Saturday special | The Guardian Latest news and comment on Saturday special from the Guardian en-gb Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2014 Sat, 12 Jul 2014 11:39:40 GMT 2014-07-12T11:39:40Z en-gb Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2014 The Guardian Corrections and clarifications <p>The item on page 7 of today's Family section headlined Snapshot: My parents on stage, Ilfracombe, 1935, is by Paul Delve. It was attributed to Anna Melville-James in error.</p><p>In our obituary of the pioneering photographer and pilot Anne Noggle, we attributed to her the most unlikely job of dust-cropping. Crop-dusting was what we meant (page 36, September 14).</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:55:27 GMT Guardian Staff 2005-09-17T22:55:27Z Leader: In praise of ... Skype <p>The world's telephone system is being systematically destroyed by upstart hi-tech companies - led by Skype - who are routing calls through the internet free of charge to anyone who signs up. It is a beautiful technology. It uses the existing infrastructure of the internet so it can scale its business ad infinitum without much fresh investment. New subscribers (signing up at 150,000 a day) don't cost anything, so Skype can afford to charge nothing for calls in the hope of selling other services later. Traditional (monopolistic) telephone operators must either embrace the new technology (as BT is doing), or get out of town.</p><p>Skype was cannily taken over by eBay, the world's biggest online market, this week. Many analysts thought a price tag of over $2.6bn for a company with sales - not profits - of less than $70m had a hint of madness about it. Maybe, but buying the market leader (with almost 50% of net voice traffic) in the world's fastest-growing industry will not only enhance eBay's own business but could turn it into a giant phone company. Skype, only two years old, has been praised by the OECD for undercutting fixed carriers by 80%. Unusually, in the internet age, Skype was, until this week, a European company, set up by a Swede and a Dane with its HQ in Luxembourg and employees in Estonia and London. The founders have made a mint for themselves, but if they help cut the world's phone bills by 80% there won't be many people complaining.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> eBay Telecoms Internet Technology Skype Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:55:14 GMT Leader 2005-09-17T22:55:14Z Leader: UN summit <p>Like other issues on the summit agenda, this was subject to much battering as the final document was negotiated. Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Syria tried to block it. And for all its rhetoric about freedom, the US did not want to be obliged to act in all such cases, preferring a reference to &quot;moral responsibility&quot;. Happily, a majority of states, including many in Africa, the EU and Japan, backed Canada's initiative - producing what amounts to a significant advance in international humanitarian law and a clear break with the UN's tradition of non-intervention.</p><p>Cynics and UN-bashers will counter that the 1994 Rwandan genocide - when nearly a million died in 100 days - took place despite the strictures of the 1948 genocide convention, itself a response to the Nazis' industrial-scale extermination of Jews in the second world war. It would be right too to point to sterile semantic debates over what has happened in Darfur, where there have been planned mass killings of people on the basis of their ethnic identity, but a shameful failure to act because of national interests such as China's close ties with Sudan. Nato's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 went ahead without a UN mandate because Russia, an ally of Serbia, blocked agreement in the security council. Yet no one who has followed the cases being tried at the UN tribunal in the Hague - including the Srebrenica massacre - can doubt the nature of the crimes committed in the Balkan wars.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:55:14 GMT Leader 2005-09-17T22:55:14Z Letters: Is there intelligent design? <p>The intelligent design argument (The ideas interview, G2, September 12) has been around for centuries and is no more valid now than when it was first proposed. St Anselm outlined a version in The Proslogion, almost 1,000 years ago. Evolution has taken place over billions of years and Michael Behe accepts that the evolution of complex organisms can arise from simple ones. Surely the same is possible at a molecular level. The search for a designer stems at an emotional level from a desire not to be alone and at an intellectual level from the inability to explain how something like the universe can come from nothing. Intelligent design offers us comfort only at the emotional level because at an intellectual level it fails to explain where the designer came from.</p><p>For centuries, scientists have endured persecution simply to be able to question established religious dogma. To see this dogma coming through the tradesman's entrance in new packaging is depressing. Intelligent design is the same hocus-pocus that leads people to believe in voodoo and that it is God's will that they should blow themselves up on a bus. <br /><strong>Adam Hamdy</strong> <br />Willoughbridge, Salop</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Science Religion Society Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:55:09 GMT Guardian Staff 2005-09-17T22:55:09Z Letters: Literary molehills <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:53:48 GMT Guardian Staff 2005-09-17T22:53:48Z Letters: The right place for personal memorials <p>In the little bay it stands on a plinth out of the water on the spot where the child fell over the side of the rowing boat and disappeared. It's so near the shore you could skim a stone to it; the water is no more than a few metres deep, yet the child's body was never found. You can shut your eyes a century later and feel the aching, consuming pain of the family as it searched in that beautiful place for their child.</p><p>And there's the point the young Muriel missed when she concluded &quot;doubly unpleasant was the hierarchy of grief that the statue implied&quot;. No, it's the stark evidence that grief transcends hierarchy, the statue speaks to. No amount of wealth, and the Colquhouns had plenty, could buy them out of the suffering the episode caused them. No lack of wealth, education, intelligence or resources makes the loss of a poor person's child easier or harder to bear. Grief is grief.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:53:48 GMT Guardian Staff 2005-09-17T22:53:48Z Letters: Hove actually needs fantastic buildings <p>In 1995 I was working with a renowned German housing architect. We were visited by Frank Gehry, who was undertaking research prior to building his Frankfurt-Goldstein housing complex. We were taken aback at the resultant scheme which was lumpen, uninviting and inferior to the best of the home-grown architectural talents' offerings. Learning from this, if the Hove scheme were, for example, subject to a genuine competition open to UK architects, it is certain that many of Jenkins' architectural concerns would be successfully addressed by a strong diversity of sensitive home-grown designers. Someone might propose buildings, even tall ones, that actually enhanced the local skyline rather than creating a gawdy theme park of Gehryesque cliches. <br /><b>Adam Firth</b> <br />Leigh-on-Sea, Essex</p><p>No planner in their right mind is going to turn down two big towers, because they tick all the right boxes: they're bold, innovative, achieve fantastic levels of built-density and are likely to secure massive amounts of &quot;planning gain&quot; (money) from the developers to benefit the community in the form of open space, improved public transport and community facilities.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:53:48 GMT Guardian Staff 2005-09-17T22:53:48Z Country diary: Snowdonia <p>Few places in the Welsh hills are more replete with story than this. Vortigern, who invited the Saxons in, had his stronghold here; here Myrddin Ambrosius - the enchanter Merlin of Arthurian legend - was brought as a child to be sacrificed, proved himself wiser than wizards, foretold conflict. Under the footings of this ruined tower, dragons fought. Now, apart from the chittering disputations of rubble-occupying wrens, and a few querulous sheep calling from streamside meadows below, all is silent.</p><p>Resting against a wall on the outer defences, I look out. A mounting sun burns down. A fog-bank pink as candy-floss rolls up the hillside, in front of it a lone heron in slow flight. It rounds a protruding bluff, sights the waters of Llyn Dinas, glides to land, stalks into the shallows, and stands motionless like some tutelary spirit, deadly, spear-intent.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Rural affairs UK news Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:53:26 GMT Jim Perrin 2005-09-17T22:53:26Z Leader: Terrorism measures <p>Here are three ways fundamental democratic principles are being quite unnecessarily damaged by this week's moves. First, free speech. Under the proposed law anyone who &quot;glorifies, exalts or celebrates&quot; any terrorist act committed over the past 20 years could face a sentence of up to five years. Rarely, even within notorious conspiracy legislation, has there been such a broadly drafted clause. What makes it even more unnecessary is that the bill already tightens up the incitement to terrorism offence. If the test has to be overt endorsement of terrorism - as officials suggested this week - why not prosecute them under the direct incitement clause? More absurd still, the home secretary will be empowered to go even further and draw up a list of historical terrorist acts which if &quot;glorified&quot; could mean a criminal act had been committed. Consider the huge distractions such a list would generate, when all efforts ought to be concentrated on effective moves to pre-empt terrorism.</p><p>Second - which both opposition parties are rightly opposing - is a clause extending the right to detain suspects for questioning for up to three months. Remember, we are talking about suspects. Many will turn out to be innocent. The current 14 days was only recently introduced. Even at the height of the IRA campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, only seven-day detentions were allowed. Three months would be the equivalent of a six-month prison sentence given current 50% remission rules. Clearly the home secretary had doubts himself. An early draft of a letter he sent to shadow spokesmen was leaked yesterday. It included the line - &quot;I believe there is room for debate as to whether we should go as far as three months&quot; - that was deleted from the final version. Charles Clarke is not going to win the cross-party support which he was rightly seeking to build if he sticks to this proposal. He should drop it now.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Politics Counter-terrorism policy World news UK security and counter-terrorism UK news Immigration and asylum Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:21:36 GMT Leader 2005-09-17T01:21:36Z From the archive <p>They began their shortened lives again at 9am today in shed 107 of Southern Region railway docks. A joyful crowd had come to meet them, and a hundred private festivals were celebrated every minute as sunburned, happy soldiers crowded down the gangways from the transport Asturias. Children in their Sunday best were hoisted high into the air, admired, embraced and deposited among kitbags, while all the news of the 30 months came tumbling out at once. The long moment of welcome, the sum of the personal rejoicing of five hundred happy families, made slightly ludicrous the Army's stiff but well-meant attempts to be informal and the dark preoccupation of the press with the prisoners' politics. Brigadiers with nervous smiles wandered unsaluted through the throng. As for the Communists, real or alleged, the general opinion among the prisoners who would talk seemed to be that their main reason for co-operating with the Chinese was to improve their lot in camp. In particular they got permission to send news of their survival to relatives. &quot;But some of them&quot; said a tall judicious corporal (who had spent a year in a punishment camp), would sell their county for a tailor-made fag.The welcoming began long before the Asturias' lines were fast. Families began to recognise their men - or to think that they had recognised them - at impossible ranges in the rain. The shouts were addressed to individuals dimly seen through the rain, individuals who maddeningly failed to recognise the recognisers until all breath was spent.</p><p>Half an hour later, with the ship secured, the recognition process was repeated. Soldiers, their eyes searching the four corners of the shed, wandered distractedly through the crowd. Then came the embraces and happy, silent meetings, all the remarks that are made for the sake of saying something - &quot;Hasn't he grown?&quot; and &quot;I got your telegram all right&quot;.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Thu, 17 Sep 1953 22:54:00 GMT Guardian Staff 1953-09-17T22:54:00Z