Opinion
Atheist 'megachurches' undermine what atheism's supposed to be about
A so-called godless church wants to establish more US congregations. These 'places of worship' come across as a joke
It's not easy being an atheist. In a world that for centuries has been dominated (and divided by) religious affiliations, it's sort of inevitable that the minority group who can't get down with the God thing or who don't subscribe to any particular belief system would find themselves marginalized. As children of no God, it seems that atheists are somehow seen as lesser – less charitable, that is, and more selfish, nihilistic, closed minded, negative and just generally unworthy. Now, however, a group of atheists are fighting back.
Determined to show that those who believe in nothing are just as good as those who believe in something, the faithless are establishing a church of their own, and a mega-church at that. On the surface it seems like a rather brilliant idea. What's not to like about beating the faithful at their own game? Apart from the one small caveat that establishing a place of worship for the faithless, even a godless one, rather negates what atheism is supposed to be all about.
The godless church concept is the brainchild of Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones, two British comedians, who identified a gap in the faith market that so far non-believers are flocking to fill. The first Sunday Assembly (as the gatherings are being called) took place in a dilapidated church in London on a cold morning this past January. It went down a treat, apparently, and the movement has gained enough momentum in Britain that the comic duo have since embarked on a "40 dates, 40 nights" tour of the United States raising money to build US congregations so godless Americans can become churchgoers too.
This past Sunday, the groups' inaugural assembly in Los Angeles attracted some 400 people. Similar gatherings across the states have also drawn big crowds, bursting to do all the good stuff religious people do, just without the God stuff. As one of those non-believing types – the kind who'd be inclined to tick off the "spiritual but not religious" checkbox on a dating profile – I should fall right into the Sunday Assembly movement's target demographic. If only the central idea of dragging atheists into a church so they can prove they are just as worthy as traditional churchgoers didn't strike me as a bit of joke.
I'm sure Evans and Jones mean well. Although they might want to tone down the "shiny happy people" routine they have going on in their promotional video. It's a little too reminiscent of the bearded, guitar playing priest that used to pay regular visits to the convent school I attended as a child in Ireland, who tried a little too hard to convince us skeptical kids that Catholicism is cool. I don't mean to downplay the human need to find like-minded communities either or to explore the deeper purpose of our existence. I just can't quite embrace the notion that atheists should be under any obligation to prove their worthiness to religious types, or that to do so they should mimic the long established religious practices that non-believers have typically eschewed.
I would have thought the message of atheism (if there needs to be one) is that churches and ritualized worship (whatever the focus of that worship might be) are best left to the people who feel the need to have a God figure in their lives. I say this as someone who has done plenty of Elizabeth Gilbert ("Eat, Pray, Love") style dabbling in various philosophies to find life's bigger meaning, albeit on a lower budget and so far with less satisfying results – no mega movie deals or hot Brazilian husbands have materialized to date, but the journey continues.
Like a lot of people who don't subscribe to any particular faith or belief system, I'm all for exploring the many spiritual adventures that are out there, and there are already plenty of inspirational (and godless) paths to choose from. The thing is, rewarding as these ventures into the spiritual realm often are, be they Buddhist retreats, Hindu meditation sessions or just a good old-fashioned yoga class with some "Om" chanting built in, I know that my true self is an atheist one. No philosophy, full on religion or Sunday Assembly – no matter how enticing, inviting or full of wisdom it may be – is going to win me over in the long term. I'm just not in the market for any man-made belief system – and they are all man-made – because I already have the one I am comfortable with: atheism.
That is why I have a fundamental problem with the so called atheist mega-church movement that Jones and Evans are spearheading. While they have every right to form congregations and get together with like-minded people and to share hugs and plan good deeds, they don't have the right to co-opt atheism for their cause. I'm sure the Sunday Assemblies have the potential to benefit many people and will fill a void for anyone who likes the idea of being part of a community. But if faithlessness ends up becoming a quasi-religion with its very own church, where are the true atheists – the ones who don't feel the need to join a congregation or to sing and hold hands to show the world we're good and worthy – supposed to call home?
The stereotype of the 'horrible female boss' is still a problem
Even in 2013, many people still prefer men in charge. It's a bias problem that doesn't have any objective reality
Who would you rather work for: a man or a woman?
According to a recent Gallup poll, just over half of Americans say they don't have a preference, but those who do strongly lean towards men. Forty percent of women and 29% of men say they prefer a male boss to a female one, and the results are even more skewed when broken down by political affiliation – Republicans, unsurprisingly given their socially conservative views, strongly prefer male bosses, while Democrats are about evenly split. That political divide helps to shed some light on why, in 2013, so many people still prefer to have men in charge. It's a problem of worldview and stereotypes, not of inherent characteristics or lady-boss bitchiness.
The good news is that the preference for female bosses is the highest it's been since Gallup started polling on this question in the 1950s. Back then, only 5% of respondents preferred a female boss, while 66% wanted to work for a man. But while the radical increase of women in the workforce has shifted views, we're still not living in a society that sees women and men as equally competent, likeable and authoritative. Americans don't prefer male bosses because men carry some sort of boss-gene on their Y chromosome; Americans prefer male bosses because male authority is respected while female authority is unbecoming, and because the expectations are set so high for women in power that it's nearly impossible for any mere mortal to meet them.
Even among ostensibly liberal, equality-supporting people, "that one horrible female boss I had" is a staple story in the work-and-gender debates. It's an anecdote that gets trotted out for little discernible reason other than as a suffix to an "I'm-not-sexist-but" grimace; a way to demonstrate the speaker's supposed honesty about the real problems with women in charge. And it's not a story that people are just making up – lots of us have, in fact, had female bosses who are less than stellar. The complaints vary, but are usually some combination of: she was bitchy; she was demanding; she wasn't nice or understanding; she didn't engage in enough mentorship of younger women; she worked unreasonable hours and expected everyone else to; she cut out too early to be with her kids; she was scary.
The problem isn't the fact that some female bosses suck, it's that if you have a crappy boss and he's a man, the conclusion is "I had a crappy boss". If you have a crappy boss and she's a woman, the conclusion is "I had a crappy female boss, so female bosses are crappy." No one sees a bad male boss as a reflection on all men everywhere, or emblematic of male leadership capabilities. But bring up women at the head of the table and every bad female co-worker or supervisor suddenly becomes Exhibit A for what's wrong with female bosses.
I saw this too often when I worked at a large corporate law firm. Younger female associates felt put out when the small number of female partners weren't there to adequately mentor and guide them, feeling it was the responsibility of the more senior women to take the younger ones under their wings in female solidarity and sisterhood. Of course, many of the female partners and senior associates did mentor the younger women, but women in law firms become fewer as you move up the ranks – we vastly outnumber men in the secretarial staff, are about even with them in the junior associate classes, and then become fewer and fewer up the seniority chain. By the time you reach the tippy-top, fewer than 1 in 6 are women. It's a gendered seniority structure – pyramidal for women, tower-like for men.
Men, of course, can mentor young women, and many do. But they're more likely to mentor junior male associates, not out of intentional bias but because they simply see themselves reflected in those young men, and can interact without any hint of impropriety. And the many men in power who don't offer mentorship aren't really noticed. But if women aren't actively helping out other women every step of the way, we're selfish and failing our gender.
When we do succeed, we're also considered less likeable, while the inverse is true for men – successful men gain in likability. In one study, students evaluated the story of a successful entrepreneur, half the time described as "Heidi" and the other half as "Howard". Even though the stories were identical, Howard was perceived as effective and likeable, while Heidi was deemed selfish and a less desirable colleague. In another, the simple change of a name from female to male on application materials led evaluators to judge the male candidate as more competent and hireable; male candidates were also offered higher starting salaries and more mentorship opportunities than female candidates with identical credentials.
From the time we're little, girls are taught to play nicely, and the opinionated or determined ones are derisively called "bossy" – when was the last time you heard the word "bossy" applied to a little boy?
And even – especially – the most ardently feminist among us pin our hopes on the very few women at the top, and are even more spectacularly disappointed and angry when they don't meet all of our ideals.
Those facts, widely publicized by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, were ironically illustrated in the response to Sandberg's book. When male CEOs write best-selling books on how to succeed in business, they're roundly lauded. When Sandberg does it, she's not adequately representing all women everywhere, and she's an out-of-touch rich lady telling the less privileged what to do. She's a know-it-all goody two-shoes and she doesn't know my life. She's bossy.
The take-away from the weight of the social science research on gender and power is that while you might truly believe your female boss was a real bitch or that your male boss was just better at his job, your views are colored by your boss's gender. Your assessment of him or her might say more about your own unrecognized biases than it does about any objective reality.
In the course of my career, the majority of my most committed mentors, champions and door-openers have been women. I've had great female bosses, as well as great male bosses. I've also worked for total jerks, and the jerks have been fairly apportioned by gender – I've worked for more male jerks than female jerks, but I've also worked for more men generally. But even as a professional promoter of gender equality, I've caught myself making unfair and gender-influenced assessments of my superiors – the tone of her email was bitchy while his was just direct.
That's the trouble with battling these forms of insidious, unintentional bias: most of us think we're fair-minded people who don't let things like gender, skin color, age or other factors influence our assessment of others' skills or character, but that's simply not the case. For the overwhelming majority of us who are not as fair-minded as we think we are, standard anti-discrimination policies and laws aren't going to get to the root of the problem. What needs to shift is awareness – individual commitments to checking in and taking a step back to assess your own thoughts. It also takes institutional commitments to countering unintentional bias, both by ensuring diversity in hiring and promotion and by effective education about how bias actually works.
It's heartening to see that more Americans than ever before state no preference for the gender of their boss. Now, we've just got to make sure that those stated preferences actually translate into the workplace.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Climate change hits the poor harder and Typhoon Haiyan is just one example
The devastation in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan is a terrifying reminder that developing nations are hit hardest by severe weather brought on by climate change, which leads to even greater global inequality and suffering. Typhoon Haiyan…
The more you know about the odious Trans-Pacific Partnership, the less you'll like it
Among the many betrayals of the Obama administration is its overall treatment of what many people refer to as "intellectual property" – the idea that ideas themselves and digital goods and services are exactly like physical property, and that therefore the law should treat them the same way. This corporatist stance defies both reality and the American Constitution, which expressly called for creators to have rights for limited periods, the goal of which was to promote inventive progress and the arts.
In the years 2007 and 2008, candidate Obama indicated that he'd take a more nuanced view than the absolutist one from Hollywood and other interests that work relentlessly for total control over this increasingly vital part of our economy and lives. But no clearer demonstration of the real White House view is offered than a just-leaked draft of an international treaty that would, as many had feared, create draconian new rights for corporate "owners" and mean vastly fewer rights for the rest of us.
I'm talking about the appalling Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a partial draft of which WikiLeaks has just released. This treaty has been negotiated in secret meetings dominated by governments and corporations. You and I have been systematically excluded, and once you learn what they're doing, you can see why.
The outsiders who understand TPP best aren't surprised. That is, the draft "confirms fears that the negotiating parties are prepared to expand the reach of intellectual property rights, and shrink consumer rights and safeguards," writes James Love a longtime watcher of this process.
Needless to say, copyright is a key part of this draft. And the negotiators would further stiffen copyright holders' control while upping the ante on civil and criminal penalties for infringers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has "extensive negative ramifications for users' freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and hinder peoples' abilities to innovate". It's Hollywood's wish list.
Canadian intellectual property expert Michael Geist examined the latest draft of the intellectual property chapter. He writes that the document, which includes various nations' proposals, shows the US government, in particular, taking a vastly different stance than the other nations. Geist notes:
[Other nations have argued for] balance, promotion of the public domain, protection of public health, and measures to ensure that IP rights themselves do not become barriers to trade. The opposition to these objective[s] by the US and Japan (Australia has not taken a position) speaks volumes about their goals for the TPP.
The medical industry has a stake in the outcome, too, with credible critics saying it would raise drug prices and, according to Love's analysis, give surgeons patent protection for their procedures.
Congress has shown little appetite for restraining the overweening power of the corporate interests promoting this expansion. With few exceptions, lawmakers have repeatedly given copyright, patent and trademark interests more control over the years. So we shouldn't be too optimistic about the mini-flurry of Capitol Hill opposition to the treaty that emerged this week. It's based much more on Congress protecting its prerogatives – worries about the treaty's so-called "fast track" authorities, giving the president power to act without congressional approval – than on substantive objections to the document's contents.
That said, some members of Congress have become more aware of the deeper issues. The public revolt against the odious "Stop Online Piracy Act" two years ago was a taste of what happens when people become more widely aware of what they can lose when governments and corporate interests collude.
If they become aware – that's the key. One of TPP's most odious elements has been the secrecy under which it's been negotiated. The Obama administration's fondness for secret laws, policies and methods has a lot to do with a basic reality: the public would say no to much of which is done in our names and with our money if we knew what was going on. As Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out, in a letter to the White House:
I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the administration's policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States. I believe in transparency and democracy and I think the US Trade Representative should too.
Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have at least partial transparency today. The more you know about the odious TPP, the less you'll like it – and that's why the administration and its corporate allies don't want you to know.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Occupy Wall Street's debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism
Across the United States, 2,693 people have received a letter in the last few months, which identified a debt and read: "You are no longer under any obligation to settle this account with the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else." This is the work of the Rolling Jubilee project – a non-profit initiative which buys personal debt for pennies on the dollar in the secondary market (where debt is sold to companies who then resell it to collection agencies) but then simply cancels it.
When the Occupy movement came into being in the summer of 2011, its critics said that a lack of identifiable objectives and strategy for achieving them meant it was doomed to fail. This was a monumental underestimation of its potential impact. Two years on, the debate about the ethics of corporate capitalism in its current form, the fairness of the remuneration of those at the top, the widening wealth gap and the morality of tax avoidance is alive and well. The concept of the "99%" is now part of the collective consciousness. All this is, in no small part, down to the fuse lit by the Occupy movement.
However, another significant aspect of the movement – dismissed as being woolly – was that it brought like-minded people together and allowed a dialogue which identified common strands. This appears to have evolved into several focused and practical initiatives. One of the most significant, and perhaps the most threatening to the status quo, is the Strike Debt group, of which the Rolling Jubilee project forms part.
The idea is that, those freed from debt and those sympathetic to the movement, then donate into the fund to keep it "rolling" forward; hence the name. The fund has already raised $600,000 and has used $400,000 of this to purchase and cancel an astonishing $14.7m of debt, primarily focusing on medical bills. This strikes at the very heart of the system, not only by using its own perverse rules against it, but critically by revealing the illusory and circular nature of debt.
Capitalism requires a layer of cheap, flexible labour to operate optimally. It is not a coincidence that the most successful global economy, by any traditional capitalist measure, is an authoritarian quasi-communist state. Many, myself included, have been arguing that our current predicament is not crisis-consequent austerity, but a permanent adjustment. David Cameron on Monday confirmed as much. The great lie, peddled by Thatcher and Reagan, was the idea that we could all be middle class, white-collar professionals within a neoliberal economy. It was simply not true.
David Graeber, one of the original members of Occupy Wall Street writes: "[A]lmost immediately we noticed a pattern. The overwhelming majority of Occupiers were, in one way or another, refugees of the American debt system … The rise of OWS allowed us to start seeing the system for what it is: an enormous engine of debt extraction. Debt is how the rich extract wealth from the rest of us, at home and abroad." Western capitalism is running out of serfs, slaves, colonies, immigrants, child labour and women as chattels. A new underclass must be created. Debt is the weapon of choice. Medical bills underlie more than 60% of bankruptcies in the US. The level of student debt has reached an eye-watering $1.2tn.
This is why the debate on the back-door privatisation of medical and education services in this country matters so much. The extraction of profit from these two key areas changes the social contract in a fundamental way. The idea is no longer that the state will educate you and keep you healthy, so that you may continue to contribute with both your work and your taxes. It has mutated instead into "you will borrow money from the state's private partners in order to become educated and stay healthy, so that you may continue to contribute to their bottom line". All of the 99%, in a very real way, work in part for an assortment of financial institutions, largely invisible and certainly unaccountable.
Iceland's – strangely unreported – decision to write down mortgage debt for its citizens, undermines that notion. A rejection of traditional systems of credit and money as a response to austerity, such as in the barter markets of Volos in Greece and Turin in Italy undermines that notion. The Rolling Jubilee project undermines that notion in a significant way, by asking the sizzling question: "If a corporation is prepared to accept five cents on the dollar in exchange for our debts, if that is our debt's open market value, how much do we really owe?"
And if your instinct is to point out that $15m is so small a drop in the ocean as to be insignificant, my response would be: not to the 2,693 people who received that letter. The sparkle of a lit fuse is, by its nature, humble.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via David Shankbone, Creative Commons licensed.]
Real-life hunger is no game
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How did graffiti become respectable?
For old school graffiti taggers, it may prove the final proof that commercialism is destroying their proud culture. Justin Bieber, the Canadian singer, has been accused of spray-painting the wall of a hotel in Rio de Janeiro. But even before the baby…
Are American universities 'selling their souls' by targeting foreign markets?
When outspoken economics professor Xia Yeliang was dismissed by Peking University (PKU) last month, 136 faculty members at Wellesley College, an elite all-women's school outside Boston, took it personally.;
Unions love New York's new Mayor Bill de Blasio. But can he deliver?
When Bill de Blasio won the New York City mayor’s race in a historic landslide Tuesday, most of the city’s 152 municipal unions felt a wave a relief – if not outright joy.;
Google and Facebook may be our best defenders against Big Brother
The big online companies are calling for urgent reforms to protect us from having data intercepted
Over a few weeks' worth of bedtimes in the summer of 1984, my dad read me Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Though the dystopian context would have been lost on nine-year old me, the pervasive malevolence and the futility of the struggle was not.
References to Orwell are never far off today, whether to Big Brother and the surveillance society, or doublethink and Room 101. The Orwellian dystopia is so familiar now to us – and so astonishingly real – that we might need a new cultural reference, a new literary vision to warn of what lies ahead.
It's the relentless creep of progress and development that inevitably makes our worst nightmares and most brilliant visions a reality. Fifty years ago, security expert Eugene Kaspersky told a conference last week, the public would have been protesting on the streets at the idea that cameras would be surveilling every public placeacross the country, all day, every day. Today, we just accept it.
At the same conference, Dublin's Web Summit, the vast audience in the hangar-sized hall was asked how many had abandoned consumer web companies in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. Three people put up their hands – and this among well-informed, technologically confident people.
The gap between the shock of these revelations and the call to action is perverse. The story is huge, multifaceted and complex, which excludes all but the most committed. For others, the truth about services on which they are utterly dependent – we are all utterly dependent – is too inconvenient to want to act; far easier to declare, "I'm not doing anything wrong," and, "I don't care if I'm being watched."
In truth, the call to action is not that we consumers abandon our online lives and seek out anonymity tools such as Tor, or start encrypting all our email using PGP. It's no bad thing that more sophisticated security techniques are seeping into the mainstream consciousness; gleeful pub conversations about our how mobile phones double as microphones and how even the subtle differences in the sound of typewriter keys can be decoded. Kaspersky has his own currency of expertise to maintain, and he too recounts how he won't store any compromising data on a computer at all.
This is borne out by the testimony of the tech investors at Web Summit too. "We're just not looking for privacy-aware services," said Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures. "There are so many compelling examples of value being created by sharing data, from traffic jams to healthcare. The problem isn't privacy but trust. We can't retreat into the dark ages." That means spending time influencing policy, he concluded. Entrepreneurs were falling over themselves to testify to their fierce protection of customer data; taxi-app Hailo is building up records of payment details combined with location data for account holders, while Evernote records increasingly extensive personal notes covering everything from bank statements to work meetings. Both say they have not handed over customer data outside of specific warrants but as we now know, the NSA doesn't need permission – it will help itself. What are you sharing online?
The crisis is in public trust of both our governments – who, when it suits them, will seize the opportunity to criticise oppressive regimes who restrict free speech — and corporations whose reputation depends on credibility and trust. European nations have generally set up rigorous laws to protect their citizens from business, while its governments rely on the trust and goodwill of the public. In the US that situation is reversed, with citizens protected from government through the constitution, and business commercially dependent on trust, among other things. The lack of oversight and accountability has meant the security services never had to draw the line about what is acceptable, necessary, moral and legal.
This dynamic of corporate autonomy may end up creating the strongest fightback against the over-reaching security services, with Google and Yahoo's fury at the intercepts of their data networks and heavy lobbying in Washington. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks," said Google's chief legal officer David Drummond. "It underscores the need for urgent reform."
Surveillance is the undercurrent in every tech conversation now, a lens for understanding our vulnerability and exposure to every part of the online world. This is not a choice between catching terrorists and what David Cameron astonishingly described as some "la-di-da, airy fairy" views on free speech and the right to privacy. If we are happy to accept that our online lives are best represented by Google, Skype, Yahoo, Facebook and all the rest, despite the compromises we make on those commercial platforms, then we have to hope they have the best chance of clawing back our right to free expression and privacy, our right to relate the world around us without being watched.
Returning to Orwell, what will the state of our surveillance nation be in 2031? The worst that can happen is that the whole lot comes true.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Dear Richard Dawkins: Stop with the tweeting already. We atheists need you more than ever now
Atheism has plenty of adherents, but few internationally respected people we're happy to have speak for all. It's high time Richard Dawkins stepped back up to the plate
'Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste," was the heartfelt message posted this week on Twitter by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, author, emeritus professor of New College, Oxford, and world-famous proselytiser for atheism.
It's a good thing that, in addition to the chance to fire off any first, furious half-thoughts that cross our minds, Twitter has given us the expression *headdesk*. Even the most rigid secularist can find a crumb of comfort in that karmic rebalancing.
To channel Twitter's love of brevity for a moment, Dawkins is doing my nut in. The tweets are bad enough; everything about this one, in fact (not just a jar of honey, the world's most inoffensive foodstuff, but a little jar, up against the world's mightiest hate figure), contriving to stuff more bathos into 140 characters than most novelists manage in a lifetime, then adding a dash of arrogance by thinking this an ideal time to try to make his new coinage for modern jobsworths take flight. (Pardon the pun! LOLZ!) And it comes after a flurry of (primarily Islamosceptical) others that, as a Dawkins devotee ever since I read The Selfish Gene, leaves me deploying another few Twitterisms. Namely, WTF? WTFF? FFS.
Atheism has plenty of adherents, but few internationally respected people we're happy to have speak for all. Douglas Adams and Christopher Hitchens are lost to us for ever (unless, y'know, we're wrong about a couple of key issues). Stephen Fry's still around, but too busy. And my personal choice, Stephen Colbert, insists on remaining Catholic. We can't afford to lose the most cogent and indefatigable of them all.
Religion (or non-religion) needs marketing, like everything else. Atheism has been coasting for a while, as that dismal bus ad ("There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life") proved, managing to be both pusillanimous and patronising in an even shorter space than the average tweet. But after all, potential converts to Islam were presumably deterred by the prospect of being rotated by various parts of the media (even before Dawkins lent a hand) through a variety of roles from terrorist to benefit scrounger. And Catholicism was bringing itself down with one vile child abuse scandal after another, and further alienating followers and potential followers with its disapproval of gay marriage and acceptance of women in the church. Life was sweet.
But now Catholics have got a new, improved pope, keen to emphasise the centrality of love and charity to faith, instead of policing private sexual matters while offering lifetimes of succour to the worst of sinners. The Anglicans have performed the ecclesiastical equivalent of a Tesco price match and produced an archbishop who condemns corporate greed, is pro-marriage in all its forms, and generally seems to chime with the public mood better than anyone had dreamed.
Secularists must start fighting harder for market share, especially now that Dawkins is shrinking it with every tweet. At the risk of playing Sinead O'Connor to his Miley Cyrus: professor, please stop. Otherwise, it's all, well, *headdesk*
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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