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TV ad revenue hits record thanks to Google and Groupon
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Television advertising revenue in the UK increased by 2.2% year on year to a record £4.36bn in 2011, as advertisers such as internet giants Google and Groupon ploughed millions into TV commercials for the first time.
The UK TV market was buoyed by 887 new or returning advertisers – defined as those who have not run commercials for at least five years – according to research conducted by TV marketing body Thinkbox and Nielsen Media Research.
New advertisers, which accounted for £113m or 2.6% of TV ad spend in the UK, included Google, Groupon, Ann Summers, Jimmy Choo and British Airways new frequent-flyer brand Avios.
Google, which has historically shied away from TV and brand advertising, spent £5.2m on TV ads in the UK last year.
This represents 23% of the £22.5m that Google spent in the UK on all forms of advertising – including internet, outdoor, press and radio – according to figures from Nielsen.
Google’s ad spend in the UK has increased more than seven-fold in just three years. In 2009 Google spent £3m, in 2010 this more than doubled to £6.6m and then almost quadrupled to £22.5m last year.
The rocketing ad spend is a far cry from Google’s previous ethos with Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive, admitting on Twitter that “hell has indeed frozen over” when the search giant purchased one of the world most expensive ad slots to run a commercial during the Super Bowl in 2010.
Notable work in the UK last year includes ad agency BBH’s campaign for Google Chrome featuring Jamal Edwards, the teenager behind urban music site SBTV, which ran with the strapline “The web is what you make of it”.
Google UK also uses M&C Saatchi for marketing and advertising communications around the issue of privacy and has a prolific in-house ad department called Creative Labs.
Tess Alps, the chief executive of Thinkbox, said the rise in UK TV ad revenue was an encouraging performance particularly given that in 2010 the market rose 16% year on year in the recovery following the downturn, making a further rise last year all that more difficult to achieve.
“The strength of linear TV advertising investment reflects commercial TV’s record viewing and the further acknowledgement by advertisers of its ability to create business profit,” said Alps.
The top spending category remained retailers, followed by the entertainment and leisure sector, and finance.
Telecoms companies increased ad spend by 28.8% year on year, travel and transport rose 27% and the never-ending battle between comparison websites saw TV ad spend rise 21.5% year on year in this sector.
In January, Thinkbox produced its annual TV viewing report, showing UK viewers watched an average of four hours and two minutes of television per day. Each viewer watched an average of 47 TV ads per day in 2011.
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Local elections 2012: Labour enjoys ‘stunning’ night in Wales
Posted by: | CommentsLabour has enjoyed what it called a “stunning” night in Wales, claiming impressive wins in Cardiff, Swansea and Newport at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.
The party had been expected to take back former strongholds, including Newport and Swansea, but it had not been so confident of winning in the capital, where the Liberal Democrats have ruled for eight years.
Re-counts were taking place in two Cardiff wards but Labour was satisfied it had won enough seats to seize control of the council and expected the Liberal Democrat leader, Rodney Berman, to be ousted from his seat.
Ahead of the count, Labour had claimed that voters who deserted the party at the height of Gordon Brown’s unpopular premiership were returning. As the night went on it began to look as if new voters had also turned to the party.
The Welsh Labour leader and first minister, Carwyn Jones, said: “The momentum is clearly with Welsh Labour. We are taking seats from every party across the country. We have reconnected with people and our community campaigning has resonated with voters right across Wales.”
Welsh Labour’s campaign was a two-pronged affair. It called on the electorate to make the vote a referendum on the Tory/Lib Dem coalition at Westminster. And it encouraged activists to prepare manifestos tailored to local needs, rather than publishing a national one.
Kirsty Williams, the Liberal Democrat leader, said the party had tried to fight the election on local issues and the record of its councillors. But she said Labour and the media had concentrated on what was happening at Westminster.
The Conservatives had a poor night, losing the majority in two of their strongest areas, the Vale of Glamorgan, west of Cardiff, and Monmouthshire. Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary, said the Tory vote was softening and claimed Labour was persuading Conservative voters to switch to it. Such a move was key if Labour was to win the next general election, he said.
Andrew RT Davies, the Tory leader in Wales, said the night had been a setback. Like Williams, he said Labour had succeeded in focusing on the Westminster agenda.
Plaid Cymru, under its new leader, Leanne Wood, suffered disappointments, particularly in Caerphilly, where the nationalists lost control of the council to Labour. A familiar figure, the former Welsh secretary Ron Davies who is now a member of Plaid, lost his seat. Plaid activists argued they were the victims of a UK-wide move towards Labour.
But as elsewhere in the UK, it may be Liberal Democrat losses that create the biggest headlines. They lost power — of various kinds — in the cities of Swansea and Newport in the south and in Wales’ largest town in the north, Wrexham. In Cardiff, the Lib Dems went into the election holding 34 seats to the Tories’ 16 and Labour’s 14, but saw their vote collapse.
Interestingly, council leaders lost their seats in Wrexham, Caerphilly, Ceredigion and the Vale of Glamorgan, possibly because they are so closely identified with service cuts.
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George Galloway’s Respect party wins Bradford council seats
Posted by: | CommentsGeorge Galloway’s electoral winning streak has continued in Bradford with five rookie politicians from his Respect party winning city council seats – including one swiped from the Labour leader of the administration.
Ian Greenwood, who has run the council since 2010 and has been a councillor in Bradford for 17 years, loses his £50,000 a year job. He was defeated by Alyas Karmani, onetime head of race relations for the Welsh Assembly and these days a youth worker and expert on sexual violence.
In a bruising campaign that resulted in the police being called to address complaints of violence, Respect won three other seats from Labour in the city and another from the Conservatives. The resurgent party contested 12 out of the 30 seats up for grabs in the Yorkshire town, hoping to capitalise on Galloway’s tumultuous victory in the Bradford West byelection in March.
The only woman to win a seat for Respect was Ruqayyah Collector, already a veteran campaigner at 28, having led the successful campaign to have the controversial Leeds University lecturer, Professor Frank Ellis, suspended as the university investigated whether he was in breach of the Race Relations Act. She won the student-heavy City Ward, beating Labour by around 700 votes.
Before Thursday’s election Bradford city council was run by a minority Labour-led administration. Three votes short of a majority, Labour required help from the trio of Greens on the council to pass key motions.
Despite making a few gains from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Labour was denied an overall majority when Greenwood lost Little Horton to Respect. They now hold 45 seats – exactly half of the 90 in the whole administration.
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Local elections: great expectations as Labour ends ‘southern discomfort’
Posted by: | CommentsLabour has won back control of councils across the country, boosting the position of Ed Miliband and prompting soul searching among Conservative MPs.
John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university, declared that Labour was now a serious opposition party after performing better than last year and securing seats across England.
In a symbolic gain Labour wrested control of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, from a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration early on Friday. Labour also regained control of Great Yarmouth and Harlow from the Tories.
In Great Yarmouth Labour gained five seats to take its share to 21 seats. The Tories lost four seats as its number dropped to 18. In Harlow Labour gained five seats to take its share to 20. The Tories lost four to take their figure to 13. The Lib Dems lost their only seat.
Labour also won back control of Thurrock, Exeter, Wirral, Chorley and Nuneaton and Bedworth. There were signs that the party was on course to gain control of Southampton, allowing the party to say it is tackling the “southern discomfort” that helped keep Labour out of power nationally between 1979 and 1997.
The Liberal Democrats experienced a difficult night on a par with last year’s elections when the party lost 760 seats. In an early result, the Lib Dems lost all four of their councillors in Knowsley to Labour, which now has all 63 seats on the council.
The BBC reported that the Lib Dems had lost four councillors in Grimsby. One Lib Dem councillor told the BBC that the party was facing “meltdown mark two”.
Simon Hughes, the party’s deputy leader, told the BBC: “We will not do as badly as last year because people are getting used to the idea of us being in government. For me, it will be a slow climb.”
One of the few bright spots for the Lib Dems was in Eastleigh, held by Chris Huhne at Westminster, where the party made gains. The party won back seats from former Lib Dems who had become independents.
Miliband will hail the Labour results as a sign that Labour is returning in areas it has to win back if is to form a government. The Tories won Harlow with a majority of 4,925 at the 2010 general election. It gained Great Yarmouth with a majority of 4,276.
Curtice told the BBC: “Labour will take heart. It is not the kind of performance Labour was putting in before the 1997 election. But Labour now looks like a serious opposition to an incumbent government.”
A Labour source said: “Early results show we are exceeding expectations – Great Yarmouth, Plymouth, Dudley. We are making real progress in areas where we need to win in 2015 – Harlow, Nuneaton and Bedworth. The big story seems to be a disaster for the Tories who are losing twice as many seats as Lib Dems.”
The Tories showed nerves in the early hours as it became clear Labour had performed well. Lady Warsi, the Tory co-chair who had started the evening trotting out the party’s official claim that Labour had to gain 700 seats to show that it was performing well, suddenly changed her projections. After consulting her iPad during the BBC election night programme, Warsi said that Labour had to gain 1,000 seats.
Tom Watson, the Labour deputy chairman, said: “We will not gain 1,000 seats. That is a ridiculously over-optimistic figure. There are only 3,600 seats.”
The Tories said there were some bright spots. In Castle Point in Essex the Tories held all their seats, ensuring that Labour still has no seats on the council. In Preston Labour lost a seat.
Labour entered the elections facing an acute challenge because it scored just 24% of the vote when the same set of seats were contested in England in 2008. The party is now on 40% in national polls, which prompted psephologists to say that Labour should gain at least 700 seats in this year’s elections.
The party said it hoped to make gains of between 300 and 350 in England and 100 in Wales. It expected to make net losses in Scotland because the SNP is still performing strongly after its emphatic victory in last year’s parliamentary elections.
Labour expects to lose control of Glasgow city council, though it believes the SNP will fail to gain control of Scotland’s largest city.
In the first result, declared just before midnight, Labour gained eight seats on Sunderland city council to secure 64 seats. The Tories lost six seats to take their total to eight. The Lib Dems lost their only seat. Independents have three seats.
Justine Greening, the transport secretary, indicated that the Tories will assess the results across the country with care. “We need to be a government that represents the whole country and not just the fringes of it,” she told the BBC.
Greening’s comments came after Gary Streeter, the moderate Tory MP for South West Devon, launched a stinging attack on the government for having “clobbered” natural party supporters in the budget. “We have to put right the misdeeds of the last month,” Streeter told the BBC.
Labour hopes to repeat its overnight successes in London – in at least one area – when the results are declared this afternoon. It believes it is on course to squeeze the Tories into second place in the London assembly elections.
But Labour is bracing itself for a setback amid a growing belief that Boris Johnson will secure a second term as mayor. In a sign of nerves at the highest levels of the Labour party, the deputy leader, Harriet Harman, criticised Watson for saying that voters should hold their noses and vote for Livingstone.
“It was wrong of Tom Watson to say, ‘Hold your nose’,” Harman said on Question Time on BBC1. “Ken Livingstone has great policies for London.”
Harman made clear that Labour will focus on the difficulty of unseating such a huge personality as Boris Johnson.
“It is a pity that there has not been a focus on the issues that matter,” she told Question Time.
“I hope that Londoners will have seen through the [focus on personalities] and will not have been distracted by the mudslinging from Boris.”
Harman declined to say whether it was right that Livingstone was selected as the Labour candidate. Senior Labour figures blame Harman for agreeing that the contest to choose the Labour candidate should take place at the same time as the party’s overall leadership contest in 2010. This denied David Miliband the chance of throwing his hat into the ring in London.
Harman quibbled with David Dimbleby, the Question Time presenter, when he asked whether it was right of Watson to question Livingstone’s candidacy.
But Watson told LBC last month: “I’m being totally candid with you. I’m saying to you, those Labour voters who are thinking of going to vote for Boris Johnson, ‘Hold your nose, vote for Ken,’ because that’s the way that you will help Labour.”
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Former FM launches hacking action
Posted by: | CommentsWeek in pictures: 21-27 April 2012
Posted by: | CommentsUS military criticised for secrecy over death of Afghan BBC correspondent
Posted by: | CommentsUS military secrecy over the death of a BBC correspondent shot dead by US forces during a Taliban attack caused needless distress to his family and sparked fears of a cover-up, a report into the shooting has said.
Ahmed Omed Khpulwak, 25, an Afghan national who worked as a BBC stringer in southern Uruzgan province, died when the local radio and television offices where he worked were attacked last July.
Khpulwak was shot dead by US soldiers who mistook him for an insurgent when they spotted him hiding in the bathroom of the building, which had been half-destroyed by suicide bombers.
Both the Afghan government and the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) initially said Khpulwak had been killed by the Taliban, despite the questions of family members who retrieved his body.
“Those who saw Omed’s body and the place of his death and heard police saying that foreign forces had stormed RTA [Radio Television Afghanistan] understood there was something wrong with the official account,” the report from the Afghanistan Analysts Network said.
But when his family spoke out about suspicions that he had been killed by a foreign soldier instead – based on the state of his body and the bullet casings around it – they received death threats in anonymous phone calls, probably from people linked to a local strongman, according to the report.
“Isaf’s failure to talk frankly with the media and Afghan population caused needless distress to Omed’s family and friends and helped spark suspicions of a cover-up,” said the report’s author, Kate Clark.
The truth about Khpulwak’s death emerged weeks later, when the results of a US investigation were published. A redacted version of the full conclusions was released only after a freedom of information request.
Clark’s report questions whether US troops did enough to meet their legal obligation to check there were no civilians in the offices, although it acknowledges that the soldier who shot him dead did so “with a reasonable belief that Omed was a possible suicide bomber”.
US troops were told by a local security battalion that there were no civilians in the building, but did not seem to have made further checks, the report said. At least one fellow journalist who reached Khpulwak by phone and tried to get to the offices was turned back by Afghan and Nato forces.
The top Nato and US commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, endorsed investigators’ recommendations, including those “that address the need to establish whether civilians are present at the scene of any potential engagement”, a conclusion Clark said showed the importance of transparency when operations do go wrong.
“The release of the military investigation has shown how an honest explanation of events can be a positive contribution both to accountability for civilian deaths and to improving the protection of civilians,” the report said.
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Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street book to become Virgin feature film
Posted by: | CommentsA book detailing one of the most tumultuous periods of The Rolling Stones is set to be turned into a film via Richard Branson’s production company Virgin Produced, reports Deadline Hollywood.
Robert Greenfield’s Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones examines the troubled genesis of the group’s 10th UK album. The critically acclaimed record that includes the hits Rocks Off and Tumbling Dice, was made during recording sessions that were notoriously chaotic. The band, who had left Britain as tax exiles, decamped to the Villa Nellcôte in the south of France to record the double album. Drugs, alcohol and a stream of visiting celebrity friends (including William S Burroughs and Gram Parsons) were constant distractions, while the relationship between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was at a particularly low point. It is thought the film will focus on tussles between the lead singer and the guitarist, although no casting has yet been announced.
A previous documentary about the making of the album, Stephen Kijak’s Stones in Exile, coincided with Exile on Main Street’s remastering and re-release in 2010.
Branson’s occasional involvement in film production has resulted in critical hits (Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape) and the odd misfire (The Rachel Papers). After a film-making hiatus during much of the 90s and 00s the entreprenuer announced the formation of Virgin Produced, which has been behind recent popular films like pop-psychology thriller Limitless and Tarsem Singh’s swords and sandals epic Immortals.
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ZX Spectrum: the legacy of a computer for the masses
Posted by: | CommentsCelebrated today in a pitch-perfect Google Doodle, the anniversary of the ZX Spectrum will have many veteran gamers swooning into a reverie of eighties nostalgia.
Released on this day in 1982, the machine typified the British approach to industrial design – Utilitarian but also idiosyncratic and characterful. It should have been buried by its more powerful contemporary, the Commodore 64, but somehow this strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computing market, especially in Britain.
Partly its success was about price. Since the launch of the ZX80 computer two years earlier, restless British inventor Clive Sinclair had been interested in computing for the masses.
Using cheap components and a minimalistic approach to design, he was able to manufacture machines at a lower cost than rivals such as Acorn, Apple and Tandy. The computer’s rubber keys, for example, were created from a single sheet, with a metal overlay to separate them – much less expensive than producing a conventional keyboard.
So while the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A option and the C64 hit the shelves at around £350, the Spectrum launched at just £125 for the 16k version or £175 for the mighty 48k.
At a time of deep recession, with unemployment at 3 million in the UK, this was a vital factor – especially as a lot of the interest in home computers was coming, not from businessmen who wanted to do spreadsheets at home, but from kids, excited by the possibility of writing and playing cool arcade games in their own living rooms.
“The key thing was price for us,” says Ste Pickford, who together with his brother John, started out writing computer games in the earlier eighties.
“We spent a full year with this massive jar in the house labelled ‘Spectrum savings fund’. We put every spare bit of pocket money we had into it. £175 was way more than what mum and dad would have been able to afford on a Christmas present, but we wanted it all year.
“He must have saved up £80, which just about took enough of the price so my parents could put the rest in. So the price was everything. It was the only way a family like ours could have owned a computer.”
There was also a fundamental difference in philosophy – while his competitors were still producing hardware with serious computing interests in mind, Sinclair was targeting the mass market; he saw the wider consumer appeal of computers, not just as serious workhorses for home accounting, but as gadgets that could be as ubiquitous and easy to use as the TV or pocket calculator.
“Computers were quite scary at the time,” remembers Philip Oliver, co-founder of Blitz Games Studios and one half of the Oliver twins, who created the legendary Dizzy series of games on the Spectrum.
“Some people were actually worried they were going to take over the world, thanks to movies like WarGames, other people worried that computers were going to steal their jobs. What the Spectrum did was gave a friendly, fairly simple image to computing. There was nothing frightening about the Spectrum!”
Ironically, there were strengths too in the technical limitations of the hardware. The Commodore 64 was more powerful and capable – its multi-chip architecture had been designed to move coloured sprites around the screen as quickly as possible – but it also did some of the work for the coders.
“When we started at the development studio Binary Designs we noticed that, actually, a lot of the C64 programmers weren’t that good,” says Pickford, now running digital publisher Zee-3, responsible for the Bafta award-nominated puzzler Magnetic Billiards.
“We realised that machines like the C64 had a lot of clever hardware; they did a lot of the hard things – like scrolling and sprites – for you. You could get most of the way to having a game running without knowing that much.
“The Spectrum had nothing. Architechtually, it was a really simple machine for a programmer – it was just a load of Ram and a processor; and the screen itself was just dealt with as part of the ram. You had to do everything the hard way, but it meant that if you managed to get a sprite moving around on the screen, you’d done a lot of really clever stuff.
“Years later, when that generation of coders grew up, Britain was really punching above its weight in the PlayStation era, when you had the start of games like Grand Theft Auto. The Spectrum bred a generation of really smart programmers.”
This blank slate design also meant that developers weren’t steered toward creating conversions of established arcade titles – they were free to improvise. Hence, the surreal Python-esque platform puzzlers Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, created by eccentric lone coder Matthew Smith; hence, the beautiful and challenging arcade adventure, Head over Heels, by Jon Ritman who introduced the concept of controlling two different characters.
There were also bizarre experiments like Mel Croucher’s Deus Ex Machina, an adventure about life emerging from a computer, which came with an audio tape featuring Ian Dury and Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee.
The ZX Spectrum held its own in the format wars until the late eighties, and developers were pushing the tech to the very end.
For example, the initial inability to properly colour sprites without bleeding out into surrounding space (thanks to the way the Spectrum handled colours as 8×8 pixel cells), was defeated in games like Trap Door and Dizzy through the use of thick character outlines and large sprites.
But the machine didn’t prosper outside of the UK, and with the arrival of 16bit behemoths like the Commodore Amiga, as well as specialist consoles like the Ninteno NES and Sega Master System, Sinclair found itself unable to compete.
But for those thrilling years between 1982 and 1988, against other machines designed to push objects around screens, the Spectrum symbolised and amplified a peculiarly British approach to technology; it was about lone mavericks, doing their own thing, figuring stuff out, inventing their own conventions.
Certainly, the Commodore 64 produced plenty of genius coders, artists and game musicians, but the Spectrum arguably fostered something else – something that the Raspeberry Pi initiative is now attempting to re-capture – an approach to computer hardware that is more about exploiting the machine, testing the architecture, probing at the metal and silicon innards, rather than trusting to high-level languages and application-programmer interfaces.
Writing for the ZX Spectrum was more about invention than design. It was a blank slate on to which a large section of the British game development industry drew itself.
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Syria crisis and Bahrain unrest – live updates
Posted by: | CommentsEgypt: The Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission decision to uphold the disqualification of both Khariat al-Shater of the Muslim Brotherhood and Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s former intelligence chief, may come as a relief to both men, as some are suggesting – neither man was ever a serious contender.
Shater (pictured) has been working on the assumption that he will become prime minister this summer, not president, diplomatic sources say.
He also expects the prime minister to have a more important role than the president, since the Brotherhood’s plan is to increase the power of parliament under the still-to-be-drafted constitution and decrease that of the president, they point out.
According to one story that is circulating, Shater’s entry into the presidential contest was basically a game of bluff in which the candidacies of Shater and Suleiman were meant to cancel each other out – as has now happened. Though we can’t confirm that this is the real story behind the scenes, it has a ring of plausibility.
Assuming Shater does become prime minister, he is likely to face tough times ahead. The country’s financial reserves have more than halved since the revolution and, according to an EU diplomat who was visiting London earlier this week, “Egypt will have to be rescued by the international community in a few months.”
Discussions have been taking place behind the scenes, involving the military council, the Brotherhood, the EU and the IMF, with a view to having an 18-month programme in place by August or September.
The aid will come with “very strong conditionality”, the diplomat said – meaning that the Brotherhood (assuming it holds the reins of government by then) will have to accept a very tough austerity package.
The Brotherhood has “a good economic team”, the diplomat said, and it recognises the need for austerity. However, all sides also recognise that persuading the Egyptian public to accept it will be problematic politically. The Brotherhood is therefore planning to announce a series of popular measures during its first weeks in power before moving on to the unpopular ones – such as addressing the subsidies on bread and fuel.
Bahrain: Activist Ala’a Shehabi has circulated video showing the crown prince being met by a small crowd of protester chanting “we want the downfall of the regime” in the village of Sanabis.
She tweeted:
Sanabis village is an opposition stronghold, very rare would a member of the ruling troika set foot there particularly at this time #Bahrain
— Dr Ala’a Shehabi (@alaashehabi) April 18, 2012
Guardian correspondent Paul Weaver, who is Bahrain to cover Sunday’s Grand Prix, says 15 demonstrations are planned in the kingdom today.
There was a heavy security presence in Dera’a during yesterday’s UN observer mission, according to video from activists.
It doesn’t look as if they are being granted unfettered access.
Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, says the bombardment of Homs appears to be increasing despite last Thursday’s ceasefire.
Speaking to reporters last night she said:
I would observe that the situation is not improving, the violence is continuing, the bombardment, particularly in Homs, seems to be increasing, and the conditions that one would want and need to see for the effective deployment of the balance of the monitors are not at present in place.
She repeated the point on Twitter this morning:
In #Syria, the violence is continuing. The bombardment, particularly in Homs and Idlib, is increasing.
— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) April 18, 2012
Rice said Annan’s mission represented “potentially the last best effort to resolve the situation through peaceful diplomatic means”.
But she conceded that mission may be “impossible”.
It may be that the government’s logic is that it will continue the use of violence despite its repeated commitments as long as it can get away with it. From the US point of view, we have been very clear that we have no illusions—that we are going to assess the government as we have today on the basis of its actions, not its words. We’re very concerned with the resumption and the escalation of violence, particularly the bombardment in Homs and we are by no means limiting our efforts to the good diplomatic work that we are supporting here at the United Nations, but also very much engaged in efforts to strengthen and increase the pressure on Assad and hence the meeting today in Paris on sanctions. We’re also very much interested in supporting the opposition to cohere and coalesce—the peaceful political opposition—and we are providing non-lethal support, primarily medical supplies and communications equipment to that end. So this is from our view a multifaceted effort, but the political process is one that we will support as long as possibly viable.
This dual approach of proclaiming support for Annan on the one hand contemplating tougher action on the other was criticised as counter productive in the latest International Crisis Group report on Syria.
Four opposition districts in Homs have been bombarded again this morning, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It told AFP that the neighbourhoods of Jurat al-Shayah, Al-Qarabis, Khaldiyeh and Bayada, all came under attack.
Once again activists have circulated video purporting to show the latest shelling of the city. This clips purports to show the skyline of Khadiyeh.
(all times BST) Welcome to Middle East Live. The Arab League has urged Syria to help UN observers and the crackdown in Bahrain continues ahead of Sunday’s Grand Prix.
Here’s a roundup of the latest developments:
Syria
• Oppositions activists and the government accused each other of breaching the precarious ceasefire as an advance team of United Nations observers was spotted in the southern city of Dera’a, the New York Times reports. “Three United Nations cars came, escorted by security,” said Ammar, a law student in Dera’a. He said protesters took to the streets instantly to send a message to the observers, who stayed closeted in an extended meeting with the local governor.
• Arab League ministers have pressed Syria to co-operate with UN monitors after meeting international envoy Kofi Annan. A statement issued after meeting in Qatar said: “We request the Syrian government to help observers do their job and allow transport and the ability to reach all areas in Syria, and not to impose conditions on them that prevent them from doing their job.”
• The United Nations security council is expected to approve deploying a full mission of 250 monitors to Syria later today, but secretary general Ban Ki-moon questioned whether that number would be sufficient, the LA Times reports. “I think this is not enough, considering the current situation and considering the vastness of the country, and that is why we need very efficient mobility of our observer mission,” he said.
• International tensions over the observer mission are mounting after Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov accused unnamed countries of seeking to destroy Annan’s plan for a peaceful resolution to the 13-month-long crisis. His remarks seemed aimed at both western and Arab countries, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia, leading opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
• China’s foreign minister is meeting with his Syrian counterpart in the latest show of support for Damascus despite Beijing’s tentative engagement with the opposition. The official Xinhua News Agency said Yang Jiechi exchanged views on the latest Syrian developments on Wednesday with Walid Moallem in Beijing.
Sheila Lyall Grant and Huberta von Voss-Wittig said in a letter accompanying the video that as a champion of women’s equality, Assad could not “hide behind her husband”.
Bahrain
• Bahrain has arrested at least 60 protest leaders in recent days to try to prevent widescale unrest ahead of a controversial Formula One Grand Prix this week, according to activists. They also said riot police had used live ammunition for the first time since last year’s pro-democracy protest movement was crushed, firing bullets into the air.
• The Bahraini royal family is divided over whether to free a jailed human rights leader, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who has been on hunger strike for more than 60 days, the Independent reports. A Bahraini source told the paper: “They were going to release him three weeks ago but this was vetoed by hardliners in the family.”
Libya
• A former Libyan dissident who was abducted and flown to one of Muammar Gaddafi’s prisons in a so-called rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 has started legal proceedings against Jack Straw, who was British foreign secretary at the time. Lawyers representing Abdel Hakim Belhaj confirmed that they had served papers on Straw alleging his complicity in the torture that Belhaj subsequently suffered, as well as misfeasance in public office.
Egypt
• The election authorities have upheld the disqualification of 10 presidential candidates including Omar Suleiman, former intelligence chief; and Khairat Shater the Muslim Brotherhood financier; and the Salifist Hazem Salah abu Ismai. A member of the judicial commission said: “All appeals have been rejected because nothing new was offered in the appeal requests.”
Israel
• An Israeli soldier filmed slamming his M16 assault rifle into the face of a Danish protester faces possible dismissal from the army following an investigation and after conceding to friends he had “erred” in his action. Amid continued widespread coverage of the incident in the Israeli media, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, joined in the condemnation of the incident, saying the actions of Lt Col Shalom Eisner were unacceptable and that a full inquiry would be held.
Morocco
• Human Rights Watch has urged the authorities to release a rapper who has spent three weeks in pretrial detention on charges that he insulted the police in his songs. Police arrested Mouad Belghouat, known as “al-Haqed” because of a YouTube video with a photo of a policeman whose head has been replaced with a donkey’s.
There may have been no revolution in Morocco last year, but the thirst for change and accountability is real. As other Arab regimes discovered, promising reform can only get you so far before it becomes a matter of re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Perhaps Morocco still has more lessons to learn than to teach after the Arab uprisings.
Iran
• A popular Iranian singer who publicly defied regime censorship by releasing pro-opposition songs on the internet has been sentenced to a year in jail. Arya Aramnejad, 28, a musician from Iran’s northern city of Babol, fell foul of the authorities after singing political songs in condemnation of the regime’s crackdown against the Green movement.
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