Amstetten's social services did not ignore the expanding Fritzl family on the upper floors of the stolid grey house on Ybbsstrasse. On the contrary, they visited 21 times, but never reported any anxieties about the "upstairs" children or a father who later told his court-appointed psychiatrist that he was "born to rape". Why not? Three times fires broke out at the house, possibly caused by faults in the electrical wiring to the cellar. Three times an inspector called but did not properly investigate. Why not? Never in her daughter's quarter-century incarceration eleven steps below her living room did Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, question his explanation for her absence. Nor have police questioned Rosemarie since his arrest even though Elisabeth is known to despise her. Why not? LEADERThe Times These are Britain's two nations. Not those born abroad and those born here, not black or white, rich or poor, men or women, North or South, public or private sector, writes Alice Thomson. But those who belong to the world of work and those who are alienated from it, living off the taxes from other people's earnings. Nearly eight million people of working age in Britain have been "economically inactive" for the past few years. More than 2.5 million of them are on incapacity benefit - of these 2,130 people are too "fat" to work; 1,100 can't work because they have trouble getting to sleep; 4,000 get headaches; 380 are confined to the sofa by haemorrhoids; 3,000 are kept at home by gout; and half a million are too depressed to get a job. ALICE THOMSONThe Times Just as visitors to the Middle East see half-built, mostly abandoned concrete housing blocks and barracks littering the landscape of Syria and Jordan, so the towers of Dubai will become casualties not of human greed but of architectural folly, writes Simon Jenkins. Their lifts and services, expensive to maintain, will collapse. Their colossal facades will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs. Animals will inhabit their basements. Thousands of residential properties, if occupied at all, will be squatted by a migratory poor, like the hotel towers of the Spanish littoral or Corbusier's blockhouses of Chandigarh in India. Refugees will colonise the camps where Indian workers have lived as they built Dubai. Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards. SIMON JENKINSThe Guardian A recent study in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organisation found that one of the biggest single factors in reducing corruption in a country is "the free circulation of daily newspapers per person." Go to any country,writes Johann Hari, and you'll find that the lower the newspaper circulation, the higher the corruption. If nobody's watching, anything goes. The best plan to save the newspaper has come from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He has launched a programme where every French citizen, on her 18th birthday, will be given a year's free subscription to a newspaper of her choice. The effects are subtle. Many young readers will develop a newspaper habit. In turn, newspapers will compete harder to capture this lucrative guaranteed market, and make their product accessible and fresh. JOHANN HARIThe Independent We have spent an extra £90 billion on the health service, the third-biggest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways, writes Camilla Cavendish. We have Third World maternity wards, elderly patients discharged with malnutrition, lower cancer and stroke survival rates than most of Europe Used wisely, extra cash is a quid pro quo for convincing professionals to accept unpopular reforms. But ministers, luxuriating in their largesse, struck some hopelessly poor bargains. We have also suffered from what I call Parkinson's Second Law. This is the rule that meetings, feasibility studies, vanity projects and pointless activity expand to fill the budget available. So you get armies of people creating forms for other people to fill in - 10 strategic health authorities and 152 primary care trusts, 47 learning and skills councils and 9 regional development agencies.CAMILLA CAVENDISHThe Times Browsing in Waterstone's bookshop, my attention was captured by a section that revealed a fresh layer of national insanity. Painful Lives, it was called. You know the sort of thing, child abuse, abandonment, death, alienation of affection, grief, autism and a little more child abuse thrown in, for that is the money shot of misery memoirs, apparently. What sort of creeps are captivated by these tales? Who walks into a bookshop and announces he is of a mind to read about child molestation? Martin Samuel The Times Now, in the interests of clarity, George W Bush's book isn't strictly speaking an autobiography but rather a series of explanations of decisions he has taken, including why he gave up drinking and why he decided Dick Cheney was a good idea, without having to bother with that boring crap called "narrative". Think of it, as one suspects George does, as the York Notes to his autobiography. It's crazy that size-zero models get endlessly criticised while Beth Ditto is described as an icon. I know skinny-is-cool is a dangerous message but let's recognise that obese-is-cool is every bit as bad. We bullied and nagged smokers, made adverts that said they smelt so awful they were unkissable and finally, with the smoking ban, we literally turned them into shivering outsiders - all because we knew it was for their own good. You have to be cruel to be kind and pretending that obesity is groovy is not being kind to anybody. Advocates of killing criminals now try to argue that the strongest contributor to false convictions - misleading evidence - has been lessened by forensic advances, and that modern judges are less likely to send a man down for the cut of his jib. But other variable elements in the system of justice - juries, witnesses, media - may have become less reliable because of the greater risk of prejudicial publicity and the increasing difficulty, at a time when work is short and short-contracted, of attracting a broad social mix to serve on juries. Google Earth is only the start. One of the hottest phrases in technology at the moment is "geo-tagging", aka location-based technology. The idea is that the online world will eventually merge with the offline - that as you walk down the street, your mobile phone, earpiece, wristband, 3-D goggles or brain implant will alert you to whether your friends are in the vicinity, or provide carefully filtered offers and discounts from nearby shops and restaurants. Robert Colvile Daily TelegraphQuestions after Fritzl
Full article: Jozef Fritzl: Austria must examine itself 
The people who simply won't work
Full article: Two nations: those who work, those who won't 
Dubai will crumble
Full article: As they did Ozymandias, the dunes will reclaim the soaring folly of Dubai 
Save the newspaper
Full article: How we can save newspapers 
Billions wasted on the NHS
Full article: Insane spendaholics are mortgaging our future In Brief
Painful lives
Full article: Who walks into a bookshop wanting to read about child molestation? Dubya's book
Hadley Freeman The Guardian
Full article: The Dubya diaries We need to bully fat people
Frank Skinner The Times
Full article: Fat comedians? They'll die laughing Miscarriages of justice
Mark Lawson The Guardian
Full article: Courts, like theatres, deliver drama but also great pretence Google earth
Full article: Google Street View's looking at you, kids. . .
Thursday, 16 April 2009
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