Today the Guardian published an article from the head of Penguin books, John Makinson – a man with an interesting career path, more varied than most in the publishing world – showing that the growth of ebooks seems to be following the same path as, say, digital music or digital movies. Me, I still got my vinyl, still got my books. As I said my colleague Andrew earlier today with books I like the navigation….

John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that’s what publishers must give them

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.
But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

This disturbing article from the Washington Post, which consistently knocks British papers into a cocked hat for the quality of its reportage, shows that Mexican drug gangs have become a force powerful enough to subvert the progress of democracy in Central America.

SAN SALVADOR — Drug cartel violence in Mexico is quickly spilling south into Central America and is threatening to destabilize fragile countries already rife with crime and corruption, according to the United Nations, U.S. officials and regional law enforcement agents.

The Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — has long been a major smuggling corridor for contraband heading to the United States. But as Mexican President Felipe Calderón fights a U.S.-backed war against his nation’s drug lords, trafficking networks are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world.

The Mexican cartels “are spreading their horizons to states where they feel, quite frankly, more comfortable. These governments in Central America face a very real challenge in confronting these organizations,” said David Gaddis, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. attention has mostly focused on Mexico. But the homicide rate there — 14 for every 100,000 residents — is dwarfed by the murder statistics in the Northern Triangle, where per-capita killings are four times higher and rising.

In El Salvador, the region’s most violent country, homicides jumped 37 percent last year, to 71 murders per 100,000 residents, as warring gangs vied for territory and trafficking routes. Police and military officials in El Salvador said cartels are increasingly paying local smugglers in product, rather than cash, driving up cocaine use and the drug dealing and turf battles that come with it.

“The more pressure there is in Mexico, the more the drug cartels will come to Central America looking for a safe haven,” Gen. David Munguía Payés, El Salvador’s defense minister, said in an interview here.

The amount of cocaine moving through the region has risen sharply, although the overall volume entering the United States is falling. Cocaine seizures in Central America nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2007, according to the most recent U.N. data.

The United States has allocated $258 million in anti-narcotics assistance for Central America since 2007 as part of the three-year, $1.6 billion Merida Initiative. But a report this month by the Government Accountability Office found that only 9 percent of the money promised under the initiative has been spent and that U.S. officials had no reliable way to determine whether it was making a difference in the drug war.

‘A paradise for criminals’

In remote, lawless regions of Guatemala, the Mexican organized crime syndicate known as the Zetas is setting up training camps and recruiting elite ex-soldiers to serve as assassins, arming them with weapons diverted from the country’s military arsenals.

Last month, four human heads were left near the Guatemalan Congress and elsewhere in the capital. The national police spokesman, Donald González, said the grisly display was the work of the Zetas and other Mexican traffickers.

“Guatemala has become a paradise for criminals, who have little to fear from prosecutors owing to high levels of impunity,” the International Crisis Group, a conflict research organization, said in a June report. “High-profile assassinations and the government’s inability to reduce murders have produced paralyzing fear, a sense of helplessness and frustration.”

Over the past two years, Guatemala’s top anti-narcotics official, two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives. In May, the Guatemalan president appointed, then removed after international protests, an attorney general who U.N. prosecutors say has ties to mobsters.

In Honduras, where a military coup last year toppled the president, Mexican cartels have established command-and-control centers to orchestrate cocaine shipments by sea and air along the still-wild Caribbean coast, often with the help of local authorities, according to DEA and U.N. officials. Ten anti-narcotics officers were caught smuggling 142 kilos of cocaine last July. In December, Honduras’s drug czar, Gen. Julián Arístides González, was killed after trying to shut down clandestine landing strips allegedly operated by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Police in El Salvador say traffickers are cultivating ties to street gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street, building alliances that could eventually help those groups mature into international syndicates.

“Organized crime has penetrated the government,” said Jeannette Aguilar, a crime expert at San Salvador’s University of Central America, citing recent arrests of police commanders and prominent politicians. “We’ve made strides toward democracy, but this threatens to reverse that progress.”

According to Steven S. Dudley, a consultant for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the high homicide rates signal the expanding presence of Mexican drug cartels. Investigators are finding more corpses bearing marks of torture or execution in well-coordinated hits by assassins armed with high-caliber weapons, trademarks of Mexican crime gangs.

The newspaper El Diario de Hoy in El Salvador recently counted 35 bodies found in plastic bags over a six-month span.

A U.N. report found that the highest homicide rates were not in the largest cities, but in provinces with strategic value to drug traffickers: along borders, coasts and jungles.

Some victims had ties to the drug trade; others were simply in the way. In Honduras, in the Caribbean province of Atlantida, one of every 1,000 residents was murdered last year.

Central American migrants, interviewed at three shelters as they crossed Mexico on the way to the United States, said they left their countries not only because of economic desperation but also to escape soaring violence.

Undermining democracy

The expansion of cartel power in the Northern Triangle threatens to undermine democratic gains made since the end of civil conflicts here in the mid-1990s. Analysts say the lucrative profits of the drug trade wield powerful influence in these countries, where half the people live in poverty.

“The Guatemalan government is weak, and the drug cartels provide services that the state does not,” such as health clinics, soccer fields and schools, said Fernando Giron Soto, a researcher at the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights organization in Guatemala City whose doors are guarded by armed sentries. “It’s the same thing that Pablo Escobar used to do in Medellin” during the 1990s in Colombia, he said.

In many areas of the Northern Triangle, police are ineffective, if they exist at all, experts say. Guatemala and Honduras have fewer than half as many police per capita as Mexico, U.N. data show. In Guatemala, as many as seven of the country’s 22 provinces appear to be under the control of criminals, according to the International Crisis Group report.

The region is awash in weapons left over from the Cold War, making it an important source of arms for the Mexican cartels. Before Guatemalan gun laws changed last year, anyone could legally buy up to 500 rounds of ammunition a day, said Sandino Asturias, a crime analyst for the Center for Guatemalan Studies.

A special U.N. prosecutor’s office has been working in Guatemala since 2007 to break the country’s culture of impunity, but it faces enormous obstacles. Of 6,548 murders last year, 423 suspects were arrested. However, that was a significant improvement over the previous year, when 128 homicide arrests were made, Asturias said.

As everyone knows a psychic Octopus named Paul has correctly forecast all the world cup results so far. National feelings run deep however, and Paul has been threatened with death because of the accuracy of his predictions according to the Washington Post. William Hill admit to losing £100,000 as a result of his predictions. But remember folks, a closer look at Paul will tell you that betting is for suckers.

paul the psychic octopus

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) – Paul the oracle octopus was given a replica of the World Cup on Monday as a reward for his perfect eight-for-eight record in picking matches as bettors worldwide collected their winnings based on his selections.
The two-year-old octopus with possible psychic powers turned into a worldwide celebrity for accurately predicting the winner of Germany’s five World Cup wins as well as their two defeats. Paul also tipped Spain to beat Netherlands in Sunday’s final.
“We’ve had a lot of offers for Paul but he will definitely be staying with us and returning to his old job — making children smile,” Sea Life spokeswoman Tanja Munzig in Oberhausen told Reuters after presenting Paul with the World Cup replica.
“There’s no rational reason why he always got it right.”
Bettors around the world made small fortunes based on Paul’s uncanny picks, said Graham Sharpe, media relations director at William Hill in London, one of Britain’s largest bookmakers.
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime but this is the first time I’ve ever seen people making their picks based on what an octopus tells them,” Sharpe told Reuters.

“We had people coming in saying they didn’t know how to place a bet but heard about this German octopus and wanted to bet with him. It’s ludicrous. But he kept getting it right,” said Sharpe. “It’s one of the finest tipping feats ever.”
Sharpe said that anyone who had placed a 10-pound accumulator bet on Paul’s picks from the start of the World Cup would have won 3,000 pounds ($4,500) by the end of the tournament.
Paul’s home at Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen has been inundated with visitors and media from across Europe. Many networks broadcast his picks live. Hundreds were on hand to watch the World Cup replica lowered into his tank on Monday.
WINNING BETS
“Paul now wants to say good-bye to the whole world,” Daniel Fey, a supervisor at Sea Life, told Reuters. “He really enjoyed all the media attention but now he’s returning to his old job.”
Yet interest in the 50-cm long octopus remained intense, especially after his last two picks on Friday were once again accurate. Germany won Saturday’s match for third place and Spain won Sunday’s final — as Paul had called it on Friday.
Last week Germans were shocked and distraught when he picked Spain to beat Germany in the semi-final after tipping German wins over Argentina, England, Ghana and Australia.
And after Spain beat Germany, many wanted to publicly grill him. Sea Life installed extra security to protect their octopus.
“We have to remember he’s quite old now — 2-1/2 years is quite old for an octopus,” Fey said.
Probability experts were quoted in media reports saying the likelihood of getting eight consecutive picks right is 1/256. Sharpe said the odds of getting eight straight right was over 1/300. Humbled professors were quoted saying Paul got lucky.
The octopus, considered by some to be the most intelligent of all invertebrates, had a choice of picking food from two different transparent containers lowered into his tank — each with a national flag on it.
The container Paul opened first was regarded as his pick.
Sharpe at William Hill said he had at first been skeptical about the oracle octopus. But he became a believer.
“I suspect that Paul’s predictions could have made about a half a million pounds,” Sharpe said, adding he estimated William Hill paid out 100,000 pounds on his picks at its 2,300 outlets.
“We had people coming in asking who Paul had picked before they placed their bets,” Sharpe said. “I’m sure there were a lot more people too who were too embarrassed to tell you they made their bet based on what the octopus said.”
He said it was the first time in 30 years of work that he had seen “such widely orchestrated use of a non-human tipster.”
Sharpe said he, unfortunately, did not follow Paul’s advice. “It’d have been too embarrassing,” he said. But Sharpe said he was going on holiday soon. “I’m going to the seaside and intend to eat as much octopus as I can cram down as revenge,” he said.

I spoke to my brother on the phone this afternoon and he was at Newmarket races having a traditional flutter. This fascinating article from the Economist shows how the world of betting has been radically changed by the internet. That having been said, there is nothing like the sight of those beautiful creatures in the summer sunlight to stir the soul, especially with the jockey’s bright colours….hope you didn’t lose too much bro’…….

ON APRIL 9th nearly 45,000 people crammed into Oaklawn, a 106-year-old track nestling in the foothills of the Ouachita mountains in central Arkansas, to watch Zenyatta, a spirited six-year-old mare, win her 16th consecutive race. The next day’s event—the Arkansas derby, which in recent years has become a preview ground for the more famous derby held three weeks later in Kentucky—drew over 60,000 fans. In those two days punters at the track bet nearly $6.5m. Attendance was 38% up on the previous year. Neither the charming old track nor the town itself, with a population of just under 40,000, was built for such crowds. Enterprising locals turned their lawns and shopfronts into parking lots at $20-25 a go.

For racing fans everywhere such a turnout is reason to celebrate; it shows that the sport of kings has not lost its attractions. And indeed attendance remains strong at marquee events, such as the Arkansas and Kentucky derbies or Britain’s Grand National. But although sports betting does well online, horseracing has a particular problem. The business model that has kept it going up to now is being superseded by new and increasingly popular betting methods offered by the internet.

For all the national differences, racing in most parts of the world has two things in common. First, it has provided one of the few legal forms of wagering and bookmaking available to most of the public for much of the past two centuries. Second, the sport depends on money from betting. Practically every national racing association the world over takes its cut from bets placed on races. In Britain 10% of bookmakers’ profits go to the Horserace Betting Levy Board, a statutory body that distributes the funds to British racing interests (mainly purses but also courses, breeders and veterinary science). The levy was put in place when punters had to bet through parimutuel pools (in which odds depend on the number of punters backing a bet) or licensed bookmakers. But now they have other options, so in 2008-09 the total levy collected reached its lowest level in six years, at about £92m.

As other forms of gambling became legal, betting on racing fell. Between 2003 and 2008 the amount wagered on racing dropped by 10% in America and close to a third in Britain. But betting at the track is falling even faster. Punters in America have turned to advance-deposit wagering companies (ADWs) such as Youbet, TVG and Twinspires, which combine the functions of bookmakers and television networks, showing races from around the world. They allow punters to bet using a computer, mobile phone or television remote-control. Dedicated race fans in America can bet on European races in the morning, American ones throughout the day and Australian and Asian ones at night, all without having to leave home. And just as casinos offer free accommodation and meals to big players, ADWs offer redeemable reward points as an added incentive.

Punters in Britain and Australia have an even more attractive option: betting exchanges. The largest is Betfair, which bought TVG in January 2009. Betfair’s revenue last year was £303m, up 27% from the previous year. Around 90% of bets placed through exchanges and more than half of bets made online in Britain are through Betfair. Exchanges allow people to bet with each other, rather than going through a licensed bookie or a parimutuel pool. Betfair makes money by charging a small commission, based on a user’s net profit in a given market.

Unlike traditional operators, the exchanges also permit betting throughout races. Yet although Betfair’s model attracts savvy punters who understand how markets work, its numbers-heavy interface may intimidate casual sport punters. Noting that the odds on Chelsea are 1.19 and watching the market to see if they improve requires more effort than putting £10 on Chelsea to win.

But some punters may want to offer odds against Chelsea, which Betfair allows and traditional bookies do not. There are worries that letting people bet on a negative event will encourage corruption. In 2004 Chris Bell, the then boss of Ladbrokes, a bookmaker, claimed that at least one race a day was being fixed, and blamed betting exchanges. Yet a corrupt jockey or trainer can always ride badly or hobble a favourite and then bet the field. Also, online commerce is far more readily vetted and tracked than transactions by high-street or on-track bookies, so corruption should be far easier to sniff out.

Neil Goulden, who heads Coral, another bookmaker, says the real problem is not so much corruption as licensed bookmakers shutting up shop and offering odds through Betfair to avoid paying tax and levy. Yet even if this is true, bookmakers will find ways to get away from both anyway: Ladbrokes and William Hill have moved their betting operations from Britain to Gibraltar, where they are exempt from paying the levy and the tax on betting profits is 2% rather than Britain’s 15%.

The tap is also running weaker in America. Between 1977 and 2006 parimutuel betting on horses in America fell by 52% in real terms. Whereas on-track betting has dropped every year since 1996, the off-track variety over the same period has increased noticeably.

When off-track betting was first introduced, it was seen as a boon to the industry. Races being run in different locations were screened at the tracks so that punters at, say, Aksarben in Omaha, Nebraska, could bet on races being run at Los Alamitos in California. The revenue from off-track betting was split so that 80% of the pool went to the state’s horsemen’s association, 17% to the place where the race was being screened and 3% to the track where the race was taking place.

As long as the screenings were track-to-track and most betting was done on-track, that made some sense. But as on-track betting has fallen and the races are now being screened in all sorts of places that allow betting but do not stage any races (such as greyhound tracks, casinos and now ADWs), 3% seems a paltry reward for the effort of hosting a race. Yet finding a new payment model has proved tricky. In a number of places ADWs have been forced to pay a source-market fee: for instance, 10% of all racing bets made in Virginia—that is, where the punter is in Virginia, regardless of where the track is—must go to Colonial Downs, the state’s main track, and to the state’s horsemen’s association.
A downhill race – The sport remains in decline. California’s oldest thoroughbred track, Bay Meadows, closed in 2008; Hollywood Park, in southern California, is teetering; and Aqueduct, in Queens, was nearly sold to developers in 2007. New York’s racing authority, which runs Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga, emerged from bankruptcy in 2008—only to have to take up a $17m emergency loan in April.

No doubt more casualties will follow. After all, the sport’s success depended on its monopoly status, and that has gone. Banner days still draw a crowd, but everyday racing—“Wednesday afternoons at Beulah Park” (a track in Columbus, Ohio), as one insider calls it—is harder to sustain.

In more than a dozen states some tracks have added slot machines or card tables to attract those who want to gamble on something other than horses. These “racinos” funnel much of the money from slots and tables to fund purses and subsidise breeders. But cantering into that good night as an appendage to a slots parlour seems a sad fate for the sport of kings.

As regular readers know I have long been a kind of inverted fan of The Daily Mail, the newspaper which came out in official support of the British Union of Fascists back in 1934 with their headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Well, today the Mail is running a great story about the German national football team – and how the Germans in it are not true Germans but a whole bunch of foreigners. German nationalism is obviously an important issue for the Mail – or perhaps it’s more of a dirty cheating Germans story in anticipation of….no I won’t say it. I have to say we were treated to the sight for the first time ever in the World Cup of the two Boateng brothers playing on opposite sides in Germany versus Ghana this week. And Boateng is a traditional Ghanaian name rather than a German one…..My goodness I am beginning to sound like a Daily Mail reader. One read clearly has a lasting effect.

Whatever, this is a great story by true pro journalist Adam Tozer in today’s Mail.

To long-suffering England fans, Germany’s footballers are an all-too familiar foe.

But the side that the Three Lions will face in Sunday’s World Cup clash is anything but representative of the old Germany.

In fact, many of them wouldn’t have even been able to play for the three-times World Cup winners, until a recent change in the country’s strict citizenship laws.

German Squad – Old foe, new faces: The German World Cup squad who face England on Sunday. Numbered are those players who, before 1999, could not have become German citizens

A total of 11 of the current 23-strong German squad would have been branded foreigners under rules dating back to before the Nazis and would have therefore been ineligible to play only a decade ago.

Names such as Jurgen, Klaus, Franz and Lothar have been replaced with those of Mezut, Mario and Cacau.

Under strict citizenship laws dating back to 1913 and the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, only children born in Germany to parents who were both Germans themselves could be considered German. At the time Germany was in a frenzy of nationalism as it armed in preparation for the First World War.

They were not repealed until 1999 as Germany – mindful of having the most dramatically declining birthrate in the world – finally made it easier to become a citizen of the Fatherland.

The new-look German side is collectively known as ‘Generation M’ for ‘multi-cultural’.

Observers say it the change has led to an influx of exciting new players for the German team.

By contrast, the England side has been regularly benefiting from players of immigrant backgrounds since the 1970s, and eight of the current squad are black or mixed-race.

Parallels will also be drawn with the French World Cup-winning side of 1998 which featured many members of France’s large ethnic minority communities and was credited with advancing race relations in France.

A majority of that team had foreign-born parents, including star player Zinedine Zidane, whose parents moved to France from Algeria.

England? They’re stupid and burnt out says (guess who) Franz Beckenbauer

It’s not really a game that needs any extra rivalry.

But that hasn’t stopped Germany’s greatest ever footballer from stoking up the tensions ahead of his country’s World Cup clash with England on Sunday.

Franz Beckenbauer yesterday intensified his criticism of the England team, calling them ‘stupid’ and ‘burnt out’.

AND WE’RE IN RED SHIRTS AGAIN…

After dusting off their ‘lucky’ all-red strip for the first time in 40 years for the win against Slovenia on Wednesday, England-will wear it for Sunday’s match against Germany.

England have never lost in five games wearing red shirts, shorts and socks – winning four games – yet last wore the combination in 1970.

The team have usually worn red shirts, white shorts and red socks as an alternative kit when facing opposition in similar colours, such as Germany.

‘The Kaiser’, who won the World Cup with Germany as a player and a manager and now works for football’s governing body, Fifa, had already slated England for playing ‘kick and rush’ football in this summer’s tournament.

But after hearing that the two sides were to meet in a last-16 knockout tie because England failed to top their group as expected, he continued his assault on Fabio Capello’s men, telling German newspaper Bild: ‘A game like this should be a semi-final, not a last-16 game. Stupidly, the English have slipped up a little by finishing second in their group.’

He added: ‘The English look a little tired. There is a good reason for that. The Premier League players have got to play far more games than their [German league] colleagues, including two national cup competitions.

‘Therefore, when it comes to a World Cup or a European Championships, they are burnt out. Our players, on the other hand, seem to be in a physically better condition.’

Of how he felt about having to play England earlier than expected in South Africa, he said: ‘Of course we respect them, but we certainly don’t fear them. England’s first two appearances at the World Cup were paltry, but they improved against Slovenia.’

In a backhanded compliment apparently designed to pile pressure on to England, he added: ‘And after all, England have been waiting since 1966 for a title.

‘Fabio Capello appears to have brought discipline to the troops. After they failed to qualify for Euro 2008, England hit rock bottom.’

Beckenbauer’s ‘mind games’ appeared last night to have backfired within the England camp based in Rustenburg. One insider said: ‘We must thank Beckenbauer for doing a team talk for us – we can pin his comments on the dressing room wall before the match and that will give us all the motivation we need.’

Children of lesbian parents do better than their peers according to New Scientist magazine in this interesting article written by Jim Giles.

The children of lesbian parents outscore their peers on academic and social tests, according to results from the longest-running study of same-sex families.

The researchers behind the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study say the results should change attitudes to adoption of children by gay and lesbian couples, which is prohibited in some parts of the US.

The finding is based on 78 children who were all born to lesbian couples who used donor insemination to become pregnant and were interviewed and tested at age 17.

The new tests have left no doubt as to the success of these couples as parents, says Nanette Gartrell at the University of California, San Francisco, who has worked on the study since it began in 1986.

Compared with a group of control adolescents born to heterosexual parents with similar educational and financial backgrounds, the children of lesbian couples scored better on academic and social tests and lower on measures of rule-breaking and aggression.

A previous study of same-sex parenting, based on long-term health data, also found no difference in the health of children in either group.

“This confirms what most developmental scientists have suspected,” says Stephen Russell, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Kids growing up with same-sex parents fare just as well as other kids.”

The results should be considered by those who oppose the right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, adds Gartrell. A handful of states, including Florida, prohibit same-sex or unmarried couples from adopting, although many of the state laws are being challenged in the courts.

“It’s a great tragedy in this country,” says Gartrell. “There are so many children who are available for adoption but cannot be adopted by same-sex couples.”

Over 100,000 children are awaiting adoption in the US, says the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and advocacy organisation based in New York. The institute estimates that just 4 per cent of all adopted children – around 65,000 – live with gay or lesbian parents, despite research suggesting that same-sex couples may be more willing than heterosexual couples to adopt.

Journal reference: Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-3153

At times like this it is always interesting and amusing to see how the outside world views Britain. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Dry as a bone. But harder than our wishy washy liberal press. Is it OK to say that any more? Or will I be arrested by the liberal Tory Home Secretary…or perhaps not….

LONDON—Conservative Party leader David Cameron on Tuesday completed a tortuous journey to become Britain’s prime minister, and essentially clinched a fragile power-sharing deal with the country’s No. 3 political party in the wake of Thursday’s inconclusive election.

Five frenetic days after a general election that resulted in a so-called hung Parliament—in which no party holds a majority—Mr. Cameron’s Tories agreed on a power-sharing deal with the Liberal Democrat Party headed by Nick Clegg, subject to official approval by the two parties.

The 43-year-old Mr. Cameron became Britain’s youngest prime minister since 1812 after the incumbent, Labour Party leader Gordon Brown, abandoned his own party’s hopes of making a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the men executed Britain’s carefully choreographed change-of-power ritual, in which Mr. Brown visited the queen to resign and Mr. Cameron followed shortly thereafter to assume power.

The move returns the Tories to the premiership for the first time since 1997—but they return to Downing Street under far-from-ideal circumstances. The country faces problems that include a massive budget deficit and an economy that has been slow to recover from the recession.

Mr. Cameron will have to tackle those woes without the big parliamentary majority he was long expected to have, but squandered in the final months of a historic, topsy-turvy campaign. Instead, he faces the prospect of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.

Sweeping into a newly vacated Downing Street amid cheers, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that a coalition government will present challenges.

“Our country has a hung Parliament…and we have some deep and progressing problems, a huge deficit, deep social problems and a political system in need of reform,” he said.

That coalition will force the Conservatives to concede key policy ground on issues such as taxes and electoral reform—despite the fact that the Tories won five times more parliamentary seats in Thursday’s election. Mr. Clegg will be deputy prime minister, and discussions were under way late Tuesday that would also award cabinet posts in the government to the Liberal Democrats, with the Conservative’s George Osborne and William Hague taking Treasury chief and foreign secretary respectively.

For any coalition deal to be completed, the leadership of both parties must still ask members of their respective groups to back the deal. And that may not be a certainty given a huge gulf that divides them on everything from managing the economy to immigration and relations with Europe.

If the two sides don’t manage to agree on the coalition, the Tories can still go it alone in a minority administration. But they would be dependent on support from other parties to pass legislation.

Either way, the Conservatives are faced with keeping a government together as they try to push through aggressive spending cuts to Britain’s much-loved public services, with £6 billion to come this year alone.

The new government must do this without upending a fragile economic recovery and must deal with other issues, such as public anger if progress isn’t seen in the unpopular war in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday night, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were close to finalizing terms on a coalition after an attempt by the newly deposed Labour Party to seal a deal with the Liberal Democrats failed. The party’s last toss of the dice, after 13 years in power, crashed amid opposition from Labour Party lawmakers and the realization that any coalition, which would need the help of other parties, would be too fragile to survive.

The High and Lows of Labour’s 13-Year Reign

May 1997: Labour’s Tony Blair becomes U.K. prime minister in landslide victory, ending 18 years of Conservative rule.

May 1997: Labour’s Tony Blair becomes U.K. prime minister in landslide victory, ending 18 years of Conservative rule.

April 1998: Blair helps broker historic peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

June 2001: With economy growing, Blair re-elected by wide margins.

September 2001: Terrorists attack the U.S.; Blair subsequently backs U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

March 2003: Blair backs U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which quickly becomes a political liability for Labour.

September 2004: Protesters storm Parliament in opposition to Labour’s proposed ban on fox hunting.

May 2005: Blair re-elected again, but Labour’s majority in Parliament shrinks.

July 2005: Terrorist bombings of London’s transit system kill dozens.

June 2007: Facing low approval ratings and internal party pressure, Blair resigns, handing power to Gordon Brown.

September 2007: Mortgage lender Northern Rock requires rescue by Bank of England, in harbinger of financial crisis.

October 2008: Brown unveils bailout of several big U.K. banks, serving as a model for U.S. and other government rescues.

April 2010: Brown asks the queen to dissolve Parliament and call national elections.

After an emotional farewell speech in front of his staff and supporters outside No. 10 Downing St., Mr. Brown headed to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation, ending a long career at the top of British politics with the words “thank you and goodbye.”

The Liberal Democrats’ leadership was set to meet with party lawmakers and other senior officials early Tuesday evening in London in what could prove the last major hurdle to a coalition deal. The Liberal Democrats need backing from three quarters of their lawmakers and their governing Federal Executive.

Financial markets reacted positively to signals that a deal between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats seemed set to happen.

The pound surged on the news with the euro sinking 0.7% to the day’s low of £0.8514. Sterling spiked by the same amount against the dollar to the day’s high of $1.4915.

A day of frantic back-and-forth meetings began with Tory impatience about the lack of a conclusion to power-sharing talks with the Liberal Democrats that began Friday.

“The Liberals played us quite smartly, kept us in the wings to keep the Tories keen,” said Jim Fitzpatrick, who until Tuesday evening was a government minister. In a sign of likely recrimination that could hurt Labour, Mr. Fitzpatrick said his party should never have tried to torpedo the Liberal Democrat talks with the Conservatives, given the Tories had won the most seats

Thursday’s general election left Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives as the largest in Parliament, with 306 seats, compared with 258 for Mr. Brown’s Labour party. A party needs 326 seats to form a majority government.

With 57 seats, the Liberal Democrats would guarantee a Conservative-led government a majority.

But not all Conservatives are on board for a deal with the Liberal Democrats. The Tories offered a referendum on the alternative-vote system, in which the electorate numbers their candidates in order of preference and it is the one with more than 50% of the vote that wins the seat. Many Tories don’t want to tamper with a system that works well for the bigger parties, in which it is the number of seats won in the House of Commons, rather than the proportion of the vote, that wins the day.

Outside Downing Street, his pregnant wife at his side, Mr. Cameron set out the values that he has used to modernize the party and push it to a victory after three consecutive landslide losses.

“I want to try and build a more responsible society in Britain, one where don’t just ask what are my entitlements but what are my responsibilities,” he said. But in a classic Cameron twist to this traditional Conservative message in which the poor and needy are looked after by the state, the new Prime Minister spelt out that “those who can should and those who can’t we will always help.”

I loved this story well put together by Tom Lamont in the Observer this weekend. My keep-fit-mad 17 year old son is a prime candidate for this US survivalist stuff. Hand him an AK47 and wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, “social anarchy”, solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground “assurance of life” resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that “Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis”, and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist’s surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. “Virtually any meal” can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes “baked potato soup” but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications.

How long do the rest of us have to decide? “Nobody knows” when disaster will strike but Vivos takes a shot at guessing, sourcing clues from Nostradamus, the Bible and Native American lore to suggest 2019, 2029 and 2036 as danger years. But the real fear is for 21 December 2012, a date forecast for doom by the Mayans and towards which a countdown clock on Vivos’s website ticks.

We ought not to get too comfy over the next couple of years either: President Obama’s recent warnings about nuclear terrorism proved “timely”, a Vivos spokesperson told the Observer. “Doomsday may be closer than many would otherwise like to believe…”

It’s warning enough. £32,000? Check. Carpentry skills? Check. Jogging bottoms? Check. Good luck in the hills.

Only in Liverpool. Two women try to smuggle a corpse onto their easyjet flight, The Ottawa Citizen reports. Obviously these low cost flights are now producing some stiff competition.

LONDON — Two women allegedly put their dead relative in a wheelchair, dressed him in sunglasses and claimed he was simply asleep as they tried to check in at Liverpool airport for a flight to Germany.

The women convinced a taxi driver that 91-year-old Curt Willi Jarant was well enough for the 45-minute drive to the airport.

However, when they arrived, staff at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool noticed something was wrong.

Andrew Millea, a worker who greeted the group with a wheelchair, said one of the women asked for help lifting her father from the car.

“I did my best to help by lifting the man from his seat,” he said. “To my horror his face fell sideways against mine, it was ice-cold. I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he ‘always sleeps like that.’

“I could see the driver of the taxi was shocked too, he was white as a sheet and looked very shaken, so I placed the body into the wheelchair and pushed the man to the back of the easyJet queue.”

Millea contacted security who tried to check the man’s pulse, but were ushered away by the women. He claimed the younger woman, who was with two children, “encouraged them to ’tell the man that’s how your grandad sleeps’”.

When officials established that the man was dead, one of the women asked if she could still board the flight.

The German women are thought to have decided to sneak Jarant — thought to have died of natural causes — on the flight rather than pay up to $7,650 in repatriation fees for the body.

Police arrested Jarant’s wife, Gitta, 66, and his stepdaughter, Anke Anusic, 44, on suspicion of failing to give notification of death.

Police sources suggested that Mr Jarant died from natural causes on Good Friday – 24 hours before his arrival at the airport. Anusic said: “They would think that for 24 hours we would carry a dead person? This is ridiculous. He was moving, he was breathing. Eight people saw him.”

This nicely written story by Lyndsey Layton appeared in the Washington Post this week. Americans have been disguising food as something more upmarket and selling it at vastly inflated prices. “Sturgeon caviar” was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish. I bet it happens in the UK.

The expensive “sheep’s milk” cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow’s milk. And a jar of “Sturgeon caviar” was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish.
Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.
And last year, a Fairfax man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.
“Food fraud” has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multimillion companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA.
Such deception has been happening since Roman times, but it is getting new attention as more products are imported and a tight economy heightens competition. And the U.S. food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.
“It’s growing very rapidly, and there’s more of it than you might think,” said James Morehouse, a senior partner at A.T. Kearney Inc., which is studying the issue for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the food and beverage industry.
John Spink, an expert on food and packaging fraud at Michigan State University, estimates that 5 to 7 percent of the U.S. food supply is affected but acknowledges the number could be greater. “We know what we seized at the border, but we have no idea what we didn’t seize,” he said.
The job of ensuring that food is accurately labeled largely rests with the Food and Drug Administration. But it has been overwhelmed in trying to prevent food contamination, and fraud has remained on a back burner.
The recent development of high-tech tools — including DNA testing — has made it easier to detect fraud that might have gone unnoticed a decade ago. DNA can be extracted from cells of fish and meat and from other foods, such as rice and even coffee. Technicians then identify the species by comparing the DNA to a database of samples.
Another tool, isotope ratio analysis, can determine subtle differences between food — whether a fish was farmed or wild, for example, or whether caviar came from Finland or a U.S. stream.
The techniques have become so accessible that two New York City high school students, working with scientists at the Rockefeller University and the American Museum of Natural History last year, discovered after analyzing DNA in 11 of 66 foods — including the sheep’s milk cheese and caviar — bought randomly at markets in Manhattan were mislabeled.
“We put so much emphasis on food and purity of ingredients and where they come from,” said Mark Stoeckle, a physician and DNA expert at Rockefeller University who advised the students. “But then there are things selling that are not what they say on the label. There’s an important issue here in terms of economics and consumer safety.”
It is not clear how many food manufacturers, importers and retailers are testing products, but large companies with valuable brands to protect have been increasingly using the new technology, said Vincent Paez, director of food safety business development at Thermo Fisher Scientific, which sells some of the equipment and performs laboratory analysis, including DNA testing.
Still, of the hundreds of customers who bought 10 million pounds of mislabeled Vietnamese catfish — including national chains and top rated restaurants — only one or two caught the deception, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns, who prosecuted the Fairfax fish importer. “It was the rare exception, not the norm,” he said.
Heinz USA and Kraft Foods, two giant food makers with well- established internal controls, nevertheless fell victim to “Operation Rotten Tomato,” a conspiracy in which the scion of a California farming dynasty was indicted this month. He was accused of disguising millions of pounds of moldy tomato paste as a higher- grade product and selling it to foodmakers.
And E&J Gallo, the nation’s largest wine seller, sold 18 million bottles of Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir between 2006 and 2008 that had been filled in France with wine made from cheaper merlot and syrah grapes, according to a French court that last month indicted a dozen of its citizens in a scam dubbed Pinotgate.
At the FDA’s first public meeting on food fraud last year, groups across the industry complained that it is not doing enough.
“If it’s not going to hurt or kill someone, FDA’s resources are limited enough that they can’t take time to address it,” said Bob Bauer, a spokesman for the National Honey Packers & Dealers Association and the North American Olive Oil Association.
Both groups have petitioned the FDA to set standards for honey and olive oil, which would make it possible for companies to sue competitors that sell an adulterated product. The olive oil industry has been waiting for FDA to act on its request since 1991; major honey and beekeeping groups have been waiting since 2006. An agency spokesman said those requests are pending.
One longtime crabmeat seller on the Chesapeake Bay said he has complained, without results, to the FDA for years about a competitor who imports cheap crab and repackages it as Chesapeake blue crab, a different species that can be sold for twice or three times the price.
The National Seafood Inspection Laboratory, part of the Marine Fisheries Service, randomly sampled seafood from vendors between 1988 and 1997; it found that 34 percent had been mislabeled and sold as a different species. In 2004, scientists at the University of North Carolina estimated that 77 percent of snapper sold in the United States is mislabeled.
“With the recession, people are trying to make money in any way, shape or form,” said William Gergits, a co-founder of Therion International LLC, which specializes in DNA-based testing services. “Southeast grouper and red snapper fisheries here are limited. If you think about all the restaurants in Florida, there’s not enough supply to go to those restaurants.”
Despite growing imports, the FDA inspects just 2 percent of fish coming into the United States from other countries.
The agency wants to create a surveillance system that would alert regulators to likely fraud, said Jennifer Thomas, director of enforcement at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She said the FDA regularly swaps intelligence with two other agencies that share responsibility for catching seafood fraud. It has also bought a $170,000 DNA sequencer for its Seattle field office.
She pointed to several FDA actions against food fraud in recent months, including the first debarment of a seafood importer, suggesting that may be a deterrent.
Peter Xuong Lam, president of Virginia Star Seafood Corporation of Fairfax, was convicted last year of selling the mislabeled catfish. Ten other individuals and companies were also charged. Lam was sentenced to five years in prison and is barred from importing food into the United States for the next 20 years.
Authentification should be a standard practice throughout the food industry, Stoeckle said: “If it’s simple enough that high school students with some supervision can do it, it moves out of the research application to something you can do regularly.”