Georgy had been shot in the head by a sniper when he tried to see what was going on at the school through his binoculars. The lenses caught the sun and shortly afterwards a bullet passed through his head narrowly missing his brain Amina was hurt when the school gym’s roof fell on her. She suffered serious shrapnel wounds and her skull was cracked. Yesterday Valentina, her grandmother, allowed herself a brief smile Both Georgy and Amina survived. In fact Georgy, wearing a white baseball cap to cover his scars, was excitedly sitting behind the wheel of the family car which he recently learnt to drive again. His left arm doesn’t work and he has a plastic plate in his skull but he seemed cheerful enough.Valentina’s husband Taimuraz said the family was lucky.

“God has spared us compared to others.” Valentina said Amina was still troubled though. “She runs around like a normal child but every now and then she’ll stop and say her head is spinning She also complains of bad headaches Why did it all happen? We still don’t know. Putin and the government are as much to blame as anyone else.”That Georgy is alive is a miracle. The doctors who treated him believed he would die and when asked whether he himself is surprised he gives a broad smile. “Yes I am.” He complains of black-outs and of terrible headaches but says he is determined to achieve full rehabilitation “I would like to do something. Maybe my arm will get better in two or three years.”100 Pervomaiskaya StreetA year ago Chermen, then 8, did not really understand that his mother, Jana, had died in the school siege. He told himself that she was too busy in town to come back home.

Twelve months ago he talked freely and even excitedly about how he had been held as a hostage and rescued. But now that he knows for sure that Jana is never coming back, he seems to be a different child.His mother’s death has left his father Atzamas on his own to bring up four sons. Yesterday Chermen sat in his family’s dark kitchen and nervously played with a piece of string, barely looking up and answering in monosyllables He talks about how he has visited Egypt and Bulgaria He says he liked Bulgaria more. He also concedes that he thinks about the siege a lot but then falls silent, unwilling to talk further.His brother, Tamik, 16, cannot face talking about what happened either. His face creases with distress and tears well in his eyes as he asks to be excused Klara, the boys’ aunt, says Chermen is in a bad way.

“For the first time we will be able to establish if it’s possible to induce cultural changes in the behaviour of threatened species to teach them to avoid potential dangers.”If they learn, we could probably reduce deaths by electrocution to zero.”Naturalists have worked with the electric companies to install gadgets to discourage birds from landing on cables or crashing into pylons. “We expect that they will end up associating this shock with electric cables and posts in general, and stop landing on them,” says Miguel Ferrer, whose research team has fought for years to save Aquila adalberti.”We know that what they learn during their early youth marks their behaviour through their adult life. Posts carrying mild electric current are placed near their nests so that chicks, when they land on them, receive a “harmless but disagreeable” shock intended to warn them off the real thing. The birds have also fallen victim to poison set by farmers to combat foxes, and the drastic fall in numbers of rabbits, their main prey.Biologists at Spain’s principal scientific investigation centre, CSIC, are pioneering a system of “electric sheepdogs” designed to teach eagle chicks to avoid the deadly cables. This accounts for 60 per cent of deaths of imperial eagles in their first year of life. Despite efforts to save them, their chances of survival remain precarious. Fewer than 220 birds are reckoned to inhabit the Iberian peninsula, mostly around Andalusia’s Coto Do? national park where they are the main attraction.
But they face danger of electrocution from high-tension power cables that criss-cross their flight path.

This magnificent bird of prey, which lives only in Spain and Portugal, almost died out in the 1960s. Spanish scientists have launched an ambitious plan to halt the disappearance of the endangered Spanish imperial eagle, by teaching the birds not to electrocute themselves. The workers fought Communism because they wanted honourable working conditions,” he said. “Frankly, those working conditions have got worse, and there’s no solidarity if Polish lawyers have to go and wash English dishes for want of work here.”Mr Sieletycki, a representative of a section of Polish youth frustrated with the harsh capitalism that Solidarity finally won for Poland, is a member of the right-wing League of Polish Families, and speaks with admiration of Margaret Thatcher.Anna Walentynowicz, the Gdansk shipyard worker whose dismissal sparked the strike that Lech Walesa then led to form Solidarity, has staged a counter-commemoration, and maintains that Mr Walesa made too many compromises with Communists.Lech Walesa, a former shipyard electrician, acknowledged during his speech at the site of a new European Solidarity Centre yesterday that “freedom came, but it is still hard to get bread.”. Mr Saakashvili added: “Solidarity was the best thing which happened in the 20th century.”But not everyone in Gdansk yesterday was ready to join the celebrations.

“What we have in Poland today is not what my parents fought for,” said a Gdansk city councillor, Grzegorz Sieletycki, who at 25 was born just days after Solidarity was created on 31 August 1980.”Once we were the slaves of Moscow, now we are the slaves of Washington and Brussels. Young revolutionaries stood shoulder to shoulder with their elders as they paid tribute to the powerful influence of Poland’s Solidarity movement at 25th anniversary ceremonies held to commemorate the birth of the Communist bloc’s first independent trade union. As brilliant sunshine lit the streets of Gdansk yesterday, Georgia’s President, Mikhail Saakashvili, hailed the “second wave of Solidarity” that brought him to power in 2003. President Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the orange revolution from neighbouring Ukraine, told the invited leaders: “Solidarity has become a road for everyone.” The German President, Horst K?r, said: “Poles freed not just themselves, they launched a process which radiates until today. Turkey vehemently denies that genocide took place, saying the death toll is inflated and Armenians were killed in a civil war as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, eventually giving way to the Turkish Republic in 1923.The “thirty thousand Kurds” mentioned by Pamuk refers to those killed since 1984 as Turkey fought a vicious war against armed Kurdish separatists.Turkey, which has been trying to improve its human rights record as it vies for membership of the EU, is extremely sensitive about both the Armenian and Kurdish issues, and its new penal code makes it a crime to denigrate Turkey’s national identity.Pamuk’s books, which include the internationally acclaimed Snow and My Name is Red, have been translated into more than 20 languages His publisher said yesterday:”We have to wait for the court Then he [Pamuk] will make his speech in the court.”. Orhan Pamuk is scheduled to go on trial on 16 December and could face up to three years in prison for comments on Turkey’s killing of Armenians and Kurds, his publisher, Tugrul Pasaoglu, said yesterday.
“Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” Pamuk said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper in February.The “one million” refers to Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks at about the time of the First World War, which Armenians and several nations recognise as the first genocide of the 20th century. The study was presented at a British Psychological Society conference yesterday..

They were: * The methods used to fight terrorists should neither undermine the fundamental belief in the rule of law nor give the terrorists new grievances to exploit. * The political dimension is a critical part of the response. * The whole democratic world must work together to counter the problem. “Iraq was a diversion from the core task of the pursuit and destruction of al Qaida. Indeed, the failure to prepare properly for the aftermath of invasion has led to a horrifying expansion of terrorist activity in Iraq. We must not make such a mistake again.” Mr Clarke laid out four principles for responding to the threat of Islamic terrorism. “After September 11, 2001 our Government was quite right to pledge its support for President Bush’s campaign against global terrorism, it would have been failing in its duty if it had not done so.

“I marvel that Prime Minister Blair, who has such an excellent record of seeing through John Major’s political initiative in Northern Ireland, should fail to make the same judgments on the problem of resolving our conflicts with the Muslim world.” Mr Clarke suggested that Mr Blair had been too quick to lend his backing to President Bush over Iraq. No amount of preaching in itself ever made any person turn to the barbaric practice of suicide bombing. “They foment and support an extreme and fanatic sense of injustice and a crazed drive for revenge that takes root in the minds of a small number of young people for other reasons.” Mr Clarke argued: “No amount of military action, on however great a scale, nor tough legislation, of however draconian a nature, are in themselves going to make us safer or usher in a saner and more rational world “Constructive political responses are far more important We found that out for ourselves in Northern Ireland. “I am very conscious of the offence that the extreme propaganda of the worst examples of radical imams can cause to the families of the innocent victims of the outrages that these people support and encourage.

“But the public and the media should not be persuaded by the spin from No 10 that ‘mad mullahs’ are the most important creators of the dangers we face. They are one of the symptoms of the problem rather than the cause of it. I do not believe that the recent London bombs were the result of any deficiencies in our legal system.” Mr Clarke cautioned: “The Government is also now seeking to blame our problems on the behaviour of extremist preachers in our midst. “I support the expulsion of some of these vile propagandists from this country so long as the courts can be satisfied of their guilt of the crimes they are charged with. “The Government’s response to every terrorist event is to propose new tougher anti-terrorist laws.

I have always supported tough and exceptional laws against terrorism of every kind as I did when I was Home Secretary in the face of Irish terrorism “However, we do not lack anti-terrorist laws. “If the Prime Minister really believes it, he must be the only person left who thinks that the recent bombs in London had no connection at all with his policy in Iraq. I see little sign yet, however, that the outline consensus that appears to be emerging is of adequate substance to match the threat. “There will be more terrorist outrages and more international crises before anyone can hope to resolve it. Having made one catastrophic error in putting our troops into Iraq, we must seek to avoid further mistakes at home and abroad.” He continued: “Of course, the political parties in Britain must seek to achieve a cross-party consensus on where we go now and the present political leaders are trying to do so. He said: “The problem of our relationship with the Muslim community, both internationally and domestically, is now one of the major political problems that British governments are going to have to face for many years to come. Disengagement from Iraq has to be part of a much larger and more sophisticated political programme than we are delivering at the moment.” Mr Clarke argued that Britain had to seek ways of resolving conflicts with the worldwide Islamic community.

Nothing was more likely to grab Japanese public attention than a story in which bomb tests awaken a long-dormant, 30-storey high, monster with white-hot radioactive breath. Only a decade after Japan surrendered to the Allies after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of nuclear attack and radiation were still a sensitive subject for the country’s citizens. ” The bombings created a deep collective fear,” Ms Deriaz said. Those concerns were compounded when America, followed by the Russians, first exploded the newly-developed hydrogen bomb in 1952.

And two years later there was public outcry in Japan when American H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, caused radiation sickness among the crew of a Japanese tuna boat, Lucky Dragon. Faced with hundreds of people dying from radiation, he relents. The film concludes, however, with a warning that more monsters could be provoked unless nuclear testing is ended. The whole project was Japan’s first foray into big budget science fiction and cost 10 times the budget of the average Japanese film, and twice as much as the same studio’s The Seven Samurai which was also released that year. Godzilla was realised by Eiki Tsuburaya, a special effects expert who had spent the war making propaganda films including a recreation of the bombing of Pearl Harbour using miniatures that were so real the Americans were convinced it was documentary footage. Transformed and provoked by mankind’s nuclear bomb tests on the floor of the sea, Godzilla goes on the rampage, creating scenes of devastation that clearly recall wartime Japan.

Only a machine invented by the scientist, Dr Daisuke Serizawa, can kill him, but the doctor worries about his invention falling into the wrong hands. “When this original version was finally shown in America last year, people flocked to see it. They said it was an expression of nuclear anxiety to rank with Dr Strangelove [Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy starring Peter Sellers] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [directed by Alain Resnais in 1959].” When Godzilla – or Gojira in Japanese – was made by the Toho studio in 1954, it was a last-minute substitute for another project that had fallen through. Directed by Ishiro Honda, whose own experience of the bombing of Tokyo encouraged him to translate the horrors of war into film, its star was undoubtedly the monster Godzilla. “Along with King Kong, Godzilla is one of the most celebrated movie monsters of all time, yet hardly anyone in this country has seen the original that sparked the phenomenon,” she said.

“That’s why it’s fascinating to go back to the original and see how it all really started as opposed to the terrible distortion of the film that was caused by the release of the butchered American version. Next month, in the wake of the 60th anniversary commemorations of the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, the British Film Institute (BFI) is releasing this landmark in science fiction movie-making in its original form. Margaret Deriaz, the BFI’s head of film distribution, said the film had proved an important cinematic phenomenon. But now British audiences are to get their first opportunity to see the complete Japanese version of the film deemed politically unacceptable for ordinary Americans – and hence the rest of the world – half a century ago. Without the politics, the re-cut dubbed story of the dinosaur-like creature with radioactive breath, was an anodyne monster-on-the-loose picture which none the less added the name “Godzilla” to the lexicon of popular culture.
Such has been the success of the spin-offs, including more than 20 sequels from the Japanese studio that invented him, a major computer-generated Hollywood movie version seven years ago and assorted cartoons, that even fans may not know there was ever a serious point to the plot. Who knows: even the elusive Bostridge might finally turn up.. When the Japanese monster movie Godzilla was sold to an American distributor 50 years ago, it was re-edited to excise every mention of the strong anti-nuclear message that had made it such a hit in Hiroshima and Tokyo.

“Landlords get the market rent less 15 per cent, but the money is guaranteed by the council and paid three months in advance There are no voids or arrears, and no management fee. “It is true that some tenants are beyond redemption, but in those cases the local authority goes back to paying the landlord directly.”Matters be saved by an emerging system called Private Sector Leasing (PSL), under which local authorities lease the housing they need for benefits claimants from a specialist provider which, in turn, leases units from buy-to-let landlords.Landlords have the security of a long let with no voids and guaranteed payment by the quarter, in advance. At the end of the lease, the property is returned in good condition.The local authority gets the housing it needs from a single supplier and a landlord with the management skills to meet the needs of vulnerable families.The most prominent PSL contract so far is by the London Borough of Hillingdon, which has brought in the local estate agent Orchard & Shipman.Nick Medhurst, Orchard & Shipman’s chief executive, explains: “It started because the Government was keen to move families out of B&B, and Hillingdon responded by deciding to enlist buy-to-let landlords to provide 900 properties on medium-term leases of between three and five years.”The rent is not generous, Medhurst concedes, but other factors can make the deal more attractive. The laudable aim is to teach self-reliance, but this has deterred buy-to-let landlords from taking on claimants.Harrison believes this is a mistake. Some councils even manage to claw back rent if they felt that they had overpaid.The position has been made worse by the Government’s new policy of returning to paying the housing benefits to the families rather than landlords.

In Liverpool, landlords faced an impenetrable bureaucracy that delayed payments and sometimes left landlords in the lurch after properties had been damaged by tenants on benefits, who rarely have money for a deposit. Private landlords were encouraged to help with the offer of rent paid directly by councils, eliminating the risk that the tenants would default.Unfortunately, some local authorities proved to be worse payers than the benefits claimants. “Landlords assume there must be something wrong with such people, but most are simply going through a bad patch,” he says.
The Government is pushing local authorities to end the practice of shunting families into cramped, often squalid bed-and-breakfast accommodation, creating a demand for decent rented flats and houses. But investors who risk it often find that this isn’t true, says Malcolm Harrison of the Association of Residential Letting Agents.

Buy-to-let landlords are not keen on tenants who receive housing benefits They are, by definition, poor Landlords assume that this makes them feckless and slovenly. The drive from Woodstock to Oxford is slow on weekdays.Downside: Town is heaving with tourists in the summer.. Places to see include Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough since the 1700s and birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill.How to get there: Only 100 minutes’ drive from London Trains from Paddington to Oxford are frequent but slow. There is also a £10m estate for sale on the edge of the town.Attractions: Monthly farmers’ markets, an athletics team and dozens of societies.

Its small footprint should keep the anti-4×4 brigade at bay.( www.toyota.co.uk; 0845 275 5555) 4 Volvo XC90 £30,700 to £45,600 The huge XC90 is apparently co-designed by women, so you can imagine how practical it is inside. There are storage compartments galore and, with the two back seats folded out, there’s enough space for seven. The 2.0-litre diesel sounds a little agricultural, but it pulls well and is fairly frugal. The powerful 2.2-litre diesel generates impressive torque, and for a predominantly front-wheel-driven 4×4 (the rear wheels kick in when needed), it handles very confidently. It’s spacious, too.
( www.honda.co.uk; 0845 200 8000) 2 Lexus RX300 £29,800 to £39,000 The RX300 is such a looker that you might never take it off-road. Inside, it’s a hi-tech executive pad with electric everything, plus sat-nav and a superb Mark Levinson hi-fi.

The 3.0-litre plant is thirsty, but it’s very smooth and the auto gearbox is sublime. Look out for the upcoming hybrid petrol-electric RX400h – clean and green.( www.lexus.co.uk; 0845 278 8888) 3 Toyota RAV4 £17,200 to £24,400 The new RAV4 is longer than versions of old, and it handles better for it. It looks utilitarian enough to bash through the bush, yet handsome enough to pick up the kids in. 1 Honda CR-V £17,200 to £22,800 It may not be blessed with the most attractive dashboard on this page, but most other aspects of the CR-V are spot on. The 100-acre Tottenham Marshes and several large reservoirs are nearby to the east.And one for the pub quiz.The Blue Plaque at 7 Bruce Grove honours Luke Howard (1772-1864) What is Howard famous for?Cumulus Nimbus Cirrus.

Those who have gone on living have hidden away what happened to them under a code of silence Not Mai. She broke every taboo in Pakistani society, telling her horrific story again and again, to the police, to the media and to the courts, until the men who did this to her were convicted.And she will have to go through all of this again. This is Mukhtar Mai, the most famous Pakistani woman in the world. The tragedy of it is that her fame is a result of being gang-raped at gunpoint by four men from her village as an “honour punishment”.
But then even that doesn’t single her out in Pakistan, where women are still raped every year on the orders of such councils as punishments because their relatives have somehow offended against tribal codes of “honour”.No, this shy, unassuming village woman in front of us is famous around the world because she was the first victim to stand up and demand justice, to insist that the men who raped her be brought to court, and to refuse to be silenced by the traditional values that say being raped is too shameful for a woman to speak of.Many Pakistani rape victims have committed suicide rather than live with the “shame” of what has happened to them.

After a furious row, the Transport Ministry agreed to pay Global 50 per cent of the money owed.. She is the last to enter the room. It is almost as if she slips in behind the others, a small woman, her slight figure hidden in the folds of her brightly coloured salwar kazmeez. When it comes time to talk, she is happy to let the others do most of the talking, preferring to leaf through a pile of magazines, shyly pretending to study the pictures

But she’s the one we’ve come to meet. On Friday, troops from the Interior Ministry advanced on the airport, but withdrew when faced with US troops. Tit-for-tat killings have now become common.Baghdad international airport reopened yesterday after being closed down by the British security company Global Strategies Group because it has not been paid for seven months.

Both events are likely to deepen the divide between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.Sectarian hostility between Shia and Sunni Arabs is increasing by the day. The bodies of 18 men, all Shia, have been found handcuffed and shot to death after they were picked up by men in police uniforms in a Shia neighbourhood of Iskandariyah, a town 30 miles south of Baghdad.One of the problems in using the Iraqi army to take and occupy Sunni Arab towns and villages is that the presence of Shia and Kurdish soldiers provokes a backlash and leads to greater support for the insurgents. It faces a referendum on the draft constitution on 15 October and an election for the National Assembly in December. The disproportionate casualty figures suggest that, if true, most of the insurgents were killed by bombs or shells.Mr Dulaimi implied that his men would soon launch attacks on other cities and towns where the resistance is largely in control.

He said: “We say to our people in Qaim, Rawa, Samarra and Ramadi – we are coming and terrorists and criminals will not be able to hide there.” He blamed Iraq’s neighbours for allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq.In the past, the US army has borne the brunt of the fighting and the Iraqi army presence has largely been cosmetic. When Iraqi troops have been engaged, it is usually former Kurdish and Shia militiamen who have been most effective.Tal Afar is a mainly Turkoman town of 200,000 people, most of whom have fled, west of Mosul.The US and the Baghdad government have long believed that Tal Afar is a staging post for insurgents entering Iraq from Syria. But Turkomans and Sunni Arabs in the town see themselves as under pressure from the Kurds. The town has been governed by a Shia city council and police force since the fall of Saddam.

One is company earnings – these have been upgraded by 7 per cent for both this year and next. Global bond yields are low, too, despite unsustainable public deficits. It makes you wonder what markets might be doing were there not all this negative stuff around.One broker paper caught my eye last week. It was from Citi- group and concerned prospects for the UK stock market. The authors point out that the market has delivered a healthy return of 15 per cent this year, and they have increased their target to 6,000 on the FTSE 100 index by the end of 2006.There seem to be two drivers. Maybe the paradox will continue: wonderful products and companies but not enough jobs or money spent in the shops. Maybe, on the other hand, there will be a supply-side revolution and the economy will start to fulfil its true potential.

It would be good for all of us were that to happen.Shares strong enough to resist the blowsThe puzzle gets, well, more puzzling. We have just had the worst natural disaster in the US since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. We have the oil price, in money terms at least, close to its all-time high, and with the prospect of staying high for the foreseeable future. We have the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates and, maybe after a pause, doing so again. And we have the underlying threat from all the various global imbalances that economists (including me) have rabbited on about for ages.Yet financial markets are calm, with shares climbing across the world this year and seeming utterly unfazed by all this bad news. The next downward swing in the world economic cycle, whenever it comes, would be serious indeed.For those of us here who know and like Germany, its politics are tantalising: so near and so far; so hard to deliver what the majority of the German people do want. That would not be an immediate catastrophe, just a loss of time because eventually the present model will become unsustainable.

The next French president, whoever he (unlikely to be a she) turns out to be, would have a tougher job on his hands.The likelihood would be that the big continental European economies would continue to under-perform relative to the smaller ones and to the rest of the world. That would not mean there could be no serious reforms, of course, either in Germany or elsewhere – just that they would be harder to sustain. What then?What it would mean, I suppose, is that it is very difficult in Europe to win an election on a reform ticket. The period of cold turkey could have run its natural course.Suppose, however, Ms Merkel does not get the clear majority and there is a grand coalition. Once the country has got its costs in line with its productivity and quality, the export sector could indeed start to stimulate domestic demand. Its present estimate is only 0.8 per cent but better to revise up than down.The second reason for optimism is that five years of squeezing down costs since Germany locked into the eurozone are at last bearing fruit That is why exports are doing so well.

The institute has been a noted (and accurate) bear of the German economy, so this is significant. It would be too much to say that the success in exports is at last spreading to the rest of the economy, but the Ifo Institute in Munich says it might increase its forecast for growth this year. If the policies were sustained and Germany did indeed emerge from stagnation, it would give a wake-up call to the rest of Europe.There are two reasons to be quite optimistic. One is that the very latest figures for exports and production are encouraging. Germany would press on with reforms that would make life tougher for most ordinary people at first, in the hope there would be a supply-side revolution leading ultimately to faster growth and higher living standards. Other changes – for example, trimming some social security payments – might actually cut demand in the short term.So the prospect would be for another two years of cold turkey. Saying you will do this is a pretty good way of encouraging people to bring forward big-ticket purchases, so in the very short run the programme would lead to a boost in demand But that would be a one-off.

He could see that just wasn’t going to happen in his final year in office.”As well as facing another year of his unpopular reform programme, blocked by the CDU majority in parliament’s upper house, he has good personal reasons for wanting out. What about a third term in office? A massive reduction in the five million Germans unemployed? Sustained growth for his country’s beleaguered economy? It conveyed the image of a man who almost wanted to lose.”You certainly get the impression he’s had enough,” said Tom Levine, a leading German political commentator “It’s why he called early elections in the first place He wanted to be Chancellor so he could get things done. Not long ago a couple of 12-year-olds sent by the state broadcaster, ARD, asked him to write down his greatest wish. He paused thoughtfully, and then scrawled the simple word “health” This raised many eyebrows.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric of the campaign is becoming bitter.
Furious about claims that the CDU has radical neoconservative plans for “the end of social Germany”, the party’s general secretary, Volker Kauder, said of Mr Schr?: “That a serving Chancellor should lie so brazenly is unique in the history of the Federal Republic.” With the SPD leader still far more personally popular than his somewhat colourless adversary, other CDU figures have taken up the theme that he is a liar, an unusual departure in Germany’s normally sober politics.The election race appears to have revived Mr Schr?, who has often seemed weary of the cares of office. Opinion polls are showing for the first time that the CDU and its coalition partners, the Free Democrats, could fall short of a parliamentary majority. Although Mrs Merkel remains on course to become Germany’s first female Chancellor, Mr Schr? and his Social Democrats (SPD) have narrowed the gap. A week before Germans go to the polls, Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU) are becoming rattled as Chancellor Gerhard Schr? gains ground in the fight to retain a job he has often appeared to want to lose. His brother, 28-year-old Mutassim, is known as Hannibal and is not a footballer. But he is a player, the pair having long been known for their playboy lifestyle..

Biennale spokesman Paolo Luighi said “we know absolutely nothing” about the deal, but confirmed Mr Croff had attended.Saadi Gaddafi, 31, a professional footballer, is worth an estimated $4bn. He currently plays for Italian team Perugia, after being dropped from the Libyan national side when their manager described him as “useless”. Rapper 50 Cent entertained and 400 of La Serenissima’s finest were invited.The ostensible purpose was to promote the Gaddafi’s humanitarian project for children in Niger, but the pair are also reportedly schmoozing Davide Croff, president of the Venice Biennale, which organises all major arts events in the city. They want him to accept Libyan funding for the prestigious film festival.The brothers are keen to help fund Mr Croff’s plans to renovate the Venice Lido. The site is cramped and unable to cope with the influx of celebrities and media.

The shimmering reds of video and jagged diagonal lines of regular TV are gone.Suppose I’m happy with things as they are? Fair enough, although it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be missing out. Start saving now.HD – and why it mattersWhat makes high definition so great?Just as DVD looks better than VHS because it has twice the resolution, so HD broadcasts and discs push the resolution further, with sharper, more realistic images full of detail and colour. And when you do have the new HD player, you will probably never want to watch standard definition again.The HD-DVD slogan that it’s “evolution, not revolution” makes it sound like an interim technology, and the fact that HD-DVD isn’t available as a recordable format from the start may not help.Either way, next year you are going to be asked to upgrade most of your home audio-visual equipment in return for truly amazing picture and sound quality that will look realistic, rich and detailed and sound as impressive as if you are in the cinema. The chance that this disc will be the same price as a regular DVD is low, so you’ll be paying more just for DVD content. So you can play the DVD content now, and when you do buy a new machine, you’ve already got the film in HD.That’s not an entirely convincing argument. First, the discs are a direct evolution of DVD rather than a new technology, so it is claimed that HD-DVDs will be much cheaper to produce, with disc manufacturers switching machinery to the new format with little difficulty.Second, a hybrid disc is on the way, capable of holding 30Gb of HD data on one side and a regular DVD capacity on the other.

Now, every studio apart from Warner Bros has signed up.Before Sony and company are given the prize, though, it should be noted that HD-DVD has advantages. When the console launched there in April, some film studios were sceptical about releasing films for the platform. On 1 September, it launched the desirable PlayStation Portable, a hand-held games console with a big screen, which also plays movies on another new format, UMD.UMD is proving successful in America. Feingold, for one, believes that packaged media rather than HD broadcasts will lead the way.Sony has reason to be confident about Blu-Ray in the UK.

And, as Sony owns both Columbia Tristar and MGM, a substantial number of movies available on Blu-Ray may not be released on HD-DVD. It included Blu-Ray compatibility, offering enormous capacity for games developers and allowing users to play Blu-Ray discs. The inclusion of DVD playback on the PlayStation 2 was a factor in the uptake of DVD, so perhaps the PS3, which will sell in very large numbers, very quickly, will do the same for Blu-Ray.Until HD broadcasts are plentiful, a Blu-Ray player may be the best way to watch HD films, say. The group backing HD-DVD includes Toshiba and Sanyo, while Blu-Ray is endorsed by Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi, Philips, LG, Samsung, Thomson and more – not to mention the computer manufacturers Dell and HP.But that’s not what the Blu-Ray camp hopes is its killer blow. That came a couple of months ago, when Sony announced the specifications for its PlayStation 3 console.

There are benefits to both formats if they get together.”Blu-Ray, on the face of it, looks the probable winner. One reason VHS defeated Betamax was that more companies backed it, even though the Sony-developed Betamax was more advanced. The electronics firms found a way round this by building machines that would record and play on more than one format. With HD discs, the warring formats will need to sue for peace, or face a long battle for for market share.Ben Feingold, the president of Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment (owned by Sony) believes that peace will come “I think cooler heads will prevail. When DVD-recordable discs were available on three incompatible platforms, consumers held back for fear of “buying the Betamax”.