemployment figures are a big deal during a presidential election year:

No economic indicator is the holy grail. The American economy is a hard thing to measure, and initial estimates of economic performance are subject to significant revisions.... But if you want to focus a single economic indicator, job growth during the presidential election year — especially as measured by the series called nonfarm payrolls — has a lot going for it.

Warning: article contains the phrase: "if you run a regression analysis..."

12.21pm: Mitt Romney is up on his hind legs in Las Vegas, campaigning befopre the foregone conclusion that is Saturday's Nevada caucus.

He's trying to retool his message somewhat in the face of the latest unemployment figures, so that it is now basically: "It should have been more."

But then it's back to the Romney stump speech that we have come to know and loath from New Hampshire onwards – including a brief tour through the lyrics of America the Beautiful.

12 noon: Donald Trump's endorsement of Mitt Romney made a few people queasy – and the Obama campaign was quick to capitalise with a fundraising email to supporters:

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he was 'humbled' to accept Donald Trump's endorsement. Seriously. Yes, Donald Trump – birth certificate conspiracy leader – has decided that Mitt Romney's his guy, and Romney has embraced him without reservation. He made a speech and even sent out a press release welcoming him.

11.46am: After the latest jaunty jobs figures, President Obama appears at a fire station in Arlington, Virginia.

In brief remarks before urging Congress to pass a bill helping US military veterans find work, Obama said the US economy is going strong and that the recovery was speeding up – although he cautioned: "These numbers will go up and down in the coming months."

Obama then called on Congress to extend the payroll tax cut:

I want to send a message to Congress: do not slow down the recovery we are on. Don't muck it up. Keep it moving in the right direction.

11.22am: After three days of controversy over its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening programme, the Susan G Komen foundation backs down.

Here's the statement from Susan G Komen board of directors and chief executive Nancy Brinker:

We want to apologise to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

That about-turn is met with dismay by anti-abortion activists who had been quick to support the decision by Komen, seeing it as further isolating Planned Parenthood:

The net outcome for Komen is the worst of all possible world: they have now managed to outrage both sides.

This one, as they say, will run and run.

10.50am: While Mitt Romney continues to reap his financial and organisational advantages in Nevada, some conservatives are unhappy to discover another position Romney took while governor of Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe reports:

Mitt Romney accused President Obama this week of ordering "religious organizations to violate their conscience,'' referring to a White House decision that requires all health plans - even those covering employees at Catholic hospitals, charities, and colleges - to provide free birth control. But a review of Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor shows that he once took a similar step.

In December 2005, Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims, even though some Catholics view the morning-after pill as a form of abortion.

Cue much grumbling among religious conservatives, who are ramping up attacks on the Obama administration over just this issue.

If the economy recovers, exactly what is Mitt Romney left to complain about the Obama administration?

10.22am: Video has surfaced of Rick Santorum telling the mother of sick child she shouldn't have a problem paying $1m to keep her son alive.

Speaking in Woodland Park, Colorado, Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder, "People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad but paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you've been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it." The mother's son is prescribed Abilify, which can cost up to $1m a year without health insurance. Santorum argued that demand should set the price for drugs:

He's alive today because drug companies provide care. And if they didn't think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn't be here.... Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don't have incentives, they won't make those drugs.

10am: While Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich squabble in Nevada on the final day of campaigning before Saturday's GOP presidential caucus, the big story of the day is the surprisingly good national job figures.

The US unemployment rate dipped to 8.3% in January – where it was when Barack Obama took office in 2009 – thanks to a buoyant 240,000 growth in jobs during the month, suggesting that a recovery is finally gathering steam.

The White House was exultant about the figures, while Republicans were dismayed since the fall in unemployment tends to undermine its central case against Obama's re-election, especially if Mitt Romney wins the GOP nomination.

Here's a round-up of the latest news on the campaign trail, from Ryan Devereaux:

• Mitt Romney continues to dominate the polls heading into the upcoming Nevada caucuses. Public Policy Polling has the former Massachusetts governor on 50% while Newt Gingrich has 25%. In a reversal of yesterday's Las Vegas Review-Journal poll, PPP has Ron Paul ahead of Rick Santorum with 15% for the Texas congressman and 8% for Santorum.

• Romney is understandably winning the large Mormon vote, leading Paul 78-14. PPP projects Mormons will account for 20% of the vote in Nevada. Romney's support from his fellow Mormons is not without some controversy, however. The New York Times notes that his hardline views on immigration have conflicted the church's accepting approach to the issue.

• While PPP reports that Gingrich is decidedly disliked in Nevada – only 41% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of him – multi-millionaire Mitt Romney has received the support of fellow super-rich guy, Donald Trump. Yesterday Trump announced his official endorsement of Romney: "He's not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love."

• Minnesota's house speaker and majority leader have also climbed on to the Romney bandwagon before Minnesota's caucuses next Tuesday. The AP reports speaker Kurt Zellers will make his announcement later today. Romney wasn't Zellers' first choice for the Republican nomination: he originally backed Tim Pawlenty and then endorsed Michele Bachmann.

• Romney has condemned President Obama's plan to pull US troops out of Afghanistan next year as "naive" and "misguided." Speaking at a warehouse in Las Vegas, Romney said that he didn't understand why the president would announce his time table for withdrawal.

And in other news:

Roseanne Barr is running to be the Green Party presidential nominee. For real.

2/3/2012 4:38:00 PM

A major factor in why US prisons are overflowing is the highly profitable privatised industry that has an incentive to fill them

In the past few decades, changes in sentencing laws and get-tough-on-crime policies have led to an explosion in America's prison population. Funding this incarceration binge has been an enormous drain on taxpayer dollars, with some states now spending more to lock up their citizens than to provide their children with education. It's difficult to spin anything positive out of that scenario, but as it turns out, even this blackest of clouds has a silver lining – silver as in dollars, that is, for the private prison industry.

In 2010, two of the largest private prison companies in America, GEO Group, Inc and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) generated over $4bn dollars in profit between them. Their respective CEOs, George Zoley and Damon Hininger, each earned well in excess of $3m in 2010. Although there have been some concerns that any relaxation of sentencing or drug laws might negatively impact their bottom line (profit), they remain confident in their ability to drum up new ways of generating their taxpayer-funded commodities (also known as inmates): lobbying California for their excess prisoners being one; caging juveniles on trivial charges another. But the favorite, by a long shot, is the accelerated drive to lock up America's immigrants.

So far, these strategies seem to be working nicely. In their 2011 third-quarter earnings report, the GEO group proudly announced an increase in profits from the previous year. This joyous news can be at least partially attributed to changes in immigration law, particularly in states like Arizona and Oklahoma, which allow for, among other things, the indefinite detention of illegal immigrants, including those whose asylum proceedings are underway. The majority of immigrants who are picked up by law enforcement officials, mostly on civil charges, like being caught with a broken tail light for instance, will end up in privately run prisons. In many of these facilities, they will be charged $5 per minute to call their loved ones, whilst earning $1 per day for their labor, from which the corporation running the facility will profit.

According to an investigation by NPR, in 2008, two men, allegedly from CCA, showed up in a small Arizona town, close to the Mexican border to pitch the construction of a new prison specifically to house women and children who were illegal immigrants. Local officials were not convinced that the prison could be kept full, but that is, perhaps, because they were unaware that, at the time, CCA was one of the key groups involved in drafting and promoting the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (which requires police to lock up anyone who cannot prove they came to the US legally), under the auspices of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which specializes in model legislation.

It's hard to think of a more cynical way to earn one's fortune than to devise means of placing innocent children in prison. But if no one's going to stop you, then why the hell not?

It's not all sunshine and roses in private prison land, however. These dens of inequity were sold to the public as super-efficient, money-saving, job-creating dream machines. The trouble is, most of the savings are derived from hiring too few prison guards and paying them on average 30-40% less than their counterparts in government-run prisons. According to Brian Dawe, executive director of the American Correctional Officers (ACO), an organization that promotes the well-being and safety of corrections officers (COs), no self-respecting CO wants to work in a private prison – where their chances of being assaulted are 49% higher, where escapes are commonplace, where riots are frequent and where the staff are ill-equipped to cope.

It might seem counterintuitive to create conditions that are conducive to outbreaks of violence, until you realize that violence is good for business. Inmates who act out tend to get time added to their sentence. Time added to sentences means more money, and more money is exactly what the CEOs and their shareholders are interested in.

This brings me to what the ACLU's David Shapiro, who authored the recent report Banking on Bondage, calls a "fundamentally flawed incentive". In a sane society, the purpose of a prison should be to keep the public safe. The goal should not be to encourage criminal behavior or to find new ways to incriminate people, so that certain private individuals can line their pockets.

It's an added kick in the face that these corporations which profit from human misery are doing so at the taxpayers' expense and to the detriment of public safety. But until the public cries foul, there will be no stopping them.

Interested parties can write to: 

Sadhbh Walshe 
PO Box 1466
New York, NY 10150

Or send an email to: sadhbh@ymail.com

2/3/2012 4:08:19 PM

Elections in Nevada are usually colourful, but the result this time is not in doubt: Mitt Romney has this one sewn up

Nevada will be an easy win for Mitt Romney on Saturday, based on his performance in the 2008 Republican presidential race. Even with Romney coming off second best to John McCain in many states elsewhere, Romney easily won the Nevada caucuses, with 51.1% to Ron Paul's 13.7% and John McCain's 12.75%. The reason: Mormons.

Although they only make up about 5% of the adult population in Nevada, they accounted for an estimated 25% of Republican caucus-goers four years ago. Does it follow that a Mormon will automatically vote for a candidate of the same faith? Well, in 2008, 5% voted for someone else. But the staggering statistic is the other 95% voted for Romney.

A PPP poll suggests that Saturday's caucuses will not be significantly different; Romney on 50%, Newt Gingrich 25%, Ron Paul 15% and Rick Santorum 8%.

Nevada elections have a reputation for being colourful, with scenes of casino workers and hotel staff from Las Vegas voting in their workplaces. These tend to take place during the Democratic caucuses, but the Republican ones can be colourful too. Outside of Las Vegas, the empty desert areas tend to attract fiercely independent, eccentric personalities that make for good television.

Although the Las Vegas area accounts for about two-thirds of Nevada's population, about half of the Republican caucus-goers are from Reno and the rural areas.

These areas are where Romney's rivals – Gingrich, Santorum and Paul – will be looking for a share of the votes. Even if they do not expect to win, they will be hoping for a share of the delegates to the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. Nevada has 34 delegates.

As a caucus rather than primary, good organisation is essential. Romney has had an organisation in place since 2010 and Paul, too, has a large, well-established ground team. Gingrich and Santorum only established teams there recently, too late to make a real difference.

Analysing the results as carefully as the Republicans will be the Democrats.

Holding Nevada is a key part of what Barack Obama's re-election campaign refer to as the western strategy. Nevada is a swing state, won by Bill Clinton and then by George Bush, and Obama won it by a whopping 12.5% in the 2008 general election. There is a strong trade union presence that will help Obama, as will the big Latino population. On the negative side, Nevada is one of the states that has been worst hit by recession, with unemployment of 12.6%. Many blame Obama.

That unemployment rate, combined with a collapse in the housing market worse than most other states, led to the rise of a strong Tea Party movement. It was discredited in the 2010 congressional mid-terms when they secured the Republican nomination for Sharron Angle to take on the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid. Angle fought a cack-handed campaign, Reid survived and the Tea Party movement fell into disarray. Gingrich, Santorum and Paul are fighting for the remnants. Angle has endorsed Gingrich: it is difficult to judge whether that is a help or a hindrance.

2/3/2012 3:48:00 PM

From bonuses to knighthoods, the leaders we put in high office prefer jaw-jutting certainty to thoughtful judgment

The laws of contempt demand that we tread warily when assessing the matter of Chris Huhne's judgment. We can wonder if the now departed energy secretary would have had to resign to spend more time with his lawyers had he played things differently. Perhaps if he had been less abrasive, declining to compare his Tory cabinet colleagues to Nazis during the alternative-vote campaign for example, he would have had more friends in high places saddened rather than cheered to see him go.

Not that they could have saved his job. Whatever the law says about innocent until proven guilty, politics has its own code – one that deems criminal charges incompatible with high office. If Huhne has any regrets at all, they probably relate to … but no, the lawyer is hovering.

Still the Huhne resignation on Friday did one man a favour, diverting the spotlight from Sir Philip Hampton, the RBS chairman, who, with his knighthood still intact, did a round of morning interviews, mostly focusing on the bonus of very nearly £1m offered to, and then waived by, the bank's chief executive, Stephen Hester. "I think it's true that we underestimated the scale of the public reaction to the bonus award," Hampton conceded.

Think about that for a moment. This is the chairman of a huge institution, in a post so responsible he was himself deemed worthy of a £1.4m bonus, admitting that he was unable to predict that taxpayers would be agitated by the prospect of forking out a seven-figure prize to the head of a bank they all but own, even though that bank's share price had tumbled by 37% in a year. Only "in hindsight" could Hampton see what anybody who had opened a newspaper or listened to a phone-in over the past three years could have told him in advance.

Forget the outrage over rewarding failure and throwing millions at this one public employee, Hester, while everyone else in the public sector has to endure a pay freeze that is, in effect, a pay cut. Focus only on the admission of utterly defective judgment. A titan of British finance has confessed that he did not know what was obvious to the dogs in the street.

It recalled the round of interviews Peter Mandelson had given a week earlier, where the former Lord High Marshal – I forget his exact title – of the Brown government explained his new understanding of globalisation. He had once believed that globalisation would produce "rising incomes for all". Indeed, he said, "we took all that for granted". But, to his shock, "we've learned that markets, while indispensable … can become volatile and unstable and have to be managed and regulated"; and, more shocking still, that "globalisation is also generating income inequalities within countries and between countries."

Now, perhaps we should applaud Mandelson both for changing his mind and coming clean about the gaps in his previous thinking. But it's not as if he has discovered a truth impossible to glimpse until now. He was a cabinet minister in the era of the great anti-globalisation protests in Seattle and elsewhere. All he had to do was listen to what those protesters were saying nearly 13 years ago, as they warned that the new economic orthodoxy was fuelling inequality and that markets needed to be tamed. For, as he has now admitted, their judgment was right and his was wrong.

He's not, of course, the only eminence to have erred. Alan Greenspan – yet another financial big to be knighted – was revered as the oracle, the sage who chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly 20 years. Yet he eventually confessed that he did not see the devastating sub-prime housing bubble coming – "I really didn't get it until very late" – and, what's more, that it was with "shocked disbelief" that he realised that bankers might not put the safety of their depositors' cash ahead of all other considerations, including, say, personal greed.

Hampton, Mandelson, Greenspan – all confessing that they got it wrong. Which would be admirable if judgment were not the very quality they were hired for. That, after all, is the deal. The eminent public official gets the titles, the salary, the status that separates him from lesser mortals because he is meant to be endowed with greater wisdom. That's their purpose. And yet, in Philip Hampton we have the lavishly paid chairman of a public concern cheerfully admitting that when faced with a critical decision he had less insight than any man or woman you might pick at random from the top deck of a passing bus.

The Mandelson case is graver. His first boss, Tony Blair, used the word "judgment" all the time, especially when defending the Iraq war, solemnly insisting that this was a judgment that ultimately he, as prime minister, had to make. But Blair's judgment proved to be fatally wrong: there were no WMDs and no plan for the aftermath of invasion. An unkind historian could seize on Mandelson's recent admission and conclude that, while right on so much else, on the two great questions of the age – the changing global economy and the "war on terror" – Blair's judgment was badly wrong. And yet it was precisely the quality of his judgment that he insisted qualified him to lead.

There are countless examples, in every direction. George Osborne slammed quantitative easing as "the last resort of desperate governments", before resorting to that very move himself. In 2001 Paddy Ashdown declared the idea of "a long drawn-out guerrilla campaign" in Afghanistan "fanciful". Earlier, Michael Gove wrote a pamphlet denouncing the doomed folly of the Northern Ireland peace process. Again and again, those who believe their judgment qualifies them to make great decisions of state get it wrong.

Perhaps Ed Miliband will draw comfort from this. He's made several judgment calls he's proud of: Murdoch, Hester and Fred Goodwin. The trouble is, it might not matter. Al Gore could always point to a good record – he supported the first Gulf war and opposed the second, for example – but it was not enough. It might not be sound judgment we crave, but the leader-ish appearance of it: the jaw-jutting certainty, the alpha confidence. Blair had that by the bucketload and so does Cameron. It may all be an illusion, covering an alarming pattern of misjudgment. But by the time the voters find out, it's often too late.

Twitter: @j_freedland

2/3/2012 3:15:01 PM

School-age athletes being subjected to potentially fatal brain trauma in sports like football, hockey and soccer, experts warn

Experts on repetitive brain trauma suffered by players of sports such as football, ice hockey and soccer have drawn up radical new proposals designed to limit the risk of potentially fatal brain injury in child athletes.

The proposals, presented in a white paper by the Sports Legacy Institute, come in response to growing alarm about the exposure to brain injuries of thousands of American schoolkids. The youngest identified of case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to blows to the head, was recently discovered in a high-school football player, Nathan Stiles, who collapsed on the field and died aged 17.

The institute calls for a limit to be imposed on the number of hits to the head in school and college sports, with the aim being to reduce by more than a half the risk of developing major brain damage. It launches its white paper just two days before the annual showcase of football at the Super Bowl.

The timing of the announcement was intentional, and designed to highlight a glaring paradox – that the dangers of sports-induced brain damage are now taken far more seriously at a professional adult level in America than they are for children.

The growing body of evidence of a connection between concussions and CTE has convinced the National Football League and the NFL Players Association to reduce the number of full-contact practices in the professional game to 14 each year in an attempt to limit the trauma on players' brains. Yet there are no such restrictions in youth football, and some teams are known to scrimmage four times a week on top of two competitive matches at weekends.

Chris Nowinski, a co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, said they had used the Super Bowl to highlight the issue because of the leading role taken by the NFL in discussing reforms. "If the NFL and NFL Players Association are smart enough to do this, why wouldn't we want this for our children?"

Studies cited by the white paper have shown that high school football players can suffer almost 2,500 blows to the head per season, each one exceeding a force of 10g. In ice hockey, the peak figure is almost 800 per season.

Brain scientists working at Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy have built up a brain bank of more than 100 brains of athletes, most of them football players, where CTE has been diagnosed upon autopsy. Every case of CTE that has been identified involved a person with a history of extraordinary, and usually repetitive, brain trauma.

CTE, which used to be known as punch-drunk syndrome in boxers, is now understood to cause memory loss, impaired thinking, loss of sensation, communication difficulties and emotional disorders. It can also cause epilepsy and increase risks of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

There have also been a number of suicides of players later diagnosed with having CTE, such as the legendary Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson.

Under its proposals, the institute wants to reduce the number of hits inflicted on school and college athletes by more than half. In the case of football, that would involve limiting the number of blows to the head to no more than 1,000 per season.

The institute's experts recognise that scientific understanding of CTE is still in its infancy, and that the technology to measure accurately the number and force of blows to the head in football does not yet exist. But it wants to see investment in developing the technology, as well as an immediate injection of new rules that would restrict the most dangerous routines, and limit the number of youth practices where many of the repetitive blows occur.

The white paper points to the example of baseball, where children under 10 already have a "pitch count", where they are limited to a maximum number of pitches they can throw in a day in order to prevent damage to their ulnar collateral ligament. The institute says a new "hit count" should be introduced for football and other sports, to limit the number of head blows in a similar way.

"If we go to such great lengths to protect the elbows of baseball players then heck, don't you think we ought to set limits to the number of times we allow a child to be hit in the head in sports?" said Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University's medical school.

Statistical information is less readily available for soccer, though experts are convinced that repetitive heading of the ball in practices and matches can cause the same sub-concussions that are believed over the long term to cause CTE. They suggest that restrictions on school-age soccer would also be sensible.

2/3/2012 3:07:00 PM

The country's reaction to the stadium disaster shows that the desire to finish what started a year ago is as strong as ever

One of the many features which made Egypt's deadliest night of football different from similar stadium disasters at Hillsborough or Heysel is the widespread belief that the violence was planned. There is circumstantial evidence for this view: from Port Said stadium itself, where knives and swords were smuggled into the stadium, exit gates were locked, gates on to the pitch mysteriously opened, and riot police remained uncharacteristically static; and from the wider political context, just one week after the military partially lifted the state of emergency.

The deep state has previous form. Anyone who can release convicted criminals to terrify the middle class into rejecting calls for Mubarak's resignation, or who opens fire on Coptic Christians to increase sectarian tensions in the runup to elections, is more than capable of organising a knife fight between rival football fans. Whatever the truth, the tragedy in Port Said stadium has sparked two days of rioting and renewed demands for an immediate transfer of power from military to civilian rule. It feels like groundhog day, as the streets around the interior ministry fill with teargas. The difference this time is that a parliament exists, and this has become its baptism of fire.

The chaos of the first anniversary of the uprising in Egypt has given rise to gleeful attempts to declare its premature demise: the Arab spring is in midwinter; soaring hope has turned sour and disillusion now reigns; the economy of a country where 40% live below the poverty line is on its knees. All partially true. But consider the scale of the change being demanded in the post-Mubarak transition. From a paternalist dictatorship to a society stripped bare, where every social contract has to be renegotiated and there are no rules, let alone a functioning police force and justice system. A huge, and perhaps unbearable, weight of expectation rests on the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice party controls 46% of the new parliament and is in a position to call the terms on which the military hand over power. Before the deaths in the stadium, the Brotherhood, along with the Salafi Islamists, stuck to the military's preferred date in June. Parliament has debated forming a government of national salvation. If the social chaos in Egypt is being choreographed from a bunker in the bowels of SCAF, the ruling military council, it is having the opposite of its intended political effect. It is speeding, rather than slowing, demands for an immediate transfer of power.

The Arab spring should not be so speedily written off. The reaction to the tragedy in the stadium shows that the desire to finish what started a year ago is as strong as ever.

2/3/2012 3:00:05 PM

Like Helen Gardiner's father (Letters, 2 February), mine was a boy soldier. Born in 1900, he enlisted in a cavalry regiment in 1914 (presumably falsifying his age) and his parents first knew where he was when he sent them a photo taken in Egypt dated January 1915. He later served in France in the trenches. He never spoke about the war, but had a few catchphrases which irritated me as a teenager, including "a soldier's first duty is to his horse" (he was about to go to the lavatory) and "the birds are singing" as he gazed out of the window at … what? Who knows? He survived the war physically unscathed, but because he was not a casualty I could find little about his war career – the records were lost or destroyed. So he died, keeping his silence, in 1963. I found the photo from Egypt, his "dog tag" and various scribbled notes – including "the birds are singing" – after his death.
Margaret Westwood
Guildford, Surrey

2/3/2012 2:59:00 PM

Protesters and security forces continued fighting in Cairo on Friday evening, with three dying in clashes across the country

2/3/2012 2:54:15 PM

The UK's ruinous experiment with austerity only highlights how good the US economic news is for Obama's re-election chances

There were two major pieces of good news Friday on the US economy. First, there was better-than-expected news from the non-manufacturing survey from the ISM, which added to a very positive sister survey of manufacturing earlier in the week. The combined message that can be drawn from the two surveys is that the US economy grew at the fastest rate for ten months in January. The surveys are broadly consistent with gross domestic product rising at an around 3.0% at the start of the year, setting the scene for a robust first quarter.

The ISM survey also brought goods news on employment, with a leap in non-manufacturing headcounts, following a more modest, though still substantial, rise in manufacturing jobs reported earlier in the week. The overall rise in employment was the largest since February 2006, with non-manufacturing jobs also showing the largest increase over that near-six-year period.

The good news on jobs kept on coming with the publication Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the latest data on the US labor market. An improving labor market boosts Obama's re-election chances, given that both his likely Republican opponents have argued that his economic policies have not been working. The data are starting to suggest otherwise.

The rise in non-farm payrolls of 243,000 was larger than the consensus of around 150,000, with all of the increase in the private sector (+257,000), and only a small fall in public-sector employment. There was growth in employment across almost all sectors, with especially large increases in manufacturing (+50k), professional and business services (+70k) and leisure and hospitality and even construction (+21k). Non-farm payrolls are now up by nearly 2 million on the year; private-sector job creation of 2.22m far outweighs public-sector job declines of 275,000.

These employment numbers are derived from a survey of firms. Data are also reported in the release from a survey of households, which also provides a count of the number of jobs. Employment counts from the firm and establishment surveys often diverge since the coverage is different. (The household survey has a more expansive scope because it includes the self-employed, unpaid family workers, agricultural workers and private household workers, who are excluded by the establishment survey.) According to that measure, which can be pretty volatile, employment has grown by an unlikely 850,000 on the month; but on the year, the increase of 2.3m is very close to that derived from the firms' count.

The household survey is also used to calculate the unemployment rate, which fell by more than expected, to 8.3%, the lowest level since February 2009. The number of unemployed also fell, by 340,000 on the month, and is now down by 1.1m on the year. Unemployment rates fell sharply for African Americans (from 15.8% to 13.6%), and somewhat for Hispanics (from 11.0% to 10.5%). Young adults aged 20-24 saw a sharp decline in their unemployment rates, from 14.4% to 13.3% on the month, as did high-school dropouts (13.8% to 13.1%) on the month.

Interestingly, the young, minorities and the least educated tend to do worst in slumps – and benefit, relatively, most in booms – as their unemployment experience tends to be more cyclically volatile than other groups such as the more highly-educated. So, these are all welcome signs and will alleviate some of the pressure on incomes at the low end of the US scale.

Of interest also is how the improvement in the unemployment rate is distributed across states. The latest data we have by states, up to December 2011, shows that 46 states registered unemployment rate decreases from a year earlier, while four states – Hawaii (6.3% to 6.6%); Illinois (9.2% to 9.8%); Mississippi (10.2% to 10.4%); North Carolina (9.8% to 9.9%); plus the District of Columbia (9.6% to 10.4%) – experienced increases. Currently, five states have double-digit unemployment rates – California (11.1%); DC (10.4%); Mississippi (10.4%) and Rhode Island (10.8%). But overall, the improvement is widespread and not limited to a few states, which should also help Obama in November.

An especially interesting comparison is between the United States and the United Kingdom, which implemented a package of austerity measures in 2010. US GDP growth for Q4/2011 was +0.7% compared with -0.2% for the UK. Both the UK and the US have large financial sectors and both were highly exposed to a financial sector shock. In March 2008, unemployment rates in the US and the UK were similar (5.1% and 5.2% respectively). The response in the US was for firms to shake out workers at early stages of the recession; thus, unemployment went up to 10% in October 2009 (see graph). UK firms appear to have hoarded labor, and by October 2009, it had only reached 7.9%; but they have now started to shake the tree.

So the situation has now reversed itself, and the two series are now moving in the opposite directions – US unemployment down and the UK's up. We only have data for the UK up to November, as their surveys are small, so they only report rolling three-month averages, but all indications are that the series will cross in the next couple of months. The UK is in a jobless, or even a job-loss, recovery.

It is likely that Obama will run on a platform for jobs against an obstructionist Congress and a Republican party committed to fiscal austerity and a weakening of the Federal Reserve. As far as I can tell, they have no credible plan at all for jobs. The lab experiment that has been conducted in the UK, which essentially has done what Republicans advocate, which provides great ammunition for the Democrats since austerity has demonstrably failed in the UK – and with more than 90% of the proposed cuts yet to come. Despite both countries having their own exchange rate, and central banks that have cut interest rates to the nominal bound and which have injected large amounts of quantitative easing into the economy, outcomes on the job front are very different.

Unlike Greece and Ireland who are stuck in monetary union, the UK coalition government voluntarily decided to run the experiment to see if there is such a thing as an "expansionary fiscal contraction". Now, they have found out that there isn't.

The UK cut public spending and fired public-sector workers; over the last year for which we have data, public-sector employment fell by 276,000, while private-sector employment grew by 262,000, giving a net decline of 14,000. There has been no private-sector resurgence and a "expansionary" fiscal contraction has turned out, in fact, to be contractionary.

Interestingly, the UK coalition government is hugely supportive of loose monetary policy and more quantitative easing, which, they have made clear, is their plan B. Next week, the Bank of England will do more quantitative easing – probably, another £75bn injection – to make up for the fact that cutting public spending doesn't work in a slump. Aren't Republican nomination rivals Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (both pledged to implement, in large part if not all, the Ryan plan) proposing cuts in public spending? And are they not opposed to further QE by the Fed, a position that looks like a disaster to me, if the UK is anything to go by?

I suspect they would have a different view, if they were in power. But it is now starting to look as if we won't have the chance to find out.

2/3/2012 2:52:12 PM

Iran's supreme leader spoke to worshippers at Friday's prayers in Tehran on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution

2/3/2012 2:44:19 PM