Current Affairs: Viewers complain about 'frightening' Ikea gnomes advert

 This story could only happen in Britain !!! ...

Viewers complain about 'frightening' Ikea gnomes advert

Advert features couple kicking gnomes across their garden before using a hammock to hurl them against a fence

The Independent 

An Ikea advert showing a couple using increasingly violent methods to kill off garden gnomes has drawn dozens of complaints from viewers.

The homeware giant's Say No To Gnomes campaign features a family updating the look of their garden with new products, only to find the upset gnomes launching a revenge attack.

The couple fight back, kicking them across the garden and into a pond before using a hammock to hurl them against the fence.

One scene shows a furious gnome standing over the body of his broken friend.

The woman finally aims a jet of hose water at an assembled mob, smashing them into pieces.

The ad finishes with the tagline: "Make more of your garden. Say no to gnomes."

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it received nearly 50 complaints that the ad was offensive, unsuitable for children, frightening, violent and encouraged emulation and anti-social behaviour.

The ASA said: "As a starting point, we take all the complaints we receive seriously. However, just because an ad has prompted a negative reaction amongst some viewers does not mean that we will automatically investigate.

"We didn't take any further action on this occasion.

"While we appreciated that the ad would not be to everyone's taste, we thought it was clearly fanciful and light-hearted. We also didn't share the view that it would encourage or condone violence or anti-social behaviour and was unlikely to upset children."

Ikea UK marketing manager Peter Wright said: "We believe the advert takes a light-hearted approach to demonstrating to consumers how easy and affordable it is to treat their outdoor spaces just like any other room in the home.

"As always, our adverts are compliant with the advertising standards code and are cleared through the compliance service Clearcast, and we are pleased that the ASA has taken a similar view to our own.

"We can confirm that no gnomes were harmed in the making of the advert, thanks to the brave stunt doubles and some clever post production. The gnomes are currently helping us in our office and most of them will be finding new homes with our customers."

 

Current Affairs: Embryonic stem cells: Advance in medical human cloning

An exciting breakthrough or a dangerous precedent …

Embryonic stem cells: Advance in medical human cloning

BBC

Human cloning has been used to produce early embryos, marking a "significant step" for medicine, say US scientists.

The cloned embryos were used as a source of stem cells, which can make new heart muscle, bone, brain tissue or any other type of cell in the body.

The study, published in the journal Cell, used methods like those that produced Dolly the sheep in the UK.

However, researchers say other sources of stem cells may be easier, cheaper and less controversial.

Opponents say it is unethical to experiment on human embryos and have called for a ban.

Stem cells are one of the great hopes for medicine. Being able to create new tissue might be able to heal the damage caused by a heart attack or repair a severed spinal cord.

There are already trials taking place using stem cells taken from donated embryos to restore people's sight.

However, these donated cells do not match the patient so they would be rejected by the body. Cloning bypasses this problem.

The technique used - somatic cell nuclear transfer - has been well-known since Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned, in 1996.

Skin cells were taken from an adult and the genetic information was placed inside a donor egg which had been stripped of its own DNA. Electricity was used to encourage the egg to develop into an embryo.

However, researchers have struggled to reproduce the feat in people. The egg does start dividing, but never goes past the 6-12 cell stage.

'Real deal'

A South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, did claim to have created stem cells from cloned human embryos, but was found to have faked the evidence.

Now a team at the Oregon Health and Science University have developed the embryo to the blastocyst stage - around 150 cells - which is enough to provide a source of embryonic stem cells.

Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov said: "A thorough examination of the stem cells derived through this technique demonstrated their ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells.

"While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine."

Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, said this looked like "the real deal".

"They've done the same as the Wright brothers really. They've looked around at where are all the best bits of how to do this from different groups all over the place and basically amalgamated it.

"The Wright brothers took off and this has actually managed to make embryonic stem cells."

The ethical rival

Embryonic stem cell research has repeatedly raised ethical concerns and human eggs are a scarce resource. This has led researchers to an alternative route to stem cells.

The technique takes the same sample of skin cells but converts them using proteins to "induced pluripotent" stem cells.

However, there are still questions about the quality of stem cells produced using this method compared with embryonic stem cells.

Prof Mason said the field was leaning towards induced pluripotent stem cells: "It has got a lot of momentum behind it, a lot of funding and a lot of powerful people now."

Dr Lyle Armstrong, at Newcastle University, said that the study "without doubt" marked an advance for the field.

But he warned: "Ultimately, the costs of somatic cell nuclear transfer-based methods for making stem cells could be prohibitive."

Opponents of the new technique argue that all embryos, whether created in the lab or not, have the potential to go on to become a fully-fledged human, and as such it is morally wrong to experiment on them.

They strongly advocate the use of stem cells from adult tissue.

Dr David King, from the campaign group Human Genetics Alert, warned that: "Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos.

"This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research."

However advocates of the new technique say that the embryos created from this technique could never become viable human beings.

Cloned babies?

Could scientists fully clone a person? It's an interesting question that emerges from this research.

These researchers have certainly developed a cloned embryo further than anyone else.

But producing a five-day-old embryo is a world away from a woman giving birth to the first human clone.

The embryo would need to be implanted as per IVF, but primate research shows that things often go wrong before the clone is born.

Prof Robin Lovell-Badge of the UK National Institute for Medical Research said: "It is an unsafe procedure in animals and it will similarly be an unsafe procedure in humans. For this reason alone it should not be attempted."

It would also be illegal is some countries, such as the UK, which differentiate between "therapeutic" and "reproductive" cloning.

Finance&Economics: Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can

 

 The controversial article from The Daily Telegraph ...

Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can

I'd not noticed this until someone drew my attention to it, but the latest IMF Fiscal Monitor, published last month, comes about as close to declaring Spain insolvent as you are ever likely to see in official analysis of this sort. Of course, it doesn't actually say this outright. The IMF is far too diplomatic for such language. But that's the plain meaning of its latest forecasts, which at last have an air of realism about them, rather than being the usual dose of wishful thinking.

Let's take the projected budget deficit first. This is expected to decline quite steeply this year to 6.6 per cent of GDP, but that's mainly because the cost of bailing out the banking sector fell substantially on last year's budget. On a like-for-like basis, there has in fact been very little fall in the underlying deficit. And nor on the present policy mix is there ever likely to be, for that's where the deficit is projected to remain until the end of the IMF's forecasting horizon in 2018.

Next year, the deficit is expected to be 6.9 per cent, the year after 6.6 per cent, and so on with very little further progress thereafter. Remember, all these projections are made on the basis of everything we know about policy so far, so they take account of the latest package of austerity measures announced by the Spanish Government.

The situation looks even worse on a cyclically adjusted basis. What is sometimes called the "structural deficit", or the bit of government borrowing that doesn't go away even after the economy returns to growth (if indeed it ever does), actually deteriorates from an expected 4.2 per cent of GDP this year to 5.7 per cent in 2018. By 2018, Spain has far and away the worst structural deficit of any advanced economy, including other such well known fiscal basket cases as the UK and the US.

So what happens when you carry on borrowing at that sort of rate, year in, year out? Your overall indebtedness rockets, of course, and that's what's going to happen to Spain, where general government gross debt is forecast to rise from 84.1 per cent of GDP last year to 110.6 per cent in 2018. No other advanced economy has such a dramatically worsening outlook. And the tragedy of it all is that Spain is actually making relatively good progress in addressing the "primary balance", that's the deficit before debt servicing costs.

What's projected to occur is essentially what happens in all bankruptcies. Eventually you have to borrow more just to pay the interest on your existing debt. The fiscal compact requires eurozone countries to reduce their deficits to 3 per cent by the end of this year, though Spain among others was recently granted an extension. But on these numbers, there is no chance ever of achieving this target without further austerity measures, which even if they were attempted would very likely be self defeating. IN any case, it seems doubtful an economy where unemployment is already above 25 per cent could take any more.

In the past, the IMF has been guilty of being far too optimistic about Spain, both on the outlook for growth and the public finances, so it's possible it is now committing the reverse mistake of undue pessimism. Yet somehow I doubt it. Spain is chasing its tail down into deflationary oblivion.

All this leads to the conclusion that a big Spanish debt restructuring is inevitable. Spanish sovereign bond yields have fallen sharply since announcement of the European Central Bank's "outright monetary transactions" programme. The ECB has promised to print money without limit to counter the speculators. But in the end, no amount of liquidity can cover up for an underlying problem with solvency.

Europe said that Greece was the first and last such restructuring, but then there was Cyprus. Spain is holding off further recapitalisation of its banks in anticipation of the arrival of Europe's banking union, which it hopes will do the job instead. But if the Cypriot precedent is anything to go by, a heavy price will be demanded by way of recompense. Bank creditors will be widely bailed in. Confiscation of deposits looks all too possible.

I don't advise getting your money out lightly. Indeed, such advise is generally thought grossly irresponsible, for it risks inducing a self reinforcing panic. Yet looking at the IMF projections, it's the only rational thing to do.

Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, is one of Britain's leading business and economics commentators.