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Wednesday 14 April 2010

The pope should stand trial

 

Why is anyone surprised when Christopher Hitchens and I call for the prosecution of the pope? There is a clear case to answer

 

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI Holds Weekly Audience - December 23, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI ... 'severely shaken' by the abuse cases. Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images

Sexual abuse of children is not unique to the Roman Catholic church, and Joseph Ratzinger is not one of those priests who raped altar boys while in a position of dominance and trust. But as so often it is the subsequent cover-ups, even more than the original crimes, that do most to discredit an institution, and here the pope is in real trouble.

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the institution as a whole, but we can't blame the present head for what was done before his watch. Except that in his particular case, as archbishop of Munich and as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what used to be called the Inquisition), the very least you can say is that there is a case for him to answer. See, for example, three articles by my colleague Christopher Hitchens here, here, and here. The latest smoking gun is the 1985 letter obtained by the Associated Press, signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger to the diocese of Oakland about the case of Father Stephen Kiesle, mercilessly analysed by Andrew Sullivan here.

Lashing out in desperation, church spokesmen are now blaming everybody but themselves for their current dire plight, which one official spokesman likens to the worst aspects of antisemitism (what are the best ones, I wonder?). Suggested culprits include the media, the Jews, and even Satan. The church is hiding behind a seemingly endless stream of excuses for having failed in its legal and moral obligation to report serious crimes to the appropriate civil authorities. But it was Cardinal Ratzinger's official responsibility to determine the church's response to allegations of child sex abuse, and his letter in the Kiesle case makes the real motivation devastatingly explicit. Here are his actual words, translated from the Latin in the AP report:

"This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner."
"The young age of the petitioner" refers to Kiesle, then aged 38, not the age of any of the boys he tied up and raped (11 and 13). It is completely clear that, together with a nod to the welfare of the "young" priest, Ratzinger's primary concern, and the reason he refused to unfrock Kiesle (who went on to re-offend) was "the good of the universal church".
This pattern of putting church PR over and above the welfare of the children in its care (and what an understatement that is) is repeated over and over again in the cover-ups that are now coming to light, all over the world. And Ratzinger himself expressed it with damning clarity in this smoking gun letter.

In this case he was refusing the strong request of the local bishop that Kiesle should be unfrocked. Vatican standing orders were to refer such cases not to the civil authorities but to the church itself. The current campaign to call the church to account can take credit for the fact that this standing order has just changed, as of Monday 12 April 2010. Better late than never, as Galileo might have remarked in 1979, when the Vatican finally got around to a posthumous pardon.

Suppose the British secretary of state for schools received, from a local education authority, a reliable report of a teacher tying up his pupils and raping them. Imagine that, instead of turning the matter over to the police, he had simply moved the offender from school to school, where he repeatedly raped other children. That would be bad enough. But now suppose that he justified his decision in terms such as these:
"Although I regard the arguments in favour of prosecution, presented by the local education authority, as of grave significance, I nevertheless deem it necessary to consider the good of the government and the party, together with that of the offending teacher. And I am also unable to make light of the detriment that prosecuting the offender can provoke among voters, particularly regarding the young age of the offender."
The analogy breaks down, only in that we aren't talking about a single offending priest, but many thousands, all over the world.

Why is the church allowed to get away with it, when any government minister who was caught writing such a letter would immediately have to resign in ignominy, and face prosecution himself? A religious leader, such as the pope, should be no different. That is why, along with Christopher Hitchens, I am supporting the current investigation of the pope's criminal complicity by Geoffrey Robertson QC and Mark Stephens. These excellent lawyers believe that, for a start, they have a persuasive case against the Vatican's status as a sovereign state, on the basis that it was just an ad hoc concoction driven by internal Italian politics under Mussolini, and was never given full status at the UN. If they succeed in this initial argument, the pope could not claim diplomatic immunity as a head of state, and could be arrested if he steps on British soil.

Why is anyone surprised, much less shocked, when Christopher Hitchens and I call for the prosecution of the pope, if he goes ahead with his proposed visit to Britain? The only strange thing about our proposal is that it had to come from us: where have the world's governments been all this time? Where is their moral fibre? Where is their commitment to treating everyone equally under the law? The UK government, far from standing up for justice for the innocent victims of the Roman Catholic church, is preparing to welcome this grotesquely tainted man on an official visit to the UK so that he can "dispense moral guidance". Read that again: dispense moral guidance!

Unfortunately I must end in bathos, with a necessary correction of a damaging error in another newspaper. The Sunday Times of 11 April, on its front page, printed the headline, "Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI." This conjures up – as was doubtless intended – a ludicrous image of me ambushing the pontiff with a pair of handcuffs and marching him off in a half Nelson. Blood out of a stone, but I finally managed to persuade that Murdoch paper to change the headline in the online edition.
Never mind headlines invented by foolish sub-editors, we are serious. It should be for a court to decide – a civil court, not a whitewashing ecclesiastical court – whether the case against Ratzinger is as damning as it looks. If he is innocent, let him have the opportunity to demonstrate it in court. If he is guilty, let him face justice. Just like anybody else.



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Friday 9 April 2010

If you're looking for class war, just read Cameron's policies


 

Johann Hari: 

It is very hard for the British people to make a serious choice in this election without talking about one factor above all others - class. This isn't about David Cameron's background; it's about his policies. It is a provable fact that he will redistribute wealth - substantially - but in a strange direction: from everyone in the big wide middle and bottom of British society, to the very top.
Here are the facts. He will give a £1.2bn inheritance tax cut to the richest 2 per cent in Britain - with most going to the 3,000 wealthiest estates (including his wife's). Then he promises to end the 50p top rate of tax, giving another £2.4bn to the richest 1 per cent. Then he has pledged to cut taxes on the pensions of the richest, handing another £3.2bn to the same 1 per cent. Then his marriage tax relief policies will give 13 times more to the rich than the poor. To pay for this, he will slash programmes for the middle and the skint, like the Child Trust Fund, SureStart and state schools.
 
But this is not called "class war". No. The nasty "class warriors" are the people who try - with hard statistical facts - to point out this rip-off by the rich. This exposes the assumptions that underpin our politico-media debate. Money being endlessly shovelled up to the top by the state is considered the natural state of affairs; anybody trying to speak for the interests of the majority is considered a rude and irrational "warrior." These premises were best rebuffed by the billionaire Warren Buffett, who quipped: "Let's face it - if there's a class war, my side's winning."
 
Yet the media is trying to render all of this taboo, by claiming that any discussion of class is an attack on Cameron's childhood at Eton. One front page screamed: "Now The Class War Begins!" - referring not to Cameron's policies, but Gordon Brown's mild reference to himself as "middle class." But how can the British people know what they are choosing, if we can't discuss which class will benefit from Cameron - and which classes will lose?
 
Yes, the differences between New Labour and the Conservatives are far too small, on this as on all issues. There are myriad ways in which the current Government has also spoon-fed the super-rich. They cheer-led the economy-crashing deregulation of the banks; they turned Britain into a de facto tax haven for non-doms; when you add it all up, a tycoon still scandalously pays a lower proportion of his income in tax than his secretary.
 
But it is wrong to say, on this issue, there is no difference at all. The gap is real, and millions of people live in that gap. The Institute of Fiscal Studies just published a long-term study of how Labour's tax changes have affected different classes, compared to the last Tory government. It found that the richest 10 per cent have seen their incomes cut by 9 per cent, to pay for an increase in the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent. A rich man has lost on average £25,000 a year; a poor woman has gained on average £1,700 a year. I have seen these changes among my own family and friends: gaining £1,700 is the difference between struggling to pay the bills, or being able to give your kids a summer holiday. Yes, there should have been much more - but the cigarette paper between the parties is big enough to make a pretty fat roll-up.
 
Cameron's policies make it pretty plain: this redistribution will be slammed into reverse by him, with state cash flowing in the opposite direction. Is this due to the fact that Cameron has lived his life in a bubble of extreme privilege, and thinks it is natural that People Like Us should be the primary beneficiaries of government action? This is a question that matters - but it needs to be answered carefully. It is idiotic to attack somebody for a decision their parents made when they were a child, or money they earned before he was conceived. There's nothing wrong with being an Etonian: George Orwell went to Eton, and went on to become the greatest left-winger this country has ever produced.
 
The problem isn't Cameron's extreme privilege - it is that he has never tried to see beyond it. He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands. For example, Cameron said in an interview: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school."
 
Read that sentence again. Now imagine how Britain looks from inside David Cameron's head, where the 97 per cent of us who went to day schools are "very unconventional". (In the Bullingdon Club, he called George Osborne "oik", because he had gone to the £20,000-a-year St Pauls, not the £30,000-a-year Eton.) This points to a wider mindset. The group he considers "conventional" and "normal" are the only people he has ever really mixed with, and they are the people he chooses to staff his office with today - very rich people. Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them, not us?
 
But this attempt to stop the British people understanding the class differences underpinning the election campaign is part of a wider effort to stop us understanding how our society still works. Cameron keeps saying class doesn't matter any more, and "it's not where you're from that matters, it's where you're going." But today, a child born into a poor family has to be 20 IQ points smarter than a child born into a rich family to have the same income when he is an adult. To a kid born in east London, the glistening towers of the City - just a 10-minute walk away - may as well be on a different planet.
 
But any discussion of this is stigmatised as old fashioned, gauche, or even "spiteful." Look at how the term "middle class" is used in our political discussion. The median income in Britain - where half earn more, and half earn less - is £23,000 a year. That's the middle class. Yet routinely the media will refer to taxes on people earning more than £100,000 - the richest six per cent - as "attacks on the middle class." Even the BBC has been referring to Cameron as "upper middle class", when he is related to the Queen and, with his wife, is estimated to be worth £30m - more than 1,000 times the middle-class wage. How is that the middle? The middle of what - White's gentlemen's club? By creating a false middle in this way, they obscure how much Cameron's policies serve a tiny clique at the very top.
 
Labour must not be intimidated into silence on this issue. On this, it is closer to public opinion than Cameron or his media cheerleaders. Poll after poll finds 75 per cent believe Britain is too unequal, and virtually nobody believes tax cuts should not be targeted at the rich. Indeed, public opinion is substantially to the left of Labour, choosing more progressive policies almost across the board - revealing yet again that New Labour's tragedy has been its conservatism and capitulation to the right. Despite all the disinformation, the British people are whiffing the truth: a Populous poll found that 50 per cent think Cameron is on the side of the rich, compared to only 42 per cent who thought he was on the side of ordinary people.
 
Yet Brown keeps lapsing into a feeble technocratic line of attack instead, complaining "the Tories' sums don't add up". This will fail and fail badly. People are so disgusted by politicians they assume all their plans are lies anyway - so finding a supposed "£6bn black hole" leaves everybody cold. He needs to appeal to people's visceral instincts instead.
 
The truth is plain, and it is provable. David Cameron's policies will take money from the hard-working majority of Brits, and hand it to his friends and relatives on landed estates and in tax havens. He is not on your side; he is on the side of a tiny clique who have every luxury in life and now bray for even more. Cameron bragged to his supporters last month: "Nothing and no one can stop us." It's up to the majority who will lose out if he become PM to say - oh yeah?




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How Wikileaks Shone Light On Some of the World's Darkest Secrets

 

 

By Archie Bland

08 April, 2010
The Independent

How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? Archie Bland investigates

When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.

The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.

"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print - you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."

And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers - five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call - are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable - to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year - some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."

Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist - so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed - Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.

Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."

Full disclosure: What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks

Trafigura's super-injunction

When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.

The CRU's 'Climategate' leak

Emails leaked on the site showed that scientists at the UK's Climate Research Unit, including director Phil Jones, withheld information from sceptics

The BNP membership list

After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.

Sarah Palin's emails

Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.




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Thursday 8 April 2010

Beyond Law And Order


 
 
The political class cannot abdicate responsibility for leadership and make the Naxal problem into a mere security issue. The way Pakistan deals with its tribal-belt in FATA should not be a role-model to emulate in central India
 
 
There are two Indias.

The dazzling India which we see every day on our TV channels, in the spins of our political leaders and in the writings of our so-called strategic analysts. This is the India which, according to them, is moving rapidly forward to take up its position as a world power, which is courted by the other nations of the world.

But there is another India which we rarely see or write about. This is the India of grinding poverty-- a victim of social exploitation of the worst kind, where the inhabitants--mainly tribals-- are treated like chattels and domestic animals by the upper caste political leaders, landlords and forest contractors.

We rarely see India of negative images because it has been sought to be pushed under the carpet by the dazzling India, which feels embarrassed to admit to the world that such an India exists 63 years after independence.

It is this India kept pushed under the carpet, which has managed to struggle its way out from under the carpet and is hitting out with ferocity at all its perceived exploiters-- whether in the Government or in the society.

It is this India coming out from under the carpet, which is flocking to the banners of the Maoist ideologues and taking to arms against the Government and its social exploiters. For it, the Government is not of the people, by the people and for the people, but of the exploiters, by the exploiters and for the exploiters.

Unless we have the moral courage to admit this harsh reality we are going to see more and more incidents of utter savagery as we saw on April 6, 2010, in the Dantewada district of Chattisgarh where a group of Maoists --estimated at between 300 and 1000-- ambushed and butchered about 75 members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), who had gone into the jungles for counter-insurgency operations.

This is not the first incident of butchery of the security forces  in the history of our counter-insurgency operations. This will  not be the last unless and until we realize that counter-insurgency is not only about putting down violence against the State and Society, but also about making resort to violence unnecessary by addressing the problems and grievances of the tribals.

It would be very easy to dismiss the Maoist insurgency as the political manipulation of illiterate or semi-literate tribals by Maoist ideologues from cities to achieve political power through the barrel of the gun. Yes, there is an element of cynical political  manipulation of the tribals by many city-bred Maoist ideologues.

But the claim of political manipulation alone cannot explain how hundreds and hundreds of tribals are flocking to the banners of the Maoists. Intense anger over the failures of successive Governments to recognize and address their problems are driving them  to heed the calls of the ideologues to massacre their perceived class enemies.

Unless and until we have a two-pronged approach to the problem--better counter-insurgency to put down violence and better governance and administration to remove the expoitation of the tribals by the non-tribals and improve their quality of life, blood will continue to flow in the jungles and roads of the tribal homelands in Central India.

Tribal India had always posed law and order problems. The tribal homelands in the North-East did so when Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were Prime Ministers. They put down the Chinese and Pakistani supported tribal insurgency in the North-East with a firm hand. At the same time, they interacted vigorously with the tribal people and addressed their problems in an attempt to wean them away from violence. Nehru started a special service called the Indian Frontier Administration Service (IFAS) and inducted the best officers from other services into it to improve governance in the tribal areas not only in the North-East, but also in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. They were always ready for a dialogue with the tribal leaders--even with those who had taken to arms against the State.

They addressed poverty and social injustice not only in the tribal areas, but also in  the rest of the country. Indira Gandhi used to start her day every day by mingling with poor and exploited people outside her residence and listening to their tales of woe. Her shoulders were always available to the poor and exploited to rest their head on and cry.

After Rajiv Gandhi, we have had a succession of Prime Ministers without a human touch in governance and administration in the tribal areas. They tend to look upon the tribal revolt in Central India as purely a problem of law and order, but not also as a problem with human dimensions.

The Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh is rarely seen or heard. He hardly ever mingles with the poor and downtrodden in the tribal belt of Central India. He deals with the tribal belt of Central India in the same way as the Pakistani leaders deal with the tribals of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)-- as mainly a problem to be tackled by the security forces as if the political class has no responsibility for leadership.

There is hardly a medium and long-term strategy -- with a judicious mix of the law and order and hearts and minds dimensions. All new ideas on counter-insurgency coming up are about how to make the security forces more effective. It is important for them to be effective . But it is equally--if not more--important for the political leadership to be seen by the tribals as caring and sensitive to their anger and bitterness towards their exploiters.

The time has come for the Prime Minister to take up in his hands the responsibility for working out a comprehensive political, operational and human strategy for dealing with the problems of the tribal homelands in Central India

If we continue to dither  as we are doing now, Mao Zedong may have his last laugh in India. 



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Wednesday 7 April 2010

"But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

Mark Steel in The Independent on 7 April 2010

Gordon Brown has one genuine chance left. He must employ the Vatican, as their public relations team operates at a level of utter genius. Somehow, while they're embroiled in an international paedophile scandal, they've fixed it so the person who's had to apologise is the Archbishop of an entirely different faith, for suggesting on Radio 4's Start the Week that the scandal has caused the Catholic church to lose credibility. Gary Glitter must have been straight on to 118 118 to gasp "Give me the number of the Pope".


The Pope's own preacher managed to make life even trickier for his boss, complaining that criticism of the Catholic Church on this issue was similar to anti-Semitism and "Collective punishment for Jews." Of course. I'm sure when a priest is told the children he abused want action to be taken against him, he thinks "I tell you what, now I know exactly how Anne Frank felt."

Still, I suppose we should be grateful he didn't add "But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

In a way this follows the history of the church, which has never been keen on owning up to its bad behaviour until the last minute. As a guide, having threatened to kill Galileo unless he withdrew his astronomical discoveries, they did manage to apologise, in 1996. So if the child abuse victims can be patient for three more centuries that should get everything cleared up.

You could argue there's something in the nature of the priesthood that makes this sort of activity more likely. A shrink for example might suggest that if you're seen as a conduit between your parishioners and the creator of the universe, and have to be celibate and even masturbation lands you with an eternity in unimaginable agonising torment, that could lead to behavioural issues in certain cases.

The Vatican has objected that the percentage of paedophiles in the priesthood is lower than in society as a whole. Who knows what polling company produced those figures but the problem isn't that some priests abuse children, it's that the ones who do it have been protected by their holy bosses.

It may be that a similar percentage of gas fitters are child abusers, but if they're caught they're sent to the police, and not told that as long as they quietly slip off to a different parish they can still advertise themselves as Corgi registered.

For example, one Father Lawrence Murphy is said to have abused around 200 boys at a deaf school over a period of 24 years in South Wisconsin, and when this was reported to the Vatican he was asked to move to North Wisconsin. And if they'd thought of it they'd probably have suggested he tried the blind school instead as at least they wouldn't be able to identify him in court.

Or there's the government commission in Ireland that concluded in one institution: "For six years priests and nuns terrorised boys and girls with physical, sexual and mental abuse."

If that was any other body, the press would plaster photos of all the abusers on their front pages under headlines saying "Boil this scum." And with your normal paedophile case, if someone suggests the institution that protected them will lose credibility as a result, the media reaction isn't "Hmm, well that seems a little strong."

But there's an assumption that if someone's a religious leader they are by definition wholesome and a bit saintly, so even a paedophile priest must mean well. And the person in charge of the branch of the Vatican that dealt with these misdemeanours was Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope, so it must all be a result of a bureaucratic mix-up or something.

So the Pope will just have to offer a semi-regret, send a couple of the worst offenders to a clinic, maybe suggest in future if a priest can't help himself with a bit of child abuse, he should use patches to wean himself off it, and then complain how upsetting it is if in spite of all this someone suggests his church is losing credibility.

Or maybe we've all been fooled and the Archbishop's comments were part of a publicity stunt for the show he made them on, in which case it was a huge success and similar tactics will be used for other shows. So the first question on next week's Gardeners' Question Time will be: "Can the panel tell me why my hydrangeas have been riddled with greenfly since the Church of England has been effectively finished as a religion? And that comes from the Dalai Lama?"

Sunday 4 April 2010

‘Essay factory’ offers 2:1 degree or your cash back

 

 
IT is the academic equivalent of "phone a friend". Students are being sold foolproof dissertations written for them with a cashback guarantee if they fail to get at least a 2:1 degree.
 
Instead of burning the midnight oil, all the students have to do is put the cost on their credit card. The company selling the service also says its contributors can ghost-write a first-class version of the essay for £1,440. An MA dissertation will cost up to £15,000.
 
The offers by the website UKEssays.com are the latest evidence of the growth of "essay mills", widely condemned as cheating aids. The firms claim they do not encourage dishonesty and say they tell students to use the essays as a "resource" and not hand them in.
 
The tailor-made work is becoming increasingly popular as universities become better at detecting direct plagiarism from the internet.
Most universities now use anti-plagiarism software to scan work that students submit, but they have done little to combat the essay mills.
 
UKEssays.com promises to put the completed essay through its own anti-plagiarism scanner to make sure it cannot be detected.
The firm is among the most successful of the essay mills. Its parent company, Academic Answers Ltd, recently reported profits of £241,598 for the year ending November 30, 2008. Its founder, Barclay Littlewood, 31, a qualified solicitor, has an estimated fortune of some £7m, according to The Sunday Times Young Rich List.
 
The company claims to have 4,000 contributors, ranging from serving lecturers to solicitors, retired doctors and recent graduates, who write the essays on behalf of students.
 
It says it has regular customers from universities including Durham and York. It claims none of the essays it recently provided for 240 students at Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities to pilot its new guarantee was detected.
 
Many university degrees now award all marks — or nearly all — through coursework and dissertations rather than final exams, making them vulnerable to students plagiarising work or buying essays online.
 
Last week a Sunday Times researcher posing as an Edinburgh University undergraduate asked the company about providing a final-year dissertation and essays for a course in English literature and classics.
 
A member of staff at UKEssays.com told her that a 6,000-word dissertation, which would count towards her final degree, would cost £1,440 at first-class standard and £720 for a 2:1. She advised that students should not try buying essays that were of an improbably high standard.
 
Tony Eynon, managing director of UKEssays.com, based in Nottingham, said the new guarantee was a "real breakthrough in contemporary academia".
 
Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, said: "It is potentially very serious and undermines the whole fabric of higher education."


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Friday 2 April 2010

The secrets in some English surnames

Terence Blacker

They reveal family origins, as well as insights into one's life and character

There are moments in one's life when a powerful curiosity about family origins begins to niggle. An urge to talk to older relations about interestingly eccentric great aunts is one symptom of this malaise; researching one's family tree on the internet is another.
Ancestors rarely live up to expectations. When Michael Parkinson was dropped from the genealogical celebrity show Who Do You Think You Are? because the Parkinsons were simply too dull, his experience reflected a wider reality. I am said to be descended from a ninth-century king of Denmark, belong to the family of one of Napoleon's mistresses, and be a distant cousin of Stephen Fry - but then it turns out so is virtually everyone else.
 
Surnames are different. They not only reveal family origins but quite possibly contain insights into one's own life and character. Recognising how helpful names are as a key to self-knowledge, Professor Richard Coates of the University of the West of England launched a project researching the surnames of Britain this week.
 
Can the origin of a family surname inform the way we behave today? Perhaps some familiar names can provide a few clues.
Cowell. In Anglo-Saxon times, a cowell was a tool for picking up animal droppings, particularly those of cattle. Because cowpats were then highly valued in dried form, being used as insulation, cushions and an early form of Frisbee, those who collected them and sold them, cowellers or cowells, gained great respect for making money out of muck and were often revered local figures.
 
Darling. It is wrongly assumed that the family name darling was earned by court favourites who were easy with their sexual favours. In fact, the name originates from the old Wiltshire verb "to darl", meaning to render a person unconscious by means of speaking in a tedious, dull manner for a long time. Darlings were much in demand among residents of Salisbury and other major towns who had difficulty in sleeping.
 
Windsor. During the reign of Henry II, a pejorative term "wind sir" was used to describe particularly useless, vacillating members of the aristocracy. (By contrast, the name Winslet derives from the Viking "vintslett" or "wind-slayer", denoting a powerful and attractive warrior).
 
Rooney. Surprisingly, the name Rooney, or Ru Ni to give it the correct spelling, originates in Mongolia where it denoted a strong but less than talkative stone-carver. The name is thought to have transferred to English during the 19th century.
Widdecombe. As indicated in the old folk song Widdecombe Fair ("The maid with eyes so fair and fay/ Took me twa to Widdecome Fair, wehay!"), the word "widdecombe" was a euphemism for physical delight. The highest compliment that could be paid to a woman of mature years was that she was "wise, wide and widdecombe".
 
Clarkson. In 15th-century Basildon, the town clerk employed his son to make public pronouncements on his behalf at every possible opportunity. Thereafter a self-important loudmouth who liked to claim rather more attention than he deserved became known as a clerkson, or clarkson.
 
Osborne (or Osbourne). Literally "dog-skinner" in the local Worcestershire dialect, an Osborne was someone who did unpleasant things on behalf of the community. As a result, he became something of an oddity, a social outsider. Despite their apparent and superficial differences, recent osbornes - George, Ozzy and John - share this common heritage.

 


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