You Can Get A Watch

Mr Loophole strikes again. The Liverpool footballer Joe Cole has escaped an immediate driving ban for speeding at 105mph after his solicitor told the court that the midfielder needed his licence to drive his wife, who is too scared to get behind the wheel following a carjacking – and too famous to catch public transport.

The court heard that Carly Zucker was left "severely traumatised" after being dragged from her car by "eight thugs on motorbikes" outside her flat in London two weeks ago.

Nick Freeman, known as Mr Loophole for his ability to defend clients facing driving offences, told Staines magistrates' court that Ms Zucker had not driven since the incident and was too well known to be able to comfortably use public transport, therefore she needed her husband to drive for her.

The solicitor also managed to argue that Cole, who already has six points on his licence, should avoid the normal punishment of six points for speeding at more than 100mph – something which would have meant an automatic six-month ban, given his previous record.

The chairman of the bench instead banned Cole, who was found guilty at an earlier hearing, for 50 days, and also agreed to suspend the punishment and a £750 fine after Mr Freeman announced that he was appealing against the verdict.

It essentially means that Cole will be tried again for the offence. His legal team insist that the officer who was operating the speed gun used it wrongly and therefore the reading was not accurate.

Cole was driving his wife's Audi A4 when a police officer spotted him breaking the 70mph limit on the A3 in Surrey. Andrew Mitchell, who has since retired from the force, told the court he believed Cole's car was being driven too fast when he saw it approach at 12.55pm on 19 November. "My estimate was confirmed when the laser, when shone on the vehicle, recorded a speed of 105mph," he said at an earlier hearing.

But Mr Freeman, whose clients include Sir Alex Ferguson, Wayne Rooney and Jeremy Clarkson, said he believes Mr Mitchell was "panning" the speed-gun – moving it from side to side rather than holding it still – and that this created a false reading. It is a defence that he successfully used when defending the golfer Colin Montgomerie.

After Cole's hearing Mr Freeman explained that asking for the retrial was a "calculated risk", acknowledging that a 50-day ban was a relatively short punishment and should the player be found guilty again the ban could be longer. But he added: "My client and I believe that he is innocent. We do not accept he was driving that fast."

Mr Freeman told the court details of Ms Zucker's carjacking: she "was outside their house in London when she was carjacked by eight thugs who were on motorbikes. She was physically removed from the car. The car was stolen ... She is 26 and has been severely traumatised by this incident to the extent that she has not driven a car since."

Ms Zucker and her five-month-old baby would not be able to use public transport if Cole was banned because of their "profile", the lawyer added.

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Senior figures at the Prince of Wales's complementary health charity, which closed amid a criminal investigation this year, are opening a college to promote holistic medicine in the NHS.

The College of Medicine aims to raise the acceptance of "an integrated approach to health" among doctors, politicians and the public by running courses and publishing books, journals and films.

Doctors who endorse integrated medicine believe it improves patients' wellbeing by considering their beliefs and personal circumstances and helping them look after their own health. The approach is controversial because some practitioners use complementary therapies, such as homeopathy, alongside conventional medicine.

The establishment of the college has dismayed scientists who believe there is scant evidence that complementary medicines work and that taxpayers should not be funding such treatments

The four directors of the college are former fellows or directors of the prince's charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, which shut in April after Scotland Yard began a fraud and money-laundering inquiry. Police later charged the charity's finance director, George Gray, with theft totalling £253,000. None of the directors of the new college have been accused of wrongdoing in the investigation.

Registration documents filed at Companies House and other details of the college were obtained by David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College London and critic of alternative medicine. They are published today on his website, DCscience.net.

One director of the college is Michael Dixon, a GP in Cullompton, Devon, who was formerly medical director of the Foundation for Integrated Health. The others are George Lewith, who runs a complementary medicine unit at Southampton University; David Peters, the chairman of the British Holistic Medical Association; and Christine Glover, a holistic health consultant. All are former fellows of the prince's charity.

Dixon's surgery lists alternative therapies including one called "frequencies of brilliance" which, according to its Australian founder, works in extra dimensions of space. Dixon does not practice any alternative medicine himself.

The College of Medicine had been registered as the College for Integrated Health, but documents at Companies House show the name was changed after a teleconference between the directors a week after the prince's charity shut. A promotional slide show for the College of Integrated Health said it was "a new strategy to take forward the vision of HRH Prince Charles," adding: "It is the evolution of his Foundation for Integrated Health's work to date."

A Clarence House spokesperson said the Prince of Wales was aware of the institution, but "has not been involved with setting-up the college, is not launching it and has no official role with it".

Some scientists say greater availability of complementary medicines on the NHS could put patients at risk. "It is the constant claim of alternative medicine enthusiasts that only they appreciate the caring side of medicine. That is simply not true," said Colquhoun.

"If I'm ill, I want above all to be cured. I don't want to be given magic beans and left to die. However caring the treater may be, the treatment fails if I'm not cured."

Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said: "I fear that the College of Medicine will amount to little more than a smokescreen and a farce." He feared courses being planned could be about "popularising disproven or unproven treatments within UK healthcare".

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On 8 July 2009, 98 days after Southampton Leisure Holdings plc, Southampton FC's former holding company, had been placed in administration, a little-known German-born, Swiss businessman, Markus Liebherr, stepped in and bought the club. The Saints, as the club is known, had suffered several years of decline and had just been relegated from the Championship to League One, having suffered a 10-point deduction because the parent company had gone into administration.

The end seemed nigh when a consortium led by the former Saints hero Matthew Le Tissier withdrew. Liebherr, however, agreed a deal within two hours of arriving at the club's St Mary's ground. He would not disclose how much he had paid for the club, but claimed it was "ein Schnäppchen" [a bargain].

He certainly surprised many in the UK and Switzerland. Some in Switzerland thought he should have done something for football in his adoptive country rather than investing abroad. His answer was that he was not an expert on football, but that Southampton FC was very attractive and it was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. "I had to make a quick decision," he said.

Apparently, he was attracted by the club's sporting heritage, loyal fan base, first class stadium and training facilities, and the potential for the Saints to regain their place in the higher echelons of English football. He put in a Swiss banker, Nicola Cortese, as executive chairman while Alan Pardew, previously in charge at Reading, Charlton and West Ham, was appointed manager. Liebherr was prepared to spend generously on transfer fees and wages and paraded his enthusiasm by encouraging his family to accompany him to games, including the 4-1 thrashing of Carlisle at Wembley in the final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy - the club's first significant silverware since the famous victory over Manchester United in the 1976 FA Cup final.

Markus Liebherr was born one of five children in the village of Kirchdorf an der Iller, Württemberg, in 1948. His father Hans had taken up an apprenticeship in his stepfather's building firm before serving in a pioneer unit of the Wehrmacht in Russia during the Second World War. Twice wounded, he returned to the family business in 1945. He wanted to make building work easier and employ fewer men, as skilled labour was in short supply. Remarkably, there were no cranes for smaller building sites; with others he designed a Fahrbarer Turmdrehkran [mobile tower crane], the TK 10, which could be easily dismantled and put together again. In 1949, he patented the TK 10.

The time was right: the Federal Republic was established in the same year and West Germany's economic miracle got underway, and as his success continued Liebherr diversified into white goods as well as construction equipment and aircraft parts. He sought to keep his empire to himself and, in the early 1970s, to avoid inheritance tax, moved to Bulle in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

When Hans died in 1993, Liebherr Holding employed more than 30,000 "co-workers" in various parts of the world. His children, Hans, Markus, Hubert, Isolde and Willi, were given equal shares in the company when it moved to Switzerland but at that point Markus gave back his shares. Hans and Hubert also left the company, Hans turning to equestrian sports and Hubert devoting himself to religion.

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Covering nearly three-quarters of the Earth's surface to a depth of up to seven miles, it is one of the most abundant natural substances and free to anyone who cares to scoop it up and take it away. Yet if one entrepreneur has his way, gourmet restaurants could soon start stocking their larders with sea water – and paying for the privilege.

Chefs eager to enhance the authentic taste of their bisques and bouillabaisses will soon have the opportunity to buy purified sea water from the Outer Hebrides. Launched at the Taste of Edinburgh festival yesterday, Acquamara claims to be the world's first designer sea water and will retail at £4.95 per three-litres.

It is the idea of Andy Inglis, a former United Nations official, who was inspired after helping his daughter research a project for her homework. He concedes that some people might be reluctant to part with a fiver for something they can get for nothing, but hopes the project will reap dividends for the local economy in the tiny Hebridean island of Berneray. There it is extracted from the sea and passed through a filter which removes any particles of sand, dirt and rust before being brought by tanker to Dunbar where it is tested to ensure it passes European standards for safe drinking water and then decanted into a wine-type box. "I think it's going to be seen as a bit cheeky, but if I can be a bit cheeky and create jobs in the Hebrides than I'm happy being a bit cheeky," Mr Inglis said.

Mr Inglis, 49, who works part-time for the Department for International Development, said it would be the aspiring MasterChef contestant that was most likely to buy the product.

"For those who like food done the proper way this is going to be a great product," he said. "For the sort of chef who gets up at 5am in the morning to go and source proper mushrooms, for that high-end restaurant market, it's going to be a must-have.

"We live by the sea, so I tried cooking a few things with sea water and I couldn't believe the difference it made in the flavours. It was remarkable. So I started to look around and see if this might be viable as a business and spoke to some people within the industry who seemed to think it would be possible."

Some leading chefs have already tried and liked what they have tasted of the new product, which has long been a feature of ancient sailors' cookbooks, as well as a staple ingredient in some of the world's best seafood restaurants. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant named last month as the best restaurant in the world, offers langoustine cooked in sea water as one of its starters.

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Jermain Defoe is due to undergo surgery on a groin injury next week and has "no chance" of playing in England's Euro 2012 qualifying matches against Bulgaria and Switzerland next month according to Harry Redknapp. The Tottenham manager added that he would play "60 minutes" at most tonight as the London club aim to turn around a 3-2 deficit from the Champions League play-off first leg against Swiss club Young Boys of Bern.

Defoe, 27, has an appointment with a specialist on Monday, and the club's medical staff say he is 90 per cent certain to need an operation the next day, ruling him out of the games against Bulgaria at Wembley on 3 September and Switzerland in Basle four days later.

The timing of the procedure is sure to further strain the rocky relationship between the England manager Fabio Capello and Redknapp, who have clashed publicly on numerous occasions.
Redknapp yesterday insisted the operation is necessary as Defoe is unable to train fully, and that the first apointment with the specialist is next week. "He [Defoe] will be out for a couple of weeks," Redknapp said. "He won't be fit for England, no chance. He was supposed to have it on Thursday, but the specialist who would have done it can't do it until after the weekend which is a blow for us, but he has got to have it done. He's hardly been training, and it's getting worse all the time."

Defoe aggravated the injury in last week's 3-2 loss. Redknapp rested him for last weekend's 2-1 win over Stoke and says he will not last more than an hour in tonight's second leg against Young Boys at White Hart Lane.

"60 minutes is about as long as he can last. He wants to play and train but he has to have it done now, he can't go on like that," Redknapp said. He admitted the priority was to ensure that Defoe would be fit for the Champions League should Tottenham progress tonight. "It is getting worse each time, the pain. I'm not sure if he will start."

"I've had it for a few months," Defoe said. "The manager knows what I'm like. If I can I'll always be out there training. I've worked with the physios to try to strengthen it and get myself out there to try to help the team. If it means coming off after 60 minutes then so be it.

"I might need an op but the lucky thing is it's a straightforward op. I'll only be out for seven days. Alan Hutton had the same thing and so did Didier Drogba. The problem would go completely and I'd only miss seven days of training."

Defoe, who has 12 goals from 43 England caps, said he has been playing through injury since the World Cup finals in June. It ruled him out of the recent friendly with Hungary, when Capello gave a full debut to Bobby Zamora, but Defoe still features strongly in Capello's plans for the future.

Defoe's forced withdrawal would add to controversies surrounding the England squad announcement, as speculation that Capello could select Everton's Spanish midfielder Mikel Arteta refuses to die down. Arteta has been resident in England for five years and would qualify through dual nationality, having not played for Spain's senior side.

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The Soviet Union gave the world cosmonauts, America followed with astronauts and China eventually added its own Sinonauts. If all goes to plan on a floating platform in the Baltic sea during the next three weeks, a 63cm-wide rocket hand-built by two self-employed engineers will herald the unlikely arrival of a new breed of space pioneers – the Danonauts.

Depending on weather conditions and some last-minute fine tuning of its oxygen-fuelled engine, the Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or Heat 4 rocket is scheduled to launch from a barge off the wind-swept island of Bornholm before mid-September. In so doing it will bring significantly closer the day when Denmark – a country hitherto better known for the combustive qualities of vikings and roll mops – breaks into the exclusive club of four nations to have sent a human being into space.

Blast off for the 1.6-tonne projectile, which is due to take place during a 17-day window beginning this weekend, will be the culmination of six years' work for Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, the two Danish enthusiasts who have dedicated themselves to the successful launch of the world's first amateur-built rocket capable of manned space flight.

Although the first flight will be carrying a crash test dummy, it is intended that Heat 4 will eventually take a human in the shape of former Nasa scientist Mr von Bengtson into sub-orbital space inside a capsule barely big enough to contain his body in a standing position and topped with a thick glass dome allowing the one-man crew a 360-degree view of a rapidly-shrinking Earth.

If all goes to plan, the 9 metre-high rocket will burn through its fuel of liquid oxygen and solid rubber in about 60 seconds to propel the craft at 1,250mph to a height of more than 100km where it will experience weightlessness for about five minutes before drifting back to the Baltic sea slowed by a parachute.

All this for approximately €50,000 (£41,000) paid entirely by donations of between 10p and £2,000 from members of the public and sponsors. The cost is about 0.02 per cent of the £290m average cost of a Nasa space mission.

Mr von Bengtson, 34, who once built the world's largest home-made submarine and co-founded the Copenhagen Suborbitals organisation behind the plan with Mr Madsen, told The Independent that their mission was driven by a desire to prove that the cosmos is accessible without the backing of a multi-billion dollar state space agency.

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None of the alarms and only seven out of 43 surveillance cameras were working at a Cairo museum where a Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen, Egypt's top prosecutor said yesterday.

Thieves took the canvas, known by the titles of Poppy Flowers and Vase with Flowers, on Saturday from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum.

Prosecutor general Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud told Egypt's state news agency that the painting was removed from its frame with a utility knife.

He blamed lax security measures, calling them "for the most part feeble and superficial". He said the museum guards' daily rounds at closing time were inadequate.

Mr Mahmoud said his office had warned museums to tighten security after nine paintings were stolen last year from another Cairo institute, the Mohammed Ali Museum. Similar security lapses were to blame.

Fifteen Egyptian officials, including the director of the Khalil museum, Reem Bahir, and the head of the fine arts department at the Ministry of Culture, have been barred from leaving Egypt during the inquiry into the theft, Mr Mahmoud said.

On Saturday, Egypt's minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, said that police had confiscated the painting from an Italian couple at Cairo airport hours after it was stolen. But Mr Hosni later backtracked, saying his announcement was based on "false and incorrect" information. He said authorities were still searching for the missing painting, which he said is worth an estimated $50m (£32m).

This is the second time this painting by the Dutch-born Post-impressionist has been stolen from the Khalil museum. Thieves first made off with the canvas in 1978. It was recovered two years later at an undisclosed location in Kuwait.

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Joel Sternfeld’s moving body of work “Sweet Earth,” published in 2006, has been on my mind for some time now. In over fifty images, “Sweet Earth” explores sites and communities Sternfeld describes as “experimental utopias in America.” “As the world seemed to turn in unison to hyper-capitalism and large scale urbanism,” Sternfeld writes, “I wanted to point out that there were other models.” I caught up with Sternfeld over the phone while he was at his cabin in Vermont, and asked him to tell me about the genesis of the project and his current work.

“Sweet Earth,” Sternfeld explained, was the first of what he envisions as a four-book cycle, the subsequent installments being “When it Changed,” “Oxbow Archive,” and his most recent book, “iDubai.” Utopic and dystopic aspects of mankind’s activities have been dominant and consistent themes throughout Sternfeld’s work, and in this cycle he draws a link between social models and the environmental implications of our actions.

The title of the second book in the cycle, “When It Changed,” can be read, Sternfeld said, as a continuation of the first: “Sweet Earth, When It Changed.” In this book, Sternfeld documents our descent into a possibly irreversible situation not through photographs of the changing landscape but through the faces of its inhabitants. The series consists of portraits of delegates and attendees at the 11th United Nations Conference on Climate Change, in Montreal, 2005, snapped at the moment “when the horror of what they hear becomes visible on their faces,” the moment when utopia dissolves.

After the harsh realities of the climate-change conference, Sternfeld felt compelled to work on “Oxbow Archive.” Over the course of a year, he photographed a single field in Northampton, Massachusetts, nearly every day. Sternfeld, who said he has always “been deeply engaged in the seasonality and the landscape of New England,” confessed that he had “imagined doing this work as an old man, but after hearing what I heard in Montreal, documenting this field felt urgent, because of the possibility it was going to change radically in the next fifty or one hundred years.”

While doing his research for “When It Changed,” Sternfeld began to believe that “even if we could solve climate change, it would simply allow us to consume the world and the world’s resources in some other way,” and he wanted to make a statement on consumption. This past winter he published “iDubai,” the final book of the cycle. Dubai seemed “a perfect symbolic site for a consuming world,” and what better way to document it, he said, than with the “consumer object du jour,” the iPhone. Sternfeld, who is known for his beautiful 8x10 view camera images, admits that he loves the iPhone palette and its pinhole lens, which creates “little chromatic jewels.”

Here’s a selection of images from all four books. The first two images, from “Sweet Earth,” are followed by Sternfeld’s full accompanying text.

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Scientists are baffled by the mutilated carcasses of dozens of seals washing up on the British coast this summer, each bearing near-identical and as yet unexplained "corkscrew" lacerations.

The horrific injuries appear to have been made by machine and have been described by one researcher as looking as if the animal has passed through a giant pencil sharpener, or even a lathe cutting through thick blubber to the bone. The public is being urged to be vigilant and to contact police should anyone come across the remains of seals on beaches.

Worst hit have been populations off the Norfolk coast, where 50 carcasses have been recovered this year. But in parts of Scotland such as the Firth of Tay, where numbers of common or harbour seals have been in serious decline for the past decade, up to 10 per cent of the breeding population was found dead in June, prompting concern for the species' survival there. Seven incidents were also reported in St Andrews Bay and the Firth of Forth during the past two months.

Callan Duck, senior research scientist at the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University, said: "We simply don't know what is causing this. We are finding seals coming ashore dead with these highly unusual lacerations right around their body like a spiral. From their head down they can have one or two complete revolutions to their abdomen. It is a continuous cut with a very smooth edge."

The injuries are not like those inflicted by existing designs of boat propeller, although the researchers believe that they are mechanically produced, most likely by an as-yet-unidentified vessel.

Seals have learned to be wary of approaching boats and tend to swim away from them, so the most likely theory is that the animals are being sucked into the blade when it suddenly starts up-close. But the investigation has failed to find any kind of offshore machinery capable of producing such wounds. One clue has been the experience of researchers in Canada where similarly injured seals were recovered a decade ago in the Gulf of St Lawrence. It was believed that the culprits were Greenland sharks, which can grow up to six metres in length and are the Arctic's most fearsome predator, having been linked to attacks to polar bears.

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The Israeli military yesterday began removing part of an eight-year-old concrete wall which once protected an Israeli settlement from gunfire and shelling, citing sharply improved security as the reason.

The Palestinian Authority pointed out that the move, which does not affect the much longer 450-mile separation barrier, will have no impact on the lives of local Palestinians. But it seized on it as making the case for a wholesale easing of restrictions on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Army engineers removed sections of a three-metre-high blast wall alongside the Gilo settlement on the southern edge of Jerusalem in an operation which will continue over the next fortnight. The wall was constructed at the height of the intifada in 2002 to protect the settlers from shooting attacks from militants in the Palestinian town of Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem.
Israel Defence Forces spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said yesterday that this was the first time "we have moved such a structure from a neighbourhood that was directly hit by sniper fire and shells". Lieutenant-General Hezi Revivo, of the engineering force removing the Gilo wall, told the Ynet news service: "The security situation in the area is better than it was in the period before the wall was built." Israel has praised the performance of US-trained Palestinian security forces.

But Ghassan Khatib, spokesman for the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, said: "They are not easing anything in practical terms. The only significance is an acknowledgement of the security situation. We are disappointed that when they acknowledge improvements in security they are not lifting the restrictions related to the day to day life of Palestinians, like removing checkpoints and stopping expansion of the wall itself."

The north-south route of the main separation barrier deviates at many points from the pre-1967 "green line" isolating Palestinian villages and cutting off Palestinian residents from their farmland, urban services, and their neighbours.

The US Presidential envoy George Mitchell has been conducting intensive negotiations on a formula which can bring Mr Abbas to the negotiating table despite fierce opposition from more militant Palestinian groups. The Palestinian President has so far been insisting on an extension of the current partial freeze to settlement building beyond September and for internationally endorsed negotiating "parameters".

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