The Sri Lankan military and rebels traded blame today for an artillery attack that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians, with the army accusing the encircled Tamil Tigers of launching the assault to pressure authorities for a truce and the guerrillas saying the deaths were further evidence of government atrocities.
The attack took place late Saturday and early today when artillery shells were reportedly lobbed into a densely packed area of northern Sri Lanka, resulting in at least 378 civilian deaths, according to the rebels.
Foreign governments and U.N. agencies have repeatedly asked the government to halt the hostilities so that noncombatants can reach safety. But the army argues that any halt would allow the rebels, known formally as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, to escape or regroup.
"The LTTE fired mortars indiscriminately into this place," army spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said today. "They fire indiscriminately at civilians because it's the only weapon left them. And they may be forcing doctors to give these kinds of statements."
TamilNet.com, a pro-Tamil website, in turn accused the government forces of carrying out the artillery barrage, which it said killed at least 378 people and wounded 814, quoting unidentified medical sources.
"More than 2,000 innocent civilians have been killed in the last 24 hours," it said, quoting Selvarajah Pathmanathan, the Tigers' foreign relations intermediary and longtime weapons smuggler wanted by Interpol. This, it said, amounts to "state terrorism and a war crime."
Bitter accusations, propaganda and a lack of credible information have been longstanding features of this conflict.
The army has severely restricted access into the area by media or humanitarian groups -- both of which it has at times accused of being Tamil Tiger sympathizers -- citing safety concerns.
The Tigers, accused of numerous human rights violations, have rarely allowed media access to areas they've controlled. The U.S. and European Union have labeled them terrorists, while the U.N. has accused it of using civilians as human shields.
Today, the government deported three journalists from Britain's Channel 4 on charges their stories were "tarnishing the image of the country."
Channel 4 broadcast a report last week quoting what it said were Tamil aid workers inside one of the humanitarian camps for war-displaced people saying they were underfed, mistreated and that some women were sexually abused.
The government called the report Tiger propaganda, adding that the camps were considered largely up to international standards by U.N. and foreign officials.
The civil war has raged since 1983. The Tigers seek an independent homeland for ethnic Tamils marginalized in Sinhalese-majority Sri Lanka.
After years of relative stalemate, the army recently made dramatic advances and now has the Tigers trapped in a 2-square-mile area on the island's northern coast surrounded by 50,000 troops.
As the military end-game nears, a man who worked closely with Tamil Tigers' leader Velupillai Prabhakaran said the Tiger guerrilla will never surrender and will soon be "eliminated."
Col. Karuna, whose real name is Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, joined the Tigers when he was 19. He led forces in eastern Sri Lanka until 2004 when he defected to the government side, paving the way for the latest military advances.
"The LTTE is nearly finished," Karuna said during an interview at his heavily fortified headquarters in Colombo, the capital, where visitors are frisked. "I am No. 1 on the LTTE's hit list," he said. "Prabhakaran hates me."
Once Prabhakaran is killed or dies -- the Tigers carry cyanide capsules with them in case they are captured, he said -- the rebels won't appoint another leader, he predicted. "There are no new leaders waiting in the LTTE," Karuna said. "They are finished."
Thileepan Parthipan, a spokesman for the LTTE, who spoke by telephone from what he said was a bunker, agreed that Prabhakaran would never give himself up alive.
"He's fighting for his people and is still with us," he said. Reports that the guerrilla leader had fled the conflict zone were army disinformation, he said, adding that people in the area were starving and the international community needed to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster.
Parthipan denied the Tigers were using civilians as human shields. "You should realize, these are our own mothers, brothers, wives," he said. "It's the army that is using our people as human shields."
In the interview, meanwhile, Karuna sought to paint Prabhakaran as a leader who kept himself out of danger while demanding great sacrifices from his cadres, and someone who failed to read the political situation correctly.
"Prabhakaran made many mistakes" by not seriously pursuing peace negotiations, the burly, mustached former fighter said. "I spent 22 years with him and he never came to the battlefield."
Karuna, appointed the new minister for national integration and reconciliation in March, said it is unsafe for him to travel around the country.
Some analysts and regional diplomats fear Sri Lanka could win the war but lose the peace if its postwar policies prove prejudicial to the marginalized Tamil community, thereby providing fertile ground for a new LTTE-like group.
Karuna, himself accused of appalling acts of barbarism both as a Tiger fighter and a government supporter, said Prabhakaran must die, not because he holds any remaining sway over the Tamil populace but as punishment for the things he has done.
"He's a very horrible man," Karuna said. "He has to be eliminated
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Wo
YELLING, scheming and sabotaging: all are tell-tale signs that a bully is at work, laying traps for employees at every pass.
During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.
It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.
In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?
Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called “the pink elephant” in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?
Women don’t like to talk about it because it is “so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women,” Ms. Klaus said. “We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters.”
Ask women about run-ins with other women at work and some will point out that people of both sexes can misbehave. Others will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women — more so than men — have mistreated them.
“I’ve been sabotaged so many times in the workplace by other women, I finally left the corporate world and started my own business,” said Roxy Westphal, who runs the promotional products company Roxy Ventures Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. She still recalls the sting of an interview she had with a woman 30 years ago that “turned into a one-person firing squad” and led her to leave the building in tears.
Jean Kondek, who recently retired after a 30-year career in advertising, recalled her anger when an administrator in a small agency called a meeting to dress her down in front of co-workers for not following agency procedure in a client emergency.
But Ms. Kondek said she had the last word. “I said, ‘Would everyone please leave?’ ” She added, “and then I told her, ‘This is not how you handle that.’ ”
Many women who are still in the work force were hesitant to speak out publicly for fear of making matters worse or of jeopardizing their careers. A private accountant in California said she recently joined a company and was immediately frozen out by two women working there. One even pushed her in the cafeteria during an argument, the accountant said. “It’s as if we’re back in high school,” she said.
A senior executive said she had “finally broken the glass ceiling” only to have another woman gun for her job by telling management, “I can’t work for her, she’s passive-aggressive.”
The strategy worked: The executive said she soon lost the job to her accuser.
ONE reason women choose other women as targets “is probably some idea that they can find a less confrontative person or someone less likely to respond to aggression with aggression,” said Gary Namie, research director for the Workplace Bullying Institute, which ordered the study in 2007.
But another dynamic may be at work. After five decades of striving for equality, women make up more than 50 percent of management, professional and related occupations, says Catalyst, the nonprofit research group. And yet, its 2008 census found, only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.
Leadership specialists wonder, are women being “overly aggressive” because there are too few opportunities for advancement? Or is it stereotyping and women are only perceived as being overly aggressive? Is there a double standard at work?
Research on gender stereotyping from Catalyst suggests that no matter how women choose to lead, they are perceived as “never just right.” What’s more, the group found, women must work twice as hard as men to achieve the same level of recognition and prove they can lead.
If women business leaders act consistent with gender stereotypes, they are considered too soft,” the group found in a 2007 study. “If they go against gender stereotypes, they are considered too tough.”“Women are trying to figure out the magical keys to the kingdom,” said Laura Steck, president of the Growth and Leadership Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an executive leadership coach.
Women feel they have to be aggressive to be promoted, she said, and then they keep it up. Then, suddenly, they see the need to be collegial and collaborative instead of competitive.
Cleo Lepori-Costello, a vice president at a Silicon Valley software company, came to the center for training. She got off to a bumpy start when she stormed into her new role “like a bull in a china shop,” Ms. Steck said.
In gathering feedback about Ms. Lepori-Costello, Ms. Steck heard comments like: “Cleo is good at getting things done but may have come on too strong in the beginning. She didn’t read the different cultural unspoken rules like she could have.”
So Ms. Steck and Kent Kaufman, another coach at the center, began a one-year, once-a-week individual coaching program. It included role-playing and monthly group discussions with other female executives who acknowledged that they also had major blind spots about being politic at work. (The group was once nicknamed the Bully Broads.)
When she came to the center, Ms. Lepori-Costello said, she thought her colleagues were not initially open to her ideas. Through coaching and conflict role-playing, she came to realize that her behavior was perhaps “too much overkill” and that she was not always attending to all the people around her.
Joel H. Neuman, a researcher at the State University of New York at New Paltz, says most aggressive behavior at work is influenced by a number of factors associated with the bullies, victims and the situations in which they work. “This would include issues related to frustration, personality traits, perceptions of unfair treatment, and an assortment of stresses and strains associated with today’s leaner and ‘meaner’ work settings,” he said.
Mr. Neuman and his colleague Loraleigh Keashly of Wayne State University have developed a questionnaire to identify the full range of behaviors that can constitute bullying, which could help companies uncover problems that largely go unreported.
Bullying involves verbal or psychological forms of aggressive (hostile) behavior that persists for six months or longer. Their 29 questions include: Over the last 12 months, have you regularly: been glared at in a hostile manner, been given the silent treatment, been treated in a rude or disrespectful manner, or had others fail to deny false rumors about you?
The Workplace Bullying Institute says that 37 percent of workers have been bullied. Yet many employers ignore the problem, which hits the bottom line in turnover, health care and productivity costs, the institute says. Litigation is rare, the institute says, because there is no directly applicable law to cite and the costs are high.
Two Canadian researchers recently set out to examine the bullying that pits women against women. They found that some women may sabotage one another because they feel that helping their female co-workers could jeopardize their own careers.
One of the researchers, Grace Lau, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo, said the goal was to encourage women to help one another. She said: “How? One way we predicted would be to remind women that they are members of the same group.”
“We believe that a sense of pride in women’s accomplishments is important in getting women to help one another,” Ms. Lau said. “To have this sense of pride, women need to be aware of their shared identity as women.”
In the workplace, however, it is unlikely that women will constantly think of themselves as members of one group, she said. They will more likely see themselves as individuals, as they are judged by their performance.
“As a result, women may not feel a need to help one another,” she said. “They may even feel that in order to get ahead, they need to bully their co-workers by withholding information like promotion opportunities, and that women are easier to bully than men because women are supposedly less tough than men.”
WHAT better place to be a bully than in a prison? Even so, that is exactly where Televerde, a company in Phoenix that specializes in generating sales leads and market insight for high-tech companies, set up shop. About 13 years ago, the company created four call centers in the Arizona state prison in Perryville, employing 250 inmates (out of 3,000).
Through immersion training, mentoring and working with real-world clients, these women can overcome their difficult circumstances, said Donna Kent, senior vice president at Televerde. “Often, they will win over bullies and we see the whole thing transform. That’s what gives us inspiration and our clients inspiration.”
TODAY, about half of Televerde’s corporate office is made up of “graduates” from Perryville, including Michelle Cirocco, the director of sales operations. She has seen how women treat one another in other settings and she thinks the root cause is that women are taught to fight with one another for attention at an early age.
“We’re competing with our sisters for dad’s attention, or for our brother’s attention,” Ms. Cirocco said. “And then we go on in school and we’re competing for our teachers’ attention. We’re competing to be on the sports team or the cheer squad.”
To be sure, the Televerde experience is not for every inmate, and those who are in it still must work hard to maintain a highly competitive position.
“As we get into the corporate world,” Ms. Cirocco added, “we’re taught or we’re led to believe that we don’t get ahead because of men. But, we really don’t get ahead because of ourselves. Instead of building each other up and showcasing each other, we’re constantly tearing each other down.”
Televerde reversed that attitude in Perryville, Ms. Cirocco said, by encouraging women to work for a common cause, much like the environment envisioned by the Canadian researchers.
“It becomes a very nurturing environment,” Ms. Cirocco said. “You have all these women who become your friends, and you are personally invested in their success. Everyone wants everyone to get out, to go on to have a good healthy life.”
If the level of support found at Televerde were found elsewhere, Ms. Klaus said, it would solve a lot of problems.
“The time has come,” she said, “for us to really deal with this relationship that women have to women, because it truly is preventing us from being as successful in the workplace as we want to be and should be.
“We’ve got enough obstacles; we don’t need to pile on any more.”
During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.
It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.
In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?
Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called “the pink elephant” in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?
Women don’t like to talk about it because it is “so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women,” Ms. Klaus said. “We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters.”
Ask women about run-ins with other women at work and some will point out that people of both sexes can misbehave. Others will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women — more so than men — have mistreated them.
“I’ve been sabotaged so many times in the workplace by other women, I finally left the corporate world and started my own business,” said Roxy Westphal, who runs the promotional products company Roxy Ventures Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. She still recalls the sting of an interview she had with a woman 30 years ago that “turned into a one-person firing squad” and led her to leave the building in tears.
Jean Kondek, who recently retired after a 30-year career in advertising, recalled her anger when an administrator in a small agency called a meeting to dress her down in front of co-workers for not following agency procedure in a client emergency.
But Ms. Kondek said she had the last word. “I said, ‘Would everyone please leave?’ ” She added, “and then I told her, ‘This is not how you handle that.’ ”
Many women who are still in the work force were hesitant to speak out publicly for fear of making matters worse or of jeopardizing their careers. A private accountant in California said she recently joined a company and was immediately frozen out by two women working there. One even pushed her in the cafeteria during an argument, the accountant said. “It’s as if we’re back in high school,” she said.
A senior executive said she had “finally broken the glass ceiling” only to have another woman gun for her job by telling management, “I can’t work for her, she’s passive-aggressive.”
The strategy worked: The executive said she soon lost the job to her accuser.
ONE reason women choose other women as targets “is probably some idea that they can find a less confrontative person or someone less likely to respond to aggression with aggression,” said Gary Namie, research director for the Workplace Bullying Institute, which ordered the study in 2007.
But another dynamic may be at work. After five decades of striving for equality, women make up more than 50 percent of management, professional and related occupations, says Catalyst, the nonprofit research group. And yet, its 2008 census found, only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.
Leadership specialists wonder, are women being “overly aggressive” because there are too few opportunities for advancement? Or is it stereotyping and women are only perceived as being overly aggressive? Is there a double standard at work?
Research on gender stereotyping from Catalyst suggests that no matter how women choose to lead, they are perceived as “never just right.” What’s more, the group found, women must work twice as hard as men to achieve the same level of recognition and prove they can lead.
If women business leaders act consistent with gender stereotypes, they are considered too soft,” the group found in a 2007 study. “If they go against gender stereotypes, they are considered too tough.”“Women are trying to figure out the magical keys to the kingdom,” said Laura Steck, president of the Growth and Leadership Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an executive leadership coach.
Women feel they have to be aggressive to be promoted, she said, and then they keep it up. Then, suddenly, they see the need to be collegial and collaborative instead of competitive.
Cleo Lepori-Costello, a vice president at a Silicon Valley software company, came to the center for training. She got off to a bumpy start when she stormed into her new role “like a bull in a china shop,” Ms. Steck said.
In gathering feedback about Ms. Lepori-Costello, Ms. Steck heard comments like: “Cleo is good at getting things done but may have come on too strong in the beginning. She didn’t read the different cultural unspoken rules like she could have.”
So Ms. Steck and Kent Kaufman, another coach at the center, began a one-year, once-a-week individual coaching program. It included role-playing and monthly group discussions with other female executives who acknowledged that they also had major blind spots about being politic at work. (The group was once nicknamed the Bully Broads.)
When she came to the center, Ms. Lepori-Costello said, she thought her colleagues were not initially open to her ideas. Through coaching and conflict role-playing, she came to realize that her behavior was perhaps “too much overkill” and that she was not always attending to all the people around her.
Joel H. Neuman, a researcher at the State University of New York at New Paltz, says most aggressive behavior at work is influenced by a number of factors associated with the bullies, victims and the situations in which they work. “This would include issues related to frustration, personality traits, perceptions of unfair treatment, and an assortment of stresses and strains associated with today’s leaner and ‘meaner’ work settings,” he said.
Mr. Neuman and his colleague Loraleigh Keashly of Wayne State University have developed a questionnaire to identify the full range of behaviors that can constitute bullying, which could help companies uncover problems that largely go unreported.
Bullying involves verbal or psychological forms of aggressive (hostile) behavior that persists for six months or longer. Their 29 questions include: Over the last 12 months, have you regularly: been glared at in a hostile manner, been given the silent treatment, been treated in a rude or disrespectful manner, or had others fail to deny false rumors about you?
The Workplace Bullying Institute says that 37 percent of workers have been bullied. Yet many employers ignore the problem, which hits the bottom line in turnover, health care and productivity costs, the institute says. Litigation is rare, the institute says, because there is no directly applicable law to cite and the costs are high.
Two Canadian researchers recently set out to examine the bullying that pits women against women. They found that some women may sabotage one another because they feel that helping their female co-workers could jeopardize their own careers.
One of the researchers, Grace Lau, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo, said the goal was to encourage women to help one another. She said: “How? One way we predicted would be to remind women that they are members of the same group.”
“We believe that a sense of pride in women’s accomplishments is important in getting women to help one another,” Ms. Lau said. “To have this sense of pride, women need to be aware of their shared identity as women.”
In the workplace, however, it is unlikely that women will constantly think of themselves as members of one group, she said. They will more likely see themselves as individuals, as they are judged by their performance.
“As a result, women may not feel a need to help one another,” she said. “They may even feel that in order to get ahead, they need to bully their co-workers by withholding information like promotion opportunities, and that women are easier to bully than men because women are supposedly less tough than men.”
WHAT better place to be a bully than in a prison? Even so, that is exactly where Televerde, a company in Phoenix that specializes in generating sales leads and market insight for high-tech companies, set up shop. About 13 years ago, the company created four call centers in the Arizona state prison in Perryville, employing 250 inmates (out of 3,000).
Through immersion training, mentoring and working with real-world clients, these women can overcome their difficult circumstances, said Donna Kent, senior vice president at Televerde. “Often, they will win over bullies and we see the whole thing transform. That’s what gives us inspiration and our clients inspiration.”
TODAY, about half of Televerde’s corporate office is made up of “graduates” from Perryville, including Michelle Cirocco, the director of sales operations. She has seen how women treat one another in other settings and she thinks the root cause is that women are taught to fight with one another for attention at an early age.
“We’re competing with our sisters for dad’s attention, or for our brother’s attention,” Ms. Cirocco said. “And then we go on in school and we’re competing for our teachers’ attention. We’re competing to be on the sports team or the cheer squad.”
To be sure, the Televerde experience is not for every inmate, and those who are in it still must work hard to maintain a highly competitive position.
“As we get into the corporate world,” Ms. Cirocco added, “we’re taught or we’re led to believe that we don’t get ahead because of men. But, we really don’t get ahead because of ourselves. Instead of building each other up and showcasing each other, we’re constantly tearing each other down.”
Televerde reversed that attitude in Perryville, Ms. Cirocco said, by encouraging women to work for a common cause, much like the environment envisioned by the Canadian researchers.
“It becomes a very nurturing environment,” Ms. Cirocco said. “You have all these women who become your friends, and you are personally invested in their success. Everyone wants everyone to get out, to go on to have a good healthy life.”
If the level of support found at Televerde were found elsewhere, Ms. Klaus said, it would solve a lot of problems.
“The time has come,” she said, “for us to really deal with this relationship that women have to women, because it truly is preventing us from being as successful in the workplace as we want to be and should be.
“We’ve got enough obstacles; we don’t need to pile on any more.”
China Emerges as a Leader in Cleaner Coal Technology
China’s frenetic construction of coal-fired power plants has raised worries around the world about the effect on climate change. China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, making it the world’s largest emitter of gases that are warming the planet.
But largely missing in the hand-wringing is this: China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of so-called clean coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.
While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building them at a rate of one a month.
Construction has stalled in the United States on a new generation of low-pollution power plants that turn coal into a gas before burning it, although Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Thursday that the Obama administration might revive one power plant of this type. But China has already approved equipment purchases for just such a power plant to be assembled soon in a muddy field here in Tianjin.
“The steps they’ve taken are probably as fast and as serious as anywhere in power-generation history,” said Hal Harvey, president of ClimateWorks, a group in San Francisco that helps finance projects to limit global warming.
Western countries continue to rely heavily on coal-fired power plants built decades ago with outdated, inefficient technology that burn a lot of coal and emit considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.
Cao Peixi, the president of the China Huaneng Group, the country’s biggest state-owned electric utility and the majority partner in the joint venture building the Tianjin plant, said that his company was committed to the project even though it would cost more than conventional plants.
“We shouldn’t look at this project from a purely financial perspective,” he said. “It represents the future.”
Without doubt, China’s coal-fired power sector still has many problems, and global warming gases from the country are expected to continue rising under any plausible scenario. China’s aim is to use the newest technologies to limit the rate of increase.
Only half the country’s coal-fired power plants have the emissions control equipment to remove sulfur compounds that cause acid rain, and even power plants with that technology do not always use it. China has not begun regulating some of the emissions that lead to heavy smog in big cities.
Even among China’s newly built power plants, not all are modern. About 60 percent of the plants are being built using newer technology that is more expensive but highly efficient. That leaves 40 percent of the new plants using less optimal technology.
With greater efficiency, a power plant burns less coal and emits less carbon dioxide for each unit of electricity it generates. Experts say the least efficient plants in China today convert 27 to 36 percent of the energy in coal into electricity. The most efficient plants achieve an efficiency as high as 44 percent, meaning they can cut global warming emissions by more than a third compared with the weakest plants.
In the United States, the most efficient plants achieve around 40 percent efficiency because they do not use the highest steam temperatures being adopted in China.
The average efficiency of American coal-fired plants is still higher than the average efficiency of Chinese power plants because China built so many inefficient plants over the past decade. But China is now rapidly closing the gap by using some of the world’s most advanced designs.
After relying until recently on older technology, “China has since become the major world market for advanced coal-fired power plants with high-specification emission control systems,” the International Energy Agency said in a report on April 20.
China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth. The agency is now reviewing further its projections for Chinese emissions.
“It’s definitely changing the baseline, and that’s being taken into account,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China specialist at the energy agency.
But by continuing to rely heavily on coal, which supplies 80 percent of its electricity, China ensures that it will keep emitting a lot of carbon dioxide; even an efficient coal-fired power plant emits twice the carbon dioxide of a natural gas-fired plant.
Perhaps the biggest question now is how much further China can go beyond the recent steps. In particular, how fast will it move toward power plants that capture their emissions and store them underground or under the seafloor?
That technology could, in theory, create power plants that contribute virtually nothing to global warming. Many countries hope to develop such plants, though progress has been halting; Dr. Chu, the energy secretary, has promised steps to speed up the technology, called carbon sequestration, in the United States.
China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions to provide carbonation for beverages, and the government has a short list of possible locations for a large experiment to capture and store carbon dioxide. But so far, it has no plans to make this a national policy.
China is making other efforts to reduce its global warming emissions. It has doubled its total wind energy capacity in each of the past four years, and is poised to pass the United States as soon as this year as the world’s largest market for wind power equipment. China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.
But coal remains the cheapest energy source in China by a wide margin. China has the world’s third-largest coal reserves, after the United States and Russia.
“No matter how much renewable or nuclear is in the mix, coal will remain the dominant power source,” said Ashok Bhargava, a China energy expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila.
Another problem is that China has finally developed the ability to build high-technology power plants only at the end of a national binge of building lower-tech coal-fired plants. Construction is now slowing because of the economic slump.
By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, China has cut its cost dramatically through the economies of scale from building many identical power plants at the same time.
It now costs as much as a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States.
But largely missing in the hand-wringing is this: China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of so-called clean coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.
While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building them at a rate of one a month.
Construction has stalled in the United States on a new generation of low-pollution power plants that turn coal into a gas before burning it, although Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Thursday that the Obama administration might revive one power plant of this type. But China has already approved equipment purchases for just such a power plant to be assembled soon in a muddy field here in Tianjin.
“The steps they’ve taken are probably as fast and as serious as anywhere in power-generation history,” said Hal Harvey, president of ClimateWorks, a group in San Francisco that helps finance projects to limit global warming.
Western countries continue to rely heavily on coal-fired power plants built decades ago with outdated, inefficient technology that burn a lot of coal and emit considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.
Cao Peixi, the president of the China Huaneng Group, the country’s biggest state-owned electric utility and the majority partner in the joint venture building the Tianjin plant, said that his company was committed to the project even though it would cost more than conventional plants.
“We shouldn’t look at this project from a purely financial perspective,” he said. “It represents the future.”
Without doubt, China’s coal-fired power sector still has many problems, and global warming gases from the country are expected to continue rising under any plausible scenario. China’s aim is to use the newest technologies to limit the rate of increase.
Only half the country’s coal-fired power plants have the emissions control equipment to remove sulfur compounds that cause acid rain, and even power plants with that technology do not always use it. China has not begun regulating some of the emissions that lead to heavy smog in big cities.
Even among China’s newly built power plants, not all are modern. About 60 percent of the plants are being built using newer technology that is more expensive but highly efficient. That leaves 40 percent of the new plants using less optimal technology.
With greater efficiency, a power plant burns less coal and emits less carbon dioxide for each unit of electricity it generates. Experts say the least efficient plants in China today convert 27 to 36 percent of the energy in coal into electricity. The most efficient plants achieve an efficiency as high as 44 percent, meaning they can cut global warming emissions by more than a third compared with the weakest plants.
In the United States, the most efficient plants achieve around 40 percent efficiency because they do not use the highest steam temperatures being adopted in China.
The average efficiency of American coal-fired plants is still higher than the average efficiency of Chinese power plants because China built so many inefficient plants over the past decade. But China is now rapidly closing the gap by using some of the world’s most advanced designs.
After relying until recently on older technology, “China has since become the major world market for advanced coal-fired power plants with high-specification emission control systems,” the International Energy Agency said in a report on April 20.
China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth. The agency is now reviewing further its projections for Chinese emissions.
“It’s definitely changing the baseline, and that’s being taken into account,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China specialist at the energy agency.
But by continuing to rely heavily on coal, which supplies 80 percent of its electricity, China ensures that it will keep emitting a lot of carbon dioxide; even an efficient coal-fired power plant emits twice the carbon dioxide of a natural gas-fired plant.
Perhaps the biggest question now is how much further China can go beyond the recent steps. In particular, how fast will it move toward power plants that capture their emissions and store them underground or under the seafloor?
That technology could, in theory, create power plants that contribute virtually nothing to global warming. Many countries hope to develop such plants, though progress has been halting; Dr. Chu, the energy secretary, has promised steps to speed up the technology, called carbon sequestration, in the United States.
China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions to provide carbonation for beverages, and the government has a short list of possible locations for a large experiment to capture and store carbon dioxide. But so far, it has no plans to make this a national policy.
China is making other efforts to reduce its global warming emissions. It has doubled its total wind energy capacity in each of the past four years, and is poised to pass the United States as soon as this year as the world’s largest market for wind power equipment. China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.
But coal remains the cheapest energy source in China by a wide margin. China has the world’s third-largest coal reserves, after the United States and Russia.
“No matter how much renewable or nuclear is in the mix, coal will remain the dominant power source,” said Ashok Bhargava, a China energy expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila.
Another problem is that China has finally developed the ability to build high-technology power plants only at the end of a national binge of building lower-tech coal-fired plants. Construction is now slowing because of the economic slump.
By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, China has cut its cost dramatically through the economies of scale from building many identical power plants at the same time.
It now costs as much as a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States.
Gates’s Plan to Shift Military Spending Faces Skepticism
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited southern Afghanistan late last week not only to assess the American war effort, but also to showcase the kind of conflict he thinks the military must prepare to fight in the years ahead.
Mr. Gates predicted more of these messy, unconventional wars, and he argued that this kind of conflict requires America to shift spending to items like mine-resistant vehicles, surveillance drones and medical-evacuation helicopters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers.
But as Mr. Gates returned to Washington on Saturday for what will mostly likely be a lengthy, detailed and often hostile series of Congressional budget hearings this week, opponents of his risk assessment are attacking the spending plan as rendering America unprepared for traditional war.
They say the proposal goes too far in shifting money to unconventional warfare from the weapons needed to deter and defeat an enemy nation. And Mr. Gates’s focus on counterinsurgency training, they say, means that troops have not spent enough time honing their skills for conventional conflict.
Mr. Gates has slashed money for the Army’s future combat vehicle because its flat-bottom design made it vulnerable to roadside bombs. Here in Afghanistan, he examined a fleet of angular, heavily armored mine-resistant vehicles sent as part of the multibillion-dollar crash program he ordered to counter the insurgents’ weapon of choice.
Standing beside one armored troop carrier crippled by a huge homemade mine, Mr. Gates spoke with two soldiers who had emerged from the wreck unscathed. Others suffered a broken arm, a knee injury and a concussion.
“These vehicles keep us alive,” said Lt. Col. Michael Jernigan, commander of the Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 3.
Mr. Gates has proposed eliminating money for the new, high-tech presidential helicopter and capping purchases of a top-of-the-line jet-fighter — but here he also met with the crew operating 10 medical-evacuation helicopters ordered from the Nevada desert to be on standby in the deserts of southern Afghanistan. Mr. Gates had been angered by how long it took to move the wounded off a battlefield, so he increased the number of helicopters here, plus three more field hospitals.
Lt. Col. Christopher Barnett is commander of the Air Force medical-evacuation helicopter unit moved to Afghanistan from war games in Nevada, where it played on the enemy team.
“Now it’s about saving lives,” he told Mr. Gates.
And to highlight the defense secretary’s initiative to get faster tactical intelligence to American troops in combat, Mr. Gates toured a secret intelligence fusion center, where a series of oversize screens showed real-time video broadcast from surveillance drones in the skies over insurgent havens of Afghanistan.
“My job is to get you what you need to get the mission done successfully,” Mr. Gates told several hundred Marines who just landed here at Camp Leatherneck as the vanguard of more than 20,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama.
The defense industry, which makes what Mr. Gates wants as well as what he does not, has chosen to mute its complaints on the proposed spending plan. But on Capitol Hill, champions of programs in jeopardy are preparing to do battle during hearings this week.
The proposed spending plan “is taking us down a path that leads to a weaker military that is poorly equipped,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
“Are the forces being provided to our commanders in the field postured to counter the full spectrum of threats both in the near and far term?” he asked during a speech on the Senate floor. “Are we providing our troops the best and most capable equipment available? We are not today.”
Others, like Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, cite the threats posed by nations around the world that remain true adversaries — or at least are competitors to American interests.
In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy center in Washington, Mr. Cornyn said that China was upgrading and expanding its navy to challenge American warships, that Russia was striving to intimidate its neighbors and re-establish a sphere of influence, and that North Korea and Iran continued to expand their missile arsenals while pursuing nuclear weapons.
“Despite so many security threats emerging or growing,” Mr. Cornyn said, “the administration envisions a military that will have less strength to meet them.”
Mr. Gates explained during troop visits in Afghanistan that half of his budget proposal remained committed to conventional warfare, while 40 percent paid for weapons that can be applied to both traditional and unconventional conflicts.
His attempt to rebalance military spending, Mr. Gates said, shifts only 10 percent of the budget to buying in the specialized tools of unconventional and counterinsurgency warfare.
Many of those most directly involved in today’s war say that the Gates budget proposal sets the priorities right, and that the complexities and rigors of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan have created the most capable American military in the nation’s history.
“When you get into what does that mean, to do counterinsurgency, you’ll find that there will be companies on the battlefield that are fighting the combined arms fight using artillery, other weapons systems, maneuver, intelligence and all of that,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of allied forces across southern Afghanistan.
“And they are synchronizing all of these systems and doing all of the things they would have to do in a conventional fight — but they are doing it at a lower level, with more junior officers in charge, than ever before,” he added. “Our squad leaders, platoon leaders, our company commanders are broadening their experience
Mr. Gates predicted more of these messy, unconventional wars, and he argued that this kind of conflict requires America to shift spending to items like mine-resistant vehicles, surveillance drones and medical-evacuation helicopters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers.
But as Mr. Gates returned to Washington on Saturday for what will mostly likely be a lengthy, detailed and often hostile series of Congressional budget hearings this week, opponents of his risk assessment are attacking the spending plan as rendering America unprepared for traditional war.
They say the proposal goes too far in shifting money to unconventional warfare from the weapons needed to deter and defeat an enemy nation. And Mr. Gates’s focus on counterinsurgency training, they say, means that troops have not spent enough time honing their skills for conventional conflict.
Mr. Gates has slashed money for the Army’s future combat vehicle because its flat-bottom design made it vulnerable to roadside bombs. Here in Afghanistan, he examined a fleet of angular, heavily armored mine-resistant vehicles sent as part of the multibillion-dollar crash program he ordered to counter the insurgents’ weapon of choice.
Standing beside one armored troop carrier crippled by a huge homemade mine, Mr. Gates spoke with two soldiers who had emerged from the wreck unscathed. Others suffered a broken arm, a knee injury and a concussion.
“These vehicles keep us alive,” said Lt. Col. Michael Jernigan, commander of the Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 3.
Mr. Gates has proposed eliminating money for the new, high-tech presidential helicopter and capping purchases of a top-of-the-line jet-fighter — but here he also met with the crew operating 10 medical-evacuation helicopters ordered from the Nevada desert to be on standby in the deserts of southern Afghanistan. Mr. Gates had been angered by how long it took to move the wounded off a battlefield, so he increased the number of helicopters here, plus three more field hospitals.
Lt. Col. Christopher Barnett is commander of the Air Force medical-evacuation helicopter unit moved to Afghanistan from war games in Nevada, where it played on the enemy team.
“Now it’s about saving lives,” he told Mr. Gates.
And to highlight the defense secretary’s initiative to get faster tactical intelligence to American troops in combat, Mr. Gates toured a secret intelligence fusion center, where a series of oversize screens showed real-time video broadcast from surveillance drones in the skies over insurgent havens of Afghanistan.
“My job is to get you what you need to get the mission done successfully,” Mr. Gates told several hundred Marines who just landed here at Camp Leatherneck as the vanguard of more than 20,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama.
The defense industry, which makes what Mr. Gates wants as well as what he does not, has chosen to mute its complaints on the proposed spending plan. But on Capitol Hill, champions of programs in jeopardy are preparing to do battle during hearings this week.
The proposed spending plan “is taking us down a path that leads to a weaker military that is poorly equipped,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
“Are the forces being provided to our commanders in the field postured to counter the full spectrum of threats both in the near and far term?” he asked during a speech on the Senate floor. “Are we providing our troops the best and most capable equipment available? We are not today.”
Others, like Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, cite the threats posed by nations around the world that remain true adversaries — or at least are competitors to American interests.
In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy center in Washington, Mr. Cornyn said that China was upgrading and expanding its navy to challenge American warships, that Russia was striving to intimidate its neighbors and re-establish a sphere of influence, and that North Korea and Iran continued to expand their missile arsenals while pursuing nuclear weapons.
“Despite so many security threats emerging or growing,” Mr. Cornyn said, “the administration envisions a military that will have less strength to meet them.”
Mr. Gates explained during troop visits in Afghanistan that half of his budget proposal remained committed to conventional warfare, while 40 percent paid for weapons that can be applied to both traditional and unconventional conflicts.
His attempt to rebalance military spending, Mr. Gates said, shifts only 10 percent of the budget to buying in the specialized tools of unconventional and counterinsurgency warfare.
Many of those most directly involved in today’s war say that the Gates budget proposal sets the priorities right, and that the complexities and rigors of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan have created the most capable American military in the nation’s history.
“When you get into what does that mean, to do counterinsurgency, you’ll find that there will be companies on the battlefield that are fighting the combined arms fight using artillery, other weapons systems, maneuver, intelligence and all of that,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of allied forces across southern Afghanistan.
“And they are synchronizing all of these systems and doing all of the things they would have to do in a conventional fight — but they are doing it at a lower level, with more junior officers in charge, than ever before,” he added. “Our squad leaders, platoon leaders, our company commanders are broadening their experience
Child traffickers find it easy to operate in UK, say MPs
Child traffickers are targeting the UK because of the ease with which they can move victims through British ports and local authority care homes, the chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into human trafficking has warned.
Keith Vaz, head of the home affairs select committee, said he and colleagues were "very concerned" about low levels of funding for law enforcement agencies to fight trafficking, and he called on the government to hold an urgent review of the number of foreign children missing from local authority care.
Cautious estimates suggest five suspected victims of child trafficking go missing from care around ports and airports in the UK every week.
"Because we are failing to track down the victims of trafficking we are encouraging more to be sent," said Vaz, before the publication on Thursday of the committee's year-long inquiry into trafficking. "There is a duty of care to make sure young people are tracked down and safe, and to tackle the problem with the origin countries which we are not doing successfully."
Vaz also said there was "a growing connection" between local authority care facilities and trafficking, exemplified he said by the case exposed in the Guardian last week of 77 Chinese children missing from a single care home next to Heathrow airport since March 2006, only four of whom have been found. Two girls had been exploited as prostitutes in the Midlands, and others were suspected of having been forced to work in the drug trade and illegal labour.
The committee's report is likely to increase pressure on ministers to reform the national approach to tackling child trafficking, which Gordon Brown has described as "a truly appalling crime that deserves our urgent attention".
Downing Street said Brown had asked the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the children's secretary, Ed Balls, for an urgent update on the issue at the Heathrow home. He has told them to report back within six weeks. "It's not just the home near Heathrow airport, although that is the most obvious case," said Vaz. "The worry is that it is much more widespread.
"The best way to tackle this is for the government to ask local authorities how many children have gone missing. I'll be asking the secretary of state for communities and local government to list the authorities and the children."
Police sources believe the exploitation by traffickers of local authority care homes as collection points for victims has spread to areas around other airports, including Manchester and Stansted, in Essex.
The committee is expected to include a call for more police funding to find trafficked children and prosecute their traffickers. During evidence, senior officers from the Metropolitan police said a specialist anti-child trafficking operation faced having its budget halved to £400,000; a strategic threat assessment by the Home Office's child exploitation and online protection centre revealed that no trafficker in the exploitation of Chinese children has been successfully prosecuted; the same report called trafficking of Chinese children into the UK as "a significant and urgent issue".
"More effort is needed to reduce the attractiveness of the UK as a destination country, and more work is needed to safeguard those children who do make it to the UK and are exploited," said Vaz.
"We need a consistent approach across all local authority areas and police areas. There is a lack of co-ordination between all the agencies. It is something we heard in open evidence."
Immigration minister Phil Woolas said child trafficking was "a very difficult issue, as children can be coerced or misled".
"We're having real success targeting the routes used by the criminals who prey on these vulnerable youngsters – a joint operation has seen 12 traffickers arrested in the past 12 months alone," he said.
"We work with local authorities to ensure the best care for vulnerable children identified by UK Border Agency officers at ports. We have a welfare code of practice [for the agency] on keeping children safe from harm, and our latest bill will make the code law."
Keith Vaz, head of the home affairs select committee, said he and colleagues were "very concerned" about low levels of funding for law enforcement agencies to fight trafficking, and he called on the government to hold an urgent review of the number of foreign children missing from local authority care.
Cautious estimates suggest five suspected victims of child trafficking go missing from care around ports and airports in the UK every week.
"Because we are failing to track down the victims of trafficking we are encouraging more to be sent," said Vaz, before the publication on Thursday of the committee's year-long inquiry into trafficking. "There is a duty of care to make sure young people are tracked down and safe, and to tackle the problem with the origin countries which we are not doing successfully."
Vaz also said there was "a growing connection" between local authority care facilities and trafficking, exemplified he said by the case exposed in the Guardian last week of 77 Chinese children missing from a single care home next to Heathrow airport since March 2006, only four of whom have been found. Two girls had been exploited as prostitutes in the Midlands, and others were suspected of having been forced to work in the drug trade and illegal labour.
The committee's report is likely to increase pressure on ministers to reform the national approach to tackling child trafficking, which Gordon Brown has described as "a truly appalling crime that deserves our urgent attention".
Downing Street said Brown had asked the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the children's secretary, Ed Balls, for an urgent update on the issue at the Heathrow home. He has told them to report back within six weeks. "It's not just the home near Heathrow airport, although that is the most obvious case," said Vaz. "The worry is that it is much more widespread.
"The best way to tackle this is for the government to ask local authorities how many children have gone missing. I'll be asking the secretary of state for communities and local government to list the authorities and the children."
Police sources believe the exploitation by traffickers of local authority care homes as collection points for victims has spread to areas around other airports, including Manchester and Stansted, in Essex.
The committee is expected to include a call for more police funding to find trafficked children and prosecute their traffickers. During evidence, senior officers from the Metropolitan police said a specialist anti-child trafficking operation faced having its budget halved to £400,000; a strategic threat assessment by the Home Office's child exploitation and online protection centre revealed that no trafficker in the exploitation of Chinese children has been successfully prosecuted; the same report called trafficking of Chinese children into the UK as "a significant and urgent issue".
"More effort is needed to reduce the attractiveness of the UK as a destination country, and more work is needed to safeguard those children who do make it to the UK and are exploited," said Vaz.
"We need a consistent approach across all local authority areas and police areas. There is a lack of co-ordination between all the agencies. It is something we heard in open evidence."
Immigration minister Phil Woolas said child trafficking was "a very difficult issue, as children can be coerced or misled".
"We're having real success targeting the routes used by the criminals who prey on these vulnerable youngsters – a joint operation has seen 12 traffickers arrested in the past 12 months alone," he said.
"We work with local authorities to ensure the best care for vulnerable children identified by UK Border Agency officers at ports. We have a welfare code of practice [for the agency] on keeping children safe from harm, and our latest bill will make the code law."
Pakistani civilians flee Swat valley as major ground offensive draws closer
The Pakistani army ordered residents to flee the Swat Valley during a lull in fighting , triggering a further exodus of frightened people and raising expectations of a significant ground offensive against the Taliban.
Miles of traffic jams snaked out of the war-torn valley as tens of thousands of people fled using all available means, from donkey-drawn carts to rickshaws.
In the battlezone the army said it had killed another 200 militants, most of them in a strike on a training camp in Shangla district and 55 in Swat. The fight is being closely watched from the US.
General David Petraeus, head of the US central command, ,warned that the Taliban posed a threat "to the very existence of the Pakistani state".
Petraeus said al-Qaida's central leadership had moved to Pakistan but he denied that generous military aid was linked to a possible US deployment. "This is not about us putting combat boots on the ground," he told Fox News.
The exodus out of Swat added to a humanitarian crisis that is rapidly swelling beyond earlier fears. Officials in Mardan, on the lowland plains below Swat, said that 250,000 people had registered for help, more than double the total on Friday.
Including 550,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, officials said they feared as many as 1.3 million people could soon be homeless in North West Frontier province. The aid group World Vision said it had found "intolerable" conditions in some of the six hastily opened camps, pointing to high temperatures and a lack of toilets and electricity.
The army said that between 12,000 and 15,000 security forces – regular army and paramilitary frontier corps – are stationed in Swat, pitted against between 4,000 and 5,000 Taliban guerrillas, the bulk of whom are concentrated in Mingora.
The the militants used the nine-hour pause in fighting to deepen their defences against an expected army ground offensive. In Kanju, a strategically important village beside the river Swat, fighters surrounded a police checkpoint near the army-controlled city airfield.
Further along, fighters sheltered under overhangs and thickets of trees to avoid being detected by helicopter gunships buzzing overhead. They warned residents to leave the area immediately.
Absent was the militants' leader, the charismatic preacher Maulana Fazlullah, who villagers speculated was hiding in the Tharan Valley, 10 miles to the west bordering Upper Dir district. Fazlullah continues, however, to make use of the FM radio broadcasts that helped him rise from obscurity two years ago, employing them to issue coded instructions to battlefield commanders and threats to perceived enemies.
The army launched a full-scale operation on Thursday, following the collapse of a fragile peace deal that saw militants fanning out of their Swat stronghold into neighbouring districts such as Buner and Dir. It was a fight "for the survival of the country", the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said on Saturday. The offensive came as President Asif Ali Zardari visited the United States to reassure a nervous Obama administration that Pakistan was committed to fighting militancy.
The operation has also enjoyed an unusual level of support at home, even from conservative forces previously reluctant to criticise the Taliban.
A conference of religious clerics in Rawalpindi endorsed the military campaign as a "jihad against the enemies of Islam".
Turning points in public opinion included the release of a video showing a Taliban fighter flogging a teenage woman, and a declaration by Sufi Muhammad, a senior pro-Taliban cleric, that democracy was an "infidel" concept.
The provincial government had released the 78-year-old jihadi cleric from prison last year in the hope he would persuade the Taliban to lay down arms.
One of the few voices publicly opposing the campaign is the former cricketer Imran Khan, who leads a small party and has aligned himself with rightwing forces in recent years.
Allegations of Talibanistan in Frontier province were "nonsense", he told the Guardian.
"This whole thing is very sinister," he said, accusing the government of "setting up this idea that Islamabad was being threatened and the Taliban were coming with their way of life and cutting of throats".
Khan's stance has antagonised left-leaning Pakistanis. "He is very foolish," said Talat Masood, a retired general and analyst. "He is just trying to build up his image by criticising a military operation. But he is doing a great disservice to himself."
Miles of traffic jams snaked out of the war-torn valley as tens of thousands of people fled using all available means, from donkey-drawn carts to rickshaws.
In the battlezone the army said it had killed another 200 militants, most of them in a strike on a training camp in Shangla district and 55 in Swat. The fight is being closely watched from the US.
General David Petraeus, head of the US central command, ,warned that the Taliban posed a threat "to the very existence of the Pakistani state".
Petraeus said al-Qaida's central leadership had moved to Pakistan but he denied that generous military aid was linked to a possible US deployment. "This is not about us putting combat boots on the ground," he told Fox News.
The exodus out of Swat added to a humanitarian crisis that is rapidly swelling beyond earlier fears. Officials in Mardan, on the lowland plains below Swat, said that 250,000 people had registered for help, more than double the total on Friday.
Including 550,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, officials said they feared as many as 1.3 million people could soon be homeless in North West Frontier province. The aid group World Vision said it had found "intolerable" conditions in some of the six hastily opened camps, pointing to high temperatures and a lack of toilets and electricity.
The army said that between 12,000 and 15,000 security forces – regular army and paramilitary frontier corps – are stationed in Swat, pitted against between 4,000 and 5,000 Taliban guerrillas, the bulk of whom are concentrated in Mingora.
The the militants used the nine-hour pause in fighting to deepen their defences against an expected army ground offensive. In Kanju, a strategically important village beside the river Swat, fighters surrounded a police checkpoint near the army-controlled city airfield.
Further along, fighters sheltered under overhangs and thickets of trees to avoid being detected by helicopter gunships buzzing overhead. They warned residents to leave the area immediately.
Absent was the militants' leader, the charismatic preacher Maulana Fazlullah, who villagers speculated was hiding in the Tharan Valley, 10 miles to the west bordering Upper Dir district. Fazlullah continues, however, to make use of the FM radio broadcasts that helped him rise from obscurity two years ago, employing them to issue coded instructions to battlefield commanders and threats to perceived enemies.
The army launched a full-scale operation on Thursday, following the collapse of a fragile peace deal that saw militants fanning out of their Swat stronghold into neighbouring districts such as Buner and Dir. It was a fight "for the survival of the country", the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said on Saturday. The offensive came as President Asif Ali Zardari visited the United States to reassure a nervous Obama administration that Pakistan was committed to fighting militancy.
The operation has also enjoyed an unusual level of support at home, even from conservative forces previously reluctant to criticise the Taliban.
A conference of religious clerics in Rawalpindi endorsed the military campaign as a "jihad against the enemies of Islam".
Turning points in public opinion included the release of a video showing a Taliban fighter flogging a teenage woman, and a declaration by Sufi Muhammad, a senior pro-Taliban cleric, that democracy was an "infidel" concept.
The provincial government had released the 78-year-old jihadi cleric from prison last year in the hope he would persuade the Taliban to lay down arms.
One of the few voices publicly opposing the campaign is the former cricketer Imran Khan, who leads a small party and has aligned himself with rightwing forces in recent years.
Allegations of Talibanistan in Frontier province were "nonsense", he told the Guardian.
"This whole thing is very sinister," he said, accusing the government of "setting up this idea that Islamabad was being threatened and the Taliban were coming with their way of life and cutting of throats".
Khan's stance has antagonised left-leaning Pakistanis. "He is very foolish," said Talat Masood, a retired general and analyst. "He is just trying to build up his image by criticising a military operation. But he is doing a great disservice to himself."
Conservative party faces spotlight as expenses crisis engulfs MPs
David Cameron today finds the Conservative party in the firing line over the highly charged issue of MPs' expenses and allowances, as embarrassing details about the claims of a series of shadow cabinet ministers are leaked.
As a former deputy speaker of the Commons warned that a general election may have to be held to resolve the expenses crisis, shadow ministers tonight defended claims which appear to show that Tory MPs have followed Labour in maximising their benefits.
The Daily Telegraph, which has faced criticism for focusing on Labour MPs in the three days since it started publishing leaked details about parliamentary expenses, today shifts its attention to the shadow cabinet. The paper claims that:
• One shadow minister had piping repaired that stretches under the tennis court at his country house. The Tories said the piping happened to pass under the court, but had nothing to do with it.
• A senior member of the shadow cabinet claimed for 25 light bulbs at his west London home.
• A shadow minister used the £24,006 additional costs allowance, used to subsidise MPs' second homes, to upgrade a property just before selling it.
• A Tory frontbencher claimed thousands of pounds for the upkeep of his garden.
Tory sources said last night that the party would be embarrassed by some of the disclosures, but no resignations were expected because the rules had not been broken. "We have a perception problem," one source said.
The focus on the Tories is likely to turn the expenses leaks into a wider crisis for the political classes. Downing Street is angry that the Telegraph has focused on Labour in the first three days of its series.
The wider impact was highlighted by Lord Naseby, a former Commons deputy speaker, who said that the leaks were so damaging that parliament may have to be dissolved. "It's dreadful. It is quite awful," the Tory peer told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend. "I think frankly, if this runs and runs, then parliament should be dissolved, I think they have to start again. The Great British public has lost their confidence and I think that it is extremely serious. And if it is that serious then there is only one way of dealing with it, that is to dissolve parliament."
His remarks came as Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, faced a fight for her political life after apparently making contradictory declarations about a publicly subsidised flat to avoid a £18,000 tax bill. Gordon Brown, who gave Blears a dressing down after she accused the government last week of a "lamentable" failure to communicate, is planning to reshuffle his cabinet after what is expected to be a poor performance by Labour in the European elections next month. Senior Labour figures are now privately saying that Blears's position is vulnerable.
Blears appeared to have avoided paying capital gains tax when she sold a flat in Kennington, south London, in August 2004 for £200,000, making a profit of £45,000. To avoid paying tax of about £18,000 on the profit, she would have had to declare the flat to the Inland Revenue as her main residence. But in April 2004 she designated the Kennington flat as her second home to the Commons authorities. This allowed her to claim mortgage interest payments on it of £850 a month.
Blears insisted yesterday she had done nothing wrong. Standing outside her home in Salford, as she prepared to drive off with her husband on his motorbike, she said: "I have complied with the rules of the house, the rules of the Inland Revenue, and that's the situation as it is. But I understand how strongly the public feel about it and they hate all of this and that means we have got to get it sorted out as quickly as possible."
Her performance, seen in Labour circles as a low in the expenses saga, illustrated a wider problem of how politicians are struggling to defend themselves.
Blears changed the status of her home in 2004 when rules which meant that ministers had to declare their London homes as their main residence were changed. Until then rent and mortgage payments on these properties had to be paid from ministers' own pockets. Had Blears not declared her Kennington flat to the Inland Revenue as her main property she would have paid tax on a flat funded from her own pocket for three years from her appointment as a minister in 2001 until just four months before she sold it. MPs will make clear the need for change when they tomorrow agree to a tougher system to audit their expenses. Sir Stuart Bell, the veteran Labour member of the Commons Commission, said: "In all probability the commission will approve a special specific audit unit, hived off from the fees office, independent of the fees office, which will verify in future every claim that's made by any MP."
Under the new system, officials who approve MPs' claims will be overseen by senior officials who will be formally charged with advising on whether claims are valid. A separate audit office in the Commons will conduct statistical analysis to identify MPs who over-claim. Since 1 April this year the National Audit Office has been auditing MPs after they were placed on the same level as the rest of the public sector.
The internal and external auditing marks a major change. Until now MPs' expenses have only been examined individually, with no overall oversight. By conducting a statistical analysis, the auditors are meant to identify MPs who claim above average amounts.
As a former deputy speaker of the Commons warned that a general election may have to be held to resolve the expenses crisis, shadow ministers tonight defended claims which appear to show that Tory MPs have followed Labour in maximising their benefits.
The Daily Telegraph, which has faced criticism for focusing on Labour MPs in the three days since it started publishing leaked details about parliamentary expenses, today shifts its attention to the shadow cabinet. The paper claims that:
• One shadow minister had piping repaired that stretches under the tennis court at his country house. The Tories said the piping happened to pass under the court, but had nothing to do with it.
• A senior member of the shadow cabinet claimed for 25 light bulbs at his west London home.
• A shadow minister used the £24,006 additional costs allowance, used to subsidise MPs' second homes, to upgrade a property just before selling it.
• A Tory frontbencher claimed thousands of pounds for the upkeep of his garden.
Tory sources said last night that the party would be embarrassed by some of the disclosures, but no resignations were expected because the rules had not been broken. "We have a perception problem," one source said.
The focus on the Tories is likely to turn the expenses leaks into a wider crisis for the political classes. Downing Street is angry that the Telegraph has focused on Labour in the first three days of its series.
The wider impact was highlighted by Lord Naseby, a former Commons deputy speaker, who said that the leaks were so damaging that parliament may have to be dissolved. "It's dreadful. It is quite awful," the Tory peer told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend. "I think frankly, if this runs and runs, then parliament should be dissolved, I think they have to start again. The Great British public has lost their confidence and I think that it is extremely serious. And if it is that serious then there is only one way of dealing with it, that is to dissolve parliament."
His remarks came as Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, faced a fight for her political life after apparently making contradictory declarations about a publicly subsidised flat to avoid a £18,000 tax bill. Gordon Brown, who gave Blears a dressing down after she accused the government last week of a "lamentable" failure to communicate, is planning to reshuffle his cabinet after what is expected to be a poor performance by Labour in the European elections next month. Senior Labour figures are now privately saying that Blears's position is vulnerable.
Blears appeared to have avoided paying capital gains tax when she sold a flat in Kennington, south London, in August 2004 for £200,000, making a profit of £45,000. To avoid paying tax of about £18,000 on the profit, she would have had to declare the flat to the Inland Revenue as her main residence. But in April 2004 she designated the Kennington flat as her second home to the Commons authorities. This allowed her to claim mortgage interest payments on it of £850 a month.
Blears insisted yesterday she had done nothing wrong. Standing outside her home in Salford, as she prepared to drive off with her husband on his motorbike, she said: "I have complied with the rules of the house, the rules of the Inland Revenue, and that's the situation as it is. But I understand how strongly the public feel about it and they hate all of this and that means we have got to get it sorted out as quickly as possible."
Her performance, seen in Labour circles as a low in the expenses saga, illustrated a wider problem of how politicians are struggling to defend themselves.
Blears changed the status of her home in 2004 when rules which meant that ministers had to declare their London homes as their main residence were changed. Until then rent and mortgage payments on these properties had to be paid from ministers' own pockets. Had Blears not declared her Kennington flat to the Inland Revenue as her main property she would have paid tax on a flat funded from her own pocket for three years from her appointment as a minister in 2001 until just four months before she sold it. MPs will make clear the need for change when they tomorrow agree to a tougher system to audit their expenses. Sir Stuart Bell, the veteran Labour member of the Commons Commission, said: "In all probability the commission will approve a special specific audit unit, hived off from the fees office, independent of the fees office, which will verify in future every claim that's made by any MP."
Under the new system, officials who approve MPs' claims will be overseen by senior officials who will be formally charged with advising on whether claims are valid. A separate audit office in the Commons will conduct statistical analysis to identify MPs who over-claim. Since 1 April this year the National Audit Office has been auditing MPs after they were placed on the same level as the rest of the public sector.
The internal and external auditing marks a major change. Until now MPs' expenses have only been examined individually, with no overall oversight. By conducting a statistical analysis, the auditors are meant to identify MPs who claim above average amounts.
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