Archive for Economy

16 May, 2008 | No comments

Reformer Sarkozy waves goodbye to Chirac

A NEW era opened in French politics yesterday as Nicolas Sarkozy took over as president from Jacques Chirac and pledged a period of major reforms to lift France out of its economic and social malaise.

In a symbolic handover of power, Mr Chirac, 74, passed on the launch codes to France’s nuclear arsenal and briefed his 52-year-old successor on current agenda items before being driven away from the Elyse Palace for the last time after 12 years in residence.

A 21-gun salute rang out from the esplanade of the Invalides across the River Seine to mark Mr Sarkozy’s assumption of the presidency as the results of his election victory were read out to invited guests in the Elyse’s ornate main reception hall.

Mr Chirac yesterday confirmed plans to set up a foundation later this year devoted to “dialogue between cultures and sustainable development”.

However, his presidential immunity expires on 16 June and judicial officials have said it is “most probable” he will be interviewed as a witness in an investigation into a kickback scheme for paying workers of his RPR party during his 18-year stint as mayor of Paris.

In a ten-minute televised inaugural address, Mr Sarkozy said France needed “to take risks and follow initiatives” and called for change and national unity.

He added that the country also needed to “rehabilitate the values of work, effort, merit and respect” and defeat intolerance.

Mr Sarkozy inherits a country divided over its future and beset by sluggish economic growth, with unemployment of more than 8 per cent and social tensions, especially in the deprived, multi-ethnic Paris suburbs.

He said his first decision was to make all schools read a letter home written by a young Second World War resistance fighter.

He said he could never read Guy Moquet’s letter - written before his execution in 1941 at the age of 17 - without being “profoundly moved”, and said it was essential children knew the horror and barbarism of war.

Mr Sarkozy said: “The people have given me a mandate; I will carry it out scrupulously, with the desire to be worthy of the trust the French have placed in me. There is a demand for change. Never have the risks of inertia been so great for France as they are now in this world, where everyone is trying to change quicker than others, where any delay can be fatal.”

The new president finished a whirlwind first day by jetting to Berlin to meet Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, to discuss his proposals for relaunching the European constitution rejected by French voters in a referendum two years ago.

Mr Sarkozy is expected to waste no time starting reforms in his first 100 days in office, including tax cuts, trade union rules, new controls on immigration and tougher sentencing rules for repeat offenders.

Mr Chirac, once a rival of Mr Sarkozy, urged people to remain “united” under his successor.

ENTENTE CORDIALE ONCE AGAIN

TWO historically rocky relationships for the new French president showed signs of thawing as Nicolas Sarkozy took office yesterday.

Jacques Chirac, Mr Sarkozy’s former mentor turned arch rival gave him a cordial, almost friendly wave as he left the Elyse Palace and he received a public kiss on the lips from his once-estranged wife Cecilia.

Mr Sarkozy headed for his wife moments after making his first speech as head of state and affectionately stroked her face. The 49-year-old former model, conspicuously absent from his side during the presidential campaign, appeared surprised at the gesture, but later she kissed him on the lips after a brief hesitation when he went to peck her on the cheek.

Mrs Sarkozy left her husband for an advertising executive in 2005 but the couple were reunited in January 2006. The question now is whether the fiercely independent former PR executive will move into the Elyse Palace with her husband. She once said: “I don’t see myself as a first lady. It bores me.”

16 May, 2008 | No comments

Proxy war could soon turn to direct conflict, analysts warn

The growing US focus on confronting Iran in a proxy war inside Iraq risks triggering a direct conflict in the next few months, regional analysts are warning.

US-Iranian tensions have mounted significantly in the past few days, with heightened rhetoric on both sides and the US decision to establish a military base in Iraq less than five miles from the Iranian border to block the smuggling of Iranian arms to Shia militias.

The involvement of a few hundred British troops in the anti-smuggling operation also raises the risk of their involvement in a cross-border clash.

US officers have alleged that an advanced Iranian-made missile had been fired at an American base from a Shia area, which if confirmed would be a significant escalation in the “proxy war” referred to this week by General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq.

“The proxy war that has been going on in Iraq may now cross the border. This is a very dangerous period,” Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said.

Iran’s leaders have so far shown every sign of relishing the confrontation. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared yesterday that American policies had failed in the Middle East and warned: “I am certain that one day Bush and senior American officials will be tried in an international court for the tragedies they have created in Iraq.”

In such circumstances, last week’s Israeli air strike against a mystery site in northern Syria has triggered speculation over its motives. Israel has been silent about the attack. Syria complained to the UN security council but gave few details. Some say the target was Iranian weapons on their way to Hizbullah in Lebanon, or that the sortie was a dry run for a US-Israeli attack on Syria and Iran. There is even speculation that the Israelis took out a nuclear facility funded by Iran and supplied by North Korea

The situation is particularly volatile because the struggle for influence threatens to exacerbate a confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The US has called a meeting of major powers in Washington next Friday to discuss Iran’s defiance of UN resolutions calling for its suspension of uranium enrichment. It comes amid signs that the Bush administration is running out of patience with diplomatic efforts to curb the nuclear programme. Hawks led by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, are intensifying their push for military action, with support from Israel and privately from some Sunni Gulf states.

“Washington is seriously reviewing plans to bomb not just nuclear sites, but oil sites, military sites and even leadership targets. The talk is of multiple targets,” said Mr Cronin. “In Washington there is very serious discussion that this is a window that has to be looked at seriously because there is only six months to ‘do something about Iran’ before it will be looked at as a purely political issue.”

US presidential elections are due in November 2008, and military action at the height of the campaign is usually seen by voters as politically motivated.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief who is now a security analyst, said: “The decision to attack was made some time ago. It will be in two stages. If a smoking gun is found in terms of Iranian interference in Iraq, the US will retaliate on a tactical level, and they will strike against military targets. The second part of this is: Bush has made the decision to launch a strategic attack against Iranian nuclear facilities, although not before next year. He has been lining up some Sunni countries for tacit support for his actions.”

US and British officials have complained to Iran about the use by Shia militias in Iraq of what they say are Iranian-made weapons. The main concern is the proliferation of roadside bombs that fire a bolt of molten metal through any thickness of armour, which the officials say must have been made in Iran.

A US military spokesman in Baghdad, Major General Kevin Bergner, raised the stakes when he said the 240mm rocket that hit the US military headquarters outside Baghdad this week, killing an American soldier and wounding 11, had been supplied to Shia militants by Iran.

Gen Bergner used to work in the White House, where he was aligned with administration hawks, and his dispatch to Baghdad was seen by some as a move to increase pressure on Iran.

“There are an awful lot of lower level officers who are very angry about the deaths from explosively formed projectiles said to come from Iran. There is a certain amount of military pressure to do something about this,” said Patrick Clawson, the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That said, it is very difficult for us to do anything without much better evidence. In that respect, border control is a sensible solution.”

Any US decision to attack Iran would force Gordon Brown to choose between creating a serious rift in the transatlantic alliance and participating in or endorsing American actions. British officials insist that Washington has given no sign it is ready to abandon diplomacy and argue that UN sanctions are showing signs of working. They point to the resurgence in Iran of Hashemi Rafsanjani, seen as a pragmatic counterweight to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hopes that a new war could still be avoided have also been boosted by Gen Petraeus’s claim that Iran’s covert Quds force alleged to be supporting Shia attacks on coalition forces had been pulled out of Iraq. If true, it could be that in the stand-off between the US and Iran, Iran has blinked first.

16 May, 2008 | No comments

Israel's 'invisible hand' still controls Gaza, says report

Israel continues to control Gaza, 16 months after it pulled out its settlements and military installations, with an “invisible hand” that has provoked a severe humanitarian and economic crisis, according to an Israeli human rights body.

Ending its 38-year military occupation of the Gaza Strip did not end Israeli control but simply changed the rules of engagement, charges Gisha, the Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, in a report due to be published next week.

The organisation says that Israels control over Gazas borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry, tax system and supply of goods means that it cannot absolve itself of responsibility for its citizens under international law.

“Its a new position made very clear in Hebrew before the courts but not something that Israel has made clear internationally,” said Sari Bashi, Gishas executive director.

“Sometimes Israeli soldiers still operate in the streets of Gaza but Israeli control of every aspect of the lives of Gaza citizens is constant, they know that their ability to do ordinary things like turn on a light or buy milk depends on decisions made by the Israeli military.”

The report details how Israel has removed some of its elements of control while significantly tightening others.

“Far from improving the economy and welfare of Gaza residents, Israeli actions since September 2005 - including severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza and an economic stronghold on the funding of civil services - have contributed to an economic and humanitarian crisis in Gaza not seen in the 38 years of Israeli control that preceded the withdrawal of permanent ground troops.”

Gisha says that Gaza has been cut off from the outside world for 42 per cent of the time since the Strip was evacuated of Jewish settlers and troops. The Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt is operated by the Palestinian Authority under the supervision of European Union monitors and Israeli security officials who monitor operations with live video footage and passenger lists.

Travel through the crossing is restricted to Palestinians registered in the Israeli-controlled Palestinian population registry.

This means that foreigners may only enter Gaza via the Israeli-controlled crossing points in the north.

“Reports and internal military documents suggest that Israel has used the closure of the (Rafah) crossing to exercise pressure on Gaza residents. In the first year following the completion of its disengagement programme, Israel kept Rafah Crossing closed for 148 days.” Since June last year, when militants kidnapped an Israeli soldier, the Rafah crossing has been closed for 80 per cent of the time and, on days that it has opened, has functioned only for a few
hours.

At the same time Israel has also kept Gazas other crossings mostly closed and has withheld monies needed to pay the salaries of civil servants and to run civilian institutions.

“The results of these controls have been devastating and have helped plunge Gaza into an economic and humanitarian crisis unprecedented in nearly four decades of occupation,” says the report, seen by The Times.

Israel completely controls the import of goods into Gaza and exercises substantial control over exports from Gaza to third countries and to the West Bank.

16 May, 2008 | No comments

A Mars a day? Not if you’re a vegetarian

VEGETARIANS with a sweet tooth may find many chocolate treats are off-limits, because they are now being made with animal products.

A recipe change to some of the UK’s most popular chocolate bars by giant confectionery manufacturer Masterfoods will prevent strict vegetarians being able to enjoy a range of the UK’s most popular chocolate brands.

Mars, Bounty, Snickers, Twix and Milky Way, as well as Maltesers and Minstrels, are now off the menu, because they will include whey containing animal rennet, a by-product of the slaughter process.

Trade magazine The Grocer said yesterday it had seen a letter to a consumer from Masterfoods which explained that, due to a change in the ingredients used in their chocolate recipes from 1 May, 2007, many of the products now contain whey.

The company explained that this was a by-product of the cheese-making process and uses rennet from an animal source.

Masterfoods corporate affairs manager Paul Goalby said: “Since changing the sourcing of our ingredients, we are no longer able to ensure our chocolate will be animal rennet-free and so we made the principled decision to admit it was not guaranteed to be vegetarian.

“If the customer is an extremely strict vegetarian, then we are sorry the products are no longer suitable, but a less strict vegetarian should be fine to enjoy our chocolate.”

Products with a best-before date up to 1 October are not affected by the change and remain suitable for vegetarians. The company is offering a refund on any bar that has a later best- before date to those who cannot eat animal rennet.

The Vegetarian Society said in 2004, the last full year for which figures are available, the meat-free foods market was estimated at 626 million, a 38 per cent rise on the 1999 level. Data from the Office of National Statistics also shows that confectionery sales in the UK continue to rise.

A Vegetarian Society spokesman said: “There are about three million vegetarians in the UK, which is a significant part of the market. It is very disappointing that Masterfoods products are no longer vegetarian-friendly. We hope the company will reconsider this move.”

George Rodger, a representative of the society in Aberdeen, said he deplored the change, which he believes is being made for economic reasons, to the detriment of UK farmers.

“Ninety per cent of the cheese produced in this country is produced with non-animal rennet. One must suspect Mars is going overseas to get whey products,” he said.

He described the move as unnecessary, and criticised the company for their avoidable use of other animal products. LEAVING AN UNPLEASANT TASTE

THIS is not the first time foodstuffs have been “outed” for including animal products somewhere in their manufacture.

In 2002, fast-food giant McDonald’s agreed to pay $10 million (5 million) in an out-of-court settlement after Hindus living in the US claimed the company used beef extract in the oil with which it cooked French fries. In Britain, a majority of wines are “fined” using meat and fish products, including bull’s blood, to improve their clarity. And supermarket apples are often given their shine by a coat of shellac, a protective covering derived from the shells of insects.

16 May, 2008 | No comments

Desperately seeking Osama

A little less than a year ago, deep within the confines of a private screening room in Berlin, about 50 international film-buyers sat down to watch a 15-minute teaser trailer from Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? The follow-up to Spurlock’s 2004 Oscar-nominated documentary Super Size Me was hot stuff - so much so that the executives were sworn to secrecy about what they would see that day.

Inevitably, though, word leaked out. Spurlock was filming top-secret footage in Afghanistan, they said. The wisecracking, mustachioed maverick, who had put his life on the line to demonstrate the ills of a McDonald’s-only diet, was undergoing anti-terrorism training and had learned kidnap evasion tactics. Forget about fast food and the obesity epidemic, Spurlock had bigger fish to fry: he was going to pull off what America and its allies had failed to accomplish since 9/11. He was going to capture the World’s Most Notorious Terrorist Mastermind. He was going to bring in Osama bin Laden.

Cut to the present. Spurlock is cradling a cup of coffee in a Utah restaurant, the morning after his film’s world premiere at the Sundance festival earned a rousing reception. Two fingers on his left hand are in a splint - a wound incurred not from a Taliban interrogation but from a snowboarding accident several days earlier. Spurlock smiles a lot and has the calm demeanour of a man who has returned, enlightened, from a Homeric journey. But the journey was not what anybody, including Spurlock, expected.

“After Super Size Me, I remember sitting down in 2005 and thinking about what to do next,” says Spurlock, in his sing-song timbre. Then he noticed a resurgence of media interest in Bin Laden. “People were asking why we couldn’t find him,” he says. An idea was planted. When Spurlock ran into a like-minded venture capitalist called Adam Dell, who became executive producer on the film, the adventure began, with $3m in backing from French financiers.

The movie’s opening 15 minutes serve as a reminder of why Super Size Me ballooned into a cultural phenomenon, becoming one of the highest-grossing documentaries ever. As Spurlock’s voiceover raps about the need to find Bin Laden, we see footage of the film-maker toning up in the gym, taking a course in Arabic and learning survival skills, followed by an audacious animated sequence in which the West Virginian 37-year-old and his nemesis square up to each other as video game avatars.

It’s a breathtaking and silly conceit, a typically dazzling montage from the poster-boy of the YouTube generation. However, of far greater significance is a new subtext that bubbles within the Spurlock psyche, one that derives from the fact that, in early 2006, Spurlock’s wife, the vegan chef Alexandra Jamieson, announced she was pregnant.

This had a seismic impact on the project. “The film took on a whole different meaning,” he says. “The question becomes: what kind of world am I bringing this kid into? Anybody who’s on the verge of becoming a father will know that feeling: you want the world to be a better place.

“The media blew things way out of proportion before the film came out, and made everybody think it was going to be a certain type of movie. The goal was initially to capture Bin Laden, but a friend once told me that if your notion of what your film will be hasn’t changed by the time you get to the end, then you didn’t listen to anybody. You walk through a door and there are three more that take you in a new direction.”

The new direction didn’t stop Spurlock from travelling, with cameraman Daniel Marracino, to such far-flung regions as Morocco, Israel, Egypt, Leeds (sadly, destined for the cutting-room floor) and Afghanistan. It just tweaked the outcome. Spurlock is an affable man whose laid-back charm and goofy humour are evident during interviews with journalists, religious leaders and ordinary people across the Arab world. One of his lines, an offhand inquiry about the whereabouts of Bin Laden, raised a huge laugh from the Sundance audience. This is pure Spurlock - yet the very casualness of the question reveals how his original goal was supplanted by something bigger.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the US administration isn’t about to deposit a $25m reward into Spurlock’s bank account. Bin Laden, if he is even still alive, remains at large. “I realised that finding this guy isn’t the answer,” says Spurlock. “I always wanted to learn what shaped him and his followers.” He believes the movie shows how US foreign policy and socio-economic forces in US-backed regimes created a hatred that certain factions could exploit.

“At the same time,” he adds, “I met so many people who want the same things for themselves and their families that we want. These moderate voices are not represented in the media. All we hear about are the extremists, the terrorists, because it’s all about fear and scare tactics. I wanted to give these people a voice.”

It’s an approach that has drawn favourable comments from the LA Times, which, after chastising Spurlock for not catching his man, talks of “a surprising sweetness to be found behind some of those imposing Muslim beards. Perhaps because [Spurlock’s] not shouting, people may actually listen.” The website Ain’t It Cool News wasn’t so impressed, calling it “one big 98-minute ego-fart”.

Edited down from 1,000 hours of footage, the movie shows Spurlock strolling into several danger spots. He accompanies Israeli police on a bomb-disposal assignment, wanders into a Saudi mosque while an imam invokes war against America, unintentionally incites a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews to near-violence, and gets embedded in a US army unit in Afghanistan that comes under attack from the Taliban.

“I never tell Alex everything I’m going to do,” Spurlock says of his wife, who “banned” him from going to Iraq. “The gist of what I said to Alex was that everything was fine and nothing was really going on. We never told her we were fired on in the Gaza Strip, for example. She knows me well enough to know that things probably were going on, but she didn’t want to hear about it.”

He pauses. “We were scared to death a lot of the time, actually. When the plane flying you into Afghanistan goes into a steep spiral descent to avoid potential anti-aircraft fire, you know you’re entering an intense environment. One night in Kabul, there was a knock at my door. The security guard had told us never to open the door at night because the Taliban had started kidnapping western journalists from their hotels. I freaked out, got out of bed and followed my security training - standing behind the door holding something in my hand, ready to whack whoever came into the room. Fortunately, they went away.”

In Afghanistan, the tone of the film becomes more sombre, as Spurlock nears his final destination. “We were following clues, as people told us to go here or there. Pretty much everything we heard led us to Peshawar.” This is the tribal region in Pakistan where many believe Bin Laden resides. The crew was denied entry to Pakistan more than once; eventually they bribed their way in.

At the border with Peshawar, a more immediate kind of fatherly imperative replaces Spurlock’s earlier gung-ho desire to rid the world of evil. “We decided not to go into the tribal regions because there was another place for me to be at that moment, which was back home with my wife Alex. Shoot what you can and be safe wherever possible - but no matter what you get, it isn’t worth losing your life. So as we got close to the border with Peshawar, that was close enough for me. I realised in that moment that it was time to head home to Brooklyn. There are so many other issues to address, and that’s what I tried to do in the movie.”

Spurlock, now the father of a 13-month-old boy, readily admits he remains as clueless as the next person about the whereabouts of Bin Laden. He is not surprised that the international efforts to find him have failed, given that Bin Laden probably no longer uses any kind of device that could betray his location. Watching the film’s sequences with the US Army, you get the sense that they too have moved on to the broader strategy of supporting the Afghan National Army’s fight against the Taliban.

As Super Size Me proved, Spurlock is no journalist; rather, he is a direct activist with a camera who tries to use his platform to engage audiences in an age where the blizzard of technology and information causes people to lose sight of one basic truth. “The media manipulate what is going on out there to keep people afraid,” he says. “But we should ask more questions for ourselves, talk to each other and challenge what we hear. Then we can learn about our similarities. Maybe that will give us a better chance of surviving in the future”

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? will be released later this year

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