Law / Justice
Live-Blogging the Health Care Summit: Waxman to Obama "Republicans Won't Help You"
Watch the summit live below.
Goldman Plays, We Pay
The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
HAITI EARTHQUAKE LIVE BLOG: Who to Follow and What to Read for Breaking Developments
Here is the link to Thursday's live blog. Please check the page regularly for updates.
7:45am PDT: The BBC has a disturbing first hand video report from a hospital in Port-au-Prince where, last night, injured people waiting for treatment slept amongst dead bodies.
Despite Anger Over BP Spill, Washington Might Not Act on It
Washington As the Gulf of Mexico focuses on cleaning up the mess left by the BP oil spill, the question facing the nation's capital is: Will Washington clean up its act, too?
Congress is considering stricter regulation of oil exploration, and the Obama administration has pledged to overhaul the disgraced federal agency that oversees oil drilling.
Already, however, some of the toughest proposals are facing stiff opposition from Republicans and some Gulf Coast Democrats whose constituents rely on the oil industry for jobs.
Al Gore cleared of assault allegations made by masseuse
Official says masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, and witnesses could not remember anything unusual
Former vice president Al Gore has been cleared of allegations that he groped and assaulted a masseuse in a Portland hotel room in 2006.
After a four-week investigation that included interviews with Gore, the masseuse, her acquaintances and hotel staff, authorities said there was no basis for prosecution.
Senior deputy district attorney Don Rees cited "contradictory evidence, conflicting witness statements, credibility issues, lack of forensic evidence and denials by Mr Gore".
Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.
"Mr Gore unequivocally and emphatically denied this accusation when he first learnt of its existence three years ago," spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said. "He respects and appreciates the thorough and professional work of the Portland authorities and is pleased that this matter has now been resolved."
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Audit Notes: Illiquid Lehman, Drumbeat.org, Markets Rule
The SEC Slaps Citi for Concealing $43 Billion in Toxic Assets
Al Gore Cleared In Sex Assault Case - Hannity's Case Falls Apart
Sorry, Seanie-Pooh. It looks like your "Al Gore, serial sex assaulter" case just went the way of impeaching Obama over Sestak-gate. Local television station KOIN reports, "The complaining witness, Molly Hagerty, stated that she was sexually abused during a massage session at the Hotel Lucia when Gore was in Portland. Hagerty failed a polygraph test during the course of the investigation, and there was no DNA evidence on the pants she claimed she wore during the alleged incident, according to investigators."
Huffington Post has the very damning - against Hagerty - statement from the Multnomah County DA which basically says that none of her allegations are supported by any evidence.
Will Sean Hannity apologize for his rush to judgment? Don't make me laugh.
Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »Pakistan security officers cancel UK visit
Talks between ISI officials and UK security experts called off after David Cameron accused Pakistan of exporting terrorism
Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has cancelled planned talks with British security experts in protest at David Cameron's comments that elements within the country are responsible for exporting terrorism abroad, it was reported last night.
ISI officers were due in London for discussions on counter-terrorism co-operation with British security services. But the talks have been scrapped after the prime minister's remarks while on a visit to India on Wednesday, the Times reported.
"The visit has been cancelled in reaction to the comments made by the British prime minister against Pakistan," an ISI spokesman was quoted as saying. "Such irresponsible statements could affect our co-operation with Britain."
Cameron sparked outrage in Islamabad when he said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India, whether to Afghanistan, or to anywhere else in the world."
The comments were made during a visit to Delhi.
Neither Downing Street nor the Foreign Office would comment on the reported decision by the ISI, which also comes days before a UK visit by the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari. He is expected to stay with Cameron at his country retreat, Chequers.
Last night, officials said that Zardari's visit was still expected to take place. "Our understanding is that the visit is on," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.
Following Cameron's remarks, Pakistani politicians pointed to the country's offensive against militants on the border with Afghanistan and the many victims of terrorist bombs in Pakistan.
Cameron defended his comments a day later, saying: "I don't think the British taxpayer wants me to go around the world saying what people want to hear."
Amy Fallonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Great strides: a British soldier's rehabilitation
Three years after losing his legs in Helmand province, Private Derek Derenalagi is training for the 2012 Paralympics
In the few seconds it took for the numbness he felt after the explosion to turn to pain, Private Derek Derenalagi knew he had lost his legs. He thought he was going to die.
He briefly did die, he later learned, on the operating table at Camp Bastion, and again when his heart stopped beating on the operating table at Selly Oak.
In the hours after the blast that threw him from his Land Rover and sent him 30ft in the air, broke his back and blew off his legs, his heart stopped three times, medics began preparations to zip him into a body bag.
"The last time my heart stopped I was pronounced dead," said Derenalangi, 35. But medical staff detected a faint pulse and he was resuscitated. He was flown to Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, and spent eight days in a coma.
Just two weeks on, Derenalagi was demanding to use the gym.
"I told people: One day, I will walk," he said.
Now, three years after his injury, in Helmand province, he has already broken records in shot put and aims to be on the podium at London 2012.
Karen McVeighguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Simon Hoggart's week: Lot valley? The French aren't kidding
The beauty of France: expensive wine, slow trains, unchanging views and prank pork
✒We are just back from France, where we had a lovely time staying with friends in the Lot valley, although we once again experienced that unnerving sensation Brits get on the continent these days. You are a visitor from a third world country, or possibly a former communist state in eastern Europe.
It's fatal to translate prices. You go to the supermarket and think, "What, 8,250 leva for that? Why it's hardly anything!"
Or you inspect the menu at a modest restaurant in a pleasant provincial town. There are cheery boards outside, sometimes depicting a smiling, red-faced diner with a checked bib round his neck. "Nous vous proposons notre formule!" it says, and you reflect that they're asking only a bit more than you'd pay for the set lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London.
✒Even the wine is no cheaper now – at least not the good stuff. It's a myth that the French keep the best wine for themselves. They can't afford to, with world competition as ferocious as it is. Instead, you see row after row of the second-rate fluids they can only sell at home. If you bought any by the case because it looked so cheap, you would deeply regret it until you needed something to clean the toilet bowl.
To be fair, the French are catching on. Some of the larger supermarkets will even sell one or two non-French wines. And they are belatedly learning how to meet modern demands. Take Cahors, the "black wine" of the Lot. It's made from the Auxerrois grape, known elsewhere as Malbec, and is a worldwide bestseller for the Argentinians. They have learned how to soften its rough tannins, but for years the Cahors growers sold stuff that made your mouth feel as if it had been turned inside out. On this trip, though, we tried one or two – admittedly quite old, and so more expensive – that were delicious, with a depth even the better new world Malbecs don't quite reach.
✒What I like about France is the way the ultra-modern is juxtaposed with the old and ancient. We took a rattling train down south; not being a TGV, it chugged along at a gentle 60mph or so. All those forlorn marshalling yards and abandoned signal boxes whisked me back to films about the occupation. Those endless lines of poplars by the road take you back 200 years, since Napoleon planted them so his armies could march in the shade.
One day we took our daughter to Toulouse airport, which is as hi-tech as a Formula One car, then half an hour later were in a tiny hill village, where we saw a view that can't have changed much for centuries. (Nearly 10% of all EU spending goes to French farmers, which is why their countryside still looks beguiling, while ours – in, say, East Anglia – looks like a vast, empty car park.)
We saw those old houses with their crumbling facades and peeling paint - a throwback to the years when people with smart, trim houses were assumed by the authorities to be tax evaders.
✒We were staying on the fringe of the region that used to be dominated by the Cathars, so I read Sean Martin's book about them – "the world's most successful heresy", he says. Most people know about Montaillou, the village which left the most detailed account of medieval Cathar life, and the famous last stand against the Catholic forces at Montségur.
What I hadn't realised was that the same dualistic heresy made it to England, specifically Canterbury and Oxford, where believers were known as "publicans" – nothing to do with barmen, but a corruption of "popelican", whatever that meant.
Anyhow, they were dealt with roughly: denounced, branded with hot irons and thrown out into the snow. Which may let us date the formation of the Bullingdon Club to around AD1165.
✒Detective story cliches, from Lucy Fisher: the service is over. A solitary worshipper remains. The priest or vicar scurries up to see if he needs help. He taps him on the shoulder, and he slumps to one side, dead.
✒I've mentioned before the crazy pricing policies on many of our trains. Often, if you book in advance, you can get a ticket for less than a quarter of the cost that the bossy PA system says is the full single fare you'll be fined if you have got on the wrong train.
Andrew Gaved points out that, on Virgin, things are even more cuckoo. On a morning train he visited the "shop" for a bacon sandwich and a coffee. He was asked if he'd like a meal deal including a sarnie, drink and crisps for £3.95, but he didn't fancy crisps at that hour. "Right," said the assistant, "that'll be £4.35".
So he went back, added crisps to his order, paid £3.95, then carefully put the crisps in the bin, making sure she saw him. How else can you let management know they are stark, staring bonkers?
✒Before catching the Eurostar home, we had dinner at the celebrated Brasserie Terminus Nord. The chips were hot and crisp, the bechamel sauce delicious, but will someone tell me what the point of pied de porc is? Having eaten maybe half an ounce of meat, I was left with a small mountain of bones and oleaginous fat. Maybe it's just a prank aimed at gullible tourists.
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Booker-longlisted novel The Slap is 'most divisive in years'
Panel's chairman defends portrayal of 'curdled love' as reviews range from excitement to criticism of 'unbelievable misogyny'
Christos Tsiolkas's Man Booker-longlisted novel The Slap opens with a bang when a man at a suburban barbecue hits another parent's child.
But while some readers including, evidently, the Booker judges speak excitedly of the Australian author's bravery in tackling uncomfortable truths, others criticise the word-of-mouth hit as "offensive" and say it is full of "unbelievable misogyny". The Slap is turning out to be the most divisive Booker novel in years.
Although reviews from newspaper critics have been positive – "riveting from beginning to end," said the Guardian ; "Tom Wolfe meets Philip Roth," said the Los Angeles Times – readers posting reviews online have far more mixed opinions.
"Dull, boring and offensive," wrote one Amazon reviewer. Another criticised its "constant obsession with bodily functions, sex, and the f-word"; another wrote that "it had no heart, such terrible cynicism … I feel soiled after reading it".
The writer India Knight said she hated the book. "The whole novel has this ludicrous, comedy-macho sensibility – you get the feeling that if he'd been forced to read 'literary' fiction, Raoul Moat would have gulped it down in one sitting," said Knight.
"It's also unbelievably misogynistic, and I say that as someone who loves Flashman and Philip Roth ... There is no joy, no love, no hope, no beauty, just these hideous people beating each other up, either physically or emotionally."
The Slap is a bestseller in Australia, and UK sales are already rumoured to be colossal.
A publishing insider said the novel had sold 23,000 copies even before the Booker announcement, an almost unheard-of figure for new literary fiction from a relatively unknown author. The novel also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, said that there "hasn't been a divisive book on taste grounds" in the Booker lineup for years.
The last time readers were really split over titles selected by judges was in 2003, when Martin Amis's Yellow Dog and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were both longlisted for the award and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little went on to win it.
The former poet laureate Andrew Motion, who is chairing this year's Booker panel, defended The Slap, saying "quite unusually for a Booker book, the copy I read already had international bestseller written across it, which means that not everyone thinks it's a hateful misogynistic book".
He also took issue with Knight's comment that the novel was loveless, suggesting instead that "it's curdled love ... It's more complicated than being hate-filled. It's full of love that's gone wrong".
However, he admitted that he could "see why people might think it is misogynistic, in that the whole story is triggered by an act of male violence".
Alison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Fox Nation Reports On "Fastest White Man In History"
Fox Nation has a post on its front page called, Fastest White Man In History. Query: How often does Fox Nation take an interest in sports? (H/T David M.)
Even the Fox Nation readers - not exactly a group known for its sensitivity on racial issues - think Fox is race baiting with this post. Even one who commends Fox' "frank and honest discussion(s) about race" thinks it's race baiting.
Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »Bullfighting ban is sweet revenge for Catalonia
For Catalans, bullfighting is a barbaric and alien tradition. Their region's decision to ban it is less about animal rights than a gesture of anti-Spanish defiance
The banning of bull-fighting in Catalonia by the regional parliament on Wednesday satisfies a deep need in the Catalan soul. Killing off bullfighting offers Catalans a lovely and easy revenge for various humiliations heaped on them by Madrid in recent times; it also fulfils their deep anxiety to be understood and appreciated throughout the world as a separate nation, a place with a different identity and a different sensibility from the rest of Spain. Most Catalans loathe bullfighting, they view it as part of a strange, dark, foreign, Iberian spirit which has sought to encroach upon the modern, European spirit to which they feel allegiance.
When I came to Barcelona first in 1975, I found that Catalans would wince at the very word bullfighting and seemed genuinely upset that such a cruel sport took place in their city. For them, the corrida belonged to a world foisted on Catalonia by Franco at the end of a civil war. This was a world which also included a police force and an army which no Catalan would join, and forms of dancing, singing and religiosity which were utterly alien to Catalans, who pride themselves on working hard, remaining anti-clerical and enjoying classical music.
It was only when I came to write a book about Barcelona that I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn't last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal's pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.
The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker then you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.
I remember leaving early and walking back down through Barcelona. It was late afternoon. I chanced to pass through the Placa de Sant Jaume, one of the main squares of the city, and there in the corner were groups of Catalans dancing sardanes, the national dance. There was a group of musicians playing for them. I stood and watched. The dance is done by forming a circle and joining hands, the music rises and the steps change almost imperceptibly. At the beginning little energy is expended; this means that very old people can join. Then gradually it lifts, and there is a beautiful, elegant edge to the way the dancers operate, as well as a subtle and discreet restraint. Led by one among them, they slowly let the steps rise and the spirit lift.
That day I was grateful to them for releasing such gentle and graceful energy. There was something so light and easy and civilised about how they gathered and related to each other. I was proud of the years I had spent in Catalonia and content, too, that I now joined the Catalans in feeling utter revulsion for bullfighting, knowing that its cultural significance had nothing to do with me.
Then friends who loved bullfighting assured me that I was a fool and had made a mistake. Going to a bullfight in Barcelona was, I was told, like listening to Irish traditional music in a London wine bar. I would have to go south for the real thing. Since I was writing a book about Catholic Europe, I found myself in Seville during Easter week. The city is beautiful, I loved the bars and I was intrigued by the zeal with which people carted their statues of the virgin around the streets. I enjoyed the resurrection, as far as I remember, and then on Easter Sunday I went to a bullfight.
I felt the same revulsion, the same hatred for the crowd, but this time it wasn't so simple. The religious ceremonies and the bullfight in Seville that Easter seemed to belong to an intact culture, one that I could not fully penetrate, but which everyone in the city took for granted, knew and loved. There was no point in telling people in Seville that you didn't like bullfighting, they would merely shrug and tell you that you didn't understand it and maybe you should think of going back home.
There are two ways of understanding this. The first is that Spain is a country filled with variety, and this is part of its pleasure for the outsider. The lack of sameness, the ways in which weather, food, architecture and language in, say, Galicia, are so far from the same things in Seville makes it a great country to travel in. The Basque country, Madrid, the villages of Asturias, are all like independent republics and this makes the country fascinating and intriguing.
The second way is how Catalans view things. They see Madrid not as different as much as dominating. They wonder why the first AVE (Spain's fast train), for example, was built to go from Madrid to Seville in 1992, but there is still no AVE from Barcelona to France, which is the direction Catalans want to go. They notice the gradual downgrading of Barcelona airport. They notice that, since Catalonia is one of the richest parts of Spain, their taxes are used to build up infrastructure elsewhere rather than in Catalonia. They cannot legislate on matters such as immigration, which affects them deeply. They feel discriminated against in many ways, both small and large.
Nonetheless, since the death of Franco in 1975 a great deal has been gained and consolidated in Catalonia. The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language. This has happened to the children of immigrants who came from Spain's poorer regions. The current president of Catalonia, for example, was born in Córdoba in the south of Spain, and came to Catalonia at 16, and yet he has been absorbed into Catalan national life and is considered Catalan, even though, since there was a free vote, he actually voted against the ban on bullfighting on Wednesday.
One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don't go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring "olé!" and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city's Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets.
If you come from Madrid or Seville to the city, however, you feel sightly different. You notice that the Catalans, even though they are bilingual, don't like speaking Spanish to you. You watch how they have made it impossible to get a state job without fluency in Catalan. You watch with deep irritation their resentment against Madrid, their insistence that they are a nation rather than a region, their emphasising that they feel culturally closer to France, or Switzerland, or northern Italy than to Spain.
I have yet to meet someone from Madrid who does not shake their head in dislike, mild to wild, at the way in which Catalans conduct themselves.
Just as Catalans believe in hard work and sobriety, they have a real skill at making pacts and increasing the terms of their political autonomy incrementally. Unlike the Basques, they do not have a terrorist army, and there is a deep revulsion among Catalans for what Eta has done. They are pro-European and have also shown some flair in how their politicians deal with Madrid. The Catalan Socialist party, one of the two main parties in Catalonia, is allied to PSOE, the Spanish socialists, and this has given them a good deal of leeway and influence.
It was these connections that caused them, then, to seek a new estatut, or constitutional arrangement with Spain, which would give them greater power over matters such as taxation, language policy and the creation of infrastructure. For rightwing voters and politicians, the idea that Catalans wanted greater autonomy than other regions of Spain was an affront to the unity of Spain, a core belief for them. Thus the right wing sent the estatut to the highest constitutional court for consideration.
The court, in a long and detailed judgment earlier this month, ruled against the Catalans, and managed to add insult to injury by stating that there was only one nation in Spain, and that was the Spanish nation, and that Catalonia, as a historical entity, had only come into being as a result of the Spanish constitution of 1978.
This drove people crazy. When more than a million people marched through Barcelona on 10 July to protest against the court's decision, most of the flags being waved were Catalan independence flags; the decision has meant that even larger numbers of Catalans see complete independence from Spain as the only long-term solution. The Catalan general sense of grievance was not helped the next day when Spain won the World Cup, since the core players in the Spanish team were Catalans who played for Barça, the Barcelona football club, which Catalans feel represents the Catalan spirit in the world.
As I watched the game on television in the Catalan Pyrenees, there were Catalans in the room who wanted Spain to lose, who could not bear the idea of Spanish flags being waved in jubilation and the general Spanish triumphalism.
It was noted with some glee in the following weeks that certain members of the constitutional court who had ruled against Catalonia had been photographed attending bullfights, which are a normal part of life in many Spanish cities and are covered by the main Spanish newspaper El País as important cultural events. Banning bullfights on Catalan territory from the beginning of 2012 would be the beginning of Catalonia's sweet revenge. While the ban may have something to do with animal rights, it is seen here as a way of proclaiming national rights.
The ban was, of course, opposed by the rightwing parties. The newspapers on Thursday were deeply divided. The far rightwing La Gaceta on a front page editorial heaped insults on the politicians who had voted for the ban, singling out the man who is likely to become the next Catalan president as "a separatist who hates everything Spanish". The Catalan-language Avui, on the other hand, ran a headline proclaiming: "Goodbye Black Spain". El País on its editorial page showed a cartoon of a Spanish bull saying to a Catalan donkey, "Muchas gracias" and the donkey replying, in Catalan "De res", Catalan for "Not at all". At least someone, besides the Catalans, is happy: the bulls. If they were to join forces, perhaps they would get us a fast train line to France.
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Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad: 'It's not possible to write a neutral story'
The Bookseller of Kabul propelled Åsne Seierstad to global literary renown – and then to court. Did she exploit her subjects' privacy and trust in her portrayal of Afghan family life? And what does the case mean for journalism?
In three weeks, Åsne Seierstad will give birth to her second child. Substantial rebuilding work is being done to her house in Oslo and her young son is driving her neighbours to despair every morning with his new drum kit. But all of this is nothing to the storm Norway's most successful author has gone through in the past few days.
Last week, Seierstad learned that she had lost the first legal stage of a literary tussle over her representation of the real-life subject of her bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, which has fascinated her readers around the world for almost a decade. "Even though I'm in the middle of this and it's boiling right now, I can see that it's a fascinating situation and an important debate about who can and should, write what – and in what way," she says
Seierstad was a war correspondent before she exchanged the front lines to write the book that made her name, and which could now ruin it.
Provoking controversy almost from publication, The Bookseller of Kabul is a compelling portrait of an Afghan bookseller, a local hero who risked his life to save the literary heritage of his country and publicly argued for women's rights and liberal ideals. But, in the course of the book, the eponymous hero is revealed by Seierstad to be a tyrant who mercilessly oppressed his own family, enslaving his wives and refusing education to his sons.
It quickly became the bestselling nonfiction book in Norwegian history. It was translated into 29 languages and topped the international bestseller charts. Tim Judah, reviewing it in the Observer, called it "compulsive, repulsive and frightening". "If this is what life is like in the family of Afghanistan's answer to Tim Waterstone, there is clearly no hope for Afghanistan," he added. Another reviewer said it was "an emotive indictment of a horrible society".
But then, the central character stepped out from its pages and repudiated the book. Instead of staying quietly put where she left him, in Kabul, Shah Muhammad Rais bought a business-class flight from the Afghan capital to Norway, hired a lawyer and launched a counter-publicity trail through the Norwegian media, appearing on television and the front pages of newspapers, accusing Seierstad of treachery.
He claimed that her depiction of his family was inaccurate and invasive; that she had humiliated and destroyed them, forcing his first wife to move to Canada to live with her brother. The book had also, he said, dishonoured Afghanistan. The man who had risked his life to prevent his library being burned by the communists, the mujahideen and the Taliban insisted that Seierstad's account of him and his family was so slanderous that every copy should be destroyed.
For almost eight years, the row has played itself out in public and last month, Seierstad found herself in the witness box for three days, defending her book and her journalistic integrity.
She was confident she would win. "It is hard as a journalist to be judged like this," she says. "I can insist to everyone that it is just three small, concrete points that the judge has found against me, but it will always be written about me now that I have been judged for breaking privacy and had my accuracy questioned, and that's not a good thing as a journalist." (Those points were that Rais's wife hadn't wanted to marry him; that she hadn't been terrified of wanting a girl; and that Seierstad didn't do enough to make sure the wife's thoughts were correctly presented.)
She must now pay 250,000 Norwegian kroner (£26,000) to the first wife for invasion of privacy and for failing to ensure her quotes were accurate. He is claiming that seven other members of his family are poised to make similar claims against the author.
The second wave of litigation, however, will have to wait. Seierstad is appealing against the judgment. She plans to take it to Norway's supreme court and all the way to the European court of human rights if necessary.
"If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's OK to write," she says. "I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write. The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the country's constitution as the 'fundamental pillar of society'. Family law – decided by the men in the household – is more important than government legislation: [President Hamid] Karzai might insist that women can work but that doesn't mean anything if a father forbids his daughter from going to school. If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan."
Born in Norway in 1970, Seierstad studied Russian, Spanish and the history of philosophy at Oslo University. After graduating, she spent a year in Russia, where her father was working as a political scientist. In 1993, she moved to Moscow full-time to study politics. Keen to gain access and speak to Russian government officials, she posed as a journalist and her career took off.
Seierstad asked Rais, whom she met during her time in Afghanistan, if she could come and live with his family and write an intimate portrait of their lives. For five months, she probed, delved and peeled back the secrets of the family. There was nothing she didn't ask and nowhere she didn't go: into the men's world of commerce and conversation; into the women's world of the hammam, where burqas and inhibitions are shed.
It is a fascinating portrait: a family's dirty linen hung out for public gaze. Seierstad absented herself from its pages: in the book, the omnipotent storyteller is never present. Having lived with the family for so long and questioned them so closely, she says she felt justified writing from inside the head of each character, attributing thoughts and feelings to them without the filter of her own voice – as if she were writing a novel. In previous interviews, Seierstad has made much of the fact that the most important lesson that her parents taught her was to care for others less fortunate than herself, and has cited the writer and traveller Ryszard Kapuscinsk as a hero owing to the respect he always showed his subjects.
I ask whether it was kind of her to draw out these women's most intimate sexual secrets and private emotions, and reveal them to the world. "What's unkind in it?" Seierstad says, surprised. "My project, my only goal, was to understand what was going on inside one of these families. I was there as a journalist, invited into their home to find out about Afghanistan. Should I, when I know something is not right, like the way the bookseller treated his wives, say it's not important? Yes, it is important and I have to find out."
But was it right to accept Rais's hospitality for almost half a year and then tear him apart in public? She may have been invited into the family home by Rais, but did the women in the house – one of whom was 16 and had barely left the backyard of her father's home before marrying the aging Rais – truly understand what would happen to their secrets after they were scribbled down in a writer's notepad?
"They say now that they didn't say certain things or that they are humiliated by having them written about, but who is really saying that?" Seierstad says. "It is Rais who is leading this campaign against me for reasons of money or of honour, I have no idea, but because these women are dependent on him, they have no choice but to say what he says. It's important for us to know Afghanistan. It is a country where we waged a war and to understand people you have to dig deeper and there's nothing unkind in that."
Yet Seierstad admits that, at times, she did go too far. In the first edition of the book, published in a limited run in the UK and now out of print, there is an astonishingly intimate description of one of the women in the household at the hammam. In two passages, Seierstad writes about the breasts, belly and genitals of this woman – a woman who since reaching adulthood has never left her house without wearing a burqa.
"I removed that section because Rais asked me to," says Seierstad. "But this book went through several editors and we all overlooked that problematic word, genitals. We realised it was a mistake only after Rais focussed on it, and I apologised to him and to his mother for it."
That she put it in at all, is perhaps evidence of a lack of sympathy for her subjects' privacy. In the past, Seierstad has claimed that the book is not a criticism of the Islamic way of life – but that it "just reveals a lot about it". This, I suggest, is disingenuous – and dangerous. Her outrage at the way women are treated in the book crackles on every page, but because she has written herself out of the narrative, her highly subjective account could be accused as masquerading as an objective report.
There is a long pause. "I agree now that it is not possible to write a neutral story," she says. "I don't criticise the society with my words in the book but I agree, it's there in the text anyway. It's not an open critique but it is a critique."
Despite standing her ground, Seierstad says that she needs to be more rigorous: "If I write a book in future, I may decide to take the precaution of going back to every person I interview, reading their quotes back to them and asking them to sign a letter, saying it is accurate," she says. "Journalism is moving into a different world where we are held to almost impossible standards. In everything I write, ever again, I need to make sure I am 100% accurate. A journalist can get away with this sort of controversy once, but I can't survive it again."
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Half the Sky: how the other half suffer
Half the Sky has been described as 'a brutal awakening' and is a bestseller in the US. But can its accounts of violence and injustice to women in the developing world really come as such a surprise?
It's unusual for a book that takes its title and its epigraph – "Women hold up half the sky" – from Mao Zedong to receive such critical and popular acclaim in the US as Half the Sky, by Pulitzer-prizewinning American journalists Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It's not until page 177 that we learn who actually said the words that figure on the dedication page simply as "Chinese proverb". Then it turns out that husband and wife team Kristof and WuDunn don't really believe them anyway, for the last words of the book urge us to "get on with it and speed up the day when women truly hold up half the sky."
Nothing in Half the Sky: How to Change the World is new or news, although it is sometimes made to appear so. In chapter 11 Kristof and WuDunn describe microcredit as a "revolution sweeping the developing world". The Grameen bank was pioneered in Bangladesh 44 years ago. It has been a proper bank since 1983, owned by more than 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women, with a loan collection rate of almost 98%. Kristof and WuDunn mention Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel prize for the idea in 2006, but only to describe the motivation of Roshaneh Zafar who set up the Pakistani version, Kashf, in 1996. Kashf has yet to reach its millionth client; meanwhile a variety of microfinance corporations followed the business plan of the Grameen bank and are now handling $25bn (£16bn) worth of loans. Kristof and WuDunn tend to pussyfoot around the reasons that the preferred clients for microcredit are female: firstly they suggest that poverty has greater impact on women; the business reason is that women's credit performance is better than men's; the moral reason that women don't spend the money on their own immediate gratification, but invest it in family, business and community.
Yet it would seem from the worldwide reaction to Half the Sky – since it was first published in the US in September it has sold over 200,000 hardback copies; the paperback has now been on the New York Times bestseller lists for seven weeks – that it has surprised people. Melinda Gates found it "a brutal awakening". Where can she have been? The jacket quote from Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner, nails what, to me at least, is worrisome about the book: for him it is "a savage indictment of gender inequality in the developing world". True: the developed world gets off scot-free.
We begin with the story of Cambodian Srey Rath, who went to Thailand to work, was forced into prostitution and traded to Malaysia, succeeded in escaping, was imprisoned under Malaysian anti-immigrant law, and released after a year only to be sold by the police to a trafficker who sold her on to a brothel in Thailand. The justification for prefacing Half the World with this story is that "Rath's saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world." Routinely? Though such cases are far too easy for journalists to find, the inference that they are routine indicts whole nations of criminal misogyny.
The trafficking of women from the European countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and the Ukraine to other European countries, merits a sentence. We are never reminded that the US is a prime destination for trafficked individuals. Instead, the US appears as the potential saviour in practically all cases. When Rath finally escaped from the Thai brothel and returned to Cambodia she was put in touch with an American charity set up by a Newsweek journalist specifically to help trafficked girls; the charity gave her $400 to set herself up as a street trader.
The authors describe brutality towards women as "a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century." Raising awareness of brutality towards women is not a slow process; the problem is rather that the flash of outrage soon dissipates, to lie dormant until somebody or something triggers it again, while the vileness carries inexorably on, partly because the concerned public is unaware of its own misogyny.
Panic about trafficking has gripped the British on and off since the uproar about white-slaving in the 1880s, when ladies who "routinely" ill-treated their maids put on their hats and went to hear rousing denunciations of the evil foreigners who snatched beautiful young Englishwomen off the streets and sold them into prostitution. It is 100 years since the passing in the US of the White-Slave Traffic Act, usually called the Mann Act. When the UN general assembly adopted the convention for the suppression of the traffic in persons and of the exploitation of the prostitution of others in 1949, it was the culmination of a series of enactments designed to deal with what was perceived to be an international scourge. For Kristof and WuDunn the passing of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was "a milestone in raising awareness of international trafficking on the global agenda." As year on year the US fails to pay its UN dues, and most Americans are unaware of the existence of other hemispheres anyway, perhaps it was.
The book lays out "an agenda for the world's women focusing on three particular abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honour killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute". Gender-based violence here includes wife-beating in Asia, but not wife-killing in Britain or America. "Rape has become endemic in South Africa" we learn – as if rape had not coexisted with apartheid. The solution is apparently a gadget called Rapex, "a tube, with barbs inside", which a woman puts in her vagina before she goes on a date. The Kristof and WuDunn slant on this craziness is that "the Rapex is a reflection of the gender-based violence that is ubiquitous in much of the developing world."
Misogyny is as real in the US as anywhere else on earth. People who think charity begins at home will be driven to apoplexy by the authors' certainty that the US has the answers. Global figures for domestic violence are cited, but examples of women whose sexual experience began with a rape "or attempted rape" are drawn from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. The evidence about the involvement of women soldiers in sexual violence is taken not from Abu Ghraib, but from Sierra Leone's civil war, from Haiti and Rwanda. In contemplating these horrors Kristof and WuDunn sometimes become downright owlish in their capacity for incomprehension.
"Women have suffered grievously in the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur. Men too … In Darfur, after interviewing several women who had been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question: 'If women are raped when they get firewood… why don't the men collect firewood?'"
Answers on a postcard – and let's not forget that immediately after the war the population of Rwanda was 70% female. In a later chapter the authors sing the praises of Rwanda for having the highest share of women members of parliament, without appearing to suspect that this may also be a consequence of genocide. With no sign of a shudder they intone that Rwanda is "one of the least corrupt, fastest growing and best governed countries in Africa". One of them? You have to wonder what the others are.
Kristof and WuDunn have done the usual Pulitzer thing of finding specific cases to illustrate general points: "Frankly," they write, "we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanising. A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act." Individual cases cannot prove that behaviours are routine or ubiquitous. The authors state with confidence that: "No group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law." Mothers-in-law do not form a group; the group with whom they identify is their extended family. Sure, a vicious mother-in-law can drive a young wife to self-harm and suicide, but in village society a wise mother-in-law knows that, if she is to build a strong cohesive family, she needs to earn the love of her daughters-in-law. In the developed world she wouldn't have the option.
"So while the primary purpose of a new movement on behalf of women is to stop slavery and honour killings," they write, "another is to expose young Americans to life abroad so that they, too, can learn and grow and blossom – and then continue to tackle the problems as adults." Nothing in this book would suggest to young Americans that their lifestyle perpetuates the poverty that lies at the root of developing-world brutality towards women. Do they know who made their jeans? Do they realise that they haven't the option of buying American-made, because if they do the Asian sweatshop worker will be thrown out of work? International aid programmes are infested with people seeking their own salvation at other people's expense; if Kristof and WuDunn have their way there will be a whole lot more of them.
A number of explanations for the intractable rate of maternal mortality that continues to bedevil the world are suggested – but poverty is left out. Doctors Allan Rosenfield and Deborah Maine wrote their seminal article on maternal mortality for the Lancet in 1985; in 1999 Rosenfield received a $50m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to set up a programme called Averting Maternal Death and Disability. If brilliance and application had been enough Rosenfield might have done it. But mothers are still dying, and for the same reason: poverty. Poverty leads to illiteracy, low status, poor nutrition, teenage pregnancy, poor physical development, lack of infrastructure, and lack of resources and expertise. Multimillion-dollar programmes enter the scenario much too late. Meanwhile, as western doctors win awards for setting up humanitarian programmes in third-world countries, we harvest the doctors who trained in those same countries, whose skills are better adapted to the needs of rich patients than to those of their own rural poor.
The chapter entitled "Family planning and the 'God gulf'" argues that "secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause" if there is to be "a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries". The discussion of this issue is dominated by American policy in regard to support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and any other family planning organisations that can be found to have supported abortion programmes. Kristof and WuDunn have no objection to the involvement of religious organisations in international programmes – indeed they counsel getting the Pentecostalists on board because they already have so much influence in the developing world. As far as they are concerned, dealing with the agonies of women is a matter for charity, which they sometimes misname as philanthropy. The love of humanity has to be a better motive for intervention than the love of God, you would think. Or even feminism, a word that the authors use very oddly, usually to pillory an attitude they find fundamentally unreasonable.
They praise the small Campaign for Female Education charity (Camfed) which was set up by Ann Cotton to fund girls' education, first in Zimbabwe, and now in Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana, because of what it doesn't do. "We highlight Camfed partly because we believe an international women's organisation needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into schools."
Without feminism it's difficult to imagine how an international women's movement could get off the ground. Anyone would think that there was a naughty international women's organisation that did nothing but have conventions and lobby for new laws. The equal rights amendment was never ratified in sainted America; American feminists might find that embarrassing, but they gave up lobbying about it long ago. Funnily enough, when it comes to discussing microcredit, Kristof and WuDunn decide that new laws and more women in parliament are exactly what is needed.
The authors have no critique of globalism to offer, nor do they appear to grasp how western economic power keeps the developing world too poor to develop. Astoundingly, they suggest that what women need is more sweatshops. "The factories prefer young women, perhaps because they're more docile and perhaps because their small fingers are more nimble for assembly or sewing. So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and the status of women. The implication is that instead of denouncing sweatshops, we in the west should be encouraging manufacturing in poor countries, particularly in Africa and the Muslim world."
One of the best parts of the book, unexpected given its own brief, is the short discussion of female genital-cutting and the success of a grassroots organisation called Tostan in changing attitudes.
The impulse behind Half the Sky is a good one. Anyone who has endured the talkfests of the UN for decade after weary decade, and seen massive aid projects miss their mark and collapse in a welter of bad faith, will echo the authors' certainty that it is now down to ordinary people to do practical things for other ordinary people. It is tempting to believe that with "our loose change we can loosen chains" and that the internet will make real help possible as it has never been before. The only really enviable privilege that the privileged have is the chance to do good. Kristof and WuDunn make it sound easy. It's practically impossible, but Half the Sky does make you want to try.
Half the Sky: How to Change the World is published by Virago on 5 August
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Good to meet you … David Pattison
A Guardian reader on Zimbabwe, later-life career changes and theatrical inspiration
I'm 70 and became a Guardian reader when I became an undergraduate student in 1988. My career in accountancy had plateaued and, as I'd always wanted to write, I decided I had to break the mould. In 10 years I completed three degrees: a BA in humanities, an MA in African studies and a PhD on the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera. I couldn't have done it without a grant; it would never be possible now.
I first went to Zimbabwe in 1996 to address a conference on Marechera. It was a bit like going back to 1950s England. The parks were full of English flowers, and department stores sold tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Harare was a beautiful city and Zimbabweans are such a generous people, but you could see things were beginning to fall to bits. It's a tragedy what has happened to the country.
After university, I went to teach at the University of Hull and devoured the Guardian's Tuesday Education supplement. Now my day starts with both crosswords and the sudoku, then I read the theatre reviews; Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner have such a breadth of knowledge. In my home town of Hull we are celebrating Larkin – it's 25 years since the poet died – and I have two plays featured. I have had some success as a playwright and have learned much from the Guardian critics.
My late elder brother, Peter, tried to introduce me to the Manchester Guardian when I was a boy. We were both sport-mad and he used to read out pieces to me. I will never forget the reference to cricketer Tony Lock in a match against Yorkshire back in the 1950s as "throwing appeals at the umpire like a madman throwing eggs at a cathedral". My father had always read the News of the World. Reading the Guardian, I realised newspapers could produce good writing.
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Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes | Book review
The Vietnam war proves rough terrain for James Campbell
For the men of Bravo Company, Fifth Marine Division, boredom and fear are almost as daunting a prospect as the guns of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, just 19 and recently dropped in the jungle on the Laos border, finds his days "filled with nerve-racking tedium": "patrols and nighttime listening posts, the stupefying work of laying barbed wire, hacking out fields of fire with K-bars, digging holes, improving positions, eating, shitting, drinking, nodding off, trying to stay awake. Still, it beat humping."
Humping is marching, of which the men of Bravo Company also do a great deal. The form of Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes's first novel, is purposely structured on the typical soldier's divided experience. In the first of two equal parts, the reader slogs along with the men through numbing preparations for a plan to retake the mountain they have named Matterhorn. They held the position earlier, then abandoned it, only to see their own bunkers occupied advantageously by the NVA. The American commanding officers order one assault after another, and the second half of the story is taken up with the battles, which are brilliantly, sickeningly described. Modern American literature is rich in writing about war – from The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer through Tobias Wolff's wonderful memoir of his Vietnam duty, In Pharaoh's Army, to the recent poems about Iraq by Brian Turner – but nothing comes to mind to compare with the close-up evocations of combat in Matterhorn.
Marlantes, a richly decorated Vietnam veteran, is said to have spent 30 years on the novel, while working as a business consultant. The original typescript was more than twice the length of the finished book, which is probably still too long. A slow build-up is generally welcome in fiction, but Marlantes is not an experienced enough writer to keep the reader interested through 300 pages of dull routine, comradely joshing – "Do unto others before they do you. That's the fucking Golden Rule out here, Jack" – and edgy testing of authority. It is sometimes difficult to follow the action through forests of jargon and initials (DMZ, KP, LZ, RPG and so on – the glossary covers 30 pages). His numerous characters are insufficiently differentiated, and when their minds are not on the task that lies ahead, their emotions turn trite: "Slowly, with each breath, his anger grew: at the cliff, the bullshit, the hunger, the war, everything." There are echoes of the Hemingway of A Farewell to Arms in Mellas's tantrums: "He cursed the diplomats . . . He cursed the South Vietnamese . . . He cursed the people back home . . . Then he cursed God."
But Marlantes trumps Hemingway in one essential respect: he experienced the heat of battle (Hemingway drove an ambulance in the first world war) and the aftershocks are vividly present in his narrative. Curses against God are futile once the attack is under way. No God sensitive to curses would have landed them here.
"A stunned NVA soldier struggled to turn the machine gun on Goodwin but couldn't move fast enough. Goodwin, like a panther making a kill, was on top of him, firing his M-16. The remaining NVA in nearby gun pits stood up, weaponless, eyes filled with terror, and raised their hands . . . Mellas, still standing on the dead boy's body, slumped his head forward and rested his bloody, stinging face on the cool clay . . . 'We won', Jackson said." In common with warriors through the ages, the men of Bravo Company respect their enemies. The NVA know what they are fighting for – their country – but what of the Marines? There is scarcely a mention of US patriotism or any other national cause. Courage is pledged to one another. Hatred is reserved for their own commanding officers.
The main sub-theme of Matterhorn (it can't be called a subplot, since the novel doesn't have a main one) is race relations. The action is set in 1969, one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, when the tone of civil rights protests had become more strident. "The nigras are up in arms with this black power crap," the colonel reflects, as he "carefully measured out just a little more whiskey". It's not just him – the good guys are also having problems adjusting to the evolving consciousness of the African American soldier. All-black cliques, the whites complain, disrupt company spirit. One black private claims to have relentless headaches and wants to go home. Doesn't everybody? Accusations of malingering (well-founded, as it turns out) have a familiar ring of racism to sensitive black ears. Mellas is portrayed as the voice of reason in this area (he is, after all, the main representative of his creator) but he is forced to face his own prejudices by the admired squad leader, Jackson.
Matterhorn is a story of men without women. When Mellas thinks of the girl he left behind in Virginia, Marlantes's prose becomes fluttery, as it does when Mellas, suffering an eye injury, is cared for by a nurse on board a medical ship. "They're sending you back to the bush," she says. "It's like I do my job well, and the result is sending you back to combat." In the inevitable movie, they might arrange it differently, just as the battle scenes are likely to seem studio-fabricated, inspiring a more familiar type of horror. Marlantes has demonstrated the supremacy of the written word. The tedious ascent of Matterhorn might seem drawn out to some readers, but they should savour each moment, before the shooting starts.
James Campbell's Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin is published by Faber.
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This week: Tony Hayward, Chelsea Clinton and North Korea's football team
Lucy Mangan on the people making the headlines in the last seven days
PeopleCaps off
Tony Hayward
BP has axed its chief executive to try and draw a line under the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the handling of which he ... well, didn't. Though he did manage to offend the families of the 11 people who died in the explosion and anger the rest of the US by whining that "No one wants this over with more than I do. I would like my life back."
Axed seems a slightly inappropriate term, of course, for Hayward, who will leave not immediately, as the term would imply, but in October. With a £1m payoff and £600,000 a year pension, and a new job, in a non-executive position at TNK-BP, his firm's joint Russian venture, he's got his life back. Hurrah.
Bill's bills
Chelsea Clinton
Omigod, it's TODAY! Entirely unconfirmed reports suggest that as you read this, the $7,000 (£4,500) cake is being assembled, $500,000 worth of flowers are being artfully distributed, and the $125,000 meal for 500 is being prepared. The daughter of Bill 'n' Hill will be zipping herself into a $25,000 Vera Wang dress, and Hillary – if she didn't have her ducts cauterised during the Lewinsky days – will be dabbing away a tear. And you know who will be being kept away from the bridesmaids by a large and vigilant contingent of the $200,000 security detail.
Only $30,000 has apparently been spent on the booze, so guests – fill a flask for your breast pocket but don't reach in there too fast. You'll probably be shot. Have a wonderful day!
Management study
North Korea's football team
They do things a little differently in Kim Jong-il's land. As its punishment for losing all three of their games in South Africa during their first ever World Cup, the national team have been subjected to public humiliation at the People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang. They received a six-hour reprimand from 400 students for letting down the country.
Rumour has it that the coach, Kim Jong-un, has been sent to work on a building site and expelled from the Workers' party of Korea.
Don't you wish, sometimes, that the human race could learn to find a happy medium occasionally? Somewhere between "£600,000 a year for life for mismanaging the greatest environmental disaster in history" and "public shaming and banishment for losing a football match". Somewhere between those two.
What they said"Every one of them had a tough life. First [problem] was to master a foreign language as your own. Think and speak it and do what are you told to do for the interest of your motherland … without counting on diplomatic immunity"
Vladimir Putin hails the spy ring
"I've taken a lot of lessons from him, but I don't have that ability to carve the ocean like he does"
Cameron Diaz on her Knight and Day co-star Tom Cruise. Ah, actors
"For sustainability reasons"
Andrew Thornton, owner of a Budgens store in north London, explains why he stocks squirrel meat"I know the history of actors making music is a chequered one, but I promise no-one will get hurt"
Hugh Laurie, who is recording a blues album in New Orleans.
What we've learned• The first Twilight novel has become the 13th book this century to sell 2m copies in the UK
• 200,000 people a year are injured by flip-flops
• A quarter of dogs are overweight
• 1 in 36 pound coins is fake
• The average mobile phone has 18 times more germs than a toilet handle
• Churchill's false teeth sold for £15,200
… and what we haven't• What we should all go and see at this year's Edinburgh festival
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Peek into Fidel Castro's past in Cuba's wild east
Oriente is the steamy, jungle-dense, tourism-free side of Cuba – it is also where Fidel Castro grew up. Lydia Bell visits his family's finca and his revolutionary HQ
The clapped-out Moskvich is blaring Charanga Forever, the hottest salsa band in Cuba. Its owner, Yasser, is being paid to drive us to the Sierra Maestra. The blacked-out windows are de rigueur to hide his illegal cargo – the yuma (foreigner, me) and her Cuban husband. We are cutting past the Bay of Nipe, shooting at breakneck speed down straight roads banked by thigh-high sugar cane, the Sierra Cristal hovering on the horizon, when Yasser mentions that Fidel Castro's childhood farm is five kilometres away. I plead with him to make a detour.
Twenty minutes later, past a tiny hamlet called Birán, we arrive at a remote farm overlooked by mountains, set in sun-kissed meadows. There is no one there save a couple of guards who send for a guide for us. We have chanced upon an extraordinary place: the estate where the nine Castro siblings spent their halcyon childhood.
I had no idea Fidel's father was so successful. An immigrant from Spain, Angel Castro married Lina, a Cuban girl 28 years his junior, and bought a farm, which he kept expanding (Fidel ultimately confiscated land from his father: no special treatment there). Angel built a general store, telegraph room, school, hotel and mini cockfighting stadium.
You can visit the house Fidel's parents lived in until their death. Lina's bedroom is dotted with religious statues, her glass-top dresser decorated with clippings of her son in the jungle. There is Angel's old wardrobe with his clothes hanging there, and all the family bric-a-brac. In a country of closed doors, which knows about as much about museum curating as it does about hedge fund management, this is most compelling – perhaps because it was rescued from dilapidation and passionately restored in 1979 by Celia Sánchez, Fidel's friend and rumoured lover, rather than by a bunch of Communist party officials with a lot of agenda and little insight.
I don't know why I should be surprised that austere Fidel spent his formative years here, so far from the bright lights of Havana. Like many Cuban anti-imperialists, including those who fought the Spanish, he was brought up wealthy, amid great poverty, in the east. In Oriente, peasant insurrection and revolutionary passions were always easily ignited.
Today Oriente remains the Cuba of your wildest imagination, a world away from beach loungers, cuba libre cocktails and musicians singing Guantanamera on auto-pilot. It has dense jungles, hidden rivers and unvisited coasts. The weather is steamier and more temperamental; the roads peter out into tracks. The people are darker, their mores and beliefs more African, their manners lackadaisical and Caribbean.
If we feel we've seen a new side to Fidel here, where we are headed is more fearfully revolutionary: the Sierra Maestra, the tallest mountains in Cuba, where the rebels hid while they plotted their revolution (see the Stephen Soderburgh biopic, Che: Part One, for details). Santo Domingo in the Sierra Maestra is the jumping-off point for La Comandancia, Castro's headquarters. We arrive at dusk, aware that it is by the grace of God that Yasser's panting Moskvich made it up these gradients.
Villa Santo Domingo is a collection of cabanas wedged into the side of the road next to a river in the middle of nowhere, overlooked by towering peaks. We cross the river to find a village of wooden shacks and tethered horses, where they seem to husband farmyard animals in miniature: chicks, piglets and kid goats, even puppies. On the path there are two boulders, daubed with one word each – "Fidel" and "Raúl". Not the usual government-ordered murals, just villagers who still have revolutionary fervour in their breasts. We return to the villa to find them spit-roasting a pig.
The next morning we awake to discover that the downside to this apparent idyll is a complete lack of organisation. The only way to get up to the mountain is by taxi. There is a visitor centre, but you are supposed to transport your guide. There are no taxis available till midday.
In typical Cuban style, the guides in the centre are busy: watching a Rambo-style film. In typical Cuban style, our appointed guide is thoroughly miserable to be coming up the mountain with us (when our taxi finally arrives) and doesn't bother hiding it. And in typical Cuban style, he turns out to be charming and amusing, and offers an insight into the failings of the local farming economy.
When Castro had his headquarters here, he chose it for its virgin jungle, obscurity and austerity. A sympathetic local population protected the rebels. We stop at the house of a family who delivered early warning signs of outsiders. Their impossibly isolated home has turkeys, peacocks, chickens and a panoramic view from a terrace with rocking chairs. We eat juicy oranges sliced with a sabre.
Arriving at La Comandancia we see that the dwellings – hospital, radio tent, lookout and small museum, among others – were thatched shacks some distance from each other. At Fidel's hut, a nest of bees has taken residence by the front door. Whether you are a socialist or not, whether you admire what has happened in Cuba since the revolution or not, the romance and idealism of this place is moving. We are alone on this mountain today, walking in Casdtro's footsteps for the second time in two days.
We leave Santo Domingo for Santiago, which, the taxi driver informs us, is the home of the most annoying policemen in Cuba. To avoid them he peels off the motorway at El Cristo, a village in the hills just above Santiago with stunning plantation-style mansions in spectacular states of dilapidation. The closer you get to Santiago, the more overpowering the heat and humidity become.
Like so many famous places in Cuba, Santiago feels small, with a handful of key venues. The place to hear the city's cutting-edge salsa and rumba is La Casa de la Trova, where the tables and balconies are packed with tourists and lady hustlers. From the top of the Casa Grande hotel you can see the whole city, starting with the bell towers of the beautiful Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. For epic scale, there's the Castillo del Morro, the old fortress outside town, at dusk.
If you seek revolutionary history, Santiago has it in spades: Santiago people were always more Cuban, less Spanish, and prone to disobedience. The Moncada Barracks, where Fidel led a failed coup in 1953, are here but we don't visit. I'm interested in what the Cuban government calls "the triumph of the revolution" but I'm tired of being force-fed it.
More decadent is the Museo Emilio Bacardí Moreau, which houses the art and archeological collection of the former Santiago mayor and rum king. It has everything from Egyptian mummies to sinister slave-whipping devices. I wonder when the Bacardí family will return to try and claim it back.
Our last stop is the most eastern of the eastern towns: Baracoa. The road from Santiago to here passes through the wild-west-style country town of Guantánamo and skips over the top of Guantánamo Bay before hugging a deserted coastline. From our Chinese-made bus we pass resting farm workers in high, straw-thatched hats sitting in carts next to their oxen. They look like people you might squint at in a scuffed black-and-white photograph. It is hard to imagine Gitmo just "over there" on the other side of the cactus curtain, with its mini movie theatres and McDonald's.
Then the bus scales La Farola, the road that was cut through the Sierra del Purial in the 1960s and opened Baracoa to the world. The bends are speckled with clapboard dwellings with cottage gardens, where women sell mandarins, Baracoan chocolate and cucurucho – a cloying mixture of coconut, orange, guava and sugar sold in cones made of palm leaves.
Cuba was Columbus's second landfall in the New World, and Baracoa was his first port of call, in 1492. He planted a cross in the ground and got an enthusiastic greeting from the doomed Taíno Indians. Diego Velázquez founded the first colonial town in the Americas here in 1512, and it was Cuba's capital from 1518 to 1522.
You wouldn't know it. This is not a town trumpeting faded colonial grandeur; rather it is a village in disrepair, with colonnaded colonial shacks in tumbledown rows, where cockerels, piglets and strays mingle with children. The cathedral is a shell awaiting restoration, and Columbus's Cruz de la Parra has been removed to a house on a side street. The northern part of town is full of the scent of cocoa: Baracoa has Cuba's only chocolate factory.
Cut off by the mountains for centuries, Baracoa remained sequestered, the only place you could still see the genes of Taíno Indians in the faces of the locals. It was here that the 16th-century Taíno chief Hatuey raised an army to fight the Spanish. Away from the centre, the town drifts upwards into the hills, its houses dotted among palms, breadfruit and mango trees. The archaeological museum is housed in caves that are Taíno burial sites: skeletons rest in the foetal position alongside a trove of pre-Columbian artefacts. It's surrounded by shacks among banana trees; to reach it you push through washing strung between fat palms, and paths criss-crossed by piglets. We are the only people there.
We stay in hotel El Castillo, one of Baracoa's old fortifications. From its pool you can see the town's greatest asset: the whole, glistening countryside, from the mist-covered flat peak of El Yunque to the snaking rivers and brooding seas. There is no doubt that this is the most enchanted landscape in the whole of Cuba.
Much of the time we are in Baracoa it thunders and pours, so we sit in rocking chairs on the dripping porch and watch the landscape turn against itself. The skies light up, water gushes down from the hills, the rivers turn a strange burgundy and the sea goes an apocalyptic brown. When the rains abate we visit the mouth of the Rio Toa. Under storm-cloud skies we find a wilderness beach with a thousand tides' worth of coconut husks and driftwood scattered over it, huddled beneath towering royal palms.
The Toa, a dark emerald green, swirls moodily into the sea. We see three people fishing quietly, a clutch of girls washing clothes and two lovers embracing in the shallows. We hike up to El Yunque, the remnant of a plateau so isolated it has its own species of ferns and palms. At the mouth of the Rio Yumuri, which cuts through stunning gorges, we eat coconut-poached snapper prepared by women in tumbledown houses on the beach.
We end at Playa Maguana, a beach 25km north of Baracoa where we stay at Villa Maguana, an elegant beach shack, with 12 spacious timber-built rooms. A villager called Javier brings us home-cooked lobster, plantain and salad on the beach for a princely £2.60, and slices off the tops of green coconuts for us to drink. We eat the lobster, observed by a giant, malodorous pig, and ponder how to get out of here.
Rain is expected again, and tomorrow we need to find someone to take us the 25 muddy kilometres to Baracoa, so we can catch a bus to Santiago, as all the planes are booked. It's an odyssey, but then that feels right for a place that looks like the Garden of Eden at the end of the earth.
Way to goJourney Latin America (020 8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk) can organise an eight-night stay in Cuba taking in Havana and the highlights of eastern Cuba, including Santiago, Baracoa and the Sierra Maestra, from £942. This price includes accommodation, internal flights, transfers and some meals, but not international flights. Flights from the UK to Havana with Air France (0871 6633 777, airfrance.co.uk), via Paris, start from £495.
The Conjunto Histórico de Birán, the museum in the Castro family finca, is 3km northeast of Birán (open Tue-Sun).
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