PM's 'open and honest' approach has angered Israel and Pakistan and stirred EU debate over Turkey

As waiters in livery dispensed chicken curry canapes and a selection of colourful Indian summer fruit juices from silver trays, a tinkle on a glass indicated the guest of honour had something important to say. David Cameron stepped up in front of the guests gathered in the drawing room of the British high commissioner's palatial residence in New Delhi to say he had made a mistake.

With due apologies to Humphrey Bogart, the prime minister told scores of business leaders and diplomats he had quoted one of the great lines from Casablanca incorrectly when he concluded a speech to Indian business leaders with the words: "Let's build a beautiful relationship." Looking mildly sheepish, Cameron joked: "I should have said: 'This could be the start of a beautiful friendship'."

The audience laughed before filing out in the humid monsoon heat to the splendid gardens of the residence, in the heart of the Lutyens-designed New Delhi, the main feature of which is a croquet lawn. The guests were too polite to ask publicly whether the prime minister had made a rather graver mistake at the end of his speech to the Indian business leaders earlier in India's hi-tech centre of Bengalooru (formerly Bangalore).

In remarks which reverberated across the subcontinent within minutes, the prime minister blamed elements of the Pakistani state for promoting the export of terror. Islamabad was quick to criticise Cameron, saying the prime minister should not believe leaked US military documents. A central finding of the Wikileaks documents is that Britain and the US believe the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is still encouraging the Taliban.

The prime minister's remarks raised eyebrows in the Foreign Office which believes that, given that most terror plots in Britain originate at some point from the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Britain has a vital interest in maintaining warm relations with Islamabad. A message was quickly despatched to Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president who will be visiting Cameron at Chequers next week, that Britain believed his government is fighting hard against the terror threat. Cameron echoed this , though he insisted he would continue to talk frankly about Pakistan.

While experienced diplomats were alarmed, Cameron's colleagues saw nothing wrong with his remarks which demonstrated a refreshing approach in their eyes.

William Hague, the foreign secretary, said: "The prime minister is a great diplomat. He is a natural at it." A senior aide said: "What you see with David is what you get. He has always spoken his mind and told it exactly as it is. David does that back in Britain. After the Cumbria shootings he expressed his horror but said there was no need for fresh legislation. Imagine how many new criminal justice bills Gordon Brown would have introduced.

"David is also adopting this straightforward, open and frank approach abroad. It is so refreshing. With Labour you could never quite understand what they thought because they would always have convoluted ways of looking at issues abroad."

A series of interventions by the prime minister, during a frantic two weeks on both sides of the Atlantic, are held up by Downing Street as signs of this open and honest diplomacy. On the eve of his speech in Bengalooru, Cameron delighted Turkey with two pronouncements: accusing Israel of turning the Gaza Strip into a "prison camp" and indicating that Britain was prepared to battle France and Germany over Ankara's bid to join the EU.

The Cameron bluntness was given a high-profile outing the week before in the US, though the victims that time were patriotic readers of the Daily Mail. In an attempt to recalibrate Anglo-American relations to a more realistic level, the prime minister said Britain should accept it is the "junior partner".

To illustrate his point, Cameron said that this was even the case at the height of the "special relationship" in 1940 when Britain and the US stood shoulder to shoulder to meet the Nazi threat. He later admitted his remarks showed a shaky grasp of history because in 1940 Winston Churchill was embarking on his year-long campaign to persuade Washington to join the allied war effort.

Cameron had warmed up for his US trip by speaking his mind on a sensitive matter closer to home. The release, last year on compassionate grounds, of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing by the Scottish authorities had been a mistake, he said. During his visit to Washington the prime minister also raised the case of Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker facing extradition to the US, asking whether McKinnon can serve his sentence, if convicted, in Britain.

Downing Street's firm defence of the prime minister's performance over the last two weeks shows that, as Cameron flew back to Britain at the end of the largest official visit to India since independence in 1947, he is convinced he is fashioning a new form of open and honest diplomacy. Where Labour wound itself up in intricate and complex explanations, Cameron will just speak his mind.

But old lags at the Foreign Office argue that the delicate art of communications overseas is a well-established practice known as diplomacy. In India's case it dates back centuries to the era when emissaries from the English crown came bearing gifts to princely rulers as they sought to trade. Diplomacy was quickly replaced with the sword in India, but an art form had made an early mark.

The need for a delicate approach to diplomacy today was highlighted, according to the traditionalists, when Cameron blundered into the tinder box of Indo-Pakistan relations this week.

Cameron believes the two countries can be broadly dealt with in two categories: trade with India and security co-operation with Pakistan. Diplomats say Cameron is overlooking lesson number one of the subcontinent: the nuclear neighbours, who formed one country under the British crown until 1947, can never be treated separately. Opening up Britain's civil nuclear technology to India in the hope of boosting trade, as Cameron did, will be hailed in Delhi. But Pakistan will be alarmed.

Cameron had an early taste of the perils of plain speaking the day before his India trip when he likened Gaza to a prison camp and warned of a battle with France and Germany over Turkey's EU membership bid. No 10 said his Gaza remarks were no different to his description of the Palestinian territory in June as a "giant open prison". The reaction from Israel may give the prime minister pause to reflect on whether it was wise to accuse the state created by Holocaust survivors of creating a prison camp.

Government sources said that his second message in Ankara – his warning to France and Germany – fits into an approach of delivering uncomfortable home truths to close allies. "It is really noticeable that the prime minister has been pretty outspoken to the US on BP, saying it is a multinational company," one senior figure said. "He has also not shied away from speaking his mind in the EU on financial services and the importance of not harming the City of London with undue new regulations. This approach is paying dividends."

Cameron will be on his diplomatic best when he hosts Zardari at Chequers next week. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder that life as the leader of a permanent member of the UN security council means every word has to be measured with care.

The prime minister believes his trip has been a resounding success in boosting trade. So pleased is he with his debut that he was even heard saying it might be time to move on. "That's it, I retire," he said after realizing a childhood dream by hitting the Indian cricket legend Kapil Dev for six. Unlike his trip that was easy. Dev had bowled him a tennis ball.

Shakespeare's Globe, London

As you might expect, Howard Brenton's new play about Anne Boleyn is no mere picturesque romp on the lines of TV's The Tudors. In fact, it's a radically revisionist work that argues that Anne was more Protestant martyr than sexual predator. It both challenges received wisdom and bulges with theatrical vitality.

Avoiding the conventional bio-play format, Brenton presents us with a ghost hunt. On his accession in 1603, James I rummages through a chest that belonged to Anne Boleyn. He discovers, apart from her coronation robe, two books: William Tyndale's once-banned version of the New Testament and an even more subversive volume. Backtracking in time, we discover how Anne used her sexual stranglehold over Henry VIII to pursue the idea of religious reform. Crucial to the story is her secret meeting with Tyndale, who gives her a copy of The Obedience of a Christian Man; and it is this book, claiming that kings are responsible directly to God rather than the pope, that falls into Henry VIII's hands at the very moment when he is seeking to divorce Catherine of Aragon.

I can't help feeling that Brenton slightly overplays his admiration for Anne in suggesting that she was responsible not merely for the Reformation but, in part, for the existence of the King James Bible. But he gets away from the pop image of Anne as the doomed siren to show her as a resolute, deeply religious woman who deployed her sexual power to become a "conspirator for Christ". Brenton's play also sets the historical detail in a wider context. We get fascinating accounts of Tudor contraceptive methods and of Anne's tactical skill in denying Henry consummation for seven years. But Brenton's main point is that Anne helped to shape England's destiny: one of the richest scenes shows James I pursuing her idea of a reformed church and seeking to reconcile warring factions.

John Dove's production matches the play's frontal attack. Miranda Raison, directly addressing the Globe audience whom she sees as "godless demons", creates a rivetingly plausible Anne more concerned with evangelical zeal than missionary positions. And there is fine support from James Garnon as a gay, twitching, scholarly James I, Anthony Howell as a lean, impulsive Henry VIII and John Dougall as a Thomas Cromwell who is both prince of darkness and closet Protestant. Academics may pounce on Brenton's play, but it eschews mock-Tudor costume drama to offer a compelling portrait of a woman contentiously described by James I as "the whore who changed England".

Rating: 4/5

Prime minister launches emergency legislation as dry fuel pumps leave drivers stranded

Thousands of Britons heading to Greece for their summer holiday tonight risked becoming caught up in the chaos of a nationwide strike by protesting truck drivers that is threatening fuel, food and medical shortages across the country.

From the popular Chalkidiki peninsula in the north to Rhodes in the south, holidaymakers were affected by the mayhem amid reports that supplies had dried up at petrol stations countrywide.

At least 100,000 tourists who had driven to Greece from neighbouring Bulgaria and Serbia were stranded, with thousands abandoning their cars by the side of the road and officials taking the highly unusual step of beseeching visitors to stock up on fuel in Macedonia.

The prime minister, George Papandreou, resorted to emergency legislation late on Wednesday, telling the drivers that unless they returned to work they would face stiff fines and their vehicles being requisitioned.

It was the fourth time since the end of military rule in 1974 that a mobilisation order – usually announced at times of war or great natural disaster – has been issued by a government. "This is an unpleasant decision … but the country cannot afford adventures in the middle of the summer," Papandreou said.But the reaction was swift and unforgiving.

"It is highly unusual that after just three days of going on strike we should be mobilised in this way," said Giorgos Stamos, a member of the truck drivers' union. "The order is coming through to [drivers] but I have no idea how they are going to react to it."

In a culture where workers' rights are seen as sacred, the mobilisation call has riled unionists with the KKE communist party newspaper, Rizospastis, declaring that the government was bent "on smashing every striker's right".

"There is nothing left but to gather forces and fight," it proclaimed from its front page.

The prospect of tourists being mired in further mayhem deepened as tourist industry officials said it would days before the situation returned to normal.

On islands, where the vast number of holidaymakers are headed, vital food stuff and medicines are already in short supply.

Boat connections to the mainland are also threatened as petrol supplies quickly diminish.

In a bout of especially bad timing for the beleaguered government, the chaos erupted after domestic terrorisists warned tourists this week that they would turn Greece into a "warzone".

In a week when Britons traditionally begin their summer break, flying into airports across Greece, air traffic controllers compounded the chaos by staging a stringent work-to-rule protest that saw dozens of flights either cancelled or delayed.

"What we are seeing is a catastrophe for tourism, for our [debt-stricken] economy," said Yannis Evangellou, one of the industry's leading figures. "There have been hundreds of cancellations, particularly by tourists who had planned to drive into northern and central Greece."

Wendy Taylor, 55, a doctor from Newcastle on holiday in the Peloponnese, said that the popular tourist area was running out of fuel and that hotels had stopped taking bookings.

"We heard that there was a problem on Monday, when we tried to go out for the day. We had to drive around about six different petrol stations before we found one – people kept waving us away. Kalamata, the biggest town near us, has run out of fuel. We have heard there are shortages on the islands as well."

The drivers launched the strike last Monday. But by today visitors who had planned trips around the isles were faced with the prospect of fuel-deprived cruisers and yachts remaining docked in island harbours.

In other surreal scenes, yachts were spotted drifting out at sea after their supplies of oil and gas had run out.

The protests, sparked by mounting fury over the unpopular economic austerity measures the ruling socialists have been forced to enact to stave off bankruptcy, showed no sign of abate last night despite marathon negotiations.

The 33,000-strong union of truck drivers is up in arms over government plans to open up the freight industry – one of many "closed–shop" professions blamed for keeping the Greek economy isolated and uncompetitive.

But with the nation's economic recovery now more dependent on holidaymakers than at any other time – and with most Greeks also poised to begin their summer break – the industrial action has been quick to trigger widespread condemnation.

Tourism, which has already taken a blow in the wake of repeated riots and strikes, accounts for one in five jobs and nearly 20% of GDP.

An estimated 3 million Britons visit the country every year topping arrivals alongside Germans.

Despite popular opposition to policies not seen since the second world war, most Greeks understand that their country is under intense pressure from the EU and IMF to make the changes following the organisations' decision to inject it with €110bn in emergency aid in May.

Legislation will give security services powers to arrest people for crimes they have yet to commit

Russian citizens can be issued official warnings about crimes that they have not yet committed under powers granted to the security services today.

President Dmitry Medvedev signed off on a new law giving the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, the right to caution people suspected of preparing acts of extremism, or to jail them for obstructing the agency's work.

The powers appear similar to those enjoyed by Precrime, the police unit in the 2002 Hollywood film Minority Report. "This is a draconian law reminiscent of our repressive past," said Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement.

Rights activists had hoped Medvedev would rein in the security services, after his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, stuffed his administration with hawkish veterans. The Kremlin's tough stance comes against the backdrop of a disparate but emergent civil movement protesting against corruption and authoritarian government.

Under the new provisions, the FSB will be able to echo Soviet practices. The punishment for ignoring a warning was unclear, but 15-day jail sentences are envisaged for "obstructing an FSB officer's duties". Sergei Ivanenko, a leader of the Yabloko party, called it "the law of a police state". He said: "If such a law exists in a democratic country then it is limited by a very powerful system of civil, public and parliamentary control. In our conditions it will mean absolute power for the security services."

Rights activists, who fear the measures could be used to stifle civil disobedience, had expressed optimism that Medvedev might step in to quash the legislation.

There have been signs of democratisation under Medvedev, while Putin, whom he replaced two years ago, has continued to promote a hardline image from his post as prime minister. But during a meeting with Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, a fortnight ago, Medvedev said: "Each country has the right to perfect its own legislation, including that which affects its special services." He added: "What's going on now – I would like you to know this – was done according to my own direct instructions."

Russia's police and security services have looked increasingly clumsy as they try to deal with inventive grassroots activists or single-issue protest groups. One group wears blue buckets on their heads in mimicry of the flashing blue lights on the cars of bureaucrats who terrorise the roads: police arrested several activists but had to let them go because they had committed no crime. Another organisation has been attacked while trying to stop destruction of a protected forest near Moscow.

"Medvedev may smile more than Putin but the face of power hasn't changed," said Eduard Limonov, an opposition politician who plans to run for president in 2012. "The Kremlin is still terrified there will be an Orange Revolution in Russia if people are allowed to gather on the streets."

This Saturday will be the first anniversary of protests started by Limonov and a coalition of activists known as Strategy 31. They meet in Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow at 6pm every 31st of the month to demonstrate in favour of Article 31 of the constitution: the right to free assembly.

Despite each rally being broken up by riot police, the protests have grown steadily, attracting more than 500 people in May. About 180 of them were arrested.

"Instead of thinking of new ways to suppress us, the authorities should listen to our concerns," said Limonov.

Yet democracy activists are often demonised as traitors or extremists in the state-dominated media. This week at its summer camp the Kremlin-backed Nashi youth movement put up a photograph of 83-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva, one of the organisers of Strategy 31, on a dummy wearing Nazi insignia.

On Saturday she will go to Triumfalnaya. The protest movement, she said, "will only grow in the face of repression."

• Idowu sets new personal best in Barcelona final
• France's Tamgho fails to mount serious challenge

Britain's Phillips Idowu has added European gold to his burgeoning medal collection with a superb performance in Barcelona's Olympic Stadium.

Idowu set a new personal best of 17.81m in the triple jump final to beat Romania's Marian Oprea and France's Teddy Tamgho to the title. The 31-year-old Londoner now holds the World, European and Commonwealth titles, with Portugal's Nelson Evora only denying him the Olympic title in Beijing in 2008 by five centimetres.

Idowu led from start to finish with jumps of 17.46m, 17.47m and 17.40m followed by 17.81m in the fourth round, eclipsing his previous personal best of 17.73m set in winning the world title in Berlin last year.

Tamgho was expected to be the major threat after jumping a world-leading 17.98m in New York in June, but the 21-year-old had to settle for bronze with a best of 17.45m, Oprea taking a surprise silver with 17.51m in the fifth round.

The FSA may talk as if it's getting tough on the City, but it seems it has already run out of steam

Financial watchdog gets tough on City bonus culture. EU-inspired crackdown to catch 2,500 firms in the Square Mile. New rules go far beyond anything imposed on Wall Street. These sentences are designed to chill the blood of traders in London dealing rooms, groomed to expect at least 50% of their income in bonuses.

The Financial Services Authority says deferred bonuses and a switch from cash to shares, at least for 50% of the bonus, will force banks to focus less on making a quick return and more on driving long-term advantage.

A diktat that bonuses should be paid out of profits and not revenues, which is commonplace, could focus shareholders' attention on how much bank income is siphoned off by super-rich staff.

In a detailed report, the FSA shows that of the 27 firms netted by its first regulatory trawl, 2,800 bankers got more than £1m, almost 90% of the total in bonuses. Thousands more lower down the food chain also benefited from bonuses, usually worth at least 80% of their total income.

Anyone concerned with past excesses in the City might be tempted to welcome the regulator's tougher stance. Certainly the industry will complain loudly about how Wall Street and Zurich are poised to steal all the best jobs and cleverest people, which must be a sure sign that the plan is causing some pain. Senior bankers have also told George Osborne and Vince Cable that heavy-handed regulation will drive financial services firms abroad to low-tax, low-regulation jurisdictions. (HSBC relocates to Hong Kong before 2020, anybody?)

And the policy shows that, together with the previous government's 50p tax rate and limits on pension tax relief for six-figure earners, the authorities are doing their bit to circumscribe the casino, winner-takes-all mentality nurtured by investment banks, hedge funds and private equity.

Yet the process that generates excessive profits will remain largely in place. It is not the idea that traders, corporate financiers and boardroom directors can earn £1m that is up for debate, just how long they should wait for their money and how much they should be paid in shares.

There is talk of introducing more competition to the banking industry. But Metro Bank's entrance on the high street and the launch of a few boutique investment banks are unlikely to shake things up. If anything, they have joined an industry with the express aim of enjoying the same bumper profits.

They know the public understand little of how they make profits. Investment bankers and much of the financial community are at least one level removed from the consumer. Recent developments in the way banks trade, and the exotic products they buy and sell, mean that few people understand their inner workings.

Safe from the protests of ignorant consumers and from intervention by a government fearful of killing the golden goose, banks feel secure.

A little heat could be applied by the agents whom consumers pay to handle their money. Fund managers, pension trustees and independent financial advisers could exercise some control to the benefit of ordinary savers.

It does not happen and is unlikely to happen when this small and shadowy group are under instruction to maximise short-term profit for their customers. They also benefit from fees and commissions that oil the industry's wheels.

The FSA chairman Lord Turner famously said that much banking activity was socially useless. It's a pity the debate he sparked last year already seems to have run out of steam.

People have fears about retiring at 65 because their pensions are inadequate

Employers are understandably anxious about the abolition of a default retirement age (DFA). It is far easier to press a button on the workplace ejector seat than spend hours agonising over the productivity of a 66-year-old member of staff.

Anyone who has donned the manager's suit will know how hard it is to talk to staff about their poor performance. Add into the mix the question of age, and the conversation can be truly tortuous.

These undoubted problems can be overcome, but not without addressing some fundamental issues about the workplace and retirement itself.

The pension regime is one important area. On the continent, where many countries have dispensed with a DFA, it is rarely an issue for employers. Why would it be, when generous pensions signal a golden retirement? Workers, especially in manual trades, jump at the chance to quit. In the US, where employees can keep going beyond 65, employers have more power to apply tests of competence for older workers.

In the UK, most workers face the prospect of a miserable pension, if they have one at all. The financial incentive to keep working will be strong. Employers hint that in the absence of better pensions we need to follow the US model. Maybe a more flexible retirement package would be a better solution?

John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that's what publishers must give them

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry fixes its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron's delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson's diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

"It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," he says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers."

Publishing, he says, must embrace trying new things: "I am keen on the idea that every book that we put onto an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn't come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they're writing about."

Soundtrack

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show's music soundtrack and Follett's video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

"You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants, you can't tell the consumer to go away. So we didn't participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it."

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for "apps", creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin's profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: "We can't pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places."

About 8% of the publisher's sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin's founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books "by" Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

"Allen Lane's view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices," Makinson says. "I'm not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved."

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin's parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community's chattering classes by staying in post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group now dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: "I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas's argument was, 'all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant'. Well, it hasn't happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

"The reason it doesn't work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service, they edit the book, then they publicise it." In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then as Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.

But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop, attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

"We are all terribly sentimental about books," Makinson insists. "It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this," he points to the books on the shelves behind him, "which I am not."

CV

Born: 1954, Derby.

Education: Graduated from Cambridge with honours in English and History.

Career: 1976-1979, journalist, Reuters; 1979-1986, journalist, Financial Times; 1986-1989, vice-chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi; 1989-1994, co-founder of capital markets advisory firm Makinson Cowell; 1994-1996, managing director, Financial Times; 1996-2002, finance director, Pearson; 2002-present, chairman and chief executive Penguin Books.

Other interests: chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a director of the National Theatre and of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation.

Family: Married with two daughters.

Details of plot emerge in file among US military intelligence documents published by WikiLeaks website

It may be one of the more audacious terrorist plots to be hatched in Afghanistan, but it was certainly not the most original. The same al-Qaida masterminds behind 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington planned to commit a similar attack in the capital of the country that once harboured them, according to a file among US military intelligence documents published this week by the WikiLeaks website.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's second in command, is said to have given the order for a team of 22 to board one or more planes at Kabul airport, hijack the aircraft and steer them toward a number of "important objectives".

The targets were to include Hamid Karzai's presidential palace, Nato headquarters, the British and US embassies and the Ariana hotel – the whole which the CIA rented and used as its station in Kabul.

The details of the plot have emerged as the leak of secret intelligence continues to create controversy in Kabul and Washington owing to the large number of references alleging that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), supported the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Karzai today told reporters that Islamabad was the source of the conflict in his country, and called on his western allies to "destroy" the Taliban's sanctuaries inside Pakistan. It was a striking return to the sort of anti-Pakistani rhetoric that he, who has sought better relations with Islamabad, has refrained from for many months.

Karzai also criticised the publication of files naming Afghan informers as "extremely irresponsible and shocking", echoing widespread fears that their lives are now at risk from Taliban reprisals. Several logs published by Wikileaks have been found to contain information about local intelligence sources including names, locations and even grid references. The three news organisations which published reports based on the Afghan war logs this week, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, took care not to publish any material that would identify informers or otherwise put troops at risk.

The report on the alleged hijack plot, recorded by intelligence officers on 23 March 2009, highlights the mixed quality of western intelligence, particularly the large number of "threat reports" fed to coalition forces each day – there are almost 2,500 for Kabul alone in the five-year period covered by the logs.

On the one hand the airline plot report is detailed, naming a number of conspirators, including Afghan or Pakistani generals and a pilot from the Afghan national carrier, who were allegedly involved in providing the hijackers fake IDs and "facilitating anti-coalition training".

Whereas the 9/11 hijackers went to flight schools in Arizona and Florida, the Kabul plotters were due to receive flying lessons at a "private air club in Karachi". Apparently their ideological indoctrination had already begun as they attended a madrasa in Khukitan, in Pakistan's Swat valley.

All 22 were al-Qaida members and included Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and Uzbeks with fake Afghan IDs, the report claims. At an unspecified date they would enter Afghanistan and try to obtain Russian, Chinese and Iranian visas to allow them to fly to those countries.

"During the flight they will hijack the plane and conduct attacks in Kabul," said the report. Although it is categorised as a "C3", meaning the source is regarded as "fairly reliable" and the information is "possibly true", the report is imprecise, both referring to a single plane being hijacked and to a number of different "attacks" against various targets.

Iran's Fars news agency reported that an attempted hijack of an Ariana aircraft by a loan hijacker was foiled in May.

Even if the intelligence report referred to a serious plot it seems very unlikely to have succeeded.

A 9/11-style attack would be ruled out by the fact that only a couple of commercial flights take off from Kabul every hour, and there are no direct flights to China or Russia. Kabul airport is also an exceptionally difficult place from which to hijack planes, with some of the most stringent security procedures in the world.

It is normal for passengers to have their bags searched twice and to be frisked four times, with varying degrees of effectiveness, before they reach check-in – there's another frisk and bag check before getting onto the plane.

• England all-rounder will play as batsman next week
• Yorkshire suspend Azeem Rafiq over Twitter tirade

Andrew Flintoff remains on course to return from a long injury lay-off in Lancashire's second XI fixtures against Yorkshire next week. The 32-year-old, who still hopes to play for England in future limited-overs matches, is set to feature at Crosby, near Liverpool, where the Roses rivals play a one-day match on Monday and a three-day game starting the following day. "Hopefully next week possibly there's a chance of playing in the second team, just as a batter initially and then start picking up the ball from there," Flintoff said.

Gloucestershire inflicted a first Clydesdale Bank 40 defeat of the season on Yorkshire with a 65-run victory in the opening game of the Cheltenham Festival. Gloucestershire joined Yorkshire on 10 points at the top of Group B after the visitors were bowled out for 229 in reply to 294 for six by the hosts. Chris Taylor, with an unbeaten 83 off 63 balls, top scored for Gloucestershire before Yorkshire slumped to 73 for five at one stage.

A superhero no more, KP's dismal run of form has at least proved the middle order is no longer a one-man band

The Pakistanis complimented Kevin Pietersen by using both of their reviews in an attempt to get rid of him. This was based more on Pietersen's reputation than the evidence of their own eyes. Pietersen was once the totem among England's batsmen, without question the most coveted wicket for the opposition. But today the tourists might have been better advised to save at least one review for Eoin Morgan. As it happened Morgan was palpably lbw to a Shoaib Malik off-break and given not out, but the Pakistanis had already used up their quota.

Pietersen looked in dreadful form; Morgan, who had the opportunity to adjust to the red-ball game with a slow, match-saving innings for Middlesex at Uxbridge last week, was all composure. To spin this positively, which is the way of the 21st century: England's middle order is no longer a one-man band. Pietersen no longer overshadows the others.

Morgan arrived after two wickets had fallen in five balls. Unlike his two knocks against Bangladesh he found himself in a "pressure situation". Actually that probably suited him; his sharp cricketing brain would have worked out that runs here – from 118-4 – would mean far more than if England were coasting along. This was a terrific opportunity for him to demonstrate his Test credentials. He soaked up the pressure defending against Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif, biding his time with the calculation of a long-lived gunslinger.

It soon became easier. Umar Gul could not match his fast-bowling partners and spinners do not bother Morgan much. He will be a good sub-continental Test player; he has quick eyes, hands and feet. Initially he was all orthodoxy. Then on 29, facing Danish Kaneria he unveiled his hallmark reverse-sweep, which sent the ball to the boundary.

It was the only reverse-sweep he played all day but it had consequences. Kaneria decided he could not allow this to happen again so he stationed a man on the boundary at deep third man for that shot. This meant that there were gaps elsewhere – at cover point for example – and that is where Morgan often sent the ball for four rather than the statutory single.

Comparisons of Morgan with Brian Lara are silly except in this regard: he has the same precise picture in his mind of where every fielder is stationed and upon receipt of a poor ball he avoids them quite brilliantly. He gets full value for his strokes. Paul Collingwood could not keep up with him.

Nor was Morgan hard to watch, but the end outranks the means when he is at the crease. The cover drive with such economy of movement is graceful enough but that is not his goal. He craves runs rather than sighs of ecstasy from those looking on. His only extravagance was to pop down the pitch to Shoaib Malik and to drive him for six to register his first Test hundred and the seventh of his first-class career.

It is a century that puts the cat among the pigeons. Ian Bell, nursing his  injured ankle, can only look on from the sidelines, albeit with his stock high. Ravi Bopara is scoring stacks of runs for Essex. And yet England are only likely to pick seven batsmen in their tour party to Australia. After this innings it would be remarkable if Morgan was not one of those.

Surely they could not omit Kevin Pietersen? It remains just about unthinkable but Pietersen was all at sea today. He has been practising assiduously in the nets at Lord's, but that is not the same as scoring runs in the middle in county cricket. The problem is that there appears to be nowhere for him to play county cricket now that his ties with Hampshire are being severed.

Phil Edmonds, a couple of decades ago, had the notion that he would like his schedule to comprise club cricket with, say, Finchley CC, Test cricket for England and nothing inbetween. He was rather keen to bypass the drudgery of county cricket. Pietersen might like to do the same but there are times when our internationals need a chance to organise their game away from the microscope with a low-profile outing on the humble county circuit.

Pietersen is not in crisis – yet. He has not scored a century for England in 21 innings – his last was in Port of Spain in March 2009. During that time he averages 38, not too bad for a drought. But he is currently a bit-part player, in danger of becoming Morgan's side-kick. It is not a role he enjoys.

• Thousands visiting wrong headstones in Virginia
• Senator in charge attacked for lack of explanation

The families of thousands of dead American soldiers may have been mourning at the wrong graves for years, it was revealed yesterday, as more than 6,000 headstones at Arlington cemetery may have been mixed up.

There was outrage among families, the American Legion and others last month when the number of graves that had been misnamed was thought to be 211. The higher figure was revealed yesterday at a Senate investigation into how there could be so much confusion over the headstones at the US national military cemetery.

Senator Claire McCaskill, who is heading the Senate committee conducting the inquiry, said: "We now know that the problems with graves at Arlington may be far more extensive than previously acknowledged. At a conservative estimate, 4,900 to 6,600 graves may be unmarked, improperly marked, or mislabeled on the cemetery's maps."

Arlington, just across the river from Washington, is one of the most revered and emotional sites in the US, having been used for members of the military since the civil war. There are an estimated 300,000 graves, including those of John F Kennedy and his two brothers, Robert and Edward.

Fresh graves are being dug regularly for the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Army investigators found that Arlington has been mismanaged, with remains buried in graves listed as empty and others had headstones but no remains. Others were unmarked or misidentified, or did not appear on cemetery maps.

At the Senate hearing, John Metzler, who was superintendent of Arlington for 19 years, said he accepted "full responsibility" for the problems. He said the paperwork relating to the graves was complex and this gave rise to errors.

"Personally it is very painful for me that our team at Arlington did not perform all aspects of its mission to the high standard required," he said.

Metzler and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham, were forced to retire last month after army investigators discovered the initial mix-up over the 211 graves.

Metzler cited a 35% cut in staff and the complexity of burying 6,000 people a year at the cemetery.

"Those staffing losses were to be offset by increased opportunities for outsourcing to private contractors," Metzler said . "As experience has shown, however, that approach does not always result in the most effective or efficient solution."

Senators appeared frustrated and exasperated at times with Metzler's explanations for the mix-ups. He said that problems down the years had been quickly remedied and that though maps used by cemetery employees were mislabelled, this did not mean people were necessarily in the wrong graves.

The anger among senators applied across partisan lines. McCaskill, a Democrat, said: "The notion that you would come in here and didn't know about it until a month ago is offensive. You did know about it, and you did nothing."

Scott Brown, the Republican who won Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat in January, said: "I don't think we're getting straight talk here."

Higginbotham answered some questions but invoked his right, under the fifth amendment, not to respond to others.

He said: "It was always conceptual that anything done by hand for 40-plus years that there would have to be some errors somewhere."

When the original mix-up was first revealed, the secretary of the army, John McHugh, apologised. At the time, the Stars and Stripes military paper quoted families expressing concern.

Ami Neiberger-Miller, whose brother Christopher Neiberger is buried in Arlington, told the paper: "I think anyone would be concerned and alarmed.

"I appreciate that the army came forward with this information and talked about it in such an open way and that the secretary of the army actually apologised to surviving families for this."

The American Legion expressed disappointment at the time that "our nation's heroes are treated in such an undignified manner".

The couple, the parents, the celeb guest list, the toilet arrangements . . . everything you need to know about the wedding of the decade

What is Truman trying to prove?" wondered a waspishly pained Cecil Beaton of Mr Capote's legendary Black and White Ball. "The foolishness of spending so much time organising the party is something for a younger man or worthless woman to indulge in, if they have social ambitions." Well, quite. But what if the organisers of such an event were a former US president and a serving secretary of state, and nothing was too good for their little princess?

Alas, we will never know for sure what Beaton would have made of Chelsea Clinton's wedding, which is scheduled to take place on Saturday , and is being covered as though it were America's hottest social ticket since Capote's 1966 extravaganza. But as someone who had no compunction about describing Dorothy Parker as "never funny" and Grace Kelly as a "big bull puppy", you sense dear Cecil might not have held back.

Yet on with the romance. Tomorrow, Bill and Hillary Clinton's only child Chelsea marries her boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky, who works for Goldman Sachs and is the son of a disgraced former congressman who has done a bit of bird for fraud. I know – as if anyone cares about the groom's family.

Arrangements-wise, I could recycle rumours that $15,000 worth of upscale portable toilets have been ordered for the event, on the basis that no mobile sanitaryware is too good for Oprah's urine, or indeed for the waste matter of various stewards of the most disastrous foreign policy adventures since the Johnson administration. I could repeat claims that $320,000 has been spent on flowers. But no such figures have been confirmed, so do join me as we tread carefully through the speculation.

Venue

Even attendees have been kept in the dark as to the location of the Clinton wedding, informed only that they must be within driving distance of New York. Over the last few days, however, the erection of a vast marquee village at the Astor estate in Rhinebeck has led to the widespread assumption that the wedding will take place at this turn-of-the-century mansion on the banks of the Hudson – unless of course the encampment is the second most repulsively wasteful decoy in Clinton history. The first? I think bombing that aspirin factory in Sudan to distract from the Lewinsky blowjob hearings is always going to edge it, on balance.

Anyway, Astor Courts was built by John Jacob Astor IV, and elitism is part of its heritage, given that it was John Jacob's mother Caroline who inspired the capping of New York's social register at 400 during the Gilded Age. Self-styled social arbiter Ward McAllister declared that there were only 400 people in town who were at ease in a ballroom – which was, not entirely coincidentally, the precise number Caroline Astor's ballroom could hold.

As for tomorrow's affair, Mrs Astor loathed parvenus, so one can't think she'd have warmed to Bubba and the gang, while the presence of guests such as an erstwhile interior designer to the White House would doubtless have sent her calling for the smelling salts. "Just because I buy my carpets from him," she once observed of a businessman, "does not mean I have to invite him to walk on them."

Guest list

It was said of the hyper-exclusive Black and White Ball that Capote invited 500 friends, but made 15,000 enemies. Of course, the Clintons' real enemies already number considerably in excess of 15,000 – their imagined foes run into googols – but they are working to similar constraints.

Indeed, contrary to earlier reports it turns out even Barack Obama is NFI, and yesterday TV viewers were treated to the edifying sight of the president of the United States explaining to a chatshow: "I was not invited to the wedding because I think Hillary and Bill, properly, want to keep this thing for Chelsea and her soon-to-be husband." Mmm. Lost in Showbiz suspects Obama wasn't invited because nobody puts Bubba in the corner – but let's not digress.

Other no-shows? Estranged dullards Al and Tipper Gore have obligingly press-released their non-attendance, while those who have made the cut reportedly include Mr Spielberg, the aforementioned Oprah, and our beloved Sting, hopefully with his sainted Plus One. The minute we know Trudie's planet-raping coiffure arrangements for the event, so will you.

Mother and father of the bride

In State Department memos, Hillary has been jokingly referring to herself as MotB (Mother of the Bride), while explaining of the wedding: "It truly is the most important thing in my life right now." Whether you regard that as charming or geopolitically unsettling is a matter for you, but rest assured the US secretary of state is up to speed with the napery. "Luckily we have email now," she explained to reporters during a recent diplomatic tour. "People can send me pictures of flower arrangements and other kinds of decisions."

Of her husband, Hillary was adoringly undermining. "You should assume that if he makes it down the aisle in one piece, it's going to be a major accomplishment," she declared, reminding us what a shameless old scene-stealer Bill is.

Primarily, though, the wedding allows Hillary to pepper her public utterances with homespun anecdotes that effectively suggest she's just like the voters. You know the sort of thing: "Like any mother, I'm hugely emotional." "Like any mother, I'm stressing over the table centrepieces." Like any mother, she's having trouble keeping her lists in order, and the tiniest mix-up could see her point 300 intercontinental ballistic missiles at a florist and request a selection of white rose buttonholes from Kim Jong-il.

The snubbed

Speaking of the Dear Leader, it is perhaps time to consider those whom we might class as the event's 13th fairies – overlooked dignitaries who could react angrily to the social rejection, perhaps by putting all guests to sleep for a hundred years, or using the moment at which the celebrant asks, "Can anyone show any just cause why the happy couple cannot be joined in matrimony?" to start a war in the Korean peninsula.

While Kim could still rain on Chelsea's parade, the encouraging news is that Bill and Hillary are said to have invited Barbra Streisand. This is wise. Yes, the "strong-willed" diva's endorsement is typically viewed as the ultimate nail-in-the-coffin for any Democratic candidate – and the sight of her singing You Don't Bring Me Flowers at a John Kerry benefit in 2004 brought new layers of meaning to the term ballot box poison. But the Clintons have correctly judged it is better to have Barbra inside the tent pissing into $15,000 toilets, than outside doing the same all over Hillary's 2012 ambitions.

Security

As indicated, the nuptials are taking place under a level of secrecy against which all of Katie Price's future weddings will be judged. Entering the church covered in a blanket to protect an OK! mag deal now looks desperately small-time. Accept nothing less than a no-fly zone and a security detail with shoot-to-kill clearance.

Already, two Norwegian journalists have been arrested for trespassing, although they were fortunate enough to have been picked up by state troopers. Come tomorrow, you may assume that interlopers will be taken to some sort of black site marquee Hillary has omitted to tell Congress about, where they will be encouraged to give up their secrets via "mousseboarding" – a Geneva conventions-flouting interrogation procedure involving restraints, a mask, and untouched salmon appetisers.

Presents

Tomorrow, all wedding presents are to be deposited for screening by Secret Service operatives, presumably in case they contain anthrax or duplicate toasters. Less easy to do anything about, unfortunately, are the gifts that have been foisted upon the secretary of state in recent weeks during the course of her diplomatic visits, with special mention going to the gemstone mosaic portrait of Hillary and Chelsea given by the Vietnamese government. Do let's hope Chelsea has a weirdo butler to act as a fence, as I believe is traditional practice with presents from foreigners with poor taste.

Seating plans

Lost in Showbiz once went to a wedding at which the designer Valentino was also in attendance, having created the bride's dress. The walnut-stained signor is evidently a man not held back by self-doubt, given that his response to the usher's inquiry, "Bride or groom?" was an immensely haughty "I am Valentino!" The look on his face when he was nevertheless billeted at least 10 rows from the front was what we who are not in fashion call a keeper. Aren't the indignities of being in trade loathsome?

Fortunately, tomorrow's big event is in America, a land without snobbery where anyone can rise to the top (even though, had Hillary won the 2008 election, presidential power would essentially have been passed between two families for a quarter of a century or more). So rest assured that the likes of Oprah and Barbra won't mind in the slightest if they're bunged somewhere near the back, or required to make up numbers on one of the children's tables.

The Palin challenge

Enormous congratulations to Chelsea and Marc for seeing off an audacious headline grab by the Palin family, in the form of young Bristol's shock engagement to her babyfather, Levi Johnston. While Hillary's daughter remains an exemplary shunner of the limelight, Sarah's eldest recently announced her engagement on the cover of a celebrity magazine. So heartlandy! "It felt right," Bristol said, "even though we don't have the support of our parents."

For now, the Chelsea and Marc show has obliterated the young pretenders, though let's not forget that the course of red state romance never did run smooth. If Bristol and Levi should embark on a Badlands-style spree tomorrow, they could still take this fight.

The wedding's place in history

Finally, for all the ballyhoo about the Clinton bash, Lost in Showbiz fears we live in an age of sadly diminished glamour. Attendees at the Black and White Ball included Greta Garbo, Frank Sinatra, Robert McNamara, Andy Warhol, the Maharaja of Jaipur, Irving Berlin, Ben Bradlee, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Marlene Dietrich, Sam Goldwyn, Billy Wilder, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth . . .

I'm afraid space constraints means we must leave the endlessly stellar roll call there, but you should know JK Galbraith's dancing was apparently electrifying, while Norman Mailer argued with McGeorge Bundy about Vietnam.

In contrast, consider Elton John's rapidly oxidising annual White Tie and Tiara ball, which this year gave lawnroom to Alex Curran and Kerry Katona. Last year we had Simon Cowell's 50th, which was hyped in hilariously awestruck terms, with people apparently unable to grasp the fact that the minute Amanda Holden's name comes within a 30-mile exclusion zone of a guestlist, all Gatsby comparisons are off.

So the optimist can hold out fantasies of Tony Blair getting an earful off Streisand tomorrow, while in an ante-room behind the cake, Bill's voice thickens as he instructs Oprah to use Chelsea's discarded veil to cushion her knees. But at some point, we're probably going to have to accept that it was the parties that got small.

Motorists will be banned from using Games lanes reserved for 'marketing partners' as well as athletes

The fact that London 2012 is just two years away was marked by the sight of Sir Chris Hoy gliding around the partly built velodrome on Tuesday. But motorists discovered today that they are unlikely to be able to travel through the capital with quite as much ease during the Olympic Games.

It was announced that 60 miles of road lanes are to be reserved for use exclusively by the "Olympic family" – and not just meaning Usain Bolt and around 24,000 other Olympians with their teams, but also an additional 25,000 "marketing partners".

The idea is that the "Games lanes" will enable swift and safe transport between accommodation and venues, while regular road users who encroach risk a £200 fine.

But it was the move to allow sponsors on to the express routes that attracted the most criticism. Richard Tracey, spokesman for the London assembly Conservative group, said: "Everyone wants to see the city put on a great show to the world and we accept that athletes have to get to their competitions on time. However, what I do not accept is the need for armies of officials to be ferried about."

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the government accepted that drivers will experience annoying delays, but stressed that the long-term benefits the Games would bring in transport infrastructure would outweigh the negatives.

The lanes will typically be open from 6am to midnight, and will run along sections of roads in central, east and west London, including Euston Road outside St Pancras and Euston railway stations, Park Lane near Hyde Park Corner, and the Mall near Buckingham Palace.

Tracey said that because some sponsors would be staying in "plush hotels in the West End" the major route along Park Lane would be partly closed.

Theresa Villiers, the transport minister, admitted Londoners' daily journeys might be affected, but said the improvements made to the capital's transport network would leave a "lasting legacy" for those living in the capital.

"Experience in other host cities clearly shows how vital this network is for enabling the world's greatest athletes to get where they need to be," she said. "There's no doubt that the Olympics will have an impact on many of the daily journeys made by Londoners, but the government, the mayor and London 2012 are working hard to ensure we keep the capital moving."

The lanes form part of a wider Olympic route network (ORN), which will cover more than 100 miles of London roads and a further 171 miles around the rest of the country. Not all roads in the ORN will have Games lanes, but they will be subject to side road closures, banned turns, changes to traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, adjustments to bus and coach stops and the temporary suspension of bus stops, although roads along the ORN will be kept free of roadworks. Motorists flouting rules will face a £200 fine for all contraventions on Olympic routes.

The president of the AA, Edmund King, said he expected drivers and residents would accept the disruption. But he added: "We will need safeguards and an appeals system to ensure that the £200 Olympic traffic penalty charge notices are only levied on those designated routes."

The routes will be signposted by road markings and temporary signs, and policed by CCTV cameras, while the Games lanes will usually run along the offside of the road (the side nearest the traffic) to minimise disruption.

With Transport for London confirming that bus lanes would still be reserved exclusively for buses, car drivers are likely to face delays as a lane of traffic becomes off-limits.

Similar measures have proved successful in other Olympic locations, with host cities typically seeing public road use drop during the event. Former British stars including Jonathan Edwards and Lady Grey-Thompson emphasised the need for athletes to be able to arrive at venues swiftly.

Edwards said his preparation for the Sydney 2000 Games – where he won gold in the triple jump – would have been affected had there been difficulty getting to the Olympic stadium.

"There's a good chance I would have become frustrated sat in traffic and started to focus less well on what I had to do that night and more and more on whether I would actually get there on time," he said. "I would have gone into the biggest night of my professional life ill-prepared and in the wrong frame of mind."

Grey-Thompson, who as Tanni Grey-Thompson won 11 gold medals in five Paralympic Games, said the reassurance that athletes could leave the Olympic village knowing that they could arrive on time was one of "the little things that make or break a Games".

Two colonies of age-old and endangered tadpole shrimps discovered alive and well near Solway coast

A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.

Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.

The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.

The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.

Wild tadpole shrimps can grow to more than 10cm long and are remarkable in surviving three major extinctions in the Earth's history. The shrimps have an extraordinary lifecycle. They live in temporary pools of water in which they lay eggs. When the pools dry out, the adults die off, but their eggs remain dormant until the pools fill up again.

Researchers at Glasgow University discovered the rare shrimps after collecting samples of mud, which were dried out and then made wet again before being placed in glass tanks. A fortnight later Elaine Benzies, a research student, noticed a tadpole shrimp swimming around in one of the aquariums. "I hadn't expected to find it and was just going in to check on the heat and lights. It was great to see everyone in the lab gathering round and peering into the tank to look at this ancient survivor from the past," she said.

Until recently, researchers believed the ancient shrimps lived only in a single pond in the New Forest in Hampshire. Six years ago, Larry Griffin, a scientist at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, discovered what appeared to be an isolated colony of the creatures in a pool at Caerlaverock.

"At the time it seemed that the Caerlaverock colony was a vulnerable historic outlier," he said. "But now that we know how this curious creature survives, we have realised that there's a good chance there are more populations out there.

"Triops matures rapidly and produces hundreds of eggs in just a couple of weeks. The pond they live in may dry out, but the eggs can survive in the mud for many years. Although in the UK they are all females, they have both male and female reproductive parts, so just one egg needs to survive to regenerate a whole population."

PartyGaming says deal with Bwin will create world's biggest publicly listed internet gambling firm

PartyGaming and its Austrian-based rival Bwin today announced plans for a merger that they say will create the world's biggest publicly-listed online gambling company.

The enlarged group, to be incorporated in Gibraltar and listed on the London Stock Exchange, would be worth $3.3bn (£2.1bn) at present market prices.

"With market-leading positions in poker, sports betting, casino and games (in particular bingo), the enlarged group will have a winning formula to exploit the growing online gaming market," said Jim Ryan, chief executive of PartyGaming.

The companies have a combined gaming revenue of €682m (£571m), and expect cost savings of €55m after the merger.

The enlarged company could be well placed to profit from the deregulation of the lucrative US market which was closed overnight to PartyGaming four years ago, causing its shares to plunge and forcing it out of the FTSE 100.

It will be 48.3%-owned by PartyGaming shareholders, while Bwin investors will control 51.6%. PartyGaming's Ryan and Bwin founder Norbert Teufelberger will be joint chief executives.

Online gaming has grown strongly since it emerged in the mid-1990s, although it exploded after the introduction of broadband technology about 10 years ago.

Global online revenues, excluding the US, have grown from an estimated €3.4bn in 2003, to €13.9bn in 2009, and are expected to reach €20.1bn by 2012, according to H2Gambling Capital, a Manchester-based consulting firm.

Countries including Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy and Spain have recently proposed legislation to regulate the sector, offer consumer protection and increase their tax revenues.

In the US, the House financial services committee voted on Wednesday to approve a bill to legalise and regulate internet gambling, reversing 2006 legislation that practically outlawed the industry.

The restriction cost PartyGaming millions, as the US generated about three quarters of the company's profits. Last year, PartyGaming agreed a $105m settlement with US authorities to avoid prosecution, and cleared its way for a return to the market under a new legal framework.

Bwin's Teufelberger has also fought to make his business legally acceptable. In 2006, Teufelberger and Bwin co-founder Manfred Bodner were arrested in France, during a press conference to announce a sponsorship deal with AC Monaco. Jailed for several days, they were then sent back to Austria on charges of breaching laws on advertising gambling.

Four years later, the recently-launched French site of Bwin pays an 8.8% betting tax to the French exchequer and is a major addition to the company's presence in continental Europe. It is particularly strong in Germany and Italy.

In Britain, the world's largest legal online betting market, Bwin had a relatively low profile, although the name is recognisable to football fans through its sponsorship of AC Milan and Real Madrid.

PartyGaming shares rose 20% to 309.5p in London, while Bwin surged 18% to €42 in Vienna.

BA's figures expected to be 'very bad', loading pressure on chief executive Willie Walsh

British Airways will tomorrow reveal the full extent of a disastrous three months in which it was hit by a double whammy of a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland and cabin crew strikes grounding planes.

Analysts said they expected the losses to be "very bad", which could put further pressure on Willie Walsh, the airline's chief executive, to reach an agreement with unions to end the long-running dispute.

Talks are being held at the conciliation service Acas on Monday. Union sources said that they were keen to resolve the dispute with BA but they are understood to be pessimistic about the chances of a breakthrough taking place.

The Unite union has planned strike meetings with its officials next week to discuss any progress made at the talks and whether to take further industrial action if the impasse continues.

This month, two-thirds of Unite members who turned out voted to reject BA's "final" pay offer of a 6% rise over two years. BA claimed that the low turnout – only about half Unite's members voted – showed that support for the union's stance was waning. If Unite presses ahead with a strike ballot, industrial action could take place again as soon as early September.

The airline was forced to ground dozens of flights during seven days of volcanic ash in April. Walsh, along with other airline chief executives, was heavily critical of the Civil Aviation Authority, which ordered planes to be grounded while tests were carried out to gauge the effect of ash on engines. There were also 23 days of strikes in May and June by cabin crew.

Howard Wheeldon, an analyst at BGC Partners, said of the forthcoming first-quarter results: "There is no reason to think they won't be anything other than very bad."

The City will also be keen to see how future bookings have been affected by the continued threat of industrial action. BA has already lost an estimated £120m from the volcanic disruption and more than £150m from the wave of strikes over cost-cutting and the removal of travel concessions from union members who went on strike, as well as disciplinary issues.

When it released annual figures in May, BA said that market conditions were starting to improve and that it hoped to break even before tax for the year.

Unite today said 75% of crew at Heathrow has lost staff travel concessions, which proved how many had been on strike, in contrast to company claims that fewer employees were joining the action.

Walsh has pledged to run 100% of long-haul services during any future industrial action and has been hiring extra cabin crew in an attempt to keep planes flying.

National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off

The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published today.

None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.

"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."

In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.

Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.

In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.

The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.

The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.

In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.

The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.

"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.

At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.

Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed.

Among the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies.

Enbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records.

Many are worried that the latest edition of the psychiatrist's 'bible' labels everyone as ill – but this has an upside

Each edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has a massive impact on psychiatric practice and medical education around the world. The book lists mental disorders and explains how to diagnose them. Seen as a gold standard, it dictates diagnostic practice in mainstream medicine.

Every media mention of DSM calls it the "bible" of mental health, and, like the latter, it generates passionate controversy. Proposals for the next edition, due in 2013, have sparked international protest, as DSM-5 looks as if it will lower the threshold of what counts as mental disorder. Critics have argued that new categories like "psychosis risk syndrome", "temper dysregulation disorder", and "binge eating" threaten to pathologise the human condition, turning clinically insignificant behaviour into illness.

People with no signs of distress may be encouraged or coerced to have therapy or take medication, with diagnoses such as "psychosis risk syndrome" being made even if a psychosis has not appeared. With the ramification of diagnoses, stigmatisation and discrimination would snowball. After DSM-5, no one will be normal again.

These critiques are both enlightening and obfuscating. The new DSM follows the logic of its predecessors: disorder is defined in terms of behaviour, so that visible aspects of our lives are used to define clinical categories. If you're nervous and shy, rather than seeing this as the symptom of an underlying clinical category to be discovered, it becomes a clinical category in itself: social phobia.

Gone is the idea of complex psychical causality or even of an interior life. For DSM, only two kinds of causes exist: biological and stress-related. The new diagnoses are made on surface symptoms that can be swiftly classified rather than invisible structures that can only be diagnosed after considerable time. As one American psychiatrist put it, using the ever-expanding diagnostic system of DSM was like trying to carve the Thanksgiving turkey according to its feathers rather than its bone structure.

This expansion cannot be denied. The first edition of DSM in 1952 was a mere 129 pages, with a few basic diagnostic categories. By the 1980s it had grown to over 900 pages, and the 180 categories of mental disorder present in 1984 would more than double over the next decade. What could explain this exponential increase in the number of mental disorders we supposedly suffer from?

DSM followed a market-led vision of the psyche in which symptoms were isolated entities that could be locally targeted. A symptom was not seen as a general problem in a person's existence which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self, but as a local disturbance that could be managed and put right. It reflected not only today's atomisation of the self but also the belief that we can change parts of ourselves without affecting other parts.

Changes in drug legislation also played a part. Each new product had to define its active ingredients, the outcomes sought and the delivery period for attaining them. This meant a new kind of surface precision. Drugs would have to prove through expensive trials that they were more effective than placebo and did better than other drugs. It was the drug industry that created the new diagnostic categories. With each new category came a new medication.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that in many parts of the US, a clinician will only receive reimbursement if they make a prescription, which means making a diagnosis. Like drugs themselves, clinical categories become objects in the marketplace, wielding economic power. The result is that the patient's underlying problems may well be neglected in favour of surface diagnoses that are both unscientific and misleading.

Curiously, the uproar over the DSM-5 proposals does bring a key clinical issue into focus. Critics complain that no one will be normal, as the threshold for disorder will be so low. But shouldn't this make us question the usefulness of talk of normality or, indeed, of "mental health"? Have these terms ever really helped anyone, beyond reinforcing the prejudices of "us" and "them"?

It is true that many people diagnosed with a so-called "mental illness" find the label helpful, allowing them to see their difficulties on a par with a physical illness, to be recognised and treated. But who are the "normal" people we would set them up against? Clinically, normality and psychosis are often the same thing. Someone may complain that everything is the neighbour's fault, not theirs, or that a plot has been hatched against them. Old psychiatry recognised this innocence of some psychotic subjects. Clinicians also know that it is in the most serious cases that a childhood is described as happy or uneventful.

Realising that no one is healthy and normal does not have to mean pathologising or medicating them. On the contrary, it can introduce a more humane approach to so-called "mental illness". Even Eugen Bleuler, who popularised the term "schizophrenia", argued that the most common form of this condition was latent. Once we accept that we can have disorders that don't activate – or to put it another way, that there is a difference between being mad and going mad – we might study what allows one person to function and another not to.

This is what old psychiatry once explored with detail and passion: the lifestyle choices, activities, roles or other solutions that people found to avoid breakdown. Studying these restitution mechanisms can help us to work with those who have not been so fortunate, and who find their lives shattered by the outbreak of psychosis.

The imperative to make people normal – rather than recognise the fault lines in all of us and strive to make them more bearable – is a constant pressure for a mental health force already overburdened by a focus on categorisation rather than on humane interactions and the uniqueness of an individual's story. Multiplying labels will not reduce the distress of those suffering most in our society: it can only serve to mask the lack in what we provide.

Only 153 schools apply to become academies – despite education secretary's claims that more than 1,000 had done so

Michael Gove, the education secretary, faced renewed attacks today when it emerged that only 153 schools had applied to become academies – despite his claims that more than 1,000 had done so.

Gove had said that the scale of demand from schools to escape town hall control required the government to rush legislation through parliament before this week's summer recess.

It now seems likely that no new academies will be formed in time for the autumn term as a result of the scheme.

The shadow education secretary, Ed Balls, accused Gove of "railroading" the legislation through parliament, and demanded that he explain why he "misleadingly claimed that more than 1,000 schools had applied". Balls, a contender for the Labour leadership, added: "It seems to me that the real reason for the rush was to avoid proper scrutiny for a deeply flawed piece of legislation."

Gove is already under attack from MPs, teachers and councils for a bungled announcement over whether hundreds of schools' plans for new buildings would go ahead.

He was forced to apologise in the Commons earlier this month after his office ignored advice to check an error-strewn list of cancelled building projects before it was published. The list suggested that many school building programmes would go ahead that had in fact been cancelled.

In relation to the academies, the department issued a press release on 2 June quoting Gove as saying: "The response has been overwhelming. In just one week, over 1,100 schools have applied." He added: "Of these, 626 are outstanding schools, including over 250 primary schools, nearly 300 secondary schools (over half of all the outstanding secondary schools in the country) and over 50 special schools."

Outstanding schools are to be fast-tracked to academy status.

A fortnight ago, the Department for Education revealed a second list of 1,907 primary, secondary and special schools that had registered an interest in turning into academies. Gove has written to every school inviting them to apply.

The new, far lower, number of schools that have applied may largely stem from the fact that Gove misdescribed expressions of general interest in the scheme as an actual application.

The lower-than-expected demand also questions why he needed to use emergency parliamentary procedures to rush through legislation this week. The academies bill, which became law on Tuesday, allows hundreds more schools to opt out of local authority control and turn into academies. The bill was pushed through the Commons in less than three days.

Balls said the emergency procedures were unnecessary given that only 153 schools had applied. He said Gove "railroaded" the bill through "because he said hundreds of schools wanted to become academies ... and many wanted to open [as such] in September. Now barely 10% of that number have even applied for academy status and none of them will convert in September."

It may be too early to say whether the level of demand to become academy schools is truly much lower than Gove had envisaged, but it would be a serious blow to the government's whole public service reform programme if it emerges that his revolution does not have the support in schools that he claimed.

Supporters of the scheme argue that school governing bodies are going to need time to weigh up the advantages of academy status, as well as see how some of the new schools perform. But the preliminary figures suggest that Gove's reforms have not sparked an instant nationwide revolution.

During the parliamentary passage of his legislation, Gove agreed to allow greater local consultation than planned before a school could take academy status.

The list of 153 schools includes about 45 primary schools, at least 12 faith schools and more than 20 grammar schools.

Gove has said he hopes – and expects – that academies will be the norm among secondary schools by the end of a first term in government. He told the Today programme earlier this month that "hundreds of schools are anxious to take advantage of these proposals".

Teachers' leaders condemned the government tonight for acting too hastily over academies.

"Our education system is too important to be subject to acting in haste, but repenting at leisure," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

"We remain concerned that many of the schools which have applied won't have carried out any form of consultation. Democracy will not be well served if children, parents and staff first learn of their school's plans to become an academy from the media."

She added that it would be "interesting to see if the list of schools applying to become an academy is as accurate, or not" as the error-ridden list that informed schools whether their building projects were to be scrapped.

Academies, unlike other state schools, have total freedom over their budgets, the curriculum and the length of the school day and term. They can also decide teachers' pay. Their expansion is thought to be the biggest change to school structures since grammar and secondary moderns were encouraged to become comprehensives in the 1960s.

Under Labour, only failing schools were turned into academies. But the new government has said that schools rated outstanding will be allowed to quickly switch to academy status and have their applications pre-approved.

The Rev Alex Brown presided over sham marriages where east Europeans were paid to wed Africans needing UK residency

The brides' outfits were borrowed, the bouquets garage-bought. Happy couples beamed for the camera, then minutes later went their separate ways.

It was the same scene, week after week. Little did passersby suspect they were witnessing not the joyful union of two people in love, but a cynical conveyor belt of sham marriages conducted on an industrial scale in the genteel Sussex seaside town of St Leonards-on-Sea.

Behind the scam, the largest of its kind to be prosecuted in the UK, was the local vicar, pillar of his community and a primary school governor.

The Rev Alex Brown, 61, was convicted of conducting hundreds of fake marriage ceremonies at his East Sussex church to enable illegal African immigrants gain residency in Britain.

In four years he presided over 383 marriages, at least 360 of them sham ceremonies where eastern European women, with rights to live and work in the UK, were paid up to £3,000 each to wed African men, mainly from Nigeria, at the small parish church of St Peter and St Paul.

The brides were recruited by Ukrainian national Vladymyr Buchak, 33, an illegal immigrant working in a sausage factory. The grooms were men about to be deported, many of them known to Nigerian-born solicitor and pastor Michael Adelasoye, 51, through his Ark of Hope evangelical church in nearby Hastings. He would advise them on residency once they were married.

The weddings, which entitled the grooms, often already married with families back home, to stay in the UK, were conducted by Brown usually without the knowledge of his congregation or church wardens.

Brown, Buchak and Adelasoye were convicted at Lewes crown court of conspiring to facilitate the commission of breaches of immigration laws. They were caught following an investigation by the UK Border Agency after caseworkers noticed the huge number of immigration applications from people who married at the church between 2005 and 2009.

At his peak, Brown married up to eight fake couples every Sunday. Ceremonies included couples who produced rings that did not fit, couples who could not speak the same language, and several people who would request to marry one person one week, only to marry someone completely different the next.

One groom married twice in one day. One bride borrowed a wedding gown minutes before her ceremony, changing back in the vestry with her bridal attire then returned to Debenhams.

Hundreds apparently lived in the surrounding streets of the parish, with 90 couples registered as living in one road alone and 52 in another.

The "couples" would usually meet just once prior to their wedding. Envelopes of cash were exchanged immediately after.

From conducting just 13 weddings in four years prior to 2005, the number of ceremonies increased 30-fold in the four years the scam was operating. Meanwhile, earnings for the church rose from £1,000 to £22,000 for the first six months of 2009.

The participants were vulnerable, mainly living in cheap Victorian bedsits that have attracted hundreds of refugees, first from Kosovo and later economic migrants from Latvia, Lithuania and other EU states, drawn to Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea in the hope of getting work in food-processing factories.

Two years after the surge in ceremonies Brown was summoned to meet the archdeacon of Hastings and Lewes, Philip Jones, to be questioned, and stopped for a short period. But then, apparently satisfied, the Church of England hierarchy allowed him to continue the weddings, which bolstered its ailing finances.

All three had pleaded not guilty. Brown claimed he was a "man of the cloth" carrying out what he saw as his "duty" to marry people. He did, however, admit failing to read out the banns before a church wedding, becoming the first clergyman in the UK to be convicted under the 1949 Marriage Act. He had been worried, the court heard, about alarming his congregation with the sheer number of foreign names.

A police search of his vicarage uncovered documents he had doctored, including the church's electoral roll, to hide the dramatic increase in weddings.

Born in Alnwick, Northumberland, and a talented chorister and solo singer before working as an account clerk in London, Brown was ordained as a priest in 1983, becoming vicar of St Peter and St Paul's several years later.

He "fell in love" with the cavernous red-brick church on a hill by the sea, and was admired by his congregation as he wandered his parish in jeans and drank as a regular in several local pubs.

But as his congregation dwindled to barely a dozen souls and the hierarchy demanded he bolster his church's ailing finances, he hit upon the lucrative plan.

Police remain nonetheless puzzled by Brown's motive, even though officers found more than £7,000 in various envelopes in the run-down building.

If the vicar was driven by money this remained unproven and he explained in his defence that such cash sums were part of a chaotic accounting system within the Church of England.

If he was motivated by a social conscience and a belief that asylum seekers who had lost their cases deserved a chance to stay in the country, and that immigration law, as he put it in his police interview, "was an ass", then he did not make this case in court.

Instead, Brown pleaded ignorance and extraordinary naivety, an argument many of his parishioners continue to believe. "If anything, he's possibly been a bit silly, a bit naive. I find it hard to believe he's deliberately set out to make money," said one local man who knew him well. "He might be gullible but that is the most he's guilty of."

Although Buchak was seen as the principal organiser of the operation, prosecutor David Walbank said there was no doubt that Brown must have been fully aware that the majority of the weddings he was conducting at the church were shams.

Sentencing was adjourned to a later date.

After the verdict, the archdeacon said he was "shocked and saddened" by Brown's betrayal of the church. "The risk of sham weddings is something that clergy are now fully aware of. Our mechanisms have been tightened up in the last three or four years," he said.

Meanwhile, the parish church, now tainted by the scandal, is unlikely to be used as a place of worship again. It will remain closed until a suitable alternative Christian use can be found.

The bride's story

Lithuanian divorcee Elvyra Ziogeviciene was persuaded to go through with a marriage as she was strapped for cash and believed she would be helping someone improve their life. But she knew it was wrong and felt "ashamed" as she shopped for a wedding dress in Debenhams the day before.

She was accompanied to the store by her then husband-to-be, Peter Ojo, and an associate, but had to give the dress back hours after the wedding.

On the day of their wedding she was handed £2,000 in cash by Ojo outside the church before they went inside. She told the court after the wedding she simply went back home with her friend. She bought a car with the £2,000.

Vladymyr Buchak, the scam organiser, had introduced her to her "husband". After agreeing to go ahead with the wedding Ojo was brought to her room in St Leonards-on-Sea.

She said she agreed to the plan because she thought she would be helping someone gain work legally and benefit herself.

Some time after the wedding Buchak called her asking for her payslips and other documents, which she handed over.

Ziogeviciene told the court that she had not seen Ojo for "quite a while". Asked whether she ever lived or intended to live with him as man and wife, she replied: "No."

"I didn't offer to marry. I got the money and I know it was wrong," she said.

• Brazilian says he will race to win after controversy in Germany
• Massa undeterred by return to scene of near fatal accident

Felipe Massa has insisted that he is not the No2 driver at Ferrari despite being ordered to let his team-mate Fernando Alonso overtake him and win the German grand prix last Sunday. Ferrari were fined $100,000 (£65,000) by the stewards at Hockenheim and the matter has been referred to the World Motor Sport Council after Alonso's controversial victory that has attracted widespread criticism.

"The time I say I'm a No2 driver I will not race any more," said the 29-year-old Brazilian ahead of this weekend's Hungarian grand prix near Budapest. Asked what he would do if similar circumstances arose in Sunday's race, Massa said: "I will win."

Massa, who is returning to the Hungaroring for the first time since his near fatal accident in qualifying for last year's race, revealed that he has had assurances from the Ferrari management that he will be allowed to compete for victories despite being 38 points behind Alonso in the world championship and 72 adrift of the leader, McLaren's Lewis Hamilton.

"I have spoken to everybody inside the team," said Massa. "As I said, I am not here really to race, I am here to win. That is really my point. As long as I am in the condition to win, we need to go to the end, to fight for the victory. I am a professional, I work for the team and everybody has to understand my point.

"I will fight for the victory here whatever the conditions," he continued, but stressed that at Hockenheim he put the team's interests ahead of his own. "I'm working for the team," he said. "If the team has a chance to win the championship, I want to help the team."

The row over Ferrari's team orders has smouldered all week. Rubens Barrichello, who was ordered by Ferrari to let team-mate Michael Schumacher win the 2002 Austrian grand prix – the incident that led to team orders being banned in Formula One – clearly has plenty of sympathy for Massa and revealed that he had been in touch with his friend and compatriot since the German race.

"I called him and told him what I thought. He's feeling the same thing that I felt," said Barrichello, who will be starting his 299th grand prix on Sunday. "All I can say is that I am very sorry for him, to see what he had to go through, such a bad thing. Nobody should be able to go through those feelings. Felipe is a friend and I wish he didn't have to go through it."

The veteran Williams driver also made it clear that he thought team orders should be stopped in any form.

"We should do something to stop this thing because at the end of the day it could get into a bit of a drama," he said. "When you are racing you want to beat the other one. I wouldn't feel good [if a team said] if I give you this and then you win. I never did like it and that's why I made changes in my life and that's why I changed teams.

"I think it's in the hands of the top people to change that. You should be allowed to race. What's the problem? If you win the championship by one point because someone lets you win, what's the point? If I have to be a bad guy to be world champion I don't care for that. I will teach my boys the same way my father taught me. I'm happy with that."

Massa said he was not nervous about returning to the scene of the accident that left him with a fractured skull and put him into hospital in a medically induced coma. "I don't remember a single thing about the accident," he said. "I've seen it many times but I don't remember it. When you close the visor you think only about doing your best." He added that he had visited the circuit medical centre and met the people who had removed him from the car.

"They did a lot for me at that moment," said Massa. "The best thing that can happen in your life is to see a guy who works very hard to help you."

Barrichello also has no doubts that Massa will be right on the pace here and revealed that his friend can see the funny side of the accident, which was caused when a spring from Barrichello's Brawn hit Massa in the visor.

"Three or four months ago we were playing poker back in Brazil and Felipe says, 'I've got something to show you'. He put the helmet he was wearing in the accident on the table and it destroyed my night. I started losing money and he was having fun with it. I think he's going to be flat out."

Schumacher has also had a conversation with Massa about the events in Hockenheim. "He is experienced enough not to need advice from me," said the seven-times champion. "But I definitely had a little conversation with him, which was naturally of a private nature."

• Injury to favourite Age Of Aquarius overshadows big race
• Illustrious Blue's win is his sixth success at Goodwood

Local knowledge was a precious commodity here today as Illustrious Blue, a horse with six previous course victories to his name, took the Goodwood Cup, while Borderlescott, a former Stewards' Cup winner, won the big sprint. An abiding image, though, was of Age Of Aquarius, the Goodwood Cup favourite, coming to a standstill after suffering an injury at the top of the straight.

Age Of Aquarius was in front and still going strongly when Johnny Murtagh felt him go lame and pulled him up. The four-year-old was taken to Arundel Equine Hospital, where it was found he had ruptured ligaments below the fetlock of his off-fore.

Dr Paul Dupreez, senior partner at the hospital, said: "He is fine and is on his way home, supported by a splint and bandages. It is not a catastrophic injury, but there are huge doubts as to whether he will be able to get back to competitive action."

As the odds-on favourite dropped through the field, Illustrious Blue, who is trained barely 10 miles from Goodwood at Angmering Park near Arundel, was going better than anything on the track he knows so well. It took him a while to master Electrolysercorrect inside the final furlong, but he was well on top at the line. Electrolyser was a length and a quarter away in second, with Purple Moon, a former Ebor winner, back in third.

William Knight, Illustrious Blue's trainer, was saddling the first Group Two winner of his career, and could not let the injury to Age Of Aquarius tarnish the moment. "He's shown today that he's one of the best stayers around, and the plan to come to his favourite track has paid off," Knight said.

"When you're a hold-up horse you need a nice long straight to make up ground, and at Goodwood he's able to wind himself up with enough time to get to the post. It wasn't nice to see the Aidan [O'Brien] horse go lame like that but, without wanting to appear arrogant, I thought we would win from four furlongs out. He was always going to get there."

Today's race also marked the retirement of Caracciola, at 13 years of age and after a 60-race career that has included victory in the 2008 Cesarewitch, the 2009 Queen Alexandra Stakes at Royal Ascot, in a Listed race at York and wins over hurdles and fences.

Borderlescott will attempt to win the Nunthorpe Stakes at York for the third year running next month after recording his first success of the season in the Group Two King George Stakes.

Robin Bastiman's sprinter came with his familiar late charge, though with the unfamiliar figure of Kieren Fallon in the saddle, in place of the suspended Neil Callan. One bookmaker now makes Fallon odds-on to retain the ride in the Nunthorpe, as the jockey seeks his first British Group One victory since returning from a long suspension nearly 11 months ago.

"He's eight now and you are always thinking 'when is he going to lose that bit of dash?'" Bastiman said. "But he's coming to hand as he always does at this time of year. He's getting a bit older and it takes a bit longer to wind him up but, once he gets wound up, he goes. The engine is still there, and that's the main thing."

Bastiman added: "Kieren rode him to perfection, just how we wanted. I'm sorry for Neil, who missed the ride because of a one-day ban at a Mickey Mouse meeting, which seems very unfair. I'll have to talk to the owner about who rides at York. Maybe we'll just have to toss a coin to decide."

Richard Hughes extended his lead as the week's top rider when Kalahaag took the fillies' maiden, while Mark Johnston, who has suffered several near misses so far at this year's Glorious Goodwood, finally saddled a winner when Eastern Aria came clear of Polly's Mark in the Group Three Lillie Langtry Stakes.

• Ryan Sidebottom injures his knee playing football
• Hildreth and Jos Buttler put on 210 for the fifth wicket

Waiting for Hildy, like waiting for Godot, involves an awful lot of mooching about. But James Hildreth, the gifted Somerset batsman, really might be making a breakthrough. They have been saying that in these parts for years about the Most Promising Young Somerset Player of 2003, 2004 and 2005. And they said it again last year, when his first innings brought him an unbeaten 303, yet he failed to make his 1,000 for the season.

Now, though, with the season just over half gone, he has scored 846 runs and is averaging 60. And because he was something of a prodigy, scoring a hundred and then 72 in what was only his second championship match, it is sometimes forgotten that he is still only 25. Justin Langer, the former captain, described him as "an extraordinary talent" and today he scored 142 to put a bit of a dent in the side of Nottinghamshire, the Championship leaders, who were up against it before the match even started.

Already without Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann, they were then deprived of Ryan Sidebottom, who injured his left knee playing football before the match. Cricketers love pre-match kickabouts but just why they are allowed to play is a mystery in this very professional environment because the indulgence has led to so many injuries.

To make matters worse for Notts they lost the toss on a very dry, flat pitch, which could give Murali Kartik, Somerset's spinner, a match-winning opportunity.

Somerset are already in a strong position, at 423 for six, although there was early movement for the visiting bowlers before lunch. Marcus Trescothick, moving across his stumps to glance his first ball, had his leg stump knocked back by Darren Pattinson. Nick Compton was caught at second slip off the same bowler before Arul Suppiah edged Andre Adams to first slip; 77 for three.

Zander de Bruyn, already dropped at third slip by Ali Brown off Adams, was fourth out at 126, lbw to Pattinson. But then Hildreth and the eye-catching Jos Buttler put on 210 in 46 overs.

The stand was broken when Buttler, going down the wicket to Samit Patel, was bowled for an aggressive 88. Hildreth was caught on the square-leg boundary to the first delivery with the new ball. It gave Pattinson four wickets.

England 331-4; Pakistan

Eoin Morgan's maiden Test hundred in only his third Test led England into a position of authority at the start of the npower series against Pakistan. Morgan even had the audacity to bring up his hundred with a straight six off the Pakistan off-spinner, Shoaib Malik, as he made a perfect start to a series in which he aims to confirm his batting credentials for the Ashes this winter.

Three wickets for Pakistan's exciting, young, fast bowler Mohammad Ameer left England nervily placed at 118 for 4 soon after lunch, but Morgan (125 not out) and the ultra-reliable Paul Collingwood (81 not out) added an unbroken 213 in four hours. Most Pakistan disappointment will centre on a clumsy wicketkeeping display from Kamran Akmal and the inconsistent – if, at times, unfortunate – leg-spin of Danish Kaneria on a dry, responsive surface.

England also made much better use of the umpire decision review system, which was making its debut in a Test in this country, using the full collection of technical aids: multiple camera angles, slow-motion replays, Hawk-Eye and hotspot.

Twice an appeal by Kaneria, was upheld by the Sri Lankan umpire Asoka De Silva and twice the decision review system overruled it. England won appeals on behalf of Morgan, on 78, and Jonathan Trott, and go into the second day with one review remaining, whereas Pakistan wasted both theirs in feverish fashion in successive post-lunch overs from Mohammad Asif in their desperation to dismiss Kevin Pietersen, who on this form is quite capable of dismissing himself.

Pietersen survived an lbw appeal on one, then a caught-behind on five. The appeal for a catch at the wicket looking particularly hare-brained as the ball clearly missed the outside edge, Pakistan perhaps fooled by the noise of Pietersen's bat hitting his leg. Pietersen still failed to reach double figures as Asif benefited from a big gap between bat and pad to bowl him off an inside edge.

Trott's campaign to establish himself as England's No3 for the Ashes – a measured affair which brought him 38 from 67 balls – was dominated by review system. The TV umpire, Marais Erasmus from South Africa, ruled out a wicket for Kaneria because of an inside edge. Trott's second recourse to the review failed to reprieve him as he shouldered arms to a big inswinger from Aamer.

England had lost both left-handed openers by lunch. Alastair Cook, on eight, edged an outswinger from Aamer to first slip. Andrew Strauss, who made a not entirely straightforward decision to bat first, was badly dropped on 15, Kamran spilling a simple wicketkeeping chance. Strauss was through the worst when, on 45, an insipid shot just before lunch gave Aamer a second wicket in the first over of his second spell.

Morgan began sketchily, surviving Kamran's appeal for a catch at the wicket on five – a TV replay showed the ball had fallen short of the keeper, and brought boos from the Trent Bridge crowd.

He burst into life when the spinners Kaneria and Malik began bowling in tandem, hitting six fours in 12 balls. Kaneria, in particular, wasted encouraging conditions with a succession of stray deliveries but he should have had Collingwood stumped on 48, only for Kamran to complete a bad day by dropping the ball.

Kaneria's frustration was complete when umpire De Silva had a second "out" verdict overturned, this time with Morgan on 78, replays suggesting the ball turned too much and would have missed leg stump.

Pakistan wore black armbands and the Pakistan flag flew at half mast in memory of more than 150 deaths in the Islamabad air crash.

It took France's first lady more than 30 takes to buy a baguette on film. There's no shame in that

Over 30 takes just to buy a loaf of bread? What on earth is Carla Bruni playing at? Just as well she wasn't remaking the chariot race in Ben Hur or we'd still be here next year.

France's first lady may allegedly have fluffed her moment on the set of Woody Allen's latest film. But in fact, movie acting isn't half as easy as it looks. You may feel that as a profession it resembles, if you'll excuse the pun, little more than organised loafing: but there's more to it than meets the eye.

The thing that astonishes casual visitors to a film set is just how unutterable dull the process is. Hours can pass with seemingly nothing happening – blokes wearing scaffolder's gloves lugging bits of lighting about, others staring with eyepieces at things only they can see, while in the middle of it all the director sits eating doughnuts and flirting with the leading lady.

That's because there's so much to get right in order to capture the perfect take. Getting the actor to put her hand out for the white sliced is the least important part of the process.

For instance, was the lighting on that last take OK? Good. Sound? Ditto. Did the supporting artist playing the passing pedestrian outside the bakery window actually walking through frame on cue, or were they a fraction late, drawing the eye just when you want it to be focused on Carla's big moment? Yes, it was all fine. Great, then lets print it.

Except no. The props department have sheepishly pointed out that after 26 takes and three hours in the baking sun, the baguette you started with earlier that morning now more resembles something you'd use to cosh a security guard over the head. No way the president of France's missus would be seen paying good money for that stale old housebrick.

OK, new bread please, re-set, first positions everyone. And … Action!! Except now some clouds have appeared overhead. The DOP (director of photography) is worried that anything you shoot now won't match with the approach shots that were filmed earlier in bright sunshine.

No matter that Carla may plead that the last take was her best yet, capturing perfectly the inner torment of her character simply by the peerless manner in which she accepted the yielding loaf. Sorry, sorry Carla, we're going again, stand down everyone, send for more doughnuts. See what I mean?

In any case, you can take it from me (as someone who's played more one-scene cameos than most), that small parts are the worst. Go into the green room on any film set, and study the actors waiting to shoot. See those nervous individuals anxiously mumbling their lines under their breath in the corner? They're the ones who have only got one speech in the entire project.

The stars, the old lags who are on screen all day every day and for whom the next scene is only one of a dozen or so before lunch – they're the ones dozing in the corner or having a contest to see who can lob a rolled-up ball of scrap paper so that it deflects off the ceiling fan and lands in the waste bin.

But even if Carla was to blame, she's assuredly in the best company. Nobody would deny that the immortal Marilyn Monroe had her good days and her bad, and in Tony Curtis's memoir of the filming of Some Like It Hot, he recalls filming a scene in which Marilyn's only line was "Where's that bourbon?"

Those "three simple words" took her 85 takes. By the time the director Billy Wilder got one he could use, 150,000 feet of film had been used and Curtis had been in high heels for nearly eight hours. The whole miserable day is summed up by three of Curtis's own little words – "Cut. Print. Faint." So don't worry Carla, don't worry. You've still got 50 odd takes in the locker yet.

Blood-thinning treatment is given green light in America as profits forecast rises

AstraZeneca investors received a double dose of good news today as the UK's second-largest pharmaceutical company revealed better-than-expected quarterly results and won US expert endorsement for its blood-thinning treatment Brilinta.

The Anglo-Swedish group doubled its share buyback programme to $2bn (£1.3bn) and raised its full-year profit forecast after reporting a net profit of $2.1bn for the three months to 30 June, compared with a $1.72bn profit in the same period a year ago. The shares rose 86.5p, or 2.7%, to £32.89.

An advisory committee of the US Food and Drug Administration voted seven to one to recommend approval of Brilinta for patients with acute coronary syndrome, or blocked arteries. The FDA is expected to make a final decision by 16 September. It usually follows the advice of its advisory committee, which endorsed the drug despite revelations that study results in the US did not match the positive reports from abroad.

The market for blood thinners, used to protect against future heart attack or stroke, is dominated by Plavix, which is made by Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb. With global sales of $9.1bn last year, it was the world's second-best selling drug behind Pfizer's cholesterol drug Lipitor.

An international, 18,000-patient study conducted by AstraZeneca showed that patients taking Brilinta versus Plavix were less likely to experience various heart-related problems, including heart attack and stroke. But US patients studied were more likely to report heart problems while taking Brilinta. However, its overall safety and efficacy benefit won through.

"While the panel identified the considerable uncertainties and unknowns of the aberrant and inconsistent US data, we were surprised how quickly these concerns fade away in the face of an overall reduction of mortality for the population as a whole," said Andrew Baum at Morgan Stanley.

Analysts reckon Brilinta could achieve annual sales of up to $1.8bn, giving AstraZeneca a new blockbuster to replace some of its ageing drugs which are coming off patent.

AstraZeneca's key brands all did well in the quarter, with sales of its cholesterol medicine Crestor rising 23% to $1.43bn while sales of the asthma drug Symbicort climbed 20% to $664m and the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel saw an 8% rise to $1.35bn.

"Our second-quarter performance reflects continued strong growth in our emerging markets and good performance for key brands Crestor, Seroquel and Symbicort," said chief executive David Brennan. China has been particularly strong, alongside countries such as Mexico and Turkey, where older drugs – branded generics – sell well.

The company raised its guidance for core earnings per share to between $6.35 and $6.65, up from its previous range of between $6.05 and $6.30.

Last month AstraZeneca won a three-year legal battle in the US to protect its patent on its money-spinning Crestor treatment, which means cheaper, generic versions of the drug cannot be sold in the American market until 2016.

However, the second half of the year looks tough as some key products lose patent protection, including the breast cancer treatment Arimidex, which brought in sales of nearly $1bn last year. Some one-off benefits that boosted profits last year, such as sales from AstraZeneca's swine flu vaccine, will not be repeated.

Pharmaceutical companies are under huge pressure to replenish their dwindling pipelines of new drugs. AstraZeneca has reorganised its research and development operation into groups called IMeds where the same scientists who discover new molecules see the development of drugs through to the late stages, giving them an incentive to come up with medicines that will make it on to the market.

Fears death toll will rise after boat capsizes 80 miles from Kinshasa

A boat carrying 200 passengers to Congo's capital has capsized after hitting a rock. A government spokesman said at least 80 people had died, with fears the toll will rise.

Rescuers were searching the Congo River near Maluku district about 80 miles from Kinshasa, information minister Lambert Mende said.

The boat was heading to the capital from western Bandundu province's district of Kwilu.

Congo is a vast country with little more than 300 miles of paved road. Many people prefer to take boats even if they do not know how to swim. The boats are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity. In May, dozens died when an overloaded canoe capsized on a river in eastern Congo. And last November, at least 90 people were killed after a logging boat sank on a lake in Congo. The timber-carrying vessel was not supposed to be carrying passengers.

Controversial legislative crack down on illegal workers could be reversed as early as next week at the court of appeal

Police in Arizona were thrown into confusion today when a controversial law cracking down on illegal immigration finally came into force, despite crucial parts being struck out at the last minute.

A ruling by a judge yesterday blocking two main elements of the law left police forces unsure how to react. Some officers said they would enact the parts that remained while others refused to have anything to do with it until the legal situation was clarified.

Latino groups staged protests throughout the state today against the law, which came into effect just after midnight yesterday.

The Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, was today planning to launch an appeal against the judge's ruling and to have the original law reinstated. That could be done by the court of appeal in San Francisco as early as next week.

She promised, if necessary, to take it all the way to the supreme court, though it would not be heard until the next session, beginning in October.

The row has highlighted the plight of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, of whom about half a million are thought to live in Arizona. Immigration is a matter for the federal government but the Arizona legislature took matters into its own hands by passing the legislation, which is opposed by the Obama administration.

The judge, Susan Bolton, yesterdayruled against the most inflammatory part of the legislation that would have allowed police to question suspects about their immigration status. Some warn this would lead to racial profiling.

Parts of the law that survived Bolton's ruling include a ban on "sanctuary cities", areas of the state that are relatively safe for illegal workers, and making it a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly take on illegal immigrants.

The police have been divided on the issue since the start, with some regarding illegal immigration as a low priority and also fearing that they could be open to law suits accusing them of racial profiling.

Others have welcomed the law, regarding illegal immigration - and the ability of drug smugglers to pass relatively easily over the border from Mexico - as a major problem. Sheriff Larry Deaver, head of Cochise County, on the border with Mexico, said todayhe would implement the law: "We have to win this. We have to stop the flow."

Assad due in Lebanese capital for the first time since assassination of counterpart Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005

Syria's president Bashar al-Assad is expected to visit Beirut tomorrow for the first time since the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005 – a murder blamed on Damascus and which forced Syria's withdrawal from its neighbour's territory.

Assad is due in the Lebanese capital for an unprecedented joint visit with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to attend a mini-summit designed to defuse tensions and overcome Arab divisions. Diplomats say the US has asked Saudi Arabia and Syria to encourage the Palestinians to resume direct peace talks with Israel – endorsed by the Arab League today.

The visit follows mounting concern about the UN tribunal investigating Hariri's killing. Syria has long appeared confident its officials will not be named, but recent leaks suggest indictments are likely for members of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shia movement backed by Syria and Iran.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, has dismissed the tribunal as a creature of Israel and the US and warned his organisation would fight any charges – fuelling fears of renewed sectarian unrest or civil war between Sunnis and Shias. Indictments of Hezbollah members would put a huge strain on the coalition government and could bring it down.

The tribunal itself, based in the Netherlands, insists it is politically neutral.

King Abdullah, 85, is seen as a key figure in attempts to bridge the gap between the US-backed conservative camp in the Arab world, and Syria and Qatar, Iran's only Arab friends and sponsors of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas – which controls the Gaza Strip and opposes the current indirect peace talks with Israel.On Wednesday he saw Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak and goes on to Jordan to meet his namesake, King Abdullah.

The Saudi monarch is close to Hariri's son, Sa'ad, Lebanon's current prime minister, who has made several fence-mending trips to Damascus since diplomatic ties were first established in 2008.

The anti-Syrian protests dubbed the "Cedar revolution" and international outrage over the assassination forced Damascus to withdraw its troops after 29 years controlling Lebanon as well as leading to the creation of the UN tribunal.

ends

• Spanish bank could take over 318 Royal Bank of Scotland branches as early as next week
• UK arm of bank reports 10% rise in profit as it bids to take on 'big four'

Santander will continue its UK expansion by taking over 318 Royal Bank of Scotland branches as early as next week.

Today the Spanish bank reported a 10% rise in profit in its British arm. It also confirmed it was considering a stock market flotation of part of its UK business, which has grown rapidly through the acquisition of former building societies Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and parts of Bradford & Bingley.

After cutting its UK workforce by 1,900 following the series of takeovers, the Spanish bank now intends to hire 600 extra staff for its branches and call centres, because of the increased demand for its products. The bank recently came bottom in a Which? survey of customer satisfaction.

Alfredo Saenz, Santander's chief executive, would not be specific about the acquisition of the RBS branches, but said he expected a "solution" in August. RBS, which has been ordered to sell the branches by the EU in return for £54bn of taxpayers' money, reports its figures a week tomorrow. RBS conducted an auction for the branches but Santander is now the only remaining bidder.

As the major UK banks prepare to publish their performance for the first half of 2010 next week, Santander admitted that, overall, its net profit fell 1% in the first half to €4.44bn (£3.72bn) as its domestic operations were hit by the economic crisis in Spain. Its shares ended 1.6% lower at €10.26 amid disappointment about the fall in profits.

But the bank was upbeat about its prospects in the UK, where it is selling one in five new mortgages and also trying to expand lending to small businesses. This is a subject that concerns the government, which wants small businesses to thrive to help cushion the blow of cuts in the public sector.

The bank lent £12.3bn for home loans to take a market share of almost 20% in the first half, which is higher than its traditional share of 14%. However if the £9bn of mortgage funds that was repaid is included in the numbers, the amount of new mortgage lending falls to £3.3bn. Lending to small business was up 20% to £7.5bn but this gives Santander a market share of just 3.2%.

The provisions for bad and doubtful debts fell back to £187m in the second quarter of 2010, from £204m in the first three months of the year. At group level, the bank set aside €4.9bn in provisions against non-performing loans, which was up 6% year-on-year.

Santander, despite having taken over Abbey as long ago as 2004, is regarded as a new entrant in the UK banking market and a competitor to the "big four" banks – RBS, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays – which continue to dominate the high street.

It is stepping up its pressure on the incumbents at a time when other new entrants are trying to win business, including Metro Bank, which opened its doors for business for the first time yesterday.

Amid much publicity, the first new bank to open on high streets for more than century was unable to disclose how many new accounts had been opened on its first day. Metro Bank is offering customers a sandwich toaster if they open accounts, as well as biscuits for dogs and lollipops for children to try to create a welcoming atmosphere.Other banks trying to expand in the UK include Tesco's finance arm, Virgin Money and a new banking venture led by City veteran Lord Levene which may try to take over the nationalised Northern Rock or branches that Lloyds Banking Group is being forced to sell by the EU in return for £20bn of state aid.

Europa League qualifier: Follow all the latest action from Macedonia with our live match centre

Chief executive warns public spending cuts of 40% would mean court 'couldn't actually deal with any casework'

The UK supreme court would have to close for business if proposed public spending cuts of 40% were implemented, its chief executive has warned.

At a press conference to mark a first legal year for the highest court in the country, Jenny Rowe said: "As 62% of our costs are genuinely fixed, a 40% cut causes us some problems. We couldn't actually deal with any casework, in fact, with a 40% cut."

Rowe said that casework was a "priority" for the court, but that after being asked to come up with scenarios of cuts of 25 and 40%, its education and outreach projects looked most vulnerable.

Since its launch in October last year, the supreme court has heard a total of 67 appeals and handed down 62 judgments.

Lord Hope, deputy president of the court and one of the most senior judges in the UK, said the public had gained since the court's establishment.

"Our concern is that having started on this enterprise … we should be able to sustain that operation," he said. "It's a quite different operation from what we had before [in the House of Lords]. It's one which can't be maintained without resources."

It follows Hope's comments in a speech at Gresham College in London last month, where he warned that the government's proposed cuts could not be achieved "without serious prejudice" to the quality of the service given to the public.

Every department across Whitehall is being asked to draw up spending cuts scenarios of 25%-40%. The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has already announced plans to close 157 magistrates and county courts in England and Wales.

The supreme court took over from the House of Lords on 1 October 2009, when it was opened in what was Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square, following a £56m renovation.

The move from its traditional place at the heart of parliament was intended to underline the independence of the country's top judges and increase the transparency and accountability of the court, which now sees its key role as one of educating the public about what it does, as well as adjudicating cases.

Prime minister allocated personal valet as VVIP guest at luxury hotel during trip to India

His critics might seek to caricature him as a man used to enjoying the services of a butler. However, Downing Street today insisted that David Cameron was surprised to have been allocated a personal valet at a luxury Bengalooru hotel. Aides to the prime minister said they had not requested the butler, called Leo, for Cameron's stay at the Leela Palace.

Cameron reportedly told hotel staff: "Leo has done a fantastic job in making me feel comfortable and at home. Please take good care of him." The hotel was similarly effusive, the spokesman saying that for a "VVIP" Cameron, who began his visit to India in the city on Wednesday, had proved notably "simple and down to earth".

Donmar Warehouse overcomes limits of 250-seat capacity to stage Shakespeare's tragedy for live broadcast

One of the most keenly awaited Shakespearean performances of recent times – Sir Derek Jacobi's King Lear – is to be broadcast live in more than 300 cinemas across the world.

The Donmar Warehouse in London will announce today that it is to follow the National Theatre's example and will be filming King Lear during a performance next February.

It is one way of tackling a repeated criticism of the Donmar, with its tiny audience capacity of 250: that it puts on amazing theatre which too few people get to see. Michael Grandage, the Donmar's artistic director who will also direct Jacobi, said he was "regularly made very aware" of how small the audience space was and the theatre had worked very hard at broadening access, from always making seats available on the night to the one year residency in London's West End last year which included Jude Law as Hamlet.

The pioneering technology, used first by the Met opera in New York and then the National, works so well, said Grandage, "that it seemed an obvious thing for us to explore". Grandage said he was initially sceptical but saw both Phèdre and Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art at the cinema and was completely won over.

"It has taken me years to come round to the idea of having crossover in the two mediums, theatre and film. The crucial thing that makes it work is that it is live. Theatre is of the now, the day we are living. This is not going to go on to DVD. When you do see recorded theatre it always look dated and it seems in some way a museum piece, you look at it and think, 'How weird' and 'Why did they do that?'"

The nuts and bolts details of how the broadcasts will work have still to be sorted out, but Grandage is confident that Lear, with something like 22 performers, will not be marred by walking into cameras. The Donmar stage was, he said, bigger than people think. King Lear will also have a far bigger touring programme than previous Donmar productions and will visit Llandudno, Belfast, Glasgow, Milton Keynes, Salford, Richmond, Bath and Cornwall.

Lear is one of the great Shakespearean roles. Just as the best young actors all want tackle the huge demands of Hamlet, Lear is the one to take on towards the end of a career. Grandage said he and Jacobi had been on a journey towards it over recent years, working together on The Tempest, Don Carlos and Twelfth Night. It is also a while – perhaps not since Ian Holm at the Cottesloe in 1997 – since a major Lear was performed in a more intimate space.

The production, for which rehearsals start in October with it due to open in December, will also have in the cast Gina McKee as Goneril, Justine Mitchell as Regan, Pippa Bennett-Warner as Cordelia and Ron Cook as the Fool.

The National Theatre also plans to keep up its live cinema performances after the first season was seen by 150,000 people in 22 countries. In December Rory Kinnear in Hamlet will be screened and next year there will be the musical FELA! and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein.

London studio Curve channels the spirits of Bangai-O and Gunstar Heroes into a new Playstation downloadable.

One of the most awesome things about the explosion of DLC on current gen consoles, apart from the influx of classic arcade remakes, is the influx of 2D platform adventures. There's Shadow Complex, Limbo, Braid and N+, with Comic Jumper and Rayman Origins on the way. And soon to be joining this elite cabal will be Explodemon! from London-based indie developer, Curve Studios.

Officially unveiled today and heading for the PlayStation Network, it's described as a 2.5D action platformer, inspired by classic SNES titles. You play a malfunctioning robot who must save the planet of Nibia from evil Vortex forces. This is achieved though the usual platforming channels: leaping through the air, combatting enemies and solving physics-based puzzles. The eponymous lead character also has the ability to self-destruct at will, taking a multiude of space scum out with him. Yep, it does sound like 'Splosion Man, but Curve are adamant that they thought of the game ages ago,. Apparently, they even had an XBLA slot ready for it before Twisted Pixel's similar blow-'em-up arrived, but then got sidetracked by other projects.

Anyway, it's coming this winter and the team has listed a host of intriguing influences including cult shooters Bangai-O and Gunstar Heroes as well as the excellent GBC adventure Astro Boy: Omega Factor by Treasure and Pulseman, an obscure Mega Drive platformer from the makers of Pokemon. Any game that can combine just two of those into a downloadable title is worth a look as far as we're concerned...

There's no website yet, but you can follow the studio's Twitter feed for more info.

Synthetic silks have a great future – if only scientists can unlock the chemistry of natural silk

It's tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel, and no one really knows how to make it. Except spiders of course. And silkworms.

Scientists have been trying to mimic the remarkable properties of natural silk for years, with varying success. New approaches are needed to break the deadlock, argue Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan of Tufts University in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Omenetto and Kaplan say reconstituted silks could have a wide range of applications, from implantable drug delivery systems to optical and electronic devices.

We've all watched a spider build a web or lower itself down a delicate thread. You might even have seen a silkworm make a cocoon. It looks simple, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Researchers still do not fully understand the complex chemical changes that turn silk from a concentrated protein solution inside the glands of a spider or silkworm to a high-strength extensible fibre on the outside.

Though synthetic silks have been made in the lab, Omenetto says they fall short of natural silk.

"We don't use synthetic silks [for hi-tech applications] because they're basically not good enough," he said. Instead scientists use reconstituted silk extracted from silkworm cocoons.

"The natural fibre is put in solution and purified, the protein is extracted and essentially you go back to what is in a silkworm gland. That's the 'magic sauce' from which you can make new materials," Omenetto explains.

However, he and Kaplan predict that high-quality synthetic silks, modified for a diverse range of applications, could soon be made on an industrial scale.

"In the next few years, silk sutures, drug delivery systems and fibre-based tissue products that exploit the mechanical properties of silks can be envisioned for ligament, bone and other tissue repairs," the pair write in Science.

Follow-on applications could include degradable electronic displays and implantable optical systems for diagnosis and treatment.

Omenetto believes that silk will be harvested from transgenic plants in the same way as cotton. Researchers have already created transgenic bacteria and fungi in an attempt to increase silk yields.

In 1995, a team of American researchers inserted a synthetic gene for spider dragline silk into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which made the protein. In 2002, a North American team produced spider silk in mammalian cells.

"The remaining challenges are quality control and scale-up," says Omenetto.

Currently silk is harvested by boiling and separating the cocoons of the domesticated silkmoth larva, Bombyx mori, which are reared on farms. The 5,000-year-old process, known as sericulture, provides over 300,000 tonnes of silk per year to the commodity textile and medical suture industries. But the process is labour and time-intensive.

"In a synthetic form we could bypass the purification process and have control over quality and yield," argues Omenetto.

There may be other advantages. Natural silk contains the glycoprotein sericin, which causes an immune response when used in medical sutures. The sutures have to be wax-coated to eliminate this problem, but it makes them non-biodegradable. "With purified silk you could eliminate the immune response and still maintain the mechanical properties of the silk," says Omenetto.

However, others urge caution about the prospects for artificial silk. "There are many applications for such materials, but first we have to be able to make them to order and at reasonable cost, and here we have quite a way to go," says Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford's silk research group.

One of the many challenges scientists face is in their understanding of the molecular structure of silk.

Silks are large proteins made from repeating sequences of amino acids flanked by specific side chains that determine the protein's chemical behaviour. Making the correct side chains in synthetic silks is essential to capture the properties of the natural fibre.

Another mystery is how silk protein stays fluid at high concentrations inside the glands of spinning animals. At similar concentrations on the outside, many of the proteins aggregate, coming out of solution to form a gooey mess.

Though the future looks bright for silk-based technologies, it may be some time before silkworms can weave their cocoons in peace.

• Stand-in coach urges league leaders to avoid errors
• Greg Eastwood's return to Australia may need contract buy-out

Shaun Wane will remind the Wigan players of the pain they have suffered at Headingley this season when he takes charge of the team for the second time in tomorrow night's Super League blockbuster at Leeds.

Wane, a former Wigan forward who has been on the club's coaching staff for several years, had extra responsibility thrust upon him last week when Michael Maguire returned home to Australia to be with his ill father, who died on Tuesday.

He enjoyed a dream debut in the hot seat with a 46-0 romp at Hull last Friday that re-established Wigan's four-point lead at the top of the table. Another win at Leeds would virtually guarantee Wigan finish top for the first time in a decade, if it is followed by a St Helens win at second-placed Warrington on Saturday night.

Wane's emphasis this week has been on the most costly of the five defeats the Warriors have suffered this season, when Lee Smith's late try secured a 12-10 win for Leeds in the Challenge Cup quarter-final that shattered Wigan's hopes of a first Wembley appearance since 1998.

"That defeat in the cup game still sticks in the throat," Wane admitted. "It could have gone either way, and it was just a simple error that let us down. I'm big on not making simple errors at the play-the-ball and in contact. We've been hammering the point this week."

Wigan's win at Hull allowed Leeds to climb into the top four for the first time this season by beating Salford last Sunday, and the champions should be much stronger with the return of Rob Burrow, Jamie Peacock and Keith Senior. But they are still missing Greg Eastwood, the New Zealand forward who is recovering from a knee injury and whose desire to return to Australia at the end of the season was finally confirmed today.

However, he may have to buy out the remaining two years of his contract after his former club Canterbury dismissed the idea of paying the £100,000 transfer fee that Leeds are demanding. "Last time I looked, we're not the Commonwealth Bank," said Canterbury's chief executive, Todd Greenberg.

Hull KR have confirmed that they are one of four Super League clubs to have expressed an interest in signing the colourful Australian forward Willie Mason for next season. Mason is hoping to secure a new two-year contract with the North Queensland Cowboys, whom he joined last winter from the Sydney Roosters, but said: "If not, it's a big world. I've got several options."

• Clamp down follows yellow card leniency in Tri-Nations
• Lewis Moody admits to 'butterflies' after joining Bath

Premiership referees will be told to clamp down on spear tackles this season and send off players for the offence rather than showing a yellow card, as has been the case in this year's Tri-Nations.

Two South African backs and the Australia outside-half, Quade Cooper, have been banned this month after being cited for spear tackles. Cooper and the Springboks' centre, Jaque Fourie, were shown yellow cards, only to be suspended after being later cited, while the South Africa wing Jean de Villiers went unpunished during the Wellington Test against New Zealand only to receive a two-week ban afterwards.

Citing commissioners are supposed to take action if they feel offences warrant a red card, raising the question why spear tacklers have not been sent off in the Tri-Nations. With the three matches so far refereed by Irishmen, it is not a hemisphere issue.

"Our policy has been that spear tackling warrants a red card and that remains the case," said Jeff Blackett, the Rugby Football Union's chief disciplinary officer. "I will be speaking with Ed Morrison [the RFU's referees' manager] before the start of the season to reinforce that.

"I do not know why the offences in the Tri-Nations have so far only merited yellow cards. It may be because referees and their assistants only saw the incidents for a fleeting moment and did not feel they had the necessary evidence to justify a red card. The citing system means that there will always be a follow-up.

"We regard spear tackling as a serious, dangerous offence and I believe the right decisions were reached by the disciplinary panels that considered the three citings this month. Our message to referees is that it is an offence that warrants a straight red card and players who dump an opponent on his head in the Premiership can expect to be banned."

Lewis Moody will start the Premiership campaign in the unfamiliar colours of Bath after spending 14 years with Leicester. The flanker admitted he had taken himself out of his comfort zone and added he had not heard whether he would be captaining England in the autumn after leading the side in their last three matches.

"I knew everything and everyone at Leicester and I had butterflies when I started with Bath," Moody said. "It was totally out of my comfort zone and you almost have to start again. Because it is such a great chapter of my life I'll always remember everything about Leicester, but now it's time to move on and be part of something else, something special I hope.

"I loved being England captain during the tour to Australia in June but I have to earn my spot in the team next season. If Martin Johnson still wants me to be captain and feels I am up to the job, I would like to do it again. Johnno never gives much away and you have to be the best player you can be."

One of England's successes on the Australia tour, the Leicester second row Geoff Parling, will miss the November internationals at Twickenham after having surgery on a neck problem he sustained during the trip.

"Geoff had a disc problem in his neck and has had a procedure to take some pressure off the nerves," said the Leicester director of rugby, Richard Cockerill. "He will be out of action for between 12 and 16 weeks and it is hugely disappointing. After breaking into the England team and doing well, he will not have an immediate opportunity to follow it up."

Leicester will be without another second row, Richard Blaze, until December and Cockerill is considering making an injury-dispensation signing allowed under the salary cap rules.

Improved efforts to protect Ecuador archipelago's biodiversity leads to Unesco vote

The UN has withdrawn the Galápagos Islands from its world heritage danger list, citing improved efforts by Ecuador to protect the archipelago's unique biodiversity.

The world heritage committee of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) voted 15 to four to remove the islands from the list of sites endangered by environmental threats or overuse.

"It's important to recognise the effort made by the Ecuadorean government to preserve this heritage," said Luiz Fernando de Almeida, head of the Brazilian delegation, which proposed the motion at the meeting in Brasilia.

Ecuador's government will welcome the decision, which reversed Unesco's listing in 2007, but some conservationists expressed alarm.

President Rafael Correa's administration had tackled serious problems in the archipelago but it was too soon to declare victory, said Johannah Barry, head of Galápagos Conservancy, a Virginia-based research group.

"The growing human presence in Galápagos, both through tourism and residents, has put biodiversity at risk. Introduction of disease, alien and invasive plants and animals are all factors which must be addressed immediately and aggressively. I believe the decision is premature and I hope it does not signal a relaxation of vigilant management and conservation efforts."

The chain of volcanic islands 600 miles off Ecuador's Pacific coast are home to endogenous species, such as giant tortoises and boobies, which helped inspire Charles Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection.

A permanent human population which doubled to about 30,000 in the past decade, swollen by more than 190,000 tourists annually, triggered concern about pollution, fuel spills and poaching.

Human settlers have also brought invasive species such as insects, cats, rats, cattle and fire ants threatening a habitat which evolved in isolation over millennia.

Ecuador's government has tried to balance conservation and tourism with the demands of residents and migrant workers from mainland South America. Authorities have tried to cap the number of new arrivals and deported illegal migrants. Nevertheless rubbish dumps and new housing developments continue to sprout on some islands.

A Unesco team recently inspected the archipelago. The panel listened to Ecuador's environment minister, Marcela Aguinaga, before voting. She said controls on migration and the introduction of invasive species had been tightened.

The same meeting added Uganda's tombs of Buganda kings at Kasubi (Uganda) to the list of endangered sites. Unesco's complete and amended list of heritage sites was published today

The list allows the UN to allocate immediate assistance to sites from the World Heritage fund and puts pressure on local authorities to act.

Shell refuses to rule out action against BP over losses caused by the deepwater drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico

Shell today refused to rule out pursuing damages claims against BP and other companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

The company took a $56m (£36m) hit after it was forced to stand down seven rigs and platforms because of the moratorium on drilling in the US imposed in the wake of the disaster.

The Anglo-Dutch firm, which has long been a fierce rival of BP, said it would take another hit in the next quarter if the moratorium continues.

One of the projects affected is Perdido, Shell's deepest deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico, at just under 8,000ft. Shell has had to delay plans for one or two new wells scheduled during the six-month drilling ban. In total, production was down by 8,000 barrels a day.

Shell's chief executive, Peter Voser, said "no comment" when asked directly if the firm would seek compensation from the companies responsible.

The owners of the rigs are taking the lion's share of the losses, after Shell negotiated 60-70% reductions in the cost of hiring them.

BP is likely to resist any attempt to pay compensation to companies like Shell affected by the moratorium as it seeks to try to limit its liabilities. It tried to resist pressure from the US government to pay damages to rig workers who had lost their jobs, but was eventually forced to create a $100m compensation fund for them.

Voser also disagreed with some US politicians who want to force oil companies to drill a costly second well alongside exploration wells which could then be used to cap a leak in the event of an accident. BP's relief well – which should finally seal the BP spill in the gulf next month – will have taken more than three months to complete.

"I would not say that it is a solution," Voser said. "We have to concentrate on prevention first, where global standards already play a major role. Then we look at containment." Forcing companies to drill an extra well would increase the cost of exploration, and some executives have claimed that drilling in two places would increase the risk of accidents.

Shell also said that it was confident that it would get the go-ahead for drilling in a virgin region in the Arctic which was supposed to have begun this summer but has been blocked by the US government.

Shell produces 500,000 barrels of oil a day from deepwater sites, a third of which comes from the Gulf of Mexico, out of total production of just over 3m barrels of oil and gas. Voser said that the industry needed to learn lessons from the disaster, but that deepwater drilling would continue.

"We have never had a significant offshore incident or spill in the Gulf of Mexico," he said. "You are not in a position to say an accident will never happen. Accidents happen everywhere, not just in the oil industry, but on the road. The key is to improve safety standards."

Shell said that profits in the second quarter increased by a third to £2.7bn. This was thanks to higher oil and gas prices, a 5% increase in production and faster than expected progress in cutting £2.2bn of costs.

Department for Education research shows August-born children do consistently worse than older classmates

At least 10,000 teenagers fail to achieve five good GCSEs each year simply because they were born too late in the school year, research has revealed.

A study from the Department for Education shows August-born children, who are the youngest in their peer group, consistently perform worse than their older classmates.

At the age of five, pupils born in September are almost twice as likely to achieve a good level of development as those born in August, the researchers found. There is a substantial – but smaller – gap at the age of 11 in English and maths tests and at age 16 when, as teenagers, they take GCSEs.

About half of all pupils gain five good GCSE passes, including in English and maths, across the country. But summer-born children are six percentage points less likely to achieve this than their older peers, the academics found.

Summer-born pupils are also less likely to take academic A-levels or go to university and are more likely to be bullied, have special educational needs and be unhappy at school. But they were at a lower risk of playing truant and misbehaving than their older peers, the researchers found.

Some 10,000 summer-born children fail each year to achieve five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including in English and maths, "purely because they are the youngest pupils sitting the exams", the researchers said. In their study, 90,000 summer-born pupils got five good GCSE passes, compared with 100,000 of those born in the autumn. The research concludes that while high-performing schools can reduce the attainment gap, nothing can be done to entirely close it.

In May, the government-commissioned Rose review recommended that summer-born children should be allowed to start school four months earlier than their peers. This was accepted by the Labour government and from September 2011, all local authorities will be required to offer children a place in reception classes from the September following a child's fourth birthday. The government has said parents will continue to have a choice on whether to send their child to school at this point, or defer entry until later in the year.

However, academics have cautioned against children starting school at four and argue that starting at six or seven would allow them more time to develop intellectually.

Previous studies have also shown that summer-born babies fare worse than their older peers. The Higher Education Funding Council for England found summer-born teenagers are 20% less likely to go directly to university. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found 61% of September-born girls achieve five good GCSEs, while only 55% of summer-born girls do. The difference was smaller for A-level results.

The Department for Education said ministers were considering future policy in this area.

Mexican telecoms billionaire pays £28m for an eight-storey Manhattan townhouse he does not plan to live in

Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim, widely reputed to be the world's richest man, has splashed out $44m (£28m) on an eight-storey mansion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in one of New York's most expensive ever house purchases.

According to New York City's property records, a company controlled by Slim struck a deal on 16 July to buy the so-called Duke Semans mansion, which boasts 12 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms and 19,500 square feet of floor space, a vast amount of room by the crowded standards of densely populated Manhattan.

The building, completed in 1901 for a tobacco magnate, Benjamin Duke, is on the corner of 82nd Street on New York's upper east side and is described by estate agency Brown Harris Stevens as "a residence for the ages – a home whose history-filled past is a wonderful prologue for the next era in its remarkable existence".

The purchase is the latest foray into New York by Slim, a cigar-smoking 70-year-old tycoon whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $53.5bn, ranking him top in the global wealth league, above Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. He recently paid $140m for a New York office building and has a 7% stake in the New York Times, having pumped $250m into the newspaper publisher at the height of the recession last year.

A spokesman for Slim told Bloomberg News that the telecoms magnate was buying the Duke Semans mansion as an investment and did not intend to live in it. The house has marble flooring, a gothic-inspired marquee over its main entrance and views of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The purchase price is the fourth-highest ever for a townhouse in New York. Slim's company bought the property from another billionaire, Tamir Sapir, who made his money in the Russian oil industry. But the deal is not the most expensive in New York; a number of apartments have changed hands for higher prices, including a three-storey flat in the Plaza hotel, overlooking Central Park, which was sold for $56m in 2007.

Slim's real estate investments follow in the footsteps of his father, a Lebanese immigrant who acquired property in downtown Mexico City after the Mexican revolution. The billionaire's properties in Mexico, held through Grupo Carso SAB, include shopping and office complexes, hospitals and educational campuses.

Qatari royal family fined for illegally parking their luxury cars in front of the family shop

When they went shopping in Knightsbridge three months ago and picked up a rambling old emporium for a modest £1.5bn, the Qatari royal family would have done well to enquire about proprietorial parking perks.

A quick question might have spared them £220 in parking fines – and the palpitations induced by finding sinister yellow triangles hugging the wheels of a £1.5m supercar.

Unfortunately for the al-Thani family, the traffic wardens of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are not cowed by astronomical wealth and had no hesitation when it came to ordering the clampers to Harrods last week.

A spokesman for the store refused to discuss the fate of the £1.2m Koenigsegg CCXR and the £350,000 Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce that were photographed parked illegally outside the store. Neither would he confirm or deny whether the light blue cars were indeed al-Thani property.

"Any matters relating to parking tickets and enforcement are strictly the domain of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea," he said.

The borough's parking office said that fines and release fees would probably have amounted to £110 a car, while a council spokesman insisted rules were rules.

"There is a greater shortage of parking space for residents in Kensington and Chelsea than practically anywhere else in the country," he said.

"At the same time we have a huge number of visiting motorists attracted here by our fine shops, restaurants and other attractions."

But the council's priority, he added, was its residents: "To keep space available for them, we must deter visitors from taking up residents' bays and our experience is that clamping is simply the most effective deterrent."

However, as one onlooker remarked: "Judging by their cars, I shouldn't think the owners will worry too much about paying a couple of hundred quid to have the clamps taken off."

• Celtic winger reluctant to move from Parkhead to Russia
• Glenn Loovens calls Celtic's defending against Braga 'a joke'

Aiden McGeady's reluctance to move to Russia is to be severely tested, with Spartak Moscow showing no intention of ending their six-month pursuit of the Celtic winger. Spartak's technical director, Evgeniy Smolencev, is reported to have been in Glasgow for talks with Celtic officials this week. The Russian club have so far made only a verbal offer for McGeady, worth more than £8m, which is now set to be followed up formally.

Celtic's chief executive, Peter Lawwell, was not in Portugal as Celtic crumbled to a 3-0 Champions League qualifying defeat to Braga yesterday. Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, had said McGeady would play but the 24-year-old was a notable absentee from the squad in Portugal. That matter at least will please Spartak, who will take their place in the Champions League proper, given McGeady has not been cup-tied. He instead played in a practice match at Celtic's training complex.

McGeady is virtually certain to leave Parkhead before the transfer window closes. The player is keen to test himself on a higher stage and funds from his sale will aid Lennon's overhaul of the squad he inherited from Tony Mowbray. That issue has been highlighted further by the likely lack of Champions League money for Celtic this season.

Yet a hitch will occur if McGeady maintains his reluctance towards moving to the Russian league and no rival bid is forthcoming. Aston Villa have an interest in the Republic of Ireland international but are yet to make a formal offer. Even if they do so, it will only be after James Milner is sold to Manchester City.

The most stinging critique of Celtic's display in the third qualifying round, first leg in Braga came from one of their own players. The defender Glenn Loovens claimed the manner in which Celtic lost two of the three goals was "a joke". Loovens said: "It was not good enough for the Champions League. We gave away an easy penalty [for the first goal] but I never felt we were in trouble of any sort in the game because they didn't really spread us open.

"To be fair, we have to be better on the ball, because we could not put three passes together. In the second half, we continued to play badly, but hardly gave anything away. Then, two sloppy set pieces and you are 3-0 behind. It was already hard. But, how we gave the last two goals away was a joke. You would take 1-0 home, and everything is wide open. But now 3-0 behind, it makes it a tough task."

Some good news for Lennon arrived with the completion of a deal to sign the Israeli midfielder Beram Kayal. The 22-year-old from Maccabi Haifa has signed a four-year deal.

Any candidate able to recast post-Blair Labour could beat this coalition – and there are two

Labour is tantalisingly well-placed to win the next election – or even to govern before it takes place. The coalition may go the full five-year distance or fall apart long before. In the latter case, Labour could just about make a go of a rainbow coalition, and its new leader cross the threshold of No 10 within the next couple of years. In the former, the party will fight the poll from a reassuring base of 258 seats, a reminder of how bountifully it is rewarded by the voting system it pledged to scrap at the last election.

The lack of interest in its leadership election is therefore, in a sense, surprising. It's true that the contest has failed to take wing, and that its talk of "values" and "vision" has the vanilla quality of so much of modern politics. But though scarcely an explosion, it's not an implosion, either: Labour hasn't turned in on itself as it did during the 1980s. It still looks like a party of government.

The Conservatives are tracking the candidates, noting shifts, U-turns, flip-flops. The winner's victory speech will doubtless be disturbed by noises off – namely, by a Tory briefing dossier suggesting that the victor embodies a terrifying lurch to the left.

But who would the Tories fear most? And is he or she the same person that would lead the country best? The conventional answer is, in both cases, the candidate who'd most attract the relatively small sliver of undecided voters, rather than the two in five who don't go the polls at all.

This accepted wisdom is worth testing. Applied to the Conservatives in 1997 and 2001, it would have produced Ken Clarke. The experiment would probably have worked no better than electing William Hague or Iain Duncan-Smith: the Tories were divided over an issue of constitutional importance – Europe – and Clarke was unwilling to compromise.

The comparison with Labour today only serves to highlight the latter's electability. There's no equivalent of the Europe issue to split the party. Perhaps that's why this leadership contest is not a bawling match but a conversation. Uninspiring, perhaps, but a contest fought fundamentally on civil terms.

Labour, in other words, is nicely placed to distance itself from the worst of the Blair legacy while manoevering towards a startling New Labour achievement: to have won three elections in a row by appealing to middle-class, southern-based, undecided voters. Diane Abbott couldn't do so, and isn't going to win in any event. Nor, it seems, is Andy Burnham, although with a system as unpredictable as AV one can't be sure. Nonetheless, his campaign demonstrates the error that parties often make after losing an election: focusing on their base rather than Britain as a whole. However angry it may be over immigration, government cuts and closures will leave Labour's base with nowhere else to go.

Ed Balls's campaign, pitched at school building cuts and VAT closures, has a concrete quality that his opponents' have lacked. He would make the case for spending and borrowing more with economic literacy. Nor can the craftsman of Bank of England independence be easily dismissed as a wild man. However, his platform plays into the Tory narrative. Is that what Labour members want?

Which leaves the Miliband brothers. The leadership of the people's party, in a triumph of the hereditary principle, is being fought out between two scions of Labour's intellectual aristocracy. It's tempting to compare and contrast, but the task to be accomplished is within the grasp of either. Blair said of the Tory 2005 leadership contest that the candidates' backstory didn't matter, but where they were going did. What matters isn't which brother wins, it's whether either can beat this coalition by creating an electoral force with the breadth of the one that Blair used to crush the Tories for 13 years.

The auction of Churchill's false teeth shows that relics are not just for the religious – faith in humanity is enough

What's the best way of establishing contact with the past? Reading all about it is just one answer, since the visuals matter, too. A walk in Picardy may explain the Somme battlefield's logistics of attrition, and Van Dyck's portraiture of the 1630s captures courtiers who would soon be killing each other. But it's objects that can be handled or inspected that often provide the most intuitive thrill. And when we start to look closely at artefacts owned by identifiable human beings we get close to a very ancient enthusiasm – the passion for relics.

A visit to a Catholic church in a Mediterranean or Latin American country can still disturb some British minds. Whole bodies of dead saints embalmed and preserved in glass coffins are light years removed from the sterile pieties of Songs of Praise. Fragments of bones – fingers, hips and thighs – are kept in reliquaries and may be exposed on a martyrdom's anniversary. And the hair of the blessed departed, which sits on top of many a Spanish saint's plaster-cast image, can recall the late Frankie Howerd's ill-judged wig.

The bits left behind are most worthy of respect when they once formed part of saints' bodies. But objects much used by saints can become second-division relics. Martin of Tours, the fourth-century Roman soldier, tore his cloak in half to relieve a naked beggar's distress, and the portion he kept became a treasured relic, which accompanied the kings of the Franks into battle. Islam, too, has its sacred cloak – Muhammad's is rumoured to be kept in Afghanistan's Kandahar mosque – and all religions that like relics use them to inspire believers into action.

Protestants and secularists alike can get cross about this phenomenon. Last year's procession through Britain of St Thérèse of Lisieux's body parts provoked much nose wrinkling. But this week's sale of Winston Churchill's spare dentures – which fetched £15,200 at auction today – is a reminder that relics come in many guises. Churchillianism is, after all, a secular religion in modern Britain – and the object of veneration, having been first Tory and then Liberal before returning to the Conservative party, encourages bi-partisan adulation. Churchill's lack of any orthodox religious belief means he's well qualified to be top god in a largely non-religious land, though it's doubtful if subsequent premiers' relics – locks of Blair's hair perhaps, or that keyboard-banging Brown digit – will arouse equivalent enthusiasm.

Relics exist to be enjoyed and used, whether they're part of the national heritage trail or an aspect of religious belief. Hostility to them is a sign of preciosity and elitism on the part of those who are threatened by vitality and find it vulgar. Oversensitive pagan intellectuals, for example, were really appalled by the early Christians' enthusiasm for bones and called their churches "charnel houses". And church leaders, too, were pretty wary, since this was a kind of religion that was of and for the people.

Relics were a huge phenomenon of popular devotion in Palestine and Syria before the seventh century arrival of Islamic conquerors. The religious refugees who fled afterwards to western Europe carried with them their own private collections of saints' bones, and there was a buoyant market response. Deciding which saint would be their friend and protector was one of the few ways the poor and illiterate could exercise their power to choose, and that remains true in today's Catholic Latin America.

Hanging on to relics is not supposed to be a backward-looking pursuit and the bones are meant to really come into their own at the Last Judgment. Bodies will then be resurrected, and that includes the saints who now exist as souls in heaven. Cremation's popularity may cut us off from that particular sense of the sacred, but the museum holograms that animate the faces of the recreated dead is a kind of resurrection in 3D. The same need that led to belief in wonder-inducing relics is still with us.

• European silver medallist considered quitting two years ago
• 'I was in a really bad place, physically and mentally'

In the hours after the men's 100m final, and all through the night, Mark Lewis-Francis lay awake thinking about his European silver medal. After everything he has been through, from being an 18-year-old sprint prodigy winning the world junior title to a frustrated also-ran on the senior scene, he could still not quite believe it had really happened.

"It felt like Christmas," he said, "you know, waking up in the morning." On this morning, he found a shiny new medal, his first individual senior medal outdoors which had finally arrived at the age of 27. "It's [like] one of those presents you know your grandma's going to bring you in the afternoon and you know it's gonna be the best one, you know what I mean?" He smiled – and for a moment he looked once again like the kid we all remember him as, the boy from the West Midlands who ran like the wind, whom Donovan Bailey and everybody else under the sun dubbed the most phenomenal young star they had ever seen.

Clearly, it pays to believe in Father Christmas or, at least, in Linford Christie, Lewis-Francis's coach and mentor for the last two years. When Christie began working with Lewis-Francis in 2008 he was a mess, he had missed the entire season with a torn achilles and lost his lottery funding, a veritable down and out. Somehow Christie picked up the pieces.

"I was in a really bad place," says Lewis-Francis. "Physically and mentally. I had no emotion. I didn't know if I could carry on, I started to have doubts that I didn't believe I could ever have. He motivated me, he gave me the belief again. I kept thinking 'am I too old to come back?'"

Christie was 32 when he won his Olympic title – on the same Montjuïc track on which Lewis-Francis won silver on last night. "Yeah, it was always playing in the back of my mind that this is where it all happened for Linford, you know. For me to get a silver medal in the same stadium – that's storybook."

After the final Christie was overcome with emotion at his athlete's achievement, just 10 days after Lewis-Francis was selected by the head coach, Charles van Commenee, after impressing at the team's training camp in Portugal. "I don't think I've ever seen him [Christie] like that in my life. It was humbling, it really was. Everything I've been through, everything that's happened, that was definitely the best moment. He showed me that he's passionate as much as I'm passionate, he wants me to succeed as much as I want to succeed. That means a lot to me."

After Lewis-Francis crossed the finish line in Barcelona there was a five-minute wait as the adjudicators studied the photo finish, eventually separating the four men who had all crossed the line in 10.18 seconds by just thousandths of a second.

"That was like 10 years of waiting," said Lewis-Francis. Actually, it has been. Ten years of waiting since he won the junior world title, 10 years of hopeful signs – the 9.97sec he ran at the World Championships in Edmonton in 2001 (although a dodgy wind-gauge rendered the time "unofficial"), a handful of indoor medals, and the stunning anchor leg he ran to help Britain win the 4x100m relay gold medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

And the lows: testing positive for cannabis and a three-month ban from the sport in 2005, battling with injuries, loss of form, and losing his lottery funding. Still he never gave up, not in all that time, and certainly not on the track in Barcelona.

What got him across the line? What enabled him to finish six thousandths of a second ahead of Dwain Chambers, the favourite for a medal? "I've got that 32DD chest," said Lewis-Francis, pointing to his pectorals. There is poignancy in the joke; he is not the physical specimen he once was. Standing on the start line he looked out of place among the rest of Europe's best honed and toned.

Not that he let that bother him, he was just thrilled to be there. "I stood in lane two and I was like, great, they've done me a big favour here. And when I looked to my right I thought, 'Ooh even better 'cos if he [Chambers] gets out quick and I can hold on to him then I know I've got a chance because my last 30m is the best part of my race'. And I basically did that."

What was only later revealed by Van Commenee was that Chambers had damaged his hamstring in the semi-final and had run through the pain in the final. Chambers chose not to use it as an excuse; instead he proclaimed Christophe Lemaitre deserving of the title, along with everyone else who had made the podium.

For Chambers, who so longed for the European title as redemption for the medal he won on drugs in 2002 and ashamedly posted back in a brown jiffy bag, there remains unfinished business to take care of.

For Lewis-Francis, the 10 years of waiting have been replaced by a sense of hope and fulfilment. "I've always thought being so successful in my juniors and not really getting it in my seniors – well, this is like my second chance. If I continue this I'll be over the moon. It just goes to show that anything can happen, anything at all. I've always said put me in the final and I'll try my best. And I did that."

We look back at last month's texture photography assignment and introduce this month's - pet photography

Another month has gone by. This summer seems to be going really quickly. There have been lots of submissions for the texture assignment. I wonder if this is because it didn't require interaction with human beings! Did Gabriel Oak decide to interact with himself or another model? Whatever, it produced a strong set of images, nicely themed.

Neil Walker produced another standout set, using colour and macro photography really well.

And now, on to August's assignment. We thought you could have a bit of fun with this one. Our photographer, Jill Mead, certainly did when making this month's video. The subject is pet photography. If you haven't got one, not even a stick insect, you'll have to beg, borrow or steal one to pose for you. Have a look at Jill's top tips for some advice. Remember to try to think of ways to make your images a bit different. Perhaps tell a story with the set, or think of different viewpoints.

Late-flowering writer of biographies and children's books

Verily Anderson, who has died aged 95, published more than 30 books – memoirs, biographies, children's stories and work ranging from personal reminiscences to Shakespeare scholarship and 10 Brownie books. She was a late starter: her breakthrough as a writer came in 1956, at the age of 41, when she published Spam Tomorrow, a deft and frequently uproarious account of her wartime experiences on the home front. Critics hailed it as a new kind of memoir, one of the first to explore the lives of women in wartime.

Before the success of Spam Tomorrow, she led a life that was colourful but frequently impecunious. Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the fourth of five children of the Rev Rosslyn Bruce and his wife Rachel (nee Gurney), Verily was always certain that she wanted to be a writer. As children, she and her brothers edited and wrote a nursery magazine which they called the News of the World. Verily's haphazard schooling ranged from a few years at Edgbaston high school for girls to being taught at home by her mother, to a brief and unsuccessful stint at the Royal College of Music in London. She said she worked at "100 different jobs" (including writing advertising copy, illustrating sweet papers and working as a chauffeur) before the outbreak of the second world war, when she enlisted with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, on the grounds that if there were going to be a war, it would be "less frightening to be in the middle of things".

During the war she met Donald Anderson, a writer who specialised in military history. They married in 1940 and had five children. With his encouragement, she made a precarious living as a freelance writer, while papering her lavatory walls with rejection slips received from publishers for her book projects. Her persistence was at last rewarded with the success of Spam Tomorrow – and a further half-decade on the bestseller lists. These years included a film adaptation of her 1958 memoir, Beware of Children, called No Kidding and starring Leslie Phillips and Geraldine McEwan (1960).

Donald died in 1956, and by the mid-60s Verily was again struggling financially. She was rescued by the actor Joyce Grenfell. They had struck up a friendship when Verily interviewed Grenfell for the BBC. Grenfell was so shocked at the conditions she found Verily living in that she bought her a home in Northrepps, a village in Norfolk, where she stayed for the rest of her life, writing dozens more books (including the critically acclaimed The Northrepps Grandchildren in 1968) and glorying in the role of matriarch to an ever-expanding family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When Verily married Paul Paget, architect and surveyor to the fabric of St Paul's Cathedral, in 1971, Grenfell was matron of honour.

In 2008 I conducted what turned out to be Verily's last interview. Letting myself in after some fruitless bell-ringing, I followed the sounds of a piano to her study door. "Oh my dear," she said, looking up at my knock. "There you are. Now – shall we have a gin, before we start?"

I had already heard all about Verily through her daughter, my friend the writer Janie Hampton, and so had a good idea what to expect. Janie's main piece of advice on hearing that we were going to meet was: "Whatever you do, don't let her pick you up from the station – she's half-blind." She also said: "Don't eat any of the cake she offers. She's always got some, and it's always about five weeks old."

Verily did have cake and it was past its best – but Verily definitely was not. She regaled me with anecdotes. I came away with the image of a woman with a twinkle in her eye, who after eight decades of writing was still full of energy and enthusing about her latest project. This – a memoir of the time she spent at Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex, in the 1930s and 40s – was completed the day before she died.

Verily is survived by her children, Marian, Rachel, Eddie, Janie and Alexandra, 16 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren – and Alfie, her beloved RNIB guide-dog.

• Verily Anderson, writer, born 12 January 1915, died 16 July 2010