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The 300,000 people who attended the "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington were told not to bring political placards, and the speakers – even the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin – did not cite President Barack Obama once. But the Tea Party cheerleader Glenn Beck, who organised the event, was yesterday adamant that its success signified something of political importance for the US: voters are deeply unhappy with the direction in which the country is headed.
The Fox News commentator had taken to the steps of the capital's Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech from the spot, to deliver a call for a return to traditional values. His critics accused him of stirring racial tensions, and the media took a stand-offish approach to the large conservative crowds that thronged around the famous reflecting pool beneath the Washington Monument. Meanwhile, leaders of both parties were watching to see if the event might energise conservative voters ahead of November's elections that could result in the Democratic party losing control of one or both houses of Congress.
Mr Beck declared yesterday that the event showed there was a yearning for something better from politics. "You don't get that many people to come to Washington to stand there and have that kind of moment for no reason," he told Fox News Sunday. "A good number of people are not happy with the direction we are going."
The rally, ostensibly a fundraiser designed to honour American troops and to call for restoring God to the centre of American life, seems certain to keep Mr Beck's peculiar brand of demagoguery at the centre of the pre-election debate.
The Republican establishment hardly knows how to handle the broadcaster, whose emotional warnings about impending socialism and moral degradation in the US have often landed him in trouble, but have turned him into one of the most-watched hosts on Fox News.
The anti-tax Tea Party movement has swept aside numerous mainstream Republicans in favour of more right-wing candidates, with uncertain consequences for the party's fortunes in November. Political officeholders were not invited to the rally, but Ms Palin continued her campaign for the presidency in 2012 by making an appearance.
Mr Beck was criticised for playing with racial symbolism by holding his event on the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He has been accused of playing on racial prejudices by painting Mr Obama as alien to the values of mainstream America. "They represent hate-mongering and angry white people," said Jaime Contreras of the Service Employees International Union, speaking at the smaller "Reclaim the Dream" rally.
The rallies were covered with an even hand on most news channels. Fox News was not among the organisations, however, that summarised the racial make-up of the crowds. Most others pointed out that the attendees at the Beck rally were "predominantly white".
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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At least 18 Italians have died in the past 10 days in the shadow of the Alps and Apennines – not because of rock falls or mountaineering accidents, but for the love of mushrooms.
Recent weather conditions have brought about an explosion in the number of edible fungi clinging to tree stumps and undergrowths in northern Italy. Coming after weeks of dearth, the sudden abundance has caused a correspondingly abrupt surge in the number of pickers or "fungaioli" – many of whom seem willing to take extraordinary risks in pursuit of elusive delicacies like porcini, chanterelles and Caesar's mushrooms.
The latest to die was Angelo Bertoni from a town near Milan whose body was found this morning. He, his brother and a cousin were fungi hunting in the Valgerola area, east of Lake Como.
According to Alpine rescuers, the 58 year-old factory worker had seen a particularly fine porcini mushroom. Leaving the path he had been following with his companions, he slipped from a precipice and fell about 100 metres to his death.
On Friday, another mushroom gatherer was found dead in Valgerola after his family raised the alarm. He too had entered a wooded area on a steep mountainside. A 65-year-old woman died on Saturday, just a few miles away. In addition to the confirmed deaths, another fungaiolo has been missing for more than a week in the Apennine mountains near Pistoia in Tuscany.
Mushroom tragedies sometimes occur when pickers unwittingly gather and cook poisonous toadstools. But this year most of the deaths have been caused by falls. In many cases, the victims had been trying to outwit rival gatherers by going into remote and steeply inclined woods before dawn.
"It's a problem of mentality, unfortunately," said Gino Cornelli, head of alpine rescue in the Fassa valley in the Dolomites. "Many arrive in the dark. They set off with lights on their heads, even though it is banned. They dress in grey or brown to disguise themselves from the others."
He told La Repubblica newspaper: "They do the opposite of what they should. Too many cock a snook at the rules, and unfortunately this is the result."
Marco Biasoni, an Alpine rescuer based in the predominantly German-speaking Bolzano area, said another problem was that many mushroom-pickers did not have the correct dress and equipment. "You need the right shoes, of the sort for trekking , and not boots with which you can slip. Then take along a mobile phone. And go with someone else. Always."
Mushrooms flourish after periods of alternating heat and damp. Many parts of northern and central Italy have experienced a hot summer punctuated by storms.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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Oh dear – MPs are in the firing line again over their dealings with the new expenses police, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa).
Up to 10 are accused of using bad language, shouting and even making veiled threats, so the newspapers report this morning. You can read Nick Watt's lively account here.
No, I don't expect you to feel sorry for politicians over their expenses problems.
Many were caught misbehaving – and worse – last year, though many others were unfairly traduced, victims of arbitrary and inconsistent treatment by officials, both active and retired, who should have known better, and hounded by a media which doesn't.
No provocation excuses bad manners to young people, though one miscreant, Labour's Denis MacShane, admitted it was he who dashed out and bought a box of chocolates for an Ipsa volunteer he had upset (she had upset him, too).
Volunteer? Yes, apparently Ipsa has been using volunteers from a civil service department to front MPs' enquiries.
More senior staff also appear to have been keeping what the MPs call "secret files" on their behaviour, a version of which was leaked to the Mail on Sunday two weeks before its official release yesterday.
Leaks happen, but this one should serve as a reminder that not even parliamentary watchdogs chaired by eminent people such as Professor Sir Ian Kennedy are perfect. After all, mild-mannered Vince Cable and genteel Teresa May were among the allegedly abusive MPs exposed.
I realise I'm probably not making much progress defending the political class in front of the usual hanging jury of bloggers. So let me try another tack.
The Tory ex-minister Peter Bottomley (his wife, Virgina, got into John Major's cabinet), the veteran MP for Worthing West, is another vocal critic of Ipsa, which has cost £6m to set up and has had to pay out a reported £1m on tick since election day to tide MPs over for staff wages and office costs.
What makes Bottomley's assessment interesting is that he is a very independent backbencher, a champion of unpopular causes, quixotic and occasionally even eccentric in his views.
What follows is a slightly edited version of a letter he sent to Kennedy in July and copied to me.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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On the calendar of anniversary events in New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina, one stands out: a party tonight at the Eiffel Society, a new restaurant and lounge on St Charles Avenue, where guests will be asked to celebrate something good the storm left behind: a burgeoning and highly boisterous arts scene.
It's an eruption that has provoked – and is sustained by – an influx of mostly young and creative people from across the US, all with the common hope of finding inspiration and purpose in the battered urban landscape of the city, including painters, film-makers, dancers, designers, musicians and architects.
Some will be at the party on St Charles, like the American painter Elliott Coon. This spring, she and friends with the Life is Art Foundation here in New Orleans, spent 30 days barricaded inside the octagon structure of glass and steel (it was once part of the tower in Paris), sleeping, eating, working and playing without leaving it once, though they were occasionally joined in their experiment by other artists.
The result will be on view for all the party's guests, set to include the city's new mayor and enthusiast for the arts, Mitch Landrieu, and the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Never mind what's for dinner; look at the art they have installed, whether it's the pagan-like labyrinth painted in grey and gold leaf across most of its floor by Coon or the mesmerisingly delicate embroideries of naked figures suspended like cobwebs in the central skylight by the British artist, Louise Riley. (Riley was there for much of the live-in too.)
Other pieces – there are 20 – include a book table from wood salvaged from Katrina-stricken homes by Robert Tennan, a legendary figure among New Orleans art-goers, and, hanging over the kitchen door, a slate-grey photograph of a tug surrounded by oil from the BP spill taken by Edward Burtynsky.
What may not still be there this evening is a very large igloo sculpture by Daphane Park that diners are invited to step into. Wild and woolly and made of stockings and other soft materials on a wire frame, it is called the Semi-Conductor, and has a vaginal quality that is making the restaurant's owners queasy.
Giving a reporter a sneak tour, Coon speaks of her own experience visiting New Orleans two-and-a-half years ago from Virginia where she was living at that time. She expected to be here for a month.
"It was like there this rebirth going on in the city. I just stayed," she explains with a broad smile, aware that in staying she was becoming part of a club of people in New Orleans that is hardly exclusive.
Michael Martin, 24, who is doing a masters degree on the role of cultural activity in recovering economies, did the same, arriving here from New York at the beginning of last year. Today, he has no plans to leave. "Most my friends are either artists or designers or architects," he says. "We are all here doing creative things, because New Orleans is just this amazing palate that gives you space to do what you like."
Kristian Hansen, 31, arrived a few months before Katrina from his native California and bought a house. The storm destroyed it and today he rents in the grandly eccentric (and art-stuffed) home of Tennan and his wife, Jeanne Nathan, on Esplanade Avenue. Renting is fine, he says, but best of all is the growth of a film production company he co-founded here with a friend. Called Tungsten Monkey, its newest project is a nearly completed documentary feature about a young New Orleanian from a well-to-do-family who travels to the jungles of Peru in search of salvation from drug addiction.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Vietnam: beef noodle soup (pho bo), by Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl
Ingredients to make 6 bowls
2kg beef bones
2 brown onions, cut in half
1 knob of ginger, cut into chunks
1 pig's trotter (ask your butcher to saw it in half)
1 teaspoon of salt
500g beef brisket1 star anise
4cm piece of cassia bark or 1 cinnamon stick
To serve:
200g scotch fillet, thinly sliced
1tbsp fish sauce
600g fresh pho noodles (Vietnamese pantry)
4 red Asian shallots, finely sliced
4 spring onions, half sliced in long strips and half sliced into rings
Accompaniments:
1 lemon, cut in half or wedges
1 long red chilli, sliced
1 handful coriander leaves
1 handful Thai basil leaves
Fish sauce
Method
Preheat the oven to 200C. Place the beef bones on a baking tray and roast for 20 minutes. Turn the bones over and roast for a further 20 minutes.
Heat a grill or barbecue to medium-high heat. Grill the onion and ginger on all sides until charred lines appear.
Remove the bones from the oven and place in a large stockpot. Add the pig's trotter and the salt and cover with cold water. Slowly bring to simmering point, removing scum as it comes to the surface. Add the onion, ginger, brisket, star anise and cassia bark (or cinnamon stick) and simmer gently for 30 minutes. Remove the brisket and set aside. Continue to simmer the stock for a further 4 hours. Strain the stock and discard the bones, vegetables and spices.
Marinate the scotch fillet in the fish sauce and set aside for 30 minutes. Thinly slice the brisket across the grain. bring the broth back to simmering point.
Bring a saucepan of water to the oil. Drop the noodles into the boiling water for about 20 seconds, stirring with a chopstick to separate them. Drain throughly and divide evenly between 6 bowls.
Place the brisket sliced fillet, shallots and spring onions on top of the noodles. Ladle in the hot broth and encourage diners to generously add lemon juice, chilli, herbs and fish sauce.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Defending world champion Sebastien Loeb won the German Rally for a record eighth consecutive time yesterday to extend his lead in the standings to 58 points.
The six-time world title winner led the event from start to finish to win by 51.3 seconds from Citroen C4 WRC team-mate Dani Sordo.
Citroen Junior team driver Sebastien Ogier made it a clean sweep for the French manufacturer after finishing one minute and 22sec behind Sordo.
Ford works team driver Jari-Matti Latvala was fourth, with privateer Citroen entrant Petter Solberg claiming fifth.
The win, Loeb's fifth of the season, made it 59 at world championship level for him and his co-driver, Daniel Elena, and took his points tally for the season to 191 compared to 133 for Ogier.
With four rounds of the series to go Loeb could clinch the world title in Japan next month ahead of races in France, Spain and Wales.
Loeb was delighted to have continued his dominance of the German race. He said: "This was a very good victory for me again, the eighth one in a row. It's incredible, I really have a good feeling on this rally. I wouldn't like to be beaten here and this time it's all OK again."
Sordo, on his first outing in the event in a factory Citroen, managed to keep Loeb in sight until his team-mate pulled clear on Saturday morning.
It was a positive result for Sordo as it was the first time he had competed with his new co-driver Diego Vallejo.
Ogier made up for a low-key start by passing Mikko Hirvonen for fourth and then claiming third from Latvala when the Finn spun.
Tyre damage on Friday meant that Solberg had to be content with fifth when a place on the podium had been possible, with the main battle of the weekend going on over sixth place.
Stobart Ford's Matthew Wilson eventually won that fight from former Formula One world champion Kimi Raikkonen despite the Citroen Junior driver winning the final superspecial stage after making some small mistakes on Sunday morning.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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England's world turned upside down in an hour after tea at The Oval on Friday.
There had been a couple of collapses earlier in the summer, but after two easy wins against Pakistan, England had begun to think that they only had to turn up here to wrap up the series. A broad sample of commentators and spectators had decided that Pakistan were rubbish. Some rubbish!
The rubbish was England batsmen, all of them, at one time or another. These failures are becoming ende-mic, and questions are already being asked, about the role of Graham Gooch, the batting coach, for instance.
Since the England and Wales Cricket Board have never worried about the size of England's support staff, perhaps they ought to hire a professional expectations manager. Without expert help, England appear to have ignored the fact that their opponents dismissed Australia for 88 at Headingley in July, and drew a two-match series. But after back-to-back wins, England blithely boasted that more of the same at The Oval and Lord's next week would create a record-breaking eight-game winning streak.
Moreover, confident noises were to be heard about England winning the Ashes in Australia this winter. This was the moment at which an expectations manager would have issued a formal caution and moved his gauge from "cocky" at the top of the range to "vulnerable" towards the bottom. It was as if everyone had forgotten the pitiable optimism in England before football's World Cup.
Expectations were already falling sharply at The Oval on Thursday evening when Andrew Strauss fell to a neat outswinger from Mohammad Aamer. Alastair Cook's appalling run of form acted as a brake on optimism, though he was the cause of expectations rising briefly between the start and tea on Friday when Cook (right) rode his luck and rediscovered his form. After tea, the high, grey cloud ceiling and the floodlights helped Aamer's reverse swing. With Saeed Ajmal bowling an unpickable doosra at the other end, the pair administered a sharp dose of realism.
With the loss of six wickets for 27 runs in 15 overs, a dreadful truth was exposed. England's batting is dangerously brittle. The truth has been masked, partly by the fact that of nine Tests played so far this year, four were against Bangladesh. Dropped catches had let them off the hook against Pakistan when they collapsed at Old Trafford and Edgbaston. On Friday the mask was ripped away.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Even now, five years on, Ray Nagin's words send a shiver down the spine. For the first time, a mayor was ordering the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, as the winds that heralded the cataclysm began to howl through the streets. Hurricanes were embedded in city lore, but always, it seemed, the city dodged the bullet. Now however, that charmed life was about to end, Nagin warned on the morning of 28 August 2005, at the hands of "a storm that most of us have long feared".
That night, Hurricane Katrina duly smashed into the central Gulf Coast.
By many measures, Katrina was the worst disaster ever to befall the US. Beside it, the BP oil spill pales. More people – an estimated 8,000 – may have died in the Galveston hurricane of 1900, when modern communications and weather forecasting scarcely existed. And several more recent hurricanes have been fiercer, not least Camille, with its record winds of 190mph, which in 1969 followed a path close to Katrina's, but miraculously spared New Orleans.
But from Katrina there was no escape. The giant storm levelled virtually everything standing along 100 miles of coastline. In all, it killed 1,800 people in seven states, and caused $90bn (£58bn) of damage. It wreaked colossal damage on the region's oil, forestry and tourism industries. More than one million people were left homeless; the result, for a while, was the largest internal diaspora in American history.
But although swaths of Louisiana, Alabama and above all Mississippi were affected, Katrina is above all about New Orleans. Not since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has a great American city been so comprehensively devastated. At its height, four-fifths of New Orleans was under water, to a depth of 20 feet. Today, more than a quarter of the pre-Katrina population of 450,000 have not returned.
Books have been written and films made about the hurricane. President Barack Obama will be in New Orleans on 29 August, and a National Katrina Museum is due to open in a 12,000 sq ft warehouse in the Ninth Ward, the poorest and worst-hit part of the city. Special theatrical events are scheduled in New Orleans and around the country. Some anniversaries are empty ritual, but not this one. Five years later, the impact of Katrina is still being felt.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Science begets science. In a letter to fellow natural philosopher Robert Hooke in 1676, Isaac Newton famously decreed that his own achievements were merely a matter of "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The more we know about something, the more we can study it, whether it's particles firing in a Swiss bunker, as with Geneva's Large Hadron Collider, or Newton's fabled fleshy fruit toppling from a tree.
Scientists have been examining their own careers for centuries, but only relatively recently as a separate field of research. This intellectual analysis, called "scientometrics", emerged in the 1960s, and is essentially the "science of science". It posits questions such as, "How is productivity changing?" or "How many researchers do we need?" and now, "Are scientific discoveries getting more difficult?"
This latter poser arrived in May, courtesy of Samuel Arbesman, the Harvard postdoctoral fellow, journalist and evangelist for academe, writing in the journal Scientometrics. His conclusions? That Newton wasn't being modest: his experiments really were a breeze.
Newton and his peers studied springs and apples; now we need supercomputer networks to check out broadly the same things. In an objective sense, says Arbesman, science is getting harder. "Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a 10,000-member team that runs a multi-billion dollar atom smasher," he says. "It takes increasingly more money, more effort, and more people to find out more things."
So what is scientometrics, and what else can it tell us? In simple terms, scientometrics is an "information science" that uses statistical techniques to put scientists under the microscope. Interested in how productive a certain university is? Proceed as follows: work out how many scientists it has, deduce how productive each of those brain-boxes is (why not rack up how often their research gets published?), add up all this output, and you have a reasonable means of quantifying a university's performance.
Much of modern scientometrics is based on the work of London-born information scientist Derek Price. He is best known for his 1963 book Little Science, Big Science, which made the distinction between the cottage-industry-sized experiments of the immediate post-war years and huge, international projects with budgets of billions of dollars. He argued that modern science had migrated from the former to the latter.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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The heatwave might have passed, but summer is certainly here. So if you missed the spring clean, it's time to think about how you can bring some of that glorious sunshine inside – where, let's face it, it is actually a bit warmer. There are plenty of touches that cost little or no money that you can do to make your home feel new and fresh, and it's also a good time to get a few of those boring maintenance jobs out of the way so you won't have to worry about them next winter.
Windows
Not only does the sunlight streaming through reveal just how dusty your windows are, but the frames might also need painting. This is a perfect summer job, as any weak spots and damage will have been exacerbated over the long winter months – and they were long this year. Call in a couple of local decorators and get quotes for painting the windows and perhaps the front door while you're at it – a bright colour for summer will also cheer you up in November. If you haven't got a window cleaner and one hasn't come knocking, then visit windowcleaner-directory.co.uk to find one in your area. Obviously you will need to clean the inside of your windows too. Christina Strutt, author of Cabbages and Roses Guide to Natural Housekeeping (cabbagesandroses. com), is full of advice on how to use natural products for cleaning: "White distilled vinegar has had hundreds of different uses over the past 10,000 years and it cleans windows to perfection. A solution of one part vinegar and one part warm water sprayed onto glass and rubbed with a soft dry cloth, followed by crumpled newspaper, will work miracles," she says.
Declutter
Now that the windows are clean, everything is thrown into sharp relief and you can see just how much stuff there is lying around. "There's nothing like a really good clear out to make you feel better," says Carmen Morris-Coulson, of Plan My Life (planmylife.co.uk; 0208 341 1800). "This is the perfect time of year for a declutter, as it will make your house feel bigger and brighter and you will start to love it again." The first requirement for a declutter is bin bags and new storage. She suggests filling a large kitchen drawer with lid-less plastic pots into which you can sort spare batteries, pens, phone-chargers etc. Apply the same principles to the cupboards and get rid of any old, chipped crockery that you no longer love or use. "You will have to tackle your desk too, but the last time I did mine I found a cheque lurking in a pile of papers, so you never know," she says. A visit to Ikea will buy you masses of storage for not much money. Carmen likes the Expedit Range of book-cases, which you can fix doors onto and slide boxes into as well as drawers. "You can hide things behind the doors, use boxes, which you must label, for all manner of stuff, from toys and paperwork to photos and all your filing, and you can change it round as your requirements change." And if you really can't face it, then there are plenty of professionals who will do the job for you – for a fee.
Freshen up your paintwork
We're not suggesting you do the whole house, but moving that pile of books from the floor to the shelf may have revealed some tatty paintwork that is chipped or covered in tiny muddy hand prints. Now is the perfect time of year to sort that out. You can touch up what you already have or perhaps, be bold, choose a light summery colour for one wall. This will totally change the look of the room and will be easy enough to paint over for a darker, warmer colour in a few months time when you want to feel cosy again.
Lighten the décor
You change your clothes according to the weather, so why not ring the changes with the soft furnishings too. Chrissie Rucker, of The White Company, is a big fan of the seasonal décor-change. "In summer I use lightweight fabrics in white or soft colours, and then mix up the textures to make it more interesting." Now, we don't all have to take it to White Company extremes, but there's nothing wrong with removing the winter cushion-covers – for a wash if nothing else – and replacing them with something a little more summery. You can also remove heavy velvet curtains and hang some lightweight summer blinds for a change.
Storage
This is also the time of year when you want to put away your winter boots and fetch the sandals out, so you need to examine your bedroom storage too. The Holding Company sell vacuum bags (£16 for three) into which you can pile the winter bedspreads and heavy duvets so they don't take up much space. Chrissie Rucker says you should change to a lighter duvet in the summer, not just for temperature purposes but because you should get the winter one cleaned to get rid of dust mites and bed bugs. Then you can store it away for the summer. Suzanne Baker, of The Holding Company, says: "The vacuum sacks are great, as you can put them under the bed or into a large box and they will take the shape of the box so you can stack them up. It's a great idea to buy underbed storage because that space is often under-used and it's a good size. Personally, I always buy boxes to store winter boots in too so they are protected from dust during the summer, but I can also move them out of the way so I can see the summer shoes."
In the garden
Now is the time to plant that herb or vegetable garden that you kept talking about last year but didn't get round to actually doing. Even a window box will give you plenty of produce, and when the window is open it will fill the house with the smells of summer. Christina suggests planting sweet- pea seeds and says if you pick the flowers every day they will keep you going until August. And when the sun finally starts delivering as much warmth as it promises, you need to be ready with the deck chairs and loungers. Take a trip to the garden centre and while you're buying a few plants, pick up some chairs too. Bright colours will cheer up even a dull day and give you something pretty to look at when you're inside staring through those sparklingly clean windows.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
