Ai Weiwei is free – but what about the others?
One man has been freed. Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous living artist, has been released from jail. He had been held incommunicado, in a secret prison, for more than two months. His offence, according to the Beijing police department, was tax evasion. But the whole world knew that the prominent dissident had really been arrested for having the temerity to make public criticisms of China’s oppressive record on human rights – and urging the regime in Beijing to reform its political system.
Ai Weiwei is a brave man. But he is one of the lucky ones. He is an artist of international renown and his detention prompted a worldwide campaign for his release. Protest exhibitions, winning widescale media coverage, have been held in top art galleries across the globe, such as the one in London’s Tate Modern where last October the artist unveiled a carpet of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds which he said questioned the role of an individual in society.
But what of the others?
China is thought to have the highest number of political prisoners of any country in the world. Human rights activists counted 742 arrests in 2007 alone. More recent estimates have put the number between 2,000 to 3,000. There is no way of knowing the total behind bars for “endangering state security” – the charge which in 1997 replaced “counter-revolution” in the Communist criminal code.
The world knows the names of only two or three per cent of those the repressive state has arrested, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a body based on the West coast of the United States, which is dedicated to well-informed dialogue between the democratic world and China, and is not known for producing sensationalist figures. Though Beijing’s crackdown on political dissent is well-publicised the arrest of dissidents take place out of the public view.
FollowAn extraordinary statement was posted out of Rome at the end of last week by Dr Lesley-Anne Knight, perhaps the most high-profile woman in institutional Roman Catholicism. It began with references to Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, charismatic leaders who each served less than four years before being assassinated. The invited inference was clear. The removal of Dr Knight as chief executive of Caritas Internationalis – whose member organizations, like Cafod, support 24 million people worldwide from a budget of $5.5 billion – was an act of political assassination. Since it was done by the Vatican this was a pretty explosive statement.
Dr Knight had been expected to serve another four-year term. But her election was blocked by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State which declined to grant her the nihil obstat required for all candidates to key positions. Dr Knight, Curia officials briefed, had “failed to instil a specifically Catholic identity and sense of evangelisation” into her federation’s activities.
The outgoing leader responded by wishing her successor well and saying to him: “You will need the courage of a lion; the skin of a rhinoceros; the wisdom of an owl; and the patience of a polar bear. And I don’t know if there is an animal with eyes in the back of its head, but that could also be very useful!”
So what is it all about? Right-wing bloggers have filled the internet with suggestions that Dr Knight had backed the Caritas agency in Canada in supporting pro-abortion groups in Mexico. But that is a clear a calumny. The Canadian bishops launched a high-level inquiry into those claims in 2009 and pronounced them unfounded. The real problem is more subtle, and more serious.
For Dr Knight, the first woman ever to have been elected to this position, the trouble began four years ago at her first papal audience when senior officials wanted her to move from the front-row seat occupied by her male predecessor. She stood her ground. Thereafter she routinely pointed out that at least eighty percent of Caritas workers are lay people and a majority are women. None of this has gone down well among powerful traditionalists whose official position is that, though women cannot be ordained, they must, of course, play an important role in the life of the Church. Small wonder that her comments last week spoke of only “fear, misogyny and prejudice” Church.
Ryan Giggs and an eye for the birds
You can blame your Grandad. If you are caught in a moment of sexual infidelity it may well just be down to you genes. German scientists working with zebra finches have discovered that this normally faithful species has aberrant members who like to put it about a bit. Darwin, whose theories of natural selection were sparked by the finches of the Galápagos, explained why the occasional male finch might do this – it increases his chances of spreading his genetic material. But why do some females have a roving beak?
It turns out that the daughters of promiscuous finches are more likely to play away too, to use a footballing metaphor. And the offspring of these females inherit the same wanderlust. Scientists in America last year suggested a possible cause: a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. It is found in people too, which is why Ryan Giggs might look over his shoulder at either one of this grandfathers. The gene is linked to thrill-seeking potentially-addictive behaviour like alcoholism, gambling and even watching horror films. Those with liberal political views manifest it more than conservatives.
So it could be your DNA that makes you more prone to, well, getting prone. There is one catch. When the news about DRN4 broke last year it was accompanied by headlines suggesting: “It might not be your fault that you’re a cheating piece of trash”. Whatever the genes say society still presumes we should be held to account as beings possessed of free will. Life is sometimes more complicated than science allows.
What the Archbishop of Canterbury should have written in the New Statesman – or told the editor of the Daily Mail
Those naughty people at the New Statesman. Apparently when the Archbishop of Canterbury arrived to do his week as guest editor he was planning to write the main editorial on aid to Africa. But Rowan Williams was persuaded to offer, instead, his thoughts on the state of the Coalition government on year in. The paper got the headlines it wanted but we have been deprived of his thoughts on the place we used to call the dark continent. So what might he have said? And why does it matter?
World leaders will gather tomorrow in London at the invitation of David Cameron to discuss the £2.3 billion shortfall in money promised to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation for its work over the next five years. Without that money many children will needlessly die, despite the fact that new vaccines have now been developed against two of the main killers of children – diarrhoea and pneumonia.
This is not merely a matter of holding world leaders to their promises. A new mood is abroad, particularly in the backwoods of the Conservative party, abetted by a series of irresponsible pieces of journalism in the Daily Mail. The whole business of giving aid is being questioned, particularly at a time when public spending is being drastically cut. Siren voices are sounding that aid is a futile business which, far from alleviating poverty, has actually made things worse in places like Africa, creating dependency and propping up corrupt despots.
The Archbishop might have begun by unpacking this collection of clichéd untruths. He might have said such stereotypes are outdated. True, aid was dished out to dictators at the height of the Cold War, by both the West and the Soviets, happy to fund anyone who fulfilled Franklin D Roosevelt’s definition that “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch”. But the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Aid has been much more poverty-focused since.
He might have turned his scholarly attention to the dodgy journalism which runs headlines which misrepresent a private discussion paper as the view of the International Monetary Fund. Or which quotes oddball critics of aid like Dambisa Moyo – or her predecessors in dissent Peter Bauer and William Easterly – as though they represented some new orthodoxy when in fact the overwhelming majority of development economists know that, in the right circumstances, aid works.
Why the SlutWalkers are both right and wrong
It can only be a good thing that some controls are to be placed on the marketing of padded bras, toy pole-dancing kits and T-shirts with slogans like ‘Future Porn Star’ to primary school children. Whether the “guidelines” just announced by big-chain retailers will work is another matter.
It is wrong to impose visions of adult sexuality on a child who isn’t ready for them. Such images lend psychological support to the self-deluded paedophiles who insist that kids enjoy sex too. But the real problem is the cumulative impact on the children themselves. Placing restrictions on sexual imagery on billboards within 100 metres of schools will not do much in a media continuum where children can’t avoid seeing ads the bombarded at adults. It’s not how the world ought to be. But it is how it is.
Does it make any sense to kick against that? The women who took to the streets of Newcastle, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow last weekend certainly seem to think so. SlutWalks have spread around the world after a policeman in Toronto told female law students: “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.”
“Don’t tell us how to dress. Tell men not to rape,” Toronto’s feminists riposted. “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no!” Clothes are not consent, is the message.
This is an understandable corrective to cases like the recent one in which an 11-year-old girl in Texas was gang-raped, and the New York Times ran a widely-criticized story reporting that the girl dressed “older than her age” and wore makeup – as if that was mitigation for the 18 men accused of raping her. Judges, juries, police and the media all fall into the trap sometimes of blaming the victim.
But sloppy public stereotypes can offer sound private advice: don’t wear a Celtic shirt in a Rangers pub; don’t park your Porsche on a sink estate; don’t go to dodgy parts of town after dark; look before you step onto a zebra crossing – unless you want a tombstone reading: “I had the right of way”.
A homeless person is a grimey, smelly, uncombed individual, with dirt ingrained in their fingers, whose life does not look much beyond an unsavoury sleeping bag, a complex arrangement of cardboard boxes and an anxiety as to where the next drink is coming from. Wrong. Do not be deceived by Mariana. She is a beautiful young woman with the natural grace of an Indian princess. She has an easy open charm and a ready smile. But she is homeless.
We are sitting in a hostel in central London. Hers is the classic homelessness story.
“I got thrown out of home when I fell pregnant. I was 19,” she says. “My family weren’t happy.” Her father is Asian, her mother is white, though she became a Muslim when they married. “We’re not a religious family. No-one prays in the house; everyone drinks.” But they made it clear she was giving her religion a bad name. “They told me to get rid of the baby or I wouldn’t be allowed back in the house.”
For the next two months she slept at boyfriend’s house, in the spare room. “His Mum was supportive. We’d been in a relationship for three years. But then one day she came into my room at 5am and said she’d changed her mind and that I had to get an abortion. ‘I can’t afford to support you,’ she said. My boyfriend was 25 but he did whatever his Mum said. No backbone. That finished him for me.” She had the abortion and moved out.
“At first I slept on friends’ sofas, moving on when they got fed up of me. Then I slept rough in a roof space. I felt alone. In the end none of my friends were there for me. Everything came tumbling down at once. I developed serious depression.”
Mariana is one of the lucky ones. She stumbled across the number of a housing charity and rang it. The staff there found her a bed in a hostel in Soho. “It was horrible. Really grotty. Full of smoking, drink and drugs. But someone there referred me to the Cardinal Hume Centre, which runs a hostel dedicated to young vulnerable people between the ages of 16 and 21.”
That is where she is today, along with 31 other homeless youngsters. Now she has a dedicated support worker helping her get her life straight and look for a job. She is also receiving medical care for her psychosis. “There is so much support here,” she says happily. “Now I can look ahead”. We shall return to Mariana later.
Homelessness, which has been on the decline in Britain for the past 15 years, is on the rise again, thanks to the recession and the policies of the Coalition Government. People sleeping doorways – a familiar sight in the Thatcher era – are returning. Central London is the magnet for them. On average 1,600 people sleep out in the borough of Westminster each year. On any given night, between 100 and 200 people sleep on the streets.
Turbulent priests have a long tradition within the Church in England. You don’t have to look back as far the original one, Thomas à Becket, murdered at the whim of King Henry II. The history of church and state in far more recent times has been one of horns being locked on a far wider ranger of issues than the ones the Archbishop of Canterbury rather gently raised yesterday in his guest editorial in the New Statesman.
Those who suggested that Rowan Williams has made the most baldly political intervention by a serving Archbishop of Canterbury clearly have short memories. Robert Runcie, of Faith in the City fame, often pitched himself in opposition to the Thatcher government – on everything from the Falklands War to the Tories “lunatic” nuclear arsenal and propensity to refer to their opponents in the miners’ strike as “scum”. His successor George Carey, who dressed archiepiscopally to the right, attacked judges for their ignorance of the church and called for stricter controls on immigration to preserve “our values”. Rowan Williams himself has been forthrightly critical of the war on Iraq and the extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden, not to mention the role of bankers in provoking global recession.
Few in the government seem to have noticed that the man acronymically known in the Church as the ABC also lamented the fact that the nation is “still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently”. Dr Williams’ intervention is as embarrassing for Ed Miliband as it is for David Cameron. It is, after all Labour, rather than the church, who should be providing the Opposition.
Here’s one for your next pub quiz. Q: How many chemical elements are there in the periodic table? A: 118. Wrong. Two more have just been isolated, to the delight and/or horror of the world’s chemistry teachers.
The thing about these base elements is that only 94 of them occur naturally on the Earth. The others are produced synthetically. The two new ones, just announced by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, arrive and decay in only a few minutes. Flerovium and moscovium, as they have been provisionally named – but the IUPAP is open to suggestions if you have better ideas – start their brief existence when curium atoms are bombarded with calcium nuclei. The resulting new elements last a few milliseconds before passing into a different element and then decaying into a third.
Confused? If so spare some sympathy for the periodic tables in school laboratories up and down the land which are now officially out of date. And it could be worse. You could – like Cambridge University, the BBC and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – have just bought a £4,750 (VAT not included) oak coffee table with the out-dated table set into its top.
Still, think of it as work of art from a previous era, rather like Tom Lehrer’s setting of the Periodic Table to the classic G&S patter-tune, The Model of a Modern Major-General. It ends: “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discarvard.” Today’s students may prefer a gag that is more up-to-date: “Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because the only element he recognises is that of surprise”. Keep up, will you.
David Cameron has been passionate in his defence of British aid. And quite right too. The prime minister has been under pressure from Conservative backwoodsmen, and the cash-strapped Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, to cut international development, whose budget has been protected from public spending cuts. There is more to this than tightened public spending purse strings. There is something pernicious in the air.
Killing Osama bin Laden may well have been the easy bit
Killing Osama bin Laden may well have been the easy bit. Unless you count the armchair moralising. It was an act of justice, said David Cameron; it was an act of vengeance, said the Bishop of Winchester. Of course it was neither; it was an act of war, and war is, de facto, a spectacular acknowledgement that the civilised process has broken down. read more…
Get in line for industrial-strength theatre
There is something claustrophobic about the long, low gallery at the heart of Murrays’ Mills in Great Ancoats. It is not far from the stylish urban refit that is the eastern quarter of modern Manchester. But it feels a century away from all the upmarket warehouse loft conversions only streets away.
Here’s the spin to end all spin, though I suspect it probably won’t. An email arrived the other day telling the story of Judy Wallman, a Californian woman working on her family tree. She had discovered an ancestor in common with a leading US Senator and wrote to find out what he knew about their great-great uncle.
What she did not tell him was that she had found a photograph of the man standing on the gallows on the back of which was written: “Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889”.
The Senator’s staff replied, “believe it or not,” thus: “Remus Reid was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed”. Now that’s real political spin, Judy concluded.
Except it isn’t spin. It’s a lie, or an urban myth if you want to be more charitable. When I checked it out I discovered it had also been used by opponents against George Bush and Sarah Palin in the past. Even so, it tells a poetic truth: that we live, both politicians and their detractors, in a cheating culture.
There’s a lot of it about. In just the past few days we’ve had a survey of 10,000 youngsters, aged 13 to 15, which shows that a quarter believe it is fine to cheat in an exam and almost as many that it’s OK to travel on public transport without a ticket; and it’s getting worse, with to 29 per cent rise over the last decade in the numbers who think shoplifting is acceptable. Then three exam boards, including Cambridge, introduced a new anti-cheating computer programme which detects whether a lot of candidates are getting the same mark by copying. There was even a survey which showed that when man women are given a bunch of flowers by their husband they suspect he’s been up to something.
