Entire communities have been cut off by the rising waters (Photo: Wasantha Chandrapala)
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Weather conditions have forced Sri Lanka’s president to abandon a visit to areas affected by severe flooding which has displaced nearly 200,000 people and killed 18 others.
Mahinida Rajapaksa had to cancel his helicopter trip from Polonnaruwa in the east to the badly affected coastal city of Batticaloa 120km (75 miles) away.
The downpour is continuing after two weeks of rain in the centre and east.
The floods have inundated farmland and destroyed rice fields.
The eastern cities of Ampara and Batticaloa have been worst affected by the deluge, which has left some stretches of railway line under nearly a metre of water.
Officials in Ampara say the rainfall there since Saturday has been the highest ever recorded in such a short time.
A number of big reservoirs have burst their banks, destroying paddy fields in a major rice-growing area.
People in some areas have told the BBC they have seen no sign of aid agencies or government relief, and that some people in makeshift camps have been missing out on meals.
Those displaced by the floods have squeezed into 800 camps that have sprung up in school premises, many of which are surrounded by water.
The air force has helped evacuate people and drop food supplies to some cut-off communities.
The government has made an emergency appeal for ordinary people’s help in sending dry rations, mattresses and bottled water.
Clean water and food supplies have been sent by official and international agencies to the worst-hit areas.
But the deputy disaster management minister Duleep Wijesekara said some places, such as Mutur, have been difficult to reach.
“I boarded a high-speed navy boat to get there [to Mutur], but due to the huge waves we had to turn back after sailing for about 15km. After that we had to send food in by air,” he added.
The floods bring a risk of disease, including the mosquito-borne dengue fever, which even in normal times is a severe problem in the country.
The health ministry and relief organisations are trying to supply hygiene kits and raise people’s awareness of health hazards.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The snow caused huge disruption to travel
The severe weather in December cost UK airports operator BAA £24m, the company has said.
Many thousands of air passengers were affected in December as Heathrow and other airports closed temporarily.
BAA said it had handled 7.2 million passengers at its six UK airports in December, down 10.9% from a year ago.
Separately, airline Flybe said the disruption caused by the snow, which led to the cancellation of almost 2,000 of its flights, would cost it £6m.
Earlier this week, Virgin Atlantic said it was withholding the fees it pays to BAA because of its “slow reaction” to the heavy snow.
BAA said the drop in passenger traffic in December was almost entirely due to the severe weather.
Passenger numbers were down 9.5% at Heathrow, BAA’s largest airport, but all the firm’s airports saw steep falls in traffic, with user numbers at Southampton airport down 22% and Edinburgh down 18.4%.
Of the £24m hit from the snow, £19m was accounted for by Heathrow.
The cost was caused by lower revenues as well as higher expenses, particularly in supporting delayed passengers, BAA said.
BAA’s chief executive, Colin Matthew, apologised for the disruption caused by the bad weather.
“We are sorry for the flights that had to be cancelled as a result of the snow,” he said.
“The cost of any disruption to BAA’s airports is significant and a strong financial incentive for us to continue to make Heathrow more resilient.”
Just before Christmas, Mr Matthew announced an inquiry to establish the lessons that could be learned from the disruption. It is due to be published on 11 March.
He also said he would not take his bonus for 2010 because of the “unacceptable conditions for passengers” during the disruptions.
For the year as a whole, BAA said it had handled 103.9 million passengers, down 2.8% from 2009.
However, BAA said that excluding the impact of the severe weather, and the disruption caused by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud in April and May last year, it estimated passenger numbers would have risen 0.6% in 2010.
It added that Heathrow was recovering quickly from the “recessionary trough” of 2009, with record passenger numbers from July to November.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Sainsbury’s is the UK’s third-biggest supermarket group
Sainsbury’s has reported its “best ever” Christmas sales despite what it called the “challenging weather conditions”.
Like-for-like sales excluding petrol, which strip out the effect of sales from new stores, rose by 3.6% in the 14 weeks to 8 January from a year earlier.
The UK’s third-largest supermarket chain said non-food sales had grown particularly strongly.
The group said it had created nearly 6,000 new jobs over the period.
Earlier this week, it said it aimed to create 20,000 jobs over the next three years.
“Our strategy of providing universal customer appeal through great food at fair prices has helped Sainsbury’s to deliver its best-ever Christmas,” said the group’s chief executive Justin King.
He added that Sainsbury’s had increased its market share slightly to 16.6%.
Transactions made during the week of Christmas hit an “all-time high” of 24.5 million, the group said.
It also reported “record” online orders for groceries and said it had seen “strong growth” in sales of home and electrical wares.
Sales of lingerie and clothing accessories jumped by 45%, it added.
“Additional promotion of its higher margin products, along with the weather conditions tempting shoppers to buy more in fewer trips, played into the company’s hands such that its performance could yet prove to be the best of the big four [supermarkets],” said Richard Hunter at broker Hargreaves Lansdown.
Research released earlier this week from data provider Kantar Worldpanel, formerly TNS Worldpanel, indicated that Sainsbury’s was the only one of the UK’s big four supermarkets to increase its market share in the three months preceding Christmas.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Conrad Murray (c) faces up to four years in prison if convicted
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A judge has ordered the personal doctor of Michael Jackson to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter.
Judge Michael Pastor gave the ruling against Dr Conrad Murray at a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles.
Prosecutors say that he gave Jackson a lethal dose of a powerful anaesthetic mixed with other sedatives and then failed to provide proper care.
Dr Murray, 57, has pleaded not guilty, and says he did not give Jackson anything potentially lethal.
Judge Pastor made the order against the cardiologist on the sixth day of the hearing. He also granted a request by the California Medical Board to suspend the licence of Dr Murray to practise in the state.
Dr Murray faces up to four years in prison if convicted at trial.
Earlier, Detective Orlando Martinez, who interviewed Dr Murray two days after Mr Jackson’s death in June 2009, gave evidence to the court.
Mr Martinez told the hearing Dr Murray said that Jackson told him on the day he died he would have to cancel his comeback concerts in London unless he had a dose of the anaesthetic, propofol.
Michael Jackson was rehearsing for a series of concerts in London when he died
The detective said Dr Murray admitted giving Jackson it after a night administering lesser drugs to help him sleep.
The doctor said he then left the room for “two minutes” to go to the bathroom, but on returning found the singer had stopped breathing, Mr Martinez said.
Dr Murray started to try to resuscitate Mr Jackson but told the detective he did not call for an ambulance himself because “he said he was caring for his patient and he did not want to neglect him”.
Prosecutors say that phone records show the doctor made a series of other calls before an ambulance was finally called more than an hour later.
Mr Martinez also said Dr Murray told him he had given Mr Jackson doses of propofol six nights a week for two months but was trying to wean him off the drug as he feared his patient was becoming addicted.
During closing arguments at the hearing, Dr Murray’s lawyer, Joseph Low, said the case should be dismissed because prosecutors had not adequately proved how Dr Murray caused Jackson’s death. He also said Mr Jackson’s health may have been a contributing cause.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The Everyman’s company included Julie Walters (front centre), Matthew Kelly (back centre) and Bill Nighy (back, third from right)
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Pete Postlethwaite, who died last week, was part of a remarkable group of young actors and writers who started their careers at the Liverpool Everyman theatre in the 1970s, alongside Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce and Willy Russell.
In summer 1974, the UK got its first sense that something interesting was happening at a scruffy theatre on Hope Street in Liverpool.
A Beatles musical called John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert, written by a 26-year-old playwright called Willy Russell and starring unknown actors Trevor Eve, Bernard Hill, Anthony Sher and Barbara Dickson, had become a big hit.
It was seen by 15,000 people in six weeks before transferring to the West End, where it ran for a year and won a string of awards.
Pete Postlethwaite captivated audiences as Coriolanus
That would have been fairly impressive. But when the show moved to the West End, most of the Everyman’s company moved with it, leaving a big gap back in Liverpool.
A young Jonathan Pryce was charged with assembling a new acting company, and signed up Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Matthew Kelly and Nicholas le Provost to appear in The Taming of the Shrew that October.
That play would also have featured Pete Postlethwaite as Petruchio, but he had just accepted another job at the Playhouse, the Everyman’s city rival.
He came on board for the next production, however, for a period that saw the Everyman act as a springboard for the careers of some of Britain’s most popular and acclaimed actors.
The story of the Everyman’s class of ’74 has come to the fore again, but is tinged with sadness following Postlethwaite’s death.
His conviction and charisma made a big impression on his fellow cast members.
“Peter was at the centre of that amazing ensemble in Liverpool in the early 70s,” recalls Walters. “I was in a production of Brecht’s Coriolanus with him and I have never ever seen anybody act like that.
“It was just absolutely extraordinary. Talk about being enthralled – the audience were completely terrified part of the time.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before or since. When he came off stage, his mother said to him: ‘Oh Peter you’ll go round the bend if you carry on like that.'”
“The idea was to tackle the political establishment”
Jonathan Pryce
Pryce recalls Postlethwaite as an “enormously likeable, hugely talented, compassionate, political man”.
“You couldn’t help but like him, and audiences loved him. And he had a great sense of fun about him,” he says.
Pryce puts the theatre’s golden spell down to its former artistic director Alan Dossor, who was determined to reflect real life in the region, and to draw the city’s population in.
That included a highly political agenda, with Dossor commissioning plays about local issues and scandals.
“The idea was to tackle the political establishment,” Pryce recalls. “There were lots of targets at the time, and it was felt that it was possible to do things at a local level.”
Dossor’s determination to put real voices on stage was coupled with an attempt to nurture the talent of his performers.
“People were taken care of,” Pryce says. “It was a family. You look back on it and think, yes, it was an extraordinary time. For a lot of us, it formed the way we approached our work.”
There was an emphasis on the whole cast working together to tell the story of a play, rather than a play being a vehicle for star performers, and the methods helped the actors become “fearless” on stage, Pryce adds.
“You were being judged by a tough audience, but you weren’t being judged by the people you were working with.”
“We lived in the same boarding houses… we all lived together and socialised”
Jonathan Pryce
Dossor, speaking to some of his former proteges in BBC Radio 4’s documentary The Reunion, broadcast in 2004, said: “The one thing I wanted all of you to have when you left was the ability to not be wobbled by bad decisions, so that you could survive.”
The gang stayed together for productions including children’s show The Pig and the Junkle, the bawdy comedy Funny Peculiar and Willy Russell’s Breezeblock Park.
The close-knit group spent hours upon hours in each other’s company – if not on stage at the theatre, then putting on shows in local pubs and clubs, drinking in the theatre bar or in the houses they shared.
It was inevitable that relationships formed off stage – Walters got together with Postlethwaite, and Pryce met his future wife, Kate Fahy, also a member of the company.
“The focal point of the theatre was the bar,” Pryce recalls.
“You were in the building more or less all day. It was a lot of fun. We lived in the same boarding houses. You’d have a room or a flat in one of the houses and we all lived together and socialised.
“Those relationships have lasted 30-odd years.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The Winklevoss twins tell Rory Cellan-Jones in April 2010 that they will continue their fight
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Three men who say Mark Zuckerberg stole the Facebook concept from them have asked a US appeals court to re-open a $65m (£42m) legal settlement with the company.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra argue Facebook undervalued its share price when they struck the deal.
With the company now valued at about $50bn, they charge the deception cost them millions and now want more money.
Mr Zuckerberg, who was at Harvard with the three men, has denied the claims.
In a courtroom in San Francisco, lawyers for the Winklevoss twins and Mr Narendra asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow them to re-open a $65m settlement forged in 2008 after they sued the company.
Facebook agreed to the settlement to end “rancorous litigation” but did not admit Mr Zuckerberg had taken their idea.
Senior Judge Clifford Wallace said on Tuesday that the twins had several lawyers representing them at the earlier settlement talks, and that that their father was a business expert, factors he suggested made it hard to believe that anyone took advantage of them.
“I agree my clients were not behind the barn door when brains were passed out,” Jerome Falk, a lawyer for the twins, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The three men are effectively gambling the $65m settlement, analysts say. If the court unwinds the agreement, Facebook will have to decide whether to offer more money or fight it out in court.
Facebook’s lawyers have dismissed the claims as a case of “settlers’ remorse”.
In the 2008 settlement, the brothers received $20m in cash and $45m in stock, based on a $36 per share valuation, Mr Falk said before the hearing.
He argues Facebook had agreed to a $9 per share price in a compensation offer to employees, a price they say the company was obligated to disclosed.
“This was a highly material fact and the fact they didn’t disclose it is a violation of federal security law,” Mr Falk told BBC News.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Richard Black
Bamboo – or even carrots – are not enough – pandas need old trees too
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China’s endangered giant pandas thrive in old forest that has never been logged, research shows.
The finding comes ahead of a decision on whether to end or renew a 12-year logging ban in the area.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers – from China and the US – tell the government that continuing protection would be cost-effective.
They based their finding on data collected during a five-year forest survey in Sichuan Province.
There are thought to be fewer than 2,500 adult giant pandas in the wild, scattered across mountain ranges in small, fragmented populations.
They are classifed as a “conservation-dependent species”, meaning that without protection, they would be on their way to extinction.
In Sichuan – the animals’ main homeland – teams of observers gathered all kinds of data on forests during the State Forestry Administration’s Third National Survey, which ran from 1999 to 2003.
This database has now been mined to see which aspects are most closely associated with the presence of pandas.
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Old forests may stimulate growth of new bamboo, whcih is easier for the pandas to eat
Having bamboo in the area is a key factor that researchers had previously known and understood – hardly surprising, as the plants constitute 99% of the panda’s diet.
However, the researchers – led by Zejun Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing – discovered that the age of the trees also strongly predicted the existence of pandas.
They suggest this link has not been found before because previous studies looked at small areas only.
Why old-growth forest should be so important is not clear, and data of this type cannot yield the answer.
“One possibility is that the bamboo that grows underneath old growth [trees] is more nutritious,” they write.
“Another intriguing possibility is that only old-growth trees grow large enough to form cavities suitable for maternity dens.
“This raises the question: are birth dens a factor-limiting panda population size in reserves with a history of logging?”
Iain Valentine, Director of Animals, Conservation and Education for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) who has worked on giant pandas with Chinese colleagues for abour five years, commented that understanding the animals’ ecological needs was crucial for their long-term survival.
“It could be as simple as that old stands of bamboo produce large new shoots of bamboo at their bases, which are rich in sugars,” he told BBC News.
“These large shoots are softer too, and are therefore easier to eat than hard stalks.
“But conversely it could be far more complicated than this and involve complex seasonal nutritional needs of the panda which themselves vary as a result of the bamboo forest structure and age.”
RZSS has just concluded an agreement with the Chinese Wildlife Conservation Association to host two giant pandas in its Edinburgh Zoo – the first pandas in the UK for 17 years.
The Chinese authorities have implemented a number of policies aimed at conserving the species – banning trade in skins, setting up reserves, and, in 1998, banning logging throughout the panda’s range.
But the logging ban is up for review this year.
The scientists on this study stop short of calling for a continuation; instead, they observe: “It may be more cost-effective to protect the existing old growth than to open it up to logging while protecting an equivalent area of secondary growth forest”.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Matthew Price returns to Haiti to meet some of the 2010 quake victims
Once in a while, you visit a place that you know will forever be lodged in your mind.
That place for me is L’Hopital de la Paix, on Delmas 33, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
I first went there just about 24 hours after the earthquake on 12 January last year.
Now, a year later, walking into the hospital grounds, it all comes back.
It was a clear night, as the stars shone down brightly out of a dark Caribbean sky.
There’s the curb against which I saw a baby’s body lying wrapped and abandoned.
Flashback
Days after the earthquake last year, Matthew Price reported from Port-au-Prince’s Hopital de la Paix:
It is as if a massacre has been perpetrated here. Dirty white sheets cover some of the dead, others lie out in the open, some, their limbs entwined with another’s.
A woman lies on an unfolded cardboard box. There is a pool of her blood slowly collecting below her waist.
One man with tears in his eyes pointed to his young daughter lying on the dirty tiled floor. She has two broken legs and a large gash in her head. Her sister is already dead. “Ca va?” her father asks. “Oui,” she replies softly – but she is not okay.
14 January: Living sleep among dead 21 January: Despair deepens amid wait for aid 12 July: Haiti bears scars six months on
There’s the grass leading up to the main building, where I watched a man lay down to sleep between two dead people.
There are the steps that take me through the entrance, and back into the corridor down which a woman’s wail echoed, where a girl wrapped in bloody sheets lay curled up on a table.
And there’s the corner where Astrel Jacques first introduced me to his daughter.
Telia was lying on the tiled floor, her little legs broken, the dirty bandages on her head barely stopping the bleeding from a large gash.
Now, here we are again, the three of us, at the same corner a year later.
Telia’s hair is in braids, each finished off with a white plastic clip.
The scar across her forehead, running down from hairline to eyebrow, is still vivid. So, too, the scars on her legs. She will always have those. But today at least she can smile, and she has a beautiful smile.
“As I’m walking right here, you had to step on dead bodies. Dead bodies was everywhere,” Astrel recollects in broken English as we head along the now pristine corridors.
“Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons: everybody was just fighting to stay alive.”
Telia’s father says she is still traumatised by the events of a year ago
Telia is a quiet girl. Her father says she is still traumatised.
She was injured by falling masonry when the earthquake hit. Her younger sister was killed. So, too, was her grandmother. The scars, physical and mental, will be with her for the rest of her life.
But will Haiti too be scared forever? Twelve months ago, as I walked past the dead, as the smell of decaying bodies grew more pungent day by day, there was not much to be positive about.
There were, however, some signs of encouragement. One was the sheer level of support and help offered from around the world. Compassion fatigue? Hardly. Haiti caught the world’s attention, and benefited from the world’s generosity.
Then there was the resourcefulness of the Haitians themselves. They managed to return to some sort of basic existence pretty quickly.
There were the international promises to re-build a better Haiti – everyone seemed to agree, and the momentum was building to do just that.
Today though, back on that hospital corner, Astrel Jacques is no longer encouraged.
“As of right now, Haiti will never rebuild. I mean I don’t see any sign. For something to rebuild you have to see signs. You have to see hands put in. You have to see actions. You have to see talks. I don’t see any of it.”
It is a common refrain, born somewhat out of reality, but also out of frustration.
There have been changes here, but so far they have been limited.
In those days after the earthquake, I visited a supposedly temporary camp Next to it was a patch of empty, stony ground. I wondered how much longer it would be before the tents and tarpaulins spread out from the camp to cover it, too.
A month later, when I next saw it, people were indeed beginning to put up rough wooden structures. A few poles and bit of plastic sheeting.
After six months however, as I next passed by, the land was empty, a fence around it. A waste of space it seemed.
Now, there are 350 new homes there. Wooden structures, and temporary, but the people who moved in over the last few days consider themselves lucky. They finally have something more than a tent that they can call home.
The issue many here have is that even this is not a long-term solution. It took the International Red Cross a year to get permission to use the land, to secure it, to get the materials, to move people in.
Haiti’s 2010 EarthquakeStruck 12 January, 2010 at 1653 local time (2153 GMT)Magnitude 7.0, epicentre about 15km (10 miles) south-west of capital Port-au-Prince, near town of LeoganeKilled about 230,000 people, injured about 300,000 peopleMore than 50 aftershocksLeft about one million people homeless
Satellite image: Haiti a day after the earthquakeAnd yet there are no paved roads in what is Port-au-Prince’s newest neighbourhood, no sewage infrastructure, no electricity. Within a year this may well be Port-au-Prince’s newest slum.
This kind of rebuilding is also the exception. Much rubble is still lying where it fell.
In a crowded district, which sits in the fold between two hills, many of the ruins I climbed over a year ago are still there. As I wind through the tiny alleyways, there are some signs of clearance.
Outside Fabula’s tin shack for instance, the mound we stood on six months ago has been cleared, leaving an empty plot where one day someone will build.
Fabula’s son is now one year old. I met him in the first few minutes of his life. He was born just after the earthquake. His mother, too exhausted to push him out, almost died in labour.
Her life is still immensely hard.
“Nothing has changed,” she says.
“The people who are fortunate have done some small rebuilding, but the unfortunate have not done anything. My mum lives up the hill in a camp. I still can’t rebuild our house.”
Haiti is the kind of place that gets under your skin.
It plays with your emotions.
I have spent much of the past week here feeling angry. Why has seemingly so little been achieved?
Fabula’s son was born just after the earthquake
You can point fingers in many directions. At the government and its weak leadership – but then 17% of its civil servants died in the earthquake, and it was weak anyway.
At the international community, for failing to live up to their promises, but then all agree this is one of the most complex humanitarian disasters of the modern age, and addressing it is going to take decades.
At the NGOs – of whom there are thousands here – for failing to start longer-term projects, but then they have been pushed to the limit by other challenges, a hurricane and a cholera epidemic. They have kept Haiti alive on life support.
The challenge remains though, to move this country off emergency care, and into long-term rehabilitation.
The big stuff needs to be addressed.
A more able political leadership needs to be established. Infrastructure projects need to be planned – new streets, a sewage system and power grid. Jobs need to be created. Houses built. An entire country needs to be recreated.
How though, do you do that? Let’s hope in a year’s time we’re not still asking the same question.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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