What Would Durkheim Do?

General guidance is all very well. But it's not the place of religious leaders to provide a list of approved candidates

If last week's blogosphere was the equivalent of a giant pinball machine, which ball would makes its way around the entire table, hitting the bumpers again and again? The erroneously titled Dispatches: Britain's Islamic Republic is a worthy contender. It resulted in significant debate over the rules of engagement that Muslims should follow when immersing ourselves in the mainstream democratic process.

The programme accused the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) – a group that operates out of the London Muslim Centre (LMC) in Whitechapel – of trying to infiltrate the Tower Hamlets Labour party and wielding disproportionate influence over its activities. Associates (both Muslim and non-Muslim) tell me that the IFE carries out valuable social welfare work, but they must be held to account over some of the speakers invited to LMC events, one of whom denounced perfume-wearing women as "adulteresses". Dispatches should have also looked at local authority cronyism more widely. This is a problem that extends far beyond the M25, and is a concern for all council tax-payers, regardless of the affiliation of the cronies in question.

However, what struck me was the template letters of complaint drafted prior to the programme's transmission; these were forwarded to many Muslim individual and organisations, with clear instructions to bombard Channel 4 with e-mails. Fair play to those who wanted to complain after viewing the programme, but the mentality behind these cut-and-paste letters of protest – when the public have not yet had the opportunity to make up their own minds – makes me deeply uncomfortable. It strips us of our agency as political actors and asks us to enter an auto-pilot mode of perpetual defensiveness. Unfortunately, elements of this mentality can also be found in a paper on the IFE's website, entitled Voting in Islam. This is an expansion of Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad's earlier work, "Why vote and who to vote for".

It starts off well, urging Muslims to use voting as a means of increasing social justice: "Muslims are recommended or even obliged to vote for the party who will be of most benefit on a national and international level, who will increase upon that which is good, or at least, lessen the extent of the current evil prevalent in the world today." This is a refreshing departure from the clerics who threaten their followers with hellfire for so much as daring to enter the ballot box; Sheikh al-Haddad maintains that anyone who believes voting to be an act of disbelief should not "impose his opinion on other Muslims". He then adds that Muslims should "exert the utmost effort to oppose those whose policies are against the welfare of humanity", and this is sound guidance which would benefit the entire electorate, irrespective of whether they hold religious or not.

However, on the subject of which party to actually vote for, he states that "individuals should avoid involving themselves in this process and rather should entrust this responsibility to the prominent Muslim organisations that have sufficient experience and ability to determine the issue according to the interests of the Muslims". His organisation of choice was the Muslim Association of Britain, who, in a "Here's one I made earlier" moment, had prepared a list of relevant candidates. Now it is one thing for religious leaders to highlight important issues that followers may consider when casting their vote, and even to point out commonalities between their own ideologies and the policies of certain parties. This is part of a healthy, functioning democracy. However, it is quite another thing to order members of a religious group to vote for a particular party or candidate. We have already seen the ramifications of this in the US: the Rev Jay Scott Newman, a Catholic priest from South Carolina, barred his parishioners from taking holy communion if they had voted for the Barack Obama, seen as a pro-abortion candidate – unless they made penance first. It is therefore not surprising that 89% of respondents to the British Social Attitudes Survey 2008 thought that people should follow their own conscience in matters of right and wrong, while only 6% said they should obey the teachings of religious leaders.

My organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), supports the right of people to exercise their own judgment when deciding who to vote for. I act as a consultant for the Citizenship Foundation's Young Muslim Leadership Network, whose website states, "Citizenship education is not about trying to fit everyone into the same mould", but rather "enabling citizens to make their own decisions". BMSD is currently undertaking a qualitative research project into factors affecting the voting choices of Muslim students, and the results will be published in Spring 2010.

Muslims are of course comprised of multiple identities, just like everyone else. Any combination of these could come to the fore when marking the cross on that all-important ballot paper. It is up to us to critically analyse the political, moral and social issues facing us today and act as agents for positive change.

• Islam
• Religion

Even by a conservative estimate, there are now 2m potholes in Britain's roads. Can't anything be done to stop the rot?

What great issue is currently exercising young socialists in Bulgaria so much that they have taken to the streets in protest? What are Americans photographing and sending pictures of to the authorities? What has a South African businessman taken to repairing himself despite threats of arrest?

The answer: holes in the road. Potholes. Craters, as our tabloids call them. Because moaning about the acne that breaks out on asphalt roads is not just a peculiarly British impulse; the whole developed world is obsessed with these cracks and hollows.

In this country – however parochial or trivial the issue may seem at first glance – the holes we thud over in our cars or swerve around on our bicycles now threaten to rival the never-ending winter as a conversation starter. The two are, of course, related. But experts say that the blossoming of dangerous scars on our road network has been created by more than just hard frost. A perfect storm of ice, underinvestment, a public-spending squeeze, heavy traffic and digging-mad utility companies could yet see potholes elevated from petty gripe to general-election battleground.

There were at least 1.5m potholes on British roads last year, according to the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), a group representing roadbuilders and asphalt producers. That was up from 1m the previous year. Now, after our worst winter weather in decades, the number could well be in excess of 2m nationwide.

Potholes are caused when water penetrates tiny cracks in the road – cracks that are usually caused by traffic. When this water freezes, it expands, widening the cracks. When it melts, traffic thumps down on the space vacated by the ice and smashes new craters into the road surface. And these holes can be a nightmare for road-users. In January 2009, cyclists reported 699 allegedly hazardous potholes to cycle campaign group CTC's website, fillthathole.org.uk. In January this year, 3,508 hazardous potholes were logged. And as anyone travelling our scarred and sorry roads knows, this is just a drop in a very large puddle. The cold weather we experienced last month has led to an estimated 40% increase in the damage to our roads.

But are these holes as unavoidable as the weather itself? Not everyone thinks so. "This sort of thing doesn't happen in Scandinavia or France, where they mend the roads properly," says David Weeks, director of the AIA. "A well-maintained road will withstand snow and ice without a problem. This is a legacy of 25 years of government underfunding and the siphoning of road maintenance money into other projects at a town hall level."

While it may be true that roads in other parts of Europe are less scarred by potholes, some road experts do think that our current winter climate – with more rain and a more frequent cycle of freezing and thawing – is particularly conducive to potholes. More importantly, Britain's roads carry far more traffic than most other European countries: 34m motor vehicles clocked up 508.9bn vehicle kilometres on our roads in 2008 alone – up by 50bn over the last decade.

Perhaps most crucially of all, other countries do not have so many drains and services placed under their roads, and do not give scores of privatised utility and telecoms companies the legal right to dig up a brand new road. Transport for London calculates that 1m holes are dug in the capital's roads every year, which makes the AIA's estimate of 2m holes being dug in UK roads by the utility companies each year look like an underestimate. While utility companies have an obligation to repair what they dig up to a certain standard, this has an impact on the roads. Even if the work isn't shoddy – which it sometimes is – breaking up and then repairing the road surface makes it more perceptible to potholes.

We did not know it at the time, but we will look back on 2007 as a golden era of silky-smooth roads. In the run-up to that year, the long economic boom had encouraged the government to commit an extra £500m to tackling the backlog in road maintenance and, according to Paul Watters, head of roads policy at the AA, by 2007 our roads were in pretty good nick, assisted by a run of mild winters. But then, of course, the recession hit . . .

So what price a few holes in the road? Road builders and local authorities (responsible for nine out of 10 miles of road; the Highways Agency looks after motorways and major trunk roads) claim that repairing the full backlog of holes in our knackered roads would cost an extra £8.5bn (on top of their normal yearly spend). Last year councils did fill in 968,195 potholes, but funding for roads is unlikely to be a priority in the future, with a public-spending squeeze. The Local Government Association has asked the Department for Transport for emergency funds of £100m to deal with the latest, most pressing repairs, but how far will this go? Harrow council estimates it will cost £2m simply to fix the new potholes in its borough.

None of this is good news for motorists, but environmentalists may have reason to cheer: the road industry predicts that road building will all but cease as shrinking transport budgets are swallowed up by road maintenance.

"If it's a choice between a school or a nursing home and the roads, the votes are in people, not lumps of tarmac," says Watters. "But of course the teachers who go to these schools and the nurses who work in these nursing homes all use the roads. Our roads are such an underrated asset. We've got to preserve the asset and put more money into road maintenance. Less money is a false economy. If we let the roads collapse it will cost up to nine times more than if we repair them before they expire."

What can we do if roads are only going to get worse? An increasing number of road users are making claims or taking legal action. The AA estimates that the cost to UK car insurers of claims relating to pothole damage was £2.85m during February alone. Councils in England and Wales spent £35m – more than half of what they spent on repairing potholes – on compensation claims relating to local authority roads in 2008, according to the AIA, which seems spectacularly self-defeating on the litigants' part. Cyclists should report potholes to the local authority duty-bound to repair it, according to Debra Rolfe, CTC's campaigns co-ordinator. "Reporting it creates a public record of it being there. I hate to say it, but the fear of litigation can help motivate a council to get a pothole repaired."

In the future, bright ideas may help us rub along with potholes. University students in Milan have devised a flourescent layer of asphalt beneath the road surface which is exposed when a pothole forms, alerting the authorities and road users to the hazard. It could be trialled in Italy later this year. Or perhaps we will become a nation of renegade road repairers like Pierre Bouwer, the South African businessman who has taken to fixing potholes on a road himself, despite claims he could be arrested for doing so. Or we could make like the artist Pete Dungey, who is busy planting the potholes of Britain with primroses. He may be some time.

• Transport
• Road transport
• Cycling

Netanyahu needs all the support he can get. But he still turned Biden's visit into a diplomatic fiasco

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has a bad habit: when things appear to be moving in the right direction for him, he stumbles upon some stupid political landmine, raising doubts about his leadership and credibility.A series of blunders had ruined his first term in the 1990s, and on his way back to power Netanyahu promised that he had changed. For a year, he stayed away from trouble, avoiding unscripted public remarks, giving no interviews, and being attentive to other politicians' needs and interests. But this week, he did it again, ruining the visit of American vice president Joe Biden with an official announcement of a plan to build 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighbourhood of East Jerusalem – despite a well-known American opposition to Israeli settlement expansion. Netanyahu apparently didn't know in advance about the interior ministry's decision, taken by mid-level planning and zoning bureaucrats. But it was according to his government's policy, and he should have and could have taken steps to avoid such unpleasant surprises. His failure to do so portrays him as a hopeless schlemiel, just like "old Bibi" from the previous term.

Biden's trip was meant to mark a new chapter in the cool relationship between the Obama administration and Israel. Mindful of its political trouble at home in view of the midterm elections, and worried about an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, the White House dispatched the veep – known to be Netanyahu's best friend in Washington – to plead Barack Obama's case to the Israeli leadership and public. Biden's trip coincided with the announcement of indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, to give the battered administration a diplomatic success.

The Israeli interior ministry announcement, on Tuesday afternoon, put Biden in the worst possible position: rather than visit the Middle East as an honest peacebroker, he appeared as Israel's patsy. And not only Biden: Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, agreed to resume talks with Netanyahu despite Israel's refusal to hold off construction in East Jerusalem. The new project threatened to show Abbas as Israel's collaborator.

Previous prime ministers built more than Netanyahu in East Jerusalem, but they were careful to tie it in with positive developments in the peace process to avoid American anger. Lacking peace negotiations, Netanyahu's rightwing coalition could not enjoy the American blind eye like its predecessors. Time and again in the past year there were diplomatic clashes over Israeli plans to settle Jews in Arab neighbourhoods, to build new homes for Jews, or to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Each time Netanyahu argued that he was not in the loop, but backed the decisions. His coalition partner Eli Yishai, the interior minister and leader of the rightwing Shas party, has made the settling of more Jews in East Jerusalem his cause celebre – to prevent a future partition of the city, and to deliver cheap housing to his ultra-Orthodox constituents.

In November the Americans tacitly agreed to the exemption of East Jerusalem – the most contested spot in the Holy Land conflict – from the settlement freeze announced by Netanyahu. But they expected not to be publicly embarrassed. When Israel couldn't keep the deal, snubbing its senior American guest, the administration exploded. Biden called Obama, who told him to condemn the Israeli decision in the strongest terms – an unprecedented step in a high-level visit. Netanyahu apologised for the timing, and told Biden that the project in question will be built only "within several years". The vice president accepted the apology, and delivered a staunchly pro-Israel speech at Tel Aviv University, praising "my close personal friend" Netanyahu. The Palestinians were less satisfied, withdrawing their agreement to renew talks.

Netanyahu's constant zigzagging between his rightwing ideology and political partners and his craving for American support has turned the vice president's visit into a diplomatic fiasco. Ultimately Netanyahu could not please both sides without paying a price. Biden's face-saving remarks aside, "Bibi" is left with no friends in America's highest echelons – when he needs all the support he can get vis a vis Iran's threats and the Palestinians' quest for independence. America will not abandon Israel, but its patience for its leader is running out.

• Israel
• Palestinian territories
• Barack Obama
• Joe Biden
• US foreign policy
• United States
• US politics
• Middle East
• Binyamin Netanyahu
• Mahmoud Abbas

New Zealand protester could face up to three years in jail for illegally boarding vessel during Antarctic hunt

The Japanese coastguard has arrested an activist from New Zealand for illegally boarding a whaling ship last month.

Peter Bethune, a member of the US-based group Sea Shepherd, is accused of jumping aboard the vessel from a jetski in the Southern Ocean, where Japan was conducting its annual whale hunt.

Boarding a Japanese vessel without legitimate reasons can bring a prison term of up to three years or a fine up to 100,000 yen (£730).

Sea Shepherd said Bethune boarded the Shonan Maru 2 to make a citizen's arrest of its captain and deliver a $3m (£1.98m) bill for the destruction of a hi-tech protest ship Bethune captained, the Ady Gil, which sank in January after colliding with the whaling ship. Instead the Shonan Maru 2, which was providing security for the whaling fleet, set sail on a three-week voyage back to Japan with the activist on board.

Dozens of camera crews waited on the quayside for the ship's arrival today in Tokyo bay, where about 10 rightwing demonstrators were holding placards branding Bethune an "ecoterrorist".

The fisheries minister, Hirotaka Akamatsu, said: "Anyone who has done wrong will have to face severe punishment in accordance with the law."

Bethune is due to meet a lawyer and a New Zealand diplomat later today. The New Zealand foreign affairs minister, Murray McCully, said Bethune would receive consular assistance, which is routinely provided to New Zealanders arrested overseas.

The boarding was the latest incident in Sea Shepherd's campaign to disrupt Japanese whaling activities. The activists follow whaling boats and interrupt the hunt by dangling ropes in the water to snarl the ships' propellers and throwing packets of rancid butter on the boats' decks.

Whalers have responded by firing water cannons and sonar devices to disorient the activists.

Japan's annual whale hunt is allowed by the International Whaling Commission as a scientific programme, but opponents claim it is a cover for commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986.

The Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson, told the Japanese public broadcaster NHK last week that Bethune knew what he was doing when he boarded the whaling vessel to confront its captain.

"It was deliberate. We are going to expose the illegality of the Japanese whaling operation at every opportunity," he said.

Officials have two days to interrogate Bethune before handing him over to prosecutors, who will decide whether to press formal charges against him, said the national coastguard spokesman, Masahiro Ichijo. He said authorities were considering additional charges, including assault and destruction of property.

Whale meat isn't widely eaten in Japan, but is available in some restaurants and stores.

• Whaling
• Japan
• New Zealand
• Antarctica
• Protest

Commander of new police rapid-response force among victims of explosion after gun battle in eastern Afghanistan

Insurgents opened fire on a police post in eastern Afghanistan and detonated a roadside bomb as police reinforcements arrived, killing three officers.

Among the dead was the commander of a new police rapid-response force created in Paktia province to deal with Taliban threats, said Azizudin Wardak, the provincial police chief.

Two more members of the elite force were wounded, while another officer was injured in the gun battle near Gardez, the provincial capital, last night.

The insurgents retreated after the bomb was detonated, Wardak said.

The al-Qaida-affiliated Haqqani faction of the Afghan Taliban is active in Paktia as well as in nearby Khost, where militants launched an unsuccessful attack on the provincial government headquarters earlier this week.

A suicide bomber in Khost infiltrated a base shared by Nato and Afghan forces near the Pakistan border on Tuesday night, killing two international troops when he detonated his explosives.

• Afghanistan

Will the leaders' wives really bring their husbands electoral popularity? I'm not so sure

So now Samantha Cameron is to be let off the leash – or maybe dragged unwillingly out of the kennel – to play her part in the election race. "You are going to see a lot more of her on the campaign trail," her husband told Alan Titchmarsh in a television interview on Wednesday, "so Britain get ready!" It was nice of David to warn us, but he really didn't need to. It always seemed probable that the engaging Mrs Cameron would at some stage be press-ganged into political service; but as her husband's lead in the polls began to shrink and the prospect of a hung parliament (or even, God forbid, of another Labour victory) started to loom ominously on the horizon, it became inevitable.

David Cameron must realise that his personal appeal to the electorate is in decline. Even his charm has begun to arouse suspicion. Could it be masking the fact that he is actually no more than a clever smoothie on the make? Could he be just a cynical "Tory boy" at heart? He knows he needs "humanising", and the only person in a position to do this plausibly is his wife. Sarah Brown has shown the way by seeking to persuade the public that her dour husband is not just consumed by personal ambition, but is a warm-hearted, high-principled old buffer. "I know he's not a saint," she told the Labour party conference last autumn. "He's messy. He's noisy. He gets up at a terrible hour. But I know he wakes up every morning and goes to bed every evening, thinking about the things that matter. I know he loves our country."

Asked by Titchmarsh to give a description of himself, Cameron said he was a "young guy" who was passionate about his country, cared for his family, and was relaxed, normal and reasonable (unlike Gordon Brown, by implication). Samantha's job will be to convince people that David is not only young, relaxed etc, but also a steadfast man of character, as in Sarah Brown's depiction of her husband. And her first attempt to do so will be made this Sunday, when she is to be interviewed on television for the first time during an hour-long profile of the Tory leader by Sir Trevor McDonald. In one sentence leaked in advance, she speaks of their 18-year relationship and says: "I can honestly say that I don't think in all that time he has ever let me down." That is a rather puzzling claim, but its implication is presumably that he would never let the British people down either.

While Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron are both likeable women and potentially more popular than their husbands, it is questionable how useful their support will actually turn out to be. It may well suggest to the public a lack of self-confidence by a party leader to make his wife campaign on his behalf. None of our most successful prime ministers – Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher, even Tony Blair – have resorted to this tactic. And while Sarah Brown's professed hero-worship of Gordon may have made an impression on the public, he would appear to have benefited even more from Andrew Rawnsley's claims that he bullies his Downing Street staff. This suggested a man of rugged, independent spirit, and Brown himself has tried to build on this idea by saying in a speech this week that the test of a leader was "whether you have a clear idea of what you want to do, whether you are determined to push that through, and whether you are sufficiently impatient and strong-willed to push aside the barriers that stand in your way". Rawnsley may have done more to narrow Cameron's lead over Brown than any of Sarah's talk of his lovability. People don't necessarily want their leaders to be lovable. Margaret Thatcher was never thought lovable, but that didn't stop her winning election after election.

There is no sign yet that Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, will seek to exploit his wife Miriam in this way, which is perhaps not surprising, given that she is both Spanish and a Roman Catholic. But it may all the same work to his advantage in the election that he, alone among the main party leaders, won't seem to rely on the endorsement of a spouse to commend himself to the electorate. In this respect Clegg, who has Dutch and Russian ancestry, is more typical of continental politicians, for they don't feel the need to enlist the political support of their wives. Of course, if you were Silvio Berlusconi, you wouldn't want to, since his wife Veronica Lario is divorcing him because of what she has called his tendency to "consort with minors". Similarly, you wouldn't really expect Nicolas Sarkozy to rely on the advocacy of Carla Bruni, who even now won't confirm that her marriage to the French president is "for ever".

Sarkozy has a habit of marrying beautiful but independent-minded women, not the sort that a politician would necessarily invoke as witnesses to his solid, bourgeois virtues. But he probably regards the fact that such women are drawn to him as in itself an electoral asset. Berlusconi also hopes that his interest in young women will be both understood and approved by Italian voters, and the indications are that he is probably right. I wonder how British voters would react to an openly philandering party leader. It is just conceivable that they would respect him for his honesty.

• Samantha Cameron
• Sarah Brown
• Gordon Brown
• David Cameron
• Silvio Berlusconi

Women come out best in listening and recollection tests in study by University of London's Institute of Education

It's been an endless source of aggravation between the sexes; how can men so easily forget birthdays, anniversaries, and even friends' names?

Not, it seems, because they cannot be bothered to remember. Research suggests that, in middle age at least, absent-minded-ness is a particularly male problem.

At the age of 50, women's verbal memory outperforms their male counterparts by a significant margin, a report by the Institute of Education, University of London suggests.

A survey of more than 9,600 middle-aged British men and women showed that women outscored men in two listening and recollection tests.

"Men performed significantly more poorly in the verbal memory tests: particularly on the delayed memory test," the authors, Matthew Brown and Brian Dodgeon, said.

"This was quite a surprising result, since women turning 50 tend to do worse: another study has shown that during the menopause women do not do so well."

Participants in the first test listened to 10 common words being read out and were then given two minutes to recall as many as possible. The second test required them to list the same 10 words about five minutes later. Women scored almost 5% more than men, on average, in the first test, and nearly 8% more in the second.

Women were less accurate in a third test requiring them to cross out as many "Ps" and "Ws" as possible in a page filled with rows of random letters. They had, however, scanned letters faster than men.

In a fourth test, naming as many animals as they could in a minute, men and women had identical scores. Each could name 22 animals, on average. The study did not test whether men are better than women at recalling numbers; previous studies have shown that women tend to do better on word recognition tests.

Those tested were members of the National Child Development Study who have been tracked since their birth in 1958. They were tested at age 16, and the latest tests will help estimate the impact that exercise, diet, smoking, alcohol and depression have had on mental abilities. Initial analysis shows those who exercised at least once a month did better on all tests, on average, than those who did not. Non-smokers, including ex-smokers, also outscored smokers in the first of the "word recall" tests, even after social background was taken into consideration.

"Although measuring gender differences was not the central purpose of tests, the differences between men and women were interesting," the authors said.

• Gender
• Research
• Neuroscience
• Medical research

• RMT union refuses to rule out Easter national walkout
• Talks continuing over BA cabin crew strike threat

The prospect of a national rail strike during Easter loomed larger yesterday after maintenance workers voted in favour of a walkout.

The RMT union refused to rule out a bank holiday strike by thousands of Network Rail staff, and they could be joined by 5,500 signal workers whose ballot result is announced next week.

Meanwhile, British Airways is facing a second potential dispute alongside its row with cabin crew after the Unite union said last night that it planned to hold a consultative ballot among thousands of BA ground services staff, including baggage handlers, over new contracts. If union members voted in favour, there would then be an industrial action ballot within weeks, although the airline said that talk of such a vote was "speculative and premature".

A source close to fraught peace talks between the airline and Unite said that informal discussions about averting the cabin crew walkout were continuing, with the possibility that strike dates would not be announced today.

Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, left open the option of an Easter national rail walkout and called on Network Rail to hold further talks about changes to working practices. "It could well be that both the signal workers and maintenance workers take action together," he told Sky News.

Network Rail believes it can withstand a maintenance strike for at least a week, with some branch line closures, before services are disrupted by safety measures such as speed restrictions. However, the company admitted this week that a signallers' strike could bring the busiest sections of the network to a halt, because the main signalling centres, which employ around 3,000 people, would not be staffed.

Crow said the vote, with 77% in favour of striking on a 65% turnout, reflected safety concerns after Network Rail's decision to restructure its maintenance division. Network Rail's proposals include 1,500 redundancies, the majority voluntary.

Network Rail has overseen a significant improvement in rail passenger safety since taking over from Railtrack in 2002, and it vehemently denied the new regime could see a return to the dark days of the Hatfield crash in 2000 and the Potters Bar accident in 2002.

A spokeswoman said: "The way the railway is maintained and operated needs to change. Work practices that date back to the steam age should no longer have a place on a modern railway."

Unite and officials from its cabin crew branch, Bassa, met to discuss the next steps in the dispute with BA that is close to escalating into a walkout, after a deadline to secure a deal was missed on Wednesday. Unite must announce strike dates by Monday under rules set down by the 1992 Trade Union Act. The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Brendan Barber, is acting as an intermediary in the talks with BA, but a source said the lines of communication were now "slender".

Bassa said in a statement that it had "absolutely no wish" to trigger a strike. Unite and Bassa have offered a one-off 2.6% pay cut in talks, but BA says the proposals are still "significantly short" of its £60m cost-saving target.

A BA spokeswoman said the airline remained available for talks. One key sticking point is that the airline appears to have accepted the partial repeal of staffing cuts but has not gone far enough to satisfy Unite and Bassa.

• Transport
• Rail transport
• Trade unions
• British Airways
• Air transport

What the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew

• Former chief Dick Fuld and accountants Ernst & Young criticised in 2,200-page report
• Claims that buyer Barclays received assets it was not entitled to
• Fuld tried to involve Gordon Brown to fast-track Barclays rescue

A court-appointed US bankruptcy examiner has concluded that there are grounds for legal claims against top Lehman Brothers bosses and auditor Ernst & Young for signing off misleading accounting statements in the run-up to the collapse of the Wall Street bank in 2008 which sparked the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A judge last night unsealed a 2,200-page forensic report by expert Anton Valukis into Lehman's collapse which includes scathing criticism of accounting "gimmicks" used by the failing bank to buy itself time. These included a contentious technique known as "repo 105" which temporarily boosted the bank's balance sheet by as much as $50bn (£33bn).

The exhaustive account reveals that Barclays, which bought Lehman's US businesses out of bankruptcy, got certain equipment and assets it was not entitled to. And it reveals that during Lehman's final few hours, chief executive Dick Fuld tried to get Gordon Brown involved to over-rule Britain's Financial Services Authority when it refused to fast-track a rescue by Barclays.

With Wall Street shaken by the demise of Bear Stearns in March 2008, Valukis said confidence in Lehman eroded: "To buy itself more time, to maintain that critical confidence, Lehman painted a misleading picture of its financial condition."

The examiner's report found evidence to support "colorable claims", meaning plausible claims, against Fuld and three successive chief financial officers - Chris O'Meara, Erin Callan and Ian Lowitt.

Valukis said the bank tried to lower its leverage ratio, a key measure for credit rating agencies, through a device dubbed "repo 105" through which it temporarily sold assets, with an obligation to re-purchase them days later, at the end of financial quarters in order to get a temporary influx of cash. Lehman's own financial staff described this as an "accounting gimmick" and a "lazy way" to meet balance sheet targets.

A senior Lehman vice-president, Matthew Lee, tried to blow the whistle by alerting top management and Ernst & Young. But the auditing firm "took virtually no action to investigate".

During the bank's final hours in September 2008, Fuld tried desperately to strike a rescue deal with Barclays but the FSA would not allow the British bank an exemption from seeking time-consuming shareholder approval. The chancellor, Alistair Darling, declined to intervene and Fuld appealed to the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, to contact the prime minister.

"Fuld asked Paulson to call prime minister Gordon Brown, but Paulson said he could not do that," says the examiner's report. "Fuld asked Paulson to ask president Bush to call Brown, but Paulson said he was working on other ideas."

In a "brainstorming" session, Fuld then suggested getting the president's brother, Jeb Bush, who was a Lehman adviser, to get the White House to lean on Downing Street.

Barclays eventually bought the remnants of Lehman's Wall Street operation from receivership for $1.75bn - a sum that has enraged certain bankruptcy creditors who believe it was a windfall for the British bank.

The examiner's report finds grounds for claims against Barclays for taking assets it was not entitled to, including office equipment and client records belonging to a Lehman affiliate, although it says these were not of material value to the deal - the equipment was worth less than $10m.

A lawyer for Fuld last night rejected the examiner's findings. Patricia Hynes of Allen & Overy said Fuld did not structure or negotiate the repo 105 transactions, nor was he aware of their accounting treatment. She added that Fuld "throughout his career faithfully and diligently worked in the interests of Lehman and its stakeholders".

A spokesman for Ernst & Young, which is headquartered in London, told Reuters the firm had no immediate comment because it was yet to review the findings.

• Lehman Brothers
• Barclays
• Credit crunch
• Financial crisis
• United States
• US economy
• Gordon Brown
• Alistair Darling
• George Bush

The Senate majority leader's wife is hospitalised with broken neck and broken back after her car was hit by a truck

Sad news this evening for Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, with his wife Landra and his daughter Lana in hospital in Washington DC with serious injuries, after the car they were travelling in was hit by a truck.

Senator Reid's office put out a statement:

"Senator Reid's wife, Landra, and daughter, Lana, were involved in an accident earlier today. They are being treated at a Washington-area hospital. While driving on a Washington DC highway, their vehicle was rear-ended by a semi-truck. Mrs Reid has a broken nose, broken back and broken neck. Lana has a neck injury and facial lacerations. Both Mrs Reid and Lana are conscious, can feel their extremities, and according to doctors their injuries are non-life threatening. Senator Reid has been to the hospital and appreciates the support he and his family are receiving from Nevadans and his colleagues in the Senate."

After going at the hospital with his family, Senator Reid returned to the Senate, to deal with "dramatic" developments in on-going healthcare reform meetings. A spokesman said Reid would return to the hospital after the meeting tonight.

• Democrats
• US Congress
• US politics
• Nevada
• US healthcare
• United States

Eliza Manningham-Buller's apparent lack of awareness of alleged US mistreatment of "war on terror" suspects is baffling (The ex-spy boss says she didn't know about torture, 11 March). Does she not read the newspapers, watch television or indeed even delve into her own agency's intelligence reports?

From the Binyam Mohamed case – just one case among many – we know that the security service was told by US officials that Mohamed was kept shackled, deprived of sleep and threatened with being "disappeared" by his US interrogators. Meanwhile, members of the security service themselves "interviewed" nine British nationals at Guantánamo in 2003. Did what they heard there ring no alarm bells?

Even a quick perusal of numerous Amnesty reports from 2002 onwards could have alerted Manningham-Buller to the issue. We shouldn't have to rely on speeches from former members of the security service for a full picture of this period. Instead we need an independent and wide-ranging inquiry into all aspects of the UK's alleged involvement in human rights abuses like rendition, secret detention and torture.

Kate Allen

Director, Amnesty International UK

• Listening to the assertion of wise monkey "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" Eliza Manningham-Buller claiming not to know about the torture of detainees, I can't help feeling that I would like the head of my intelligence service to have the intelligence to know that other intelligence services, such as the CIA, might not always tell the truth.

Christopher Orlik

Bristol

• MI5
• Binyam Mohamed
• Torture
• CIA
• Guantánamo Bay
• Human rights

So Zoe Williams reckons "there's a world of difference between a man who thinks he looks cool with a tough dog, and a young man ... encouraging it to be vicious" (Comment, 11 March). Really? I didn't notice the difference when my neighbour's pit bull/boxer cross tried to separate my cat from its head while he sat there smirking; I just wanted the vicious bastard and his dog to find a new home miles away from me.

However, I did notice the difference when I worked with a guy who told us all, seriously and proudly, that he was teaching his two young staffs to react aggressively to the word "paki". The working class (Ms Williams mentioned council estates first), of which I'm from, is not one huddled, oppressed mass forever at the mercy of the "establishment". There are evil idiots among them, and if you don't believe me you are welcome to come and spend a day on my street, among the empty Stella cans, pizza boxes and dog mess.

Name and address supplied

• Two points on the government's plan to enforce microchipping of all dogs and third-party insurance to compensate victims (Man bytes dog, 9 March). 1) Microchipping is not an accurate way of tracing the owner of a dog, as it can be sold and not re-registered. 2) You cannot realistically force dog owners to take out insurance. There would have to be some kind of annual dog licence check.

Just enforce the current law which says: "Possessing an unregistered pit bull terrier type dog is unlawful and if you have such a dog you are committing a criminal offence." Technically these types of dog can only be allowed out in public if they are muzzled, chipped and registered. If not, the police can take the dog and the owner will have to go to court to prove the dog is not a danger or it will be destroyed. I see at least eight every time I take my dog for a walk in my local park. How have so many pit bull types been allowed to exist? 

Jo Sanderson

London

• Animals
• Crime

One option to get round the problem of a high-speed rail line painting a long grey "blight corridor" across the Chilterns and either Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire (The fate of the Chilterns reveals the limits of localism, 8 March) would be to stitch the HS2 into another existing blight corridor. This was done successfully a decade ago in the routing of HS1, or the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Only at a few places did CTRL/HS1 leave the noisy environs of either an existing railway or one of the motorways.

For nearly 10 years I have been promoting an HS2 route that follows closely the M1, M45/A45 and (further north) M18 and A1(M) on the east side of the Pennines, and M6 Toll and the west coast mainline to the west side. As with HS1 there are a few tricky places, but there are simple solutions such as a two-mile tunnel under the M1 as it threads through Luton. The only objection I have heard is that the M1 corridor is "rather heavily populated"; this objection implies that a route that goes through open countryside, blighting it with noise, is acceptable – well, just you wait and see. The citizens of Buckinghamshire fought off an airport at Wing/Cublington three decades ago, and I can sadly foresee them fighting off this railway too.

And as for Heathrow, well, to me the simplest solution is to extend the Heathrow Express line from Terminal 5 to run beside the M25, using part of the Egham to Weybridge line, and so provide a link into the Woking-Basingstoke-Southampton electric 100mph line. True, it would only be suitable for trains like the shorter Eurostars, but it would provide a service direct to Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 5, linking in via HS2 at Cricklewood.

Peter Stephens

Wootton, Bedfordshire

• Not to connect the proposed high-speed rail network directly to Heathrow airport would be another major missed infrastructure opportunity for this country (Rail route towards Birmingham revealed for high-speed network, 11 March). We now have a chance to build a modern multi-modal transport hub, which would significantly boost London's business competitiveness and accessibility. It is not rocket science to understand the travel efficiencies inherent in taking passengers via the airport, rather than having them traipse from one connection to another with baggage in hand.

It is a mystery why we struggle in the UK with the idea of integrated transport planning. Rail and air (and road) are not competing transport systems, but complementary elements in what should be a comprehensive multi-faceted network.

Demand for air travel will continue to grow and we need to build on recent investments at Heathrow with a third runway and high-speed rail link. Our challenge is to offer business and leisure travellers a better experience and protect the UK's competitive advantage. Not servicing Heathrow directly by the high-speed rail would be to fail in that challenge.

Frank Wingate

Chief executive, West London Business

• High-speed rail is something we really need. The use of trains to go anywhere is wonderfully sound for the environment. So could someone tell me why my partner and I this week paid £75 each for a return to London, plus a £40 taxi fare to the station because there is no bus service at the time I needed the train. I sat on the train, packed to capacity, thinking that I could have taken the car, paid for a day's parking, the congestion charge and dinner for two, and still been better off.

Eean Wyatt-Lees

Salisbury, Wiltshire

• Which infrastructure development do you think would add more value to your life/business: (a) a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, to be extended to Scotland in due course, which will benefit a few people, cutting their travel time by 20 minutes; or (b) extending optic fibre cabling to 95% of homes and businesses so we can have genuine high-speed broadband of the calibre that Korea is already building.

The costs are roughly the same. If we are going to invest £60bn in the UK infrastructure, I think it is a no-brainer that we should apply it to the digital communications future, not the historic infrastructure that made the Victorians great. Tell your MPs (of all parties) before they make a stupid mistake.

Stephen Milton

St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

• Rail transport
• Rail travel
• Channel Tunnel
• Heathrow third runway
• Broadband

There are two big decisions about high-speed rail. First, is it needed in Britain? And second, if it is, where should it go?

In many regards, yesterday was just another bad day for British transport. Rail maintenance workers decided to strike. Signallers may join them and shut the network over Easter. British Airways remained at loggerheads with its employees. The London tube network was digesting the news that it now has a £460m shortfall in its modernisation programme. Everyone expects cuts in transport spending, if not in the next budget then the one after that.

Faced with all this, only a visionary or a fool would stand up in parliament and announce plans for a £30bn, 330-mile, 225mph rail line, whose construction would not even begin until 2017, and whose completion will take much more than a decade. Yet that is what Andrew Adonis, the transport minister, did yesterday, and he deserves much congratulation for it. The case for high-speed rail is strong, but not so overwhelming that the line will be built without committed people arguing that it should happen, as Lord Adonis has done late in this Labour government and someone else will have to do if there is a Tory one. A thousand small cares could still knock the project off course, as well as one big one – paying for it, which is a subject all parties skirted around yesterday. But the principle of a new line has been established, and the government has set out detailed plans for its construction. This train, as British Rail used to boast, is getting there.

There are two big decisions about high-speed rail. First, is it needed in Britain? And second, if it is, where should it go? The answer to the first question produces remarkable consensus. High-speed rail is not just about travelling faster, and not just about links to London. It will join cities reliably and with much greater capacity than ever before, soaking up growth in transport demand while freeing up space on the existing network for commuters and freight. It is the alternative to more roads and planes, but it will also allow travel on routes badly served by existing transport lines – such as Leeds to Birmingham, or Nottingham to Scotland. That is why cities, political parties, environmental groups, unions and business are all in favour.

The subsequent question, about the route, is less easy to answer. Lord Adonis has been desperate to built a pre-election consensus around his particular plans, and the Conservative party, which backed high-speed rail before Labour, has been just as desperate to avoid joining it. This is a pity, since the detailed route published yesterday by the HS2 company makes sense, if the trains are to head west from London towards Heathrow before turning to the north. They include city centre terminals, proper interchange with the new Crossrail scheme and a reasonable compromise between environmental intrusion in the Chilterns and a direct line to the north. The Conservatives want a route from London that would come nearer Heathrow, which sounds attractive but would also be slower and more expensive to build. Nor – since the trains would run only near the airport, not under it – would it allow seamless travel to the air terminals. Under the HS2 scheme announced yesterday there will be easy connection to a 10-minute Crossrail shuttle to Heathrow; the Tory alternative is worse.

The next step will be to consult on the route, and changes will be made, although they cannot be large without simply directing the consequences of construction into someone else's backyard. The route cannot be put underground without greatly adding to the cost. It will be narrower, less polluting and less noisy than the M40 and A413 roads which already cut through Buckinghamshire, but to the people most affected by the line that will not be much compensation. Nonetheless, the government must introduce a hybrid parliamentary bill and begin the debate on its financing. This line will make Britain a better place. No one will regret building it when it is open. The hard part will be getting from here to there.

• Rail transport
• Transport
• Transport policy

Black Tory candidate Loanna Morrison has some outspoken views, but it's her comments on immigration that are really raising eyebrows

The trail starts in the 1990s, when relations between black communities and the authorities were a sorry tale and the Voice newspaper was at the forefront of the struggle. To lighten the mix, the paper had a celebrity column written by Loanna Morrison. She was always vivacious and obviously well-connected.

And here she is again, sitting on her sofa and explaining to me why she has found herself as a black Tory. She'll carry the Conservative banner against Simon Hughes in Southwark and Bermondsey. And wow. She's very Tory. On Europe: "We don't want to be some region of Europe." On race: "Black organisations should not exist. We don't need them." On the economy: "Why aren't we talking about cutting tax?"

But it's her stance on immigration that has made her a darling among some hardline Tory activists – which is OK, one supposes – but also to some outside the party. And that is less welcome. But then, if you write articles that begin "'Britain is full,' declares Nick Griffin at every opportunity, and he is right", that will happen.

Still, she's cool with it. "I was just articulating what a lot of people have been telling me on the doorstep, a lot of them minorities," she says of the piece which ran on the website Conservativehome. "People say the country just doesn't need any more immigrants. White voters tell me I can say the things they can't. I tell them that I am as annoyed as anyone else."

Black Tories were once an exotic and sorry breed. Viewed with disdain by their community, never fully accepted by the party, it seemed a lonely existence. Loanna, originally from Jamaica but "very British", says that's changed; and, true enough, there are quite a few now in winnable seats. "I can never understand why black people vote socialist," she snorts. "We are natural conservatives. I suspect it is just habit."

Most black Tories are centrists, but Loanna sits somewhere to the right of Cameron. She and Margaret Thatcher, still a heroine, would have got on famously.

We spend three hours, talking politics, old friends and incongruities, and at the end, she's still vivacious, still engaging, still Loanna. As for the rest of it, it's a free country. We won't agree on much, but that's life.

• Race issues
• Conservatives

In holding that the aim of science is truth alone, they misrepresent its real aims

George Monbiot is surely right to bemoan the profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs that exists between science and the public (With complex science, we must take much on trust. The trouble is we can't, 9 March).

Many members of the public instinctively and irrationally distrust, even fear, science. Thus, for climate sceptics, "No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us". And scientists don't help by producing specialised "gobbledegook" so incomprehensible that even scientists "studying neighbouring subjects within the same discipline can no longer understand each other".

The situation might be helped if scientists stopped deceiving us, and themselves, about the nature of science itself, and adopted a more truthful view. At present most of them take for granted the view that the intellectual aim of science is to acquire knowledge of truth, the basic method being to assess, impartially, claims to knowledge with respect to evidence – nothing being accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. But this is nonsense. Physics only ever accepts theories that are unified – that attribute the same laws to all the phenomena to which the theory in question applies – even though many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted.

This means that physics persistently accepts a substantial thesis about the universe independent of evidence: there is some kind of underlying unity in nature, to the extent at least that all seriously disunified theories are false. This substantial, influential and highly problematic assumption needs to be acknowledged within science, so that it can be criticised and, we may hope, improved. The aim of science is not truth per se, but rather truth presupposed to be unified, or explanatory.

And it goes further. The aim of seeking explanatory truth is a special case of the more general aim of seeking truth that is, in some way or other, important or of value. Values, of one kind or another, are inherent in the aims of science. But values are, if anything, even more problematic than untestable assumptions concerning an underlying unity in nature. Values implicit in the aims of science need to be acknowledged, so that they can be criticised and, we may hope, improved.

Finally, knowledge of valuable truth is sought so that it may be used by people, ideally to enhance the quality of human life. There is a humanitarian or political dimension. But this, again, needs to be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved.

In short, in holding that the intellectual aim of science is truth alone, scientists seriously misrepresent its real, problematic aims, and thus prevent urgently needed critical assessment by scientists and non-scientists alike. More honesty about the nature of science might improve science, and public attitudes towards it – and might even encourage scientists to produce less gobbledegook.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Hacked climate science emails
• Philosophy

The transport secretary, Lord Adonis, has published £30bn plans for a 250mph rail link between London and Birmingham. The proposals, which would revolutionise Britain's rail network, are subject to parliamentary approval and public consultation. Work is not due to begin on the route until 2017, with the first stage expected to take 10 years to complete. After that, the government intends to extend the high-speed track to northern England and Scotland.

Peter Walker hears the views of the people of Wendover in the Chilterns, an area of outstanding natural beauty that the new rail route would pass through.

The transport historian Christian Wolmar says the key question is whether the high-speed rail plans would increase capacity on Britain's railways.

The Guardian columnist Julian Glover says the plan will bring economic benefits to the whole country, while the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, Norman Baker, believes the consultation process will allow members of the public to be heard, and for their views to be given due consideration.

A lesbian student at a school in Mississippi wanted to take her girlfriend to the prom. So the school cancelled it

If all those John Hughes movies are to be believed, the senior prom is a highlight of American teenage life. But in a real-life scenario that would have made for a great John Hughes plot, a cowardly school in Mississippi has cancelled its senior prom this year after a female student wanted to bring her girlfriend as her date.

Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old student at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, asked to be able to take her date. The school's board objected – and to McMillen wanting to wear a tuxedo – so the American Civil Liberties Union got involved, pointing out the discrimination issue.

How did the school react? By blaming "distractions to the educational process caused by recent events" and cancelling the prom for everyone – which left the rest of the students unhappy. The local Clarion-Ledger newspaper, under the sparkling headline "Mississippi lesbian alleges retaliation after prom date debate", reported McMillen's reaction to the news that the prom had been scrapped:

"That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one. A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it's really retaliation."

The ACLU this afternoon filed a lawsuit against the school district:

She was told, according to the lawsuit, that the pair would have to arrive separately and could be thrown out "if any of the other students complained about their presence there together." McMillen was also told she could not wear a tuxedo, according to the suit, because boys are to attend in tuxedos and girls in dresses.

Announcing the cancellation, the school board said: "It is our hope that private citizens will organize an event for the juniors and seniors." A private party would circumvent the legal issues.

The gay-prom-goer issue has arisen in many states in recent years. In conservative Utah, gay students in Salt Lake City can attend a separate prom, sponsored by the Utah Pride Centre. In more liberal California – despite Prop 8 – students at Fairfax Senior High School in Los Angeles elected gay student Sergio Garcia as prom queen in 2009.

A Facebook group, Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!, has been started and already has 11,000 fans.

• Gay rights
• US constitution and civil liberties
• United States

Governments indicate support for complete international ban to allow species to recover from years of over-fishing

Japanese tuna brokers protested today after the EU decided to support a worldwide trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna. EU governments indicated that they would back a complete international ban on the species to allow the bluefin to recover from years of over-fishing.

The protest came just days ahead of a meeting this weekend of Cites, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, in Doha, which will see 175 member states vote on whether to add the fish to a list of animals threatened with extinction, banning its trade.

Raw tuna is a key ingredient in sushi and sashimi in Japan, the world's main purchaser of bluefin. Although the ban would not prevent the fish from being caught, it would end the trade between European fishing fleets and Japan, where about 80% of captured bluefin ends up.

"This is like telling the US to stop eating beef," said Kimio Amano, a 36-year-old broker at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo who joined about 100 other dealers – many clad in work boots and shiny waterproof overalls – to chant slogans calling for better use of the ocean's resources.

The brokers argue that an Atlantic ban would be unnecessary if existing tuna stocks were better managed. The Japanese tuna industry also contends that the implementation of the ban could lead to broader restrictions.

"Our biggest hope is that this doesn't spread to the Pacific," said Tadao Ban, head of the Tokyo co-operative for large fish dealers. For this reason we are promoting strict resource management. We are even supporting putting a tag on each and every tuna caught."

Global stocks of bluefin tuna – which can reach 14ft (4.3 metres) in length and weigh more than 1,000lb (450kg) (450kg) – have been decimated over the last decade, particularly in the Atlantic.

It is estimated that some 1m bluefins were caught last year, while the total population is thought to be about 3.75m. The WWF says stocks of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic have dropped by 80% since 1978.

• Japan
• European Union
• Fishing