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Republicans will be in my team, says Obama

Just two weeks after his historic election, US president-elect Barack Obama yesterday confirmed he would have Republicans in his administration and admitted there were times when he did not know where to begin in trying to deal with the enormous challenges awaiting him in the White House.In his first interview since the election, Obama acknowledged the daunting nature of assuming office at a time of war and global economic crisis."The challenges that we are confronting are enormous and they are multiple. And so there are times during the course of a given day where you think: 'Where do I start in terms of moving - moving things forward?'," the president-elect told CBS television's 60 Minutes programme.He said conversations with past presidents had persuaded him there was a "certain loneliness" to being in the White House."You'll get advice, and you'll get counsel," he said. "Ultimately, you're the person who's going to be making decisions. And - and I think that - even now, you know, I ... you can already feel that fact."The interview, which also featured Obama's wife, Michelle, was a mixture of the personal as well as the political. The couple, who had some good-natured sparring, also said the fact that he was president-elect had not yet entirely sunk in.However, Obama said he began to gain a sense of what his victory meant for many Americans on election night when his mother-in-law reached over to squeeze his hand."You had this sense of, well, what's she thinking? For a black woman who grew up in the 50s, in a segregated Chicago, to watch her daughter become first lady of the United States," he said. "There was that sense across the country."It became apparent, however, that the economy would remain the most pressing concern of the 64 days remaining until Obama takes office on January 20, and once he enters the White House.Obama brushed aside comparisons between the current crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930s. He also ruled out a New Deal type solution but said he wanted to send a message to Americans that "we're going to be thinking about them and what they're going through"."For us to simply recreate what existed back in the 30s in the 21st century - I think would be missing the boat," Obama said. "I think the basic principle that government has a role to play in kick-starting an economy that has ground to a halt is sound. I think our basic principle that this is a free market system and that that has worked for us, that it creates innovation and risk taking - I think that's a principle that we've got to hold to as well."He said that George Bush's bail-out plan was not doing enough for ordinary Americans, and that as a first step he was determined to bring in measures that would help homeowners avoid falling behind on their mortgages and losing their homes, Obama said."We have not focused on foreclosures and what's happening to homeowners as much as I would like," he said. "One thing I'm determined is that if we don't have a clear, focused programme for homeowners by the time I take office, we will after I take office."Obama offered similar reassurances for early action on unemployment in the Democrats' weekly radio address on Saturday. The president-elect, in a break with tradition, also videotaped the speech and posted it online.However, he was less forthcoming about a bail-out for America's struggling car makers. "For the auto industry to completely collapse would be a disaster in this kind of environment," he told CBS. "We need to provide assistance, but I think that it can't be a blank cheque."Other priorities in terms of policy included Guantanamo. Obama renewed his campaign pledge to close the detention centre. "I have said repeatedly that I will close Guantanamo and I will follow through on that," he said.In terms of immediate challenges, Obama listed among his first priorities in the transition the need to put a national security team in place."Transition periods are traditionally times of vulnerability in terms of terrorist attack so we want to make sure that there is as seamless as a transition as possible," he said.Obama has spent virtually all of his time since the election in Chicago. After 22 months of frenetic activity on the campaign trail, he welcomed the period as a time for his family to return to some semblance of a normal life."There seem to be more people hovering around me," the president-elect said. "On the other hand, I'm sleeping in my own bed."While in Chicago, Obama has been focused on assembling his team in the White House and the cabinet. He told CBS he would have at least one Republican in his cabinet, making good his pledge to welcome powerful personalities with competing views to his White House. But he gave no further details last night.Obama also gave away nothing about whether Hillary Clinton was on his shortlist of candidates for the post of secretary of state. The impression that Obama was leaning towards a "team of rivals" including even his most formidable opponent - Clinton - grew over the weekend with neither camp trying to damp down speculation. However, Obama said only that he valued Clinton's advice.Another potential contender for secretary of state, the New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson, has also met Obama to discuss the post. So far, Obama's transition team has focused on filling positions at the White House which are not contingent on confirmation by the Senate. The choices since then have revealed a mix of campaign loyalists and veterans of Bill Clinton's administration.Obama White HouseBarack ObamaUnited StatesDemocratsRepublicansguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Obese women 'more likely to miscarry'

Overweight women are more likely to lose a healthy baby, according to a study. The researchers said the findings supported advice that obese women should lose weight before trying to conceive. "The excess miscarriage rate in overweight and obese women is due to the loss of chromosomally normal embryos," said Inna Landres, of Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's important to identify elevated BMI [body mass index] as a risk factor for miscarriage and counsel those women who are affected on the importance of lifestyle modification."Landres' team carried out genetic analyses on 204 miscarriages in women with an average age of 35. Of the 153 women who had a BMI of less than 25, 36.6% had miscarried foetuses with no chromosome defects, either via insertions or deletions of DNA. This compared with 52.9% of the 51 overweight women (with a BMI of more than 25). The results were presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in San Francisco.One possible cause is insulin resistance, the early stages of type II diabetes, which affects a woman's hormonal state. Mark Hamilton, who is chairman of the British Fertility Society but was not involved in the study, said obesity was a recognised cause of miscarriage. He added: "This study will aid our understanding of the known association with being overweight and reproductive loss."ObesityWomenHealthHealth & wellbeingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Shannon's mother like Jekyll and Hyde, court hears

Karen Matthews switched characters like Jekyll and Hyde as her neighbours and police hunted vainly for the schoolgirl daughter whose kidnap she had organised, a court heard yesterday.The 33-year-old surprised friends by changing within minutes from a tearful mother in public, to privately sniggering about wanting sex with one of the police officers stationed outside her house."When the police and press were present she came over as all upset and withdrawn," said Natalie Brown, a neighbour on the Moorside estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where Shannon - who was nine at the time - went missing in January for 24 days. "Indoors, she acted as if it was a normal day. She helped me clean the house and make cuppas, laughing and joking."Matthews and 40-year-old Michael Donovan of Batley Carr, near Dewsbury, deny the kidnap and false imprisonment of Shannon, as well as perverting the course of justice by triggering a £3.2m police hunt.The schoolgirl was found in Donovan's flat where she had been drugged with travel pills and anti-stress tablets and tethered to a roof beam when Donovan - the uncle of Karen Matthews' partner, Craig Meehan - went out.The prosecution case focused yesterday on the "odd behaviour" of Shannon's mother, who was described by Philip Goose QC, in the opening speech for the Crown, as a "consummate, skilful and convincing liar". Brown told Donovan's counsel, Alan Conrad QC, that Matthews had behaved "like a little child" in making the sex comment about the policeman, whose "cute bum" had been pointed out by another woman in a group of neighbours supporting Matthews.The detective who informed Matthews that Sharon had been found - by officers who broke down Donovan's door and discovered the child with him in a drawer beneath a bed - said he was surprised by her lack of reaction. Det Con Alexander Grummitt told the jury of five women and seven men at Leeds crown court that Matthews had been more interested in the ringtone of his mobile phone, the song Crazy by Gnarls Barclay."Karen said: 'I like that ringtone - you must Bluetooth or text it to me,'" he said. She had then failed to ask any questions about how Shannon was on a 30-minute drive to Dewsbury police station."We've just found your daughter and you ask about the ringtone on the phone. In my opinion it just wasn't right," he said. "The strange thing was she didn't ask me any questions like where did you find her."Det Supt Andy Brennan, who led the search for Shannon, said that detectives busy with murders, rapes and other serious crime had been diverted to join the hunt. He said that until the child was found he had never doubted police were working on a genuine missing child inquiry. Julie Bushby, chairwoman of the Moorside Tenants and Residents Association, said that huge efforts had been made by local volunteers to help the search. Neighbours had gone out looking at night, companies had donated T-shirts and leaflets, and Karen Matthews had joined a candlelit vigil and was helping plans to plant commemorative shrubs and trees in her garden, an event due to take place on the day Shannon was found.On Wednesday the court heard that West Yorkshire police mobilised 200 officers during the search for Shannon. Officers searched 1,800 properties, checked every park in Dewsbury, stopped up to 1,760 cars and passersby a night, and drafted in three-quarters of the UK's police dogs.The trial continues.Shannon Matthews kidnapping trialguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jonathan Freedland: The president-elect is not a dove - he is just a much smarter hawk

That noise you've been hearing for the past week, the one that began in the United States last Tuesday before spreading throughout the world? That's the sound of a global sigh of relief. It contained a cry of joy too, of course, especially among black Americans and people of colour across the globe, seeing a man who looks like them ascend, at last, to the highest office in the world. But history will record November 4 2008 not only as the day when America elected its first black president, but as the moment when one of the bleakest chapters in the postwar era drew to a close. How else to explain scenes - on the streets of Athens and Nairobi as well as Washington and New York - of jubilation that are surely without precedent in the democratic world? What I saw in Grant Park, Chicago, last week felt more akin to South Africa in 1994 or Berlin in 1989 than a normal response to a regular election. The dancing till the small hours, the honking of car horns, the tearful hugs between strangers, these are images we associate with peaceful revolutions, the celebrations that might follow the ejection of a loathed regime. Perhaps that is how many Americans - and hundreds of millions around the globe - do indeed see the election of Barack Obama. For the past eight years, I regularly argued against the claim that anti-Americanism was on the rise in Europe and beyond. On the contrary, I said, most Britons and Europeans remained remarkably well-disposed to the United States: it was just the Bush administration they couldn't stand. The global reaction last week suggested I wasn't wrong. Witness the sheer speed with which - once George Bush had been dispatched - the citizens of the world rushed to embrace America once more. It turns out the world was not just ready but eager for the US to lead again; it just didn't want Bush to do the leading. The result is that the most pressing questions of international life now stand in a wholly new light. Part of that is the warm, amber glow of affection, verging on adulation, for President-elect Obama. (He is surely the first politician since Nelson Mandela whose face can be worn on a T-shirt without embarrassment.) But it's more substantive than that. Take the conflict that defined the age of Bush, the "war on terror". Instantly, that conflict is changed in character. It becomes much harder for violent jihadists to demonise the United States when the Land of the Great Satan is led by Barack Hussein Obama, whose African step-grandmother is still a practising Muslim. Before he has signed a single executive order, the president-elect has won a decisive battle in the propaganda war. It's not only Obama's name that will make the lives of jihadism's recruiters harder. He reportedly aims to order a planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, phased over 16 months, within a few weeks of taking office. As Obama vowed in the very last rally of his campaign - an extraordinarily atmospheric, late-night address to nearly 100,000 people standing in what was little more than an empty field in Manassas, Virginia - "I will end this war."What's more, Obama is open to negotiation in a way that separates him from his predecessor. In Afghanistan, the talk now is of finding "reconcilables": Taliban fighters who are not motivated by hardcore ideology and might be induced to lay down their weapons. Obama took plenty of heat for it in the campaign, but he maintains the same willingness to talk to Iran and Syria. And yet liberals and anti-war types should not declare the new president a kindred spirit too hastily. As Obama himself said in the now famous 2002 speech denouncing the Iraq adventure: "I am not opposed to all wars." It's true that he avoids the phrase "war on terror". But that is not because he thinks there is no war to be fought. His disagreement with Bush was that the latter had failed to define America's enemy clearly. It was not an abstract noun - terror - but a specific organisation with a specific leader, namely al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Indeed, one of Obama's central critiques of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that it diverted attention and resources from the true fight - against the men who had actually attacked the US on September 11 2001. So peaceniks should not be surprised to read the report in yesterday's Washington Post that Obama "intends to renew the US commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden". It's not only that Obama scored crucial political points with his unbending stance in the televised debates - "We will kill Bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida" (a Democrat, for once, outhawking a Republican on national security). That position also happens to fit with Obama's genuine view of the threat to America's safety. Having placed al-Qaida back in the centre of America's gunsights, the new president aims to defeat it, taking the fight to al-Qaida's enablers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even as he pulls troops out of Iraq, Obama aims to send thousands more to fight the Taliban. He was ahead of Bush in calling for the theatre of operations against al-Qaida to be expanded beyond the Afghan borders to include the tribal areas of western Pakistan where many believe Bin Laden is holed up. Put simply, Obama is no dove. He is just a much smarter hawk, his eye more sharply focused. The new disposition on Iran is similarly nuanced. The noises are much less warlike. Obama promises diplomacy and dialogue, and relegates force to where it should be: a last, not a first, resort. But his own advisers counsel that Obama is firm on this matter. He has concluded that Tehran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, not least because it would trigger a regional arms race. He will use negotiation to thwart that possibility. But if that fails, the use of force remains an option. And that's when the new global context could make all the difference. Imagine if John McCain had toured European capitals, trying to assemble a coalition for strikes against Iran. He'd have barely got a hearing. Two million people would have marched in London waving banners declaring: "We won't get fooled again."But if Obama were to make the case, explaining that he had seen through the nonsense of Iraqi WMD but that the Iranian threat was real, he would surely earn a very different response. In that sense if no other, armed international action against Iran might be more achievable under an Obama presidency than it would have been otherwise. Other areas are more straightforward. On climate change, a denier in the White House has been replaced by a believer. Tellingly, Obama's proposed bail-out of the American auto industry does not propose chucking money at Detroit to keep churning out the same old cars. Instead, Democrats want a loan programme to help the auto companies start making fuel-efficient vehicles. That fits with Obama's wider approach to the economic crisis - to see it as an opportunity to spend money to make America greener. In every sphere, Obama marks a break from the recent past. He will not be perfect; the disappointments will be real and may come soon. But for now, at least, we are entitled to that sigh of relief - and even the odd yelp of joy. ? freedland@guardian.co.ukObama White HouseBarack ObamaUS foreign policyUnited Statesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds