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| Pope on first visit since attack The Pope visits a soup kitchen in Rome in his first journey outside the Vatican since being attacked during Christmas Eve. news.bbc.co.uk |
From the archive: The crisis on top of the world Originally published on 2 January 1980Afghanistan is not quite the glittering prize of current Western legend. The country is a medieval tapestry of neglect; a craggy relic without developed resources, education, industry, effective government, health care or modern agriculture. A glittering prize? On the contrary: an anarchic nightmare. If the West, over the last 30 years, had really cared and really seen the alleged strategic importance, it would have poured in resources. Instead there was merely a cursory trickle. And now, too late, we lament.Such reflections do not, of course, make the Soviet takeover any the less menacing. But they do lend a certain perspective to a crisis which Jimmy Carter claims has overturned all his thinking about relationships with Moscow. Afghanistan has not been seized by the bear. It has fallen, probably inevitably, into Russia's lap.For the moment, the Russians have all of their work cut out simply to avoid disaster. The peril to the West may arise initially not from their easy success but from the nagging failure. There are seven million Pathans in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan; there are five million in Afghanistan. With or without active assistance from Islamabad, those twelve million Pathans are brothers against the Marxist aggressor. If Russia fails swiftly to subdue Afghanistan, the temptation for punitive action against the Pathans – which means against the sovereignty of Pakistan – may become irresistible. And Pakistan today is a ripe target; a land of severe regional tensions ruled by a military gentleman who hanged his political predecessor in the teeth of world protest.Pakistan, since Bhutto's death, has turned into a pariah among nations. Now, in the White House's turn-turtle opinion, it is to become a bastion of freedom. Any attack upon Pakistan will be an attack upon the free world. That will prove a difficult line to hold unless Pakistan, in the near future, can actually rejoin the free world.The West has a chance of doing itself some positive good. Pakistan now has a stretching border with the Soviet block. The threat is manifest. The potential for binding together a disparate nation is manifest, too.Any arguments the West deploys will have to take full account of the "Islamic revival" espoused by General Zia and headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini. But Islam and the Western world are not necessarily at daggers drawn. Force of circumstance may bring Pakistan and the West closer together. Force of circumstance, moreover, should surely give Tehran pause for thought. Iran, too, has a long border with Afghanistan. How much longer will it be before Iran – seeking to maintain Islam as a positive force rather than the tame religion of southern Russia – thinks afresh about where its interests lie?Islam and democracy do not mix well (except, fitfully, in Turkey). But India has shown for thirty years that the best way to govern vast, diffuse nations is through a system which embraces some democratic flexibilities.There is, of course, another way of governing the seemingly ungovernable. Russia's way involves complete suppression and, where necessary, the tanks. That way has still to prove itself in Afghanistan; but, even in the attempting, it shows what Moscow yet considers possible. There can be no starker message for the Islamic world. The West no longer seeks, even in extremis, to dominate by force. It stands dolefully by as its envoys are taken hostage. Russia, in extremis, has a wholly different set of options.AfghanistanRussiaPakistanIranUnited Statesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
24 hours in pictures 9 January 2010: A selection of the best images from around the world guardian.co.uk |
Electric cars struggle to spark interest All the big carmakers at the Detroit Motor Show had electrically powered and hybrid cars on display, but Americans still aren't buying green vehiclesWith a curiously squashed, elongated body, the Tango electrically-powered car is as narrow as a single passenger and as nippy as a motorbike. Billed as the world's fastest urban car, it can reach a speed of 130mph. Satisfied customers include the actor George Clooney, and its inventor describes the bizarre vehicle as a "chick magnet".Built by a US start-up called Commuter Cars, the Tango takes up only half a traffic lane. It can carry two people Âtandem-style in slightly cramped comfort. Without the need for gears, its battery-powered engine can accelerate from zero to 60mph in four seconds and, with a racing car-style roll cage design, the Tango is supposedly as robust as a Volvo estate car."It's unequivocally the fastest car you can buy for an urban environment," says Commuter Cars' president, Rick Woodbury, who has sold 11 of the vehicles so far, at a hefty price of $150,000 (£90,000) each, including a recent Âdelivery to a customer in Surrey. "I drove through Times Square and had girls throwing their arms around me."The Tango is among the quirkier exhibits on Electric Avenue, a corner of the Detroit motor show devoted to electrically-powered vehicles. Visitors this week included speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. Every large car manufacturer of any note, from General Motors to Toyota, Mitsubishi and Hyundai, has a plug-in car or, at the very least, a petrol-electric hybrid on display in Detroit, usually involving the letter "e".The future of motoring, according to political and environmental enthusiasts, is electric. But this mantra has been repeated, in different forms, for almost a decade and many industry experts feel that it is hard to find a true groundswell of enthusiasm among consumers.Held backTwelve years ago, the Toyota Prius broke new ground as the first mass-market hybrid car. Hybrid technology, which combines electric batteries with a petrol-driven back-up engine, is well established. But barely 1% of industry sales last year were hybrid or electrically powered vehicles. PricewaterhouseCoopers' automotive institute expects to see a small rise to 4% by 2015."What's holding them back?" asks Anthony Pratt, a PricewaterhouseCoopers analyst. "Cost." The starting price for a Prius in Britain is £19,500. A Toyota Avensis, with a conventional petrol engine, starts at £16,800.Typically, buying an environmentally friendly car involves paying a premium of several thousand pounds – and the recession has hardly helped. Pratt says: "When people begin to look to do more with less, they became less concerned with environmentally friendly products and more worried about trying to balance the budget."Toyota this week showcased a smaller, cheaper version of the Prius called the FT-CH concept. Its Japanese rival, Nissan, displayed a pure electric plug-in car called the Leaf, which is already on the market in Japan and will hit US showrooms this year, arriving in Britain in 2012. It has a socket in its bonnet and needs to be recharged every 100 miles. At a turbo-powered quick charging station, re-energising the batteries takes 26 minutes; a home charging station will take eight hours.Mitsubishi has a similar model, the MiEV prototype (short for Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle). With their relatively short range, these vehicles are aimed at commuters and are suitable for commercial use in towns – by, for example, postal services and restaurants delivering food. But until somebody builds a network of electric charging stations, they are awkward for longer trips.That, according to Jim Hall, an automotive expert at 2953 Analytics, a Detroit-based research company, is a major sticking point: "The average American sees a car as a tool that must be able to do everything. Our cars are viewed as Swiss army knives."Another reason, Hall believes, for the slow take-up of electric vehicles is that consumers most concerned about the environment also tend to be "late adopters" who are suspicious of impenetrable technology: "They'll be concerned about the nickel in the batteries – the fact that nickel must be mined and that nickel is toxic."New ideasOther ideas are being tested. Hyundai showed off a prototype called the Blue-Will this week, with roof-mounted solar cells to help recharge its lithium batteries. Tesla Motors, a small Silicon Valley company, has come up with a way to extend the range of a battery-powered car. Its test drivers recently managed to go 313 miles through the Australian Outback on a single charge.But the most keenly awaited mainstream "green" launch will be GM's Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid that can go 40 miles on a single electric charge but then harness power from its internal combustion engine to generate more electricity on the go, extending its range to hundreds of miles from one tank of petrol. The Volt, which will cost about $40,000, will go on sale in the US late this year, but GM's vice-chairman for product development, Bob Lutz, admits that it will not be much of a moneyspinner."If we did it purely for profitability, we wouldn't be doing it," said Lutz, who predicts that even in a decade's time, at least 90% of cars sold will still be powered by internal combustion. "Other than 5% of the public who will willingly make a sacrifice to buy green vehicles, the other 95% of people will ask, 'What am I getting – what's the deal?' They're not going to spend $5,000 to $6,000 on technology they don't need."There is a legislative incentive to lead the public towards greener cars. The Obama administration has tightened standards for fuel efficiency and ordered motor manufacturers to cut emissions from new vehicles sold in the US by 30% by 2016. But raising taxes on fuel, which would concentrate consumers' minds, has proved too risky to contemplate for politicians on either side of the Atlantic.As recently as 2005, research by JD Power, the marketing information company, found that US buyers cared more about the number of cup holders in a new vehicle than its miles-to-gallon ratio. A 2008 spike in oil prices changed that, prompting a shift towards smaller cars, yet still an electric "revolution" on the roads remains a distant prospect. Plug-in cars face a long, tough battle to break beyond a small but devoted audience of Hollywood stars, eccentrics and passionate environmentalists.Automotive industryElectric, hybrid and low-emission carsToyotaNissanGeneral MotorsUnited StatesAndrew Clarkguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Piracy 'creates cultural deserts' Music industry body the IFPI claims that music piracy has destroyed opportunities for artists in countries such as Spain. news.bbc.co.uk |