worldnews

Joint Indonesian-Australian mining venture halted after string of violent protests at which two were killed

Indonesia has revoked permits for a joint Indonesian-Australian mining venture on Sumbawa island after a string of violent protests in which two people died and a government office was set alight.

The country's leading environmental group, however, said it doubted the government's pledge was an "honest commitment".

Thousands of protesters rioted on Thursday in Bima, Sumbawa – 1,330km east of the capital, Jakarta – where they set fire to the district head's office to demand an end to the gold exploration plan, which they said would damage their land and livelihoods.

"The preliminary information from Bima is that people were acting anarchist by burning the regent's office … We don't know if there are any casualties," a police spokesman told Reuters.

Many of Sumbawa's 1.3 million residents are fishermen and farmers worried about the environmental effects of gold mining on their land and water supplies, according to Walhi, Indonesia's largest environmental advocacy group.

Thursday's violence was the latest in a string of protests in Sumbawa over the past year, during which villagers and students demanded that Bima's head district revoke the permit for the joint mining venture between Sumber Mineral Nusantara and Australian-listed Arc Exploration. In December, two protesters were shot at point-blank range by police and killed, and another eight injured, in Sape port.

The energy minister, Jero Wacik, told Reuters the mining permit would be revoked but the process would take time. The government's decision to revoke the permit, however, may not be the boon protesters were fighting for, said Walhi's mining campaigner Pius Binting.

"The Indonesian government has many times made this promise in the past, saying they want to protect the environment, but then their policies still continue," he said. "For example, they said they would stop mining in national parks, but then they changed the status of 'national park' to accommodate mining operations."

"So we don't believe their decision to revoke the permit, as we don't believe it is an honest commitment by the government."

Arc Exploration announced on 3 January its exploration licence had been temporarily suspended for one year since 23 December.

Thursday's protests in Bima follow a succession of demonstrations over the last year against mining operations across Indonesia.

In October, thousands of miners in Freeport, Papua clashed with security officers after demanding pay rises from the US-run copper and gold mining firm PT Freeport Indonesia. One protester was killed and several others injured in the violence.

The Indonesian Mining Association has agreed the government should revoke permits for mining companies that threatened the livelihoods of locals, the Jakarta Post reported.

Families desperate to leave divided community after months of terror and years of segregation

The first snow of 2012 had fallen on the day Natasha Váradi invited us into the house she shares with her 10 children, mother and father-in-law in the Hungarian village of Gyöngyöspata. The two rooms were dark and dank: for four months the family had been living without electricity, gas or running water. Every half an hour a child went down the hill with a bucket to draw water from the communal pump. By night they stumbled around with torches as they squeezed on to mattresses.

The air in the bungalow carried the sour stench of urine. "They've started wetting the bed again," said Natasha, who has lived in Gyöngyöspata for all of her 31 years. "Someone only need knock on the door and they are scared." There is not much door left on which to knock. Much of the wood has been smashed in. On 22 December, the family say a stone came flying through the front room window.

The family members have reason to fear for their lives: seven adults and two children died in 49 attacks on Roma communities in Hungary between January 2008 and April 2011, according to the European Roma Rights Centre.

Until last Easter, 31-year-old Váradi had never left Gyöngyöspata, an old coalmining village 50 miles north of Budapest, which then had a population of about 2,800, including 450 Roma.

Then, on 1 March, the militia arrived. Wearing black uniforms and calling themselves the Civil Guard Association for a Better Future (Szebb Jövóért Polgárór Egyesület) they marched through the village singing war songs and bellowing abuse. Soon, they were joined by groups including Vederö (Defence Force), wearing camouflage fatigues and armed with axes, whips and snarling bulldogs.

For almost two months they roamed the streets day and night, singing, hammering on doors and calling the inhabitants "dirty fucking Gypsies". When they were not carrying out what they described as "neighbourhood watch patrols" designed to combat what they said were rising rates of "Gypsy crime", the militia were drinking. CCTV cameras recorded one man drunk in the street, boasting at the top of his voice that he had just drawn a swastika in the dirt road with his urine.

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) reported the four most serious incidents during the patrols to police. One involved a woman giving birth prematurely after being harassed by vigilantes with using racially abusive slogans. No charges have yet been brought against the militiamen, though a Roma man was jailed for two years after a fight with the vigilantes; a further five Roma are awaiting trial over the same incident.

Roma, who number somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 in Hungary, are the prime targets for rightwing hate and more general discrimination. In March, Gábor Vona, the head of the far-right Jobbik party (which received 12% of the vote in 2010) gave a speech in Gyöngyöspata saying his party planned to start deploying similar "gendarmerie units" nationwide without delay.

In mid-April, a US businessman called Richard Field decided to act. The militia had announced plans to hold a "training camp" over the Easter weekend on the hillside overlooking the poorest part of the village, where most of the Roma live. Together with the Hungarian Red Cross, Field paid for six buses to evacuate the most vulnerable residents. On 22 April, shortly before 8am, 267 Roma women and children boarded the buses to spend Easter in one of two holiday retreats.

In the face of international outrage, the Hungarian interior minister called a press conference in which he denied that an emergency evacuation had taken place. The Roma were, he said, simply taking a "scheduled holiday". In the event, the training camp never took place because police took eight extremists into custody, although no charges were brought.

By the end of the month, Field, who runs a private US charity called the American House Foundation, was under attack from the rightwing government. He was called to give evidence to a parliamentary "fact-finding committee", which accused him of blackening Hungary's name by tipping off the Associated Press about the evacuation or labelling it as such. The government maintained it knew about the Easter training camp and had always planned to deploy hundreds of police to the village that weekend.

Váradi and her children took one of Field's buses to Szolnok and then stayed with relatives. On their return, most of the Defence Force had gone, but the fear remained. And all their utilities had been cut off.

For Váradi's husband, it was all too much. By September he had scraped together enough money to fly to Canada, where he is trying to claim asylum.

Since Canada lifted visa restrictions for Hungarians in 2008, it has become a favourite destination for desperate Roma. Hungary was Canada's top asylum claimant source country in 2010, with 2,297 cases referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board .

It appears that it will hold the top spot again in 2011, as figures for the first nine months of the year showed 2,545 Hungarian referrals, more than 1,000 above the second-highest source country, China. According to HCLU, 45 Roma children and 22 adults from Gyöngyöspata have left for Canada in the past six months. The Guardian asked Gyöngyöspata's mayor, Oszkár Juhász, from the far-right Jobbik party, if he regretted or felt sad that the Roma feel they are being driven out of their own village. The village notary replied instead. "The Roma are not pushed out of their own village," wrote Mátyás István. "Those who are not willing to work here will not work in other places either."

The Hungarian minister for government communication, Zoltán Kovács, in response to the same question, said: "We regret that some are utilising the situation and that some Roma people are leaving the country on an argument that is not valid." In a phone interview he suggested the Hungarian Roma who claim asylum in Canada plea persecution in order to "make money" and milk the benefit system. "We don't think there is any foundation for [Hungarian Roma to claim asylum because they are being persecuted for their ethnicity]," he said, adding: "We want every Hungarian citizen to stay here."

Nonetheless, Váradi said she and her children – who range in age from two to 16 – were going to Toronto as soon as they had the air fare. "We have no life here any more," she said. Asked what she hoped for in Canada, Váradi did not speak of material gain. "My husband says it's good there. He says there is going to be happiness, that people there will offer us love."

When the Guardian mentioned Natasha's case to the local council, asking what they were doing to help the poorest members of the community, the notary asked us a question instead of answering ours. "The head of that household is in Canada, alone. What is your opinion on this?" He said the family had only recently asked the council for help. "If we can, we will help them," he insisted.

It can be hard to understand how such a situation can unfold in the EU. But talk to locals, Roma and non-Roma, and it is clear that segregation is at the very heart of the community.

Both sides agree that until last March, the two groups coexisted relatively peacefully. There were "small incidents" with Roma accused of pilfering firewood or vegetables and other petty crime, but only 12 "petty larcenies" were reported to police during the first four months of 2011. Violence was rare. But the youngest members of the community quickly learned that not all children are equal in Gyöngyöspata.

The primary school is run on a sort of apartheid system, say lawyers who have brought a lawsuit against the local authority on behalf of the charity Chance for Children Foundation. Their report claims: "Romani children are illegally separated from non-Roma in separate classes, which are also physically separated from each other (Roma classes are on the ground floor, non-Roma are on the upper floors). This separation involves school separation of Roma and non-Roma children in the restrooms, school festivities and school lunch."

When the Guardian visited the school, we saw a marked difference between the quality and condition of equipment on the two floors. The classrooms on the upper levels had electronic whiteboards; downstairs, where the Roma are taught, they make do with a blackboard. Roma children we spoke to complain that only "upstairs" children receive swimming lessons, and that they are not allowed to use computers in class until several years after the non-Roma. They are excluded from after-school activities and are not allowed to use the superior toilet facilities on the first floor.

The Gyöngyöspata authorities deny the allegations and the case is ongoing. The school did not respond to our request for comment.

When asked what the government was doing to help the Roma in Gyöngyöspata and beyond, Kovács said it did not see the problems as being ethnically based, adding: "We are aware that some problems the Roma are facing are problems because they are Roma, but in general terms, these are social, educational and labour market problems." His government, he said, was rejuvenating the job market by getting people off benefits and into work: "Everyone should work who can." It was the "saddest figure in Europe", he said, that Hungary had the lowest employment rate in the EU.

For the long-term unemployed – a disproportionate number of whom are Roma – this means taking part in the government's new public work programme. According to Jeno Setét, a Roma activist, between 70% and 80% of Hungary's Roma population do not work (the rate for the whole population is around 10%). This scheme aims to get 300,000 people into work by 2014 via a sort of community service scheme for which participants are paid less than the national monthly minimum wage (around 80,000 HUF – £214 – for unskilled workers) but slightly more than they would receive in benefits.

Anyone unemployed for 90 days is offered a place on the programme, which administers projects cleaning streets or sewers, cutting down trees or building football stadiums or dams. Refusal to accept a placement will result in all social security benefits being stopped to the refusenik and family. Gyöngyöspata was chosen last year to run a pilot scheme. Unemployed locals – almost exclusively Roma – were deployed to cut down trees in a nearby wood.

For Setét, the public work scheme is a "smokescreen" that will do little to help Roma get "real" jobs and will reinforce their position at the bottom of Hungarian society. "If people on the scheme were paid properly and trained properly, I'd be all for it," he added. "But they are not. Right now it's a way of humiliating people and paying them a slave wage."

The most controversial aspect of the programme is the introduction of what Roma activists call "labour camps". If there is no suitable project near enough for someone to commute to, they will be offered "accommodation" near or on site, said Kovács. "They are not labour camps," he said. But to the Hungarian Roma, many of whose relatives perished the last time they were sent off to "labour camps", during the Nazi era, the merest whiff of anything similar is spine-chilling, said Gábor Sárközi from the Roma Press Centre: "People are absolutely terrified at the prospect."

Chinese security forces have shot and killed a young Tibetan in Sichuan province, campaign groups say, in what would be at least the third such killing this week.

The latest episode was the third of its kind this week, activist group say.

Costa Cruises has offered compensation to passengers from the Italian disaster as its US parent company faces legal action

Costa Cruises has offered to pay 11,000 euros ($14,500) in compensation to each of the more than 3,000 passengers aboard the ship that capsized near the island of Giglio two weeks ago, Italian consumer groups said on Friday.

The offer, negotiated by the consumer groups, is an attempt by Costa Cruises to limit the legal fallout of the accident.

Each passenger would also receive a refund on the cruise and costs of their return home. The offer applies to all passengers, whether a child or an adult, who suffered no physical injuries. Injured passengers will be dealt with individually.

Those accepting the offer would have to agree to drop all future litigation and receive payment within seven days.

Costa Cruises' US parent company Carnival Plc is already facing legal action for compensation.

Codacons, a consumer group which did not participate in the negotiation, is collecting names for a class action suit to be filed in Miami requesting 125,000 euros for each passenger.

Carlo Rienzi, president of Codacons, said the offer was insufficient and urged passengers to see a doctor to check whether they had suffered psychological trauma.

Meanwhile, John Arthur Eaves, a US personal injury lawyer, is urging passengers to file individual lawsuits in the United States. Eaves represented families of some of those killed when a US military jet struck and severed cables holding skiers in a cable car in northern Italy in 1998, killing 20.

"The class action is not the right tool for this case," Eaves told Reuters Television. "In this case people need to be treated like individuals. Everyone in this boat had different damages."

But Roberto Corbella, head of Italy's association of tour operators, and who helped Costa negotiate the offer with the consumer protection groups, urged passengers to accept it.

"Lawsuits have uncertain outcomes, they take a long time, there are legal costs, and some studies indicate that it's not at all certain that passengers would get more than the company is offering," he told Reuters Television.

Crew member Gary Lobaton has already filed a lawsuit against Carnival in a US district court. His lawyers said in his court filing that he was not aware of the "dangerous conditions" of the cruise ship until it was too late to abandon it safely.

On Thursday, Italy's top-ranking Coast Guard official, Marco Brusco, said Concordia Captain Francesco Schettino lost "a precious hour", which made evacuating the ship more difficult.

Had the order been given earlier, "the lifeboats could have been launched calmly, people could have been reassured", Brusco said in Senate testimony.

Passengers have complained the evacuation was chaotic, with some left waiting in lifeboats for two hours before being able to leave the ship. Several bodies were found by divers in submerged evacuation assembly points, wearing life vests.

Sixteen bodies have so far been recovered and 16 are still missing after the 290-metre long cruise liner struck a rock near the Tuscan island.

As divers continued to comb the submerged parts of the ship, Dutch salvage team SMIT finalized preparations to remove fuel from the ship's tanks.

"We could finish today the process of inserting valves on six tanks," said a spokesman for the civil protection agency, which is in charge of operations regarding the Concordia. That would open the way for fuel removal to begin on Saturday.

At least 11 people have been injured after an under-construction casino partially collapsed in Cincinnati, Ohio, emergency crews say.

A magnitude 5.3 magnitude earthquake is felt in Turin and Milan, the second to hit northern Italy in a week, but there are no reports of damage.

Forget deficits, debt and corruption. Theo Angelopoulos, the film-maker who died this week, captured the true Greek soul

The sudden death of Theo Angelopoulos, the greatest Greek film-maker, while shooting his latest film on the current troubles, has acquired great symbolic significance. In recent months, reporting on Greece has concentrated on the deficit, debt and the untrustworthiness of its people. The films of Angelopoulos remind us of another Greece and a different humanity. In his dreamlike historical films, he chronicled the melancholic nature of a nation torn between an invented tradition of classical glories and a traumatic history of repressive state policies, dictatorship, corrupt and dynastic politics. He narrated the lowly lives of the defeated in the vicious civil war 1946-9, the degradations and melancholy of exile, the Odysseus-like return of people who go back to a place they nurtured in their memories but turns out alien and unwelcoming.

In his mesmeric long sequences, a simple gesture, a silence or smile acquire philosophical depth and historic significance. This is epic cinema made out of the fragments of everyday life.

Coming from the left, as did most of the Greek cultural renaissance of the second half of the 20th century, but ascribing to no orthodoxy, Angelopoulos described the degradations of ordinary people both in the hands of rightwing governments and in the Stalinist regimes where the defeated partisans retreated but found no haven.

For Angelopoulos, humanity survives in the memories and dreams of exiled, travelling people who never fully make it back to Ithaca. What makes us human, Angelopoulos tells us, is found in traumatic memories, in the desire to preserve an imaginary beauty, and in eternal returns perennially frustrated. Angelopoulos was both the Homer of modern Greece, and the country's magical realist storyteller.

For decades, the Greek elites belittled those cultural achievements that didn't fit their view of modernisation defined as insatiable consumption. The sorry state Greece finds itself in today was built against Angelopoulos's poetry of images. If, for a moment, we put to one side the immediate economic news, a largely unreported dramatic picture of decay of the integrated political, economic and media elites that ran the country for the last 60 years emerges. The implosion of this elite is a textbook study in the collapse of a system of power.

Let me mention some recent symptoms, each of which have occurred in the last month, and which show an elite turning in on itself. First, the head of the Thessaloniki internal affairs division of the financial crimes squad (SDOE) was arrested last week for his participation in a gang of loan sharks and extortion.

Elsewhere, the government is trying to remove two economic crime prosecutors who reported the tax crimes of the rich and asked parliament to investigate the alleged 3% fraudulent increase of the country's deficit by the incoming Papandreou government in 2010. It was this upward revision of the deficit that led to the term "Greek statistics" and brought the troika of the IMF, EU and ECB to Athens.

In another example, a senior cabinet minister admitted that he did not read the memorandum detailing the measures imposed on Greece by the troika before voting for them; he added that he disagrees with them now, although he energetically implemented them.

Or witness the attack by former prime minister Papandreou on the most powerful media empire, which has consistently supported the Pasok party, for undermining his personal authority. Its CEO replied in a leader that a commercial bank had refused his company a loan on the instruction of the prime minister. He added that later he was invited into the PM's office, was ushered in Murdoch-like from the back door to avoid detection, and was asked to offer unspecified services to the government.

Greek and European elites freely admit now that the austerity – which has led to the deepest depression since the 1930s – was wrong. Former Pasok prime minister Simitis, who led Greece to the eurozone in 2001, (when the current prime minister was the governor of the Bank of Greece) and was accused by Nicolas Sarkozy of fiddling the books to achieve accession, admitted this week in Berlin that the troika measures implemented by his anointed successor were a major mistake. As the elite ship collapses, its captains run for the boats. The belated apologies confirm the suspicion that the deficit was a pretext used by the establishment to impose their desired neoliberal policies.

But there is also the Greece of Angelopoulos. This Greece is represented by men like Dinos Christianopoulos, the greatest living poet of urban solitude and malaise, who refused a Greek Academy lifetime honour stating that he does not want their gongs or money although he lives on a pension of only €600. It is also represented by those who, throughout the country, choose to show solidarity with the homeless, unemployed and poor. Only this week, farmers protesting the devaluation of their produce offered tons of free vegetables to hundreds of Athenians in Syntagma, the square where the indignants occupation last year changed the political landscape by introducing the direct democracy now seen all over the world. Ordinary people who worked hard, did not evade tax and did not participate in the great loot of the last 20 years are everywhere reviving the Greek ethos of friendship, solidarity and hospitality – characteristics lost in the get-rich-quick period.

Angelopoulos speaks of a Greece and Europe far removed from bankers' bonuses and hedge funds. An MP of the extreme right, now in coalition government with the New Democracy and Pasok parties, stated yesterday that Angelopoulos's support for open borders and "internationalism" does not represent Greece. He is wrong.

In 1971, the funeral of Nobel prize winning Giorgos Seferis became a symbolic moment of the resistance against the colonels. Greece is not a dictatorship now, but Angelopoulos's untimely death may acquire a similar meaning – it has already led to nationwide soul-searching.

The struggle for the soul of the country is currently played out in assemblies, strikes and solidarity campaigns. Ordinary Greeks now have a historic chance to redefine the meaning and values of European civilisation.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

It is a premier for Germany. Never before have artifacts from Islam's holiest site, the Kabaa in Mecca, been on display in the country. A new exhibit in Berlin's famous Pergamon Museum traces history on the Arabian peninsula from the birth of civilization to the 20th century.

Protesters move from Sun Street base of past 10 weeks to former Rafidain Bank building in Leadenhall Street

The Occupy movement in London has had yet another change of location after activists moved out of the disused office block they have used as an educational base for the past 10 weeks and straight into another property.

The Bank of Ideas – an offshoot of the original London camp next to St Paul's cathedral set up to protest at the perceived excesses of the global finance system – was based in a huge building in Sun Street, in the City. The block is owned by the banking giant UBS, but has not been used for several years.

Occupy activists squatted the building and established rooms for lectures, delivered by academics and others, and a sophisticated IT hub for the campaign.

UBS won a legal case against the group, which could have been removed forcibly at any time from this weekend.

Naomi Colvin, from Occupy, said that rather than tie up scarce legal resources with an appeal, the bulk of activists moved out of Sun Street earlier this week, leaving a small group to clean the building.

Everyone has now moved to an other vacant office block in Leadenhall Street, in the heart of the financial district and adjacent to the Lloyd's building. The Leadenhall Street building was home to the UK arm of Iraq's Rafidain Bank, which went into liquidation in 2008.

"We're hoping that the police will recognise our legal rights and leave us in place," Colvin said. "If that happens, the hope is to reopen the Bank of Ideas at Leadenhall Street."

On Wednesday, Occupy briefly took over another nearby building, a former Midland Bank at St Alphage Highwalk, but were almost immediately removed by police.

Under the 1977 Criminal Law Act, squatters have protected rights to occupy a building if no damage has been caused in entry. Police told activists on Wednesday that they were investigating the theft of a padlock – something Occupy disputes.

As well as the St Paul's camp, which has been in place for just over 100 days, Occupy also has an outdoor encampment at Finsbury Square, on the edge of the City, which it plans to turn into a model eco community.

It is also based at the former Old Street magistrates court, slightly further north – a Grade II-listed Edwardian courts and police complex which has been empty for many years.

After losing a high court battle against the Corporation of London last week, the St Paul's camp also faces imminent eviction, which could begin early next week.

Judge rules that Guatemala's former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt must face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity

Human rights groups celebrated on Friday after a court in Guatemala ruled that the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over one of Latin America's bloodiest civil wars, will face trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Members of the Ixil tribe, which suffered horrific atrocities at the hands of the army, said they had waited decades for this moment but expressed disappointment that the retired general was placed under house arrest rather than jailed.

After a day-long hearing, Judge Carol Patricia Flores Blanco ruled on Thursday that there was sufficient evidence linking Ríos Montt to the massacre of 1,700 indigenous people during his 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983.

The judge agreed with prosecutors who said the 85-year-old, as head of the government at the time, should answer for the armed forces' actions. It was one of the more brutal phases of a 36-year conflict which ended in 1996 after claiming 200,000 lives. The trial's preliminary hearing was scheduled for March.

Eduardo de Leon, of the Rigoberta Menchú foundation, named after the Nobel peace prize winner, told reporters it was a historic day. "The justice system is settling debts it had with indigenous people and society for grave human rights violations," he said.

Survivors' groups erected altars and shrines with candles and photos in the plaza in front of the tribunal. "I would have done anything to see that gentleman seated in the dock," a peasant named only as Pedro, who lost his father during the conflict, told el Periódico.

Andrea Barrios, of the Movement of Women, said activists' patience and stubbornness had been rewarded.

Aura Elena Farfán, of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Guatemala, complained that the defendant was allowed home after posting £40,000 bail, rather than jailed. "For us this doesn't mean anything. It's as if Ríos Montt was free," she said. "It pains us and we think the ruling is a game. It wasn't what we expected." Others said the defendant's impeccable suit and punctuality - in fact he arrived early - were part of a strategy to clinch house arrest.

Prosecutors said the dictator, who seized power in a coup, unleashed a campaign of slaughter, terror and rape against Maya highland villages which were suspected of backing leftwing guerrillas.

Human rights groups have long accused him of being among the cruellest despots during Latin America's cold war era of US-backed counter-insurgency operations. The Reagan administration armed and supported Ríos Montt, calling him a bulwark against communism.

During the prosecutors' presentation, the judge asked the defendant if he had any response. In a firm voice, he said: "I prefer to remain silent." Defence lawyers argued he could not be held responsible for abuses because he did not determine the level of force nor control battlefield operations.

Survivors' decades-long quest for justice bore fruit last year when prosecutors opened cases against two other retired generals. Ríos Montt was immune from prosecution since his election to congress in 2000 but his term expired earlier this month.

Meanwhile in Chile, in a further sign of the region's grappling with its authoritarian past, the government decided to resume using the term "dictatorship" when referring to Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1990 rule. Late last year Sebastian Piñera's centre-right administration caused controversy by amending the term to "military regime" in textbooks. It backtracked after being accused of trying to veil history.

All the action as it happens from Group C at the Africa Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Ford's high fourth quarter profits resulted from a one-time tax gain but missed estimates as commodity costs increased

Ford reported a lower-than-expected fourth quarter profit on Friday as commodity costs shot up and results from operations outside North America fell short of expectations.

The No2 US automaker's losses in Europe nearly quadrupled during the quarter as the economy suffered amid the ongoing debt crisis. Flooding in Thailand led to a loss in Asia, and increased competition blunted profits in South America.

"We saw the external environment deteriorate, and that really affected most regions other than North America," chief financial officer Lewis Booth told reporters, "and then we saw slightly greater than we expected impact of commodities, currency and also the Thai floods."

Shares of Ford, which derives the bulk of its revenue from North America, fell more than 5% in premarket trading.

Excluding one-time items, Ford's operating profit fell to $1.1bn, or 20¢ per share, from nearly $1.3bn, or 30 cents per share, a year earlier.

On that basis, analysts on average were expecting 25¢ per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

"It's been a tough go for Ford," said portfolio manager Gary Bradshaw of Hodges Capital Management of Dallas, which owns Ford shares. "It seems like the company continues to execute, but there are plenty of headwinds."

Besides higher commodity costs, Ford also said it missed expectations because of unfavourable exchange rates.

Profit margins in Ford's automotive business fell to 5.4% in 2011 from 6.1% in 2010. Commodity costs for the year came to $2.3bn, up slightly from the company's $2.2bn forecast.

Ford's losses in Europe widened to $190m in the fourth quarter from $51m a year earlier. In South America, the company's pre-tax operating profit fell to $108m from $281m.

Ford posted a quarterly loss of $83m in Asia, compared with a year-earlier profit of $23m. The company flagged the loss in Asia earlier this month.

Booth said he expected Ford to be "modestly profitable" in Asia in 2012, but he did not provide a forecast for Europe, where he said rivals have piled on incentives to sell vehicles. Ford expects European growth will be tempered by the debt crisis and austerity measures in 2012.

Compared with Detroit rival General Motors, Ford is less exposed to Europe, Jefferies analyst Peter Nesvold said.

"Ford won't be immune to a downturn in Europe, but I think the product lineup is a little bit fresher and a little bit better, and it's a smaller piece of the overall pie," said Nesvold, who has a "buy" rating on Ford. "Europe is less of an anchor for Ford's shares than it is potentially for GM's shares."

For the fourth quarter, Ford reported net income of $13.6bn, or $3.40 per share, buoyed by a one-time tax-related gain of $12.4bn. Net income was $190m, or 5¢ per share, a year earlier.

The higher net income was the result of an accounting change that Ford said reflects confidence in its long-term profit outlook. The one-time gain resulted in full-year net income of $20.2bn, the highest since 1998.

Republicans' promotion of 'right-to-work' laws, designed to undermine basic union functions, is pure ideological vendetta

This week, the Indiana House voted to make the state "right to work". The bill is expected to easily pass the Republican-controlled Senate and Governor Mitch Daniels, whose first act as a governor was to strip state employees of collective bargaining rights, will sign it into law. It's not yet clear how soon that will occur; currently, it looks like Indiana Republicans want to have it signed before the Super Bowl on 5 February (the NFL Players' Association has been a vocal opponent of the bill).

Right-to-work (RTW) laws are nothing new – Indiana would be the 23rd state to have one. But it is notable that this has happened now in a midwestern state, since RTW laws were previously a mostly southern and Rocky Mountain state phenomenon, which are mostly non-union anyway. But there are a number of myths about what RTW laws are and do.

First, let's be clear about what Indiana's Right to Work bill does not do. It does not end "compulsory union membership", or the "closed shop"; there is no such thing. Contrary to the deliberately misleading rhetoric of RTW laws' corporate sponsors (pdf), this is already illegal, and has been since 1947. Nowhere in the country can you be fired, demoted or hauled off to the gulag for refusing to join a union, right-to-work state or not.

Nor does it suddenly make it possible to refuse to pay union dues. Workers who object to how their unions spend their dues money outside of the workplace – such as on political contributions – can already choose not to pay that portion of their dues (again, right-to-work or not). In no case can a worker who is Republican be forced to support a Democratic candidate through their union dues.

Rather, right-to-work legislation, such as the bill Indiana will soon enact into law, prohibits a business from entering into a type of private agreement with its employees, under which they can be obliged to contribute to a specific fund. Sometimes called "agency fees", "representation fees" or "fair share provisions", these cover only what unions spend to represent workers who are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. These are local deals involving, for example, the negotiation of contracts, the filing of grievances and the defence of employees in disputes with their managers.

Under what are called "duties of fair representation", unions are legally required to provide those services to all workers covered by a contract, whether they are members of the union or not. The only difference, then, is that under right-to-work laws, workers may choose not to pay for those benefits which they will continue to receive anyway: health insurance, vacations or simply established work rules such that they cannot lose their job for capricious reasons, such as being falsely accused of stealing staplers or the boss waking up and deciding to fire everyone wearing brown shoes that day, which is perfectly legal in most – which is to say, non-union – workplaces.

In other words, right-to-work laws simply incentivize freeloading. This, of course, is something RTW laws' Republican backers tend to frown upon when it comes to welfare, but seem willing to embrace as a means of starving their political opponents. Notably, such laws do not undercut unions' political activities; workers can already choose to contribute to those or not. Instead, they only cripple a union's ability to perform the mundane, everyday functions of representing workers on the job – the very tasks Republicans say unions should be restricted to doing.

If right-to-work boosters were honest about what the laws were designed to do – which is simply to punish unions – they would still find supporters. There are, after all, plenty of politicians who hate unions for purely ideological reasons. But they are never sold that way, and Indiana is no exception. Instead, a right-to-work law will show that Indiana is "open for business", says Indiana House speaker Brian Bosma, and make the state a "magnet for job creation", promises GOP activist Grover Norquist.

Actual evidence in this regard is highly doubtful. Currently, the state with the highest unemployment in the country, Nevada, is a right-to-work state, as are six of the top ten states in jobless rates. The last state to adopt a right-to-work law, Oklahoma in 2001, has seen manufacturing jobs decline by a third since its passage.

But Bosma is not one to let economic reality get in the way of political expediency. Nor is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who was against right-to-work before he was for it. He's pledged to sign the bill into law, but as recently as 2006 declared to the Teamsters:

"I'm a supporter of the labor laws we have in the state of Indiana and I'm not interested in changing any of them – not a prevailing wage law and certainly not a right-to-work law."

What's changed since then? Daniels says it's the recession, which hasn't really changed. He doesn't say it's his elevated national profile resulting from speculation over a presidential run, culminating in his being tapped to deliver the GOP's response to Obama's state of the union address earlier this week.

Maybe, it's a genuine change of heart. Either way, Daniels' Damascene conversion is symbolic of much broader changes within his own party. Union membership wasn't a particularly partisan issue in years past. President Nixon expanded organizing rights under his administration. Ronald Reagan was a former union president himself. As Daniels' 2006 speech shows, Republicans until recently used to make at least halfhearted attempts to reach out to some of the more conservative unions – typically, the Teamsters and Carpenters. Not any longer.

It's not that unions have moved much to the left. Rather, it's Republicans who have tacked so sharply to the right, precisely on those mundane workplace issues on which there was once a consensus: the right to organize, the right to bargain, the idea that free riders should pay their fair share. It can be seen in the assaults on union rights in neighboring Ohio and Wisconsin, and the GOP's quixotic (and self-defeating) crusade against the National Labor Relations Board – not even a union, but a nonpartisan mediating agency.

The days of the pro-labor Republican are gone, probably forever. "We cannot afford to have civil wars over issues that might divide us and divert us," a different Mitch Daniels once said. Now, Republicans believe, they can.

One of Sri Lanka's most controversial diplomats, former army Maj Gen Shavendra Silva, is appointed to a senior post at the UN, officials say.

Twenty tattooed Maori heads have been repatriated from France to New Zealand after more than 200 years. A team from Wellington's Te Papa museum plans to trace the origin of the heads and return them to their communities. More than 500 heads of Maori ancestors remain in collections around the world

In 1944 US planes bombed a train carrying 1,000 allied prisoners of war at a bridge in central Italy

As Sue Finley stood among the ruins five years ago, she thought: "I might be the only person in the entire world who knows what happened here, and that a tragic accident might go unrecognised forever."

On 28 January 1944, US air force planes bombed a bridge at Allerona, north of Orvieto in central Italy. Captain William Cook, the intelligence officer of the 320th Bombardment Group wrote afterwards that "an excellent concentration of bombs bracketed the bridge" and a "train of 40/50 cars standing across the bridge received direct hits destroying 10 cars, derailing 3 and the remainder buckled up in an arch".

What he and the pilots did not know was that on that train were more than 1,000 allied prisoners of war: Americans, Britons, South Africans and others. To this day, no one knows for certain how many died. Estimates range from 200 to 600.

"It was possibly the worst incident of 'friendly fire' in the second world war, and certainly the worst in Italy," says Janet Kinrade Dethick, a British expatriate living in Umbria, who has carried out extensive research into the tragedy.

Yet, until just a few years ago, the bombing of Allerona bridge appeared to have been forgotten. When Finley, a New Jersey newspaper owner and the daughter of a survivor, tried to discover more, she found just one mention of the incident, in the book War in the Val D'Orcia, the published diaries of an Anglo-American married to an Italian landowner.

On Saturday, however, thanks to the recent efforts of an Italian historical research society, Giugno '44, and the Italy Star Association of British veterans, a monument is to be unveiled near the bridge. Finley will be there. And so, in a sense, will the victims.

Fabio Roncella of Giugno 44 says an elderly neighbour of his in the nearby village of Montegabbiano told him how he was taken by the Germans to deal with the aftermath of the massacre.

"When they arrived, they found a mountain of corpses. They put them in a bomb crater, drenched them in petrol and set light to them," Roncella said. He has unearthed a report by British engineers who were sent to Allerona two months later after the Germans had been driven northwards and the bridge destroyed.

They recounted finding the remains and deciding to put one of the piers of a new bridge over the crater. The memorial has been placed on that pier.

Allerona bridge was the scene of unimaginable horror, but also of great heroism.

"It was a terrible sight," recalled Corporal Bill Marsh of the 1st Battalion, the South Wales Borderers. "We were all locked in cattle trucks with only a small window in the top corner of the truck, which was made fast with strands of barbed wire."

Some who survived were freed by an Italian working on the bridge who grabbed a pickaxe and set about smashing bars and locks on the wagons. Others owed their lives to Corporal Leonong Matlakala, a Native Military Corps driver with 2 South African Division. "He and three others forced their way out of their truck and ran up and down the train, releasing the rest of the POWs. The strafing from the aircraft continued all the while and some of the trucks caught alight, but their actions succeeded in saving many lives," a South African military researcher concluded.

So why did the incident not feature in histories of the campaign?

"I don't think it was hushed up, but just pushed aside", says Kinrade Dethick. She is surprised, nevertheless, that the 320th Bombardment Group's official history continues to celebrate it as a victory.

It records: "Group Marauders caught a German troop train stalled on Orvieto North bridge the 28th and exploded bombs among the fleeing enemy soldiers."

IMF chief Christine Lagarde has again stressed the need for European governments to prioritise growth as talks on the region's debt crisis continue.

Nigeria's Supreme Court orders five of the country's powerful state governors to step down for overstaying their term in office in a landmark judgement.

Speaking in Davos, Ehud Barak, Israel's deputy prime minister and defence minister, warns of the dangers of Tehran's nuclear programme