by David Steven | Apr 16, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America, UK
Apparently, the BBC is trailing Lord Monckton around the United States for a documentary on the Lord’s climate scepticism (a superb use of license fee money).
Monckton, who compares climate activists to the Hitler Youth, appears to be latching onto another conspiracy theory – that Barack Obama is lying about being born in the United States, and is therefore not constitutionally allowed to serve as President.
Dave Weigel reports:
“America!” said Monckton at the start of his speech. “Land of opportunity! You can be born in Kenya and end up as president of the United States!”
That remark was well received in the crowd, if not as boisterously applauded as Monckton’s other jokes. After the speech… a reporter from USA Today and I both asked Monckton whether he was joking.
“I have no idea where he was born,” said Monckton, who was working the crowd and signing autographs. “What I do find strange is that the public records of his Hawaiian birth have been sealed, and can not be obtained by the public. His lawyers have spent a lot of money trying to seal the records of his public life. All of those records should be open to the public, as they always were for previous presidents.”
by David Steven | Apr 16, 2010 | UK
This morning, The Guardian’s website leads with a polling sensation. Apparently, Nick Clegg did so well is last night’s debate that the British election is now a two-horse race between the Lib Dems and the Tories, with Labour the UK’s new third party.
Such a sensational story – and so prominently placed – must be built on robust foundations, right? No. It turns out that:
- The Guardian has picked up a tweet from Tim Montogomerie, editor of the blog, ConservativeHome.com, referencing an -as-yet-unpublished poll from ComRes for ITV.
- Without even seeing the poll, it has decided to splash it all over the front page of its website, even while its own election blogger, Paul Sparrow, is warning readers that the sample is not nationally representative and the figures have not even yet been weighted.
This – apparently – is called journalism.
Update: Original headline pulled, replaced by the milder: “Lib Dem support surges after debate win.”
Update II: Andrew Sparrow writes:
I’ve been reading the comments about the way we reported the ComRes poll. Twitter is a wonderful source of information (if we didn’t use it, this blog would be slower and far less informative) and the figures were released by journalists who are normally reliable. But on this occasion the information was misleading. I should have waited until I had spoken to ComRes before going into overdrive. I’m sorry about that.
My beef is not really with Andrew’s live blog – which is clearly contingent and updated as new information is uncovered – but with the decision to use the information from a tweet as the basis for the main headline on the Guardian website front page. Would love to know which editor made that decision.
Update III: Here’s the Guardian’s description of the methodology for its own poll on the debate:
ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 505 people by telephone on 15th April 2010. It reinterviewed people who had previously been selected at random who told them they would be watching the debate and had agreed to be interviewed again. The sample has been weighted to the profile of all people selected at random who previously stated they would be watching the debate.
I have read this a dozen times and have no idea what it means.
by Alex Evans | Apr 14, 2010 | Economics and development
“I can only say that I am deeply sorry that our management – starting with me – was not more prescient and that we did not foresee what lay before us.”
– Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup, Congressional testimony, 8 April 2010
“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”
– Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup, interview with Financial Times, 10 July 2007
Er…
by David Steven | Apr 14, 2010 | UK
Daniel Hannan – Euro MP and the most influential politician on the Internet – has been finding the election campaign pretty stressful. Fortunately, he’s an early adopter of what I am told is the latest new television sensation from across the Atlantic:
In the evenings, Mrs H and I unwind by watching The Wire which is, for my money, quite the best cop show around. Spreading itself comfortably over five series, it uses the space to develop its characters. There are no straightforward goodies or baddies here, any more than in Shakespeare’s plays. And the dialect is addictive. Several times, on the campaign trail, I have had to force myself to say “yes” rather than “true dat” or “mos def”.
This is much more than just downtime though.
Jimmy McNulty – in real life an Eton boy like David Cameron (“I didn’t know him then but I do now. I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?'”) – has endorsed the Conservatives, sending Toby Young weak at the knees (“Dominic West is a genuinely cool famous person – a fantastically gifted actor and a movie star in the making. It was almost as if Jack Nicholson had come out for George W Bush.”)
Not only that, Hannan reckons that The Wire provides a model for policing Britain’s lawless streets:
The programme doesn’t immediately look like an endorsement of the Tory policy of elected police commissioners. On the contrary, it often shows honest rozzers being made to do the wrong thing by vote-grabbing politicians.
Then again, perfection is not of this world. An elected sheriff might make the wrong call, just as an unelected chief constable might. The difference is that we can’t get rid of the unelected chief constable… The last word ought surely to go to local people.
And you know what? Unless The Wire is lying, those Baltimore coppers are out patrolling every day. They have to, you see: their bosses answer to local voters. Messy as it can sometimes be, democracy is a pretty good idea.
As the man says, true dat. Mos def.
by Mark Weston | Apr 13, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
A couple of weeks ago in the small, poor Sahelian town of Dori in northern Burkina Faso, we were sitting at a roadside stall having a breakfast of coffee and dry bread. As we sat with our backs to the road, a group of five young boys, aged no more than twelve, hovered behind us like seagulls waiting for scraps. From time to time one would move closer, as if making to pounce on a morsel of bread, before retreating again when we looked round. They stood there for twenty minutes. After we got up and left, one of them ran to the table and downed the dregs of Ebru’s coffee.
These are the talibe children of West Africa. They are ubiquitous. In the towns of Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, posses of these young boys – uniformly skinny, dirty and covered in dust – have been constant companions on our trip. They roam the streets in packs, carrying empty, lidless tomato tins or little plastic buckets, and approach everyone they see for money or food. You never get used to the sight of them.
The boys’ story is grim. Many have been sent from their villages at the age of five or six by destitute parents to live with marabouts, Muslim “holy men” who promise to feed and shelter them and teach them about the Koran. ‘Their parents are too poor to look after them,’ says Karim, a Dori yoghurt seller, ‘and they are uneducated, so they believe the marabouts when they tell them they will house and clothe their kids.’ A few of these marabouts are genuine, and the children combine work in the fields with Arabic and Koranic education. But most are charlatans. ‘They go to the market, buy a cap and a gown and a Koran and say they are Koranic masters,’ Karim, a devout Muslim explains, ‘but it’s pure child exploitation.’
The children are sent out into the streets every morning. They are expected to earn 150 or 250 CFA francs per day (about 20-35p, or 50 cents) from begging. A former talibe child from Niger tells me that if they do not hit their target, the marabout beats or tortures them. Many therefore take to stealing if they haven’t begged enough near the end of the day.
Few receive any form of education, because their masters want them on the streets. Some of these Fagins have twenty or thirty boys. Twenty children can mean 5000 CFA (£8/$12) per day, huge money in these parts, so they do not waste time with teaching.
At night, the children sleep together on crowded floors in marabouts’ homes. Few get enough rest – we often see boys sleeping in the dust under trees in the afternoons. Those who surrounded us at the breakfast table were seriously underfed. In Ouagadougou a few days later, another feral-looking child asked us for money. When we refused, he began staring feverishly at Ebru’s bag and then made to snatch it – I pushed him away, and felt his ribs like a radiator through his T-shirt.
Karim is pessimistic about the children’s future. ‘They get used to this life of begging and stealing, so when they eventually grow up and escape they can only slip into a life of delincuency.’ The boys would make easy prey for extremists and warlords. The Burkina Faso government does occasional round-ups and places them in workshops so they can learn a trade, but this risks encouraging more parents to abandon their sons to the marabouts. Karim believes it is a ‘river that can’t be damned.’ Universal free education with meals seems the most promising solution, but Burkina’s performance in this area is abysmal – fewer than half of rural children are enrolled in school.
