Exclusive: Bulgarians are flown to Britain, live in packed caravan compounds and pocket just £45 a week to pick fruit for Britain's biggest retailers

Foreign fruit pickers are taking home as little as £45 a week at a company which provides some of Britain's largest supermarkets with thousands of tonnes of fruit, an investigation by The Independent has found.

S&A Produce, which supplies both Tesco and Sainsbury's, employs thousands of eastern Europeans who are given a specific work visa allowing them to work for the company. They are attracted by the prospect of earning up to £200 a week by picking fruit on its farms in Herefordshire and Kent.

Russia continues to react angrily to last week's Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) resolution likening Stalinism to Nazism. 

"We consider unacceptable the fact that in the OSCE's parliamentary assembly resolution there is an attempt to distort history with political goals," said Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko on Thursday. "This does not contribute to creating an atmosphere of trust and cooperation between the member states of this body," he added.

Earlier this week lawmakers from Russia's two chambers of parliament said in a statement that the OSCE resolution was a "direct insult to the memory of millions" of Soviet soldiers who "gave their lives for the freedom of Europe from the fascist yoke."

The parliamentary assembly of the 56-nation OSCE passed the resolution last Friday at a meeting in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius by an overwhelming majority.

PARIS -- Leading European newspaper and magazine publishers on Thursday called on the European Commission to strengthen copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online.

The publishers said widespread use of their work by online news aggregators and other Web sites was undermining their efforts to develop an online business models at a time when readers and advertisers are defecting from newspapers and magazines.

"Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it," the publishers said in a letter to Viviane Reding, the European media and telecommunications commissioner. "Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism."

The petition echoes other recent calls from publishers for greater copyright protection as they try to move beyond a business models based largely on advertising and try to generate more revenue from users. Only a handful of newspapers or magazines, including The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, have had success charging readers to use their sites.

German federal and state authorities agreed on Thursday on a series of anti-terrorism measures ahead of this September's parliamentary elections. Security officials say the terror threat has increased.  

Authorities say they are taking the threat of possible terrorist violence before the fall elections seriously, although a spokesman for the current chair of the German interior minister's conferences said there is "no concrete evidence of a terrorist plot at present."

 

Still, Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning indicated last week that terrorists could use attacks to try to force Germany to pull its forces out of Afghanistan, where they are engaged in peacekeeping operations.

 

According to the Spiegel Online site, the package of measures resembles stepped-up security that was put into place before the Soccer World Cup that Germany hosted in 2006.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - MEPs may next week decide when they will vote on Jose Manuel Barroso's bid for a second term as European Commission president.

The political leaders of the groups in the European Parliament will meet once more before the summer break to set a preliminary agenda for the September plenary session.

Mr Barroso: an October vote could lessen his chances of reappointment

EU member states are keen to have the vote take place as quickly as possible and have slated 15 September as a possible date, after their efforts to get a July parliament vote on Mr Barroso were thwarted by a coalition of the Socialists, Liberals, Greens and far-left.

Many of the MEPs in the these groups consider Mr Barroso to be too economically liberal and too inactive in the face of the global financial crisis. They argued that a July vote would not have given them enough time to thoroughly discuss his policy intentions for the second term.

EU authorities more than doubled their seizure of fake products smuggled into the 27-strong bloc at its external borders last year, with pirate CDs, cigarettes and clothes, mainly from China, dominating the list.

According to statistics published by the European Commission on Thursday (9 July), national customs officers are increasingly recognizing and detaining counterfeit products, in co-operation with industry.

Fake toys registered the highest increase of counterfeit cases in 2008

In 2008, some 178 million items were seized compared to 79 million in 2007, up 125 percent. There was a 13 percent increase in products registered as breaking intellectual property rights - over 49,000 cases compared to 43,000 in 2007.

European producers themselves filed some 13,000 applications to request customs interventions, this way enforcing 80 percent of all investigations.

Germany is in an uproar after the recent revelation that ex-members of the former East Germany's secret service (Stasi) are employed by the current German government. The German Financial Times claims that as many as 17,000 Stasi members are civil servants, mainly in the East of the country. Even one of Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal bodyguards worked for the communist secret police.

The East German Ministry for State Security was a highly effective organisation that conducted intelligence operations, throughout Cold War Germany. The term `Stasi', is an abbreviation of the German word for state security, but the repressive administration engaged in more than security activities, working to crush all forms of dissent inside of communist Germany. Over the years, more than 250,000 people were employed by the Stasi, but some argue that perhaps two million people worked with the organisation. The Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of life in East Germany. 

A Bulgarian politician won a seat in the EU parliamentary elections in June and was due to be sworn in next week. On Friday, however, she announced that she won't be going and plans instead stay in her current job. 

Meglena Kuneva decided to remain the European Commissioner for Consumer Protection instead of taking her seat in the parliament. 

Kuneva's term as commissioner ends in October but she would have had to resign from that position in order to be sworn in to the new parliament next week.

"I have taken my decision ... I will complete my term as commissioner," she told a news conference in Sofia.

In the European parliamentary elections on June 7, Kuneva was elected as deputy for the liberal NMSP party of former Bulgarian King Simeon Saxe Coburg, which is part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.

Kuneva said this decision came after talks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Borroso and Bulgaria's prime minister-designate, Boyko Borisov.

The global recession is causing Britain to face hard choices about its future military role in the world - putting at risk plans to build new aircraft carriers and heralding consequences for everything from operations alongside the US in Afghanistan to whether the UK remains nuclear-armed.

The start of the first full-scale official review of Britain's defense forces in more than 10 years was announced on Tuesday. It came within days of three of Britain's most influential independent research institutes forecasting that the £34 billion (about $54 billion) defense budget will be seriously cut.

The question of whether to support a £76 billion ($124 billion) program to replace Britain's aging Trident nuclear weapons system also looms large.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), warned that the UK cannot afford much of the defense equipment it plans to buy, questioned the value of renewing the submarine-launched Trident nuclear deterrent, and said it was "delusional" to think the UK could act alone without closer European defense cooperation.

The squeeze is likely also to have implications for Afghanistan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has refused to send substantial reinforcements despite appeals from President Barack Obama for more assistance from NATO allies.

EUROPEAN patients, taxpayers and national treasuries are being fleeced of billions of euros because of the big pharmaceutical companies' elaborate campaigns to delay the marketing of cheaper generic drugs, the European Commission says.

"There is something rotten in the state [of the pharmaceutical industry]," said Neelie Kroes, the Competition Commissioner, unveiling the findings of an 18-month inquiry. "Makers of original medicines are actively trying to delay the entry of generic medicines on to their markets."

Leaders of the G8 developed nations have pledged $20bn (£12bn) for efforts to boost food supplies to the hungry, on the final day of a summit in Italy.

The investment, which is $5bn more than had been expected, will fund a three-year initiative to help poor nations develop their own agriculture.

US President Barack Obama said the issue of food security was of huge importance to all nations in the world.

Richer nations had a moral obligation to help poorer nations, he said.

Mr Obama added that the G8 nations had agreed to commit $15bn for the new initiative going into Friday's meeting, but had then promised an additional $5bn in "hard commitments" during the talks.

Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent could be thrown into a world disarmament deal after President Obama called yesterday for the biggest summit to stop the spread of atomic weapons.

In a move designed to increase pressure on Iran, up to 30 countries will be invited to Washington next spring for a nuclear security conference.

Iran is likely to be forced to prove to the world that it does not have a nuclear weapons programme, Gordon Brown suggested at a press briefing last night.

His words raised the prospect of inspectors visiting Tehran to verify the existence of weapons. Officials suggested that a refusal to provide evidence could lead to pariah status for Iran, pointing out that Libya had been admitted to the world community after renouncing a nuclear programme.

At the G-8 summit in L'Aquila, the Western industrial nations have pledged to revive the Doha round of WTO trade talks. But what is being sold as a breakthrough is actually a mirage -- it will hardly be possible to revive the fatally stalled talks.

Pascal Lamy has had, professionally at least, little to smile about in recent years. As head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), he has had to watch the Doha round of trade talks, whose aim is to reduce global trade barriers, run into the sand. The negotiation round began in 2001 and is still going on today -- at least in theory.

Protesters wearing masks representing Silvio Berlusconi, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev eat "spaghetti" in an anti-G-8 protest in Rome. In that respect, few would grudge Lamy his appearance at this week's three-day G-8 summit in L'Aquila, which finishes Friday. The group of major industrialized nations had obviously decided to make him the center point of a success story. After making abundant verbal commitments to free trade, the leaders of the G-8 states -- the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Italy, France and Russia -- are now trying to achieve something slightly more concrete in L'Aquila.

In a joint declaration released Thursday, the G-8 members and the G-5 group of emerging economies -- Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa -- said they were "committed" to seeking a conclusion to the stalled Doha round by 2010. The statement also said the G-8 and G-5 would task their trade ministers to meet ahead of September's G-20 summit in the US city of Pittsburgh in a bid to get the deadlocked talks back on track.

But only a few of the parties involved believe that the ambitious goals are actually attainable.

A clear statement on Iran, ambitious targets for climate protection and billions of dollars in aid for developing countries: the G-8's ability to make real decisions has impressed its critics. Yet it was easy to regard the summit as a success when expectations were so low.

Instead of fat black limousines there are only small white electric vehicles cruising around the area where the G-8 summit is being held. And it was odd seeing Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi, famed for his penchant for gaudy opulence, lowers himself onto a narrow bench. But he clearly doesn't feel very at home on that bench, judging by the brief wave he gives in response to a greeting. At least Gaddafi's entourage, which trails his slow-moving car, is somewhat bigger than that of the other heads of state in the convey.

(L to R) Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. As it is, humility has been the order of the day for the members of the G-8 and their guests. There's the financial crisis, not to mention Silvio Berlusconi's decision to relocate the summit -- at short-notice -- to the earthquake-scarred town of L'Aquila. Berlusconi says he did this in order to raise awareness about the devastation in the region. As a result the attending politicians have had to make do with spartan accommodation in barracks belonging to the Italian financial police, which has been done up with a couple more bits of furniture.

German exports rose 0.3% in May from the month before, raising hopes of a tentative economic recovery.

Imports declined 2.1%, pushing Germany's trade balance to a surplus of 10.3bn euros ($14.4bn; £8.9bn), the highest since December 2008.

However, exports were still 24.5% lower than a year ago, with Germany enduring its worst recession since World War II.

Analysts said the data raised hopes that exports would continue to improve in the coming months.

General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy - just 40 days after the US vehicle manufacturer signed a government-backed rescue deal, the company has announced.

The main assets of the troubled auto giant, which was once the world's largest coroporation, have been transferred to a new company which will be 61 per cent owned by the government.

"Today marks a new beginning for General Motors," Fritz Henderson, the chief executive of GM, said on Friday.

"One that will allow every employee, including me, to get back to the business of designing, building and selling great cars and trucks and serving the needs of our customers.

"We recognise that we've been given a rare second chance at GM, and we are very grateful for that. And we appreciate the fact that we now have the tools to get the job done."

Simon Johnson sums up the recent G8 in part as "lamer than advertized" and in total as "an expensive flop." He complains that the issue of cross border resolution for failed banks didn't even come up. But he reserves his harshest criticism for Brown and Sarkozy's joint article Wednesday in the WSJ on the role of speculation in the oil market, which he finds to be disingenuous.

>But, more generally, the G8 - and its members this week - are disingenuous when they speak about energy prices, in three ways.

1. They are trying hard to talk up the market, with regard to global growth.  At the same time, the hard data continue to disappoint.  Naturally, this causes volatility in oil prices.

2. They claim to see no link between their failure to converge on climate change/environmental policies and what happens to energy prices.  The extent to which industrialized countries' effectively control carbon emissions will have a big impact on the longer-run demand for oil.  Flip-flopping on this issue discourages investment in the energy sector (regular and alternative), and thus directly and indirectly contributes to oil price volatility.

3. The very cheap money policies of leading central banks, including the Fed, the Bank of England and arguably also the European Central Bank, lower the funding costs for big players who want to take large positions in commodities markets.  Essentially, we are providing the credit that makes big speculative positions possible.  Add to this mix a "too big to fail" attitude and a "yes we can, recapitalize through trading profits" deal with policymakers, and you see why major financial firms are likely to place huge commodity bets in the months ahead.

The G8, separately and jointly, destabilizes energy prices and refuses to even talk about this reality - taking the view that being more candid would just upset consumer, business, and investor confidence.  They gamble, on energy and more broadly, that the road to recovery runs parallel with pretending there are no problems.

The true speculators here are your elected representatives.

The idea is that there would be a crime called bankslaughter, or "managing a bank irresponsibly." If a bank blows up, there could be a criminal investigation to determine if the bank managers behaved recklessly (more on that term later); if so, they would be convicted. The analogy is to manslaughter, which is actually a family of crimes; Collier probably means criminally negligent homicide, or causing death through negligent or reckless (more on those terms later) behavior.

Not surprisingly, the conservatives are not happy about this, even though it seems to conform to the conservative principle that people should bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions. (Or maybe that only applies if you are a pregnant teenager.) Salmon cites John Carney, who calls bankslaughter "the worst idea of the week."

Carney complains that Collier hasn't given enough thought to the consequences of "over-deterence", that is is unfair that only those whose risky bets blow up get investigated and that the investigations would be backward looking, while business is forward looking.  Kwak isn't having it.  Even with only one year of law school at Yale, Kwak can blow this critique out of the water.

Regular readers can guess what I think of the idea of "over-deterrence." We need some more over-deterrence. People can talk all they want about "socially beneficial risk taking," but the evidence that this happened during the last thirty years is pretty contestable. For a system to have the optimal amount of risk taking, it is necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) that the people who stand to benefit from the venture internalize the risk of failure in some way; as everyone on the Internet has written multiple times, that condition did not hold for the financial sector in all sorts of ways.

But the more interesting argument is whether there is a problem with retroactively holding people liable for harm that they cause unintentionally. Carney writes as if this is just a crazy idea: first, only the people who actually cause harm are prosecuted, as opposed to others who behave equally egregiously but are lucky enough not to cause harm;  second, it allows juries to evaluate behavior in the past with the benefit of hindsight.

What he doesn't say is that this is exactly how a huge chunk of our legal system works today. It's called torts, and even though I've only had one year of law school, and that was at Yale, where the joke is that you don't actually learn any law, I know something about it. The general principle is that in most spheres of life, if you act negligently - defined to mean that you do not exercise the same degree of care a reasonable person would under the circumstances - and your action causes injury to someone else (to whom you owe a duty of care), you are liable for that injury. In some areas, the threshold is lower; for example, in product liability, the rule of strict liability applies, which means that you don't even need to be negligent; if your product hurts someone, you're liable. In other areas, the threshold is higher, and the requirement is not just negligence, but gross negligence, or willful wanton recklessness, or something like that. But that's the basic principle; you don't need intent, and the legal system certainly does assign liability after the fact.

Ironically enough, the modern tort system is a product of the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, and was designed to cater to the needs of large businesses. By creating an objective, supposedly predictable and stable standard of negligence, it made it easier for businesses to manage the risks of their operations. And while there are certainly things they criticize, tort law is one of the main areas where the law-and-economics crowd has won out, and real judges actually talk about things like "cheapest cost avoiders." For many scholars and jurists, the standard of reasonable care is defined as the degree of care such that the marginal benefit of accident avoidance equals the marginal cost of care; you can see how, in a tautological way, this creates a Panglossian "best of all possible worlds," since it yields the perfect degree of deterrence. And the reason most economist types (and free marketers) like this way of thinking about tort law is that the whole point of the law is to create the right incentives without the need for all sorts of detailed regulation.

So Carney's idea that this type of liability would produce over-deterrence is a bit curious. To get optimal deterrence in the bank-management context, you want managers to take precautions (e.g., maintain capital reserves) up to the point where the marginal reduction in the risk of a collapse is balanced by the marginal cost of those precautions. Today, we have no such thing, since we have no meaningful risk of collapse for bank managers, since their downside (relative to their upside) is limited by (a) leverage, (b) the implicit government guarantee, (c) the bonuses they got in the good years, and (d) the "resume put."  Because there is no liability for blowing up a bank, our legal system provides no deterrence whatsoever, which is one reason why we need regulation. (In a perfect law-and-economics world, you wouldn't need regulators, since the threat of liability would create optimal behavior all by itself.)

(It would seem that this Carney is reluctant to reign in the carnival atmosphere that brought us to this pass for fear that it would spoil future carnivals.)

Qwak then proceeds to refine the idea by suggesting that "bankslaughter" be a civil offense which would put at risk the personal assets of the banker charged and suggests that the criterion be that of what a reasonable banker would do, violation of which would result in charges of negligence.  He would reserve the criminal charges for fraud.  He goes on to note that "the business judgement rule", which states that "that if you are a manager who makes an informed decision in a situation where you do not have a conflict of interest, you are not liable, period, no matter how risky or stupid that decision is", is an obstacle and that, amazingly, "no court has ever held that having a bonus tied to your company's stock price, with no commensurate downside risk, counts as a conflict of interest (even though it is)."  But this is common law which could be readily superseded by statute.

Come the day.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

America is back where it belongs, snug in the centre of hearts and estimations across the world. Because that was the deal, right? They give us Obama, we (citizens of the rest of the world) stop hating them. Or not.

According to a new poll, while Obama is viewed positively in most of the world, global attitudes toward America have barely improved at all.

It's important not to understand. It's important not to learn. In the total buggeration into which the world's help for Afghanistan has now descended, it's important not to know too much. Accept that somebody some day may understand, but it isn't going to be you. Somebody some day may grab the Gordian knot and cut it, but it isn't going to be us. Know only that. To know more is to know less.

It so happens that my week as Nato/Isaf's guest here in Afghanistan has coincided with some big stories coming out of the country. There are battles; there are kidnappings; there came sad news of the deaths of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond. There's a presidential election campaign under way. But my argument is that news like this is a distraction from the underlying story. The battle will ebb and flow. But victory is impossible.

I'm here as the guest of the International Security Assistance Force, which sort-of is Nato and sort-of isn't -- and, no, don't try to resolve this: it can't. My Isaf/ Nato hosts are welcoming and helpful; so I've been taking a courteous record of the many briefings by the clever chiefs they've been kind enough to arrange, though the swarms of acronyms began to defeat me. And yesterday I forgot my glasses. As I stared unfocused at my notes the acronyms swam forward, their small-print meanings swam away, and I saw only acronyms.

The coup in the small Central American nation of Honduras reveals the deep divisions in the region. The triumphal march of the leftist followers of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has provoked the established elites. The knee-jerk reaction in Honduras has been, yet again, to stage a coup.

The border region between Honduras and Nicaragua has a history of suffering. In the 1980s, the US-backed Contra rebels were deployed in the jungle here to bring down Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Occasionally, farmers still set off old land mines in the green hills near the El Espino border crossing.

Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (11 Photos)
And now it appears that the war has returned. Just past the barrier on the Nicaraguan side, travelers face the gun barrels of young soldiers who have taken control of the border crossings in Honduras. Soldiers are also posted along the road to Tegucigalpa, the capital of this small Central American country. The disputed government imposed a nighttime curfew and blocked foreign television broadcasts right after seizing power on June 28.

In San Marcos de Colón, a town near the Nicaraguan border, very few people are willing to discuss the sense political situation. "We don't know anything about politics," say three residents standing in the town's picturesque plaza. But Marcos Rojas, the deputy mayor, who is sitting on the steps in front of the town hall, says quietly, after looking around to see if anyone is listening: "We want our president back. But most people here are afraid of the soldiers."

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation -- sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups -- because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said...

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum's forces...

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that, over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Laili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan...

Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been "stacked like cordwood" in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive...

The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter...

Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.

"Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime," the official said. "And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that."

...

As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation...

Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry.

From your point of view, is that the right position to take? That this must be the essence of a settlement - a compromise deep into the Golan Heights? That even in peace we must ensure that a large part of the Golan Heights remain in our hands?

Yes

Why?

For strategic, military and land-settlement reasons. Needs of water, wine and view.

"Let they Food be thy Medicine and thy Medicine be thy Food." -
Hippocrates

Scientists have revealed a spectacular insight into turtle evolution - how the unique animals get their shells.

A Japanese team studied the development of turtle embryos to find out why their ribs grow outward and fuse together to form a tough, external carapace.

Reporting in the journal Science, the researchers compared turtle embryos with those of chicks and mice.

They found that, as turtles developed, part of their body wall folded in on itself forcing the ribs outward.

The team of researchers from the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, described the turtle shell as an "evolutionary novelty".

The powerful US television industry dominates what's seen on many small screens around Europe. But the Roma Fiction Fest wants to prove there's a world of sitcoms and dramas beyond "Beverly Hills 90210." 

Innovative television shows, mini-series and documentaries are being produced all across Europe, from Italy to France to Denmark and points far flung. But still, the small screens in living rooms across the continent need diversifying.

Luca Milano of Rai Fiction, the Italian state network's production arm, says most stations broadcast international shows from the US and then a series of national fiction.

"This means that in Germany, they see German fiction, in Spain the Spanish, in France the French," Milano said. "It is still difficult to have a true European network of programs that are able to be seen by audiences elsewhere in Europe."

The Roma Fiction Fest taking place in the Italian capital this week wants to change this. Its aim is television without borders. International network executives and Romans alike are getting to take a TV trip to Germany, watching the mini-series "Buddenbrooks," based on the Thomas Mann novel about an aristocratic family's decline.

Then, they journey to Manchester to spend time with the dysfunctional Gallagher family from the British series "Shameless." Programmers are also checking out what's on TV in Spain, France, Iceland, Russia and other countries.

PARIS -- When Jacques Roquencourt handles photographs, he does so with delicate hands. An accomplished aerospace engineer, he spent his life building things like airborne radar systems. He is also one of France's foremost experts on early photography, particularly the work of Daguerre.

But when a package of photographs arrived recently from Freiburg, Germany, he handled them with special delicacy. For if investigations now under way bear fruit, one of the people in the black-and-white photos, taken in the 1930s, will prove to be the father whose identity has remained a mystery to Mr. Roquencourt for all his 67 years.

The so-called enfants de Boches -- roughly, children of the Huns -- born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.

It has been 14 years since her last major apparition in Ireland but the Virgin Mary is back and this time in the lowly form of a tree stump in Limerick.

To the dismay of local Catholic church leaders, the freshly severed stump, with its supposed image of Our Lady, is rapidly becoming the focus of pilgrims. The last time that Ireland experienced anything similar was during its last recession in 1985, when a "moving" statue drew tens of thousands to Ballinspittle, Co Cork.

This time almost 2,000 people have signed a petition to prevent the stump's removal and hundreds of worshippers have been gathering to recite decades of the rosary and light candles.

Labourers at the Holy Mary Parish Church in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, made the discovery of the supposed image.

A patient in Essex has become the first in the UK without underlying health problems to die of swine flu.

The patient died earlier at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital.

NHS East of England said it would release no further details about the patient following a request by the family.

Two people in Canvey Island are being treated for a mild form of swine flu and the East of England has seen 14 cases overall, a spokeswoman said.

New research found that males can adjust the speed and effectiveness of their sperm by allocating more or less seminal fluid to copulations. The determining factor is whether the male finds the female attractive.

The study, conducted on red junglefowl, a director ancestor of chickens, adds to the growing body of evidence that males throughout many promiscuous species in the animal kingdom, including humans, can mate with many females, but chances of fertilization are greater when the female is deemed to be attractive.

Desirable female red junglefowl are easy to identify.

Nicolas Sarkozy's `bling bling' reputation reached new heights today when it emerged his new £50million jet has been named `Carla' after his glamorous third wife.

The French President defied the recession last year to order £240million worth of planes, including an Airbus designed to be bigger than any flown by other European leaders, and two corporate run-arounds for shorter trips. 

The first, a hugely luxurious Dassault Falcon 7X with a range of 6000 nautical miles, has now been delivered complete with the hand-painted legend `Carla One' glistening on its side, in honour of First Lady Carla Bruni.  

Official filmed having sex with prostitutes may have been victim of 'honey trap'

The Foreign Office says it is fed up with "silly jokes" about "from Russia with love". The official line is that there are far too many real problems in places like Iran and Afghanistan to spend time worrying about a junior diplomat being indiscreet in the Urals.

Yesterday, a four-minute video surfaced featuring 37-year-old British diplomat James Hudson, entitled "Adventures of Mr Hudson in Russia". It shows the deputy consul general in Ekaterinburg cavorting with two prostitutes. He has since resigned.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: "The FCO expects all its staff to demonstrate high levels of personal and professional integrity and takes all allegations of inappropriate behaviour seriously.

Already judged to be Europe's worst tourists last year, the French have now been named as the worst in the world. In a survey of 4.500 international hotel owners, they are criticized for not speaking foreign languages and of being arrogant and tight with their cash...

French tourists were praised for being almost as well dressed abroad as Italians. However, the overall message was that a polite bonjour, merci, or au revoir - spoken in the local language - would be a big improvement.

The next worst tourists were the Spanish and Greeks, said to be noisy and badly behaved.

The Japanese came out top in the survey again. They are polite and discreet, calm in the face of adversity, and they never complain. The only drawback is that they have difficulty speaking other languages.

British and Canadian tourists came second and third in the poll, which was carried out for an Internet travel agency. Germans and British share the second place in Europe. The survey compared the behavior of 27 different nationalities

The survey showed US tourists were most likely to swallow their pride and order a pizza, baguette or a paella in the local lingo. US tourists also got top marks for generosity -- as the biggest spenders and tippers -- but fell short on other counts as the least tidy, the loudest, the worst complainers, and the most badly dressed.

On June 11, the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) made possession of pornography - not extreme porn, but ANY porn - a criminal offence. It will be punishable by a fine of 850 hryvnia - which our currency converter helpfully reveals is approximately 69 British pounds - or up to three years in prison. As in the UK, this is a significant shift in the law, which previously only concerned itself with those who produced or distributed pornography.

The problem with this legislation is that the only available definition of porn comes from 2003 legislation, which states, according to the English language version of the Kyev Times:

"Pornography is vulgar, candid, cynical, obscene depiction of sexual acts, pursuing no other goal, the explicit demonstration of genitals, unethical elements of the sexual act, sexual perversions, realistic sketches that do not meet moral criteria and offend honour and dignity of the human by inciting low instincts."
It is not clear whether this is a literal translation of confused law - or an attack of "Babel-itis" on the part of that paper.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's Ministry of Justice appears to have complicated the legislation even further by conceding that porn may be retained "for medicinal purposes".

"The students, all members of the 1,344-member incoming freshman class, have been isolated in a dorm. None has been hospitalized."

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12810444

A concern is that there is lots of traffic between the AFA, the two Air Force bases, and the Army fort in Colorado Springs, which increases the population potentially exposed...

A black bear that ventured into downtown Colorado Springs on Friday afternoon was captured when it tried to hide in a city-owned parking garage.

State wildlife officers tracked the animal down with the help of Colorado Springs police. The bear was tranquilized in the municipal parking garage at South Nevada and East Colorado avenues about 1:50 p.m.

Witnesses called police after the bear interrupted the course of business on a busy stretch of East Pikes Peak Avenue, a few blocks from the central business district.

Less than a km from my house! Probably planning to steal tomatoes from my garden...