Sandip Moneea, 41, Raj Theekoy, 33, and Avinash Treebhoowoon, 29, have already been charged over the killing
Related Stories
One of the men arrested in connection with the murder of Michaela McAreavey in Mauritius has been released without charge.
Seenarain Mungoo, 39, is a security officer at the Legends Hotel and had been charged with conspiracy.
Four men are still being held in connection with the murder.
Mrs McAreavey, 27,the daughter of Tyrone Gaelic football manager Mickey Harte, was found strangled in her honeymoon hotel room in Grand Gaube.
Mr Mungoo is from Petit Raffray- the same village as Sandip Moneea – who is charged with murdering Michaela but has not confessed to the crime.
Sandip Moneea, 41, and Avinash Treebhoowoon, 29, are charged with Mrs McAreavey murder.
Raj Theekoy, 33, has been charged with conspiracy to murder.
In January Mr Treebhoowoon confessed to the killing.
A fourth man, Dassen Narayanen, 26, who also works for hotel security was charged with aiding to commit a crime.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Experts say that there is little prospect so far of Pervez Musharraf being indicted
Related Stories
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has issued an arrest warrant for former military ruler Pervez Musharraf over the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007.
Prosecutors say he was aware of Taliban plans to target her but did not act to prevent her murder in Rawalpindi.
They accuse him of failing to provide adequate security for the former PM.
Mr Musharraf – who lives is a self-imposed exile in London – denies the allegations.
Ms Bhutto was killed while in a gun and suicide attack while travelling in an election motorcade in the city of Rawalpindi in December 2007.
She was twice prime minister of Pakistan, from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996.
Benazir Bhutto’s assassination sent shockwaves across Pakistan
On Saturday, prosecutors at the anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi said that any further progress in investigating Ms Bhutto’s assassination was not possible without Mr Musharraf’s presence.
They said they had tried repeatedly to contact Mr Musharraf over the case but he had refused to co-operate.
They added that he would be declared a wanted fugitive if he did not appear for the next hearing on 19 February.
A questionnaire was also sent to Mr Musharraf’s London address.
Last year, the Pakistani authorities arrested two senior police officers suspected of not giving adequate protection to Ms Bhutto at the time of her murder.
According to prosecutors, the two officials told investigators that on the orders of Mr Musharraf they removed a security detail for Ms Bhutto just before she departed the venue where she was speaking in Rawalpindi.
She was killed shortly afterwards.
Mr Musharraf denies all the allegations, describing them as politically-motivated.
He has not publicly commented on the issuing of the arrest warrant.
Mr Musharraf seized power in 1999 when, as chief of Pakistan’s army, he ousted elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a coup. He resigned as president in 2008.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
When should you start dealing with a pandemic?
Related Stories
Measures to reduce the impact of a flu pandemic, such as closing schools, should not necessarily take place at the beginning of an outbreak, according to computer models.
A report in PLoS Computational Biology argues that starting several weeks later could be more effective.
The researchers said this would have a lower impact on society and the economy.
Experts believe the work could be important for controlling pandemics.
Governments prepare for worst-case scenarios, such as the emergence of a deadly flu outbreak which spreads across the globe.
The UK’s pandemic flu plan sets out how the country will deal with such an outbreak.
In the early stages, vaccines are still being developed so measures rely on slowing the spread of a virus, such as closing schools, asking people with flu to stay at home or prescribing antiviral medicines.
“It’s like pacing yourself for a race: while you can cope with a pandemic you don’t want to disrupt public life.”
Dr Deirdre Hollingsworth Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling
This study, by researchers at Imperial College London and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, investigated when those measures should be introduced.
It might be thought that the answer is at the start of the outbreak, but the research suggests this is not always the right one.
The problem comes from measures which the government would only want to apply in the short term, because they are expensive and difficult to maintain.
In this case, the mathematical models show that the timing of measures, such as closing schools or restricting public transport, is important.
If they are introduced when the first cases are recorded, it is costly to society and the economy and there is a large second surge if the measures are lifted.
However, when the researchers delayed the introduction of these measures by several weeks, the size of the pandemic and the peak number of cases were similar to the model in which the measures were introduced at the beginning.
This also has the benefit of reducing the second surge while putting off costly measures.
Dr Deirdre Hollingsworth, of the Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London, said: “If you take into account the impact that those policies will have on society, it might be better to hold back at the start.
“It’s like pacing yourself for a race: while you can cope with a pandemic you don’t want to disrupt public life.”
Professor Matt Keeling, who models infectious diseases at the University of Warwick, said: “For ages we’ve always been saying, hit hard and early, a bit like dealing with compound interest.
“However, if you can only hit for so long, then don’t do it at the beginning, target the bit you want to control.
“Like all good computer modelling, the conclusions seem obvious afterwards.”
The researchers are clear that their work is not a policy document. However, the Department of Health said it monitored all research in the area and noted the findings with interest.
Dr Nim Pathy from Princeton University said: “Experience of the swine flu pandemic showed just how much uncertainty there can be in these early stages, so this work could have important implications for the practicalities of pandemic control.
“If potentially costly interventions can be delayed even by a matter of weeks, this may buy valuable time to gather important clinical, virological and epidemiological information. Such data would be key in guiding flexible, responsive pandemic control measures.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The agreement ends a long dispute over the ownership of the artefacts
Related Stories
Yale University has signed an agreement to return to Peru some 5,000 Inca artefacts removed from the famed Machu Picchu citadel nearly a century ago.
The relics – stone tools, ceramics and human and animal bones – will be housed in a new centre in the city of Cuzco.
The deal ends a long dispute over the artefacts, which were taken from Machu Picchu by American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1912.
Machu Picchu, high in the Andes, is Peru’s main tourist attraction.
“This agreement ensures the expanded accessibility of these Machu Picchu collections for research and public appreciation in their natural context,” Yale President Richard Levin said.
Victor Raul Aguilar, rector of San Antonio Abad University in Cuzco, said he hoped that “all who visit Machu Picchu will enrich their experience and understanding of Inca culture with a visit to the centre”.
The International Centre for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture will be jointly run by the US and Peruvian universities.
Peru had argued during the dispute that the artefacts were lent in 1911 but never returned. It filed a lawsuit against Yale in 2008.
Machu Picchu is Peru’s most important archaeological site
Yale had said that it returned those relics which it borrowed, while it had full ownership of many others.
It also took protest marches and a letter penned by Peruvian President Alan Garcia to his US counterpart Barack Obama to win the battle over the artefacts, the BBC’s Dan Collyns in Lima reports.
The relics will be yet another draw for hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the 15th Century Inca site every year, our correspondent adds.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Nick Clegg addressed students over tuition fee rises this week
Related Stories
Despite all the government warnings, the clear signs are that the great majority of universities in England will raise fees above £6,000 – with most going straight to the £9,000 maximum.
Oxford and Cambridge were the first to put their heads above the parapet this week.
But others will follow over the next few weeks as universities set their fee levels for the 2012-13 academic year.
There are several reasons why universities say it makes no sense for them to stick to the £6,000 level.
The first is just brass tacks. Universities estimate that, on average, they need to charge at least £7,500 just to maintain their current income levels.
This is because the government is cutting teaching grant by 80% over the next few years.
Some universities say their “standstill fee” is even higher if they are to compensate for losses in research and capital funding too.
The second reason is that the maximum fee of £9,000 will inevitably become a badge of quality.
No university wants to risk being perceived as second-rate by charging less than others.
The few who did so when the fee cap was raised to £3,000 quickly regretted being out of line.
Indeed, as the NUS President, Aaron Porter, regretfully told an audience of university advisers this week: “Price will be set as a proxy for academic league table standings”.
“Are these warnings just bluster?”
And it appears that students may take the same view as their vice-chancellors.
Addressing the same audience, Professor Julia King, vice-chancellor of Aston University, said student representatives at her university’s council had argued fees needed to be set at £9,000 or they would object the university was planning to spend less on them than other universities.
There is also anecdotal evidence that students feel it may harm their employment prospects if they are seen as coming from a university with a £6,000 price tag, rather than a £9,000 one.
We have all got used to rating things by their price. There is a sense that “you get what you pay for”, whether it is mobile phones or university courses.
Professor King echoed the views of many other university leaders I have spoken to when she said “there is not going to be any real competition on price”.
The government should not be too surprised that universities will not stick to the £6,000.
At a meeting this week between the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and vice-chancellors it emerged that the Treasury has modelled its future spending on average fees of £7,500.
And this is where it becomes interesting. On the Treasury model, the cost of funding student loans would be £3.6bn.
But if average fees are more like £8,000 or even £8,500 the Treasury will be out of pocket.
Vice-chancellors were told the government could not allow this to happen and the Treasury would claw back any excess spending on student loans from university teaching grants.
This is the background to the rather desperate warnings from government this week that universities charging above £6,000 could be fined or forced to cut their fees if they fail to admit more students from poorer homes.
“Vice-chancellors I spoke to doubted whether Offa has the teeth to impose a reduction in fees”
But are these warnings just bluster?
It will be two or three years down the road before the independent regulator, Offa, can decide if a university is failing to fulfil the “access agreement” imposed as a condition of exceeding fees of £6,000.
Like a struggling teacher threatening to send recalcitrant pupils to the head teachers’ office, the government also threatened universities with unspecified further punishment if they are found to be “clustering charges at the upper end of what is legally permissible”.
In the guidance letter to Offa, Business Secretary Vince Cable, said the government would consider taking new powers through legislation to ensure there is “differentiation” in fee levels.
However, despite this sabre-rattling, vice-chancellors I spoke to doubted whether Offa has the teeth to impose a reduction in fees.
They also seriously doubted whether the government could take such powers over autonomous institutions.
Finally, there is another reason why universities will see little reason to keep fees down.
This is the result of an anomaly in the repayment arrangements for graduates which means that they will pay back at the same rate, whatever level of fees they have paid whilst undergraduates.
This is counter-intuitive so needs some explaining. Under the new system graduates start to repay their loans once they are earning over £21,000. They will pay 9% of their salary above this level.
So, for example, a graduate on £30,000 a year will pay 9% of £9,000 (the amount they earn above £21,000). That comes to about £16 a week.
They will pay £16 a week whether they have a tuition loan of £27,000 (three years at £9,000 each) or £18,000 (three years at £6,000).
The only difference for those with the bigger loan is that they will have to keep paying for longer before they eventually repay their full debt.
In the example above, graduates are likely to be paying back for at least 10 years, maybe longer.
Indeed, as we know, the government expects that about a third of graduates will never pay off any debt and another third will only repay a proportion of it.
So, if you are a 17-year-old choosing between a £6,000 university and a £9,000 university, there is really little incentive to choose on the basis of price.
It will make no difference to your outgoings until you are approaching middle age.
So, one way and another, it is a one-way bet that from September 2012 the great majority of students in England will be paying close to £9,000 a year for their courses.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The ASA will see staff numbers expand to cope with online changes
Related Stories
People who use the internet are about to get a new opportunity to complain about company websites.
From 1 March, consumers are being invited to make official objections about indecent or misleading information on the internet.
They will be able to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which is taking on new powers to regulate commercial websites.
Up to now the ASA has only been able to monitor traditional advertising.
These were generally on billboards, in newspapers or on television.
From the start of March, the ASA will be able to police any statement on a company’s website which could be interpreted as marketing, even if it is not a paid-for advert.
“The principle that ads have to be legal, decent, honest and truthful is now going to extend to companies claims on their own websites,” said Matt Wilson, of the ASA.
Earlier this month, for example, the ASA ruled that an Yves St Laurent perfume advert was unfit for broadcast on television.
It showed a woman stroking her own arm, and writhing around on the floor.
The ASA said the advert “simulated drug use”, and its use on television was banned.
Under the current rules, however, the company would be entitled to use the same advert on its website, without fear of redress.
In fact the advert still appears on the Yves St Laurent UK website, but with a couple of “offending” shots removed.
In another ruling this year, the ASA decided that a regional television advert for the Metrocentre on Tyneside breached the advertising code.
“With 2,500 complaints, this does not mean they will all be upheld”
Matt Wilson ASA
The Gateshead shopping centre had claimed that it was “the best shopping centre in Britain”.
The ASA said that claim was based on a three-year-old survey, which was misleading.
However a quick look at the Metrocentre’s website shows that they are still claiming to be the best in the country.
That is acceptable within the current rules, but should anyone complain after 1 March, the ASA would have to look at it again.
“I think anyone with a website needs to have a fresh look at it, and say ‘am I totally happy about that?’ ” said Ian Twinn of ISBA, the industry body which represents British advertisers.
“Certainly if you have had a claim ruled against you by the ASA, now is a very good time to put that right before 1 March.”
The ASA has spent a year preparing for the change, and is expecting a large number of extra complaints.
Last year 2,500 people complained about website content, but under the old rules their objections were not admissible.
“With 2,500 complaints, this does not mean they will all be upheld,” said Mr Wilson.
Nevertheless the ASA is expanding staff numbers by 10%, to cope with the extra workload.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Literature’s lust for unrequited love leaves us ill prepared for the reality of what love really is, says Alain de Botton in his weekly column.
From my early adolescence through to my early 30s, my most intense feelings of love were towards people who had little or no interest in loving me back.
Women who already had boyfriends, who meant to return my calls but had a habit of losing numbers, who gently explained they needed a little more time on their own, or preferred not to let sex spoil a valuable friendship.
Far from deserving pity for my fate I was in fact strangely blessed, for my apparent misfortune put me in touch with the most intense of all varieties of love – the unrequited kind.
Anyone who reads even a few novels about love will swiftly recognise that love in literature is almost always impeded in some way. What we call a love story is nothing of the sort, it is merely a story of love’s interruption and delay. It is the record of a gradual victory over a range of obstacles to a happy union (parents, society, shyness, cowardice). With the consummation of love, there tends to be only one thing left for an author to do – end the story.
Romeo is not known for his sense of humour
This focus on unrequitedness is of course a great solace for the lovelorn. It means that their feelings are continually heightened and confirmed by what they read. They are trained to dwell on, and even celebrate, the bitter-sweet sensations of waiting for a phone call and microwaving meals-for-one.
My immersion in literature made it natural that I should have been left somewhat unprepared for a most surprising event that befell me in my early 30s. Surprising, that is, for someone whose favourite novels had long included Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (an unhappy quest for love followed by suicide) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (ditto).
I met someone, she didn’t fail to call back, she didn’t prefer to leave it at friendship, she didn’t have to get home for work the next day. We fell in love and got married.
Suddenly, literature ceased to be any useful guide to what to expect. All that my books had prepared me for was an image of continuous perfection, a “happy love” that was essentially without any movement or action. It was a static image, like the sort we might have of a faraway holiday destination, and in a host of ways as unrelated to the reality of love as a postcard is to the reality of travel.
Literature and philosophy often dwell on the way that, soon after meeting our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It seems as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life perhaps, or in our dreams.
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes explains this feeling of familiarity with the claim that the loved one was our long lost “other half” whose body we had originally been stuck to. All human beings used to be hermaphrodites, recounts Aristophanes, creatures with four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. But these hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two – into a male and female half – and from that day, each man and each woman has yearned to rejoin the half from which he or she has been severed.
“Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself”
I date the realisation that, despite all that united us, my wife was perhaps not the person from whom Zeus’s cruel stroke had severed me, to a moment shortly after our move in together when she introduced me to a kettle she’d bought for the house. It was practical, efficient, but exactly the kind of kettle I hated. If we were actually in love, how was she able to declare a household item beautiful which I found ugly?
It took me only a few moments to shake myself free of that most pervasive and unhelpful of all literary romantic myths: the idea that happy love must mean conflict-free love. Differences between my wife and I gathered over a host of small matters of taste and opinion.
Why did I insist on leaving the pasta to boil for those fatal extra minutes? Why was I so attached to my ragged winter coat? Why did she always park the car with one of its wheels squashed against the kerb? Why was I such a light sleeper? Why did she have to own so many clothes if she wore so few?
It is surely not coincidental that most great lovers in literature are devoid of a sense of humour. It is as hard to imagine cracking a joke with Romeo as it is with Young Werther, both of them seem differently but desperately intense. And with the inability to laugh comes an inability to acknowledge the messiness and complexity of all things human, the contradictions inherent in any union, the need to accept that your partner will never learn to park the car or cook the pasta – but that you love them nevertheless.
Humour renders direct confrontation unnecessary, you can glide over an irritant, winking at it obliquely, making a criticism without actually needing to speak it (“By this joke I let you know that I dislike X without needing to tell you so, your laughter acknowledges the criticism”).
It is a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes an astonishing degree of what true, mature love appears to be), when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humour lines the walls of irritation between our ideals and reality. Behind each joke, there can be a hint of difference, of disappointment even, but it is a difference that has been defused and can therefore be passed over without the need for melodrama.
We are taught to imagine that romantic love might be akin to Christian love, a universal emotion that would allow us to declare: “I will love you for everything that you are.” A love without conditions or boundaries, a love that is the embodiment of acceptance.
Marriage doesn’t mean love becomes bland
But the arguments that even the closest couples experience are a reminder that Christian love does not well survive the transition into the bedroom. Its message seems more suited to the universal than the particular, to the love of all men for all women, to the love of two companions who will not hear each other clipping their toe-nails.
Married love teaches us that we bring all of ourselves into a marriage – anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and alarm. I continue sometimes to feel unhappy about my work, to worry about my future and to be disappointed with myself and with my friends. Except that now, rather than sharing my sorrows, I tend to blame the person who lives beside me for them. My wife isn’t just a witness to my problems, on a bad day, she can sadly end up being held responsible for them.
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself. It’s a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, you have to be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt yourself.
There have been other surprising things about marriage and the experience of requited love. One of the most challenging is the intense dependence it brings. Proust tells the story of Mohammed II who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of his wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another.
However far fetched a response, the story nevertheless captures something about the dangers of true love. A marriage is scary in part because it involves putting oneself almost wholly in someone else’s hands. If my wife and I have an argument, we can no longer, as we might have done in the past, go off back to our own flats. There is now only one marital home. But though this constricted space may often be an imposition, in reality, it is also the best medium I have ever encountered for understanding the word compromise.
Most of Western literature seems committed to the idea that love cannot last, it is based on absence and lack and is killed by routine and stability. “When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her,” writes Proust, unhelpfully, but representatively. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place and burns itself out with marriage.
Montaigne declared that: “In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us.” A view echoed by Anatole France’s maxim that: “It is not customary to love what one has.”
But under the guise of worldly cynicism, this approach in fact betrays a quasi-adolescent blindness, for it attributes all the excitement and heroism of love to its unrequited part, while implicitly suggesting that there must be something at once easy and unheroic about the quest for everyday happiness.
As I now recognise, marriage is rarely in danger of being dull, and never in danger of being simple. The word marriage, suburban and colourless in its connotations, in fact hides a welter of intensity and depth that puts to shame the most passionate works of literature.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
