Category: news

Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney is continuing last-minute talks with opposition parties to secure the support needed to pass his budget.

As MSPs prepare to vote on the minority government’s £33bn spending plans on Wednesday, Mr Swinney hopes to strike a deal with the Tories and Lib Dems.

The two parties have demanded concessions on college bursaries and support for private sector projects.

The Scots budget is being cut by about £1bn following UK spending reductions.

Although the details are still being worked out, the Liberal Democrats have given guarded support to the spending plans, while the Conservatives – who have backed previous SNP budgets – are also hopeful of reaching a deal.

Mr Swinney’s spending plans will pass if the two opposition parties either vote for, or abstain, in the final Budget Bill vote in parliament.

Meanwhile, the finance secretary has been continuing talks with Labour, although it is thought the party still feels the budget falls short of its demands for more action on youth employment.

Mr Swinney has argued his budget – the SNP’s last before May’s Holyrood election – will boost growth and protect front-line jobs.

But those claims have been questioned by the opposition parties, who feel the plans do not do enough to support economic recovery.

The two Green MSPs, who voted against the budget at an earlier stage, have set out “£400m of revenue and spending changes”.

Among their demands are limiting further education and housing cuts and committing to a full-scale, universal home insulation scheme, to be paid for by by delaying construction of the new Forth road bridge and widening the scope of non-domestic rates.

Holyrood’s only independent member, Lothians MSP Margo MacDonald, has also been seeking budget concessions.

Mr Swinney has already had to make amendments to cover a £30m hole in the budget, after failing to win enough support for his proposed tax on large retailers.

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The war crimes trial of ex-Liberian leader Charles Taylor has been adjourned until Friday after he failed to attend the court in The Hague.

He and his lawyer walked out of proceedings on Tuesday during the closing arguments of the trial.

The prosecution has finished its oral submission and the defence was due to start its arguments.

Mr Taylor denies fuelling Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s by arming rebels.

He is charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

When proceedings resumed on Wednesday morning, the judge said that no note of explanation for Mr Taylor’s absence had been delivered to the court.

When the trial started in June 2007 Mr Taylor boycotted the opening, arguing he would not get a fair trial. The verdict is expected later this year.

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Nokia’s new CEO has sent an outspoken and frank memo to his staff that suggests the phone giant is in crisis.

Stephen Elop describes the company as standing on a “burning platform” surrounded by innovative competitors who are grabbing its market share.

In particular, he said, the firm had been caught off guard by the success of Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iPhone.

BBC News has verified that the memo is genuine.

“The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience,” Mr Elop wrote in the note that was distributed to the Finnish company’s staff and was first published by technology website Engadget.

“Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.”

Although Nokia leads the global smartphone market in terms of handset sales, its overall share has been gradually declining.

According to research firm IDC, Nokia’s share fell from 38% in 2009 to 28% by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile its rivals, including Apple and HTC have seen their share increase, or remain constant.

Ben Wood, an analyst at research firm CCS insight, said the memo showed that Mr Elop has a “deep understanding of the severe structural problems Nokia is facing”.

“I think it shows that he has inherited an organisation that is in much worse shape than he anticipated and the work that will be required to get it back on track should not be underestimated,” he told BBC News.

Mr Elop’s leaked memo also suggests that Nokia is also being squeezed at the lower, non-smartphone end of the market by Chinese manufacturers.

“They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us,” he wrote.

Nokia is expected to publicly address its future strategy at a media event this Friday.

Mr Wood said that he thought Mr Elop would use the briefing as a chance to issue a “mea culpa”.

“He will use it to say ‘we are not in a good position, we have been outgunned and if we are to recover we are going to have to take some drastic decisions’.”

Mr Wood said this could involve using Android or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating systems.

“No options will be ruled out,” he said.

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Missing Swiss twin girls were last seen on a ferry to Corsica with their father, a French prosecutor has said.

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Prosecutors in Italy say they will formally ask for PM Silvio Berlusconi to be tried for alleged sex with an underage prostitute and abuse of power.

The Milan chief prosecutor said a request for a fast-track trial would be submitted to a court on Wednesday.

Mr Berlusconi is alleged to have paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl and then intervened to get her released from custody in a separate case.

The woman, known as Ruby, is now 18 and denies that they had sex.

A Moroccan nightclub dancer whose real name is Karima El Mahroug, she was detained for alleged theft by police but freed after a phone call from the prime minister.

Although frequenting prostitutes is not a crime in Italy, having sex with one under the age of 18 is an offence that commands a prison sentence.

Mr Berlusconi denies the sex allegations, insisting they are politically motivated.

He has previously admitted calling the police after Ms Mahroug’s arrest but says he did nothing wrong and acted out of pity.

Milan Chief Prosecutor Edmondo Bruti Liberati told reporters that the inquiry into the two allegations was almost complete.

He said “a final meeting” would be held on Tuesday afternoon to consider whether there should be one fast-track trial for both charges or whether they should be separated.

Mr Berlusconi refused to appear before prosecutors as part of their investigation and last week the Italian parliament rejected their request to search the offices of the prime minister’s accountant.

As part of their request, the prosecutors submitted two sets of documents in January including what they said was proof of payments made by the prime minister to prostitutes, including the Moroccan dancer.

Although Ms Mahroug has said she received cash at the end of one of Mr Berlusconi’s parties, she maintains it was not in return for sex.

Last month, Italy’s Constitutional Court amended a law granting the prime minister and senior members of the government temporary immunity from prosecution.

The judges ruled that individual judges should be allowed to decide whether a prime minister should be tried in office.

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The parents of murdered Indian schoolgirl Aarushi Talwar, whose killing in 2008 shocked the country, are to be tried over her death.

A court near the Indian capital Delhi has ruled there is enough evidence to prosecute Dr Rajesh Talwar and his wife, Nupur, both of whom are dentists.

Magistrate Preeti Singh said they would be charged with murder, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy.

The trial is to begin on 28 February. The Talwars say they are innocent.

Their lawyer, Rebecca John, was quoted on Wednesday by India’s NDTV channel as saying that the Talwars would appeal against the court order.

“For the last three years, there has been a circus around this case. We will challenge today’s order in a superior court of law,” she said.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed an application to close the murder inquiry in December.

The federal agency said circumstantial evidence pointed to the parents’ involvement in Aarushi’s death, but added there was a lack of hard evidence.

Dr Talwar and his wife had described themselves as “completely devastated”.

The gruesome tale of murder in an affluent Delhi suburb has generated huge interest in India.

Aarushi, 14, was murdered in her bedroom at the family home in the upmarket Noida district, while her parents were in.

She was found with her throat slit and a fatal head injury.

A day later the bludgeoned body of their servant, Hemraj, was found on the roof.

Aarushi’s father was arrested then freed.

Three other men, Dr Talwar’s dental assistant and two servants employed by the family’s friends and neighbours, were also questioned and released.

The CBI took over the inquiry from Noida police, who had been accused of a botch job.

Noida police were also criticised for statements they made during their investigation.

Days after the murder, a senior police officer told the media that Aarushi had been killed because she had discovered her father’s alleged extramarital relationship with another dentist.

The same police chief also suggested the teenager could have been killed because Dr Talwar had objected to her close relationship with the murdered servant.

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A ‘polite robber’ has been filmed holding up a petrol station in Seattle

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A Taiwanese general has been detained on suspicion of spying for China – the highest-ranking officer involved in alleged espionage in decades.

Maj Gen Lo Hsieh-che was recruited by China in 2004 while he was stationed overseas, the defence ministry said.

But officials declined to comment on reports that he had worked in the US and had sold secrets about military communications networks.

His arrest follows an investigation launched last year.

Mr Lo returned to Taiwan in 2006 and was made a major general in 2008, defence ministry spokesman Yu Sy-tue said.

At the time of his arrest, he was head of the military command’s communications and information office, Mr Yu said.

The defence ministry has set up a group in an attempt to limit any possible damage, Lt Gen Wang Ming-wo, of the ministry’s Political Warfare Bureau was quoted by AFP as saying.

“He has brought shame to the military. Servicemen are supposed to be loyal to their country,” Mr Wang said.

Gen Lo is the most senior officer accused of espionage since the 1960s when a vice defence minister was arrested amid a crackdown on Communist spies.

Critics say his alleged connection with China and the fact it took several years to detect has revealed a security loophole.

Tensions have run high between the two sides since 1949, when Taiwan was separated from China at the end of a civil war.

China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force if the island ever moved to declare formal independence.

But there has been an unprecedented warming in relations since Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008.

Despite this, Taiwan’s military has repeatedly said that it will not let its guard down against the mainland’s government.

“Although tensions across the Taiwan Strait have eased over the past more than two years, the Chinese communists have not stopped their infiltration into Taiwan,” said Mr Wang.

“Instead, they have been stepping up their intelligence gathering, what we call the ‘smokeless war’ against us,” he said.

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Leeds flanker Hendre Fourie will return to the England squad for Saturday’s Six Nations game against Italy after Joe Worsley is released back to his club.

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Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia.

European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.

Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.

Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.

The idea behind RoboEarth is to develop methods that help robots encode, exchange and re-use knowledge, said RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

“Most current robots see the world their own way and there’s very little standardisation going on,” he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

“Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access,” he said. “Something like that does not exist for robots.”

It would be great, he said, if a robot could enter a location that it had never visited before, consult RoboEarth to learn about that place and the objects and tasks in it and then quickly get to work.

While other projects are working on standardising the way robots sense the world and encode the information they find, RoboEarth tries to go further.

“The key is allowing robots to share knowledge,” said Dr Waibel. “That’s really new.”

RoboEarth is likely to become a tool for the growing number of service and domestic robots that many expect to become a feature in homes in coming decades.

Dr Waibel said it would be a place that would teach robots about the objects that fill the human world and their relationships to each other.

For instance, he said, RoboEarth could help a robot understand what is meant when it is asked to set the table and what objects are required for that task to be completed.

The EU-funded project has about 35 researchers working on it and hopes to demonstrate how the system might work by the end of its four-year duration.

Early work has resulted in a way to download descriptions of tasks that are then executed by a robot. Improved maps of locations can also be uploaded.

A system such as RoboEarth was going to be essential, said Dr Waibel, if robots were going to become truly useful to humans.

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Television pictures caught the moment a bomb exploded exploded in Kirkuk, at the side of a road used by emergency services to reach the scene of a previous blast.

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An inquest on bomb disposal expert Staff Sgt Olaf Schmid who was killed in Afghanistan is due to reopen.

Staff Sgt Schmid, from Truro in Cornwall, died disarming a roadside bomb in November 2009.

His widow Christina accepted the George Cross on his behalf in a ceremony last year.

The 30-year-old soldier, who had made his home in Hampshire, died the day before he was due to return to the UK after making safe 64 devices.

He was also said to have found 11 bomb-making centres during his five-month tour of duty.

At his funeral service at Truro Cathedral, Lt Col Robert Thomson, commanding officer 2nd Battalion The Rifles, said Staff Sgt Schmid had been the “bravest and most courageous man” he had ever met.

Known as Oz, Staff Sgt Schmid had been part of the 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regiment, based in Didcot, Oxfordshire.

The inquest will be held in Truro and is expected to hear from several of his colleagues who will give evidence about their work in tackling IEDs in Afghanistan.

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Love and war bring out the passions of men. Or so it would seem from the collection of faded ink on delicate paper, the love tokens and the marriage proposals on display at the National Army Museum.

From the roughness of regimental life in the 1800s, the bleakness of being in a prisoner of war camp to the distance from family during the 1991 Gulf War, soldiers through the centuries have turned to paper and pen to share their longings with their dearest.

“My own most beloved precious Verie,” writes one officer in 1917 to his wife in England, before going on to detail his rather mundane administrative job. And his sign-off – for all of the hundreds and hundreds of his letters that the museum holds – is “always your own most devoted”.

“This is a wonderful insight into everyday life, and because it covers a long period of time from a military perspective, a historian can trace what he is doing. And it’s full of emotion,” says curator Frances Parton.

She selected pieces from the museum’s vast archive, grouping them into courtship, women, marriage, separation and reunion.

“We thought the time was right, with so many people serving overseas. And you don’t have to be a military historian to appreciate this.

“Love and families are for everyone. We could have filled this room 50 times over.”

She points out a double ring, sent to a wife by her husband after he survived the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, with her name engraved on one ring and his on another, and together placed in a glass box. He couldn’t be with her, but the token was his expression of the unity they shared.

Separation, of a boyfriend from his girlfriend, of a father from a toddler he fears he may never see grow up, can bring out strong feelings.

In the 1940s, Maj Anthony Ryshworth-Hill just had to know that one day his love would be his: “Valerie, shall we become in engaged in a sort of distant way so that we are sort of linked together until we next meet? How would that suit you?”

“Anthony… yes, Anthony, shall we?” she writes in acceptance.

Their 100-odd letters were donated, like the bulk of the museum’s archive. Mainly it is descendants who offer them, having unearthed them in the attic, “thinking that they are of historical interest even though they are very personal”, says Ms Parton.

But not everybody is pining for the girl back home. Some are having a fun old time.

Take Lt William Lee, serving with the 16th Queen’s Light Dragoons between 1787 and 1792. He has two women professing undying love for him – one is pregnant in Strasbourg and needs money, the other is an actress in Paris.

“Farewell, my friend, I kiss you with all my soul and I am yours for life,” Zinette Desincourt writes. His reply – to either woman – is lost.

“For some soldiers being away at war brings wonderful opportunities that some people take advantage of,” says Ms Parton, somewhat diplomatically.

For others it is a lonely life, like the chap in 1908 in Bloemfontein who doesn’t hold back when describing the local ladies as the ugliest and most boring he has ever met. Hardly a love letter. Or the lance-corporal in 1834 who regards his musket as his constant companion.

The wedding, when it does come, can be a rushed, and possibly ill-advised, event. One letter – sent from Operation Granby, the name given to the British military operations in the Gulf in 1991 – describes how on-site weddings were not always approved.

“One of the doctors married one of the Royal Scots officers the weekend before last – apparently been inundated with similar requests from couples at this unit but is refusing to perform them as they seem very much Op Granby romances,” the soldier writes.

The elaborate wedding dresses, the bouquets, the lines of men in uniform, and the posed bridesmaids typical of officers’ weddings in the late 19th Century were long gone by then.

By World War II, soldiers were given 48 hours’ wedding leave, prompting one bride to abandon all thought of a big family wedding in Scotland to rush to Liverpool for a trot down the aisle – leaving her gas mask at the back of the church – before the groom rushed off. It was four years before she saw him again.

A 1991 photo shows the happy couple in desert fatigues; the only concession to it being a special event is a red rose tucked in the groom’s camouflage shirt.

With Britain’s recent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, modern wives and girlfriends still find it difficult.

Nancy Tanner, married to Capt Daniel Tanner of the Royal Dragoon Guards, says: “If you marry someone who’s in the Army, you marry the Army essentially.

“And that is really, really hard to accept. And yes, it does put a strain on you. And the long periods you spend apart and not being able to communicate, it tests your relationship.”

When once letters were the norm and telegrams reserved for urgent contact, now it is easy enough to phone from a war zone. How will an exhibition like this be staged in the future?

“As a museum, that’s something we have to consider – how to store that electronic communication. And we haven’t got many recent donations. It’s not something people want to share straight away,” says Ms Parton.

She thinks the physicality of the letter and seeing the handwriting of a beloved will always remain important.

“The ways of communicating change but the sentiment never does,” says Ms Parton.

In an exhibition which ranges over 230 years, the timelessness of love is evident.

“Darling I love you so much – I love the silly hat you’re wearing and I love all your expressions – and well, I’ve always loved every little bit of you, since, I believe, possibly since the pyramids were built or perhaps a couple of years before,” wrote Maj Ryshworth-Hill in 1944.

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The Home Office has attacked AMs for voting against part of its legislation on elected police commissioners.

Policing Minister Nick Herbert called their vote “unwise” and said he feared AMs had “cut off their noses to spite their faces”.

The UK government wants to bring in elected police commissioners in England and Wales.

But it needs the assembly’s permission to introduce police and crime panels to scrutinise the commissioners in Wales.

The panels would affect local government, which is devolved.

AMs voted to refuse their consent in the Senedd on Tuesday night, the first time such a move has happened on Westminster legislation.

Mr Herbert reacted angrily, saying he would push ahead with his plans for elected commissioners anyway. Concessions offered to Wales would be withdrawn, he added.

But some senior figures in the assembly say the rebuff over police panels may have much larger implications for the way the system of commissioners can now work in Wales.

Mr Herbert wrote to AMs on Monday, urging them to vote in favour of the so-called legislative consent motion. He said he was concerned there may be some misunderstanding about the motion and insisted it was not a vote on the merits of commissioners.

Responding to the vote, Mr Herbert said: “This wasn’t a vote on police and crime commissioners because the House of Commons has already decided to introduce them in England and Wales.

“It was a vote to ensure that special arrangements could apply in Wales.

“By unwisely voting against the motion, I regret that some assembly members have cut off their noses to spite their faces, so that these agreed arrangements for Wales, which gave a role for the Welsh Assembly Government, cannot now apply.

“Police and crime commissioners will go ahead, ensuring that the people in Wales have a real say over how their communities are policed.”

The assembly government, which is opposed to replacing police authorities with directly-elected commissioners, said it would inform the Home Office of the assembly’s decision.

The four Welsh police chief constables last year questioned the need for elected commissioners.

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New Wales boss Gary Speed hopes his players have learnt some lessons ahead of next month’s Euro 2012 qualifier with England.

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