Of more than 5,000 complaints against squad, less than 0.18% were upheld
Scotland Yard faced calls for an "ethical audit" of all officers in its controversial riot squad tonight after figures revealed that they had received more than 5,000 complaint allegations, mostly for "oppressive behaviour".
Details of all allegations lodged against the Metropolitan police territorial support group (TSG) over the last four years reveal that only nine – less than 0.18% – were "substantiated" after an investigation by the force's complaints department.
The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, were described as evidence of a "culture of impunity" that makes it almost impossible for members of the public to lodge successful complaints against the Met's 730 TSG officers.
The TSG is a specialist squad that responds to outbreaks of disorder anywhere in the capital. It is under investigation for the most high-profile cases of alleged brutality at the G20 protests, including the death of Ian Tomlinson.
The unit came under renewed criticism this week after one of its officers was identified as a member of a team implicated in a "serious, gratuitous and prolonged" attack on a Muslim man.
PC Mark Jones, 42, was one of six officers involved in an attack on Babar Ahmad, 34, who was punched, kicked, stamped on and strangled during his arrest at his home in Tooting, south London. The Met paid Ahmad £60,000 in damages earlier this year and accepted its officers were responsible for the attack, during which Ahmad, a terror suspect, was forced into the Muslim prayer position and told: "Where is your God now? Pray to him."
A former Royal Marine, Jones has had 31 complaints lodged against him since 1993. Twenty-six were assault allegations, most of which had been lodged by black or Asian men, but none were substantiated.
They included a complaint from a man detained in a drug search in 2007 who, Ahmad's lawyers told the high court, accused Jones of forcing him into a TSG van, placing him on his knees, grabbing his neck and spraying CS gas into his face.
Despite being identified in court by Ahmad's lawyers as the officer who placed him in an "extremely dangerous" neck-hold, Jones faced no disciplinary action and returned to duty on Wednesday after being cleared in another case of alleged racially aggravated assault.
The TSG has been the subject of 5,241 allegations since August 2005. They include 376 allegations of discrimination and 977 complaints of "incivility". More than 1,100 of the allegations concerned what members of the public said were "failures in duty". However by far the largest number of complaints – 2,280 – were categorised as "oppressive behaviour".
Just over 2,000 (38%) were "unsubstantiated" by the Met's department for professional standards, while the rest were resolved at the police station, dismissed, discontinued or dealt with in other ways.
Senior Met officers say the TSG's work, involving drug raids and demonstrations, means they are more likely to face complaints than other officers.
Jenny Jones, a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), the force's watchdog, said tonight the figures revealed TSG officers were "practically immune" from criticism in the force.
"The fact that less than 0.2% of complaints about the TSG succeed, suggest its officers are protected within the Met to the extent that there is a culture of impunity for their actions," she said. "It's time for an ethical audit and a thorough overhaul. They desperately need better training, rotation of personnel, and reduction of duties to make them fit for purpose."
Fiona Murphy, Ahmad's solicitor, said: "The figures either mean thousands of members of the public are taking the trouble to make fabricated complaints against the TSG, which seems unlikely, or there is a systemic problem with the complaints procedure that means it is virtually impossible for officers in the unit to be held to account for their actions."
A high court order prevented identification of Jones as an officer involved in the Ahmad assault until the end of his separate criminal trial. On Tuesday jurors at Kingston crown court cleared Jones of racially and physically attacking two 16-year-old boys in a police van in June 2007.
The teenagers said they were racially taunted in front a team of TSG officers who had stopped them near Edgware Road, west London. One of the teenagers said Jones punched him several times in the head and placed him in a neck-hold while calling him an "Arab cunt".
Five other TSG officers who were in the van at the time were also cleared of charges of misfeasance in public office. A seventh, PC Amechi Onwugbonu, acted as a whistleblower during the trial, saying he saw Jones attacking the boys.
The jurors were not told about Jones's involvement in the Ahmad assault in 2003, which his lawyers said bore "striking similarities" to the teenagers' allegations. An IT support worker, Ahmad was assaulted at his home and then in a TSG van, where Jones is alleged to have put him in the neck hold. One officer said: "You'll remember this day for the rest of your life."
Another officer grabbed his testicles and he was also deliberately wrenched by his handcuffs - a technique known to cause intense pain.
President joins calls for calm across the US in wake of Fort Hood shooting spree that left 13 dead
Barack Obama today joined calls from across America for calm amid fears of a backlash in the wake of the shooting spree by a Muslim soldier at the Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 28 wounded.
Obama, speaking in the White House Rose Garden after being briefed by the FBI, sought to dampen tensions, as did politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, the military, Muslim associations and the family of the alleged shooter, Major Nadil Malik Hasan.
"I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we get all the facts," Obama said. The risk of a witchhunt rose today when the commander at the Fort Hood base, Lieutenant-General Robert Cone, disclosed that wounded soldiers said Hasan had shouted "Allahu Akbar" before opening fire on unarmed soldiers at the Texas base.
The troops, from 12 different units across the US, had been receiving final medical checks before deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hasan, 39, was initially reported by the military to have been killed but hours later officials confirmed he was still alive, though wounded. He was on a ventilator today.
The trained military psychiatrist had been due to be deployed to Afghanistan later this year and had been desperately trying to get out of it.
As the initial shock of the massacre began to wear off today, a bout of national soul-searching began about the mental strain caused to troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular as a result of multiple tours of duty.
Although the vast majority of Muslims in the US are fully integrated, websites on major newspapers sites quickly filled with hate mail questioning their loyalty.
There have been only a few incidents since 9/11 of troops from a Muslim background killing comrades, and nothing near this scale.
Obama's call for patience, saying there were still too many unanswered questions, was echoed by Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, and by the Pentagon.
In a statement, Hasan's family said his actions were "despicable and deplorable". "His actions did not reflect how they were raised in the US," they said.
Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, joined the calls for patience. "That investigation is under way by law enforcement authorities, and let's let that be the number one priory in terms of ascertaining what motivations he had," she said in a television interview.
Obama ordered flags across the country to be flown at half-staff in tribute to the dead. The president was scheduled to visit Walter Reed military hospital today, where coincidentally Hasan previously worked as a psychiatrist.
Twelve of the dead were soldiers, with one lone civilian.
Dozens of grief counsellors were being sent to Fort Hood to help the families of the dead. The FBI was today going through Hasan's apartment and office to see whether there is a clue to his motivation on his computer, as well as from his phone records.
Investigators were by his bedside, hoping to interview him when he regained consciousness. He took four bullets from a policewoman, Kimberly Munley, 34, who was wounded in the encounter.
"She happened to encounter the gunman. In an exchange of gunfire, she was wounded but managed to wound him four times," Cone said. "It was an amazing and aggressive performance by this police officer."
Soldiers said that Hasan had two handguns, including a semi-automatic, and shot down troops in clusters. Cone said one soldier who had been shot told him: "I made the mistake of moving and I was shot again."
Hasan had been in uniform at the time.
Questions were raised about why the FBI had not pursued postings on a website from a person identified as Hasan who appeared to express sympathy for suicide bombings.
Hasan, a Virginian whose parents were Palestinians, worked as a psychiatrist at the Fort Hood base and before that at Walter Reed counselling troops suffering psychological problems after returning from war zones. He heard both what they had suffered and the violence they had inflicted on Iraqis and Afghans.
Video footage at a grocery store showed him relaxed, buying goods as normal. But his behaviour then changed, going home to clear out his flat and the usually reclusive figure went round his neighbours distributing groceries from his kitchen and handing out Qur'ans.
Colonel Steven Braverman, a hospital commander at Fort Hood for whom Hasan worked, said: "He took care of soldiers with behavioural health problems and evaluated people with disabilities." He said there was no indication prior to the shooting that Hasan was unable to provide those services.
"We had no problems with his job performance while he worked at Darnall," Braverman said.
A definitive figure for the number of Muslims in the US military is unknown, as recruits are not obliged declare a religious affiliation. There are only 3,526 declared Muslims in a military force totalling 1.4 million.
Prime minister tells G20 that taxpayers must be protected from bearing cost of failure by banks
The prime minister, Gordon Brown, has called for a new "economic and social contract" with the world's banks to ensure that the cost of their failure would never again be borne by taxpayers.
Addressing a G20 meeting in Scotland, Brown said it was not acceptable that banking success was reaped by the few but failure was "borne by all of us". He called for a fund for future bank bailouts to be set up, possibly paid for by a tax on banking transactions.
Brown told the meeting in St Andrews of finance ministers from the world's 20 richest nations that there should be a "just distribution of risks and rewards". He said: "I believe we should discuss whether we need a better economic and social contract to reflect the global responsibilities of financial institutions to society. This is a unique sector that, when it fails, imposes such a high cost to the wider economy and damage to society that government intervention becomes essential. So the taxpayer had no real choice but to step in to keep the system afloat.
"And it cannot be acceptable that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us. There must be a better economic and social contract between financial institutions and the public based on trust and a just distribution of risks and rewards."
Max Lawson, Oxfam senior policy adviser, said: "Gordon Brown today signalled that pay-back time for banks could be just around the corner. A tax on banks would be a major step towards clearing up the mess caused by their greed. The G20 has a responsibility to act. Every minute around the world 100 people are forced into extreme poverty as a result of the economic crisis. Money raised by a financial transaction tax on banks could make a massive difference to the lives of ordinary people."
Brown also repeated his warning that it was still too soon for countries to consider withdrawing the one-trillion-dollar "stimulus" package which they agreed to support their economies. Some G20 nations, including the US and Germany, want to debate ending the measures.
"While recent indications of economic expansion give cause for cautious optimism they are not a reason to end economic stimulus prematurely," he said. "It would be dangerous to put recovery at risk by suddenly cutting off the funding and investment that is supporting families and businesses through the most challenging times in a generation."
He added that, when the time came, it was important that countries were able to co-ordinate their "exit strategies".
As well as discussing how and when to withdraw the huge taxpayer support they have given their economies over the past two years, finance ministers at the two-day summit are expected to focus on climate finance ahead of next month's United Nations conference in Copenhagen.
The International Monetary Fund will tell the G20 that the global economic recovery is uneven and the timing of any exit strategies should err on the side of supporting demand.
"The pace of recovery is uneven, particularly in advanced economies, with consumer confidence remaining subdued; the waning of temporary fiscal measures such as the cash-for-clunkers programme in the US and similar programmes elsewhere is slowing production," an IMF paper said.
Ticketholders come away with record prize, each of which eclipses previous biggest jackpot by £10m
Two British ticketholders have each won a record-breaking jackpot of more than £45m in the latest EuroMillions draw.
They will each receive £45,570,835.50 – making them the UK's biggest ever lottery winners, exceeding by far the previous record of £35.4m.
A National Lottery spokeswoman said: "This is fantastic news. These two ticketholders have just banked the largest lottery prizes ever paid out in the country."
The holders of the winning tickets for last night's draw now have 179 days to claim their fortunes.
The three largest National Lottery prizes won in the UK so far are all from the EuroMillions game.
They went to Angela Kelly, who won £35,425,411.80; an unnamed winner the same month with £26,533,767.50; and Brian Caswell of Bolton, who won £24,951,269.40 in June.
The man appointed to oversee the future expenses regime for MPs will not necessarily implement the proposals published by Sir Christopher Kelly, but will instead conduct a wide-ranging review of his own.
The three leaders of the main political parties and Kelly, chairman of the committee on standards in public life, had this week said the proposals should be implemented as a whole. But Sir Ian Kennedy, appointed this week as chairman of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), believes he has the statutory powers to look at many of the essential issues again. MPs' pay is currently set by the Senior Salaries Review Body, but Kennedy can see a case for looking at MPs' allowances, pensions and pay as a whole.
Ipsa was set up by parliament in the middle of the expenses scandal, and is due to take over responsibility for administering expenses as well as discipline.
Kennedy aims to have his proposals ready by the time of the new parliament, on the assumption of a spring general election. He has pointed out that lawyers may yet seek a judicial review of some of Kelly's central proposals, including his recommendation that spouses should not be employed by MPs. He also fears that there may be legal challenges to debarring MPs from making capital gains on any taxpayer-funded second home.
It is not clear if Kennedy has consulted widely on his decision to have a review, but he is under a statutory duty to consult. His approach is bound to lead to accusations that MPs are being given a fresh opportunity to water down the Kelly proposals.
Kennedy became Ipsa's chairman at the beginning of the week, following a rapid selection process. He hopes to appoint the other members of his board by the end of next month.
The Daily Telegraph today claims Kennedy, a former Reith lecturer, is a close friend of Tony Blair's former No 10 spokesman Alastair Campbell, even acting as his "phone a friend" in a celebrity edition of the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But there is no suggestion that Campbell was involved in his appointment and there will be many in the Labour government that will not welcome Kennedy's belief that he is entitled to reopen the issues that the Labour frontbench hoped had been settled by Kelly.
Kennedy has not yet met Kelly to discuss his proposals, but Kelly is likely to question why his blueprint should be radically reshaped. Kelly regarded his report as definitive after taking evidence from 732 individuals and organisations.
On Wednesday at prime minister's questions, the Tory leader David Cameron said: "Is it not important that today we accept in full Sir Christopher Kelly's report?"
Gordon Brown replied: "We should accept the Kelly recommendations and make sure that they are implemented as quickly as possible." The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, said: "We must implement the report in full, without further delay."
Kennedy, believes MPs are having to accept massive constitutional change. But he is clear that what his body decides will prevail over parliament.
Cornwall mother Mary Fox was trapped in burning house after saving her son, who may have been target of attack
Police have launched a murder inquiry after a woman died in a house fire caused by a firework pushed through the letterbox.
Mary Fox, 59, became trapped in the house in Carpenter Court, Bodmin, Cornwall, after pushing her 17-year-old son to safety from an upstairs window on Thursday.
The boy, Raum, was taken to Treliske hospital where he was treated for smoke inhalation and released.
Devon and Cornwall police said they were looking into whether Raum had been bullied at school. He is reported to have learning difficulties. Police said they did not have any police reports of the family as a whole being harassed.
Superintendent Martin Orpe said he was confident the people responsible for would be found. "As a result of a firework that was found late yesterday behind the door within the premises, and as a result of information from the public, this is being treated as a murder investigation," he said.
"I am appealing to those people involved in this to do the decent thing and come forward to the police. If not, I am confident from what I have seen that we will be knocking on their doors shortly.
"I would ask them to come forward, and anyone who knows fact in relation to this incident, not rumour, because there is a lot of rumour going around Bodmin, to come forward and give us that information."
Orpe said police were "following up leads that the family were being targeted" but said the home was not an address known to police.
"This was not an address that we were called to a number of times and we do not have any evidence within police systems to corroborate that the family were being bullied and that this was reported to the police, but that is something that we will be looking at," he said.
"We will be talking to partner agencies to tell us what they know about this family."
Orpe said officers would be speaking to Raum's school over allegations that he was being bullied. "The neighbours have picked it up from somewhere, that there may have been concerns that there was bullying of the boy at the school."
Officers are investigating reports that a gang of youths was seen around the area using fireworks. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Burgan, the senior investigating officer, said they were trying to identify the firework used.
"We are keeping an open mind at the moment, there are names being bandied around on social networking sites but this is innuendo. We need to deal with factual evidence and get the information direct," he said.
A passer-by spotted the front door of the house was on fire at about 7.15pm and alerted the emergency services. Crews arrived in six minutes but the fire had already taken hold.
Witnesses said Fox pushed her son to safety from the window but police said it was unclear whether Raum jumped or was pushed by his mother before she was overcome.
Raum ran to a neighbour's house to call 999 and said his mother was still inside. He is being treated as a crucial witness and is being spoken to by specialist officers. He is said to be very distressed and is staying with his family.
Mary Fox had nine children. Her family said in a statement: "We the sons and daughters of Mary would like to thank everyone for their kind words at this difficult time.
"We would also like to say a huge thank you to the fire service who tried to rescue our mother from this horrific fire that makes no sense.
"Our Mum devoted her life to us her nine children and went without herself to provide the best that she could for us.
"She was at times, shall we say, eccentric, she had a sense of humour and was loving and caring.
"She never did anything to hurt anyone and never would. She would give her last penny to help those in less fortunate circumstances than herself."
Doreen Rowe, 59, a neighbour, told the Western Morning News: "I'm devastated about what has happened, Mary was a dear old soul and a hero.
"There was loads of kids on the street armed with fireworks. She was not the only one targeted because my next door neighbour had one thrown at her house too."
Brett Millington, 17, said Raum had recently moved from Bodmin College to St Austell College because of bullying. "He was badly bullied. It wasn't all physical but a lot of psychological abuse he suffered," he told the Western Morning News.
"When he was at Bodmin his mum would walk him to school every day because the bullying was so bad. But if anything that just made it worse."
Messages have been left for Raum on the social networking site Facebook. One from Aimee Cavanah said: "Sorry to hear about your mum's death. I lived near her and she was such a lovely lady."
Thomas Reeve, 28, killed in Amarillo as shots are fired at drinkers during robbery
A British tourist has been shot dead in a bar in Texas. Thomas Reeve, 28, was killed in the city of Amarillo when shots were fired at several drinkers, the Foreign Office confirmed.
The attack happened at the Spotted Pony Lounge in the town at about 10.45pm local time on Thursday.
Police said Reeve arrived in Amarillo a few hours before the shooting. He was travelling across the US with two friends.
He died at Northwest Texas hospital after being shot in the torso. An autopsy was being performed in Lubbock, the Amarillo Globe-News reported.
Reeve was drinking in the bar with his friends. They had rented a car in California and stopped in Amarillo on a trip to Florida.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We can confirm the death of Thomas Reeve and we are providing consular assistance to the family."
Another customer, Gordon Gollihugh, 48, was shot in the hand and taken to a local hospital, according to the connectamarillo.com website.
The gunman hit other customers with his fist, took purses, wallets and money from the bar's cash register and forced a woman to remove some of her clothing, according to officers. Ray Carlos Cisneros, 25, was arrested yesterday and was being questioned over the shooting, according to the Amarillo Globe-News.
• Poll crackdown and state broadcaster denounced
• Supreme leader says he welcomes such comments
He may be the bravest student in Iran or an unwitting stooge of the Islamic regime – or both. Either way, Mahmoud Vahidnia has gained instant fame after breaking a taboo by criticising the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to his face.
The 25-year-old maths student has been lauded by opposition websites after reportedly telling Khamenei that he had been turned into a "grand idol" who was above criticism. But in a twist demonstrating the inscrutable nature of Iranian politics, the incident has been used by Khamenei's supporters to show how he embraces criticism. Vahidnia has remained unmolested since his 10-minute critique, which condemned the recent brutal post-election crackdown and denounced the state broadcaster, IRIB, for biased coverage. But his most remarkable comments were reserved for Khamenei himself.
"I don't know why in this country it's not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you," he told Iran's most powerful cleric, who has the final say in all state matters. "In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the assembly of experts [a clerical body with the theoretical power to sack the leader]. I feel that if this doesn't happen this situation will lead to discord and grudge."
Vahidnia, who achieved nationwide recognition two years ago by winning Iran's annual mathematics Olympiad, made his remarks at a meeting between Khamenei and the country's scientific elite. They came after the supreme leader asked at the end of a question-and-answer session if anyone else wanted to speak. He chose Vahidnia after seeing him being pushed down by officials when he stood to ask a question.
Referring to the post-election crackdown sanctioned by Khamenei, he asked: "Wouldn't our system have a better chance of preserving itself if we were using more satisfactory methods and limited the use of violence only to essential circumstances?"
Although state TV cameras were present, the criticisms only came to light when they were highlighted on Khamenei's own website and by Alef, a fundamentalist site. Both carried accounts showing Khamenei responding calmly.
"Don't think that I'll be unhappy to hear such statements. No, I would be unhappy if such statements are not made," he said. "About lack of criticism of the leader, you go and tell them to criticise. We have not said that no one should criticise us … I welcome criticism. There is criticism and there is a lot of it. And I receive it and I understand the criticism."
The exchange has been seized on by pro-regime media as a demonstration of the leader's tolerance. The hardline Keyhan newspaper, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by Khamenei, reported it under a headline reading, The Revolutionary Leader's Fatherly Response to Critical Youth.
Some opposition websites suggested that Vahidnia had been arrested by intelligence agents while other reports asked whether he had been a plant set up by regime officials. Vahidnia scotched both suggestions in an interview with Alef, in which he asked "society and elites not to spread rumours".
Under Iranian law comments deemed insulting to the supreme leader carry possible prison sentences, although in practice critics are often not arrested immediately. Ahmad Zeidabadi, the head of Iran's leading student movement, Tahkim-e Vahdat, published an open letter critical of Khamenei in 2007 but was only arrested in the round-ups that followed last June's disputed presidential election.
• Train service taken over from next Saturday
• Public ownership will last for at least 18 months
Back in the day, British Rail was synonymous with soggy sandwiches, late trains – or no services at all. Deserved or not, it was a reputation that became immortalised in the comedy, the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin – every morning, his train to Waterloo was reliably late, but always for a different reason.
From next Saturday, though, the government will get a chance to make some amends, when it returns as a long distance train operator for the first time since privatisation in the mid-90s.
Passengers on the prestigious London to Edinburgh route have been promised punctuality, good food and clean loos.
The Department for Transport has seized control of the failed £1.4bn National Express East Coast franchise. Apart from a stint running the Southeastern service earlier in the decade, the government has ducked complaints over fare hikes and poor catering by letting the private sector take the flak – and the profits.
That will change when the DfT launches the frugally titled East Coast franchise with the aim of keeping the route under public ownership for at least 18 months while funnelling the proceeds into its coffers.
Elaine Holt, the head of East Coast, said the 18 million annual passengers will soon notice improvements to facilities and complimentary first class meals. "There are areas where customers are not satisfied when they should be, like toilets. There is a whole raft of things that can be improved."
Holt said the free food for premium passengers – "they just get a biscuit really" – will be beefed up, although the upgrade might extend to pastries and peanuts only. The trolley for passengers in standard class will also get a makeover, with Holt pledging that any changes will reflect a specially commissioned passenger survey. "Customers told us they want different things," she said.
Punctuality is already strong, with nearly 90%services on time but Holt pledged further improvements.
With the reassuring tag line of "business as usual" the most noticeable changes will be cosmetic, with the National Express logo excised from all trains and station signs by the end of next month.
The DfT is banishing the name of a company that defaulted on its contract just two years into a decade-long deal after it said it could not afford franchise payments, leaving ministers with a £1.4bn hole in the rail budget.
It was the second time that the route had been handed back in three years, following in the footsteps of GNER in 2006, prompting calls from Labour backbenchers and trade unions to scrap the rail franchise system.
Next week's launch of East Coast has given some hope to privatisation's critics but Holt warned rail nostalgists not to expect a return to the days of BR. She won plaudits at the private train operator FirstGroup and pledged a commercially aggressive approach in her new role.
"I don't see this as a step backwards into some sort of BR or public sector-type environment," she said. "It is a commercial company that happens to have the government as its owner."
BR was replaced by the ill-fated Railtrack when the network was sold off, while train franchises were carved out of individual routes such as east coast and auctioned to private operators.
Railtrack's chaotic demise in 2002 is seen by many within the industry as an indictment of privatisation, amid fierce criticism of the steep fare increases regularly imposed by franchise owners.
Holt admitted that East Coast will impose the above-inflation fare hikes that National Express was planning for January, even though the new business will not have to meet the franchise payment of around £180m next year that helped derail the route's former owner. "I am not going to sit here and say that just because we are a government-owned company we are going to slash fares."
She added: "Like any train company, we will be making the equivalent of premium payments to the DfT. They will not be in the order of £180m per year. If we were to make the same payments as National Express the franchise would be in trouble again next year."
East Coast is expected to increase the price of some advance and off-peak fares that are not protected by price caps, drawing criticism from green groups who see the East Coast transfer as a chance for the government to wean long-distance travellers away from planes and cars.
Cat Hobbs, of the Campaign for Better Transport, said: "We want the government to make sure it runs the franchise in passengers' interests and does not go ahead with fare increases. We also want the DfT to keep the franchise in the public sector beyond 2011 as a benchmark to see whether other franchises provide value for money."
The transport secretary, Lord Adonis, is determined to strip National Express of its remaining franchises, the Essex commuter services National Express East Anglia and c2c.
The RMT, the largest rail union, believes all 16 major franchises should be brought under public ownership. "The failure of the east coast franchise for the second time should kill off the rail privatisation policy which has been an expensive disaster," said Bob Crow, RMT general secretary.
A mother's desperate year-long search for her missing baby has revealed a group of doctors and nurses who allegedly tricked patients into believing that their newborns had died, and then sold the children for a few hundred pounds.
The gang was allegedly headed by the owner of a small private hospital in a working class neighbourhood in the east of Mexico City, where Vanessa Castillo gave birth to a girl by caesarean section on 25 October 2008.
Castillo says she saw the newborn and heard her healthy cries before the baby was whisked away from her for routine tests. The next day one of the doctors who had attended the delivery came to her bedside to inform her that the baby had died and had been cremated.
Castillo said that after she was sent home she kept going to the hospital in search of her baby's death certificate and her ashes, but was repeatedly brushed off. A few months later, however, she received an email from the son of the owner of the clinic, saying that her baby was alive but had been sold by his father for 15,000 pesos (about £700).
The police investigation that followed led to the arrest this week of the owner of the hospital, two doctors, a nurse and a receptionist, as well as a psychologist who has admitted to buying the child and who apparently looked after her well.
Once tests had confirmed that Castillo was the mother of the child, she was reunited with her baby girl at an emotive press conference yesterday.
"This is the first time I have seen her since she was born," a tearful Castillo told reporters.
When she was asked about the woman who had bought her baby, she added, "I would like to thank her for looking after my daughter for the last year, but this is not the way to obtain a child."
Police say they have hard evidence of at least one other similar case involving the clinic, and that they are now going through hospital records in an effort to track down more.
"It could be an important number of babies," Mexico City's chief prosecutor, Miguel Mancera, told the Televisa TV network.
"They didn't just steal babies and give them up in illegal adoptions. They also issued false registrations of births at the clinic for babies born without papers elsewhere."
The arrested doctors have denied the charges, claiming that Castillo had gone to the hospital for a very late abortion, and that they gave the baby away for adoption to safeguard its life.
During the past year, Mexico City's authorities have been under fire for not doing enough to track down child trafficking rings.
Local newspapers reported this week that staff from the same clinic had been arrested in 2005 after another mother reported that her baby had been stolen in very similar circumstances. The prompt release of the staff on that occasion has now raised suspicions of past complicity within the prosecutor's office.
In another high profile case involving older children, at least five wards of court from dysfunctional families placed in a private shelter run by an evangelical church have disappeared without trace.
• De facto regime sought to form 'unity' government
• Ousted president refuses to continue 'charade'
A power-sharing deal between the de facto government of Honduras and the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, has collapsed, reigniting the country's political crisis. Zelaya refused to join a new "unity" government on Friday after it became clear he would not be heading it. "The accord is dead," he told Radio Globo. "There is no sense in deceiving Hondurans."
The leftist leader, toppled and exiled in a coup four months ago, signed up to a US-brokered pact last week thinking it would be his ticket back to power. But opponents in the Honduran congress delayed a decision on Zelaya's reinstatement and the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, went ahead with forming a new administration without his rival.
The accord had set a Thursday midnight deadline for the new government and left the decision over Zelaya's return to power in the hands of congress. "It's absurd what they are doing, trying to mock all of us, the people who elected me and the international community that supports me. We've decided not to continue this theatre with Mr Micheletti," Zelaya said.
He urged Hondurans to boycott a presidential election slated for 29 November in which neither he nor Micheletti are candidates – raising the spectre of a discredited poll and continued crisis.
The de facto regime appeared to be bracing for fresh street demonstrations in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Local television showed soldiers, tanks and military vehicles reinforcing positions around the Brazilian embassy where Zelaya has holed up since slipping back into the country last month.
In a televised speech Micheletti said the new caretaker administration would rule until the January swearing-in of the election winner. "We've completed the process of forming a unity government. It represents a wide spectrum despite the fact that Mr Zelaya did not send a list of representatives."
The de facto authorities have the support of many middle class and conservative Hondurans as well as the supreme court, congress and military. They mistrusted Zelaya's leftward tilt and alliance with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez. Curfews, media curbs, teargas and mass arrests have been used to suppress protests by Zelaya's mostly poor supporters. Several have died. Foreign condemnation of the coup has been near universal, leaving the impoverished coffee exporter isolated but defiant.
European and Latin American governments said they would not recognise the looming election unless Zelaya was first reinstated. US negotiators clinched last week's agreement by apparently reinforcing that message. The Obama administration appeared to have scored a significant diplomatic victory. But since congress stymied Zelaya's reinstatement the US has said it will recognise the election regardless, which could deepen Latin American frustration that Washington has not done more to pressure the Honduran regime.
A state department spokesman said the pact did not demand Zelaya's return. "The only deadline was to form a government of national unity, which was done."
Washington's decision to recognise the new government gave the Honduran congress little incentive to bring back the ousted leader, said Michael Shifter, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank. He suggested there was still hope for a negotiated settlement.
Two small bombs have exploded in different parts of Tegucigalpa, causing slight damage but no casualties.
When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them?
Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius's legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.
At least they do in the photographs in Bauhaus Women, a book by Ulrike Muller, a "museum educator" in Weimar, the German town where the Bauhaus opened in 1919, declaring equality between the sexes. Where German women had once received art education at home with tutors, at the Bauhaus they were free to join courses.
And yet the photographs of those seemingly liberated women tell, at best, a half truth. Yes, the world's most famous modern art school accepted women. But few became well known. While the men of the Bauhaus – Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – are celebrated, names like Gunta Stölzl (a weaver), Benita Otte (another weaver), Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain (ceramicist), Ilse Fehling (sculptor and set designer) or Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (toy maker) mean precious little.
If these bright young things came to the Bauhaus as equals, why are the women so obscure? The school's fleeting existence (just 14 years), the rise of the anti-modern National Socialist movement and six years of world war may have been factors, but the uncomfortable truth is that the Bauhaus was never a haven of female emancipation.
More women than men applied to the school in 1919, and Gropius insisted that there would be "no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex" – those very words betraying his real views. Those of the "strong sex" were, in fact, marked out for painting, carving and, from 1927, the school's new architecture department. The "beautiful sex" had to be content, mostly, with weaving.
The school's students produced radical work, but Gropius's vision was, at heart, medieval, if apparently modern, and he was keen to keep women in their place – at looms, primarily, weaving modern fabrics for fashion houses and industrial production. He believed women thought in "two dimensions", while men could grapple with three.
By the time Mies van der Rohe was appointed director in 1930, the Bauhaus had essentially become an architecture school and, increasingly, there was little place for women to shine. Those who did, like Anni Albers, did so only after they abandoned the Bauhaus. Albers left Germany for the US in 1933, with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, to teach at the new Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and make fabrics for design-led companies like Knoll and Rosenthal.
Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, the ceramicist, also became a big success in the US with her Pond Hall pottery. Benita Otte was ousted from her position as head of the weaving department but established her own mill elsewhere in Germany; her fabrics remain in production. Mean while, Gunta Stölzl, hounded by Nazi sympathisers within the Bauhaus after her marriage to a Jew, left in 1931 and founded her own successful handweaving business in Switzerland.
Many other Bauhaus women simply vanished without trace. Sadly, this was all too true of the toy maker Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who was killed in a bombing raid in 1944, and of Otti Berger who, on a trip to see her mother in Yugoslavia in 1939, was unable to get a visa to the US despite an offer of work at Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 2005, newly available Soviet archives revealed that Berger, a Jew, had died at Auschwitz in 1944.
Marianne Brandt, a metalworker, was one of the few who made a name for herself while at the Bauhaus. The globe lamps she designed in 1926, and the Kandem bedside light, with adjustable reflector, have long been standard-bearers of Bauhaus design.
But if the school's women are largely unsung, their legacy lives on. As Bauhaus architecture becomes a distant vision of the future, so Bauhaus fabrics remain as useful, tactile and special as they were when these women set out to equal their male peers. As Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) put it, "We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance, suitable for a new style of life. Huge potential for experimentation lay before us. It was essential to define our imaginary world, to shape our experiences through material, rhythm, proportion, colour and form." Against the odds, they did.
• Bauhaus Women, by Ulrike Muller, is published by Flammarion at £24.95. To order a copy for £22.95, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend
It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a poignant little diary entry from Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, which covers the period from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Adrian, nearing 40, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer (the misspelling in the book's title is deliberate, and people's inability to get it right is a source of much irritation to Adrian) and living in a converted pigsty with his dangerously dissatisfied wife, Daisy, is in need of cheering up. "For some reason," he writes, "I always feel comforted when I am in Woolworths. When I was a child, I spent my first pocket money there. I was five years old and forked out twenty pence on flying saucers. It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there."
Adrian made his first print appearance in 1982, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, which followed a play broadcast on Radio 4 earlier that year. He had hitherto been part of what Townsend calls her "secret writing" – the manuscripts that piled up under the stairs, added to by night but spoken of to nobody. "He came into my head when my eldest son said 'Why don't we go to safari parks like other families do?' That's the only real line of dialogue from my family that's in any of the Mole books. It's in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that 'surely these are not my parents.' I heard him first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn't see his face, didn't know what he looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly." By way of qualification, she adds that John Major has a lovely face when he takes his glasses off, and Adrian has become steadily more attractive over the years, the more plausibly, perhaps, to stoke a future relationship with Pandora Braithwaite, his childhood sweetheart, now a polished and rampagingly on-message New Labour MP.
Pandora makes suitably dramatic appearances in The Prostrate Years, as do Adrian's parents, Pauline (now writing an entirely fabricated misery memoir entitled A Girl Called Shit) and George, his best friend Nigel ("an unpleasant blind person!" laughs Townsend, who was herself registered blind in 2001), and the Chinese restaurateur Wayne Wong, to whose premises Adrian repairs to sit near the fish-tank and eat beef in black bean sauce, one of his few indulgences in life. The ninth volume of Adrian's diaries – following updates that have taken us from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole to The Wilderness Years, The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction – is, like its predecessors, an ensemble piece smuggled into a monologue.
But, aside from much of the topical humour that fuels the book's jaunty pace and often throwaway comedy – the smoking ban, flooding, Northern Rock and The Jeremy Kyle Show all pop up – there is an undertow that makes it a far darker and at times angrier work than Townsend's readers might expect. For a start, Adrian is ill, quite possibly terminally; and, second, he writes his diary as the New Labour project shows ever more serious signs of strain. On Tony Blair's last day in office, Adrian summons up all his hauteur to write: "I expect he will have a full day trying to repair his reputation."
Townsend is unequivocal about the extent to which she feels betrayed by the Labour party and how completely her views were changed by the Iraq war. "I am a passionate socialist," she says, "but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers . . . I could still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children'. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How would he have explained it to his children? They were old enough to understand politics easily. What would he have said? I suppose that stupid line about the weapons of mass destruction. But I think he's been punished."
Nor is her disillusion confined to British foreign policy. In 1997, asked to write a pre-election dispatch for the Observer, she travelled to the Gipton estate in Leeds, deliberately distancing herself from her native Leicester, where she has lived all her life. There, she found grinding poverty and very little hope, concluding: "The vermin, as Aneurin Bevan described the Tory party, will shortly be crawling back behind the skirting-board and New Labour will be dancing a victory jig on the floor. And I hope that over the coming years a socialist Labour party will gather strength. Somebody has to care for the poor."
Revisiting Leeds in 2005, Townsend was able to report significant improvements for the inhabitants of the city's estates. But she also described the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, each of them surrounded by iron spikes "uncannily like a crown of thorns"; she inveighed against the government's attitude towards the sick, revealing how a fascination with Bevan had turned her into a childhood socialist and writing: "I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor."
Everything about Townsend's life is informed by her sense of where she has come from. Her house, a former vicarage that sits at the top of a broad, leafy avenue, is within walking distance of Leicester city centre but clearly in one of its more well-to-do suburbs. It is beautiful but not flashy. In her writing room, where we sit and talk, the walls are covered with framed publicity posters and jackets from her plays and books, but they only arrived there after a good deal of soul-searching that ended when she saw a television programme in which her friend and sometime mentor, the late John Mortimer, had decorated his study similarly. "They used to be all up in the attic," she explains, "because I was almost ashamed of it – I couldn't bear any evidence that I was a professional writer. Then I saw a documentary about him, and he had all of his posters, thousands more than I've got, and I thought, if he can do it, I will."
The eldest daughter of a postman, she was born in 1946 and brought up in a happily close-knit family who lived on the edge of the countryside, four miles from Leicester. "We were probably the last generation to be truly free to play," she says, remembering days spent stalking through the grand rooms of an abandoned mansion, foraging for berries and soft grass, building rope swings and rafts. Somewhere along the way, she also discovered reading, fuelled by the affordability of Penguin Classics, an acquaintanceship with a second-hand bookseller and a passion for the great Russian novelists, and later the Americans. At the age of 14, the secret writing began. "Nobody ever knew. I learned to hide it. It was stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations."
At the same time, Townsend's life was developing along another track. She was married at 18, and had three children by the time she was 22. The secret writing continued at night, when the children were in bed: "I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards. Television was boring in those days."
But it wasn't until her first marriage had ended and she had met Colin Broadway, who became her second husband and is the father of her fourth child, that she considered that her writing could be anything other than a nocturnal activity. Even when she "confessed" to Colin, she didn't allow him to read what she'd written or tell anyone else about it. It was only when he saw an advertisement in the local paper for a writer's group that things began to happen. In 1979, her first of many plays, Womberang, was produced, later winning her a Thames Television bursary (John Mortimer was on the panel), and the box under the stairs was opened for good. It was something of a jolt to those around her: "I was married to my first husband for seven years, and he didn't know. It was a massive surprise to him when he saw a poster in town to do with the play I'd written. Last time he sees me I'm surrounded by kids and wearing an apron, and then I've written this play, and there's an article in the local paper: "Local Mother Moves Into Theatre World". Local mother! I was a novelty, but then it was the 70s. Women had made a good stab at getting equality, but you were still fighting. Still skirmishing."
Adrian Mole went on to make her a bestselling novelist throughout the 1980s and beyond, and one of the country's foremost humorous writers. I tell her that I am almost exactly the same age as Adrian and was, as a young teenager, utterly addicted to him: his premature world-weariness, his combination of self-importance and neurotic lack of confidence and his romantic agonies struck a chord with me, as they did with teenagers (not to mention their teachers and parents) everywhere. The illustration on the front of my dog-eared copy of The Secret Diary hints at the reason, with its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other; the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail.
Now Adrian is at another of life's staging posts: on the brink of middle age, he is a man whose life still feels as provisional, bewildering and unsteady to him as it did 27 years ago. But this time, he is forced to confront a crisis that can't be wished away or played down. "I wanted him to face death," says Townsend. After his diagnosis, his thoughts are a characteristic blend of melodrama and mundanity: "I can't die yet. I've got responsibilities and a family and I have to look after my parents; they're completely irresponsible and couldn't survive without my help. And there are so many places I haven't visited yet: the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the new John Lewis department store they're building in Leicester."
Throughout the novel, Adrian goes through radiotherapy and chemotherapy but, although he ponders much on the fraught love-life of his hospital nurse, he is reticent when it comes to his own suffering. "I imagine he doesn't have the words for the fear he feels," Townsend says. "He knows it's a feeling, but he doesn't want to express it because that would make it real. That's what quite a lot of people do. I'm really good at detachment myself. It's been a handy trick over the last three months or so."
One feels that Townsend has had to do what she calls her "detachment trick" for longer than the last three months. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her 30s, having previously been fit, healthy and active. "I did go overly dramatic," she says, although everything about her suggests that this was not the case. "I did lie on the couch and employ a cleaner." Through the decades, her condition deteriorated significantly; she lost her eyesight and, over the course of five years or so, her kidneys failed. Eight weeks before we met, she had a kidney transplant, using an organ donated by her son; she had endured years of dialysis. She is still a frequent visitor to the hospital, and will remain on medication for the rest of her life.
But if illness is one of novel's most fruitful themes – Adrian's initial attempts to secure a doctor's appointment will chime with most people – it doesn't prevent Townsend addressing other concerns. Issues of paternity and family run through the Mole books (Adrian himself has three children by three different mothers), and in the wake of the latest crisis – who is his sister Rosie's real father? – Townsend dispatches the interested parties to that great arbiter of contemporary ethics, The Jeremy Kyle Show. But what you don't get is any de haut en bas satire on reality television. "I love those people," she says firmly. "I've worked with them, and I know them intimately. They're completely manipulated by the show, but . . . I think it's validating their life; being on the television is success, it doesn't matter what the context is. You haven't been able to make much of yourself because nobody's expected anything of you; first your parents, second your schoolteachers, certainly not your peer group – they're more comfortable with the lowest common denominator, because we're all in this together, so . . . I am overly sentimental, probably, about people like that."
As a child, Townsend used to sit on the bus into Leicester city centre, fascinated by the thought that the workers from the Fox's Glacier Mints factory would buy the bread made at the bakery up the road, following the chain of production and consumption as far as she could. She is convinced that the lives of the working class had more compensations than we now realise: Leicester itself had 15 working men's clubs, and most factories had several sports teams. Latterly, one of Townsend's contributions to community life has been to buy two pubs that would have otherwise disappeared, knowing that "if you gave people really good clean lavatories, not the 60-year-old urine smell, and you treated people well and were friendly, you could fill the place".
She is committed to the idea that the vast majority of people are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their best selves, and that this is being thwarted by the depredations and excesses of government – a belief that surfaces not only in the Mole books, but also in more overtly political novels such as Number Ten and Queen Camilla. Her anxiety that we are increasingly wary of one another leads her to believe that "we're on the cusp of something significant, because if it goes on that way what kind of a world are we going to be living in? We're going to be paranoid, fearful, isolated."
Townsend's novels are little hymns to the power of family and community to make life bearable. It seems horribly obvious to ask her whether she keeps a diary, but rather remiss not to. She laughs and assumes a mock-dramatic voice: "I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave . . . and beyond!"
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