The paper discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

The US’s controversial new weapon the Active Denial System is being tested in Afghanistan Blank Mag can reveal.

Dubbed “the Pain Ray” the non-lethal weapon uses microwave energy to cause intense pain but no physical damage.

Although not yet being used operationally Defense Department officials today confiemd that wepon was being tested in Afghanistan.

How does the Active Denial System work?

The weapon works by transmitting a beam of millimeter waves  (the highest radio frequency band) at the speed of light.

The spot size is large enough to cover the whole body.

Upon contact the ray heats the water and fat molecules in the skin.

The ray penetrates less than 0.04cm into the targets therefore avoiding any damage to the skin layer where the nerve endings and blood vessels are found.

It ceases when the body moves out the way or the beam is switched off.

The beam shows no marks.

The Active Denial System is designed to limit collateral damage and civilian deaths in crowd control and combat situations.

A controversial nonlethal weapon that uses microwave energy to create intense pain is being considered for use in, AOL News has learned.

“Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for the crisis: they really did this,” he argues. “And what is different to previous crises is that people now understand Wall Street has been enriching itself while impoverishing the rest of us.”

As a result, in Lewis’ analysis, the world is finally moving towards bringing the banking industry to book. Whether through fraud cases against its flagship institution, via the new taxes on the sector to be discussed at this weekend’s meeting of the International Monetary Fund, or through “the sea change in our relationship with financial culture” that took place when governments stepped in to stand behind the global financial system at the height of the crisis, the credit crunch has been a “game-changer”. Lewis says: “When the markets went through their turmoil in September 2008 and the banks’ risk was socialised, their relationship with society was suddenly turned on its head – they went from being the master class to wards of the state and now, finally, to enemies of the people.

“The bailout was the moment when society realised that our economies have become perverse: when we had socialism for the capitalists and capitalism for everyone else.”

When did this switch from an election scripted by Charles Saatchi to one painted by Salvador Dali? If I had told you a month ago that Gordon Brown would be despatching naval warships to Spain, David Cameron would be jostling with a man dressed as a chicken and down to 30 per cent, and Nick Clegg would be identified alternately as “the most popular leader since Churchill” and a Nazi, you would have called for Nurse Ratched.

But something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

To understand what these forces are, you have to start with a fact that is usually kept obscure: Britain is a country with a large liberal-left majority. Eighty-five per cent of us say the gap between rich and poor should be “much smaller”, and a majority would get there by introducing a maximum wage that caps the incomes of the rich at £135,000 a year.

Fifty-eight per cent support a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. Fifty-eight per cent want to ditch Trident – an act of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Seventy-seven per cent want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan now, or within a year at the latest. Fifty-three per cent say people come out of prison worse than they go in, and would rather spend money on more youth clubs than on more prison places.

Across most policies, our views are to the left of all three parties. (These statistics are all from Mori, Ipsos or YouGov polls.) And Brits hold these views even though they are constantly told by the media that they are marginal, impossible, or mad.

Ah, you may say, but that’s just what people tell pollsters. They vote for the polar opposite: look at Thatcher’s victories. But look again. At every election where Margaret Thatcher stood, 56 per cent of the British people voted against her, for parties committed to higher taxes, higher public spending, and lower inequality. The media declared this to be a “landslide” endorsement of her programme of deregulation that continued for decades, and has now crashed the global economy.

Yet in this election, one of those distorting forces – the media – has been bypassed for an electrifying moment, and the second force, our dusty 19th-century voting system, may break entirely on election day.

The British media is overwhelmingly owned by right-wing billionaires who order their newspapers to build up the politicians who serve their interests, and marginalise or rubbish the politicians who serve the public interest. David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, bravely confessed this week that as soon as he took his post, he was told the Lib Dems had to be “the invisible party, purposely edged off the paper’s pages and ignored”. Only a tiny spectrum of opinion was permitted. Everyone to the left of Tony Blair (not hard) had to be rubbished – even when their policies spoke for a majority of British people.

continued here

A humbling photo has been released that shows that our surfing comes at a price. The price of worker exploitation.

The photo below shows Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion. Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks.

For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for Microsoft.

This photo and others like it were smuggled out of the KYE Systems factory at Dongguan, China, as part of a three-year investigation by the National Labour Committee, a human rights organisation which campaigns for workers across the globe.

The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room.

They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC.

The workers also sleep on site, in factory dormitories, with 14 workers to a room. They must buy their own mattresses and bedding, or else sleep on 28in-wide plywood boards. They ’shower’ with a sponge and a bucket.

And many of the workers, because they are young women, are regularly sexually harassed, the NLC claimed.

The organisation said that one worker was even fined for losing his finger while operating a hole punch press.

Microsoft is not the only company to outsource manufacturing to KYE, but it accounts for about 30 per cent of the factory’s work, the NLC said. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus also use KYE Systems.

Microsoft, which exports much of the hardware made at the factory to America, Europe and Japan, said that it is taking the claims seriously and has begun an investigation.

One employee told the NLC: ‘We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work – we do not work to live. We do not live a life, only work.’

The NLC’s report included an account from one worker whose job consisted entirely of sticking selfadhesive rubber feet to the bottom of Microsoft computer mice.

But the monotony of sitting or standing for 12 hours, applying foot after foot to mouse after mouse, was not the worst of the worker’s testimony.

It was the militaristic management and sleep deprivation that affected the worker most. ‘I know I can choose not to work overtime, but if I don’t work overtime then I am stuck with only 770 Chinese yuan (£72.77p) per month in basic wages,’ the worker said.

‘This is not nearly enough to support a family. My parents are farmers without jobs. They also do not have pensions.

‘I also need to worry about getting married, which requires a lot of money. Therefore, I still push myself to continue working in spite of my exhaustion.

‘When I finish my four hours of overtime, I’m extremely tired. At that time, even if someone offered me an extravagant dinner, I’d probably refuse. I just want to sleep.’

Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the NLC, said: ‘It sounded like torture – the frantic pace on the assembly line, same motion over and over for the 12 hours or more of work they did.’

Microsoft said it was committed to the ‘fair treatment and safety of workers’. A spokesman added: ‘We are aware of the NLC report and we have commenced an investigation. We take these claims seriously and we will take appropriate remedial measures in regard to any findings of misconduct.’

Our parents had free education, fat pensions, and second homes. We’ve got student debt and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Thanks very much, says Andrew Hankinson.

Last week a man in the jobcentre handed me a letter summoning me to a Back to Work session – come on! Back to work! Break’s over! A week later, I sit on a blue settee and wait to be called into a meeting room. A man with a goatee beard and ponytail sits on the blue settee opposite. He’s reading a book. To my left is another man on another blue settee, reading a newspaper. I flick through some notes. We share the daunted look of the new unemployed. I look at a poster on the wall – “You can find a job” – next to a picture of an ecstatic woman. Finally, the three of us are ushered into a room. The man who was reading the newspaper claims he attended a session last week and is immediately excused. Smart move. Two of us remain. A few minutes later a third claimant/loafer/tax thief enters. There were supposed to be 12 of us – damn buses and slow shoes. I sit with a bundle of government leaflets in my lap and one of the three staff members explains the Job Vacancy Pie. It’s impressive – a big chart showing where the jobs are. Hidden, apparently. No longer advertised. We should ask contacts instead, or come to the recruitment drives by the armed services and the new Morrisons down the road.

“We can also help with business plans,” a man in a beige suit adds, “though whether you’d be thinking of that in this climate, I don’t know.”

The claimant who arrived late opens a bottle of Coke and poses a theoretical question about what would happen if he had worked for McDonald’s and quit after three weeks because he didn’t like it. I decide to treat it all as research and start scribbling, detaching myself from the drudgery; unemployment is like being locked in a room with Tim Lovejoy and no gun. A university- educated man shouldn’t experience this. I amassed student debt in the belief that graduation would be followed by a huge bubble bath filled with sexy young jobs and beautiful, cigar-smoking status symbols. Not joblessness. I did my year working at a Newcastle-based call centre (where a degree was a requisite). I stuck it out, asking the team leader for permission to use the toilet. I did my time. I got a journalism qualification from Darlington College. I chased that job I wanted: working on Arena magazine (now defunct) in the dazzling capital. But then came redundancy. I took a job at another magazine. Redundant again – unemployment down south! Now I live with my girlfriend in a one-bedroom rental with collapsing ceilings (the landlord won’t fix a leak) and pillowcases for curtains.

The Back to Work session finishes. The goody bags are disappointing – forms to fill in and badly photocopied brochures. It’s time to get away from the jobcentre’s sour odour of bad hygiene, bureaucracy and mass failure. I head past the security guards and sidestep the terror dog tied to the railing. There’s goatee man. I say hello and ask his story. He’s 22 years old and called Alan. He lives with his parents in south London and got an A and two Bs at A-level. After that he went to Lancaster University to study English literature. This is his second stint on the dole. As we walk, I tell Alan I’ve been unemployed for 13 weeks.

It’s easy to sympathise with Alan. I’m 29, so I had some good years before my income (the dole) and assets (nothing) became a tiny fraction of my debt (£10,000 in student loans). But those arriving now are being shellacked. They already have a nickname – the lost generation, due to the 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds who are looking for work. It’s even hitting those traditionally saved by educational life rafts – one in every five graduate recruitment schemes has been scrapped and an estimated 40,000 of last year’s graduates were expected to be signing on six months after returning their mortarboards. The government’s answer is the Future Jobs Fund (a promise of 150,000 jobs for 18- to 24-year-olds who are unemployed for a year) and the Graduate Talent Pool (a website enabling firms to recruit 2008 and 2009’s graduates on minimum wage or unpaid internships).

“People are feeling incredibly angry,” Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, told me. “They have debts in excess of £20,000 after being told they would get a job at the end of their degree and earn more money. Instead they’re just heavily indebted.”

The anger is due to intergenerational unfairness. Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes (150,000 at the last census), but when we got to the buffet table – oh look, a couple of manhandled sandwiches. We’ve been left with education on the never-never and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Our work ethic is slurred and our salaries are stagnant. Any hope of promotion is paralysed by the comatose grey ceiling clogging every hierarchy. Overtime is unpaid and pensions are miserly. And the financial system which made our parents rich has left us choosing between crap job or no job. It’s like we’ve been handed the keys to the family castle only to discover the family sold it to Starbucks. And we’re going to have to work there.

The most vociferous complaint came from 23-year-old George Lewkowicz after the CBI proposed raising tuition fees. His furious letter to the Guardian last September roared that his generation has been “shafted”. He attacked unaffordable housing and unemployment, and suggested that those who received their university education for free – like the CBI’s Richard Lambert – forgo their “patio heaters” and pay a university windfall tax, applying interest since they graduated. He appeared on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show twice and was written about in newspaper columns. The letter was posted on dozens of blogs and forums. “You’ve made this mess,” he concluded, “so you can pay to clear it up.”

In Newcastle we call that a proper radge. I meet him for a pint, and he’s still angry and stands by his letter. He says his friends are equally riled and he’s considering formalising his campaign: the credit-crunch generation’s Robin Hood. Asking around friends, it’s not hard to find him a gang of angry followers: Olivia, 23, philosophy graduate, currently studying a business skills course – “I’m furious at paying another £4,000 on top of university fees merely in the hope of getting a job”; Catherine, 27, psychologist – “I got a first-class degree and ended up serving frothy soya milk to posh mums”; Ali, 24, anthropology and sociology – “I got my degree but everywhere needed more: more experience, more qualifications. So now I teach English in Japan”; Will, 25, unemployed –”A degree from a good university counts for nothing, as universities are flooded with people who shouldn’t be there”; Hollie, 24, fashion graduate – “I lost my job and live in a crummy house share with my landlord’s Thai bride. Yes, I’m miffed.”

I widen my hunt and find internet forums and blogs venting intergenerational bitterness. And OK, the internet is just a massive two fingers from everyone to everyone, but it indicates which way the mad herd is stampeding: “baby boomers reveal themselves to be simply the most spoilt generation in the history of the entire planet”, “a parasitic generation”, “thanks for looking the other way”, “it’s a generational mugging”. Even playwright David Hare noted it in The Power of Yeswhen a 24-year-old banker reproaches the baby boomers with: “You’ve taken everything and left us with nothing.”

But before we work ourselves into a mob, maybe I should double-check. Take George Lewkowicz. It turns out he’s doing OK: private education, a job in the City, parents paid for his university costs. And there’s me: got a 2:2, refusing to change industry despite publishing hitting the iceberg years ago. And take Alan. I thought he was the perfect specimen – student debt, lives at home, unemployed – but he wouldn’t stop talking and he spoiled it. He told me he quit university after a year and went to Australia because he “wasn’t inspired by” his studies. He got a job at a solicitor’s office but couldn’t get his “head around Microsoft Office” (despite a grammar school education). He doesn’t have “the right sort of mind” to fix electronics like his dad. And he was a roadie, but got fired. It seems as if Alan has had a few chances, and perhaps he’s just not that keen on work (the boring kind that our parents did). And it’s this fundamental reassessment of what is required to make money (ie, that boring work) that we have to face up to. I ask Alan what he wants to be.

“A poet,” he replies.

Our generation: inculcated with dreams, hampered by the economy, scuppered by our own ineffectiveness. And then there’s our spending. We do spend. I’m told that in the past, people would save for years to buy a house, then live with no carpets and save again. Now we splurge on the Ikea elves who fly around on a giant credit card, furnishing our homes in time for house-warming parties. Student loans = textbooks? Incorrect. A duck-feather jacket was my folly. Mobile phones and iPods, DVDs and Uggs, ISPs and olive bars. And then there’s the holiday epidemic. Above my desk is a photograph of a baseballer (£12 for a large print and £55 to frame), which I took in Central Park (£1,500 for flights, hotels and spending money). I expect a large chunk of mortgage deposits is circulating the bars of New York and the hash dens of Morocco. But we learned to spend in childhood and it’s become instinctual, like disliking Ashley Cole. And the instinct has been amplified through the generations – Grandma shopped around for the cheapest meat, Mum went to Marks & Spencer, I ask the waiter for medium-rare. Unfortunately, we’re struggling to fund the habit.

Which is why the woman at the jobcentre sent me on a compulsory seminar for “unemployed professionals” (code for: been to university, probably owns a suit). The sessions are occurring all over the country as part of the government’s effort to get people like me working again. This one is near London’s Liverpool Street and is being run by a recruitment firm called GR Law. I’m expecting the usual stuff about formatting CVs and not swearing too much during the interview, but John, the presenter… Well, I’m shocked. The jobs market has changed vastly since the recession hit. I pull a face when John mentions Twitter, but he says 346,683 jobs were uploaded on Twitter in the past 30 days worldwide. That’s compared with no jobs on Twitter nine months ago. And the Job Vacancy Pie was right – around 70% of jobs are not advertised. Facebook is a necessity. LinkedIn is a necessity. And we shouldn’t wait until the application deadline, because recruiters stop opening emails after the initial 20 CVs.

“You’ve never looked for a job in a market like this,” says John. “Even if there’s nothing wrong with your CV, you’re up against 50 others who have nothing wrong with theirs either.” I sit slack-jawed, like John’s just played the Zapruder tape and pointed out a guy on the sidewalk with a smoking gun and a big clown hat. The seven others in the seminar are a lawyer, a digital media graduate, a young offenders worker, a fashion graduate, a property researcher, a former British Gas call centre manager and a criminology graduate. They’re smart and confident. Rajiv Nawbatt is one of them. He’s a recruiter’s dream: studied law at Sheffield University (2:1), worked in the City for a year, did a postgraduate legal practice course, worked as a paralegal for a year and completed his two-year training contract with a “silver circle” law firm. But they didn’t hire him permanently, and now he’s 27 and has been claiming the dole for two months. I pour myself a cup of tea (life support, mini-break and Christmas bonus for the unemployed). The criminology graduate is Christine Babicz, 22, from Essex. After graduating, she worked at the National Centre for Social Research, but temporary staff were let go and now she’s doing a research internship at the Magistrates’ Association. She’s been on the dole for a month and hates it. The jobcentre says she has to give up the internship. Her student debt is £21,000 and she’s getting desperate. Unfortunately there aren’t enough jobs to go round.

Economist David Blanchflower, a labour expert and former member of the Monetary Policy Committee (and sage of the recession), is equally worried about our prospects. He explains what needs to be done: raise the education leaving age to 18, more teachers, no National Insurance for under-25s, and guaranteed work for the long-term unemployed. Most worrying for graduates is his final bit of advice. “Young people have not seen anything like this before,” he says. “Their expectations were different, but they will have to adapt to this new world. If they have to lower their expectations, that’s what they have to do. If that means less money, that’s what you do. If that means delivering pizza, that’s what you do.”

Delivering pizza? I ask Rajiv if he’d deliver pizza, considering the time and money he and his family have spent. He says he might, but not at the moment. Christine says she would if she could drive. But even if she learns to ride a scooter, is that work even available? I phone my local pizza takeaway and ask – “No, no jobs, sorry Sir.” I’m not disappointed, because there are acceptable down-jobs (labouring on a building site, helping an old man strip narrow boats, acting) and there’s delivering pizza. I would have to work nights. My boss would be… not a graduate. I’d have to chat with other deliverers – is that the job title? – who stack deodorants and empty beer cans on their bookshelves rather than books. Who probably don’t even have bookshelves. Who probably think a digestif is a biscuit. And then there’s my friends: they’d show interest initially, but after four weeks, three months… What if they ordered pizza? And what if I were unable to claw my way back out of the social quicksand?

No. I’m part of the digital generation. I’m an email and adjustable-seat kind of worker. Maybe I can invent an iPhone app to deliver pizzas. Perhaps an entire series of iPhone apps. One of them could scoop cigarette ends out of urinals, another could be polite to customers. What’s wrong with me? Why am I not like Dad? Dad would deliver pizzas. I remember when his building business folded in the 1990s. He didn’t sign on. He knew he was going to end up in a flat above a shop, but he stacked Thomson directories in the front garden and asked for help delivering them. I said no, because friends might see us schlepping up those long driveways. Life was easier when he had a Mercedes and Mum had a Porsche. Instead, he was riding a bicycle to the paper shop; not to buy a paper, to work there – the shop where I had a round! He was furious when I said no, but he delivered the directories himself, worked in the paper shop, bought a van, started another building business, paid for my university accommodation, had a stroke, got walking again, went back to work, bought a nice house and built a large pond in his massive garden. And I will never forgive myself for not helping with those directories. Nice work, son.

“You’re a Geordie. They’ve got a strong work ethic in that part of the country.”

That’s Lord Tebbit, and he’s talking about people like my dad, rather than me, but I steal the compliment. For those who weren’t born in the olden days, Tebbit was employment secretary from 1981-83, then trade and industry secretary, before becoming Conservative party chairman until 1987. He was also Thatcherism’s boogie man (not the dancing kind).

“I don’t think you could make the case that there’s been some generational change in the youngsters themselves,” he says. “Given good leadership, good advice and good education they could be every bit as good as their fathers and grandfathers. But an awful lot have been misled into acquiring a pile of debt and finishing with a qualification which is not of very much value, at universities which don’t have a great deal of credibility with employers.”

I ask who misled them.

“The schools. False expectations were raised. I also think there’s an element of young Brits wanting the job they want and not being willing to take a job. They haven’t got from their schools the idea that the best way to get to the top of the ladder is to get on one of the lower rungs and start climbing, as opposed to expecting someone to lift you up and pop you halfway up the ladder.

“A bit of personal experience here. We have carers for my wife and we advertise on an internet site called Gumtree. It’s quite an instructive thing to do, to find out who replies to an advert for that sort of job. It’s not badly paid – £350 a week, and they get good live-in accommodation. Far more people from central Europe are applying for these sorts of jobs than Brits, and I wonder where the equivalent Brits are – the 20- to 25-year-olds who say they can’t get work.”

I phoned Tebbit because in 1981 he famously suggested rioters should get on their bikes and find a job. We don’t have proper riots any more, but I thought he might have some advice for today’s equivalent – the angry internet commentators and grumbling graduates.

“It was much easier to set up in self-employment in the 80s,” he says. “The regulatory environment was much easier. I find it surprising how many people come up to me and say: ‘I took your advice to get on my bike’ – advice which I never actually gave, but that’s the way it came out – ‘and I made a great success of it.’ I think perhaps that’s lacking from the ambience now. There’s a lack of belief in one’s ability to change one’s own circumstances.”

I have a coffee with Martin Bright, ex-home affairs editor of the Observerand currently political editor of the Jewish Chronicle. He’s been campaigning for the revival of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (the 1980s’ most lamented policy) since the recession started, having benefited from it during two years of continual unemployment, despite a 2:1 from Cambridge.

“I found being unemployed and not meaningfully employed really demoralising,” he says. “It knocks your confidence. What stopped me from being totally demoralised was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which I went on twice. The first time was as a printer. We did an advert for a taxi firm and that was it. Failing was fantastic experience, though. Then I was a self-employed journalist. The scheme gave me the freedom not to have to sign on every week, and to call myself a journalist.”

Or a dance instructor, builder, pizza chef or a poet. The rules were: if you were unemployed for 13 weeks (later eight) and had £1,000 capital, you could stop signing on, start a business and for a year you’d receive a slightly higher allowance than the dole. Hundreds of thousands of businesses were created, including Creation Records (which signed Oasis) and the Superdry fashion label, and everyone could be their own boss – “That’s the third shoulder pad I’ve sold today; might knock off early and catch Crocodile Dundee at the Odeon.”

Bright wants to make sure (through his creative industry coalition, New Deal of the Mind) that the Future Jobs Fund isn’t simply about cheap labour. He cites Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was formed during America’s Great Depression, when writers wrote public pamphlets and builders built public buildings, rather than everyone immediately queuing for a shovel and pretending they never listen to Radio 4. He suggests today’s unemployed graduates could be hired to collate Britain’s oral history or work on similar projects. I ask about delivering pizzas.

“I think that’s a defeatist attitude,” he says. “It’s precisely the wrong message. People should raise their expectations. My fear is, if there are fewer jobs across the board and people want graduates to do the shittier jobs, those who would have done those jobs are going to do even worse ones. And those below them will spend even longer on the dole. That’s a recipe for social breakdown.”

After coffee I sign on. My appointments have become weekly; the assessors are stroking the “any job” trigger. There are more claimants bearing iPhones than there were three months ago. Back then, everybody looked like the boy sitting next to me, a flat look on his face and dirty clothes – in 40 years’ time I’ll realise I would have gone double, treble, quadruple on my student loan not to be him. I ask a member of staff about a self-employment credit Bright told me about. Apparently you need six months of unemployment and it’s only £50 per week (£14 less than the dole) over 16 weeks – “Even then it’s far from straightforward,” says the woman. Not great. Unfortunately the Department for Work and Pensions says there are no plans to expand it.

In fact there are no plans to do anything ambitious, despite the hardship ahead (Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, prophesied it will be 2011 before the economy is full-blooded again). I ask Dad how he coped with recession. He left school at 14, started as an office boy (”fetching the senior partner’s tobacco”), learned his trade and created a company from nothing. Then suddenly his business was liquidated in 1993 and he was working in a paper shop and delivering Thomson directories.

“Absolutely. Anything to get cash,” he says. “Any number of smaller jobs – put them together and make a decent living. Then I started again, just me on the tools with a van.”

I ask him why younger people think it’s harder these days. “Aspirations are greater. You lads go to university these days and come out full of hope, but you end up full of debt and the job market crashes. It’s hard. You’ve tasted redundancy twice and you’re only 29. It doesn’t bode well for the way this country’s performing. You’ve got to keep that entrepreneurial spirit going.”

But I’m struggling. My industry is collapsing and jobs are scarce – I’ve applied for dozens, with no interviews. Instead I’ve been focusing on hundreds of pitches for freelance work, grafting day and night. So far I’ve had £2,000 of commissions. That’s in four months. And an email has already arrived cancelling £500 of that, with no compensation, but a note asking if I have any celebrity contacts they could use. Also, a £600 portion has been cut to £200, once again with no compensation. And a big chunk of what is left has been pushed back two months. Suddenly no money for rent. And I start crying before breakfast. Never done that before. Can’t sleep either. I rip a chunk of hair out of my head because I’m so angry and helpless. And each morning before my girlfriend goes to work she sincerely asks me not to kill myself. I won’t, but I consider going to one of the commissioning editors’ offices to punch (throttle, gouge, thump so hard, stamp on, scream at) him. I don’t though. I’m too worried he might tell acquaintances and cost me further work. I’ve abandoned my dignity.

Someone takes me for a drink and asks how long I’ll give it before trying something else. I don’t know how to answer. I’ve put in years on the bottom rung. I never got off the bottom rung. I started out doing captions at a property magazine, and did horrible shifts for a pittance before I got myself on the bottom rung at big magazines and earned praise. I sat with a literary agent who was taking my book to publishers. Now he doesn’t even answer my phone calls, and nor does anyone else. I’m tortured by the drip-drip of unanswered emails. The industry doesn’t want me. I should do something else, but even David Blanchflower, a labour specialist, says nobody knows what people should train in yet – the future is unknown. And how do you afford retraining anyway? But more than that, I fought hard to get here. Really hard. I’m not from this kind of background. Why should I abandon it all to those with posh parents, posh educations and posh voices? I earned it. So when people ask how long I’ll give it, I tell them I’ll stop when I’m dead.

And OK, I realise refusing to switch industry is my fault, not the older generation’s. But me being unemployed is their fault. It’s the fault of rotten managers who coasted in a cushy economy, relying on the nation’s growth and rising house prices to make them rich rather than learning how to make better products. They made us casualties of balance-sheet adjustment while keeping fat pensions to themselves. They sold every small company to a bigger one for a few bits of silver, leaving it to be milked dry by shareholders. Where’s the moral integrity? And regarding university, it was the older generation who opened up the financial markets, which meant we had to compete against globalised labour. Now it’s even more of a necessity – what else do you do if even call centres require university education? All of which makes it hard not to be bitter.

No doubt the older generation will have a good time with their free bus passes and villas in Spain. They’ll enjoy the pensions and property. Shame about the smashed unions that might have got us decent wages and pensions. Shame about houses only being affordable to trust-funders. Shame about the abandonment of industry and its replacement with… coffee? Shoes? Credit? We’re just cheap labour, here to fund a bit more wealth. We know that now. And don’t worry, we’ll pay off the debt.

Have a nice life.?

What’s happened to global warming?.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists’ main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. “Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity,” said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth’s great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man’s influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures – all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world’s top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

In a new appraisal of the disorder, an eminent consultant psychiatrist argues that, far from being a modern malaise, depression has been with us for thousands of years and survived because it can give people an increased resilience to cope with life’s challenges.

One in four of us will suffer from depression at some point in our lives, and one in 20 of us is currently living with it. In Britain the economic cost of depression in terms of lost productivity is enormous, around £17bn a year. Doctors are divided over why it is so common.

Dr Paul Keedwell, an expert on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has written How Sadness Survived in order to understand why something that causes so much pain and disability has withstood evolutionary changes and still occurs so commonly.

‘We see it as a defect – often patients see themselves as broken in some way – whereas I think of it as a defence mechanism. It has simply adapted in the human species to actually give us some long-term benefits.

‘Essentially, depression can give us new and quite radical insights – it can give us a way of responding effectively to challenges we have in life. In its severe form it is terrible and life-threatening, but for many it is a short-term painful episode that can take you out of a stressful situation for a while. It can help people to find a new way of coping with events or your situation – and give you a new perspective, as well as making you more realistic about your aims.’

Keedwell says there is good evidence from long-term studies, particularly a recently published population survey of Dutch adults, to show that, after their depression, many patients seem to be able to cope better with challenges. ‘For most, their vitality, their social interaction and their general health actually improved on recovery – and so did their work performance. I know from patients that it can also make you more realistic in your outlook; you develop more empathy to those around you.’

But the Dutch study also showed that there was a minority who became worse after the first bout of depression, particularly those who were socially isolated before the illness, or where there was a drug or drink addiction.

Keedwell suffered a bad spell of depression in his thirties. ‘It went on for months, but I did come out of it, and I think I was a better doctor as a result. I certainly had more empathy with my patients. It also made me put my problems into perspective and I probably had a little more humility.’

The book describes the creativity of those who have experienced dark periods of depression, such as John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill. Aristotle saw it as a state of immense moral and spiritual value because of the insights it could bring.

According to Keedwell, the strongest argument for depression’s usefulness ‘lies in its ability to force us to take stock of ourselves and ask: “Why have I allowed myself to become so frustrated for so long?” If depression did not encourage us to reassess things, we would merely return later to the same battle.’

For too long the cult of positive thinking has reigned. And look where it got us ? Optimism has cost the world a financial meltdown. The banking “masters of the universe”, devoid of pessimism, were super confident in their predictions, channelling a belief that everything would be OK, and using it to motivate others. We were all carried along in their slipstream. Maybe now is the time for some negative thinking ?

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Relentless consumption, spiralling debt, information overload. Is modern life making you ill? William Leith discovers the hidden problems with living in a 24-hour world

On a Sunday morning in early June, Kate, a 36-year-old counsellor, was sitting on a sofa, drinking a cup of tea, and saying she didn’t think she could go on any more. “I can’t see a way out,” she said. “I look at my life and I don’t see any possibility of hope.” She dipped her head and put a thumb up to her eye to brush away a tear. “I know I’ve said it before. But this time… I’ve come to the end.”

Kate said: “I don’t know what to do. God, I could just give up. Yesterday I had this feeling that I could just give up my responsibilities. I could become derelict and hopeless. But that’s not the way to go, is it? I have a child. I have my job. Something’s got to give. I don’t know what, but something’s got to give, because I’m at breaking point.”

I was talking to Kate about exhaustion. I should say, first of all, that Kate is not her real name – she does not want me to use her real name. What if her boss knew the state she was in? For one thing, she is responsible for the wellbeing of other people – people who are supposed to be more vulnerable than her. Although sometimes, these days, she’s not so sure.

What state is Kate in, exactly? She is drained beyond belief. Her facial expression reminds you of one of those young combat veterans you see in war photography; she has a “thousand-yard stare”. Her facial muscles are somehow bunched up. Her body, she says, aches all over. She is often dizzy and nauseous. She describes her mental state as “foggy” and “fuzzy”. On top of this, she has persistent bacterial and viral infections – this month she has had a cough; last month she had aches and fevers. She has just finished two courses of antibiotics; her cough, she says, is dying down. But when one thing dies down, another always springs up to take its place.

Once or twice a day, while she’s working, Kate feels as if she’s going to faint. It’s as if her entire system is shutting down. “Something descends,” she says. “I feel draped in it. It’s like a curtain coming down.” What’s the explanation? Kate does very little physical labour. She does not run, or cycle, or walk long distances, or carry heavy loads. Her exhaustion may feel physical, but it is coming from somewhere outside the physical realm. “It’s weird,” says Kate.

But there’s nothing weird or abnormal about Kate. She is one of an enormous number of people with a similar constellation of symptoms – millions of people at the end of their physical, and spiritual, tether. Frank Lipman, a South African doctor working in New York, has identified the condition in hundreds of his patients – he has a word for it: “spent”. Lipman says that feeling spent is an understandable response to the 21st century. If you put a human being in a modern city, and add computers, mobile phones, credit cards, neon lights and 24-hour shopping, he says, what do you expect?

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