Section:OBS NS PaGe:1 Edition Date:110911 Edition:05 Zone: Sent at 11/9/2011 0:34 cYanmaGentaYellowblack

Continued on page 6

Work longer: new pension bombshell for under 50s

Retirement age rise to be speeded up■

We’ll rip up previous plan – minister■

INSIDE > WEATHER THIS SECTION PAGE 49 | CROSSWORDS SPEEDY, THIS SECTION PAGE 49 AZED, PAGE 40 + EVERYMAN, PAGE 44 IN THE NEW REVIEW

Israel faces crisis with Egypt as diplomats fl ee

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Make no mistake, al-Qaida will keep trying, Obama tells Americans by Paul Harris New York and Daniel Boff ey London

President Barack Obama yesterday warned that al-Qaida was likely to strike the US again as America pre-pared to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11.

“Make no mistake, they will keep trying to hit us again, but as we are showing again this weekend we remain vigilant. We are doing everything in our power to protect our people,” the president said in his weekly radio address.

Though he struck a militaristic and highly patriotic tone, the president

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, at Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, yesterday as the nation prepared to mark 9/11. Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Reuters

revealed a more nuanced side of American thinking.

Though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sprang directly from decisions taken after 9/11, Obama said those confl icts were winding down. “They want to draw us into end-less wars, sapping our strength and confi dence as a nation. But even as we put relentless pressure on al-Qaida we are ending the war in Iraq and begin-ning to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. After a hard decade of war it is time for nation building here at home,” he said.

He highlighted his administration’s

by Daniel Boff eyPolicy Editor

The government will bring forward an increase in the state pension age to 67 under radical plans designed to prolong the working life of millions of people aged 50 and under.

Ministers are already pushing contro-versial changes through parliament to raise the age at which men and women can claim a pension to 66 by 2020. Now, as the government moves to keep up with the “express train” of life expect-ancy, the retirement age could rise to 67 as early as 2026.

Steve Webb, the pensions minister, has told the Observer that further moves are necessary and the coalition government will rip up the former administration’s timetable, under which the pension age was to be increased to 67 in 2036 and 68 by 2046. Webb, a Liberal Democrat, indi-

cated that he was not seeking merely to tinker with the timescales. He said: “The timescales for 67 and 68 are too slow. If it is 67 in the mid-2030s we will be going backwards in terms of share of your life in retirement. I mean the problem would be worse than 20 years before.”

The raising of the state pension age to 67 in 2026, the most likely option according to Whitehall sources, would aff ect 8.1 million people in their 40s who would otherwise have expected to retire at 66.

It will also dismay the public sector unions, meeting at the Trades Union Congress tomorrow , who are already close to endorsing mass strikes over the government’s intention to ask their

members to pay higher contributions while working longer for what they believe will be smaller pensions.

But, likening the recent fl urry of gov-ernment activity over pensions to the bursting of a dam, Webb said previous governments had failed to address a huge increase in life expectancy which is said to be rising by an average of two and a half years every decade.

He also defended the pensions bill currently going through parliament, which increases women’s pension age to 65 in 2018, before rising to 66 in 2020 in parallel with the male retirement age – a move which gives 330,000 women just seven years’ notice on up to two extra years in work before retirement.

And in his fi rst major interview since the government closed this summer’s consultation on whether further reforms to the state pension age were necessary, Webb said it had become clear that more needed to be done to avoid a major pen-sions crisis.

“We are going to get some new fig-ures next month. We get them every two years, and you just know what they are going to say,” he said. “Everybody knows we are living longer. It is like an express train. I am even more convinced now than I was a year ago that we are running to standstill on all this stuff .

“In a world [where] you are going to live into your late 80s, and before we know it [into your] 90s, we think now we have got to move on these things.

“In a way, successive governments over the decades were so behind the curve behind all this. If you think of male pension age, it hasn’t changed for a century. How much has life expectancy improved in a century? So, in a way, what is going on is a big dam that is finally breaking.”

The move to quicken the pace of changes to the retirement age follows the recent decision by the Netherlands

Continued on page 5 Continued on page 3

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Strikes are the only way to prevent cuts, says union chief, 5 Faultlines dividing Cameron and Clegg,In Focus, 26-27

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www.observer.co.uk Sunday 11 September 2011 £2.20

by Harriet Sherwood Jerusalem

Israel is facing its worst crisis with Egypt for 30 years after being forced to airlift diplomats and their families to safety during the storming of its embassy in Cairo by a violent mob.

The siege of the embassy ended, with the 86 Israelis fl eeing, only after intervention from the White House following phone calls between the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and US President Barack Obama.

The attack was the latest diplomatic storm to engulf the Jewish state, whose relations with another ally, Turkey, have worsened over the past nine days. Israel is also facing a “diplomatic tsu-nami” at the UN later this month when a majority of countries are expected to back recognition of a Palestinian state.

The embassy attack , in which a secu-rity wall was demolished and a group of protesters reached the door of the embassy’s secure area, threatened to

cause “serious damage in peaceful rela-tions between our two countries”, the prime minister said.

He added that it was a “grave viola-tion of accepted diplomatic practice” .

He spent the night with senior offi cials in a foreign ministry operation room dealing with the crisis. Eighty diplomats and their families were airlifted on an Israeli military plane at 4.40am, but six personnel were trapped inside the building.

“There was one door separating them from the mob,” said the offi cial, who described the night as “very dramatic and tense”. Eventually the six were rescued by Egyptian commandos following behind-the-scenes interven-tion by the US .

Obama spoke to Netanyahu during the night, the White House said. He also appealed to Egypt to “honour its international obligations”.

David Cameron condemned the attack and urged Egypt to meet its responsibilities under the Vienna

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