The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- UK's Miliband wants media watchdog scrapped
- Shrapnel, high security in Turkmen town after blasts
- European suicide rates pushed higher by financial crisis
| UK's Miliband wants media watchdog scrapped Posted: 07 Jul 2011 07:49 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's media watchdog is "toothless" and should be scrapped, opposition leader Ed Miliband is expected to say on Friday after a phone-hacking scandal sent shockwaves across the country and led to the closure of a top-selling tabloid. In extracts of a speech seen by Reuters, drawn up before Thursday's announcement that News International would close the News of the World, the Labour party leader calls for a judge-led inquiry into the scandal rocking Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
He also criticises Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's close relations with News International executives. "The Press Complaints Commission has totally failed," Miliband will say. "It has been exposed as a toothless poodle. It is time to put it out of its misery. We need a new watchdog." Britain's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper will publish for the last time this weekend. Allegations that News of the World journalists hacked the voicemail of thousands of people, from child murder victims to the families of Britain's war dead, have outraged readers and posed a growing threat to Murdoch's hopes of buying out broadcaster BSkyB. The scandal has also touched Cameron, who picked as his communications director a former News of the World editor who resigned over the hacking affair. Miliband will say leaders must take responsibility for change: "I know this is difficult for the prime minister because of his personal relationships and because these are very powerful forces." Cameron, who said he was "revolted" by allegations that News of the World investigators eavesdropped on the voicemail of victims of crime, said he would order an inquiry but resisted calls to put an end to attempts by Murdoch to buy out news and entertainment broadcaster BSkyB. (Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Janet Lawrence) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. | ||
| Shrapnel, high security in Turkmen town after blasts Posted: 07 Jul 2011 07:19 PM PDT ABADAN, Turkmenistan (Reuters) - Army and police units patrolled Abadan on Friday after several explosions were heard in the town close to the Turkmen capital. Residents of Ashgabat, capital of the gas-rich, secretive Central Asian state, reported hearing several loud blasts coming from nearby Abadan at about 4 pm (1100 GMT) on Thursday and said electricity supplies were intermittent. The authorities said fireworks had detonated at a storage facility in Abadan due to hot weather. It said there were no casualties or serious destruction. The website of Turkmenistan's exiled opposition, www.chrono-tm.org, said army ammunition depots were on fire about 20 km (12 miles) outside Ashgabat. A Reuters correspondent said roads in Abadan, which has a power station serving the capital, were strewn with metal shards and the air was thick with acrid smoke. The streets looked deserted. Despite a heavy police and army presence, the town was not cordoned off and cars could enter freely, although police hurried onlookers away. The opposition website said: "There is large-scale destruction and victims" as a result of the blasts. The report was accompanied by a picture of a huge plume of smoke rising over the area. The Turkmen government said in a statement: "The local population is being given all necessary kinds of medical, social and other types of assistance," adding a government meeting on the accident had been chaired by the country's strongman President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. (Reporting by Marat Gurt; Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Janet Lawrence) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. | ||
| European suicide rates pushed higher by financial crisis Posted: 07 Jul 2011 06:17 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece and Ireland seeing the most dramatic increases, researchers said on Friday. But rates of road deaths in the region fell during the same period, possibly because higher numbers of jobless people led to lower car use, according to an initial analysis of data from 10 European Union (EU) countries. "Even though we're starting to see signs of a financial recovery, what we're now also seeing is a human crisis. There's likely to be a long tail of human suffering following the downturn," said David Stuckler, a sociologist at Britain's Cambridge University, who worked on the analysis. Stuckler, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Sanjay Basu of the University of California San Francisco published their initial analysis in the Lancet journal and said the data "reveal the rapidity of the health consequences of financial crises." Stuckler said in a telephone interview the researchers did not yet have enough data to make a worthwhile estimate of how many deaths in total could be linked to the financial crisis, but that is something they plan to do in future work. "In particular, we want to understand better why some individuals, communities, and entire societies are especially vulnerable, yet some seem more resilient to economic shocks," the researchers wrote. Stuckler said he feared the social and health costs of the recent global economic downturn would turn out to be high. "We can already see that the countries facing the most severe financial reversals of fortune, such as Greece and Ireland, had greater rises in suicides," he said. "And suicides are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health problems. Suicide itself is a relatively rare event, but wherever you see a rise in suicides there is also a rise in failed suicide attempts and in new cases of depression." Analysing data available so far, Stuckler and colleagues found that suicide rates were up 17 percent in Greece and 13 percent in Ireland. Unemployment increased by 2.6 percentage points -- a 35 percent relative increase -- between 2007 and 2009 across the EU as a whole, they said. "The steady downward trend in suicide rates, seen...before 2007, reversed at once," the researchers wrote. In 2008 the increase in suicide rates in new EU members states studied -- those like Hungary and Lithuania, which joined after 2004 -- was less than 1 percent, but in the older members it increased by almost 7 percent. And in both, suicides increased further in 2009. Among the 10 countries studied -- Austria, Britain, Finland, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia and Romania -- only Austria had fewer suicides in 2009 than in 2007, with the rate down 5 percent. In all of the other countries, the increase was at least 5 percent. In Britain suicide rates rose from a recent low of 6.14 per 100,000 people aged under 65 in 2007, to 6.75 in 2008 -- an increase of 10 percent, and remained similarly high in 2009. Stuckler said that overall, the higher death rates from suicides appeared to be balanced out by the lower fatalities on the roads, which fell substantially, especially in new EU member countries where they were initially very high. Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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