|  |  |  | | | | | The Guardian World News | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | High court clears way for Islamist cleric and four other terrorist suspects to be extradited immediately to the United States The radical cleric Abu Hamza and four other terrorist suspects were last night extradited to the US after the high court cleared the way for their immediate removal. The men were on two planes that left a military airbase in Suffolk late last night, the home secretary, Theresa May, said. Speaking after the US-bound flights had taken off, May said: "I can confirm that tonight two planes have left RAF Mildenhall to transport Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Adel Abdul Bary, Syed Ahsan and Khalid al-Fawwaz to the US to face trial. "I am pleased the decision of the court today meant that these men, who used every available opportunity to frustrate and delay the extradition process over many years, could finally be removed. "This government has co-operated fully with the courts and pressed at every stage to ensure this happened. We have worked tirelessly, alongside the US authorities, the police and the prison service, to put plans in place so that tonight these men could be handed over within hours of the court's decision. It is right that these men, who are all accused of very serious offences, will finally face justice." After three days of legal argument, Sir John Thomas, president of the Queen's Bench division, and Mr Justice Ouseley lifted injunctions that had been preventing the men's removal. The decision is the culmination of an eight-year legal battle that has strained the government's constitutional relationship with the European court of human rights in Strasbourg and frustrated politicians, as well as the lord chief justice. The cases have involved appeals through the hierarchy of British and European courts, then back to the royal courts of justice in London. Delivering judgment, Sir John Thomas said: "All of these claimants have long ago exhausted the [legal] procedures in the UK. There's an overwhelming public interest in the proper functioning of the extradition arrangements in the US. It's important to recognise the finality of these proceedings." Sir John said that extradition proceedings should take months not years and the process had been "disfigured" by protracted delays. "There's no appeal from our decision and the home secretary will be free" to extradite them, he added. Sir John was scathing about the attempt to try to bring a private prosecution against Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan in Britain. "It's now far, far, far too late to raise it now," he said. The use of such a procedure amounted to an "abuse of process". Sir John Thomas also suggested that reform of extradition procedures in future to stop them dragging on for so long. He said: "There may well be a need to reconsider the inter-relationship of the statutory appeal scheme, the ability to reopen appeals and the role of judicial review." The US wants all five men to face al-Qaida-related terrorist charges in American courts. The Home Office reacted immediately to the decision by tweeting: "We welcome the high court decision on Abu Hamza & others. We are now working to extradite these men as quickly as possible." Police vehicles, including armoured vans, arrived at HMP Long Lartin, near Evesham, in Worcestershire at around 6.30pm on Friday. After about an hour, the vehicles, understood to have Hamza and the other men inside, left the prison grounds. Under heavy security, they drove off at speed to RAF Mildenhall. Four of the five men had claimed that harsh prison conditions in the high security unit at the US jail, ADX Florence in Colorado, where they may eventually be imprisoned would breach their human rights. Abu Hamza, it was said, would not have to spend too long at the facility because of hid many medical conditions. Abu Hamza, 54, who was jailed for seven years for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, has been fighting extradition since 2004. His lawyers opposed deportation on the grounds that he was suffering memory loss and depression and was unfit to plead. They sought permission for the former imam at Finsbury Park mosque in north London to be given an MRI scan to assess his medical condition. Ahmad, 37, a computer expert, and Ahsan, 33, are accused of raising funds for terrorism through a website. Lawyers for the two men challenged the director of public prosecution's decision not to charge them with offences allegedly committed in the UK. Fawwaz, who is alleged to have been an aide to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, was seeking disclosure of an 800-page MI6 document relating to the debriefing of another suspect which, his lawyers maintain, would undermine the charges against him. Bary, 52, is also said to have worked closely with Bin Laden. His barrister argued that conditions in US high-security jails would breach his rights under the European convention on human rights – a claim already dismissed by the Strasbourg court. Bary and Fawwaz are wanted in relation to the bombings of US embassies in east Africa in 1998. Protesters opposing deportation and supporting Ahmad and Ahsan gathered outside the royal courts of justice. Lines of police officers watched as protesters chanted: "British justice for British citizens" and waved "Stop extradition" placards. A few wore union flag T-shirts emblazoned with the motto: "Extradite me, I'm British". The US embassy in London welcomed the court's decision and noted that they had submitted the first extradition request 14 years ago: "These extraditions mark the end of a lengthy process of litigation through the UK courts and the European court of human rights." Its statement particularly highlighted the Strasbourg court's finding that conditions in American maximum security facilities did not violate European standards. Babar Ahmad stated: "Today I have lost my eight-year-and-two-month battle against extradition to the US. I would like to thank all those over the years who supported me and my family: lawyers, politicians, journalists and members of the public from all walks of life. "By exposing the fallacy of the UK's extradition arrangements with the US, I leave with my head held high, having won the moral victory." Ashfaq Ahmad, father of Babar Ahmad, stated: "After over 40 years of paying taxes in this country, I am appalled that the system has let me down in a manner more befitting of a third world country than one of the world's oldest democracies. "It seems that the Metropolitan police, the CPS and even the court have all colluded to implement a predetermined decision which was made in Washington. "We will never abandon our struggle for justice and the truth will eventually emerge of what will be for ever remembered as a shameful chapter in the history of Britain."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women: how to spend time with their children without ruining their careers. In an extract from the book The End Of Men, female executives at Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo reveal how they make it work This is how problems are solved in the workplace of the future: Marissa Mayer, at the time the highest-ranking woman at Google, had a bad feeling that one of her top directors, Katy, was going to quit. Katy was hard-working and well liked, but Mayer was picking up rumblings of burnout and resentment. Mayer did not like losing women executives – there were too few to begin with at Google. She figured it was obvious what was causing the strain. Katy was a mother of three, including twins. As the leader of her Google team, she had to participate in a 1am call to Bangalore every night. Mayer assumed that with young children at home who did not necessarily sleep through the night, the calls were putting Katy over the edge. So she decided to intervene. Mayer called Katy in and explained what she calls her "finding your rhythm" philosophy – not an alternative form of birth control but her remedy for burnout. What causes burnout, Mayer believes, is not working too hard – people, she believes, "can work arbitrarily hard for an arbitrary amount of time" – but they will become resentful if work makes them miss the things that really matter to them. The key to sustaining dedication and loyalty is having an employee identify what he or she absolutely cannot tolerate missing, then having the employer accommodate that. Mayer, it turns out, was wrong about the 1am phone calls. Katy loved her job and didn't mind staying up late to help out. What was bothering her was something entirely different. Often, Katy confessed, she showed up late at her children's events because a meeting went on overly long, for no important reason other than meetings tend to. And she hated having her children watch her walk in late. So Mayer instituted a rule: if Katy had told her earlier that she had to leave at four, then Mayer would make sure Katy could leave at four. Even if there were only five minutes left to a meeting, even if Google co-founder Sergey Brin himself was mid-sentence and expecting an answer from Katy, Mayer would say, "Katy's got to go", and Katy would walk out of the door and answer the questions later by email after the kids were in bed. I had always heard that Silicon Valley was the ultimate flexible workplace. When I visited, successful women executives there told me stories that would make jealous anyone struggling to manage a job and a life. As a mother of three, Katie Stanton had found her job at the White House a nightmare. One night at 8pm, her boss called her at home to ask what she was doing out of the office. "Tucking my kids into bed," she answered. "Why, is there an emergency?" her boss asked. Soon after, she quit and went to work for Twitter. As head of international strategy, Stanton asked her new boss if she could leave at five every day – she lives an hour away – and pick up on email again after eight. No problem. "I consider myself incredibly lucky," Stanton says, "because I can do this job really well and have a family." Life for the women I talked to is not exactly perfect; in fact, it sounds exhausting. Stanton works every single week night, and never gets to the gym or goes out with her husband. These women work flexibly, but they work all the time. As Emily White, a Facebook executive, put it to me, "Forget the balance, this is the merge", meaning that work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same 24-hour period. (White came up with this term after she finally managed a night out alone with her husband, and they spent half the dinner staring at their iPhones.) But the work culture is still a revelation. Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, one everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers. The industry has by no means solved the ultimate problem, meaning that there are just as few female heads of companies as there are in any other elite sector. But it gives us a glimpse of the work culture of the future, where face time isn't so relevant and people take it for granted that women – and men – can be really ambitious and manage a life, too. "Your reputation is based on what you've done," White said. "It doesn't really matter what's in your pants." In a chart comparing the "career cost of family" in elite workplaces – meaning the price people pay for taking time off – the economist Claudia Goldin floats the tech companies high above the rest. Women and men there can take time off and not take a big salary hit. Other industries, by contrast, suffer from "inertia" or "resistance to change", Goldin argues: "These more novel industries step in and they suddenly figure out how to do things differently." All the problems companies elsewhere agonise over, the Silicon Valley women seem to workshop informally and on the fly. Worried that the Katy rule stigmatises mothers? Mayer had it apply to everyone. Now one of her young male executives leaves early every Tuesday for his hallowed dinner with his old roommates. Life problems are not all that different from technological ones: with enough creative thinking, anything can be solved. The first female engineer hired at Google, and now the first female CEO of Yahoo, Mayer is something of a legend. She got her master's from Stanford in computer science with a speciality in artificial intelligence, and is so intense in even casual conversation that I found myself tracking whether she ever blinks. She is also tall and blond, and regularly appears in society blogs at fancy parties on the arm of her entrepreneur husband, with whom she is expecting her first child. She is well aware that she is an unusual package, and has embraced the extra task of being a role model for aspiring girl geeks everywhere: "I do think it's important for girls especially to know that there is not one way to break through. You can be into fashion and be a geek and a good coder," she says. "You don't have to give up what you love." But try to draw Mayer into the morass of issues around discrimination and she'll resist. Why aren't there more female computer science graduates, for example? "I am much less worried about adjusting the percentage than about growing the overall pie," she says. "We are not producing enough men or women who know how to programme." The women of Silicon Valley do not live in such a shiny, detached bubble that they don't recognise sexism. You would have to be blind to walk through the offices of Facebook or Google every day and not notice the sea of mostly male programmers, or the "frat house", as Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, calls it. These women don't deny sexism, but rather will themselves to ignore it so they can get their work done. Their attitude is neither idealistic nor defiant, but highly practical: better just to workshop these situations one by one, like so many coding glitches, one de-gendered brain to another. At the start of the millennium, researchers began to puzzle over why women's earnings seemed to be levelling off. Women were still graduating from college at greater rates than men, still flooding lucrative jobs, but their earnings, especially at the top, had stalled. Economist Linda Babcock hit upon a fairly simple explanation when directing the PhD programme at Carnegie Mellon University. A group of female graduate students came in to complain that they were stuck teaching for other faculty while the men got to teach their own classes. Babcock tracked down the dean in charge to ask him about it. The women, he told her, "just don't ask", so they don't get assigned their own classes. Babcock wondered if this might be true in other areas of their lives, so she ran an experiment with Carnegie Mellon alumni who'd recently graduated with master's degrees, asking them about starting salaries in their new jobs. It turned out that 57% of the men had negotiated their starting salaries, while only 7% of the women had, even though the school's career services department strongly advised negotiation. As a result, men had starting salaries that averaged 7.6% higher than women's. Babcock is an economist, so she worked this out to its logical conclusion: even if a man never asked for a raise again and he and his female counterpart both got 3% raises for the rest of their careers, the man's 7.4% higher starting salary would make him half a million dollars richer than her by the time they reached retirement age. Women weren't bad at negotiating in general – on behalf of the company, say, or for their children or friends – but they were reluctant to negotiate for themselves. They seemed to assume that if they worked hard, the proper rewards would come their way. Babcock's research helped spawn an industry of advice books intended to toughen women up: Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office; Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman; Stop Sabotaging Your Career. But the academic research was taking a curious turn. Study after study found that women who did not conform to female stereotypes – who bluntly asked for a raise, self-promoted or demanded credit for work they'd done – paid a high price in the workplace. People judged them as harsh or unpleasant, and didn't want to work with them. Researchers tested different workplace scenarios, always with the same result: women who speak aggressively get lower marks than women who speak tentatively. Women who self-promote are judged to lack social skills. Ditto for women who express any kind of anger in the workplace. In one scenario, some colleagues were about to go to an office party when another showed up in a last-minute panic over a broken photocopier. He needed help manually stapling 500 sets of the pages he had copied. The women who said no and went off to the party were marked down. Men who did the same were not judged at all. For men, behaving in a friendly, communal way was optional. For women, it was mandatory. Perhaps the most dispiriting experiment was conducted in 2004 by Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University. Heilman handed out a packet giving background information about a certain employee who was an assistant vice-president in an aircraft company. In some cases, the employee was described as not yet having received a performance review. In other cases, the employee had gone through the review and been deemed a "stellar performer" or a "rising star". The only other difference was that in some cases, the employee described in the packets was "Andrea" and in others "James". Among those who believed the employee had not yet received a review, Andrea and James were judged equally. But among those to whom the employee had been described as a "rising star", there were vast differences in response. People judged rising star Andrea as far less likable and far more hostile than James; in fact, the Andreas were judged to be "downright uncivil", Heilman says, even though there was no information provided to support that view. Subjects merely assumed that "Andrea" must have done some nasty things along the way in order to break through in such a male-dominated field. A few years later, Heilman repeated the Andrea/James experiment, only this time she added extra descriptions. Andrea/James "demands a lot from her/his employees" but is "caring and sensitive to their needs" or "fair-minded" or encourages "cooperation and helpful behaviour". Any of these three descriptions did the trick for Andrea, making subjects like her as much, be happy to have her as a boss and consider her competent. In 2011, researcher Hannah Riley Bowles, working with Babcock, picked the simple scenario of an employee receiving a job offer, then asking for a higher salary. Each subject saw a video of different employees, played by actors, asking for a raise using a different script. Her working hypothesis was that, to be successful, the performance had to fulfil two different criteria: it had to be girlish enough not to trigger a backlash, but aggressive enough to convince the research subjects that the woman should be given a raise. "I think I should be paid at the top of that range. I'd also like to be eligible for an end-of-year bonus." No. Too aggressive. "I hope it's OK to ask you about this. I'd feel terrible if I offended you in doing so." No again. Too girlish. "I don't know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate, but I'm hopeful that you'll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job." Bingo. When the actor used this script, research subjects were willing both to work with the woman and to give her a raise. The key was to meet the stereotype halfway. The woman was polite, but firm. And they accepted her advocating for herself when she portrayed her needs as aligned with those of the company. She could negotiate for herself in order to prove she could negotiate for the company later. The formula is maddening in its tightrope specificity and insulting in the capitulation it requires, Bowles admits: "If we could change the results of our experiments, we would choose a more liberating message." But it is also pragmatic and, in its own way, liberating. When women negotiate, emotions tend to get in the way: excess humility, shame, resentment, outrage. Those feelings are not so helpful in building a reasonable case. The Bowles strategy gives women something else to focus on, something that may even fall more in their comfort zone: creating a convincing narrative that explains why her own needs match up with the company's. Facebook executive Sandberg's version of the script goes something like: "You realise you are hiring me to run the business development team, so you want me to be a good negotiator. Well, here goes. I am about to negotiate." Sandberg is friends with the feminist Gloria Steinem and they have a long-standing disagreement about this pragmatic approach. "But I say, you have to put your ego aside and play by the rules so you can get to the top and change things. Look, here I am at Facebook, in a position to institute five months of paid maternity and paternity leave. Isn't that worth it?" Emily White is one of Sandberg's protegees and has reluctantly adopted the mandate that she play by the rules as well. "I am a really aggressive person," White says. " I have strong views, I'm very competitive and I expect people around me to be the same way. But I've definitely tried to change my style and hold my tongue more. I always ask for other people's opinions even when I don't care about their opinions. And I hedge a lot more and use softer language." Then she adds, "It drives me nuts. I'm not sure how long I can keep it up." From White's resentful attitude about the forced makeover, you get the hopeful feeling that this painful transition phase won't last for ever, that we are closer to the tipping point than we realise and one day soon there will be enough Whites in power that they won't have to tread so lightly any more. One would expect that a powerful woman would downplay her husband's role in her success. But in a new twist on an old trope, the powerful women I spoke to all admitted being utterly dependent on their husbands. White's husband runs a private equity firm, which is a demanding job but still leaves him more space than she has. He now "does the majority of house stuff", White says – paying bills, fixing leaks, getting dinner, planning the rare vacations. She takes their child to school in the morning, but he does the evening nanny handover – "Arguably the bigger sacrifice" – so she can work later. White's experience has left her with the impression that "the men around here" – meaning in Silicon Valley – "are becoming more comfortable with all that. There's no shame if you're the one doing more of the childcare." Sandberg reframed the issue of women and work in her 2010 TED talk with the memorable phrase, "Don't leave before you leave." The phrase was attached to a story about a young woman at Facebook who came into her office agonised about how she would balance work and a child. The woman looked very young, so Sandberg asked her, "Are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" It turned out the woman didn't even have a boyfriend. She was just doing that thing young women tend to do, which is hesitate before she'd even got started. "I watch it all day long," Sandberg told me. "Women are making room for kids they don't have, years before they try to get pregnant. Then, when they do get pregnant, they would be coming back to a job they no longer want." The men, meanwhile, are "super-aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. 'Can I do that? Can I lead this?' They don't have to be talked into things." Recently, Sandberg offered a woman a new job in business development. The woman came into her office worried that she might not be able to handle it. Why, Sandberg asked. She was pregnant, the woman confessed. "Congratulations," Sandberg said. "That's all the more reason for you to take this job. Then you'll have something exciting to come back to." The logic is, it's hard to leave for work in the morning when your toddler is clinging to your leg, so what's at the other side of that had better be pretty compelling or you'll just give up. Sallie Krawcheck, a former Bank of America and Citigroup executive, has seen plenty of Wall Street women succumb to the temptation to jump ship. They make it through their first career plateau, where they don't get promoted or don't like a boss, then a few years later they hit a second one. "The men continue to make it through, but I've seen numerous women who at that point say, 'I'm out. It's not worth it. I have two beautiful children at home, and it's socially acceptable to be home. It's more fun at home.'" But, she adds, "If we can get women past their second career plateau, you'll find more making their way to the top – because it does get a lot easier when the kids are in school. It's a lot easier for me, with kids who are 12 and 14, than when they were four and six." A recent McKinsey survey on women and the economy uncovered an admirable and also frustrating trait common to women. Much more than men, women tend to derive their satisfaction and moral identity from aspects of work – and life – that are unrelated to promotion. Women stay at jobs rather than move up to new ones because they might "derive a deep sense of meaning professionally", the report concluded. They don't necessarily want to "trade that joy for what they fear will be the energy-draining meetings and corporate politics" that come with a bigger title. I asked Sandberg about this. What if it's innate that women are allergic to a certain kind of ambition? "I think it might be innate and I still don't care," she said. "We need to get over it. We might be biologically programmed to get obese, but we don't give in to that." Sandberg has been accused of blaming women for not advancing more quickly, of being blind to the realities of the average working woman (she stands to gain $1.6bn in the Facebook stock market launch). But this is a narrow reading of the situation. If Sandberg is watching over Facebook's maternity leave policy, the receptionist has as much to gain from that as Sandberg does. If women want the future to contain fewer energy-draining meetings and a more family-friendly workplace, we need more women to make it to Sandberg's level. Not just for her benefit, but for the millions of women who have a lot less power to make demands. You need women at the top to remake the workplace in their own image. • This is an edited extract from The End of Men: And The Rise Of Women, by Hannah Rosin, published next week in paperback by Viking at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, including free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | China Labor Watch says up to 4,000 employees walked out in Zhengzhou after Foxconn and Apple 'raised overly strict demands' Thousands of workers at Foxconn in China have gone on strike over working conditions related to production of the iPhone 5. Three to four thousand employees walked out of Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory on Friday, according to China Labor Watch. It said Foxconn and Apple had "raised overly strict demands on product quality" without providing adequate training. The strike comes just weeks after Foxconn was forced to close a plant in Taiyuan, when a brawl involving as many as 2,000 workers left a number of people needing hospital treatment. China Labor Watch, a labor rights group which monitors factory conditions in China, said Friday's strike came after Foxconn and Apple introduced new quality controls, while at the same time Foxconn forced employees to work during a public holiday. "Foxconn raised overly strict demands on product quality without providing worker training for the corresponding skills. This led to workers turning out products that did not meet standards, and ultimately put a tremendous amount of pressure on workers," China Labor Watch said in a statement. The organisation said the new quality demands led to workers turning out products that did not meet production standard, placing "a tremendous amount of pressure on workers". "Additionally, quality control inspectors fell into to conflicts with workers and were beaten up multiple times by workers. Factory management turned a deaf ear to complaints about these conflicts and took no corrective measures." The majority of Foxconn employees taking part in the strike worked on the "onsite quality control line", according to China Labor Watch. It said the strike meant iPhone 5 production lines were "in a state of paralysis for the entire day". The organisation said Apple was involved in some of the reasons for the dispute, pressing ahead with production demands despite design problems. The new quality demands included "indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers" China Labor Watch said. It said the pressure of the new quality demands, coupled with workers not being permitted to take vacation during a recent holiday period, had led to the strike. "This strike is a result of the fact that these workers just have too much pressure," said CLW executive director Li Qiang. In September Foxconn was forced to shut a plant in Taiyuan, northern China, after a mass brawl. As many as 2,000 workers were said to have been involved in the violence, with pictures showing smashed windows and riot police at the site. Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the pressure group China Labor Bulletin, said at the time that Foxconn workers were becoming increasingly emboldened. "They're more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice," he said.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Twelve more patients struck down with illness as clinics face questions of buying steroids from Massachusetts firm The number of people in the US confirmed to have been infected by meningitis from a contaminated steroid injection increased on Friday to 47, as clinics faced questions about buying from an unaccredited firm with a history of violating safety standards. As hospitals rushed to trace patients who may have been given the steroid, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there had been no new fatalities but that a further 12 patients had been struck down by illness. Five people have died after being infected by the rare form of fungal meningitis. Health officials have traced the outbreak to the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, which sent out more than 17,000 doses of contaminated steroid injections. Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration who were sent to the firm after the outbreak found a fungal contaminate in a sealed vial of the steroid, methylprednisolone acetate. They also found a "foreign material" in another, opened container. Tests are being conducted to determine if the contaminants match the one that has led to recent cases of meningitis. On Friday, the Guardian made repeated calls to the homes of the owner of New England Compounding Center and its president. All such calls went unanswered and the company's website had been taken down. A history of failings at the company has emerged. The New York Times quoted Dr Madeleine Biondolillo, director of the Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, as saying that complaints had been registered against the company in 2002 and 2003 and earlier this year. A 2006 warning letter from the FDA to company boss Barry Cadden cited a string of health and safety violations. They included the misbranding of drugs and the copying of FDA-approved, commercially available products. Investigators expressed special concern over the company's practice of splitting an injectable drug, Avastin, into multiple doses to be sold on. The move could lead to "potential microbial contamination", the letter said. The FDA also noted that Avastin is approved only for use in treatment of colorectal cancers. New England Compounding Center was marketing the drug to ophthalmologists, despite it having "no approved indications for use in the eye". Mr Cadden was warned: "Your firm is distributing an unapproved new drug." But despite such violations of health and safety standards, the firm continued to operate. Compounding pharmacists have long been on the radar of federal regulators. In a 2007 document, the FDA said it was scrutinising the industry "mainly because of instances where compounded drugs have endangered public health". Compounding pharmacists mix or alter ingredients according to the needs of individual patients. "In its traditional form, pharmacy compounding is a vital service that helps many people, including those who are allergic to inactive ingredients in FDA-approved medicines, and others who need medications that are not available commercially," Kathleen Anderson, then the deputy director of the FDA's division of new drugs and labelling compliance, stated in the 2007 public health information document. However, the compounds produced are not FDA-approved. Moreover, poor practice can lead to contamination, as seems to be the case in the latest meningitis outbreak. Such infections have led to deaths and injury. In 2006, three patients died due to contaminated solutions that had been used to paralyse the heart during open-heart surgery. In 2005, at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Washington DC, two people were blinded by bacteria in a batch of drugs used during cataract operations. In 2011, nine patients at hospitals in Alabama died after receiving intravenous nutritional supplements that were infected with a lethal bacteria. It had been prepared by a pharmacy compounder in Birmingham. Defenders of the practice have suggested that rogue operators are to blame and that in the latest outbreak, regulators and the clinics affected could be at fault. David Miller, executive vice president and chief executive of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, said that the New England Compounding Center was not accredited and had been guilty of past health violations. He also said that the large quantity of doses prepared by the firm seemed to put it at odds with rest of the industry. "There were more than 17,000 doses put together by the pharmacy. How is it possible they had 17,000 individual doses? It looks like there were working with the drug manufacturers. If that was how it was being done, that is in contrast to traditional compounding," said Miller, whose body represents more than 2,700 compounding pharmacists across the US. Miller also questioned why clinics in states as far away as Tennessee and Florida were using drugs that had been prepared in Massachusetts. "Something doesn't feel right," he said. "The more you look at this the more questions come up – this was not a traditional pharmaceutical compounder. It doesn't make sense. We do not know why there are buying from this pharmacist. Was it price? What due diligence did the clinics do to make sure it was licensed and accredited, which it was not?" Miller rejected claims that regulation of the industry needs to be tightened up. He said: "Compounding pharmacists, just like all other pharmacists in the US, are regulated by three different government agencies: the state board of pharmacies, the FDA and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]. There is plenty of regulation. The question that needs to be answered is whether or not this pharmacist was in compliance with state and federal laws." Only one of the clinics affected in the latest outbreak returned the Guardian's phone calls on Friday, to explain why it bought drugs from a compounder, rather than from bigger pharmaceutical companies. A representative from Greenspring Surgery Centre in Maryland – which is contacting patients it knows to have been given steroids from the Massacusetts firm – said it bought from compounders "because sometimes there are formulations of medications that are unavailable commercially. This is a commercial product. But whether you buy it from a large or a small company, they all have the same standards that have to be met." Asked if there was a cost consideration, the spokesman, who declined to be identified, said: "Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. In this case there wasn't, it was actually an availability issue and an issue of having the right medication, the right dosage. "There has been a scarcity of multiple medications over the last couple of years and that has created a need to reach out to multiple suppliers."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Rolling report: St Louis Cardinals visit Atlanta Braves for the National League Wild Card Game
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Aided by a controversial call, the St Louis Cardinals defeated the Atlanta Braves this evening and will face the Washington Nationals in the NLDS
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Romney's denunciation of his own '47%' comments the latest in a series of sharp changes of tack that has Obama wobbling It has taken longer than expected to come about, but Mitt Romney has finally taken the advice of his chief aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, and turned his campaign for the US presidency into an Etch A Sketch. As Fehrnstrom famously put it back in March: "You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again." In the first presidential TV debate with President Obama on Wednesday night, and in subsequent media appearances, the former governor of Massachusetts has made several sharp changes in tack that have left seasoned Romney observers flabbergasted. The most dramatic was on Thursday night, when during an interview on Fox News he completely denounced his own notorious comments in a private fundraiser that 47% of the American people were dependent on government. In the firestorm that followed Mother Jones's publication of the remarks, Romney tried to stand by them, saying they were correct albeit inelegantly put. But on Thursday night he ditched them entirely, saying: "In this case, I said something that's just completely wrong." The U-turn was in the spirit of his performance in the previous night's presidential debate, in which he displayed similarly breathtaking revisions to policy positions that he has been projecting on the campaign trail for at least 18 months. On tax, having spent the entire Republican primary season trying to convince the fiscally conservative Tea Party that he could be trusted to cut taxes for all Americans including the super-rich, he said: "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people [who are] doing just fine." Having spent months attacking government red tape for cramping the creativity of the free market, he announced that he now believed that: "Regulation is essential. You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation." And having tub-thumped consistently on the campaign trail against Obamacare, he attempted to embrace the most popular aspects of the Affordable Health Care Act. "I do have a plan that deals with people with pre-existing conditions," he said, referring to the provision in the legislation that prevents insurance companies rejecting such patients. He even praised his own healthcare reforms in Massachusetts as a "model for the nation, state by state". In the past, Romney has tended to avoid talking about his healthcare record as governor because it is seen by many arch conservatives as evidence of his closet liberal tendencies. Obama has been criticised by pundits of both left and right for failing to point out his opponent's nimble footwork on Wednesday night. But he's been trying to make up for the omission in speeches delivered since. At a rally in Fairfax Virginia on Friday morning, Obama accused Romney of "trying to do a two-step, to have an extreme makeover". Political observers have reacted to Romney's energetic shift to the centre with surprise; not that he has made the move in itself, but that he has made it so late in the election cycle. The political analyst Larry Sabato said: "Romney has completely ignored until now Richard Nixon's advice – go right for the primary season and then scramble back to the middle for the general election. He is only now scrambling back." Michael Wissot, a senior strategist with Luntz Global, who advised John McCain in his presidential run against Obama in 2008, said: "I am very surprised that this strategy has been put into place so late. As governor he had a very strong record of bi-partisanship in Massachusetts where he courted Democrats to achieve results." One explanation for the time delay between Fehrnstrom's hailing of Romney the Etch A Sketch six months ago and the emergence of such a candidate just four weeks before election day has been his persistent difficulties with his own Republican base. He has struggled to convince rightwing conservatives who hold sway at many levels of the party that he can be trusted to carry their convictions into the White House should he win on 6 November. But there are signs that following his confident and assertive performance at the first debate, the doubters are finally coming on board. William Kristol, editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard and a long-time critic of Romney, conceded after the debate that there was a need for him to be "somewhat reassuring about what he would do as president, which is important for independent swing voters who are not 100% behind the conservative agenda". That other thorn in Romney's side, Rush Limbaugh, gushed that "this was one of the best debate performances in my life". Erik Erickson, editor of the blog Red State, tweeted the day after the debate: "Mitt Romney may be an Etch a Sketch, but it beats the hell out of Obama's whack-a-mole from last night."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Turkish media says deal struck in wake of this week's deadly border shelling incident which killed five Turkish civilians Syria has agreed to keep its forces six miles (10km) back from the Turkish border in the wake of this week's deadly shelling incident, Turkish media has reported. Such a move would amount to a buffer zone – fulfilling a long-standing request by Syrian opposition groups that would allow rebels to operate freely and civilians to seek refuge. Syria has not confirmed the claim and Ankara has made no official announcement. However, several Turkish media outlets, citing well-placed sources, claimed a deal had been struck. Opposition groups have implored Turkey and the international community to establish an area in which they can move without fear of jets and helicopters, claiming it would be a significant step in their 19-month battle to oust the regime of Bashar al-Assad. However the demands have been rejected by Ankara, as well as the US and Nato, who have all repeatedly baulked at suggestions that they directly intervene in the conflict. A buffer zone would not be effective unless it was enforced militarily, something that Turkey has so far been unwilling to do. However, the Syrian shelling of the Turkish border town of Akcacle has sparked Ankara to re-calibrate its military options to deal with the gathering crisis across its southern border. The Turkish parliament on Thursday approved a bill allowing its military to launch cross-border raids into Syria at any point in the next 12 months. Prime Minister Recap Erdogan said on Friday that Turkey was not pushing for an escalation with its once close ally. "We are not interested in war," he said in Istanbul. "But we're not far from it either." Syria has said it is waiting for the results of an investigation before publicly acknowledging blame for the shelling, which killed five Turkish civilians and wounded nine more. However, it has privately conceded that it was at fault and did not respond to a barrage of retaliatory Turkish shellfire, which is believed to have killed several Syrian soldiers. The Syrian air force continued to pound Aleppo on Friday, and reportedly launched its heaviest raids over the city of Homs in the past five months. Video footage uploaded to the internet on Thursday appeared to show a military helicopter being struck then crashing to the ground over Damascus, not far from where rebels claimed earlier on Friday to have seized control of a missile base.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | President's government is blamed for mismanagement and incompetence as rial hits all-time low Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has survived many crises during his seven years in office, both at home and abroad. But fears over the country's crumbling economy, which have exposed the extent of internal divisions at the top of the Islamic republic, could signal the beginning of the end. Ahmadinejad has been left increasingly marginalised as the country's currency has plummeted, with analysts speculating that he is being used by his former allies as a scapegoat for the regime's problems. With the rial reaching an all-time low this week, Ahmadinejad has been roundly rebuffed by his opponents, who blame his government for mismanagement and economic incompetence. The currency has lost a third of its value in a week, with the dollar now three times stronger against it than early last year. At a press conference in Tehran this week, Ahmadinejad made a speech which highlighted the power struggle between his supporters and his conservative rivals in the parliament and the judiciary. The president defended his economic policies and blamed the plummeting value of the rial both on western sanctions and a "propaganda campaign" perpetrated by his opponents at home. Ahmadinejad's words widened the internal rift, prompting many of his parliamentary rivals – who form an overwhelming majority – to launch the strongest attack on him by regime insiders so far. Abbas Rajaei, an MP for the central city of Arak, accused the president of "lying vividly to the people", and Kamalodin Pirmoazen, another parliamentarian, said he was inciting discontent among Iranians towards their officials. The influential MP Ali Motahari, an outspoken critic of Ahmadinejad, has also recently said that the president should not remain in presidential office "even for another single day". These remarks echoed what the Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both currently under house arrest, said in 2009 when Ahmadinejad took office for a second term amid unrest and allegations of fraud. They are the latest signs that Ahmadinejad, who has suffered a series of setbacks in his ongoing feud with the conservatives, has lost a great deal of his influence in the country – although he is still able to grab headlines abroad. Last week, while he was addressing the UN general assembly, his media adviser, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, was taken to Tehran's Evin prison. Ahmadinejad suggested this week that he wanted to inspect the prison, but authorities signalled that he would not be welcome. It did not help that Tehran's Grand Bazaar, the heartbeat of the capital's economy, also went on strike and hundreds of protesters took to the streets, chanting anti-government slogans that described the president as a traitor". Iranian state TV, which rarely reflects public anger about the regime, reported the closure of the bazaar and the discontent about the devaluation of currency. Analysts saw it as a sign that pressure is mounting on the president. Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of political science at Tehran University, said Ahmadinejad was increasingly becoming a "lame duck". Zibakalam said Ahmadinejad was being used as a scapegoat by many of the same people who were his supporters in the past. "Ahmadinejad's economic policies are not new. They have been in place from the beginning. If there's a failure, it's not limited to Ahmadinejad. The leadership of fundamentalists should be held responsible too." Fundamentalists, who are believed to be close to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have accused Ahmadinejad and his allies, including his controversial chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, of attempting to undermine clerical power and advocating nationalism and greater cultural openness. "Ahmadinejad and Mashaei don't think they need to obey clerical power. They both have not been loyal enough to the supreme leader," said Zibakalam. He predicted that Ahmadinejad, who cannot run for a third time under Iranian law, would not be able to ensure the election of one of his allies in the 2013 vote. Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, said that some of the slogans used by protesters this week showed that the crisis was "much more deep-rooted" and had wider political implications. "Now the endemic factionalism [in Iran] will try to ride on this crisis, as the Islamic Republic is gearing up for the next presidential election. The conservatives will happily blame Ahmadinejad for everything," he said. "And if [the former president Mohammad] Khatami plays his historic role of warming up the otherwise depleted political energy of the Islamic Republic, they may actually manage to regenerate some political legitimacy for the ruling regime."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | German chancellor is due in Athens next Tuesday, and big demonstrations are expected
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Move to appease Jewish and Muslim communities comes after a German court ruled circumcision was tantamount to bodily harm Germany is poised to introduce a law that will allow parents to choose whether their sons are circumcised. The move is an attempt to appease the Jewish and Muslim communities angered by a court ruling in June that in effect outlawed the practice. The cabinet is expected to adopt the bill next week to clarify the law after the court in Cologne ruled that carrying out the religious tradition on boys was tantamount to bodily harm. "It is a clear political signal that Jews and Muslims continue to be welcome in Germany," said Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in a statement. "We are glad that Jewish laws, and with it Jewish life, will not be deemed illegal – legal certainty in this case means safeguarding the future of Judaism in Germany." The draft of the bill allows circumcision to be carried out on boys up to six months old by a doctor or someone as "skilled as a doctor". Although the religious practice is also carried out by many Muslims, the row has largely centred on the Jewish community, which has been angered by the debate. "Why should people say how I should live my religion?" said Walter Rothschild, chief rabbi of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, adding that he did not blame the government. "Politicians didn't want this fight," he added. "It was the last thing they wanted." Members of the Jewish community said the debate had made many feel unwelcome in Germany, which has been exacerbated by recent attacks on prominent Jews in past weeks. Although the federal ministry of justice was not able to confirm when the bill would be adopted, a spokesman said it was likely to be on Wednesday, with the first reading due to take place in parliament in November.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | American, 23, reportedly stole a gun from a hotel security guard before killing a hotel employee in resort city of Eilat A young American shot and killed a chef at a hotel in the Red Sea resort city of Eilat Friday, before forces from an anti-terror unit shot the gunman dead, police said. The incident appeared to be based on a personal dispute. The attacker was on a Jewish work and study program and was employed at the hotel until earlier this week. Eilat police official Eitan Gedassis told Israel Radio the attacker snatched a gun from a hotel security guard and fired a number of shots at the Leonardo Club hotel in the Red Sea resort city, killing the chef. Police and army anti-terror units stormed the hotel, and the gunman fired back from the hotel kitchen, Gedassis said. Forces from the army's anti-terror unit returned fire, killing the attacker, said a spokeswoman for the Israeli military. The gunman was a 23-year-old Jewish man from New York. He was participating in a program that brings Jews to Israel for work and studies, said Ofer Gutman, head of the Oranim program, which is sponsored partially by the Israeli government. "He was a normal guy," Gutman told the Associated Press. "There was nothing that indicated what would happen in the end." Gutman declined to give the attacker's name. Gutman spoke by telephone before boarding a flight to Eilat, where he hoped to calm the gunman's fellow program participants. "It's terrible what happened," he said. The man arrived in Israel about two months ago on the Oranim program, combining Hebrew study, travel and work in an Eilat hotel along with a university course on hotel management, Gutman said. On Tuesday, the hotel and the program decided, together with the man, to terminate his work at the hotel, and the Oranim staff was planning to reassign him to another workplace, Gutman said. Gutman did not say why it was decided to end his work at the hotel, but said participants sometimes transfer to other workplaces based on their personal preferences. Israeli media reported that the man the gunman killed was a hotel employee who had argued with him. Police could not immediately verify that account. Zaki Heller, a spokesman for Israel's rescue service, told Israel's Channel 2 TV the victim was a man in his 50s. Police said he was a hotel chef. His name was not released. Israel Radio reported that the gunman ran into the lobby and fired a shot in the air, then ran through the dining room as hotel guests dived under tables. Michal Bouaron, a guest at the hotel, told Channel 2 that police ordered guests to stay in their rooms during the incident. Later, police announced that it was safe for guests to leave their rooms. "Everyone left here happy, clapping," Bouaron said. "There was a lot of tension." She added, "Life goes on ... We won't let this ruin our day and our vacation." The hotel is filled to capacity, Israeli media reported, because of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, when many Israelis take vacations. Eilat, with attractive Red Sea beaches and hot, dry weather, is a favorite getaway spot for Israelis.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | German chancellor is due in Athens next Tuesday, and big demonstrations are expected
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Jedi acorn worm joins a horse fly named after Beyoncé and a trio of slime mold beetles named after Republicans A worm from an ecosystem far, far away has been named after the Star Wars character Yoda. Yoda purpurata is one of three new species of deep-sea acorn worms discovered 1.5 miles beneath the Atlantic. Scientists coined the genus name because the large lips on either side of the creature's head reminded them of the Jedi master's floppy ears. The creature is a dark reddish-purple – hence the other part of the worm's name, which is Latin for purple. The Yoda worm, technically known as an enteropneust, is described in the latest issue of the journal Invertebrate Biology. A remotely operated submersible collected the specimen during a research mission along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Iceland and the Azores. Professor Monty Priede, from the University of Aberdeen, said: "Our colleague in California, Nick Holland, the world authority on enteropneusts, chose the name Yoda for the new genus characterised by its large, ear-like lips. There is much interest in acorn worms from the point of view of understanding the early evolution of the vertebrates. Whilst they are not strictly a missing link in our own evolution, they give an insight into what the lifestyle of our remote ancestors might have been like." The pint-sized Star Wars character joins a long list of other famous people and characters who have had a new species named after them, including a fish parasite named after Bob Marley; a horse fly named after Beyoncé and a trio of slime-mold beetles named after George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | High court clears way for Islamist cleric and four other terrorist suspects to be extradited immediately to the United States The high court has finally cleared the way for the immediate extradition of the radical cleric Abu Hamza and four other terrorist suspects to the United States. After three days of legal argument, Sir John Thomas, president of the Queen's Bench division, and Mr Justice Ouseley lifted injunctions that had been preventing their removal. The decision is the culmination of an eight-year legal battle that has strained the government's constitutional relationship with the European court of human rights in Strasbourg and frustrated politicians, as well as the Lord Chief Justice. The cases of Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary have involved appeals up through the hierarchy of British and European courts then back to the royal courts of justice in London. The US wants all five men to face al-Qaida-related terrorist charges in American courts. The Home Office reacted immediately to the decision by tweeting: "We welcome the high court decision on Abu Hamza & others. We are now working to extradite these men as quickly as possible." It is possible the men, who are at Long Lartin prison, near Evesham, could be on a plane within hours. Thomas said: "Their extradition to the USA may proceed immediately." Abu Hamza, 54, who was jailed for seven years for soliciting to murder and inciting racial hatred, has been fighting extradition since 2004. His lawyers opposed deportation on the grounds that he was suffering memory loss and depression and was unfit to plead. They sought permission for the former imam at Finsbury Park mosque in north London to be given an MRI scan to assess his medical condition. Ahmad, 37, a computer expert, and Ahsan, 33, are accused of raising funds for terrorism through a website. Lawyers for the two men challenged the director of public prosecution's decision not to charge them with offences allegedly committed in the UK. Fawwaz, alleged to have been an aide to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, was seeking disclosure of an 800-page MI6 document relating to the debriefing of another suspect which, his lawyers maintain, would undermine the charges against him. Bary, 52, is also said to have worked closely with Bin Laden. In court, his barrister argued that conditions in American high-security jails would breach his rights under the European convention of human rights — a claim already dismissed by the Strasbourg court. Both Bary and Fawwaz are wanted in relation to the bombings of US embassies in east Africa in 1998. Protesters opposing deportation and supporting Ahmad and Ahsan gathered outside the royal courts of justice. Lines of police officers watched as they chanted: "British justice for British citizens", and waved "Stop extradition" placards. A few wore union flag T-shirts emblazoned with the motto: "Extradite me, I'm British".
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | US economy added 114,000 jobs last month as unemployment falls to 7.8%, the lowest level since Obama took office Barack Obama's hopes of holding on to the White House have received a major boost from new figures showing that the US unemployment rate has dropped below 8% for the first time since he took office in January 2009. The US added 114,000 new jobs in September, in line with expectations. But August's disappointing jobs figure was dramatically revised upwards from 96,000 to 142,000, helping to bring the unemployment rate down to 7.8%. Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, described the report as "pretty darn good". Greenhaus highlighted the fact that the total number of employed persons rose by "a whopping" 873,000 while the number of unemployed persons declined by 456,000, the largest increase in employment since January 2003. The news could not have been better timed for Obama, whose re-election campaign has been rattled in recent days by his perceived weak performance in his first debate with rival Mitt Romney. The report contained good news for many voters in key demographics being targeted ahead of the election. The unemployment rates for adult men is now 7.3%, for adult women it was 7%. But problems remain. September's unemployment rate for teenagers was 23.7% and there was little change for black Americans (13.4%) or Hispanics (9.9%). The number of people working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job rose from 8 million in August to 8.6 million in September. "This is not what a real recovery looks like," Romney said in a statement. "We created fewer jobs in September than in August, and fewer jobs in August than in July, and we've lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs since president Obama took office." He added: "The results of President Obama's failed policies are staggering – 23 million Americans struggling for work, nearly one in six living in poverty and 47 million people dependent on food stamps to feed themselves and their families. The Republican House speaker John Boehner also noted the figures are too high but, unusually, acknowledged there was some good news too. "While there is positive news in today's report, job creation is far too slow and the unemployment rate is far too high." Conservative business guru Jack Welch, former boss of General Electric, went as far as accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the books. "Unbelievable jobs numbers… these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," he said on Twitter. The monthly jobs report has become a political hotspot on the 2012 election. Last month's disappointing figures came as the Democrat's wrapped up their convention in Charlotte. "If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover," Romney said in a statement. While Obama can now point to 24 consecutive months of growth, the Republicans argue the rate remains historically weak. An increase of 114,000 barely covers population growth in the US as new entrants come into the job market. Geoff Hoffmann of recruitment firm DHR International said employers were growing increasingly confident but a lot of uncertainty remained. "There's uncertainty about the impact of healthcare legislation, tax impacts, it's not really clear what is going to happen in 2013 and beyond," he said. Hoffmann said recovery was taking place in industries like technology, life sciences and that consumer and retail recruitment were doing "surprisingly well". But industries like financial services were still lagging after the financial crisis. Greenhaus said the report was "95% better than expected" but warned that slow growth could still come back to bite the recovery in the jobs market. The US recently cut its forecasts for gross domestic product – the widest measure of economic growth - after a sharp fall in manufacturing orders. "You can't have jobs growth without economic growth," he said.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Unemployment falls to lowest rate of Obama's presidency in major election boost as number of jobs added is revised upward The US unemployment rate fell to 7.8% last month, dropping below 8% for the first time in nearly four years. The rate declined because more people found work, a trend that could have an impact on undecided voters in the final month before the presidential election. Both campaigns were watching the monthly reports closely, but neither appeared to react publicly in the first few minutes after Friday's news. The labor department said employers added 114,000 jobs in September. The economy also created 86,000 more jobs in July and August than first estimated. Wages rose in September and more people started looking for work. The revisions show employers added 146,000 jobs per month from July through September, up from 67,000 in the previous three months. The unemployment rate fell from 8.1% in August, matching its level in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office. The decline could help Obama, who is coming off a disappointing debate performance against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Stock futures rose modestly after the report. Dow Jones industrial average futures, up 30 points just before the report came out, were up 45 points after it was released. The yield on the 10-year US treasury note climbed to 1.73% from 1.68% just before the report, a sign that investors were more willing to embrace risk and move money from bonds into stocks. The job market has been improving, sluggishly but steadily. Jobs have been added for 24 straight months. There are now 325,000 more than when Obama took office. The September gains were led by the health care industry, which added 44,000 jobs the most since February. Transportation and warehousing also showed large gains. The revisions showed that governments actually added 63,000 jobs in July and August, compared with earlier estimates that showed losses. Still, many of the jobs added last month were part time. The number of people with part-time jobs who wanted full-time work rose 7.5% to 8.6 million.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Unemployment falls to lowest rate of Obama's presidency in major election boost as number of jobs added is revised upward The US unemployment rate fell to 7.8% last month, dropping below 8% for the first time in nearly four years. The rate declined because more people found work, a trend that could have an impact on undecided voters in the final month before the presidential election. Both campaigns were watching the monthly reports closely, but neither appeared to react publicly in the first few minutes after Friday's news. The labor department said employers added 114,000 jobs in September. The economy also created 86,000 more jobs in July and August than first estimated. Wages rose in September and more people started looking for work. The revisions show employers added 146,000 jobs per month from July through September, up from 67,000 in the previous three months. The unemployment rate fell from 8.1% in August, matching its level in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office. The decline could help Obama, who is coming off a disappointing debate performance against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Stock futures rose modestly after the report. Dow Jones industrial average futures, up 30 points just before the report came out, were up 45 points after it was released. The yield on the 10-year US treasury note climbed to 1.73% from 1.68% just before the report, a sign that investors were more willing to embrace risk and move money from bonds into stocks. The job market has been improving, sluggishly but steadily. Jobs have been added for 24 straight months. There are now 325,000 more than when Obama took office. The September gains were led by the health care industry, which added 44,000 jobs the most since February. Transportation and warehousing also showed large gains. The revisions showed that governments actually added 63,000 jobs in July and August, compared with earlier estimates that showed losses. Still, many of the jobs added last month were part time. The number of people with part-time jobs who wanted full-time work rose 7.5% to 8.6 million.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | US unemployment falls below 8%, the lowest since Barack Obama took office, in a boost for the president as the presidential campaign heats up
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ally assesses cause of economic woes following violent protests at grand bazaar over plummeting rial Iran will defeat an enemy "conspiracy" against its foreign currency and gold markets, an adviser to the country's supreme leader said on Friday, following violent protests that closed Tehran's grand bazaar. Riot police clashed with protesters and arrested money changers on Wednesday during demonstrations triggered by the collapse of the rial, which has lost around a third of its value against the dollar in a week. Protesters called President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a traitor because of what many say is his serious mismanagement of the economy, which has been hit by western sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear programme. But there has so far been no public criticism of the country's most powerful authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "Iran is overcoming the psychological war and conspiracy that the enemy has brought to the currency and gold market and this war is constantly fluctuating," Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, an adviser, was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying. "The arrogant powers, in their crude way, think that the nation of Iran is ready to let go of the Islamic revolution through economic pressure but we are establishing Iran's economic strength." Haddad Adel is an ally of Khamenei and father-in-law to his second son, Mojtaba. Most of the bazaar remained shut on Thursday with police patrolling the area. Business associations said it would reopen on Saturday with security forces present. It is traditionally closed on Fridays. The bazaar, whose merchants were influential in bringing an end to Iran's monarchy in 1979, wields significant influence and the unrest shows that the economic hardship already faced by many Iranians is also being felt by merchants.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The actor along with another woman were arrested in Texas for criminal trespassing as the pair protested against an oil pipeline The actor Daryl Hannah was arrested in northeast Texas on Thursday, along with a landowner as the pair protested against an oil pipeline designed to bring crude from Canada to the Gulf Coast. "They've arrested Daryl Hannah and a rural Texas great-grandmother," said Paul Bassis, Hannah's attorney. Hannah and Eleanor Fairchild were standing in front of heavy equipment in an attempt to halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on Fairchild's farm in Winnsboro, a town about 100 miles east of Dallas. They were arrested for criminal trespassing and taken to the Wood County Jail, Bassis said. Hannah has long opposed TransCanada's construction of the $7bn pipeline, which is designed to transport heavy tar-sands crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to Texas' Gulf Coast refineries. "It is unfortunate Ms Hannah and other out-of-state activists have chosen to break the law by illegally trespassing on private property," David Dodson, a spokesman for TransCanada, said in a statement. He also said protesters were "putting their own safety and the safety of others at risk". Hannah – who has starred in dozens of movies, including Kill Bill and Splash – also was arrested in August 2011 while protesting against the pipeline in Washington. She was one of several hundred prominent scientists and activists arrested that month. They argue the pipeline would be unsafe because it would be carrying heavy, acidic crude oil that could more easily corrode a metal pipe, which would lead to a spill. They also say refining the oil would further contaminate the air in a region that has long struggled with pollution. TransCanada says its pipeline would be the safest ever built, and that the crude is no dirtier than oil currently arriving from Venezuela or parts of California. The issue became politically charged when congressional Republicans gave President Barack Obama 60 days to decide whether TransCanada should be granted the necessary permit for the pipeline to cross an international border before snaking its way 1,700 miles south to the Texas coast. Obama, saying his administration did not have enough time to study the potential environmental impacts, denied the permit in January. However, he encouraged TransCanada to reroute the northern portion of the pipeline to avoid an environmentally sensitive area of Nebraska. He also promised to expedite permitting of a southern portion of the pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast to relieve a bottleneck at the Cushing refinery. TransCanada began construction of that portion of the pipeline this summer after receiving the necessary permits. Some Texas landowners, joined by activists from outside the state, have tried through various protests to stop or slow down construction.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Republican candidate admits he was 'completely wrong' to say nearly half of voters were dependent on government support Mitt Romney has said his comment on a secretly taped video in which he disparaged 47% of voters as dependent on government "was just completely wrong", as he attempts to repair the damage from the controversy. In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, the Republican presidential candidate for the first time completely disavowed the remarks he made at a private fundraiser in May and that have emerged as a major stumbling block in his campaign against President Barack Obama. The "47%" videotape did not come up during his Wednesday night debate with Obama, although the Democratic campaign has used his remarks in a television ad. Asked what he would have said if the issue had come up in the Denver debate, Romney said he would have said that after thousands of speeches as a presidential candidate, "now and then you're going to say something that doesn't come out right". "In this case, I said something that was just completely wrong," he said. "I absolutely believe, however, that my life has shown that I care about 100%. And that's been demonstrated throughout my life. This whole campaign is about the 100%. When I become president, it will be about helping the 100%." Romney said at the Florida fundraiser that 47% of voters were dependent on government and unlikely to support him in the election on 6 November. When the video was disclosed on 17 September by the liberal magazine Mother Jones, Romney said his comments had been "not elegantly stated" but that he stood by them. Obama has been criticised by some of his supporters for not bringing up the 47% video at the Denver debate. The president has been widely declared as the loser in that encounter, with two more presidential TV debates to come later this month.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Death during clashes at Anglo American Platinum mine comes as Shell halts fuel deliveries over truckers' strike A South African miner has been killed in clashes between police and striking workers as violent unrest returned to the country's platinum mines two months after 34 striking workers were shot dead at a mine operated by London-listed miner Lonmin. The latest death came as the oil firm Shell declared force majeure on fuel deliveries – effectively saying the situation was too dangerous for it to meet its delivery contract – as a two-week strike by more than 20,000 truck drivers hit crisis point. Local police confirmed on Friday that they are investigating claims of a death during violent clashes between police and miners at an Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) mine in the north-west town of Rustenburg. "Yesterday [Thursday] the cops shot many people, but one of them is dead, even the dead body is still there where he was shot yesterday, it has not yet been taken (away)," Gaddhafi Mdoda, a witness and workers' activist told AFP on Friday. Police had fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse a group of striking workers gathered near the mine on Thursday. Mdoda claimed police had used "live ammunition". A local police spokesman confirmed the force had received reports of a death. "At this stage we are busy on a manhunt to see if we can recover the body," he said. "The situation is tense … anything can happen." About 28,000 workers have been on a strike at Amplats, the world's top platinum producer, since 12 September, demanding higher wages. Explaining its declaration of force majeure on fuel deliveries around Johannesburg and Pretoria, Shell said: "There is fuel available across the country so the issue is not fuel supply but the challenge is delivering it safely to our retail sites." Force majeure allows the company and its customers to break contracts owing to situations beyond their control and its use is a sign of the truckers' strike starting to bite in Africa's biggest economy. The unscheduled strikes also spread to manufacturing sector for the first time this week, with workers at Toyota's Durban car plant downing tools on Monday to demand higher pay. The strike was resolved on Thursday, with unions saying workers had received a 5.4% pay rise.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | All 15 security council members, including Russia, call on Syria to respect 'sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbours' The UN security council has unanimously approved a statement condemning Syria's shelling of a Turkish town that killed five civilians and edged the two former allies closer to conflict. Western nations, including Turkey's Nato allies, and Russia, Syria's main backer, were divided on drafts put to the council through negotiations on Wednesday and Thursday, but a final statement agreed by all 15 members said the shelling had "highlighted the grave impact the crisis in Syria has on the security of its neighbours and on regional peace and stability". The council demanded an immediate end to such violations of international law and called on the Syrian government "to fully respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbours". Russia's agreement that the Syrian shelling violated international law was a key concession by Moscow after it blocked a draft that called the mortar attack "a threat to international peace and security". Earlier on Thursday, Turkey's parliament gave legal authority to the military to launch cross-border raids into Syria at any point over the next year. It was passed by 320 votes to 129. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Turkey did not want war with Syria following the shelling on the town of Akçakale, but was determined to protect its borders and its people. He said: "Turkey is a country which is capable of protecting its people and borders. No one should attempt to test our determination on the issue." Erdogan suggested the Syrian shelling was not accidental, saying shells had fallen on Turkish territory on seven previous occasions since the civil war began. Ankara said it had received an apology from the Syrian regime on Thursday, relayed by the UN, and an assurance that such an incident would not occur again. The moves by the Turkish parliament followed a day of high tension on the restive frontier and at least 12 hours of artillery fire from southern Turkey at targets deep inside north Syria. Observers outside the country who had spoken to activists in Tel Abyad, about nine miles from the border, claimed an unknown number of Syrian soldiers had been killed by the Turkish fire and others had withdrawn from their bases. As the shellfire ceased shortly after sunrise on Thursday, officials in Ankara announced that Erdogan would turn to parliament for the same sort of legal backing that underpinned the country's operations against Kurdish groups in northern Iraq. Erdogan's motion said the shelling had been "on the threshold of an armed attack" and was a "serious threat to Turkish national security". The statement said: "As part of the military operations being conducted by the Syrian Arab republic armed forces, starting from [20 September] aggressive actions have been directed against our country's territories too. These actions have continued despite our repeated warnings and diplomatic initiatives. "Therefore, the need has developed to act rapidly and to take necessary precautions against additional risks and threats that may be directed against our country." Besir Atalay, the deputy prime minister, later said: "The bill is not for war. It has deterrent qualities." On Thursday, Turkey moved troops and armour to the area near the town of Akçakale, which was hit late on Wednesday afternoon by at least two shells fired from Syria. Officials said radar tracks had shown the firing point was about six miles inside Syria, near a military base used by regime troops. The Syrian strike was roundly condemned by Nato, of which Turkey is a member state, as well as the UN and US. Russia, a staunch ally of Damascus and backer of Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president, in the uprising, said it had asked its ally to explain what had happened and to apologise for any "mistake". Atalay later claimed to have received the indirect Syrian apology. There was no immediate comment from Damascus. Turkey and Syria had edged towards conflict in the summer when a Turkish jet was downed by a missile fired from Tartous, in Syria. On that occasion, Turkey invoked the Nato treaty that can require the powerful security body to defend a member state under attack. Ankara did not retaliate at the time but said it would do so against future provocations. Syria has accused Turkey of arming and sheltering the Free Syria army, its main adversary in the civil war. Syrian officials brand the rebel forces terrorists and say they are backed by foreign powers. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's chief, reiterated to the Guardian on Monday that Nato would not support a Libya-style military intervention in Syria. "Syria is a very, very, complex society. Foreign military interventions could have broader impacts." An urgent meeting of Nato ambassadors hours after the Syrian strike produced a strongly worded statement condemning Damascus, but offered no hint that its anti-intervention stance had changed. "The alliance continues to stand by Turkey and demands the immediate cessation of such aggressive acts against an ally, and urges the Syrian regime to put an end to flagrant violations of international law," it said. Meanwhile, close to 100 people were reported to have died across Syria on Thursday as fighting continued to rage in most parts of the country. The popular uprising, inspired by the Arab spring, which by earlier this year turned into an intensive armed insurrection, has claimed more than 30,000 lives and shows no signs of abating. Aleppo and Damascus are battle zones, as are most secondary cities and towns. The deteriorating situation in Syria poses an ever-increasing risk to neighbouring states, including Turkey, which is already battling an insurgency led by restive Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Antonis Samaras tells German newspaper Handelsblatt that the Greek people have been pushed to the limit, and compares situation to the end of the Weimar Republic
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