Sell Watches To You

Police took the unusual decision yesterday to step in and deny increasingly lurid reports about the private life of the murdered GCHQ officer Gareth Williams.

Scotland Yard sources said that reports of bondage equipment found at his flat and a "ritualistic" arrangement of his possessions were untrue. A spokesman later added that the detective team investigating the death, had clarified the accuracy of the reports "out of respect" for Mr Williams' relatives.

Mr William's body was found stuffed into a holdall in the bathroom on his home in Pimlico, central London, last week. Since the discovery suggestions regarding Mr Williams' private life and sexual tendencies have been rife.

Reports included the suggestion that the 30-year-old was, variously, a male escort or a transvestite; that bondage equipment had been found at his flat; and that a dozen mobile phone SIM cards had been laid out in a ritualistic manner in his home.

His family said they feared there was a smear campaign. Mr Williams' uncle told newspapers: "The family are concerned it may have been an attempt to put false, unkind details about Gareth's private life into the public domain to diminish him and take attention away from the security services he worked so loyally for."

All police have previously confirmed is that they are investigating a "suspicious death" – preferring that term to murder – and that the last known sighting of Mr Williams was in London on Sunday 15 August, eight days before his body was found. Initial reports said he had not been seen for a fortnight.

His body was discovered when police were called to check on him after a colleague voiced concerns.

Those scant details aside, little is known about precisely when, why or how Mr Williams died. As is usual in such cases, police have not confirmed any potential motive they are investigating. Early speculation suggested that Mr Williams' job may have been the reason for his death. But latterly, the focus has shone more on his personal life. Last week a pathologist was unable to establish a cause of death. Toxicology tests will determine if he was poisoned, or if drugs or alcohol were a factor. But the report suggested he was not stabbed.

On Saturday night Channel 4 News claimed that the initial police report had stated that Mr Williams' death was a "neat job", suggesting that he was killed by someone who knew what they were doing.

There are also suggestions that Scotland Yard detectives have become frustrated with the interference of colleagues in the intelligence agencies who are not used to their own organisations or employees being the subject of investigations. Police are also said to be investigating payments and withdrawals of thousands of pounds into and out of Mr Williams' bank account in the days leading up to his death.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Imagine asking a pharmacist for condoms and being given the choice between a packet of Durex and socks. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

The government has released its eagerly anticipated response to the Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy and, incredibly, it's even worse than I thought it would be. The verdict is "business as usual", with the main recommendations of the committee ignored in a fog of confusion and double-think.

You get a sense of this confusion very early on, with lines like: "given the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity in England, [policy on homeopathy] involves a whole range of considerations including, but not limited to, efficacy." I actually have no idea what this means – do medicines work differently in Norfolk from the way they work in Hampshire? The report doesn't elaborate.

As expected, the word "choice" features heavily in the government's response:

There naturally will be an assumption that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice ... if regulation was applied to homeopathic medicines as understood in the context of conventional pharmaceutical medicines, these products would have to be withdrawn from the market as medicines. This would constrain consumer choice and, more importantly, risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand."

So we can't regulate these products as medicines because they'd end up being banned, but we'll let them be called medicines anyway? It gives me a headache just trying to think down to the level of the person who wrote this stuff.

The report accepts that there's no evidence that homeopathy works, but apparently this shouldn't be a barrier to it being distributed via the NHS because not handing out medicines that don't work might infringe the freedom of patients to choose things that don't work. What makes this even more absurd is that they concede that:

In order for the public to make informed choices, it is therefore vitally important that the scientific evidence base for homeopathy is clearly explained and available. He [the government's chief scientific adviser] will therefore engage further with the Department of Health to ensure communication to the public is addressed."

So the government is planning to launch a public information campaign against homeopathic treatments at the same time as it continues to fund those treatments through the NHS. In this glorious mess of a policy the government has come up with something so brain-meltingly stupid that even the satirical brain of Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop) would struggle to match it.

What I find so frustrating is this dedication to a form of "consumer choice" that is absolutely anything but. If I walk into a pharmacist looking for a packet of condoms, and I'm given the choice between a packet of Durex and a sock, it isn't a choice, it's just a pointless piece of confusion that's going to lead to lots of people having really uncomfortable sex, and a localised population explosion.

Another feature worth picking up on is the way in which responsibility for these decisions has been passed down the line, allowing alternative medicine to fall conveniently into various regulatory gaps. The government doesn't believe that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has time to waste on a review of homeopathy, while the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has made its guidelines flexible enough to allow many homeopathic products a free pass, for reasons that are still unfathomable to me.

In this regulatory vacuum the government's response repeatedly delegates responsibility for making decisions on the use of homeopathy to primary care trusts, yet these are set to be abolished in the next few years, which will dump responsibility onto individual GPs.

The General Medical Council's guidance to GPs on the issue of alternative medicine is woolly at best (and the the council has ignored my requests to clarify it). The GMC states that "we are not in a position to advise doctors about the suitability or otherwise of particular treatments as our remit does not extend to collecting, analysing or disseminating clinical information" and basically leaves it to GPs' own judgement about whether or not a treatment is in the best interests of a patient.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Black holes may play a far more important role in the evolution of the universe than scientists had previously realised, according to a study suggesting that these massive and mysterious structures in space could have been key to the formation of the earliest galaxies.

Scientists have used supercomputers to simulate what would have happened in the early universe when two galaxies collided.

They found that the collision quickly forms a "supermassive" black hole with a mass many millions of times greater than that of the sun.

The gravitational fields of supermassive black holes are so great that no cosmic objects, not even light, can escape them if they stray too close.

Until now, it was thought that they played only a secondary role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, but the latest research suggests they are in fact central players.

Cosmologists also previously believed that galaxies formed in a gradual, hierarchical fashion, with clumps of matter coming together to form stronger centres of gravity that would pull in further matter, eventually forming new constellations of stars.

However, the computer simulation suggested that galaxy formation occurs far more rapidly than this gradual process and that it may at least in part be driven by the formation of supermassive black holes, which are believed to exist at the centre of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

"The standard idea that a galaxy's properties and the mass of its central black hole are related because the two grow in parallel will have to be revised," said Stelios Kazantzidis of Ohio State University, who was part of the research team whose study is published in the journal Nature.

"In our model, the black hole grows much faster than the galaxy. So it could be that the black hole is not regulated at all by the growth of the galaxy. It could be that the galaxy is regulated by the growth of the black hole," Dr Kazantzidis said.

The universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old. The new computer simulations suggest that the first supermassive black holes formed when early galaxies began to collide with one another within the first few billion years after the universe began following the Big Bang.

"Our results add a new milestone to the important realisation of how structure forms in the universe," Dr Kazantzidis said. "Together with these other discoveries, our result shows that big structures, both galaxies and massive black holes, build up quickly in the history of the universe. Amazingly, this is contrary to hierarchical structure formation."

Astronomers believe that the earliest stars in the universe were many times larger than present-day stars, some 300 times the mass of the sun for instance, a feature that had to be built in to the computer simulations.

The computer simulations of the cosmic collisions were also far more detailed than previous simulations – the new ones contained features that were 100 times smaller than earlier studies. Dr Kazantzidis said the work should help the search for the elusive gravity ripples in space, the "gravitational waves" predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, but never detected.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

When Heston blumenthal, Raymond Blanc, Angela Hartnett, and dozens of other top chefs come to dinner, what do you cook? How about the turbot in chicken crust with sage, or the scallops with peanut sauce – or the snail flan?

If you are celebrating running the most successful restaurant in British history and serving the country's best chefs, there is no need to choose. Last night, Michel and Alain Roux served 25 dishes – including the three above – along with some of the finest champagne and claret in the world at the most extraordinary culinary gathering witnessed in a British restaurant.

The occasion was the family's 25th successive annual award of three Michelin stars to the Waterside Inn, the £150-a-head restaurant in the Thames-side village of Bray in Berkshire, which has maintained the highest standard of traditional haute cuisine for decades.

Winning a Michelin star is an accolade for which many chefs sweat in vain; Britain has only four three-star establishments. So when the Rouxs, father and son, came to wonder how they would celebrate 25 years at the top, they hit upon a twist to the usual practice of inviting the owners of the world's other three-star Michelin restaurants to a banquet. Instead, they invited the 140 UK chefs in possession of a Michelin star.

"We invited them all," recalled Michel Roux, 69, whose son Alain runs the restaurant day-to-day. "We were surprised. I was expecting about 60 or 70 or 80 of them to say yes, because not everyone can take a day off from the kitchens, but we have 116 of them, which is a huge compliment."

He went on: "I wanted to share it with the one, two and three-star chefs from the UK and not the three-star club from all over the world. There will be a lot of people with one star who are 25 to 35 years old – and they are the future of the UK."

On the guest list were some of the best known faces in British cooking, among them six who have recently had their own TV series – Blumenthal, who runs the neighbouring Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, fellow Frenchman Blanc, Hartnett, Tom Aikens, Marcus Wareing and John Burton Race.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

The trouble with leaving the farm is that it always means missing something. The bat man came while we were in Bournemouth and his report was a beautifully written, fascinating document. I knew it would be. He did a really excellent job. You could tell that he was an expert just from his name. There were so many letters before and after it. I really wanted to see if he looked bat-like, too. But we missed him.

From his report it seemed he knew more about bats and their habits than they do themselves, but he cost less than a plumber. He had made two visits, both at unreasonable hours. The bats have to be measured at dawn and dusk. It's the only way to tell where they live. They go out at dusk and they come in at dawn.

They are nice to have around, bats. As soon as twilight falls, they are all over the garden with a glamour all their own, a fanfare of swooping and dipping. I thought everyone had them, like pigeons, but it's just us, apparently. They are quite scarce, to such an extent that all species are protected. You can't eat them or move them or even disturb them.

The bat is to the moth what the bird is to the butterfly, a darker mysterious cousin. The more you think about them, the more interesting they appear. They have all kinds of advanced weapons technology: radar, gps, the works.

I found out last night that Burford, the picture postcard fudge emporia epicentre of the billionaires' playground that is the Cotswolds, was half-empty after the war. Literally, only every other house was occupied. It's hard to imagine as now you can't park there.

As well as all the empty houses a generation ago there were grain stores, outbuildings, barns, sheds and lofts that have now, along with the empty houses been turned into 5:1 dolby surround cinemas. I recommend a bat box over a satellite dish.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Jonathan Groff, the star of Glee, might have swapped the bleachers of William McKinley High School for a West End theatre, but one wouldn't know it to look at him.

His all-American style – tight T-shirt, trainers, blindingly white teeth – perfect for the award-winning TV show, appears at odds with the fusty drapes and swags of the Noël Coward Theatre, where previews of his new play, Deathtrap, begin this week.

As an fan of the hit US import, I half expect Groff – whose name is usually prefixed with the words "hunk" or "heart-throb" – to break into song, or at the very least punctuate his sentences with jazz hands, but he is more muted than the limelight-loving character for which he is best known. While the 25-year-old has been working on Broadway for some time, it was his appearance in the enormously popular TV show about a fictional high-school glee club, New Directions, which has brought him international success, and much controversy.

Groff has the good looks of Hollywood's golden age actors. Although he bears more than a passing resemblance to James Dean, which will do little to hurt his career, it is a comparison to another star, Rock Hudson, that has attracted the most attention. When a Newsweek magazine journalist criticised the performance of Groff, who is gay, as Jesse St James in Glee, in an article that also questioned the ability of gay actors to play straight characters, a furore was ignited.

The journalist wrote: "There's something about his performance that feels off ... he seems more like your average theater queen, a better romantic match for Kurt than for Rachel." This prompted a massive backlash.

While Glee's creator, Ryan Murphy, called for a boycott of the magazine, and guest star Kristin Chenoweth condemned the article as "horrendously homophobic", Groff appears much more relaxed. "It's just one of those things," he says. "You just have to take it like any good or bad review, and try to let it roll off your back. I've played all kinds of characters, with all kinds of sexuality, and I hope to go on doing that."

However, he doesn't believe the article was homophobic, and compares it to a scathing review of an actor's unconvincing accent. "It's all pretty much the same. People will say, 'so-and-so can't play this role because of this or that'," he muses. Sitting in the Royal Retirement room at the theatre, Groff seems positively Zen. "As an actor, it is great if you can leave your personal life at the door, but it is inevitable that the public is going to come to know more about you."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

China's ruling Communist Party signalled yesterday that it will step up its campaign against corruption amid public anger over a stream of revelations about the luxurious lifestyles of senior cadres. An anti-graft campaign has outlawed expensive banquets, visits to karaoke bars and precious gifts for senior officials. The Premier, Wen Jiabao, called yesterday for reforms that would allow more public scrutiny to address the "problem of over-concentration of power with ineffective supervision".

Speaking in Shenzhen, the booming city just north of Hong Kong, Mr Wen called for political reforms to safeguard the country's economic gains, reported the official Xinhua news agency. "People's democratic rights and legitimate rights must be guaranteed," he said.

Among generations of people brought up on struggles against capitalist running dogs and landlords, there is a strong level of mistrust about the super rich in China, but the real ire among the local populace is reserved for corrupt officials. It has become a major political issue as the privileged official classes and a new generation of hyper-rich that has benefited from the booming Chinese economy – which grew at about 10 per cent last year – creating a massive wealth divide.

Last year, China recorded its widest rural-urban income gap since 1978, and there is no sign of the gap closing. The World Luxury Association (WLA) said that by the end of 2009, total consumption of luxury goods in the Chinese market had reached £6bn, nearly 28 per cent of the world's total. An attempt by a senior Chinese police officer to have a subordinate registered as a "martyr" after he was killed by a drinking binge at an official banquet caused outrage last year. These dinners are seen as a flagrant form of corruption.

The latest target is golf. The sport, taken up with gusto by China's new rich, has been the focus of a series of corruption inquiries. Twenty government officials in Wenzhou, an entrepreneurial city in Zhejiang province, were reprimanded this month after they were publicly linked to a high-end golf club that charged 398,000 yuan (£37,000) to join – 40 times the average annual income of farmers in Zhejiang.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Andy Freeberg’s first solo show, in 2007, had a bit of fun with the Chelsea art-gallery world. Each picture in the series, called “Sentry,” was a head-on view of the huge front desk in another white-cube gallery; the receptionists are invisible save the very tops of their heads. “In a sense, Freeberg is taking scalps,” Vince Aletti wrote at the time, “but his real targets are uniformity, anonymity, and their chilling effect.”

A year later, on a visit to the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Freeberg found the inspiration for a series that would be both a sequel and a kind of flip-side to “Sentry.” Big Russian museums, you see, don’t monitor their collections with the uniformed guards common to American institutions. Instead, the babushkas handle security. Contrasted with “Sentry,” the images in this series, called “Guardians,” are warm and homey. Each woman looks over the artwork in her care from a cozy chair, wearing her own comfy clothes. Most intriguing is the way the women often seem to echo or complement the paintings and sculptures beside them; each seems to be paired with a masterwork that best matches her personality.

Freeberg told me that when he first showed people the work, “their impression was that the women looked really stern, and bored, not interested in what they’re doing there.” Later, when he returned to the museums with a translator and interviewed the guardians, he found that the opposite was true. “Actually, they love their work,” he said. “They love sitting there in the rooms; they feel like they’re protecting the history of their country and they’re very proud of it. They know about the artwork, and most of them are retired professionals of one sort or another. There was a dentist, an economist, an archivist, a dancer.”

“Guardians” is now a book, from Photolucida. Here’s a selection.

drive from www.newyorker.com

A quarter of a million pounds' worth of stuff by BBC staff over the last two years. Three times as much lost by government departments, more than £600,000-worth by the MoD alone. Ten thousand pieces of luggage a day gone missing in the USA.

Wheelchairs and wedding dresses at Waverley Station, nearly 9,000 mobile "devices" lost each year in Washington taxis, 85,000 phones (not to mention 21,000 PDAs – remember PDAs? – and "pocket PCs" lost in Chicago in one year, and that was 2005 when stuff was bigger. Lost.

Three hundred mobile phones a week in Disneyland. This stuff is prosaic. What about the lawnmower, the quarter-of-a-million-quid bag of (perhaps, maybe, just, ever-so-slightly moody) Rolexes, the human skulls, the breast implants, and the lawnmower lost on London Transport, except, as in all these cases, when we say "lost" we mean "found". The French have it right. No Lost Property Office for them, but Bureau des Objets Trouvés. Your loss is my find.

Guess where a fishing rod, a chess clock, a toaster, a ballet skirt, three crutches (miracle! miracle!), a miniature Doberman, a milk tooth and a set of dentures were found.

The Munich Oktoberfest. Come on. The chess clock and the Doberman should give it away. And 18 children. (The children were reclaimed.)

Beer and stuff. A dangerous mixture. The wise drinker leaves home with nothing in his pockets except the amount of cash he's prepared to drink, lose or have pinched and, possibly, a bottle-opener. Only a fool goes out for an evening's beerfesting with a ballet skirt, a fishing rod, a toaster and 18 children. Either a fool or someone with an extraordinarily intricate private life.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

They see themselves as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. But while for the moment they are America's most famous fugitives, even Hollywood would surely have trouble glamorising the likes of John McCluskey, who broke out from a medium-security Arizona prison on the night of 30 July, and his alleged accomplice Casslyn Welch.

True, there is romance of a sort in their tale. Welch, 44, is not just the woman who threw the wire cutters over the fence to McCluskey, giving him and two jailbird buddies the means to set themselves free. She is also, we are told, his fiancée. But wait, McCluskey's brave betrothed is in addition his cousin.

Smoothly would not describe how the escape unfolded. Now a band of four – McCluskey, 45, his girl and two other inmates named Tracy Province and Daniel Renwick – instantly hit trouble when they became disoriented in the dark. Only Renwick found the getaway car, a Chevy Blazer, which Welch had parked near by, packed with goodies for what was meant to be a trip for four including food, cash and drugs. He drove off alone.

The remaining trio resorted to hijacking another car to get as far away from the prison as fast as they could. The violence was to continue. Soon afterwards police found the bodies of an elderly Oklahoma couple in the charred remains of a camper in eastern New Mexico. The victims, they believe, died after encountering the escapees.

Luck was initially on the side of the police. Renwick was picked up in the getaway Chevy just two days after the breakout in Colorado. The cash they found amounted to almost $3,000. They also discovered a HiPoint .40 calibre model 4095 rifle, plus 141 rounds of ammunition, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and a driver's licence belonging to a Californian man. Then, last Sunday, Province was taken into custody in Wyoming.

And so they were two – and gone. This weekend, police here acknowledge that the whereabouts of McCluskey and his fiancée are simply not known. McCluskey was serving 15 years for attempted murder, and had already spent 14 years behind bars in Pennsylvania for a string of grocery shop robberies. It cheers no one that both have experience as long-distance lorry drivers. They may even have crossed the borders to Canada by now.

drive from www.independent.co.uk