30.01.

2015

THE DEATH OF FAT

Prepare
for the
pill to make
you thin
ISSN 2052-1081

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9 772052 108010

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YOSEMITE: THE INSIDE STORY By Andy Cave

30.01.2015

N.5

18 The socialite

murder gripping
the States
by Lynnley Browning

20 The Greek rebel

shaking up the EU
by Yiannis Baboulias

22 Inquiry opens on

the spy poisoned

by Russia
by Mary Dejevsky

26 A dating

revolution for
Islams millenials
by Vivian Nereim

NEW WORLD
COREY RICH/AURORA

52 How magnets can

stop machines
wearing out
by James Badcock

DOWNTIME
FEATURES

VERTICAL LIMIT: After

19 days on the wall,
Yosemite climbers
reached the summit of
El Capitan, see p36

28

Al-Qaida: the comeback

After a year in which the leadership of global terrorism was

seized by Isis, al-Qaida is launching its return. Newsweek
reports from its new stronghold in Yemen
36

China
River rescue

The truth about the Dawn Face

Crowd cooling

10 Chechnya

by Andy Cave
42

Brazil

The inspirational feat achieved by two young adventurers

on Californias El Capitan rock gripped millions. But only
another climber can possibly know the real story

Poster girl

The death of fat

scholar the real

Anne Boleyn
by Leanda de Lisle

60 Eastwoods latest
BIG SHOTS
6

by James Fergusson

56 Seductress or

12 India

The medical arms race to nd a magic pill that will defeat

obesity is nearly over and the winner will make a fortune

film explores the

soul of war
by Alexander
Nazaryan

64 Hitchocks lost

WWII footage
returns to TV
by Abigail Jones

66 This week in 1966

Truman Capotes In
Cold Blood

Shake it all about

PAG E O N E

by Catherine Ostler

14 Frances problem
COVER CREDITS

with secularism

DANIEL BIDDULPH, SHUTTERSTOCK

by Lucy Wadham

Newsweek (ISSN 2052-1081), is published weekly except for a double issue in December. Newsweek (EMEA) is
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NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

IN THIS ISSUE

CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE

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NEWSWEEK (Europe, Middle East & Africa)

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
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EDITORIAL: EMEA@NEWSWEEK.COM / SUBSCRIPTIONS: EMEA-SUPPORT@NEWSWEEK.COM

NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

Andy Cave
is an awardwinning author,
world class
mountaineer. He
has led expeditions around the
world, including the Himalayas, the
Alps and Alaska and is the author of
Thin White Line.
Catherine
Ostler
is a contributing
editor to Newsweek and to the
Daily Mail. She is
the former editor
of Tatler and the Evening Standard
Magazine.
James
Fergusson
is the author of
several acclaimed
books on Afghanistan and Somalia.
He recently
completed a Masters degree in hydrogeology at Strathclyde University.
Lucy Wadham
is a British
novelist and
journalist based in
Paris. She is the
author of the
bestselling The
Secret Life of France, a study of the
French mindset.
Mary Dejevsky
has worked as a
foreign correspondent in Moscow
for The Times, and
in Paris and Washington DC for The
Independent. A member of the Chatham House thinktank and the Valdai
Group, she is also an Honorary
Research Fellow at the University of
Buckingham.

The fridge needs help. Because much of the energy we need to power it produces waste, pollutes
the atmosphere and changes the climate. We can transition the way we produce and use energy
in a way that will contribute to a sustainable future. Were campaigning in countries all around the
world to provide the solutions for governments, for companies and for all members of society to
make the right choices about energy conservation and use. And you, as an individual, can help
just by the choices you make. Help us look after the world where you live at panda.org/50

Spitsbergen, Norway.
Wild Wonders of Europe / Ole Joergen Liodden / WWF-Canon

1986 Panda symbol WWF WWF is a WWF Registered Trademark

HELP
SAVE
THE
FRIDGE

EPA

NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

BIG
SHOTS

CHINA

River rescue
Relatives of
passengers missing
from an overturned
tugboat in the
Yangtze River huddle
together, united in
their grief. A man
seeks news on his
mobile telephone.
Only three out of
22 people on board
were saved, one of
whom was freed a
full 14 hours after
the boat capsized
when rescuers cut
through the bottom
of the hull. The
30-metre-long boat
was undergoing tests
when it suddenly
turned over,
flooding the cockpit
within 20 seconds,
according to one of
the survivors.

WU HONG

NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

GETTY

NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

BIG
SHOTS

BRAZIL

Crowd
cooling
Temperatures in
Brazil have reached
40C during the most
severe heatwave in
the country for 50
years. Some respite
is at hand for these
residents of Rio,
cooling off in the sea
at Copacabana Beach,
where traditionally
it is unusual to swim
after the sun has gone
down. Elsewhere,
in the city of Santos,
close to So Paulo,
at least 30 elderly
people have died
in the heat. This
comes after 2014 was
declared the warmest
year, globally, since
records began in
1880, says Nasa.
MARIO TAMA

NEWSWEEK

30/01/2015

BIG
SHOTS

]CHECHNYA
Poster girl
A woman holds a
placard expressing
her commitment
to the prophet
Muhammad during
a state-sponsored
rally in the North
Caucasus region
of Chechnya.
Demonstrators chant
Allahu-Akbar
(God is great) and
release balloons into
the sky as speakers
harangue Western
governments for
allowing publications
to print caricatures
of the prophet.
Chechnya is loyal to
Russia, where the
leadership extended
its condolences to
France over the
Charlie Hebdo killings
but also accused
the cartoonists of
provoking the attacks.
MAKSIM BABENKO

NEWSWEEK

10

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NEWSWEEK

11

30/01/2015

BIG
SHOTS

]INDIA
Shake it all
about
Makar Sankranti
marks one of the
most important
festivals of the Hindu
calendar, celebrating
the suns celestial
journey into the
northern hemisphere.
On Sagar Island, at
the confluence of
the river Ganges and
the Bay of Bengal,
a Sadhu or holy
man casually
tosses his head after
taking a dip in the
water, creating an
impressive arc of
water. The festival
marks the arrival of
spring in India.
RUPAK DE CHOWDHURI

NEWSWEEK

12

30/01/2015

13

30/01/2015

REUTERS

NEWSWEEK

MILLIONS OF MUSLIMS IN
FRANCE FELT DEEPLY INSULTED

One of Frances most eminent Muslim

intellectuals, Malek Chebel, discusses
post-Charlie Hebdo multiculturalism
AN EMOTIONAL shock often makes us look
for some kind of echo, some proof in the world
around us that everything has changed, but the
morning after last weeks terrorist attacks on
their city, Parisians woke to pristine winter sunshine and a clear blue sky.
Crossing town to meet Malek Chebel, one of
Frances most prominent Muslim intellectuals
a man who always meets fanaticism, wherever it

scared, though, she told me. People are crying

at their desks. That evening she left her own
desk and went straight to the Place de la Rpublique, along with about 35,000 others, and called
me from the vast square.
Its such a beautiful, poignant atmosphere.
And it has nothing to do with patriotism or politics. It really gives you hope. I didnt ask her how
many Muslims she thought might be out on that
square, but that was what I was thinking as I spoke to her.
I met Malek Chebel in the English
Bar of the Hotel Raphael in the 16th
arrondissement a quiet, oak-panelled room with crimson velvet
upholstery and antique Persian rugs,
designed to look like the French idea of an
English gentlemans club. Chebel was visibly
delighted to be there. It was only 10 oclock and
hed already given four interviews. Im usually
called in at times like these to calm things down,

BETWEEN WORLDS:
Malek Chebel, right,
an Algerian-born
French academic, has
remarked upon the
continuing tension
between secularism
and multiculturalism
in France

France no longer just wants

integration, it wants assimilation
and thats just not acceptable.
hails from, with the same reassuringly sagacious
smile I thought of the tears in my daughters
voice when shed called me from work the day
before. Her office is not far from Charlie Hebdos
and she said she could hear the sirens. No ones

NEWSWEEK

14

30/01/2015

BY
LUCY WADHAM
@LucyWadham

BE NJAM IN CHEL LY

NEWSWEEK

15

30/01/2015

he said. Out there its a Greek tragedy, everyones passions unleashed.

Later that afternoon hed been invited to a televised debate with the right-wing polemicist, Eric
Zemmour, whose terrifyingly successful misery essay, Le Suicide Franais (which has sold
400,000 in three months) argues that ever since
de Gaulle, French identity has been irredeemably corroded by feminists, homosexuals and
Arabs. That day in particular, I looked forward to
seeing Chebel dismantle Zemmours passions
with his usual skill and charm.
With his religious upbringing in Algeria, followed by his two French doctorates in social
anthropology and psychology, Malek Chebel has
passports into both worlds. He earned his reputation in Arab society by translating the Koran into
French in an edition that won the approval of all
the key Muslim clerics from the Maghreb to Indonesia. But he has also tackled the two subjects
closest to French hearts: sex and psychoanalysis.
Chebels titles include The Arabic Kama Sutra,
Arab Eroticism, and the just-published The
Islamic Unconscious. Impressively, he has to date
no fatwa on his head. Thats because few Muslims have actually read the Koran. Its a very, very
difficult text. I gave 10 years of my life to studying
it and that earned me peoples respect.
Using his erudition to spread a message of liberation from what he calls the dangerous ideologies that have taken possession of his religion,
Chebel regularly cites the learned and inclusive
Islamic society that was established under the
Abbasid caliphates of the Middle Ages as proof
that Islam can be reformed.
I asked Chebel if hed experienced much racism in his adopted land. He told me that when
hed first arrived in France from Algeria in the
mid-1970s hed gone to see the Alps with his girlfriend at the time. They had stopped in a remote
village and an old woman, after circling him several times, had approached him and offered him
some household bleach for his skin. Something
remains of that womans desire in many French
people the desire to wash us all whiter than
white, he said with a forgiving smile.
When I asked him whether he thought France
was Islamophobic, his answer was coy and rueful:
Im afraid theres a subtle system of thought in
place here, which lends itself to an Islamophobic
atmosphere. Chebel was talking about Frances
obsession with la lacit, which in English means
secularism as in the separation of church and
state. This translation, however, doesnt quite
cover it. Today, the word in French carries with it
a history of deep antagonism and mutual distrust
between the worlds of political belief and reli-

NEWSWEEK

16

gious faith. Its a visceral hatred that was fuelled

by the excesses of the Catholic church under the
ancien rgime, nurtured by the Revolution, reignited under the Third Empire and, even after the
official separation of church and state in 1905, has
flared up regularly ever since. Unfortunately, la
lacit has become a dogma in this country which
often masks a posture of intolerance.
This intolerance is not only expressed towards
Muslims. A Jewish friend of my daughters, who
has recently begun practising her religion in
defiance of the disapproval of her forcefully lac
parents, as well as nearly all her friends, told me
that to be a practising anything in this country
requires real strength of character.
That lacit might be seen as a form of oppression would be deeply offensive to many French
secularists who pride themselves on their egalitarian values. These are the people who supported the ban on French Muslim girls wearing
their headscarves at school, and of course the
law against wearing a burka in public. Their main
argument in support of these measures (which
many outside France perceive as an infringement
of personal liberty) is somewhat paradoxical:
young French Muslim women must be protected
from patriarchal oppression (of which the headscarf is a symbol) by being told what they can or
cant wear in public.

30/01/2015

PARIS IS BURNING:
In the wake of the
attacks on the offices
of the satirical
magazine Charlie
Hebdo, demonstrators
made their way
along the Place de la
Rpublique in Paris,
left. Chebel, below
left, who received the
Legion of Honour from
President Nicolas
Sarkozy, has spoken
about Frances failure
to truly integrate
Islamic culture

In fact, as Chebel pointed out, Frances allergy

to the Muslim headscarf may have more to do
with Frances own patriarchal traditions, which
make the idea of a woman choosing to cover up
her charms distinctly unpalatable.
Perhaps Islams function in the French collective unconscious is to mask its own regressive
tendencies, Chebel suggested. The French
patriarchy can hide behind Islam, which everyone thinks of as a patriarchal and misogynistic
religion. He said he was against headscarves in
schools at first and supported the ban, but has
since changed his mind. When I realised that
many Muslim girls wear the headscarf because
it made them feel more comfortable, I could no
longer oppose it.
Whats not often discussed here is whether
religious intolerance is just another form of racial
discrimination. According to a study carried out
by the French institute of national statistics in
April 2014, a candidate with an Arabic-sounding name here is still considerably less likely to
be called back for interview, even if he or she has
better qualifications, than a rival with a European-sounding name.
When I mentioned the idea of positive action
to counteract this kind of discrimination, Chebel

P A G E

realised, perhaps, that my prejudices might not

be the ones against which he had armed himself so carefully, he began to lower his guard. He
confessed that, wedded as he was to the idea of
freedom of expression, hed felt that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had indeed been offensive.
There are millions of Muslims in this country
who felt deeply insulted. Of course death should
never be the consequence, but we must have
more understanding.
In todays multicultural society, Frances secularist doctrine creates an unbearable tension
and behind this dogmatic form of lacit there
often lies a fundamental lack of acceptance of
other cultures. The trouble is, he added. France
no longer just wants integration, it wants assimilation and thats just not acceptable. I think the
British model, which practices tolerance towards all
minorities, is wonderful.
But were still a long way
from that.
When it was time for
him to face Zemmour, we
walked together to the nearest Metro station. On
the Place de LEtoile, a young man recognised
him, came up to us and made a heartfelt speech
about his horror at the terrorist attacks: Im a
Muslim but Im well-integrated, he began, his
hand on his heart. He went on to say how the
shootings had made him feel physically sick, how
that wasnt Islam, how grateful he was to France
for welcoming him in (from Morocco), for giving
him a job (he was a waiter in a nearby caf), and
for helping him to educate his children.
After Chebel and I had said goodbye, I remembered the young mans words: Im a Muslim but
Im well-integrated. I tried to imagine a British
Muslim making that kind of statement today. I
realised that it was something you might have
expected to hear back in the 1960s from someone whod just moved to Britain from Pakistan.
Its true, I thought as I descended the steps
into the Metro for all Frances beautiful ideas
and high moments of popular fervour, there is,
in practice, a long way to go before its practising
n
Muslims will feel at home.

M A RC P I ES EC K I / DAV I D RA M OS/G E T T Y/G E RA R D C E R L ES/20 0 8 A F P

The French patriarchy can hide behind

Islam, which everyone thinks of as a
patriarchal and misogynistic religion.
expressed the view of the majority of French people: Positive action signals an admission that, in
a society of equal opportunity, the person youre
favouring is weaker. Its a mark of disdain.
Chebels argument echoes the prevailing egalitarianist orthodoxy the same orthodoxy that
supports Frances law against gathering data
about ethnic minorities, even as a tool to combat
discrimination. The argument is that the French
are so attached to the ideal of equality before the
law that they perceive any departure from that
principle as a form of injustice.
Chebels caution towards his host culture is
very occasionally replaced by a gentle mockery. When I brought up the horror that had
spread across France when it was revealed that
non-Muslim children had been given halal meat
in their school cafeterias, he said, The reason
for the violence of that reaction was their unconscious belief that we were invading them from
the inside. And we were using meat to do it,
which of course is sacred here.
As we settled into the conversation and Chebel

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30/01/2015

P A G E

O N E

THE TRUST-FUND BABY WHO

SHOT HIS FATHER IN THE HEAD

AS WALL STREET investor Thomas Gilbert Sr.

stood under the giant elm trees shading Princeton Universitys stately Nassau Hall on a sunny
June Commencement Day in 2009, he saw a
gleaming future for his son, Thomas Jr. Hes
going to run a hedge fund! the senior Gilbert,
also a Princeton alumnus, declared with pride
when asked what the handsome, 6ft 3in, blondhaired Tommy planned to do with his economics degree. Things turned out very differently for
both Tommy and his father.
Tommy, now 30, never held down a job after
graduating and lived off his parents handouts.
And on 4 January he was arrested on suspicion
of shooting his 70-year-old father in the head
inside his parents eighth-floor Manhattan apartment. Tabloids and TV news were riveted by the
drama of the wealthy scion who, according to an
indictment, killed his father on a Sunday afternoon with a .40-calibre Glock pistol after asking
his mother, Shelley, to run out and fetch him a
sandwich. When she returned to her expensive
Beekman Place apartment shortly after 3.15pm,
Tommy was gone and her husband was dead in

NEWSWEEK

18

the bedroom, the Glock not so artfully placed on

his chest, as if to suggest this was a suicide. She
called 911 and reported that she thought Tommy
had murdered his father, court papers show.
When police descended on Tommys shabby,
one-bedroom apartment in New York Citys
Chelsea neighborhood around 11pm, after tracking him down by pinging his iPhone and ordering him to return to his apartment, they found
ammunition for a .40 Glock, a Glock manual and
carrying case, a speedloader, a red dot sight for a
handgun, 21 blank credit cards and a skimmer
used to steal credit card numbers. Arrested on
the spot, Tommy was indicted by the Manhattan
district attorneys office a few days later.
The details of the Tommy Gilbert case have
captured the imagination of a certain portion of
society in Manhattan and the Hamptons. After
all, if money, good looks, an Ivy League education and an entre to Wall Street arent sufficient
ingredients for happiness and success, what is?
People are calling him a monster, but the person I knew wasnt a monster, a former Princeton classmate tells Newsweek. He was a human

30/01/2015

BY
LYNNLEY BROWNING
IN NEW YORK

AP

Since the murder earlier this month,

New Yorks socialites have been trying
to explain likeable Tommy Gilbert

WASP ON TRIAL:
Gilbert was arrested
after his mother
called the police
and reported he had
murdered his father
at their apartment in
Manhattans Beekman
Place

and a likeable one. Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for

Tommy, declined to comment.
With his model looks, Tommy seemed a classic New York Wasp. The family belonged to the
obsessively exclusive Maidstone Club in fashionable East Hampton, New York, close to where
his father and mother own a house worth more
than $10m. As blogs bristled with barbs about
a spoiled brat and trust-fund baby, NYPD
chief of detectives Robert Boyce indicated at
a press conference that money was behind the
ghastly crime. The senior Gilbert had been
paying the $2,400-a-month rent on Tommys
Chelsea apartment, and tabloids reported that
Tommy was not happy with his fathers threat to
cut his weekly allowance to $300 from $400
hardly a princely sum in Manhattan.
Last 18 September, court records show,
Tommy was charged by police in Southampton,
Long Island, with violating a June 2014 protection order taken out by Peter Smith Jr, whose
father rode the Hampton Jitney bus on weekends
from Manhattan with Tommys father. Three
earlier, in nearby Sagaponack, the Smith home,

NEWSWEEK

a 17th-century historic mansion, burned to the

ground in circumstances that are unclear. Lisa
Costa, a detective with the Southampton police
who is investigating the fire, says Gilbert is a
person of interest in the blaze.
Tommy spent the five years since he left
Princeton doing not much more than surfing,
practicing Bikram yoga, working out, eating
sushi and watching Netflix, according to Anna
Rothschild, who dated him in early 2014. Rothschild is a 49-year-old Manhattan socialite who
runs a public-relations firm. Until he moved into
the Chelsea apartment in May 2014, he lived in
a dark, cramped basement studio apartment,
also paid for by his father, near 86th Street and
Lexington Avenue, where the Upper East Side
starts to turn from pricey to gritty. Tommy was
quite well dressed and very clean, but that studio, with ragged furniture and a television with
no cable service, was appalling, says a person
who saw it. Friends and former classmates told
Newsweek he was quiet. He seemed kind of gentle but insecure, a former classmate says. He
always seemed ambivalent. He was sweet, but he
seemed abnormally calm.
Despite his fathers bold prediction, Tommy
was skeptical of Wall Street. He saw it as having way too much power and control, the former
classmate says. Others say that was a reflection of his attitude to his father, who was also a
Harvard Business School graduate. He would
talk about how anything he attempted to do, it
wasnt good enough for his father, Rothschild
says. He probably figured, Whats the point of
having a job? Last May, Tommy did register a
hedge fund, though it never raised any money,
securities filings show. While wealthy in absolute
terms, the Gilbert family was not super rich by
New York standards. A will filed in Manhattan
Surrogate Court shows Gilbert Srs estate worth
$1.627m. Slayer laws would prevent Tommy
from inheriting his one-third share if convicted.
In a possible sign of a cash crunch, according to a
former colleague of the father, the Gilberts listed
their East Hampton home for sale last month
for $11.5m. (The listing was canceled after the
murder.)
At the Main Beach Surf Shop in East Hampton,
George McSurfer McKee remembers Tommy
as someone who always took the path of least
resistance, who was a little below-average in
turning and catching waves. He was kind of fooling around. While he always had plenty of surfboards, he tended to avoid the tough-to-control
short boards, preferring a longer, wider fishtail
board. He would always, McKee says, ride the
n
easiest one to ride.

19

30/01/2015

P A G E

O N E

GREEKS BEARING 12M EURO

DEMANDS SPOOK EURO LEADERS

Alexis Tsipras is the new face of a

pan-European left-wing movement
determined to upset the staus quo

ITS ELEVEN at night, on 12 January, and Alexis

Tsipras, the 40-year-old leader of the radical
left-wing Syriza party, is being interviewed live
on Greek TV. Speaking with the confidence of
a man who the polls say will give him a lead of
at least 3.5% over the incumbent conservative
party, New Democracy, he looks like he is giving
his first prime ministerial interview, two weeks

most in Greece have lost their appetite for grandstanding politicians. Two days later, Tsipras took
questions on Twitter, making #AskTsipras the
number one trending hashtag in Greece and the
third globally.
No longer the anti-Euro maverick introduced
to the mainstream when Syriza was a marginal
political force, Tsipras is promising to end austerity and renegotiate Greeces massive debt now standing at more than
170% of the countrys GDP while
staying within the Eurozone. More
bodly still, he promises to go to war
with Greek oligarchs, an intention
indicative of the extend of his ambition to break with traditional politicking in this
corruption-ridden country.
For those who remember his early days at the
helm of a tiny party that hardly won 4,6% of the
vote, the contrast between Tsipras past and his
current image, is huge. When the state-educated
son of an engineer took over Syriza (then Syn-

THE NEW LEFT:

Alexis Tsipras, leader
of Syriza, above, and
Pablo Iglesias, below
right, who spurred
Spains left-wing
party Podemos to
its amazing lead in
the 2014 European
elections have struck
up a firm friendship

Staying in the Euro with justice,

solidarity and democracy. . . Its
what we deserve.
before the actual election date on the 25 January.
We have sacrificed enough. [Stay within the]
Euro with justice, solidarity and democracy.
Its what we deserve and what well demand
... There is no alternatively, there is no other
way, he says. That night, 650,000 people
watched the interview, at a time when when

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20

30/01/2015

BY
YIANNIS BABOULIAS
IN ATHENS

aspismos) in 2006, he was the youngest political

leader in the country.
In 2013, when I interviewed him in the back of
a car for the New Statesman as he crossed London with his youngest son on his lap on the way
to a Tottenham Hotspur match he came across

NEWSWEEK

as supremely sure of himself. He had just delivered two major talks in the space of a week and
the left-wing British press had treated him with
reverence.
Now, in 2015, he is becoming the face of the
European left and yet its surprising how little
is known about him. Born in 1978, he is married
to his high-school sweetheart and as the father of
two children he still tries to walk them to school
every morning. The family lives in downtown
Athens in an area many would consider rough
miles away from the sons and daughters of
political dynasties that have reigned over Greek
political life in the past seven decades.
His first steps in Greek political life were taken
early on, during the wave of school occupations
rocking Greece in the early 1990s. Then a longhaired student and member of the communist party youth, Tsipras represented a group
of schools and soon became adept at playing
politics.
He joined the Synaspismos youth movement
after a split in the Communist party and was the
leader of the barely 500-strong group from 1999
and until 2003. But his star really began to shine
when he ran for mayor of Athens in 2006, winning
10% of the vote. Alekos Alavanos, then leader of
the party, hand-picked him as his successor, and
in 2008 he was elected by party-members as the
leader of Synaspismos with a convincing 70%.
He wasnt actually elected as an MP until a year
later, after the 2009 elections.
Within three turbulent years, the 35-year-old
took what had by now become Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) from 4,6% in 2009 to
26,7% in 2012 and transformed the party into the
de-facto opposition.
But today there is another dimension to Tsiprashis his links to Spains Podemos leader, Pablo
Iglesias. Dubbed Tsiglesias by Bloombergs Joe
Weisenthal, the duo is heralded as the new face
of the European Left, with Podemos activists
saying that Tsipras is treated like a hero when he
visits Spain.
Tsiprass anti-austerity policy calls for a 12 million Euro increase in social spending, putting
Greece on collision course with the European
Union. But opinion polls show that some 75 %
of Greeks want the country to stay within the
single currency. At the time of writing, a likely
result in the ballot is that no party will win an
overall majority. Tsipras publicly has ruled out a
coalition with the fast-rising centre left To Potami party but a power-sharing deal would give
Syrizas energetic leader a valid reason to tone
down his radical proposals and avoid an outright
n
conflict with the European Union.

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P A G E

O N E

WHO KILLED THE SPY? MAYBE

NOT RUSSIA AFTER ALL

Alexander Litvinenko was slipped

radioactive poison in 2006. Now, the
mystery of his murder deepens

IT HAS TAKEN more than eight years. But finally,

at 10am on Tuesday 27 January, the doors to
court 73 at Londons Royal Courts of Justice will
swing open; the barristers, solicitors, reporters,
and a host of other interested parties will troop
in, and judge Sir Robert Owen will declare the
start of a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, a fugitive from Russia and newly-minted British citizen, who died in
a London hospital on 23 November 2006.
At the centre of proceedings will be Marina
Litvinenko, Alexanders wife for 12 years and a
figure of preternatural calm and dignity amid all
the hurly-burly and frustration of the near-decade since his death. In large measure, that these
hearings are being held at all, and that they have
been designated a public inquiry rather than
an inquest, represents a personal victory for Litvinenko, reflecting her dogged determination to
find out how and why her husband died.
She also wants to know whether the UK security services could have done something to save
her husband. The British government, in its standard phrase, neither confirms nor denies her
assertion that Alexander received a regular sti-

NEWSWEEK

22

pend from the British intelligence agencies.

At the time of his death, he had lived in Britain with his wife and young son, Anatoly for
six years. A fugitive from Russia, he had spoken
out ever more boldly against President Vladimir

30/01/2015

BY
MARY DEJEVSKY

charged in absentia. Efforts were made to secure

his extradition, but they failed, with Russia invoking a constitutional ban on extraditing nationals.
A diplomatic stand-off between the UK and Russia ensued, with tit-for-tat expulsions initiated
by a furious David Miliband, who at the time had

just become foreign secretary.

But this was not just a dry tale of diplomatic shenanigans. The Litvinenko affair came
adorned with all the seductive baubles of a spy
thriller. There was Litvinenkos own shadowy

step is to conduct a post-mortem, which was duly

done in the hospital basement, by three doctors
encased in protective clothing. The second is to
open an inquest and the third, where a crime is
suspected, is to put the presumed perpetrator

He will forever be the emaciated

figure, whose last testament was
to accuse Putin of his murder.

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23

30/01/2015

L EO N N E A L /A F P/G E T T Y, M I S H A JA PA R I DZ E /A P

DIPLOMATIC ROW:
Below left, copies
of the book Death
of a Dissident by
Litvinenkos friend
Alex Goldfarb and
wife Marina, pictured
outside the High
Court, below right.
The main suspect
in the case, Andrei
Lugovoi, below centre,
said he would not
cooperate with the
inquest because
political pressure
in Britain was
preventing him from
getting a fair trial

background in Soviet and then Russian intelligence. There were the polonium tracks across
London and in British Airways planes in distant
parts of the world. Dont panic, Londoners were
told, even as the spectre was conjured up of a
criminal, armed with deadly radiation, loose in
the UK capital.
Litvinenkos movements shortly before he
became ill included lunch with an Italian agent
and investigator, Mario Scaramella, in a Piccadilly sushi bar, and a meeting with Lugovoi
who, it turned out, was a long-time associate
at the Pine Bar in Mayfairs Millennium Hotel.
It was here, police concluded, that the deed had
been done, when a deadly dose of polonium was
added to Litvinenkos tea. Boris Berezovsky, the
migr oligarch, fierce Putin foe and incorrigible
schemer, had more than a bit part. Litvinenko,
it emerged, had been partly in his
employ, and Berezovsky had funded
the family in London. Reinforcing the
cloak-and-dagger atmosphere was the
coincidence of the new James Bond
film, Skyfall, hitting the screens, with
spectacular sequences shot around
the Thames-side headquarters of MI6.
Months trundled by; then years. The law
requires that mysterious deaths be investigated,
and they hardly come more mysterious than Litvinenkos or more potentially threatening to
public safety or to diplomatic relations. The first

Putin and rights abuses in his homeland.

What else he may have done with his life, however, was largely eclipsed by the way in which he
died: poisoned, as it was established too late, by
the radioactive isotope, polonium-210. To readers of the British press, Litvinenko will forever
be a bald and emaciated figure in a green gown
in a hospital bed, whose last testament was to
accuse Putin of his murder. At the time, all the
elements combined to tell a simple story, and an
official narrative soon settled down. According
to it, Litvinenko had been killed on the orders
of the Kremlin because of his increasingly vocal
opposition.
Russia was one of very few countries to produce
polonium-210. Scotland Yards investigation led
investigators to a certain KGB officer-turned-security consultant, Andrei Lugovoi, who was

P A G E

O N E

on trial. In fact, a trial commonly supersedes

an inquest, as the same evidence is likely to be
heard. In the Litvinenko case, Russias refusal
to deliver up Lugovoi delayed, and eventually
thwarted, the possibility of a trial.
There was further delay to the inquest when
the coroner, who should have conducted it, first
fell ill and was then replaced for (unrelated) misconduct. It was postponed once more by gov-

documenting, if not actually explaining, what

happened. The most glaring, seen as the key
to any inquiry by the US investigative author,
Edward Jay Epstein, among others, is the publication of the post-mortem findings. Although
Litvinenkos death provoked shocked headlines and prompted a drawn-out diplomatic
row, the actual post-mortem results have never
been released, not even to support the UKs
extradition request for Lugovoi.
As the British investigative reporter David
Habakkuk notes, it is still not at all clear who
contaminated whom, and in what order. There
remain questions about the role of Berezovsky
in managing information, and the role of a
certain businessman, Yuri Shvets (who was the
focus of a BBC radio investigation soon after
Litvinenkos death).
A Soviet-era exiled scientist, Zhores Medvedev, insists that Russia itself is among those who
argue that the country is not the only source of
polonium. There is evidence, too, that
in the wake of Berezovskys death last
year, Scotland Yard is taking a new
look at its earlier investigation into
the Litvinenko case. Some also maintain that Owen has retreated from
his earlier assumption that this was a
(Russian) state-directed assassination.
This line was put about, first by anonymous security sources, and later by the director
of public prosecutions at the time, Ken Macdonald. If true, this would change a great deal.
There is plenty, in other words, for Sir Robert Owen to get his teeth into, if he so chooses.
Marina Litvinenko, meanwhile, remains stalwart
in her faith in British justice. In interviews, she
has said that there is no such thing in Britain as
Russian-style telephone justice, and the that
law had to be allowed to take its course. Her
solicitor, Elena Tsirlina, insists that her client is
happy with the inquiry arrangements, including the anonymity granted to many witnesses
and the amount of evidence likely to be heard
in secret. She has full confidence in Sir Robert
Owen, she told me.
In Ben Emmerson, Marina Litvinenko has one
of the countrys most revered barristers when
it comes to challenging the establishment. But
there are many including Epstein, in a recent
book about unsolved cases who doubt that the
truth will ever come out. He observes that the
least likely to be resolved are those where there
is state, and especially multiple-state, involvement. Less conspiratorially, there is the abiding
truth that justice delayed is justice denied. A lot
n
of truth can go missing in eight years.

In the wake of Berezovskys

death last year, Scotland Yard is
taking a new look at its earlier
investigation into the case
ernment attempts to protect most intelligence
evidence. And lastly, it was delayed by judicial
wrangling about its status: whether a case with so
many ramifications should not take the form of
an inquiry. The home secretary opposed this. But
after a court challenge and something ministers deny was related the implication of Russia
in the downing of the Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine last year, the government changed
its mind. The inquest was redesignated a public
inquiry.
In practice, the distinction will be modest. The
inquiry allows the judge but no one else to consider secret intelligence evidence; that would not
have been so with an inquest. But how much will
remain secret is still in doubt.
The years of delay nourished a clutch of conspiracy theories, but the official version of events
and motives has been set for so long that few
expect Owen to turn up any surprises, despite
his repeated resolutions to undertake a fair and
fearless inquiry. UK public opinion has largely
tired of the story, dismissing it as just another
example of Kremlin thuggery.
Yet the gaps and inconsistencies that have
been pointed out by some of those lumped
with conspiracy theorists are fundamental to

NEWSWEEK

24

30/01/2015

EUROPE

NOW GET THE BOOK

Read the extended versions of Newsweeks
most gripping stories online and in print

What made a young Harry Potter fan from a British

suburb become a martyr for Allah in the Syrian desert?

newsweekinsights.com

P A G E

O N E

FOR THE ISLAMIC INSTAGRAM

GENERATION, DATING TAKES OFF

Young Omanis, raised on social

media and disillusioned with arranged
marriage, are finding love online

IN ANOTHER AGE, the engagement between

Mubarak al-Balooshi and his cousin would have
been arranged by their family, with little input
on the decision from him or her. Instead, the
23-year-old Omani met his fiance on Instagram,
the photo-sharing application.
I was liking her photos, then it turned out she
was from my family, al-Balooshi says. As he tells
his story, he is sitting with friends on a seaside
road in Muscat nicknamed Sharia Al Hub Arabic for Love Street. The caf-lined promenade is
a popular place for dates, increasingly common
in Oman as the Persian Gulf sultanate adjusts to
four decades of oil-fuelled development. While
the sun sets over the Indian ocean, young men
call out honeyed words to female passers-by.
But in this traditional Islamic society, where
mixing between genders is limited, social media
offered one of the only discreet ways for al-Balooshi to woo a girl.
I got to know the charisma of her personality, he says of his cousin, whom he did not know
personally because she lives in the United Arab
Emirates. Two months ago, he proposed. Their
families welcomed their plans.
Marrying for love was rare just 20 years ago in
Oman, a peaceful nation of four million that borders Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Arranged matches

NEWSWEEK

26

were for a long time the norm, with minimal contact between a couple before their wedding. But
customs are evolving rapidly. Oil wealth, globalisation and widespread higher education have
transformed the country since Sultan Qaboos
bin Said seized power from his father in 1970 and
opened Oman to the world.
Its a new generation, says Rahma al-Mahrooqi, director of the humanities research centre
at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. People
are becoming more open-minded, says Ammar
Ali, 26, an Omani who met his wife Sarah (halfOmani, half-Scottish) through a mutual friend.
In a survey of 921 Omanis aged 18 to 60,
al-Mahrooqis research centre found that 83%
were against arranged marriage. More than a
love marriage, young Omanis want a compatible marriage, al-Mahrooqi says. Somebody
with, for example, the same kind of education
and background, instead of the same kind of
family. As a result, many are looking for partners at university, at work or on social media.
Similar changes are happening in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, says Jane Bristol-Rhys, associate professor of anthropology
at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Exposure to
other cultures whether through television, the
internet, or direct contact with foreigners has

30/01/2015

A LOT LIKE LOVE:

Islamic weddings,
right, have, until
recently, traditionally
been arranged by the
families of the couple,
but as the internet
allows young Muslims
to connect directly
with one another, a
Western-style dating
culture is emerging

BY
VIVIAN NEREIM
IN MUSCAT
@viviannereim

PASCA L D E LO C H E /G O LO N G

influenced ideas about what a good marriage

should look like. Theyre not living in a vacuum
here, and they know there are other choices,
Bristol-Rhys says.
An arranged marriage was unthinkable
for Waleed Abdullah, a 28-year-old Omani.
Because I had relationships before, its impossible I could be convinced easily by any girl, he
says. I need to know the girl.
Abdullah married a woman he met at university. She follows a different sect of Islam, but
after many months of discussion, he convinced
his family that she was the right choice.
In some segments of Omani society, dating
and marrying for love has become ordinary.
Samar al-Mawali, 23, did not tell her parents
about her relationship with her high-school
sweetheart at first, but when they found out anyway, they supported her. The couple married in
December after eight years together. Persuading
her family was simple, she says. They may be
conservative in terms of religion and praying five
times a day and fasting ... but theyre not conservative in the sense that they dont allow us to mix
with boys, she says.
But in other segments of Omani society, dating
is still completely taboo. While the country lacks
the religious police of Saudi Arabia, vigilant relatives can play a similar role. Amira, 23, who has
dated in secret for years, has always been careful.
Imagine if somebody sees me, my cousin or my
brother, by chance? she says. So its always in
places a bit closed-off, places like the seaside at
night, or a park, places far from people close to
us. She asked Newsweek not to publish her last
name, so that her family does not find out.
Amira met her first boyfriend in an online chat
room when she was 18. Charmed by his words,
she talked to him for two years before they met
in person. It was the first date in my life, and I
was shaking, she remembers. It was the first
time I sat with a man. Over two more years, they
fell deeply in love, picking names for their future
children. Then he told her his family would never
approve, cut off contact and married his cousin.
Amira was hurt, but she recovered. A year after
the break-up, he asked her to be his second wife;
men are permitted to marry up to four women
in Islam. She refused. After this love, I said,
Enough, whats the point of love? And guys are
idiots, she said. Ill try a traditional marriage.
Her family arranged three matches, none of them
right. Now she is dating a man she met at work.
With dating, of course, come broken hearts.
Mohammed al-Hinai, 29, is happily married,
but wistfully remembers his first love. Their families were too different, he says. Opposition from

NEWSWEEK

relatives sunk the relationship. Sometimes the

culture kills us here, he says.
Twenty-six-year-old Dana not her real name
hopes to avoid a similar fate. After she met
her boyfriend on Facebook four years ago, they
schemed to win over her father, who has no idea
she dates. Her boyfriend prayed at the mosque
near her house and trained at the gym her
brother attended, hoping to run into her family
members. Dana found a job at the office where
her boyfriend worked, giving them a safe explanation for how they met.
But when he proposed, three times, her father
demurred. He never informed Dana she had an
offer, rejecting the proposal because the boyfriend has two daughters from a previous marriage and is separated but not divorced. This
does not matter to Dana; she loves him. But she
cannot tell her father, she says. For us, its a
shame for the girl to say to her father, I want this
one or that one, she says. Unless the father has
reached a level of open-mindedness that ... she
laughs, as if the thought were absurd.
Sitting on a lawn chair on Love Street, al-Hinai says he has moved on from his disappointment. After refusing a marriage his father had
arranged, he chose a wife for himself, a woman
from his village. His eyes are bright as he
describes the way their two-year-old son calls
out Baba each morning. Its impossible to
get everything, impossible, he says. The most
beautiful thing in life is hope. And a message to
every lover, every madman: dont say that I loved
and it didnt happen, so enough, end of life.
When love fails, look around, he says. If one
n
door is closed, 99 will open.

27

30/01/2015

In Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama

bin Laden, al-Qaidas most deadly franchise
has claimed responsibility for the recent
attacks in Paris. Now, it is increasing its
stranglehold by controlling the water in a
country dying of thirst

By James Fergusson in Sanaa

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28

30/01/2015

M O H A M M E D H UWA I S/A F P/G E T T Y

Al-Qaidas
next act

DEADLY FRANCHISE: Al-Qaida in Yemen

struck a police academy in central Sanaa
with a car-bomb explosion on 7 January
killing 37 people queuing outside

NEWSWEEK

29

30/01/2015

T
The ancient city of Sanaa is one of the
oldest continuously-inhabited cities on
the planet. Its astounding street markets, almost unchanged since the time
of the Prophet, used to attract hordes
of Western tourists. Not any more. The
risk of kidnap has become too great; the
British Embassy advises its nationals to
leave the country if possible, and if not,
to keep any movement around the capital to an absolute minimum. Walking
anywhere in the city these days raises
hairs on the back of the neck.
The kidnap of foreigners, usually by
hill tribes seeking leverage over the
Sanaa government, has a long history in
Yemen. It used to be considered bad for
business to harm the victims, who were
traditionally released unhurt that has
changed too. In a sign of the resurgence
of Islamic extremism in the region,
kidnappers have started selling their
victims to al-Qaida and abducted foreigners increasingly end up dead.
For the last year or more, the Wests
fear and attention has been focused
on the emergence of Isis in Syria and
northern Iraq. The Islamic States ideology, the brutality of its methods, and
the success of its territorial campaign
have eclipsed al-Qaida, the movement
that spawned Isis, but which also formally disavowed them a year ago. Since
the death of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida has seemed divided, directionless; a
diminished force.
Its franchise in Yemen, al-Qaida in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was perhaps

NEWSWEEK

best known abroad for thwarted attacks

on the West, such as that of Umar
Farouk Abdumutallab, the so-called
underpants bomber, who tried to blow
up a plane over Detroit in 2009, or the
cargo-planes bomb plot of 2010. But
with the groups claim of responsibility
for the recent attacks in Paris, however,
al-Qaida appears to have made a dramatic international comeback.
In truth, Yemen has always been an
al-Qaida stronghold. As the ancestral
homeland of bin Laden himself, Yemen
is arguably where the movement was
born. The first ever al-Qaida attack took
place in Yemen, when US Marines staying in two hotels in Aden were bombed
in 1992, and, despite some setbacks,
al-Qaida has never been extinguished in
Yemen since. In 2010, the CIA declared
AQAP the most potentially dangerous
franchise on the planet. In 2011, the year
of Yemens Arab Spring, AQAP exploited
the revolutionary chaos by taking over
the southern province of Abyan, which
they declared an Islamic Emirate. It
took the Yemeni military a year to drive
them out again.
In recent times AQAPs targets have
been mostly domestic. A suicide bomb
attack on a Parade Day rehearsal in
May 2012 killed 120, and injured 200
more; a horrendous assault on a defence
ministry hospital in December 2013 left
56 dead; on the same day as the Paris
attacks, a car bomb outside a Sanaa
police college killed 37.
In 2013, when a 10-month, UN-spon-

30

30/01/2015

sored National Dialogue Conference

opened in Sanaa, with the promise of
a new constitution ahead of fresh elections in 2015, AQAPs prospects seemed,
briefly, to dim. But then, in September,
Yemens transition to democracy was
dramatically derailed when disgruntled
Shia Houthi tribesmen from the north
of the country first surrounded and then
took over the capital. With the Houthis
continuing to tighten their grip this
week, the Presidents Chief of Staff,
Ahmed bin Mubarak, was abducted
at a Houthi checkpoint all bets on a
2015 election are now off. Instead, with
rumours swirling that the Houthis are
covertly supported by Iran, the prospect of an Iraq-style sectarian conflict
beckons. Renewed instability is a boon
to AQAP, who have always fought the
apostate Shia Houthi, and have positioned themselves as a logical rallying
point for Sunni resistance. Yemen no
longer looks like the model of peaceful
transition to democracy that it did a year
ago, but more like the next Middle East
nation to spin violently apart.

Terrors return
Al-Qaida has a long track record of
exploiting sectarian differences. In
Yemen, though, it has developed
another, more surprising, method of
winning tribal hearts and minds: its
members have become champion
exploiters of the countrys chronic
water shortage. (The country is one
of the five most water-stressed in the

M O H A M M E D H UWA I S/A F P/G E T T Y, T RACY WO O DWA R D/ WAS H I N GTO N P OST/G E T T Y

world, with just 86 cubic metres available per capita per annum, according
to the World Bank. Even drought-prone
Somalia has 572 cubic meters available
per capita. The UK, by contrast, has
2,262 cubic metres).
In regions south and east of Sanaa,
where many communities have been
ignored for years by the central government, AQAP has won significant
support not just by providing villagers
with water, but also by helping them to
dig wells and install other vital water
infrastructure. Sharia, the Islamic law
that al-Qaida is determined to impose,
means, in one of its many possible
translations, the path to the water
hole a metaphor for spiritual salvation with obvious appeal to followers of
a religion that originated in the Arabian
desert. AQAP is trying to make that
metaphor a reality.
This activity goes far beyond social
work. In an impoverished farming
nation, where over half the population
still lives off the land, access to water,
and the ability to irrigate crops, is often

a matter of life or death. Even government officials estimate that local disputes over land and water already lead
to 4,000 deaths every year.
Sanaa is badly affected, too. Supply is
already so poor here that municipal taps
function on average only once a month.
Its 2.6 million residents have long relied
on rooftop cisterns filled with water
expensively tankered in from elsewhere.
According to a study commissioned by
WATER WEAPON: Above: Flooding on
the outskirts of Sanaa. Below: Islamist
idealogue Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a US
drone in 2011, was an engineer

NEWSWEEK

31

the World Bank, the city could be unsustainable as soon as 2019. Unless action
is taken soon, Sanaas residents may
be forced to leave the city to wither and
die. The wars of the future, it is often
said, will be fought not over oil but over
water. Yemen offers us a glimpse of the
coming apocalypse.
Worse, AQAP is looking to export its
water weapon. In a document discovered by the Associated Press in 2013,
addressed to AQIM (al-Qaida in the
Maghreb), AQAP suggested trying to
win locals over by taking care of their
daily needs like water. Providing these
necessities will have a great effect on
people, and will make them sympathise
with us and feel that their fate is tied to
ours. AQAP has identified the provision of water and its infrastructure as
a key means of doing this. The United
States former Enemy Number One
in the region, the Islamist ideologue
Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a US
drone strike in 2011, was the holder of a
BSc in Civil Engineering from Colorado
State University.

30/01/2015

AQAPs
members
have become
champion
exploiters of
the countrys
chronic water
shortage.
AQAP may also have learned from the
mistakes of other AQ franchises, such as
their neighbours in Somalia, al-Shabaab.
The greatest reversal suffered by that
organisation came during the southern
Somali drought of 2011, which it dealt
with by asserting that it existed only in
the minds of Western propagandists.
Refugees fleeing the drought zones were
ordered to return to their homes and to
pray for rain. Tens of thousands died as
a consequence, and popular support for
al-Shabaab collapsed.

Water wars
The demand for water is growing
worldwide as populations expand,
but groundwater sources are being
sucked dry. The result, in places like
the Middle East, is simple: whoever
controls the water holds the power.
Ratio of withdrawals to supply
Low stress (<10%)
Low to medium stress (10-20%)
Medium to high stress (20-40%)
High stress (40-80%)

Wells, not drones

Extremely high stress (>80%)

The Sanaa government is miles behind

AQAP in its appreciation of the problem.
A new strategy for managing the nations
dwindling resource is urgently needed.
At the National Dialogue Conference,
Yemens tiny, beleaguered community
of hydrologists lobbied hard for their
sector to be made a priority but in this
years spending round, the budget of the
ministry of water and environments
National Water Resources Authority
(NWRA), was cut by 70%. As Najib
Maktari, a senior ministry adviser, put
it: It shows you how little importance
Hadi attaches to the sector.
The vast majority of the governments
resources is spent on the military, as
it has been for years. There are over
400,000 men under arms in Yemen
fighting Houthis in the north, separatists in the south, and al-Qaida just about
everywhere. They are aided in this last
campaign by US drones though the

NEWSWEEK

Yemeni government does not have

its own drones, it is widely believed
to provide American drone operators
with target intelligence. In fact, Yemenis have judged their president such an
enthusiast for drone strikes that he has
long been nicknamed Drone al-Hadi.
The results of these policies, very much
abutted by the strong Western support
of al-Hadis government, have ranged
from ineffective to catastrophic.
Mohamed Ali al-Gauli is a schoolteacher from the remote mountain district of Khawlan. His brother and cousin
were killed in a US drone strike while
driving in their car and, as a reminder
of the tragedy, he keeps a scrap of tailfin, complete with American markings,
from the missile he holds responsible
for the deaths. His brother and uncle,

32

30/01/2015

he insists, had nothing to do with AQAP.

Their mistake had been to pick up four
armed hitch-hikers in the course of a
routine shopping trip.
As in Pakistan and elsewhere, the
accuracy of the drone strikes used in
Yemen has been called into question.
A recent study by Reprieve, the New
Yorkbased human rights group, which
was widely circulated on Yemeni social
media, suggested that strikes aimed
at 17 named men have so far killed 273
people, at least seven of them children;
while at least four of the targets are still
alive. You know, those drones are very
expensive, Al-Gauli observes bitterly.
Yet in our village, it takes a 2km donkey
ride to fetch water from a well. If someone spent a tenth of the cost of a missile
on a well for our village, maybe no-one

PORTA B L E NETWORK
PORTABLE
N E T WORK G
GRAPHICS
RAPHICS

would pay attention to al-Qaida and

they would go away.
The Sanaa administration has made
mistakes, but the crisis in Yemen is not
all of President al-Hadis making. At
its root, say sociologists, is Yemens
extraordinary population growth, from
five million in 1960, to 26 million today,
to a projected 40 million by 2030
numbers that would be a challenge to
provide with fresh water even if Yemen
were rich and stable. Sanaa, with a population growth of almost 7% more
than double the national rate faces the
greatest challenge. There were fewer
than 20,000 people living in the city in
1910. Soon there will be three million.
Desalination is not an option for Sanaa,
which is both too far from the ocean
and, at 2,250m above sea level, too high

to make it practical. For its size, Sanaa

is a city in the wrong place, said Brett
Grist, a British former consultant to
NWRA. Its as simple as that.

Water for drugs

Yemens water crisis has been in pipeline, as it were, for at least 40 years.
Until the 1970s Yemenis irrigated their
crops as they had always done, with seasonal rainwater captured in elaborate
systems of mountain terraces. Increasing demand for food as the population
expanded, however, led farmers to seek
a more reliable source of irrigation and
they found one in groundwater, pumped
up by tubewells from beneath their feet.
The switchover accelerated with the
discovery of oil in the 1970s when the
government, anxious to increase agri-

NEWSWEEK

33

cultural production, introduced fuel

subsidies to encourage farmers to drill.
Without maintenance, much of the
beautiful, millennia-old mountain terracing, for which Yemen is famed, was
abandoned. It soon collapsed, deepening the farmers dependence on groundwater.
The political ramifications of that
decision are still being felt. There were
mass protests by Houthi tribesmen last
autumn over the central governments
attempt to reduce those fuel subsidies
which, now that Yemens oil is running
out, it can no longer afford. The Houthis,
though, would not countenance the
higher water drilling costs that a subsidy cut would entail. The government
quickly reversed their decision, but not
quickly enough to avert a coup.

30/01/2015

If someone spent a tenth of

the cost of a missile on a well for
our village, maybe no-one would
pay attention to al-Qaida.
Switching to groundwater irrigation
has also been an environmental disaster. Aquifers take time to recharge, but
Yemenis arent giving them a chance.
In the Houthi heartland of Saadah,
for instance, groundwater is being
extracted 12 times faster than nature
can replace it. Thirty years ago, it was
possible to find groundwater at a depth
of 100m in the Sanaa basin. Todays
drillers sometimes have to go as deep as
1,200m. The shallow, self-replenishing
reserves were plundered long ago; the
water now being exploited is so-called
fossil water that may never be replaced.
Tens of thousands of farmers, forced
from their land, have headed for the big
city looking for alternative employment
where there generally is none. As the
Sanaa basin aquifer depletes further,
this trickle of displaced farmers looks
certain to become a flood.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in conserving the countrys dwindling aquifers
comes from what is actually cultivated
on Yemeni farms. The governments
intention, when it first subsidised agricultural diesel in the 1970s, was that
farms should produce food. But farmers
soon found it much more profitable to
grow qat, the amphetamine-like chewing leaf to which Yemen, as a nation,
is addicted. An estimated one in three
Yemenis, perhaps eight million people,
are regular users of the drug, which,
although a controlled substance in the
West, is legal in Yemen and throughout
the Horn of Africa. Yemenis spend, on
average, between a quarter and a third
of their income on qat, about $4bn a
year nationally. According to one Dutch
study, the qat business accounts for 16%

NEWSWEEK

of employment and 25% of GDP.

Qat trees are deep-rooted and thirsty,
and because only the soft, leafy tops of
the tree are suitable for consumption,
they are notoriously wasteful to grow.
Some analyses suggest that 40% of
all the fresh water available in Yemen
is used in the cultivation of a product
that has no nutritional value whatsoever and this in a country where more
than half of all children under five are
stunted by malnutrition. Yet the area of
land dedicated to the cultivation of qat
continues to expand by 10% a year.
Attempts to rein in the trade have
all foundered due to insurmountable
vested interests. The land-owning tribal
sheikhs and military figures who profit
most from qat farming tend also to be
members of parliament and block any
change. When, for example, parliament tried to discuss the import of qat
from Ethiopia a measure designed to
undercut local profits, thus reducing
the appeal of the crop and therefore the
amount of Yemeni land dedicated to it
one MP stood up and announced: Well
shoot down the planes.
Our greatest problem in Yemen
adds the deputy chairman of NWRA,
Abdulla al-Thary, is that noone ever
thinks about the common good. It is
always I, I, I and never We, we, we.

The Wildcat Drillers

Private and unlicensed wells continue to
be sunk at an astonishing rate by so-called
wildcat drillers who own and operate
a vast fleet of mobile rigs. Estimates
suggest that there are 14,000 privately-owned tube wells in the Sanaa basin
today, with more being drilled every day.

34

30/01/2015

The under-resourced water ministry

does its best, but has effectively lost the
war against the wildcatters, who tend
to be employees of the same influential
sheikhs who control the qat trade. For
example, a government programme to
install supposedly tamper-proof GPS
transmitters in all known rigs failed
when the operators found ways to
remove or destroy them. In 2012, NWRA
set up a public hotline and encouraged
Sanaanis to report any suspicious-looking drilling operation. But the uptake
was minimal; and even when NWRA
officials turned up to try to prevent
an illicit operation, they were quickly
chased off by tribal gunmen, or even, on
one occasion, by co-opted police.
Recently, Noori Gamal, a senior
hydrologist with the water ministry,
heard a rumor that a wildcatter was in
action in Hadda, the main downtown
business district, and invited me to meet
him there. I could hear nothing at first,
but his experienced ear immediately
detected the rumble of a deep hydraulic rotary drill. He lead me three blocks,
and there it was: a tall Heath-Robinson contraption in the side garden of
a private house belonging (as we later

M O H A M M E D H UWA I S/ N ATA L I A KO L ES N I KOVA /A F P/G E T T Y

discovered) to a qat-farming, land-owning sheikh. Backed up to the wellhead,

blocking the road, was a long, low
truck loaded with hundreds of metres
of drill pipe. The street was filled from
side to side with a waist-high river of
drill lubricant that oozed from the bore
hole, a wobbling mass of soapy white
foam through which two boys were pulling wheelies on mountain bikes. Half a
dozen labourers stood about, surly and
staring, their cheeks distended from the
lumps of qat in their mouths.
The foreman of the operation was not
pleased to see us, but Gamal soon made
it clear he wasnt there to try to stop
him. Obstructing a drilling operation,
he explained afterwards, had become
a perilous business; the sheikh who
employed the foreman could manipulate the political system to have Gamal
fired, or arrested, or much worse.
I see unlicensed drilling rigs as
mobile artillery batteries, and the tankers that distribute the groundwater as
missiles landing in every neighbourhood, Gamal added. I dont think
that language is too strong. What we
are doing to our water resource does
as much damage to our country as any

THIRSTY NATION: Farmers in Sanaa are

drilling unlicensed boreholes to irrigate
their thirsty qat crops. President Hadi,
below, has failed to stop the practice

military campaign and the water shortage is already killing more of our people than al-Qaida ever will.

Off the precipice

There are no easy solutions in Yemen.
Last November, in co-operation with
the UN and the Dutch embassy, the
water ministry launched a three-year
project in the Sanaa basin aimed at
persuading its farmers to start conserving their resources, and to pump
less groundwater. To the south of the
city, meanwhile, where a large aquifer remains untapped, new municipal

NEWSWEEK

35

wells are being sunk. These and other

measures can buy Sanaa some time.
Yet tapping more aquifer water will only
postpone the inevitable. Yemen is like
a man sliding towards a precipice, said
a former water minister, Abdul-Rahman
al-Eryani. He will definitely go over the
edge. The only question is when.
Not everyone is so gloomy. Some senior
officials believe the wholesale change of
approach to water management that the
country needs is possible, and that they
have time. The experience of a community of Ismaili Shia in Haraaz in the western highlands offers some hope. Fifteen
years ago they decided to uproot their qat
orchards some 200,000 trees have so
far been destroyed and plant crops of
comparable commercial value, notably
premium coffee, for which Yemen was
once famous. (The Mocha coffee bean
takes its name from the Yemeni Red
Sea port of that name.) The Ismailis also
introduced modern drip irrigation and
have begun to repair their water-harvesting terraces. As a result, the Haraaz water
table is no longer falling, and the local
economy is thriving. Could this brave
experiment become a model for the rest
of the country?
The chairman of NWRA, Ali
al-Suraimi, seems to think so. He
believes that even Sanaa could be sustainable if highland farmers reduce their
dependence on groundwater. We need
to repair our terraces and go back to the
old ways, and to live like our grandfathers did, he says. It is an unhappy paradox, but the future of Yemen, together
with its ancient capital, may depend on
the ability and willingness of its people
n
to turn back the clock.

30/01/2015

THE
DAWN
WALL
Last week, two young
men mastered the
mind-bogglingly difficult
Dawn Wall of El Capitan,
Yosemite, their every move
watched by an audience
of millions. Mountaineer
and author Andy Cave
explains what made their
achievement so remarkable
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NEWSWEEK

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30/01/2015

rass-roots climbers are uncomfortable

with statements like the hardest climb
in the world. But most would agree that
last weeks first free ascent of the Dawn
Wall on El Capitan, Yosemite, ranks as
one of the toughest rock-climbs ever to
be completed.
Americans Tommy Caldwell and
Kevin Jorgeson spent 19 days on the
famous 3,000-foot wall in California.
Full-time professional climbers, the
men are no strangers to elite-level performance. Nevertheless, the project
drained them entirely. Keen to grasp
any marginal gains they could, the two
30-year-olds climbed the most difficult
parts in the shade or at night; the cooler
temperatures allowing them better purchase on the razor blade-thin granite
holds. During rest periods they repaired
the holes in their fingertips with sandpaper and superglue, and sanded the
rough edges of their tight-fitting, rubber
compound rock shoes.

For many people, climbing seems an

odd activity; strange really, as we all
start out climbing instinctively how
else do we go up and down stairs in
the first few months of life? Most of us
give up early, due to discouraging parents and a sense of self-preservation.
Tommy Caldwell never did; he was
rock-climbing aged just three.
Caldwells Dawn Wall journey began
seven years ago when he first inspected
the line as a potential free-climb. Originally designated an aid-climb, where
climbers fix ropes and use shunts, the
Dawn Wall was considered even by talented climbers to be impossible to freeclimb due to its sheer lack of holds and
the walls relentlessly steep angle. I, too,
have glanced across at the face while
climbing a neighbouring route; it is an
extraordinary expanse of rock.
Caldwell, 36, had the vision and the
self-belief. He dared to dream. And after
watching a movie of Caldwell trying to
climb sections of the route, Jorgeson, a
former indoor world champion, asked to
join him on the project. They failed on
five occasions spread over several years.
The ultimate aim was for both climbers to climb all 32 pitches (sections of
rock) from bottom to top without falling, gripping the rock features with only
their hands and feet. While the men had
safety ropes, they were merely to halt a
fall and couldnt be relied upon for progress up the wall.
There were other aspects of the climb
that were unusual. For one, the camaraderie between the two climbers. In
a show of team-spirit, Caldwell stated
that it was crucial that both members
of the team made the summit a rare
sentiment in a sport that has, in recent
years, followed the trend of many mainstream sports in celebrating the cult of
the individual. More than anything, I
want to top out together, Caldwell said
on day 13. We gotta make that happen.
It would be such a bummer to finish this
thing without Kevin. I cant imagine
anything worse, really.

TOP OF THE WORLD:

American climbers Tommy Caldwell
and Kevin Jorgeson, left, successfully
ascended the Dawn Wall of El Capitan,
Yosemite, earlier this month

BLIG H GILL IES/B IG UP PRODUCTIONS/AURORA PHOTOS

But that ambition was severely tested

when Jorgeson struggled for an age on
pitch 15. Everything was in the balance.
With bleeding fingertips, worried that
he was holding his teammate back,
Jorgeson finally made it and, exuberantly, he posted on Instagram: After 11
attempts spread across 7 days, my battle
with pitch 15 of the Dawn Wall is complete. Hard to put the feeling into words.
Theres a lot of hard climbing above,
but Im more resolved than ever to free
the remaining pitches. The men had
trained so hard and prepared as well as
they possibly could. Still, they needed
the gods on their side.
The conditions were just magic. It
was the one moment over the last 10
days when it was actually cloudy and
cold enough to climb during daylight. It
all lined up to create this one moment in
which my skin was good enough and the
conditions were perfect, said Jorgeson.
The level at which top climbers now
operate is flabbergasting, even to the
most experienced. Jorgeson climbed
pitch 16 by making a jump six feet horizontally to catch a downward-sloping
edge of rock, which he then had to hold
despite the swinging momentum of his
body. Now, with the most difficult section of the wall completed, the duo felt
invigorated, and the people watching,
via their social media updates, began to
scent success.
GYMNASTS, BALLERINAS,
CHESS-PLAYERS
So what does it take to climb at this
level? There are three broad spheres
requiring mastery: physical, technical
and mental. Being strong in all three is
rare. Think elite gymnast, ballerina and
chess-player rolled into one.

HOW IT COMPARES
2,307m

El Capitan, Yosemite
National Park

2,000m

632m
1

Shanghai
Tower,
Shanghai

301m

Eiffel Tower,
Paris

830m

Burj Khalifa,
Dubai

115m

Redwood Tree,
California

308m

The Shard,
London

The conditions
were just magic.
It was the one
moment over the
last 10 days when
it was cloudy
and cold enough
to climb during
daylight.

Physical requirements include finger

strength, the ability to maintain contact
with a variety of different-shaped holds;
the ability to generate anaerobic power
via fast-twitch muscle fibres for single,
desperate moves; good lactate tolerance in the forearms to sustain strength
through consecutive difficult moves;
core strength and flexibility to ensure
the feet can reach and engage footholds.
Technically, these climbers have
thousands of movement patterns
ingrained from years of experience, as
well as very specific moves for this climb
that are rehearsed over several years.
These mental schemes mean they can
act on a sequence of moves quickly,
almost unconsciously. The glaciated
granite of Yosemite is notoriously difficult to climb, requiring a whole suite of
movement skills.

ANDY CAVE: WRITER AND ADVENTURER

A VETERAN OF SOME OF THE WORLDS
most formidable summits, Cave is a
mountaineer, academic and writer. His
career began at 16 in a Grimethorpe coal
pit, an experience that was to brace him
for a lifetime of determination: In that
filthy, dangerous hell, I learned essential
lessons about teamwork. Without it, you
couldnt survive. His climbing career

began at 17, and within three years he

found himself atop the infamous north
face of the Eiger. He has since scaled some
of climbings toughest peaks, from Mount
Kennedy in Canada to Divine Providence
in the Alps. Returning to education to
complete a PhD, and then writing two
books on his experiences, he is one of the
worlds leading voices in adventure sport.

TOUCHING THE VOID:

The successful ascent of one
of the worlds most difficult
climbing routes by Tommy
Caldwell, far right, and Kevin
Jorgeson, whose taped hands
are pictured right, attracted
unprecedented attention for
the sport on social media

Caldwell has dedicated most of his

climbing career to ascending the big
walls of Yosemite. Mental tenacity and
the ability to focus under extreme pressure are what distinguish the best climbers. Overcoming the fear of falling and
the fear of failure is often the biggest
challenge, whatever the level.
But Caldwell has overcome many difficulties in life. In 2000, while climbing
in Kyrgyzstan, he and his team were
taken hostage by Islamist militants. Left
briefly with a single guard, Caldwell
pushed him over what he assumed was
a cliff, allowing his team to escape at
night. Finally, it emerged the guard had
survived the fall. But Caldwell was traumatised by the incident and the media
interest it stirred. Then, just a year later,
he cut off his own index finger with a saw
in a DIY accident. It was re-attached by
surgeons but it lost most of its function,
so Caldwell had it re-amputated.
MASTERING EL CAP
To complete pitch 15 alone of this climb
would be considered world-class. In the
context of 32 pitches, it is mind-boggling. On top of this, Caldwell and
Jorgenson had to work out the logistics of living in winter on a sheer rock
face for almost three weeks, hauling
up their supplies behind them and setting up porta-ledges mobile, double-mattress-sized camp beds erected
at 90 degrees to the wall. Their supplies
included fresh coffee and iPhones. They
practised yoga and did press-ups to

maintain good form between attempts

at each section. A small, expert film crew
accompanied them, moving around on
a complex web of fixed ropes. Nothing
was left to chance.
Above pitch 16, the climbing relents
to some extent. On the final part of the
climb, I am sure the climbers will have
been accustomed to the flow at one
with the wall and utterly focused. Vertical and overhanging terrain becomes
normal and, with each small success,
the will to succeed grows deeper. The
dream closer.
What is so special about El Cap? The
first time I saw it, I had just finished the
first year of university. I was mesmerised. I had climbed the north face of the
Eiger and a couple of Himalayan peaks
by first ascents, but still I had never seen
a piece of stone so big and flawless as
this. The fact that you can drive underneath it makes it logistically simple to
reach. Even with a big load, a 30-minute
hike from the parking lot through trees
brings you to the base.
The descent off the back requires caution and a few abseils not unreasonable as far as climbing descents go. But

its front is a smooth, sheer, stupefying

cliff full of history.
There is often a great sense of camaraderie among the climbers in the Valley, particularly on Camp 4, a place
steeped in legend. Just next to it is the
base of the Yosemite rescue team, comprised of top climbers. There is a feeling
that you are part of something special in
Yosemite. On that first trip, I had spent
three days on the wall. It is a strange
alien world. For days afterwards, I was
dehydrated and my hands were cut and
swollen. But I felt so alive.
Over the past 30 years, almost every
climber I have met has either visited
Yosemite or desperately wants to. A true
climbing Mecca, even the easiest big
free-climbs on El Cap, such as Freerider,
are still too difficult for the majority.
Some complete the West Buttress and
the shorter East Buttress, but they are
not tackling the highest, steepest part of
the wall. Most people come to climb The
Nose, right up the centre, using at least
some aid. In peak season, small international teams are strewn from bottom to
top, inching their way up.
Most of the routes here started out as

BREAKTHROUGH CLIMBS: A CHRONOLOGY

1786

1865

1889

1953

MONT BLANC,
FRANCE

MATTERHORN,
SWITZERLAND

MT. KILIMANJARO,
TANZANIA

MT. EVEREST,
NEPAL

As the first to reach the

summit, Jacques Balmat
and Michel Paccard won
a prize that was offered
by a Swiss scientist 26
years previously.

The English illustrator

Edward Whymper led
the first successful
ascent, in which four
of the party fell to
their deaths.

The peak was first

reached by the Austrian
mountaineer Ludwig
Purtscheller and the
German geographer
Hans Meyer.

After many abortive

attempts, Sir Edmund
Hillary and a Sherpa
mountaineer, Tenzing
Norgay, reached the top
from the south side.

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30/01/2015

COREY RIC H/AURORA PHOTOS

aid climbs, the pioneers linking cracks

and corners up to the top. Later, bolder
aid climbs were established, with big
reputations and requiring specialist
skill. The first major line to be free
climbed was Salath by Paul Piana
and Todd Skinner, a real breakthough
achievement in 1988. In 1993, Lynn
Hill broke a huge barrier by free-climbing The Nose
American climbers havent monopolised pioneering here, however: the
Bavarian brothers, Thomas and Alexander Huber, were extremely prolific
between 1995 and 2007. UK climbers
have made an impact too, notably Leo
Houlding, whose route, The Prophet,
is still one of the most serious big-wall
climbs in the world. El Cap is a vertical
stage that continues to allow the elite
to search out the limits of possibility.
Climbers like Houlding and the Hubers
have applied their Yosemite skills in
more remote big walls in the Himalayas, Baffin Island and Antarctica. The
extra complications of difficult access,
altitude, glaciers, and little chance of
rescue mean that the stakes are much
higher than a climb in Yosemite.

I had climbed
the north face
of the Eiger and
a couple of
Himalayan peaks
by first ascents,
but still I had
never seen a
piece of stone so
big and flawless
as this.

REAL-TIME CLIMBS
While climbers have been surprised by
the media storm surrounding Caldwell
and Jorgensons ascent, in some ways El
Cap has always been in the public space.
Tourists spend hours watching climbers in action, in a similar way to people at Kleine Scheidegg, Switzerland,
who point telescopes at alpinists on the
Eiger. The difference this time is that the
adventurers themselves could drip-feed
tweets, Facebook posts and video clips
to a breathless audience, providing a
blow-by-blow account of their progress.
People go climbing for many reasons:
to escape the mundane pressures of
work, to be close to nature, to be lost in
the endeavour. Surely spending hours
on social media detracts from this? Critics will doubtless claim the duo have
created a media circus. But look closely
at their messages and there is a self-effacing tone. I am not sure Barack Obama
quite understood that sentiment, however, passing on his congratulations in
another tweet: So proud of Tommy
Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson for conquering El Capitan. You remind us that
anything is possible.
Nevertheless, the spotlight on such a
great achievement by two elite climbers is a positive step. The public needs
to know what todays pioneers are
doing. Yes, many of them are virtually
unheard-of outside climbing circles, but
the Dawn Wall story makes a welcome
change from the usual fuss around quite
ordinary climbers being guided up Everest, on a route first climbed 60 years
ago, and rigged all the way by Sherpas.
Hopefully, the better-informed media
pieces have educated the public in a
new narrative that reveals elite climbers not to be thrill-seeking adrenaline
junkies, but as extraordinarily talented
individuals who have spent hours pern
fecting this vertical ballet.

1958

1996

2011

EL CAPITAN,
UNITED STATES

NECESSARY EVIL,
UNITED STATES

BURJ KHALIFA,
DUBAI

The first ascent of El

Capitans most famous
route, The Nose, took
Warren Harding, Wayne
Merry and George
Whitmore 47 days.

Aged 15, Chris Sharma

completed what was, at
the time, the highestrated climb in North
America, between Utah
and Arizona.

Alain Robert, widely

dubbed the French
Spiderman, scaled the
worlds tallest building
in six hours as the world
looked on.

BY
CATHERINE OSTLER

Prepare for a magic pill to end obesity

CORBIS

ur airwaves, like our organs

and limbs, are suffocated by
expanding flab. Fat dominates the news. In the last
month alone, the National
Obesity Forum suggested
that regular weight checks
should be compulsory; a
European court ruled that obesity is a disability after the sacking of a 25-stone Danish
child-minder; and the chief executive of NHS
England called the same ruling daft, declaring war on obesity after a study found that
only Hungary has fatter adults than the UK.

NEWSWEEK

42

30/01/2015

Queensland, meanwhile, declared an obesity

state of emergency; the Saudis organised an
anti-obesity run; federal regulators in the US
approved an appetite-suppressing implant;
a Canadian study linked a type of serotonin
with obesity; and a Harvard team found two
compounds that turn bad white fat cells into
good brown fat ones.
The Western world is preoccupied with obesity, and rightly so, because the statistics of our
expanding girths are shocking by any measure. Twenty-five per cent of citizens in most
Westernised countries, including the UK, are
now obese; and about half of the population is

NEWSWEEK

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30/01/2015

overweight. The problem is so immense

that lifespans, it is predicted, may begin
falling, rather than rising, for the first
time in history.
Even more worryingly, it is not so
much the length of life as its quality that
is affected by fat. Being obese means we
are more likely to suffer from mobility
and joint problems such as aching knees,
type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers as well as social stigma
and diminished mental health.
A predisposition for obesity, alongside
a fondness for smoking and drinking
(exacerbated by its pervasive association with the underclass) has been condemned in the court of public opinion
as a moral weakness. It is an issue for
those who lack self-control or the ability
to help themselves; in other words, an
issue only for those without any sense of
personal dignity or responsibility.
In the course of writing this piece
I spoke to several intelligent, usually
sympathetic, types who displayed the
near-anger, disgust even, that the educated classes feel for the feckless fat.
They just need to eat less, people say.
While this is true, things arent quite
that simple. For a start, less of what?
Once it was saturated fats; now sugar
is the fashionable smoking gun. Some,
reductively, argue that a sugar tax

mind, the flip-side of personal responsibility is personal liberty. While we

must have the freedom to eat whatever
we like, anyone who chooses to abuse
that right is weak-willed, greedy and
self-destructive.
And so it is that complications from
type 2 diabetes, a disease largely
brought on by obesity, are costing the
NHS 1.5m an hour 10% of its annual
budget. Is the problem too big to stall?

LEADING THE FIGHT:

Professor Sir Stephen ORahilly, above,
is a pioneer in world obesity research

would bring an end to the problem.

Certainly sugary drinks, from soda to
fruit juice, are particularly unhelpful
because though they are calorific they
do not alleviate hunger. In obesity
terms, this is toxic.
But politicians are reluctant to level
taxes on foodstuffs partly because
they dont want to annoy the food-anddrinks lobby, a significant player in any
economy, and partly because such taxes
always disproportionately penalise the
poor. In Denmark and New York, fiscal
measures didnt work, and were shelved.
So while everyone knows there is
a problem, many of the answers are
controversial because, in the British

THERE IS A SECRETIVE
GLOBAL ARMS RACE TO
DEVELOP A CURE, OF WHICH
ORAHILLY IS PART AND
PROBABLY, GIVEN HIS
REPUTATION, OUR BEST BET

NEWSWEEK

44

30/01/2015

THE BEGINNING OF FAT

Lets wind back a little see how we
arrived at this mess. In any society, there
have always been severely obese people.
The Venus of Willendorf, a statuette of a
very roly-poly female figure found in
rural Austria, dates from before 25,000
BC; Hippocrates wrote about obesity
in the fourth century BC. In 1700, as
England became more prosperous and
its food supplies more reliable, Thomas
Short wrote A Discourse Concerning the
Causes and Effects of Corpulency. At the
time, though, the condition was a rarity.
It is only since the Second World War
that the march of fat has accelerated.
Coincident with our moving in from the
fields and working in increasingly sedentary office jobs, food supplies have
become more plentiful, cheaper, and
laden with fat and sugar. Just as our calorific output went drastically down, our
calorific input went drastically up.
Multiple environmental reasons have
compounded the problem: the availability of calorie-laden, cheap, deliberately-addictive fast food; the reduction in
exercise among urban children, fuelled
by a rise in interest in computer games,
a fear of letting children play outside,
and scaled-back state-school sport; an
increase in city living, and a concurrent
rise in the use of public transport and
takeaway food outlets; and the evermore sophisticated marketing techniques of food companies. Even central
heating has played its part since we no
longer shiver, we no longer have to move
around as much to stay warm. Gyms,

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST:

At the Institute of Metabolic Science in
Cambridge, right, alternative solutions
to gastric bypass surgery, below right,
are being researched in an attempt to
tackle the worlds obesity crisis. Sugary
drinks, bottom right, are cited as a
major factor in weight gain

A D R I A N A Z E H B RAUS K AS/ P O L A R I S/ EY EV I N E

meanwhile, are a mixed blessing. Intensive exercise (unlike, say, working in the
fields all day or walking everywhere) is
unlikely to be sustained over time, and
is subject to interruption by even mild
injury. It is also likely to boost appetite.
So we hear the (often accurate) horror stories of the need for NHS beds
to be doubled in size; of morgues with
bodies too big for their fridges; of airline seats rebuilt to accommodate the
large. Tabloids feature a gallery of
grotesques: teenagers carried out of
their houses by stretcher, men who are
unable to leave theirs at all.
The severely obese have their own
specific set of problems. But underneath these outliers there is a growing
army: the overweight and less-severely
obese, who are getting fatter and fatter,
and less and less healthy.
In a world that, incredibly, has more
overfed than underfed people in it, even
the way we look at fat has changed. The
problem of over-nutrition is so severe
that those of ideal weight (between 18
and 25 on the BMI index) now look malnourished to us. Obesity is so prevalent
we cant even see it straight.
INVENTING THE FAT PILL
In order to see what were doing about
this complicated problem, I went to visit
Britains war rooms in the fight on flab:
the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research
Council Institute of Metabolic Science
in Cambridge. Its the vision of an affable, determined and imaginative Irishman, Professor Sir Stephen ORahilly.
The Institute opened in 2008 next to
Addenbrookes Hospital. On the ground
floor there is a clinic for diabetic patients,

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 adult and paediatric who often join

trials. On the second floor, Professor
Nick Wareham runs the public health
department, looking at measures that
might make a difference to the population at large. In January, he announced
the results of a study of 334,000 people
which showed the importance of exercise 20 minutes a day cuts the risk of
premature death by a third.
Meanwhile on the top two floors, Professor ORahillys 19 principal investigators examine all manner of scientific

Many people are trying to work on

mimicking the effects of bariatric [gastric bypass] surgery through the use of
medicines that a) mimic or enhance
the effects of natural satiety hormones
produced by the gut after food and/or
b) enhance the amount of those natural hormones produced after food, he
explains. He wont go into detail about
his own trials, or even tell me which
pharma company hes working with.
While other global teams release enticing snippets that may or not may lead

potentially be personalised. Clearly, half

of Europe cannot have a bariatric procedure. But they could be given different
combinations of hormones to stop them
eating so much.
Such a pill would be a seminal breakthrough. ORahillys team, though, are
thorough, and there doesnt seem to
be an angle on obesity that theyre not
investigating. His colleague, Dr Giles
Yeo, says we tend to look at obesity in
the wrong light. Rather than just condemning those who overeat, he says,

MINUTES
TO WALK
EACH DAY TO
AVOID DYING
PREMATURELY
Y

THE
SKINNY ON
OBESITY

30

337,000
OBESITY

NUMBER OF EUROPEAN
DEATHS CAUSED BY
OBESITY AND LACK OF
EXERCISE IN 2008
LACK OF
EXERCISE

BMI FIGURE THAT

DEFINES OBESITY

angles on obesity: the specific genes

involved; what happens in utero; the
effect of circadian rhythms.
The bigger the problem, the greater
the glory and the riches at stake for
any person, or any company, who can
produce the much-discussed miracle
pill, the magic bullet that can make the
world thin again.
It is no exaggeration to say that millions of lives and billions of pounds are
at stake. There is a secretive global arms
race under way to develop a cure, of
which ORahilly is part and is probably,
given his reputation, our best bet.

NEWSWEEK

anywhere, this is not ORahillys style.

The most effective surgery works by
making people feel full. But such surgery is dangerous, expensive, and onesize-fits-all. A pill that can trick the brain
into feeling full by elevating satiety hormones and thus sending it false messages from the gut which, I sense from
ORahillys caginess, may not be that far
off will change everything. Only feeling full will stop us from eating, and if we
can medically induce that, then we will
have slayed the obesity dragon.
The other advantage of a pill over
surgery, says ORahilly, is that is it can

46

30/01/2015

676,000

we should be asking, Why, exactly, do

some people eat too much, when others
dont? Our environment plays its part,
but how we eat is powerfully genetically
determined, because of how we got
to today . . . all of us are programmed
to survive long enough to reproduce.
In order to survive that long you need
to eat, and you need to survive. For the
entire history of our existence as a living, breathing creature, too little food
has been around, until the last 50 years.
Pre-agriculture, in the Serengeti, we
caught an antelope, brought it back and
ate it because didnt know what would

S H U T T E RSTO C K

YOUR
BMI

happen next we would eat, and prepare

for famine. In other words, our genes
tell us more loudly in some of us than
in others to eat whenever we can.
Fifty years, in context of genetics, is
the blink of an eye; our bodies havent
yet adapted to our suddenly food-dense
environment. As Yeo puts it, our body
frame has evolved to be lean and is
unable to adapt to our new habits. If
we do become obese, our chances of
getting heart disease and cancer, and
dying early, rise. So there is now a catastrophic mismatch of our genes and
our environment. Once, very few of us

74%

61%

67%

betic about to die, chooses to use heritability as a crutch, the only person whos
going to suffer is her. But ignoring the
role of genetics is helpful to no one.
As Yeo sees it, those who eat less arent
morally stronger, they are just people
who dont feel like eating as much, just
like those who feel like taking more
exercise. ORahillys team often looks at
the extremes the severely obese, and
now the very underweight not only to
help them, but also because a study of
the margins often yields clear insights
into the more muddled mainstream.
Professor Sadaf Farooqi studies

ICELAND:
WESTERN EUROPES
MOST OVERWEIGHT
COUNTRY

57%

MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE EITHER

OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE IN THE UK
MORE THAN A QUARTER
OF CHILDREN ARE ALSO
OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE

29% OF GIRLS
26% OF BOYS
could overeat. Today in the West most
of us can we can all be Henry VIII now.
Of course, this doesnt mean that everyone is fat the less-hungry stay thin.
Although in Serengeti terms, you could
argue that the fat ones are more evolved.
Perhaps, back then, Kate Moss types
would have been lion food, says Yeo.
THE GENETIC CRUTCH
The genetic argument is not a popular
one. Yeo tells a story of a man at a Cambridge college dinner pointing at him
saying, you are giving them a crutch.
Yeo says, If Mrs Smith, a 25-stone dia-

severely obese children. Although we are

fatter because we take in more calories
than we burn, what we choose to eat isnt
always a rational decision. In children it
is more complicated still, because it isnt
always clear who is choosing what.
Farooqi reads me a recent email from
a professor of endocrinology at Harvard. She writes that she had her work
cut out with a piece from The New York
Times in June titled, In Britains, Childs
Weight Leads to Parents Arrest. The
parents of an 11-year-old boy in Norfolk, who weighed 210 pounds, had been
arrested. There is a massive failure of

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47

understanding when it comes to severe

obesity, says Farooqi. Later, ORahilly
tells me they have heard of children eating food straight from the freezer, and
chewing on bin scraps, because they feel
extreme hunger.
The idea that you might take a child
away from its parents because of its size
is a travesty, Farooqi says, because,
ironically, the more severely obese the
child, the more likely it is that genes are
playing a powerful part. She has seen
children from war-torn Liberia and rural
Pakistan who are severely obese when
you might expect them to be malnourished. There is no way, she says, that
the parents are to blame in these cases;
who could possibly get a three-year-old
to 36 kilos? As all parents know, young
children eat what they want to eat and
nothing else.
She is currently working on a study
involving a disorder that affects some
50,000 people in the UK (and over a
million globally) and that may be able
to remedy another defect in the brain
concerning hunger and satiety. ORahillys study on extreme metabolic
phenotypes (people with rare genetic
defects) led him to identify children
with a congenital leptin deficiency.
Leptin is a hormone that causes people
to feel full after eating; when he treated
the children with doses of the missing
hormone, even those who were nearly
wheelchair-bound returned to a normal
weight. That was a breakthrough; but
leptin, frustratingly, proved ineffective
for all but the most chronically deficient.
It wasnt quite the magic bullet.
Farooqi finds it frightening that society is so judgemental. In the case of
the three-year-old in Manchester, she
identified a genetic problem. I never
realised Id be getting involved in these
disputes, but I want to help the patients,
partly because of the social stigma. Public awareness means that people are
confusing the population problem with
the more unusual problem of severe
obesity. People think parents must be

30/01/2015

taking toddlers to McDonalds 10 times

a day. But its often a biological problem. I dont think children should ever
be taken away from their parents for
weight reasons alone, she says.
On the other hand, obese parents
do often have obese children. Farooqi
estimates the genetic component at
4070%. In other words, we inherit
much of our propensity to fat, our appetite and our metabolism. More and
more genetic factors are being identified. ORahilly is currently excited about
Labrador dogs; with the Department of
Veterinary Medicine, they have worked
out why some Labradors are hungrier
than others. This may lead to treatment
for flabby Labs and, possibly, information on the fight against fat in the human
population (insulin was first identified in
dogs, and research is often performed
on mice leptin, for example, was first
identified in the rodents).

NEWSWEEK

M AT T H EW M C D E R M OT T/ P O L A R I S/ EY EV I N E , G O R D I TOS D E CORAZO N / BA RC RO F T

THE PRICE OF BEING THIN

If ORahilly had to point the finger at
anything that got us into this, it would
be food transportation. Never in history
has so little percentage of income been
needed to buy so much food, he says.
Theres the rise of discount retailers
like Aldi and Lidl, and portion expansion croissants the size of boomerangs; buckets of popcorn and Coke. As
his colleague Yeo says, if we could wind
the clock back to 1950, obesity would go
away, but we cant, so we have to find a
way to deal with it.
The cure will be multifaceted, just
as it has been for high blood pressure.
ORahilly draws me a graph: like blood
pressure, obesity has a normal range
and a rather arbitrary cut-off point at
which normal tips into excessive. Blood
pressure is now manageable because of
an awareness of the dangers of salt and
an accompanying reduction in its consumption, and because of drugs such
as statins that control it. Hospitals were
once full of those suffering from the
effects of hypertension, such as strokes

A GROWING CRISIS:
One of the most pressing issues in global
obesity is the rise in overweight children,
top, who are most affected by fast-food
products of high sugar content, above

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 but no longer. The hope is that through

a variety of environmental and pharmaceutical measures, obesity, too, will
become manageable, a crisis of the past.
The key might be in genetic treatment,
or otherwise in a magic pill that mimics
the effects of gastric bypass surgery. A
team from Barts and the London School
of Medicine and Dentistry, for example,
announced recently that they were five
years away from producing one. Bands
and balloons dont really work and
shouldnt be heaped
together with other surgery, says ORahilly,
a stomach bypass is
effective because as
the food goes into the
intestine lower down,
the brain is tricked into
thinking its full. But
it is surgery, and it is
expensive.
ORahilly, working
alongside pharmaceutical companies, sees
his team as a kind of
military intelligence,
and the companies as
their weaponry. There
have been other pills
in the past: safe ones
that werent effective; effective ones that
werent safe. His promising early-phase
trials have a clear aim: that high bodyweight eventually becomes, like high
blood pressure, easily, cheaply treatable, and no longer life-threatening.
Like the rest of his team, he is
non-judgemental and intensely sympathetic to the obese. Thin people are not
morally superior. They are less prone to
obesity, and those who are unlucky are
not feckless. They are biologically different. I want to see what we can tweak
under the bonnet.
Its not a straightforward task. Unlike
cancer when people who know they
might die will take anything obesity
kills you very slowly so we can only use
safe agents. Obesity studies struggle

with funding because of the moral angle

an obese man eventually dies of a
heart attack and his widow gives money
to a heart charity, says ORahilly drily.
He thinks in spite of data that show
sharp acceleration in recent years,
there is also some evidence that obesity
is levelling out, particularly among children that it wont continue rising to a
point where we are all obese.
Governments are taking notice.
ORahilly broadly supports a sugar

to cause weight gain, fructose is worse

for us because its handled differently
in the body, especially the liver. As a
consequence of this, high-fructose diets
in rodents tend to cause high lipid levels in the blood, insulin resistance, high
uric acid (the substance that precipitates
out in joints when we get gout) and high
blood pressure.
In conclusion, ORahilly wrote:
There is evidence that excessive consumption of fructose (found in sugar
and in high-fructose
corn syrup) is associated with a worsened
metabolic state than
excessive
consumption of glucose, even
though both forms of
overconsumption can
increase weight and
fat stores to a similar
amount. This provides
further evidence that
policies designed to
discourage the ingestion of sweetened beverages would likely
have a positive impact
on public health.
So even within sugars, some calories are
worse for your health than others. To
complicate matters further, Professor
Toni Vidal-Puig says its not as simple as
fat equals bad, thin equals good.
All fat is not equal. Internal fat can be
even more dangerous than the external kind. They are investigating why
a 200kg man can be healthier than an
80kg one. If his adipose tissue doesnt
work as well then the fat will go to his
muscles, heart and liver. This is part of
ORahillys second question (after that
of what makes some people obese): why
excess weight leads to illness and why,
sometimes, it doesnt.
In another area of Vidal-Puigs studies lies, potentially, an amazingly simple fix. In spite of all the millions spent
on diets, food and exercise, it may be

A PILL THAT CAN TRICK

THE BRAIN INTO FEELING
FULL BY SENDING FALSE
MESSAGES TO THE
BRAIN FROM THE GUT
BY ELEVATING SATIETY
HORMONES WILL
CHANGE EVERYTHING
tax, although he thinks that, ideally,
food companies will one day find that
healthy food equals more profit.
THE SUGAR DEMON
Some things are simple. When sugary
drinks are restricted in lunch boxes,
studies show that weight falls. Its not
magic its just lowering calorie intake,
says ORahilly. Sugary drinks are particularly dangerous because they are not
filling theyre empty calories.
And as Yeo says, sugar has the power
to distort the appetite: people will
have a dessert when theyd never have
another portion of mashed potato.
ORahilly recently wrote that while
glucose and fructose are equal in calories, and therefore equal in their ability

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that something as basic as temperature is the answer. We all have two

types of fat, white and brown. White
fat is inert and sits in deposits. Brown
fat, which regulates babies temperatures but is much harder to pinpoint in
adults, can be activated to burn calories and generate heat.
Studies show that exposure to low
temperatures may encourage white fat
to behave like brown fat. So while central heating ensures we move less and
burn fewer calories, its possible that
lower temperatures might increase the
activity of brown fat, which will burn our
calories for us. It is indeed theoretically
possible that if we all switched on our
brown fat by living in colder ambient
temperatures we might all expend more
energy, says ORahilly.
Its a nice idea, he says, but so far
there has not been sufficient study to
show whether its possible, or whether
our bodies will compensate in other
ways by making us eat more.
THE BIG BREAKTHROUGH
Scientists at the Stem Cell Institute at
Harvard and Massachusetts General
Hospital (one of the many teams in the
world to have joined the race) announced
before Christmas that they had identified two compounds that could turn
bad white fat into good brown fat,
in what is possibly a step towards their
own version of that magic pill. One of
the two compounds is already used to
treat rheumatoid arthritis, but the team
admits they are some way from their
pill because the compounds concerned
could damage the immune system.
Associate Professor Chad Cowan
says, If you administered them [the
compounds] for a long time, the
person taking them could become
immune-compromised . . . The good
news and bad news is that science is
slow; just establishing proof of concept
takes an enormous amount of time.
At the same time, another player a
team of researchers from Imperial Col-

NEWSWEEK

ONWARDS AND DOWNWARDS:

Recent studies have shown that 20
minutes of exercise per day, above,
can burn enough calories to prevent
premature death. The consequences
of severe obesity, top, can include
type 2 diabetes and heart disease

lege, London identified an enzyme

called glucokinase which could possibly
be target for a new pill because it drives
the craving for sugar in the brain.
This is the first time anyone has
discovered a system in the brain that
responds to a specific nutrient, rather
than energy intake in general. It suggests that when youre thinking about
diet, you have to think about different
nutrients, not just count calories, says
James Gardiner of Imperial College,
whose study was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. His tests on
rats showed that boosting glucokinase
activity caused the animals to consume
glucose over normal food. If a pill could
reverse this desire, sugar consumption
would decrease.

50

30/01/2015

Earlier this month, a report was published in Nature Medicine from researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla,
California, claiming they had developed
a drug that works like an imaginary
meal, which was shown to reduce obesity in mice. ORahilly says of the paper,
If we could fool those cells into thinking
we have had a meal, that could be a way
of reducing peoples food intake to produce safe weight-loss. While these are
interesting observations, only a modest
percentage of drugs that seem effective
in mice ever make it into the clinic for
patients. So, in spite of the constant
flow of exciting announcements, most
of them, as yet, seem to be better news
for rotund rodents than obese people.
Work in Cambridge isnt confined to
ORahillys team; Professor Nick Wareham, on the second floor, examines the
population as whole. The causes of the
obesity epidemic are not quite the same
as the causes of obesity in individuals. Education and labelling, Wareham
believes, can only go so far because we
are not rational creatures. He wrote
a paper recently in the British Medical Journal studying the importance of
exposure to takeaway food: the more
outlets, the higher the local bodyweight.
That might sound obvious but lined
up with the fact that flat, spacious countries have more cyclists, a central point
emerges: people are suggestible. They
will do whatever is easiest. So we should
perhaps look at changing the environment rather than just telling people to
change their habits. If I was forced to
choose, diet matters the most, says
Wareham, But so does the environment and the infrastructure.
Somewhere between magic tablets,
genetic studies, sugar taxes, cycle lanes,
turning the central heating down, education and sympathy, ORahilly and
Wareham, and others of their noble
breed will, I hope, help cure us with
kindness and ingenuity. Until then, the
n
fat battle rages on.
@CatherineOstler

Cravings: how food

controls our brains
BY ROGER HIGHFIELD

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, BARC ROF T, SHUTTERSTOCK

n the increasingly-dogged battle against

obesity, people have resorted to all kinds
of clever ways to trick their appetites.
Eating some foods can make us feel
more full. Then there are appetite suppressants. A gastric band, bypass and
other forms of weight loss surgery can
also cut cravings.
Now, approval has been given to the
first obesity electroceuticals, where
electrical signals are used to trick the
brain into thinking the gut is full. If their initial promise
holds good, this approach could be a gentle option next
to stomach stapling, which carries a 0.5% risk of death,
would have fewer side effects, such as frequent diarrhea,
and be reversible too.
Their target is the vagus nerve, a bundle of neurons
that provides a major highway taking signals back and
forth from the brain to many of the major organs. The
vagus does a plethora of jobs, including helping to
control heart rate, breathing, secretion of stomach acids
and appetite. It also feeds information back to the brain
on how various body systems are operating.
It is possible to wrap electrodes around the nerve in the
neck and connect these to a power source programmed
to switch on and off at intervals. While trying to do this
to treat severe forms of epilepsy and depression it was
found that people lost weight as a side effect, possibly
because stimulation was mimicking the normal messag-

THIN AMBITIONS:
A device that is
surgically implanted
in the abdomen to
control hunger is
the next big step in
fighting obesity

es from our gut to signal to our brain that we are full.

Research on obese mini pigs published in 2010 by
a team based in Rennes, France, showed that vagus
nerve stimulation stopped the animals overeating and
even made them select healthy food options. That year,
a human pilot study by Jacek Sobocki at the Medical
University of Warsaw, showed promise too.
On 14 January, the US company EnteroMedics announced Food and Drug Administration approval for an
implant. So-called VBLOC therapy intermittently blocks
the signals of the vagus using the Maestro System,
which is an implanted pacemaker-like device. A trial
showed that, after a year, treated patients achieved
24.4% excess weight loss.
This is the first new medical device to be approved by
the FDA for obesity in over a decade, said Scott Shikora, EnteroMedics Chief Consulting Medical Officer. By
blocking signals along the nerves that connect the brain
and stomach, the device promotes earlier feelings of
fullness, which can help people with obesity reduce the
number of calories consumed.
The US company IntraPace, in San Jose, also has
European approval for its battery-powered Abiliti device. When food or drink is detected, this also delivers
low-energy electrical impulses to the stomach that are
intended to create a feeling of fullness.
Chris Toumazou and Sir Stephen Bloom of Imperial
College London are trying a more elaborate approach
which will be on display in Cravings: Can Your Food
Control You?, a new exhibition opening in February at
the Science Museum in London. The Imperial device, a
microchip a few millimetres across, can also be implanted by relatively minor surgery and is attached using
cuff electrodes to the vagus nerve within the peritoneal
cavity in the abdomen. The cuffs go one step further than
before because they read both electrical and chemical
signatures of appetite within the nerve, offering more
sensitivity.
The chip can then act upon these readings and send
electrical signals to the brain, subduing the urge to
eat. It will be control of appetite, rather than saying
dont eat, said Toumazou. Though still too early to
say when the new chip will be used in obese patients,
electroceuticals offer a promising new way to curb
n
unwanted cravings.

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30/01/2015

NEW WORLD

NEW FRICTIONLESS TECHNOLOGY

COULD SECURE FUTURE OF SPACE

Scientists have developed a new magnetic

drive mechanism for use in space rovers
that will extend their operational life
WHAT IF A PLANETARY exploration mission
were jeopardised by a stuck axle or a misaligned
gear cog? What if grease clogged up a delicate
sensor on a lunar rover? These are some of the
nightmare scenarios researchers in Madrid claim
to have banished with the successful development of a drive mechanism in which none of the
mechanical parts actually touch each other.
Using the forces between magnetic bearings,
the transmission system needs no lubrication
and is immune to damage by wear and friction,
leading international space scientists to predict
a bright future for the Magdrive projects contactless gear reducer the mechanism that transforms the rotational speed of an input axle to the
different speed of an output axle, as in a bicycle
chain mechanism or a cars gearbox.
It substitutes geared teeth with magnets that
repel and attract each other so that the transmission of [ . . . ] forces between the moving parts

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52

is achieved without contact, explains Efrn

Dez Jimnez of Madrids Carlos III University
(UC3M). According to the researcher, the big
advantages of this breakthrough are that parts
do not need to be lubricated, and that there is no
wear-and-tear through their contact, meaning
that the operational life of these devices could
be much longer than that of a conventional drive
mechanism with teeth. Even after an overload,
says Dez Jimnez, the device will continue to
function. If the axle is blocked, the parts simply
slide amongst themselves, but nothing breaks.
Magdrive has superconductors integrated into
the structure in order to keep the axles floating
with stable repulsion forces. These not only allow
the gear to rotate, but also give it stability to deal
with oscillatory movements or other possible
destabilising forces.
Professor Jos Luis Prez-Daz, the lead
researcher on a project for which the Madrid

30/01/2015

SMOOTH OPERATOR:
Space rovers such
as ExoMars, right,
which is due to be
launched in 2018, can
suffer mechanical
failures associated
with friction between
parts. It is hoped that
a new magnetic drive
shaft developed by
Spanish scientists,
in which parts do not
come into contact
with one another,
will circumvent this
problem

BY
JAMES BADCOCK
@jpfbadcock

NEWSWEEK

53

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N E W

W O R L D

university coordinated work at seven different

institutions across Europe, sees a number of
applications for a contactless transmission in
space technology: from robot arms or antenna
positioners, where high-precision movements
are needed or when contamination from lubricants is undesired, to vehicles that, because of
temperature or extreme conditions, have their
life shortened by conventional mechanisms, as
happens with the wheels of a rover on Mars.
By the time Nasas Spirit rover became stuck in

ment where there is little possibility of repairing

friction-related wear, and where low weight is
essential. Prez-Daz recalls that the programme
originated as a bullet-point on a sheet of technological requirements published in 2010 by
the European Space Agency (ESA), a kind of scientific wish-list. The European Commissions
Seventh Framework R&D funding programme
then picked up on the ESAs request for a way to
improve the tribological conditions [wear from
friction] of gear-reducing mechanisms in cryogenic conditions.
As Prez-Daz points out, the Magdrive consortium took a more ambitious approach in avoiding
contact between the moving parts altogether.
For Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University
of Leicester and president of Britains Royal
Astronomical Society, Magdrive is a very
exciting development, particularly due to its
capacity to operate outside planetary atmospheres. Oil and grease are horrible in a vacuum, Barstow says, adding that he has spent
long periods of his life trying to avoid
this problem, and suggesting that the
magnetic drive may prove to be of huge
assistance in future lunar exploration.
Mechanisms such as filter wheels
on telescopes or carousels that change
instruments are very difficult to lubricate.
Optical systems need to be kept clean and, in a
vacuum, lubricants can be easily deposited on
optical components and reduce their effectiveness. If you try to build mechanisms without
lubricants, they have a tendency to stick through
a process called cold welding: in a vacuum,
smooth metal surfaces fuse when brought into
contact. This new mechanism seems likely to

If the axle is blocked, the

parts simply slide amongst
themselves, nothing breaks.
what was to be its final resting place on Mars in
2009, after five years of exploration, it had problems with two of its six wheels, fatally hampering
its bid to extricate itself from a soft patch of soil.
However, the rovers desperate, wheel-spinning
attempts to continue with its mission did prove
to be serendipitous they uncovered sulphates
under the planets surface, evidence of the previous existence of hot springs that could have
supported life.
Prez-Daz highlights the potential of the
magnetic drive, which can operate in cryogenic
temperatures not found on Earth, for use in
space. Our prototype can work at -210 degrees
Celsius, in a vacuum and bearing weight, with
zero backlash, meaning perfect precision can be
achieved. And, in what the physics professor
describes as a world-record feat for Spanish science, it is the first time in history that the input
axle, as well as the output axle, of a gear-reducer
are floating without any kind of contact, while
being capable of keeping a mechanism spinning
at 3,000 revolutions per minute even at cryogenic temperatures.
The physicist says that satellites, as well as
rovers, could benefit from such a smooth drive
mechanism for its moving parts in an environ-

NEWSWEEK

54

30/01/2015

IN THE WORKS:
The Magdrive
projects contactless
gear reducer,
which relies on
superconducting
bearings, below,
that allow parts to
interact without
coming into contact
with each other, is
in development
in Madrid

A D V E R T O R I A L

solve this problem, he explains. A spokesman

for Airbus Defence and Space agrees that the
contactless technology is extremely interesting for the future, but says it will not be ready in
time for ESAs ExoMars rover, currently under
development at the companys Mars yard in
Stevenage, north of London. ExoMars is due to
be launched in 2018 in cooperation with Roscosmos. For a rover we need technology thats
already proven and space-qualified, and then
we build redundancy into that anyway so there
is always a back-up. But it is clear that this technology could be of interest for going to very cold
places, perhaps with a view to future missions to
Europa, the moon of Jupiter.
While space rovers and robotic arms gently placing satellites correctly into orbit will
one day be enhanced by this technology, the
breakthrough could also become one of those
improvements that the earthbound quickly take
for granted, perhaps only reminded of it from
time to time when a friends old banger produces
that once-familiar crunching sound as the driver
battles with the gearbox.
Besides the prototype that functions at cryogenic temperatures, the Magdrive team has also
developed another that can be used at ordinary
Earth temperatures. The technology is ready
to be used in any industrial sector where it is
needed, says UC3Ms Dez Jimnez, who mentions the possibility of solving problems experienced by wind turbines when gearing-down
high-wind energy to match the needs of the grid.
The absence of lubrication, and the fact that the
system can transmit its magnetic power through
hygienic barriers, means the technology could be
beneficial in the pharmaceutical sector and other
health-related areas.
The European Magdrive project was coordinated by UC3M with the six other members of
the consortium: Italys National Research Council, the University of Cassino, the University of
Lisbon, and three companies Germanys BPE,
Spains LIDAX, and Can Superconductors from
the Czech Republic. According to Professor
Prez-Daz, the total cost was a modest 2.5m,
mostly supplied by EU funding.
The magnetic non-contact drive is a rare
success story for Spanish science, which has
itself become somewhat toothless after years
of funding cutbacks. According to national figures for 2013, investment in R&D fell to 1.24%
of GDP, a figure well short of the EU average
of 2.02%. The countrys contribution to ESA
funding has also fallen off a cliff, dipping
under 100m in 2013. Spains debt to the space
n
agency currently stands at 75.5m.

Rhiannon Griffiths
Acupuncturist

21st-century
professionals
UNCONVENTIONAL
MEDICAL PRACTICE
MEDICAL PRACTICE

he biggest barrier to getting people

through the clinic door is fear of
needles, according to Rhiannon
Griffiths, who has been in practice since
2009. Rhiannon is a member of the
British Acupuncture Council; members
require a minimum three year degree level
qualification in acupuncture that includes
conventional biomedical training.
Acupuncture is an established ancient
practice, but is not the main medical
model in the UK. According to Rhiannon,
sheer unfamiliarity with Chinese Medicine
can be a challenge, translating Western
Medical language into Chinese Medicine
concepts of how we view health is key.
She explained how barriers can be overcome: Patients can ask questions at every
stage to be sure theyre clear and happy. We
talk in depth about how they are feeling, upon
which I base my acupuncture point choices
for that individual, what I choose to do to
restore and harmonise the flow of energy.
But the proof is in the pudding. It works.
Acupuncture is now recommended for
more conditions. Years ago acupuncture
would have been known for bad backs or
frozen shoulders, but now Im passionate
about spreading the word that it can help
with stress, anxiety and other emotional
conditions.
Rhiannon uses social media to boost
accessibility and understanding of Chinese
Medicine: We cant often share patient
experiences, but I post snippets of my life,
sometimes in clinic, sometimes not. I might
Instagram or Tweet what Im eating and
explain what impact the food is having on
my body according to Chinese food energetics nourishing blood, boosting energy or
supporting particular organs. Authenticity is a
high value of mine. I show current or potential
patients that I do live my own life according to
Chinese medicine. It proves I walk the walk as
well as talk the talk.
By Andy Friedman parnglobal.com

DOWNTIME

SCHOLAR, STRATEGIST, SEDUCTRESS

WHO WAS THE REAL ANNE BOLEYN?

As the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall sparks

another bout of Tudor mania, Henry VIIIs
most alluring wife remains enigmatic
about her is lost in myth. After Annes execution
for treason, Henry VIIIs subjects didnt keep pictures of the fallen queen, and the only contemporary image of her that survives is on a coin so
damaged you cannot see the middle of
her face.
The paintings of Anne we know the
most famous being that of her wearing
a necklace adorned with a B were
painted after both Anne and Henry
were dead. The woman in that particular picture may not even be Anne. In her lifetime
she used A, for Anne, as a cipher not B for
Boleyn. It could equally be a picture of a Belinda
or a Beryl.
The contemporary descriptions of what Anne
looked like are, however, vivid. She was not
beautiful. Her skin was sallow, as was that of her
daughter Elizabeth, who made her face white

She was chic. It was said that

her black eyes could read the
secrets of a mans heart
Now we are to meet the Anne Boleyn of the BBC
adaptation of Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall. Vindictive, calculating and political, this Anne sets out
to marry Henry VIII and to destroy his heroic servant, Thomas Cromwell.
The historical Anne was born the daughter
of the prominent courtier, Sir Thomas Boleyn.
But we dont know exactly when, and much else

NEWSWEEK

56

30/01/2015

THE OTHER WOMAN:

Anne Boleyn, the
second wife of
Henry VIII, has been
represented on
screen on a number of
occasions. Claire Foy,
right, will appear as
Boleyn in the BBCs
adaptation of Hilary
Mantels Wolf Hall
later this month

BY
LEANDA DE LISLE
@LeandadeLisle

G I L ES K EY T E / B B C

WHO WAS THE real Anne Boleyn? In the film

Anne of a Thousand Days, she is the brave girl
who loves a king. In the novel The Other Boleyn
Girl she is the fallen woman, her brothers lover.

NEWSWEEK

57

30/01/2015

D O W N T I M E

with make-up. Annes nose was also rather large,

but she was chic, with black eyes she used to
great effect. It was said that they could read the
secrets of a mans heart. Educated in the courts
of Burgundy and France, Anne was an expert in
the art of courtly flirtation. But it is wrong to suggest that she set out to capture the king. When
he fell in love with her in 1526, Henry had ended
an affair with Annes sister Mary, who had been
married off to a gentleman.
It was a pattern the king had followed with mistresses before. Anne, who had already attracted
the attentions of many high-born suitors, was disinterested. She resisted Henrys attentions in the
hope that he would move on, but her behaviour
appealed to his love of chivalric romances and
their unobtainable heroines.
In any case, at this stage in his life, Henry
needed a wife, not a mistress. The queen, Katherine of Aragon, could not give him a son and heir,
and Anne was a possible replacement. While
Henry did not approve of divorce and was therefore reluctant to leave Katherine, he could argue
that his marriage to her was invalid. She was his
brothers widow and this, he claimed, broke an
inviolable biblical injunction against marrying
your brothers wife. The Pope disagreed.
The arguments with Rome went on for years
and Anne was stuck. No courtiers would take
on the king as a romantic rival. She would either
marry Henry soon, or end up barren and unwed.
But Anne was fiercely intelligent and resourceful,
and she looked for solutions in the movements
for religious reform that were sweeping Europe
at the time. Contrary to myth, Anne was never
a Protestant. But she fed Henry with selected
readings that supported the view that kings had
rightful authority over the church. Henry already
associated himself with King Arthur, whom, he
believed, had wielded an imperial power over the
English church, as well as the state. He became
convinced the papacy had usurped this power.
In 1533, Henry finally broke with Rome and
had his marriage to Katherine annulled. The
already-pregnant Anne was now his queen. But

NEWSWEEK

58

Katherine remained much-loved, and women in

particular resented Henrys abandonment of his
first queen. Anne acquired a new reputation as a
goggle-eyed whore.
At court, Anne was also envied for her new
position, and detested for her association with
the break from Rome. Her position was further
weakened when her first baby proved to be a
girl. But, undeterred, she continued to play
politics for the highest stakes; she was never
a mere victim. Anne backed the reign of terror
Henry now launched with Thomas Cromwell
upon opponents of his religious changes, and
she insisted her daughter Elizabeth was given
precedence over Katherines daughter Mary,
who was declared a bastard. Yet still she failed
to produce a healthy son, and after she miscarried a male foetus in January 1536, Henry lost
hope that she ever would.
He began complaining that Anne had seduced

him into marrying her an accusation that carried suggestions of witchcraft. He also showed a
growing romantic interest in one of her maidsof-honour, Jane Seymour. It was at this time that
Anne made her fatal enemy: the kings leading
servant, Thomas Cromwell, played in the forthcoming series Wolf Hall by Mark Rylance.
Anne wanted the money raised from the closing of monasteries to go into education; Cromwell intended to pour it into the kings pocket.
He was never the upstanding figure of Hilary
Mantels invention. Only one of the pair would
survive the quarrel and it wasnt Anne.
Cromwell used the snatches of flirtatious con-

30/01/2015

THE ELUSIVE QUEEN:

Natalie Portman,
above, in 2008s The
Other Boleyn Girl, and
Natalie Dormer, far
right, in the Showtime
television series The
Tudors, are among a
number of actresses
who have played the
second wife of Henry
VIII. It is argued that
the most famous
portrait of Boleyn,
above right, may in
fact depict another
woman entirely

R E X F E AT U R ES/ U N I V E RSA L H I STORY A RC H I V E / U N I V E RSA L I M AG ES G ROUP

versation Anne had enjoyed with male courtiers

(and a young musician) to weave a conspiracy.
She was accused of adultery with several men,
among them her own brother. Those historians
who claim that adultery against the king was, at
that time, an act of treason punishable by death,
are wrong. The claims of adultery were simply
used to colour the real charge: together, Anne

Historians have said this decision was made in

recognition of her many years in France, where
nobility were traditionally executed in this manner, and because it offered a more dignified end.
But in truth, Henry didnt care a jot for Annes
feelings. His only thoughts were for himself.
In Thomas Mallorys The Death of Arthur, the
king sentenced his adulteress, Queen Guinevere, to death by burning (although it was
never carried out). The sword was the
symbol of Camelot, of a rightful king,
and of masculinity. Once again, Henry
was associating himself with King Arthur.
Contrary to popular belief, Anne had
never been the reason that Henry broke
with Rome. He did so because of his obsession
with having a son, and his desire to have more
power over the church. He would go on to use that
power to secure the annullment of a second marriage; to his Catholic subjects, the new Church of

Anne continued to play politics

for the highest stakes; she was
never a mere victim
and her lovers were accused of plotting to
kill the king, in order that Anne might be free to
marry one of them. The kings close servant and
friend, Sir Henry Norris, was put in the frame.
Anne and her co-accused were arrested, incar-

cerated in the Tower of London, and charged. In

court, her brother described how they had joked
about the kings poor sexual performance and
his bad poetry. This gave substance to the lurid
stories of Annes sexual exploits. But only one of
the accused confessed to having slept with the
queen the musician Mark Smeaton. It was later
said that Smeaton had been tortured, though evidence for this is elusive. He seems to have been a
fantasist, a nobody who became a somebody by
claiming to have slept with Anne.
When Anne was found guilty of the murder
plot, Henry decided she should be beheaded
with a sword rather than with the traditional axe.

NEWSWEEK

England, Parliament, and Henry himself, Anne

had never been his wife at all. Eleven days later,
he married his new conquest, Jane Seymour.
I heard say the executioner was very good
and I have but a little neck, Anne said, the day
before her execution, as, laughing, she put her
hands round her throat. It was, at least, to be a
quick death. Her head fell with one blow, her
eyes and lips still moving as it landed on the
straw. Her real life was over, but the many stories
n
of Anne Boleyn were about to begin.
Leanda de Lisle is the author of Tudor: The Story of
Englands Most Notorious Royal Family.

59

30/01/2015

D O W N T I M E

CLINT EASTWOODS DRAMA OF

TWISTED SOULS AND SAVAGERY

I ALWAYS SEEMED more vulnerable at home,

wrote Chris Kyle in his 2012 book, American
Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper
in US Military History, which has sold an estimated 1.6 million copies and has been made into
a Clint Eastwood film that opens across Europe
this week. Overseas, on deployment, in the war,
I seemed invincible, Kyle wrote. But then some
minor injury, like a stubbed toe, would befall him
back home. You take your superhero cape off

Rough Creek Lodge, outside of Dallas, because

Kyle thought that men who shot guns in Iraq and
Afghanistan might want to keep shooting guns in
Texas. He was right too right. Routh shot Kyle
and another man, Chad Littlefield, thus leaving
Taya Kyle alone with two young children and
proving her husbands premonition about his
stateside vulnerability tragically correct.
Much of Eastwoods film takes place on the
battlefield: we see the world reduced to the
crosshairs of a scope, all moral quandaries compressed into the question of
whether to squeeze the trigger. Lying
prone on a rooftop, as he almost always
is, Kyle whisperingly pleads for a boy
not yet old enough to shave to drop
the grenade-launcher of a dead insurgent. If he keeps the weapon, he is an enemy, and
must be killed. I dont see too much gray, Kyle
wrote in his book, which opens with him killing a
woman determined to lob a Chinese grenade at
a unit of approaching marines. After shes dead,
Kyle concludes that the American lives he saved
were clearly worth more than that womans
twisted soul.
American Sniper the book, but not the

Fuck, I thought to myself, this is

great. Its nerve-wracking and
exciting and I fucking love it.
every time you come home from deployment,
Taya Kyle told her husband.
She was right. Kyle was not felled in Nasiriya,
Fallujah or Sadr City. It wasnt a roadside bomb
that got him, nor an insurgent sniper on the hunt.
Chris Kyle was murdered on 2 February 2013 by
Eddie Ray Routh, a deeply disturbed marine who
was one of the veterans Kyle had dedicated himself to helping. He had taken Routh shooting at

NEWSWEEK

60

30/01/2015

BY
ALEXANDER
NAZARYAN
@alexnazaryan

PAU L M OS E L EY/2013 M CT/A P P H OTO/ WA R N E R B ROS

Based on the memoir of a US navy

Seal, American Sniper is a brutal
examination of moral truth in warfare

SHARP SHOOTER:
Chris Kyle, top, a
US navy Seal and
bestselling author of
American Sniper: The
Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper
in American History,
was one of two people
killed on a gun range
in Texas in February
2013. He is portrayed
by Bradley Cooper,
above right, in a new
film, American Sniper,
by Clint Eastwood

movie often delves into this uncomfortable

moral territory, making the fight in Iraq seem
less like a military campaign than a religious
crusade. Savage, despicable evil. Thats what
we were fighting in Iraq, writes the man who
was branded Shaitan ar Ramadi, or the Devil of
Ramadi. His pronouncement certainly sounds
messianic. Yet many in the Bush administration felt exactly the same way.
Timothy Murphy climbed a tree and positioned his rifle. Three hundred yards away was
Brigadier General Simon Fraser, and Murphy
had been ordered to kill him. Murphy did not

NEWSWEEK

hit Fraser with his first shot, nor with his second. But that second shot did strike his horse,
causing the British general to fall. Murphy
fatally wounded Fraser with a third shot, and
he died the next morning.
This scene took place on 7 October 1777, during
the Second Battle of Saratoga, of the Revolutionary War. The fight was won by the Americans
and became a foundation stone in the legend of
Sure Shot Tim, the Pennsylvanian whom Andy
Dougan calls a precursor of the modern sniper
in Through the Crosshairs: A History of Snipers.
Murphy was a man who uses his deadly skill as
a marksman to target opposing commanders and
shatter the morale of the enemy.
The 1st United States Sharpshooters were
formed during the Civil War, by Colonel Hiram
Berdan. We have no drill or picket duty, he
advertised. Our warfare is like the guerrilla
or Indian ... You are privileged to lay upon the
ground while shooting, picking your position. No
commander while firing. By the end of September 1861, he had 1,392 men under his command,
as well as permission to form a second regiment.
The mythic image of the sniper proffered by
Berdan has persisted into the modern age. He is a
soloist, a minimalist, a brooding freelance killer
who lurks in the shadowy edges of the chaotic
fray. During the Vietnam War, where the irregular terrain made traditional warfare obsolete,
snipers were seen as having a tactical advantage
over regular infantry. You dont select the first
gooner that comes into your field of fire, counselled Captain Jim Land, who trained snipers in
Hawaii. I know that as grunts it was easy for
you to feel justified in killing the enemy when he
attacked you he was trying to kill you ... As a
sniper you do not have that luxury. You will be
killing the enemy when he is unaware of your
presence ... You will be, in a sense, committing
murder on him premeditated.
The military historian Adrian Gilbert once
called the sniper the ultimate hunter in a
game where the quarry shoots back, a description that would have surely appealed to Kyle.
The product of north-central Texas, Kyle wrote
that he always loved guns, always loved hunting. He got into fights at school, though he
claims he didnt start most of them. After
high school, he dipped in and out of college,
then worked as a ranch hand. In 1999, he did
what he had long wanted to do and enlisted in
the navy, eventually becoming a member of a
Seal team. He makes no pretences to having
been the best marksman in his class. Yet he was
good enough to become, in time, a sniper.
Jeremy A Mitchell, who served as an army

61

30/01/2015

D O W N T I M E

sniper in Afghanistans treacherous Kunar province, told me that being a sniper was a coveted
position. But it was also a difficult one, he recalls.
You lay in the same place for days, watching for
enemy movements. Mitchell would go for weeks
without showering or changing his clothes. Out
in the elements the whole time, he recalls. You
just get fatigued.
The genius of the Chris Kyle story is that it
imbued warfare with a kind of glamorous sheen,
turning the privations Mitchell describes into
the stuff of macho American legend. His book is
clearly written for a generation reared on PlayStation, Red Bull and Vin Diesel flicks.
Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great, he
writes in American Sniper. I fucking love this.
Its nerve-wracking and exciting and I fucking
love it. He was good at it, too, with 160 kills
to his name. Yet it is hard to imagine a similar
sentiment from a private who had liberated
Buchenwald, or from a grunt whod spent a
miserable year wading through the bloody rice
paddies of Da Nang.
Brian Van Reet, a veteran who served in Iraq,
has accused Kyle and others of promulgating the
kill memoir genre, in which the horrors of war
are treated with a sunny, uncomplicated, Rumsfeldian braggadocio. Authors like Kyle, he wrote
in The New York Times, [offer] the spectacle of
high body counts and terrorists twitching on
the floor as proof that we are winning. Or if not
that exactly, then proof we have inflicted serious
damage. Van Reet, who is now a writer, has read
American Sniper but had not yet seen the movie.
He told me he thought Kyle was an embellisher and that the movie based on his memoir
is for people who like Toby Keith, the gratingly
patriotic country singer.
There is much to admire about the movie Clint
Eastwood has made. The film version of Chris
Kyle, for starters, is far more likeable than the
one in the book, even if the latter is more faithful to life. We dont watch films for accuracy,
do we? Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle, could
make just about anyone seem like the kind of guy
youd want for a brother-in-law. He captures the

NEWSWEEK

62

snipers bravado, at once alluring and threatening, but endows the character with depth. Its
almost something like navet, a likeable quality
of aw-shucks-Im-just-a-Texas-boy-doing-myjob. Sienna Miller is also excellent as the devoted
and brassy Taya Kyle, though she is underused.
The battle scenes are poems of dust and blood.
Eastwood has made a great combat movie; a
great war movie, though, would have needed
more of Kyle at home, trying to find a purpose in
the civilian world, struggling with alcohol, feeling holy matrimony slip from his grasp.
While on leave, he startles at the sound of
a lawnmower. In that moment, Cooper capably broadcasts the inward anguish of his character, the bad juju he brought back; Eastwood
could have done more with that blip of pain.
And with Routh, too, whom we only see in the
final sequence of the film. Kyles death is treated
almost like an afterthought, though the credit
sequence, which shows actual footage from his
funeral procession through Texas, is so moving
because it is so real.
Perhaps what makes some uncomfortable
about Kyle is that he reminds us of who fights our
wars. You live in a dreamworld, Kyle once told
an interviewer. We may do so, too, for about two
hours, while stuffing our faces with popcorn and
soda. Then we can go back to our lives without
ever having to think about Moqtada al-Sadr.
Its not even on the news, Kyle complains to
Taya during a spell back home. No one cares.
This must have been a dismaying thought for
someone who felt the cosmic import of what he
was doing. Even those soldiers who didnt share
Kyles religious vision for the conflict felt keenly
the apathy back home. There was no attempt by
the government to call for some national sacrifice, Van Reet told me. Besides asking people
to go out and shop more, there was no effort.
Invariably, both the right and left will use
American Sniper, though the movie is far less susceptible to political manipulations than the book
on which it is based. But when has that stopped
anyone? Already, a writer for the Guardian has
written a piece labelling Kyle a hate-filled
killer, while a critic for the right-leaning New
York Post praised the navy Seals depicted therein
as a class of men in whom is contained a distilled essence of the American spirit.
Some will surely go see the movie because they
are fans of Chris Kyle and what he represents
the cowboy machismo of the Texas plains. And
others will avoid it for much the same reason. But
both blind devotion and wholesale rejection miss
the point. The wars are yours, whether you love
n
them or not.

30/01/2015

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HBO RESURRECTS FORGOTTEN

HITCHCOCK HOLOCAUST FILM

TWO WOMEN DRAG an emaciated female corpse

along the ground, its head bouncing on the dirt.
When they reach a large pit, they stop, give
the naked body a quick tug backwards to pick
up momentum, then hurl it into the hole. The
corpse, which looks like a skeleton covered in a
thin film of skin, flops onto a mound of decomposing bodies.
The scene, shot at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War,
might never have been seen by the public had
a decommissioned film, which boasted Alfred
Hitchcock as a supervising director and the British film pioneer Sidney Bernstein as producer,
not been resurrected. Authorised in the spring of
1945 by the Allied forces, German Concentration
Camps Factual Survey captured the monstrous
realities found during the liberation of Nazi
death camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau
and Auschwitz.
Yet by August that year, the film was shelved by
British authorities. Everything reels of footage,
the script, the cameramens notes was boxed up
and buried in the archives of the Imperial War
Museum in London. Now, a new HBO documentary, Night Will Fall, debuting on 26 January,
directed by Andr Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and Jasper Britton, tells the
story of how, 70 years later, this lost film came

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64

back to life. The film will air on HBO in the US,

on German-French channel Arte, ARD in Germany, Channel 4 in the UK, and also in Poland,
the Netherlands, Israel, Denmark, Slovenia, Portugal, Finland and Norway.
In the spring of 1945, British, American and
Soviet troops were headed towards Berlin. Along
with them were soldiers whod been trained as
cameramen, brawny men with large, boxy cameras hoisted up on their shoulders, who arrived
at concentration camps during their liberation
to record the harrowing aftermath of the atrocities there. It took a while for details about the
concentration camps to get out. On 19 April 1945,
BBC radio aired a controversial report by Richard
Dimbleby about his experience at Bergen-Belsen
in northern Germany. Initially, the BBC refused
to air the report; the broadcaster simply couldnt
believe Dimbleby hadnt embellished the details.
I found myself in the world of a nightmare,
the journalist recalled. Dead bodies, some of
them in decay, lay strewn about the road and
along the rutted tracks. On each side of the road
were brown wooden huts. There were faces at
the windows. The bony, emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside, propping
themselves against the glass to see the daylight
before they died. And they were dying, every
hour and every minute.

30/01/2015

BY
ABIGAIL JONES

HBO

The documentary, which recorded the

atrocities of concentration camps, was
shelved by British authorities in 1945

A SHOT IN
THE DARK: In
a documentary
film directed by
Alfred Hitchcock,
top, and now
restored by HBO,
cameramen, above,
arrive at German
concentration
camps in 1945
to document the
horrors within

The report was so stunning that, a couple of

days later, Bernstein, then a leading film producer and head of film for Britains psychological war department, made his way to the camp.
What he found there inspired his next endeavor:
a full-length documentary that would portray
the Nazis horrific crimes so vividly it would be
impossible to deny that they ever took place.
After the American and British governments
approved his film, Bernstein hand-picked a powerhouse team, including editor Stewart McAllister, writers Richard Crossman and Colin Willis,
and a famous movie director, Alfred Hitchcock.
They had just three months in which to complete the documentary from the reels and reels of
footage captured by those British, American and
Russian cameramen.
Night Will Fall shows many of these scenes, and
they are rife with unspeakable details: dead bodies are strewn across plots of land, some in heaps
and others lined up like a carpet of human carcasses. When the camera zooms in, we see limbs,
as thin as bones, tangled together like pretzels.
Skulls cracked open by puncture wounds. Gaunt,
hollow eyes and gaping mouths frozen in silent
screams. Shoulders, thighs and legs marked by
burns, cuts and filth.
We see soldiers slinging the dead over their
shoulders as they hurl them into dump trucks. We
watch the twins who survived Dr Josef Mengeles
grotesque human experiments at Auschwitz
walk through a narrow corridor of barbed wire.
And we look into the eyes of the dead and dying
at Dachau, which John Krish, an editor on the
film, said was like looking into the most appalling hell possible.
All the while, German locals stood on the sidelines, bearing witness to a genocide they claimed
they didnt know about.
The images will make you want to look away
but dont. As Raye Farr, a former director at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
says in the documentary, The films shot at Bergen-Belsen by the British cameramen reveal
every level of humanity to a much greater extent
than any other of the film evidence.
Helping us make sense of this heart- and
gut-wrenching footage are interviews with concentration-camp survivors, the soldiers who
saved them, and the cameramen who were there
to record the slaughter.
You couldnt tell if they were dead or alive,
Benjamin Ferencz, a sergeant with the US Third
Army, recalls in the documentary. Youd step
over a body and it would suddenly wave at you,
raise a hand. Total chaos. Dysentery, typhoid, all
kinds of diseases in the camp. Putrid. The smell

NEWSWEEK

of the camps, the crematorium was still going,

the dead bodies piled up like cordwood in front
of the crematorium. Its hard to imagine for a
normal human mind. I had peered into hell and
thats . . . Ferencz, who later served as chief
prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials, tries to
stop himself from crying its not something
you quickly forget.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
is Hitchcocks only known documentary feature. Though his tenure on the film lasted just
one month, he made lasting contributions, helping to outline the story and emphasizing the
importance of showing just how close the concentration camps were to picturesque villages
where German civilians lived during the war. He
wanted the film to be as believable and irrefutable as possible to ensure that the massacre of 11
million people, including six million Jews, would
never be forgotten.
In the summer of 1945, plans for German Concentration Camps Factual Survey began to unravel.
The American government grew impatient with
Bernsteins slow, meticulous process and pulled
its footage, hiring its own director, Billy Wilder,
to create a shorter film. Wilders Death Mills
premiered in Wrzburg following an operetta
with Lilian Harvey. Of the 500-odd people in
the audience at the beginning of the screening,
fewer than 100 were in their seats at the end.
Bernsteins work had also become a political headache for American and British officials.
The consensus was that the film was no longer
necessary. Policy at the moment in Germany
is entirely in the direction of encouraging, stimulating and interesting the Germans out of their
apathy, and there are people around the Commander-in-Chief who will say No atrocity film,
read a memo Bernstein received on 4 August
1945, from the British Foreign Office.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
was shelved in September 1945, though its footage was used as key evidence in the trials of Nazi
war criminals.
Four years ago, the IWM began restoring and
completing Bernstein and Hitchcocks film as
they had originally envisioned it, including the
sixth reel, which was unfinished when the project
was shut down. Night Will Fall ends with a scene
from the now-completed documentary. A large
group of civilians (its unclear who) walk through
one of the camps, passing by decaying bodies on
both sides of the road. As the camera zooms in
on the grotesque faces of the dead, the narrator
speaks: Unless the world learns the lesson these
pictures teach, night will fall. But by Gods grace,
n
we who live will learn.

65

30/01/2015

NEWS
W EEKS
PAST

23 January 1966 In Cold Blood . . . An American Tragedy

n November 1959, the American author

Truman Capote read in The New York Times
about the brutal murders of a well-to-do
Kansas farmer, and his teenage son and daughter. He spent the next three years reporting and
researching the story, and three more in editing
his copious notes. The result was In Cold Blood,
a piece of narrative non-fiction that marked the
dawn of a new era of American journalism.
The publication, in 1966, of 343 cool, clear,

NEWSWEEK

66

controlled, crescendoing pages, made the

cover of Newsweek in a report that marvelled at
the $2m-dollar financial avalanche of book and
movie rights those pages had already triggered.
I had this theory about reportage, Capote
told Newsweek. Ive always felt that if you
brought the art of the novelist together with the
technique of journalism fiction with the added
knowledge that it was true it would have the
n
most depth and impact.

30/01/2015