|  |  |  | | | | | The Guardian World News | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Despite a small poll bounce for Obama following the highly-watched Democratic convention, polls remains extremely close President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney headed to battleground states Saturday after emerging from their party conventions virtually neck-and-neck in the race for the White House. As the 2012 electoral showdown turns towards its final two months of campaigning, the bitter rivalry between the two candidates – which has already produced one of the most negative campaigns in recent memory – has failed to see either man pull away. In the latest rash of polls to come out after the Democrats wrapped up a mainly well-reviewed convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Obama appears to have earned a small "bounce". But the lead it gives him is razor-thin. The Rasmussen tracking poll puts him two points ahead of Romney, while a Gallup tracking poll has the Democrat three points up. Earlier in the week Obama's lead was just one or two points, and a CNN poll had the race in a dead heat. However, those polls are national surveys, and most experts believe that the election will be decided in about nine "battleground" states where narrow margins and swing voters are the focus of intense attention. Already those states have been subject to a barrage of political adverts, and the picture there has generally been more positive for Obama as he usually holds leads in key states like Ohio, Iowa and Florida. The influential political blogger Nate Silver, who tracks polls for the New York Times, currently predicts Obama to have a 78% chance of winning the election, based on his ability to win votes in those vital areas. However, there is little likelihood that the Obama campaign is going to rest easy, despite a convention season which failed to produce any breakthrough for Romney. Just a day after the Charlotte gathering dispersed, the latest monthly US job figures were released, revealing an American economy still failing to produce many jobs. The survey showed that just 96,000 jobs had been created in August, and revised down numbers for previous months. It showed the jobless rate dipped from 8.3% to 8.1%, but that was partly due to many job seekers simply dropping out of the market and giving up the hunt for employment. Economic matters lie at the heart of the campaign, and Romney has placed criticism of Obama for failing to adequately reduce unemployment at the centre of his strategy. Romney called the data a "hangover" after Charlotte. "I don't think the American people want four more years of the last four years. I think they want to see more jobs, they want to see their kids coming out of college able to get jobs, they want to see rising incomes again," he said in a statement. Both candidates are now likely to spend little time outside the battleground states in the remaining eight weeks of the campaign. Obama and Romney both headed toward such battlegrounds immediately after the Democratic convention ended. On Friday, Obama paid trips to New Hampshire, Iowa, and Florida – effectively crossing paths with his rival Romney, who visited Iowa and New Hampshire and then headed to a NASCAR auto race in Virginia on Saturday. Obama will now spend the next two days in Florida on a campaign bus tour.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Tehran accuses Canada of acting as a puppet of Israel and the west after embassy closures over Syria and nuclear concerns Iran accused Canada of "hostile behaviour" under Israeli and British influence on Saturday, threatening "immediate" retaliation to Ottawa's decision to cut ties with Tehran. Canada said on Friday that it was closing its embassy in Tehran and gave Iranian diplomats five days to leave the country, branding the Islamic Republic as the "most significant threat to global peace and security".
Ottawa cited Iran's disputed nuclear work, which Western states see as a disguised effort to develop atomic bombs, its hostility toward Israel, and alleged military aid to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is battling a popular uprising. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the Canadian move was a "continuation of anti-Iranian policies" by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government, which has long had poor relations with Tehran. "The current government of Canada under the leadership of Mr Stephen Harper is known for extreme policies in the domain of foreign policy," Mehr news agency quoted Mehmanparast as saying. "The hostile behaviour of the current racist government in Canada in reality follows the policies dictated by the Zionists (Israel) and the British." The Jewish state is Iran's arch-enemy, while Britain expelled Iranian diplomats late last year after radical Iranian protesters sacked its embassy in Tehran.
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads Iran's influential parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, said there could be an "immediate and decisive" response to Canada's action, Fars news agency reported. "It is essential that the foreign ministry respond to this action by Canada on the basis of national interests." Canada's 10 diplomats in Iran have already left Tehran, the Canadian foreign ministry said on Friday. Western states led by the United States believe Iran is covertly trying to develop nuclear weapons capability, though Iran states its uranium enrichment work is wholly peaceful, aimed at generating electricity and medical isotopes. Mehmanparast said the Canadian move was an attempt to nullify Iran's diplomatic success in hosting a summit of Non-Aligned Movement developing countries last month, which he said Canada had tried to scuttle. He said Canada's anti-Iranian policies included a ban on money transfers for Iranian students studying in Canada and the blocking of the bank accounts of ordinary Iranians as a result of Western sanctions imposed on Iran's banking sector. There is a large Iranian diaspora in Canada, with more than 120,000 people reporting Iranian ethnic origins. Ottawa's bilateral relations with Tehran deteriorated markedly in 2003, when Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died in Tehran's Evin prison while in custody. The closure of Ottawa's Tehran mission is the most significant row between Iran and another country since the ransacking of the UK embassy, which British officials said could not have happened without some level of government consent. The United States has not had a functioning embassy in Tehran since the 1979-81 hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held for 444 days.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Four other children are among the dead as it is revealed boy posed as a street seller to evade heavy security A teenage suicide bomber has killed six people, including four children, in an attack near the headquarters of the Nato-led international coalition (Isaf) in Kabul. The boy, with explosives hidden in a backpack, slipped into the Afghan capital's fortified diplomatic district by posing as one of the many street children who sell wristbands and other trinkets to foreigners there, a senior police officer said. "The killer was a child, aged 12 to 14," said Haji Wasiullah Taj, chief of district 10 where the bombing happened. "A lot of sellers go down this road and the security teams thought he was one of them, but he was not known to the children here." Most of his victims were from the group of young vendors he had imitated, including sisters Khorshid, 13, and Fatana, aged eight, local residents who helped clear away the bodies said. The spokesman for the Ministry of Interior suggested the work could be retaliation from the Haqqani network, a Taliban-linked group responsible for most of the high-profile attacks in Kabul in recent years, after the US government blacklisted them as a terrorist group on Friday. It was not clear why the teenage bomber had ignored a host of diplomatic and military targets within a few dozen metres of where he struck – including the entrance to Nato headquarters, the outer gate of the US embassy and the residences of the Italian, Indian and Spanish ambassadors – to decimate a group of Afghan civilians. "His aim was to get to Nato headquarters or the US embassy. The other children were apparently giving him a hard time, but we don't know the reason why he detonated [his explosives] here," Taj said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group had sent an adult attacker to target a CIA base and killed only US soldiers, but the intelligence agency's office is several hundred metres away from the explosion site, and multiple eyewitnesses said the dead were all Afghan. A group of children were gathered around an iPhone one of them had got from a foreigner, when the bomber struck, said 14 year-old Azizullah. "They wanted to play games on it, and that is when it happened," he told the Guardian. He survived because his father had summoned him away to watch the family stall minutes before the explosion, he said. Hafizullah Suleimanzai, the 40 year-old father of Azizullah, who sells mobile phone scratch cards nearby, said he was closing his business because of the blast. "I don't know how I will support my children but this is too dangerous." The blast site is strewn with a child's pink plastic sandals were scattered next to shards of glass, twisted metal and pools of blood. Afghan forensic teams collected human remains in plastic bags. A woman who lost her husband shouted "death to America", before she was led away weeping by a relative.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Former LA deputy DA alleges central piece of evidence was doctored by ex-football star's defence team during 1995 trial Nearly seventeen years after OJ Simpson walked away from his murder trial a free man, a prosecutor at the center of the case has alleged that the lead defense lawyer tampered with a crucial piece of evidence. Former Los Angeles deputy district attorney Christopher Darden has accused Simpson defense lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran, of "manipulating" one of the infamous gloves that the prosecution said linked Simpson to the grisly double murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. After Simpson struggled to fit the gloves on his hands - in one of the defining moments of the racially charged trial that captivated the nation - Cochran famously admonished the jury, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." On Thursday, during a panel discussion about the trial at Pace Law School in New York City, Darden, a member of the prosecution team, declared: "I think Johnnie tore the lining. There were some additional tears in the lining so that O.J.'s fingers couldn't go all the way up into the glove." Darden said in a follow-up interview on Friday that he noticed that when Simpson was trying on a glove for the jury its structure appeared to have changed. "A bailiff told me the defense had it during the lunch hour." He said he wasn't specifically accusing anyone, adding: "It's been my suspicion for a long time that the lining has been manipulated." He said he had previously voiced similar concerns in TV interviews, but could not recall the details. Darden's incendiary charge surprised key participants in the trial and related legal action. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who was a member of Simpson's defense team, and Paul Callan, who represented Nicole Brown Simpson's estate in a successful civil trial against Simpson, said it was the first time they had ever heard the allegation. On Friday, Dershowitz called the claim that the defense had an opportunity to tamper with the gloves "a total fabrication" and said "the defense doesn't get access to evidence except under controlled circumstances." "Having made the greatest legal blunder of the 20th Century," Dershowitz said of Darden, "he's trying to blame it on the dead man." Darden's remarks came after Dershowitz, a fellow panelist, called Darden's decision to have Simpson try on the glove for the first time before the jury "the most stupid thing" a prosecutor could have done. Dershowitz said that if Darden had evidence that there had been tampering, he would have had an ethical obligation to report the alleged misconduct. He also questioned why Darden hadn't filed a grievance with the state bar association. Darden responded by saying that this would have been a "whiny-little-snitch approach to life" and that was not what he believed in because it didn't change anything. The event was part of a "Trials and Errors" series, co-sponsored by Pace Law School and the Forum on Law, Culture & Society at Fordham Law, that examines America's most controversial cases. Also on the panel were Goldman's father, Fred Goldman, and his sister, Kim Goldman. Derek Sells, the managing partner of Cochran's old law firm, The Cochran Firm, did not respond to requests for comment. A call to Cochran's daughter, Tiffany Cochran Edwards, who is a communications director for the firm, was not immediately returned. Cochran died in 2005 from a brain tumor at age 67. Simpson was acquitted in the double murder case despite what prosecutors described as a "mountain of evidence" against him. The evidence included a blood-soaked glove found on Simpson's estate and a matching one found at the scene of the murder. Questions about the lining of the gloves emerged during the 1995 trial, but they did not involve allegations of tampering by defense lawyers. Three other members of Simpson's defense team, Robert Shapiro, Barry Scheck and F Lee Bailey, did not immediately return requests for comment. Robert Kardashian, who also represented Simpson, is deceased. A civil jury in 1997 found Simpson liable for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages to the murder victims' families. Simpson is currently serving up to 33 years in prison for a 2007 armed robbery in which he claimed he was trying to recover his own sports memorabilia
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Rimsha Masih, accused of desecrating Qur'an, leaves custody via armoured vehicle and helicopter after being granted bail A Pakistani Christian girl accused of desecrating the Qur'an has been freed from a jail near Islamabad, an official said. The release of Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old accused by a neighbour of committing an act of blasphemy last month, comes a day after a judge granted her bail. Mushtaq Awan said the girl left the prison in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the Pakistani capital, on Saturday afternoon. Rimsha has been held for a little over three weeks. An Associated Press reporter on the scene said she was taken from the prison in an armoured vehicle and driven to a waiting helicopter while covered with a sheet to protect her identity. Her lawyers say they will now push to have the case against her thrown out entirely. The teenager, who her defenders say is mentally disabled, became the first person ever accused of blasphemy to win bail, in large part due to the extraordinary turn of events in the case. Earlier this week witnesses came forward alleging she had been framed by the head of the local mosque in the impoverished neighbourhood where a Christian minority live. The mullah was accused by his own deputies of adding pages torn from the Qur'an to a plastic bag of burned rubbish that Rimsha had been seen carrying near her home on 16 August. Residents said the bag contained charred sacred texts from the Qur'an. It is alleged the mullah, Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, then added additional pages from the Qur'an in order to strengthen the evidence against her. People living in the neighbourhood of Mehrabadi said Chishti helped to whip up anti-Christian sentiment in the town and then publicly welcomed the mass departure of hundreds of Christians who fled to other parts of Islamabad. Individuals accused of blasphemy have been killed by vigilante groups in the past, including one case last year when a mob descended on a police station in Punjab, pulled out a suspect in a case and burned him in the street.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | French police work with British detectives at the Hilli family home in Claygate as relatives travel to Grenoble to be with two girls Police have begun their search of the family home of a couple shot dead with two other victims on a secluded French hillside. A team of four French officers has travelled to Britain to work with British detectives at the house of Saad al-Hilli in Claygate, Surrey. Iraqi-born Hilli, 50, was gunned down in his car alongside his wife, Iqbal, in the French village of Chevaline on Wednesday. The couple and a 77-year-old Swedish woman and a cyclist were killed in cold blood with a bullet to each of their heads. The couple's four-year-old daughter Zeena lay undiscovered under her mother's corpse for eight hours after the murders. Her sister, Zainab, aged eight, who was shot in the shoulder and suffered severe head injuries after being beaten, remains in a medically induced coma in hospital in Grenoble. Doctors report her condition as stable and improving. Two relatives of the Hilli family have travelled to France, alongside a British social worker, and will visit the girls who are under police supervision, according to reports. However it was unclear when they would be able to see the elder girl, Zainab, as she continues to be treated in hospital. French investigators are expected to reveal the results of postmortems on the bodies of the girls' parents and the Swedish woman in the car, as well as that of the cyclist. Officers from Surrey Police erected a tent at the front of the Hillis' house on Saturday as they prepared to conduct a search of the property with the French police team, led by officer Marc de Tarle. French prosecutor Eric Maillaud said investigators were told of a possible feud between Hilli and his brother over money, but the sibling had gone to a police station to deny the row. Maillaud said he had not heard about any possible inheritance issue and that Zaid remains "a free man". Zeena has spoken to police and confirmed that two of the victims were her parents, but said she did not know the Swedish woman very well, although she has been identified as her grandmother in some reports. The other man killed was Sylvain Mollier, 45, a French cyclist who lives in the area, who appears to have been passing the scene when he caught up in the attack. Maillaud said the girl remained under the care of psychiatric teams and had spoken about what he described as the "terror" of what happened, but did not see anything because she was hiding. "The witness statement of the four-year-old girl, she just talked about a fury, a terror. She explained that from the beginning of the murder she was already between her mother and that other woman and she rushed under her mother's legs, her mother's skirt," Maillaud said. "I imagine she'll go back to Britain in a short timescale. We have to be able to identify members of her family, we have to make sure that they are people that can be trusted. You can imagine that we cannot entrust that little girl to the first person that turns up." Her sister is not yet well enough to be interviewed but it is hoped she will be able to provide vital details of the attackers. Witnesses have said they saw a green four-wheel-drive vehicle in the area at the time of the killings, and possibly a motorbike. Surrey police said it was assisting the French authorities as they carry out a "complex" investigation. "As part of this, the force is facilitating a visit by French investigators to conduct inquiries in the UK," a spokesman said. Italian and Swiss police are also helping with the investigation because of the proximity of the attack their borders. The Hilli family is also understood to own property in Switzerland.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | At least six people die in Taliban attack near Nato headquarters in the Afghan capital A suicide bomb attack near Nato headquarters in the Afghan capital of Kabul has killed at least six people, Nato and local officials have said. The bomber, who was riding an explosives-laden motorcycle, blew himself up near the entrance of the base Camp Eggers on Saturday morning, a Nato spokeswoman said. Those killed, who include young children, were all civilians, said an interior ministry spokesman. Another five people were injured. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying target was the Kabul offices of the CIA. "One of our mujahideen targeted an important intelligence office used for recruiting Americans and Afghans for spying," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters. He said in an email that the bomber was a 28-year-old militant from Logar province, south of Kabul. But Kabul deputy police chief Daud Amin said eyewitnesses reported seeing a teenage boy, who was about 13 or 14 years old, walking in the area carrying a bag. Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the US-led international military alliance, said he was not aware of any casualties among members of the coalition. The US and Italian embassies as well as the Afghan presidential palace are also located near the site of the blast. Sediqqi speculated on his Twitter feed the attack may have been carried out by the insurgent Haqqani network, one of the most dangerous militant groups fighting US-led forces in Afghanistan. The Obama administration on Friday declared the Haqqanis a terrorist body, banning Americans from doing any business with members of the Pakistan-based militant group and blocks any assets it holds in the US.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Kim Kardashian has 16 million Twitter followers, and about the same number of critics. She's very famous, but what for exactly? Kim Kardashian is in a makeup chair under giant rollers, looking down at her phone and intermittently up again, to meet her own eye in the mirror. We are at a studio in a Los Angeles suburb; various stylists and Kardashian hangers-on fill the room. "One second," says the star's assistant, calling the group to order. Kardashian frowns at her phone. "You guys," she says, "what should I say? You guys?" There is a moment's hush; Kardashian is passing a tweet. For those few who haven't yet had the pleasure, Kardashian is a 31-year-old US reality TV star, lately prominent in Britain, who has, since becoming famous in 2007, ascended to the level of a symptom in the culture. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, currently in its seventh season, is contrived, sensationalist, repetitive and witless, but no more so than a lot of things one enjoys without accusing them of spiritual corruption. The difference in this case is reach. Twitter is an unreliable measure of influence, but Kardashian has nearly 16 million followers, putting her ninth in the world, three places behind President Obama. (Lady Gaga is number one; Taylor Swift number eight.) With her two sisters, Khloé and Kourtney, she runs a chain of clothing stores called Dash, has a Las Vegas-based outlet called Kardashian Khaos, promotes makeup and fashion lines under the label Kardashian Kollection, all of which act as window dressing for the business, merely, of being Kim Kardashian: a woman of above average looks, seemingly rather nice, who along with the rest of her family – emotionally speaking – strips on TV for tips. After the shoot, we sit in a courtyard at the back of the studio and Kardashian tries to explain what the fuss is about. There is an awful lot of fuss. For Kardashian haters, the tipping point came last year when she filed for divorce from Kris Humphries, a basketball player, after three months of marriage and a blizzard of wedding coverage said to have been worth many millions (she will dispute the numbers). The whole thing looked like a stunt to drum up trade for her TV show, although if it was, it backfired in that for a short while she was reviled as the most cynical woman in America. She seems to aggravate male actors in particular. Earlier this year, Jon Hamm unchivalrously referred to her as a "fucking idiot" in Elle magazine, as did Daniel Craig in GQ the year before. Kardashian takes all this with a certain laconic indifference, the standard LA response, heightened by what is probably an effort not to emote too much and generate wrinkles. "When I hear people say [what are you famous for?], I want to say, what are you talking about?" she says slowly, her eyes wide as a bushbaby's. "I have a hit TV show. We've shot more episodes than I Love Lucy! We've been on the air longer than The Andy Griffith Show! I mean, these are iconic shows, so it blows my mind when people say that." But you're not performing; you're just being followed around by cameras… "But to be able to open up your life like that and to be so… if everyone could do it, everyone would. It doesn't make sense to me." The day before the interview, I go to Dash in Beverly Hills, the flagship store aimed at Kardashian's teen fan base. A bouncer stands outside letting teenagers in one by one, although the store is almost empty. "There's a line!" he calls out to baffled passers-by, and the teenagers snigger. Inside, the clothes are very nice; soft T-shirts, cute shorts and dresses, but that isn't why people are here. Kardashian says that since the show started airing, the store has become a "tourist attraction" and the stock is angled accordingly. After taking photos of themselves in front of a giant Kardashian family montage, the adolescents buy one of several items within their price-range; a $20 compact mirror; pencils for a few dollars; or a $10 bottle of water with the Kardashian sisters' photo on one side. "Our water sells out all the time," Kardashian says. "People collect them because each store has a different picture on the bottle." That's amazing. "It's really crazy," she says. "I mean, a water bottle? It's crazy." She blinks slowly at the wonder of effortless profiteering. Kardashian characterises her typical fan as "a younger girl, like 15 or 16, who loves fashion, loves to be a girly girl, loves beauty, glam", and whom she respects as a backwards projection of herself. If you can overlook the vacant materialism, she is in some ways not a bad role model. She points out that she is not "your stick-skinny typical model"; that she doesn't go out on benders; that she tries not to swear too much. "I remember this one time when I used the F-word – and everyone was like, I can't believe you said that! You never say that! I am really cautious about what I say and do. If I look at the message I'm portraying, I think it definitely is be who you are, but be your best you." Whether or not you approve of the show, she has wrought a successful business out of thin air. It's also worth pointing out, given how snotty the fashion industry is towards Kim Kardashian, that to anyone's knowledge she has never thrown her phone at a personal assistant. And yet she makes people incredibly angry. "Yeah. I have no idea why. I work really hard – I have seven appointments tomorrow before 10am. I'm constantly on the go. I have a successful clothing line. A fragrance. I mean, acting and singing aren't the only ways to be talented. It's a skill to get people to really like you for you, instead of a character written for you by somebody else." She is currently dating Kanye West, who might have had a hand in the following analogy. "When rap music first started," Kardashian says, "rappers were not respected and people thought it was just a fad. And people thought reality shows were going to come and go. They have taken over the soap operas. So it's a modern version of a soap opera." The difference, of course, is that the Kardashians are purporting to sell something real. For bald cheek, nothing matches a recent scene in the show in which Kardashian balked at attending a family therapy session because, she said, she didn't feel like sharing family secrets "with a stranger". Very occasionally, a genuine emotion is caught on camera and stands out in relief to the rest of the show – most recently during a staged discussion about Khloé's paternity; while her mother and sisters mugged centre screen, Khloé, to one side, looked fleetingly devastated. Despite all the phoniness, rehearsed dialogue and fake scenarios, however, there is some grain of authenticity to the Kardashians to which fans respond: when I asked teenagers at Dash why they liked the show, the most common reason was that, despite all the drama, "they all really love each other and are such a close family". Like the Osbournes before them, the Kardashian family unit is convincingly tight. There is something unexpectedly soothing about this. For the record then, what is Kardashian's talent? "What is my talent?" She cocks her head to one side. "Well, a bear can juggle and stand on a ball and he's talented, but he's not famous. Do you know what I mean?" The mastermind behind the Kardashian empire is assumed to be Kris Jenner, mother, manager and ringmaster of her children's careers, who comes across on the show as a gimlet-eyed monster, wringing every last dollar from the family conceit. Despite her 100% belief in the reality genre, Kim Kardashian has to admit she is very glad she went through adolescence off-camera, unlike her youngest sisters, who were nine and 10 when the show started. (Their father is Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and Kris's second husband, whose career as a motivational speaker she reignited after marrying him. Her first husband, Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003, was OJ Simpson's lawyer.) "I feel a little bit sad for my little sisters," Kardashian says. "If there's one thing I'm so thankful I have, it's that privacy of pretty much my whole life until seven years ago." It was a spoilt childhood, materially – her father was a wealthy entrepreneur as well as a lawyer – and it's a mark of the milieu they grew up in that the Kardashian girls and their brother, Rob, were considered deprived because their parents wouldn't give them their own credit cards. But her dad bought them each a car, right? "He gave us a car, but I had to sign a contract with him before I got it." The contract said she had to have it washed once a week; had to make sure it always had gas. "And my grades had to be at a certain average to keep the car. If I crashed it, I had to be responsible for paying for it." She did crash it, within the first six months, and got a job to pay for the repairs. This was the beginning of Kardashian's career. She found work in a clothing store and liked it so much that, after paying off the car, she kept the job. She started to design her own accessories. "I would make these headbands that were really popular and I'd sell them to all the fun stores in LA. I would make them after school and go around selling them." She and her sisters periodically lived with their father at this point, their parents' marriage having disintegrated after Kris Jenner had an affair with a 22-year-old. Fault lines in the family were, bizarrely, crystallised by the OJ Simpson trial. Kardashian's mother had been one of Nicole Brown Simpson's best friends and was supposed to have seen her on the day she was murdered; she believed OJ was guilty. Robert Kardashian was one of OJ's best friends and defended him. "We were kids – 14 and 15 years old, me and Kourtney," Kim says. "We took my dad's side. Just because my dad was not married and my mum kind of broke his heart. It was personal. And we thought that my dad was the smartest man in the whole world. And if he thought he was innocent, we were going to be on that side." One day, their father came to them and said, "Girls, this is a huge trial and is going to be a part of history, and I think you guys are old enough to handle it." They went into court with him and sat in the OJ camp. "And my mum had gone with Bruce and she was sitting on the Brown side – on Nicole's side. And she turned around and gave as a stare like, I don't even want to see you guys when you get home. We wouldn't even look her way. She was so mad." This was the beginning of the family's life in the spotlight, although Kardashian had always wanted to be on TV. She watched the first MTV reality show, The Real World, and thought that's what she wanted to do. What, be on a reality show? "Yes. I wasn't thinking fame. I was just thinking how cool." Why? "I don't know; I just thought my life seemed interesting. I thought, if only people knew the crazy things that go on in this household, it would be so funny. And everyone kept saying that. They'd come over and be like, 'Oh my God, you need your own reality show.' I was always on board. Kourtney was the one who wasn't." Kim inched farther towards her goal when she started knocking around with Paris Hilton, and then, in 2003, she made a sex tape with her then boyfriend, the singer Ray J. The tape was eventually leaked and a star was born. (In a rare moment of coyness, Kris Jenner, in her memoir, glosses over this momentous turning point in the family history: "There was so much media coverage swirling around Kim then, both positive and negative.") Anyway, to "take advantage of the moment", Jenner made a pilot of the family and took it to Ryan Seacrest at US TV network E! Word came back that there were too many characters, too many siblings and that it was confusing. But Seacrest ultimately backed the show, correctly intuiting that, as with band members, young fans would be able to choose which of the three sisters was their favourite: blank but beautiful Kim, sweet Kourtney or sarcastic Khloé. Meanwhile, Jenner's conniving entertained adults and, for comic relief, there was Bruce, bobbing around in the background, looking more startled with each season and new wave of plastic surgery. It's no small thing to keep a reality show afloat, and even Kardashian admits that by season four the family was getting panicky about content. "I was like, 'You guys, I don't know that I have much more to give. I can only be myself, like… we're so boring now, we've shown everything.'" And? "And then Khloé got married, Kourtney got pregnant and everything else just happened organically." OK. So here's the thing: surely, living under that kind of pressure to feed the beast, one is tempted to say yes to things one might otherwise say no to, for example marrying Kris Humphries and then divorcing Kris Humphries. It doesn't even have to be mercenary; just a matter of needing to Make Something – Anything – Happen. "Not really. We had done filming our season at that point, so we decided to film for the wedding. And that was a decision that he and I made together. But I think that, with any decisions in life [brace yourselves], like, I spoke to a girl today who had cancer and we were talking about how this is such a hard thing for her, but it taught her a big lesson on who her friends are and so much about life. She's 18. And I was like, that's how I feel." There is no ethical dimension to Kardashian's defence of her marriage, merely the rationale that it would have made bad commercial sense to have faked it. "Getting married and divorced quickly, if that was my goal the whole time – I'm not an idiot, I obviously know that that would be a bad business decision. If anything, I probably would have left sooner had I not been filming, because I didn't want to end the relationship on TV." The sums of money she was said to have made are "completely outrageous and not true", she says. "No, I mean even with the money we made, we still had to pay for the wedding. We didn't even make enough for that." So if you married again, would you sell the rights? "I would definitely do it differently. Just all the scrutiny that I got. You don't plan to go through all of that willingly. For money." Her voice rises out of its Californian drawl and sounds momentarily urgent. "That's just not what a sane person would do. So. Would I get married on TV again? No." She thinks about it for a moment. "Well, I guess you never say never. Because who knows? So many other people I know have gotten married on TV and it has worked out amazing for them." There is a pause. "William and Kate got married on TV," Kardashian says thoughtfully. Not all the endorsement deals have been successful. There was a debit card ("the Kardashian Kard") that had high hidden fees and from which, after a firestorm in the press, the family distanced themselves; and a diet product that is currently the subject of a lawsuit. Of the card, Kardashian says, "definitely not the right deal for us. It sounded like a good idea when we went into it, but there were all these hidden fees and costs that even we didn't know about. Although, if you looked at it, it was still a lower percentage than the bank gives you on a credit card." (It's true that $10 a month fees for prepaid debit cards are not unusual, although there were other fees attached – $1.50 to ring the service centre for example – which looked, given the age of the target market, a little ungenerous.) In Kardashian world, attracting bad PR is a moral failing. "For us, we just didn't want that negative press, so we backed off." As for QuickTrim, the diet product, "If you look at every diet product, there's tons of lawsuits. So that is a successful product, actually." Kardashian has probably attracted more criticism for her decision to pose topless in Playboy and W magazines, something she hesitated over, but her mother talked her into. Good old Kris. Her father would have been horrified, Kardashian says. "He would have killed me." But her mum? "Oh, she was all for it." Doesn't she think it undermines her credibility as a business person? "No, sex is powerful and I think it's empowering, so I don't. I would have thought that before, but now I don't. I go back and forth about it." The point is that men in her position would not be asked to pose naked. "Yeah!" she says with wonder, as if we have hit upon yet another feminist advantage in the world. "I think it's empowering and I'll do what I want!" She has at least been consistent in this. In her early 20s, long before the show, Kardashian was married to a musician called Damon Thomas, a fact she shared with her family only after the event. When I ask why she didn't tell her mother she was getting married, she has what looks like a rare, unstudied reaction. With a shuttered look, Kardashian says, "Just a bad choice on my part." For months after the second marriage debacle, Kardashian says she stopped Googling herself, as near to a breakdown a member of that family can get. She changed her email address. She lost friends. "All these people who were so on my side completely turned on me, and they're now trying to come back and be friends." Her pairing with Kanye West is odd; he so outspoken and political, Kardashian so neutral on almost everything. The first time she voted in her life was for Obama. "I loved being part of that decision-making process, but I never voted in prior years when I was legally eligible. I don't know why." She is, she says, a "liberal Republican", put off Mitt Romney because of his stance against gay marriage. This election, she says, "I don't know which way I'm going to go." Her favourite politician of all time is Kennedy. Kanye will appear intermittently in the next season of the show. They are taking their relationship "season by season". "It's what we're both comfortable with, and it's all about making a group decision. Him and I, as a team." I imagine Kris Jenner might be in that decision, too. Won't the day come, I ask, when Kardashian rises up and overthrows her mother? She actually breaks out an annoyed facial expression. "We are totally equal. She listens to what I say. She follows my lead. She works for me. I mean, on the show maybe it doesn't come off that way…" Meanwhile, another generation of Kardashians is emerging to fill the endless hours of scheduling. Kourtney's child Mason, a toddler, now takes up a good part of many episodes. Khloé and her husband Lamar have their own show, Khloé & Lamar. The other day, Lamar went to the dentist. If Kardashian had a baby, she says, she would probably put it on TV, with certain caveats. For example, with Mason, "he can come in and say, hi/bye, and that's it", but isn't allowed to drive story lines. The point is, she has more perspective these days. The marriage crisis changed her. "I'm leaning more towards being a little more private." So she might potentially say no to another season? Kardashian blinks. "I never said I wouldn't do the family show." But it's very possible, she says, that the universe has shifted enough for her to say words she couldn't have imagined herself saying a year ago, an extraordinary break with Kardashian family values: "I'll never do a spin-off."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Union and mayor Rahm Emanuel at an impasse as strike threatened for Monday an awkward situation for Obama A bitter dispute between Chicago public school teachers and mayor Rahm Emanuel may escalate into a strike on Monday in a showdown over education reform that has national implications. Nearly 30,000 public school teachers and support staff represented by the Chicago Teachers Union have vowed to walk off the job starting at 12.01am on Monday if an impasse in contract talks with the city is not broken. Emanuel, former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a speaker at this week's Democratic national convention, has made reform of Chicago's troubled public schools a top priority. Emanuel cut short his trip to the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, to deal with the teacher crisis. Earlier this year, he pushed through a longer school day, but the union is opposed to other proposed reforms, including tougher teacher evaluations tied to student test scores and giving principals wide latitude in hiring. The union also wants more than the 8% pay raise over four years that Chicago is offering. The school district says it cannot afford concessions as it is running a large budget deficit and major credit rating agencies have downgraded its debt rating. The threatened walkout, the first in Chicago in 25 years and one of the largest labor actions nationwide in recent years, comes at an awkward time for Emanuel's former boss, President Barack Obama, who spent much of his adult life in Chicago and owns a house in the city. Obama and his fellow Democrats facing voters on November 6 are counting on unions such as teachers to get out the vote around the country in a close election. Chicago's public school system, the third-largest in the country behind New York and Los Angeles, has more than 400,000 students enrolled. Both sides in Chicago agree the city's public schools need fixing. The city's fourth-grade and eighth-grade students lag national averages in a key test of reading ability, according to the US department of education. Until Emanuel forced through a longer school day, which began last week, Chicago elementary and middle school students received instruction for fewer hours a year than any of 30 major cities studied by the National Center on Time and Learning, an education reform group. Emanuel, a tough negotiator called a bully by the teachers union, wants to close schools, expand non-union charter schools, and let corporations and philanthropies run some schools. He also wants principals to be able to hire whom they want, and he wants to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers. The union wants to shrink class sizes and increase education funding. It is suspicious of efforts to erode job protections such as tenure, teacher autonomy and seniority. It believes charter schools – which are taxpayer-funded but not subject to all public school regulations – undermine public education. "What Emanuel represents is a new breed of urban mayors, pushing for a whole system of school improvements … responding to public demand," said Kenneth Wong, director of the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University. As the strike deadline approached, union president Karen Lewis told local radio on Friday she was heartened that a top school board official attended the talks on Thursday for the first time and seemed to understand the teachers' concerns. "Both sides remain far apart on core issues such as job security, compensation and how to give our students a better day," union spokeswoman Stephanie Gadlin said in a statement. The two sides met on Friday and the union said it was ready to continue the talks through the weekend. The city of Chicago has allocated $25m for a strike contingency fund. It would be used to provide breakfast and lunch to students in the district – 84% of whom qualify for free and reduced-price meals at school – and to pay for four hours of supervision at some schools, other public facilities and churches. The plan has prompted concern from some parents and the union about the well being of the children and how low-income kids would be supervised in neighborhoods which have seen a sharp rise in gang-related murders in recent months. "It [the contingency plan] sounds like a train wreck," the union statement said, adding that those supervising children had received little training.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Gendarmes from Annecy plan to search victims' Surrey home while concern grows for four-year-old's welfare A team of French detectives are to work with British police in the desperate search for clues as to why a British family was murdered in cold blood along with a passing cyclist on a secluded French hillside. The detectives are to request permission to search the Surrey home of Saad al-Hilli and his wife, Ikbal, and speak to the dead man's brother, Zaid, after claims there may have been a dispute in the family over money. French officials said this was one line of inquiry among others and Zaid has reportedly told police he denies any involvement. More than 48 hours after the Hillis, a 77-year-old woman and a cyclist were gunned down in cold blood with a bullet to each of their heads, French officials revealed they had confirmed the couple's identity by asking their four-year-old daughter, Zeena. In the presence of a French child psychologist the orphaned girl, who spent eight hours cowering in terror under the body of her mother before being discovered, was shown photographs of her parents from passports found in the car where they were killed. Eric Maillaud, the public prosecutor, said she had responded in "childish language" saying: "Yes, that's my mummy. And that's my daddy". The young girl also identified a photograph of her older sister, Zainab, aged seven, who was shot, bludgeoned and left for dead near the vehicle, parked in an Alpine beauty spot. Shortly after she was found, French investigators said the best place for the orphaned girl was "back with what's left of her family", and said they had taken a softly-softly approach to questioning her. But British experts expressed shock and surprise that she has not been reunited with a relative or family friend already. Maillaud said the French authorities hoped to hand the child over to relatives said to be waiting to fly to France to collect the child, "as soon as possible". "The girls have to be our first priority," he said. Three French detectives flew to London to coordinate the inquiry with the British authorities, and a fourth was expected . Maillaud said investigators from both countries were co-operating "100%". He added that the relationship between Hilli, a 50-year-old aerospace engineer, and his brother Zaid, and rumours of a dispute over money and a family inheritance were the primary, but not exclusive, line of inquiry for the moment. "We hope he will be heard as a witness, but that doesn't mean he is suspect number one," he said. Maillaud said that Zaid al-Hilli had first gone to police to ask about his brother after learning from the television news that he had been murdered in France. "He was worried and went to make inquiries," he said. When reports emerged claiming the brothers had been engaged in a dispute over money, Zaid al-Hilli returned to the police to deny there had been any bad feeling between them. "We were given information from a British police source that there was a conflict between the two brothers. A conflict about money. Now we understand Mr al-Hilli's brother has said there was no conflict," added Maillaud. He said that police had found a further 10 cartridges from an automatic pistol following the removal of the family's BMW estate car from the isolated car park at the end of the narrow Route de la Combe d'Ire, bringing the total number of cartridges to 25. He said he had no idea if there was more than one killer or whether more than one weapon had been used. "Was the family targeted? Honestly we don't know. The hypothesis [of a family row] has come out because there appears to have been some legal action between the brothers. But it's still just one line of inquiry because there is also the profession of the victim and even the fact that he was born in Iraq, that might be important," said Maillaud. He said the younger girl, who is in hospital under the care of a child psychologist and under armed protection, had been interviewed by detectives in the presence of an English-speaking representative from the British embassy. The British ambassador, Peter Ricketts, confirmed that members of consular staff were staying with the girl "round the clock". Maillaud said: "Physically she is very well; she is being protected by a gendarme and has a nurse with her. She has been told her family is dead. I don't know how you tell a four-year-old that she will never see her family again, but she knows." "She is only four so what she has been able to tell us is more about the ambiance. She has spoken of hearing noises and cries and told us she was afraid so she hid. "Our priority now is to get this poor little girl reunited with one of her relatives and back with family members. I understand there are members of the family ready to come to France to get her." But Michael Hughesman, who provides post-traumatic psychological support to schools, said that universally accepted good child protection practice meant the four-year-old should have been reconciled with a familiar adult she could "emotionally cling to as an urgent priority". Hughesman said: "Until the child is reunited with an adult she knows and trusts, she is likely to continue to vividly replay in her head those hours in which her parents were murdered and the eight hours that came afterwards, when she was left alone in the car with the bodies. "She is likely to continue to intensely relive those experiences and memories until she finds an attachment figure who can bring her back to some sort of grounded reality. "The only person who can do that is an adult she has known for a substantial period of time and already trusts. This little girl will be looking for a suitable adult to cling to. It's vital for her recovery process." Gordon Milson, a clinical psychologist and head of psychotherapy and training services, agreed: "She will be stuck in that traumatic situation and living in a distorted reality until she is reunited with people, objects and environments with which she is familiar and with which she feels safe. "She will be unable to be certain she is safe and the threat is even over until that happens. Her only instinct for finding solace will be with an adult she already knows." But Julie Stokes, a consultant clinical psychologist and founder of the childhood bereavement charity Winston's Wish, in London, said that the child's age might protect her "even if something goes drastically wrong [with the way she is treated] in the first few days". Stokes, who was given an OBE for her work with bereaved children and runs a service at the charity for children whose parents have been murdered, said: "While older children can become fixated on things that go wrong in the first few days after the traumatic event but the memories of younger children are different. "Their brains have a natural defence mechanism that protects them from quite a lot of horror. I would be hopeful that this mechanism could protect this child now." Investigators said on Friday they were waiting for doctors to give the green light to question Zainab, who is in an artificially induced coma to aid her recovery. "The elder girl is not in a state to speak and we will have to wait for a go-ahead from the doctors before talking to her. She is a key witness for us, which we know is terrible for her. "They say seven is the age of reason and we just hope she can give us some descriptions, some details of clothes, colours of skin, anything that could lead us to who killed her parents." Surrey police said in a statement: "This is a tragic incident and at this time our thoughts are with the family and friends of all those involved. This is a complex and ongoing investigation being led by the French authorities and Surrey police is providing any assistance possible. "As part of this, the force is facilitating a visit by French investigators to conduct inquiries in the UK. We are unable to confirm any details around the investigation and it is inappropriate to make any further comment at this time."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | One of the first journalists to enter the Damascus suburb after the slaughter finds a desperate search for lost relatives The young mechanic had lost the sight in his right eye during the battle of Daraya. Still, he searched for his missing father for three days, combing destroyed buildings and piles of rubble. He finally found the old man dead on the outskirts of town, at a farm with three other bodies, boys aged 16-20. "Why kill an old man?" he asks. He is not the only one to ask the question. An estimated 500 people were slaughtered in Daraya over two and a half days at the end of last month. Rebels and the government accuse each other. Left behind is a town destroyed beyond recognition. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has interviewed Daraya residents and analysed satellite images of the battle, evidence points towards government responsibility for the killings, although it is not clear whether uniformed men or the shabiha militia carried out the killings after the town was bombed by helicopters and shelled. "What we don't know yet is who did the dirty work, the executions – whether it was men in uniform or shabiha," says HRW's Ole Solvang. "We're still investigating." Witnesses speak of intense shelling from helicopters with mounted machine guns, mortars from a government military airport near the Mezzah neighbourhood, and snipers in buildings in the north of the city. They speak of bodies lying in the street, and groups of civilians hiding underground only to be found and summarily killed. Shortly after the events, in an extraordinary act of indecency, the pro-regime television journalist Micheline Azar, entered the town to interview the dying, sticking her microphone in front of their bloody and wounded faces. She said the killings were "in the name of freedom". Not even children were spared her intrusions. "It was horrific," says Reem, a Daraya resident. "She was a vulture. She went through the crowds talking to the wounded as though she was floating on water, as though there was not this scene of hell in front of her." Ghost townTwo weeks on, Daraya still stinks of death. A poor Sunni suburb south of Damascus, it had been well known for furniture-making, and for its peaceful resistance before the conflict. Now it is a ghost town of shattered glass and broken graveyard walls, bombed vegetable shops and decapitated blocks of flats. Rank rubbish is piled on corners, uncollected. There is the unmistakable smell of rotting corpses that have not yet been removed from houses. A lone bicyclist makes his way awkwardly through the rubble and debris. The town is still and lifeless. There is no way to confirm the death tally. It ranges from opposition reports of more than 1,000 to government figures of several hundred. The local gravedigger says he has already buried 1,000, and more bodies are found every day. The mounds of freshly dug, moist earth in the cemetery in the middle of town look like they harbour at least several hundred dead. A woman who comes to the graveyard each day to check a list for news of her sons says: "We are still searching houses and abandoned ruins trying to find them." She says everyone waits for the hour when the gravedigger arrives and there are new bodies to identify. In the ashen aftermath of war, it is impossible to imagine what this place looked like before, or what really happened here. It was first bombed, the centre flattened, before house-to-house operations were conducted. Some witnesses say men and boys were killed at close range with guns; others say knives were used. "The problem is there is no food, no water, no electricity," says one family. Outside, two children play amid the rubble. "There's nothing to do, no one to play with," says six-year-old Rauda. "My friends left when the bombing started. I stayed close to my mother and held her. But she said we were not leaving." Many fear becoming refugees as much as they fear the violence. "Would you leave your home?" asks Rashid, who owned a shop, now destroyed. "Would you take your life apart? We leave with our heads high, or we don't leave at all." The attack on Daraya started on 20 August and intensified two days later. The Free Syrian Army withdrew from the town on 23 August and the army entered the next day. "The shelling started at 7.30am. There is no sound more frightening than rockets," says Rashid. People hid in basements, and when the army arrived some were pulled out and killed outside; others were sprayed with machine-gun fire, Rashid says. "We had some informers who pointed out where opposition people were. They let the women run away but they shot the men one by one. In some cases, they went into the basement and killed old men and children – just because they were boys." His wife's four brothers and three nephews were among the victims. Secret gravesA woman called Umm Hussein says she was rushing to escape the bombardment with her young daughter and 20-year-old son when a truck went by with soldiers shouting: "With our life, with our blood we will fight for Bashar." Umm Hussein and her children did not make it in time: they were stopped and, while she and her daughter were spared, her son was shot and his body taken out of town. There are rumours that some victims are being moved to secret graves, in an eerie reprise of Srebrenica. But other people say the regime soldiers fed them and provided medical attention to the wounded. "They gave us bread," one man says. "Not all of them were monsters." Will Daraya be a turning point in the conflict? Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's special envoy, sent to the region after Kofi Annan's resignation, has said he is under no illusions about the difficulty he will face. Three months earlier the Houla massacre was also called a turning point. "We are waiting for God, waiting for victory," says Rashid, looking around his wasted street. "But victory doesn't seem very soon now."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Global stock markets and euro rise after ECB president Mario Draghi's ambitious plan to keep the eurozone together European Central Bank president Mario Draghi's rescue plan for the eurozone brought cheer to financial markets for a second day, while pressure built on Portugal, which was expected to announce further austerity measures. The Italian stock market added 2.1%, while the Dax closed up 0.7% and Spain's Ibex, France's CAC and the FTSE 100 in London all finished the day 0.3% higher after "Super Mario's" ambitious plan announced on Thursday to keep the eurozone together by sanctioning "unlimited" bond buying by the ECB. Asian markets also staged a strong rally, with Japan's Nikkei index posting its biggest gain in five months, of 2.2%. The euro rose against the dollar, climbing near the $1.28 level for the first time in three months. Spanish and Italian borrowing costs declined sharply, with the yield, or effective interest rate, on Spanish 10-year debt dropping 0.4 percentage points to 5.6% - the first time it has been below 6% since May. Six weeks ago it had surged to 7.6%, deep in the danger zone where borrowing costs become unsustainable, and at the start of this week it was still around 7%. The Italian equivalent fell a quarter of a point to 5% - in late July before Draghi's commitment to "do whatever it takes" to preserve the euro it was at 6.75%. The cost of insuring Spanish debt also tumbled. The 10-year Portuguese yield was down 0.4 points to its lowest level since March 2011. Although as high as 8.1%, that compared with 18% in February. The Dow Jones industrial average hovered between gain and loss after the US Labour Department said the US had added just 96,000 new jobs in August, far below expectations. The Dow hit its highest level since December 2007 on Thursday, but the jobs report focused investors on the US's own problems. The pound got a fillip from the weak US jobs data, climbing to above $1.6 for the first time since mid-May. Surprisingly strong industrial production data also brought some cheer to Britain. Factory production in Germany was also stronger than expected, rising by 1.3% in July. The Federal Reserve meets next week and economists speculated that the poor jobs figures will add further pressure on the central bank to act. Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated in a speech last week that he was concerned about the slowing pace of the US recovery and the still high unemployment rate. The Portuguese prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, was expected to set out fresh austerity measures last night in a televised address billed as a "declaration to the country". Measures such as a VAT rise, cuts to the public sector payroll, or new tax measures were expected. Spain gave no hints on when it might make a formal bailout request to trigger the bond-buying programme. Deputy prime minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría said the plan would be discussed at next week's meeting of European finance and economy ministers in Cyprus. "While markets are currently happy that the ECB's bond purchase scheme stands ready to be activated, getting the Spanish and Italian governments to agree to programmes is likely to be fraught with difficulties," said Grant Lewis at Daiwa Capital Markets. "Indeed, the positive market reaction makes their activation less likely by taking the pressure off the Spanish and Italian governments. So, it may well require a significant deterioration in market sentiment once again to ultimately trigger the programmes that lead to ECB purchases." German chancellor Angela Merkel expressed support for the ECB over the creation of the bond-buying programme, and said the central bank was right to insist on conditions in return for any assistance provided through the scheme. Meanwhile, the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, refused to back the plan, and it did not go down well in parts of the German media. Top-selling tabloid Bild led the way, warning that the ECB's "blank cheque" could make the euro "kaputt". Handelsblatt criticised "the democratic deficit of the euro rescuers" and linked the ECB's latest action to next Wednesday's ruling by Germany's Constitutional Court on the legality of the eurozone's new bailout mechanism and budget rules. This is another crunch day in the euro - a rejection of the European Stability Mechanism and the fiscal pact would plunge the eurozone into fresh turmoil. A Reuters poll of 20 top lawyers found unanimous agreement that the court will throw out the request for a temporary injunction to halt the ESM and the pact. However, 12 of those questioned also expect the court to insist that German liability has to be limited.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Data that shows US economy added just 96,000 jobs in August cast shadow over buoyant convention performance in Charlotte The Democratic party's euphoria at the close of its party convention in Charlotte evaporated within hours when the US government published a dismal set of unemployment figures that threatened Barack Obama's re-election chances. Obama had fired up the party faithful with a speech that pleaded for a second term but recognised that economic recovery would be slow. "I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy," he said. But on Friday morning, the department of labor revealed that the US economy had added only 96,000 jobs in August, well below expectations. The figures undermined the president's oft-repeated argument that his policies, while slow to bring results, are on the right track. The Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared the figures to be an indictment of Obama's economic policies. "If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover. For every net new job created, nearly four Americans gave up looking for work entirely," Romney said. The White House response to the unemployment figures was muted, saying the economy is continuing to recover but more work remained to be done. Republicans are banking on the sluggish economy to take them to the White House. There are two more sets of unemployment figures still to be published, the last just four days before the election on 6 November. No US president since the Great Depression has won re-election with unemployment so high. Democrats had been buoyed by their three-day convention, dominated by an inspired speech from Bill Clinton on Wednesday night and Obama's more pragmatic address late on Thursday night. But the jobs figures cast a pall over the celebrations. Although the headline figures showed a drop from 8.3% to 8.1% the fall was mainly attributed to people giving up the search for work. Only 96,000 new jobs were created in August compared with 141,000 in July – well below the rate of population growth. Pressure is building on the Federal Reserve, when it meets on 12 September, to intervene to stimulate the economy. With the conventions over, the election campaign now begins in earnest and voters beginning to pay attention. Obama, within hours of his convention speech in which he formally accepted the party's nomination to fight the election, headed off early Friday morning on a punishing campaign schedule that took in Iowa and New Hampshire and a two-day bus trip across Florida beginning Saturday. The Obama campaign teams admits the election is going to be close. Polls have shown Obama and Romney almost neck-and-neck for months. A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Thursday put Romney on 45% to Obama's 44%. Over the next two weeks, with voters more fully engaged in the campaigns, the coming polls will provide the first genuine indication of who is likely to win the White House. The Obama campaign team and supporting groups splurged on ads over the summer, spending an estimated $120m mainly negative campaigns portraying Romney as rich, uncaring and out-of-touch. But now it is the turn of the Romney campaign to spend big, releasing on Friday 15 new television ads in eight battleground states. Over the next two months, the Romney campaign, backed by Super Pacs – political action committees formed by small groups of mainly wealthy supporters – is expected to outspend Obama by two to one. The Democrats nevertheless had the better of the conventions. The Republican event in Tampa, Florida, was disrupted by hurricane Isaac and there was a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Romney as the GOP's presidential candidate. The delegates were overwhelmingly white and generally older. The Democratic convention was also disrupted by weather. Obama's speech had to be moved from a 73,000-seater football stadium to a 23,000-seater smaller arena, leaving disappointed ticket-holders, mainly party volunteers, to line up for seats at a screening in the nearby convention centre. The thunderstorms that party officials had cited as the reason for the venue change failed to materialise. Republicans claimed it was moved because Obama would not be able to fill the stadium and feared television images of empty seats. But the Democratic convention had more energy, with a party atmosphere in Charlotte. The delegates were more representative of America, much more diverse than the Republicans in terms of ethnic background, with more young people and a 50-50 split between men and women. After Clinton's barnstormer on Wednesday, Obama struck a more low-key approach on Thursday, his tone more subdued compared with the sense of euphoria he created at the Denver convention four years ago. The more sober approach was deliberate, a recognition of the mood of disenchantment among some voters, tired of fine oratory and more interested in his plans for a second term. Obama hinted that he would, if re-elected, embark on a bold and ambitious Franklin Roosevelt-style New Deal programme, but offered few details. Instead, he called for patience."You didn't elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades," he said. Obama was careful to recognise his own shortcomings, at one point telling the crowd that one of the differences from 2008 was that he was "far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said: 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'" Among Obama supporters leaving the arena after the speech, Sandy Blakney, 54, a psychiatrist from the Raleigh area of North Carolina, said she understood why Obama had adopted a low-key approach. "He did a little bit of the soaring rhetoric but in general his tone was a little more subdued, a little bit more serious," she said. This reflected the gravity of the economic crisis he faced on taking office. She added another reason. "He does not want people to think he has become over-confident."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Deaths of protesting miners mark low point for democratic South Africa run by a 'co-opted' ANC mistrusted by the poor Phumelele Gura survived a barrage of police bullets and more than two weeks in prison, where he lay awake listening to the sound of workmates allegedly being tortured. His grandfather and his father backed the ANC. He no longer will. "I won't vote for the ANC next time because they failed the people," he said. "My family always voted ANC but we don't trust it any more." Gura, 49, is not alone in thinking the events of 16 August 2012 marked a tectonic shift in South Africa. That was the day when police, enforcing the will of the country's black-majority government, opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and injuring 78. The massacre represented "probably the lowest moment in the short history of a democratic South Africa", wrote Cyril Ramaphosa, a senior figure in the African National Congress and a former mining union leader. Comparisons were made with the bloodiest days of apartheid: Sharpeville, Soweto, now Marikana. Three weeks on, the strike persists and the dust has not settled. But it is increasingly apparent that this tragedy has shaken faith in the ANC and its union allies as never before; that it has focused scrutiny on the exploitative 140-year relationship between foreign capital and black labour and led some to speculate that the tinderbox of South African inequality is just a spark away from conflagration. Mining has powered the South African economy, and warped its society, since the arrival of the empire builder Cecil Rhodes. Like many of the millions who burrowed underground to extract diamonds, gold and other minerals, Gura came a long way from home in search of a working wage. He found it as a rock driller at the Marikana platinum mine, owned by the British-based company Lonmin. "It's hard work and sometimes you drill the rock and a rock falls down on you," he reflected. "That's what we're afraid of. "We spend eight hours underground. It's very hot and you can't see daylight. There is no air sometimes and you have to get air from the pipes down there." Gura said he lived in a tin shack with a pit toilet and intermittent electricity and water. He earned about 5,000 rand (£380) a month and, like many workers here, sent a portion home to his family in Eastern Cape province. He ran for his life when the shooting began on 16 August, but was arrested and jailed. "From my cell I could hear the police beating my brothers, telling them to speak what they want." BetrayedHis partner, Primrose Magwangqana, 45, was afraid she would never see him again. "I thought he was dead," she recalled. "They said to some people, 'your husband is in prison', but later they found out he was in the mortuary." She too feels betrayed by the party she supported all her life. "I am an ANC member but I won't vote for them next time because they failed us. Only [the expelled youth leader] Julius Malema helped us." Striking mineworkers interviewed by the Guardian in Marikana this week echoed the sentiment. The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, which liberated black South Africans and is celebrating its centenary year, can no longer take their support for granted. Samkele Mpampani, 36, a ringleader who marched on another Lonmin mineshaft this week, said: "I won't vote ANC. They have killed our workers. I don't recognise the ANC any more. Jacob Zuma must step down. It's over now. It's over." The ANC was already bleeding electoral support before Marikana and sinking into factionalism. The party is accused of enriching a tiny black elite while failing to bring decent education, healthcare and jobs to the poor. Once a courageous anti-apartheid warrior, Ramaphosa now sits on the board of Lonmin and, it was recently reported, can afford to bid up to R19.5m (£1,480,000) for a prize buffalo. Protests over poor service delivery have been swelling for years, sometimes fatally, but the scale of Marikana looks like a watershed. Allister Sparks, a veteran journalist and analyst, said: "It is a cataclysm. Black people saw the police of the black ANC government shooting their own workers. It's shattered the deep-seated trust of the ANC as 'our party', the party you're born into, the party your fathers belonged to. "The ANC was in the black mind, the black soul, it took on an almost mystical quality. But now they've lost faith in it. The bond is shattered and it happened on television." The unwritten, almost Faustian, pact made by the ANC at the end of apartheid is creaking under the weight of curdled promises. It set up the ANC's union allies to deliver modestly higher wages for workers while also ensuring labour stability for big business. It saw Thabo Mbeki, the former president, assuring business owners that they should donate to the ANC because "people trust us, we fought for them … they will be patient". The patience now appears exhausted. Critics say white capital was essentially left untouched and that the purportedly socialist ANC was co-opted by the establishment. Malema has been calling for a revolution that will make the mines ungovernable until they are nationalised. He has lashed out at British firms such as Lonmin for scooping mineral resources from under the soil upon which workers live in squalid conditions. Lonmin is easily portrayed as a ruthless capitalist vulture presiding over Orwellian conditions, but the details are bitterly disputed. Mineworkers continue to insist they are paid R4,000 a month and want R12,500. Lonmin asserts that most workers get about 10,500, if bonuses are included. Economists claim this amount would put them in the top 25% of formal-sector earners in South Africa. "There are a hell of a lot of people in the country worse off than those miners," said one. Yet it is hard to gloss over the bleak landscape in Marikana, where mine headgear spins, chimneys belch smoke, and giant corrugated steel and concrete silos loom over scrubland dotted with shacks, rubbish and dung. The Bench Marks Foundation, an organisation monitoring corporate social responsibility, has described a "yawning gap" between Lonmin's promises and the experience of local communities. "They don't engage, they don't communicate properly with the community," it said. Defenders of Lonmin argue that housing is also a local government responsibility and that many mine workers use part of their wage to maintain homes in distant provinces. Lonmin claimed: "There are factual inaccuracies within the Bench Marks report and the company doesn't agree with all the findings. However, it does acknowledge that there are certain areas in which it could be doing better. This is a challenge faced by the entire mining community and requires the co-operation and involvement of many parties." Writing in South Africa's Sunday Times, Ramaphosa admitted: "There are few innocents in this tragic saga … For wherever we find ourselves, we cannot escape the sense that, through our action or inaction, we bear some responsibility for the circumstances that made such a tragedy possible. "As we mourn, so too must we introspect … What we do now as a people will determine what we become as a nation." The government has expressed frustration at the mining sector's slow pace of transformation. The sector failed to meet last year's target of 15% black ownership, transferring only 9% of wealth into black hands. It looks unlikely to achieve the required 26% by 2014. The horror of Marikana and the daily grinding poverty of mines like it can be traced to boardrooms in London and elsewhere. Robust Moeletsi Mbeki, an economist and brother of the former president, said: "It's a 140-year-old problem. The mining industry in South Africa effectively started in 1870. Marikana is telling us that the change in 1994 was to incorporate the black elite into the socioeconomic system that the white elite had been running for 140 years. It is a formula loaded with conflict in which violence keeps repeating itself." Mbeki does not expect a national "catastrophe" to follow but warned: "There is a lot of popular discontent; you can't say popular discontent is not endemic. The reason why the government reacted the way it did is that they have got to show the poor they can react like the previous regime and crack down on discontent. "We have seen it before with service delivery protests around the country. The difference this time is a lot of people died in one place on the property of a foreign company." Just how far could the rage spill in this, one of the world's most unequal and violent industrial societies? Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, has cast Marikana as a warning, "a bomb waiting to explode". Justice Malala, a political analyst, wrote of the disenfranchised: "It might make many of us quiver with fear, but here is the cold, hard, truth: they will opt out of the current social, economic and political arrangements and they will choose anarchy." Paul Verryn, a Methodist minister visiting Marikana this week where he helped broker talks between striking workers and mine management, said the prospect of more violence "nestles in the consciousness of all of us". He said: "We've got to look very carefully at history. It teaches us that this kind of disparity between rich and poor doesn't go to bed at night. If we don't shift we are preparing ourselves for a revolution." But while the scars of apartheid unquestionably run deep, other voices warn against nihilism. They argue that racial disparities are narrowing due to the growth of a black middle-class and a gradual but discernible increase in black ownership of companies, homes and land. Unlike regimes toppled by the Arab spring, South Africa is a country with robust democratic institutions, courts and civil society. Asked if South Africa was hurtling towards disaster, Sparks said: "I've read that in foreign newspapers for the last 18 years. This is a substantial country, not just a pile of bricks. This is not a country in imminent crisis but it is a country being badly governed, and the constituency that always supported it is losing faith in it." Meanwhile, amid allegations that police in Marikana shot some miners in cold blood or ran over them in armoured vehicles, the strike continues to boil. On Wednesday more than 3,000 workers took to the streets. At the head of the march one man carried a handwritten cardboard sign that read: "Lonmin, who gave you power to kill us on our own land? Protect us Juju [Malema]. One demonstrator said: "We work very hard to earn peanuts. Whenever you enter the [lift] cage you risk your life. If they don't give us 12,500, we'll go back to where we're from and break the bank. We will do whatever we have to do to get money. Even if we have to kill to get money, we'll do it." Asked if he believed whether violence could ever be the answer, the miner replied: "Sometimes violence is the answer."
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