Gasps echoed through the Nobel Hall in Oslo yesterday as Barack Obama was unveiled as the winner of the 2009 Peace Prize, sparking a global outpouring of incredulity and praise in unequal measure.
Mr Obama was sound asleep in the White House when the Norwegian Nobel Committee made the shock announcement. It said that he was being honoured for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
In a clear swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, the committee praised the “change in the international climate” that the President had brought, along with his cherished goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future,” it added.
International reaction ranged from delight to disbelief. The former winners Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu voiced praise, the latter lauding the Nobel Committee’s “surprising but imaginative choice”.
But Lech Walesa, the dissident turned Polish President, who won the Peace Prize in 1983, spoke for many, declaring: “So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far.”
Mr Obama’s domestic critics leapt on the award as evidence of foreigners fawning over an untested “celebrity” leader. Rush Limbaugh, the US right-wing commentator, said: “This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama."
Speaking later, Mr Obama said that he was “surprised and deeply humbled” by the unexpected decision and announced that he would donate the £880,000 prize, due to be awarded in December, to charity.
“Let me be clear. I do not view it as recognition of my own accomplishments but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," he said.
The Nobel Peace Prize is a notoriously difficult award to predict, but yesterday's decision was clearly a political choice, with three of the past six peace awards going to Bush adversaries.
In 2002 the prize went to Jimmy Carter as an explicit rejection of the Bush presidency in the build-up to the Iraq war. In 2005 Mohamed ElBaradei, the UN atomic agency chief who had clashed with Washington over the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was honoured. In 2007 Al Gore received the prize for his warnings on climate change, denounced by President Bush as a liberal myth.
The award is also an example of what Nobel scholars call the growing aspirational trend of Nobel committees over the past three decades, by which awards are given not for what has been achieved but in support of the cause being fought for.
Thorbjørn Jagland, the committee chairman, made clear that this year’s prize fell in that category. “If you look at the history of the Peace Prize, we have on many occasions given it to try to enhance what many personalities were trying to do,” he said. “It could be too late to respond three years from now.”
But Bobby Muller, who won the Nobel Prize as co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, told The Times: "I don't have the highest regard for the thinking or process of the Nobel committee. Maybe Norway should give it to Sweden so they can more properly handle the Peace Prize along with all the other Nobel prizes."
Source:The times
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Saturday, October 10, 2009
Territorial Army told to stop training for six months to save money
The Territorial Army has been told to stop training for six months to save millions of pounds from the Army’s budget because of growing financial pressure on the Ministry of Defence.
Drill-hall instruction, weekend exercises and all other training associated with the TA will stop, cutting costs by about £20 million.
The Land Force budget of the Army has been cut by £54 million, and the TA is the first to be affected. The huge cut in TA spending will mean that the weekend warriors will not be paid. “They are paid to go training, and if there is no training, they won’t get paid,” a Ministry of Defence official said.
A spokesman insisted that the savings and the ban on training would not affect the TA’s operational contribution to Afghanistan, where about 500 Territorial soldiers are serving. There are also ten TA soldiers in Iraq.
The spokesman said that TA training for Afghanistan would carry on as normal. TA soldiers train with their regular army counterparts, before deployment to Helmand province. The MoD’s pledge to keep the operational TA safe from cuts was, however, greeted with scepticism by senior officers in the volunteer reserve force. “This is dangerous. When you cancel training at one end, it is bound to have an impact through the TA, especially if this goes on longer than six months,” one senior TA officer told The Times. “If the MoD shuts the whole place down and says, ‘Come back in April’, there will be a number of TA members who will just go off and find something else to do, and all the skills they have learnt will fatigue.”
That would have repercussions throughout the TA, and could eventually affect the availability of volunteers for Afghanistan and other operations, he said.
One MoD official said that care would have to be taken to ensure that the temporary suspension of training did not undermine the TA’s role in Afghanistan. The official also said that, given the budget restrictions, the training suspension could last longer. The annual budget for the TA is about £143 million. The TA officer said: “This decision means that people’s advancement and promotion within the TA will be arrested, and the MoD will find it cannot get recruits to join the TA if the whole thing is being put in mothballs. You cannot suspend training and expect people to come back as normal six months later.
“The decision is tragic and dangerous, especially when you look at the contributions made by the TA to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. The regular Army could not have done these operations without the TA. People will feel undervalued and not properly respected and they’ll just go off.”
Another former senior officer in the TA said: “Here we go again, cutting back the TA.”
The size of the TA has fallen rapidly since Labour came to power in 1997. The following year there were 57,620 in the TA. Today the Territorials, trained and untrained, should be about 39,000-strong, but the trained strength is only 19,300, according to the latest MoD figures.
The senior TA officer told The Times that the downward spiral in numbers was shocking and reflected the dangerous neglect of this part of the services. In 2003, 9,500 reservists, the vast majority from the TA, were mobilised to take part in Operation Telic, the campaign in Iraq. About 1,200 members of the TA continue to be deployed annually on tours of duty.
The trend in recent years has been to pare down the TA and integrate them more into the regular Army, preparing them for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. An MoD spokesman said: “These are challenging times and, like all government departments, we have to live within our means. We routinely review spending to balance priorities, focusing on the highest priorities, including on our operations, particularly in Afghanistan.”
• Yesterday a soldier from the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was killed in an explosion near Camp Bastion in Helmand province. His death takes the number of British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001 to 221.
Source:The times
Drill-hall instruction, weekend exercises and all other training associated with the TA will stop, cutting costs by about £20 million.
The Land Force budget of the Army has been cut by £54 million, and the TA is the first to be affected. The huge cut in TA spending will mean that the weekend warriors will not be paid. “They are paid to go training, and if there is no training, they won’t get paid,” a Ministry of Defence official said.
A spokesman insisted that the savings and the ban on training would not affect the TA’s operational contribution to Afghanistan, where about 500 Territorial soldiers are serving. There are also ten TA soldiers in Iraq.
The spokesman said that TA training for Afghanistan would carry on as normal. TA soldiers train with their regular army counterparts, before deployment to Helmand province. The MoD’s pledge to keep the operational TA safe from cuts was, however, greeted with scepticism by senior officers in the volunteer reserve force. “This is dangerous. When you cancel training at one end, it is bound to have an impact through the TA, especially if this goes on longer than six months,” one senior TA officer told The Times. “If the MoD shuts the whole place down and says, ‘Come back in April’, there will be a number of TA members who will just go off and find something else to do, and all the skills they have learnt will fatigue.”
That would have repercussions throughout the TA, and could eventually affect the availability of volunteers for Afghanistan and other operations, he said.
One MoD official said that care would have to be taken to ensure that the temporary suspension of training did not undermine the TA’s role in Afghanistan. The official also said that, given the budget restrictions, the training suspension could last longer. The annual budget for the TA is about £143 million. The TA officer said: “This decision means that people’s advancement and promotion within the TA will be arrested, and the MoD will find it cannot get recruits to join the TA if the whole thing is being put in mothballs. You cannot suspend training and expect people to come back as normal six months later.
“The decision is tragic and dangerous, especially when you look at the contributions made by the TA to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. The regular Army could not have done these operations without the TA. People will feel undervalued and not properly respected and they’ll just go off.”
Another former senior officer in the TA said: “Here we go again, cutting back the TA.”
The size of the TA has fallen rapidly since Labour came to power in 1997. The following year there were 57,620 in the TA. Today the Territorials, trained and untrained, should be about 39,000-strong, but the trained strength is only 19,300, according to the latest MoD figures.
The senior TA officer told The Times that the downward spiral in numbers was shocking and reflected the dangerous neglect of this part of the services. In 2003, 9,500 reservists, the vast majority from the TA, were mobilised to take part in Operation Telic, the campaign in Iraq. About 1,200 members of the TA continue to be deployed annually on tours of duty.
The trend in recent years has been to pare down the TA and integrate them more into the regular Army, preparing them for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. An MoD spokesman said: “These are challenging times and, like all government departments, we have to live within our means. We routinely review spending to balance priorities, focusing on the highest priorities, including on our operations, particularly in Afghanistan.”
• Yesterday a soldier from the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was killed in an explosion near Camp Bastion in Helmand province. His death takes the number of British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001 to 221.
Source:The times
Expenses bills return to haunt up to 100 MPs
The expenses scandal is set to engulf the House of Commons again on Monday when MPs will be sent an auditor’s letter about the claims they made over the past five years.
The Times has learnt that up to 100 MPs will be asked to repay expenses, or prove that their claims were legitimate. About a dozen are likely to face demands to hand back significant sums, in some cases “tens of thousands of pounds”.
Investigators working for Sir Thomas Legg, a former civil servant appointed by the Commons to audit MPs’ expenses, are understood to have focused on big mortgage claims, as well as extravagant charges for household services.
Sir Thomas is also said to have widened the net of his investigation to include MPs who exploited loopholes to make claims that were in breach of the spirit, if not the letter, of the fees system.
“If I was an MP getting a letter suggesting I repay sums, then in the current climate it would be foolish not to do so, even if the claims were within the rules,” said a Commons official close to the inquiry.
Some MPs have already had to pay back four-figure sums after being found to have claimed the full cost of their mortgages, rather than merely the interest that they are allowed under the rules.
The letters being sent out on Monday are expected to ask dozens more to provide details of complex mortgage loan agreements so that it can be determined whether wrongful claims have been made, either deliberately or by mistake.
Others, who have charged thousands of pounds for gardening or cleaning costs, will be asked to make immediate repayment.
Sir Thomas’s audit this summer was ordered after a meeting between Commons authorities and party leaders and is said to have cost upwards of £1 million.
MPs who receive what are being described as “challenging letters” from Sir Thomas will get three weeks to provide evidence clearing their name before being referred to a committee chaired by John Bercow, the Commons Speaker.
A Times/Populus focus group this week confirmed that there is intense voter suspicion towards all politicians and both main parties. According to one well-placed source yesterday, the Legg inquiry is likely “to catch fish of different political colours”.
The report will be published in December together with full details of expenses claims from 2008-09. Unlike last summer’s official disclosure of such information, when huge sections were blacked out, these will be uncensored except for details such as bank account numbers.
Source:The times
The Times has learnt that up to 100 MPs will be asked to repay expenses, or prove that their claims were legitimate. About a dozen are likely to face demands to hand back significant sums, in some cases “tens of thousands of pounds”.
Investigators working for Sir Thomas Legg, a former civil servant appointed by the Commons to audit MPs’ expenses, are understood to have focused on big mortgage claims, as well as extravagant charges for household services.
Sir Thomas is also said to have widened the net of his investigation to include MPs who exploited loopholes to make claims that were in breach of the spirit, if not the letter, of the fees system.
“If I was an MP getting a letter suggesting I repay sums, then in the current climate it would be foolish not to do so, even if the claims were within the rules,” said a Commons official close to the inquiry.
Some MPs have already had to pay back four-figure sums after being found to have claimed the full cost of their mortgages, rather than merely the interest that they are allowed under the rules.
The letters being sent out on Monday are expected to ask dozens more to provide details of complex mortgage loan agreements so that it can be determined whether wrongful claims have been made, either deliberately or by mistake.
Others, who have charged thousands of pounds for gardening or cleaning costs, will be asked to make immediate repayment.
Sir Thomas’s audit this summer was ordered after a meeting between Commons authorities and party leaders and is said to have cost upwards of £1 million.
MPs who receive what are being described as “challenging letters” from Sir Thomas will get three weeks to provide evidence clearing their name before being referred to a committee chaired by John Bercow, the Commons Speaker.
A Times/Populus focus group this week confirmed that there is intense voter suspicion towards all politicians and both main parties. According to one well-placed source yesterday, the Legg inquiry is likely “to catch fish of different political colours”.
The report will be published in December together with full details of expenses claims from 2008-09. Unlike last summer’s official disclosure of such information, when huge sections were blacked out, these will be uncensored except for details such as bank account numbers.
Source:The times
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