the north African country since it became independent in 1962.

David Cameron arrives for Algeria talks

David Cameron with Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal

Continue reading the main story

David Cameron has landed in Algeria for the first visit by a British prime minister to the north African country since it became independent in 1962.

He said his aim was "very much about helping this neighbourhood to help itself", amid concerns raised over UK military going to neighbouring Mali.

The prime minister will discuss the threat of terrorism in a meeting with his Algerian counterpart.

This follows the recent siege at the In Amenas gas plant in the Sahara.

Mr Cameron said he would be announcing a security partnership with Algeria, as well as co-operation on trade, investment and education.

Wreath

The UK is to send 330 military personnel to Mali and west Africa to support French forces battling Islamist militants. Critics have warned of "mission creep".

The deployment will include as many as 40 military advisers in Mali and 200 British soldiers in neighbouring African countries, to help train the Malian army.

French-led forces are continuing their offensive against militants who seized northern Mali last year.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the prime minister was keen to use this trip to address fears that he is risking a protracted military engagement in north Africa.

He wanted to stress the situation in Mali would not become "another Afghanistan or even another Libya", our correspondent, who is travelling with the UK government entourage, added.

Mr Cameron will lay a wreath as a mark of respect to the hostages who died in the In Amenas siege and will hold talks with the Algerian Prime minister and president.

Some 37 foreigners and at least 10 Algerians died after militants seized workers at the gas plant earlier this month.

Lord Stern, author of the government-commissioned review on climate change

Lord Stern now believes he should have been more ‘blunt’ about threat to economies from temperature rises. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Lord Stern, author of the government-commissioned review on climate change that became the reference work for politicians and green campaigners, now says he underestimated the risks, and should have been more "blunt" about the threat posed to the economy by rising temperatures.
In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Stern, who is now a crossbench peer, said: "Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then."
The Stern review, published in 2006, pointed to a 75% chance that global temperatures would rise by between two and three degrees above the long-term average; he now believes we are "on track for something like four ". Had he known the way the situation would evolve, he says, "I think I would have been a bit more blunt. I would have been much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise."
He said some countries, including China, had now started to grasp the seriousness of the risks, but governments should now act forcefully to shift their economies towards less energy-intensive, more environmentally sustainable technologies.
"This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? These risks for many people are existential."
Stern said he backed the UK's Climate Change Act, which commits the government to ambitious carbon reduction targets. But he called for increased investment in greening the economy, saying: "It's a very exciting growth story."
David Cameron made much of his environmental credentials before the 2010 election, travelling to the Arctic to highlight his commitment to tackling global warming. But the coalition's commitment to green policies has recently been questioned, amid scepticism among Tory backbenchers about the benefits of wind power, and the chancellor's enthusiasm for exploiting Britain's shale gas reserves.
Stern's comments came as Jim Yong Kim, the new president of the World Bank, also at Davos, gave a grave warning about the risk of conflicts over natural resources should the forecast of a four-degree global increase above the historical average prove accurate.
"There will be water and food fights everywhere," Kim said as he pledged to make tackling climate change a priority of his five-year term.
Kim said action was needed to create a carbon market, eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies and "green" the world's 100 megacities, which are responsible for 60 to 70% of global emissions.
He added that the 2012 droughts in the US, which pushed up the price of wheat and maize, had led to the world's poor eating less. For the first time, the bank president said, extreme weather had been attributed to man-made climate change. "People are starting to connect the dots. If they start to forget, I am there to remind them.
"We have to find climate-friendly ways of encouraging economic growth. The good news is we think they exist".
Kim said there would be no solution to climate change without private sector involvement and urged companies to seize the opportunity to make profits: "There is a lot of money to be made in building the technologies and bending the arc of climate change."

Attacks on polio workers

Attacks on polio workers would not deter us: Bill Gates The philan­thropi­st wishes for his money to reach some of the poores­t people on the planet.
By News DeskPublished: January 20, 2013

A major focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is eradicating polio in Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. PHOTO: FILE
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said the recent attacks on polio fieldworkers in Pakistan would not stop his foundation from succeeding in eradicating the crippling virus.“It’s not going to stop us succeeding,” he said, in an interview with the Telegraph. “It does force us to sit down with the Pakistan government to renew their commitments, see what they’re going to do in security and make changes to protect the women who are doing God’s work and getting out to these children and delivering the vaccine,” he added.
A major focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is eradicating polio in Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. “We’re focused on the help of the poorest in the world, which really drives you into vaccination,” he said.
The philanthropist said money has no utility to him beyond a certain point and wishes for his money to reach some of the poorest people on the planet.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2013.William Henry “Bill” Gates is a rich man. His estimated wealth, some 65  billion measured in US dollars, equals the annual GDP of Ecuador, and maybe a bit more than that of Croatia. By this rather crude criterion, the founder of Microsoft is worth two Kenyas, three Trinidads and a dozen or so Montenegros. Not bad for a university dropout.

Gates is also mortal, although some of his admirers may find that hard to believe, and as they say, there are no pockets in shrouds. So he is now engaged in the process of ridding himself of all that money in the hope of extending the lives of others less fortunate than himself.

“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organisation and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.”

That “certain point” is set a little higher than for the rest of us – Gates owns a lakeside estate in Washington State worth about $150 million (£94  million) and boasting a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system – but one gets the point. Being rich, even on the cosmic scale attained by Bill Gates, is no guarantee of an enduring place in history. The projection of the personal computer into daily life should do the trick for him, but even at the age of 57 he is a restless man and wants something more. The “more” is the eradication of a disease that has blighted untold numbers of lives: polio.

Later this month, Gates will deliver the BBC’s Dimbleby Lecture, taking as his theme the value of the young human being. Every child, he will say, has the right to a healthy and productive life, and he will explain how technology and innovation can help towards the attainment of that still-distant goal. Gates has put his money where his mouth is. He and his wife Melinda have so far given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8  billion of it to improve global health.

Related Articles

• 'Making that film was horrendous'
  20 Jan 2013

“My wife and I had a long dialogue about how we were going to take the wealth that we’re lucky enough to have and give it back in a way that’s most impactful to the world,” he says. “Both of us worked at Microsoft and saw that if you take innovation and smart people, the ability to measure what’s working, that you can pull together some pretty dramatic things.
“We’re focused on the help of the poorest in the world, which really drives you into vaccination. You can actually take a disease and get rid of it altogether, like we are doing with polio.”
This has been done only once before in humans, with the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s.
“Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.”
One can see why that appeals to Gates. He has always sought neat, definitive solutions to things, but as he knows from Microsoft, bugs are resilient things. The disease is still endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and killing it off altogether has been likened to squeezing jelly to death. There is another, sinister obstacle: the propagation by Islamist groups of the belief that polio vaccination is a front for covert sterilisation and other western evils. Health workers in Pakistan have paid with their lives for involvement in the programme.
“It’s not going to stop us succeeding,” says Gates. “It does force us to sit down with the Pakistan government to renew their commitments, see what they’re going to do in security and make changes to protect the women who are doing God’s work and getting out to these children and delivering the vaccine.”
Gates does not usually speak in religious terms, and has traditionally danced around the issue of God. His wife, a Roman Catholic, is less defensive on that topic but ploughs her own furrow, encouraging contraception when necessary, in contradiction to teaching from Rome.
“Melinda and I had been talking about this even before we were married,” he says. “When I was in my 40s Microsoft was my primary activity. The big switch for me was when I decided to make the foundation my primary purpose. It was a big change, although there are more in common with the two things than you might think – meeting with scientists, taking on tough challenges, people being sceptical that you can get things done.”
Gates is still chairman of Microsoft but without his day-to-day attention it has taken on the appearance of a weary giant, trailing Apple and Google in innovation. Some have called for Gates’s return to the company full-time to inject some verve but he isn’t coming back.
“My full-time work for the rest of my life will be at the foundation,” he says. “I still work part-time for Microsoft. I’ve had two careers and I’m lucky that both of them have been quite amazing.
“I loved my Microsoft: it prepared me for what I’m doing now. In the same way that I got to see the PC and internet revolutions, now I see child death rates coming down. I work very long hours and try to learn as much as I can about these things, but that’s because I enjoy it.”
He emphasises that the foundation’s effort is part of a global campaign in which governments must play the lead role.
“The scale of the (foundation’s) wealth compared to government budgets is actually not that large, and compared to the scale of some of these problems. But I do feel lucky that substantial resources are going back to make the world a more habitable place.”
In 1990 some 12 million children under the age of five died. The figure today is about seven million, or 19,000 per day. According to the United Nations, the leading causes of death are pneumonia (18 per cent), pre-birth complications (14 per cent), diarrhoea (11 per cent), complications during birth (nine per cent) and malaria (seven per cent). For Gates, though, polio is a totem. The abolition of the disease will be a headline-grabber, spurring countries on to greater efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend $1.8 billion in the next six years to accomplish that goal, almost a third of the global effort.
“All you need is over 90 per cent of children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops spreading. The number of cases eventually goes to zero. When we started, we had over 400,000 children a year being paralysed and we are now down to under 1,000 cases a year. The great thing about finishing polio is that we’ll have resources to get going on malaria and measles.”
Gates is no saint. He could be an intimidating boss at Microsoft and his company became notorious for using its clout to reinforce its dominance in the market place, at the expense of smaller rivals. Still, he and his wife are showing generosity on a staggering scale, a counterblast to the endemic greed of the Nineties and early Noughties, and they have convinced others that mega-philanthropy is the way of the future. That wily investor, Warren Buffett, has so far given away $17.5 billion via the Gates Foundation.
The children of Bill and Melinda Gates will never know poverty. They may not become multibillionaires but even the loss to charity of the vast bulk of their parents’ fortune should leave them with a billion or so each.
Gates explains: “The vast majority of the wealth, over 95 per cent, goes to the foundation, which will spend all that money within 20 years after neither of us are around any more.”
So, is it about some new-found faith, all this giving?
“It doesn’t relate to any particular religion; it’s about human dignity and equality,” he says. “The golden rule that all lives have equal value and we should treat people as we would like to be treated.”
The 37th Dimbleby Lecture will be broadcast on BBC One on Jan 29  

Hapsoro

National environmental movement mourns the passing of a leader

Melati Kaye, Contributor, Bogor | Environment | Tue, December 18 2012, 11:23 AM

A-AA+

Paper Edition | Page: 22

At work: Hapsoro oversees a ceremony to recognize new members of the Telapak network in this undated photo. Courtesy of Forest Watch Indonesia
For the helmsman of a tech-savvy, archipelago-spanning NGO, Hapsoro cut a distinctly retro figure. In Bogor, his home base, people remember him on “car-free” Sunday mornings riding a beat-up bicycle in a sarong and batik blangkon turban.

As a founding member of Telapak and later Forest Watch Indonesia (FWI), Hapsoro was an early and persistent activist against large-scale deforestation. So much was his energy and reach that his untimely death in October at the age 41 has left a huge gap in the nation’s environmental leadership.

At his tahlilan recently, a traditional Muslim “wake” to mark the 40-day anniversary of his passing, Indonesia’s foremost environmentalists turned out to pay their respects.

Many of them were Hapsoro’s classmates or seniors at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB).

The school’s Pecinta Alam or Nature Lovers’ Club in the late 1990s proved to be a fertile intellectual seedbed of “green” activists. Among them are Emy Hafild, Abdon Nababan and Tri Nugroho, who went on to head, respectively, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, Indonesia’s Indigenous People’s Alliance and the Indonesian Tropical Institute.

While other students militated against the Soeharto dictatorship, Pecinta Alam members busied themselves hiking and climbing. It was only after Soeharto’s downfall that massive deforestation drew many of them into activism.

The regulatory vacuum post-dictatorship coincided with the Asian economic meltdown, causing Indonesia’s forests to be cut and sold at a rate higher than anywhere else in the world. Two percent of Indonesia’s forests, a whopping 1.8 million hectares, were logged every year between 2000 and 2005. The Forestry Ministry contests that this was a consistent rate.

Hapsoro, along with another IPB-alumnus, Ambrosius Ruwidrijarto, cofounded Telapak, which became a leading investigator of illegal logging in the 1990s. Beginning at Telapak and later at FWI, Hapsoro documented and denounced the impacts of large-scale illegal logging. This became his life’s work.

In 1996, he founded FWI — an independent non-profit that produces their own, publically accessible maps to monitor those produced and used by the Forestry Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry, the President’s Climate task force and the National Land Agency to grant and manage forest concessions. Since 2002, FWI has worked with the World Resources Institute to monitor illegal activity in Central Kalimantan’s forest concessions where much of Indonesia’s deforestation occurs.

Hapsoro was a vital link between international environmental activists and the ground realities in Indonesia. In 2006, Hapsoro sailed aboard Greenpeace’s signature ship, the Rainbow warrior, to Papua to protest the cutting of the last stretch of intact, as-yet-untouched tropical rainforest that was to be converted into logs bound for markets abroad. The following year, he helped the international environmental watchdog photograph the extent land was being converted from forest to oil palm plantations in Riau.

The nature of the fight against illegal logging has since changed. In 2002 and 2003, licensing and the government’s natural resource management system moved from dictums sent out from Jakarta to regency or province-level duties.

And instead of finding a new way to battle this tide, NGOs seem to be getting smaller and fewer. “Decentralization created more actors,” Ambrosius says. “A new common strategy is needed in Indonesia’s environmental movement but we are still struggling to create one.”

Though his major legacy is helping to preserve his country’s magnificent forests, Hapsoro was also a founding member of Indonesia River Defenders (IRD). But this was not as dramatic a shift as one might think. Hapsoro saw forests and their waterways as intrinsically connected. Forests act as catchment basins for river water. Clean rivers full of fish indicate intact forests along the river-course.

With IRD, Hapsoro returned to Riau again, this time to map river health, and since the visit, the NGO has gained many more regional branches across Indonesia.

“Rivers are where you can see the impacts of the destruction of forests,” explains Hariyanto Kikuk, Hapsoro’s friend. With Hariyanto, Hapsoro cofounded his last NGO, Komunitas Peduli Ciliwung (KPC) or the Community of Concerned for Ciliwung River. The Ciliwung arises in the mountains above Bogor and flows over a hundred kilometers through the capital city before it empties into Jakarta Bay. As part of its activities, KPC organizes weekly river walks to pick trash or plant trees along its banks.

Kikuk sees the founding of this last organization as coming full circle for Hapsoro. “He had already been everywhere advocating for Indonesia’s forests — Kalimantan, Papua, Europe. [With KPC] Hapsoro wanted to be answerable to his neighbors,” says Hariyanto .

And what better place to start than the river he grew up fishing along.

Hapsoro is survived by his wife and three children.

Italy suspends Vatican bank card payments

All tickets and souvenirs at the Vatican will have to be purchased in cash for the time being

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Vatican Bank 'needs more reform'
• Head of Vatican Bank is sacked
• Vatican Bank 'being investigated'

The Italian central bank has suspended all bank card payments in the Vatican, citing its failure to implement fully anti-money laundering legislation, Italian media report.

The Holy See was required to meet European Union safeguards on finances by the start of 2013.

Its failure means tourists will have to pay cash at its museums and shops.

A Vatican spokesman said contacts were under way and the suspension of bank card payments should be "short-lived".

Pope Benedict has promised greater transparency in Vatican finances and the operations of its bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which has in the past been implicated in major money-laundering scandals.

A group of experts from the Council of Europe said last year that the Vatican had made progress in reforming its legislation to meet EU standards but that a lot of work remained to be done.

The failure to complete that work meant the Italian central bank ordered Deutsche Bank Italia, which handles all bank card payments on Vatican territory, to deactivate its terminals on 1 January.

The five million tourists who visited the Vatican museum last year spent more than 90m euros (£73m; $120m) on tickets and souvenirs.

Cash only will be accepted until a solution is reached. The same rules have also been enforced at the Vatican's pharmacy, its post office and the few shops that operate in the tiny territory.

Collections or donations at Mass will continue to have to be made in cash.

More on This Story

Related Stories

• Vatican Bank 'needs more reform'
  18 JULY 2012, EUROPE
• Head of Vatican Bank is sacked
  24 MAY 2012, WORLD
• Vatican Bank 'being investigated'
  21 SEPTEMBER 2010, EUROPE

From other news sites

• Yahoo! UK and IrelandItaly bans card payments in Vatican over money laundering2 hrs ago

• France24VATICAN CITY: Card payments blocked, cash only in Vatican City3 hrs ago

• NEWS.com.auBank card payments suspended in Vatican6 hrs ago

• Finance 24Vatican suspends bank card payments7 hrs ago

• Times Live South AfricaBank card payments suspended in Vatican over money laundering concerns7 hrs ago

• About these results

Share this pag

e-waste

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

e-waste

Britain's e-waste illegally leaking into West Africa

In Britain each year, we throw away a million tonnes of electronic waste - enough to fill Wembley Stadium six times over. So what happens to our broken TVs and computers - our e-waste - once we have dumped it? Raphael Rowe reports from Ghana. When he turns his hand over, 10-year-old Mohammed reveals the deep open cut on his thumb, visible through the black soot that covers his small hands. Two other cuts have been covered up with blackened, filthy plasters. He tells me that the wounds are from the sharp copper wire that he is scavenging from the biggest digital graveyard in Africa. The Agbogbloshie dumpsite is where the poorest of nearby Accra stream in order to scrape out a living from the tons of electrical waste piled here. UK ELECTRONICS BUYING 2010 UK consumers bought more than 17 million TVs and computers Computer sales: 8.2 million Television sales: 9.5 million Source: GFK retail and technology UK Alfred, 12, said he has no choice but to eke out a living at the dumpsite since his mother died. He complained of headaches from the toxic fumes as he and the others use their hands, hammers and fire to extract precious metals from the scrap heap. Activists told me the nearby river is dead owing to the contamination from this crude form of recycling. And, they add, much of this electronic garbage - known as e-waste - originates in the UK. Mike Anane is a campaigner with the League of Environmental Journalists which is trying to stop e-waste pouring into Ghana. "We are destroying the lives of children, we are destroying the environment, the rivers no longer have fish, just because of the illegal shipments and dumping of electronic waste from the UK," he said. Tracking devices It is estimated that 100,000 tons of e-waste is leaking out of the UK each year via the ports that see seven million containers exported each year.  There needs to be a lot more enforcement, but there also needs to be a shake-up of how we handle electronic waste in the UK  Environmental Investigation Agency campaign group A confidential report obtained by Panorama suggests that 77% of e-waste from England and Wales ends up in West Africa, primarily Ghana and Nigeria. Environmental law states that broken electronics, everything from fridges to televisions to computer monitors, should be responsibly recycled within the UK. Discarded electronics need to be tested to ensure they work before they can be legally exported for resale, usually to the developing world. But a BBC Panorama investigation that involved putting hidden tracking devices in broken televisions found evidence of large amounts of e-waste being illegally shipped to West Africa where boys like Mohammed and Alfred are risking their health for scraps of copper and pennies a day. The Environment Agency, which has a special investigations unit dedicated to halting these illegal exports, said the reason behind the trade is obvious. "There is a vast sum of money to be made by exporting abroad illegally," said Chris Smith, National Intelligence Manager at the EA. The government estimates that a 40-foot container of used televisions can contain as many as 600 sets and is worth £7,000 in the street markets of West Africa. It estimates that one in eight containers claiming to be working electronics, is in fact broken e-waste. The maximum penalty for the illegal export of e-waste is an unlimited fine and two years in prison. But in practice the maximum fine has been around £12,000 and no one has been sent to prison. 'Send a message' Margaret Bates, a lecturer in sustainable waste management at Northampton University, said that while other streams of waste are being reduced owing to recycling efforts, e-waste is going in the opposite direction - growing at a rate of 5% a year. FIND OUT MORE Raphael Rowe presents Panorama: Track My Trash Monday, 16 May 8.30 on BBC One She said the cost and time it takes to safely recycle e-waste is fuelling the illegal trade. Ms Bates said it is time for a message to be sent to illegal exporters. "Until fairly recently a lot of the criminals involved in the e-waste trade didn't think they were going to get caught. We need to see people who are doing this sort of thing coming through regularly in the courts and being made to suffer for it." Posing as a small business, Panorama placed a hidden tracking device in a broken television set and then paid a private recycling firm, Sanak Ventures, to dispose of the set. From the company's warehouse in Wembley, the tracker showed that the television was soon on the move to Felixstowe Docks, then shipped to Ghana before if finally ended up in Lagos, Nigeria. And it was in Lagos, in a street market, that we found it - still broken - and for sale for £40. Taking responsibility When asked about how a broken television managed to be exported, Sanak Ventures said they were a respectable company and denied any wrong-doing, but they failed to answer our question of how our broken JVC television ended up in Nigeria. Campaigner Mike Anane says the onus is on the UK to halt e-waste Activist Mike Anane said while governments in Africa are attempting to legislate against the e-waste trade, the source of the broken electronics needs to be addressed. "I think that the onus and greater part of the responsibility rest with the people in the UK," he said. It is a sentiment echoed by the Environmental Investigation Agency - a campaign group. A spokeswoman for the group, which has also attempted to track e-waste from the UK to West Africa, said: "There needs to be a lot more enforcement, but there also needs to be a shake-up of how we handle electronic waste in the UK and our waste needs to be much more closely monitored than it ever has been." Panorama: Track My Trash, BBC One, Monday, 16 May at 2030BST and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.