Daily Telegraph: Mysterious radiation in Reading

Exclusion zone

Raymond Fox claims that radioactivity at his former home has blighted his health - so he refuses to return. His neighbours and the local council insist that the area is perfectly safe. David Rowan investigates a suburban mystery

It is something of a riddle how Raymond Fox's detached suburban home came to be contaminated with plutonium and uranium. Since his family abandoned the four-bedroom house two years ago, following his diagnosis with severe radiation poisoning, Mr Fox has devoted his remaining strength to uncovering the truth about 337 Wokingham Road, in the comfortable Reading suburb of Earley.

At first, he thought the radioactivity might be connected with the nearby atomic weapons plant at Aldermaston; or perhaps the result of a hushed-up air crash involving a damaged nuclear weapon. But since he discovered toxic black sludge in drains leading from the former Shell depot next door, Mr Fox has drawn a conclusion which, if true, has far more worrying implications for his neighbours. Somewhere beneath the bottom of his garden, he is convinced, there was once - perhaps still is - a secret nuclear bunker.

Mr Fox, a short, frail 53-year-old, has built up filing cabinets full of witness statements, photographs and contamination test results that, he says, will prove what has made number 337 "the most radioactive house in Britain". He refuses to go back inside, his symptoms worsening whenever he returns. Scientists who have examined the property confirm unusually high radiation levels in and around it.

The latest independent tests, conducted in June, identified "a source of material from a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb in the vicinity of the property" - and warned that a neighbouring road where children play was so contaminated with radium and uranium that it represented "a public health hazard".

There can be few more shocking claims to confront a quiet, residential neighbourhood, yet no exclusion order has ever been placed on this leafy part of Earley, and no steps have been taken to rehouse anxious local families. The statutory authorities Mr Fox has turned to - from the Environment Agency to the local council - have uniformly denied that residents have anything to worry about, and Shell denies that its site ever housed a nuclear facility. The council insists that the radiation detected is still at a relatively low level and so "gives no cause for concern in respect of public safety".

Unconvinced, Mr Fox and his lawyers have now taken their "explosive" dossier of evidence to the European Commission - which, they believe, will finally expose official complacency as part of "a gigantic nuclear cover-up".

In the meantime, the residents of Amber Close, the neat Persimmon housing development built three years ago on the site of the former Shell depot, appear more concerned about the impact on property values than any immediate health risks. "We've been trying to sell our house since July, and if Mr Fox stops us we'll be really cross with him," says the mother of a young baby who, like most of the neighbours, declined to be named. "If there was proof of some historic nuclear bunker underneath these houses, it wouldn't be so bad - but the council says there's nothing wrong. What does he expect us to do, for God's sake?"

Deserted: 337 Wokingham Road

"Of course, it's going to devalue houses," says a sceptical local shopkeeper. "I've lived here since 1970, and brought up two children here, and there's nothing wrong with them. Do I look like I glow in the dark?"

The doubters do not bother Mr Fox and his growing support team - among them anti-nuclear campaigners, volunteer press officers, anti-corporate activists, as well as the local Green MEP, Caroline Lucas. At one stage, his house was covered with "Danger: Radiation" signs visible to any commuter driving between the town centre and the M4 approach roads. Today, though, it is distinguishable by the tarpaulin hanging over the leaking front roof, the dishevelled caravan blocking the driveway, and the stench of damp that hits you as the front door opens into the mould-infested hallway.

Deserted suddenly in spring 2001, when Mr Fox finally persuaded his then wife Susan to move elsewhere with the children, number 337 today reflects the painful disruption of a family's life. Crockery and pans lie half-washed on the draining-board; a pile of folded towels sits in the bathroom waiting to be put away. Children's toys spill out of boxes on the playroom floor - a Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, a stuffed clown and a tennis racquet, long forgotten now beside a creased copy of The Daily Telegraph dated April 6, 2001.

Upstairs in the main bedroom, a Swan Teasmade pays homage to domestic comforts long given up. A child's Vanilla Ice cassette lies unspooling on a bed below a Winnie-the-Pooh noticeboard. According to the "Untidy Room Certificate" on the door, this bedroom once belonged to the Foxes' son, Christopher.

But it is in the main living-room, where the crumbling floor joists lie exposed, that one is starkly reminded what has kept the house empty for so long. The timbers have been eaten away by what Mr Fox calls "radioactive seepage". The radiation also explains, he says, the blistering paint on walls facing the former Shell plant. In a car parked a safe distance away from the house, he reads the conclusion of a "scintillation counter" investigation conducted in June by Dr Chris Busby, a radiation specialist who took samples from the garden and the drains running underneath it, and from an adjoining road, Lambourne Gardens. The caesium and plutonium ratios found in the drain, Dr Busby noted, showed that "highly concentrated material containing plutonium-239" was once present.

Additionally, the Lambourne Gardens samples contained enough radium-226, and possibly uranium-235, to constitute a public health hazard. Such isotopes, he pointed out, could have come only from a nearby nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb. The council and Shell stressed that Dr Busby's study has not altered their views, based on earlier evidence, that there is no current source of radiation and no evidence of a historic source.

The Fox family, with two children and two adopted children, paid £150,000 for the house at the height of the 1988 property boom. Life was good: a builder whose £1.5 million firm was offered work at Windsor Castle, Mr Fox owned other homes in Sussex and a Tenerife timeshare.

But soon he began to fall mysteriously ill - gut trouble, back problems, a constant nausea. "We also had problems at the house, such as raw sewage coming up through the drains, the vegetables refusing to grow in the garden, and the pet rabbits dying," he recalls. "And then one day we spotted the white worms."

Neighbours had also spotted them. "A friend said, if you've got white worms, you've got trouble. That's a sign of radiation."

By 1995, Mr Fox's health was deteriorating quickly. In retrospect, things became much worse after he went down in the drains to investigate a leak, and emerged covered in "black sludge", which had apparently come from the Shell site. Shell cleaned out the pipe after Mr Fox alerted them to its contents. Shell acknowledges that there was a cleaning operation. No publicly disclosed tests were conducted. Mr Fox contends that the material they took away was radioactive. "I didn't realise that this stuff was lethal," he says now. "I was being sick all the time, bleeding terribly all over my body, and my moods were changing. From my diaries, I now realise that whenever I went to Sussex for a weekend, I was fine - but when I worked in the garden, near that drain, I was taken ill on the Monday."

Mr Fox: 'That house is riddled with contamination'

His father mentioned that, while in Germany during the war, he had learned a little about the effects of radiation. He encouraged Raymond to go for independent tests. Dr Josef Kees, a specialist in Bad Homburg, Germany, who had worked with Chernobyl children, agreed to see him.

Dr Kees diagnosed "chronic multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome", involving "radiation-induced toxicodermatitis" and a range of problems linked to uranium and lindane exposure. Mr Fox was prescribed months of detoxification treatments that, he says, saved his life. The marriage, however, was not to survive, and Mr Fox, who lost his business and was made bankrupt, now lives in a one-bedroom flat in central Reading, from where his campaign for justice continues.

Mr Fox has gained a reputation locally as a rather difficult man, who is quick to declaim the "conspiracy" he believes is designed to silence him and save Shell and the Government the expense of rehousing the residents of Earley. He may not have helped his case by refusing the Environment Agency's scientists access to his home, or by engaging in frequent if unsuccessful litigation against those he believes are maligning him.

Wokingham District Council insists that it has investigated his concerns "fully and extensively" in partnership with the Environment Agency and the National Radiological Protection Board, yet found no evidence to substantiate them. In 2001, the Environment Agency and the council tested soil, pebbles, grit and household dust near the property and concluded that the results showed radioactivity at "levels expected in any area of the country which is not close to a radiation source", which contradicts the findings of tests Enviro Consultants and Analysts carried out on behalf of Mr Fox's insurers.

That study found unusually high levels of two isotopes of plutonium and three isotopes of uranium. The family were advised to vacate their home. The council's assessment of both surveys combined "did not give us any further reason to carry out more investigation of this matter", it told The Daily Telegraph.

Shell, for its part, insists that its Earley depot was a conventional oil-storage terminal, and that the company has never operated a nuclear site there or anywhere else in the UK. "I have no idea what is the cause of Mr Fox's health problems and we're obviously very sorry about them, but I can only reiterate that Shell had no nuclear facility there," says Justin Everard, a spokesman for Shell. "Because we are a large oil company, some people are convinced we must be involved in some terrible subterfuge. But it's not in the interests of Shell to pursue secrecy - we've got too much to lose."

That still leaves important questions over the source of the radiation identified in and around 337 Wokingham Road. Besides Dr Busby's test, an earlier analysis for Mr Fox's insurers also detected unusually high levels of radioactivity. Michael Meacher, when Environment Secretary, suggested that the cause might be a fire affecting a railway fuel wagon near the Shell site; others have speculated that there was a nearby underground explosion, or perhaps a leak from a 1950s atomic bomb.

For as long as the speculation continues, the homeowners of Amber Close and the surrounding streets can only curse the publicity that they fear may imperil their house values.

Estate agents, in the meantime, still have a job to do. For the past year, the local firm of Haslams has had the unenviable task of selling the now notorious house "at offers in excess of £200,000".

Remarkably, it has attracted a serious offer above this price - an achievement that fills Mr Fox with disgust and suspicion. "That house is riddled with contamination," he says angrily. "Why would I want someone else to fall ill or die, when it's got to be torn down?"

"The prospective buyer, who is well known to us, is quite aware of Mr Fox's claims, and I very much doubt that he's part of some conspiracy," an agent from Haslams says with a philosophical sigh. "Maybe one day this house will be sold and we won't hear anything more of it. Then again," and he breaks into an intense laugh, "these things are sent to challenge us estate agents."

(Daily Telegraph, Property section front, November 3 2003)

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The Times: What 'supersized' food portions are doing to us

When size does matter: Food portions are bigger and cheaper than a decade ago but what's the real cost? By David Rowan

Blame the XL Double Whopper burger, the "big eat" giant crisp pack and the king-size chunky chocolate bar. As British food manufacturers have increased portion sizes to match the "supersized" American norms in recent years, our obesity levels have also ballooned to create a US-style epidemic. Could the two be related?

Increasingly, nutritionists are pointing to the decline of "standard" portion sizes as a key factor behind the rise in "lifestyle" obesity - and with it higher rates of cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The National Obesity Forum has identified a 30 per cent increase in portion sizes of fast foods and takeaways over the past decade - during which time obesity levels have doubled among adolescents in Britain. Policy makers are now warning that, by 2010, obesity will affect one in four adults and cost the NHS almost £4 billion. And much of the damage, they say, comes down to the ever larger portions on our plates.

According to the British Dietetic Association (BDA), our growing reliance on energy-packed "meal deals", "triple-pack" sandwiches and "bargain-sized" giant chocolate bars is promoting habit-forming patterns of dangerous over consumption.
Although these larger portions are marketed as offering improved value for money, the true price, the BDA gives warning, will be "larger people with larger health problems".

Last September, the World Cancer Research Fund presented findings from the US comparing today's servings with those of 20 years ago. Since 1982, a standard-sized hamburger has grown by 112 per cent, steaks by 224 per cent and chocolate-chip cookies by 700 per cent. And, however strong our willpower, once we are served bigger portions, we learn to consume more. A team at Pennsylvania State University found that volunteers consumed 30 per cent more calories on days when they were served larger portions than normal, even though most failed to notice the differences in size. And when people unthinkingly consumed bigger portions, they were unlikely to compensate for the extra calories later in the day.

Although most of the detailed studies have taken place in America, where 61 per cent of adults are now classed as overweight or obese, Britain is fast catching up, according to Andrew Prentice, a professor of international nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "Go to McDonald's website and compare the portions available in different countries," he says. "The differences between US and European portions now are small - which tells us we're up there with the worst."

Indeed, a large McDonald's meal comprising 20 Chicken McNuggets, supersized fries and Coke, and a McFlurry Crunchie for dessert will provide 1,972 calories - not far off the total daily adult recommended allowance, and particularly high in fat and sugar.

The problem, says Prentice, is that food ingredients have become an ever cheaper element of a packaged meal. A fast-food company will have spent a relatively high sum on marketing to entice you into the restaurant - so if a supersized burger differentiates it from a rival, management will consider the costs of the extra ingredients worthwhile. Forty years ago in Britain, we spent about 30 per cent of disposable income on food, Prentice notes. Today, the proportion is less than 10 per cent - suggesting that the "value" marketing strategy is not necessarily working to the food companies' benefit.

"It makes my blood boil when people are sold troughs of soft drinks and buckets of popcorn at the cinema," Prentice says. "It's so irresponsible. If anything, sizes should have been adjusted downwards to take account of our more sedentary lifestyles. Our energy requirements are falling thanks to technological change and our declining exercise, and we actually need to eat less than previous generations."Now that we all have mobile phones, for instance, we might save ourselves having to walk ten miles over a year to the nearest phone box.

Dympna Pearson, who chairs an obesity working group for the BDA, believes that legislation may be needed if manufacturers do not voluntarily agree to reduce portion sizes. "We have a major epidemic in the UK and we need to be much stronger in taking action, especially to protect children," she says. "Food is more widely available now than it was even ten years ago, when we were more likely to sit down at the table for a meal and it was considered rude to eat on the street. And although a well-informed, disciplined person might choose not to finish a larger portion, it takes an uncommonly strong degree of self-awareness."

The manufacturers, for their part, believe that consumers are getting ever more value for money and variety. "Competition over the past decade has led to a range of pack sizes, giving consumers more choice," says Kate Snowden, spokeswoman for the Food and Drink Federation. "Not only have you seen some products getting bigger but some getting smaller -so parents can give children a mini-bar as a treat. That's got to be good."

Andrew Prentice is familiar with the argument: "The food industry is right in that it's promising greater choice - but mini-bars are available only in large multi-packs." He believes that the trend disproportionately penalises the socially deprived, at whom most value-for-money marketing is targeted.

"We've reached a tipping point now," he says. "Why can't the industry, before legislation is needed, come to some voluntary agreement whereby they compete on anything but portion size?" Kate Snowden's response is that, in a hugely competitive market, manufacturers will wish to protect their "trade secrets". She adds: "There's only a certain amount of openness you can have between businesses, but as manufacturers we do take our responsibility seriously."

Still, some manufacturers are starting to acknowledge that the trend towards ever larger sizes may not be in their own best long-term interests. Last year, Kraft, one of the world's biggest food producers, announced that it would voluntarily cut the size of its portions because of concerns over obesity and potential lawsuits. The move attracted favourable publicity but only limited action has so far been taken.

For others within this highly competitive industry, however, the trend is still in the other direction. Last year, the Pizza Express chain announced that it was increasing the size of its pizzas by nearly 50 per cent after a wave of publicity suggesting that its meals offered worse value than its rivals. To the British consumer, it seems, bigger still appears to be better.

(The Times, November 29 2003)

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Evening Standard: Profile - Tim Buttimore, Jonny Wilkinson's agent

By David Rowan

IT is not the most glamorous place from which to shape Britain's newest global brand, but Jonny Wilkinson's future was being decided yesterday in a small office in Leamington Spa. By mid-afternoon, Wilkinson's agent, Tim Buttimore, was fielding so many calls - endorsement opportunities, media requests, offers to buy his company - that his mobile battery was going flat.

"The response has been phenomenal and very gratifying," says Buttimore, catching his breath between calls. "But it doesn't change the strategy for Jonny. Playing and training must come first, with commercial activity way behind." And yet, and yet ...

Even before his World Cup-winning performance put Wilkinson on the world's front pages this week, his sponsorship deals and commercial endorsements were due to bring him more than £1 million this year, making him by far rugby's most marketable player. By Saturday afternoon, the country's top sports agents were predicting that his clean-cut image could net deals worth at least £5 million.

Suddenly, Buttimore finds himself in the big league - with his small PR and sponsorship agency being eyed up by the giant corporations that dominate sports management. Up against aggressive deal-makers such as First Artist and Global Sports Management, some are asking whether "team Wilkinson" - Buttimore and Jonny's father, Phil - can capitalise on their star's global appeal.

Buttimore says he is in no hurry to maximise his client's earnings "by putting him around like a bluearsed fly". But shouldn't they be striking while the iron is hot and making deals that could take Wilkinson into David Beckham's earning league, as Max Clifford suggested over the weekend? The Standard asked some top sports agents how they would maximise Wilkinson's long-term value, and whether Buttimore is up to the job.

Caroline McAteer, who represents David Beckham in a new sports agency co-founded with Simon Fuller, believes he is right to be cautious. "Jonny will get bombarded with requests, offers and deals, but it's important that he steps back and thinks carefully before committing to anything," she advises. "What's important is that the sport must come first - any endorsements must be relevant to his image as a sportsman. A lot of people will want him to do cheap and tacky things, but you've got to stick to stuff you believe in." Beckham learned early that too many commercial commitments could detract from his game.

"David has never done anything just for money, and is always careful about what he puts his name to and the time it may take," McAteer says. "Jonny has to be aware of this." Unlike Beckham, who earns more than £5 million a year to play for Real Madrid, Wilkinson is paid less than £250,000 by the Newcastle Falcons. But while Beckham's range of endorsements has helped boost his wealth to an estimated £50 million, Wilkinson has focused on five main deals - with Adidas, Mercedes, Cartier, Lucozade and Lloyds TSB - worth around £200,000 each.

A column for The Times, and associated television advertising, is said to have paid almost £250,000 (and, says The Times, to have boosted circulation by 10 per cent last week), and there have been other deals, such as with Tetley's beer. Buttimore will not confirm any figures, but he says he turns down around four-fifths of everything Wilkinson is offered.

One factor is Wilkinson's reluctance to put himself into the limelight. He recently expressed incredulity that Beckham could cope with "everyone scrutinising his lifestyle". Buttimore sees protecting his client's privacy as a major factor in shaping his future commercial exploitation.

Bart Campbell, director of Global Sports Management, which represents half adozen England rugby players including Steve Thompson and Julian White, says Buttimore should form "strategic partnerships" with half a dozen global brands to promote casual clothing, sportwear, boots, cars and watches.

"Pretty much as he's already doing," Campbell says. "The key thing is don't take a quick buck: if Jonny advertises hairloss products now, that will make it hard to secure the more lucrative Coke sponsorship later." So how much could Wilkinson's image be worth? "The figure of £5million could be right, as Jonny redefined the market last weekend in terms of what rugby players can earn off the field," Campbell says.

"These guys are valuable to sponsors as they're not conducting themselves off the pitch in ways that will tarnish their images, unlike some footballers." Phil Smith, whose agency First Artist manages 100 footballers including Kevin Phillips and Chris Perry, would target blue-chip companies: "banks, airlines, upperclass clothing houses - ones so big that if Jonny has a long career there could be huge windfalls.

There's enough commercial interest without him having to prostitute himself now. He should see it long-term: he's got four years on Beckham" (Wilkinson is 24, Beckham 28).

SMITH respects Buttimore's strategy, and the trust he has earned from his client. Would he like to buy out the smaller firm, and maybe keep Buttimore on? "You never know whether Tim will want to sell on the back of this," he says, "but if he wants to give us a call, we'd be delighted."

As a former rugby player himself - he played centre for Leicester in the late Eighties - Buttimore, 43, has worked with Wilkinson for more than four years. His company, Sports Connection Group, also represents Martin Johnson, the England captain, Neil Back and Ben Kay. He has received takeover offers this week, but says he is not looking not to sell. "We're a small team, but one of our goals for the next year will be to form alliances with overseas companies where we feel a need to market Jonny globally," he says. "Adidas has started some of this, associating him with Beckham (they recently made an advertisment together). That led to a request from a Spanish beer company to use Jonny in a commericial - but we turned it down."

For the moment, perhaps it will benefit Wilkinson's game to have his interests looked after from Leamington Spa. "Saturday was just a milestone, but it's not the end of the journey," warns Dave Williams, whose small agency, Big Bug Sports, represents England players such as Dan Luger and Ben Cohen. "The interest will die down, then Jonny's game will be all that matters. The smartest thing I've heard this week came from Jonny's dad. He said: 'Isn't it better to concentrate on being an A-list player than a C-list celebrity?'"

(Evening Standard, November 26 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Amateur media/RFID/Bill Gates' philanthropy

By David Rowan

IS THE journalistic establishment done for? As the Bush cavalcade came to town last week, I unplugged the TV and radio, suspended the papers and relied entirely on amateur websites to follow events. Catching up later on the "official", media coverage, I can't say I missed very much (save for the erudition of Times commentators, naturally). Fellow hacks will hate me, but for real-time reporting of high-profile events, corporate media could learn much from the web community.

With activists from Buckingham Palace to Sedgefield armed with camera phones and wireless-enabled laptops, grassroots sites such as Chasing Bush and Indymedia poured out live reportage, photographs and the occasional video feed that conveyed the protests' raw energy more compellingly than any professional report I saw. All gloriously subjective, of course, but for every anti-Bush weblog covering the visit, there were competing pro-Bush webcasts, not least the President's re-election team's own weblog, chronicling his "warm, countryside welcome".

As more of us go broadband and use the web to communicate our own experiences, corporate media are facing unprecedented competition for citizens' attention. A year ago, when a website called Technorati started monitoring what people were saying on their weblogs, it was linking to between 2,000 and 3,000 new ones a day. By last spring, the number had risen to 5,000 - and now 9,000 are being added every day.

We know that campaigning politicians, notably Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential hopeful, are bonding with vast numbers of supporters, and raising millions in funds, through their regularly updated weblogs. But it is not just the slick, well-financed semi-official sites that can shape events. A politically embarrassing videoclip or a damaging first-person report on an amateur weblog can instantly find its way around the world.

Howard Rheingold, whose writings helped to define "cyberspace", sees nothing less than a social revolution taking place. "We're seeing weblogs grow into a community of commentators," he says. "A new literacy of internet publishing is emerging, just as a new literacy emerged in the wake of the printing press." A grand vision, perhaps; but rather than ignore this vast pool of amateur eyes and ears, shouldn't smart media companies be tapping into it?

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THE WORLD'S largest retailers seem determined to ignore public anxieties over the "smart tags" being built into everyday consumer goods. The tags, which identify individual items using radio signals, will eventually take over from barcodes. But civil-rights groups say that they let products (and their owners) be tracked indefinitely.

Last week 30 pressure groups demanded a moratorium on these "spy chips" until consumers are given privacy guarantees. Tesco's response has been to rename them "radio barcodes", and to push ahead with trials. As with other companies pressing ahead, such as Wal-Mart, little attempt has been made to clarify how the tags are being used. Fears may be exaggerated, but unless companies are completely open, they face potential PR disasters ahead.

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NEXT TIME your PC crashes or your Windows upgrade burns a hole in your wallet, pause before cursing Bill Gates. He continues to be one of the world's most generous people. The Microsoft boss and his wife have so far given away more than half their $46 billion (£27 billion) fortune.

(The Times, November 25 2003)

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The Times Magazine: A big fight over Winnie the Pooh

A small bear with a very big legal bill

It's a little like Eeyore trying to knock out Tigger - the old-school family who bought the American rights to A. A. Milne's creations have victory in their sights in their vicious court battle with the unstoppable Disney.

By David Rowan

For a cuddly bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie the Pooh has left behind an awful lot of ill will. Alan Alexander Milne, for a start, never forgave Pooh for defining his legacy not in terms of pacifist essays and satirical plays, but through a quartet of whimsical children's books. He had, after all, brought the Hundred Acre Wood to life simply to amuse his only child, Christopher Robin - "little thinking", as he reflected in a later poem, that "all my years of pen-and-inking/Would be almost lost among/These four trifles for the young".

For Christopher, the books' success was to cause far greater turmoil. At first amused by his instant fame, he came to resent the oppressive public persona that his father had created for him. Until he died seven years ago, Christopher Milne spent his adult life evading his unsought celebrity, running a bookshop in Devon and believing that his father "had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son".

Pooh Bear's fame would also come to bump, bump, bump his original illustrator, Ernest Shepard, on the back of the head in a bothersome manner. Walt Disney decided that Shepard's sketches needed "adapting" to maximise their commercial value in a series of films and spin-off merchandise. The artist denounced Disney's 1966 film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, as "a complete travesty" - rebranding his fluff-stuffed bear in the clean-cut, T-shirted form demanded by toy stores, Americanising his accent, even replacing Piglet with a gopher. As Eeyore might have thought sadly to himself, Why? and Wherefore? and In as much as which?

But there is another family, thousands of miles from Milne's beloved Ashdown Forest, that Pooh has left feeling not just sad, but very, very angry. This family, called the Slesingers, lives in Beverly Hills. Although the Slesingers have never been to play Pooh sticks in Sussex, they love the silly old bear as they would an adopted child. And this sweltering morning, as she sits by her swimming pool, the most outspoken of the Slesingers, a middle-aged lady called Pati, is furious at what the Disney Company has done to him.

"I'm mad at Disney, and I'm mad at the chairman Michael Eisner, as he's the one who's supposed to be in charge," Pati says in a determined if exhausted voice. "We've given him so many opportunities to turn this around. And he's never even come to the table!" For more than 12 years, Pati and her elderly mother have been pursuing Disney in an epic lawsuit that could only have been scripted in Hollywood. At its heart lies a 1930 agreement struck between Pati's late father, Stephen, and A. A. Milne himself, which gave the Slesingers the North American merchandising rights to Pooh. But since Disney bought out their rights four decades ago, in exchange for a share of total royalties, the Slesingers claim that they have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Disney denies the charge. The Slesingers, it says, are motivated purely by greed.

Case number BC022365 is the longest-running lawsuit currently in the Los Angeles court system. It is an extraordinary David vs Goliath battle, which has thrown out just enough entertaining sideshows - conveniently destroyed documents, diversionary secondary lawsuits, questionably acquired private memos - to retain Tinseltown's interest whenever the show seems to be flagging. It helps that the tale is being narrated by some of the most high-profile, and expensive, showbiz lawyers in Hollywood.

The Slesingers had hoped, finally, to get Disney in the dock this autumn, when, after repeated delays, the case was at last scheduled to go to trial. But having already spent tens of millions of dollars taking on this most aggressively litigious of Hollywood studios, they are resigned to the trial being pushed back for another year. Judge Ernest Hiroshige, who had been hearing the case, withdrew a few weeks ago: it now sits with the court's "complex litigation unit". The lawyers' bills, meanwhile, continue to soar higher than a balloon disguised as a rain cloud - rising with every deposition, motion to quash, order and objection. For the Slesingers, this means pouring ever more money into what has become a Very Deep Pit.

It takes a certain diplomacy to arrange a visit to the Slesinger home. Pati, 51, is concerned that Disney has portrayed her and her mother as greedy opportunists, and is wary of talking to the British press. She almost never gives interviews - she once spoke to CNN about her main business, an annual guide to luxury living called the Goldbook. But she knows that Disney has powerful friends in the media, and she presumes that coverage will be slanted against her family. Why, even Fortune magazine, whose reporter she had trusted, made great play last year of her "plush house with a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi", quoting her mid-interview as snapping "Water!" at one of her two servants.

There is also the more practical matter of her 80-year-old mother's health. Shirley Slesinger Lasswell - she remarried in 1964, to the late cartoonist Fred Lasswell - has been in and out of hospital with flu. According to the family's New York-based PR consultants, Pati wants her to rest with no distractions.

After three days in Los Angeles waiting to secure our promised meeting, I finally reach Pati at home from a hotel payphone. The call lasts for an hour and 40 minutes. Pati evidently values having someone to talk to: expecting guarded formality, I find her keen to prolong our discussion to cover English customs, the week's news, her father's achievements. Finally, a deal is struck on the basis that I will bring some fine English tea. But I should, she warns, dismiss any thoughts of getting to see Shirley.

The Slesinger front door is open when I arrive at 10.30 the next morning, bearing Earl Grey, Belgian chocolates and limited expectations. Pati, wearing a full-length loose-fitting gown, has been searching on eBay for various items of Pooh merchandise. But she has also been busy preparing for the visit. On a vast dining-room table, below extravagant murals depicting Italian Renaissance artworks, there are 20 or so plates and dishes filled as if for a feast - cucumber sandwiches, chocolate-chip cookies, crudites, cakes, and silver teapots. Her two Hispanic staff are on hand to help. Pati is later visited briefly by her husband, an English-born businessman who no longer lives with her. She asks that I do not mention a younger family member, "for reasons of security".

Over three hours, Pati narrates the Slesinger vs Disney story as she sees it. The Pooh revenues that she says have been hidden in other parts of Disney's accounting system; the endless paperchase to find evidence, only for Disney to say that documents have been destroyed. "It's like they have a master plan to obstruct, confuse, delay and outspend," she says. "They must sit there thinking, hmm, you're not gone yet? We'd better turn up the heat. I guess it's just their way of litigating when there's so much money at stake."

At the poolside, looking through the smog towards LA's towering lawyers' district of Century City, Pati talks warmly of the "masterwork" whose potential her father recognised back in 1929. Stephen Slesinger, a literary agent whose list included the Tarzan and Red Ryder books, set sail for England that year to meet A. A. Milne. At a time when character merchandising was in its infancy, Slesinger offered Milne $1,000 for the North American marketing rights to the Pooh characters, whose celebrity had grown since their first appearance in the Christmas Eve 1925 edition of the London Evening News. Then in 1932, at no extra cost, Milne expanded these rights to include a share of royalties whenever the Pooh characters appeared on radio, television, or any "other mechanical instrument" or similar "devices" created in the future.

When Stephen died in 1953, leaving Shirley with a one-year-old daughter, Winnie the Pooh merchandise was starting to make money for Stephen Slesinger Inc. But it took the Disney marketing machine, from the mid-Sixties, to turn Pooh into the multibillion-dollar franchise that made him the company's most important character - more valuable than Donald, Mickey and Goofy combined.

"The dynamics of the characters are remarkable, and the verses are fabulous," Pati says wistfully, stroking some original Fifties soft toys she has arranged around the garden table: Kanga, Piglet, Pooh and - her favourite - sad old Eeyore. "When my father died, my mother sat on the floor of his office, a 30-year-old widow, just wondering what she should do. She familiarised herself with all my father's characters, but it was Winnie the Pooh who appealed most to her. And so she put all her effort into promoting him."

Shirley started calling herself "the Pooh Lady", selling tickets for Pooh tea parties, negotiating with board-game manufacturers and clothes firms, and doing whatever she could to market her scruffy friend. "She was always working," Pati says. "She wasn't home when I got back from school, and I got a little jealous of Pooh for taking my mommy away." She rasps a throaty laugh.

Walt Disney, too, was quick to recognise the bear's potential. Buoyed by the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, he approached Milne to acquire film and merchandising rights to Pooh. Milne was happy to make a deal, but the Slesingers' share of the rights, as Walt's brother Roy warned in a memo, put the family in "a beautiful spot to either hold us up for an outrageous price or sit back and reap the rewards of our work". It was not until 1961, when Walt negotiated with Shirley, that his company acquired full world rights. The Slesingers and the Milne heirs would receive a small percentage of the global revenue: the Slesingers 4 per cent, the Milnes 2.5 per cent. Five years later, Disney released its first Winnie the Pooh animation. Walt died a few months later - and that, according to the Slesingers, was when things started to go wrong.

"We first smelt a rat in 1979," Pati sighs. "My mother called me and said she thought there was something up with the royalty statements. We went to Disney, and they showed us a huge computer printout and said, no, they must be right. A couple of weeks later we got a call from our attorney, who said Disney wanted him to represent them on another case so he couldn't work with us."

For years, Shirley and Pati had brought home Pooh merchandise whenever they travelled overseas. They claim to have identified items - from Pepsodent toothbrushes to Japanese T-shirts - never accounted for in their royalty statements. They wondered why Disney was not paying royalties on videos, DVDs, theme-park tickets and software, which they believed were covered under the original 1932 agreement with Milne. So on February 27, 1991, having failed to get Disney to open its books, the Slesingers sued.

"When we started, we thought perhaps this would take a year," Pati says wearily. "It's not as though we planned to go to a 12-year crusade. It's just that day by day there are little skirmishes that lead to further skirmishes. The bottom line is, they owe us money. They need to honour their contract, and it's unconscionable to think they won't."

Today, you can buy Winnie the Pooh car mats, cutlery, exercise equipment, breakfast foods, "Roo Juice", telephones and waffle irons. He was the foundation stone for the Disney Channel, his videos are among the biggest sellers ever, and, according to Disney, he is its "key pre-school property". There is no disagreement that Pooh now brings more honey in to Disney's pot than any of his stablemates. Disney puts his worth at around $1 billion a year.The Slesingers' lawyers say he is in fact worth $4 billion, or even $5 billion. That would account for a fifth of everything Disney makes - an excellent reason, they say, for the firm to play down his true value.

The Slesingers have certainly done well out of Pooh - banking $70 million sincethe Seventies, according to the Disney side. Their royalty payments, according to papers filed in court, rose from $79,828 in 1983, when the contract was re-negotiated, to $627,631 in 1993, and, as the Disney stores expanded, $2.1 million in 1995. By 1997, they were receiving $7.6 million; for each of the three years from 1998, the windfall had grown to $12 million. Yet, although Pati owns another house at Newport Beach, the Beverly Hills place is not extravagant, the swimming pool far too small to register on the Hollywood glamour index. It is easy to see where the royalties are going: according to Pati, their legal fees are up to $800,000 a month.

I put it to her that the family might be said to have done rather well financially out of the Disney franchise. Was it wise to spend pretty much all of their current after-tax royalties on lawyers? "It's not about money, it never has been," Pati shoots back. "It's the principle. It's about the ethics. Sometimes they make you so mad that you just want to show them. It's about my mother's life. She's 80 and she got into this lawsuit when she was 67. Would you want your mother to be in a lawsuit against Disney for all that time, over a simple agreement they don't want to honour because they're Disney?"

By now, Shirley is feeling well enough to make an appearance. Ever the showgirl, she has put down her oxygen mask and put on her make-up. She is wearing jeans and a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt with the slogan: "Oh bother!", and she soon relaxes, even flirts, as she reminisces about the old times. It is not hard to picture the dancer who, on Broadway in Hellzapoppin' in the Forties, caught the eye of Stephen Slesinger, more than two decades her senior, and soon became his wife.

"I couldn't believe I'd married the man who had Winnie the Pooh," Shirley says. She looks over to the neighbouring chair. "Here's my friend." She pats a 3ft-tall bear, whom she calls her "litigation bear". "These are my children."

She recalls Stephen introducing her to the Milnes - Alan and Daphne - which she considered "quite an honour". "He was quiet - very sweet. I liked him very much." In 1961, she met Walt Disney himself when she agreed to give up her North American rights. "He said, Shirley, everybody loves Winnie the Pooh. You'll never be sorry."

Today, Shirley says disbelievingly, "Walt Disney would be going whirly-whirly if he knew what they were doing to us." The family has been shortchanged, she says, firmly - to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And she is not prepared to let Disney win. "Winnie the Pooh's my whole life. I've had people call me and say, you're little and they're big, and I'm so glad to hear that you're after them, that you're not giving up. And I'm not going to give up. Because they owe it to us."

For the past couple of years, this blockbuster has co-starred some of Hollywood's most powerful celebrity lawyers. In Century City, where litigation fees have built vast towers on the lot where Ben Hur's chariot race was filmed, the opposing teams until recently worked across the street from one another. Disney's forces, at number 1999, Avenue of the Stars, are led by Daniel Petrocelli, an Italo-American from New Jersey. Petrocelli, aged 50, became famous winning the Goldman family's civil suit against O. J. Simpson.

Until last summer, the Slesingers' lead attorney was Bert Fields, an elegant 73-year-old amateur Shakespeare scholar whose clients have ranged from Brando to the Beatles. Fields, based at 1900 Avenue of the Stars, is one of the few lawyers who makes Disney executives nervous: six years ago, he won a rumoured $250 million settlement for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio boss. But Fields suddenly withdrew from the Slesingers' case in July without giving his reasons. The word in Century City is that relations cooled over his firm's growing bills. Pati's version of events sees Fields's departure as evidence of yet another Disney dirty trick. Mattel, a Disney partner in the litigation, wanted Fields dismissed because his firm had represented its own interests over unrelated matters. "They succeeded in driving a wedge between us," Pati says.

Lawyers close to the case suggest Petrocelli's team are billing Disney between $1 million and $1.5 million a month. The stakes could not be higher for the company: in May 2002, it disclosed in a US securities filing that, if the Slesingers win, "damages could total as much as several hundred million dollars and adversely impact the value to the company of any future exploitation of the licensed rights". In other words, Disney could lose Winnie the Pooh. Its stock price fell by almost a third in two months.

Sitting at his desk, surrounded by courtroom sketches from the Simpson case, Petrocelli explains that "fictional characters" have never interested him. As a boy he cared more for the Yankees' star Mickey Mantle than for a toy bear. Perhaps this explains why he has little time for the Slesingers' attachment to what, as he sees it, is a commercial property that Disney successfully reinvented.

"They roll out Mrs Slesinger as 'the Pooh Lady', but that's just a market-driven manipulation to make her seem to be the living personification of Winnie the Pooh," he says. "But she hasn't done anything. The Slesingers did not create Winnie the Pooh, they didn't write a word or draw a picture." Their motivation is simple, he says. "Money, and lots of it. Ten to 12 million dollars a year isn't enough. They want more."

The reality, he explains, is not only that they have been paid their full due, but they have "probably been overpaid". He rejects as "misrepresentations" claims that Pooh's true annual revenue is closer to $ 5 billion than the acknowledged $1 billion. And the lawsuit has been drawn out not through stonewalling by Disney, but because his opponents challenge every transaction.

The fight has been dirty. Petrocelli has sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that a convicted felon allegedly helped the Slesingers obtain Disney documents unlawfully. Judge Hiroshige, in turn, issued sanctions against Disney for destroying 40 boxes of documents, including a file marked "Winnie the Pooh: legal problems". Surely that weakens Disney's case? "Well, the judge has not ruled that Disney acted to do anything wrong," Petrocelli fires back. Some old files had merely been "inadvertently discarded".

"They seem like pleasant enough people," Petrocelli concedes. "But Disney is being forced to defend itself because wild and extravagant charges are being made to take a simple contract and convert it into massive monetary claims. Anybody would have to fight that."

In the four months since losing Bert Fields, the Slesingers have also split with the firm that took over from him. "They say they can't budget this case for less than $ 800,000," Pati says. "They say that Disney is putting on pressure by making it as expensive as possible." Bert Fields understands the tactics. "When you get into a fight with Disney, you know you're probably going to have to go to trial, and it can cost a fortune," he says. "They bleed people by this tremendous stress they put on fighting to the end."

Although no longer representing them, Fields says that he has "continued confidence in the merit of the Slesinger case and I feel they will prevail at the trial". If the court agrees with him, and allows the Slesingers to claim both damages and the right to terminate the contract, it could, Fields says, cost the company billions of dollars. Disney, meanwhile, is pursuing a separate copyright action to let Milne's granddaughter, Clare, reclaim the Slesingers' rights.

Pati Slesinger is briefing her eighth set of lawyers. She sees the next year as "the home stretch". Remarkably, Pati has also been reassessing her view of Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman and her declared enemy. They met recently, with the help of an intermediary, to discuss Pati's plans for her charitable Pooh Foundation. She was impressed by Eisner's attitude. Had they met earlier, she believes, the dispute could have been settled many lawyers ago.

In the meantime, the 13 boxes of documents relating to the case continue to pile up in the Los Angeles Superior Court archives, the legal bills keep growing, and Shirley Slesinger Lasswell becomes an ever more delicate potential witness. Pati Slesinger, though, is starting to imagine life after litigation. "I always saw light at the end of the tunnel," she says. "It's just that Disney kept throwing all of these rocks in the way."

And then Pati reads a poem that she has written, in an attempt to tell the story of the Slesingers' fight with Disney in a form that A. A. Milne would have appreciated. The poem ends:

"Now, oh giant corporation,
This Pooh wants an explanation.
Tell me, please, how much you owe,
And where did all my Hunny go?
Through all the tangled, tangled vines
Of your worldwide accounting lines,
From what and why did you subtract,
Trade off, commingle and redact?
To cut my tiny share until
Gross was net and net was nil?"

Pati Slesinger does not expect her questions to be answered any time soon.

(The Times Magazine, London, November 22 2003)

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Interview: Ben Frow, Channel Five (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

THINK of it as Executive Swap - the dramatic TV reality show where programme chiefs trade jobs amid bitter legal threats. When Kevin Lygo joined Channel 4 from Five as programme director earlier this month, his former bosses furiously accused him of poaching two of their top entertainment controllers.

Until last week, all Five had in return was Dan Chambers, the former Channel 4 executive promoted to take Lygo's old job. But now Chambers has stolen one of his rival's most acclaimed stars - and the talk in Horseferry Road is of a key defection to "the enemy".

Ben Frow has been responsible for some of Channel 4's biggest hits of recent years, including Property Ladder, No Going Back and Location, Location, Location. He turned Nigella Lawson into TV's sexiest cook, took a gamble with Jamie's Kitchen, and turned domestic clutter into peak-time viewing with How Clean Is Your House? Mark Thompson, the station's chief executive, calls him "one of the most imaginative and original commissioners in Britain" - but from January he will be in charge of all Five's features and entertainment.

He is best known for kick-starting the property blitz that has saturated the evening schedules with series such as Grand Designs and Relocation, Relocation. But hasn't a deluge of such formatted shows killed Channel 4's edge? Naturally, Frow sees them as innovative - at least, before the other channels copied them. "People forget how radical Wife Swap or How Clean Is Your House? were when they started," he says. "Channel 4 is very innovative, but everybody else rips it off. I always kept ahead of the curve on property." So what can we expect at Five? The property-programme market, he says, is now ready to bust.

"Everyone's looking for a new variation, and too many property shows now are just homogenised.

But you still need programmes with a good deal of aspiration - we all dream of buying a house in the south of France and growing hazelnuts, so lots of people will watch that kind of show." We can also forget the nastier confrontational documentaries that have been gaining ground. "There are too many programmes which I call bear-pit TV - taking the superficial premise of Wife Swap, the argument potential, but without its intelligence. In fact, Wife Swap is quite life-affirming. That's not the case for ITV shows such as Holiday Showdown or Take My Mother-in-Law - I don't want to have people shouting at each other. I'm into feelgood programming."

Vulnerability in a presenter will help. This is what convinced him that Nigella Lawson, whose husband was dying, would make a star cookery presenter. "Nigella was well spoken, beautiful and talented, but it was her personal circumstances that enabled the viewer to feel sympathy," he says. "Without that fragility, nobody would watch this posh woman with a cut-glass accent." He also helped Jamie Oliver reinvent his television career, initially against his better instincts.

"He was a bit of a self-parody after the Naked Chef and the Sainsbury's ads, and I sent Tim Gardam, [the programme director], a 10-point memo on why we shouldn't do Jamie's Kitchen." The project was inherited from BBC2. Frow agreed to take it on only if Oliver would allow the camera into his personal life. "I told him, 'I need to know that you're real - to be there if you have a row with the wife, to see the gritty reality'. And he laid himself on the line." This week the series won the Grierson Documentary of the Year.

Frow, 42, follows his gut instincts when commissioning. "The last time I got that little chemical reaction in my stomach that tells me something's going to work was at a funeral," he says. "One of the mourners turned to me and said of another guest, 'You know her problem? She's too posh to wash.' And I said, 'Stop - that's the title of a show about personal hygiene.' We've just done the pilot." How did he decide, four years ago, that property would be the next trend?

"I don't work like that," he says. "I just commission on the basis of what I'd watch. I'd just bought my first flat, and was so obsessed by decorating that I used to paint walls before going to work. I guess I just tapped into that boom." He has had his failures: The Dinner-Party Inspectors, he admits, did not deliver. Sir Jeremy Isaacs, meanwhile, has lambasted the number of sex-based shows on the channel he founded - and Frow is responsible for Sex Tips for Girls and Designer Vaginas.

He is guarded about his personal life - all he will say about his partner is that he is a costume designer - but he is more forthcoming about his current domestic "nightmare": "I'm hopeless at property. I've got a small terraced house in Clapham which I paid too much for and that's still not finished. I go cold at night thinking how much the building work is costing me. I fell for the classic trick - they'd painted everything white. I only discovered later that the whole house had been built out of MDF." When talking about his ideal television format, Frow, dressed entirely in black, and with a clipped greying beard, lapses slightly camply into TV jargon. You need "a gottasee title that punches above the schedules", a "jaw-droppingly must-see opening sequence", a middle section "that rewards the viewer for watching".

IT WAS a language he learned late. Born into a London theatrical family - his grandfather, the late actor Bernard Miles, cofounded the Mermaid theatre - Frow studied stage design at school "alongside the embroidery girls", and worked at the National and then the Bristol Old Vic "as a ladies' costume cutter". His TV break came as the dresser to Richard and Judy - "starting off fixing Judy's tights and ironing Richard's shirts".

At one stage, he planned to become a fashion designer, but decided that the business side would impede his creativity. "There was the thought that I'd open a chain called Frowline, which would have a different colour range in each shop - one shop stocking blacks to whites, another yellows to oranges." But he found work producing and reporting on fashion for ITV, followed by jobs at the BBC and eventually at Channel 4.

Frow knows that his reputation will last only as long as he brings in the hit shows. But if things do not work out at Five, he does not appear too bothered. "I got into TV by accident," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if I walked away in a few years' time to do something completely different - running a flower shop or baking bread. As long as it's something creative and simple where I'm in control …"

(Evening Standard, November 19 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Biometrics/distributed computing

By David Rowan

IF WE can believe the politicians, biometric technology offers the world's first foolproof identification system. The use of iris patterns or fingerprints on ID cards, says the Home Secretary, "will make identity theft and multiple identity impossible - not nearly impossible, impossible". This certainty is echoed by the Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart, a former chairwoman of Liberty who once denounced ID cards as an outrage. Now, she says, the "security and opportunity" of biometrics has convinced her that this "revolutionary" hi-tech solution is the only way to protect personal identity.

Get nervous whenever you hear ministers extolling the benefits of a magical new technology. Whitehall has an impeccable record of making IT promises that it failed miserably to deliver. With most over-hyped government IT projects, it normally takes a few hundred million extra £and a couple of years' delay to put things right. If a vast national biometric database goes wrong, the costs could be far greater.

Iris recognition, for instance, may one day be as effective as DNA at proving an individual's identity, but we have no idea how it will work on a national scale.

Last March the US General Accounting Office reported that the largest iris-recognition system yet developed contained as few as 30,000 records. How effectively such a system would perform on a national scale, the GAO concluded, remained "unknown".

As for David Blunkett's conviction that a biometric record will guarantee an individual's identity without any "false positive" readings, the evidence is lacking. Last year, after rigorously testing leading iris-scanning and face-matching products, the US Defence Department reported that they were far less effective than their manufacturers claimed.

Eye-scanning software from Iridian, for instance, claims a 99.5 accuracy rate; the Pentagon found that it worked only 94 per cent of the time. As for Visionics' "face-recognition" technology, which maps patterns on individuals' faces, it recognised people in tests barely 51 per cent of the time, rather than the 99.3 per cent claimed.

There have been too many abandoned trials of biometric recognition to make Mr Blunkett's certainty appear realistic. Even if he does find a technology that works perfectly at a national level, a couple of problems will remain. As Britain will have to accept biometric ID cards from elsewhere in Europe, what is to stop an identity thief or criminal faking the details of someone from across the Continent? And what happens when a fraudster tricks an iris-scanning machine by using a digital image of somebody else's eye?

Over to you, Mr Blunkett.

++++

IT HAS NOT yet found any space aliens, but "distributed computing" is causing a stir in the medical world. This is the harnessing of ordinary PCs' spare processing power over the internet - most famously by SETI@home, which has more than 500,000 computers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Now a project based in Evesham, Worcestershire, says it has used 13,000 volunteers' computers to identify 42 molecules with potential cancer-fighting properties. The Find-A Drug scheme says its community has given the equivalent of 1,000 years' computing time.

It is a healthy start, although some way behind an Oxford University project using 2.5 million computers to provide 225,000 years of medical number-crunching. Before logging off tonight, you may want to search Google for some medical distributed computing software to download. You might just save some lives.

(The Times, November 18 2003)

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The Times: Hackers Threaten to Short-Circuit E-Voting Plans

A group of experts has begun a campaign to expose unsafe electronic polling systems. David Rowan investigates

COMPUTER security experts and MPs say that government plans to introduce electronic voting risk opening elections to fraud and malicious hacking.

As a practical means of countering voter apathy, the Government is backing large-scale trials of internet and telephone voting to prepare for its target of "an e-enabled general election some time after 2006". Next month the Electoral Commission will announce where British voters will be able to choose their MEP electronically in June next year. But fears are growing about the security of the commercial "e-voting" systems being used, which fail to keep a record of votes cast by computer.

A group of technical, legal and political experts has begun a campaign to expose the use of unsafe electronic voting systems in Europe. Jason Kitcat, a programmer who helped to start the campaign, is concerned that voters' trust will be eroded as problems emerge with insecure voting systems, as has been happening in the United States.

With most e-voting companies refusing to make their software available for public testing, and no current system offering a printed record of votes cast, it will now be easier than ever to hack into an election, Mr Kitcat told The Times.

"You could have fraud on a scale never seen before, and it will be completely undetectable," he said. "What worries me is that by rushing in we 'll actually turn more young people off voting. Instead of thinking that their vote doesn't count, they will now be worrying that no one's going to be counting their vote."

Critics of electronic voting cite early problems in the US, where President Bush last year pledged $3.9 billion (£2.3 billion) to modernise the ballot. Bev Harris, author of a book investigating electronic-voting companies, has catalogued what she alleges are electoral irregularities involving touch-screen and other computerised voting systems.


Last November, for instance, 6,300 votes changed overnight after an election in Alabama, handing the state's governorship to a Republican. At the same time three winning Republican candidates in elections in Texas all polled exactly 18,181 votes. Ms Harris, who suggests that the vote may have been compromised by a hacker, points out that an alphabetical conversion of 18,181 is "Ahaha".

Diebold Election Systems, a US company whose software has been used in Greater Manchester e-voting pilots, has faced particularly close scrutiny. This year its programming code - which it refuses to disclose - was found on an unprotected website and passed to computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University.

The scientists' analysis, published in July, found significant security flaws and said that a teenager could circumvent the system using equipment that can be bought for £70 over the internet. Voters could cast unlimited votes without being detected by mechanisms within the voting terminal, they reported, and votes could be overwritten in the system's logs. Poll workers could give passwords to their friends and alter the terms of an election.

Diebold said the study was based on incomplete and outdated code, and made false assumptions about the electoral process - for instance, wrongly claiming that voting machines were connected to the internet. "We believe electronic voting is safe, secure and user-friendly," David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said Rebecca Mercuri, one of the world's leading academics specialising in electronic voting systems, believes that Britain is making a huge mistake by turning to internet voting.

Dr Mercuri, a Pennsylvania-based computer security specialist, said: "Both the unauditable touch-screen machines being promoted in the US, and the internet voting systems being introduced in the UK . . . are not independently auditable. But internet voting is considerably worse, because it could encourage coercion and vote-selling, as it takes place outside of the precincts . . . I fear for democracy."

Pressure is growing in Parliament for the Government to suspend moves towards electronic voting until the public can be assured that it is safe. Bill Cash, the former Shadow Attorney-General, said that a "rushed and bungled" electronic vote next summer could create "a Florida-style 'hanging chad' debacle".

Tom Watson, a junior Treasury Minister, said: "Before we rush in, I want to make sure we get it right." Richard Allan, the Liberal Democrats' technology spokesman, said: "The great thing about paper ballots is that you can verify them afterwards if a result is contested."

(The Times, November 15 2003)

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Interview: Peter Howarth, publisher (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

IT USED to be enough for Premiership footballers to spend their nights at Chinawhite, bank their endorsement fees, and kick the occasional ball about. As from this Friday, they will also have their own glossy magazine to play with. The Newspaper Magazine might sound like something aimed at broadsheet circulation managers, but it is in fact the first fashion magazine aimed specifically at top-rank footballers. And unlike Vogue or Arena Homme Plus, they also get to star in it.

There cannot be many magazines that would hire Blackburn's Andy Cole as star interviewer, send Jason Euell of Charlton to testdrive the new Bentley Continental, and invite Wes Brown (Manchester United) to share his "top essential tunes". Then there are the fashion models: Sol Campbell on the cover, his Arsenal teammate Ashley Cole posing inside in Paul Smith, and Bobby Zamora and Simon Davies of Spurs draped in Prada and Dior Homme. Together with other star players, such as Jermaine Jenas, Eidur Gudjohnsen and Glen Johnson, they are all offering their services for nothing. Is this simply a way of diverting attention from the unfavourable headlines some have faced in recent months?

Nonsense, says Peter Howarth, the former Esquire editor overseeing the twice-yearly venture. Footballers are style gurus.

"Admittedly there has been a lot of stuff in the papers lately, all unsubstantiated," he says. "They can be incredibly powerful role models - but with it comes the dark side, the temptation." The magazine, he says, is "a necessary consequence of their superstar status". "The trend towards footballers as fashion icons has been growing ever since Bobby Moore modelled for Vogue in the Sixties.

Take Calvin Klein - he used to use pop star Marky Mark in his adverts; then he moved to Kate Moss, a model. And now? It's Freddie Ljungberg of Arsenal." The magazine is owned by Jason Ambrose, a former stockbroker who specialises in footballers' personal finance. He conceived the venture once he discovered how anxious his clients were about life after football. They had learned from David Beckham how managing their images could boost their incomes. So they would give their time if they felt a magazine would portray their stylish side.

Once word spread around the locker-rooms, the project took off.

"It's the Caroline McAteer effect," says Howarth, referring to Beckham's publicist. "They are acutely aware that they need to diversify before it's too late. They're looking at Vinnie Jones as a Hollywood actor, or Thierry Henry as the face of the Renault Clio. They're streetsmart and are planning ahead." McAteer agrees that demand is rising for footballers in advertisements. "Brands want to be associated with talent and not simply looks," she says. "I can see why people would buy this magazine."

With a print run of just 20,000 - of which 6,000 are being mailed to players on a database supplied by Ambrose - it is unclear how, even at £5, the magazine will break even. Howarth explains that this is not an issue. His company, Show Media, is paid simply to produce it, and Ambrose sees value in raising his profile among potential clients. Besides, the first issue has advertisers such as Burberry and Tag Heuer, with the rate card asking £10,000 for a colour page.

BUT isn't this simply contract publishing, with the magazine appearing whether or not it finds an audience? Howarth prefers the term "fusion publishing". In its first year, his company has produced magazines for clients ranging from FCUK to Moët & Chandon. "Because you're not relying on newsstand sales, you have greater editorial freedom to pursue high journalistic values," he says.

Howarth confronted the realities of commercial journalism at Esquire, when he took the radical decision to banish "semi-naked babes" from covers in favour of male role models. The January 2000 cover featured a Wonderbra model; February had Johnny Depp. Circulation dropped by 30 per cent, and although Howarth says the strategy boosted advertising revenue and established Esquire as distinct from other men's magazines, rivals suggest that he left a year ago before he was pushed.

Was Howarth depressed by some of the bitchy coverage? He still recalls James Brown's "evil quote" about him being a "submarine editor - driving sales down", and Raymond Snoddy's mocking remark that he was leaving "to spend more time with his family" (he has children aged two, five and eight with his wife, Tracey Brett, former managing editor of GQ).

"I chose to leave. If Esquire wanted me out why would they have given me a contract as editorial consultant? I've launched seven magazines in a year, I'm an ownerproprietor now and I'm making more money than ever." He was simply facing a "midlife crisis": "I was 38, and after six years was the longest-serving editor since men's magazines started. But what do you do next?" It is a question also on the minds of contributors to The Newspaper Magazine. Still, a second career in modelling may not be guaranteed.

As Sir Paul Smith, who dressed the 1998 England World Cup team, tells the magazine: "Big bums and thighs don't always work in fashion clothes."

(Evening Standard, November 12 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - iTunes economics/social websites/Microsoft domain renewal

By David Rowan

THE MUSIC download store iTunes has been called "the coolest invention of 2003", and last week it claimed an 80 per cent market share in one of the fastest growing areas of technology. But what is extraordinary about the Apple system is its apparently suicidal business model. "There's no way to make money on these stores," the company's CEO, Steve Jobs, cheerily said last week. Even though iTunes has already sold 17 million digital songs, at 63p a legal download, two thirds of that goes straight to the music labels, the rest on administration. Has Jobs finally lost his touch?

Actually, he is being clever. The iTunes online store is designed to work smoothly with Apple's stylish (and profitable) iPod music player. If habits can be formed early, even if the "content" is provided at a loss, other music players become marginal. Guess which is the bestselling digital music player? Yes, the iPod, selling at a rate of two a minute and boosting Apple's cash flow.

Napster has just relaunched as a legal subscription service, as MTV and Wal Mart prepare download stores of their own (absurdly, the UK remains unserved). But if iTunes keeps its lead, iPod proprietary software will come to dominate a digital music market predicted soon to be worth billions.

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OCCASIONALLY, the web throws up a genuinely useful social innovation - a customisable information source such as UpMyStreet.com, or a private transport exchange along the lines of LiftShare.com. But what of all the other potentially life- enhancing ideas that go to waste because no entrepreneur sees profit in them? A new venture called MySociety.org may have come up with the answer. Set up by some techies with Westminster connections - some of the founders are behind FaxYourMP.com - MySociety.org is a charitable project that aims to use electronic networks to provide benefits at low cost. Anyone can submit an idea - and those that best improve the quality of life, or solve social problems, will get financial backing from this month.

Some of the early contenders are ingenious: a car-sharing service based on your mobile phone location; an online payments system that bypasses credit-card companies; and an electronic version of neighbourhood watch. Many of the more useful ideas are simply community-built databases that we would all use if they had been developed - an online collection of instruction manuals, or a localised rating of tradespeople based on personal recommendations. My favourites, though, are the simple tools that let people communicate: a mothers' and toddlers' information exchange, or the service that alerts the family of an old person living alone if they fail to e-mail a contact address each morning. The net may be a lousy tool for generating profits, but it does occasionally make the world a better place.

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SOMEONE AT Microsoft should buy a desk diary. It emerged last week that the corporation "forgot" to renew its hotmail.co.uk domain name when it expired on October 23. Hotmail, you may recall, is the world's most popular e-mail account - yet it took a call from the tech journal The Register to alert Microsoft that a private individual had snapped up the back-on-the-market domain. Four years ago, Microsoft neglected to renew the domain passport.com, which gives access to its Hotmail accounts. Only after it gave an alert Linux programmer $500 (£300) and a free piece of software did it re-acquire the domain.

(The Times, November 11 2003)

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The Times: Should we have fluoride in our water?

The Government proposes to let us force water companies to fluoridate supplies. Opponents preparing a human rights challenge say it amounts to poisoning. David Rowan reports

Sue Woodman first knew something was wrong when she noticed a mottled stain darkening her six-year-old daughter Rachel's teeth. Two months later, one of Rachel's new front teeth "sheared off" as she was biting a slice of bread. And then Rachel and her brother Daniel started fracturing their arms and legs after the most minor playground bumps, five or six times each, Sue recalls, prompting the hospital to suggest they might have childhood osteoporosis.

The dentist diagnosed dental fluorosis, a defect in tooth enamel caused by ingesting too much fluoride, which has also been linked to a softening of the bones. He explained that the stains could later be treated. But Daniel became self-conscious about his brown-flecked smile, and as a teenager was almost suicidally depressed. "I thought I'd been a bad mother, even though I'd made sure they brushed their teeth twice a day," Sue says. After all, as a dental nurse, she knew the importance of oral hygiene.

The Woodmans' semi-detached house lies in the Hillmorton suburb of Rugby, an area where Severn Trent Water fluoridates the supply. After thousands of pounds' worth of dental treatment, Daniel, now 28, and Rachel, 26, have gleaming teeth. But their younger sister Hannah, 15, is trying to come to terms with the off-white flecks and shadowy stains that tarnish her teeth. "All my friends have got perfect teeth, and they make fun of me at school, telling me to 'get a toothbrush'."

If Hannah's contemporaries do have gleaming smiles, fluoridation must take some of the credit. But what angers Sue - who believes her family is genetically predisposed to fluorosis - is that no one cautioned of the dangers. "They put fluoride in the water against my will," she says. "By forcing it on to us, they're saying we haven't got the intelligence to make up our own minds."

On Monday, the House of Commons will decide just what rights we have over our drinking water. The Government wants MPs, in a free vote on the Water Bill, to give strategic health authorities the power to force water companies to fluoridate supplies after local consultation. Backed by the British Dental and Medical Associations, the British Fluoridation Society, and various professional health bodies, the vote looks like going the Government's way. If so, an alliance of parliamentary opponents will mount a court challenge on grounds of human rights.

The Government's clumsy lobbying has done nothing to reassure the doubters. It added the pro-fluoridation amendment to the Water Bill at a late stage just before the summer recess, prompting MPs' complaints that they had been "bounced". Then last month Melanie Johnson, the Public Health Minister, wrote to MPs promoting fluoridation as a cheaper, more effective alternative to fluoride toothpaste - forcing her later to clarify that "we are not saying people should stop brushing their teeth".

The British Dental Association (BDA) backs fluoridation on behalf of "hundreds of thousands of children destined to a life of poor dental health and low self-esteem". Because fluoride strengthens tooth enamel, it says, a five-year-old in unfluoridated Bury will have five times the number of missing, decayed or filled teeth than one in fluoridated Burton. The British Medical Association, meanwhile, also supports it and sees no evidence of adverse health risks.

About five million Britons drink water fluoridated at one part per million, mainly in the Midlands, North East and East. Another half million receive water that is naturally fluoridated. The proposed law will legally protect water companies if health authorities tell them to fluoridate their supply and it goes wrong.

Opponents claim this will bring the Government a "huge PR disaster". "They're poisoning children," says Jane Jones who, from her Barnsley kitchen, runs the National Pure Water Association campaign, a leading anti-fluoridation group. "We're talking about industrial grade chemicals, further contaminated by cadmium, arsenic and lead. And dental fluorosis is a sign of poisoning."

Fluoride, say opponents, is linked to thyroid disorders, impaired intelligence, arthritis, premature ageing, musculo-skeletal disease, kidney disease, infertility, central nervous system damage and cancer, and it suppresses human metabolism to make citizens more pliant. Nonsense, responds the BDA; where is the evidence?

Tony Lees, a Herefordshire dentist who opposes fluoridation, questions the BDA's impartiality because it is paid to accredit fluoride toothpastes (the BDA considers the claim contemptible). Then there is the sugar industry's "unseen hand". "Isn't it convenient," Mr Lees asserts, "that fluoridation takes people's eye off the damage sugar is doing?" Professional bodies also question the Government's haste.

Nick Reeves, director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, thinks that the Government's plan "not only contravenes the Human Rights Act, but would appear to violate the Poisons Act, the EU Codified Pharmaceuticals Directive, the Code of Medical Ethics and consumer legislation".

Professor Elizabeth Kay, scientific adviser to the BDA, is exasperated by the "antis". A practising dentist at Manchester's dental hospital (unfluoridated), she spends her days "taking little children's teeth out". It is "nonsense" to see fluoride as a poison; water is certainly not being "medicated". "This law will give local people choice." she says. "At present it is up to the water industry."

Most fluoride in our water is produced industrially during the manufacture of phosphoric acid for fertiliser. Britain's main supplier is Norsk Hydro. Although no longer a producer, the Norway-based multinational meets Britain's needs by importing other companies' fluoride com£through its Lincolnshire plant. The fluoride is supplied in the form of hexafluorosilicic acid, or HFSA (another compound, sodium fluorosilicate, is also permitted). The British Fluoridation Society calls it a "valuable co-product" of fertiliser manufacture; the anti-fluoridation lobby calls it "industrial waste".

Yet the fluoride-supply industry is secretive. "We can't give the name of our suppliers," says Ingegerd Rafn at Norsk Hydro. Nor will she say how much HFSA we import, nor what it earns the company. But in the West Midlands, where 3.7 million people drink fluoridated water, the annual bill (paid by the NHS) is £1.2 million. Still, each unrequired filling saves the NHS £10.

The real problem concerns scientific evidence. In 2000, a team at York University published a review for the Government. It agreed that fluoridation cut tooth decay and found no evidence of health risks, but said more research was needed. The BDA cites the York review as "evidence that fluoridation is effective". The York team is "concerned about the continuing misinterpretations" of its findings, as "we were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature worldwide."

The National Pure Water Association's register of objectors now has nearly 400,000 names, with 10 sheets of signatures arriving daily. "People are angry", says Jane Jones. "In a contentious scientific area, shouldn't the precautionary principle apply?" The Government appears to think not. Yet Sue Woodman wonders why, with all the trouble over MMR and GM food, ministers still think they can ignore public concerns over what goes into our bodies.

"It's mass medication, isn't it?" she says. "I just wonder if, 30 years down the line, we're going to find people coming forward with all sorts of fluoride-related problems."

(The Times, November 8 2003)

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Interview: Kelvin MacKenzie, TalkSport (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

KELVIN MacKenzie has gone soft. He wants the Tories to embrace the gay and ethnic communities, and considers Michael Howard so Rightwing as to be unelectable.

For all his hatred of the BBC, he says he would love to offer Greg Dyke's son a job at talkSPORT. And even as he wages war against Rajar, the body that measures radio audiences, he phoned its departing boss this week to wish her well. Could a multi-millionpound fortune and a Cote d'Azur villa have mellowed Fleet Street's most famous Rottweiler?

At 57, the former Sun editor and current boss of the Wireless Group admits to being "vaguely more liberal" these days. "All that old 'pulpit poofs' stuff was 15 bloody years ago," he says about his days writing gay-baiting and Frogbashing headlines at The Sun (which is "very good these days"). "I'm just older now and I've moved on," he says. "Mind you, I did used to enjoy aggravating everybody..."

Tomorrow, MacKenzie will sink his teeth into a target he has never tired of tormenting. In an Intelligence2 debate at the Royal Geographical Society, he will argue that the BBC should be abolished. With Gerald Kaufman and the media historian Brian Winston on his side - against Rod Liddle, Michael Grade and Heather Rabbatts for the corporation - MacKenzie is clearly relishing the fight.

"There's a Left-of-centre viewpoint across the BBC's output," he begins, thumping the desk in his South Bank office. "The 26,000 employees remind me of council tenants in the Seventies who used to vote Labour to keep their rents down. In the BBC's case, they have a natural Labour view in order to keep their jobs." But what mainly bothers MacKenzie is the £3.2 billion the BBC has "sploshing about" each year that it uses to distort commercial markets.

"If they want to stop me getting radio rights to the Premiership, they can put their hands into a magic honeypot and pull out millions," he says. "Last time, they bid more than I take in revenue." He is a consummate performer, energetic and engaging as he gets into character, interrupting his flow only to walk to the sales floor and make a joke. His anti-BBC performance is a familiar one, rehearsed across the Murdoch press - although MacKenzie, who went from The Sun briefly to run Sky in 1994, insists that he does not know Rupert Murdoch's views on the BBC, and has certainly "never heard him rail against it". (Murdoch, for the record, owns a chunk of the Wireless Group.) Like Jonathan Miller, the Sunday Times columnist who has refused to pay his television licence ("I very much admire him," says MacKenzie), he does not see how programmes such as EastEnders can be justified as public-service broadcasting.

"It should be about supplying programmes where there is market failure," he says. "The BBC spends £130 million every year on overseas programmes such as Neighbours; but why doesn't it invest that money in our hard-pressed independent production sector?" Even when the corporation commissions indpendent production firms to meet its quota, it squeezes out competitors, he claims. A contract for televised darts was recently awarded to TWI - which had agreed to use the BBC's in-house facilities. "It's a fix," MacKenzie claims, "a total bloody racket." (BBC Sport defends the deal as a "fast-track" way of bringing in an independent production firm at short notice.) He sees BBC News as offering "a Left-of-centre, Hyde Park demo" view of world affairs; even Radio 4, which MacKenzie accepts might be justified if under Arts Council control, currently sees its duty as providing "documentaries about the history of the teapot".

The answer, he says, is privatisation. "The only people who want to pay a licence fee are academics and people with strange sweaters. An investment banker friend worked out that you'd get somewhere between £4 and £5 billion. That's £250 for each licence-payer. If Michael Howard wants to become the next prime minister, that's all he has to announce. Forget health or education - if he said, I'm going to privatise the BBC, and 90 days after I'm elected I'll send you a cheque for £250, he'd win by a mile."

Short of that, MacKenzie believes that Howard will never win an election. "It's preposterous that the Tories have moved into a position where the ethnic vote and the gay vote aren't naturally theirs. I'm puzzled that they're not a bit more embracing." Is this the same Kelvin MacKenzie who was once condemned for his paper's homophobia? "Look, the gay issues, the ethnic issues are yesterday's issues," he says. "We're a very potpourri society now." On this week's other pressing media story - James Murdoch's appointment to BSkyB's top job - MacKenzie is uncharacteristically bland.

He has done a "fantastic" job in Asia and made Star TV profitable. Besides, nepotism is a virtue. "I like hiring people who have the genes in the family - if Greg Dyke's son came for an interview, I wouldn't hesitate to offer him a job on that basis. It cuts out a lot of the learning curve. I'm not sure about employing Greg Dyke, though."

BUSINESS has been good to MacKenzie. Broadcast magazine recently estimated his wealth at £4 million, and his French house is reported to have cost £1 million. So how much is he worth? "I've no idea. I'm not interested, and that's that." His other obsession is an impending courtroom challenge to the Rajar measurement system, which he claims underestimates his station's reach. He is having fun imagining who would ever want to follow Jane O'Hara, Rajar's departing MD.

"It would have to be somebody who's out of work and pretty compliant. That leaves... well, Iain Duncan Smith... and probably, shortly [he laughs], Andrew Gilligan."

Even as a prosperous media proprietor, his new "liberal" credentials to the fore, the tabloid beast will out.

(Evening Standard, November 5 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Newham IT/robots.txt files

By David Rowan

IT MAY be just an act of kindness that has led Microsoft to provide expensive independent IT consultants to help an East London local council. Then again, when that council is the borough of Newham - now participating in government trials of non-Microsoft products for the public sector - this could be seen as a cynical means of influencing how taxpayers' money is spent.

Microsoft will not reveal how much it earns from British taxpayers, but the Treasury body that negotiates government licence fees says that it saved £100 million recently by pushing for a better deal. Naturally, Microsoft would be most concerned if the public sector moved to "open source" software - non-proprietary alternatives such as Linux, which are claimed by supporters to offer greater security, reliability and cost-effectiveness than Windows or Office.

Newham, which runs 5,000 networked computers, believes that it could halve its non-capital IT bill if it moved to open source. And with the borough now testing open-source programs as part of a high-profile government pilot, other local authorities are paying close attention.

Microsoft's response has been to offer the borough a "free audit" of its IT systems by sending in independent consultants from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. They will analyse "on a fair and objective basis" whether open source really does compete favourably with Microsoft products, according to Matt Lambert, Microsoft's director of government affairs. Yet it seems unlikely that OpenOffice or Linux will come out on top after Microsoft has paid the consultants' substantial bill.

"The consultants aren't going to roll over and do as we say, as they have a lot of credibility at stake in terms of impartiality," Lambert insists. But he adds: "Of course, we believe that our products are better."

Newham's IT department is known for its pioneering adoption of smart-card and CCTV technology. If it moved to open source, the impact on other councils would be huge. The underlying politics has not escaped Richard Steel, the borough's IT director. "We didn't ask Microsoft to bring in Cap Gemini, and clearly our job is to make objective judgments about what is presented to us when they issue their report," he says. "I understand the scepticism, but in my position, what would you do if offered free consultancy?"

When Munich's city council was thinking about switching from Microsoft to Linux last spring, Steve Ballmer, the former's chief executive, visited the mayor in person. Yet even the offer of heavy discounts failed to stop Munich going open source, a move said to have benefited taxpayers considerably.

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IF YOU want pages on your website to be ignored by search engines, you can list them in a file, "robots.txt". So let's see which files the White House website wants to stop being returned or archived by Google. Type www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and we find more than 700 files and directories that include the word "Iraq". Could this be an attempt to stop us comparing earlier White House statements on Saddam Hussein's threat with the situation there today? After all, a few months ago a White House web page claiming that "combat operations in Iraq have ended" was later revised to "major combat operations", a fact disclosed, to administration embarrassment, by the Google "cache". The White House says "it's lubricious" to claim that it is trying to censor past output, but conspiracy theorists, and Democrats, are copying pages just in case.

(The Times, November 3 2003)

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