Speaking gig at Weird Weekend 2011 - 20 August

I am speaking on "the (alleged) pygmy elephants of Kerala" (or more accurately the lack of them) at the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Weird Weekend 2011 in Woolfardishworthly, North Devon. I'm on at 1.15 on Saturday 20 August, assuming the Tarka Line train from Exeter is reliable. A train line named after an otter hardly inspires confidence! The full Weird Weekend programme is here.

The talk will be an account of my now not-so-recent investigations into the alleged "kallana" pygmy elephants of Kerala, India, and a sneak preview of my forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book.

Support the struggle of the interns!

This first appeared in the Freelance, July 2011


THE NUJ's Cashbacks for Interns campaign, started by London Freelance Branch, was the subject of NUJ London Freelance Branch's June meeting. Our invited star speaker, Keri Hudson, who with the NUJ's help won her back pay for her unpaid work placement at an industrial tribunal, regrettably had to work late at short notice, in her current paid job.

In Keri's absence, Fiona O' Cleirigh, instigator of the Cashback for Interns campaign, said that “If people are working for free, wages go down, there will be only a small pool of talent with money" and urged members to get interns “in union from the start." Read more...

The Star Crossed Stone

This book review first appeared in Fortean Times 278, August 2011

The Star Crossed Stone – The Secret Life, Myths and History of a Fascinating Fossil

$27.50, Kenneth J. McNamara, University of Chicago Press, hardback, 272 pages plus bibliography, index, footnotes.

Even before they were recognisable humans, back in the days of Homo heidelbergensis and H. erectus, people collected fossil sea urchins, took them with them to places where such fossils didn’t naturally occur, and were buried with them.

The current world record-holder for fossil sea urchins found in a single grave is at least 147 fossil sea urchins, and possibly as many as 200, arranged in a ring around “Maud,” a Neolithic woman unearthed in Dunstable Downs in1887. Roughly contemporary with “Maud” is a specimen of Echinolampus africanus – you guessed it, a fossil species of sea urchin – recovered from the tomb of the architect Kha in ancient Egypt’s Heliopolis, carved with an inscription from around 2000 BCE identifying the fossil as “found in the south part of quarry at Sodpu by Tja-Nefer”. McNamara suggests the quarry (possibly in Sinai, and dedicated to a god associated with several star constellations) could have been known for its “star stones.”

A chronologically more recent sea urchin burial featured one clasped in the cold, dead hand of a Saxon woman buried in Bury St Edmunds. Some French barrows from Neolithic times to the Iron Age seem to have been built around fossil sea urchins and nothing else.

Why? The five-pointed star with a hole in the centre, unique in nature to echinoderms (urchins and starfish,) is the only natural example of so many axis of symmetry. Our ancestors started collecting fossil urchins around the time their brains were first beginning to grasp concepts like symmetry, and making leaps into expressions of abstract ideas and “art”. The fossil sea urchin’s mysterious symmetry may have been humankind’s first-ever sacred geometry.

Urchins were modified by early humans – chipped out to take away the matrix around the star, or drilled to make into pendants or necklaces. Axes and scrapers were made from the very earliest days of tool-making from flint rocks with little fossil urchins embedded in it. These were carefully centred on the tool, and sometimes used as a grip.

Once you’ve revealing the fascinating fact that we’ve been collecting fossil sea urchins since before the dawn of humankind, there’s only so much you can say on the subject. McNamara says it over and over, padded out with too much atmospheric detail. While it’s nice to have some flavour of the conditions in which archaeological discoveries were made, the scene-setting of an imagined cold and frosty morning experienced by an archaeologist in 1911 in the South Downs is too much. As are McNamara’s own reminiscences of a childhood spent collecting Brooke Bond Tea cards.

But just when you want him to get to the point, McNamara shines with a mercifully fast-paced potted history of palaeontology, including proto-fortean martyr Bernard Pallisey, who “took a great delight in thumbing his nose” at the “learned writers of the time.” Pallisey announced that fossils were not the results of the Earth’s “plastic virtue” that was supposed to spontaneously produce simulacra of natural forms, but petrified animals. For his pains he died imprisoned in the Bastille.

Other highlights are epic narratives of complex ancient Egyptian cosmology and the fall and rebirth of the gods of Asgard, and where fossil urchins fit into these belief systems. (To the Vikings, fossil urchins were “thunderstones”.)

McNamara relates how sea urchins increasingly became less an object to accompany the dead on into the afterlife and an amulet of good luck or protection for the living, right up to 1929, when folklorist Herbert Toms photographed the collections of urchins that were then common on windowsills across Sussex.

The bibliography, footnotes and index are excellent.

VERDICT: ENTERTAINING PALAEONTOLOGY/ARCHAEOLOGY CROSSOVER – 7/10

© Matt Salusbury 2011

Counter Terror Expo 2011

I went to Counter Terror Expo in Olympia in May assuming I’d find all sorts of dodgy goings-on involving the transformation of the policing of legitimate protest into some ludicrously over the top ‘counter-terror’ operation, or something, with an industry to match. (The company that runs Counter Terror Expo, Clarion, also does this year’s DSEi arms fair, hence the protesters outside Counter Terror.) But when I got into Counter Terror to take a look, the event’s title seemed a bit of a con.

I had to look quite hard to find in the exhibition for an example of ‘counter-terror’ tech that could be readily abused to crush civil liberties. I can report that it’s a very bad idea indeed to take your smart 3G phone on a demo. Half your life is on it.

“Mobile phone forensics “ is definitely one to be wary of. If Counter Terror is anything to go by, mobile phone forensics is absolutely huge. There are handheld readers that can get everything off your mobile in a second, or possibly even suck in details if it’s nearby through some Bluetooth-type system. Then there’s the software to store and analyse all the data on your mobile, and don’t forget they can now easily cross-reference it with all the other data they got.

And if you ever doubted the ability of the state to find you using your mobile phone as a beacon, Winkelmann sell detectors of ‘electronic devices.’ They’re designed for finding the triggers to IEDs, but their policing and civil liberties implications are obvious.

I heard secondhand reports that the two black blocs on the March 26 demo had left their smartphones at home and taken their old phones from a few years back, that were essentially just phones with text, and the minimum amount of phone contacts stored on them.

Micro Systemation (MSAB) “the leader in mobile device forensics” was flogging its XRY system - software for data recovery for law enforcement, with the expensive support team as well, of course. And training. The not very clear photo on their literature suggests the kit can read credit cards too, and comes with a briefcase full of different phone adaptors.

Then there’s a whole infant industry of “Voice Biometrics” or “voice-based identification.” As described by its cheerleaders at the Speech Technology Centre, this is “a branch of forensic science called ‘audio forensics is being propagated to process such audio evidences.” Its “based on the theory that voice of each person is as unique as fingerprints or DNA.” So the science behind it is still dodgy, and it’s not legally admissible as evidence in UK courts yet, but no doubt lobbyists are on the case ensuring it will be. Expensive training in voice biometrics is on offer, along with exorbitantly-priced voice database management system.

Although the voice biometrics publicity emphasises “suspects,” there are obvious links to mobile forensics, such as voice messages found on a mobile, etc. No doubt it won’t be long before someone is taking your data off your mobile, copying your voice messages, and doing voice identification on them, and build up databases of voice.

The voice biometrics brochure was pushing an infrastructure of regional and national voice databases , with three human operators each in the regional databases, using software that can handle 10 million operations a day. On the diagram, the “Voice IDs” linked to other stuff like photos. The diagram suggests a lot of voice data will come from mobiles.







Two bomb disposal robots entertain bored punters by delicately picking up small water bottles







Other than some scary stuff at the mobile phone end of the spectrum, Counter Terror turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag of corporate counter-espionage, mercenaries, protecting businesses from organised crime, Torture Garden fetish uniforms complete with gas masks, contemporary Japan panic nuclear biological chemical disaster, and really dreary stuff about the integrity of seals on containers coming to airports. Even demonstrations of unbreakable cases being run over by Land Rovers, and a simulated ‘IED’ area, couldn’t disguise the fact that this was an essentially dull event for people flogging security stuff, who’d gathered under the ‘counter-terror’ title in an attempt to look impossibly sexy and glamorous.

It seems the ‘corporates’ and law enforcement have no faith anymore in the vast infrastructure of CCTV that’s grown up. Many exhibitors sell packages that let you set up your own on-the-spot CCTV network instead for whatever occasion it is. There was one stall-holder selling CCTV systems to schools. Terrorism it ain’t, but selling it at a fair called Counter Terror makes it sound way cooler than it is.

CCTV Image magazine for winter 2011 was being given out. In it, a article says the mythical ‘300’ a day number of time you’re captured on CCTV is more like between 42 and 101 with a mean average of 68, based on known cameras in Cheshire and real journeys people took. (According to a Cheshire Constabulary survey.)

There were items for conventional policing on sale – batons, the people who do the warrant cards and police insignia and so on, but there wasn’t even the pretence that it had anything to do with terrorism. It just sounds more glam than policing and boring security and intelligence-gathering. There’s also the intriguing Metropolitan Life, a rather rubbish magazine for and by London coppers. It had a regular Indian cookery column by ex-cop Rayeesa Asghar-Sandys who now runs a cookery school in Herts. More interestingly, who’s advertising on the back? Divorce lawyers. Russell Jones & Walker have a specialist “Family team” called Divorce 4 Police offering a first appointment free, and 35 per cent off for Police Federation members.

Much of the floor space was devoted to the deeply dull but comparatively very big industry in reinforced fences and bollards. The only slightly exciting variation on the vast number of these was a ‘hostile vehicle protection system’ disguised as a strategically-placed large planter for ornamental shrubs or bench in your corporate forecourt. Someone seems to have convinced everyone that people want to ram trucks into their building. The ‘hostile protection vehicle system’ under its ordinary street furniture disguise has steel pillars going several feet into the ground, and is guaranteed to prang any mythical jihadi truck bombers who’ve taken a strong dislike to your corporation.

In the world of boring corporate security, PAS68planters.co.uk frighten their customers with the thought that “unwelcome visitors try to smash their way into your building with a truck”. They prevent them with “highly effective vehicle barriers” discreetly disguised as a plant pot. Competitor company Marshalls Street Furniture have reinforced planters, bollards and benches that continue underground and also stop speeding trucks in the obligatory dramatic crash test photos.

The sexiest item on display was the BCB International "The Buccaneer” a compressed air cannon that hurled ‘golf balls, nets or whatever you want” at pirates. Steel nets caught up in the propellers will take them out. They deliberately don’t provide ammo. The fact that it’s “not pyrotechnics” means you can bring it into any port no bother. The salesman said golf balls will hole a small launch. ‘Non-lethal’ improvised projectiles could include ice cubes or paintball pellets. They also do self-inflating body armour.

This is more anti-piracy on the high seas (the Red Sea in particular) than anti-terror, but the applications for use by Japanese whalers against Greenpeace are obvious.

Back on the boring end of the spectrum, there’s bespoke insurance for places like Libya and the new buzzword is ‘extraction’ – mercenaries to get your expatriate corporate workforce out of this weeks’ Middle Eastern dictatorship that was regarded as the most stable country in the world until last Tuesday.








Your worst paranoia about faceless militarized robo-cops is true after all!



Some of the wares on display were not so much counter-terror but counter espionage. Some were selling kit for encrypted voice calls on smart phones (Cellcrypt). And never mind the tinfoil hat brigade, corporates were being sold a tinfoil communications tent into which you could disappear safe in the knowledge that no one could get at the data held on those leaky electronic devices.

I didn't have time for any of the Counter Terror talks, but what did strike me from reading their brochures was the
frightening number of academics whoring themselves to the security industry.

Another revelation for me is that the ‘security experts’ of the world all agree that Cameron’s policy of cuts, cuts, cuts is wrong, wrong, wrong. Another freebie being handed out was the Intersec fear and security industry magazine. Its take on the Greek riots identified austerity, specifically youth unemployment, and people taking it out on a young immigrant workforce, as the key security problems in the Eurozone. Spain, they said, with a much bigger youth unemployment rate, had handled the crisis well with job creation programmes.

British security services according to magazine’s article ‘Spreading Disorder’ say Britain is four meals away from anarchy. The EU has to address youth unemployment or “immigrant-related racism” and rioting will spread. The professional cynics of the security industry agree that massive cuts are the worst thing you can do in these circumstances. They also say there’s not much else you can do in response to a security crisis, apart from buying in more of that boring perimeter security (fences and razor-wire) to go around your ministry buildings in response to Europe’s “new wave of anti-government protests”.

Maddest of all was the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, who have as their logo a cartoon bomb-throwing anarchist.







Surveillance drones-R-us

Olympics organisers tell local Union branch they can't use the words "London Olympics" to describe the subject of their branch meeting

The London Freelance Branch of the NUJ contacted the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to request a speaker almost a year ahead of their planned Branch meeting on "reporting the London Olympics", which took place in April 2011.

After some truly bizarre interaction with the various London Olympics bodies, LFB were told they weren't allowed to use the words "London Olympics" to describe their meeting, as the term was copyrighted. (In fact, trademarked. As freelance journalists we know the difference.)

There's a report here on the meeting and the strange story of the Branch's attempts to get a speaker from LOCOG. We also learnt at the meeting that Team USA will be bringing their own food, and their security detail has been in and out of London for the past two years.

Evolution of Island Mammals - book review

This first appeared in Fortean Times

Evolution of Island Mammals: Adaptation and Extinction of Placental Mammals on Islands

Alexandra van der Geer, George Lyras, John de Vos, Michael Dermitzakis
ISBN: 978-1-4051-9009-1
Hardcover, 496pp
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Here's a challenge. Can an enthusiast with only a biology 'O' level deal with a book pitched at zoology or paleontology postgraduates? There comes a point in pursuing fortean interests where you may have to confront literature so technical it leaves you behind. So I approached Evolution of Island Mammals warily, but found it surprisingly easy going. I only had to look up 'parietal' (bits on the side of your skull), while I called in my sister - an osteopath - to explain what "synostotic fusion" is.

That aside, there's a lot of material in here that’s fascinating to the non-specialist. Much of the research is new, or a new assessment of existing material, the result of admirably painstaking work by the Dutch-Greek authorial team who travelled the world’s obscure museum collections measuring and comparing old bones and teeth.

There's a few laughs in here too. Intrepid British lady naturalist Dorothea Bate arrived in Cyprus at the turn of the twentieth century and revealed that the miraculously preserved relics of the "300 marionites," the legendary founding fathers of Cypriot Christianity on display in churches, were in fact the fossilized bones of pygmy hippos. That discovery can’t have been well received locally.

Some of the larger mainland mammals – especially the good swimmers like hippos, elephants and deer – evolved quite quickly into cute miniature island versions. The smallest of the pygmy elephants, at just under a meter high, was proto-Sicily’s Elephas falconeri, the biggest mammal on an island it shared with mice, rabbits and not much else. The authors consider the controversial pygmy human "hobbits" of the Indonesian island of Flores, Homo floresiensis to be a distinct species. A volcanic eruption 17,000 years ago apparently finished off the "hobbits" and Stegadon sondaari, a dwarf relative of the elephants, and may have killed off the island's giants cave rats too.

Island Mammals concludes most of these island dwarf mammals died out before humans arrived, although Majorca’s early humans may have domesticated the 50cm-high Myotragus balaericus, the “mouse goat”.

The same evolutionary forces that produced cute miniature versions of mainland mega-fauna also drove the evolution of scary giant versions of normally cute fluffy little mainland mammals. The Cretan deer Candiacervus major, at 1.65 m at the shoulder, was slightly larger than the Irish elk. Malta has Leithia, a double-sized dormouse, preyed on by outsize owls. Madagascar once had knuckle-dragging ground lemurs, and Sardinia had Megalenydris barbaricia, a flat-tailed otter that was “truly a giant… much larger than that of a living otter”, although its remains are too fragmentary to tell just how much bigger. What really kept me awake at night was the thought of Diogaronyx, the terrier-sized “monster hedgehog” from a Miocene archipelago that’s now part of Italy.

While the scholarship of Island Mammals’ research is excellent, its presentation and structure is more “postgraduate.” This – and the price tag – make it more a work of reference than bedside reading for forteans to dip into for a pleasant read. The illustrations are mostly black and white, with small colour plates confined to the middle. This is a pity, as the authors have shown they can write a more coffee-table type book on this subject – Island Mammals evolved (excuse the pun) out of the Dutch-language Hoe Dieren op Eilanden Evoluren, a sumptuously-illustrated 2009 Darwin anniversary celebratory work aimed at the general reader. Surely this subject is broad and engaging enough to deserve an English-language work for us non-specialists.

Score: 7 (9 for specialists)







Dwarf Cypriot elephants' teeth from the Bate Collection at the Natural History Museum London. They feature in Evolution of Island Mammals. Photo: Matt Salusbury

How to hold on to your lifeline

Matt Salusbury on why keeping your passport in the Middle East is more vital than ever

(This first appeared in EL Gazette, May 2011.)

It has long been common practice in some Middle Eastern countries for employers to retain the passports of expatriate teachers. Back in the days when falling out with your boss or being refused a holiday were the worst things that could happen, EFL teachers put up with it.

In the last six months, however, a wave of protests has swept across the Middle East. Expat EFL teachers left Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in droves, though they're now mostly back in Egypt. One British Tefler escaped from Tripoli courtesy of a lift from the South African armed forces, while another hitched a ride with Portuguese diplomats.

Both these teachers - and those who boarded Royal Air Force cargo planes and a Royal Navy warship - only got on board because they had proof of their nationality to hand. Estimates vary for the number of migrant workers stranded in Libya without passports – mostly African, Bengali or Egyptian. There could be almost a million. Meanwhile the US State Department and the British Foreign Office have instructed all nationals to leave both Yemen and Bahrain. Suddenly we’re in an unpredictable Middle East where your passport being locked in the office for 'safekeeping' is very bad news.

The UK and US advise talking employers out of keeping passports if at all possible. The UK says that if you can’t avoid handing in your passport you should make a full, colour copy before you do so and keep it somewhere safe. It’s enough to get you onto a Royal Navy helicopter.

Teachers should also register with their embassies. Canada recently said that because so few of their nationals in the Japan earthquake zone had done so they had no idea how many were there.

Under the laws of most Middle Eastern countries, it is illegal for bosses to retain passports. When expat workers go to court in the Gulf states to get their passports returned, they usually win. Teachers who want their passports back can also say that the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO) has declared retaining passports 'forced labour', a form of slavery. Even Saudi Arabia has adopted the ILO conventions.

Saudi employers will briefly need to hold on to the passports of expats to obtain an iqbal (alien registration card and residency permit) for them, but beyond that there is no reason to retain them. Visas that allow expats in Saudi to go on holiday are complicated, though recent reports suggest that getting a temporary exit and re-entry visa is becoming much easier, with payment and paperwork available via an ATM.

The retention of passports continues to be quite common in Saudi Arabia and has in the past led to teachers being put at risk. Back in the Gulf War of 1991 BAE Systems (British Aerospace at the time) retained teachers' passports after classifying them as 'essential personnel'. Many chose to break their contracts rather than live under threat from Iraqi missiles, while reports suggested some were redeployed to undertake 'security duties'.

Saudi courts seem to take a dim view of employers retaining passports. To everybody's surprise, an Indian oil worker who was recently denied his passport by his boss went to the Saudi courts and won. Arab News reported that in January the Jubail and Damman courts ordered the return of the unnamed expatriate’s documents, along with his family's passports, stamped with (eventually) the correct exit visas.

Passport retention seems to be a problem in Kuwait. The US State Department website says, 'There are cases where employers retain passports of foreign nationals resident in Kuwait. You should try to avoid this where possible, but you should always keep a copy of your passport.'

In Oman, employers 'often ask that expatriate employees deposit their passports with the company as a condition of employment - this practice is contrary to Omani law', according to the State Department. While a 2006 Omani Ministry of Manpower circular upholds the employee’s right to retain their passport, it doesn't stipulate penalties for employers, making enforcement difficult. The UK Foreign Office reminds its nationals in Oman that they need their passport (or a copy) at all times to show as ID.

In Qatar a 2009 law forbids bosses from retaining passports 'except for visa and immigration processing'. Labour laws are likely to be tightened due to the international attention focused on the country as its vast expatriate workforce prepares for the football World Cup 2020.

In the UAE it's also against the law for an employer to keep passports. Only a 'competent judge' can do so. This has been upheld by a 2008 Ministry of Labour ruling that companies retaining passports 'will not be tolerated'. A 2002 law imposes fines of 20,000 dhirams (£3,300) or three months' prison for employers who do so. A bigger risk than revolution in the UAE (in the boom-bust Emirate of Dubai, specifically) is your employer suddenly going out of business with your passport still locked in the safe.

Teachers on work visas will need some form of exit visa to get on the plane out of Saudi (a 'letter of no objection' releasing you from employment), Qatar and 'in certain situations' Yemen. But when revolution starts and your country's (or another country’s) armed forces arrive to evacuate you, they couldn't care less about any exit visa, they just want to see your passport in your hand, or at least a copy of it.
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Update: Since the article appeared, the British consulate in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) has started issuing 'Emergency Travel Documents' for its nationals who need such documents in order to return to the UK. Reading between the lines, this could be as a result of passports not being released by employers.

I have also recently come across an unconfirmed story of a teacher in an international school 'held hostage' in Qatar. The lack of an exit visa was allegely involved.

This feature was inspired by a source (a teacher who I won't name) who contacted the Gazette about passport retention issues with their employer in Saudi. As they haven't got back to us, we assume it's been sorted and they have their passport. They reported to us that a group of female Egyptian colleagues who went to the manager's office to demand their passports. They got them.