The Guardian World News

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• William and Kate seal it with a kiss – twice
• Storming of the palace, British-style
• Uganda unrest gathers pace despite crackdown
• Activists claim Facebook page purge
• Gaddafi troops captured in Tunisia
• Briton killed in Morocco bomb attack
• Syrians protest as unrest spreads
• Nasa delays Endeavour's final voyage
• N Ireland faces another bomb alert
• Obama vows swift post-tornado aid
• Manning 'competent' to stand trial
• 'Al-Qaida members' held in Germany
• Mubenga death: UN may investigate
• Rabbit battery farms to return to UK
• Fame, therapy and not fitting in
• Spice Odyssey
• I didn't leave my house for a decade
• Computer says: um, er...
• UK film Man and Boy wins at Tribeca
• Dear Rapist …
• Zorba author's adopted son 'is heir'
• Daimler profits roar on back of China
• Camden Crawl's decade of new music
• PlayStation hack: 2.2m cards 'stolen'
• Top 10 female detectives

William and Kate seal it with a kiss – twice Posted: 29 Apr 2011 12:23 PM PDT Considering the huge guest list, the crowds, and the massed ranks of cameras, the royal wedding proved an intimate affair Considering the size of the audience, the two sets of trumpeters, two choirs and several of the most senior clerics in the land, the presence of the entire British royal family, 45 crowned heads from around the world and a guest list stretching to nearly 2,000, it was quite an intimate wedding. And, confounding all the understandable fears, nerves and precautions, it went off without a hitch. Miss Catherine Middleton of Bucklebury, Berkshire went into Westminster Abbey at 11am and came out an hour and a quarter later, holding the hand of the second in line to the throne as Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge – she will not be known as Princess Catherine. At the moment of their wedding, the Queen bestowed a title on her husband, Prince William of Wales. In fact, there were three titles so that none of her realms felt left out: he also became Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus. Yet, for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding them, the couple found space to share knowing looks and smiles, suggesting that the natural instincts and affections which Dr John Hall, the abbey's dean, told them at the start of the service had been implanted by God, were already in place. There were giggles between them as he struggled to wriggle the Welsh gold ring on to her finger. Later, appearing on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to give each other the obligatory kiss to satisfy the watching crowd and the massed ranks of the world's cameras, they gave each other the most perfunctory and chaste of pecks, as if slightly dismissive of the public nature of the ritual. After a couple of minutes, they did it again in case anyone had missed it. But there was another surprise: William and his bride appearing later in his dad's 40-year-old open-topped Aston Martin, festooned with balloons and a Just Wed number plate, roaring out of the palace and heading down the Mall. On a grey but bright and muggy day in central London – no sign during the morning of the showers that had threatened to break the month's hot weather – police estimated that up to a million people congregated, half of them in the Mall. In contrast to how police count demonstrations, that may have been an overestimate, but there were certainly many thousands. In the only slight sign of trouble, a small group of protesters gathering in Soho Square to put on masks were pre-emptively stalled without getting near. Overnight several thousand people had camped outside the abbey, where some had bagged space since early in the week, and along the edge of St James's Park. From early morning, many thousands more poured in, parents carrying picnic bags and rucksacks and children with flags and painted faces, wearing their best party dresses, some of them with cardboard crowns and many others with union flag hats. There were whole families, including grannies and grandads and a high proportion of young people, with many tourists among them. As they made their way across the bridges, tramping towards Westminster, where the abbey glowed white in the early light, the mood was cheery and police officers, asked to take family photos, obliged. It was, Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi, noted on the BBC, Britain and royalty at its best. Later the prime minister would gush too: "It was beautiful to see two people who really love each other and who are incredibly happy at an amazing ceremony ... A day when we see 'the new team'. It was incredibly romantic and moving. "It's a great moment for Britain, a moment when everyone is celebrating and it's being watched round the world where people will see lots of things they love about Britain," David Cameron said. Before 9am the first guests were arriving at the abbey, walking the red carpet that had been laid outside, through the Great West Door, past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior and up to the altar steps. The nave itself was lined with growing trees, eight maples and two hornbeams, with scented lily of the valley flowers planted at their base. The guests looked like an animated Madame Tussauds: Trevor Brooking and Earl Spencer, Elton John – his hair billowing in the wind like his very own fascinator – waving to the crowd with his partner David Furnish, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and the Beckhams, newly arrived from Los Angeles with David wearing his OBE pinned to his suit. Cheering wafted into the abbey from outside. Then came the foreign leaders: Australia's republican prime minister Julia Gillard and her partner, New Zealand's John Key and his wife . They were followed by British politicians, the men dragooned into morning suits: Ed Miliband and his fiancee Justine Thornton, Nick Clegg – his wife Miriam González Durántez almost defiantly glamorous – followed by David and Samantha Cameron and a clutch of ministers. Prince William, in the scarlet tunic of the Irish Guards, followed 45 minutes before the service, accompanied by his brother and best man Prince Harry, in time to greet arriving members of foreign royal families. Then, a fleet of four minibuses followed carrying minor royals from Buckingham Palace, like a charabanc outing. And then there were the Middletons. A week ago Carole Middleton, flight attendant turned successful businesswoman, could have caught a cab unnoticed in Whitehall. Yesterday she and her son James, who has just started his own cake business, were driven by limousine up the Mall, across Horseguards Parade and past the Houses of Parliament past cheering crowds, to be greeted at the abbey door by a clutch of clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury in mitre and cope. Do mothers still dream that their daughters might grow up to marry a prince and be driven down the Mall in a carriage? If so, Mrs Middleton bore the slightly stunned, unreal expression of one who has woken up to find the dream come true. They were followed by Prince Charles, in naval uniform, and the Duchess of Cornwall and then the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. And then the bridesmaids and pages, the littlest, three-year-old Grace Van Cutsem, yawning from excitement and tiredness - the little girl, led out on to the balcony at the palace, would later cover her ears to shield them from the noise. Then lastly, precisely on time, Kate Middleton and her father Michael, whose career started as a British Airways cargo dispatcher, slid into a royal Rolls-Royce at their hotel, the dress, subject of so much speculation, still hidden from view: all that could be seen was lace about the sleeves and a veil over the head. The secret of the elegant ivory gown, designed by Sarah Burton, had to wait another nine minutes until the bride stepped out of her limousine at the abbey. The intention behind the service itself was a demonstration of Britishness: music by British composers – John Rutter and Peter Maxwell Davies and the young Welsh composer Paul Mealor as well as Elgar, Britten and Vaughan Williams – and old, favourite hymns: Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and Jerusalem. The service itself, in conformity with the Church of England's 1966 prayerbook, was a mixture of modern and archaic English, during the course of which Middleton and her husband promised to love, comfort, honour and keep each other, forsaking all others and keeping only unto themselves. William also promised to share all his worldly goods with her. In his address Richard Chartres, the bishop of London and the clergyman closest to the royal family, advised: "The more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves ... In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life." As he spoke of the Holy Spirit quickening within them, filling their lives with light and so leading on to family life, Middleton blushed and smiled. There are those loyalists who say Princess Diana's spirit would be hovering and certainly her influence was seen most obviously as the couple left the abbey: the new duchess grinning with relief and joy, her husband smiling, but self-consciously blushing with eyes downcast, like his mother in a thousand photographs. And so to the palace in the 1902 state landau, pulled by white horses. En route the only unforseen incident of the day occurred when a horse ridden by a member of the Household Cavalry escort bolted, throwing its rider as the procession passed Downing Street. Only pride was dented, the Ministry of Defence said later: the horse "had had a bit of a moment". Then those discreet kisses on the balcony. And that was thought likely to be that: retirement for the Queen's reception to partake of crab salad and duck terrine, smoked salmon on beetroot blini, asparagus spears and quails' eggs, langoustines and pork belly, Pol Roger champagne and wedding cake and to listen to Charles joke about passing his bald spot on to his son. After that spread, the 85-year-old monarch and her 89-year-old husband were understandably going to retreat to the country, leaving the youngsters to a dinner and disco. This is a prince less hidebound than his father and more informal. For most couples the drive down the Mall would be the start of their drive into the sunset, but not this pair, not any longer: they turned sharp left 200 yards down the road into Clarence House to rest and recuperate before the evening. Last night they were staying at Buckingham Palace. Today they set off on a fortnight's honeymoon – destination a closely guarded secret but one that is almost certain to be discovered in time for the Sunday papers: a new life for the Duke of Cambridge and a transformed one for his duchess. She will never walk unnoticed down a street ever again. Royal wedding Prince William Kate Middleton Monarchy Weddings Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Storming of the palace, British-style Posted: 29 Apr 2011 02:03 PM PDT Forget republicanism – the closest Britain got to a revolution is people pushing down barricades and rushing to the palace Whether it was history repeating itself as history, or farce repeating itself as farce, depends entirely on your point of view. The marriage of His Royal Highness Prince William to Catherine Middleton was washed down by that cocktail of fevered excitement and irate lack of interest that constitutes public opinion these days – so consider it a day when the country split into two, with each side accusing the other of madness. Much like a standard marital row, in fact. But along with binge-drinking and misplaced self-regard, royal occasions are something at which Britain is undeniably world class, and anyone still poised for a republic is advised to put down their knitting needles. As the cameras trained on the Queen's rather shabby net curtains, awaiting the couple's balcony kiss, one costumed wellwisher told the BBC the crowds had initially been held back. "But in the end," she explained, "the people just pushed the barricades down and rushed towards the palace." And that's as close to the French Revolution as we're going to get – a sort of love-storming of the Bastille. It all read like a recipe for the perfect British day: worries about the weather, lots of mentions of Princess Di, and a chance to talk about the class system. Even the Germans obliged by having a pop at us, with Der Spiegel's London correspondent wondering "why this eccentric nation continues to worship the Windsors". The answer, perhaps, is because there is no quality more English than the country's ability to suspend its disbelief again and again – be it in the buildup to a World Cup quarter-final, or when faced with the latest iteration of the House of Windsor story. People know that most of the royal family's recent marriages have been fairytales. Grimm. But something allows the excitement to rebuild, and anyone who begrudged the gazillions who camped out to spend their day cheering and waving flags had a sobering televisual alternative: ITV2's back-to-back screening of The Only Way is Essex. As for the marriage ceremony, it was watched by luminaries from the Beckhams to the Bercows to the alleged former head of the Bahraini torture service. To the left, the king of this; to the right, the queen of that. The last time Carole Middleton had to proceed down an aisle this intimidating she was pushing a trolley and uttering the dreaded words "I'm afraid we've run out of the chicken." But for all the confected snobbery about Kate's origins, and her black sheep uncle Gary, the bourgeois preoccupations of the buildup could never have withstood the big guns of the occasion. In truth, there is scarcely a piece of British heritage so vulgar or outrageous that it cannot be somehow softened and folded into this most oddly enduring of myths. During his apprenticeship on Savile Row, the late Alexander McQueen famously sewed "I AM A CUNT" into the lining of a suit jacket being made for Prince Charles. Yet today, the newest member of the House of Windsor was dressed by the house of McQueen, itself renewed dazzlingly by the succession of Sarah Burton. At Westminster Abbey itself, two establishments fought for prominence. The Beckhams – who you'll recall sat on thrones at their own wedding – queued like hoi polloi to get in, while megastar Elton John travelled in steerage at the back of the nave, miles behind various ancient but unidentifiable aristos who haven't been playing with a full order of service since the old king was on the throne. The telly cameras immediately overrode their protocol function, and were far more interested in cutting to the celebs than any of the more recherché foreign dignitaries. Thus it was possible to see that neither the Queen nor Victoria Beckham knows the words to Jerusalem off by heart, with both filmed relying intently on their order of service. Incidentally, we must doff our plastic coronets to the choice of William Blake's brilliantly mad and mystical hymn of nostalgia for something that never really existed, but which does bring the neck hairs to attention on the big occasion. The only reading was from Romans. "Bless those who persecute you," intoned Kate's brother James, pausing to allow the reference to the press to sink in. "Bless and do not curse them." Most overused phrase of the day? "A very modern love story", followed by telly commentators' dreary emphasis on the fact that William and Kate were "very down-to-earth people", as though all the nation wanted out of a monarchy were a former accessories buyer for Jigsaw and a groom spawned in the hellfires of the House of Windsor, but now merely keen to make his name as a mid-ranking air-sea rescue operative. The day frequently couldn't make its mind up. On the one hand, loyal subjects were supposed to be impressed that minor royals had foregone horsedrawn carriages and were being shuttled in minibuses. On the other, they were expected to develop a sudden yet obsessive interest in state arcana – the provenance of gold altar plates, the engraving of a ceremonial bridle, the fact that the Green Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace opens into the White Drawing Room. We're all supposed to be semioticians now, so do feel encouraged to speculate on what Prince Harry calling himself "best man" as opposed to the more traditional "supporter" means for modern Britain, or what Samantha Cameron's failure to wear a hat means for your local Sure Start centre. As for what's next, you need hardly ask. ITV's coverage of the wedding kicked off at 0600 hours, and it took all the way until 06.16 before sofa-based royal expert Eve Pollard had declared firmly: "We want an Olympics baby." So there you have it. Royal uterus watch begins today. Royal wedding Monarchy Weddings Kate Middleton Prince William Republicanism Marina Hyde guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Uganda unrest gathers pace despite crackdown Posted: 29 Apr 2011 08:47 AM PDT Violent response to protests led by Kizza Besigye has fuelled rioters' determination to throw out President Yoweri Museveni Riots have swept across Ugandan's capital, Kampala, in the biggest anti-government protest in sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Security forces have launched a brutal crackdown, firing at unarmed civilians with live rounds, rubber bullets and teargas. Two people have been killed, more than 120 wounded and around 360 arrested. Women and girls have been among those beaten, according to witnesses. Two weeks of growing unrest – triggered by rising food and fuel prices – have gained fresh impetus after the violent arrest of the opposition leader Kizza Besigye on Thursday. Critics say President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 25 years, is losing his grip. They claim his wildly disproportionate crackdown on Besigye's "walk to work" protests smacks of panic and is sowing the seeds of popular revolt. "I thought the police were going to kill me," said Andrew Kibwka, 18, after police beat him with heavy sticks. "I [told] them I'm harmless but they just carried on. I did nothing to provoke them. They beat me because I was running away." Some point to the political earthquakes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and wonder if the aftershocks could reach tyranniessouth of the Sahara. Already there are pockets of unrest from Burkina Faso to Senegal to Swaziland. Even South Africa, reputed anchor of the continent, is tormented by deadly protests over poor public services. In Uganda there is an inchoate revolution struggling to be born. Protests have spread to several towns, leaving seven people dead and hundreds in jail. The riots, in which roads have been barricaded with burning tyres and vehicles pelted with rocks, mark a new level of defiance. Facebook and Twitter, which the government unsuccessfully tried to block, are reverberating with dissent. Museveni's heavyhanded attempts to put out the fire only appear to be fanning its flames. The subversion here began on 11 April with nothing so spectacular as an act of self-immolation: rather, a defeated politician and half a dozen allies walking down a street. The walk to work campaign is intended to highlight the soaring food and fuel prices, which leave many Ugandans unable to afford public transport. If Besigye, who has lost three elections to Museveni, had been ignored the protest might have fizzled out. But instead riot police blocked the group, used teargas and arrested him. At a stroke this waning establishment figure was reborn as a hero of resistance. Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda, an MP-elect for Besigye's Forum for Democratic Change, recalled the innocuous beginnings of walk to work. "We never intended to have a Tahrir Square to remove Museveni," he said. "We just wanted a reawakening of the people. We started walking, the simplest thing on Earth, and Museveni said you can't." At the third protest Besigye was hit in the hand by a rubber bullet. Images of him with hand bandaged and in a sling gave the opposition a publicity coup. With each walk he has attracted more followers like a pied piper. Nganda, who was jailed for five days for taking part in a walk, said: "When you start a campaign you never know what the response will be. I didn't know we'd have any people following; nobody knew. Museveni's brutal reaction is what raised its profile beyond our expectations. It's dominating the media, the opposition, even Museveni himself." The 37-year-old said Ugandans would prove as determined as their north African counterparts. "I don't think when the Tunisians started they knew it would be the end of Ben Ali, or when the Egyptians started they knew they would get rid of Mubarak. Nobody can be sure what shape it will take in Uganda but we are going to continue until Museveni leaves." Besigye, 54, who was Museveni's doctor during the bush war against the former president Milton Obote, was detained again in Kampala on Thursday after police smashed their way into his vehicle and shot pepper spray into his eyes, potentially causing permanent damage to his sight. An hour earlier he had admitted he was hesitant to draw comparisons with Egypt and Tunisia. "The only parallel goes to the extent that people are discontented with what is going on and their governments are non-responsive," he said. "There is a loss of trust between the regime and the people. I think that is the only parallel I can see. How this popular discontent is channelled is always governed by the unique qualities of governments." Asked if he was prepared to die for the cause, Besigye said: "I am not setting out to become a martyr of anything. I am simply asserting my citizen's rights, which are inherent, which are not offered by the state and which I am determined to defend at all costs." Commodity prices could be the spark in a Ugandan tinderbox of resentment over corruption and neglected public services. Museveni has refused to copy neighbouring Kenya by cutting fuel taxes while his recent re-election campaign is estimated to have cost $350m (£210m) with a further $1.3m allotted to his inauguration ceremony, and the bill for new military fighter jets stands at $740m. Public anger was burning on a street where no car was safe from flying stones. Robert Mayanja, a self-described activist, said: "What they are doing now shows that Museveni rigged the last election. If you look at Uganda, why should we vote for him after 25 years? We have high prices, we have hospitals without medicine." Mayanja, 31, said a repeat of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia was "definitely" possible. "What we are seeing here are people who are not armed but are taking a stand against armed forces," he said. "People are ready. It's just a question of time. "We know they are going to arrest many people and put them in torture chambers. We know this regime has expired. These are the signs." In Ntinda district angry youths shouted and hurled stones and chunks of concrete at passing cars. On one corner a man ran up to a passing council vehicle and smashed the driver's window with a rock, raising cheers from onlookers. A teacher, who gave his name only as Nixon, 32, said he could not imagine an Egypt-like revolt in the short term. "But in the long term I believe it can happen," he said. "The military is still strong and many of the soldiers are unwilling to turn to the side of the people. But in time they might get tired of beating the people. "I really look forward to it. As your friends are beaten and arrested, the professionals need to come out and organise the people." A young population often seen as politically apathetic has reached unexpected levels of activism. People who used to bolt at the first whiff of teargas are losing their fear. But there are serious doubts over whether a critical mass of Ugandans have the will or the means to drive out a the president who retains a vice-like hold on the military and police. Rosebell Kagumire, a journalist blogging and tweeting the political crisis, said: "Most people on Twitter are anti-Museveni but there is not a firm opinion on what to do now. They don't expect him to go anywhere soon. He owns the army and his government won't stop at anything. "It's hard to get people to believe going to the streets will change anything, especially when they know the government is prepared to kill half of them. Ugandans have not reached that level yet." Museveni, whose election victory has been denounced as fraudulent, is confident he can avoid the fate of Arab leaders. "Nobody can take over power through an uprising," he said recently. "Whoever thinks like that, I pity such a person." His spokesman, Tamale Mirundi, added: "In Tunisia and Egypt democracy was lacking; in Uganda we elect our leaders at every level. The president organised and campaigned in transparent elections. Besigye cannot say he was cheated and that is why he is jumping on oil prices." Mirundi played down the power of the internet. "Go to the villages. How many people can access Facebook? Very few. Who knows Facebook? Very few. Facebook cannot create a politician in our country. Facebook cannot create a problem." Yet every day in Uganda, and elsewhere in Africa, new people are connecting and interacting for the first time. "Uganda is sitting on a time bomb," tweeted Richo Nuwagaba . "It's just a matter of time. I am scared." Uganda Protest Arab and Middle East unrest David Smith guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Activists claim Facebook page purge Posted: 29 Apr 2011 03:27 PM PDT Protest groups claim Facebook has taken down dozens of pages over the weekend in a purge of activists' accounts Facebook has removed dozens of profiles from its site, causing an outcry from campaigners trying to organise anti-austerity protests this weekend. The deactivated pages include UK Uncut, and pages created by students during last December's university occupations. A list posted on the Stop Facebook Purge group says Chesterfield Stop the Cuts, Tower Hamlet Greens, London Student Assembly, Southwark SoS and Bristol Uncut sites are no longer functioning. Administrators for the profiles say hundreds of links between activists have been broken in the run up to the May Day bank holiday. When users click on URL links the message "the page you requested was not found" now appears. Guy Aitchison, 26, an administrator for one of the non-functioning pages, said: "I woke up this morning to find that a lot of the groups we'd been using for anti cuts activity had disappeared. The timing of it seems suspicious, given a general political crackdown because of the wedding. It seems that dozens of other groups have also been affected, including some of the local UK Uncut groups." It is not yet known how many groups have been affected in total. A Facebook spokeswoman explained that the profiles were suspended because they had not been registered correctly and denied that the removal of pages was politically motivated or instigated by law enforcement concerns before the royal wedding. Facebook accounts that claim to represent individual people but are in fact groups or organisations contravene the company's "statement of rights and responsibilities". The company said a number accounts were suspended at the same time. Facebook uses technology to track relationships between groups and when one "fake" profile is found, pages that have links to it are also checked. This is done to maintain safety and security on the site and the removal of everything from fake celebrities to pages representing pets is a regular occurrence. The company did not confirm how many activist accounts had been deactivated on Friday morning. A spokeswoman for Facebook said activists would be contacted by email and told how to re-activate their accounts correctly. They said this would take several days. Jim Killock, 38 who runs the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for civil liberties on the net, said: "It's pretty flatfooted of Facebook to pull profiles without notifying users. Clearly, if you just take down sites without any warning, people are going to feel aggrieved, they're going to have activities disrupted and be unable to organise politically," he said. "It's a pretty bureaucratic move; it's almost impossible to know the difference between a profile and a page, so Facebook should have emailed people first and given them some notice. It's bizarre and upsetting and it's not a good way to treat their users," he said. Facebook UK Uncut Activism Shiv Malik guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Gaddafi troops captured in Tunisia Posted: 29 Apr 2011 05:16 PM PDT Attempt by Libya loyalist soldiers to retake a key crossing from rebel hands leads to border skirmish with Tunisian forces The Libyan civil war briefly spilled into Tunisia yesterday as the west of the country saw heavy fighting on two fronts and Nato reported that Muammar Gaddafi's forces were laying anti-shipping mines in the sea off Misrata. Pro-Gaddafi troops made incursions over the border into Tunisia in a battle to retake a key crossing from rebel hands, drawing condemnation from Tunis. Libyan soldiers were captured by Tunisian forces after firing indiscriminately in clashes that lasted about 90 minutes, according to reports. Witnesses said three Tunisians were injured. Any sign of the Libyan conflict stretching into Tunisa would have serious regional implications. "Given the gravity of what has happened … the Tunisian authorities have informed the Libyans of their extreme indignation and demand measures to put an immediate stop to these violations," the Tunisian foreign ministry said. Rebels later claimed the Wazin-Dehiba crossing was back in their hands. "Gaddafi forces are no longer in Dehiba. They were defeated," a witness named as Akram told the Associated Press. Control of the crossing has changed several times in the past 10 days. More than 30,000 refugees have flooded across the border since fighting intensified about three weeks ago, and it is a critical supply and escape route for the besieged opposition. The area is dominated by Berbers, who have suffered systematic repression under the Gaddafi regime. Nato said it was mounting air strikes against loyalist targets in two towns in the region, Zintan and Yafrin. It said its aircraft have destroyed a dozen tanks in the area this month. Heavy fighting in Misrata centred on the area around the airport, the last position held by Gaddafi's forces. The Libyan army continued shelling the port, the city's lifeline, as Nato said its warships had caught government naval forces trying to lay mines in the harbour. Brigadier Rob Weighill, the British director of Nato's Libyan operations, said his ships had intercepted small boats laying mines in the harbour, which is the only entry point for food and medical supplies into Misrata. "It again shows [Gaddafi's] complete disregard for international law and his willingness to attack humanitarian delivery efforts," Weighill said in Naples. Aid agencies have evacuated thousands of civilians and injured people from the port. Rebels have also brought in light weapons from eastern Libya by sea. After several days of low-intensity clashes in the city, rebels attacked early in the morning with automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. Government troops responded with missiles and tanks, setting fire to a shoe factory. "It's very difficult against tanks," said Rami Pengharpia, 21, a rebel fighter wounded in the back by shrapnel. "Only Nato can do something against them." On the western side of Misrata, where rebels have been slowly pushing Gaddafi's forces back along the road to Tripoli, there was close-quarter fighting near the satellite town of Zawiyat al-Mahjoub. Tanks fired at rebel positions, and into civilian areas. Mortars were also used. By mid-afternoon at least 15 rebel fighters and civilians had died, according to doctors in Misrata. Several dozen people were injured, including three young siblings, two boys and a girl, hurt after a shell fired by Gaddafi's forces struck their house. "Gaddafi knows that he cannot win in Misrata as long as Nato is flying above," said Dr Khalid Abu Falgha. "But he is still trying to kill as many people as he can by shelling indiscriminately." Khalifa al-Zwawi, the leader of the rebellion in Misrata, made an urgent plea to the international community for weapons that would allow his fighters not just to defend the besieged city, but to topple Gaddafi. "The most important thing for us now is arms. We need weapons that are suitable to take on Gaddafi," he said. The Libyan government said it was offering a "general pardon to all armed individuals in Misrata". Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said: "If they surrender … directly to the relevant authorities or tribal leaders, they will be forgiven and reintegrated into society. We do not have a spirit of revenge." He acknowledged that the regime was still holding "hundreds" of opposition activists. Human rights groups have said they believe that tens of thousands of protesters have "disappeared". Among the targets hit during the aerial onslaught were 220 tanks and armoured personnel carriers, 200 ammunition facilities and 70 surface-to-air missile systems. Libya Muammar Gaddafi Tunisia Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Harriet Sherwood Xan Rice guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Briton killed in Morocco bomb attack Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:40 PM PDT Peter Moss, a British travel writer, was among 16 victims of a remote-controlled nail bomb explosion at a busy tourist cafe A British travel writer and novelist has been named among the 16 victims of a terrorist bomb explosion at a busy tourist cafe in Marrakech. Peter Moss, 59, was at the Argana cafe in the popular Jamaa el-Fnaa square when a remote-controlled nail bomb was detonated at lunchtime. A video released before the attack by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb reportedly claimed responsibility, with terrorism experts saying the group was one of several likely candidates. Moss, a father-of-two, was a writer, broadcaster and comedian, who had earned praise for several screenplays and novels including The Singing Tree and The Age of Elephants. At the British Press Awards in 2004, while working for the Jewish Chronicle, he was celebrated as "one of the country's finest travel writers, with an unmatched eye for detail". Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt said: "While we do not yet know the exact cause of the blast, reports from the Moroccan authorities are that this may have been a result of terrorism. An act of this kind, causing the death of 16 innocent people, is cruel and wrong, and I condemn it in the strongest terms." As investigations continued into the blast, the country's deadliest for eight years, Moroccan authorities said the bomb had been packed with nails and set off remotely and not by a suicide bomber. Jamaa el-Fnaa square, next to the city's historic market area, draws crowds of tourists with its snake charmers, fire-eaters and tooth pullers. Most of the dead were foreign nationals – including French, Dutch and Canadian tourists – and at least 23 others were injured by the explosion. British ambassador Tim Morris has travelled to Marrakech to bolster the UK team dealing with the aftermath and Interpol has described the attack as "senseless and deplorable". While police from both Morocco and Spain could be seen working in the wreckage, friends and family of the victims gathered at the city's Ibn Tofail hospital. Mouhou Rachid, a cafe worker, said at least one of his co-workers had died and another was in hospital with serious injuries. "The explosion was terrible. When I recovered consciousness I saw people picking up victims. My friend has injuries in the stomach, face and head." Israel's foreign ministry said two of the victims, a man and a woman, were Jews living in Shanghai and that the woman apparently had Israeli citizenship. The attack is the deadliest in Morocco since 12 suicide bombers killed 33 people in co-ordinated strikes in Casablanca in 2003. The latest attack was a blow to Morocco's most important tourist city. Tourism is Morocco's biggest source of foreign currency and the second biggest employer after agriculture. "We are going to work very hard so that this does not have an impact on tourism in Marrakesh," said Salaheddine Mezouar, the finance minister."To go to a country as a tourist and return dead is a terrible thing." Fernando Reinares, a terrorism expert at Spain's Royal Elcano Institute, told RNE radio there were few doubts that jihadists were behind the attack. "Morocco and its monarchy are a target for al-Qaida and for the north African groups that have been associated with al-Qaida." The attack adds to the challenges facing Morocco's ruler, King Mohammed VI, as he tries to prevent the uprisings in the Arab world from reaching his normally stable kingdom. He recently pardoned a raft of political prisoners, including some alleged militant Islamists. The monarch has promised to reform the constitution to placate pro-democracy protesters. But more protests are planned for Sunday. Morocco Global terrorism Damien Pearse Giles Tremlett guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Syrians protest as unrest spreads Posted: 29 Apr 2011 11:54 AM PDT • At least 42 people killed, many in Deraa • UN approves inquiry into government violence Thousands of Syrians defied their government's bloody attempts to suppress protests, braving gunfire from security forces to demonstrate in Damascus and across the country. At least 42 people were killed, most of them in the opposition stronghold of Deraa, where villagers tried to break through the security cordon to relieve its besieged population. Further deaths were reported in Latakia and Homs after the security forces opened fire on demonstrators. There was news of protests in 50 towns and villages including Hama, Aleppo, the coastal cities of Latakia and Banias, Deir Ezzor in the east, and Qamishli in the north-east. Unrest was also reported on the Syria-Jordan border, which is straddled by the Haurani tribes. Despite the government crackdown, the demonstrations, many starting as Friday worshippers left mosques, appeared to be at least as big as last week. Even more significantly, activists said, the protests spread closer to the centre of Damascus. Demonstrators in the neighbourhoods of Barzeh, Midan, Bab Srejeh and Hajr al-Aswad faced security forces backed by soldiers for the first time. Two witnesses in Midan told the Guardian that a crowd of 4,000 protesters who came out of Zain al-Abideen and Hassan mosques were dispersed by teargas and security forces with batons. "I counted 17 buses of security," said one, who asked not to be named. Another said teargas and sound bombs were used, and the street to the main hospital was closed. He said shabiha (gangs connected to the ruling family) were terrorising the neighbourhood long after the demonstration was dispersed. Meanwhile, the international community stepped up its pressure on Damascus. The UN human rights council in Geneva approved an investigation into the Syrian use of violence against protesters, and called for the immediate release of political prisoners and the lifting of restrictions on the press and the internet. The US-drafted resolution passed despite the resistance of Russia, China and some Arab and African countries. However, it was watered down to omit mention of Syria's currently unopposed candidacy to join the council itself. The UK envoy to the council, Peter Gooderham, said there could be "no impunity" for those who have committed human rights violations. "Those in power can see violations being committed in their name," he said. "They are accountable, too, for the violence and the deaths, even more so if they do nothing to stop these actions." Last night, the US imposed sanctions on Syria's intelligence agency and two relatives of President Bashar al-Assad in Washington's first concrete steps in response to the crackdown. Assad, Syria's long-serving ruler, was not among those targeted under an order signed by President Obama, but he could be named soon if violence by government forces against democracy protesters continued, a senior US official said. "The sanctions that were announced today are intended to show the Syrian government that its behaviour and actions are going to be held to account," the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, told reporters. Sanctions for alleged human rights abuses were imposed against Maher al-Assad, Bashar's brother, and Atif Najib, his cousin, together with Syria's General Intelligence Directorate and its chief. Iran's Revolutionary Guard, accused of helping Syria's crackdown, was also targeted. EU officials also debated similar sanctions in Brussels, but these will not come into force until a ministerial meeting which may not take place for weeks. Next month Damascus could come under pressure from another direction. Western diplomats say Yukiya Amano, director general of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, will state that Syria had been developing a nuclear reactor at a desert site bombed by Israel in 2007. Syria has denied western allegations that the Dair Alzour site was intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Until now, the IAEA has sought more information before making a judgment, but has been blocked by the Syrian government. If Amano declares Dair Alzour was in fact such a reactor, it could lead to Syria being referred to the UN security council for scrutiny of its nuclear ambitions. Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Bashar Al-Assad United Nations Middle East Human rights Julian Borger guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Nasa delays Endeavour's final voyage Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:04 PM PDT Technical fault in the power unit derails launch during countdown to liftoff The penultimate space shuttle launch was postponed on Friday because of mechanical problems, dashing the hopes of the biggest crowd of spectators in years, including the mission commander's wife, Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt earlier this year. Nasa hopes to try again to send space shuttle Endeavour on its final voyage on Monday. President Barack Obama and his family visited Kennedy Space Centre anyway and met Giffords, who is recovering from a gunshot wound to the head and has been in Cape Canaveral since Wednesday to attend her husband's launch. The White House said Obama saw Giffords for about 10 minutes before meeting the shuttle's crew. Giffords has not been seen publicly since the assassination attempt on 8 January, and left her Houston rehabilitation hospital for the first time to travel to Florida. It was not immediately known whether she would stay for the next attempt, or return to Houston. She had been expected to watch the liftoff in private – as were the other astronauts' families. "Bummed about the scrub!! But important to make sure everything on shuttle is working properly," her staff said via Twitter. Endeavour was fuelled and the six astronauts were heading to the launchpad when the countdown was halted about three and a half hours before the liftoff, at 3.47pm local time. Nasa's silver-coloured astrovan did a U-turn at the launch control centre and returned the crew to quarters. It would have been the first time in Nasa history that a sitting president and his family witnessed a launch. As a consolation, Obama and his family got an up-close look at Atlantis. It will make the last shuttle flight this summer as Nasa winds up the 30-year programme and retires the fleet to museums. The president and his wife met briefly with Endeavour's crew. Obama told the crew he was hoping to get back to Florida for a shuttle launch. "One more chance, we may be able to get down here," he said. Launch director Mike Leinbach said the next launch attempt for Endeavour would be Monday at the earliest – and hinted at an even longer delay. Technicians will have to crawl into the shuttle's engine compartment to track a suspected electrical short circuit in a power distribution box. As many as 700,000 spectators had been expected to visit the area around the launch site. Endeavour's upcoming mission to the International Space Station is the last in its 19-year history. It will deliver a $2bn physics experiment. The shuttle – the youngest in the fleet – was built to replace Challenger, destroyed during liftoff in 1986, and made its maiden voyage in 1992. The space shuttle Space Nasa United States guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

N Ireland faces another bomb alert Posted: 29 Apr 2011 07:50 AM PDT Partially exploded bomb found on ground under van in County Derry An incendiary bomb has been removed by army technical officers in County Derry, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has confirmed. The security alert occurred in Maghera in the early hours of Friday morning, the PSNI said. The bomb, which was put on the ground under a van in the Willow Glynn area, partially exploded at around 3am. The device was reported when it was discovered by the vehicle's owner at 8am, police said. A PSNI spokesman said they believe the device was left in the area sometime between midnight and 3am. Local councillor Kate Lagan said she was shocked by the blast: "This is a quiet estate, full of young families and children on their bicycles and this device could have caused tragic consequences. "I have no idea why it was left here, but it doesn't matter who it was meant for, a person could now be dead. "I think it's ridiculous and it makes me very angry." The technical officers have examined the bomb and removed it for further examination. Northern Ireland UK security and terrorism Henry McDonald guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Obama vows swift post-tornado aid Posted: 29 Apr 2011 09:43 AM PDT President visits wrecked university town of Tuscaloosa in Alabama, the worst hit of seven states where 210 people died Barack Obama travelled to tornado-ravaged Alabama on Friday as the authorities struggled to deal with the aftermath of a disaster that killed more than 300 people and wiped an entire neighbourhood off the map. "I've never seen devastation likes this," Obama said as he toured destroyed neighbourhoods in the university town of Tuscaloosa with his wife, Michelle. Two-thirds of those killed in Wednesday's historic storms were in Alabama and Tuscaloosa was among the worst-hit towns. The president announced immediate federal government aid to the state and on Friday he repeated the pledge, telling locals: "We're going to make sure you're not forgotten." As he has during other moments of crisis, Obama tried to use his visit as a healing moment. "What's amazing is when something like this happens folks forget all their petty differences," he said, after meeting the state's governor, Robert Bentley. "When we're confronted by the awesome power of nature and reminded that all we have is each other." News reports described a muted response to the presidential visit from locals more focused on trying to reassemble their lives. But state and local officials warned they faced shortages in everything, including bodybags. Officials in some areas said they were still struggling to describe the enormity of the destruction. "I would classify it as a nightmare," Tuscaloosa's mayor, Walter Maddox, said in a radio interview. At least 38 people were killed in the town, and 900 more were injured. Thousands have been left homeless, and television reports described people wandering the devastated streets pushing their few salvaged belongings in shopping carts. A million homes and businesses in Alabama were without power on Friday. Long lines began forming outside petrol stations, which were forced to operate on generator power. In some towns, the only grocery store had been destroyed. Tuscaloosa lost its entire emergency department. Schools and other buildings were destroyed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it had received 200 reports of tornadoes. The historic storm system – the deadliest since 1974 – swept across six southern states. Some of the tornadoes were a mile-wide and stayed on the ground longer than typical systems, the national weather service reported. At least one, which touched down in Smithville, Mississippi, had winds of 205mph, the weather service said. Alabama was singled out for the worst punishment but deaths and heavy destruction were also reported in Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia. In Tuscaloosa, residents described homes lifted clear of their foundations by tornados, which stretched more than a mile wide, and travelled at speeds of up to 200mph. "This is massive," Maddox said. Officials in several small towns warned resources were being stretched dangerously thin. In Hackleburg, a town of 1,500 that recorded 27 dead in the storms, officials told the Associated Press there were shortages of bodybags, portable showers, tents, and flashlights. There were also concerns for security. The authorities in Tuscaloosa have declared a night curfew, and there was a report of looting from a demolished jeans manufacturing plant. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP Natural disasters and extreme weather Alabama Barack Obama United States Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Manning 'competent' to stand trial Posted: 29 Apr 2011 10:44 AM PDT Intelligence analyst suspected of passing government secrets to WikiLeaks has undergone a medical and mental evaluation The intelligence analyst suspected of illegally passing government secrets to the WikiLeaks website has been found competent to stand trial, the U.S. Army has said. Spokesman Gary Tallman says a panel of experts completed its medical and mental evaluation of Bradley Manning on April 22, and had informed Army officials of the conclusion. Tallman says no date has been set yet for the initial court hearing, and added that the evaluation board's findings "have no bearing on the guilt, innocence, or any potential defences of the accused." Manning's case is under the jurisdiction of the Army's Military District of Washington. The Army private is suspected of obtaining hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive documents while serving in Iraq and providing them to the website. He faces about two dozen charges, including aiding the enemy, that can bring the death penalty or life in prison. Manning was transferred from a Marine Corps prison near Washington last week to a new facility in the Midwest state of Kansas. He passed the lengthy physical and psychiatric evaluation given to new inmates there and received final clearance Thursday to live alongside other inmates, according to the facility's commander Lt. Col. Dawn Hilton. He had been held at the Marine prison for the eight months after his arrest, and the conditions of his incarceration triggered protests and international inquiries. At that prison, Manning had to surrender his clothes at night and was required to wear a military-issued, suicide-prevention smock. Manning's attorney and supporters said that was unnecessary and argued his living conditions, including his isolation from other inmates, were inhumane. Pentagon officials consistently said he was being held under appropriate conditions given the seriousness of the charges against him. Bradley Manning US military WikiLeaks United States guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

'Al-Qaida members' held in Germany Posted: 29 Apr 2011 09:14 AM PDT Three men of Moroccan origin posed 'concrete and imminent danger' to country, according to officials German police on Friday arrested three suspected al-Qaida members who officials say posed a "concrete and imminent danger" to the nation. Authorities did not say whether the three had planned specific targets and offered few details, but security officials said that all three suspects were of Moroccan origin. They also said that two were arrested were in the western German city of Duesseldorf and one in nearby Bochum. The arrests were based on suspicion they were planning a terror attack, they said. Local media reported that officers had seized large amounts of explosives when the three were arrested. The arrests "succeeded in averting a concrete and imminent danger, presented by international terrorism," German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said in a statement. They showed "Germany remains a target of international terrorists." Germany has escaped any large-scale attack by an Islamic terror organisation, such as the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the London underground attacks of 2005. But Germany's presence as part of the Nato coalition in Afghanistan has sparked anger and at least two major plots have been thwarted or failed in Germany before they could be carried out. The suspects had been under surveillance since November when Germany increased security across the country in response to heightened terror threat warnings in Europe, but authorities only had enough evidence to launch an official criminal investigation starting 15 April, Friedrich said in a statement. Federal prosecutors said earlier that they had ordered federal police to arrest the trio, but gave no further information about the timing or location of the arrests. Officials were planning a news conference for Saturday. A US official speaking on condition of anonymity said a team picked up three people in a raid on suspicion they were planning an attack with explosives. "Our concerns about threats in Europe had a number of different threads and strands, some of which have been disrupted by good intelligence and law enforcement work by the relevant services," another US official said. "There have been five disrupted plots in Europe during the past four years including a credible plot in Germany in 2007 all of which demonstrate Pakistan-based al-Qaida's steadfast intent to attack the US and our allies." Duesseldorf, a city of 600,000, has one of the largest Moroccan immigrant communities in Germany. It is to host the Eurovision Song Contest on 14 May, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of spectators. Prosecutors said the three alleged terrorists would be brought before a judge Saturday who will decide whether they are to remain in detention pending a trial. Germany raised its security posture in November after receiving information from its own and foreign intelligence services that led authorities to believe a sleeper cell of some 20 to 25 people may have been planning an attack inside the country or in another European nation. Germany Europe Global terrorism guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Mubenga death: UN may investigate Posted: 29 Apr 2011 09:14 AM PDT Campaigners are pressing for an examination of Jimmy Mubenga's death during removal on Heathrow flight The United Nations special rapporteur on torture is being asked to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of an Angolan man who collapsed while being deported on a commercial flight from Heathrow. Campaigners are sending a file on Jimmy Mubenga to the UN and each member of the Commons home affairs select committee, calling for a comprehensive review of the way people are deported from the UK. Deborah Coles, of the Inquest charity, said: "Given the profound human rights issues that this case raises we felt we needed to put pressure not only on parliament but also on the UN so that these issues are examined properly by the state and international human rights mechanisms to ensure enforceable and accountable learning." Mubenga collapsed and died as he was being deported on a commercial flight from Heathrow in October. Passengers told police they saw three G4S security guards heavily restraining Mubenga, who they said had been complaining of breathing difficulties before he collapsed. The guards were later arrested in connection with the death and have been bailed until 4 May. However, campaigners fear any legal process could take months or even years to complete and warn that there needs to be a comprehensive review of UK deportations to prevent a further tragedy. Mubenga's wife, Adrienne Makenda Kambana, who lives in east London with the couple's five children, said she was supporting the move. "Jimmy was a loving and caring father and husband. My children and I don't understand why he was being deported ... We don't want this to happen to anyone else. We want to know how and why this happened to Jimmy. Why did he die?" The file is being sent to UN special rapporteurs on extra-judicial summary executions, torture and contemporary forms of racism as well as the Council of Europe's committee on the prevention of torture. Coles said: "The legal processes underway will mean that the systemic issues raised by this death will not be dealt with in a comprehensive or holistic way for a very long time thus frustrating the learning process and the risk of further deaths." Earlier this year four G4S whistleblowers submitted evidence to the home affairs committee, obtained by the Guardian, that alleged serious failings by G4S. It also contradicted some of what senior G4S officials told MPs at a hearing after Mubenga's death. Police have interviewed three of the whistleblowers who included a G4S charter operations manager who said he warned seniors they risked "playing russian roulette with detainees' lives". Detectives are also seeking to track down other individuals from G4S known to have concerns about safety standards and training at the company. Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who chairs the home affairs committee, said the possibility that whistleblower evidence could assist the police investigation represented progress. The committee has yet to decide whether to recall the G4S officials or hold further evidence sessions. Immigration and asylum United Nations Jimmy Mubenga G4S Keith Vaz Matthew Taylor Paul Lewis guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Rabbit battery farms to return to UK Posted: 29 Apr 2011 05:14 AM PDT Local and welfare concerns over planning applications lodged for first intensive rabbit farms since 1990s, Guardian can reveal Planning applications for at least six rabbit battery farms have been lodged with local authorities across the UK. The intensive farms, which would be the first for rabbits in the country in 15 years, have been proposed at sites from Nottinghamshire to Cornwall. Each facility would house up to 1,100 animals in wire cages stacked three high in windowless barns. The rabbits would be sent to slaughter for their meat at 12 weeks old. The developer, Philip Kerry of T&S Nurseries in Grantham, Lincolnshire, told the Guardian that the farms would be "very green and very sustainable". He said: "The environment will be light and airy, with lots of space in there, and the cages are 18% bigger than required [by law]. And we hope to retire the does after four to five years and give them away as pets, if there is the demand." The decision on three Nottinghamshire planning applications are imminent, in Fiskerton, Granby and East Bridgford. A proposal for a site near Truro, Cornwall, was refused after the parish council objected and another at Barnack, Cambridgeshire, was also rejected, on the grounds that it would lead to the loss of agricultural land. The outcome of an application for a farm at Gresham in Norfolk appears to have been withdrawn. Kerry claimed he had already had three applications for rabbit battery farms granted, but refused to divulge where, saying: "I don't want to be unpopular everywhere." The plans come amid controversies over other large intensive farms for pigs and cows. An application for a "mega farm" housing up to 25,000 pigs near Foston, Derbyshire, has been resubmitted to the county council after being withdrawn from the district council in January. The firm, Midland Pigs Producers, had used lawyers Carter-Ruck to threaten libel proceedings over an objection lodged by the organic farming trade body the Soil Association. In February, a proposal for a Lincolnshire "super dairy" housing nearly 4,000 cows was withdrawn after objections from the Environment Agency and 1,600 objections lodged with local planners. Michele Danan, at the campaigners Compassion in World Farming, said: "It's time for us to be banning these cruel systems, not to be introducing them. I don't think that the public will be in favour when they learn that this friendly and inquisitive animal, regarded by many as … furry pets, is going to be deprived of their basic rights – to be free from pain or mental suffering." Some local people have concerns about increased traffic and disposal of waste. "I don't think there's any need, and it's not kind," said Tracy Annable, who lives a couple of hundred metres from one proposed farm in Fiskerton. "They are moving away from battery farming in chickens, so it seems like a retrograde step." The proposed rabbit farms would be the first in Britain for at least 15 years. Previous farms closed down, undercut by foreign rabbit farms with lower welfare standards, particularly in eastern Europe. What has changed, according to Kerry, is the ability to produce lower cost feed. The facilities would include a hydroponic pond in which barley grass would be grown, providing 60% of the rabbits' diet. Grain would provide the rest, and Kerry said his company would mill its own dry feed, saving more money. Each battery farm would contain 280 cages, containing 250 does and 30 bucks. The doe would share the 110cm by 60cm cage with her seven to nine kittens until they were five weeks old. At that point, said Kerry, the young rabbits would be housed on the floor of the barn with access to an outdoor run measuring three by nine metres. The does would remain in the cages and be "retired" at four to five years old, when their productivity dropped. Kerry said 3,000 tonnes of rabbit meat was eaten each year in Britain, virtually all of it imported. Most of his rabbits would be New Zealand whites, bred for meat, but some angora rabbits would be kept for their fur. Kerry argued that, per kg of meat, rabbits consumed much less grain than cattle. Danan said the cages were too small to allow the rabbits to move around normally by hopping or running or to get any meaningful exercise. Bare wire floors, she added, led to painful sores on the footpads and hocks of the animals and a barren environment could lead to rabbits developing abnormal behaviour – such as excessive grooming and in the worst cases, cannibalism. "Our information shows that in these intensive systems, rabbits can be so starved of any stimulation, that out of sheer frustration they eat each others' ears – not an image many of us would want to have in our heads when eating a stew or wearing an angora jumper," said Danan. The land on which planning permission is being sought for the farms is owned by a firm called BCH UK Ltd, which is listed at Companies House as a development and real estate business, and is owned by Kerry. He said he had not kept livestock before, but wanted to find an additional use for the horticultural nurseries and vineyards run by T&S Nurseries. That company, named on the planning applications, was dissolved in September 2010. Farming Animal welfare The meat industry Animals Planning policy Local government Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fame, therapy and not fitting in Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:04 PM PDT One minute Jesse Eisenberg was a small-time actor in indie movies, the next he was starring in the film that defined a decade. He talks about life after The Social Network and why he'll never be comfortable with success From a certain perspective, Jesse Eisenberg's acting career resembles a darkly ironic cosmic joke, with Eisenberg as the victim. The story goes like this: you are a shy and awkward child, deeply uncomfortable in your skin. Then, one day, you discover acting, which you find "enormously comforting". Performing a prescribed role soothes your paralysing self-consciousness; hiding inside a character, you get the attention you crave, minus the deer-in-the-headlights panic of trying to "be yourself". Unsurprisingly, you prove particularly good at portraying fiercely intelligent but emotionally semi-detached geeks, angry at the self-assured world from which they, like you, feel excluded. You do it so well that eventually, at 27, you're cast in one of the highest-profile Hollywood movies of recent years, starring as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for which you bag an Oscar nomination and justified critical acclaim. Which means that half your life, these days, is spent doing precisely what you'd fled into acting to avoid: being paraded around the movie-publicity circuit, not in character but as Jesse Eisenberg, put on the spot by talkshow hosts, stopped in the street by admiring fans and hassled by gaggles of journalists demanding that you tell them about yourself. No wonder you wear your hair in thick, curly clumps, almost down to your eyes: it's the only protection you've got left. Not that Eisenberg is moaning about his situation. Arriving at a coffee shop near Grand Central station in New York, bike helmet in hand, he is on the contrary unfailingly courteous, posing patiently for photos with customers. ("Thank you, thanks for coming, thanks for doing this, thanks," he says to me as we sit down. This is supposed to be my line.) He is, of course, self-conscious about being so self-conscious, and so quickly grows uneasy talking about how much more he gets recognised in public since playing Zuckerberg: "Complaining about it is obnoxious, because it's the problems of the rich, you know, isn't it?" But it's clear he's deeply uneasy. "The thing I find most alarming," he concedes under questioning, "is that I've only been famous for three months, but it's been the three months [in which] anybody who didn't have a camera on their telephone before, now they do. So, in the subway, I'll turn around and see someone holding their cellphone up or their iPad and surreptitiously taking a picture of me, and it sort of feels... I mean, not to self-aggrandise, but it sort of feels like an attack. It's jarring." His eyes dart beneath his fringe. This is the final twist in the cosmic joke: Zuckerberg and Facebook may or may not be destroying our privacy, but The Social Network – which is in large part a meditation on that question – certainly seems to have ruined Jesse Eisenberg's. It's a testament to Eisenberg's talent that so many of the characters he plays are of a piece, yet he never radiates the tedious Hollywood sense that he's just playing himself, or that he's a one-trick pony. His roles as the frustrated virgin Nick in 2002's Roger Dodger and as Walt, the furious and defensively contemptuous child of divorcing Brooklyn bohemians in 2005's The Squid And The Whale, seem in hindsight like logical forerunners of his portrayal of Zuckerberg, who channels similar resentments into billionairehood. (He also starred in two well-received 2009 comedies, Zombieland and Adventureland.) Eisenberg would probably sooner die than express the view that he ought to have walked away with Best Actor for his compelling performance in The Social Network, which manages to portray the Facebook founder as simultaneously intensely dislikable yet oddly heroic. But come on: in the absence of Oscar-bait period drama about a lovable British monarch, he surely would have done. Following a brief detour to voice the part of a (geeky) pet macaw in the animated movie Rio, he can be seen next in the UK in Holy Rollers, directed by Kevin Asch, the true story of Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn lured into an Israeli ecstasy-smuggling ring in the late 1990s. Made before The Social Network, it's both less laugh-out-loud funny, and more engrossing, than its unpromising title suggests. Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a 20-year-old whose naivety – at first, he thinks he's couriering medicine – makes him an easy target for smugglers who rightly predict that devout-looking men in black hats, long black coats and sidelocks are unlikely to be bothered by customs agents. The barriers that separate the youthful Hasidim from the New York that surrounds them aren't so different from those that separate Zuckerberg from Harvard's preppy elite. "It's different cosmetically, of course," Eisenberg says, "but it's still just a question of trying to bring some emotional realism to a character that's living in a very isolated world." To research the role, he made multiple visits to Hasidic schools, and was given the barmitzvah that was absent from his secular Jewish upbringing. The seemingly isolated sect proved surprisingly welcoming. "They'd talk to me for hours and hours, and almost never question why I was there. One guy did ask, and I told him I was doing a role in a play – I thought if I said 'movie' it would lead to too many other questions – and he was, like, 'Oh. OK.' And that was it." One might have assumed that someone as ill at ease in interviews as Eisenberg would clam up when asked to talk about himself; in fact, though, his dislike of such questions seems based more on the fact that he can't help but answer them candidly, in long, endlessly detouring flights of introspection. This isn't a matter of shtick; it's all real. Compliments seem genuinely to pain him ("The more people say nice things about me, the more I feel it's false," he told one interviewer). Being recognised in the street alarms him (though it has its upsides: "It makes you not want to do stupid movies, because you end up having to talk to people who like stupid movies," he has said). Success depresses him ("If you look at the movies that come out, most of them are bad, so it's not as if achieving some level of success means you get offered better roles, because frankly they don't seem to exist"); appearing on TV chatshows makes him paranoid ("I tend to feel I'm being mocked in some way"). He writes plays, with roles for himself, and there are plans to produce one of them in New York soon, but he worries that his writing might be rubbish and that nobody is willing to tell him. Getting all this off his chest confers little relief, however, because then he just feels self-indulgent. When I point out that journalists, at any rate, prefer candid interviewees over hyper-controlled actors determined to give nothing away, he looks stricken. "But don't you think that's a good thing – saying less? Don't you think it's healthier than, you know, constantly revealing your deep fears? I mean, there's something almost more obnoxious in what I'm doing, isn't there, as though the world needs to hear all about my Jungian theories of myself? Right? I mean, wouldn't it be more respectful for me to say, 'This movie's so great! We're so excited that it's coming out in England'? Wouldn't it?" Close family ties – plus the services of two therapists – are what seem to keep Eisenberg from drifting unrescuably into a vortex of anxiety and self-doubt. He was born in Queens, and his parents still live in New York; his younger sister Hallie, also an actor, appears in Holy Rollers. When we meet, he's en route to his weekly visit to his 99-year-old aunt, who lives uptown. His father teaches sociology in Brooklyn, and, unlike when he was a teenager, Eisenberg is now unembarrassed to discuss the fact that for two decades his mother worked as a children's party clown. "She didn't do my parties," he clarifies hastily. "That would have been strange. What she would do would be to barter with a local magician, so she'd do the magician's kids' parties for free. Although the magician cost a little more, so we had to give him a pie as well. To make it an equal transaction. "Anyway, as you might imagine, she's very supportive of the arts. A lot of the things I do are so ridiculous, but not at all compared with what she's done. So that's nice... she knows what it's like to put yourself out there and make yourself vulnerable in order to entertain." Eisenberg now lives in Chelsea with his girlfriend Anna – a 33-year-old executive at an arts education organisation who surpasses even him in publicity-shyness – in what he describes as "a very small apartment with no internal doors". They share it with a changing selection of troubled foster cats. (Eisenberg once said, presumably not entirely in jest, that he fosters new cats in proportion to how guilty or self-loathing he feels about each new professional success.) "Shanti has a neurological disorder," he says, describing the current residents, "and Snow Leopard has some kind of childhood trauma where he doesn't leave the closet. But they're so lovely. My job is a strange one, with no routine, so it's nice to have some kind of responsibility, even if it just means filling up two bowls." Given Eisenberg's neurotic candour, it comes as something less than an enormous shock to learn that one of his next roles – after the crime caper 30 Minutes Or Less, due for US release this summer – is rumoured to be in Woody Allen's next movie, alongside Ellen Page, Alec Baldwin and Penélope Cruz. "The way he makes movies is so secretive, I'm not sure what the official status of that is," Eisenberg says. "But, yes, I am aware of it." Speaking of Page, the star of Juno, it turns out there is at least one identifiable upside to Eisenberg's new-found profile: he doesn't get mistaken for Michael Cera so much as he once did. "I guess, you know, I was in something that became part of the popular consciousness. So now," he adds, gnomically, "people mistake me for myself." He is, he insists, less anxious than he once was. "I know some amazing actors who are not mortified every moment of the day," he says, hopefully, "so my feeling is that maybe you don't have to be a wreck to be good." But does he ever worry that successful therapy, or just growing older, might cause his anxieties to subside to such a point that he's no longer a virtuoso of on-screen awkwardness, too serene and comfortable with himself to portray discomfort and isolation so well? A flicker of a grin: "My therapist says I'm never going to get to that point, so I don't think it's going to be a problem." And shortly thereafter he's back on the street, helmet strapped on, and launching himself off into the 42nd Street traffic, weaving perilously between cars and taxis, taking facefuls of exhaust fumes from buses – just another anonymous Manhattan cyclist, which is almost certainly exactly the way he prefers it. Jesse Eisenberg Oliver Burkeman guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Spice Odyssey Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:02 PM PDT One family holiday was enough to leave our resident chef well and truly hooked on his very own spice odyssey Few temptations could winkle me out of my own corner of England during a warm spring or hot summer. For one thing, the exquisite tyranny of the fruit and veg plot demands so much of my time (I give it willingly, of course). And for another, I happen to think there are few more beautiful places on earth. Try me in January or February, though, and I'm not waving my union flag quite so enthusiastically. In fact, I'm easily lured away by the romantic notion of tropical heat. And tropical fruits (in the widest sense of the word). This winter, we spent some time in Sri Lanka doing a bit of diving, plenty of fishing and some very memorable eating. This fertile island off the tip of India is home to some very fine foods – abundant fish, fragrant rice, spicy curries, a host of pickles, chutneys and sambals. And those fruits: mangoes, papayas, custard apples, jackfruit and the most luscious pineapples. And a dozen types of banana, including short, fat, lemony ones that I couldn't get enough of. Centuries of trade and colonisation have left their mark on the island's dining tables. An important stopping-off point on the east-west trade routes, its spices such as cinnamon, cloves and pepper were highly prized bounty. In return, it's believed the Arabs brought with them saffron, coffee and rosewater. The Portuguese – who colonised what was then Ceylon in the 16th century – introduced chillies, an ingredient for which anyone who has experienced the fierce, searing yet fragrant heat of many Sri Lankan dishes is inordinately grateful, even a little tearful. During my time on the island, I was seduced by the variety, colour and intensely aromatic punch of the meals we enjoyed every day. My perennial, go-to flavour favourites of garlic, ginger and chilli were joined by lemon grass, turmeric, cardamom, curry leaves and fenugreek. Eye-watering heat was tempered with sweet and cooling coconut milk and freshened with lime juice. And on the coconut milk front, I make no apology for the fact that all today's recipes contain coconut in some form, no more than I would if I gave you three European recipes that featured chicken stock. A dash of coconut milk is used to finish so many Sri Lankan dishes, it would seem contrived to try to omit it. So I returned home determined to reignite my passion for the spice drawer, tossing out anything that had hung around for too long and stocking up on spanking new flavours. Many of the ingredients I'm using today are widely available, but if you have a problem tracking them down, try steenbergs.co.uk for mail-order. And you can always have a go at growing your own lemon grass, coriander and chillies – they're all easy to cultivate in containers, even if you don't have a large garden. So this spring I'm getting exotic with the local and the home-grown, spicing up my greens from the garden with Sri Lankan flavours, tossing them with homemade curry powder, finishing them with a dash of coconut milk and dishing them up with improvised sambals. It's not an exercise in authenticity by any means, but by goodness it's delicious. Spring onions and greens with coconut milk A quick, simple side dish that you can vary according to the seasons – it's good now with spring onions and spring greens; later in the year, try it with leeks and kale or cabbage. Serves six. 2 tbsp groundnut oil 3 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced 2-3 bundles spring onions, trimmed and cut on a diagonal into 4cm slices 250g spring greens, shredded 1 tsp curry powder or curry paste 200ml coconut milk Salt and freshly ground black pepper Warm the oil in a large frying pan over a medium-low heat, then sweat the garlic for a couple of minutes, being careful not to let it burn. Add the onions and sauté for a couple of minutes, then add the greens and sweat down for three minutes or so, until wilted but still slightly crunchy. Stir in the curry powder or paste, then add the coconut milk and simmer for five minutes. Season to taste and serve immediately. Bream curry It may seem a bit of a fiddle to make your own curry powder, but it's easy and very satisfying. The quantities here will make more than you'll need, but it keeps well, sealed in a jar in a cool, dark place, for a month or so. Use it in curries, certainly, but it's also good sprinkled over vegetables such as cubed aubergines or squash before roasting. Serves six. For the curry powder 3 tbsp desiccated coconut 1 tbsp black peppercorns ½ tbsp fenugreek seeds 2 tbsp cumin seeds 2 tbsp fennel seeds 2 tbsp coriander seeds 10 curry leaves For the fish 400ml coconut milk 2-3 fresh green chillies, roughly chopped 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced ½ small cinnamon stick ½ tsp fenugreek, soaked in water for 15-30 minutes 10-12 fresh curry leaves 1 lemon grass stalk, white part only, thinly sliced 1 small onion, peeled and grated or very finely chopped 1 tbsp Sri Lankan curry powder (or any good curry powder) ½ tsp ground turmeric Good pinch soft light brown sugar 700g bream or gurnard fillets To finish Juice of a lime, a handful of coriander leaves, steamed rice First make the curry powder. In a small frying pan, dry fry the coconut until lightly browned, then set aside. Gently dry-fry the rest of the ingredients for four minutes, until fragrant. Tip the lot into a spice grinder or clean coffee mill (clean it by grinding a few cubes of stale bread, then tipping out the crumbs), then grind into a fine powder. Pour the coconut milk and 250ml water into a large, wide saucepan along with everything but the bream. Bring to a simmer, and cook, stirring frequently, for five minutes or so. Add the fish, gently spoon over the liquid and simmer for another five minutes, until just cooked – don't stir or you will break up the fish; just rattle the pan gently from time to time. Remove from the heat and serve immediately with rice, lime wedges and coriander scattered over the top. Coconut roti These simple, tasty breads are delicious hot from the pan with curries and/or chutneys. Makes six. 300g plain flour 100g freshly grated coconut 3-4 green chillies, finely chopped 1 small onion, finely chopped 3 tbsp melted butter 1 ½ tsp salt Butter, ghee or groundnut oil, for frying In a large bowl, mix together the flour, coconut, chillies, onion, butter and salt until everything is well combined. Add enough water to create a slightly stiff dough – 150-180ml should be enough, then on a floured surface knead lightly and divide into six equally sized balls. Roll or pat these out into fairly thin round or oval shapes. Warm a frying pan over a medium-high heat and add a knob of butter, ghee or a splash of groundnut oil. When the fat is fairly hot, fry the roti in batches for three to four minutes a side, until golden. Serve at once. • Learn new skills on River Cottage's four-day cookery courses; rivercottage.net for details. Herb and spice recipes Fruit recipes Fish recipes Main course recipes Rice and grains Side dish recipes Snack recipes South-east Asian recipes Spicy recipes Stew recipes Vegetable recipes Vegetarian recipes Food & drink Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

I didn't leave my house for a decade Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:03 PM PDT 'In the early years I tried leaving many times, but my husband would threaten to kill me and I was demoralised enough to believe him' When my husband John died from double pneumonia at the age of 54, I was relieved. It felt like a paving slab had been lifted from my head. We'd been married for 30 years, and for the last 10 of those, I hadn't been outside our five-bedroom house in Northampton. I left school at 15, which most people did in those days, and got a job as a waitress, which I loved. The cafe was next door to a cinema where John worked as a projectionist. I knew from the moment we met he was terribly insecure. He had ginger hair, walked with a limp and had been badly bullied as a child. But I hoped my love would change him. We got married when I was 19, and a year later I gave birth to our first baby. By 28, I was a mother of six. John was always a heavy drinker, but once we were married, he became violent and controlling. Whenever we went out, he would insist on holding my hand. If I so much as glanced at another man, he would beat me when we got home. We were barred from our doctor's surgery when John punched my GP for asking me to reach down and touch my toes. In the early years I tried leaving many times, but he would threaten to kill me and I was demoralised enough to believe him. Gradually, it just seemed easier to go out less. Then one day, as I was walking back from dropping the kids at school, a man tried to attack me. I was crying and shaking when I got home, but John refused to call the police. He thought it was my fault for giving the stranger the eye. I started to experience panic attacks. Some days I'd only be able to take the children half way to school, then it was a quarter of the way. Before long, just putting my hand on the front door knob would set me off. I began to rely on the elder kids to do the school run and my oldest daughter took over the weekly shop. In some ways, my life as "her indoors" was easier. I no longer had to suffer John's temper if a man cast his eye over me. He wasn't bothered about me staying in and would take my eldest son to the pub for company instead. My days were filled with doing the housework and preparing meals for the kids, who didn't question why I no longer left the house – they were scared of John, too. Television became my way of keeping in touch with the world, running up and down the stairs was all the exercise I needed. My family had long stopped visiting because of John's behaviour towards them, so I spoke to them by phone. I was very unhappy. There was a bus stop just outside our house and every day I'd sit in the living room and watch people boarding and alighting, wishing I could do the same. Many times I considered suicide, but the thought of the kids stopped me. Then John died and a lot of the fear I had been harbouring went with him. A few days after his death, I decided to go to the local shop. I drank a couple of glasses of sherry to calm my nerves and stepped out of the door for the first time in a decade. There was an old bike in the shed and I took that with me – having something to hold on to made me feel reassured. I dashed in and out of there as fast as I could, not speaking or making eye contact with anyone, but when I got home, I felt elated. Gradually, I was able to go out without the bike or a drink inside me and I relearned the art of making conversation with strangers. But the years of abuse still affected me, so I started group bereavement counselling. On that first session, I sat trembling until a friendly looking man came over to ask my name. Bernie was on his own after losing his wife a year before John had died. I instinctively knew that I could trust him. He was shocked when I told him about my decade indoors and was determined to help me make up for lost time. We have now been married for 16 years and had holidays in Austria, Germany and Cyprus, where we renewed our wedding vows. When people meet me, they struggle to believe I spent 10 years indoors. I have only to think of my first husband to remember how that happened. Sometimes I hover at the threshold of our house and recall how I wasn't able to cross it. The one small step I take from there is all I need to appreciate everything I now have. • As told to Danielle Wrate. Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Computer says: um, er... Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:01 PM PDT Since the 1950s, scientists have been striving to create computers that can think like humans. And each year they pit their efforts against a panel of real humans. Brian Christian went head to hard drive... It's early September and I wake up in a Brighton hotel, the sea crashing just outside. In a few hours, I will embark on what I have come here to do: have a series of five-minute-long instant-message exchanges with strangers. It may not sound like much, but the stakes for these quick chats are high. On the other side of the conversation will be a psychologist, a linguist, a broadcaster and a computer scientist. Together they will form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I've been asked to do: convince them that I'm human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it's not clear how much that will help. I'm participating as a human "confederate": one of four representatives of homo sapiens in the artificial intelligence community's most anticipated annual event – a meeting to confer the Loebner prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing test. The test is named after mathematician Alan Turing, famed second world war code-breaker and one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field's earliest questions: Can machines think? That is, would it be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated it could be said to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine, how would we know? Instead of debating this question on theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. A panel of judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents – one a human, the other a computer program – and attempt to discern which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from gossip to heavy-duty philosophy – the gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that, by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30% of human judges after five minutes of conversation and that, as a result, one would "be able to speak of machines thinking". Turing's famous prediction did not come to pass. By the turn of the millennium, even the most advanced computer programs at the Loebner prize were generally lucky to manage a single "deception" – instances when a judge votes the computer to be the human (and vice versa) – each year. However, at the 2008 contest, the top-scoring machine managed a whopping three deceptions, fooling a quarter of the 12-judge panel and missing Turing's 30% mark by a single vote. A narrow scrape for humanity; reading the news, I realised the 2009 test, to be held in Brighton, could be the decisive one. Each year, the computer program that receives the most votes and highest ranking from the judges is awarded the "Most Human Computer" title. It is this title that the research teams are gunning for, the one that includes a several-thousand-dollar research grant, the one with which the organisers and spectators are principally concerned. But there is also another title, one given to the most convincing confederate: the Most Human Human award. Here's the thing: beyond its use as a technological benchmark, beyond even the philosophical, biological and moral questions it poses, the Turing test is, at bottom, about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: how do we connect meaningfully with each other within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? These, to me, are the test's most central questions – the most central questions of being human. And to explore them, I decided to enter as one of the human confederates. My first step was to write to Hugh Loebner himself, who put me in touch with the contest organisers: before I knew it, my name was on the confederate roster. The competition would be held during the science conference Interspeech at Brighton that autumn; the other confederates would be attendees who would volunteer a couple of weeks before. I felt like a bit of a fraud: I had no research paper to present, I was in Brighton just for this. Then again, 2009 could be the year Turing's prediction came true. My own ability to convince the judges that I am, in fact, human could make or break the human defence. The organisers briefed me on the logistics of the competition, but not much else. "There's not much more you need to know, really," I was told. "You are human, so just be yourself." This advice suggested to me a somewhat naive overconfidence in human intuition. Many of the AI programs we humans go up against are the result of decades of work. The AI research teams have huge databases of test runs for their programs, and they know how deftly to guide the conversation away from their shortcomings and toward their strengths, which conversational routes lead to deep exchange and which ones fizzle. We humans, however, don't always know what makes a conversation succeed or fail. We are frequently left scratching our heads, asking others for advice, even enrolling in communication classes. One of the first winners of the Most Human Human award, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Platt. How did he do it? By "being moody, irritable and obnoxious", he writes – which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak but, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: how, in fact, do we be the "most human" we can be? I decided to ignore the organisers' advice to "just be myself" – I would spend months preparing to give the contest everything I had. My preparation took me to some strange and fascinating places. University of New Mexico's artificial life researcher David Ackley counselled me that to speak at the right times is generally more important than to say the right things. The history of the computer has generally been a case of expecting the right answers, as quickly as possible – whereas life is more the reverse: the timely answer, as correct as possible. What's more, a look into the linguistic history of pseudo-words such as "um" turned up evidence that negotiating the turn-taking of conversation is at least as challenging as knowing what to say, and in fact is particularly devilish for software to grapple with. Perhaps surprisingly, then, informal chatter, with its silences and overlaps, is more complex than formal conversation. A foray into the world of online security – where Twitter users increasingly find themselves "followed" by bots (accounts run by a computer rather than a person), and Facebook and email users often find their friends touting strange products, only to realise their out-of-character endorsements come instead from bots who have hijacked their account – suggested that rather than authenticate ourselves with content (pin, password, social security number), in the human world we recognise each other by form: facial expression, voice, idiosyncrasies of diction and syntax. That is, more by the how than the what. A look at some of the early chatbot programs – starting with the famous therapist-parody Eliza in 1965 (which would respond to a statement such as, "My head hurts" with, "Why do you say your head hurts?") – revealed a crucial difference between "stateless" and "stateful" conversation. In a "stateless" conversation, each question and answer is self-contained, providing its own context and responding only to the immediately previous remark. Human conversation is generally in the stateful mode, where each remark and reply builds on the last, creating an accumulation of context in which later remarks gain additional shades of meaning, sometimes to the point where, without this context, an eavesdropper would find the talk inscrutably cryptic or ambiguous. Humans don't always converse this way, and bot programmers explicitly try to steer the conversation towards the mathematically simpler stateless forms of dialogue. One such example is trivia or test-taking: the asking of discrete and not necessarily connected questions. Another, I was interested to learn, is verbal abuse: the back-and-forth trading of insults that often results in both parties forgetting what they were originally talking about. It became my job to resist such moments. As I researched the best way to do so, I was struck by how the chatbots' deliberate attempts to simplify language were eerily reminiscent of human conversation at its most lacklustre. Turing proposed his test as a way to measure the progress of technology, but it just as easily presents us with a way to measure our own. Oxford philosopher John Lucas argues that if we fail to prevent the machines from passing the Turing test, it will be "not because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden". A look at the transcripts of Turing tests past – the types of conversations that bots both produce and induce – is in some sense a tour of the various ways in which we demur, dodge the question, lighten the mood, change the subject, distract, soliloquise, burn time: what shouldn't pass as real conversation at the Turing test probably shouldn't be allowed to pass as real human conversation, either. And so a good strategy for the Turing test may well be a good strategy for life. Entering the Brighton Centre, I found myself in the crush of several thousand engineers, programmers and theorists from all over the world. I made my way to the Loebner prize contest room, where a handful of audience members had gathered, and up front, what could only be the bot programmers worked hurriedly, plugging in tangles of wires and making the last flurries of keystrokes. Before I could get too good a look at them, test organiser Philip Jackson led me behind a velvet curtain. Four of us confederates sat around a table: Doug, a Canadian linguistics researcher; Dave, an American engineer working for Sandia National Laboratories; Olga, a speech-research graduate student from South Africa; and me. As we introduced ourselves, we could hear the judges and audience members slowly filing in on the other side of the curtain. We grew quiet, staring at the blinking cursors on our laptops. It was a strange feeling, almost existential: my humanity thrown into doubt, my species' honour at stake. And Doug, Dave, Olga and I were simultaneously allies – against the Turing test – and competitors for the Most Human Human award. Meanwhile, my months of preparation, of interviews and rumination and research, would be over in a few minutes. My hands poised over the keyboard like a nervous gunfighter's over his holsters. Then all at once, letters and words began to materialise: hi how are you doing? The Turing test had begun. I had learned from reading past transcripts that judges – who steer these conversations – come in two types: the small-talkers and the interrogators. The latter go straight in with word problems, spatial reasoning, deliberate misspellings. They lay down a verbal obstacle course, and you have to run it. This type of conversation is extraordinarily hard for programmers to prepare against. The downside to the give-'em-the-third-degree approach is that it doesn't leave much room to express yourself, personality-wise. Small talk has the advantage of making it easier to get a sense of who a person is – if you are indeed talking to a person. And this style of conversation comes more naturally to layperson judges. The downside is that these conversations are, in some sense, uniform – familiar in a way that allows a programmer to anticipate a number of the questions. I started typing back. hey there! I'm good, excited to actually be typing, how are you? Four minutes and 43 seconds left. My fingers tapped and fluttered anxiously. I imagined the boilerplate conversation ahead of us: Good, you? / Pretty good. Where are you from? / Seattle. How about yourself? / London. I could just feel the clock grinding away while we lingered over the pleasantries. This template and routine was the enemy, every bit as much as the bots. How, I was thinking as I typed, do I get an obviously human connection to happen? Part of the process is what chess players call "getting out of book". Every chess game begins from an identical starting point, and only a certain number of moves are possible, and thus it takes top-level players a considerable amount of time before they reach a position with which neither is familiar: here they are "out of book" and must rely on judgment, rather than mere memory. Conversations are much the same: what chess players want from each other, what Turing test judges want from the confederates, is what we want, chatting with old friends – to breeze past formalities and received gestures, out of book, and into the real thing. Soon enough my judge and I were debating the relative merits of the Beatles and the Stones. But just as things were getting good, the five-minute timer expired and his keystrokes disappeared. In a 2006 article about the Turing test, the Loebner prize co-founder Robert Epstein writes, "One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computers will." I agree with the latter, and couldn't disagree more strongly with the former. The implication is that, because technological evolution seems to occur so much faster than biological evolution (measured in years rather than millennia), once homo sapiens is overtaken, it won't be able to catch up. Simply put: the Turing test, once passed, is passed for ever. I don't buy it. It's the close of the afternoon, and Philip Jackson is announcing the winner of 2009's Most Human Computer award – a chatbot written by AI-enthusiast and former Loebner prizewinner David Levy. I know what's next on the agenda, and my stomach knots despite myself. I'm certain that Doug's won it; he and the Canadian judge were talking hockey from the third sentence. "And the results here show also the identification of the humans," Jackson says. "And from the ranking list we can see that 'Confederate 1', which is Brian Christian, was the most human." And he hands me a small certificate: the Most Human Human award. I didn't know what to feel about it, exactly. It seemed strange to treat it as meaningless or trivial: I had, after all, prepared quite seriously, and that preparation had, I thought, paid off. And I found myself surprisingly invested in the outcome – how I did individually, yes, but also how the four of us did together. In fact, I was proud to learn that my fellow confederates and I had avenged the mistakes of 2008 in dramatic fashion. Whereas 2008 was a nail-biter with a stunning five deceptions, the humans in 2009 had effected a complete shut-out. It was with no small measure of pride that I learned we hadn't permitted a single vote to go the machines' way. It's quite rare for technology to appear to move backwards like this, and partly it's because Loebner allows certain of the test's parameters to be varied each year (for instance, 2008 simply had more judges). But there's a deeper reason, too. We think of science as an indefatigable advance. But in the context of the Turing test, humans – dynamic as ever – don't allow for that kind of narrative. The fact is, the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative and quick-learning species on the planet. We're not going to take defeat lying down. • The Most Human Human: A Defence of Humanity In The Age Of The Computer by Brian Christian is published by Viking on 5 May at £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19 with free UK mainland p&p, go to the Guardian Bookshop. Artificial intelligence (AI) Programming Research and development Computing guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

UK film Man and Boy wins at Tribeca Posted: 29 Apr 2011 10:33 AM PDT New York festival honours Man and Boy but top awards go to Swedish and Israeli directors A British film about the death of a suspected paedophile has won the award for best narrative short at the Tribeca film festival in New York. Man and Boy, which was directed by David Leon and Marcus McSweeney, stars Eddie Marsan. It was inspired by the case of Scott Campbell, who fell to his death from a tower block in 2008 after trying to flee a mob who thought he had sexually assaulted a boy. The jury said: "The jury liked this film's marriage of brilliant acting, superb technical prowess and provocative subject matter. It's a movie memorable for upending expectations." There was another UK success at the festival when the British writer and director Jerry Rothwell won the best feature film prize in an online competition involving visitors to the Tribeca website. His documentary film, Donor Unknown, is about JoEllen Marsh, a woman who was one of the first generation of children conceived through donor insemination and decided to embark on a quest find her biological father. The top honours were taken by She Monkeys, a Swedish film about two teenage girls on a young women's equestrian acrobatics team whose friendship turns to rivalry; and a documentary, Bombay Beach, about a range of characters living on the fringes of a ghost town in the Californian desert. She Monkeys, the first feature length production by Sweden's Lisa Aschan, won best narrative feature and was described by a jury as "haunting, resonant but never posed". "This film speaks of sex, adolescence, power and ambition. It is original and authentic," the jury said. Bombay Beach, by the Israeli director Alma Har'el and featuring music by Bob Dylan, won the best documentary prize for its depiction of the remains of a community in the Salton Sea area, a once thriving holiday destination that was abandoned by visitors decades ago. The documentary jury said the choice was unanimous for the film's "beauty, lyricism, empathy and invention". Ramadhan 'Shami' Bizimana won best actor in the Rwandan and Australian film about genocide, Grey Matter, which is director Kivu Ruhorahoza's first feature. Carice van Houten was named best female actor for Black Butterflies, a drama based on the life during apartheid of South African poet Ingrid Jonker. The awards were announced at a ceremony on Thursday night. Now in its 10 year, Tribeca was created in a bid to revive the New York neighbourhood after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Awards and prizes United States Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dear Rapist … Posted: 29 Apr 2011 04:04 PM PDT Twenty years after her assault at a college party, Liz Seccuro received a letter of apology from her attacker. The correspondence that followed led her to pursue justice at last It was late summer 2005 and we were about to set out on an extended vacation with our two-year-old daughter, Ava. "Hey, you got a letter," said my husband Mike, tossing it to me like a Frisbee. It smelled faintly of vanilla, nice paper. I ripped it open and began to read the very precise, almost feminine cursive script. Dear Elizabeth: In October 1984 I harmed you. I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, in your eyes, my behaviour has affected you in its wake. Still, I stand prepared to hear from you about just how, and in what ways you've been affected; and to begin to set right the wrong I've done, in any way you see fit. Most sincerely yours, Will Beebe In 1984, I arrived, like any other student, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. An only child, I was the first in my family to attend college. My parents were thrilled, although the university was far from our home town, a suburb of New York City. I had graduated top of my high school class and was prepared to make something great of myself. But those hopes and dreams were dashed about five weeks later. A dorm friend, desperately wanting to join a fraternity, begged me to be his date to a party at Phi Kappa Psi, a massive pile of Georgian bricks and white columns at the head of fraternity row. Reluctantly, I climbed out of my sweatpants and donned a denim miniskirt, long-sleeved crew-neck sweater, navy blue flats and a pearl necklace. And then we set off on our five-minute walk with a few other friends from our dorm. We arrived to the din of a party in full swing – a band, kegs of beer, jubilant collegians. Nothing out of the ordinary, but for the fact that my date was gay and, back in 1984, being gay was not as openly accepted as it is today. He needed to "pass", so I stuck to his side as we toured the property and listened to the brothers talk about tradition, academia and the honour that was bestowed upon the lucky few who would be chosen as Phi Kappa Psi brothers. We got separated. My date was invited to smoke pot with some brothers. I had never done so, nor did I want to start. I decided to wait in the second-floor living room, thinking I'd be safer there than walking home alone. I sat on a sofa near a makeshift bar where two brothers, acting as bartenders, assured me that my friend would be back soon. And would I like a drink? Not wanting to seem square, I said yes. "It's our house special – here you go," said one brother, offering a green drink in a plastic tumbler. "Thank you," I said. And sat back down, sipping my drink, waiting for my date to return. People milled about, greeting one another and dancing. "When do you think my date is coming back?" I asked no one in particular. "Oh, he'll be here in a few minutes. Just relax. You're fine here," said another brother. Suddenly I noticed something was wrong. I could not feel my hands or feet; my arms and legs followed in numbness. What was happening? I started to panic. At that point, a very tall, owlish-looking man with glasses appeared, asking where I was from, what was my major, where did I live? I answered his questions perfunctorily, begging off that I was soon going home as I was tired. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had been there. He grabbed my arm and said loudly, "I have something to show you!" "No!" I said. I couldn't really walk. And I had no interest in what this stranger wanted to show me. He dragged me down the hall like a rag doll, into a room, grabbed me around the waist, sat me on his lap and began reading to me from a volume of poetry. I squirmed, trying to set myself free. He stuck his tongue in my ear and told me to settle down. Adrenaline kicked in and I freed myself, running into the hall, screaming. At that precise moment, the music was turned up loud and one of the guys from the bar calmly walked over to me, picked me up like a sack of ashes and deposited me back into the waiting arms of the bespectacled stranger. What happened next was unspeakable. He raped me repeatedly, despite my screams. I awoke sporadically throughout the night; hearing voices, feeling hands. I could not move. At last, light flooded the room. I saw that I was lying on a filthy orange couch, covered in a filthy sheet, across the room from where I was raped. The sheet was covered with large spots of blood. As I tried to get upright, I realised, with horror, that the blood was my own. It had dried in rivulets down my legs. After cleaning up and finding my clothing, I gingerly walked down the stairs and out into a gorgeous October morning. I started to walk right, towards my dorm, but then realised I needed to get to a hospital. So I turned left, toward the university medical centre. After hours of waiting and many stares, I was told that what I needed "could not be done here in Charlottesville" and that I should travel to a large city such as Richmond or Washington, DC for testing. Those tests today are called "rape kits". I went back to my dorm, where I told my dorm mates and resident adviser what had happened to me. Some sympathised, some rolled their eyes and many just walked away. I was bruised from head to toe – my head, my cheekbone, my foot, my ribs, my legs and of course my private areas. I finally showered, had some soup and slept for a good 12 hours. On the following Monday, it was arranged that I would meet with the dean of students, Robert Canevari. Still smarting from the pain, I arrived at the appointed time and told him what had happened to me at the Phi Kappa Psi house. He looked at me, nonplussed. "Are you sure you didn't have sex with this man and you don't want to admit that you aren't a 'good girl'?" "No, that's not what I am saying. I am saying I was raped." The dean told me, when I asked, that the Charlottesville police could not be called as the fraternity house fell under "university jurisdiction" and that I should make my report to them. But not before he volunteered to have me transferred to another school because of my "distress". I said no. I had always said no. Nothing ever came of the investigation by the university police. I was the one calling them, always greeted with a terse, "Someone will call you back." No one ever did. The deans said that they had spoken with the young man in question and told me, "He said it was consensual." He, the rapist, withdrew from the university and was thus "no longer a danger" to me. One night, I took the bag of clothes I had worn that night and saved in the back of my closet, walked to the edge of the local cemetery and set them on fire. I had lost. But then, in 2005, William Beebe, my rapist, wrote a letter to my home to apologise. After thinking and stewing and not sleeping, I make a decision: I am going to reply. I need to know that Beebe is in Las Vegas, as it says on the return address, and not creeping outside my door. A day after receiving the letter, after putting Ava to bed, I'm sitting with my legs dangling in the pool of our Hamptons house, puffing surreptitiously on a cigarette (I'd quit years earlier) as I tap out the email on my BlackBerry. Mr. Beebe: I am in receipt of your letter. My life was terribly altered by the fact that you raped me, and I want to know why you did it and why you are reaching out to me now. Every decision in my life has been coloured by wanting to feel safe. Now I don't feel safe again. How can you live with yourself? I don't sign it. He'll know who it's from. As Mike, Ava and I try to enjoy our vacation, I obsessively check the BlackBerry. And then it arrives. I see the new mail icon, see his name and click on it. He describes the selfishness of his youth, a time when he rarely thought about the consequences of his actions, especially when he had been drinking. He'd joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He wanted to right the wrongs in his past. It seems that he regards his crime against me as just one more instance of collateral damage from the alcoholic life he has put behind him. He says he prays for me. This is torture. I can't let this email be the last word. Shamefully, I haven't discussed with my husband the correspondence – can't he tell something is wrong? That night, I email Beebe back. Are you married? Does your wife know what you did? My life was a living hell after the rape. Almost 24 hours later, my BlackBerry buzzes. Again, he speaks mainly about himself. He rambles on and on about his "spiritual awakening" and various trips to rehab. Not once does he really answer my questions, except to admit that he has never been married because he couldn't find "true union with a woman; especially after what he did". He refers to a much more romantic scenario than the brutal rape it was. He writes, "You were a natural blonde, as I recall." After reading those words, I almost drop the device in the pool. I have no idea what fantasy he is reliving. His emails become erratic. The end of November brings many emotions to my household. The emails from William Beebe continue, and I intermittently email him back. The correspondence is never friendly, although my questions are sometimes benign. One night I finally tell Mike about the emails. He stares at me, his expression changing from sympathy to anger to fear in the time it takes for me to sputter out what is happening. In early December, I pick up the phone, hesitate, then punch in the number of the Charlottesville police department and ask for the chief. I am transferred to the voicemail of Timothy Longo. "Hi, you don't know me, but I was a student at the university, and I was raped by a fellow classmate in 1984 at the Phi Kappa Psi house. I reported it to the deans and the university police. Nothing was done. This person has made contact with me again and knows where I live. Sir, I think I need your help." I don't expect an answer. Forty-five minutes later, Chief Longo calls me back. I give him a synopsis of what happened in 1984, and what has since transpired. He is polite, strong and businesslike. He tells me that, contrary to what the dean of students had told me two decades earlier, the fraternity house is indeed under the jurisdiction of the Charlottesville police department and always has been. My brain freezes. Had they lied to me? I am stunned. Longo also tells me that there is no statute of limitations on rape in Virginia, that Beebe can still be charged with the crime. Longo and I exchange email addresses, and he tells me that he or one of his detectives will follow up. The next evening, the phone rings. It is detective Nicholas Rudman asking if I'd be willing to come to Charlottesville to give a statement. I phone Mike and we agree to go that Friday night. At noon on Saturday 10 December 2005, detectives Rudman and Scott Godfrey are in the hotel lobby to meet me. "Liz, could you take us to some of the places you mentioned in your statements to Chief Longo?" asks Godfrey. Sure, I say. As we drive, I point out the salmon-coloured building that housed the university police and tell the detectives of my visits there. I point to the Phi Kappa Psi house, sitting gracefully on Madison Lane. "That's the room I was raped in," I say, gesturing toward the second-floor window on the far right. "There's a window overlooking Madison and the bed was flush against that window." We double back and drive toward campus, to my freshman dorm. On the second floor, at the end of a long hall, I see the door to my room. I'm overwhelmingly sad as I stand there, feeling so much older, but still so scared. Finally, we begin our drive to the police department. They ask if I am ready to tell what happened to me that night in October 1984. It has been 20 years since I have spoken about it in such detail, from beginning to end. Telling it now, especially back in Charlottesville, is the oddest sensation. I ask for a piece of paper and draw a layout of Phi Kappa Psi, the room in which I was raped and myself as a stick figure on the bed and on the sofa. I stand up and ask Godfrey to stand in order to describe Beebe's height and weight. I take off my boots to demonstrate my own height. I can hear the clock on the wall ticking softly. And then we come to the part where I have to describe the rape itself. My whole statement takes more than two hours. The story I had kept buried comes pouring forth, the details fresh. People are listening to me, hearing me, and I will never be silent again. "I think we have enough here," Rudman says, clicking off the tape. Enough for what, I wonder. "Would you like to press charges against William Nottingham Beebe for your rape in October of 1984?" I begin to sob. "Yes," I say, "I would like to press charges, please." William Beebe was arrested on 4 January 2006 for felony rape. I was told that when he was arrested, there was packed luggage and a passport in his foyer, but he went without incident. He was extradited from Nevada to Virginia, where he was released after six days on a $30,000 bond. In March 2006, I testified at a preliminary hearing, sitting a mere eight feet away from my monster. Beebe had hired a very costly and prestigious team of lawyers to defend him. As it turned out, he had found my home address by merely dialling the University of Virginia alumni office – they gave it to him without question. I didn't look at Beebe, except when I had to identify him as my assailant. When I did, he was exactly as I remembered. The years fell away and I was 17 again and vulnerable and frightened, despite being surrounded by friends, family and the legal team. Beebe was indicted by a grand jury and, as the investigation went on, it was revealed that I had actually been the victim of a gang rape, just as I had suspected. There was, however, not enough hard evidence to indict the other two. Two weeks before trial in November 2006, William Beebe pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated sexual battery. The plea took two hours and he stared at me the entire time, so that the judge later told his defence team that he was not allowed to look at me. His attorneys had said that he was innocent; that he was guilty only of "a thoughtless college sex encounter during which he acted ungentlemanly". He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, all but two and a half of them suspended. He served less than six months. I was told that he was never even transferred to a maximum security prison, that "human error" had misclassified him as non-violent. He was released early as a result of this mistake and overcrowding at the city jail. Also, he was white and educated, so they figured they should set him free. I think of all the people in prison for far lesser crimes, serving far lengthier sentences, and wonder if justice was served. Crash Into Me: A Survivor's Search for Justice by Liz Seccuro is published by Bloomsbury. Rape guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Zorba author's adopted son 'is heir' Posted: 29 Apr 2011 08:49 AM PDT Feud over the rights to the work of Zorba the Greek's author Nikos Kazantzakis intensifies despite ruling A row over the rights to the works of Greece's most celebrated writer Nikos Kazantzakis is intensifying after the supreme court ruled that the adopted son of his late widow is his rightful heir. The feud, which has pitted relatives and admirers of the author of Zorba the Greek against Patroclos Stavrou, the adopted son of his late widow, Eleni, erupted seven years ago as a disagreement over copyright ownership of the author's works. Despite the intervention of the supreme court, which ruled that Stavrou, a Cypriot-born philologist, was the writer's rightful heir, the dispute shows no sign of abating. "Kazantzakis' natural heirs are considering taking further action," said Yorgos Stassinakis who heads the Geneva-based International Society of the Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis. "The court decision did not go to the heart of the matter, which is the books. Publication and translation of all of this great man's works has been very poor and as a result readers worldwide have not had access to them." A widow for more than 40 years, Eleni Kazantakis met Stavrou during a visit to the island in 1967. Fifteen years later she adopted him as her legal son and heir. She was in her 70s and he was 55. "She became my mother and I became her son," writes Stavrou in a prologue to the catalogue of works produced by the publishing company he established with Eleni. "She called me son, dearest son, and radiated certainty and happiness … She took her last breath, a few months before her 101st birthday in 2004, at a hospital in Athens holding my hand." After her death, he became the guardian of Kazantzakis' works. But critics accuse him of failing to adequately promote the author's legacy. The Cypriot was forced to withdraw from the board of the Kazantzakis Museum in Crete, where the writer was born and buried, for allegedly failing to attend meetings. Last year, the International Society of the Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis began a global campaign, gathering some 4,008 signatures in 92 countries, to "save and promote" his artistic legacy. In an open letter addressed to the Greek president, it denounced what they said was Stavrou's dismal oversight of the oeuvre. The Nobel prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer and the French politician, Ségolène Royal, are among those who have signed the petition. "To make someone your adopted son when he is more than 50 years old, his parents are still alive and you are over the age of 70, is a strange thing," said Stassinakis. "But much more it is the lack of love this man has shown towards the work of Kazantzakis. A large part of his oeuvre remains unpublished and many of his most important books are out of print, unavailable even in countries like France where he lived for years." An essayist and traveller, who translated Shakespeare and Dante to make ends meet, Kazantzakis wrote more than 30 books. His range extended from popular novels such as the Last Temptation of Christ to The Odyssey: A modern Sequel, an epic poem of 33,333 verses which he rewrote seven times and considered his best work. In 1957 he lost the Nobel Prize for Literature to Albert Camus by one vote. At the two-storey offices of Kazantzakis publications in the heart of Athens, Patroclos Stavrou's daughter Niki, described the "seven continuous years of absolute hell" that the family has endured since the court action began. "I cannot begin to describe how much vital energy and time was wasted on trying to defend ourselves," says the scholar who directs the company's foreign rights division and is trying to get Kazantzakis' works translated and on bookshelves around the world. "When he was alive Kazantzakis lived under constant persecution from the Greek Orthodox Church and critics. I am sure this [row] would have broken his heart." Greece Europe Literary fiction Fiction Nobel prize for literature Awards and prizes Helena Smith guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Daimler profits roar on back of China Posted: 29 Apr 2011 09:11 AM PDT Daimler follows trend for growing confidence in car industry and doubles first-quarter profits as Chinese sales rise 82% Booming demand for luxury cars in China has helped Daimler double its profits in the first quarter of the year and highlighted a wider turnaround in confidence for automobile makers. Sales of Mercedes-branded cars and sports utility vehicles (SUVs) increased by 82% in the world's most populous nation compared to 4% growth in western Europe and America. The German-based carmaker reported earnings of €1.18bn (£1.05bn) compared with €612m in the same period of 2010, while revenues were up 15% at €24.7bn. "We achieved excellent earnings in the first quarter. This puts us well ahead of our planning and confirms our positive outlook for the year 2011," said Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of the Mercedes division. The strong performance confirms a trend highlighted by other companies recently, including Volkswagen, Volvo and particularly Ford, which had its best quarter for 13 years. The industry has been in a parlous position since the banking crisis of 2008 triggered a global recession and a slump in car sales that led governments to introduce a "cash for clunkers" financial incentive scheme. Recent upsets have included the Japanese earthquake which has disrupted output among companies such as Toyota with major British production factories. Daimler itself said it had been forced to write down €49m at its Daimler Truck division, which has a joint venture in Japan, and a further €29m at Daimler Financial Services. But the truck operation – the biggest in the world – generally performed very strongly, raising operating earnings from €130m in the first quarter of 2010 to €415m this year. Overall, Daimler sold 15% more cars and commercial vehicles in the first three months of this year while Mercedes' operating profits rose 60% to €1.2bn. Bodo Uebber, chief financial officer at Daimler, said there was no indication that demand in China for Mercedes would ease off in the near future and the group expected the marque to hit record sales of 1.2m cars this year helped by its top-of-the-range S-Class model. Similar trends – a burgeoning middle class seeking out luxury vehicles – can be seen in India. However, the City was not impressed by Daimler's figures after far stronger than expected results from others. Daimler shares were trading down 2%. Tim Schuldt, a car industry analyst at Equinet Bank, said: "While the first quarter was definitely a good quarter for Daimler, it also shows that it becomes more difficult for the company to surprise positively as expectations are high." Volkswagen announced this week that it had tripled its profits in the first quarter, crediting mounting demand in China for its VW and Audi brands. Volvo has also doubled its earnings and said its European orders were up by nearly 50% and its North American ones more than tripled, while Ford said US sales had risen by 16% as customers sought fuel-efficient vehicles such as the Escape. This helped Ford's total vehicle sales to reach 1.4m, up by 150,000 vehicles. But some firms are still struggling. Spyker Cars – the owner of the Saab marque – has reported a net loss of €76.3m as it struggled to find cash to restart production at its factory in Sweden. Output has been at a standstill since earlier this month after Spyker ran out of money to pay Saab suppliers. Spyker has been trying to interest a handful of Chinese carmakers to put up some cash for Saab, while China's state-owned SAIC now owns the MG brand and has just launched the new MG6 fastback. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders in Britain reported last week that 135,052 cars were produced in the UK last month – a 14.8% increase on the March 2010 figure. Automotive industry Volkswagen (VW) Ford Germany China Terry Macalister guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Camden Crawl's decade of new music Posted: 29 Apr 2011 07:15 AM PDT This year's bands will hope to walk in the footsteps of festival alumni Mumford & Sons and Amy Winehouse Its early days amounted to a gaggle of obscure indie kids playing to beer-soaked youngsters in pub back rooms, but Saturday will see a rather more slick, and vastly extended, Camden Crawl celebrate 10 years at the coalface of new music. More than 300 acts are to perform in 50 venues over the bank holiday weekend as part of the London music festival, including sets from urban star Tinchy Stryder and a new comedy circuit. It is a far cry from the largely chaotic scenes that accompanied the first crawl back in 1995, said founder Lisa Paulon. It was set up by a group of friends who ran small independent labels and were struggling to find venues for their acts, she explained. "We thought we'd pool together to get some gigs put on, but it was ultimate chaos," she said. "We were just five people who didn't know anything about putting on a gig, and less about health and safety. It was definitely a lot noisier than it is now." Cans of lager sold like hot cakes in an unlicensed Scout hut, while the Saturday night nearly saw a riot after more than 1,000 punters turned up for a gig in a venue designed for half that number, she explained. "We had kids breaking the windows, spilling out on to the street fighting … when I see the photos now I just put my head in my hands." That event had just 15 bands, playing in five venues, and covered a stretch of road no longer than 200 metres. This year's Camden Crawl will stretch for more than two miles and will feature fringe theatre, with more than 100 comedians including Robin Ince and Rufus Hound. Alongside the laughs and the tunes, the East End film festival is linking up with Camden Crawl for two days of "sonic film" during which movie-savvy musicians – Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne and indie band Guillemots – will show special selections, accompanied with live sets at The Forge. "We attract a much wider scope of people now," said Paulon. "Before it was just people who were very into the underground music scene, but now we have every type of punter under the sun from all over the country. It's like the Camden version of the Edinburgh festival." The festival gives music fans a taster of relatively unknown bands: you may not yet have heard of Lulu and the Lampshades, or the History of Apple Pie, but a few years ago a little-known band called Mumford & Sons played a set to around 70 people and this year played the Grammys with Bob Dylan. The queen of Camden, Amy Winehouse, has also performed at the festival, slurping tequilas while belting through an electrifying set in the Dublin Castle pub back in 2007. The band Paulon is backing to provide the spine-tingling moment of the festival go by the rather catchy name of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, sometimes abbreviated to Odd Future, or the equally memorable OFWGKTA. The hip-hop collective from Los Angeles, California, are playing the outdoor stage on Sunday. "I think there will be about 2,000 people in the audience and I'm pretty sure I'll look at it and think: I can't believe we've done this," said Paulon. Andy Ross, who curates the crawl lineup in the Spread Eagle venue and in a former life signed Blur to his indie label Food Records, said the ethos of the event was to give people the chance to see next year's hot acts, via serendipitous methods. "It's sometimes hard to get in venues for the bigger names, so you often end up stumbling into a bar to hear something. It's a testing ground for up-and-coming bands and there is a lucky-dip element to it, and that's really quite entertaining." Camden Crawl Festivals Pop and rock Indie Alexandra Topping guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

PlayStation hack: 2.2m cards 'stolen' Posted: 29 Apr 2011 02:54 AM PDT Discussions in hacker forums point to huge numbers of credit card details stolen from Sony's PlayStation Network, while some owners see fraud – but is it just coincidence? Hackers in underground online forums are claiming to have access to credit card details stolen from Sony's PlayStation Network in mid-April, though security researchers say it is not possible to verify the claims. The online discussions centre around a haul of 2.2m Sony customer credit card numbers that are claimed to have been copied during the attack, which led Sony to shut down the network for more than a week after it happened between 17 and 19 April. At the same time some of the 77 million PSN users have begun to report discovering new fraudulent charges on their credit cards, though the timing could be coincidence and not linked directly to the breach. Any sufficiently large number of credit card owners is certain to include some who have recently been defrauded by other methods. The claims of fraud include the equivalent of $1,500 spent in a German grocery store on an American credit card, and dozens of people reporting charges on items such as German airline tickets and Japanese stores. Kevin Stevens, a security analyst with Trend Micro, said in a tweet that "the hackers that hacked PSN are selling off the DB [database]. They reportedly have 2.2m credit cards with CVVs" - the latter being the three-figure number required for "card not present" transactions. But Stevens added that he couldn't be sure the claim was true. The hackers were also claiming to have offered to sell the database back to Sony, but that the company declined it. Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said that as far as he knew there was no truth in that claim. Speculation is growing that the hackers who carried out the attack could be European, based on the names being used in forums, though no further details have emerged so far. One reader of Venturebeat said he had been contacted by Sony and told that his card might have been compromised, and discovered two new charges totalling $400 he hadn't made. Sony insisted in a blog post that the credit card data it stored was encrypted: "While all credit card information stored in our systems is encrypted and there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. "If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained. Keep in mind, however, that your credit card security code (sometimes called a CVC or CSC number) has not been obtained because we never requested it from anyone who has joined the PlayStation Network or Qriocity, and is therefore not stored anywhere in our system." PlayStation Sony Hacking Games PS3 Data and computer security Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Top 10 female detectives Posted: 29 Apr 2011 08:30 AM PDT With Zen axed because of the slew of male detectives cluttering up BBC1, it's time for the ladies to step forward – in the footsteps of these classic female crime-fighters Fans of Inspector Zen, the Italian detective played by Rufus Sewell, will be disappointed: the BBC has axed the show, with controller Danny Cohen citing concerns that there are too many male detectives cluttering up BBC1. A slew of female-led detective shows are due to grace our screens this year, including The Body Farm, a spin-off from Waking the Dead. But these shows will be following in the footsteps of some iconic female investigators. Here is my top 10 list of female characters who broke boundaries and helped redefine the image of the investigator. Who would be on your list? 1. Nancy Drew The original, the iconic teenage detective, any list of female detectives inevitably starts with Nancy Drew, who has been solving mysteries for more than 80 years, with Hilary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor among the high-profile women to cite her as an inspiration. The character may still be a teenager, but she has evolved over time – notably some of the early stories were rewritten to expunge the racism of the original versions. 2. George George (emphatically, not Georgina) from Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, is similarly essential. These books similarly show many signs of their age to a modern reader. But George, the brave, tousle-haired tomboy, was still an alternative and important role model for young readers. 3. Miss Marple Agatha Christie's amateur detective Miss Marple conceals a sharp intelligence in a visage which our culture sees as the epitome of the unthreatening: an elderly "spinster" living in the English village of St Meade's. She has been reimagined repeatedly in TV and film adaptations. Confoundingly, Disney is about to remake the character yet again, casting Jennifer Garner as Miss Marple in her younger days. 4. Precious Ramotswe It's notable that the rest of the detectives in this list are white women, either American or European. Representations of black female investigators are still thin on the ground, but Precious Ramotswe from Alexander McCall Smith's series, The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency, has helped redefine the image of the detective. The adaptation by the BBC and HBO, starring Jill Scott as Precious, has also won praise for its positive representation of Botswana. 5. Jane Tennison DCI Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) from the ITV series Prime Suspect set the mould for police procedurals and female cops struggling in the male-dominated workplace. She's tough, she gets the job done. Tennison could be back on our screens again soon, in the form of a US remake, relocating the show from London to New York, and starring Maria Bello. 6. Veronica Mars In the mid-2000s, the teenage girl detective evolved into Veronica Mars (Kristin Bell), the hero of the eponymous American TV series. Mars is witty, tough and a brilliant investigator. But she's not bulletproof: in the first episode, we learn Mars was roofied and sexually assaulted at a party. The case is dismissed by the police; she must go back to high school with the boys who assaulted her. 7. Lis Salander Much has been written about whether Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is feminist or misogynist. Lis Salander is the strongest argument in the books' favour: her extreme hacker skills are crucial to getting to the bottom of the crime and corruption in the books. She's an unusual character in this genre: while most amateur detectives work in tandem with the police, or do their job for them, Salander has been a victim of state violence, she has her own agenda and she works to her own moral code. 8. Sarah Lund In the first episode of the winding Danish detective series The Killing, we're introduced to Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl). She's meant to be moving to Sweden with her boyfriend and son, it's her last day on the police force. But Lund quickly realises she can't leave her less competent replacement to solve her last case, the murder of a teenage girl. The success of the show has led to it being remade in the US. 9. Temperance Brennan Temperance Brennan is the hero of a series of detective books by Kathy Reichs, then very loosely adapted for television in the US series Bones, where she puts her skills as a forensic anthropologist to use on current-day murder cases with FBI partner Seeley Booth. Spiky and socially awkward, Brennan is brilliant at everything except interacting with other humans. 10. Marge Gunderson In the Coen brothers' film Fargo, Frances McDormand plays the chief of police, Marge Gunderson, who carefully unpicks the homicides that are occurring in the small American town. She comes into the film 31 minutes in, only to steal the show. Seven months pregnant, she defies the image of the lone and lonely hard-boiled detective, an oasis of common sense, competence and good humour. Crime drama Crime fiction Television Alexander McCall Smith Stieg Larsson The Killing Gender Jess McCabe guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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