12 Dead, 31 Wounded in Base Shootings

Military officials identified the gunman as Army Maj. Malik Nadal Hassan. Two other suspects are in custody.

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05.11.2009. 23:59h

that he had been promoted to officer. Another was a member of the Territorial Army who worked for a supermarket when he was not soldiering. The family of a third described how they had just sent him a parcel for his 19th birthday. Warrant Officer Class 1 Darren "Daz" Chant, 40, was due to be told on the day of the killings that he had been awarded a commission in the Grenadier Guards. He was a contender to become the academy sergeant major at Sandhurst training college. He leaves a pregnant wife, Sheenie, and three children from a previous marriage. She said: "I am devastated. Our unborn son will never meet his father, but he will know him through his legacy." Chant was praised by Lance Corporal Scott Blaney, whom Chant carried a mile to safety after he lost his leg in a roadside bomb. "He seemed to be indestructible like Superman. He was an army legend." The widow of Sergeant Matthew Telford, 37, said she did not know what to tell their four-year-old son. Kerry Telford said: "I don't want to say that nasty men have killed Daddy – I want to be able to tell him that he's gone to be with the angels." Telford was thriving in his role as a police mentor, according to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker. "His spirits were high because he could see the results in the men he was working with." At 18, Guardsman James Major was the youngest of those killed. At the family home in Grimsby, his father, Adrian, said: "It's his birthday next week and we'd just sent shoeboxes out with his birthday things, birthday cake and everything." Corporal Nicholas Webster-Smith, 24, of the Royal Military police, was described by his family as irreplaceable. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Debbie Poneskis, said: "He could normally be found in the thick of it with a cheeky smile on his face." Acting Corporal Steven Boote, 22, of Birkenhead, was in the Territorial Army and served with the Royal Military police. A security team leader at a Tesco store, he wanted to join the civilian police and colleagues remembered him excited at the prospect of going to Afghanistan. His family said: "We couldn't stop him doing what he believed in, and he did believe he was doing his bit for his country." Meanwhile, the body of Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, 30, was repatriated via RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. He died trying to defuse an improvised explosive device in Helmand province a few days before he was due to return to the UK. As the hearse carrying his body drove through the nearby town of Wootton Bassett, his widow, Christina, led the mourning, throwing roses and mouthing: "You have done really well." Wearing her husband's medals, she said: "He was an absolute hero and it was awesome to see him coming in and taken off that plane by his friends who loved him. He adored his job. He was one of a unique brave few who carry out this type of work. He was there to preserve life and he was a protector not a destroyer." Military Afghanistan Steven Morris guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

On a visit to the Energy Department on Thursday, first lady Michelle Obama quizzed middle-school students about red blood cells ...

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05.11.2009. 23:35h

Met police sees papers alleged to link Mark Thatcher to coup plot

Yard. The counter-terrorism command has yet to interview Thatcher or the businessman Ely Calil, who were named by the mercenary Simon Mann as the organisers and bankrollers of his failed plot to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in 2004. Codenamed Operation Antara, the police inquiry began in 2004 after Equatorial Guinea wrote to the Yard alleging that the men planned the operation on British soil. The inquiry was considered political and highly sensitive. Among the evidence are several statements made by Mann, 56, when British police visited him three times in prison in Equatorial Guinea. In these Mann, who was jailed for 34 years for his involvement in the plot, is understood to have openly implicated Calil and Thatcher, an allegation he had previously made at his trial last year and repeated as he left Equatorial Guinea on Wednesday after being pardoned. Police also have a dossier of evidence passed to the Yard by José Olo Obono, the attorney general in charge of Mann's prosecution. In relation to Thatcher, Obono claimed these documents included papers that provided "incontrovertible evidence that he helped finance the coup". Thatcher, who now lives in Spain, and Calil, a London-based businessman of Lebanese origin, have both denied involvement in organising the coup attempt. Both are said to be confident they will not be drawn into any criminal proceedings despite the return of Mann, who spent today with his family in the New Forest. Calil is understood to have a letter from the Met anti-terrorist branch, written late last year or early this year, which states that it has no interest in talking to him. "Both men have welcomed Mann home," said one acquaintance. "Why would they do that if they were worried?" Neither man has been interviewed or received an approach by Yard detectives despite several months of investigation by the counter-terrorism command. Thatcher, who is said to be happy to talk to police, was named by Mann as a member of the plot's "management team". He has already admitted in South Africa to helping charter a helicopter he suspected "might be used for mercenary activity". In a rare interview last year Calil acknowledged that he financed plans by Severo Moto, the opposition leader exiled in Spain, to return to Equatorial Guinea . But he said he had only ever supported "democratic change". Scotland Yard would not comment on the inquiry. Police Equatorial Guinea Sandra Laville Giles Tremlett guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

some activists. As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming. Is Jeremy Clarkson similarly entitled to protection if he declares himself a conscientious objector and wants to keep his 4x4? It is yet another symptom of general confusion over the status of science among the public, politicians, the judiciary and, indeed, just about anyone who is not a practising scientist. I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence. As Einstein is said to have reacted to an article entitled 100 scientists against Einstein: "If I'm wrong, one would be enough." The scientific case for human influence on climate is not a political opinion, made stronger simply by lots of people signing up. Nor is it a religious conviction, made stronger, in Mr Justice Burton's phrase, if it is "genuinely held". It is based on evidence and understanding that has withstood some of the most intense scrutiny in the history of science. If I could come up with convincing evidence that greenhouse gas emissions do not cause dangerous climate change after all, evidence that similarly withstands the scrutiny of my peers, I would get, and deserve, a Nobel prize (and for physics this time, not peace). If a scientist finds something that appears to conflict with mainstream opinion, she or he publishes it like a shot – this is not the behaviour of an adherent to a "genuinely held philosophical belief". There is, of course, a moral and ethical dimension: to what extent should we concern ourselves with what happens to the generation-after-next? But very few of those arguing against emission reductions actually claim they don't care at all what happens in the 22nd century. They argue that emission reductions will not make a substantial difference to the risk of dangerous climate change. That is a testable hypothesis, and one which looks, on the overwhelming weight of current evidence, to be wrong. To be fair, Tim Nicholson, the activist who brought the case, seems to be aware he may have opened a Pandora's box, stressing that climate change is not a new religion because it "is based on scientific evidence". But that means he should have lost his case: one of the key arguments the judge used was that, in his opinion, the case for human influence on climate was not "a view based on the present state of information available". But that is precisely what scientific evidence provides: if countervailing information becomes available, I would revise my view, as would any genuine scientist. There is a very dangerous trend to regard climate scientists as just one of many "stakeholders" in the climate change debate. Journalists have taken to asking me whether I take steps to reduce my personal carbon footprint, presumably as a test of whether my beliefs are "genuinely held". If anyone thinks this is relevant, they don't understand how science works. I know climate scientists who drive Priuses and climate scientists who drive 4x4s: this is not a factor I consider when reading or reviewing their papers. Working as I do in a University traditionally dominated by the Humanities, I suspect many of my colleagues would also be suspicious of a scientist arguing she or he occupies a privileged position. Memories of Cold War arrogance die hard. Of course, unlike the pope, science is not infallible: that is precisely the point. But nor are scientists just another participant in a political, philosophical or religious discourse. Our job is to provide the factual framework within which that discourse takes place. Some of the darkest episodes of the 20th century occurred when we forgot this distinction. The problem is not Mr Justice Burton's views on climate change. The problem is his view of science. This decision should be appealed, and the appeal should be supported by the Royal Society and universities everywhere, in the name of science in general.Myles Allen heads the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford, and was an author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Read Tim Nicholson's take on the ruling at guardian.co.uk/commentisfree Law Climate change Climate change Climate change scepticism Jeremy Clarkson Religion Myles Allen guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

It is an insult to science to rule that belief in man-made climate change is a religious conviction A British judge has decided that belief in human influence on climate has the status of religious conviction. This is being celebrated as a success by...

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05.11.2009. 23:30h

The Jedward paradox and what it means | Mark Lawson

classes took a flattering interest in the phenomenon. Party HQs mused aloud about how Westminster might tap into the enthusiasm for voting shown by young viewers of Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Then, as these formats spread around the globe, some optimists even argued that the experience of making choices between candidates might popularise democracy in cultures resistant to the idea. Regrettably, the reputation of wannabe shows as a model for political interaction has been irretrievably damaged by the latest series of The X Factor. The only democratic parallel would be the possibility of the British electorate conspiring to put the Monster Raving Loony party in power purely because it would really annoy the leaders of the main parties and the BBC. And so to John and Edward Grimes, the tuneless crooners with electric-shock hairdos who have become the stand-out act in this year's X Factor, whose performances have brought something close to a grimace to Simon Cowell's face – a manoeuvre generally thought impossible because of Botox. Yesterday, the Chinese ambassador to Britain intervened in the furore surrounding "Jedward", as the brothers are now known, with a letter to the Sun, denying earlier reports that the senior UK representative of the People's Republic had been irritated by hysterical fans of the twins outside the walls of the X Factor house, which abuts the embassy. Her Excellency Madam Fu Ying insists that she loves the show, a view which may further encourage political scientists to see the series as an antidote to tyranny. The Chinese ambassador may not, however, realise that this year's show has become an exercise in anarchy rather than democracy, rather as Strictly Come Dancing did when viewers were determined to defy the expert judges, and on the most recent Britain's Got Talent when the audience eventually rebelled against Cowell's enthusiasm for Susan Boyle. In one sense, a ballot-box analogy may apply. Electoral analysts have long argued that political candidates are increasingly judged on the power of their personal narratives and, especially, their success in overcoming an obstacle to reach the top: whether gender, race or poverty. In the same way, the Grimes twins have overcome drawbacks – such as the ability to sing consistently in tune – which would, in less egalitarian times, have doomed those aspiring to a musical career. In a perverse version of the boost given to Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama by being outsiders, Jedward's sheer unsuitability for what they are doing makes them more attractive candidates, their hopelessness nicely contrasting with the steely ambition of other aspirants. But, mainly, viewers are backing Jedward because Cowell doesn't want them to. The massive support for John Sergeant, despite his dragging feet, was at least partly an expression of the audience's anger at the fakery scandals in TV. This attempt to sabotage The X Factor is a small-screen version of the revolt against financial fat-cats in a time of recession. Routinely placed high in lists of the richest and most powerful people in TV, Cowell is now being shown that money can't buy you control. The spoilsports probably realise that any wiping of the smirk off Cowell's face will be temporary. The X Factor doesn't offer the opportunity to choose a completely nonmusical winner – the tactic used by the Britain's Got Talent audience to annoy the judges – and so wherever Jedward finish, Cowell will presumably sign them up for the lucrative novelty Christmas single they have in them before the programme and the viewers move on to next year's contenders. But a talent show in which the votes are being cast sardonically or sentimentally is clearly in some kind of trouble, and there are signs that the enthusiasm for TV's number one genre is wobbling. Just in the time for the panto season, the BBC has more or less killed its golden goose, weakening its previously critic-proof hoofing show through panel-tampering, an arrogant head-to-head with ITV, and elongation of episodes. The ratings are still robust – Strictly and The X Factor attracted a combined 20 million viewers last Saturday – but hit-entertainment formats (see Noel's House Party) can go from all to nothing very quickly. There's a feeling now that only the lack of ambition and creativity caused by the funding crisis across the industry can keep talent shows as the reliable ratings-makers they have been since Will Young won Pop Idol in 2002. Gordon Brown used to wish he could match the appeal of the TV voting shows. Soon, The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing may start to worry that they have the appeal of Gordon Brown. Politics TV Gordon Brown Television Television industry Simon Cowell Mark Lawson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

of the Valencia Open. The Scot, in just his second match back after six weeks off with a left wrist injury, was outplayed in the second set by the world No64 but bounced back well and battled through to the last eight with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 victory. Spaniard Alex Corretja, who is taking his turn working with the Scot again this week, had watched some of the Argentinian's first-round win over Russian Igor Andreev so Murray would have known a little about his ability and his style. Even so, he must have been surprised just how hard he had to work for victory by a man who was playing only his fifth ATP Tour match indoors. The match was played in cold conditions after the doors at one end of the arena were left open, with no explanation forthcoming. Murray said it was tough to cope. "I couldn't believe it, it was absolutely freezing," he said. "There was a draft from one of the ends and when he took a toilet break [after the first set], it was so cold. I said to the umpire at the start of the match: 'What's going on?' It was freezing. For an indoor tournament, it was the coldest I've ever played on the tour." Mayer, born on the same day as Murray, gave him just as many problems as the conditions, however, and the Scot admitted he had been surprised by his opponent's style of play. Unlike some of his fellow countrymen who are more at home on clay courts, the Argentinian possesses an attacking nature and against Murray, he was quick to come forward when the opportunities arose. "He's kind of come through pretty steadily, but he's going to be good," Murray said. Murray took the first set thanks to one break, in the seventh game, but his concentration wandered at the start of the second. Mayer took advantage, racing to a 5-0 lead and holding on to force a decider. By that stage, though, Murray had regained his poise and after breaking for 4-2 in the third set, he came from 0-30 down to hold serve and set up a match against Albert Montanes of Spain, the world No34, for a place in the semi-finals. After so much time off, this week is all about getting back into the rhythm of matches for Murray and the Scot admitted results were not quite as crucial as usual. "I wanted to try and play matches before Paris just to see where I was at," he said. "If I'd lost after two and a half hours, I would have been disappointed but it turned out to be the perfect match to get myself back in shape." Andy Murray Tennis Simon Cambers guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

in an impossible position by Israeli and American pressure to renew peace negotiations. Yasser Arafat's successor as leader of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority is, say friends and allies, deeply frustrated by Barack Obama's failure to halt Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — the Palestinian precondition for resuming long-stalled talks. If Abbas does step down it would be a serious blow to already fading hopes for a two-state solution, though he insisted in his speech that it could still be achieved. Aides admitted he might be persuaded to his change his mind. Praise from the US state department suggested efforts would be made to do just that. Abbas has been under pressure for months, but his decision not to stand for re-election was triggered by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who last weekend shifted from demanding a settlement "freeze" to praising the "restraint" shown by Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's Likud Likud prime minister. Having dropped her bombshell in Jerusalem, she insisted to alarmed Arab foreign ministers in Morocco that nothing had changed. She then flew to Egypt to persuade President Hosni Mubarak to urge the Palestinians to resume talks unconditionally. The British foreign minister, David Miliband, went to Jordan to get King Abdullah on board. Abbas, 74, rejects the old talk of armed struggle and believes the Palestinians will only ever get their state by negotiating with Israel. But he has failed to deliver, thanks to Israeli intransigence and Palestinian divisions. Hamas's victory in the 2006 elections, its eventual takeover of Gaza and last January's Operation Cast Lead all badly weakened his standing. His delay in endorsing the Goldstone report accusing Israel of war crimes confirmed his critics' view that he is effectively collaborating with Netanyahu. Abbas has also been tarnished by the failure to achieve reconciliation with Hamas – whose "bloody coup" he pointedly again condemned – despite months of Egyptian mediation. Improved security and modest economic growth in the West Bank, which is still divided into disconnected enclaves dotted with Israeli settlements, have not helped. Analysts say talk of alternative presidential candidates is irrelevant since it is hard to imagine any other leader – even the popular Marwan Barghouti – being as flexible as Abbas or agreeing to talks with Israel without a settlement freeze, or a firm guarantee that the international community will force Israel to return to the 1967 borders to allow the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Abbas's announcement may not have any immediate practical effect since the elections are likely to be postponed until June. But his decision will surely fuel the already grave doubts about the future of the peace process. Israel Palestinian territories Gaza US foreign policy Hillary Clinton Middle East Ian Black guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

about my documentaries. The producer wanted to put me together with a Russian film-maker, to contrast their work against my own for British TV, and asked if I had any ideas who that might be. I didn't know much about Russian documentaries, but I had just seen a strikingly original 17-minute film called Paradise. It was made up of five scenes filmed in a village in the Kazakh steppe, each shot in one uninterrupted take. It was all pure observation, and yet each scene fell into a perfectly timed, often funny, and seemingly God-given mise en scene. The director turned out to be a student at the school where I happened to be teaching. That's how I met Sergei Dvortsevoy. As you'd expect, this "double portrait" turned out rather unbalanced. On the one hand, you had an established film-maker on a BBC salary working with proper budgets; on the other, a student making a film for no money at all and living with his wife, child and cat in one room on the 11th floor of a decrepit hall of residence. Yet, embarrassingly, it was my films that felt like works in progress – uneven, impatient, trying too hard – while Dvortsevoy's short was a single-minded work of art, beautifully formed and in perfect harmony with itself. A lot changed since our meeting in 1996. The world has turned more cynical and nasty, but Dvortsevoy has stuck to his guns, making a series of extraordinary documentaries all as pure and uncynical as his student debut. He took his time over each one, working and reworking them, until they were complete. When, five years ago, Dvortsevoy disappeared off the face of the earth to make his fiction debut, I was secretly disappointed. I knew he wasn't one of these career-minded directors who treat documentary as a stepping stone to making "real" movies. Still, I suspected that plot, actors,and a larger crew would lead him astray. I needn't have worried. It took him four years and the odd reshoot to get it right, but in Tulpan, the story of a sailor who returns home to the Kazakh steppe to find a wife, he has managed to blend his documentary method with narrative storytelling to create something fresh and original. The film's success at Cannes, where it won the Un Certain Regard award last year, may have taken the film world by surprise, but for Dvortsevoy's fans it was a continuation of a long and patient journey, one inspiringly at odds with the logic of today's film industry. Where he can go from here is hard to say, but one thing is clear; the producers and financiers who've started besieging him with scripts and deals are barking up the wrong tree. When I met Dvortsevoy last February he'd just come out of a football game at Stamford Bridge. Typically, he appeared less excited about a late equaliser and Chelsea's stoppage-time winner than about the movement and body language of Frank Lampard and John Terry. Football was Dvortsevoy's first big love affair. Growing up in provincial Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, his only plan for life had been to become a footballer. "From the age of 10 I had nothing else on my brain," he says. "I trained all day, slept with my ball in the bed." He got into a special sports school and at 18 he had trials with a team in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, before an injury put paid to his hopes. Instead, he fell into a traineeship as a flight radio engineer and spent nine years with Aeroflot before he came across a newspaper advert for directors' courses at a Moscow film school. "I've no idea what possessed me to apply, especially as I'd never been that interested in cinema or even photography," he says. "Literature, yes, that was serious. Chekhov, Tolstoy, I used to read a lot; but cinema was just something you went to on a Saturday night with the lads." He remains mystified how he got through the selection process. "Maybe they were tickled that here was this flight engineer from nowhereseville who had no idea about film. They probably needed one village idiot in each year." He says it was precisely because of his naivety and total lack of cinematic baggage that he found his style so soon. "Basically I quickly worked out what I didn't like. They were showing us these Soviet-style documentaries, which were made of vérité shots, lots of commentary and talking heads, with people saying the sort of things they were expected to say; for the most part they were lying. But what seemed interesting were the images, the glimpses of reality where you could see people doing something, I was more interested in how people behaved rather than what they had to say." Dvortsevoy shot his graduation film, Paradise, with a jobbing cameraman from a local TV station. "The man kept trying to teach me what cinema was about. I remember this scene where a small kid eats a bowl of sour cream, and then licks it clean, burps, falls over backwards and falls asleep. I wanted to shoot it all in one take. The cameraman said: 'Come on, we have to cover this scene properly from different angles, close, wide, one way, then the other, and then you put it together in the cutting room and you have a scene. That's cinema!' I didn't want to antagonise the man, couldn't afford to, so I just said: 'You're probably right, but let's try and do it my way first and then we do it your way.'" His next film, Bread Day, was set in an abandoned Russian village, whose only inhabitants were old people, alcoholics and goats. They were kept alive by a weekly delivery of bread, which was left in a train carriage at a railway junction five kilometers from the village. The film opens with an wonderful 10-minute shot of the locals pushing the carriage with bread along an abandoned railway track. Dvortsevoy's most moving and most difficult documentary, In the Dark, is contained in a small flat in an anonymous Moscow tower-block, where a blind pensioner lives alone with only a mischievous white cat for company. To stay sane, the old man weaves woollen bags, while the cat – his only friend and greatest enemy – keeps stealing, hiding and unravelling his wool. "I was so limited in that flat. There was so little movement, even my hero's face was quite still, though he did have his emotional moments. But basically, it was a man and a cat in a room. I thought if I can make a film out of this, I must be pretty good." In the Dark was Dvortsevoy's last documentary. "I'd started feeling bad about spending time with these people, using their lives, turning them into art and then abandoning them to their own devices. You can't interfere in life like this and expect there won't be consequences. Paradise, for instance, seemed like an innocent enough film, but it went down badly with some local apparatchiks, it didn't show a positive enough image of the country, so they took it out on my hero. They made his life a misery, even had him arrested. Also, working with real people you're always tempted to dig deeper and deeper into their lives – but for the sake of what exactly? You become a vampire." If, in documentaries, Dvortsevoy's strategy was to observe and lie in wait for the right moment to turn over, letting reality choreograph itself into an eloquent shot, Tulpan was a balancing act between the accidental poetry of his documentaries and the needs of drama and plot. His central character, Asa, comes back to live with his sister Samal and her sheep-herding husband Ondas, and begins negotiations to a marry local girl called Tulpan – the only eligible girl in the area. Dvortsevoy tried to organise his action in such a way as to tell each scene in a single long take, while staying open to happy accidents. A real whirlwind, for example, rises up in the steppe to engulf Asa and Ondas as they round up the herd; a goat comes up to the lovestruck Asa and kisses him on the mouth; a hyper-active toddler chases after his uncle Asa, but then changes his mind halfway through the shot and starts playing with his tortoise, which scampers off in the sand. "This could only work with a really alert camera operator, who was constantly framing things out and including events at the right moment," Dvortsevoy says. "That little boy kept looking at the camera, so it was a real challenge." Keeping the long takes going and getting performances from the actors can't have been easy. Admittedly, the characters and the emotions involved were not very complicated, but it must have been a challenge to keep the energy and the focus through these long takes, in which so many planned and unplanned elements played together. "Yes, that's why I often talked out loud throughout the shots, to the horror of my French soundman, I had to shout stuff or make noises to energise the actors." The key moment in the film is when Asa accidentally comes across a pregnant sheep in the steppe and helps her give birth. It's all told in a continuous 10-minute take. "We did a lot of preparation for that. We spent days getting the sheep used to the crew and the actor, and we observed a few live births to give everyone an idea how it all works. It was a major operation. We had people keeping an eye on the herd, so we'd know in advance which sheep might be giving birth and were always at the ready." Of course, Dvortsevoy's methods are unthinkable in the context of contemporary western cinema, with nosy executives, fussy crews, agents, actors, health and safety issues, and completion bonds. More importantly, Dvortsevoy's cinema depends on a particular sort of landscape, where objects have texture and history, where people physically interact with nature – rather than sit in front of screens, commute in cars or trains, work out in gyms and live out their adventures in some virtual space. "I must admit, I don't envy you having to make films in Britain," Dvortsevoy tells me. "It seems like this world is becoming more and more digitised. When I applied for a visa to come to the UK, I had to go on the internet and fill in a long questionnaire with questions about myself. In the end the computer said no. I was refused a visa four times! I was turned down not by a human being who looked, listened and made a decision, but by a computer. Something in my personal details didn't make sense. It seems like people's behaviour is becoming more and more predictable and programmed. Everyone knows their place, how they fit in. But there's no way you can digitise reality out in the steppe; the world is open to possibilities. There's no way of telling which way the camel might go." Documentary guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy felt documentaries were turning him into 'a vampire', so he turned to fiction – and he's still a genius While I was teaching at a Moscow film school in 1996, I was approached by Russian television to appear in a programme...

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05.11.2009. 23:20h

ANKARA, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) -- Turkey and the European Union (EU) agreed to intensify cooperation to overcome the common problem on migration flow and to fight irregular migration, said a joint statement on Thursday.

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05.11.2009. 23:19h