Leaked documents reveal UK fight to dilute EU green energy targets | Environment. 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 | Nesrine Malik. 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. What stands out, however, is her simple demand for readers to recognise that men, in the Arab world, hate women. Reading the article I found myself bristling, yet simultaneously felt guilty for doing so. Yet to my dismay I found, as I read on that instead of unravelling and unpicking the usual stereotypes which pepper the plethora of commentary on Arab women and exposing missing nuances, the author simply reinforced a monolithic view – holding the argument together using rhetoric, personal anecdotes and a rhythmic punctuation with her main theme – that all Arab men hate Arab women.
Jack Kerouac's ex-girlfriend lifts lid on beat novelist's rise and fall | Books | The Observer. 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. She was 21 when she met Kerouac.
She said: "He spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French. Ken Loach: 'the ruling class are cracking the whip' | Film. 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. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation. Save The Children Fund Film Production year: 1969 Country: UK Runtime: 50 mins Directors: Ken Loach More on this film They don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner.
Most surprisingly of all, Crissy Rock, the lead in Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) – a brilliant, devastating gut-wrencher of a film – was convinced she was starring in a happy, upbeat, redemptive story. It's at this point I laugh and call Loach a sadist. Why Marxism is on the rise again | World news. 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. The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party.
There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers | Technology. 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. It's a solved problem. Bad for business. I may be a pensioner, but I won't stop protesting | John Catt. 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. When I was 14 I worked as a farm labourer in Coombe, Sussex. The workers were not being paid on time, and one day we were made to wait in the pouring rain for a very long time for our wages. I volunteered to fight in the second world war at the age of 17 and joined the Royal Air Force. Even during the war, my protesting did not stop. I am fortunate to be able to protest at my age. There's no escape from the corporations that run India | Arundhati Roy. 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. Infotel owns the only nationwide license for 4G broadband. Ambani also owns a cricket team. RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. The era of the privatisation of everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. Of late, the main mining conglomerates have embraced the arts – film, art installations and the rush of literary festivals that have replaced the 1990s obsession with beauty contests. US food aid programme criticised as 'corporate welfare' for grain giants | Global development. Two-thirds of food for the billion-dollar US food aid programme last year was bought from just three US-based multinationals.
The main beneficiaries of the programme, billed as aid to the world's poorest countries, were the highly profitable and politically powerful companies that dominate the global grain trade: ADM, Cargill and Bunge. The Guardian has analysed and collated for the first time details of hundreds of food aid contracts awarded by the US department of agriculture (USDA) in 2010-11 to show where the money goes. ADM, incorporated in the tax haven state of Delaware, won nearly half by volume of all the contracts to supply food for aid and was paid nearly $300m (£190m) by the US government for it. Cargill, in most years the world's largest private company and still majority owned by the Cargill family, was paid $96m for food aid and was the second-largest supplier, with 16% of the contracted volume. The potato industry also hopes to raise its share of US food aid business. What are the links between shame and poverty? | Society.
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. You retreat into yourself and let go of people around you who could help".
"[In the UK] the Victorian legacy pervades public discourse," Walker maintains. "We still talk about the deserving and the undeserving poor, and about 'handouts'. As for 'scroungers', I sense that it's increasingly being used as a collective term for claimants of working age. " Suggested UK films include Shane Meadows' This is England, Billy Elliott and The Full Monty. Torture UK: why Britain has blood on its hands | Law. 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. Among the Britons who were picked up in the wake of the attacks was a man called Jamal al-Harith. Born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, Harith had converted to Islam in his 20s and travelled widely in the Muslim world before arriving in Afghanistan. After 9/11, he had been imprisoned by the Taliban, who suspected him of being a British spy. Harith then spent two years at Guantánamo, being kicked, punched, slapped, shackled in painful positions, subjected to extreme temperatures and deprived of sleep. Within five days of 9/11, Black had drawn up plans for the CIA's response. Events moved rapidly. Nationalists promote their agenda by masquerading as rights advocates | Glenn Greenwald. 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.
Ecuador must therefore be publicly flogged for its impertinence, and its press freedom record is a readily available whip. As a fun bonus, denunciations of Correa's media oppression is a cheap and easy way to deride Assange's supposed hypocrisy. The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | Ben Goldacre | Business. Chicago police bulk up with $1m in riot gear for 'peaceful' Nato summit protests | World news. 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. Officers are also preparing to use the controversial long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, during the operation. Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science | Science | The Observer.
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. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version.
What made it worse for philosophers of science was that Kuhn wasn't even a philosopher: he was a physicist, dammit. Lonised and coloniser, empire's poison infects us all | George Monbiot. 'The ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words "Work Makes You Free". Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin's gulag: "Through Labour – Freedom! ". Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: "Labour and Freedom". Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right to sue the British government for the torture that they suffered – castration, beating and rape – in the Kikuyu detention camps it ran in the 1950s.
Many tens of thousands were detained and tortured in the camps. The government's secret archive, revealed this April, shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial secretary knew what was happening. Little distinguishes the British imperial project from any other. In 1799 Charles White began the process of identifying Europeans as inherently superior to other peoples. The message sent by America's invisible victims | Glenn Greenwald. I lost my daughters in Gaza last time. Surely the bloodshed has to end | Izzeldin Abuelaish | Comment is free | The Observer. How shaming the poor became a new bloodsport | Barbara Ellen | Comment is free. Girl soldiers face tougher battle on return to civilian life | Global development. Sellafield: 'Everything was contaminated: milk, chickens, the golf course' | Environment | The Observer. Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering | Glenn Greenwald. US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets | Glenn Greenwald.
Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks | Environment. Censorship is inseparable from surveillance | Technology. Finnegans Wake becomes a hit book in China. Cameron's attack on George Galloway reflects the west's self-delusions | Glenn Greenwald. Pursued by violence, pawns in Syrian conflict await an endgame | World news. Land grabbers: Africa's hidden revolution | World news | The Observer. France funding Syrian rebels in new push to oust Assad | World news. 'Israelis talk about fear, we Palestinians talk about death' | World news.
The Detroit riots of 1967 hold some lessons for the UK | UK news. Why can't we know the truth about a strike that happened 40 years ago? | Ricky Tomlinson. Saudi Arabia's treatment of foreign workers under fire after beheading of Sri Lankan maid | World news | The Observer. Why didn't CNN's international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain's Arab Spring repression? | Glenn Greenwald | World news. Top five regrets of the dying. Syria: the foreign fighters joining the war against Bashar al-Assad | World news.