Oklahoma National Guard respond to tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Photograph by Sgt. 1st Class Kendall James

Emergency workers in the US continue to search for survivors from the destruction caused by the gigantic tornado that tore through a suburb of Oklahoma City on Monday.

Entire neighbourhoods were flattened in just 55 minutes by the 200mph winds, with rescuers working through the night to rescue people trapped in the rubble in Moore, the worst hit suburb of the city which is home to 55,000 people. Lightning lit up the sky as heavy lifting vehicles moved in to clear some of the debris and attempt to rescue people and find survivors. Much of the rescue effort was focused on the Plaza Towers Elementary School, which took a direct hit with the roof and walls being knocked down.

24 people have been confirmed dead by the city's Chief Medical Examiner, a lower number than the 51 circulating earlier in the day, with some news reports claiming the number to be as high as 91.

President Barack Obama has offered his prayers and thoughts to the people of Moore and pledged any assistance they need for the disaster response, saying:

"The people of Moore should know that their country will remain on the ground, beside them, for as long as it takes," he said.

The tornado over Moore, Oklahoma, captured by NASA's Aqua MODIS satellite

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Photograph by Sebastian Bergmann

When Marissa Mayer took over control of Yahoo, the company was in trouble. They may have been one of the internet 1.0 pioneers, but they missed out on search, were left behind on email, and earned themselves a very bad reputation for dropping the ball with startups they take over. Startups would sell to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even AOL, but Yahoo was falling further and further behind.

Now things are starting to look very different.

Many may have complained about Mayer preventing Yahoo employees from "working form home", but with all those extra hours in the office Yahoo already looks like a completely different beast. They have taken some big strikes towards the mobile market with the acquisition of Summly, and relaunching a much improved Yahoo app including its technology. They also gave the Yahoo Weather app and beautiful overhaul, which has found some very positive reviews, and acquired flight search Milewise. They also acquired recommendation service Jybe with plans to roll its technology out across a number of Yahoo's properties, and acqui-hired the social news team from Snipe.It.

They have redesigned the Yahoo homepage, still a big pull for millions of users and month, to make it more perosnalised. They are also not scared of working with other technology companies to improve their offerings, with Dropbox attachments now offered in the improved Yahoo Mail, and Google AdSense units filling up some unsold inventory with their contextual ad units.

This week Flickr has seen a huge upgrade with free users now offered a massive 1 terabyte of storage (that's over 400,000 8MP images), with photos available in full resolution, and apps for Android and iOS to allow simple uploading from those devices. It appears that Yahoo may have finally woken up to the threat of the combined Facebook and Instagram in this space, and they are doing something about it.

And then there's Tumblr. Tumblr has seen huge growth over the last few years as it offered a space somewhere between a blog and a twitter stream, so users could easily share images, videos, and short phrases with a few clicks. It is simpler to use than WordPress, but offers more space for creativity that Twitter, whilst still allowing you to "follow" your friends and those you find interesting. It's a centralised service and manages 300 million monthly unique visitors, with estimates putting their active users at around 150 million. Tumblr has a brand with today's youth where Yahoo does not, and whilst Google, Twitter, Facebook, and blogging have become mainstream, Tumblr has managed to keep its youthful edge. Tumblr is Yahoo's re-entry to a youth market, who see Yahoo as an old grandfather of the internet that hasn't done anything relevant for as long as they can remember.

Some Tumblr users may be annoyed that Yahoo is the company to acquire them, but this may be Tumblr's best fit as it started to run out of money. Google is a technology company and not too interested in another blog-style platform (they already own Blogger), Microsoft would likely switch off Tumblr's rather popular adult sections which makes up around 11% of its numbers, and Facebook would likely kill the product and try and roll it into the Facebook behemoth. With Yahoo, Tumblr has found a bed-follow more focused on its success and keeping its "cool"/liberal ideas on censorship alive and well, and the Tumblr team is staying in place. Yes you will start to see more ads on Tumblr, but that was going to happen sooner or later as the company pushed towards profitability anyway. If that's the only sacrifice, it will be worth it.

Now Yahoo just needs to find itself some traction in video they might finally be back in the game. They have been trying, but the French government put the stoppers on a deal for yahoo to acquire a controlling stake in DailyMotion, but Vimeo would be a far better fit with its creative community anyway. It certainly needs one after its unwatchable live stream of yesterday's announcements made clear. Yahoo may have bought Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban many moons ago, but a technology company needs to march towards progress and yahoo sat on it laurels for more than a decade, which makes much of that technology now hugely out of date and near worthless. Mayer looks like she appreciates the need to catch up quickly and start pushing ahead with all these acquisitions. Buying Vimeo may catch them up, but an interesting acquisition of SoundCloud or even LibSyn could get them out in front in audio.

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Photograph by Julien Harneis

Vaccine scares have emerged as a major challenge to global efforts to eliminate preventable diseases, with rumours and conspiracy theories proliferating faster than health authorities can respond to them. Now researchers, led by Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, are developing a tool to identify the first signs of these negative reports.

Vaccine scares have popped up in both the richest parts of the world and the poorest. Over a decade ago, suggestions in the UK that the combined MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine could trigger autism led to a dramatic drop in the number of parents having their children vaccinated. Wales, which had one of the lowest vaccination rates, is now in the grip of a major measles outbreak, with young teenagers - the generation that was not protected - particularly affected.

Northern Nigeria saw rumours that the polio vaccine was part of a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims, preventing polio’s eradication in the country and leading to the disease’s reappearance in surrounding countries where it had already been eliminated.

“Bad news stories damage vaccination programmes as much as biological hazards, and these stories evolve over minutes or hours, needing immediate action,” said University of Toronto public health specialists Natasha Crowcroft and Kwame McKenzie, in a comment published this week alongside Larson’s paper in the medical journal The Lancet. “By the time a detailed scientific analysis of a vaccine safety issue is completed, the story is no longer newsworthy.”

Crowcroft and McKenzie point out that modern communications, especially the internet, can exacerbate vaccine scares. But Larson’s Vaccine Confidence Project set out to establish whether the internet could also provide the tools to fight misinformation.

Rumour Surveillance

Larson’s team set up a media surveillance system covering 144 countries, looking at online articles, blogs and reports about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.

The first stage of the process was automated, using the HealthMap data collection system, which searched for terms such as “vaccine”, “rotavirus” or “measles”. The accumulated material was inspected by real people, who assessed whether it positively or negatively portrayed vaccination, and whether it should be flagged as a cause for concern.

When one report appeared on multiple websites, all copies were counted, “recognizing the fact that replicated reports show the spread of information,” Larson’s paper says.

Although it was a worldwide survey, the researchers paid particular attention to five countries - China, Finland, France, Nigeria and Pakistan - that had seen issues over public confidence in vaccines. They also mapped reports about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine in India, where trial HPV vaccination projects had been suspended in two states.

The Vaccine Confidence Project initially ran from April 2010 to April 2011. At the end of the year, they could see that the system had worked - clusters of reports expressing concern about vaccination correlated with real-world events. Of the reports analysed, 69 percent were assessed as favourable to vaccination and 31 percent as hostile.

“We picked up concerns we already knew were there, but more than that,” Larson told IRIN. “For instance, we saw activity around a narcolepsy/H1N1 vaccine link, and we were picking up early discussions suggesting this might be an issue before the final confirmation (in Finland) that there was indeed a link.

“And in Pakistan, where we were following issues around polio acceptance, we started picking up political tensions and concerns among lady health workers. We certainly didn’t predict the killing of polio workers, but we had seen the tensions growing.”

Waves of Information

There are questions about whether internet surveillance, using search terms in English, can spot emerging concerns in rural societies where internet penetration is low and public debate occurs in local languages. Could this kind of surveillance, for instance, have picked up the early signs of polio vaccine rejection in Hausa-speaking northern Nigeria?

Larson, who has worked in that area on behalf of the UN Children’s Fund, says she thinks it would have.

“It was emerging in the local media a bit, and then reports started to circulate on the BBC Hausa service. And since Nigeria has English as an official language, they were soon circulating in English as well. A former Nigerian minister of health, Nike Grange, is on our advisory board, and she says that if they had had a system like this at the time, and had understood the full impact of the rumours they heard, they would have acted much sooner,” Larson said.

“And the world has changed a lot in the last decade. What we are seeing is that you don’t have to have a computer in every household. People hear something on the radio, they tell their neighbour, they tweet it, and there are waves of information. We hadn’t anticipated how ubiquitous cellphones and smartphones were going to be, and that makes this work even more relevant.”

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The study looks at how councils are struggling to cope with increasing numbers of homeless as rising rents and benefit cuts leave the poor unable to afford their homes. At the same time a shortage of affordable housing is forcing local authorities, particularly in London, to place an increasing number of households into bed and breakfast accommodation, hostels and shelters. Many of these are desperately vulnerable families.

The sheer numbers of people turning to over-stretched councils for housing is forcing many authorities to turn to the suburbs in search of cheaper short-term housing solutions. 

Our info-graphic shows the true scale and impact of Britain’s housing crisis.

UK Housing Crisis Infographic by TBIJ

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Grooveshark

Grooveshark’s lengthy legal battle with several of the world’s major recording labels, who accused the popular music streaming service of mass-copyright infringement, may soon come to an end. Several of the company’s (former) employees have agreed to a “consent judgment” which prohibits them from infringing the major labels’ copyrights or working with similar services in future. No settlement has been reached with the parent company yet, but the recent developments cast doubt over Grooveshark’s future.

In November 2011, Universal Music Group, the world’s largest recording label, sued music streaming service Grooveshark.

The label claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and accused the company of massive copyright infringement. The accusations included claims that bosses and other workers at the company, from the CEO down, personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service.

Universal was later joined by Sony, Warner and several other labels who all called for the shutdown of the streaming service and fines against the named employees. In recent months activity in the case slowed down, but behind the scenes the discussions continued.

This has now resulted in a voluntary agreement between the labels and five Grooveshark employees. Nikola Arabadjiev is the only one who still works at the company. Grooveshark founder Sam Tarantino and co-founder Josh Greenberg have not signed an agreement.

The “consent judgments” obtained by TorrentFreak suggest trouble for Grooveshark, which up until now streamed millions of songs without explicit authorization from copyright holders.

Under the agreement the named Grooveshark employees are prohibited from infringing copyrights of musical works owned by the major labels. In addition, they must never again work with a business that systematically infringes upon label copyrights.

“The Defendant and all those acting in concert with the Defendant shall be immediately and permanently enjoined from infringing in any manner any copyright in any and all sound recordings, whether now in existence or later created, in which any of the Plaintiffs own or control any exclusive rights under Section 106 of the United States Copyright Act (the “Copyrighted Works”),” the agreement reads.

“This shall include, but is not limited to, copying, uploading, reproducing, distributing, transmitting or publicly performing any of the Copyrighted Works in violation of the United States Copyright Act, via the Grooveshark service or any other online streaming service, website, application, or peer-to-peer or file-trading system that operates without authority or license from the appropriate Plaintiff or any of its licensees,” it adds.

TorrentFreak approached Grooveshark and the record labels for comment on the recent developments. Grooveshark’s attorneys preferred not to comment on the developments and we have yet to hear back from the labels.

The current lawsuit is just one of many Grooveshark has been dragged into over recent years. January last year EMI sued the music service over a contractual dispute, and Grooveshark has been blocked following court orders in Germany and Denmark. This week, record labels in the UK indicated that they are preparing an ISP blockade of the site.

Over the years Grooveshark has always fiercely defended its business, arguing that it operates within the boundaries of the law and removes unauthorized content when it receives a DMCA takedown notice. At the same time, they negotiated licensing deals with the major labels.

“Laws come from Congress. Licenses come from businesses, Grooveshark is completely legal because we comply with the laws passed by Congress, but we are not licensed by every label (yet),” Grooveshark’s Paul Geller said previously.

However, it seems that the major labels probably want to quash the site entirely instead of legitimizing it through licensing deals.

At the time of writing the music service is still up and running and no settlement with Grooveshark has been entered. However, now that key defendants in the case have struck a deal it would be no surprise if parent company Escape Media follows suit.

Grooveshark sent the following statement. We have yet to get a reply on out follow up questions asking what the settlements mean for the future of the site.

“We are pleased that the case between Universal Music and Escape Media has been narrowed and simplified by the removal of some individual defendants from the case upon their stipulation to simply obey the law—something Escape Media does every day through its active licensing of millions of tracks and its strict compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Escape Media Group will continue to deliver innovative new solutions and services that revolutionize music consumption for its growing audience of 30 million+ fans around the world.”

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Pakistan has just experienced the first democratic change of government in its history. It did so despite a violent campaign by religious extremists to derail the election, and targeted at secular-oriented parties such as the ousted Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

However, the victory by Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Party (PML-N) is still a genuine win. The 60 per cent voter turnout is excellent for Pakistan, with Pakistanis defying the religious extremists to cast their votes and have their say.

The election results show that voters were clearly fed up with the PPP’s corruption and poor economic management. The country has suffered from serious electricity cuts and an anaemic economy. It is burdened by a rapid population growth rate, fuelled by poor levels of general and especially female literacy. Environmental problems in the heavily irrigation-dependent economy are also growing.

At the time of writing, former cricket star turned politician Imran Khan had won about 30 seats, which roughly equals the PPP. It is likely Sharif will be able to reach the necessary 137 seats to govern in his own right by attracting independent support. He may nevertheless seek a deal with Khan in order to provide additional stability.

Although the electoral base of the new Sharif government is mostly confined to Punjab, it has the benefit of being far more stable than the wobbly coalition it replaces.

Sharif, who is a self-made billionaire in the steel industry, will be more market oriented than Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistan will have a less-regulated economy and economic growth will likely pick up given a reasonable international environment. However, judging by Sharif’s previous stint in power, don’t look for a marked diminution in corruption or ‘money politics’.

Pakistan’s regional and security relationships are also challenging. Sharif campaigned on the basis of lessening Pakistani dependence on the United States. Even though Washington is winding down the US military commitment in Afghanistan, it needs Pakistan to achieve an ordered withdrawal. This is a massive logistical exercise. It would be greatly complicated should the United States be forced to use the alternative route through the Central Asian Republics and Russia. Washington also needs Pakistan to ensure that a post-NATO Afghanistan is not unduly destabilised from across the Pakistani border.

Sharif may well temper his supposed antagonism to the United States. He will likely be encouraged to do so by the Pakistani military. He has no love for the military and was ousted in 1999 by then Chief of Staff Pervez Musharraf and sent in to exile. But he will have little choice but to work with them given their importance.

Despite hiccups in the relationship between the United States and the Pakistani military, such as the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the two still have an important working relationship, including in the provision of aid. Sharif will no doubt give the impression of distancing Pakistan from the United States, but will probably allow himself to be convinced on crucial issues like continuing supply and exit through Karachi.

Even though drone attacks now originate from Afghanistan rather than Pakistan, Sharif may force the United States to curb such attacks on Pakistani soil since this is an especially high-profile issue in Pakistan. If the US route through Pakistan is cut, it may be a temporary measure as a way of negotiating a stop to the attacks.

The really interesting effect of the change of government could be on Pakistan-India relations. Sharif was born in what is now Indian Punjab, and the PML-N is far better regarded by the so-called ‘religious right’ than is the PPP. Should the PML-N emerge as the majority party in its own right, its hand would be further strengthened. These factors could give Sharif a freer hand to deal with India than his predecessor.

Both Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Singh have been encouraging and have already had a long talk by phone. Any major change in the relationship would need to be achieved at the political level and this election could prove a circuit breaker.

But there are also some profound impediments to a major breakthrough. The military needs a continuing level of antagonism against India to maintain its influential role in Pakistani society. Pakistani Islamist jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) have been attacking India from across the border for many years. The attacks on Indian Kashmir are clearly sponsored and supported by the Pakistani state, especially the military intelligence, the ISI. Attacks on other parts of India — such as that on Mumbai in 2008 — are also mounted from Pakistani soil.

The leaders of groups like the LeT seem to function in Pakistan with impunity. India is both threatened and outraged by this situation and it has become, along with the obvious and major issue of Kashmir, a serious impediment in improved relations.

Can Sharif do better at reining in these groups than his predecessor? Will he be willing to do so? Can he work with the military to ease relations with India? These remain important and unanswered questions as we move into the Sharif government.

Written by Sandy Gordon
Sandy Gordon is a Visiting Fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network, College of Asia & the Pacific, the Australian National University. This article was first published by the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific.

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Undifferentiated embryonic stem cells.
Photograph by Jenny Nichols/Wellcome Images

In a paper published in Cell recently, scientists from the US and Thailand have, for the first time, successfully produced embryonic stem cells from human skin cells.

That sounds interesting, but what are stem cells and where do they come from?

If you take a limb from a rose tree, and put it in soil, it will grow into a thriving bush.

But you might say: “Plants are special. This won’t work with animals.” Or will it? If you cut off a lizard’s tail, a new tail may grow. A lobster can grow back a lost claw.

There is a special type of flatworm that can be cut in half, again and again hundreds of times, and each half grows back into a full worm.

Similarly, if you cut out half a human liver, it will grow back. The story of Prometheus, whose liver was eaten away by eagles and regrew each day, suggests that the Greeks of ancient times knew about regeneration of organs.

This sort of regeneration is attributed to special cells called “stem cells”.

Reprogramming the Workers

Most of our cells are like many professional workers – they are hardened in their ways and can’t manage career changes.

Blood cells carry oxygen or fight disease, muscle cells expand and contract to move us around, nerve cells carry signals, skin cells form a protective layer over our bodies, and structures made up of kidney cells filter our blood.

The cells of most organs or tissues are referred to as “terminally differentiated” cells. They have specialised, and many won’t divide again. If they are damaged or die they will disappear. This is very important.

Although we feel like we grow a lot after we are born, we really only double in size two or three times and most of our cells don’t divide much.

If they did we would be at great risk from cancer – the uncontrolled doubling of cells at the wrong time.

We have a lot of cells and it is important that none of them run out of control.

But some cells can double to renew themselves and can also differentiate and give rise to specialised progeny.

These are the stem cells. We need them to produce new skin to replace damaged skin cells. Similarly, we need them in our guts to replace damaged cells on the surface of our intestines.

Our blood cells also get worn out as they race around our bodies so we have blood stem cells that divide and replace themselves. They also differentiate to form the different types of white and red blood cells we need.

Australian researchers identified stem cells in the breast that can proliferate and form a complete functioning breast. There are also stem cells in the brain and in the heart.

While stem cells tend to be very rare, they exist in many of our organs.

Types of Stem Cells

The ultimate stem cells are embryonic stem cells.

These cells are found in the inner cell mass of the early embryo and are referred to as “totipotent” since they have the ability to form every cell that is needed in the growing embryo.

Human embryo at nine weeks from ectopic pregnancy. Photograph by Ed Uthman

They can also be genetically modified by the addition of DNA, then injected back into other embryos or into adult animals where find their way into localities that suit them and replace themselves by duplication or differentiate into other cell types that may be needed. For a long time this type of work had been done primarily in laboratory mice.

The techniques in yesterday’s Cell paper involved injecting the nucleus from a human skin cell into a human egg (the nucleus of which has been destroyed) then growing the resulting embryo until the inner cell mass cells could be harvested.

The method may still be controversial because it uses unfertilised eggs, but many people will regard it as preferable to using human embryos. And there are other interesting methods for making stem cells.

Somatic Cells to Stem Cells

It is also possible to convert skin cells, and indeed many different terminally differentiated cells, back into what are called “induced pluripotent stem cells” or iPS cells.

One uses the “magic four” or “OKSM” set of DNA-binding proteins that govern normal stem cell biology:

• Octamer-binding transcription factor 4 (OCT4)
• Kruppel-like factor 4 (KLF4)
• SRY (sex determining region Y)-box 2 (SOX2)
• cellular myelocytomatosis virus-like gene (MYC)

In 2012 Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for discovering how to convert normal cells into iPS cells using the OKSM regulators to turn on and off the right genes and convert skin cells into stem cells.

Researchers are continuing to investigate whether iPS cells have the same therapeutic potential as embryo derived stem cells.

It is hoped that stem cells may provide therapies for people suffering from degenerative diseases.

Skin cells could be taken from a patient, converted to stem cells, and then these could be injected back into the damaged organ.

Ideally, they would repopulate the damaged organ with new cells.

So why doesn’t this happen in normal biology? Why aren’t our own heart stem cells busy trying to repair broken hearts?

They may be but our natural supply of stem cells is limited and presumably insufficient to tackle severe disease.

So why don’t we just have more stem cells in our bodies?

Lung cancer cells. Photograph by Anne Weston/LRI/CRUK/Wellcome Images

The down side of having too many stem cells may be cancer.

Stem cells share a number of features with cancer cells – both are able to self-renew and double without limit.

One theory about cancer holds that the disease most often originates not from terminally differentiated cells but from one of the small number of stem cells in the relevant tissues.

The obvious concern about using stem cells for therapy is that injecting too many could increase the chances that some of these cells would proliferate beyond control, and ultimately give rise to cancer.

Stem cell therapy for regenerative medicine is an exciting idea.

Every day we are learning more about stem cells – how to purify or make them, and how to grow them in culture and direct them down particular pathways to repopulate different organs.

Future research will assess the risks and how effective they can be in experimental systems and ultimately in human patients.

By Merlin Crossley

Merlin Crossley receives funding from the University of New South Wales, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

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Photograph by TCC

The UK has spent almost £2bn housing vulnerable homeless families in short-term temporary accommodation, according to new research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which demonstrates the dramatic scale of Britain’s housing crisis.

Rising private rents, a shortage of affordable housing and benefit cuts have forced local authorities, particularly in London, to place increasing numbers of households into bed and breakfast accommodation, hostels and shelters.

With the number of houses built in Britain falling to new lows, according to figures released last week, a four-month study by the Bureau drawing on local authority disclosures, has revealed that £1.88bn – enough to build 72,000 homes in London – has gone on renting temporary accommodation in 12 of Britain’s biggest cities over the past four years.

Campaigners have said welfare changes will exacerbate the problem. Official figures show that in London alone 7,000 families dependent on benefits stand to lose more than £100 a week under the ­benefit cap, and many are expected to become homeless as a result.

Leslie Morphy, chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis, said: ‘For the sake of cutting just a few pounds a week from their benefits, families and individuals are being forced out of their homes, to be put up in B&Bs or temporary accommodation that costs us all far more.’

A separate investigation by the Bureau has uncovered fresh evidence that London councils are rapidly accelerating the rehousing of homeless households outside their home boroughs. Some 32,643 homeless households have been rehoused out of their borough since 2009. In the year to April, 10,832 households were rehoused in this way – a 15.86% rise on the previous 12 months.

Most left the more affluent districts of inner London for the cheaper outer suburbs, although an increasing number of London’s homeless are being moved to towns outside the capital, such as Dartford in Kent, Slough in Berkshire and Spelthorne in Surrey.

Related story: Get the data – Where councils move their homeless

Officials at the ‘destination’ boroughs have said that the influx of new households has put a significant strain on local services. Councillors in Enfield in outer London, where more properties and B&B rooms are secured by London authorities than anywhere else, have said the demand from inner London authorities is pushing up private rents and placing untenable pressure on school places.

‘The pressure will not abate,’ said Edward Smith, a Conservative councillor in Enfield. ‘Before long we will have to build more secondary schools.’

The Labour leader of Slough council, Robert Anderson said: ‘If authorities put people in our area with complex needs, or even just families; they need to inform us. If we know where they have come from we can make sure that the borough does not shirk (its) responsibilities and just pass on their more difficult clients.

‘You can’t just pitch up half way through a year and expect to get a school place. It’s not McDonalds.’

Related story: Britain’s housing crisis – The impact on children

The housing minister, Mark Prisk, insisted last night that councils should be careful about placing families in B&Bs far from their home borough.

‘There is absolutely no excuse for families to be sent miles away without proper regard for their circumstances, or to be placed in unsuitable bed and breakfast accommodation for long periods of time,’ he said. ‘The law is clear: councils have a responsibility to take into account people’s jobs and schools when securing homes for those in need.’

But Prisk also defended the policy of removing families on benefit from central London. ‘Nor is it right that those living on benefits should be able to live in parts of the capital that those who aren’t reliant on this support couldn’t afford to,’ he said.

Related story: Get the data – The families moved out of their boroughs

Jeremy Kite, Dartford council’s Conservative leader, called on London councils to use savings they make ‘outsourcing’ their homeless outside the capital to create a ‘new homes fund’.

‘London councils receive all the benefits of high levels of council tax which arise from their property values and this means there’s a strong moral case for them solving their own housing problems,’ said Kite.

Households accepted as homeless by their local council will often be placed in temporary accommodation until a more permanent home can be found for them.

As latest government figures show there are 53,130 households living in temporary accommodation at the end of 2012  – 9% higher than the previous year – a leading law firm is preparing a class action against councils who keep families in B&B for longer than the statutory maximum six week limit.

Official guidance says B&B accommodation should be avoided ‘wherever possible’. Lack of privacy, and amenities such as cooking and laundry means it is ‘not suitable’ for families with children or pregnant women “unless there is no alternative accommodation available and then only for a maximum of six weeks.’

Related story: Get the data – The millions spent on temporary accommodation

But Bureau data shows that in the past year alone, spending by 12 of Britain’s biggest cities on B&B rooms increased by 25.34% to £91.1m.

Jack Dromey MP, Labour’s Shadow Housing Minister, said: ‘Ministers’ failure to get a grip on this crisis is causing misery for tens of thousands of families who are being uprooted from their local communities, friends, schools and places of work.

‘Local councils are being forced into making impossible decisions, placing families in completely inappropriate bed and breakfasts. And taxpayers are footing the bill to the tune of millions of pounds every week.’

The Bureau’s data shows the amount spent on all temporary accommodation across 12 of Britain’s biggest cities was up 5.7% to £464m last year. And London councils have budgeted for further significant overall rises this financial year.

Mayor Sir Steve Bullock, London Councils’ executive member for housing, said: ‘London is in the grip of a housing crisis. Homelessness is on the rise, private sector rents continue to rise and there is a drastic shortage of affordable housing in the capital.’

Since 2009, London councils have secured 5,827 properties and B&B rooms in the three outer London boroughs of Enfield, Waltham Forest and Haringey alone.

The borough suffering the worst homeless crisis in the country appears to be Newham, in east London, which has spent £185.2m placing people in temporary accommodation since 2009.

A spokesperson for Mayor of London, Boris Johnson said: ‘Reform of the housing benefit system is needed but the Mayor has made clear the need for transitional arrangements. He has already managed to secure mitigation funding for boroughs, incentives for landlords to reduce their rents and more time for some existing claimants. London needs more affordable homes and boosting the supply, to rent or buy, is one of the Mayor’s top priorities.’

Written by  Nick Mathiason, Victoria Hollingsworth and Will Fitzgibbon
Additional Reporting: Miranda Atty and Jude McArdle.

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Protesters in Bahrain. Photograph by Sara Hassan/Al Jazeera

More than two years after peaceful demonstrators took to the streets to demand reforms, Bahrain’s uprising has not abated. Activists and opposition groups continue to demand the basic human rights and political reforms promised to them by their government. Rather than meet the opposition’s calls for reform, the government of Bahrain has responded by subjecting citizens to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and abuse.

Human rights activists such as Naji Fateel, board member of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, and Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, are frequently subjected to arbitrary arrest and ill treatment. Similarly, medical professionals who have been interrogated, detained, tortured, and convicted for providing medical care to injured protesters remain in prison or have not been allowed to return to work. Educators who have endured similar ill-treatment continue to be fired from their positions or languish in prison, while soccer players who were banned from their clubs for participating in protests remain blacklisted or live in self-imposed exile to continue playing the sport they love.

The demands of the opposition movement are hardly unreasonable, which makes the government's recalcitrance all the more suspect. The people of Bahrain want a representative government and an elected prime minister. They want a representative of the king to participate in the national dialogue. They want an end to human rights abuses and accountability for those who committed them. They want the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), a body commissioned by the Bahraini government following the 2011 protests, to be fully implemented. They want prisoners of conscience, jailed for exercising their rights to free speech and expression, to be released. They want to be able to associate freely in political groups, civil society organizations, unions, and associations. In the grand scheme of things, the financial, moral, and political cost to the Bahraini government for granting these requests would be negligible.

Unfortunately, reform — the key to Bahrain’s stability and security — is what the Bahraini government seems determined to prevent. As the U.S. State Department noted in its 2012 Human Rights Country Report on Bahrain, although the government of Bahrain has made “some” progress in implementing reforms since 2011, that progress has not been significant. The report found that the Bahraini government frequently did not respect its own laws regarding human rights, let alone the standards set by international human rights treaties. Additionally, the report highlighted cases of arbitrary arrest and detention; restrictions placed on freedom of speech, press, and assembly; and the use of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, among other rights abuses.

Bahrain’s response to the 2012 country report has been predictably shrill, a sure sign the U.S. State Department struck a nerve with a regime that has become increasingly sensitive about its image. Unfortunately, the Bahraini government seems unable or unwilling to recognize that the best way to improve its image is to undertake the reforms that the king promised in 2011.

Instead, the government continues to dispense the same argument it has been making since 2011: that the opposition is to blame for ongoing strife and sectarian divisions in the country — a rift that the government itself is largely responsible for. As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted in its 2013 annual report, the government of Bahrain must overcome sectarian divisions by addressing the “ongoing lack of accountability for abuses against the Shi’a community since 2011.”

This conclusion was also reflected in a report issued by the U.S. Department of Labor in December 2012, in which the agency noted the ongoing “deterioration in the labor rights environment in Bahrain" and "political and sectarian-based discrimination against Shia workers.” The agency recently requested formal consultations with the Bahraini government to address allegations of ongoing labor rights violations following the 2011 crackdown.

The U.S. government’s increasing interest in Bahrain may seem unusual given its size (its population and area are about the same as Rhode Island’s), but the presence of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain gives this small island nation outsized importance when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Gulf region. As Deputy Secretary of State William Burns said in a speech at Princeton University this May, the United States does not “have the luxury of pivoting away from the Middle East, which sometimes has a nasty way of reminding us of its relevance.”

Several analysts have echoed this sentiment, including former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recently raised concerns regarding the increasing instability in Bahrain. If the situation continues to deteriorate, they argue, Bahrain may no longer be a viable location to host the Fifth Fleet. Although the Defense Department has yet to create a “Plan B” to relocate the fleet, it appears at least to recognize the threat such instability could pose. In March, then-head of U.S. Central Command General James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that dialogue and reform in Bahrain are “key to ensuring the country’s stability and security,” which are needed in light of simmering tensions between Iran and the West.

The relationship between the United States and Bahrain grows more complicated by the day. These tensions—and the Bahraini government’s unfaltering intransigence toward reform—will put American diplomacy to the test in the coming weeks and months. It is a test we cannot afford to fail. As President Barack Obama said in his 2013 State of the Union Address, “[i]n the Middle East, we will stand with citizens as they demand their universal rights, and support stable transitions to democracy. The process will be messy, … but we can—and will—insist on respect for the fundamental rights of all people.”

The U.S. government can begin to demonstrate its commitment to democracy and human rights in the Middle East by making foreign aid and military assistance contingent upon the government of Bahrain’s full and satisfactory implementation of the BICI recommendations. In the meantime, the Defense Department should begin developing a contingency plan to relocate the Fifth Fleet in the event that the security situation in Bahrain makes the fleet’s presence there untenable. Finally, the U.S. Department of Labor should insist that Bahrain adequately address legitimate concerns regarding its ongoing violations of international labor laws. Although the path to reform in Bahrain may be messy, the consequences of failure are worse, for Bahrain and for America.

Written by Husain Abdulla

Husain Abdulla, originally from Bahrain, is the founder and Director of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain. As Director, Husain leads the organization’s efforts to ensure that U.S. policies support the democracy and human rights movement in Bahrain. Husain also works closely with members of the Bahraini-American community to ensure that their voices are heard by US government officials and the broader American public. Husain graduated from the University of South Alabama with a Master’s degree in Political Science and International Relations and a BA in Political Science and Mathematics.

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