Hardcore porn, choking and rape: UK universities left to tackle rising tide of sexual assaults


As on-campus sexual misconduct cases escalate, there are increasing calls to talk openly with young people about sex, pleasure and consent

‘Students see stuff online about sex which many adults would struggle to process. Allegations of choking are not uncommon’: says Smita Jamdar, partner at law firm Shakespeare Martineau. Illustration: Observer Design/The Observer

Anna Fazackerley

Sun 17 Sep 2023

Among the stalls encouraging students to sign up for rock climbing, parkour, the law society, and inevitably the pub crawl group, university freshers’ fairs have for many years now given out free rape alarms to young women. This conjures up the image of an attack by a stranger, perhaps on the way home from a night out.

But this gesture perhaps distracts from an urgent and rapidly escalating problem taking place much closer to home – that of increasingly violent sexual assault on campus. In most cases the male student accused of wrongdoing is in the same friendship group as the young woman reporting him, often studying on the same course. They may live just down the corridor in halls or even in the same flat.


Universities are gearing up this term for what is becoming an increasingly frequent and difficult problem, with staff left to investigate these complex cases. Many victims are unwilling to go to the police because they know the justice system is slow, traumatic and rarely results in conviction for rape, and more and more are turning to their university instead.

Prof Steve West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, heads one of the many universities now trying to work out how to tackle this issue. He explains that once a student has made a complaint, and it has been determined that they do not want to go to the police, the university’s own internal investigation will “gather pace quite quickly”. While a criminal rape investigation often takes years, a university will aim to investigate in a few months.

Both students will have a different team in the university offering them support, though West says in serious cases they often suspend the accused student pending investigation “to give some distance”.
Not talking to teenagers in universities and schools about choking without consent seems ridiculousRose Stephenson, Higher Education Policy Institute

West is frustrated that the Office for Students has stressed that universities are not like courts of law and should take evidence from students supported by friends or family, but then goes on to advise that accused students facing possible suspension or expulsion can have legal representation.

“This is happening more often – and my personal view is that hiring a lawyer is completely unfair and unmanageable,” West says. “Usually you’ve got the accused student being represented legally and the victim not. It is completely ridiculous.”

He worries that this will put students off coming forward when they have been assaulted. “The last thing we want is to drive silence, and have young women feeling they can’t go through the trauma of an investigation,” he says.

Experts say issues around consent at university are becoming more complicated, with strangling – referred to by many students as choking – often a feature of sexual assault complaints, echoing its prevalence in the violent porn which many students will have been encountering for years while still at school.

Rose Stephenson, director of policy and advocacy at the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says universities need to be “brave” and look this squarely in the face.

‘We need to have grownup conversations with teenagers about choking and also sexual pleasure’: Rose Stephenson of the Higher Education Policy Institute. 

Photograph: Nic Delves-Broughton

“Not talking to teenagers in universities and schools about choking without consent seems ridiculous to me,” she says.

“We need to have grownup conversations with teenagers about this – and that means also discussing sexual pleasure,” she adds. “That can be an uncomfortable thing for institutions to accept they have to talk to freshers about.”

Smita Jamdar, partner and head of education at law firm Shakespeare Martineau, gets called in to sexual assault investigations when universities feel particularly out of their depth, often because the parents of the accused have hired a lawyer.

She says: “Students now are navigating so much more complexity. They have seen stuff online about sex which many fully grown adults would struggle to process.”

As a result she says: “Allegations of some form of sado-masochism, including choking, are not uncommon.”

Jamdar explains that in some of these S&M cases the woman who has reported the assault has been clear that she does not want this. However, sometimes it is in a longer-term relationship where it has been a shared practice between two students, but some months in, one “reaches the conclusion that it is not OK for them”.

“These are particularly challenging cases, and it is difficult for the university to get to the bottom of whether someone should have known if their partner was still consenting,” she says.

In an attempt to address this earlier, the majority of universities now offer training on sexual consent as part of the packed freshers’ programme of activities and parties. Yet far fewer insist that all students attend.

While men do attend the consent workshops I’ve delivered at universities, they make up 25% to 30% of the audience

Allison Havey, Rap Project

Allison Havey, co-founder of the Rap (raising awareness and prevention) Project, which runs consent workshops for students, firmly believes they should be mandatory when young people arrive at university. This is something many female students have campaigned for, and which the Office for Students is consulting on.

Havey says: “While men do attend the consent workshops I’ve delivered at universities, they make up 25% to 30% of the audience.”

She wants all students to be taught the law around consent, understanding, for instance, that if a woman is really drunk, she cannot consent to sex and it is rape. And she wants freshers to understand how to be an active bystander, stepping in when something doesn’t feel right.


‘It’s a power game’: students accused in university rape hearings call in lawyers


“We absolutely ask students to have each other’s backs,” she says. “If you are at a party and someone is very drunk or out of it and you see someone leading them into a bedroom, you should say something like: ‘Hey, they’re wasted and can’t say clearly if they consent or not. Why not revisit this tomorrow when they have sobered up?’”

Investigating sexual assault cases, regardless of the details, is rarely an easy task for universities. A student conduct panel will need to decide whether a student has broken the university’s rules by committing “sexual misconduct” and should therefore be suspended or expelled, but with none of the forensic crime facilities the police use and no right to demand anything such as access to phones for evidence.

Any quasi-legal process requires listening to both sides, and Jamdar acknowledges that women who have gone to their university for justice and support can find this very painful.

Hope Conway-Gebbie, who was women’s liberation officer for Edinburgh University students’ union last year, recalls how “deeply upsetting” one female student who she supported found the process.

The student was, she says, initially told by the student disciplinary team that they would be upholding her complaint of rape. However, when she attended the final panel session she was “totally unprepared for what they put her through”.


Conway-Gebbie says: “Her attacker’s parents were wealthy and he had the best legal representation money could buy. He had access to anything submitted on her behalf, such as medical evidence and evidence from her friends.” Meanwhile the female student had no access to any of his information and wasn’t even aware she could have a lawyer.

In the end no sanctions were made, and both students continued to study at the university. The female student bumped into the man she accused in Edinburgh and regularly had to see the friends who defended him.

Conway-Gebbie says this deters others from reaching out. “For every woman who has been failed and retraumatised by this process, there are a dozen who hear this and decide not to put themselves through it. Their assaults then go unreported.”

A spokesperson for Edinburgh University said they could not comment on individual cases, but insisted the safety of students and staff is their priority.


Universities criticised for failed response after report details extent of sexual violence on campuses

She said: “We do not tolerate sexual violence within our community and we have processes in place to enable us to investigate reports made to us thoroughly and in a supportive way.

“We have a dedicated team who provide specialist advice, support and guidance to those affected by forms of abuse, including guidance on how to contact external organisations, including the police,” she added.

Ellie Wilson, who saw the boyfriend who raped her while she was a student at Glasgow University convicted in court last year, told the Observer that she understood why other female students go to their university instead of the police.

“I was in a fairly unique position because I had a lot of strong evidence, including screenshots of messages where he said he had raped me, and a recorded confession,” she says.

She went to the university first herself, which she describes as “an enormous step” for a victim. “You worry about what the reaction of other people in the university will be. There is huge social pressure, and speaking out against your peers can be really isolating. People take sides,” she says.

Wilson’s boyfriend was suspended by Glasgow after the police arrested him for rape. However, while waiting for the case to come to court he was able to enrol at Edinburgh University. When Wilson heard she was horrified and approached Edinburgh to warn them of the ongoing case, but she was informed that they already knew.

“It was truly appalling,” she remembers. “I was working in Edinburgh and I had thought he was miles away at home in Inverness, but instead he was there and being allowed to make a fresh start, going out drinking and joining the athletics club.”

A spokesperson for Edinburgh University reiterated that they could not comment on individual cases.

Wilson has lodged a petition with the Scottish parliament demanding that universities should be required to declare if someone is being investigated or has been expelled or suspended for sexual assault by another institution.

Kieran McCartan, professor of criminology at UWE, runs a programme which works with male students who are reported for sexual harassment or misogyny, with the aim of making them question their attitudes before their behaviour escalates.

This is not common practice in universities yet, but he hopes it could help to stem the growing tide of sexual violence across the sector.

“The vast majority of young men I’ve worked with in this group start to question their actions by the end,” he says. “You see them realise that their whole life could be derailed because they are making bad decisions.”

A SEVENTIES CURRICULUM

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (frauenkultur.co.uk) PDF

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Rebel, rebel: how Lee Miller’s defiance in fashion, photography and life still endures


Miller counted Picasso and Man Ray as friends, took devastating war photos and dressed outrageously. A new film starring Kate Winslet and exhibition explore her renegade spirit

Lauren Cochrane
Sun 17 Sep 2023 
The Observer
Fashion

Lee Miller models a headband made from a new material called plastic in 1932. Photograph: Lee Miller/Tessa Hallmann

The forthcoming production of Lee, the film starring Kate Winslet based on the life of Lee Miller, has one scene in which Winslet is seen reclining in a two-piece swimsuit of the kind that a decade later would be called a bikini. It is the 1930s, when the item would have been considered “scandalous”, but it showed how the photographer and war reporter liked to defy convention. Now the bikini, along with other items from Miller’s wardrobe, has been discovered in the attic of her old home and will go on display alongside some more of clothes for the first time.

Lee Miller: Dressed, an exhibition set to open at Brighton Museum in October, brings a fashionable perspective to the life and work of the American photographer. It will include a red dress possibly created by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the bikini and Miller’s war uniform

Martin Pel, the curator, says the pieces tell the story of Miller’s life and rebellion against the norms. The bikini – dated to 1937 – was a case in point. It predated the fashion by around a decade. “It would have been scandalous, really incredibly racy, to have worn it 10 years earlier,” says Pel. Miller also wore jodhpurs when trousers were not worn by women, and lent a black fur coat to her brother John, who sometimes wore women’s clothes. These are also included in the exhibition. “She really didn’t care what people thought,” says Pel. “Lee absolutely lived on her own terms.”

Miller will become a talking point again this autumn. In addition to the exhibition and film, there are two books published by Thames & Hudson.

Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in the film Lee. 

Photograph: Toronto film festival

Glamorous and beautiful, and part of a circle that included Picasso and Man Ray, Miller has finally emerged from these associations over the last 20 years to be rightly lauded for her brave and uncompromising images from the end of the second world war.

But Miller also has an important place in the history of fashion and fashion photography. “She’s become so well known for [the war images] that the fashion stuff is overlooked,” says her granddaughter Ami Bouhassane, who is also director of Farleys, the Sussex house that Miller lived in from the late 40s onwards. “We have five and half thousand negatives, and the war work that most people think of is only the last 18 months [of her career].”

Miller grew up in New York state and began her career as a model, working for Man Ray in Paris after convincing him to take her on as an assistant as she was familiar with photography. Romy Cockx, curator of the recent Man Ray and Fashion show in Antwerp’s Momu, says Miller influenced Man Ray’s fashion imagery. “On the one hand she was a model and on the other he was learning how to become a photographer from her.”

“I think the interplay of these elements made it sometimes like a dialogue between them.”When war broke out in 1939 Miller was an established photographer and worked for Vogue. In the early part of the war she created images that managed to turn uninspiring briefs from the Ministry of Information into creative images for the magazine. “We’ve a whole series of fashion images with models looking nonchalant next to some hairy mammoth in the Natural History Museum. She had this amazing imagination,” says Bouhassane.

Although there were other women working in photography in the 1930s and 40s – Cockx points to Berenice Abbott, also mentored by Man Ray – Bouhassane says Miller’s determined rise to the top came from her background. “Her parents gave her this incredible gift of treating her equally to her brothers,” she says. “Her natural bass line was in the space of equality. So when she hit these walls of ‘no, you can’t do that because you’re a woman’, and ‘women don’t run their own business’, she’s like, ‘yes, I can.’”

Lee Miller’s photograph of Romanian gypsies in Sibiu, from 1938. Photograph: Lee Miller Archives

Pel says this attitude is borne of her approach to clothing– through both an irreverence, and a desire for functionality. “I think she loved sort of shocking peopleand doing things out of the ordinary,” he says. “Her attitude to clothing [also] reminds me of a heterosexual man’s attitude to dress– she just wants it to work.”Michael O’Connor, costume designer for Lee, studied images of Miller prewar: on the beach in the south of France with Picasso and Paul Eluard, wearing the bikini, a design they replicated for the film. “In those days Lee knew how important clothes were,” he says. “She was part of a set of dapper people – she’s sitting on a picnic blanket with Picasso and she’s a confident part of that scene.”

The film focuses on Miller’s life during the end of the war, but even in this period “her eye for fashion was so acute,” says O’Connor. “Audrey Withers, the editor of Vogue, had Miller’s Class A uniform tailored on Savile Row, we know that from the label in the original. So Winslet went to Savile Row to have hers tailored.” Withers is also said to have sent Miller nice underwear “so she could feel feminine” even under horrific circumstances.

Miller was traumatised by the war and stopped taking pictures soon after. However, her influence can be seen in postwar photography. “The way she brought this more humane aspect to fashion photography influenced British photographic trends in the 60s, reemerging in the work of Lord Snowdon and David Bailey,” says Cockx.

There’s also the now familiar switch from model to photographer – a move that other women including Corinne Day have made recently. Bouhassane says: “She’d been a model so she knew what it felt like to be on the other side of the camera. We’ve got some really great shots where she’s having a giggle with the models, they seem really relaxed.”

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/09/manrays-muse-kate-winslet-personally.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-big-picture-lee-millers-sphinx-like.html

A smoking quill? Notes in Bible margin could be handwriting of the Venerable Bede

Annotations in eighth-century manuscript point to work of revered English monk, scholar and saint

Part of an extract from St John’s Gospel in the Lindisfarne Gospels

Dalya Alberge

Sat 16 Sep 2023 

His life of service through scholarship earned him the title “venerable”. He is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the post-Roman world, and acknowledged as a saint in the Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican traditions.

Now a leading academic believes she has identified an example of the handwriting of Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, along with his “lost” Old English translation of the St John’s Gospel.

A stained glass window depicting the Venerable Bede at St Nicholas church in Blakeney, Norfolk. 

Photograph: ASP Religion/Alamy

Michelle Brown, the British Library’s former curator of illuminated manuscripts, told the Observer that extensive evidence within two manuscripts makes a compelling and exciting case for linking them to the eighth-century monk and scholar of the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow near Newcastle.

In the preface to the Book of Kings in the Codex Amiatinus – a Bible that was taken to Rome from Jarrow in 715 and is now in a Florentine archive – she found parallels between grammar and linguistics within annotated passages and Bede’s published writings.

Noting the sophistication of an exceptional scholar rather than a mere scribe, she singled out complex Greek letter-forms in the margins and a distinctive “lightning flash” that Bede pioneered to highlight quotations.

She said: “We know that Bede knew Greek. Not that many people did know Greek at that time. So we’ve got the marginalia and the way in which he marks up. The little zigzag lines that look like lightning flashes he invented like a yellow magic marker to indicate when he was quoting a passage – a passage of the Old Testament period in the New Testament, for example. So it’s got these mark-ups that he’s only inventing around this period.”

She argued that the use of Greek and Hebrew, as well as marginal reference annotations, reflect Bede’s interests and practices: “We also know from his own admission that he was ‘author, notary and scribe’ and would have mastered the gamut of the Insular system of scripts, as this hand had.

“He was referring to the Old Testament use of the word scribe as a priestly function for writing scripture … Given that Codex Amiatinus … [was] such an incredible intellectual feat, it is unthinkable that Bede’s hand would not be present.”

She added that a number of the scribes left colophons – publisher’s emblems – at the end of their contributions which say, “Pray for me”. “But the one that I think is Bede doesn’t … He emphasises in his colophon, ‘labore’ (work), and that’s something that throughout his autobiographical writings and elsewhere Bede always stresses – the sanctity of the work. So the colophon sections by this particular hand point to a different take … than that of the other scribes.”

On his deathbed in 735, Bede translated the Gospel of St John into Old English, the first time that a western vernacular language other than Latin had been used to record any part of the Bible.

The original work has not survived but Brown argues that sections were added to the Lindisfarne Gospels around 950, as she has identified evidence such as “characteristic Bedan marginal quotation marks”.

She also noted the omission of disciples, such as Thomas, that are given in the Latin text, and the addition of the names of the sons of Zebedee, though they are not given in the text: “It seems more consistent with Bede’s rapid translation work, introducing some short cuts due to pressure of time, with death approaching fast, and interpolating some details from memory.”

Brown, who worked at the British Library for 28 years, is professor emerita of medieval manuscript studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

She said of the evidence: “You haven’t got a smoking quill. It doesn’t say ‘Bede’. But put all the evidence together and I think this is as good an argument as has been advanced.”

Her discoveries will feature in a new book, titled Bede and the Theory of Everything, to be published by Reaktion Books in October.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – across the great divide


The writer’s enjoyable obsession with the ‘other Naomi’ (Wolf), a conspiracy theorist, becomes a deeply insightful inquiry into the way technology fuels the polarisation of society

Down the rabbit hole: Naomi Klein. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian


Review
Tim Adams
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 17 Sep 2023 

The first time it happened, Naomi Klein was in a public lavatory just off Wall Street in Manhattan. She heard two women discussing something she had said about the Occupy movement, which was then camped outside. Klein emerged from her cubicle to put the women right: it wasn’t her who had said those things, but she knew straight away who had. It must have been the “other Naomi” – Naomi Wolf. After that, the misunderstanding started happening more and more, particularly online.

It was true the pair of them had things in common, beyond the name. They had both written generation-defining bestselling polemics. In 1991, Wolf’s The Beauty Myth promoted the idea that eating disorders were by-products of the cosmetics and fashion industries; while Naomi Klein’s No Logo, nearly a decade later, had become a global rallying cry against the exploitative working practices of multinationals and their billionaire owners. They both (for the purposes of author photos at least) had big hair and broad smiles. They both were children of Jewish parents with alternative lifestyles. They both even had partners called Avi.

Her quest is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the ‘other side’ but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness

But while these similarities persisted, over the past 20 years the political journeys of the Naomis could hardly have been more distinct. Naomi Klein developed her original anti-corporate message into a critique of the environmental catastrophe of global capitalism that argues for a green New Deal. Naomi Wolf, meanwhile, made a strange journey from beauty myths to a full diet of conspiracy theory, pro-Trump activism and anti-vaccine extremism.

Even so, during the pandemic, the confusion became so pointed that one Twitter user even came up with a handy rhyme, to tell the two women apart:

If the Naomi be Klein
You’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

This book begins as an enjoyably obsessive investigation into that doppelganger relationship, touching on famous precedents: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. It broadens into a deeply insightful inquiry into the ways in which the technology that drives our lives increasingly demands mirror-image doubles, tribal combatants to fuel a divided culture. This process, Klein argues, was accelerated by the restrictions and anxieties of the pandemic when “the [real] world was disappearing and so was I”.

In that enforced isolation, the activist-author found herself spending more and more time following her accidental nemesis down internet rabbit holes. Wolf, banned from Twitter for her crazy views, had by now become a star turn in the mirror world of “alt-right” YouTube and podcasts. Klein describes how she would occasionally emerge from this “doomscrolling” to inform her baffled husband of the latest outrage she had discovered: “She just wrote that ‘vaccinated people’s urine/faeces needs to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people’s drinking water is established’.” By now Klein did not have to identify the “she” in question.

That proposition for an alternative water system might stand as a useful metaphor to describe the extremes of contemporary “us and them” that the story of Klein and Wolf comes to illustrate. Friends with a knowledge of her project keep asking Klein to explain exactly how Wolf came to “fall off a cliff” from liberal and scientific orthodoxy; but Klein is too good a writer to fall for that diagnosis. She is appalled and fascinated by her shadow principally because she wants to understand the motivations behind Wolf’s world view if not its unhinged conclusions. Wolf’s “Covid rollercoaster ride…” is, Klein comes to argue, if nothing else, a response to “what it increasingly feels like to be at the mercy of omnipresent technologies that are governed according to opaque algorithms… outside of existing laws”. The problem, she suggests, is that the explanation for that feeling is ascribed to “the wrong c”: conspiracy not capitalism.

Her quest in all of this is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the “other side” but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness. Like a rival general, Klein listens hard to Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room – on which Wolf has become a fixture with her own mass following (the “Wolf Pack”) – and identifies exactly the strategic political ground they seek to colonise; that new coalition between “the far right and the far out”. The unlikely crossover, for example, between the “wellness industry” and gun-loving libertarians, around the issue of vaccination. Campaigning with her husband, who is running as a New Democratic party candidate in Canada, she confronts insistent evidence of this on the doorstep – women with telltale “internet eyes”, one-time liberals who now spout received nonsense about global elites and casually suggest that the pandemic was sent to cull the weaker members of society.


Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality

Klein’s instinct is not only to condemn. She makes the important case that the very nature of polarity now means that crucial journalistic questions go unanswered. There should, for example, have been legitimate scepticism about the UN acceptance of China’s story of the origins of the Covid virus, or about Bill Gates’s defence of the drug companies’ insistence on patents for their vaccines. But the mere fact that the conspiracists on Wolf’s side amplified those issues meant that such arguments were ignored or under-investigated. “Once an issue is touched by ‘them’ it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else,” Klein observes of what is a growing and dangerous trend.

Her book is a powerful antidote to such instincts. In articulating and examining some of the darker forces of the world her “double” inhabits, Klein never forgets that the primary purpose of mirrors is actually self-reflection; to understand the other, you first have to know yourself.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane (£25). 

GREENWASHING

Rainforest carbon credit schemes misleading and ineffective, finds report

System not fit for carbon offsetting, puts Indigenous communities at risk and should be replaced with new approach, say researchers


Patrick Greenfield
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 15 Sep 2023

Rainforest conservation projects are not suitable for carbon offsetting and a different approach should be used to effectively protect critical ecosystems such as the Amazon and Congo basin, a report has concluded.

New research by UC Berkeley Carbon Trading Project looking into rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra, which operates the world’s leading carbon standard, found that the system is not fit for purpose.

It generates highly inflated environmental impacts and some projects fail to provide safeguards for vulnerable forest communities, according to the report, making them unsuitable for companies to use for carbon offsetting claims as they are not equivalent to fossil fuel emissions.

Halting the destruction of the world’s rainforests is an urgent task for meeting UN climate and biodiversity targets, and supporters of carbon markets say they could direct billions to climate change and biodiversity mitigation if they work as intended.


Through offsetting, companies and people say their own emissions have been cancelled out by paying for greenhouse gas removal or reductions elsewhere, often in developing countries.

But a new assessment by a team of 14 UC Berkeley researchers, funded by the NGO Carbon Market Watch, found that the current system of generating rainforest protection carbon credits was not fit for purpose and was open to exploitation.

The researchers assessed five quality factors of Verra’s rainforest carbon credit system, known as Redd+ projects: their durability, forest carbon accounting, community safeguards, deforestation leakage and baselines, finding widespread shortcomings in all areas.


Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

They found that the majority of credits did not represent a positive impact on the climate, that projects had routinely underplayed the risk of displacing deforestation elsewhere, and that auditors often failed to enforce Verra’s own rules on generating credits. The report said some Redd+ projects had led to the displacement or dispossession of vulnerable communities, despite safeguards that were meant to prevent harm.

“Our research shows that the project type with the most credits on the voluntary carbon market, avoided deforestation, generates highly inflated credits that put forest communities at risk. An entirely different approach is needed to reduce deforestation and cut emissions,” said Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading project who led the report.

The report recommended that governments and businesses should focus on curbing the drivers of deforestation around the world, support plans designed to help Indigenous communities conserve forests, and said companies should support a contributions approach to supporting rainforest conservation instead of buying offsets.

In response, Verra said it welcomed the scrutiny of the scientific and environmental community on its work, saying that many of the issues highlighted in the report would be dealt with in the new methodology for generating carbon credits, which it will be publishing in the next few weeks. It has published a technical response to the study.

“We are committed to transparency, and have built an ecosystem of processes and relationships to develop consensus standards and methodologies that support climate action,” Verra said in a statement. “It is important to note that the vast majority of findings and recommendations from this research align with extensive and systematic work to update the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program that has been carried out by Verra over the last two years,” it added.

Earlier this year, the Guardian published an investigation that found that a vast numbers of rainforest carbon offsets were worthless. Several large companies have moved away from claims based on offsetting in recent months.

“The research shows that the current rules governing Redd+ projects seriously lack credibility and cannot be trusted to generate high quality carbon credits. Businesses are offsetting their emissions on the cheap by buying low-quality carbon credits connected to forest protection projects in the Global South,” said Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch.

Carbon Market Watch said it would be writing to Verra highlighting projects they thought were issuing illegitimate credits.

“Biodiversity, the climate and Indigenous people or local communities are losing out on what should have been a system to drive meaningful financial flows to the forest conservation projects that so desperately need it,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy lead on global carbon markets for CMW.

“Offsetting should be axed. It cannot work in its current form, and carbon markets must evolve into something different. The focus should be on getting money to the right place, rather than getting as many credits as possible,” he said.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

Diverse mix of seedlings helps tropical forests regrow better, study finds


Malaysia trial shows quicker recovery compared with areas replanted with four or just a single native species

An area of cleared land and an oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysia. Tropical forests cover 6% of the planet’s land surface but are home to about 80% of species and are major carbon sinks. Photograph: Christian Loader/Alamy

Patrick Barkham

THE GUARDIAN

Fri 15 Sep 2023 

Replanting logged tropical forests with a diverse mixture of seedlings can help them regrow more quickly than allowing trees to regenerate naturally, a study has shown.

Satellite observations of one of the largest ecological experiments in the world in the Malaysian state of Sabah have revealed how lowland rainforest recovered over a decade.

After trees were felled in the 1980s, the publicly owned Malua Forest Reserve was dedicated to learning how best to restore tropical forests. A 500-hectare (1,235-acre) study site was divided into 125 experimental plots that, in 2002-03, were either left to recover naturally or planted with a mixture of one, four or 16 native tree species.

By 2012, the plots replanted with a mixture of 16 native tree species showed a quicker recovery of canopy area and total tree biomass, compared with areas replanted with four or only a single native species. But even plots replanted with just one tree species recovered more quickly after 10 years than those left to naturally regenerate.

A river runs through a rainforest in Sabah, Malaysia.
Photograph: Genevieve Vallee/Alamy

Prof Andrew Hector, of the University of Oxford, who set up the experiment more than 20 years ago as part of the South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP), said: “Our new study demonstrates that replanting logged tropical forests with diverse mixtures of native tree species achieves multiple wins, accelerating the restoration of tree cover, biodiversity, and important ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration.”

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Science Advances, said that the probable reason for the better recovery was that different tree species occupied distinct niches within the forest ecosystem and so diverse mixtures of planted species complemented each other and increased the effective functioning of the whole ecosystem. For instance, some tropical species were more tolerant of drought because they produced more protective chemicals, giving the forest resilience during periods of low rainfall.

Hector added: “Having diversity in a tropical forest can be likened to an insurance effect, similar to having a financial strategy of diverse investment portfolios.”

Tropical forests cover 6% of the planet’s land surface but are home to about 80% of the world’s documented species and are major carbon sinks. Between 2004 and 2017, 43m hectares of tropical forest were destroyed, an area the size of Morocco.

Restoring forests that have been logged is a crucial part of tackling the climate and extinction crises but it is debatable whether this is best achieved through allowing forests to restore themselves via seeds in the soil or through active replanting.

The Sabah biodiversity experiment planted nearly 100,000 trees, including several endangered species and the world’s tallest tropical tree, Shorea faguetiana or yellow meranti, which can reach more than 100 metres in height.

The recovery of the plots was assessed by applying statistical models to aerial images captured by satellites.

Ryan Veryard, the lead author of the study, said: “Importantly, our results show that logged forest can recover so long as it is not converted to agricultural uses like oil palm plantation. They also emphasise the need to conserve biodiversity within undisturbed forests, so that we can restore it in areas that have already been logged.”

‘People feel unprotected’: Greeks lose faith in state after Storm Daniel and a summer of wildfires

Before the catastrophe in Libya, the cyclone brought devastation to Thessaly – and there are fears the climate crisis will bring more

Floodwaters cover a plain in Thessaly on 8 September; at least 17 people died and the clean-up operation is continuing. 

Photograph: Dimtiris Papamitsos/AP

The Observer Greece
Helena Smith in Athens

Sat 16 Sep 2023 

The whiff of death permeates the once fertile plain of Thessaly. Thirteen days may have elapsed since Storm Daniel pummelled Greece – a prelude to the fatal descent it would make on Libya – but even now, as the flood waters slowly recede, families bury loved ones and the authorities begin to catalogue the scale of the destruction, it is clear the agricultural heart of the country has been devastated beyond recognition.

What remains is a broken land, rain-sodden and bruised, covered with the detritus of all that fell foul of the storm, animate and inanimate, fish, birds, bees, dogs, cats, livestock, buildings, bridges and roads.


This weekend, Greek soldiers in masks and protective suits were frantically collecting carcasses for mass incineration. More than 200,000 animals perished in the storms, officials say, and with fears of outbreaks of infectious disease, there is a race against time to remove putrefying remains from farms and pens in areas frequently described as impassable.

“The stench is unbearable,” one reporter told viewers on state-run television. “And it hangs over Thessaly.”

At least 17 people lost their lives in floods whose waters continue to submerge fields of cotton and corn, villages and towns in a thick layer of mud and sludge.

After Daniel’s devastating impact on Libya – where the death toll has surpassed 11,000 – Greeks are counting their blessings. But anger is also mounting. In a region hit by a ferocious Mediterranean cyclone, or “medicane”, named Ianos, exactly three years ago on Monday, fury is widespread that almost no flood prevention measures had been taken even if most accept that this month’s storms, energised by a summer of unprecedented heat, had not occurred in several hundred years. The downpours unleashed by Daniel were the worst since records began in the 1930s.

“You could call it the perfect storm,” Greece’s leading climatologist, Prof Christos Zerefos, told the Observer. “Locked between two meteorological systems it stood still, unable to move from west to east, taking its energy from the ever-warmer sea and [dumping] the equivalent of a year’s rain on Thessaly in two days.”

At 80 years old, Zerefos has long been studying changing weather patterns at the Academy of Athens’ research centre for atmospheric physics and climatology. He is the first to say that Daniel was “a very rare” extreme weather event, a storm whose magnitude he did not think he would ever see.

But what worries Zerefos is with the atmosphere so destabilised by a changing climate Ianos may not be a one-off. “The Ianos medicane cost about one fifth of the damage [predicted from] Daniel,” he said. “What frightens me is that we’ll have more events like Ianos, say every four or five years, which would not only be highly destructive but very costly.”

With so many in Greece’s agricultural heartland facing financial ruin – livestock recovery alone is expected to take years – the centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been put on the defensive.

After a summer of devastating wildfires – including a blaze described as Europe’s biggest after ravaging an area the size of New York City in the north-eastern region of Evros – there are growing public concerns that state authorities are ill-equipped to deal with natural disasters in a part of the world already singled out as a climate emergency hotspot. The sight of hapless residents in Thessaly being rescued by volunteers before civil protection units could get to them has reinforced the image of official incompetence.

On Thursday the polling company Metron Analysis, releasing its first survey of public opinion after the floods, noted that 61% of respondents had a negative opinion of the government’s work, versus 57% in May. For the first time since Mitsotakis, who won a second four-year term in June, assumed power, analysts have begun to speak of the nation resembling a “failed state”.

“There is a prevalent feeling that Greece is a failed state, that it cannot meet our expectations or [global] challenges,” said Maria Karaklioumi, a political analyst at the polling company Rass. “When Mitsotakis first came to power [in 2019] he promised that the country and state would work better and that hasn’t happened.”

Likening Greek sentiment to the backlash against US president George W Bush, whose reputation was badly hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she added: “People right now feel unprotected and abandoned. After the floods and fires, any sense of security that the state should offer has evaporated.”

Late on Saturday, in his first annual keynote economic speech since re-election, Mitsotakis emphasised that he would not only highlight challenges posed by the climate emergency – announcing local and EU-funded relief measures for those hit by the floods – but forge ahead with structural changes to a system that has clearly laboured under the pressure of dealing with successive disasters.

With the wildfires and floods expected to weigh on an economy otherwise doing well in the aftermath of Greece’s near decade-long debt crisis, the climate, more than any other potential foe has, after Daniel’s passing, clearly become the leader’s public enemy number one.

Bernie Sanders: workers should reap AI benefits in form of ‘lowering workweek’

Vermont senator says technology should benefit ‘not just people on top’ as he cites financial stresses confronting most Americans

Ramon Antonio Vargas

Sun 17 Sep 2023

If the US’s ongoing artificial intelligence and robotics boom translates into more work being done faster, then laborers should reap some of the gains of that in the form of more paid time off, the liberal US senator Bernie Sanders said Sunday.

“I happen to believe that – as a nation – we should begin a serious discussion … about substantially lowering the workweek,” Sanders remarked on CNN’s State of the Union.


Citing the parenting, housing, healthcare and financial stresses confronting most Americans while generally shortening their life expectancies, he added: “It seems to me that if new technology is going to make us a more productive society, the benefits should go to the workers.


“And it would be an extraordinary thing to see people have more time to be able to spend with their kids, with their families, to be able to do more … cultural activities, get a better education. So the idea of … making sure artificial intelligence [and] robotics benefits us all – not just the people on top – is something, absolutely, we need to be discussing.”

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with congressional Democrats, delivered those comments after State of the Union host Jake Tapper asked him about the four-day work week sought by the United Auto Workers. About 13,000 workers from that union went on strike Friday against the nation’s three biggest carmakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler-parent company Stellantis – after walking away from negotiations to renew a contract that expired at the end of the previous day.

Tapper asked Sanders, who appeared Friday at a rally in support of the strike, whether the concept of a shortened work week may simply be a negotiating tactic that the UAW would abandon when some of its other demands were met. But Sanders defended the validity of the demand while also seizing the moment to reiterate criticisms of the gaudy salaries collected by the car manufacturers’ executives.

Sanders – the chairperson of the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee – alluded to how the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis had pocketed hundreds of times more than their workers’ median wage. Their pay jumped by 40% between 2013 and 2022 while their workers’ real hourly earnings fell by about a fifth since 2008, according to the Economics Policy Institute.

According to the UAW, the disparity has shown how workers were never fully compensated for the sacrifices their bosses asked of them after the 2008-09 financial crisis, when they agreed to numerous cuts in the name of bailing out the auto industry. Demands from the union’s striking members include a 40% wage increase, better retirement benefits and job security protections – in addition to the 32-hour work week.

Seventy-five percent of Americans support the striking auto workers, according to a recent poll from Gallup.

Nonetheless, the sheer scale of the strike could unsettle the US economy as a whole and may eventually mean higher car prices for already distressed commuters.

Meanwhile, the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, told MSNBC and CBS on Sunday that progress had been mostly slow in the talks between his union and the carmakers.

Speaking to Tapper before Sanders’s appearance, former Republican US vice-president Mike Pence sought to blame the Joe Biden White House for auto workers’ dissatisfaction.

“All those hardworking auto workers are living in the same reality every other Americans live, and that is wages are not keeping up with inflation,” Pence said.

But Sanders contended that the car industry’s top executives are solely to blame for the strike.

“American people are sick and tired, in my view, … of corporate greed, in which the very richest people are becoming richer,” Sanders said. “What you’re seeing in the automobile industry, in my view, is what we’re seeing all over this economy – greed on the top, suffering on the part of the working class, and people are tired of it.

“You people on top – you’ve never had it so good. … So UAW is standing up against corporate greed. And I applaud them for what they’re doing.”

1933

Tim Peake backs idea for solar farms in space as costs fall

Beam me down: can solar power from space help solve our energy needs?


Sophie Zeldin-O'Neill

THYE GUARDIAN

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

Tim Peake has backed the idea of solar farms in space, saying the concept is “becoming absolutely viable”.

Astronaut Maj Peake said the falling cost of launching heavy cargoes into orbit means that complex structures, such as solar power farms, could soon be launched into space, and had the potential to provide significant power.

Peake – the first European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut from Britain to visit the International Space Station – said: “It boils down to hard numbers at the end of the day. Launching thousands of tonnes of hardware into low Earth orbit is becoming absolutely viable.”

The ESA has been exploring the idea of space-based solar power plants, and commissioned two “concept studies” this year. It is hoping to present a business case to the EU by 2025.


Peake said the agency had calculated that solar farms in space would be financially viable when cargoes could be launched at a cost of $1,000 (£807) per kg or less.

“So far, the actual costs have been about $2,700 per kilo,” he told an energy tech summit last week, but he said two rockets designed by SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, could cut this. “Launches using the Falcon Heavy can reduce that to about $1,500 and the so-called Starship brings that down by an order of magnitude to about $300 per kilo.”

The Falcon Heavy is already transporting cargo such as satellites into space, while the Starship is in development. An unmanned test flight in April exploded minutes after lift-off.

Unlike previous launchers, they are programmed to return to Earth intact and are reusable. This means there is no need to construct a completely new rocket for each launch, bringing the overall cost down.

ESA’s Solaris programme aims to launch solar panels into space, each programmed to robotically link up with others to build a solar farm.

While Earth-based solar farms are unable to generate electricity during times of darkness, such as at night or when the weather is bad, space-based panels are able to harvest the sun’s energy continuously.

Peake said: “If you can build solar farms in space, then you can beam that energy down to ground stations via microwaves. It means clean, limitless energy from space becomes an absolute possibility.”

This year, it was announced that UK universities and tech companies were to receive £4.3m in government funding to develop space-based solar power.

It followed a 2020 UK government-commissioned report into space-based solar farms which said the systems had the potential to provide energy equivalent to a large power station, up to a quarter of the country’s electricity needs, and, in time, to become an unlimited and constant zero-carbon power source.

Such developments, though, would take many years and are unlikely to help solve any of the world’s urgent energy challenges.

STILL WHACKADODDLE

Liz Truss: economic consensus since 1997 to blame for UK woes – not me


Former prime minister to make remarks in speech on Monday almost a year since mini-budget that led to her downfall


Kiran Stacey

Political correspondent

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

Liz Truss will blame the UK’s economic problems on “25 years of economic consensus” as she doubles down on the policy proposals that helped trigger financial turmoil and caused her to be ousted from Downing Street after just 49 days.

The former prime minister will give a speech at the Institute for Government on Monday, almost exactly a year since her government’s “mini-budget”, which caused the pound to crash and ultimately led to her downfall.

Speaking days after it emerged that the UK economy shrank by 0.5% in July, Truss will say the UK’s current economic problems are not her fault.

“I believe that the reason for the problems we have is the 25 years of economic consensus that have led us to this period of stagnation,” she will say, according to extracts from her speech briefed in advance. “And I believe it is vital that we understand that and shatter that economic consensus, if we are to avoid worse problems in the future.”

TORY'S IN POWER FOR OVER A DECADE

Truss will add: “Some say this is a crisis of capitalism – that free markets are responsible. But that’s not borne out by the facts. Quite the opposite is true. The fact is that since the Labour government was elected in 1997, we have moved towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Truss has spent the past few months attempting to rehabilitate her political reputation after her turbulent time in No 10 – the shortest ever term for a prime minister.

Last week she gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday in which she accused the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility of being part of “an orthodoxy that was gradually moving to the left”. In her speech on Monday she will say: “Free market economists went off to lucrative jobs in the City, allowing academic institutions and thinktanks to be captured by the left.”

Truss’s opponents reacted to news of the speech by renewing their criticisms of her premiership. Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, likened the speech to “an arsonist giving a talk on fire safety”, while Labour urged her successor, Rishi Sunak, to block her planned resignation honours list.

The former Bank of England governor Mark Carney said Truss created “Argentina on the Channel” not “Singapore on Thames”. Carney was in Montreal on Saturday at the Global Progress Action Summit, and made the comment in a reference to Argentina’s history of being unable to services its debts and Truss’s mini-budget of unfunded tax cuts.

Truss is writing a book about her period in office entitled Ten Years To Save the West, which is due to come out next spring. But further details about that time emerged over the weekend in extracts from a forthcoming book by the Telegraph’s political editor, Ben Riley-Smith.

According to the book, senior officials at No 10 and the Treasury had to intervene to persuade Truss to abandon many of her policies after being warned by City executives that the UK would enter a financial crisis within days if she did not.

Extracts revealed that several people at the top of government – including the incoming Treasury permanent secretary, James Bowler, and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case – were brought in over the course of a single day last September to warn her of the potential consequences of her policies.