Julian Assange says he will stay in the Ecuadorian embassy "as long as it takes"

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange marked a year living in one room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week, and announced he will stay "as long as it takes" to resolve his situation. He originally took refuge in the embassy when the British high court refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden, but now he says he won't come out even if Sweden drops its request because he believes the US has already drawn a secret warrant for his extradition on charges of leaking military documents. The advantage for Assange in remaining in the embassy is clear; he keeps his case in the media spotlight, a cause he's helped this week by tying his case to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's, offering him a charter flight from Hong Kong to Iceland. It's interesting to think about what Ecuador is gaining from this; foreign minister Ricardo Patino visited London for talks this weekend in what looked like a desperate attempt to get rid of their awkward house guest, but then defiantly told a press conference Britain is violating Assange's human rights. It seems to me that Rafael Correa's government believes it's worth risking strained relations with Britain and the US for regional diplomatic gains; the charismatic Ecuadorian president sees himself as the heir to Hugo Chavez as leader of the Latin American left and wants to be seen defending the sovereignty of small countries against perceived imperialism, even if that means sheltering an alleged rapist.

Here's my report for Channel News Asia on Assange's year in the embassy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3uXbFbtoww

G8 disappoints on tax evasion

Last week I interviewed a number of anti-poverty activists full of hope ahead of the G8 summit, praising David Cameron's courage in pushing the issue to the top of the summit agenda. For the British government, the political calculation is clear; the electoral advantage in convincing a public outraged by serial revelations about tax dodging that major international firms are being forced to pay their share should outweigh the interests of keeping those firms happy. All the G8 nations lose money to tax havens; developing nations lose more than they receive in aid, as multinationals extract resources and hide their business in shell companies based offshore. The summit concluded with much fanfare about a breakthrough in fighting tax evasion; but the devil is in the detail. Campaigners wanted two things: a set of international rules on exchange of tax information, and a pubic registry of beneficial ownership that shows who really owns companies. On the former, the G8 agreed to exchange information with one another, but doubts remain over how much developing countries will get access to that information, with the US particularly having pushed for exchanges to be reciprocal, when most developing nations just don't have the bureaucracy to collect that kind of information. On the latter, the UK was alone in pushing for public registries. A 10 point plan was agreed that says lots of the right things, but doesn't give member countries any deadlines for action. I'm reminded of the fact that a quarter of the aid promised to developing countries at the 2005 G8 summit has yet to be received; set-piece summit diplomacy continues to make grandiose promises, but deliver very little.

Here's my report on the G8 and tax evasion for Channel News Asia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRqZYG2EoR8

British space industry goes into orbit

The UK is hoping to become a world leader in aerospace technology - with the government last year announcing a 300 million pound boost in funding for the sector, saying Britain could become the best place in the world to do science.

The drive to develop new satellite technology in Britain is being led by a collaborative project with China - manufacturing high-resolution observation satellites in a factory near London, as part of a joint agreement with Beijing-based firm 21AT.

Here's my report for CCTV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kgeWBvLCCk

Ethical fashion, made in Britain

After the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a thousand people, the major British retailers are under increasing pressure to clean up their supply chains, with Primark among big names forced to admit their clothes were being made in the factory where the disaster occurred. Fast fashion retailers aren't solely responsible for poor welfare standards though - far more expensive brands are also unable to give shoppers any guarantees about the way their clothes are produced, I discovered when researching this piece for CCTV. But there is an alternative; small British brands who are revitalizing the garment industry in Britain and keeping traditional crafts like Harris tweed alive, by choosing to produce their clothes entirely in the UK, as you can see in this report.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsGUqJgeyD4

On Carnival, and deleting racism from the dictionary

I've neglected to blog entirely since moving to South America, but did feel the urge to sit down and write this evening, so apologies for the poor service, and I hope this is the beginning of a return to form. 

It's Carnival here in Uruguay, a place that clearly decided that if they couldn't beat Brazil in sequins and spectacular, they would instead trump them by having the world's longest Carnival, seven weeks of it, stretching out to the middle of March with no regard whatsoever for Lenten frugality. The setpiece though is a parade that sees teams of dancers snake their way through the city to a throbbingly heavy drumbeat pounded out until the drummers' hands bleed - a shockingly African drumbeat. I say shockingly because one could easily live here for years under the impression you were in a small town in Spain or italy several decades ago, certainly before the arrival of mass immigration; quaint restaurants selling home-made gnocchi, blustery beaches, bars that play the Beatles unironically - in short, a less exotic feeling place 6000 miles from Europe it is hard to imagine. 

In the 17th century, though, Montevideo was the main entry port for African slaves trafficked to South America to till Brazilian sugar plantations or toil in Bolivian silver mines, and inevitably some stayed. About 8% of the population is considered of African descent now. Their faces are virtually absent from the city centre and swish beachside suburbs, being mostly tucked away in parts of the city you're advised not to go to alone, only allowed to stake a claim to public spaces at odd events like the carnival parade, or the festival pictured here, where believers throw fruit and flowers into the Atlantic for the African sea goddess Iemanjà. 

Those faces have also made newspaper headlines here lately for less picturesque reasons - a racially motivated attack by two white girls on a black anti-racism activist outside a nightclub has caused a national bout of soul-searching about whether Uruguay is much more racist than people would like to think. Campaigners have also been grabbing column inches with a petition to get the expression "trabajar como un negro" - to work like a black man - removed from the official Spanish dictionary. If you're a native English speaker, of course, you just involuntarily gasped on reading that expression, and I feel slightly morally compromised for having even written it, but the role of dictionaries is to describe language as it is used, not prescribe - or proscribe - it. 

There is a debate worth having here, though, about language, racism and political correctness. The conservative press here, while admitting the black population has suffered systemic discrimination, rails against copying the Anglophone example of policing language, socially banning certain terms and replacing them with more consensual alternatives, and many in the Anglophone press would agree. Even if reports that, say, Luton Council once banned Christmas decorations because they might offend non-Christian residents (this was repeated in an Uruguayan paper today, but I'm virtually certain it was a British tabloid invention) have been somewhat exaggerated, we all sometimes feel that in English we are treading in a linguistic minefield. Spanish is far less socially policed in this sense; does that mean, as someone argued to me last night, that Uruguay's most famous son Luis Suarez shouldn't have been suspended, whatever he said to Patrice Evra, because for him the words don't pack the same cultural punch? There is a shred of a case here - most people swear much more liberally in foreign languages because you lose the learnt sense of taboo - but I don't believe that Suarez, who has claimed the regular excoriation he gets from the British press is racially motivated, doesn't understand the taboo, even if he doesn't know much about the cultural baggage around race in Britain or Evra's native France. Does the blunt language still used about race in Spanish, then, really mean its speakers are generally more racist than Anglophones? Most people who consider themselves cosmopolitan and multilingual would say it's just a question of cultural difference, and most translators, if confronted with "trabajar como un negro" would render it into something inoffensive in English.

And yet. And yet, in Uruguay the unemployment rate for young black women is nearly double that for white ones. A scholarship scheme to help send Afro-Uruguayans to university can't find enough qualified applicants. In Mexico, one of my home countries, the indigenous population suffers systematic discrimination, to the point where people of indigenous origin living in cities do everything they can to hide that fact. They rewrite their histories and pretend they can't speak indigenous languages to fear of being classed an "indio", a word that's still almost universally used, and makes me shudder every time I hear it. Language is not just a toolkit manipulated to describe the world around us - it manipulates us, it sets the parameters within which we can express ourselves. We think we can go in any direction we choose, but in fact we have a set range of passages to choose from within the architecture built by syntax, grammar, and the vocabulary available to us. Deleting an expression from a dictionary in itself cannot help close one of those passages, but its existence is the signifier that points towards a deeper cultural problem. It will take time for mainstream Spanish usage to absorb the difference between, say, disabled people and people with disabilities, but the quicker it goes down that route, the better.  

And if you clicked on this hoping for a fun story about Carnival, here's one I made earlier - about Uruguay's 79 year old drag queen.

The campaign that was - and the problems it's left President Hollande

This post was originally published on my  France24 blog on May 7th 2012.

It was the party the French left have waited 31 years for - the iconic Place de la Bastille carpeted with people squeezed in so tight you could barely breathe, people hanging out of trees and lampposts with French flags, campaign T-shirts and home-made placards, deafening boos when Nicolas Sarkozy took to the giant plasma screen to give a surprisingly humble admission of defeat, and far, far more deafening applause when François Hollande took to the stage at half past midnight to address the crowd for the first time as their president. For those of us who were there, it's a moment of history to remember for ever, but reading the signs in the crowd was enough to flag up some of the challenges that face President François - and the fault lines that could soon appear among the ecstatic crowd.




There were louder shouts of 'Sarkozy, c'est fini' than anything else - and more posters attacking the bling-bling president than vaunting the virtues of Mr Normal, the provincial bank manager lookalike from Corrèze. In an overwhelmingly negative campaign, this has been more a punishment vote for the incumbent than an expression of confidence in Hollande - as today's Guardian put it, Nicolas Sarkozy should take this personally, because it is personal. Some of the French were put off from that first night at le Fouquet's five years ago, by the yachts and the Rolexes and the supermodel wife, others by the hard right tone of a re-election campaign that blamed immigrants for all France's woes and claimed halal meat was foremost among voters' worries, but it will take work to convince many the man they voted for is more than the least bad option. Then there are the far deeper divisions in French society that right-wing campaign dug; we're left, effectively, with three Frances: the victorious left, the disappointed mainstream right, and the enraged hard right, who feel entirely disassociated from traditional politics and have chosen to reject a European-leaning, globalised France they feel has rejected them, by tossing them onto the scrapheap of unemployment and dead-end jobs. Nicolas Sarkozy is overwhelmingly responsible or this, for running a campaign that crossed every taboo, from suggesing a populist referendum on immigration or saying le Pen was 'not incompatible' with teh values of the Republic; but it's François Hollande who has to find a way to re-engage the often young, mostly working class, small town voters who chose Marine le Pen - he cannot afford to ignore them. Parliamentary elections are just a month away, and Le Pen is counting on the implosion of the defeated UMP to win a block of seats - he must show the socialists can build those voters a better future and counter the malign influence she may soon wield from the Assemblée Nationale.




Many of those who did vote for him also present a problem; one of the commonest placards last night was a variation on 'François, don't let us down'. After 17 years of right-wing government, hopes on the French left could hardly be running higher; and he'll be under a lot of pressure ot fulfil them. The 11% of far-left voters who opted for anti-capitalist Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round did so to send a future President Hollande a clear message - many on the left also feel entirely disenchanted with the current system, and would like it remade virtually from scratch. Communist paper l'Humanité today called for higher wages, more protection from redundancy and retirement at 60 for all; Hollande has promised none of that, but that won't stop widespread disappointment, and probably angry unions on the streets, when it becomes plain just how empty the state coffers are.




The most common message heard on the campaign trail, though, was 'Why aren't the candidates saying anything about the issues that worry me?' ; most commonly, housing, unemployment, the economy, and the future of France in Europe. Hollande, of course, has promised to renegotiate the European fiscal pact, and has become the embodiment of hope for many struggling under austerity measures from Lisbon to Athens. It very much remains to be seen, though, if he can really create a new Europe-wide policy based on growth, or if those many cynical French voters who said 'It hardly matters who I vote for, our economic policy will be decided in Brussels and Berlin anyway' will turn out to be right after all. It was certainly a good party - but the new President will have no breathing space to recover.

What do young voters want?

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on April 11th 2012.

Definitely my weirdest experience of covering this French election campaign was at a UMP youth rally a couple of weeks ago, watching a series of well-groomed young people, most of whom didn't look old enough to vote at all, writing their messages of support (and declarations of love) to the President with marker pens on a white wall, and queueing up to have their photos taken with a cardboard cut out of their hero. Unfortunately for him, these cravat-wearing heirs of France's ruling class are far from typical of their age group - two thirds of under 30s voted socialist in 2007. Polls now indicate their preferences might have swung in some rather less orthodox directions - one this week had Marine le Pen as the preferred candidate for 18-25 year olds, while numerous others say large chunks of the young don't plan to vote at all. This risk of record low turnout worries both major parties - this week saw a unlikely political spat over driving licences as both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande both promised to make them cheaper to get, in a fairly blatant bid for the young vote. They've got concrete policies aimed at that age group too - Hollande's put them at the heart of his campaign, offering to cut charges for employers hiring them, while Sarkozy promised a youth bank to help them finance study or starting a business. Nevertheless, a poll for today's l'Humanité said 73% of the young are 'disappointed with all the candidates'.

Young people, though, don't constitute any more of a homogenous vote than any other age group, and they aren't all avoiding the polls for the same reasons either. A clever bit of polling from Liberation recently divided them into four groups; the 'prosystem' 22% - that's the polo shirted middle-class kids who want to see Sarkozy re-elected, and tend to be very well educated and optimistic about their futures; the 32% who want to see things change, sympathise with the Occupy movement, and feel their generation has been ripped off by their elders - they choose left wing candidates Hollande or Jean-Luc Melenchon, but also Marine le Pen, an example of how she's managed to make her party presentable, partly by stealing a lot of the economic clothes of the left; the 17% who really aren't interested in politics at all; and the 29%  of often unemployed or low income youth who say they're completely disenchanted and unlikely to vote at all - or if they do, for you guessed it, Marine le Pen. Her poll numbers are actually falling consistently among voters as a whole, but her mix of a fresh and engaging image with rhetoric placing her as the defender of ordinary people against a rapacious system is playing well with impressionable young people who don't remember her father's anti-Semitic rants. It's this temptation towards extremism - or abstention - that the main parties are doing everything to fight. I went to meet some of their youth leaders, to find out how they do it.