bbc

Sainsburys had a 5 minute free advert on the Today programme last week. Peak time. Justin Webb was enamoured, mmm-ing and aagh-ing and popping a few dummy questions to the CEO (Justin King), but mostly leaving him to stray over the high quality of sainsbury products, expanding profits, the uniqueness of the Sainsbury service, how they were doing the right thing for customers, responding to their needs, helping them with their weekly budgets. And to plug the new Sainsbury campaign: live well for less (twice).

"It's very interesting talking to you" says Webb, "you get a sense that you are preparing yourelf and your business for a really very different longer term situation when it comes to the decisions that shoppers make..."

A longer term situation where people can't afford to shop. Or eat.

"Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. "People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren't coping."

"[Fairshare] works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services.

John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: "It's a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we're distributing has risen from 41 tonnes a year three years ago to 98 tonnes now, and that's to the same number of organisations."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/01/families-queue-for-food-ha...

Listen to Webb at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9607000/9607794.stm

UPDATED:
Correspondence with Evan Davis

Good old BBC. Let's try as hard as we can not to make the banks look too bad.

Nearly all outlets are reporting that Barclays paid out less than 1% of its stupendous profits in corporate tax:

The Guardian
Sky News
FT (uses Barclays' own initial declaration of 11.6 bn in profit, which gives the 1% figure for corporate tax.)
The Daily Torygraph (yes, even them)
The Mirror
The Daily Mail (uses 11.6 bn figure)

The Independent ... manages to bump it up to 4.5%

And the BBC?

This page on the BBC says 'Barclays has revealed it paid £113m in corporation tax to the UK in 2009, 2.4% of its £4.6bn global annual profit.'

This page (BBC) says 'Barclays has said it paid £113m in corporation tax in 2009, which was 2.4% of its global profit.'

Evan Davis reveals all in his morning chat with Joe Lynam on the Today programme:

ED: First just tell us what the profits are, because the Guardian calls it 11.6 billion pounds of profit
JL: ... and Barclays say that was correct for 2009. But then they changed the number when they released their figures this week on Tuesday, so they .. they're now saying that the official figure that they should have said last year was £4.6 billion. Both the Guardian and Barclays are correct, because they sold a huge management company called BGI for around 7 billion, they then took that back off the profits that they had ...
ED: So let's call it ... let's call it 4.6 billion, be generous to Barclays, which makes it a rate of 2.4%...

'Let's be generous to Barclays'!!?

Incredible.

Israel inquiry finds Gaza aid flotilla raid 'was legal' (BBC news online)

Not, incredible, of course, that Israel found itself to have acted legally. Incredible that the BBC writes a long piece about how Israel found itself to have acted legally, and their idea of 'balance' is to offer the information that a UN inquiry found that... the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality"!

Even a pretence at balance ought to mention not just that the brutality was 'unacceptable', according to 'a' UN report - but that the said UN report concluded that

Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law.

Fact-finding mission to investigate Israel's attacks on the Gaza flotilla, by the Human Rights Council

Much more importantly, the 'balancing' fact to Israel finding that its actions were legal has little to do with brutality: it is surely that the UN report found they were illegal.

My complaint:

Dear Steve Herrmann (etc)

This page, about Israel's report on the Gaza flotilla, contains the following claims:

1. 'An Israeli inquiry has found the country's navy acted legally'

2. 'in the report released on Sunday, the Turkel Committee said: "The imposition and enforcement of the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip does not constitute 'collective punishment' of the population of the Gaza Strip."'

As 'balance' to the first claim, you offer the following two pieces of information:

a) 'A separate UN inquiry last year said the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality".'

UPDATED

• Original letter to BBC
• BBC reply (1)
• BBC reply (2)

Inevitably, the Soviet government portrayed its invasion as an act of humanitarian intervention initiated at the “request of the [Afghan] government”. (Pravda, April 27, 1980) The aim was “to prevent the establishment of... a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression”. (Lyahovsky & Zabrodin, p.48)

Quoted in an alert by Media Lens Invasion - a comparison of Soviet and Western media performance

How close we are...

Dear Sarah Montague

In your interview this morning with General Peter van Uhm, he made the following claim:

‘A lot of people ask me that question [was it worth it], but I keep reminding them of the question why we went to Afghanistan. And it was the government of Afghanistan who asked for help. The United Nations supported that, and in the end Nato stepped in with ISAF.’

This is false, or at the very least, highly misleading - as you must be aware. The government of Afghanistan did not invite the United Nations in to ‘help’ until the end of December 2001, by which time the country had already been devastated by nearly 3 months of Nato’s bombing. The initial Nato invasion was not on the government’s invitation – indeed, the Afghan government made an offer to hand Bin Laden over to a 3rd country for trial in order to prevent the bombing, but the US refused to enter into negotiations. Nor was Nato’s action sanctioned by the Security Council – in other words, it was almost certainly in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, and therefore almost certainly illegal.

Why did you not challenge General van Uhm on this issue, or at least attempt to clarify the point? Listeners have been left with a very misleading impression.

I would be very grateful for a response, and will be submitting a formal complaint through the BBC’s complaints page.

Yours [*]

Vladimir Danchev was a Soviet radio reporter who broadcast 'anti-soviet' reports on the Afghanistan invasion, referring to it as an 'occupation'. This is an account of the way Danchev came to the attention of the KGB, by one of his former colleagues. Original version available at http://vasilysweekend.rpod.ru/7451.html (Russian). The following translation is not exact and omits some parts of the original report.

* * *

[Voice of Vassiliy Strelnikov] Vladimir Danchev worked as newsreader for Radio Moscow, English service. The radio put out hourly news casts and if I wasn’t in the office, I’d listen from home. If there were any mistakes, I’d ring the newsroom and alert the newsreader: ‘check the text, you may have made a mistake. Have another look’. Mostly my colleagues would thank me, because if the Radio controller caught any mistakes, the consequences might have been terrible. It was our kind of ‘newsreader solidarity’.

Vladimir Danchev had a very interesting background: he was half Bulgarian, half Russian, but came from Tashkent. He was a longstanding [Communist] Party man, hard working, member of the ‘DND’ (Voluntary People’s Friendship Group). Used to clean the streets, volunteered to work even on non-working days. A quiet man, intelligent, Pushkin-style.

1983. 3rd or 4th year of the Afghan occupation (of course we didn’t call it that then). Volodya Danchev was a newsreader, used to broadcast live in English.

What did broadcasting live mean? You came to the studio, a policeman stood at the door, you had to have a special pass to get to the microphone. The whole world heard you, so live broadcasts were taken very seriously.

UPDATED - latest response

• Original complaint
• Round robin response from the beeb
• Laurel and Hardy (with comments)

Jane Corbin: The elite Israeli force that seized the Mavi Marmara is training for its next operation. I’ve had unique access to this top secret unit. Naval Commandoe 13 has never been filmed by the media in action before. Israel says these commandoes had to fight for their lives on the ship that night. Turkey accuses Israel of an act of piracy. They called it Operation Sea Breeze, but what these Israeli Naval Commandoes encountered on the Mavi Marmara was anything but a breeze. It caused a storm of international condemnation - but did Israel fall into a trap? And what was the real agenda of some of those people who called themselves ‘peace activists’ aboard the Free Gaza flotilla?

From Death in the Med

A trap... ! Trapped into venturing out into the high seas. Trapped into storming illegally a boat full of 'peace activists' and firing at them with live ammunition. Trapped into killing 9 and injuring hundreds more, although the wily victims - those 'peace activists' - possessed no weapons of their own. Trapped, no doubt, into trapping the Gazans inside their own territory and trapping outside the Gaza borders the necessities they need to survive.

I trapped them into killing me! A wily trap indeed. I took no weapons with me, and made sure to stay in international waters on my own vessel. They fell for it.

But perhaps it all depends on whether you set more store by the UN Fact Finding Mission's investigation, or the BBC's dramatic version, reported breathlessly by Jane Corbin, Special Expert on Making Things Sound Dramatic and putting questions which are quite irrelevant.

The programme can still be viewed here, and a transcript of the breathy Jane is available here.

My letter to her breathlessness: