- Sarah McDermott
- Fri 20 Nov 09, 04:39 PM
Across Cumbria emergency services are continuing evacuations where flood defences have been overwhelmed by record rainfall. Police searching for a colleague missing after a bridge collapsed amid the devastating floods have found the body of a man.
Just two days ago the Queen announced a Flood and Water Management Bill promising new legislation to protect communities from flooding and to improve the management of our water supplies. So how prepared are we and how well protected? Paraic O'Brien has been to the Met Office's Flood Forecasting Centre.
A husband who killed his wife was set free from court in Swansea today. Brian Thomas blamed a rare sleep disorder for his actions. He said he was having a dream about attacking an intruder when he strangled his wife. We'll look at how often this sort of defence is used and how a sleeping disorder might cause someone to carry out such a violent act.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is to end next year after more than two decades on air. Tonight we'll consider Oprah's influence and legacy - from culture, politics and race, to literature and entertainment. We'll be joined by Britain's very own Oprah, chat-show host Trisha Goddard, who styled herself in Winfrey's image.
For our Flemish viewers, if you'd like to see an interpretation of David Grossman's film about the Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, who has been named President of the European Council, click here. We'd like to thank Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (Flemish Radio and Television Network) for their interest in our journalism.
Join Gavin for Newsnight at 10.30pm on BBC Two, and read on for news from Kirsty on what's coming up in tonight's Newsnight Review at 11pm.
I'll be joined by Tom Paulin, Rosie Boycott and Sarfraz Mansoor and we'll be roaming over making fiction out of history. Does dramatic licence reveal deeper truths, or is it wrong to play fast and loose with the facts?
We'll be discussing Women We Loved, the new season of drama on BBC Four which goes behind the public image of three 20th Century icons, Enid Blyton (Helena Bonham Carter), Margot Fonteyn (Anne Marie Duff), and Gracie Fields (Jane Horrocks).
And we'll be discussing Alan Bennett's new stage play, The Habit of Art, for which he teams up once again with director Nicholas Hytner. In the play he creates the imaginary reunion of two estranged friends, WH Auden (Richard Griffiths) and Benjamin Britten (Alex Jennings).
"There is no such thing as a single, correct version of history, and if dramatists are honestly trying to achieve a deeper poetic truth about their subject, that should be the guiding light".
Following his broadside against the BBC over what he believes are stifling constraints upon television drama, the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff tells us why he thinks dramatists should be allowed to take greater liberties with history.
We are also reviewing his first feature in almost twenty years, the historical thriller, Glorious 39, in which he visits the uncomfortable truths about the appeasers on the eve of WWII.
And at The National Gallery in London we'll walk through a recreation of history in the Hoerengraght, the final work of the pioneering American installation artist Ed Kienholz and his wife Nancy Reddin, which takes us into the red light district of Amsterdam in the 1980s.
This is going to be a very colourful and argumentative Newsnight Review.
I hope you will join us, Kirsty
- Mark Urban
- Thu 19 Nov 09, 06:57 PM
President Hamid Karzai's statement in his inauguration speech, that he expects Afghan security forces to be running operations across the country within five years, is the latest sign that an exit strategy is being formulated.
In itself Mr Karzai's statement might seem like little more than a pious hope - given the fact that his forces lose so many to desertion (around one quarter each year) that they are struggling hard enough just to maintain their current strength.
But his words follow those of Gordon Brown on Tuesday in his Mansion House address, when he hinted that an international conference might be held in London which might begin to set a timetable for the transition to Afghan control.
In between the Brown and Karzai statements came one from Barack Obama, saying that he did not intend to make the US military presence an open ended commitment that would need to be solved by his successor.
Combine the recent words from these three players and what starts looking likely is a conference at which the US troop reinforcement could be presented as part of a wider package that includes charting a pathway to Afghan security control, sets out reforms to the government of Afghanistan, launches an anti-corruption drive, possibly the formation of a new more broadly based government, and coordinates all of this with pledges of development assistance.
This may well mean that early next year there could be a big international moment - a conference of Afghans, donors and troop contributors that would set the future course in a way that has not been done since the 2001 Bonn Conference.
Mr Brown said on Tuesday that he was offering London as the venue. Whether this will appeal to the other participants is a moot point, since it smacks of Downing Street trying to set the international agenda in the run up to an election.
So will the US troop announcement have to wait until this conference, possibly in January? The ominous possibility that President Obama might leave it five months between receiving the McChrystal Report and endorsing the reinforcements needed to make it work seemed a little more real yesterday when he said that he would be announcing his decision in the next 'several weeks'.
Equally, it may be that Mr Obama (as many are predicting) makes an announcement after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend near the end of this month, or indeed before it upon his return from his Far East tour.
However, if the precedents of this long and tortuous policy re-think are followed he may well want to know more about how the international conference is taking shape, even if he does not wait for the event itself, before announcing his reinforcements.
- Michael Crick
- Thu 19 Nov 09, 04:23 PM
This is nothing to do with politics at all, but I am sad to report that Dairmaid Jennings, the model for Anthony Buckeridge's famous Jennings stories, has died at the age of 96.
One of my proudest scoops as a journalist was to track him down about a dozen years ago. I had got to know Anthony Buckeridge through my daughter's love of the Jennings stories (following on from my own interest as a child).
Anthony told me that the model for the stories was a boy called Dairmaid Jennings at his school, Seaford College, where they were schoolboys together in the 1920s, and where Dairmaid was always getting into scrapes.
But Anthony had no idea what had happened to Dairmaid in later life.
I was determined to track him down, and found he was living in a nursing home in Nelson in New Zealand.
Amazingly, Dairmaid Jennings knew nothing about the Jennings stories, and that he'd been the model for a fictional character whose exploits have been read by millions, ever since Anthony Buckeridge published his first Jennings stories after the war (his last Jennings book came out in 1994).
They were turned in radio and TV series, and translated into 17 languages, but Dairmaid was ignorant of all this, partly because he'd gone to live in Australia around 1940 (and later New Zealand), and perhaps because he'd never had any children of his own.
After I'd discovered Dairmaid, he was put in touch with Anthony and they remained in contact for the last few years of the writer's life (before he died in 2004). Anthony's publishers sent Dairmaid copies of the Jennings books, which were read to him by the staff at his nursing home. He loved them.
- Paul Mason
- Wed 18 Nov 09, 02:57 PM
The rare earth story goes to the heart of China's relationship with the West - not just that, but to the heart of the West's inability to understand China.
It is a complicated story, involving a whole chunk of the Periodic Table, high secrecy, patent battles and conspiracy theory.
But it boils down to this - 97% of the specialist metals that are crucial to green technology are currently mined in China.
China is already limiting exports and has plans to limit them some more. As a result much of the hi-tech metals industry is also moving to China.
As you can see in my film for Newsnight:
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First the science.
There are 17 rare earth metals; they have got their own special bit of the Periodic Table.
In nature they are mainly found clumped together underground in specific types of rock and ore, so they have to be separated.
It takes a large quantity of rock to make a tiny quantity of rare earth. And the rock can often be radioactive. For now just try and remember two elements - Lanthanum and Neodymium.
In the early 1980s a US company called Ovonics perfected a rechargeable battery using rare earth metals that would form the basis of a whole branch of experimentation in electric and hybrid cars.
For geeks, the battery is a Nickel Metal Hydride battery (NiMH) and uses, primarily, Lanthanum.
But remember the name Ovonics. The firm formed a JV with General Motors, ceding 60% ownership to the car giant.
Meanwhile in 1982 General Motors discovered a new compound that could make cheap, highly effective, permanent magnets, again using a rare earth - in this case Neodymium.
Again for geeks - the nomenclature is a Neodimium-Iron-Boron magnet (NdFeB).
The primary effort at turning science into commercial technology here took place in the United States, with GM at the hub.
In parallel, these scientists were putting in place the key technologies for green capitalism:
• battery powered cars would become crucial in the effort to wean us off the petrol engine and;
• permanent magnets are a crucial component in almost any gadget that moves or sees or is guided by a computer.
And both technologies rely on rare earth metals.
Now the geology.
As far as we know there is rare earth ore in California, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Vietnam and Australia. There's even some in Greenland.
But the mother lode is sitting under the mountains 50km (30 miles) north of the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou, in the Bayan Obo mine.
In addition to Bayan Obo, China has also found massive deposits in Sichuan.
As Deng Xiao Ping presciently commented, at a time when electric cars and wind power seemed like ecotopian wet dreams: "Arabia has oil, China has rare earth".
The story of how China seized a stranglehold on the ore supply and then large parts of the metallurgy is a modern epic.
"Either by stupidity or design" says one industry insider, "the Chinese flooded the market in the mid 1990s and collapsed the price. Almost everybody else went out of business".
For the purposes of today, there are three big potential sources of rare earth outside China - in California, Canada and Australia.
The Californian mine has not produced since 1998, the Australian mine was set to start production in 2011 but has just lost its financing and the Canadian mine likewise is aiming at 2011. Together their annual production could amount to one third of China's.
Each of these projects has been hampered by lack of finance, particularly since the financial collapse of 2008. Some industry voices say the danger of China flooding the market again, making the mines uneconomic, means only a strategic rather than pure economic view makes them viable.
So with the doubling of demand and the collapse of non-Chinese supply, China ended up with 97% of the ore market.
But as the industry for processing the metal and making products out of it developed rapidly in the late 1990s and this decade, China has also managed to bring much of that on-shore as well.
In addition to producing nearly all the rare earth metals, companies operating in China consumes 60% of the stuff.
How has it achieved this? First by relentless state-backed focus.
If you do a web search for the scientific papers on rare earth, a lot of Chinese results come back. China's metallurgy industry flourished while the West's declined.
But increasingly China has started to pare back exports. It places an export tax on rare earth and a quota. In each of the last two years the quota has been shrunk by 20%.
There is of course, this being China, a flourishing black market. In addition to the 35,000 tonnes officially exported, another 20,000 tonnes were somehow consumed outside China.
There is also endemic illegal mining of the stuff in the Chinese deserts. This export limit is an overt signal to producers of rare earth products that, to ensure supply, they need to move production into the People's Republic of China.
Now, in addition to the export restrictions so far, another problem is looming. China's demand is predicted to equal the entire Chinese supply by 2012.
In a recently released - but not published in the West - draft report, Rare Earths Industry Development Plan 2009-2015, the Chinese government pondered a complete ban on five heavy rare earth elements and a cap on exports at the current level (35,000 tonnes).
Officials later downplayed this, reminding journalists that since "no-one wants to give up profits" the quotas are rarely enforced. However, if they were enforced - ie if smuggling was stopped - it would be a big problem.
Unless the non-Chinese mines ramp up production, there will be a shortage outside China. So Western companies who want to manufacture have, increasingly, got to move onto the Chinese mainland.
As Dr Ian Higgins of the Birkenhead rare earth firm Less Common Metals told Newsnight:
"What you're going to get is no opportunity for manufacturing outside of China. And it just depends how far you think it's acceptable to take this policy. Somewhere along the line do we say 'yes, the world does need some strategic control in terms of manufacturing these materials'?"
Now to the reasons why this is such a problem for the rest of us.
The wind farm and the hybrid car - the two key technologies in the transition to green energy use - are completely reliant on rare earths.
There is about a tonne of rare earth magnets in a wind turbine and about 2kg of Neodymium in the rechargeable battery of a Toyota Prius, plus another kilogram or so of Lanthanum and Praeseodimium in the drive train up the front.
(For those whose focus is more on blowing people to smithereens, it is also disconcerting that guided munitions such as the US's JDam bomb cannot function without rare earth magnets.)
Now to the response of the two big manufacturing powers outside China - the US and Japan. How have they coped with this complex problem of rising new technology creating a resource monopoly for China?
In summary, very differently.
Japan's car manufacturers jumped into the electronic vehicle game early. As a result a joint venture between Toyota and Panasonic is the world's leading manufacturer of rechargeable NiMH batteries.
Likewise on the magnet front, again largely due to the foresight of Toyota and its ilk, Japan makes the majority of the the Neo magnets that are not made in China.
Japanese companies hold an unspecified stockpile of the key materials. In addition Toyota has become the first car maker to own a mine - it has set up a rare earth mine in Vietnam which will solely produce for its car plants.
In addition, according to The Times newspaper, about 20% of all Japanese rare earth imports are black market. One Japanese offical told The Times:
"If the Chinese export quota limits were the reality of what comes into Japan each year, we would be even more worried than we already are."
Now what you can say about Japan's attitude to rare earth is that it is canny. The state and major companies are aligned, they're combining geo-politics with realpolitik up to - if The Times is correct - the point of tolerating a black market.
They have, in the process, gained the best part of a decade's head start on the West in cleantech cars. And, though they are reliant on China for rare earth, they have effectively pulled China into an Asia-centric rare earth economy.
Contrast this with the US. It was not just the free market that closed the Mountain Pass mine in California, but environmental concerns about radiation.
But for whatever reason the US allowed its own rare earth source - the second largest in the world - to go out of business.
Next, the rare earth magnet business. In 1996, GM sold its magnet business, Magnequench, to a Chinese-led consortium. It then moved large parts of its Neo magnet production operations to China.
Magnequench has now been taken over by a joint Chinese-Canadian business, but the bulk of its operations remain in China.
There is a large literature of political claim and counterclaim over this.
Next the rare earth battery business.
In the late 1990s GM famously scrapped its work on the EV1 plug in car and crushed all known models out in the desert.
It sold Ovonics, together with the patents for the key battery technologies, to Chevron/Texaco - an oil company - which successfully sued Toyota to maintain intellectual property rights over of the technology.
The resulting company was named Cobasys. During its period of ownership by Chevron it failed to produce NiMH batteries in large numbers. A highly polemical account of this can be found in the Sony Pictures film Who Killed The Electric Car?
In 2004, a protracted legal dispute between Cobasys and Toyota/Panasonic was resolved by the Japanese firms agreeing to pay Cobasys about $30m and also royalties on the batteries sold in America out to 2013.
As a result of the legal settlement the battery situation in the US is beginning to free up, but the legal battle leaves those promoting hybrids - and their next-generation development, the plug-in hybrid - rueing their dependence on non-US manufactured NiMH batteries.
Sherry Boschert, author of a book on electric cars, wrote in 2007: "It's possible that Cobasys (Chevron) is squelching all access to large NiMH batteries through its control of patent licenses in order to remove a competitor to gasoline.
"Or it's possible that Cobasys simply wants the market for itself and is waiting for a major automaker to start producing plug-in hybrids or electric vehicles."
Cobasys has now been sold to a JV between Samsung and Bosch, which specialises in the rival Li-Ion battery (which is not so rare earth dependent).
What matters, in the long-run, is that the US lost any kind of lead in electric car battery manufacturing and left the Japanese complex of Toyota, Panasonic and Sanyo as the NiMH battery superpower.
It has also taken a major bet on Li-Ion technology which some commentators doubt is wise.
Meanwhile, when Panasonic and Sanyo merged, China's competition regulator this year ordered these two Japanese companies to divest part of their rare earth battery business.
There are no prizes for guessing which country's cash rich state-backed companies will be queuing to take this division off their hands.
Stepping back to see the bigger picture: in little more than two decades China has achieved absolute dominance in the raw materials side of rare earth and forced much of the manufacturing industry to move to China.
Its coming export restrictions will force more of this, but will probably also stimulate non-Chinese raw material production as the price rises.
In the process China has acquired key tech transfers, as is its stated aim under the so-called 863 Program.
And, as a byproduct of US corporate decision making, the China-Japan axis has emerged as the centre of the rare earth economy.
The US is now so worried about all this that in the National Defense Act 2010 there is for the first time a whole section requiring the government to launch an urgent probe into the impact of rare earth dependence on national security.
But for years US governments - both in the Clinton and Bush eras - have stated they have no problem with the transfer of rare earth jobs, plants and science to China.
The whole story reveals a mismatch between Western and Asian ways of doing business, and of perceptions.
President Barack Obama has now, reportedly, accepted there will be a global resource crunch within a decade, led by peak oil.
But the Chinese and Japanese governments and industrial elites have been operating on a resource agenda for the past decade. China is demonstrably using foreign policy to gain direct access to supplies of raw materials.
When the Afghan war began, and the Russian involvement in the "Stans", it became common to talk about Central Asia being the "New Great Game" for the warring superpowers.
But the real new Great Game is being played in the swamps of the Niger Delta, on the borders of Colombia-Venezuela, in the metal mines of the DRC and now in the rare earth mines of the world.
For example, China attempted to buy 51% of the Australian rare earth mine, but pulled out in September when the Australian government vetoed this.
For decades US foreign policy, and much of the Western world behind it, has focused on security of supply of oil from the Middle East.
Chinese policy - foreign, industrial and commercial - now centres on finding and securing supplies not just of oil but of all major natural resources needed by an economy developing at 9% for the rest of the century.
The old, oil-based policy shaped the world; the rise of freemarket capitalism after 1989 became possible because no rival powers existed that could fragment the world economy and challenge US dominance; the new, multi-resource based policy of China (together with Japan and South Korea) is what is reshaping the world.
It has put roads through Kenya, and sent Chinese engineers into the swamps of West Africa and the airless space of the Andean metal mines.
As Asia powers out of the recession it is enchancing the prestige of a model based on resource monopolies, giant integrated manufacturing empires, overt black-marketeering and state directed industrial policy.
The FT's Martin Wolf reminds us we are stacking up a potentially huge conflict between the US and China over trade and currency - and these two issues are what dominate the thinking of free-market, Western-trained economists when they think of China.
But it seems to me that the West has been largely blindsided by the growing importance of resource strategy.
While the West was thinking about one thing, the big Asian industrial powers were thinking about another.
- Verity Murphy
- Tue 17 Nov 09, 06:21 PM
Here is what is coming up in tonight's programme:
The 21st Century has been dubbed the Asian Century - the era in which Western domination will end and the countries of Asia, particularly China, will grow in strategic, political and economic power.
Tonight, we will be looking at the challenge the West faces and our Economics Editor Paul Mason will be explaining how the Toyota Prius - the world's first mass-produced hybrid car - could be key.
At the heart of the hybrid is a rechargeable battery, and at the heart battery is a metal - one of 17 so-called Rare Earths which are at the heart of so many of the world's new technologies that they have the potential to bring about a shift in global power.
Plus, the other day Jeremy Paxman asks Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan whether he "fancied" Herman Van Rompuy.
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He was of course asking if the Belgian prime minister would be suitable for the EU presidency.
Tonight, David Grossman will be taking a closer look at the man who is in the running to become the most powerful man in Europe, and assessing whether we should all be fancying his chances.
Also tonight, a second group of Newsnight viewers face the panel in our Politics Pen.
Last week, three intrepid members of the audience went up against the political animals pitching their ideas for easing the public finances - but all to no avail, as all of their suggestions were roundly rejected.
How will the next three fare?
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