Nato repels daring assaults on Afghan bases by insurgents in US uniform

August 31st,2010    by Eric

Insurgents wearing US army uniforms launched an audacious co-ordinated attack on two major Nato bases in eastern Afghanistan early yesterday morning. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said the attacks were repelled with five insurgents captured and 24 killed, four of whom were wearing suicide vests. The Afghan Defence Ministry added that two Afghan soldiers were killed in the fighting and two wounded.

The assaults were on the sprawling Camp Salerno and nearby Camp Chapman in Khost at about 3am – just before morning prayers. The camps are about 60 miles south-east of Kabul, close to the border with Pakistan. The area is a hotbed of insurgent activity. In December seven CIA officers were killed in a suicide bombing on Camp Chapman – the worst attack on the CIA in 25 years.

In recent months the Taliban have been launching increasingly sophisticated guerrilla-style attacks on Nato bases, with similar assaults launched at Bagram, Jalalabad and Kandahar.

Afghan police said about 50 insurgents armed with rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons were involved in the latest assault. Two insurgents did manage to breach the perimeter of Camp Salerno but were monitored as they cut the fence and were killed immediately.

"Coalition forces had the two insurgents under surveillance and when they cut the fence a quick reaction force was dispatched to the location, where they were killed," an Isaf statement said. Small-arms fire continued through the morning.

Major Wazir Pacha, of the provincial police headquarters, added that they had captured a pickup truck full of ammunition along with a light truck packed with explosives – which may have been intended for use in a suicide bombing – that had become stuck in deep mud. Bomb specialists later destroyed the truck and its cargo. After being repelled from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were driven off.

"Given the size of the enemy's force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it," Khost's provincial police chief, Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai, said.

Nato said the dead insurgents were members of the Haqqani network, a Taliban-affiliated group with strong ties to al-Qa'ida that is accused of launching frequent raids across the border from neighbouring Pakistan.

An airstrike on a truck in which insurgents were fleeing killed a senior Haqqani explosives expert suspected of arranging suicide bomb attacks, along with two other militants. Isaf said last week that it had captured a senior commander of the local Taliban network in Khost – although it is not clear whether the arrest is connected to the latest attacks.

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New York student charged with attack on Muslim taxi driver

August 30th,2010    by Eric

A college student who did volunteer work in Afghanistan has been charged with slashing the neck and face of a Bangladeshi taxi driver who said he was Muslim.

A criminal complaint alleges Michael Enright uttered an Arabic greeting and told the driver: "Consider this a checkpoint" before the brutal attack occurred on Tuesday night inside the yellow cab on Manhattan's East Side. Police say Enright, 21, was drunk at the time.

Enright is being held on charges of attempted murder and assault as hate crimes, and possession of a weapon. The handcuffed defendant did not enter a plea during the brief court appearance.

In addition to a serious neck wound, cab driver Ahmed Sharif suffered cuts to his forearms, face and one hand while trying to fend off his attacker, prosecutor James Zeleta said while arguing against bail.

Jason Martin, defending, told the judge his client was an honours student at the School of Visual Arts who lived with his parents in suburban Brewster, New York.

Enright volunteered for Intersections International, a group that promotes interfaith dialogue and has supported plans for an Islamic centre and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. A group representative, the Reverend Robert Chase, called the situation "tragic".

"We've been working very hard to build bridges between folks from different religions and cultures," Chase said. "This is really shocking and sad for us."

Sharif, a 43-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant who has driven a cab for 15 years, was quoted in a news release from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance as saying that the attack had left him shaken.

"I feel very sad," he said. He added that, because of tensions over the mosque, "all drivers should be more careful". He accepted an invitation from New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a supporter of the mosque, to visit City Hall.

"This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe no matter what God we pray to," the mayor said.

At around 6pm on Tuesday, a man hailed the cab at East 24th Street and Second Avenue, a police spokeswoman said. Sharif said that during the trip his customer asked him whether he was Muslim. When the driver said yes, the customer pulled out a weapon – believed to be a folding tool with a knife blade called a Leatherman – and attacked him.

After the assault, the driver tried to lock the customer inside the cab and drive to a police station, police said. The attacker jumped out of a window, 17 blocks from where he hailed the cab, police said.

An officer noticed the commotion, found Enright slumped on the pavement and arrested him.

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Meat consumption per capita

August 28th,2010    by Eric

Between 1961 and 2002, meat consumption has seen a large increase virtually worldwide and a corresponding jump in its environmental impact.

Links between meat consumption and climate change have been widely known for many years, partly due to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to make room for the livestock. Clearing these forests is estimated to produce a staggering 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector.

Increased meat-eating has followed rising affluence in many parts of the world. China's levels doubled between 1990 and 2002. Back in 1961, the Chinese consumed a mere 3.6kg per person, while in 2002 they reached 52.4kg each; half of the world's pork is now consumed in China.

The US and the UK are among the few countries whose meat consumption levels have remained relatively stable. Surprisingly, it is not the US with the largest consumption (124.8), but Denmark with a shocking 145.9kg per person in 2002.

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From gate to plate – chefs grow their own

August 26th,2010    by Eric

It's an old gardeners' adage that nothing tastes as good as a home-grown vegetable. But that was before some of Britain's best restaurants started planting their own kitchen gardens to cash in on the soaring popularity of locally sourced food.

Chefs from London to Loch Voll are growing their own produce, from bumper crops of carrots to unusual herbs they find difficult to source. Some restaurants are rearing their own animals to give diners the ultimate gate-to-plate experience.

In France and the US the "locavore" movement is well established, and the idea is catching on at last in Britain's restaurants. Richard Harden, of Harden's London Restaurants guide, said: "We had lost our connection with food, so this is about trying to get closer to what we eat."

The award-winning chef Simon Rogan has run Howbarrow Organic Farm alongside his L'Enclume restaurant in Cartmel, Cumbria, since last year. He said: "The organic produce we serve now just costs us the price of the seed. For us it's a quality thing: we can pick things out of the ground when we want." Eventually he hopes to cut his "six-figure" annual vegetable bill down to zero.

Although chefs such as Mr Rogan, or the French culinary legend Alain Passard, whose farm in Brittany supplies his Parisian restaurant, L'Arpège, are at the radical end of the scale, even London-based chefs are sowing seeds where they can. Shane Osborn has planted a garden on the roof of his double Michelin-starred London restaurant, Pied à Terre. Nuno Mendes, the Portuguese El Bulli-trained chef, is picking his own herbs for his Viajante restaurant in east London, which opened this year.

They follow the likes of Oxfordshire's Raymond Blanc, who has served diners at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons vegetables grown in his two-acre kitchen garden for several years, and Nigel Haworth, whose celebrated Lancashire hotel and restaurant, Northcote Manor, was another early pioneer. Other restaurants that grow-their-own include the Nut Tree Inn, Oxfordshire, and Monachyle Mhor, on Loch Voll in Perthshire.

Restaurateurs who lack the space to get planting are finding other methods. Tony McKinlay, who owns the south London restaurant Platform, has gone into partnership with one of his suppliers, the Devon-based farmer Barnaby Butterfield. The pair are both shareholders in a company that runs a central kitchen where the animal carcases are butchered and prepped before being dished up at Platform. The aim is to use every bit of the animal.

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Big mouth strikes again

August 25th,2010    by Eric

When I invite Michael Winner to lunch at McDonald's in Wood Green he readily accepts, as I rather knew he would.

I then feel bad and even try to talk him out of it. Michael, I say, Wood Green is known locally as Hood Green for all its prowling hoodies; hoodies who are mostly accompanied by those powerfully squat, fat-bollocked Staffordshire Bull Terriers sometimes called Tyson and sometimes called Killer. Michael, I continue, last time I went to see a film in that badlands of north London and pulled down the seat, it had a huge penis graffitied on it. Michael, I further continue, when I opted to not sit on that seat – sit on a penis?; at my age? – and pulled down the next one it had "Fuck You!!" scrawled on it. Do we even think the second exclamation mark was necessary, Michael? Wasn't the point rather well-made with the first? Michael, you don't have to do this. I thought it would be amusing to take you out of your comfort zone, away from Sandy Lane or dining with your hundreds of celebrity friends (ie, Michael Caine) but I can now see it's a rotten, lousy, stinking, mean-spirited, cruel, low, putrid, patronising, cheap, shaming and pathetic idea. "Next Thursday, darling?" he suggests. And we're on.

So, McDonald's in Hood Green, which is situated on the high street, between an amusement arcade and a shop offering the faux-est of faux Ugg boots for £4.99, it is. I arrive first and wait outside; wait while keeping a safe distance from the two fat-bollocked Staffies already tied to the railings. (I have nothing against Staffies, by the way, and do understand they can be very sweet when not otherwise occupied with taking your leg or your nose off.) I am informed of Michael's whereabouts every two minutes or so. Either he calls from his car – "I'M ON GREEN LANES, DARLING!" – or his PA calls from his office: "HE'S ON GREEN LANES, DEBORAH!" I eventually spot his vintage Rolls-Royce nosing down the high street, past all the shops with "pound" in the title: Poundworld, Poundstretcher, Poundland; useful shops which may or may not one day go upmarket, as in Twopoundworld, Twopoundstretcher and Twopoundland. It's a small dream of mine. Anyway, Michael's driver parks up and then Michael exits the car. This causes quite a stir. Particularly among a group of large, black ladies who shriek hysterically: "It's the calm-down-dear, man ... it's the calm-down-dear, man." And then keep repeating: "Nice to see you, nice to see you ... calm down, dear!"

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It's one big girls' night out at the theatre

August 24th,2010    by Eric

We have read chick lit and watched chick flicks; now women are queuing up for a stream of female-friendly dramas on the stage. Theatre is awash with shows appealing particularly to women, many based on popular novels and films, and more are in the pipeline. Women are responding in their droves, often on a girls' night out.

Crowd-pleasers include the musical Legally Blonde, which opened in January and is based on the Reese Witherspoon film, and the Abba-inspired Mamma Mia!, which went from the stage to the big screen. Bridget Jones: The Musical is in development, with author Helen Fielding adapting her chick lit phenomenon and Lily Allen writing the songs.

Dirty Dancing, inspired by the 1987 film, smashed West End records when it took £11m in advance sales. Ghost: The Musical, based on another popular Patrick Swayze film, opens next year. Grease has played to more than 1.25 million people – approximately three-quarters of them women – since returning to the West End three years ago.

Arlene Phillips is choreographing Flashdance: The Musical, an adaptation of the 1983 film about a female welder who loves to dance, which previews from September. "I don't think it's a conscious 'we are going to do chick theatre'," she said. "It just happens to be that there is an explosion of those musicals around and, fortunately, it is the women audiences who go back again and again that are keeping these musicals on in the West End." She added theatre had changed, with audiences now including hen nights and groups of women screaming for the show's stars.

"When, for instance, Grease first opened, it was very much a traditional theatre audience coming to see it," explained the So You Think You Can Dance judge, who also choreographed that musical. "It was families or teenagers. You didn't get, as we do now, huge parties. Sometimes on the Friday night and Saturday night, the theatre is packed with screaming crowds of women cheering on the dancing. That is something new."

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Edwards storms Palace but Keane is still blue

August 23rd,2010    by Eric

Roy Keane was left frustrated, despite seeing his Ipswich side extend their excellent start to the season with victory over Crystal Palace.

Second-half goals from Grant Leadbitter and Carlos Edwards took Ipswich's total to seven points for the season, yet it was a fierce contest at Selhurst Park with Claude Davis and Andros Townsend both being sent off, the latter rather unfortunately.

Keane felt referee Jonathan Moss was wrong to dismiss the on-loan Tottenham midfielder Townsend for a lunge on the goalkeeper Julian Speroni. Keane said: "I thought Andros was very unlucky. He is not that sort of player. Sometimes the referee makes those decisions to even things up. He just jumped for the ball. If I felt one of my players deserved to be sent off I would sit here and tell you."

Talk before kick-off had been about Edgar Davids, who has agreed a pay-as-you-play deal with Palace. Yet supporters were not treated to their first appearance of the former Dutch international, as George Burley did not include him in his squad.

Ipswich manager Keane handed a debut to Celtic defender Darren O'Dea, who has agreed a five-month loan with the Suffolk side. But it was Palace who made the brighter start when former Ipswich midfielder Owen Garvan shot over the bar after just 17 seconds. Ipswich also had their chances as Edwards went close from Jonathan Stead's pass, and Stead's cross almost dipped under Speroni's bar in the 30th minute.

Palace thought they had taken the lead in the 22nd minute when Andrew Dorman coolly rounded Martin Fulop before slotting home, only for his effort to be ruled out for offside.

Six minutes into the second half, Palace found themselves a man down when Davis was dismissed following a cynical challenge on Stead as he pulled the forward back on his route through to goal.

Moss had no further option but to point to the penalty spot and Leadbitter kept his cool to hammer home from 12 yards. Ipswich were clearly buoyed by their advantage and were two goals up when Edwards slid home at the far post from Leadbitter's cross in the 56th minute. Yet there was more drama as Townsend was dismissed in the 73rd minute and Neil Danns scored a late consolation with a lob over Fulop.

the Palace manager Burley felt his side were unfortunate and was critical of Davis for his loss of control. He said: "The game hinged on one incident and we have not got anybody to blame but ourselves.

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Music mourns photographer who chronicled icons of jazz

August 20th,2010    by Eric

Herman Leonard, the American photographer who captured the jazz halls of New York, Paris and London, has died in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 87.

During the Second World War, Leonard made his mark roaming the clubs of New York City, taking silky, black-and-white portraits of legends of American jazz and swing such as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis.

It was a fascination with music that remained with him throughout his career. Last year, Leonard, who was born to Romanian parents in Pennsylvania, was asked to be the official photographer for the Montreal Jazz Festival.

"You could look at his photos and almost hear the music," John Edward Hasse, a curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, said. "He used light, shadow and smoke, and he made indelible the faces of many of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century."

Leonard's travels began in 1956 when Marlon Brando, the actor, took him on a tour of the Far East as his photographer. Leonard then lived for seven years in Paris, still pursuing the stars of jazz. In the late 1980s he moved to London, where he held his first exhibition.

He moved to New Orleans in the early 1990s, where flood waters during Hurricane Katrina ruined his home and destroyed 8,000 of his archive prints. His negatives were not in his home and, in the last years of his life in Los Angeles, he successfully digitised and catalogued 60,000 of his frames.

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Britain's best handed Commonwealth choice

August 16th,2010    by Eric

As Augustine Choge, the Commonwealth 5,000m champion from Kenya, charged down the finishing straight to win the Emsley Carr Mile at Crystal Palace on Saturday, the final hope of a home victory from one of the international events on the programme came to grief at the end of the two-day Aviva London Grand Prix.

After the Lord Mayor's Show of the record haul of 19 medals at the European Championships, it was something of a post-Barcelona nightmare for Britain's runners, jumpers and throwers.

As the Samsung Diamond League circus packed up and left town for Zurich, the lingering question for the best of Britain's athletes was: having been able to summon so little stomach for the Grand Prix scrap in south London, how many would have the belly to fight for medals in New Delhi?

The Commonwealth Games open for business in the Indian capital on Sunday 3 October, less than seven weeks away. For many British athletes, they are simply a peak too far – not just another one, after the European Championships, but too far away in the calendar to consider attempting to maintain medal-winning form.

They also happen to fall at a time when athletes would traditionally be returning after a post-track-season break to start getting down to the grind of winter training.

With a global championship on the schedule in 2011, the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, from 27 August to 4 September, Charles Van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics, is wary of the threat of potential burn-out.

He has told British team members that if they decide to go for Commonwealth gold with England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland they must miss the indoor season early next year in order to be fully-recovered and fully-prepared for the summer outdoor campaign.

Given the number of British athletes who struggled to rise to the occasion at the London Grand Prix, it must be tempting for those who remain undecided to follow Jessica Ennis' lead and shut up competitive shop for the year.

The world and European heptathlon champion, the only British athlete occupying a top spot in the world rankings in 2010, was sitting pretty on the BBC television gantry at Crystal Palace on Saturday – still emanating a golden glow, while a succession of her team-mates failed to reproduce the sparkle they had shown with their medal-winning performances in Barcelona.

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At home with a new classicist

August 14th,2010    by Eric

Like me, you'd probably expect the London flat of a self-confessed architectural classicist (someone, that is, who admires the architectural qualities of the classical world) to be as embedded in the past as current conditions will allow – Georgian colours, washstands, cleverly concealed white goods. After all, the tiny home (just 35 square metres) of Ben Pentreath – the classicist in question – is in a building that dates from 1720; it's got panelling and slivers for stairs and doors that speak of a time when people were smaller than today. It's a step back in time.

The 38-year-old Pentreath, however, is something of new kind of traditionalist. The sort that likes looking at a historical model precisely to work out how it might best be freshened up and reconfigured for contemporary use, not the sort that wants to use lead paints, read by candlelight and determinedly turn back the clock. Admittedly, he studied – for less than a year – at the Prince of Wales Foundation ("it was just too chaotic to get anything much done," he says of his brief time there) and has done considerable amounts of work on Poundbury, the Duchy of Cornwall's backward-looking "model village" just outside Dorchester. But a real hardliner, he says, looking towards the wooden table covered in new and vintage books in the middle of his bijou sitting room, "would never have a 1950s coffee table".

When he arrived in his mini-Bloomsbury room of his own six years ago, Pentreath did the early Georgian thing. "The sitting room was soft grey, the kitchen was blue. I stripped back the fireplaces. It was pretty nice," he says. He filled it with period furniture, including a sofa in perfect primrose upholstery, put curtains around the bed, had a set of Hogarth prints in the bedroom, and covered the walls in maps, all in the spirit of the 18th century. Then he took another rental, on a second place in Dorset where work had become plentiful ( "I don't own. I'm one of life's renters. It's something I believe in."), and shipped out the Georgian pieces to the country.

Now the bedroom is decorated with textiles by the Swedish mid-century designer Kaj Franck; prints by early 20th-century English artist Eric Ravillious hang on the walls; and the rugs are Moroccan. Furniture is modest, mid-century modern, often found at the super-reasonable Criterion auction house in Islington – just the right scale for the interior, if not the right period. Brightly coloured resin lamp stands in red blue and yellow, by Spitalfields designer Marianna Kennedy, are dotted throughout.

Pentreath's relaxed attitude dates back, perhaps, to four years spent in New York, working on interiors for a clientele that included a good sprinkling of celebrities. He had, he says, exchanged one village in Norfolk, where he had spent five years learning the business of architecture at the elbow of the vernacularist Charles Morris, for a village in Manhattan - Greenwich village, one key difference being that Sarah Jessica Parker didn't have a house to be done up in Norfolk. But it was during a furniture-finding trip to London in 2003 with his favourite customer, the "absolutely normal" Liv Tyler ("an old head on young shoulders," says Pentreath. "Eclectic would be the kindest way to describe her taste") that he realised he wanted to come home.

Pentreath's fascination with the neo-classical feels very timely. While it has long been regarded as the benchmark for good architecture, younger architects and critics no longer see the architectural world as a battle between the Classic and the Modern (as in the rigorous and undecorative work of the 20th century). The battle waged so ruthlessly for years in London, primarily between the British starchitect Richard Rogers and the tradition-bound Prince of Wales (which really kicked off in 1983 when the Prince denounced a proposal for a new Sainsbury wing at the national Gallery in London as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a well-loved and elegant friend") seems out of date.

There are even unfounded suspicions that the recent rejection of Richard Rogers plans for the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment, on aesthetic grounds (too strong, steely and severe for the denizens of SW3), could have as much to do with a fear of being able to sell the rather generous number of £10m-plus apartments on the part of the developers as objections to its appearance. The replacement scheme by architects Dixon Jones, however, is quite in line with Pentreath's thinking. The austere lines of Roger's glassy blocks have been replaced with a development that introduces town squares and park spaces, much in the tradition of London.

Pentreath himself is working on a new development bringing 230 new houses to Chichester. "I'm looking hard at old towns and old settlements to see what has worked in the past. The houses won't be at all Poundbury pastiche, but quite contemporary. But for the plan of the place, I want to use a model that works. You can't use people like lab rats and expect them to live in your urban experiments that turn out not to work."

Meanwhile, at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Pentreath is in a show with three contemporaries, George Saumarez Smith and Francis Terry, called 3 Classicists. Huge drawings of his work, that have taken up to three months to be produced on computers, and subsequently been hand ink-washed by him, are on show. "And do you know what has blown me away," asks Pentreath? "it's been the younger journalists who have been interested in the show. A couple of the older ones are still feuding away."

Of course, Pentreath isn't alone in looking to the past to create a better future. The interior architect Martin Brudnizki, who is becoming celebrated for his work in hotels and restaurants including Scotts in Mayfair and the Ivy Club in Soho, believes in taking the best of the old world and making it work in the new. Recently, he completed the Townhouse restaurant in Dean Street, for the Soho House group. "One wall had original, listed Georgian panelling, which we had to keep. For the other walls, we took the idea but didn't use it literally. We applied it in a different way."

The most famous contemporary designer of them all, Frenchman Philippe Starck, hit paydirt with his Louis Ghost chair, a reworking of a classic Louis XV chair in transparent acrylic, with sales in excess of 1 million. When I spoke to him recently, he put its success down to our need to have contact with our history, in many ways, including in our homes.

Pentreath would no doubt agree with that, just as long as it doesn't stop you living in the present day.

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