Author: Londonbear

I am writing this in the hope it may provide some comfort for those grieving the injuries suffered by the City of New Orleans, part of the World’s heritage, as well as working for the relief of the people affected.

The city of New Orleans is in a state of what seems like irrecoverable devastation. On September 2, 2005 the city is covered by a smoke from fires in a paint factory and other buildings in the centre of the city. On another September 2 it was not water but a fire starting in a bakery that caused the razing of a city to the ground leaving a smoking ruin in which beloved buildings were no more.

When the rebuilding of the iconic great church began, a smashed stone was found in the foundations. On it one word in latin was inscribed that became the motto of the building and in many ways the city that was reborn round it. I urge you to take this up as a watchword and example for New Orleans. That single inspirational word was “Resurgam” – “I shall rise again”.

That previous September 2 was in 1666 in London. A small fire in a shop in Pudding Lane spread and levelled most of a city that the previous year had gone through another disaster. Plague had come from the docks and killed huge numbers who were already living in squalor in crowded poverty. The rich decamped the city, ironically spreading the disease as they went. By the time the fires subsided, the city had been sterilised of plague but the symbol of the city, the great medieval cathedral of St Paul was reduced to smoking ruins. The people were very much in the same mental state as those in New Orleans are now. Faced with the ruins,  they asked how the city could possibly be inhabitable let alone prosper.

Along with his plans for the rebuilt cathedral, Christopher Wren proposed a whole new layout, wiping away more than a millennium of street layout and planning a new city of straight boulevards and broad roadways so that fire could not leap across the open sewers that passed for streets, from one overhanging upper storey to another. (Open sewers as few houses had “guardrobes” or internal long drop toilets to a cesspit but threw the “nightsoil” out of the window with a shout of “Gardez vous”, corrupted to “gardez loo” giving the British the “loo”).  Here comes lesson number one for the rebuilding of New Orleans, those of you who have visited London may have noticed a distinct lack of these designs. They got lost in the post-fire squabbles as owners reclaimed their land and refused to have any part of the plans. What remained were building codes that ensured high risk structures like thatched wooden buildings could not come back. Rather than rebuilding the “shotgun houses” in the lowest part of NO, it may be necessary to have them built on stilts or floatable like some new developments in the Netherlands. Those are built like boats retained by columns that carry the services like water and electricity in flexible systems that minimise damage. If individual buildings cannot economically comply, rebuilding the levees to much higher levels and re-establishing the wetland protection would be an alternative. Remember, if the loss of the wetlands continues at the current rate, the city will be on the coast in the second half of the century.

While they were obliged to rebuild business and houses according to the new code, London was rebuilt “organically” ie as and when the owners could afford and extended or rebuilt as they prospered. But very soon after the fire the people returned. Communities re-established themselves. Lesson two – a city is not only buildings and land, it’s a complex interplay of the communities in them. The city of New Orleans did not invent Jazz and all of that vibrancy, the people of the city did. New Orleans is the mournful/joyful funeral procession of a poor person and the community they came from, not the tourist traps of Bourbon Street.

Wren did not have life easy, his plans for St Paul’s were much changed and criticised and in the end the final version was not what was expected by those paying for it. What he gave was leadership and inspiration. If the Mayor or Governor can rebuild the community that is New Orleans alongside the buildings, they would be worthy to have a memorial with the same inscription as that for Wren. On his grave in St Paul’s is no statue or portrait. There is just another inscription it Latin. “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you”  

This weekend is a Bank (public) holiday in England and it’s party time on the streets of west London. Celebrating it’s 40th birthday, the Notting Hill Carnival is under way.

This is the first big public event since the July bombings on the transport system and is the biggest multi-cultural street celebration in Europe. Emphasis is being put on the way that after starting as a predominantly West Indian event, it has become part of the late summer scene for all the communities in London. The theme is “unity and diversity”.

Just how quickly Londoners recovered was shown in an article in the British Medical Journal this week. The analysis of the survey’s results also has some important lessons for dealing with man-made and natural disasters.  

More below fold (number of photos)
Carnival is a two day event. The Sunday is always Children’s Day when the young people parade in their very colourful costumes.

An estimated 200,000 people were in the streets for the first day. Monday is the main event and up to a million are expected there and in a complementary event in Hyde Park organised by the Mayor.

The article in the BMJ is based on a survey using the same method employed in New York after 9/11. The bald results are in an abstract:

Main outcome measures Main outcomes were presence of substantial stress, measured by using an identical tool to that used to assess the emotional impact of 11 September 2001 in the US population, and intention to travel less on tubes, trains, and buses, or into central London, once the transport network had returned to normal.

Results 31% of Londoners reported substantial stress and 32% reported an intention to travel less. Among other things, having difficulty contacting friends or family by mobile phone (odds ratio 1.7, 95% confidence interval 1.1 to 2.7), having thought you could have been injured or killed (3.8, 2.4 to 6.2), and being Muslim (4.0, 2.5 to 6.6) were associated with a greater presence of substantial stress, whereas being white (0.3, 0.2 to 0.4) and having previous experience of terrorism (0.6, 0.5 to 0.9) were associated with reduced stress. Only 12 participants (1%) felt that they needed professional help to deal with their emotional response to the attacks.

Conclusions Although the psychological needs of those intimately caught up in the attacks will require further assessment, we found no evidence of a widespread desire for professional counselling. The attacks have inflicted disproportionately high levels of distress among non-white and Muslim Londoners.

The possible lessons are in the detailed report, linked from the above page in .pdf format. The comparatively less stress experience by Londoners is put down to several factors but one is the preparedness for an attack, including the national distribution of a booklet by the Government of advice about what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. The second is that informal support networks of friends and relatives or simply discussing concerns with them are a very important way of dealing with the stress.

More interesting perhaps is the lesson that stress could be reduced if people were able to contact friends and relatives by cellphone in the event of a disaster. Thinking about this, it may be an idea to encourage contact networks so one person acts as the central contact for the members of a family, ideally by SMS message which take fewer resouces on the system. Already people in the UK have been encouraged to have an “ICE” or “In Case of Emergency” number listed on their phone’s contact list so emergency services can contact them in the event of injury.

A couple of final notes, although it is obvious that muslim respondents were more stressed over the event – the more stressed all of those with a strong religious conviction. People have also reacted practically to any concerns over public transport as bicycle riding is up 20%.

OK a piece of speculation but there are some links between a man now held in Zambia and the 7 July bombings in London. The man was arrested trying to enter Zambia from Zimbabwe over the border at Livingstone, an unusual route.

More details below the fold.
First, why would Mugabe have common cause with presumed radical muslims to attack London? Well pressure on him after the corrupt elections, deliberate starvation of opposition supporters, forced demolition of structures built without planning consent (not all “shanty towns” as it portayed sometimes) and his desperate economic situation where he is scrabbling aroung trying to get loans from South Africa and is selling off Zimbabwe to China in order to get money to run the country. To divert from his own incompetence and corruption, Mugabe’s favorite ploy is to blame the ex-colonial power’s critcising his running of Zimbabwe as a neo-colonialist plot to re-establish a colony (particularly ironic in view of his dealings with the Chinese). Mugabe is more batty than Blair so the idea of him believing his own propaganda is not inconceivable.

Now the evidence of the Zambian detainee. This BBC report from Friday gives some details of his arrest. Further information has emerged but this is not yet up or only on Sky News. While that is Murdoch owned, it has a better reputation than Fox but I am aware some do not like the linkage. Faroon Aswat was wanted by the US authorities and they requested extradition. That apparently has now been refused and there seems to be more interest in him now in connection with the London bombings than there was previously. He was brought up in the same area as one of the 7/7 bombers. After leaving the US he was reported as trying to settle in South Africa.

Now he has been arrested in Livingstone, Zambia. That is just over the border from the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls so the question becomes – why was he trying to cross there? Frankly about the only attraction for tourists coming from Zim to Livingstone is the railway museum. A bit like the Canadians with Niagra, the Zim side has the better views and much more developed tourist facilities. If you stay in Livingstone. you visit these on a day visa, not the other way round.

So was he trying to get to Lusaka, the Zambian capital? Well there is a railway from Livingston to Lusaka – I’ve used it and if I tell you that they will only sell you a ticket when the train arrives from the other end of the line, you can judge the reliability. “Greyhound” like buses make the journey and a recently completed well paved road links the two – it was built to serve a luxury hotel complex on the Zambian side of the Falls that opened at the turn of the decade. Both these options are very strange for somebody travelling from South Africa to Lusaka. If you look at the map, you will see the capital is well east of Livingstone. Buses  go directly from Lusaka to Johannesburg and cross nearer Lusaka at the other, eastern. end of the land border and then virtually directly north/south through Harare and Beit Bridge. So if Aswat was entering Zambia, he was doing so in an uncoventional way that must have been to avoid detection.

So this raises all sorts of questions – how long had he been in Zimbabwe and what was he doing there? Did he link up with the Zim regime to get funding or other support to plan the London bombings?

We may be well into tin hat territory here but Blush (Blair/Bush) used far weaker evidence to justify a link  between Iraq and the 9/11 New York attacks. Oh I forgot, no oil.

After a fairly torrid two weeks of attempted repeated bombings and the police killing an innocent man, I thought it might be helpful to have a rather lighter diary which indicates life continues very much as usual here in “old Europe”. I also have a piece of news that I think is going to be the first time you hear it.
Naked Germans

First, since this is after all the reason you are carrying on past the fold, the naked Germans. Well this is one of those good old stories about one EU country falling out with another over a fairly minor matter but it growing to a possible diplomatic incident.

The British have long had a running war with Germans over their practice of putting towels on sunbeds by the poolside of holiday hotels in Spain to reserve them. Not content with sitting on the sidelines of this Anglo-German spat, the Italians have decided to have their own two eurocents worth, as the Independent reports:

 An Italian beach etiquette guide that advises against topless bathing and consuming beer on beaches has provoked a backlash from German holidaymakers and the newspaper Das Bild.

The guide has been issued by the Italian Union of Bathing Establishments (SIB). It consists of a series of “suggestions” for good behaviour on beaches, some of which critics allege are targeted at northern European holiday habits. As well as nudity and drinking, the tourists’ habit of hanging clothes from seaside umbrellas is also frowned upon.

Yesterday’s Bild claimed that the Italian authorities “want to ruin our holidays” by banning German tourists from such practices.

A war of words erupted as the La Stampa of Turin newspaper attacked Bild for “stigmatising the Italian summer”, by claiming there are so many rules banning activities on Italian beaches that “Germans are unable to enjoy themselves”.

Bild claimed it was bewildering for northern visitors to Italy to be faced with bans such as playing football, eating noisily, drying swimming costumes and changing outside cabins.

Chocolate Coatings

Now a British story which is the latest in the never ending fun we have in deciding what rate of VAT (purchase tax) should be charged on an item. The system is complicated because there are different rates. A special one for some very specified items but there is a “standard” rate of 17.5%, with some exempt. The two main disputes surround the exemptions of children’s clothing and food.

The clothing is determined by the clothe’s size. That means you can have a small adult paying no VAT but parents having to pay out the tax on trainers for their hefty brute of an 11 year old. The UK is not quite as bad as the USA but we also have the problem of overweight kids so there are some disputes over where the break point should be set. These are nothing tho when it comes to food. Usually these are zero rated but some count as “luxury” items and carry the full rate. Confectionery (candy) and “luxury biscuits” are taxed.

This is where the definitions really start to get fun. Frozen yoghurt is taxed when it is intended to be eaten frozen like ice cream. Fair enough. Then frozen food centres started selling ordinary yoghurt in tubs frozen to conserve them. As these are intended to be defrosted  before being eaten, they count as a zero rated basic food.

Even better, cakes are “food” and zero rated as are plain biscuits (cookies). If you wholly or partially chocolate coat a biscuit, it becomes confectionery and is taxed. Enter the great Jaffa Cake debate. These are flat dry sponges with an orange jelly on top and then  the top half coated in chocolate. They are sold packed in exactly the same way as cookies. The company that made them successfully argued that although the sponge cake was dry and biscuit like, they were in fact cakes and should be tax free. They convinced the panel by  baking one 12 inches across. That had ramification for another company making “teacakes” which have a similar sponge base but a large marshmallow on top and the whole is coated in chocolate.

All this updated version of the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” debates sound amusing but the have real economic implications and  as the Independent also reports, the dispute is how much, up to $6million the company should get back. England’s highest tax court cannot decide and have asked the EU Court to advise!    

Albert Einstein

And finally the information all you quantum physicists have been waiting for. A friend of mine has just got the commission to make what is believed to be the first major public memorial to Albert Einstein. It surprised me as well but there is not even a plaque on the Customs House he worked in.

Subject to planning permission, final design approval, funding  and technical feasibility of the installation (phew!), it should be at the Science Museum in London early next year. Based on a comment by Einstein, it will consist of a white marble plaza with a marble tree standing in it. In the marble paving under the tree will be the “indentation” of an apple. A design in the marble will encourage visitors to contemplate the presence of a higher dimension.  

That was the last the world will probably hear of Fatima. Fatima was a child photographed by a BBC team in a MSF hospital in Niger. Fatima was so starved her body had stopped absorbing water. Her mouth was infected with parasites and she could not eat.

I want to recommend to everybody the reports by Hilary Andersson for the BBC on the crisis in Niger. Her daily reports are available on the BBC web site. I won’t provide a link but ask you to find the most recent one as they are updated each day. If you want to see the finest of reporting, check her dispatches out.
Hilary’s reports are difficult to watch but I ask you to make the effort. Her style is simple, unemotionally delivered descriptions of what she found. Without hysteria the facts accuse the west for its ignoring of the crisis until it became desperate.

Aid was too late for Fatima. It may be too late for the boy who is covered with sores. His body is starting to not fight the infection. A crisis will come if his blood gets infected but he has become stonger. He can now say “my skin hurts”.

The rains came too late for one family’s livestock. They are now reduced to eating the rotting meat scraped from the corpses. The head of the family’s mother and grandmother lie around with water as almost their only sustenance. One child died last week.

In the second poorest nation on Earth the crops have failed or have been eaten by locusts. Where they came, the rains came late and are adding to the misery. The ex-colonial power France sent some aid but enough for a small proportion of those strong enough to reach feeding stations. Many have to be turned away until they are ill enough to qualify for food. The mothers’ breasts are empty bags. Their newborn survive on the gruel they share with their mothers. A few day’s food can make dramatic differences. One child we saw earlier lying near death is now strong enough to walk.

There are heroes in this situation. The MSF staff who agonise over which child should have food. The mothers who walk miles carrying their babies in the hope they will get food.

We must also recognise the heroes and heroine in the BBC team. Without them we would not know about Fatima. Without their reports the world would not have been stunned into finally getting aid to the country. It’s often easy and justified to damn the main stream media for their incompetence. For once let’s praise a team. They have not driven in a truck of grain. They have not treated a single sick child. But by their skills another little girl called Fatima might just make it.

Years ago another camera crew told us the first stories of the famines in Ethiopia and those led to Band Aid and the campaign to halve poverty. Sometimes you can believe a TV airhead claiming to be a journalist could not change a diaper. The best can change the world.

I am starting this as a new diary (and cross posting it on Kos) because the BBC is reporting a new factor which may help clarify the whole picture of the shooting. It is highly relevant to the discussion and I do not want the information lost in a response in another diary.

The big puzzle all weekend has been why de Menezes ran from the police when challenged. The new report provides a possible reason for that.

The new report suggests de Menezes had an expired student visa and no work permit and was therefore in the UK illegally.  
As I write the story is only headlined on the ticker  on the BBC News front page. More links as the story goes up.

None of this is justifiable reason on its own for de Menezes to be killed. What it does do is explain his fatal error in running from the arned police. It does however help dispell questions as to why he ran.  

Having wrongly identified him as a suspect, the police challenged him. Instead of stopping to be searched and cleared he ran, leapt a ticket barrier, ran downstairs and on to a train. That action we now know was wrongly intepreted by the police as a desperate attempt by a terrorist to kill after being detected.

What the information does do is put the lie to the allegations that the police acted in an arbitary or racist manner. It confirms the opinion of those who were willing to wait for more information before the police’s intent could be assessed.

 

This is breaking news and has been cross-posted on Kos.

The Metropolitan Police have just announced that the man shot dead at Stockwell Underground station was not involved in the investigation.

The news is breaking and there are suggestions that other forces than the Police might be involved but the killing is to be investigated initially by the Scotland Yard Professional Standards Unit and referred to the Police Complaints Commission.

The BBC report on the breaking news (the story in the link may change after posting)

Regarding the press statement:

The statement read: “We believe we now know the identity of the man shot at Stockwell Underground station by police on Friday 22nd July 2005, although he is still subject to formal identification.

“We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005.

“For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets.”

The statement confirmed the man was followed by police from a block of flats that was under surveillance.

A spokeswoman from the human rights group Liberty has issued a statement expressing sympathy for the family of the victim and the policemen asking that no-one should rush to judgement

Background: BBC report on new rules of engagement.

If Special Forces were involved in the killing, there is an echo in the 1998 killing of a suspected Irish terrrorist in Gibraltar. The killing was the subject of a landmark documentary “Death on the Rock”

Faryadi Zardad,an Afghan brigand who tortured and held capitive travellers on a road in Afghanistan has been jailed for 20 years in Britain. This is a landmark case as it is believed to be the first time the torture conventions have been used to prosecute anyone who committed torture in another juresdiction.

The BBC played a very important part in both bringing the case to light and tracking Zardad to a London suburb where he was living in political asylum from the Taliban. He had been granted asylum after entering the UK on forged papers in 1998.
Much of the journalist work was done by the BBC’s veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson. The story was first broadcast in July 2000 on BBC2’s Newsnight. Simpsn had interviewed Mutawakil, the Taleban Foreign Minister, in Kabul during 1999.

It was a long, tough interview about why the Taleban were prepared to shelter Osama Bin Laden.

During one of his answers Mutawakil hit back. “Well, you British are sheltering the criminal Commander Zardad,” he said.

Commander Zardad was a man I knew nothing about. The Foreign Minister told me about the man who ran the checkpoint on the road to Sarobi. The dangers of the road were well known, but I’d never heard of Zardad. I told the foreign minister we would look into it.

Although the BBC grace him with the title “warlord”, like many he was more like a violent mafia family head. His band had a fort and checkpoint on the Sarobi road. They extorted tolls with threats of and actual violence. He would hold members of rival gangs hostage or exchanged them for his own men. Others he simply kidnapped for ransom, frequently beating them. One of his men was kept as a “human dog” in a cave, to be brought out to terify and bite his victims.

Simpson traced Zardad to the house in South London where he was living under his assumed name.

We staked the house out for three or four days just to make sure that this was our man. A neighbour let us use his front room to watch people come and go.

To our surprise he [Zardad] invited us in…he was very polite and offered us tea

Watch John Simpson confront Faryadi Zardad in 2000
We soon recognised the man we knew as Zardad, but the man was living there under a different name. We needed to make one last check to be sure. One of the cameramen posed as a delivery man, with a parcel addressed to Mr Zardad. He banged on the door.

“A parcel for Mr Zardad?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

We had our man. We moved in with our other camera and introduced ourselves. To our surprise he invited us in. He was very polite, offered us tea, but just as we were about to sit down he ran out of the room.

Zardad was kater arrested and charged with torture. The first trial jury failed to reach a verdict. At thhe first trial, the prosecution was conducted by Lord Goldsmith (of the “Downing Street Memorandum”)

He explained why Britain had decided to try the case, arguing that Zardad’s crimes were so “merciless” and such “an affront to justice” that they could be tried in any country.

“Mr Zardad was found in England. An international convention and English law allow the trial in England of anyone who has committed torture or hostage-taking, irrespective of where those crimes were committed.”

That is taken from this report which descibes some of the difficulties of the trial, including the need to have evidence given by video link from Kabul.

Simpson went on to be the first westerner to openly enter Kabul during the Afghan war, having walked in after being frustrated by the delays imposed by the military.

On Friday the British Medical Association “struck off the register” an eminent paediatrician who had given flawed evidence in baby murder cases. This is the equivalent of a US doctor losing his licence. The reason I want to draw your attention to this is the possible implications for child abuse cases in the USA.

After retiring from clinical practice, he had become an “expert witness” and gave evidence so severely flawed that mothers convicted of child murder have been freed and several more appeals in other cases of murder and child protection are pending.    The doctor coined the term “Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy”. Part of the reports I have heard indicated that he had been lecturing US doctors on his theories of child abuse.
Professor Sir Roy Meadows was the first president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. As well as naming Munchausen’s he also coined a dictum he used in cases of cot(crib) death. “One is unfortunate, two suspicious and three murder”. In cases where parents had lost two childen he gave, through ignorance of statistical analysis, the impression that this was sufficently rare to indicate the probability of murder. Such was his standing in the profession that evidence pointing to a natural death was overlooked.

As President of the Royal College and with such a distinguised main career, Meadows was highly respected and influential. There is every possibility that his erroneous statistics have been transmitted to US expert witnesses. There could be women sitting in US prisons (or worse) who are innocent of child abuse or murder and who are there because “experts” at their trials listened to Meadows.

Use this as an alert, if you know of any cases in  your community that may be miscarriages of justice because of this man’s false theories being repeated, bring these Q&As or the report of his striking off to the attention of the appropriate people.

OK it was my own stupid fault and quite minor but I thought it might be informative to let US readers know about my experience of the UK Health Service today.I’d also be interested in learning of any different experiences you have had in similar circumstances.
I must admit I was rushing to get outside for the two minutes silence at midday and grabbed a bin bag of rubbish to take to the main bins. Unfortunately I had not well enough wrapped the pieces of the broken plate I had dropped earlier. A very shap edge slipped out and put a V shaped gash about 3 inches long on the frontof my calf.

For a cut that was basically just through the skin, it was quite spectacularly bloody. In the current circumstances I was reluctant to call an ambulance but I live about a 5 minute walk from my local general practioner’s health centre so I wrapped a large handkerchief to staunch the blood a bit and went there. By the time I arrived, the blood had soaked through and was running over my foot.  

Luckily the centre was open and the nurse practioner had a look at it, irrigated it an put on a pressure bandage to stop the flow. They do not have facilities to do stiches there and because of its location, I needed stiches. I live just outside central London and I am virtulally exactly between a cemtra; London hospital (Guys) and a more suburban one (Lewisham) which both have minor injuries units. Choosing was one of those “which bus comes first” as the journey times are roughly 30 minutes either way. The bus for Lewisham came first so it was off to there. As well as the minor injuries unit, Lewisham is a full emergency hospital. Guys links with another central London one for major emergencies.

The walk-in rather than the ambulance entrace has a triage nurse to assess injuries but as I explained to the receptionist I just needed stiches, she sent me over to the minors unit. I must admit her asking me which leg needed treatment was a bit redundant as I was wearing “pedal pusher” length trousers (very hot today!!) and sporting a fresh bandage. Still she probably didn’t see it over the counter tho I did say “the one with the bandage”.  Not that staying there would have been a problem, there were only three people waiting, none in any great distress. By the time I had strolled the 50 yards or so to the unit, my details had been trasferred over and I was greeted by “hello, is it Peter?”  

I was after a couple of people getting the results of the x-rays on their sprained ankles (an epidemic!!!) and a woman who had shut her car door on her fingers. A further irrigation of the wound, anesthetic, five stiches and a selection of steri-strips later the nurse practioner there was slapping on a giant band-aid, getting me some to take home and giving me some advice about caring for the wound.

The bus home was a bit delayed – traffic is a hassle in London at the moment because of bomb checks. Nevertheless I got home clutching my stock of outsize band-aids just before a quarter to three. Most of the two and a half hours or so had been taken up in travelling and I only had to wait about 10 minutes. That’s not unusual with the walk in minor injuries units, I had to take somebody to the one at Guy’s and   there the wait was similar.

Now I know the impression you get from things like “E.R.” is hyped but we get the impression here that many US emergency rooms are clogged by people for who they are a last resort to get treatment for a chronic illness. How does the fast service for a minor injurty compare to any of your experiences? I should of course add that the costliest aspect of this escapade for me were the bus fares and a bottle of water to keep hydrated on the very hot bus. What would have been the sort of bill I might have expected if I had done it in the USA?