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A five-year-old girl from south London has drowned in a hotel pool at an Egyptian resort in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Chloe Johnson, from Forest Hill in south London, died in a water park at the Coral Sea Waterworld hotel while on a family holiday.

Her grandmother told Sky News on Saturday that the family was devastated by her death.

A spokeswoman for the travel company First Choice said: “First Choice can sadly confirm that a child has died while staying at the Coral Sea Waterworld hotel in Egypt. The incident occurred in a pool in the hotel’s water park.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with the family at this extremely difficult time. The British consulate were immediately informed and they are now working with our dedicated resort team in Egypt, to offer every assistance possible to the family in resort.

“In partnership with the hotelier, our resort team are working to understand how the incident occurred, and we will be carrying out a full and thorough investigation. At this time our priority is to provide support to the family.”

A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed the death of a British national and said it was providing consular assistance.

A spokesman said: “We are aware of the death of a British national in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on 17 May. We are providing consular assistance to the family at this difficult time.”

The Coral Sea Waterworld water park had been open for less than three weeks, according to its Facebook page.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/iZtOVWDWZo4/british-girl-drowns-egyptian-hotel-pool

A British backpacker has died after drinking poisoned alcohol in the Indonesian jungle.

Cheznye Emmons, 23, had bought a bottle labelled “gin” from a shop, which turned out to be deadly methanol. The beauty therapist from Essex had been trekking with her boyfriend and another man they met while travelling.

All three suffered health problems after drinking the methanol, which can cause kidney failure, blindness, seizures and death. Emmons lost her sight and was taken through the jungle to the nearest eye clinic. She was referred to hospital where she was placed in an induced coma.

Her parents flew to Indonesia where they eventually decided to turn off her life support machine.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We can confirm the death of a British national in Indonesia and we are providing consular assistance to the family at this difficult time.”

Her brother, Michael Emmons, said: “We’re all just in shock. From what we understand, the shop poured the gin out of the original bottle and then replaced it with methanol. It was in the original bottle with the gin label on it. As far as we’re aware, the shop has been shut and there’s a police investigation.”

Home-brewed spirits are common in Indonesia because of an alcohol tax of more than 200%, but methanol is a by-product of poor distillation techniques.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/iC6KhB1OYmo/uk-backpacker-dies-poisoned-alcohol-indonesia

An NHS trust at the centre of a row over death rates for children‘s heart surgery is to replace its chief executive.

Maggie Boyle will leave Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) next month, ahead of a management shakeup which follows fears over high mortality figures.

Operations were temporarily suspended earlier this year after concerns were raised over death rates at the children’s heart unit at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI).

Boyle is not believed to have tendered her resignation.

A trust spokesman would not confirm whether her departure was related to the heart surgery fears.

Boyle, a former nurse, issued a statement through the trust in which she expressed support for managerial change and the implementation of a “clinically led” structure.

“It has been a pleasure and a privilege to be chief executive at LTHT over the past six years,” she said. “I believe the move to new management arrangements which will see a clinically led, managerially supported structure being established is absolutely the right thing to do and will have enormous benefits for patient focused care delivery.

“I would like to wish the senior leaders and all of their staff all best wishes for a successful future.”

The trust found itself at the centre of a public outcry when Sir Roger Boyle, the government’s former heart tsar, raised fears about high mortality rates at LGI.

He presented data to NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh, who suspended surgery at the hospital’s child cardiac unit for eight days while an investigation took place.

The decision – which meant 10 children had to be transferred to centres up to 120 miles away for treatment – was widely condemned. Experts claimed the information that led to the unit’s closure was incomplete.

But health secretary Jeremy Hunt said suspending surgery was “absolutely the right thing” to do.

Boyle resigned from his role last month.

A trust spokesman said: “Arrangements to cover the chief executive post until a substantive appointment is made will be advised shortly.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/L33eIC5kEjY/leeds-hospital-chief-executive

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Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/i2Mj3XnHPrs/getting-it-right-video

The education secretary is like a fanatical personal trainer who urges schools to jump higher and run faster, the leader of the headteachers’ union has said.

Bernadette Hunter, president of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said Michael Gove ignores the damage he is causing to the education system as he bullies headteachers into turning schools into academies.

Hunter, who represents most primary school headteachers, also attacked school inspectors, saying they reduce rather than enhance educational standards.

Hunter said: “The reality is that Ofsted is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It costs an enormous amount of money, demoralises schools and staff and does nothing to improve the quality of education. It is leading to many good heads taking early retirement and many young teachers reluctant to work in more challenging schools, let alone taken leadership in those establishments.

“We’re not afraid of proper and rigorous accountability but the current regime is damaging schools, not making them better.”

Before her speech Hunter told the BBC that headteachers were also unhappy about the “constant churn of educational change” and negative rhetoric from the government.

“We know that UK schools are amongst the best in the world,” she said. “They are highly regarded by other countries, but to hear the department for education you would think we have a failing system.”

The NAHT conference also heard claims that brokers employed by the Department for Education (DfE) have been pressurising schools, particularly those that face the biggest challenges, into becoming academies. More than half of secondary schools in England are now academies, but the vast majority of primary schools retain their links with local authorities. Many academy schools are part of chains, while others are run individually.

“What we cannot tolerate is the completely unacceptable bullying of heads and governors to turn their schools into academies, to meet a political target set by the secretary of state,” Hunter said.

Delegates attending the conference debated a resolution warning that they have no confidence in the government’s education policies, which they claim are not in the best interests of children.

A DfE spokeswoman said: “We are clear that the best way forward for an underperforming school is to become an academy with the support of a strong sponsor. Academy sponsors have already turned around hundreds of struggling schools across the country, and academy results are improving far faster than the national average.

“Academy brokers help us to identify the best possible sponsor to turn around failing schools and ensure pupils are given every chance to fulfil their potential. We expect the highest levels of professional conduct from academy brokers and any allegations of misconduct are fully investigated.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/Z1tYsx9FJ1E/michael-gove-fanatical-personal-trainer

This debut feature from young British director Paul Wright concerns a disturbed young man in a remote Scottish fishing village: Aaron, played by George Mackay. He was the only person rescued alive from a craft wrecked by a catastrophic storm; the other five crew-members, including his adored elder brother Michael (Jordan Young), were drowned. It is a study in grief, pain and survivor-guilt – that is, the guilt felt by the survivor, and also that imposed on him by a community who will not forgive him for being alive while their loved ones are dead, and whose anguish gradually metamorphoses into irrational suspicion and rage. In his loneliness and misery, Aaron becomes close to Michael’s fiancee (Nichola Burley) – a taboo-infringement which just intensifies the village’s anger, particularly enraging Nichola’s father (Michael Smiley) and increasing the burden of fear placed on Aaron’s mother Cathy – a typically good performance from Kate Dickie.

The movie is intensely acted, with a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but it is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood and moment. Wright creates a showy visual texture, a collage of film and video for various memories, impressions and snatched glimpses of local TV reports – although the use of Super-8 for childhood is a little close to cliche. There is a superabundance of ideas. Wright maybe just has the first-timer’s inability or reluctance to leave anything out.

For Those In Peril reminded me a little of the Japanese movie Bashing (2005) by Masahiro Kobayashi, about an aid worker held hostage in Iraq, freed after official intervention, but then perpetually hated and harassed – “bashed” – in her hometown by locals who perpetually suspect her of selfishness and ingratitude, and somehow hold her survival against her, especially as she intends to return to the Middle East. In For Those In Peril, Aaron conceives the idea of returning to the sea in a crude raft of his own making, obsessed with the crazed, visionary possibility of somehow finding all five remaining crew-members alive.

George Mackay gives a good and honest performance as Aaron, and if his impassivity creates a slightly shapeless impression, then that is probably close to the numbed, un-expressed and inexpressible sense of pain that someone in this situation would experience in real life. He has an excellent scene with Lewis Howden, who plays the middleaged fisherman Davie: Aaron approaches Davie in the pub, wanting a private word, and every single drinker apart from Aaron himself is aware of the cracklingly tense atmosphere his request has created. To Davie’s astonishment and anger, Aaron mumblingly asks about the possibility of finding something or someone out there: his question is naive and tactless – and in fact quite genuinely selfish – in ways that Aaron had failed to anticipate, and it is also a startlingly real moment of banal everyday pain, an excruciating stubbed toe of pain, in a movie whose ambient agony is often rather poetically created.

Kate Dickie’s Cathy is the still emotional centre of the movie, a difficult role and a character who doesn’t have Aaron’s dramatic prerogative of dangerous and self-destructive action: Cathy must remain calm and almost martyred, rather like the mother of a universally loathed criminal. Poignantly, her only chance at self-expression and defiance is performing at a karaoke night, dedicating the song significantly to “her boys”. Again, it comes close to cliche, but Wright and Dickie carry it off.

Paul Wright creates a blanket of sadness in his film, a blanket which ily cast off by his final image, or images – it is a mysterious, serendipitous redemption and catharsis which perhaps could have been refined and clarified further in the edit, but it is bold and confident. This is a striking film from a valuable new talent.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/JsOjvEyE2kg/cannes-for-those-in-peril-review

Amid rampant weeds and crumbling stones, Matteo Giunti makes his way to the tomb of Francis Horner MP, a Scottish Whig who co-founded the Edinburgh Review and died, in 1817, in what he would have known as the prosperous Tuscan port of Leghorn.

But, as he reaches the once imposing grave, Giunti stops first at the Nike trainer and plastic bottle that have been left there overnight – not, presumably, by well-wishers. “This is nothing,” he says. “People throw trash over the walls. We’ve found bicycles. We’ve found wheels. We’ve found all sorts of things.”

Francis Horner’s damaged tomb.

In March last year, as he and fellow volunteer Francesco Ceccarini were scrabbling through the mud and vegetation on the top of Horner’s dilapidated tomb in the city’s old English cemetery, they stumbled on something whose significance was not immediately apparent. A piece of stone, broken into three and caked in dirt, it was barely recognisable. But, after some research and more thought, the penny dropped. They had, Giunti realised, found the long-lost medallion that had once graced the tomb: a profile of Horner in bas relief carved by the foremost sculptor of Regency Britain, Sir Francis Chantrey. “When I understood what it was,” he says, “we decided, ‘Wow, this is something – we need to take it away from here.’”

Unveiled on Friday before journalists and locals in the Museo Fattori, the sculpture represents vindication for the five locals who make up the cultural association Livorno delle Nazioni (LdN) and who have fought to reverse the decline of what they describe as Italy‘s oldest Protestant cemetery still in existence.

With its first marked grave dating from 1646 (a 21-year-old, Leonard Digges), Livorno’s small corner of England has almost two centuries on its counterpart in Florence and is older even than Rome’s. There are merchants and mothers; novelists and navy men; one of Byron’s bankers and a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.

After wartime bombing and decades of neglect, however, many tombstones lie cracked and dirty. And the cemetery’s aesthetic appeal is marred by the large car park that opened last year next door. The cemetery has been run for decades by the Misericordia, a charity which also runs an ambulance service. In 2011, the LdN was set up to formalise the efforts of Giunti and his fellow volunteers, who have tried to step up the cleaning, gardening and research that is needed if the place is to be returned to its former glory.

Now, the LdN hopes that the discovery of the Chantrey could help to attract attention – and money. “I’m pretty confident that this could be a real treasure. It’s something that just needs more organisation and funding,” says Lisa Lillie, Giunti’s American wife. Among the hundreds of graves are those of Scottish writer Tobias Smollett, Irish aristocrat Margaret King – taught by Wollstonecraft and friend to her daughter, Mary Shelley – and the English merchant Robert Bateman. The cemetery was closed in the mid-19th century.

What will become of Chantrey’s long-lost work is unclear. It must first be restored, then a decision taken on whether to put it back on Horner’s tomb or in a Livorno museum. “I feel that someone would steal it,” Giunti says, rather despondently. “Even if it’s difficult to sell it.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/p-iJqq9oTmU/italians-unveil-tomb-medallion-francis-horner

Whenever I think of those iconoclasts at Google, changing the very essence of business one totally awesome logo doodle at a time, I remember a New York Times article about a Waldorf school that featured a girl called Andie. Based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, this school is a studiedly old-fashioned place of blackboards and chalk, where the classroom tools are things such as knitting needles and apples, and there is an absolute, quasi-religious ban on computers or screens or any of the other hi-tech devices of which all other, less-knowing schools might boast. Even their use at home by pupils is heavily frowned upon. Andie was a fifth grader (10 to 11 age group), and her father was proud to say that she “doesn’t know how to use Google”. Daddy’s job? Well, he was high up in the executive communications department at Google.

Yes, Andie’s school is in Silicon Valley, and – in an irony so predictable that it only deserves the old cliche about drug dealers never dreaming of using their own product – her classmates were the scions of bigwigs at Apple, Yahoo, eBay and the rest.

These kids will all have been twiddling away with their yarn this week, so there isn’t the remotest chance they’d have done anything so brain-mushingly transgressive as Googled Google, and noticed it was suffering a little local difficulty in the UK. And anyway, I’ve no idea whether the moral rectitude of paying tax is one of the wholesome values being so expensively instilled into them. But it wouldn’t take long for them to grasp the lesson, because children have an innate sense of fairness.

The journey into adulthood does its best to disabuse them of this, of course, and by the time they grow into Google executives in the mould of the firm’s northern Europe boss, Matt Brittin, they are able to sit before the Commons public accounts committee and explain why they paid £3.4m in tax in Britain despite taking sales of £3.2bn from UK customers. Brittin was explaining again that Google’s UK salespeople don’t actually sell, despite rapidly mounting whistleblower testimony to the contrary – just as Amazon’s great and good will no doubt maintain of their own operation if they are recalled before the committee as expected.

For all the brilliant marketing of these firms as something entirely new, Brittin’s performance was utterly familiar. In fact, the single thing that distinguished him from all the bankers and the Murdochs and the so-called old-style capitalists who have sat before such committees in recent times was that he wasn’t wearing a tie. This, of course, is how we know that he works for one of those firms so often held to be remaking the very idea of commerce itself, when of course they aren’t, and big business has always been big business, and just as rapacious.

If you had to design a composite of today’s rulebook-tearing businessman who is of course anything but, then he would have Richard Branson’s sensationally unconventional beard and wear Steve Jobs’s outrageously leftfield black poloneck and Mark Zuckerberg’s iconoclastically unorthodox Adidas sandals. In every meaningful other respect, his behaviour would mimic that of every other chief executive since capitalism began.

It’s a mark of this generation’s strange self-regard that people are minded to think particularly of the tech billionaires as having somehow created a new model of business, when the new boss is inevitably similar to the old boss. For all their Prius-driving babyfacery, you know most of them would be sitting down with Pyongyang in a heartbeat if they thought there was a few extra quid in it.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg has already hosted his first Republican fundraiser, and is pouring vast sums of money into lobbying for laws that would suit his business. He has the usual philanthropic ventures, of course, for which he’ll one day probably win one of those bizarre humanitarian awards handed out to famous people who devote a tiny percentage of their time to charity work, but never to the nameless souls who do it for a pittance day in, day out. Perhaps these inevitable future garlands can sit alongside his honour from the satirist Stephen Colbert, who awarded him a “Fear medal” for “valu[ing] his privacy a lot more than yours”.

As for Google and Amazon and all the bright young companies, you have to take your hat off to the marketing whizzes who have managed to convince significant swaths of the public (and media) that they are seeing something new. As one tax lawyer observed of their timeworn practices, “in the real world people play to win”. It was ever thus. These firms are only changing the way you thought about big business if you were one of those adorable ingenues who thought big business paid its fair share, when in fact across the world the poor give a far greater percentage of their money away than the rich.

Taxes are still for the little people, I’m afraid, as is paying for the financial crisis that was definitely caused by their reliance on a few quid of benefits, while the masters of the universe remain very masterful indeed, for all the relaxed dress code. But do let’s hope they’re not using apples or pebbles or something to teach this lesson in the Silicon Valley Waldorf school. Innocence is so precious – in fact, even at conservative estimates, it’s worth billions a year.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/gA9IHWAaotk/dont-be-fooled-by-googles-babyfacery

Call it the smell test. When Google justifies paying minimal taxes in the UK because “no money changes hands” here, while admitting that up to 70% of its relevant ad revenues are handled by UK staff, then all may be legal – but something still doesn’t smell right. When Amazon negotiates the deals in its Slough office, but gets the paperwork done in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg, the whiff really is pretty overpowering. When a high court judge allows as legal a “sweetheart” deal struck by Revenue and Customs with Goldman Sachs to let the bank off £20m in payments, but also slams the settlement as “not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue”, then something really stinks.

These three incidences of the bilking of the public purse are from just the last couple of days. In each case, the full gory details only came into the public domain because of committed (in some cases bloody minded) individuals and organisations. Google had to face the wrath of Margaret Hodge after former employees pointed out that the internet giant’s previous testimony had been misleading. The extent of Amazon’s business dealings in the UK, a country in which it claims not to be what tax lawyers call a “permanent establishment”, have emerged through a Guardian investigation this week. And we only know that HMRC waived a £20m bill for Goldman Sachs so as to avoid “potential embarrassment” to George Osborne because of a legal challenge by the pressure group UK Uncut. Without backbench MPs and whistleblowers, journalists and activists, all of these details would have been obscured from the public gaze. And that really doesn’t smell right.

What has been on display again this week is the brokenness of our system of taxing businesses. True, that is a big conclusion – yet hardly anyone disputes it: not campaigners and academics nor tax accountants, nor even government ministers. George Osborne summed up the problem admirably in his March budget speech: “We want the global rules governing the taxation of multinational firms to be updated from the 1920s when they were first written, and made relevant to the global internet economy of the 21st century.”

Under the current system, a modest bookshop on a local highstreet faces proportionately greater exposure to Revenue and Customs than does a multibillion dollar internet retailer such as Amazon. With clever accountants and suitably aggressive lawyers, corporation tax can become as voluntary as a collection plate passed around at the end of a service. According to Alex Cobham at Washington’s Centre for Global Development, Bermuda and other tiny secrecy jurisdictions make up less than 1% of world GDP but somehow account for 14% of US companies’ profits. The consequent shortfall in tax is obviously bad for crisis-hit western countries slashing their welfare bills and public services; but it is absolutely lethal for developing countries without the tax-collection infrastructure or political clout to strike even a bad bargain with powerful multinationals. Imagine a Zambian equivalent of Margaret Hodge; now ask yourself whether Google would bother flying one of its top executives over to Lusaka for a parliamentary pelting.

Whether it’s Jimmy Carr or Starbucks, public anger over tax avoidance must be most evident in the UK. No wonder David Cameron has made a new deal on tax a key objective of this summer’s G8 summit. The economist Paul Collier, who is advising the government, has suggested multinationals report the scale of their economic activity in each state. Such transparency would be cheap and easy for the likes of Google to provide (isn’t providing information its business?); but even that has been resisted by big business. Yet it would be a modest first step; as would Revenue and Customs disclosing all of its sweetheart deals. Openness might be a small victory, but it could open the way to much bigger ones.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/lJNe6L534bw/mutinationals-tax-bad-smell-editorial

Three damselflies rose as one from the pond on their maiden flights, wings flickering, twirling and glistening with amber transparency. They did not make it beyond the garden fence. Their second birth into a world of wind and air announced, they veered off to land. One dropped on to a fading cowslip, the flower head giving not so much as a nod to its weightless burden. The other two fluttered into bushes, folded their wings over their backs and were hidden again.

It felt like the marker of a new season – not the coming of spring but a bridge into summer by an insect whose adult knows nothing of the colder months. I poked my head into the winter jasmine and peered at a creature that was a large red damselfly in name only. The jointed segments of its abdomen were still some hours away from the flush of being suffused with blood. They resembled part-bleached knuckle bones of a human skeleton. Between the damselfly’s enormous, near-hemispherical eyes was a pin-sized head. What could the tiny brain within comprehend of its host’s transformed shape, way of hunting, eating, moving, even breathing in this other world? The damselfly raised one leg as if contemplating “the new me”, then lowered it again.

I crouched down at the pond. A whole platoon of nymphs had shinned part-way up spearwort stems, where their feet gripped on still in a final embrace. Their heads looked up to the sky and their abdomens were tipped with leaf-like paddles. But these were empty husks that showed their exit wounds – gaping splits in their thoraxes and a stringy mass of redundant breathing tubes on their backs. Further up one stem was an adult that had crawled from the wreckage of its former self, and was sitting there waiting to dry then fly. It had a tube looped over its thorax. This was an odd detail that I had never seen before, perhaps an umbilical cord of sorts, about to drop off. And here was a hiatus: a moment of stillness before its brief life on the wing would begin.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/89Gqyt4w-Ik/sandy-befordshire-moment-stillness-damselfly-begin