BBC chief will tell top stars they can still be a bit risqué

BBC stars should be not be afraid of making risqué jokes or stirring creative controversy, the corporation’s Director-General will tell an audience of its best-known names, including Bruce Forsyth, John Humphreys and Jeremy Clarkson, at a special meeting...

Related articles:

BBC chief will tell top stars they can still be a bit risqué

suggest

whole article timesonline.co.uk, entertainment

08.11.2009. 23:53h

Now the celebrity chef Rick Stein is planning to extend his foodie empire a little further west and south to Falmouth, until now most famous for its deep natural harbour and proud maritime history. Stein's company has put in a planning application to build a fish and chip restaurant and takeaway and an oyster bar close to the colourful waterside – all bobbing boats and sweeping views – a move greeted with a mixture of excitement, trepidation and downright grumbling. Supporters feel that the Stein brand would bring in more visitors and increase spending for other businesses. But some competitors worry that diners will be lost to the TV chef. And more than a few are grumbling that Stein, sometimes seen as an "English newcomer" though he has operated in Cornwall since the 70s, may try to take over the burgeoning foodie scene in Falmouth, as he has in Padstow. Diana Merrett, a town councillor, said: "What we don't want is this town becoming 'Falstein'. This is an independent, proud town. We wouldn't want one person coming in and changing the feel of the town. I don't understand why he wants to come here and I have my reservations about it." Though Stein is not talking about his plans yet, they do seem to make good business sense. He may have gone as far as he can in Padstow. In a relatively small town he has four restaurants, The Seafood Restaurant, St Petroc's Bistro, Rick Stein's Cafe and Stein's Fish & Chips. The Stein organisation has 40 guest bedrooms around town, a cookery school, a delicatessen, patisserie and a gift shop. Up the road in St Merryn, it runs a pub. Falmouth has the potential to become a boom town. Plans are afoot to build a new marina to bring in more yachties and the resort hopes to attract more cruise ships. "Falmouth is on a roll, I can see exactly why he thinks it's a good idea to come here," said Peter Fraser, who would perhaps be Stein's chief competitor. Fraser owns the Harbour Lights fish and chip shop, a few minutes' walk from the spot where Stein is applying for planning permission. He admits he thought "Oh shit" for "about five minutes" when he heard the news. "But then I thought, well it's great for the town and great to have competition. It's brilliant news." Fraser reckons Stein's fish may not be to everyone's taste: he batters his fish in beef dripping. "I do mine in vegetable oil. They are two different entities," he said. Price may give Fraser an edge. Fish and chips, mushy peas and a drink sets you back more than ?10 at Stein's Padstow chip shop. A takeaway fish and chips from Harbour Lights costs less than a fiver. Kerry Duffield, the owner of the Seafood Bar, was not sounding so confident. "He's going to do oysters, is he? There probably won't be any point in me doing them then," she said. "It's good for the town but it's going to make life more difficult for the restaurants already here." Being a celebrity chef in Cornwall is not all plain sailing. Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, who founded Fifteen Cornwall near Newquay in 2002, stepped up security two years ago after a group calling itself the Cornish National Liberation Army threatened to burn down one of Stein's businesses. The group also claimed it had Fifteen, set up by Oliver to help disadvantaged Cornish youngsters find a career in catering, in its sights, accusing him of driving up house prices and living costs. Stein and Oliver were offended. Stein's family has had connections with Cornwall for the best part of a century and his businesses have brought in millions to the economy. Oliver's Fifteen is a charitable foundation based at Watergate Bay, a hotel and extreme sports academy that has been operating in Cornwall for five generations. The business is run by local people. Back in Falmouth, the only evidence so far of Stein's presence is a shelf of his oat biscuits at the Cornish Store, a shop selling all things Cornish. Its owner, Kevin Ayres, said some people could be put off by the Stein name, but added: "I suppose that everything that creates publicity for Falmouth is a good thing." Customers at Arwenack Fisheries were blunter. "People who go to his places in Padstow and pay those sort of prices are mad," said one local, John. "More money than sense." Stein's plan has been approved by town councillors and now goes before Cornwall council. A spokeswoman for the chef said: "Nothing has been confirmed as we are in the early stages of planning permission which has now been put forward. I can confirm we are looking at a site in Falmouth and we are in the legal process." Mike Rangecroft, who organises festivals in Events Square where the new restaurant would be sited, said it was fantastic news. "But I know there are people who think he's ruined Padstow and there are already people here complaining … some people just don't like success." Billy Fowles, the owner of the All About Olives delicatessen, spoke for many. "It's only a name. I don't suppose he'll be cooking the fish and chips himself, will he? And when it comes down to it, it is just fish and chips, isn't it?" Rick Stein Restaurants Steven Morris guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

• Stein proposes Falmouth takeaway and restaurant • Mixture of grumbles and guarded welcome in town His restaurants and shops are already so dominant in the Cornish port of Padstow that, to the chagrin of many locals, it has been nicknamed "Padstein"....

Related articles:

Rick Stein plans to extend Cornish cod and chips empire

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, lifestyle

08.11.2009. 20:43h

Former X Factor finalists JLS beat judge Cheryl Cole to number one

Former X Factor contestants JLS oust show judge Cheryl Cole from the top of the singles chart.

Related articles:

Former X Factor finalists JLS beat judge Cheryl Cole to number one

suggest

whole article news.bbc.co.uk, entertainment

08.11.2009. 20:05h

Obama Calls Bill’s Passage ‘Courageous’

and geometry. He also worked in mathematical biology, opening up the field of integral geometry, a topic that is fundamental to medical scanners. He was an incomparable teacher and made significant advances in every field that he touched. Gelfand was born to Jewish parents in the small town of Okny (now Krasni Okny) to the north of Odessa in southern Ukraine, which was then a part of the Russian empire. In 1930 he moved to Moscow to complete his secondary education. However, he was not permitted to enrol as an undergraduate, having (according to some sources) been expelled from school because his father, a miller, was considered to be a capitalist. Israel took a part-time job as doorkeeper at the Lenin Library and taught evening classes on mathematics. The work made it possible for him to attend mathematics courses at Moscow State University. He showed such talent that Andrei Kolmogorov, the leading Soviet mathematician of the period, took him on as a postgraduate student. His 1935 PhD thesis was in the relatively new area of functional analysis, where the ideas of calculus are extended from finitely many variables to infinitely many. One practical application is to partial differential equations, the mathematical physicist's favourite tool for describing the natural world. Another is the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. Gelfand was appointed to the Steklov Mathematical Institute and taught at the university, but lost both positions temporarily through antisemitism. He was elected a corresponding (low-status) member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but it was more than 30 years before he was made a full member. His seminar series, run independently of the university and open to anybody, ran for nearly 50 years and is famous throughout the mathematical world. He moved to America in 1989, first to Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then settling at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The heart of Gelfand's research was representation theory, a formal setting for symmetry, a concept of central importance in mathematics and physics. A symmetry of an object is a transformation that preserves its structure, and the collection of all such transformations is the object's symmetry group. The physical world, at subatomic level, is highly symmetric: if you change an electron's direction of spin, or its electric charge, the laws of physics still work the same way. Representation theory studies all the contexts in which a particular symmetry group can arise. Its applications include subatomic particles and pattern formation – why snowflakes are six-sided, and why tigers have stripes but leopards have spots. The most important types of symmetry are the "classical groups", a typical example being the group of all rotations of space. Gelfand solved many fundamental questions about classical groups, using a mixture of algebraic and geometric methods. His interests went beyond mathematics into theoretical and experimental science. In 1958, when his son, Aleksandr, contracted leukaemia, he started applying mathematics to cell biology, setting up the Institute of Biological Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Some of his discoveries have applications that are important for everyone: medical scanners. Doctors routinely use several different kinds of scanner. CT scanners, for example, use beams of x-rays to obtain a three-dimensional image of the body's internal organs. This is a bit like holding a semi-transparent object up to the light and using the resulting shadows to work out its true shape. The first steps in this area were taken in 1917 by Johann Radon. Gelfand developed Radon's ideas extensively, founding an entire field of mathematics, now called integral geometry. His ideas are vital to today's medical imaging methods. I first came across Gelfand in 1973, early in my academic career. Oxford University was awarding him an honorary degree, and – unusually for that time – he had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union to receive it. So this was a rare opportunity to see the great man in action. Several of us piled into a car and drove to Oxford's Mathematical Institute. I still remember the lecture, which was about a remarkable geometrical phenomenon, the "five subspace" theorem. Today it is interpreted as a deep phenomenon in representation theory, placing limits on what is theoretically possible. Gelfand had a reputation for clear, well-organised lectures, and this one was no exception. It was aimed at professionals, and quite technical, but he developed the ideas systematically, explaining their significance as he went along. By the end of the talk, he had made a very surprising result seem natural and inevitable – a sure sign of high-quality mathematics. Gelfand received many awards. The Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Lenin three times. He won the Wolf prize (comparable to a Nobel) in 1978, and the Kyoto prize (for "significant contributions to the progress of science, the development of civilisation, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit") in 1989. He was elected to innumerable academic bodies, including the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Science. He was also a great teacher. He set up a distance-learning school for mathematics in the Soviet Union, and a similar one in the US in 1992. He considered teaching and research to be inseparable, and was equally comfortable talking to schoolchildren or his research colleagues. He supervised 22 PhD students, several of them now outstanding mathematicians in their own right. Gelfand is survived by his second wife, Tatiana, two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. • Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, mathematician, born 2 September 1913; died 5 October 2009 Mathematics Mathematics United States Biology Medical research Judaism Russia University of Oxford guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Legendary mathematician whose work on integral geometry was vital to medical scanners Israel Gelfand, who has died aged 96, was a major figure in mathematics for seven decades. His research ranged over most of pure maths, including algebra, analysis,...

Related articles:

Israel Gelfand obituary

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, sci-tech

08.11.2009. 19:13h

ETS offers scholarship to Chinese test takers

BEIJING, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- The United States Educational Testing Service (ETS) has launched a scholarship program to recognize Chinese excellent test takers of its TOEFL and TOEIC.

Related articles:

ETS offers scholarship to Chinese test takers

suggest

whole article sina.com, lifestyle

08.11.2009. 18:19h

Call of Duty: 'Modern Warfare 2' set to strikes

New chapter of bestselling video game begins its worldwide blitz.

Related articles:

Call of Duty: 'Modern Warfare 2' set to strikes

suggest

whole article telegraph.co.uk, sci-tech

08.11.2009. 17:24h

Chicago Vaccinates Almost 51,000 Against H1N1

At first, James Sevigny didn't know where he was. He was sprawled on the ground when he came to, and he shivered as he noticed how much of his blood had splattered across the snow.

Related articles:

Near death, aided by ghostly companion

suggest

whole article cnn.com, lifestyle

08.11.2009. 14:53h

Steven Tyler quits Aerosmith, guitarist says

night in hospital? Three times. The first time, aged four, I was circumcised. My grandma would tell the story that she came in to see me the day after the op and my doctor said: "Hello Justin, how's your willy?" and I said: "It's fine, thank you, doctor – how's yours?" The second time I was 12 and I broke my wrist, and the last time was to have a septorhinoplasty, at 20. When I was 10, Daniel Perrott very unkindly punched me and broke my nose, so it grew out like a banana when I hit my teens. Then I started getting a lot of migraines. So: circumcision, broken wrist, septorhinoplasty – nose, arm and willy. What exercise do you take? Lots. I love to swim, I do a lot of walking and I do weights, but I'm not an iron pumper. Why can't we have a gym where there's no iron to be pumped, just runners and rowers and cross trainers? Can't they give the iron pumpers their own room so they can slap each other on the buttocks and grunt? How do you relax? Saturday evening a couple of weeks ago we'd managed to get our boys to bed at a reasonable hour, I got a takeaway and opened a bottle of white wine, my wife Karen was sat at the kitchen table doing a jigsaw puzzle and I was sat next to her listening to my jukebox – and it was the most wonderful, relaxing evening imaginable. Are you happy? Absolutely. My family keeps me sane and happy. I'm married to a very relaxed lady who takes care of me, and I'd be screwed without her, I really would. And we've got the most beautiful baby boys. Attitude to drugs? I've never done a drug in my life. I've never tried cocaine – I've never even been offered it – but my attitude to it is if that's what people want to do and they're not hurting anybody other than themselves and they're in control, who am I to judge? Is sex important to you? No, it's a very mucky, unpleasant business and I really couldn't care less if I never have sex again. That's my honest answer. I think it's so massively overrated – maybe that's just because I'm not very good at it, who knows? Obviously we have two wonderful sons, so it served its purpose, but I'd rather have a glass of wine and a good book. I'm a big fan of a kiss and a cuddle. NHS or private? NHS, but my main bugbear is that GPs never have any time for you. They stare at the screen, they write you a slip of paper and they send you on your way, so just recently I've started to think – for my boys – if paying means that person is going to sit in front of you and listen to you, then maybe I'll start paying. Good Times! by Justin Lee Collins is published by Ebury Press, ?18.99 Health & wellbeing Comedy Laura Potter guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Justin Lee Collins, comedian, 35 Are you healthy? I've lost about 3 stone since the beginning of the year – I saw myself onscreen and couldn't believe how fat I'd become. I go to the gym as often as I can and I've cut out beer and lager. Ever spent a...

Related articles:

Justin Lee Collins: My body & soul

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, lifestyle

08.11.2009. 01:10h

RAMALLAH, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- A Palestinian woman has died of A/H1N1 influenza Saturday evening in the West Bank, the health ministry said.

Related articles:

Second Palestinian died of A/H1N1 in West Bank

suggest

whole article sina.com, lifestyle

08.11.2009. 00:19h