Forget X-Factor or Pop Idol: the quickest route to instant celebrity is now the glitzy, straight-to-YouTube suicide bomber video, writes Jamie Bartlett.
The videos made by 7/7 bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were widely circulated and viewed. But while they took care to quote Koranic verses and authenticated hadiths to justify their acts, the "new wave" is emphatically less concerned with ideology. The copycat videos made by six of the eight young hopefuls currently on trial for planning to blow up passenger jets are inspired more by gangster movies than by religious fanaticism. Egged on by an impromptu cameraman urging him to "give it some!", Abdul Ahmed Ali, from Walthamstow, says he will "decorate" streets with body parts; Tanvir Hussain hopes his attack will "make people realise, you know, don't mess with the Muslims."
Across Europe, violent Islamic extremists are getting younger and showing less interest in theology. What motivates them is not injustice in Palestine or religious fervour—it's James Bond-style adventure and notoriety. The young men found guilty last year of plotting to blow up Bluewater went to an al Qaeda training camp, but were disappointed because it didn't have an assault course, "like I'd seen on TV," as one put it. (Things improved when they were given a rocket launcher. "It was wicked," one said.)
Al Qaeda is no longer a religious terrorist network, it's a brand—and the suicide bomber video, guaranteed a million hits on YouTube, provides a handy shortcut on the arduous path from anonymity to stardom.
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Image, above: 22nd April—a worker rests after searching for usable coal at a cinder dump site in Changzhi, China. According to the deputy head of the country's power regulator, coal supplies at major Chinese power plants have slipped to levels that cover just 12 days of generation, down from 15 days in early March
Back to black
Are rising fuel costs driving the world energy market backwards? Europe is experiencing an astonishing return to coal as an energy source, with around 50 coal-fired power plants expected to come on stream across the continent over the next five years. This is largely the result of soaring oil and gas prices, and stringent restrictions on building new nuclear power plants. Even more remarkably, the oil-rich United Arab Emirates has plans to invest in coal-fired power plants to meet power needs at a time of acute natural gas shortages. Thus far, the global struggle to lower carbon emissions has focused largely on the coal-powered economies of India and China. But now, with other continents returning to the "dirty" fuel, increasing emphasis is bound to fall on questions of technology. Power companies claim that modern coal plants filter out most toxins from their emissions, but environmentalists contend that such "clean coal" is a contradiction, and that new plants emit barely less carbon than old ones. One country that stands to benefit is Australia, which accounts for almost a third of world coal exports. Between climate and economic necessity, however, this is a battle that will only continue to run.
Shoot the swans
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestselling account of the power of the unexpected, is being appropriated by desperate financiers, writes Nicholas Dunbar. Financial rating agencies have begun to lace their credit crunch mea culpas with echoes of Taleb's theory that history is often punctuated by cataclysmic events that could not have been predicted—so-called "black swans." Desperate to avoid the suggestion that they were corrupted by the vast profits they made while the asset bubble grew, ratings agencies are now claiming they were simply surprised by a bevy of black swans. Fair enough? Not when it was an open secret that billions of dollars' worth of high-risk portfolios had the potential for extreme loss built into them from the start. Time, perhaps, for some good old-fashioned empirical blame.
Short story glory
Thanks to all who took part in the inaugural Prospect/Franco-British Council prize for a short story of under 1,000 words inspired by France, which was awarded in May by an illustrious jury including Julian Barnes, Ian Rankin, Bonnie Greer and our own ex-deputy editor, William Skidelsky. Congratulations, in particular, to the two winners: Sarah Collier of the University of Salford (in the undergraduate category) for "The Face," and Caitlin Hart of St Paul's Girls' School (sixth form category) for "Heat." The standard of writing was, Barnes noted, "very high," with entries "creating believable and quirky characters—a real achievement in under 1,000 words." All the prize-winning stories in each category can be read on our website and discussed via our blog.
All hail the holy goalie
Boruc's divinations may be having an effect: against all the odds, Celtic have regained their lead in the Scottish league and are now title favourites.
Poor old China
Last year, the World Bank made the world $3.5 trillion poorer—overnight. The bank conducted price surveys of goods and services to calculate relative costs of living in different countries, and, consequently, relative personal wealth. But in China, the data was gathered exclusively from 11 large, mostly prosperous cities—whereas 60 per cent of China's population live in rural areas.
Unsurprisingly, then, the survey found that prices in China were much "higher" than previous estimates—which themselves were highly questionable. So the bank shrank its estimate of China's 2005 output (in PPP terms) by a remarkable 40 per cent since its previous report—to $5.3 trillion from $8.8 trillion.
What does all this confusion mean for the bank's ambitious prediction that global poverty will be halved by 2015? The bank's official line is that it is still calculating backdated figures, but does not expect that this will "fundamentally affect" the 2015 projection. Quite breathtaking confidence from an organisation that seems to have great trouble working out exactly how many poor people there actually are.
Farewell Maxwell
Simon Maxwell, one of the biggest names on the development scene in Britain, has come to the end of his term as head of the Overseas Development Institute. The think tank-cum-consultancy—named "think tank to watch" by Prospect in 2005—has grown rapidly under his leadership in the past few years, and now employs more than 100 people, making it Britain's biggest think tank. Maxwell says he has no idea what he's going to do next.
Three-jobs Johnson?
Meanwhile, what is to become of Veronica Wadley, the Evening Standard editor wot won it for Boris? Rumours of the Standard's closure are again doing the rounds. But Wadley's gamble on Boris must certainly boost her chances of becoming the next editor of the Daily Mail.
