Thursday
11th
February
2010
Brown's 'reign of terror' at Downing Street
Body blow for PM as former spin-doctor's book reveals tantrums and turbulence at No 10
Andrew Grice - The Independent
Severe doubts about Gordon Brown's character and judgement have been raised ahead of the election in a highly critical book by a former senior Downing Street adviser.
In a series of interviews with current and former No 10 staff, Lance Price, deputy to Tony Blair's communications director Alastair Campbell, paints a damaging portrait of the way Mr Brown runs government. He describes the Prime Minister "shouting at staff, jabbing an angry finger, throwing down papers, kicking the furniture".
Mr Price, whose book is serialised exclusively in The Independent today and tomorrow, quotes aides as saying that the Prime Minister's treatment of junior staff is "unforgivable". They claim Mr Brown is obsessed with controlling hour-by-hour media coverage and shows "extraordinary flashes of anger" when a news story runs out of control. Others accuse him of allowing his staff to undermine ministers, including the Chancellor Alistair Darling, by briefing against them to the media. Although Mr Brown claims others had let him down by behaving in ways he would not have condoned, one official described that as "typical self-delusion".
Where Power Lies. Prime Ministers v The Media is based on interviews with staff including Damian McBride, the close Brown aide who resigned in disgrace last year after sending an email containing inaccurate smears about senior Tories including David Cameron.
One staffer describes as an understatement the claim that Mr Brown has "psychological flaws", a phrase attributed to Mr Campbell but denied by him. Insiders accuse Mr Brown of being "pathetic", indulging in "self-pity" when things go wrong. Another who has witnessed his behaviour told Mr Price: "He is psychologically and emotionally incapable of leadership of any kind."
The poisonous atmosphere inside No 10 is described as far worse than it looks from the outside and is said to stem from Mr Brown himself. He is portrayed as obsessed with short-term tactics. "Nobody knows what the big picture is. That has to come from the boss," one insider told Mr Price.
Brown allies reacted angrily last night. One No 10 source said: "Lance Price has absolutely no idea what goes on inside Downing Street. A very long time ago he spent about 10 minutes there. To suggest he is someone who has an insight into Gordon Brown's premiership is frankly laughable. He should stick to reviewing the newspapers on television. The world of Downing Street according to Lance Price is a complete fantasy."
However, other government insiders argued that Mr Price's portrait was accurate but out of date. One said: "The atmosphere has improved a lot since the leadership question was finally settled last month [after the failed coup against Mr Brown]. A cloud has been lifted." One minister said: "Gordon has had his tantrums in the past when mistakes have been made, but only because he is ... determined to succeed. The mood is much better now; everyone is rowing in the same boat and in the same direction."
Mr McBride defends Mr Brown, telling the author: "In the entire time I've been working with him I've never seen him throw anything. I've seen him shout and swear, but that is always quite a superficial thing, to release a bit of frustration, and then he settles down and can be normal again. The times when he's really angry are not when he shouts but when he's very quiet."
The timing of Mr Price's book is bad for Mr Brown, coming just as Labour has narrowed the Tory lead in the opinion polls, many of which now point to a hung parliament. His description of both Mr Brown's style and performance will be an unwelcome reminder of past criticism of the Prime Minister at a time when he is keen to spell out the "big choices" between Labour and the Tories on policy.
Downing Street braced for further allegations about the Prime Minister's behaviour this weekend in another book, The End of the Party, by Andrew Rawnsley, chief political commentator of The Observer. Reports have suggested that Rawnsley will claim that Mr Brown physically attacked his staff during a series of outbursts, pulling a secretary out of her chair and hurling abuse at aides while distraught over an alleged snub by Barack Obama during a trip to the US last year. The allegations have been hotly denied by Downing Street.
'Psychologically flawed? That doesn't come close'
In these exclusive extracts from the explosive memoirs of former spin doctor Lance Price, Gordon Brown's draconian rule at No 10 is laid bare
Standing on the front step of Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown promised to lead "a new Government with new priorities". Before turning and disappearing inside he declared: "Now let the work of change begin."
The message he wanted to convey was unambiguous. This Prime Minister was going to do things very differently to his predecessor and changing the way Downing Street dealt with the press was a high priority. Even before the expenses scandal of 2009, Brown knew that the public's faith in politics generally, and in New Labour in particular, was at a low ebb.
He believed Tony Blair's use of the media was a contributory factor, but his attempts to change the culture were very quickly disappointed.
According to Damian McBride, who was the nearest thing Brown had to an Alastair Campbell figure, "it was a noble experiment but probably doomed to failure in the age we live in".
Others who have worked inside No 10 at a senior level since 2007 and have seen the media operation at work are less charitable. They are unable to give their views on-the-record while Brown is still Prime Minister, but they say he and his closest advisers must take responsibility themselves for seeing the reputation of 10 Downing Street sink still further so quickly.
Brown entered Downing Street with the best intentions sincerely held. Above all he wanted to rebuild the public's trust through an open and honest dialogue about the problems facing Britain and what he hoped to do to address them. Many correspondents who had worked at Westminster over the previous decade were doubtful. In their experience Brown had been no more straightforward in his dealings with the media than Tony Blair, indeed in many ways less so.
Brown wanted to put policy first, with presentation a distant second. His promise was summarised by the media as "an end to spin" although he never used those words. One of those who joined Brown in No 10 six weeks later now believes there was less to the pledge than at first appeared: "No more spin was the new spin. Almost everything they did in the initial phase was simply about delineating themselves from what Blair and Campbell had done."
One adviser to the governments of both Blair and Brown described the new administration's media-management plan as "all tactics and no strategy, scarily so".
If Brown saw something he didn't like he would rush to the press office and demand that it be corrected or that a response be issued immediately.
His personal intervention helped Downing Street look very much in control when the first crises hit, including terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London, summer flooding in the north of England, and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey.
At times, however, he seemed to want to direct every minute detail of policy and presentation himself. One person who witnessed it said: "He would come racing round and stand over people saying, 'You've got to get this bulletin changed,' or 'We've got to get this corrected for six o'clock. I've got to do a clip.' On one occasion during foot and mouth it was about a cracked pipe on a farm and I thought to myself, that's probably a bit below the job of a junior minister at DEFRA [Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]." Another recalled him "storming into the press office dictating a press release in response to something he'd seen on the television, except he'd misread it. It was embarrassing."
Brown likes to start the day with an early briefing over the phone on what the media are reporting. This is followed by a wider conference call with his other key advisers at 7.30. He is not an avid reader of newspapers, although he will look at the front pages and the main political stories. His preference is for regular verbal updates during the day. "He will regularly ask, 'What's going on? Everything under control?' " When he believes a story is running out of control or that – the worst sin of all – the press office has been caught unawares, he can react with extraordinary flashes of anger. Stories of mobile phones hurled across the room in fury regularly appear in the press, although it rarely gets to that stage. Shouting at staff, jabbing an angry finger, throwing down papers, even kicking the furniture are far more common.
His behaviour towards relatively junior members of staff can be "unforgivable" according to one person who has witnessed it. "It isn't a very nice place for people to work. However bad it sometimes looks from the outside, it's far, far worse from the inside. And the atmosphere is very much set by him." Those in the press office more used to dealing with the daily onslaught of unpredictable news put it down to Brown's 10 years in the Treasury, where events could be carefully planned and the phone never rang in the middle of the night with another crisis to be handled.
It is Brown's misfortune that he is forever being assessed in the light of the observation that he is "psychologically flawed". Those who have witnessed his behaviour refer back to it constantly without being prompted. "It doesn't come close," said one. Another said Brown was always looking for somebody else to blame when things went wrong. "It's this self-pity thing. There's a pathetic side to him that is really unbecoming." A third said the problems have got no better with time, concluding: "He is psychologically and emotionally incapable of leadership of any kind."
McBride, however, thinks that those who know Brown less well misunderstand his moods. "In the entire time I've been working with him I've never seen him throw anything. I've seen him do lots of other things.
"I've seen him shout and swear, but that is a superficial thing, to release a bit of frustration. The times when he's really angry are not when he shouts but when he's quiet. Sometimes civil servants come out of meetings and think, 'Oh that went OK,' because they had been expecting him to explode when actually he'd be very quiet. But it's then that he's really angry."
Having concluded the polls were too volatile, Brown decided against an election in the autumn of 2007. Privately some of his closest advisers said he had "bottled it". Having anticipated an election Downing Street was left with a vacuum as the summer of confidence turned into an autumn of recriminations. Brown's loss of political authority prompted exactly the kind of stories about Government divisions that Downing Street had been determined to avoid.
"There was no exit strategy when the election was called off," said one civil servant. "They were left with nothing. The autumn was a shambles." Another put it down to a lack of strategic vision that left the press office unsure what they were selling. "What was missing was an overall narrative – what the big picture was. That has to come from the boss."
Little more than six months after his succession, Brown's insistence that No 10 should speak only with one voice was flagrantly ignored. A new duopoly of power was created at the top of the No 10 administrative structure with the arrival of Stephen Carter [chief executive of City PR firm Brunswick] as head of strategy and "principal adviser" to work alongside Jeremy Heywood [the Downing Street Permanent Secretary]. While Carter was a talented and confident administrator, he was outgunned politically. When the current director of communications Simon Lewis was appointed, figures in Whitehall feared Brown had again appointed "a smooth top-class PR man" rather than the political heavyweight the communications team still lacked.
The Prime Minister faced a familiar dilemma. If the Downing Street press office is too political it runs a far greater risk of generating controversy. If it is not political enough, its ability to communicate the Prime Minister's objectives will be hampered.
Gordon Brown faced the few months before his fate would be decided at the ballot box with trepidation. Mastery of the media, once New Labour's weapon, was in other hands. Power no longer lay where it had been thought to lie. No Prime Minister in the years to come would need to concern him or herself with flattering and placating the owners of newspapers to anything like the degree their predecessors had. Nor could they expect the luxury of exercising as much untrammelled power as previous incumbents. The system Brown had grown up in and learned to dominate had changed dramatically and was changing still.
He had come to the job he had coveted just when his own political skills were becoming redundant and his discomfort was painful to observe. Yet however inglorious his premiership may have looked, from its many tribulations has emerged the possibility of a healthier relationship between the government and the governed and, perhaps, between Downing Street and the media. Both sides have had to learn a little humility and to look afresh at how they operate. How far-reaching the change will be has still to become clear, but business as usual is no longer an option.
Extracted from Where Power Lies. Prime Ministers v The Media, by Lance Price,
published by Simon and Schuster (£20)
Gordon Browns's mental breakdown
Bolivia wants own satellite
Bolivia wants to launch a satellite to improve its communication systems.
President Evo Morales is engaged in negotiations with China on the construction of the satelite.He intends to travel to China soon to signed the contract.If all goes well, work on the satelite will start next month.
In addition to developing Bolivian commucations systems, the satellite is also intended to contribute to the improvement of education, public health and technology in the poor Latin American country.
The costs of the project, about 300 million dollars, will for the most part be paid by international organisations. Bolivia would be the fourth Latin American nation after Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela with its own satelite.
Berlusconi silences TV critics ahead of elections
Programmes investigating Italy's PM hit after changes to rules for broadcasters
Michael Day - The Independent
Silvio Berlusconi's supporters in the Italian parliament last night outraged opposition MPs and journalists with a controversial clampdown on political talk shows ahead of next month's regional elections.
The ruling PDL Party's majority on the parliamentary watchdog that oversees public broadcaster RAI forced through rules that mean the state broadcaster's most popular talk shows will have to scrap their political content – or face a transfer from mid-evening to graveyard shifts. Programmes such as Ballarò and Annozero, which have frequently held Mr Berlusconi to account for alleged sex scandals and even Mafia links, will be the main victims of the month-long clamp down that prompted accusations of censorship.
Political content will be allowed – but only if all 30 or so parties standing in the elections are represented on every show, which programme-makers said would make their formats unworkable.
The rules will apply from 28 February until 28 March, when the country's regional elections are held. Government supporters said the rules were needed to ensure political neutrality during the election campaign. Marco Beltrandi of the PDL said: "The rules mean that the analysis programmes can choose. They can give political platforms [to everyone] or be broadcast at different times and in different ways."
The Prime Minister, whose Mediaset empire owns three of the six principal Italian terrestrial TV channels – some of which have been censured for pro-government bias – has often complained that RAI shows attack him unfairly.
But Fabrizio Morri of the opposition Democratic Party said the ruling centre-right coalition had "voted for the suppression of journalistic analysis". "This sort of censorship wouldn't happen in a proper democratic country," he said. "I doubt very much whether the communications watchdog will cancel Matrix or any other of Mediaset's political shows," he added.
"They're threatening the very purpose for which public service broadcasting exists. It's absurd," said Carlo Verna, secretary of the RAI journalists' union, before calling for strike action.
The ill-feeling between state TV and the government has been mounting. Last October, a furious Mr Berlusconi rang the live Ballarò talk show, hosted by Giovanni Floris, and let rip against the programme to boos and cheers from the studio audience.
The Prime Minister began his surprise intervention by hitting out at his perceived nemesis, the left-wing judiciary, before launching into a spectacular rant against the programme and RAI. Earlier that month Mr Berlusconi described RAI's other flagship debate show Annozero as a "criminal use of public television" after it broadcast the first live interview with the call-girl Patrizia D'Addario, in which she dismissed the premier's claims he was unaware she was a call girl when they slept together.
The hostility against Annozero was further exacerbated after it devoted programmes to the claims made by Mafia informers that Mr Berlusconi had had links with the Mob.
But opponents of Mr Berlusconi say his own Mediaset shows are not above targeting people who have made enemies of their media-mogul owner.
Silvio Berlusconi - some facts and history
Berlusconi lends Blair £15 million
China indicts Rio Tinto workers
China has indicted four workers of the British-Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto on charges of bribery and violating commercial secrets.
The suspects are three Chinese and one Australian. They were arrested in July and will now be put on trial on a date yet to be determined. The Chinese authorities say the four accused repeatedly accepted large sums in bribes from Chinese steel companies.
The arrests have put substantial strain on Sino-Australian relations. China is Australia's biggest trading partner, while Australia exported 11 billion euros worth of iron ore to China, 40 percent of the country's total iron ore imports.
'Death tax' to fund care of elderly not ruled out by Gordon Brown
Rosa Prince - Telegraph
Gordon Brown has refused to rule out a compulsory 'death tax' to pay for the care of elderly people who can no longer look after themselves.
The issue of pensioners’ care looks set to form a key election battleground, with a new report warning that an estimated 1.7 million more people will need to be looked after in their old age in 20 years’ time.
Labour accused the Conservatives of misleading the public about the Government’s plans, after the party issued posters claiming that ministers were proposing to introduce a £20,000 “death tax”.
During furious clashes at Prime Minister’s Question Time, Mr Brown denied the £20,000 figure and accused David Cameron, the Conservative leader, of performing a “U-turn” by breaking the consensus on social care.
But the Prime Minister repeatedly failed to respond to Mr Cameron’s demand that he rule out a compulsory inheritance levy.
The Tory leader challenged Mr Brown to say how he planned to pay for the national care service scheme, and pointed out that council leaders and some Labour peers had criticised the proposals.
Accusing the Prime Minister of using the issue of social care to promote “cheap dividing lines” between the parties ahead of the election, he added: "What we want to know is where is the money coming from? People who work closely with you are completely opposed to the way this is being done."
Parliament is currently considering plans to extend social care in the home for elderly people at a cost of £670 million a year. A Government consultation is under way into ways of expanding this into a national scheme which would also include residential care.
The Prime Minister said that the Conservatives had originally backed the home care proposals, which would help 400,000 of the most vulnerable elderly people.
Amid shouting and booing from Tory MPs, he added: "The wall of noise will not disguise the fact that the Conservative Party have absolutely no policy on an issue that is vital to the needs of the elderly."
Council leaders have warned that they do not have enough funds to pay for the additional services they will be required to provide.
David Rogers, of the Local Government Association, said: “Councils would like to be in a position to offer help to every resident who would benefit.
“However, the recent economic downturn means councils are faced with ever harder decisions on the use of valuable public funds together with increased demand and rising expectations.”
The scale of the problem facing future generations became apparent after the Care Quality Commission predicted that 1.7 million more people would need care by 2030 than today.
Dame Jo Wiliams, chairman of the CQC, said that radical changes were needed to provide elderly people with the tailored care they would expect in future.
She added: We all know that the context is changing. Trends such as increasing demand and rising expectations will be exacerbated by pressure on finances. That means we cannot go on as we are. To cope, we need some radical changes in the way that we organise and deliver services.
"This means shifting the culture away from a one-size-fits-all approach to care that puts the needs of individuals and carers at the centre of everything. A key part of this will involve helping people maintain their independence and health."
Stephen Burke, chief executive of the charity Counsel And Care, said an “honest and serious" debate was needed about funding.
He added: "Politicians, nationally and locally, owe it to older people, their families and carers to prioritise care reform and funding.
"Older people and their families want to know what care they will get and how much they will have to pay.”
European parliament supports Iran sanctions
A broad majority in the European Parliament supports sanctions against Iran now that the country has started to enrich uranium to a 20-percent level.
Iran refuses to cooperate with other countries in its nuclear development. And the parliament said Tehran's brutal crackdown on the opposition constitutes a violation of human rights. It wants to deny entry into the EU to Iranians involved in human rights violations.
The parliament has also asked corporations such as Nokia and Siemens not to sell Iran technology which would allow it to impose censorship.
US President Barack Obama has warned Iran that extensive sanctions may be imposed now that the Washington expects that a UN resolution, imposing a package of sanctions on Iran, will be passed within a couple of weeks.
Iraq orders Blackwater security guards to leave
Iraq has ordered hundreds of private security guards linked to Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face possible arrest on visa violations, the interior minister said on Wednesday.
The order comes in the wake of a US judge's dismissal of criminal charges against five Blackwater guards who were accused in the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.
It applies to about 250 security contractors who worked for Blackwater in Iraq at the time of the incident, Jawad al-Bolani said.
Some of the guards now work for other security firms in Iraq, while others work for a Blackwater subsidiary, Mr al-Bolani said. He said all "concerned parties" were notified of the order three days ago and now have four days left before they must leave. He did not name the companies.
Blackwater security contractors were protecting US diplomats when the guards opened fire in Nisoor Square, a busy Baghdad intersection, on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
"We want to turn the page," Mr al-Bolani said. "It was a painful experience, and we would like to go forward."
Backlash from the Blackwater shooting has been felt hardest by private security contractors, who typically provide protection for diplomats, journalists and aid workers. Iraqi security forces have routinely stopped security details at checkpoints to conduct searches and question guards.
Security guards will be required within the next 10 days to register their weapons with the Ministry of Interior, Mr al-Bolani said. Failure to do so could result in arrest, he added.
Based in Moyock, North Carolina, Blackwater is now known as Xe Services, a name change that happened after six of the security firm's guards were charged in the Nisoor Square shooting. At the time, Blackwater was the largest of the State Department's three security contractors working in Iraq.
Xe Services said the company had no employees currently in Iraq, including with its subsidiary, Presidential Airways.
"Xe does not have one, single person in Iraq," said Xe spokeswoman Stacy DeLuke.
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
Binyam Mohamed case shows MI5 to be devious, dishonest
and complicit in torture
Legal defeat plunges Security Service into crisis over torture evidence, and it is revealed that judge removed damning verdict after Foreign Office QC's plea
Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain - The Guardian
MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression" that undermined government assurances about its conduct.
The condemnation, by Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls, was drafted shortly before the foreign secretary, David Miliband, lost his long legal battle to suppress a seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed.
Amid mounting calls for an independent inquiry into the affair, three of the country's most senior judges – Lord Judge, the lord chief justice, Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen's Bench Division, and Lord Neuberger – disclosed evidence of MI5's complicity in Mohamed's torture and unlawful interrogation by the US.
So severe were Neuberger's criticisms of MI5 that the government's leading lawyer in the case, Jonathan Sumption QC, privately wrote to the court asking him to reconsider his draft judgment before it was handed down.
The judges agreed but Sumption's letter [351KB PDF] , which refers to Neuberger's original comments, was made public after lawyers for Mohamed and media organisations, including the Guardian, intervened.
They argued that Neuberger had privately agreed with Sumption to remove his fierce criticisms without giving then the chance to contest the move.
In his letter, Sumption warned the judges that the criticism of MI5 would be seen by the public as statements by the court that the agency:
• Did not respect human rights.
• Had not renounced participation in "coercive interrogation" techniques.
• Deliberately misled MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee, who are supposed to scrutinise its work.
• Had a "culture of suppression" in its dealings with Miliband and the court.
Sumption described Neuberger's observations in his draft judgment as "an exceptionally damaging criticism of the good faith of the Security Service as a whole".
His letter also refers to the MI5 officer known as Witness B, who is understood to have interrogated Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002. Witness B gave evidence in the hearings and is now at the centre of a Scotland Yard investigation. Sumption's letter implies that Neuberger did not believe that Witness B was acting alone and that the judge believed that Witness B's conduct was "characteristic of the service as a whole".
The court's final ruling forced the Foreign Office to publish a seven-paragraph summary of 42 classified CIA documents that were handed to MI5 before Witness B travelled to Pakistan to interrogate Mohamed. These show that MI5 was aware that Mohamed was being continuously deprived of sleep, threatened with rendition and subjected to previous interrogations that were causing him "significant mental stress and suffering". If administered in the UK, the summary says, it would clearly be in breach of undertakings about interrogation techniques made by the British government in 1972.
The three judges referred to a recent case in a US court where the judge found Mohamed's claims about how he was tortured to be truthful. This vindicated his assertion that "UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill-treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of the USA authorities".
There were renewed calls tonightfor an inquiry into MI5's involvement in torture overseas and into government policies after the 9/11 attacks.
Miliband told MPs that the ruling was leading to a "great deal of concern" in the US. In a statement to the Commons he said he had fought to prevent the release of the information to defend the "fundamental" principle that intelligence shared with the UK would be protected.
The Foreign Office claimed tonightthat the criticisms in the draft judgment had been "unsubstantiated", and denied that Sumption's approach to the court had been intended to suppress criticism of MI5. Nevertheless, the court is to convene tomorrow to reconsider whether to publish all or parts of the 21-line paragraph from the draft judgment in which the criticisms appear.
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, wrote to the court after the Sumption letter came to light on Monday night. He said today: "It is good news that – after a challenge from the Guardian and other news organisations – the courts have finally ordered the government to reveal evidence of MI5 complicity in torture. This is a watershed in open justice in an area in which it is notoriously difficult to shine a light. But it was extremely disturbing that the government's lawyers made a successful last-ditch attempt to get the master of the rolls to rewrite his judgment."
Spies, torture and terrorism
Bodies are piling up in this Westminster thriller
Groom sues in-laws over bride's 'beard and crossed-eyes'
Richard Spencer - Telegraph
An Arab diplomat who lifted his bride's veil only to discover she was cross-eyed and had facial hair has sued her parents for emotional and moral damages.
The diplomat, an ambassador and minister plenipotentiary who has not been identified but is thought to be from a Gulf state, brought the case in a sharia court in Dubai.
According to court papers, he said he decided to divorce her immediately after her niqab, the face-veil worn by many Gulf women for modesty, was removed.
He claimed that photographs of the woman he had been promised in marriage and which were shown to his mother in advance turned out to be of her sister.
"Every time the couple met, the bride would do her best not to reveal her entire face," a source close to the case told the local Gulf News. "After the ambassador and the woman, who is a physician, signed the marriage contract, the groom was sitting with the bride.
"He claimed to the sharia court officials that when he wanted to kiss his wife-to-be, he discovered she was bearded and cross-eyed as well."
Claiming he had been tricked, the ambassador took her parents to court to reclaim the £8,300 he had spent on jewellery, clothes and gifts for her.
The court heard an examination by a specialist failed to find any medical condition that might have caused the facial hair.
On this basis, the judge rejected the claim for compensation, but he did agree to approve the divorce.
Dating, chatup lines, etiquette and traditions
Child brides in Afghanistan
How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam
For Muslim women in Europe, a medical road back to virginity
China upholds 11-year sentence for dissident Liu Xiaobo
Peter Foster - Telegraph
China has faced fresh condemnation from the US and European Union after upholding an 11-year jail sentence against a human rights activist who circulated the Charter 08 online petition calling for greater democratic rights in China.
Washington and Brussels both moved swiftly to condemn the sentence against Liu Xioabo, a 54-year-old retired university professor who previously spent 20 months in jail for joining the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Mr Liu's wife, Liu Xia, said she was not surprised by the court decision. "The court session lasted for only a few minutes and the judge gave the verdict directly without allowing the defence lawyers to speak, or allow my husband to make a statement in his defence," she told The Telegraph.
The only words spoken by Liu Xioabo came as he was escorted out of the court when he cried out loudly "I am innocent!", she added.
The US warned that the "persecution" of individuals peacefully expressing their political views violated internationally-recognised norms of human rights.
"We are disappointed by the Chinese Government's decision to uphold Liu Xiaobo's sentence of 11 years in prison on the charge of "inciting subversion of state power." We believe that he should not have been sentenced in the first place and should be released immediately," said Jon Huntsman Jr, the US ambassador to China.
The EU voiced similar concerns in a statement, saying the verdict against Mr Liu was "entirely incompatible with his right to freedom of expression" and calling on the Chinese government to unconditionally to release Mr Liu and end harassment other Charter 08 signatories.
Signed by 300 academics – and now some 10,000 people online – the Charter echoed the 'Charter 77' of the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel which paved the way for the Velvet Revolution which swept away the Communist regime of what was then Czechoslovakia.
China has consistently ignored or rebuffed international criticism of the case, arguing that Mr Liu's detention is an "internal affair" in which other nations have no right to interfere.
The sentence was widely interpreted as a warning to other dissenters as China's autocratic rulers have embarked on a year-long campaign of intimidation against lawyers and intellectuals who challenge one-party rule.
Mr Liu's case is the most high-profile in a series of sentences handed out over the last 12 months against activists, including those who campaigned for justice and transparency for victims of the Sichuan earthquake and the powdered milk scandal of 2008.
Although broader public criticism is stifled in China, very unusually, the verdict was criticised by four old Communist Party cadres who wrote a strongly-worded open letter urging the party leadership to reconsider.
The protest, lead by Hu Jiwei, a former editor of the state-run People's Daily newspaper now in his 80s, said that Mr Liu's call for a Chinese "federal republic" was in keeping with the early slogans and ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.
"If the judge violates the constitution and has no knowledge of the history of the party and makes false and incorrect accusations that will seriously tarnish the image of the country and the party, then it's difficult to prove that China is a country ruled by law and a harmonious society," said the letter.
Tiananmen Now Seems Distant to China's Students
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