'Pope Benedict has passed up a glorious opportunity,' says campaigning group of pastoral letter to Irish Catholics

Survivors of child abuse by Catholic clergy in Ireland have expressed disappointment with the pope's apology for the scandal.

Victims criticised Benedict XVI's letter of apology because it did not directly address the long history of concealment by Irish bishops of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by priests, nuns and Catholic orders.

The campaigning group One in Four condemned the pope for failing to acknowledge that the church hierarchy had attempted to suppress the scandal.

"Victims were hoping for an acknowledgement of the scurrilous ways in which they have been treated as they attempted to bring their experiences of abuse to the attention of the church authorities," the group's director, Maeve Lewis, said.

"Pope Benedict has passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the clerical sexual abuse scandal: the deliberate policy of the Catholic church at the highest levels to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children."

Lewis also accused the Pope of dodging Vatican responsibility for failing to tackle child abuse.

"If the church cannot acknowledge this fundamental truth, it is still in denial," she added.

Andrew Madden, who in 1995 became the first person in Ireland to go public with an abuse lawsuit against the church, said he did not need to hear the pope say that clerical sex abuse was a crime and a sin.

"The apology today is not for the cover-up, it's for the abuse and for the most part they didn't commit the abuse – but they caused some because of the cover-up," he said. "That's the bit they should say sorry for."

Support group Irish Survivors of Child Abuse was more welcoming of the pope's letter.

"It would appear that the message overall is one of sincerity to bring about change in the church," he said.

"We have an apology for the first time, and that's important."

But Kelly called for further explanation of the letter's mention of a Vatican investigation into the Irish church, and the suggestion some abusers should be brought before tribunals.

"Will anybody be made accountable? It would appear so from my reading of what the pope is saying, so that's positive but we need clarification," he said.

In a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, the pope castigated Irish bishops for "grave errors of judgment" in their handling of the paedophilia scandal.

But he made no mention of any Vatican responsibility and gave no specific punishments for bishops who have been blamed by victims and Irish government inquiries for having concealed the abuse.

BA says its contingency measures for three-day strike are off to a 'good start', while Unite union talks of planes stacking up

The first day of a three-day strike by British Airways' cabin crew is under way with unions and management in dispute about its impact on passengers.

The airline said its contingency plans for dealing with the strike, which include using 1,000 volunteer cabin crew and 22 chartered jets, had got off to a "good start".

But the Unite union, which represents the crew, said the number of planes stacking up at airports across the country because of the strike was growing, with 85 parked at Heathrow, 20 at Cardiff and 20 in Shannon.

The union said its 12,000 members were solidly supporting the walkout and that none of the buses that normally transport crew to work had crossed picket lines.

A BA spokeswoman said: "We aim to fly as many customers as we can this weekend. At Heathrow and Gatwick we have got off to a good start. London City is operating as normal.

"Cabin crew are reporting as normal at Gatwick and the numbers reporting at Heathrow are above the levels we need to operate our published schedule.

"This is the biggest contingency plan we have ever launched."

BA is planning to operate all long-haul flights to and from Gatwick plus around half of short-haul flights, while all flights to and from London City Airport are expected to fly as scheduled.

BA said 65% of passengers would still be able to reach their destination during the strike, although 1,100 of the 1,950 scheduled flights would be cancelled. BA is using 1,000 volunteer cabin crew and 22 chartered jets, including three Ryanair planes complete with flight attendants.

The company said it was confident of handling around 49,000 passengers today and the same number tomorrow, as against about 75,000 for a normal weekend day in March. It has arranged with more than 60 other airlines to take BA customers on their flights.

Another four days of industrial action are set to begin on 27 March and further action is expected from mid-April unless the deadlock is broken.

Last-ditch talks between BA and Unite collapsed acrimoniously yesterday, with the airline management warning that unless a new framework were drawn up it would scrap an agreement that gives shop stewards the use of company offices and time off to represent members.

Unite's joint leader, Tony Woodley, accused BA of wanting a "war" with the union and complained that the BA chief executive, Willie Walsh, had tabled a worse offer than one withdrawn last week.

Woodley said today that he had been set "mission impossible" because of the new offer, which included a four-year pay deal which the union maintained would at best freeze wages until 2014.

The union had offered a 2.6% pay cut this year as part of a three-year deal.

Woodley said: "The disruption that passengers will inevitably experience over the next three days could have been spared had BA grasped that you cannot put an offer on the table one day, take it off the next and then come back with a worse one a few days later."

A Unite spokesman added: "The support we are getting shows how strongly people feel about this and is in spite of the bullying by management.

"Willie Walsh's appeal for people to cross our picket lines has obviously not worked."

One industrial relations expert said if BA ended its current arrangement with Unite, which stipulates how much work airline employees can do for the union and what facilities they can use, it would reduce co-operation to the "bare minimum".

The failure of the peace talks is a bitter blow to Gordon Brown, who is desperate to banish the spectre of large-scale industrial action 46 days before the likely election date.

The prime minister has urged the two sides to resolve the dispute, but today the Conservative leader David Cameron accused him of failing to act because Unite is "bankrolling" the Labour Party.

Big increases in minimum wage and reduction of voting age to 16 being considered for party's 'next phase of national renewal'

Labour will pledge an end to the era of extortionate credit in its election manifesto, and is considering big increases in the minimum wage, the introduction of free school meals for all and a reduction in the voting age to 16, Ed Miliband, the cabinet minister responsible for its drafting, reveals today.

In a Guardian interview trailing Labour's manifesto for an unprecedented fourth term, Miliband reveals that the prospectus will be about showing that Labour can lead the country to "the next phase of national renewal" and that the party "will reform both the market and the state".

The manifesto will also set out proposals for a new model of banking built round a People's Bank, drawing on the post office network, and a possible cap on credit interest rates.

Miliband said one aim would be to show that Labour's rights and responsibilities agenda "needs to go all the way to the top". The manifesto would "not promise the earth", but he said: "One of the profound issues in this election is: in a world of tough decisions, in whose interests do you make those decisions? We are going to be very clear about where money comes from in this manifesto."

The energy and climate change secretary likens the introduction of a People's Bank, in the wake of the banking crisis, to the creation of the Sure Start network of children's centres – an institutional reform that meets new demands in society and brings together poor and middle-class people. Built round the 12,000-strong network of post offices, the bank would provide capital for the hundreds of credit unions in the UK, he disclosed.

He argued: "Institutions are the things that define governments. The 1945 government was defined by its relationship with the NHS. The 1997 government was defined around rebuilding the fabric of communities through institutions like Sure Start. I think the idea of the People's Bank … is one of those ideas."

Ministers are completing talks with the Post Office on the range of banking services to be provided, and the scale of its initial capitalisation.

Miliband said: "Frankly banks have let down low-income consumers. The People's Bank can be a very serious financial institution and a competitor to the conventional private sector. One of the exciting ideas is for the People's Bank to provide the network of credit unions access to funds, but it can also become a banking alternative for a significantly wider group than just the low-income consumers. It is part of a bigger reform we need in the relationship between individuals and financial institutions."

Some consumer groups have warned that a cap on interest rates might see the suppliers of credit refuse to provide it to poor people altogether. But access to an alternative supplier of credit would reduce that risk, making a cap easier to introduce.

Miliband said: "We are looking more widely at a cap on interest rates. There is a real issue about the way in which low- income groups are being ripped off."

A review into credit card companies this month proposed smaller-scale reforms, but government sources said the option of a cap was likely to be in the manifesto. Despite historically low Bank of England base rates, the average interest charged on a credit card has reached 18.8% – the highest level since 1998. Some consumers are now paying more than 40% on the cash they have borrowed.

Miliband has been working on the manifesto for three years, and says it will offer the country a radical response to the banking and political crises.

"What people do not want after these two events is a return to business as usual. They want a sense we have learned lessons from the past. They want the next stage of national renewal," he said. "The task of the manifesto is to show that when it comes to the national renewal we are the people to deliver it, not the Conservatives."

Miliband said he favoured the introduction of votes at 16 to be included as part of a package of constitutional reforms, including changes to the voting system. "Perhaps the opportunity was not there before, but expenses has so brought into focus a sense that politics needs to change and open up. There is a new appetite for political renewal."

He also indicated the possibility of a strengthening of the minimum wage, currently £5.80 an hour, saying that reforms would go beyond tighter enforcement to examining a radical increase in its level.

He also said that, subject to an affordability test, there was "a strong case for universal free school meals. It makes a big difference in terms of nutrition. It makes a big difference in terms of concentration in classrooms."

The manifesto would also contain proposals for a more open state in which the floodgates of government data are opened to the public, so changing the relationship between citizen and state.

In a speech on Monday, Gordon Brown may suggest making one welfare benefit available exclusively online as a way of encouraging Britain's 10 million digitally excluded towards the internet.

Miliband also trailed a more interventionist European industrial policy, including both infrastructure and green investment banks.

"The old view that the conventional private sector on its own would ensure our infrastructure was built, the right sort of companies were supported and people will get the banking services they need has not worked."

He promised the manifesto would offer fresh guarantees for citizens to seek redress if the health service, police or schools let them down. The government has already announced that it will offer a private sector alternative in the case of NHS failure, a parental ballot in the case of a failing school, and a right to a neighbourhood beat meeting in the case of police.

Miliband said: "We need to be stronger in terms of the redress we offer and you will see that in the manifesto, because people have to have a sense that they are meaningful and will give them power."

Conservative party would impose unilateral tax on banks to recover taxpayers' billions if elected, says David Cameron

The Conservative party would impose a unilateral tax on banks to claw back the billions of pounds of taxpayers' money used to prop up financial institutions during the economic crisis, David Cameron said today.

His pledge came as the Financial Times reported that the chancellor, Alistair Darling, would use next week's budget to signal government support for a global bank tax, although only as part of an international agreement.

Darling would set out detailed options in his budget statement,, the paper said, but would insist that the money raised went to national governments rather than an insurance fund against future collapse.

There are fears that the existence of an insurance fund could encourage risk-taking and that any unilateral action could prompt an exodus of banks from the City to less punitive regimes abroad.

But Cameron said the Conservatives' proposed levy, similar to unilateral measures announced by Barack Obama in the US, was needed to protect British taxpayers from future bank collapses.

The banking industry was one of the vested interests he would confront if elected, he said, accusing Gordon Brown of failing to stand up to the financial sector.

"We had the biggest bank bailout in the world. We can't just carry on as if nothing happened," he said during a speech in London today.

"In America, President Obama has said he will get taxpayers back every cent they put in. Why should it be any different here?

"So I can announce today that a Conservative government will introduce a new bank levy to pay back taxpayers for the support they gave and to protect them in the future.

"No, it won't be popular in every part of the City. But I believe it's fair and it's necessary."

The prime minister has been a leading advocate of a globally co-ordinated levy on banks, which could bring in tens of billions of pounds a year from the financial services sector worldwide.

He had to abandon his preferred option – a "Tobin" tax on financial transactions – but hopes the International Monetary Fund will back the measure at its April meeting in Washington ahead of a G20 meeting in June.

The FT said Labour's manifesto could commit to diverting some of the proceeds of the levy into aid for poorer countries – in line with a campaign for a "Robin Hood tax" on the banks.

Press F5 for updates or turn on the auto-update button below. Then email tommyturbo100@hotmail.com with all your thoughts on the game

61 min: England get the ball down over the tryline. That was a great break from Cueto who charged up into the French 22. He didn't have the support though, and when Care finally reaches him, he knocks it on. The ball is touched down over the line, but France are given the scrum. Wilksinson is on for Flutey. Flood has moved to centre, while Wilkinson steps into the fly-half role.

60 min: Chabal comes on to replace Pierre for France. He instantly drives a ruck forward as France advance, thunderingly, up the pitch. But England turn it over. Care chips to the 22 and Ashton fly-kicks over Poitrenaud's head. But he gets too much onto it and France can touch down for a 22. Mike Tindall has just told the BBC's touchline reporter that he didn't want to come off.

58 min: The scrum is untidy again and Nick Easter is forced to break from the back with the ball. Ludicrously, he kicks. Even more ludicrously, it's a good kick that finds touch halfway in the French half. Bewildering. I am still baffled by the decision to take of Mike Tindall, incidentally. Utterly nonsensical.

57 min: Marty breaks through the English line but, when in need of support, he turned to see Poitrenaud streaking past him, rather than being just off his shoulder. A let off for England as the full back could have been though - though admittedly he was on the halfway line. A knock-on then gives England possession. Jonny Wilkinson is warming up.

56 min: Foden collects a high ball under pressure on his 22 line. He offloads to Care, he skips past a couple of tackles, before passing to Flood, who does the same. Eventually, England win a penalty, which Flood kicks long into touch on the French 22. England absorbed the pressure well, then, but have to make this chance pay ... which they don't. The French kick long into the England 22, forcing Foden to kick back.

54 min: Tindall runs at the French in exactly the sort of way that Tait probably won't. So Tindall is replaced by Tait. Hmmm. Szarzewski replaces Servat for France. While I was typing all of that, the French run the ball across the backs and Ashton is forced into a good tackle on the touchline. Still, the French blood is up and they running the ball strongly at England. They make it halfway into the 22 and then, with the droip goal on, Parra kicks a high box kick that absolutely no-one was expecting - least of all the French. England take the 22 with relief.

52 min: The scrum stays up and allows Care to chip into the French 22. Poitrenaud grabs the ball and hoofs to the halfway line. Did I say earlier that Thompson is on for Hartley at hooker? I didn't? I must have done. Surely you just failed to read it. Ahem.

51 min: Tait is warming up on the touchline, while Marty has replaced Bastareaud for France. The big Frenchman has done nothing in this game. France then make their first foray into the England half and promptly knock the ball on, giving England the scrum.

50 min: "Say what you like about Brian Moore, but he does at least have a bit of knowledge in the scrum department," writes Guy Hornsby. "He's also recently done a referees course as part of a wager so he does know the laws. He can moan and bleat and grind, but of anyone that's fit to dissect the laws, it's him. The referee's having a terrible game, missing offences left, right and centre, and we've been on the receiving end more often than not. Give me Moore over David Pleat or Lawro any day." What you say is dead right, but there's something about Moore's bullishness that irritates.

49 min: Ashton breaks free and then lets excitement get the better of him. He only had Poitrenaud to beat but, with men in support, he chipped the ball over the French full-back's head far too soon. It gives the Frenchman time to turn, get back, and put a hand on the ball over the try line. A good chance goes begging.

47 min: England win the lineout against the head and can't make progress. They are driven back to the 22 by the French as the rain comes lashing down once more. Finally, Toby Flood tries a drop goal and his kick is a shocker - wide, short and scudding over the dead ball line.

45 min: Line out just inside the French half, which is stolen by France illegally and England take the free-kick quickly. The referee misses a knock-on, so England keep possession and run a series of crash balls. Easter is the man doing the driving. Then Care chips the ball over the top of the ruck. Had the ball popped up nicely, the England runner would have been over the line. As it is, England have a lineout five metres out.

43 min: Dan Cole is on the touchline with his hand in ice as England rework their front row. Wilson is the man on. Good thing too, the scrummaging was what has handed France most of their points.

Peep, peep: That noisy woman in the crowd is Raphael Ibanez's mother-in-law. Quite embarrassing that. England start the second half well. building a solid platform from which to attack - until Flutey passes the ball badly and France get a scrum.

Brian Moore, misunderstood: "I have to serve a riposte to Wendy Cooper," emails Lynn Bashforth. "Brian Moore can be a little gloomy at times, but largely because he has to watch some truly dismal English performances. In general, I find that he speaks from the heart, and explains things as if he were still on the pitch and in amongst them. The whole England team is bl**dy irritating this year. Now don't get me started on the oft pompous and antidiluvian Eddie Butler." Careful Lynn, that's my colleague Eddie Butler. Who I've never met.

Some half time emails: Guy Hornsby has this to say: "It's a funny game this one. We started with no real expectation of winning, even with our recent record against France, and came out like madmen, so it's been pretty pain-free so far. The rain really has spoiled things though. Our scrum seems to be strangely at odds. I don't think Cole is to blame for most of it, and he's getting singled out. But we're giving away too many penalties. 12-7 is pretty decent but we can't just keep handing 3 points to the French every 10 minutes."

Phil Harrison: "I cannot understand the appalling performance of this referee." He then goes on to say something about why he suspects the referee might not be much good which, if I printed, would earn me a swift clip round the ear from our lawyers, and a writ from the ref himself.

"Would it be against the laws, or even the spirit, of the game for England to come out second half gloved-up and wearing marigolds?" asks Ian Copestake. The rain has changed things in the first half. When it was dry, England looked much more confident. When it got wet, their handling went to pieces and they made a number of mistakes that gave France the chance to kick a series of penalties. England must sort their scrum out in the second half.

Peep, peep: Finally England manage a scrum that doesn't collapse. From it, Flutey runs along the left wing as the time ticks over the 40 minute mark. There is good quick ball that allows the backs to do some running before Worsley (I think) loses it and France run a series of thrusts at England. Finally, England win the ball back and Flood wisely hoofs it into touch and the teams head in for half-time.

39 min: "This question may have been asked many, many times before, but isn't Brian Moore just the most miserable, negative, whiney, commentator ever?" posits Wendy Cooper, correctly. He's exceptionally irritating.

39 min: Trinh-Duc hoists a whopping great high ball into the 22. Foden is underneath it and about to claim easily ... until Cueto jumps across him for absolutely no reason. Foden, fortunately, ignores him though and marks. The ball is wellied into touch.

37 min: The rain has stopped now, allowing England to try and pass the ball about a bit. However, the ball goes down and gives France a penalty. Emerging from the ruck is Domingo, exhibiting a spectacular builder's bum with his shorts halfway round his aris'.

36 min: A note on the ref from Lynn Bashforth's dad: "Watching with increasing frustration at Lawrence's bizarre decisions. My dad's latest text summary: 'He's always useless. Just does not understand the scrum laws. He was in charge of the first Lions match in SA and made a mess of that. Why do we have them?'. Would it be that hard to find northern hemisphere refs for northern hemisphere matches?"

35 min: Parra clears from the kick-off, landing the ball into touch on the halfway line - where almost all of the play seems to have been. Well, the bits of it that haven't been on the England 22.

PENALTY France 12-7 England: Parra thumps the ball over left footed. England have just given France these points.

33 min: There is more scrum nonsense and Dan Cole is at the heart of it. England collapse the scrum once again, on their own 22 line, and France have yet another chance to kick for goal. They really need to sort this out. The ref is being very particular about it.

32 min: "Depression has set in over here in Ireland after the Scottish defeat," writes Anthony O Connell."Eeven our top class pundits have lost it. Pundit 1: 'This is the worst defeat ever against the worst team in the tournament, I ask you when was the last time we lost to Scotland?' Pundit 2: '5 minutes ago and the better team won today.'"

31 min: A lineout is not straight, so the ref awards England a scrum on the halfway line. It immediately goes down and France are awarded a penalty for a lack of binding. The England scrum have been awful so far. The ball is kicked into the England 22 and the visitors have again messed up a decent attacking position.

30 min: This rain has altered England's gameplan. From the first few minutes, it seemed there was a greater willingness to keep the ball in hand. The slipperiness of the ball has changed that, though, so the ball is being hoofed a good deal more. Which is a shame.

29 min: There's some pushing at the lineout and England win a penalty for some (fairly minor) nudging, which is blasted into touch. France win it, kick long, England kick back and things get quite boring. Two French players are down, one is Parra and the other is the prop Domingo.

28 min: The lineout is won and, after a ruck, Care puts up a high box kick for Ashton to chase. But France win it back and, from another ruck, it's Parra's turn to put up a box kick. From it Foden is caught but England keep hold of the ball. Care has a kick charged down which, fortunately, falls into an English hand. They clear long and into the French 22. Poitrenaud simply takes his time and wellies it into touch near the halfway line.

26 min: England win a lineout on the halfway line. They hang onto it, looking to drive, but it comes out to Danny Care anyway. He runs through the French line, chips the ball, and France claim it back. They put the ball into touch for another England line out, five metres inside their own half.

PENALTY! France 9-7 England Parra is 10 metres in from the touchline, on the 22. The rain is pelting onto his head, and he strikes the ball sweetly between the posts. It's hard to remember the last time England were in the French half.

23 min: The scrum is, again, scrappy with all sorts of dubious binding issues that infuriate Brian Moore. The problem, really, was that the ball had been put it wonky. So here's another scrum ... which collapses and gives France a penalty on the 22.

22 min: France win a free-kick after England narrow the lineout. They run it and find a wall of England players, who they drive into with a series of rolling mauls. This is getting intp Trinh-Duc drop-goal territory. Instead, though, he chips the ball to the left touchline for Andreu to latch onto. Bastareud gets it, though, when it bounces off Ashton. He concedes a scrum to England, though.

20 min: A certain amount of hoofing the ball back and forwards, involving some slippery ball droppage is eventually won by France, who earn a lineout just inside England's half. "I think the angry woman [who was yelling at Martin Johnson] in the players' and coaches' section in the crowd is Jonny's mum," chortles Gary Naylor.

PENALTY France 6-7 England: Morgan Parra is five metres outside the 22, in the middle of the park, and he drills the ball between the posts.

18 min: Tom Palmer is the man to replace Simon Shaw. Perhaps it's his influence but, for the first time, the referee allows a scrum to take place. France win their put in and Flutey concedes a penalty for playing the ball while off his feet. This is kickable.

16 min: France are beginning to look more threatening and work the ball wide where, of all people, Servat is standing on the wing. He is bundled into touch by Care.

15 min: France kicked long into the corner and England, via the lineout, won the ball back. They hoisted it high and Cueto mowed Poitrenaud down, who was under it. Cueot came off worse, though, but Simon Shaw conceded a penalty in which he injured himself again and he has to go off. Brilliantly, all of this causes an angry woman in the crowd to turn around and yell at Martin Johnson.

14 min: Here's Ian Copestake: "For me rugby lost its appeal when Diego Dominquez gave up, so I don't have a clue what England's best side is. But I get the impression that many other people haven't a clue either." Least of all Martin Johnson on the evidence of this Six Nations.

13 min: Parra misses his kick. The ball eventually works its way back to Trinh-Duc, deep in his own half. He kicks high but not long, allowing Flood a chance to run back at the French. The rain has made everything slippery, though, and Flood loses the ball.

11 min: France win the lineout and fling it wide. Andreu nearly finds a way through, but is tackled by Ashton. A certain amount of midfield grinding then takes place before Shaw is caught offside. He looks injured too. Parra is lining up the penalty, slap bang in the middle of the park. It is also absolutely slating it down, rainwise.

9 min: Another scrum goes down and the referee gives the free-kick against England again. He's being very finickity about scrummaging. France kick long, then Cueto kicks it straight back at them and finds a solid halfway-line touch.

8 min: Nick Easter leaps the highest to win a line-out against the head. Care passes to Tindall on a crash ball run and England are pressurising France. They pass the ball along the backs, thanks to some great quick hands from Flutey. Cueto tries to chip through the French defence but it is charged down allowing France to regroup. A knock-on from England then gives the home side the scrum

France 3-7 England Flood nails the conversion, a good kick from the touchline. Blimey, this wasn't in the script.

TRY! France 3-5 England (Foden, 4 min) A sensational reply by England. From the kick off, they keep possession and, with two lots of quick ball, they work the ball out along the backs very smartly and Foden charges for the line.

DROP GOAL! France 3-0 England France muff it up though. They throw the ball wonkily and England get a let off, winning the scrum. The referee, though, is being a bit fussy about the binding in the scrum and eventually awards France a free-kick, which they take quickly. From the next breakdown, Trinh-Duc drops deep and slams a drop-kick over with consumate ease.

2 min: Trinh Duc hoists a high ball up which Foden claims well. He hoofs it back and then France find a great touch about 15 metres from the England line.

Peep, peep: England keep possession from the kick-off but lose it later when Flutey is flattened somewhat illegally. France kick long ... but too long and Ashton, on his debut, touches down behind the try line for a 22.

Commentary watch: How long before Brian Moore says something marginally dubious about the flakiness of the French? How long before he talks about England's passion to beat the Frenc?... Oh, hang on. He's just done the last one already.

It's for charidee: "My rugby mad friend Charlene is running a triathlon for Hearts and Balls, a charity that supports catastrophically injured rugby players, in case any of your lovely readers would like to sponsor her. She's managed to persuade three of the Scotland team so far but the more support she gets the better as she's dreading it," writes Eleanor Stanley.

The French anthem is brilliant. And always has been. It's also a bit silly, which is how all good anthems should be.

Anthem time: England go first. They adopt the arms-around each other, bellowing out of tune approach. Toby Flood, however, adopts the look of a man about to go over the top in the trenches.

Here come the teams: The noise in Paris is sensational. "So, 'Imanol Harinordoquy has admitted he cannot help but "bear a grudge" against England'," writes Gary Naylor. "Me too, and I'm English."

Teams

France: Poitrenaud, Andreu, Bastareaud, Jauzion, Palisson, Trinh-Duc, Parra, Domingo, Servat, Mas, Nallet, Pierre, Dusautoir, Bonnaire, Harinordoquy.
Replacements: Szarzewski, Poux, Chabal, Lapandry, Yachvili, Marty, Malzieu.

England: Foden, Cueto, Tindall, Flutey, Ashton, Flood, Care, Payne, Hartley, Cole, Shaw, Deacon, Worsley, Moody, Easter.
Replacements: Thompson, Wilson, Palmer, Haskell, Youngs, Wilkinson, Tait.

Referee: B Lawrence (New Zealand)

Preamble: Scotland's win over Ireland means that France have already been named as Six Nations champions. This, then, is the game that could see them become Grand Slam winners. How much would they love to do that against the English, against who they have a considerable emnity. Imanol Harinordoquy has admitted he cannot help but "bear a grudge" against England.

As for England, it will be interesting to see how their new look side pans out. First: Lewis Moody, who will captain tonight with Steve Borthwick injured. He's gone from the bench in the last game to leading it in this one and his style will not be one of nuanced tactics. Instead, Moody's is a body-on-the-line, beat the chest type of leadership. Would Nick Easter or Joe Worsley have been the better choice. We'll see.

Toby Flood's promotion to the starting line-up is a deserved one but, really, Martin Johnson had no choice, so limited has Jonny Wilkinson's game been. He's suggested England need to "go out there, forget about the result, and play ... the ability to express yourself as an individual is key." It suggests he wants to spearhead a new, attacking, flair-filled game.

How will that tie up with Moody's more attritional skills? It could be just what England need to defeat the French - plenty of grit up front (and some in the backs with Mike Tindall's reinstatement), plenty of creativity behind. Or it could be a complete mess with the French - with their patience and incision - absolutely the best team to pick holes in any uncertainty or joined-up thinking. It's worth bearing in mind that, though England have beaten France in their last four meeting, they have a score difference of plus 50, while England are 31 points shy of their lowest-ever Six Nations aggregate points tally.

• Mitchell's trip to region back on after concession
• Blair expects resumption of indirect negotiations

The US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is due to fly to the region on Sunday to try to secure a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks amid optimism about a breakthrough.

Mitchell had been due to visit Israel on Tuesday but his trip was cancelled – a victim of US-Israeli tensions. It was reinstated after Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, bowing to US pressure, phoned the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, last night to offer concessions.Mitchell is scheduled to see Netanyahu in Israel and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah.

Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet group of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia, predicted talks between Israel and the Palestinians could start soon. Blair, who was in Moscow today, told Reuters he expected proximity talks, indirect negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, with the US as a broker.

"I hope very much that in the next few days we will have a package that gives people the sense that, yes, despite all the difficulties of the past few days, it is worth having proximity talks and then those leading to direct negotiations," he said.

The Quartet issued a statement reiterating its hope that the talks would lead to a settlement within 24 months and condemning the plan to build 1,600 Jewish homes at Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem.US-Israeli relations deteriorated quickly after Israel's surprise announcement last week about the homes.

Clinton phoned Netanyahu and set out demands including confidence-building measures that could include withdrawing roadblocks on the West Bank, releasing Palestinian prisoners, and removing soldiers from parts of the West Bank. She also demanded a freeze on new Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory such as that planned for Ramat Shlomo.

Today she told a press conference in Moscow, where she had been at the Quartet group meeting: "What I heard from the prime minister in response to the requests we made was useful and productive and we are continuing our discussions with him and his government."

Netanyahu's office and the US state department would only say publicly that he had agreed to confidence-building measures, and made no reference to a moratorium on settlements. But diplomats and analysts said that there would also have been private undertakings for such a moratorium, sufficient to allow the Palestinians to agree to resume talks.

Clinton, in a BBC interview, suggested the pressure on Netanyahu was bringing results: "I think we're going to see the resumption of the negotiation track, and that means that it is paying off."

She will try to get Netanyahu to commit himself to specific details when the two meet next week in Washington. The White House today declined to confirm whether Barack Obama would meet Netanyahu too.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government peace negotiator and now an analyst based in Washington, said he believed Netanyahu would have promised Clinton not to undermine US peace efforts with any more surprise announcements of settlement building. "I think there will almost certainly have been private undertakings by Bibi [Netanyahu] to adhere more rigorously to the embarrassment test, meaning no settlement announcements or developments, evictions or demolitions in both Jerusalem and the West Bank," Levy said.

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at Washington's American Task Force on Palestine, thought Netanyahu would have given enough ground to allow the Palestinians back into the talks. "The Obama administration has made its point and extracted pretty significant assurances," Ibish said. "I think it will be enough for the Palestinians to go into the proximity talks. Netanyahu tried to defy Obama and did not get away with it."

Aaron David Miller, an adviser to six secretaries of state on Middle East negotiations, said the call between Clinton and Netanyahu was "an effort to walk the cat back from the heat and fire of the last week". He expected a resumption of indirect talks but was pessimistic about the chances of peace in the long term. "It is hard to see a way to an outcome. They could agree on borders but not Jerusalem and refugees … the gaps are too long for this Israeli government and I suspect too for the Palestinians," he said.

David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute for the Near East Project on the Middle East Peace Process, said the peak of the crisis was "clearly behind us". But he suggested there could be more drama on Monday when Clinton is due to address the Israeli lobby group Aipac in Washington. "When you get a crowd of 7,500 people, it is hard to predict that all 7,500 will behave appropriately. The organisation is trying to make it clear she should be received respectfully. The question is whether they can get 100% compliance," Makovsky said.

Meanwhile, Hamas security officials and witnesses said Israeli aircraft struck at targets in the Gaza Strip yesterday, a day after a rocket from the Palestinian enclave killed a Thai worker in Israel. Eleven people were wounded in Israeli strikes, which targeted smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt, a foundry near Gaza City and the non-operating airport.

German firm Hipp says one in four consumers now grown-ups who find baby food easier to swallow and digest

Can't be bothered to chew your food? Too tired to cook and looking for a quick meal? It seems that in such circumstances a growing number of adults may consider opening a jar of baby food.

The world's largest baby food manufacturer, Hipp, has said an increasing number of adults are turning to its pre-cooked, pureed meals because they find them easier to swallow and digest.

About a quarter of those who eat the Bavaria-based firm's 100 varieties of pulped meals – from apple and cranberry breakfast to vegetable and beef hotpot – are adults, it says.

Claus Hipp said in recent years his firm's products had grown in popularity, particularly among elderly people, with stewed apple said to be a favourite.

He said the 50-year-old company – the world's largest producer of baby food, with 46% of the market – was increasingly turning its attention to the adult market rather than babies as Europe's population ages.

"Not so long ago, we had twice as many births as now, and that, of course, has a knock-on effect. As our society gets ever older, baby food is showing that it has a future in the adult market," Hipp said at a company birthday celebration.

Despite the fact that birth rates have dropped in most European countries, most notably in Germany, the company's profits rose by €90m last year to €500m (£450m).

A million and a half jars of baby food come off the Hipp production line every day. Hipp said calorie-conscious new mothers saw the meals – which are low in fat, sugar and salt – as a way to help them lose weight after giving birth and were among new customers it had won in recent years. Sportsmen and women looking for a light meal are believed to favour the jars, too.

The company, which recommends its organic meals to babies "at the start of weaning to three years of age", and makes no mention on its packaging of anyone above that age, said it had no intention of relaunching the products for a separate market.

"Older people can often cope with the mashed baby food better than regular meals, but we're not planning to change our advertising to target them … we want to keep our baby image," said Hipp, whose father, Georg, started putting baby food in jars in 1960.

Eileen Steinbock, of the British Dietetic Association, said pureed food could benefit people whose ability to swallow had been greatly reduced through old age, dementia or a stroke, and was already in widespread use in care homes.

But people who could still chew and swallow should continue to do so for as long as possible, she added.

"I wouldn't like to see people being given pureed food just because it's easier for a carer to give it to them that way. It should only be given when it's appropriate or essential," she said.

In addition, the protein content of food declines when it is pureed because extra water is added to help liquify it, leaving it with fewer calories. "That would be a bad thing because a lot of people who require pureed food find it hard to eat enough and are quite likely to be nutritionally compromised and possibly even malnourished," she added.

John Sheehan, a former Nato commander, sparks outrage over claims homosexual soldiers weakened the Dutch army

A senior US officer and former Nato commander sparked outrage in the Netherlands today by declaring that gay soldiers in the Dutch military were one of the reasons for the Srebrenica massacre, the worst act of mass murder in Europe committed since the second world war.

The Dutch government and military responded with anger and contempt after General John Sheehan, a retired marine corps officer who was Nato's supreme commander at the time of the 1995 atrocity, told a US Senate hearing that gay soldiers in the military could result in events like Srebrenica.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the Bosnian Muslim enclave under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers and killed 8,000 Muslim males, making the event a traumatic national disgrace for the Dutch.

Following recent remarks from Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, that Europeans had gone soft, Sheehan argued that changes after the end of the cold war had reduced Europe's appetite for combat.

"They declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialise their military – that includes the unionisation of their militaries, it includes open homosexuality. That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war," he said.

"The case in point that I'm referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs. The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since world war two."

He added that the Dutch chief of staff had told him that having gay soldiers at Srebrenica had sapped morale and contributed to the disaster.

"Total nonsense," said General Henk van den Breemen, the Dutch chief of staff at the time. The Dutch embassy in Washington dismissed the US officer's argument as worthless, Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister said that it was not worth commenting on, and the Dutch defence ministry voiced incredulity.

"It is unbelievable that a man of this rank is stating this nonsense, for that's what it is," said the ministry.

"Scandalous and not worthy of a soldier," added Eimert van Middelkoop, the Dutch defence minister.

The UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague – where the Dutch government sits – has found that the mass murder in Srebrenica was an act of genocide, the only one in Europe since the Holocaust.

Sheehan argued that openly allowing homosexuals in the military was part of a post-cold war "socialisation" process in Europe that had concentrated on peacekeeping in the belief that Germany would not attack again and that Russia was no longer a threat.

Compensation for staff at Ground Zero who suffered ill-health is not a fair deal, federal judge rules

A judge has rejected a $657m (£437m) deal to compensate workers who suffered ill-health after helping out at New York's Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks, ruling the sum is not adequate.

Federal judge Alvin Hellerstein said the proposed payout was not a fair deal for about 10,000 police officers, firefighters and labourers made sick by the dust and debris.

Under the settlement, the amount received by each responder is based on a complicated points system that would give some workers only a few thousand dollars while others might qualify for $1m or more.

The judge said he was concerned too much of the money would be eaten up by legal fees and that the plaintiffs were being pressured into signing up to the agreement before they knew how much they stood to receive.

A third or more of the cash was expected to go to lawyers.

Workers have been given just 90 days to decide whether they agree to the terms, far too short a time for such an important decision, said Hellerstein.

"I will not preside over a settlement that is based on fear or ignorance," he said.

Hellerstein, who rules over all federal court litigation related to the terror attacks, had heard from several tearful responders speaking about their illnesses, and received letters and phone calls from others expressing confusion about the deal.

The settlement has taken years to negotiate and was announced last week. Hellerstein said more negotiations were now needed.

The payouts will come from a fund set up after the attacks when New York City was unable to find private insurance to cover claims originating from the clean-up effort.

• Green Zone security man killed two colleagues
• War horrors played part in behaviour, family claims

The parents of a former British soldier who is facing the death penalty in Iraq for the killing of two colleagues said today that horrific experiences on active service had destabilised his behaviour.

Daniel Fitzsimons, 29, from Middleton, Greater Manchester, shot dead two fellow security guards while working for the private ArmorGroup in Baghdad's Green Zone last August. He maintains there had been a series of drunken fights and provocations.

If found guilty of murdering Paul McGuigan, 37, of Peebles, Scotland, and Darren Hoare, 37, from Australia, the former Royal Fusilier could be executed. The next hearing is on 7 April.

His stepmother Liz and father Eric met officials from the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office in London today to press the British government to become more involved in the case. The couple are hoping their lawyers will be able to persuade the families of the dead men to ask the Iraqi court for clemency.

Fitzsimons had seen terrible atrocities in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, said his stepmother. "He was most affected by a young boy who brought them bread in their camp. One day the boy's severed body was found in the water supply," she said. He had been killed by Serbs for collaborating with the British.

"That played a huge part in the mental illness he suffered. He has post-traumatic stress disorder very badly."

While serving with a private security company in Iraq, the vehicle in front of Fitzsimons was hit by an explosion. "The plastic doors of the truck sealed shut in the heat and one of his team was stuck inside," said Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal organisation Repreive, which is helping the family.

"His friend screamed for Danny to get him out but Danny could not break the window as it was bulletproof glass. He was forced to watch his friend burn inside the truck, unable to help."

Fitzsimons has given a detailed account, published in the Guardian today, of the violence in the contractor's residential quarters in the secure Green Zone that led to the killings. He admitted that his recollection was at points "blotchy" because of heavy drinking and claimed that McGuigan and Hoare had been harassing him through the evening.

Tariq Harb, the Iraqi lawyer representing Fitzsimons in Bahghad, said he had asked lawyers for the other families to consider withdrawing their claims.

McGuigan's family disputes Fitzsimons's version of events, insisting that McGuigan's body showed no sign of injuries from earlier fighting.

"The British postmortem clearly states that other than the horrific gunshot wounds, there were no marks on Paul to indicate that there had been any fighting," his family said.

After years of infighting, the East Lothian MP is deselected after a vote by local party members

A sitting Labour MP has been deselected by her local party members after tensions over her style erupted into a public feud with senior constituency officials.

With only weeks to go before the general election, Anne Moffat has been sacked as Labour's candidate for East Lothian, a seat she has held for nine years, after a special meeting of her local constituency party tonight.

Nearly 200 members, approximately half the local party, took part and voted for a special resolution to deselect her by 130 to 59 – a heavier margin than her supporters expected. The meeting heard her pleas to be kept on in silence.

Moffat, a former president of the trade union Unison and granddaughter of a famous Scottish miners' leader, has until 5pm on Monday to appeal to Labour's ruling national executive committee.

If she accepts the result, an all-women shortlist will be drawn up urgently to contest the seat. There is speculation she may now retire on health grounds.

The vote comes after four years of infighting between Moffat and senior party activists in East Lothian – a constituency shared by the current Labour leader in the Scottish parliament, Iain Gray. He has repeatedly refused to back her.

Complaints about her track record and her style as MP has twice led to four out of the area's six Labour party branches asking her to stand down. Moffat has relied heavily on a union block vote for her survival, and the feuding led to the formal suspension of the constituency party by the NEC in 2008.

Harry Cairney, one of her leading critics and the chairman of Prestonpans Labour club, one of the largest in Scotland, said that despite the deep split within the party the meeting had been "conciliatory and business-like".

Cairney said: "People have waited three years to get this vote and people said three years ago when she couldn't carry a majority of the branches they should have their say."

Moffat left without speaking to the media. She had accused senior party officials of "bullying and intimidation", while her critics claim she had failed to do her job adequately, failed to attend party meetings and neglected her duties.

Moffat was involved in the first controversy over the suppression of information about MPs' expenses by the Commons authorities.

In 2007, a two-year battle by a Green party activist under freedom of information legislation finally led to the release of Moffat's £40,000 travel claims from 2004 – then the highest of any MP at Westminster.

A former nurse, she has countered by claiming the party has ignored her medical condition after she had a brain haemorrhage last year. She wrote to the party to say doctors had advised her not "to engage in any activity which would cause stress and anxiety".

In an earlier interview with the BBC, she attacked her critics, claiming her recovery "has been hampered by their bad feelings, and viciousness and vindictiveness of those people who even when I was seriously ill, didn't let up".

Labour is defending a nominally strong 7,600-vote majority in East Lothian but that has been halved since the previous sitting MP John Home Robertson stood down before the 2001 general election to focus on his career in the Scottish parliament.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats are pressing hard to take the seat and their candidate, Stuart Ritchie, said after the vote: "Labour are going to parachute in a candidate, who probably won't know or understand the issues the people of East Lothian face every day.

"They'll just parrot Labour's tired old lines.

"It doesn't matter to the people of East Lothian who the Labour candidate is. Because whoever they end up with, Labour are falling apart here."

Moffat's period as MP has been dogged by controversy. She quickly fell out with Home Robertson after allegedly interfering in his constituency concerns; fought off allegations of an affair with a fellow Labour MP; came bottom of a table of MPs ranked by the number of their Commons speeches; and endured a sacking row with a senior member of her constituency staff.

Saman – formerly Farzaneh – Arastu takes male role in Anahita a year after playing a woman in another film

She earned her acting credentials playing female characters in a host of hit films and television dramas. Now one of Iran's best-known screen actors has ditched her previous persona to embark on a new career playing male roles.

But Saman – formerly Farzaneh – Arastu's gender transformation has little to do with dramatic talents. Instead she has turned into a he by becoming the first known Iranian actor to undergo a sex change operation.

Following a career as a female actor, Arastu, 42, has already played one role as a man after taking advantage of surprisingly liberal laws that make Iran second only to Thailand for carrying out the most sex change operations.

The cameo role in Anahita, a recent film about a group of students doing research into water molecules, came only a year after playing a woman in another cinema production, The Extorter. While homosexuality is outlawed as a sin under Iran's sharia legal code, sex changes are legal as the result of a fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Conservative attitudes mean there is greater social tolerance for women undergoing operations to become men than the other way around. Government financial aid is available for gender change surgery.

Arastu told an Iranian magazine that the decision to change sex had been driven by the lifelong feeling of being a male trapped inside a female body. The courage to undergo surgery had been plucked up only after years of counselling. But the decision had prompted a psychological – as well as a physical – transformation.

"Now I feel totally well," Arastu said. "Previously there was only fear and depression in my eyes. I was always hiding myself and justifying myself."

A selection of the best images from around the world

Today we focus on mephedrone, the drug Lincolnshire police have linked with the tragic deaths earlier this week of two teenage boys in Scunthorpe. Reporter Robert Booth recounts what happened to Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19.

We also hear from an (anonymous) man who's used mephedrone. He describes its effects.

Joining our studio panel is Martin Barnes, chief executive of Drugscope, and a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which meets on 29 March to discuss a recommendation that mephedrone be banned.

Niamh Eastwood, deputy director of Release, says the sacking of Professor David Nutt from the council led to a delay in the assessment of mephedrone's dangers.

Alan Travis, the Guardian's home affairs editor, explains how the drug is made and the dangers that if it's banned it will simply be replaced by a similar compound.

Reporter Adam Gabbatt looks at how internet users are discussing the drug and its possible prohibition.

Guardian photographer charts the 2010 election campaign as it happens

Two dispatches from the far frontiers of science send our panellists into orbit around such issues as "how many years will it be before we all carry our personal genomes around with us, alongside our mobiles and our wallets?" and "why hasn't ET phoned earth yet?"

We hear astrophysicist Paul Davies's views on what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would do to the religions of the world. And we consult a new book by Barack Obama's medical supremo, Francis Collins, to discover whether genomic medicine will be the saving of us, or our damnation.

We also interview the poet and memoirist John Burnside about the problems that plagued his early adulthood, from alcoholism to the neurological condition of apophenia – the experience of perceiving patterns and connections in random objects.

Reading list:

The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalised Medicine, by Francis Collins (Profile)
The Eerie Silence: Are we alone in the Universe? By Paul Davies (Allen Lane)
Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life's Too Busy for Breast Cancer, by Dina Rabinovitch (Pocket Books)
Waking Up In Toytown, by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)

Elsewhere: Tim Radford's latest science book club choice is Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, by Ian Stewart.

Martin Wainwright talks to fell top assessor Jon Bennett as he makes his daily ascent of Helvellyn in the Lake District, climbing the third highest English peak to provide weather and ground conditions for walkers

Never mind that Stoke played the second half with 10 men, Tottenham came through a tough test here to claim their fourth Premier League win in a row, particularly after Roman Pavlyuchenko's hamstring joined Jermain Defoe's on the sick list.

Harry Redknapp must have been rehearsing his 'down to the bare bones' routine until, would you Adam and Eve it, Eidur Gudjohnsen came on and visibly lifted Spurs with his first goal for the club and a generally composed display.

"I'd like to keep Eidur here. He's a top, top player," Redknapp said of the striker he beat West Ham to sign on loan from Monaco. "He only began talking to West Ham because he thought we'd lost interest, but I always wanted him.

"Monaco's a place you go to retire, anyway. I think he knew he'd joined the wrong club. I'm going to need Eidur now, too. I'm not going to sit here complaining again, but you could make a terrific team out of all the players we have out injured or on loan. It's just unbelievable."

This was a game of one half, the first 45 minutes being completely forgettable. Gudjohnsen got the second off to a cracking start after 22 seconds, muscling Abdoulaye Faye out of the way to fasten on to Peter Crouch's excellent pass and complete a strong run with a finish that gave Thomas Sorensen no chance.

When Dean Whitehead was sent off, three minutes later, for a second foul on Luka Modric and a second yellow card, that should have been that, especially with Gudjohnsen looking likely to score another at any moment.

Yet, even with 10 men, Stoke came back and when Benôit Assou-Ekotto wrestled Dave Kitson to the ground to prevent him reaching Matthew Etherington's cross, the winger equalised from the penalty spot. Then Ricardo Fuller missed a glorious chance to put his side ahead when Danny Higginbotham mis-hit the ball to him, six yards out, and he wafted a hasty shot over the bar.

It was now up to Spurs to show what they could do in adversity – and the answer was to score a stylish winner. Assou-Ekotto earned some atonement by overlapping down the left and sending in a low cross that Gudjohnsen dummied to allow Niko Kranjcar a chance, a difficult one that the Croatian managed to make look easy with a controlled drive from close to the penalty spot.

Even then, there was a half-chance for Mamady Sidibé at the end, but the substitute slipped at the crucial moment.

The first half was as grey and wet as the weather. Nothing happened to raise the pulse rate, unless you count Joe Jordan being spoken to by the referee for his outspoken objections to a series of early Stoke fouls on Gareth Bale.

In stoppage time at the end, Stoke could have scored when Huerelho Gomes stranded himself in a tangle with Kitson and left Fuller an opportunity. Unfortunately, the striker wanted it for himself. A quick ball to the left would have given Etherington a chance with the net empty, but Fuller never considered a pass and by the time he had worked space for his shot, the goalkeeper was back in his ground.

So while Spurs were value for their win, Stoke had their chances. "We probably created more clear-cut ones, so that was disappointing," Tony Pulis said.

The Stoke manager also revealed he had tried, without success, to have the referee, Mike Dean, switched from the game. "He's not been great for us this season and that's the third of our players he's sent off," Pulis explained.

"I've no problem with the first booking, but I didn't think there was much in the second. I'm not sure it was really worth a second card and a sending-off.

"I watched the earlier game at Villa and when [Stilian] Petrov committed a worse foul when he was on a yellow, the referee just had a quiet word. That's the difference between referees. Some can apply a bit of common sense."

Pulis is normally more reasonable than ranting, and his old mate from years ago at Bournemouth was willing to back him up. "I did think it was a bit harsh," Redknapp said. "I'd have been disappointed if one of my lads had been sent off for that."

THE FANS' PLAYER RATINGS AND VERDICT

RICHARD MURPHY, Author, Stoke City On This Day I thought we were very unlucky. We need to take our chances and have a referee other than Mike Dean: Whitehead's second booking wasn't a booking. The first half was very even, but Spurs scored early in the second, then Whitehead got sent off and they were all over us for about 15 minutes. But we were the better team for the last half-hour, got a penalty and then Fuller missed a sitter. Their winner was a good goal, but it was against the run of play. Dave Kitson was excellent. He hasn't started for us for a long time because he's been on loan, but he looked like he wanted to play – he was everywhere.

The fan's player ratings Sorensen 7; Huth 7, Faye 6, Higginbotham 7, Collins 7, Delap 6, Whelan 7 (Sidibé 84 5); Whitehead 6, Etherington 7 Fuller 6, Kitson 8 (Tuncay 84 7)

DAVE MASON, Observer reader It was a good result, although we looked like we were going to throw it away, with giving away the penalty. Stoke were very physical, but we knew what to expect and were geared to how they were going to play and had some big players in the side. Gudjohnsen has been a bit limited for us since he came, but he did well and muscled their centre-half out of the way for the goal, which was good to see. The sending-off put us in the driving seat, but Modric ran the game in the second half and Bale was a threat – they targeted him. The back four were also very strong and Dawson was excellent again – he leads by example.

The fan's player ratings Gomes 7; Corluka 7, Dawson 8, Bassong 7, Assou-Ekotto 6, Kranjcar 7 (Livermore 90 n/a), Modric 8; Kaboul 7, Bale 7, Pavlyuchenko 6 (Gudjohnsen 36 7), Crouch 7

TO TAKE PART IN THE FANS' VERDICT, SPORT@OBSERVER.CO.UK

• Arsenal face champions; United play old foes Bayern Munich
• English sides to meet in final if they overcome tough opponents

Arsène Wenger thinks Arsenal still have a 50-50 chance of reaching the Champions League semi-finals despite being drawn against the team no one wanted – Barcelona – in the quarters.

Barcelona are the holders, the bookmakers' favourites at 7-3, and play the decisive leg at home. "I believe we will not be favourites," admitted Wenger, "but for me it will be a 50-50 game. That's how we have to take it. Of course they are a good side, so are we."

In the other fixtures, Manchester United face Bayern Munich, who have lost just twice in this year's Bundesliga, a fixture Sir Alex Ferguson called "very tough". In an all-French game Lyon face Bordeaux, and José Mourinho's Internazionale play CSKA Moscow, who look the weakest of the remaining sides. The two English sides will meet in the final if they progress.

Arsenal's secretary David Miles admitted they had been landed with the team everyone wanted to avoid. "I'm sure the other clubs felt the same thing," Miles said. "But, having said that, the draw gives us what it gives us, we can only play, and hopefully beat, what's in front of us. We owe Barcelona one and we'll certainly be up for it."

Barcelona's sporting director Txiki Begiristain said: "This will be the most spectacular of all the quarter-finals in terms of football. These are two teams that play open football and the match will be a duel to keep hold of the ball.

"We are two teams who don't shut up shop and play long ball football, and this tie will be nice for the fans. It will be a good spectacle and we'll see if we are a little stronger than them. In any case, the best news is knowing that we will be playing the return leg at home. We are strong at home and we've shown that."

United are second favourites at odds of 3-1 with Ladbrokes, after being handed a repeat of their famous "football, bloody hell" final of 1999, when they scored twice in the dying moments to pickpocket Bayern.

Germany's biggest club currently sit top of the Bundesliga, though they were twice beaten by Bordeaux in the group stages.

Ferguson is wary of an under-rated Bayern side. "The history of playing Bayern in past European ties tells you it's going to be a very difficult tie for us," he said. "It'll be a fantastic atmosphere. They have a great stadium and good pitch and we're up against a good, experienced team."

Bayern chairman's Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said his side's draw was "tough but attractive". He explained: "Manchester are a team who are ranked right at the top. We will have to push ourselves to our limits and possibly even beyond to go through. Manchester are the favourites, but that is where the attraction lies: to try to beat a favourite."

There will definitely be a French side in the last four after Lyon and Bordeaux were paired together.

The Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas told Eurosport: "It will be a peculiar tie, but it will mean there will be a French side in the last four for the first time since Monaco [in 2004]."

"I'm a little bit disappointed," said the Bordeaux president Jean-Louis Triaud. "We talked a lot about it before, about the possibility of this. We were chatting with Jean-Michel Aulas before the draw and agreed we did not want to face each other. Our advantage is that we will play at home for the return leg. Their advantage will be that they have much more experience than us at this level."

Inter are favourites against CSKA Moscow, arguably the weakest side left in the competition. But their chief executive Ernesto Paolillo was taking nothing for granted. "This isn't an easy tie," he said. "It would be wrong to underestimate it for two reasons. First CSKA Moscow are at the start of their season. So they are rested and fresher than any other team at the moment. Secondly, they play on a synthetic pitch, which favours less technical teams because players have less control of the ball."

Luís Figo was pleased his old side Inter had avoided United and Barça. "You cannot choose, they're all good teams with quality, but theoretically you don't want to play against Manchester or Barcelona."

Eight teams from six different countries reached the quarter-finals, the most varied group since 1998-99.

Quarter-final draw

Lyon v Bordeaux

Bayern Munich v Manchester United

Arsenal v Barcelona

Internazionale v CSKA Moscow

First leg 30 and 31 March; second leg 6 and 7 April.

Semi-final draw

Bayern Munich or Manchester United v Lyon or Bordeaux

Internazionale or CSKA Moscow v Arsenal or Barcelona

First leg 20 and 21 April; second leg 27 and 28 April.

Experts believe release of pent-up energy after such a long, hard winter could produce the most spectacular spring in years

Up in the plane and ash trees, all London's wildlife appeared hard at spring yesterday. Tail feathers were shaking along the Regent's canal, the first buds were bursting on brambles and honeysuckle and carpets of crocuses were delighting crowds in the grand royal parks.

But in the more egalitarian Camley Street natural park, just 100 yards from St Pancras station, there was still precious little sight or sound of a new season. A heron was spotted last week, a few tits were investigating the bat boxes but the grasses were dead, the hedgehog boxes empty and the newts absent.

It's been the longest, hardest winter the UK has known for 30 years, with twice as many frosty nights as usual, says the Met Office. Wales has barely seen a daffodil and vast swaths of countryside that should be green by now are still dull and grey after months under snow. But – shout it! - tomorrow is the vernal equinox, the official first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, when night and day are the same length.The release of pent-up energy could spur the most spectacular spring for years, but there have been losers as well as winners.

For more than a decade, ever milder winters have led to ever earlier springs, with daffodils and frogspawn found at Christmas and confused insects and small mammals stirring in January. But this year, says Matthew Oakes, conservation adviser to the National Trust, harks back to older times when British life, to all natural intents, began near the end of March. "The trend is to earlier seasons, but this is a slow, late, old fashioned spring," he said.

Oakes, who keeps meticulous records of nature's first sightings, says wildlife in London is well ahead of the rest of the country because of the "heat island" effect of 12 million people driving cars and heating their homes. "Outside London, everything appears incredibly late this year. It's the first year since 1996 that there have been no bumblebees in January. In the woods very little has been happening. The bluebells and wild garlic are putting up their first spikes and the primroses are just starting. There a little bit of green from honeysuckle and rose but the woods are really leafless.

"Rooks are only building their nests now. The bluebells this year will be very late, perhaps not in full flower until mid-May," he adds.

Oates's predictions were echoed by Steve Marsh, a conservationist with the Woodland Trust, which has up to 40,000 people recording the arrival of the seasons and posting sightings on the web. He said: "This has been an exceptional season. We've only had one blackthorn in blossom so far, yet usually we would have 1,000 or more sightings by now. There have been only 10 recordings of coltsfoot when we would have expected hundreds. And it's the same with celandines. Normally we would see them now right across the UK, but this year there has been sparse coverage in the south and midlands and almost none reported in northern England and Scotland". But he adds that even this year's "late" spring is early compared to 1970s. "

Among those celebrating, say conservationists, are galanthophiles - snowdrop lovers - and those cherishing bats, who can expect a bumper year because the baby mammals thrive in a hard winter with its deep, refreshing hibernation. Equally, Jack Frost may have stopped some pests in their tracks, including the parasitical sturmia bella fly which has nearly wiped out tortoiseshell butterflies and the midge that can spread the bluetongue virus among livestock.

But pity the very small birds, says Paul Stancliffe, of the British Trust for Ornithology. "We don't know for certain yet what effect this winter has had on bird populations, but other bad winters, like in the 1940s and 1960s, really hit small ones like the goldcrest and the wren very hard. This winter will almost certainly have had an [adverse] effect on them. Frozen water and plummeting temperatures may have also severely reduced populations of birds like the kingfisher and heron, who have had less water open water to feed from."

But the growing British habit of feeding garden birds will certainly have helped, he says. "We spend £200m-300m a year on bird food. That will have seen many birds through the harshest months."

On the wing, there are further signs of winter easing its grip. Scientists in Ghana this week reported great flocks of swifts heading north and the first swallows and wheatears have just arrived in southern England from equatorial Africa after one of nature's greatest annual journeys.

"The migration is well under way," says Stancliffe, whose records suggest we can expect great numbers of swallows, swifts, willow warblers, ring ouzel and housemartins to arrive in the next few weeks.

"The early birds are taking a gamble. If we have had an early spring they get the best choice of nest sites and mates. But in a bad winter, like this, they could be in trouble. Next week we should get a rush of migrants. If this milder weather persists then they will have timed it right. All they need now is a rush of insects."

"It's all about to explode," says Oakes. "It could come with a bang and be one of the most spectacular springs in years. We've all – humans and wildlife – suffered a lot. We all need the sunshine now".

Spring 2010

What's thriving

• Snowdrops

• Crocuses

• Bats

What's not

• Daffodils

• Bluebells

• Bumblebees

• Kingfishers

• Read the letter in full

A group of senior public figures have called on the government to abandon its plan to push through controversial digital economy bill before the election, amid claims that the move could "sidestep" the democratic process.

Earlier this week the government revealed that it wants to force the digital economy bill - which includes the controversial "three strikes" rule to cut off the internet connections of those accused of illegal file sharing - into the statute books in the next few weeks.

While it usually takes far longer to create an act of parliament, thanks to the public debates held by MPs, the secretary of state for business, Lord Mandelson, plans speed up the process by making use of a controversial parliamentary technique known as the "wash-up".

Under those rules, party whips bypass the usual debating process and make a series of horse trades in order to get proposals into law before parliament dissolves ahead of a general election.

That proposal has already caused concern, but today a coalition including a cross-party group of MPs and peers - as well as figures from the business world and entertainment industry - said that short circuiting the democratic process could have disastrous side effects.

In an open letter the group suggests that the controversial nature of the legislation - which it says "threatens to severely infringe fundamental human rights" and could introduce "website blocking" measure that impede free speech - must face the full scrutiny of parliament before it becomes law.

Among the signatories are musician Billy Bragg, human rights activist Peter Tatchell and writer Graham Linehan, who helped create comedy series including Father Ted and The IT Crowd. They are joined by a number of activists and campaigners, as well as politicians drawn from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

"Our worry today is that none of this will be properly debated by parliament," says the letter. "Last week Harriet Harman failed to give the Commons any reassurances that this important, complex and controversial bill will be properly scrutinised by our elected MPs."

"Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called 'wash-up' process. The thousands of people we know to be contacting their MPs with concerns will find their faith in politicians even further undermined."

The plans, which first became public last autumn, have caused controversy at almost every turn.

As well as the three strikes rule and measures to take down websites accused of infringing copyright - which could potentially result in the closure of major web destinations such as YouTube - Lord Mandelson has also sought the power to alter copyright law without the assent of parliament.

In addition, it has also been suggested that the bill's measures to prosecute the owners of internet connections used for illegal file sharing could hit anybody who provides web access - such as universities, libraries and cafes, as well as those individuals who leave their home Wi-Fi connections open.

While the made it through three readings in the House of Lords, it was not without serious objections. Lord Puttnam, the film producer, said he had faced "an extraordinary degree of lobbying" over the proposals, while others questioned the revelation that an amendment used language British music industry body the BPI.

Earlier this week BPI chief Geoff Taylor said that it was imperative that the legislation is passed before the election.

"It is vital for the future of the UK's creative sector that the digital economy bill becomes law before the dissolution of parliament," he said.

However, the open letter suggests that the bill's most controversial elements must receive proper debate or be removed from the bill entirely and left until after the forthcoming election.

The Iranian indie band talk about life as outlaws in their homeland, as documented in their new film No One Knows About Persian Cats

At first glance, Take It Easy Hospital look like any other aspiring indie duo. Dressed in impeccable Shoreditch chic – plaid shirt and skinny jeans for him, cute vintage dress, black tights and brogues for her – their teenage epiphanies came on copied cassettes of Nirvana and Pink Floyd, while these days they're more into Sigur Rós and Foals.

Their ambition for next year, once they find a drummer, is to get on to the bill at Glastonbury or Reading. The difference is that Take It Easy Hospital originally formed in Iran, where rock music is banned. When the local music industry is non-existent, gigs and recording studios are regularly raided by police and even MySpace is monitored, simply finding someone who shares your love of guitars and plaintive vocals is fraught with difficulties.

Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi, the twin songwriters of Take It Easy Hospital, are the stars of a new Iranian film by garlanded Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, called No One Knows About Persian Cats (so named because pet cats, like rock musicians, are outlawed in Iran). The film is a fictionalised account of the duo's attempts to recruit a rhythm section in order to play a local underground gig and ultimately escape to the rock-friendly west. As the two indie innocents are taken under the wing of music-loving wide-boy Nader (Hamed Behdad), the film becomes a Linklater-esque romp through Tehran's clandestine rock underground. All the bands and musicians featured are real, but whether hairy blues rockers, jazz singers, class-war rappers or indie kids, they exhibit a love for making music that overrides the fear of being arrested the moment they switch on their amps. "If you were discovered playing rock music, you'd get arrested, you'd have to pay a fine," reveals Ash, matter-of-factly. "Sometimes you'd go to prison."

The film gleans affectionate humour from the various bands' ingenuity when it comes to hiding their rehearsal spaces from the authorities in diligently-soundproofed underground caverns, shacks constructed on the roofs of tower blocks or, in one case, in a working cattle barn (much to the cows' displeasure).

By coincidence, there is a British film out this month which also documents the struggle of a couple of indie dreamers to form a band – except 1234 is based in London, so the only obstacles are their own musical inadequacy and weedy sexual tension between bandmates. Persian Cats makes 1234 look rather pathetic.

In Iran musicians are forced to behave like fugitives, even though the charges invoked against them are vague (Ahmadinejad imposed a ban on "western and decadent music" soon after becoming president in 2005). "It's a not a written law," complains Negar. "There isn't this red line. You never know when you're crossing it. [The authorities] don't even really know what they're opposing. They don't see that music brings energy and good nature to society."

In 2007, Ash's former band Font staged an open-air gig in a private garden in a suburb of Tehran. Armed police arrived en masse to shut it down, arresting everyone in the audience, and slinging the band in prison for 21 days. "They didn't have any law that said what they should do with us, so they called us satanists. They said we were against the moral law and disgracing the face of society." Ash chuckles wryly at the memory. "It was an odd experience, sleeping next to a serial killer for three weeks. But it made me believe even more in what I was doing."

Font and Take It Easy Hospital are rarities: most Iranian wannabe rockers never even get further then their bedrooms, due to the subtle pressure exerted within families. "Under this regime, you don't have any opportunity to make a living from being a musician, so families prevent their children from learning music in the first place," Ash explains. "Families are a small example of big government. They don't trust the young generation."

When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.

The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?

"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."

If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."

Ash picks up the thread: "Politics is a tool to solve a situation at one moment. We believe that art is pure and always depending on human nature, so we've always kept ourselves far from politics. Our music is not dangerous, but the current regime in Iran feels that it has to keep people away from honest expression because if they face up to the reality they will soon find out what they are missing."

Ash and Negar agreed to star in Persian Cats not to make a political point, but to try to show the older generation, including their parents, that music is a force for good. But while Ash has received some positive feedback from older Iranians – "I've heard that they walk away after seeing this film to remember what they had before the revolution" – Negar is despondent that most of them haven't been able to overcome their prejudices. "I guess that when people decide to close their eyes to something, you can't force them to see the truth."

In the light of last year's post-election protests, the police crackdown on young people involved in music and the arts has intensified. When Take It Easy Hospital's old drummer went back to Iran several weeks after the election, he was arrested and beaten. Last January, the film's co-writer, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, was arrested in Tehran and handed an eight-year jail sentence on trumped up charges of being a US spy (she was eventually freed following a global outcry).

Reluctantly, Ash and Negar decided it was unsafe to return to Iran and have successfully applied for asylum in the UK, where they've been living since coming over to play at Manchester's In The City festival in 2008. In the film, the duo never make it to London, so in this case, truth is happier than fiction. However, Negar is at pains to point out that they never viewed England as the promised land, despite our rather more relaxed laws regarding the public airing of Farfisa-driven jangle pop.

"Some people say we've run away," says Negar. "But there is no running away. Moving from one country to another doesn't necessarily solve all the problems that are on your mind." Proof that indie introspection truly is an international language.

No One Knows About Persian Cats is out Fri; it previews at Brixton Ritzy, SW2, Tue

Ahead of the release of Shank, which was met by protests from locals during filming, a look at some other location shoots that went bad

Question: if you peaked out your window, and noticed a ragtag gang of knife-wielding teens storming past, what would you do? Call the police, of course. That's exactly what residents of the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle did, only to find their estate was actually the film set of dystopian thriller Shank, where knife-wielding gangs roam free, starring Kaya Scodelario (Effy from Skins), Kidulthood's Adam Deacon, and oddly, Tim Westwood. "I can see," offered the director Mo Ali, "how residents might get the wrong impression".

Long gone, of course, are the days of parking your entire film in the MGM lot and making do with a plastic tree and the contents of the fire bucket to make Elvis look like he's in Hawaii. But with the credit crunch, more places than ever are eager to take the film companies' dollar. David Boice – who runs BeforeTheTrailer.com, a fansite that tracks location shoots – points out that previously unlikely locations are now tripping over themselves to give generous tax breaks and entice film crews, with Michigan leading the way. The result? "In the past year the city of Detroit has filled in for Washington [for Red Dawn]. Rather than filming 'on location', they just film where there's the best incentives."

Last April, the LA Times reported that LA-based location shoots had fallen to their lowest level since records began. Put another way: everywhere is anywhere now. But with more locations, come more problems. The films that have been protested about because of the nature of the film are too numerous to mention – from Brick Lane due to perceived prejudice against the Bangladeshi community to Basic Instinct, which, well, take your pick – anti-woman and anti-gay were the main ones.

But, like Shank, what about the effect on the locals? And what, more importantly, about the house prices? You can forgive the residents of London's Kentish Town (Zone 2, tube, nice pubs), for instance, for being concerned when filming commenced on Nick Love's hooligan film The Firm, as they prepared for a brawl scene involving 140 actors, stuntmen, extras, and with dire warnings of "noise and swearing". That wouldn't do. That wouldn't do at all. With Timmy listening! The locals protested, and filming was soon moved to Hackney. "Residents of Hackney were happy for the fighting to take place on their streets," reported a London freesheet, who declined to mention if the residents actually noticed the difference.

Still, brawling in the UK is one thing. When location shoots go global, it can be far worse. Of course, we all know the foreign shoots that went south – Terry Gilliam's aborted crack at Don Quixote, Coppola going cuckoo during Apocalypse Now – but at least those two can say one thing: they didn't bar people from the Almighty. Last September, Julia Roberts was on location near Dehli filming the Brad Pitt-produced Eat, Pray, Love, in which she plays a woman who finds God via food and Hindu spirituality. All well and good. The only problem was, no one else could find God, as their temple was shut. Villagers hoping to celebrate the beginning of Navratri – a nine-day Hindu festival of worship and dance – found their temple sealed by Roberts's security team, which featured the small matter of 350 guards, bulletproof cars, and a chopper. It was a security detail that essentially said: We have your God now. He's shooting a movie. And he's not available for comment. One villager threatened a break in: "I am going to barge in for the evening aarti [ritual]. Let's see who stops me. What is it that they are shooting that we cannot even enter our own temple?"

Of course, upsetting the faithful is one thing. But won't someone, please, think of the dangerous criminals. Not, it seems, Mel Gibson. For his latest, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, in which he'll star as a career-criminal sent to a harsh Mexican prison, 300 real-life inmates were made to relocate from their prison in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz this January to make way for the film crew, causing not just demonstrations by relatives, angry at having to travel further to visit their incarcerated ones, but a full-scale prison riot. "Mel Gibson, it's your fault they want to take away our relatives," read a banner of one of protesters, who clearly wasn't big on irony.

Yet if you can't find it in your heart to feel for the muggers and murders crushed under Hollywood's unfeeling foot, at least spare a thought for the prostitutes. When Ed Harris-starring drama The Third Miracle was filming in Ontario, Canada, in 1998, they unwittingly became the third consecutive production to shoot in the red light districts of Sherborne and Carleton, causing out-of-pocket street workers to protest about lack of earnings.

Yet sometimes, it's not even that their home has been disrupted, trampled on and destroyed. It's that they're not getting enough credit for it. When filming A Quantum Of Solace in the small town of Baquedano, Bolivia, local mayor Carlos Lopez took matters into his own hands by jumping in his car, nearly hitting two police officers as he sped through the barricades, storming the set, and coming to a skidding halt between Daniel Craig and the cameras. The reason? Bolivia was being used to represent local rivals Chile, and that wouldn't do at all. He was swiftly taken into police custody. But as for Bond himself? Not just shaken or stirred it seems, but, according to Lopez, a full-scale pants disaster. "He fled in terror!" he said after being released. "When he saw me, James Bond ran off!" 007, really …

Still, protests from the locals are what you expect. While filming Australia – the Baz Luhrmann multimillion pound movie/tourist board infomercial – the protests came from closer to home. Extras were appalled when actors climbed upon a first world war memorial in the tiny town of Bowden during a cattle stampede scene, and lobbied to ensure the actors stood their ground and took the marauding 2,000lb beasts like men. Rumours that another memorial was needed for the fallen thesps are, as yet, unconfirmed.

There's even been the odd occasion where it wasn't the filming itself that caused the disruption, but what those filming asked the locals to do. When a crew was about to film aerial scenes for The Dark Knight in Hong Kong, they sent letters to building residents requesting they keep their lights on to present the city in its full illuminated glory. For six days. From 7am to 11pm. Unsurprisingly, they declined. "Producers are able to create the same effects through post-production," argued Gabrielle Ho at Green Sense, "but instead they are asking us to turn on so many lights, wasting so much energy."

Though there is one thing to be said about all these disruptions: they ended once the filming did. The crew of The Beach not only got permission to film in what was part of a protected national park in Thailand – Maya Bay on Phi Phi Le island – in 1998, but also to make it even "more" of a paradise, uprooting trees, removing natural vegetation that held the sand formations together, levelling sand dunes, and adding 100 non-native coconut palms. Fox promised to put everything back the way it was, but there was erosion, and in 2006 Thailand's Supreme Court upheld an appeal court ruling that the environment had been harmed. Still, Leo had had a look, and it seemed OK to him. "From what I see with my own eyes, everything is OK," the self-described environmentalist said in a statement. "I have seen nothing that has been destroyed or damaged in any way – I cannot tell you the reasons why people have been saying the opposite. It is beyond me." It's beyond us too, Leo. Those inconsiderate, unfeeling bastards.

Shank is out on Friday

The Guardian's fashion editor, guides you through the latest trends

Indian firm, once the world's leading scooter maker, ends production

The will to learn brings confidence, and the ability to view society through truthful eyes

The socialist paradise in which I'm now sitting is a place where people from all walks of life, young and old, firm and somewhat less firm, have – through a combination of apprenticeship and self-examination – come to learn together about the world, without having to pay for the privilege.

It's a public library, of course: a place which you visit voluntarily in order to learn more things than you were taught at school. I call it "the place where dreams can come true". It's where the project of learning continues, at your own pace and of your own volition, and where you are understood to be an equal participant in the making and changing of your mind. No possibility is closed off to you.

Good fortune favours the well-primed, and the habit of seeing yourself as someone who doesn't do that sort of thing, or have that kind of luck, can be hard to get out of. But oh, to be a child in Newham now! The east London borough has just announced a policy of giving every pupil in its primary schools free music lessons for a minimum of two years, and the loan of an instrument of their choice. You can almost hear its mayor, Sir Robin Wales, rubbing his hands together at the thought of spending £1.25m a year making Every Child a Musician, as the scheme is known.

Knowing that my nan, who left school at 11, could play a bit of piano, whereas I barely know one end of the instrument from the other, proves that no skill is transmitted by osmosis. It has to be passed on deliberately, which is why progress can never be taken for granted, and why the invidious nature of cultural dispossession must be kept in mind.

It's hard to convey the sheer desultoriness of our music teaching at my secondary school. For a start, we were given one half-hour lesson a week, of which 25 minutes were spent trying to wind up the plainly contemptuous teacher. When she couldn't be bothered, she looked out of the window and let us get on with pressing the demo button on our Casio keyboards: playing at playing and learning nothing in the process because the person we needed to guide us didn't think it was worth her while.

This is shown more powerfully in 36 Children, Herbert Kohl's account of teaching in a Harlem elementary school in the late 1960s. He shows the children that they have brains when every other teacher has told them they're brainless. He invites them round to his apartment and puts on jazz music while they rifle through his books and artefacts. They quickly become fascinated by Greek myths and work together to produce a literary magazine full of allegory, truth and creativity.

Middle-class children are subjected to "accelerated learning" virtually from birth. The nascent person of power is treated as a sponge who can take it all in, because they're assumed to have the potential for discrimination and specialism later in life. Start with piano, violin, trumpet, ballet and chess club and you can always drop one when, as expected, you start to show exceptional talent in one or more of them. This enrichment of the domestic environment – turning home life into an extension of schooling – is taken as a given by teachers at largely middle-class schools, which stretch their children to the extent that excelling becomes the norm.

Note that accelerated learning programmes – or "wraparound schools" which start early and finish late, the better to fit more of these "middle-class" activities into the daily life of working-class children – are intended to do the opposite: to make school an extension of the home. However, the value of making educational activities something you do outside of school, as well as inside, is surely that you stop associating learning exclusively with schooling.

Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman, writes convincingly of the role that learning to read and play music has in building confidence. Mastery is a transferable skill – once you've mastered, or at least gained a working knowledge of, one thing, there's nothing stopping you from trying another. When my husband takes his Grade 8 exam in classical guitar next month he'll be 35, but that won't stop him picking up another instrument to learn straight afterwards (I know what he's like). Playing music gives him another kind of voice, and affords him a sort of enviable mental polyphony.

You can keep people down with this kind of power: the power to deprive, to impoverish, to make ignorant. But you can't keep them down for ever. At some point it will warp and blast out some other way, in bitterness, in fighting, in baying for blood, the consequences of having just enough knowledge to know you're ignorant. Learning is what enables us to look at ourselves and our society through more detached, more truthful, eyes. Who would deny anyone that?

Far from a triumph, Iraq's national elections have created a constitutional and leadership vacuum as sectarianism prevails

Although Iraq's second parliamentary elections since the US-led invasion represent a milestone, they will neither resolve the country's existential crisis nor bring it closer to genuine democracy. Results released by the inept Independent High Electoral Commission show little change in political attitudes and loyalties. On the whole, Iraqis did not vote according to party or ideology. Sect, ethnicity, and tribe trumpeted other loyalties, including the nation.

For the foreseeable future, Iraqi politics will be toxically fragmented along sectarian, ethnic, and personality lines, though fear of all-out civil war is unwarranted. A week after the balloting, prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition and the cross-sectarian Iraqiya coalition, headed by ex-premier Iyad Allawi, were projected to win roughly the same number of seats – about 87 each – in Iraq's 325-member parliament.

The Iraqi National Alliance (INA), a grouping of Shia religious parties closely linked to Iran, is set to come a close third with 67 seats, while the powerful main Kurdistan alliance of President Jalal Barzani and Massoud Talabani led as expected in Erbil, the autonomous Kurdish region, with 38.

Far from a triumph for democracy, the results threaten to plunge Iraq into a constitutional and leadership vacuum. With Maliki and his main rival, Allawi, falling short of the 163 seats needed to govern alone, they will probably need to ally with one or two blocs to form a coalition government – a complicated negotiating process fraught with security risks and that might last months, putting sectarian leaders back in the driving seat.

After the last parliamentary poll in 2005, sectarian violence erupted as political leaders clashed for more than five months in an effort to form a government. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, plunging the country to the brink of all-out civil war.

Although the security situation has improved today, the next few weeks will test Iraq's fragile institutions to breaking point. Unless Iraqi political leaders build a reformist, cross-sectarian government, they could squander precious security gains made over the last three years.

Early signs are not reassuring. A stream of fraud allegations by the two leading blocs risks delegitimising the whole electoral process. As his coalition's lead slipped, Maliki called for a recount, accusing election officials of doctoring tallies in some of the country's 50,000 polling stations – a serious charge. Likewise, Allawi made fraud allegations when the count showed him trailing behind Maliki.

On the face of it, the fierce electoral struggle bodes well for transition to democracy. But the reality is much more complex and alarming, as sectarianism is deeply entrenched in the body politic.

For example, Allawi – a secular Shia – has drawn heavily on Sunni support in central and western Iraq, appealing to Sunni Arab voters who are frustrated with their own incompetent religious leaders while attracted to Allawi's non-sectarian and anti-Iran stance.

In contrast, few Sunni Arabs voted for Maliki, a Shia, who failed to finish in the top three in all but one of Iraq's Sunni-majority provinces. That in itself speaks volumes about the polarisation of Iraq seven years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Sensing public dissatisfaction with sectarian-religious parties, Maliki recast himself as a non-sectarian nationalist who has brought law and order to the war-torn country.

Maliki's gamble did not fully pay off. Resenting his decision to ban hundreds of mostly Sunni candidates suspected of links to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, many Sunnis are unconvinced that the prime minister has shed his sectarian inheritance and consider al-Dawa, a Shia-based organisation, the driver behind the State of Law coalition. Others are suspicious of his continued, if reduced, ties to Iran.

While the results indicate that conservative sectarian-based parties like the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) did very poorly, the radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, and his supporters are the big winners. Defying predictions that they were a spent force after suffering repeated military setbacks, the Sadrists are expected to win more than 40 seats. That would be roughly the same size as the Kurdish bloc, making it a potent Shia rival of Maliki.

The Sadrists' spectacular gains complicate the effort to cobble together a governing coalition. They are bitter enemies of Maliki, who in 2008 sent the army to Basra and Baghdad and put down a challenge by Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. Sadr, who lives in Iran and has close ties with the Iranian regime, has spearheaded resistance to the US military presence among Iraqi Shias. His victory is welcome news to the Iranian regime.

With the exception of Allawi's secularist, cross-sectarian alliance, the balance of power favours sectarian orientation cloaked in various disguises. In the end, Maliki will probably try to form a government composed of some of his estranged former Shia partners and current Kurdish allies – a move likely to alienate Sunni Arabs who, for the first time, voted in large numbers.

Regardless of which blocs form the new government, the US and Iran will be Iraq's two most influential external players. As Maliki often states, Iran will still be there after the Americans leave, but the election results mean the Iranian regime will be unable to call the shots. The new coalition government in Baghdad, whether led by Maliki or Allawi, will seek to maintain good relations withboth Iran and the US, and will try and avoid putting all its eggs in one basket. Despite their previous criticism of US interference, Maliki and Allawi view the relationship with the US as critical to maintaining stability and peace in the short term.

By honouring its commitment to withdraw American troops from Iraq, the Obama administration will begin the process of repairing the damage done by its predecessor and building a new relationship based on mutual interests, not domination. Iraqis must take ownership of their country, security and their future.

Whether it's sweet or savoury, breakfast or dinner, the addition of a little nutmeg can improve a dish no end

In this final part of my spice trilogy, I'm not quite saving the best until last, but I am perhaps saving the most versatile. Nutmeg is the spice that transcends cultures and cuisines, sweet and savoury, and takes the flavour-hungry cook from breakfast to dinner with its sweet, warming, pungent aroma.

Not surprisingly, such a miraculous spice has a history splattered with bloody rivalry – the gore shed over several centuries in its violent pursuit. Nutmeg is one of the two spices obtained from the beautiful, tropical evergreen tree, Myristica fragrans, the other being its lacy covering, or aril, mace. It is native to the Banda Islands of the Indonesian archipelago, whose spicy bounty was tussled over by the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, until the pragmatic French smuggled out a few seeds and planted them in Mauritius, thus breaking the Dutch monopoly.

Nutmeg was probably first brought to Europe by the Crusaders, though it wasn't until the 18th century that we really lost our heads over it (it contains myristicin, which gives it its warmth and savour, and which can also, in huge quantities, have a narcotic effect). It became the height of fashion to carry your own nutmeg around with you, along with a fancy silver grater, to scatter its sweet, aromatic and spicy gratings on everything from drinks to meat.

So much more than something to sprinkle on your cappuccino or hot chocolate, nutmeg's uses are almost too numerous to list. At breakfast time, it gives an added dimension to porridge, eggy bread or muesli. Later in the day, its pungency adds savour to all manner of savoury dishes. It softens spinach's slightly metallic edge, marries beautifully with creamy fried onions in the classic Alsatian tart, perks up cabbage and kale, adds depth to sweet carrots and squash, gives an added shot of subtle flavour to mash, and marries beautifully with charcuterie (see today's quatre-épices blend) and slow-cooked ragùs.

Of course, nutmeg's affinity with eggy, milky dishes is legendary; it's essential to perfect rice pudding and a béchamel sauce would be a poor thing indeed without a grating or two. It has an affinity for orchard or vine fruits – in which context it's more subtle and sophisticated than ubiquitous cinnamon: it steals less from the fruit. So try some in an apple tart, with poached pears or in a cake bursting with juicy dried fruits.

Writing this, I'm now thinking those 18th-century dandies were really on to something, so I'm off to commission a gold nutmeg grater on a chunky chain. Nutmeg bling – you read it here first.

Quatre-épices

This classic French spice blend is used most often in charcuterie, particularly in pork terrines and sausages. If, however, you'd like a sweet blend to add to gingerbread and other kinds of baking, for instance, simply replace the peppercorns with an equal amount of allspice and replace half of the ginger with cinnamon. The finished mix will keep well in a dark place in an airtight container for a couple of months.

2 tbsp white or black peppercorns
1 tsp whole cloves
2½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1½ tsp ground ginger

In a spice grinder or clean coffee grinder, whizz the peppercorns and cloves to a fine powder, then mix with the nutmeg and ginger.

If you have neither the time, inclination nor equipment to make your own sausages, give these simple patties a go instead – they're the perfect, spicy addition to a special cooked breakfast. You need to make a start a couple of days before you want to eat them, but it's not as if there's a great deal of work involved. Makes eight to 10 patties.

750g coarsely minced pork (you want it fairly fatty – a mix of shoulder and belly is good) or 600g pork shoulder, coarsely ground, plus 125g streaky bacon, very finely chopped
10g flaky sea salt (5g if you've used bacon rather than pork belly)
1 tsp quatre-épices (recipe above)
1 tsp rosemary leaves, finely chopped
1 tsp thyme leaves, finely chopped
8 sage leaves, finely chopped
¼ tsp chilli flakes
50ml red wine
1 egg yolk
1-2 tbsp groundnut oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 small handful sage leaves
1 bay leaf

Combine the first eight ingredients in a bowl, cover and refrigerate for two days. Then, when you want to cook your patties, mix in the egg yolk and break off a small piece. Fry this in a little oil, taste for seasoning, then add salt and pepper to the mix as necessary. Form into patties. Warm the oil in a frying pan over a medium-high heat, add the sage leaves and bay leaf, and fry the patties for about four minutes a side. Serve with fried eggs and toast.

Custard tart

This English classic is the perfect combination of soothing, creamy, eggy filling and warming, spicy nutmeg. Makes one large tart or six small ones.

125g unsalted butter, softened
90g caster sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
250g plain flour, sieved
1 good pinch salt
1 egg yolk whisked with a little water, to glaze

For the filling
500ml double cream
100ml whole milk
1 vanilla pod, split
3 egg yolks
2 eggs
60g golden caster sugar
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg, plus a little more for grating over the top of the tart

To make the pastry, beat together the butter and sugar until smooth and light, then gradually beat in the egg. Slowly beat in the flour and salt. As soon as you have a crumbly dough, tip it out on to a lightly floured surface and form into a smooth, flattened disc. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for a couple of hours.

On a lightly floured surface, or between two sheets of greaseproof paper, roll out the pastry so that it's large enough to line, with some overhang, a 22cm loose-bottomed flan tin; or divide it into six and use to line six 10cm loose-bottomed flan tins. Don't trim it too closely at this stage, and reserve a little excess pastry for patching up gaps later. Lightly prick the base(s) all over with a fork, line with clingfilm or greaseproof paper, and fill with baking beans (or uncooked rice or dried pulses). Chill for 20 minutes. Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4.

Place the flan case(s) on a baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes. Carefully lift out the clingfilm or greaseproof paper and baking beans, and trim the edges with a sharp knife. Patch up any tears with the reserved pastry offcuts. Return the flan case(s) to the oven for five to eight minutes, or until it (they) just takes on some colour. Remove from the oven, brush with the egg wash and bake for another five minutes. Remove and set aside to cool. Reduce the oven temperature to 150C/300F/ gas mark 2.

Meanwhile, over a medium-low heat warm the cream and milk with the vanilla pod in a saucepan until bubbles appear around the edge of the pan. While the cream is heating up, beat together the egg yolks, whole eggs and sugar. Pour in the hot cream, stirring constantly, then strain through a sieve into a jug and stir in the nutmeg. Pour into the tart case(s), grate over a little more nutmeg and place on a baking tray.

Bake until just set – they should still wobble a little in the middle: about 13-15 minutes for small tarts, 20-25 minutes for a large one. Serve at room temperature or cold.

• Go to rivercottage.net for the latest news from River Cottage HQ.

When Terri was diagnosed with cancer, Lionel Shriver was doting – at first. But as her condition worsened, there always seemed to be a reason not to call…

I met Terri in the early 1980s at an arts camp in Connecticut. We were both in the metalsmithing workshop, and this sharply featured, appealingly surly Armenian taught me some new tricks. Her speciality was rivets and other "cold connections", an apt expression in her case. She was a wilful, stubborn woman, more fiercely so than I first realised; 25 years later, I'd discover just how defiant my closest girlfriend could be, even in the face of the undeniable.

Terri was full of the contradictions that always captivate me in people: inclined to bear grudges but incredibly generous (often rocking up with gifts for no reason – why, I still have half a dozen pairs of her shoes). Harsh but warm. Prone to depression but with a knack for festivity. I conjure her scowling down the pavement and rolling in laughter with equal ease. She was tortured and brooding; she was terribly kind. And she was a serious artist in the best sense: not pretentious, but determined to craft interesting work well.

Back in Queens, where we both lived in our mid-20s, we found common cause in our improbable aspirations. She wanted to become a famous artist, I a famous novelist – but Terri had then sold next to nothing and I'd not published more than my phone number. It was a big, indifferent world out there, and an ally was crucial. We'd conspire over a six-pack in my tiny one-bedroom flat, jovially certain that we'd still be best friends when we were "cancerous old bags". It was a running gag. We thought it was funny.

Beware the jokes of your heedless, immortal youth. Fast-forward through two and a half decades, during which Terri and I survived abusive boyfriends, marital problems, professional setbacks, my expatriation to the UK and her exile to New Jersey, Terri's painful endometriosis and four failed IVF treatments, as well as, of course, each other. During my regular summer migration to New York, in 2005, Terri shared her perplexity that she'd been running a low-grade fever for weeks. I said it sounded like a tenacious virus. But shortly thereafter she rang from hospital.

She was being tested for a range of ailments, the most far-fetched of these a rare disease called mesothelioma. Thus it was quite a shock when the doctors confirmed that peritoneal mesothelioma was exactly what she had – almost certainly caused by exposure to the asbestos that laced metalsmithing materials when she was in art school. Her husband Paul reported grimly that the average survival rate for this ravaging cancer was a single year.

Terri was only 50, and the timing was tragic for other reasons, too. From frustration, malaise and exactingly high standards, through most of her career she had underproduced. Yet in recent years something had loosened up, and her output had accelerated. Better still, she was at last imbuing her creations with the feeling they'd sometimes lacked, the most moving of which was an elegy to her unavailing IVF treatments. She was finally pulling in big commissions, one of which was about to go on display at the V&A. At the same time, her brooding demeanour had brightened; she'd grown more outgoing, energetic and relaxed. Almost... happy. Well, so much for that.

On the heels of her diagnosis, I was doting. I'm not tooting my own horn. I suspect being a paragon at the very start of a loved one's illness is pretty much the form. We're on the phone daily. We stop by regularly, and bring freshly baked scones. We follow every medical twist and turn. And we're inclined to rash promises. With a flinch, I recall declaring before Terri's surgery that I'd be willing to move into their house in New Jersey for weeks at a time! I'd be at her beck and call, running errands, preparing meals and filling prescriptions.

Useful tip: if someone close to you falls gravely ill, at the outset, in the first flush of anguish and desperation to help? Watch the mouth.

For the timing of Terri's cancer was terrible for me as well. A month after her diagnosis, I was intending to return home to London, where a host of professional commitments could not (or so it seemed) be reneged upon. Although for most of my literary career I'd scribbled in obscurity, my prospects were suddenly looking up. My seventh novel had inexplicably hit the bestseller list in the UK, and subsequently won the Orange prize earlier that summer. (I still have the droll good-luck package Terri and Paul delivered when I made the shortlist: orange marmalade, orange candles, orange oil.) For the first time, I faced a smorgasbord of opportunities – festival gigs, bookstore appearances, feature assignments – and I was in the middle of a new book.

So, however reluctantly, I flew back to London. After Terri's surgery, Paul phoned with the lowdown: the surgeons had discovered a patch of aggressive "sarcomatoid" cells, which meant Terri's prognosis was bleak.

I will give myself this grudging credit: I did fly back to visit Terri for Thanksgiving that November, and for a while I kept in faithful touch, ringing weekly and following every grisly detail of her punishing chemotherapy. But this is not a boast about what a wonderful friend I was in Terri's time of need. This is a mea culpa.

Little by little, I'd notice that it had been a fortnight since I'd rung New Jersey. I'd kick myself. But some book review would be due that afternoon, so I'd vow to ring tomorrow. Time and again some immediate task would seem more urgent, and I'd tell myself that I should ring Terri when I'm settled and concentrated. Watch out whenever you "tell yourself" anything; it's the red flag of self-deceit. Long hours of being "settled and concentrated" mysteriously failed to manifest themselves.

I stuck a Post-it note on the edge of my desk: "RING TERRI!" Over the months, the note faded, much like my resolve. On the too-rare occasions I acted on the reminder, I had to put a mental gun to my head. But why? This was one of my closest friends, and she was dying. While she was still on this Earth, why was I not battling to maximise every moment? Surely the problem should have been my ringing too often, whizzing back to the States too many times, making a pest of myself.

Granted, our conversations were sometimes awkward. My own life had never gone more swimmingly, while Terri's was circling the drain. I was embarrassed. I found myself editing from our discussions anything I'd done that was exciting or fun. When I returned from an author's tour of Sweden, I portrayed the trip as a drag. This  sort of cover-up reliably backfired. So apparently I felt sorry for myself – for going to Sweden! When Terri could rarely leave the house.

I make no apologies for this, since this is what novelists do: at some midpoint in Terri's decline, I decided that my next novel would draw on this encounter with cancer. At least I had the humanity to refrain from taking notes during our phone calls, thus relinquishing many a "telling detail" and much "great material". Consequently, I had to do an enormous amount of research on mesothelioma later, and this is what I do apologise for: not having done all those web searches on her treatments – the surgery, the drugs, the side-effects – when Terri was still suffering through them. Now, I'm mortified to have Googled "mesothelioma" only once the search was for a book.

When I returned to the US that second summer, Terri had alarmingly deteriorated. Thin to start with, she'd lost weight. She was gaunt and weak, her skin tinged a dark, unsettling orange: a chemo tan. It was obvious where this was headed. But whenever anyone acted as if she wasn't going to make it, Terri grew enraged. She resented the "sentimental" testimonials her friends and relatives recited at her bedside; she thought they were delivering a death sentence. Though she wouldn't have put it that way. I wonder if throughout her illness I ever heard her say the word "death" aloud.

Thus on one count only could I blame Terri herself for my increasingly deficient friendship. Her refusal to admit she was dying meant we couldn't ever talk about the elephant in the room. Pretending that the treatments were working and she was going to come through this injected an artifice in our relationship at odds with the confidences we'd shared for 25 years. Days I did visit, afternoons I did ring, we'd end up talking, lamely, about recipes. Indeed, on a brief trip in November 2006, I visited Terri in New Jersey; it was the last time I'd ever see her, and I knew this instinctively at the time. Yet we spent an appalling proportion of that final visit talking about mashed potatoes.

When her husband rang me in London a few days later with the news, he was consumed with a steely rage. Obviously Paul was angry that he'd lost his wife. But he was also angry at other people. Oh, he expressed his disgust in general terms, as a disillusionment with the human race, a good-riddance to our whole species. But I knew what he meant. Paul's fury was aimed at Terri's friends and family, who had almost universally made themselves scarce for months. His fury was also aimed at me.

I thought I deserved it. I had visited, some. I had rung up, some. But not nearly often enough, and in truth one of my best friends perishing before my eyes had instilled a deep aversion, an instinctive avoidance, a desperation to flee.

It would be a far better thing if I were a lone shithead amid an ocean of altruists. And surely some folks really do step up to the plate when a friend or relative falls mortally ill – wonderful people who keep popping by with casseroles to the very last day. I have a new admiration for such stalwarts, as well as a new appreciation for the Christian duty to "visit the sick". Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing of our time. In fearing and avoiding death, we fear and avoid the dying.

I'll risk sounding preachy, since I've paid for my sermon with a regret that never leaves me. Most of us will experience the afflictions of our nearest and dearest perhaps multiple times before we're faced with a deadly diagnosis of our own. So be mindful. Disease is frightening. It's unpleasant. It reminds us of everything we try not to think about on our own accounts. A biological instinct to steer clear of contagion can kick in even with diseases like cancer that we understand rationally aren't communicable. So the urge to avoid sick people runs very deep. Notice it. Then overcome it. There will always be something you'd rather do than confront the agony, anxiety and exile of serious illness, and these alternative endeavours seem terribly pressing in the moment: replacing the printer cartridge, catching up on urgent work-related email. But nothing is more pressing than someone you love who's suffering, and whose continuing existence you can no longer take for granted. So never vow to ring "tomorrow" – pick up the bloody phone.

• So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, is published by HarperCollins on 25 March at £15. To order a copy for £14, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

Sports Direct has been given a two-week deadline to make a formal takeover offer for rival retailer Blacks Leisure.

The Takeover Panel imposed the "put up or shut up" ruling this afternoon, a day after the Guardian revealed that Blacks had received – and rejected – an approach from its larger rival, and largest shareholder. The panel said that all sides had accepted the deadline of 5pm on 1 April. If Sports Direct does not announce a firm intention to bid, it will be forced to walk away for six months.

Sports Direct made its £26m approach on Wednesday, and saw it promptly rebuffed by Blacks. At 62p per share, the offer was only 3% higher than Blacks' share price, and came three weeks after Sports Direct blocked Blacks' efforts to raise £20m to help its recovery.

The board of Blacks told the City this morning that it had rejected the approach as "wholly inadequate". It added that the company intends to keep working on a new fundraising move that cannot be blocked by Sports Direct.

Sports Direct, which owns 20% of Blacks, said it was disappointed that its approach had been rebuffed.

"[Sports Direct] continues to hope that the board will recognise the merits of an offer which, if made, it believes would be highly attractive for Blacks shareholders, particularly in the context of Blacks' share price performance over the past 12 months, providing certainty, in cash, at a price exceeding the highest closing price for Blacks shares over that period," it added.

George Papandreou has threatened to turn to the IMF in exasperation with the EU's lack of clarity on a plan to resolve the Greek crisis

Greece raised the stakes in the row over how to stabilise the euro today when prime minister George Papandreou set European leaders a deadline of next week for unveiling rescue plans for his battered economy and threatened to turn instead to the International Monetary Fund for help.

Clearly exasperated by the lack of clarity from the EU on what it might do to help resolve Greece's ballooning debt and deficit crisis, Papandreou effectively told European leaders it was time to put up or shut up.

The 16-country eurozone had to deliver on its pledge last month of coming to Greece's rescue if need be by putting a "loaded gun on the table" which would deter speculators betting on a Greek sovereign default and reduce the punitive rates on Greek borrowing.

"This is an opportunity we should not miss," Papandreou told the European parliament in Brussels. "We are expecting this from the summit next week."

Papandreou's remarks put him on a collision course with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who became the first European head of government on Wednesday to demand that the rule book for the euro be rewritten to enable the ejection of persistent fiscal delinquents.

Merkel's call has no chance of support across the 27 countries of the EU who would need to agree on the radical step.

On Monday eurozone finance ministers agreed to pay out "coordinated" bilateral loans to Greece if Athens requests help. But the governments have refused to divulge the details and terms of the rescue measures and today it appeared that Merkel was getting cold feet over the plan.

Declaring that he was making the most savage and radical spending cuts in Greece ever, Papandreou complained that Athens was getting the worst of both worlds – an IMF-style austerity package without the concomitant IMF standby loans.

"This is where Europe has to come in and say OK, we have to provide what the IMF would provide or Greece has to go to the IMF. We hope that won't be necessary."

Resorting to the IMF is strongly opposed by the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, the head of the eurozone, Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German finance minister, and other key players. They view calling in the IMF as an act of despair, a humiliating failure for Europe's single currency zone. But for the first time influential voices in Germany are stating that the IMF would be the lesser evil if Greece needs to be bailed out. Calls for an IMF role are supported in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

Deeper frictions

"It would be cheaper for Greece to go to the IMF," said Daniel Gros, economist and director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, noting that if eurozone countries supply bilateral loans, they could be on stiffer terms than available from an IMF deal.

Papandreou is enraged at the exorbitant rates of more than 6% Greece is having to pay to borrow, twice as high as Germany, a predicament he constantly blames on market speculators. The Greeks fear the borrowing costs are hastening the prospect of insolvency and want more than vague signals of support from an EU summit next week.

But Merkel said on Wednesday that any rapid action could be "disastrous" and appears in no rush to step into the breach.

The Greek crisis is exposing deeper frictions over common policy-making in the eurozone and chronic current account imbalances exacerbating the frailty of the euro. France and Germany are locked in verbal fisticuffs over excessive German surpluses and calls for Merkel and Schaeuble to tinker fiscally to boost German consumption. The Germans complain they are being criticised for success.

A senior MEP following the financial crisis closely said that many in Brussels were fed up with Berlin's "holier-than-thou" position. The captive eurozone market is a boon for German exporters.

Papandreou also disclosed more tensions with Germany today by saying that the question of second world war reparations was not closed. "This is still an open issue. We sometimes discuss it with the Germans. But it's inopportune to bring it up at this time," he said.

"We are basically under an IMF programme, whatever you want to call it," said Papandreou. "But we don't have the facilities the IMF could give, namely the money, if necessary."

Musicians, DJs and authors to reveal their favourite hangouts

Have your say on the Travel blog

HiFi, New York

HiFi is the best rock'n'roll bar in NYC.The room is covered with empty album sleeves and the juke box is hands-down the best in the city – I believe there are about 3,000 albums on it, so you can't complain about them not having your song. There is a fantastically affordable happy hour and a great local crowd. Like the rest of the East Village, it can get a bit much on weekend nights, but most of the time it's my favourite bar in town.
• 169 Avenue A, +1 212 420 8392.
Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady

Pegu Club, New York

The entrance to the Pegu is an unassuming doorway on the south side of West Houston Street. It's only when you are up the stairs that the glory of this place hits you. It is like going back to the great clubs of the 20s, when the staff were pretty and jazz and cocktails ruled. On a recent visit, two amazing Django Reinhardt-style guitarists were swinging through 30s classics. Cocktails are taken seriously here – the art of proper, classy drinking is almost a motto. At the weekend it can get pretty busy as it is becoming the "in" place.
• 77 West Houston Street, +1 212 473 7348.
James Pearson, artistic director, Ronnie Scott's, London

Po' Monkey's, Mississippi

It was a balmy night in September when I visited Po' Monkey's juke joint. It's a ramshackle hut powered by a single cable in the tiny town of Merigold, deep in the Mississippi delta. A poster on the door warned: "Bring your liquor inside but not your beer." The walls were cluttered with posters and age-old postcards, while toy monkeys swung from the rafters. It was low lit – smoky but inviting, with beer and whiskey flowing freely. Terry "Harmonica" Bean took to the tiny stage, elbow to elbow with the crowd, and delivered a mind-blowing, foot-stamping performance that will stay with me forever. Delicately soulful cries came from his ageing gruff voice, while stupendous bluegrass melodies oozed effortlessly from his antique steel guitar. This was raw blues at its authentic and spine-shivering best.
• +1 662 514 7488, 15km from Cleveland.
Dan Hipgrave, co-founder of Original Music Company (originalmusictravel.com), which launched this month and specialises in music-themed holidays

The Spirit Store, Ireland

The Spirit Store in Dundalk, County Louth, is on the edge of town beside a small harbour. There's a small, friendly bar downstairs which opens around 4pm, but it is the live music upstairs that is the main draw. You would be hard-pressed to find anywhere as welcoming to an artist and more genuinely music-driven in its programming of events. That's why I keep going back there to play, and why many other artists who have outgrown the 120- or so capacity venue keep returning. So many venues and promoters are about the money but Derek Turner, who books the music, is driven by something much more.
• +353 42 9352697.
Duke Special, musician. His DVD box set, The Stage, A Book & the Silver Screen is out now

The Hideout, London

Not exactly a venue, not exactly a bar, entrance to Trishas/The Hideout/that door on Greek St (as it is variously known), is obtained by boldly knocking on what appears to be the entrance to a flat above a shop, striding through a starkly lit corridor and down a flight of stairs, before mumbling an explanation to the owner as to why you don't appear to be in possession of a membership card – having accidentally put it through the washing machine normally does the trick. Inside, you'll find a cupboard-sized, candle-lit cavern which can be hired out for private music showcases. But stumble in unannounced after hours on a weekend and you might also find a doo wop or jazz band sandwiched into the corner between the usual crowd of transvestites, metropolitan hipsters and veteran Italian locals.
57 Greek Street, Soho, London.
Krissi Murison, editor, NME

The Shed North Yorkshire

I first played at this blink-and-you'll-miss-it shed in the tiny village of Brawby back in 1998. It only held 64 people and we scraped our legs on the front row's knees. It has since moved to Hovingham village hall, though it retains its name. The man behind The Shed, Simon Thackray, has presented events from the Fish and Chip Van Tour with a trombonist, to mixed media knitting installations – saxophonist Lol Coxhill playing free jazz in a skip to coach trips for folks in knitted Elvis wigs touring sites of Elvisian interest in Ryedale. My own band, Hank Wangford and the Lost Cowboys, started a tradition of Christmas gigs at The Shed, where we play morose songs and have a riotously miserable time. The Shed was the inspiration for my village hall tour around Britain, which I am currently writing up as a book. And, after 235 villages, The Shed is still the loony best.
• 01653 668494.
Hank Wangford, writer and musician. His CD, Whistling in the Dark, is out now

A38, Budapest

For me, the greatest gig of 2009 was at A38, a huge old ship that used to lug coal up and down the Danube. The lower deck is now a state-of-the-art live music venue, but bits of engine room equipment are still there. Even though the boat is held down in dry dock by 100 tonnes of concrete, the bottles still jingle on the shelves of the bar when the parties get wild. The booking policy is great – they've had cutting-edge electronic artists such as Ikonika, Dorian Concept and Foreign Beggars play recently. And nothing compares with the signature dish of the restaurant on the upper deck: rooster stew, complete with the crest and testicles of the bird.
• +36 1 464 39 40.
Mary Anne Hobbs, Radio 1 DJ. Her show is broadcast on Thursdays 2-4am

Wild At Heart, Berlin

Wild At Heart is a whisky-soaked, no-nonsense rock'n'roll joint in Berlin's old anarchist district, Kreuzberg: a seven-nights-a-week venue painted blood red, crammed with Elvis memorabilia, Hawaiian gods and a lifetime's supply of hard liquor. For 15 years it has presented bands from all over the world – mostly punk, rockabilly, psychobilly, 60s garage and surf. I spent a memorable evening there talking to TV Smith from the Adverts and another with Wreckless Eric, both of whom started out with punk label Stiff Records in 1977, and I've played there with my band, the Flaming Stars. The music's loud, but the welcome is friendly, and the club also runs the Tiki Heart cafe and clothes shop next door, where you can eat, drink and kit yourself out in a spectacular variety of rock'n'roll clobber.
• Wienerstrasse 20, +49 30 610 747 01.
Max Décharné, singer in the Flaming Stars and author of A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster's Guide to Rockabilly, to be published by Serpent's Tail in June

Mesa de Frades, Lisbon

Mesa de Frades in Alfama, the oldest district of Lisbon, is the sort of place you dream of hearing fado, the traditional soulful Portuguese music. A tiny converted chapel with tiled walls, it is full of locals and quality performers booked by owner Pedro Castro, a great guitar player. You can come for the music, which starts late – around 11pm – or book a table and come for an excellent dinner beforehand. A couple of years ago I sat here watching Carminho, the amazing young fado singer who is now the talk of Lisbon. When the music starts, the doors are shut to enclose the tiny performing space. It's what fado in Lisbon should be, but so rarely is.
• Rua dos Remedios 139A, +351 91 702 9436, mesadefrades.com. Booking is essential.
Simon Broughton, editor of Songlines magazine (songlines.co.uk/musictravel)

Il Folk Club, Turin

In the heart of Turin, off Piazza Statuto, you'll find the best of all worlds: from Wednesday to Saturday Il Folk Club plays host to Italian and international jazz, folk and world musicians. How this Italian institution – legendary in Turin for over 20 years – has remained generally unknown to travellers and music junkies outside Italy is a mystery. Alongside its regular programme, Il Folk Club is also the launching point for Radio Londra, a monthly mini-festival which fuses British musicians such as Jim Mullen, Kit Downes, Brandon Allen and Quentin Collins Quartet, with local stars such as Mario Pozza, Enzo Zirilli and Dado Moroni. The bar is simple – one central room with space for about 150 people, exposed brick walls, and a stage – so the focus is always on the incredible music.
Via Ettore Perrone 3, Turin.
Sam Sollai, buyer and events coordinator, Ray's Jazz at Foyles

Gerbard, Barcelona

This little neighbourhood bar used to have a green door with panes that rattled when you opened it, but it has now been replaced with something more solid, partly to keep the sound in. It's run by Mar and Nacho, both dyed-in-the-wool culés (Barcelona supporters), and nights there are long and loud. You can hear Sam Lardner, an American resident who plays his own fusion of flamenco and bossa nova, or wonderful classical and flamenco guitarists like Daniel Figueras and Pedro Javier Hermosilla, or the Covers Project, with frontman Philip Stanton. The eating and drinking are delicious too – Galician-style octopus, traditional meatballs, pimientos de padron (small green peppers), and wine for not much more than a euro a glass. A great night out in the Alta Zona.
• C/ Ivorra 24, Sarria, Barcelona, +93 203 4988.
Rupert Thomson, author living in Barcelona. His latest book, This Party's Got to Stop, will be published on 8 April

La Casona del Molino, Salta, Argentina

Salta, in north-west Argentina, is well-known for its folk music heritage. This has given rise to the creation of pena, which roughly translates as a place where musicians and music lovers come together. Seven nights a week you can experience this at La Casona. The venue's five colonial rooms are filled to the brim with musicians, professional and amateur, folk, jazz and others, locals who come down from the Andes bearing pan pipes and drums, and some foreign visitors, all coming together to jam the local tunes. As a musician, I found great comfort in the fact that this kind of place exists in the world. And of course, many people come simply for the music.
• La Casona del Molino, Caseros.
Lizzie Ball, violinist and singer. She will be performing – and launching her album – with Machaca at La Linea Festival in the Purcell Room on London's South Bank on 27 April

Salón Rosado de la Tropical, Havana

The first time I asked a taxi driver to take me to Havana's Salón Rosado de la Tropical back in 1989 he said it was a place for Cubans, not foreign tourists – and certainly not lone women – and I'd better watch out as it could be rough. He'd obviously never been inside this mecca of Cuban dance music, where all the top bands play regularly, testing their latest material in front of the sexiest dancers on the island. In Cuba, most music venues are geared to tourists and too expensive for ordinary Cubans, who are often not allowed in anyway. Not so the Salón Rosado. This is the closest you can get to hanging out with a Cuban clientele. Dedicated to the memory of Beny Moré, Cuba's touchstone band leader of the 1950s, it started out life a Spanish cultural centre at the beginning of the 20th century. These days there's a balcony reserved for tourists overlooking the dance floor where, if you're lucky, you may rub shoulders with the musicians as they gather for the gig. Although today reggaeton and hip-hop dominate street tastes, Salon Rosado continues to offer a window on to the latest music scene and is a dancer's dream.
• Avenida 41 esq. 46, Nicanor del Campo, Marianao, +53 7 203 5322.
Jan Fairley has been travelling to Cuba since 1978 and is writing a book on women and music in Cuba

Liquid Room, Tokyo

Leading Japanese venue Liquid Room has been going for about 15 years and hosts weekly bands and DJs from Japan and around the world. The website may say it closes at 12, but the last time I played there, as The Orb, they didn't let us out till 6am. There's a beautiful cafe upstairs and the friendly enthusiasm of Tokyo clubbers has to be experienced to be believed. The last time I played there I took a bag of Space Dust (the sweet!) which made me very popular.
• Higashi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, +81 3 5464 0800, liquidroom.net.
Alex Paterson, co-founder of The Orb and HFB, his new project. HFB's first three EPs are available from 12 April on Malicious Damage Records

New Africa Shrine, Lagos, Nigeria

Lagos is not your classic tourist destination; it's a prohibitively expensive city of 14 million people and a crime record to frighten even the toughest traveller. But Nigeria's notorious capital does have one musical landmark worth going the extra mile for: the New Africa Shrine. It's named after the legendary club run by the late musical activist Fela Kuti, which was razed by soldiers. Fela's daughter Yeni and her musician brother Femi have built up a nightclub that can hold thousands and has live music throughout the week. It's not for the faint-hearted, but the Shrine is probably the safest place in Lagos: it has its own police force. You'll get a warm welcome, and hear some of the best live music in the region.
• Pepple Street, Ikeja.
Rose Skelton, music and travel journalist specialising in West Africa

Kevin Rushby thought he didn't get on with horses. But a two-day ride across beautiful countryside of Provence was the start of a new love affair

When the horses come down from the hill, I'm standing on the lane, wondering if there is any way to get out of what is about to happen. It's an impressive sight: the dozen horses, manes and tails in motion, all cantering through the forest, the dog barking at their heels. There were two patched and painted ponies, like Apache war steeds, a pair of dainty Arabs, dish-faced and bug-eyed, like they had pranced straight out of a Stubbs painting. There were a couple of greys and some big brown mares. The biggest brute will be mine, I thought – the one with the grudge.

Far below us, down 700m of mountainside, shimmering and hazy, was the Côte d'Azur with its white tower blocks, black cars and scorched skin. But we were no longer in that world; we were in a golden forest of field maples, oaks and scarlet sumac near the village of Sainte-Agnès, just a few miles north of Monaco, close to the Italian border. We were setting out on a two-day ride into the virtually uninhabited interior, our saddlebags stuffed with supplies and bedrolls.

Denis came past me, whistling, then shouting for the dog, "Avant, avant, Uxel! Allez, Juanita!" And the dog, a huge lolloping hound, was behind Juanita, one of the painted ponies, urging her down. I noticed that the dog appeared to know the horse's name, and thought, "Is that possible?"

I stepped back. My partner, Sophie, and six-year-old daughter Maddy were with Denis, catching horses by the manes, slipping on bridles, tying them up to a rope strung between two trees. But I stepped back.

I'll be honest. Horses and me never did click. A bite on the hand long ago, tales of terrifying injuries, cowboy movies where they get thrown and trampled and bitten and generally reduced to a bloody, quivering pulp, and finally the time in Sudan – I blush at the recollection – when I coolly threw myself up on a mule, and went directly over the other side into the dirt. If only the whole village hadn't been watching! Some of them laughed so hard they had to lie down. Gimme a bike any day. To add to my woes, Sophie and Maddy are comparative experts – and they look good in jodhpurs.

The night before, Denis had explained his methods. "I leave the horses out on the mountain – that way they get strong and they have the security of the herd. They got a pecking order and they got leaders. I work with 'em."

Denis Longfellow inspires confidence. Born in California in the 60s, he grew up surrounded by writers and poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an ancestor). In the 70s he moved to Provence and spent 10 years with the last generation of old-time shepherds: "They couldn't read or write, but they knew how to keep animals."

Denis has a direct simple animal psychology: "In Europe you got a lot of culture grown up around horseback riding. There's a guy two metres up there, looking down on someone, and he wants to make that seem mysterious and complicated. But it ain't. Horseback riding ain't complicated."

Now, here on the lane, Denis is about to show me how simple it is. He grabs the big brown mare – the one with the grudge, of course – and he grips the reins in one hand together with a fist full of mane and he says to me. "Hold her like this. Get a foot in your stirrup, then jump up."

I do it. The horse keeps steady. Denis positions my toe in the stirrup. "It's a natural position: feet underneath, basin ..." he points at my pelvis. "That's where you ride – in the basin. You can stand if you want, but keep your head down and butt up. Hold the mane with both hands if you need to."

Maddy and Sophie are up, too. Mel and Liz, colleagues of Denis, are up. The loose horses are milling, hooves clattering on tarmac. The dog, Uxel, is waiting for a signal. Denis jumps into the saddle. A piercing whistle. My brown mare, Mada, turns sharply right and pounces forwards after the loose horses. A cacophony of hooves explodes around me. A black horse bashes my knee. We're going downhill at a trot and my bum is being punched. Stand up. Grab mane. Horse's head starts to pump up and down as she breaks into a canter. Denis comes rattling past, cooler than a cowboy dude, leaning back like he's tootling a Harley D up Route 66: "Sit back. Use your basin. It's like making love."

I can't sit. I can't make love with my basin. I can't do anything but hold on. And yet that's cool. Denis is cool. "OK, basin up and head down," he shouts. "Like a jockey."

I'm laughing with exhilaration. We sheer away down a broad grassy footpath. Sophie is alongside me on her grey gelding and grinning. "Well?"

I can't stop smiling. "I – think – I – might – like – this ..." How come, I'm wondering, I never realised what fun this could be? And I haven't even thought about falling off.

After an hour we pull up by a tumbledown cottage where a man with a face full of furrows is waving a bottle of pastis. He pours me a stiff measure.

"You'll never believe what I saw this morning: a man with a knapsack and nothing else – naked!" He laughs. "I hardly see a soul up here, though it's just a few kilometres from the coast."

A curious thing about Provence is how the coast and the mountains have exchanged population: the coast was once an overheated pirate-afflicted zone that nobody wanted, while the cool hills were desirable – everyone lived up here. Now the population is all down on the coast, even though it's still overheated and pirate-infested (they sail in gilded mega-yachts these days), and the hills are silent: you would struggle to get a pétanque match together in most villages.

Riding through the sun-dappled forest, the only humans we see are a couple of mushroom collectors. We emerge at an abandoned coastguard station and a magnificent panorama. Behind us are the snow-capped Alpes Maritimes, ahead the sparkling sea and the mountains of Corsica on the horizon, 200km away. Westwards we can see Provence disappearing in ridges of blue and violet, while to the east are the mountains of Italian Liguria.

"I guess most kids in England learn horseback riding indoors," Denis says to Maddy.

She nods: "My horse is called Pippin. We go across the ring from A to C, then B to D. It's fun."

I think Maddy is missing the rule-bound predictability of the riding school, a place where correct clothes, posture and meticulous attention to detail are observed. She has coped with the intensity of this outdoor experience with remarkable sang-froid, but for her – truth to tell – the confidence nurtured in the riding school is indispensable here.

Lunch is laid out: tiny black Niçoise olives, cheeses, hunks of bread, a bottle of red wine, pasta and salads. We eat and talk, then some of us snooze. Later we trot onwards in the deep glow of late afternoon. Denis tells me how he breaks new horses in.

"There ain't no problem when they live in a herd. The young colts run with us and they see what happens with the older horses. When they're three years old, I put a bridle and saddle on them. I use hackamore bridles so there's no bit. They take to it real easy."

In a broad meadow we gallop about and round up the loose horses, whooping and yelling like cowboys on the range. It is both ridiculous and wonderful. That evening we light a camp fire, put some sausages on to cook, and watch the stars come out.

"If only I'd known riding could be like this!" I say to Denis. "No pomp – just relaxed."

My attitude to horses has, I admit, been damaged by exposure to a certain kind of horsey person: braying women in uptight clothes, red-faced toffs in white cravats, all wearing those foul black helmets with a ribbon on top. (I have to stop myself at this point since Maddy and Sophie love this kind of kit.) Denis, I scarcely need to say, does not wear any of that ghastly garb, favouring jeans and checked shirts with sunglasses under a baseball cap.

"A lot of guys come to it when they are older – thirties, forties, even fifties and sixties," Denis says. "There's no problem with age at all."

There is a commotion among the horses and Maddy goes to investigate. She comes back grinning sheepishly. "They're doing binki-bonki."

A torch reveals what exactly binki-bonki is: a grey gelding in an aroused state mounting a chestnut mare.

"Ah, that's Dodo," says Denis. "He gets in the mood every three or four months – no problem." He goes back to turning sausages on the fire.

Next morning we ride for about three hours and have lunch on a hilltop before heading back towards Sainte-Agnès, at 760m the highest coastal village in Europe. We unsaddle the horses and send the herd off into the forest, then sit down to an excellent dinner in the village restaurant.

Later that evening, I head out alone on to the rocks around the village. The trip has challenged my prejudice, and then surprised me by flipping it over entirely. The truth is that I was the one with the grudge, not the poor horse. I sit down on a spur of granite and look around. To the south are the bright lights of Menton and Monte Carlo; to the north is complete darkness, punctuated by the hoots of owls calling across the valley. And above, as if attempting to tie these two impossibly different worlds together, is the broad spangled belt of the Milky Way.

• Museveni criticised for not signing bill into law
• Will new law impact on rural communities?

The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has been criticised for not signing a domestic violence bill into law.

Alice Alaso, the secretary general of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), the main opposition party in Uganda, said the president had yet to give the bill assent, despite it being passed by parliament. It was given the green light by the cabinet more than a year ago. Alaso said this meant women's rights were continuing to be undermined in Uganda.

"We have passed several laws which the president has assented to, except for the domestic violence law, yet women have continued to be abused," she said.

During celebrations to mark International Women's Day in Katine last week, the state minister for youth and children's affairs, Jessica Alupo, said the delay was because the president was still studying the bill. Apparently sections of the bill have been opposed, although she did not elaborate on which sections.

The bill will afford legal protection to people in abusive relationships for the first time.

Currently, most women have no say in affairs relating to their home life, and many have lost their lives through domestic violence.

The bill is intended to protect sufferers of domestic violence, punish perpetrators and set guidelines for courts on the protection and compensation of abused women.

The bill defines a domestic relationship as "a family relationship, a relationship akin to a family relationship or one in a domestic setting that exists or existed between a victim and a perpetrator". These relationships include those between spouses, relatives and between householders and domestic workers.

According to figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2007, 68% of married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced some form of violence inflicted by their spouse or intimate partner.

According to the 2006 Uganda Law Reform Commission study, domestic violence is most common in northern Uganda, where it was reported to have occurred in 78% of homes. Most women do not report cases of domestic violence to authorities and police rarely intervene or investigate.

Often women are reluctant to file a complaint for fear of reprisal, embarrassment, poverty, ignorance of the law or not knowing where to report abuse.

A report published on the Refworld website, citing figures from various sources, found that 60% of men and 70% of women in Uganda condone "wife beating" if, for example a woman burns food or refuses sex.

In rural areas like Katine, where the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) is implementing a development project funded by Guardian readers and Barclays, cases of domestic violence are often handled among the community, rather than by the police. In most cases this means women are returned home to their partners. Often parish leaders are initially brought in to settle disputes between couples. More serious cases are passed on to sub-county leaders or the district gender officer, who may encourage police involvement.

Cases of domestic violence have hindered women's emancipation in Katine, said Christine Agwero, a women's representative on the Katine sub-county council. Often women do not attend meetings or take up leadership positions because they are threatened by their husbands, she said.

Speaking at International Women's Day, Agwero asked the government to protect women and provide them opportunities to empower themselves economically.

At the mid-term workshop held in Soroti last year to discuss progress in Katine, Agwero voiced her concerns about the lack of women in attendance and the threat of violence some face when they want to get involved.

"Seriously, we need to bring women on board to participate in committees. It needs both parties... we need to move together to bring development," she said.

She explained that a major obstacle to women taking a more active role was lack of education, which affected their confidence. "If not well educated, women fear answering questions [in meetings]."

She added: "Women are busy, but not so busy. Some men don't feel women should be at the meetings because they will have to take care of children if women go."

The workshop heard from other attendees that women had been beaten up by their husbands for attending village savings and loans associations, which have had a positive impact on women's lives in the sub-county, given them a means to save and invest money.

Alaso said that the longer the delay in implementing the law, the worse the situation will get for women in rural communities.

Once the law is passed, it will be up to local government officials to ensure it is interpreted correctly in their communities and that men and women know their rights.