• BBC coverage
• On The World: Boston Haitian mother reunited with her son
• The Haitian Revolution podcast

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  There’s been much improvement of the delivery of aid to quake survivors in Haiti.  Even so, basic necessities like food, water and shelter are in short supply.  The United Nations is threatening to cut off the delivery of free medicine to Haitian hospitals caught charging patients for the drugs.  Four weeks after the quake is also way past the time when anyone would hope to find any more survivors still alive in the rubble, but the news today in Haiti is about just such a case.  The BBC’s Mike Woolridge is in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.  He says details about the most recent quake survivor remain sketchy and nearly impossible to verify, but he says experts suggest the man might indeed have spent almost four weeks trapped in the rubble.

MIKE WOOLRIDGE: Nobody would realistically have expected that other people might still emerge from the rubble but there always was that possibility where people have had some sort of life support.  It has happened in one or two other disasters.  But I think that whatever attention there may be for that now, really here the overwhelming mood is not really any hope of the possibility of further rescue stories or survival of that kind.  It is so much focused.  This is certainly true for all the people around me here right in the center of Port-au-Prince area that was hardest hit by the earthquake.  It’s so much focused on still getting the most basic needs of food and water and above all, shelter over people’s heads.

WERMAN: So Mike you’re speaking to us from downtown Port-au-Prince.  Tell us where you are right now and what you see around you.

WOOLRIDGE: I’m in a place called Champs de Mars.  It is right opposite the Presidential Palace and of course it’s the damage to that white Presidential Palace with the domes on either end of it which collapsed down into the floor below one of those domes leans forward.  The other one backwards.  That’s where I am at the moment.  This is the largest of the camps that sprung up all across this city after the earthquake, but there are several hundred of them all together.  Around this particular place a mother I was just talking to a moment ago says her small child is now already experiencing diarrhea.  That’s a real fear here.  Over this last three, four hours here talking to lots of people, there is still a feeling that they are not getting certainly what they expected four weeks into virtually into this disaster, in the way of food.  Most certainly not in the way of shelter.  They’re begging for tents here.  A lot of people here have erected themselves very simple dwellings of cotton sheets and maybe a plastic sheet for the roof, all this just strung up on poles.  A few people have used corrugated iron.  But they are saying that when the heavy rains come, and they’ll be expected in just a few weeks now, they’ll likely do the kind of damage that will give people no protection.

WERMAN: There must be somebody kind of in charge doing the triage of the priorities, whether it’s medical, food, shelter, rebuilding, jobs, education and whatnot.  Who is taking care of that?

WOOLRIDGE: In this area, as I say since early morning here the only people we’ve met in any kind of authority, there’s no NGO’s at the moment here in this area.  We’ve met somebody from a local committee whose job it is to try and keep order here, to try and make sure that some of these things are provided better.  He was one who was expressing some of the greatest frustration, so much so that there’s just been a demonstration going past us here of women.  They were holding up banners saying we need food, we need help, we need shelter.  What they were particularly worried about as we talked to them and they were chanting about this as well, was getting those things in time to be able to give them better protection, better defenses against the heavy rain.  They’re really worried about the outbreak of more disease.

WERMAN: And Mike, these women walking through downtown Port-au-Prince, Haitian President Rene Preval is in Ecuador for an aid summit.  Who is listening to these women, their grievances?

WOOLRIDGE: They’re not at all sure that anybody is.  That’s why they say they’re having to stage demonstrations of that kind, just to get some sort of attention.  There’s been talk of moving people like this out of Port-au-Prince, probably quite some considerable distance to be able to accommodate them and give them better shelter.  Some people I’ve spoken to here say they wouldn’t be against that if it was relatively temporary.  But of course other people who very much want to get back to jobs here if they can, or find new jobs if the place where they work was destroyed in the earthquake there perhaps.  And indeed, they’re saying they’d be quite reluctant to go.  So they are asking for much more attention to be given already to what you might call the longer term as well.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Mike Woolridge in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.  Mike very good to hear from you, thank you.

WOOLRIDGE: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Deutsche Welle story about the case

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: So here’s a good plot for a movie.  Four disgruntled senior citizens kidnap and hold hostage their financial advisor after losing a bundle in the U.S. property market.  Great screen play idea, but once again, life beats Hollywood to the punch because this is for real.  Two elderly married couples in Germany are accused of the crimes.  Annette Kuglar is a reporter at Bavarian Radio. She’s in Munich.  So Annette, who are these alleged senior citizen kidnappers?

ANNETTE KUGLAR: They were two couples that both live in the very south of Germany in upper Bavaria close to the Alps.  They’re all aged between 64 and 74.  All of them were, I would say, financially more or less well settled.  One man worked as a medical doctor, the other formerly owned a construction company in Bavaria.  And now they’re accused of hostage taking and grievous bodily harm.

WERMAN: When did this happen?

KUGLAR: It happened in June 2009 when two of the seniors traveled to Speyer where the financial advisor Minta Unwa lives and forced him into his flat, tying him up, putting celotape over his mouth and forcing him into a large box in which they carried him back to upper Bavaria.  There they locked him into the basement of their house and well did something like a trial on him, sitting around him and asking him questions.  What happened with our money?  And forced him to give it back to them.  He had to send a fax to his financial advisors and on this fax he managed to hide a secret message which more or less said call the Police.  Police is a word with a double meaning in German.  So the financial advisor on the other side of the fax realized, okay there must be a problem and then called the Police and then story took a more or less bizarre end.  The Police arrived at the basement and had to blow up part of the door to liberate the prisoner.

WERMAN: That’s an incredible story.  Were these two retired couples holding this financial advisor at gun point or anything?  How did they manage to force him to do all this?

KUGLAR: They tied him up actually.  They never threatened him with a gun or anything.  There was obviously physical violence, there were two broken ribs, so at the moment, the trial is on again for the seniors.  They say no we never used any violence, but obviously there were injuries, there were hurts, there was blood, so they weren’t very gentle with him.  I can go that far.

WERMAN: Why did they do this?  It seems like he lost some money on their behalf, but how much did they lose and just, they must have been really angry.

KUGLAR: It is an amount of 2.4 million we’re speaking about at the moment, which they invested in real estate properties.

WERMAN: Two point four million Euros, that’s a little over three and a half million dollars. Why did they do this?

KUGLAR: I think it’s a mixture out of greed, but then also frustration.  They saved a lot of money, they worked hard for their money, invested it hopefully wisely, and then just lose it by the fault of another person.  And the trial going on at the moment against those four seniors, they even sound like, it’s not our fault, we are the victims and he is the guilty person.  It’s almost like a twist in their heads that they feel treated so unjust by the situation which is also part of the financial situation in Germany and all the world at the moment.  People lose things without having done anything.  You can feel the frustration very strongly at the trial going on in Bavaria at the moment.

WERMAN: And where is public sympathy falling?  Is it falling for this financial advisor or do people sincerely feel bad for these senior citizens?

KUGLAR: I think it’s very much in the middle.  It’s really that people feel bad, they know you must not do self-administered justice against anybody, obviously you must not lock him in and threaten him.  But then again, they also feel like maybe a small spark of truth in that, of understanding that somebody gets so frustrated of losing so much of his life, of what he built up, that there’s also maybe a little spark of sympathy in all of that.

WERMAN: Nobody kidnapped Bernard Madoff here in the United States, although I’m sure there were a few people who would have liked to, but has the media in Germany cast this financial advisor as their own Bernard Madoff or is that too strong?

KUGLAR: Everybody knows and from the trial going on it’s also become clear that this financial advisor isn’t a choirboy.  There are several investigations going on against him and he will probably, maybe get his own trial in the future.  But at the moment the media tries to be fair and says well, it’s not right what he has done, and it is terrible that those financial disasters keep going on on large and small scale levels, but then again, well you must not do self-administered justice and not do harm against anybody.

WERMAN: Annette Kuglar reporter with Bavarian Radio.  She spoke to us from Munich.  Thanks so much for your time.

KUGLAR: You’re very welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Video: The Swedish high-tech skiing treadmill (via Swedish TV)
• More pictures from the global positioning work in Whistler

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The 2010 Winter Olympics get underway this Friday in Vancouver.  For the athletes the Games will be the culmination of years of training.  And for members of Sweden’s cross country ski team, some of that training involved a state of the art skiing treadmill.  Here’s more from The World’s technology correspondent, Clark Boyd.

CLARK BOYD: The Swedish Winter Sport Research Center has a simple goal, harness all manner of biomechanical research and technology to help Swedish athletes excel.  The center is prepared to go to some lengths to do it.  This is from a Swedish TV report, a cross country skier prepares for training.  That’s the sound of a giant treadmill starting up.  Yes, the skier is indoors.  He’s using a pair of roller skis on the treadmill.  Meanwhile, a very realistic video of the cross country course in Canada plays on the monitor in front of him.  What the Swedes have created isn’t virtual reality, but it is about as close to skiing Whistler as you can get and not be there.

MIKAEL SWAREN:  You know where you are, you recognize where you are and you can visualize what it’s going to be like during the Olympics.

BOYD: That’s Mikael Swaren, a biomechanics expert at the Swedish Winter Sports Research Center.  He’s part of a team that designed and programmed the special treadmill.  One unique feature involves speed.  Unlike a runner on a regular treadmill, skiers don’t use up and down buttons to set their pace.  Instead, the program adjusts the speed automatically based on the skier’s own movements.

SWAREN:  When we started thinking about it, we also realized that it would be even better to be able to ski, if you could adjust the speed yourself, that means that you could easily ski a track.

BOYD: But that meant, first and foremost, getting incredibly accurate measurements of the course in Whistler.  Regular GPS wasn’t good enough.  So, the researchers decided to use something called a real time Kinematics Global Navigation Satellite System.  Matej Supej used the system to take the measurements of the course at Whistler.

MATEJ SUPEJ:  This is a very accurate type of global navigation system which actually uses both the Russian and the United States GPS system at the same time.

BOYD: Think of it this way, the GPS system in your car is probably accurate to a few feet.  The system Supej used is accurate to for tenths of an inch.  The team also had skiers get rigged up with equipment to measure their velocities on various parts of the track.  And, says Mikael Swaren, they went one step further.

SWAREN:  When we took the GPS measurements we also videoed it from a snowmobile.

BOYD: Then they brought all this data and footage back to Sweden.  They wrote some sophisticated software and fed it all into the treadmill.

SWAREN:  So now the skiers can come to the research center and they can see the video following them, in front of them on the video screen.  And then they can adjust the speed according to how they want.  So they can, you can play around and they can go back and ski the same hill a few times over and over again and see what it feels like.

BOYD: At every stride, the skier keeps his or her own pace, and that’s great, the researchers say, for mental preparation.  Skiers will have a sense of how tired they’re likely to feel at various points on the real course.  One thing the treadmill can’t do, of course, is recreate the snow conditions.  The other thing it can’t do, says Mikael Swaren, is turns.  Sure you can see the turns on the video, but the treadmill itself is always pointing straight ahead.

SWAREN:  So if you see any Swedes skiing straight into the woods, then you know that they’ve been on the treadmill too much.

BOYD: You’ll be able to judge the effectiveness of the Swedish treadmill training for yourself.  The Olympic cross country events start next Monday.  For The World, this is Clark Boyd.

WERMAN: You can see pictures and a video of that treadmill in action at the world dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• www.miguelzenon.com
• Plena

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: There’s no question the need in Haiti remains enormous.  The international community has contributed more than $500,000,000.00 so far.  No one knows how much will be enough.  But the crisis in Haiti raises a question, in these tough economic times, is there enough money out there to do the job without short-changing other places in need?  The World’s Katie Clark takes a look.

KATIE CLARK: The United States is at the top in terms of dollars contributed to Haiti so far.  Though when it comes to foreign disaster assistance the pie can only be sliced so many ways.  And with Haiti now the priority, some other programs benefiting from U.S. assistance are feeling the pinch.  Take a recent email sent to U.S. Agency for International Development staff working in Somalia.  The email said that because of Haiti planned programming in all regions is being reduced, at least temporarily, by 40%.  Carol Lancaster is a former Deputy Administrator of USAID.  She’s now Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

CAROL LANCASTER:  The needs of Haiti are exceptionally large, so I’m not at all surprised that resources for other parts of the world would be shifted to Haiti.

CLARK: Lancaster says given the challenges of delivering aid to Somalia, which has a barely functioning government; the decision to shift funds from there to Haiti might not have been too difficult.

LANCASTER:  I’m guessing that people are sitting around thinking, where can these resources come from and where can they be used most effectively?  I suspect glances have turned to Somalia because of the challenges of doing business there.  I actually know individuals who have been working on delivering aid to Somalia refugees, having been transferred to Haiti.

CLARK: But Somalia is just one place that benefits from American aid.  Pakistan is another.  Today the United Nations launched an appeal for more than $500,000,000.00 over the next six months.  It’s to help hundred of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by Army clashes with the Taliban.  Humanitarian groups launched a similar appeal last year.  They fell nearly $200,000,000.00 short of their goal and that was before Haiti captured the world’s attention.  Robert Smith is with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  He says they’re well aware that there’s a limited pot of money to draw from.

ROBERT SMITH:  We’ve been in touch with donors about maintaining necessary funding levels for the other major crises around the world and I think we all share an understanding that we have to keep our eyes on several situations at once.

CLARK: Smith says he hasn’t seen too many instances where funds are being diverted to Haiti.  But Haiti is likely to consume the attention of aid groups for years to come.

SMITH:  You have to look at the Haitian crisis as an evolving situation.

CLARK: Peter Bell worked in Haiti for many years during his tenure with CARE USA.  He’s now with the Hauser Center for non-profit organizations at Harvard.  Bell is cautiously optimistic that Haitians will use this as an opportunity to rebuild their country for the better.

PETER BELL:  And at the same time, there is this problem of what development professionals would call limited absorptive capacity.  It will take a good deal of steadfast purposefulness and patience and a realization that everything isn’t going to go smoothly.

CLARK: And there’s no guarantee that another crisis won’t come along before the job in Haiti is completed, diverting international attention elsewhere, yet again.  For The World, this is Katie Clark.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Europe is poised to scrap a deal that has given the United States what the U.S. calls one of its key weapons against terrorists, the ability to monitor international money transfers.  Nearly all such transactions are done through a Belgian company called Swift.  The United States has been demanding and getting Swift transfer data since just after September 11th, including transactions in Europe.  But some European leaders have said their citizen’s privacy is being violated and they want it to stop.  The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

MALE VOICE 1:  The report is adopted so the recommendation is to reject the agreement.  Is that understood?

GERRY HADDEN: With that vote the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament this week recommended blocking American access to European money transfer records.  Committee member Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert says the full Parliament should follow suit in a vote on Thursday.

JEANINE HENNIS-PLASSCHAERT:  Some very basic principles are being violated under the current conditions of the agreement.  On top of that we also have the problem of not having access to all relevant documents and information.  So it’s very difficult for us to give our consent.

HADDEN: The European Parliament has a long list of demands it wants the U.S. to meet before allowing further access to Swift’s records.  It wants guarantees that Europeans’ personal information won’t be shared with third parties that information related to dead end leads will be destroyed and above all, that European authorities will be kept abreast of terrorist investigations.  Nigel Inkster of the London based International Institute for Strategic Studies says the U.S. is unlikely to accept that.

NIGEL INKSTER:  The question that arises, who exactly is it you’re keeping in the loop?  With whom would you actually have to share this information?  And how confident could you be that they would actually provide the adequate safeguards?

HADDEN: The U.S. has been subpoenaing the records of the private money transfer giant Swift since just after the 9-11 attacks.  Swift is actually based in Belgium, outside of U.S. jurisdiction.  But until this year, it kept copies of all transactions on back up servers in the U.S.; they were fair game for U.S. investigators.  The subpoenas were top secret until 2006 when the New York Times broke the story.  Some European officials were furious to learn that millions of European transactions were open to U.S. scrutiny without their knowledge so they pressured Swift to move its European records back to Europe.  Swift recently complied.  U.S. Treasury officials did not respond to interview requests, but they insist the Swift records are invaluable.  In Berlin last week the Treasury’s Adam Szubin said that information gleaned from Swift transactions helped German authorities break up a radical Islamic cell planning attacks in 2007.  Again, Nigel Inkster.

INKSTER:  The main point about this is not so much the money per se, but the information it conveys about relationships.  Who is in touch with whom?  Who is communicating with whom?  I think that probably is the single biggest element of value in this. Its one of these capabilities which clearly intelligence and investigative agencies feel, I think there’s some justification, that they’re better off having than not.

HADDEN: In recent days U.S. officials have been pushing Europe to leave access to Swift open but skeptical Parliamentarians like Alexander Alvaro appear ready to resist.

ALEXANDER ALVARO:  It is very unusual that we have American officials putting so many pressures on members of this house, including the President of the Parliament, interfering in such a way.  I do not see that we lobby the U.S. Congress or U.S. Senate in a similar way.

HADDEN: But the desire to shut the U.S. out is not embraced by all Parliamentarians.  Michael Cashman from the U.K. says Europe should help the U.S. fight terrorists however it can.

MICHAEL CASHMAN:  My citizens want me to stop the financing of terrorists and terrorist groups and organized crime that feed it.  So we may say, look, we’re angry, we should have been consulted, we want more input.  But I think we’re in danger of achieving nothing.

HADDEN: That’s because the U.S. might try to forego the EU altogether and negotiate access agreements directly with the Netherlands and Switzerland, the two countries now hosting Swift’s back up servers.  For The World, I’m Gerry Hadden.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Here in the United States religious schools are private institutions.  In Britain, though, many religious schools are funded directly by the government.  They are also controversial.  Some critics in Britain feel that state funded religious schools segregates students based on faith.  Others say the schools often attract too many students from well off families.  Such criticism didn’t stop the opening of Britain’s first ever state funded Hindu school.  It’s an elementary school that cost almost 20 million taxpayer dollars to set up.  Kevin Bocquet has more from London.

KEVIN BOCQUET: When you catch your first glimpse of the Krishna-Avanti primary school, it’s a very, very striking building.  It looks rather like an up market Alpine ski lodge.  Across the front of the building all sorts of Hindu decorations, paintings of lotuses and conch shells.  So far, the school has only two classes of children age four to six.  It’ll take another five years to fill all the classes and by then there’ll be nearly 250 children.  All these pupils come from Hindu families.  But the head teacher of the Krishna-Avanti school, Naina Parmur, said they were deliberately forging links with other schools in the area.

NAINA PARMUR:  We’ve got a wonderful link with the local Jewish school and of course other local schools.  Our actual fundamental mission is to understand that every human being, every living thing is a spirit soul and that spirit soul transcends race, class, gender.  In a way we’re just applying our faith.

JONATHAN ROMAINE:  Well I’m sure they genuinely mean that, but the inevitable social effect is they are separating, they’re segregating those children.  They’re almost sort of locking them off in a sort of academic ghetto and they are not going to meet children from other faiths.

BOCQUET: Rabbi Jonathan Romaine chairs the Accord Coalition which campaigns against state funded religious schools.  He said was particularly disappointed that the U.K.’s first Hindu school was built in Harrow, an area with an excellent reputation for racial integration.

ROMAINE:  It’s not just the children who are being separated, it’s the adults too.  Because the parents will no longer meet outside the school gate, or at the school fete or at parent/teacher’s evenings.

PARMUR:  Does anybody remember any of the key words in the reciprocal reading?  Student:  Florence Nightingale.  Absolutely, Florence Nightingale.

BOCQUET: Like every state funded religious school, the Krishna-Avanti teaches the government mandated national curriculum.  That includes educating the children about all the major world faiths.  But there is also a heavy emphasis on Hinduism and that’s what the parents say they want for their children.

PARENT:  I want my children to be imbibed with those principles of good qualities of truthfulness, honesty, humility, forgiveness and also to understand that there’s something higher in life than just the material things.

PARENT 2:  Each and every other faith have their own schools except Hindu school.  So this is the first state school and that’s stopped me sending my son back to India for education.  So he can have education here.

BOCQUET: In addition to the money it received from the government, the school has raised millions locally to build a small temple within the school complex.  It’s now very over-subscribed with around four or five applicants for every place available.  I asked Nitesh Gor, Chair of the School Board if this meant more Hindu families would want to move into the area and if this might lead to the creation of a Hindu ghetto.

NITESH GOR:   There will be a number of individuals who may move to the area.  But of course you’ll see transition between other Hindu families moving out of the area and I think the important thing to bear in mind here is how integrated are they within the community and what else is going on in the community for them to be involved in.  I think that’s the important thing to bear in mind.

BOCQUET: Around a third of state funded schools in England, that’s more than six and a half thousand, have some kind of religious connection, mostly with the major Christian denominations.  And now that the Hindus finally have their first public primary school, they hope to establish state secondary schools in London and in Leicester.  For The World, this is Kevin Bocquet in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Video: Glasgow’s amphibious “Amfibus” in action
Photos: Amphibious bus

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: North of the English border with Scotland there’s another U.K. first, a bus that can travel on both roads and water.  Scottish bus company Stagecoach has been testing out the Amfibus.  If successful, it would replace a commuter ferry which runs between the towns of Renfrew ad Yoker on the River Clyde just west of Glasgow.  With me on the line is Stagecoach spokesperson Steve Steward.  So Steve, tell me what this bus looks like and how it works.

STEVE STEWART: Well it’s based on a bus chassis.  It looks very much like a coach when you look at it from the road.  But it’s built on top of a hull, so it means that we can use the coach to go on the roads and then drop into the water.

WERMAN: And as for how it looks, it’s kind of the color of an American yellow-orange school bus and I guess it wouldn’t be unfair to say it also looks like an old school VW minibus that’s been pumped full of air.

STEWART: A few people have said to us it looks a bit like a yellow submarine, but this one doesn’t go under water, it stays on top of the water.

WERMAN: And we have a picture of said bus at our website, the world dot org.  The design is from Holland, right?

STEWART: That’s right.  We’ve taken delivery just temporarily of the Amfibus from a company in Holland.  It can carry 50 passengers and at the completion of the trials it’s going to go back to Holland to be used as a splash tour in Rotterdam.

WERMAN: How have the tests gone so far on the River Clyde, just west of Glasgow?

STEWART: We’ve been very impressed.  We did some trials two weeks ago in Rotterdam, which is one of the busiest harbors in Europe.  And then we tried it on the Clyde which is our smoother conditions and in both environments it’s performed extremely well.

WERMAN: So the Amfibus will replace this ferry that currently runs between Renfrew and Yoker.  What are the advantages of bus versus boat?

STEWART: Well the local transport authority is facing quite a tough financial situation at the moment and cannot afford to continue to subsidize the current ferry service.  The beauty of the idea that we’ve come up with is that this vehicle can travel not just between the two points of Renfrew and Yoker; it can actually go on road.  The idea we have is to travel from a major shopping center and leisure area nearby across the water and then on land on the other side to a place called Clyde bank where there’s quite a significant population center.  So that will give us the volumes of passengers that we believe would make it commercially viable.

WERMAN: And as far as contingencies for when the bus is in the water?  Do you have oars or life preservers onboard just in case?

STEWART: In the same way that you have regulations for ferries, it’s covered by the same maritime regulations, so there’s life jackets under every seat.  But from the performance of the vehicle over the past couple of weeks, I’m fairly confident that we won’t have to face that eventuality.

WERMAN: And Mr. Stewart, have you taken a ride or a float on the magic bus yet?

STEWART: Yeah, I’ve been on it several times.  The first time it’s a strange experience, going from land into water, but it was incredibly smooth.

WERMAN: And does the strange experience come when you actually glide into the water and you’re making that transition or is it actually once you’re floating in the water in the bus, and its like oh I’m in a bus and I’m floating.

STEWART: Just as you make that transition, I suppose it’s possibly the same feeling that people going into space maybe had the first time that they blasted off into the atmosphere.  They didn’t quite know what to expect, but it felt very safe, very smooth and I’m sure it’s something that would be a hit with passengers.

WERMAN: Stagecoach spokesman Steve Steward, good to talk to you about the Amfibus.

STEWART: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Last week we reported on new online technologies to help consumers track the environment footprint of some products.  Well, other ways of monitoring the impacts of products are emerging as well.  In Britain some food products are now sporting carbon footprint labels alongside their nutrition labels.  The World’s Laura Lynch has the story.

LAURA LYNCH: Britain’s biggest grocery store chain Tesco is all about selling food.  But lately the store has started selling itself as an environmental champion too.  Two years ago Tesco joined a program to put labels on a handful of products, showing the carbon dioxide emissions generated to create them.  Chloe Meacher is Tesco’s climate change manager.

MEACHER: They launched 20 products, orange juice, washing detergents, light bulbs and potatoes and we’ve now got 120.

LYNCH: Tesco worked with the Carbon Trust, an environmental consulting group funded by the British government.  The Trust has offered to calculate carbon footprints for companies in exchange for a commitment to reduce their CO2 output.  The first product foot printed was Walker’s Potato Chips.  The Trust’s Euan Murray says the calculation starts all the way back on the farm.

EUAN MURRAY:  That’s the emissions from the farmer plowing the fields.  It’s making the packaging.  It’s then everything that goes on in the factory and then it’s shipping to the store, and then of course you and buying them and disposing of the packaging.

LYNCH: Murray says each of those stages uses energy and produces greenhouse emissions.  The total for the chips, a standard size bag, was 85 grams of CO2.  For consumers it’s likely only a number.  And with no other chip brands carrying the label, it’s impossible to choose the product with the smallest footprint.  But what they can see is the fact that Walker’s reduced its carbon emissions by seven percent over the last two years.  As with Tesco’s, Walker’s has agreed to the requirements of the Carbon Trust.  In order to get the carbon label, it had to find ways to cut emissions.  For Walker’s it meant switching to British potatoes to cut food miles, running trucks on biodiesel containing used cooking oil and other measures.  All of the effort is attractive to companies because changes like these usually mean cutting costs too.  The Carbon Trust’s Euan Murray says more and more companies are signing up from all over the world.

MURRAY:  We’ve really started to build momentum in companies working across their supply chains and also helping consumers realize that actually their credit card is perhaps the most powerful weapon that they all have in the fight against climate change.

LYNCH: Now, Tesco wouldn’t allow me to go into one of its stores to talk to customers about the carbon labels.  So instead, I took a couple of Tesco’s products to some consumers.  This is London’s Borough market, a food eater’s fun fair.  It’s where I found Richard Travis.  He sometimes shops at Tesco’s and agreed to a little test.  I showed him two cartons of Tesco milk.  And I’m wondering if you can look at these and tell me what difference you see between the two of them.

RICHARD TRAVIS:   That’s go a recycling mark on it.  That one doesn’t.  One’s labeled organic, and the other one isn’t.

LYNCH: But that’s not the only difference.  I point out what he missed, the carbon footprint label on the regular milk.  Do you know what this is?

TRAVIS:  I’ve seen it on things recently, but no I don’t know what it is.

LYNCH: But Travis says now that he knows about it, the carbon footprint label might make a difference in his shopping.

TRAVIS:  We’ve tried to shop locally, not too many food miles, and we recycle.  If I thought that by doing something it was reducing or had a lower than benchmark CO2, then actually I would think that was probably a good thing.

LYNCH: But that creates another dilemma for people like Travis; how to choose between the regular milk with the carbon footprint label and the organic milk without it.  Which has the lower total environmental impact?  As of now, there’s no way for consumers to know.  Tesco says its organic milk isn’t labeled.  But Chloe Meacher from Tesco says the chain does plan to eventually label all of its store brand products.  And she says the chain believes it will ultimately be good for the bottom line.

MEACHER:  If we can be there with the information about which products are low carbon, we believe that customers will reward us.

LYNCH: Right now Euan Murray says the Carbon Trust is working with more than 5,000 products and more than 65 brands across Britain, Europe, North America and Asia.

MURRAY:  But of course, we still have a long way to go to turn this into something that really does become a global standard and that we get businesses buying into this idea and that they see value in their brands being positioned in that lower carbon way.

LYNCH: And the carbon label might not be the end of what some might worry is an information overload for consumers.  There is a new movement afoot for water footprint labels, to show how many gallons of H2O are used to create products.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.