Vladd’s view of the World

Birthday party snub sparks debate

The case has sparked a debate in Sweden about civil liberties

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

The boy’s father has lodged a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.

He says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.

The boy handed out his birthday invitations during class-time and when the teacher spotted that two children had not received one the invitations were confiscated.

“My son has taken it pretty hard,” the boy’s father told the newspaper Sydsvenskan.

“No one has the right to confiscate someone’s property in this way, it’s like taking someone’s post,” he added.

A verdict on the matter is likely to be reached in September, in time for the next school year.

Eco-towns: Britain’s brave new worlds?

By Neil Tweedie

27/06/2008

On Monday, the initial public consultation on ‘eco-towns’ ends. However, opposition to them is just getting started, reports Neil Tweedie

Middle Quinton lies in the very heart of England. Six miles to the north, over rolling Warwickshire fields, lies Shakespeare’s Stratford.

How far will Renault’s hydrogen fuel cell Scenic go?

The development costs mean that each of Renault’s new hydrogen fuel Scenic ZEV H2 is currently worth about a million euros. But is the world really on the road to a hydrogen future?

By Sean O’Grady
Friday, 27 June 2008

The Renault Scenic ZEV H2 in action

The Renault engineer bent his head conspiratorially to me and vouchsafed his company’s greatest technical challenge. Well, here’s a story, I thought. What could this be? A dud new engine? Dodgy electrics? A faulty batch of steel that will reduce all Renaults to a pile of rust inside a British winter? (Actually a few years ago that really was their biggest challenge. But I digress). No. The big problem for Renault, as for every other car maker, is really no secret at all – “it’s the public”.

Well, he had a point. The public don’t like change. Which is perhaps why the most revolutionary car Renault has produced in decades, and probably ever, looks very much like a competent but ordinary mid-range people carrier.

Yet the Renault Scenic they invited me to drive round a track in rural France was a very special Scenic indeed: for the Renault Scenic ZEV H2 is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.

The development costs mean its worth about 1 million euros. An expensive Renault, then. It won’t be going on sale anytime soon, however, even at that price. The Renault folk say it will be a decade before they’ve managed to get everything right. Weight and cost are the most pressing problems with this replacement for the familiar internal combustion engine, that and the fact that there’s nowhere to fill one up with gas.

Yet the Scenic is by no means the first hydrogen fuel cell car to be produced. Honda has beaten everyone to the front of the pack with its FCX Clarity model, now being leased in admittedly tiny numbers in California, but qualifying for the title of “production car”. Some 200 of these novel looking executive saloons will be out there very soon.

It follows a similar pioneering experiment by Honda a few years ago, also in California, with a small hatchback driven by hydrogen gas. Mercedes-Benz and Opel, among others, have also launched experimental hydrogen fuel cell models. I’ve even driven the Mercedes, a converted A-Class, around London. It was a few years ago, when the PR drank the water that came from the exhaust, H2O being the only product of the process. A memorable moment. So it has been done before, Renault.

Yet the Renault is interesting both because it is a very convincing conversion of existing technology and because it shows how even those manufacturers which have disdained alternative technologies in the past are now embracing them.

Carlos Ghosn, Renault’s famous and charismatic leader, is also putting a huge effort into conventional electric cars for his firm and partner Nissan, with some ground-breaking schemes in Israel and Denmark on the way, chosen for their compactness and mostly flat topography: electric cars like short journeys without inclines.

The hydrogen fuel cell car is also electric, but it has more oomph and more range than the usual milk float. You pump some hydrogen into the car much as you’d refill your car with petrol or diesel, and the gas chemically reacts with oxygen from the air. That takes place in the “fuel cell” or stack, and the electricity generated amounts to 90kw – enough to tug a medium sized car around.

The power is stored in lithium batteries, of the kind you have in your laptop, which is both good and bad for PR, given the incidents of spontaneous combustion that were reported a while back. There is also a conventional 25kw back-up battery on board. That lot powers an electric motor and that moves you and your Scenic along at up to about 100mph. It has a range of perhaps 150 miles. Both are far in advance of anything the conventional electric car scene can provide. Your hydrogen fuel cell Scenic sometimes leaves a little trail of water from the exhaust, like an incontinent spaniel. Very clean.

So as Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, and now Renault have shown, the technology is out there, and it works well. The car felt fine to me; very quiet, obviously, with the traditional engine removed. It is noticeably heavier in the handling, as the Scenic ZEV has gained some 300kg of weight in the conversion, an issue for the engineers. Yet it stopped OK, accelerated briskly and went round corners at moderate speeds in a predictable fashion. As far as the safety of the tank is concerned, this pressurised unit has apparently had grenades thrown at it and survived, so it is probably more secure than most petrol tanks of today. But such concerns as this, and vague memories of the Hindenburg disaster will, I fear, prevent the public from taking to hydrogen fuel cells without a great deal of persuasion.

Trickier though is the whole question of whether this great leap forward is actually worthwhile, on environmental or economic grounds. The technology is there; but that doesn’t mean we have to use it. For a start there’s the cost. Economies of scale would soon kick in, but it may well be that there is still a cost penalty compared with the old-fashioned petrol or diesel car. Will we want to pay that?

Then there’s the small matter of scrapping our entire internal combustion engine and fossil fuel infrastructure. We would have to build, or adapt, an entirely new distribution structure. That will be obviously pretty expensive.

Finally, we need to factor in the real cost to the environment. If the hydrogen is made via electrolysis that too will need energy to produce it and energy will be needed to shift the hydrogen around the country to filling stations. Or we might have mini processing plants throughout the land. Who knows? Are these methods of moving and making hydrogen efficient? Are they run off fossil fuels or nuclear or renewables? It makes a huge difference.

And, as some point out, what is the purpose of converting energy into hydrogen to be transported everywhere and to make electricity on board a car when the simplest thing might be to use the existing national electricity grid and simply plug our electric cars into the mains? A hydrogen future is perfectly feasible, but I’m not entirely sure we’ll want it.

Plight of the Roma: echoes of Mussolini

The compulsory fingerprinting of Italy’s Gypsy population is the latest example of the country’s increasingly repressive attitude towards minorities – and an ominous reminder of the policies of the former Fascist dictator. Peter Popham reports

Friday, 27 June 2008

AFP/GETTY

Police patrol a Roma camp in Rome on 6 June before forcing its residents out

Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.

The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the “emergenza di sicurezza”, the “security emergency”: fingerprinting all Gypsies.

It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, for Italy to guarantee “to those who have the right to remain here, the possibility of living in decent conditions.” For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni’s supporters must have sounded obvious: “to avoid phenomena,” as he put it, “such as begging”. The new measures, he said, were indispensable “in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy”.

For anybody not swept up in the wave of anti-Roma fury, the campaign has a strong whiff of Mussolini and Hitler about it.

The task of counting and identifying the residents of Italy, citizens or otherwise, who happen to belong the most despised minority in Europe is, in fact, already under way.

Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist, found one small camp where the count had already taken place on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan. “There is not even a bar where one could ask the way,” she wrote in Il Manifesto, “but once you scramble up a hill you see the roofs of the huts. There are about 10 of them, along with the caravans, dotted around the outskirts, under flyovers and high-tension wires. Around 40 Roma lived here.”

They told her that the police arrived at dawn, woke everybody up, surrounded the camp and flooded it with lights and then went from home to home, demanding identity documents and photographing them. All the residents were Italian citizens. It made no difference. “This wasn’t a census,” protested a Roma called Giorgio. “This was an ethnic register.”

Fingerprinting was the detail they omitted – lacking, at that point, the power to do it. But Mr Maroni has now set about remedying that.

Italy’s “security emergency” is a strange and distracting phenomenon which has been brewing up slowly for the past decade as economic growth slowed to a stop. It intensified dramatically with the admission of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU in January of last year, and now bulks so large that it was the biggest factor in Mr Berlusconi’s election victory and continues to dominate the media. It led to the decision last week to allow police numbers in the big cities to be augmented by up to 3,000 troops.

The issue is strange and distracting because it does not seem to exist, either statistically or as a fact of personal experience. Crime is not a big deal in Italian cities. There is no epidemic of burglary, mugging, bag-snatching, rape. Italy remains a country where it is pretty safe to walk the streets. Yet the government is behaving as if this were Colombia. And Colombia with a very special difference: that the supposedly soaring rate of crime is the work of one particular ethnic group, known as “nomadi rom.”

Gypsies or Roma are visible in Italian cities as in the rest of Europe, and their number has increased. In Rome your subway journey may be made slightly less enjoyable by their accordions and violins and the appeals of their begging. Your eyes may be offended by the sight of them fishing in the waste bins, or hauling stuff home for recycling. Rome is so badly policed that small, utterly miserable squatter camps have sprung up in many places. They are a disgrace – unhygienic, unaesthetic – and have no place in a civilised modern country. But as the source of a “security emergency”?

Giovanni Maria Bellu, a La Repubblica journalist and an expert on Italy’s minorities, said the problem was one of misunderstanding. “Most Italians make no distinction between Italian Roma and those who arrived from Yugoslavia during that country’s break-up,” he said. “And many Italians think that ‘Rom’ is an abbreviation of ‘Romanian’ – and since the arrival of Romania in the EU there has been a large influx of Romanians. People conflate these separate things. There have been crimes committed by Romanians – and people confuse these with the Rom, and the Rom end up being blamed for everything.

“Security was the over-riding theme of the general election, which is why this conflated Roma-Romanian theme became so big, and a part of the left is very timid about confronting the problem. The security emergency itself is a myth: there has been no increase in the number of rapes, for example – in fact, the number has declined. But when a single case occurs it is splashed on the front page of certain papers for a double reason: it increases the climate of fear; and it damages the centre-left, which is perceived as being weak on security.”

Italy’s Roma paranoia spilled on to the world’s front pages on 13 May, when a woman in a suburb of Naples called Ponticelli alleged that a Roma girl had tried to steal her baby. The community erupted in fury, and thugs belonging to the Camorra crime syndicates threw petrol bombs into the local gypsy squatter camp, driving out the inhabitants and burning the place to the ground. Suddenly there was no avoiding the fact: the Italian hatred for the Roma had taken a dramatic new turn.

But the origin was an ancient fear, rooted not in fact but legend. Mr Bellu said: “There is nothing in police records to support the idea that Roma have stolen babies. It’s just a legend. But one that still has people in its grip.”

Marco Nieli, the president of Opera Nomadi, the most important organisation representing Italy’s Roma, said: “The first Roma arrived in Italy in 1400 and have been here ever since, and are Italians in every respect. The real problem is one of crass ignorance: if someone says that Roma steal babies, the political parties reflect and amplify this nonsense. This way all the problems are swept under the carpet.”

Thomas Hammerberg, European commissioner for human rights, visited a big Roma camp in Rome earlier this month. “I visited Casalino 900 camp, where 650 or so Roma live,” he said. “There was no electricity, no water. It was a very bad slum.”

And the fear of the “ethnic register” was already rampant, he said, “due to what happened to them in the past in Germany and elsewhere. They also raised the question, why us? Why not others? Many of those in the camp I visited had been in Italy for 40 years; they came over from Yugoslavia, some of them still have problems with identity papers, squeezed between the old and the new country. If you’ve been in a country for 40 years, are you still a foreigner? This talk about fingerprints was another reminder that their status has never been settled.

“The basic problem of Roma is widespread in Europe: housing, health, education, employment, political representation… But for a long time in Italy the Roma have been a symbol of something that is unwanted.

“The Nazis and the Fascists used the same methods of singling them out in the 1930s. It’s not surprising that they are frightened.”

A pocket dictator and the Manifesto of Race

Racism is often seen as intrinsic to fascism, but the inventor of the ideology, Benito Mussolini, was brought around to the Hitler obsession with race late in his career and after a great deal of arm-twisting.

Jews had lived in Italy for centuries without persecution. The community in Rome, though confined to the historic ghetto area for many centuries, has the longest uninterrupted history of any Jewish community in the world. In Mussolini’s Italy, upper middle- class Jews continued to live and prosper without persecution – until 1938.

In that year Mussolini introduced his Manifesto of Race, closely modelled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship, the right of Jewish children to go to school and of adults to work in the government or the professions.

Traditional Italian tolerance and/or indifference towards Jews meant that many were sheltered during those years, but after the fall of Rome, when Mussolini moved to the town of Salo on Lake Garda and was set up by the Nazis as the pocket dictator of the Republic of Salo, deportations of Jews to the death camps began in earnest.

And what of Italy’s Roma during the grim final years of Mussolini’s rule? Some 1.6 million Roma died in Germany and elsewhere during the Holocaust, a proportionately greater genocide than that suffered by the Jews.

The history of their treatment under Mussolini is a subject that contemporary Italian historians have been loath to look into, according to Marco Nieli, president of the Italian Roma organisation Opera Nomadi.

“It’s a fact that there were concentration camps for Roma in Italy during the Fascist period, and it’s also a fact that thousands of Roma died in them of hunger, cold and over work,” he claimed. “Studies are now under way to discover the extent of the suffering that took place.”

Laptop Searches in Airports Draw Fire at Senate Hearing

By AUSTIN BOGUES

Published: June 26, 2008

WASHINGTON — Advocacy groups and some legal experts told Congress on Wednesday that it was unreasonable for federal officials to search the laptops of United States citizens when they re-enter the country from traveling abroad.

Civil rights groups have said certain ethnic groups have been selectively profiled in the searches by Border Patrol agents and customs officials who have the authority to inspect all luggage and cargo brought into the country without obtaining warrants or having probable cause.

Companies whose employees travel overseas have also criticized the inspections, saying that the search of electronic devices could hurt their businesses.

The federal government says the searches are necessary for national security and for legal action against people who bring illegal material into the country.

“If you asked most Americans whether the government has the right to look through their luggage for contraband when they are returning from an overseas trip, they would tell you ‘yes, the government has that right,’ ” Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said Wednesday at the hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

“But,” Mr. Feingold continued, “if you asked them whether the government has a right to open their laptops, read their documents and e-mails, look at their photographs and examine the Web sites they have visited, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing, I think those same Americans would say that the government absolutely has no right to do that.”

In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Customs and Border Protection agency could conduct searches without reasonable suspicion.

In her testimony, Farhana Y. Khera, the president and executive director of Muslim Advocates, said Muslim Americans traveling abroad had often had electronic storage devices seized without apparent cause. She said several had also been questioned about their political views.

Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said the seizing of laptops could hurt people who travel overseas for business.

“In today’s wired, networked and borderless world, one’s office no longer sits within four walls or a cubicle; rather, one’s office consists of a collection of mobile electronic devices such as a laptop, a BlackBerry, PDA, and a cellphone,” Ms. Gurley said in prepared remarks.

She said the searches meant that “you may find yourself effectively locked out of your office indefinitely.”

Ms. Gurley said a concern was the lack of published regulations explaining what happened to data when it was seized and who had access to it.

Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview, “You can’t go into my home and search my computer without a warrant, but simply because I’m carrying my computer with me as I travel, you can search it.”

But Nathan A. Sales, an assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said in a statement: “The reason the home has enjoyed uniquely robust privacy protections in the Anglo-American legal tradition is because it is a sanctuary into which the owner can withdraw from the government’s watchful eye. Crossing an international border is in many ways the opposite of this kind of withdrawal.”

Mr. Feingold expressed discontent that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the customs and border agency, did not send a witness to testify. He said a written statement by Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for the agency, provided “little meaningful detail on the agency’s policies.”

Mr. Ahern’s statement said that the agency’s efforts did not infringe upon privacy and that it was important to note that the agency was “responsible for enforcing over 600 laws at the border, including those that relate to narcotics, intellectual property, child pornography and other contraband, and terrorism.”

Live albums are dead, and music is the loser

No crystal-clear DVD or shoddy hand-held YouTube clip can ever match the power and majesty of a live concert album. Simon Hardeman mourns the loss of a medium that created many of pop’s defining moments

Friday, 27 June 2008

getty

Bring it on: Matthew Bellamy of Muse

It is time to say farewell to some of the greatest albums ever made, albums that made careers, defined genres, and celebrated the raw power of music. Because the live album, once a rite of passage for every act of substance, is dead.

Yes, some bands may still make live albums: Muse, in particular, have released three live sets in a career of just four studio albums, but they are the exception. And just as there is no such thing as radio with pictures – it becomes television – then the live DVD is different from the live album. The visuals overwhelm the music, the spectacle takes over, and the sound loses its primacy.

You might think you could just buy the CD of a DVD and it would behave like a live album. But, with a few exceptions, de-visualised discs feel like the soundtracks they effectively are. Perhaps it’s the digital squeaky-cleanness of DVD; the music is dragged to a similar, soulless quality. Pink Floyd’s Pulse, while a big seller, is an offender in this category: as a record of the band’s tours it is excellent, and the musicianship is stunning, but if it converted many to the Floyd I’d be amazed.

This is because a proper live album harvests (in some cases, even creates) a performance that, in its recorded form, becomes something more than simply a DVD-style virtual ticket to a long-gone performance. It can break a band, epitomise a career, or record poignant last moments. The lack of pictures allows the music to gain power and mystery.

In particular, the crowd – banal, merchandise-clad whoopers and flag-wavers on a DVD – becomes a single, dark, tidal entity, adding unpredictable energy to, and becoming wholly part of, the experience. This means live albums aren’t the poor relations of studio sets, either – they’re darker, slightly dangerous, more unpredictable, bigger cousins.

Can you think of a single band that has broken through because of a live DVD? Live albums once did that for Dr Feelgood, Peter Frampton, and many more.

There are countless current acts who are brilliant live, but who haven’t released non-studio sets – Amy Winehouse, Kaiser Chiefs, Arcade Fire, The Raconteurs, and Arctic Monkeys for starters. Why not? Perhaps it’s the web, which, in recent years has become an outlet for live sets. There is, of course, the MySpace mush of segments of poorly recorded gigs. And there are also live webcasts, but these are effectively radio, not records. But the big outlet for live recordings today, other than DVDs, is YouTube.

Amy Winehouse may not have released a live album, but there are more than 1,500 clips of her live to view on YouTube. It’s a similar number for Arcade Fire and the Kaiser Chiefs. Search for the Arctic Monkeys, and you turn up more than twice as many. Even Duffy comes up with several hundred. For fans, the clips may work, but most are scratchy grabs from TV or mobile-phone footage that do little to communicate the musical and emotional power of the artist. It’s not only the quality of the clip, either; the quality of the video and audio stream is thin and gutless and chokes the music. Can you imagine if all we had of Johnny Cash in San Quentin was a YouTube clip? One of the pivotal moments in pop music would have been reduced to an internet viral.

There are exceptions to the lack of current notable live albums as well as Muse. Beth Ditto’s Gossip marked their first release on a major label this May with a live album, Live in Liverpool. Ditto explained at the time, “We’ve always wanted to do a live album, but… who does a live album any more?”. She also implied that the live album kind of came about because the band didn’t want to be pushed into writing new material; the conclusion is that they needed new product and a live set was the best way to get it out fast. This has always been one of the criticisms of live albums, another being that they can be end-of-career valedictions or fan-specials. Björk’s 2004 four-CD box-set Live Box was the latter, a live reading of each of her first four studio albums which, while of interest, probably didn’t make too much difference to non-Björk-obsessives. (The Icelandic singer does, though, have another live album in the can, titled Live Sessions.)

For the general music-lover, such fan albums and quick-let’s-get-something-out live releases are probably not of much interest. Another to be avoided is the yes-we-really-can-play-that-well advert. Acoustic guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela did just such a thing with their 2004 Live Manchester and Dublin CD. Anyone who has seen these amazing virtuosi on the festival circuit knows how impressive their renditions of heavy-metal favourites are, and this CD probably gained them a load more live bookings, but it is, frankly, tedious.

At the other end of the musical spectrum are the dance duo Daft Punk. Last year they released Alive. Their Thomas Bangalter explained why: “We thought at this time that there was an importance to experiment with the live show and the performances and we wanted to favour that form of expression rather than making a new album. We thought that, with a live tour, we would have more opportunity to experiment than with a new album.” Between the lines, of course, that means “we didn’t have time to write any new stuff”. But, then, who cares? It is, actually, a good set, and a decent introduction to the band.

One of the great functions of live albums has always been to serve as a kind of surrogate Greatest Hits collection. My favourite, the live album I’ve listened to more than any other, does exactly that: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Live in Europe, from 1970. It’s not the best line-up of the band: rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty had left after falling out with his brother John (the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter), and so CCR were reduced to a three-piece, and would soon be no more; the perfectionist John Fogerty didn’t even want the album released. And yet it’s a snarling, amplifier-speaker-ripping, sweat-drenched rock’n'roll tour de force. Fogerty and bassist Stu Cook have to work all the harder to fill in for the missing instrument, and it shows. It encapsulates everything that made CCR the biggest band in the world once The Beatles had gone.

Live albums are at their best when they combine being important documents with containing fabulous music. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, recorded in 1963, is too early for the funky classics that most now associate with Brown. Instead, in a 32-minute set, it shows both his sensitive and soulful side as well as the uptempo soul grooves that drive the crowd wild. The band are as tight as a moccasin loafer. This rip-snorting incendiary bomb of a live performance is the moment Brown went from R&B star to pop star – it reached No2 on the Billboard chart and might have reached No1 had the record company been able to keep up with demand.

But perhaps the act who most combines these two functions of document and excitement on his live recordings is Bob Dylan. The best, though not necessarily the most interesting, is the double LP he did with The Band, Before the Flood, the 1974 reworking of a set of his greatest hits. But there are several notable live Dylan albums, including The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 (which records the historic moment Dylan “went electric”, with the “Judas” cry audible). Even more exciting, collections such as this can be the only place his more obscure songs are found. The shame is that the legacy of a Dylan of today would be more likely to be a list of fuzzy YouTube clips. RIP the live album.

SIX OF THE BEST LIVE ALBUMS

Dr Feelgood
Stupidity
The best live record ever: and it reached No1! Just a few years into the 1970s, rock had become self-indulgent, and pompous, and singles were increasingly cheesy. But on the pub-rock live circuit Dr Feelgood were building a reputation for their sweaty, speedy, choppy, Canvey Island-bred rhythm and blues. The ace in their hole was their mop-topped, black-clad, bug-eyed guitarist, Wilko Johnson, who careered around the stage like a madman with a machine gun, chopping out funky riffs in a totally unique style. This 1975 live set (released in 1976) was fresh, unrelentingly exciting and inescapably danceable.

Ben Harper
Live from Mars
This double CD from 2001, the first of which is an electric set and the second of which is acoustic, is surely the best thing that Harper has done. It features the pick of his own material from his first four albums, along with (in classic live-album fashion) a selection of covers, ranging from The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” to a rather good “Sexual Healing”. The first CD has plenty of energy, but it’s the second, acoustic one that makes this record essential, despite the irritating whooping, cheering, and whistling that interrupt even the most intimate numbers. Yet Harper’s gorgeous voice and understated guitar survive.

Muse
H.A.A.R.P
Muse’s music has so much more presence live, and this CD – an accompaniment to the DVD – emphasises that. Pomposity and pretentiousness are more acceptable when the music feels authentic, which is what this selection does. Songs grow here, in a set that, effectively, begins with the buzzing guitar and choral vocals of “Knights of Cydonia” and simply ratchets up the power from there. To get this, you do have to accept that Muse like their music BIG. Of all current, rather than reformed, acts playing the stadium circuit, they are the ones for whom live playing seems to mean the most, and it shows.

The Who
Live at Leeds
Possibly the most famous live album ever. It’s a brilliant rock’n'roll set, mixing Who originals with classic covers. The songs are slowed down and heavied up, most notably Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over”, where Pete Townshend often dispenses with the classic riff, preferring chunky chords and Hendrix-like fills. He is asserting himself, pushing the envelope, and sidelining Roger Daltrey, whose vocals are often swamped by the enormity of the music, particularly in a huge, 16-minute version of “My Generation”. But the other revelation is John “The Ox” Entwhistle’s bass.

Nirvana
Unplugged
The last Nirvana release, recorded in November 1993, before Kurt Cobain shot himself the following April. Songs like “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, and lines like the repeated “I don’t have a gun” send tingles down the spine. But even without the poignancy, it’s a superb set, the quieter, raw, setting of MTV’s Unplugged series allowing Cobain to show a gentleness and humour that had eluded some listeners for whom the formulaic nature of grunge was a barrier. This is an album that could only have been made live, and is, perhaps, Cobain’s career-defining legacy.

Jimi Hendrix
Band of Gypsys
After he had split the Experience, Jimi Hendrix was obliged to provide an album of new material for Capitol. He got together his old friend Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums, to play four shows over two nights at the Fillmore East in New York. What resulted was an astonishing semi-jammed guitar master-class. Hendrix, using a new set of effects pedals for the first time, seems fresh, free, released and relaxed and at one with his instrument, which sounds as though it is mainlining his thought processes. This a sad document, too, as it was the last official album by the guitar genius before his death.

An obnoxious brat in the street, a chilling leaflet… and my 14-year-old son who chants ‘Childline’ when I try to hug him

Tom Utley

26th June 2008

An obnoxious brat told me I freaked him out (file picture)

The other afternoon, I had an ugly encounter in the street outside the office. I’d nipped out for my umpteenth cigarette of the day when a child of about ten or 11, wearing school uniform, walked past me and dropped a leaflet on the pavement.

I picked it up, caught up with him and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘You dropped this,’ I said.

The boy spun round, glared at me and shouted: ‘You freaked me out, man!’ (by which I suppose he meant: ‘Forgive me, sir. You startled me.’)

I said I was sorry I’d freaked him out and showed him the leaflet, not knowing whether he’d dropped it intentionally or not.

If he’d done it on purpose, it was clearly my civic duty to tell him to put it in the bin instead of littering the pavement. If he’d done it by mistake, then I was doing him a service. After all, it might have been important  -  something to do with his homework, perhaps.

‘You dropped this,’ I said again. ‘Do you want it?’

He yelled at me even more loudly than before: ‘You freaked me out, man! Lay off me!’ I took that as a No.

Then he did something so infuriating that I felt like slapping him: he dug into his satchel, took out more pieces of paper and  -  looking me insolently in the eye, with a sneery smile  -  dropped them one by one on the pavement.

What’s a middle- aged, middle – class, upstanding member of the community supposed to do in Labour Britain, confronted by a little b*stard like that?

In a properly ordered world, of course, I would have grabbed him by the collar, forced him to pick up his litter and marched him to the nearest bin. I have four sons of my own, for heaven’s sake, and even I  -  one of the most abject cowards on the planet  -  haven’t the slightest physical fear of an 11-year-old squit.

But as we all know (and none of us better than that kid), the world has gone barking mad. If I’d laid a finger on him, I would probably be dictating this column from a cell in Wandsworth prison.

I toyed with the idea of picking up all the paper he’d dropped, to set him an example of good citizenship. But as he stood there jeering at me, my pride wouldn’t let me. I’m not a ruddy saint. So I just threw him what I hoped he would take as a dignified scowl, stubbed out my cigarette on the pavement (a rotten example, I know) and stalked back to the office.

Final score: Obnoxious Little Brat 3; Civilisation 0.

Only when I was back at my desk did I realise that I still had in my hand the first leaflet the child had dropped. It was produced by the Metropolitan Police and headed: ‘Think Safe, Team Up! Personal Safety Advice for Young People.’ He’d obviously just been given it at school.

As I read it, I thought it went a long way towards explaining why my tormentor had felt so justified in abusing me and so confident that I could do absolutely nothing about it.

Almost every line in it encouraged children to look upon adults not as authority figures to be respected, but as perverts and predators to be deeply distrusted and despised.

Here’s a selection of the Met’s advice to children travelling on foot: ‘Think about safe places on your route such as a friend’s house, or a shop or public building where you can go and ask for help. At night, look for a house with lights on, with signs of young people living there such as bikes or scooters in the front garden…

‘If you feel uneasy about someone who is walking ahead of you, cross the road to avoid them. . . Avoid parked cars with their engines running and people sitting in them  -  you could be dragged into the car. . .’

Blimey! No wonder I freaked the horrible child out.

On trains, the leaflet advises, children should choose an open carriage where there are several other passengers. On buses, they are told to take an aisle seat and sit as near to the driver as possible. ‘If someone sits by you and makes you feel uneasy then get up and move.’

When they are at home alone, they are told: ‘If someone calls (like a gas/electric meter reader), tell them it is not convenient and to telephone for an appointment. . . Avoid telling anyone that you are alone. If necessary, say that your parent/carer is in the bath and they can’t get to the door.’

My 14-year-old son jokingly threatens to call ChildLine if I dare tell him off or give him a bedtime hug

For good measure, the Met offers children a long list of authorities they can contact if they have any trouble from adults, ranging from ChildLine to the UK Youth Parliament and the Children’s Safety Education Foundation, which ‘aims to help deliver preventative safety education to every child in the United Kingdom’.

Yes, of course a great deal of the advice in the leaflet is thoroughly sensible (though is it really any part of the Met’s job to tell children ‘ Bullying can occur because of your age, disability, faith, gender, race or sexual orientation’?).

But I can’t help feeling that material like this, drummed remorselessly into our children from their primary schools onwards, has contributed greatly to upsetting the balance of power between children and adults, so that we grownups are left with no means at all of making them behave themselves. Something very unhealthy has happened to the relationship between the generations in modern Britain.

This week, the Civitas think-tank came to much the same conclusion in its report, Licensed To Hug, on the pernicious effects of the Government’s latest child protection policies.

Sociologist Professor Frank Furedi, who co-wrote the report, says that laws such as the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act are ‘poisoning’ interactions between adults and children.

This is the Act, in force since April, which insists that any adult who has contact with children under 16 must first be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau. According to the professor, this will mean no fewer than

11.3million people  -  a quarter of all adults in England  -  will have to undergo the official ‘anti-paedophile’ test.

He and his fellow author Jenny Bristow report many examples of the unpleasant consequences of this hysteria  -  from mums being banned from helping out at the school disco to a shortfall in volunteers for work in children’s organisations, as a growing number of adults are put off by the bureaucracy, expense and downright insult of having to subject themselves to vetting.

From my own family’s experience, I could add the example of my dear old mum, who at the age of 79 had to submit to CRB vetting before she was allowed to do voluntary work helping backward children to read. When was the last time you heard of an elderly middle-class grandmother molesting a child?

The whole rigmarole was stupid and humiliating. What a way to treat a lady who, in her socially conscious way, wanted only to give less fortunate children some of the help she had lavished on me and my siblings when we were young.

Then was the time when the gasman, fitting our new boiler, told my wife that she couldn’t leave our third son alone in the house with him, since my son was a few weeks short of his 16th birthday at the time.

I could have told the researchers, too, how my 14-year-old jokingly chants ‘ChildLine! ChildLine!’ at me, when I tell him off or give him a bedtime hug. It’s amusing enough, coming from him. But all children of his generation know the power they have been handed by the current wave of hysteria  -  and, believe me, it’s not at all amusing when that power is wielded by an 11-year-old monster dropping litter in Kensington High Street.

All right, he may have been startled for a moment when I tapped him on the shoulder  -  particularly since he’d just been reading the Met’s scaremongering leaflet. But as soon as he realised I was just a harmless old bore, rebuking him for dropping litter, he knew he had me completely at his mercy  -  and that he could make a damn sight more trouble for me than I ever could for him.

If we value our country’s future, wouldn’t we be wise to redress the balance of power, double quick?

New top-level internet addresses come with $100,000-plus price tag

Your very own domain… just $100,000

Mike Harvey and Jonathan Richards

A new era in the way websites are named was ushered in yesterday when the governing body for internet domain names announced a massive liberalisation.

The body that oversees the internet’s structure yesterday approved a “land grab” for new web addresses that will allow people to apply for any top-level domain name — but it will cost them at least $100,000 to do so.

Scripts other than Latin — for example Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Cyrillic — will also be allowed, opening up the internet to many millions in the Middle East and Asia.

Until now top-level domain names— the .com or .uk at the end of a web address — have been restricted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the international not-for-profit body set up in 1998 to to oversee the structure of the internet and maintain its stability. Icann regulates the way web addresses are assigned to ensure that computers can communicate with each other.

The free-for-all agreed in Paris yesterday is seen as a great leap forward akin to the privatisation of telecommunications in the Thatcher era. Icann is not being forced to act because of there are not enough name options, but because it wants to open up the system to increase consumer choice.

Most web addresses in Britain have the suffix .uk. The most popular top level domain name in the world is .com and there are about another 20 possibilities such as .org or .net. Every country has a country code domain name such as .de (Germany) and .fr (France). Now the possibilities are endless and the new names could range from place names to commodities.

Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Icann, said: “It’s a massive increase in the real estate of the internet. It will allow groups, communities and businesses to express their identities online.”

Experts are divided on how many new domain names will come into existence. Sceptics argue that some of the more recent additions such as .name introduced in 2000 have failed to take off. But several categories of suffix, such as those relating to cities, are sure to prove popular. It is easy to imagine addresses ending in .london or .paris. City authorities could apply for use of the domain name and then group services and companies under the .london umbrella.

Another top-level domain name likely to attract attention is .web. Experts also predicted that regional names such as .scot for Scotland would be snapped up.

It was not clear last night how many big name companies would want to change their well-established web addresses to take advantage of the new opportunities. Some were asking whether, for instance, Microsoft would want to stop residing at www.microsoft.com.

But there is the potential for large sums to be won — and lost — amid fears that “cybersquatters” would cash in on the liberalisation to register hundreds of new web addresses created within each new suffix, and seek to sell them on to companies or organisations that want to claim them.

Big companies already spend millions of pounds buying up web addresses similar to their own to protect their brands. At the other end of the scale, those with money to burn might register their own personal domains.

Would-be applicants are advised that the process is different from registering a regular website. Top-level domains require significant equipment — including servers, routers, and databases — to run. “These new names are not going to be for mom-and-pop businesses,” Dr Twomey said.

Icann said it would begin taking applications for new domains in April, with the first expected to be in operation by the end of 2009. The system is open to anyone, but applicants have to show they have a “business plan and technical capacity”. Disputed domains will be auctioned to the highest bidder, though in some cases intellectual property law may help a company to secure a name. Icann also reserves the right to reject a domain on “morality or public order” grounds, in which case the matter may go to an international arbitration committee.

One area of dispute will be domain names useful to the sex industry. Icann has in the past rejected the .xxx domain name on the grounds that it would be forced to become a content regulator. Whether .sex or .hot may be now allowed remains unclear.

Dr Twomey said that the fees would cover the $10 million Icann is having to spend developing the domain name system to accommodate new domains and languages.

The largest top-level domain is .com, with 71 million addresses, followed by .de — the country code for Germany — with 11.2 million and .net, with 10.6 million. The fastest-growing is .cn, for China, which has 10.5 million addresses and grew by 31 per cent in the past three months alone.

But most commentators believe the dominance of the .com suffix will make it hard for new domain names to establish themselves. As one blogger put it: “Adding more skimmed milk to the mix will not stop the cream from rising, and that cream is .com.”

Dr Twomey did not expect there to be thousands of applicants, mostly because of the cost, but he said: “We hope there will be a broad range of applications. They key principle is that it is open to all to apply.” He did, however, expect some vanity applications.

Countries that do not use Latin script were very keen to start using their own domain names, he said. Russia has already requested to use the Cyrillic script for the Russian Federation suffix. Such requests will be fast-tracked. But it may take years to establish a full list of country code domain names in local scripts.

The bees fitted with microchips to find out why they’re dying

By Claire Cohen
26th June 2008

It is a remarkably hairy close-up.

But this tiny microchip attached to a bee’s back will hopefully explain why so many honeybees are dying from disease.

Professor Juergen Tautz and his team at the University of Wurzburg in Germany are studying the health of more than 150,000 bees, in the hope of halting the apparently inexorable decline in their worldwide population.

Enlarge

Creating a buzz: A tiny chip will revolutionise the study of individual bees

Bees have always been tricky to study individually.

Each colony has around 50,000 members, all interacting simultaneously and making it near-impossible to observe them.

Previously, each bee would be painted with a different-coloured dot on its back and scientists would video the colony — watching the tape endlessly, to try to work out the behaviour in each insect.

But a revolutionary technology enables the study of bees at close quarters. As soon as a bee hatches, a tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip is stuck to its back using a lacquer.

This allows scientists to study its behaviour throughout its life.

The bee will be unaware of the chip as it weighs only 2mg — a typical bee weighing in at 70mg can carry its own body weight.

Once it has been chipped, each bee has a serial number, and a scanner on the outside of the hive (like a supermarket one) registers its movement every time it leaves or enters.

Enlarge

Big loader: A honeybee carrying two balls of pollen it has collected

The data allows scientists to determine the health of every bee — how many trips it is taking, how soon after hatching it collects pollen and how much food it gathers.

The scientists also hope to discover why some bees live for just four weeks and others up to ten months.

They also put the bees through a rigorous programme in the hope of training them to be ‘sniffer bees’ capable of detecting explosives and suicide bombers.

The bees are conditioned to stick out their tongues (or proboscis) when they detect a certain scent — for example, that of explosives.

Each time they do so, they receive a drop of their favourite tipple — sugar solution — and they rapidly learn to associate the smell with receiving food.

Before long, they will stick out their tongues whenever the scent of explosives is present, in anticipation of the sugar.

And by watching their tongues, scientists can use them as sniffer bees. There are three colonies involved in this scheme — involving 150,000 bees — but it can be expensive.

Although the microchips cost just £1.20 each, they are lost for ever once the bees die outside the hive.

Man mistaken for joyrider kung-fu kicked to ground by police (even though he has two brothers in the force and a third who directs Crimewatch)

By Andy Dolan
26th June 2008

A father-of-three has been left partially blind after he was allegedly kung fu kicked to the ground and then battered by two officers who mistook him for a joyrider.

David Markham, 35, told how he was woken in the middle of the night by the sounds of sirens as police chased the suspected car thief on to a remote farm.

When the chicken farmer stepped out of his bungalow to investigate the 5am disturbance he was pounced on by the officers who then launched their attack.

David Markham has been left partially blind after he was kicked in the face by police officers who mistook him for a joyridder

Such was the ferocity of the beating, Mr Markham – who, ironically, has two brothers in the police force and a third who directs the television series Crimewatch – feared the officers were actually robbers dressed as police for a disguise.

He said: ‘You don’t expect to walk out of your front door and be battered by the police.
‘I thought I was going to die – it was like something out of Life On Mars.

‘One officer ran towards me and knocked me to the ground with a kung fu kick in the ribs. Then he kicked me in the eye and three or four times on the back of the head while I was face down on the ground.

‘The other officer sat on my back pummelling me. I was in agony and screaming for help from my wife and I was shouting, ‘You’ve got the wrong man – it isn’t me’.’

Police were hunting for a passenger who fled from a stolen car. The driver was arrested.

The drama unfolded when David and eight-week pregnant wife Stephanie were woken by one of their children crying early on Sunday at the farm in Corley, Warwickshire.

Chicken farmer Mr Markham claims he was attacked on his own land

The family, who breed chickens, rent a bungalow on the farm from landowner Michael Harris, 65.

Mr Markham said he had gone outside to see if he could help the police catch the man they were looking for. But he was met by an officer on the drive who grabbed his hands and asked for his name, date of birth and telephone number.

Mr Markham supplied the information and the officer then waved at a colleague to join them.

‘He then came charging at me full tilt and kicked me to the ground kung-fu style’, Mr Markham said.

He added: ‘I didn’t imagine the police could ever behave in this way. I’ve always had a really high respect for my brothers and we bring up our children to respect the law – but how do you tell an eight-year-old you’ve just been beaten up by the police?

‘I don’t know why they did what they did. There was no reason for it at all. Even if I had stolen a car I wouldn’t expect to end up looking like this and be beaten up.’

The farmer’s brother Dan is a director on BBC TV programme Crimewatch, second brother Matt is a detective chief inspector and third brother Richard is a police sergeant.

Mr Markham spent seven hours in hospital after the attack and has only 40 per cent vision in his left eye and bruising to his head, ribs and back.

But he returned to University Hospital in Coventry on Wednesday with severe headaches and remained there yesterday.

Dog breeder Mr Harris, who drove Mr Markham to hospital after the attack, said: ‘After the attack, David told the police they had been filmed by the security cameras and when they heard that they were shaking like a leaf.

‘Fortunately for them though, the cameras were not recording at the time. What happened to David was absolutely outrageous. He told me the attack was so vicious that he thought the police were really robbers in disguise.’

Mr Markham -  who is 6ft 2in and weighs 15st – said he intends to sue Warwickshire Police.

A force spokesman said: ‘Warwickshire Police can confirm that a complaint has been made by Mr Markham following an incident that took place in the early hours of Sunday 22 June.

‘This matter is currently being investigated and the Independent Police Complaint Commission have been informed. It is inappropriate to comment further at this time.

‘Future deployments for the officers concerned are being considered.’