Friday 17 August 2012

Mitt's runnning mate


As Mitt Romney’s shaky one-man road-show reeled in some reinforcement from Paul Ryan, Rupert Murdoch described the Republican presidential candidate’s choice of running mate as “almost perfect”, and the Democrats may gleefully agree.

Mr Ryan was presented in faintly farcical manner, billed as the “next President” by his bumbling boss, who then interrupted his speech to correct the cock-up, inadvertently painting it as a possibly more palatable option. When unhindered however, Ryan revealed the easy, affable intelligence apparently absent from his campaign colleague. Whether or not you can digest the doctrine, it is hard to knock Ryan’s delivery.

Regarded as the furthest to the right of Romney’s options, Paul Ryan, at 42, has already represented his home state of Wisconsin in Congress for seven terms. As chairman of the committee overseeing the federal budget, he has also authored an alternative to Barack Obama’s budget. His “Path to Prosperity” reads like chapters chopped from the conservative bible. The plan proposes slashing the soaring US debt more dramatically than the present administration would dare, radically reducing government spending, whilst cutting tax for top earners. A familiar story to that told on this side of the pond of course, but one yet to produce a happy ending.

The Republican guard will no doubt relish Paul Ryan’s robust plans, his insightful intellect and his considerable contrast to the gaffe-prone Governor Romney, and yet his selection of side-kick is not without its risks. Democrats will dine out on the perception that the “Path to Prosperity” may not perhaps be wide enough for everyone. Ryan’s mooted reform of Medicare, for example, has caused concern for the over 65s. Acting as a guarantee of medical services for ageing Americans, it’s the nearest they get to an NHS, and meddling with that may not sit well with the elderly of the electorate. In addition, despite being a fully paid-up member of the stimulus-sceptic society, Ryan has been forced to admit that he went cap in hand for the very funding he refused to support, having twice denied he did.

But these are just the early skirmishes, and with the cast now complete, the circus starts in earnest. President Obama, as incumbent in uncertain times, has a hard sell on his hands, and with Ryan in his corner, Romney now packs a more powerful punch in the policy department. Donations to the Republican campaign have reportedly rocketed in response to Ryan’s recruitment, so with both sides rolling up their sleeves, the fight is unlikely to be clean, and it certainly won’t be cheap.  

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Parking a rover on a Martian mountain.

To great fanfare, a Nasa probe about the size of a small hatchback, has landed on the planet Mars, and will be shuffling about for the next couple of years looking for signs of life. I have had a similar experience in Holyhead.

Billions of years ago, so science insists, there was water present on the red planet, so this mission is to ascertain if there was anything around to drink it. Our heroic hatchback will therefore be on sightseeing and soil sampling detail, and like any self respecting tourist on a daytrip to Margate, the Curiosity Rover will send back copious holiday snaps, and spend a large part of its time digging.  

The journey to Mars is a bottom-numbing 570 million kilometres, but at least with unmanned space-flight you can cut out the toilet breaks. The final daring descent to the planet’s surface is the most critical phase, affectionately dubbed “seven minutes of terror”. As the radio signals take around 14 minutes to travel back to Earth, the good folk at Nasa had to wait, like agonised expectant parents, to see if Curiosity could touchdown in tact, or become a rather pricey jigsaw puzzle.

As it was, the number cruncher’s calculations were correct. The probe pierced the planet’s atmosphere at 13,000 mph before decelerating rapidly using a canny combination of parachute and retrorockets, which proved effective, but more expensive that my wife thumping an imaginary brake pedal with her size fives and screaming. The landing manoeuvre was then completed by the “Sky Crane” lowering the rover safely to the surface on nylon ropes.

The good news was greeted on the ground with gleeful delirium. For many, the mission was nearly ten years in the making, and the relief was palpable in an outpouring of emotion seldom seen in those with more letters after their names than in them, even American ones.  

But this is a modern mission by any means. Curiosity, like any gal about the galaxy, has her own Twitter feed, and when settled into her new surroundings, she tweeted: “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!”

Sadly, Gale has so far declined to comment.

Thursday 2 August 2012

Honouring Shafilea Ahmed.


“Feelings of sympathy and revulsion” should be set aside, the jury have been told, as they retire to consider their verdicts in the trial of Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed. The couple, of Pakistani origin, stand accused of murdering their 17 year old daughter, Shafilea, at the family home in Warrington in September 2003, in a row over her desire for a western lifestyle.

During the three month trial, the court heard details of how the teenager drank bleach on a family holiday to Pakistan, fearing she would be forced into an arranged marriage and denied a return to the UK. Having also listened to the testimony of  the couple’s younger daughter Alesha, who claims to have witnessed her parents forcing a plastic bag into Shafilea’s mouth to suffocate her, setting aside sympathy and revulsion may yet be the hardest task the jury have faced.

Honour killings are hidden crimes by nature, statistics are therefore challenging to collate and likely to depict a picture that falls short of the true scale. However, in March of this year the issue was the subject of a Panorama investigation by the BBC, revealing that a national helpline for “honour” related domestic violence receives 500 calls per month. In addition, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, in a survey of UK police forces, found the number of honour crimes to be 2,823 per year, which is almost eight a day.

Before being taken to Pakistan on a one way ticket, Shafilea Ahmed approached Warrington Borough Council for emergency housing. Her application suggests her father Iftikhar was all too adept at setting “feelings of sympathy” aside, going beyond a simple cry for help into a catalogue of alleged abuse. She mentioned her not-unfounded fears of an arranged marriage, “regular incidents of violence” from the age of 15, and having been prevented from attending college and her part time job. Depicting a build up of violent treatment at the hands of her parents, the 17 year old had clearly felt that the involvement of the police and social services would be enough to secure her safety. Instead, she disappeared in September 2003, her body discovered on the banks of the River Kent in Cumbria in February of 2004.   

Did authorities with the power to intervene suffer inertia to avoid a charge of racial intolerance? Did they lack the legal teeth to react as robustly as the situation demanded? When lives are taken within our borders through a sense of honour that does not belong, our collective honour rests on these questions being asked and answered. In order for the judicial system to be beyond reproach, society’s representatives in the jury must indeed endeavour to transcend sympathy and revulsion, as Mr Justice Roderick Evans indicates. If however, as a wider community, we ever cease to be so stirred then we will have failed Shafilea Ahmed for a second time.