Leaked documents reveal UK fight to dilute EU green energy targets. The government has been trying to water down key environmental regulations in Brussels despite trumpeting its commitment to green issues at home, leaked documents show.
The papers, seen by the Guardian, reveal British officials repeatedly trying to prevent the adoption of European Union rules on energy efficiency, curtailing the proposals and making them voluntary rather than mandatory in many cases. In addition, the UK has tried repeatedly to ensure that the EU does not adopt a new target for renewable energy generation. They are significant because they indicate that Ed Davey, the energy secretary since February, has given his blessing to lobbying begun under his predecessor Chris Huhne.
These government efforts have the backing of the UK's big six energy firms, according to other documents obtained under freedom of information rules. The document shows that Davey, a Liberal Democrat, has opposed a new EU target on renewable energy since taking office in early February. Do Arab men hate women? It's not that simple. Photograph: Foreign Policy The latest edition of Foreign Policy, the cover of which bears the same stark question posed by its main article Why Do They Hate Us?
, has stirred up some serious controversy. In the article, Mona Eltahawy runs through a litany of indictments of women's rights in the Middle East, and issues a call to arms against cultural relativism. Jack Kerouac's ex-girlfriend lifts lid on beat novelist's rise and fall. The former girlfriend of the leading novelist of the beat generation Jack Kerouac has revealed details of their affair and his descent into bizarre behaviour on finding fame, in a new book to be published more than 40 years after his death.
Joyce Johnson, an accomplished author, also dispels the myth that Kerouac's writing was effortlessly spontaneous. Where he claimed his novel On the Road was written in a blast of energy during three weeks in 1951 she recalls that he spent years revising his work and carefully crafted each paragraph. Her book is just part of a revival of the cult that surrounded Kerouac which has this year prompted three feature films and a documentary, as well as books and an exhibition at the British Library.
Johnson, now 77, describes him as a "very odd person" who treated her dreadfully but was the love of her life. Ken Loach: 'the ruling class are cracking the whip' About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist.
The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. Why Marxism is on the rise again. Class conflict once seemed so straightforward.
Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. " (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.) Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers. At the end of April, Tor Books, the world's largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital rights management (DRM) from all of their ebooks by the summer.
It was a seismic event in the history of the publishing industry. It's the beginning of the end for DRM, which are used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content after sale. That's good news, whether you're a publisher, a writer, a dedicated reader, or someone who picks up a book every year or two. The first thing you need to know about ebook DRM is that it can't work. Like all DRM systems, ebook DRM presumes that you can distribute a program that only opens up ebooks under approved circumstances, and that none of the people you send this program to will figure out how to fix it so that it opens ebooks no matter what the circumstances. What's more, books are eminently re-digitisable. I may be a pensioner, but I won't stop protesting. Having listened to arguments for and against my judicial review against the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Metropolitan police on Thursday – who branded me a "domestic extremist", placed me on a database and secretly recorded my activities merely because I attend demonstrations and make sketches – I feel more resolute than ever about safeguarding our civil liberties.
I am 87 and have been protesting for some 70 years or more. I am retired and live in Brighton not far from where I grew up in Shoreham. Right from my formative years, I stood up against oppressive and unjust behaviour. There's no escape from the corporations that run India. Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, is personally worth $20bn.
He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47bn and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, special economic zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95% shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels in almost every regional language.
US food aid programme criticised as 'corporate welfare' for grain giants. Two-thirds of food for the billion-dollar US food aid programme last year was bought from just three US-based multinationals.
What are the links between shame and poverty? Shameless – an accurate portrayal of real life?
Photograph: Channel 4 Undermining the dignity of the poor is a tendency that "resides deep in the pores of our culture", observes Robert Walker, professor of social policy at Oxford University, who has just embarked on a major international study on the connection between shame and poverty. He goes on to quote Indian economist Amartya Sen, who argues that "shame is pernicious because it leads to a lack of self-esteem, and ultimately that saps the will to get on and do something. Torture UK: why Britain has blood on its hands.
When the US and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in 2001, it was inevitable that a small number of those captured on the battlefield would be British. For more than a decade, MI5 had been aware that British Muslims had been travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan in what it saw as a form of jihadi tourism that posed no threat to the UK. All that changed after 9/11. Nationalists promote their agenda by masquerading as rights advocates. Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it. It's because feigning concern for these oppressive measures is a convenient instrument for demeaning and punishing Ecuador for the supreme crime of defying the US and its western allies.
The government of President Rafael Correa granted asylum to western establishmentarians' most despised figure, Julian Assange, and Correa's government then loudly condemned Britain's implied threats to invade its embassy. The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal. Chicago police bulk up with $1m in riot gear for 'peaceful' Nato summit protests. Police in Chicago have spent $1m on riot-control equipment in the last few months ahead of next month's Nato summit, which is expected to attract thousands of anti-war protesters. Protesters from a coalition of organisations including unions, anti-war and Occupy groups are expected to descend on the city.
National Nurses United, the largest nurses' union in the US, is providing free buses to Chicago for activists from across the country even as its own plans to demonstrate were vetoed by the city of Chicago on Tuesday. While protesters insist demonstrations during the Nato conference – the main action is planned for Sunday 20 May – will be peaceful, police appear to be leaving nothing to chance.
Records show that since it was announced the Nato conference would be held in Chicago, police have purchased improved riot gear for both officers and horses. Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science. Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas.
The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. Lonised and coloniser, empire's poison infects us all. 'The ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles. The message sent by America's invisible victims. (updated below) Yesterday I had the privilege to watch Dirty Wars, an upcoming film directed by Richard Rowley that chronicles the investigations of journalist Jeremy Scahill into America's global covert war under President Obama and specifically his ever-growing kill lists. I lost my daughters in Gaza last time. Surely the bloodshed has to end.
A policeman pulls a rocket launched from Gaza out of the ground in Netivot, Israel in November 2012 Photograph: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images. How shaming the poor became a new bloodsport. Perhaps some of you are aware of the phenomenon of "slut-shaming" – whereby generally a female (why bother pretending, it's always a female) is contemptuously attacked, usually online, for anything from her dress style to what is perceived as sexually promiscuous behaviour. Girl soldiers face tougher battle on return to civilian life. Girl soldiers are often thought of only as "sex slaves", a term that glosses over the complex roles many play within armed groups and in some national armies. Sellafield: 'Everything was contaminated: milk, chickens, the golf course' Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering. (updated below) US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets. Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks.
Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned. The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives. The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Censorship is inseparable from surveillance. There was a time when you could censor without spying. Finnegans Wake becomes a hit book in China. Cameron's attack on George Galloway reflects the west's self-delusions. On Wednesday afternoon in the British Parliament, near the end of question time for British Prime Minister David Cameron, a short though incredibly revealing exchange occurred between Cameron and Respect Party MP George Galloway.
Pursued by violence, pawns in Syrian conflict await an endgame. Land grabbers: Africa's hidden revolution. France funding Syrian rebels in new push to oust Assad. 'Israelis talk about fear, we Palestinians talk about death' The Detroit riots of 1967 hold some lessons for the UK. Why can't we know the truth about a strike that happened 40 years ago? Saudi Arabia's treatment of foreign workers under fire after beheading of Sri Lankan maid. Why didn't CNN's international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain's Arab Spring repression? Top five regrets of the dying. Syria: the foreign fighters joining the war against Bashar al-Assad.