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Bulls and bullying: the fight over animal rights and tradition - BBC News | 2017-01-21 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Animal rights activists caught in social media cross-fire regarding banned bull-taming tradition. | BBC Trending | Tamil actress Trisha Krishnan deleted her Twitter account as a result of a row over bull-taming
A ban on the ancient practice of bull-taming has spurred thousands to protest in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. While the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, the argument over the festival has turned ugly online.
This week around 4,000 protesters camped out on a beach in the state's capital, Chennai (Madras) - with hundreds more gathering in other parts of the state.
The crowd, who are mostly students, are against India's ban on Jallikattu, a 2,000 year old bull-taming tradition, which takes place as part of an annual harvest festival.
Bull-taming involves men chasing and removing prizes tied to the bull's horns. Animal rights activists argue it's abusive and results in mistreatment of the animals, but protesters contend the practice central to Tamil identity and that the bulls are rarely harmed or killed.
The men participating in Jallikattu attempt to grab prizes attached to the bull's horns
Jallikattu was banned by India's supreme court in 2014, a ruling that was upheld in 2016. The lawsuit that led to the ban was filed by animal rights groups including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). And as protests against the ban have spread, PETA activists and supporters have found themselves targeted on social media.
"I have been threatened with rape I'm called all sorts of names which I can't repeat," says Poorva Joshipura, CEO of PETA India.
"The general public are being incited and influenced through lies and online bullying and fake news which has unfortunately become so common in our world today," Joshipura tells BBC Trending radio.
She takes particular issue with memes containing false personal information which have been shared online.
"One is a picture of me wearing my vegan boots (footwear made without leather or any animal ingredients), boots that I really like a lot. The meme falsely says that the boots are made of leather," Joshipura says. "I have been campaigning against the leather industry for years."
Hear more on this story on the BBC World Service.
The Indian film actress Trisha Krishnan has also been caught up in the debate. In 2010, Krishnan worked on a PETA campaign. Reports on social media suggested that she had tweeted, and then deleted, her support of a Jallikattu ban.
One of the social media posts spreading about the actress was a fake obituary claiming she had died of HIV.
The faked obituary poster of Trisha Krishnan lists cause of death as "HIV affected" - insinuating that the actress is sexually promiscuous. It also calls her father a "poramboku" (wastrel) and her mother a "peethasirukki" (boastful woman).
In response, Krishnan first denied that she supported the ban and later deactivated her Twitter account, releasing a statement saying: "I'm a proud Tamilian by birth and I believe and respect the Tamil culture and tradition and I will never go against the sentiments of my own people who have been instrumental in my growth and stature."
Krishnan declined a request by BBC Trending for an interview. Her spokesperson told us that "PETA and Trisha are separate", stressing that the actress had only collaborated with the group on one campaign.
Bull tamers must hold on to the animal's hump for about 15-20 metres or three jumps of the bull to win a prize
Krishnan wasn't the only high profile person targeted on social media. The actor Vishal also received online backlash for being a supporter of PETA, and subsequently deactivated his Twitter profile.
False allegations that the PETA India CEO Poorva Joshipura wears leather boots have been circulating online
The pictures and rumours have been spread by groups such as Chennai Memes, a politically active viral marketing agency which made up the leather boots rumour about Poorva Joshipura.
Gautam Govindaram, one of the founders of Chennai Memes, defended the group's decision in creating the meme, telling BBC Trending: "I'm sure she has at least one product that is made of leather. She can't say that she has never used any product in her lifetime that has not been made of leather. I can be 100% sure I mean if she's born and she's one year old or two years old she must have come across with something made of leather."
Operating primarily on Facebook, Chennai Memes create around 20 memes a day, often referencing local and national political and social issues.
The group were cited by local media as being key to galvanising and mobilising the youth-led protests over the Jallikattu ban - creating shareable posters and spreading information on dates and timings of events through their Facebook page, which has more than 600,000 fans.
Govindaram added that the group was not behind the memes targeting the actress Trisha Krishnan.
"It's not exactly only us, it's the entire people here in the state of Tamil Nadu who are making a stand," he says. "Why should an organisation from another country come here, tell us about our traditions and why do they have the government of India in the palm of their hand?"
A number of villages in Tamil Nadu are reported to have defied the Jallikattu ban and held bull-taming events this week. And other prominent South Indian film stars, like Rajinikant and Kamal Haasan, have expressed their support of the sport.
Next story: The Instagram star who cuts Michelle Obama's hair
Johnny Wright has several celebrity clients but perhaps none is as famous as the former First Lady. READ MORE
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-38656721 | news_blogs-trending-38656721 |
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Brexit: Berlin business leaders unimpressed with UK's message - BBC News | 2017-01-21 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | An appeal over a post-Brexit trade deal was met with sniggers in Berlin, Damien McGuinness writes. | Business | Two British officials failed to win favour from German business leaders in Berlin
The distinguished audience members were too polite to heckle. But the eye rolling, frowns and audible tutting made it quite clear how the Brexiteers' message was going down with German business leaders.
Owen Paterson, a former minister and Conservative MP, and John Longworth, co-chair of Leave Means Leave, came to Berlin on Saturday with a clear mission - to persuade German business leaders to lobby Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Britain a good trade deal.
They should have been on safe territory.
The two men are confident, witty speakers with impressive business and free-trade credentials.
Mr Longworth is a former head of the British Chamber of Commerce. Mr Paterson's years spent trading in Germany meant he could open his address with a few remarks in German - which drew an appreciative round of applause - and a well-judged joke about multilingual trade.
But it turned out they had entered the lion's den.
The laughter from the audience quickly turned to sniggers as they heard the UK described as "a beacon of open, free trade around the world".
Westminster's decision to leave the world's largest free trade area does not look like that to Germany.
When Europe was blamed for spending cuts and a lack of British health care provision, there were audible mutters of irritation from the audience.
The occasional light-hearted attempts at EU-bashing - usually guaranteed to get a cheap laugh with some British audiences - was met with stony silence.
Brexiteers argue German manufacturers will want to still sell to UK customers
In another setting - at another time - this gathering of the elite of Germany's powerful business community would have lapped up the British wit.
Every ironic quip would ordinarily have had them rolling in the aisles. But British charm does not travel well these days.
Rattled by the economic havoc Brexit could unleash, Germans are not in the mood for gags.
Britain used to be seen by continentals as quirky and occasionally awkward - but reliably pragmatic on the economy.
However, since the Brexit vote, Europeans suspect endearing eccentricity has morphed into unpredictable irrationality. The UK has become the tipsy, tweedy uncle, who after too much Christmas sherry has tipped over into drunkenly abusive bore.
When the audience was asked how many of them welcomed Brexit, only one hand went up - and it turned out that belonged to a businessman who wanted more EU reform and was fed up with Britain slowing things down.
Brexiteer rhetoric over the past year has often focused on the size of Britain's market and how keen German manufacturers are to sell to British customers.
Many leave campaigners remain convinced that German business leaders will force Mrs Merkel to grant the UK a special free trade deal in order not to lose British trade.
But that's not what's happening.
Angela Merkel has said Britain will not be able to cherry-pick the best bits of the single market
Instead German firms are remarkably united in their support of the chancellor in her rejection of British "cherry-picking" - even if it means losing business in the short-term.
When you talk to German bosses they say their top priority is in fact the integrity of the single market, rather than hanging on to British customers.
That's because their supply chains span across the EU.
A German car might be designed in Germany, manufactured in Britain, with components made in various parts of eastern Europe, to be sold in France. This only works if there are no cross-border tariffs, paperwork or red tape.
German companies - more often family-owned and with deeper connections to their regional heartlands - tend to look at the wider picture, sometimes thinking more long-term.
They supported Mrs Merkel on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, even though that meant a blow to trade. The financial hit was deemed less bad for business than worsening unrest in nearby Ukraine.
The same calculations are being made over Brexit.
Theresa May's speech on Brexit last week made front page news in Germany
This doesn't mean German business is thinking politically, and not economically. But rather, it indicates a wider attitude towards how business can thrive long-term.
German business leaders tell you that the British market may be important. But it is only one market, compared to 27 markets in the rest of the EU.
Leave campaigners also still underestimate the political and historical significance of the EU for Germany, where it is seen as the guarantor of peace after centuries of warfare.
It is tempting to see the clashes between Westminster and the EU27 as one big decades-long misunderstanding of what the EU is.
An idealistic peace-project versus a pragmatic free-trade zone. This makes it even more ironic that London may reject the free-trade area it spent so much time creating.
Germany was shocked and saddened by the UK's vote to leave the EU. But the decision was quickly accepted in Berlin.
"The Brits never really wanted to be members of the European Union anyway," is something you often hear these days.
Many Germans now want to just work out a solution that does the least amount of harm to the European economy. Hence the irritation in Germany when British politicians keep rehashing the pre-referendum debate.
"It was frustrating to hear the same old arguments from the referendum campaign," one business leader told me when I asked him what he had thought about Saturday's discussion.
Germany has moved on, he said. Maybe Britain should too.
The Brexiteers might not have persuaded their audience in Berlin. But if they return to London with a better idea of the mood in Germany's business community, then the trip may well have been worthwhile. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38707997 | news_business-38707997 |
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Was Buzzfeed right on Donald Trump dossier? - BBC News | 2017-01-13 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Buzzfeed's decision to publish the Donald Trump dossier raises many questions about modern journalism. | Entertainment & Arts | Donald Trump has criticised the decision to publish the dossier
Was Buzzfeed right to publish the Trump dossier?
That comes down to editorial judgement, which is to news what eggs are to an omelette - the essential ingredient.
That said, I opened this post with a question which I will not answer - partly because I work for the BBC and it is not my place to pass judgement on other news organisations' editorial calls and partly because those editorial calls are subjective.
But as BBC media editor, and as a former editor of The Independent who had to make thousands of these calls, often against tight deadlines and under great pressure from the subjects of our stories, I want to explore some of the considerations that we editors have to make.
Hopefully that will illuminate the hugely controversial decision made this week by Buzzfeed.
Editorial judgement is ultimately a moral activity. It is an exercise in selection - which stories, facts, claims, pictures, words, ideas to publish, and which to leave out - that relies on several smaller judgements.
These include: the importance you attach to veracity; your own political persuasion; a sense of your audience's interest and - outside the BBC and unfortunately more common now the news business model is under such strain - a consideration of the commercial implications of publishing particular things.
The rectitude of all moral activity or actions - editorial judgement included - can be analysed along three criteria:
Let's look at Buzzfeed's decision to publish the dossier in terms of intentions and consequences.
Some people will argue that - whether you agree with it or not - there is a coherent case for putting information in the public domain even if you are not 100% certain it is true.
Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief, has spoken eloquently about how, in our digital era, publishers are no longer gatekeepers of information who demand to be trusted, arguing that Buzzfeed is simply a distributor.
His second argument is that because this publication was being circulated widely among government officials, it had tremendous news value and therefore it was in the public interest to put it in the public domain with plenty of caveats so readers could make up their own minds.
I know from personal experience that, if you are a digital publisher whose content is free, you mainly make money from advertising, which is related to traffic and which you are under immense pressure to generate.
This ultimately commercial imperative can - and does - influence the editorial judgement of many publishers.
But let us be charitable to Buzzfeed and say that commercial considerations did not influence this editorial decision.
Buzzfeed has a young audience and often publishes journalism associated with the political Left, unlike Trump whose most stable constituency is older voters on the Right.
It is reasonable to conclude that one reason Buzzfeed published this dossier about Mr Trump is that it calculated it could harm someone it does not like.
So Buzzfeed, having put traffic considerations aside, and being antithetical to some of the things Mr Trump stands for, calculated that the document, which had potentially huge implications for the incoming president, deserved to be seen in its entirety by readers who want access to information.
That covers the intentions, but what of the consequences?
Huge traffic for this article must have been one consequence. Another is that Buzzfeed, as a powerful international brand, is now clearly associated with a willingness to publish information it knows could be false.
Another consequence is of course that the information contained in the dossier, some of it untrue, much of it not corroborated, is now in the public domain we call cyberspace. Perhaps citizens across the globe are digesting it to better understand the incoming president.
Finally, life has been made harder for other news organisations, such as CNN, who Trump targeted in his remarkable press conference.
They have now been conflated with Buzzfeed under Trump's pernicious umbrella term "fake news".
Buzzfeed could reasonably say it is not its job to secure access to Mr Trump for CNN - and in any case the president-elect was not exactly friendly with the mainstream media before the dossier's publication.
It will be for editors and citizens everywhere to decide, in balancing Buzzfeed's intentions with the (largely foreseeable) consequences, whether it made a correct editorial judgement.
That in turn depends on your moral position - your commitment to truth and so on.
What really interests me is that Mr Smith is saying that the digital revolution has redefined journalism, creating publishers who are prepared to put lots of information into the public domain without verifying it.
Julian Assange's Wikileaks has put huge amounts of information into the public domain
There is a difference, however, between Wikileaks, who do that sort of thing, and what most journalists understand their role to be: corroborating information before making selections as to what should be published.
In a sense, Mr Smith's position is an argument against journalism, in that being gatekeepers who curate and edit the world is precisely what many hacks believe their role to be.
Just as traditional media included many different types of publisher - tabloids v broadsheets, for example - so new, digital media include those who exhaustively check their facts and proceed with caution and those who are prepared to publish unverified allegations because they think the public should know.
The BBC is in the former camp, as my colleague Paul Wood argued in his excellent blog.
We work very hard to verify claims before publishing them: so much so that there are always big stories we know about that we cannot use, because we haven't got sufficiently solid sourcing. Our political editor Laura Kuenssberg has talked about this - and I can certainly relate to it.
Together with Mr Trump, this controversy helps to illuminate how fast the media is changing - and how it affects all our lives. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38600531 | news_entertainment-arts-38600531 |
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Does Catholic praise for Mary Magdalene show progress towards women priests? - BBC News | 2017-01-13 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Does increasing honour paid to Mary Magdalene in the Catholic Church show progress towards women priests? | UK | The emotional scene in John's Gospel in which Jesus calls to the grieving Mary Magdalene by name and she tries to touch him has inspired many artists. This is Titian's interpretation.
The gospels depict Mary Magdalene as one of Jesus' closest companions. Her emotional encounter with the risen Jesus and her supposed sinful past have fascinated Christians for centuries.
The latest of many films about her is released shortly. Its heroine, played by Rooney Mara, is billed as a young woman who joins "a radical new social movement" and "must confront the reality of Jesus' destiny and her own place within it".
There was amusement when cast members were pictured in ancient garb smoking on set.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has enhanced the saint's status. Last year her Saint's Day (22 July) was promoted to a Feast, equal to those of most of the male Disciples.
Explaining the decision, Archbishop Arthur Roche pointed out that she had long been known as "apostle to the apostles, as she announces to the apostles what they in turn will announce to all the world."
A bizarre tradition in depictions of Mary Magdalene shows her naked, but clothed with her long red hair. Terracotta by Andrea Della Robbia of about 1590
This refers to John 20:17, in which Jesus sends her to the disciples to tell them he would ascend to God - "apostolos" in Greek means "one who is sent".
The Vatican press office said that 22 July would be "a feast, like that of the other apostles." A special prayer for use at Mass on that day says Jesus honoured her with the task of an apostle (apostolatus officio),
This has coincided with what some believe are signs of a change in Rome's attitude on the possibility of women priests.
The announcement on Mary Magdalene, and the setting up of a commission to discuss the ordination of women as deacons - not priests, but able to preside at weddings, christenings and funerals is an indication to some of change.
Tina Beattie, Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, says: "I accept that it has to be slow, it has to be sensitively done... But my own feeling is that something is happening".
What was said about the feast day was encouraging, says Pippa Bonner of the campaign group Catholic Women's Ordination. "As soon as we spotted that we shared that news around - I think that's a very, very positive step."
Pope Francis met Sweden's female archbishop, Antje Jackelen. But on his journey home he said Catholic policy forbidding women priests had not changed.
In 1994 Pope John Paul II declared "that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful." Jesus had "called only men as his Apostles", The constant practice of the Church, he stressed, "has imitated Christ in choosing only men."
In November, while returning from a visit to Sweden where he worshipped with the country's female Lutheran archbishop, Antje Jackelen, Pope Francis was asked if his Church still ruled out women priests.
"Saint Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands," he said.
Asked again if the ban was permanent, he responded: "If we read carefully the declaration by St. John Paul II, it is going in that direction."
Prof Beattie comments: "Whenever he's asked to give a reason he always references John Paul II... I'm not aware of him saying that under his own Papal authority."
Paloma Baeza played Mary Magdalene in The Passion, shown on BBC1 in 2008.
The idea that statements about Mary Magdalene and her "apostleship" contradict the rulings of John Paul II is discounted by many Catholic commentators.
"Many Catholics from the Anglican tradition will rejoice at her commemoration being raised to the dignity of a Feast, while thinking that the idea that this has any relevance to the closed question of women's ordination is entirely fanciful," says Fr Simon Chinery, spokesman for the Ordinariate set up by Pope Benedict as a home within the Catholic Church for Anglicans opposed to women bishops.
The idea of Mary Magdalene as a great sinner led to celebration of her as a great penitent, as in this haggard sculpture by Donatello (about 1455).
Austen Ivereigh, co-founder of the group Catholic Voices, says: "Declaring her day a Feast reflects a growing awareness that the role of women in the early Church was an important one, and needs to be recovered.
"But opening church leadership to women's unique gifts does not equate to opening the priesthood to women - at least that argument is not being made in any significant way in the Church at the moment,"
Arguments against women's ordination in the Church of England were ultimately unsuccessful.
But of course the Catholic Church is very different. In the CofE the argument over women's ordination went on for decades. But it was possible to say where it had got to by referring to the state of discussions in the General Synod. It could not have been stopped for good by a ruling like that of Pope John Paul.
Of all the hundreds of churches named after Mary Magdalene, the grandest is perhaps La Madeleine in Paris. Marochetti's statue on the high altar shows angels lifting her to heaven..
A change in doctrine can come as news to Catholics. And it can happen suddenly.
That was the case with Mary Magdalene herself. In the late 6th Century AD Pope Gregory I declared that she was also the woman in Luke 7:37 who "lived a sinful life", who washed Jesus's feet and dried them with her hair.
This fuelled the tradition that Mary Magdalene was not only a sinner (which Christianity says we all are) but a particularly colourful one, and inspired dozens of artistic portrayals of her ranging from ravaged penitent to borderline erotic.
But the revised Roman Calendar of 1969 simply declared that 22 July was indeed the day of Mary Magdalene, but she was not the woman in Luke 7:37. And that, after nearly 1,400 years. was that.
Is she, as the Anglican Rev Giles Fraser claims some see her, "the standard bearer for women's developing role in the Catholic church, and even... for women's ordination"?
The Church can hardly show it is moved by the late unofficial gospels - one of which talks of Jesus repeatedly kissing Mary Magdalene,; the recent crop of stories claiming she was actually married to Jesus; or the Rooney Mara film. And Pope Gregory's claims about her sinful life may be discredited. But all these things contribute to her prestige. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38528682 | news_uk-38528682 |
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Bernie Ecclestone: Why F1's titanic leader was loved and loathed - BBC Sport | 2017-01-25 | None | Bye, bye, Bernie. F1's revolutionary, roguish leader has finally vacated the throne he created - so how will he be remembered? | null | Bernie Ecclestone stands a little under 5ft 3in tall but for 40 years has wielded a giant influence in Formula 1 with canniness, wit and not a little menace.
At times, Ecclestone has had close to absolute power. So the end of his reign following the takeover of the sport by US giant Liberty Media represents a seismic change.
Ecclestone, now 86, is a tactician of remarkable skill, and a deal-maker extraordinaire who used chutzpah and brinksmanship to turn F1 into one of the world's biggest sports, form relationships with world leaders such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and make himself and many of F1's participants multi-millionaires.
In a remarkable four decades, Ecclestone revolutionised the sport:
• None He bought the Brabham team and won two world titles, including a historic first with a turbo engine in 1983.
• None Turned F1 into the biggest annual sporting event in the world, outstripped only by the Olympics and the World Cup.
• None Controversially took the commercial rights away from the teams and made himself a billionaire.
• None Fought off a criminal prosecution for blackmail that arose from a complicated series of sales of those rights.
• None Carved a notorious reputation for making controversial statements, including saying Adolf Hitler was "able to get things done" and likening women to "domestic appliances".
But what made him mind-bendingly - some would say obscenely - rich is what brought him down in the end.
Selling on the commercial rights to F1 is the source of Ecclestone's vast wealth. But it was never about the money, per se - it was about the deal. And now the deal has done him in.
Restructuring the finances of the sport in the first years of this decade, Ecclestone also reorganised its decision-making process.
He did it to increase his power, but the structure he set up inadvertently neutered him and gave the big teams - particularly Mercedes and Ferrari - power to block him. This has led to log-jam.
The latest company to buy the sport - USA's Liberty Media - has looked at this, at a skewed prize-money structure, at a policy that is threatening to price out much-loved historic races in favour of characterless new ones in countries with questionable regimes, at a refusal to engage with digital media, and several other issues, and decided to ease him out.
Ecclestone is held in genuinely high regard within F1 for everything he has achieved but, outside a handful of acolytes, few will be genuinely sorry to see him go.
There has been a feeling for some years that he is a man out of time, that the sport needed to move on. In truth, this has contributed to the stalemate in F1 - people were simply waiting him out.
Many believe his departure will be good for the sport. However, it will certainly make F1 less colourful, and it is hard to imagine seeing the like of him again.
Where did he come from?
Ecclestone's involvement in F1 started in the late 1950s. After a brief driving career in lower categories, he emerged as a manager for the British F1 driver Stuart Lewis-Evans but then disappeared from racing when Lewis-Evans was killed in a fiery crash at the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix.
He appeared again in the late 1960s, again as a manager, this time to the Austrian Jochen Rindt. He was already very rich.
What had the fortune come from? "Property," Ecclestone says. All manner of rumours have abounded, including that he was involved in organising the Great Train Robbery, when £2.6m was stolen from a Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire in 1963.
"Nah," Ecclestone once said. "There wasn't enough money on that train. I could have done something better than that."
Rindt became F1's first and so far only posthumous world champion after he was killed at the 1970 Italian Grand Prix. But this time Ecclestone did not retreat.
Within a couple of years, he bought Brabham from its founder, the three-time world champion Sir Jack Brabham, and began establishing his power base.
How did he become omnipotent?
Back then, circuit deals and television rights were operated on a somewhat haphazard, piecemeal basis. Ecclestone offered to look after them on the teams' behalf and wasted little time in building his influence.
He persuaded television companies to buy F1 as a package, rather than pay for individual races. That guaranteed vastly increased exposure, and the sport's popularity grew increasingly quickly.
The vast growth of F1 from what it was then to what it is today arguably started in earnest after the 1976 season, when a championship battle between the playboy Englishman James Hunt and the ascetic Austrian Niki Lauda caught the public's imagination.
By the 1980s, F1 was becoming a global sport, more and more races were being shown live, and a generation of charismatic stars enhanced its appeal - Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and, most of all, Ayrton Senna.
Ironically, Senna's death in 1994 only increased its reach and shortly after that the sport started on the route that has led to Ecclestone's departure.
The beginning of the end
Controversially, in the mid-1990s, Ecclestone struck a deal with his long-time friend and ally Max Mosley, who was then the president of governing body the FIA. It saw his own company become the rights holder of F1, taking over from the teams' collective body that Ecclestone previously ran.
This led to a furious row with some of the teams - particularly McLaren, Williams and Tyrrell - who claimed what Ecclestone was doing was illegal and that he was effectively robbing them.
But the complainants were eventually bought off. Ecclestone then set about monetising his new asset.
In 2000, Mosley granted Ecclestone the commercial rights to F1 until the end of 2110 for a one-off fee of $360m. Even then, many were shocked by the relatively paltry amount of money that changed hands to secure such a lucrative and lengthy deal.
This led to a dizzying series of sales as the rights transferred through various institutions. A German cable TV company bought them, and then collapsed, which led to its creditors - banks - taking its assets. In 2006, the German bank BayernLB sold its 47.2% stake in F1 to an investment company called CVC Capital Partners.
CVC ran the sport for 10 years, employing Ecclestone as chief executive and empowering him to carry on as before, before selling to Liberty last September, in the deal completed on Monday.
But the sale from BayernLB to CVC is what ultimately led to the court cases on bribery charges that Ecclestone fought and survived a couple of years ago - and which he ended by paying the German courts $100m to end the case, without a presumption of guilt or innocence.
It did not escape notice that a man charged with bribery had paid - perfectly legally under German law - to end a criminal trial.
What is he like?
Despite his diminutive stature, Ecclestone is a forbidding character. Stories abound in F1 of real and threatened menace.
A conversation with him is akin to juggling sand - he ducks and dodges and avoids questions with obfuscation, distraction and quick wit, a dizzying mix of truths, half-truths and fallacies.
He is approachable but apart, engaging but unknowable. After a verbal sparring match, he will sometimes reach up and chillingly pat you on the cheek, not unlike a mafia don in the movies.
For years, the more unsavoury aspects of Ecclestone's stewardship were glossed over or laughed off - largely because he was making those he was working for so much money.
But in recent years, the tone in F1 has changed as more and more people began to feel he was past his sell-by date.
He was a reluctant embracer of the internet age, and rejected entreaties to try to use it to extend F1's reach.
His argument was that he saw no way to make money out of it; others argued that his modus operandi of pursuing only the deal, the bottom line, and disregarding its potential longer-term effects was doing more harm than good.
His simple model - sell television rights and races to the highest bidder no matter who it was; squeeze the highest price possible out of continuing partners - created an annual global revenue in the region of $1.5bn (£1.2bn).
Yet he became increasingly haphazard and intransigent in his decision-making, coming up with unpopular ideas such as a double-points finale in 2014 or the fiasco over the change to the qualifying format at the start of 2016 - to try to spice up the sport.
He was responding to declining audiences, but seemed to ignore the fact they were dropping largely because of his switch away from free-to-air towards pay television in key markets, and the questionable effect on the racing of gimmicks such as the DRS overtaking aid and tyres on which drivers could not push flat out.
The declining audiences have led to a crisis of confidence within the sport, the response to which is a new set of rules for 2017 that mean faster, more dramatic-looking cars. But already there are concerns that these may not have the desired effect.
But while the problems are real, the fact remains that F1 has just changed hands in a deal that values it at $8bn (£6.4bn).
And that is almost entirely down to Ecclestone and what he has built with his remarkable personality, vision and drive.
Controversial he certainly was; past his best he may have been. But for all his faults, Bernie Ecclestone is a unique and titanic figure who turned what was essentially a niche activity into a glittering global enterprise that to many represents an intoxicating mix of glamour, danger and raw, unmatched drama.
Gone from power he may be, but he will never be forgotten. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/38721123 | rt_formula1_38721123 |
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Brexit white paper: Climbdown or goodwill gesture - BBC News | 2017-01-25 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Giving MPs a white paper is a clear concession by Theresa May but one that is unlikely to affect her Brexit timetable or damage her authority. | UK Politics | It was only yesterday that the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, told MPs it just might all be a bit tricky to have a White Paper, a formal document outlining the government's plans for Brexit, and stick to the timetable they want to pursue.
Rebel Remainers though were "delighted", that, stealing Jeremy Corbyn's thunder, a planted question from a loyal Tory MP at PMQs today produced in fact a promise from the Prime Minister that, after all, there will be a White Paper.
It is a climbdown, no question, a last-minute change of heart.
Late last night Brexiteers were being assured there would be no bending, no delay to the government's plans and no giving in to the Remainers.
Even early this morning, government sources were privately suggesting that they were quite happy to have the white paper option up their sleeve, but there were no immediate plans to make that promise.
Then voila, at 1205 GMT, the pledge of a white paper suddenly emerged. As one senior Tory joked, "welcome to the vacillation of the next two years".
It may be being described as a "massive, unplanned" concession but it doesn't seriously hurt the government.
First off, it shows goodwill to the rebel Tory Remainers, many of whom feel their Eurosceptic rivals have had the upper hand of late. Schmoozing matters round these parts.
It takes one of the potential arguments that could have gathered pace off the table, before the Article 50 bill is even published. And, rightly or wrongly, no one expects a white paper will contain anything new that the prime minister has not yet already said.
It's largely a victory for the Remainers about process, rather than substance.
For her critics this is evidence of weakness, that's she has been pushed into changing her mind.
But it doesn't need to change the government's timetable, and today's embarrassment of a climbdown might be worth the goodwill that Number 10 will get in return. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38747976 | news_uk-politics-38747976 |
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Bulls and bullying: the fight over animal rights and tradition - BBC News | 2017-01-22 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Animal rights activists caught in social media cross-fire regarding banned bull-taming tradition. | BBC Trending | Tamil actress Trisha Krishnan deleted her Twitter account as a result of a row over bull-taming
A ban on the ancient practice of bull-taming has spurred thousands to protest in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. While the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, the argument over the festival has turned ugly online.
This week around 4,000 protesters camped out on a beach in the state's capital, Chennai (Madras) - with hundreds more gathering in other parts of the state.
The crowd, who are mostly students, are against India's ban on Jallikattu, a 2,000 year old bull-taming tradition, which takes place as part of an annual harvest festival.
Bull-taming involves men chasing and removing prizes tied to the bull's horns. Animal rights activists argue it's abusive and results in mistreatment of the animals, but protesters contend the practice central to Tamil identity and that the bulls are rarely harmed or killed.
The men participating in Jallikattu attempt to grab prizes attached to the bull's horns
Jallikattu was banned by India's supreme court in 2014, a ruling that was upheld in 2016. The lawsuit that led to the ban was filed by animal rights groups including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). And as protests against the ban have spread, PETA activists and supporters have found themselves targeted on social media.
"I have been threatened with rape I'm called all sorts of names which I can't repeat," says Poorva Joshipura, CEO of PETA India.
"The general public are being incited and influenced through lies and online bullying and fake news which has unfortunately become so common in our world today," Joshipura tells BBC Trending radio.
She takes particular issue with memes containing false personal information which have been shared online.
"One is a picture of me wearing my vegan boots (footwear made without leather or any animal ingredients), boots that I really like a lot. The meme falsely says that the boots are made of leather," Joshipura says. "I have been campaigning against the leather industry for years."
Hear more on this story on the BBC World Service.
The Indian film actress Trisha Krishnan has also been caught up in the debate. In 2010, Krishnan worked on a PETA campaign. Reports on social media suggested that she had tweeted, and then deleted, her support of a Jallikattu ban.
One of the social media posts spreading about the actress was a fake obituary claiming she had died of HIV.
The faked obituary poster of Trisha Krishnan lists cause of death as "HIV affected" - insinuating that the actress is sexually promiscuous. It also calls her father a "poramboku" (wastrel) and her mother a "peethasirukki" (boastful woman).
In response, Krishnan first denied that she supported the ban and later deactivated her Twitter account, releasing a statement saying: "I'm a proud Tamilian by birth and I believe and respect the Tamil culture and tradition and I will never go against the sentiments of my own people who have been instrumental in my growth and stature."
Krishnan declined a request by BBC Trending for an interview. Her spokesperson told us that "PETA and Trisha are separate", stressing that the actress had only collaborated with the group on one campaign.
Bull tamers must hold on to the animal's hump for about 15-20 metres or three jumps of the bull to win a prize
Krishnan wasn't the only high profile person targeted on social media. The actor Vishal also received online backlash for being a supporter of PETA, and subsequently deactivated his Twitter profile.
False allegations that the PETA India CEO Poorva Joshipura wears leather boots have been circulating online
The pictures and rumours have been spread by groups such as Chennai Memes, a politically active viral marketing agency which made up the leather boots rumour about Poorva Joshipura.
Gautam Govindaram, one of the founders of Chennai Memes, defended the group's decision in creating the meme, telling BBC Trending: "I'm sure she has at least one product that is made of leather. She can't say that she has never used any product in her lifetime that has not been made of leather. I can be 100% sure I mean if she's born and she's one year old or two years old she must have come across with something made of leather."
Operating primarily on Facebook, Chennai Memes create around 20 memes a day, often referencing local and national political and social issues.
The group were cited by local media as being key to galvanising and mobilising the youth-led protests over the Jallikattu ban - creating shareable posters and spreading information on dates and timings of events through their Facebook page, which has more than 600,000 fans.
Govindaram added that the group was not behind the memes targeting the actress Trisha Krishnan.
"It's not exactly only us, it's the entire people here in the state of Tamil Nadu who are making a stand," he says. "Why should an organisation from another country come here, tell us about our traditions and why do they have the government of India in the palm of their hand?"
A number of villages in Tamil Nadu are reported to have defied the Jallikattu ban and held bull-taming events this week. And other prominent South Indian film stars, like Rajinikant and Kamal Haasan, have expressed their support of the sport.
Next story: The Instagram star who cuts Michelle Obama's hair
Johnny Wright has several celebrity clients but perhaps none is as famous as the former First Lady. READ MORE
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-38656721 | news_blogs-trending-38656721 |
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Brexit: Berlin business leaders unimpressed with UK's message - BBC News | 2017-01-22 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | An appeal over a post-Brexit trade deal was met with sniggers in Berlin, Damien McGuinness writes. | Business | Two British officials failed to win favour from German business leaders in Berlin
The distinguished audience members were too polite to heckle. But the eye rolling, frowns and audible tutting made it quite clear how the Brexiteers' message was going down with German business leaders.
Owen Paterson, a former minister and Conservative MP, and John Longworth, co-chair of Leave Means Leave, came to Berlin on Saturday with a clear mission - to persuade German business leaders to lobby Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Britain a good trade deal.
They should have been on safe territory.
The two men are confident, witty speakers with impressive business and free-trade credentials.
Mr Longworth is a former head of the British Chamber of Commerce. Mr Paterson's years spent trading in Germany meant he could open his address with a few remarks in German - which drew an appreciative round of applause - and a well-judged joke about multilingual trade.
But it turned out they had entered the lion's den.
The laughter from the audience quickly turned to sniggers as they heard the UK described as "a beacon of open, free trade around the world".
Westminster's decision to leave the world's largest free trade area does not look like that to Germany.
When Europe was blamed for spending cuts and a lack of British health care provision, there were audible mutters of irritation from the audience.
The occasional light-hearted attempts at EU-bashing - usually guaranteed to get a cheap laugh with some British audiences - was met with stony silence.
Brexiteers argue German manufacturers will want to still sell to UK customers
In another setting - at another time - this gathering of the elite of Germany's powerful business community would have lapped up the British wit.
Every ironic quip would ordinarily have had them rolling in the aisles. But British charm does not travel well these days.
Rattled by the economic havoc Brexit could unleash, Germans are not in the mood for gags.
Britain used to be seen by continentals as quirky and occasionally awkward - but reliably pragmatic on the economy.
However, since the Brexit vote, Europeans suspect endearing eccentricity has morphed into unpredictable irrationality. The UK has become the tipsy, tweedy uncle, who after too much Christmas sherry has tipped over into drunkenly abusive bore.
When the audience was asked how many of them welcomed Brexit, only one hand went up - and it turned out that belonged to a businessman who wanted more EU reform and was fed up with Britain slowing things down.
Brexiteer rhetoric over the past year has often focused on the size of Britain's market and how keen German manufacturers are to sell to British customers.
Many leave campaigners remain convinced that German business leaders will force Mrs Merkel to grant the UK a special free trade deal in order not to lose British trade.
But that's not what's happening.
Angela Merkel has said Britain will not be able to cherry-pick the best bits of the single market
Instead German firms are remarkably united in their support of the chancellor in her rejection of British "cherry-picking" - even if it means losing business in the short-term.
When you talk to German bosses they say their top priority is in fact the integrity of the single market, rather than hanging on to British customers.
That's because their supply chains span across the EU.
A German car might be designed in Germany, manufactured in Britain, with components made in various parts of eastern Europe, to be sold in France. This only works if there are no cross-border tariffs, paperwork or red tape.
German companies - more often family-owned and with deeper connections to their regional heartlands - tend to look at the wider picture, sometimes thinking more long-term.
They supported Mrs Merkel on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, even though that meant a blow to trade. The financial hit was deemed less bad for business than worsening unrest in nearby Ukraine.
The same calculations are being made over Brexit.
Theresa May's speech on Brexit last week made front page news in Germany
This doesn't mean German business is thinking politically, and not economically. But rather, it indicates a wider attitude towards how business can thrive long-term.
German business leaders tell you that the British market may be important. But it is only one market, compared to 27 markets in the rest of the EU.
Leave campaigners also still underestimate the political and historical significance of the EU for Germany, where it is seen as the guarantor of peace after centuries of warfare.
It is tempting to see the clashes between Westminster and the EU27 as one big decades-long misunderstanding of what the EU is.
An idealistic peace-project versus a pragmatic free-trade zone. This makes it even more ironic that London may reject the free-trade area it spent so much time creating.
Germany was shocked and saddened by the UK's vote to leave the EU. But the decision was quickly accepted in Berlin.
"The Brits never really wanted to be members of the European Union anyway," is something you often hear these days.
Many Germans now want to just work out a solution that does the least amount of harm to the European economy. Hence the irritation in Germany when British politicians keep rehashing the pre-referendum debate.
"It was frustrating to hear the same old arguments from the referendum campaign," one business leader told me when I asked him what he had thought about Saturday's discussion.
Germany has moved on, he said. Maybe Britain should too.
The Brexiteers might not have persuaded their audience in Berlin. But if they return to London with a better idea of the mood in Germany's business community, then the trip may well have been worthwhile. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38707997 | news_business-38707997 |
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Is it OK to watch porn in public? - BBC News | 2017-01-14 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | How would you feel if the person sitting next to you on the bus was watching porn - and what would you do about it? | Magazine | It's no secret that lots of people watch pornography on the internet. It's usually something done behind closed doors - but how would you feel about someone watching porn in public? The BBC's Siobhann Tighe describes a troubling experience on a London bus.
It had been a long day at work. I got on the bus at 7.30 in the evening and it was cold and drizzly. All the passengers were wrapped up in thick coats, hoods and hats.
Inside, the bus was softly lit and I was expecting to zone out on my way back home: just let the day go and switch off.
I sat on the lower deck beside a complete stranger and didn't give it a second thought. I was just relieved to get a seat. As we meandered through the London traffic, my gaze was drawn to my neighbour's phone. I wasn't being nosy but in the dim light of the bus, the brightness of his mobile caught my attention even though he was slanting it slightly away from me.
Although I didn't mean to or want to, I found myself looking over towards his mobile a few times and then it suddenly occurred to me what was going on. The man beside me was watching porn.
Once I realised, although I genuinely didn't mean to, my eyes kept on being pulled back to it. I couldn't quite believe it. First he was watching animated porn, with the two naked characters in lurid colours repeating their movements over and over again. Then he started watching a film, which seemed to begin in a petrol station with a large woman in a low-cut yellow top and blonde hair peering into the driver's window.
I didn't hear any sound, apart from a brief few seconds when my fellow passenger pulled the headphone jack out of his mobile, and then reinserted it.
The man didn't seem to notice my glances towards his phone, maybe because his hood was hampering his peripheral vision. He seemed oblivious to me and others around him, who admittedly wouldn't have been able to see what I saw.
We eventually arrived at his bus stop and because he had the window seat and I had the aisle, he made a motion that he needed to get out, and he muttered a "thank you" as he squeezed past me. I watched him get off and walk down the street.
I felt uncomfortable and annoyed, but I didn't do anything about it. I didn't say anything to him and neither did he pick up on any of my glances or quizzical looks. His eyes didn't meet mine so I couldn't even communicate my feelings non-verbally and it didn't occur to me to tell the driver. Even if I wanted to, it would have been difficult to get to the front of the bus because it was packed.
But when I got off, questions flooded into my mind about what I had just experienced. What if a child saw that? Are there any laws about looking at porn in public spaces? If there are laws, how easy are they to enforce? Why did this passenger feel public transport was an appropriate place to watch porn, and should I be worried from a safety point of view?
As a journalist, I also looked at it from his point of view, even though he made me feel uncomfortable. I asked myself: is he within his rights to look at porn on his private device wherever he is? Do civil liberties in our society grant him that freedom?
But in my heart, I was offended.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. From disgust to it's ok, Woman's Hour took to the streets to find out what you think of it.
When I mentioned it to friends, everyone seemed to have a story of their own, or an opinion.
"It happened to me when I was with my son having a coffee at a Swiss airport," one said. "Two Italian guys were sitting next to me. I said something because I felt safe and I sensed there'd be support if an argument ensued." It worked, and they politely switched the laptop off.
It certainly got everyone talking, but like me, no-one was sure where the law stood.
According to Prof Clare McGlynn from Durham University who specialises in the law around porn, there's little to stop someone viewing pornographic material in public - on public transport, in a library, in a park or a cafe, for example.
"It's like reading a book," she says. "They are viewing lawful material which is freely available, and restricting people's access to it presents other challenges."
In Prof McGlynn's view, the law would only prevent it if the porn viewer is harassing someone or causing a disturbance.
So, what do you do? Prof McGlynn describes it as a dilemma.
"It's like someone shouting at you, calling to you to 'Cheer up, love!'" says Prof McGlynn. "Do you confront it, or do you put your head down and walk along?"
But when I contacted Transport for London, they appeared to take the case very seriously.
"If someone has made you feel uncomfortable, for example by viewing pornographic material, please tell the police or a member of our staff," I was told.
A member of staff said passengers should report incidents like to this to the bus driver, who would tell the control centre, and the information would then be passed to the police for them to investigate.
In Prof McGlynn's view, there is not much the police could do. On the other hand, James Turner QC contacted the BBC to say that there is a law - the Indecent Displays (Control) Act - which might form the basis for a prosecution.
Five years ago, in the US, the executive director of a group called Morality in the Media had an experience similar to mine on an aeroplane. As a result, the group - now called the National Center On Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) - campaigned to get the major US airlines to stop passengers watching porn.
"All of them except for one agreed to improve their policies to prohibit passengers from viewing this material during flights and agreed to better train their flight attendants on what to do," Haley Halverson of NCOSE told me.
Buses don't have flight attendants, though. Nor do trains. And even if police wanted to investigate incidents of porn-watching on public transport, passengers can get off whenever they like.
How would officers catch them and question them then?
Siobhann Tighe and Prof Clare McGlynn spoke to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour, on BBC Radio 4. Listen to the discussion here.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38611265 | news_magazine-38611265 |
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Could a national maximum wage work? - BBC News | 2017-01-10 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Jeremy Corbyn’s call on Radio 4’s Today programme for a high earnings cap is not a unique position. Franklin D Roosevelt called for something similar. | Business | In 1942, Franklin D Roosevelt - not known as a Socialist radical, though he had his moments - proposed that anyone earning over $25,000 should be taxed at 100%.
Effectively, the President of the United States was calling for a high pay cap of, in today's money, just under $400,000 or £330,000.
Interviewed this morning on the Today programme, Jeremy Corbyn rekindled the debate on high pay, saying that a "cap" should be considered for the highest earners.
With legislation if necessary.
Franklin D Roosevelt - not known as a socialist radical
Given that a direct limit (making it "illegal" for example for anyone to earn over, say, £200,000) would be almost impossible to enforce in a global economy where income takes many forms - salary, investments, returns on assets - very high marginal rates of tax could be one way to control very high levels of pay.
Another could be by imposing limits on the pay ratio between higher and lower earners in a company - possibly a more politically palatable option.
The High Pay Centre, for example, supports considering this approach.
Their research reveals the ratio has increased substantially.
"The average pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive has rocketed from around £1m a year in the late 1990s - about 60 times the average UK worker - to closer to £5m today, more than 170 times," the organisation said in 2014.
Firms have been under fire over high rates of executive pay
In its submission to the review of corporate governance by the House of Commons business select committee in October, the centre said executive pay was "out of control".
It is only relatively recently that high marginal rates of tax have been dropped as a way of limiting "out of control" pay.
Although America's Congress couldn't quite stomach the wartime 100% super tax (the actor Ann Sheridan commented "I regret that I have only one salary to give to my country") by 1945 the marginal rate on incomes over $200,000 was 94%.
Post-war, very high rates of income tax on high earners were the norm and income inequality was far lower.
By the 1970s in the UK, the marginal rate on higher incomes was 84%, a figure that rose to 98% with the introduction of a surcharge on investment income.
Denis Healey, then the Labour chancellor, famously said he wanted to "squeeze the rich until the pips squeak" - a quote he subsequently denied.
The mood changed with economic stagnation, industrial strife and the arrival of mainstream monetarism and its political leaders - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Strikers gather round a brazier at a picket line in London in 1979
They built an economic and political philosophy based on a belief that it wasn't the state's job to spend, in Thatcher's famous phrase, "other people's money" - it was better to allow people to retain the money they earned and spend it as they saw fit, even if it was an awful lot.
Lower levels of income tax were the result and economic growth strengthened for a period.
Income inequality also grew, maybe a price worth paying for the economic riches which, it was argued, were flowing around the country.
For many, especially since the financial crisis, the pendulum has swung back, away from lower taxes towards a more punitive approach to high incomes.
Mr Corbyn was speaking about a belief that some individuals at the top of the income scale now have far too much money to spend compared with the "just about managing" classes.
Theresa May has also made it clear that "fat cat pay" is on her radar.
The economics of high pay and whether it should be limited are based on a judgement between two competing interests.
The first is summed up by the Laffer Curve, popularised by the US economist Arthur Laffer, which argues that if income taxes are too high (or pay limits in any guise too strong) they reduce the incentive to work, which ultimately affects growth, national wealth and government income.
At its most basic, under the "Laffer rules" a 0% income tax rate would collect no revenue.
And a 100% income tax rate would also collect no revenue, as no one would bother working.
Ronald Reagan slashed the top rates of US income tax
It has been used from Reagan onwards as the economic underpinning for an argument that lower taxes support growth.
In the 1980s, US government revenues increased as taxes were cut, although that was as much to do with general strong levels of growth as it was to do with the tax cuts themselves.
The second, contrary, economic pressure, as countless studies from the World Bank and others have shown, is that countries with high levels of income inequality have lower levels of growth.
Tackling that inequality, by whatever method, incentivises people to work more effectively.
The problem is that lifting lower wages by increasing, for example, productivity levels, could be a more effective way of reducing the gap between low and high pay, although it would take many years of concerted effort to be successful.
Since the 1970s, the notion of a government inspired "incomes policy" has been - in the popularity stakes - right up there with multi-millionaire bankers at a meeting of Momentum, the organisation that supports Mr Corbyn's Labour leadership.
But, ever since the introduction of the minimum wage in the 1990s, the government has made it clear that the amount people are paid is not simply a matter for private businesses and the free market.
Mr Corbyn has said he wants to consider a national maximum wage.
Many might nod in agreement.
How to do it, though, and whether it is economically helpful for growth, is a very different matter. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38570434 | news_business-38570434 |
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Veganuary: Is following a vegan diet for a month worth it? - BBC News | 2017-01-04 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | A record number of people have signed up for Veganuary - swerving meat and dairy for January - but does it do any good? | UK | The Veganuary campaign, encouraging people to try a vegan diet for the month most commonly associated with resolution and change, is under way, with a record 50,000 people signed up.
But can forgoing meat, fish, dairy, eggs and honey for 31 days do any good?
The adverts are on display, supporters on board and partner restaurants are promoting their meat and dairy-free dishes.
Campaign organisers say following a vegan diet, even for such a short spell, can bring benefits.
It promotes the animal rights argument - that sentient animals should not be eaten or used in food production. And environmental grounds - warning about the pollution caused by raising animals and as a by-product of agriculture.
But it also says a balanced vegan diet can provide the nutrition people need in concord with health benefits - catchy at a time of year when people look to make up for festive excesses.
Veganuary spokeswoman Clea Grady told the BBC she feels "brilliant - better than I ever have" as a result of trying, and staying with, a vegan diet.
The charity says the change can lessen obesity, cut blood pressure, and lower the levels of type 2 diabetes.
"More than 75 per cent of people who have tried going vegan for a month report an improvement in their health.
"They said they slept better and they lost an average of 6lbs as a result of their changed diet," the Veganuary website says.
There is a lot to be said for "strict dietary changes" says Lucy Jones, consultant dietician and spokeswoman for the BDA, the Association of UK Dieticians.
"If people follow a restricted diet, they think about what they're eating - you can no longer pop into the office and eat a biscuit or a cake."
They tend to "plan their meals in advance, prepare and cook from scratch".
"It is certainly possible to have an awful diet. But, as a vegan, you tend to have more plant proteins, beans and pulses and more fruit and vegetables," she says.
"We have to be cautious about what you can achieve. But having a month where you are eating more fruit, vegetables and nuts can't be a bad thing."
Proponents say it's a time for change
Veganuary can lead to changed eating habits throughout the year.
Will all those greens and pulses have an impact on pounds and pressures?
"The impact on blood sugars is fairly immediate, cholesterol takes a few weeks and blood pressure takes longer, and comes with the weight loss," says Lucy.
All burgers, and all dinners, are not created equal
There's a bias in play after years of being told meat, eggs and animal fats are bad for us, she says.
"There is a world of difference between hamburgers and hot dogs, fried eggs and pasteurised milk, versus grass-fed organic meat, pastured poultry, poached organic eggs and raw, or at least organic, dairy," she says, touching on the continuing debate about the benefit of organic foods.
"Vegan is a plant-based diet with high vegetables but also large amounts of cereal grains (both refined and unrefined) and legumes, both of which are low in bio-available nutrients and high in anti-nutrients such as phytate.
"On the other hand wholefood animal produce such as organic meats, fish and shellfish and eggs are among the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat," she explains.
Vegans can run low on minerals and vitamins like B12, iron, zinc, D and calcium - in fact the Veganuary website points towards supplementing B12 to ensure it's covered.
And, whereas some studies show vegans and vegetarians living longer, she says, they often include people who pursue other healthy lifestyle traits, like exercise and not drinking alcohol, comparing them with the junk food-lovers.
In January, both experts observe that anyone going from Christmas excess to a vegan diet plus exercise will feel different.
But Kahler warns they can become nutrient-deficient down the line.
"People use the words 'balance' and 'in moderation' as a cover to incorporate whatever they want in their diet. Moderation isn't the key to health," she says.
"Setting boundaries is the key along with an understanding that there are certain 'foods' - like fizzy drinks and doughnuts - that we consume which simply should not be labelled with the word 'food'".
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38506418 | news_uk-38506418 |
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Ivan Rogers resignation: Dear Sir, I quit! The resignation quiz - BBC News | 2017-01-04 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | How much do you know about famous resignations? | Magazine | Sir Ivan Rogers has quit his job as British ambassador to the EU, issuing a resignation statement that urged his team to "continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking". But he's not the first person to make headlines with a biting departure.
Test your knowledge about some of history's more celebrated resignation statements.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38510071 | news_magazine-38510071 |
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Obituary: Tam Dalyell - BBC News | 2017-01-26 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Veteran Labour MP who first articulated the West Lothian Question. | UK Politics | Tam Dalyell was a political contradiction, an aristocratic Old Etonian who became a socialist politician.
It was he who articulated what became known as the West Lothian Question, which festered at the heart of Scotland's relationship with Westminster.
A former Conservative activist, he became a thorn in the side of the Thatcher government.
But he won admiration from across the political spectrum as an honourable and principled member of parliament.
Thomas Dalyell Loch was born in Edinburgh on 9 August 1932.
His father Gordon Loch, a civil servant, adopted his wife Nora's maiden name in 1938.
It was through his mother that Dalyell later inherited the Dalyell baronetcy, although he never used the title.
The Suez crisis made him an opponent of British military intervention
He went to Eton before doing his National Service as a trooper with the Royal Scots Greys, having failed his officer training.
After he was demobbed, he went to Cambridge where he was chairman of the University Conservative Association.
It was while working as a teacher that he experienced a political conversion, brought about by the Suez Crisis in 1956.
The debacle, in which Britain, together with Israel and France, unsuccessfully attempted to gain control of the Suez Canal, made a deep impression on him
Not only did he join the Labour Party, but the aborted invasion made him a committed opponent of future British military involvement overseas.
In 1962, he won the seat of West Lothian in a by-election, fighting off a strong challenge from a future SNP leader, William Wolfe.
Less than two years after he entered parliament, Dalyell was appointed parliamentary private secretary to Dick Crossman, then Minister for Local Government.
Dalyell (r) arrived at Westminster in 1962 as the newly elected member for West Lothian
The position of PPS was seen as the first step to a ministerial career, but Dalyell's independent stance on issues irritated the party establishment.
That irritation turned to anger in 1967 when he was heavily censured for leaking minutes of a select committee meeting about the Porton Down biological and chemical warfare establishment to the Observer newspaper.
Dalyell claimed he thought the minutes were in the public domain but he did not escape a public dressing-down by the Speaker.
In a parliamentary debate on devolution in 1977, Dalyell first proposed what would become known as the West Lothian Question.
A vocal opponent of Scottish devolution, Dalyell contrasted the town of Blackburn in his own constituency, and Blackburn in Lancashire.
"For how long," he asked, "will English constituencies and English Honourable Members tolerate at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important and often decisive effect on English politics?"
It was Enoch Powell who coined the term West Lothian Question, in his response to Dalyell's speech.
He fought to uncover the truth about the Lockerbie bombing
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 she found Dalyell a persistent critic of her policies.
He supported the Troops Out movement in Northern Ireland and attacked the prime minister's proposed boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
But it was the Falklands War that raised his public profile. He described the conflict as "like two bald men fighting over a comb," quoting the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
He strongly condemned the decision to sink the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, insisting the vessel had been steering away from the conflict when torpedoed by a British submarine.
His political opponents called him Daft Tam, ignoring the methodical and painstaking preparation he put into sourcing the facts to back up his arguments.
He was no slave to parliamentary protocol and was suspended from the House on numerous occasions, twice for calling Mrs Thatcher "a liar" over the Falklands campaign.
"She is a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat, a crook and a disgrace to the House of Commons," was one notable contribution during a 1987 debate.
However, some felt that his intemperate language did nothing to win him support.
Former Conservative MP and later political commentator, Matthew Parris said that "this element of personal vendetta seriously weakens his case".
Dalyell was persistent in trying to uncover the truth about the Lockerbie bombing and consistently said he did not believe Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi was responsible for the outrage.
He was, predictably, bitterly opposed to the Gulf War, "Kuwait is the 19th bloody state of Iraq," and went to Baghdad in 1994 to negotiate with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz.
The election of a Labour government under Tony Blair in 1997 failed to deter Dalyell from speaking his mind.
In 1999, he decided that he would no longer vote at Westminster on purely English issues, defying a number of three-line whips.
He was one of 25 MPs who opposed military action in Kosovo. "I am one of a dwindling number of MPs who have actually worn the Queen's uniform," he said.
He continued to live in the ancestral home
"Perhaps we are a bit less relaxed about unleashing war than those who have never been in a military situation."
He had little time for the New Labour project, describing Tony Blair as the worst of the eight prime ministers who had held power while he was a parliamentarian.
In 2001, he became Father of the House, the longest continuous serving MP, using his position to attack the US led invasion of Iraq.
"These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world," he said. "I am appalled that a British Labour prime minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing."
Dalyell stood down from the House of Commons in 2005, after serving 43 years as an MP, first for West Lothian, then, from 1983, the redrawn constituency of Linlithgow.
Behind Tam Dalyell's somewhat shambling and eccentric demeanour was a keen analytical brain and a passion for meticulous research.
Unrepentant about his dogged approach, he claimed that "you must not be afraid to be thought a bore".
He was that rare thing among politicians, a man who stuck to his principles, regardless of how unpopular it made him. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29367988 | news_uk-politics-29367988 |
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Donald Trump and Theresa May - Do opposites attract? - BBC News | 2017-01-26 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | The prime minister has joked that 'opposites attract', but how will she get on with Donald Trump? | UK Politics | As she made her way across the Atlantic, Theresa May joked with the press pack on her flight that "sometimes opposites attract".
A wisecracking way of trying to cover the question about how she and Donald Trump can work together - the reality TV star billionaire and the self-described hard working vicar's daughter.
Voters will decide for themselves how funny they find it.
But Number 10 has already invested a lot in the early days of this relationship.
Perhaps, that is in part due to the early embarrassment of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage's adventures in Manhattan. However, it is also certainly due to her conviction that whoever the US president is, a British leader needs to, and should, cultivate their friendship.
Downing Street sources say they have had more contact with the Trump team since its victory than any other country has - and the conversations between the two leaders have focused on how to develop their personal relationship and the bond between the two countries.
But even before the two politicians meet tomorrow in the Oval Office, Mrs May is trying to put forward serious arguments about Britain and America's relationship as the world changes at warp speed around the two countries - making a major foreign policy speech at a gathering of the Republican Party in Philadelphia just hours after she touches down.
It is plain to see that while she is deadly serious about creating an extremely close relationship with the new president, she will continue to disagree with him on some issues.
When repeatedly questioned about his view that torture works, the prime minister told us: "We condemn torture, I have been very clear, I'm not going to change my position whether I'm talking to you or talking to the president."
And crucially, she said guidance stating that UK security services cannot share intelligence if it is obtained through torture will not change, telling me: "Our guidance is very clear about the position that the UK takes, and our position has not changed."
Despite President Trump's very public doubts about Nato, she says he has already assured her on the phone that he is committed to the alliance.
A public restatement of that in the next 24 hours would no doubt be a political boon for her.
While the prime minister is plainly uncomfortable with some of Mr Trump's positions, she also wants to emphasise some of the areas where they do agree - the "shared values" of looking out for "ordinary working class families".
In her speech to senators and congressmen tonight she will also emphasise how, in her view, Conservative values are Republican values.
The Republicans - the Tories' sister political party - are now in charge at all levels on Capitol Hill, as well as inside the White House. For the GOP and Mrs May's Conservative Party, patriotism, flag and family are not values to shy away from.
And despite the squeamishness, even in Tory ranks, about her eagerness to be seen alongside the president, the prime minister is unapologetic about her friendly stance.
When asked about appearing to be too close to the controversial new president, she said: "Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America.
"The UK and the US have shared challenges, shared interests, that we can work together to deal with. We have a special relationship, it's long standing, it's existed through many different prime ministers and presidents."
A more different prime minister and president are hard to conceive. What they make of each other, and the relationship between our two countries, will affect us all. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38760718 | news_uk-politics-38760718 |
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Brexit white paper: Climbdown or goodwill gesture - BBC News | 2017-01-26 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Giving MPs a white paper is a clear concession by Theresa May but one that is unlikely to affect her Brexit timetable or damage her authority. | UK Politics | It was only yesterday that the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, told MPs it just might all be a bit tricky to have a White Paper, a formal document outlining the government's plans for Brexit, and stick to the timetable they want to pursue.
Rebel Remainers though were "delighted", that, stealing Jeremy Corbyn's thunder, a planted question from a loyal Tory MP at PMQs today produced in fact a promise from the Prime Minister that, after all, there will be a White Paper.
It is a climbdown, no question, a last-minute change of heart.
Late last night Brexiteers were being assured there would be no bending, no delay to the government's plans and no giving in to the Remainers.
Even early this morning, government sources were privately suggesting that they were quite happy to have the white paper option up their sleeve, but there were no immediate plans to make that promise.
Then voila, at 1205 GMT, the pledge of a white paper suddenly emerged. As one senior Tory joked, "welcome to the vacillation of the next two years".
It may be being described as a "massive, unplanned" concession but it doesn't seriously hurt the government.
First off, it shows goodwill to the rebel Tory Remainers, many of whom feel their Eurosceptic rivals have had the upper hand of late. Schmoozing matters round these parts.
It takes one of the potential arguments that could have gathered pace off the table, before the Article 50 bill is even published. And, rightly or wrongly, no one expects a white paper will contain anything new that the prime minister has not yet already said.
It's largely a victory for the Remainers about process, rather than substance.
For her critics this is evidence of weakness, that's she has been pushed into changing her mind.
But it doesn't need to change the government's timetable, and today's embarrassment of a climbdown might be worth the goodwill that Number 10 will get in return. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38747976 | news_uk-politics-38747976 |
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Theresa May's Brexit speech: What does it mean for free trade? - BBC News | 2017-01-18 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | BBC Economics Correspondent Andrew Walker answers your questions on Theresa May's Brexit speech. | UK | This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Theresa May confirmed that the final deal would be put to the vote in Parliament
Following Theresa May's widely anticipated speech on Brexit on Tuesday, you sent us your questions.
The impact on free trade was the most asked about subject. Below, BBC Economics Correspondent Andrew Walker looks at two of the most popular questions you asked:
The only thing on the list above that the Prime Minister has said she wants to opt out of is the free movement of people - or rather the free movement of people to work and settle in the UK.
She is very keen on the free movement of goods and services. She said in the speech that she wants: "the freest possible trade in goods and services between Britain and the EU's member states."
She does not want to opt out of that.
The freest possible means what we have today. For example: no tariffs on goods travelling in either direction, mutual recognition of each other's technical standards, the freedom to offer services across borders and more.
In short, it means the provisions of the single market that apply to goods and services. It would be theoretically possible to go further still, especially in services. The European Commission says there are still barriers and it wants to tackle them.
But for now, the single market as it is represents the freest we can get.
But Mrs May seems to accept that we can't have that without also accepting freedom of movement for workers. And that is one of her red lines.
So once that has gone, the freest possible movement for goods and services will presumably mean something less than the single market, something less than we have today.
How much less will be a matter for negotiation. In fact, the answer to many questions about what will "X" be like when we leave will depend on the outcome of the negotiations. We can speculate but we can't know for sure.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Some of the headlines from Theresa May's vision for future UK-EU relations
The UK does have some cards which will encourage the EU to lean towards what the Prime Minister wants. Some European businesses have the UK as an important export market - German car makers for example.
During the referendum campaign many Leave supporters were keen to point out that the rest of the EU exports more to the UK than the UK exports to them. That, they argued, means they need the UK more than we need them.
The counter-argument is that EU exports to the UK as a share of national income are a lot smaller than trade in the opposite direction. That suggests UK/EU trade matters more to us than to them.
Another reason that the remaining EU might want to be cooperative in trade negotiations is that many continental businesses would want to continue to be able to use the City of London as a financial centre. On the other hand some other cities, including Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin, might fancy a bigger slice of that pie.
So there are some economic reasons for the EU to share Mrs May's desire for free movement of goods and services.
But there is an important political issue that pulls them in the opposite direction. They don't want life in the UK to look too rosy at a time when there are rising Eurosceptic movements in many countries beyond the UK. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38658697 | news_uk-38658697 |
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Is free trade good or bad? - BBC News | 2017-01-18 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Free trade has been a dominant part of the post-WW2 global economy, but it is now being challenged. | Business | Trade makes the world go round, but how free can it remain?
Free trade is something of a sacred cow in the economics profession.
Moving towards it, rather slowly, has also been one of the dominant features of the post-World War Two global economy.
Now there are new challenges to that development.
The UK is leaving the European Union and the single market - though in her speech this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May promised to push for the "freest possible trade" with European countries and to sign new deals with others around the world.
Most obviously Donald Trump has raised the possibility of quitting various trade agreements, notably Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Even the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proposed new barriers to imports.
In Europe, trade negotiations with the United States and Canada have run into difficulty, reflecting public concerns about the impact on jobs, the environment and consumer protection.
The WTO's Doha Round of global trade liberalisation talks has run aground.
The World Trade Organization is based in Geneva and came into being in 1995
The case for trade without government imposed barriers has a long history in economics.
Adam Smith, the 18th Century Scottish economist who many see as the founding father of the subject, was in favour of it. But it was a later British writer, David Ricardo in the 19th Century, who set out the idea known as comparative advantage that underpins much of the argument for freer trade.
It is not about countries being able to produce more cheaply or efficiently than others. You can have a comparative advantage in making something even if you are less efficient than your trade partner.
When a country shifts resources to produce more of one good there is what economists call an "opportunity cost" in terms of how much less of something else you can make. You have a comparative advantage in making a product if the cost in that sense is less than it is in another country.
Economic arguments over free trade date back to the 19th Century
If two countries trade on this basis, concentrating on goods where they have a comparative advantage they can both end up better off.
Another reason that economists tend to look askance at trade restrictions comes from an analysis of the impact if governments do put up barriers - in particular tariffs or taxes - on imports.
There are gains of course. The firms and workers who are protected can sell more of their goods in the home market. But consumers lose out by paying a higher price - and consumers in this case can mean businesses, if they buy the protected goods as components or raw materials.
The textbook analysis says that those losses add up to more than the total gains. So you get the textbook conclusion that it's best to avoid protection.
Many lower-skilled workers in developed economies feel they have lost out in the drive to globalisation
And this conclusion is regardless of what other countries do. The 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat set it out it like this:
"It makes no more sense to be protectionist because other countries have tariffs than it would to block up our harbours because other countries have rocky coasts."
The implication is that unilateral trade liberalisation makes perfect sense.
A more recent theory of what drives international trade looks at what are called economies of scale - where the more a firm produces of some good, the lower cost of each unit.
The associated specialisation can make it beneficial for economies that are otherwise very similar to trade with one another. This area is known as new trade theory and the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman was an important figure in developing it.
The basic idea that it's good to have freer trade has underpinned decades of international co-operation on trade policy since World War Two.
Free trade has been a cornerstone of the post-war world
The period since 1945 has been characterised by a gradual lowering of trade barriers. It happened in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which began life in 1948 as a forum for governments to negotiate lower tariffs.
Its membership was initially small, but by the time it was replaced by the World Trade Organization in 1995, most countries had signed up.
The motivation was to end or reduce the protectionism or barriers to trade that went up in the 1930s. It is not generally thought that those barriers caused the Great Depression, but many do think they aggravated and prolonged it.
The process of post-war trade liberalisation was driven largely by a desire for reciprocal concessions - better access to others' markets in return for opening your own.
But what is the case against free (or at least freer) trade?
First and foremost is the argument that it creates losers as well as winners.
What Ricardo's theory suggested was that all countries engaging in trade could be better off. But his idea could not address the question of whether trade could create losers as well as winners within countries.
Economic theory says if governments adopt protectionism, total losses will outweigh total gains
Work by two Swedish Nobel Prize winners, Eli Hecksher and Bertil Ohlin, subsequently built on by the American Paul Samuelson developed the basic idea of comparative advantage in a way that showed that trade could lead to some groups losing out.
Putting it very briefly, if a country has a relatively abundant supply of, for example, low-skilled labour, those workers will gain while their low-skilled counterparts in countries where it is less abundant will lose.
There has been a debate about whether this approach fits the facts, but some do see it as a useful explanation of how American industrial workers (for example) have been adversely affected by the rise of competition from countries such as China.
A group of economists including David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at the impact on areas where local industry was exposed to what they call the China shock.
"Adjustment in local labour markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labour-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences.
At this week's World Economic Forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned against isolationist moves that could spark a trade war
Still if you accept that overall countries gain, then the winners could in principle fully compensate the losers and still be better off.
Such programmes do exist. Countries that have unemployment benefits provide assistance to people who have lost their jobs. Some of those people will have been affected by competition from abroad.
The United States has a programme that is specially targeted for people who lose their jobs as a result of imports, called Trade Adjustment Assistance.
But is it enough? Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank in Washington writes: "The winners have never tried to fully compensate the losers, so let's stop claiming that trade benefits us all."
Which arguments will Donald Trump be listening to in the White House?
In any case, it is not clear that compensation would do the trick. As Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor noted, they may lose their jobs and also "the dignity of work".
He is keen on maintaining open markets for trade, but recognises the need to do something about what you might call the side effects.
To return to recent political developments - Donald Trump clearly did get support from many of those people in areas of the US where industry has declined.
We don't yet know how he will address those issues when he takes his place in the White House.
Perhaps his threats to introduce new tariffs are just that - threats. But the post-war trend towards more liberalised international trade looks more uncertain than it has for many years. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38209407 | news_business-38209407 |
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Theresa May's Brexit 'deal or no deal' - BBC News | 2017-01-18 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Theresa May's long-awaited speech on her strategy for Brexit leads Wednesday's front pages. | The Papers | Theresa May set out her Brexit strategy in a speech in London
Theresa May's Brexit speech is pretty much the only story in town, at least as far as the front pages are concerned.
It is the tough rhetoric which captures the headlines.
The Times headline sums up her message to the EU as "Give us a fair deal or you'll be crushed".
At the opposite end of the market, the Daily Star renders it as "May: I will crush EU".
For the Daily Mail, the parallels with Margaret Thatcher are hard to resist. It says the speech showed the "steel of the new Iron Lady".
Among the papers that opposed Brexit, the Guardian found the speech a "doubly depressing event" - a reality check for those who want to keep the UK in the single market while being riddled with its own streak of "global fantasy".
But the Guardian acknowledges that as a political manoeuvre it was a huge success for Mrs May and has strengthened her authority.
The Financial Times praises the prime minister's "bold vision" but warns that the road ahead will be perilous.
The Daily Mirror says Brexit will be a rollercoaster ride and only the reckless would pretend that it will be easy to reach a good deal with other nations.
The Sun's front page is mocked up as a Biblical tablet of stone with the single word headline "Brexodus".
The paper says Mrs May could call a snap election if Parliament votes to reject the deal she negotiates.
The Daily Telegraph praises the "steel behind" Mrs May's words and declares the speech "a defining moment in British politics".
Matt's cartoon has a worker bricking up the Channel Tunnel and remarking: "Mrs May's Brexit is a little harder than we'd been led to expect".
In other stories, the recently-retired head of the Serpentine Gallery in London, Dame Julia Peyton-Jones, features widely after becoming a mother at the age of 64.
The Daily Mail says that instead of putting her feet up after a high-flying career, the woman known as the "Queen Of Arts" will now be busy raising her daughter, Pia.
Dame Julia has not revealed further details, and the papers cannot say whether she had the child naturally or through a surrogate mother, IVF or adoption.
The Times reports that Manchester United, the world's richest football club according to Forbes magazine, has defended the launch of three new replica kits each season by claiming that their fans want "newness".
The paper thinks that argument flies in the face of concern expressed by parents at the high cost of funding their children's support for top teams.
Each new United kit costs £88 pounds for a child's version. Manchester City, Spurs and Arsenal also bring out three new strips per season.
Finally, the Daily Telegraph reports that intelligence agency GCHQ is launching a recruitment drive targeting teenage girls who know their way around social media.
A nationwide competition will launch next month designed to attract thousands of potential female spies with the skills to protect the nation against cyber attacks.
The Telegraph says the security services want to tackle their image as "male, pale and stale" by recruiting more "Jane Bonds" to their ranks. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-38659108 | news_blogs-the-papers-38659108 |
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All aboard the China-to-London freight train - BBC News | 2017-01-18 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | The Yiwu-to-Barking express is the newest way to send your freight from China to Europe. | Business | It's not on a boat, it's not on a plane, it's on a train. The newest way to send your freight from China to Europe involves spending 15 days on a train that doesn't have a buffet car in sight.
On 3 January in Yiwu in eastern China, a bright orange locomotive pulling 44 containers laden with suitcases, clothes and an assortment of household goods set off on a 7,500-mile (12,000km) journey to western Europe.
Ten containers were taken off at the German cargo hub of Duisburg. The rest made up the first cargo train from China to arrive in London at Barking's Eurohub freight terminal.
London is the 15th European city to find its way on to the ever-expanding map of destinations for China's rail cargo. Last year, 1,702 freight trains made the voyage to Europe, more than double the 2015 figure.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.
Yiwu Timex Industrial Investments, which is running this service with China's state-run railways, says prices are half that of air cargo and cut two weeks off the journey time by sea.
The UK's biggest supermarket, Tesco, doesn't have any goods on this particular train but does use rail to carry toys, electrical goods, homeware and clothing from China to European rail hubs such as Bratislava in Slovakia and Krasnaje in Belarus.
Alistair Lindsay, Tesco's head of global logistics, says the supermarket prefers shipping its goods because this is the most environmentally friendly way, as well as offering the best value for money, but that "where we need to move products quicker we have that option to do it by rail".
This decision would normally be driven by customer demand for particular products, he says.
It demonstrates how market demand and the realities of globalisation are increasingly allowing China's President Xi Jinping to realise his ambitious plan to revive the ancient Silk Road.
For centuries the fabled trade route from the ancient capital of Xian provided a link to the bustling markets of European cities such as Istanbul and Venice.
In the 21st Century China has become the world's biggest exporter, with the export of goods totalling $2.28 trillion (£1.85tn) in 2015.
The Silk Road provided a link to the markets of European cities like Istanbul and Venice
This rail expansion is part of President Xi's "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) trade policy. For Beijing it offers another way to sustain its economic growth.
Kazakhstan is one of the countries on the route and it was there that Mr Xi first outlined his vision in a speech in 2013 saying, "This will be a great undertaking benefiting the people of all countries along the route."
Extolling the virtues of globalisation was a theme he repeated again at Davos this week.
For some, this is as much political as economic, offering Beijing the chance to project soft power as well as demonstrating it has the influence to thread disparate nations from Russia to Spain together.
China is also pushing its version of a "maritime silk road for example", by building a $1.4bn port city in Sri Lanka
"[OBOR] is set to become Xi Jinping's grand legacy," says Dr Sam Beatson, of King's College London.
"Regardless of the returns on offer... the policies will continue to be pushed as a means of seeking to fulfil Xi's dream under his leadership."
One of the other legacies President Xi is trying to tackle is China's pollution problem. While rail cargo is not as green as sea transport it emits less carbon dioxide (CO2) than air travel.
Freight transport accounts for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions
This is the "first argument when trying to get our customers to re-evaluate their options", says Johan Ignell, rail freight manager at Swedish cargo firm Greencarrier.
It calculates that a 40ft (12m) container with 20 tonnes of cargo would account for just 4% of the CO2 emissions it would take to move it by air (though emissions would be more than halved again if it were moved by sea).
Freight transport accounts for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is "fraught with difficulty" to compare emissions from different transport modes, says Prof Alan McKinnon of Germany's Kuehne Logistics University.
Prof McKinnon, one of the authors of a 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says "load factor, energy efficiency and power sources all make a difference and can be hard to ascertain".
China is now the world's biggest exporter
He adds: "While shifting air cargo to rail will certainly cut emissions, container shipping will continue to command a significant carbon advantage over transcontinental rail, particularly now that most vessels are slow steaming to save fuel."
There is also a business case for this emerging trade route to grow. Not least among European companies looking to export to China.
At the moment there are no plans to run a return train service from London but that could change quickly. China is already the European Union's second biggest export market - though there is an EU trade deficit in goods of about $190bn.
For UK companies facing up to the reality of Brexit, China is an attractive proposition and the train carries new opportunities.
Brand Avenue is a company that already exports British-made goods including cosmetics and jewellery to China, and chief executive Jody Jacobs says he's exploring moving to rail.
"We deal a lot in goods which weigh a lot in comparison to their volume [which is] where airfreight becomes expensive, such as cosmetics and baby food.
"So for us a service which is quicker than sea and cheaper than air is a great middle ground."
For UK companies facing up to the reality of Brexit, China is an attractive proposition
For established cargo companies rail also offers the potential for growth. Shipping lines have seen profits fall because of overcapacity attributed to the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
The world's biggest shipping company, Maersk, told the BBC it is investigating "possible opportunities" in long-distance rail, though it sees them as supplementary to sea and air routes.
China is planning another 20 European routes for rail freight, and with the world's demand for consumer goods continuing to grow, all the ingredients seem to be there for rail to help the global economy steam ahead in 2017 and beyond. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38654176 | news_business-38654176 |
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Mexico and Mr Trump: What will happen to trade ties? - BBC News | 2017-01-05 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Caroline Bayley reports on the impact the Nafta trade deal has had in Mexico, and what its potential demise under US President-elect Trump would mean for the country. | Business | Donald Trump is not popular in Mexico
Mexico is being blamed by President-elect Donald Trump for taking jobs from the US.
He's been putting pressure on US companies not to move jobs south, and this week Ford announced it was investing in its factory in Michigan rather than building a new plant in Mexico.
During his election campaign, Mr Trump threatened to rip up Nafta, the free trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico, which has been in place for 23 years.
But what impact has Nafta had in Mexico, and what would its potential demise mean for the country?
In a leafy square in Mexico City on a warm December evening a group of excited children are hitting a brightly coloured pinata stuffed with sweets. A fellow passer-by explains to me that pinatas are a Mexican tradition, particularly at Christmas and birthdays.
However, Mexicans also like pinatas "in the shape of everything we want to hit", he says. "The latest trend is Donald Trump pinatas," he adds.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A look back at some of the things Donald Trump has said about Mexicans
Mr Trump is not popular in Mexico. He was incredibly rude about Mexicans during his election campaign, and at a time when the world seems to be turning away from free trade he threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the US, Mexico and Canada.
The important thing about Nafta is that companies importing and exporting between the three countries pay no tariffs. Mr Trump believes it's been bad for the US as cheaper Mexican labour has meant some US manufacturers have moved production across the border, resulting in job losses at home.
Nafta was implemented in 1994 and over the past 23 years Mexico has grown as a manufacturing hub. Today the United States and Mexico trade over $500bn (£400bn) in goods and services a year, equal to about $1.5bn a day. Mexico is the US's second-biggest export market, and the US is Mexico's largest.
Thierry Legros says without Nafta his farming business would be under threat
Red Sun Farms, a large vegetable-growing firm in central Mexico, depends on the free trade agreement. Its managing director, Thierry Legros, shows me into a vast greenhouse, 200m long, with row upon row of tomato plants. The company also grows peppers and exports 90% of its crop to the US and Canada.
So what would it mean if Mr Trump repealed the Nafta agreement completely with its tariff-free trading? "We might need to close the whole company," Thierry tells me. "It would be around 3,000 direct jobs, so with all the indirect that's quite a lot, probably double that."
Outside Thierry's office three flags flutter in the wind - one for each Nafta country.
The three Nafta flags at Red Sun Farms reflect the company's integration within the free trade area
Red Sun Farms even owns a farm in the US and sends Mexican workers over there. However, there's a stark wage differential, with pay significantly higher in the US.
"Right now with the exchange rate that's huge," Thierry explains, "it's about one to eight, one to 10."
These Red Sun Farms workers in Mexico earn far less than their counterparts in the US
As well as enabling Mexico to export freely, Nafta also opened the door to US imports, giving Mexican consumers much greater choice.
"It was an achievement, it was against history," says economic consultant Luis de la Calle, who was one of the negotiators of the free trade agreement.
"Most Mexicans thought that it was impossible or not convenient to have a strategic association with the US, and many people in the US never thought that Mexico could be their partner."
You can listen to In Business: Mexico and Mr Trump on BBC Radio 4 at 20:30 GMT on Thursday, 5 January and at 21:30 GMT on Sunday, 8 January.
Increased demand, as a result of free trade, forced Mexican manufacturers to improve quality.
Luis de la Calle says that before Nafta Mexico had three producers of TV sets, and the quality was "awful". But today, Mexico is "the largest manufacturer of TV sets in the world". They are exported and are "high quality, completely different from the protected market we had before".
The instantly recognisable VW Beetles are manufactured in Puebla, Mexico
Mexico is now a centre of manufacturing for overseas companies, such as the motor industry. General Motors and Ford both have factories in Mexico as well as the US.
But Donald Trump has put public pressure on US companies not to move production, and has threatened to impose import duties on cars coming in from Mexico. It's a sensitive subject and the American carmakers refused to be interviewed.
Donald Trump had this message for the car industry earlier this week
However, in the city of Puebla, a two-hour drive from the capital, the German car manufacturer Volkswagen is the biggest employer with 14,000 staff. It's the only place in the world where VW produces its famous Beetle, and as you enter the site you're greeted by a display of Beetles suspended in the air like a piece of installation art. The Golf and Jetta models are also produced here.
Thomas Karig from VW Mexico was tight-lipped about whether the firm had come under any pressure about jobs
Like the US carmakers, Volkswagen's Mexican production is integrated with its US plant. "We use a lot of parts coming from the US for assembly here in Mexico in Puebla, and our colleagues in Chattanooga in Tennessee - they use a lot of parts coming from Mexico," explains Thomas Karig from Volkswagen Mexico.
This integration is possible because there are no tariffs to pay each time components are sent from one Nafta country to another. But when I ask whether Volkswagen has come under pressure from Mr Trump about keeping jobs in the US, the atmosphere cools and there is a curt "no comment".
The Nafta agreement has not benefited everyone in Mexico though. Some small farmers were unable to compete with US agricultural imports and big Mexican rivals.
According to a study by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, from 1991 to 2007 some 4.9 million family farmers were displaced. Some found work with big exporting agricultural companies, but there was still a net loss of 1.9 million jobs.
Three of Aurelio's children are illegal migrants in the US
An hour's drive from Puebla I meet Aurelio, whose family has farmed a tiny patch of land since 1925. Deep in the dry countryside he raises a few cows.
Job opportunities are scarce and three of his five children have migrated illegally to the US where they have found work painting cars. But Donald Trump has said he wants to deport illegal immigrants. Aurelio takes out his mobile phone and calls one of his sons in the US. Is his son worried about this, I ask.
His son says that if there is a chance of being deported they will have to look elsewhere, but adds: "Mexico is a tough choice because of lack of opportunities, violence, high taxes and the economic situation, so it wouldn't be easy."
President Obama has deported at least 2.4 million illegal immigrants so this isn't a new policy. And according to the Pew Research Center, by 2014 more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico than migrated to the US.
Luis de la Calle says both the US and Mexico benefit from Nafta
Mr de la Calle acknowledges that the free trade agreement has split the country. He says there are two types of regions in Mexico.
"[There are] parts of the south of Mexico that are disconnected from international trade, that are lagging behind, where Nafta had little impact. Rates of growth are low, there is little investment, and you don't see large manufacturing operations."
In contrast to this, he says: "There are 16 or 17 other states that grow very fast, you see a lot of dynamism." These he describes as "Nafta states" with exporting businesses.
However, he dismisses Mr Trump's criticism of Mexico. "He says [Nafta's] been great for Mexico, actually his whole argument is that Mexico is doing so well. It's flattering."
He also claims that the US is benefiting from its close manufacturing links with Mexico.
However, when I ask who would come off worst if Nafta were repealed, the US or Mexico, he answers, "Mexico because we are smaller, but the US would lose quite a bit as well."
Donald Trump wasn't the first US presidential candidate to criticise Nafta. Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama did so on their campaign trails.
But abandoning it completely? The US may find it has too much to lose and perhaps Mr Trump has realised that too.
In Business: Mexico and Mr Trump is on BBC Radio 4 at 20:30 GMT on Thursday, 5 January and at 21:30 GMT on Sunday, 8 January. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38507482 | news_business-38507482 |
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Veganuary: Is following a vegan diet for a month worth it? - BBC News | 2017-01-05 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | A record number of people have signed up for Veganuary - swerving meat and dairy for January - but does it do any good? | UK | The Veganuary campaign, encouraging people to try a vegan diet for the month most commonly associated with resolution and change, is under way, with a record 50,000 people signed up.
But can forgoing meat, fish, dairy, eggs and honey for 31 days do any good?
The adverts are on display, supporters on board and partner restaurants are promoting their meat and dairy-free dishes.
Campaign organisers say following a vegan diet, even for such a short spell, can bring benefits.
It promotes the animal rights argument - that sentient animals should not be eaten or used in food production. And environmental grounds - warning about the pollution caused by raising animals and as a by-product of agriculture.
But it also says a balanced vegan diet can provide the nutrition people need in concord with health benefits - catchy at a time of year when people look to make up for festive excesses.
Veganuary spokeswoman Clea Grady told the BBC she feels "brilliant - better than I ever have" as a result of trying, and staying with, a vegan diet.
The charity says the change can lessen obesity, cut blood pressure, and lower the levels of type 2 diabetes.
"More than 75 per cent of people who have tried going vegan for a month report an improvement in their health.
"They said they slept better and they lost an average of 6lbs as a result of their changed diet," the Veganuary website says.
There is a lot to be said for "strict dietary changes" says Lucy Jones, consultant dietician and spokeswoman for the BDA, the Association of UK Dieticians.
"If people follow a restricted diet, they think about what they're eating - you can no longer pop into the office and eat a biscuit or a cake."
They tend to "plan their meals in advance, prepare and cook from scratch".
"It is certainly possible to have an awful diet. But, as a vegan, you tend to have more plant proteins, beans and pulses and more fruit and vegetables," she says.
"We have to be cautious about what you can achieve. But having a month where you are eating more fruit, vegetables and nuts can't be a bad thing."
Proponents say it's a time for change
Veganuary can lead to changed eating habits throughout the year.
Will all those greens and pulses have an impact on pounds and pressures?
"The impact on blood sugars is fairly immediate, cholesterol takes a few weeks and blood pressure takes longer, and comes with the weight loss," says Lucy.
All burgers, and all dinners, are not created equal
There's a bias in play after years of being told meat, eggs and animal fats are bad for us, she says.
"There is a world of difference between hamburgers and hot dogs, fried eggs and pasteurised milk, versus grass-fed organic meat, pastured poultry, poached organic eggs and raw, or at least organic, dairy," she says, touching on the continuing debate about the benefit of organic foods.
"Vegan is a plant-based diet with high vegetables but also large amounts of cereal grains (both refined and unrefined) and legumes, both of which are low in bio-available nutrients and high in anti-nutrients such as phytate.
"On the other hand wholefood animal produce such as organic meats, fish and shellfish and eggs are among the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat," she explains.
Vegans can run low on minerals and vitamins like B12, iron, zinc, D and calcium - in fact the Veganuary website points towards supplementing B12 to ensure it's covered.
And, whereas some studies show vegans and vegetarians living longer, she says, they often include people who pursue other healthy lifestyle traits, like exercise and not drinking alcohol, comparing them with the junk food-lovers.
In January, both experts observe that anyone going from Christmas excess to a vegan diet plus exercise will feel different.
But Kahler warns they can become nutrient-deficient down the line.
"People use the words 'balance' and 'in moderation' as a cover to incorporate whatever they want in their diet. Moderation isn't the key to health," she says.
"Setting boundaries is the key along with an understanding that there are certain 'foods' - like fizzy drinks and doughnuts - that we consume which simply should not be labelled with the word 'food'".
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38506418 | news_uk-38506418 |
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Ivan Rogers resignation: Dear Sir, I quit! The resignation quiz - BBC News | 2017-01-05 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | How much do you know about famous resignations? | Magazine | Sir Ivan Rogers has quit his job as British ambassador to the EU, issuing a resignation statement that urged his team to "continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking". But he's not the first person to make headlines with a biting departure.
Test your knowledge about some of history's more celebrated resignation statements.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38510071 | news_magazine-38510071 |
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Obituary: Tam Dalyell - BBC News | 2017-01-27 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Veteran Labour MP who first articulated the West Lothian Question. | UK Politics | Tam Dalyell was a political contradiction, an aristocratic Old Etonian who became a socialist politician.
It was he who articulated what became known as the West Lothian Question, which festered at the heart of Scotland's relationship with Westminster.
A former Conservative activist, he became a thorn in the side of the Thatcher government.
But he won admiration from across the political spectrum as an honourable and principled member of parliament.
Thomas Dalyell Loch was born in Edinburgh on 9 August 1932.
His father Gordon Loch, a civil servant, adopted his wife Nora's maiden name in 1938.
It was through his mother that Dalyell later inherited the Dalyell baronetcy, although he never used the title.
The Suez crisis made him an opponent of British military intervention
He went to Eton before doing his National Service as a trooper with the Royal Scots Greys, having failed his officer training.
After he was demobbed, he went to Cambridge where he was chairman of the University Conservative Association.
It was while working as a teacher that he experienced a political conversion, brought about by the Suez Crisis in 1956.
The debacle, in which Britain, together with Israel and France, unsuccessfully attempted to gain control of the Suez Canal, made a deep impression on him
Not only did he join the Labour Party, but the aborted invasion made him a committed opponent of future British military involvement overseas.
In 1962, he won the seat of West Lothian in a by-election, fighting off a strong challenge from a future SNP leader, William Wolfe.
Less than two years after he entered parliament, Dalyell was appointed parliamentary private secretary to Dick Crossman, then Minister for Local Government.
Dalyell (r) arrived at Westminster in 1962 as the newly elected member for West Lothian
The position of PPS was seen as the first step to a ministerial career, but Dalyell's independent stance on issues irritated the party establishment.
That irritation turned to anger in 1967 when he was heavily censured for leaking minutes of a select committee meeting about the Porton Down biological and chemical warfare establishment to the Observer newspaper.
Dalyell claimed he thought the minutes were in the public domain but he did not escape a public dressing-down by the Speaker.
In a parliamentary debate on devolution in 1977, Dalyell first proposed what would become known as the West Lothian Question.
A vocal opponent of Scottish devolution, Dalyell contrasted the town of Blackburn in his own constituency, and Blackburn in Lancashire.
"For how long," he asked, "will English constituencies and English Honourable Members tolerate at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important and often decisive effect on English politics?"
It was Enoch Powell who coined the term West Lothian Question, in his response to Dalyell's speech.
He fought to uncover the truth about the Lockerbie bombing
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 she found Dalyell a persistent critic of her policies.
He supported the Troops Out movement in Northern Ireland and attacked the prime minister's proposed boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
But it was the Falklands War that raised his public profile. He described the conflict as "like two bald men fighting over a comb," quoting the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
He strongly condemned the decision to sink the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, insisting the vessel had been steering away from the conflict when torpedoed by a British submarine.
His political opponents called him Daft Tam, ignoring the methodical and painstaking preparation he put into sourcing the facts to back up his arguments.
He was no slave to parliamentary protocol and was suspended from the House on numerous occasions, twice for calling Mrs Thatcher "a liar" over the Falklands campaign.
"She is a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat, a crook and a disgrace to the House of Commons," was one notable contribution during a 1987 debate.
However, some felt that his intemperate language did nothing to win him support.
Former Conservative MP and later political commentator, Matthew Parris said that "this element of personal vendetta seriously weakens his case".
Dalyell was persistent in trying to uncover the truth about the Lockerbie bombing and consistently said he did not believe Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi was responsible for the outrage.
He was, predictably, bitterly opposed to the Gulf War, "Kuwait is the 19th bloody state of Iraq," and went to Baghdad in 1994 to negotiate with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz.
The election of a Labour government under Tony Blair in 1997 failed to deter Dalyell from speaking his mind.
In 1999, he decided that he would no longer vote at Westminster on purely English issues, defying a number of three-line whips.
He was one of 25 MPs who opposed military action in Kosovo. "I am one of a dwindling number of MPs who have actually worn the Queen's uniform," he said.
He continued to live in the ancestral home
"Perhaps we are a bit less relaxed about unleashing war than those who have never been in a military situation."
He had little time for the New Labour project, describing Tony Blair as the worst of the eight prime ministers who had held power while he was a parliamentarian.
In 2001, he became Father of the House, the longest continuous serving MP, using his position to attack the US led invasion of Iraq.
"These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world," he said. "I am appalled that a British Labour prime minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing."
Dalyell stood down from the House of Commons in 2005, after serving 43 years as an MP, first for West Lothian, then, from 1983, the redrawn constituency of Linlithgow.
Behind Tam Dalyell's somewhat shambling and eccentric demeanour was a keen analytical brain and a passion for meticulous research.
Unrepentant about his dogged approach, he claimed that "you must not be afraid to be thought a bore".
He was that rare thing among politicians, a man who stuck to his principles, regardless of how unpopular it made him. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29367988 | news_uk-politics-29367988 |
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Donald Trump and Theresa May - Do opposites attract? - BBC News | 2017-01-27 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | The prime minister has joked that 'opposites attract', but how will she get on with Donald Trump? | UK Politics | As she made her way across the Atlantic, Theresa May joked with the press pack on her flight that "sometimes opposites attract".
A wisecracking way of trying to cover the question about how she and Donald Trump can work together - the reality TV star billionaire and the self-described hard working vicar's daughter.
Voters will decide for themselves how funny they find it.
But Number 10 has already invested a lot in the early days of this relationship.
Perhaps, that is in part due to the early embarrassment of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage's adventures in Manhattan. However, it is also certainly due to her conviction that whoever the US president is, a British leader needs to, and should, cultivate their friendship.
Downing Street sources say they have had more contact with the Trump team since its victory than any other country has - and the conversations between the two leaders have focused on how to develop their personal relationship and the bond between the two countries.
But even before the two politicians meet tomorrow in the Oval Office, Mrs May is trying to put forward serious arguments about Britain and America's relationship as the world changes at warp speed around the two countries - making a major foreign policy speech at a gathering of the Republican Party in Philadelphia just hours after she touches down.
It is plain to see that while she is deadly serious about creating an extremely close relationship with the new president, she will continue to disagree with him on some issues.
When repeatedly questioned about his view that torture works, the prime minister told us: "We condemn torture, I have been very clear, I'm not going to change my position whether I'm talking to you or talking to the president."
And crucially, she said guidance stating that UK security services cannot share intelligence if it is obtained through torture will not change, telling me: "Our guidance is very clear about the position that the UK takes, and our position has not changed."
Despite President Trump's very public doubts about Nato, she says he has already assured her on the phone that he is committed to the alliance.
A public restatement of that in the next 24 hours would no doubt be a political boon for her.
While the prime minister is plainly uncomfortable with some of Mr Trump's positions, she also wants to emphasise some of the areas where they do agree - the "shared values" of looking out for "ordinary working class families".
In her speech to senators and congressmen tonight she will also emphasise how, in her view, Conservative values are Republican values.
The Republicans - the Tories' sister political party - are now in charge at all levels on Capitol Hill, as well as inside the White House. For the GOP and Mrs May's Conservative Party, patriotism, flag and family are not values to shy away from.
And despite the squeamishness, even in Tory ranks, about her eagerness to be seen alongside the president, the prime minister is unapologetic about her friendly stance.
When asked about appearing to be too close to the controversial new president, she said: "Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America.
"The UK and the US have shared challenges, shared interests, that we can work together to deal with. We have a special relationship, it's long standing, it's existed through many different prime ministers and presidents."
A more different prime minister and president are hard to conceive. What they make of each other, and the relationship between our two countries, will affect us all. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38760718 | news_uk-politics-38760718 |
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India serial killings: Could 'house of horrors' accused be innocent? - BBC News | 2017-01-11 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | A new documentary explores whether one of two men accused of serial murders is innocent. | India | The murders were discovered after children went missing from Nithari
Ten years ago, India was gripped by serial murders in Noida, a wealthy suburb of the capital Delhi, where at least 19 children and women were raped and killed.
Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, in whose house the murders took place, and his manservant, Surinder Koli, were arrested for the crimes. Koli has since been convicted and sentenced to death in some of the cases, while the trial continues in the others. The businessman has been freed on bail.
An explosive new documentary, The Karma Killings, which globally released on Tuesday on Netflix and other digital platforms, now argues that Mr Pandher may not be guilty.
Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher has always denied the allegations against him
Koli admitted to horrific crimes but later retracted his confession, saying he had been coerced
Indian-American filmmaker Ram Devineni, who spent more than three years investigating the Nithari crimes, was visiting relatives in India in December 2006 as the murders played out on news TV channels.
"I was reading the stories in the papers and magazines and watching it on TV, thinking this is too unbelievable. Every day, new revelations were being reported and each one stranger than the next," he told the BBC on the phone from New York.
Many children had gone missing from the nearby slums of Nithari over the past two years and their parents alleged that police had ignored their complaints.
After the first corpses were discovered, it was reported that several children from the slums had been lured to their deaths by Koli, who had invited them into the house, offering them sweets and chocolates. Angry mobs then attacked the police and overran the crime scene.
Moninder Singh Pandher was known for his fondness for alcohol and call girls
In his confession, Koli admitted to killing a call girl for refusing to have sex with him
In the initial days after his arrest, Koli admitted to his interrogators that he had raped children as young as three, had sex with the corpses of his victims and once cooked and tried to eat human organs in the belief that cannibalism cured impotency; although during the trial he retracted his confession, saying he had been tortured and coerced into making his statement.
Mr Pandher denied all the charges against him from day one, but was vilified and portrayed as a monster by the press.
"With his beard and moustache, he looked like the perfect Bollywood villain. Then there were stories of his drinking, call girls coming to his house, his depression," says Devineni, adding that there was a sort of "an inverse racism" at play here. "Mr Pandher was a rich man, he was this privileged person and everyone wanted to bring him down."
After body parts and children's clothing were fished out of a sewer next to his house, the crime scene was dubbed India's "house of horrors".
The scene of the crimes in the Delhi suburb
But the parents of the victims believe that both Pandher and Koli are guilty
The two accused "looked" and fitted the "face of evil" and Devineni started off with the presumption that they were both guilty, but was persuaded by the evidence to change his mind.
Inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, he spent months in Nithari, visiting the crime scene and the courts, meeting the police, the lawyers, families of the victims and the accused, and the accused themselves, painstakingly recreating their stories and the crimes.
"I first met Koli and Pandher in October 2012 in the court in Ghaziabad where they were being tried and I was surprised by how easy the access was," Devineni says.
Clothes and body parts were fished out from a drain adjoining Moninder Singh Pandher's house
Filmmaker Ram Devineni says it took him weeks to persuade the mother of a victim to walk past the crime scene
The accused were brought to court every day and one day, the filmmaker walked up to Mr Pandher's lawyer and asked if he could talk to his client.
"While I was standing there talking to Pandher, Koli also joined in the conversation. We just stood there, talking about murders. It was surreal."
After that, he returned to the court daily, talking to the men accused of India's most horrific crimes in recent years, getting to know them and, in the process, getting close to them.
He describes his first encounter with Koli as "eerie and unsettling".
"He never denied committing any of the crimes, he always tried to put the blame on someone else. A doctor in their neighbourhood was involved in an organ scam so Koli suggested that he may have been behind the killings."
After his arrest, Moninder Singh Pandher spent seven years in jail
He has now been freed on bail
Koli was waiting to be executed and sought his help. "Our conversations were very laid back and casual. He talked a lot about his family, his wife and two children."
Devineni describes Koli as "really shrewd and cunning, one of the smartest people I've ever met".
"He's had little education, knows no English, but he does his own research. On his own, he has learnt India's complex legal system and how to stay on top of it."
His impression of Mr Pandher, on the other hand, was that of a "quiet and kind grandfather-type" of man. "He denied his involvement in the crimes and asked me to look at the evidence instead."
In his initial confessional statement, Koli did not say that Mr Pandher was a participant in the crimes, but in 2007, he changed his tack to implicate him. It is not known why he did that.
Devineni believes that Moninder Singh Pandher may be innocent
Many have questioned how Mr Pandher could not know what was going on in his own house.
Devineni says "Pandher had deep love and affection for Koli who covered for him in front of his wife when he saw call girls. Pandher trusted him and left the running of the house to him.
"I'm convinced that Koli committed all the murders on his own. Pandher is an innocent man."
The victims' families, however, are unlikely to find his argument convincing. Over the years, they have insisted that justice would only be done when Mr Pandher is hanged. And they are unlikely to change their minds.
"None of them really care about Koli," says Devineni. "Their whole focus is on Pandher. Koli is poor, like them. He's one of them. Pandher is rich and if he's let off, it's the big guy getting away with murder." | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-38529255 | news_world-asia-india-38529255 |
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Could a national maximum wage work? - BBC News | 2017-01-11 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Jeremy Corbyn’s call on Radio 4’s Today programme for a high earnings cap is not a unique position. Franklin D Roosevelt called for something similar. | Business | In 1942, Franklin D Roosevelt - not known as a Socialist radical, though he had his moments - proposed that anyone earning over $25,000 should be taxed at 100%.
Effectively, the President of the United States was calling for a high pay cap of, in today's money, just under $400,000 or £330,000.
Interviewed this morning on the Today programme, Jeremy Corbyn rekindled the debate on high pay, saying that a "cap" should be considered for the highest earners.
With legislation if necessary.
Franklin D Roosevelt - not known as a socialist radical
Given that a direct limit (making it "illegal" for example for anyone to earn over, say, £200,000) would be almost impossible to enforce in a global economy where income takes many forms - salary, investments, returns on assets - very high marginal rates of tax could be one way to control very high levels of pay.
Another could be by imposing limits on the pay ratio between higher and lower earners in a company - possibly a more politically palatable option.
The High Pay Centre, for example, supports considering this approach.
Their research reveals the ratio has increased substantially.
"The average pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive has rocketed from around £1m a year in the late 1990s - about 60 times the average UK worker - to closer to £5m today, more than 170 times," the organisation said in 2014.
Firms have been under fire over high rates of executive pay
In its submission to the review of corporate governance by the House of Commons business select committee in October, the centre said executive pay was "out of control".
It is only relatively recently that high marginal rates of tax have been dropped as a way of limiting "out of control" pay.
Although America's Congress couldn't quite stomach the wartime 100% super tax (the actor Ann Sheridan commented "I regret that I have only one salary to give to my country") by 1945 the marginal rate on incomes over $200,000 was 94%.
Post-war, very high rates of income tax on high earners were the norm and income inequality was far lower.
By the 1970s in the UK, the marginal rate on higher incomes was 84%, a figure that rose to 98% with the introduction of a surcharge on investment income.
Denis Healey, then the Labour chancellor, famously said he wanted to "squeeze the rich until the pips squeak" - a quote he subsequently denied.
The mood changed with economic stagnation, industrial strife and the arrival of mainstream monetarism and its political leaders - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Strikers gather round a brazier at a picket line in London in 1979
They built an economic and political philosophy based on a belief that it wasn't the state's job to spend, in Thatcher's famous phrase, "other people's money" - it was better to allow people to retain the money they earned and spend it as they saw fit, even if it was an awful lot.
Lower levels of income tax were the result and economic growth strengthened for a period.
Income inequality also grew, maybe a price worth paying for the economic riches which, it was argued, were flowing around the country.
For many, especially since the financial crisis, the pendulum has swung back, away from lower taxes towards a more punitive approach to high incomes.
Mr Corbyn was speaking about a belief that some individuals at the top of the income scale now have far too much money to spend compared with the "just about managing" classes.
Theresa May has also made it clear that "fat cat pay" is on her radar.
The economics of high pay and whether it should be limited are based on a judgement between two competing interests.
The first is summed up by the Laffer Curve, popularised by the US economist Arthur Laffer, which argues that if income taxes are too high (or pay limits in any guise too strong) they reduce the incentive to work, which ultimately affects growth, national wealth and government income.
At its most basic, under the "Laffer rules" a 0% income tax rate would collect no revenue.
And a 100% income tax rate would also collect no revenue, as no one would bother working.
Ronald Reagan slashed the top rates of US income tax
It has been used from Reagan onwards as the economic underpinning for an argument that lower taxes support growth.
In the 1980s, US government revenues increased as taxes were cut, although that was as much to do with general strong levels of growth as it was to do with the tax cuts themselves.
The second, contrary, economic pressure, as countless studies from the World Bank and others have shown, is that countries with high levels of income inequality have lower levels of growth.
Tackling that inequality, by whatever method, incentivises people to work more effectively.
The problem is that lifting lower wages by increasing, for example, productivity levels, could be a more effective way of reducing the gap between low and high pay, although it would take many years of concerted effort to be successful.
Since the 1970s, the notion of a government inspired "incomes policy" has been - in the popularity stakes - right up there with multi-millionaire bankers at a meeting of Momentum, the organisation that supports Mr Corbyn's Labour leadership.
But, ever since the introduction of the minimum wage in the 1990s, the government has made it clear that the amount people are paid is not simply a matter for private businesses and the free market.
Mr Corbyn has said he wants to consider a national maximum wage.
Many might nod in agreement.
How to do it, though, and whether it is economically helpful for growth, is a very different matter. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38570434 | news_business-38570434 |
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Newspaper headlines: Trump to 'make Brexit great' with trade deal - BBC News | 2017-01-15 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Donald Trump's first UK interview is one of many stories featured on Monday's front pages. | The Papers | President-elect Donald Trump is making the headlines on several of Monday's front pages.
His pledge to offer Britain a "quick" trade deal dominates the front page of the Times.
The president-elect tells the paper that Brexit will be a "great thing" and predicts that other countries will follow Britain's lead in leaving the EU, which he says has been "deeply damaged" by the migration crisis.
Mr Trump's interview is also the lead story for the Daily Telegraph which sees his remarks as a "boost" for Theresa May, ahead of her speech on Tuesday about the government's plans for Brexit.
The Guardian says Mr Trump has been warned that his "careless" use of Twitter could cause a security risk.
The outgoing director of the CIA, John Brennan, is quoted as saying the president-elect has a "tremendous responsibility" to protect the US and its interests.
The Daily Telegraph says Mr Brennan has cautioned Mr Trump against forging closer ties with Russia, arguing against the lifting of sanctions.
But the Daily Mail suggests the next US leader is planning a summit with Vladimir Putin "weeks" after becoming president, "as he seeks to improve relations with the Kremlin".
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is set to pocket £15m from the sale of an education website, according to the Daily Mirror.
The paper's headline describes the deal as a "payday sickener" as the NHS is "cut to the bone" while its editorial accuses Mr Hunt of being "born with a silver thermometer in his mouth" and calls on him to "study his conscience".
The Times agrees that the windfall is "politically embarrassing" following the government's disputes with junior doctors and GPs. The Daily Telegraph claims the deal will make Mr Hunt "the richest member of the cabinet".
Jeremy Hunt set to receive a £15m windfall is "politcally embarrassing" says the Times
Meanwhile the Daily Mail's lead story highlights what it calls "the scale of abuse of the crumbling NHS by health tourists".
It claims a hospital in Luton is attempting to recoup £350,000 from a Nigerian woman, who is said to have flown to Britain to give birth to twins.
The cancer specialist, Professor Meirion Thomas, tells the paper that similar, "staggering" debts should be investigated by NHS fraud officers, as "patients don't arrive at specialist hospitals with serious illnesses by chance".
The Sun says the half-brother of Prince Harry's American girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has apologised after he was arrested for alleged gun offences in the US. Thomas Markle Jr blamed the incident on a drunken argument, prompting the headline "Soz Sis! I was so sozzled".
The Daily Mail says other members of the family have insisted the arrest will not cause problems for Ms Markle's relationship with Prince Harry, but the Daily Express claims there is "some concern" in royal circles. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-38632547 | news_blogs-the-papers-38632547 |
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Is it OK to watch porn in public? - BBC News | 2017-01-15 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | How would you feel if the person sitting next to you on the bus was watching porn - and what would you do about it? | Magazine | It's no secret that lots of people watch pornography on the internet. It's usually something done behind closed doors - but how would you feel about someone watching porn in public? The BBC's Siobhann Tighe describes a troubling experience on a London bus.
It had been a long day at work. I got on the bus at 7.30 in the evening and it was cold and drizzly. All the passengers were wrapped up in thick coats, hoods and hats.
Inside, the bus was softly lit and I was expecting to zone out on my way back home: just let the day go and switch off.
I sat on the lower deck beside a complete stranger and didn't give it a second thought. I was just relieved to get a seat. As we meandered through the London traffic, my gaze was drawn to my neighbour's phone. I wasn't being nosy but in the dim light of the bus, the brightness of his mobile caught my attention even though he was slanting it slightly away from me.
Although I didn't mean to or want to, I found myself looking over towards his mobile a few times and then it suddenly occurred to me what was going on. The man beside me was watching porn.
Once I realised, although I genuinely didn't mean to, my eyes kept on being pulled back to it. I couldn't quite believe it. First he was watching animated porn, with the two naked characters in lurid colours repeating their movements over and over again. Then he started watching a film, which seemed to begin in a petrol station with a large woman in a low-cut yellow top and blonde hair peering into the driver's window.
I didn't hear any sound, apart from a brief few seconds when my fellow passenger pulled the headphone jack out of his mobile, and then reinserted it.
The man didn't seem to notice my glances towards his phone, maybe because his hood was hampering his peripheral vision. He seemed oblivious to me and others around him, who admittedly wouldn't have been able to see what I saw.
We eventually arrived at his bus stop and because he had the window seat and I had the aisle, he made a motion that he needed to get out, and he muttered a "thank you" as he squeezed past me. I watched him get off and walk down the street.
I felt uncomfortable and annoyed, but I didn't do anything about it. I didn't say anything to him and neither did he pick up on any of my glances or quizzical looks. His eyes didn't meet mine so I couldn't even communicate my feelings non-verbally and it didn't occur to me to tell the driver. Even if I wanted to, it would have been difficult to get to the front of the bus because it was packed.
But when I got off, questions flooded into my mind about what I had just experienced. What if a child saw that? Are there any laws about looking at porn in public spaces? If there are laws, how easy are they to enforce? Why did this passenger feel public transport was an appropriate place to watch porn, and should I be worried from a safety point of view?
As a journalist, I also looked at it from his point of view, even though he made me feel uncomfortable. I asked myself: is he within his rights to look at porn on his private device wherever he is? Do civil liberties in our society grant him that freedom?
But in my heart, I was offended.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. From disgust to it's ok, Woman's Hour took to the streets to find out what you think of it.
When I mentioned it to friends, everyone seemed to have a story of their own, or an opinion.
"It happened to me when I was with my son having a coffee at a Swiss airport," one said. "Two Italian guys were sitting next to me. I said something because I felt safe and I sensed there'd be support if an argument ensued." It worked, and they politely switched the laptop off.
It certainly got everyone talking, but like me, no-one was sure where the law stood.
According to Prof Clare McGlynn from Durham University who specialises in the law around porn, there's little to stop someone viewing pornographic material in public - on public transport, in a library, in a park or a cafe, for example.
"It's like reading a book," she says. "They are viewing lawful material which is freely available, and restricting people's access to it presents other challenges."
In Prof McGlynn's view, the law would only prevent it if the porn viewer is harassing someone or causing a disturbance.
So, what do you do? Prof McGlynn describes it as a dilemma.
"It's like someone shouting at you, calling to you to 'Cheer up, love!'" says Prof McGlynn. "Do you confront it, or do you put your head down and walk along?"
But when I contacted Transport for London, they appeared to take the case very seriously.
"If someone has made you feel uncomfortable, for example by viewing pornographic material, please tell the police or a member of our staff," I was told.
A member of staff said passengers should report incidents like to this to the bus driver, who would tell the control centre, and the information would then be passed to the police for them to investigate.
In Prof McGlynn's view, there is not much the police could do. On the other hand, James Turner QC contacted the BBC to say that there is a law - the Indecent Displays (Control) Act - which might form the basis for a prosecution.
Five years ago, in the US, the executive director of a group called Morality in the Media had an experience similar to mine on an aeroplane. As a result, the group - now called the National Center On Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) - campaigned to get the major US airlines to stop passengers watching porn.
"All of them except for one agreed to improve their policies to prohibit passengers from viewing this material during flights and agreed to better train their flight attendants on what to do," Haley Halverson of NCOSE told me.
Buses don't have flight attendants, though. Nor do trains. And even if police wanted to investigate incidents of porn-watching on public transport, passengers can get off whenever they like.
How would officers catch them and question them then?
Siobhann Tighe and Prof Clare McGlynn spoke to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour, on BBC Radio 4. Listen to the discussion here.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38611265 | news_magazine-38611265 |
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Brexit: Berlin business leaders unimpressed with UK's message - BBC News | 2017-01-23 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | An appeal over a post-Brexit trade deal was met with sniggers in Berlin, Damien McGuinness writes. | Business | Two British officials failed to win favour from German business leaders in Berlin
The distinguished audience members were too polite to heckle. But the eye rolling, frowns and audible tutting made it quite clear how the Brexiteers' message was going down with German business leaders.
Owen Paterson, a former minister and Conservative MP, and John Longworth, co-chair of Leave Means Leave, came to Berlin on Saturday with a clear mission - to persuade German business leaders to lobby Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Britain a good trade deal.
They should have been on safe territory.
The two men are confident, witty speakers with impressive business and free-trade credentials.
Mr Longworth is a former head of the British Chamber of Commerce. Mr Paterson's years spent trading in Germany meant he could open his address with a few remarks in German - which drew an appreciative round of applause - and a well-judged joke about multilingual trade.
But it turned out they had entered the lion's den.
The laughter from the audience quickly turned to sniggers as they heard the UK described as "a beacon of open, free trade around the world".
Westminster's decision to leave the world's largest free trade area does not look like that to Germany.
When Europe was blamed for spending cuts and a lack of British health care provision, there were audible mutters of irritation from the audience.
The occasional light-hearted attempts at EU-bashing - usually guaranteed to get a cheap laugh with some British audiences - was met with stony silence.
Brexiteers argue German manufacturers will want to still sell to UK customers
In another setting - at another time - this gathering of the elite of Germany's powerful business community would have lapped up the British wit.
Every ironic quip would ordinarily have had them rolling in the aisles. But British charm does not travel well these days.
Rattled by the economic havoc Brexit could unleash, Germans are not in the mood for gags.
Britain used to be seen by continentals as quirky and occasionally awkward - but reliably pragmatic on the economy.
However, since the Brexit vote, Europeans suspect endearing eccentricity has morphed into unpredictable irrationality. The UK has become the tipsy, tweedy uncle, who after too much Christmas sherry has tipped over into drunkenly abusive bore.
When the audience was asked how many of them welcomed Brexit, only one hand went up - and it turned out that belonged to a businessman who wanted more EU reform and was fed up with Britain slowing things down.
Brexiteer rhetoric over the past year has often focused on the size of Britain's market and how keen German manufacturers are to sell to British customers.
Many leave campaigners remain convinced that German business leaders will force Mrs Merkel to grant the UK a special free trade deal in order not to lose British trade.
But that's not what's happening.
Angela Merkel has said Britain will not be able to cherry-pick the best bits of the single market
Instead German firms are remarkably united in their support of the chancellor in her rejection of British "cherry-picking" - even if it means losing business in the short-term.
When you talk to German bosses they say their top priority is in fact the integrity of the single market, rather than hanging on to British customers.
That's because their supply chains span across the EU.
A German car might be designed in Germany, manufactured in Britain, with components made in various parts of eastern Europe, to be sold in France. This only works if there are no cross-border tariffs, paperwork or red tape.
German companies - more often family-owned and with deeper connections to their regional heartlands - tend to look at the wider picture, sometimes thinking more long-term.
They supported Mrs Merkel on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, even though that meant a blow to trade. The financial hit was deemed less bad for business than worsening unrest in nearby Ukraine.
The same calculations are being made over Brexit.
Theresa May's speech on Brexit last week made front page news in Germany
This doesn't mean German business is thinking politically, and not economically. But rather, it indicates a wider attitude towards how business can thrive long-term.
German business leaders tell you that the British market may be important. But it is only one market, compared to 27 markets in the rest of the EU.
Leave campaigners also still underestimate the political and historical significance of the EU for Germany, where it is seen as the guarantor of peace after centuries of warfare.
It is tempting to see the clashes between Westminster and the EU27 as one big decades-long misunderstanding of what the EU is.
An idealistic peace-project versus a pragmatic free-trade zone. This makes it even more ironic that London may reject the free-trade area it spent so much time creating.
Germany was shocked and saddened by the UK's vote to leave the EU. But the decision was quickly accepted in Berlin.
"The Brits never really wanted to be members of the European Union anyway," is something you often hear these days.
Many Germans now want to just work out a solution that does the least amount of harm to the European economy. Hence the irritation in Germany when British politicians keep rehashing the pre-referendum debate.
"It was frustrating to hear the same old arguments from the referendum campaign," one business leader told me when I asked him what he had thought about Saturday's discussion.
Germany has moved on, he said. Maybe Britain should too.
The Brexiteers might not have persuaded their audience in Berlin. But if they return to London with a better idea of the mood in Germany's business community, then the trip may well have been worthwhile. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38707997 | news_business-38707997 |
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100 things we didn't know last year - BBC News | 2017-01-01 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Each week we publish a list of 10 things we didn't know the week before. Here are 100 of our favourites from 2016. | Magazine | Interesting and unexpected facts from daily news stories are collected in the BBC's regular feature, 10 things we didn't know last week. Here is a selection of the best from 2016.
1. You could probably outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
2. Ronald Reagan suggested that Margaret Thatcher read Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy in order to understand Soviet thinking.
3. German tourists can travel to more countries without a visa than any other nationality.
4. People played with a fifth suit of cards in the 1930s.
5. There are about three million shipwrecks lying on the ocean floor.
6. YouTube was originally meant to be an online dating site.
7. Parents are worse at telling if their child is lying than complete strangers.
8. London Underground journeys take more than four times longer for disabled people.
9. Air rage is more common on flights with a first-class cabin.
10. Boris Johnson knows how to sing Ode to Joy in German.
11. The spice turmeric may help stave off dementia
12. The world's most dangerous school run may be in south-western China, where children have to climb down an 800m cliff.
13. The oldest world title in sport is for real tennis and it dates back to 1740.
14. Male sparrows retaliate when females are unfaithful by providing less food.
16. Sadness causes more road accidents than tiredness.
17. The tattoo policy of the US Marine Corps is 32 pages long.
18. Exercising four hours after learning can help you remember information.
19. The speed Batman reaches while gliding through the air would probably kill him on landing.
22. Trevor Nunn has directed every one of Shakespeare's plays.
23. Prime Minister Theresa May owns more than 100 cookbooks - but none by Delia Smith.
24. The fertility drug Pergonal was developed using gallons of nuns' urine.
25. Even in the early 1970s, women in the UK frequently had to get a male relative's signature to get a loan.
26. Every winter, great white sharks swim for 30 to 40 days to congregate at a particular spot halfway between Mexico and Hawaii. No-one knows why.
27. Fewer than one in five listed statues in the UK are of women.
28. Every English elm is descended from a single tree imported by the Romans.
29. The "Arsenal" letters outside the football club's stadium are an anti-attack measure.
30. "Burn" is the most heavy metal word in the English language, and "particularly" is the least.
32. There are at least 42 different fares for rail travel between London Euston and Birmingham, ranging from £6 to £119.
34. One female Greenland shark is around 400 years of age, making the species the longest-living vertebrate known on Earth.
35. Only about half of perceived friendships are mutual.
36. Holding your coffee cup from above in a claw-like grip is the best way to prevent it from spilling.
37. A hot bath could be better than cycling at lowering the blood sugar levels of type-2 diabetics
38. Being the sole breadwinner is bad for men's health but good for women's.
40. A fifth of UK parents regret the names they gave their children.
41. New Yorkers would pay $56 a month to trim a minute off their commute.
42. Georgetown University in Washington sold 272 slaves in 1838 to help pay off the institution's debts.
43. Mayors in Pakistan can run cities from jail.
44. It would take 112,000 years to fly to the nearest Earth-like world travelling at 25,000mph.
46. In the Grand Canyon, the US postal service delivers mail by mule.
47. It's possible to be arrested for being drunk while riding a mobility scooter.
48. Intelligent people tend to be messier and swear more than others.
49. Protesters at a Republican party convention are banned from carrying tennis balls but are allowed to carry guns.
50. Bees spit water at each other in hot weather.
51. In some remote areas of Malawi, parents pay a man to have sex with their daughters at the age of 12 or 13.
53. At US airports, the usual limits on taking liquids through security do not apply if the liquid is holding live fish.
54. There is a scientific reason why some people have "uncombable" hair.
55. Some porn sites have a voiceover function for blind people that explains what's going on.
56. So many Ford Sierra Cosworths were stolen or written off that surviving models have become very valuable.
57. The son of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar works as an architect in Argentina.
58. There is a way to get people with strong views to consider alternative arguments (that doesn't involve shouting or violence).
59. Doctors estimate dying patients will live twice as long as they actually do.
60. How drunk you think you are depends on how drunk your friends are.
61. A pack of Smarties is more likely to be missing red than any other colour.
62. Dating app Tinder has 37 options for defining gender, beyond male or female.
63. Three British and three Dutch World War Two ships have vanished from the bottom of the Java Sea.
64. Someone has a job making wooden tanks for Islamic State.
65. You can get pregnant while already being pregnant.
66. Industrial spills may be more dangerous in cold weather.
67. London's benchmark interest rate, Libor, was invented by a Greek banker arranging a loan for Iran.
68. The most historically accurate recent Oscar contender is Selma and the least is The Imitation Game.
69. The new Bank of England £5 note is not suitable for vegetarians...
70. ...But you can use it to play vinyl records.
71. Fidel Castro's obituary cost the New York Times more man and woman hours over the years than any other article in the newspaper's history.
73. Under triathlon rules, competitors are allowed to help each other.
74. There are only 28 websites on the internet in North Korea.
75. A litre of cow urine is more valuable to an Indian farmer than a litre of milk.
76. More than 200 UK drivers are at least 100 years old.
77. Giraffes are four species, not one.
78. Most British tourists in the Spanish resort of Magaluf are on their first holiday without their families.
79. People spend 1.3 years of their life on average deciding what to watch on television.
80. Heading a football can reduce your memory for 24 hours.
82. The world's top institution for undergraduates, measured by Nobel prize winners per 10,000 students, is the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
83. Your doctor's political preferences can influence the treatment they recommend.
84. Close-protection security consultants work on the principle that a client should never be more than eight seconds from rescue.
85. Teenage acne is not all bad news: Unblemished skin ages faster.
86. The mammal that kills the most members of its own species is not the human, the bear or the wolf, but the meerkat.
87. Putting an image of a flat screen TV on a box containing a bicycle reduces the chance of damage during delivery by up to 80%.
88. Riding a rollercoaster can help you pass kidney stones.
89. You can run over a golf ball with a steamroller and still not damage it.
90. About 1.7% of the UK population identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.
91. Replacing the artificial colouring in blue M&Ms would require twice the current global supply of the natural alternative.
93. Rainbows can also occur at night.
94. You can't return or rescind a Nobel prize.
95. Drivers in China who dazzle other road users with full-beam headlights are made to stare into the lights for a minute as punishment.
96. The UK's National Sperm Bank has taken on only seven men.
97. Chimpanzees are as good at recognising each other's bottoms as humans are at recognising faces.
98. Trees on city streets may worsen rather than reduce air pollution.
99. Women can improve their chances of winning board games against men by playing rock music in the background.
Seen a thing? Tell the Magazine on Twitter using the hashtag #thingididntknowlastweek
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38315407 | news_magazine-38315407 |
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Theresa May's Brexit speech: What does it mean for free trade? - BBC News | 2017-01-19 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | BBC Economics Correspondent Andrew Walker answers your questions on Theresa May's Brexit speech. | UK | This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Theresa May confirmed that the final deal would be put to the vote in Parliament
Following Theresa May's widely anticipated speech on Brexit on Tuesday, you sent us your questions.
The impact on free trade was the most asked about subject. Below, BBC Economics Correspondent Andrew Walker looks at two of the most popular questions you asked:
The only thing on the list above that the Prime Minister has said she wants to opt out of is the free movement of people - or rather the free movement of people to work and settle in the UK.
She is very keen on the free movement of goods and services. She said in the speech that she wants: "the freest possible trade in goods and services between Britain and the EU's member states."
She does not want to opt out of that.
The freest possible means what we have today. For example: no tariffs on goods travelling in either direction, mutual recognition of each other's technical standards, the freedom to offer services across borders and more.
In short, it means the provisions of the single market that apply to goods and services. It would be theoretically possible to go further still, especially in services. The European Commission says there are still barriers and it wants to tackle them.
But for now, the single market as it is represents the freest we can get.
But Mrs May seems to accept that we can't have that without also accepting freedom of movement for workers. And that is one of her red lines.
So once that has gone, the freest possible movement for goods and services will presumably mean something less than the single market, something less than we have today.
How much less will be a matter for negotiation. In fact, the answer to many questions about what will "X" be like when we leave will depend on the outcome of the negotiations. We can speculate but we can't know for sure.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Some of the headlines from Theresa May's vision for future UK-EU relations
The UK does have some cards which will encourage the EU to lean towards what the Prime Minister wants. Some European businesses have the UK as an important export market - German car makers for example.
During the referendum campaign many Leave supporters were keen to point out that the rest of the EU exports more to the UK than the UK exports to them. That, they argued, means they need the UK more than we need them.
The counter-argument is that EU exports to the UK as a share of national income are a lot smaller than trade in the opposite direction. That suggests UK/EU trade matters more to us than to them.
Another reason that the remaining EU might want to be cooperative in trade negotiations is that many continental businesses would want to continue to be able to use the City of London as a financial centre. On the other hand some other cities, including Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin, might fancy a bigger slice of that pie.
So there are some economic reasons for the EU to share Mrs May's desire for free movement of goods and services.
But there is an important political issue that pulls them in the opposite direction. They don't want life in the UK to look too rosy at a time when there are rising Eurosceptic movements in many countries beyond the UK. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38658697 | news_uk-38658697 |
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Is free trade good or bad? - BBC News | 2017-01-19 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Free trade has been a dominant part of the post-WW2 global economy, but it is now being challenged. | Business | Trade makes the world go round, but how free can it remain?
Free trade is something of a sacred cow in the economics profession.
Moving towards it, rather slowly, has also been one of the dominant features of the post-World War Two global economy.
Now there are new challenges to that development.
The UK is leaving the European Union and the single market - though in her speech this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May promised to push for the "freest possible trade" with European countries and to sign new deals with others around the world.
Most obviously Donald Trump has raised the possibility of quitting various trade agreements, notably Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Even the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proposed new barriers to imports.
In Europe, trade negotiations with the United States and Canada have run into difficulty, reflecting public concerns about the impact on jobs, the environment and consumer protection.
The WTO's Doha Round of global trade liberalisation talks has run aground.
The World Trade Organization is based in Geneva and came into being in 1995
The case for trade without government imposed barriers has a long history in economics.
Adam Smith, the 18th Century Scottish economist who many see as the founding father of the subject, was in favour of it. But it was a later British writer, David Ricardo in the 19th Century, who set out the idea known as comparative advantage that underpins much of the argument for freer trade.
It is not about countries being able to produce more cheaply or efficiently than others. You can have a comparative advantage in making something even if you are less efficient than your trade partner.
When a country shifts resources to produce more of one good there is what economists call an "opportunity cost" in terms of how much less of something else you can make. You have a comparative advantage in making a product if the cost in that sense is less than it is in another country.
Economic arguments over free trade date back to the 19th Century
If two countries trade on this basis, concentrating on goods where they have a comparative advantage they can both end up better off.
Another reason that economists tend to look askance at trade restrictions comes from an analysis of the impact if governments do put up barriers - in particular tariffs or taxes - on imports.
There are gains of course. The firms and workers who are protected can sell more of their goods in the home market. But consumers lose out by paying a higher price - and consumers in this case can mean businesses, if they buy the protected goods as components or raw materials.
The textbook analysis says that those losses add up to more than the total gains. So you get the textbook conclusion that it's best to avoid protection.
Many lower-skilled workers in developed economies feel they have lost out in the drive to globalisation
And this conclusion is regardless of what other countries do. The 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat set it out it like this:
"It makes no more sense to be protectionist because other countries have tariffs than it would to block up our harbours because other countries have rocky coasts."
The implication is that unilateral trade liberalisation makes perfect sense.
A more recent theory of what drives international trade looks at what are called economies of scale - where the more a firm produces of some good, the lower cost of each unit.
The associated specialisation can make it beneficial for economies that are otherwise very similar to trade with one another. This area is known as new trade theory and the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman was an important figure in developing it.
The basic idea that it's good to have freer trade has underpinned decades of international co-operation on trade policy since World War Two.
Free trade has been a cornerstone of the post-war world
The period since 1945 has been characterised by a gradual lowering of trade barriers. It happened in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which began life in 1948 as a forum for governments to negotiate lower tariffs.
Its membership was initially small, but by the time it was replaced by the World Trade Organization in 1995, most countries had signed up.
The motivation was to end or reduce the protectionism or barriers to trade that went up in the 1930s. It is not generally thought that those barriers caused the Great Depression, but many do think they aggravated and prolonged it.
The process of post-war trade liberalisation was driven largely by a desire for reciprocal concessions - better access to others' markets in return for opening your own.
But what is the case against free (or at least freer) trade?
First and foremost is the argument that it creates losers as well as winners.
What Ricardo's theory suggested was that all countries engaging in trade could be better off. But his idea could not address the question of whether trade could create losers as well as winners within countries.
Economic theory says if governments adopt protectionism, total losses will outweigh total gains
Work by two Swedish Nobel Prize winners, Eli Hecksher and Bertil Ohlin, subsequently built on by the American Paul Samuelson developed the basic idea of comparative advantage in a way that showed that trade could lead to some groups losing out.
Putting it very briefly, if a country has a relatively abundant supply of, for example, low-skilled labour, those workers will gain while their low-skilled counterparts in countries where it is less abundant will lose.
There has been a debate about whether this approach fits the facts, but some do see it as a useful explanation of how American industrial workers (for example) have been adversely affected by the rise of competition from countries such as China.
A group of economists including David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at the impact on areas where local industry was exposed to what they call the China shock.
"Adjustment in local labour markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labour-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences.
At this week's World Economic Forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned against isolationist moves that could spark a trade war
Still if you accept that overall countries gain, then the winners could in principle fully compensate the losers and still be better off.
Such programmes do exist. Countries that have unemployment benefits provide assistance to people who have lost their jobs. Some of those people will have been affected by competition from abroad.
The United States has a programme that is specially targeted for people who lose their jobs as a result of imports, called Trade Adjustment Assistance.
But is it enough? Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank in Washington writes: "The winners have never tried to fully compensate the losers, so let's stop claiming that trade benefits us all."
Which arguments will Donald Trump be listening to in the White House?
In any case, it is not clear that compensation would do the trick. As Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor noted, they may lose their jobs and also "the dignity of work".
He is keen on maintaining open markets for trade, but recognises the need to do something about what you might call the side effects.
To return to recent political developments - Donald Trump clearly did get support from many of those people in areas of the US where industry has declined.
We don't yet know how he will address those issues when he takes his place in the White House.
Perhaps his threats to introduce new tariffs are just that - threats. But the post-war trend towards more liberalised international trade looks more uncertain than it has for many years. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38209407 | news_business-38209407 |
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Mexico and Mr Trump: What will happen to trade ties? - BBC News | 2017-01-06 | https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews | Caroline Bayley reports on the impact the Nafta trade deal has had in Mexico, and what its potential demise under US President-elect Trump would mean for the country. | Business | Donald Trump is not popular in Mexico
Mexico is being blamed by President-elect Donald Trump for taking jobs from the US.
He's been putting pressure on US companies not to move jobs south, and this week Ford announced it was investing in its factory in Michigan rather than building a new plant in Mexico.
During his election campaign, Mr Trump threatened to rip up Nafta, the free trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico, which has been in place for 23 years.
But what impact has Nafta had in Mexico, and what would its potential demise mean for the country?
In a leafy square in Mexico City on a warm December evening a group of excited children are hitting a brightly coloured pinata stuffed with sweets. A fellow passer-by explains to me that pinatas are a Mexican tradition, particularly at Christmas and birthdays.
However, Mexicans also like pinatas "in the shape of everything we want to hit", he says. "The latest trend is Donald Trump pinatas," he adds.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A look back at some of the things Donald Trump has said about Mexicans
Mr Trump is not popular in Mexico. He was incredibly rude about Mexicans during his election campaign, and at a time when the world seems to be turning away from free trade he threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the US, Mexico and Canada.
The important thing about Nafta is that companies importing and exporting between the three countries pay no tariffs. Mr Trump believes it's been bad for the US as cheaper Mexican labour has meant some US manufacturers have moved production across the border, resulting in job losses at home.
Nafta was implemented in 1994 and over the past 23 years Mexico has grown as a manufacturing hub. Today the United States and Mexico trade over $500bn (£400bn) in goods and services a year, equal to about $1.5bn a day. Mexico is the US's second-biggest export market, and the US is Mexico's largest.
Thierry Legros says without Nafta his farming business would be under threat
Red Sun Farms, a large vegetable-growing firm in central Mexico, depends on the free trade agreement. Its managing director, Thierry Legros, shows me into a vast greenhouse, 200m long, with row upon row of tomato plants. The company also grows peppers and exports 90% of its crop to the US and Canada.
So what would it mean if Mr Trump repealed the Nafta agreement completely with its tariff-free trading? "We might need to close the whole company," Thierry tells me. "It would be around 3,000 direct jobs, so with all the indirect that's quite a lot, probably double that."
Outside Thierry's office three flags flutter in the wind - one for each Nafta country.
The three Nafta flags at Red Sun Farms reflect the company's integration within the free trade area
Red Sun Farms even owns a farm in the US and sends Mexican workers over there. However, there's a stark wage differential, with pay significantly higher in the US.
"Right now with the exchange rate that's huge," Thierry explains, "it's about one to eight, one to 10."
These Red Sun Farms workers in Mexico earn far less than their counterparts in the US
As well as enabling Mexico to export freely, Nafta also opened the door to US imports, giving Mexican consumers much greater choice.
"It was an achievement, it was against history," says economic consultant Luis de la Calle, who was one of the negotiators of the free trade agreement.
"Most Mexicans thought that it was impossible or not convenient to have a strategic association with the US, and many people in the US never thought that Mexico could be their partner."
You can listen to In Business: Mexico and Mr Trump on BBC Radio 4 at 20:30 GMT on Thursday, 5 January and at 21:30 GMT on Sunday, 8 January.
Increased demand, as a result of free trade, forced Mexican manufacturers to improve quality.
Luis de la Calle says that before Nafta Mexico had three producers of TV sets, and the quality was "awful". But today, Mexico is "the largest manufacturer of TV sets in the world". They are exported and are "high quality, completely different from the protected market we had before".
The instantly recognisable VW Beetles are manufactured in Puebla, Mexico
Mexico is now a centre of manufacturing for overseas companies, such as the motor industry. General Motors and Ford both have factories in Mexico as well as the US.
But Donald Trump has put public pressure on US companies not to move production, and has threatened to impose import duties on cars coming in from Mexico. It's a sensitive subject and the American carmakers refused to be interviewed.
Donald Trump had this message for the car industry earlier this week
However, in the city of Puebla, a two-hour drive from the capital, the German car manufacturer Volkswagen is the biggest employer with 14,000 staff. It's the only place in the world where VW produces its famous Beetle, and as you enter the site you're greeted by a display of Beetles suspended in the air like a piece of installation art. The Golf and Jetta models are also produced here.
Thomas Karig from VW Mexico was tight-lipped about whether the firm had come under any pressure about jobs
Like the US carmakers, Volkswagen's Mexican production is integrated with its US plant. "We use a lot of parts coming from the US for assembly here in Mexico in Puebla, and our colleagues in Chattanooga in Tennessee - they use a lot of parts coming from Mexico," explains Thomas Karig from Volkswagen Mexico.
This integration is possible because there are no tariffs to pay each time components are sent from one Nafta country to another. But when I ask whether Volkswagen has come under pressure from Mr Trump about keeping jobs in the US, the atmosphere cools and there is a curt "no comment".
The Nafta agreement has not benefited everyone in Mexico though. Some small farmers were unable to compete with US agricultural imports and big Mexican rivals.
According to a study by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, from 1991 to 2007 some 4.9 million family farmers were displaced. Some found work with big exporting agricultural companies, but there was still a net loss of 1.9 million jobs.
Three of Aurelio's children are illegal migrants in the US
An hour's drive from Puebla I meet Aurelio, whose family has farmed a tiny patch of land since 1925. Deep in the dry countryside he raises a few cows.
Job opportunities are scarce and three of his five children have migrated illegally to the US where they have found work painting cars. But Donald Trump has said he wants to deport illegal immigrants. Aurelio takes out his mobile phone and calls one of his sons in the US. Is his son worried about this, I ask.
His son says that if there is a chance of being deported they will have to look elsewhere, but adds: "Mexico is a tough choice because of lack of opportunities, violence, high taxes and the economic situation, so it wouldn't be easy."
President Obama has deported at least 2.4 million illegal immigrants so this isn't a new policy. And according to the Pew Research Center, by 2014 more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico than migrated to the US.
Luis de la Calle says both the US and Mexico benefit from Nafta
Mr de la Calle acknowledges that the free trade agreement has split the country. He says there are two types of regions in Mexico.
"[There are] parts of the south of Mexico that are disconnected from international trade, that are lagging behind, where Nafta had little impact. Rates of growth are low, there is little investment, and you don't see large manufacturing operations."
In contrast to this, he says: "There are 16 or 17 other states that grow very fast, you see a lot of dynamism." These he describes as "Nafta states" with exporting businesses.
However, he dismisses Mr Trump's criticism of Mexico. "He says [Nafta's] been great for Mexico, actually his whole argument is that Mexico is doing so well. It's flattering."
He also claims that the US is benefiting from its close manufacturing links with Mexico.
However, when I ask who would come off worst if Nafta were repealed, the US or Mexico, he answers, "Mexico because we are smaller, but the US would lose quite a bit as well."
Donald Trump wasn't the first US presidential candidate to criticise Nafta. Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama did so on their campaign trails.
But abandoning it completely? The US may find it has too much to lose and perhaps Mr Trump has realised that too.
In Business: Mexico and Mr Trump is on BBC Radio 4 at 20:30 GMT on Thursday, 5 January and at 21:30 GMT on Sunday, 8 January. | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38507482 | news_business-38507482 |
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