Next Gen News

Humanity 2.0 is an understanding of the human condition that no longer takes the "normal human body" as given. On the one hand, we're learning more about our continuity with the rest of nature - in terms of the ecology, genetic make-up, evolutionary history. On this basis, it's easy to conclude that being "human" is overrated. But on the other hand, we're also learning more about how to enhance the capacities that have traditionally marked us off from the rest of nature. Computers come to mind most readily in their capacity to amplify and extend ourselves. Humanity 2.0 is about dealing with this tension.

For example, in terms of the NHS, we don't deprive people of prosthetic enhancements such as hearing aids and eyeglasses along the lines of income, so we should be thinking about what other future enhancements we want people to have access to as part of being human 2.0.

, in which a frustrated young wife in the Wicklow mountains walks away from her home and marriage into the arms of a tramp whose name she doesn't even know.

Nationalists also resented the implication behind the Abbey project that there could ever be an Irish national literature in English, the language of the coloniser. Synge believed that there could, albeit in an English as Irish as it is possible for that language to be. So he created sentences in which standard English was reconfigured by peasants who were thinking still in Irish: "Is it you that's going to town tomorrow?" "Is it tomorrow that you're going to town?" Emphasis is achieved not by tonal underlining but by bringing the key word forward to the start of the sentence.

in 1914.

Certain contemporaries thought that Synge was hurt more by the controversy than he pretended. That seems unlikely - he gave as good as he got, and then some. His own family turned a blind eye to the row. A nephew recalled that the morning after the riots, when papers were filled with reports, Synge's mother disdained even to mention the topic. She never recognised his career or his genius.

. Crace follows the team to the dimmest recesses of this country and Europe; he collects mountains of unmemorable memorabilia; he neglects his family in order to catch an obscure game on TV. He also hugely over-identifies himself with the club: when, in a chance meeting with novelist Jim Crace, he discovers they are distantly related, he enjoys his new found Jewishness primarily because it further ties him to Spurs, the most Hebrew of football institutions. Most telling of all, given what we come to learn about his fluctuating mental health, he measures the remainder of his life by the numbers of future football seasons he's likely to see.

exposes the self-delusion, moral gymnastics and nervous tics that are the lot of any football fan following a team in the modern game. It also vividly, and stoically, describes the plight of those blighted by the black dog. Only one thing prevents the book from being truly lovable, and that is the fact that Crace, in the long spells when he is clear of his clinical depression, is still a bit of a misery.

Match pointers

Subs:

Howard Webb (S Yorkshire)

"I like those 8-1 odds," says Gary Naylor. "It's not that I think Everton will win - City will beat better sides than ours this season - but expectations have been set so low at Goodison and so many players are young and / or largely unknown in English football, that there's a kind of fearlessness abroad that produces goals at either end (ignore all that stuff about playing with one or none up front: formations don't score goals, players do). Moyes's men may cop a few 4-0s this season, but we might turn over one or two big boys when they're least expecting it." So 4-0 to City it is then.

Nasri slashes a shot wide. "Leighton Baines is a worthy successor to Andy Hinchcliffe and, of course, the great Kevin Sheedy and a lovely bloke by all accounts, but somebody should have a word about that hair," says Gary Naylor. He's also a very fertile man, he'd had three kids by the age of 22 or something. But in a homely way, not in a the mothers of my children are Las Vegas strippers way.

Everton throw in and Tony Hibbert takes to little success. I'm not sure if I've ever noticed Hibbert doing anything before. He just is. "Who is Mancini extending his hand to in that photograph," asks Jack Goodson. "With a face such as that, it can only be Rowan Atkinson surely."

37 min:

40 min:

60 min:

63 min:

Baines wins a corner. Osman takes and the ball comes, eventually, to Drenthe who shoots over. "All these yellow cards for Everton whenever Silva goes to ground, but no pen for an arm in the face on Cahill in the first half, and not even a foul now on Saha on the edge of the area," says Duncan Hawthorne.

City have the ball in the net. Balotelli beats his man and taps it to Silva, who taps it into the net but it's offside. Balotelli has been a far better player today than the man he replaced, Dzeko. Jagielka is booked for a tackle from behind.

Her fertility specialist referred her to a doctor in Atlanta who did reductions. But when Shelby called, the office manager told her that she would have to pay extra for temporary staff to assist with the procedure, because the regular staff refused to reduce pregnancies below twins. She contacted three more doctors and in each case was told: not below two. "It was horrible," she says. "I felt like the pregnancy was a monster, and I just wanted it out, but because we tried for so long, abortion wasn't an option. My number one priority was to be the best mum I could, but how was I supposed to juggle two newborns or two screaming infants while my husband was away being shot at? We don't have family just sitting around waiting to get called to help me with a baby."

Today, her daughter is two and a half years old. Shelby intends to tell her about the reduction one day, to teach her that women have choices, even if they're sometimes difficult. "I am the mother of a very demanding toddler," she says. "I can't imagine this times two, and not ever knowing if I'd have another person here to help me."

Milly Dowler's family have been made a £3m offer by Rupert Murdoch's News International in an attempt to settle the phone-hacking case that led to the closure of the News of the World and the resignation of the company's chief executive, Rebekah Brooks.

The money on the table is understood to include a personal £1m donation to charity by Murdoch himself as well as contributions to the family's legal costs. But the publisher has not yet reached final agreement with the Dowler family, whose lawyers were thought to be seeking a settlement figure closer to £3.5m.

The seven-figure sums under negotiation are far larger than other phone-hacking settlements reached - and amount to one of the largest payouts ever made by a newspaper owner - reflecting the fact that the phone-hacking case affected a family who were victims of crime.

Milly Dowler went missing aged 13 in March 2002 and was later found murdered.

Other lawyers bringing phone-hacking cases have privately indicated that they would be advising many of those bringing actions to try to reach a settlement rather than take their cases to lengthy and expensive trials. A handful of cases have been taken forward as lead actions by Mr Justice Vos, to establish a benchmark for settlements in future lawsuits. However, with the amount of damages alone offered to the Dowler family expected to amount to well over £1m, the settlement easily exceeds other high-profile payout made by newspapers by way of apology.

In 2008, Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of the missing Madeleine McCann, accepted £550,000 in damages over more than 100 "seriously defamatory" articles published by Richard Desmond's Express newspapers.

Here's the Guardian's coverage of Obama's speech today:

10.11am:

The Joint Committee plan significantly reduces deficits and puts the country on a fiscally sustainable path by 2017.

- bulk of cuts coming from ending military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan ($1.1tn), and savings on interest payments ($430bn).

Meanwhile, my colleague Dominic Rushe forwards reaction from the Tea Party Nation:

The "Jimmy Buffett rule" would however involve hefty taxes on cheeseburgers eaten in paradise, and increased duty on salt.

Both sides agree that deficit reduction of $4tn is needed - but that the opposition won't share the burden and pay their fare share. "This is not class warfare. It's math," says Obama, getting a brief laugh.

Unfortunately, the president has not made a serious contribution to its work today. This administration's insistence on raising taxes on job creators and its reluctance to take the steps necessary to strengthen our entitlement programs are the reasons the president and I were not able to reach an agreement previously, and it is evident today that these barriers remain.

Here it is on page 28 of the full document:

A new opinion poll on the Republican race from USA Today and Gallup shows Rick Perry still in the lead, Mitt Romney doing better, and Michele Bachmann fading away.

4pm:

Congressional reporter Jamie Dupree has been reading the fine-print of Obama's deficit reduction plan so you don't have to, all 80 pages of it.

5pm:

. He suggested that Tory extremists were putting the future of the coalition at risk.

Chris Huhne has now finished. Full details of the measures that will give strengthen the rights of energy consumers are now on a news release on the Department for Energy and Climate Change's website.

Let that be a warning to the Conservative right here: we need no Tea Party Tendency in Britain.

Ofgem is already stamping out bad doorstep practices that lead to energy mis-selling, with the guilty companies suffering swingeing fines.

Today I can announce a new package to help the hard-pressed consumer this winter and every winter.

Requiring energy companies to tell you whether you could buy more cheaply on another tariff.

It is just that consumers still think that they face the same bill whoever they go to.

12.28pm:

12.28pm:

He says that he and Vince Cable have been competing for the "most unpopular minister" slot in the poll of Tory activists on ConservativeHome website. That means they "must be doing something right", he says.

You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the Guardian politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.

. Steve Richards in the Independent says Tim Farron's speech to the conference on Sunday was "a political work of art, mapping out a more social democrat argument while declaring several times his overwhelming admiration for Nick Clegg's leadership".

In his new study of coalition Government, Clegg's Coup, Jasper Gerard argues that the Lib Dems need to exchange what he says one minister calls "fluffy bunny voters", the idealists who prefer ideological purity to power, with realists (wily foxes?) who are willing to make the compromises required by government.

Do take a look at the Comment is free rolling comment blog from the conference. Among today's contributions is one from George Monbiot, who has put up a terrific short post about corporate lobbying at the conference. Here's an extract.

Whilst firms have every right to talk to their workers and ex-workers about getting their pension rights in a different way, we need to make sure that people are making well-informed decisions and not losing out on valuable pension rights without realising it.

Steve Webb, the pensions minister, is delivering his speech to the conference. He begins with a rather good joke. Pointing out that Shirley Williams will be speaking on the platform in about 20 minutes, he says that for the first time in his life there will be more people in the hall when finishes his speech than at the start.

, the former Lib Dem leader, has joined the debate about the euro. (See 8.50am.) He told BBC News that the party's policy on the euro was "right at the time".

This is almost word for what what Gordon Brown used to say when he was asked about wanting to be leader. And we all knew what to make of that.

Q: Aren't you conceding then that the UK is not in the same position Italy?

Clegg says it is not happening as quickly as he would like. But the government is introducing the greatest move towards transparency in this area the country has seen.

, the Lib Dem grandee and health bill "rebel", take part in a question and answer session on health.

12.20pm:

Ed Balls

It has been pretty clear for over a year Greece cannot access global financial markets. They are only propped up with support from the other governments, the other governments are saying we will only continue this support if you keep cutting spending and raising taxes, even though that is not working.

. Financial markets remain calm after central banks pledged unlimited dollar loans - the FTSE 100 is currently 22 points higher at 5361.

11.26am:

The more consistent we are the better. I don't want to chase every week another cow through the village and not discuss...new ideas that can not be put into reality.

10.39am:

However, Austria is taking a more optimistic line. Finance minister Maria Fekter said she was "very confident that the next tranche to Greece can be paid out in October."

10.04am:

is continuing to give his views on the financial situation in Manchester (presumably he'll be heading off to Poland pretty swiftly after this Q&A session is over). The Telegraph's

TALF was credited with restarting frozen U.S. markets for securities backed by car, student and small business loans and leases. By taking in paper that had no other buyers at the time, the Fed acted as market maker. No losses were reported on the programme.

However, there's a problem with this nifty solution. If the EU uses leverage to turn EFSF funds into a much larger sum, then the potential liabilities increase (as the fund will end up holding much more assets). That increases the potential losses for the members of the Eurozone, who are funding the EFSF.

Eurogroup meeting


· Eurogroup debriefing




· Global economic and sovereign debt markets developments

18.30 - 19.00

at CMC Markets said:

has also flown in, a sign of America's concern over the eurozone debt crisis.

.Youth unemployment increases to 972,000

The unemployment rate using the internationally agreed yardstick for calculating joblessness rose to 7.9% for May to July, from 7.7% in February to April.

"Most worrying are the signs of a second wave of rising young unemployment - with the number of 18-24-year-olds out of work now higher than at any point during the recession - making the government's decision to slash the support to young people through Educational Maintenance Allowances and the Future Jobs Fund look even more short-sighted and cruel," Barber added.

Science-fiction author who used dystopian settings to tackle social issues

Sleator's first publication of note was The Angry Moon (1970), a picture book based on a legend of the Tlinglit people in the Pacific northwest of the US. The Angry Moon, which was illustrated by Blair Lent, was chosen as a Caldecott honour book by the Association for Library Service to Children, but Sleator soon turned to longer fiction.

House of Stairs (1974), one of the first great dystopian novels for young adults, concerns a group of deeply troubled orphans who awake to find themselves imprisoned in a huge structure based on the famous MC Escher print of the same name, which consists of nothing but staircases that they must constantly climb up and down in search of food. Eventually they discover that they are part of a secret government psychological conditioning program and that, rather than being expected to work together, they are being trained to treat each other with cruelty. The Young Adult Library Services Association named House of Stairs as one of its 100 best books for young adults.

Sleator's parents, intensely intellectual, involved in the St Louis arts community and strongly supportive of Sleator's early artistic attempts in both writing and music, were nonetheless somewhat hands-off when it came to their children. This is a theme that runs through many of his books, particularly Interstellar Pig and the highly autobiographical collection of short stories Oddballs (1993). His other significant novels include his first, Blackbriar (1972), Singularity (1985), The Boy Who Reversed Himself (1986), The Duplicate (1988), Strange Attractors (1990), The Boxes (1998) and The Last Universe (2005). His final novel, The Phantom Limb, written with Ann Monticone, is due to be published next month.

In his later years, Sleator alternated his time between the small village of Bua Chet, in Thailand, and Boston, in Massachusetts. He was predeceased by his mother, his sister, Vicky; and two partners, Paul Peter Rhode, in 1999, and Siang Chitsa-Ard, in 2008. He is survived by his father and his brothers, Tycho and Daniel.

It is a view shared by many Palestinians. As world leaders engage in frantic last-minute diplomacy in an attempt to avoid a damaging car crash of competing interests in New York, Palestinians shrug and get on with lives governed by checkpoints, permits, house demolitions, land confiscation and harassment from Jewish settlers. A vote at the UN, they say, will not end Israel's occupation.

The story of Atrash, 68, and his village, al-Walaja, which perches on terraced hills between the ancient cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, is the history of the Palestinian people over more than six decades.

Violence borne from a combustible mix of frustration and settler provocation is predicted by many, on both sides of the conflict. "The Israelis are closing off other options," says Araj. "Violence is the last thing I want, but it's coming."

"I've just got a mini-HP, but you can pay a bit more and get a Mac or an iPad," says Mua Stanbery, 16, who has just started at ProCivitas, the most popular of the town's profit-making free schools.

But Vlachos, an associate professor of economics at Stockholm University, is standing his ground. His argument is based on his finding that students who entered gymnasium [sixth form] from free secondary schools on average went on to get lower grades over the next three years than those who had entered with the same grade from municipal secondary schools.

But when I visited the Malmö school, it was hard to see how. It was so noisy that I thought it must be break time. "Students here, they don't have to do every task if they can show that they know it," a teacher said. "English for example, they can learn from the TV and other places."

"Some do have problems with handling their freedom," admitted Osterman. "Freedom gives them less fact-based knowledge."

Comet Elenin was beyond Jupiter when it was found, but tracking inwards towards a perihelion 72 million km from the Sun, which it passed on Saturday. It is now tracking outwards and will pass a safe 35 million km from the Earth on 16 October. Despite the claims to the contrary, there is no chance of a collision or of any of the other dire effects we read about. Indeed, the comet's nucleus was only ever a small icy body and observations suggest that it may have disintegrated as it neared perihelion, as others have done before.

Our chart shows the lower half of our eastern sky at 05:30 BST tomorrow, but is valid also for 03:30 BST in mid-October. Mercury is just visible tomorrow, very low in the twilight at mag -1.1, but is likely to disappear by next weekend.

Choosing between MA courses at universities requires detailed research. Teachers who have identified an area of practice that they want to explore in more detail should look for courses that offer that specialisation. Alternatively faculties allow students to chose from a range of subject modules to build up broader knowledge.

Amy Lightfoot, a British teacher who has worked in Europe and Asia, set out to study a diploma to consolidate her classroom skills, but when she discovered that Bath University offered a combined Delta and MA course she says it had unexpected benefits.

"I knew I wanted to do the Delta because it was so practical. I thought I would do an MA later. But the Bath course meant that I could cover all the teaching skills, then look at other education issues during the MA. I got a much broader overview of education than I expected," she said.

. The judge has forbidden reporting at the trial.

He also pledged that women would play an active role in the new government as ministers and ambassadors.

1.06pm:

#Erdogan:#Israel MUST apologize, compensate families of martyrs, end #Gaza siege or relations can't return (APPLAUSE) #Turkey

#Erdogan praises #Libya's NTC #Turkey

Omar Suleiman, the former security chief and deputy prime minister under Hosni Mubarak's, has been testifying in a closed session at the trial of former boss.

The 74-year-old Suleiman, one of the most secretive figures in Mubarak's government, was Mubarak's point man in dealing with the protesters against his rule. Witnesses confirmed that Suleiman arrived Tuesday morning at the heavily fortified Police Academy on Cairo's outskirts where the trial is being held.

While we were waiting for Erdogan, Arab League secretary-general Nabil El-Araby has been filling time with a pretty juicy speech of his own, according to Jack Shenker in Cairo.

Al-Jazeera Arabic is showing live coverage of the speech.

Erdogan has been delayed in security meetings with Egypt's interim leaders, al-Jazeera's Sherine Tadros reports.

'Hand in hand with Erdogan for a common future' reads the billboards plastered along Cairo's 6th October flyover. The image accompanying the slogan is a stirring one, featuring the Turkish prime minister standing before the Turkish and Egyptian flags and clasping his heart - but do the thousands of drivers stuck in traffic below really view Egypt's latest foreign guest as a political saviour?

"The Turkish government's attitude to Israel has been very popular," claimed Egyptian writer Bassem Sabry. "Anyone who thinks they can accurately gauge the varied public reaction to Israel and Turkey is mistaken, but I do know that people don't want a war with Israel - what they want is to believe that they have a voice and that, as Erdogan says, soft power can be used to achieve constructive ends."

Still no sign of Erdogan, but there's no shortage of comment on what his Arab Spring tour means.

He says Tuareg leaders are pushing for the government to accept the former regime loyalists so they don't become fugitives in the West African nation, which has a vast northern desert.

"I have come here to say 'thank you' because he says things no man can say," said Hani, a 21-year-old university student.

In the vicinity of Sebha: 6 Tanks, 2 Armoured Fighting Vehicle.

9.06am:

We are a Muslim nation, with a moderate Islam, and we will maintain that. You are with us and support us - you are our weapon against whoever tries to hijack the revolution.

.

. Melanie Henwood: Problems leaving hospital will be a lasting memory for patients

on our streets
'big society'


, says Stuart Etherington

. Community Care: Vulnerable lose out on advocacy as cuts and demand take toll
. Independent: Poor pub hygiene link to rise in gastric infections



. Telegraph: Planning reforms author: rules 'stop locals resisting developers'

14 September 2011, London

22 September 2011, Edinburgh

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