Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.
Around this time of year, I always start wondering about the people who sell Christmas trees in lots, the folks who live in trailers or RVs from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. Sometimes there are families, sometimes just single young guys. Where do they come from? Do they mind not having their holidays at home?
I wonder about them, but not being someone who converses with strangers easily, I never ask them questions. I was talking about this with Brian, and lamenting that I’m not more like my mom or uncle, who can strike up conversations and find out all about people when they’re just waiting in line at the grocery store. I want to write a story about a Christmas tree salesperson, I said, but I’m too shy to find out about them.
Maybe, though, Brian said, that part of being a fiction writer — as opposed to a journalist — is not finding out too much about people you’re interested in. It creates preconceptions, when your mind should be free to invent. After all, a person selling Christmas trees can be like anybody. (Like Vincent van Rhyn, a Buddhist adventure traveler. Or Francis, a French-Canadian organic farmer who sells trees with his Chinese wife and Spanish friend.) You can just get the basics of their situation so your facts are straight, but the rest is up to you.
Family of British student murdered in Perugia, Italy, say they are pleased with decision but 'it is no time for celebration'
The family of murdered British student Meredith Kercher have welcomed the convictions of her killers, saying they agree with the guilty verdicts.
Meredith's brother, Lyle Kercher, said they were "pleased with the decision" to convict Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
"Ultimately we are pleased with the decision, pleased that we've got a decision, but it's not a time for celebration," he told a press conference in Perugia, Italy.
His mother, Arline, said: "If the evidence has been presented, then yes, you have to agree with that verdict."
Knox, 22, and Sollecito, 25, killed Kercher in an attack that ended with Sollecito taunting Kercher with one knife while Knox plunged another into her throat, the trial heard.
Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found with a deep knife wound in the throat on the floor of her bedroom in the flat she shared with Knox and two young Italian women. The Leeds University student had been spending a year at Perugia's university for foreigners when she was found murdered on 2 November 2007.
The Kerchers have been awarded €4.4m compensation (£4m) but Lyle Kercher said the figure was "symbolic", reflecting the "severity and gravity of the case" and no amount could make up for their loss.
"It's not the case that this has ever been about us seeking money, which is why we've been reluctant to do much media stuff throughout. That money will never really change anything in that respect," he said.
The family said her death had left a hole in their lives but they wanted to focus on positive memories. Her other brother, John Kercher, said: "Everyone in this room associates Meredith with a tragic event but we would prefer not to remember her in that way. We would like to concentrate on the 21 years that we had with her."
The family said they expected an appeal against the guilty verdicts but were satisfied with the prosecution's case.
The verdict was announced last night. Knox came into the courtroom weeping and shaking. She appeared not to react immediately as the sentences were read out, but then broke down and buried herself in the shoulder of her senior lawyer, Luciano Ghirga. She was led from the court by police and her sobbing could be heard from the corridor that leads away from the vaulted underground court in which the trial was heard.
Her younger sister, Deanna, 20, wept. Sollecito, who had been less composed than his former girlfriend during the trial, sat rigidly, staring ahead as the colour drained from his face. His stepmother was seized by a panic attack and appeared to be hyperventilating.
Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison while Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. Knox was found guilty of several other offences including criminal slander for pointing the finger of guilt at Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, 38, who ran a local bar. He later proved to have an alibi and was released after initially being arrested in connection with the murder.
The verdict put an end, though perhaps only a temporary one, to a case that has baffled and divided amateur detectives on both sides of the Atlantic and turned a probing light on the Italian legal system. Knox, a student at the University of Washington, and her boyfriend were sent for trial despite the fact that a third person had been convicted of the killing before their indictment. Rudy Guede, a drifter born in Ivory Coast, was sentenced to 30 years last year after a fast-track trial. He is appealing against his conviction.
Amanda Knox's family left in tears and fought their way through the dense crowd outside the courtroom. The parents of the American student said in a statement that they would immediately begin the process of appealing against her guilty verdict. Curt Knox and Edda Mellas said: "Amanda is innocent and we will continue to fight for her freedom. We are extremely disappointed in the verdict rendered ... against our daughter.
"While we always knew this was a possibility, we find it difficult to accept this verdict when we know that she is innocent, and that the prosecution has failed to explain why there is no evidence of Amanda in the room where Meredith was so horribly and tragically murdered."
Knox's parents criticised the media for the way their daughter had been portrayed, alleging this swayed the judges and jurors.
They said in their statement: "It appears clear to us that the attacks on Amanda's character in much of the media and by the prosecution had a significant impact on the judges and jurors and apparently overshadowed the lack of evidence in the prosecution's case against her."
Speaking to American network ABC, Curt Knox said: "This is just a failure of the Italian judicial system and, literally, it is a failure for the city of Perugia and the community around it, as well as Italy as a whole."
He described his reaction to the guilty verdict as "anger and just disbelief at how a judicial system could even come up with a verdict like this. It's beyond me."
Knox's sister Deanna said: "I feel like this trial has failed their own system. This is completely unjust and I'm in complete shock."
Knox's family visited her in Capanne prison today. Speaking outside the jail, her mother Edda Mellas said: "She got a lot of support when she got back to the jail. Everybody there, the inmates and the guards, were all taking great care of her. They care a lot."
Knox and Sollecito, a computer science graduate, were caught up in the murder inquiry after investigators became suspicious of their behaviour in the hours and days following the discovery of Kercher's body.
The two former lovers gave contradictory accounts of their movements on the night of the crime when, as they both acknowledged, they had been smoking cannabis. Amanda Knox gave police a statement saying she had been at the flat when Kercher was murdered and had covered her ears to block out her screams. Then she retracted the statement – given at the end of an overnight interrogation without the assistance of a lawyer or interpreter – and it was ruled inadmissible by Italy's highest court.
But by a quirk of the law it was able to be cited repeatedly in court and was even shown this week on a giant screen to the two professional and six lay judges trying the case. That was not the only unusual aspect of a trial during which the leading counsel for the prosecution, Giuliano Mignini, was also being tried for abusing his powers in another case.
Mignini, who initially suggested Kercher might have died in an occult rite, later argued that Knox had killed her because she had come to hate her British flatmate. The judges appeared to accept that explanation and the prosecution's reconstruction of the killing, which also changed during the trial.
The prosecution's version had Sollecito taunting Kercher with one knife while Knox plunged another into her throat. Mignini suggested it was the culmination of a violent game forced on the British student in which she was sexually assaulted by Guede.
The final days of the trial saw media sentiment in Italy shift in favour of the defendants as their lawyers kept up an offensive on the forensic evidence linking them to the crime.
On Thursday, Knox and her former boyfriend both made emotional appeals to the judges to free them. The US student and the young Italian had spent more than two years in jail waiting to know their fate. Trials in Italy proceed at a leisurely pace of two hearings a week at most. Theirs took eight months.
'Dangerous, deceitful' attempts to derail Copenhagen summit condemned
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Gordon Brown tonight led a chorus of condemnation against "flat-earth" climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit by casting doubt on the evidence for global warming.
Sceptics in the UK and the US have moved to capitalise on a series of hacked emails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia, claiming they show attempts to hide information that does not support the case for human activity causing rising temperatures.
On the eve of the Copenhagen summit, Saudi Arabia and Republican members of the US Congress have used the emails to claim the need for urgent action to cut carbon emissions has been undermined.
But tonight the prime minister, his environment secretary, Ed Miliband, and Ed Markey, the man who co-authored the US climate change bill, joined forces to condemn the sceptics.
"With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics," Brown told the Guardian. "We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal."
According to the government adviser Sir Nicholas Stern, 10bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions must be taken out of the atmosphere by 2020. So far agreement is in place for only half of that amount.
Ed Miliband gave his most damning assessment of the sceptics yet, describing them as "dangerous and deceitful".
He said: "The approach of the climate saboteurs is to misuse data and mislead people. The sceptics are playing politics with science in a dangerous and deceitful manner. There is no easy way out of tackling climate change despite what they would have us believe. The evidence is clear and the time we have to act is short. To abandon this process now would lead to misery and catastrophe for millions."
Markey warned against allowing America's political agenda to be hijacked by the email affair. "We can no longer allow our climate and energy policy to be hijacked by the government of Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil, and the defenders of the fossil fuel status quo," he said.
Even if an investigation into the university emails were to show evidence of wrongdoing, scientists and politicians say there is an overwhelming body of evidence that humans are causing climate change. However, the hacking affair is putting new obstacles in the way of getting a bill past Congress – seen as a crucial precondition for a binding climate change treaty.
The summit, which begins on Monday, aims to seal a global deal to control greenhouse gas emissions, but all of the significant issues remain to be resolved. There is still no agreement between developing nations and the richer countries over the carbon cuts required and the funding which must be given to poorer countries to help them cope with global warming.
China and India, whose economies are growing rapidly, must still agree a deal on curbing their emissions while being able to lift billions of people out of poverty.
The concern for some of those attempting to drive through a global deal is that the sceptics will delay critical decisions by casting doubt over the science at a time when momentum has been gathering towards a historic agreement. "The sceptics have clearly seized upon this as an incident that they can use to their own ends in trying to disrupt the Copenhagen agreements," said Bob Watson, Defra chief scientist and former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "If this slows down an international agreement to significantly reduce greenhouse gases, it will mean we're committed to an even larger temperature change … with adverse consequences on agriculture, water, human security, human health and biodiversity."
Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, said it would be disastrous for the planet if sceptics were able to undermine support for a climate change deal. "Ideological dinosaurs, whether in Saudi Arabia or in the Conservative party, who deny climate change must not be allowed to hide behind some leaked correspondence to support their outdated theories," Clegg said.
A number of prominent Conservatives, including former chancellor Lord Lawson and former Cameron frontbencher David Davis, have pounced on the email furore. But tonight the shadow climate change secretary, Greg Clark, made clear the party line remains that climate change is a serious man-made threat. "Research into climate change has involved thousands of different scientists, pursuing many separate lines of independent inquiry over many years. The case for a global deal is still strong and in many aspects, such as the daily destruction of the Earth's rainforests, desperately urgent," he said.
Additional reporting by Alok Jha and Andrew Sparrow
Europe and US should also be responsible for millions who will be displaced by climate change, says Abul Maal Abdul Muhith
Up to 20 million Bangladeshis may be forced to leave the country in the next 40 years because of climate change, one of the country's most senior politicians has said. Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, Bangladesh's finance minister, called on Britain and other wealthy countries to accept millions of displaced people.
In a clear signal to the US and Europe that developing countries are not prepared to accept a weak deal at next week's Copenhagen climate summit, Abdul Muhith said Bangladesh wanted hosts for managed migration as people began to abandon flooded and storm-damaged coastal areas.
"Twenty million people could be displaced [in Bangladesh] by the middle of the century," Abdul Muhith told the Guardian. "We are asking all our development partners to honour the natural right of persons to migrate. We can't accommodate all these people – this is already the densest [populated] country in the world," he said.
He called on the UN to redefine international law to give climate refugees the same protection as people fleeing political repression. "The convention on refugees could be revised to protect people. It's been through other revisions, so this should be possible," he said.
Tens of thousands of people in Bangladesh and other low-lying areas of Asia are leaving their communities as their homes and land become inundated. But this is the first time that a senior politician from a developing country has openly proposed that those countries considered responsible for climate change should take physical responsibility for the refugees created.
Bangladesh, India, and many small island states such as the Maldives face having to relocate large populations over the next 50 years as sea levels rise up to one metre. This would have profound effects on the 1.5 billion people who presently live in coastal areas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that assesses the impact of climate change, has said there could be 200 million climate change migrants by 2050.
There is mounting evidence in India and Bangladesh and other low-lying countries that sea levels are rising faster than the global average of 1.2mm a year. Islands and coastal communities in the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal have recorded rises of up to 5mm a year. In Bangladesh hundreds of coastal villagers are forced to drink salty water as tides continue to rise and the sea intrudes on fresh water aquifers.
Abdul Muhith said managed migration could be positive for Bangladesh and the west: "We can help in the sense of giving the migrants some training, making them fit for existence in some other country.
Managed migration is always better – we can then send people who can attune to life more easily." But he added, in another warning before Copenhagen where money will be a critical issue, that current levels of aid were inadequate. "Total aid in Bangladesh today is less than 2% of GDP. It is almost the same in China and in India. So we, the most populated, least developed country, gets peanuts. This inequity is terribly intolerable."
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said the Bangladeshi migration proposal should be taken seriously. "This is clearly a warning signal from Bangladesh and similar countries to the developed countries. And I think it has to be taken very seriously. If you accept that those countries that have really not been responsible for causing the problem, and have a legitimate basis for help from the developed countries, then one form of help would certainly be facilitation of immigration from these countries to the developed world," he said.
"If you had 30 or 40 million migrating to other parts of the world, that's a sizable problem for which we have to prepare. And if it requires changes to immigration laws and facilitating people settling down and working in the developed countries, then I suppose this will require legislative action in the developed world," he said.
Douglas Alexander, the international development secretary, said: "As the largest international donor to Bangladesh, Britain has been urging the international community to provide extra money for climate change adaptation." But Jean-Francois Durieux, who is in charge of climate migration at the UN refugee agency, cautioned against reworking the UN convention on refugees.
"The risk of mass migration needs to be managed. It's absolutely legitimate for Bangladesh and the Maldives to make a lot of noise about the very real risk of climate migration – they hope it will make us come to their rescue. But reopening the 1951 convention would certainly result in a tightening of its protections."
He said there was a danger of a backlash in rich countries. "The climate in Europe, North America and Australia is not conducive to a relaxed debate about increasing migration. There is a worry doors will shut if we start that discussion," he said.
There is extreme sensitivity about adapting the UN convention on refugees. A UNHCR report in August warned: "In the current political environment, it could result in a lowering of protection standards for refugees and even undermine the international refugee protection regime altogether."
Tory leader says that if elected he would base any withdrawal of troops on success rather than 'artificial timelines'
The number of British troops in Afghanistan is unlikely to fall if the Conservatives are elected next year, David Cameron has said.
On a visit to the country, the Tory leader said he did not want to raise "false hopes" that there would be a reduction in troop numbers next year, even if Afghan forces took over control of districts in Helmand province. Troop withdrawals would depend on the success of the transfer of power to Afghan authorities.
Cameron told the BBC: "I don't want us to raise false hopes. I think it's pretty unlikely that you are going to see a reduction in British troop numbers next year.
"But it should be based on success. The key here is, as soon as you can hand over lead responsibility to the Afghans in a district you should do – once it's safe.
"And once you're doing that you can bring down troop numbers in the future, but do it based on success, don't keep talking about artificial timelines."
The prime minister, Gordon Brown, this week announced that a further 500 British troops would be deployed in Afghanistan, increasing Britain's military presence to more than 10,000 personnel. Brown wants an international conference in London in January to set a "clear timetable" for the handover of power.
He has said certain districts in Helmand could be handed over to local Afghan commanders next year, which has raised expectation that British troops could return home.
Cameron said an immediate withdrawal would be a "bad option", but added: "My view is very simple – we can't be here for another eight years."
The Conservative leader said Barack Obama's announcement of 30,000 extra US troops presented a "big opportunity" for success in Afghanistan.
"The door is open, as it were, and we need to go through that door and do everything we can as quickly as we can to make progress and show we can have a successful outcome," he said.
Obama has set July 2011 as the target date for the start of US withdrawals from Afghanistan after the forthcoming surge.
Cameron said British troops were having to cover much more of the population per soldier than the Americans.
"We are spread too thinly," he said. "I want to see the British forces more concentrated in areas where we can make a difference.
"And I think that's a decision we need to make relatively rapidly so that we can have forces in the thickness ... among the people. So we can actually do proper counter-insurgency, make a real difference and be a part of what I hope will be a success."
Cameron is using the trip to promise to double bonuses paid to serving soldiers in Afghanistan and said the payment for a six-month tour of duty would increase to £4,800 if the Conservatives won next year's general election. He addressed British troops at their base in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, and spoke to local people at a market.
He was to meet military leaders and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul, as well as watching Afghan forces train.
Officials say fireworks, not terrorism, to blame for blast in city of Perm
More than 100 people have been killed in an explosion in a Russian nightclub, according to news agency reports. The blast rocked the Lame Horse club in the city of Perm, Russia's sixth largest city, at 11.15pm local time.
The club, situated in the centre of the city, was thought to have been packed with 200 people at the time, said Itar-Tass news agency. Initial reports suggested that 15 people had died, but the death toll rose quickly as bodies were pulled from the building.
Interfax news agency quoted police officials as saying that the explosion was caused by fireworks.
"We are not talking about an act of terrorism in the Perm cafe – people died as a result of an explosion of fireworks," an official from the Russian prosecutor's office told Interfax.
Russian state-run television channel Vesti-24 showed bodies piled on top of each other in the street outside the club. Many more revellers were taken to local hospitals, some seriously injured, reports said.
Perm, near the Ural mountains, has a population of 1.2 million and is about 700 miles east of Moscow.
The tragedy comes just days after Russian investigators blamed terrorism for a devastating train crash in which 26 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
The Nevsky Express was sent hurtling off the rails as it made its way from Moscow to St Petersburg last Friday. The luxury train, carrying 661 passengers, derailed close to the village of Uglovka, 200 miles north of Moscow.
The head of Russia's railways, Vladimir Yakunin, said he believed an "unidentified device" had exploded under the train, derailing three carriages.
Yakunin said the incident was "analogous" to another derailment on the same line three years ago, also involving the Nevsky Express, in which 19 people were injured.
Russian prosecutors blamed the earlier derailment on Chechen extremists, who have been fighting an on-off war against the Russian state for two decades.
Fighters have carried out numerous attacks in recent months, including suicide bombings, in an apparent attempt to establish an Islamist caliphate in the north Caucasus region. There are daily attacks on security forces in the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.
Russia has been hit by a number of major terrorist attacks since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including the seizures by Chechen extremists of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow in October 2002 and the taking of more than 1,000 hostages at Beslan's School Number One in September 2004.
'Super-regulator' CQC confirms 'voluntary' departure of its chairwoman after heavy criticism over substandard care in Basildon
The head of the NHS's watchdog in England has unexpectedly quit, days after it was heavily criticised over how it monitors the quality of patient care in hospitals.
The Care Quality Commission said last night that Lady Barbara Young's decision to resign as chairwoman was voluntary and was conveyed to the health secretary, Andy Burnham, on 26 November "after careful prior reflection".
However the Health Service Journal reported on its website that she had resigned after a "difficult" meeting with Burnham that same day, when it had emerged investigators were being sent into Basildon hospital in Essex because dozens of patients are thought to have died due to inadequate care.
The month before, the commission had rated the quality of care at the hospital as "good" — which led to a major row about the credibility and trustworthiness of the regulator's rankings.
However, Young said last night: "Having overseen the major task of creating a single regulator for health and social care and pointed it in the right direction, I have decided it will be for others to take it forward." And a friend said: "She jumped. It's got nothing to do with Basildon. She just decided that she didn't want to do it."
Sources at the Department of Health added: "This was completely her own decision. There's no ill-feeling or secret story behind this."
The timing of Young's departure follows huge controversy over whether the commission is doing enough for patient care at the 152 NHS hospital trusts across England. The Conservatives have pledged an overhaul of how it assesses performance if they are elected, including less reliance on "tickbox" methods of self-assessment and more unannounced inspections.
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: "This is a massive blow to the government. To lose the chair of its new flagship health regulator just months after it was created is extraordinary. We need clarity about why this has happened, because few people will accept that she has decided to walk away so calmly."
Young became the commission's first chairman when it became operational in April, being called the "super-regulator" because it merged three previous watchdogs, the Healthcare Commission, Commission for Social Care Inspection, and Disability Rights Commission.
Young was previously chief executive of the Environment Agency. She has also been chairman of English Nature, the BBC's vice-chairman, and the RSPB's chief executive, and is involved in the Institute for Public Policy Research. She became a Labour peer in 1997 as Baroness Young of Old Scone, but later became a "non-affiliated" member of the House of Lords.
Burnham thanked Young for helping to establish the commission, saying that under her direction it "has already made a strong impact in putting patients and users of social care services at the heart of its mission to ensure the highest standards of care and patient safety. She has set the organisation on a clear path for the future and I am grateful to her for all her hard work and dedication."
She will be replaced from 1 January by her deputy, Dame Jo Williams, as acting chairman until a replacement is found. "[The] board were sad to hear that Barbara has decided to move on, both on a professional and personal level", said Williams. "Barbara has played a major role in forging strategy for the next five years."
Corus is one of the biggest employers on Teesside and unions said today that the closure would have a devastating impact
Corus, Europe's second largest steelmaker, announced this morning that it would mothball operations at a Teesside factory with the loss of 1,700 jobs.
Operations at Redcar, Lackenby and South Bank will be closed by the end of January with the company blaming the loss of its main customer. The company said 1,700 jobs would be lost – about 300 fewer than feared in May when Corus first warned the plant could close.
Unions said the closure would have a "devastating" effect on the region. The business secretary, Lord Mandelson, said it was "very disappointing" that Corus had not been able to find a new buyer but promised help for workers finding new jobs in an area blighted by high unemployment.
Corus blamed the failure of four international slab buyers to fulfil their obligations under a 10-year contract signed in 2004. The firm pursued legal action against the consortium but conceded it would take a "considerable time" to resolve.
The company, which is owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata, intends to keep open a number of operations, including the Redcar Wharf, Redcar coke ovens and some of the power-generating capacity.
Kirby Adams, chief executive of Corus, who broke the news to workers at a meeting at the site this morning, said: "We are acutely aware that this will be devastating news for our employees, our contractors, their families and the local community. We extend our sincere gratitude to all of them, as well as to the management team and the trade unions on Teesside, who have all worked night and day to try and avoid this outcome."
The steel industry has suffered across the world during the recession with Corus estimating today that there were 300m tonnes of excess capacity. More than 2,000 UK steel workers have already lost their jobs. In June Corus said a further 2,000 were at risk across the country.
The Redcar plant lost £130m between April and September, Adams said, making it unsustainable without new customers. The cost of mothballing the plant and redundancy payments will be £80m.
'Devastating news'
Corus is one of the biggest employers on Teesside and unions said the closure would have a painful impact on the area.
Keith Hazlewood, national officer of the GMB union, said: "This is devastating news for Teesside. The union will be seeking urgent talks with Corus and we will also want to talk to the government about maintaining support for our vital manufacturing industries.
At least 40 killed in suicide attack during Friday prayers at mosque near Pakistan's army headquarters
Suicide attackers have swarmed through a Pakistani mosque frequented by senior army officers, shooting randomly, killing worshippers at close range and exploding bombs in a frenzied attack that killed at least 40 people.
The bloody assault jolted even violence-weary Pakistanis because it occurred during Friday prayers in Rawalpindi, the country's most heavily guarded city. The army confirmed two serving generals and four other officers were among the dead.
At least four gunmen stormed into the mosque on Parade Lane, a five-minute drive from army headquarters, firing guns and throwing grenades at a crowd of at least 150 men, women and children.
The crowd scattered for cover but the militants singled out some for murder in cold blood, according to witnesses. "They took the people, got hold of their hair and shot them," a retired officer who survived the attack told a local television station.
Two of the attackers blew themselves up inside the mosque, destroying part of the building, while another two kept firing outside. They died in an hour-long exchange of fire with soldiers and police who surrounded the building.
"Their objective was to kill and be killed," said the retired officer. "From the terrorists' point of view it's a very successful raid. One could not imagine they would enter such a high-profile target."
Afterwards soldiers combed the area around the mosque, which is surrounded by army housing, and sealed it off from the media. Survivors said the mosque was covered in blood.
"It was terrible. We were helpless and hopeless," one man who cowered in a corner for 20 minutes told reporters.
City officials said at least 40 people were killed and more than 80 injured. Interior minister Rehman Malik said 10 children were among the dead.
"I believe they are not just the enemy of Islam but also of the country. They want to finish the upcoming generation," he said.
The attack followed a brief lull in a wave of attacks that started two months ago, on the eve of an army drive into the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan.
More than 400 Pakistanis have died since early October in attacks on UN offices, security installations and crowded bazaars. The capital, Islamabad, increasingly resembles cities such as Kabul, with rising sandbagged walls, checkpoint-clogged streets and shopping areas bereft of foreigners and, increasingly, Pakistanis.
Nearby Rawalpindi has suffered even more attacks, including a 22-hour siege of the army headquarters in early October that left 23 people dead and badly embarrassed the military.
The South Waziristan operation has gone better than many expected – the army now controls most of the main routes through the mountainous area while incurring fewer casualties than feared.
But the Taliban leadership, headed by Hakimulluah Mehsud, remains at large, and this latest attack demonstrates it is capable of inflicting painful blows at the heart of Pakistan's security complex.
The violence also feeds anti-Americanism. After the bombing some Rawalpindi residents blamed the US presence in Afghanistan for fuelling militancy.
The strain is showing among army personnel, who have never suffered such targeted violence inside Pakistan. In a live television interview Brigadier Shaukat Qadir described the militants as "beasts in human clothing".
"Everyone is agreed to we have to get rid of these damn bastards," he said.
Guide to Understanding Women written in 1986 advises on 'how to pick up virgins' and has choice lines including 'let's name your breasts'
If you want to pull a drunk girl, offer to take her home and name her breasts. To get her to leave after sex, suggest she might be accidentally infected with Aids.
The author of these and other gems of relationship advice was today revealed to be the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, as it emerged that as a young man, he wrote a personal guide to luring women into bed.
The John Bercow Guide to Understanding Women was written in 1986, when he was a 23-year-old Tory councillor in Lambeth, south London. It was published in a radical magazine for young Tories called Armageddon. Offering his own insights into what women truly want, it included advice on "how to pick up virgins" and "how to pick up refined girls". Women, he wrote, "will settle for anything that breathes and has a credit card". Picking up "drunk girls" could be done by using the line: "Maybe we could go back to your place and name your breasts." To get rid of a girl say: "Don't move, I have just broken a test tube filled with the Aids virus."
News of the young Bercow's sexual expertise came a day after the Speaker's wife, Sally, revealed her history as a "party girl". In the Evening Standard she said: "It was all very ladette – work hard, play hard." Sally Bercow, who first dated her husband when they belonged to the Oxford University Conservative Association in the 1980s, is standing for Labour in the local elections in Westminster next May. She said she gave the interview as "this has all got to come out". Her husband had mellowed since his days as a "right-wing headbanger", she said.
A spokesman for the Speaker said: "This article … in no way reflects the Speaker's views today."
• Connoisseurs angry at New York authenticators
• Doubts surround 10 identical Red Portraits
Is this Warhol a fake, or is it worth $2m? Tate Modern's Nicholas Serota says he believes the deadpan self-portrait on a red background, made in 1965, is perfectly genuine.
Nevertheless, he recently declined to have it bought with taxpayers' money, because of claims convulsing the art world that the picture may not actually be the work of one of the 20th century's most influential artists.
The silk-screen print was to have been offered to the Tate by the wealthy art dealer Anthony d'Offay, who has now been forced to withdraw it.
Nor is D'Offay the only British-based connoisseur to be stuck with an unsaleable Warhol. The famous set of 10 identical so-called Red Portraits have all had their authenticity questioned.
Invective is being hurled back and forth across the Atlantic as a result. David Mearns, a Sussex businessman and underwater explorer, accuses the New York body that pronounces on Warhol authentications of "conspiring to remove" all the red portraits from the market.
Mearns, whose firm Blue Water Recoveries discovered the sunken remains of the second world war British battleship HMS Hood, says his antique dealer father bought one of the same Warhols 30 years ago and his family has no immediate interest in selling.
But the authentication board contacted him "out of the blue", inviting him to submit it for an opinion.
It transpires, he claims, that its real intention was to destroy the picture's value by stamping "Denied" on the back, in a "premeditated and underhanded ploy".
A third victim is American film producer Joe Simon, who lives in London. Simon launched a lawsuit in 2007 after his hopes were dashed of selling his Warhol portrait for $2m. The board also stamped it "Denied".
Simon says he bought the print in 1989 for $195,000: "Most of my friends and family bought a house, I bought a Warhol. I loved the work – I had known Andy quite well when I was a kid."
He alleges in his US lawsuit that the authentication board, and the linked Warhol Foundation, which inherited a large cache of Warhols and sells them off periodically, may have a conflict of interest. The foundation's income depends on the prices it receives and its appointed dealer, Vincent Fremont, receives commission on the sales.
These bitter claims were backed in last month's New York Review of Books by the British art critic Richard Dorment. Dorment said the board's position – that prints signed, dedicated and dated by Warhol himself were not his work – was "sublime idiocy".
He suggested that Joel Wachs, the board president, should resign for fighting the Simons lawsuit, "wasting millions of dollars attempting to shore up the credibility of his scandal-ridden board".
Wachs retaliated with equal vehemence this week. He claimed to the Guardian: "Mearns's views are a damaging distortion of the truth and are motivated by his own economic self-interests."
He added that Mearns's picture "was one in a series of works that the board determined are not the work of Andy Warhol … the board performs a critical role in preserving the Warhol legacy, and protecting buyers and sellers, by preventing inauthentic works from entering the market." It was "absurd" to suggest a conflict of interest, he said.
The foundation was a charitable organisation which donated many Warhol works and sold others at substantial discounts. "The vast majority of the proceeds from its sales are used to fund grants for the visual arts. The foundation has given away some $200m."
In a novel twist, he accused Dorment and Simon of pressing the board on another occasion to authenticate an "obviously forged" piece. "Mr Dorment sent emails to board members advocating that the work should be deemed an authentic Warhol, despite the fact that the collage contained dollar bills that were signed by the US treasury after Andy Warhol had died," he said.
Dorment calls this "an attempted smear".
One cause of the present rancour is that Warhol often deliberately blurred the lines between individual authorship and mechanical reproduction, so much so that some critics find the idea of a "fake" or "genuine" Warhol to be almost meaningless. He famously christened his studios the Factory.
The red portraits were made from a previously-used acetate transparency, based on an automatic photobooth picture. Warhol gave the transparency to an associate, who had an outside firm run off the red silk-screen prints. Warhol is said to have later approved them.
The authentication row has been spurred on by the huge global prices paid for contemporary art before the 2008 banking collapse.
Warhol's Green Car Crash sold in New York in May 2007 for $72m, with Lemon Marilyn going for $28m on the same day.
Despite D'Offay losing out on the failure of the Tate to buy his Warhol self-portrait last year, he has received millions from sales of art works to public galleries.
The Tate and the National Gallery of Scotland jointly agreed in early 2008 to buy the bulk of the rest of his stock of works by Beuys, Koons, Mapplethorpe, Damien Hirst and some 230 other Warhols for a total equivalent to £41.5m, all but £1m of it publicly financed.
D'Offay cleared £26.5m from that sale after tax, and his company accounts for that year show that he immediately paid himself out a dividend from his Mayfair gallery's profits, which totalled more than £35m.
The Hollywood star refused to come out of his trailer, the leading lady's hair melted and the actor hired to play the joy- rider couldn't drive
Brixton-born City trader Robert Fucilla had succeeded in everything he had put his hand to, from selling oil to backing British hip-hop acts, and believed his Italian ancestry gave him a shot at being a British Al Pacino. Of course, millions dream of breaking into the movies, but what underpinned Fucilla's ambition, friends and workmates agree, what made him stand out from every other fantasist and wannabe, was self-belief and a monumental ego.
Too impatient to train as an actor, and having briefly tried the traditional route of castings and pumping connections, Fucilla decided to buy his way in. At first, this approach proved remarkably successful. Somehow, the novice film-maker secured more than £1m from investors, assembled a solid, homegrown cast that included Phil Davis, Paul Kaye and Steven Berkoff, and in Michael Madsen – the psychopathic Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs – he even had a bona fide Hollywood name. Having slated himself as executive producer, found his story (a young thug's brutal coming of age) and recruited a reputable ad director to shoot it, all that remained was for Fucilla to cast himself. What better way to be spotted than in a tightly managed, low-budget Brit movie supported by an ensemble of proven talent?
The story of Fucilla's unlikely foray into the film business begins in 1998, with a young man making a radical decision. Bored with his architecture degree at the University of East London, 21-year-old Fucilla jacked it in and got on a plane to LA. "I just woke up one morning and wanted to be something else," he says. "What was I waiting for?" Blagging a sofa in a friend's apartment, he hired an agent and sent headshots of himself to casting agencies while paying his way by waiting tables. After two years, in which the closest he came to a co-starring role was serving breakfast to Robert De Niro ("I got as far as joking that we had the same first name"), Fucilla retreated from LA, determined to find another entrée.
Back in London, he scored a job as a runner for Nic Auerbach, a seasoned commercials director. Auerbach, too, had always wanted to get into movies, and on any given night could be seen around Soho in his Bentley or Range Rover with the personalised plates MOVIES and FILMS. In Fucilla, he saw a younger version of himself. "Rob was a young, brash, brazen guy who had that balance of cockiness and chutzpah. We both had towering egos." They were both also sensitive to ageing in an industry that prizes youthfulness – Auerbach had been telling people he was 30 for so many years that they referred to it as his "screen age". For a few months they worked together on an advertising campaign for Thomson holidays, but that was not Fucilla's idea of stardom. Soon after, they went their separate ways, although Auerbach "half expected to see Rob again".
By 2006, Fucilla was transformed: he had a diamond ring bigger than a peach pit on his finger, a Porsche in the driveway of his large north London house. He had done well in the City. "You could say I was a millionaire before I was 30." But he still harboured aspirations towards a more glamorous career. Now that he had the cash, he might as well use it to finance a film. And after the two lost years in LA, he was in no mood to wait for agents to come calling. "Why wait to be cast and all of that palaver when I could take a short cut?" He went back to Auerbach and said he could raise the money for him to direct his first feature.
At first Auberbach thought he was bluffing – "This business is full of people talking up their money when the cash is a long way from the bank" – but Fucilla persisted until, in early 2007, he gave in and the two began discussing ideas. Auerbach had been toying with one pitch for some time. The story of a London joyrider who falls in with some criminal heavyweights, it featured gangsters, brasses, geezers, Beemers and a smattering of violence. A script was commissioned from unknown writer Tim Cunningham and, having had feedback from readers and studios, it was chosen as the vehicle for Fucilla's film debut. Its name, aptly enough, was The Big I Am.
Almost immediately, however, producer and director began pulling in different directions. "I saw our film as a classic English gangster movie," Fucilla says. "The investors were happy because we thought it was more likely to make everyone some money."
Auerbach, meanwhile, "had no intention of making another English gangster movie. For me, it was a coming-of-age drama about a young guy facing hard choices in order to become a man."
Then there was Fucilla's on-screen role. "As exec producer, and having helped raise the money, I wanted a strong part to show my ability," he says. "Is that unreasonable? It was my film."
Auerbach, however, saw Fucilla's part as "top of the non-stars, something credible but not too large, because no actors of worth would agree to be in a vanity project, and I didn't want to shoot one."
Fucilla rages at the thought of this. "All I wanted was a chance to show off my acting," he says.
The friction between the two men was immediately apparent to David Ball, the veteran British producer Auerbach approached to pull the project together. He remembers thinking the set-up was odd from the start. "I was told Robert Fucilla used to be Nic's assistant. We had to give him a part because he was putting up the money. I said, 'Fine. We have loads of thugs – he can be a thug. He's only 5ft 9in with a 39-inch chest, and he doesn't exactly frighten me, but if that's what it takes, so be it." Ball was more concerned when he saw the script: "This was Guinness Book Of Records stuff, a BMW going up on two wheels performed by a driver of the capabilities of the Stig." When Ball asked about financing, Auerbach told him the budget was just over £1m, which to Ball's mind would barely cover the stunts.
Ball claims that he repeatedly asked Auerbach to arrange a meeting with Fucilla to discuss the budget shortfall, but by this time Auerbach was swept up in casting. Vincent Regan, an Irish actor who starred alongside Brad Pitt in the 2004 Hollywood epic Troy, was put forward. Auerbach was ecstatic: "I said, 'Sign him now, he's like Michael Caine at the beginning of his career. Get him before the price goes up.'" Regan accepted the role of Barber, a vicious gang lord. Soon Phil Davis, Paul Kaye and MC Harvey of So Solid Crew were on board, too, along with Beatrice Rosen, who is Batman's Bolshoi ballerina connection in The Dark Knight and one of the leads in this winter's blockbuster 2012.
In early 2007, Auerbach flew to the US in an attempt to hook self-styled Hollywood "bad ass" Michael Madsen. They met at the Chateau Marmont hotel, where Madsen had been living on and off with his two rottweilers. The role Auerbach had in mind for him was Martell, a washed-up casino owner. The debutant director returned triumphant, but casting Madsen added another layer of difficulty. The actor liked Harley-Davidsons, guns and writing poetry on his own skin. What he did not like was being bossed. "I knew things could go wrong with Madsen," Auerbach admits, but he was excited, too, about the film's growing momentum. "Madsen was to wear silver shoes, Berkoff an aqua blue latex suit. All the stylistic things were coming off." Finally, Auerbach found his lead – young British actor Leo Gregory would play Skinner, a car thief who steals the wrong vehicle only to find Barber (Vincent Regan) tied up in the boot. All spent up by now, Auerbach and Fucilla cast friends in smaller roles, with Fucilla himself taking on the part of Floyd, a small-time mobster eager to move up a division.
Ball recruited his crew and finally met some of the financial backers, including Fucilla and Andrew Frangos, another City trader. The producer says he immediately warned them about costs: "I told them this film felt like £3m to me. No one was listening." Fucilla recalls the meeting somewhat differently: "Ball said, 'Come to Wales, everything is cheap here and you'll get hundreds of thousands back in grants and your tax credit.' He said he could do it for the agreed price."
The regional grants never materialised, but Ball blamed Auerbach for the rising costs. "We could have saved money in some places, but for that you need a very flexible director, and Nic wasn't." Particularly irksome was Auerbach's method approach to directing, especially when it came to coaching Gregory. "I took Leo on a tour of London's finest and filthiest nightspots," Auerbach concedes. "I hired bodyguards to make him feel he was in the business." He also got menacing figures to call Gregory round the clock demanding money, to simulate his character's experience.
Shooting was just days off when Gregory, the would-be joyrider, confessed that he could not drive. Visualising all the car chases that could not now be shot, Auerbach went ballistic – and then sent him off for driving lessons. Worse, when the cameras did finally start rolling in April 2008, a stunt backfired, smashing Gregory's nose in three places. Ball was dismayed: "He was supposed to be in every scene and now he was hospitalised. We virtually had to shut down." Gregory was rushed to a private hospital in London for emergency treatment. Sets were held over. Hired equipment sat idle. Actors were paid for doing nothing. "What is Leo's face going to cost us?" Fucilla wondered as two weeks went by and the bills mounted.
From the wings, veterans such as Phil Davis looked on with increasing foreboding. The Big I Am was a curious mix. "The first 20 minutes were amusing in a Tarantino-esque way," he says. "Then there was a darker element when all these prostitutes arrived from eastern Europe, gangsters carved in half with Samurai swords... But I was just there to play my character and go home at the end of it."
When filming restarted, however, Davis was pleasantly surprised by the scale of Auerbach's ambition. "We were shooting on film, not digital. We had two cameras running. We had a major Hollywood star. It felt like a genuine, pukka movie." Even so, he still had the odd misgiving. "Once or twice there were some folks who were high five-ing each other and talking about going to Hollywood, and here we were on the outskirts of Cardiff doing this low-budget gangster movie... It all seemed a bit daft and inappropriate."
Behind the swagger, Fucilla was wondering what he had got himself into. "I was now being told it was going to cost upwards of £1.6m, perhaps more. I told them to keep it tight. I tried to get on with my day job." Back in the City, the global financial crisis was threatening to cripple his business. "It was all going mad in the office – 30 guys on the trading floor crying like children." At home, his wife was expecting their second child in a difficult pregnancy. "After I finished my 12-hour day in the City at 6pm, I had to drive two hours to Cardiff and fight my corner on set before driving back to London in the early hours."
Then Fucilla learned that filming was to stop again, so Auerbach could take the cast to the Cannes film festival. He even proposed shipping over his Bentley and Range Rover so that they looked the part. "They were having a laugh," says Fucilla. "We still had no film in the bag, so why play at movie moguls? We had no money."
Auerbach was adamant, however. "What Rob could not understand was that Cannes is the one place where the entire film world comes together. We had to be there." Auerbach won that battle, but Fucilla had the last word, sending them by easyJet.
Filming restarted three days after the festival, and by the end of May Auerbach was delighted with the rushes. Then, one morning, he heard screaming coming from Beatrice Rosen's trailer. Ball heard it, too. They ran towards the noise. Inside, Rosen's hair appeared to be on fire. Ball stood at the door, transfixed. "Her hair was shrivelling up and vanishing before my eyes. We were agog." Fucilla got a call at his desk in the City. Auerbach explained how a shampoo had reacted badly with Rosen's hair extensions, leaving him with no choice but to send her, sobbing, to a specialist hairdresser in Knightsbridge. "Do they not have hairdressers in Cardiff?" Fucilla raged into the phone. "It's not fucking Zimbabwe." This led to another costly delay to filming, and with the budget now rising to £1.8m-plus, Fucilla was running out of cash.
For the first time, he decided to scrutinise The Big I Am's escalating expenses. "I talked to one of the cast drivers and found out people were staying in penthouses and lovely hotel rooms. They took the piss out of me so badly." Days later, he found out that some in the cast and crew had also been hiring limos to ferry them from Cardiff to London and back at £1,000 a time.
Incensed, Fucilla drove to Cardiff to bang heads together, and on arrival discovered that a new set had been built on an old SAS training base. He was staggered: "This was a low-budget film and they had constructed an entire nightclub to film one scene. We could have bought a real nightclub and gone out in it every night this year for the amount they had spent." The film was already £700,000 over budget and everything was piling on top of him. "My wife was suffering. My business was struggling. I was arguing with everyone on set. I hated them all and felt I was on the verge of a breakdown. One day David Ball said to me, 'Why don't you sell your house?' I felt as if I was being bled. I wanted to sue everyone."
Then Michael Madsen arrived from LA. Wearing a bandana and full of unorthodox demands – such as insisting all costume department mannequins be turned to the wall lest he be spooked by the wigs – he was at first charming. But as the days went on, he became "a handful", Ball says.
Auerbach was feeling the pressure, too. "By now I was plate-spinning. Getting up and thinking, OK, run towards that plate. And then it's Michael calling. 'OK. I'll be with you in 30 minutes, Michael. What do you mean you have not gone to bed yet? You should be getting up now.' Spin another plate. 'Phil Davis? Phil's not having a good time in the rain.' Spin his plate. Then suddenly I was in Michael's trailer and he was lying on the floor saying, 'Nic, you're a fucking dictator. Quentin never makes me do it like this.'"
Everything came to a head on Madsen's big day shooting in the exorbitant, all-white nightclub set. "There were five cameras, cranes, 300 extras," Ball says. "It was a £100,000 day and had been planned to the nth degree. Planned. Planned. Planned." Fucilla and Frangos drove down from London to witness their star turn, but Madsen did not show up. Ball was apoplectic. He tracked the star down to his hotel room, but he wouldn't come out. "He had suffered some sort of stress attack," Ball says. (Madsen's lawyer claims "the project was unprofessional and my client wanted out".)
Auerbach and Ball concluded that they would have to write Madsen out of the film by killing his character. The only problem was that the superstitious star never died on film. "I eventually broke it to him that if he wanted to be released, he had to die," Auerbach says.
The death scene would take place on the nightclub set, with Davis delivering the fatal shot. "Madsen was kitted out in a white suit and placed behind a white piano," Davis says. "I put two bullets in him, but he wouldn't die. I shot him again. There were these squibs throwing out blood, but he was still staggering about. Then he made up a poem – something about the nature of true love. We were all gobsmacked." They would have to do it again. They cleaned up the set and found a new white suit for Madsen. "I put all my bullets inside him," Davis says, "and he began singing Green, Green Grass Of Home." And even then Madsen rose up from the floor. As Auerbach peered above the camera, he screamed, "Am I fucking dead enough for you now, Nic?"
A few nights later, police were called to the Dorchester hotel in London, where Madsen had gone to recuperate with his wife and five-year-old daughter. Guests had complained about screaming and shouting coming from the star's room, and shortly afterwards he was led out through the ballroom to avoid waiting photographers.
Fucilla read about the Madsen episode in the tabloids, head in hands. In fear of his investors, his alienation only deepened when his car windows were smashed by what he believed to be a disgruntled crew member. "I was stuck in Cardiff with people I could not stand. I wanted to go home. I wanted out."
Ball was having an equally terrible time, accused of incompetence and profligacy by City investors while he claimed to have had to write 37 new schedules to contain the chaos. Davis remembers seeing Ball crisscrossing the set one morning. "There was this shock of white hair struggling along, cursing to himself, 'What else is going to fuck up now?'" He didn't have to wait long for an answer: his production manager was diagnosed with terminal cancer and an assistant had a car crash and ended up in a coma.
With the production now even deeper in the red, Fucilla finally lashed out, sacking Ball and removing his credit. "We were up to almost £2m and nowhere near finished," he says. Auerbach contested the figure, saying the £2m included moneys that would be claimed back from insurers and maintaining he had completed principal photography as the shooting schedule dictated.
Nevertheless, Fucilla instructed Auerbach to stop filming and sat down alone to view the raw footage. What he saw horrified him. "I had been cut out of my own film. I spoke to the script supervisor and she said, 'Basically, Rob, you are a featured extra.' I went mad. I wanted to kill everyone. I was on the rampage." Fucilla regrouped. He got a friend, Jack Landoli, who had also been cast in the film, to write extra scenes for his character. Without telling Auerbach or any of the actors what he was doing, he hired a young director, Arun Kumar, and called back some of the cast to act beside him in the new scenes. Kumar could not believe what greeted him. "It was chaos," he says, "I had seen nothing like it. I agreed to go ahead only if they paid me in cash."
The Big I Am finally wrapped last October, with Fucilla inserted, Zelig-like, throughout. Off screen, controversy continued to dog the film. "We were accused of causing £80,000 damage to an apartment we borrowed," Fucilla says. "Six more writs came in claiming unpaid bills. I settled all of them – another £70,000 down – while everyone told me to draw a line and get out."
The Big I Am appeared to be bankrupt before it had even made it into post-production. But earlier this year, Fucilla relented and called Auerbach. "Film is so intensive, and Rob and I benefited from some time out," the director says. "Despite it all, we both loved this film and wanted it to work." Auerbach agreed to supervise the edit for free, while Fucilla tried to get the film sold. All at once things began to fall into place. Impressed by the cast and direction, distribution companies began vying for rights. There were offers for a UK cinematic release with talk of a US deal to follow.
When the film premieres in April, the boy from Brixton will get his longed-for turn on the red carpet and then watch as his name appears fourth in the opening credits, above Berkoff, Davis and Rosen. Davis is incredulous. "Sometimes a film looks fantastic. Everyone's excited and talking about the genius of this and that, how it's going to be a masterpiece, and it turns out to be poop. And sometimes the opposite is true. It seems to be a complete nightmare, but then it all comes together. And no one would be more pleased than me if that happened to The Big I Am."
Auerbach is now preparing to shoot his second feature, while Fucilla is putting together a new movie deal through which to narrate his life. "We're going to do a story, LA Dream," he says, forgetting the heartache of the last three years. "It's about two British guys who pitch up in LA to become movie stars but don't have a cat in hell's chance."
© Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark, 2009
• British boxer prepares to defend WBA light-welterweight title
• 'He's tough and doesn't give up,' he says of opponent
Amir Khan is relishing the prospect of taking on a fighter "as skilful as me" when he defends his World Boxing Association light-welterweight title against Dmitriy Salita on Saturday. Khan will put his world title on the line in Newcastle for the first time since dethroning the Ukrainian Andreas Kotelnik in the summer.
The 22-year-old from Bolton, an Olympic silver medalist in Athens in 2004, produced a punch-perfect performance to beat the technically sound Kotelnik but he expects a tougher time of it against the unbeaten New Yorker Salita.
"He'll bring out the best in me," said Khan. "I don't get many fighters who are as skilful as me but I think Salita is, he's very skilful. He's got a style which is probably going to make me look good. He's tough and doesn't give up, he's got a big heart in the ring."
Khan has spoken regularly of the need to step up in performance when making the first defence of his WBA title and believes the time he has spent in Los Angeles with his trainer Freddie Roach since the Kotelnik fight will bear fruit at the Metro Radio Arena on Saturday.
"We're improving with every fight and getting better and better," he said. "We learned a lot from the Kotelnik fight about the weaknesses. We've worked on it, improved on it and we're going into this fight not making the mistakes we made against Kotelnik.
"Freddie is a great trainer and he's always working on what I should do and shouldn't do. Everything we do in the gym is done for a reason. I see myself as being a better fighter now than I was when I fought Kotelnik."
On Saturday's undercard Kevin Mitchell meets Breidis Prescott – the Colombian who defeated Khan in September last year – in a World Boxing Organisation lightweight title eliminator.
Meanwhile, the former leading amateur lights James DeGale, Frankie Gavin and Billy Joe Saunders look to close out 2009 by protecting their unbeaten professional records.
• Striker not ready to play against Blackburn
• Benítez may use Spaniard against Fiorentina
Fernando Torres has been left out of Liverpool's squad to face Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park tomorrow. The Spain striker has not played since 4 November after suffering from a hernia and while he returned to full training this week, was not passed fit by Liverpool's medical staff.
The news will come as a blow to Liverpool's manager Rafael Benítez, whose side currently sit a disappointing fifth in the Premier League.
"He has been training with the team – not full training sessions but part of them," said Benítez, who has not ruled out giving the player match practice in next Wednesday's Champions League dead rubber against Fiorentina.
"He's doing well but he will not be ready for this game. He could be ready for Fiorentina. He was doing some exercises with the team and with the football but it's too soon. Maybe next week it will be easier."
Yunnan borders with Laos, Vietnam, Burma and Tibet, making it a melting pot of culinary cultures and China's ultimate foodie region
In Britain, the vast majority of Chinese menus comprise of the Sino equivalent of that least Indian of dishes: chicken tikka masala. Thanks to the thousands of Chinese restaurants serving up tough, battered nuggets of protein with neon orange sauce and MSG-laden, greasy, gloopy stir-fries, the country's reputation as one of the world's culinary greats lies in tatters.
And the stereotypical view of what they eat in China (Dogs? Insects? Chickens' feet?) is even less flattering to the country's 1.2 billion inhabitants. Now, I knew that neither of these are really the way China sustained itself, but equally I had no idea what they eat. So when our Chinese-American friend Alida said she was organising a trip to her homeland with her husband, Doug, a keen historian, my missus and I jumped at the chance to learn a little about authentic, regional Chinese cuisine.
We spent the first 10 days in Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'an, but for me the trip really started when we flew south-west into what is considered one of the most culturally diverse, agriculturally rich and historically renegade areas of the People's Republic: Yunnan, a province roughly the size of France, and one, it turned out, with unique cuisine.
One of the aspects that make Yunnan's food so distinctive is its location: it borders Vietnam and Laos to the south and Burma to the west, while internal frontiers with Tibet, Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi, make it the most culturally diverse area of China – with just 50% Han Chinese compared to 92% elsewhere, and the rest made up of 26 minority nationalities (the rest of China has 56).
By the time we got to Yunnan we were gasping for fresh air. In Beijing we were cosseted by a guide who toed the party line so closely that as we stood in Tiananmen Square, he told us that no one had died there in June 1989, and that we should remember the Beijing Olympics instead. Xi'an was a dirtball of construction dust and pollution smog. A massive subway project was underway across the city, but instead of approaching the task line by line, they were chucking hundreds of thousands of migrant workers at it, and doing the whole thing at once. I could see the logic: one year of hell as opposed to a dozen of purgatory – but it wasn't very people-friendly.
So it was a relief when we arrived in Yunnan – somewhere to breath, politically different and with unique, delicious food.
From the province's capital, Kunming, we flew straight to Lijiang, the small city capital of the Naxi kingdom, a matriarchal society whose ancestors claimed these great valleys, and a Unesco world heritage site. With Jade Dragon Snow Mountain behind us, and a burbling brook in front, we found a restaurant called Muwang Yanyu (near the waterwheel by the main square), which served us a lunch of near perfection.
In China you are presented with three to eight small cold dishes as soon as you sit down – and for me, these little palate zingers were often the highlight of the meal. Here there was roasted, peeled shredded eggplant in fiery chilli oil (testament to the proximity of Sichuan, famed for its love of spice); sautéed rhomboids of emerald greens (similar to cucumber) tossed with lotus blossom – fresh, raw and absolutely delicious. And rice noodles, a speciality of Lijiang, with an eye-watering hidden heat.
Next came a parade of hot dishes that made my heart beat faster: thin escalopes of pork, breadcrumbed, tossed with spring onions, finished with threads of eggy omelette; small pieces of chicken on the bone, cooked in a light stock with taro root and chopped tomato; pork with ginger, chilli and coriander in an obscene amount of lip-smacking oil; stir-fried cauliflower with green and red peppers; fried bobby beans with shitake mushrooms and soy. A couple of soups followed – a congee-ish affair (China's traditional breakfast of gloopy rice soup) and another much better fishy one, milky looking, with floating heads and crunchy radishes. The best dish of the lot was sticky rice and coriander wrapped in lotus leaves with little pieces of pork that resembled south-east Asian cooking: it was the kind of snack you could eat everyday for the rest of your life without getting bored.
This meal was also memorable as my introduction to yak – on a kebab, grilled over coals and sprinkled with chilli. And all of this was accompanied by the local brew – Snow beer, at an impressive 9.5% volume.
The food market at the southern end of town was the most exhilarating I saw in China – and I tried a good few. Eggs of many kinds (ducks, quails, preserved), a massive butchery hall including weird and wonderful offal, all the amazing fresh greens associated with Chinese cuisine, multi-coloured bags of rice, dried mushrooms galore, and even a section for spirulina, an algae dietary supplement. We were there during Yunnan's walnut season – they were the freshest and creamiest I'd ever tasted – and we watched an old man with an ancient piece of machinery that chucked out golf-ball sized warm walnut cakes a dozen a minute. He'd clearly been doing this for most of his life.
Lijiang was pleasing on so many levels: the air was clean, the people happy and colourful, the landscape breathtaking. Nothing brought that home more than the spectacular outdoor show Impressions of Lijiang, which was choreographed by one of China's most famous directors, Zhang Yimou, who also did the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Sitting in light drizzle in an open air theatre, with cloud-topped mountains in the distance, and the story of the Naxi people being told through song and costume by hundreds of locals – many on horseback – was the best surreal moment of the trip.
We caught a bus to Lijiang's outskirts to visit the Black Dragon Pool, a temple-filled nature park and water source since the Ming Dynasty, and we walked along a stream into the old part of town, past street vendors selling corn cakes, persimmons and kebabs to kids on their way home from school. I enjoyed the architecture, much of it restored after the 1996 earthquake, and I loved the fact that the bookshops were confident enough and far enough away from Beijing to sell copies of Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China in Mandarin, which is still officially banned. Lijiang had an aura of happiness and freedom – the first time I'd sensed these two qualities on our trip.
From there we drove northeast, towards Tibet. We crossed the old border, entering an area that was part of Tibet until 1951, when Mao Zedong carved off two corners after invading it, giving one to Sichuan and the other to Yunnan. But the people there remain Tibetan in all but nationality.
We stopped for lunch at the Dali hotel near Qiaotou: our Chinese guide had taken trouble to avoid touristy restaurants, but in this remote spot there was little choice; still, it was a far cry from British Chinese, with the majority of dishes being vegetarian. We ate piles of rosti-like deep-fried spud sticks; stir-fried long beans with batons of chilli; torn oyster mushrooms in ginger and soy; battered, fried aubergines with tomatoes; protein in the form of cold pig's liver and a beautiful whole baked fish.
To burn off all that grease we hiked down (and back up again) the 1,000 steps into the infamous, churning Tiger Leaping Gorge, the most impressive point on the Yangtze river and reportedly the deepest in the world. It was well worth it to look at nature's giant, swirling milkshake.
Then on to what was until recently called Zhongdian (and before that Gyalthang in Tibetan), but was renamed Shangri-la in 2001. The authorities decided this remote Tibetan place, in the foothills of the Himalayas, was the mythical location recounted in James Hilton's cult 1933 book, Lost Horizon, and renamed it to attract tourists. It worked: a friend told me that when she visited Zhongdian in 1995, there was one guesthouse and you had to order your hot water a week in advance; now there's a population of 50,000, a good few hotels – all with running water – and you even get a full signal on your mobile. The centre felt slightly touristy, but we also felt a sense of achievement for having reached such an isolated spot.
Foodwise, Shangri-la is all about meat and preparation for the harsh winter that lasts nearly six months. The main crops are barley (for the humans) and grass (for the animals), and equal importance is attached to both. Turnips are thrown over huge wooden structures to dry in the sunlight, but essentially all fruit and veg is imported; not much grows up here. Interestingly we encountered dairy for the first time in China – of the yak variety of course: yak cheeses of various kinds, yak milk in our tea and yak butter on our toast.
Quni, our local guide, spoke with pride about how the local pigs have hair as jet black as his, so they too can absorb the heat when the sun shines, and proudly explained rhubarb was originally found in this region, before being shared with the rest of the world.
The dish to eat up here is Tibetan hotpot, made from a bubbling stock of pigs' knuckles, pork ribs, chunks of ham, dried mushrooms and, said our chef, "local medicinal herbs" the most famous being goji berry. You are then presented with plates of ingredients: meat (chicken, pork, and the ubiquitous yak), seafood (scallops, prawns and fishballs) and lots of veggies like cabbages, mushrooms and lettuce, to drop into the fire-fuelled clay pot "at your leisure" (a key phrase in the hotpot experience). You then make a dipping sauce by mixing three little pots to your liking: chopped chillies, minced garlic and fine matchsticks of ginger with soy sauce. After a day doing whatever they do up here at this extreme height and in unfiltered light, this is exactly what I'd want to sit down to eat too – especially if rounded off with some local barley wine.
The hotpot was sold all over town, we ate excellent examples at Da Ling Kezhan and in our hotel, the Banyan Tree. Being so high up, the hotel also provided free oxygen canisters in our room which aided our late-night attacks of high altitude giggles to a tirade of yak jokes:
"What do you call an abstract expressionist painter?"
"Yak-son Pollock!"
Well, it's funny when you're two miles above sea level and full of barley wine.
We also saw breathtaking Ganden Sumtseling gompa, the largest Tibetan monastery in Yunnan, set up by the 5th Dalai Lama in 1679. Photos of the current Dalai Lama covered the walls, which is highly discouraged if not illegal – another testament to their attitude to politics in this remote corner.
From there we flew back to Kunming. Everything I'd read about it, from its reputation as a laid-back and cosmopolitan city, to its nickname "City of Eternal Spring", led me to believe we were in for a special time, but we were stymied again by roadworks: we visited just days before the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic, so everything had ground to a standstill in order to get the new ring road finished. I don't think that I've ever been anywhere that is pushing so aggressively through its present to get to its future.
Our time here was rewarded by tasting tea, which can be done all over the city. This province is China's largest supplier of tea, including the world-famous, highly-prized pu'er tea, from the south west. I'm not quite sure that I understood the appeal of pu'er – especially at around $60 for a wheel about the size of a discus, which is how it's sold, but it is ranked as the number one tea in China. We also tried a tannic, rich black tea and a light and fragrant jasmine, but my personal favourite was the oolong, which was both deeply interesting and very drinkable.
Our final meal was at the Shiping Huiguan, on the edge of a lake in Cuihu park. Talk about going out with a bang! Here we ate the hottest meal so far: tofu dishes (a speciality of this restaurant), chicken (shredded with peanuts), fish (white and filleted, with peppers and corn) or pork (belly, with bok choy). And surprisingly, this far south, we were offered fried yak cheese, which looked a bit like halloumi, with a dried chilli dipper.
We also tried the most famous dish of the area – "crossing the bridge noodle". The story goes that a diligent wife would get upset because by the time she had taken lunch to her scholarly husband on the island in the middle of the lake where he studied, the soup was always cold. One day she discovered that if she kept a layer of chicken fat on top of the broth, and carried the bits to go in the soup across in little bowls on the side, it would stay hot.
As we walked back to the hotel, the streets smelled strongly of curry: this was the food of the southern part of the province, belying its borders with Burma and Laos, which sounded and smelled to me like a whole other taste trip.
Getting there
American tour operator China Road (001 206 818 9767, chinaroads@comcast.net) offers a 14-day tour, taking in Yunnan province, starting in Beijing and ending in Hong Kong, for US$4,300. The price includes all internal flights, ground transport, most meals, accommodation in five-star hotels, transfers and the service of a guide. Open-jaw tickets, flying from Beijing to London and returning from Hong Kong to London, start at around £450 inc taxes, with kayak.co.uk.
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