Former NBA basketball player Jerome Williams, left, and Orlando Magic's Dwight Howard (file photo)
Several former National Basketball Association stars are on a goodwill tour of Israel this week. Stars like Dwight Howard, Allan Houston, and Jerome Williams are hoping to heighten awareness of the professional game and give some disadvantaged kids a good workout.
At Jerusalem's Malcha Stadium, several hundred cheering children greeted the basketball pros as they jogged into the arena. The players put the young people through several drills, including footwork, jumping, and sprints.
The clinic was part of a special program sponsored by the U.S.-based Sports Power International, an evangelical Christian organization based in Baltimore, Maryland. The players included Allan Houston, a former New York Knicks guard, who says he made the trip because of his faith.
"We've been honored to be here and show our support for not just these wonderful kids and students out here, but just for all the Israeli people that have embraced us," he said.
Houston, an assistant to the President for Basketball Operations for the Knicks, joined former Utah Jazz center Paul Grant, Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard and New York's Jerome Williams on the trip.
Bill Alexson is the head of Sports Power International and the founder of the NBA's chapel program. He told VOA that even a second-string NBA star would be better known worldwide than some of the stars of the U.S. National Football League or Major League Baseball.
"I take these players across the globe. We do exhibition games; we do camps, clinics, school assemblies, and urban outreaches," said Alexson. "And at all of these events, selected players will share their personal stories of how they have overcome adversity in life, how they have handled success. They will encourage young people to make right choices in life. And their talks emphasize having character, leadership, responsibility and faith."
On Wednesday, the delegation also met with Israeli President Shimon Peres. They presented the 87-year-old president with an autographed basketball. The former NBA stars will play the Israeli team Bnei Eshet in an exhibition, and will conduct a clinic at the Yemin Orde youth village outside Haifa. Yemin Orde focuses on helping at-risk youth.
The residents come from numerous countries around the world.
Bill Alexson says that his hope is that the former NBA players can help young people turn their lives around. But he added that the teenagers are not the only ones who benefit from the basketball clinics.
"And the beautiful thing is when they [the players] read a comment card that says, 'I was considering taking my life, but after listening to you talk I changed my mind,' that athlete's life is changed! And they don't look at themselves as, 'well, I used to be so-and-so, but now I'm a failure," said Alexson.
The players' trip is co-sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, a charitable arm of the pro-Israeli lobbying group AIPAC. But Israel is not the only place Bill Alexson says his players are planning to go. The team has also been invited to Russia, Ukraine, China, and Cuba.
U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell said late Wednesday he believes progress is being made on the issue of extending an Israeli freeze on settlement building in the West Bank. Mitchell spoke in Jerusalem after a second day of direct Israel-Palestinian peace talks brokered by the United States.
Mitchell is adhering closely to an agreement among the parties to avoid discussion on the substance of the talks. But he does say he believes there has been progress on the issue of the settlement moratorium, which has threatened to bring the talks to an early end.
Palestinians have threatened a walkout if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not extend the ten-month moratorium on most West Bank settlement building that ends at the end of the month.
The United States has pushed for an extension, coupled with Palestinian gestures that would make it to easier for Mr. Netanyahu to get such a decision through his right-leaning coalition government.
Though giving no details, Mitchell said after a two-hour trilateral meeting at Mr. Netanyahu's official residence that he thinks there is progress on the issue.
He heaped praise on both Mr. Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for their approach to the talks, saying they are serious, and they mean business.
Mitchell was a key negotiator in the 1990's Good Friday accord that ended the Northern Ireland conflict. He said those talks dragged on many months before there was a single serious discussion of major issues.
But he said the new Middle East talks, which began in Washington early this month and continued Tuesday in Egypt, have moved quickly to the core issues.
"In this case, within a matter of literally days since this process began, the leaders have yesterday at Sharm el-Sheikh and this evening here, engaged directly, vigorously, seriously in what are among the most difficult and sensitive issues that they will confront," said George Mitchell. "And so we think that this is a strong indicator of sincerity and seriousness of purpose."
Mitchell stressed that serious talk on the core issues, which include Jerusalem, refugees and the borders of a Palestinian state, is not the same as a resolution of them. But he said it has been extremely impressive to see both leaders engaging in this way.
The U.S. envoy said the two leaders tasked working-level officials with continuing the dialogue and planning for the next senior level meeting, which reportedly could take place in New York where leaders convene for the U.N. General Assembly next week.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who led the U.S. team at this week's trilateral talks, returns to Washington late Thursday after meeting Mr. Abbas in Ramallah and Jordan's King Abdullah in Amman.
Mitchell goes to Damascus Thursday to meet President Bashar al-Assad and other key Syrian officials in a bid to renew Syrian-Israel peace contacts, which he said could be complementary and beneficial to the talks between the parties.
He goes on to Beirut Thursday night for similar discussion with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
Welfare should not 'compensate poor' but encourage mobility, says deputy prime minister as Liberal Democrat activists prepare for clashes at party conference
Liberal Democrat backbenchers accuse Nick Clegg of targeting the vulnerable and breaking promises on 'fairness' Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Nick Clegg today issued a staunch defence of radical benefit cuts as he geared up for potential clashes with Liberal Democrat activists at the party's annual conference.
The deputy prime minister said welfare should not be there "to compensate the poor for their predicament" but act as "an engine of mobility".
Billions of pounds are to be slashed from the welfare budget by the chancellor, George Osborne, when he unveils the results of his drastic public spending review next month.
Liberal Democrat backbenchers have publicly accused the coalition government of targeting the vulnerable and Clegg of breaking promises to ensure all cuts were "fair".
The issue could prove a flashpoint with the left of the party when activists gather in Liverpool from Saturday for the first time since joining the Tories in government.
But Clegg made clear he considered the reforms to be essential.
"A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another," he wrote in an article for the Times (paywall).
"Welfare needs to become an engine of mobility, changing people's lives for the better, rather than a giant cheque written by the state to compensate the poor for their predicament.
"Instead of turning the system from a 'safety net' into a 'trampoline', as Labour promised, people have been stuck on benefits, year in, year out."
A fair society, he wrote, was "one in which people are able to make a better life for themselves, with support from government and the broader community".
Clegg's intervention came hours after the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, denied that he had signed up to another £4bn of spending cuts to the welfare budget.
Liberal Democrat MP Bob Russell forced the chancellor to face a Commons grilling on the issue earlier this week after Osborne revealed the figure in a media interview.
Around £11bn was taken from benefits in June's emergency budget.
Duncan Smith acknowledged that he would have to find savings in the government's forthcoming spending review but said he was still in negotiations with the Treasury.
The chancellor was demanding proof that his planned reforms to the welfare system – to make it easier to get claimants back into jobs – would work, he told a Commons committee.
Unemployment benefit claims have risen unexpectedly. Photograph: David Sillitoe Phillip Inman The number of people claiming unemployment benefits jumped unexpectedly last month, fuelling concern that the government's austerity budget in June undermined business confidence and pushed the economy into reverse.
The claimant count rose by 2,300 in August to 1.47m, according to the Office for National Statistics, confounding City expectations that a downward trend started in January would continue throughout the summer.
The broader International Labour Organisation measure of the number of people without a job registered a fall, but the decrease of 8,000, to 2.467m was also below City forecasts. Analysts had been expecting a decline of around 35,000.
In a poor month for economic data, the unemployment figures follow the highest balance of trade deficit on record last week and surveys of the services and construction sectors showing employer sentiment deteriorating sharply.
The International Monetary Fund said this week it was worried by rising unemployment in western countries and urged governments to consider measures to boost employment. The OECD, the Paris-based rich nations thinktank, revised down its most recent growth forecasts and warned of the need for governments to stimulate growth.
Unions said the unemployment figures highlighted their concerns that the economy had gone into reverse over recent months and public spending cuts due in the comprehensive spending review would make the situation worse.
Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, said: "The worry must be that we are at a turning point as spending cuts hit business and consumer confidence."
"What is clear is that the economy is still extremely fragile. With more than one in six young people without work, the best the government can expect is a largely jobless recovery. At worst the economy could go into reverse, as the OECD now recognises."
There was some positive news. The number of people in employment in the three months to July registered its largest rise since records began, with 286,000 more people securing jobs. However, economists pointed out the figure was boosted by 166,000 part-time jobs, continuing a trend during the year for employers increasingly to rely on part-time workers. The employment figures also lag behind the claimant count data, which gives a more recent signal of labour market trends.
Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight said the data was "both disappointing and worrying" fuelling fears that the improvement in the labour market is coming to an end, "even before public sector job cutting really gets under way".
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said the labour market was "showing signs of weakening" which can be "largely explained by the fact that the increase in employment was driven by part-time workers" Alan Clarke, UK economist at BNP Pariibas said the increase in employment wopuld represent a peak.
"The worsening in unemployment is consistent with what we know is happening to growth. Hence we very much doubt the buoyancy of the employment data will last much longer. Archer added the jump in part-time employment indicated that many companies are reluctant to add full-time workers amid serious concerns over the sustainability and longer-term strength of the recovery. Part-time workers now account for 27.2% of total employment, up from 25.4% at mid-2008.
Employers groups said the government needed to move quickly to boost job growth with investment in infrastructure and other major projects.
Unions said the figures showed the economy remained fragile and in need of government support.
Employment minister Chris Grayling stressed that full-time and part-time jobs were being created at record levels, which supported the government's view that the economy was robust. He said he was disappointed the number of people claiming unemployment benefits had remained stubbornly high, justifying further action to get welfare claimants back into work.
British universities have performed poorly in an international league table of top universities which ranks Oxford and Cambridge joint sixth in the world. The list is dominated by American institutions but China and South Korea have also scored highly after compilers placed less emphasis on "reputation and heritage" and gave more weight to objective measures including the influence of universities' research.
The league table published today by the magazine Times Higher Education (THE) is topped by Harvard. American universities take all five top places and have 72 entries in the global top 200.
Britain has three institutions in the top 10, with Imperial College London at ninth. But there are just five British universities in the top 50 – UCL is rated 22nd and Edinburgh 40th – and just 14 in the top 100.
The list contrasts sharply with a league table published last week by the careers advice company QS, in which Cambridge came top and Harvard second. Phil Baty, editor of Times Higher Education's world university rankings, said the table was based on revised measures which provide an accurate and reliable picture of global higher education.
He said: "Some institutions, and even whole countries, have not come out well under the new system. Others look much better."
"Because of the change to the methodology, any movement up or down since 2009 cannot be seen as a change in performance by an individual country or institution. We do contend, however, that these tables are realistic, and so in some cases they may deliver an unpleasant wake-up call that the days of trading on reputation alone are coming to an end."
The table is dominated by English-speaking universities. The only institution in the top 20 which is not based in Britain or North America is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Canada, which invests heavily in higher education, has nine institutions in the top 200, with the University of Toronto ranked highest at 17.
Mainland China has six institutions in the top 200, more than any other country in Asia, and overtaking Japan for the first time. Peking University is the highest-ranked Chinese institution, at 37.
Technology-focused universities are ranked highly in the list, with California Institute of Technology in second place and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) third. The new list reflects concerns raised last week that Britain is lagging behind global competitors in its public investment in higher education. A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, published last week, found the share of public spending in British higher education is 0.7% of GDP, below the OECD average of 1%, and behind the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Slovenia.Announcing the OECD's results in London, Andreas Schleicher, the head of its indicators and analysis division, said Finland, Canada and Japan were now major players in higher education.
Professor Steve Smith, president of the vice-chancellors' umbrella group Universities UK, last week warned the government against squeezing university funding in the comprehensive spending review next month.
"My worry is that we may be about to make decisions that fundamentally undermine our future capacity to be a globally competitive knowledge economy," he told an audience of vice-chancellors.
This year's THE university rankings are based on a revised method of measuring university performance which looks at thirteen indicators including academic citations as well as surveys which rated research and teaching quality. Source
