The Newest Watches

It is tempting to tell ourselves that we're on the verge of an inclusive, multicultural new age.

An era where colour doesn't matter all that much, where race doesn't define us. After all, society is changing. Radically. The Conservative Party's first-ever black female MP, Helen Grant, has just been elected. And across the pond, there is a black man in the White House. Or is there?

A controversial new book, The History of White People, claims that Barack Obama is, to all intents and purposes, white. Not because he had a white mother but because of his educational background, his income, his power, his status. The book's author, the eminent black American historian Nell Irvin Painter, has written a fascinating, sprawling history of the concept of race, looking specifically at the idea of a white race and at why and how whites have dominated other, darker-skinned races throughout recent centuries. The conclusion of Painter's book – which has taken more than a decade to research and write – is explosive. Race, she argues, is a fluid social construct, entirely unsupported by scientific fact. Like beauty, it is merely skin-deep.

Technically, she has a point. The $3bn Human Genome Project revealed in 2003 that every human being has a unique DNA sequence which differs from that of any fellow human being by just 0.1 per cent, regardless of ethnic origin. Thus, all humans beings are 99.9 per cent the same and, from a scientific viewpoint, there is no such thing as racial difference.

And now along comes this weighty history of white people, written by a 67-year-old black woman, telling us that the white race has never really existed. Unsurprisingly, America's far-right are furious. On the white supremacist group Stormfront's internet forum, one member complained that the book: "will likely win a Pulitzer – just look at how they patronise and indulge these negroes". Another member said Painter "is just jealous of our history and of the beauty of white women".

Painter remains unfazed by the criticism: our perceptions of race are expanding, she claims, and she herself is, she says, effectively white – by virtue of her lifestyle (she's a Harvard-educated former Princeton history professor currently pursuing a master's degree in painting).

Being "white" in America is perhaps like being upper-class in Britain, except in America a wealthy, well-connected black person can become "white" and a disadvantaged white person could lead a life that's "black".

Historically, the entire classification of 'whiteness', Painter argues, was in no small part a philosophical justification of slavery. The white-black thing was about economics. Whiteness came to represent freedom and nobility, while black-skinned peoples were now cast in the role of the underdog. Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, white-skinned people were not routinely held to be more elite than blacks. In medieval times, it was largely whites who were the slaves. During the 1300s there was a dearth of labour as a result of the Black Death, and Christian kingdoms in the Mediterranean enslaved more and more white-skinned people – hailing from Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. It was another 200 years or so before the growth of the sugar industry demanded more and more slave labour. White-skinned Europeans began to enslave Africans to work their plantations. The transatlantic slave trade flourished. White-skinned slave owners, enjoying the financial fruits of this new slavery, started to deify themselves, self-identifying as inherently superior to blacks – morally, socially and intellectually. Suddenly blacks were held by their white 'owners' to be only three-fifths human. The widespread worship of 'whiteness' had begun; to date it has not ended.

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A mile-long oil sheen has spread from an offshore petroleum platform burning in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, west of the site of BP's massive spill.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Coklough said the sheen was spotted near the platform owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy Inc. He said Mariner had deployed three firefighting vessels to the site and one was already in place fighting the blaze. The Coast Guard said one person was injured but no one was killed in the incident, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the site. All 13 people on the rig were rescued.

The platform is in about 340 feet of water, about 100 miles south of Vermilion Bay on the central Louisiana coast. Its location is considered shallow water, much less than the approximately 5,000 feet where BP's well spewed oil and gas for three months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April.

Coast Guard spokesman, Chief Petty Officer John Edwards, said: "These guys had the presence of mind, used their training to get into those gumby suits [survival outfits] before they entered the water. It speaks volumes to safety training and the importance of it because beyond getting off the rig there's all the hazards of the water such as hypothermia and things of that nature."

All were being flown to a hospital in Houma, Louisiana, to be checked over. In a statement, the platform's owner, Houston-based Mariner Energy, Inc., said: "Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident. The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken."

The platform is a fixed petroleum platform that was in production at the time of the fire, according to a homeland security operational update obtained by the Associated Press. The update said the platform was producing about 58,800 gallons of oil and 900,000 cubic feet of gas per day. The platform can store 4,200 gallons of oil.

Seven Coast Guard helicopters, two airplanes and three cutters were dispatched to the scene from New Orleans, Houston and Mobile, Alabama.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama was in a national security meeting and did not know whether he had been informed of the explosion. "We obviously have response assets ready for deployment should we receive reports of pollution in the water," said Mr Gibbs.

The platform is about 200 miles west of BP's blown-out well. The BP-leased rig Deepwater Horizon exploded on 20 April, killing 11 people, injuring 17 others and setting off a three-month leak that totalled 206 million gallons of oil.

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A senior judge has delivered a stinging rebuke to the Department of Health over its treatment of a former head of an NHS trust that experienced the worst superbug outbreak in memory.

Lord Justice Sedley yesterday gave his ruling as the Court of Appeal awarded more than £190,000 in damages to Rose Gibb, former chief executive of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in Kent, where outbreaks of clostridium difficile from 2004 to 2006 infected more than 1,100 patients and led directly to 90 deaths.

Ms Gibb went to court after the Department of Health withheld a six-figure severance payment she had agreed in return for her resignation days before a report into the outbreak was published by the Healthcare Commission.

The judge said the trust had offered to compensate Ms Gibb, who was paid £150,000 a year, so it could "sacrifice on the altar of public relations a senior official who had done nothing wrong". Its decision was one that "the Department [of Health] does not appear to have cavilled at," he added.

But when the department later disallowed most of the payment, worth £250,000, it triggered the court action by Ms Gibb.

Lord Sedley said: "The effect of unwarranted departmental interference has been to trap the trust between a rock and a hard place and to expose it, in its attempt to escape, to heavy legal costs." He added: "It seems that the making of a public sacrifice to deflect press and public obloquy, which is what happened to the appellant, remains an accepted expedient of public administration."

The Healthcare Commission inquiry into the outbreak, published in October 2007, was highly critical of the trust's leadership but pinned much of the blame on the Trust's board – all of whom resigned following its publication.

The Commission's report said the trust should review its leadership and the trust ordered its legal advisers to report on allegations against Ms Gibb. But no adverse findings were discovered and a decision was made not to remove her by the trust's Remuneration Committee.

That decision was reversed at a meeting of the committee in September 2007, when it was decided to pay off Ms Gibb before publication of the Healthcare Commission report in October. It was agreed that she would receive £75,000 in lieu of notice and £175,000 compensation. But the trust rescinded the agreement after being ordered by the director-general of NHS Finance, Performance and Operations to withhold the £175,000 compensation payment, which has since increased to £190,000 with interest.

The Court of Appeal yesterday ordered the trust to pay Ms Gibb the full amount of the compensation plus the costs of the court hearings.

Lord Sedley concluded: "Perhaps those responsible will now reflect that, since such blame as the report allocated was subsequently accepted by the trust's board – all of whom resigned following publication of the report – there had been no good reason to dismiss the CEO; and that all this money, both compensation and costs, could have been spent on improving hygiene and patient care in the trust's hospitals."

Patients and relatives affected by the superbug reacted angrily. Former Bucks Fizz singer Cheryl Baker, whose mother-in-law Doreen Ford died at Maidstone Hospital in 2008 aged 77 after contracting clostridium difficile, called on Ms Gibb to give the money to the families whose loved ones died.

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Sunderland have landed Ghana World Cup star Asamoah Gyan on a four-year deal for a club-record fee.

Steve Bruce has splashed out at least £13million to buy the striker from French outfit Rennes.

A club statement confirmed the deal was done 20 minutes before the 6pm deadline to sign the player, who scored three goals in South Africa this summer.

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England and Arsenal footballer Jack Wilshere was arrested in the early hours of this morning following a "fracas", his spokesman said.

The 18-year-old midfielder was released on bail following the incident at 2.45am in Kensington High Street, London.

Officers and paramedics called to the scene found a man with minor facial injuries and a woman with a broken arm. Both were taken to a west London hospital for treatment.

Police later stopped a vehicle and arrested four men, two aged 18 and two aged 21, on suspicion of assault.

They were taken to a west London police station and bailed to return in mid-October pending further inquiries, a Met police spokesman said.

Wilshere's spokesman said: "Jack Wilshere was arrested by police in the early hours following a fracas but was released on bail later.

"The police have made it very clear that he is an important witness to the incident and played the role of peacemaker and is unlikely to face any charges as a result.

"Jack has made it very clear he will co-operate fully with the police investigation."

A Met Police spokesman said: "Police were called at approximately 2.45am on Sunday 29 August following reports of an assault on Kensington High Street.

"Officers and London Ambulance Service attended and discovered a man and a woman suffering injuries.

"The woman had suffered a broken and dislocated elbow; the man was treated for a minor facial injury. Both went to a west London hospital for treatment.

"Officers subsequently stopped a vehicle and arrested four men on suspicion of assault.

"They were taken to west London police station and subsequently bailed to return in mid-October, pending further inquiries."

It is believed that Wilshere was out socialising after appearing in Arsenal's Premier League victory against Blackburn.

Earlier this week Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger said he was surprised that the youngster had been omitted from Fabio Capello's England squad to face Bulgaria and Switzerland next month.

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Family doctors and nurses should tell people they are fat rather than obese because such plain speaking would help more to lose weight, a health minister said today.

Anne Milton said the word fat was more likely to motivate people into shedding the pounds, adding it was important that they took "personal responsibility" for their lifestyles.

She told the BBC: "If I look in the mirror and think I am obese, I think I am less worried [than] if I think I am fat."

Milton – a former nurse who said she was speaking in a personal capacity – claimed too many NHS staff were worried about using the term fat, but said it could encourage people to take responsibility.

"At the end of the day, you cannot do it for them," she said. "People have to have the information."

Campaigners say the use of the word obese is grounded in medical science, whereas fat is simply a pejorative term.

Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said: "We had this debate 18 months ago when the Department of Health said we should call people overweight.

"Being obese is an internationally accepted medical definition where one's weight is so extreme that there is a risk of comorbidity of stroke, diabetes type two [and] heart disease. Obesity is a wake-up call to do something about weight. It's not just being fat."

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) today published guidelines on pregnancy, saying NHS staff were dealing with "an epidemic of obesity" among pregnant women.

The coalition government has struggled to define an agenda on public health, hoping to move away from the previous government's tendency to make new laws and instead push better behaviour in the wider population.

In doing so, it has come under fire from lobby groups who say people do not change the way they live their lives without signals from the government.

However, anti-smoking groups today praised the minister for confirming that the smoking ban would stay in place despite the previous administration's promises of a review, which would have examined whether it should have been extended to beer gardens and pub doorways.

"We are not rolling back the smoking ban, nor are we deploying austerity as an excuse for deregulation," Milton told an audience of health experts in central London.

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The death of Dr Ghazi Al-Qosaibi, the straight-talking Saudi technocrat, diplomat and poet, leaves a large hole at the top of the power structure in King Abdullah's Saudi Arabia. Ostensibly Ghazi (pronounced "Rhazzi") was Minister of Labour, charged with the hopeless task of reducing the foreign labour force and getting male Saudis to do a decent day's work. In reality he was the King's principal non-family confidant and adviser, the closest thing he had to a prime minister.

A sprawling, funny, oversized man of gargantuan appetites and ideas, Al-Qosaibi pursued an academic career in Cairo, California and London to become Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at King Saud University in Riyadh in the early 1970s. Outspoken and in a hurry, he caught the eye of the future King Fahd, who promoted him through a succession of positions to the Ministry of Industry and Electricity in 1975 and the Ministry of Health in 1982.

But in 1984 Al-Qosaibi's outspokenness proved his undoing, when he composed A Pen Bought and Sold, a poem that bemoaned the Saudi culture of wasta [influence] and corruption against which he battled as a minister, and the lack of high-level support he felt he was receiving – from his mentor Fahd, in particular

I see you among the crowds; yet I do not

see

That wonted smile flourishing on your

countenance.

Your eyes pass me over, hurrying, as if

They were passing a stranger, fleeing in

terror.

The minister's poem was published in Al-Hayat, the Beirut-based, pan-Arab newspaper, and everyone who mattered in the Arab world got the message. Fahd's close family was a byword for their profiteering, and the king's "sentence" on his outspoken minister could almost be seen as an admission of his own guilt. Although removed from his ministry, Al-Qosaibi was posted to not-so-painful exile as Saudi ambassador to the island of Bahrain off the Saudi eastern province of Al-Hasa – where he had been born in 1940 and where his family, a successful merchant clan, had long served as agents for the house of Saud.

Eight years later he was moved to London, to the be-pillared white Saudi embassy in Curzon Street, Mayfair, where he reveled in his role of trying to explain the Kingdom to an unsympathetic British public. Like many an ambassador, he wrote his fair share of letters to The Times, but perceiving where British political opinion was most fundamentally formed, he dispatched his truly impassioned epistles to the letters page of Private Eye.

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Tesco has been accused of hypocrisy for selling lager for a quarter of the pub price, a day after announcing its support for a government crackdown on irresponsible drinks promotions.

Britain's biggest supermarket is running cut-price deals on eight brands, including charging the equivalent of less than 70p a pint for Strongbow cider and Carling lager.

The Independent found the bargain-basement offers as Tesco announced its support for proposals to end them, laid out the previous day by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive, said that the company was aware of the need to act because of polling showing that 70 per cent of its customers thought binge-drinking was one of the most serious issues facing the country.

He wrote in an article in The Daily Telegraph yesterday: "We welcome the new Government's commitment to act on below-cost selling of alcohol and today I pledge that we will support Government-led action to make this happen across the UK. We will also support any future discussions on a minimum price for alcohol."

Sir Terry, a member of the former Prime Minister's senior council of business people, added that the reason action must be government-led was not because retailers were "unwilling to play their part in tackling this important issue" but because competition laws prevented them from holding discussions about prices.

Tesco first called for a ban on cheap alcohol promotions two years ago. In the ensuing period, along with other major store chains including Asda and Sainsbury's, it has continued to sell alcohol at a fraction of the price available in pubs and other licensed establishments.

This weekend Tesco is running a buy-two-packs-for-£16 deal on eight popular brands: Stella Artois, Carling, Becks, Boddingtons, Brahma, Carlsberg, Strongbow and Guinness.

Under the deal, shoppers can buy 30 440ml cans of these brands – totalling more than 13 litres, or 23 pints – for the equivalent of 69p a pint. Bottles of Stella Artois, the 5 per cent alcohol lager dubbed "wife beater", are on offer for the equivalent of £1 a pint. Duty and VAT are at least 55p per pint.

Tesco denied it was being hypocritical. "We have said that we will support an end to below-cost selling, and if appropriate a minimum unit price to help tackle the problem of binge-drinking," said spokesman Tom Hoskin. "But, to be effective, any action on price has to involve the whole retail industry."

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Betty's divorce came through on the day of her golden wedding anniversary. She had lived overseas for 50 years, married to a domineering Frenchman who earlier in their marriage had fathered a child with another woman. When finally she called time on the troubled relationship, she decided to return to her native Liverpool, yet her self-confidence was completely shot. Betty is 79.

Sue lost both her husband and her father within 12 months. She, too, found herself bereft of confidence, and couldn't bring herself to leave the house. She became introverted, introspective, and stopped reading anything, even newspapers.

Margaret suffered from depression. Her sister's health was poor and her son, too, had been ill. A devout Catholic, she found solace in prayer, but still suffered from panic attacks and needed anti-depressants.

Pip, aged 58, and once the regional sales manager for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, has suffered nine strokes, all stress-related. He no longer works.

Louise has Asperger's syndrome. She has difficulty following conversations, but is fed up of being "treated like an idiot".

Noelene rarely left the sanctuary of her home. Her mother said to her, "What you need is some friends to hang out with". Noelene replied, "Well, do me a favour, go and find me some. And when you find them, I'll hang out with them."

Noelene has friends now. Louise relates better than ever to other people. Pip's health has improved. Margaret and Sue are cheerful, outgoing and chatty, while Betty positively radiates charisma. And they all owe their transformation to a Friday-morning reading group at a community centre in Birkenhead, led by Kate McDonnell, a serene, softly-spoken, middle-aged Oxford graduate who suffers badly from rheumatoid arthritis.

McDonnell works for Get Into Reading, an initiative started nine years ago by Jane Davis, an English lecturer at Liverpool University. This is principally a story of inspirational women, none more so than Davis, whose original motivation was to introduce great literature to people who would never otherwise encounter it. That is still one of the principles of Get Into Reading, and the charity to which it gave birth, The Reader Organisation. Yet along the way, the goalposts shifted. Davis has effectively turned William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson and WB Yeats, into therapists.

Her own background is key to the whole remarkable enterprise. Davis left school in Liverpool at 16, with two O-Levels. By 19, she was a mother, living in squats. Yet she had always read to keep herself company. Part of her childhood had been spent living above a pub, surrounded by drunk adults, so she would escape to the local library to immerse herself in what she now describes as "another universe, where your parents look after you, and you have a pony".

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It's at least five days since I last wrote about Angelina Jolie and, fresh from her publicity tour for the broad Cold War stereotyping of her spy thriller Salt, the star has revealed she's to make a more nuanced movie next.

On a "surprise visit" to Sarajevo this weekend, she announced – via the unusual means of a statement issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – that she's developing a romance set during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. Ms Jolie met returnees to Eastern Bosnia earlier this year, in her capacity as a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

On her latest visit, she discussed ways to help returning war refugees with members of the country's inter-ethnic presidency. Her solution? Cast actors from the various ethnicities of the former Yugoslavia: "I would like to involve as many local people as possible and learn as much as I can," she said. The film, about a couple who meet just before the outbreak of war, is, Ms Jolie insisted, "a love story, not a political statement". But then, everything is politics. (Especially in Bosnia.)

* Red-faced Russianist Orlando Figes last month agreed to pay damages to two fellow academics whose work he'd anonymously disparaged on the Amazon website. Figes has been unwell, and absent from his post as a history professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, since the scandal broke. He's now on the road to recovery, however, and took up an invitation to lecture at the Universidad Gabriela Mistral in Santiago last week, while on a long-planned holiday in Chile with his family. Figes's five lectures in four days included one about "Russia in the World" and another on "Private Life in Stalin's Russia". The trip, I'm told, was part of the Prof's "phased return to work", approved by Birkbeck and his doctors. Should he wish to take a break from Russia, as well as from the UK, then the nearby Bolivarian republics ought to keep a historian of socialism happy.

* Frank Skinner got into something of a spat with Edinburgh Fringe venue the Assembly Rooms when he pulled out of hosting a run of "talk shows" with fellow performers days before this year's festival kicked off. Skinner's reason was that there were "too many gaps" in the guest list, despite confirmed appearances from Alan Cumming, Ardal O'Hanlon, Mel Smith, Steven Berkoff, Omid Djalili, Jenny Eclair, Jo Brand, Alistair McGowan, Clive Anderson and Julian Clary (among others). "My bags were packed, my train ticket was in my pocket, and I was very excited about the whole thing," Skinner said. "[But] it seems it was harder to put together than anyone thought. I'm genuinely gutted." The venue booked Skinner's fellow comic Stephen K Amos to take his place, but its artistic director, William Burdett-Coutts, believed Skinner had just "changed his mind... It was not exactly ideal." Burdett-Coutts might be surprised to learn that Skinner has been enjoying the Fringe anyway. On Saturday the funnyman featured in the impromptu "Iranian dancing" finale of Irish-Iranian stand-up Patrick Monahan's show at the Gilded Balloon. He's yet to turn up, even as a reserve guest, at "The Talk Show".

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